The Nov. 20 Style article “What does the Kennedy name mean now?” quoted Robert F. Kennedy Jr., an independent candidate for president in 2024, as saying at a recent campaign event, “If I get 34 percent in the battleground states, I can win those electors. … It’s winner take all. So in a three-way race, all I have to do is beat the other two by a point.”
Of the many false and misleading statements by Mr. Kennedy, none might be more dangerous than that.
Mr. Kennedy is playing on the ignorance of many Americans about how a president is elected in the United States. If he takes a handful of states in a close election, that would mean that no one will have gotten an electoral majority, and the choice will go to the House of Representatives, voting by state. Even if Democrats retake the House majority, Republicans probably will control a majority of state delegations, and thus will select former president Donald Trump, the likely 2024 Republican nominee.
This outcome would again negate the popular vote. It would differ from past instances in which the popular vote has been thwarted because of who will benefit. Mr. Kennedy’s egotism could well put the United States into the ranks of those countries where a dictatorship comes to power by constitutional means.
Over the next year, the survival of democracy should be the central issue in American politics. To insist on this is to be a realist, not an alarmist. But making that case requires identifying two distinct threats.The first is Donald Trump, who is already at the center of our national conversation. The second is the ongoing assault on voting rights, which rarely commands the airwaves.We are paying far less attention to the long-term deterioration of the right to vote, the essential building block of a democratic republic. It’s easier to overlook because chipping away at access to the ballot has been a subtle, decade-long process. It began with the Supreme Court’s 2013 Shelby County v. Holder decision that gutted Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act, thus sharply circumscribing the Justice Department’s power to enforce the law.In his decision in Shelby, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. claimed that even without a strong Section 4, the Voting Rights Act bans discrimination under Section 2, which “is permanent, applies nationwide, and is not at issue in this case.”
Permanent? Not if the 2-1 decision last week from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit is allowed to stand.
The court’s majority arrogantly tossed aside what Congress explicitly said it was doing when it passed the law, claiming miraculous powers to read the “text and structure” of the act as preventing private parties, including civil rights groups, from bringing cases under Section 2. As the Atlantic’s Adam Serwer noted, the ruling’s claim that only the Justice Department had this authority ignored “Congress’s intentions, Supreme Court precedent and decades of practice.”
This is no minor bit of judicial activism. Rick Hasen, a law professor at UCLA, wrote in the Election Law Blog that the ruling would eliminate the bulk of the cases aimed at protecting voting rights because “the vast majority of claims to enforce section 2 of the Voting Rights Act are brought by private plaintiffs, not the Department of Justice with limited resources.” Bye bye, Voting Rights Act. Indeed, there were immediate signs (in a key Louisiana case, for example) that the 8th Circuit ruling would be used to overturn earlier voting rights actions.
George Santos says he'll treat expulsion as a 'badge of honor' as he claims his colleagues are drunkenly having sex with lobbyists 'every night'In an X Space hosted by conservative media personality Monica Matthews on Friday evening, the scandal-plagued Republican said he expects to be expelled when the House votes on the matter, which is likely to happen this coming week."I don't care. You want to expel me? I'll wear it like a badge of honor," Santos said. "I'll be the sixth expelled member of Congress in the history of Congress. And guess what? I'll be the only one expelled without a conviction."He calls Ethics Committee chair @RepMichaelGuest a "pussy," mocks Guest's home state (Mississippi), describes his colleagues as corrupt philanderers, and says he'll wear expulsion "like a badge of honor."pic.twitter.com/jnjPt9jph8 — bryan metzger (@metzgov) November 25, 2023
If the average American were asked what they imagine the priorities of the feminist movement are these days, most people would likely cite concerns like "fighting abortion bans" or "getting justice for sexual violence victims" or boring mainstays like "equal pay for equal work." But if you listen in to the world of right-wing social media influencers, they have a different answer. To them, feminists are single-mindedly obsessed with destroying women who identify as "tradwives.""Angry Feminist Compares Tradwives to Neo-Nazis and White Supremacists," screams the headline from the YouTube channel for Michael Knowles, a far-right troll with 1.75 million subscribers.
"This Video Is Triggering All The Feminists," declares the headline of a video defense of tradwives from right-wing grifter Amala Ekpunobi, who has 1.7 million subscribers.
