Archives for category: Democracy
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »

Thom Hartmann: Putin Now Owns the GOP

By dianeravitch
February 27, 2024 //
27

Thom Hartmann connects the dots: the Republican Party is now controlled by Vladimir Putin. The Republicans do only what is in the interest of Putin. His goal, as it was in 2016 and 2020, is to get Trump elected. Trump is subservient to Putin. Trump wants to block American aid to Putin. So does House Speaker Mike Johnson, who called a two-week recess as Ukrainian forces are running out of ammunition. How do you define GOP these days? Guardians of Putin? Goons of Putin? Other ideas?

Thom Hartmann

There’s little doubt that Russian President Vladimir Putin has succeeded in achieving near-total control over the Republican Party. They’re gutting aid to Ukraine (and have been for over a year), working to kneecap our economy, whipping up hatred among Americans against each other, promoting civil war, and openly embracing replacing American democracy with authoritarian autocracy. 

Putin has declared war on queer people, proclaimed Russia a “Christian nation,” and shut down all the media he called “fake news.” Check, check, check.

Over the past two years, as America was using Russia’s terrorist attacks on Ukraine to degrade the power and influence of Russia’s military, Putin was using social media, Republican politicians, and rightwing American commentators to get Republican politicians on his side and thus kill off US aid to Ukraine. 

The war in Gaza is making it even easier, with Putin-aligned politicians like Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO) tweeting: “Any funding for Ukraine should be redirected to Israel immediately.”

Most recently, the three-year “Biden bribery” hysteria Republicans in the House have been running — including thousands of hits on Fox “News” and all over rightwing hate radio — turns out to have been a Russian intelligence operation originally designed to help Trump win the 2020 election. The Russian spy who’d been feeding this phony info to “Gym” Jordan and James “Gomer Pyle” Comer is now in jail. 

Russia’s battlefield, in other words, has now shifted from Ukraine to the US political system and our homes via radio, TV, and the internet, all in the hopes of ending US aid to the democracy they’ve brutally attacked. 

And the momentum is following that shift: Russia is close to having the upper hand in Ukraine because of Putin’s ability — via Trump and Johnson — to get Republican politicians to mouth his talking points and propaganda.

Now, with Speaker “Moscow Mike” Johnson shutting down the House of Representatives so nobody can offer a discharge petition that would force a vote on Ukraine aid (and aid for Palestinian refugees, Taiwan, and our southern border), it’s becoming more and more clear that Vladimir Putin is running the Republican party via his well-paid stooge, Donald Trump.

I say “well paid” because Donald Trump would have been reduced to homelessness in the early 1990s if it weren’t for Russian money, as both of his sons have said at different times. He’d burned through all of his father’s estate, even stealing a large part of it from his siblings. He’d lost or hidden almost two billion dollars running a casino.

As Michael Hirsch noted for Foreign Policymagazine:

“By the early 1990s he had burned through his portion of his father Fred’s fortune with a series of reckless business decisions. Two of his businesses had declared bankruptcy, the Trump Taj Mahal Casino in Atlantic City and the Plaza Hotel in New York, and the money pit that was the Trump Shuttle went out of business in 1992. Trump companies would ultimately declare Chapter 11 bankruptcy two more times.”

He’d been forced to repeatedly declare bankruptcy — sticking American banks for over a billion dollars in unpaid bills — after draining his businesses of free cash and stashing the money in places he hoped nobody would ever find.

No American bank would touch him, and property developers in New York were waiting for his entire little empire to collapse. Instead, a desperate Trump reached out to foreign dictators and mobsters, who were more than happy to supply funds to an influential New York businessman…for a price to be paid in the future.

He sold over $100 million worth of condos to more than sixty Russian citizens during that era, and partnered with professional criminals and money launderers to raise money for Trump properties in Azerbaijan and Panama. According to Trump himself, he sold $40 to $50 million worth of apartments to the Saudis.

He then partnered with a former high Soviet official, Tevfik Arif, and a Russian businessman, Felix Sater, who’d been found guilty of running a “huge stock-fraud scheme involving the Russian mafia.”

As the founders of Fusion GPS wrote for The New York Times in 2018:

“The Trump family’s business entanglements are of more than historical significance. Americans need to be sure that major foreign policy decisions are made in the national interest — not because of foreign ties forged by the president’s business ventures.”

Thus, when it came time to run for president, Trump had to pay the price. He and the people around him were inundated with offers of “help” from Russians, most associated directly with Putin or the Russian mafia.

Trump’s campaign manager, Paul Manafort, had been paid millions by Putin’s oligarchs and ran Trump’s campaign for free. Reporters found over a dozen connections between Russia and the Trump campaign, and during the 2016 campaign Trump was secretly negotiating a deal to open a Trump tower in Moscow. Trump’s son and his lawyer met with Putin’s agents in Trump Tower. 

Putin’s personal troll army, the Internet Research Agency (IRA) based out of St. Petersburg but operating worldwide, began a major campaign in 2016 to get Trump elected president. 

Manafort fed Russian intelligence raw data from internal Republican polling that identified a few hundred thousand individuals in a half-dozen or so swing states the GOP thought could be persuaded to vote for Trump (or against Hillary), and the IRA immediately went to work, reaching out to them via mostly Facebook.

Mueller’s report and multiple journalistic investigations have noted that the most common message out of Russia then was directed at Democratic-leaning voters and was, essentially, “both parties are the same so it’s a waste of time to vote.”

A report from Texas-based cybersecurity company New Knowledge, working with researchers at Columbia University, concluded, as reported by The New York Times:

“‘The most prolific I.R.A. efforts on Facebook and Instagram specifically targeted black American communities and appear to have been focused on developing black audiences and recruiting black Americans as assets,’ the report says. Using Gmail accounts with American-sounding names, the Russians recruited and sometimes paid unwitting American activists of all races to stage rallies and spread content, but there was a disproportionate pursuit of African-Americans, it concludes.

“The report says that while ‘other distinct ethnic and religious groups were the focus of one or two Facebook Pages or Instagram accounts, the black community was targeted extensively by dozens.’ In some cases, Facebook ads were targeted at users who had shown interest in particular topics, including black history, the Black Panther Party and Malcolm X. The most popular of the Russian Instagram accounts was @blackstagram, with 303,663 followers.

“The Internet Research Agency also created a dozen websites disguised as African-American in origin, with names like blackmattersus.com, blacktivist.info, blacktolive.org and blacksoul.us.”

And it appears to have worked in suppressing the potential Black Democratic vote in swing states. 

A 2018 bipartisan Senate report found the Russian efforts consequential, as the BBC headline on that analysis summarizes: 

“Russian trolls’ chief target was ‘black US voters’ in 2016.”

The news story summarizes:

“A Senate inquiry has concluded that a Russian fake-news campaign targeted ‘no single group… more than African-Americans.’ …

“Thousands of Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and You Tube accounts created by the St. Petersburg-based Internet Research Agency (IRA) were aimed at harming Hillary Clinton’s campaign and supporting Donald Trump, the committee concludes.

