Trump and his campaign are emulating Hitler and his Nazi regime. Of that there is no longer any doubt. From the hate filled anti Semitic, anti Muslim rhetoric and false propaganda, to the infusion of Christian Nationalism. This is Nazism. And the GOP is going along with him.
Art by Kevin Kreneck. For more Graphics and Greeting Cards, go to https://kkreneck.wixsite.com/mysite
Donald Trump reacted the only way he knows how to deal with a challenge May 30 when a New York jury returned guilty verdicts on all 34 felony counts against him after only two days of deliberation. Jurors found Trump falsified business records to cover up a potential sex scandal that could have wrecked his 2016 presidential campaign. Trump replied with lies and threats.
The Trump defense team may have been surprised by the quick verdict after a six-week trial. They may have thought they had a ringer among the jurors who would hold out against a guilty verdict and possibly force a mistrial, which would sideline the case at least until after the election. If so, they lost that bet, big time.
Trump refused to take any responsibility, of course. ”This was a disgrace. This was a rigged trial by a conflicted judge who was corrupt,” Trump told reporters after the verdict. He insisted he is “a very innocent man.”
“I was just convicted in a rigged political witch hunt trial: I did nothing wrong,” Trump wrote in a message to backers.
Trump and his flunkies, including House Speaker Mike Johnson, blamed President Joe Biden, whom they accused of “weaponizing” the Department of Justice and making the U.S. into a banana republic. But the U.S. would look more like a banana republic if it let a corrupt president get away with such crimes.
Banana Republicans ignored the fact that Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg answers to the voters of Manhattan, not to Biden or Attorney General Merrick Garland.
Instead, Bragg’s team brought a case to the state court that literally included the receipts that corroborated statements of damning witnesses, such as David Pecker, former publisher of the National Enquirer, who told how he agreed with Trump to execute “catch and kill” deals with porn actress Stormy Daniels and former Playboy model Karen McDougal in service of helping Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign — a plot that prosecutors labeled a conspiracy to illegally influence the election. Trump’s former lawyer, Michael Cohen, who made the payment to Daniels, filled in the details. When Trump was president, he let Cohen take the fall. Cohen served prison time for his role in the federal election violation.
Republicans have been trying to bluff their confidence that Democrats are playing into Trump’s hands ever the New York trial.
“I think it’s time we put a felon in the White House,” Republican Riverside County, California, Sheriff Chad Bianco said in a video posted to his personal Instagram account.
A post-conviction poll conducted by YouGov between May 31 and June 2 found Republicans are more receptive to having a criminal candidate for president.
In April, just 17% of Republican voters said convicted criminals “should be allowed” to become president while 58% said they should not. But now 58% of Republicans say felons “should be allowed” to be president, while just 23% say they should not.
More Republicans now say felons should be allowed to become president. But other polls show majorities of all registered voters approve of the verdict, which puts the convict in a bit of a hole.
Trump now says that, because of his conviction on 34 felony counts, he has “every right” to go after political opponents should he be elected in November. He tells supporters that his return to the White House will feature “retribution” against his enemies, who are also their enemies. When the trial started in April, Trump claimed he passed on the chance to prosecute Hillary Clinton during his presidency It would’ve been “a terrible thing” if he’d taken such a step, he claimed.
“This remains a bizarre lie,” Steve Benen wrote at MaddowBlog.com. In Trump’s first year in the White House — after the 2016 election was over and Clinton largely withdrew from public view — the then-president publicly called on the Justice Department to go after Clinton. “Everybody is asking why the Justice Department (and FBI) isn’t looking into all of the dishonesty going on with Crooked Hillary & the Dems,” Trump claimed at that time.
Republicans have joined Trump in claiming Democrats have weaponized the justice system and Trump has made it clear that he intends to purge the federal government of impartial career officials and replace them with Trump loyalists if he gets back in the White House. The Heritage Foundation’s “Project 2025” aims to destroy the DOJ’s impartiality and turn it into an attack dog for Trump.
But Republicans aren’t waiting. They’re moving forward with an aggressive plan to obstruct state and federal prosecutors who have brought another 54 felony counts against Trump that are still awaiting trial. They are targeting other Trump inquisitors ahead of the election.
Voters deserve to know the facts on Trump’s indictments brought by special prosecutor Jack Smith in Florida, where Trump is accused of keeping classified documents after leaving the White House and storing them at his Mar-a-Lago Club, including in a ballroom, a bathroom and shower, an office space, his bedroom, and a storage room,” according to the indictment. He is also accused of a “scheme to conceal” those documents from federal officials seeking their return.
Trump is accused in D.C. federal court of participating in a scheme to interfere with the transfer of power after he lost the 2020 election to now-President Joe Biden. The indictment accuses Trump and six unindicted, unnamed co-conspirators of knowingly spreading lies that there was widespread fraud in the election and that he had actually won, ultimately leading to the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. Trump denies wrongdoing and argues he is immune from prosecution.
Trump and 18 others are accused in state court in Atlanta under Georgia’s Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) of coordinating an effort to thwart proper certification of the state’s 2020 presidential election, which Biden won. The investigation was launched after disclosure of a recorded phone call to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger on Jan. 2, 2021, in which Trump pressed him “to find 11,780 votes.” Trump denies the allegations.
That trial has been delayed until at least October as three Republican appointees on the Georgia Court of Appeals consider a bid by Trump and his allies to remove Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, a Democrat, and her office from the case because of a personal relationship she had with special prosecutor Nathan Wade, who has since withdrawn from the case.
House Speaker Johnson outlined a “three-pronged approach” on how House Republicans can target the DOJ, New York and other jurisdictions that try to investigate Trump. Those plans call for launching investigations and cutting funds for Jack Smith and any state that tries to investigate Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election.
In a May 31 appearance on Fox News, Trump adviser Stephen Miller, who reportedly is on the shortlist to be Trump’s next attorney general, urged Republicans to pick up the pace in weaponizing the system against the judicial process.
“Is every House committee controlled by Republicans using its subpoena power in every way it needs to right now?” Miller asked. “Is every Republican DA starting every investigation they need to right now?”
Stephen Miller will never try to talk the Convict in Chief down from a proposed retribution scheme. Neither of them belongs back in the White House. — JMC
From The Progressive Populist, July 1-15, 2024
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What Donald Trump’s criminal trial reveals about a potential second term
EDITORIAL
Big Lie Party backs their guy
DON ROLLINS
A farewell to Bill Walton
RURAL ROUTES/Margot McMillen
Voter challenges coming
DISPATCHES
Study makes case to abolish Medicare Advantage.
Trump’s guilty verdict driving away voters he can’t afford to lose.
Trump’s losing streak continues with New Jersey liquor license in jeopardy.
House R’s amp up their revenge against A.G.
