Robert B. Reich's Blog, page 28

Profiles in Cowardice

Financial regulators subject banks to stress tests to see if they have enough capital to withstand...

The Real Reason Trump Won’t ConcedeJoe Biden has decisively won...

The Real Reason Trump Won’t Concede

Joe Biden has decisively won the presidency. There is no way for Trump to overturn the results of the election, and his campaign’s post-election lawsuits have gotten dismissed left and right. 

That hasn’t stopped him from launching an “Official Election Defense Fund” and bombarding his supporters with fundraising appeals to supposedly finance the campaign’s ongoing litigation.

But the fine print tells a very different story.

60 percent of a donation to Trump’s “Official Election Defense Fund” goes to Save America, Trump’s new leadership Political Action Committee that he set up less than a week after the election. The other 40 percent goes to the Republican National Committee. 

So if someone donates $500, Trump’s PAC gets $300, the RNC gets the other $200, and not a cent actually goes to the election defense fund.

Donations only start going to that fund once Trump’s PAC reaches the legal contribution limit of $5,000 – and the RNC gets $3,000. 

This means a supporter would have to donate over $8,000 before any money goes to the fund they think they’re supporting.

Apparently enriching himself on the taxpayer dime for the past four years wasn’t enough for Trump. Now he’s lining his pockets by attacking our elections and undermining our democracy – and swindling his supporters every step of the way.

Is this just a final grift before Trump leaves office? Or is there more at stake?

Trump certainly wants to keep the money flowing, and a leadership PAC is an easy way to do it. Trump’s PAC can be used to fund a lavish post-presidency lifestyle, as leadership PACs can use donors’ funds for personal expenses, like personal travel and events at Trump properties, while campaign committees cannot.

But there’s more at stake than just Trump’s personal greed. Creating a PAC solidifies Trump’s grip on the GOP, as he can distribute the funds to GOP candidates. It helps keep his base whipped up ahead of the Georgia runoffs. And the PAC allows him to start preparing for a potential 2024 run, an idea he’s already floated to his inner circle. 

In the grand scheme of things, Trump’s PAC also fuels the GOP’s cynical strategy to maintain power. The GOP has a permanent stake in stoking a cold civil war. 

A deeply divided nation serves the party’s biggest patrons, giving them unfettered access to the economy’s gains while the bottom 90% of Americans fight each other for crumbs. That division will persist even with Trump out of the White House, thanks to his bonkers claim of a stolen election, and a base more riled up from racist appeals than ever.

We may have defeated Trump, but we haven’t defeated Trumpism. We must work to push the Biden administration to tackle the systemic conditions that allowed Trump to seize power in the first place.

Georgia Runoffs: How You Can Help Flip the SenateThe battle for...

Georgia Runoffs: How You Can Help Flip the Senate

The battle for the Senate is far from over.

Both of Georgia’s Senate races are going into runoffs, as no candidate in either race received more than 50 percent of the vote. 

Reverend Raphael Warnock is facing off against Republican incumbent Kelly Loeffler. And Jon Ossoff is challenging Republican David Perdue.

The winners of the races, and – therefore – control of the Senate, will be decided on January 5th. If both Warnock and Ossoff win their races, the Senate is tied 50-50. And with Kamala Harris as Vice President, she’ll have the tie-breaking vote.

Here’s what you need to know about the Republicans defending their seats.

Kelly Loeffler has used her brief tenure in Congress to praise Trump at every turn, ignore the needs of her constituents, and protect her own bottom line. 

In April, it was reported that she made millions of dollars worth of stock trades before the public knew about the severity of the coronavirus pandemic and the likelihood of a stock market crash. She began making trades the same day Congress received a classified briefing about the virus, and just four days later she accused Democrats of fearmongering about the virus and parroted Trump’s line that everything was under control. She has denied knowing anything about the trades, but the whole saga reeks of corruption.

Senator David Perdue also began making suspicious stock trades on January 24th, the day of the classified briefing. That same day, he bought stock in DuPont, a chemical company that produces personal protective equipment. Throughout the pandemic, he joined Loeffler in praising Trump’s deadly response and downplayed the virus to the public.

Perdue and Loeffler represent one of the worst tenets of today’s GOP: governing for personal gain while ignoring the needs of their constituents. 

They’re also emblematic of the party’s overt racism: Loeffler called the movement for Black lives and racial justice “divisive” and claimed it “seeks to destroy American principles”, and Perdue recently went viral for intentionally mispronouncing Kamala Harris’ name at a Trump rally. 

Loeffler has even been endorsed by right-wing extremist Marjorie Taylor Greene, a QAnon promoter with a history of making racist comments. 

Oh, and they’re happy to parrot Trump’s baseless claims about voter fraud, even calling on Georgia’s Republican Secretary of State to resign because of supposed “failures in Georgia elections this year” – without providing any evidence of what those failures were.

Georgians deserve better. They deserve senators who will fight for them in Washington – they deserve the leadership of Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff.

Warnock’s platform is all about serving the people of Georgia – unlike his opponent Loeffler, who only serves herself and her rich friends. Warnock serves as Senior Pastor at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, the former pulpit of Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. He supports Medicaid expansion, instituting a living wage, restoring the Voting Rights Act, and overhauling our cruel system of mass incarceration.

Jon Ossoff has dedicated his career to taking on corruption – a fitting replacement for David Perdue. Ossoff supports campaign finance reform; making massive investments in environmental protection to save our climate; protecting Roe v. Wade; and common sense gun reform.

Here’s what you can do to make the biggest impact in this make-or-break fight, which will determine whether we take back the Senate from Mitch McConnell:

— Georgians have until December 7th to register to vote in the runoffs. You can make calls to Georgia voters to help them get registered before the deadline. 17-year-old Georgians who turn 18 by January 5, 2021 are eligible to vote in the run-off election that will be held on that date. Please spread the word.

— Let locals lead. Donate directly to the candidates’ campaigns and to grassroots organizations led by communities of color, who worked tirelessly to register new voters and mobilize the state for Joe Biden. FairFight Action, New Georgia Project, and Black Voters Matter Fund are a few of the organizations to support in this moment and beyond. You can split a donation between FairFight and the two campaigns by going to GASenate.com, and donate to New Georgia Project (newgeorgiaproject.org) and Black Voters Matter Fund (blackvotersmatterfund.org) at their websites.

— Volunteer with the Warnock and Ossoff campaigns. You can find all the information you need by heading to mobilize.us/fairfightaction, mobilize.us/electjon, or mobilize.us/warnockforgeorgia.

Georgia, home to John Lewis, is now the ultimate battlefield, thanks to years of grassroots organizing by Black leaders like Lewis, Stacey Abrams, Nse Ufot, Helen Butler, Deborah Scott, Tamieka Atkins, and countless others. Their hard work has gotten Georgia to this crucial junction, and now it’s up to the rest of us to support them in every way possible.

The stakes couldn’t be higher. Let’s bring this home, flip the Senate, and usher in the transformative change this nation requires.

Who Wins from Trump’s Final Travesty?

Leave it to Trump and his Republican allies to spend more energy fighting non-existent voter fraud...

Debunking Trump’s Post-Election LiesEven though Joe Biden won...

Debunking Trump’s Post-Election LiesEven though Joe Biden won the highest percentage of the popular vote for any challenger since FDR in 1932, the Trump campaign is fighting in courtrooms across the country in a desperate attempt to overturn the results.

So far, they’ve been utterly unsuccessful. Why? They have no evidence to back up their claims of widespread voter fraud.

Here’s a brief debunking of some of the baseless claims Trump and his lackeys are promoting in key swing states.

In Pennsylvania, a postal worker who alleged he saw a postmaster instruct postal workers to backdate ballots mailed after Election Day walked back his allegations when questioned by federal investigators. In a recording of his interview, the postal worker can be heard admitting he made “assumptions” based on snippets of a conversation he overheard, and declined to stand by his original statement.

And in a court case filed in the state, the Trump campaign claimed that Republican poll watchers had been barred from watching vote counts in Philadelphia. That was a lie: One of Trump’s attorneys admitted in court that the campaign did, in fact, have people in the room.”

In Michigan, Trump supporters circulated a list of over 14,000 voters who are supposedly dead but cast ballots for Joe Biden. CNN ran a random sample analysis of 50 of the names, and found no instance of a dead person voting.

They have tried to bolster their claim by circulating videos showing voters who have birthdates in January, 1900 returning ballots. But Detroit’s Director of Elections explained that “the date of January 1, 1900 is often used…as a temporary placeholder for absentee ballots arriving just before Election Day,” – information that has to be inserted in order for the electronic poll book to accept the entry.

Down in Georgia, false rumors of ballots being found in a dumpster behind the Spalding County Election Office circulated widely. But an investigation from the Sheriff’s office found that no ballots were found in the dumpster, and that conclusion was affirmed by the Secretary of State’s Office.

In Arizona, claims that the use of Sharpie markers on ballots would result in them being tossed sparked a flimsy lawsuit. But the Maricopa County Board of Elections, the State Director of Elections, and the State Attorney General all confirmed that the use of Sharpies did not result in disenfranchisement.

In Nevada, Trump campaign lawyers claimed they had evidence of “criminal voter fraud,” because some Nevadans had voted from out-of-state. In fact, the voters in question included military service members and their families, as well as students and Congressional staffers who moved out of state within 30 days of the election, all of whom are legally allowed to cast a vote in Nevada.

And the New York Times reached out to top election officials in every state, and all said they found no evidence of widespread voter fraud.Make no mistake: Trump and his lackeys have no standing to change the outcome of the election. But with GOP leaders pushing his lies, nearly half the country is coming to believe the election was stolen — and that is almost as dangerous.Joe Biden will be our next president. But we need to aggressively knock down every baseless claim made by Trump and the GOP, to defend not just Biden’s victory, but also, the trust on which American democracy is based.

Trump’s Last Attempt to Steal the Election Won’t WorkJoe Biden...

Trump’s Last Attempt to Steal the Election Won’t Work

Joe Biden has won. He will be our next president. 

Normally, the loser of the race would give a gracious concession speech, and accept the results. 

That won’t happen this time around, because Donald Trump is a pathological narcissist who will never admit defeat. But there’s no legal requirement for the losing candidate to formally concede - it’s just another tradition Trump will choose to ignore. 

He can bluster and protest all he wants, but like it or not, the Constitution and federal law establish a clear timeline of how electoral votes are processed, and when the new president takes office. Here’s how that process normally plays out, how Trump might try to undermine it, and why he is unlikely to succeed.

The first date to look out for is December 8th. After Election Day, states have until this date, called the “safe harbor” deadline, to resolve any election disputes. Each state has a unique process outlined in its state constitution for this, and the federal deadline was created so that state electoral disputes don’t drag on endlessly.

Next is December 14th. This is when the electors meet in their states, and cast paper ballots for president and vice president. And then governors certify the electors’ votes. 

The governor sends these certified results to Congress by December 23rd.

On January 6th, 2021, the newly sworn-in Congress meets in a joint session to officially accept each state’s Electoral College votes and count them. This is normally a ceremonial event in which the already-settled results of the election are simply made official. This is when the presidential race formally ends.

Lastly, on January 20th, the president and vice president are inaugurated.

Normally, no one pays much attention to this process before Inauguration Day because it goes off without a hitch. But we’ve seen that Trump will do anything to hold onto power. It’s important to know how and when he might try to undermine this process, and also understand how unlikely it is he’ll succeed. 

Trump backers are trying to push Republican-controlled state legislatures to appoint their own slates of Trump electors. That’s why the campaign has launched empty legal challenges to perfectly normal vote counts – trying to sow enough doubt to give the state legislatures political cover to appoint their own electors. 

This isn’t likely to happen. It would be challenged as an unconstitutional power grab, since state legislatures have almost always deferred to the results of the state’s popular vote in assigning electoral votes. And not to mention, it would spark massive public outrage.

Thankfully, it doesn’t look like Republican legislators in any of the key swing states want to expend their political capital defending a failed president, and some have even explicitly come out against this plan.

All this is to say, be patient, keep the faith, and don’t fall into Trump’s cry for attention. We must see this for what it is: A final attempt of a desperate, bitter man to cling to power. 

Joe Biden will be our next president.

Can Biden Heal America when Trump and his Allies Don’t Want it Healed?

In case you missed the news, Joe Biden was elected president of the United States. With almost all...

Thanking YouThe only good thing Trump has done is to awaken many...

Thanking You

The only good thing Trump has done is to awaken many of us to injustices that have plagued our country for centuries. 

Over the past four years, we’ve taken to the streets to raise our voices – from protecting the sovereignty of Indigenous land and water, to demanding an end to systemic racism and police brutality, to fighting back against nonstop attacks on reproductive freedom, and so much more.

This unprecedented wave of activism has made one thing clear: The American people are fired up.

And now we are taking that momentum to the ballot box. We are voting not only for ourselves and our family’s future, but for our community, for those whose votes have been suppressed, and for the survival of American democracy itself. 

We’ve made millions of phone calls, sent thousands of letters, and knocked on who knows how many doors. We’ve mobilized our families, friends, and neighbors to head to the polls. 

We are a multi-racial, multi-class coalition that’s come together in unprecedented solidarity to send this racist, narcissistic man packing.

FAQs About What’s Ahead

You’ve been in or around politics for more than 50 years. How are you feeling about Tuesday’s...

The Stock Market is Not the EconomyWhatever happens to the...

The Stock Market is Not the Economy

Whatever happens to the economy – jobs, wages, the hardships so many are facing – the stock market seems to be in a world of its own. Why?

The primary answer is simple. Stock values roughly reflect profits, especially anticipated profits. When profits are expected to rise, stock prices trend upward.

But that only raises a deeper question: How can profits be trending upward when jobs and wages are doing so badly?

Because of a disconnect in the American economy that began way before the pandemic – about 30 years ago. 

Before the 1980s, the main driver of profits and the stock market was economic growth. When the economy grew, profits and the stock market rose in tandem. It was a virtuous cycle: Demand for goods and services generated more jobs and higher wages, which in turn stoked demand for more goods and services.

But since the late 1980s, the main way corporations get profits and stock prices up has been to keep payrolls down. Corporations have done whatever they can to increase profits by cutting jobs and wages. They’ve busted unions, moved to “right-to-work” states, outsourced abroad, reclassified workers as independent contractors, and turned to labor-saving automation.

Prior to 1989, economic growth accounted for most of the stock market’s gains. Since then, most of the gains have come from money that would otherwise have gone into the pockets of workers.

Meanwhile, corporations have used their profits and also gone deep into debt to buy back shares of their own stock, thereby pumping up share prices and creating an artificial sugar-high for the stock market.

All this has made the rich even richer. The richest 1 percent of American households own 50 percent of the value of stocks held by American households. The richest 10 percent own 92 percent.

But it’s had the opposite effect for everyone else. More and more of the total economy is going into profits and high stock prices benefiting those at the top, while less and less is going into worker wages and salaries.

America’s CEOs and billionaires are happy as ever, because more and more of their earnings come from capital gains – increases in the prices of their stock portfolios.

Meanwhile, the Fed has taken on the debts many corporations generated when they borrowed in order to buy back their shares of stock – in effect bailing them out, even as millions of Americans continue to struggle.

So the next time you hear someone say the stock market is a reflection of the economy, tell them that’s rubbish! The real economy is jobs and wages.