"Tradwife" is internet slang for "traditional wife." It's largely a social media trend of conventionally attractive white women putting out TikToks and videos gushing about the joys of submissive marriage and "modesty," though notably this "modest" clothing often leaves little to the imagination.It's a neat marketing trick from tradwives to position themselves as a dangerous threat that feminists are desperate to take out. It helps sell the central, lucrative fantasy to credulous audiences: That female submission is a woman's natural desire, one that's being stolen from them by sinister feminist forces. And that you, male viewer, would be gifted with a compliant helpmeet of your very own, if not for those dastardly feminists. But these brave women of YouTube, with their picture-perfect make-up and slender-but-curvy physiques, will stand up to those bitches and restore your birthright: A smoking hot 22-year-old housewife who never talks back, never gets tired, never says "no," and never gains weight, no matter how many children she has.By feeding conservative audiences a largely imaginary war with feminists, the tradwives are also pulling off another sleight of hand: distracting from how their content preys upon men, especially young men, by selling them a silly fantasy as reality. In the process, they're contributing to the male loneliness epidemic, by discouraging young men from developing the skills and mindset they need to get a real girlfriend, instead of just subsisting on a steady stream of social media delusions.For instance, one video by popular vlogger "Mrs. Midwest" is titled "10 Ways to Bless Your MAN!" and has chapters like "Cooking!", "Compliments!" and "Anticipate needs!" The comments on the video suggest that the viewers are unaware that this is not for real, and that flesh-and-blood women are not, in fact, perfectly coiffed sex-robots here to read your mind and fluff your pillows. Young men who mistake this fantasy for reality are going to have a tough time on the dating market. Inevitably, many get angry and disillusioned upon finding out that most women aren't interested in the thankless role of an unpaid maid and sex worker. Unfortunately, when that happens, there's even more right-wing propaganda aimed at them, which blames their frustrations on feminism. An entire industry of right-wing grifters, from Ben Shapiro to Jordan Peterson to Andrew Tate, are making a mint by exploiting young men who are desperate to hear that the problem isn't that they're sexist, it's that women don't like sexism.
Donald Trump’s supporters unleashed a wave of death threats and antisemitic and homophobic messages to the judge overseeing his fraud trial, as well as his chief clerk, according to a state court filing this week.
A filing to support New York Justice Arthur Engoron’s opposition to a freeze on a gag order in the case includes a statement from the court’s top security official, who has collected “hundreds of threats, disparaging and harassing comments and antisemitic messages” that followed the former president’s harassment.
Federal prosecutors – who are seeking a separate gag order – shared those threats with the federal appeals court judges who will decide whether Mr Trump should be gagged in his election interference case.
But on Friday, the former president’s attorneys dismissed those threats as “irrelevant”.
‘It was stunning': Bipartisan anger aimed atMedicare Advantage care denials
A bipartisan group of lawmakers is increasingly concerned that insurance companies are preying on seniors
Enrollment in Medicare’s private-sector alternative is surging — and so are the complaints to Congress.
More than 30 million older Americans are enrolled in Medicare Advantage plans, wooed by lower premiums and more benefits than traditional Medicare offers.
But a bipartisan group of lawmakers is increasingly concerned that insurance companies are preying on seniors, and, in some cases, denying care that would otherwise be approved by traditional Medicare.
“It was stunning how many times senators on both sides of the aisle kept linking constituent problems with denying authorizations for care,” Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) said in an interview, referring to a bevy of complaints from colleagues during a recent Senate Finance Committee hearing.Lawmakers are peppering the Biden administration with demands for reforming the commonly used tool called prior authorization, the process in which health insurers require patients to get insurer approval ahead of time for certain treatments or medications.
It “has turned into a process of basically just stopping people from getting care,” said Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), leader of the House Progressive Caucus.But Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.) said some hospitals in his state won’t take Medicare Advantage plans any more. “We can’t do it because we can’t afford the constant chasing from all the denials,” he said.
