Tom Roche

Yale professor of law and history, Samuel Moyn, joins the show to discuss the Supreme Court after the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Matt and Katie discuss a dustup in Syria that hasn't gotten much media attention.

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Excellent Patreon-only ep https://www.patreon.com/posts/41941054 warning against calling Trump a fascist, Trump-washing & making war more 'humane.' Samuel Moyn, Henry R. Luce Prof. of Jurisprudence and Prof. of History, Yale, talks to me about Ruth Bader Ginsburg's legacy, her decision not to retire earlier, what her death means for the country, the election, and world, and why we need to rethink and reshape and pack the Supreme Court.

Historian Fredrik Logevall discusses the first volume of his major new biography of John F Kennedy, exploring the US president’s upbringing and rise to political prominence. Historyextra.com/podcast

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As the US economy was spiralling out of control in 2008 and 2009, economist James Galbraith predicted that an insufficiently large stimulus would lead to a prolonged recession. He was right, and today he has a different set of economic prescriptions to address the economic crisis brought on by Covid-19. If Biden wins, will he listen? Senior politics editor Nausicaa Renner talks to Galbraith about his recent piece for The Intercept.

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Against a backdrop of fires that have burned over 600,000 acres in Washington state, the climate crisis is becoming an important issue in the congressional race between two Democrats in the state’s 10th Congressional District, which includes Olympia and the surrounding area.

State Rep. Beth Doglio, a supporter of the Green New Deal, is facing off against former Tacoma Mayor Marilyn Strickland. The race pits an environmental activist who successfully fended off fossil fuel projects in Washington against a mayor who stood by as fossil fuel infrastructure developed in her city without necessary permits. Which one will go to Congress will say much about what kind of Democratic Party will be tackling climate change in the years ahead.

 Which one will go to Congress will say much about what kind of Democratic Party will be tackling climate change in the years ahead.

In Strickland’s two terms as mayor of Tacoma, from January 2010 to January 2018, she frequently clashed with climate activists by supporting expanded fossil fuel infrastructure at the Port of Tacoma. The port is not directly under the City of Tacoma’s control, though the city does have to permit construction projects inside the port. The conflicts centered on two issues: the proposed construction of a methanol plant in 2016 and a liquid natural gas, or LNG, facility that Strickland initially invited to Tacoma in 2013 with hopes that it would reduce air pollution, but became controversial due to the plant’s infringement on tribal lands. In response to a detailed set of questions from The Intercept, Strickland declined to weigh in on her record at the port, and her campaign would not make her available for an interview.

Prior to her tenure in the statehouse, Doglio had worked to stop fossil fuel infrastructure, having been a co-chair of Power Past Coal, a coalition that led successful campaigns in 2015 and 2016 to stop the construction of seven coal export terminals in the state. Doglio and the Power Past Coal coalition organized with the state’s Lummi tribe in opposition to what was meant to be the nation’s largest export terminal, arguing that it would infringe on the federal government’s treaty obligations to the tribe. In 2016 the Army Corps of Engineers denied permits for the project, citing the treaty rights. “We’re totally at a crossroad and the Northwest stood up and said we’re not going to allow this to happen in our own backyard,” Doglio said at the time.

In the summer of 2017, toward the end of Strickland’s mayoralty, the Puyallup Tribe began arguing that the new facility infringed on their tribal lands and fishing treaty rights. Because of that, combined with new data on the effects of methane as a greenhouse gas, the plant should have been a non-starter for the city, said Eric de Place of the Sightline Institute, an environmental watchdog group based in Seattle. (Leaks in natural gas extraction and production are a significant contributor to methane emissions, which can be 84 times more potent as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.) Constructing the LNG facility would require ”infringement on tribal rights, we now know a lot more about the climate impact of methane, and it also became clearer that we have a giant climate crisis and we have to stop new fossil fuel infrastructure,” said de Place.

As the LNG facility moved forward, the City of Tacoma, under Strickland’s leadership, issued an environmental review that contained a major error, the Sightline Institute found. Namely, it significantly understated the amount of marine traffic that the new facility would generate. Puget Sound Energy, one of the state’s utility companies, began building the facility without the necessary permits, and the city never pushed back, eventually retroactively granting the permits. Puget Sound Energy is owned by a confederation of Canadian and Dutch pension funds.

“The blame for all of this falls on the city of Tacoma,” said de Place. “They did a very poor job of conducting the review. That should never happen again. The facility is completely built.”

While her administration was conducting the environmental review for the proposed methanol plant in 2016, Strickland appeared in a promotional video for the Chinese government-backed project, despite her public claims of neutrality. The plant would have been the largest methanol plant in the world, an export facility that would have been used as an integral component in Chinese plastics production. In addition to the plastics, environmentalists were concerned about the plant’s huge water and electricity consumption, as well as methanol’s status as a toxic substance. While the project was under consideration, Strickland orchestrated an elaborate PR opportunity for Chinese President Xi Jinping at a Tacoma school. The China-backed company, Northwest Innovation Works, backed out of the plan in April 2016. The company is now seeking to build the plant in the town of Kalama, Washington, which is about 40 miles outside of Portland, Oregon.