“More than 66% of Facebook adverts posted by the Russian troll farm contained a term related to race.

“African-American community voters were discouraged from voting, and from supporting Hillary Clinton.”

Between the information compiled by Oxford Analytica and the details passed along from the GOP to Prigozhin via Manafort, a mere margin of 43,000 votes across a handful of swing states —all mictotargeted by Russia — handed the electoral college to Trump, even though he lost the nationwide vote to Hillary Clinton by almost 3 million ballots.

So now Trump has succeeded in making the entire GOP a party to his long-term debt to Putin and his oligarchs. “Moscow Mike” Johnson has blocked any aid to Ukraine for over a year; the last congressional appropriation for foreign aid was passed in 2022, when Nancy Pelosi ran the House.

Meanwhile, under Trump’s and Putin’s direction, Republicans in Congress are doing everything they can to damage the people of the United States. 

They believe it will help them in the 2024 election if they can ruin the US economy while convincing American voters that our system of government is so corrupt (“deep state”) that we should consider replacing democracy with an autocratic strongman form of government like Putin’s Russia. Tucker Carlson is even suggesting that Russia is a better place to live than the US. 

They revel in pitting racial, religious, and gender groups against each other while embracing a form of fascism that pretends to be grounded in Christianity, all while welcoming Putin’s social media trolls who are promoting these divisions.

Republican-aligned think tanks are working on Project 2025, a naked attempt to consolidate power in the White House to support a strongman president who can override the will of the people, privatize Social Security and Medicare, shut down our public school system, fully criminalize abortion and homosexuality (Sam Alito called for something like that this week), and abandon our democratic allies in favor of a realignment with Russia, China, and North Korea.

Trump got us here by openly playing to the fears and prejudices of white people who are freaked out by the rapid post-1964 “browning” of America. Putin jumped in to help amplify the message a thousandfold with his social media trolls, who are posting thousands of times a day as you read these words.

Now that Putin largely controls the GOP, today’s question is how far Republicans are willing to go in their campaign to bring the USA to her knees on behalf of Putin and Trump.

— When Congress comes back into session next week, will they take up Ukraine aid? 

— Will they continue their opposition to comprehensive immigration and border reform? 

— Will they keep pushing to privatize Social Security with their new “commission”? 

— Will they work as hard to kneecap Taiwan on behalf of President Xi as they have Ukraine on behalf of Putin?

— Will they continue to quote Russian Intelligence propaganda in their effort to smear President Biden?

— Instead of just 7 Republicans going to Moscow to “celebrate” the Fourth of July, will the entire party move their event to that city like the NRA did? Or to Budapest, like CPAC did? 

Or will the GOP suddenly start listening to the rational voices left in their party, the Mitt Romneys and Liz Cheneys who still believe in democracy (even if they want to gut the social safety net and turn loose the polluters)?

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Corruption, Cruelty, Democracy, Elections, Evil, Extremism, Fascism, History, International, Propaganda, Republicans, Trump

Does Your State Support Public Schools? A New Report Card from the Network for Public Education

By dianeravitch
February 26, 2024 //
13

The Network for Public Education released a report card today grading the states on their support for democratically-governed public schools. Which states rank highest in supporting their public schools? Open the report to find out.

Measuring Each State’s Commitment to
Democratically Governed Schools

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY


Neighborhood public schools remain the first choice of the overwhelming majority of Ameri-
can families. Despite their popularity, schools, which are embedded in communities and gov-
erned by elected neighbors, have been the target of an unrelenting attack from the extreme
right. This has resulted in some state legislatures and governors defunding and castigating
public schools while funding alternative models of K-12 education.

This 2024 report, Public Schooling in America: Measuring Each State’s Commitment to
Democratically Governed Schools, examines these trends, reporting on each state’s commit-
ment to supporting its public schools and the children who attend them.

What We Measure

We measure the extent of privatization in each state and whether charter and voucher laws
promote or discourage equity, responsibility, transparency, and accountability. We also rate
them on the strength of the guardrails they place on voucher and charter systems to protect
students and taxpayers from discrimination, corruption and fraud.

Recognizing that part of the anti-public school strategy is to defund public schools, we rate
states on how responsibly they finance their public schools through adequate and equitable
funding and by providing living wage salaries for teachers.

As the homeschool movement grows and becomes commercialized and publicly funded,
homeschooling laws deserve public scrutiny. Therefore, we rate states on laws that protect
children whose families homeschool.

Finally, we include a new expansive category, freedom to teach and learn, which rewards
states that reject book bans, and the use of unqualified teachers, intolerance of LGBTQ stu-
dents, corporal punishment, and other factors that impinge on teachers’ and students’ rights.

How does your state rank?

Categories Accountability, Censorship, Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, Corruption, Democracy, Disruption, Education Industry, Education Reform, Equity, Fraud, Funding, Home Schooling, Network for Public Education, Privatization, Republicans, School Choice, Supporting public schools, Vouchers

Paul Bowers: Reconciling/Resisting Christian Faith and Christian Haters

By dianeravitch
February 25, 2024 //
24

Paul Bowers used to be the education reporter for the Charleston News & Courier. I contacted him when I was trying to understand some issues that he wrote about. Paul left his newspaper job (I think someone in the local power elite complained about his honest reporting on the privatizers). After he left, he started a blog called Brutal South. Now he works as communications director for the South Carolina ACLU. As you can imagine, he’s always busy, always pushing back against book bans, attacks on voting rights, and more.

In this post, he wrestles with his Christian faith. He’s covered so many Christian faith leaders who espouse hateful views that he has had to question his own views. He feels sure that the Jesus he believes in would not agree with them.

I urge you to read the post. I’m quoting just the beginning and the ending.

He writes:

On weekday mornings the coffee shop is clustered with pods of the men. The men are holding forth — loudly — about the virtues of intermittent fasting, the meaning of the Egyptian plagues, and the Bible’s clear teaching on matters of human sexuality.

I used to be part of the pods, but now I sit alone. I eavesdrop. Some days when I listen to them reading from their Bible commentaries I hear an encouraging word, and I miss the feeling of spiritual fellowship. Most days I hear nonsense and remember why I’m in no hurry to return to church.

Last year the great Mississippi songwriter Andrew Bryant released one of my favorite albums, Prodigal, building on the theme that he’s “like the prodigal who never left at all.” He still lives in Mississippi; I still live in South Carolina. When he sings about living on the far side of the creek from the faith community that raised him, I understand him to mean it’s a walkable distance, a permeable barrier. I find myself similarly situated.

I’ve left two churches in my adult life, a theologically conservative one by choice and a theologically progressive one because its leaders left and the congregation ceased meeting. I still see people from both churches often. My family and I never intend to leave our town, so this will likely be the case for the rest of our lives….

