How Existential A Threat To Democracy Is Trump And What Do We Do About It?

I don't trust the voting machines... never did, never will. They're too easily hackable. And I've thought that Trump's hysteria over vote-by-mail was because he had it all down exactly how the election would be stolen via machine tampering. With the appointment of future federal penitentiary inhabitant Louis DeJoy as postmaster general, Trump may have handled the vote-by-mail threat to his November plans.

In an OpEd for The Hill, Al Hunt wrote that "The charge by Trump and his attorney general that mail voting risks massive fraud is a canard. Spencer Cox, the conservative Republican lieutenant governor of Utah, who oversees voting in one of five states that exclusively votes by mail, says it's a 'tremendous success' with little fraud. The stated reason for going after the Postal Service is red ink which totaled $8.8 billion last year. A little bit of context on Donald Trump worrying about deficits: As a businessman, he bragged about being 'the King of Debt,' and on his watch, the federal deficit has almost doubled to close to $1 trillion, before the pandemic.

The new postmaster general is a Trump loyalist. He has given $2 million to Republicans and Trump campaigns since 2016, the latest being a $210,000 contribution to the Trump Victory Fund in February. He was going to be finance chair of the Republicans’ Charlotte convention before it was curtailed; his wife has been nominated to be U.S. ambassador to Canada.

DeJoy told the Postal Board of Governors Friday that he's not making any changes that will impede voting by mail and declared: although he has a "a good relationship" with the president, any assertion he'd make decisions at the direction of Trump "is wholly off-base."

In response to an email from me, he wouldn't say whether he spoke with Trump about the job prior to his appointment or has communicated with him since taking over.

He has not assuaged Democrats.

Congressman Gerry Connolly (D-VA), chairman of the House Oversight and Reform Subcommittee on Government Operations, told me: "Trump has appointed a donor and political crony to undermine the postal service for partisan gain."

In the first month and half under DeJoy, instructions have gone out to the more than 600,000 postal workers to curb any overtime and cut back services.

There's a more pressing need for overtime during this health crisis. Most postal workers are out every day, exposed to the virus. Three months ago-- the latest data-- some 2,400 postal employees had tested positive for the virus; 17,000 had been quarantined, and scores died. Those numbers undoubtedly have risen since then.

DeJoy is playing with political fire.

In a recent Hart Research-North Star Opinion Research national survey, 94 percent of Americans say the Postal Service is important to them, and there's widespread backing of federal support. A large number of the 31,000 post offices are in rural America, areas that are generally more dependent on mail delivery and that are represented by Republicans.

This morning I woke up to this ominous tweet by by friend Frank Schaeffer:

Jamelle Bouie's NY Times column, published at the same time, came to a similar conclusion: To keep a crooked authoritarian threat to democracy from claiming victory on Nov. 3, Americans patriots who can vote in person may well have to. This is gettin' serious, friends.

There’s no mystery about what President Trump intends to do if he holds a lead on election night in November. He’s practically broadcasting it.

First, he’ll claim victory. Then, having spent most of the year denouncing vote-by-mail as corrupt, fraudulent and prone to abuse, he’ll demand that authorities stop counting mail-in and absentee ballots. He’ll have teams of lawyers challenging counts and ballots across the country.

He also seems to be counting on having the advantage of mail slowdowns, engineered by the recently installed Postmaster General Louis DeJoy. Fewer pickups and deliveries could mean more late-arriving ballots and a better shot at dismissing votes before they’re even opened, especially if the campaign has successfully sued to block states from extending deadlines. We might even see a Brooks Brothers riot or two, where well-heeled Republican operatives stage angry and voluble protests against ballot counts and recounts.

If Trump is leading on election night, in other words, there’s a good chance he’ll try to disrupt and delegitimize the counting process. That way, if Joe Biden pulls ahead in the days (or weeks) after voting ends-- if we experience a “blue shift” like the one in 2018, in which the Democratic majority in the House grew as votes came in-- the president will have given himself grounds to reject the outcome as “fake news.”

The only way to prevent this scenario, or at least, rob it of the oxygen it needs to burn, is to deliver an election night lead to Biden. This means voting in person. No, not everyone will be able to do that. But if you plan to vote against Trump and can take appropriate precautions, then some kind of hand delivery-- going to the polls or bringing your mail-in ballot to a “drop box”-- will be the best way to protect your vote from the president’s concerted attempt to undermine the election for his benefit.

...There are reforms that could keep the president from taking this tack. To account for postal delays, states can pledge to count ballots postmarked on or before Nov. 3, so that they’re included in the total even if they arrive late. To speed up the process, states could permit election officials to verify and count mail-in ballots even before Election Day. They could also decline to release results until all polls close and all votes are in. News organizations, similarly, could set expectations for viewers and bring as much transparency as possible to vote counts and other forms of election analysis.

Nonetheless, there is a chance that the president takes this path regardless of state officials and the media. And there’s every reason to think that some portion of the Republican Party will back him. The Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee are already challenging mail-in voting laws and suing to keep states like Nevada and Pennsylvania from enlarging their scope. It is easy to imagine a replay of Florida 2000, except on a national scale.

The best defense for the president’s political opponents is, if possible, to vote in person. For some, this will mean going to the polls in November, in the middle of flu season, when the spread of Covid-19 may worsen. In most states, however, there are multiple ways to cast or hand in a ballot. Every state offers some form of early or absentee voting, and 33 states-- including swing states like Arizona and Wisconsin-- allow absentee voting without an excuse. Trump supports absentee voting-- it’s how his older supporters in Florida vote-- and his opponents should take advantage of the fact that those systems won’t be under the same kind of attack. Many vote-by-mail states also offer drop boxes so that voters can deliver ballots directly to the registrar. And if you must mail in your ballot, the best practice would be to post it as early as possible, to account for potential delays.

Earlier this year, a group of more than 100 people-- Republicans, Democrats, senior political operatives and members of the media-- gathered to role play the November election, using predetermined rules and procedures. “In each scenario other than a Biden landslide,” writes Nils Gilman of the Berggruen Institute, who helped organize the exercise, “we ended up with a constitutional crisis that lasted until the inauguration, featuring violence in the streets and a severely disrupted administrative transition.”

There you have it. To head off the worst outcomes, Trump must go down in a decisive defeat. He’s on that path already. The task for his opponents is to sustain that momentum and work to make his defeat as obvious as possible, as early as possible. The pandemic makes that a risk, but it’s a risk many of us may have to take.

Christine Pellegrino is favored to replace a worthless Republican Trumpist on Long Island. This morning she mentioned to me that "Trump's popularity or lack there-of is absolutely going to drive people to the polls, or their mailboxes, to vote. But I'm not taking my foot off the gas. At the end of the day, voters care about common sense issues: good jobs, good schools, and healthcare. Talking to voters about the change Albany can create for all of us is empowering for the disaffected. The voters want a real representative. They’re tired of lazy, lifetime politicians and they’re demanding more than they just show up for photos. Down ballot candidates like me need to make sure that people mobilized by the 'Trump factor' fill out their entire ballots."

My old friend, Jerry Leichtling, came up with a brilliant idea-- that's what brilliant people like Jerry do... come up with brilliant ideas. Take look at this proposal he just sent me:

Inasmuch as E-Commerce companies have benefitted tremendously from the Covid-19 Pandemic, these same companies should be willing to do the people of the United States a massive public service. Given the Trump-ordered slowdown of the United States Postal Service there is no reason why federally-bonded companies like Amazon, Fedex and UPS should not, as a patriotic public service, pick up all voters' ballots and deliver them to Local Boards of Elections. These companies, and hundreds more, already do massive business with the Postal Service. They have literally millions of employees and are NOT slowing down. Please write to the CEO’s of Amazon-- Jeff Bezos (Jeff@Amazon.com); Fedex-- Fred Smith (Fredric.Smith@Fedex.Com) and UPS, Carol Tome (CTome@UPS.com) with the heading or hashtag Special Delivery Democracy. and send copies to your elected representatives as well. Let’s see if we can derail Trump’s express train to tyranny.

Counting Sheep by Nancy Ohanian

Pushing Back Against The Times' Understanding Of Normalizing Nazis 101

-by Valley Girl

I’ve been following the fall-out from the New York Times article A Voice of Hate in America’s Heartland. (By the way, early versions have the title as "The Neo-Nazi Next Door." I’ve read everything I could find. Two articles particularly struck me, out of the many I’ve read.

One is from Damon Young titled A Line-by-Line Response to the New York Times’ Response to the Backlash It Received for Publishing a Nazi Puff Piece. In addition to writing for The Root, Damon Young is also a columnist for GQ. The response Damon Young gives is to this defense by the NY Times: Readers Accuse Us of Normalizing a Nazi Sympathizer; We Respond. In the following, I’ve added who said what, because the original formatting in the article challenged my copy and paste abilities. Damon:

On Nov. 25, the New York Times published “A Voice of Hate in America’s Heartland”-- a piece about the wedding registry, eating habits and eyebrow maintenance of an Ohio man who also happens to be a Nazi. This profile bothered quite a few people, who were somewhat annoyed that the country’s biggest and most important newspaper would give a white nationalist a Better Homes and Gardens cover spread.

The Times was kind enough to respond to that response. And I felt it was only right to top off the response lasagna by giving a response to that response, which is underneath the Times’ response to the response.

Response response response response response response response.

The Times explained:

A profile in The Times of Tony Hovater, a white nationalist and Nazi sympathizer in Ohio, elicited a huge amount of feedback this weekend, most of it sharply critical. Here’s how the piece came about, why we wrote it and why we think it was important to do so.

This should be fun.

NYT: The genesis of the story was the aftermath of the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Va., in August, the terrifying Ku Klux Klan-like images of young white men carrying tiki torches and shouting “Jews will not replace us,” and the subsequent violence that included the killing of a woman, Heather D. Heyer.

Damon: Those images were truly terrible, and the murder of Heather D. Heyer was horrifying. As was the response from the president of the United States of America about what happened in Charlottesville.

Fortunately, we have institutions like the New York Times that we can depend on to bring us the truth during these dark hours and to ensure that white supremacists and Nazis are thought of and treated the same way you might treat a roach scurrying across a kitchen counter.

NYT: Who were those people?

Damon: Um, wait. You literally just answered that question in your last paragraph. Those people are white supremacists. And just to reiterate that point, you refer to them as "young white men carrying tiki torches and shouting 'Jews will not replace us.'" What the hell is happening here? Did you have a stroke between the writing of these sentences?

NYT: We assigned Richard Fausset, one of our smartest thinkers and best writers, to profile one of the far-right foot soldiers at the rally. We ended up settling on Mr. Hovater, who, it turned out, was a few years older than another Ohio man, James Alex Fields Jr., who was charged with murder after the authorities said he drove his car into a crowd of protesters, killing Ms. Heyer.

Damon: But why, though? You could have assigned an intern for this task. Shit, you could have assigned me. I would have just emailed Hovater.

"Yo, dude. You still on that Nazi shit?"

If he replied "Yes," I would have written the story on the spot. And it would have been called, "“Tony Hovater Is Still on That Nazi Shit and There’s Really Nothing Else to See Here." And the entire text of the story would have been "Nazis gonna Nazi."

NYT: Our reporter went to Ohio to spend time with Mr. Hovater and submitted several drafts and updates in between assignments that included Hurricane Harvey in Houston, Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico and the Roy Moore campaign in Alabama. The story finally ran online Saturday.

Damon: It’s great that Richard Fausset has other responsibilities at The Times other than existing as the Ohio-Nazi Whisperer. I’d imagine the Ohio-Nazi-whispering beat to be quite dry.

NYT: Whatever our goal, a lot of readers found the story offensive, with many seizing on the idea we were normalizing neo-Nazi views and behavior. "How to normalize Nazis 101!" one reader wrote on Twitter. "I’m both shocked and disgusted by this article," wrote another. "Attempting to 'normalize' white supremacist groups-- should Never have been printed!"

Damon: If the goal of devoting thousands of words to a fucking Nazi in Ohio wasn’t disgusting, then what was it? Seriously. What was the fucking point of this? We already know that Nazis exist in America. And we already know that some of them shop at Target. So, again, what was your goal?

NYT: Our reporter and his editors agonized over the tone and content of the article. The point of the story was not to normalize anything but to describe the degree to which hate and extremism have become far more normal in American life than many of us want to think.

Damon: I, for one, am sorry that your reporter and his editors agonized over doing the fucking jobs that they are paid to do. That reporters and editors would be expected to report and edit and vet is truly a travesty, and I’m sure the family of Heather Heyer would agree. I will organize a candlelight vigil for your newsroom this evening.

NYT: We described Mr. Hovater as a bigot, a Nazi sympathizer who posted images on Facebook of a Nazi-like America full of happy white people and swastikas everywhere. We understand that some readers wanted more pushback, and we hear that loud and clear.

Damon: Yes. It would have been nice, if the New York Times decided to run a profile on a Nazi, for said profile to have provided more pushback. Because if there’s one thing we know about Nazis, they can always use more pushback. There’s never a point, in regard to Nazis and pushback, where you might step back and say, "You know, I think this Nazi pushback is overkill now." Because there is no overkill with Nazi pushback. Just underkill. And by "underkill" I mean "a profile in the New York Times."

NYT: Some readers also criticized the article for including a link to a webpage that sells swastika armbands. This was intended to show the darker reality beyond the anodyne language of the website. But we saw the criticism, agreed and removed the link.

Damon: Wait, y’all did what? Y’all gave the Nazis a branding platform? What the fuck is wrong with y’all?

NYT: Some readers did see value in the piece. Shane Bauer, a senior reporter at Mother Jones and a winner of the National Magazine Award, tweeted: "People mad about this article want to believe that Nazis are monsters we cannot relate to. White supremacists are normal ass white people and it’s been that way in America since 1776. We will continue to be in trouble till we understand that."

Damon: Yeah, some people saw the value in the piece. And some people put lettuce in the microwave. What’s your point?

NYT: But far more were outraged by the article. "You know who had nice manners?" Bess Kalb, a writer for Jimmy Kimmel Live, said on Twitter. "The Nazi who shaved my uncle Willie’s head before escorting him into a cement chamber where he locked eyes with children as their lungs filled with poison and they suffocated to death in agony. Too much? Exactly. That’s how you write about Nazis."

Damon: Bess Kalb has a point.

NYT: Others urged us to focus our journalism less on those pushing hate and more on those on the receiving end of that hate. "Instead of long, glowing profiles of Nazis/White nationalists, why don’t we profile the victims of their ideologies?" asked Karen Attiah, an editor at the Washington Post. "Why not a piece about the mother of Heather Heyer, the woman who was killed in Charlottesville? Follow-ups on those who were injured? Or how PoC are coping?"

Damon: Of course, profiles on the people directly harmed by this hate speech and violence would be much more compelling. But that would require whiteness—white maleness, specifically—to be uncentered. And uncentering whiteness is harder than eating just one Lay’s potato chip, apparently.

NYT: We regret the degree to which the piece offended so many readers. We recognize that people can disagree on how best to tell a disagreeable story. What we think is indisputable, though, is the need to shed more light, not less, on the most extreme corners of American life and the people who inhabit them. That’s what the story, however imperfectly, tried to do.

Damon: There’s a difference between shedding light and handing someone the spotlight. I agree that light is necessary to expose and, if required, shame. But y’all basically gave him and the thousands like him the light and the mic. Instead of truly depicting him for who he is, you let him take a selfie. And it’s not wrong to believe that "No country for Nazi selfies" should be an editorial edict at the New York Times.

NYT: As always, we want to continue hearing from our readers. Please share your thoughts in the comments. We will be reading them.

Damon: Wait, you’re going to do more work? Shit. Do I have to organize another vigil?

The second article that particularly struck me was What the New York Times’ Nazi Story Left Out-- The history of America has been written by normal white racists living in normal towns, by Jamelle Bouie.

The conceit of "A Voice of Hate in America’s Heartland," the New York Times’ profile of Tony Hovater-- a neo-Nazi who helped start the Traditionalist Worker Party, a white nationalist group-- is that there’s something incongruent in Hovater’s ordinary Midwestern life and his virulently racist and anti-Semitic beliefs. "Why did this man-- intelligent, socially adroit and raised middle class amid the relatively well-integrated environments of United States military bases-- gravitate toward the furthest extremes of American political discourse?" asks the writer, Richard Fausset, in a subsequent piece explaining the editorial decisions behind the story and reflecting on his conversations with Hovater.

Hovater’s extremism may demand some additional explanation, but there’s nothing novel about virulent white racism existing in banal environments. That, in fact, is what it means to live in a society structured by racism and racist attitudes. The sensational nature of Hovater’s identification with Nazi Germany obscures the ordinariness of his racism. White supremacy is a hegemonic ideology in the United States. It exists everywhere, in varying forms, ranging from passive beliefs in black racial inferiority to the extremist ideology we see in groups like the League of the South.

A look back to the past is instructive. In 1921, one of the deadliest anti-black riots in American history occurred in Tulsa, Oklahoma. A mob of white men, eager for retribution after the alleged assault of a young white woman, descended on the city’s prosperous Greenwood neighborhood, dubbed the "Black Wall Street" by admirers. Armed with pistols, rifles, and a machine gun-- as well as a plane equipped with rudimentary bombs--this makeshift army burned Greenwood to the ground, killing hundreds in the process. We don't know who gave order to the mob, organizing and amplifying its lethality, but we can identify the men who participated.

Virulent racism doesn’t just exist in seemingly banal environments; virulent racism has shaped their very existence. [sidebar]

They weren’t, as white Tulsans would later learn, the working-class men drawn to the city’s oil wealth and frontier atmosphere. No, they were Tulsa’s white elite--its respectable middle class. "Photographs of the tragedy also showed that many in the white mob drove the most expensive cars and dressed in clothes beyond the means of the average roughneck," notes Tim Madigan in The Burning: Massacre, Destruction, and the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921. They were recognizable. Ordinary.

The same was true of the anti-black mob that destroyed parts of Knoxville, Tennessee, in 1919. It was true of the one that lynched Rob Edwards in Forsyth County, Georgia, in 1911, and later drove the blacks of Forsyth out of the county. From the Ku Klux Klan of the Reconstruction South to the White Citizens Councils of the Jim Crow South, ordinary men and women have always been enforcers for the racial order.

Likewise, those seemingly ordinary environments are themselves part of the story of American racism. As James Loewen describes in Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism, the human landscape of the Midwest was shaped by rigid segregation. "Beginning in about 1890 and continuing until 1968, white Americans established thousands of towns across the United States for whites only. Many towns drove out their black populations, then posted sundown signs. Other towns passed ordinances barring African Americans after dark or prohibiting them from owning or renting property; still others established such policies by informal means, harassing and even killing those who violated the rule." Hovater's home, Huber Heights, Ohio, was one of those places. Virulent racism doesn't just exist in seemingly banal environments; virulent racism has shaped their very existence.

If the focus on Hovater's mundane life paints an inaccurate picture of racist ideology as abnormal, then the larger decision to profile a neo-Nazi further obscures the forces driving our politics at this moment. Even with their greater visibility in public life, extremist racists like Hovater remain fringe figures who can make a splash in the media—and provoke violence—but do little else.

By contrast, more "moderate" forms of white racism-- the everyday, ordinary varieties that rarely elicit protest outside of public forums-- are politically powerful. They are what had a profound influence on the 2016 election, what President Trump stokes and feeds on when he tweets against black athletes and celebrities, and what shape some of the limits of the possible in our politics. Someone like Hovater might have a relatively high profile, but what's fueling the return of explicit racism to our politics is something appropriately banal and, yes, ordinary.

And, if anyone is interested in what has happened to Tony Hovater... well, he, his wife, and his brother-law have lost their jobs at the 451 Grill. One writer says that a reference to the "Haystack hamburger" in the original article allowed people to figure out that he worked at the 451 Grill. Well I couldn’t find that reference in the article. But, however it was discovered, the 451 Grill responded in part:

A November 25th New York Times article featured one of our employees. In the article, the employee shared his political views, specifically those of being a white nationalist. The article went on, illustrating some very disturbing images and thoughts from this individual. The 571 Grill and Draft House does not share any of these views with this person, nor was the owner aware of them prior to the publishing of this article.

Since the release of this article, we have been swamped with phone calls and social media messages that are threatening and intimidating to both us and our employees. These hateful and disturbing messages are truly saddening to those of us who just want to serve delicious food and cold beers.

Due to these very disturbing threats, the employee who was featured in the article suggested that we release him from employment. We have done so and have also released his wife and her brother who also worked for us. We felt it necessary to fully sever the relationship with them in hopes to protect our 20 other employees from the verbal and social media threats being made from individuals all over the country, and as far as Australia. We neither encourage nor support any forms of hate within our establishment.

Oh, yeah, and someone published Hovater’s home address, and as a result he’s been forced (decided) to leave the rental house, to move to an undisclosed location.

"Hovater tells The Post he's moving because he can no longer afford the rent and because of safety concerns. 'It's not for the best to stay in a place that is now public information,' he said. 'We live alone. No one else is there to watch the house while I'm away.'"

Two more points-- the first: Richard Fausset kinda sorta defended himself (poor me) in an article at the NY Times titled I Interviewed a White Nationalist and Fascist. What Was I Left With? You can read the whole thing it you want. But below, I’ll give some choice parts, along with my responses.

Fausset: There is a hole at the heart of my story about Tony Hovater, the white nationalist and Nazi sympathizer.

VG: No shit.

Fausset: And yet what, of any of this, explained Mr. Hovater’s radical turn? What prompted him to take his ideas beyond his living room, beyond the chat rooms, and on to Charlottesville, where he marched in August alongside allies like the neo-Confederate League of the South and the Detroit-based National Socialist Movement, which bills itself as "America’s Premier White Civil Rights Organization?" Where was his Rosebud?

VG: Where was his Rosebud? WTF. Rosebud? That ends a paragraph, and no further reference to Rosebud is given. I assume he was referring to the movie Citizen Kane, in a hoity toity way. Unless, and my thoughts did go there, he was asking if Hovater had failed to sexually satisfy his wife, by failing to find her rosebud?

Fausett: On the phone, Mr. Hovater responded to my question by rattling off names of libertarian academics, making references to sci-fi movies and describing, yet again, his frustration with what he described as the plodding and unjust nature of American democracy. As he did so, I was thinking about an album I grew up with by the Minutemen, the Southern California punk group, and its brilliantly koanic title: What Makes a Man Start Fires?



VG: WOW! How cool Fausset claims to be (or so he thinks) by mentioning the influence a Southern California [virulently anti-fascist] punk band had on him. The Minutemen or aka the Missingmen, as I learned when I went to Youtube to listen to this band’s music. I could barely understand a word of the album he references. Green Day they are not [Ed- D. Boon and Mike Watt were a major influence on early Green Day].

VG: And Fausset closes his agonizing "mea culpa" by asking again "What Makes a Man Start Fires?" Gosh, it’s a toss-up as to whether he was taking about Hovater, or referring to himself, given all the fall out from his horrible NY Times article.

Now, on to the second point: how does a reporter report on and interview neo-Nazi white supremacists? Here’s how it’s done: From a Vice broadcast-- Charlottesville: Race and Terror-- VICE News Tonight (HBO).

"This Is A Gangster Family"-- The FBI's Person Of Interest

The quote in the subject line was something reporter Michelle Goldberg said to Chris Hayes last night, about Prince Jared or, as we know him, Kushner-in-law. Her point was that the Kushners-- like the Trumps-- may be able to afford to clean up nicely but that they are nothing but vicious, merciless predators. And now the law is catching up with them (again). As more than one Twitter wag remarked this morning, "Gangsters don't hire family members because they're qualified. Gangsters hire family members because they're less likely to talk to the FBI." The FBI is looking into Kushner's Putin-Gate role. NBC first reported that Kushner is under scrutiny.

The FBI's scrutiny of Kushner places the bureau's sprawling counterintelligence and criminal investigation not only on the doorstep of the White House, but the Trump family circle. The Washington Post first reported last week that a senior White House official close to Trump was a "person of interest," but did not name the person. The term "person of interest" has no legal meaning.

The officials said Kushner is in a different category from former Trump aides Paul Manafort and Michael Flynn, who are formally considered subjects of the investigation. According to the Justice Department's U.S. Attorneys' Manual, "A 'subject' of an investigation is a person whose conduct is within the scope of the grand jury's investigation."

...Kushner met at least once in December with the Russian ambassador, Sergey Kislyak, and he also met last year with a Russian banker, Sergey Gorkov... Congressional aides have said they would like to question Kushner about that meeting, and Kushner has said he would voluntarily appear before the Senate intelligence committee as part of its Russia investigation.

Gorkov is chairman of VneshEconomBank, a Russian government-owned institution that has been under U.S. sanctions since July 2014. Gorkov studied at the training school for the FSB, one of Russia's intelligence services.

Sources on the fringe right say Bannon is taking a victory lap over the widely reported FBI news. We've been writing about Jared's fabulous adventure for over a year now, from the jailbird father to the visa-selling in China. But a must-read on this slimy crook came out this week at Slate by Jamelle Bouie, Nothing But Slumlords. "In a feature for ProPublica and the New York Times Magazine," wrote Bouie, "journalist Alec MacGillis shined light on the role of Jared Kushner-- son-in-law and close adviser to President Trump-- as a real estate developer and landlord. In 2011 and 2012, seeking a stable source of revenue, Kushner and his partners purchased thousands of units of working-class housing in the inner-ring suburbs of cities like Baltimore and Pittsburgh. Their largest holdings are in Baltimore County, Maryland, where they control 15 complexes that house up to 20,000 people in total. And in managing these properties, reports MacGillis, Kushner is a harsh and unforgiving landlord." A friend of mine, who was Kushner's tutor when he was in high school tells me Kushner isn't very bright and her son told me he's "a violent, spoiled asshole." No one could believe he got into Harvard-- until it came out that his father bought him a slot in the freshman class.

Kushner’s company is relentless in its pursuit of “virtually any unpaid rent or broken lease-- even in the numerous cases where the facts appear to be on the tenants’ side.” Residents are slapped with thousands of dollars in fees and penalties, even if they had previously won permission to terminate a lease. All of this is compounded by poor upkeep of facilities. MacGillis describes one family that has had to deal with mold, broken appliances, and physical damage to their unit-- even after paying the management company for repairs. In one complex, a resident “had a mouse infestation that was severe enough that her 12-year-old daughter recently found one in her bed.” In another, raw sewage flowed into the apartment.

Jared Kushner stepped down as chief executive of Kushner Companies upon taking his position in the White House, although he retains a $600 million stake in the business, which still holds and manages these properties. “They’re nothing but slumlords,” said one tenant to MacGillis. For someone whose company all but exploits the precariousness and desperation of people who have few other choices for decent housing, it is a fair charge.

...Kushner... is working in an administration whose policies would make life more precarious for even more people. The priorities include a health care plan that would take insurance from tens of millions of people, a budget plan that would slash vital aid for up to one-fifth of all Americans, and a tax plan that would use those funds to lower rates for the wealthiest Americans. In turn, that precariousness opens new opportunities for those, like Kushner and Trump, who will not hesitate to exploit vulnerable people for profit.

The past eight years of Democratic government were far from perfect, but liberal policymakers were at least attuned to the reality of exploitation and the need for policies and protections to stop and punish the businesses that work to make life more difficult, and more expensive, for ordinary Americans. Like President Trump’s “university,” Jared Kushner’s history in the low-income housing market is a reminder: With this White House, we don’t just have an indifference to exploitation-- we have an administration of actual predatory capitalists eager to reshape the government in their image, for their interests.

Last night Politico ran a story by David Freedlander, Meet the Real Jared Kushner in which he reiterates that Kushner "in a White House sullied by ties to Russia and all sorts of unsavory characters from the fringe, Kushner was set to float above, surrounding himself with fellow figures from the elite worlds of Manhattan finance and real estate and deep-sixing the harder-edged ideas of the White House’s 'nationalist' wing... Because he is soft-spoken, slim and handsome, with degrees from Harvard and NYU and a family that donates to Democrats, he couldn’t possibly be the same guy knifing his West Wing rivals and urging the president to go to war with the Justice Department and the FBI."

Except that this isn’t quite how it has gone in the White House over the last several months. It was Kushner who reportedly pushed for the firing of FBI Director James Comey over the objections of Bannon. And it was Kushner who was the lone voice urging for a counterattack after Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein announced the appointment of a special prosecutor, according to the New York Times. And it is now Kushner whose family’s business activities leave him open to the same level of charges of conflict of interest that have dogged his wife and father-in-law, and Kushner who appears to be as closely tied to the Russian government as anyone serving in the White House: NBC News and the Washington Post reported Thursday that the FBI is taking a close look at his contacts with the Russians.

UPDATE: It's Friday So The News Is Coming Hot And Furious

The NY Times has their own new Putin-Gate blockbuster tonight-- just hours after the story about how Kushner proposed to the Russians that they set up a secret channel of communication using secure Russian facilities, something he carefiully hid from American intelligence. This one is about a Putin crony, Oleg Deripaska, who Manafort used to work for. He wants immunity to testify in front of Congress. Congress turned him down. Deripaska lives in Moscow and has been banned from traveling to the U.S. because of his connections to organized crime.

But he was able to enter the country in another way during that period, according to previously undisclosed court documents. Mr. Deripaska came to the United States eight times between 2011 and 2014 with government permission as a Russian diplomat, according to affidavits he gave in a little-noticed lawsuit in a Manhattan court. Mr. Deripaska said in the court papers that his visits were brief and made in connection with meetings of the G-20 and the United Nations, not to conduct business.

The court documents and public records show that Mr. Deripaska, whose companies have long had offices in New York, has expanded his American holdings over the past 10 years, buying high-priced Manhattan townhouses and a major stake in a Russian-language newspaper in New York.

The lawsuit was brought by Alexander Gliklad, a Russian-born businessman, who charged that Mr. Deripaska had used his diplomatic status as a cover to do business, which the oligarch denied. Mr. Gliklad claims he is entitled to collect funds that Mr. Deripaska had agreed to pay to settle a lawsuit with a man who owed Mr. Gliklad money from a court judgment. Last month, a New York State Supreme Court justice rejected Mr. Gliklad’s argument that the Manhattan court had jurisdiction over Mr. Deripaska.

As Mr. Manafort’s dealings with Russia-friendly Ukrainian politicians, business activities and loans have come under examination in recent months, his former client has gotten caught up in the media scrutiny. The two men were partners in an offshore fund set up in 2007 to buy telecommunications and cable television assets in Ukraine, where Mr. Manafort had advised then-President Viktor F. Yanukovych. That deal fell apart, winding up in litigation in the Cayman Islands.

In March, Mr. Deripaska took out newspaper ads stating that he was willing to participate in hearings before Congress after The Associated Press published a report alleging that Mr. Manafort had provided him with a plan in 2005 outlining steps to “greatly benefit the Putin government,” by influencing politics and news coverage in the United States. Mr. Deripaska has denied ever entering into such an arrangement and sued The A.P. for libel last month. The news organization has said it stands by its article. Mr. Manafort has denied that his work for the oligarch was aimed at aiding the Russian government.

Is Hillary Clinton Too Hawkish To Be The Democratic Party Nominee?

Does it comes as news to anyone that establishment Democrat Hillary Clinton is an unabashed hawk?

It shouldn't. She may be in the party that favors-- or at least pays lips service to-- peace, but she's really always been ready to prove how tough she is by sending American kids off to fight for corporate interests. It's fair to call her policies militaristic and aggressive and to point out that she hasn't learned a lesson after her defeat the last time she ran for president, when many Democrats refused to vote for her because of her support for George W. Bush's unprovoked attack on Iraq. She opted to get involved-- and in as big a way as she could persuade Obama to-- with the disastrous Libyan civil war, which has been catastrophic for that country and for the region, from Mali to Italy.

Glenn Greenwald, writing for The Intercept, pointed out that the neoliberal Brookings Institution was the perfect place for her to stake out her militaristic turf last week. "Brookings," he wrote, "served as Ground Zero for centrist think tank advocacy of the Iraq War, which Clinton (along with potential rival Joe Biden) notoriously and vehemently advocated. Brookings’ two leading 'scholar'-stars-- Kenneth Pollack and Michael O’Hanlon-- spent all of 2002 and 2003 insisting that invading Iraq was wise and just, and spent the years after that assuring Americans that the 'victorious' war and subsequent occupation were going really well."

Since then, O’Hanlon in particular has advocated for increased military force in more countries than one can count. That’s not surprising: Brookings is funded in part by one of the Democratic Party’s favorite billionaires, Haim Saban, who is a dual citizen of the U.S. and Israel and once said of himself: "I’m a one-issue guy, and my issue is Israel." Pollack advocated for the attack on Iraq while he was "Director of Research of the Saban Center for Middle East Policy." Saban became the Democratic Party’s largest fundraiser-- even paying $7 million for the new DNC building-- and is now a very substantial funder of Hillary Clinton’s campaign. In exchange, she’s written a personal letter to him publicly "expressing her strong and unequivocal support for Israel in the face of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanction movement."

So the hawkish Brookings is the prism through which Hillary Clinton’s foreign policy worldview can be best understood. The think tank is filled with former advisers to both Bill and Hillary Clinton, and would certainly provide numerous top-level foreign policy officials in any Hillary Clinton administration. As she put it today at the start: "There are a lot of long-time friends and colleagues who perch here at Brookings." And she proceeded to deliver exactly the speech one would expect, reminding everyone of just how militaristic and hawkish she is.

Her inability to just come out and admit she's as much a hawk as a garden-variety Republican is part of what makes her seem so inauthentic to so many Democratic voters. She is the most unlikable front-runner I have ever seen. Bernie is both authentic and straight-talking... and very likable. And not a warmonger.

Bernie Sanders took to the floor of the Senate on Wednesday to outline his support of the Obama administration's Iran nuclear deal, likening its critics to those who backed the Iraq War in 2002.

In doing so, Sanders drew a sharp contrast with Hillary Clinton, who earlier Wednesday made her own case for supporting the deal.

"Those who have spoken out against the Iran agreement, including many in this chamber, and those who have made every effort to thwart the diplomatic process, are many of the same people who spoke out forcefully and irresponsible about the need to go to war with Iraq, one of the worst foreign policy blunders in the modern history of our country," Sanders said.

Sanders did not mention his vote against the war in 2002, but he has frequently cited his early opposition to the bill that authorized military force, and, like other Democratic candidates, has used the issue to highlight differences between him and Clinton.

In the speech, Sanders characterized the GOP as war-mongering.

"I fear that many of my Republican colleagues don't fully understand that war must be a last resort not the first resort. It is easy to go to war. It is not so easy to fully comprehend the unintended consequences of that war," Sanders said. "Yes, the military option should always be on the table, but it should be the last option."

Sanders' remarks came hours after Clinton delivered a forceful yet cautious backing of the Iran nuclear deal in a speech at the Brookings Institution in Washington, saying it helps protect Israel and pledging that, if elected, she would strengthen the security bond between the Jewish state and the U.S.

The Senate is currently debating a resolution to disapprove of the administration's agreement. Forty-two Democratic members of the Senate have come out in favor of the deal, giving President Barack Obama enough votes to prevent a likely GOP-led resolution disapproving of the deal.

"It is my firm belief that the test of a great nation with the most powerful military on earth is not how many wars it can engage in, but how it can use our strength and our capabilities to resolve international conflicts in a peaceful way," Sanders said. "I believe it is incumbent upon us to give the negotiated agreement the chance to succeed."

Clinton's vote to authorize the war in Iraq has nagged her political career for years, most notably during her 2008 bid for president, when then-Sen. Barack Obama, who publicly opposed the war, cited Clinton's support to claim he was better suited to lead on foreign policy.

Clinton has since said her Iraq War vote was a "mistake."

Yes, but why does she now see it as a mistake? Because it proved to be powerfully unpopular enough to deny her the Democratic presidental nomination in 2008? She's already saber-rattling against Iran, a posture far more popular among GOP primary voters than among Democratic primary voters.

Addressing Iran directly today, Hillary Clinton said unequivocally that she “will not hesitate to take military action” as president if the country attempts to obtain a nuclear weapon.

“The United States will never allow you to acquire a nuclear weapon,” Clinton said during remarks at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C Wednesday morning, in a message aimed directly at Iran’s leaders. “As president I will take whatever actions are necessary to protect the U.S. and its allies. I will not hesitate to take military action.”

The democratic presidential candidate, who says she supports the Iran nuclear deal as “part of a larger strategy” for dealing with Iran, explained that military action would only be a last resort after trying diplomatic routes first.

“Because we’ve shown our commitment to diplomacy first, the world will likely join us,” she predicted.

...Clinton also sympathized with Israelis who she said have “every reason to be alarmed by a country that both denies its existence and seeks its destruction.”

“I would not support this agreement for one second if I thought it put Israel in greater danger,” she said, adding, “I say it with humility…I’m not Israeli.”

In addition, Clinton pledged to sell Israel sophisticated F-35 pilot aircrafts and to invite the Israeli Prime Minister to the White House during her first month as president.

James Bouie, writing for Slate, referred to Clinton as a wise hawk. The public, he asserts-- and he's armed with polls-- wants a more hawkish foreign policy than Obama's. And she's not as bad, never as bad, as Republicans. "[T]he public," he wrote, "wants a more active foreign policy. But it isn’t interested in reckless confrontation."

People remember the last war, and aren’t thrilled with the chance for another one. To that point, 59 percent of Americans still think the Iraq war was a mistake, and 55 percent oppose putting ground troops back in the country. What’s more, about half of Americans are wary of too much foreign involvement. Put differently, the public wants an alternative, and it isn’t the GOP. Which brings us back to Clinton. If Republicans represent the right wing of the mainstream debate on foreign policy, and if Obama represents the left, then Clinton is well-placed to stand in the center as a tough but diplomatic leader.

Clinton’s approach may be the right tack for a general election. Again, voters want change. But they support diplomacy and don’t want another war or occupation. Clinton offers a third way: Obama-style policies merged with hawkish rhetoric. It satisfies the public but keeps Clinton to the left of the Republican Party, and clears her path for attacks on GOP candidates. Which, incidentally, is what she did. “That’s not leadership, that’s recklessness,” said Clinton of Republican rhetoric. “It would set us right down the very dangerous path we’ve worked so hard to avoid. … Great powers can’t just jump agreements and expect the rest of the world to go along with us.”

Hillary has a new attack line, and she owes it all to her (and Obama’s) opponents in the GOP.

If you're tired of voting for the lesser of two evils-- as I am and don't plan on ever doing again-- we're blessed to have a real alternative to that Beltway trope right now: Bernie Sanders, worth supporting based on his record and his platform.

What's The Matter With White Folks Today?

No, not a new Bennelton ad

Just as Boehner announced his roster of all white male committee chairs (plus a gal to take care of the cafeteria and bathrooms), Bernie Sanders was on NPR with Steve Inskeep talking about, among other things, how the Democrats have been losing white working class voters to the anti-working family rightists. He worries, as do most progressives, that the Democratic Beltway insiders have decided to throw their lot in with the Big Business and Wall Street interests and abandon the FDR coalition of working class Americans.

When contemptible party apparachik Debbie Wasserman Schultz's says she's leading an investigation into why the Democrats failed so miserably November 4 so that she can prove it wasn't her fault, clearly saner minds are needed if the Democrats are going to more than just muddle through. Bernie's ideas about why the part failed 2 weeks ago probably don't have much in common with the view from Wasserman Schultz, Steve Israel and the Beltway Dems. "To see where the Democratic Party is, I think, it's important to understand where America is," he began. "And where America is, is that today we are seeing the collapse, the continued collapse, of the American middle class. You have working-class families who have given up the dream of sending their kids to college. My family never had any money. My father came ... from Poland without a nickel in his pocket. He was able to send two of his kids to college. That dream is now not a reality for a whole lot of folks in this country.

And then people look out and they say, 'Gee, the wealthiest people are doing phenomenally well.' And where are the Democrats? Do people see the Democratic Party standing up to Wall Street? Any of these guys going to jail? Not really. The average person is working longer hours, lower wages, and they do not see any political party standing up and fighting for their rights. What they see is a Republican Party becoming extremely right wing, controlled by folks like the Koch brothers. But they do not see a party representing the working class of this country." White working class voters, desperate, confused and rightfully pissed off, are falling into the arms of their class enemies. Bernie:

I am focusing on the fact that whether you're white or black or Hispanic or Asian, if you are in the working class, you are struggling to keep your heads above water. You're worried about your kids. What should the Democratic Party be talking about, Steve? What they should be talking about is a massive federal jobs program. There was once a time when our nation's infrastructure-- roads, bridges, water systems, rail-- were the envy of the world. Today that's no longer the case.

I would say if you go out on the street and you talk to people and say, "Which is the party of the American working class?" People would look to you like you were a little bit crazy, they wouldn't know what you were talking about, and they certainly wouldn't identify the Democrats.

People have been talking about Dana Milbank's opinion piece in Tuesday's Washington Post in which he tries to delineate the limits to populism. It's not encouraging.

Warren’s populism is appealing-- not fiery or vengeful but compassionate and grounded in fairness. She also has the virtue of being correct: People don’t feel improvement in the economy because the gains haven’t been shared evenly, income inequality has widened and wages haven’t increased along with stock prices and corporate profits.

Yet there’s a limit to how far Warren, and the Democrats, can go with their little-guy theme, for one simple reason: They can’t afford it.

More than ever in America, elections are purchased, not won. And that money comes from corporate and wealthy interests. Run against corporations and you lose that money-- and the election.

...This leaves Warren well-qualified to ask what she calls a “fundamental question”: “Who does the government work for?”

The answer is easy: The people who bought it.

Responding to all this in Slate, Jamelle Bouie goes off in a way different direction from Milbank's defeatism. He correctly identifies the problem for the Beltway careerist Democrats as not really embracing populism to bring the party any credibility with the working class Americans-- regardless of how the Republicans try to divide them up-- Bernie Sanders is talking about. "The Democratic Party," he reminds us, "styles itself a fighter for the working class. But a substantial part of that class-- the white part-- wants nothing to do with it." Democratic politicians didn't get their votes-- didn't get their votes hugely.

The recurring debate of how to win these voters, or at least a portion of them. In a recent feature for the Washington Monthly, for example, Ruy Teixeira and John Halpin argue that Democrats can capitalize on the generational divide in the white working class. The key fact is that “white working class” is a big category with a large number of different kinds of voters, including millennials, who fall to the left on most national issues. “Today’s young white working-class voters are notably more liberal on issues concerning the role of government” than their older counterparts note Teixeira and Halpin. And significantly these young whites are “significantly more open to rising diversity than the white working class as a whole.”

The conclusion is straightforward. Democrats don’t have to worry about alienating these voters with their cosmopolitanism. If they can just embrace a populist, forward thinking agenda-- in which they tackle stagnation and explicitly attack the wealthy engineers of extreme income inequality—they can win these younger whites who are comfortable with diversity and want a more level society. As Noam Scheiber writes for the New Republic, commenting on Teixeira and Halpin’s piece, “The politics of this approach work not just because populism is a ‘message’ that a majority of voters want to hear. But because, unlike the status quo, it can actually improve their economic prospects.”

Implicit in all of this is the assumption voters will believe the pitch. That they’ll hear the case for stronger programs, higher minimum wages, and higher taxes on the rich, and believe Democrats are advocating for them, and not some other group.

The problem is I don’t think we can make that assumption.

After all, working-class whites didn’t leave the Democratic Party over insufficiently populist policy and rhetoric. The liberal economic reforms of 1960s-- and Medicare in particular-- paid benefits to white working-class families throughout the 1970s and ’80s, even as the group moved to a decisive break with the Democrats. No, the proximate cause of the break was the Democratic Party’s close identification with black Americans, who-- after the riots of the late ’60s and ’70s-- became identified with urban disorder and welfare.

Specifically, whites were bewildered and infuriated with liberals who defended rioting communities-- correctly noting the decades of deprivation and abuse that led to those violent outbursts—and pushed anti-poverty programs to address the underlying conditions. Black incomes rose while at the same time, many white incomes were beginning to stagnate or even fall. Why was the government spending our tax dollars on them, working-class whites asked, when they destroy their neighborhoods and refuse to work, and we’re losing our jobs and our homes? In Nixonland, historian Rick Perlstein captures the basic attitude by relaying this comment from a white construction worker, directed at George McGovern, “They’re payin’ people who are on welfare today doin’ nothin’! They’re laughin’ at our society! And we’re all hardworkin’ people and we’re gettin’ laughed at for workin’ every day!”

Part of this was just racism. For most of the post-war era, whites were empowered by the federal government to separate themselves and their lives from black Americans. For the white middle class, federal aid built white suburbs and white schools, and for the white working-class, it built segregated housing projects and cities. The civil rights revolution brought blacks and black demands to their doorsteps, and for the white working class-- which couldn’t just leave for the suburbs-- it fueled a backlash.

But part of it was something broader. After all, there wasn’t a backlash to government programs writ large. Then, as now, working-class whites are ardent supporters of Social Security and Medicare. But to them, our retirement programs came with an implicit social contract: If you work and contribute to society, society will care for you into your old age. By contrast, you didn’t have to work to benefit from anti-poverty programs, in fact, you could riot and still receive government benefits. To these whites, the New Deal and its successor programs rewarded self-reliance and independence. The War on Poverty didn’t. And they hated it.

...Working-class whites are physically closer to the poor. And to them, as Kevin Drum notes, the poor are often “folks next door who don’t do a lick of work but somehow keep getting government checks paid for by their tax dollars.” It doesn’t matter that working-class tax rates are relatively low, and that anti-poverty programs are a small part of the federal budget. What matters is that they pay taxes but don’t get the same kind of benefits.

...Democrats can adopt populist rhetoric, but there’s no guarantee working-class whites will buy it. Indeed, in parts of the country-- like the Deep South-- it’s a lost cause. The Democratic Party is too associated with blacks and too associated with welfare to win over enough whites to make a difference.

Put another way, for a new rhetoric of populism to work-- or at least, attract the winnable whites identified by Teixeira and Halpin-- it needs to come with a commitment to universal policies that working-class whites like and support. (It’s no coincidence that the most liberal working-class whites belong to private and public sector unions.)

But the United States doesn’t have a political party to support that kind of social democracy. Instead, it has the Democratic Party, a collection of disparate interests which-- at its best-- is nervous about economic liberalism and hesitant to push anything outside the mainstream. And worse, it has a presidential frontrunner who-- more than anyone else-- is connected to the kinds of elites and the kinds of policies that would push the party away from the muscular liberalism it needs.