Month: October 2015

Enemies of the State – American Insurrection and the Second Amendment

by Gaius Publius

Not long ago, this excellent piece by Ken at Down With Tyranny explored the real meaning of the Second Amendment. An added, also excellent, comment by John Puma at that site contributed to the discussion. I’d like to summarize what these two are saying, then print the whole of the first part of Justice John Paul Stevens’ dissent in Heller, the Scalia-authored Supreme Court majority opinion that “found” a right for personal gun ownership in the Second Amendment, an amendment about “militias.” At the end, I’ll add a comment of my own about American insurrection.

Quoting Adam Gopnik’s good essay on this subject in The New Yorker, Ken writes (my emphasis):

To the inevitable argument “that the Second Amendment acts as a barrier to anything like the gun laws, passed after mass shootings, that have saved so many lives in Canada and Australia,” Adam replies: “In point of historical and constitutional fact, nothing could be further from the truth: the only amendment necessary for gun legislation, on the local or national level, is the Second Amendment itself, properly understood, as it was for two hundred years in its plain original sense.”

So what is the “plain original sense” of the Second Amendment? Keep in mind the times. The Constitution was establishing a strong federal government, and the relationship between that government and the (formerly supreme) state governments were continuously at issue. Each state had a state “militia” — a state army, in other words. Would the federal government require that these state militias be disbanded and replaced with a (standing) federal army?

Keep in mind as well that these state militias (state standing armies) had many functions, including suppressing insurrections — in the South, especially slave insurrections, as Thom Hartmann points out. In fact, according to Hartmann, these “militias” were also called “slave patrols,” tasked with hunting down runaways.

But state militias weren’t just for use against the slaves. This shows the role of state militias during the Whiskey Rebellion of 1791 (links at the source; my emphasis):

The Whiskey Rebellion, also known as the Whiskey Insurrection, was a tax protest in the United States beginning in 1791, during the presidency of George Washington. The so-called “whiskey tax” was the first tax imposed on a domestic product by the newly formed federal government. It became law in 1791, and was intended to generate revenue to help reduce the national debt.[3] Although the tax applied to all distilled spirits, whiskey was by far the most popular distilled beverage in the 18th-century U.S. Because of this, the excise became widely known as a “whiskey tax”. The new excise was a part of U.S. treasury secretary Alexander Hamilton’s program to fund war debt incurred during the American Revolutionary War.

The tax was resisted by farmers in the western frontier regions who were long accustomed to distilling their surplus grain and corn into whiskey. In these regions, whiskey was sufficiently popular that it often served as a medium of exchange. Many of the resisters were war veterans who believed that they were fighting for the principles of the American Revolution, in particular against taxation without local representation, while the U.S. federal government maintained the taxes were the legal expression of the taxation powers of Congress.

Throughout counties in Western Pennsylvania, protesters used violence and intimidation to prevent federal officials from collecting the tax. Resistance came to a climax in July 1794, when a U.S. marshal arrived in western Pennsylvania to serve writs to distillers who had not paid the excise. The alarm was raised, and more than 500 armed men attacked the fortified home of tax inspector General John Neville. Washington responded by sending peace commissioners to western Pennsylvania to negotiate with the rebels, while at the same time calling on governors to send a militia force to enforce the tax. With 13,000 militiamen provided by the governors of Virginia, Maryland, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania, Washington rode at the head of an army to suppress the insurgency. The rebels all went home before the arrival of the army, and there was no confrontation. About 20 men were arrested, but all were later acquitted or pardoned. Most distillers in nearby Kentucky were found to be all but impossible to tax; in the next six years, over 175 distillers from Kentucky were convicted of violating the tax law.[4] Numerous examples of resistance are recorded in court documents and newspaper accounts.[5]

The Whiskey Rebellion demonstrated that the new national government had the will and the ability to suppress violent resistance to its laws.

Even after the ratification of the Constitution, state militias had a military function.

Justice Stevens’ Dissent in “Heller”

Now read Justice Stevens’ excellent takedown of Justice Scalia’s majority opinion in Heller. Trust me, you’ll enjoy it (my emphasis in italics; links in the original):

Stevens, J., dissenting

SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES

No. 07–290

DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA, et al., PETITIONERS v.
DICK ANTHONY HELLER 

on writ of certiorari to the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit

[June 26, 2008]

Justice Stevens, with whom Justice Souter, Justice Ginsburg, and Justice Breyer join, dissenting.

The question presented by this case is not whether the Second Amendment protects a “collective right” or an “individual right.” Surely it protects a right that can be enforced by individuals. But a conclusion that the Second Amendment protects an individual right does not tell us anything about the scope of that right.

Guns are used to hunt, for self-defense, to commit crimes, for sporting activities, and to perform military duties. The Second Amendment plainly does not protect the right to use a gun to rob a bank; it is equally clear that it does encompass the right to use weapons for certain military purposes. Whether it also protects the right to possess and use guns for nonmilitary purposes like hunting and personal self-defense is the question presented by this case. The text of the Amendment, its history, and our decision in United States v. Miller, 307 U. S. 174 (1939), provide a clear answer to that question.

The Second Amendment was adopted to protect the right of the people of each of the several States to maintain a well-regulated militia. It was a response to concerns raised during the ratification of the Constitution that the power of Congress to disarm the state militias and create a national standing army posed an intolerable threat to the sovereignty of the several States. Neither the text of the Amendment nor the arguments advanced by its proponents evidenced the slightest interest in limiting any legislature’s authority to regulate private civilian uses of firearms. Specifically, there is no indication that the Framers of the Amendment intended to enshrine the common-law right of self-defense in the Constitution.

In 1934, Congress enacted the National Firearms Act, the first major federal firearms law.1 Upholding a conviction under that Act, this Court held that, “[i]n the absence of any evidence tending to show that possession or use of a ‘shotgun having a barrel of less than eighteen inches in length’ at this time has some reasonable relationship to the preservation or efficiency of a well regulated militia, we cannot say that the Second Amendment guarantees the right to keep and bear such an instrument.” Miller, 307 U. S., at 178. The view of the Amendment we took in Miller—that it protects the right to keep and bear arms for certain military purposes, but that it does not curtail the Legislature’s power to regulate the nonmilitary use and ownership of weapons—is both the most natural reading of the Amendment’s text and the interpretation most faithful to the history of its adoption.

Since our decision in Miller, hundreds of judges have relied on the view of the Amendment we endorsed there;2 we ourselves affirmed it in 1980. See Lewis v. United States, 445 U. S. 55, n. 8 (1980).3 No new evidence has surfaced since 1980 supporting the view that the Amendment was intended to curtail the power of Congress to regulate civilian use or misuse of weapons. Indeed, a review of the drafting history of the Amendment demonstrates that its Framers rejected proposals that would have broadened its coverage to include such uses.

The opinion the Court announces today fails to identify any new evidence supporting the view that the Amendment was intended to limit the power of Congress to regulate civilian uses of weapons. Unable to point to any such evidence, the Court stakes its holding on a strained and unpersuasive reading of the Amendment’s text; significantly different provisions in the 1689 English Bill of Rights, and in various 19th-century State Constitutions; postenactment commentary that was available to the Court when it decided Miller; and, ultimately, a feeble attempt to distinguish Miller that places more emphasis on the Court’s decisional process than on the reasoning in the opinion itself.

Even if the textual and historical arguments on both sides of the issue were evenly balanced, respect for the well-settled views of all of our predecessors on this Court, and for the rule of law itself, see Mitchell v. W. T. Grant Co., 416 U. S. 600, 636 (1974) (Stewart, J., dissenting), would prevent most jurists from endorsing such a dramatic upheaval in the law.4 As Justice Cardozo observed years ago, the “labor of judges would be increased almost to the breaking point if every past decision could be reopened in every case, and one could not lay one’s own course of bricks on the secure foundation of the courses laid by others who had gone before him.” The Nature of the Judicial Process 149 (1921).

In this dissent I shall first explain why our decision in Miller was faithful to the text of the Second Amendment and the purposes revealed in its drafting history. I shall then comment on the postratification history of the Amendment, which makes abundantly clear that the Amendment should not be interpreted as limiting the authority of Congress to regulate the use or possession of firearms for purely civilian purposes.

I

The text of the Second Amendment is brief. It provides: “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”

Three portions of that text merit special focus: the introductory language defining the Amendment’s purpose, the class of persons encompassed within its reach, and the unitary nature of the right that it protects.

“A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State”

The preamble to the Second Amendment makes three important points. It identifies the preservation of the militia as the Amendment’s purpose; it explains that the militia is necessary to the security of a free State; and it recognizes that the militia must be “well regulated.” In all three respects it is comparable to provisions in several State Declarations of Rights that were adopted roughly contemporaneously with the Declaration of Independence.5 Those state provisions highlight the importance members of the founding generation attached to the maintenance of state militias; they also underscore the profound fear shared by many in that era of the dangers posed by standing armies.6 While the need for state militias has not been a matter of significant public interest for almost two centuries, that fact should not obscure the contemporary concerns that animated the Framers.