I don’t have Christian fellowship anymore, but I do have solidarity. They’re not the same thing.

It would be fair for you to ask if I still believe in God at all. I do, though I would no longer try to convince you one way or the other. I find myself in the position the writer John Jeremiah Sullivan described once: “My problem is not that I dream I’m in hell … It isn’t that I feel psychologically harmed. It isn’t even that I feel like a sucker for having bought it all. It’s that I love Jesus Christ.”

I do love Jesus, and I love the people I know who follow him. Lately I’ve seen Christians with the ash of mortification on their foreheads giving benedictions to the frightened families of trans kids; pledging to fight our Christian governor’s labor union-bashing tactics to the gates of hell; and speaking out against the death penalty — our modern crucifixion — even for people who murdered their family members.

Nietzsche called the way of Jesus “slave morality” and he wasn’t completely wrong, but I think he misread the faith of enslaved people. If the gospel narrative is true then I want to be on the side of Jesus and not the Roman empire, of Moses and not Pharaoh, of Harriet Tubman and not Robert E. Lee. I want to walk justly and love my enemies and fight for liberation always. I’m with the crucified people, as Ignacio Ellacuría put it. There are nonreligious people following this path just as well as the faithful, but for better or worse I will always have a religious impulse in me. A part of me will always seek the Spirit even if it never comes.

This coming Friday I’ll speak at an event hosted by faith leaders in Greenville, focused on how we can carry out the sacred work of hospitality by fighting for housing justice. We pursue this work in the heart of so-called Trump Country, in the shadow of the Moral Majority, amid the ferment of white Christian nationalism and even Christian fascism. We walk as believers, against other believers, ostensibly praying to the same god.

Categories Civil Rights, Courage, Democracy, Ethics, Extremism, Injustice, Religion, South Carolina

Heather Cox Richardson: Two Years Ago, Russia Invaded Ukraine Without Cause

By dianeravitch
February 24, 2024 //
17

Heather Cox Richardson brings us back to that terrible day two years ago when Vladimir Putin sent Russian troops into Ukraine. He expected the government to collapse within a matter of days or weeks. Yet Ukraine stands. Entire cities, such as Mariupol, have been obliterated. The inhabitants of towns such as Bucha were subjected to murders, rapes, and torture. Yet Ukraine stands. Europe supports Ukraine because they fear what Putin will do next. Will he storm Poland or Lithuania? The extreme right wing of the GOP has turned against funding Ukraine because Trump, their cult leader, is opposed. As usual, he will do thing to offend his very good friend Putin.

Richardson wrote:

Two years ago today, Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky made a passionate plea to the people of Russia, begging them to avoid war. He gave the speech in Russian, his own primary language, and, reminding Russians of their shared border and history, told them to “listen to the voice of reason”: Ukrainians want peace.  

“You’ve been told I’m going to bomb Donbass,” he said. “Bomb what? The Donetsk stadium where the locals and I cheered for our team at Euro 2012? The bar where we drank when they lost? Luhansk, where my best friend’s mom lives?” Zelensky tried to make the human cost of this conflict clear. Observers lauded the speech and contrasted its statesmanship with the ramblings in which Putin had recently engaged.

And yet Zelensky’s speech stood only as a marker. Early the next day, Russian president Vladimir Putin launched a “special military operation” involving dozens of missile strikes on Ukrainian cities before dawn. He claimed in a statement that was transparently false that he needed to defend the people in the “new republics” within Ukraine that he had recognized two days before from “persecution and genocide by the Kyiv regime.” He called for “demilitarization” of Ukraine, demanding that soldiers lay down their weapons and saying that any bloodshed would be on their hands. 

Putin called for the murder of Ukrainian leaders in the executive branch and parliament and intended to seize or kill those involved in the 2014 Maidan Revolution, which sought to turn the country away from Russia and toward a democratic government within Europe, and which itself prompted a Russian invasion. He planned for his troops to seize Ukraine’s electric, heating, and financial systems so the people would have to do as he wished. The operation was intended to be lightning fast.

But rather than collapsing, Ukrainians held firm. The day after Russia invaded, Zelensky and his cabinet recorded a video in Kyiv. “We are all here,” he said. “Our  soldiers are here. The citizens are here, and we are here. We will defend our independence…. Glory to Ukraine!” When the United States offered the next day to transport Zelensky outside the country, where he could lead a government in exile, he responded:

“The fight is here; I need ammunition, not a ride.”

That statement echoes powerfully two years later as Ukraine continues to stand against Russia’s invasion but now quite literally needs ammunition, as MAGA Republicans in Congress are refusing to take up a $95 billion national security supplemental measure that would provide aid to Ukraine. 

Instead, Republicans spent the day insisting that they do not oppose in vitro fertilization, the popular reproductive healthcare measure that the Alabama Supreme Court last Friday endangered by deciding that a fertilized human egg was a child—what they called an “extrauterine” child—and that people can be held legally responsible for destroying them. Since the decision, Alabama healthcare centers have halted their IVF programs out of fear of prosecution for their handling of embryos. 

Republicans who oppose abortion have embraced the idea that life begins at conception, an argument that leads naturally to the definition of IVF embryos as children. But this presents an enormous problem for Republicans, whose antiabortion stance is already creating warning signs for 2024. Today a memo from the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC) noted that 86% of the people they polled support increased, not reduced, access to IVF procedures.

The good news for the Republicans is that their frantic defense of IVF means that the media has largely stopped talking about the news of just two days ago, the fact that the man whose testimony congressional Republicans relied on to launch an impeachment process against President Joe Biden turned out to be working with Russian operatives. House leaders have quietly deleted from their House Impeachment website the Russian disinformation that previously was central to their case against Biden. 

But today, as Republican House members remain on vacation, President Biden announced new sanctions against Russia, and Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) was in Ukraine, where he challenged House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) to pass the national security supplemental bill. “The weight of history is on his shoulders,” Schumer told reporters in Lviv. “If he turns his back on history, he will regret it in future years.”

“Two years,” Ukraine president Zelensky wrote today. “We are all here…. Together with representatives of Algeria, Argentina, Armenia, Australia, Austria, Azerbaijan, Belgium, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Brazil, Canada, Chile, China, Colombia, Croatia, Cyprus, Czechia, Egypt, Estonia, the EU, Finland, France, Georgia, Germany, Greece, Guatemala, the Holy See, Hungary, Iceland, India, Indonesia, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Kazakhstan, the Republic of Korea, Kuwait, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Moldova, Montenegro, the Netherlands, New Zealand, North Macedonia, Norway, Pakistan, Peru, the Philippines, Poland, Portugal, Qatar, Romania, Saudi Arabia, Slovakia, Slovenia, South Africa, Spain, Sudan, Sweden, Switzerland, Tajikistan, Thailand, Türkiye, the UAE, the United Kingdom, the USA, Viet Nam, as well as international organisations….”

