Fight Fascism and Corruption -- Protect the Election
Charlie Cooper
No Complacency! We must we protect the election
Trump’s disapproval rating is one point higher than at the comparable time in his first term:
Trump is clearly fearful of losing the mid-term elections and also seems not to have given up on continuing as President/King beyond the end of this term. The blatant racism of his recent post depicting the Obamas has obscured the fact that he posted an image of himself as King.
The FBI seizure of Fulton County, Georgia ballots from the 2020 election is a clear sign that Trump’s and his allies’ threats to interfere in the mid-term elections are not mere bluster. The action creates doubt among some people that elections are fair, thus providing a veneer of plausibility that Trump can invoke when he acts to subvert the 2026 and 2028 elections. In addition, the raid could trigger a Georgia law that would allow the MAGA-dominated state election board to take control of the Fulton County election apparatus. (See here.)
Trump will try to purge the voter rolls, stop people from registering and from voting, and he may try to stop votes from being tabulated. Steve Bannon says that ICE agents should surround the polls – an extension of the lie that non-citizen voting influences elections in Democrats’ favor.
Election law expert Rick Hasen of UCLA suggests that people should start working now to:
Bolster the budgets and reputations of state and local election boards. States should protect the privacy of election employees because we have seen Trump dox and harass innocent workers. Election boards may want to request injunctions from the judiciary to block federal interference in elections that the Constitution clearly delegates to the states.
Volunteer to be election workers and election watchers.
Talk to our relatives, friends, co-workers, and acquaintances and encourage them to vote early in person or by mail.
In addition, our resistance movement should start building a list of states and Congressional districts where we need to concentrate our efforts.
Trump has taken many drastic actions (imposing tariffs, cutting budgets,invading US cities, murdering people in the open seas, attempting to bring down the governments of Venezuela and Cuba) based on fake emergencies. The Supreme Court has given him leeway to take these actions but usually without ruling that a fake emergency is a real one. Delay is the coin of the realm for judicial tolerance of fascism. Mass action by We the People is a critical tool to defeat fascism. Please look into taking one or more of the actions listed above.
Financialization doesn’t direct capital to productive uses; it’s a grift
I spent a few days in China in 2024, and the difference between a nation that builds and one that is obsessed with swapping assets was on stark display. No US city comes close to the level of development I saw in Guangzhou.
Percentage of Gross Domestic Product
(From US Bureau of Economic Analysis)
Financialization of the economy has been underway in the US for decades and goes hand-in-hand with other malign trends such as outsourcing of blue-collar jobs, wage stagnation, privatization of government services, and deregulation. Corporations now buy back their own stocks to juice the share price – and reward executives – rather than investing profits in new capacity. Using tools such as mergers and acquisitions and private equity ownership, financialization has resulted in radical concentration of ownership of industries from health insurance, to tech, to nursing homes and medical practices, to youth sports. To the extent that these phenomena are financed by debt, they are setting the stage for the next “Too-Big-to-Fail” fiasco in which working people pay for billionaire malfeasance.
The New York Times unexpectedly has published a critique of financialization by conservative economist Oren Cass of the kind I’ve been reading in left-wing sources for decades. Some excerpts:
“[T]he financial sector as a whole — investment banks, hedge funds, private equity firms, cryptocurrency platforms and all the rest of it — has exploded as a share of the United States’ gross domestic product. It now claims the highest share of corporate profits and attracts the highest share of top talent from top schools, . . . But actual business investment has declined . . . .
“So few resources have gone toward new equipment, toward developing better ways to do things and toward hiring and training that productivity in America’s manufacturing sector . . . has been falling. More workers are now needed than in 2012 for the same result.
“. . . . In the past 20 years, the United States has gone from leading China in 60 of the 64 “frontier technologies” identified by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute to now trailing in all but seven.”
Left-wing economist Dean Baker has praised Cass’s article. Baker recommends a small financial transactions tax and other reforms.
We must defeat Trump’s fascism, but we absolutely must not return to the bi-partisan consensus that produced financialization and made the plight of working-class families so precarious over the past four-and-a-half decades.
News Brief
Robert Reich: Mamdani was elected Mayor using New York City’s public campaign finance system. [NOTE: We have some version of public financing in Montgomery, Howard, Prince George’s, Baltimore, and Anne Arundel counties plus Baltimore City.]