These health plans and hundreds of others are part of Medicare Advantage, a program created by Congress in 2003 to help stabilize health care spending on the elderly. But the plans have sharply driven up costs in many parts of the United States — larding on tens of billions of dollars in overcharges and other suspect billings based in part on inflated assessments of how sick patients are, an investigation by the Center for Public Integrity has found.Risk score errors triggered nearly $70 billion in “improper” payments to Medicare Advantage plans from 2008 through 2013 — mostly overbillings, according to government estimates. Federal officials refused to identify health plans suspected of overcharging Medicare, citing agency policy that keeps many business records confidential. The Center is suing to make these records public.Risk scores of Medicare Advantage patients rose sharply in plans in at least 1,000 counties nationwide between 2007 and 2011, boosting taxpayer costs by more than $36 billion over estimated costs for caring for patients in standard Medicare.In more than 200 of these counties, the cost of some Medicare Advantage plans was at least 25 percent higher than the cost of providing standard Medicare coverage. The wide swing in costs was most evident in five states: South Dakota, New Mexico, Colorado, Texas and Arkansas.
Some academic experts and researchers believe the increase in risk scores is more likely to reflect aggressive billing than a rapid deterioration in patients’ health.
Medicare Advantage Industry Continues toMislead Public to Protect Their Overpayments“MediScare Ads” Falsely Claim Medicare “Cuts”
In our CMA Alert referenced above, we highlighted some of the insurance industry’s misleading ads, and the culprits behind them, including the industry-funded Coalition for Medicare Choices and Better Medicare Alliance. We also discussed how the industry is falsely framing these MA payment adjustments as Medicare “cuts.”
[Insurance] “organizations representing Medicare Advantage plans are running ads accusing the White House of cutting seniors’ benefits — a tactic the industry has used before to avoid changes to the program.”
Fact checking industry ads:
Ad #1 states: “Medicare Advantage saves taxpayers billions every year by delivering basic benefits at 85% of the cost of original Medicare.”
Verdict: FALSE.
FACT: According to the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission (MedPAC), “private plans in the aggregate have never produced savings for Medicare” [emphasis added]; see the summary of their March 2022 report, which also highlighted that while nearly all MA plan sponsor bids are below the cost of traditional Medicare, “[t]hese efficiencies are shared exclusively by the companies sponsoring MA plans and MA enrollees in the form of extra benefits. The taxpayers and Medicare beneficiaries who fund the MA program do not realize any savings from MA plan efficiencies” [emphasis added].
Can 12-step programs be required for release from prison?
West Virginia is the latest state to end a rule requiring that inmates eligible for parole must complete a religious-based 12-step substance abuse disorder recovery program before being released.
The move comes after Andrew Miller, a formerly incarcerated man and atheist in West Virginia, repeatedly refused to participate in the religious program at several state jails. He called the requirement “religious coercion," according to court records. Prison officials rejected his complaints five times before two groups – American Atheists and Mountain State Justice – sued the leadership at the West Virginia Division of Corrections and Rehabilitation on Miller's behalf.After a months-long legal battle, U.S. District Court Judge Joseph Goodwin in July denied West Virginia’s motion to dismiss the case and required state prison officials to remove the state’s religious programming from Miller’s parole eligibility requirements.“Although Mr. Miller has no entitlement to parole, the record strongly suggests that he would already have been released, but for maintaining his objections to an unconstitutional policy,” Goodwin said. He also said there was an “undeniably religious nature of the program.”
Miller was released from Saint Mary's Correctional Center and Jail in October after completing the rest of the division's requirements.
Snippets:
Stocking Up on Wealth … ConcentrationSpeaking of competition and losers, Ronald Reagan set the tone of the neoliberal era when, in 1981, he fired 11,000 striking air-traffic controllers. The message? Workers were losers who would be subjected to the discipline of competition. Reagan called it ‘morning in America’. But really, it was ‘morning for American big business’.
Today, we are well into the next-day’s hangover, and we know how the party played out. For workers, it was a disaster. But for the rich, it was an incredible boon. Wealth didn’t trickle down so much as it got catapulted up. The result, as Figure 1A shows, was a relentless rise in the concentration of American wealth.Gini index of wealth concentrationamong all Americans
Interestingly, as wealth got catapulted from the poor to the rich, it also got transported from the mega rich to the supremely rich. This is the story told by Figure 1B. Here, I’ve focused on the richest Americans — the folks who grace the Forbes 400 list. Even here, among the upper crust of elites, wealth has grown more concentrated. Why?
As you’ll see, the culprit seems to be the stock market.The message is that billionaire wealth is both spectacularly large and spectacularly concentrated. .... Something is driving billionaire wealth concentration up and down. What could it be?The stock market drives billionairewealth concentration
The stock-market average seems to ‘know’ about something that it shouldn’t. Why?
.... It happens when growth is driven by inequality. .... the S&P 500 index (an average) is connected to levels of elite wealth concentration (a form of spread). But this connection only makes sense if the S&P 500 is an (unwitting) indicator of stock-market inequality..... what I’m calling ‘growth through inequality’ — explains our stock-market results. .... the S&P 500 index (an average) is connected to levels of elite wealth concentration (a form of spread). .... in simple terms, the S&P 500 tracks the total market capitalization of the 500 largest US firms.
.... firms that are giant companies like Apple, Microsoft, Google and Amazon — four corporations that have a combined market capitalization of about $5.9 trillion. .... [those huge] firms account for about a sixth of the value of the entire S&P 500. So if their stock rises, it will buoy the whole S&P 500 index. But this buoyancy isn’t really ‘growth’; it’s an artifact of corporate concentration — rich firms getting richer.
.... we’ve got evidence that the S&P 500 is an unwitting indicator of US corporate concentration. And it’s not because S&P analysts tried to make that happen. (They didn’t.) It’s because historically, an important part of (apparent) stock-market growth is simply the richest firms getting richer.
To the owners go the spoils
So what happens as rich firms get richer? Well, the rich owners of these firms also get richer. .... the concentration of corporate wealth should beget the concentration of individual wealth. So does it? At least in the United States, the answers seems to be yes. .... To the richest owners go the spoils of oligopoly.The concentration of corporate wealthbegets the concentration of individual wealth.At this point we’ve got some fairly incendiary evidence. The ‘crime’ of elite wealth concentration seems to be tied directly to corporate oligarchy. But .... let’s consider the testimony of the defense’s expert witnesses. I’m talking, of course, about neoclassical economists.Ostensibly, neoclassical economists love competitive markets and hate monopoly. But beginning in the 1980s, a weird thing happened; economists at the University of Chicago started to argue that despite lacking competition, monopolies could still be ‘efficient’. Their reasoning was that if monopolists actually behaved badly, they would be undercut by competitors, and their monopoly would be undone. Therefore, if a monopoly exists, it must be because the monopolist is doing what the market wants.
Now the logic here is torturous. We’re positing imaginary competition to justify a lack of real-world competition. But then again, neoclassical economists have never let the real world get in the way of their imaginations. And in this case, the goal of the imaginary theorizing was always obvious: it was designed get government out of the way and allow big corporations to purchase their way to power.
Backing up a bit, politicians are rarely incensed when a big corporation builds more factories. So in that sense, the government is not opposed to big companies getting bigger. But from a corporate vantage point, factory building is a less-than-ideal route to bigness. The problem is simple: if everyone builds more factories, it leads to ‘free run of production’ (Thorstein Veblen’s term) which then collapses profits. So savvy corporations are always looking for a better route to power. And that better route is to buy instead of build.
The buy-not-build tactic is hardly rocket science. As Jonathan Nitzan and Shimshon Bichler observe, when you buy your competitor, you solve two problems at once: you accumulate power and reduce your competition. The difficulty, though, is that this buy-not-build tactic has the appearance of being a blatant power grab. So there’s the risk that an entrepreneurial government might get in the way.
That’s where Chicago-school theorists come in. Starting in the 1980s, they successfully preached an ideology that got the government out of the way. The net result is the modern corporate landscape, forged in large part by a string of government-approved corporate acquisitions.
Tech monopolist Google has been a prime benefactor of this buy-not-build tactic. As Cory Doctorow notes, “Google didn’t invent its way to glory — it bought its way there.” He continues:Google’s success stories (its ad-tech stack, its mobile platform, its collaborative office suite, its server-management tech, its video platform …) are all acquisitions.
The same strategy holds for most of today’s corporate oligarchies. Their tentacles have largely been bought, not built. On this front, the numbers don’t lie: the consolidated corporate landscape of the 21st century was forged by a massive, neoliberal wave of mergers and acquisitions.
To quantify the scale of mergers and acquisitions, we’ll turn to an index called the buy-to-build ratio. As the name suggests, the buy-to-build ratio measures the corporate proclivity for buying other companies instead of building new capacity. Created by Jonathan Nitzan and Shimshon Bichler (and first published in 2001), the buy-to-build ratio takes the value of corporate mergers and acquisitions and divides them by the value of greenfield investments. The greater this buy-to-build ratio, the more that corporations are buying (and not building) their way to power.
As I’ve alluded, the neoliberal era saw a massive wave of corporate mergers and acquisitions. As a result, from 1980 to 2000, the US buy-to-build ratio jumped nearly tenfold. And guess what accompanied this acquisition wave. That’s right … a sharp rise in corporate concentration. .... over the last forty years, big corporations have been buying their way to consolidated power.
One of the (few) nice things about living in an era of concentrated corporate power is that modern plutocrats are brash enough to speak plainly about their ambitions. Forget the arcane language wielded by Chicago-school economists. Today’s plutes — men like Peter Thiel — say the quiet part out loud. If you want to ‘capture lasting value’, Thiel proclaims, ‘look to build a monopoly’. Or in mantra form, ‘competition is for losers’. (emphasis added)
John D. Rockefeller would be proud.
Speaking of Rockefeller, did you know that he was one of the principle funders of the University of Chicago? Ironic, isn’t it. Rockefeller, like Thiel, spoke openly about his pursuit of power and personal enrichment. So if, during Rockefeller’s life, someone had connected elite wealth concentration to corporate consolidation, the reaction would have been “Well, that’s obvious.”
Fast forward to the 1980s and the connection became not-so obvious, at least to economists. And that’s thanks in large part to Rockefeller’s Chicago-school investment, which pumped out decades worth of pro-oligarch propaganda.
Today, we’ve come full circle. Billionaires like Peter Thiel are so hubristic that they speak brazenly about their pursuit of power, laying bare their inner robber baron. The upshot to this plute bravado is that few people will be surprised by the straight line that connects corporate oligarchy with the concentration of elite wealth.
From a small brick building in Garden City, Kan., 13 men manage the use of groundwater across five million acres in the southwest corner of the state, some of the most productive farmland in America for corn, wheat and sorghum.
They serve on the board of Groundwater Management District 3, which since 1996 has overseen the pumping of 16.2 trillion gallons of groundwater — enough to fill Lake Mead, the country’s largest reservoir, twice over.
The board is elected, but not by everyone: The only people eligible to vote are large landowners, a group of less than 12,000 people in an area of roughly 130,000. And in some years, fewer than 100 people actually vote. Others — cashiers at Walmart, teachers at the community college, workers at the local St. Catherine Hospital — have no say in the management of the aquifer on which they, too, rely.
The aquifer is running out of water, fast. But the board hasn’t slowed down the pumping.
In a country where the value of land often depends on access to water, powerful interests in agriculture, heavy industry and real estate draw vast amounts of water out of the ground. For generations, that water has been treated as an unlimited resource in much of the United States, freely available to anyone who owns a piece of land and can drill a well. Entire local economies have been built around the assumption that the water will never run out.
Now it is starting to run out, not only in Kansas but across much of the country. From Maryland to Hawaii groundwater levels are falling, often the result of overpumping and underregulation, made worse by climate change. As the planet warms, demand for water is increasing. At the same time, increased evaporation, as well as decreased precipitation in some places, means that less water is refilling the aquifers, accelerating their decline.
“If we don’t make change, we’re not going to have water,” said Lindsay Vaughn, a state lawmaker in Kansas who has tried to curtail pumping in her state.But change is being actively resisted by many of the agribusinesses, multinational companies and big landowners who depend on enormous amounts of water. They say that reducing groundwater access strikes at the heart of local and regional economies. It also strikes at their bottom lines.
“You lose land value, you lose tax base, and quite frankly you lose the way of life,” said Joe Newland, president of the Kansas Farm Bureau.
In reporting around the country, The New York Times found that the struggle is intensifying between those who benefit from pumping large amounts of groundwater and those who see it as a looming catastrophe.
