Yet they refuse to believe that while in office Trump put forth policies “designed to cut health care, food and housing programs and labor protections for poor and working-class Americans.” Under Trump, the income gap between the richest and poorest income brackets grew by 9% annually, leaving those with stagnant wages in low-paying jobs with little prospect of upward mobility.

Political analysts have done a reasonably good job of identifying the factors that helped Trump to victory. Still, we are mystified by what drove so many working-class males, including a significantly large number of blacks and Latinos, to choose Trump, despite Bidden-Harris’s concrete policies to help working-class Americans. By voting for Trump, they were voting against their self-interest. Psychology can help us better understand the root cause of this puzzle. The place to begin is the provenance of the “rage” that Trump has so effectively capitalized upon. His unrelenting rageful rhetorics were not intended as a steppingstone to constructive solutions to address the grievances of the working class. It was rage for the sake of rage against all political and social institutions. These had to be destroyed with virtually no plans to replace them.

As a psychologist/psychoanalyst, I focus on important challenges besetting the development of normal masculinity that embraces the experiences of strength, generativity, relevance, productivity, and reasonable power. Usually, these experiences develop within a family setting in which the son successfully experiences himself as a chip off the old block through identification with a capable, loving father. However, despite the strong presence of the father within the family milieu, if the society at large does not treat the father’s role as a respectful equal, the son will experience a huge sense of shame which is channeled into anger and resentment resulting from his self-respect having been compromised. We know that poverty and the stress of incessant struggles for survival reduce the chance that the father could live up to the expectations of the son as a positive loving model of identification. Alcoholism, drug addiction, and domestic violence are some of the most damaging consequences resulting from the generational transmission of trauma within this group which society habitually neglects. America’s increasing wealth inequality exacerbates this dynamic.

“Insufficient Weight,” Digital, Dream / Dreamland v3, 2024.

Over the long haul, with the untenability of strong identification with a solid father, the male grows up with a “father hunger” –a longing for a father figure who can make up for all the helplessness and humiliation he experienced as a child into adulthood. The unconscious wish is to have enough power to turn against the society that shamed him by depriving him of a father who could carry sufficient weight in society that could in turn fulfill the needs of the son to have a solid sense of himself as a man. The painful experience of shame and its annihilating impact is deeply damaging to the core of the sense of self. He feels broken and unfulfilled in an environment where he cannot be seen! The typical unconscious tit-for-tat solution to this loss is to hold society responsible for depriving him of his legitimate developmental needs. The expression of rage and retribution artificially rescues their damaged sense of self from the painful ravages of shame. Hence, here lies Donald Trump’s genius in mobilizing his unyielding supporters with the slogan “I’M YOUR RETRIBUTION”!

Through his audacious rebellion against the society that has deprived this disadvantaged group, Trump has become their Messiah. He is the only one who can restore their sense of self, repair their injured ego, and provide them with a new sense of self-respect and dignity through his crusade against all the societal norms that have excluded them. To them, Trump comes across as the powerful, fearless father figure that these “little boys” long for. His crusade against every norm of the “illegitimate” society helps heal and restore their deprived dignity. The society Trump has exposed is disqualified and no longer has the power to humiliate them. Hence, the more unconventional, the ruder, and cruder Trump becomes in shunning all the rules of civility, the more powerful his healing touch.

This idealization of a strong, fearless father figure is exactly what this population longs for to feel lifted and accepted. There is also a great vicarious pleasure from Trump’s unbending will and power. The society that disempowered them is being disempowered by the valiant father figure giving them a strong illusion that through this idealization everything that escaped them in the past has become within reach. If society and its norms are debunked, as Trump time and time again openly avows, then there’s no reason to feel deprived, unanchored, or adrift.

 Trump is the warrior/savior of this group; he gives them the gift of belonging and importance. His legal convictions are meaningless and/or false because society no longer carries any moral weight to pass judgments. Trump’s heroic stand against society is both edifying and offers them a newfound sense of belonging, respect, and trust in their idealized identification.

In the circumstances outlined above the primitive defenses of denial and disavowal aided by fake news and conspiracy theories inevitably produce a certain degree of disconnect with reality. Psychology can help us understand this and why some groups unwittingly work against their self-interest by abandoning reality.

Musk — owner of SpaceX, Tesla, and Twitter/X — had already endorsed the Tyrant and helped fuel his alternative reality, based on lies and fear. Throughout 2024, he amplified Trump’s xenophobia and election paranoia with a steady drumbeat of conspiracy theories and disinformation. Messaging his 202 million followers, Musk stoked panic about Haitian immigrants and spread debunked claims that FEMA failed to help victims of hurricane Helene and spent the money instead on migrants.

Regarding the election, Musk asserted that “if Trump is NOT elected, this will be the last election” and wove that lie into a false narrative about the “great replacement” conspiracy theory. He posted a vile, toxic, hate video that purports to lay bare the vast conspiracy: Democrats are expediting the conversion of “illegals” to citizens in an attempt to make America a “one-party state.” Musk amplifies radical right propaganda to the masses that might otherwise languish in the darkest corners of the internet.

With his promotion of fascist fabrications, Musk channels Model-T owner and Hitler-apologist Henry Ford. In 1918 plutocrat Ford, who had just lost a Senate race, purchased a newspaper The Dearborn Independent — the 20^th century equivalent to Twitter/X. Convinced that victory had been stolen from him, Ford bought a platform for his self-promoting populist message, unfiltered by media skeptics and naysayers.

After purchasing the newspaper, Ford attacked the man who beat him in the Senate election and continuously harangued readers that the election had been stolen. Musk has feebly crawled onto Trump’s 2020 Big Lie bandwagon and is even helping set the stage for Big Lie 2.0 by spreading false claims that voting machines are programmed to rig the election against Trump.

One of the most successful industrialists on the planet, Ford became well-known for his anti-Semitic scapegoating of Jews that echoed Musk’s current scapegoating of immigrants. According to Rachel Maddow in her book Prequel: An American Fight Against Fascism: “Ford spewed anti-Semitism freely in private tirades among friends, family, business cohorts, newspaper reporters or anybody within earshot. He attributes all evil to Jews or to Jewish Communists.”

For Ford, Jews and Communists were interchangeable. He hated both equally and considered them synonymous. After Trump repeatedly called Kamala Harris a Communist and referred to her as “Comrade Kamala,” Musk amplified the Demagogue on Twitter/X. He posted an AI-generated image of Harris dressed as a “communist dictator,” wearing a red uniform complete with hammer-and-sickle emblazoned hat. Musk captioned the image with the false assertion, “Kamala vows to be a communist dictator on day one. Can you believe she wears that outfit!?” A troll like Trump, neither Musk nor Trump ever says anything that is amusing, wry or witty.

Finding a new way to scapegoat Communists and “evil Jews,” Ford latched onto a newly translated tome called ”The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.” The work of Russian fabulists and the Tsars’ secret police who were furious at the Bolsheviks’ overthrow of tsarist aristocracy, the screed purported to be the surreptitious “notes of a top-secret meeting wherein Jewish puppet masters had drawn up their strategy and tactics” to overthrow the regime. As Maddow says, “Ford unleashed a new era of anti-Semitism.”

Beginning in 1920, Ford’s newspaper published 149 articles, a multi-year series on the anti-Semitic hoax “proving” that a cabal of Jews were plotting to enslave the “goyim” and take over the world. The Protocols were debunked over and over. But that didn’t matter to Ford. Like Trump and Musk’s promotion of anti-immigrant lies, Ford’s unbounded hatred was not susceptible to facts.

Ford pressured his dealerships, which were selling the wildly popular Model-T at the time, to distribute his publication. It reached 900,000 copies at its peak in 1925 — the second largest newspaper circulation in the US. Ford also published the noxious series in book form, titled The International Jew. It ran to four volumes and contributed to the deaths of millions.

In Mein Kampf, Hitler — one of Trump’s favorite dictators according to his former chief of staff — lifted ideas, stereotypes, and whole passages from Ford’s publications. Hitler extolled Ford by name, singling out the American automobile baron for his steadfast courage in the face of assault by strikers or Communists or bankers, all of whom he asserted were Jews.

When Ford mulled running for president in 1923, Hitler wanted to deploy “some of my shock troops to Chicago and other big American cities to help in the elections.” Hitler kept a large framed portrait of Ford in his office and told a reporter, “I regard Henry Ford as my inspiration.” Returning the adulation, Ford — who did extensive business in the Third Reich — was obsessed with Hitler and Nazism and throughout his life kept company with Nazi sympathizers and devout Hitlerites including Fritz Kuhn, the Nazi leader of the German American Bund.

Kuhn, who wanted to be the American Hitler prior to Trump, helped organize the 1939 Nazi rally in Madison Square Garden that championed Nazi ideals camouflaged as pro-American rhetoric. It presaged Trump’s recent MSG MAGA rally — an orgy of fascism, misogyny, racism, and grievances. The MAGA retribution list included Blacks, Latinos, Jews, women, and liberals and anyone who would even consider voting for Kamala Harris. To MAGA, all that matters is gaining power and then using it to crush anyone who would stand in their way. At the rally, Musk said nothing of consequence, but wore a black hat in which the MAGA lettering resembled the Nazi font Fraktur.

Like Ford did for Hitler, Musk has become a mouthpiece for Trump, turning Twitter/X into the 21^st century version of The Dearborn Independent — one that scapegoats immigrants, Muslims, and, more quietly, Jews. Musk praised the pernicious anti-Semitic conspiracy theory that Jewish communities are supporting “hordes of minorities” who are “flooding” into the country to replace white people. He further asserted that George Soros “appears to want nothing less than the destruction of western civilization.”

Musk has also re-instated Twitter/X accounts that are pro-Hitler Holocaust deniers, white nationalists, and neo-Nazis with a predictable surge in anti-Semitism, racism, and homophobia, according to reports in Media Matters. He allowed Nazis like Andrew Anglin and Nick Fuentes back on his Website along with Qanon supporter, pardoned-by-Trump criminal, and violence promoter Mike Flynn. The Twitter/X algorithm blocks left liberal views and clearly favors MAGA content, with the blatant goal of breeding extremism and radicalizing people against their own government — and against each other.

To help buy Twitter/X, Musk received funding from a Saudi conglomerate, the cryptocurrency firm Binance, entities associated with the rapper Sean “Diddy” Combs — indicted recently for sex trafficking — and fellow apartheid veteran and PayPal Mafia associate Peter Thiel, who controls JD Vance. United in their formative white supremacist experience in South Africa, Musk and Thiel — in backing a racist for president, expressing xenophobic views, and opposing a Black presidential candidate — show that the old white South African mindset lives on in MAGA. Musk, like Ford, chooses to use the power gained through the labor of others to persecute and dehumanize those they consider lesser.

Musk, however, is going beyond Ford in his parasitical attachment to Trump and his manic pursuit of political power. The MAGA billionaire founded America PAC earlier this year so he and his like-minded, ultra-rich MAGA pals could dump tens of millions of their own wealth into registering and persuading voters on behalf of the criminal candidate.

“If the Blind Lead the Blind . . ,” Digital, Dream / Dreamland v3, 2024

Musk craves a techno-fascist fantasy of ultimate power. As a foreign-born South African, Musk cannot run for president, according to the Constitution — assuming that still matters. By attaching himself to Trump like a leech, he hopes to not only enrich himself but also seize power in the United States. The wannabe Dictator has explicitly invited Musk into the government as a social engineer to redesign America.

To reach that objective, Musk — a messianic narcissist — is pouring tons of personal attention and financial resources into the campaign. He has relocated to Pennsylvania to oversee Trump’s ground game there. Last week, he rehashed the refuted assertion that Dominion Voting Systems rigged the vote count in 2020, a falsehood that resulted in a $787.5 million settlement paid by Fox News. “We should not allow voting machines of any kind,” he said in Pittsburgh. If Trump wins Pennsylvania and the presidency, it will be by a slight margin that could be attributed to Musk. He can boast that he was the critical variable in this success.

In another desperate attempt to elect the Insurrectionist and gain the approval of the MAGA pack, the socially inept Musk hosts his own rallies that turn into bacchanals of greed. In one instance, Musk stood stiffly before a huge US flag and told an assembled crowd that he loved them while promising one of them a million dollars. Like the audience at a giveaway gameshow, they howled in ravenous anticipation and chanted Musk’s name. He glowed amidst their purchased admiration.

“This kind of energy lights a fire in my soul,” Musk said, as he made one of the crowd a millionaire and pledged to do that daily. His love and the million-dollar-handouts were conditioned on their signing a petition tied to his PAC, which is devoted to returning the Madman to the White House. The spectacle was bizarre and potentially illegal — akin to buying votes. But no one, not least Musk himself, cared in the slightest.

Musk’s public adoration of the Bigot begins with his avaricious understanding of his own economic interests. A corporate welfare bum, he has turned the government into a spectacular money gusher. Tesla flourishes on tax credits for electric cars as well as subsidies for its charging stations. SpaceX heavily depends on contracts with the Department of Defense while taking over key roles previously handled by NASA. Both companies have won $15 billion in federal contracts. But that’s just the beginning. SpaceX is designing a slew of new products with “national security customers in mind.”

While railing against alleged government giveaways to migrants, Musk himself has only begun to tap the financial benefits of the government. Trump will fulfill his ambitions. He rewards loyalists, whether they are foreign leaders who praise him, former opponents who genuflect before him, or supplicants who spend money at his resorts and hotels. In office, Trump gave some of his donors highly unusual and potent roles in government, despite conflicts of interest. The king of corruption, Trump knows that his party or even the Supreme Court will never punish him for his lawless transgressions.

Trump makes it easy to imagine how the Tesla car-baron will exploit this deal with the Devil. When Trump brags that Musk will send a rocket to Mars during his administration, he is pledging to bestow SpaceX with a gargantuan amount of money. He is talking about making the world’s richest man even richer.

Trump already announced that he will put Musk in charge of a murky new government-efficiency position — the “secretary of cost-cutting.” Hating regulation, Musk will advocate for privatizing the government, outsourcing state functions to self-interested hustlers and his technologist pals. Musk would also reap one of the largest personalized tax breaks in American history — a tax benefit available to government employees. Further, by targeting regulators of his own companies, conflict of interest will be institutionalized as the normal method by which Musk does government business.

Project 2025 involves the dismantling of the federal government — eliminating entire agencies while sweeping out swaths of politically neutral civil servants. This kind of transformative change suits Musk’s grandiose dreams of world domination and his techno-authoritarian ideology. An exaltation of the narcissism encoded in the Silicon Valley Tech Bro’s pursuit of monopoly is the belief that concentrating power in the hands of self-described geniuses is the most desirable social organization. Musk agrees with his accomplice Pete Thiel, “Competition is for losers.” In this worldview, democratic restraints on absolute power must be eradicated as hindrances to “progress.”

While Henry Ford hung out with fascists back in the 1920s and 30s, and published anti-Semitic bilge, Musk has wealth and access to power that Ford could only dream of. A sniveling sidekick to the Despot who wants generals ”like Hitler had,” the raving reactionary Musk — out of rapacious greed — is doing everything in his power to get that maniac elected.

At Tesla, Musk crowned himself “technoking.” Following Trump’s example of malfeasance, Musk will not divest himself from his businesses — not even his social-media company. In a dictatorial regime of unchecked power, he would not need to fear congressional oversight. The risk posed by Musk running parts of the government will not be on the minds of most Americans voting in the election, given the myriad other potential horrors already promised by the delusional Authoritarian. Yet if Americans elect the Fascist or the Fascist steals the election and the ghastly Trump nightmare becomes real, Musk will be one of its hideous monsters — a vampire squid feeding on what remains of America’s lifeblood.

(The Conversation) – Amitav Ghosh is an internationally celebrated author of 20 historical fiction and non-fiction books. The Indian thinker and writer has written extensively on the legacies of colonialism, violence and extractivism. His most famous works explore migration, globalisation and commercial violence and conquest during the colonial period, against the backdrop of the opium trade in the 1800s.

Caroline Southey, from The Conversation Africa, asked economics professor Imraan Valodia and climate and inequality researcher Julia Taylor about the significance of his work.

What has Ghosh contributed to our understanding about the root causes of climate change?

Julia Taylor: In Ghosh’s recent non-fiction book, The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis, he used his storytelling prowess to outline the roots of climate change within two systems of power and oppression: imperialism and capitalism.

Imperialism is the expansion of influence over other countries through military force and colonisation. It usually entails the destruction of the environment to support imperial interests.

Capitalism is the dominant economic system where ownership of the means of production (industry) is private. Private actors are driven by profit and growth, which has relied on combustion of fossil fuels.

What Ghosh makes clear is that violence and destruction of the environment are key to capitalism, as they were to colonialism.

Imraan Valodia: Ghosh challenges us to think more deeply about the role of conquest and violence in shaping the planetary crisis we’re facing. And the need to reshape our economic and social relations to address climate change. He does this with remarkable acumen and clarity in another of his works of non-fiction, The Great Derangement. In the book he seeks to explain our failure to address the urgency of climate change. He asks very powerfully whether the current generation is deranged by our inability to grasp the scale, violence and urgency of climate change.

He uses the history of nutmeg to illustrate some of his main points. What does he draw from this history?

Julia Taylor: The story of the nutmeg is one among many of conquest of both people and land during colonisation which led to the industrial revolution and the explosion of greenhouse gas emissions.

In the present day these conquests take different forms. But they continue, particularly in the context of mining and extractivism.

Amitav Ghosh, The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis. The University of Chicago Press. Click here to Buy.

Imraan Valodia: Ghosh traces the history of the household spice – nutmeg – all the way to its origins in the Banda Islands of Indonesia. He uses the analogy of the nutmeg to explain how colonisation of land and people has led to the climate disaster.

The nutmeg was harvested from trees in the Banda Islands and traded by the Bandanese for centuries. With the growth in value of spices, various European countries sought to claim exclusive rights to the nutmeg trade in the Banda Islands. The local population resisted. However, in 1621, representatives of the Dutch East India Company chose to destroy the settlements of the Bandanese population and massacre or enslave anyone who could not escape, to gain control over the nutmeg trade.

Ghosh explains these horrifying events in the context of Anglo-Dutch tensions and the trend of empire in Europe, sanctioned by religious beliefs of racial superiority.

A major theme of his work is the link between imperialism and the planetary crisis. What’s his main line of argument?

Julia Taylor: Ghosh argues in The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis that

the discussion of climate change, as of every aspect of the planetary crisis, tends to be dominated by the question of capitalism and other economic issues; geopolitics, empire, and questions of power figure in it far less. (p116)

However, he highlights that

the era of Western military conquests predates the emergence of capitalism by centuries. Indeed, it was these conquests, and the imperial systems that arose in their wake, that fostered and made possible the rise to dominance of what we now call capitalism … colonialism, genocide and structures of organised violence were the foundations on which industrial modernity was built. (p116)

Imraan Valodia: This argument forces us to grapple with both capitalism and the dominance of the west in our understanding of climate change. It highlights the power dynamics and violence which enabled the destruction of many lands in the form of deforestation, industrial agriculture, mining and more.

To respond to climate change, we need to rethink these dominant systems and relationships with land and the environment. This can be linked to the need to address inequality and power dynamics if we are to have any hope of addressing climate change.

Professor Valodia will be hosting Amitav Ghosh for a series of events at the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa from 10 to 12 September 2024. The university has partnered with the Presidential Climate Commission, the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (WiSER) and the University of Pretoria to host the sessions.

Julia Taylor, Researcher: Climate and Inequality, University of the Witwatersrand and Imraan Valodia, Pro Vice-Chancellor: Climate, Sustainability and Inequality and Director: Southern Centre for Inequality Studies., University of the Witwatersrand

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

In a recent 5-4 decision, the U.S.Supreme Court rejected Purdue Pharma’s controversial bankruptcy settlement that protected the billionaire Sackler family from further liability for the opioid epidemic in the USA. The Harrington v. Purdue Pharma SCOTUS case blocks a ruling by a federal bankruptcy court in New York that was first rejected by a district court but later appealed before the US Department of Justice finally challenged it before the Supreme Court.

The original deal allowed Purdue, the Sackler owned pharmaceutical company behind the prescription opioid OxyContin, to restructure and protect Sackler billionaires without requiring them to declare personal bankruptcy. From the huge fortune they made from OxyContin the Sacklers agreed to contribute $6bn to the settlement from the vast fortune they made from OxyContin plus relinquish ownership in Purdue Pharma.

In a bankruptcy filing, a New York Times article,”The Sacklers Could Get Away With It,” reported, “debts are forgiven — “discharged,” in legal terms — after debtors commit the full value of all of their assets (with the exception of certain types of property, like a primary home) to pay their creditors. That is not, however, what the Sacklers want, and indeed the members of the family have not filed for bankruptcy themselves. What they proposed instead is to be shielded from all OxyContin lawsuits, protecting their tremendous personal wealth from victims’ claims against them. What’s more, a full liability release would provide the Sacklers with more immunity than they could ever obtain in a personal bankruptcy filing, which would not protect them from legal action for fraud, willful and malicious personal injury, or from punitive damages”.

CNBC Video: “Supreme Court blocks Purdue Pharma bankruptcy settlement”

By using the bankruptcy agreement, Purdue/Sackler wanted to resolve lawsuits, including those filed by state and local governments, alleging that Purdue Pharma caused a crisis killing half a million Americans when it asserted that OxyContin was non-addictive while it promoted massive over-prescribing via pill mills. Elizabeth Prelogar, U.S. solicitor general, argued that “the release of the Sacklers from future liability is not authorized by the bankruptcy code and constitutes an abuse of the bankruptcy system.”

PARAGONS OF GOOD WORKS

With charitable foundations on both sides of the Atlantic, the Sacklers, who are based in New York, have donated millions to the arts and sponsored faculty at Yale and many other universities. In each case, the family’s name is displayed prominently as the benefactor. Forbes listed the collective estimated worth of the 20 core family members at $14bn in 2015, partly derived from $35bn in sales revenue from OxyContin between 1995 and 2015. The name Sackler is displayed in the forecourt at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London and was noted in the Sackler Gallery at the Serpentine in 2013. The ancient Egyptian Temple of Dendur has a Sackler Wing in the Metropolitan Museum in New York. The Sackler Centre for Arts Education at the Guggenheim and many other arts institutions around the world have galleries or wings named after the Sackler family.

But few know Sackler wealth comes from Purdue Pharma, a private Connecticut company the family developed and wholly owns. In 1995, the company revolutionised the prescription painkiller market with the invention of OxyContin, a drug that is a legal, concentrated, chemical version of morphine or heroin. It was designed to be safe; when it first came to market, its slow-release formula was unique. After winning government approval it was hailed as a medical breakthrough, an illusion that many now refer to as “magical thinking”.

It was marketed to physicians, many of whom were taken on lavish junkets, given misleading information and paid to give talks on the drug . Patients were wrongly told the pills were a reliable long-term solution to chronic pain, and in some cases were offered coupons for a month’s free sample. DEA data says that the US has been flooded with about 10 billion pain pills a year. Most pain drugs were sold by a small number of pharmacies, with prescriptions for these drugs written by a small number of physicians at pill mill clinics that charged cash for prescriptions. Data has shown these clinics were good OxyContin customers for the Sacklers/Purdue Pharma. Launched in 1996, Purdues OxyContin sales strategy was highly successful for twenty years because it alleged concentrated aggressive OxyContin marketing programs on what Purdue labeled ‘supercore clinics’, i.e., pill mills.

PROFIT, PLUNDER, DEATH

The untimely overdosing death of famous singer Tom Petty can be traced to the Sackler family and Purdue Pharma according to many addiction specialists.The family of Tom Petty said that the singer’s death was caused by an accidental overdose with a cocktail of prescription drugs and pain pills, including oxycodone and fentanyl. Although prescriptions for opioids fell in response to the crisis, Americans didn’t shake the habit or seek rehab; they turned to heroin instead. Four out of five people in the US who try heroin today started with prescription painkillers, according to the American Society of Addiction Medicine. Alarmingly, street heroin started being secretly cut with the dangerous synthetic opioid fentanyl.

By misleading physicians about the safety of OxyContin in order to earn $35bn in sales revenue from the toxic pain drug between 1995 and 2015, many addiction specialists say that Purdue Pharma owners, the Sackler family, bear the lion’s share of the responsibility for many deaths and today’s opioid crisis. Legal experts, the NYT writes, conclude that “allowing the bankruptcy court to impose a global OxyContin settlement may at first appear to be an efficient way to resolve litigation that could drag on for years, the Sacklers will benefit from this expediency at the expense of victims. At stake is whether there will ever be a fair assessment of responsibility for America’s deadly prescription drug epidemic. Protection from all OxyContin liability for the Sackler family would be an end-run around the reckoning that justice requires”.

Just like all Big Pharma corporations, Sackler/Purdue pharma are dedicated to the bottom line of maximization of profit; everything else is of insignificant value compared to this. Their large and aggressive marketing campaign to sell the supposedly ‘safe’ pain drug OxyContin appears to have disregarded all boundaries and turned this dangerous drug into immense profit for themselves. There are always among us those self-serving and toxic individual and corporate predators who regard democracy/government regulation/community as an obstacle to their greed and avarice. The opioid epidemic is now burgeoning in the U.S. with millions of ruined lives, individuals, families. The Sacklers want to retreat back into their money and vast profiteering, and let other people clean up and pay for the overall and inevitable long-term suffering, death and destruction they allegedly created.

The SCOTUS decision recognizes plaintiff’s due process rights and the ability of plaintiffs to sue the Sacklers. The Sacklers, they argued, should not be rewarded for their contribution because they “created the need for that money” by taking it out of the company in the first place, setting up the situation where they would be protected from lawsuits “by piggybacking on the bankruptcy of their company.” In agreement with. SCOTUS, U.S. Attorney General Merrick B. Garland said in a statement, “The bankruptcy court did not have the authority to deprive victims of the opioid crisis of their right to sue the Sackler family.”

(The Conversation) – The Supreme Court has ruled that the Eighth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution does not prohibit cities from criminalizing sleeping outdoors.

City of Grants Pass v. Johnson began when a small city in Oregon with just one homeless shelter began enforcing a local anti-camping law against people sleeping in public using a blanket or any other rudimentary protection against the elements – even if they had nowhere else to go.

The court confronted this question: Is it unconstitutional to punish homeless people for doing in public things that are necessary to survive, such as sleeping, when there is no option to do these acts in private?

In a 6-3 decision written by Justice Neil Gorsuch, the court said no. It rejected the claim that criminalizing sleeping in public by those with nowhere to go violates the Constitution’s prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment. In my view, the decision – which I see as disappointing but not surprising – will not lead to any reduction in homelessness, and will certainly result in more litigation.

As a specialist in poverty law, civil rights and access to justice who has litigated many cases in this area, I know that homelessness in the U.S. is a function of poverty, not criminality, and that criminalizing people experiencing homelessness in no way helps solve the problem.

“Criminalization,” by Juan Cole, Digital, Dream/ Dreamworld v 3, PS Express, 2024..

The Grants Pass case

Grants Pass v. Johnson culminated years of struggle over how far cities can go to discourage homeless people from residing within their borders, and whether or when criminal sanctions for actions such as sleeping in public are permissible.

In a 2019 case, Martin v. City of Boise, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals held that the Eighth Amendment’s cruel and unusual punishment clause forbids criminalizing sleeping in public when a person has no private place to sleep. The decision was based on a 1962 Supreme Court case, Robinson v. California, which held that it is unconstitutional to criminalize being a drug addict. Robinson and a subsequent case, Powell v. Texas, have come to stand for distinguishing between status, which cannot constitutionally be punished, and conduct, which can.

In the Grants Pass ruling, the 9th Circuit went one step further than it had in the Boise case and held that the Constitution also banned criminalizing the act of public sleeping with rudimentary protection from the elements. The decision was contentious: Judges disagreed over whether the anti-camping ban regulated conduct or the status of being homeless, which inevitably leads to sleeping outside when there is no alternative.

Grants Pass urged the Supreme Court to abandon the Robinson precedent and its progeny as “moribund and misguided.” It argued that the Eighth Amendment forbids only certain cruel methods of punishment, which do not include fines and jail terms.

The homeless plaintiffs did not challenge reasonable regulation of the time and place of outdoor sleeping, the city’s ability to limit the size or location of homeless groups or encampments, or the legitimacy of punishing those who insist on remaining in public when shelter is available.

But they argued that broad anti-camping laws inflicted overly harsh punishments for “wholly innocent, universally unavoidable behavior” and that punishing people for “simply existing outside without access to shelter” would not reduce this activity.

In today’s decision, the court rejected the city’s invitation to overrule the 1962 Robinson decision and eliminate the prohibition on criminalizing status, but denied that being homeless is a status. Instead, the court agreed with the city that camping or sleeping in public are activities, not statuses, despite the plaintiffs’ evidence that for homeless people, there is no difference between criminalizing “being homeless” and criminalizing “sleeping in public.”

The decision is surprisingly thin on Eighth Amendment analysis. It declines to engage with plaintiffs’ arguments that criminalizing sleeping imposes disproportionate punishment or imposes punishment without a legitimate deterrent or rehabilitative goal.

Instead, the court returned over and over to the idea that the 9th Circuit’s decision required judges to make impermissible policy decisions about how to respond to homelessness. The court also extensively cited friend-of-the-court briefs from cities and others discussing the difficulties of addressing homelessness. Significantly, however, neither these briefs nor the court’s decision cite evidence that criminalization reduces homelessness in any way.

In a strong dissent beginning “Sleep is a biological necessity, not a crime,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor, joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, quoted extensively from the record in the case. The dissent included some shocking statements from the Grants Pass City Council, such as “Maybe [the homeless people] aren’t hungry enough or cold enough … to make a change in their behavior.”

Sotomayor noted that time, place and manner restrictions on sleeping in public are perfectly permissible under the Ninth Circuit’s analysis, and that the inevitable line-drawing problems upon which the majority dwells are a normal part of constitutional interpretation. She also observed that the majority’s contention that the Ninth Circuit’s rule is unworkable was belied by Oregon’s own actions: in 2021, the state legislature codified the Martin v. Boise ruling into law.

A national crisis

Homelessness is a massive problem in the U.S. The number of people without homes held steady during the COVID-19 pandemic largely because of eviction moratoriums and the temporary availability of expanded public benefits, but it has risen sharply since 2022.

Scholars and policymakers have spent many years analyzing the causes of homelessness. They include wage stagnation, shrinking public benefits, inadequate treatment for mental illness and addiction, and the politics of siting affordable housing. There is little disagreement, however, that the simple mismatch between the vast need for affordable housing and the limited supply is a central cause.

Crackdowns on the homeless

Increasing homelessness, especially its visible manifestations such as tent encampments, has frustrated city residents, businesses and policymakers across the U.S. and led to an increase in crackdowns against homeless people. Reports from the National Homelessness Law Center in 2019 and 2021 have tallied hundreds of laws restricting camping, sleeping, sitting, lying down, panhandling and loitering in public.

Under presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden, the federal government has asserted that criminal sanctions are rarely useful. Instead it has emphasized alternatives, such as supportive services, specialty courts and coordinated systems of care, along with increased housing supply.

Some cities have had striking success with these measures. But not all communities are on board.

Pushing people out of town

I expect that this ruling will prompt some jurisdictions to continue or increase crackdowns on the homeless, despite the complete lack of evidence that such measures reduce homelessness. What such laws may well accomplish is to push the issue into other towns, as Grants Pass officials candidly admitted they sought to do.

The decision will likely put even more pressure on jurisdictions that choose not to criminalize homelessness, such as Los Angeles, whose mayor, Karen Bass, has condemned the ruling. While this ruling resolves the Eighth Amendment claims against sleeping bans, litigation over homeless policy is doubtless far from over.

This is an updated version of an article originally published April 17, 2024.

Clare Pastore, Professor of the Practice of Law, University of Southern California

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

( Tomdispatch.com ) – Officials and election experts are now struggling in a big-time way. How, they wonder, can they effectively address mounting threats — of violence, election denialism, foreign influence, and voter discrimination? Do they run the risk of alarming the public to the point of reducing voter turnout? Are there reasons to assuage fears about either election disinformation or possible election interference in 2024? Standing in Pointe du Hoc, France, to mark the anniversary of D-Day, President Biden told the world that those who fought in that pivotal battle are “asking us to do our job: to protect freedom in our time, to defend democracy.” Election security would be a good place to start.

Perhaps one way to assess the question of election stability and security in 2024 is to ask: How different is this election from earlier tumultuous ones in American history?

What, if any, lessons can we draw from the past? Or are we in genuinely uncharted territory today? 

In truth, when it comes to presidential elections, this country has faced some frightening moments in its history, ones that touch on a number of the fears that confront us today. We may never have faced the likes of Donald Trump, but we have experienced disputed vote tallies, Supreme Court interference, threats of violence, voting rights restrictions, and a lack of confidence in the process itself.

Contested Elections

Donald Trump has made no bones about it. Should he lose the coming election, he reserves the “right” to refuse to accept the results. In 2020, his denial of the results led to a violent attempt to block Congress from certifying the vote on the following January 6th. To date, any accountability for his past actions has been minimal. Found guilty last month of falsifying business records to conceal election law violations in 2016, he has yet to be sentenced and may well appeal all the way up to a sympathetic Supreme Court. Moreover, he hasn’t been tried yet in Georgia and in federal court in Washington, D.C., on significantly more serious criminal charges about ways he and his followers tried to subvert the results of the 2020 election — and he’s unlikely to be before the November elections. 

Most Republicans have remained at his side. Indeed, election denialism has become a rallying point rather than a mark of shame. As a result, the former president continues to engage in implied threats to the democratic political process with unwavering partisan support. And were he to disappear from the political scene thanks to a decisive defeat in 2024, others could follow him in exploiting the democratic system for political gain.

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While there have been a handful of disputed presidential election results since the country’s founding, two stand out. In the election of 1876, Republican Rutherford B. Hayes lost the popular and electoral vote to Samuel Tilden. The Republicans protested that, in three states, the results were uncertain. To resolve the issue, Congress created a bipartisan panel, including House and Senate representatives and five Supreme Court justices. That panel then granted Hayes all 20 disputed electoral votes, giving him a one-point electoral margin over Tilden, and so making him president. Ultimately, the country found a way forward.

More than a century later, in the 2000 election between Republican George W. Bush and Democrat Al Gore, the results again lay in dispute. Gore had won the popular vote, but the electoral vote was too close to call. All eyes focused on Florida where the results would determine the outcome. Although the Florida Supreme Court ordered a statewide recount, the Supreme Court stopped it and, in doing so, made Bush president.

In neither post-election resolution did the losing candidate contest the results, though Tilden waited four months before conceding. The day after the Supreme Court’s decision, Gore conceded, saying, “I accept the finality of this outcome” — a stark contrast to Donald Trump who still refuses to concede that the 2020 election result was legitimate.

It’s worth mentioning that both elections had major consequences. Hayes’s win, the result of a brokered deal, also ended the post-Civil War Reconstruction era and led to the withdrawal of U.S. troops from the South. That election would prove an integral part of efforts to undo the biggest push the nation ever had to achieve racial justice.

The Bush administration, in turn, failed to prevent the attacks of September 11, 2001, and then launched a multidecade-long “war on terror” that would destabilize parts of the globe from South Asia to the Middle East and Africa, while, according to the Costs of War Project, leading to the deaths of more than 7,000 American service members and more than 177,000 allied military and police in conflicts ranging from Afghanistan and Pakistan to Iraq and Syria, not to mention the deaths of more than 430,000 civilians.

Along with the knowledge that uncertainty can accompany election results, Americans sense as well that violence could indeed loom in as yet unknown ways, thanks to Election 2024.

Violence Before, During, and After an Election

It’s not that Americans have never experienced the threat of violence around elections. The Civil War years saw numerous outbreaks of violence. In 1861, a mob of Confederate supporters tried to gather to storm Congress to stop the certification of Abraham Lincoln as president. There was no violence only because General Winfield Scott, a southerner, made sure the Capitol was protected.

So, too, in 1868, in the runup to the first election of the Reconstruction era between Ulysses S. Grant and Horatio Seymour, Ku Klux Klan violence led to thousands of murders in Georgia, Kansas, and Louisiana, and threats of violence kept voters away from the polls in droves. In the 1876 Tilden-Hayes election in which four states submitted multiple slates of electors to Congress, one popular slogan was “Tilden or Blood.” Expecting violence, President Grant secured the Capitol with troops and prepared to deploy them elsewhere as well.

And then (as now), race and violence were a distinct issue. In 1873, white mobs assaulted a courthouse in Colfax, Louisiana, to remove pro-Reconstruction Republican officials. In 1898, a horde of white North Carolinians conducted a coup against the fusionist government of the city of Wilmington to empower reactionary southern Democrats.

During the last part of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, southern Jim Crow laws imposed in response to Reconstruction produced literacy tests and poll taxes that disenfranchised Black voters. And in the twentieth century, racially motivated violence aimed at suppressing the vote became a regular part of election politics.

During “Freedom Summer” in 1964, three civil rights workers — James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Mickey Schwerner — were killed by white terrorists for participating in Black voter registration initiatives in Mississippi. When demonstrators were assaulted by police and white mobs on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Alabama during a nonviolent march on March 7, 1965, in support of voting rights legislation, the nation witnessed just how much brutality then existed when it came to those seeking to fulfill the nation’s democratic promise.

Twenty-First-Century Challenges

Experts anticipate a surge of violence at the polls in 2024. A Brennan Center survey found that, since 2020, “38 percent of local election officials experienced threats, harassment, or abuse for doing their jobs.” To counter this, the federal government and individual states have already mounted efforts intended to protect both voters and officials. Since 2020, in fact, the Department of Justice, the Department of Homeland Security, and Congress have ponied up an extra $205 million for election protection. And yet, as the Brennan Center points out, a growing fear of violence and harassment has led to “an exodus from the field” of election work. Not surprisingly, a recent Ipsos/Reuters poll reported that two out of three Americans are concerned about the prospect of election violence in 2024 and fear the possibility of a worse version of the January 6th insurrection at the Capitol.

Violence at the polls has, in fact, plagued elections throughout the nation’s history, as Steven Hahn recounts in his new book, Illiberal America, while the Voting Rights Act of 1965 proved to be fragile indeed, as red states continued to put voting restrictions in place based on false allegations of voter fraud.

Worse yet are the threats already emanating from former president Trump and Republicans close to him. The embrace of such anti-democratic sentiment by such a potentially powerful figure and his party at a time when global anti-democratic forces are on the rise has already created an historically rare level of instability in this country.

And keep in mind that not all the dangers of this moment have a footprint in the American past. There are new challenges that face the nation today. Disinformation is a case in point.  While false information has always been a part of politics — smears against alleged communists were, for instance, a staple of the early Cold War years — the Internet has proven a game-changer when it comes to facilitating false narratives that could lead to both voter suppression and a deep mistrust of election results.

The scale and scope of disinformation in the modern age has no precedent. Without editorial control and given the ease of disseminating misinformation, guardrails have crumbled. Experts warn that the massive communications infrastructure that transmits bad information could undermine confidence in election results in ways never before seen. Worse yet, Artificial Intelligence (AI) is likely to prove a particularly dangerous mechanism for producing electoral deepfakes.

Additionally, foreign interference seems now to have become a permanent feature of American elections, although to what end remains in question. As the 2019 report issued by Special Counsel Robert Mueller demonstrated, Russia’s attempts to interfere with the 2016 election, including conducting “information warfare” and attacking voter databases, proved “sweeping and systematic.”

Where Are We Today?

When it comes to elections, despite Donald Trump, it’s not been all downhill. In 2021, the Department of Justice launched an Election Threat Task Force aimed at individuals who posed threats to election workers. To date, 17 people have indeed been prosecuted. Significantly, in 2022, Congress passed the Electoral Count Reform Act, an attempt to update the Electoral Count Act of 1887 and improve the process of certifying the vote, ensuring that the transition period between election day and inauguration day goes smoothly. In addition, in 2022, Congress passed legislation to establish a Foreign Malign Influence Center to counter disinformation from overseas generally, not just in elections.

The federal courts have also proven to be barriers against electoral subversion. In the wake of the 2020 election, they repeatedly denied Donald Trump success in his efforts to overturn the results. Yet even this source of democratic protection has been limited, while the present all too conservative Supreme Court, which in 2013 gutted the Voting Rights Act, has continued to weaken voter protections.

The question then remains: What do the lessons of history — and recent reforms — tell us about our current moment? On the one hand, history suggests that election dysfunction has been overcome time and again. Whether we’re talking about contested results, challenges to voter suppression, outbreaks of violence, or presidents elected without national majorities, such situations have been resolved reasonably successfully in the past. Meanwhile, new measures have been put in place for the security of election workers, the certification of the vote, and the deterrence of voter suppression in new ways. In other words, American democracy has continued, despite deeply rooted problems.

And yet, it’s also clear that past negative experiences have, in our moment, been twisted into newly dangerous configurations. In place of contested elections, there is now outright election denialism. In addition to racially motivated violence, there’s growing extremist violence aimed at the institution of voting itself. In place of partisan campaign rhetoric, we’re experiencing the spread of hate speech based on race, ethnicity, gender, or simply opposition to democracy itself. Instead of support for the outlawing of post-election violence, we now live with references to the imprisoned offenders of January 6, 2021, as “hostages.” And just because this country has survived challenging times in the past doesn’t mean it will do so again, particularly as pressure against democratic norms ramps up globally.

Many would blame such election instability on Donald Trump alone and there’s no question that he does have a profound knack for manipulating public discourse and threatening to upend election laws, not to speak of the rules, norms, and processes that underlie election legitimacy. However significant, though, he’s not the only factor that warrants attention in this election year.

The largest threats to our elections now come not from weaponized technology, or a tone-deaf Congress or Supreme Court, or even perhaps from Donald Trump himself (though dangerous he may be). The biggest challenge may lie in the absence of any long-term focus on the need for fundamental structural changes in how our elections are run.  For centuries, we as a nation have made incremental changes in response to moments of election-related crisis. But far more is needed if we are to escape a future in which questions about whether the electoral process itself is legitimate and whether the results will be accepted become part of every election season.

Our democratic system seems increasingly frail. To face the future with confidence in the most elemental building block of our democracy, we need a longer-term perspective. The elimination of the Electoral College, greater accountability for violence in and around elections, tools for curbing disinformation and improving election administration, a vast increase in funding for public education about polling sites and candidate platforms, strict accountability for attempted voter suppression, and heightened efforts to secure voting rights for all are badly needed. In other words, rather than facing a continual nip and tuck of problems as they appear, what we really need is a commission that will offer a full-scale rethinking of election security in the twenty-first century, while focusing on getting Congress to move toward developing a comprehensive new strategy to deal with it. Even if we get through the 2024 election cycle intact and violence-free, the task of election reform remains both essential and, sadly, all too ignored.

Perhaps, however, there could be a silver lining in our unnerving moment if our ongoing election troubles lead us to conclude that the time for keeping our fingers crossed should end and the time for wholesale reform begin.

Copyright 2024 Julian E. Zelizer and Karen J. Greenberg

Via Tomdispatch.com

Among them were owners of Germany’s largest corporations, some of whose names are familiar to us even today – Siemens, Krupp, Allianz, and defunct chemical manufacturer and Zyklon B poison gas supplier IG Farben, an antecedent of pharma giant Bayer.

Göring implored the gathering for the money needed to guarantee a favorable climate for business and “get rid of that wishy-washy regime once and for all.” The twenty-four billionaires nodded solemnly. “And if the Nazi Party won the majority,” added Göring, with a laugh, “These would be the last elections for ten years — even for a hundred years.”

“The twenty-four lizards rose to their hind legs and stood stiffly,” as Hitler joined the meeting, Author Eric Vuillard depicted the scene in his history, The Order of the Day. Like Göring, Hitler warned of the communist menace and promised to eliminate trade unions. “We must first gain complete power to crush the other side completely.” He impressed upon them that democracy and private property could not co-exist. Hitler argued that, in supporting his rise as Führer, the moguls would in effect be supporting themselves, their firms, and their fortunes.

“And now, gentlemen, to the cash register!” Right on the spot, the lizards opened their checkbooks and forked over nearly three million Reichsmarks, roughly equivalent to $16 million U.S. dollars today. Much like the black box of hidden donations allowed by Citizens United, the Nazis made sure to cloak the real names of their donors, who Vuillard calls “the clergy of major industry . . . the high priests of Ptah. And there they stand, affectless, like twenty-four calculating machines at the gates of hell.”

Almost a hundred years later, the American donor class is just as affectless, just as calculating, and just as eager to ensure that profits never stop rising. The threat of fascism is still second to the bottom line, while fear-mongering about the “radical left” is as common today as the warnings about communism coming out of Hitler’s mouth.

Ignoring Trump’s promise to turn America into a “unified Reich,” Republican donors have claimed, “the threat to capitalism from the Democrats is more concerning than the threat to democracy from Trump” — an absurd, spurious claim. Indeed, three-and-a-half years into Biden’s term, the U.S. economy is easily the strongest in the world, and international investors are throwing money at American businesses.

In the past month, some of the most insidious billionaires have coalesced like flies behind Trump, threatening to blunt President Biden’s fundraising edge. Most Blue Chip Wall Street CEOs have distanced themselves from the insurrectionist criminal who tried to steal the 2020 election and savaged the judicial system. Although no one among the Fortune 100 CEOs has donated to Trump this time, however, some heads of lesser corporations and many among the unaffiliated, wild-card super-rich, are less responsible. These modern-day lizards are swallowing their gag-inducing qualms about Trump’s campaign of lies, retribution, mindless gibberish, and willingness to bulldoze laws and democracy. They’re focusing instead on issues closer to their ideological and vampiric interests: how he might ease regulations, subvert unions, and cut their taxes.

Trump is auctioning off his potential presidency in a desperate drive to win the election and avoid jail. In a shakedown meeting with oil executives worthy of Hitler and Göring, Trump promised that if elected he would immediately reverse dozens of environmental rules, kill the transition to green energy, and keep us addicted to fossil fuels. In pressing the energy CEOs for donations, he said, “You all are wealthy enough that you should raise $1 billion to return me to the White House” and that “giving $1 billion would be a ‘deal’ . . . because of the taxation and regulation they would avoid.”

Given this influence peddling, it’s hardly surprising that Trump has outraised Biden in the energy sector. Despite blatant extortion, the media barely raises an eyebrow when Trump incoherently rants about whether sinking electric boats can electrocute sharks — his exceedingly stupid rationale for a policy plan to ban electric vehicles. The proposal is a shameless, open payback for his one billion dollar campaign donation ask from fossil fuel giants.

MSNBC Video: “Joy: ‘Every other billionaire is kissing Trump’s… ring'”

Trump no longer pretends to be the incorruptible swamp drainer with no need of corporate money. Demonstrating that nothing matters to his mindless MAGA drones, he openly grovels like a dog, pleading for money, and saying anything to ingratiate himself with his corporate masters as he tests the boundaries of campaign finance laws.

The convicted felon’s fire sale on his future presidency will involve totally capitulating to Israeli billionaire and radical Zionist Miriam Adelson, who is worth $30 billion. Trump, who bribed Adelson with the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2018, met with her multiple times in recent months. After hesitating and letting him squirm and beg, Adelson committed more than $100 million to Trump’s campaign.

Adelson demands no criticism of Israel or Netanyahu, who she has backed since the early 1990s.

Trump psychotically detests Netanyahu — not for slaughtering more than 30,000 Palestinians, but for recognizing Biden’s 2020 victory. But he has stopped sniping at the Israeli authoritarian.

Beyond this, Adelson also expects Trump to unconditionally support Israel’s war, support Israeli annexation of the West Bank, and recognize its sovereignty there. Adelson has never embraced what she called the “useless mold of the so-called peace process.” Trump‘s re-election will make a horrible situation unfathomably worse.

Adelson is not the only rich, pro-Israeli Trump donor. He met with a group, which he said included “98 percent of my Jewish friends.” In response to a question about anti-genocide protestors, Trump said, “Any student that protests, I throw them out of the country. You know, there are a lot of foreign students. As soon as they hear that, they’re going to behave.” Trump called the demonstrators part of a “radical revolution” that he vowed to defeat. “If you get me elected, and you should really be doing this . . . we’re going to set that pro-Palestinian movement back 25 or 30 years.”

If Trump gets re-elected, it will set the world back 25 or 30 years, yet billionaires continue to rally behind him. David Sacks — a grotesquely pro-Trump Silicon Valley investor, and his tech associate Elon Musk reportedly held a secret dinner party of billionaires and millionaires in Hollywood last month. Its purpose: to defeat Joe Biden and re-install Trump in the White House. The guest list included Peter Thiel — tech billionaire and ultra-conservative, Rupert Murdoch — owner of the Foxbot propaganda network, and Steven Mnuchin — Trump’s ultra-rich, corrupt treasury secretary. These oligarchs aren’t just hostile to progressivism. They’re hostile to American democracy itself.

Thiel once wrote: “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” He  donated $15 million to the successful Republican senatorial campaign of J.D. Vance, who alleged that the 2020 election was stolen and that Biden’s immigration policy meant “more Democrat voters pouring into this country.” A dangerously converted former Trump hater, Vance is high on the list of Trump vice-presidential possibilities.

Musk posts frequently in support of Trump while amplifying the volume of his anti-Biden harangues on Twitter/X, the platform he owns. According to a New York Times analysis, Musk has posted Biden criticism at least seven times a month this year. Vilifying the president on issues ranging from his age to his policies on health and immigration, he called Biden “a tragic front for a far left political machine.”

This is no small matter. Musk has 187 million followers on X, and because he owns the platform he’s able to manipulate the algorithm to maximize the number of people who see his posts. Serving his business interests and reactionary politics, Musk promotes other autocrats around the world. In addition to Trump, Musk has used X to bolster India’s Narendra Modi, Argentina’s Javier Milei, and Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro.

When asked if he was becoming more political, Musk admitted on Lex Fridman’s podcast, “If you consider fighting the woke mind virus, which I consider to be a civilizational threat, to be political, then yes. The woke mind virus is communism rebranded.” Musk reverts back to the 1930s for this Hitlerian threat.

Thiel regresses even further, writing: “The 1920s were the last decade in American history during which one could be genuinely optimistic about politics. Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women – two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians – have rendered the notion of ‘capitalist democracy’ into an oxymoron.”

If “capitalist democracy” is a contradiction, it’s not because of public assistance or because women got the right to vote. It’s because billionaire capitalists like Musk and Thiel are intent on killing democracy by supporting mob boss Trump and the neo-fascists surrounding him.

As for the threat of communism, many investors and executives in the tech sector are currently doing very well. According to a Silicon Valley research group, the market capitalization of Valley companies reached $14.3 trillion last year, and “venture capital funding reached an astounding $30 billion.” Big banks, hedge funds, and private-equity funds have all made bumper profits. The Financial Times recently reported that “founders and top executives of the largest private equity groups in the U.S. have seen the value of their shares rise by more than $40 billion since the beginning of 2023.”

How grateful is the capitalist class to Biden for presiding over this swelling tide of riches? Not very. Stephen Schwarzman, billionaire CEO of the private-equity Blackstone Group, had previously denounced the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol as “appalling and an affront to the democratic values we hold dear as Americans.” Yet last month, the sycophantic Schwarzman issued a statement: “I am planning to vote for change and support Donald Trump for president” because “our economic, immigration, and foreign policies are taking the country in the wrong direction.”

The Business Roundtable — a powerful Washington lobbying group whose CEO members include Apple’s Tim Cook, General Motors’ Mary Barra and JP Morgan’s Jamie Dimon — led a chorus of condemnation after the January 6 insurrection. “The chaos unfolding in the nation’s capital is the result of unlawful efforts to overturn the legitimate results of a democratic election. The country deserves better,” the Business Roundtable said in a statement.

Recently, the same CEOs met privately with Trump. Despite being shocked by his incoherence and his nonsensical meandering, CEOs are flocking back to Trump,” according to the Wall Street Journal. Though the WSJ is an unreliable narrator, this opinion rings true because Biden-supporting CEOs are not publicly voicing their support for him nor are they criticizing Trump’s litany of failures as president and as a human being. These money men are not even mocking Trump’s current policy proposal of a 10 percent tariff on imports — a “terrible” plan that economic journalist Matt Yglesias called “cartoonishly evil” because it would “raise taxes on the poor and the middle class in order to finance yet another tax cut for rich people.”  

Speaking in January from the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Jamie Dimon – one of the most influential CEOs in the world – heaped praise on the former president who he earlier castigated for trying to overthrow American democracy. “Take a step back, be honest,” Dimon said. “Trump grew the economy quite well. Tax reform worked.”

No, not for most people. The tax cuts benefited wealthy families and corporations.

Trump has repeatedly promised to extend many of the giveaways that the 2017 GOP tax bill bestowed on corporations and high earners. When Republicans passed the tax cuts six years ago, they set much of it to expire in 2025 — a budget gimmick to mask the cost in lost revenue.

Biden has pledged to let the 2017 tax handouts lapse for the ultra-rich. His 2025 budget proposes raising the corporate tax rate and requiring billionaires to pay at least twenty-five per cent of their income in federal taxes. Further, the Biden Administration’s long-overdue effort to enforce antitrust laws more aggressively has enraged some Republican corporate leaders and financiers.

So it’s no surprise that some of the opportunistic vultures of corporate America are swarming around Trump even though the loser president still has not accepted the results of the 2020 election, nor has he committed to accepting the 2024 outcome. He even vows to pardon insurrectionist criminals sentenced to jail.

Not satisfied with their vast, obscene wealth, the MAGA idle rich overlook the felon’s criminality, his profound ignorance, his pathological indifference to reality, and his anti-American tirades so they might reap yet more benefits — from lucrative tax breaks to sweeping rollbacks of Biden’s efforts to strengthen worker power. American oligarchs want a useful idiot running the U.S. government, even if he is a fascist mob boss surrounded by a criminal cartel.

Last year, the rightwing Heritage Foundation published “Project 2025,” a 900 page policy-by-policy, agency-by-agency roadmap to “dismantle the administrative state,” as the organization’s president described it. Many of the recommendations align with positions that corporate interests have already taken. If Trump wins through mass psychosis, the implementation of Project 2025 is a blueprint for an authoritarian take-over, giving Trump and his stooges total control over the entire federal apparatus.

Trump has been able to fill his campaign coffers by undertaking one of the most nakedly corrupt fundraising tours in the history of presidential campaigns, promising his well-heeled benefactors a generous return on their investment. In addition to financing his circus show campaign, he requires a enormous amount of money to pay the legal fees that have helped him delay three other court cases against him — with the help of an incompetent Florida judge and the MAGA-majority Supreme Court‘s super-slow motion ruling on his absurd claim of total immunity from prosecution.

The cynical billionaires who support Trump — whether feverishly with piles of ill-gotten wealth or passively by not using their wealth and influence to try to stop the fascist train — are the enemy within. These MAGA bankrollers believe that great individual wealth is a sign of the holder’s innate superiority, not the lucky fallout of nepotism, whiteness, a privileged childhood, and access to education. They are the 21st Century American version of the German industrialists, bankers, and rich families who bankrolled Hitler and the Nazis in the 1930s, similarly fanatical about expanding their already-vast wealth and willing to ignore the consequences of the creeping fascism that they are enabling.

Americans have been actively debating questions like these for almost a century and a half, ever since we entered the era that Mark Twain quite artfully tagged the “Gilded Age.” We never totally ended that gilded epoch. But we came close. By the 1950s, Americans of massive means faced tax rates as high as 91 percent on their income over $200,000, the equivalent of about $2.4 million today.

In those same years, the wealth America’s wealthiest left behind when they entered the great beyond faced an estate tax top rate that could go as high as 77 percent. Wealthy married couples here in 2024, by contrast, can totally exempt as much as $27.22 million from any federal estate tax.

Our wealthiest today have good reason to be high-fiving these wealth-enhancing new tax realities. Top 1 percenters are now grabbing 21 percent of our nation’s income, over double the top 1 percent income share in 1976.

Back in that same 1976, the always helpful World Inequality Database reminds us, the 40 percent of Americans in the nation’s statistical middle held just over a third of America’s wealth, 33.7 percent. The top 1 percent’s considerably smaller share that year: 22.6 percent. Today’s story? Our richest 1 percent hold just about 35 percent of our nation’s wealth, our middle 40 percent less than 28 percent.

The wealthiest of our wealthy, a just-released report from Americans for Tax Fairness points out, are doing their best to keep these good times — for America’s rich — rolling.

“Just 50 billionaire families,” the new ATF report details, “have already injected more than $600 million collectively into the crucial 2024 elections, with that number sure to show accelerating growth in the final six months of the campaign.”

“Plutocrat,” Digital, Dream / Dreamland v 3, 2024

Stats like these, adds the report, offer “further proof that the nation’s richest families consider democracy just another commodity they can buy.”

Any transaction requires, of course, both buyers and sellers. In the buying and selling of our democracy, the sellers sit in Congress, and some have even called the White House home. This spring, one particular former president has been doing “selling” aplenty to get back to his former 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue address.

In one recent private event, the Washington Post reports, Donald Trump “asked oil industry executives to raise $1 billion for his campaign and said raising such a sum would be a ‘deal’ given how much money they would save if he were reelected as president.”

At another event with deep-pocket donors, held at New York’s luxurious Pierre Hotel, Trump reminded all present that a re-elected Joe Biden would let Trump’s 2017 tax cuts for the rich expire at the end of 2025. Warned Trump: “You’re going to have the biggest tax increase in history.”

What can we do to significantly limit how deeply political candidates can feed at the billionaire trough? The Billionaire Family Business — the new Americans for Tax Fairness report — advances two core recommendations.

The first: We need to reform our current campaign finance landscape. A good place to start would be ending our burgeoning “dark money” political contribution charade.

To end run our already feeble federal limits on political giving — and, at the same time, keep their donations secret — our contemporary billionaires have over recent years been advancing frightfully huge sums to non-profits that don’t have politics as their “primary” purpose. These non-profits have then been moving those dollars to billionaire-friendly candidates without having to publicly reveal the identity of the billionaires behind the contributions.

But closing gaping loopholes like this “dark money” two-step, the new Americans for Tax Fairness study recognizes, would only get us so far. The wealth of our richest, just like water, seeks its own level. Cut off one channel and that wealth will find another. To limit the impact of our wealthiest on our politics, in other words, we simply must limit the wealth of our wealthiest.

“We need,” as the new Americans for Tax Fairness paper puts it, “more effective taxation of billionaires.” And that more effective taxation must include moves to seriously tax the billionaire inheritances that “leave economic dynasties with plenty of spare cash to try to influence elections.”

Without those sorts of moves, the ATF concludes, we’ll continue to have “no practical limit to how much billionaire families can spend” on getting their “allies into office.”

Plutocracy can flourish in that environment. Democracy most definitely cannot.

Via Inequality.org

Published under a Creative Commons 3.0 License

(The Conversation) On university campuses across North America, a new anti-war movement has emerged. Camped-out students are pressuring their universities to divest from companies that profit off the Israeli war machine, to cut ties with Israeli institutions and to publicly condemn Israel’s deadly military campaign in Gaza.

Away from the student encampments, unsympathetic alumni and donors are pressuring university administrators to suppress this student movement.

New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft announced he would cease donations to Columbia University. Hedge-fund billionaire Bill Ackman, dissatisfied with Harvard University administration’s response to a student statement criticizing Israel, led a highly publicized campaign to oust the university’s first Black president, Claudine Gay.

At Toronto Metropolitan University, several donors threatened to withhold scholarships and donations to the law school in response to a student letter in solidarity with Palestinians.

More recently, Ernest Rady, the man behind the University of Manitoba’s largest-ever donation, publicly condemned the convocation address delivered by the medical school’s valedictorian.

The valedictorian called for a ceasefire, humanitarian aid to Gaza and an end to the killing of Palestinian medical professionals and journalists. The university responded by denouncing the valedictory speech and removing it from their media channels.

Donor influence over university policy on pro-Palestinian student protests is an alarming case of the growing footprint of private philanthropy in higher education. It poses a grave risk to free inquiry, critical thinking and the democratic ideals of universities.

Philanthropy goes beyond mere do-gooding

Philanthropy refers to the mobilization of private resources for the public good.

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As governments have scaled back public spending, philanthropists have stepped in. They are widely celebrated for making financial contributions to social, cultural and educational institutions.

For example, the Gates Foundation has been praised for spending billions on health and education. The names of billionaire businessmen like Schulich, Sprott and Munk grace post-secondary institutions across Canada.

Our work, however, shows that philanthropy’s “goodness myth” obscures the fact that “philanthropic wealth and power emerge through social relations of colonial and capitalist accumulation, which produce the very societal harms … that are the target of philanthropic interventions.”

Scholars have long cautioned against philanthropy’s undemocratic and unaccountable nature. Stanford political scientist Robert Reich calls it “a plutocratic exercise of power.”

Philanthropic donations are publicly subsidized through charitable tax receipts. However, spending is directed according to donors’ preferences. Philanthropy therefore allows wealthy people to exchange financial capital for social and symbolic capital. This grants philanthropists undue influence over public policy, including matters related to post-secondary education.

Mega-donations and Canadian universities

The neoliberal turn in higher education has resulted in a stagnation or decline in provincial funding to post-secondary institutions.

In addition to raising student fees and cutting costs, universities are seeking philanthropic donations to fill funding gaps. These donations boost university trust, capital, endowment and research funds, even though they constitute a small portion of university revenues.

Canadian universities’ growing dependence on philanthropic donations coincides with a significant expansion in the number and size of philanthropic foundations.

Foundations are charitable institutions used by the wealthy to make donations. From 2013 to 2022, the total assets of philanthropic foundations in Canada rose from approximately $56 billion to $123 billion. This growth ushered in a new era of “mega-donations” to universities. In just the last five years, the University of Toronto, Queen’s University, the University of Waterloo and McGill University have received individual donations of $100 million or more.

Mega-donations provide post-secondary institutions with the financial resources to help them realize their goals. In the process, however, university administrators are rendered accountable to the whims and political priorities of wealthy philanthropists. When balancing donor interests against their own academic principles and organizational priorities, the balance all too often tips in favour of the donors.

In 2020, for example, the dean of the University of Toronto Faculty of Law blocked the hiring of a human rights scholar in response to pressure from a major donor (and sitting judge) who disapproved of the scholar’s research on Israel/Palestine.

The need to increase public funding

Scholars of the philanthropic sector have long pointed to the power imbalances in donor-grantee relationships. Philanthropy is uniquely characterized by upward accountability — institutions like universities that are reliant on big donations are compelled to sacrifice the needs of students and faculty at the altar of donor wishes and priorities. Administrators are driven by fear of losing philanthropic funding.

Philanthropists clearly understand this power when they demand that post-secondary institutions discipline student protests supporting Palestine.

When university administrators accede to donor demands, they punish students for enacting the core values and principles their institutions profess. This cultivates the conditions for wealthy elites to introduce their ideological biases into public academic institutions.

There is a long history of wealthy people controlling organizations and institutions through giving and withholding donations. Elites across the political spectrum have used their philanthropy to un-democratically shape public policy and “capture” social movements.

This structural dependence on philanthropy explains why donors are able to pressure university administrators into suppressing the anti-war student movement against Israel’s campaign in Gaza. Safeguarding against this creep of private forces into the university requires a recommitment to increased public funding of post-secondary education.

Fahad Ahmad, Assistant Professor, Department of Criminology, Toronto Metropolitan University and Adam Saifer, Assistant Professor, Faculty of Management, University of British Columbia

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.