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Will Sen. Whitehouse Renew His Call for RICO Prosecution of Companies like Exxon?

by Gaius Publius

I’ve been writing recently about the blockbuster report by Inside Climate News that Exxon knew, as early as 1977, that climate change was very likely real and that continuing to burn fossil fuels would disrupt the livability of the planet. The main page of the ICN report is here. My initial discussion is here.

Prior to those revelations, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (see below) and others were calling for RICO civil suits against companies financing climate deniers to determine if these companies are guilty of defrauding the public in the same way the tobacco companies were guilty of defrauding the public. This piece is about those calls for RICO lawsuits, in particular, Sheldon Whitehouse’s.

Bottom line first, to keep the timeline clear:

• Before it was known that Exxon knew (before the full release of their internal documents), Senator Whitehouse and others thought companies funding deniers may be defrauding the country in the same way tobacco companies defrauded the country and their customers.
   
• Whitehouse and others have already called for a federal RICO (racketeering) lawsuit to investigate the allegation and, if proved, to stop the lying and the fraud and seek damages.
   
• One of the hurdles for a RICO conviction (as opposed to a lawsuit or investigation) involves proving that the companies knew they were lying. In the case of tobacco companies, pre-trial discovery overcame that problem. Subpoenaed internal company documents showed they knew.
   
• Now Inside Climate News has released a treasure trove of internal Exxon documents going back to 1977, documents that appear to show the company knew, internally, that global warming was real and that the likely cause was carbon (CO2) emissions. ICN has also, with Frontline, interviewed many of the participants in Exxon’s then study of global warming. This evidence is strongly against Exxon’s claim that global warming is “uncertain” or unrelated to burning fossil fuel, its main product.
   
• In light of this new information, will Sen. Whitehouse renew his call for a federal RICO investigation? Will others?
   
• Will climate-aware voters call for Democratic political candidates to go on the record about RICO investigations?

The last two bullets above represent next steps. Care to help?

Now the details.

Sheldon Whitehouse Wants to Sue Fossil Fuel Companies For Climate Fraud

Back in late May, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), a former prosecutor, wrote an op-ed calling for RICO investigations into companies engaged in and financing climate denial, likening these practices to the fraudulent practices of tobacco companies, who were similarly sued. (Hat tip to Daniel Marans at the Huffington Post, who wrote about the op-ed and from whom I borrowed this section’s heading.)

Whitehouse starts by discussing the case of the tobacco companies (my emphasis throughout):

The fossil-fuel industry’s campaign to mislead the American people

by Sheldon Whitehouse

Fossil fuel companies and their allies are funding a massive and sophisticated campaign to mislead the American people about the environmental harm caused by carbon pollution.
Their activities are often compared to those of Big Tobacco denying the health dangers of smoking. Big Tobacco’s denial scheme was ultimately found by a federal judge to have amounted to a racketeering enterprise.

The Big Tobacco playbook looked something like this: (1) pay scientists to produce studies defending your product; (2) develop an intricate web of PR experts and front groups to spread doubt about the real science; (3) relentlessly attack your opponents.

Thankfully, the government had a playbook, too: the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, or RICO. In 1999, the Justice Department filed a civil RICO lawsuit against the major tobacco companies and their associated industry groups, alleging that the companies “engaged in and executed — and continue to engage in and execute — a massive 50-year scheme to defraud the public, including consumers of cigarettes, in violation of RICO.”

Tobacco spent millions of dollars and years of litigation fighting the government. But finally, through the discovery process, government lawyers were able to peel back the layers of deceit and denial and see what the tobacco companies really knew all along about cigarettes.

In 2006, Judge Gladys Kessler of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia decided that the tobacco companies’ fraudulent campaign amounted to a racketeering enterprise. According to the court: “Defendants coordinated significant aspects of their public relations, scientific, legal, and marketing activity in furtherance of a shared objective — to . . . maximize industry profits by preserving and expanding the market for cigarettes through a scheme to deceive the public.”

Notice that Whitehouse is not accusing the carbon (fossil fuel) companies of having different ideas than most climate scientists. He’s accusing them of fraud. You’ll hear cries of “criminalizing ideas” from professional climate deniers if this lawsuit moves seriously forward. Far from having differing ideas, however, a successful suit will prove that the carbon companies, like the tobacco companies, have the same ideas the public and most scientists have … and that they lied about what they knew. That’s not prosecuting ideas; it’s prosecuting … well, fraud, something the government frequently does (except in the case of Wall Street investment banks) and should do as part of its job. 

Whitehouse: Fossil Fuel Companies Are Acting Like Tobacco Companies

Whitehouse documents considerable similarity between the tobacco industry’s funding of claims it knew to be wrong — that smoking was safe, or at best, its harm was “unproven” — and the funding of similar claims by the carbon companies. For example:

The shape of the fossil fuel industry’s denial operation has been documented by, among others, Drexel University professor Robert Brulle. In a 2013 paper published in the journal Climatic Change, Brulle described a complex network of organizations and funding that appears designed to obscure the fossil fuel industry’s fingerprints. To quote directly from Brulle’s report, it was “a deliberate and organized effort to misdirect the public discussion and distort the public’s understanding of climate.” That sounds a lot like Kessler’s findings in
the tobacco racketeering case.

There’s more to back up his assertions in the op-ed. This is just part of the evidence he cites.

Whitehouse Wants to Use Discovery to See if Carbon Companies Are Guilty of Lying

At the time he wrote the op-ed, May 2015, Whitehouse wasn’t sure — he didn’t have the evidence — that the carbon companies were guilty in the same way the tobacco companies were. He didn’t know, in other words, whether they knew they were lying. In the case of the tobacco companies, it took the “discovery” phase of the lawsuit to uncover the proof:

The tobacco industry was proved to have conducted research that showed the direct opposite of what the industry stated publicly — namely, that tobacco use had serious health effects. Civil discovery would reveal whether and to what extent the fossil fuel industry has crossed this same line. We do know that it has funded research that — to its benefit — directly contradicts the vast majority of peer-reviewed climate science. One scientist who consistently published papers downplaying the role of carbon emissions in climate change, Willie Soon, reportedly received more than half of his funding from oil and electric utility interests: more than $1.2 million.

