I thought for sure he was going to say that America’s greatest threat comes from China. But no. He says “the greatest threat to western civilization is ourselves and some of the USA hating people that represent us.”
That man wants to be president again.
This piece by Zach Carter on the SVB crisis is the best I’ve seen. (Carter published the great biography of John Maynard Keynes last year. If you haven’t read it, it’s excellent.)
The most important bank in Silicon Valley failed on Friday, prompting a Sunday night bailout for some of the wealthiest people in the world as the Federal Reserve opened a new emergency lending program hoping to prevent the crisis in California from triggering a nationwide banking collapse. As with any financial crash, it’s impossible to predict where exactly the money will flow next, but it’s clear that the tech sector that reshaped American business and culture in the 21st century is coming apart.
The nexus of this breakdown is Silicon Valley Bank, a firm with $209 billion in assets as of December 31, 2022. SVB works hand-in-glove with venture capital firms, tech start-ups, and a lot of very rich people in California, claiming nearly half of all VC-backed tech companies and over 2,500 VCs as its clients. Its demise is the immediate product of horrendous risk management by the bank’s officers—but there are also important public policy failures here, particularly the Fed’s high-interest rate policy and a reckless, bipartisan bank deregulation law signed by President Donald Trump in 2018.
It’s hard to imagine a deeper embarrassment for Silicon Valley. Tough-talking tech dudes who spent years celebrating the genius of free markets totally lost their minds in a bank panic, failed to coordinate a private rescue of their own sector, and then went whining to the federal government for a bailout. What’s worse, many of these guys—including SVB Bank CEO Greg Becker—lobbied Congress to eliminate tougher capital and liquidity regulations for banks like SVB, and got what they wanted. Becker’s testimony to the Senate Banking Committee (see p. 114) feels destined for the corporate hubris canon. Hailing “SVB’s deep understanding of the markets it serves, our strong risk management practices, and the fundamental strength of the innovation economy,” Becker declared that, “SVB, like our mid-sized bank peers, does not present systemic risk.”
And yet, on Sunday night, the federal government officially declared SVB a “systemically important financial institution” in order to ensure that its depositors didn’t get wrecked by Becker’s shoddy risk management. So many people stood to lose so much money from SVB’s failure that the government invoked special emergency powers to keep the bank’s clients from losing their shirts.
The mechanics of SVB’s collapse are relatively straightforward. The bank bought up a ton of long-term Treasury bonds and mortgage securities when interest rates were low over the past few years. When the Fed raised interest rates, those bonds became less attractive on the open market—newer bonds came with higher payouts, making SVB’s older bonds harder to sell off in a pinch. So when SVB’s depositors began drawing down their balances this year to meet business expenses, the bank was forced to dump its bonds at fire-sale prices to obtain the cash it needed to meet customer withdrawals. As the bank ran low on cash, it announced plans to raise more, and a bunch of influential people in Silicon Valley panicked, withdrawing their money en masse in a classic bank run. Fail fast, indeed.
The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation has long guaranteed that depositors will not lose a penny in a bank failure, provided they have less than $250,000 in their bank account. But in SVB’s case, over 95% of the bank’s deposits were stashed in much larger accounts. A lot of these customers are rich people who were too lazy to manage their money more carefully, but a lot of them are also actual businesses that used those accounts to meet payroll and other basic expenses. Roku, which sells consumer hardware for digital streaming services, had nearly half a billion dollars stashed at SVB. Thanks to the emergency measures the government announced on Sunday night, none of these accounts will suffer losses from the bank’s failure.
Rescuing SVP’s depositors is a prudent and reasonable step for the government to take. As anyone with a checking account understands, depositors don’t manage the banks where they keep their money. There is no moral hazard involved in shielding them from losses. SVB’s shareholders and executives screwed up here, and unlike the bank bailouts of 2008 and 2009, the government is not rescuing them. And despite the $250,000 threshold, there’s quite a bit of precedent for rescuing depositors with large accounts—the FDIC has essentially been doing it since 2008. During the crash, the deposit insurance limit was formally raised from $100,000 to $250,000, and in the years since the FDIC has arranged mergers and taken other measures to keep depositors from losing money while other creditors are forced to take haircuts.
That is generally a good policy. Deposit insurance is a critical way to prevent financial contagion from spreading and to fend off unnecessary bankruptcies. Roku might have been stupid to park so much money with SVB, but it would be insane for it to be forced out of business for that mistake. If regulators allow other banks and businesses to be pushed into failure by one bank’s mismanagement, then the scope of a relatively small banking crisis can grow exponentially in a matter of days. The fact that SVB’s depositors include some of the worst people in the world does not invalidate a century of hard-won financial crisis-fighting wisdom.