Slava Ukraini.

Categories Courage, Democracy, Evil, Freedom, International, Republicans, Trump

Michael Hiltzik: Elon Musk Wants the Courts to Destroy NLRB

By dianeravitch
February 24, 2024 //
11

Michael Hiltzik of the Los Angeles Times reports on Elon Musk’s latest foray into disrupting the lives of other people. He’s suing to destroy the National Labor Relations Board because it is weighing in on his company’s decision to fire some workers.

We are witnessing the accelerated rollback of the New Deal and the past nine decades of progressive reforms.

He writes:

Few business leaders have taken to heart more than Elon Musk the old lawyer’s saw that if you don’t have the facts or the law on your side at trial, pound the table.

Musk has truculently flouted regulatory standards of all varieties as the guiding spirit of companies such as Twitter, Tesla and SpaceX — keeping factories open despite pandemic shutdown orders, allegedly committing securities fraud by issuing misleading tweets about his investment plans and ignoring government safety recommendations for self-driving automotive technologies.

As I’ve reported, Musk has gotten his way with regulators and municipal officials “through bluster and intimidation.”

Now he’s trying what may be his most audacious flip-off to regulators yet:

Faced with an accusation by the National Labor Relations Board that SpaceX improperly fired nine employees in 2022, among other illegal acts, the company, which is controlled by Musk, filed a lawsuit in federal court in Texas to declare the NLRB’s action — indeed, the board itself — unconstitutional.

Now he’s trying what may be his most audacious flip-off to regulators yet:

Faced with an accusation by the National Labor Relations Board that SpaceX improperly fired nine employees in 2022, among other illegal acts, the company, which is controlled by Musk, filed a lawsuit in federal court in Texas to declare the NLRB’s action — indeed, the board itself — unconstitutional.

There’s more to it than that, however. The SpaceX lawsuit takes direct aim at the very enforcement structure of the NLRB, through which appointed administrative law judges weigh unfair labor practice charges laid against employers and recommend penalties to be imposed by the board itself.

The company’s argument is that because the judges are largely immune from being fired other than “for good cause,” their role in enforcement deprives accused parties of their constitutional right to trial by jury.

It also asserts that the board’s power to act as judge and jury in employment cases and the members’ immunity from being removed by the president violates the separation of powers principle in the Constitution. In sum, SpaceX claims that it’s being held “subject to unlawful proceedings before an unconstitutionally structured agency.”

More such claims are in the offing from businesses facing regulatory scrutiny. According to a transcript obtained by Bloomberg, grocery chain Trader Joe’s made the same argument at a Jan. 16 NLRB hearing on charges that it engaged in illegal union-busting by retaliating against unionization advocates among its workers.

What are these companies up to? The SpaceX claims are unusual, but they’re not unique in recent regulatory litigation. Similar claims have been brought against the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

“This is an effort by a group of lawyers who are foes of the administrative state and the New Deal-era legislation that created the NLRB and the SEC to essentially end enforcement of those statutes,” says Catherine Fisk, an employment and labor law authority at UC Berkeley law school.

Unable to challenge the laws themselves — they’ve been upheld by Supreme Court decisions dating back to the 1930s — or the regulations directly, Fisk told me, “they’re arguing that the administrative structure is in some part unconstitutional.”

Before delving into the details of the SpaceX lawsuit, let’s examine the NLRB’s enforcement case. The agency says SpaceX illegally fired the nine workers for circulating an open lettercomplaining about Musk’s “repeated conduct of issuing inappropriate, disparaging, sexually charged comments on Twitter,” which he owns. The silence of SpaceX management about Musk’s conduct, the letter said, allowed a “culture of sexism, harassment and discrimination” to “pervade … the workplace.”

The NLRB filed a formal complaint against SpaceX on Jan. 3, encompassing not only the firings but charges that it illegally interrogated workers and conducted illegal surveillance of their activities. The agency scheduled a hearing on the charges before an administrative law judge for March 5 in Los Angeles.

The very next day, SpaceX filed its lawsuit.

By some measures, SpaceX’s response to the NLRB charges might be interpreted as overkill. Even if it’s found to have committed all the violations, the consequences are meager. The NLRB can’t levy monetary fines.

It can order back pay and reinstatement for workers who have been wrongly discharged, but those wouldn’t make much of a dent in the finances of a company that was reported to have brought in $8 billion in revenue last year from government and commercial contracts.

Moreover, SpaceX hasn’t yet come before an administrative law judge over the NLRB charges, much less having them voted on by the full board. Its lawsuit, then, looks like a shot across the NLRB’s bow. The company asks the trial judge in Texas to block the NLRB’s case against it, declare that the NLRB’s structure is unconstitutional, and permanently prohibit the agency from pursuing unfair labor practice charges via administrative law judges.

That points to the conclusion that this case, and others like it, aim to exploit the veer to the right seen throughout the federal judiciary generally and the Supreme Court in particular.

This variety of attack on regulations went out of fashion in the 1930s, Fisk observes. The Supreme Court, which had overturned a sheaf of New Deal initiatives as well as state minimum wage laws, turned back to the middle in the face of rising public disdain and the court-packing scheme of Franklin Roosevelt.

FDR ultimately abandoned his proposal, but after 1936 the court ceased ruling against the New Deal — upholding the National Labor Relations Act, which created the NLRB, in 1937.

“For 85 years, those arguments weren’t made,” Fisk says, “because lawyers knew that they would get nowhere with them — they might even get sanctioned. The Supreme Court signaled that it was up to Congress to design regulatory structures.”

But today’s Supreme Court isn’t your great-grandfather’s Supreme Court. “The Supreme Court has given lawyers reason to think that they might be able to invalidate part or all of these statutes as being unconstitutional.”

As recently as last week, a majority of justices appeared ready to overturn or at least pare back the so-called Chevron doctrine, the nearly 40-year-old principle that courts should defer to agencies’ interpretations of their governing laws as long as those interpretations aren’t plainly unreasonable.

Overturning the doctrine, as industry litigants urged the court to do during oral arguments Jan. 17, could sap regulatory agencies’ ability to base their rule-making on expert advice.

Although Congress could theoretically overcome any regulatory problems created by an adverse court ruling by amending the laws in question, that’s not a good bet given the profound dysfunction reigning these days on Capitol Hill. The industries will have achieved their goals for years into the future.

That brings us to Musk’s litigation strategy. SpaceX filed its lawsuit against the NLRB not in Southern California, where the company is headquartered, or Washington, D.C., where the NLRB maintains its main office, but in federal court in Brownsville, Texas, a judicial outpost on the Mexican border. This reflects the practice of filing anti-government lawsuits in remote federal courtrooms in Texas, where plaintiffs have a good chance of drawing a right-wing judge.

On the face of it, that tactic may have failed in this case, because the Brownsville court has two judges, one of whom was appointed by Donald Trump and the other by Barack Obama, and the SpaceX case was assigned to Rolando Olvera, who was Obama’s appointee.

