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Month: March 2023

Our love language is anxiety

Published by Tom Sullivan on March 14, 2023

Short-term anxiety

Watch this clip of Guy Cecil, the departing chair of Priorities USA PAC. He provides a pretty concise breakdown of where Democrats go wrong.

The right takes a long view of politics, Cecil argues. They invest in long-term ideological change. It took the conservative movement 50 years to repeal Roe, but they retained that focus and worked at it until they did. Democrats’ think in election cycles. They need a broader, longer approach to building their coalition and infrastructure.

“One of my concerns is that we have fetishized the use of data and analytics,” Cecil tells MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow. In so doing, Democrats reduce their electoral coalition to “a confederacy of caricatures.” This groups cares about this issue, and that group cares about another. In fact, people are people, and they care about many things.

I wrote recently about the fixation on data:

Young, presidential-campaign staffers fresh off primary races and with visions of West Wing jobs dancing in their heads are all about data. Data is how superiors evaluate their job performance. How many volunteers, how many calls, how many knocks today? Get those 9 p.m. numbers filed on time. Hit your targets whether or not those numbers are meaningful. In 2008, Obama’s staffers measured supporter engagement. In 2016, Team Clinton seemed to measure measuring. Coordinated campaign staffers here knew what they were sending up the chain-of-command was crap, but it was what superiors asked for: numbers.

Read the room. What Democrats need to do better, says Cecil, is communicating their vision for where they want to take the country, for how they want to build a more perfect union. A laundry list of issues is not a vision. It does not tell an underlying story.

Cecil is stepping aside because “organizations benefit from change.” From “new leadership and fresh thinking.”

I couldn’t agree more. If only the gerontocracy atop the party itself felt the same way.

“We need to think more long term about how we are going to engage at every level of the ballot and across all these different spheres of influence,” Cecil continues. Most Americans agree with Democrats’ positions, but we must ask, “whose fault is it that we are not effectively communicating those things?”

Not to overstate the problem, Cecil observes, “Our love language is anxiety in the Democratic Party.”

Ain’t that the truth?

Paul Waldman observed in the wake of Donald Trump’s 2016 win:

Democrats are forever worried about whether they might be criticized, whether Republicans will be mean to them, whether they might look as though they’re being partisan, and whether they might be subjected to a round of stern editorials. Republicans, on the other hand, just don’t care. What they’re worried about is winning, and they don’t let the kinds of criticism that frightens Democrats impede them. It makes Republicans the party of “Yes we can,” while Democrats are the party of “Maybe we shouldn’t.”

But that was 2017. With Joe Biden in the White House knowing he has one shot (and at best two terms) at making the union more perfect, he’s accomplished more than I expected. But Biden is not the Democratic Party and eight years is an eye-blink.

Cecil is right. Who he has to convince as much as a party leadership past its sell-by date is the clique of high-rolling Democratic millionaire/billionaires more interested in hanging their names on short-term victories than on financing long-term goals. Advancing a progressive agenda (and saving democracy) is not just about raising money. It’s about commitment.

Autocrats trying to close the global commons

Published by Tom Sullivan on March 14, 2023

Time to restore U.S. shipbuilding?

Image: Voice of America

The Taxes-are-Theft crowd are the Makers-and-Takers crowd are Entitlement-Reform crowd are the Government-Never-Created-a-Job crowd. Somehow, 25 percent of U.S. food grown on an inland desert just gets watered and manifests in the local supermarket (along with foreign produce; we’ll get to that). Somehow, the national system of interstate highways over which they travel just appeared overnight. Somehow, water appears out of their taps and what they shit disappears just as magically.

Entitlement? There’s a whole lot goin’ ’round. We used to call it taking things for granted. Like bank deposits being safe.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren Monday night reminded Rachel Maddow’s viewers how banking should work. It should be boring. Something that, like those other things, we hardly notice. That was the point of Michael Lewis’ “The Fifth Risk.” When government works as it should, it’s almost unnoticeable. We take it for granted. We don’t know a fraction of what it does.

On that, retired Navy captain Jerry Hendrix reminds The Atlantic readers how much of global trade depends on freedom of the seas. That didn’t just happen either. In our lifetime, Hendrix writes, freedom of the seas “has seemed like a default condition, it is easy to think of it—if we think of it at all—as akin to Earth’s rotation or the force of gravity: as just the way things are, rather than as a man-made construct that needs to be maintained and enforced.”

Temporary shipping disruptions such as the Suez Canal blockage or a global pandemic disrupting global supply chains remind us, but our awareness fades quickly. Shipping should be boring too. But what if?

Imagine, though, a more permanent breakdown. A humiliated Russia could declare a large portion of the Arctic Ocean to be its own territorial waters, twisting the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea to support its claim. Russia would then allow its allies access to this route while denying it to those who dared to oppose its wishes. Neither the U.S. Navy, which has not built an Arctic-rated surface warship since the 1950s, nor any other NATO nation is currently equipped to resist such a gambit.

Or maybe the first to move would be Xi Jinping, shoring up his domestic standing by attempting to seize Taiwan and using China’s anti-ship ballistic missiles and other weapons to keep Western navies at bay. An emboldened China might then seek to cement its claim over large portions of the East China Sea and the entirety of the South China Sea as territorial waters. It could impose large tariffs and transfer fees on the bulk carriers that transit the region. Local officials might demand bribes to speed their passage.

Once one nation decided to act in this manner, others would follow, claiming enlarged territorial waters of their own, and extracting what they could from the commerce that flows through them. The edges and interstices of this patchwork of competing claims would provide openings for piracy and lawlessness.

The great container ships and tankers of today would disappear, replaced by smaller, faster cargo vessels capable of moving rare and valuable goods past pirates and corrupt officials. The cruise-ship business, which drives many tourist economies, would falter in the face of potential hijackings. A single such incident might create a cascade of failure throughout the entire industry. Once-busy sea lanes would lose their traffic. For lack of activity and maintenance, passages such as the Panama and Suez Canals might silt up. Natural choke points such as the straits of Gibraltar, Hormuz, Malacca, and Sunda could return to their historic roles as havens for predators. The free seas that now surround us, as essential as the air we breathe, would be no more.

Walmart would be dead in the water (pun intended) if international shipping were disrupted by such moves. (The blueberries for my morning cereal come from Chile, for one.) Hendrix argues that freedom of the seas “has depended on sea power wielded by nations—led by the United States—that believe in such freedom.” But is he being alarmist?

I’ve written multiple times that the Malacca Strait that gives access from the Indian Ocean to the South China Sea is a strategic chokepoint for global shipping. The South China Sea over which China is attempting greater control is “the most important body of water for the world economy.” A third of global trade transits its waters. Shipping disruption there would be … bad.

The United States and England emerged from World War II as the predominat sea powers and helped establish the current regime of global trade. That war, the retired Navy captain argues, “was won not by bullets or torpedoes but by the American maritime industrial base.”

Our commitment to maintaining free navigation since then has created the world we know (and hardly notice) just as assuredly as the rest of the boring infrastructure we take for granted. But the U.S. has allowed its navy and, concomitantly, its shipbuilding capacity, to shrink for decades.

“Meanwhile, both China and Russia, in different ways, began to develop systems that would challenge the U.S.-led regime of global free trade on the high seas,” Hendrix warns:

Russia began to invest in highly sophisticated nuclear-powered submarines with the intention of being able to disrupt the oceanic link between NATO nations in Europe and North America. China, which for a time enjoyed double-digit GDP growth, expanded both its commercial and naval shipbuilding capacities. It tripled the size of the People’s Liberation Army-Navy and invested in long-range sensors and missiles that could allow it to interdict commercial and military ships more than 1,000 miles from its shores. Both Russia and China also sought to extend territorial claims into international waters, the aim being to control the free passage of shipping near their shores and in their perceived spheres of influence. In short: Autocratic powers are trying to close the global commons.

As if you needed something else to worry about. Hendrix is already there.

For 40 years, we have watched domestic industries and blue-collar jobs leave the country. Now we find ourselves locked in a new great-power competition, primarily with a rising China but also with a diminishing and unstable Russia. We will need heavy industry in order to prevail. The United States cannot simply rely on the manufacturing base of other countries, even friendly ones, for its national-security needs.

What Hendrix argues for is a new industrial policy of the sort President Joe Biden advocates. With the U.S. Navy at its heart, of course. But quite frankly I never gave freedom of the seas much thought until China began militarizing artificial islands in the Spratleys.

It’s all Id

Published by digby on March 13, 2023

Republican politics in a nutshell

I’ve written this in various forms over the years, but I think JV Last distills it perfectly:

Last week Amanda Carpenter made the point to me (on TNL) that Republican voters have simply decided that they like DeSantis. Period. And once voters decide they like a candidate, then all of the logic flows from there. In politics, Amanda argued, voters make their decisions first and then rationalize backwards.

And that theory was on full display in The Focus Group podcast this weekend (listen to the show here) where Sarah talked with groups of evangelical Christians who voted for Trump in both 2016 and 2020.

If you go by the numbers, then for these voters, Mike Pence should be The Guy. But to a man, they were all anti-Pence. Why? Their rationalizations were ridiculous:

“I don’t like how Trump was like in your face and everything. But then Pence is almost too far in the other direction. You don’t know anything about him.”

“I’m having a hard time backing Pence right now and I can’t tell you why other than just maybe my gut.”

“He’s almost become too entrenched in the establishment.”

“I almost feel like he’s the Donald Trump equivalent of Kamala Harris.” [JVL: WTF does that even mean?]

At the risk of playing armchair psychologist, there are only two possible explanations for such statements:

-These people are dumb as a bag of hammers; or

-After January 6th they decided that they no longer liked Pence. So they have now invented reasons to be against him.

Option (2) seems more likely to me. Your mileage may vary.

The same dynamic was on display in the The Focus Group with evangelicals who were rationalizing why they loved Trump. One woman told Sarah that she felt comfortable with Trump because Trump spends so much time with “his minister.”

“What I saw in [Trump’s] four years was he did have a very strong pastor that was there with him a lot. And you know that pastor was here from Dallas and I would hear him on the radio a lot talking about not necessarily their personal meetings but just talking about how he’s . . . getting it.”

Please raise your hand if you think Trump has been to services more than a dozen times in the last 20 years. Or has read the Bible. Remember: Trump is a self-proclaimed Christian who says he’s never had to ask for God’s forgiveness—tell me you have no understanding of Christianity without saying, “I have no idea what Christianity is.”

But sure.

So did this evangelical voter genuinely believe that Donald Trump was praying with his “pastor” every day and working through his Bible study and walking with Christ?

Or did she decide that she just liked Trump and so built a rationalization from there?

Again: Your mileage may vary. But I know what I’d guess.

So maybe politics really is that simple.

Policy matrices, logical arguments, and advanced positioning are just backfill. What really matters is the id, which decides to either like or dislike apart from rationality.

The id is the instinctual, illogical part of the self. The part of the brain that just wants. But the source of the id’s want is very specific: The id is a pleasure-seeking impulse. It’s not motivated by desires for protection or actualization. It’s all about self-gratification.

The id wants what it wants because it feels good.

And I think you can construct a theory of Republican politics around the id that fits observable reality pretty well.

It’s not like Republican voters have been overburdened by logical consistency over the last decade. By turns they have:

-Insisted that character and virtue are the paramount issues in politics; then voted for the thrice-married liar who cheated on his postpartum wife with a porn star and was on the cover of Playboy.

-Proclaimed the importance of Christian teaching in public policy; then celebrated using refugees as political pawns.

-Claimed that January 6th was a false-flag operation conducted by Antifa activists; insisted the protests were entirely peaceful; and also believed that the people engaging in violence were brave patriots trying to stop a constitutional usurpation of the presidency.

-Demanded unquestioning support of law enforcement when minorities are beaten or killed by police; then argued for defunding the FBI when it investigated Trump and also called the Capitol Police crisis actors after January 6th.

-Argued that America shouldn’t be giving aid to Ukraine because we should be “helping people at home”—even though they opposed the Child Tax Credit to help working families.

You can come up with your own list. My point isn’t to make an exhaustive chronicle, but to observe that these seemingly contradictory positions are more the rule than the exception in Republican politics.

And also to observe that if you try to square these circles with logic, then you’re going to tie yourself in knots coming up with some grand unified policy worldview to explain it all.

But the Id Theory of politics explains it quite nicely. In each case, there is a view that challenges Republican voters and a view that gives them pleasure. Republican voters, as a group, seem to choose pleasure just about every time.

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I’m not convinced that they have all decided they like DeSantis. He’s still largely unknown. And a lot of those who are super-tuned in also like Trump and Trump certainly doesn’t like DeSantis. I think it’s complicated when there is a front runner they know and like.

But the general thesis is correct, in my opinion. They are all about their pleasure. And what gives them pleasure is owning the libs, racism, whining about their grievances, trolling etc. It’s the pleasure of a 12 year old bully. They will take it wherever they can find it and their politicians are eager to give it to them. It’s all Id.

Gilead Texas

Published by digby on March 13, 2023

It’s happening

A man is suing a woman’s friends for helping her obtain abortion pills:

A Texas man is suing three women under the wrongful death statute, alleging that they assisted his ex-wife in terminating her pregnancy, the first such case brought since the state’s near-total ban on abortion last summer.

Marcus Silva is represented by Jonathan Mitchell, the former Texas solicitor general and architect of the state’s prohibition on abortions after about six weeks of pregnancy, and state Rep. Briscoe Cain, R-Deer Park. The lawsuit is filed in state court in Galveston County, where Silva lives.

Silva alleges that his now ex-wife learned she was pregnant in July 2022, the month after the overturn of Roe v. Wade, and conspired with two friends to illegally obtain abortion-inducing medication and terminate the pregnancy.

The friends texted with the woman, sending her information about Aid Access, an international group that provides abortion-inducing medication through the mail, the lawsuit alleges. Text messages filed as part of the complaint seem to show they instead found a way to acquire the medication in Houston, where the two women lived.

A third woman delivered the medication, the lawsuit alleges, and text messages indicate that the wife self-managed an abortion at home.

The defendants could not immediately be reached for comment. Silva’s wife filed for divorce in May 2022, court records show, two months before the alleged abortion. The divorce was finalized in February. They share two daughters, the lawsuit said.

The lawsuit relies heavily on screenshots from a group chat the ex-wife had with two friends seemingly seeking to help her terminate her pregnancy. Her friends expressed concern that Silva would “snake his way into your head.”

“I know either way he will use it against me,” the pregnant woman said, according to text messages attached to the complaint. “If I told him before, which I’m not, he would use it as [a way to] try to stay with me. And after the fact, I know he will try to act like he has some right to the decision.”

The lawsuit alleges that assisting a self-managed abortion qualifies as murder under state law, which would allow Silva to sue under the wrongful death statute. The women have not been criminally charged. Texas’ abortion laws specifically exempt the pregnant person from prosecution; the ex-wife is not named as a defendant.

The legality of abortion in Texas in July 2022 is murky. The state’s trigger law, which makes performing abortion a crime punishable by up to life in prison, did not go into effect until August. But conservative state leaders, including Cain and Attorney General Ken Paxton, have claimed that the state’s pre-Roe abortion bans, which punish anyone who performs or “furnishes the means” for an abortion by up to five years in prison, went back into effect the day Roe v. Wade was overturned in June.

The legal status of these pre-Roe statutes remains a contentious question. In 2004, the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that those laws were “repealed by implication,” which U.S. District Judge Robert Pitman reaffirmed in a recent ruling. But Cain and others have repeatedly argued that the Legislature restored those laws into effect with recent abortion legislation. This issue went before the Texas Supreme Court, but the case was dismissed before a final ruling.

In 2021, the Legislature passed a law making it a state jail felony to provide abortion-inducing medication except under extremely specific circumstances.

Joanna Grossman, a law professor at SMU Dedman School of Law, said this lawsuit is “absurd and inflammatory.” Since the pregnant patient is protected from prosecution, there is no underlying cause of action to bring a wrongful death suit in a self-managed abortion, she said.

“But this is going to cause such fear and chilling that it doesn’t matter whether [Mitchell] is right,” Grossman said. “Who is going to want to help a friend find an abortion if there is some chance that their text messages are going to end up in the news? And maybe they’re going to get sued, and maybe they’re going to get arrested, and it’s going to get dropped eventually, but in the meantime, they will have been terrified.”

But it’s possible this lawsuit could get traction, said Charles “Rocky” Rhodes, a law professor at South Texas College of Law.

“It’s scary to think that you can be sued for significant damages for helping a friend undertake acts that help her have even a self-medicated abortion,” Rhodes said. “Obviously, the allegations would have to be proven, but there is potentially merit to this suit under Texas’ abortion laws as they exist now.”

Mitchell and Cain intend to also name the manufacturer of the abortion pill as a defendant, once it is identified.

“Anyone involved in distributing or manufacturing abortion pills will be sued into oblivion,” Cain said in a statement.

Silva is asking a Galveston judge to award him more than $1 million in damages and an injunction stopping the defendants from distributing abortion pills in Texas.

And then there’s this:

The federal judge in a closely watched lawsuit that seeks to overturn federal approval of a widely used abortion pill has scheduled the first hearing in the case for this week, but he planned to delay making the public aware of it, according to people familiar with the case.

Judge Matthew J. Kacsmaryk, of the Northern District in Texas, told lawyers in the case on Friday that he was scheduling the hearing for Wednesday morning. However, he asked them not to disclose that information and said he would not enter it into the public court record until late Tuesday evening.

One person familiar with the case, which is being heard in federal court in Amarillo, Texas, said such steps were “very irregular,” especially for a case of intense public interest.

Judge Kacsmaryk, a Trump appointee who has written critically about Roe v. Wade and previously worked for a Christian conservative legal organization, told lawyers in a conference call Friday that he did not want the March 15 hearing to be “disrupted,” and that he wanted all parties involved to share their points in an orderly fashion, according to people familiar with the discussion.

At the hearing, lawyers representing the plaintiffs, the F.D.A. and a manufacturer of mifepristone will present arguments for and against an injunction. It is unclear if the judge will decide whether to issue an order that day or sometime later.

Such an order would be unprecedented, legal experts say, and — if higher courts were to allow an injunction to stand — would make it harder for patients to get abortions in states where abortion is legal, not just in those trying to restrict it.

This is happening, people. Whether or not these laws stand up through the courts, it’s not in dispute that they are seeking a full ban on abortion. I will be surprised if the Supremes decide to completely ban the abortion pill right away but you never know. They are certainly on a roll. As for punishing people for helping a woman get an abortion I could easily see them upholding the notion on the basis of “states’ rights.” No, they are not consistent. But consistency is no longer necessary. They have power instead.

Update. If that wasn’t bad enough:

MEMBERS OF THE South Carolina State House are considering a bill that would make a woman who has an abortion in the state eligible for the death penalty. 

The “South Carolina Prenatal Equal Protection Act of 2023” would amend the state’s code of laws, redefining “person” to include a fertilized egg at the point of conception, affording that zygote “equal protection under the homicide laws of the state” — up to and including the ultimate punishment: death.  

The bill was authored by Rep. Rob Harris, a registered nurse and member of the Freedom Caucus; it has attracted 21 co-sponsors to date. (Two former co-sponsors — Rep. Matt Leber and Rep. Kathy Landing — asked to have their names removed as sponsors of the bill. Leber and Landing could not be reached for comment.)  …

Multiple Texas lawmakers have floated the idea of executing women who have abortions in the past. Those bills, proposed before the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, failed.

So what’s happening in Florida today?

Published by digby on March 13, 2023

More bans!

https://twitter.com/monitoringbias/status/1635005380601470977?s=20

As the poster writes:

“any major or minor that… utilizes pedagogical methodology associated with Critical Theory” This would theoretically include: — Gender and African-American and other “studies” disciplines — Literature — Sociology — History — Anthropolgy — Political science And other majors.

The comments are interesting. Most of them are in favor and excuse the authoritarian overreach by saying that it’s all fine because it doesn’t ban private colleges from doing it. Others point out that professors would still be allowed to apply this sort of critical analysis in their teaching but the colleges could not offer majors in anything that uses it. (I don’t think that solves the problem.) Mostly, though people on that twitter thread really seem to love this solution because:

CRT, etc., are founded on logical fallacies, the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy in particular, and taxpayers ought not be compelled to pay for teaching of ways of thinking that can only lead kids astray.

Lol. This person doesn’t know what CRT is but that doesn’t stop him or her from throwing around some Latin for the rubes.

By the way, I think plenty of Florida citizens think they ought not to be compelled to pay for transporting immigrants from Texas to Martha’s Vineyard or funding an “election police force” but that’s what’s happening.

Will indictments matter?

Published by digby on March 13, 2023

Probably not

It was reported on Friday that Donald Trump’s former lawyer, Michael Cohen, will be testifying before a grand jury today. This is widely considered to be leading to a probable indictment of Trump in the Stormy Daniels hush money case after the Manhattan DA, Alvin Bragg, invited the former president to testify last week. Apparently, prosecutors routinely give that option to targets they are about to charge with a crime.

You’ll recall that the case pertains to the hush money scheme cooked by Trump and the National Inquirer back in 2016 to pay off women who slept with Donald Trump. The Daniels case ended up being a criminal investigation when it was revealed that Cohen bought her story through a shell company and was later reimbursed by Trump personally. Cohen went to jail for his part in this and his indictment left no doubt that he was doing the bidding of Trump who was nonetheless not charged. It appears that Bragg may have decided to rectify that.

Meanwhile, the case in Georgia seems to be getting close to some kind of conclusion. The New York Attorney General’s civil case against Trump and the Trump Org. is still in play. And the E. Jean Carroll defamation case is chugging right along just as the pair of Special Prosecutor cases pertaining to the classified documents theft and the January 6th insurrection are being energetically investigated.

It’s a lot.

Here we have a former president, and current Republican front-runner for the GOP nomination, as the target or subject of criminal investigations and massive civil litigation. And these cases run the gamut from tawdry payoffs to a porn star and the defamation of a woman who accuses him of rape to massive financial crimes, electoral fraud, espionage and sedition. These cases are going to be rolling out over the course of months as the presidential race is heating up.

Everyone is aware of this and yet, it doesn’t seem to be a deal breaker.

In fact, to the extent that the GOP establishment and some voters are second-guessing a third Trump campaign, it is rarely mentioned that he is a one-man crime spree. Their only concern is that they really want to win and they aren’t sure that he has it in him to go another round. However, if he manages to pull off a primary win you can be sure that they’ll be right on board all the way, indictments or no indictments.

Trump thinks an indictment will actually help him and it will almost certainly motivate his supporters to fork over more of their hard earned cash. After the Mar-a-Lago search, he was collecting over $1 million a day for several days afterwards. And virtually everyone in the GOP reflexively defended him. Even arch-rival Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis jumped in with a perfect rendition of Trumpian talking points:

“The raid on [Mar-a-Lago] is another escalation in the weaponization of federal agencies against the regime’s political opponents, while people like Hunter Biden get treated with kid gloves,”

I’m only surprised he didn’t call it the”woke federal agencies” and the “woke regime.” It’s very unlike DeSantis to resist using the word woke at least twice in every sentence. But it did send the message that even those who are trying to knock Trump off his pedestal are with him when it comes to committing crimes. And Trump has every reason to believe they will continue to do so. When asked at the recent CPAC gathering if he would drop out of the race if he were to be indicted Trump told reporters, “Oh, absolutely, I won’t even think about leaving … probably it’ll enhance my numbers, but it’s a very bad thing for America. It’s very bad for the country.”

There have been a number of times in the past few months as these cases have been heating up when Trump has gone even farther and hinted that if he is legally pursued, there will be violence. After the Mar-a-Lago raid, he made it pretty clear:

“If a thing like that happened, I would have no prohibition against running,” Trump said in an interview with conservative talk radio host Hugh Hewitt. “I think if it happened, I think you’d have problems in this country the likes of which perhaps we’ve never seen before. I don’t think the people of the United States would stand for it.”

When Hewitt asked him how he would respond to accusations that he was inciting violence, he fatuously replied, “That’s not inciting. I’m just saying what my opinion is. I don’t think the people of this country would stand for it.” Over the weekend he said it again on his social media platform Truth Social:

The Department of Injustice has fully weaponized Law Enforcement in the United States, except against Joe and Hunter Biden. The American people will not stand for what is happening on our Borders, with our Rigged Elections, or with the Soviet style Weaponization of Law Enforcement!

Remember, he’s not priming some of the crazies in his party like those who stormed the Capitol on January 6th to take matters into their own hands. He’s just stating his opinion. And he’s certainly not sending any messages by recording a song with the “January 6th Choir” — prisoners who are being held without bail because they present a threat to others — which is now the number one song on iTunes.

We’re starting to hear some faint rumblings of something called “Trump fatigue,” which suggests that while people really like him they are just getting worn down by all the drama. That’s probably a real phenomenon. It used to happen with Bill and Hillary Clinton, who were always dogged by scandal (although they are rank amateurs compared to Trump.) Sometimes people just want a break.

I would not be surprised if there are a fair number of Republicans who will feel that way if these legal cases actually draw blood. But I suspect that his hardcore following will become even more devoted, just as he suspects. Keep in mind that Trump brought in a lot of new voters who had never participated in politics before. They don’t care about policy. They certainly don’t care about the Republican Party which they have been programmed to believe is just as much the enemy as the Democrats. They’ll follow him wherever he wants to go.

At the moment Trump is refusing to pledge that he will support the eventual nominee in 2024 if he loses the primary. Of course he is. And he has hinted broadly at a possible third-party run should he be rejected by the Republicans, although that’s a very tough undertaking I’m not sure he would be prepared to do.

The monumental problem Republicans face is that it doesn’t matter if he’s indicted, on trial or in jail, there are some voters who will not vote for anyone but him as long as he’s in the mix. And he has said repeatedly that he will not drop out, no matter what. One of his rivals could get 70% of the delegates and he will still have that 30% and they will be with him or no one. They’re in it for Trump. And the party just can’t get around that.

Breathtaking entitlement

Published by Tom Sullivan on March 13, 2023

Who Do You Serve, Who Do You Protect?

Brad Miller, a former congressman from N.C. (2003-2013) who served on the House Financial Services Committee, believes that unsecured SVB and Signature bank customers bailed out by government action will not be chastened by their own failure to self-insure assets exceeding $250k. Instead, “their sense of entitlement will be breathtaking.”

It’s already breathtaking. Americans don’t need to have served on Financial Services to know it.

The bailout decision Sunday will cost President Biden support, a friend retired from the FDIC tells me. And the Fed? They’ve been mismanaging the economy for quite a while.

Biden pledges to hold the bankers responsible for their risk-taking. Management will be fired. Bank investors will lose their money, Biden said this morning. “That’s how capitalism works.”

But the all-knowing, all-seeing Market should also hold the those who mismanaged (largely) venture capital assets by leaving them unsecured with these niche banks should also face consequences. They will not under this government bailout.

“Who Do You Serve, Who Do You Protect?” is a regular chant at protests against police violence. How many Americans already know the answer to that rhetorical question, whether it is law enforcement or financial regulators?

It’s bad enough that politicians on the right are systematically undermining confidence in elections and paving the way for authoritarianism or worse. Federal officials reacting like Pavlov’s dog to squeals from financial elites is adding more straws to a tired camels back.

Rugged individualism for everyone else

Published by Tom Sullivan on March 13, 2023

Yellen, FDIC, White House backstop SVB depositors

What a difference 10 hours makes. Soon after Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen told “Face the Nation” on Sunday that the government would not bail out failed Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) owners and investors, Treasury, the Federal Reserve, and FDIC issued a joint statement late Sunday that after consulting with President Joe Biden the FDIC would government regulators would “complete its resolution of Silicon Valley Bank … in a manner that fully protects all depositors.”

“Depositors will have access to all of their money starting Monday, March 13. No losses associated with the resolution of Silicon Valley Bank will be borne by the taxpayer,” the statement continued.

We are also announcing a similar systemic risk exception for Signature Bank, New York, New York, which was closed today by its state chartering authority. All depositors of this institution will be made whole. As with the resolution of Silicon Valley Bank, no losses will be borne by the taxpayer.

Shareholders and certain unsecured debtholders will not be protected. Senior management has also been removed. Any losses to the Deposit Insurance Fund to support uninsured depositors will be recovered by a special assessment on banks, as required by law.

The Federal Reserve announced separately it would establish a loan program for banks “designed to buttress them against financial risks caused by Friday’s collapse of SVB,” the Washington Post reports:

The decision by Treasury to backstop all deposits at SVB and Signature — not just those up to $250,000 that are insured under federal law — rested on a judgment that it was necessary to avoid a wider “systemic” meltdown. The move will likely ignite a political firestorm over the decision to protect the assets of tech firms, venture capitalists, and other rich people in California.

Biden is expected to address the bank collapses this morning.

“The American people and American businesses can have confidence that their bank deposits will be there when they need them,” the president said. “I am firmly committed to holding those responsible for this mess fully accountable and to continuing our efforts to strengthen oversight and regulation of larger banks so that we are not in this position again.”

So he says. The problem is that, after the 2008 financial crisis, “again” was last Friday. Those responsible for the 2008 collapse faced no appreciable consequences under the Obama-Biden administration. Making things worse, as soon as Republicans held the White House, Donald Trump, with help from 33 House Democrats and 17 Senate Democrats, “signed the biggest rollback of bank regulations since the global financial crisis.”

https://twitter.com/kriswernowsky/status/1635139574933651456?s=20

Is it torches and pitchforks yet?

A second Washington Post report considers the political fallout from this latest banking crisis:

“Now is not the time for U.S. taxpayers to bail out Silicon Valley Bank,” Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) said in a statement, per our colleague Tony. “If there is a bailout of Silicon Valley Bank, it must be 100 percent financed by Wall Street and large financial institutions. We cannot continue down the road of more socialism for the rich and rugged individualism for everyone else.”

Another potential flash point: SVB serves plenty of tech companies that are unpopular with both parties, and they are likely to benefit from the government’s maneuver, as will some wealthy Californians.

American Prospect Executive Editor David Dayen (“Chain of Title” and “Monopolized“) notes that there exists a private option for insuring deposits over $250k that SVB and its venture capitalist depositors (VCs) seem not to have used.

“There’s something called Insured Cash Sweep. It essentially cuts up your large account if you’re a business into insured pieces, $250k each. In the event of a run, those deposits over the limit are safe,” Dayen tweeted Sunday. For reasons unknown, these financial masters of the universe did not use it.

“OK Roku’s CFO should be told not to come in on Monday,” Dayen snarked. Roku had 26 percent of its assets, nearly half a billion dollars, at SVB.

“Insured Cash Sweep is good up to $150 million,” Dayen added. “Having half a billion dollars in one bank is the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard.”

But there will be no accountability, personal or otherwise, for them leaving their deposits (and investors) exposed. Uncle Sam will ensure Roku and other tech firms are made whole. The rest of you can eat cake.

Again: High rollers exposed to the bank failure screamed. Government heard them the way it did not hear mortgage holders who lost their family homes and equity in the wake of the 2008 meltdown. The class-preference in who the government believes merits a bailout and who gets rugged individualism won’t be lost on Americans not among the 1 percent, as Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) observed Sunday.

The crisis of confidence that Treasury, the Federal Reserve, FDIC, the president and Congress need to address is not just financial. Complicating resolution is that they are the ones behind it as much as financial elites to whose whims they cater.

UPDATE: Monkeys are more sensitive to unfairness than pols in D.C.