Saturday, August 29, 2020
A Carnival of Disinformation
The RNC Treated Blue America Like Occupied Territory
Trump’s parade of desperate lies reveals one big and awful truth
Friday, August 28, 2020
The latest chaos at the convention reveals Trump as a miserable failure
Thursday, August 27, 2020
The Police Take the Side of White Vigilantes by Alex Pareene
The Police Take the Side of White Vigilantes
Over the past week, cops have shown that they share a coherent ideology.
Alex Pareene/June 4, 2020
Who are the cops for? Over the last week, all across the country, in ways large and small, they’ve shown us.
In Philadelphia on Monday night, the cops made it fairly explicit on whose behalf they police the streets. As they unleashed tear gas on unarmed protesters marching on Interstate 676, getting caught on camera spraying gas directly into the faces of harmless, seated demonstrators, across town they allowed an actual roving mob of men armed with baseball bats and other improvised weapons to violate curfew and move about with impunity. Or something more than impunity: an endorsement. Residents reported attempting to get the police to arrest or disperse the would-be vigilantes and being mocked and dismissed.
“We don’t take sides,” Philadelphia’s police commissioner said the next day. “Our mission is to always protect all persons.” That is what she is supposed to say. But the untruth of that claim is well documented. Over and over again, cops take sides. They do so in broad daylight and at night, on cell phone–captured video and behind mysteriously nonfunctioning body cameras.
In Chicago last weekend, a man in tactical gear with a long gun brandished it menacingly at protesters. “Open carry” of firearms is illegal in Illinois. The police had a quick chat with him and sent him on his way unmolested. As police departments have everywhere else, this one gassed and beat unarmed demonstrators who were protesting police violence. “We don’t tolerate police misconduct—ever,” the mayor said. But they do. They have tolerated it among Chicago police officers for 100 years.
What would lead a police department—not a few misbehaving officers but every officer on the street, in this instance—to dismiss a heavily armed man as no threat (to either their own safety or the safety of the community) in one case, while, in another, viewing an unarmed local activist as so much of a threat that multiple cops decided to surround and brutally beat him with batons?
The incidents in Chicago and Philadelphia are evidence that American police across the country share a coherent ideology. Armed white boys don’t code as a threat to them; “anarchists” and angry black people do (even if the protesters are the ones at least attempting to engage in constitutionally protected behavior, while the roving white gangs are flagrantly violating the law). That disconnect, the galling image of watching the law so obviously tossed aside under certain circumstances, highlights a fundamental truth about what’s happening across the United States. The police are not using brutality to enforce “the law.” They’re using the law to enforce something else: a particular social order that is, to them, worth fighting for.
The words “white supremacy” make some people shut their brains off (especially when so many cops are indeed black and so many people they’re brutalizing during these clashes are white), but the order, and the ideology, that these police departments, from Kansas City to Minneapolis to Philadelphia, are enforcing is one that dates back to the beginning of our country’s history, one that relies on the domination and subjugation of particular classes and groups, often out of the fear that, if given power, they would turn around and return the favor. That is what makes the response to these protests so brutal, so urgent, for the police: In town after town, they seem to ignore any course of action that might de-escalate tensions in favor of the ones that only serve to prolong the conflict.
Make no mistake: Cops have allowed other demonstrations, even very large ones, to play out with minimal or no interference. Heavily armed right-wingers marched on statehouses last month decrying measures to arrest the spread of Covid-19, and the police universally treated them as peaceful and lawful demonstrators, even as they threatened lawmakers and burned at least one governor in effigy. There were no violent crackdowns, no curfews, no brawls on the streets, no kettling or mass arrests. There was no tear gas. No major George Floyd–inspired protest has received the same courtesy, as far as I can tell. Fifty cops decked out in full riot gear descended on 14 quietly protesting students in Hoover, Alabama, on Tuesday, and arrested them all.
A few weeks ago, in Huntington Beach, a city in Orange County, California, thousands were allowed to gather and demand the reopening of the beaches, in spite of a worldwide viral pandemic, with minimal police interference. A protest of police violence in the exact same place weeks later was met with the usual displays of force.
This disparity in cop reactions to demonstrations could be seen as a bias against the left and in favor of the right, but that’s not the whole picture. A wholly unregulated, seemingly impromptu militia is allowed to participate in the guarding of Philadelphia not strictly because it might be more likely to support the Republican president, but because it is white and vocally defending the extant system of dominance and hierarchy against those who seek to upend or even simply reform it.
Those afraid of the complete reimagining of American policing tend to prefer to treat cops as individual and discrete actors, in order to separate the “good” from the “bad”—to say that the majority of them never kill anyone, that hardly any commit the acts of brutality and criminality that capture headlines. The question then becomes simply finding more of the good and fewer of the bad, or somehow turning the bad into the good. But none of the good apples arrested any of those white guys with baseball bats in Philadelphia. None of the good apples enforced the curfew against them. They chose to exempt the one group that enjoys special privileges and immunity from state violence for reasons even the squishiest moderate has to acknowledge.
Why each individual cop turned a blind eye doesn’t really matter. What does matter is that good cops don’t seem to police the bad ones. (Unless directly ordered to do so by their superiors, cops simply never arrest cops for committing crimes in the line of duty.) And this means we can judge them for what they do collectively.
Cops aren’t even more interested, as their critics sometimes accuse them of being, in protecting “property” than they are in protecting people. In Manhattan, New York police allowed widespread looting while gearing up for a prearranged clash with non-looting protesters. Philadelphia cops who put up a huge show of force to protect a statue of a notorious racist aren’t protecting “property” so much as declaring their allegiance. Minneapolis cops, it has been reported, have completely abandoned the largely black north neighborhoods of the city where arsons (not protest- or riot-related fires) have been rampant, forcing citizens and community leaders to organize spontaneously for their own self-defense. (It serves, perhaps, as an accidental trial run for police abolition.)
At one point last weekend, Chicago police responded to a ridiculous claim of a caravan of antifa soldiers streaming over the border from Indiana by dispatching a chopper. Cops react in legitimate and genuine panic at the fantastical prospect of vans full of antifa coordinating violence in their towns, even as they mainly ignore actually extant far-right provocateurs streaming in from the sorts of outlying suburbs where the cops themselves live. Cops frequently lie to the press, understanding that journalists will disseminate whatever they’re told, but when police in Louisville, Kentucky, told the press that their officers were worried protesters were putting bleach in leaf blowers, you have to understand both that the Louisville Police as an institution did not actually believe this was happening, and that its officers still consider bleach-blowers a far more serious threat to their safety than actual firearms carried by actual anti-government extremists.
Democratic (and occasionally libertarian) politicians, liberal think tanks, and policy shops have produced lots of proposals designed to prevent what happened to George Floyd from happening again: implicit bias training, de-escalation training, body cameras, use of force restrictions. None of these figures have a plan to stop police from allowing a white mob to violate a curfew with impunity while brutally repressing protesters representing the “other side.” What is the reform plan for that, exactly? What is the reform plan for police choosing to believe deranged conspiracy theories about demonstrators?
It is almost reassuring to believe that the police want peace but are, through ineptness or poor training, bad at achieving it. They have told us, over and over again, that they are a political force with specific goals. Are we ready to listen yet?
Alex Pareene @pareene
Alex Pareene is a staff writer at The New Republic.
Wednesday, August 26, 2020
Republicans Stage a Norm-Busting Convention by Jonathan Bernstein
Tuesday, August 25, 2020
Biden’s Economic Plan Gets a Lot of Big Things Right / Noah Smith
Biden’s Economic Plan Gets a Lot of Big Things Right
By Noah Smith
bloomberg.com
5 min
View Original
Presidential candidate and former Vice President Joe Biden has just released a major industrial policy plan for reviving U.S. manufacturing. The proposal is the first in a four-part series called Build Back Better, which will also address economic recovery, infrastructure, clean energy, racial equity, and modernization of health care, child care and elder care.
