Rhys Blavier's News Feed

31/10/2024

"In point of fact, 2024 could well be the closest election Trump has run in to date when it comes to both the popular vote and the Electoral College. If Kamala Harris sweeps the Rust Belt while Trump takes the Sun Belt states, she would win with exactly 270 electoral votes, the absolute minimum needed to emerge victorious. This result is one that would, with near certainty, lead us directly into a full-blown constitutional crisis."

The election being determined by a single vote in the Electoral College would obviously lead to Donald Trump dusting off his 2020 playbook and fighting with everything he has to overturn it.

31/10/2024

🤣🤣🤣

MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell's company has refused to repay a loan that reportedly includes 360% interest fees. According to The Minnesota Star Tribune, Lindell's company took out the $600,000 loan during a cashflow panic last month. MyPillow agreed to pay $16,000 a day in interest as a part of the con...

30/10/2024

28/10/2024

"A key ally to former President Donald Trump detailed plans to deploy the military in response to domestic unrest, defund the Environmental Protection Agency and put career civil servants “in trauma” in a series of previously unreported speeches that provide a sweeping vision for a second Trump term.

In private speeches delivered in 2023 and 2024, Russell Vought, who served as Trump’s director of the Office of Management and Budget, described his work crafting legal justifications so that military leaders or government lawyers would not stop Trump’s executive actions.

He said the plans are a response to a “Marxist takeover” of the country; likened the moment to 1776 and 1860, when the country was at war or on the brink of it; and said the timing of Trump’s candidacy was a “gift of God.”

A key Trump ally detailed plans to deploy the military in response to domestic unrest, defund the EPA and put career civil servants “in trauma” in a series of previously unreported speeches that provide a sweeping vision for a second Trump term.

28/10/2024

"If Trump fits within any political tradition, it's a sort of blunt, low-cunning authoritarianism. MAGA, after all, is an authoritarian movement, just as today's GOP is a patently authoritarian party. But any two-bit goon can be an authoritarian; it takes at least nominal adherence to an ideology to be a legit, committed fascist.

Fascist true believers might have his ear. He might bellow fascist talking points at his rallies. He might admire fascists, living and dead. But far from an ideological warrior, Trump's animating principle appears to be a bone-deep, reflexive gangsterism wedded to frenzied self-preservation."

More and more observers have taken to painting the movement and especially its sundowning 78-year-old leader with a single, saucy epithet: Fascist.

28/10/2024

"The founder of the Proud Boys, the far-right group that played a major role in the January 6 riot at the US Capitol and was famously instructed by Donald Trump to “stand back and stand by”, has told the makers of a Trump documentary: “We want to make America hate again.”

The founder of the Proud Boys, the far-right group that played a major role in the January 6 riot at the US Capitol and was famously instructed by Donald Trump to “stand back and stand by”, has told the makers of a Trump documentary: “We want to make America hate again.” Gavin McInnes, the U...

28/10/2024

"An incendiary device was also found on or near a ballot drop box in downtown Vancouver early on Oct. 8. It did not damage the box or destroy any ballots, police said. The FBI and other agencies had been investigating.

Washington and Oregon are both vote-by-mail states. Registered voters receive their ballots in the mail a few weeks before elections and then return them by mail or by placing them in ballot drop boxes.

In Phoenix last week, officials said roughly five ballots were destroyed and others damaged when a fire was set in a drop box at a U.S. Postal Service station there."

SEATTLE (AP) — Authorities were investigating Monday after early morning fires were set in ballot drop boxes in Portland, Oregon, and in nearby Vancouver, Washington, where hundreds of ballots were destroyed. The Portland Police Bureau reported that officers and firefighters responded to a fire in...

28/10/2024

"NEW YORK—And at the end of the day, all that was proven was that these people can’t even be fascists with any kind of dignity. In February 1939, with World War II having already begun at the Marco Polo Bridge two years earlier (although nobody knew it at the time) and seven months before the Wehrmacht rolled into Poland, there was a famous rally in the old Madison Square Garden held in concert with the German-American Bund and the isolationist America First crowd. The latter was insignificant. It was a N**i rally."

The Garden hosted a N**i rally in 1939. Let’s remember that the lesser of two evils is still evil.

28/10/2024

"The reports follow others released in recent weeks that warn of an increase in online chatter about an impending civil war, as well as several incidents of violence or thwarted attacks before the election. Agents wrote that some extremists were “reacting to the 2024 election season and prominent policy issues by engaging in illegal preparatory or violent activity that they link to the narrative of an impending civil war.”

U.S. intelligence agencies have identified domestic extremists with grievances rooted in election-related conspiracy theories, including beliefs in widespread voter fraud and animosity toward perceived political opponents, as the most likely threat of violence in the coming election.

28/10/2024

“The rules are being rigged and the companies are helping to rig them,” Irit Tamir, senior director of Oxfam America’s private sector department, tells Fortune, speaking of company taxation that has gone down due to a strong corporate-lobbying presence."

"While money was seemingly tight for some, it was an equivalent of Christmas for those at the top: Stock buybacks in 2022 hit a record of $681 billion, per Oxfam.

The consolidation of power at the top has been a decades-long process. The concept of shareholder primacy started to take hold in the 1970s, per Tamir, who added that while companies started to prioritize this group, safeguards for workers were fading as union membership ebbed. In the 1980s, stock buybacks, once banned as a form of stock manipulation, became legal; Tamir says this change, specifically, allowed companies to inflate their stock prices. At the same time, corporate tax rates fell dramatically thanks to a series of tax cuts, first in the Reagan era and again during the Trump administration, while corporations gained more and more ability to directly influence politics, capped off with the 2010 Citizens United decision, in which the Supreme Court gave companies and wealthy individuals carte blanche to spend unlimited amounts of money on elections."

CEOs cite the need to downsize in a rough economy, but it seems corporations are doing better than ever.

28/10/2024

You can have one or the other, not both.

28/10/2024

I'm just putting this out there for anyone who hasn't figured it out yet...
Capitalism is NOT compatible with Democracy.