Brian Klaas, a political scientist at University College London, captured the remarkable nature of the 2024 presidential election in an Oct. 1 essay, “The Case for Amplifying Trump’s Insanity.”
Klaas argued that the presidential contest now pitsa 77-year-old racist, misogynist bigot who has been found liable for rape, who incited a deadly, violent insurrection aimed at overturning a democratic election, who has committed mass fraud for personal enrichment, who is facing 91 separate counts of felony criminal charges against him and who has overtly discussed his authoritarian strategies for governing if he returns to power
against “an 80-year-old with mainstream Democratic Party views who sometimes misspeaks or trips.”
“One of those two candidates,” Klaas noted, “faces relentless newspaper columns and TV pundit ‘takes’ arguing that he should drop out of the race. (Spoiler alert: It’s somehow not the racist authoritarian sexual abuse fraudster facing 91 felony charges.)”
Klaas asked:What is going on? How is it possible that the leading candidate to become president of the United States can float the prospect of executing a general and the media response is … crickets?How is it possible that it’s not front page news when a man who soon may return to power calls for law enforcement to kill people for minor crimes? And why do so few people question Trump’s mental acuity rather than Biden’s, when Trump proposes delusional, unhinged plans for forest management and warns his supporters that Biden is going to lead us into World War II (which would require a time machine), or wrongly claims that he defeated Barack Obama in 2016?
The media, Klaas argued, has adopted a policy in covering Donald Trump of “Don’t amplify him! You’re just spreading his message.”
In Klaas’s view, newspapers and television have succumbed to what he called the “banality of crazy,” ignoring “even the most dangerous policy proposals by an authoritarian who is on the cusp of once again becoming the most powerful man in the world — precisely because it happens, like clockwork, almost every day.”
This approach, according to Klaas,has backfired. It’s bad for democracy. The “don’t amplify him” argument is disastrous. We need to amplify Trump’s vile rhetoric more, because it will turn persuadable voters off to his cruel message.
Looking over the eight and a half years during which Trump has been directly engaged in presidential politics, it’s not as if there had been no warning signs.The warnings that Trump is dangerous and unstable began well before his 2016 election and have become increasingly urgent.
These warnings came during the 2016 primary and general campaigns, continued throughout Trump’s four years in the White House and remain relentless as he gets older and more delusional about the outcome of the 2020 election.In recent months, Trump has continued to add to the portrait Glass paints of him.
In March he told loyalists in Waco, Texas:I am your warrior. I am your justice. And for those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution.
“With you at my side,” Trump went on to say,we will totally obliterate the deep state, we will banish the warmongers from our government, we will drive out the globalists, and we will cast out the communists and Marxists, we will throw off the corrupt political class, we will beat the Democrats, we will rout the fake news media, we will stand up to the RINOs, and we will defeat Joe Biden and every single Democrat.
At the California Republican Convention on Sept. 29, Trump told the gathering that under his administration, shoplifters would be subject to extrajudicial execution: “We will immediately stop all the pillaging and theft. Very simply, if you rob a store, you can fully expect to be shot as you are leaving that store.”
Trump has continued to forge ahead, pledging to a crowd of supporters in Claremont, N.H., on Nov. 11: “We will root out the communists, Marxist fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country that lie and steal and cheat on elections and will do anything possible — they’ll do anything, whether legally or illegally, to destroy America and to destroy the American dream.”Trump, the Washington Post noted, dismissed federal criminal indictments as “third-world-country stuff, ‘arrest your opponent,’” then claimed that the indictments gave him license, if re-elected, to do the same thing: “I can do that, too.”In an earlier story, Haberman, Savage and Swan reported that Trump allies are preparing to reissue an executive order known as Schedule F, which Trump promulgated at the end of his presidency but which never went into effect.
Schedule F, the reporters wrote,would have empowered his administration to strip job protections from many career federal employees — who are supposed to be hired based on merit and cannot be arbitrarily fired. While the order said agencies should not hire or fire Schedule F employees based on political affiliation, it effectively would have made these employees more like political appointees who can be fired at will.
Schedule F would politicize posts in the senior civil service authorized to oversee the implementation of policy, replacing job security with the empowerment of the administration to hire and fire as it chose, a topic I wrote about in an earlier column.