The parallels between the Second Amendment and these state declarations, and the Second Amendment ’s omission of any statement of purpose related to the right to use firearms for hunting or personal self-defense, is especially striking in light of the fact that the Declarations of Rights of Pennsylvania and Vermont did expressly protect such civilian uses at the time. Article XIII of Pennsylvania’s 1776 Declaration of Rights announced that “the people have a right to bear arms for the defence of themselves and the state,” 1 Schwartz 266 (emphasis added); §43 of the Declaration assured that “the inhabitants of this state shall have the liberty to fowl and hunt in seasonable times on the lands they hold, and on all other lands therein not inclosed,” id., at 274. And Article XV of the 1777 Vermont Declaration of Rights guaranteed “[t]hat the people have a right to bear arms for the defence of themselves and the State.” Id., at 324 (emphasis added). The contrast between those two declarations and the Second Amendment reinforces the clear statement of purpose announced in the Amendment’s preamble. It confirms that the Framers’ single-minded focus in crafting the constitutional guarantee “to keep and bear arms” was on military uses of firearms, which they viewed in the context of service in state militias.

The preamble thus both sets forth the object of the Amendment and informs the meaning of the remainder of its text. Such text should not be treated as mere surplusage, for “[i]t cannot be presumed that any clause in the constitution is intended to be without effect.” Marbury v. Madison, 1 Cranch 137, 174 (1803). […]

The rest is a good read as well, though occasionally legalistic, as you’d expect.

Again, the concern of the framers was to protect armed state militias … only. If they were concerned with protecting the hunting rights of citizens, as the contemporaneous Pennsylvania and Vermont Declaration of Rights documents did explicitly, they would have done so, explicitly. Scalia’s opinion, joined by the right-wing majority of the Court, is a 180-degree reversal of the plain meaning of the Second Amendment.

Which leads us to one or two more considerations.

Enemies of the State: The American Insurrection

I have two takeaways from this discussion. Both are striking, and they echo each other in that they stand in 180-degree opposition to each other on exactly the same topic, American insurrection.

First, the primary argument (the “rationale” in sales terms*) of the American Right in favor of a “gun rights” interpretation of the Second Amendment is this: The reason (they say) the Founders wanted citizens to be armed is to oppose the federal government. Yet, as John Puma points out, Article One, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution enumerates the powers of Congress, one of which is (paragraph 15, my emphasis):

To provide for calling forth the Militia to execute the Laws of the Union, suppress Insurrections and repel Invasions;

▪ So ask yourself — How can anyone, for any minute, consider that a Constitution that protects the government’s right to “suppress insurrections” also adds a right that encourages and arms them? The Constitution is plainly, obviously, an anti-insurrectionist document.

Second, it’s been clear for some time that the American Right is not interested in government as established by the Constitution. Their elected officials aren’t interested in using the power of Congress to govern, in using the power of the Executive Branch to enforce the law; nor are their appointed justices interested in using the power of the Court to enforce the Constitution.

Using the power of government to subvert the government is itself insurrectionist. Which tells us two things — the insurrectionist strain in voters of the American Right (per their arguments in favor of “gun rights”) is matched by the insurrectionist strain in their leaders and those who hold office in their name.

▪ So ask yourself — Why is the rest of the country not treating this insurrection as an insurrection, like the Whiskey Rebellion, instead of treating it as just another difference of political opinion? In other words, why are we not treating the virtual (and sometimes literal) armed rebels in the hills as a threat to the existence of our government?

That’s a serious question. The rest of the country does not see the American Right as an insurrection, is determined not to, in fact, and also is encouraged not to. The reasons they don’t and won’t see the insurrection as an insurrection are both revealing and determinative of the outcome. After all, would the modern and mainly corrupted Democratic Party be able to sell its own brand of “rule by the rich” if they didn’t have Republicans to point to as political enemies, instead of what they are, enemies of the state itself?

It seems at least possible that if the Democrats didn’t keep the insurrectionist Republican Party alive as political enemies, their leaders would have to offer actual popular solutions, Sanders- and Warren-esque solutions, instead of only offering solutions favored by the wealthy that finance both parties.

I’m serious. Picture a world in which the Republicans were delegitimized as a political party. What would happen to the Democratic Party? It would split, of course, into a party that could only offer blackmail as a reason to vote for them, and a party that offered solutions to real problems instead.

Interesting considerations, no?

*The “rationale” in sales terms — The “rationale” is the cobbled-together explanation you give your spouse for why you want some god-awful something he’s certainly going to oppose and you’re determined to buy. And yes, this is how sales pitches work. They teach you about the “rationale,” just this way, in courses about writing these pitches. The rationale always comes second in the pitch, after you stimulate the “want,” the lizard brain reason for buying in the first place (“chicks will love you” or “fish will jump out of the water into your net”).

(A version of this piece appeared at Down With Tyranny. GP article archive here.)

GP

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Benghazi back at ya, pal
by Tom Sullivan

So now the Hillary Clinton campaign gets to shout Benghazi, Benghazi, Benghazi. TBogg:

If the GOP planned on making Beghazi [sic] one of the centerpieces of their eventual nominee’s campaign, they might want to shred those attack ad storyboards and think again after Hillary Clinton struck first with a devastating ad featuring House Speaker front runner Kevin McCarthy shooting his mouth off.

