Heather Cox Richardson's Blog, page 136
November 23, 2023
November 23, 2023
Thanksgiving is the quintessential American holiday…but not for the reasons we generally remember.
The Pilgrims and the Wampanoags did indeed share a harvest celebration together at Plymouth in fall 1621, but that moment got forgotten almost immediately, overwritten by the long history of the settlers’ attacks on their Indigenous neighbors.
In 1841 a book that reprinted the early diaries and letters from the Plymouth colony recovered the story of that three-day celebration in which ninety Indigenous Americans and the English settlers shared fowl and deer. This story of peace and goodwill among men who by the 1840s were more often enemies than not inspired Sarah Josepha Hale, who edited the popular women’s magazine Godey’s Lady’s Book, to think that a national celebration could ease similar tensions building between the slave-holding South and the free North. She lobbied for legislation to establish a day of national thanksgiving.
And then, on April 12, 1861, southern soldiers fired on Fort Sumter, a federal fort in Charleston Harbor, and the meaning of a holiday for giving thanks changed.
Southern leaders wanted to destroy the United States of America and create their own country, based not in the traditional American idea that “all men are created equal,” but rather in its opposite: that some men were better than others and had the right to enslave their neighbors. In the 1850s, convinced that society worked best if a few wealthy men ran it, southern leaders had bent the laws of the United States to their benefit, using it to protect enslavement above all.
In 1860, northerners elected Abraham Lincoln to the presidency to stop rich southern enslavers from taking over the government and using it to cement their own wealth and power. As soon as he was elected, southern leaders pulled their states out of the Union to set up their own country. After the firing on Fort Sumter, Lincoln and the fledgling Republican Party set out to end the slaveholders’ rebellion.
The early years of the war did not go well for the U.S. By the end of 1862, the armies still held, but people on the home front were losing faith. Leaders recognized the need both to acknowledge the suffering and to keep Americans loyal to the cause. In November and December, seventeen state governors declared state thanksgiving holidays.
New York governor Edwin Morgan’s widely reprinted proclamation about the holiday reflected that the previous year “is numbered among the dark periods of history, and its sorrowful records are graven on many hearthstones.” But this was nonetheless a time for giving thanks, he wrote, because “the precious blood shed in the cause of our country will hallow and strengthen our love and our reverence for it and its institutions…. Our Government and institutions placed in jeopardy have brought us to a more just appreciation of their value.”
The next year, Lincoln got ahead of the state proclamations. On July 15 he declared a national day of Thanksgiving, and the relief in his proclamation was almost palpable. After two years of disasters, the Union army was finally winning. Bloody, yes; battered, yes; but winning. At Gettysburg in early July, Union troops had sent Confederates reeling back southward. Then, on July 4, Vicksburg had finally fallen to U. S. Grant’s army. The military tide was turning.
President Lincoln set Thursday, August 6, 1863, for the national day of Thanksgiving. On that day, ministers across the country listed the signal victories of the U.S. Army and Navy in the past year and reassured their congregations that it was only a matter of time until the United States government put down the southern rebellion. Their predictions acknowledged the dead and reinforced the idea that their sacrifice had not been in vain.
In October 1863, President Lincoln declared a second national day of Thanksgiving. In the past year, he declared, the nation had been blessed.
In the midst of a civil war of unequaled magnitude and severity, he wrote, Americans had maintained their laws and their institutions and had kept foreign countries from meddling with their nation. They had paid for the war as they went, refusing to permit the destruction to cripple the economy. Instead, as they funded the war, they had also advanced farming, industry, mining, and shipping. Immigrants had poured into the country to replace men lost on the battlefield, and the economy was booming. And Lincoln had recently promised that the government would end slavery once and for all. The country, he predicted, “with a large increase of freedom,” would survive, stronger and more prosperous than ever. The president invited Americans “in every part of the United States, and also those who are at sea, and those who are sojourning in foreign lands” to observe the last Thursday of November as a day of Thanksgiving.
In 1863, November’s last Thursday fell on the 26th. On November 19, Lincoln delivered an address at the dedication of a national cemetery at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. He reached back to the Declaration of Independence for the principles on which he called for Americans to rebuild the severed nation:
”Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”
Lincoln urged the crowd to take up the torch those who fought at Gettysburg had laid down. He called for them to “highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
The following year, Lincoln proclaimed another day of Thanksgiving, this time congratulating Americans that God had favored them not only with immigration but also with the emancipation of formerly enslaved people. “Moreover,” Lincoln wrote, “He has been pleased to animate and inspire our minds and hearts with fortitude, courage, and resolution sufficient for the great trial of civil war into which we have been brought by our adherence as a nation to the cause of freedom and humanity, and to afford to us reasonable hopes of an ultimate and happy deliverance from all our dangers and afflictions.”
In 1861, Americans went to war to keep a cabal from taking control of the government and turning it into an oligarchy. The fight against that rebellion seemed at first to be too much for the nation to survive. But Americans rallied and threw their hearts into the cause on the battlefields even as they continued to work on the home front for a government that defended democracy and equality before the law.
And in 1865, at least, they won.
November 22, 2023
November 22, 2023
“It all began so beautifully,” Lady Bird remembered. “After a drizzle in the morning, the sun came out bright and beautiful. We were going into Dallas.”
It was November 22, 1963, and President John F. Kennedy and First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy were visiting Texas. They were there, in the home state of Vice President Lyndon Baines Johnson and his wife, Lady Bird, to try to heal a rift in the Democratic Party. The white supremacists who made up the base of the party’s southern wing loathed the Kennedy administration’s support for Black rights.
That base had turned on Kennedy when he and his brother, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, had backed the decision of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit in fall 1962 saying that army veteran James Meredith had the right to enroll at the University of Mississippi, more commonly known as Ole Miss.
When the Department of Justice ordered officials at Ole Miss to register Meredith, Mississippi governor Ross Barnett physically barred Meredith from entering the building and vowed to defend segregation and states’ rights.
So the Department of Justice detailed dozens of U.S. marshals to escort Meredith to the registrar and put more than 500 law enforcement officers on the campus. White supremacists rushed to meet them there and became increasingly violent. That night, Barnett told a radio audience: “We will never surrender!” The rioters destroyed property and, under cover of the darkness, fired at reporters and the federal marshals. They killed two men and wounded many others.
The riot ended when the president sent 20,000 troops to the campus. On October 1, Meredith became the first Black American to enroll at the University of Mississippi.
The Kennedys had made it clear that the federal government would stand behind civil rights, and white supremacists joined right-wing Republicans in insisting that their stance proved that the Kennedys were communists. Using a strong federal government to regulate business meant preventing a man from making all the money he could; protecting civil rights would take tax dollars from white Americans for the benefit of Black and Brown people. A bumper sticker produced during the Mississippi crisis warned that “the Castro Brothers”—equating the Kennedys with communist revolutionaries in Cuba—had gone to Ole Miss.
That conflation of Black rights and communism stoked such anger in the southern right wing that Kennedy felt obliged to travel to Dallas to try to mend some fences in the state Democratic Party.
On the morning of November 22, 1963, the Dallas Morning News contained a flyer saying the president was wanted for “treason” for “betraying the Constitution” and giving “support and encouragement to the Communist inspired racial riots.” Kennedy warned his wife that they were “heading into nut country today.”
