Since January, there have been nearly 300 strikes throughout the U.S. This week on Intercepted: a look at the labor movement in 2021. Last week, tens of thousands of Kaiser Permanente health care workers announced that they will go on strike on November 15 if a collective bargaining agreement is not reached. If they take to the picket line, they will join hundreds of thousands of other workers nationwide who have used their labor power to demand better wages and working conditions in the aftermath of the Covid-19 pandemic. We hear from Kaiser Permanente workers, and then Labor Notes’ Jonah Furman joins The Intercept’s Washington Editor Nausicaa Renner to discuss this year’s strike wave, the continued strike at John Deere, and the political implications of 2021’s rise in labor activism. join.theintercept.com/donate/now
skip Rittenhouse segment (which BTW platforms the vicious racist Elie "what [white, non-college educated voters] care about is using their guns on black people" Mystal) for Anderson and Monbiot starting ~39 min
Democracy Now! 2021-11-11 Thursday
Headlines for November 11, 2021
White Supremacy on Trial: From Rittenhouse in Kenosha to Killers of Ahmaud Arbery, Will They Go Free?
How Wealth Inequality Fuels the Climate Emergency: George Monbiot & Scientist Kevin Anderson on COP26
skip Cashin to 22:59 and listen to the much better Victor/Pollin segment
Doug speaks with Sheryll Cashin, author of White Space, Black Hood, about the origins, mechanisms, and effects of residential segregation, mostly by race but also by class. Plus, Peter Victor and Robert Pollin debate the virtues of “degrowth” in avoiding climate catastrophe.
Behind the News, hosted by Doug Henwood, covers the worlds of economics and politics and their complex interactions, from the local to the global. Find the archive here: https://www.leftbusinessobserver.com/Radio.html
Irving Finkel speaks to Ellie Cawthorne about his book The First Ghosts, which looks at what we can learn from the first written evidence of ghost beliefs. He reveals what ancient Mesopotamian cuneiform tablets can tell us about everything from necromancy and getting rid of troublesome spirits to demons and the underworld.
(Ad) Irving Finkel is the author of The First Ghosts: Most Ancient of Legacies (Hodder & Stoughton, 2021). Buy it now from Waterstones:
Caitlin Petre, media sociologist at Rutgers University, has just published All the News That’s Fit to Click, a critical look at how performance analytics are transforming the work of profit-driven journalism. She exposes how newsroom metrics that measure and gauge reader engagement with digital news content represent a new form of intensified commercial pressure. Journalists are driven to optimize their content for clicks in ways that end up reshaping the newsroom power dynamics and their own working conditions. Journalism, after all is a form of labor—and one that has become increasingly casualized and precarious. Caitlin Petre’s account of data-driven journalism is also an important preview of how the metrics revolution may transform other professions with far-reaching implications. We talk to Caitlin about her research and ask what it portends for intellectual labor or knowledge work.
Read Victor Pickard's excellent review of Caitlin Petre's book in Jacobin.
necessarily thin (given spatiotemporal scale) but an excellent attempt at summary
In this episode, /u/EnclavedMicrostate talks with /u/starwarsnerd222 about great power politics of the late nineteenth century, focussing on British foreign policy from the end of the Crimean War in 1856 to the eve of the First World War in 1914. How did British officials and diplomats react to changing world circumstances, if they did at all? What sorts of crises did they respond to, or not depending on the situation? Find out all this and more on this fortnight's episode. 67 mins.
> without U.S. military protection, Taiwan would probably build nuclear weapons, something it has the wealth and technology to do quickly and has explored in the past. It is also not a signatory to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons. [...] The U.S. would never accede to this, however. Part of being an empire is defending your vassals so they don’t create the means to defend themselves.
Umm ... tell that to Israel, which attained nuclear weapons in the late 1960s with the active assistance of fellow "vassals" France, UK, Norway, Argentina, and (apartheid) South Africa, as well as financial assistance from US Zionists and the *complete* knowledge of the US government itself (going back to at least the Kennedy administration).
Recently a Republican college student asked President Joe Biden during a town hall on CNN if he could “vow to protect Taiwan” from China. “Yes,” Biden responded.
Anderson Cooper, who hosted the town hall, followed up with Biden, asking, “Are you saying that the United States would come to Taiwan’s defense if China attacked?”
“Yes,” Biden said, “we have a commitment to do that.”
There are several problems with this. First, the U.S. does not, in fact, have a commitment to do that. Second, the policy we do have is deliberately ambiguous, requiring that the U.S., China, and Taiwan pretend that certain aspects of reality do not exist. Third, the lifespan of this delicate situation may be drawing to a close, yet the most sensible way of resolving it will always be opposed by America, since it would crack the foundations of the worldwide U.S. empire.
In other words, the whole morass is one of the most insoluble in international relations, which is saying something. It’s also a situation that is genuinely frightening, since it could lead to a large war between China and the U.S., both armed with nuclear weapons.
Aged anti-landing barricades are positioned on a beach facing China on the Taiwanese island of Little Kinmen, which at points lies only a few miles from China, on April 20, 2018.
Photo: Carl Court/Getty Images
Taiwan is an island about 100 miles off the coast of China. It’s small, barely larger than Maryland, and just 0.4 percent of China’s size. Its population of 23.5 million is only one-sixtieth of China’s 1.4 billion. So it’s just a small speck in China’s enormous shadow.
Ten thousand years ago, the island that’s now Taiwan was connected to the larger Asian landmass, until sea levels rose and cut it off. About 6,000 years ago, it was settled by someone, probably farmers from the mainland. During the 1600s, both the Dutch and the Spanish attempted to colonize the island, with little success. In 1683, China’s Qing dynasty formally annexed it.
But in 1895, the Qing dynasty was forced to cede Taiwan to Japan after China was defeated in the First Sino-Japanese War. Japan happily engaged in settler colonialism similar to the European genre, encouraging industrialization while carrying out staggering massacres of the island’s Indigenous population. When Imperial Japan announced the hilariously named Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere in 1940, Taiwan was a key part of it.
After the end of World War II and Japan’s total defeat, it was understandable for Chinese leaders and the Chinese population in general to believe that Taiwan was part of China and should be returned to it. President Franklin D. Roosevelt and U.K. Prime Minister Winston Churchill had explicitly declared in 1943 that “all the territories Japan has stolen from the Chinese, such as Manchuria, Formosa [an alternate name for Taiwan], and the Pescadores shall be restored.”
There was a problem, however: Who was actually in charge of China? Who would get Taiwan back? The Qing dynasty had been overthrown in 1912 by a revolution that established the Republic of China. But within 15 years, an intermittent civil war had broken out between Republic of China forces and Chinese communists. After the two sides put things on hold during World War II, the communists won in 1949, took control of the mainland, and established the People’s Republic of China, or PRC. At that point, in a decision that has reverberated to this day, the ROC forces fled to Taiwan and seized control.
This is where the U.S. comes in. There were intense recriminations from the American right that the weak-kneed secret communists of the Truman administration had “lost China,” suggesting that China had somehow previously belonged to the U.S. The links between the U.S. right and ROC were both political and emotional. For instance, the CIA’s chief of station in Guatemala in 1954, who ran the coup overthrowing the democratically elected government, was close friends with the wife of Chiang Kai-shek, the dictatorial leader of the ROC. The CIA officer’s ancestral home, a former plantation on Maryland’s eastern shore, was decorated with Madame Chiang Kai-shek’s sketches.
The conservatives of that time are the direct ancestors of the neoconservatives of the past several decades. Both setsused high-flown hyperbole — about our love for democracy and the moral need to free suffering foreigners — in the service of hard-right objectives. The U.S. left often cites a 1948 State Department planning document as a sign of American perfidy — look at these insiders opposing people who care about human rights! — when in fact it was written by famed diplomat George Kennan in opposition to the bogus human rights rhetoric of the U.S. right:
We should cease to talk about vague and — for the Far East — unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of the living standards, and democratization. The day is not far off when we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts. The less we are then hampered by idealistic slogans, the better.
