The Washington Post is very worried that American women don't want to marry Trump supporters

Who could've guessed.  Those Trump-supporting men are such class acts. Here's one of them.

By Dartagnan

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Sunday, November 26, 2023

In an editorial published last week titled, “If Attitudes Don’t Shift, A Political Dating Mismatch Will Threaten Marriage,” The Washington Post’s editorial board points out that political polarization in this country has reached the point where it is now a prominent, often decisive factor in determining who Americans settle on as their potential mates. They emphasize this trend is now so acute it may actually threaten the institution of marriage as a whole. In particular, it seems that Democratic women are rejecting potential Republican suitors not only for marriage but as relationship material, all across the board. The message the editorial conveys—perhaps hyperbolically, perhaps not—is that as a consequence of this shift in attitudes, marriage itself in this country is in jeopardy.

Presumably the Post’s editorial board has a good reason for alerting us to this phenomenon. But what it doesn’t bother to do is tell us “why” it is occurring, and if what the editorial portends is true, Americans would be well served by knowing “why.” Had the Post bothered to provide some basic context, explaining that young American women, in particular, are loath to date right-wing (presumably Republican) men because they find some specific views, attitudes, and values they represent to be abhorrent, the editorial might live up to the serious social ramifications it implicates.

It’s easy enough to point to Donald Trump as the catalyst for such a drastic social upheaval, but by failing to address the actual belief and value systems his presence has stoked among Republican men and instead just throwing up their hands and asserting that such “attitudes” must change and that “someone will need to compromise,” the Post ends up simply doing a disservice to its readers. Because, quite honestly, an issue this profound affecting the country’s future deserves more than the shrinking, hesitant treatment the Post chooses to afford it. 

RELATED STORY: Why does Donald Trump keep denying that he's into golden showers?

At least the Post’s editorial does a decent job in explaining the underlying issue. As the editors note:

The problem with polarization … is that it has effects well beyond the political realm, and these can be difficult to anticipate. One example is the collapse of American marriage. A growing number of young women are discovering that they can’t find suitable male partners. As a whole, men are increasingly struggling with, or suffering from, higher unemployment, lower rates of educational attainment, more drug addiction and deaths of despair, and generally less purpose and direction in their lives. But it’s not just that. There’s a growing ideological divide, too. Since Mr. Trump’s election in 2016, the percentage of single women ages 18-30 who identify as liberal has shot up from slightly over 20 percent to 32 percent. Young men have not followed suit. If anything, they have grown more conservative.

Maybe it’s just me, but is anyone else getting tired of hearing excuses about why “men” in particular are “increasingly struggling?” Higher unemployment? Really? It’s 3.9%. “Lower rates of educational attainment”? Nope. Those rates are higher than ever, for both men and women. Perhaps if the Post had acknowledged the reality of stagnant wage growth, out of control housing, and health care costs—which affect women just as much (if not more) as men—that might have proved a more enlightening exercise. As for the psychological traumas fueling drastically “more drug addiction” and “deaths of despair” among men (but apparently not as much among women)—it also might have been helpful to ask whether it isn’t more a case of the male ego and a wounded sense of their assumed primacy in our society that’s actually the root of these problems, which aren’t occurring to the same degree in other countries.

But I digress. The Post’s editors do acknowledge that political polarization seems to be a driving factor in explaining this “collapse” in (presumably heterosexual) marriages: “According to a major new American Enterprise Institute survey, 46 percent of White Gen Z women are liberal, compared to only 28 percent of White Gen Z men, more of whom (36 percent) now identify as conservative.” Also, we learn that ”Whereas 61 percent of Gen Z women see themselves as feminist, only 43 percent of Gen Z men do.” The Post observes that as a consequence of this political divide, “A 2021 survey of college students found that 71 percent of Democrats would not date someone with opposing views.” Implicitly, then, this appears to be a Democratically driven phenomenon (Republican men, apparently, are still willing to mate with anyone who will tolerate them). Accepting that premise at face value, then, the question still is “why?”

The Post grudgingly concludes that, well yes, there may be “some logic” involved:

There is some logic to this. Marriage across religious or political lines — if either partner considers those things to be central to their identity — can be associated with lower levels of life satisfaction. 

What kind of “things” are so “central” to women’s identities that would compel them to so collectively reject Republican males? Rather than address that question, the Post instead chooses to punt. 

This mismatch means that someone will need to compromise. As the researchers Lyman Stone and Brad Wilcox have noted, about 1 in 5 young singles will have little choice but to marry someone outside their ideological tribe. The other option is that they decline to get married at all — not an ideal outcome considering the data showing that marriage is good for the health of societies and individuals alike. (This, of course, is on average; marriage isn’t for everyone. Nor is staying in a physically or emotionally abusive marriage ever the right choice. But, on the whole, while politically mixed couples report somewhat lower levels of satisfaction than same-party couples, they are still likely to be happier than those who remain single.)

Those who click on the links in that paragraph will first be directed to an article in The Atlantic written by two members of the Institute for Family Studies, a right-wing think tank whose founders and contributors promote two-parent, heterosexual marriages, advocating fundamentalist  “Christian” marriage principles and the abolition of no-fault divorce laws. The second link is to a survey on marital satisfaction conducted by the same conservative-leaning IFS. The rhetorical point being urged here, by both the right-wing think tank and The Washington Post, is that political polarization threatens the institution of marriage, and that marriage is desirable because married people are “likely to be happier.” 

That’s a debatable proposition in itself, but again, it misses the point. Neither the Post editorial board, or the (uniformly right-wing) sources it cites explain the reasons this polarization is happening. While it’s quite understandable that the prospect of dating someone who regards women as vessels to be forced to endure unwanted pregnancies; who supports a man currently accused by at least 26 women of sexual battery, sexual assault, and rape; and who believes the solution to gun violence in our schools is to equip everyone with an AR-15, might just be a nonstarter for Democratic women (and maybe even some Democratic men!). Both the Post and its primary right-wing sources concede that this divide has greatly expanded thanks to Trump, but neither of them take on the task of explaining why women are reacting the way they are.  