To be clear: I don’t know whether the fossil fuel industry and its allies engaged in the same kind of racketeering activity as the tobacco industry. We don’t have enough information to make that conclusion. Perhaps it’s all smoke and no fire. But there’s an awful lot of smoke.

Thanks to the ICN report, we now appear to have that information.

Will Sheldon Whitehouse Renew His Call for RICO Lawsuit in Light of the Exxon Documents?

Above, Whitehouse wrote (and I bolded): “I don’t know whether the fossil fuel industry and its allies engaged in the same kind of racketeering activity as the tobacco industry. We
don’t have enough information to make that conclusion.” I think any interpretation of Exxon’s own internal documents is a strong indicator of real concern and guilty knowledge on their part.

For example, from the initial ICN report:

At a meeting in Exxon Corporation’s headquarters, a senior company scientist named James F. Black addressed an audience of powerful oilmen. Speaking without a text as he flipped through detailed slides, Black delivered a sobering message: carbon dioxide from the world’s use of fossil fuels would warm the planet and could eventually endanger humanity.

“In the first place, there is general scientific agreement that the most likely manner in which mankind is influencing the global climate is through carbon dioxide release from the burning of fossil fuels,” Black told Exxon’s Management Committee, according to a written version he recorded later.

It was July 1977 when Exxon’s leaders received this blunt assessment, well before most of the world had heard of the looming climate crisis.

A year later, Black, a top technical expert in Exxon’s Research & Engineering division, took an updated version of his presentation to a broader audience. He warned Exxon scientists and managers that independent researchers estimated a doubling of the carbon dioxide (CO2) concentration in the atmosphere would increase average global temperatures by 2 to 3 degrees Celsius (4 to 5 degrees Fahrenheit), and as much as 10 degrees Celsius (18 degrees Fahrenheit) at the poles. Rainfall might get heavier in some regions, and other places might turn to desert.

“Some countries would benefit but others would have their agricultural output reduced or destroyed,” Black said, in the written summary of his 1978 talk.

Other documents and company actions show Exxon took Black’s warning very seriously. ICN is writing analyses of the documents it has released (document repository here, if you want to lookat them for yourself). For example, read “Exxon Confirmed Global Warming Consensus in 1982 with In-House Climate Models“. In it you’ll learn that in 1979 a researcher told company executives that “unless fossil fuel use was constrained, there would be ‘noticeable temperature changes’ and 400 parts per million [ppm] of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the air by 2010, up from about 280 ppm before the Industrial Revolution.” We’re at 400 ppm today. The company spent millions studying global warming, including funding a then-state-of-the-art supertanker to take sea and air temperature readings.

This is explosive information. Will Sheldon Whitehouse renew his call for the government to file a RICO lawsuit against Exxon and others like them who finance climate denial in order to continue their profits? He should, in my view. Who knows what other documents will be uncovered by aggressive “discovery” and subpoenas?

If you recall, the tobacco companies lost their case, lost it big, and paid a heavy price. Isn’t it time the carbon companies — Exxon, the Koch companies, BP and Shell — paid a price for their misdeeds as well? Just because we may have crossed some lines, reached some tipping points (peak water in California) doesn’t mean we can’t act now to prevent even worse consequences (multi-meter sea level rise in this century, as much as 240 feet when all ice melts).

James Hansen would call this a moral obligation. So would I.

It’s Going to Take Force

I’d like to close with something I wrote earlier: Don’t be confused. It’s going to take force to defeat the fossil fuel companies. We’re not in a debate with them, we’re in a battle. It will take an exercise of power to make the Kochs and the Exxons stand down. Battle means weapons — the weapon of public opinion, yes, but stronger ones too, the strongest we can find.

A multi-billion-dollar federal lawsuit, one with every chance of succeeding, would count as force in my book. Would Senator Whitehouse, Senator Sanders or candidate Clinton be willing to call for one? Perhaps it’s time to ask them.

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

GP

Dr Ben Carson can see the Baltics from his house

by digby

This interview with Hugh Hewitt has to be seen to be believed:

HH: Now Dr. Carson, I don’t do ambush interviews, but I do believe that the most important job of the president is national security and Defense related. Are you prepared to talk about some of those issues with me today?

BC: Absolutely.

HH: First question I always ask every candidate, have you had a chance to read the Lawrence Wright book called The Looming Tower, which is sort of the history of al Qaeda and where it comes from?

BC: I’ve not read that particular one, but I have had a chance to look at a lot of material on not only al Qaeda, but the radical Islamic movement in general, the kinds of things that motivate and drive them.

HH: What do you consider to be their tap root? What is the origin of their rage, in your view?

BC: Well, first of all, you have to recognize they go back thousands and thousands of years, really back to the battle between Jacob and Esau. But it has been a land issue for a very long period of time. Possession is very important to them. And one of the things that we’re doing, I think, incorrectly right now is not recognizing that they are expanding their territory. Not only the land that they’ve taken in Iraq, but what they’ve taken in Syria, they’re creating an Islamic state. And we can bomb it all we want. But unless we actually can take the land back, we’re really not doing them any damage.

HH: Dr. Carson, but you know, Muhammad lives in 632AD, so it’s a 1,300, 1,400 year old religion. How do you go back to Jacob and Esau, which are BC?

BC: I’m just saying that the conflict has been ongoing for thousands of years. This is not anything new, is what I’m saying.
HH: So it’s not specific to the Islamic faith or the Salafist offshoot to the Islamic faith?

BC: Well, the Islamic faith emanated from Esau.

HH: Okay, I would date it to 632, but you’ve got a Biblical connection here that some people may share with you, but I think scholars might dispute. I gather that. Let me ask you, though, in the current manifestation of the Islamic State, what is driving them to act as they are acting? Is it a particular variant of the Koran? What is it that you think animates their barbarianism?

BC: Well, I believe first of all that they believe that they are the possessors of right. And because of that, anything that is in disagreement with them is wrong and needs to be destroyed. And whatever mechanism they use to destroy it is okay. And that includes some of the things that appear to be very barbaric acts – chopping off people’s heads, burning them. It doesn’t matter, because they are infidels.

HH: Now do you rate the threat that the Islamic State and their adherents, and we don’t know if the Tunisian attack is Islamic State today or not. There are some suspicions is it, but we don’t know for sure. Do you rate the threat posed by them equal to the threat posed by Iran or other nation-state actors like North Korea, Russia or the People’s Republic of China?

BC: Well, I think right now, our biggest enemies are the group motivated by, that have sprung out of the Sunni radicals. That would be ISIS. And you know, there are a number of sponsored terrorist groups that emanate from the Shiia, which are based primarily in Iran. Right now, they’re fighting each other in Iraq, admittedly. But in the long run, I think they would gladly unite against us in their attempt to destroy the United States, our way of life, and Israel. And we have to be extraordinarily careful about any alliances with them.

HH: Now you’re unique in positing the prospect of a Shiia-Sunni alliance, although they have had some operational tactical alliances during the course of the Iraq war. But they are at each other’s throats right now, aren’t they?

BC: They are. There’s no question they’re at each other’s throats, and it’s tempting for us to say you know, the enemy of our enemy is our friend. But I do not believe that for one second. I believe that they believe that we are evil, and they want us destroyed.

HH: Are there any circumstances under which you can imagine trusting the mullahs of Tehran with nuclear weapons?

BC: No. No, because I don’t believe that they operate under the same guidelines as the rest of civilization in the sense that we were able to have some security, because people were afraid of mutual destruction. And I don’t believe that the threat of destruction to them carries the same weight as it does for other parts of civilization. In fact, in their philosophy, you know, becoming a martyr and dying could be a good thing.

HH: So do you rate, then, Iran as a greater threat than, say, Russia and China?

BC: I think currently, it is a greater threat, because I believe if they are able to acquire nuclear weapons, there’s a greater chance that they will utilize them, or that they will fall into the hands of other terrorists who might in fact use them.

HH: What would you like to see the President order John Kerry to do? Should we break off negotiations in Geneva and recalibrate our sanctions regime? Or should we continue to try and negotiate a halt to the program as it currently exists?

BC: I have nothing against negotiations, but they need to be very serious negotiations. And the demands need to be met quickly. So if we want to inspect, we should be able to inspect not based on their wants and desires, but based on what we have demanded. And if they’re not willing to comply with those, then why are we playing games with them?

HH: Yesterday, Vladimir Putin gave an interview in which he indicated he was willing to activate his nuclear alert status over Crimea. What do you assess Putin as, in terms of rational actor or a megalomaniac or what?

BC: Well, I think he’s a very rational actor, because he is sensing weakness. He’s sensing weakness in us and our allies in Europe, and he’s a bully. And I think he has bold ambitions, wants to reconstitute and empire. You know, when he invaded Georgia in 2008, you know, it was thought that you know, this was going to accomplish a limited, military action, and then he would withdraw. He never withdrew. And then he’s taken Crimea and Eastern Ukraine. And I think the only thing that really is stopping him is finances right now. And we should understand that, and we should do everything we can to create more economic problems for him. But then in the meantime, we should recognize what his goals are. And we should be establishing relationships with all the former components of the Soviet Union. We should be strengthening NATO. We should be getting them aligned with NATO. I mean, we need to be proactive. Why should we just wait until he does stuff and then say oh, he’s a horrible person and talk about sanctions again. That doesn’t make any sense.

HH: The Baltic states are very nervous, and we have troops in the Baltic states. Ought NATO to be willing to go to war if Putin attempts in the Baltic states anything like he’s attempted in Ukraine?

BC: I think they would be willing to go to war if they knew that they were backed up by us. I think part of the problem throughout the world right now is that our allies cannot be 100% certain that we’re behind them.

HH: And so should we have that sort of commitment, that if Putin makes a move on the Baltic states, we’d go to war?

BC: Well, if we have them involved in NATO. We need to convince them to get involved in NATO and strengthen NATO.

HH: Well, the Baltics, they are in NATO. So that’s, we’ll come back after the break and continue that conversation. And Poland’s in NATO, and we’ll talk about what that means with Dr. Ben Carson doing foreign affairs on the Hugh Hewitt Show.
— – – – –
HH: I’d like to turn to the Defense budget, Dr. Carson. Have you had a chance, yet, to review the House GOP budget or the Senate GOP budget that were introduced this week?

BC: No, I haven’t had a chance to, I’ve certainly heard what’s in it, but I haven’t actually read them.

HH: And are you up to day, yet? Have you stayed up on the specifics of America’s Defense posture and its nuclear triad and our current state of preparedness, etc?

BC: Yes.

HH: So what is, what are we going to do about upgrading our nuclear triad, specifically our submarine fleet which ages out by 2029?

BC: Well, not only the submarine fleet, but the entire Navy, as you probably know, is at a state that is the smallest that it’s been since 1917. We are now in the process of not cutting out fat, but cutting into the muscle and cutting into the bone. And the question is, is that going to continue? And the answer is yes, if we continue with the current rash of sequestering. So I believe that Congress is going to have to intervene, because I think the President is perfectly happen to continue with the cutting into the flesh and the bone of our military strength.