SpaceX, however, is playing a longer game. Any appeal from the Texas federal court would go to the extremely conservative U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals, which I’ve described in the past as “the hackiest of hack-ridden federal courts.”

The New Orleans-based appellate court upheld Texas’ malevolent SB 8 antiabortion law in 2022, for example, after which the Supreme Court allowed the law to go into effect.

Last year it partially endorsed a ruling by federal Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk of Texas narrowing access to the abortion drug mifepristone. Kacsmaryk’s ruling was based on a tendentious and long-abandoned reading of an antique 1873 law, but that was enough for the issue to come before the Supreme Court, which has the case on its docket this year.

More to the point, the 5th Circuit has implicitly endorsed the practice of challenging regulations by taking aim at the constitutionality of regulatory agencies. It did so in a case targeting the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau brought by the payday lending industry, which has long been in the CFPB’s crosshairs.

A 5th Circuit panel composed of three Trump-appointed judges ruled the bureau’s funding mechanism unconstitutional; the government appealed that ruling to the Supreme Court, which heard oral arguments on Oct. 3 but hasn’t yet ruled….

The NLRB has called foul on SpaceX’s choice of venue, calling the company’s rationale for filing in Brownsville “less than paper thin.” The allegedly unlawful conduct of SpaceX took place entirely at the company’s headquarters in the Southern California enclave of Hawthorne, and nothing actually happened in Texas. The government has asked Olvera to transfer the case to federal court in Los Angeles, but he hasn’t yet ruled.

Put it all together, and the SpaceX lawsuit bears watching.

As I’ve written before, conservative federal judges, many of them appointed by Trump, have the power to move the country to the far right for decades to come, eroding reproductive health care, eviscerating gun control laws and making life more difficult for ordinary Americans depending on the federal government to protect their rights. Elon Musk, pursuing his own personal interests, is urging them to keep at it.

Categories Billionaires, Democracy, Deregulation, Disruption, Unions

Heather Cox Richardson: The Putin Wing of the GOP

By dianeravitch
February 21, 2024 //
29

Heather Cox Richardson writes about the ascendancy of “the Putin wing of the Republican Party.” It’s headed, of course, by Donald Trump, who remains deferential to Putin. He continued to compare himself to Navalny, who was murdered by Putin, since he thinks of his trials as akin to Navalny’s experience.

Aid to Ukraine is stalled in the House of Representatives, where Marjorie Taylor Greene leads the opposition.

Richardson writes:

Both global and national affairs appeared to shift over the holiday weekend. Events of the past week or so highlighted the global stakes of not stopping the aggression of Russia’s president Vladimir Putin. In turn, those global stakes highlighted that Trump’s MAGA Republicans are strengthening Putin’s hand. 

Since October, MAGA Republicans have managed to delay a national security supplemental bill that would provide additional aid to Ukraine. Although a bipartisan majority of Congress supports the measure, House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) recessed the House on Thursday without taking it up, just days after former president Trump attacked the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and suggested he would urge Russia to “do whatever the hell they want” to U.S. allies if they didn’t meet a guideline of spending 2% of their gross domestic product on their own military forces. 

On Friday, February 16, Russian authorities murdered opposition leader Alexei Navalny in prison, where he was being held on trumped-up charges, and on Saturday, Russian forces advanced into the front-line city of Avdiivka. 

The Munich Security Conference, the world’s largest gathering on international security policy, met this year in the midst of these events, from Friday, February 16, to Sunday, February 18. At Saturday’s lunch, Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen of Denmark made a surprise announcement. Denmark, she said, will donate all its artillery to Ukraine. She suggested other countries, too, could do more than they already have.

According to Jack Detsch and Robbie Gramer of Foreign Policy, Frederiksen’s announcement “left attendees grappling with some existential questions: Are they prepared not just to help Ukraine but also to defend Europe from a possible Russian attack on a NATO country? Are democracies capable of standing up against the threat of territory-grabbing dictatorships like Russian President Vladimir Putin’s?”

Sweden today announced it will donate about $682 million in equipment and cash to Ukraine, its 15th aid package to Ukraine since the 2022 Russian invasion. The European Union today announced it is committing 83 million euros, or about $89 million, in humanitarian aid for those in Ukraine and Moldova affected by the war. Three weeks ago it approved $54 billion in military aid.

There is increasing pressure, as well, to transfer Russia’s frozen assets to Ukraine. On Saturday, February 17, the U.S. Justice Department, which is in charge of a task force called “KleptoCapture,” transferred $500,000 in forfeited Russian funds to Estonia for fixing Ukraine’s electrical transmission and distribution systems. Biden promised more sanctions against Russia on Friday and has again called for House Republicans to pass the national security supplemental bill. 

Indeed, the real elephant in the room is the fact that MAGA Republicans in the House are refusing to commit more U.S. aid. The Institute for the Study of War, a nonprofit research organization, assessed on Sunday that “delays in Western security assistance to Ukraine are likely helping Russia launch…offensive operations along several sectors of the frontline in order to place pressure on Ukrainian forces along multiple axes.” 

MAGA Republicans are refusing that aid although it is popular both in Congress and among Americans at large. A Pew study released Friday, before news of Navalny’s murder broke, showed that 74% of Americans believe the war in Ukraine is important to U.S. interests; 59% say it’s important to them personally. 

House speaker Johnson condemned Putin as “a vicious dictator” over the weekend and said he was “likely directly responsible” for Navalny’s death. But on Monday he posted to Twitter a photograph of him standing alongside Trump, apparently at Trump’s West Palm Beach golf club, flashing a smile and a thumbs-up sign. Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) has vowed to try to throw Johnson out of the speaker’s chair if he even brings Ukraine funding to the floor. Trump himself referred to Navalny’s murder on Sunday simply by calling it a “sudden death” before launching into an attack on the United States.

On Sunday, former representative Liz Cheney (R-WY) came out and said it: the Republican Party has a “Putin wing.” She said: “The issue of this election cycle is making sure the Putin wing of the Republican Party does not take over the West Wing of the White House.” Conservative pundit Bill Kristol agreed, in italics: “The likely nominee of one of our two major political parties is pro–Vladimir Putin.This is an astonishing fact. It is an appalling fact. It has to be a central fact of the 2024 campaign.”

Russian authorities have cracked down on those expressing sorrow for the death of opposition leader Alexei Navalny and are refusing to hand over his body to his mother and lawyer, who flew to the penal colony north of the Arctic Circle to reclaim it, saying they need to keep the body for “chemical analysis.”

Meanwhile, a Russian who defected to Ukraine last year has been killed in Spain, and Russian authorities have arrested for “treason” a dual Russia-U.S. citizen who lives in Los Angeles as she traveled in Russia after having participated in pro-Ukraine rallies.