In a brilliant preemptive strike, Clinton released the ad, called “Admit,” excerpting comments by McCarthy fessing up that the latest GOP-led Benghazi investigative committee was designed to harm her presidential chances.

But wait! There’s more. Politico:

Meanwhile, Democrats on Capitol Hill unveiled a new, aggressive strategy: They plan to release the panel’s transcripts of testimony from Cheryl Mills, Clinton’s chief of staff at State, who defended her former boss behind closed doors. After going along with the GOP’s secrecy rules for months, Democrats on the Benghazi will play hardball by releasing the private testimony to combat Republican “mischaracterizations.”

Panel Democrats have consistently said the GOP selectively leaks information, if not distorts it, in an effort to make Clinton look bad. Just recently, GOP sources said that Mills had confirmed in closed-door testimony that she suggested changes to an independent review of the Benghazi attacks before it was published by a government review board.

That’s because investigators asking government agencies under review to provide comments on reports prior to release is a routine procedure to ensure accuracy. Explaining that on Fox News doesn’t sell erectile dysfunction medicine. But “coverup”? Coverup attracts eyeballs.

Pissed off about the leaks, five Democrats led by Rep. Elijah Cummings sent a letter to Republican committee chair Trey Gowdy announcing their plan, saying, “It has become obvious that the only way to adequately correct the public record is to release the complete transcript.”

One can only hope the timing of the letter and the Clinton ad release was anything but coincidental. It’s nice to see Democrats and the normally über-cautious Clinton taking the gloves off. It may be 2015, not 2016, but still. It’s October. Surprise.

QOTD: Doctors without borders

by digby

“Today the US government has admitted that it was their airstrike that hit our hospital in Kunduz and killed 22 patients and MSF staff. Their description of the attack keeps changing—from collateral damage, to a tragic incident, to now attempting to pass responsibility to the Afghanistan government. The reality is the US dropped those bombs. The US hit a huge hospital full of wounded patients and MSF staff. The US military remains responsible for the targets it hits, even though it is part of a coalition. There can be no justification for this horrible attack. With such constant discrepancies in the US and Afghan accounts of what happened, the need for a full transparent independent investigation is ever more critical.”

Read the whole rundown of press malfeasance and government obfuscation from Greenwald.

And people wonder why we don’t believe our government and elite press reporting on foreign policy, war and national security. Too many lies too often.

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Mom loved her guns 

by digby

I don’t know if the right wingers have been able to process this latest mass shooting in a way that makes sense to them yet (they’ve been all over the place calling the shooter a black nationalist or a Muslim or a violent anti-Christian atheist) but this should provide some food for thought:

According to multiple reports, the shooter’s mother boasted online about her arsenal and feared that gun ownership would soon be restricted.

“When the mood strikes,” Harper reportedly wrote on Facebook, “I sling an AR, Tek-9 or AK over my shoulder, or holster a Glock 21 (not 22), or one of my other handguns, like the Sig Sauer P226, and walk out the door.” Shotguns, she said, “are a little too cumbersome to open carry.”

According to officials, the Harper family moved from Torrance, California to Winchester, Oregon, in 2013. “I moved from So. Calif. to Oregon, from Southern Crime-a-mania to open carry,” Harper noted in that same Facebook post advocating for open carry laws.

Harper, a registered nurse who shared an apartment with her son, spoke “openly about her love of guns,” according to one of her patients.

“She said she had multiple guns and believed wholeheartedly in the Second Amendment and wanted to get all the guns she could before someone outlawed them,” Shelly Steele told the New York Daily News. Steele hired Harper to provide care for her sickly teenage son and said that Harper enjoyed talking to her husband, an avid hunter and former member of the military, about taking her son to shooting ranges.

Steele said that Harper complained to her husband that the shooting range nearest their home “wasn’t very private.”

“You needed to have a range master with you, and she didn’t like anyone watching,” Stelle explained, “she wanted more privacy.”

“She told my husband she just purchased some new guns a few weeks ago and took him shooting. I thought the whole situation was very strange. If you know your son has mental health issues, do you encourage a fascination with guns?”

Obviously, I don’t know about this particular case, but the Newtown killer’s mother also provided her son with guns apparently in some vain hope that it would help him with his mental/emotional issues. Also, she was a big gun proliferation zealot who bought into NRA propaganda.

Maybe that isn’t such a hot idea.

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Reactionaries with a bullet

by digby

I mused a bit this morning over at Salon about the reactionary nature of the modern GOP and how there’s more to Trump than meets the eye. This is an excerpt:

“You know, Dwight Eisenhower was a wonderful general, and a respected President – and he moved a million people out of the country, nobody said anything about it. When Trump does it, it’s like ‘whoa.’ When Eisenhower does it, ‘well that was Eisenhower, he’s allowed to do it, we can’t do it.’

That was also in the ’50s, remember that. Different time, remember that.

That’s when we had a country. That’s when we had borders; you know, without borders you don’t have a country, essentially. We don’t have a country. Without borders, you just don’t have it.

But Dwight Eisenhower, this big report, they used to take them out and put them on the other side of the border and say, ‘you have to stay here.’ And they’d come right back, and they’d do it again and again, so they said ‘Wait a minute, this doesn’t work.’ And they took them out and moved them all the way South; all the way. And they never came back again; it’s too far. Amazing.

And I’m not saying this in a joking way — I’m saying this happened. It wasn’t working, they were coming back, and then they literally – literally – moved them all the way. A lot of the politicians – they never came back, it was too far. They’d put them on boats and move them all the way down South, and that was it.”

“We get a traitor like Bergdahl, a dirty rotten traitor, who by the way when he deserted, six young beautiful people were killed trying to find him. And you don’t even hear about him anymore. Somebody said the other day, well, he had some psychological problems. You know, in the old days ……bing – bong[pantomiming shooting]

When we were strong, when we were strong.”

There’s more at the link. The vision these folks have of an America of the past is not one I remember or think ever existed. It’s something out of cartoons or video games or science fiction. Or, at least, as Perlstein points out in his piece, professional wrestling. (Or maybe Reality TV…) It’s a fascinating phenomenon which is very hard to wrap your mind around. But you can’t look away.

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About that tired and poor thing

by digby

They’re all a bunch of terrorists as far as the right wing is concerned:

Republican presidential contender Ted Cruz says the Obama administration’s plan to accept about 10,000 Syrian refugees is “nothing short of crazy.”

The Texas senator told a Michigan crowd on Monday he thinks a “significant number” of refugees entering Europe are terrorists from the Islamic State group. He says it would be the “height of foolishness” to allow “Syrian Muslims” into the country.

Germany’s top security official said last week that intelligence services are watching for signs that terrorists are mixing into the flow of incoming migrants but had confirmed no such cases.

He’s not alone:

Republicans determined to stop further Syrian refugees from resettling in the United States are looking for solutions at the legislative level to halt the administration’s plan.

Alabama Republican Sen. Jeff Sessions, Chairman of the Senate’s Subcommittee on Immigration and the National Interest, released a statement on Monday that proposes to resettle the refugees in Middle Eastern countries. According to Sessions, the administration plans to resettle 200,000 new refugees in the next two years.

“The U.S. has already taken in four times more immigrants than any other nation on Earth. Our foreign-born population share is set to break every known historical record. Since 9/11, we have permanently resettled approximately 1.5 million migrants from Muslim nations inside the U.S.,” Sessions said.

He explained, “Ninety percent of recent refugees from the Middle East living in our country are receiving food stamps and approximately 70 percent are receiving free healthcare and cash welfare.”

The proposal is actually for only 10,000 Syrian refugees, but who’s counting?

And there’s Trump of course. I’m going to predict that this will end up being a “closing Guantanamo” situation. They’ll win.

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Kevin McCarthy is Wondferful! Why is Everyone Dissing Him???

by tristero

This makes absolutely no sense, all this bizarre contempt, even disrespect, everyone’s showing for Kevin McCarthy. Give the guy a break!

Granted, he’s not the brightest star by a long shot, but anyone who’s seen him in Invasion of the Body Snatchers knows that he can play a stiff and extremely unromantic romantic lead in the space of extraterrestrial horror better than anyone. And he’s a mensch, too, what with his cameo in the Phillip Kaufman remake. Heck, he even got an Academy Award nomination for Death of a Salesman, for goodness sakes!

Wait, wait, it’s not that Kevin McCarthy? it’s this one?

You sure?

The real reason for mass shootings

by digby

… can be boiled down to women. According to this Brietbart writer anyway:

I might be a raging homo, but I still innately understand the male need to conquer, crush and win. Men need to express that dark, powerful part of themselves, or it can abruptly overflow. If it is suppressed, derided and ridiculed, it can show up without warning and with horrible consequences.

That’s why I’m so distressed that heterosexual men are being told, constantly, by the media and even in schools, that what they are is bad. This, I submit, is at least in part what’s driving the recent spate of shootings.

The media trash-talks everything men love: guns, booze, boisterousness, drugs, sex and video games. Economic pressures are relentlessly stripping away male spaces like the traditional pub, where blokes can drink and bond. Social pressures are opening up male-only golf and social clubs to women, destroying what made them precious and essential.

The breakdown of the nuclear family is a euphemistic phrase used to describe a more troubling picture: there are more absent fathers now and vanishingly few positive male role models for young men to admire and emulate. This is often fuelled, or at least endorsed, by wrongheaded progressives who want to tear down supposedly patriarchal institutions.

But it is those patriarchal institutions, if you like, that for centuries provided the sort of structure, order and role models that young men need.

Masculinity isn’t fragile, as a spiteful, sociopathic feminist Twitter hashtag recently claimed. But — and here’s where some man-hating feminists almost get it right — it is powerful, and exciting, and it does have a flip-side if not properly respected. At its best, male competitiveness is the driving force behind most of society’s progress. We would be nowhere without the patriarchy, from the internet and space travel to the road under your feet and the roof on your house. The same thing that drives mass shooters inspires courage, too.

That doesn’t mean masculinity is “toxic.” What’s toxic is society’s attitudes towards men. Masculinity only becomes “toxic” when it is beaten down and suppressed and when men are told that what and who they are is defective. It becomes toxic when young boys are drugged in school because they don’t conform to feminine standards of behaviour.

What’s worse is that the media ridicules, criticises, punishes and demonises masculinity, then uses the product of its own hatred to justify more man-hating, in a Kafkaesque cycle of progressive insanity that has only one, inevitable consequence: more innocent dead people.

Progressives don’t see the irony in going after “straight white men.” But they are hypocritical bigots, hounding people for gender, skin colour and sexuality and saying that essential male characteristics are wrong. Men must be allowed to compete. To fight. To shoot things. Today’s man-punishing, feminised culture is creating killers by suppressing these urges. We have to stop it.

It goes on in that vein.

Civilization has been tamping down the human urge to fight, shoot, kill since time began. One might even say that it’s the fundamental reason for civilization in the first place. It doesn’t always work, obviously. But the effort is largely why the species has progressed.

The idea that America, the country with the largest military the world has ever seen, with more bloodshed than any other developed nation, which boasts only 17% of female political representation and 5% of female business leadership is smothering its males and denying them their “masculine urges” is vacuous in the extreme.

The most chilling thing about this is that we don’t have anything like equality and people are making this argument. Lord only knows what they’ll say and do if the half of the population that is female ever achieves parity of power. I know that so far distant that I’ll long be dead in that event but I do feel sorry for the people who will be alive then and have to deal with the fallout of this insistence on violence as a “masculine” need that cannot be denied.

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Indian summer of Trump and Fiorina’s debt problem

by digby

The Huffpost poll aggregation:

I have no idea why he would be rising, but it does appear to be at Carson and Fiorina’s expense so maybe it’s just that they are not wearing well.

Speaking of Fiorina, this story in today’s Washington Post is really something:

Famed California pollster Joe Shumate was found dead in his home one month before Election Day 2010, surrounded by sheets of polling data he labored over for the flailing Senate bid of Carly Fiorina.

Upon his death, Fiorina praised Shumate as “the heart and soul” of her team. She issued a news release praising him as a person who believed in “investing in those he worked with” and offering her “sincerest condolences” to his widow.

But records show there was something that Fiorina did not offer his widow: Shumate’s last paycheck, for at least $30,000. It was one of more than 30 invoices, totaling about $500,000, that the multimil­lionaire didn’t settle — even as Fiorina reimbursed herself nearly $1.3 million she lent the campaign. She finally cleared most of the balance in January, a few months before announcing her run for president.

“Occasionally, I’d call and tell her she should pay them,” said Martin Wilson, Fiorina’s former campaign manager, who found Shumate after the pollster collapsed from a heart attack. “She just wouldn’t.”

I’ve written about her failure to pay her campaign staff before but I’d never heard that detail. One of her staff famously told a reporter that he’d rather go to Iraq than ever work for her again …

But what can you make of this?  Granted it’s not her speaking but it’s an absurd comment anyway. The article goes on to note that she refused to pay vendors who printed flyers and did surveys and this is a response from some California Republican:

Fiorina, through a spokeswoman, declined to comment. Her supporters say the criticism was misplaced.

“People are just upset and angry and throwing her under the bus,” said Jon Cross, Fiorina’s operations director for her Senate campaign. “If we didn’t win, why do you deserve to get paid? If you don’t succeed in business, you shouldn’t be the first one to step up and complain about getting paid.”

Now I understand why vendors insist on getting their money upfront. For some reason people like this guy think that if their candidate loses it’s the printing company’s fault and they don’t deserve to get paid at all.

Keep in mind that Fiorina is worth 60 million dollars — all of it from a golden parachute from her failed leadership at HP.

I have to note one other thing, so typical of the Washington Post:

Many campaigns end up in debt, including that of Hillary Rodham Clinton, who did not close out the $20 million she owed from her 2008 presidential campaign until January 2013. Struggling campaigns often set up payment plans or hold fundraisers to pay their bills. Fiorina’s staff members said they asked her to do the same. She declined.

