Dispatches

POLL: TRUMP LOSING IN COURT OF PUBLIC OPINION. A YouGov poll for Yahoo News released May 14 found 52% of Americans now believe the central premise of Donald Trump’s hush money trial: that he did “falsify documents to conceal a hush money payment to a porn star.” Just 22% say he did not, while roughly one-quarter say they don’t know, Kerry Eleveld noted at Daily Kos (5/17).

Nearly half of Americans said they were following the trial at least somewhat closely, at 48%, while 52% said they were not.

Still, the trial itself appears to be affecting public opinion. Before the trial began in April, the same poll found that 48% believed Trump had falsified documents—a 4-point increase and a 7-point increase since March 2023.

Overall approval of the trial has also gotten a sizable bump, from a 7-point margin last month to a 12-point margin now, 49% to 37%.

In short, Trump is losing by a lot, to borrow a phrase, on most counts. Here’s how the three major pillars of the prosecution’s case poll:

• 45% believe that Trump and Stormy Daniels had sex, and just 14% disagree (the defense actually began the trial with the contention that the two did not have sex);

• 43% say Trump made a deal with the National Enquirer to buy and kill bad stories about him, and just 17% don’t believe that;

• 50% believe that deal was struck to protect Trump’s 2016 campaign bid, and just 18% say that’s false.

Even among Republicans, roughly 20% or more believe the central tenets of the prosecution’s case.

‘WE’LL BE BACK,’ SAYS UAW CHIEF AFTER ‘TOUGH LOSS’ IN ALABAMA. Workers at a pair of Mercedes-Benz plants near Tuscaloosa, Ala., narrowly voted against joining the United Auto Workers in mid-May, Jessica Corbett noted at CommonDreams.org (5/17).

The UAW webpage had the National Labor Relations Board tally at 2,045 in favor of joining the union (44%) and 2,642 opposed (56%).

Voting at the large facility in Vance and the battery plant in Woodstock kicked off May 13 and wrapped up May 17. Speaking to reporters after the vote was announced, UAW president Shawn Fain said it was “obviously not the result we wanted” but “we’ll be back in Vance.”

“These courageous workers reached out to us because they wanted justice,” Fain said of the Mercedes employees. “They led us. They led this fight, and that’s what this is all about—and what happens next is up to them.”

“Justice isn’t just about one vote or one campaign, it’s about getting a voice and getting your fair share,” he continued, noting that “workers won serious gains in this campaign.”

Fain added that “it’s a David v. Goliath fight. Sometimes Goliath wins a battle but ultimately David will win the war.”

The Alabama election followed a UAW win in Chattanooga, Tenn., where Volkswagen workers in April voted to join the union.

The UAW has ramped up organizing in the South since securing contract victories last year following a “Stand Up Strike” targeting Ford, General Motors and Stellantis, the American automobile industry’s “Big Three.”

The Alabama organizing effort has garnered support from progressives and union workers around the world. The UK-based Global Justice Now said “we stand with Mercedes autoworkers who are voting to join UAW to better their lives and help end the so-called ‘Alabama discount.’ It’s time we end the US South and Global South ‘discounts’ that allow corporations to perpetuate a race to the bottom that hurts all workers.”

Meanwhile, Republican leaders in U.S. Southern states have shown “how scared they are that workers organizing with UAW to improve jobs and wages,” as the Economic Policy Institute put it in April, after Govs. Kay Ivey of Alabama, Brian Kemp of Georgia, Tate Reeves of Mississippi, Henry McMaster of South Carolina, Bill Lee of Tennessee, and Greg Abbott of Texas issued a joint statement accusing the union of coming to their states to “threaten our jobs and the values we live by.”

Mercedes has said that it “fully respects our team members’ choice whether to unionize and we look forward to participating in the election process to ensure every team member has a chance to cast their own secret-ballot vote, as well as having access to the information necessary to make an informed choice.” However, both employees and the UAW accused the company of union-busting ahead of the vote.

During remarks to the press after the vote, Fain charged that “this company engaged in egregious illegal behavior” and pointed to ongoing probes by German and US officials into “the intimidation and harassment that they inflicted on their own workers.”

The Alabama facilities are operated by Mercedes-Benz US International, a subsidiary of the German parent company. The UAW said Germany’s Federal Office for Economic Affairs and Export Control has launched an investigation into worker claims.

The Alabama effort is widely seen as a test case for unionizing more auto workers in the South. Before the results were announced, Harley Shaiken, a labor professor at the University of California, Berkeley, told Reuters that “if the union wins, they improve their momentum dramatically for future organizing.”

RUDY’S TAUNT AT ARIZONA PROSECUTORS DIDN’T AGE WELL. Rudy Giuliani, who had been avoiding process servers since he was indicted April 24 on a felony charge in Arizona for his role in a plot to overturn the 2020 election, taunted the Arizona attorney general with a posting on X (formerly Twitter) at 7:06 p.m. May 17: “If Arizona authorities can’t find me by tomorrow morning: 1. They must dismiss the indictment; 2. They must concede they can’t count votes.”

Four hours later, Giuliani was served with the legal notice of his indictment by two officials from Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes’ office, outside the Palm Springs, Fla., home of top GOP consultant Caroline Wren, who hosted a birthday party 11 days before Giuliani’s 80th birthday, the New York Post reported (5/18).

“The final defendant was served moments ago. @RudyGiuliani nobody is above the law,” Mayes posted on X at 11:20 p.m.

Giuliani, Trump’s former lawyer who had been eluding Arizona authorities for weeks, was the last of 18 pro-Trump defendants served in the indictment returned by a grand jury in April. They’re accused of partaking in a failed bid to award the state’s 11 presidential electoral votes to Trump.

Despite Giuliani’s claim that Arizona only had only one more day to find him before the charge would be dismissed, Richie Taylor, a spokesman for Arizona’s attorney general, said there was no deadline to serve the notice, the New York Times reported.

Besides Arizona, the states of Michigan, Nevada and Georgia are also charging electors for falsely casting votes for Trump.

VOTERS CREDIT BIDEN AND TRUMP EQUALLY ON INFRASTRUCTURE. ONLY ONE GOT IT DONE. Donald Trump’s administration became infamous for routinely declaring it was “Infrastructure Week,” only to make exactly zero progress on his pledge to “put millions of our people to work” rebuilding highways, bridges, tunnels, airports, schools, and hospitals. In political circles, mentioning “Infrastructure Week” not only drew surefire laughs, it also became synonymous with Trump’s pervasive governing incompetence. In the end, Trump and his allies never even got around to unveiling a bill on the matter, Kerry Eleveld noted at Daily Kos (5/9).

Yet while Trump campaigned on a $1 trillion infrastructure plan in 2016, Joe Biden was the president who got it done, ensuring a once-in-a-generation investment into upgrading the country’s ailing transit systems.

But new polling conducted by Morning Consult for Politico shows voters credit Biden and Trump almost equally for advancing infrastructure projects—and the jobs that flow from them.

While 40% of voters say Biden “has done more to promote infrastructure improvements and job creation,” 37% say the same of Trump. On the bright side, nearly three-quarters of Democrats say Biden has done more—it’s important for Democratic voters to have some concept of their president’s accomplishments.

But among independents, Trump gets slightly more credit than Biden, at 34% to 32%.

The poll speaks to a persistent conundrum for Biden’s White House: how to make sure voters are aware of the historic amount of legislation the president has helped usher through a deeply polarized Congress, with the thinnest of margins.

The notion that Trump, who became the butt of Beltway infrastructure jokes, is now viewed as having advanced the policy nearly as much as Biden is gobsmacking.

President Biden is now consistently drawing more contrasts on the issue between himself and Trump.

“You may recall that my predecessor promised ‘Infrastructure Week’ every single week for four years,” Biden told attendees at an event in May in Wilmington, N.C. “He didn’t build a damn thing — nothing,” Biden said to laughter and applause.

“At the same time,” Biden continued, “he and his MAGA allies in Congress were happy to give the very super rich a $2 trillion tax cut in his administration — $2 trillion — that benefitted the super wealthy and the biggest corporations while exploding the federal debt.”

Biden traveled to another battleground state on May 8 to tout a multibillion-dollar investment by Microsoft at the very site in Racine, Wis., where Trump once promised Foxconn would pour $10 trillion into building a new manufacturing complex, creating 13,000 new jobs.

“Are you kidding me?” Biden said, noting that Trump and GOP Sen. Ron Johnson wielded golden shovels at the event. “Look what happened. They dug a hole with those golden shovels, and then they fell into it,” he quipped.

Foxconn, Biden added, “turned out to be just that, a con.”

“Folks, during the previous administration, my predecessor made promises which he broke more than kept and left a lot of people behind in communities like Racine,” Biden said. “On my watch, we make promises and we keep promises.”

REPUBLICANS ARE MAKING IT HARDER AND MORE HAZARDOUS TO REGISTER NEW VOTERS. While new voters or voters who have recently moved to a new location can register at any time, there are usually big drives to get people registered ahead of each election. Both parties make an outreach to new voters, but with Democrats holding a 28-point margin among the youngest group of voters, it’s understandable that registration drives tend to be slightly more exciting on the left than on the right, Mark Sumner noted at Daily Kos (5/19).

However, as NPR reports, in this election cycle groups trying to register those new voters are facing a frightening set of obstacles. If Republicans can’t find new voters, they want to make sure no one can.

Since the 2020 election, at least six states have passed legislation cracking down on voter registration drives. Many groups view the laws—enacted by Republicans in Florida, Idaho, Kansas, Missouri, Montana and Tennessee—as an existential threat to their work, and several have shut down operations rather than risk financial penalties or prison time.

To justify these new rules, Republicans have been spreading unfounded claims about Democrats attempting to register undocumented immigrants. Claims about noncitizen voting have reached the US House in the form of unfounded fears spread by Speaker Mike Johnson, and they’ve been blasted around social media with the help of Elon Musk.

Backed by these ridiculous, racist and self-serving claims, Republicans have drafted new limits on voter registration that are truly draconian. In Kansas, if a potential voter mistakes someone offering to register them to vote for an election official, that person can be charged with a felony.

“​​If you’re [convicted of] a felony, you lose your right to vote. So you could lose your right to vote for registering voters,” Davis Hammet of the group Loud Light said.

In Florida, legislators bumped the maximum fine for making a mistake during voter registration from $1,000 to $50,000. Then they bumped it again to $250,000, while imposing additional restrictions on how organizations can register voters. It was enough to force even long-established groups like the League of Women Voters of Florida to hang up their clipboards.

“More new voters means more new Democrats. Republicans know that. So they’re throwing up all the obstacles they can and justifying them with a smokescreen of fear.

“All of which makes 2024 more difficult. And more important,” Sumner concluded..

POLL SHOWS BIDEN AND TRUMP SUPPORTERS ARE SHARPLY DIVIDED BY THE MEDIA THEY CONSUME. An NBC News poll in April found Biden is the clear choice of voters who consume newspapers and national network news, while Trump does best among voters who don’t follow political news at all, Ben Kamisar reported at NBC News (4/29).

The poll looked at various forms of traditional media (newspapers, national network news and cable news), as well as digital media (social media, digital websites and YouTube-Google). Among registered voters, 54% described themselves as primarily traditional news consumers, while 40% described themselves as primarily digital media consumers.

Biden holds an 11-point lead among traditional news consumers in a head-to-head presidential ballot test, with 52% support among that group to Trump’s 41%. But it’s basically jump ball among digital media consumers, with Trump at 47% and Biden at 44%.

And Trump has a major lead among those who don’t follow political news — 53% back him, and 27% back Biden.

“It’s almost comic. If you’re one of the remaining Americans who say you read a newspaper to get news, you are voting for Biden by 49 points,” said Republican pollster Bill McInturff, who conducted the poll alongside Democratic pollster Jeff Horwitt.

Although the NBC News poll’s sample size of 1,000 nationwide is small, with an overall margin of error of plus or minus 3.1 percentage points, those who don’t follow political news feel more positively about Trump and independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and more negatively about Biden.

Trump’s lead among those not following political news caught Horwitt’s eye amid Trump’s trial on charges related to allegations he paid hush money to quash news of an alleged affair from coming out during the heat of his 2016 presidential campaign and as he faces legal jeopardy in other cases that consistently make news.

“These are voters who have tuned out information, by and large, and they know who they are supporting, and they aren’t moving,” Horwitt said.

“That’s why it’s hard to move this race based on actual news. They aren’t seeing it, and they don’t care,” he continued.

TEXAS GOV. GREG ABBOTT PARDONS RACIST MURDERER. Garrett Foster, a 28-year-old White man and Air Force veteran from a conservative family, who was sympathetic to the Black Lives Matter protests in the summer of 2020, carried an AK-47-style rifle to a rally against police violence in downtown Austin, as is legal in Texas, with the stated goal of protecting other marchers, including his longtime girlfriend. Daniel Perry, a 30-year-old White man and Army sergeant who was driving for Uber the night of July 25, 2020, ran a red light and drove his car into a crowd. He was also legally carrying a gun. Foster, sensing a potential threat, approached Perry’s car. Perry, seeing a man with a rifle, also sensed a potential threat. But, as Christopher Hooks noted at Texas Monthly (5/17), neither man had broken the law in Texas at this point. Then Perry shot Foster to death.

Perry turned himself in to police and told officers he was the first to point his gun. “I believe he was going to aim [his rifle] at me. I didn’t want to give him a chance.” He was not, in other words, claiming the right to self-defense. He was claiming the right to preemptively kill someone he thought might become a threat.

“No witness testified that Foster raised his weapon. A jury of Perry’s peers determined he had not acted in self-defense, and he was sentenced to 25 years in prison for murder in 2023. A day later, Abbott vowed that he would pardon Perry pending a recommendation to do so by the Board of Pardons and Paroles, whose seven members Abbott appointed. … For Abbott, who is ever trying to bolster his credentials on the right, vowing to pardon Perry was a no-brainer—particularly after TV host Tucker Carlson taunted him for not doing so,” Hooks wrote.

A few days later, court records showed Perry used racist language, compared protesters to “monkeys” in a “zoo,” and had fantasized for weeks about shooting a protester at a Black Lives Matter rally. “I might have to kill a few people on my way to work,” he wrote once. Another time: “I might go to Dallas to shoot looters.” He flirted online with teenagers. He reminisced about the time he shot “an Afghan in the chest with a 50 cal,” adding that “they are not real people.” His other messages reveal a man who was angry, alienated, and conspiratorial. (He wrote that he believed the Black Lives Matter movement wanted his parents to lose their “4 bed room house” by giving it to a poor Black family.)

But the rest of the story didn’t stop the Board of Pardons and Paroles from recommending a full pardon March 16 and Abbott granted it an hour later.

Hooks concluded: “Texas is not a military dictatorship, and Abbott did not send Perry to attack Black Lives Matter protesters. … But the unjustified pardon of Perry is a form of state crime, and it’s ugly. What’s next? The news of the pardon came soon after Abbott deployed state police, heavily armed, to crack down on another peaceful protest movement that is unpopular among his supporters: the rally at the University of Texas in Austin against Israel’s conduct during its war against Hamas in Gaza. What strange forces are waiting in the wings that have taken the wrong lesson from what Abbott did this week? What will Abbott do—or fail to do—when they act?

WASHINGTON POST IS VERY WRONG ABOUT ECONOMY. The Washington Post reports (5/19) that consumer sentiment softened in April. That’s true enough. But they also say this:

“That pessimism is altering consumers’ spending habits. McDonald’s, Home Depot, Under Armour and Starbucks all recently reported disappointing earnings, as people cut back on fast food, kitchen renovations, sneakers and afternoon lattes,” Abha Bhattarai, the Post’s economics correspondent wrote.

“… Employers are adding fewer jobs, wage growth has decelerated, and Americans are holding off on big purchases like homes, cars and washing machines.”

“Come on, folks. Do we have to keep doing this? Nobody has to guess at consumer buying habits by looking at fast food, kitchen renovations, sneakers or afternoon lattes. Why? Because every month the government publishes a nice, tidy summary of all consumer spending,” Kevin Drum noted at Jabberwocking.com (5/19). The figures show a growth in consumer expenditures from January 2022 through March.

“Whatever else you can say about the economy, consumers are not pulling back on spending,” Drum wrote.

“And guess what? The government also publishes lots of other handy statistics! I’ll spare you the charts, but real wage growth has been up steadily; home sales are down from their 2021 boom year but have increased lately; auto sales are up and have been steady lately; and durable goods consumption is up. Inflation has been hovering around 3% for an entire year, which is not especially dire. Hell, even consumer sentiment, which sparked this article in the first place, has been steadily up except for the single month of May—so it’s a little early to be pretending there’s some kind of downward trend.

“It’s hard not to feel like giving up sometimes. This is not arcane information. It’s all easily available in a matter of minutes from FRED or the agency websites. So why does the Post publish a jumble of misleading or outright incorrect economic statistics instead of just looking them up first? I will never figure this out.”

FEC REPUBLICANS BLOCKED IN ATTEMPT TO GIVE EVEN MORE SHADOW TO DARK MONEY. All three Republican members of the Federal Election Commission on May 16 voted in favor of a new rule change that would have made it even easier for right-wing megadonors to hide their political campaign contributions from public view, Jon Queally noted at CommonDreams.org (5/17).

While the three Democratic members forced a deadlocked vote that prevented passage of the proposal, pro-democracy watchdogs said the unanimous vote by the Republican-appointed members shows the powerful commitment by GOP forces to increase the ability for wealthy individuals and corporate interests to mask their political giving.

FEC Chairman Sean Cooksey was joined by his two Republican colleagues Allen Dickerson and James “Trey” Trainor III in backing the measure, but all three Democrats—Commissioners Shana Broussard, Dara Lindenbaum, and vice chair Ellen Weintraub—voted against it.

The proposal, Sludge reported earlier this week, would “supercharge” the flow of so-called “dark money” in political campaigns and was proposed by Dickerson, a Trump-nominated member who “previously worked at an anti-campaign finance regulation organization funded by conservative political megadonors.”

Dickerson’s proposed rule change, per the FEC, would have allowed advocacy groups or campaigns to “withhold, redact, or modify contributors’ identifying information in campaign finance disclosure reports”—reports currently mandated so that the public is made aware of who is funding such organizations.

The FEC consists of six commissioners appointed to six-year terms by the president, split between the two major parties, and confirmed by the Senate. The chair of the commission rotates among the commissioners each year.

From The Progressive Populist, June 15, 2024

Populist.com