Putin is facing an election next month, and he may have intended the murder of Navalny to frighten other opponents and intimidate Russian voters. But it is possible it had the opposite effect. 

Yesterday, Navalny’s widow, Yulia Navalnaya, stepped into his place, saying: “Putin didn’t only kill Alexei Navalny as a person. He wanted to kill our hope, our freedom, our future. But the most important thing we can do for Alexei and for ourselves is to go on fighting. I will continue Alexei Navalny’s work. Continue to fight for our country. I call on you to stand alongside me. To share not only the grief and unending pain that has enveloped us and won’t let go. I also ask you to share the fury and hate for those who dared to kill our future. I speak to you in the words of Alexei, in which I believe truly: There is no shame in doing little. There is shame in doing nothing. In allowing them to scare you…. By killing Alexei, Putin has killed half of me. Half of my heart and my soul. But I have another half and it tells me that I don’t have the right to give in.”

Today she urged the European Union not to recognize the results of Russia’s March election, saying that “a president who assassinated his main political opponent cannot be legitimate by definition.”  

In the U.S., there has not been any apparent move from House Republicans to come back into session to approve the national security package. Indeed, Trump appears to be strengthening his hand over the mechanics of the Republican Party, with the state parties he salted with loyalists lining up behind him, supporters in Congress killing legislation at his demand, and lawmakers who are interested in actually making laws exiting Congress out of fear or frustration. 

But the apparent support of MAGA Republicans for Putin is unlikely to play well in the U.S. Today, Republican candidate for president Nikki Haley, former governor of South Carolina, tricked the Fox News Channel into covering live what she said was a major speech, likely leading producers to think she was withdrawing. Rather than doing so, she came out swinging with an attack on Trump. 

Aaron Rupar of Public Notice recorded her comments, spoken with the backdrop of the past week in everyone’s mind. Americans “deserve a real choice,” she said, “not a Soviet-style election where there’s only one candidate and he gets 99 percent of the vote.”

Categories Accountability, Corruption, Cruelty, Democracy, Elections, Evil, Extremism, Fascism, International, Republicans, Trump

Jonathan V. Last: How Biden Can Defuse the Age Issue: Embrace It!

By dianeravitch
February 21, 2024 //
17

Jonathan V. Last writes for The Bulwark, a site created by Republican Never Trumpers. I find there sone of the most interesting writing about the political issues of our day.

Last offers sound advice to President Biden about defusing the age issue: Make a virtue of your age. Don’t pretend to be 40. Speak up for the wisdom and experience of your years.

Age is not what separates Biden from Trump. Biden will protect our institutions from all enemies, foreign and domestic. Trump has already made deals with them.

Last writes:

My headline probably oversells it: Biden can’t defuse the political problems his age creates for him. But he can mitigate them…

But first I want to lay out the strategy Biden’s team should be using. It has three components:

  1. Hang a lantern on his age.
  2. Make it relatable.
  3. Put it in context.

Contra the conventional wisdom, I think Biden’s hasty press conference last Thursday was a good idea that was executed fairly well. It’s important that Biden takes ownership of “elderly.”

In fact, I’d have him go further. He ought to mention it every time he speaks in public. He ought to joke about it. He should have a handful of stock lines ready at all times: People talk about life before the internet? I remember what it was like before we had electricity!

The cornier the better.

Biden should set the expectation that he’s going to have senior moments in every appearance. Hell—he should flub things on purpose sometimes and then wink at the audience and razz them if they don’t catch it.

If we’ve learned anything from the Trump years, it’s that one problem is a tragedy, but a thousand problems are just white noise. So don’t be defensive about the age and don’t complain about the media fixating on it.¹ Lean all the way in. Make it a part of the candidate’s identity.

Next: Make it relatable.

Nick Grossman mentioned this today and it ought to be said constantly: We all get mixed up. I call my kids by the wrong names probably a dozen times a day. When I go to the pharmacy to pick up a prescription for one of them and have to give their birthdate, I always get the month and day right. But the year? I have to stop and think about that every damn time.

Sitting here typing I could not even tell you without looking it up what year we started The Bulwark. I think it was 2018, but it could have been 2019.

Our brains are set up to have amazing recall and processing speed that generally peaks in our 20s and declines every year after. It is not an accident that Einstein did his most important work at age 26.

Finally, there’s the context: We don’t choose our leaders based on recall and processing speed. 

What does it mean to grow old? It means that you’re not as quick on your feet as you used to be. Old people, in general, don’t want to get dragged into real-time debates with 45-year-olds. The synapses don’t fire as quickly; the gift of gab wanes. You very rarely look at an old guy and think, “That dude is slick.”

But slick isn’t what we want in our leaders. We want wisdom.

There is a reason that we have a minimum age for voting in this country and not a maximum age—it’s because we don’t trust young people, with all of their rapid recall memory and synaptic lightning, to be wise enough to vote.

By the same token, we don’t have a maximum voting age, because we recognize that the losses elderly people experience in the ability to rapidly process are over-balanced by the accumulated wisdom of years and experience.

Especially in a president, we value wisdom over speed.

And Joe Biden has demonstrated the power of wisdom throughout his term. It allowed him to reach deals with Republicans in Congress. It led him to focus like a laser on the economy and get America back on its feet. 

It was wisdom that let Biden understand the stakes in Ukraine and wisdom that helped him navigate the maintenance of our alliance against Vladimir Putin. It is wisdom that allows Biden to see the incalculable benefits America receives from leading the global order.

Just as it was wisdom that made Biden cooperate with the special counsel and respect the rule of law.

President Biden is the wisest guy to sit in the Oval Office since Reagan and that’s not in spite of his age—it’s because of it. 

Meanwhile, the problem with Donald Trump is NOT that he, too, is old. The problem with Trump is NOT that he sometimes forgets what day it is, or who he’s running against.

The problem with Trump is that he’s a madman who wants dangerous things.

He is on Putin’s side. He sees NATO as a threat to American prosperity. He thinks laws must not apply to him. He believes that democracy is only useful to the extent that it provides him advantage. He thinks that dictatorship would be preferable—so long as he gets to be the tyrant. 

If I were Biden’s speechwriter, I might put it like this:

Am I elderly? You betcha. Don’t move like I used to. And I have the occasional senior moment. I’ll probably have one during this speech, just so folks from the New York Times have something to write about.

But I know what the hell I’m doing.

Let me tell you about getting older. You aren’t as fast on your feet. You have to think a moment before you remember stuff.

But also: As you get older, you’re able to see what really matters. You’re able to let go of your ego and focus on what’s important. That’s why I was able to work with the Republicans in Congress even while they said nasty things about me in public: Because I didn’t care what they said—I’m too old for that. What I did care about was passing gun reform laws that both parties knew we needed.

I cared about lowering the costs of medicine for seniors and capping the price of insulin. I cared about infrastructure—getting roads and bridges fixed and new semi-conductor factories built so that young people could get good jobs and provide for their families.

And let me tell you what else age has done for me: It made me realize that I’m the president of all Americans. Not just the people who voted for me. Because I’m old, I understand that it’s my duty to make sure that even the people who run around saying that I’m part of a crime family—God love ‘em—are able to get good jobs, and have broadband internet, and have more and better police keeping their communities safe.

So am I old? You bet. I’m 87. No, wait, 78. I forget. Whatever—I’m old. Older than you. And that’s why America is prospering, everyone who wants a job has one, crime is coming down, more people have health insurance, and the Russians and the Chinese understand that there’s a united West, led by America, opposing them and holding them to account.

Thank you, Jonathan V. Last!

Categories Biden, Democracy, Elections, Ethics, History, Trump

Houston Chronicle Endorses Joe Biden for President

By dianeravitch
February 21, 2024 //
11

This may be the earliest Presidential endorsement ever by a major newspaper. The Houston Chronicle endorsed Joe Biden. Come to think of it, why should any newspaper hesiatate when the choice is between Biden, a lifelong centrist and accomplished President, and the unhinged Trump, who is facing multiple criminal indictments and attempted a coup when he lost in 2020?

The editorial says:

Now that the Kansas City Chiefs have triumphed over the San Francisco 49ers in Super Bowl LVIII — and without the help of Taylor Swift and the CIA, as far as we know— this nation can turn its attention to another winning team. We have in mind the Biden administration. Under the leadership of the oldest and arguably the most experienced president in American history, the team in the White House for the past three years has performed remarkably well, despite the rancor and divisiveness that have afflicted this nation for nearly a decade.

The accomplishments of an administration dedicated to governing, one that believes in the power of government to make life better for the American people, is a key reason we heartily endorse the reelection of President Joe Biden. The other reason, equally important, is to fend off the chaos, corruption and danger to the nation that would accompany the return of Donald Trump to the White House.  

The president has his shortcomings, to be sure, but what his administration has managed to get done during the past three years is a potent reminder to his fellow Democrats, to independents and to those Republicans who have somehow resisted Trump’s cultish appeal that the nation has a viable alternative. Here is a sampling:

If it’s really “the economy, stupid,” that determines success in presidential elections, then Biden can probably rest easy at neutral. No, Bidenomics alone didn’t save us but neither did they damn us. One of the clear advantages of a president as experienced as Biden is wisdom: in this case, the wisdom to get the heck out of the Fed’s way as it masterfully applied the breaks to what could have been runaway inflation.  

The economy has recovered from the perils of the pandemic and is now healthier than that of any other advanced nation. With unemployment approaching a 50-year low, companies large and small need workers. (Notice the “help wanted” signs in shop windows, the “We’re Hiring” signs outside huge warehouses and distribution centers just off I-10 east of Brookshire.)

Inflation is trending downward, somehow, despite all dire prophecies of economists, without the bitter medicine of a recession or a period of high unemployment. Food prices are still high, and hard-working Americans are still wincing at grocery store receipts, but gas prices have fallen, as the U.S. produces more oil than any country in history, including Saudi Arabia. In an ongoing effort to wean ourselves off fossil fuels, the administration is investing $7 billion in an ambitious solar-power projectand is promoting other alternative energy projects, as well.

The stock market is percolating along and hitting record highs.

“Infrastructure week” became a punch line during the inept Trump administration, but the Biden administration in its first year managed to pass a bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act that’s expected to add an estimated 1.5 million jobs per year for the next 10 years. This administration’s “infrastructure week” is investing in clean water and high-speed internet. It’s repairing roads and bridges, upgrading air- and seaports, modernizing our power infrastructure, investing in public transit and pahssenger rail and cleaning up Superfund and brownfield sites.

A little heralded initiative related to infrastructure involves “strategic sector” investments in employment-distressed counties around the nation. In 2021, according to a study conducted by Brookings Metro (a think tank) and MIT’s Center for Energy and Environmental Policy, these 1,071 counties have received about $82 billion in private-sector investment from industries the Biden administration has targeted. Industries that will locate in these areas include manufacturers of semiconductors (in this country instead of China) and equipment to generate solar and wind power.

One of the distressed areas to benefit is Wilbarger County, Texas, along the Red River northwest of Wichita Falls. A $4 billion private-sector venture is constructing a mega-scale green hydrogen plant that’s expected to create 115 permanent jobs and more than 1,300 construction jobs in a county where population has declined almost every decade since 1940. It’s worth noting that Wilbarger County in 2020 cast 21 percent of its votes for Biden, nearly 78 percent for Trump.  

Steadily growing reliance on the Affordable Care Act during this administration has made coverage more affordable and more accessible for millions of Americans. More than 21 million Americans are now enrolled, up from 12 million shortly before the pandemic.

The Biden White House also has given Medicare the power to directly negotiate with Big Pharma, thereby lowering drug prices and placing a $35-per-month cap on the cost of insulin for Medicare beneficiaries. 

After decades of “thoughts and prayers” and little else in response to mass killings, the Biden White House managed to shepherd a bipartisan Safer Communities Act through a balky Congress. With the support of 15 Republican senators and 14 Republican House members, the act represents at least a modest effort to address gun safety in this country.

The Biden administration has managed to organize and lead an allied response to a brutish dictator’s invasion of a neighboring democracy. As Ukraine desperately tries to hold off Russia’s invasion, Biden, in the words of former Republican Party operative Stuart Stevens, is “standing on the side of freedom versus tyranny in the largest land war in Europe since WWII.” 

Under the leadership of a president with decades of experience in the Middle East, the administration is seeking a path to peace and stability in the post-October 7 conflagration involving Gaza, Iran and Israel and the desperate Palestinian people. The administration also is trying to tamp down the potential danger of a region-wide war. It’s hard to imagine Biden’s predecessor having either the patience or the prowess to play a significant role in resolving a devilishly complex crisis.

Another attribute of the Biden administration is its normality. Stevens, the former GOP operative, put it this way in a recent article in The New Republic: “One of the greatest gifts of a democratic civil society is the freedom not to think about government, to wake up and not worry about the mood of a leader. Joe Biden has made governing boring and predictable, both fundamental rights of the people in a healthy democracy.” 

We are well aware that the Biden administration has not been successful on every front. The calamitous withdrawal from Afghanistan was the most obvious failure. The administration’s inability to quell chaos at the border is another, although blame primarily belongs to caviling and cynical MAGA Republicans in the House. In servility to Trump, they torpedoed a bipartisan border-security plan painstakingly crafted in the Senate. Biden can’t solve the crisis by executive order; he needs Congress to act.   

We are well aware of Biden’s age, 81, (and Trump’s, 77), as well as memory lapses that have prompted near-panic among many of the president’s fellow Democrats. Those of us who remember the energetic, garrulous, occasionally even eloquent Joe Biden of years past can see the difference a few years have made, even if he was always prone to gaffes. Accounts other than the report of Special Counsel Robert Hur suggest, however, that Biden remains focused, engaged and in command on the vital issues that occupy a president. Experience counts.   