But the motorcade through Dallas started out in a party atmosphere. At the head of the procession, the president and first lady waved from their car at the streets “lined with people—lots and lots of people—the children all smiling, placards, confetti, people waving from windows,” Lady Bird remembered. “There had been such a gala air,” she said, that when she heard three shots, “I thought it must be firecrackers or some sort of celebration.”
The Secret Service agents had no such moment of confusion. The cars sped forward, “terrifically fast—faster and faster,” according to Lady Bird, until they arrived at a hospital, which made Mrs. Johnson realize what had happened. “As we ground to a halt” and Secret Service agents began to pull them out of the cars, Lady Bird wrote, “I cast one last look over my shoulder and saw in the President’s car a bundle of pink, just like a drift of blossoms, lying on the back seat…Mrs. Kennedy lying over the President’s body.”
As they waited for news of the president, LBJ asked Lady Bird to go find Mrs. Kennedy. Lady Bird recalled that Secret Service agents “began to lead me up one corridor, back stairs, and down another. Suddenly, I found myself face to face with Jackie in a small hall…outside the operating room. You always think of her—or someone like her—as being insulated, protected; she was quite alone. I don’t think I ever saw anyone so much alone in my life.”
After trying to comfort Mrs. Kennedy, Lady Bird went back to the room where her own husband was. It was there that Kennedy’s special assistant told them, “The President is dead,” just before journalist Malcolm Kilduff entered and addressed LBJ as “Mr. President.”
Officials wanted LBJ out of Dallas as quickly as possible and rushed the party to the airport. Looking out the car window, Lady Bird saw a flag already at half mast and later recalled, “[T]hat is when the enormity of what had happened first struck me.”
In the confusion—in addition to the murder of the president, no one knew how extensive the plot against the government was—the attorney general wanted LBJ sworn into office as quickly as possible. Already on the plane to return to Washington, D.C., the party waited for Judge Sarah Hughes, a Dallas federal judge. By the time Hughes arrived, so had Mrs. Kennedy and the coffin bearing her husband’s body. “[A]nd there in the very narrow confines of the plane—with Jackie on his left with her hair falling in her face, but very composed, and me on his right, Judge Hughes, with the Bible, in front of him and a cluster of Secret Service people and Congressmen we had known for a long time around him—Lyndon took the oath of office,” Lady Bird recalled.
As the plane traveled to Washington, D.C., Lady Bird went into the private presidential cabin to see Mrs. Kennedy, passing President Kennedy’s casket in the hallway.
Lady Bird later recalled: “I looked at her. Mrs. Kennedy’s dress was stained with blood. One leg was almost entirely covered with it and her right glove was caked…with blood—her husband’s blood. She always wore gloves like she was used to them. I never could. Somehow that was one of the most poignant sights—exquisitely dressed and caked in blood. I asked her if I couldn’t get someone in to help her change and she said, ‘Oh, no. Perhaps later…but not right now.’”
“And then,” Lady Bird remembered, “with something—if, with a person that gentle, that dignified, you can say had an element of fierceness, she said, ‘I want them to see what they have done to Jack.’”
—
Notes:
https://www.discoverlbj.org/item/ctjd-19631122
Edward H. Miller, Nut Country: Right-Wing Dallas and the Birth of the Southern Strategy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015).
November 21, 2023
November 21, 2023
Yesterday the United Auto Workers ratified their new contracts with General Motors, Ford, and Stellantis. The new contracts include wage increases of at least 25% over the next 4.5 years, cost of living increases, union coverage for electric battery plants, and the reopening of a closed plant. “These were just extraordinary wins, especially for those of us who’ve been studying strikes for decades,” Washington University labor expert Jake Rosenfeld told Jeanne Whalen of the Washington Post.
Union president Shawn Fain told Rachel Maddow of MSNBC, “It’s a sign of the times…. In the last 40 years…working class people went backwards continually…. There’s this massive chasm between the billionaire class and the working class and…when those things get out of balance, we need to turn it upside down. When 26 billionaires have as much wealth as half of humanity, that’s a crisis….”
Fain said the automakers strike was “just the beginning…. Now, we take our strike muscle and our fighting spirit to the rest of the industries we represent, and to millions of nonunion workers ready to stand up and fight for a better way of life.”
President Joe Biden, who stood on the picket line with UAW members, congratulated both the auto workers and the companies for their good faith negotiations. “[W]hen unions do well, it lifts all workers,” he said. In the wake of the agreements between the UAW and the Big Three automakers, nonunion automakers who are eager to prevent unionization, including Toyota, Honda, Hyundai, Nissan, and Subaru, also announced wage increases.
Following a tradition normalized in the 1980s, Biden also pardoned the turkeys Liberty and Bell yesterday, marking the unofficial start of the holiday season. The birds will move to the University of Minnesota’s College of Food, Agricultural and Natural Resource Sciences where they will become educational ambassadors for a state where turkey production provides more than $1 billion in economic activity and more than 26,000 jobs.
At the ceremony, Biden urged people to “give thanks for the gift that is our nation.” He offered special thanks to service members, with whom he and First Lady Jill Biden shared a Friendsgiving meal on Sunday.
Falling prices for travel and for the foods usually on a Thanksgiving table are news the White House is celebrating. Gas prices have dropped an average of $1.70 from their peak, airfares are down 13%, and car rental prices are down about 10% over the past year.
According to the American Farm Bureau, the price of an average Thanksgiving dinner has dropped by 4.5%. The cost of turkeys has dropped more than 5% from last year, when an avian flu epidemic meant nearly 58 million birds were slaughtered (this year, growers have lost about 4.6 million birds to the same cause). Whipping cream, cranberries, and pie crust have also dropped in price.
But plenty of grocery prices are still rising, and Senator Bob Casey (D-PA) has taken on the issue, documenting how “corporations are making record profits on the backs of American families.” In a public report, Casey noted that from July 2020 through July 2022, inflation rose by 14%, but corporate profits rose by 75%, five times as fast. A family making $68,000 a year in 2022 paid $6,740 in that period to “corporate executives and wealthy shareholders.” In 2023, that amount will be at least $3,546.
The report notes that the cost for chicken went up 20% in 2021 as Tyson Foods doubled their profits from the first quarter of 2021 to the first quarter of 2022; Tyson has been ordered to pay hundreds of millions of dollars in penalties and restitution for “illegally conspiring to inflate chicken prices.” PepsiCo’s chief financial officer said in April 2023 that even though inflation was dropping, their prices would not. He said “consumers generally look at our products and say ‘you know what—they are worth paying a little bit more for.’”
President Biden has launched a campaign to push back on corporate profiteering, including cracking down on the practice of so-called junk fees—unexpected hidden costs for air travel, car rentals, credit cards, cable television, ticket sales, and so on. (The airline industry collected more than $6.7 billion last year in baggage fees, for example.)
But Tony Romm of the Washington Post explained on Sunday that corporate lobbyists are warring with the Biden administration to stop the crackdown. An airline lobbyist testified at a federal hearing in March that changing the policy would create “confusion and frustration” and that there have been “very few complaints” about the extra costs for bags. The same lobbying group told the Department of Transportation that the government had no data to “demonstrate substantial harm” to passengers. A lobbying group for advertising platforms including Facebook and Google agreed that the Federal Trade Commission had failed to present “sufficient empirical evidence” that junk fees are a problem.
