Mitchell Zimmerman: Democrats would be stupid to try ‘to work with’ an increasingly depraved GOP
A QAnon emblem (upper left) is raised during the 2021 storming of the United States Capitol by Trump cultists. The extreme-right, bogus-conspiracy-based QAnon group has become a particularly violence-prone part of the Republican Party.
— Photo by Elvert Barnes
Trump supporters/cultists at the “Unite the Right’’ rally in Charlottesville, Va., on Aug. 12, 2017
Via OtherWords.org
Unity and bipartisanship sound wonderful. But can anyone explain how “building bridges” to today’s GOP will get anything done?
Republicans now demand “unity” even as many embrace the big lie that President Biden stole the election from Trump — and even after some cheered on the attack on the U.S. Capitol that killed five.
But the bigger difficulty is that there can be no reasonable compromise between those determined to confront the crises America faces and those who deny that the problems exist — and have indeed aggravated them.
Consider the key challenges: climate change, racial injustice and the coronavirus pandemic.
Climate change is upon us: violent superstorms, rising seas, flooding, wildfires, new diseases. But the differences between Democrats and Republicans are not about the best ways to reckon with climate change. They’re about whether climate change is real at all.
President Trump, with support from the rest of the Republican Party, called climate change a “hoax,” actively promoted fossil fuels, and reversed every step taken to stave off climate disaster. There is no “working with” the party that is working directly to worsen the problem.
Likewise for racial bias in American life. This past year massive, multiracial protests against racist police violence and impunity swept the nation, and much of white America finally accepted that racism and white supremacy are ugly realities.
But not the GOP. The Trump-led party cozied up to the “very fine people” who unleashed racist violence in Charlottesville and to the racist street gangs Trump urged to “stand by” until he could fire them at the Capitol.
Promoting white racial resentment has been key to the Republican playbook for decades. So don’t ask the fox to work with the farmer to keep the chicken coop safe.
Finally, should Democrats look for middle ground with Republicans in responding to the pandemic?
Donald Trump made the lethal, worldwide contagion a partisan issue when he claimed it was another hoax and instructed his faithful to fight mask-wearing and social distancing. He developed a movement dedicated to sabotaging the COVID-19 response, threatening public health officials, and demanding businesses reopen whatever the human cost.
Even as Republicans promoted the “liberty” of Trump’s followers to infect others with COVID-19, they opposed strong action to help those tens of millions of Americans facing lost jobs, foreclosure, eviction, and hunger.
Why are Republicans so set against our government protecting us from the consequences of the coronavirus? It’s not really about deficits, which they happily exploded with tax cuts for the rich and bloated Pentagon budgets.
Their real fear is that President Biden’s big response might actually work. They’re counting on Americans continuing to suffer, which may bolster Republicans in the next elections.
So forget about working “with” Republican political leaders.
“Unity” to solve our key problems isn’t possible. Nor is it necessary. Instead, the Democrats should exercise their power without begging for support from Republicans.
Voters gave Democrats the power to put their program into effect. They should seize the opportunity to move boldly, with or without the losers. The voters will get to see how that works out and decide in the next election whether they like what they got. That’s how democracy works.
America desperately needs effective government. If it is “partisanship” for the Democratic Party to provide that without the pretend cooperation of Republicans, let’s have more partisanship.
Mitchell Zimmerman is an attorney, longtime social activist, and author of the anti-racism thriller Mississippi Reckoning.
Chris Powell: Democrats might make sure GOP survives; revolving door keeps spinning for Conn. politicians
MANCHESTER, Conn.
As he skipped the inauguration of his successor and shuffled off to his resort in Florida, has Donald Trump destroyed the Republican Party? Some political observers think so and of course Democrats hope so.
Trump's petulant and even seditious exit from office did him no credit. But then he did not do so badly in the popular vote and the Electoral College, and even landslide defeats in presidential elections seldom knock a major party down for long.
Herbert Hoover led the Republicans to a landslide victory in 1928 over Democrat Al Smith but himself was ousted in a landslide by Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Democrats in 1932.
Barry Goldwater, the Republican presidential nominee in 1964, was derided as far too conservative and was clobbered by Lyndon B. Johnson and the Democrats in 1964, but the Republicans still won the next presidential election, with Richard Nixon.
George McGovern, the Democratic presidential nominee in 1972, was derided as too liberal and lost big to Nixon and the Republicans in 1972, but the Democrats still won four years later with Jimmy Carter.
The reversal of party fortunes in these cases was largely a matter of self-destruction. Hoover turned a stock market crash into the Great Depression. Johnson escalated and failed to win a stupid imperial war. Nixon and his vice president, Spiro Agnew, got caught in criminality. (Even so, Nixon's appointed vice president, Gerald Ford, nearly won the 1976 presidential election for the Republicans anyway.)
Both major parties have influential elements that many voters find objectionable if not repulsive and yet gain big roles when their party is in power. So it is not hard to imagine such elements bringing trouble to Joe Biden's new Democratic national administration even as the Republicans at last may be relieved of the daily embarrassments of Trump's demeanor, especially since, out of office, much civil and even criminal litigation may keep him busy. Additionally, Republicans in Washington may rediscover that being in the minority makes taking potshots easy, far easier than governing.
Will the Biden administration self-destruct with corruption, incompetence, failure, or politically correct nonsense? Maybe not, but with the Democratic margins in Congress being so thin, the new administration may have to be unusually successful to avoid losing control of both houses in the elections two years hence, since mid-term elections usually go against the president's party.
In any case, while good government is good politics, good government seldom lasts long, so defeated parties tend to revive faster than expected.
xxx
Having just left the speakership of Connecticut's House of Representatives, former state Rep. Joe Aresimowicz, D.-Berlin, has quickly moved into a position with Gaffney Bennett and Associates, which calls itself Connecticut's leading government relations firm. Connecticut's “revolving door” law prohibits Aresimowicz from lobbying legislators and government agencies for a year, but obviously the firm believes that he can bring in a lot of good business anyway.
Aresimowicz's transformation may dishearten advocates of the public interest but it's not unusual. The Connecticut Mirror notes that three former House speakers are already lobbying or working for firms that do government relations. The Mirror might have added that a former state Senate leader heads Connecticut's biggest teacher union.
As a legislator Aresimowicz himself was employed by a government employee union. While this presented more than the typical potential conflict of interest most legislators face, it was perfectly legal, since the legislature is nominally part-time work, most legislators must hold other jobs, and Aresimowicz's constituents knew who he was when they elected him.
Former state legislators aren't the only ones drawn to government employment in Connecticut. Many journalists have left news organizations for public-relations positions with government agencies or businesses. Indeed, there now may be more former journalists in government P.R. in Connecticut than there are news reporters.
Government is just where the money is these days. Former legislative leaders don't go to work for the Red Cross, Salvation Army, or Audubon Society, nor do former journalists. There always has been and always will be more money in subverting or deflecting the public interest than in pursuing it.
Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester.
Phil Galewitz: Vt., N.H. and Maine are pushing to import Canadian drugs
The Haskell Free Library and Opera House straddles the border in Derby Line, Vt., and Stanstead, Quebec. The dark line shows the exact border.
Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine, all bordering on Canada, as well as Florida and Colorado, are moving ahead with efforts to import prescription drugs from Canada, a politically popular strategy greenlighted last year by then-President Trump.
But it’s unclear whether the Biden administration will proceed with Trump’s plan for states and the federal government to help Americans obtain lower-priced medications from Canada.
During the presidential campaign, Joe Biden expressed support for the concept, strongly opposed by the American pharmaceutical industry. Drugmakers argue it would undercut efforts to keep their medicines safe.
The Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, an industry trade group, filed suit in federal court in Washington, D.C., to stop the drug-purchasing initiatives in November. That followed the Trump administration’s final rule, issued in September, that cleared the way for states to seek federal approval for their importation programs.
Friday was the deadline for the government to respond to the suit, which could give the Biden administration a first opportunity to show where it stands on the issue. But the administration could also seek an extension from the court.
Meanwhile, Florida and Colorado are moving to outsource their drug importation plans to private companies.
Florida hired LifeScience Logistics, which stores prescription drugs in warehouses in Maryland, Texas and Indiana. The state is paying the Dallas company as much as $39 million over 2½ years, according to the contract. That does not include the price of the drugs Florida is buying.
LifeScience officials declined to comment.
Florida’s agreement with LifeScience came last fall, just weeks after the state received no bids on a $30 million contract for the job.
Florida’s importation plan calls initially for the purchase of drugs for state agencies, including the Medicaid program and the corrections and health departments. Officials say the plan could save the state in its first year between $80 million and $150 million. Florida’s Medicaid budget exceeds $28 billion, with the federal government picking up about 62% of the cost.
On Monday, the Colorado Department of Health Care Policy and Financing issued a request for companies to bid on its plan to import drugs from Canada. Unlike Florida’s plan, Colorado’s would help individuals buy the medicines at their local pharmacy. Colorado also would give health insurance plans the option to include imported drugs in their benefit designs.
Kim Bimestefer, executive director of Colorado’s Health Care Policy and Financing agency, said she is hopeful the Biden administration will allow importation plans to proceed. “We are optimistic,” she said.
Her agency’s analysis shows Colorado consumers can save an average of 61% off the price of many medications imported from Canada, she added.
Prices are cheaper north of the border because Canada limits how much drugmakers can charge for medicines. The United States lets the free market determine drug prices.
The Canadian government has said it would not allow the exportation of prescription drugs that would create or exacerbate a drug shortage. Bimestefer said that her agency has spoken to officials at the Canadian consulate in Denver and that officials there are mainly concerned about shortages of generic drugs rather than brand-name drugs, which is what her state is most interested in importing since they are among the most costly medicines in the U.S.
Colorado plans to choose a private company in Canada to export medications as well as a U.S. importer. It hopes to have a program in operation by mid-2022.
But skeptics say getting the programs off the ground is a long shot. They note that Congress in 2003 passed a law to allow certain drugs to be imported from Canada — but only if the secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services agreed it could be done safely. HHS secretaries under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama refused to do that. But HHS Secretary Alex Azar gave the approval in September.
Biden’s HHS nominee, Xavier Becerra, voted for the 2003 Canadian drug-importation law when he was a member of Congress.
HHS referred questions on the issue to the White House, which did not return calls for comment.
Trish Riley, executive director of the National Academy for State Health Policy, said that states have worked hard to set up procedures to ensure drugs coming from Canada are as safe as those typically sold at local pharmacies. She noted that many drugs sold in the United States are already made overseas.
She said the Biden administration could choose not to defend the importation rule in the PhRMA court case or ask for an extension to reply to the lawsuit. “Right now, it’s murky,” she said of figuring out what the Biden team will do.
Ian Spatz, a senior adviser with consulting firm Manatt Health, questions how significant the savings could be under the plan, largely because of the hefty cost of setting up a program and running it over the objections of the pharmaceutical industry.
Another obstacle is that some of the highest-priced drugs, such as insulin and other injectables, are excluded from drug importation. Spatz also doubts whether ongoing safety issues can be resolved to satisfy the new administration.
“The Trump administration plan was merely to consider applications from states and that it was open for business,” he said. “Whether [HHS] will approve any applications in the current environment is highly uncertain.”
Phil Galewitz is a Kaiser Health News journalist.
Phil Galewitz: pgalewitz@kff.org, @philgalewitz
David Warsh: Aaron Burr, the Gunpowder Plot and our current scoundrel-in-chief
Vice President Aaron Burr in 1802
SOMERVILLE, Mass.
Donald Trump has begun appearing in the rear-view mirror. I have compared Trump to Aaron Burr, the scoundrel who sought to overturn the 1800 presidential election in the early days of the Republic. Hit this link for an explanation of what he did.
Later, starting in 1804, Burr sought to invent around U.S. elections altogether, hoping to foment a breakaway-nation that he could govern in the Spanish Southwest.
No other episode in American history comes close. But after following news about the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol, I’m inclined to believe that the history of England offers a more illuminating comparison. I’ve been thinking about Guy Fawkes and the 17th Century Gunpowder Plot.
The background was the Protestant Reformation, which had begun in Germany, in 1517, with Martin Luther. Starting in 1533, King Henry VIII withdrew Britain its allegiance to the Roman Catholic Church. Catholics, especially Jesuit priests, had a hard time of it under Henry’s daughter Queen Elizabeth I. Elizabeth’s Catholic cousin, Mary, Queen of Scots, was executed for treason in 1587.
Elizabeth died childless, in 1603, without having named an heir. Queen Mary’s son, Elizabeth’s nephew, peacefully acceded to the throne as James I of England and James VI of Scotland. But repression of Catholics continued, and in 1605 a group of English Catholics plotted to blow up the House of Lords during the opening of Parliament, on Nov. 5. Betrayed by a letter of seemingly mysterious provenance, one of the plotters, Guy Fawkes, was discovered guarding 36 barrels of gunpowder in the basement the night before, quite enough to demolish the building. The plotters were captured and, one way or another, put to death, including some Catholic clergy linked to the plot.
The world was smaller then. Passions ran deeper. Globalization had only just begun. But it is hard to think of any other episode in Anglo-American history whose rhetorical aim resembled more closely that of the mob that descended on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, having been dispatched on their mission by President Trump.
One group of skirmishers came within seconds of sighting Vice President Pence as he, along with his wife and daughter, was spirited out of the Senate chamber and into a hideaway, according to a Jan. 16 story in The Washington Post. The gunpowder plotters intended to kill King James and install his nine-year-old daughter on the throne as Catholic monarch. The Capitol Hill mob vigorously denounced Pence as a traitor for his failure to overturn the presidential-election results. A mock gallows was installed on the western approach to the Capitol.
Persecution of Catholics continued but was mild relative to the century before for the remainder of the reign of James I – he died in 1625 – but anti-Catholic sentiment persisted in England for two centuries, through a not-unrelated civil war and a very-related “Glorious Revolution.”
No one knows what might be the long-term effects of the assault on the Capitol. My hunch is that it will be remembered as thoroughly repugnant and rejected and condemned until it is forgotten. For a higher-resolution characterological account of the Trump story, see “What TV Can Tell Us about How the Trump Show Ends,” by Joanna Weiss. The Trump presidency resembled an antihero drama, Weiss says, more closely than reality TV, the saga of Tony Soprano her chief case in point.
With this emergency behind, I am returning this weekly to my main concern, economics, meanwhile finishing a book on the last hundred years of its textbook versions. As for my plans to shift to the Substack publishing platform, they are postponed; Economic Principals will move at the end of the year, by which time the book will have begun wending its way its way to the press. Luck be a lady this year!
David Warsh, a veteran columnist and an economic historian, is proprietor of Somerville, Mass.-based economicprincipals.com, where this column originated.
Overview of American madness metastasizing with crazed conspiracy theories; see disturbing video here
Logo of QAnon, the crazed far-right conspiracy theory, which has many followers and has become part of the Republican Party coalition.
Engraving of the eighth print of A Rake's Progress, depicting inmates at Bedlam Asylum, by William Hogarth
This piece includes two fervent Rhode Island Trumpists, Anne Armstrong (whose AKAs include Anna Winograd Vrankar) and Alan Gordon, who were in Washington on Jan. 6 to demand the overturning of the free and fair 2020 election so that their leader could stay in office. She asserted to me (Robert Whitcomb) that they were not in the riot at the Capitol itself.
Ms. Armstrong was ordained a minister by a mail-order and Internet operation called World Christianship Ministries. She and Mr. Gordon operate “The Healing Church of Rhode Island’’ in rural gun-and-Trump-besotted West Greenwich, R.I. (at 99 Hudson Pond Road, to be exact). They are both QAnon fans. Given the incendiary nature of QAnon lies, it’s easy to see how some adherents could become violent. We hope that federal and state officials can keep track of the more crazed QAnon believers.
QAnon is an easily disproven far-right conspiracy theory alleging that a cabal of Satan-worshipping cannibalistic pedophiles is running a global child sex-trafficking ring and has been plotting against Donald Trump, who has been fighting the cabal.
All Americans should look at this video to see what fellow cultists of Armstrong and Gordon did at the Capitol that day. They won’t forget it. And this.
Below can be found some entertaining but also disturbing stuff in the links provided. It gives some local sense of the madness that has overtaken so much of America.
First, for some context, use these links:
https://harpers.org/archive/1964/11/the-paranoid-style-in-american-politics/
and:
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/14/opinion/facebook-far-right.html
and:
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/09/magazine/trump-coup.html
and:
https://theconversation.com/how-to-spot-a-conspiracy-theory-expert-guide-to-conspiracy-theories-part-one-133802
And:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/2021/01/16/video-timeline-capitol-siege/?arc404=true
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20161026-how-liars-create-the-illusion-of-truth
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-shared-psychosis-of-donald-trump-and-his-loyalists/?fbclid=IwAR1THagB-MzvOpEBPc4zdMItlxeo
https://www.cnn.com/2021/01/20/tech/qanon-believers-inauguration-reaction/index.html?
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/01/conservatism-reaches-dead-end/617629/?surface=meter_limit_reached&article_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theatlantic.com%2Fideas%2Farchive%2F2021%2F01%2Fconservatism-reaches-dead-end%2F617629%2F&fbclid=IwAR03wWVJSXHbzhmROsW6ZgH0_AbsIJdcSKXQ79vOHxIkKKlCm1uBV4B8_Yk
Contrary to a couple of news reports, such as The Daily Mail report here, Alan Gordon and Anne Armstrong are not married to each other but live on the same spread as their church business in West Greenwich, R.I. Ms. Armstrong says she has a husband and seven children.
Also, extremists (including Ms. Armstrong) make references to the alleged (and bogus) conspiracy of the “Illuminati”.
Hit this link for background on that conspiracy trope, often used by anti-Semites.
https://www.ucl.ac.uk/european-institute/news/2019/sep/jacob-rees-moggs-alarming-cry-illuminati
And these links, some of which have entertaining pictures:
https://www.eastbayexpress.com/oakland/cult-of-cannabis/Content?oid=31505241https://turtleboysports.com/totally-sane-wizards-accuse-rhode-island-pd-of-sex-trafficking-special-needs-kids-are-begging-to-be-infecte
https://www.academia.edu/38062539/Clergyman_to_jail_self_CIA_plot_alleged
https://www.facebook.com/AnneArmstrongRI/posts/2672468839689031
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U8vvE0g-dxg
http://thehealingchurchri.com/
https://www.bostonherald.com/2020/02/10/pro-pot-christian-sect-boards-trump-train/
https://www.tmz.com/2018/10/24/rhode-island-candidate-alan-gordon-n-word-marijuana/
https://ecf.rid.uscourts.gov/cgi-bin/show_public_doc?2015cv0215-23
https://ballotpedia.org/Anne_Armstrong
https://www.facebook.com/AnneArmstrongRI/
https://twitter.com/AvengingAnnieRI/status/1350288973181181952
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2016/01/08/and-here-you-thought-you-knew-what-i-n-r-i-meant/
https://patch.com/rhode-island/coventry/boy-could-one-thing-have-gone-right-alan-gordon
https://merryjane.com/news/marijuana-church-our-lady-guadalupe
https://www.facebook.com/AnneArmstrongRI/posts/hey-qanon-obama-got-fakenewsd-too-the-video-that-got-qd-out-today-was-edited-to-/2125350864400834/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/fbi-warning-inauguration-qanon/2021/01/18/293284b6-59c8-11eb-b8bd-ee36b1cd18bf_story.html
https://www.facebook.com/AnneArmstrongRI/posts/hey-qanon-obama-got-fakenewsd-too-the-video-that-got-qd-out-today-was-edited-to-/2125350864400834/https://independent.academia.edu/AlanGordon3
https://www.facebook.com/AnneArmstrongRI/
Bridgewater (Mass.) State Hospital for the Criminally Insane
Happy memories of way back in Washington, long before the neo-Fascist invasion
From Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com
“This is what you’ve gotten, guys.”
-- Utah Sen. Mitt Romney, during the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol, yelling at Sen. Ted Cruz and some other neo-Fascist GOP colleagues in the Capitol who were leading the lie-and-demagoguery-filled attempt to overturn Biden’s election.
Trump's acting defense secretary, Christopher Miller, presumably at the order of Trump, had refused until it was too late to authorize the use of National Guard to defend the Capitol, making its storming easier. And the Capitol Police acted (intentionally?) hapless. Were Russia-connected agents involved? How much of this attack was closely coordinated with Trump and his henchmen? Questions, questions….
Watching the ignoramuses, Nazis, gun fetishists, KKK-style white racists, QAnons and simply suckers, and all of them traitors, crashing into the Capitol at their fuhrer’s command on Jan. 6 in Washington took me back to a quieter, easier time in that city, in the late ‘50s and early ‘60s, when I’d visit friends there. The District then still often had the air of a sometimes sleepy Southern town, and there was far, far less security. The assassinations, riots and terrorist attacks, especially, of course, 9/11, that would come in future years would lead to much tighter restrictions in public buildings, including those hideous barriers in front of the White House on Pennsylvania Avenue.
But back then you could wander around with considerable freedom. I remember one in particular, in 1961, with my friend Al d’Ossche, a native of New Orleans (where he learned to become a terrific performer of jazz and other music) who had moved to Washington and quickly learned its byways. We’d wander the Capitol building and nip into the offices of senators and congresspeople, often chatting with them and their staffers.
I particularly remember meeting in the hall with Arizona Sen. Barry Goldwater, the libertarian/conservative from Arizona (where he took many beautiful photos) and New York Sen. Jacob Javits, who was a member of that now mostly extinct species (Nelson) “Rockefeller Republican’’. Javits grew increasing grouchy by being held up by a couple of kids as Goldwater continued to talk with us, maybe because I told him I had read his book The Conscience of a Conservative. I wonder if they missed an (unimportant) vote on the Senate floor as a result.
On another trip in those years, I dropped by the office of my old-fashioned Yankee Republican congressman from southeastern Massachusetts, Hastings Keith. He asked me: “What do you actually know about how Congress really works?’’ Then, without waiting, he explained how it did. And, God knows, in those days Congress often worked pretty well because Democrats and Republicans were frequently more than happy to work together. For that matter, unlike now, they also often socialized together, including with their families.
On that and other trips, I found it easy to wander through assorted grand buildings housing federal departments with virtually no security apparent. One was the White House, where the man in the guard house (a Marine, I think) waved us through. We explained to a guide in the public part of the mansion that we wanted to look at the official – and large -- official portrait of Harry Truman, which Al’s maternal grandmother, Greta Walker, had painted. The guide led us there and showed us some parts of the White House that were then off-limits to the general public.
Truman is my favorite Democratic president. My least favorite are the genocidal Andrew Jackson – crook, slaveowner and mass murderer of Native Americans, whose portrait Trump appropriately hung in the Oval Office -- and the extreme racist prig Woodrow Wilson, whose ignorance of Europe and rigidity in dealing with the Senate about the League of Nations killed American participation in it. That was a factor in creating the conditions that led to World War II.
Al also showed me such exotic (for back then in America) private-sector sights as the mosque at the Islamic Center of Washington and the National Press Club, with its always crowded bar, which, sadly, we were a tad too young to patronize. Mid-day drinking by journalists, politicians, lobbyists, PR people and other very-Washingtonian groups was far more common then. D.C.’s boozing culture started to go into sharp decline in the ‘80s. It was great unhealthy fun while it lasted.
Mitchell Zimmerman: Of the Nazis and Trump's Fascist mob
Nazis during the Beer Hall Putsch
Trump’s fascist mobs, inspired by nonstop lies, invade the Capitol
From OtherWords.org
In 1923, Hitler and the Nazis stormed a beer hall in Munich, Germany, whence they planned to overthrow German democracy. The putsch failed ignominiously, and Hitler was briefly jailed.
That, of course, was not the end of Adolf Hitler. America needs to remember that history if we want to preserve our democracy from the right-wing forces rallied by Donald Trump today.
As Congress gathered to formalize Trump’s election defeat, he and his extremist followers launched their own beer hall putsch. “We will not take it anymore,” Trump told them. “You’ll never take back our country with weakness, you have to show strength.”
With these words, Trump unleashed the frenzied horde.
They breached the barriers around the Capitol and fought their way in, brutally killing a police officer and assaulting many others. They broke into offices, smashed windows, looted, and forced Congress to cease its operations. Outside, they built a gallows.
Many rioters carried weapons and some had plastic handcuffs. Their obvious goal: to take hostages and force Congress to award Trump a second term. A total (so far) of five deaths.
Trump is responsible, but not him alone. The mob he sent had accomplices: a second mob of Republican officials who laid the groundwork by enabling Trump’s lies.
The second mob includes the eight Republican senators and 139 House Republicans who voted against certifying Joe Biden’s election, as well as the 17 Republican attorneys general who supported a bogus lawsuit to throw out the election.
Finally, it includes the Republican office holders who refused to tell their voters the truth: Trump lost. There was no “steal,” as 60 court rulings — including many by Trump-appointed judges — unanimously concluded.
These Republican politicians knew this, but they still insisted that Trump be installed as president, confirming their opposition to elections and hostility to constitutional democracy.
The second mob misled Republican voters so well that 45 percent of them actually support the criminal attack on the Capitol. Those tens of millions of people represent a potential mass base for fascism.
So, what should we do?
First, Trump should be impeached, removed, and charged with inciting a riot and other crimes. And criminal charges are obviously in order for the terrorist violence committed by the first mob. Experts also suggest expelling members of the second mob from Congress or boycotting them from public life.
Accountability is vital. But the Democrats who will now control Congress and the White House must also double down on efforts to restore and strengthen American democracy.
They should act swiftly to limit the power of money in politics, restore the Voting Rights Act, and eliminate needless obstacles to voting. And Washington, D.C., should be admitted as a state, so its citizens have full voting rights and powers.
Finally, the Democratic Party must fight to enact bold programs to deal with the massive problems Americans face — from climate change to the pandemic to the declining living standards of working Americans.
Half-hearted steps will only leave ordinary Americans feeling that that government does not work, priming the pump for more right-wing radicalization. But a full-throated campaign for real, understandable change — even against Republican obstruction — can help voters understand that democracy can work for them when it isn’t hijacked by the super-rich and their servants.
The assault on the Capitol has uncovered the true nature of right-wing Republican politics in America: a thinly veiled war on constitutional democracy and majority rule. The way to prevent the next authoritarian coup attempt is to build a robust democracy that demonstrates it is responsive to the needs and interests of real people.
A slap on the wrist for the coup plotters and a swift return to the status quo isn’t enough, as the beer hall putsch should have taught us. We need a real commitment to reverse the erosion of our democracy.
Mitchell Zimmerman is a lawyer, social activism and author of the thriller Mississippi Reckoning.
Llewellyn King: Trump and his terrorists have desecrated our temple to democracy, where I had spent many happy hours
The East Front of the Capitol at dusk
WEST WARWICK, R.I.
Cry, the beloved building.
I have been lucky and have walked the halls of the Houses of Parliament in London, visited the Elysée Palace, in Paris, the Bundestag, in Berlin, and the Kremlin, in Moscow.
Still, it is the Capitol, the building on a hill in Washington, that fills me with awe, but it isn’t awesome or frightening, and doesn’t exalt in power.
The Capitol is at once romantic, imposing and egalitarian. Ever since I first set foot on Capitol Hill, the building has been for me, an immigrant, the elegant expression of everything that is best about America: open, accessible and shared.
Until terrorism changed things, anyone could walk into the Capitol without security checks. Taxis could draw up and let you out under the arches that designate the Senate or House entrances.
It hurt me in profound ways to see a mob, inspired by the rogue president and his lickspittle enablers, trash that hallowed place; try to lay waste to the temple of American tolerance, freedom, excellence and uniqueness; to treat it as an impediment to their coup, to their lies-fed catechism of overthrow.
To see any great building desecrated is painful, but to see it happen to the Capitol is to witness heresy against democracy, against Americanism, against our better angels and highest aspirations.
When the Cathedral of Notre Dame, in Paris, was engulfed in flames, I realized that the building was a prayer: the elegant stone, wood and plaster embodiment of man’s search for God. By that measure, the Capitol is the embodiment of man’s search for fairer government.
As a reporter, the first thing you notice about the Capitol when you go there is how open it is once you have gotten through the metal detectors at the entrances. You walk the halls, ride the elevators and the little trains that run between the Capitol and the House and Senate office buildings, and eat in the cafeterias. The members have privileges, like their own entrances, reserved elevators and reserved train seats. But you can see legislators in the corridors and snack bars, conferring with aides, and often those who are there to get help or to lobby for a cause.
The work of government is at its most accessible to outsiders in the Capitol. Although there are tours, it is still best to roam the building alone, from the tunnels in the basement (where you end up when you take the elevator or stairs and go down too far) to the glory of the Rotunda. The tiled floors, paneling, frescoes, paintings and statuary are all art of the voice of the people, cobbled into a great building.
There are secret places in the Capitol, too. I once had lunch with Sen. Bennett Johnston (D.-La.), then chairman of the Senate Energy Committee, and The Wall Street Journal’s Paul Gigot in a dining room assigned just to the chairman of that committee — one that neither of us guests even suspected existed. The old Joint Committee on Atomic Energy had a near-secret set of offices accessible through a discreet elevator, unmarked and looking as though it might carry freight instead of nuclear secrets.
But mostly the work of the Congress, which is carried on in the Capitol and its adjacent office buildings, is surprisingly open, accessible and, in that, democratic.
My fervent hope is that freedom, which has been somewhat eroded over the years with new layers of security, isn’t further eroded after the Jan. 6 assault.
Looking forward, maybe the horror of government by the Great Lie will be held at bay. While we will never see an end to politicians’ fibs, we can hope that politicians will be called out for them, won’t have them respected as an alternative truth, which is the ignominious and extraordinary achievement of the Trump administration.
Trump laid the fire before the election, declaring there would be fraud, perhaps certain that he would lose. He lit it on Jan. 6.
The mob that stormed the Capitol isn’t to blame. The blame rests with those who have assaulted the truth over the past four years.
Blame Trump and castigate his enablers, from the talking heads of television to members of Congress like Republican senators Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley and Marco Rubio. They don’t deserve to sit under the Capitol dome. That is for those who care about America. It is a noble mantle.
On Twitter: @llewellynking2
Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. He’s based in Rhode Island and Washington, D.C.
Don Pesci: In Connecticut, the politically royal Ritters, the House and an always looming outhouse
“The Genius of Connecticut,’’ in the state Capitol, by sculptor Randolph Rogers (work done in 1877–78), is a plaster version of the bronze statue (destroyed) originally mounted on top of the Capitol dome.
VERNON, Conn.
In politics, power is golden. Indeed, power, not riches, is the coin of the political realm. In Connecticut, the Ritters, a power family, are the closest we have come to political royalty.
Hartford Courant journalist Chris Keating lays out the political lineage of the Ritter clan in a piece titled “Hartford’s Ritter Family extends influence.”
“The Ritters,” Keating notes in the lead to his story, “a Hartford family whose public service spans more than five decades, have arrived at a level of political prominence and influence unseen in recent Connecticut political history.
“The family has sent four members — a grandfather, two sons, and a grandson — to the state Capitol as Democratic representatives in the state legislature. Ritter family members now control powerful positions in the General Assembly, state Supreme Court and among special-interest lobbyists.”
Matt Ritter, the incoming Democratic House speaker, started herding progressive cats when the General Assembly session convened on Jan. 6 and will continue until it adjourns, in June. Ritter replaces state employee union factotum Joe Arsimowicz, who, along with two leading Republicans, Sen. Len Fasano and Rep. Themis Klarides, left the General Assembly at the last session’s end.
Ritter and his counterpart in the state Senate, President Pro Tem Martin Looney, may, if he wishes, rule the roost without Republican support in the House or Senate. This was former Gov. Dannel Malloy’s preference, but Malloy’s heavy hand took a toll on his popularity. And when he threw in the gubernatorial towel at the end of his second term and accepted a position as chancellor of the University of Maine System, Malloy’s popularity was a burning wreck.
Democratic numbers in the General Assembly – a majority of 98-63 in the House and 24-12 in the Senate following the 2020 elections -- now allow the party to run roughshod over Republican sensibilities. Democrats, it had not been noticed by media savants in Connecticut, triumphed over Republicans by means of a magician’s trick; they ran against President Trump, who was not on the ballot in 2018 and who in 2020 was responsible for none of the shutdown regulations imposed by the Democratic governor and the Democratic-run legislature.
However, the sticking point in Connecticut are the progressive cats and, difficult as it may be to accept, some journalists in Connecticut’s left-of-center media afflicted with an institutional memory who may not be willing to accept without modest resistance the continuing deterioration of the state’s economy in the post-Coronavirus era.
Ritter himself, a man of the House, may not be willing to sell his family’s long service on behalf of Connecticut for a mess of progressive-union pottage – which means that he may be more willing than Arsimowicz or Looney, a thoroughgoing progressive, to make common cause with Republicans on matters that promote the prosperity of his state and the honor of the General Assembly.
In days gone by, when Ritter’s grandfather, George Ritter, was serving on the Hartford City Council, thereafter “spending 12 years at the legislature starting in 1969,” as The Courant puts it, such solicitude for the honor and prosperity of the state was brashly called patriotic. And the state patriotism that burned in the heart of the grandfather may, as sometimes happens, still light the darkness enshrouding the grandson.
Why should raw politics, the pursuit of power for power’s sake, always be the victor in political battles? Honor in politics -- a genuine love and solicitude for the state of Connecticut as such -- is more than half the battle that must daily be fought. It is the whole battle, always and everywhere; for politics without honor, a foresight that sees beyond battles of the moment, is tyranny writ large or small.
The honor of the House demands that the House should convene as usual and, as usual, do the public’s business. The legislature, House and Senate together, a co-equal branch of government along with the chief executive and the judiciary, represents the voice of the people, and that voice should be heard loudly above the clamor of partisan divisions. The General Assembly must not operate longer as a Coronavirus victim, metaphorically afraid of its own shadow. The welfare of Connecticut depends upon the courage and patriotism of members of the state legislature, and this body cannot function properly as an agency that rents its constitutional prerogatives to governors or committee chairmen or union representatives.
Likewise, the judiciary is not, nor was meant to be, the servant of the governor; it is the servant of the law, and cannot perform its proper function hiding behind Coronavirus flower pots.
To be a representative body, the House over which Ritter will preside must first be, and Ritter's first and most difficult duty will be to restore the republican (small “r”) character of the House. Lincoln said rightly “a house divided against itself cannot stand.” But an outhouse -- simply an instrument of power politics -- pretending to be a House should not be permitted to stand at all.
Don Pesci is Vernon-based columnist.
Llewellyn King: The traitorous tribe that kills fellow Americans
President Trump touring a Honeywell mask factory (!) in May 2020. As at many other crowded events he has attended during the pandemic, Trump and his entourage, (fearful of his rebuke) refused to wear masks at this highly publicized visit.
WEST WARWICK, R.I.
When a nation goes to war its first step to survival is to protect the homeland against invasion. Every citizen is co-opted: It is their national duty.
We are on a war footing against COVID-19. It has invaded our homeland, and it is slaughtering us. Nearly 300,000 are dead and the vast hospital network in the United States is overwhelmed.
A dark cloud passes before our sun. Christmas promises more sorrow as we wait for reinforcements -- in this case, the vaccine -- to arrive.
The first line of defense against this common enemy, this indiscriminate killer, is a simple piece of layered cloth or paper held over the nose and mouth by cloth or elastic strings. It is a face mask, the simplest of defensive weapons.
But there is in the United States a tribe that has lost its head, reminiscent of Nicholas Monserrat’s great novel of 1956, The Tribe That Lost Its head. (See an old cover below.)
There are among us those who won’t defend their homeland, won’t wear masks, and accompany that treason by propagating a theory that to wear a mask is to grant a malign government total authority over the individual, and to bring about totalitarianism; or that to wear a mask is to cede manhood or endanger our way of life.
Worse, there are those who believe that it is a political statement of solidarity with the outgoing administration, with the embattled president, and the raucous nationalism that is the core of his appeal.
Some won’t wear masks out of youthful chutzpah, believing this is a disease of the old and that the young and the healthy are immune. This is a fiction they have been fed by those who should know better and most likely do know better, most of whom reside under Republican roofs, presided over by that Niagara Falls of disinformation, President Trump.
While the nation is taking fatal casualties which it doesn’t need to take, while first responders and medical personal are thrown again and again into the breach, exhausted and scared, the Trump Republicans can’t bring themselves to join the battle.
While the signs of war — a war with a terrible count in deaths -- rages on, congressional Republicans are foraging for scandals like pigs after truffles. Most of them still won’t condemn Trump for his super-spreader activities, like his rallies, parties and reckless behavior in public, which signal masks aren’t needed.
The trouble is that leaders of this headless tribe, this unacceptable face of what was the Grand Old Party, are so cowed that they won’t check the president.
The Republican Party used to be made up of muscular individuals, lawmakers who took their mandate seriously, not today’s pusillanimous followers. Incredibly, most Republican members of Congress can’t bring themselves to admit that Joe Biden won the election and will be the next president. Had there been “massive voter fraud” this wouldn’t be so. The courts would have spoken other than as they have.
All of this has played into the anti-mask movement and its lethal consequences. The virus doesn’t ask party affiliation: It is an equal-opportunity slayer.
Then there is Trump’s great enabler in the Senate, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.
Even as millions of Americans don’t know where the next meal will come from this Christmas besides a food bank, and rent and utility bills are unpaid, McConnell, and McConnell alone, will decide who gets relief, who gets the shaft for Christmas. He can just refuse to bring a bill to the floor and end it right there. His personal concerns are paramount, not those of the other members of Congress.
Not only does McConnell not wish to understand the gravity of the situation in the country, but he also seems to relish his ability to exacerbate it, to turn his job into a Lego game for his own amusement.
This will be a bleak Christmas lit by the hope that the vaccine will deliver us from despair and bottomless hurt.
But for the vaccine to vanquish the virus, we must get our shots. If the same idiocy that shuns masks prevails, the war won’t fully be won for years when it could be ended next year.
The sight of victory is the best Christmas present, and it is possible next year if we close ranks. Those who will bear the guilt are known. They are in Washington now.
Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. His email is llewellynking1@gmail.com and he’s based in Rhode Island and Washington, D.C.
Web Site: whchronicle.com
Rachana Pradhan: How big pharma money colors Operation Warp Speed
April 16 was a big day for Moderna, the Cambridge, Mass., Massachusetts biotech company on the verge of becoming a front-runner in the U.S. government’s race for a coronavirus vaccine. It had received roughly half a billion dollars in federal funding to develop a COVID shot that might be used on millions of Americans.
Thirteen days after the massive infusion of federal cash — which triggered a jump in the company’s stock price — Moncef Slaoui, a Moderna board member and longtime drug-industry executive, was awarded options to buy 18,270 shares in the company, according to Securities and Exchange Commission filings. The award added to 137,168 options he’d accumulated since 2018, the filings show.
It wouldn’t be long before President Trump announced Slaoui as the top scientific adviser for the government’s $12 billion Operation Warp Speed program to rush COVID vaccines to market. In his Rose Garden speech on May 15, Trump lauded Slaoui as “one of the most respected men in the world” on vaccines.
The Trump administration relied on an unusual maneuver that allowed executives to keep investments in drug companies that would benefit from the government’s pandemic efforts: They were brought on as contractors, doing an end run around federal conflict-of-interest regulations in place for employees. That has led to huge potential payouts — some already realized, according to a KHN analysis of SEC filings and other government documents.
Slaoui owned 137,168 Moderna stock options worth roughly $7 million on May 14, one day before Trump announced his senior role to help shepherd COVID vaccines. The day of his appointment, May 15, he resigned from Moderna’s board. Three days later, on May 18, following the company’s announcement of positive results from early-stage clinical trials, the options’ value shot up to $9.1 million, the analysis found. The Department of Health and Human Services said that Slaoui sold his holdings May 20, when they would have been worth about $8 million, and will donate certain profits to cancer research. Separately, Slaoui held nearly 500,000 shares in GlaxoSmithKline, where he worked for three decades, upon retiring in 2017, according to corporate filings.
Carlo de Notaristefani, an Operation Warp Speed adviser and former senior executive at Teva Pharmaceuticals, owned 665,799 shares of the drug company’s stock as of March 10. While Teva is not a recipient of Warp Speed funding, Trump promoted its antimalarial drug hydroxychloroquine as a COVID treatment, even with scant evidence that it worked. The company donated millions of tablets to U.S. hospitals and the drug received emergency use authorization from the Food and Drug Administration in March. In the following weeks, its share price nearly doubled.
Two other Operation Warp Speed advisers working on therapeutics, Drs. William Erhardt and Rachel Harrigan, own financial stakes of unknown value in Pfizer, which in July announced a $1.95 billion contract with HHS for 100 million doses of its vaccine. Erhardt and Harrigan were previously Pfizer employees.
“With those kinds of conflicts of interest, we don’t know if these vaccines are being developed based on merit,” said Craig Holman, a lobbyist for Public Citizen, a liberal consumer advocacy group.
An HHS spokesperson said the advisers are in compliance with the relevant federal ethical standards for contractors.
These investments in the pharmaceutical industry are emblematic of a broader trend in which a small group with the specialized expertise needed to inform an effective government response to the pandemic have financial stakes in companies that stand to benefit from the government response.
Slaoui maintained he was not in discussions with the federal government about a role when his latest batch of Moderna stock options was awarded, telling KHN he met with HHS Secretary Alex Azar and was offered the position for the first time May 6. The stock options awarded in late April were canceled as a result of his departure from the Moderna board in May, he said. According to the KHN analysis of his holdings, the options would have been worth more than $330,000 on May 14.
HHS declined to confirm that timeline.
The fate of Operation Warp Speed after President-elect Biden takes office is an open question. While Democrats in Congress have pursued investigations into Warp Speed advisers and the contracting process under which they were hired, Biden hasn’t publicly spoken about the program or its senior leaders. Spokespeople for the transition didn’t respond to a request for comment.
The four HHS advisers were brought on through a National Institutes of Health contract with consulting firm Advanced Decision Vectors, so far worth $1.4 million, to provide expertise on the development and production of vaccines, therapies and other COVID products, according to the federal government’s contracts database.
Slaoui’s appointment in particular has rankled Democrats and organizations such as Public Citizen. They say he has too much authority to be classified as a consultant. “It is inevitable that the position he is put in as co-chair of Operation Warp Speed makes him a government employee,” Holman said.
The incoming administration may have a window to change the terms under which Slaoui was hired before his contract ends, in March. Yet making big changes to Operation Warp Speed could disrupt one of the largest vaccination efforts in history while the American public anxiously awaits deliverance from the pandemic, which is breaking daily records for new infections. Warp Speed has set out to buy and distribute 300 million doses of a COVID vaccine, the first ones by year’s end.
“By the end of December we expect to have about 40 million doses of these two vaccines available for distribution,” Azar said Nov. 18, referring to front-runner vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna.
Azar maintained that Warp Speed would continue seamlessly even with a “change in leadership.” “In the event of a transition, there’s really just total continuity that would occur,” the secretary said.
Pfizer, which didn’t receive federal funds for research but secured the multibillion-dollar contract under Warp Speed, on Nov. 20 sought emergency authorization from the FDA; Moderna just announced that it would do so. In total, Moderna received nearly $1 billion in federal funds for development and a $1.5 billion contract with HHS for 100 million doses.
While it’s impossible to peg the precise value of Slaoui’s Moderna holdings without records of the sale transactions, KHN estimated their worth by evaluating the company’s share prices on the dates he received the options and the stock’s price on several key dates — including May 14, the day before his Warp Speed position was announced, and May 20.
However, the timing of Slaoui’s divestment of his Moderna shares — five days after he resigned from the company’s board — meant that he did not have to file disclosures with the SEC confirming the sale, even though he was privy to insider information when he received the stock options, experts in securities law said. That weakness in securities law, according to good-governance experts, deprives the public of an independent source of information about the sale of Slaoui’s stake in the company.
“You would think there would be kind of a one-year continuing obligation [to disclose the sale] or something like that,” said Douglas Chia, president of Soundboard Governance and an expert on corporate governance issues. “But there’s not.”
HHS declined to provide documentation confirming that Slaoui sold his Moderna holdings. His investments in London-based GlaxoSmithKline — which is developing a vaccine with French drugmaker Sanofi and received $2.1 billion from the U.S. government — will be used for his retirement, Slaoui has said.
“I have always held myself to the highest ethical standards, and that has not changed upon my assumption of this role,” Slaoui said in a statement released by HHS. “HHS career ethics officers have determined my contractor status, divestures and resignations have put me in compliance with the department’s robust ethical standards.”
Moderna, in an earlier statement to CNBC, said Slaoui divested “all of his equity interest in Moderna so that there is no conflict of interest” in his new role. However, the conflict-of-interest standards for Slaoui and other Warp Speed advisers are less stringent than those for federal employees, who are required to give up investments that would pose a conflict of interest. For instance, if Slaoui had been brought on as an employee, his stake from a long career at GlaxoSmithKline would be targeted for divestment.
Instead, Slaoui has committed to donating certain GlaxoSmithKline financial gains to the National Institutes of Health.
Offering Warp Speed advisers contracts might have been the most expedient course in a crisis.
“As the universe of potential qualified candidates to advise the federal government’s efforts to produce a COVID-19 vaccine is very small, it is virtually impossible to find experienced and qualified individuals who have no financial interests in corporations that produce vaccines, therapeutics, and other lifesaving goods and services,” Sarah Arbes, HHS’s assistant secretary for legislation and a Trump appointee, wrote in September to Rep. James Clyburn (D.-S.C.), who leads a House oversight panel on the coronavirus response.
That includes multiple drug-industry veterans working as HHS advisers, an academic who’s overseeing the safety of multiple COVID vaccines in clinical trials and sits on the board of Gilead Sciences, and even former government officials who divested stocks while they were federal employees but have since joined drug company boards.
Dr. Scott Gottlieb and Dr. Mark McClellan, former FDA commissioners, have been visible figures informally advising the federal response. Each sits on the board of a COVID vaccine developer.
After leaving the FDA in 2019, Gottlieb joined Pfizer’s board and has bought 4,000 of its shares, at the time worth more than $141,000, according to SEC filings. As of April, he had additional stock units worth nearly $352,000 that will be cashed out should he leave the board, according to corporate filings. As a board member, Gottlieb is required to own a certain number of Pfizer shares.
McClellan has been on Johnson & Johnson’s board since 2013 and earned $1.2 million in shares under a deferred-compensation arrangement, corporate filings show.
The two also receive thousands of dollars in cash fees annually as board members. Gottlieb and McClellan frequently disclose their corporate affiliations, but not always. Their Sept. 13 Wall Street Journal op-ed on how the FDA could grant emergency authorization of a vaccine identified their FDA roles and said they were on the boards of companies developing COVID vaccines but failed to name Pfizer and Johnson & Johnson. Both companies would benefit financially from such a move by the FDA.
“It isn’t a lower standard for FDA approval,” they wrote in the piece. “It’s a more tailored, flexible standard that helps protect those who need it most while developing the evidence needed to make the public confident about getting a Covid-19 vaccine.”
About the inconsistency, Gottlieb wrote in an email to KHN: “My affiliation to Pfizer is widely, prominently, and specifically disclosed in dozens of articles and television appearances, on my Twitter profile, and in many other places. I mention it routinely when I discuss Covid vaccines and I am proud of my affiliation to the company.”
A spokesperson for the Duke-Margolis Center for Health Policy, which McClellan founded, noted that other Wall Street Journal op-eds cited his Johnson & Johnson role and that his affiliations are mentioned elsewhere. “Mark has consistently informed the WSJ about his board service with Johnson & Johnson, as well as other organizations,” Patricia Shea Green said.
Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine is in phase 3 clinical trials and could be available in early 2021.
Still, while they worked for the FDA, Gottlieb and McClellan were subject to federal restrictions on investments and protections against conflicts of interest that aren’t in place for Warp Speed advisers.
According to the financial disclosure statements they signed with HHS, the advisers are required to donate certain stock profits to the NIH — but can do so after the stockholder dies. They can keep investments in drug companies, and the restrictions don’t apply to stock options, which give executives the right to buy company shares in the future.
“This is a poorly drafted agreement,” said Jacob Frenkel, an attorney at Dickinson Wright and former SEC lawyer, referring to the conflict-of-interest statement included in the NIH contract with Advanced Decision Vectors, the Warp Speed advisers’ employing consulting firm. He said documents could have been “tighter and clearer in many respects,” including prohibiting the advisers from exercising their options to buy shares while they are contractors.
De Notaristefani stepped down as Teva’s executive vice president for global operations in October 2019, but according to corporate filings he would remain with the company until the end of June 2020 in order to “ensure an orderly transition.” He’s been working with Warp Speed since at least May overseeing manufacturing, according to an HHS spokesperson.
When Erhardt left Pfizer in May, U.S. COVID infections were climbing and the company was beginning vaccine clinical trials. Erhardt and Harrigan, whose LinkedIn profile says she left Pfizer in 2010, have worked as drug industry consultants.
“Ultimately, conflicts of interest in ethics turn on the mindset behavior of the responsible persons,” said Frenkel, the former SEC attorney. “The public wants to know that it can rely on the effectiveness of the therapeutic or diagnostic product without wondering if a recommendation or decision was motivated for even the slightest reason other than product effectiveness and public interest.”
Rachana Pradhan is a Kaiser Health News correspondent.
Looking across the Charles River toward Kendall Square, Cambridge, headquarters of Moderna and other tech companies.
Mitchell Zimmerman: Republicans are traitors to democracy
From OtherWords.org
Donald Trump’s refusal to accept the judgment of the American people might just seem like denial. But in denying the legitimacy of more than 78 million votes against him as of Friday, Trump and leading Republican politicians are implementing a design more sinister than poor sportsmanship.
Trump and his party have declared war on the fundamental principle of American constitutional democracy: When incumbent lose an election, they leave office. A peaceful transfer of power follows.
Republicans know full well that Biden won. Republican as well as Democratic election officials from across the country confirm there’s no evidence of voter fraud. The election was not stolen.
Nonetheless, Trump and Republican politicians are scheming to persuade tens of millions of Republican faithful that our elections cannot be relied on and that Joe Biden is an illegitimate president.
In doing so, they are undermining the bedrock of American democracy: trust in peaceful elections in a constitutional order. And they demonstrate their animosity to electoral democracy itself.
Trump himself made his views all too clear before the election, when he repeatedly refused to agree he would accept it if he lost. His excuse was that mail-in votes were going to perpetrate a massive fraud. Consistent with that fabrication, he now asserts he won the election.
Voting by mail is allowed under the law of every state in the union, and citizens have voted that way for decades without fraud or other issues. In all their lawsuits, Republicans have presented zero evidence of even remotely significant fraud.
Trump’s insidious rhetoric on the election won’t stop Biden from taking office, but it’s not harmless. For if the election was “stolen,” the hate groups Trump asked to “stand by” could well take it as a signal to move against the new government and its supporters.
Of course, this is not the first time Trump and the GOP have disputed the legitimacy of a Democratic president. When Barack Obama became the first Black president, Trump built his political career trumpeting baseless claims that Obama was born abroad and wasn’t a U.S. citizen.
And it’s not the first time they’ve fomented violence either.
During the 2016 campaign, Trump routinely encouraged violence against peaceful protestors at his rallies.
This summer he defended a supporter who shot and killed two anti-racist protestors in Kenosha, Wisconsin. And he lauded the “passionate” nature of two young men who, citing Trump’s policies, beat a 58-year-old Mexican American man with a metal pole.
Trump retweeted a video in which a supporter says, “The only good Democrat is a dead Democrat.” And when a caravan of Trump supporters, some armed, menaced a Biden bus in Texas, reportedly trying to drive it off the road, Trump expressed his delight.
American democracy is a flawed instrument. Still, imperfect as it is, it’s worth saving — and the majority voted to save it from Trump’s creeping authoritarianism. But the danger is not over, because the party that lost has turned to challenging the foundation of our constitutional democracy.
What could more openly display contempt for democracy than crowds of Trump loyalists, echoing the demand of the great man himself, chanting “stop counting votes!”
Our election has been decided — by the lawful civic engagement of over 150 million Americans, peacefully casting ballots, nearly all of them already counted. A clear, plain majority gave their votes to Joe Biden.
Donald Trump and those who promote his lies and his refusal to yield to the voters are traitors to our Constitution.:
Mitchell Zimmerman is a lawyer, longtime social activist, and author of the thriller Mississippi Reckoning.
Llewellyn King: Horrific holiday season; Pfizer vaccine developed in Germany, not U.S.
Nurse dealing with COVID-19 patient.
WEST WARWICK, R.I.
It is coming to us as a diabolical enemy: malign, merciless and murderous.
The second wave of COVID-19 will be killing us today, tomorrow, and on and on until a vaccine is administered not just to the willing recipients, but to the whole population. That could take years.
We haven’t been through anything like this since the 1918-1919 influenza pandemic. Not only is COVID-19 set to kill many more of us than it already has, but it also is likely to have huge collateral damage.
Think restaurants: 60 percent of the individually owned ones are set to fail. Think real estate: The damage is so far too great and expanding too fast to calculate -- all those office buildings sitting empty, all those shopping centers being vacated. The real estate crisis is beginning, just beginning, to be felt by the banks. Think education: A year has been lost in education.
Our cultural institutions, from small sports teams to all the performing arts, are on death watch. How long can you hold a theater production company together? How do you save those very fragile temples of high culture, including ballet, opera and symphony music? What of the buildings that house them?
Now looming are the malevolent threats to Thanksgiving and Christmas. These festivals, so cherished, so looked forward to, such milestones of every year and our lives, are set to kill many of us, gathered in love and joy.
Families will assemble in happiness, but that diabolical guest COVID-19 will be taking its monstrous, lethal place at our tables -- at the very events that in normal times bind us together. Death will share our feasts.
These are words of alarm, and they are meant to be.
Nearly a quarter of a million of us have died, choked to death by the virus. Projected deaths are 110,000 more by New Year. Yet our leaders have spurned the modest defenses available to us: face masks and isolation. There is little usefulness in assigning blame, but there is blame, and it points upward.
But there is localized blame, too. Blame for what I see on the streets, where young people stroll without protecting themselves and others from the deadly virus. Blame for what I see at the shops, where customers gain entry without the modest consideration of wearing a face mask for a few minutes.
There is blame for pastors who have insisted on holding services that have spread COVID-19 to their parishioners. And there is blame for those who have rallied or taken to street demonstrations. The virus has no political affiliation, but politics has befriended it in awful ways.
The mother lode of blame must be put upon that increasingly bizarre figure Donald J. Trump, president of the United States, elected to lead and defend us.
Trump couldn’t have vanquished the pandemic, but he could have limited its spread. He could have guided the people, set an example, told the truth, unleashed consideration not invective.
He could have done his job.
When we needed information, we got lies; when we needed guidance, we were encouraged to take risks by myth and bad example. A high number of his own staff has been felled.
On Jan. 20, 2021, President-elect Joe Biden will step into this gigantic crisis. Even if the first doses of a vaccine are being administered, the crisis will still be in full flame, taking lives, destroying businesses, subtracting jobs, and changing the trajectory of the future.
There will be good, but it will take time to arrive. It will be in innovation in everything, from more medical research to start-ups and lessons learned about survival in crisis.
It will impact immigration. Only the willfully unobservant won’t note that a preponderance of the health authorities featured nightly on television weren’t born here, and their talent is a bonus for the country.
It should be noted that Pfizer’s landmark COVID-19 vaccine wasn’t developed in that U.S. pharmaceutical behemoth, but by a husband-and-wife team in a small company in Germany. Both are children of Turkish immigrants to that country.
In all countries, immigrants have had the adventurous spirit that is the soul of creativity. Let them in.
The "Wee Annie" statue, in Gourock, Scotland, has a face mask during the pandemic.
Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. His email is llewellynking1@gmail.com and he’s based in Rhode Island and Washington, D.C.
Web site: whchronicle.com
Llewellyn King: The huge unanswered questions of the presidential campaign
WEST WARWICK, R.I.
Can’t Anybody Here Play This Game? was the title of a 1963 book by Jimmy Breslin about the disastrous first year of the New York Mets, an expansion team. It’s attributed to the team’s manager Casey Stengel.
As I’ve watched this picaresque presidential election year unfold, I’ve had the same thought.
The game is governance; the campaign, the run-up. And nobody seems to know how to play this game. The questions that should’ve been raised and answered were neither raised nor answered.
Some unheard and unanswered questions:
· How will you rebuild our stature abroad, restore America to global leadership and moral authority?
· What will you do if the pandemic hangs on for years? How will you place the millions whose jobs were lost through the pandemic in work?
· How will you fix our ailing school system with its disastrous weaknesses exposed by Covid-19?
· The health-care system is stretched to breaking under the pandemic with or without Obamacare. What is your plan?
· If the climate change-induced sea level rise accelerates, how will you deal with cities that appear in danger, including New York, Boston, New Orleans, and San Francisco?
· One of the rationales for the U.S.-Mexico border wall was to reduce the influx of drugs. Now, with the advent of drones, we may have a new drug-smuggling crisis. What is your plan to combat it?
· States depend on gasoline and cigarette taxes, but electric vehicles are pushing out gasoline taxes and cigarette smoking is in steep decline. How do you see these tax streams being replaced?
· What will you do if China invades Taiwan?
· What will you do if China bars U.S. shipping from traversing the South China Sea?
· The population of Africa is set to double every quarter century. Already there is vert high unemployment, what should the United States do to help?
· Jobs are being eaten up by AI and other technologies. While those enthralled with these job-subtracting technologies point to the history of the Industrial Revolution, this may be different. What should be done?
Just think of anything to do with the future and a gusher of questions erupts, but no answers have been heard, or few at best.
President Trump, it seems, will offer us more government as demolition derby, but wilder than in the first four years. We’ve gotten a shower of hopes, fanciful and improbable. When it comes to the overhanging crisis of today, the pandemic, he is like King Canute commanding the waves to retreat.
From his opponent, former Vice President Joe Biden, we are to get what? Decency, character? Like all candidates, he’s told us he’ll fix everything. But how remains obscured from us, and quite possibly from himself.
On the evening of April 7, 1775, Samuel Johnson, the sage and lexicographer, told us that patriotism was the last refuge of the scoundrel. That is a truth that Trump -- who probably doesn’t know who Johnson was -- has exploited as his own. He would undo the things we should be proud of in the world, like human rights, and get away with it because he wraps himself in the flag like Linus in his blanket.
Those who’ll vote for Biden will vote for a man who is old in years and old in ideas. If he wins, his supporters can trade fear for apprehension.
As we face the most momentous challenges the world has ever borne -- international upheaval, a lingering pandemic and climate change – we’ve gone through a presidential campaign where the issues were shelved for repetitive nothingness. We haven’t been lifted by high rhetoric nor inspired by blinding vision.
The global upheaval triggered by disease, nation realignment and technology will have to await the judgment of those who whisper into the ears of presidents, when they, the candidates, have none, as now.
Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. His email is llewellynking1@gmail.com and he’s based in Rhode Island and Washington, D.C.
Web site: whchronicle.com
Don Pesci: My Journal of the plague year, continued
Thank God for such friends.
October 25, 2020
VERNON, Conn.
Life goes on. {My wife} Andree’s brother Ernie died in Florida. Titan, Andree’s guide dog for the last dozen years, died as well. And my cousin, the city mouse, writes to tell me: “There are two kinds of cynics among us, Republican cynics and Democrat cynics. The Democrats are better able than Republicans to dress their cynicism in gorgeous, empathetic cloth. They are here, they want us to know, to help with the problems they have caused. It all reminds me of a quip by Karl Kraus on psychoanalysts – they are the disease they purport to cure”
In an earlier letter, he wrote, “Whatever the problem is, you may be sure that a political solution to it can only make matters worse.”
And he wonders why cultural antibodies in the United States have not yet produced an Aristophanes or a Lucian, author of the biting satirical play The Sale of Philosophers. Instead we are confronted daily with unintentionally comic politicians. And our too, too serious politics has murdered comedy. Lincoln could never have survived this poisonous sobriety.
Fall has arrived. Brown leaves are scattered across the property. I’m waiting for the wind to do the work of raking. The wood pile and the furniture out front and down by the lake, now sprinkled with a bib of leaves, have been covered with tarpaulins. We are waiting on winter. Certain as the arrival of dawn and midnight, it will come and cover all in a blanket of purist white silence.
Andree is having some difficulty in attaching the new dog’s name, Dublin, to her commands, and the commands too have changed. Thank God and Fidelco for Dublin, a sleek and attentive, male German Shepard with large eyes and silver-tipped fur. Andree mentions to the many strangers who pause to comment on the dog, “He is the only Irish German Shepard in Connecticut.”
Every so often, Titan’s name is mentioned. This is usual; in our naming and our prayers, we cling to a safe and bountiful remembered past. I have had two dreams in which my father was a presence. This is very unusual for me. One does not dream of the center joist of a house. It is simply there in one’s life, preventing the whirlwind from carrying away all treasures; for that is what a home is – a bank of treasures much more reliable than bank notes.
The pandemic, the city mouse tells me, is useful primarily as a political hobgoblin to frighten people into an attitude of compliance and submission, not to say that it is not a serious threat.
He certainly has his finger on something there.
Did I watch the last presidential debate, he asks?
God no!
To the country mouse,
Well then, you missed a gaudy show, a significant part of it – Hunter Biden’s delinquencies, and his father’s memory lapses -- unreported by Connecticut’s left of center media. Trump was his usual solipsistic best. Biden looked as if he had been biting bullets for weeks while hunkering down in his bunker. The less one sees of Biden, the more popular he becomes. His is the first “front-porch-campaign” the nation has seen since the McKinley’s 1896 campaign and the advent of 24/7 news.
The opposite is true, of course, with {Connecticut} Governor Ned Lamont. As befits an autocrat, he is seen everywhere, rearranging the constellations in the sky, crowing up the sun, destroying yet another business, citing for the hundredth time the death toll in Connecticut, 60 to 70 percent of which is attributable to bad political decisions made by the autocratic governor.
There will come a time when even the most insensate retailer of fact in Connecticut realizes that Coronavirus is not responsible for a single business closure in the state – all of which have been shuttered by politicians, not a virus – and that our economic malady is every bit as serious AND DEADLY as Coronavirus.
But not yet. Perhaps after the November elections have been concluded to the satisfaction of the state’s dominant left of center party, the truth may once again resurfaced and break the hard-shelled exterior of campaign propaganda.
My city cousin certainly is right there. Coronavirus is a viral infection, not a politician, and viruses, unlike governors out rigged with plenary powers, are powerless to close by gubernatorial edict a school or a nail salon.
A Hartford Courant front page, above the fold, headline screams, “Just how bad could the latest spike get?”
About a week and a half before Election Day, Lamont, it would appear, has hoisted himself on his own petard. Connecticut’s Coronavirus numbers, though still far below spring numbers, are rising steadily. Connecticut is now “on the pathway to being bad.”
“I am concerned,” Lamont said. “I take nothing for granted.”
Sure, sure, but when will be pull the lockdown trigger?
“We need to slow the resurgence right away,” a Courant editorial barks this Sunday. Clamp down on the number of people allowed at indoor gatherings; stop playing softball with coaches and sport parent; order all schools to revert to hybrid learning models, and stop saying the surge was “expected.”
Find a hole, jump into it, pull the hole in over your head. Don’t worry about Connecticut’s economy. The state is in arrears in payments to its public employees by about $68 billion; we are among the highest taxed, most progressive states in the nation; businesses have fled the state for greener pastures elsewhere; clamorous state employee unions are still petted by the progressive politicians they help to re-elect; and the only sunbeam shining through the darkness is that the real-estate sector is flourishing, because whipped millionaire New Yorkers are fleeing that state and settling in Connecticut’s Gold Coast, abandoned by companies such as GE and Raytheon Technologies, formerly United Technologies.
Lucian, where are you?
... to be continued
Don Pesci is a columnist based in Vernon.
Daniel Hunter: Things to do to thwart a Trump coup
Via OtherWords.org
Our president has openly said he might not respect the outcome of our election. Is it a sign of things to come, or just tough talk? Either way, it’s good to plan ahead.
I’m part of an effort called Choose Democracy, which is preparing people to stop a coup attempt — or prevent one altogether. These guidelines are drawn from the many countries that have experienced a coup since World War II.
*Don’t expect results on election night.
Many mail-in ballots may not be counted until days or weeks after Election Day.
Wayward state officials may try to exclude these ballots. We may even see governors or state legislatures try to send different results to the Electoral College than their voters chose.
As election results start coming in, the message needs to come through loud and clear: Count all the votes and honor the result.
*Call it a coup.
One reason to use the language of a coup is that people know it’s wrong.
We know it’s a coup if the government stops counting votes, declares a winner who didn’t get the most votes, or allows someone to stay in power who didn’t win the election. These are sensible red lines that people can grasp right away.
*Know that coups have been stopped by regular folks.
Most coup attempts have failed — especially when there is an active citizenry. The moments after a coup are moments for heroism amongst the general population. It’s how we make democracy real.
*Be ready to act quickly — and not alone.
People who stop coups rarely get a warning that one is coming. This time, we do. To start preparing, talk to at least five people who would go into the streets with you. Get yourself ready to act.
*Focus on widely shared democratic values.
Don’t just go out with a list of grievances against a vilified leader. Instead, exalt our widely shared core democratic values. This invites people who wouldn’t normally join movement causes into the process.
*Persuade people not to just go along.
In all the research on preventing coups, there’s one common theme: People stop doing what the coup plotters tell them to do. They refuse orders, go on strike, and close airports and shops until the coup ends.
*Commit to nonviolence.
The uncertain center has to be convinced that “we” represent stability and “the coup plotters” represent hostility to the democratic norms of elections and voting.
It’s a contest of who can be the most legitimate. Historically, whichever side resorts to violence the most tends to lose.
*Yes, a coup can happen in the United States.
Unfortunately, it can happen here. In 1898 in Wilmington, North Carolina, white racists organized a violent coup against newly elected Black officials, with white squads killing 30 to 300 people.
*Center in calm, not fear.
Fearful people are less likely to make good decisions. Breathe deeply. Play out scenarios, but don’t become captured by them. We’re doing this to prepare, just in case.
*Prepare to deter a coup before the election.
Get people into the mindset of taking action so they don’t freeze. Sign and circulate a pledge saying “If it comes to this bad thing, then I’ll act.” Here’s ours:
We will vote.
We will refuse to accept election results until all the votes are counted.
We will nonviolently take to the streets if a coup is attempted.
If we need to, we will shut down this country to protect the integrity of the democratic process.
You can sign the pledge at ChooseDemocracy.us. These public commitments ahead of time increase the political cost of attempting a coup — because the best way to stop a coup is to deter it.
Daniel Hunter is a trainer and organizer with Training for Change. .
David Warsh: Biden should fill a couple of Cabinet posts with centrist Republicans
Secretary of State Mitt Romney?
SOMERVILLE, Mass.
If, as seems likely, President Trump is on the verge of defeat in his bid for re-election, an epic battle between Republicans is in the offing. Joe Biden should put his thumb on its scale from the start. May he recall Winston Churchill’s maxims – “in war, resolution; in defeat, defiance; in victory, magnanimity; in peace, goodwill – and prepare to offer important Cabinet positions to one or two senior centrist figures in the GOP.
Utah Sen. Mitt Romney, who was the Republican presidential candidate in 2012, would make an excellent secretary of state. So would former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman, another 2012 GOP hopeful. Two-term Ohio Gov. John Kasich, who came closer than any but Ted Cruz to defeating Trump for his party’s nomination in 2016, could restore low-key competence to the embattled Department of Health and Human Services.
Are these unreasonable suggestions? I don’t think so. Certainly Biden understands the logic very well. In an outdoor speech last week near the Gettysburg memorial park, he asserted the nation was once again “in dark times” – in the grips “not of just ferocious division, but of widespread death, structural inequity, and fear of the future.”
Instead of treating each other’s party as the opposition, we treat them as the enemy. This must end. We need to revive the spirit of bipartisanship in this country, a spirit of being able to work with one another.
Biden added that when he said such things in the past, he was accused of being naive. “Maybe that’s the way things used to work, Joe, but they can’t work that way anymore,” he said he was told. Not only can work that way, he replied, he said, but they must, if the damage is to be repaired.
Romney’s nomination to head the State Department would be all but impossible to oppose. Foreign policy is traditionally conducted in a bipartisan manner, after all. Romney indicated his willingness to serve in the post when he submitted to a humiliating interview with President Trump not long after the 2016 election. The former governor of Massachusetts has since been elected to the Senate. Perhaps he would prefer to keep that post. In that case, Huntsman deserves a look, having served as ambassador to both China (2009-2011) and Russia (2017-2019).
Kasich is a less obvious choice, but after nine terms in the U.S. House, he served two successful terms as governor of Ohio, mastering its budget and engineering a statewide Medicare expansion that saved many lives during the opioid epidemic. He endorsed Biden’s candidacy in a speech to the Democratic National Convention.
(As recently as the Obama administration, it was common practice to have someone from the other party in the Cabinet: Ray Lahood as transportation secretary in its first term, and Chuck Hagel as secretary of defense in the second. Obama also asked Robert Gates stay on for two years at the Pentagon.)
Political parties are large and complicated organizations. Pundits have been regularly pronouncing the death of the Republican Party for four years now. I think that is wrong. For the moment, Americans are feeling their way, divided between the party of innovation (the Democrats), and the party of conservatism (probably the Republicans).
Gradually an acceptable program of innovation will emerge and settle into its tracks. What lies ahead for Republicans now are battles among those who seek election appealing to the Trump base, and a pool of still little-known politicians and staffers who believe that the party’s future belongs to leadership committed to preserving what the nation already has achieved: a cheerful, tolerant, and resourceful civil society. A deep reservoir of talent is available at the Lincoln Project ready to resume construction. See this lengthy story on The New Yorker Web site for details.
Then there are the progressives, the Democratic faction in whose dreams can be glimpsed the future of their party. But politics takes time as well as passion. In their fury over the Trump years, progressives are calling for a Carthaginian peace. Biden should offer Republicans a Marshall Plan, meaning help restoring a once- strong organization back in working order. Meanwhile, let the de-Trumpification of the GOP begin.
xxx
The 2020 Nobel Prize in chemistry to Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier recognizes not one but two historic landmarks, the first for science, the second for gender equality. Development of “genetic scissors,” the mechanism known as CRISPR, is widely understood to be the most important advance in biological science since 1962, when the prize recognizing the discovery of the helical structure of the DNA molecule was awarded.
And it was in the years since then that women have made strides toward parity with male colleagues at nearly every level of the new science and attendant biotechnology, including, now, the world-historical highest. No one who sits in on biotech meetings (or even regularly walks across town in certain districts of Cambridge, San Francisco, or Palo Alto) can fail to notice that the professional class now includes many women as well as men.
As befits an epic achievement, the Doudna/Charpentier story merits a very good book, and then a film. (After her biopic portrayal of two-time laureate Marie Curie, it seems a given that Rosamund Pike will play Doudna.) Laureate James Watson’s The Double Helix: A Personal Account of the Discovery of the Structure of DNA has been a classic since it appeared in 1968. Walter Isaacson, biographer of Benjamin Franklin, Albert Einstein, Steve Jobs, and Leonardo Da Vinci, last week registered first dibs on the CRISPR story with an op-ed in The New York Times.
Eric Lander, president of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard University, whose scientists. and others in a Harvard lab, were rivals to Doudna and Carpentier in the chase to nail down the details of the scissors (and gain its patent rights) raised hackles in January 2018, when, in The Heroes of CRISPR, an article in Cell, he called attention the successes of his local heroes, Feng Zhang and George Church, as an illustration of the intricacy of the web of science. They lost out in the end. But the story of this year’s prize is better for Lander’s controversial article.
David Warsh, a veteran columnist and an economic historian, is proprietor of Somerville-based economicprincipals.com.
Sam Pizzigati: How taxpayers funded 'consulting fees' for Ivanka Trump
A "Lion's Mouth" postbox for anonymous denunciations at the Doge's Palace, in Venice. Translation: "Secret denunciations against anyone who will conceal favors and services or will collude to hide the true revenue from them."
Via OtherWords. org
BOSTON
The warmest and fuzziest phrase in the political folklore of American capitalism? “Family-owned business”!
These few words evoke everything people like and admire about the U.S. economy. The always welcoming luncheonette. The barbershop where you can still get a haircut, with a generous tip, for less than $20. The corner candy store.
But “family-owned businesses” have a dark side, too, as we see all too clearly in the Trump Organization. We now know — thanks to the recent landmark New York Times exposé on Trump’s taxes — far more about this sordid empire than ever before.
Put simply, the report shows how great wealth gives wealthy families the power to get away with greed grabs that would plunge more modest families into the deepest of hot water.
Let’s imagine, for a moment, a family that runs a popular neighborhood pizza parlor. Melting mozzarella clears this family-owned business $100,000 a year. The family owes and pays federal income taxes on all this income.
Now let’s suppose that they had a conniving neighbor who one day suggested that he knew how the family could easily cut its annual tax bill by thousands.
All the family needed to do: hire its teenage daughter as a “consultant” — at $20,000 a year — and then deduct that “consulting fee” as a business expense. That move would sink the family’s taxable income yet keep all its real income in the family.
The ma and pa of this local pizza palace listen to all this, absolutely horrified. Their daughter, they point out, knows nothing about making pizzas. How could she be a consultant? Pretending she was, ma and pa scolded, would be committing tax fraud.
The chastened neighbor slinks away.
Donald Trump goes by a different standard. Between 2010 and 2018, Trump’s hotel projects around the world cleared an income of well over $100 million. On his tax returns, Trump claimed $26 million in “consulting” expenses, about 20 percent of all the income he made on these hotel deals.
Who received all these “consulting” dollars? Trump’s tax returns don’t say. But New York Times reporters found that Ivanka Trump had collected consulting fees for $747,622 — the exact sum her father’s tax return claimed as a consultant-fee tax deduction for hotel projects in Vancouver and Hawaii.
All the $26.2 million in Trump hotel project consulting fees, a CNN analysis points out, may well have gone to Ivanka or her siblings.
More evidence of the Trump consulting hanky-panky: People with direct involvement in the various hotel projects where big bucks went for consulting, The Times notes, “expressed bafflement when asked about consultants on the project.” They told the paper that they never interacted with any consultants.
The New York Times determination: “Trump reduced his taxable income by treating a family member as a consultant and then deducting the fee as a cost of doing business.”
During the 2016 presidential debates, Donald Trump dubbed his aggressive tax-reducing moves as “smart.” Now, veteran tax analysts have a different label: criminal. Daniel Shaviro, a tax law prof at New York University, feels that “several different types of fraud may have been involved here.”
Ivanka Trump, adds former Watergate prosecutor Nick Akerman, had no “legitimate reason” to collect consulting fees for the Trump hotel projects “since she was being paid already as a Trump employee.” Donald and Ivanka Trump, says Akerman, should with “no question” be facing “at least five years in prison for tax evasion.”
Plutocrats don’t play by the same rules as pizza parlors, and that won’t change so long as Donald Trump remains in the White House. But these new revelations may make that a harder sell.
Sam Pizzigati, based in Boston, co-edits Inequality.org for the Institute for Policy Studies. He’s the author of The Case for a Maximum Wage and The Rich Don’t Always Win. This op-ed was adapted from Inequality.org and distributed by OtherWords.org.
Jill Richardson: Trump's bogus 'meritocracy'
“The Worship of Mammon;; (1909), by Evelyn De Morgan
Via OtherWords.org
Today I looked at a graph of income inequality over time in America. This was not new information to me, and yet it was still shocking.
From the 1950s until the early 1970s, Americans grew richer together. Some Americans were poor and others were rich, but their incomes, adjusted for inflation, grew at the same pace. Income roughly doubled for all.
Then the lines diverge. The rich got much, much, much richer and the rest of us had more modest gains.
Recently, Trump issued an executive order declaring America a “meritocracy” where hard work and skill are fairly rewarded. If America’s inequality reflects a meritocracy and the wealthy grew richer while everyone else didn’t, is the president calling the majority of the American people stupid and lazy?
I am in my seventh year of a PhD program. Everyone around me is in a difficult position. COVID-19 has hobbled the economy.
The freshmen are missing out on the normal college experience right after they all missed their proms and graduation ceremonies. Some of them are living in quarantined dorms where some students have COVID. I can’t imagine how worried their parents must be. And the upperclassmen will graduate into an economy that set records for the worst unemployment since the Great Depression this year.
Graduate students are struggling to do fieldwork under quarantine. The academic job market is wrecked. Nobody knows what this will mean for our futures. How will I pay my student loan debt? I’ve done my part to get my education, and I am on track to be qualified for a job. But will there be any jobs?
The people around me are lucky. They are at an excellent state university, in training for professional jobs. How much more are others suffering compared to us right now? Many Americans are suffering far worse than missing out on frat parties.
Over 208,000 are now dead from the coronavirus, and millions more are alive but suffering in various ways — mourning lost family members, suffering long term health complications, risking their lives to go to work, or out of work and in need of income.
I think I am saddest for people who lose family members during this time. You need friends and family with you when you grieve, and too many have had to bear that burden alone.
Meanwhile, the person responsible for the safety of our nation, who has mishandled the coronavirus from the start, was living in luxury and sleeping with a porn star while he wasn’t even paying his taxes.
Donating your salary is not that noble when you are gaining much more than that by dodging taxes. Implying that you got where you did through merit when it was cheating — and that the millions of Americans with less wealth than you have less merit — is an insult.
We live in a deeply unequal society, and we are led by someone who benefits from that inequality. No executive order should gaslight us into thinking that’s fair.
Jill Richardson is a sociologist.
It's all about pumping up fear
Providence Mayor ‘‘Buddy” Cianci in his City Hall office
From Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com
The Sept. 22 Boston Globe ran a good interview by Dan McGowan with Jon Shields and Stephanie Muravchik, authors of Trump’s Democrats, which is about how some (many now former?) members of that party became fans of the most corrupt and depraved president in American history, and a traitor to boot. These wishful thinkers ignored Trump’s decades of personal and public depravity and gave him enough Electoral College votes to now threaten what’s left of American democracy. Consider that he’s threatening to try to stay in office even if he loses the election!
The authors talked to people in Johnston, R.I., Ottumwa, Iowa, and Elliott County, Ky.
Central is their admiration for tough guys who will put down the people whom the Trumpians resent, envy and even hate, and in so doing make the Fox-fueled leader’s fans feel stronger. As the authors note, that admiration of what a lot of people would call bullies is one reason for the support in some quarters of the flamboyant and criminal late Providence Mayor Vincent (“Buddy”) Cianci (whom I knew quite well; he could be very entertaining.). No wonder that Trump’s and his minions’ frequent threats to use violence against street protesters and others who oppose The Leader sells well to this crowd, which also tends to love guns, as a security blanket. (Forget the phrase in the Second Amendment about a “well-regulated militia’’.)
The authors say:
“Cianci, Johnstonians, and many working-class communities throughout the United States have been shaped by an ‘honor culture.’ Citizens in this culture prize a social reputation for toughness, which they see as necessary to defend one’s honor and interests. Critics of honor culture … see it as a culture that cultivates bullies.’’
“Like Johnstonians generally, Trump embraces the values of a sick honor culture. His philosophy of leadership is to never show weakness, to never let any slight slide. As Trump once put it: ‘Real power is fear. It’s all about strength. Never show weakness. You’ve always got to be strong. Don’t be bullied. There is no choice.’’’
Whether Trump’s supporters’ “interests,’’ at least their socio-economic ones, are actually defended by a gangster like Trump, without an iota of what most people would define as “honor,’’ is highly debatable.
xxx
Reminder: The most damning information about Trump comes from the people who worked with him.