Month: August 2016

Tells it like it is

by digby

Just this:

American white nationalism isn’t isolationist #USA!USA!USA!

by digby

I wrote about the Alt-right for Salon today. It’s not exactly the same as European ethno-nationalism. It’s scarier:

After months of squabbling about whether it’s acceptable to use the “F” word (fascism) it seems at long last that we have come to some kind of consensus about what to call Donald Trump’s “philosophy”: Alt-Right, also known as white nationalism. With the hiring of the former chief of Breitbart media, ground zero for the Alt-right movement, as Trump’ campaign chairman, the interest in it has now gone mainstream. Hillary Clinton will be making a speech about it later today.

Alt-right white nationalism is an apt term for a campaign that has electrified white supremacists so it makes sense that most people would focus on the racial angle. According to this analysis in the Guardian, the rising right wing ethno-nationalist movement in Europe is the progenitor of this American version, which adheres to its basic premise but brings its own special brand of deep-fried racism. Both share a belief that the white race is under siege and that “demands for diversity in the workplace which means less white males in particular forms the foundation for the movement.” So it stands to reason that Trump’s border wall, Muslim ban and bellicose appeals for “law and order” (along with his overt misogyny) is a clarion call to this faction.

But while it’s obvious that the subtle and not-so-subtle racial messaging are among the primary attractions for Trump voters, they are also responding to an economic appeal, much of which stems from the misconception that because Trump himself is a successful businessman he must know what he’s doing. But as Dave Johnson of Campaign for America’s Future pointed out, many of the white working class folk who believe Trump’s promises to “bring back jobs” would be surprised to know what he actually means by that:

Trump says the U.S. is not “competitive” with other countries. He has said repeatedly we need to lower American wages, taxes and regulations to the point where we can be “competitive” with Mexico and China. In other words, he is saying that business won’t send jobs out of the country if we can make wages low enough here.

His “plan” is to compete by pitting states against each other to lower wages, particularly by encouraging businesses to move to low-wage anti-union states. Once the lay-offs start, workers will be willing to take big pay cuts to keep their jobs. Johnson shows how Trump believes “companies should continue this in a ‘rotation’ of wage cuts, state to state, until you go ‘full-circle,’ getting wages low enough across the entire country. Then the U.S. will be ‘competitive’ with China and Mexico.

So this white nationalist “populist” economic appeal is less than meets the eye. In that regard Trump is just another “cuck-servative” (you can look it up) who thinks he can fool the rubes into making people like him even richer than they already are. But all that is subsumed in Trump’s message of white grievance and American decline.

One of the most important characteristics of this faction is a strong attraction to authoritarianism. This fascinating report at Vox by Amanda Taub tracked studies which show that “more than 65 percent of people who scored highest on the authoritarianism questions were GOP voters and more than 55 percent of surveyed Republicans scored as “high” or “very high” authoritarians.”

Authoritarians, we found in our survey, tend to most fear threats that come from abroad, such as ISIS or Russia or Iran. These are threats, the researchers point out, to which people can put a face; a scary terrorist or an Iranian ayatollah

That fear is also something the American alt-right has in common with their European cousins, but I see it having a different effect here. In Europe the desire truly is for a withdrawal from external obligations and dismantling the institutions that have blurred national identity and political independence. They are afraid of mass immigration from the Middle East in the age of terrorism and the economic crisis emboldened the usual European suspects. So some observers are tempted to believe that Trump’s invocation of the old isolationist slogan “America First” will likewise result in a pull-back of American global empire. But a closer look at Trump’s rhetoric shows that he has a much different worldview and so do his followers.

Look at his slogan: “Make America Great Again.” Implicit in those four words is the idea of America dominating the planet as it did after World War II. Of course, it still does, but in Trump’s mind, America has become a weak and struggling nation hardly able to keep up with countries like Mexico. He believes other countries are laughing at us and treating us disrespectfully, which has had him seething for over 30 years. Back then it was Japan “cuckolding” America. Today it’s China and Mexico, both of which he promises to sanction for failing to properly “respect” America — with a thinly veiled violent threat backing it up. After all, trade wars have often led to shooting wars.