HH: So how high should the budget go? And they’re playing some games in order to avoid the sequester cap by having an Overseas Contingency Operations fund combine with the Defense cap. But how high should total Defense spending go, putting aside the categories we’ve put it in? Do you have a number in your mind, Dr. Carson?

BC: Well, I would put I this way. We need to look around the world and see what our needs are. It’s not necessarily the kind of thing that you can say $600 billion dollars is going to take care of this, or $700 billion, you know, that it may well. But you first of all have to ask yourself what your goals are, what are you trying to accomplish, and how critical those things are. And we look at, you know, things that are Level A critical, things that we absolutely must do. Those cannot be compromised. And we look at Level B, things we’d like to do, and Level C, things we may or may not do sometime in the future. Level A things, we must take care of, so I would be willing to sit down with the budgetary analysts to figure out what that amount has to be to accomplish those things.

HH: Have you given thought, yet, to the minimum size of the fleet, for example, 11 carrier groups, and 18 Ohio-Class submarines, and that kind of thing? Have you gotten to that level of detail, yet?

BC: No, I would say we need to be able to respond in at least three areas of the world simultaneously. If we don’t have what we need to be able to do that, I think we’re in great jeopardy.

HH: Now as this campaign develops, there will be a lot of important questions which are detailed. For example, should we buy more F-18 Superhornets, because the F-35’s aren’t in production at the level that we want? Are those fair game to ask Ben Carson, who’s a neurosurgeon and new to the national defense? Or are those off limits?

BC: They’re fair questions to ask. But they have to be willing to hear the answer. And the answer to that kind of thing is the job of the commander-in-chief is not to micromanage the military budget or micromanage the way that things are done. It is to set out the goals and to produce those for the people who really are the experts in those areas to carry out. I think one of the big problems that we’re having right now, both in terms of morale and in terms of being able to accomplish things is that we have people who really have no idea what they’re doing trying to control the military.

HH: But Dr. Carson, one of the things I know that’s going to come up, and again, I don’t do ambush interviews, but when it appeared you didn’t know that the Baltic states were a part of NATO, or where you date the…

BC: Well, when you were saying Baltic state, I thought you were continuing our conversation about the former components of the Soviet Union. Obviously, there’s only three Baltic states.

HH: Right, and they’re all part of NATO.

BC: Right.

HH: And so what I worry about as a Republican, as a conservative, is that because you’ve been being a great neurosurgeon all these years, you haven’t been deep into geopolitics, and that the same kind of questions that tripped up Sarah Palin early in her campaign are going to trip you up when, for example, the gotcha question, does she believe in the Bush doctrine when it depends on how you define the Bush doctrine. And so how are you going to navigate that, because I mean, you’ve only, have you been doing geopolitics? Do you read this stuff? Do you immerse yourself in it?

BC: I ‘ve read a lot in the last six months, no question about that. There’s a lot of material to learn. There’s no question about that. But again, I have to go back to something that I feel is a fundamental problem, and that is we spend too much time trying to get into these little details that are easily within the purview of the experts that you have available to you. And I think where we get lost is not being able to define what our real mission is, and not being able to strategize in terms of how do we defeat our enemies, how do we support our allies? I could spend, you know, the next six years learning all the details of all the SALT treaties and every other treaty that’s ever been done and completely miss the boat.

HH: Well, that’s possible, and I want to be respectful in posing this. But I mean, you wouldn’t expect me to become a neurosurgeon in a couple of years. And I wouldn’t expect you to be able to access and understand and collate the information necessary to be a global strategist in a couple of years. Is it fair for people to worry that you just haven’t been in the world strategy long enough to be competent to imagine you in the Oval Office deciding these things? I mean, we’ve tried an amateur for the last six years and look what it got us.

BC: Well, if you go to, let’s say, a very well-run hospital, you’re going to have a president of the hospital or chief administrator. He probably doesn’t know a whole lot about cardiac surgery, probably doesn’t know a whole lot about neurosurgery or pediatric infectious disease. But he knows how to put together a structure where the strength of all those departments work effectively. And as far as having an amateur in the Oval Office in the last six years, I would take issue with that. I would say that this man has been able to accomplish a great deal. It’s maybe not the things that you and I want accomplished, but in terms of fundamentally changing this nation and putting it on a different footing? I think he’s done quite a masterful job.

Talk about missing the point

by digby

I have never been to Burning Man and I’m sure I’ll never go.  I’m not a fan of big crowds or desert heat. But I can certainly appreciate the spirit of it.  Unfortunately, money (as usual) seems to have corrupted the thing as it always does:

For his 50th birthday, Jim Tananbaum, chief executive officer of Foresite Capital, threw himself an extravagant party at Burning Man, the annual sybaritic arts festival and all-hours rave that attracts 60,000-plus to the Black Rock Desert in Nevada over the week before Labor Day. Tananbaum’s bash went so well, he decided to host an even more elaborate one the following year. In 2014 he’d invite up to 120 people to join him at a camp that would make the Burning Man experience feel something like staying at a pop-up W Hotel. To fund his grand venture, he’d charge $16,500 per head.

Tananbaum, a contemporary art collector who resembles the actor Bob Saget, grew up on Manhattan’s Upper East Side and graduated from Yale and Harvard, where he earned both an M.D. and an MBA. After years of starting, selling, and investing in health-care companies, he founded Foresite in 2011. A private venture capital firm with $650 million under management, San Francisco-based Foresite specializes in the health-care and pharmaceutical industries.

Busy building his portfolios, Tananbaum only made it to Burning Man in 2009, the festival’s 24th year, but instantly fell under its spell. While his peers in San Francisco’s high finance circles took up kitesurfing or winemaking, he devoted his spare time to preparations for the next burn. “Jim put a tremendous effort into trying to create something very special for the Burning Man community,” says his friend Matt Nordgren, a former quarterback at the University of Texas, who went on to star in the Bravo reality show Most Eligible Dallas.

For 2014, Tananbaum wanted a camp that was aesthetically novel, ecologically conscious, and exceedingly comfortable. In the spring he and his team sent out a detailed invitation, enticing potential guests with an early vision of the camp, named Caravancicle. Anyone concerned about living in a hot, unforgiving wilderness could rest assured. There would be no roughing it at Caravancicle. Accommodations would consist of a series of cubical tents with carbon fiber skeletons. Each cube would have 9-foot ceilings, comfortable bedding, and air conditioning. The surrounding camp, enclosed by high walls, would be safe and private. Amenities would include a central lounge housed in a geodesic dome, private showers and toilets, solar panels, wireless Internet, and a 24-hour bar. Guests could count on a “full-service” staff, who would among other things help create “handcrafted, artisanal popsicles” to offer passers-by. To help blend in with the Burning Man regulars, who tend to parade around the commons in wild, racy outfits (if anything at all), the camp would include an entire shipping container full of costumes.

You have to read the whole article to appreciate just how fully they screwed it up. And it wasn’t just them, it was the board of Burning Man too which went out to find rich patrons and you know what happened next. This is the world in which we now live: everything is a toy for rich people and the rest of us are just supporting players, servants and slaves to their needs and wants. If you’re lucky they’ll trickle enough down on your head so that you can carve out a fairly decent life.  But there are no guarantees. Don’t ever forget, it’s all about them.

And as this article shows, these rich guys aren’t good at everything. In fact, they might not really be good at anything. But, like the aristocrats of yore they believe they were ordained by God (in their case Mammon, the God of Markets and Meritocracy) and they are, therefore, infallible.

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John Kasich, rebel with a resume


by digby

I wrote about John Kasich’s forgettable Washington Post editorial board interview today for Salon:

Speaking to the Washington Post editorial board John Kasich made his pitch for the presidency saying he is a rebel and an anti-establishment maverick who also has a resume a mile long from having been a Republican official for most of the last 30 years. And it’s kind of true. Unfortunately, for him, his brand of rebel is the kind that was popular 25 years ago, the kind who worked with Democrats to pass budget deals or campaign finance reform. It’s the kind that says the Republican party is too conservative.  He doesn’t seem to have gotten the memo that today’s Republican maverick thinks the the Republican Party is a bunch of wishy-washy, liberal sell-outs if they even pretend that compromise is a virtue.

Still, he does represent a small faction of sane Republicans and this comment will undoubtedly speak to them:

See, I am a fundamental believer in ideas. If you don’t have ideas, you got nothing. And frankly, my Republican Party doesn’t like ideas. They want to be negative against things.
Now we got – we’ve had a few who have been idea people. We had Reagan. Okay, Saint Ron. We had Kemp, he was an idea guy. We had, you know, I’d say Paul. Paul is driven mostly by ideas, Paul Ryan. He likes ideas. But you talk about most of them, most of them – the party is kind of a knee jerk against. Maybe that’s how they were created. I don’t know. 

That’s quite an indictment and he’s right.  It used to be an article of faith that the Republican Party was the party of ideas and it was the moribund philosophy of the left that was creaking along with nothing left to offer. But that’s been over for a long time, going back to when Kasich was in the leadership and Newt Gingrich was burning down the House. You would at least think think he would have noticed when he was employed at Fox News that “ideas” weren’t exactly motivating the right anymore.

But lest anyone gets the idea that Kasich has any innovative new ideas, his litany of policy prescriptions could have come directly from the Poppy Bush campaign. He’ll eliminate some federal agencies like the Commerce Department and move Medicare to “coordinated care.” He defends his massive tax cuts by evoking stale Wall Street blather about “certainty” being the magic elixir that will stimulate growth.  And he has the nerve to claim that the budget analysts who call his tax cuts a budget buster are innumerate hacks despite insisting he’s going to win the nomination even though he was mathematically eliminated some time ago so.

And there were times when one was immediately reminded that John Kasich can sometimes give Donald Trump a run for his billions in the bragging department:

And if you look at Ohio, you know, we have so many ideas, new ideas, newfangled ideas in Ohio it’s unbelievable, and they’re paying off. It’s the same thing I did when I was here, whether it was reforming the Pentagon or fixing the budget.

His subsequent ramble about the primaries, the convention, the party and politics is so disjointed you wonder if he’s so sleep deprived from campaigning that he can’t think straight. It seems to be part of his “common sense, regular guy” persona but it ends up sounding downright daft.  It’s not quite as bizarre as Trump’s frightening stream of consciousness babble but it’s closer than any allegedly sensible moderate should be.

But one thing does come through in all of it: Kasich truly believes that if either Trump or Cruz are nominated the party is going to be wiped out in November at all levels. And he thinks that its best hope of avoiding that is the grassroots party officials who are being selected as delegates who he trusts to make a sensible decision and choose him.  Unfortunately, Kasich doesn’t seem to have met the Tea Party or the conservative movement stalwarts who have taken over the party in the last few years. You’d think the Governor of Ohio would be a little bit more in touch but there’s something about Kasich that’s frozen from an earlier time. He obviously is engaged in contemporary politics but his rhetoric and attitudes are right out of the 80s.

The other headline that came out of this interview was his answer to the question of whether the District of Columbia should have the vote. The sensible moderate, compassionate conservative said no:

ARMAO:  What about voting rights in Congress, voting representatives?

KASICH:  Probably not. I don’t know. I’d have to, I mean, to me, that’s just, I just don’t see that we really need that, okay?  I don’t know. I don’t think so. 

ARMAO:  But you realize though that people in D.C. pay taxes, go to war and they have no vote in Congress.

KASICH:  Yeah. 

ARMAO:  How is that– 

KASICH:  Well look, I am not – I don’t – I am not, because you know what, what it really gets down to if you want to be honest is because they know that’s just more votes in the Democratic Party. 

Those would be mostly African American Democratic votes. What’s that stale old saying about a gaffe being when a politician accidentally tells the truth?

To his credit Kasich has not joined Trump’s wall and mass deportation party.  But whether he knows it or not (and I expect he knows it very well) he has evoked the major conservative movement motivation for opposing immigration and supporting vote suppression: the likelihood that American racial minorities and immigrants will become Democrats after being treated like dirt by white conservatives.

Ann Coulter, author of “Adios America” makes the point explicitly. She not only claims that any path to citizenship for undocumented workers and their kids is a nefarious plot to create more Democrats, she claims that’s the design of all immigration for the past 50 years:

Half a century ago, Democrats looked at the country and realized they were never going to convince Americans to agree with them. But they noticed that people in most other countries of the world already agreed with them. The solution was obvious.  

So in 1965 — 50 years ago this week — Sen. Ted Kennedy passed an immigration law that has brought 59 million foreigners to our shores, who happen to vote 8-2 for the Democrats.

Republicans should be sweeping the country, but they aren’t, because of Kennedy’s immigration law. Without post-1965 immigrants bloc-voting for the Democrats, Obama never would have been elected president, and Romney would have won a bigger landslide against him in 2012 than Reagan did against Carter in 1980.

This isn’t a guess; it’s a provable fact. Obama beat Romney by less than 5 million votes in a presidential election in which about 125 million votes were cast. More than 30 million of Obama’s votes came from people who arrived under Teddy Kennedy’s immigration law; fewer than 10 million of Romney’s did.  

The 1965 act brought in the poorest of the poor from around the globe. Non-English-speaking peasants from wildly backward cultures could be counted on to be dependent on government assistance for generations to come. 

It’s not hard to see why she loves Trump so much.

John Kasich doesn’t believe that. But he reflexively says he’s fine with denying people the vote if he thinks they might become Democrats. So for all his insistence that he’s a sensible moderate, his inner Ann Coulter slipped out there. (And if you look at his record in Ohio his inner Ann Coulter comes out quite a bit, in more ways than one.)

Nobody is quite sure why Kasich is still plugging along in this race and this interview didn’t clear it up. Some people believe that really he’s running for Vice President and others think he’s just being a good #neverTrump soldier. If you take him at this word he really believes that he’ll prevail at he convention when all good stolid GOP activists and officials realize that he’s the only prudent and judicious choice. He’s noticed that his party hasn’t got any ideas but not that it’s gone batshit crazy all the way down to the grassroots.

Same As It Ever Was

by tristero

David Byrne burning down the house, Radio City Music Hall, NY February 28, 2009.

All performers were dressed in white while the background lights were almost entirely red and blue. Get it? And don’t think that wasn’t intentional: David Byrne is one of the most visually sophisticated musicians alive.

Poisoning the well for profit and cruelty

Among would-be Rambos who fancy themselves patriots, artifacts from the American Revolution serve to justify, well, whatever antisocial, anti-American behavior needs justifying. Sacking the U.S. Capitol comes to mind. They’ll wave Gadsden flags and sport tee shirts citing Thomas Jefferson’s “the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.” Etc.

But when they’re not sacking capitols and bear-spraying police, and when their crooked lawyers are not working to overturn elections that don’t go their way, these miscreants employ a more ancient tradition: poisoning the well. Smithsonian Magazine provides a thumbnail history of “an early form of biological warfare,” the practice of belligerents as ancient as the Sumerians and as recent as the Israeli Army and ISIS iterally poisoning wells to inflict suffering on civilians. RationalWiki describes metaphorically poisoning the well as “a rhetorical technique and logical fallacy that uses the association of negative emotions to distract a subject from actual evidence in an argument,” adding, “Poisoning the well is an appeal to hate.”

Brother, do many on the right hate the country they claim so loudly to love. Abusive men, take note, the Republican Party is acting out one of those dreary murder ballads with America. If they can’t have her, nobody can.

Robert Reich sees in Donald Trump’s criminal trial in Manhattan how thoroughly the right has poisoned the well of democracy by undermining human decency. He finds no one admirable in the Donald-Michael-Allen-Stormy-David saga revealed in court testimony. What has our American experiment in self-government come to when so many from MAGA foot soldiers to presidents and Supreme Court justices lack the basic honor and integrity to conduct it as intended?

This cast of characters — and there are many, many others like them in Trump world — are loathsome not because they have violated the law, but because they have contributed to creating a harsh society in which everyone is potentially bought or sold.

It’s a sell-or-tell society, a catch-and-kill society, a just-take-care-of-it society. A society where money and power are the only considerations. Where honor and integrity count for nothing.

I am not naive about how the world works. I’ve spent years in Washington, many of them around powerful people. I have seen the seamy side of American politics and business.

But the people who inhabit Trump world live in a more extreme place — where there are no norms, no standards of decency, no common good. There are only opportunities to make money off others and potential dangers of being ripped off by others.

When most sites where you might read this see you only as data to be mined, your humanity has been stripped. You’ve been reduced to a commodity to be bought and sold. Nothing more.

John Pavlovitz (someone you should read) noted in 2021 that the right-wing war on “woke” is an assault on basic human decency:

“Woke” is Republican-speak for those of us who believe every America adult should have a voice in the electoral process of this nation,
for people who don’t believe a human being’s body, gender identity, or sexual orientation are anyone else’s business,
for we who are sickened at the violence against the Asian community: the direct result of the irresponsible rhetoric of a Republican president,
for Americans who are disgusted that a cancer diagnosis now often necessitates a gofundme page, because we are making illness a financial death sentence,
for people who will not abide the assassination of unarmed people of color by members of a police force infected with white supremacy,
for those who grieve the way this nation is ravaged by preventable gun violence because those who profit from it have such a stranglehold on our lawmakers—
for those of us who exhibit the slightest empathy whatsoever toward migrant families or the working poor or people of color, when we see how hostile our nation has been to them and how oppressive it still is.

It’s woke to want fair elections.
It’s woke to be anti-racist.
It’s woke to be anti-fascist.
It’s woke to trust Science.
It’s woke to wear a mask in a pandemic.
It’s woke to be the parent of a bullied child.
It’s woke to want to be addressed with the gender you identify with.
It’s woke to want a less-polluted community.

Anything that brings equity gets this label from the Right because inequity is its only goal.

Their goal is not to water the tree of liberty. Their goal is to poison the well of democracy, to render it unusable by the rest of us who share this land, to sabotage its very foundations.

The rule of law is one of those foundations. Equal justice under law is on trial in Manhattan (and in pending Trump cases).

See the New York Times this morning for what it looks like in the West Bank where the law protects the lawless but not the disfavored, where lawbreakers become lawmakers:

The two-tier situation has only become worse during the past year. We scrutinized a sample of three dozen cases from the West Bank since Oct. 7 that shows how much the legal system has decayed. In cases ranging from stealing livestock to arson to violent assault, not a single suspect was charged with a crime; in one case, a settler shot a Palestinian in the stomach while an Israel Defense Forces soldier looked on, yet the police questioned the shooter for only 20 minutes and never as a criminal suspect.

Where does the extremist right mean to take the United States? Behold the template:

In the West Bank, a new generation of ultranationalists has taken an even more radical turn against the very notion of a democratic Israeli state. Their objective is to tear down Israel’s institutions and to establish “Jewish rule”: anointing a king, building a temple in place of the Jerusalem mosques sacred to Muslims worldwide, imposing a religious regime on all Jews.

The Times investigation continues here. As Republican lawmakers threatened the International Criminal Court last month, you have been warned.

Now, what are you prepared to do about it?

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For The Win, 5th Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free countywide GOTV planning guide at ForTheWin.us.

Where were you when?

It’s tiresome by now, these “where were you when” events. The JFK assassination (or MLK’s or RFK’s) or the first moon landing or the Challenger disaster or September 11 were days you never forgot. Nowadays it’s U.S. Supreme Court decisions like Dobbs. If you are reading this between 10 a.m. and noonish EST, you may be missing today’s “where were you when” event at the U.S. Supreme Court (Washington Post):

The Supreme Court on Thursday will confront the critical question of Donald Trump’s eligibility to return to the White House, hearing arguments in an unprecedented case that gives the justices a central role in charting the course of a presidential election for the first time in nearly a quarter-century.

The justices will decide whetherColorado’s top court was correctto apply a post-Civil War provisionof the Constitution to order Trump off the ballot after concluding his actions around the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol amounted to insurrection.Primary voting is already underway in some states. Colorado’s ballots for the March 5 primary were printed last week and include Trump’s name. But his status as a candidate will depend on what the Supreme Court decides.

Zero hour is approaching, so I’m cutting this short. Oral arguments available live here.

Enjoy this fiery celebration of book-burning from Valentina Gomez Noriega (funny, for some reason she’s going by Valentina Gomez), Republican candidate for Secretary of State in Missouri in the August 6 GOP primary. Missouri Democrats failed to field a candidate. Terrific.

The entire Republican Party has devolved into a Stooge scene. I gotta go see if Trump’s Supreme Court picks are going to set fire to the 14th Amendment.

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For The Win, 5th Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free countywide GOTV planning guide at ForTheWin.us.

You’ve read about how the Trump White House was basically a pill mill, dispensing uppers and downers like candy and even handing out fentanyl for reasons no one has been able to explain. Right. Perfectly normal.

Look what’s been happening at Tesla, the company owned by the other Very Stable Genius, Elon Musk. The Wall Street Journal reports:

Several current or former directors at Tesla and SpaceX attend parties with him, go on exotic vacations and hang out at Burning Man, the Nevada arts and music festival.

Musk and these directors, including venture capitalists Gracias and Ira Ehrenpreis, tech mogul Larry Ellison, former media executive James Murdoch, as well as Musk’s brother, Kimbal Musk, have invested tens of millions of dollars in each other’s companies—Ellison held billions of dollars in Tesla shares with about a 1.5% holding in 2022. Some also received career support and help from Elon Musk.

Most members of Tesla’s current eight-person board have amassed shares worth hundreds of millions of dollars from their seats over the years, significantly more than what board members at other companies make for their service. 

Tesla pays its directors mostly in stock options, and the current board, not including Musk himself, collectively has made more than $650 million selling shares from those options. They hold additional options valued at nearly $1 billion. Some directors agreed to return a portion of that compensation to Tesla to resolve a shareholder lawsuit about their compensation while denying any wrongdoing. A judge has yet to approve the settlement. 

Some current and former Tesla and SpaceX directors have knowledge of Musk’s illegal drug use but haven’t taken public action, according to people who have witnessed the drug use or were briefed on it.

The Wall Street Journal reported in January that Musk has used drugs including cocaine, ecstasy, LSD and magic mushrooms, and that leaders at Tesla and SpaceX were concerned about it, particularly his recreational use of ketamine, for which Musk has said he has a prescription. The illegal drugs violate strict antidrug policies at Musk’s companies and could put SpaceX’s federal contracts and Musk’s security clearance at risk. 

At the upscale Austin Proper Hotel, Musk has attended social gatherings in recent years with Tesla board member Joe Gebbia, the 

Airbnb co-founder and a friend of his, where Musk took ketamine recreationally through a nasal spray bottle multiple times, according to people familiar with the drug use and the parties. 

Other directors, Gracias, Jurvetson and Kimbal Musk, have consumed drugs with him, according to people who have witnessed the drug use and others with knowledge of it.

Musk and some people close to him, including Kimbal Musk, attend parties at Hotel El Ganzo, a boutique hotel in San José del Cabo, Mexico, known for its art and music scene as well as drug-fueled events, according to people familiar with the parties.

The volume of drug use by Musk and with board members has become concerning, some of these people said.

In the culture Musk has created around him, some friends, including directors, feel there is an expectation to consume drugs with him because they think refraining could upset the billionaire, who has made them a lot of money, some of the people said. More so, they don’t want to risk losing the social capital that comes from being close to Musk, which for ome feels akin to having proximity to a king.

Totally fine. Nothing to worry about.

Elon Musk already holds the world record for losing the most money, and the Tesla CEO has lost another $30.5 billion in the first month of 2024. At the same time, his rival in wealth, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, has gained $7.3 billion.

Now the gap between the tech moguls is just $15 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. That might sound like a lot (a lot, a lot) to normal people, but it’s not much in the race to the top for the world’s richest, especially considering that Musk has already lost twice that sum in just a few weeks.

You’d think that Musk would be attending to business in light of that. Well, not so much. Get a load of what he spent the weekend doing around the clock:

It was a full blown bender, I’m afraid.

The man has issues. Big ones.

Forcing women to carry fetuses with fatal chromosomal disorders to term is a grotesque violation of human rights

Kate Cox, the mother of two whose request for an abortion was granted by a Texas judge, speaks out to NBC News after the ruling. “We’re going through the loss of a child,” Cox says of her grief. We have coverage of the landmark case on “NBC Nightly News with Lester Holt” 

By the way, here’s a look at what the anti-abortion zealots want Trump to do if he’s elected by Elaine Godfrey from the “If Trump Wins” issue of The Atlantic. Do you think that he wouldn’t do it once he’s back in the White House, burning with vengeance?

A federal ban, which would require 60 votes in the Senate, is unlikely. But some activists believe there’s a simpler way: the enforcement by a Trump Justice Department of a 150-year-old obscenity law.

The Comstock Act, originally passed in 1873 to combat vice and debauchery, prohibits the mailing of any “article or thing” that is “designed, adapted, or intended for producing abortion, or for any indecent or immoral use.” In the law’s first 100 years, a series of court cases narrowed its scope, and in 1971, Congress removed most of its restrictions on contraception. But the rest of the Comstock Act has remained on the books. The law has sat dormant, considered virtually unenforceable, since the Roe v. Wade ruling in 1973.

Following the Supreme Court’s Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision in 2022, the United States Postal Service asked the Justice Department for clarification: Could its workers legally transport abortion-inducing medications to states with bans? The DOJ replied by issuing a memo stipulating that abortion pills can be legally mailed as long as the sender does not intend for the drugs to be used unlawfully. And whether or not the drugs will be used within the bounds of state law, the memo notes, would be difficult for a sender to know (the pills have medical uses unrelated to abortion).

If Donald Trump is reelected president, many prominent opponents of abortion rights will demand that his DOJ issue its own memo, reinterpreting the law to mean the exact opposite: that Comstock is a de facto ban on shipping medication that could end a pregnancy, regardless of its intended use (this would apply to the USPS and to private carriers like UPS and FedEx). “The language is black-and-white. It should be enforced,” Steven H. Aden, the general counsel at Americans United for Life, told me. A broader interpretation of the Comstock Act might also mean that a person receiving abortion pills would be committing a federal crime and, if prosecuted, could face prison time. Federal prosecutors could bring charges against abortion-pill manufacturers, providers receiving pills in the mail, or even individuals.

The hopes of some activists go further. Their ultimate aim in reviving the Comstock Act is to use it to shut down every abortion facility “in all 50 states,” Mark Lee Dickson, a Texas pastor and anti-abortion advocate, told me. Taken literally, Comstock could be applied to prevent the transport of all supplies related to medical and surgical abortions, making it illegal to ship necessary tools and medications to hospitals and clinics, with no exceptions for other medical uses, such as miscarriage care. Conditions that are easily treatable with modern medicine could, without access to these supplies, become life-threatening.

Legal experts say that the activists’ strategy could, in theory, succeed—at least in bringing the issue to court. “It’s not hypothetical anymore,” Mary Ziegler, a law professor at the UC Davis School of Law, told me. “Because it’s already on the books, and it’s not ridiculous to interpret it this way, [the possibility] is not far-fetched at all.”

Eventually, the Supreme Court would likely face pressure to weigh in. Even though a majority of the Court’s justices have supported abortion restrictions and ruled to overturn Roe, it’s unclear how they’d rule on this particular case. If they were to uphold the broadest interpretation of the Comstock Act, doctors even in states without bans could struggle to legally obtain the supplies they need to provide abortions and perform other procedures.

This is what activists want. The question is whether Trump would accede to their demands. After years of championing the anti-abortion cause, the former president seemed to pivot when he blamed anti-abortion Republicans’ extremism for the party’s poor performance in the 2022 midterm elections (only a small fraction of Americans favors a complete abortion ban). Recently, he’s come across as more moderate on the issue than his primary opponents by condemning Florida’s six-week abortion ban and endorsing compromise with Democrats.

As president, Trump might choose not to enforce Comstock at all. Or he could order his DOJ to enforce it with discretion, promising to go after drug manufacturers and Planned Parenthood instead of individuals. It’s hard to be certain of any outcome: Trump has always been more interested in appeasing his base than reaching Americans in the ideological middle. He might well be in favor of aggressively enforcing the Comstock Act, in order to continue bragging, as he has in the past, that he is “the most pro-life president in American history.”

There is no reason to believe he won’t do it. He doesn’t care about the Republican party. He cares about revenge. And he is a true believing misogynist.

If you think it can’t get worse, think again.

Update: