Dispatches

KAVANAUGH SUPREME COURT FIGHT TURNS FOX NEWS WHITE SUPREMACIST

The political fight over whether to seat Brett Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court — a man who has been accused of sexual assault and was nominated by a man who has bragged about sexual assault — was portrayed as largely about race, and that white men are being subject to false rape allegations to perpetuate some kind of anti-white oppression, Amanda Marcotte wrote at Salon (10/5).

Tucker Carlson, edging his show ever toward overt white nationalist rhetoric, argued (10/1) that criticisms of Kavanaugh and the power systems that hold him up are a form of “genocide” against white people.

“You might wonder what in the world this story, the Kavanaugh story, has to do with race,” Carlson said, before arguing that the real agenda here was about “punishing everyone who looks like Brett Kavanaugh,” as opposed, perhaps, to holding abusive men accountable for their behavior.

Variations of the anti-white racism charge echoed through Fox News coverage. Martha MacCallum wondered if Kavanaugh should say he’s “not guilty just because I am a white guy,” which completely overlooks that the actual argument against him is based on corroborating evidence and the lies he told under oath. Ben Shapiro later announced that “white men are presumed guilty because they are white men,” which ignores not just all the evidence against Kavanaugh and his false statements to the Senate, but also the fact that Kavanaugh was given a Senate hearing to defend himself and allowed to speak after his accuser.

All of these folks were likely following Ann Coulter’s lead. Even before the Senate hearing in which Christine Blasey Ford testified against Kavanaugh, Coulter appeared on Carlson’s show to deliver a rant about how the term “white privilege” meant that “any white male can be accused with an evidence-free accusation like this,” and appeared to equate being accused of something with being found guilty.

‘THIS IS HOW VICTIMS ARE ISOLATED AND SILENCED.’ KAVANAUGH ACCUSER REACTS TO CONFIRMATION. Debbie Ramirez, who attended Yale with Brett Kavanaugh, said the Senate’s treatment of her was reminiscent of when the new associate justice first assaulted her 35 years ago.

“[T]he other students in the room chose to laugh and look the other way as sexual violence was perpetrated on me by Brett Kavanaugh,” Ramirez said in a statement released just a few hours before Kavanaugh’s final confirmation vote.

“As I watch many of the Senators speak and vote on the floor of the Senate I feel like I’m right back at Yale where half the room is laughing and looking the other way. Only this time, instead of drunk college kids, it is US Senators who are deliberately ignoring his behavior.”

Ramirez told The New Yorker that Kavanaugh had exposed himself to her at a college party, thrusting his penis in her face and making her touch it without her consent. She is one of three women who accused minority President Trump’s nominee of sexual assault. She was not allowed to testify.

Despite Dr. Christine Blasey Ford’s credible testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee in which she described her own assault and reports that the FBI investigation into the allegations were far from thorough, 50 senators voted in favor of the nomination to confirm Kavanaugh.

Many senators said they believe Dr. Ford was assaulted but that it wasn’t Kavanaugh and that she’s “mixed up” and “mistaken” — meaning, they do not actually believe her. So Kavanaugh, a man who is opposed by senators representing a majority of the country, was confirmed and sworn in as the newest Supreme Court justice.

Ramirez’s statement echoed testimony from Dr. Ford, who told senators she could never forget the “uproarious laughter” from Kavanaugh and his high school friend Mark Judge when the former assaulted her in high school. Using her expertise as a psychologist professor, Ford said “indelible in the hippocampus is the laughter — the uproarious laughter between the two and they’re having fun at my expense.”

Meanwhile, Ford’s lawyer, Debra Katz, says Dr. Ford and her family have been unable to return to their home because of continued death threats. “This has been terrifying, her family has been through a lot,” Katz told MSNBC’s Kasie Hunt. “They are not living at home, it’s going to be quite some time before they’re able to live at home. The threats have been unending, it’s deplorable.”

Lisa Banks, another of Ford’s attorneys, told MSNBC Ford had no regrets about coming forward because she “still believes it was the right thing to do.”

But Ford’s lawyers said she was “horrified” at President Trump’s attacks and compared her ordeal to that of Anita Hill, the woman who publicly testified against then-Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas.

“We thought it was bad back in 1991, and it’s even worse today, the political climate and how women are treated,” Banks said.

PROMINENT CONSERVATIVE PUNDIT SAYS GOP MUST BE DESTROYED. Max Boot, a prominent conservative commentator, warned that the Republicans are being identified as the white nationalist party. “It’s hugely harmful to the long-term future of the Republican Party as America becomes less white,” he said on MSNBC’s Morning Joe (10/8).

Boot, a Soviet emigre and former Wall Street Journal editor, called for the total destruction of the Republican Party to undo the damage by Donald Trump, whom he blamed for making racial hatred an overtly celebrated value in the GOP, Travis Gettys reported at RawStory.com.

“I came here at age 6, I learned to speak English — I think I speak it reasonably well,” Boot said. “I try to fit in, blend in — I thought I achieved that. I thought of myself as an ordinary American, not as a hyphenated American. Donald Trump is making me to think in those terms, he’s making me think there’s something less American than me. I wasn’t born here, I’m Jewish. I’m not the kind of American that Donald Trump celebrates. It’s a tragedy for me and heartbreaking for me.”

Boot said that trend would metastasize if the GOP achieved midterm election victories, and the former Republican called for voters to send a strong message opposing racial hatred.

“They will double down on white nationalism and racism, xenophobia, undermining the rule of law,” Boot said. “They will be solidified as a core part of the Republican identity. That’s why I think it is essential that Republicans pay a price at the ballot box for what they are doing, and that’s why I’m urging, as somebody who is a lifelong Republican never voted for a Democrat before I voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016, having said all that, I’m urging everybody to vote straight-ticket Democratic in November, because I think it’s imperative to get some checks and balances.”

GOP MIGHT REPRIMAND MURKOWSKI FOR KAVANAUGH OPPOSITION. Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK), who voted with her home-state constituents and with her own conscience in declining to support Brett Kavanaugh for the Supreme Court, is being threatened by the Alaska Republican Party.

Tuckerman Babcock, the party chair, tells AP that they have “asked Murkowski to provide any information she might want its state central committee to consider,” and that it could decide to issue a statement, withdraw its support from her, encourage the party to look for a replacement, or ask that she not run for re-election as a Republican in 2022, when her term expires.

“Murkowksi lined up all the support she needed at home to take this vote, so she’s probably not terribly frightened by this,” Joan McCarter wrote at DailyKos (10/8). “So she should give the following statement: ‘I won a write-in campaign in 2010, when my name had to be correctly spelled on every vote for me. MURKOWSKI. Do your best, a**holes.’

“Then declare herself independent and starting voting with the Democrats. Clearly, she can’t be a Republican unless she declares total fealty to Trump.”

DEMS HAVE NARROW EDGE IN BATTLEGROUND HOUSE DISTRICTS. Likely voters who live in 69 battleground House districts across the country narrowly prefer Democratic candidates, according to a Washington Post-Schar School survey, a potentially worrying sign for Republicans given that the overwhelming percentage of these districts are currently in GOP hands.

With just a month to the midterm elections and with early voting set to begin in many states, the new poll highlights the challenge for Republicans as they seek to maintain their House majority at a time when President Trump’s approval rating remains stuck in the low 40s despite sustained economic growth, low unemployment and a rising stock market.

The survey of 2,672 likely voters from Sept. 19 to Oct. 5 shows that likely voters in these districts favor Democrats by a slight margin: 50% prefer the Democrat and 46% prefer the Republican. In 2016 these same districts favored Republicans over Democrats by 15 percentage points, 56% to 41%.

Kevin Drum at MotherJones.com noted the gender divide: Men prefer R’s by an average of 5 points, while women prefer D’s on average by 14 points. Women’s support for Republicans dropped to “an astonishly low 40%,” Drum noted, adding, “If things stay this way, it’s hard to think of a more deserving result. Over the past month Republicans have demonstrated as loudly as they can that they couldn’t care less about women or any of the issues women care about. They deserve a gender-based shellacking about as badly as any political party ever has.”

Democrats need a net gain of 23 seats to gain control of the House.

CLIMATE REPORT DESCRIBES CRISIS AS EARLY AS 2040. The United Nations’ scientific panel on climate change unanimously approved a landmark climate report warning that we need far stronger climate policies to stop catastrophic climate change than the world agreed to in Paris in 2015. And the Trump administration still plans to withdraw from the climate change agreement.

“This latest report underscores the danger that Donald Trump poses to the planet,” leading climate expert Michael Mann told ThinkProgress (10/8). It “makes clear we need to reduce emissions dramatically, vastly exceeding our Paris targets. Yet Trump probably poses the single greatest threat to meeting those targets.”

The bombshell in this “Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5ºC” from the world’s foremost scientific panel on climate change (the IPCC) is that on our current emissions path, we will cross a key threshold of dangerous climate change (1.5ºC or 2.7°F) by 2040, Joe Romm noted at ThinkProgress.

Equally shocking is that — absent much stronger global action and a very sharp reversal of Trump’s anti-climate policies — we would hit an even more worrisome threshold of catastrophic climate change (2°C or 3.6°F) just two decades after that.

Two key points of the new report are, first, that the impacts from 1.5°C warming will be very dangerous for humanity, but, second, the difference between these two targets is still significant: “Coral reefs, for example, are projected to decline by a further 70–90% at 1.5°C with larger losses (>99%) at 2ºC.”

Coral reefs are estimated to support a quarter of all marine life and are a major food source for half a billion people.

As the planet warms from 1.5°C to 2°C, the risks grow rapidly for some very dangerous tipping points, including the irreversible collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheet (which would raise sea levels 20 feet).

The report notes that “Limiting global warming to 1.5°C rather than 2°C is projected to prevent the thawing” of as much as 1 million square miles of permafrost. And that matters because the northern permafrost contains twice as much carbon as the atmosphere does today.

The new IPCC report says that keeping total warming to 1.5°C is still technologically possible, but it would require “rapid and far-reaching transitions in energy, land, urban and infrastructure (including transport and buildings), and industrial systems.

“In a massive environmental impact statement released in August to justify rolling back Obama-era fuel-economy standards for cars and light trucks, the Trump team simply assumed that Earth will warm 7°F by century’s end,” Romm noted. “And since this  apocalypse supposedly can’t be stopped, freezing car standards at 2020 levels simply won’t matter much — if you buy into this suicidally defeatist denial of climate science.”

DAIRY FARMERS SAY NAFTA REDO WON’T SOLVE MILK PRICE CRISIS. National Farmers Organization says the new tri-lateral trade agreement known as the US-Mexico-Canada Argreement (USMCA), which is supposed to replace NAFTA, may be viewed as a positive step by some, but won’t change the low milk-price forecast for US producers.

In the past four years, American dairy producers have experienced a milk price drop of nearly 50%.

“We appreciate that opening up export markets to more US milk products is important when we have an over-supply of production here at home,” said NFO President Paul Olson. But, when you consider there are more dairy cows in Wisconsin than all of Canada, the positive impact is significantly offset.

The new trade deal allows the US to regain access to the Canadian market for milk powder and milk proteins, or Class 7 products. The US will now be able to export $560 million worth of dairy products, or about 3.5% of Canada’s dairy industry, up from 3.2%.

Olson says it could give a short-term psychological boost to markets here at home, but it won’t be a salvation for America’s dairy farmers. “What our dairy producers need is a new milk production and pricing system based upon balancing supply and demand factors; that is just reality,” he said. “Supply management and structure management changes need serious review by US co-ops and all milk marketing organizations, along with dairy farmers themselves. Then, we will need implementation in a meaningful way.”

Exports are particularly important because of milk over-supply domestically, but the small Canadian gains will be dramatically offset by China’s new tariffs on lactose, infant formula, caseins and others. “When you look at China’s new tariff schedule, every single US dairy product will now face additional fees to enter the country,” Olson said. The NFO is concerned tariffs may remain in place until 2020.

Bob Yonkers, dairy economist and analyst with the Daily Dairy Report says during the past five years, China imported nearly 10% of the total value of America’s dairy product exports, coming in third after Mexico and Canada.

NFO also pointed out that Country-of-Origin Labeling, which the organization favors, was not addressed in the tri-lateral trade deal.

POSTAL UNIONS FIGHT PRIVATIZATION EFFORTS. Four unions at the US Postal Service, including the National Association of Letter Carriers and the American Postal Workers Union, held rallies around the nation (10/8) to call attention to White House plans to privatize the post office.

The labor movement has strongly supported USPS over the years and is dead set against privatization.

With origins dating to Ben Franklin, USPS remains the greatest postal service in the world, delivering to every address. For 50 cents, you can send a first-class, 1 oz. letter to any of 157 million addresses in the US, no matter how isolated. That connectivity has served our nation well and stems from public oversight. 

Whatever financial problems the Postal Service may have are the doing of Congress, starting with a unique requirement for setting aside the full cost of worker pensions over 75 years. That is a standard that no corporation or other public entity requires. Even in the era of electronic communications, the Postal Service is doing well, in large part, because of stepped-up package delivery; the pension requirement has been responsible for deficit numbers that otherwise might not exist.

Urge your members of Congress to oppose the sale of your public Post Office. Call your representative at 202-224-3121 and urge them to co-sponsor the bipartisan House Resolution 993, opposing the sale of the post office. Then, call your senators and urge them to cosponsor the Senate version, SR 633.

STEEL IS BOOMING, BUT WORKERS ARE FUMING. Donald Trump’s steel tariffs have caused the domestic steel industry to boom, the Washington Post reported (10/3)

The steel industry was already in a period of renewal when Trump slapped 25% tariffs on steel imports…. The tariffs sent the price of steel surging more than 33%. “We have a strong US exposure; clearly we are a net beneficiary of the trade actions,” Aditya Mittal, chief financial officer of ArcelorMittal, said in August, according to Bloomberg News.

Trump has repeatedly cited the gains as one of the biggest upsides of his trade policy. After he visited the Granite City plant, video circulated of a steelworker being brought to tears by news of the plant’s expansion. “Trump has supercharged [the sector] with broad-based tariffs,” said Phil Gibbs, a steel industry analyst at KeyBanc Capital Markets.

But the benefits have not trickled down to the workers. When President Trump imposed tariffs on steel imports in June, Richard Lattanzi thought of dozens of his fellow steelworkers who have for years put off badly needed repairs of their cars and homes. “There was a lot of excitement here; there were a lot of us saying, ‘It’s about time someone is looking out for us,’ ” said Lattanzi, the mayor of this town of 7,000 and a safety inspector at the US Steel plant in nearby West Mifflin.

Four months later, Lattanzi is less optimistic. Production at US Steel’s facilities have ramped up, and the company announced this summer that, thanks in part to the tariffs, its profits will surge. But Lattanzi and other steelworkers said they’re no longer confident they’ll take part in the tariff bounty.

In its latest offer, US Steel said it would give workers an immediate raise of 4%, followed by 3% annual raises later on. But the company is also asking workers to start paying $145 per month for health care, which would reduce the wage increase to 1.7% over nine years.

But to the union, it was an upsetting plan. Workers haven’t paid premiums in the past and the health premiums would reduce the overall wage increase to just about 1.7% over nine years.

According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, family health premiums have increased about $60 per month for large firms since then. For some reason, though, US Steel and ArcelorMittal, the largest steel company in the world, wants workers to start paying $145 per month. That’s about a thousand dollars per year more than their actual increase in costs.

ArcelorMittal is also demanded sweeping concessions, including wage givebacks and cuts to vacation pay, as well as the elimination of profit-sharing bonuses for newer workers. Out-of-pocket health care costs will increase by up to $9,300 over the three years of the contract.

Kevin Drum notes at MotherJonnes (10/4), “it sure sounds as if steelworkers will at best come out even under the new contract proposal, but will probably come out worse. And that’s in the wake of a three-year period of no wage hikes.

“In other words, somebody is getting rich thanks to the domestic steel boom caused by Trump’s tariffs. But as usual, under Trump’s Republican policies, it sure doesn’t seem to be the workers themselves.”

NO ‘STATES’ RIGHTS’ FOR TRUMP WHEN CALIFORNIA WANTS OPEN INTERNET. California Gov. Jerry Brown signed net neutrality into law for the state of California on Sept. 30. The law imposes rules similar to those previously enforced by the Federal Communications Commission under its open internet rule, which Trump’s FCC overturned last year. Trump’s Department of Justice, hours after Brown signed the law, filed suit against the state to block it, Joan McCarter noted at DailyKos (10/1).

California’s new law would prohibit internet service providers from blocking or throttling legal internet traffic or from imposing pay for play fees on websites or services either to deliver or to prioritize their traffic to consumers. It would ban paid data cap exemptions and blocks ISPs from trying to evade net neutrality protections by slowing down traffic at network interconnection points.

That just can’t stand, says Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who sniffed that the department was having to “spend valuable time and resources to file this suit,” but did so because “we have a duty to defend the prerogatives of the federal government and protect our Constitutional order.” States’ rights, except for when the state is California and the rights go to the people rather than the corporations.

Trump’s FCC Chair, Ajit Pai, chimed in about how we was looking “forward to working with my colleagues and the Department of Justice” in not doing his job at all, but instead “to ensure the Internet remains ‘unfettered by Federal or State regulation.’”

California Attorney General Xavier Becerra welcomes the fight. “While the Trump Administration continues to ignore the millions of Americans who voiced strong support for net neutrality rules, California—home to countless start-ups, tech giants and nearly 40 million consumers—will not allow a handful of power brokers to dictate sources for information or the speed at which websites load,” he said. “We remain deeply committed to protecting freedom of expression, innovation and fairness.”

FCC’S 5G VOTE BLASTED AS HANDOUT TO CARRIERS. The Federal Communications Commission voted (9/26) to restrict the abilities of local municipalities to govern public rights of way when considering the installation of small-cell wireless facilities within their jurisdictions.

The FCC’s proposal would require local governments to approve the deployment of facilities within a set time period. More importantly, this plan would limit the fees local governments are allowed to charge providers for using local rights of way, such as public utility poles, to deploy so-called 5G and other “next generation” wireless technologies.

Instead of allowing industry and municipalities to negotiate terms and letting the cities recover their actual costs, the decision suggests fee caps at levels predetermined by the FCC. The agency also warns municipalities not to act on the needs and interests of their residents if those costs exceed the FCC’s approximations.

The vote had been opposed by many city governments that favor negotiating carrier access to public facilities on their own terms. These municipalities believe they have the right to charge appropriate fees for 5G providers seeking to install small-cell devices or other network elements on public infrastructure.

Free Press Policy Manager Dana Floberg made the following statement: “This is yet another giveaway from Chairman Pai to wireless giants like AT&T and Verizon. With no discernible benefit to deployment of 5G wireless facilities to underserved areas, this order would preempt local government authority and deprive communities of the right to determine collection of funds — all in the name of marginally lowering costs for wireless giants. (See ).

TRUMP ATTACKS DEMS FOR IMMIGRATION BILL THAT DOESN’T EXIST. Speaking to the International Association of Chiefs of Police in Orlando, Fla. (10/8), Donald Trump added a new line to his standard message. Unfortunately, it involved the president attacking a pending piece of legislation that exists only in his imagination.

“Every single Democrat in the US Senate has signed up for the open borders — and it’s a bill. And it’s called The Open Borders Bill. What’s going on? And it’s written by — guess who — Dianne Feinstein.”

Steve Benen noted at MaddowBlog (10/8), “Trump’s lies come in a variety of types and styles, but the ones that alarm me the most are the lies in which he describes imaginary things as real. The president has an unnerving habit, for example, of telling people detailed information about conversations that simply did not occur in reality, though he seems convinced that they did.”

This falls into the same broad category, Benen said. There is no “Open Borders Bill.” Trump made it up. Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) has a bill to prohibit family separations at the border, and the proposal enjoys broad Democratic support, but no sane person would characterize that as an “open borders” policy. (The White House says it no longer supports family separations, either.)

When the lines between fact and fiction blur for the president, it’s unsettling.

But more broadly, Trump has also apparently convinced himself, not only that an imaginary bill is real, but also that he’s accurately describing the Democratic position on immigration policy. To put it mildly, he isn’t.

TRUMP SAYS CHINA CAN PAY FOR PRE-EXISTING CONDITIONS. At a campaign rally (10/4), Donald Trump peddled a familiar line on health care, but he added a new twist to his pitch.

“We will always protect Americans with pre-existing conditions. We’re going to take care of them. Some of the Democrats have been talking about ending pre-existing conditions.

“And some people have – you know what I say? We’ll get a little more money from China. It’ll be just fine. It’ll be just fine. We’ll be just fine. We’re going to take care of pre-existing conditions, folks. Remember that.”

Steve Benen of MaddowBlog noted, “Right off the bat, it’s important to note that the president is just straight-up lying about his – and his party’s – position on protecting Americans with pre-existing conditions. Trump may expect voters to believe that ‘we’ will always extend these safeguards, but he and his administration have taken aggressive steps in the opposite direction.

“What’s more, the idea that some Democrats ‘have been talking about ending pre-existing conditions’ is plainly ridiculous, even by Trump standards. He just made this up out of whole cloth. It’s brazen nonsense.

“But it’s that other part of the president’s pitch that stood out as especially odd: he apparently expects to finance consumer health care protections by getting ‘a little more money from China.’

“So let me get this straight: Trump thinks he’ll get Mexico to pay for a border wall, and he’ll get China to pay for protecting Americans with pre-existing conditions?”

Benen concluded that the president got in his head that, by imposing tariffs on China, he’s created a tax that China is now paying to the US.

“In fact, he’s said as much more than once. Two weeks ago, for example, Trump released a video via social media in which he said Americans are ‘taking in a lot of money’ as a result of his tariffs. Two weeks earlier, the Republican president said the same thing, arguing at a White House event that thanks to his tariffs, there’s ‘a lot of money coming into the coffers of the United States of America. A lot of money coming in.’ Evidently, Trump believes he can take some of that money and use it to pay for health care coverage.”

The problem is that China doesn’t pay those tariffs on Chinese goods. American consumers and businesses are the ones who will pay higher costs for imports after he slapped penalties on $200 billion of Chinese goods.

“If Trump is serious about reversing his position on protecting those with pre-existing conditions and adopting the Democratic agenda, great. If he’s counting on China to pay for his newfound preference, the White House will need a give the president another tutorial on how tariffs work,” Benen concluded.

WAIT, JUDGE KAVANAUGH TOLD US HE WOULD BE FAIR AND IMPARTIAL! Charles Pierce is beginning to wonder if Brett Kavanaugh was playing it straight when he talked about what an impartial, disinterested Supreme Court justice he was going to be. “I mean, what the hell is going on here?” Pierce asked, tongue in cheek, at his Esquire blog (10/8), referring to a notice of a repeat of the swearing-in ceremony on the Monday evening after perhaps the most contentious confirmation battle for a Supreme Court nominee in history. “In front of a room full of reporters, television cameras and Republican lawmakers at 7 pm Monday, the president will stand next to Kavanaugh and present him to the nation as one of the crowning achievements of his first two years in office,” the Washington Examiner reported.

“In other words,” Pierce wrote, “a sitting Supreme Court justice—Kavanaugh already was sworn in on Saturday by the person who was supposed to do it, Chief Justice John Roberts—is going to participate willingly in a meaningless masquerade of a partisan campaign event. (We’ll leave how disgusting it is that anyone besides Fox is going to televise this puppet show for another time.) Worse, it is a meaningless masquerade of a partisan campaign event that implies that a Supreme Court justice must be ‘sworn in’ by the head of the Executive Branch, which, at the moment, is headed by someone as ill-suited to that office as Kavanaugh is to his.

“If Kavanaugh was as dedicated to a non-partisan, independent judiciary as he claims to be, he’d have told the president*, politely, how completely unseemly this spectacle is. I’m telling you, I’m starting to wonder.”

From The Progressive Populist, November 1, 2018

Populist.com