Citizen Cartwright

Biden’s concern as he departs: Oligarchy of the ultrawealthy

In his Oval Office farewell speech Wednesday night, the president said, “I want to warn the country of some things that give me great concern … the dangerous concentration of power in the hands of a very few ultrawealthy people, and the dangerous consequences if their abuse of power is left unchecked. 

 

“Today, an oligarchy is taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power and influence that literally threatens our entire democracy, our basic rights and freedoms and a fair shot for everyone to get ahead.”

 

(Federal Reserve data show that the wealthiest 0.1 percent of Americans hold more than five times the wealth of the bottom 50 percent combined, The Associated Press reports.) 

 

“More than a century ago, the American people stood up to the robber barons back then and busted the trusts,” Biden said. “They didn’t punish the wealthy. They just made the wealthy play by the rules everybody else had. Workers want rights to earn their fair share. You know, they were dealt into the deal, and it helped put us on the path to building the largest middle class, the most prosperous century any nation the world has ever seen. We’ve got to do that again.”

 

Biden said: “You know, in his farewell address [in 1961], President Eisenhower spoke of the dangers of the military-industrial complex. He warned us that about, and I quote, ‘The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power.’”

 

“I’m equally concerned about the potential rise of a tech-industrial complex that could pose real dangers for our country as well.”

 

Biden also said: “We need to get dark money — that’s that hidden funding behind too many campaign contributions — we need to get it out of our politics. We need to enact an 18-year time limit, term limit, time and term, for the strongest ethics — and the strongest ethics reforms for our Supreme Court. We need to ban members of Congress from trading stock while they are in the Congress. We need to amend the Constitution to make clear that no president, no president is immune from crimes that he or she commits while in office.”

 

Biden expressed his thanks to the American people and said that after his 50 years of public service, “Now it’s your turn to stand guard. May you all be the keeper of the flame. May you keep the faith. I love America. You love it, too.”

 

Here is the full transcript of Biden’s speech, from The New York Times.

‘Just Mercy’ author on progress in criminal justice

Bryan Stevenson, a lawyer and executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative, was interviewed by the PBS NewsHour on Wednesday on how his book “Just Mercy” has changed the criminal justice system and the public's understanding of it since the book was published 10 years ago.

 

“When I started doing this work 40 years ago, there were very few organizations, there were very few resources available to people who were in jails and prisons, people wrongly convicted, people condemned to die,” Stevenson says.

 

“But certainly in the last 10 years, that has shifted enormously. We have had eight states abolish the death penalty. The rates of incarceration have dropped. We're no longer seeing that steady increase that we saw during the last decades of the 20th century. We have seen some real significant reforms.

 

“Most of the young people that I wrote about in ‘Just Mercy’ who were condemned to die in prison when they were 13 and 14 have been released and they're now out. So I have been really encouraged by the success we have seen over the last decade, but more so by the number of people who are now engaged on these issues, on campuses, in policy spaces, in legislatures.”

 

“We have had a legal system for a long time that treats you better if you're rich and guilty than if you're poor and innocent.

 

“And we haven't been concerned about changing that because we have just ignored this population. And I think by highlighting the people and the stories, that has shifted. And when you make the kind of mistakes that we have made — this year, we saw the 200th person exonerated after being sentenced to death.”

 

“For me, invoking mercy, invoking grace, invoking this idea that the criminal justice system isn't just about the people we are prosecuted, it's also about us, it's about what kind of society we live in, what kind of community we create when we tolerate injustice and inequality.”

 

You can watch the full interview or read the transcript here.

A quick explainer of how we got to this political moment

Long-time journalist and National Book Award-winner George Packer offers us some context for our current political situation in an Atlantic article. Here are some excerpts:

 

“The Roosevelt Republic — the progressive age that extended social welfare and equal rights to a widening circle of Americans — endured from the 1930s to the 1970s. At the end of that decade, it was overthrown by the Reagan Revolution, which expanded individual liberties on the strength of a conservative free-market ideology, until it in turn crashed against the 2008 financial crisis. 

 

“The era that followed has lacked a convincing name and a clear identity. It’s been variously called the post–post–Cold War, post-neoliberalism, the Great Awokening, and the Great Stagnation. 

 

“But the 2024 election has shown that the dominant political figure of this period is Donald Trump, who, by the end of his second term, will have loomed over American life for as long as Franklin D. Roosevelt’s dozen years as president. We are living in the Trump Reaction.”

 

“This new era is neither progressive nor conservative. The organizing principle in Trump’s chaotic campaigns, the animating passion among his supporters, has been a reactionary turn against dizzying change, specifically the economic and cultural transformations of the past half century: the globalization of trade and migration, the transition from an industrial to an information economy, the growing inequality between metropolis and hinterland, the end of the traditional family, the rise of previously disenfranchised groups, the ‘browning' of the American people." 

 

“For two and a half centuries American politics alternated between progressive and conservative periods, played between the 40-yard lines of liberal democracy. The values of freedom, equality, and rule of law at least received lip service; the founding documents enjoyed the status of civic scripture; the requisite American mood was optimism. 

 

“Although reaction has dominated local or regional (mainly southern) politics, it’s something new in our national politics — which explains why Trump has been misunderstood and written off at every turn. Reaction is insular and aggrieved, and it paints in dark tones. It wants to undo progress and reverse history, restoring the nation to some imagined golden age when the people ruled. They want a strongman with the stomach to trample on the liberal pieties of the elites who sold them out.

 

“This is why so many voters are willing to tolerate — in some cases, celebrate — Trump’s vile language and behavior; his love affairs with foreign dictators; his readiness to toss aside norms, laws, the Constitution itself. Asked by pollsters if they’re concerned about the state of democracy, these voters answer yes — not because they fear its demise, but because it has already failed them. They don’t think Trump will destroy democracy; he’ll restore it to the people.”

Biden apologizes to Native Americans for 150-year forced boarding school policy

On, Friday he became the first sitting U.S. president to apologize for the systemic abuse generations of Indigenous children endured in boarding schools at the hands of the federal government.

 

The United States removed Indigenous children as young as 4 from their homes and sent them away to the schools, where they were stripped of their cultures, histories and religions and beaten for speaking their languages. 

 

“We should be ashamed,” Biden said to Indigenous people, including tribal leaders, survivors and their families, gathered at the Gila River Indian Community outside Phoenix. Biden called the system “one of the most horrific chapters in American history,” while acknowledging the decades of abuse inflicted on children and widespread devastation left behind. 

 

Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., who introduced a bill last year to establish a truth and healing commission to address the harms caused by the boarding school system, called the apology “a historic step toward long-overdue accountability for the harms done to Native children and their communities.” 

 

The schools were intended both to assimilate Native American, Alaska Native and Native Hawaiian children and to dispossess tribal nations of their land, according to an Interior Department investigation launched by Secretary Deb Haaland, the first Native American to lead the agency. A member of the Pueblo of Laguna, Haaland commissioned the investigation in 2021.

 

The investigation documented the cases of more than 18,000 Indigenous children, of whom 973 were killed. The report and independent researchers say the overall number was much higher.

 

As part of the investigation, former students recounted harmful and often degrading treatment they endured at the hands of teachers and administrators while separated from their families. Descendants spoke about traumas that have passed down through generations and are seen in broken relationships, substance abuse and other social problems that plague reservations today. 

 

Bill Hall, 71, of Seattle, was 9 when he was taken from his Tlingit community in Alaska and forced to attend a boarding school, where he endured years of physical and sexual abuse that led to many more years of shame. He and others long have been advocating for resources to redress the harm.

 

Congress laid the framework for the nationwide boarding school system for Native Americans in 1819 under the fifth president, James Monroe. The last of the schools opened in 1969, the same year that a Senate report declared the boarding school system a national tragedy. It found that the schools were grossly underfinanced, academically deficient and had a “major emphasis” on discipline and punishment.

 

The forced assimilation policy was finally and officially rejected with the enactment of the Indian Child Welfare Act in 1978, but the government never fully investigated the boarding school system until the Biden administration.

 

The schools, similar institutions and related assimilation programs were funded by a total of $23.3 billion in inflation-adjusted federal spending, officials say. Religious and private institutions that ran many of the schools received federal money as partners in the effort to “civilize” Indigenous students.

 

Here is a transcript of Biden’s apology, from the White House.

 

And here is more on the boarding schools, from the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian.

U.N. General Assembly approves ‘Pact for the Future’

The pact is a consensus pledge among the 193 nations of the General Assembly to do more on issues including sustainable development, climate change, artificial intelligence, elimination of nuclear weapons, and youth participation at the national and international levels.

 

The 42-page pact calls for 56 actions. For example, the pact obligates governments to form an impartial worldwide scientific panel on artificial intelligence and to start an international conversation about AI governance inside the UN.

 

And the pact commits world leaders to overhaul the 15-member Security Council, to make it more reflective of today’s world and “redress the historical injustice against Africa,” which has no permanent seat, and to address the under-representation of the Asia-Pacific region and Latin America, says the Associated Press.

 

The pact was negotiated over eighteen months, led by Germany and Namibia. 

 

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz says, “The road [to implementing the pact] is rocky. But was that ever any different?”

Good news on global equality, food prices, sustainable natural resource use

Fix the News has switched from a weekly newsletter to twice a week. Here are the most recent editions:

 

August 23

 

August 21

Good news on child health, equality, energy use

Among the items this week in Fix the News:

 

— The mortality rate for Southeast Asian children under five declined by 72 percent between 1990 and 2022, UNICEF reports.

 

— Thailand will become the first Southeast Asian country to legalize same-sex marriage, after legislation passed the kingdom’s Senate on a 130-4 vote, says CNN.

 

— The world is investing almost twice as much in clean energy as it is in fossil fuels, according to the International Energy Agency.

 

And China’s solar power sector is providing more energy than Big Oil, says Bloomberg.

Efforts to heal partisanship

“The nation’s poisonous divisions, exacerbated by politicians, cable news and social media, and collectively known as the outrage industrial complex, have been much lamented. Less noticed is the counterweight, a constellation of nonprofits and other organizations like the Kentucky Rural Urban Exchange devoted to bridging divides — urban and rural, Black and white, LGBTQ and straight, left and right. Call it the kumbaya industrial complex,” says The New York Times.

 

“We have to be focused on what we call the exhausted majority — that’s 65 percent of Americans,” says Stephen Heintz, president and chief executive of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, a major financial backer of the proliferating groups trying to promote common ground. “It’s just not an efficient use of time to convince true ideologues to compromise.”

 

On Monday, with the backing of Rockefeller Brothers, the MacArthur Foundation, the Emerson Collective and others, a new group, Trust for Civic Life, awarded its first $8 million to 20 civic groups considered the most promising in their efforts to rebuild community and reinforce democratic values.

 

The first trust grants, chosen from more than 60 organizations, were announced in Boulder, Colo., at a Democracy Funders Strategy Summit on combating authoritarianism — “more evidence that bridge-building has become the hot new concept in a country looking for hope,” the Times says. 

 

Another $2 million will come later this year to meet the trust’s pledge of $10 million a year for community-level democracy efforts, says the Times. In this case, “democracy” is with a small “d” — emphasizing efforts to shore up the values needed to promote democratic pluralism, without explicit mentions of Republicans or Democrats.

 

In Minnesota, a Rural-Urban Exchange modeled on Kentucky’s is taking root. Braver Angels, a national organization, explicitly seeks to develop dialogue and respect across the political divide. 

 

The Lyceum Movement, hearkening back to early 19th-century efforts to forge communities in a new nation, is convening meetings and lectures in towns large and small in Iowa, Michigan and Minnesota, “trying to stand in for local institutions like churches, newspapers and service societies that have atrophied, replaced by a national tribalism,” according to the Times.

 

Lyceums began in the early 19th century to bring the brightest minds to small towns and rural lecture halls in the hope of bringing all the citizens of the fledgling American democracy into the communal conversation. By the outbreak of the Civil War, there were about 3,000 lyceums in the United States, says the Times.

 

NewGround is expanding from its Los Angeles base to train facilitators who foster dialogue between Muslims and Jews at one of the most difficult moments in the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. And at colleges and universities, BridgeUSA has established 65 chapters, hoping to make those who embrace dialogue the real campus radicals, not those who fall in line with the left or right, says Manu Meel, the organization’s chief executive.

 

“If you’re a student, you need to feel that the way you earn credibility is to be a bridge builder, not a conflict entrepreneur,” Meel says.

Groups planning how to preserve democracy if Trump wins

A "loose-knit coalition" of Democratic officials, progressive activists, watchdog groups and ex-Republicans has been taking steps to prepare for a potential second Trump presidency, out of concern that Trump’s return to power would pose a threat not just to their agenda but to American democracy, says The New York Times.

 

“Trump has made clear that he’ll disregard the law and test the limits of our system,” says Joanna Lydgate, chief executive of States United Democracy Center, a nonpartisan democracy watchdog organization that works with state officials in both parties.

 

If Trump returns to power, he's openly planning to impose radical changes, including plans to use the Justice Department to take revenge on his adversaries, send federal troops into Democratic cities, carry out mass deportations, build large camps to hold immigrant detainees, make it easier to fire civil servants and replace them with loyalists, and expand and centralize executive power, says the Times.

 

Ian Bassin, executive director of Protect Democracy, a nonprofit policy and litigation effort, says the planning for how to resist such an agenda shouldn't be seen as an ordinary policy dispute, but as an effort to defend fundamental aspects of American self-government “from an aspiring autocrat.”

“He is no normal candidate, this is no normal election, and these are no normal preparations for merely coming out on the wrong side of a national referendum on policy choices,” Bassin says.

 

Among the actions:

 

— While the Supreme Court last week rejected an attempt to nullify federal approval of the abortion pill mifepristone, liberals fear a new Trump administration could rescind the pill’s approval or use a 19th-century morality law to criminalize sending it across state lines.

 

So at least five Democratic governors — of California, Massachusetts, New York, Oregon and Washington state — have established stockpiles of mifepristone to guard against the possibility of a Trump administration using federal power to stop its interstate distribution.

 

California Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom has established a group called the Reproductive Freedom Alliance as a hub for governors to coordinate their strategies. Though nonpartisan, it’s currently composed of 23 governors, all Democrats.

 

— ACLU Director Anthony Romero says his group mapped out 63 scenarios in which a new Trump administration could pose a threat to individual rights and the rule of law. 

 

That exercise led the group to focus on four areas, for which it's drafting potential legal filings. Those areas are Trump’s plans for an unprecedented crackdown on unauthorized immigrants, the potential to further curtail access to abortion, firing civil servants for political reasons and the possibility that he would use troops to suppress protests.

 

— Democracy Forward, an organization formed after Trump’s 2016 victory that filed legal challenges to policies during his first term, has developed a 15-page threat matrix that covers issues including abortion, health care, climate, civil rights, environmental protection, immigration and the “weaponization of government.”

 

— There's also a widely held view among Democrats that many types of legal actions may be less effective during a second Trump term than they were during his first, says the Times. A Supreme Court remade by Trump is far more conservative and likely to be more sympathetic to his administration’s actions.

 

So people preparing for a Trump return to power are focusing on state-level actions that can be locked in before the 2024 election.

 

— Next month, the anti-Trump conservative group Principles First and Norman Eisen, who was a lawyer for House Democrats during Trump’s first impeachment and helped produce an “autocracy threat tracker” focused on Trump’s plans, are organizing a conference at New York University titled “Autocracy in America – A Warning and Response.” 

Good news on drinking water, the ozone layer, reproductive rights

Last week, our Friday Fix the News good-news fix was squeezed out by good news on global democracy.

 

So this morning, we have two editions of good news from our Australian Fix the News pals.

 

From the June 6 edition:

 

— Between 2015 and 2023, global access to clean drinking water in schools increased from 66 percent to 77 percent, basic sanitation increased from 68 percent to 78 percent, and basic hygiene rose from 58 percent to 67 percent, says Fix the News, citing a new report from the World Health Organization and UNICEF.

 

This means that "well over 200 million schoolchildren have gained access to improved water, sanitation, or hygiene services in the last eight years, a period of time which includes the severe disruptions of the pandemic,” says Fix the News.

 

From the June 14 edition:

 

— There’s good news on recovery of the ozone layer, which protects life on Earth from too much ultraviolet radiation from the sun.

 

Levels of hydrochlorofluorocarbons (HCFCs), the last ozone-damaging chemicals to be phased out, have been dropping since 2021 — the first decline since scientists started taking measurements in the late 1970s, the lead researcher of a study in the journal Nature Geoscience reports in The Conversation.

 

"This marks a major milestone in the recovery of Earth’s ozone layer – and offers a rare success story in humanity’s efforts to tackle climate-warming gases too [HCFCs are even more harmful greenhouse gases than carbon dioxide]," says the researcher, Luke Western of the University of Bristol.

 

— About 60 countries around the world have made their abortion laws more liberal in the past 30 years, according to the nonprofit Think Global Health. Only four — the United States, El Salvador, Nicaragua and Poland — have made their abortion laws more restrictive.