Lawrence Wilkinson is the Distinguished Visiting Professor of Government and Public Policy at the College of William and Mary. He was chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell from 2002-2005 and served 31 years in the U.S. Army. At Lobelog, he writes—The Neoconservative Comeback:
To those who are strongly opposed to Donald Trump, his present troubles no doubt resonate positively. The looming prospect of his successful removal from office through impeachment proceedings—or his just leaving as pressure for such proceedings builds—might even be such opponents’ fondest wish. But as Colin Powell used to say to me, “Be careful what you wish for…”
In this instance, such a warning has nothing to do with the line of succession and what Jane Mayer in The New Yorker called “The Danger of President Pence.” It has to do instead with the return of the Neoconservatives (Neocons) and only by extension, then, with a Pence or other caretaker presidency.
Because what is happening today, as Trump is preoccupied increasingly with the considerable, ever-growing challenges to him personally and to his presidency institutionally, is the reentry into critical positions in the government of these people, the people who gave America the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Even those many of them who declared “Never Trump”—as arch-Neocon Eliot Cohen summed it up—are salivating at the prospect of carrying out their foreign and security policy while Trump essentially boils in his own corrupt juices.
A vanguard, of course, is already in our government to beckon, comfort, and re-establish others of their type. John Bolton as national security advisor to the president leads this pack though he’s not, strictly speaking, a card-carrying Neocon. [...]
Nikki Haley at the United Nations, a true-blue Neocon, is almost as important as Bolton as she gives off the air of 2020 and replacing Trump as the new, duly-elected Republican president.
Matt Ford at The New Republic writes—Criminal Justice Reform Is on the Midterm Ballot:
Andrew Gillum wasn’t expected to win Tuesday night’s Democratic primary for the Florida governor’s race, even after he won Senator Bernie Sanders’s endorsement weeks ago. The 39-year-old Tallahassee mayor was outspent five-to-one by the frontrunner, and even more so by the two billionaires in the race, but he triumphed nonetheless—a key victory for the insurgent progressive wing of the Democratic Party. If he prevails in November, Gillum would be only the second black governor in the South since Reconstruction and Florida’s first Democratic governor since 1999.
In his victory speech, Gillum highlighted an issue that’s received short shrift from Florida policymakers in recent years. “Beneath my name is also a desire by the majority of people in this state to see real criminal-justice reform take hold,” he told a crowd of supporters at his Tuesday night victory rally. “The kind of criminal-justice reform which allows people who make a mistake to be able to redeem themselves from that mistake, return to society, have their right to vote, but also have their right to work.”
The message could apply anywhere in the United States. But it carries greater resonance in Florida, which ranks among the most carceral states in the union. While crime has plummeted nationwide since the early 1990s, Florida’s prison population hasn’t seen significant declines. Instead, the number of people serving more than ten years in prison tripled between 1996 and 2017. Lawmakers abolished parole for most crimes by 1993, which requires the state to keep many prisoners behind bars who don’t pose a danger to society. Even today, the state has shirked the broader reform-oriented trend on both the left and the right.
Gillum has campaigned on a platform that could change that.
Joan Walsh at The Nation writes—Andrew Gillum’s Win Is Great News for All Democrats—Despite What the Media May Tell You:
Just three weeks ago, the mainstream political media reported that the broad Democratic left was divided, and that the so-called “establishment” wing had defeated the forces of Senator Bernie Sanders. The evidence? Mainly that in Michigan, Gretchen Whitmer beat Sanders-endorsed Abdul El-Sayed in the gubernatorial primary, while in Kansas, Sharice Davids topped another Our Revolution favorite, Brett Welder, for a congressional nomination. I argued at the time that progressives, defined broadly, had in fact won the night: It’s ridiculous to define women like Whitmer, who supports a $15 minimum wage, gun-safety legislation, and Planned Parenthood funding, or Native American lesbian Obama administration veteran Davids, as merely “establishment.”
This time, the script is flipped, but the divisive storyline is the same.
Now the Sanders forces supposedly have the establishment on the run, with the surprise victory of Tallahassee Mayor Andrew Gillum in a crowded Democratic primary race. But again, that’s the wrong takeaway from an exciting primary. Gillum was an early Hillary Clinton surrogate and convention delegate whose victory is first and foremost due to the hard work of African-American Democrats, the backbone of the party. The “Gillum beats the establishment” storylines are creating a false narrative, maybe even intentionally so.
As is often the case, Politico demonstrates the problem. Three weeks ago it told us “Bernie and his army are losing 2018.” This morning we learned “Sanders-backed Gillum notched Florida stunner.” Both stories were misleading.
Black Democrats bet on Gillum early, when most observers didn’t think he had a chance. BlackPAC and Color of Change went all-in last spring; the Sanders endorsement came in August. It was particularly meaningful since Gillum had been a prominent Clinton surrogate. As he did with Stacey Abrams, a black Clinton supporter who won the gubernatorial primary in Georgia, Sanders showed an ability to move beyond the fissures of 2016 that others in the party, on both sides, appear to lack—and that the media will forever use to write their favorite (and laziest) storyline, “Dems in disarray.”
Charles M. Blow at The New York Times writes—The Commander of Fear:
Trump has found — or has always had — a winning populism perfectly suited for this moment in our history, when the anxious, scared, hateful and callous desire an unapologetic voice that has the backing of actual power.
Trump’s magical mixture is to make being afraid feel like fun. His rallies are a hybrid of concert revelry and combat prep.
Trump tells his followers about all the things of which they should be afraid, or shouldn’t trust or should hate, and then positions himself as the greatest defense against those things. His supporters roar their approval at their white knight.
Fear is the poison-tipped arrow in Trump’s quiver. He launches it whenever he needs to change the subject, justify his callousness and racism, or defend himself from critique.
E.J. Dionne Jr. at The Washington Post writes—Will we ever escape 1968?
“Get the thing straight once and for all: The policeman isn’t there to create disorder,” said Mayor Richard J. Daley in explaining the riots in the streets of his city in the summer 1968. “The policeman is there to preserve disorder.”
Daley’s verbal jumble became the butt of jokes and the source of claims, inspired by Freud, that Da Mayor had unintentionally blurted out the truth.
Yet he may also have been an accidental prophet. The chaos on the streets of Chicago during the Democrats’ catastrophic national convention 50 years ago this week lives on not only in memory, but also in our fractured present.
In clashes played out across the country on television, Chicago’s police clubbed and arrested youthful demonstrators gathered to oppose the Vietnam War. Members of the media got caught up in the melee, too. The phrase “fake news” would have resonated with Daley, who said as much without using the words. [...]
We have preserved the disorder of that moment in a culture war that seems to have no expiration, in divisions along the lines of class and race, in confrontations over the proper role of law enforcement, and in conflicts within a Democratic Party that never fully recovered from the wrenching schism opened by the Vietnam War.
Marshall Auerback at Common Dreams writes—The Failure to Punish White-Collar Crime After the 2008 Financial Crisis Helped Produce President Donald Trump:
In the aftermath of the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, bank officials at HSBC admitted to the Department of Justice that the bank violated the Bank Secrecy Act, the International Emergency Economic Powers Act and the Trading with the Enemy Act. This amounted to one of the largest and most destructive money laundering and anti-terror finance sanctions-busting in history. Fines were leveled, but no senior bankers went to jail. In another investigation, the DOJ implicated Deutsche Bank and UBS in a bid-rigging cartel that illegally manipulated LIBOR, the most important global benchmark interest rate. Professor Bill Black estimates that the “dollar amount of deals affected by the collusion range[s] from $300-550 trillion in deals manipulated at any given time.” It was a scandal that may have been history’s largest financial crime, yet the U.S. Department of Justice refused to prosecute any of the elite bank officers involved.
As we approach the 10th anniversary of the 2008 crash, ProPublica’s Jesse Eisinger reminds us that no top bankers were ever “held accountable for the biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression… No one. No top officer from any major bank went to prison.” All of these instances of corporate corruption occurred well before Trump’s election. Trump stands accused of much the same. But how do you make a political case for the latter’s impeachment on the grounds of corporate corruption (even as the president virtually daily violates the Constitution’s Emoluments Clause), given the earlier reticence of multitudes of politicians, regulators, and DOJ officials to prosecute similar white-collar crimes whose impact dwarfed those allegedly committed by America’s 45th president?
Robin Marty is the author of the forthcoming Handbook for a Post-Roe America. At In These Times she writes—How to Prepare for a Post-Roe America. Roe v. Wade will fall. We must be ready for it:
Within a few years, abortion will likely be illegal in close to half of U.S. states—if we’re lucky. Should Republicans continue their control of the House, Senate and White House, within a decade or two they could easily move to pass a total abortion ban, extending the right to life guaranteed in the 14th Amendment down to the moment of conception—and have the Supreme Court votes to uphold it.
None of this came out of the blue. Anti-abortion leaders have spent the last decade urging Republican politicians to pack federal benches and pass incremental state abortion restrictions in the hopes of inching the right case up to the right mix of Supreme Court justices. As this issue went to press, the court that could make this happen was nearly set. Unless every Democrat blocks Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination and one Republican defects, Kavanaugh will be confirmed. Soon after, the Court will hear one of the many state restriction laws pending in the lower courts—either a 20-week abortion ban or even a more stringent six-week “heartbeat” version—and use it to overturn Roe v. Wade. When that happens, states will again have the final say on abortion law within their borders.
Analysts refer to the inevitable map that would result as a “patchwork” of abortion legality, but patchwork is the wrong word. Patchwork implies one complete piece made up of different scraps of fabric. What we will have is tatters. Remnants. The South will be gone. Most of the Midwest missing. The Appalachians nearly empty. Abortion will be legal almost nowhere but the coasts and a smattering of states in between.
[...]
That is why it is imperative that, above all, we support self-managed abortion care. In January, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists declared its support to stop the criminalization of self-induced abortions, saying such laws are medically unnecessary and only cause harm. We must take action now to push state, if not federal, legislation proclaiming no person can be jailed for the act of ending their own pregnancy.
Dana Milbank at The Washington Post writes—The Democrats are a menace to public safety
So President Trump is worried there will be violence if the Democrats win in November.
“They will overturn everything that we’ve done, and they’ll do it quickly and violently — and violently,” Trump reportedly told evangelical Christian leaders at a private White House dinner Monday. Citing Antifa (anarchists, not Democrats) and “some of these groups,” Trump added, “these are violent people.”
His concern is entirely understandable. The Democrats are a menace to public safety. It is time to hit this threat to domestic tranquility right between the eyes — and to arm teachers with guns just in case a Democrat wanders into one of their classrooms looking for trouble.
This week, for example, I was sure Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren (Mass.) was about to cane Republican Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (S.C.) on the Senate floor (restarting the 1856 feud in which a South Carolinian attacked Massachusetts Sen. Charles Sumner). Fortunately, an overheard remark about income distribution tables distracted Warren from unleashing American carnage.
And in the House there is no more aggressive a man than 78-year-old Democratic Rep. John Lewis of Georgia. In Selma, Ala., in 1965, he rammed his head into a state trooper’s club so forcefully he fractured his skull.
David Dayen at The New Republic writes—The economy continues to grow, yet wages remain flat. Corporate concentration may be to blame:
The Kansas City Federal Reserve, one of the dozen reserve banks in the U.S., gathered on Friday in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, to discuss a signature puzzle of our times: How can the economy hum along, with unemployment falling for years, without wage growth? How have the gains from the economy been segregated from most Americans who do the work, instead flowing into the hands of a small group at the top? And what can the Fed, or anyone, do to reverse this?
The main culprit discussed at the economic policy symposium was increasing corporate concentration: the limited number of firms in any one industry. A series of working papers and speeches examined monopolization’s impact on various aspects of the economy, from worker bargaining power to capital investment to inflation. While the Fed isn’t singularly responsible for policing market competition, it does have the power of the megaphone, and the implications of the research unveiled last week should signal a sea change across government: either tame the corporate giants, or watch helplessly as they eat everything not nailed down.
Northwestern University’s Nicolas Crouzet and Janice Eberly submitted a paper about what they call “intangible capital”—intellectual rather than physical property, such as patents, software, or even copyrighted brands. Over the last two decades, businesses have invested more in these intangibles than in physical capital like factories and workers; according to the authors, this can account for nearly all of the drop in physical capital investment since 2000. If you have a patented product that nobody else can manufacture, why bother to spend money attracting top talent?
Roxane Gay at The New York Times writes—Louis C.K. and Men Who Think Justice Takes as Long as They Want It To
The #MeToo movement has existed for more than a decade, since the activist Tarana Burke coined the phrase, and it was popularized in 2017, as men such as Harvey Weinstein, Mario Batali, Matt Lauer, Kevin Spacey, Louis C.K. and Charlie Rose were called to account for reported instances of sexual harassment, assault and, in some cases, rape. For the past several months the court of public opinion has litigated the misdeeds of these men. Some have lost their jobs. Harvey Weinstein is facing criminal charges. They have fallen from grace, but they have had mighty soft landings.
Their victims, however, have been disbelieved. They have had to withstand accusations that they are seeking attention. Justice has been grandly elusive. The public discourse has been more about whether the #MeToo movement has gone too far than it has been about reckoning with the alarming prevalence of sexual predation in every circumstance imaginable.
In November of 2017, the comedian Louis C.K. admitted to exposing his penis and masturbating in front of women without their consent, then disappeared from public eye until this month. On Sunday night, he returned to the stage at the Comedy Cellar in New York. Apparently, he found a new way of forcing himself on an unsuspecting audience. He performed for about 15 minutes and received a standing ovation a mere nine months after the confirmation of his disgraceful behavior.
Other disgraced, once powerful men also appear to be plotting their comebacks. Matt Lauer told people that he’s going to re-enter the public sphere. Stories have circulated about potential comeback vehicles for Charlie Rose and Mario Batali.
In each instance, it has been less than a year since the allegations against these men surfaced, and in each instance, the men have done little in the way of public contrition.
Omar G. Encarnación at Foreign Policy writes—Latin America’s Rights Riddle. Why the region says yes to same-sex marriage and no to abortion:
In Latin America, progressive politics present something of a mystery: As LGBT rights have flourished, women’s reproductive rights have floundered. Earlier this month, for example, a bill to legalize abortion in the first 14 weeks of pregnancy was defeated in the Argentine Senate. This is the same body that in 2010 made Argentina the first Latin American country to legalize same-sex marriage with identical rights to heterosexual marriage. And since that historic milestone, Argentina has enacted one of the most liberal laws on gender identity to be found anywhere in the world. Its code allows people to change the gender listed on their legal documents without a diagnosis of gender dysphoria or permission from a judge, as is required in most countries. The country has also granted same-sex couples reproductive rights, such as access to in vitro fertilization under the national health plan, and has banned programs that aim to “cure” same-sex attraction.
The trend of LGBT rights outpacing reproductive rights is not unique to Argentina. In recent years, a rights revolution in Latin America has wiped out all remaining laws criminalizing homosexuality; the last of such laws to fall was Panama’s, in 2008. Same-sex marriage and civil unions are legal in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Uruguay, and several Mexican states. Most countries in Latin America have also enacted laws banning discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation (and in Mexico and Chile, it was even right-wing governments that did so). In the midst of all this history-making progress, the liberalization of abortion has lagged significantly. If anything, in some countries, the picture for abortion rights is bleaker than ever.
Save for in Cuba, Mexico City, and Uruguay, it remains a crime in Latin America in most circumstances for a woman to terminate a pregnancy. The region is also home to four of the six countries in the world where abortion is banned in all circumstances: El Salvador, Nicaragua, Honduras, and the Dominican Republic (the two other countries are Malta and Vatican City). Chile exited this club only last year, when it began allowing abortions under very limited circumstances, but Brazil could take its place soon via a constitutional amendment. The toll on Latin American women is staggering. Punishment is rare but not unheard of. Since 1998, more than 150 women in El Salvador have been prosecuted for illegal abortions. The pro-abortion rights Guttmacher Institute reports that between 2010 and 2014, one in four of the 6.5 million abortions performed annually in Latin America was unsafe, the highest among all regions.
David Atkins at The Washington Monthly writes—The November Election is About Much More Than Just Trump:
It’s understandable that most of the focus on the November elections has swirled around their potential impact on President Trump and the historic investigations surrounding him. Just a few days ago Republican leadership floated an overwhelming list of potential Democratic investigations into the president in an effort to rally their donors and voters. Republicans should be terrified. Trump blots out the sun, politically speaking, and the multiple overlapping scandals dogging his administration are unprecedented in American history.
But it’s crucial that the policy consequences of the November elections not be eclipsed by the planetary scale of Trump’s malfeasance, both from investigatory and legislative angles.
Juan Cole at Informed Comment writes—Storm Death Toll in Puerto Rico Rivals 9/11: But where is War on Climate Change?
A team of researchers at George Washington University has estimated that deaths of Americans in Puerto Rico during and after last year’s Hurricane Maria reached almost 3,000, a number accepted by the governor.
In his visit to the island after the hurricane struck, Donald Trump was insufferable. He said that the death toll was low compared to that of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans in 2005, which killed 1,400. (The new estimates mean that Maria killed twice as many Americans. Puerto Ricans are American citizens.) He also castigated the victims for messing up the U.S. budget.
In the end, the GOP Congress did nothing special in the way of aid appropriations for Puerto Rico. So Trump wasn’t inconvenienced after all.
But the same GOP Congress found $1.5 trillion for tax-cut giveaways to the billionaire class in February. Apparently slashing government revenue (which is equivalent to raising taxes for services on nonbillionaires) and embarrassing the budget that way is OK, as long as the superrich are happy.
The intensity and longevity of Hurricane Maria was boosted by climate change. Putting billions of tons of carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas, into the atmosphere every year causes the oceans to warm up. Hurricanes are caused by warm water, and the hotter the water, the stronger and longer the storm. Increased water vapor in the air, associated with climate change, also causes rains after landfall to be much heavier.
Will Bunch at the Philadelphia Daily News writes—John McCain and the 29-second ‘Rashomon’ moment that defined America’s coming crisis:
Finally, a woman in a bright red T-shirt with gray hair was called onto the stage and took the mic for her question.
"I can't trust Obama. I have read about him and he's not, he's not uh — he's an Arab. He's not — "
McCain dramatically grabbed the mic before she could say another word.
"No, ma'am. He's a decent family man [and] citizen that I just happen to have disagreements with on fundamental issues and that's what this campaign's all about. He's not [an Arab]."
This was the Rashomon moment — 29 seconds that would come to define American politics, where all of us saw the same event but, like characters in the classic Kurosawa movie, spun wildly different interpretations of what it all meant.
To the McCain myth-makers and legend keepers, McCain's honorable comments — viewing politics as a decent if spirited clash of ideas, not a war of hateful stereotypes — was the America That Used To Be, even if it requires a pair of rose-colored glasses to see it that way. To this interpretation, McCain was committing an act of cowboy-style patriotism by standing up for American values — the moment that defined him even as the actual values he stood up for were slipping away.
The problem is that to millions of people watching the same scene — just not the people with the loud megaphone of the mainstream media — the hero of those 29 seconds was not McCain but the woman in red. Over the next decade, the people like her would grow louder and more influential, a Tea Party screaming at politicians that "I want my country back," to be climaxed by a demagogic political leader happy to ride their waves of racism and xenophobia. Not the America That Used to Be, but the America That Really Is.
There is a less-heard third perspective on what went down in Lakeville on that Friday night. Why, some people asked, was McCain's instinctive, gut-level reaction that being a "decent family man" was the polar opposite of being "a Muslim"? Aren't most of the millions of American Muslims decent, family men and women? What if — imagine the thought — an actual Muslim ran for president in the nation that once embraced the world's refugees?