Specifically, the document advises that “our objectives for the immediate coming period should be … to liquidate as rapidly as possible our unsound commitments in China and to recover, vis-à-vis that country, a position of detachment and freedom of action.” In other words, realists like Kennan believed that we should not commit ourselves to supporting the ROC forces.
This stalemate on all sides has largely endured since then, with shifting feats of imagination by everyone involved. Chiang Kai-shek pretended for years that he was the true leader of China and was going to marshal forces to take back the mainland. The PRC continues to pretend that Taiwan is part of China — although by this point it clearly is its own nation — while also being willing to continue the status quo as long as Taiwan does not formally declare independence.
Since 1978, we have pretended that Taiwan is not a sovereign nation while also not recognizing China’s claims of sovereignty over the island.
The United Nations, under strong pressure from the U.S., pretended until 1971 that the ROC was the legitimate government of all of China and hence controlled China’s vote on the U.N. Security Council. (That year, the U.N. General Assembly passed the famous Resolution 2758, which recognized the PRC as “the only legitimate representative of China to the United Nations.”)
The United States pretended until 1978 that the ROC was actually China, when we switched and recognized the PRC as the “sole legal government of China.” Since then, we have pretended that Taiwan is not a sovereign nation while also not recognizing China’s claims of sovereignty over the island. While the U.S. abrogated a defense treaty between Taiwan and the U.S. in 1980, Biden is not the first president since then to pretend that maybe one still sort of exists. In 2001, when President George W. Bush was asked whether the U.S. had an obligation to defend Taiwan from Chinese attack, he responded “yes, we do” and that America would do “whatever it took to help Taiwan defend herself.”
Biden’s and Bush’s factotums had to walk their statements quickly back, emphasizing that U.S. policy had not changed. This policy, codified in the Taiwan Relations Act of 1979, simply states that the U.S. will “consider any effort to determine the future of Taiwan by other than peaceful means [to be] of grave concern to the United States” — which could mean everything or nothing.
Pro-independence demonstrations take place in Taipei, Taiwan, during the elections there in March 1996.
Photo: Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images
The danger now is that political factions in all three countries see an opportunity to force a resolution to this 72-year-old kludge. In the U.S., the successors to the conservatives of the ’50s — found in both the Republican and Democratic parties — are eager for a confrontation with China as part of a new Cold War. As part of this effort, they hope to encourage the sections of the Taiwanese political spectrum that want to formally declare independence, even as Taiwan’s President Tsai Ing-wen has pragmatically taken the position that Taiwan is already independent and hence has no need to formally say that it is. For its part, the Chinese government would find any Taiwanese declaration of independence totally unacceptable — “Taiwan independence means war,” China’s defense minister has declared — and much of China’s establishment might push for an invasion of Taiwan, suspecting that the country’s rising power could defeat the corroding power of the U.S.
Whether a Chinese attack on Taiwan will ever come to pass, and what would happen if it did, is anyone’s guess. But the situation is genuinely ominous, especially since there has never been a direct confrontation between the U.S. and another nuclear-armed power. Moreover, Americans seem more enthusiastic about such a war, with a recent poll finding that 52 percent of respondents supported the use of American troops if China invades Taiwan. This number has been slowly rising since the 1980s, when it was 19 percent, and has spiked recently for the first time to a majority.
It’s difficult to know what a legitimate solution to this problem would be. All sides are right to some understandable degree, and all sides are also wrong.The best of the terrible options for the world here is probably for the U.S. to make clear that Taiwan is now a grown-up country and responsible for defending itself.
But this would have its own enormous downside. After decades of autocratic rule by Chiang Kai-shek, Taiwan is now a real democracy. It has every reason to fear both an invasion by China and the likely aftermath, especially after seeing what has happened in Hong Kong after its return to Chinese rule in 1997.