Well, here’s why: It’s because by aligning themselves with Trump, men are—implicitly and explicitly—declaring their allegiance to what he represents. Putting children in cages and tearing them away from their parents? Mocking those with disabilities? Making fun of and belittling American servicemen? Lying about serial marital infidelity? Insulting and degrading women? Demonizing people of different backgrounds and different faiths? Refusing to take responsibility for … anything (except, perhaps, for overruling Roe v. Wade)? 

These are the “values” that Republican men are projecting to women when they align themselves with Trump. They’re values rooted in intolerance, bigotry and hatred. So, perhaps the more important question the Post should have explored is: Why any woman would want to commit the rest of their lives to such men? Why would anyone want to raise children with them?

But instead, the Post editorial board decides, in effect, that incorporating one’s politics into decisions about marriage itself is an idea that needs to be reevaluated:

A cultural shift might be necessary — one that views politics as a part of people’s identity but far from the most important part. Americans’ ability to live together, quite literally, might depend on it.

In essence, what the Post suggests is that Americans—and particularly Democratic American women—ought to sublimate their own values for the sake of preserving the institution of marriage. They suggest a “cultural shift” might be necessary to accomplish this.

But that cultural shift has already occurred. If the institution of marriage is in trouble in this country it’s because so many men inadvertently revealed to women exactly what they stood for when they pulled the lever for Donald Trump. Perhaps the greatest irony of all is that those same religious-based “think tanks” that the Post cites—all of whom supported Trump in the first place—have only themselves to blame for the destruction of an institution they claim to revere.

They shouldn’t worry so much, though. They’ll have the same opportunity to demonstrate their values in just a few short months.

Here's one woman who wants nothing to do with Trump supporters.

NO-FAULT NO MORE: Religious conservatives want to change divorce laws

Add "Divorce Denialist" to that list.

By Hunter for Daily Kos

Daily Kos Staff

Tuesday, November 28, 2023 at 7:00:21a MST

 

REPUBLISHED BY:

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Rim Country Gazette Blog 

A new CNN piece examines the history of no-fault divorce, asking the very good question: "Why do some conservatives want to get rid of it?" Because that is a thing now. As Republican-controlled state legislatures take steps to effectively ban abortion and birth control alike, a portion of the same movement has been giving the side-eye to getting rid of no-fault divorce laws.

The "issue," if one can call it that, is getting more attention because House Republicans decided on a certified full-tilt godbotherer to be the new speaker of the House, and that godbotherer has very strong opinions on the matter:

 Newly minted House Speaker Mike Johnson has been a vocal opponent of no-fault divorce, which allows couples to obtain a divorce without proving fault — and without both parties agreeing to the split. In a 2016 sermon, he claimed it turned the United States into a “completely amoral society.”

No-fault divorce has been with us for a mere half-century; like Roe v. Wade, it dates back to a time when married American women couldn't open their own bank accounts without a husband's permission, much less divorce an abusive spouse without being wrung through a legal system designed to protect the abusers.

But no-fault divorce has been an unalloyed good. No, really: As the CNN story explains, a new framework for divorces that requires no proof of adultery, abuse, or other wrongdoing simplifies the process, reduces trauma (including for the children,) and avoids the need for couples to come up with fraudulent reasons for a divorce that both parties want. But mostly, it's had a dramatic impact on household violence.

Since 1969, studies have shown no-fault divorce correlates with a reduction in female suicides and a reduction in intimate partner violence. A 2004 paper by economists Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolvers found an 8 to 16% decrease in female suicides after states enacted no-fault divorce laws. They also noted a roughly 30% decrease in intimate partner violence among both women and men, and a 10% drop in women murdered by their partners.

So there you go: It turns out that misogynistic, racist European assholes did not perfect human governance back in the 16th and 17th centuries, in their spare time between bloodlettings and witch hunts.

Unless, of course, you don't want to let victims get out of abusive marriages?

Yup—there's the catch. What CNN doesn't do a good job of explaining is the question implicit in the title: Why do religious conservatives want to do away with no-fault divorce laws? There’s no answer that isn’t premised entirely on abstraction and hand-waving.

We get the raving of some fringe figure muttering about "defendants" in divorces being "deprived of life, liberty and property without due process" and that's just pointless gibberish, right there. But the only real explanation we get is that some believe "unilateral divorce degrades the American family unit," and that "Some conservative Christians in particular have fought against no-fault divorce because they believe that divorce is unbiblical and marriage ordained by God."

Okay. So ... don't get one, then? How is this a problem for the rest of us?

We have established a system in this country by which you are free to declare anything you want to be biblical or unbiblical—and you can go absolutely nuts with that, if you're willing to live with the looks you'll get. But your own little spittle-flecked declarations are not supposed to infringe on anyone else's right to tell you to Actually, Fuck Off With That.

Why then, on a fundamental level, do any "conservatives" care whether people who are not them can get divorced without going through extensive judicial review? What does the judicial review part have to do with the "biblical" part? If divorces are going to be permitted at all, which indeed is something many religious conservatives continue to object to, why is "no-fault" divorce even a hair worse than the other version?

We have hard evidence that no-fault divorce (and divorce in general) reduces household violence, murders, and suicides. Arguments against that consist of muttering about "men's rights" being harmed in allowing it. We have evidence that amicable or at least begrudgingly tolerable divorce is better for children than remaining in a dysfunctional or abusive household; in response we get airy claims about the "American family unit" from people whose family units seem to have been balls of tightly wadded horrors.

If two married partners believe that they will spend eternity in hell if they divorce each other, then ... don't get divorced?

If one partner believes that, but the other doesn't, aren't you still covered? You got divorced, but it's not your fault! You didn't agree to it! God's not going to send you to hell for something done to you against your will, right? (Save your tittering, Old Testament readers and fig tree lovers.)

