HINDSIGHT - WRITE SOMETHING WORTH READING ABOUT OR DO SOMETHING WORTH WRITING ABOUT
Saturday, April 30, 2022
Friday, April 29, 2022
Wednesday, April 27, 2022
Heather Cox Richardson
I intended to write tonight about Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s statement today before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee—and I will—but the research for that topic led me elsewhere: into the world of the early years of the Trump administration, when many journalists were trying oh, so hard to pretend that maybe Trump’s gutting of the State Department, for example, was just some part of a new policy approach.
It’s startling when you compare it with today’s coverage of Biden.
What got me on this track was Blinken’s offhand comment today that his testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee was “the 100th time that I’ve had an opportunity to brief Congress, which is one of the ways I’ve worked to meet the commitment that I made in my confirmation before this committee to restore Congress’s role as a partner both in our foreign policymaking and in revitalizing the State Department.”
That reminded me that shortly after Trump took office journalists wrote about how he was sidelining the State Department. “Is the State Department Being Intentionally Gutted?” wondered Michael Fuchs on February 28, 2017, in Just Security. He noted that Trump’s secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, former chief executive officer of ExxonMobil, had not held a single press briefing since he took office and hadn’t been at summit meetings with Trump and foreign leaders. The tradition of daily press briefings from State Department spokespeople had also stopped dead the day Trump took office. The White House had said it was going to cut the State Department budget to offset an increase of $54 billion in defense spending.
The Trump administration had asked the senior career officers running the department’s administration to resign, and several senior diplomats had been recalled before replacements were even nominated. The floor where the secretary of state and the senior team have offices was essentially empty, and the administration was not filling those positions.
Maybe, Tillerson was “just getting up to speed,” but while he sounded tentative, Fuchs wasn’t willing to believe an innocent explanation. He said there were “strong signs” that “the White House [was] trying to sideline the State Department[.]” Fuchs noted that Trump seemed “enamored of the military” and seemed eager to get rid of the nonpartisan bureaucracy that stabilizes democracies.
CNN’s Nicole Gaouette had similar observations but wondered if the silence of Tillerson’s State Department was just a reflection of his caution in front of the media. She recorded that the deafening silence from the State Department created confusion as Trump’s tweets rocked long-stable ships. “[T]he President and his Cabinet have given mixed messages on issues like the US commitment to NATO,” she noted.
And then, for his first trip abroad, Trump went not to Canada or to Mexico, our two largest trading partners, democracies, close allies, and neighbors, but to Saudi Arabia, an oligarchic kleptocracy. There, he and Tillerson appeared to embrace the culture, something previous presidents had been careful to avoid because of its extreme misogyny and occasional extremism. Tillerson did in fact hold a press conference there, but U.S. media was banned: only foreign media was admitted. Foreign affairs expert Anne Applebaum called the trip “bizarre, unseemly, unethical and un-American.”
Of course, we now know that Trump was centering foreign affairs in the White House—Ivanka Trump went along on that trip to Saudi Arabia to promote “female entrepreneurs”—and among his own cronies like the “Three Amigos” who tried to pressure Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky into launching a fake investigation into Hunter Biden. The plan was, at least in part, to stop looking at foreign affairs as national security—just days ago, Trump told an audience that during his term he had threatened European leaders that the U.S. would not honor the mutual aid pact and defend Europe against incursions by Russia—and instead to pocket huge sums of money. We know now it was Trump friend Tom Barrack who was behind the meeting with the Saudis as he angled for a huge deal to transfer nuclear technology to Saudi Arabia.
People who seemed nonplussed by the extraordinary actions of the Trump administration were not deliberately giving him a pass, I don’t think. They just couldn’t believe they were seeing the dismantling of centuries of diplomacy to enrich one family and its inner circle.
So when Blinken now talks about values and national security again, it seems sometimes we are cynically harsh.
Today, he spoke to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, reminding it that he, the secretary of state, had spoken to the committee 100 times. He thanked it for its support and talked of the recent visit he and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin had made to Kyiv, where they had gone to demonstrate the U.S. commitment to the government and the people of Ukraine. He described the countryside and cities coming back to life after the carnage Russia visited on them, and he hailed the extraordinary determination of the Ukrainians.
There is a lesson in that determination for the U.S., he suggested. “Moscow’s war of aggression against Ukraine has underscored the power and purpose of American diplomacy. Our diplomacy is rallying allies and partners around the world to join us in supporting Ukraine with security, economic, humanitarian assistance; imposing massive costs on the Kremlin; strengthening our collective security and defense; addressing the war’s mounting global consequences, including the refugee and food crises….”
Blinken was understating things. The administration’s bolstering of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and other allies and partners, along with its strong effort to keep various nations on board with economic sanctions, has been key to supporting Ukraine. Today, news broke of just how extensive U.S. sharing of intelligence has been with Ukraine, enabling Ukraine not only to protect its own weapons from attack, but also to shoot down a Russian plane transporting troops. Indeed, U.S. intelligence has helped prevent Russia from getting control of the airspace over Ukraine.
And now the administration has expanded that cooperation to include intelligence sharing to enable Ukraine to take back territory Russia has captured, including in Crimea or the Donbas. This reflects Austin’s statement today that Ukraine can not only survive against Russia, but can “win.” Pentagon spokesperson John Kirby elaborated: “winning is very clearly defined by a Ukraine whose sovereignty is fully respected, whose territorial integrity is not violated by Russia or any other country for that matter.” Kirby also explained Austin’s comment that the U.S. wants “to see Russia weakened to the degree that it can’t do the kinds of things that it has done in invading Ukraine.” Kirby said: “We don’t want a Russia that’s capable of exerting…malign influence in Europe or anywhere around the world.”
In addition to responding to the urgency of the attack on Ukraine, the State Department “continues to carry out the missions traditionally associated with diplomacy, like responsibly managing great power competition with China, facilitating a halt to fighting in Yemen and Ethiopia, pushing back against the rising tide of authoritarianism and the threat that it poses to human rights,” he said. The State Department will continue to modernize, as well, to address emergence of infectious diseases, the climate crisis, and the digital revolution.
Blinken noted that the State Department is filling out its ranks as quickly as it can with diplomats that “reflect America’s remarkable diversity, which is one of our greatest strengths, including in our diplomacy,” providing the paid internships that will enable poorer young people to accept them, and finally having State’s “first ever chief diversity and inclusion officer.” The effort is paying off: State is on track for its largest hiring intake in ten years.
“My first 15 months in this job have only strengthened my own conviction that these and other reforms are not just worthwhile;” Blinken said, “they’re essential to our national security and to delivering for the people we represent.”
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It's not a culture war. It's button-down hate and racism with a smile.
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You want to know how Republicans talk about “states’ rights” these days? Parental rights. The new way they talk about the “gay agenda”? Grooming. How about the new way they signify their racism? Critical Race Theory. This stuff doesn’t have anything to do with cheese or opera, but somehow Republicans have gotten away with turning prejudice and hatred into wedge issues and the culture war.
It’s like they’ve brought Lee Atwater back from the dead to run the Republican Party’s messaging. You remember Lee, don’t you? Smiling South Carolina boy who once had a political consulting firm with – you’re going to love this – Paul Manafort and Roger Stone, Atwater made his Republican bones working on campaigns for Strom Thurmond, the infamous segregationist who ran for president in 1948 as the candidate of the States Rights Party. Thurmond was quoted during the campaign saying, “I wanna tell you, ladies and gentlemen, that there's not enough troops in the army to force the Southern people to break down segregation and admit the Nigra race into our theaters, into our swimming pools, into our homes, and into our churches.” But not into his bedroom: later in life it was revealed that he had fathered a mixed race daughter with a Black woman.
Atwater was celebrated in the Republican Party because he had figured out how to use political misdirection to get around Republican candidates being called racists when the charge was clearly an accurate one. In 1981, Atwater gave an anonymous interview to political scientist Alexander P. Lamis for his book, “The Two-Party South.” Only later in a column by Bob Herbert in the New York Times in 2005 was Atwater revealed as the man who said the following: “Y'all don't quote me on this. You start out in 1954 by saying, ‘nigger, nigger, nigger.’ By 1968, you can't say ‘nigger’—that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now that you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is that blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I'm not saying that. But I'm saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me—because obviously sitting around saying, ‘We want to cut this’ is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than ‘nigger, nigger.’ So, any way you look at it, race is coming on the back-burner.”
Clever guy, huh? You want to talk about race, all you have to do, like Ronald Reagan in the 1980 campaign, is talk about “welfare queens.” Everybody knows what you’re saying without you having to come out and say it.
Today’s Lee Atwater is another smiling preppy guy by the name of Christopher Rufo who has one of those right-wing sinecures at a think tank called the Manhattan Institute. Rufo is the thinker, if you could call it that, behind the mass-marketing of Critical Race Theory (CRT) as a Republican fear campaign. To the extent that it exists at all, CRT is taught in some law schools as a legal theory holding that race plays an instrumental role in the nation’s system of criminal laws and courts. Rufo came up with the idea of claiming CRT is a liberal plot to indoctrinate grade school children with the idea that there is something inherently wrong with being white. He even did the world the favor of writing a series of Tweets spelling out his plan. “We have successfully frozen their brand—‘critical race theory’—into the public conversation and are steadily driving up negative perceptions. We will eventually turn it toxic, as we put all of the various cultural insanities under that brand category. The goal is to have the public read something crazy in the newspaper and immediately think ‘critical race theory.’ We have decodified the term and will recodify it to annex the entire range of cultural constructions that are unpopular with Americans.”
See? Easy. Instead of welfare queens, it’s evil second grade teachers and junior high school student counselors poisoning the minds of innocents. Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin, appearing in a fleece vest to give evidence of his bonafides as a man of the people, said Critical Race Theory so many times during his campaign last year his face froze. Texas legislators last year banned the teaching of the 1619 Project specifically and CRT generally from being taught in state schools, followed closely by – you guessed it – Florida. “In Florida we are taking a stand against the state-sanctioned racism that is Critical Race Theory,” said Governor Ron DeSantis in a press release last December. “We won’t allow Florida tax dollars to be spent teaching kids to hate our country or to hate each other. We also have a responsibility to ensure that parents have the means to vindicate their rights when it comes to enforcing state standards.”
And now, like magic, the bogeyman is Democrats and liberals condoning pedophilia and of course, grooming. Last month DeSantis signed the “don’t say gay” bill, banning even the mention of “gender orientation and sexual identity” in grades K-3, a classic solution in search of a problem since sex education wasn’t being taught in those grades anyway. “If you’re against the Anti-Grooming Bill, you are probably a groomer or at least you don’t denounce the grooming of 4-8 year old children,” Christina Pushaw, DeSantis’s press secretary, tweeted last month when the bill was being argued in the state legislature.
And of course it’s spreading. Earlier this month, Alabama Governor Kay Ivey signed two overtly anti-transgender bills into law. One bans parents from arranging medical care for their trans children, and the other mandates that students use bathrooms that match their birth certificates. Last month, Idaho passed a bill making it a felony for doctors to provide medically necessary, age-appropriate gender affirming care for transgender children. Other Republican states have similar bills before their legislatures.
This is what Republicans are doing while Ukraine fights a war for its survival as a sovereign nation against Russia and while the Biden administration presides over record low unemployment numbers and record high economic growth. They’re creating problems where they don’t exist and appealing to racism and anti-gay, anti-trans prejudice by slapping the word “grooming” on everything in sight.
Pundits and newspaper editors and cable news shows call it culture war politics. It’s not. It’s racism and hate, plain and simple. The House, the Senate, and the White House are at stake, and if “woke” Democrats don’t wake up and figure out how to counter this bullshit, Republicans are going to push more of DeSantis and Youngkin style button-down hate and racism with a smile.
Back in the office? Three rules to keep the peace
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 Back in the office? Three rules to keep the peace As team members stream back to the workplace, don’t expect life to resume where it left off two years ago. 27-Apr-22 – There are probably at least a dozen good reasons for folks to look forward to getting out of their houses, off the Zoom calls, and back to the office. But none will be more important than the long-awaited return to those time-honored and ritualistic watercooler conversations. These critical daily pipelines for the most current, direct, and valuable dissemination of the gospel, gossip, and goings-on of any business are, without question, the most effective purveyors of connection, engagement, and company culture ever invented. In most companies, more substantive and actionable information generally flows back and forth during such sessions than in any formally organized meetings – where no one wants to be too outspoken, too woke, or not woke enough, or too far ahead of the pack. Meetings these days make mainly for consensus, wasted time, and mediocrity. Forget about Teams and Slack as well. They may be handy for real-time messaging and short alerts, but they’re sterile, noisy, and cluttered environments largely drained of real interpersonal connection and emotional engagement. These uncontrolled channels quickly turn into sewers of specious sentiment, woke wars, and podiums for the loudest, most voluminous, and most pedantic voices in the conversation. There’s simply no good alternative to getting the juicy tidbits directly and personally right from the horse’s mouth.
In a word, WOM works best at work. While millions of Americans have largely given up on the mainstream media as a source of objective truth, we still basically want to trust the folks we work with every day to give us the straight scoop. Pre-pandemic, the peer-to-peer, face-to-face workplace was the best place to be – and to be seen and heard – because we trust the people that we know and with whom we spend most of our daily waking hours. Even more importantly, the work environment serves a curatorial and collective function for us. We know where our friends, peers, and others are bound to be found, and we know when they’ll be there and how to readily access them. All of this reliable regularity, of course, is now entirely up for grabs. Political discussion will be a minefield It’s already clear that the office environment will be considerably different than our fond and nostalgic memories of the places we left. One thing for sure: discussing politics in the office is a no-win proposition, a waste of breath, and bad for the business as well. Given the substantial time that we’ve all been homebound and imprisoned in carefully filtered online information bubbles, we’re going to find it challenging, upsetting, and highly revelatory when we leave our own little echo chambers and COVID-19 clans to get back to the work world. We’ll reacquaint ourselves with seriously changed old friends and somewhat unknown new ones; and immediately get a strong dose of the new realities. As much as we all think we’ve just been cooped up in suspended animation for two years, we’ve all had very different experiences – mostly bad – and they’ve left scars, sour spots, and a lot of tender sensibilities. The common ground, the shared views, and even the watercooler conversations simply aren’t going to provide the safe spaces they once did. Word of mouth is going to have to work even harder and in dramatically circumscribed circumstances. Management is going to have to quickly and clearly set out some new keys, rules of the road, and frankly some limitations – freedom of speech notwithstanding – on what are going to be genial conversations in the “new” world of work.
I’m not simply talking about pronouns, although, even there, most of the world doesn’t understand or appreciate what the constantly shifting appropriate protocols are – and why, apparently, it’s no longer proper to even ask. In a world of pronoun-denominated name tags, the next step may have to be warning signs we all wear (like convention badges) outlining the matters and topics we’d be pleased to never discuss at the office. This turn of events may be good for sports fans (arguably still a safe topic), but it’s going to be hard on most other day-to-day social chatter. We’re going to have to carefully rebuild and restructure the watercooler conversations because they’re the heart of the information sharing systems, and those informal sharing systems are how we develop, build, and sustain our trust in and comfort with our peers and others.
If simple trust and social sharing disappears, there’s very little left upon which to form the common bonds and connections we need to make our commerce systems and our society work. So, the question really is what should the new rules of the road be and how should they be implemented in a way that doesn’t simply cause new and different problems? If you’re a business aggressively trying to (a) get your people back to business and (b) trying to keep them from spending inordinate amounts of time every day arguing with each other about things that don’t mean a hill of beans to the business, here are a few thoughts and suggestions.
• Contact Howard Tullman at h@g2t3v.com |
Opinion:
The Republican blueprint to steal the 2024 election
Opinion by J. Michael
Luttig
Updated 6:12 AM ET, Wed April 27, 2022
J. Michael Luttig,
appointed by President George H. W. Bush, formerly served on the US Court of
Appeals for the Fourth Circuit for 15 years. He advised Vice President Mike
Pence on January 6. The opinions expressed in this commentary are his own. View
more opinion at CNN.
(CNN)Nearly a year and a
half later, surprisingly few understand what January 6 was all about.
Fewer still understand why former President Donald Trump and Republicans persist in their long-disproven claim that the 2020 presidential election was stolen. Much less why they are obsessed about making the 2024 race a referendum on the "stolen" election of 2020, which even they know was not stolen.
January 6 was never about a stolen election or
even about actual voting fraud. It was always and only about an election that
Trump lost fair and square, under legislatively promulgated election rules in a
handful of swing states that he and other Republicans contend were unlawfully
changed by state election officials and state courts to expand the right and
opportunity to vote, largely in response to the Covid pandemic.
The Republicans' mystifying claim to this day
that Trump did, or would have, received more votes than Joe Biden in 2020 were
it not for actual voting fraud, is but the shiny object that Republicans have
tauntingly and disingenuously dangled before the American public for almost a
year and a half now to distract attention from their far more ambitious
objective
That objective is not somehow to rescind the
2020 election, as they would have us believe. That's constitutionally
impossible. Trump's and the Republicans' far more ambitious objective is to
execute successfully in 2024 the very same plan they failed in executing in
2020 and to overturn the 2024 election if Trump or his anointed successor loses
again in the next quadrennial contest.
The last presidential election was a dry run
for the next.
From long before Election Day 2020, Trump and
Republicans planned to overturn the presidential election by exploiting the
Electors and Elections Clauses of the Constitution, the Electoral College, the
Electoral Count Act of 1877, and the 12th Amendment, if Trump lost the popular
and Electoral College vote.
The cornerstone of the plan was to have the
Supreme Court embrace the little known "independent state legislature"
doctrine, which, in turn, would pave the way for exploitation of the Electoral
College process and the Electoral Count Act, and finally for Vice President
Mike Pence to reject enough swing state electoral votes to overturn the
election using Pence's ceremonial power under the 12th Amendment and
award the presidency to Donald Trump.
The independent state legislature doctrine
says that, under the Elections and
the Electors Clauses of
the Constitution, state legislatures possess plenary and exclusive power over
the conduct of federal presidential elections and the selection of state
presidential electors. Not even a state supreme court, let alone other state
elections officials, can alter the legislatively written election rules or
interfere with the appointment of state electors by the legislatures, under
this theory.
The Supreme Court has never decided whether to
embrace the independent state legislature doctrine. But then-Chief Justice
William Rehnquist, and Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas in separate
concurring opinions said they would embrace that doctrine in Bush v. Gore, 20 years earlier, and
Republicans had every reason to believe there were at least five votes on the
Supreme Court for the doctrine in November 2020, with Amy Coney Barrett having
just been confirmed in the eleventh hour before the election.
Trump and the Republicans began executing this
first stage of their plan months before November 3, by challenging as violative
of the independent state legislature doctrine election rules relating to early-
and late-voting, extensions of voting days and times, mail-in ballots, and
other election law changes that Republicans contended had been unlawfully
altered by state officials and state courts in swing states such as
Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, North Carolina and Michigan.
These cases eventually wound their way to
the Supreme Court in
the fall of 2020, and by December, the Supreme Court had decided all of these
cases, but only by orders, either disallowing federal court intervention to
change an election rule that had been promulgated by a state legislature,
allowing legislatively promulgated rules to be changed by state officials and
state courts, or deadlocking 4-4, because Justice Barrett was not sworn in
until after those cases were briefed and ready for decision by the Court. In
none of these cases did the Supreme Court decide the all-important independent
state legislature doctrine.
Thwarted by the Supreme Court's indecision on
that doctrine, Trump and the Republicans turned their efforts to the second
stage of their plan, exploitation of the Electoral College and the Electoral
Count Act.
The Electoral College is the process by which
Americans choose their presidents, a process that can lead to the election as
president of a candidate who does not receive a majority of votes cast by the
American voters. Republicans have grown increasingly wary of the Electoral
College with the new census and political demographics of
the nation's shifting population.
The Electoral Count Act empowers Congress to
decide the presidency in a host of circumstances where Congress determines that
state electoral votes were not "regularly given" by electors who were
"lawfully certified," terms that are undefined and ambiguous. In this
second stage of the plan, the Republicans needed to generate state-certified
alternative slates of electors from swing states where Biden won the popular
vote who would cast their electoral votes for Trump instead. Congress would
then count the votes of these alternative electoral slates on January 6, rather
than the votes of the certified electoral slates for Biden, and Trump would be
declared the reelected president.
The Republicans' plan failed at this stage
when they were unable to secure a single legitimate, alternative slate of
electors from any state because the various state officials refused to
officially certify these Trump-urged slates.
Thwarted by the Supreme Court in the first
stage, foiled by their inability to come up with alternative state electoral
slates in the second stage, and with time running out, Trump and the
Republicans began executing the final option in their plan, which was to scare
up illegitimate alternative electoral slates in various swing states to be
transmitted to Congress. Whereupon, on January 6, Vice President Pence would
count only the votes of the illegitimate electors from the swing states, and
not the votes of the legitimate, certified electors that were cast for Biden,
and declare Donald Trump's reelection as President of the United States.
The entire house of cards collapsed at noon on
January 6, when Pence refused to go along
with the ill-conceived plan, correctly concluding that under the 12th Amendment
he had no power to reject the votes that had been cast by the duly certified
electors or to delay the count to give Republicans even more time to whip up
alternative electoral slates.
Pence declared Joe Biden the 46th President of
the United States at 3:40 a.m. on Thursday, January 7, roughly 14 hours after
rioters stormed the US Capitol, disrupting the Joint Session and preventing
Congress from counting the Electoral College votes for president until late
that night and into the following day, after the statutorily designated day for
counting those votes.
Trump and his allies and supporters in
Congress and the states began readying their failed 2020 plan to overturn the
2024 presidential election later that very same day and they have been
unabashedly readying that plan ever since, in plain view to the American
public. Today, they are already a long way toward recapturing the White House
in 2024, whether Trump or another Republican candidate wins the election or
not.
Trump and Republicans are preparing to return
to the Supreme Court, where this time they will likely win the independent
state legislature doctrine, now that Amy Coney Barrett is on the Court and
ready to vote. Barrett has not addressed the issue, but this turns on an originalist
interpretation of the Constitution, and Barrett is firmly aligned on that
method of constitutional interpretation with Thomas, Alito, and Gorsuch, all
three of whom have written that they believe the doctrine is correct.
Only last month, in a case from North Carolina
the Court declined to hear, Moore v. Harper, four Justices (Alito, Thomas,
Gorsuch and Kavanaugh) said that the independent state legislature question is of
exceptional importance to our national elections, the issue will continue to
recur and the Court should decide the issue sooner rather than later before the
next presidential election. This case involved congressional redistricting, but
the independent state legislature doctrine is as applicable to redistricting as
it is to presidential elections.
The Republicans are also in the throes of
electing Trump-endorsed candidates to state legislative offices in key swing
states, installing into office their favored state election officials who deny
that Biden won the 2020 election, such as secretaries of state, electing sympathetic
state court judges onto the state benches and grooming their preferred
potential electors for ultimate selection by the party, all so they will be
positioned to generate and transmit alternative electoral slates to Congress,
if need be.
Finally, they are furiously politicking to
elect Trump supporters to the Senate and House, so they can overturn the
election in Congress, as a last resort.
Forewarned is to be forearmed.
Trump and the Republicans can only be stopped
from stealing the 2024 election at this point if the Supreme Court rejects the
independent state legislature doctrine (thus allowing state court enforcement
of state constitutional limitations on legislatively enacted election rules and
elector appointments) and Congress amends the Electoral Count Act to constrain
Congress' own power to reject state electoral votes and decide the presidency.
Although the Vice President will be a Democrat
in 2024, both parties also need to enact federal legislation that expressly
limits the vice president's power to be coextensive with the power accorded the
vice president in the 12th Amendment and confirm that it is largely ceremonial,
as Pence construed it to be on January 6.
Vice President Kamala Harris would preside
over the Joint Session in 2024. Neither Democrats nor Republicans have any idea
who will be presiding after that, however. Thus, both parties have the
incentive to clarify the vice president's ceremonial role now.
As it stands today, Trump, or his anointed
successor, and the Republicans are poised, in their word, to "steal"
from Democrats the presidential election in 2024 that they falsely claim the
Democrats stole from them in 2020. But there is a difference between the
falsely claimed "stolen" election of 2020 and what would be the
stolen election of 2024. Unlike the Democrats' theft claimed by Republicans,
the Republicans' theft would be in open defiance of the popular vote and thus
the will of the American people: poetic, though tragic, irony for America's
democracy.
Tuesday, April 26, 2022
The political landscape is littered with Republicans’ lies and evidence of their authoritarian schemes.
The political landscape is littered with Republicans’ lies and evidence of their authoritarian schemes. Consider the evidence of their anti-democratic bent from just the past week:
- Former senator David Perdue of Georgia, who has been endorsed by defeated former president Donald Trump in his state’s Republican primary for governor, kicked off his debate with incumbent Gov. Brian Kemp on Sunday with this lie: “First off, let me be very clear tonight. The election in 2020 was rigged and stolen.” It was not. This is an insult to democracy and an indication that he is incapable of comprehending the oath of office he would take if elected.
- House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) was caught lying about his conversations about the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection that Trump instigated and his prior statements that he wanted Trump to resign. Trump rewarded McCarthy’s lies and subsequent sycophancy with praise.
- Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis retaliated against Disney for speaking out against his “don’t say gay” law by enacting what amounts to a massive tax hike on Floridians. Right-wing pundits cheered this deployment of government power to punish political opponents. This is a page straight out of Hungarian leader Viktor Orban’s playbook.
- Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) asked then-White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows for “something to work with” on Nov. 20, 2020, to overturn the will of the voters and justify throwing out electoral votes for Joe Biden.
- As my colleague Aaron Blake reports, Cassidy Hutchinson, a former aide to Meadows, testified that the White House Counsel’s Office made clear that the plot to overthrow the election was not “legally sound” and that Meadows had been warned about the potential for violence on Jan. 6.
- CNN reports on a tranche of 2,319 text messages between Meadows and other Trump allies, including “texts with Rep. Scott Perry of Pennsylvania about a scheme to replace Justice Department leaders who opposed Trump’s claims of election fraud.” CNN adds: “Beginning on Election Day, Meadows was in the middle of it all, from connecting activists pushing conspiracy theories to strategizing with GOP lawmakers and rally organizers preparing for January 6.”
NEW INC. MAGAZINE COLUMN BY HOWARD TULLMAN
Blockchain's Threat to Uber
It's always fascinating to watch a tech platform evolve into a
true disrupter. Uber was one, but now the disruptor stands to be disrupted.
BY HOWARD
TULLMAN, GENERAL MANAGING PARTNER, G2T3V AND CHICAGO HIGH TECH
INVESTORS@TULLMAN
As WeCrashed, this season's most cartoonish
financial porn offering, makes abundantly clear, WeWork had about as much to do
with actual technology as Olive Garden does with authentic Italian food. WW was
a pathetic series of desperate lurches, a fantastical story and a mouthful of
buzzwords foisted upon millions of millennials by an egomaniac aided and
abetted by a fawning press and a gaggle of greed heads from
Benchmark, Chase and elsewhere. The WW carcass as well as other
co-working spaces, which were never novel to begin with, survive in a
much-reduced form -- validated and sustained in some unexpected respects by the
pandemic -- while the entrepreneur and his spouse are out of the picture,
having been both booted and bolstered by billions in severance payments.
Super Pumped, on the
other hand, attempts to demonstrate in an equally superficial and overamped
fashion how Uber created and deployed a truly exceptional and revolutionary
technology -- albeit in often illegal, anticompetitive, and fraudulent ways.
But Uber's tech actually did change the daily behaviors of tens of
millions of consumers while it simultaneously destroyed the lives and livelihoods of thousands of taxi
drivers worldwide. Uber's founding CEO was also abruptly ousted
and similarly showered with billions by his board to induce him to quietly
drive off into the sunset.
But in the residue of Uber's rancid corporate culture there
remains a very large and powerful component that continues to dominate several
industries through the implementation and extensions of its innovative
technology. Uber, and to a lesser extent Lyft, continues to be a forceful
demonstration of the power of platforms and the "winner take all" nature of big tech. At
the same time, thousands of other eager entrepreneurs who tried to replicate
Uber's model in different industries and verticals and almost
universally failed.
Yet there may actually be a serious challenge to Uber itself on
the near horizon and-- as buzzwordy as it may be --blockchain could be the next
big disruptor, an enabling technology for a revolt by the oppressed masses. I
won't try to explain blockchain technology here. Suffice it to say that
blockchain's success and staying power so far suggests the strong likelihood
that it can be the basis for a relatively simple, decentralized, and low-cost
information sharing and payment system-- one that's both secure and stable and
universally accessible. Such an information system would enable a scenario
calculated to supplant and undermine the big guys in the ridesharing business.
It might be called the FAIR system, pun intended.
(1) A passenger in a ridesharing vehicle could directly
and instantly transfer payment to the driver through a simple mobile-to-mobile
transaction fully enabled and documented by the blockchain without any
requirement that the payment move through either Uber, Lyft, Curb or any other
central taxing and/or gatekeeping hub, platform or parent company. And without
any of those entities extracting the typical current fees of 30% to 50% of the
fares.
(2) The passenger and the driver could negotiate the fare
(or it could be stipulated by specified travel zones similar to those in D.C.
and elsewhere) and no portion of the payment would be retained by any parent
company or other intermediary apart from any modest fees associated with the
payment system itself. However, a portion of each fare (perhaps 10%) would be
set aside to create an ongoing pool, which would be shared by all drivers and
all passengers and allocated in real time dynamically based on their individual
activity within the system as compared to all the activity in the system.
Participants on both sides of each transaction would be owners
in common of the enterprise as well as active participants in it. The more they
drove or used the system, the greater the value of their ultimate ownership in
the overall enterprise would be over time. In blockchain terms, they would be
"miners" building their own net worth through their own actions,
which create tokens or other forms of convertible and transferable currency.
And to be clear, the fares being paid by the passengers and the payments being
received by the drivers would still be more attractive and more equitable than
the current schemes, where the prime beneficiaries are the parent companies.
(3) While over time the enterprise could be externally
funded and the collective owners could vote to develop some or all of the
systems that now make up the ridesharing universe, this isn't initially
required or even a financially prudent step at the outset. The new FAIR payment
and sharing system would simply piggyback on all the work already done by Uber,
Lyft and others and the initial pools of drivers and passengers would
presumably be Uber and Lyft drivers (many of whom already operate under both
companies' brand umbrellas) and rideshare customers - all of whom would now be
effectively working for themselves and actually being fairly paid for their
services in addition to accruing long term value for their nest egg and/or
retirement.
(4) The ironic charm of such an approach would be that,
initially, drivers could be summoned by prospective riders using all the
functionality of the current Uber or Lyft applications but requested rides
would be quickly canceled once the driver and rider had connected in real life
and the alternate FAIR payment system would be used instead. There's nothing
more satisfying or smarter for an entrepreneur than building your business on someone else's rails. And
- given Uber's grievous history - this would be the sweetest form of
comeuppance possible.
This is merely a simple example of the coming waves of
innovation and disruption that we can all expect as the vertical pressure for
decentralization combines with a new, highly mobile and highly motivated workforce
looking for more control over their own lives. This workforce is far more
interested in transacting in peer-to-peer and horizontal environments rather
than the top-down hierarchies of old. Big tech and big business beware -
nothing is the future forever.
APR 26, 2022
The
opinions expressed here by Inc.com columnists are their own, not those of
Inc.com.
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