Biden’s plan should immediately make one thing clear: The era in which free trade was a centerpiece of the elite economic consensus is well and truly over. Although President Donald Trump embraced a blunt form of protectionism and thinkers on the right have been floating ideas about industrial policy, there was always the possibility that Democrats would hew to a Clintonite free-trade position. But Biden’s announcement proves that Democrats, too, are squarely in the industrial policy camp.
But even though Democrats and Republicans now agree that some sort of industrial policy is desirable, the harder question is what to do. Trump’s tariffs have resulted in economic losses for the U.S. and offended key allies, while failing to stem the decline of manufacturing or the out-migration of high-tech industries.
Stalled Out
Index of manufacturing production*
Source: Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis
* Index 2012 = 100
One good part of the proposal is a large federal investment in research and development. Biden’s plan would spend $300 billion on R&D, even more than the amount now being considered in Congress. This not only would revitalize the competitiveness of U.S. industry, it would help sustain college towns under threat from cuts in state funding and declining tuition revenue.
A second strength of the plan is education. Biden would invest in community colleges, apprenticeships and other alternatives to expensive four-year colleges. Alternative education of this sort has been used to great effect by Germany, and it has helped that country maintain a solid manufacturing base even in the face of Chinese competition. In addition to manufacturing competitiveness, this could shrink the gap between the educational haves and have-nots.
Another potentially good idea, if well executed, is supply-chain internalization to protect against pandemics and other disasters. The coronavirus outbreak has left top economists scratching their heads as to how the world’s greatest economy could fail to produce items as prosaic as face masks and cotton swabs. The problem is that during normal times, U.S. companies concentrate on the profitable parts of the supply chain -- design, marketing and the provision of final goods and services -- instead of on the boring, low-margin stuff. That makes economic sense right up until the point where a crisis strikes.
Biden’s plan would leverage public-private partnerships to identify the missing pieces of the U.S.’s internal supply chains and fill in those gaps. He’d use a number of other incentives, including taxes and subsidies, to encourage companies to retain the ability to make everything the country would need in an emergency. Though pandemic preparedness is the obvious goal, there’s also another concern -- the ominous possibility of intensified tensions or even conflict with China. Biden’s plan would also try to internalize the supply chains for semiconductors, electronics and other high-tech equipment that would be crucial in any clash.
With regards to the revitalization of U.S. manufacturing, Biden strikes the right notes -- public-private partnerships and manufacturing extension services.
Finally, Biden appears to take the correct approach to China -- rallying allies against predatory trade practices and intellectual property theft, while taxing the carbon content of imported goods in order to encourage China to pollute less.
All this is good. One troubling part of Biden’s plan, however, is his commitment to have the government buy $400 billion worth of U.S.-made goods. Domestic procurement orders can have positive effects, such as when technology companies can use government contracts to gain sufficient scale and know-how to compete in international markets. But Biden’s plan also proposes to have the U.S. government buy domestically made concrete, building materials and other products.
This is problematic, because there’s no need for the U.S. to specialize in mundane products like this; concrete, unlike cotton swabs, is not a strategic industry that the U.S. will suddenly find itself unable to produce in the event of a pandemic or war. “Buy American” provisions also have the potential to raise costs for U.S. government contractors, just as Trump’s steel and aluminum tariffs raised costs for U.S. automakers. That would make U.S. companies less competitive, not more. It might also annoy U.S. allies by restricting imports from Canada, Europe, South Korea and so on, in addition to China. It could increase the price tag for needed government projects such as green energy and infrastructure. And it could become a vehicle for political patronage and pork.
Finally, there’s one big additional strategy Biden should add to his plan: export promotion. Competing on world markets often forces companies to raise productivity, but some businesses need a push to leave the comfort and familiarity of the domestic market. Successful developing countries often use a technique known as export discipline: Incentivizing companies to sell abroad, helping them to get started, then culling those that fail in international markets. For the U.S., this could involve implicit export subsidies -- trade credit, overseas marketing assistance, free consulting, R&D support and so on. It could involve destination-based corporate taxes that encourage domestic content. It could even involve explicit monetary subsidies for exporting, though this would require rewriting of World Trade Organization rules. But the assistance would have to be temporary, to avoid creating a conduit for political patronage.
So Biden’s plan needs a little bit of work. But overall, it’s a solid start toward the kind of industrial policy that the U.S. needs after a long period of laissez-faire.
This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
To contact the author of this story:
Noah Smith at nsmith150@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story:
James Greiff at jgreiff@bloomberg.net
Published on July 10, 2020, 6:30 AM EDT
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Monday, August 24, 2020
Trump is ‘Fox’s Frankenstein,’ insiders told CNN’s Brian Stelter — and here’s the toll it’s taken
Trump is ‘Fox’s Frankenstein,’ insiders told CNN’s Brian Stelter — and here’s the toll it’s taken
Brian Stelter, the author of a new book about Fox News, at his CNN desk in March 2017.
Brian Stelter, the author of a new book about Fox News, at his CNN desk in March 2017. (Jesse Dittmar/for The Washington Post)
If anyone was born to write a juicy book about the democracy-threatening relationship between Fox News and Donald Trump, it had to be Brian Stelter.
After all, at not quite 35, the Maryland native has been reporting on cable news for more than 15 years. As a college undergraduate, he started a blog, CableNewser, that he eventually sold to a digital-publishing company.
At 22, straight out of Towson University, he was hired by the New York Times as a media reporter, where he had a starring role alongside the legendary columnist David Carr in the documentary “Page One,” about the inner workings of the paper.
And as CNN’s chief media correspondent, he is so ubiquitous — writing stories, producing a popular newsletter, tweeting prolifically and hosting the Sunday media-centric show, “Reliable Sources” — that Columbia Journalism Review called him “unavoidable.”
Turning this bottomless drive and energy to one of the most consequential media stories of our time, the symbiotic ties between Fox News and Trump, Stelter talked to hundreds of current and former network employees for a new book to be published Tuesday by Simon & Schuster: “Hoax: Donald Trump, Fox News, and the Dangerous Distortion of Truth.” (I obtained an early copy and interviewed Stelter last week.)
Not surprisingly, almost everyone spoke to him only on the condition of anonymity, which gives the book a certain “just trust me” opacity. Still, the insider details are believable and often stunning — like ultimate Trump loyalist Sean Hannity reportedly calling Trump “bats--t crazy” when speaking privately.
Or this, from someone identified as a Fox News star: “Trump is like Fox’s Frankenstein. They helped make him and he’s out of control.”
The book’s depiction of the feedback loop between media company and president is undeniable. Media watchers and political insiders see it unfolding day after day, but Stelter pulls it together:
“Trump granted pardons because of Fox. . . . He raged against migrant ‘caravans’ because of Fox. He accused public servants of treason because of Fox. And he got the facts wrong again and again because of mistakes and misreporting by the network,” he writes.
“And then,” he adds, “there was the coronavirus.” Stelter writes about the deep reservations Fox News staffers harbor about the network’s early, mostly dismissive coverage of the pandemic, with some of them calling it “unforgivable” and “hazardous to our viewers.”
I asked Stelter what he found most surprising as he reported the book. (We overlapped briefly when I was the New York Times public editor, and I have been an occasional guest on his Sunday media show.)
First, he said, he was struck by “the number of staffers who miss Roger Ailes,” the network’s dictatorial co-founder who resigned in disgrace in 2016 after a horrifying string of sexual harassment allegations and died less than a year later. Under Ailes, these staffers told Stelter, there was at least some leadership, a clear vision and some journalistic standards — even if those standards were aimed squarely at maximizing ratings and pursuing an arch-conservative agenda. Ailes was the obvious “audience of one,” at the Murdoch-owned network, the boss whom all strove to please or suffer the consequences. With his fall from grace, a new, far stranger reality emerged: The audience that matters most now is President Trump.
The second surprise, Stelter told me, was the number of Fox News staffers who acknowledge the harm the network has done and its frequent failure to meet basic standards for truth-telling — and who struggle with whether to remain at the network. Some hesitate because they fear they are tainted by having worked at Fox News; others because the money is too good to walk away.
“These calculations are right there at the surface,” Stelter said, and not just among high-profile names such as news anchor Shepard Smith, whose abrupt departure as the network’s on-air conscience last fall captured the media world’s attention. “These are real moral and ethical struggles.”
Other staffers have reached a breaking point, he reports, such as former anchor Jenna Lee, who chose not to re-up when her contract expired in 2017, telling friends that “the real estate for real news was shrinking” at Fox News, though she wouldn’t say so publicly.
This was not long after the network’s disgraceful, conspiracy theory-fueled reporting about Seth Rich, the young Democratic National Committee staffer who was slain on a D.C. street in 2016; Hannity, among others, spent weeks trying to tie his death to Hillary Clinton’s campaign. How could such baseless reporting ever have been broadcast? Stelter delves into one reason: Fox News’s lack of traditional standards and practices, the kind that every respectable news organization has.
“The Seth Rich debacle happened because Fox operated without brake-tappers,” he writes. Stelter quotes a veteran Fox News anchor: “I was never never ever asked to get a second source.”
Then there was Abby Huntsman, the former co-host of “Fox & Friends Weekend,” who couldn’t countenance Fox News’s full-throated support of the Trump policy that cruelly separated migrant families at the border. Huntsman “had been quietly talking to ABC executives about leaving Fox,” but was on the fence. “Family separations tipped her off the fence and onto ABC.” (She left ABC News’s “The View” early this year to help her father, Jon Huntsman, with his gubernatorial campaign; he lost in the Republican primary.)
As for the future of Fox News, much depends on November’s presidential election, Stelter said. Should Trump lose his reelection bid, he thinks that Fox may change course — going on the offensive against Joe Biden’s presidency as it did against President Barack Obama, and has never stopped doing against Hillary Clinton. Or, he speculated, it could return to meatier reporting overall.
But there may be a new player to consider: “The biggest question is does Trump become a competitor,” Stelter told me, no longer content to dominate a network but wanting total control in the form of a new entity that might be dubbed “Trump TV.”
That’s the problem, of course, with creating a Frankenstein — you may come to regret how he behaves.
But with Fox News “on a path to $2 billion in profits,” according to Stelter’s sources, that hasn’t happened yet.
READ MORE by Margaret Sullivan:
For more by Margaret Sullivan visit wapo.st/sullivan
QAnon Is the Future of the Republican Party
Tuesday, August 18, 2020
Bernie Sanders has the right medicine for a country too sick to hold a convention
Bernie Sanders has the right medicine for a country too sick to hold a convention
This is exactly the right convention for our times.
by Dana Milbank
August 18, 2020 at 2:02 p.m. GMT+9
There are many losses to mourn since the pandemic, and President Trump’s woeful handling of it, shut down our lives — but the demise of the modern political convention is not among them.
Gone, mercifully, are the corporation-financed parties where lobbyists ply their trade and big donors buy access to public figures. Absent, thankfully, are the convention-floor pageantry and theatrics that haven’t meant a thing for decades. Missing, too, are the preening journalists bagging trophy interviews on media row. Vanished are the scores of interest groups threatening to withhold support if they don’t get their moments in the spotlight and their planks in a platform the nominee will eventually ignore.
As Democrats gather virtually for their 2020 political convention, they don’t have the luxury of a balloon-drop convention spectacle. None of us does. We are living in the worst of times. There is nothing to celebrate.
Instead, Democrats on Monday night gave us the somber moment we deserve: a recognition of the desperate condition Trump has put our country in, and a passionate call to action. Democrats of all variety — socialist and moderate, coastal and heartland, Black and White and Brown — may be geographically dispersed this week but they are uncommonly unified in one existential message.
“We are facing the worst public health crisis in 100 years and worst economic collapse since the Great Depression,” as Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) put it. “We have a president who is not only incapable of addressing these crises but is leading us down the path of authoritarianism.”
Sanders, once Biden’s most formidable primary opponent, became his most powerful advocate Monday night, demanding “a movement like never before” to fight for his former rival. “During this president’s term the unthinkable has become normal,” Sanders said, with a passion and urgency that eluded him in his 2016 support for the Democratic ticket.
“He has tried to prevent people from voting, undermined the U.S. Postal Service, deployed the military and federal agents against peaceful protestors, threatened to delay the election, and suggested that he will not leave office if he loses. This is not normal, and we must never treat it like it is. Under this administration authoritarianism has taken root in our country. I and my family and many of yours know the insidious way authoritarianism destroys democracy, decency and humanity. As long as I am here, I will work with progressives, with moderates and, yes, with conservatives to preserve this nation from a threat that so many of our heroes fought and died to defeat.”
Trump, who has governed by division, hoped for disunity among Democrats. “Great division between the Bernie Sanders crowd and the other Radical Lefties,” he tweeted Monday afternoon.
So he wishes. The Democratic Party — now joined by Republicans of conscience — has never been so unified. They are unified around Biden and his basic human decency. The resounding, reverberating message Monday night, and almost certainly for the rest of the week, is that Democrats are united in determination to end the catastrophe Trump’s presidency has been for the country.
“You have the most destructive, hateful, racist president in the history of the country who is tearing apart the fabric of the United States,” said former congressman Beto O’Rourke, another Biden rival for the nomination.
Kristin Urquiza, an Arizona woman whose Trump-supporting father died of covid-19, told the convention “his only preexisting condition was trusting Donald Trump, and for that he paid with his life.”
John Kasich, the former Republican governor of Ohio and longtime Republican leader of Congress, declared that “we’re being taken down the wrong road by a president who has pitted one against another.”
New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo angrily pointed out “how many lives can be lost when our government is incompetent.”
And former first lady Michelle Obama closed the night with a portrait of America’s children seeing “our leaders labeling fellow citizens enemies of the state while emboldening white supremacists. They watch in horror as children are torn from their families and thrown in cages, and pepper spray and rubber bullets are used on peaceful protesters for a photo op.”
Interspersed were memorials to some of the 170,000 Americans lost to the coronavirus, the many African Americans killed by police brutality, the infamous images of Trump throwing paper towels to hurricane survivors in Puerto Rico and holding a bible at his church photo-op, and testimonials from lifelong Republicans and former Trump voters who felt betrayed.
The virtual convention was undoubtedly weird, with actress Eva Longoria playing emcee and occasionally looking into the wrong camera, Biden himself attempting to lead a virtual roundtable, video and audio glitches, several pre-taped speeches and a couple of attempts at crowd applause using Zoom-style boxes.
Will any of it matter? Probably not. Biden already has a lead approaching double digits and can’t possibly get much more of a bounce. And the broadcast networks aired only an hour of the two-hour event — inexcusable stinginess at a time when other means of campaigning are impossible.
But give Democrats credit for capturing the moment — the infuriating reality of a great nation brought to its knees by a president who has botched twin crises and fomented rage and division.
“A president who fights his fellow Americans rather than fighting the virus that’s killing us,” said Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer.
A president who isn’t “decent enough, stable enough, strong enough,” to get our economy back on track, said former Republican New Jersey governor Christine Todd Whitman.
A man who “has not clue how to run a business, let alone a country,” said Republican businesswoman Meg Whitman.
But the most biting of all was the senator from Vermont, in front of neatly stacked firewood. “Nero fiddled while Rome burned. Trump golfs,” Sanders said. “His actions fanned this pandemic, resulting in 170,000 deaths, and a nation still unprepared to protect its people. Furthermore, Trump’s negligence has exacerbated the economic crisis we’re experiencing.”
In apocalyptic terms, Sanders made the case for his former opponent. “Joe Biden will end the hate and division Trump has created. He will stop the demonization of immigrants, coddling of white nationalists, racist dog-whistling, religious bigotry and the ugly attacks on women. My friends, I say to you, to everyone who supported other candidates in the primary, and to those who may have voted for Donald Trump in the last election: The future of our democracy is at stake. The future of our economy is at stake. The future of our planet is at stake. ... My friends, the price of failure is just too great to imagine.”
For a country too sick to hold a political convention, this is the right medicine.
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