Local activists said the two projects led to little love lost between Strickland and the city’s environmental movement. “She had more police presence in the city hall during the citizens forums than any other mayor I knew of,” said Barbara Church, a Tacoma activist. “Just because she had so many people protesting the projects she supported or brought in like LNG, or the methanol,” Church said. “Her history has shown that she would be the exact opposite by supporting the methanol and LNG facilities.”

Doglio has been endorsed by the League of Conservation Voters, the Sierra Club, and the Sunrise Movement, while the endorsement list on Strickland’s website does not include any environmental groups. The groups backing Doglio point to her record in the state House, where she passed a green construction bill mandating efficiency benchmarks for large commercial buildings, legislation to eliminate fossil fuels from utilities by 2035, legislation to eliminate food waste, and legislation to allow localities to more easily raise funds for mass transit. Doglio also passed a complete overhaul of regulation of toxic substances after a bruising battle with the chemical industry, a win that has acquired new relevance as toxins in home construction are now being sent directly into the atmosphere due to the fires.

Sunrise, the youth-led climate movement, anticipates making at least 75,000 calls to voters in the district on behalf of Doglio. “We have the opportunity to elect someone who will prioritize community well-being over profiting from fossil fuel executives who want to drill in the district,” said Michele Weindling, electoral campaigns coordinator with Sunrise, in a statement to The Intercept. “Right now, the entire west is burning, the climate crisis is here, and we must elect the candidates who have a bold plan to battle it at the scale it requires. Beth is that candidate.”

Strickland, meanwhile, supports reentering the Paris climate agreement, and said in a statement to The Intercept that she “supports impactful plans to address climate change that are attainable and effective to reduce carbon emissions, while creating and maintaining family-wage jobs, and ensuring a just and equitable transition to clean energy source.” She added that she supports the recommendations of the House Select Committee on the Climate Crisis, which are less ambitious than those outlined in Green New Deal proposals. The GND sets a deadline of 2030 for achieving net zero emissions, while the Select Committee’s timeline extends to 2050. Additionally, unlike the Green New Deal, the Select Committee’s proposal does not set a goal of halting fossil fuel extraction, to the ire of some environmentalists.

Doglio, on the other hand, is much more aggressive. “It’s really clear right now that we have to do everything we can to turn the tide on fossil fuel production,” Doglio said in an interview with The Intercept. “The Green New Deal is an incredible vision where we don’t just significantly reduce fossil fuels over time. It also has intersectional smarts — on poverty, racial justice and union jobs. The Green New Deal moves climate policy forward so it centers people, and racial justice specifically.”

Sunrise’s Weindling argued that the Green New Deal is integral to any solution to the climate crisis currently engulfing the West. “These fires are proof that the climate crisis is here, and that we as a country are not prepared for how devastating it will be.”

The race in the crowded primary was to replace four-term Rep. Denny Heck, who decided to run for lieutenant governor. Strickland has the backing of former Democratic Govs. Christine Gregoire and Gary Locke — the latter of whom was also secretary of commerce and the ambassador to China in the Obama administration — among many other members of the Washington Democratic political establishment, including centrist U.S. representatives Derek Kilmer, Suzan DelBene, Rick Larsen, and House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn. In addition to environmental groups, Doglio also has the endorsement of the Washington State Labor Council federation of unions. Washington has all-party political primaries, à la California and Louisiana, which led to the Democrat-on-Democrat race. Doglio and Strickland had raised a roughly equal amount of money — just over $600,000 — as of the June 30 FEC deadline.

The post Washington Congressional Race Lays Bare Democratic Divide on Tackling Climate Crisis appeared first on The Intercept.

The slow migration of the elite wing of the Republican Party into the Democratic fold saw its most pronounced movement earlier this month when the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, long an appendage of the GOP, overcame internal dissension to endorse 23 vulnerable House Democrats for reelection, along with a slate of 30 Democratic congressional candidates total. 

The move comes as Democrats have been performing increasingly well among white, suburban voters and the elderly, particularly women, a shift in voting patterns that handed control of the House of Representatives to the party in the 2018 midterms and has made cul-de-sac right states like Texas, Georgia, and North Carolina increasingly competitive. A new survey from the Atlanta-Journal Constitution found President Donald Trump and Democrat Joe Biden locked in a 47-47 tie in Georgia, while other polls have found Biden within striking distance in Texas. 

The tectonic plates are not shifting smoothly, and the move by the Chamber, which is, broadly speaking, a lobbying and political operation funded by large businesses, has sparked an intra-business fight, drawing protestations from the fossil fuel industry, whose loyalty to the GOP has not waned. Allen Wright, a top executive at Devon Energy Corp., quit the U.S. Chamber’s board in protest of the endorsements. Chad Warmington, president of the Oklahoma State Chamber of Commerce, lashed out at the national Chamber for endorsing freshman Democrat Rep. Kendra Horn, who he said was hostile to the industry in Oklahoma. 

On Friday, lit up by an article on the drama in Breitbart, Trump and Vice President Mike Pence both demanded a phone call with Chamber head Tom Donohue. The article, in Breitbart’s unsubtle style, was headlined, “The Great Betrayal: How Republican Wunderkind Became Democrat Darling at the Chamber of Commerce,” and focused on the role of one-time conservative movement figure Neil Bradley in the Chamber’s shift. 

Pence tried to be conciliatory, acknowledging that every cycle the Chamber has endorsed a Democrat or two, such as New Jersey’s Josh Gottheimer or Texan Henry Cuellar. Still, he noted, never has the operation put its clout behind the full project of making sure that Democrats retain the majority in the House. Republicans need to flip 16 Democratic seats to win back the majority, a not-inconceivable feat given how many seats Republicans lost last cycle by the slimmest of margins. But the Chamber support undercuts that effort in a variety of ways, including by giving a Democrat in a tight race a card to play if they are attacked as a tax-and-spend liberal who’ll stall economic growth. 

Democrats have not been shy over the past few weeks in touting the endorsement back home. 

While the Chamber is a different beast in Washington, at the local level, town Chambers of Commerce tend to have a Kiwanis-esque reputation for boosting small businesses and working to beautify streets, sponsor Little League teams, or otherwise contribute to the fabric of the community. The national Chamber routinely exploits that cultural misunderstanding, by positioning itself as similarly benign, and now Democratic candidates can exploit it to their own advantage. 

The Chamber has been a fierce ideological ally of the Republicans, but that ideology was always a cover for its true motive: doing what it is paid to do by big companies and industries.

In some ways, the Republican surprise at the Chamber’s pivot suggests that leading party figures never understood the organization’s mission. It has indeed been a fierce ideological ally of the Republicans, but that ideology was always a cover for its true motive: doing what it is paid to do by big companies and industries, which generally prefer Republicans in power but whose highest priority is profit. If that means working with Democrats, so be it. As detailed in the 2016 book by Alyssa Katz, “The Influence Machine,” the Chamber on a national level has long been a mercenary project funded by rent-seeking corporations looking to cloak their profit motive in the sheen of pro-growth ideology.

Trump, on his call with Donohue and Pence, asked Donohue if the endorsements were final, and Donohue said the group had no plans to change them, Axios reported. He noted that bipartisanship had been important for some of Trump’s major successes, including his renegotiation of NAFTA. 

Neil Bradley, an Oklahoma native, launched his career as an aide to Sen. Tom Coburn, the Oklahoma senator who was the tea party before the tea party. Bradley went on to work for the Republican Study Committee, a mirror version of the House Congressional Progressive Caucus. From there, Bradley became a top lieutenant to Rep. Eric Cantor, the Virginia Republican who represented the conservative flank of House leadership before he was stunned in an upset by a local tea party-backed professor, Dave Brat, in a 2014 primary. Bradley, after a stint with Rep. Kevin McCarthy, the current GOP House leader, wound up at the Chamber, where he serves as executive vice president and chief policy officer. 

Brat, in turn, was ousted in 2018 by Democrat Abigail Spanberger, a veteran of the CIA, as seats that had only recently been safely in the hands of Republicans began drifting Democratic. Now the Chamber, under Bradley’s guidance, has endorsed Spanberger in his old boss’s seat. The Chamber’s realignment has caused great consternation among Republicans, while Democrats, eager for the support, have spent little time discussing what it means to have the backing of an organization it only recently associated with all of the things that are wrong with politics and an economy tilted in favor of the wealthy and powerful. 

Bradley said that the endorsements prove what the Chamber has always claimed, but rarely been believed: that it is fundamentally nonpartisan. “Many of these Democrats are representing districts that were previously represented by Republicans. Perhaps it’s possible that both Republicans and Democrats are representing their districts,” he said.

Heading into the 2010 midterms, the Chamber went to war against then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her Democratic majority, pumping millions into the effort to flip the House. “If they were to win, it would mean that we are now … a plutocracy and oligarchy,” Pelosi said. “Whatever these few wealthy, secret, unlimited sources of money are can control our entire agenda.” 

They did win, making Cantor majority leader and in line for the speakership, but Pelosi reclaimed the gavel eight years later, and this time, she and the Chamber have engaged in a delicate dance, as Pelosi quietly refused to bring to the House floor the Protecting the Right to Organize Act, legislation to expand and reform labor laws and make it easier to organize workers into unions. Stopping the PRO Act was a top priority of the Chamber and will remain a top priority in the Biden administration. Under intense labor union pressure, Pelosi finally put the bill on the floor in early 2020, where it passed with 224-194.

Only six Democrats broke with the party and voted against the legislation, meaning that most of the Chamber’s endorsed candidates opposed the Chamber on a major priority. Of the 23 front-line Democrats endorsed by the Chamber, just three — Kendra Horn in Oklahoma, Ben McAdams in Utah, and Joe Cunningham in South Carolina — sided with the Chamber in the vote. Those three Democrats won their seats by a total of roughly 7,000 votes. (Bradley said that the books on the Chamber’s scorekeeping were closed early this year, before the PRO Act came to the floor.)

Spanberger voted aye on the PRO Act, but the Chamber’s strategy — rooted in the hope that if Democrats take full control in Washington, their willingness to fight for labor will diminish, as it has before — appears to be aspirational. Indeed, a Pelosi-led House has passed labor law reform before, during the 2007-2008 term, when the party was sure that if it made the desk of President George W. Bush, he would veto it. Democrats couldn’t find the 60 votes needed to overcome a filibuster it in the Senate, and once President Barack Obama was sworn in, it never passed the House again — similar to how Republicans successfully repealed Obamacare more than 50 times when Obama was there to veto it, but somehow couldn’t get it to Trump’s desk. The Chamber is no doubt hoping a similar scenario unfolds if former Vice President Joe Biden wins the White House, and is increasing its clout among vulnerable Democrats, which could help them win converts next term, when passing it would actually matter. 