Much of the fight over the relative power of ordinary Americans and corporations will play out in the courts. Those courts are themselves struggling over the role of money in their deliberations. After scandals in which it has become clear that Supreme Court justices—primarily Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, but a real estate deal of Neil Gorsuch’s has also been questioned—have accepted gifts from exceedingly wealthy Republican donors, the court on November 13 finally issued its own ethics guidelines.
That code of conduct echoes the obligations of judges in the rest of the U.S. court system, but it takes away the requirements for behavior imposed on the lower courts, and—crucially—it has no methods of enforcement. Legal analyst Dahlia Lithwick noted that the code appeared to be designed to assure the American people they were confused about the need for an ethics code. It appeared, Lithwick said, to be “principally drafted with the intention of instructing us that they still can’t be made to do anything.”
The Supreme Court has been packed with lawyers from the Federalist Society, established in the 1980s to push back on what its members believed was the judicial activism of federal judges who used the Fourteenth Amendment to defend civil rights in the states. Federalist Society lawyers were key to creating legal excuses for Trump to overturn the lawful results of the 2020 presidential election, and yet the society has never addressed how their people have turned into such extremists.
In the New York Times today, leading former Federalist Society lawyer George Conway, former judge J. Michael Luttig, and former representative Barbara Comstock (R-VA) called out both the Federalist Society for failing to respond to the crisis Trump represents, and “the growing crowd of grifters, frauds and con men willing to subvert the Constitution and long-established constitutional principles for the whims of political expediency.”
They announced a new organization to replace the corrupted Federalist Society, a significant move considering how entrenched that society has become in our justice system. The Society for the Rule of Law Institute, made up of conservative lawyers, will be “committed to the foundational constitutional principles we once all agreed upon: the primacy of American democracy, the sanctity of the Constitution and the rule of law, the independence of the courts, the inviolability of elections and mutual support among those tasked with the solemn responsibility of enforcing the laws of the United States.” The authors say that the new organization will provide a conservative voice for democracy and that they hope to work with much more deeply established progressive voices.
For now, the Biden administration continues to try to rebalance the economic playing field. Today the Treasury Department announced the largest settlements in history for violations of U.S. anti–money laundering laws and sanctions. Cryptocurrency giant Binance, which handles about 60% of the world’s virtual currency trading, settled over violations in transactions that laundered money for terrorists—including Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Al Qaeda, and ISIS—and other criminals, and violating sanctions, including those against Iran, North Korea, Syria, and the occupied Crimean region of Ukraine.
Binance will pay more than $4 billion in fines and penalties.
At the same time, the Justice Department obtained a guilty plea from Binance chief executive officer Changpeng Zhao, a Canadian national, for failing to maintain an effective anti–money laundering program. Zhao amassed more than $23 billion at the head of the company; he will pay $200 million in fines and step down. He could face as much as 10 years in prison, but his sentence will likely be less than 18 months.
U.S. officials say this is the biggest-ever corporate resolution that includes criminal charges for an executive.
—
Notes:
https://www.whitehousehistory.org/pardoning-the-thanksgiving-turkey
https://cfans.umn.edu/news/turkey-home-minnesota
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2023/11/20/uaw-contract-ford-general-motors-stellantis/
https://www.cnn.com/2023/11/15/business/thanksgiving-dinner-less-expensive-inflation/index.html
https://www.casey.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/greedflation1.pdf
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2023/11/19/companies-lobbyists-fight-junk-fees/
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/21/opinion/trump-lawyers-constitution-democracy.html
https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/jy1925
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/binance-and-ceo-plead-guilty-federal-charges-4b-resolution
https://www.cnn.com/2023/11/21/investing/binance-changpeng-zhao-treasury/index.html
November 20, 2023
November 20, 2023
Yesterday, David Roberts of the energy and politics newsletter Volts noted that a Washington Post article illustrated how right-wing extremism is accomplishing its goal of destroying faith in democracy. Examining how “in a swing Wisconsin county, everyone is tired of politics,” the article revealed how right-wing extremism has sucked up so much media oxygen that people have tuned out, making them unaware that Biden and the Democrats are doing their best to deliver precisely what those in the article claim to want: compromise, access to abortion, affordable health care, and gun safety.
One person interviewed said, “I can’t really speak to anything [Biden] has done because I’ve tuned it out, like a lot of people have. We’re so tired of the us-against-them politics.” Roberts points out that “both sides” are not extremists, but many Americans have no idea that the Democrats are actually trying to govern, including by reaching across the aisle. Roberts notes that the media focus on the right wing enables the right wing to define our politics. That, in turn, serves the radical right by destroying Americans’ faith in our democratic government.
Former Republican National Committee chair Michael Steele echoed that observation this morning when he wrote, “We need to stop the false equivalency BS between Biden and Trump. Only one acts with the intention to do real harm.”
Indeed, as David Kurtz of Talking Points Memo puts it, “the gathering storm of Trump 2.0 is upon us,” and Trump and his people are telling us exactly what a second Trump term would look like. Yesterday, Trump echoed his “vermin” post of the other day, saying: “2024 is our final battle. With you at my side, we will demolish the Deep State, we will expel the warmongers from our government, we will drive out the globalists, we will cast out the Communists, Marxists, and Fascists, we will throw off the sick political class that hates our Country, we will rout the Fake News Media, we will evict Joe Biden from the White House, and we will FINISH THE JOB ONCE AND FOR ALL!”
Trump’s open swing toward authoritarianism should be disqualifying even for Republicans—can you imagine Ronald Reagan talking this way?—but MAGA Republicans are lining up behind him. Last week the Texas legislature passed a bill to seize immigration authority from the federal government in what is a clear violation of the U.S. Constitution, and yesterday, Texas governor Greg Abbott announced that he was “proud to endorse” Trump for president because of his proposed border policies (which include the deportation of 10 million people).
House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) has also endorsed Trump, and on Friday he announced he was ordering the release of more than 40,000 hours of tapes from the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, answering the demands of far-right congress members who insist the tapes will prove there was no such attack despite the conclusion of the House committee investigating the attack that Trump criminally conspired to overturn the lawful results of the 2020 presidential election and refused to stop his supporters from attacking the Capitol.
Trump loyalist Senator Mike Lee (R-UT) promptly spread a debunked conspiracy theory that one of the attackers shown in the tapes, Kevin Lyons, was actually a law enforcement officer hiding a badge. Lyons—who was not, in fact, a police officer—was carrying a vape and a photo he stole from then–House speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office and is now serving a 51-month prison sentence. (Former representative Liz Cheney (R-WY) tweeted: “Hey [Mike Lee]—heads up. A nutball conspiracy theorist appears to be posting from your account.”)
Both E.J. Dionne of the Washington Post and Will Bunch of the Philadelphia Inquirer noted yesterday that MAGA Republicans have no policies for addressing inflation or relations with China or gun safety; instead, they have coalesced only around the belief that officials in “the administrative state” thwarted Trump in his first term and that a second term will be about revenge on his enemies and smashing American liberalism.
MIke Davis, one of the men under consideration for attorney general, told a podcast host in September that he would “unleash hell on Washington, D.C.,” getting rid of career politicians, indicting President Joe Biden “and every other scumball, sleazeball Biden,” and helping pardon those found guilty of crimes associated with the January 6th attack on the U.S. Capitol. “We’re gonna deport a lot of people, 10 million people and growing—anchor babies, their parents, their grandparents,” Davis said. “We’re gonna put kids in cages. It’s gonna be glorious. We’re gonna detain a lot of people in the D.C. gulag and Gitmo.”
In the Washington Post, Josh Dawsey talked to former Trump officials who do not believe Trump should be anywhere near the presidency, and yet they either fear for their safety if they oppose him or despair that nothing they say seems to matter. John F. Kelly, Trump’s longest-serving chief of staff, told Dawsey that it is beyond his comprehension that Trump has the support he does.
“I came out and told people the awful things he said about wounded soldiers, and it didn’t have half a day’s bounce. You had his attorney general Bill Barr come out, and not a half a day’s bounce. If anything, his numbers go up. It might even move the needle in the wrong direction. I think we’re in a dangerous zone in our country,” Kelly said.
Part of the attraction of right-wing figures is they offer easy solutions to the complicated issues of the modern world. Argentina has inflation over 140%, and 40% of its people live in poverty. Yesterday, voters elected as president far-right libertarian Javier Milei, who is known as “El Loco” (The Madman). Milei wants to legalize the sale of organs, denies climate change, and wielded a chainsaw on the campaign trail to show he would cut down the state and “exterminate” inflation. Both Trump and Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro, two far-right former presidents who launched attacks against their own governments, congratulated him.
In 1959, President Dwight D. Eisenhower took on the question of authoritarianism. Robert J. Biggs, a terminally ill World War II veteran, wrote to Eisenhower, asking him to cut through the confusion of the postwar years. “We wait for someone to speak for us and back him completely if the statement is made in truth,” Biggs wrote. Eisenhower responded at length. While unity was imperative in the military, he said, “in a democracy debate is the breath of life. This is to me what Lincoln meant by government ‘of the people, by the people, and for the people.’”
Dictators, Eisenhower wrote, “make one contribution to their people which leads them to tend to support such systems—freedom from the necessity of informing themselves and making up their own minds concerning these tremendous complex and difficult questions.”
Once again, liberal democracy is under attack, but it is notable—to me, anyway, as I watch to see how the public conversation is changing—that more and more people are stepping up to defend it. In the New York Times today, legal scholar Cass Sunstein warned that “[o]n the left, some people insist that liberalism is exhausted and dying, and unable to handle the problems posed by entrenched inequalities, corporate power and environmental degradation. On the right, some people think that liberalism is responsible for the collapse of traditional values, rampant criminality, disrespect for authority and widespread immorality.”
Sunstein went on to defend liberalism in a 34-point description, but his first point was the most important: “Liberals believe in six things,” he wrote: “freedom, human rights, pluralism, security, the rule of law and democracy,” including fact-based debate and accountability of elected officials to the people.
Finally, former First Lady Rosalynn Carter, who was a staunch advocate for the health and empowerment of marginalized people—and who embodied the principles Sunstein listed, though that’s not why I’m mentioning her—died yesterday at 96. “Rosalynn was my equal partner in everything I ever accomplished,” former President Jimmy Carter said in a statement.
More to the point, perhaps, considering the Carters’ profound humanity, is that when journalist Katie Couric once asked President Carter whether winning a Nobel Peace Prize or being elected president of the United States was the most exciting thing that ever happened to him, Carter answered: “When Rosalynn said she’d marry me—I think that’s the most exciting thing.”
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Notes:
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/morning-memo/the-gathering-storm-of-trump-2-0-is-upon-us
https://www.texasobserver.org/texas-legislature-votes-to-seize-immigration-authority-from-feds/
https://www.inquirer.com/opinion/commentary/mike-davis-trump-attorney-general-20231119.html#loaded
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/11/19/republican-party-trump-haley-desantis-ideas/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2023/11/20/trump-aides-cabinet-critics-election/
https://www.reuters.com/markets/emerging/argentina-2023-inflation-seen-185-cenbank-poll-2023-11-13/
https://twitter.com/bobcesca_go/status/1726618919161762272
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2023/11/mike-johnson-announces-release-january-6-footage
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/20/opinion/cass-sunstein-why-liberal.html
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/oct/17/bolsonaro-brazil-coup-report
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November 19, 2023
November 19, 2023
For three hot days, from July 1 to July 3, 1863, more than 150,000 soldiers from the armies of the United States of America and the Confederate States of America slashed at each other in the hills and through the fields around Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.
When the battered armies limped out of town after the brutal battle, they left scattered behind them more than seven thousand corpses in a town with fewer than 2,500 inhabitants. With the heat of a summer sun beating down, the townspeople had to get the dead soldiers into the ground as quickly as they possibly could, marking the hasty graves with nothing more than pencil on wooden boards.
A local lawyer, David Wills, who had huddled in his cellar with his family and their neighbors during the battle, called for the creation of a national cemetery in the town, where the bodies of the United States soldiers who had died in the battle could be interred with dignity. Officials agreed, and Wills and an organizing committee planned an elaborate dedication ceremony to be held a few weeks after workers began moving remains into the new national cemetery.
They invited state governors, members of Congress, and cabinet members to attend. To deliver the keynote address, they asked prominent orator Edward Everett, who wanted to do such extensive research into the battle that they had to move the ceremony to November 19, a later date than they had first contemplated.
And, almost as an afterthought, they asked President Lincoln to make a few appropriate remarks. While they probably thought he would not attend, or that if he came he would simply mouth a few platitudes and sit down, President Lincoln had something different in mind.
On November 19, 1863, about fifteen thousand people gathered in Gettysburg for the dedication ceremony. A program of music and prayers preceded Everett’s two-hour oration. Then, after another hymn, Lincoln stood up to speak. Packed in the midst of a sea of frock coats, he began. In his high-pitched voice, speaking slowly, he delivered a two-minute speech that redefined the nation.
“Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal,” Lincoln began. While the southern enslavers who were making war on the United States had stood firm on the Constitution’s protection of property—including their enslaved Black neighbors—Lincoln dated the nation from the Declaration of Independence.
The men who wrote the Declaration considered the “truths” they listed “self-evident”: “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” But Lincoln had no such confidence. By his time, the idea that all men were created equal was a “proposition,” and Americans of his day were “engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.”
Standing near where so many men had died four months before, Lincoln honored “those who here gave their lives that that nation might live.”
He noted that those “brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated” the ground “far above our poor power to add or detract.”
“It is for us the living,” Lincoln said, “to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced.” He urged the men and women in the audience to “take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion” and to vow that “these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
[Image of President Abraham Lincoln at Gettysburg, center-left, with his head tilted downward. Work is in the U.S. public domain, obtained here from Wikimedia Commons.]
November 18, 2023
November 18, 2023
I didn’t see much of the Fall in Maine this year because I’ve been seeing so much else of the country, but my friend Peter sent this image of last month's Hunter Moon to bring me a little bit of home.
Headed that direction myself in the morning.
Going to take the night off and rest up. I’ll see you tomorrow.
[Image “Hunter Moon” by Peter Ralston.]
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You can find Peter and his wife Terri at the gallery in Rockport, Maine, or here: https://www.ralstongallery.com/
November 17, 2023
In an NPR piece yesterday, Bill Chappell noted that “the war between Israel and Hamas is being fought, in part, through disinformation and competing claims.”
Khalil al-Hayya, a member of Hamas’s leadership team currently in Qatar, told Ben Hubbard and Maria Abi-Habib of the New York Times that Hamas’s goal in their attack of October 7, 2023, when Hamas terrorists crossed from Gaza into Israel and tortured and killed about 1,200 people, taking another 240 hostage, was to make sure the region did not settle into a status quo that excluded the Palestinians.
In 2020 the Palestinians were excluded from discussions about the Abraham Accords negotiated by then-president Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner that normalized relations between Israel and the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain (and later Morocco). More recently, Saudi Arabia and Israel were in talks with the United States about normalizing relations.
Al-Hayya told the reporters that in order to “change the entire equation and not just have a clash,” Hamas leaders intended to commit “a great act” that Israel would respond to with fury. “[W]ithout a doubt, it was known that the reaction to this great act would be big,” al-Hayya said, but “[w]e had to tell people that the Palestinian cause would not die.”
“Hamas’s goal is not to run Gaza and to bring it water and electricity and such,” al-Hayya said. “This battle was not because we wanted fuel or laborers,” he added. “It did not seek to improve the situation in Gaza. This battle is to completely overthrow the situation.”
Hamas media adviser Taher El-Nounou told the reporters: “I hope that the state of war with Israel will become permanent on all the borders, and that the Arab world will stand with us.”
Hamas could be pretty certain that Israel would retaliate with a heavy hand. The governing coalition that took power at the end of 2022 is a far-right coalition, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu needs to hold that coalition together to stay in power, not least because he faces charges of bribery, fraud, and breach of trust.
Once it took power, Netanyahu’s government announced that expanding Israeli settlements in the Palestinian West Bank was a priority, vowing to annex the occupied territory. It also endorsed discrimination against LGBTQ people and called for generous payments to ultra-Orthodox men so they could engage in religious study rather than work. It also tried to push through changes to the judicial system to give far more power to the government.
From January 7 until October 7, 2023, protesters turned out in the streets in huge numbers. With the attack, Israelis have come together until the crisis is resolved.
Netanyahu’s ability to stay in power depended in large part on his promises that he would keep Israelis safe. The events of October 7 on his watch—the worst attack on Jews since the Holocaust—shattered that guarantee. Polls show that Israelis blame his government, and three quarters of them think he should resign. Sixty-four percent think the country should hold an election immediately after the war.
Immediately after the attack, on October 7, Netanyahu vowed “mighty vengeance” against Hamas, and Israeli airstrikes began to pound Gaza. On October 8, Israel formally declared war. Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said the country’s retaliation would “change the reality on the ground in Gaza for the next 50 years,” and on October 9 he announced “a complete siege on the Gaza Strip. There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed…. We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly.”
Israel and the U.S. have strong historic and economic ties: as Nicole Narea points out in Vox in a review of their history together, the U.S. has also traditionally seen Israel as an important strategic ally as it stabilizes the Middle East, helping to maintain the supply of Middle Eastern oil that the global economy needs. That strategic importance has only grown as the U.S. seeks to normalize ties around the region to form a united front against Iran.
For Biden, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, and other envoys, then, it appeared the first priority after the October 7 attack was to keep the conflict from spreading. Biden made it very clear that the U.S. would stand behind Israel should Iran, which backs Hamas, be considering moving in. He warned: “[T]o any country, any organization, anyone thinking of taking advantage of this situation, I have one word: Don’t.”
The movement of two U.S. carrier groups to the region appears so far to be helping to achieve that goal. While Iran-backed Hezbollah fighters from Lebanon and Yemen’s Houthis have fired missiles and drones at Israel since October 7, Iran’s leaders have said they will not join Hamas’s fight and are hoping only to use the conflict as leverage against the U.S.
Militias have fired at least 55 rocket and drone strikes at U.S. forces in Iraq and Syria since October 7 without killing any U.S. soldiers. In retaliation, the U.S. has launched three airstrikes against militia installations in Syria, killing up to seven men (the military assesses there were not women or children in the vicinity) in the third strike on Sunday. The U.S. keeps roughly 900 troops in Syria and 2,500 troops in Iraq to work with local forces to prevent the resurgence of the Islamic State.
At the same time that Biden emphasized Israel’s right to respond to Hamas’s attack and demanded the return of the hostages, he also called for humanitarian aid to Gaza through Egypt and warned Netanyahu to stay within the laws of war.
Rounds of diplomacy by Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who flew to Israel and Jordan initially on October 11 and has gone back repeatedly, as well as by Biden, who has both visited the region—his second trip to a war zone—and constantly worked the phones, and other envoys, started humanitarian convoys moving into Gaza with a single 20-truck convoy on October 21. By early November, over 100 trucks a day were entering Gaza, the number the United Nations says is the minimum needed. Yesterday the Israeli war cabinet agreed to allow two tankers of fuel a day into Gaza after the U.N. said it couldn’t deliver aid because it had run out of fuel.
The U.S. has insisted from the start that Israel’s military decisions must not go beyond the laws of war. Israeli officials say they are staying within the law, yet an estimated 11,000 civilians and Hamas fighters (the numbers are not separated out) have died. Gaza has been crushed into rubble by airstrikes, and more than a million people are homeless. That carnage has sparked protests around the world along with calls for a cease-fire, which Israel rejects.
It has also sparked extreme Islamophobia and antisemitism exacerbated by social media. In the immediate aftermath of October 7, Islamophobia inspired a Chicago man to stab a 6-year-old Palestinian American boy to death; more recently, antisemitism has jumped more than 900% on X (formerly Twitter). On Wednesday, Elon Musk agreed with a virulently antisemitic post on X. White House spokesperson Andrew Bates responded: “We condemn this abhorrent promotion of Antisemitic and racist hate in the strongest terms, which runs against our core values as Americans.” Advertisers, including IBM and Apple, announced they would no longer advertise on Musk’s platform.
While calling for humanitarian pauses in the fighting, the Biden administration has continued to focus on getting the hostages out and has rejected calls for a cease-fire, saying such a break would only allow Hamas to regroup. In The Atlantic on November 14, former secretary of state Hillary Clinton, who negotiated a 2012 cease-fire between Hamas and Israel only to see Hamas violate that agreement two years later, explained that cease-fires have only kicked the can down the road. “Israel’s policy since 2009 of containing rather than destroying Hamas has failed,” she said.
Clinton called for the destruction of Hamas on the one hand and “a new strategy and new leadership” for Israel on the other. “Instead of the current ultra-right-wing government, it will need a government of national unity that’s rooted in the center of Israeli politics and can make the hard choices ahead,” she wrote.
Central to those choices is the long-neglected two-state solution that would establish a Palestinian state. Biden and Blinken and a number of Arab governments have backed the idea, but to many observers it seems impossible to pull off. Still, at the same time Clinton’s article appeared, King Abdullah II of Jordan published his own op-ed in the Washington Post titled: “A two-state solution would be a victory for our common humanity.”
“[L]et’s start with some basic reality,” he wrote. “The fact is that the thousands of victims across Israel, Gaza and the West Bank have been overwhelmingly civilians…. Leaders everywhere have the responsibility to face the full reality of this crisis, as ugly as it is. Only by anchoring ourselves to the concrete facts that have brought us to this point will we be able to change the increasingly dangerous direction of our world….
“If the status quo continues, the days ahead will be driven by an ongoing war of narratives over who is entitled to hate more and kill more. Sinister political agendas and ideologies will attempt to exploit religion. Extremism, vengeance and persecution will deepen not only in the region but also around the world…. It is up to responsible leaders to deliver results, starting now.”
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Notes:
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/08/world/middleeast/hamas-israel-gaza-war.html
https://www.npr.org/2023/11/16/1212889717/satellite-images-us-israel-gaza
https://www.thedefensepost.com/2023/11/16/us-troops-iraq-syria-attacked/
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/03/world/middleeast/netanyahu-corruption-charges-israel.html
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/history-its-importance-and-irrelevance-plus-some-books
https://www.usip.org/publications/2023/09/saudi-israel-normalization-agreement-horizon
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/who-takes-over-gaza
https://www.vox.com/world-politics/23916266/us-israel-support-ally-gaza-war-aid
https://il.usembassy.gov/secretary-blinkens-travel-to-israel-and-jordan/
https://www.cnn.com/2023/10/17/politics/inside-joe-biden-israel-trip-planning/index.html
https://www.state.gov/humanitarian-assistance-for-gaza/
Diplomatic, by Laura RozenIsrael agrees to fuel for Gaza after US privately warned of humanitarian catastropheA day after the United Nations said it could no longer deliver aid in Gaza because it had run out of fuel and American officials warned Israeli counterparts…Read more16 hours ago · 7 likes · Laura Rozenhttps://www.washingtonpost.com/world/interactive/2023/gaza-rising-death-toll-civilians/
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/15/technology/hate-speech-israel-gaza-internet.html
https://www.axios.com/2023/11/17/apple-twitter-x-advertising-elon-musk-antisemitism-ads
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/11/14/king-abdullah-jordan-two-state-solution/
Twitter (X):
November 16, 2023
November 16, 2023
The summit of the leaders of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) economies continued today in San Francisco, California.
Formed in 1989, APEC is made up of the economies of 21 nations around the Pacific Rim: Australia, Brunei, Canada, Indonesia, Japan, South Korea, Malaysia, New Zealand, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, Taiwan, Hong Kong, China, Mexico, Papua New Guinea, Chile, Peru, Russia, Vietnam, and the United States. Together, these economies make up about 62% of global gross domestic product and almost half of global trade.
David Sanger of the New York Times today noted an apparent shift in the power dynamic between President Joe Biden and Chinese president Xi Jinping, who met yesterday for a four-hour conversation. Earlier in his presidency, Xi was riding on a strong economy that overshadowed that of the U.S. and looked as if it would continue to do so. Then, Xi favored what was known as “wolf warrior” diplomacy: the aggressive defense of China’s national interests against what Chinese envoys portrayed as foreign hostility, especially that of the U.S.
Under that diplomatic regime, Xi emphasized that liberal democracy was too weak to face the twenty-first century. The speed and momentous questions of the new era called for strong leaders, he said. In early February 2022, Russia and China held a summit after which they pledged that the “[f]riendship between the two States has no limits.”
Things have changed.
The U.S. has emerged from the coronavirus pandemic with a historically strong economy, while China’s economy is reeling from a real estate bubble and deflation at the same time that government crackdowns have made foreign capital flee. This summer, Xi quietly sidelined Qin Gang, the foreign minister associated with wolf warrior diplomacy, and in October, he replaced Defense Minister General Li Shangfu, who is under U.S. sanctions for overseeing weapon purchases from Russia.
Indeed, China has also been quietly pushing back from its close embrace of Russia. Just weeks after their February 2022 declaration, Russia invaded Ukraine in an operation that Russian president Vladimir Putin almost certainly expected would be quick and successful, permitting Russia to seize key Ukrainian ports and land. Such a victory would have strengthened both Russia and China at the same time it weakened Europe, the United States, and their allies and partners.
Instead, Ukraine stood firm, and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and allies and partners have stood behind the embattled country. As the war has stretched on, sanctions have cut into the Russian economy and Putin has had to cede power to Xi, accepting the Chinese yuan in exchange for Russian commodities, for example. This week, Alberto Nardelli of Bloomberg reported that the European Union is considering another round of sanctions, including a ban on the export of machine tools and machinery parts that enable Russia to make ammunition.
In a piece at the Center for European Policy Analysis today, Julia Davis, who monitors Russian media, noted that Russia lost an extraordinary 997,000 people between October 2020 and September 2021, even before the war began. Now it is so desperate to increase its population that its leadership claims to have stolen as many as 700,000 Ukrainian children and is urging women to have as many children as possible.
Holly Ellyatt of CNBC noted that to the degree they even mentioned it, Russian media sniped at the Biden-Xi summit, but it was hard to miss that although Russian president Putin was not welcome to attend, Xi came and engaged in several high-level meetings, assuring potential investors that China wants to be friends with the U.S. Also hard to miss was Xi’s pointed comment that the China-U.S. relationship “is the most important bilateral relationship in the world.”
Going into this summit, then, the U.S. had the leverage to get agreements from China to crack down on the precursor chemicals that Chinese producers have been shipping to Latin America to make illegal fentanyl, restore military communications between the two countries now that Li has been replaced, and make promises about addressing climate change. Other large issues of trade and the independence of Taiwan will not be resolved so easily.
Still, it was a high point for President Biden, whose economic policies and careful investment in diplomatic alliances have helped to shift the power dynamic between the U.S. and two countries that were key geopolitical rivals when he took office. Now, both the U.S. and China appear to be making an effort to move forward on better terms. Indeed, Chinese media has shifted its tone about the U.S. and the APEC summit so quickly readers have expressed surprise.
Today, Biden emphasized “the unlimited potential of our partnerships…to realize a future that will benefit people not only in the Asia-Pacific region but the whole world,… [a] future where our prosperity is shared and is inclusive, where workers are empowered and their rights are respected, where our economies are sustainable and resilient.”
Biden and administration officials noted that companies from across the Asia-Pacific world have invested nearly $200 billion in the U.S. since Biden took office, creating tens of thousands of good jobs, while the U.S. has elevated its engagement with the region, holding bilateral talks, creating new initiatives and deepening economic partnerships.
Today, Biden and Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo announced that the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework, an economic forum established last year as a nonbinding replacement for the Trans-Pacific Partnership former president Trump abruptly pulled out of, had agreed on terms to set up an early warning system for disruptions to supply chains, cooperation on clean energy, and fighting corruption and tax evasion.
In a very different event in San Francisco today, a federal jury convicted David DePape, 43, of attempted kidnapping and assault on account of a federal official’s performance of official duties for his attack on former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband Paul with a hammer on October 28 of last year, fracturing his skull.
DePape’s lawyers did not contest the extensive evidence against him but tried to convince the jury that DePape did not commit a federal crime because he did not attack Pelosi on account of Representative Pelosi’s official position. Instead, they said, DePape had embraced the language of right-wing lawmakers and pundits and believed in a conspiracy theory that pedophile elites had taken over the country and were spreading lies about former president Donald Trump.
DePape told jurors he had come to conspiracy theories through Gamergate, a 2014–2015 misogynistic online campaign of harassment against women in the video game industry, which turned into attacks on feminism, diversity, and progressive ideas. Trump ally Steve Bannon talked of pulling together the Gamergate participants behind Trump and his politics.
Also today, a subcommittee of the House Ethics Committee set up to investigate allegations against Representative George Santos (R-NY) issued its report. The Republican-dominated committee found that Santos had lied about his background during his campaign and, furthermore, that he appears to be a serial liar. Those lies also “include numerous misrepresentations to the government and the public about his and his campaign’s financial activities.”
That is, the committee found, Santos defrauded his campaign donors, falsified his financial records, and used campaign money on beauty products, rent, luxury items from Hermes and Ferragamo, and purchases at the website Only Fans. The subcommittee recommended the Ethics Committee refer Santos to the Department of Justice, and “publicly condemn Representative Santos, whose conduct [is] beneath the dignity of the office” and who has “brought severe discredit upon the House.”
Santos says he will not run for reelection.
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Notes:
https://www.reuters.com/world/what-is-apec-asia-pacific-leaders-head-san-francisco-2023-11-01/
http://en.kremlin.ru/supplement/5770
https://thediplomat.com/2023/09/the-rise-and-fall-of-chinas-wolf-warrior-diplomacy/
https://cepa.org/article/women-enter-the-putin-regimes-crosshairs/
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2023/08/15/chinese-diplomat-qin-gang-fall-00110333
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/16/us/politics/biden-xi-china-power-balance.html
https://apnews.com/article/china-defense-minister-us-taiwan-8bbb77e5e37e5427cb8cc79b6e8d2b22
https://abcnews.go.com/US/paul-pelosi-hammer-attack-federal-trial-verdict/story?id=104879502
https://ethics.house.gov/sites/ethics.house.gov/files/documents/ISC%20Report_0.pdf
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/16/us/david-depape-paul-pelosi-verdict.html
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/11/16/xi-biden-meeting-china-summit/
November 15, 2023
November 15, 2023
Extremist Republicans today shut down House business by refusing to pass a procedural vote to take up a spending bill, as they had threatened to do in retaliation for the passage yesterday of the continuing resolution to fund the government into the new year. This is the fourth time the extremists have defeated special rules in the House this year, and as deputy chief of staff for Representative Don Beyer (D-VA) Aaron Fritschner pointed out, their doing so is highly unusual. In the previous 20 years the House voted down no such measures at all.
Although they were in the middle of a 17-vote series, the Republicans then recessed the House until after Thanksgiving.
Members of the far-right House Freedom Caucus made it clear they are angry that their own demands are not being met. “We’re sending a shot across the bow,” caucus chair Scott Perry (R-PA) told reporters. “[W]e are done with the failure theater here.”
Representative Chip Roy (R-TX) angrily said to his colleagues: “One thing. I want my Republican colleagues to give me one thing. One. That I can go campaign on and say we did. One! Anybody sitting in the complex, if you want to come down to the floor and come explain to me, one material, meaningful, significant thing the Republican majority has done besides, ‘Well, I guess it’s not as bad as the Democrats.’”
In contrast, the Democrats with the same slim majority in the last Congress passed a series of sweeping bills that are already changing the country. Today marks the second anniversary of the Bipartisan Infrastructure Act that invested $1.2 trillion—$550 billion of it new spending—in roads, water systems, electrical grids, broadband, bridges, and so on.
So far, that act has seen the start of more than 37,000 projects across the country. Bridges, airports, and supply chain projects are underway, creating hundreds of thousands of jobs. The Democrats today emphasized that they are delivering on the things that make people’s lives easier, and the White House listed a number of Republicans who voted against the measure only to boast of the benefits of the infrastructure investments to their constituents.
“And,” Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said in a video in which he echoed the tagline of the administration: “the great news is, we’re just getting started.”
The investment in infrastructure is part of what has created a booming U.S. economy. Growth is far better in the U.S. than in Europe or China, where a property bubble and local government debts have led to deflation.
That economic strength is standing behind President Joe Biden in San Francisco, where he traveled yesterday for a summit of the 21 member economies of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum (APEC groups economies, not nations). APEC economies make up almost half of world trade and about 62% of global gross domestic product.
Today, Biden met with Chinese president Xi Jinping in a much anticipated second meeting since Biden took office. But even before today’s discussion, the two leaders announced a new climate agreement. The U.S. and China are the world’s two largest climate polluters, accounting for 38% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions.
China did not agree to phase out coal, which is the dirtiest fossil fuel, but both countries agreed to ramp up renewable energy capacity around the world and to reduce emissions in their power sectors overall. This is the first time China has agreed to cut emissions. In two weeks the 28th United Nations Climate Change Conference will take place in Dubai. Observers hope the willingness of China and the U.S. to make this announcement, even with its limitations, will jump-start negotiations there.
Remarks by Biden and Xi before their meeting were cordial but tense. Biden emphasized that their “meetings have always been candid, straightforward, and useful,” telling Xi: “I value our conversation because I think it’s paramount that you and I understand each other clearly, leader to leader, with no misconceptions or miscommunication. We have to ensure that competition does not veer into conflict. And we also have to manage it responsibly—that competition.”
Xi responded that the China-U.S. relationship “is the most important bilateral relationship in the world,” and while it “has never been smooth sailing over the past 50 years and more…, it has kept moving forward amid twists and turns. For two large countries like China and the United States, turning their back on each other is not an option. It is unrealistic for one side to remodel the other, and conflict and confrontation has unbearable consequences for both sides.”
In their four-hour meeting, the two leaders agreed to recommence military communications more than a year after China broke them off when then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi visited Taiwan. The two countries also agreed to strengthen cooperation on stopping the flow of what are known as precursor chemicals—the chemicals needed to make street fentanyl—which are produced in China and shipped to drug operations primarily in Latin America. The U.S. has cracked down hard on that trade; additional Chinese cooperation will be welcome.
They agreed to continue to work together to address climate change, as well as to address the risks of artificial intelligence.
On the rest of their discussions, concerning Taiwan, human rights, the Middle East, and Ukraine, the two leaders “exchanged views,” according to the White House readout. Later in the day, meeting with business leaders who have grown nervous about investing in China, Xi assured them that China wants to be friends with the U.S., and “does not seek spheres of influence, and will not fight a cold or hot war with any country.”
In his remarks welcoming APEC leaders this evening, in the city of the famous Golden Gate Bridge, Biden emphasized the power of building bridges to span space and time, the past and the future. He spoke of connecting diverse communities: “All across the traditions, cultures, and languages, we find the common dreams we share for ourselves and for our children.”
Biden urged his audience to “take full advantage of this summit to make new connections and spark new partnerships, because every step we take to deepen our cooperation, to launch a new venture, to tackle the challenges that impact on all of us is a step toward realization of the enormous potential of our Asian Pacific future…, a future where our economics are strong, vibrant, and sustainable because our workers are empowered and protected; women and girls are full and equal participants in every aspect of our society; young people…can envision for themselves the lives and hope for unlimited possibilities.”
The strongest tools we have to meet this era’s challenges, he said, are “connection, cooperation, collective action, and common purpose. That’s why we’re all here.”
Late tonight, by a vote of 87 to 11, the Senate passed the continuing resolution to fund the government into the new year. One Democrat and ten Republicans voted no.
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Notes:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/11/15/biden-xi-meeting/
https://www.reuters.com/world/what-is-apec-asia-pacific-leaders-head-san-francisco-2023-11-01/
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/14/climate/us-china-climate-agreement.html
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2023/11/15/senate-vote-avert-government-shutdown/
Twitter (X):
MZanona/status/1724827604409049190
SteveRattner/status/1724846743550861723
SecretaryPete/status/1724785353167638617
JakeSherman/status/1724823562916094371
HibaNasr/status/1724952615539359911
JoeBiden/status/1724857317642965376
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fritschner/status/1724840416590123465
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robertjimison/status/1724851727717822499
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November 14, 2023
November 14, 2023
This evening, by a vote of 336 to 95, the House of Representatives passed a bill to fund the government. Pushed by Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA), the measure funds the government at current spending levels. Funding for different parts of the government will run out on two separate dates: January 19 and February 2. The measure does not include any funding for military aid to Israel or Ukraine.
Democrats provided most of the votes for the measure, which passed under a special rule that required two thirds of the House to agree to it. The Democrats provided 209 yes votes; the Republicans, 127. Two Democrats and 93 Republicans opposed it.
The Democratic House leadership, Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY), Democratic Whip Katherine Clark (D-MA), and Democratic Caucus Chair Pete Aguilar (D-CA) and Vice Chair Ted Lieu (D-CA), released a statement saying:
“From the very beginning of the Congress, House Democrats have made clear that we will always put people over politics and try to find common ground with our Republican colleagues wherever possible, while pushing back against Republican extremism whenever necessary.
“That is the framework through which we will evaluate all issues before us this Congress. We have consistently made clear that a government shutdown would hurt the economy, our national security and everyday Americans during a very fragile time and must be avoided. To that end, House Democrats have repeatedly articulated that any continuing resolution must be set at the fiscal year 2023 spending level, be devoid of harmful cuts and free of extreme right-wing policy riders. The continuing resolution before the House today meets [those] criteria and we will support it.”
Just two Democrats opposed the measure. Ninety-three Republicans did.
Passing a continuing resolution at the same spending levels as fiscal year 2023 with the help of Democrats while much of his own party opposes it puts Johnson in the exact same place Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) was in when eight extremists voted to oust him from the speakership: relying on Democratic votes to fund the government.
Far-right extremists were angry at Johnson and took an official stand against it. Now they are talking about retaliating against the speaker by holding up any further legislation in procedural votes so it cannot move forward, grinding the House to another halt. Johnson might have been trying to address that anger when he today endorsed former president Donald Trump for president in 2024, a move his predecessor McCarthy refused to make.
But McCarthy supporters looked at Johnson getting a pass for the same deal that cost McCarthy his leadership and cried foul. Republican tempers ran hot on Capitol Hill today as Representative Tim Burchett (R-TN) accused former speaker McCarthy of elbowing him in the kidney as McCarthy passed him in the House basement while Burchett was talking to NPR reporter Claudia Grisales. Clearly taken aback, Grisales tweeted: “Have NEVER seen this on Capitol Hill: While talking to [Burchett] after the GOP conference meeting, former [Speaker McCarthy] walked by with his detail and McCarthy shoved Burchett. Burchett lunged towards me. I thought it was a joke, it was not. And a chase ensued….” Burchett was one of the eight Republican representatives who voted to oust McCarthy from the speakership.
In a House hearing of the Oversight Committee on the U.S. General Services Administration, chair James Comer (R-KY) angrily told Representative Jared Moskowitz (D-FL), who was wearing a blue suit, that he looked like a Smurf (a small, blue cartoon character). Comer angrily defended himself from Moskowitz’s observation that Comer had lent the same amount of money to his own brother that President Biden lent to his brother James.
Comer has insisted without any proof that Biden’s loan was illicit; Moskowitz has repeatedly asked Comer to testify about his own loan. "That is bullsh*t," Comer said of Moskowitz’s observation that the American people would like to know more about his own loan. Moskowitz answered: "Your word means nothing, Mr. Chairman.... I think the American people have lots of questions, Mr. Chairman, and perhaps you should sit maybe for a deposition."
That was House Republicans today.
In the Senate, at a hearing of the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, Republican Markwayne Mullin of Oklahoma tried to start a physical fight with one of the witnesses, president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters union Sean O'Brien. O’Brien had criticized Mullin on Twitter, and Mullin wanted to fight it out. O’Brien indicated he was more than ready. Mullin got up from his chair as if to begin, when Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT), chair of the committee, yelled at him to sit back down. “You are a United States senator!” he shouted.
Meanwhile, the Biden administration today celebrated the drop of the inflation rate to zero for the month of October, meaning that prices did not rise at all between September and October. That flat month means the yearly inflation rate dropped to 3.2% for the past year. Much of that lower inflation rate reflects lower gasoline prices, which dropped 5% in October.
Under the Democratic administration, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), which oversees the maintenance of fair business practices, has been much more aggressive about policing misconduct, and today it announced it filed 784 enforcement actions and claimed $4.95 billion in penalties in the fiscal year that ended in September. This financial recovery was the second highest in the history of the SEC, second only to last year’s amount of $6.4 billion.
The White House yesterday announced a new initiative on women’s health research designed to combat the fact that women’s health has been ill studied, leaving half the nation’s people suffering from poorly understood debilitating conditions such as endometriosis and fibroids, as well as being diagnosed or treated incorrectly for disorders such as cardiovascular disease, Alzheimer’s disease, and autoimmune disorders.
Today the White House issued the fifth national climate assessment, which showed a decline in U.S. greenhouse gas emissions despite the growth of the population and of the economy. The White House statement attributes this decline to efforts to mitigate emissions and the increasingly available low-emissions options. In the last decade, it noted, wind energy costs dropped 70% and solar energy costs dropped 90%. In 2020, 80% of new energy generation capacity came from clean energy. Climate change and related extreme weather events are rapidly intensifying, the administration warned, and will cost the U.S. at least $150 billion a year.
Reflecting that fact, Biden today announced more than $6 billion in investments to strengthen the electric grid, reduce flooding, support conservation, and advance environmental justice, as underserved communities bear the brunt of weather events. The money is coming primarily from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), and the Inflation Reduction Act.
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Notes:
https://apnews.com/article/mike-johnson-donald-trump-2024-c0d8304f44bd7158415ac80673eb8c7f
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/14/us/politics/government-shutdown-vote-mike-johnson.html
https://www.politico.com/news/2023/11/14/mike-johnson-speaker-shutdown-democrats-00127083
https://thehill.com/business is/4308537-october-2024-inflation-consumer-price-index/
https://www.barrons.com/articles/october-cpi-inflation-report-data-today-155d53f1
https://www.cnn.com/2023/11/14/politics/burchett-mccarthy-elbowing-fight/index.html
https://www.cnn.com/2023/11/14/politics/speaker-johnson-conservative-reaction/index.html
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