Trump meets with probation officer.
Repubs ‘salivating’ to ram corporate tax break.
Economy generates 272,000 jobs in May, unemployment edges up to 4%.
RNC's latest awful hirs: A Stop-the-Steal guy and a Christian nationalist.
ART CULLEN
These people are’t serious about our most basic enterprise: Food
ALAN GUEBERT
Words matter ... until they don’t
KELSEA McCLAIN
It’s time to put Americans’ health decisions back in our own hands
JOHN YOUNG
Ah, hah; Mueller probe found criminal act
DICK POLMAN
Are Americans so depraved that they’ll put a convicted felon in power?
JOE CONASON
No, you’re not a ‘political prisoner’
DAVID McCALL
We’re here. And we’re strong.
SETH SANDRONSKY
How freelance journalists are moving from precarity to solidarity
ROBERT KUTTNER
The support our public services briefly had — and still need
GENE NICHOL
The Supreme Court’s war on democracy
SONALI KOLHATKAR
‘Tough-on-crime’ doesn’t apply to people like Donald Trump
THOM HARTMANN
Why the GOP deploys the “Mudsill Theory” to destroy social mobility in America
GRASSROOTS/Hank Kalet
No room at the inn
HEALTH CARE/Joan Retsinas
Nursing homes: A conservative’s dilemma
SAM URETSKY
Don’t take any lip from bulldogs
WAYNE O’LEARY
Britannia hunkers down
JOEL D. JOSEPH
Make the Justice Department truly independent
JASON SIBERT
Defuse tensions with China
JUAN COLE
Trump’s attempt at planeticide was worse than hush money sex pay-off
KENT PATERSON
Landslide elects Mexico’s first woman president
JAMIE STIEHM
A grave moment in history
BARRY FRIEDMAN
Mrs. Alito’s performance art, again
FRANK LINGO
Anyone give a rat’s ass about Antarctica?
RALPH NADER
‘No one is above the law’ — really Mr. Biden?
PAMELA M. COVINGTON
Affordable child care helped my family out of deep poverty. Can we save it?
JOHN CLAYTON
In small towns, bookstores are thriving
ROB PATTERSON
Taylor Swift is in a class of her own
ELWOOD WATSON
After Trump conviction, Bragg becomes the target
FILM REVIEW/Ed Rampell
‘Power’: Chronicling the history of policing
SATIRE/Rosie Sorenson
My kingdom for a wife
AMY GOODMAN p.
A Gaza twin’s desperate fight for survival
From The Progressive Populist, July 1-15, 2024
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A month into Donald Trump’s criminal trial in New York City, we’ve heard adult film star Stormy Daniels testify that Trump pressured her to have sex with him, with a vague offer to put her on his reality TV show, while Trump’s third wife was home with their infant son, Barron. Trump’s former lawyer, Michael Cohen, testified that Trump ordered him to pay Daniels $130,000 to keep quiet about the tryst before the 2016 election. Then Trump used his business funds to reimburse Cohen for making the payments, under the cover that they were “legal expenses.”
We believe the Manhattan District Attorney’s deputies have made their case that Trump directed the hush money payment to Daniels before the election to avoid a sex scandal he feared would derail his presidential campaign — and then authorized an illegal reimbursement scheme to conceal the coverup. And prosecutors brought the receipts from the payoff, as well as notes and recordings to corroborate testimony of witnesses.
Trump denies 34 counts of falsifying business records to conceal another crime. He still insists he never had sex with Daniels, but he dares not take the witness stand to say that under oath, because he is a liar, and was bound to be caught up in perjury, and his lawyers know it, and everybody else in the courtroom knows it.
Trump’s defense attorneys tried to discredit Cohen, who is now a convicted felon and lately has made a living criticizing his former boss. But Cohen was even-tempered as he testified about his 10 years as Trump’s lawyer, which started with admiration for his employer and ended with him going to federal prison in 2018 for campaign finance violations relating to the payouts to Daniels and former Playboy model Karen McDougal, tax evasion and lying to Congress on Trump’s behalf about plans to build a Trump Tower in Moscow.
Trump was OK with Cohen going to prison for him, but now that Cohen has turned state’s evidence, the former president’s best hope is that his lawyers can get at least one juror to insist on Trump’s innocence, which might create a hung jury and a mistrial. Trump has brought in congressional Republicans to debase themselves as Trump flunkies, echoing his contemptuous claims that Bragg and Judge Juan Merchan are partisans working for Joe Biden.
House Speaker Mike Johnson made the trip to Manhattan to make the reckless claim that “the judge’s own daughter is making millions of dollars” off of the trial, and a prosecutor in the case had “recently received over $10,000 in payments from the Democratic National Committee.” The House Speaker claimed that, in Trump’s classified documents case in federal court in Florida, prosecutors “manipulated documents” and “might have tampered with the evidence.”
“It was demeaning to the office of the speaker, and to Congress, for Johnson to be trashing the criminal justice system as ‘corrupt,’ and nakedly campaigning for Trump at the former president’s trial,” Dana Milbank wrote for the Washington Post. But Johnson was only one of a parade of MAGA legislators making the pilgrimage to the courthouse in mid-May. On May 13 came Sens. Tommy Tuberville (Ala.) and J.D. Vance (Ohio) and Rep. Nicole Malliotakis (N.Y.). May 14 produced Johnson and a quartet of Republicans all dressed as Trump mini-mes in blue-gray suits, white shirts and red ties: Reps. Cory Mills (Fla.) and Byron Donalds (Fla.), North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum and former presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy. On May 16 so many House MAGA Republicans showed up that the House Oversight Committee had to postpone a vote to hold Attorney General Merrick Garland in contempt of Congress.
Fifty years ago, between July 27 and July 30, 1974, the House Judiciary Committee, approved articles of impeachment of Richard Nixon for his role in covering up the burglary of Democratic National Committee offices in the Watergate complex. Nixon refused to turn over tapes of conversations with his aides. The Supreme Court took only six days after hearing arguments to order the release of White House tapes to Watergate investigators.
Nixon still hoped to keep support of enough Republican senators to block his removal. But after the text of the “smoking gun” tape on Aug. 5 proved Nixon’s involvement in the cover-up, a delegation of Republicans, including Sen. Barry Goldwater of Arizona, Senate Minority Leader Hugh Scott of Pennsylvania and House Minority Leader John Rhodes of Arizona went to the White House on Aug. 8, 1974, to tell Nixon his game was up, and he needed to resign the presidency or face impeachment by the House and conviction and removal by the Senate. He resigned the next day.
There are not enough principled Republicans remaining in Congress with the authority to tell Trump it’s time to step aside. A few Republican leaders expressed their outrage over Trump’s failure to take action to stop the Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021, when the president refused to call on his supporters to leave the Capitol for several hours.
“Former President Trump’s actions preceding the riot were a disgraceful, disgraceful dereliction of duty,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said on Feb. 13, 2021. “… There’s no question, none, that President Trump is practically and morally responsible for provoking the events of the day.”
But McConnell made that statement less than an hour after voting to acquit Trump for his role in the storming of the Capitol. And less than two weeks later, on Feb. 26, 2021, McConnell said he would support Trump again, if he was the Republican nominee for president.
One week after the attack, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy said Trump bore “responsibility” for it. But by the time McCarthy spoke at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) on Feb. 27, 2021, McCarthy had pivoted to praising Trump for helping Republicans win races across the country.
Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) has scrapped any principle he had since May 3, 2016, when he said, “If we nominate Trump, we will get destroyed ... and we will deserve it.” Nowadays Graham has become one of Trump’s fiercest defenders, despite Trump being the first president since Herbert Hoover in the Great Depression to lose the House, the Senate and the White House in a single term.
If a Trump partisan on the jury stands in the way of a unanimous verdict, that does not mean Trump is acquitted. If the jury is deadlocked, the DA can ask the judge to put the case before a new jury.
In any event, assuming the Republican-majority Supreme Court does not allow Trump’s federal criminal trials to proceed before the November election, Trump will still emerge with the Republican nomination as a notorious liar, as well as a serial adulterer, who has already been found liable in civil trials for fraud and sexual assault.
The Republican Party is no longer the Grand Old Party of yore. As a subsidiary of the Trump Organization, it is now the Big Lie Party, because that’s all that ties the cult together nowadays. Trump’s enablers and defenders are just party clowns. — JMC
From The Progressive Populist, June 15, 2024
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Campus in crisis: Clueless on Gaza?
FRANK LINGO
Tripping the right fantastic
DON ROLLINS
School boards and the fragility of progress
RURAL ROUTES/Margot McMillen
Truth in food labeling: bringing it home
DISPATCHES
Poll: Trump losing in court of public opinion. ‘We’ll be back,’ says UAW chief after ‘tough loss’ in Alabama.
Rudy’s taunt at Arizona AG didn’t age well.
Voters credit Biden and Trump equally in infrastructure. Only one got it done.
Republicans are making it harder and more hazardous to register new voters.
Poll shows Biden and Trump supporters are sharply divided by media they consume.
Texas Gov. Abbott pardons racist murderer.
ART CULLEN
Getting a charge down the river and back
ALAN GUEBERT
Here comes the 2024 Farm Bill, there goes any 2024 reforms
LINDSAY OWENS
Trump’s corporate tax cuts paved the way for inflation
JOHN YOUNG
‘Civil War’ on screen: Secessionists’ dream
LEA WOODS and JULIE KASHEN
How public investment can create jobs — and ease the child care crunch
DICK POLMAN
Stormy dished the dirty details that Trump hid from voters on ‘16 election eve
JOE CONASON
Donald Trump, drenched in tabloid sleaze
ELWOOD WATSON
Republicans of color aren’t standing up to racism
DAVID McCALL
Solidarity sends the bullies packing
JEREMY SCHWARTZ, ProPublica
Former far-right hard-liner says billionaires are using school board races to sow distrust in public education
ROBERT KUTTNER
Biden’s new tariffs on Chinese EVs
CANDACE MILNER
This graduation season, debt relief still feels out of reach for young borrowers
THOM HARTMANN
Trump is willing to trade our children’s future for a billion dollars
SONALI KOLHATKAR
Weight loss drugs go hand-in-hand with junk food industry
CARLA VENTURA
I run a food pantry, but it’s not enough. We need funding for SNAP.
JESSICA GARCIA
‘Bluelining’ leaves climate vulnerable communities without home insurance
HEALTH CARE/Joan Retsinas
Victories for middle-income America
SAM URETSKY
The decline of tabloids and everything else
PAUL ARMENTANO
The beginning of the end of cannabis prohibition
WAYNE O’LEARY
Lyndon Baines Biden
SAM PIZZIGATI
The toughest job today’s richest ever face?
ROBERT C. KOEHLER
A world under spiritual construction
KEN WINKES
Hijacked — the work ethic
JAMIE STIEHM
A rose helps quiet the noise inside
BARRY FRIEDMAN
Shades of 1932 Deutschland
SETH SANDRONSKY
Prison costs busting California’s budget?
RALPH NADER
Ultraprocessed deadly corporate food demands action
TED WILLIAMS
Bobcats need protection, not killing for their pelts
ROB PATTERSON
Ozzy Osbourne belongs in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame
SATIRE/Rosie Sorenson
Noem sweet Noem
FILM REVIEW/Ed Rampell
TCM’s ‘Woodstock of Classic Movies’ presents vintage films & stars galore
From The Progressive Populist, June 15, 2024
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Supporters of Palestine in Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza have gotten in the news with their contentious protests on college campuses, but they should temper their anger about President Joe Biden’s support for Israel, when the alternative is Donald Trump, who undoubtedly would make things much worse.
Pro-Palestinian protesters have been calling Biden “Genocide Joe” for his role in arming the Israel Defense Forces, which reportedly have killed more than 34,000 Gazans since Oct. 7, when Israel declared war in retaliation for the surprise attack by Hamas fighters who killed 1,143 people in southern Israel, including 695 Israeli civilians (36 children and 270 fans at a music festival), 71 foreign nationals and 376 members of Israeli security forces, and left 3,400 wounded. Sexual assaults of Israeli women also were reported. Hamas took 252 hostages from Israel (including 30 children) across the border into Gaza.
Arguably, Hamas would have caused more civilian casualties if they had an air force, but they got the disproportionate response they expected from Israel. Hamas, supported by Iran, continues to fire missiles into Israel, and retaliation after the Hamas attack succeeded in sidelining the normalization of relations between Arab nations and Israel, which had started under the Trump administration when the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain signed the Abraham Accounts, bilateral agreements with Israel, in September 2020. Sudan joined in October 2020 and Morocco joined in December 2020.
Biden’s Secretary of State Antony Blinken was working on normalizing relations between Saudi Arabia and Israel, but in June 2023, Blinken warned Israel that rising tensions with the Palestinians, including settlement of Israelis in the West Bank, threatened the expansion of normalization agreements with Arab nations. Speaking alongside Blinken earlier in June 2023, the Saudi Foreign Minister had stated that “without finding a pathway to peace for the Palestinian people ... any normalization will have limited benefits.”
After Oct. 7, the Saudi demand for a pathway to a Palestinian state, as a condition for normal relations with Israel, threatens to put the United States on a collision course with Netanyahu, who has said he opposes any postwar plan that includes a Palestinian state, Isaac Stanley-Becker noted in the Washington Post Feb. 10.
The Abraham Accords represented “one of the reasons” for the Oct. 7 attack, which “obstructed and complicated all strategies and agreements … that deny the freedom and dignity of the Palestinian people,” said Abbas Zaki, a member of the Central Committee of Fatah, the political faction that controls the Palestinian Authority. The attack, he added in an interview, “put the Palestinian issue back on the international agenda,” Zaki told the Post.
But Biden has been urging Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who leads a right-wing coalition, to moderate attacks against purported Hamas targets in Gaza and focus on negotiating with Hamas to free the hostages Hamas is still holding.
Trump is a longtime ally of Netanyahu, and in March he called on Israel to “finish up” the war in Gaza, mainly because it was bad PR.
In an interview with Time magazine in April, Trump said he was “not sure a two-state solution anymore is going to work.” He also said he wouldn’t hesitate to use the National Guard against pro-Palestinian protesters, while also leaving open the possibility of using the broader US military against them and deporting Muslims when possible.
Seeking to take advantage of domestic unrest, Trump recently said the neo-Nazi violence in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017 was “like a peanut compared to the riots and the anti-Israel protests that are happening all over our country,” Dana Milbank wrote in the Washington Post. In recent months, Trump said Israel should be allowed to “finish the job” in Gaza and boasted about cutting off aid to Palestinians. And he has vowed, if elected, to reimpose his travel ban on predominantly Muslim countries and “expand it even further.”
So it’s entirely consistent that, in Wisconsin on May 1, Trump said he’s “restoring the travel ban, suspending refugee admissions and keeping terrorists the hell out of our country.” He went on: “We’ve seen what happened when Europe opened their doors to jihad. Look at Paris, look at London. They’re no longer recognizable.”
Trump, on Sean Hannity’s show, called the demonstrators at Columbia “paid agitators” and “brainwashed.” At his Wisconsin rally, he condemned the “raging lunatics and Hamas sympathizers at Columbia and other colleges.” He called for authorities to “vanquish the radicals,” many of whom “come from foreign countries,” Milbank noted.
This is the same guy who called thousands of National Guard troops to Washington and federal police to Oregon in 2020 to combat racial-justice demonstrators after the George Floyd killing; who held a Bible-wielding photo op in Lafayette Square after authorities cleared a peaceful demonstration with tear gas; who, according to his own former defense secretary, suggested to military leaders that they shoot demonstrators; who calls the free press the “enemy of the American people”; who defended the “very fine people” among the Nazis in Charlottesville; and who called those convicted of attacking the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, “hostages,” Milbank noted.
The pro-Palestinian protesters’ disdain for Biden is reminiscent of the antipathy of protesters against the Vietnam war to Hubert Humphrey, who was to be nominated at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in 1968. Humphrey was a liberal, but as Lyndon Johnson’s vice president he was reviled by antiwar leftists — who were unaware that Johnson’s efforts to end the war were sabotaged by Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger. The chaotic protests outside the convention hall, magnified by the notorious Chicago police and televised nationwide, undermined the Democratic nominee and gave Nixon a head start going into the general election.
In late October 1968, as Johnson was nearing a deal to end the war, Nixon ordered H.R. Haldeman, his chief of staff, to find ways to sabotage Johnson’s peace talks, so a frustrated American electorate would turn to the Republicans as their only hope to end the war, Anna Chennault, a Republican fundraiser, became Nixon’s back channel to the South Vietnamese government, and was heard telling the South Vietnamese ambassador to Washington to “hold on … We are gonna win.” — but Johnson hesitated to expose it because he had no proof Nixon had personally directed her actions.
Nixon narrowly won the presidency, and the Vietnam war went on four more years, costing 24,000 more American lives, for a total of 58,220 US military fatalities, 500,000 more Vietnamese lives (Vietnam’s estimate), and hundreds of thousands in Cambodia and Laos. The Paris Peace Talks finally called the end of the war in January 1973, along pretty much the same lines as the Johnson administration could have gotten in October 1968.
Trump operatives will surely be encouraging, and perhaps ensuring, a replay of chaos in Chicago in August to undermine Biden.
Don’t be fooled. Biden will try to do what’s best for Israel and Palestinian statehood. Trump will do what’s best for himself, and send in the National Guard to clear out protesters, while his son-in-law is looking forward to developing beachfront property on the Gaza Strip as soon as Netanyahu can clear out the Gazans. — JMC
From The Progressive Populist, June 1, 2024
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COVER/Liz Carey, The Daily Yonder
Privatized Medicare is putting financial strain on rural hospitals
EDITORIAL
Gaza gang: Don’t help Trump
FRANK LINGO
UN plastic conference bows to lobby
DON ROLLINS
The coal baron who would be a Democrat
RURAL ROUTES/Margot McMillen
Abortion rights: Men must make a choice
DISPATCHES
Medicare, Social Security funds doing better, but must be protected.
US billionaires pay lower tax rate than working class for first time.
Economy matches late 1960s low unemployment streak.
Poll finds rise of fascism and extremism in voters’ top concern.
Voters sharply divided by media they consume.
Biden campaign targets Latino men on abortion.
ART CULLEN
Iowa law: If you’re Brown, get out of town
ALAN GUEBERT
How to win the SAF game: Part 2
SARAH ANDERSON
House progressives unveil 2025 agenda to inspire action for a more equitable nation
JOHN YOUNG
‘Fake news’ fable: The liar and the Enquirer
LIZ CAREY
Privatized Medicare is putting financial strain on rural hospitals
DICK POLMAN
The Supreme Court, its credibility in tatters, is goose-stepping for Trump in slow motion
JOE CONASON
When moral hygiene becomes a lethal mistake
HEIDI SHIERHOLZ
Looking for a better job? Good news!
DAVID McCALL
Building resilience, saving lives
JOSEPH B. ATKINS
UAW organizers hope Chattanooga VW win opens South to unions
SONALI KOLHATKAR
Prison communications: Increasingly free, but prisoners still aren’t
THOM HARTMANN
Would ‘dictator’ Trump kill his rivals?
GENE NICHOL
Election interference
JOEL D. JOSEPH
The Supreme Court should lift the stay in the Trump immunity case
HEALTH CARE/Joan Retsinas
The crack that is a chasm: Medicaid unwinding
SAM URETSKY
Trump’s deteriorating state of mind is an issue
WAYNE O’LEARY
Is democratic capitalism the answer?
CLAUDE CUMMINGS JR.
Don’t let Congress widen the digital divide
HELEN H. ABRAHA
Restaurant workers deserve a livable wage, too
N. GUNASEKARAN
The evil of inequality and wrong prescriptions
JAMIE STIEHM
A light in the House: Farewell to a Senate friend
BARRY FRIEDMAN
The receding view of Rudy Giuliani
SETH SANDRONSKY
Lethal workplaces: Deaths on the job continue
RALPH NADER
Palestinians as ‘The Others’
RICH WANDSCHNEIDER
How did so much stuff pile up?
ROB PATTERSON
Dick Wolf gets back to the basics with ‘Homicide’ docs
SATIRE/Rosie Sorenson
Did he or didn’t he
FILM REVIEW/Ed Rampell
The ‘Coachella of Classic Movies’ rides again at Hollywood
AMY GOODMAN
Campus protests, press freedom and Israel’s war on Palestine.
From The Progressive Populist, June 1, 2024
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House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) defied the chaos agents in his own party as he allowed the House to approve $95 billion in US aid for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan in a special Saturday session April 20 that was a rare victory for bipartisanship.
The most controversial portion was $61 billion earmarked for embattled Ukraine. The MAGA Chaos Caucus, which protects the interests of Donald Trump and his mentor, Russian President Vladimir Putin, had stopped Johnson from allowing the House to approve the aid to rearm Ukraine, which has held Russian invaders at bay for more than two years, but had been running low on ammunition and interceptor missiles for Ukraine’s air-defense systems since the last major infusion from the US in December 2022.
President Joe Biden requested funding for Ukraine in October 2023, but the Chaos Caucus blocked the bill, demanding that any assistance for Ukraine be tied to policy changes at the US-Mexico border. Then MAGA rejected a bipartisan Senate deal on immigration reforms, on Trump’s instructions, reportedly because Trump wanted to keep stirring the “border crisis” through the election.
The Pentagon warned that, without an infusion of aid from the United States, Ukraine would continue losing territory to Russian military, which is preparing to start a spring offensive. The aid to Ukraine finally was approved on a 311-112 vote, with opposition from the right-wing members of the Chaos Caucus, who did not want to give President Biden a “win.” Trump has sakd he would settle the war by letting Russia keep the land it has seized.
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) filed a “motion to vacate” March 22, which could remove Johnson from his post, after Johnson allowed the House to pass a spending package to avert a partial government shutdown just hours before the deadline. The funding had support from both sides of the aisle, but the Chaos Caucus really wanted to force a government shutdown.
Then, after Johnson agreed to allow the aid for Ukraine, Reps. Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.) and Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) joined Greene in the motion to vacate and urged Johnson to voluntarily step aside. Democrats might need to vote with moderate Republicans to keep Johnson in office, unless they can find three moderate Republicans to switch parties to elect Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries. If Dems can’t find three R’s who’ll switch, they should vote to keep Johnson in office, because Trump and the Chaos Caucus aren’t going to allow any more reasonable Republican to take his place.
MAGA Congress members who complain that money is being spent on defending Ukraine when there are needs in the US that go unmet are displaying the usual hypocrisy. The Center for American Progress in 2022 reported that the tax cuts enacted during the George W. Bush and Trump administrations slashed taxes disproportionately for the wealthy and profitable corporations, severely reducing federal revenues. Instead of paying for themselves by spurring economic growth, the tax cuts added $10 trillion to the nation’s debt.
And if Republicans extend the Trump tax cuts, which were enacted on a party-line vote in 2017 and expire in 2015, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office reported, the extended tax cuts would add $3.5 trillion to the deficit through 2033.
“MAGA Republicans don’t give a damn about the deficit, and today’s estimate of the cost of kickbacks for their friends and donors is further proof,” said Senate Budget Committee Chairman Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.). “Republicans racked up the national debt by giving tax breaks to their billionaire buddies, and now they want everyone else to pay for them. It is one of life’s great enigmas that Republicans can keep a straight face while they simultaneously cite the deficit to extort massive spending cuts to critical programs and support a bill that would blow up deficits to extend trillions in tax cuts for the people who need them the least.”
The Kremlin reacted angrily to news that Congress was on track to approve an aid package for Ukraine, warning that it will lead to the “deaths of even more Ukrainians.”
The decision “will make the United States of America richer, further ruin Ukraine and result in the deaths of even more Ukrainians, the fault of the Kyiv regime,” Kremlin spokesperson, Dmitry Peskov, said, in remarks reported by Russia’s state news agencies.
Activists on the far right and the far left in the US joined the MAGAts in urging the US to force Ukraine to settle a fight they cannot hope to win. War critics have been saying that ever since Putin sent in the invaders in February 2022, expecting Kyiv to fall in 72 hours. Then they said the “special military action” might take two months.
Two years later, Russia’s military death toll in Ukraine has passed 50,000, the BBC reported, relying on research by BBC’s Russian language service, independent media group Mediazona and volunteers who have been counting deaths since the invasion, monitoring new graves in cemeteries, open-source information from official reports, newspapers and social media.
More than 27,300 Russian soldiers died in the second year of combat — nearly 25% higher than the first year, the BBC reported — a reflection of how territorial gains have come at a huge human cost as Russian officers have used the “meat grinder” strategy to send waves of soldiers forward in frontal assaults to try to wear down Ukrainian forces and expose their locations to Russian artillery.
The overall Russian death toll of more than 50,000 is eight times higher than the only official public acknowledgement of fatality numbers ever given by Moscow in September 2022. Russia considers casualty figures a state secret.
Ukraine rarely comments on the scale of its battlefield fatalities. In February, President Volodymyr Zelensky said 31,000 Ukrainian soldiers had been killed — but US intelligence estimates suggest greater losses, the BBC reported.
Russia has made advances in Ukraine as the aid from the West has waned, and the Ukrainian defenders have had to count their remaining bullets. But the Pentagon says a massive military aid package is “ready to go” as soon as Congress acts and Biden signs off.
Russia, which has a population of 144 million, has around 1.1 million active troops across all branches. Ukraine, with a population of 37.9 million, claims one million in the military and has proposed mobilizing another 500,000 to step up the war with Russia.
Ukraine has shown they are up to the challenge of pushing the Russians back as long as the Ukraine defense forces have access the advanced weapons the US and other NATO members can furnish.
Ukraine doesn’t need American soldiers to join the fight, but if Ukraine defeats the Russians, that might end Putin’s further imperial ambitions. If Russia moves against NATO member states, such as Poland or the Baltic States, that could put American troops on the firing line. It’s still better to arm Ukrainian troops now. — JMC
From The Progressive Populist, May 15, 2024
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The EPA has done nearly everything it can to clean up this small town. It hasn’t worked.
EDITORIAL
Ukraine survives GOP chaos
FRANK LINGO
Earth Day update: Optimism and pessimism
DON ROLLINS
Ohio was wrong last time: Let’s do it again!
RURAL ROUTES/Margot McMillen
Diversions from political mainstream
DISPATCHES
Trump eyes Social Security cuts by slashing payroll tax.
Tennessee VW workers vote to join UAW in a landslide..
Green groups call RFK Jr. ‘Dangerous conspiracy theorist and science denier.’
Biden rent-increase cap shows tenant union win.
Emergency rooms refused to treat pregnant patients after ‘Dobbs’ decision.
Green groups cheer $7 billion in “Solar for All’ grants.
ART CULLEN
A rushed farm bill is a bad one
ALAN GUEBERT
How to win the SAF game: Part 1
TIFFANY TAGBO
Lawmakers should spend a night in a homeless shelter
JOHN YOUNG
For its stakes, trial eclipses the solar eclipse
DICK POLMAN
Criminal court: day one: The grifting grievances of Don Snoreleone
JOE CONASON
Bully Bobby Jr. is no friend of free speech
FRAN QUIGLEY
Biden rent increase cap shows the tenant union movement can win nationally
DAVID McCALL
A new manufacturing frontier
SAM PIZZIGATI
To trim our richest down to Democratic size, we need to think big
ROBERT KUTTNER
The US-Japan Summit and the Nippon Steel Deal
SONALI KOLHATKAR
Here’s why you can’t afford an electric car
THOM HARTMANN
We need a Democratic revolution to overcome the rightwing media machine!
FARRAH HASSEN
A bittersweet Arab American Heritage Month
SULMA ARIAS
Why do my groceries cost so much?
HEALTH CARE/Joan Retsinas
Conscience: When mine conflicts with yours
SAM URETSKY
Health care should be more than bitter pills
ROBERT DODGE
Our budget priorities should reflect the people’s agenda, not hasten nuclear oblivion
WAYNE O’LEARY
Absurdity of American immigration policy
LES LEOPOLD
Raging against ‘White Rural Rage’
OMAR OCAMPO
Billionaires are bad for democracy. Taxing them is good for it.
JUAN COLE
Netanyahu, empowered by Biden’s grant of impunity, baits Iran into his genocidal Gaza war
ELWOOD WATSON
What you might have forgotten about OJ Simpson and his trial
JAMIE STIEHM
Trump’s luck and mojo run low
BARRY FRIEDMAN
Performative outrage
SETH SANDRONSKY
Living life: Reviewing Helena Sheehan’s new autobiography
RALPH NADER
New book: Choosing regular food to extend longevity
PEPPER TRAIL
An invitation to play the climate-change game
ROB PATTERSON
Where’s the music ripped from the headlines?
SATIRE/Rosie Sorenson
Deeply fakey
From The Progressive Populist, May 15, 2024
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Joe Biden has seven months to beat Donald Trump, the known adulterer and compulsive liar who has been found liable for sexual assault and fraud and is accused of at least 88 felonies, including the misuse of business assets to cover up adulterous affairs before the 2016 election.
Most of these character flaws — and more — were known before Trump’s election in 2016, but they were not enough to stop the grifter and “reality” TV celebrity from winning the election through the Electoral College, as enough disgruntled progressives in swing states either sat out the election or voted for Green candidate Jill Stein to deny Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton the election, with a vacant Supreme Court seat to be filled.
Trump filled that vacant Supreme Court seat with right-winger Neil Gorsuch in 2017. Then he named Brett Kavanaugh to replace moderate conservative Justice Anthony Kennedy in 2018. And conservative Amy Coney Barrett replaced liberal Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who died Sept. 18, 2020. The Republican-led Senate rushed Barrett’s confirmation, giving the Big Lie Party a 6-3 majority to overturn progressive achievements from the 20th century.
John Nichols, associate editor of the Madison, Wis., Capital Times, noted in The Nation April 4 that Trump has very real problems in the battleground state of Wisconsin, which he won in 2016 by roughly 22,000 votes, in what may have been a high-water mark for MAGA Republicans. Democrats won the governorship and every other statewide office in 2018, then Biden beat Trump in Wisconsin by almost 21,000 votes, which Trump never conceded, fighting the results in court and demanding a recount, and losing both ways, but he continues to insist he was robbed.
In the April 2 Wisconsin primary, Biden faced an organized challenge from activists who object to his policies regarding support of Israel in Gaza. The effort to get voters to cast ballots for an “uninstructed delegation” option, in order to send a message to Biden, was backed by a number of Democratic state legislators and local officials, as well as groups such as Our Revolution, Progressive Democrats of America, Democratic Socialists of America, Voces de la Frontera Action, and Jewish Voice for Peace Action.
On the Republican side, all of Trump’s challengers had suspended their campaigns. Hence the victory lap, with a Trump rally in Green Bay April 2 before the polls were closed.
Turnout for the primary was roughly equivalent, with both sides drawing close to 600,000 voters. By any reasonable measure, Trump should have gotten the higher popular vote and the higher percentage of the total, Nichols noted. But that didn’t happen.
Biden won 511,845 votes, with almost all the ballots counted, to 476,355 votes for Trump. Though their names appeared on different ballot lines for their respective primaries, that’s still a margin of more than 35,000-votes—far better than Trump’s in 2016, or Biden’s in 2020, Nichols noted.
Biden also is doing better in polls of seven key battleground states, Nichols noted. A Bloomberg/Morning Consult poll March 26 showed Biden leading by 1 point in Wisconsin and tied in Michigan and Pennsylvania in head-to-head matches, but Trump leads by 2 in Nevada, 5 in Arizona, 6 in North Carolina and 7 in Georgia.
When Robert Kennedy Jr., Cornell West and Jill Stein are included in the poll, the results are complicated, showing Trump leading by 2 points in Wisconsin, and 4 points in Pennsylvania but still tied in Michigan. Trump leads by 6 in Arizona, 7 in Georgia, 6 in Nevada and 5 in North Carolina. But the Big Liar still faces at least 88 felony charges in four jurisdictions, including New York on April 15.
To overtake Trump, Biden should distance himself from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu, who has abused Biden’s trust in pursuing revenge against Hamas terrorists in Gaza, regardless of the casualties among civilian residents of Gaza.
Biden was right to pledge support for Israel after Hamas and other Palestinian militant commandos broke the ceasefire between Israel and Gaza Oct. 7, 2023, by crossing a largely unguarded border to kill more than 1,000 people in Israel, most of them civilians, including participants in a music festival. The Gazans took approximately 250 hostages, including women, children and elderly people, with the stated goal to force Israel to exchange them for imprisoned Palestinians.
Biden assured Israelis that the US would continue to support Israel’s right to defend itself against a movement that aspires to wipe the Jewish state off the map “from the river to the sea,” but Biden warned Netanyahu not to give in to the demand for revenge.
Biden cautioned Israel against getting bogged down in Gaza, as the US did in Iraq and Afghanistan following the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States.
“Justice must be done,” Biden said Oct. 18 in Tel Aviv. “But I caution this: While you feel that rage, don’t be consumed by it … After 9/11, we were enraged in the United States. While we sought justice and got justice, we also made mistakes.”
Biden’s pleas fell on deaf ears. Netanyahu ordered bombing of population centers, with the stated intention of hitting Hamas personnel who were embedded with the civilian population. He also shut off electricity, water, fuel and food distribution in Gaza.
Over the past six months, the war has cost the lives of more than 33,000 Palestinians, including more than 13,000 children and 8,400 women, Al Jazeera reported. More than 75,000 have been injured, and more than 8,000 are reported missing. The casualties include more than 300 aid workers, including seven World Central Kitchen workers killed by Israeli missile strikes April 1.
In the US, Muslim and Arab populations have turned sharply against Biden. Despite being a part of Biden’s 2020 winning coalition, particularly in Michigan, they have been vial to the success of the ‘uncommitted campaign’ during the 2024 presidential primaries, which has sent strong signals that Biden has a realistic chance of losing the election in several battleground states in November 2024 if his administration does not shift its unwavering support for Israel.
Ironically, if Arabs sit out the election, it could put Trump back in the White House, who has been an ally of Netanyahu and has urged Israel to finish off the war to avoid bad “optics.” Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, praised the potential value of waterfront property in Gaza if Israel could move the Gazans into the Negev desert.
Biden already has gotten Israeli officials to approve the reopening of the Erez crossing between Israel and northern Gaza to allow more aid to reach starving Palestinians. He reportedly threatened to condition the transfer of weapons to Israel on limiting civilian casualties. He should demand that Israel restore water, electricity, food and fuel supplies in Gaza. Israel must negotiate a ceasefire that returns hostages. And Israel must replace Netanyahu, who has shown he can’t be trusted as an ally. — JMC
From The Progressive Populist, May 1, 2024
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Tar Heel trauma: Strange times, stranger candidates
EDITORIAL
Throttle Bibi to beat Trump
FRANK LINGO
State of the planet 2024
DON ROLLINS
Oxymorons and why the Dems need ‘em after all
RURAL ROUTES/Margot McMillen
CAFOs slim down, but that’s not good news is rural areas
DISPATCHES
US is still at ‘full employment,’ ‘crisis at border’ appears to have little impact on natives.
Immigrants are pretty law-abiding people.
Supermajority of Mercedes-Benz workers in Alabama file for UAW vote.
Economy has done better under Democrats for 75 years, report finds.
RFK Jr. official admits goal is to elect Trump.
Campaigners cheer FCC plan to restore net neutrality rules.
New Biden plan for student debt relief ...
ART CULLEN
Back from the spiritual desert
ALAN GUEBERT
Another $1 billion to refinance status quo won’t stop ag pandemics
ASHLEY DINES
Rents are unaffordable nationwide. A renter’s tax credit would help.
JOHN YOUNG
If Donald Trump is a Christian
JAMES EGGERT
We are all socialists (and capitalists too)
DICK POLMAN
If you or I depicted the president kidnapped and hog-tied...
LES LEOPOLD
Can you slam Wall Street and still win an election? Ask Sherrod Brown
DAVID McCALL
A new shipbuilding era
SAM PIZZIGATI
Meet the secretive rich funding efforts to keep others poor
ROBERT KUTTNER
How Republicans screw workers
BRIAN CARSS
Making ends meet is hard enought without a penalty for coming up short
SONALI KOLHATKAR
Corporate profiteering destroyed the Baltimore bridge
THOM HARTMANN
The early days of Fox: Losing money to gain political power
HANK KALET
Ill-defining antisemitism: IHRA definition will chill speech and academic freedom
MARIAH MONTGOMERY
‘Gaslighting and greed’: How Uber overcharges riders and underpays drivers
HEALTH CARE/Joan Retsinas
Opill: A victory for women (and their male partners)
SAM URETSKY
Be very afraid of Republican ‘reforms’
PAUL ARMENTANO
State-level marijuana legalization has been a stunning success
WAYNE O’LEARY
Democrats bite the bullet
JOEL D. JOSEPH
The end of recessions in the United States?
GENE NICHOL
The arrogance of unaccountable power
JAMIE STIEHM
A key to Baltimore’s broken heart
SETH SANDRONSKY
Walk this way: Reviewing Anne Braden’s letters, speeches and writings
RALPH NADER
Is the same old Democratic Party ready to correct course? In time?
STEPHEN TRIMBLE
Culture wars and an embattled Utah monument
ROB PATTERSON
Bradley Cooper’s Bernstein
SATIRE/Rosie Sorenson
Golden boy
FILM REVIEW/Ed Rampell
New left ex-fugitive lived underground after prison shootout
From The Progressive Populist, May 1, 2024
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Donald Trump’s promoters are now asking “Are you better off today than you were four years ago,” when Trump was in office. Seriously?
By almost any objective standard, the US is in much better shape today than it was when Joe Biden took office in January 2021.
Trump inherited a healthy economy from Barack Obama, who led the recovery from the recession George W. Bush left him in 2009. Trump took a 4.5% unemployment rate and rode it for three years until the COVID-19 pandemic hit the US in early 2020. Nonfarm employment fell by 1.4 million jobs in March 2020 and a staggering 20.5 million jobs in April, a loss of 22 million jobs that largely erased the gains from a decade of job growth, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities noted in March. Unemployment was 6.3% in January 2021, the gross domestic product had dropped 3.5% during 2020, grocery shelves were empty as supply chain problems made everything from toilet paper to computer chips hard to find.
The British medical journal The Lancet in February 2021 blamed Trump for an error-filled response to the coronavirus pandemic that analysts said contributed to 40% more deaths compared to other wealthy countries.
Trump undermined science at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, he pulled the US out of the World Health Organization, and cast doubt on the public use of masks, among other things..
“Instead of galvanising the US populace to fight the pandemic, President Trump publicly dismissed its threat (despite privately acknowledging it), discouraged action as infection spread, and eschewed international cooperation.”
“His refusal to develop a national strategy worsened shortages of personal protective equipment and diagnostic tests,” it added. “President Trump politicised mask-wearing and school reopenings and convened indoor events attended by thousands, where masks were discouraged and physical distancing was impossible.”
During his first year, Biden got COVID vaccinations distributed throughout the country, which slowed the spread of the virus and helped people get back to work and school. He also helped clear up the supply chain problems and got Americans back to work.
All those jobs lost during Trump’s last year have been recovered under Biden, plus 423,00 manufacturing jobs that have been created since passage of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act in 2021.
Inflation spiked from a 1.4% annualized rate when Biden took office to more than 6%, but it has settled back to 3.2%, much of which is caused by corporate profiteering, which Republicans have shown little interest in checking. And real wages (adjusted for inflation) are up, with particular gains at the low end of the income scale.