Here’s how Reuters reported that Clinton debt issue earlier this year:

At the end of her 2008 presidential bid, Clinton owed $12 million to nearly 500 staffers, consultants and vendors, according to campaign finance website Opensecrets.org. FEC documents show Clinton paid off the bulk of her leftover debts by the third quarter of 2009.

Clinton did continue to owe money, about $845,000, to one firm, that of her pollster Mark Penn, which her campaign steadily chipped away at over the course of the next three years, the records show. As secretary of state, Clinton was banned from fundraising to clear the debt, but both President Barack Obama and former President Bill Clinton helped fundraise the money.

It’s hard to know where the discrepancy between 12 million and 20 million comes from. But the only one they left hanging for very long was that overpaid jackass Mark Penn. If there’s anyone who deserved to wait for his money it was him.

But throwing that in there about Clinton made it appear that she didn’t bother to pay up 20 million until 2013, which is nice. It doesn’t matter if it’s true or not — it’s “out there”.

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What Sanders can accomplish by Not Acting

by Gaius Publius

UPDATE: With the news that TPP may now be ready for Congress, we’re entering the first test phase for presidential candidates (on both sides, given Trump’s disdain for American trade deals.) What will our candidates do to put their words into action? Note the TPP/trade bullet in my imagined progressive-candidate speech below.
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This is the first of several pieces on what Bernie Sanders can accomplish if elected president. At the end I offer an example of a Sanders-like “What I will never do” speech. Scroll down or click the link to go directly to the speech.

I recently wrote about British politician Tony Benn’s speech, a “ten-minute history of neoliberalism.” Near the beginning Benn says, “This country and the world have been run by rich and powerful men from the beginning of time.” If the “beginning of time” means the start of humanity’s post-Stone Age history, that’s a period more than 5,000 years long. A brief window opened in the mid-1800s, with the beginning of trade unionism and, in the U.S., the New Deal, when “rich and powerful men” were no longer as in charge as they have always been. That brief window, the blink of an eye compared to the rest of human history, is now closing.

Then we looked at a recent Noam Chomsky interview and noted as he does that the “economic system” being evolved in that closing window, what I’ve called “modern capitalism” — “capitalism” as practiced today — isn’t capitalism at all, but merely theft, the adult equivalent of bullies taking lunch money, or the Roman ruling class enslaving most of Europe to work the land, which only the ruling class owns.

Nor is “modern capitalism” a market in any sense that matters. Is a monopoly on all essential products a market? Only in the most reduced sense; only in the sense that “0” is a number. Only in the sense that one person, living alone, is a family. Only in the sense that a man in a meadow talking to silent birds is a conversation.

In other words, that closing window brings us back to Tony Benn’s original description, a world “run by rich and powerful men.” Period. Those pieces are here and here, and they set up the following.

Can Sanders Reopen that Closing Window?

In his speech, Tony Benn said not to despair:

It’s very important to keep optimism. … Progress has always been made by two flames burning in the human heart. The flame of anger at injustice. And the flame of hope you can build a better world.

In his own piece, though, Noam Chomsky is less optimistic, at least when it comes to the “Bernie Sanders” electoral solution (my emphasis in italics):

[Q] Let’s imagine for example that Bernie Sanders won the 2016 presidential elections. What do you think would happen? Could he bring radical change in the structures of power of the capitalist system?

[Chomsky] Suppose that Sanders won, which is pretty unlikely in a system of bought elections. He would be alone: he doesn’t have congressional representatives, he doesn’t have governors, he doesn’t have support in the bureaucracy, he doesn’t have state legislators; and standing alone in this system, he couldn’t do very much. A real political alternative would be across the board, not just a figure in the White House.

It would have to be a broad political movement. In fact, the Sanders campaign I think is valuable — it’s opening up issues, it’s maybe pressing the mainstream Democrats a little bit in a progressive direction, and it is mobilizing a lot of popular forces, and the most positive outcome would be if they remain after the election.

It’s a serious mistake to just to be geared to the quadrennial electoral extravaganza and then go home. That’s not the way changes take place. The mobilization could lead to a continuing popular organization which could maybe have an effect in the long run.

While I agree that a broad movement is needed and helpful, I disagree with Chomsky on these three points:

• The electoral majority that puts Sanders in the White House, if it does, would represent a mobilizing of popular forces.
   
• If Sanders carries through (unlike Barack Obama in 2009) on the opportunity he would have, his election would represent much more than a “quadrennial electoral extravaganza.” He could, in fact, lead the ongoing political revolution he says he wants.
   
• Bernie Sanders could accomplish an enormous amount without Congress. He wouldn’t be acting alone; he’d have control of the whole of the Executive Branch — or most of it (more on that last later).

