A Practical Prescription For Taxing Our World’s Richest – OpEd

 July 11, 2024 

By Sam Pizzigati

Ever wonder why the divide between the world’s richest and everybody else keeps getting wider? Gabriel Zucman, one of the world’s finest young economists, has just produced a report that riffs on one key reason: Our super rich pay next to nothing in taxes.

Just how close to nothing? This close: Over the past four decades, the world’s “ultra-high-net-worth individuals” have seen their fortunes increase, after taking inflation into account, an average 7.5 percent per year. How much annually have these rich paid in taxes? They’ve been paying, Zucman calculates, an effective tax rate “equivalent to 0.3% of their wealth.”

Other analysts have over recent years been sharing variations on that same basic story. But none of those analysts have ever had the opportunity to share that story on a grander stage than Zucman, the founding director of the EU Tax Observatory and an economist based at the University of California Berkeley.

Zucman prepared his landmark new report at the express request of Brazil, the nation that currently holds the presidency of the G20, the global grouping of the world’s most powerful economic nations. The world’s super rich, Brazil’s current leadership believes, are nowhere near paying their fair tax share.

Earlier this year, Brazil’s finance minister invited Zucman to address the G20’s finance ministers on how best to start reversing that state of affairs. This past February, Zucman did just that, making an impressive case for a global minimum tax on billionaires. Brazil subsequently asked Zucman to prepare a report on that notion for the upcoming end-of-July G20 finance ministers meeting in Rio de Janeiro.

Zucman has now officially delivered that report, and his study is already making headlines worldwide.

How could a global minimum on billionaires actually work when no international body has the authority to impose taxes on individuals? No international body, Zucman notes, has the authority to tax multinational corporations either. But the world now has what amounts to a 15 percent minimum tax on corporate profits that over 130 nations and territories are enforcing on a coordinated basis.

That same cooperative approach, Zucman contends, could bring the world an effective minimum tax on billionaires. This minimum tax, Zucman proposes, would kick in when billionaires aren’t paying in annual taxes a sum equal to 2 percent of their personal wealth.

In a world with this 2 percent global minimum, participating nations would also remain absolutely free to tax their richest at levels much higher than the minimum. Indeed, Zucman’s report points out, the existence of a global minimum tax on billionaires would encourage nations to put in place higher tax rates on our world’s wealthiest. In a minimum tax world, billionaires would have less opportunity—and incentive—to engage in tax avoidance.

Progressive taxes, a key pillar of democratic societies

A 2 percent global billionaire tax minimum would raise, Zucman calculates, as much as $250 billion a year from a mere 3,000 individuals worldwide. Extending this tax to centi-millionaires—deep pockets worth at least $100 million—would add another $140 billion annually. Raising the global billionaire minimum tax rate to 3 percent could raise the annual take to as much as $688 billion.

A massive infusion of new tax revenue along these lines would significantly bolster our world’s capacity to address the continuing challenges of poverty and climate change. That same revenue would significantly enhance the political health of our world’s democracies as well.

Progressive taxes, Zucman’s report stresses, remain “a key pillar of democratic societies.” Having tax systems that recognize that the rich have the wherewithal to pay taxes at a higher rate than people of limited means “strengthens social cohesion and trust in governments to work for the common good.”

Modern societies have typically aimed to do that strengthening via income taxes. But income taxes have had little success collecting appreciable revenue from our ultra-rich, Zucman relates, mainly because “ultra-high-net-worth individuals derive their income not from the wages they earn, but from the wealth they own—more precisely, in most cases from the businesses they own.”

These rich can use the corporations they control to end run their personal income taxes. One example: The less their companies shell out in dividends, the higher their corporate share price rises. And by not selling their own personal shares, the rich can sidestep capital gains taxes. Some of our planet’s largest publicly traded corporations—think corporate giants that range from Amazon and Tesla to Alphabet and Meta—pay only token dividends if they pay dividends at all.

These sorts of tax-avoiding maneuvers have enabled our world’s richest 0.0001 percent—our billionaire class—to more than quadruple their wealth as a fraction of global gross domestic product since the 1980s. This enormous addition to the wealth of our richest has for the most part totally escaped taxation.

Under the global 2 percent minimum tax that Zucman is advancing, that picture would change. All billionaires would find themselves facing this minimum tax if the “individual income taxes, wealth taxes, and economically equivalent levies” they pay add up to less than 2 percent of their overall wealth.

Could billionaires weasel their way out of paying this global minimum tax? Could they hide significant pieces of their personal fortunes? Not likely. The market value of each billionaire’s assets would take no great sleuthing to establish since the bulk of billionaire wealth comes from the value of the corporate shares of stock they hold, a matter of public record.

And most nations, Zucman adds, have also developed methods to value other sources of billionaire wealth because they’re already levying either inheritance or estate taxes.

Zucman’s minimum billionaire tax would let each participating nation determine how to make its billionaires meet the 2 percent minimum tax standard. Nations could, for instance, define unrealized capital gains as income, as the Biden administration has proposed, or put a wealth tax in place. A 2 percent tax on a billionaire’s personal wealth, Zucman points out, would “by definition” meet an international 2 percent minimum tax standard.

Nations could also simply presume that ultra-high-net-worth individuals “earn a certain fraction of their wealth in income” and place a tax on that presumed income.

Obstacles to subjecting billionaires to a global minimum tax

Allowing nations flexibility in how they enforce a global billionaire tax minimum, Zucman explains, would let each country “choose the instrument that best fits its circumstances, its legal context, its fiscal tradition, and its existing information reporting system.” And this flexible approach would likely “maximize the number of countries that could join the common standard.”

Serious obstacles to subjecting billionaires to a global minimum tax, Zucman’s report concedes, certainly do exist, on both technical and political levels.

“A variety of political and geopolitical factors,” he observes, “could make it difficult to obtain truly global participation in the proposed common standard.”

But the already existing minimum tax on multinational corporations, now three years old, vividly illustrates how global cooperation can overcome even the most serious of obstacles. The new corporate minimum tax allows “participating countries to tax non-participating countries’ undertaxed multinationals.” A coordinated global minimum tax on billionaires could adopt that same approach.

Zucman’s proposal for a global minimum tax on the world’s super rich, the economic ministers of Brazil and Spain stressed earlier this month, is already gaining significant international momentum. At a news conference in Rome, these two ministers called higher taxes on the world’s wealthiest an absolute must in a world confronting challenges that range from hunger and climate change to the horrific debt burden that’s currently confronting low-income countries.

A global minimum tax on billionaires, Brazil’s Fernando Haddad declared, would “affect just a few thousand individuals while benefiting billions.” Haddad went on to label a global billionaire minimum tax “a reasonable proposal in terms of social, economic, and political justice.”

Zucman, for his part, seems equally optimistic on his proposal’s prospects.

“New forms of international cooperation, long deemed utopian,” as he observes in his landmark new report, “can emerge in a relatively short period of time.”

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Sam Pizzigati

Sam Pizzigati co-edits Inequality.org at the Institute for Policy Studies. His books include The Case for a Maximum Wage and The Rich Don’t Always Win.

Project Total Control: Everything Is A Weapon When Totalitarianism Is Normalized – OpEd

 July 11, 2024  

By John and Nisha Whitehead

The U.S. government is working to re-shape the country in the image of a totalitarian state.

This has remained true over the past 50-plus years no matter which political party held office.

This will remain true no matter who wins the 2024 presidential election.

In the midst of the partisan furor over Project 2025, a 920-page roadmap for how to re-fashion the government to favor so-called conservative causes, both the Right and the Left have proven themselves woefully naive about the dangers posed by the power-hungry Deep State.

Yet we must never lose sight of the fact that both the Right and the Left and their various operatives are extensions of the Deep State, which continues to wage psychological warfare on the American people.

Psychological warfare, according to the Rand Corporation, “involves the planned use of propaganda and other psychological operations to influence the opinions, emotions, attitudes, and behavior of opposition groups.”

For years now, the government has been bombarding the citizenry with propaganda campaigns and psychological operations aimed at keeping us compliant, easily controlled and supportive of the government’s various efforts abroad and domestically.

The government is so confident in its Orwellian powers of manipulation that it’s taken to bragging about them. For example, in 2022, the U.S. Army’s 4th Psychological Operations Group, the branch of the military responsible for psychological warfare, released a recruiting video that touts its efforts to pull the strings, turn everything they touch into a weapon, be everywhere, deceive, persuade, change, influence, and inspire.

“Have you ever wondered who’s pulling the strings?” the psyops video posits. “Anything we touch is a weapon. We can deceive, persuade, change, influence, inspire. We come in many forms. We are everywhere.”

This is the danger that lurks in plain sight.

Of the many weapons in the government’s vast arsenal, psychological warfare may be the most devastating in terms of the long-term consequences.

As the military journal Task and Purpose explains, “Psychological warfare is all about influencing governments, people of power, and everyday citizens.”

Mind you, these psyops (psychological operations) campaigns aren’t only aimed at foreign enemies. The government has made clear in word and deed that “we the people” are domestic enemies to be targeted, tracked, manipulated, micromanaged, surveilled, viewed as suspects, and treated as if our fundamental rights are mere privileges that can be easily discarded.

This is what is referred to as “apple-pie propaganda.”

Aided and abetted by technological advances and scientific experimentation, the government has been subjecting the American people to “apple-pie propaganda” for the better part of the last century.

Consider some of the ways in which the government continues to wage psychological warfare on a largely unsuspecting citizenry in order to acclimate us to the Deep State’s totalitarian agenda.

Weaponizing violence in order to institute martial law. With alarming regularity, the nation continues to be subjected to spates of violence that terrorizes the public, destabilizes the country’s ecosystem, and gives the government greater justifications to crack down, lock down, and institute even more authoritarian policies for the so-called sake of national security without many objections from the citizenry.

Weaponizing surveillance, pre-crime and pre-thought campaigns. Surveillance, digital stalking and the data mining of the American people add up to a society in which there’s little room for indiscretions, imperfections, or acts of independence. When the government sees all and knows all and has an abundance of laws to render even the most seemingly upstanding citizen a criminal and lawbreaker, then the old adage that you’ve got nothing to worry about if you’ve got nothing to hide no longer applies. Add pre-crime programs into the mix with government agencies and corporations working in tandem to determine who is a potential danger and spin a sticky spider-web of threat assessments, behavioral sensing warnings, flagged “words,” and “suspicious” activity reports using automated eyes and ears, social media, behavior sensing software, and citizen spies, and you having the makings for a perfect dystopian nightmare. The government’s war on crime has now veered into the realm of social media and technological entrapment, with government agents adopting fake social media identities and AI-created profile pictures in order to surveil, target and capture potential suspects.

Weaponizing digital currencies, social media scores and censorship. Tech giants, working with the government, have been meting out their own version of social justice by way of digital tyranny and corporate censorship, muzzling whomever they want, whenever they want, on whatever pretext they want in the absence of any real due process, review or appeal. Unfortunately, digital censorship is just the beginning. Digital currencies (which can be used as “a tool for government surveillance of citizens and control over their financial transactions”), combined with social media scores and surveillance capitalism create a litmus test to determine who is worthy enough to be part of society and punish individuals for moral lapses and social transgressions (and reward them for adhering to government-sanctioned behavior). In China, millions of individuals and businesses, blacklisted as “unworthy” based on social media credit scores that grade them based on whether they are “good” citizens, have been banned from accessing financial markets, buying real estate or travelling by air or train.

Weaponizing compliance. Even the most well-intentioned government law or program can be—and has been—perverted, corrupted and used to advance illegitimate purposes once profit and power are added to the equation. The war on terror, the war on drugs, the war on COVID-19, the war on illegal immigration, asset forfeiture schemes, road safety schemes, school safety schemes, eminent domain: all of these programs started out as legitimate responses to pressing concerns and have since become weapons of compliance and control in the police state’s hands.

Weaponizing entertainment. For the past century, the Department of Defense’s Entertainment Media Office has provided Hollywood with equipment, personnel and technical expertise at taxpayer expense. In exchange, the military industrial complex has gotten a starring role in such blockbusters as Top Gun and its rebooted sequel Top Gun: Maverick, which translates to free advertising for the war hawks, recruitment of foot soldiers for the military empire, patriotic fervor by the taxpayers who have to foot the bill for the nation’s endless wars, and Hollywood visionaries working to churn out dystopian thrillers that make the war machine appear relevant, heroic and necessary. As Elmer Davis, a CBS broadcaster who was appointed the head of the Office of War Information, observed, “The easiest way to inject a propaganda idea into most people’s minds is to let it go through the medium of an entertainment picture when they do not realize that they are being propagandized.”

Weaponizing behavioral science and nudging. Apart from the overt dangers posed by a government that feels justified and empowered to spy on its people and use its ever-expanding arsenal of weapons and technology to monitor and control them, there’s also the covert dangers associated with a government empowered to use these same technologies to influence behaviors en masse and control the populace. In fact, it was President Obama who issued an executive order directing federal agencies to use “behavioral science” methods to minimize bureaucracy and influence the way people respond to government programs. It’s a short hop, skip and a jump from a behavioral program that tries to influence how people respond to paperwork to a government program that tries to shape the public’s views about other, more consequential matters. Thus, increasingly, governments around the world—including in the United States—are relying on “nudge units” to steer citizens in the direction the powers-that-be want them to go, while preserving the appearance of free will.

Weaponizing desensitization campaigns aimed at lulling us into a false sense of security. The events of recent years—the invasive surveillance, the extremism reports, the civil unrest, the protests, the shootings, the bombings, the military exercises and active shooter drills, the lockdowns, the color-coded alerts and threat assessments, the fusion centers, the transformation of local police into extensions of the military, the distribution of military equipment and weapons to local police forces, the government databases containing the names of dissidents and potential troublemakers—have conspired to acclimate the populace to accept a police state willingly, even gratefully.

Weaponizing politics. The language of fear is spoken effectively by politicians on both sides of the aisle, shouted by media pundits from their cable TV pulpits, marketed by corporations, and codified into bureaucratic laws that do little to make our lives safer or more secure. Fear, as history shows, is the method most often used by politicians to increase the power of government and control a populace, dividing the people into factions, and persuading them to see each other as the enemy. This Machiavellian scheme has so ensnared the nation that few Americans even realize they are being manipulated into adopting an “us” against “them” mindset. Instead, fueled with fear and loathing for phantom opponents, they agree to pour millions of dollars and resources into political elections, militarized police, spy technology and endless wars, hoping for a guarantee of safety that never comes. All the while, those in power—bought and paid for by lobbyists and corporations—move their costly agendas forward, and “we the suckers” get saddled with the tax bills and subjected to pat downs, police raids and round-the-clock surveillance.

Weaponizing genetics. Not only does fear grease the wheels of the transition to fascism by cultivating fearful, controlled, pacified, cowed citizens, but it also embeds itself in our very DNA so that we pass on our fear and compliance to our offspring. It’s called epigenetic inheritance, the transmission through DNA of traumatic experiences. For example, neuroscientists observed that fear can travel through generations of mice DNA. As The Washington Post reports, “Studies on humans suggest that children and grandchildren may have felt the epigenetic impact of such traumatic events such as famine, the Holocaust and the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.”

Weaponizing the dystopian future. With greater frequency, the government has been issuing warnings about the dire need to prepare for the dystopian future that awaits us. For instance, the Pentagon training video, “Megacities: Urban Future, the Emerging Complexity,” predicts that by 2030 (coincidentally, the same year that society begins to achieve singularity with the metaverse) the military would be called on to use armed forces to solve future domestic political and social problems. What they’re really talking about is martial law, packaged as a well-meaning and overriding concern for the nation’s security. The chilling five-minute training video paints an ominous picture of the future bedeviled by “criminal networks,” “substandard infrastructure,” “religious and ethnic tensions,” “impoverishment, slums,” “open landfills, over-burdened sewers,” a “growing mass of unemployed,” and an urban landscape in which the prosperous economic elite must be protected from the impoverishment of the have nots. “We the people” are the have-nots.

The end goal of these mind control campaigns—packaged in the guise of the greater good—is to see how far the American people will allow the government to go in undermining our freedoms.

The facts speak for themselves.

Whatever else it may be—a danger, a menace, a threat—the U.S. government is certainly not looking out for our best interests, nor is it in any way a friend to freedom.

When the government views itself as superior to the citizenry, when it no longer operates for the benefit of the people, when the people are no longer able to peacefully reform their government, when government officials cease to act like public servants, when elected officials no longer represent the will of the people, when the government routinely violates the rights of the people and perpetrates more violence against the citizenry than the criminal class, when government spending is unaccountable and unaccounted for, when the judiciary act as courts of order rather than justice, and when the government is no longer bound by the laws of the Constitution, then you no longer have a government “of the people, by the people and for the people.”

What we have, as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, is a government of wolves.

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John and Nisha Whitehead

John W. Whitehead is an attorney and author who has written, debated and practiced widely in the area of constitutional law, human rights and popular culture. He is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute. Whitehead can be contacted at johnw@rutherford.org.

“The West Should Not Be the Sole Leader in This Endeavour”: Global South Perspectives on Reforming Multilateralism

By Aude Darnal
- 11 July 2024
GLOBAL GOVERNANCE


Worsening crises call for a radical rethink of global governance – which means centering the Global South, writes expert Aude Darnal.

What are perspectives from the Global South on the state of the multilateral system – and on what needs to change?

Recent global crises have spotlighted the deeply entrenched inequities of the international order, which mostly disadvantage countries from the Majority World (aka the Global South) – countries that have long been marginalised in multilateral decision-making processes. The international system was established by colonial powers following World War II, so at a time when most of the Global South had not even begun decolonisation. From the vantage point of these countries, the current models of global governance are outdated. They were defined by and are still centred around a minority: Western states.

Political leaders and thinkers across the Majority World have long pressed the most powerful states to support an overhaul of the global system. But by and large, they have met with a refusal by Western powers to facilitate meaningful reforms that would truly level the playing field for all. Global South countries are still underrepresented in multilateral bodies such as the UN Security Council or the International Monetary Fund. These influential institutions frequently adopt policies that disregard the interests and needs of Global South countries, including those that urgently need resources to address climate change and foster development.

This resistance on the part of the West has led to severe grievances in the Global South. This sense of double standards is only exacerbated by the fact that current US and European debates about reforming multilateralism are mostly framed through the prism of great-power competition between the US, China, and Russia. So it is no surprise that Global South countries have developed their own strategic pragmatism and sought out new regional or bilateral partnerships that may better serve them.

That does not mean, however, that they have lost interest in creating a more equitable international system. Worsening global crises call for a radical rethinking of global governance. But this endeavour should not focus on the Global South alone. Prominent narratives presuppose that reforming the international system would entail undermining rules and order: an assumption that hinges on the idea that these rules and norms — human rights, territorial integrity and sovereignty, and the rule of law — are inherently Western. Such a perspective dismisses the Global South’s historical contributions to these norms and values. And it is also in the West’s interest to challenge the structures of power and domination that foster inequities between and within countries. The effort to reform the international system is not simply an advancement of human-centred development – it is a matter of global security, stability, and sustainability.
How do Global South countries see multilateral efforts on issues like conflict prevention or economic development?

Although some governments in the Global South may be pursuing national security strategies that pose a threat to regional and global security, most are committed to making the global order more peaceful, durable, and equitable. Their advocacy for change does not contradict international rules but rather strengthens the principle of universality. Their vision of reform is thus primarily about fostering a more stable and secure world that serves everyone and is based on a more legitimate institutional architecture.

But the dominant experience for Global South countries in international peacebuilding and development programmes – not to mention in other economic reform processes – has been that international actors like powerful donor countries, international organisations, or international NGOs systemically marginalise local actors such as academic and civil society organisations or other economic stakeholders. According to a 2022 CSIS report, in 2020 “the percentage of [humanitarian] funding to local and national actors sat at a mere 3.1 percent,” leaving most of that funding in the hands of international NGOs and other stakeholders. This grave imbalance remains the case despite the best efforts of certain initiatives, like the growing localisation movement in the development sector, that have tried to effect a reckoning with these harmful, counterproductive, and often predatory dynamics.
What can the EU learn from Global South perspectives as it seeks to advance reforms of multilateralism?

The transformation to achieve a global order that is not centred on or dominated by the West – and consequently more equitable and fit to address common challenges – is well underway. And though there is no consensus on the parameters of change, even in the Global South, what is clear is that the West should not define these by themselves and be the sole leader in this endeavour. In fact, Western powers’ self-importance, and their obsession with performing as the international system’s sole architect, leader, and police force, are increasingly both problematic and divorced from reality.

If Western states remain unable to change their worldview, adapt it to new realities, and support positive change through concrete actions, they will feed into further fragmenting and polarising the world. In such a scenario, this fragmentation will ultimately impede collective action and stymie opportunities for addressing global crises through cooperation – including on pandemics, the climate emergency, political and economic refugee and migrant flows, and drug and weapons trafficking, which have a destabilising impact in both the West and the Global South.

Against the backdrop of great-power competition, Western powers often dismiss the shortcomings of the international system – and, therefore, Global South demands for more equity – as well as their own role in orchestrating its failure. By viewing Global South countries as passive agents that are tacitly content with the global system as is and have no interests, agency, or capacity to assert their own sovereignty, Western powers are reducing states in the Global South to pawns of either the West or the East – meaning China and Russia. If the EU really wants to advance reforms of multilateralism, this dynamic is something it must grapple with – and then set out to change through its own foreign policy and approach in global institutions.


This blog post was adapted from a longer policy paper published by Security in Context as part of an edited collection titled “Global South in an Era of Great Power Competition.” You can access the full article and other papers in the collection here.

Aude Darnal is a Research Analyst and Project Manager in the Stimson Center's Reimagining U.S. Grand Strategy Program. She also leads the centre‘s "Global South in the World Order" project.

This first appeared on the ENSURED website.

Photo by Ali Arapoğlu

ICYMI

AI dominates 2024 World Intelligence Expo in China 

Project 2025 Continues The Historic Racist, Fascist Project – OpEd

 July 11, 2024  

By Margaret Kimberley

Project 2025 is just the latest in a series of conservative think pieces which outlines how republicans should wield presidential power. The outrage surrounding it ignores democrats’ collusion with republican policies when they are in office and is a cynical effort to scare especially Black voters into continuing support for the Biden/Harris ticket. 

The right wing counter-revolution has been going on for more than 50 years. The Powell Memo was a 1971 directive from soon-to-be Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell, instructing the US Chamber of Commerce how to defeat the “attack on the American free enterprise system”. In other words, how to defeat any leftist or even leftish policies. The Contract with America outlined Newt Gingrich’s plan for republican control of congress. These are just two examples of conservative narratives that periodically receive public attention. They are declarations of how the right wing have been working to counter the gains of the New Deal and the Black liberation movement that resulted in benefits to everyone in the U.S. 

The latest iteration of this dynamic is Project 2025 , a project of the Heritage Foundation which states clearly its intention to, “…take back the country from the grip of the radical Left.” Project 2025 is a blueprint for presidential policy should Donald Trump be elected again.

We should be so lucky to be in the grip of the radical left. Even milquetoast social democrats have been consigned to the sidelines of U.S. electoral politics. Joe Biden is president because the Democratic Party bosses feared the possibility of liberal reformer Bernie Sanders winning the nomination in 2020. 

Project 2025 is replete with right wing red meat, from banning abortion to ending the Department of Education and also funding for public television. These have been staples of right wing think tank rhetoric since the very same Heritage Foundation played a large role in the Ronald Reagan administration. Project 2025 is an effort to expand cutting government spending, including for programs like Head Start, which millions of people use, and expanding presidential powers over federal agencies and replacing civil servants with political appointees.

This columnist urges caution in allowing Project 2036 to become a Democratic Party tool used to silence critics and to advocate for unquestioning support for Joe Biden’s re-election. There is always a right wing bogeyman trotted out when democrats are in trouble and need to silence their own people, especially Black people.

The frenzy over Project 2025 is such an example. We are suddenly supposed to cease criticism of Joe Biden, stop believing our own eyes when we observe his physical frailties and diminished capacity all in order to keep Donald Trump and Project 2025 at bay.

It has also been conveniently forgotten how often democrats have assisted in bringing right wing policies to fruition. It was Bill Clinton whose Crime Bill, assisted by then Senator Joe Biden, sent thousands of Black people to jail. It was Clinton whose Telecommunications Act ended Federal Communications Commissions regulations and resulted in media consolidation so complete that only six corporations control most of what we watch and hear. 

Clinton’s welfare “reform” came straight from the Heritage Foundation and other right wing think tank playbooks. The right to seek public assistance from the federal government which had existed for 60 years ended. States were free to do as they pleased, with some making assistance nearly impossible to secure. Clinton’s plan required states to digitize their food stamp programs which were handed over to private corporations such as xerox. The conservative bogeymen could not have done any better as their dreams came true in a democratic administration. 

The concept of Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act, known as Obamacare, was one that Richard Nixon proposed and in 1989 the very same Heritage Foundation called for mandates to purchase insurance, a foundation of the Obamacare plan. Republican Mitt Romney put what became Obamacare in place as governor of Massachusetts. Nixon, Romney, and the Heritage Foundation all eschewed any concept of a publicly run health care system and insisted on enshrining health care as being run by corporations. 

Now that Biden is suffering from anemic approval ratings and a bad debate performance the campaign pulled out their secret weapon, scaring Black people into voting for them. What better way to do so than to mix popular culture with their campaign. 

The BET Music Awards was the venue for their latest gambit. The event included a cringe worthy faux interviewbetween host Taraji P. Henson and Kamala Harris. Between the bad, fake R&B playing in the background and Harris saying, “I’m out here in these streets,” the painful performance and Henson’s pronouncements about Project 2025 struck a chord.  “The Project 2025 plan is not a game. Look it up! I’m talking to all the mad people that don’t want to vote. You’re going to be mad about a lot of things if you don’t vote.”

Henson’s words were magic to millions of Black voters. The inclination to feel trapped by the duopoly was suddenly in full effect and anyone expressing the slightest doubt about supporting Joe Biden and Kamala Harris is now targeted with vote shaming harangues. 

The reality is that Project 2025 has been going on since 1776 with only infrequent successes in subduing the white power structure. The marketing may change and in 2024 conservatives over played their public relations hand and gave democrats a cudgel to use against them. So much so that Donald Trump tried to distance himself . “I know nothing about Project 2025. I have no idea who is behind it. I disagree with some of the things they’re saying and some of the things they’re saying are absolutely ridiculous and abysmal. Anything they do, I wish them luck, but I have nothing to do with them.” Of course, some of Project 2025’s authors were staffers in Trump’s administration. His clumsy attempt at denial proves how much traction the democrats gained from amplifying it.

Now millions of people who were stunned by Biden’s debate performance are back on board pledging to keep the barbarians from the gates. Not to be outdone with scaring Black people, Biden made the obligatory appearance at a Black church, Mt. Airy Church of God in Christ, in Philadelphia.

Conservatism and white power are the foundations of this country. There are moments when that dynamic is openly supported and praised and sometimes a place called Hope and Hope and Change are the means of masquerading what conservative think tanks say very openly.

Margaret Kimberley

Margaret Kimberley's is the author of Prejudential: Black America and the Presidents. Her work can also be found at patreon.com/margaretkimberley and on Twitter @freedomrideblog. Ms. Kimberley can be reached via e-Mail at Margaret.Kimberley(at)BlackAgendaReport.com."