The Progressive Populist Today Blog: Dispatches

Sunday, February 27, 2022

Dispatches

INFLATION AND PRICE-GOUGING: THE CASE FOR AN EXCESS PROFITS TAX.

Despite very different stimulus policies, Europe and the US are experiencing similar price pressures due to supply shocks, Robert Kuttner notes at Prospect.org (2/7). One result that adds to inflation is opportunistic price hikes and excess profits.

The big investment banks booked record profits in 2021. Likewise the platform monopolies. Amazon just reported profits of $14.3 billion on the fourth quarter alone, double its fourth-quarter profits of 2020.

On an earnings call with Wall Street analysts in February, the meat giant Tyson reported earnings per share up by 50% over last year, driven by price increases of 32% in beef, 20% in chicken, and 13% in pork. These price hikes to consumers go neither to farmers nor to supermarkets, but to giant monopoly middlemen like Tyson.

Ocean shippers have quintupled their rates, and booked astronomical returns of $150 billion in 2021, up from $25 billion in 2020. This price-gouging reflects the extreme economic concentration that has resulted from deregulation coupled with a four-decade failure to enforce antitrust laws. All of this comes at the expense of consumers and of workers whose nominal pay is up but in most cases lags behind price hikes.

“So COVID has been a grotesque bonanza for America’s most concentrated industries,” Kuttner noted. “The long-term cure for the supply crunch is drastic re-regulation of the global logistics system, as well as rebuilding domestic manufacturing and supply. The Biden administration’s antitrust crackdown will also help reduce pricing power.

“In the meantime, we need an excess profits tax, to tax away the opportunistic price hikes, just as we did in World War II. Profits that exceeded a normal rate of return, based on several pre-pandemic years, would be subject to a much higher rate of tax.

“This idea will both spotlight the real source of the inflation and help pay for the domestic industrial policy that we need to prevent future supply shocks. Even if it’s not enacted, Biden should propose it.”

NEW POLL THROWS MAJOR WRENCH INTO STORYLINE ON GLEN YOUNGKIN AND EDUCATION. Republicans hope to use a schools-focused culture war to take Democrats down in the 2022 midterms, and Democrats are predictably fumbling the response. But while some polls suggest that Republicans succeeding at dragging Democrats down on the issue, they’re also making themselves downright toxic, Laura Clawson noted at DailyKos (2/21).

Take Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R), supposedly swept into office by parents angry about mask mandates and teaching about race in schools. A new poll from Christopher Newport University finds Youngkin’s approval rating underwater, with 41% of Virginia voters approving and 43% disapproving just over a month after his inauguration. “We have some history being made today. Glenn Youngkin is the first Virginia Governor to ever poll with a majority disapproval rating anytime in his first year in office,” Democratic state Sen. Louise Lucas gleefully noted. “He did it in just over a month!”

The same poll finds that majorities of voters support teaching about how racism impacts society, oppose a ban on critical race theory, and think school mask mandates should be determined by health data and information from health experts.

That’s one poll, but the mask portion of it, at least, echoes a September 2021 poll of Virginia and other, more recent national polling on that issue. Similarly, multiple national polls find majority support for teaching about the history of racism in the US—though Republicans are something of an exception to that.

All that said, while Republicans are not winning majorities of voters over to their positions on the specific educational culture wars they’re waging, they are doing what Republicans do best: making the whole issue so ugly and conflictual that voters are disgusted with everyone. Sowing doubt and fear is a specialty, and a November 2021 poll found significant erosion in Democrats’ traditional advantage on education.

CALIFORNIA BILL WOULD LET CITIZENS ENFORCE ASSAULT WEAPON BAN. California Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom endorsed a bill that would allow private citizens to enforce the state’s ban on assault weapons, Kenny Stancil noted at CommonDreams (2/18).

California’s new bill mimics a Texas law empowering private citizens to enforce the state’s draconian abortion ban by suing anyone who “aids or abets” an abortion after six weeks of pregnancy.

After the right-wing dominated US. Supreme Court refused to strike down the Texas Republicans’ effort to kill Roe v. Wade, Newsom vowed to work with California lawmakers to craft similar legislation targeting gun manufacturers.

“If Texas can use a law to ban a woman’s right to chose and to put her health at risk, we will use that same law to save lives and improve the health and safety of the people in the state of California,” Newsom said at a press conference. “There is no principled way the US Supreme Court cannot uphold this California law. Full stop. It is quite literally modeled after the law they just upheld.”

While Republican-controlled states’ previous attempts to ban abortions after six weeks—before many individuals know they’re pregnant—have been blocked by courts, “Texas’ new abortion law is unique in that it bars the government from enforcing the law,” the Associated Press noted.

“The idea is if the government can’t enforce the law, it can’t be sued to block it in court,” the AP continued. “That hasn’t stopped abortion providers from trying to block the law. But so far, the US Supreme Court’s conservative majority has allowed the abortion law to stay in place pending a legal challenge.”

“Our message to the United States Supreme Court is as follows: What’s good for the goose is good for the gander,” state Sen. Bob Hertzberg (D), author of the proposal, said Feb. 18. “I look forward to rushing a new bill to the governor’s desk to take advantage of that United States Supreme Court guidance.”

Last year, a federal judge overturned California’s decades-long ban on the manufacture and sale of assault weapons, but the law remains in effect while the state appeals the decision.

The new bill would let people seek a court order to stop assault weapons, .50 BMG rifles, and ghost guns or ghost gun kits from being produced, distributed, transported, imported into, or sold in California, according to Hertzberg’s office. Plaintiffs could recover up to $10,000 in damages for each weapon, plus attorney’s fees.

The proposal fulfills fears from some gun rights groups, who have opposed the Texas abortion law because they worried liberal states like California would use the same principle on guns, AP reported.

“If Texas succeeds in its gambit here, New York, California, New Jersey, and others will not be far behind in adopting equally aggressive gambits to not merely chill but to freeze the right to keep and bear arms,” attorney Erik Jaffe wrote in a legal brief on behalf of the Firearms Policy Coalition, a nonprofit group that advocates for gun rights.

CHILD POVERTY SKYROCKETED 41% AS CHILD TAX CREDIT ENDED. Child poverty went up 41% between December and January for one very simple reason: The expanded child tax credit expired. The expanded child tax credit expired for two very simple reasons: Every single Republican opposed it, and Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin also opposed it, Laura Clawson noted at DailyKos (2/18).

That’s 3.7 million more children in poverty, with Latino and Black children hit the hardest, according to the Center on Poverty and Social Policy at Columbia University. Everyone knows how to keep those kids out of poverty because the United States government did it for six months, and then, thanks to a small number of people—overwhelmingly wealthy, overwhelmingly white, overwhelmingly men—3.7 million children were made poor in the space of a month.

The expanded child tax credit sent monthly checks of $250 for children ages 6 through 17 and $300 for children ages 5 and younger, to 36 million households with over 60 million children. In addition to lifting millions of children out of poverty, the money helped families stay out of poverty. It helped families that had enough to pay the basic bills but nothing more to send their kids to Girl Scouts, or get extra support for children with special needs. It helped single mothers pay for child care while they went to college.

This program cost $120 billion a year, a small fraction of the $778 billion US defense budget. It’s also money that could be viewed as a very smart investment in the future: Study after study shows that boosting income for families with children leads those children to have better educational outcomes, better work outcomes, better health outcomes.

“But Manchin—he of the Maserati and $500,000 annual coal income—thinks parents might use the money to buy drugs, despite all the studies showing they’re using it to buy food and clothes and a modicum of stability for their kids. Despite, also, the Republican drug-tests-for-welfare schemes that have lost money because the cost of the drug testing was more than the benefits rejected as a result of positive tests,” Clawson wrote.

“It’s not just Manchin. Every Republican opposes this, too. But no one expects better of Republicans. Whether we lament it or celebrate it, everyone expects cruelty from them. Today, we know that 3.7 million children are experiencing poverty—and we know how to stop it. We know who could stop it. It’s on the consciences of those senators. The ones who have consciences.”

LATEST FOX NEWS TRUMP CONSPIRACY THEORY ABOUT HILLARY CLINTON DRAWS MOCKERY — AND A WARNING. Hillary Clinton aimed directly at the Republican Party, Donald Trump and Fox News in a speech to the New York State Democratic Party convention (2/17), and as usual, post-2016 Clinton has their number. “It’s funny, the more trouble Trump gets into, the wilder the charges and conspiracy theories about me seem to get,” Clinton said.

Laura Clawson at DailyKos noted (2/18) that Republicans are squawking about a false reading of a legal filing from special counsel John Durham; Trump is calling for the death penalty for Clinton and her 2016 campaign team over the filing, which contains little new information and no substantial allegations. Fox News mentioned Clinton 200 times in one day as it works to blow Durham’s work into a full-fledged conspiracy theory (with the active help of Durham, who was appointed by Trump’s Attorney General William Barr to undermine investigations into Trump’s Russia connections).

Clinton nailed what’s going on here, including a little warning shot to Fox News.

“So now his accountants have fired [Trump] and investigations draw closer to him and right on cue, the noise machine gets turned up,” she said. “Fox leads the charge with accusations against me, counting on their audience to fall for it again. And as an aside, they’re getting awfully close to actual malice.”

”Actual malice” is a legal standard by which even public figures can get libel judgments against the media.

Fox News personality Sean Hannity responded. “Malice, really? It’s called news,” he said, stretching the bounds of the definition of “news” even by Fox standards. “Hillary, we invite you to bring it on.”

She probably won’t bother, but considering that Fox News is facing a $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit from voting machine maker Dominion—a lawsuit the network lost a bid to have dismissed in December—its lawyers might want to take a look at just what its public faces are saying when they mention Clinton 200 times in a day.

Clinton also addressed the Republican Party itself, highlighting its recent resolution describing the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol as “ordinary citizens engaged in legitimate political discourse.”

“When the Republican Party officially embraces violent insurrection as legitimate political discourse, when storming the Capitol, assaulting police officers, trying to overturn an election, are being normalized, we are in uncharted territory. And make no mistake, our adversaries around the world are watching,” she said. “Republicans are defending coup-plotters, they’re curbing voting rights at precisely the moment when democracy needs champions, when we should be standing together against autocracies like Russia and China.”

Clinton’s specific take on Trump and her take on the Republican Party tie together: The Republican embrace of lawlessness is so broad and so deep that it needs to create people like Clinton as villains at the head of vast conspiracy theories to distract from its own sordid realities.

TEXAS NATIONAL GUARD MEMBERS STUCK ON ABBOTT’S BORDER MISSION UNIONIZE. Gov. Greg Abbott (R) has had Texas National Guard troops on the border for months, in horrible conditions, with no real purpose and no projected end date. Now some of the troops are moving to join a union after the Justice Department said National Guard troops on state active duty orders can do so, Laura Clawson noted at DailyKos(2/18).

The troops are associating with an existing public employee union, the Texas State Employees Union’s Military Caucus, Davis Winkie reports at Army Times. “They are the first-known troops to organize while in a state active duty status, though a small subset of full-time Guard troops, dual-status technicians, are already unionized in their civilian capacity as federal employees,” according to Winkie.

The path was cleared for the Texas troops to unionize by a Connecticut lawsuit in which public employee unions sued on behalf of Connecticut National Guard members who wanted some of the same protections as state employees they worked alongside in responding to the COVID-19 pandemic.

”Connecticut National Guard members on state orders have worked alongside the public service workers we represent to distribute protective equipment and assist with testing at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic,” said Jody Barr, a former Guard member and local union leader, in a November press release. “Yet Guard members were not able to bargain over COVID-19 safety precautions, even though the state employees they worked directly alongside were able to have a voice in COVID-19 testing, shift safety, and other necessary precautions.”

The Justice Department moved to have that lawsuit dismissed, not because it was without merit, but because “the Government agrees” that a federal law banning members of the military from unionizing “does not apply to Guard members on state active duty or in the Inactive National Guard.”

At the time, the Army Times’ Winkie noted that the Texas National Guard Troops on Operation Lone Star would be one of the relatively rare cases in which National Guard troops are on state active duty for long enough to organize.

Abbott’s quest to look tough on immigrants has led him to pull thousands of National Guard members away from their families, businesses, and schools to go sit in the desert doing little. In some cases their pay has been late, they are stationed at outposts with no bathrooms, and the state has slashed tuition assistance for its National Guard. Several Texas National Guard members have died by suicide believed to be related to the operation, and another has died after being accidentally shot by a fellow soldier. Increasingly, they have spoken out about the conditions they face and the futility of their photo op of a nonmission. Lawmakers have called for investigations. But Abbott is steadfast: He really, really wants this Trumpian photo op and platform for complaining about President Joe Biden at whatever cost to his state’s National Guard.

Public employee unions are not allowed to strike or engage in collective bargaining in Texas, but the troops who are unionizing hope that organizing will give them an increased voice and protections.

TRUCKERS PLAN CONVOY TO OCCUPY NATION’S CAPITAL. Trucker convoys are headed to Washington, D.C., with plans that could include a blockade intended to strangle access to the nation’s capital like a “boa constrictor,” Brandi Buchman noted at DailyKos (2/21)

Bob Bolus, a Pennsylvania-based organizer for Truckers for Freedom, said demonstrators would blockade the Beltway around the nation’s capital, a circumferential 64 miles of road touching the District of Columbia and surrounding states like Maryland and Virginia.

The Washington metropolitan area alone—which encompasses D.C., central Maryland, and northern Virginia—is home to over 3 million people. Given the area’s history of notoriously heavy congestion, demonstrations of any considerable size are likely to cause lengthy disruptions.

“We intend to circle Washington, D.C and basically I’ll give you an analogy of that of a giant boa constrictor that basically squeezes you, chokes you, and then swallows you,” Bolus told a Fox News affiliate in Washington (2/20).

He said the convoys would control the flow of traffic as well.

“They’ll be a lane open for emergency vehicles to get in and get out. We will not compromise anybody’s safety or health one way or the other,” he said Sunday.

Bolus was unmoved when asked how he thought the blockade might impact ordinary people trying to work or go about their business. “If they can’t get to work, jeez that’s too bad,” Bolus said.

The groups sprang up in the wake of trucker protests in Canada which, were laden with conspiracy theories, xenophobia and anti-vaccine rhetoric.

Demonstrators making up the “Freedom Convoy” in Canada were in place for weeks and caused major disruptions when blocking bridges and border crossings. Police finally cleared the high-traffic Ambassador Bridge linking Detroit, Michigan, and Windsor, Ontario, but not without clashes beforehand and significant trade disruptions.

How long the trucker convoys plan to be in place in D.C. is unclear.

The American convoys are a mashup of different groups with common goals and common beliefs, with most of them leaning ultra-conservative. The Great American Patriot Project, for instance, is just one of the US groups participating in the looming convoy.

All of the groups sprang up and linked up quickly in the wake of trucker protests in Canada which, were laden with conspiracy theories, xenophobia, and anti-vaccine rhetoric.

The Great American Patriot Project specifically wants to launch convoys from March 1 to March 6. National organizers from another group known as the “People’s Convoy” said (2/20) that their “unified transcontinental movement” will kick off in Southern California Feb. 23.

American truck drivers are not obligated to be vaccinated against COVID-19 if they do not cross international borders. Nor are they obligated to wear masks if they are driving a vehicle alone. Many of their grievances would also be subject to state laws, not federal ones.

Appearing at the center of both the Canadian and American trucker convoy movements is anti-vaccine lawyer, Q-Anon enthusiast, and avowed Scientologist Leigh Dundas.

Dundas founded the Freedom Fighter Nation, a far right-wing conspiracy theory group, and has pushed Trump’s lies about election fraud routinely since 2020.

She spoke at a “Stop the Steal” rally in California in November 2020 and on Jan. 6, she was at the Capitol during the insurrection. She can even be seen in one video standing at a Capitol entrance near Jacob Chansely, the so-called “Q-Anon Shaman.”

Chansley is now serving a 41-month sentence.

Dundas told protesters on Jan. 6 they should “stand the hell up” because they were “better off fighting on your feet and being prepared to die on your feet than living a life on your damned knees.”

To huge applause on Jan. 6, 2021, Dundas told the crowd that protesters would be “well within our rights” to take “turncoats” who didn’t support Trump’s claim to victory in the 2020 election “out back to shoot ‘em or hang ‘em.”