The real outrage is that any of this became necessary at all. If Congress hadn’t gone out of its way to deregulate banks like SVB, SVB very likely would not be in this situation. Back in 2018, 17 Senate Democrats joined a unanimous bloc of Senate Republicans to eliminate important capital and liquidity rules for 25 of the 38 largest financial institutions covered by American banking law. Becker and other executives of large regional banks insisted that the rules written in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis were too stringent—they were designed for multitrillion-dollar behemoths, but firms with as little as $50 billion in assets were being subjected to them. Sensing a political fundraising opportunity, swing-state Democrats helped Republicans write a bill to aid guys like Becker, and then pitched it to the public as a lifeline for mom-and-pop operations.
Senator Mark Warner (D-Va.) wrote a down-home op-ed in the Tidewater News claiming the bill would abolish “excessive regulations” that were “making it too expensive, too time consuming for small banks and credit unions to serve consumers, farmers, and small businesses.” His colleague Senator Tim Kaine (D-Va.) called the bill a victory for “rural and underserved communities,” while senators Heidi Heitkamp (D-N.D.), Jon Tester (D-Mont.) and Joe Donnelly (D-Ind.) declared that the bill would “provide mortgage and other credit to hardworking Americans, helping them and their families grow and start businesses.” Trump agreed: “We are unleashing the economic potential of our people.”
These claims were preposterous. The regulations in question involved basic banking practices—how much debt banks were allowed to rely on, and how much cash they had to keep stashed away to meet an emergency. The entire point of the rollback was to permit bigger short-term profits from bigger long-term risks, and it was tailored for banks with up to $250 billion in assets—not exactly a hardscrabble set.
When pressed on these points, bank-friendly Democrats pointed to Barney Frank, the Massachusetts liberal who cowrote the congressional response to the 2008 financial crisis. After he retired from government, Frank joined the board of Signature Bank, a New York–based firm that, at the time, controlled about $40 billion in assets. By 2018, the bank was up to $47 billion, and Frank decided to join Becker and others in calling to roll back the very regulations he had written in Congress, enabling Signature to grow past the $50 billion threshold without triggering stricter liquidity and capital requirements.
Signature got a pretty good deal out of Frank. They’ve paid him almost $2.5 million since he joined the board at the end of 2015, as the bank nearly tripled its balance sheet to $110 billion, with a particular focus on the cryptocurrency sector. On Sunday night, the feds took over Signature Bank too. Its involvement in the cratering crypto world and the fears spreading from the SVB failure had sparked a run on Signature, and regulators were unwilling to chance any further losses. Again, this is probably the right move to ensure that the government can take care of Signature’s depositors at the lowest cost possible.
But there is more to economic management than rescuing deposits. Civil and criminal probes are warranted here. Becker has been paid more than $45 million since 2018, according to SEC filings, and he dumped $3.6 million in SVB stock on February 27 as his firm was collapsing—not a traditional marker of sound fiduciary stewardship. It is extremely unusual for so many companies to be keeping so much cash in a single institution—particularly when the VC bigwigs they worked with were also carrying very large accounts at the same firm. It is essential that the government not repeat the mistakes it made after 2008, when prosecutors simply decided not to pursue clear-cut cases against fraudulent activity. Anything illegal must be pursued—to do otherwise would damage American democracy.
The entire debacle, moreover, reveals that the Fed hasn’t been paying enough attention to financial stability. Federal officials do not announce Sunday night bailouts when things are going according to plan. In his quest to eradicate inflation, central bank chairman Jerome Powell has been raising interest rates fast, ignoring the possibility that doing so could trigger a rapid repricing of assets and set off an event like the SVB failure. Regulatory failures don’t excuse reckless bank management, but they’re still failures.
There is, in fact, a dissonance between the Fed’s recent bank rescues and its stated policy on inflation. By raising interest rates, central bankers deliberately impose higher financing costs on businesses and restrict the supply of credit. This forces companies to either cut back on labor costs or simply go out of business. The idea is to reduce the purchasing power of ordinary people, which will eventually encourage retailers to slash prices. Voila, inflation vanquished.
In theory, anyway. So far, the tech sector has proved uniquely sensitive to higher rates. After months of rate hikes, job growth remains very strong in the economy at large. Tech, by contrast, is really hurting, with more than 120,000 layoffs announced in 2023 alone.
This makes the SVB rescue a little curious. With one hand, Powell and the Fed induce tech layoffs to curb inflation, while with the other, they rescue tech workers to prevent a financial crisis. This is not a particularly effective way to run an economy.
But whatever the Fed does next, it’s hard to imagine the tech landscape surviving long in its present state. All of these layoffs and bank failures indicate that the VC-oriented tech world was largely dependent on ultralow interest rates. The chaotic irresponsibility of Silicon Valley’s best and brightest in the SVB crash certainly does not inspire much confidence in the entrepreneurial savvy of California’s investor class. They’ve already told us they can’t save themselves.
As far as the alleged genius of the silicon valley bunch, I have two words for you: Elon Musk. He may have been great at picking companies to buy (until now) but his twitter feed shows that he’s actually a blithering idiot.
The knives are out and it’s getting ugly. And it’s not just coming from Trump:
At any given fundraiser or VIP room where he’s present, Ron DeSantis is usually easy to find—in the corner, keeping to himself.
Despite having a job that entails exchanging small talk and pleasantries on a daily basis, the Florida governor tends to brush off those obligations and struggles with basic social skills, according to a source close to DeSantis, several of his former staffers, and other GOP operatives who have worked with him and his team.
As DeSantis gears up for a potential White House run in 2024, his aloof public persona is being thought of by his rivals—namely, former President Donald Trump—as his Achilles heel in the retail politics-heavy early primary states.
And even though he hasn’t announced a bid yet, DeSantis’ apparent desire to test the waters of a presidential campaign—while barely dipping a toe into the aspects he recoils from—is already being put to the test.
During his donor retreat in Palm Beach in late February, an attendee stood up and called him “DeSatan,” according to Republicans familiar with the outburst.
At his recent book tour stop in Davenport, Iowa, a volunteer English teacher and seasoned caucus enthusiast posed for a photo alongside the governor with the term “fascist” carved out within her design of a paper snowflake.
The governor’s aversion to pressing the flesh, and his concern over the risk of unexpected interactions with the public, is already so well-known that early primary state players are working to DeSantis-proof their events in order to attract the flinty would-be candidate and his tight-knit team.
The problem is, hosts often have no idea what the DeSantis team wants.
“Easily the least responsive campaign I’ve ever dealt with,” one veteran event host in an early primary state told The Daily Beast, requesting anonymity to avoid alienating the Florida governor.
“We invite, invite, invite, ping, ping, ping. We don’t hear anything,” this prominent event host said.
“He’s been tighter in his requests than other candidates,” a top New Hampshire Republican told The Daily Beast, adding that only former House Speaker Newt Gingrich came to mind as a bigger “nightmare” to deal with.
During his Iowa swing, DeSantis’ apparent use of bike racks to create space between himself and a crowd didn’t go unnoticed elsewhere. “If they want 50 bike racks, we’ll give them 50 bike racks,” a New Hampshire GOP lawmaker quipped to The Daily Beast. A representative for DeSantis did not return a request for comment for this story.
While DeSantis is winning over supporters in the conservative movement for his hard-right brand of politics—and has impressed with his electoral success in once-purple Florida—his untested skills under the bright lights of a presidential campaign have led operatives and pundits to wonder if he is just the second coming of Jeb Bush or Scott Walker.
[…]
If DeSantis continues on his current course, Trump’s job may not prove very difficult.
Gone are the days of covert fundraisers, such as a little known DeSantis soiree in San Francisco last October, which was hosted by David Sacks, an Elon Musk and Peter Thiel acolyte who recently helped spread panic amid the run on Silicon Valley Bank.
In the critical early primary states of New Hampshire and Iowa, a panoply of elected and unelected power brokers—not to mention thousands of seasoned voters—are accustomed to interacting with presidential candidates up close.
In their view, that scrutiny helps the rest of the country determine which candidates are legit and which aren’t, though many political observers in both parties believe that the early primary’s emphasis on retail politics is overblown.
But the veteran primary event host compared DeSantis’ insular approach to the way former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton ran her campaign in 2016—not exactly a blueprint that the governor would like to follow.
A GOP strategist, who has no horse in the 2024 race, even compared DeSantis’ early approach to that of his potential general election opponent, arguing the governor has embraced a “Tallahassee basement strategy, mirroring that of Biden in 2020, where he hides from press and real voters.”
DeSantis’ tendency to restrict media outlets also worries hosts of primary campaign stops who have long been friendly to presidential hopefuls of both parties, leading to concerns that the Florida governor may be setting new precedents for future candidates.
Three former DeSantis staffers described him as simply “quiet” no matter the occasion—someone who keeps to himself. That’s made the shift to the national scene harder than anticipated, one source explained, particularly in the governor’s hesitation when it comes to “delegating” and his insistence on maintaining a “very small” orbit.
For all the focus on his personality, DeSantis has defenders who don’t try to spin it. Former Rep. Francis Rooney (R-FL), still an influential donor in the state, told Politico that “Ron is a little reserved and dry compared to George W. Bush and Bill Clinton. He is what he is. So what he needs to do is organize his campaign to minimize that characteristic.”
Or, as comedian Bill Maher put it in a sitdown with CNN in making the devil’s advocate case for DeSantis, a good personality isn’t “a prerequisite, it’s great if you have one.”
Several former staffers for the governor told The Daily Beast almost everything he does is scripted, which, coupled with an aversion to small talk, general pleasantries, and any unplanned interactions with the public, make him difficult to manage ahead of events.
“It’s very prescribed,” one former DeSantis staffer told The Daily Beast, while adding there are limited “off-the-cuff” interactions while on the trail with DeSantis.
For his upcoming trip to the Granite State on April 14, DeSantis is expected to keep a minimal media presence at the state GOP’s annual Amos Tuck Dinner in Manchester, according to a source familiar with the plans.
DeSantis may hold a separate press conference or other kind of media availability, but will not take any questions following his remarks at the fundraiser, the source added. Some New Hampshire Republicans have begun to worry that DeSantis’ efforts at avoiding any pointed questions from the press or public could become its own side show.
The chatter over DeSantis’ public engagement has also surfaced past unflattering stories about his social skills—particularly, his propensity to devour food during meetings.
“He would sit in meetings and eat in front of people,” a former DeSantis staffer told The Daily Beast, “always like a starving animal who has never eaten before… getting shit everywhere.”
Enshrined in DeSantis lore is an episode from four years ago: During a private plane trip from Tallahassee to Washington, D.C., in March of 2019, DeSantis enjoyed a chocolate pudding dessert—by eating it with three of his fingers, according to two sources familiar with the incident.
The narrative that’s emerging, and it seems to be legitimate rather than some “trumped up” nonsense, is that DeSantis is weird and not in a kooky, fun way. After Trump I have to say that this is not exactly unprecedented. The Republicans clearly don’t have a problem with weird. But DeSantis’ whole rationale is that he’s just as aggressively right wing as Trump but he’s not weird.
He’s weird. Very weird.
That’s some obscure right wing influencer but I think his comment is a good example of the incoherence of the current wingnut worldview. In an earlier tweet he says this:
It’s possible that he’s agitating for war with Mexico. That’s a growing desire on the right:
Yes, she says “cartels” but even Desantis says that we need to withdraw support for Ukraine because we need our weapons for the border. I don’t know how else you can interpret what these people are saying. Let’s face it, they don’t want any part of defending against Russian aggression because Russia is a white, anti-gay, Christian nationalist authoritarian state — their dream. But that doesn’t make them anti-war. They are violent people who want to wage war against non-white people only. And they are itching to wage war, whether it’s against China or Mexico or right here at home. People like Marjorie Taylor Green or Donald Trump are not pacifists, fergawdsakes. I mean, come on…
As for training American schoolkids in the classroom to handle semi-automatic weapons, I would guess that’s on the agenda too. A bunch of “good guy” 4th graders with guns is obviously the best way to stop bad guys who are trying to kill them. It’s only common sense, amirite?
Josh Marshall has a story that will make you want to throw something it’s so infuriating. You can read it here. He did a brief twitter threat with the basic outline:
Rarely do I stumble upon something quite so gross and stupid as this. So if you’ll indulge me for a brief thread, I’d appreciate it.
Over the last couple days there’s a claim making the rounds in right wing media that Silicon Valley Bank went under in part because it gave more than $73 million to “BLM”. So they were so focused on woke culture they forget to run the bank, etc.
Even if the claim about why the bank went under was silly I couldn’t believe that even a medium sized bank could have possibly given that sum of money. A little poking around quickly led me to newly published database put out by the Trumpist think tank Claremont Institute. It probably won’t surprise you that of course SVB didn’t donate $73 million to “BLM”. But that only scratches the surface of this hideous little bundle of racist garbage.
The database allows you to look up dozens of individuals corporations and how much they gave to the “BLM Movement & Related Causes,” funding which they explicitly say “funded the BLM riots.” But when you look at the database, not only are the total sums usually wrong, the great majority of the giving is to organizations like the United Negro College Fund, various historically Black colleges and universities, the National Urban League, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, the Local Initiatives Support Corporation and various other orgs funding housing, medical care & STEM education in Black communities.
Since BLM is a movement rather than a discrete organization, it might be fair at some level to list this or that left wing Black advocacy organization as part of “BLM & Related Causes”. But they’re actually pretty hard to find examples that are even argumably in that ballpark. Even then the overwhelming amount of the money claimed as going to “BLM” is actually going to organizations like the ones I listed above. The upshot of the database is the basic point that anything tied to Black people or even adjacent to Black people is “BLM” and tied to violence and public mayhem.
Postscript: I only touch on this in the post. But among the many truly inane things in this database it leasts Bank of America as contributing $18 Billiion, yes, billion to “BLM” but when you look up the cited document it’s almost entirely mortgages and small business loans in Black communities. So if you’re Black even your BoA home mortgage is a contribution to “BLM” and urban rioting.
Originally tweeted by Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) on March 15, 2023.
These are the most loathsome of all the MAGA warriors. They know that it’s all bullshit and they do it anyway because they love to manipulate the rubes and own the libs. They are nihilistic little jerks.
That was this morning, not 2020..
It’s been well documented that Hydroxychloraquine is useless against COVID, Ivermectin as well. There was just another study on the latter a couple of weeks ago. And then there’s this:
Just before 7 am on March 3, Danny Lemoi posted an update in his hugely popular pro-ivermectin Telegram group, Dirt Road Discussions: “HAPPY FRIDAY ALL YOU POISONOUS HORSE PASTE EATING SURVIVORS !!!”
Hours later, Lemoi was dead.
For the last decade, Lemoi had taken a daily dose of veterinary ivermectin, a dewormer designed to be used on large animals like horses and cows. In 2021, as ivermectin became a popular alternative COVID-19 treatment among anti-vaxxers, he launched what became one of the largest Telegram channels dedicated to promoting the use of it, including instructions on how to administer ivermectin to children.
But despite Lemoi’s death, the administrators of his channel are pushing his misinformation—even as his followers share their own worrying possible side effects from taking ivermectin and some question the safety of the drug.
Lemoi, a heavy equipment operator who lived in Foster, Rhode Island, “passed away unexpectedly” on March 3, according to an online obituary post by his family last week. He was survived by his parents and brother. The obituary gave no details about the cause of his death.
In the Telegram channel, administrators broke the news of his death to his followers. “Though it was obvious that Danny had the biggest heart, it was unbeknownst to him that his heart was quite literally overworking and overgrowing beyond its capacity, nearly doubled in size from what it should have been,” the admins wrote, adding: “We understand that this is going to raise questions for those who were following him.”
The admins added that Lemoi had undergone testing on his heart last year, but the results had shown no cause for concern.
Lemoi began taking the version of ivermectin designed for animals on a daily basis in 2012, after he was diagnosed with Lyme disease, according to a detailed account of his medical history he gave on a podcast last November. He said then that five months after first taking the drug, he quit all other treatments and believed ivermectin had “regenerated” his heart muscle.
During the pandemic, Ivermectin became hugely popular among anti-vaxxers, many of whom were taking and recommending the veterinary formulation of the drug, rather than the one designed for human use. While ivermectin for humans is used to treat serious illnesses like river blindness, it has repeatedly been shown to be an ineffective treatment for COVID-19.
And according to the Missouri Poison Center, ingesting large doses of ivermectin formulated for animals has a long list of side effects, including seizures, coma, lung issues, and heart problems. Veterinary ivermectin is not a cure or effective treatment for COVID, the FDA has repeatedly warned, and is highly concentrated because it is designed for large animals like horses and cows. “Such high doses can be highly toxic in humans,” the FDA cautions.
“Danny was fully convinced that his heart had regenerated after his incident with Lyme disease that almost ended in congestive heart failure,” the admins wrote, before claiming that “a family history of heart disease and chronic stress” were why his heart had ultimately become engorged. “All of his other organs were unremarkable,” the admins wrote. “And this was determined to be a death by unfortunate natural causes.”
The admins of Lemoi’s channel did not respond to VICE News’ questions about where they got their information about his death. Lemoi’s surviving family did not respond to VICE News’ request for comment on the cause of his death.
But a review of Lemoi’s Telegram channels shows that many of his followers who are taking his dosage recommendations, or “protocols,” for veterinary ivermectin are experiencing numerous known side effects of taking the drug.
“I’m 4 months now and all hell’s breaking loose, all pain has hit my waist down with sciatic, shin splints, restless leg syndrome, tight sore calves & it feels like some pain in the bones,” a member wrote on Friday.
Lemoi explained away the negative side effects of taking veterinary ivermectin by describing them as “herxing,” a real term to describe an adverse response that occurs in people who take antibiotics as a treatment for Lyme disease.
“My wife has been taking ivermectin for 3 months,” a member wrote Friday. “She is being treated for autoimmune hepatitis, thyroid, and vertebrae issues. She has had some serious HERXING. Today she has a migraine, vomiting and severe stomach pain. Does anyone have any ideas how to help, and are these HERXING symptoms?”
Some members of the group are taking ivermectin not only as a treatment against COVID, but as a cure-all for almost every disease—from cancer and depression, to autism and ovarian cysts—believing that every disease is caused by a parasite that is removed from the body by ivermectin, just as animals are given the drug to treat a variety of parasitic worms.
Lemoi also formulated an ivermectin regimen for children, and numerous members of the group reported that they were using it. This week alone one member wrote that she had established another group for “parents of children on the spectrum, cerebral palsy, pans/panda, downs etc.,” who are using the Lemoi’s recommended children’s dosage.
As long as they aren’t letting kids read books about gay penguins or seeing a drag queen story hour, it’s all good.
I suppose some people are always going to use quack cures. But that’s quite different than a supposed news channel to be plugging them over established medical treatments in its news programs.
Fox News is a blight on this society. It’s literally killing people.
Matthew Desmond, a sociologist at Princeton, is the author of “Poverty, by America” and “Evicted” recalls that when abroad he’s heard heard the phrase “American-style deprivation” on several occasions. “Anyone who has visited [peer] countries can plainly see the difference, can experience what it might be like to live in a country without widespread public decay.”
“The United States has a poverty problem,” Desmond explains. It is a tragedy and a national shame (New York Times):
A third of the country’s people live in households making less than $55,000. Many are not officially counted among the poor, but there is plenty of economic hardship above the poverty line. And plenty far below it as well. According to the Supplemental Poverty Measure, which accounts for government aid and living expenses, more than one in 25 people in America 65 or older lived in deep poverty in 2021, meaning that they’d have to at minimum double their incomes just to reach the poverty line.
Programs like housing assistance and food stamps are effective and essential, protecting millions of families from hunger and homelessness each year. But the United States devotes far fewer resources to these programs, as a share of its gross domestic product, than other rich democracies, which places America in a disgraced class of its own on the world stage.
Not that Americans see their country for what it is.
Poverty is measured at different income levels, but it is experienced as an exhausting piling on of problems. Poverty is chronic pain, on top of tooth rot, on top of debt collector harassment, on top of the nauseating fear of eviction. It is the suffocation of your talents and your dreams. It is death come early and often. Between 2001 and 2014, the richest women in America gained almost three years of life, while the poorest gained just 15 days. Far from a line, poverty is a tight knot of humiliations and agonies, and its persistence in American life should shame us.
But as a nation of puffed-up rugged individualists, it does not. We could fix this, Desmond argues. But we do not, in a selfish and “a breathtaking failure of moral imagination.”
Just collecting taxes that the top 1 percent evades “— not raising their taxes, mind you, just putting an end to their tax evasion — would add $175 billion a year to the public purse.” That’s enough to almost eliminate poverty in this country, Desmond argues.
Poverty persists in America because many of us benefit from it. We enjoy cheap goods and services and plump returns on our investments, even as they often require a kind of human sacrifice in the form of worker maltreatment. We defend lavish tax breaks that accrue to wealthy Americans, starving antipoverty initiatives. And we build and defend exclusive communities, shutting out the poor and forcing them to live in neighborhoods of concentrated disadvantage.
Most Americans — liberals and conservatives alike — now believe people are poor because “they have faced more obstacles in life,” not because of a moral failing. Long overdue, however, is a reckoning with the fact that many of us help to create and uphold those obstacles through the collective moral failing of enriching ourselves by impoverishing others. Poverty isn’t just a failure of public policy. It’s a failure of public virtue.
Well. Any nation that sits on its hands and offers nought but thoughts and prayers in the wake of daily slaughter does not know the meaning of public virtue, much less have any use for it.
We could raise the national minimum wage. We might “attack labor exploitation head-on” and support collective bargaining and more, Desmond suggests.
But no.
We elect a “deeply wounded narcissist” to the White House, strip refugee children from their parents (and then lose them), and bail out the poor financial choices of bankers and investors. But help wipe away our national shame? That’s a bridge too far for a nation drunk on its own nationalist kool-aid, I say.
Desmond argues for a new movement to eliminate poverty in this wealthiest of nations:
This rich country has the means to abolish poverty. Now we must find the will to do so — the will, not to reduce poverty, but to end it.
“What, are there no workhouses?” ask even the lowest of would-be Scrooges, themselves victims of the system they tolerate.
Without getting overly wonky here, I’ve studied the Electronic Registration Information Centers (ERIC) efforts at voter roll maintenance for several years.
Multiple red states in recent weeks have exited the ERIC network. The consortium of over two dozen states (it was over 30) share voter registration data in a coordinated effort to eliminate multi-state registrants, to identify registrants who have moved within and between states, to identify those who have died, and to identify people who vote in more than one state in an election.
There seem to be quite a few of the last group in Florida, one of several red states that exited ERIC last week.
Readers who remember Kansas’ Kris Kobach’s defunct Interstate Crosscheck system and its history of bad data matching, take note. Originally a project of The Pew Charitable Trusts, ERIC is what Interstate Crosscheck purported to be and was not. Kobach’s real project was not election integrity but promoting the notion that voter fraud was widespread and photo IDs necessary to combating the phantom menace. Republicans loved it.
The Washington Post Editorial Board this morning reflects on the red states now exiting ERIC in the wake of last year’s “expose” by The Gateway Pundit. The three-part posting alleged that George Soros was behind ERIC’s “left-wing plot to add more racial minorities to the voter rolls,” the Board reports.
“If Republicans are serious about protecting election integrity and the rule of law, they’d celebrate ERIC,” the Board writes without irony:
The nonprofit association, which is led by its own members, formed in 2012 after a report showed that one in eight voter registrations across the country were no longer valid. Four of the seven charter members were Republican-led states. By last year, 34 states plus D.C. had joined — including the six tightest presidential battlegrounds. The system compiles voter participation records from member states along with change-of-address records from the U.S. Postal Service and death records from the Social Security Administration. The pooling of information has identified more than 11.5 million people who have moved across state lines and over 60 million potential voters who are unregistered.
It’s that last ERIC function, identifying potentially eligible but unregistered voters (EBUs), that now gives Republicans heartburn. It’s barely a footnote in ERIC’s contract with member states that every two years they agree to send postcards (not voter registration forms or ballots, as righties will allege) to EBUs with information on how to register to vote if they are eligible. ERIC provides the EBU targeting lists; the states do the rest. (While Democrats are still sending people with clipboards to streetcorners and farmers’ markets.)
Not one politician I’ve talked to about ERIC had any idea about the voter registation component if they were even aware of ERIC.
When Florida joined the system in 2019, Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) touted ERIC’s ability to keep the state’s voter rolls up to date and boasted that “it will increase voter participation.” Last summer, Mr. DeSantis touted the system by name as a critical tool in his efforts to prosecute anyone who illegally voted. The Office of Election Crimes and Security, which Mr. DeSantis created, said in a January report that ERIC had identified more than 1,000 voters who might have cast ballots in Florida and another member state.
As I’ve noted, Florida mailed 2.2 million ERIC postcards in 2020. A couple of studies (2013 and 2020) have shown the mailings result in a roughly 1% rise in voter registration and a 0.9% increase in voter turnout. (Sound small?) That is what Republicans really object to.
With MAGA dominating the GOP and with 2024 elections already percolating, Republicans wanting to position themselves as MAGA darlings contend that there is something deeply nefarious about the very voter list efforts they celebrated until recently.
The Post concludes:
The attacks on the database aren’t really about ERIC. They’re part of a broader, multiyear campaign to bully elections officials. Demagogues have planted seeds of doubt in the minds of Americans that their votes don’t count. Now many of these same people are trying to destroy one of the country’s best tools for fighting the rare cases of voter fraud that do occur.
Conservatives don’t want the wrong people to vote. Never have.
Update: Noted the contrast between how ERIC works and how Democrats register voters.
In an early look at the 2024 Republican presidential primary, 46 percent of Republican and Republican leaning voters support former President Donald Trump, who has declared his candidacy, and 32 percent support Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who is seen as a potential candidate, according to a Quinnipiac (KWIN-uh-pea- ack) University national poll released today. Former United Nations Ambassador and South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley receives 5 percent. Of the remaining 12 listed declared or potential candidates, no one tops 3 percent of the vote. Trump has widened his lead over DeSantis. In Quinnipiac University’s February poll, Trump led DeSantis 42 – 36 percent.
In a head-to-head Republican primary matchup between the two leading Republican candidates, Trump receives 51 percent support and DeSantis receives 40 percent support.
Too many people seem to think that Trump is a totally spent force. But the truth is that he’s weakened for sure. But he’s far from being out of the game. This has happened since Trump came on the scene in 2015. I’m still not sure why people cannot accept that fact that a whole lot of people really love this cretin. Many more think he was a damned fine president despite the fact that he accomplished virtually nothing and his presidency was a non-stop trainwreck.
They just like him, no matter what he does. I realize that seems insane. But it’s the fact.
This is also an interesting finding:
Nearly two-thirds of Americans (65 percent) think Fox News should be held accountable after Fox Chairman Rupert Murdoch acknowledged in a deposition that a number of the network’s hosts spread false information about the 2020 presidential election being stolen from Donald Trump, while 26 percent think Fox News should not be held accountable. Murdoch’s deposition is part of a defamation lawsuit filed by Dominion Voting Systems against Fox News, accusing the network of spreading false information about its voting machines.
Democrats (93 – 5 percent) and independents (67 – 25 percent) think Fox News should be held accountable. Among Republicans, 47 percent think Fox News should not be held accountable, while 41 percent think Fox News should be held accountable.
47 percent of Republicans believe Fox should not be held accountable for lying to them but I think I’m more shocked that 41 percent thinks it should be. How are Rupert and the boys parsing that?
I don’t know what this is about but it’s interesting:
At first glance, the flurry of real estate sales two blocks east of the U.S. Capitol appeared unremarkable in a city where such sales are common. In the span of a year, a seemingly unrelated gaggle ofrecently formedcompanies bought nine properties, all within steps of one another.
But the sales were not coincidental. Unbeknown to most of the sellers, the limited liability companies making the purchases — a shopping spree that added up to $41 million — are connected to a conservative nonprofit led by Mark Meadows, who was chief of staff to President Donald Trump.The organization has promoted MAGA stars like Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) and Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.).
The Conservative Partnership Institute, as the nonprofit is known, now controls four commercial properties along a single Pennsylvania Avenue block, three adjoining rowhouses around the corner, and a garage and carriage house in the rear alley. CPI’s aim, as expressed in its annual report, is to transform the swath of prime real estate into a campus it calls“Patriots’ Row.”
The acquisitions strike some Capitol Hill regulars as puzzling, considering that Republicans have long made a sport of denigrating Washington as a dysfunctional “swamp,” the latest evidence being a successful GOP-led effort to block local D.C. legislation to revise the city’s criminal code.
“So you don’t respect how we administer our city and then you secretly buy up chunks of it?” said Tim Krepp, a Capitol Hill resident who works as a tour guide and has written about the neighborhood’s history. “If it’s such a hellhole, go to Virginia.”
Reached on his cellphone, Edward Corrigan, CPI’s president, whose name appears on public documents related to the sales, had no immediate comment on the purchases, which were first reported by Grid News and confirmed by The Washington Post. “I’ll get back to you,” Corrigan said. He did not respond to follow-up messages.
Former senator Jim DeMint, CPI’s founder, and Meadows, a senior partner at the organization, did not respond to emails seeking comment. Cameron Seward, CPI’s general counsel and director of operations, whose name appears on incorporation documents related to the companies making the purchases, did not respond to a text or an email.
As Congress’s neighbors, denizens of the Capitol Hill neighborhood are accustomed to existing in close quarters with all varieties of official Washington. Walk the neighborhood and you might catch a glimpse of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) or former Trump strategist Stephen K. Bannon, among those who own homes near the Capitol. The Republican and Democratic national committees both have offices in the neighborhood.
But it’s rare, if not unprecedented, for a nonprofit to purchase as many properties in such proximity and in so short a period of time as CPI has assembled through its related companies, a roster with names like Clear Plains Holdings, Brunswick Partners, Houston Group, Newpoint and Pennsylvania Avenue Holdings. The companies list Seward as an officer on corporate filings, as well as CPI’s Independence Avenue headquarters as their principal address.
They might just be making real estate investments. But that’s an odd thing for a nonprofit to do. I havde no idea what this might be all about but it sure looks as if they have some plans. And considering who is involved, they are almost certainly nefarious.