And if neither partner believes it, then why should the American legal system be set up to enforce the "going to hell" version on either of them? Why does any of this matter? What kind of person actively seeks to turn the legal system on its head and escalate the number of murders and suicides in order to enforce their own personal religious beliefs on the people in the most danger?

What I have never seen a national media outlet do is attempt to connect the dots and present us with a "why" of the anti-birth-control or anti-divorce or other allegedly religion-premised movements that is not either fluffy faith-based unprovables or movement-peddled faux science. There's no CNN or Washington Post feature story speculating on the religious conservative crowd's actual motives.

But the odds are good that this is all exactly what it looks like. Religious conservatives do not want it to be so easy for women to leave violent marriages because "the Bible" says women should be subject to such violence, if their husband is displeased with them. Religious conservatives do not want birth control to exist because they do not believe women do have a right to engage in sex outside of marriage, and the existence of reliable, medical birth control has nearly erased the tool those religious groups have for centuries used to identify and shame and ruin the lives of those "harlots."

Either declaration is likely to be met with a whole lot of outraged bluster, but that is how discourse works. A supposition that religious conservatives actively seek to harm women on God's supposed say-so can hardly be any more controversial a hypothesis than evasive muttering about the sanctity of the "American family unit."

If Trumpism is premised mostly on authoritarianism and xenophobic paranoia, religious fundamentalism seems premised mostly on enabling and enforcing abusive relationships—on oppression as an alleged article of proving "faith." It is universal; all religious fundamentalism is premised on an alleged right to do harm to other groups if those other groups have it coming. And no, I don't think the media will be calling that out anytime soon.

But the rest of us can say it out loud: Anti-divorce, anti-birth-control, anti-20th-century zealots base their religious beliefs around a supposed right to harm people. It's not enough for them to live according to their own beliefs: You must also live by those beliefs, or they—as business owners, as community members, or as a spouse—are allowed to hurt you until you do.

We all know what this is about: what happens when evangelical Christians are in charge.

100 years after the Munich Beer Hall Putsch, Trump is borrowing from Hitler's playbook

Adolf Hitler (fourth from the right) and Gen. Erich Ludendorff (center) with co-defendants in the 1924 treason trial for leaders of the Munich Beer Hall putsch.

By Charles Jay Community Contributors Team

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Thursday, November 30, 2023 at 8:00:03a MST

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This week marks the centennial of the infamous Munich Beer Hall Putsch, the failed coup led by Adolf Hitler to overthrow Germany’s democratic government, which occurred Nov. 8-9, 1923. Within months, Hitler was tried and convicted of treason. But he received a lenient sentence, and the failure to hold Hitler accountable for his crimes enabled the Nazi leader to build his national profile.

A decade later, Hitler had worked within the political system to become chancellor. He quickly installed a totalitarian fascist regime that would ultimately cause the deaths of tens of millions of people.

RELATED STORY: It can happen here: Lessons from ‘Rise of the Nazis’ on 90th anniversary of Hitler’s coming to power

What happened in Germany a century ago bears parallels with what’s happening today after former President Donald Trump’s failed coup on Jan. 6, 2021. And that leaves us only one election away from a possible fascist takeover.

After the attack on the U.S. Capitol, commentators immediately drew comparisons with the 1923 Beer Hall Putsch. On Jan. 7, 2021, Nathan J. Robinson, editor of Current Affairs magazine, tweeted:

Michael Brenner, a history professor at the American University in Washington, D.C., noted in a Washington Post article in January 2021 that there were obvious differences between the two events. Hitler’s supporters began their coup attempt in a beer hall, while Trump’s supporters actually broke into the U.S. Capitol. Hitler was a little-known right-wing populist out to overthrow the government; Trump was a well-known figure desperate to use anti-democratic means to remain in office. Brenner wrote that what happened in Germany offers a crucial lesson ”about how democracies become imperiled.” 

In January 2023, The Nation published an article on “The Uncanny Resemblance of the Beer Hall Putsch and the January 6 Insurrection,” which emphasized how both Hitler and Trump used the Big Lie: “While Hitler’s Beer Hall Putsch and Trump’s January 6 coup attempt to bore a striking resemblance in terms of the size of the insurrections and the resulting violence, the most notable similarity is the nature of the lies that led to the buildup of political tensions: Hitler’s lies about Germany’s defeat in World War I and Trump’s lies about voter fraud driving his loss in the 2020 election. Both were big lies that undermined faith in government institutions and gained credibility from frequent repetition.”

PRELUDE TO A PUTSCH

The National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP) was founded in 1920, and Hitler became its leader a year later. Hitler propagated the Big Lie that Germany had not been defeated on the battlefield in World War I but had been ”stabbed in the back,” betrayed by civilian politicians who were controlled by Jews.

By 1923, Germany had fallen behind in paying reparations to the allied powers. French and Belgian troops occupied the industrial Ruhr region. And the government began printing more money,  resulting in rising unemployment and extreme hyperinflation.

Hitler decided that the political and economic chaos had created conditions that would enable the Nazis to replicate the October 1922 “March on Rome,” which resulted in Benito Mussolini installing a fascist regime in Italy. Hitler’s plan was to unite the far-right factions in Munich, seize power in Bavaria, and then march on Berlin to overthrow the fragile democratic Weimar Republic, which was formed in November 1918. The right-wing Bavarian state government had declared a state of emergency in September 1923. It was led by General State Commissar Gustav Ritter von Kahr, Army Commander in Bavaria Gen. Otto von Lossow, and State Police Chief Hans Ritter von Seisser.

They also supported ousting the federal government and establishing an authoritarian regime, but they wanted to do so without the Nazis. Kahr scheduled a meeting for the night of Nov. 8, at one of Munich’s biggest beer halls to discuss strategy with Bavarian political, military, and business leaders.

THE PUTSCH BEGINS AND FAILS

On the night of Nov. 8, 1923, the 34-year-old Hitler marched into the Bürgerbräu Beer Hall, which had been surrounded by hundreds of Nazi Storm Troopers. Hitler pulled out his pistol, fired a shot into the ceiling, and yelled “Silence!”

Hitler’s armed personal bodyguard detachment then pushed their way through the crowd to escort Hitler to the podium. "The National Revolution has begun!" Hitler shouted to the crowd. "No one may leave the hall. Unless there is immediate quiet I shall have a machine gun posted in the gallery. The Bavarian and Reich governments have been removed and a provisional national government formed. The barracks of the Reichswehr and police are occupied. The Army and the police are marching on the city under the swastika banner!“

None of what Hitler said was true, but it was said with conviction. Hitler ordered Kahr, Lossow, and Seisser into a back room. Waving his pistol, Hitler threatened to kill them unless they joined the putsch.

Hitler enlisted his co-conspirator, former Gen. Erich Ludendorff, a World War I hero, to advise the Bavarian leaders to support the Nazi revolution. They reluctantly declared their support for Hitler to the crowd. An ebullient Hitler told the crowd that he was determined to make Germany great again.

Hitler left the beer hall to deal with a crisis elsewhere, leaving Ludendorff in charge. The three Bavarian leaders then persuaded Ludendorff to let them leave the beer hall so they could make coup preparations. But once free, they denounced the putsch and ordered police and military units to suppress it.

Attempting to salvage the putsch, Ludendorff organized a march on Nov. 9, from the beer hall toward the Bavarian Defense Ministry in the city center. Hitler led the march of about 2,000 Nazi supporters. The marchers were confronted by a company of state police. A gun battle broke out in which 14 marchers, one bystander, and four state police officers were killed. Hitler was dragged to the ground and dislocated his shoulder when the marcher next to him was shot dead.

Hitler was arrested two days later. He was held in pre-trial detention at Landsberg Prison in southwestern Bavaria.

HITLER ON TRIAL

On Feb. 26, 1924, Hitler, Ludendorff and eight associates went on trial before a tribunal of five judges. The presiding judge, Georg Neithardt, a supporter of far-right politics, was quite deferential to Hitler, allowing him to make lengthy political speeches and question witnesses. In his opening statement, Hitler railed against racial minorities and left-wing ideologies. Hitler declared his codefendants to be “absolutely innocent,” and declared that he alone bore responsibility for the failed putsch:

“I cannot plead that I am guilty of high treason; for there can be no high treason against that treason to the Fatherland committed in 1918 … I do not feel like a traitor, but as a good German, who wanted only the best for his people.”

Historian David King, author of a book on Hitler’s trial, told The Times of Israel that the courtroom drama turned the little-known Nazi leader into an international celebrity. “During the trial the socialist and communist newspapers called Hitler a racist and said, ‘Don’t fall for this guy,’” King said. “But a lot of the far-right media built Hitler into a martyr and national hero from this moment on.”

On April 1, Hitler and three of his codefendants were found guilty of treason, but the judge gave them the minimum sentence of five years in prison. Five other defendants were placed on probation after being found guilty of aiding and abetting high treason. Ludendorff was acquitted. 

Adolf Hitler and fellow prisoners (including Rudolf Hess, second from right) at Landsberg Prison in 1924.

Neithardt did not order Hitler to be deported to his native Austria, even though that was mandated by law, noting that Hitler had served in the German army during World War I. Hitler was sent back to Landsberg Prison, where he enjoyed special privileges. Most significantly, he was able to write his political manifesto “Mein Kampf” (“My Struggle”).

On Dec. 19, Hitler was released on parole, serving just under nine months of his five-year sentence. In February 1925, Hitler was slapped with a two-year ban on public speaking after addressing the first post-putsch Nazi rally held at the Bürgerbräu Beer Hall. But Hitler had decided to eschew violent revolution. Instead, his new strategy was to pretend that the Nazis were a legitimate political party and work from within to take power.

TRUMP BORROWS FROM HITLER’S PLAYBOOK

Trump is now facing four criminal indictments, yet his popularity has grown within the Republican base. Poll shows that he is in a historically strong position to win the GOP presidential nomination. Vox writer Nicole Narea wrote in an August 2023 article:

Rather than hiding from his legal problems, Trump is leaning into them, arguing that he’s “done nothing wrong” and that the charges represent a plot against him. By invoking the charges, and using them to his political advantage, historians say that Trump is echoing a familiar playbook. …

The putsch and Hitler’s trial … provides a cautionary tale about the fragility of democracy in the face of a charismatic autocrat whom the political establishment fails to squash while they have the chance.

Hitler showed no remorse for the coup. During his May CNN town hall, Trump said he had no regrets about what happened on Jan. 6. Trump repeated the Big Lie that “the election was rigged.”

Hitler referred to the Nazi Party members killed in the putsch as blood martyrs. Their bodies were moved to “two temples of honor” in downtown Munich. The Nazi swastika flag stained with the blood of dead insurgents became an important party symbol.

Trump has portrayed Ashli Babbitt—who was fatally shot by police as she tried to force her way through a barricaded door protecting House members—as a martyr. Trump has also cast the jailed Jan. 6 insurrectionists as “patriotic” heroes, promising to pardon many of them if elected. His campaign rallies now feature a recording of the J6 Prison Choir—consisting of more than a dozen jailed rioters—singing the “Star Spangled Banner” punctuated by Trump reciting the “Pledge of Allegiance.”

During his 1924 trial, Hitler testified that the three Bavarian leaders who put down his putsch should have been put on trial for treason. Hitler testified: “Our prisons will open and a time will come when today’s accused become the accusers.”

Kahr was killed during the Night of the Long Knives purge of Hitler’s opponents on June 30, 1934. Seisser was imprisoned at the Dachau concentration camp from 1933-1945.

In August, after pleading not guilty to charges that he orchestrated a criminal conspiracy to overturn the 2020 presidential election results, Trump threatened on his Truth Social platform: “IF YOU GO AFTER ME, I’M COMING AFTER YOU!”

In another Truth Social post, the former president threatened to “appoint a real special ‘prosecutor’ to go after the most corrupt president in the history of the USA, Joe Biden, the entire Biden crime family, & all others involved with the destruction of our elections, borders, & country itself!”

The Washington Post reported last week that Trump and his allies “have begun mapping out specific plans for using the federal government to punish critics and opponents should he win a second term.”

FASCISM IS CLOSER THAN WE REALIZE                    

We are nearing the third anniversary of the Jan. 6 insurrection. And the U.S. is much closer to a fascist takeover than Germany was three years after Hitler’s failed putsch.

By 1926, Hitler had already been convicted of treason, served time in prison, and was a parolee banned from speaking in public. The Nazis were a fringe party, steadily dropping in support from 5.7% of the vote in the 1924 parliamentary election to 2.8% in the 1928 election. The Nation wrote:

The German institutions successfully sidelined Hitler for nearly 10 years after the putsch, and might have kept him out of the mainstream longer if not for a worldwide economic depression that amplified popular disaffection. In contrast, what should really worry us Americans though is that Trump has raced ahead of Hitler’s timetable when it comes to recovering from an attempted coup.

Trump has yet to go to trial in any of his four criminal cases. His MAGA cultists have taken over the GOP, holding a narrow majority in the House of Representatives (though results from the midterms were promising). The Nation wrote that Trump and the GOP “are way ahead of Hitler and the Nazis when it comes to intimidating opponents and sabotaging democratic institutions.”

We could be in danger of a fascist takeover on the fourth anniversary of the Jan. 6 insurrection. Historian Thomas Zimmer, a visiting professor at Georgetown University, wrote in The Guardian that the U.S. could now go in two directions :

There are signs that the attack on the Capitol might ultimately play a crucial role in galvanizing the pro-democracy forces in America, in getting more people – starting with the leaders of the Democratic Party – to grapple honestly with the anti-democratic radicalization of the Republican Party. ... In this scenario, January 6 could mark an important moment in an intensified push towards finally realizing the promise of egalitarian, multiracial, pluralistic democracy.

There is another scenario, however – one in which democracy does not hold. In this scenario, January 6 didn’t accomplish its immediate goal, but still served as a catalyst for the radicalization of the Republican Party, a rallying cry for the Far-Right more generally, and a milestone on the path towards democracy’s eventual downfall.

 It's almost beyond belief, but this is really happening folks.

Corporate greed and the price of eggs

By Mark Sumner for Daily Kos

Daily Kos Staff

Sunday, November 26, 2023 at 10:00:24a MST

 

REPUBLISHED BY:

Blue Country Gazette Blog

Rim Country Gazette Blog 

On Tuesday, a federal jury in Illinois concluded that along with two egg industry trade groups, two of the nation’s largest egg producers conspired to restrict the availability of eggs and drive up prices. Across social media, the jury finding was immediately connected to a huge spike in the price of eggs beginning in the fall of 2022.

However, the truth of the story is more complicated than headlines may suggest. As Bloomberg Law reports, food companies began complaining about the price-fixing scheme all the way back in 2011. What’s more, the scheme was seemingly put in place in the 1990s, if not sooner.

The story about the price-fixing of eggs turns out to not be so much about how food producers conspired to drive up prices at a time when the nation was struggling from the lingering effects of a pandemic. It’s a story about how food industry groups and corporate producers are always looking for ways to cheat the system.

According to the American Farm Bureau, the cost of Thanksgiving dinner is down by 4.5% compared with 2022. However, it’s up by 25% when compared with 2019. How much of that is simply corporate greed? A lot more than the national media wants to admit.

Here’s a chart from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics looking at the prices of some common food items earlier this year.  

Egg prices doubled in a month. When Thanksgiving rolled around last year, shoppers found that a dozen eggs cost almost three times as much as they had in the spring. That’s the kind of increase that media outlets—which seemed poised to deliver dire stories about inflation, even if it meant finding a family that buys 12 gallons of milk each week to use as an example—were dying to highlight. And they did.

Whether it came from The Wall Street Journal, CNBC, or PBS, the message and the treatment were the same: numbers showing how egg prices are up, a story of some family or small restaurant owner hurt by rising costs, and an explanation that “eggflation” was caused by an outbreak of avian flu that had killed millions of chickens. The flu problem was real. However, so were the artificial shortages and price gouging among producers that had not been heavily affected by the flu.

As a March 2023 story from CNN notes, the nation’s largest egg producer, Cal-Maine Foods, reported a 200% increase in revenues and an astounding 718% jump in profits for the previous quarter “because of sharply higher egg prices.”

Cal-Maine controls about 20% of the U.S. market for eggs. As CNN reported, not only had the company doubled the price of its eggs, it also sold more eggs than it did in the previous year. It’s hard to find evidence of an actual shortage. What’s more, in its December 2022 quarterly report, Cal-Maine indicated that “no bird flu had been detected at any of its facilities.”

The nation’s largest provider saw no bird flu. It sold more eggs than in 2021. But it more than doubled its price while scoring an incredible spike in profit. That certainly makes it seem like avian flu—which was a real thing that really did affect poultry production around the world—was used as an excuse to jack up prices to completely inexcusable levels.

Unsurprisingly, Cal-Maine is one of the two companies involved in the jury finding on Tuesday.

When it’s all put together, what it shows is an industry that has been manipulating the market for seemingly three decades or more, and that took advantage of both a real disease and media hype about inflation to disguise a naked grab for record profits.

Eggs have long been one of the cheapest forms of protein available to consumers. They are critical to the diet of many low-income individuals and families. As this Lifehacker article pointed out during the 2022-2023 price spike, eggs deliver 20 grams of protein for just 48 cents when eggs cost $2.00 a carton. But drive the cost of those eggs up 280% and the cost per gram moves above milk, tuna, and even chicken. A traditionally cheap and versatile protein source becomes one of the most expensive.

Corporate greed and the desire to make a quick buck always play a role in inflation. However, the price increases over the last few years are unique when it comes to “greedflation.” In 2021, 60% of inflation could be attributed not to increases in cost of raw materials or increasing wages for labor, but to increases in corporate profits.  

But somehow, The New York Times is still discussing inflation as if it’s a symptom of a need to “cool the economy” by jacking up interest rates. Naturally, the words “profit” or “greed” don’t appear in this story. The Associated Press reports that Americans “feel gloomy” about the economy, which economists attribute to “lingering financial and psychological effects of the worst bout of inflation in four decades.” That article also doesn’t mention corporate profits or greed, but it does have a story about a single mom who has had to cut back on food for her children.

Government agencies are showing that the biggest source of inflation is corporations reaching for record profits. The nation’s largest media outlets are not reporting this story with the magnitude it deserves. However, the AP article does note that this is a problem … for President Joe Biden.

Inflation caused by corporate greed can’t be addressed by raising interest rates that harm consumers. Solving the underlying problem can’t be done until the public is fully aware of the real cause of rising prices.

Bur corporate media is failing them on this issue, as it is on so many others.

Which came first, the chicken or the egg?   Neither.  Corporate greed came first.

The Atlantic's Anne Applebaum tells us what Vladimir Putin is thinking, and how to respond

By Dartagnan

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Friday, November 17, 2023 at 7:21:32p MST

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Friday, November 17, 2023 at 7:21:32p MST

Anne Applebaum understands the implications of modern Russian authoritarianism as well as or better than any journalist or historian operating in our current era. The graduate of the London School of Economics and a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Yale University has a fairly enormous biography of achievement, working since the 1980s as both a historian and journalist predominantly focused on Russian, Middle Eastern and Eastern European issues. She’s also created and directed multiple think tanks, websites, and programs that examine the role of disinformation, specifically as generated by authoritarian regimes. Her 2004 book, Gulag, a meticulous account of Joseph Stalin’s internal prison system, won the Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction.

Applebaum also has been targeted by Vladimir Putin’s propaganda apparatus for her writing. An early critic of the Western response to Russia’s invasion of Crimea and currently on staff at The Atlantic, she is eminently qualified to opine about the course of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the goals and motives of Putin. Her latest essay, “The West Must Defeat Russia,” explains the stakes for Russia and Putin in instigating his war on Ukraine, and clarifies why those stakes will compel Russia to see that conflict through right up until Russia itself is—hopefully—defeated.

Her main points: First, perpetuating the war as long as possible continues to serve Putin’s aims, which are still primarily dedicated to the weakening of “American power and American alliances.” Additionally, the only way to win the war is by completely defeating Russia and decisively crushing Putin’s “neo-imperial dream.” Applebaum believes that “we need to start helping the Ukrainians fight this war as if we were fighting it,” and that means not only viewing our role as “helping” Ukraine but actively seeking the defeat of Russia.  

But perhaps most importantly, she provides insight into Putin’s motives and expectations, and how they are inextricably tethered to attitudes in the United States, its allies, and certain Republicans and their presumed presidential nominee, Donald Trump. 

Applebaum confirms what most of us already know: Putin enormously miscalculated the response of Ukraine and the collective response of the Western Alliance. Yet even despite the heroic success of the Ukrainian people on the battlefield, and despite truly horrific Russian losses, his primary goal—of weakening America and its alliances—remains viable, as the war drives suffering, strife, and struggle from Europe to Africa, and he capitalizes on the conflict in Gaza.

For Putin, Applebaum writes, even being stymied to a so-called “stalemate” on the battlefield has simply served to readjust Russia’s posture towards the conflict. He is now playing a waiting game, counting on his time-tested intelligence operation to sow seeds of impatience with—and ultimately disinterest in—the war among the U.S. and its allies who provide Ukraine with military, economic and moral support.

That’s not all he’s waiting for.

[D]espite his extraordinary losses, Putin still believes that time is on his side. If he can’t win on the battlefield, he will win using political intrigue and economic pressure. He will wait for the democratic world to splinter, and he will encourage that splintering. He will wait for the Ukrainians to grow tired, and he will try to make that happen too. He will wait for Donald Trump to win the 2024 U.S. presidential election, and he will do anything he can to help that happen too.

Securing a second electoral victory for Trump, who has on multiple occasions threatened to undermine our country’s commitment to NATO, if not abandon it completely, is obviously at the top of Putin’s wish list. But the pathetic susceptibility of Republican politicians and their favored media organs to his disinformation tactics is also key to the calculation, just as it was during the 2016 election.

Applebaum tallies up some of Putin’s recent successes:

Right now, Putin’s bets are on the Republicans who repeat Russian propaganda—Senator J. D. Vance, for example, echoes Russian language about the Ukraine war leading to “global disorder” and “escalation”; Representative Matt Gaetz cited a Chinese state-media source as evidence while asking about alleged Ukrainian neo-Nazis at a congressional hearing; Vivek Ramaswamy, a GOP presidential candidate, has also called [Ukraine President Volodymr] Zelensky, who is Jewish, a Nazi. Putin will have been cheered by the new House speaker, Mike Johnson, who is knowingly delaying the military and financial aid that Ukraine needs to keep fighting. The supplemental bill that he refuses to pass includes money that will keep Ukrainians supplied with the air-defense systems they need to protect their cities, as well as the fiscal support they need to sustain their economy and crucial infrastructure in the coming months.

Applebaum notes that part of the Republicans’ position is rooted in simply wanting to see President Joe Biden fail, no matter the consequences, and that at least some of the agitation among some Western nations can be attributed to a desire to see “a Russian victory, or at least a defeat for Biden.” But she allows that some of the objections are made in the good faith belief—by supporters of Ukraine—that, since Russia won’t ever give up, a truce is the most viable solution.

But such a solution would require the parties to stop fighting, though, and Applebaum sees no indication that Putin intends to stop fighting, nor that he would be willing to accept any “partition” brokered by Ukraine or its Western allies. His goal—the complete annihilation of Ukraine —remains unchanged, despite any wishful thinking to the contrary. In fact, as she points out, Putin has already transformed the Russian economy, putting it on a solid war footing, with 40% of its state budget—10% of its GDP—now dedicated to its military. 

Applebaum’s point is that Russia is setting the stage for a permanent state of war, motivated by Putin’s belief that the West, with its fractured politics and its inherent susceptibility to his disinformation Wurlitzer, cannot sustain that type of commitment. Hence, that waiting game. The subtext to her position is that Putin can do this because he is a dictator presiding over a totalitarian state. He does not fear public dissent, because, as was made vividly clear quite recently, there is none of any significance that cannot be crushed.

Putin’s belief system was forged as a KGB officer stationed in East Germany, Applebaum notes, so the idea of perpetual war is “eminently plausible” to him; it is in his view a perfectly acceptable state of affairs. Former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev—showing no signs of vacillating from Putin’s program—recently and in great detail threatened Poland with losing “its statehood” for its actions supporting Ukraine, calling it a “historical enemy.” Poland, of course, is a member of NATO. So Medvedev’s warning—which was certainly made under Putin’s direction—can be understood as a fair representation of what a Russian victory in Ukraine would mean for the rest of Europe. As Applebaum explains, it’d be a situation “in which Poland, the Baltic states, and even Germany are under constant physical threat, with all of the attendant consequences for trade and prosperity.” 

Applebaum’s position is that the stunning successes of Ukraine thus far in thwarting and reversing Russia’s invasion have not changed Putin’s essential calculation that the West can be manipulated into giving up on Ukraine, due to the nature of its democratic traditions, its responsiveness to public sentiment, its fickle political will, and (implicitly) the general ignorance of its populations to the consequences. That is what Russia’s disinformation matrix intends to cultivate, no matter the situation on the ground. Applebaum argues that the West should be focused on combating that effort, but more than that, she has several practical suggestions that tie in directly with the idea that it is not only Ukraine, but all of us, who are fighting for Russia’s defeat.

As she writes:

If Russia is already fighting America and America’s allies on multiple fronts, through political funding, influence campaigns, and its links to other autocracies and terrorist organizations, then the U.S. and Europe need to fight back on multiple fronts too. We should outcompete Russia for the scarce commodities needed to build weapons, block the software updates that they need to run their defense factories, look for ways to sabotage their production facilities. Russia used fewer weapons and less ammunition this year than it did last year. Our task should be to ensure that next year is worse.

Applebaum suggests that the U.S. and its allies in opposition to the Russian invasion should review the sanctions already imposed and streamline them to target the supply chains Russia uses to keep its war effort going. She also believes that the assets of Russian oligarchs and Russian deposits of foreign money—frozen at the outset of the war—should be seized and the money provided to Ukraine, demonstrating that the issue of reparations for this geopolitical catastrophe will not be forgotten. Spending more now will help prevent, deter, or at the very least prepare for larger conflicts—possibly with China, or Iran, as she notes—down the line.

In sum, Applebaum offers a clear-eyed assessment of the reality. It’s unfettered and unimpeded by the political gesticulations and pandering of people more interested in performing and catering to their constituents’ fears and prejudices than in actually standing up for our nation against a corrupt, malevolent tyrant. 

In that respect, it neatly mirrors the same choice our country will be facing in 2024, when it decides who will be its next president.

Would you buy a used car from this man?

 

The Intimate Reality of the JFK Assassination

  A visit to Dealey Plaza, after years of thinking and reading about the Kennedy assassination, came as a shock. (photo: Corbis)

A visit to Dealey Plaza, after years of thinking and reading about Kennedy assassination, came as a shock.

Adam Gospnik / The New Yorker 

24 November 23

In the annals of American time, the November 22nd that happened sixty years ago today still casts a very long shadow. It is a cliché, but true nonetheless, that certain events are singularly imprinted—or, maybe, emblazoned—on the consciousness of entire generations. That November day remains pivotal for my generation, as Pearl Harbor was for my father’s, or 9/11 for my daughter’s.

What is perhaps less evident is how these events not only forge a strong memory, but will suddenly make memory exist, turning our minds inside out. Whereas private things rising from within ourselves had once reigned, public things, coming from outside, now take pride of place. The private obsessions come back, of course, but the public ones now become hard to shake or ignore. My father feels this way about Pearl Harbor, which happened when he was six. Before the attack, he had been a kid on whom outside events, baseball aside, impinged remotely and vaguely; after, he became a hungry newspaper reader—until a few years ago, I had his collection of Philadelphia Bulletin front pages, documenting the war—and, in the most basic sense, he became a man of the world.

November 22, 1963, which occurred, neat near-symmetry, when I was seven, had the same effect on me. I was walking home from school and heard the news from a stranger with a transistor radio and saw my father, very uncharacteristically—he was not even much of a Kennedy fan—in tears in our front yard. (He was hardly alone. Robert Lowell, the poet and passionate conscientious objector, wrote that he was “weeping through the first afternoon.”) My inner obsession at the time, I will confess, was the animated version of “Casper the Friendly Ghost”—I had the first serious crush of my life on his friend, Wendy the Good Little Witch—and I knew instantly, with the sickened, oppressed prescience of children, that Saturday-morning cartoons would be cancelled. Yet if before that day I was only vaguely aware of World Events—I can recall my parent’s anxiety at the Cuban missile crisis, a cloud of ominous apprehension a year before; and can see Dr. King on black-and-white television delivering his “I have a dream” speech against a background of preoccupied observers—I still had the interiority, what we wrongly call the innocence, of childhood. From then on, everything that happened out there happened in me. I can recall every public moment, from the escalation in Vietnam that Kennedy’s successor began to the subsequent assassinations and of course all else since—it’s as crystal clear as, well, a Saturday-morning cartoon. And, like many, I later shared the obsession with the details and imagery of the assassination, so that the single-bullet theory, the overpass, the triple underpass, the Moorman polaroid, the sixth floor of the Book Depository, were all eerily familiar to me, with all their ominous and dreadful associations.

And so, it was with a sense of personal obligation this past spring—in Dallas on a book tour, and impelled by an invigorating cocktail of curiosity and that 9/11 daughter’s order to walk ten thousand steps a day—that I finally walked down to Dealey Plaza, which I had seen so often in so many photographs of those sad and horrible seconds. I was at first shocked—but shocked by the predictable shock that we encounter whenever we visit a famous place about which we have often read: how much smaller it is in reality than our imagination had rendered it. A truth equally applicable to the bedroom where Lincoln died and of Omaha Beach in Normandy. They are more diminutive in scale than the intensity of our searching had made them.

I was still more startled—I am sure I shouldn’t have been, but I was—by the truth that nothing significant had altered in the layout or the articulation of Elm Street in the nearly sixty years since: the triple underpass is just as it was, and hundreds of speeding cars ran right through it as I stood there. Millions of cars, during these six decades, must have passed over exactly the same asphalt that J.F.K. experienced in his last conscious seconds on Earth, with the spot where the fatal shot struck marked merely by an “X” in the roadway. Not the same cars, and not the same asphalt, obviously, but the same pattern of traffic. It is as if Ford’s Theatre were still in place not as a museum but as a living theatre, never altered, with the President’s box still regularly occupied by theatregoers who have only a vague sense that something important once happened there.

I will also confess, to the ire of those conspiracy theorists for whom Dealey Plaza remains an obsession, that, for me, the sheer smallness of the place confirmed the likelihood that the familiar account of the assassination, or the “cover story,” if you insist, is true. The distance between the sixth floor of the Texas Book Depository and that fatal “X” is, for a rifleman, minuscule. It would have been hard for anyone to miss. And it would have been wildly impractical to plan an ambush at the location—no way for anyone to have been concealed behind the picket fence, refurbished but still there, or within the stone pergola, still there. If there were hidden assassins on the grassy knoll, a crowd of people could not possibly have failed to see them.

I am, I should add, a conspiracy skeptic, and inclined to think that the conclusion that the American security and intelligence services arrived at shortly after the assassination, that it had been done alone by a disgruntled marine named Lee Oswald—with the Harvey interjected into his name that afternoon and never quite leaving it, three names somehow becoming what assassins demand—seems the most plausible of all. The reasons for this, as skeptical encyclopedists from Gerald Posner to Vincent Bugliosi have documented, persuasively if not successfully, are simply that a mountain of evidence of all kinds points to Oswald’s sole guilt: firearm-identification evidence and eyewitness evidence and earwitness evidence and autopsy evidence. There is evidence ranging from the testimony of the friend who drove Oswald to work with a packet of “curtain rods” that clearly held a rifle to the certainty that Oswald had tried not long before to assassinate another political figure, the right-wing general Edwin Walker. The odds that all of this mountain could have been deliberately fabricated and held in place without its falseness coming obviously (as opposed to occultly) apart for sixty years seems unlikely. But no amount of this evidence can alter the conviction that a conspiracy was at work for those inclined to believe it, a conviction reinforced by the companion truth that those security services—the F.B.I. and the C.I.A., particularly—really were up to their armpits in conspiracies of their own, hidden from view then but all too obvious now. That these agencies were not responsible for this plot, but thought that some other participant might have been, seems true, too.

More important on this occasion, I had always assumed that “Dealey Plaza” was what you saw in the photographs and films of the assassination—the bits of architecture you see in the Zapruder film, with the strange Deco arcade to the right and the two sloping “knolls” to either side. A puzzling thing, really, for this place to have such an elaborate name, as it looks just like a traffic turn, hardly worthy of a name at all. During my visit, I realized that the part one sees in all the photos is just the weaker, right-hand extension of Dealey Plaza—which is actually a quite grand W.P.A.-Rockefeller Center-style monument that encloses the green space opposite the entire triple underpass and has its imposing face right up on Houston Street, where Kennedy drove seconds before the turn onto Elm. It’s really quite well done, one of those Cubist-derived geometric grids, white with punch-holes within, typical of the period. The plaza is finished by a grand, proud, dignified statue of Mr. Dealey himself, the Civic Benefactor, who gave the place its name—the last statue J.F.K. ever saw as he looked to his left—and to whom the plaza was dedicated as a sign of Dallas’s coming of age as a town of speeding traffic, not loping cows.

Standing there on Elm and Houston, where I had been so many times before in my imaginings, I thought of how W. H. Auden, in one of the rightly best-remembered poems of the twentieth century, his “Musée des Beaux Arts”—the one about Bruegel’s painting “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus”—pointed out that horrible things take place “while someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along.” His point is that the things we recall forever—the fall of Icarus, the Archduke’s assassination—are actually tiny blips of action and explosion that occupy mere seconds of existential time, even while occupying endless presence in historical time.

It was surely what Walt Whitman was after, too, when, in the wake of that earlier assassination in 1865, he wrote the most profound and peculiar of American elegies, “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d.” A poem that embraced the violent death of a President as, in the end, a positive and even sacred thing, emphasizing not only loss but the renewal that would take place—not through the cycle of nature alone but also through the collective action of the nation enduring and persisting: “the city at hand with dwellings so dense, and stacks of chimneys, / And all the scenes of life and the workshops, and the workmen homeward returning.”

The event that changed the world was a small part even of its own world. Historic time is the time line of those inside-out turning events. Human time is the time of trudging from hotels and driving through Dealey Plaza without being quite aware of where you are. I had been turned inside out by what happened on the plaza and, looking at it, was turned back inside. Revisiting a historic space, we take historic time and put it back in human time; a spot fetishized by violence becomes only one small incident in a larger and unchanging and almost comically complacent architecture. We disenthrall ourselves from obsession by seeing things as they are, in all their cosmic inconsequence. We can only cure, or at least emancipate ourselves, from trauma with time. That life goes on, and cars still roll by, and people trudge past places which, though history has happened in them, are still places where human time reigns—this is a truth rendered only more urgent by its obviousness. Dealey Plaza is a moment in history, and it is just an ordinary place in an ordinary city. It was a good walk to take.