American nationalism cannot be separated from its status as the world’s only superpower. Trump  promises to build up the American military to the most massive force in history (of course, it already is) so that “nobody will mess with us ever again.” He doesn’t say that America should pull back from its security guarantees, merely that it should require other nations to pay more for the protection. He doesn’t take nuclear war off the table, one can assume for the reason that it’s a cheaper, quicker way to “take care of” problems than these relatively smaller wars we’ve waged since the world burned in the two epic conflagrations of the 20th century. His nationalism is all about domination not withdrawal.

And that view is shared by the American alt-right. Here’s one Breitbart writer making the case:

I’d like an America that makes 7 “Fast & Furious” movies without making concessions to Ayatollah Khamenei. I’d like an America that humiliates the likes of Vladimir Putin, not vice-versa. An America that punches back eight times as hard over a tiny offense. An America that everyone might laugh at but ultimately stop attacking because it can only end poorly for them.

Trump’s nationalism is absolutely about ethno-purity and there’s an element of populism as well, although it’s clearly a misdirection. But it’s largely about wounded national pride which has been a potent motivating force on the American right for a very long time. There’s a reason Trump is now playing  the conservative anthem “Proud To Be An American” at his rallies. Good old fashioned jingoism is the one thing that brings the old right, the new right and the alt-right together.
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The Adventures of the Tom Sawyer Economy
by Tom Sullivan

Tom Sawyer’s Fence marker, Hannibal, Missouri.
Photo by Jimmy Emerson, DVM via Flickr/Creative Commons 2.0.

Leaving environmental damage for taxpayers to clean up is not the only way large companies externalize costs Forbes reported in 2014:

Walmart’s low-wage workers cost U.S. taxpayers an estimated $6.2 billion in public assistance including food stamps, Medicaid and subsidized housing, according to a report published to coincide with Tax Day, April 15.

Americans for Tax Fairness, a coalition of 400 national and state-level progressive groups, made this estimate using data from a 2013 study by Democratic Staff of the U.S. Committee on Education and the Workforce.

“The study estimated the cost to Wisconsin’s taxpayers of Walmart’s low wages and benefits, which often force workers to rely on various public assistance programs,” reads the report, available in full here.

“It found that a single Walmart Supercenter cost taxpayers between $904,542 and $1.75 million per year, or between $3,015 and $5,815 on average for each of 300 workers.”

But you knew that.

Now the company has found another way to keep profits up: by externalizing the cost of theft prevention. As a result, in Tulsa, Oklahoma and other Walmarts across the country stores are experiencing a crime wave. Shannon Pettypiece and David Voreacos write at Bloomberg Businessweek: Walmart’s Out-of-Control Crime Problem Is Driving Police Crazy. Tulsa PD’s Darrell Ross spends so much time there he’s known as Officer Walmart:

It’s not unusual for the department to send a van to transport all the criminals Ross arrests at this Walmart. The call log on the store stretches 126 pages, documenting more than 5,000 trips over the past five years. Last year police were called to the store and three other Tulsa Walmarts just under 2,000 times. By comparison, they were called to the city’s four Target stores about 300 times. Most of the calls to the northeast Supercenter were for shoplifting, but there’s no shortage of more serious crimes, including five armed robberies so far this year, a murder suspect who killed himself with a gunshot to the head in the parking lot last year, and, in 2014, a group of men who got into a parking lot shootout that killed one and seriously injured two others.

Pettypiece explained the situation last night to NPR All Things Considered host Robert Siegel:

SIEGEL: Why? Why is this happening now?

PETTYPIECE: Part of it is just the very nature of Wal-Mart. It’s big. It’s everywhere. It has millions of customers go in there every day. But another element of it is decisions that the company has made to cut costs over the past decade or more.

They’ve trimmed the number of employees they have in their stores. They’ve taken more of a reactive rather than a preventative approach to shoplifting and stopping crime. And to criminals, that all sends a message. No one’s watching. No one cares, and no one’s likely to catch you. And it’s sort of become, like, the wild, wild West for criminals in their stores.

SIEGEL: For your article in Bloomberg Businessweek, you did a comparison between Wal-Marts and Target stores in Tulsa. And there’s a real difference you found.

PETTYPIECE: The Targets get a fraction. In Tulsa, the four Wal-Mart stores last year got just under 2,000 calls. Target – their four stores got 300 calls. And it’s difficult to explain that. I mean I talked to some shoplifters while I was there. They only steal from Wal-Mart.

I remember asking one young woman, well, why’d you steal from Wal-Mart? Why not the mall? Why not Target? It was like it never crossed her mind to steal from anywhere other than Wal-Mart. She just felt like it was easy to get away with there.

Police Pettypiece and Voreacos spoke with are sick of it:

“The constant calls from Walmart are just draining,” says Bill Ferguson, a police captain in Port Richey, Fla. “They recognize the problem and refuse to do anything about it.”

Pettypiece told NPR:

PETTYPIECE: Wal-Mart says they’re trying to do things like put more employees at the door. They’ve been trying to invest in theft prevention technology, devices they can put on merchandise or more, you know, visible security monitors. The police complaint is that they’re not moving fast enough, and they’re not moving far enough.

And I talked to one retail analyst who thinks Wal-Mart needs to add an extra quarter million part-time employees in its stores to really have the employee presence out on the floor that would deter theft. And for Wal-Mart, that’s going to cost them billions of dollars to fix this problem like some people would like to see.

But it’s better for their bottom line to externalize the cost of store security and let taxpayers pay it. It’s a Tom Sawyer economy. We pay for them to conduct their business.

QOTD: Generalissimo Trump

by digby

Trump today:

We’re going to end the corruption. Hillary Clinton ran the State Department like a failed leader in a third world country. It’s run like a third world country. She sold favors and and access in exchange for cash. She sold it. She sold favors. She sold access. And wait til you see what it’s revealed!

 Audience goes into  frenzy:

LOCK HER UP!! LOCK HER UP!! LOCK HER UP!! LOCK HER UP!!!

There’s nothing third world, banana republic about putting your political rivals in jail. Not a thing. Why do you ask?

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Joe Scar goes through the change

by digby

I can hardly believe anyone would bother to write this story but they did and now I can’t unread it. So you have to suffer too:

The band began playing at 8:30 sharp—the exact call time for the evening’s gig—a punctiliousness perhaps less rock ‘n’ roll cool than cable-news precise. Its front man, after all, was Joe Scarborough, the 53-year-old host of MSNBC’s Morning Joe, and the band, naturally, goes by the name Morning Joe Music. The players—a group of talented, scruffy-looking guys in jeans—formed a constellation around Scarborough not unlike Willie Geist, Mike Barnicle, and Donny Deutsch do on-air every morning. They all had something to add, but mostly, they existed to orbit Scarborough, who has arguably become the most influential Republican in America during this election season. Scarborough, who has known Donald Trump for years, was among the first in the media to presage his mind-boggling rise—and one of the most consequential conservatives to rebuke him. But this evening was not intended as political theater. A few minutes after 8:30, a wall of sound filled the room: two backup singers ooh-ed and ahh-ed, two horn players blared high notes in harmony, and a keyboardist who sounded faintly like Rufus Wainwright all backed up Scarborough on the vocals of a song he had written himself.

Mika Brzezinski, Scarborough’s morning show co-host, was perched on the edge of her seat in a booth just offstage, toggling an iPhone, a Chanel shopper, and a drinks menu as she sang along to every word of the song and waved her fists to the beat. She ordered a bottle of wine for the table and texted friends in order to get them to stop by. She was, all at once, an inspiring combination of groupie, hostess, and dutiful colleague. And maybe a little rock star, too, in jeans and black sunglasses resting atop her white-blonde hair.

Brzezinski, who is 49, was joined in the booth by her brother and sister-in-law and niece. The big, boisterous Morning Joe family often show up to Scarborough’s gigs, too, but it was deep summer and neither Geist nor Barnicle were there. The room was still star-studded. Deutsch made an appearance. André Leon Talley, the fashion eminence and Vogue contributing editor, sat beside Brzezinski in a burnt-orange custom Tom Ford caftan of sorts. The real show, however, was onstage. When the saxophonist broke into a solo, Scarborough got on bended knee, candy-red guitar resting on his khakis, and tipped his head in reverence, perhaps an allusion to Springsteen nodding at Big Man during the E Street Band’s glory days.

The song ended, and Scarborough once again grabbed the microphone. “Now this is a special night,” he told the audience. “The band, we’ve been together since, what? 1947?” The “aren’t we so old?” age joke played well with the crowd. Scarborough knows his demo. “But tonight’s our big break because we have a star here, and her name is Mika Brzezinski.”

Read on.  Oh boy …

Here’s Joe’s band. So fresh and exciting:

Dudes sitting around talking

by digby

Fox News:

Sadly, before too long, Fox’s sexist ethos is going to seem as quaint as a 50s sitcom. What’s coming is something much, much worse.

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Leslie Jones … oh man

by digby

This is just the worst story ever. Amanda Marcotte:

Even for someone who has been researching and writing about misogyny for over a decade, it is hard to comprehend the level of obsessive hate that had to go into the attack on actress Leslie Jones. The 48-year-old comedian and actress became a big star over the summer, with her breakout role in “Ghostbusters” and her public stint as America’s funniest Olympics enthusiast.

But to the racist, misogynist internet, just letting Jones and her fans enjoy this moment could not stand. You see, Jones is black, female, and middle-aged, and therefore, in their eyes, she must be punished and humiliated for her success. On Wednesday, hackers attacked Jones’s website, replacing her regular content with stolen nude photos, private information, and racist gorilla imagery.

This comes on top of a summer-long campaign of Twitter harassment that was so vile that it drove Jones off Twitter, forcing the company — which is notoriously reluctant to do much about internet harassment — to actually take measures to stem the tide of abuse.

It is tempting, of course, to write off the attacks on Jones as the work of a few bad apples, an unfortunate artifact of an internet that allows a small number of people to get a lot of attention simply by being the absolute worst. I personally wish that were the case.

But this story goes straight back to the presidential race. You see, one of the main reasons that Jones is a favorite target of the worst people on the internet is because she was chosen as one by Milo Yiannopoulos, a writer and editor at Breitbart. He spent so much time and effort riling up the rats against her that it got him suspended permanently by Twitter, in fact. And Yiannopoulos’s boss Stephen Bannon now runs the Donald Trump campaign.

Make no mistake: Yiannopoulos got his job at Breitbart not despite, but because of his skills at whipping up the sociopathic internet into a frenzy of resentment at even the hint that they might have to share the world with women and people of color.

Under Bannon, Yiannopoulos was brought on to be the editor of their supposed “tech” vertical, even though there’s no evidence that he knows much about tech and despite his history of bashing video game players.

Yiannopoulos got his gig after doing the yeoman’s work of riling up basement dwellers on Twitter, cheerleading a phenomenon known as “Gamergate,” when a bunch of misogynists ran around the internet attacking female gamers for the crimes of being critical of sexism in video games or believing they have a right to break up with a dude if they want to. His real talent is mining the resentments of reactionary losers, and encouraging them to bash any women, especially women of color, whose success reminds them of what losers they really are.

There’s more. This level of sociopathic hate is just … scary.

And it’s gone mainstream.

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“Uncucked and hellbent”

by digby

I notice the oh-so-jaded media is pooh-poohing the Clinton campaign’s drawing attention to the Alt-Right because in their minds some insider byzantine appearances of appearance of conflicts of interest that didn’t have any conflict is so much more relevant.

It isn’t. The Alt-Right is the biggest political development in America in a very long time. It has transformed the Republican party, produced the Trump candidacy and is changing our politics. And it’s a global phenomenon.

Here’s an entertaining intro brought to you by American Renaissance, a white supremacist organization:

He can run but he can’t hide (from his racism)

by digby

I wrote about Trump’s “outreach pivot” for Salon this morning:

From the beginning of his candidacy Donald Trump has been wildly attractive to the white supremacist faction of the far right. He had groups like the white supremacist American National Super PAC running robo-calls throughout the primaries. There was more than one avowed white supremacist named as a Trump delegate to the Republican convention.  Former KKK Grand Wizard David Duke enthusiastically endorsed him and Trump didn’t exactly rush to distance himself from it. The icing on the cake was the recent hiring of Steve Bannon, the Alt-right former chief executive of Breitbart media which was a clear indication of Trump’s white nationalist bona fides.


This is not surprising since Trump began his campaign with a crusade against Latino immigrants, tagging them as killers and rapists in his announcement speech. His most popular policy always provokes the chant “build that wall, build that wall!” at his rallies. And his undocumented immigrant deportation plans and ban on Muslims were energetically applauded by his most fervent white supremacist followers.

He has, perhaps surprisingly, been a bit more subtle with his anti-semitism and straight up racism against African Americans by employing more of the standard right wing dogwhistles in those cases, tweeting out racist crime statistics and pictures of money overlaid with a Star of David, for instance. But ironically, to his white supremacist fans all the overt nativism and xenophobia serves as a dogwhistle to them, signaling his solidarity when it comes to blacks and Jews. And he is, of course, King of the Birthers.


I’ve written before about Trump’s authoritarian racist tendencies. Dragging out Nixon’s old law and order trope wasn’t an accident. Whether most of his followers understood what it was, as opposed to an allusion to the long running TV show, is unknown. But he remembered it from his youth and Trump developed his entire worldview during that period and has never revisited it since.


One of his most famous acts as a public citizen took place back in the 1980s when he place a full page ad calling for the death penalty for what was known at the time as the Central Park Five for a crime we later found out they did not commit. Just two years ago he wrote an op-ed when a settlement was reached with the wrongfully convicted men and he showed no remorse for his rush to judgment or the fact that he had called for the death penalty, suspension of civil rights and more police power:

Forty million dollars is a lot of money for the taxpayers of New York to pay when we are already the highest taxed city and state in the country. The recipients must be laughing out loud at the stupidity of the city.
Speak to the detectives on the case and try listening to the facts. These young men do not exactly have the pasts of angels

As far as Trump is concerned, the world has not changed since he was a young man living in New York in an era of very high crime. Rick Perlstein memorably wrote about this a few months back, in which he noted that Trump’s appeal stemmed from a very specific conservative archetype that came from America’s urban dark side: the avenging angel.  He discusses Trump’s father’s apparent affiliation with the Klan and Trump’s own run ins with the Department of justice over the family business’s refusal to rent to welfare recipients (which he presciently described as “reverse discrimination.”) This was the era of vigilante movies like “Death Wish” — which Trump has had his audiences chant in unison during this campaign — and “Taxi Driver” stories which Perlstein aptly places in the annals of conservatism as:

“[T]he conservatism of avenging angels protecting white innocence in a  “liberal” metropolis gone mad: this is New York City’s unique contribution to the history of conservatism in America, an ideological tradition heretofore unrecognized in the historical literature.”

This is the comic book conservatism of the Alt-Right and Donald Trump.  And he’s alluded to it plenty of times during the campaign, often expressing the view that the police must be allowed to take the gloves off and calling himself the “law and order candidate.”

The racial aspect of his paranoid fantasy of a dystopian urban landscape is obvious. One of the clearest illustrations of that took place a few months back during an interview with the New York Times editorial board:

‘What’s the most dangerous place in the world you’ve been to?’ 

He contemplated this for a second. ‘Brooklyn,’ he said, laughing. ‘No,’ he went on, “there are places in America that are among the most dangerous in the world. You go to places like Oakland. Or Ferguson. The crime numbers are worse. Seriously.’

It shouldn’t be surprising then that his “African American outreach” on Monday night (before an all white audience) consisted of a description of the lives of African Americans as “poverty, rejection, horrible education, no housing, no homes, no ownership, crime at levels that nobody’s seen. You can go to war zones in countries that we’re fighting and it’s safer than living in some of our inner cities. What the hell do you have to lose? Give me a chance. I’ll straighten it out. I’ll straighten it out.”

With his history, it’s fair to say that’s exactly what African Americans, Hispanics and Muslims are afraid of. But then, despite what much of the mainstream media is reporting, Trump isn’t really making this pitch to appeal to people of color. And when he “softens” his immigration policy it won’t be to appeal to Latinos. He’s appealing to the white Republicans, particularly women, who are repulsed by him.

Will it work? Who knows. But it won’t change the fact that Trump has held racist views for a very long time and has not shown the slightest ability to evolve or change in even the slightest ways for over 40 years. He hasn’t even changed his hairstyle since 1975. Donald Trump today is exactly the same man who wrote that full page ad in which he said, “civil liberties end when an attack on our safety begins!” Racial, ethnic and religious minorities know exactly what that means.

Oh snap, Rudy!

by digby

Colbert takes care of Giuliani:

He’s the first one to diagnose Clinton’s health problem correctly: “chronic no-penis. It’s congenital. Every woman in her family has had the same thing.”

It’s a very debilitating disease. Maybe some day we’ll find a cure.

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