We are reassured in large part because Biden has restored the tradition of a capable team running the White House, a tradition trampled by Trump’s deeply flawed scheme to run a one-man show. Like Ronald Reagan, Lyndon Johnson and Franklin Roosevelt, Biden’s deft management of his team has made him, arguably, the most productive president since LBJ in the early months of his administration. 

He has, as they say, forgotten more than his presumed Republican rival will ever know. That’s not saying much, and at the same time, it says it all.

Categories Biden, Democracy, Elections, Trump

Navalny’s Widow Says She Will Take His Place; Officials Refuse to Release Body

By dianeravitch
February 19, 2024 //
5

Yulia Navalnaya announced that she would step in to continue her husband’s long campaign to rid Russia of dictatorship and corruption. She stepped in because her husband encouraged everyone to engage, not to be afraid.

RIGA, Latvia — Yulia Navalnaya, the widow of Alexei Navalny, President Vladimir Putin’s most formidable opponent, vowed on Monday to carry on her husband’s crusade against the Russian regime, striving to build “a free, peaceful, happy Russia, a beautiful Russia of the future, which my husband dreamed of so much.”

Navalnaya, 47, made her announcement in a video statement on YouTube, in which she accused Russian authorities of fatally poisoning Navalny in the Arctic prison where he died suddenly on Friday at age 47.

“Putin did not only murder the person, Alexei Navalny,” she said, clad in black and her voice occasionally trembling during the dramatic video address. “He wanted, along with him, to kill our hope, our freedom, our future.”

Navalnaya also accused the Russian authorities of refusing to hand over Navalny’s body to his 69-year-old mother so they could cover up the cause of death.


“They lie pathetically, and wait for the traces of another Putin’s Novichok to disappear there,” said Navalnaya, referring to the class of nerve agent that international investigators said Russian security agents used in an August 2020 attempt to assassinate her husband.

“My husband could not be broken, and that’s exactly why Putin killed him, in the most cowardly way,” she continued. “He did not have the courage to look him in the eye or even say his name. And now they are also cowardly, hiding his body, not showing him to his mother, not giving it to her.”


Three days after Navalny’s sudden death Friday, the location of his body was still unclear on Monday and his mother, Lyudmila Navalnaya, was again rebuffed by morgue officials in the Arctic town of Salekhard, 33 miles from the prison colony where he died, Navalny’s press secretary said.

Navalny’s grieving family and political team have demanded the return of his remains since Saturday but have faced an extended, almost surreal, struggle to recover his body or even to establish its location — with Russian officials seemingly determined to obstruct any independent investigation into the cause of death and delay a funeral.


Navalnaya was in Brussels on Monday to address European Union foreign ministers who invited her in a show of solidarity and as a follow-up to her emotional appearance at the Munich Security Conference on Friday shortly after the news broke of her husband’s death.
At the meeting in Brussels, she sat next to the European Union’s foreign policy chief, Josep Borrell, surrounded by diplomats and officials, looking exhausted but determined.


“We expressed the E.U.’s deepest condolences to Yulia Navalnaya,” Borrell posted on X, formerly Twitter. “Vladimir Putin & his regime will be held accountable for the death of Alexei.” … “As Yulia said, Putin is not Russia. Russia is not Putin,” Borrell continued. “We will continue our support to Russia’s civil society & independent media.”


Navalnaya also met with European Council President Charles Michel.


In her video statement, Navalnaya vowed that she and her husband’s team would find out those directly responsible for her husband’s death and expose exactly how it was done. “We’ll name names and show faces. But the main thing we can do for Alexei and for ourselves is to keep fighting,” she said.
“I will continue the work of Alexei Navalny,” Navalnaya proclaimed, adding:

“By killing Alexei, Putin killed half of me, half of my heart and half of my soul. But I still have the other half, and it tells me that I have no right to give up. I will continue Alexei Navalny’s cause.”


She also directly addressed one of the resonant questions in the West about her husband: Why did he return to Russia in 2021 after recovering from the poisoning attack in Germany, risking likely arrest and possible death, when he could have lived peacefully with his family in exile?


“He could not,” she said, fighting back tears. “Alexei loved Russia more than anything else in the world, loved our country, loved you. He believed in us, in our strength, in our future and in the fact that we deserve the best.”

Categories Courage, Democracy, Fascism, International

Jonathan V. Last: About That Georgia Election Fraud…

By dianeravitch
February 19, 2024 //
43

Jonathan V. Last writes for The Bulwark, which was founded by Republican Never Trumpers. It is one of the most engaging websites I read. This post is newsworthy, since so many Trumpers were citing Dinesh D’Souza’s book about election fraud.

Last writes:

Last August we talked about True the Vote, the group whose “data” on election fraud in Georgia constituted a large part of Dinesh D’Souza’s 2000 Mules.

Let me refresh your memory:

True the Vote is a Texas-based group which filed a complaint with the Georgia State Election Board alleging fraud in the 2020 presidential campaign.

The Georgia State Election Board (the SEB) investigated this complaint and found no fraud. So it asked True the Vote to share its evidence. True the Vote declined and instead said—whoopsie!—they’d like to just take the complaint back.

The SEB explained that that’s not how it works with sworn statements and subpoenaed the extensive evidence that True the Vote claimed in its complaint to have.1 The whole thing devolved into litigation that bore a striking resemblance to George Costanza’s attempt to convince his dead fiancée’s parents that he owned a house in the Hamptons.

Anyway, this week the Atlanta Journal-Constitution broke the news that True the Vote finally gave up and told the judge in the case that they don’t have any of the so-called evidence, or data, or names, or identities—or any of those other fancy legal whosywhatsits:

True the Vote said in a recent court filing that it doesn’t know the identity of its own anonymous source who told a story of a “ballot trafficking” scheme allegedly organized by a network of unnamed groups paying $10 per ballot delivered.

True the Vote also told the court it doesn’t have documents about illegal ballot collection, the name of its purported informant or confidentiality agreements it previously said existed.

You can read True the Vote’s filing here. It’s wild. But the cajones on these guys! In a non-court-filed public statement, True the Vote went on to say that while they don’t have any of this stuff they said they had, they know that the Georgia Election Board could come up with it if they really wanted:

“The [Georgia Bureau of Investigation] consequently has ready access to the underlying data, and could, we believe, reconstruct it, but it declines to do that,” True the Vote said in a statement. “At this point, it would be redundant and cost-prohibitive for True the Vote to do so on its own. It is in that sense that there is nothing more for True the Vote to provide that it has not already provided to the GBI.”

Translation: The real evidence of voter fraud isn’t in a computer. It’s in our hearts.

Categories Accountability, Biden, Corruption, Democracy, Elections, Extremism, Fraud, Georgia, Lies
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »