“Trump Is Pat Buchanan With Better Timing” feels like a current headline eight years after it ran in Politico.  Is America trapped in a rerun of the Republican Revolution of ’94, with the platforms of “presidential candidates Buchanan, David Duke and Ross Perot — the most visible figures of the political fringe” perpetually mainstreamed? The New York Times Book Review‘s Jennifer Szalai is convinced (“Ticking Time Bomb,” June 30). Or in one of the ’80s, “When Greed Was Good” — Jacob Goldstein’s headline on the facing page of the Book Review.

Goldstein writes that the cultural catchet of financial flummery made “the United States suddenly fall in love with finance while inequality skyrocketed,” suggesting Billy Joel-style verses about the likes of “Milton Friedman’s ‘Free to Choose,’ Jane Fonda, running shoes.” At the time, Mother Jones quipped that the rock star “ain’t ‘livin’ here in Allentown'” after “marryin’ a … fashion model.” Nowadays, an ode to Air Jordan marketing from Matt Damon, previously known for plugging Howard Zinn’s People’s History, raises few eyebrows.

The line from Gekko to Gingrich needs little elaboration when Szalai places the sociopolitical rancor of the early 1990s “atop a wreckage of junk bonds, bank failures and vacant skyscrapers” of “the debt-fueled growth of the ’80s.”  While Friedman was civil enough in his limited-government sentiments to be a PBS host, Szalai finds one of the most vocal supporters of Buchanan’s 1992 campaign in “the libertarian economist Murray Rothbard” who considered George Herbert Walker Bush’s re-election bid “too timid and polite.”

Szalai traces Rothbard’s “taste for conflict” to his juvenile insistence that “Communist aunts and uncles” were too harsh on Francisco Franco’s repressive rightist regime in Spain. Yet Rothbard’s pugnaciousness led him to positions unhinted at by Szalai’s selections. In 1988, he advocated voting for Democratic “cautious spender” Michael Dukakis since Bush was providing “only lip service to the free market.” His Libertarian Forum berated Friedman for providing “a free-market cloak for state despotism” in Augusto Pinochet’s Chile and recommended an “angry dissection of the intellectuals in the ruling class” by Noam Chomsky.

Buchanan offered meager warmth to his libertarian bedfellows, who he said “don’t know anything about American history” when Rothbard’s publications identifying the ills of intervention included four volumes on the Revolutionary period alone. Llewelyn Rockwell recalled that by 1995, Rothbard could see that Buchanan’s “commitment to protectionism was mutating into an all-round faith in economic planning and the nation state;” by 2002, hostility to international comity ranged from the Buchanan who “hates China and the developing world” to a President George Bush who “hates the Muslim world” (Rockwell would sum up his administration as “red-state fascism”).

Goldstein notes that Trump’s first presidential term ended with a release of the Michael Milken who personified “the ’80s financialization wave” from boom to bust; the Trump of 1989 drew Rothbard’s mockery for calling Milken overpaid “from his own lofty financial perch.” Real competition in business and political economy would cut Trump’s towering shadow down to size.

New Yorker Joel Schlosberg is a senior news analyst at The William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

1. “When History Doesn’t End” by Joel Schlosberg, CounterPunch, July 4, 2024
2. “SCHLOSBERG COLUMN: When History Doesn’t End” by Joel Schlosberg, The LaGrange, Georgia Daily News, July 5, 2024

Joe Biden and Donald Trump are both old men. We already knew that.

Neither’s brain can be honestly characterized as hitting on all the key cognitive cylinders. We already knew that.

They’re both compulsive liars. We already knew that.

Did listening to the two geezers argue about their golf handicaps in CNN’s June 27 “presidential debate” tell us anything we didn’t already know about them? Nah.

On the particular night in question, Biden came off as more dazed/confused and Trump as more fever-dreamy/hallucinatory but in any given week we can expect each of them to display characteristics of both mental status sets.

They’re both decrepit. They’re both deranged. They’re both demented. They’re both dishonest. Neither adds up (or seems to have ever previously added up) to much beyond the sum of those characteristics.

Even if  someone, anyone, could plausibly be “qualified” to “serve” as President of the United States, neither of these two would come close to making the list. If sanity, competence, and morals were the criteria, we’d be safer picking a random name from the Elizabeth Arkham Asylum for the Criminally Insane’s patient roster than choosing between Joe Biden and Donald Trump.

Fortunately or unfortunately, depending on how one looks at it, we don’t have to worry about “qualifications” — because it’s impossible for anyone to be “qualified.”

If you don’t believe me, maybe you’ll believe Abraham Lincoln: “No man is good enough to govern another man without that other’s consent.”

In 2020, only about 47% of Americans voted for president of the United States.

About 90 million  weren’t allowed to vote. How can they have been said to have “consented” to be ruled by the winner?

Another 82 million chose not to vote. How can they be said to have “consented” to be ruled by the winner?

As for the 158.5 million Americans who DID vote, they hardly displayed unanimity. Can those who voted for Donald Trump, Jo Jorgensen, Howie Hawkins, et al. really be said to have “consented” to be ruled by Joe Biden?

Biden only knocked down 51.31% of votes actually cast … and because so many Americans chose not to vote or were forbidden to vote, fewer than one in four Americans could plausibly be said to have “consented” to his rule.

This time around, instead of arguing over which incompetent liar should rule us, let’s start thinking about how to do away with a system that allows anyone to rule us at all.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter:@thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

As a former mayor of Portage, Indiana, James Snyder will forever remain known for three things:

First, steering $1.1 million in city business to Great Lakes Peterbilt for the purchase of five garbage trucks in 2013.

Second, receiving a $13,000 “consulting fee” from Great Lakes Peterbilt in 2014.

Third, getting the Supreme Court to pretend the “consulting fee” wasn’t a bribe.

The extent of Snyder’s “consulting” appears to have been showing up at Great Lakes Peterbilt and telling its owners “I need money.” Dealership employees denied any “consulting” ever took place, nor could Snyder produce any contracts, invoices, or work product to back his “consulting” claim when federal investigators started sniffing around. The dealership’s controller testified that the money was a reward for “an inside track.” Snyder stood convicted of violating 18 U.S. Code §666 — “theft or bribery concerning programs receiving Federal funds.”

On June 26, the US Supreme Court reversed Snyder’s conviction.

In a bizarre majority opinion authored by associate justice Brett Kavanaugh, the court held that payment for “consulting” that never happened wasn’t a “bribe” in violation of §666, but a mere “gratuity” not covered by said statute.

Let’s have a look at that statute. It applies to:

“Whoever … being an agent of an organization, or of a State, local, or Indian tribal government, or any agency thereof …. corruptly solicits or demands for the benefit of any person, or accepts or agrees to accept, anything of value from any person, intending to be influenced or rewarded in connection with any business, transaction, or series of transactions of such organization, government, or agency involving any thing of value of $5,000 or more.”

Snyder secured $1.1 million in business for Great Lakes Peterbilt.

Then Snyder “solicited” a “reward” and tried to cover it up with false “consulting fee” claims.

Seems like an airtight case … but the majority opinion uses worries about the absence of a set of bright lines to distinguish “innocuous” or “obviously benign” gratuities from “criminal” gratuities  to justify overturning Snyder’s conviction.

Writing in dissent, associate justice Ketanji Brown Jackson notes that “§666 was not designed to apply to teachers accepting fruit baskets, soccer coaches getting gift cards, or newspaper delivery  guys who get a tip at Christmas. … We know this because, beyond requiring acceptance of a reward, §666 weaves together multiple other elements (that the Government must prove beyond a reasonable doubt), which collectively do the nuanced work of sifting illegal gratuities from inoffensive ones.”

Why the perverse majority ruling? Your guess is as good as mine, but my guess is:

After getting caught accepting millions of dollars worth of bribes … er, “gratuities” … and “forgetting” to disclose them, certain among the justices would like to get the most lenient possible precedents in place versus their own potential future comeuppance.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter:@thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY