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Workers are trying to unionize in greater numbers than expected in the Midwest

Public approval for labor unions is at 67%, according to a Gallup poll released at the end of August.

2023/09/07

A Starbucks barista at the Cheltenham neighborhood location at Hampton and Wise avenues joins a one-day walkout involving more than 100 stores nationwide on Thursday, Nov. 17, 2022, in St. Louis

. - Robert Cohen/St. Louis Post-Dispatch/TNS

ST. LOUIS — In the central Midwest, unionization attempts this year are continuing at a faster pace than expected and are on track to almost match last year's high number.

In the first half of this year, 49 private sector workplaces filed for representation in the region, compared with 108 throughout the entirety of 2022, according to a Post-Dispatch analysis of National Labor Relations Board data. The 2022 number was the highest in eight years, bolstered by high costs of living, an organizing campaign at Starbucks and historically low unemployment rates.

Unionization attempts are up in the Midwest and nationally, said Jake Rosenfeld, a Washington University sociology professor. But, he added, "I'm not sure it's large enough to change the broader dynamic."

In January, annual data released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics showed that while the total number of union members rose, it didn't grow at the same pace as the overall workforce. As a result, the percentage of workers who are represented by unions still fell slightly, to 10.1%.

This year has seen tough labor negotiations, strikes and protests. Some 295,500 workers have been involved in stoppages through July this year, Reuters reported, citing preliminary data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. That puts 2023 on track to become the busiest year for strikes since 2019.

Labor experts had expected to see this year's numbers hampered by broader economic conditions. Earlier this year, with many economists forecasting a recession, labor experts expected the anticipated economic downturn would make workers less likely to risk unionizing.

At the time, there was a general belief that economic storm clouds were forming, said Harley Shaiken, a University of California-Berkeley professor who specializes in labor and the global economy.

"Now, a lot of that has dissipated. It doesn't mean that we are totally out of danger, economically — we never are. But the possibility of avoiding a recession has become real," Shaiken said. "Overall, the economy appears less threatening."

Doug Swanson, field specialist for the University of Missouri Extension and coordinator of the labor studies program at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, added that the expectation of an economic downturn tempering unionizing attempts has "yet to materialize."

"I'm not seeing a dampening of that early momentum," Swanson said.

Still, experts said, the overall picture is mixed for unions.

Union membership has been on the decline, nationally, since the 1950s. It peaked at 35% of the workforce in 1954, according to the Congressional Research Service.

Public approval for labor unions is at 67%, according to a Gallup poll released at the end of August. That's just below last year's 71%, which was the highest level in 57 years.

"Despite all the energy, despite the broader public support, organizing in the private sector remains extraordinarily difficult," Rosenfeld said.

The long-term question, Swanson said, is how unions and employers alike will evolve as the U.S. population ages, bringing about larger shifts in labor dynamics.

"It's going to get tougher. We have not hit the bottom of the workforce shortage," Swanson said. "Labor is, in itself, at a crossroads."

© St. Louis Post-Dispatch

'Exaggerations': DeSantis-appointed college board member’s new book full of 'factual missteps'

New College of Florida board member Christopher Rufo, 

Image via Twitter.

Maya Boddie

September 10, 2023

In a Sunday, September 10 report by Vox senior correspondent Zack Beauchamp, he warns of the "dangerous" narratives pushed by far-right activist Christopher Rufo.

Earlier this year, Florida governor and 2024 GOP presidential candidate Ron DeSantis "hand-picked" Rufo to sit on the board of the the New College of Florida. The right-wing activist "professed that the school 'will no longer be a jobs program for middling, left-wing intellectuals.'"

Now, Beauchamp writes that "in recent essays," and in his new book America's Cultural Revolution — with the subtitle "How the Radical Left Conquered Everything," Rufo "has argued for conservatives to treat authoritarian Hungary and Richard Nixon as models for a 'counterrevolution' against the left."

In the book he "argues that America has been quietly taken over by the ideological heirs of 1960s radicals. Ideas formulated by Marxist revolutionaries and Black nationalists, disguised in benign-sounding language like “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI), have completed a 'long march' through America's major institutions — starting from universities and emanting outward to government and corporate life."

Beauchamp writes:

In June, before America's Cultural Revolution hit the shelves, Rufo reached out to me over email, offering a review copy of his forthcoming book and an on-the-record interview.

As a general rule, I think it's good to give people the benefit of the doubt, especially if their politics differ radically from your own. Rufo is an important person on the political right; it was worth taking the call to see for myself if he was acting in good faith.

However, Beauchamp notes "the more I examined Rufo's work, the weaker it started to look. His worldview is built on a foundation of exaggerations and misrepresentations — distortions that make it difficult to trust even his basic factual assertions, let alone his big-picture analysis of American society."

The senior correspondent writes:

Further pressing yielded the claim that his book couldn't be read 'literally' — that his 'artful and kind of narrative manner' requires the reader to question whether 'there was a kind of literary device at play' while reading.

But what he wrote didn't seem like any recognizable literary device. It just seemed like an obvious exaggeration, meant to make his readers think the problem is much graver than his documentation suggests.

Exaggerations weren't just a problem with the book's big-picture premise. The more I fact-checked what he said, the clearer the pattern of exaggeration and factual missteps became.

When I argued that university faculties weren't nearly as radical as he made them out to be, he pointed to his reporting on DEI departments in Florida and Texas — where, he warned, DEI departments were 'training students how to participate in violent protests.'

I traced this claim back to a piece Rufo had published in City Journal on Florida International University, focusing on a DEI pamphlet titled 'Grassroots Activism and Protest Safety.' The training contained advice like 'bring a bandana to cover nose and mouth” and “download a messaging app that has end to end encryption.' Technically, if you squint, providing such safety tips is 'training students how to participate in violent protests.' But his phrasing suggests the university is instructing students on how to engage in violence. What he said wasn't literally false, but it's profoundly misleading.

Zack Beauchamp's full report is available at this link.

READ MORE: DeSantis requests course data on CRT from state colleges to prevent 'far-left woke agenda' from taking over

Ramaswamy campaign hats made in repressive nation with ‘one of the worst governments in the world’

Vivek Ramaswamy in Phoenix in December 2022 (

Gage Skidmore)

Alexandria Jacobsonand
Raw Story

September 11, 2023

“Truth. Vote Vivek.”

Black baseball caps emblazoned with this message made their way around the Iowa State Fair last month, and Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy sported the hat before participating in Fox News’ Republican presidential debate held in Milwaukee, Wis., less than two weeks later.

But the hats have a truth of their own.

They’re made in Myanmar, a country rife with human rights atrocities and led by a military junta. The Myanmar military has propagated torture, sexual violence and mass murders, including killing children, according to pressaccounts and Human Rights Watch.

“It’s clearly one of those countries that’s sliding back on the freedom scale very much so,” said Irina Tsukerman, a foreign policy expert, human rights and national security lawyer and president of communications advisory company, Scarab Rising. “The fact that Vivek has chosen that place as opposed to another country where such issues are not really as prominent, like India or the Philippines maybe, it raises questions why. What is he willing to do for money?”

Ramaswamy’s campaign acknowledged purchasing the hats, explaining that they were from one “rush order for an event.”

“When this was brought to Vivek’s attention, he said we were changing it. He was not aware at all of the source, and it has been changed,” Stefan Mychajliw, deputy communications director for Ramaswamy’s campaign, told Raw Story.

The “Truth. Vote Vivek.” hats are made by a company called Otto, which calls itself “America’s largest source for blank caps and custom headwear.” The caps distributed by the Ramaswamy campaign show tags that say “Made in Myanmar,” and the company’s website also shows images of tags that say “Made in China."

Two Raw Story sources saw the hats in person and confirmed that the labels indicate they were made in Myanmar.

“This is bottom of the barrel,” said Phil Robertson, deputy director of the Asia division for Human Rights Watch. “This is amongst one of the worst governments in the world. It is right at the top of the list of the worst human rights abusers in Asia.”

The Business and Human Rights Resource Centre, a London-based nonprofit organization, is just “seeing the tip of the iceberg of allegations” in terms of the labor rights abuses in Myanmar since it tracks such abuses from publicly available news sources, which is limited due to a lack of press freedom in the country, said Natalie Swan, labor rights program manager for the organization.

A tag inside a "Truth. Vote Vivek." hat distributed in Iowa by the Vivek Ramaswamy presidential campaign shows that the cap comes from a company called Otto and was made in Myanmar.

“There's not some special zone where things are better in Myanmar,” Robertson said. “It's not like somehow that Otto is going to be this shining paragon of good practice in a country where the military is controlled and the workers are repressed.”

Members of Otto’s leadership team did not respond to Raw Story’s request for comment. Otto has offices in Ontario, Calif.; Arlington, Texas; and Fairburn, Ga.
China-Myanmar relationship

While the choice of where a presidential campaign sources its promotional hats might seem trivial, merchandising “is a very important part of his foreign policy because it normalizes his positions with the public,” Tsukerman said.

Ramaswamy, who is running third behind former President Donald Trump and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis in some recent national polls, wants an “America first” approach to foreign policy, according to an article he wrote for The American Conservative on August 28.

The merchandise for sale on his website also boasts “Made in USA” as a selling point.

Ramaswamy has been particularly critical of China, which has a close relationship with Myanmar. When asked about “Made in America” stickers on The Fifth Column podcast, Ramaswamy said, “I’ve actually called for total decoupling from China, total economic independence from China, not on protectionist grounds at all but on grounds of long run national security … I think it is not good for the long run security interests of the United States when we are dependent economically on our enemy for our modern way of life.”

Ramaswamy says the United States should no longer have economic dependence on China.

“I will admit that it is unacceptably dangerous that so much of our way of life is dependent upon Chinese manufacturing and Taiwanese semiconductors. I will declare economic independence from China,” Ramaswamy wrote in The American Conservative. “I will incentivize American companies to move supply chains away from China and rebase them in allied markets, especially in our own hemisphere, and I will use trade deals as the main way to do it.”

Mychajliw says Ramaswamy’s support for America’s independence from China is unwavering.

“As far as Vivek Ramaswamy is concerned, the major part of his foreign policy platform is declaring independence from China. We cannot be dependent on America's biggest adversary for the shoes on our feet or phones in our pockets. That does not change, and that's very consistent,” Mychajliw told Raw Story.

But factories in Myanmar, which shares a border with China, often are operated by Chinese factory owners, Robertson and Swan said.

China is a strong supporter of Myanmar’s military government, Tsukerman said, with the Council on Foreign Relations writing that China has “gone all in with the Myanmar regime”.

“It's really rather astonishing to me that he would stoop so low to have a piece of merchandise coming from a country that is one of the worst rights abusing situations in the world,” Robertson said. “It boggles the mind, frankly, that somehow they think it's alright to source something like a hat from Myanmar when any sort of brief Google search can come up with a full page of atrocities that have been committed by that military government.”

Ramaswamy’s foreign policy views were called out during the August Republican presidential debate by his challengers.

“You have no foreign policy experience, and it shows,” said Nikki Haley, former governor of South Carolina, The Hill reported. Haley’s campaign did not respond to Raw Story’s request for comment.

 

Republican presidential candidates, Vivek Ramaswamy (L) and former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley (R) participate in the first debate of the GOP primary season hosted by FOX News at the Fiserv Forum on Aug. 23, 2023, in Milwaukee, Wis. 

Photo: Win McNamee/Getty Images

Former Vice President Mike President, another Republican presidential candidate, said Ramaswamy is “just wrong” on foreign policy on Fox News this week. Pence’s campaign also did not respond to Raw Story’s request for comment.

“It's hypocritical on his part to claim that he wants to move away from China but nevertheless is supporting products in places where China is very dominant, where it basically is behind many of these manufacturing companies,” Tsukerman said.

Last month, Ramaswamy wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter, that his “progressive ‘elite’ former peers in places like Harvard, Yale & Wall Street” are “dripping sanctimony and condescension toward the so-called ‘rubes’ in the rest of the country.” Minutes later he shared another post with a similar message.

“They remain cloistered in their enclaves and think they’re worldly because they’ve been to London, backpacked in Prague, and took a photo with some starving child in Myanmar — yet they’re downright ignorant, bigoted, and unwilling to hear out their own fellow citizens in their own country. Do that first. Then you can feel good about yourself for going to Haiti or Myanmar *after* that. I know how to give them the dose of reality that they need. I will not be shy about prescribing it,” Ramaswamy wrote.

‘One of the worst governments in the world”

In February 2021 a military coup took place in Myanmar, sending the country into “effective civil war,” where the military has bombed civilians and engaged in” systematic commission of war crimes,” Robertson said.

In April 2023, the military bombed a Myanmar village, killing at least 157 civilians, with at least 25 of them children, the Washington Post reported.

The U.S. State Department has issued a Level 4 travel advisory — it’s most restrictive — for Myanmar, and warns of “significant ongoing challenges and human rights issues” across the nation.

Conditions for garment workers in Myanmar are particularly concerning to human rights activists.

In its August 2023 report, the Business and Human Rights Resource Centre describes “gender-based violence, wage violations, unpaid and mandatory overtime, inhumane working conditions and other forms of abuse” as common, with wages around $2 per day.

As for Ramaswamy’s campaign hats, “It is very, very problematic that this is being produced there, and any claim that somehow this was produced under fair conditions, this is produced in a way that was ethical, I think doesn't hold any water,” Robertson said.

Unions aren’t currently allowed in Myanmar, forcing union leaders to flee the country, and protests are put down by military force. Factory owners are supported by the military and take advantage of workers’ poverty and inability to strike, Robertson said.

In one case in March 2021, the military massacred at least 65 people as part of a protest by factory workers, Human Rights Watch reported. More than 4,000 pro-democracy activists and civilians have been killed by the junta and nearly 25,000 arrested, according to the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners.

“You see an immediate crackdown of the right to freedom of association and the right to join and form a trade union in the country, persecution of existing labor rights,” Swan said. “Leaders, you're no longer able to get your union registered in the country, and what that means is that you've lost that foundational framework with which workers can call for better terms and conditions.”

The U.S. Department of State has levied numerous sanctions against Myanmar since 2021.

'Didn’t even invite him': Mehdi Hasan explains how he ruffled Vivek Ramaswamy’s 'easy ride'

Image via Aaron of L.A. Photography/Shutterstock.

Maya Boddie

ALTERNET

September 10, 2023

During the Sunday, September 10 episode of MSNBC's Yasmin Vossoughian Reports, Vossoughian spoke withThe Mehdi Hasan Show host Mehdi Hasan about his recent interview with biotech entrepreneur and 2024 GOP presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy.

The Daily Beast reports, "During a marathon 25-minute sitdown with Ramaswamy that aired on NBC's streaming service Peacock, Hasan held the 38-year-old multi-millionaire's feet to the fire throughout, rarely giving the 'anti-woke' culture warrior a chance to deflect and dodge when confronted over his past comments and behavior."

Vossoughian had Hasan on Sunday's segment to discuss how the interview with Ramaswamy came about and what the MSNBC host expected to get out of it.

"First off, I should point out, I didn't even invite him on the show," Hasan said. "He suggested himself back in July. He tweeted at me saying, 'Have me on your show to debate on this stuff, MSNBC.' So we said, 'All right!' After the debate, when it looked like he was actually a serious contender, we said, 'All right. come on then.' So he actually invited himself — it's part of his strategy of throwing himself into numerous entities — it's how he's made a name for himself. Because was really a nobody six months ago. But he's done this intense media exposure campaign. And my goal was to try and hold him to account for some of the nonsense that he said in those interviews and for some of the lies he's told about his past. What he's done so well up until this point, including on the debate stage in Milwaukee, is to just basically talk over people, speak super fast, and super confidently. Thing is, Yasmin — so do I. So I was ready for that. And we did our homework, my team and I. We came to him with his quotes, with his book, with his tweets, with his tax returns. And I don't think he was quite ready for that because he had an easy ride so far."

Vossoughian went on to say, "That was a moment, Mehdi, when you went at him with his tax returns. If anybody has not seen that part of mehdi's interview, you should certainly watch it online because it is amazing to watch. When you were talking to him, I think two of the biggest things, it seems, you are trying to hold him on was, first, his qualifications, and secondly his trustworthiness. Was it there or was it not? And I think going into it, you probably understood it was likely not gonna be in there. All that being said, Mehdi, right, your audience is not the type of people that are going to be voting for someone like Vivek Ramaswamy. So even by having him on your show...it's not those folks are now gonna say, 'Well, Mehdi kind of called him out.' Right?"

Hasan replied, "Well, first of all I would say there's a value to truth in and of itself. I really don't care if I'm saying truth in an empty room. Sometimes it really doesn't matter the audience, you just have to reinforce the truth. But I will say one thing, Yasmin, the DeSantis people are sharing the hell out of this clip. He's got rivals on the right who are actually very happy to see him held to account. I've seen a bunch of conservatives, people like Meghan McCain, who's no fan of mine, saying 'Why didn't conservative media ask Vivek Ramaswamy these questions over the past six months? Why did he get a pass on the right for so long?' So actually interestingly enough, given the dynamics of the GOP presidential race, where he's snapping at DeSantis' heels, they're actually appreciating the fact that someone's asked some of these questions."

Vossoughian emphasized, "That's a really incredible point. And it's interesting because of the leak that came out of the DeSantis camp just a couple weeks ago, saying, 'We're gonna be focusing more' —ahead of the debate of course — 'We're gonna be focusing more on Vivek on that debate stage' than they would, obviously, the front runner is the former President Donald trump. What do you most, Mehdi, worry about looking ahead to this election, specifically, the primary race, and then ultimately, the general?"

READ MORE: Vivek Ramaswamy’s Hindu faith 'major stumbling block' for evangelical 'Christian nationalists': report

Hasan said, "The most worrying thing is something I've been saying for a long time. I'm sure you have too — the authoritarianism that comes out of the GOP. and Vivek Ramaswamy, despite being the son of immigrants, having a brown skin, is as authoritarian as the rest of them, if not more. On Friday, he announced that he wants to deport U.S. citizen kids of undocumented immigrants. He doesn't accept the birthright citizenship under the 14th Amendment. So, it's a real problem when you've got a bunch of people who are not called Donald Trump, but are as authoritarian as he is, if not more so in some cases."

Watch the video below or at this link.

AYN RAND INC.

The connection between a child-murderer, Reaganism and today’s GOP

Former U.S. President Donald Trump speaks during the Alabama Republican Party’s 2023 Summer meeting at the Renaissance Montgomery Hotel on August 4, 2023 in Montgomery, Alabama. (Photo by Julie Bennett/Getty Images).
Thom Hartmann

September 08, 2023

Many Americans are baffled by the Republican Party’s embrace of billionaire sociopath Trump and elected Republicans’ willingness to overlook the death of seven Americans, including three police officers, in an attempted coup. (Particularly after they spent over 2 years and tens of millions of dollars obsessing on 4 dead Americans in Benghazi.)

They’re also wondering why Kevin McCarthy would reject Liz Cheney to embrace someone like Elise Stefanik, an apologist for the January 6 treason attempt, or go along with Mitch McConnell’s attempts to sabotage the American Rescue Plan, the American Jobs Plan, and the American Family Plan.

After all, people are hurting. We just experienced the worst pandemic in a century, and, under Trump and Bush before him, two economic downturns unmatched since the Republican Great Depression of the 1920s.

Why, Americans wonder, would the GOP embrace such anti-American and nakedly brutal politics and policies?

Why would they try so hard to destroy Medicare and Social Security? Why would they mourn the loss of Trump’s program to tear children from their families and throw them into cages? Why are they so enthusiastic about efforts to make it harder to vote that Ron DeSantis would delight in parading 15 Black voters before the cameras in chains?

Why did they continue to support Trump after he lost the House, Senate, and White House and continues to rant his racist, anti-American, anti-democratic strongman rhetoric?

But, it turns out, it’s not just all about politics; the roots of this brutal movement in today’s GOP run from a 1927 child murderer, through a real-estate lobbying group, to Ronald Reagan putting both of their philosophies into actual practice and bringing a number of right-wing billionaires into the fold.

As a result, Republican policies over the past 42 years not only gutted America’s middle class, but led straight to the Trump presidency and the attack on the Capitol on January 6th that he led. Many Americans are now so confused about how government should work that they’ve embraced a bizarre conspiracy theory positing Trump as a sort of messiah and politicians like McConnell and Stefanick as noble statesmen and -women.

The Libertarians

Reporter Mark Ames documents how, back in the 1940s, a real estate lobbying group came up with the idea of creating a new political party to justify deregulating the real estate and finance industries so they could make more money.

This new Libertarian Party would give an ideological and political cover to their goal of becoming government-free, and they developed an elaborate pretense of governing philosophy around it.

Their principal argument was that if everybody acted separately and independently, in all cases with maximum selfishness, such behavior would actually benefit society. There would be no government needed beyond an army and a police force, and a court system to defend the rights of property owners. It was a bizarre twisting of Adam Smith’s reference to the “invisible hand” that regulated trade among nations.

In 1980, billionaire David Koch ran for vice president on the newly formed Libertarian Party ticket. His platform included calls to privatize the Post Office, close public schools, give Medicare and Medicaid to big insurance companies, end food and housing support and all other forms of “welfare,” deregulate all corporate oversight while shutting down the EPA and FDA, and selling off much of the federal government’s land and other assets to billionaires and big corporations.

Reagan, who won that 1980 election, embraced this view in his inaugural address, saying, “[G]overnment is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.” He then doubled down on the idea by beginning the systematic process of gutting and crippling governmental institutions that historically had supported working people and the middle class.

The child-killer who inspired a movement

Reagan wasn’t just echoing the Libertarian vision; he was also endorsing Ayn Rand’s “objectivist” view of the world, which traces its roots to a murderous sociopath in 1927.

Back in 2015, Donald Trump told USA Today’s Kirsten Powers that his favorite book was Ayn Rand’s raped-girl-decides-she-likes-it novel, “The Fountainhead.”

“It relates to business, beauty, life and inner emotions,” he told Powers. “That book relates to … everything.”

Ayn Rand’s novels have animated libertarian Republicans like former Speaker of the House of Representatives and current Fox News board member Paul Ryan, who required interns to read her books when they joined his staff.

Powers added, “He [Trump],” told her that he “identified with Howard Roark, the novel’s idealistic protagonist who designs skyscrapers and rages against the establishment.”

Rand’s hero Roark, in fact, “raged” so much in her novel that he blew up a public housing project with dynamite just to get what he wanted. Sort of like the plans of the person who planted bombs at the RNC and DNC headquarters the night before January 6th.

Rand, in her Journals, explained where she got her inspiration for Howard Roark and so many of her other novels. She writes that the theme of The Fountainhead, for example, is, “One puts oneself above all and crushes everything in one’s way to get the best for oneself.”

On Trump’s hero Howard Roark, she wrote thathe “has learned long ago, with his first consciousness, two things which dominate his entire attitude toward life: his own superiority and the utter worthlessness of the world. He knows what he wants and what he thinks. He needs no other reasons, standards or considerations. His complete selfishness is as natural to him as breathing.”

It turns out that Roark and many of her other characters were based on a real person. The man who so inspired Ayn Rand’s fictional heroes was named William Edward Hickman, and he lived in Los Angeles during the Roaring Twenties.

Ten days before Christmas in 1927, Hickman, a teenager with slicked dark hair and tiny, muted eyes, drove up to Mount Vernon Junior High School in Los Angeles and kidnapped Marion Parker — the daughter of a wealthy banker in town.

Hickman held the girl ransom, demanding $1,500 from her father — back then about a year’s salary. Supremely confident that he would elude capture, Hickman signed his name on the ransom notes, “The Fox.”

After two days, Marion’s father agreed to hand over the ransom in exchange for the safety of his daughter. What Perry Parker didn’t know is that Hickman never intended to live up to his end of the bargain.

The Pittsburgh Pressdetailed what Hickman, in his own words, did next.

“It was while I was fixing the blindfold that the urge to murder came upon me,” he said. “I just couldn’t help myself. I got a towel and stepped up behind Marion. Then, before she could move, I put it around her neck and twisted it tightly.”

Hickman didn’t hold back on any of these details: he was proud of his cold-bloodedness.

“I held on and she made no outcry except to gurgle. I held on for about two minutes, I guess, and then I let go. When I cut loose the fastenings, she fell to the floor. I knew she was dead.”

But Hickman wasn’t finished. “After she was dead I carried her body into the bathroom and undressed her, all but the underwear, and cut a hole in her throat with a pocket knife to let the blood out.”

Hickman then dismembered the child piece-by-piece, putting her limbs in a cabinet in his apartment, and then wrapped up the carved-up torso, powdered the lifeless face of Marion Parker, set what was left of her stump torso with the head sitting atop it in the passenger seat of his car, and drove to meet her father to collect the ransom money.

He even sewed open her eyelids to make it look like she was alive.

On the way, Hickman dumped body parts out of his car window, before rendezvousing with Marion Parker’s father.

Armed with a shotgun so her father wouldn’t come close enough to Hickman’s car to see that Marion was dead, Hickman collected his $1,500, then kicked open the door and tossed the rest of Marion Parker onto the road. As he sped off, her father fell to his knees, screaming.

Days later, the police caught up with a defiant and unrepentant Hickman in Oregon. His lawyers pleaded insanity, but the jury gave him the gallows.

To nearly everyone, Hickman was a monster. The year of the murder, the Los Angeles Timescalled it “the most horrible crime of the 1920s.” Hickman was America’s most despicable villain at the time.

Ayn Rand falls in love with a “superman”

But to Alissa Zinovievna Rosenbaum, a 21-year-old Russian political science student who’d arrived in America just two years earlier, Hickman was a hero.

Alissa was a squat five-foot-two with a flapper hairdo and wide, sunken dark eyes that gave her a haunting stare. Etched into those brooding eyes was burned the memory of a childhood backlit by the Russian Revolution.

She had just departed Leninist Russia where, almost a decade earlier, there was a harsh backlash against the Russian property owners by the Bolsheviks. Alissa’s own family was targeted, and at the age of 12 she watched as Bolshevik soldiers burst into her father’s pharmacy, looted the store, and plastered on her Dad’s doors the red emblem of the state, indicating that his private business now belonged to “the people.”

That incident left such a deep and burning wound in young Alissa’s mind that she went to college to study political science and vowed one day she’d become a famous writer to warn the world of the dangers of Bolshevism.

Starting afresh in Hollywood, she anglicized her name to Ayn Rand, and moved from prop-girl to screenwriter/novelist, basing the heroes of several of her stories on a man she was reading about in the newspapers at the time. A man she wrote effusively about in her diaries. A man she hero-worshipped.

William Edward Hickman was the most notorious man in American in 1928, having achieved the level of national fame that she craved.

Young Ayn Rand saw in Hickman the “ideal man” she based The Fountainhead on, and used to ground her philosophy and her life’s work. His greatest quality, she believed, was his unfeeling, pitiless selfishness.

Hickman’s words were carefully recounted by Rand in her Journals. His statement that, “I am like the state: what is good for me is right,” resonated deeply with her. It was the perfect articulation of her belief that if people pursued their own interests above all else — even above friends, family, or nation — the result would be utopian.

She wrote in her diary that those words of Hickman’s were, “the best and strongest expression of a real man’s psychology I ever heard.”

Hickman — the monster who boasted about how he had hacked up a 12-year-old girl — had Rand’s ear, as well as her heart. She saw a strongman archetype in him, the way that people wearing red MAGA hats see a strongman savior in Donald Trump.

As Hickman’s murder trial unfolded, Rand grew increasingly enraged at how the “mediocre” American masses had rushed to condemn her Superman.

“The first thing that impresses me about the case,” Rand wrote in reference to the Hickman trial in early notes for a book she was working on titled The Little Street, “is the ferocious rage of the whole society against one man.”

Astounded that Americans didn’t recognize the heroism Hickman showed when he proudly rose above simply conforming to society’s rules, Rand wrote, “It is not the crime alone that has raised the fury of public hatred. It is the case of a daring challenge to society. … It is the amazing picture of a man with no regard whatever for all that society holds sacred, with a consciousness all his own.”

Rand explained that when the masses are confronted with such a bold actor, they neither understood nor empathized with him. Thus, “a brilliant, unusual, exceptional boy [was] turned [by the media] into a purposeless monster.”

The protagonist of the book that Rand was writing around that time was a boy named Danny Renahan. In her notes for the book, she wrote, “The model for the boy [Renahan] is Hickman.” He would be her ideal man, and the archetype for a philosophical movement that would transform a nation.

“He is born with the spirit of Argon and the nature of a medieval feudal lord,” Rand wrote in her notes describing Renahan. “Imperious. Impatient. Uncompromising. Untamable. Intolerant. Unadaptable. Passionate. Intensely proud. Superior to the mob… an extreme ‘extremist.’ … No respect for anything or anyone.”

Rand wanted capitalism in its most raw form, uncheck by any government that could control the rules of the market or promote the benefits of society. Such good intentions had, after all, caused the hell she’d experienced in the Bolshevik Revolution.

Ayn Rand, like Hickman, found peace and justification in the extremes of her economic, political, and moral philosophy. Forget about democratic institutions, forget about regulating markets, and forget about pursuing any policies that benefit the majority at the expense of the very rich — the petty political rule-makers and rule-enforcers could never, ever do anything well or good.

Libertarianism and Ayn Rand set the stage for Trumpism

Only billionaires should rule the world, Trump has suggested.

And he tried to put it into place, installing a billionaire advocate of destroying public schools in charge of public schools, a coal lobbyist representing billionaires in charge of the EPA, an billionaire-funded oil lobbyist in charge of our public lands, and a billionaire described by Forbes as a “grifter” in charge of the Commerce Department. Trump’s chief of staff said that putting children in cages and billionaire-owned privatized concentration camps (where seven so far have died) would actually be a public good.

As Ayn Rand might say, “Don’t just ignore the rules; destroy them.”

Welfare and other social safety net programs were, as Rand saw it, “the glorification of mediocrity” in society. Providing a social safety net for the poor, disabled, or unemployed, she believed, were part of a way of thinking that promoted, “satisfaction instead of joy, contentment instead of happiness… a glow-worm instead of a fire.”

Sociopaths of the world, unite!

Rand, like Trump, lived a largely joyless life. She mercilessly manipulated people, particularly her husband and Alan Greenspan (who brought a dollar-sign-shaped floral arrangement to her funeral), and, like Trump, surrounded herself with cult-like followers who were only on the inside so long as they gave her total, unhesitating loyalty.

Like Trump, McConnell, Stefanik and their billionaire backers, Rand believed that a government working to help out working-class “looters,” instead of solely looking out for rich capitalist “producers,” was throwing its “best people” under the bus.

In Rand’s universe, the producers had no obligations to the looters. Providing welfare or sacrificing one nickel of your own money to help a “looter” on welfare, unemployment, or Social Security — particularly if it was “taken at the barrel of a gun” (taxes) — was morally reprehensible.

Like Trump saying, “My whole life I’ve been greedy,” for Rand looking out for numero unowas the singular name of the game — selfishness was next to godliness.

Later in Rand’s life, in 1959, as she gained more notoriety for the moral philosophy of selfishness that she named “Objectivism” and that is today at the core of libertarianism and the GOP, she sat down for an interview with CBS reporter Mike Wallace of 60 Minutes.

Suggesting that selfishness undermines most truly American values, Wallace bluntly challenged Rand.

“You are out to destroy almost every edifice in the contemporary American way of life,” Wallace said to Rand. “Our Judeo-Christian religion, our modified government-regulated capitalism, our rule by the majority will… you scorn churches, and the concept of God… are these accurate criticisms?”

As Wallace was reciting the public criticisms of Rand, the CBS television cameras zoomed in closely on her face, as her eyes darted back and forth between the ground and Wallace’s fingers. But the question, with its implied condemnation, didn’t faze her at all. Rand said with confidence in a matter-of-fact tone, “Yes.” (4:20 in the clip)

“We’re taught to feel concern for our fellow man,” Wallace challenged, “to feel responsible for his welfare, to feel that we are, as religious people might put it, children under God and responsible one for the other — now why do you rebel?”

“That is what in fact makes man a sacrificial animal,” Rand answered. She added, “[Man’s] highest moral purpose is the achievement of his own happiness.”

Rand’s philosophy, though popular in high school and on college campuses, never did — in her lifetime — achieve the sort of mass appeal she had hoped. But today Ayn Rand’s philosophy is a central tenet of today’s Republican Party and grounds the moral code proudly cited and followed by high-profile billionaires and three former presidents of the United States.

Ironically, when she was finally beginning to be taken seriously, Ayn Rand became ill with lung cancer and went on Social Security and Medicare to make it through her last days. She died a “looter” in 1982, unaware that her her promotion of William Edward Hickman’s sociopathic worldview would one day validate an entire political party’s embrace of a similarly sociopathic president.

The result so far is over a half-million dead Americans, an economy laid waste, and the collapse of this nation’s working class.

While the ideas and policies promoted by the libertarian wing of the Republican Party have made CEOs and billionaire investors very, very rich in recent decades, it’s killing the rest of us.

A return to sanity

In the 1930s and 1940s, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Harry Truman, and Dwight Eisenhower put America back together after the First Republican Great Depression and built the largest and wealthiest middle class in the history of the world at the time.

Today, 40 years of Ayn Rand’s ideas being put into practice by libertarian Republicans from Reagan to Bush to Trump have gutted the middle class, made a handful of oligarchs wealthier than any kings or Pharos in the history of the world, and brought a whole new generation of suckers, hustlers and grifters into the GOP.

When America was still coasting on FDR’s success in rebuilding our government and institutions, nobody took very seriously Rand’s or Koch’s misguided idealist efforts to tear it all down.

Now that libertarians and objectivists in the GOP have had 40 years to make their project work, we’re hitting peak libertarianism and it’s tearing our country apart, pitting Americans against each other, and literally killing people every day.

If America is to survive as a functioning democratic republic, we must repudiate the “greed is good” ideology of Ayn Rand and libertarianism, get billionaires and their money out of politics, and rebuild our civil institutions.

That starts with waking Americans up to the incredible damage that 40 years of Rand’s writings and libertarian “Reagan Republicans” have done to this country.

It will succeed if President Biden can overcome the cynicism and greed celebrated by McConnell, McCarthy and Stefanik, reclaim the mantle of FDR, and pull America out of the Second Republican Great Depression.

END GERONTOCRACY

How old is too old?

WASHINGTON, DC - MAY 11: Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) speaks with a staff member during a business hearing of the Senate Judiciary Committee on Capitol Hill May 11, 2023 in Washington, DC

. (Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images).

Robert Reich

September 11, 2023

Nancy Pelosi, at age 83, is running again for Congress. Mitch McConnell, at 81, has had two bouts of freezing in front of news cameras this summer. Dianne Feinstein, the California senator, 90, is having difficulty doing her job. At 80, Joe Biden is the oldest president the United States has ever had. Donald Trump, his likeliest rival in the 2024 election, is 77. Iowa senator Chuck Grassley is 89. The U.S. Senate is at its oldest in history.

How old is too old? In 1900, gerontologists considered “old” to be 47. Today, you are considered “youngest-old” at 65, “middle-old” at 75, and at 85, you are a member of the “oldest-old.”I ask with some personal stake. I’m now a spritely 77 — lightyears younger than our president. I feel fit, I swing dance and salsa, and I can do 20 pushups in a row. Yet I confess to a certain loss of, shall we say, fizz.

Forgive me if I’ve said this before (I’m old and occasionally repeat myself), but Joe Biden could easily make it until 86, when he’d conclude his second term. After all, it’s now thought a bit disappointing if a person dies before 85.

POLL: Should Trump be allowed to hold office again?

Three score and ten is the number of years of life set out in the Bible. Modern technology and Big Pharma should add at least a decade and a half. Beyond this is an extra helping.

“After 80, it’s gravy,” my father used to say. Joe will be on the cusp of the gravy train.

Where will it end? There’s only one possibility, and that reality occurs to me with increasing frequency. My mother passed at 86, my father two weeks before his 102nd birthday, so I’m hoping for the best, genetically speaking.

Yet I find myself reading the obituary pages with ever greater interest, curious about how long they lasted and what brought them down. I remember a New Yorker cartoon in which an older reader of the obituaries sees headlines that read only “Older Than Me” or “Younger Than Me.”

Most of the time I forget my age. The other day, after lunch with some of my graduate students, I caught our reflection in a store window and for an instant wondered about the identity of the short old man in our midst.

It’s not death that’s the worrying thing about a second Biden term. It’s the dwindling capacities that go with aging. "Bodily decrepitude," said Yeats, "is wisdom." I have accumulated somewhat more of the former than the latter, but Biden seems fairly spry (why do I feel I have to add “for someone his age?”).

I still have my teeth, in contrast to my grandfather whom I vividly recall storing his choppers in a glass next to his bed, and have so far steered clear of heart attack or stroke (I pray I’m not tempting fate by my stating this fact). But I’ve lived through several kidney stones and a few unexplained fits of epilepsy in my late thirties. I’ve had both hips replaced.

And my hearing is crap. Even with hearing aids, I have a hard time understanding someone talking to me in a noisy restaurant. You’d think that the sheer market power of 60 million boomers losing their hearing would be enough to generate at least one chain of quiet restaurants.

When I get together with old friends, our first ritual is an “organ recital” — how’s your back? knee? heart? hip? shoulder? eyesight? hearing? prostate? hemorrhoids? digestion? The recital can run — and ruin — an entire lunch.

The question my friends and I jokingly (and brutishly) asked one other in college—"getting much?"—now refers not to sex but to sleep.

I don’t know anyone over 75 who sleeps through the night. When he was president, Bill Clinton prided himself on getting only about four hours. But he was in his forties then. (I also recall cabinet meetings where he dozed off.) How does Biden manage?

My memory for names is horrible. I once asked Ted Kennedy how he recalled names and he advised that if a man is over 50, just ask “how’s the back?” and he'll think you know him.

I often can’t remember where I put my wallet and keys or why I’ve entered a room. And certain proper nouns have disappeared altogether. Even when rediscovered, they have a diabolical way of disappearing again. Biden’s secret service detail can worry about his wallet and he’s got a teleprompter for wayward nouns, but I’m sure he’s experiencing some diminution in the memory department.

I have lost much of my enthusiasm for travel and feel, as did Philip Larkin, that I would like to visit China, but only on the condition that I could return home that night. Air Force One makes this possible under most circumstances. If not, it has a first-class bedroom and personal bathroom, so I don’t expect Biden’s trips are overly taxing.

I’m told that after the age of 60, one loses half an inch of height every five years. This doesn’t appear to be a problem for Biden but it presents a challenge for me, considering that at my zenith I didn’t quite make it to five feet. If I live as long as my father did, I may vanish.

Another diminution I’ve noticed is tact. Several months ago, I gave the finger to a driver who passed me recklessly. Giving the finger to a stranger is itself a reckless act.

I’m also noticing I have less patience, perhaps because of an unconscious “use by” timer that’s now clicking away. Increasingly I wonder why I’m wasting time with this or that buffoon. I’m less tolerant of long waiting lines, automated phone menus, and Republicans.Cicero claimed "older people who are reasonable, good-tempered, and gracious bear aging well. Those who are mean-spirited and irritable will be unhappy at every stage of their lives." Easy for Cicero to say. He was forced into exile and murdered at the age of 63, his decapitated head and right hand hung up in the Forum by order of the notoriously mean-spirited and irritable Marcus Antonius.

How the hell does Biden maintain tact or patience when he has to deal with Kevin McCarthy or Joe Manchin or the White House press corps?

The style sections of the papers tell us that the 70s are the new 50s. Septuagenarians are supposed to be fit and alert, exercise like mad, have rip-roaring sex, and party until dawn. Rubbish. Inevitably, things begin falling apart. My aunt, who lived far into her nineties, told me “getting old isn’t for sissies.” Toward the end she repeated that phrase every two to three minutes.

Philosopher George Santayana claimed to prefer old age to all others. "Old age is, or may be as in my case, far happier than youth," he wrote. "I was never more entertained or less troubled than I am now." True for me too, in a way. Despite Trump, notwithstanding the seditiousness of the Republican Party, regardless of the ravages of climate change, near record inequality, a potential nuclear war, and another strain of COVID making the rounds, I remain upbeat -- largely because I still spend most days with people in their twenties who buoy my spirits. Maybe Biden does, too.

But I’m feeling more and more out of it. I’m doing videos on TikTok and Snapchat, but when my students talk about Ariana Grande or Selena Gomez or Jared Leto, I don’t have clue who they’re talking about (and frankly don’t care). And I find myself using words –- “hence,” “utmost,” “therefore,” “tony,” “brilliant” — that my younger colleagues find charmingly old-fashioned.

If I refer to “Rose Marie Woods” or “Jackie Robinson” or “Ed Sullivan” or “Mary Jo Kopechne,” they’re bewildered.

The culture has flipped in so many ways. When I was seventeen, I could go into a drugstore and confidently ask for a package of Luckies and nervously whisper a request for condoms. Now it’s precisely the reverse. (I stopped smoking long ago.)

Santayana said the reason that old people have nothing but foreboding about the future is that they cannot imagine a world that’s good without themselves in it. I don’t share that view.

I’m not going to tell Nancy Pelosi, Joe Biden, Donald Trump, Diane Feinstein, Chuck Grassley, or any other “middle olds” and “oldest olds” what to do.

But as for myself, I recently made a hard decision. At the end of April, I taught my last class after more than forty years of teaching. Why? I wanted to leave on a high note, when I felt I could still do the job well. I didn’t want to wait until I could no longer give students what they need and deserve. And I hated the thought of students or colleagues whispering about the old guy who shouldn’t be teaching anymore.

Getting too old to do a job isn’t a matter of chronological age. It’s a matter of being lucid enough to know when you should exit the stage before you no longer have what it takes to do the job well.

It saddens me that I won’t be heading back into the classroom this fall. But it was time for me to go.

What if Trump's conspiracy was way bigger than we know?

Donald Trump at Trump Tower (Shutterstock)

Thom Hartmann

ALTERNET

September 11, 2023

LONG READ

There was, it increasingly appears, a conspiracy involving some in the most senior levels of the Trump administration to end American representative democracy and replace it with a strongman oligarchy along the lines of Putin’s Russia or Orbán’s Hungary.

This would be followed, after the January 20th swearing-in of Trump for a second term, by a complete realignment of US foreign policy away from NATO and the EU and toward oligarchic, autocratic nations like Russia, China, Saudi Arabia, and Hungary.

As the possibility of this traitorous plan becomes increasingly visible, the GOP, after a frantic two weeks of not knowing what to say or do, has finally settled on a response to Trump’s theft of classified information: “Hillary did the same thing, and she didn’t go to jail!”

(For the record, Hillary did nothing whatsoever even remotely close to Trump’s theft of classified materials. Among the 50,000+ personal emails on her server, Republicans found three that had markings indicating they were at one time classified, none had to do with espionage or compromised national security in any way, and all three were clearly there because she had replied to somebody using the wrong account in error. But we can expect this to be the distraction line coming from Trump and the GOP.)

So, what did Trump do, and why did he do it? And who helped him and why?

There’s little dispute that on January 6th, 2021, an armed mob incited by Donald Trump and led by members of several white supremacist militias tried to murder the Vice President and Speaker of the House to prevent the certification of Joe Biden’s 7-million-vote victory in the November 2020 election.

Evidence is growing, however, that the leadership of this conspiracy to end our form of government and replace it with a Putin-style strongman oligarchy wasn’t limited to Trump, Stone, Giuliani, and a few dozen militia members.

While, at this moment, most of the evidence is circumstantial, collectively it paints a damning picture for which it’s hard to find any other possible explanation.

This article’s opening sentence describes the worst-case scenario that the media seems to be going out of its way not to even get close to mentioning. Again, this is, at this moment, still speculation, in large part because the alleged conspirators have been so successful at destroying much of the evidence that might have implicated (or cleared) them.

If Trump was truly planning not just to hang onto the presidency but to concurrently seize every lever of power in Washington — the way coups conducted from “inside of government” (like Putin and Orbán did) typically happen — he’d need some help, particularly from the military and the senior levels of federal law enforcement. So let’s start there.

Over at the Department of Defense then-acting Defense Secretary Chris Miller and his Chief of Staff Kash Patel (formerly of Devin Nunes’ staff) were running the place.


They controlled the Pentagon and our armed forces but, more importantly, they controlled the National Guard, whose troops hadpreviously surrounded buildings in the Capitol area three-deep during the peaceful BLM protests in the summer of 2020.

The prospect that violence was heading toward the Capitol on January 6th wasn’t a secret to anybody with a Twitter or Facebook account: the nation was awash with threats and planning for violence, much of it in the open.

This apparently so alarmed Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy that, on January 4th, he reached out to his boss, Trump’s recently-appointed Acting Defense Secretary Chris Miller, to get permission to send the National Guard to the Capitol building on January 6th to prevent the violence they were seeing being planned all over social media.

Acting Defense Secretary Miller, in the effective role of commander of our entire military just one step below Commander-in-Chief Trump (on whose behalf he acted), then issued a memo (attached at the end of this article) on January 4th specifically directing McCarthy and the National Guard that they were:
Not authorized to be issued weapons, ammunition, bayonets, batons, or ballistic protection equipment such as helmets and body armor.
Not to interact physically with protestors, except when necessary in self-defense or defense of others.
Not to employ any riot control agents.
Not to share equipment with law enforcement agencies.
Not authorized to use Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance (ISR) assets or to conduct ISR or Incident, Awareness, and Assessment activities in assistance to Capitol Police.
Not allowed to employ helicopters or any other air assets.
Not to conduct searches, seizures, arrests, or other similar direct law enforcement activity.
Not authorized to seek support from any non-DC National Guard units.

If this isn’t bad enough, on January 6th itself — as armed traitors were attacking police and searching to “hang Mike Pence” — Chris Miller oversaw a mid-afternoon, mid-riot conference call in which Army Secretary McCarthy was again asking for authority to immediately bring in the National Guard.

Then-Deputy Chief of Staff for Operations General Charles Flynn, the brother of convicted/pardoned foreign agent General Michael Flynn (who had been pushing Trump to declare martial law and seize voting machines nationwide) was on the call; both the Pentagon and the Army, it has beenreported, lied to the press, Congress, and, apparently, to the Biden administration about his presence on that call for almost a year.

It wasn’t until December that it was widelyreported that the National Security Council’s Colonel Earl Matthews (who was also on the call) wrote a memocalling both Charles Flynn and Lt. Gen Walter Piatt, the Director of Army Staff, "absolute and unmitigated liars" for their testimony to Congress in which they both denied they’d argued to withhold the National Guard on January 6th.


Last year, wediscovered that the phones and text messages of most of the group, including Chris Miller, Walter Piatt,Kash Patel and Ryan McCarthy, were all wiped of all conversations they had on January 6th.

ICE, whose plainclothes agents were sent by Trump to Portland to beat up andkidnap protesters off the street and used, essentially, as hisprivate militia was alsoinstructed by the Trump Administration to wipe all their phones after January 6th.

If they were involved in a plan to help Trump take over and run the government — as usually happens when coups involve senior levels of the military — it’s going to take a lot of digging to find out, since this coverup of their activities and conversations on January 6th was apparently in place for almost a full year before it was discovered.

Similarly, if Trump was planning to install himself in power in a way that echoed and aligned him with Putin, he’d need the active help and support of his palace guard, the Secret Service.


Here, again, we discover that the evidence is not only missing but that Trump appointees — still in government — knew about it for over a year and concealed that information from the January 6th Committee, Congress, and the media.

This was at the same time that Trump was maintaining possession of documents for which foreign governments would be willing to spend billions. In fact, Russia, Saudi Arabia, China and others have spent billions of dollars on acquiring secrets and documents of that sort, via their annual intelligence budgets.

Trump would also have needed the support of several foreign governments if he was planning to end American democracy and re-align our nation with oligarchies run along the lines he and Putin were possibly envisioning.

Russia, China, and Saudi Arabia would logically be at the top of that list because of their military, oil, and financial power, followed by Turkey, Hungary, and Egypt because of their strategic locations.

And lest you think that even Trump wouldn’t be so audacious as to solicit help from a foreign government to hold power, please remember that he was impeached for exactly that: his attempted extortion of Ukraine’s President Zelenskyy to smear Joe Biden.

A couple of events from last year might highlight the echoes of those plans to end American democracy and re-align our government with Russia/China/Saudi Arabia. If Trump was coordinating with foreign governments, suddenly a lot of seemingly disparate and inchoate events make sense.

First, throughout 2020 and in January of 2021, Trump removed from the White House to Mar-a-Lago hundreds of Top Secret (and above) documents that, according to multiple news reports, contained information that could reveal the identities and locations of America’s spies and agents.

Trump and Kushner already had a history of illegally sharing Top Secret “human intelligence” information with Saudi dictator Mohammed Bin Salman dating back to when MBS staged his own coup/takeover of the Saudi government.

AsThe Jerusalem Post reported on March 23, 2018:

“Kushner, who is the son-in-law of President Donald Trump, and the crown prince had a late October meeting in Riyadh.

“A week later, Mohammed began what he called an ‘anti-corruption crackdown.’ The Saudi government arrested and jailed dozens of members of the Saudi royal family in a Riyadh hotel – among them Saudi figures named in a daily classified brief read by the president and his closest advisers that Kushner read avidly….

“According to the report, Mohammed told confidants that he and Kushner discussed Saudis identified in the classified brief as disloyal to Mohammed.”

The day before, CBS and The Interceptquoted MBS as gloating that Kushner was “in his pocket.”

The Washington Postnoted that:

“Recently ousted Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and national security adviser H.R. McMaster expressed early concern that Kushner was freelancing U.S. foreign policy and might make naive mistakes, according to ­people familiar with their ­reactions.

“… [National Security Advisor] McMaster was concerned there were no official records kept of what was said on the calls.

“Tillerson was even more aggrieved, they said, once remarking to staff: ‘Who is secretary of state here?’”

Meanwhile, throughout his presidency, Donald Trump was having secret phone conversations with Russia’s President Putin (over 20 have been identified, including onejust days before the 2020 election).

The Moscow Project from the American Progress Action Funddocuments more than 270 known contacts between Russia-linked operatives and members of the Trump Campaign and transition team, as well as at least 38 known meetings just leading up to the 2016 election.

The manager of his 2016 campaign, Paul Manafort, who previously worked on behalf of Vladimir Putin, has recentlyadmitted that he was regularly feeding inside campaign information to Russian intelligence. There is no known parallel to this behavior by any president in American history.

The Washington Post, just yesterday,reported that Trump had a habit of carrying top-secret information that could damage our national security, intentionally leaving it in hotel rooms in hostile nations:

“Boxes of documents even came with Trump on foreign travel, following him to hotel rooms around the world — including countries considered foreign adversaries of the United States.”

The Mueller Report identifies ten specific instances of Trump trying to obstruct the investigation, including offering the bribe of a pardon to Paul Manafort, asking FBI Director Comey to “go easy” on General Flynn, and directing Attorney General Jeff Sessions to limit Mueller’s ability to investigate Trump’s connections to Russia.

As the Mueller Report noted:

“The President launched public attacks on the investigation and individuals involved in it who would could possess evidence adverse to the President, while in private the President engaged in a series of targeted efforts to control the investigation.

“For instance, the President attempted to remove the Attorney General; he sought to have Attorney General Sessions un-recuse himself and limit the investigation; he sought to prevent public disclosure of information about the June 9, 2016 meeting between Russians and campaign officials; and he used public forums to attack potential witnesses who might offer adverse information and to praise witnesses who declined to cooperate with the government.”

It adds, detailing Trump’s specific obstruction of justice crimes:

“These actions ranged from efforts to remove the Special Counsel and to reverse the effect of the Attorney General’s recusal; to the attempted use of official power to limit the scope of the investigation; to direct and indirect contacts with witnesses with the potential to influence their testimony.

“Viewing the acts collectively can help to illuminate their significance. For example, the President’s direction to McGahn to have the Special Counsel removed was followed almost immediately by his direction to Lewandowski to tell the Attorney General to limit the scope of the Russia investigation to prospective election-interference only—a temporal connection that suggests that both acts were taken with a related purpose with respect to the investigation.”

There are, after all,credible assertions that when Trump was elected, members of Russian intelligence and Putin’s inner circle were literally partying in Moscow, explicitly celebrating a victory they truly believed they helped make happen.

In his first months in office, Trumpouted an Israeli spy to the Russian Ambassador, resulting in MOSAD having to “burn” (relocate, change identity of) that spy. That, in turn, prompted the CIA to worry that a longtime US spy buried deep in the Kremlin was similarly vulnerable to Trump handing him over to Putin.

As CNNnoted when the story leaked two years later:

“The source was considered the highest level source for the US inside the Kremlin, high up in the national security infrastructure, according to the source familiar with the matter and a former senior intelligence official.

“According to CNN’s sources, the spy had access to Putin and could even provide images of documents on the Russian leader’s desk.”

The CIA concluded that the risk Trump had burned the spy was so great that, at massive loss to US intelligence abilities that may have helped forestall the invasion of Ukraine, wepulled the spy out of Russia in 2017.

Similarly, when they met in Helsinki, Trump and Putin talked in private for several hours and Trump ordered his translators’ notes destroyed; there is also concern that much of their conversation was done out of the hearing of the US’s translator (Putin is alsofluent in English and German) who may have been relegated to a distant part of the rather large room in which they met.

Things were picking up in 2019, as Putin was planning his invasion of Ukraine while Trump was preparing for the 2020 election.On July 31, Trump had another private conversation with Putin. The White Housetold Congress and the press that they discussed “wildfires” and “trade between the nations.” No droids in this car…
The following week, on August 2nd, The Daily Beast’s Betsy Swanreported that Trump had just asked the Office of the Director of National Intelligence for a list of all its employees (including all our “spies”) who had worked there more than 90 days, and the request had intelligence officials experiencing “disquiet.”
Within a year, The New York Timesran a story with the headline: “Captured, Killed or Compromised: C.I.A. Admits to Losing Dozens of Informants.” The CIA then alerted spies around the world that their identities had probably been compromised, apparently by Donald Trump himself.

Also in 2019, when the international press verified that Putin was paying the Taliban a bounty to kill American service members in Afghanistan (and 4 had died as a result), Trump refused to demand the practice stop, a possible sign that Putin ran him, not the other way around.

As The New York Timesnoted at the time:

“Mr. Trump defended himself by denying the Times report that he had been briefed on the intelligence... But leading congressional Democrats and some Republicans demanded a response to Russia that, according to officials, the administration has yet to authorize.”

Instead of stopping Putin, Trump shut down every US airbase in Afghanistan except one (there were about a dozen),crippling incoming President Biden’s ability to extract US assets from the country in an orderly fashion.

In July 2019, Trump had conversations with five foreign leaders during and just before a visit to Mar-a-Lago; they included Putin and the Emir of Qatar.

In one of those conversations, according to a high-level US Intelligence source, Trump made “promises” to a “world leader” that were so alarming it provoked a national security scramble across multiple agencies.

As The Washington Post noted in an articletitled “Trump’s communications with foreign leader are part of whistleblower complaint that spurred standoff between spy chief and Congress”:

“Intelligence Community Inspector General Michael Atkinson determined that the complaint [against Trump] was credible and troubling enough to be considered a matter of ‘urgent concern,’ a legal threshold that requires notification of congressional oversight committees.”

Along his journey toward converting America into a full-blown oligarchy (as I detail inThe Hidden History of American Oligarchy: Reclaiming Our Democracy from the Ruling Class), Trump has picked up quite a few democracy-skeptical allies.

As early as 2018, for example, Senator Rand Paulmade a solo trip to Moscow to personally hand-deliver a private note from Trump to Putin. Its contents are still unknown.

Senator Paul has also consistently taken Trump’s side with regard to the 2020 election and, when the FBI searched Mar-a-Lago this month, responded with a call for therepeal of the Espionage Act. Perhaps he had ambitious plans for a role in the Trump administration after the planned end of American democracy?

With that backstory, consider more contemporary events to see if they fit together.

In January of last year Trump stole and moved to Florida information that, multiple sourcesassert, would reveal the identities of many of our spies, as well as our nuclear plans and capabilities.

Three months later, in March of 2021, Jared Kushner filed papers showing that his brand new investment company —against the advice of the Saudi government but at MBS’s order — had received over $2 billion from the Kingdom.

It’s still unknown if or how much money the Kingdom gave to Trump himself, presumably through the dark offshore accounts common among billionaires like Trump.

This was not the first time Kushner had apparently altered US foreign policy or shared valuable US secrets with Middle East players in exchange for large quantities of cash that flowed directly to him or other members of the Trump family.

As investigative reporter Vicky Ward notes in the most recent post on Vicky Ward Investigates on Substack:

Kushner was struggling with the “ticking time bomb of a $1.8 billion mortgage on 666 Fifth Avenue that would come due in February of 2019—a debt no domestic buyer was interested in. Not even the Chinese or Qataris wanted it. … Kushner desperately needed a bail-out for his troubled building…and the clock was ticking.

“Then, in the spring of 2018, two things happened within weeks. First, the U.S. withdrew their support of the blockade of Qatar, leading the Saudis and Emiratis to lift it.

“Then, Brookfield, a Canadian real estate investment trust whose largest outside shareholder is the Qatari government, bailed out the Kushners in a deal that has real estate moguls rolling their eyes to this day: A 99-year lease paid upfront on a building that was bleeding money.”

Which brings us back, again, to last year, just after Trump’s failed January 6th attempt to overthrow the US government.

About six months after the Saudis gave Kushner that second batch of billions, we learned that for several months “dozens” of American spies and agents had been “captured or killed” around the world. AsThe Washington Post reported on October 5, 2021:

“Top American counterintelligence officials warned every C.I.A. station and base around the world last week about troubling numbers of informants recruited from other countries to spy for the United States being captured or killed, people familiar with the matter said.”

Is it possible that all these different data points are part of one whole?That Trump had a plan, worked out with Putin, MBS, a few dozen high administration officials, and a large handful of Republicans in the House and Senate, to overthrow our government and establish an oligarchic system like what is currently in place in Russia and that Fox “News”showcased in Hungary?
That once that overthrow was completed under the gimmick of six Republican-controlled states “discovering voter fraud” and changing their Electoral College votes, the plan was that Trump and his GOP allies (including the 11 Republican senators who, this May,voted against aid to Ukraine) would quickly move to re-align America away from NATO/EU and toward Russia/Saudi Arabia?
That, as soon as he was sworn in for a second term, he’d invoke his October 21, 2020Executive Order 13957 that would instantlyfire 50,000 senior Civil Service employees encompassing the management of every federal agency including the FBI, CIA, NSA, and DHS, and allow Trump to replace all of them with nakedly political loyalist appointees?
That as soon as that transformation of America and our alliances was complete, Trump would use a national state of emergency to suppress dissent and seize control of voting systems across the nation to insure he and the Republicans loyal to him would continue in power for the long run?
And that the deaths of our spies, the Saudi-driven explosion in oil prices when Biden came into office, Putin’s decision to attack Ukraine, and even Xi’s cranking up his aggression against Taiwan were all just the echoes of Trump’s failed plan?

After all, it’s not like we’ve never had a coup attempt before in this country: wealthy industrialiststried to kidnap or kill President Franklin Roosevelt 91 years ago and turn America into an Italian/German-style fascist state “friendly to capitalism.” Not a single one of those conspirators were ever arrested or tried; why not try again?

While, as noted, some of this is just speculation right now, every day we get more information that seems to validate it. After all, if you’re going to try to overthrow your nation’s government and anoint yourself dictator for life, wouldn’t you want to do everything possible to guarantee your success? Why just do half-measures?

The only “innocent” explanation I can come up with for Trump stealing spy-level documents and squirreling them away in Florida:

“Trump is simply mentally ill with a condition common among billionaires: hoarding syndrome. If he hadn’t been born rich, he’d be living in an apartment filled with newspapers and old tin cans from floor to ceiling; instead, he hoards money and anything else he thinks has value that gets close enough to grab.

“This is ‘normal’ among kleptocrats like Idi Amin or Baby Doc Duvalier: they think that they are the state, so everything the state owns is their property. Supporting this premise are over 3,000 former contractors and employees (including attorneys) who’ve sued Trump because he’s refused to pay them over the years.”

Even if that’s the extent of it — which I believe is extremely unlikely — we appear to have dodged a huge bullet here.

Was there a high-level conspiracy in the Trump administration, done in concert with one or more foreign countries, to end democracy in America?

Did they intend to seize control of our government on January 6 and never let go?

Was their next plan to realign us with autocratic nations like Russia, Saudi Arabia, and Hungary?

Given how effectively it appears much of the evidence including emails, phone calls, and text messages (that could exonerate as well as convict) has been destroyed, much of that destruction apparently done by Trump himself while in office (toilets, papers being burned, etc.) and, more recently, by Trump appointees still in our government, we may never know.

But even the possibility — that the question can be credibly raised given the evidence laid out here (which only scratches the surface) — should give every American pause.

The challenge going forward is now to repair the damage — both foreign and domestic — that this traitor and his colleagues in the GOP did to our nation, and then to make sure no Trump wannabee can ever repeat his attempt.