Despite Republican claims that crime has run out of control under Biden, a recent FBI report noted that crime actually declined significantly in 2023, continuing a post-pandemic trend.
The fourth-quarter 2023 numbers showed a 13% decline in murder in 2023 from 2022, a 6% decline in reported violent crime and a 4% decline in reported property crime, based on data from around 13,000 law enforcement agencies, policing about 82% of the US population.
NBC News noted that the drop in crime does not appear to be understood by most Americans. A Gallup poll in December found that 77% of Americans believe crime rates are worsening.
And this all happened after Trump failed in his attempt to reject the election results and resisted the transferof power. Trump and his allies tried to persuade Republican state officials in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, New Mexico, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin to reject Biden’s victories in those states, he was recorded on a phone call trying to bully Georgia state officials into finding 11,780 more ballots to put him ahead of Biden in that key state, and Trump incited an insurrection at the Capital in an apparent attempt to interrupt the certification of the election on Jan. 6. More than 2,000 “tourists,” pushed past police lines to enter the Capitol, in what the Republican National Commisttee later called “legitimate political discourse.” Much vandalism and looting followed, 174 police officers were injured and damages exceeded $2.7 million. In the past three years, 1,200 of the “tourists” have been charged with federal crimes relating to the attack. As of December 2023, 745 defendants have been found guilty and sentenced. Trump has said they are hostages, whom he would pardon if he makes it back into the White House, after a year in which he has been found liable in New York State courts for sexual assault and civil fraud.
A New York appeals court on March 25 reduced the amount of bail Trump must post to proceed with his appeal of the $454 million civil fraud judgment imposed on Trump and his business associates, including his sons, for lying about the Trump Organization’s assets to qualify for lower interest rates on loans. The court gave Trump 10 days to put up $175 million, to prevent New York Attorney General Leticia James from seizing his assets during his appeal. Trump also posted $91.6 million bond in the defamation case he lost to E. Jean Carroll.
Some of our progressive friends were dismayed that James wasn’t allowed to seize Trump Tower as her first prize, but she can wait. Unlike the thousands of contractors who were forced to take Trump to court to pay them for their work, only to be forced to settle for cents on the dollar as the unscrupulous developer starved them out, James and the state of New York can carry the case until Trump’s appeals are judged groundless.
Trump, who displayed contempt for New York state Judge Arthur Engoron throughout the trial, has claimed he has almost $500 million in cash, but he accused James and Engoron of seeking “to take the cash away so I can’t use it on the campaign.” Apparently, he has not heard the old adage, “If you can’t pay the fine, don’t do the crime.” And, with Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg prepared to start prosecuting Trump in his hush money criminal trial on April 15, Trump may be testing the corrolary, “If you can’t do the time, don’t do the crime.”
Trump faces trial in April on 34 felony charges that he falsified his company’s business records to cover up payments his lawyer made before the 2016 election to porn actress Stormy Daniels and Playboy model Karen McDougal, to keep them quiet about extramarital encounters with Trump years earlier, as well as a Trump Tower doorman who claimed Trump fathered a child out of wedlock. Trump is known to have cheated on all three of his wives, which is not illegal, but falsifying business records to cover it up is illegal in New York, and covering it up for election purposes is a federal crime, for which Trump’s former attorney, Michael Cohen, went to prison in 2018. Trump let Cohen take the fall, but Trump’s Department of Justice chose not to prosecute the new president. Federal prosecutors said in court filings Trump directed Cohen to make the payments, though they referred to him in court filings as “Individual 1,” not by name.
The New York grand jury indicted Trump April 4, 2023, 15 months after Trump returned to Mar-A-Lago, in Florida.
If convicted on the New York charges, Trump could be sentenced to four years in prison, but that would keep him until the federal insurrection and espionage cases and the Georgia election racketeering cases are decided, which could put Trump in prison for the rest of his life, if justice is served well done. — JMC
From The Progressive Populist, April 15, 2024
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COVER/Topher Sanders, Dan Schwartz and Gabriel Sandoval
What’s missing from railroad safety data? Dead workers and severed limbs.
EDITORIAL
Are you better off than Trump?
FRANK LINGO
Plastic proliferating on the planet
DON ROLLINS
A study in tax dodging
RURAL ROUTES/Margot McMillen
Who passes the dishwasher test?
DISPATCHES
Donation to Trump’s RNC is a donation to his lawyers before it’s a donation to is party.
Trump lawsuit against ABC, Stephanopoulos is risky.
Senate map is tough for Dems, but they can beat Ted Cruz and Rick Scott.
Budget proposal shows GOP is ‘party of cutting Social Security and Medicare.’
Trump-in-law calls for ethnic cleansing in Gaza.
ART CULLEN
What’s the matter with me?
ALAN GUEBERT
Meet the ‘barons’ who corrupt your dinner table
JOE CONASON
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s farce — and our tragedy
SARAH ANDERSON,WILLIAM RICE and ZACHARY TASHMAN
More for them, less for us
JOHN YOUNG
Hoax that launched a thousand lies
DICK POLMAN
The aspiring fascist’s ‘bloodbath’ comment, in the context of the last nine years
GENE NICHOL
Robert Francis Kennedy Sr. — glimpses of the anti-Trump
DAVID McCALL
Building America, fighting greed
LES LEOPOLD
A working class susceptible to Trump needs much more from Biden
ROBERT KUTTNER
Man of steel
THOM HARTMANN
What Americans and the media are missing about the TikTok crisis
SONALI KOLHATKAR
Trump plans to make his massive tax cuts for the rich and corporations permanent
KEN WINKES
Physician, heal our health care
HEALTH CARE/Joan Retsinas
Our bodies, our minds: The big bubble
SAM URETSKY
Memory can be a fleeting thing for the elderly
WAYNE O’LEARY
Reflections on the new American pastime
JOEL D. JOSEPH
Solomonic justice in Georgia
MATTHEW ROSING
We can break the cycle of poverty, mental illness and prison
KENT PATERSON
Mexico poised to elect first woman president
JAMIE STIEHM
A tale of two contagions
BARRY FRIEDMAN
Outrage and lip service
SETH SANDRONSKY
Facts against industrial farming
RALPH NADER
Israel’s right-wing wants all the Palestinian land — and this explaims its state terrorism
CLINT McKNIGHT
Freed wolves move into their old niche
ROB PATTERSON
My TV I Love Lucy is worsley
FILM REVIEW/Ed Rampell
On the Christian trail: Dramatizing the story of the first Black woman presidential candidate
SATIRE/Rosie Sorenson
The great embryo imbroglio
From The Progressive Populist, April 15, 2024
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