So without U.S. military protection, Taiwan would probably build nuclear weapons, something it has the wealth and technology to do quickly and has explored in the past. It is also not a signatory to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons. Bizarrely, it ratified the treaty in 1970 when it was China in the eyes of the world, but now that China is China and Taiwan is generally not considered a sovereign state, it couldn’t sign even if it wanted to.
The U.S. would never accede to this, however. Part of being an empire is defending your vassals so they don’t create the means to defend themselves. If Taiwan wanders off on its own, maybe South Korea and Japan would get anxious and do so next, and before long we wouldn’t be running the world.
So after the world’s avoidance of reality for decades, reality is reasserting itself. In the end reality always wins, but this is a situation in which no one can say what that means.
Correction: November 8, 2021 This article has been corrected to clarify that the island that’s now Taiwan was connected 10,000 years ago to the larger Asian landmass, rather than China, which did not then exist.
listen to the longer 1st/Moyn segment, skip the 2nd/Bhargava
Just added to my radio archive (click on date for link):
October 28, 2021Samuel Moyn, co-author of this article, on the reactionary history of the Supreme Court and how to democratize it • Deepak Bhargava, one of the editors of Immigration Matters, on immigration policy, historical, current, and future
Not sure if Krystal-absence is the cause, but certainly this was one of the worst Breaking Points episodes in my memory. Opens with 2 Nov 2021 election post-mortem that's occasionally excellent but also overlong and rambling--listenable but not great. The last 2 segments are totally skippable:
- Marshall Kosloff's monologue is just bizarre and nonsensical: main point seems to be that, because Americans don't trust institutions (true), US Democrats should just not do anything Nov 2021--Nov 2022 (what ?!?)
- closer with Oren Cass (someone with whom I often agree) mixes some good-but-conventional points about US organized labor with some that are just stupid (e.g., SEIU should not be for SCOTUS court-packing because how ya gonna explain that to workers)
Saagar and guest host Marshall Kosloff talk about the election night takeaways, mainstream media melting down, GOP 2024 possibilities, Dems SALT tax cut for the rich, foreign money in elections, the new culture war, Biden's mandate, what American workers want with Oren Cass, and more!
Ben Norton speaks with Ángel Rodríguez Rivera, president of the Puerto Rican Association of University Professors, about the devastating neoliberal economic policies forced on Puerto Rico.
Washington imposed an unelected fiscal control board, called the junta, to control Puerto Rico's finances. Now it is pushing through so-called "debt restructuring," in law PC1003, that will slash social benefits, defund public universities, and crush working-class people in order to pay off foreign corporate debt vultures.
Meanwhile, the US-imposed privatization of Puerto Rico's electrical grid in a neoliberal public-private partnership has caused chronic blackouts, while executives at LUMA Energy make huge salaries.
1st/Moyn segment excellent! then quit, because the 2nd/Bhargava segment is very, very skippable
Doug speaks to Samuel Moyn, co-author of this article, on the reactionary history of the Supreme Court and how to democratize it. Plus: Deepak Bhargava, one of the editors of Immigration Matters, on immigration policy, historical, current, and future.
Behind the News, hosted by Doug Henwood, covers the worlds of economics and politics and their complex interactions, from the local to the global. Find the archive here: https://www.leftbusinessobserver.com/Radio.html
[Jekyll](https://jekyllrb.com/) is a Ruby-based {static-site generator, framework for static websites}. Major sell: Jekyll {powers, integrates well with} GitHub Pages. Major SSG competitor is probably Hugo (which is Go-based, which is compiled).
To get myself write more, I want to make creating a blog post as painless as possible.
Since I’m using Jekyll to run my blog, the process of creating a Jekyll blog post is as follow:
Create a new file in _posts folder, for example, _posts/2021-10-31-automate-creating-a-jekyll-post.md
Fill in the file headers with settings like layout, blog title, etc.
It is a repeated task. What if we can automate it?
I found this Gist and adapted to fix my needs. You can tweak the blog-home variable and the file content as well.
;; Adapted from https://gist.github.com/tpanum/f1bcd76cfdc6d3f3b28a
(setq blog-home "/<path>/<to>/emacs-til)
(defun jz/create-jekyll-post-emacs-til
(title)
"Creates a new buffer and file for an Emacs TIL blog post"
(interactive "sTitle of blog post: ")
(let
((filename
(concat
(format-time-string "%Y-%m-%d-")
(replace-regexp-in-string " " "-"
(downcase
(replace-regexp-in-string "[^0-9a-zA-Z ]" "" title))))))
(switch-to-buffer
(generate-new-buffer filename))
(insert
(concat
(mapconcat 'identity
'("---" "layout: post")
"\n")
"\n" "title: '" title "'\n" "date: '"
(format-time-string "%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S %z")
"'\n" "categories: [til]"
"\n" "comments: true"
"\n" "---\n"))
(write-file
(concat blog-home "/_posts/" filename ".md"))))
With this, writing a blog post is just one command away. Press M-x and run jz/create-jekyll-post-emacs-til.
It prompts me to enter the blog title and create the file with templated content:
---
layout: post
title: 'Automate Creating a Jekyll Post'
date: '2021-10-31 18:41:26 -0400'
categories: [til]
comments: true
---
Vanessa Chishti joins Long Reads for a discussion about Kashmir's past and present. Vanessa is professor of history at the O.P. Jindal Global University in Delhi, India. Long Reads is a Jacobin podcast looking in-depth at political topics and thinkers, both contemporary and historical, with the magazine’s longform writers. Hosted by Features Editor Daniel Finn.
Support Pushback at Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/aaronmate
Glenn Greenwald weighs in on a series of new embarrassments for the Russiagate disinformation campaign targeting the US public: Hunter Biden's laptop confirmed; Hillary Clinton's lawyer indicted; and 'Havana syndrome' debunked. Plus, the CIA's war on Julian Assange.
Guest: Glenn Greenwald. Independent journalist who writes at https://greenwald.substack.com/.
Support Pushback at Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/aaronmate
On the eve of the 2020 presidential election U.S. media outlets and social media platforms censored reporting on the contents of Hunter Biden's laptop, based on the evidence-free claim that the story was "Russian disinformation."
In his new book "The Bidens: Inside the First Family’s 50-Year Rise to Power," Politico reporter Ben Schreckinger authenticates multiple emails from that laptop as part of a deep look at the Biden family and Joe Biden's 50-year political career.
Guest: Ben Schreckinger. National political correspondent for Politico and author of "The Bidens: Inside the First Family’s 50-Year Rise to Power."
https://twitter.com/SchreckReports
http://benschreckinger.com/
EXCELLENT--Nando Vila fills-in for Paul Prescod, and both the initial and concluding banter (both mostly on movies esp horror esp "woke horror"), as well as the interview (Slavoj Žižek at his most engaging), are very listenable.
Slavoj Žižek discusses World War I and the other forces that shaped the Russian Revolution, how we should understand the Red Terror, the Russian Civil War, and the legacy of Felix Dzerzhinsky. Plus, Žižek reviews Squid Game and Denis Villeneuve's Dune remake.
The Jacobin Show offers socialist perspectives on class and capitalism in the twenty-first century, the failures of liberalism, and the prospects of rebuilding a left labor movement in the US. This is the podcast version of the show from October 26, 2021 with Jen Pan, Nando Vila, and Cale Brooks hosting.
VERY EXCELLENT: host Jon Schwarz is witty as usual
Last month, the Democratic-controlled House voted in favor of appropriating $768 billion for the 2022 defense budget. This week on Intercepted: Senior writer for The Intercept Jon Schwarz talks with Andrew Cockburn, Washington editor of Harper’s Magazine, longtime national security journalist, and author of “The Spoils of War: Power, Profit and the American War Machine.” Cockburn and Schwarz discuss the legacy of former Secretary of State Colin Powell and how private defense companies have historically maximized profits from horrific wars. join.theintercept.com/donate/now
Behind the News, hosted by Doug Henwood, covers the worlds of economics and politics and their complex interactions, from the local to the global. Find the archive here: https://www.leftbusinessobserver.com/Radio.html
very interesting: cited studies examine both micro- and nanoplastics, and both nucleation (for clouds/precipitation) and direct radiative forcing
Enlarge / Thought climate change was already complicated? Now scientists have to consider the influence of tiny bits of atmospheric plastic. (credit: Sanka Vidanagama | Getty Images)
Like the ash spewed from a supervolcano, microplastics have infested the atmosphere and encircled the globe. These are bits of plastic less than 5 millimeters long, and they come in two main varieties. Fragments spawn from disintegrating bags and bottles (babies drink millions of tiny particles a day in their formula), and microfibers tear loose from synthetic clothing in the wash and flush out to sea. Winds then scour land and ocean, carrying microplastics high into the atmosphere. The air is so lousy with the stuff that each year, the equivalent of over 120 million plastic bottles fall on 11 protected areas in the US, which account for just 6 percent of the country’s total area.
In a study published today in the journal Nature, scientists have taken a first swing at modeling how the atmospheric particles could be influencing the climate, and it’s a strange mix of good news and bad. The good news is that microplastics may be reflecting a tiny bit of the Sun’s energy back into space, which would actually cool the climate ever so slightly. The bad news is that humanity is loading the environment with so much microplastic (ocean sediment samples show that concentrations have been doubling every 15 years since the 1940s), and the particles themselves are so varied, that it’s hard to know how the pollutant will ultimately influence the climate. At some point they may end up heating the planet.
I've been using Ledger to keep track of my finances for several years, and one
feature I really like is the ability to run reports from within Emacs via
ledger-mode.
Creating these reports is done by customizing the ledger-reports
variable. It's also possible to set them using the ledger-reports-add
function, but I prefer to set them all in one go during setup.
My current list of reports looks like this:
(setq ledger-reports
'(("bal" "%(binary) -f %(ledger-file) bal")
("bal this month" "%(binary) -f %(ledger-file) bal -p %(month) -S amount")
("bal this year" "%(binary) -f %(ledger-file) bal -p 'this year'")
("net worth" "%(binary) -f %(ledger-file) bal Assets Liabilities")
("account" "%(binary) -f %(ledger-file) reg %(account)")))
bal
Shows the balance of all accounts; this also includes individual
expenses (such as Expense:Car:Gas) so it's a pretty long report.
bal this month
As above, but only includes transactions from the
current month.
bal this year
Same as bal, but limited to the current year.
net worth
A short report that shows what I've got in each account, as
well as what I owe on loans and credit cards.
account
This prompts for an account name and then shows its
transactions for the current file. This is useful for quickly seeing how
much money has been spent on a specific category during the year.
Emacs reports that have the %(ledger-file) token are run against the current
ledger file. I have my Ledger files stored in a projectile project so I can
quickly jump to them to run reports or make adjustments.
where the slimeball Corporate Democrats get their money from
The mid-August uprising against President Joe Biden’s agenda was rewarded with an avalanche of campaign contributions from some of the country’s wealthiest donors, many of them with shared connections to the dark-money group No Labels, a review of federal campaign disclosure records finds.
On August 12, New Jersey Rep. Josh Gottheimer, the Democratic head of the bipartisan Problem Solvers Caucus, and eight colleagues sent House Speaker Nancy Pelosi a letter demanding she put a corporate-backed infrastructure plan on the House floor immediately. They wanted Pelosi to abandon the two-track strategy to tie the bipartisan infrastructure deal to the reconciliation deal. By doing so, Pelosi would have let go of major leverage she had over conservative Democrats to commit to finishing the reconciliation process.
On August 13, the day after sending the letter to Pelosi, three of Gottheimer’s co-signers had their single best fundraising days of the year until that point. Rep. Ed Case, D-Hawaii, got $99,000, more than he raised in the entire first half of this year and twice what he got in the prior six weeks, while Reps. Kurt Schrader, D-Ore., and Jim Costa, D-Calif., collected $131,000 and $106,000, respectively. Schrader was one of three Democrats on the House Energy and Commerce Committee who joined Republicans last month to vote down a proposal to allow Medicare to negotiate lower drug prices so it could afford to include vision, hearing, and dental benefits. The proposal is now on the chopping block from the reconciliation package.
On August 19, the day after he appeared on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” to advocate an immediate floor vote on the infrastructure bill, Gottheimer had his best fundraising day of the third quarter, taking in more than $124,000. His co-signers Reps. Carolyn Bourdeaux, D-Ga.; Vicente Gonzalez, D-Texas; and Jared Golden, D-Maine, also raised more on August 19 than any other day throughout the third quarter, all receiving at least $109,000.
The rush of donations appears to have come from an organized campaign or joint fundraiser: Nearly every single one of Case’s roughly 70 donors on August 13 — many of whom were financiers and consultants — also gave to Schrader and Costa that day. The three lawmakers’ average donation sizes on August 13 were more than $1,100, and none of Case or Schrader’s scores of donors that day live in their respective states.
Some of their shared donors are linked to No Labels, whose high-income members face greater taxes under Build Back Better, which would roll back some of Donald Trump’s 2017 tax cuts. The maximum $5,800 arrived from insurance industry veteran James Stanard, real estate developer Steven Fifield, and banker David Roscoe — all of whom joined a June phone call hosted by the group where Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., urged callers to use their influence to defend the filibuster, which is blocking Democrats’ voting rights legislation and other reforms.
The overwhelming majority of Case, Schrader, and Costa’s August 13 donors also gave to Gottheimer, Gonzalez, and Golden on August 19, including Fifield and Roscoe. Nearly every one of Gottheimer’s 118 contributors on August 19 donated to Gonzalez and Golden that day. Meanwhile, most of Bourdeaux’s donors during that rush in fundraising are not identifiable, as $150,000 of her $173,000 daily total came from shielded individuals with the No Labels Problem Solvers Caucus PAC, a political action committee linked with the Problem Solvers Caucus. Bourdeaux is by far the PAC’s largest recipient of campaign contributions this year, followed by South Carolina Republican Sen. Tim Scott.
Gottheimer and his letter co-signers — together known as the Unbreakable Nine — held their ground after demanding that Pelosi let go of her leverage over them, driving the House speaker on August 24 to agree to call a floor vote on the infrastructure bill in late September. Massive checks continued to arrive from people linked to No Labels and other wealthy donors. Between August 13 and 27, a few days after Pelosi made the deal, Gottheimer and his colleagues collectively raised more than $3.1 million.
In that 15-day period, Bourdeaux gained the most among the group of obstructionists: $635,000, or the bulk of the $704,000 she raised in the whole third quarter. Schrader and Rep. Henry Cuellar, D-Texas, also got more than half a million dollars, or the majority of their quarterly donations. The others — Gottheimer, Case, Costa, Gonzalez, and Golden — all raised at least $240,000. (The ninth, Rep. Filemon Vela, D-Texas, is not running for reelection in 2022 and has hardly done any fundraising this year.)
Also in August, as The Intercept reported, No Labels dangled $200,000 before two co-signers of the Gottheimer letter, Bourdeaux and Gonzalez, in exchange for canceling an August 21 fundraiser with Pelosi. Gonzalez ultimately did not attend; in the five days that followed, he took in more than $110,000 cashing checks from billionaires like hedge fund manager Louis Bacon and insurance firm founder William R. Berkley, both active contributors to Problem Solvers Caucus members. In September, he raised another $365,000.
Other Democrats who belong to the Problem Solvers Caucus but didn’t sign onto Gottheimer’s letter to Pelosi did not receive the same rush of money. For example, Rep. Elissa Slotkin, D-Mich., raised close to $91,000 between August 13 and 27 — a more modest amount, apace with the roughly $830,000 she took in during the third quarter. Rep. Elaine Luria, D-Va., raised $123,000, and $716,000 for the quarter. Slotkin’s average donation size during the 15-day period was about $175 and Luria’s was roughly $355. (For comparison, Gottheimer’s, Bourdeaux’s, and Cuellar’s all hovered around $1,000.)
More ultra-rich individuals on the dark-money group’s June call with Manchin would go on to donate to Gottheimer and his allies. Billionaire investor Howard Marks, private equity investor Kenneth Schiciano, and real estate developer W. James Tozer Jr. all donated to some or all of the eight conservative dissidents who were raising funds between August 13 and 27. None gave to Slotkin or Luria. Slotkin and Luria also notably did not receive donations from the No Labels-tied contributors Stanard, Fifield, and Roscoe.
The members of the Gottheimer’s crew also received funds from John McDonnell, founder of former aerospace manufacturer McDonnell Douglas, now part of Boeing; Paul Haaga, former chair of financial services giant Capital Research and Management; Peter Gottsegen, founder of private equity firm CAI Managers; and Craig Duchossois, chair of private investment firm Duchossois Group. McDonnell and Duchossois, major contributors to Republican causes, have also donated thousands of dollars to the No Labels Problem Solvers PAC.
In a major upset for the conservative Democrats, Pelosi called off her deal to hold a floor vote on the infrastructure bill in late September and has returned to the original strategy of hinging it to passage of the Build Back Better Act. Still, conservative Democrats have plenty to celebrate since Democratic leaders have had to temper the size and scope of the more ambitious bill, thanks to pressure from Manchin and Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, D-Ariz., who are also propped up by many of the same donors. Now, the budget reconciliation bill is facing significant cuts, such as expanded Medicare coverage and paid family leave, which conservative Democrats have sought to roll back.
EXCELLENT--the whole show, even the banter! been awhile since I could claim that ...
Facebook is changing its name.
The reason? They’re not just a social media platform anymore. They’re so much more!
Definitely not the reason? Distract and distance from a whistleblower scandal, rampant fake news issues, and an evil reputation. No, really, it has nothing to do with those things…
Activist and writer Evan Greer, director of Fight for the Future, joins the Useful Idiots to discuss The Company Soon to Be Known As The Company Formerly Known As Facebook. We delve deep into the whistleblower’s findings, how Facebook has made free speech litigious, and its most recent laundry list of crimes against humanity. Plus what whistle blower Frances Haugen gets right and what she gets wrong.
We think we found a guest more “absolutist” (whatever that means) about the First Amendment than Matt is.
Evan asks the question: Can we see a world without Facebook? If the answer is yes, then it’s time to abolish it.
Plus, a final word on Colin Powell and Joe Manchin obstructs the Carbon Offset Consideration Kickoff. Yeah, he’s a real COCK block.
It’s all this, and more, on this week’s episode of Useful Idiots. Check it out. And stand by for the Substack-only episode in which Katie and Matt discuss potato chips and Evan discusses sex workers and the internet, which drops Monday.
VERY EXCELLENT, though Luke continues to fail to recognize that the greatest Marxist US TV production is "The Wire" and *NOT* "The Sopranos" :-)
At long last, we are finally tackling something related to The Sopranos. We discuss the many things wrong (and some things right) with the big-screen prequel THE MANY SAINTS OF NEWARK (2021); the spirit of American decline that The Sopranos captures at its best; and what the recent surge in prequels and reboots tells us about this world we live in.
Michael and Us is a podcast about political cinema and our crumbling world hosted by Will Sloan and Luke Savage. To hear weekly bonus episodes, subscribe to the Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/michaelandus/
Tim Harper speaks to Ellie Cawthorne about his Cundill History Prize-shortlisted book Underground Asia, which reveals how clandestine networks of anti-colonialist rebels operated across Asia in the early 20th century.
(Ad) Tim Harper is the author of Underground Asia: Global Revolutionaries and the Assault on Empire (Allen Lane, 2020). Buy it now from Amazon:
