“Part of what Gingrich was doing was simply destroying the trust of the American people in Congress and really the government, believing that government would do the right thing. You can look at all the polls dating the decline in trust in Congress and government and really all institutions of American life and there’s a noticeable dip in the Gingrich era. So Gingrich brings these nihilistic energies to bear on Congress, and people never look at it the same way again.
You could say Gingrich is the guy who put in place this image of Congress as a “swamp,” something Trump would later play upon. And he brought a kind of partisan polarization to the institution that didn’t really exist before, or at least wasn’t a dominant strain. This is the era where Gingrich really teaches the Republicans to talk about Democrats as the enemy, as corrupt people who don’t have the interests of the American people in mind.
Ultimately, he changes the institution in ways that destroyed the possibility for comity and practical wisdom, and you can see that legacy in Congress today.”
…
“Maybe because I am on the right myself, I don’t see these conservative movements as having risen from nothing, or from mere racism or other kinds of unsatisfiable grievances. I tend to see them as inflammations or infections within the body politic that need to be treated. And historically, these movements did succeed in bringing people to power who did then try to use the power of government to address some of the problems that had motivated those movements.
The Tea Party was indicative, in ways I’m not sure we understood at the time, of the growing inequality in American life and the extent to which large parts of the country felt abandoned by the centers of power, the extent to which many Americans had become alienated from their fellow countrymen and their culture. And more should have been done in the Obama years, in hindsight, to address this. And this is not an original thought to me. I think Obama would say the same.
But what the Tea Party movement tended to produce was people who were against government in toto. So when they came to Congress, they weren’t willing to learn the system and accept their roles as junior people on the totem pole and follow the advice of their more pragmatic elders and learn wisdom. They were out to blow the place up. And when they discovered they couldn’t blow the place up, they left. And the ones who stayed on really stayed on with an eye toward doing as much damage to the system as they could.
So the direct line from the Tea Party is to the House Freedom Caucus, which is the most malign element in government, I think, that we’ve seen since the period before the Civil War. And the stated enemy of the Freedom Caucus is not even the Democrats, not even the people they call RINOs. The enemy is bipartisanship and compromise itself. And when you have a significant faction that doesn’t get expelled from a party and is allowed to keep putting this view forward, it completely undermines democracy itself.”
“Hand-picked by politicians, some magistrates were found to have accepted bribes, stolen money, flubbed trials, trampled over constitutional protections and mishandled even the most basic elements of criminal cases.
And though they handle hundreds of thousands of misdemeanor and civil cases every year, roughly three-quarters of the state’s magistrates have never practiced law in their life, the investigation found.”
…
“The investigation found that a flaw in the application process removed a requirement for magistrates to disclose if they have been disciplined for misconduct by the state’s judicial watchdog. A dozen sitting judges with prior ethics offenses skated through their last reappointment, no questions asked, the investigation found.”
…
“Magistrates are the busiest judges in the state. They sit in judgment on cases involving petty thefts, drunken driving, domestic violence, assaults and disorderly conduct. They also issue arrest warrants, set bail, preside over trials and conduct preliminary hearings to assess if there is sufficient probable cause to support felony charges such as murder, rape and robbery.
Yet the news organizations’ investigation found that most magistrates are not lawyers and could not represent someone in a court of law — yet they preside over them.
Davis has stressed that the state must bolster its legal qualifications for all magistrates. Though he has not proposed details, he would at least increase their mandatory legal training from the current minimum of 57 1/2 hours.
By comparison, South Carolina is stricter with its barbers: Their training school mandates 1,500 hours.”
“Five years ago, NBA guard Thabo Sefolosha was standing outside a nightclub when he was tackled by five New York Police Department officers, one of whom broke his leg with a baton.
Sefolosha sued, and the city paid its largest settlement for alleged police brutality in years, $4.5 million. After all, Sefolosha had to have surgery and couldn’t play basketball for a year. And a jury had acquitted Sefolosha of the charges against him for allegedly resisting arrest. The whole incident had been caught on tape.
But the payout — which didn’t cost the officers a dime — is where any accountability ended. The city had insisted during the case that the officers were blameless, and they ended up facing no significant punishment.
It’s left Sefolosha frustrated. “To get a settlement was a small victory. But big picture, it’s a small drop,” Sefolosha told ProPublica from his home in Vevey, Switzerland. “When are people going to be held accountable? You have to have repercussions. They’re going to do it over and over again.”
New York City has paid more than $1 billion over the past five years to settle lawsuits against the NYPD, according to data released by the city. ProPublica examined dozens of the biggest payouts in cases where civilians had also filed complaints with the city agency that reviews alleged police abuse. Again and again, the officers faced minimal or no discipline.
In one case, the city paid out $125,000 when officers allegedly fractured someone’s cheekbone with a flashlight. The officers were not disciplined. In another case, officers allegedly bashed in a man’s car window with a baton, then broke his ankle dragging him from the vehicle and charged him with resisting arrest. The charges were dropped and the city paid $460,000 to settle. The officers again faced no discipline.
In the 45 cases we examined, the harshest penalty any officer received was a loss of 15 vacation days — for punching a teenager and knocking him unconscious in an incident caught on tape that went viral. The city settled that case for $200,000.”
…
“Over the past seven years, at least 800 officers have been named as defendants in five or more suits settled by the city.”
…
“In a few cases reviewed by ProPublica, the city has defended officers who seem to have lied or engaged in what was clearly misconduct.”
…
“Byrne dismissed the idea that settlements can be useful in identifying problematic officers. “My belief is the settlement means nothing,” he said. Settlements often happen when the city decides lawsuits are not worth fighting and “not because the officer did anything wrong.”
But at times, the Law Department’s ferocious approach to defending the NYPD has drawn criticism from judges handling the cases. In one case, a federal judge in Manhattan admonished the NYPD for not having turned over evidence in a case where a man died after being tackled by police outside Yankee Stadium.
The city’s lawyers had long claimed that there were no recorded radio calls from the incident. When the judge insisted the head of the NYPD’s legal bureau sign an affidavit attesting to that, the calls suddenly turned up.”
AMERICAN ANTIFA The Tactics, Culture, and Practice of Militant Antifascism Stanislav Vysotsky. 2 3 2021. Routledge. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/342245835_American_Antifa_The_Tactics_Culture_and_Practice_of_Militant_Antifascism Stanislav Vysotsky, Fascism And Anti fascism In The Trump Era Daniel Folkman. 3 30 2018. 10th Annual Wisconsin Grassroots Festival. In the Streets with Antifa
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“In a quiet vote on Sept. 23, the Republican-dominated SEC adopted amendments that could allow it to lower payments to whistleblowers. Its argument is that awards should only be as large as necessary to prompt people to come forward, and excessively high payouts might be better spent on other priorities.
Advocates say that may dissuade whistleblowers, insulating the biggest Wall Street banks and investment firms, which are typically subject to the largest fines and whose wrongdoing is often the most difficult to spot without help from highly paid insiders.
The SEC’s shift may exacerbate the effects of the Trump administration’s blitz of deregulation of the financial services industry, advocates fear. With weaker incentives to report fraud, regulators may have fewer allies as they monitor markets for the kind of bad behavior that can follow such loosening of rules.”
…
” The SEC declined to comment. Defenders of the SEC’s action point out that the rule also contained some provisions that are good for whistleblowers, such as the ability to more quickly dismiss frivolous complaints that gum up the system and a new presumption that whistleblowers who help the commission attain settlements worth less than $5 million should get the maximum allowable award. Also, fiscal year 2020 saw the highest payouts in the program’s history and the most claims processed overall.”
…
“The commission weakened the law in other ways, too, making it harder for whistleblowers to get a bounty if they did not have inside information but instead provided analysis that SEC staff members could plausibly have inferred on their own — even if the staff hadn’t done so.”
…
“The financial adviser who blew the whistle on his firm says the new rules will surely dissuade some insiders at his level from stepping forward.
“If these guys decide they want to lower their awards, they’re going to get $200,000 employees taking a shot, and that’s about it,” he said. “The only people who know stuff are the people who are at the top.””
…
““I appreciate the fact that the average guy on the street can’t comprehend these numbers,” he said. “That it would be offensive to a normal human being making normal money. Lots of people on Wall Street make $100 million every 10 years. They’re not risking that for a million bucks.””
“A genuinely free market family agenda could start with reforming tax laws to ease the burden on two-income families with children. As Edward McCaffery documented in his 1997 book Taxing Women, the U.S. tax code is biased against secondary earners, who are usually women. The secondary earner’s first dollar is taxed at the same high rate as the primary earner’s last dollar, because we don’t allow true individual filing for married couples.”
…
“One of the book’s best chapters explores the benefits of marriage and decries falling marital rates among the poor. But it does not explore how tax and welfare policies that distort market signals help explain the rejection of marriage. For example, a couple who each earn $20,000 and are eligible for the Earned Income Tax Credit can get substantially more by remaining unmarried and filing two separate tax returns than by marrying and filing one. And because many welfare benefits are reduced as household income rises, there is a disincentive to live with the other biological parent of one’s children. A simpler relief system, along the lines of a negative income tax or a universal basic income, could avoid many of those dysfunctions by providing benefits directly to individuals regardless of marital status or other demographics. But even that sort of reform, hardly a radical libertarian move, doesn’t get discussed here.”
…
“Nor do we hear as much as we should about the potential drawbacks to the policies Eichner prefers. She frequently invokes Finland as a country that does more to mandate paid parental leave, subsidize day care, and limit weekly hours of paid work. She does not ask what the costs to Finnish society might be from such policies. For example, the Finnish unemployment rate over the last decade (before COVID-19) was roughly twice the U.S. average, falling only briefly below 6 percent and topping out at almost 12 percent in 2015. The female unemployment rate for 2009–19 averaged about 8 percent, compared to about 6 percent in the United States. In 2014, Reuters found that fewer women are in high management positions in the private sector in the Nordic countries than in the United States. There are two likely explanations for this. First, despite public policy geared toward equality, Nordic women still are disproportionately represented in occupations such as health care and education that are largely in the public sector. Second, parental leave laws still encourage more time off for mothers, and that time off can set women back when pursuing management tracks. The Financial Times recently reported a similar result looking specifically at Norway.
Perhaps these costs are worth the benefits, but to make that case you have to discuss the cost side of the equation. The Free-Market Family does not grapple with the evidence that virtually every federal social program in U.S. history has ended up costing far more than projected when it passed. Whatever Eichner imagines the costs of her preferred pro-family policies to be, we can reliably multiply that several times over to get the likely costs over time.
She does finally say something about costs in the final chapter. But even there we get only a few paragraphs of hand waving and the assurance that these programs will pay for themselves with greater productivity and female employment. And if they don’t, well, we can just reallocate what we spend on the military and make the tax code more progressive. There is no discussion of the potential tradeoffs caused by higher marginal tax rates. (She points out that the U.S. economy grew when statutory rates were higher in the past, but this ignores the difference between statutory rates and the effective rates paid after avoidance and deductions. According to the Tax Foundation, the top 1 percent of earners in the 1950s paid an effective tax rate of about 42 percent, which is not that much different from the 36 percent effective rate today.)
Despite these omissions and flaws, The Free-Market Family does document some significant problems facing American families. As Eichner shows, the more we learn about the neuroscience of child development, the more we know about the material conditions under which children thrive. It is important to think through how best to ensure that parents can create those conditions, especially at a time when the prevailing policy assumptions tend to favor big-government interventions like the ones Eichner proposes.”
“in 1989, I entered a world where Nebraska straddled the middle of the political spectrum. But since then, the state has drifted so far from the center it’s hard to remember it was ever there. Using DW-NOMINATE data from the congressional vote tallying website Voteview, we can see just how far Nebraska’s political representatives have drifted rightward in the last thirty years. As you can see in the chart below, the average ideology score of Nebraska’s U.S. representatives and senators, as measured by DW-NOMINATE’s first dimension, shifted more than half a point between 1990 and 2020.1 Put in today’s terms, in 1990, the average Nebraskan in Congress was similar in ideology to outgoing Democratic Sen. Doug Jones of Alabama, a moderate; whereas today she would more closely resemble Texas Republican Sen. John Cornyn, who isn’t the most conservative Republican in Congress (that’s Sen. Mike Lee), but still drifts pretty far to the right on the ideological spectrum.”
…
“the Electoral College has always favored smaller states like Nebraska. But it is only somewhat recently that these states have heavily favored Republicans.”
…
“So what’s driving Nebraska’s (and other states’) rightward shift? In part, it has to do with the nationalization of American politics. Since the 1990s, Democratic voters have moved to the left on issues such as health care and immigration, while Republicans have become more likely to identify as conservative as their moderate candidates have dwindled. And in turn, this nationalization and polarization has made it more difficult for local candidates to successfully create their own platforms. For example, as governor and senator, Nelson often broke from his own party in an attempt to attract conservative voters, taking stances like advocating for a “hard barrier” to prevent illegal immigration or supporting various anti-abortion measures. But the days of candidates creating their own platforms are largely over, and the share of registered Democratic voters in Nebraska has also dropped.”
…
“This trend extends to lower levels of government, too, like the state legislature and city councils. Republican state lawmakers have also tried to eliminate prenatal care and repeal in-state tuition for immigrants, while giving local police the power to question the immigration status of anyone they suspect of living in the country illegally. A few towns have even passed ordinances that formally ban undocumented immigrants from renting property. All this is happening in a state that, until recently, settled a high number of refugees.
Meanwhile, on the education front, Republican lawmakers have leaned into national Republicans’ growing aversion toward public education, trying to eliminate Nebraska’s democratically elected board of education, while perpetual tax cuts and exemptions have led to two-thirds of Nebraska’s school districts receiving no general financial assistance from the state, which has contributed to public schools in rural Nebraska having “the most inequitable [state aid] distribution in the nation,” according to a nationwide study by the think tank, The Rural School and Community Trust. This is all in a state where Republicans once implemented income and sales taxes to increase K-12 schools’ funding, among a host of other progressive legislation.
But lest one think the effects of nationalization have completely remade states like Nebraska, many Nebraskans disagree with the GOP’s positions. Through ballot initiatives, for instance, Nebraska voters have approved a higher minimum wage, Medicaid expansion and casino gambling, even though Republicans officials, who continue to cruise to statewide victories, have opposed these measures.”
…
““If you ask people to vote for things that might be in their own interest, and you explain the issue to them in one paragraph on the ballot, they will vote for the thing that is good for them,” said Ari Kohen, a professor of political science at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. “But you can’t ask them to give up their party affiliation.”
People are reluctant to switch parties, but they can be swayed to change their mind about a specific cause, particularly when an issue is presented outside of a partisan context. State Sen. Tony Vargas, a Democrat in Omaha, told me that he thought Medicaid expansion passed — even though Nelson encountered a brouhaha over a similar issue just eight years prior— because it wasn’t tied to a particular politician or party. “If our ballot said ‘expanding Obamacare,’ I feel like people would have voted against it,” Vargas said. “Instead, we said ‘expanding Medicaid and addressing the gap.’ … It’s a lot harder to attack the issue. It’s much easier to attack the person.””
“Like many historians, Kupchan repeats the standard claim that George Washington’s famous warning against “foreign entanglements” represented the views of the Founders and was followed by American leaders until the mid–20th century. In fact, the Founding Fathers were aggressive, unapologetic imperialists who fantasized about the creation of a global America.
Long before he entered politics, John Adams developed a theory of historical change that predicted America would become the next Rome. He wrote to a friend in 1755 that “the great seat of Empire” had been transferred from Rome to Britain and would likely move “into America.” The new country would “obtain the mastery of the seas, and the united force of all Europe will not be able to subdue us.”
Like Adams, Benjamin Franklin dreamed of an infinitely expansive America empire. In 1751, he provided a rationale, derived from John Locke’s theory that property belongs to those who mix their labor with nature, for conquering and occupying all the land held by indigenous people in North America. Industrious Anglo-Saxons, who Franklin expressly preferred as the inhabitants of the new republic, were to replace the Indians with a new empire: “Hence the Prince that acquires new Territory, if he finds it vacant, or removes the Natives to give his own People Room; the Legislator that makes effectual Laws for promoting of Trade, increasing Employment, improving Land by more or better Tillage; providing more Food by Fisheries; securing Property, &c. and the Man that invents new Trades, Arts or Manufactures, or new Improvements in Husbandry, may be properly called Fathers of their Nation.”
As president, George Washington, whose heroes included Caesar and Alexander the Great, allowed Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson to push for a buildup of the Navy and the creation of a Marine Corps, as well as for continued expansion westward across North America. Jefferson called for sending troops and warships to attack pirate ships operating from the northern African Barbary states that had captured and plundered American commercial vessels. Jefferson’s rival, Alexander Hamilton, agreed that the United States was “the embryo of a great empire,” even predicting that the U.S. would one day hold overseas colonies.
Within days of Jefferson’s inauguration in 1801, four U.S. warships set sail for Tripoli. Throughout his first term, American ships patrolled the Mediterranean, blockading the ports of several north African states and sinking or capturing Barbary pirate corsairs and Tripolitan ships. By the summer of 1804, virtually the entire U.S. Navy was deployed to the region—23 war vessels in all—including a squadron of gunships that remained anchored in the harbor of Tripoli, bombarding the city with impunity. The next year, Jefferson sent ashore a fighting force of Marines and mercenaries who besieged the pasha’s palace and replaced him with his brother, who had sworn to cooperate with the U.S.
In 1801, Jefferson told James Monroe of his vision for a totalizing and universal Americanism, calling it “impossible not to look forward to distant times, when our rapid multiplication will expand itself beyond those limits, & cover the whole Northern, if not the Southern continent with a people speaking the same language, governed in similar forms, & by similar laws.” The United States established an extensive network of formal representatives in the Mediterranean, with American consuls and Navy personnel stationed in more than a dozen cities. Jefferson also negotiated the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, which brought a swath of 828,000 square miles of land, with all the diverse peoples living on it, into the United States. In an instant, the country’s territory had doubled.