Going through with endorsements of Democrats in tight races was the Chamber’s way of showing “you can trust we’re going to follow through. … We’re going to stand by our word.”

Bradley said he would frame the decision to endorse slightly differently. Endorsing Democrats who performed well on the Chamber’s scorecard — which means voting or co-sponsoring the right way on at least 70 percent of the organization’s priority pieces of legislation — was important in terms of building credibility across the aisle, he said. “When we started this Congress, there was healthy skepticism [among Democrats] that the Chamber would follow through [on making endorsements]. When push came to shove, would they make up an excuse?” Going through with endorsements of Democrats in tight races, he said, was the Chamber’s way of showing “you can trust we’re going to follow through. … We’re going to stand by our word.”

Indeed, the Chamber’s endorsement list includes a who’s who of Democrats the GOP was most hoping to pick off: Reps. Sharice Davids of Kansas; Xochitl Torres Small of New Mexico; Colin Allred and Lizzie Fletcher of Texas; Andy Kim of New Jersey; Abby Finkenauer and Cindy Axne of Iowa; Elaine Luria of Virginia; Haley Stevens of Michigan; David Trone of Maryland; Angie Craig and Dean Phillips of Minnesota; Greg Stanton of Arizona; Josh Harder, TJ Cox, and Harley Rouda of California; Susie Lee of Nevada; and New York’s Anthony Brindisi and Antonio Delgado.

Virtually all of the Democratic candidates endorsed by the Chamber have simultaneously pledged not to accept money from corporate political action committees — though the Chamber’s PAC routinely cuts a check to endorsed candidates and has done so in most cases this time, according to Federal Election Commission records. The Chamber is technically not an individual corporate PAC, but is more accurately the mother of all corporate PACs.

The Chamber’s major spending this cycle is going mostly to protect vulnerable Senate Republicans to keep Mitch McConnell as Senate majority leader. The House endorsements have not come with big outside spending, but aside from their intrinsic value, they mean that the Chamber isn’t spending against vulnerable Democrats down the stretch, as it often is. The Chamber also plans to endorse some Republican challengers to incumbent Democrats, Bradley said, but the organization’s priority remains the Senate.

Pelosi’s major policy priority for the term was reducing prescription drug prices, another initiative that the Chamber fiercely opposes, darkly warning that any regulation or negotiation of prices would spell the end of the development of new drugs. It’s a rare area of policy agreement between Pelosi and Trump, though they have so far failed to agree on legislation. In September, after the Chamber announced its endorsements of key House Democrats, Trump issued an executive order aimed at bringing prices down. Bradley responded publicly by calling Trump’s order a “flawed and dangerous policy that will result in a substantial reduction in investment in new cures and drugs at the worst possible time,” followed by a promise to fight back. “We urge the administration to reconsider this approach, and the U.S. Chamber is assessing options to challenge this misguided policy,” he said. 

While the left has been mum about the Chamber’s new affinity for Democrats, the right has been paying close attention. “I don’t want the U.S. Chamber’s endorsement, because they have sold out,” Bradley’s old boss McCarthy sniffed on Fox News. “It is hypocrisy that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce would endorse these Democrats that are part of this socialist agenda that is driving this country out and is fighting this president. Remember, these are the people who voted for impeachment, when this president has done so much for this nation.”

The Senate’s No. 2 Republican, John Cornyn, facing a reelection fight in Texas, has come out swinging. 

The Chamber of Commerce, the nation’s premier business lobby, puts aside its principles to make nice with Democrats. It won’t work, writes @KimStrassel https://t.co/ZAD8Yz3U8M via @WSJ

— Senator John Cornyn (@JohnCornyn) September 4, 2020

Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich called for the Chamber’s leadership to be ousted. 

The spirit of neville chamberlain is alive and well at the US Chamber of Commerce. Endorsing 23 House Democrats who vote for Pelosi betrays every business member of the Chamber. The leadership should be replaced.

— Newt Gingrich (@newtgingrich) September 5, 2020

Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, mocked them for cowardice. 

What’s going on with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce? First endorsing 23 anti-growth Democrats, and now leaving “Abolish the Police” graffiti spray-painted on its own HQ?? pic.twitter.com/zdfed8fiV2

— Ted Cruz (@tedcruz) September 18, 2020

Republicans who’ve fashioned themselves as populists, like Donald Trump Jr., are linking the Chamber’s shift to its longtime support of increased legal immigration. 

The national Chamber of Commerce wanted amnesty so bad that they cut a deal w/ the devil & sold out their local members to Pelosi & her socialist squad. SAD!

The Great Betrayal: How Republican Wunderkind Became Democrat Darling at the Chamber of Commercehttps://t.co/QeQb1NG7sU

— Donald Trump Jr. (@DonaldJTrumpJr) September 18, 2020

“Everyone has their roles to play,” Bradley said of the criticism from his former boss and other Republicans. The truth, he said, is that the business community wants a working relationship with both parties, and worries that political gridlock is bad for the economy in the long-term. That it’s an aide to Cantor — who famously launched the GOP tactic of obstruction by refusing to work with Democrats on an economic stimulus package in 2009 — making that argument is an irony not lost on Bradley, though he noted that Cantor was also criticized from the right for negotiating too much, as when Cantor and Biden co-chaired an effort to find a bipartisan path to slash the deficit. 

“Of course there are gonna be votes and times the parties don’t work together. What folks are saying is when things have to get done, or you want reforms that endure, you have to figure out a way to work together across the aisle, and that’s what’s increasingly lacking, phase four being a perfect example,” he said, referring to the failed effort to get a new round of Covid-19 recovery legislation.

“There used to be a few issues where people put on their team colors, and lots of issues where they’d work together. … Today every bill is an attempt to put on your team colors.”

“There used to be a few issues where people put on their team colors, and lots of issues where they’d work together, from appropriations to infrastructure and even immigration,” he said. “Today every bill is an attempt to put on your team colors.” 

Bradley favorably cited last week’s passage of the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act. The bill, he said, was originally the product of liberal groups like the National Women’s Law Center, and led by liberal Judiciary Committee Chair Jerrold Nadler. The scene was set for a partisan battle, but the Chamber came to the table with concerns from the business world, but also a willingness to see something pass, Bradley said. The question of how to accommodate pregnant employees, he said, was one that his organization’s members would like to see resolved in a uniform way. The Chamber argued over the bill’s clause on dispute resolution, and the final bill settled on employing a similar process to the one used to adjudicate disputes stemming from the Americans with Disabilities Act. “Every employer has dealt with that for 30 years, let’s copy that process,” Bradley said the Chamber argued. “Not everything has to be a big fight,” he said of the bill that won 329 votes, including 103 Republicans. “There is this belief across the business community we have to figure out how to work with both parties.”

As the Chamber is wandering into the Democratic tent, it’s doing so while the party is in flux. At the same time that college-educated and suburban voters are flocking to the party, an insurgent left is making major inroads, even in districts packed with suburban voters. Chappaqua, New York, home of the Clintons, will be represented by progressive Mondaire Jones after the insurgent won a bruising primary earlier this year. Marie Newman knocked out Rep. Dan Lipinski in suburban Chicago. 

While the Chamber support can be helpful for swing-district Democrats in their reelection bids, doing too much of the Chamber’s bidding could end up hurting them back home in a primary from the left. One of the Chamber endorsements, for instance, went to freshman Rep. Sharice Davids, who won a narrow and bitterly fought primary in a wealthy suburban Kansas district in 2018. She carried the suburbs, but lost the Black working-class sections of her district to Brent Welder, who had the backing of Justice Democrats, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Sen. Bernie Sanders. Davids and her supporters assured voters that she was equally as progressive as her rival, aided by her pledge not to take corporate PAC money, and, with the backing of an EMILY’s List Super PAC, won the primary by just over 2,000 votes. That her claim to the progressive mantle was less than solid became clear when, after being sworn in, she joined the New Democrat Coalition, becoming one of a handful of freshmen to join both the pro-business caucus and the Progressive Caucus simultaneously. From there, her voting record has been enough to satisfy the Chamber that she deserves reelection. 

The death of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and the brazen push by Republicans to fill her seat ahead of the election is having a radicalizing effect on Democratic voters, who poured more than $100 million into the election last weekend, shattering records. Those voters are going to want something in return for their investment: a Democratic Party that fights back. But the Chamber’s going to have a few things it wants first. And for that, it’ll be leaning on swing-district Democrats. 

“Partisans on both sides wanna paint members of each party with the same brush. Every Democrat must be AOC, and conversely for Democrats, every Republican must be whatever bogeyman is the reverse. That’s not true,” Bradley said of the Bronx lawmaker the Chamber tried and failed to oust in a Democratic primary. “AOC did very poorly on the Chamber scorecard.” 

The post With Chamber of Commerce Defections, a GOP Mainstay Finds Allies Among Democrats appeared first on The Intercept.

The idea of Armageddon - the last great battle - come from a place where multiple battles were fought in ancient times. It’s known as Megiddo, now a World Heritage-listed archaeological site in northern Israel. Unearthing the past of Megiddo, in a major digging expedition in the 1920s, involved many behind the scenes battles, as well.

As the UAE and Bahrain reach a US-backed agreement with Israel, author and scholar Norman Finkelstein discusses the confluence of powerful forces that have sold out the Palestinian cause: Gulf monarchies, Palestinian Authority leaders, and U.S. liberals who have found common cause with far-right evangelicals and neocons in backing the Israeli occupation. Finkelstein contrasts their legacies on Palestine with that of the late Palestinian-American scholar Edward Said. Guest: Norman Finkelstein, author and scholar. His latest book is "I Accuse!". Support Pushback at Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/aaronmate

Waiting tables. Bartending. Hospitality, food delivery, beauty salons, rideshare driving. The service industry, as anyone who has worked in it knows all too well, is notorious for relying on tipping to undercut employee wages and deputize individual customers to determine how much money a worker should be able to take home. Amid increasing recognition of these injustices, a number of campaigns and new laws surfaced, pre-pandemic, to abolish or meaningfully reduce the practice of tipping.

But despite the best efforts of these campaigns, tipping remains the industry - and American society - standard. Indeed, the perverse logic of tipping has broadened into an ever-present 'snitch economy' - an ecosystem of tactics like mystery shoppers and Uber and Yelp rating systems designed to police the behavior of workers while outsourcing the costs of said supervision to customers and other workers.

In the process, our snitch economy pits those being surveilled against those doing the watching, and the judging. Through a ubiquitous public-facing network of rating and reviewing other people’s labor - and often the behavioral disposition they exhibit while working - people with otherwise very little power are elevated to temporary positions of authority over others, fostering a culture of surveillance rather than one of solidarity. The snitch economy serves the dual purpose of not only giving working people a false sense of power when they’re the ones being served, but also reducing millions of human interactions to opportunities for not only snap judgments, but subjective rewards and retribution.

In this episode, we detail how businesses in the service industry, bolstered by friendly media, use tactics like tipping, mystery shoppers, and ubiquitous ratings systems in order to turn us all into petty, mean, busybodies carrying out the agenda of capital with nothing to show for it but a fleeting sense of self-satisfaction.

Our guest is writer, editor and agitator Vicky Osterweil.

Harvard historian and 'New Yorker' writer Jill Lepore tells the story of the Simulmatics Corporation. Founded in 1959, it used a so-called "people machine," a computer program it claimed could predict the impact of political messages or advertising pitches. At the time, Simulmatics drew condemnation from scholars and political leaders who saw it as a threat to democracy. But now, 60 years later, the company's data collection practices and predictive models have become commonplace among political campaigns.

Her book is 'If Then.' Also, Maureen Corrigan reviews Sue Miller's book 'Monogamy.'

The Senate Intelligence Committee's final report on alleged Russian interference focuses on "a wide range of Russian efforts to influence the Trump Campaign and the 2016 election." Does the report advance our understanding of the Trump-Russia story? Mattathias Schwartz, contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine, joins Pushback. Guest: Mattathias Schwartz, contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine. Support Pushback at Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/aaronmate

College campuses have become the pandemic's newest hotspots, with more than 88,000 COVID cases at the nation's colleges and universities. We talk with reporter Scott Carlson about the tough decisions colleges are facing as they decide how to continue classes, test students, and quarantine the sick. We'll also talk about the financial strain these institutions were already facing before the pandemic.

TV critic David Bianculli reviews Ryan Murphy's new Netflix series 'Ratched,' an origin story of the notorious nurse from 'One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.' And jazz critic Kevin Whitehead reviews a new release by French-Canadian clarinetist and composer François Houle.

Historian Dr. Clifford Conner talks about John Paul Marat's unparalleled and unacknowledged influence on the causes and success of the French Revolution—an event Conner describes as arguably the most significant chapter in human history. Conner shares an updated account of his vivid and colorful 1997 book, Jean Paul Marat, only the second English-language biography in the last hundred years of the controversial and often misunderstood French revolutionary.

During the program. Dr. Conner compares Marat to persecuted journalist Julian Assange. Like the Wikileaks founder, Marat, the popular and charismatic truth teller, was falsely smeared and accused and arrested. He was forced underground for 3 years until the insurrection of August 10, 1792—the second of the four most significant turning points of the Revolution.

Other celebrated and key figures of the French Revolution—Danton, Robespierre, Desmoulins, Hebert, Mirabeau, Freron, Paine, Lafayette—are included in Conner's reflections on Marat's life during this turbulent, world changing epoch. His story concludes with a moment by moment retelling of Charlotte Corday’s ghastly murder of the heroic figure.

A podcast about political cinema and our crumbling world, hosted by Will Sloan and Luke Savage. In the weeks after 9/11, Sir Paul McCartney gathered together his rock'n'roll friends for an all-star salute to the first responders. A behind-the-scenes look at the event, Albert Maysles' THE LOVE WE MAKE (2011) is a hair-raising depiction of what it's like to be the most famous man in the world, and a time capsule of America right after the towers fell. It's also a real-life Ricky Gervais show. PLUS: James Bond, Bill Clinton, and the state of the election.

Journalist and author Ravi Somaiya discusses his new book, Operation Morthor, which investigates the mysterious 1961 death of UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld in a plane crash during the Congo Crisis. Historyextra.com/podcast

 

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In a talk from our 2019 History Weekend in Winchester, Barry Cunliffe shares his knowledge of the skilled horsemen who rampaged across the steppe in the first millennium BC 

Historyextra.com/podcast

 

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Character-based sketch comedy from Lenny Henry, featuring old favourites like Deakus (musing about Covid from his care home) and Brixton-based DJ Delbert Wilkins who's with his mate Winston talking about homeschooling. There's also new characters such as Mr Stone the former Special Forces operative-turned-teacher, and paranoid Aaron who sees crime everywhere. And there's an outtake from the Repair Shop, an appeal by parents who have been cancelled by their kids, and a debut from Northern grime artist The Yorkshire Moor, rapping about lockdown. Cast includes Lenny Henry, Vas Blackwood, George Fouracres, Llewella Gideon, Freya Parker, and Cherrelle Skeete. Written by Lenny Henry and Max Davis, with Nathan Bryon and Tom Melia, Tasha Dhanraj, Kim Fuller, Benjamin Partridge and Nathan Roberts. Music by Lawrence Insula, with Lockdown based on an original song, Shutdown by Skepta. Produced by Sam Michell. A Douglas Road and Tiger Aspect production for BBC Radio 4

From Curtis Mayfield to Minnie Riperton, Jim and Greg explore the Chicago Soul scene. They’ll examine how the music tells the story of political and cultural change in Chicago. Plus, they look at the movement’s lasting impact.

Jim and Greg chat with Talking Heads drummer Chris Frantz about his new book, Remain In Love. The book tracks the bands commercial success and internal strife. Plus, they dig into some of their favorite tracks by the 'Heads’ and Tom Tom Club.

Katie and Matt discuss the revelations from Bob Woodward's book regarding Trump, Juan Passarelli describes the extradition hearing against Julian Assange

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Welcome to Season 13 Episode 1! We shine our spotlight on comedian Dave Hemstad - and Dave shines HIS spotlight on first-class travel and cruise ships. But at the risk of getting too fancy, he also dives into semi-illegal parking, spooning and socks.

In the summer of 2016, two years before Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez ousted Joe Crowley in New York and kicked off a national insurgency in the Democratic Party, progressives in Rhode Island were organizing one of their own.

With the help of the Working Families Party, which began in New York City but had been slowly expanding to other states, four progressives ousted incumbent Democrats, including state House Majority Leader John DeSimone, a right-wing Democrat typical of the Rhode Island party establishment. A Jamaican-born teacher, Marcia Ranglin-Vassell, beat him by just 21 votes. 

Rhode Island’s Democratic Party leadership is famous for its corruption, but also for its grit. DeSimone mounted a write-in campaign in the general election. He fell short there too. 

The party establishment has spent the last four years trying to win those seats back, mounting challenges to the 2016 upstarts. This cycle, they found out they had bigger problems, forced to fend off nearly two dozen insurgents challenging establishment politicians. A new organization called the Rhode Island Political Cooperative, founded by veteran Ocean State lefties and built to recruit and provide infrastructure to an entire slate of candidates, fielded 15 candidates for state House and Senate races and teamed up with local Sunrise Movement chapters to run field programs for them. Reclaim Rhode Island, another new group made up of former Bernie Sanders organizers, endorsed an additional four candidates, and one of those campaigns was run by the local chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America. The Working Families Party also continued its push, endorsing 11 people for office, eight of whom were also backed by Reclaim, the cooperative, or DSA. Of those 22 candidates, a startling 15 won their September 8 primaries in either the House or Senate, including wins against the Senate president pro tempore and the Senate Finance Committee chair.

The most unusual intervention in the primary, from the Rhode Island Political Cooperative, endorsed candidates all the way down to the town council level. Typically, organizations vet candidates for endorsements, and then support their candidacies as much as makes sense and is doable. But the political cooperative not only recruited the candidates but effectively ran their campaigns, providing them with access to data, which is crucial for a campaign, as well as strategic and staff guidance, also critical for first-time, mostly working-class candidates. The cooperative relied heavily on help from local chapters of Sunrise, the youth-led climate movement that is a growing electoral force. Two Sunrise hubs in Providence and South County played a critical role, with more than 10 full-time organizers dedicated to the operation, which generated thousands of volunteer voter contacts.

“We had built this incredible organizing infrastructure, incredible leadership, with an incredible volunteer base. And we didn’t want it to go to waste.”

Progressives owed much of their success to the organizing groups that had sprung up over the last few years, much of it flowing from Sanders’s 2016 presidential campaign. Yet despite the work Rhode Island volunteers did for Sanders’s victorious New Hampshire campaign this year, the Vermont senator rebuffed efforts to win an endorsement for Rhode Island candidates running in his mold, sources involved in the attempt said. A Sanders spokesperson declined to comment. 

Daniel Denvir, host of the podcast “The Dig” and a writer for Jacobin magazine, co-founded Reclaim Rhode Island after writing an essay in the magazine encouraging Sanders not to let the organizing capacity he built fester. “We did such hard work here in Rhode Island [for Sanders,] sending bus after bus to New Hampshire to canvass there, car caravans every weekend, then the same in southeast Massachusetts. We had two huge rallies that we organized on our own with very little help from the national campaign,” Denvir said during an interview for the Intercept podcast Deconstructed. “We had built this incredible organizing infrastructure, incredible leadership, with an incredible volunteer base. And we didn’t want it to go to waste. And what I was hoping that the Bernie campaign would do nationally … is try to help facilitate the infrastructure that all of us had put so much sweat and so much time into building, to not let it go to waste and to build successor organizations. And that didn’t happen.” 

In addition to the progressive infrastructure that powered their wins, the insurgents had another advantage: The numbers needed to win these local races, often low-turnout affairs, are surprisingly small. Cynthia Mendes, for instance, a health care worker and single mom was outspent several times over by Senate Finance Chair William Conley Jr., yet blew him out 62 percent to 38 — but her total haul of votes was just 1,727. Brianna Henries, a theater teacher in East Providence, similarly bested her incumbent opponent 62-39 for a House seat with just 727 votes. 

One of the biggest upsets was pulled off by Leonela Felix, who won a House seat in the heavily white working class city of Pawtucket, showing that with the right message and enough work, a progressive woman who grew up in the Dominican Republic can win the votes of people who don’t look like her. Felix had long been active with the Working Families Party, which coaxed her to run this year. Her race was the top priority of Reclaim Rhode Island, which launched its largest canvassing operation for her. She knocked on plenty of doors herself; by the end of the campaign, her watch tallied more than 370 miles of walking the district’s blocks. 

“The budget will go under some deep scrutiny, and there will be a major shift going forward.”

The new progressives aren’t waiting until they enter office next year — as they’re virtually assured to do — but are working immediately to address the most pressing political problem confronting Rhode Island lawmakers: their state’s budget shortfall and its implications for taxing and spending policies. The progressive slate has argued for raising taxes on millionaires, while the Democratic governor and much of the party leadership has pushed instead for social spending cuts.

The wins this week give a boost to, and also complicate, the effort to push back against the governor’s austerity drive. A measure to add a new tax bracket to the code that would kick in at $1 million per year is being led in the House by Rep. Karen Alzate, also of Pawtucket, who was backed by the WFP in a 2018 bid that flipped her district progressive. But in the Senate, the bill was being carried by Conley, who was defeated in the primary by the co-op’s Mendes. Conley was far from a leftist champion but was arguably progressives’ closest ally in the party leadership — an admittedly low bar — and WFP and Reclaim Rhode Island refrained from backing Mendes.  

“His proposing of the taxing of the top 1 percent came on after I announced my candidacy. And so it was convenient, the timing,” Mendes said in an interview for Deconstructed. 

To pass a budget in Rhode Island, you need a two-thirds vote in both chambers, which means that just a handful of lawmakers can block any given proposal. An effort to organize such a bloc is underway, led by Reclaim and other progressive groups, is already starting to flex its new muscles, threatening to block a budget that includes cuts to funding for schools, health care, cities, or other key services. A press conference with old and new lawmakers is being planned for later this month, said David Segal, a Reclaim member and the co-founder of RI WFP.

“This budget fight is one of the most critical legislative efforts since I first moved to Rhode Island a couple decades ago,” he said. “And we need progressives and other populists in the Assembly, old and new, to come together to wield their procedural power to block a budget that hurts ordinary Rhode Islanders in the middle of this pandemic and economic catastrophe.” 

Mendes said she looked forward to being part of that bloc. “The beautiful thing about running with a slate of candidates [is] we all have eyes on that budget in new and unique ways. And another way is that we are not bought by the political establishment. We are not bought by corporate PACs. We’re able to look at that budget with the people that we’ve talked to for months in mind,” she said. “The budget will go under some deep scrutiny, and there will be a major shift going forward.”

Correction: Sept. 12, 2020

This article originally reported that the Rhode Island Political Cooperative fielded 14 state House and Senate candidates. In fact, they fielded 15. 

The post Rhode Island’s Progressive Wave Was Four Years in the Making appeared first on The Intercept.

Protesilaos Stavrou has posted a very nice video that describes how he uses Bongo and Elfeed to play and control his videos and podcasts. Just being able to handle your videos and podcasts with Emacs is a win because it puts another function under the Emacs umbrella.

But the video is much more useful because it serves as a nice example of integrating otherwise unrelated packages within Emacs to provide an excellent workflow for listening to podcasts or videos. Stavrou demonstrates how he can move a multimedia feed directly from his Elfeed index to his playlist for later viewing or listening and the seamless switching back and forth between Elfeed and Bongo buffers.

As usual, Stavrou has added a lot of functionality to the base applications with his own code. He’s linked to that so you can see how he does the magic if you’re interested in recreating or adapting it for your own use. There are two related videos, one to how he uses Bongo and the other to how he uses Elfeed. You should watch those first if you haven’t already seen them. The video is only 12 minutes, 13 seconds so it should be easy to fit in unless you need or want to watch the other videos.

Behind the News, 9/10/20 - guests: Samuel Moyn on Trump's "fascism," Juliet Schor on the gig economy and beyond - Doug Henwood

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author Isabel Wilkerson discusses her new book, Caste: The Lies That Divide Us, which argues that the divisions in American society are best understood if it is viewed as a caste system, and draws on comparisons with India and Nazi Germany. Historyextra.com/podcast

 

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We start out with our personal pledge that all of our content is new and not pre-recorded. That’s our gift to you – no recycled, reused or Amazon Renewed content. Jumping into our first topic, Risc-V IP and silicon purveyor SiFive earned a $61 million investment from a group of high-end investors including SK Hynix,… Read More »SiFive’s Big Score, Will Nvidia Buy Arm?

Justin McPhee documents the long history of the politicisation of intelligence in Australia and discusses how politicians have used intelligence material to bolster their preferred policy positions while denigrating an opposition.

This week all eyes were on a pair of hard-fought Democratic primaries in Massachusetts. Senator Ed Markey staved off a primary challenge from Joe Kennedy III, while the progressive mayor of Holyoke, Alex Morse, lost his bid to replace Congressman Richard Neal. Morse was dogged by allegations of sexual misconduct levelled at him by the Massachusetts College Democrats, which he was unable to shake off even after they were shown by The Intercept to be an unfounded smear campaign. Markey and Morse were both backed by the youth-led climate group Sunrise Movement. Sunrise leaders Evan Weber and Alex O’Keefe join Ryan Grim to discuss the lessons of this week.

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