Let’s look at what Sanders could accomplish without Congress. I want to divide these accomplishments into two groups — “What I will never do” and “What I will absolutely do, starting day one.” This piece is about the first list, some of the “actions” you will never see from a successful Bernie Sanders. I’ll offer the second list, “I’ll do this on day one” actions, another time.

A “What I Will Never Do” Presidential Speech

Consider how much time and energy was drained from the progressive community in fighting against Barack Obama’s wrong-headed neo-liberal initiatives. Think of the enormous effort to stop Fast Track (which failed). The long effort to stop the Keystone Pipeline (which may succeed, but with a huge expenditure of energy). The effort to constantly, year after year after year, block cuts to Social Security and Medicare (which have so far succeeded, but the fight is far from over).

And on and on, going all the way back to the beginning, 2009, when the progressive community (and progressives in Congress) got stiffed by the Affordable Care Act, first because it turned its back on a single-payer solution, and then by its lack of a public option, which our community fought and fought to retain (a fight that failed).

In fact, the progressive community has been in constant battle with “our” Executive Branch on what I’ve called Obama’s four big “legacy” items, his want-list:

1. Health care “reform” — a privatized alternative to Medicare expansion
2. A “grand bargain” in which social insurance benefits are rolled back
3. Plentiful oil & gas (burnable carbon), and passage of the Keystone Pipeline
4. Passage of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade agreement

Obama has been very good on many things, including peace with Iran, but not on these. Thousands of capable progressives have used hundreds of thousands of uphill hours resisting Obama’s constant attempts to roll neo-liberal boulders down the hill at them.

What could be done if we could have those hours back, hours we could use in a different way, use on proactive goals, instead of constantly playing defense against “our” president? This is not a trivial problem. Under a real progressive president — a President Sanders who kept his word, for example — you would never have to fight those things. Would that please you? Would it feel like a gift to be handed that freed-up time? Would if feel like a Sanders accomplishment if he gave it to you?

Here’s the first part of my imagined, Sanders-like “what I will accomplish” speech. It’s entitled “What I Will Never Do.” Keep in mind, this is me and my imagined progressive talking. But also keep in mind how relieved you would feel to hear these words from someone who meant them.

If you elect me president, here’s what I will never do:

    ▪ You can count on me never to push a plan to cut Social Security and Medicare. Not one person outside of government will have to spend one minute trying to prevent me from privatizing — or cutting in any way — these vital programs. Not one minute. And if Congress proposes these cuts and it reaches my desk, you won’t have to spend one minute asking me to veto that proposal. It’s vetoed the minute it arrives.

    ▪ I will never negotiate a so-called “trade” deal that sends American jobs across our borders. No one will have to spend one minute asking me to stop a deal that hurts American workers. I will support only trade deals that increase American jobs, that create new workers in this country, that increase our balance of payments, and nothing less.

    ▪ No one will have to spend one minute stopping me from granting coal, oil and gas leases on lands or in waters controlled by the Department of the Interior. Not one minute. Drilling in the Arctic? You won’t even have to ask. The answer is already No. New coal leases? Not one. Dangerous and deadly-to-the-climate offshore drilling leases? Those days are over.

    Soon I will tell you what I will do to aggressively bring down carbon emissions. But if I don’t start here, with what I won’t do, how will you know I’m serious?

    ▪ You will never see me even contemplate extending tax breaks for the very rich, as we saw all too often in our recent past — for example, during the negotiations to extend the Bush tax cuts, or negotiations at the end of the last fiscal year. Any such deal that reaches my desk will go straight back to Congress for renegotiation.

    If Congress wants a bill, they can give me one I can sign. If they want to shut down the government over tax breaks for the very very wealthy, they will shut it down, and I will explain it that way to the American people. If they want me to sign a bill, any bill, they need to understand — tax breaks for the rich can never be a part of it.

In other words, you’ll never have to lobby me to not do what I said I would never do. You can spend your precious time, your precious energy, in other ways. There are many things I will do as well. Some I will do alone, using the power of the Executive Branch. And some I will ask your help to do because we need help from others. But the things I listed above, and many more besides, will never be contemplated.

I hope you agree that sparing you the constant effort to stop these wrong acts is indeed an accomplishment, and one you’ll be glad, even eager, to have. It’s one I’ll certainly be glad and eager to give you.

Thank you.

Yes, there’s much a president like Sanders, if he really carries through, can refuse to do, acting completely alone. This list shows just a few of the “wrong acts” you would be spared from resisting. I’m sure you can add others of your own. Soon I’ll list some of what a president like Sanders can proactively do, deeds that can be done, even acting totally alone.

Stay tuned. Supporting a president like Sanders is by no means a waste of your time. (If you like, you can help Sanders here; adjust the split any way you wish at the link.)

(A version of this piece appeared at Down With Tyranny. GP article archive here.)

GP

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