What Happened Today: September 06, 2022
Team Trump scores; UK elects its next PM; Russia makes Europe pay
The Big Story
Donald Trump won a big legal victory on Monday when a federal judge ordered the Department of Justice to pause its investigation of the documents seized from his Mar-a-Lago home pending a review of the material by a specially appointed third party. That outside party, known as a special master, was ordered by U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon, a Trump appointee, to determine whether any of the documents taken from the former president’s house in last month’s FBI raid were protected by legal or executive privileges. In her judicial order, Cannon was sympathetic to the position argued by Trump and his lawyers that the raid constituted a potential infringement on Trump’s privacy and might have been unlawful. “In addition to being deprived of potentially significant personal documents, which alone creates a real harm, Plaintiff faces an unquantifiable potential harm by way of improper disclosure of sensitive information to the public,” Cannon wrote. And while the DOJ has argued that Trump can no longer invoke executive privilege now that he’s out of office, Cannon called that an overstatement and said that certain cases may allow for the “possibility of a former President overcoming an incumbent President on executive privilege matters.” The ruling buys Trump’s team some time, but the momentum is still on the government’s side as it appears to be putting the pieces together for an indictment and continues to keep the former president on the back foot ahead of the midterm elections.
For a deeper analysis of the political motivations behind the raid, read Lee Smith on what the FBI was really after. Hint: It had to do with Russiagate.
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/fbi-raid-mar-a-lago-trump-russiagate-lee-smith
In the Back Pages: Barbara Ehrenreich: Chronicler of America’s Class Struggle
The Rest
→ China, once hailed as a model nation for its “zero COVID” response to the pandemic, has now partially or fully locked down another 34 cities. The lockdowns, which affect some 60 million people in the country of roughly 1.4 billion, were ordered in response to fewer than 7,000 cases. While many Western countries that had once imitated the Chinese approach to COVID-19 abandoned lockdowns over the past year in light of their social and economic costs, the Chinese have not wavered in their enforcement of the policy. According to the Asia Times, “After the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) announced last week its plan to hold its 20th National Congress on October 16, China Central TV said in an opinion piece that the West’s ‘living with the virus’ strategy was like ‘dancing with the demons.’”
→ After consistently claiming that repeated reductions in Russia’s delivery of gas to Europe were the result of infrastructure and supply issues, the Kremlin admitted on Monday that it has been withholding the gas as a political measure. Russia will not provide Europe with a full supply of gas via its Nord Stream 1 pipeline until the “collective West” does away with sanctions aimed at punishing Russia for its war in Ukraine, said President Vladimir Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov. On Friday, hours after the G7 nations made public their plans to put a price cap on Russian oil, which would drastically bring down its value, Gazprom announced new technical issues with its pipeline that would cause yet more reductions in its shipments to Europe. But on Monday, Peskov changed his tune. “The problems pumping gas came about because of the sanctions Western countries introduced against our country and several companies,” Peskov said, according to the news agency Interfax. “There are no other reasons that could have caused this pumping problem.” On this, Peskov and the “collective West” agree, with analysts in Europe noting that there are other pipes that, if the Nord Stream 1 did ever get damaged, could be used instead.
→ A seven-week contest to replace Boris Johnson as the United Kingdom’s next prime minister has concluded, with Liz Truss, the country’s former foreign secretary, beating former chancellor Rishi Sunak in a vote among Conservative party members by a 57-43 margin. Truss will be the United Kingdom’s 56th prime minister and its third female prime minister (following Margaret Thatcher and Theresa May), and she enters office amid mounting troubles. Particularly worrisome is England’s surging energy prices, set to almost double for most Brits come October, from £2,000 for the average family to £3,500. Truss might spend as much as 100 billion British pounds on an energy relief package aimed at helping households and energy companies keep these costs down by capping energy prices, although this puts her and her Conservative party at political risk in 2024, as Truss just won an election by campaigning as an heir to Thatcher’s famously fiscally conservative government.
→ Speaking of surging energy prices: After an announcement last week that ArcelorMittal, the world’s second-largest steelmaker, would be closing two of its European facilities due to high energy costs, Europe’s largest aluminum smelter has announced it will reduce production by 22%, part of a wave of cutbacks that Bloomberg reports “are threatening the industry’s very existence.” The company Aluminium Dunkerque Industries France is owned by a U.S. private equity firm.
→ The United States’ top medical schools are increasingly inviting applicants to weigh in on issues of racism and inequity as part of their applications. The inclusion of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) language in med school applications raises concerns that the questions are being used to “weed out” applicants who don’t support such initiatives, or “may constitute, or be close to constituting, compelled speech,” as a recent report from Do No Harm put it, which would amount to “a long-recognized violation of our country’s most basic values of free speech and freedom of conscience.” The report from Do No Harm, a nonprofit organization dedicated to “protect[ing] healthcare from a radical, divisive, and discriminatory ideology,” found that “of the admissions process at 50 of the top-ranked medical schools [...] 36 asked applicants their views on, or experience in, DEI efforts.” These questions range from asking in general terms about an applicant’s personal or communal experiences with inequity in medicine to more explicitly asking how an applicant will oppose “systemic racism, anti-LGBTQ+ discrimination, and misogyny,” as the University of Pittsburgh’s School of Medicine—ranked 14th in the country—puts it.
→ Tweet of the Day:
It looks like the head of Israel’s Mossad will have his work cut out for him this week.
→ Number of the Day: $10 million
The funds filched by Black Lives Matter leader Shalomyah Bowers for personal use, according to a lawsuit filed by the organization’s board in a Los Angeles court this past Thursday. The lawsuit alleges that this “rogue administrator” and “middle man turned usurper,” who was hired to help lead the organization in April, has been self-dealing by diverting donated funds to his own consulting firm, often writing eight-figure checks for providing services. This is not the first time the organization’s leadership has been accused of self-dealing or misappropriating funds: In April, co-founder Patrisse Cullors was found to have used BLM funds to buy a $6 million mansion in Los Angeles. Bowers, for his part, is appalled by the allegations. His organization released a statement arguing that embittered members of the Black Lives Matter movement are “falling victim to the carceral logic and social violence that fuels the legal system … They would rather take the same steps of our white oppressors and utilize the criminal legal system which is propped up by white supremacy (the same system they say they want to dismantle) to solve movement disputes.”
→ Quote of the Day:
It’s a bagel and a coffee, but when you’ve slept on the street, at 7 a.m. a bagel and a coffee is really helpful.
Amanda Rainey, the owner of Goldie’s Bagels in Columbia, Missouri, who recently hung a sign beside her cash register: “Whoever needs, come and eat.” The injunction comes from the Talmud and is recited each year at the Passover Seder, which is where Amanda and her staff came up with the idea to give free bagels and coffee to anyone who couldn’t afford them: at a staff Seder. They invite customers to donate to a Neighbor Account, which then pays for the bagels of those in need. Rainey is proud of this initiative and its origins in the deep Jewish values of supporting those in need: feeding people and eating good bagels. “My whole thing in opening Goldie’s,” Rainey told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, “is we’re going to be so outwardly proud to be Jewish.”
Read More: https://www.jpost.com/diaspora/article-716150
Additional reporting and writing provided by The Scroll’s associate editor, David Sugarman
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Barbara Ehrenreich: Chronicler of America’s Class Struggle
By David Sugarman
Barbara Ehrenreich, an incisive chronicler of contemporary capitalism and the American working class, passed away on Thursday in Virginia. She was 81.
Though Ehrenreich was a lifelong leftist, her influence has been broad. Her notion of the professional-managerial class—a term she coined with her then-husband in 1977 that seemed to capture the new bourgeoise of post-industrial societies—has helped define a new class-based mode of politics that can be found on the right as well as the left.
Born in 1941 in Butte, Montana, to a copper miner and a homemaker, Ehrenreich received a PhD from Rockefeller University in cellular immunology before deciding to become a journalist. “I’d been educated as a scientist,” she said in a 2018 speech, “and journalists have the same goal: finding the truth and getting people to pay attention to it.” She spent her writing career going “undercover” to observe the difficulties faced by American workers. Her writing, which often moved from ethnographic observation to critical analysis, led Ehrenreich to challenge accepted orthodoxies and those who espoused them, be it Democratic or Republican lawmakers, other feminists, or progressive leaders (a group to which she belonged after joining Michael Harrington to help launch and then lead the Democratic Socialists of America in 1982).
It was the 2001 publication of Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, a study of minimum-wage work in the wake of Bill Clinton’s cuts to social welfare in 1996, that brought Ehrenreich to national attention. For two years, she worked minimum-wage jobs as a waitress or a nursing-home aide or a chambermaid, making the federally mandated $5.15 per hour (that number has since inched up to $7.25) while navigating an exploitative low-rent housing market and surviving on the cheap, unhealthy food she could afford after rent. Ehrenreich noted that the skill and stamina required by these “low-skill positions” left her physically and emotionally exhausted and still too poor to pay for her needs, requiring that she take multiple jobs to make ends meet. The book became a bestseller and made Ehrenreich the most well-known analyst of working-class labor conditions in the United States.
Following Nickel and Dimed, Ehrenreich turned her attention from the working poor to the increasingly precarious American middle class. She went undercover once more—this time by trying to get a job in public relations—to write Bait and Switch: The Futile Pursuit of the American Dream (2005), which offered a prescient analysis of the difficulties faced by middle-class workers who, Ehrenreich found, were being replaced by younger, less experienced, less expensive workers. “I wanted to see what was happening, what happens to people when they get downsized, laid off, outsourced,” Ehrenreich said of the book. “What world do they enter, and how do they go about getting a job, and what do they experience? I found it’s very, very difficult to get a job. In fact, right now, 44% of the long-term unemployed are white-collar people, which is a historical change.” Three years after the book’s publication, following the 2008 financial crisis, which saw unemployment rise to 10%, the middle-class precarity Ehrenreich had documented exploded into a national crisis, the effects of which are still being discussed and analyzed.
There were other books—attacking the scams of the health and wealthness industries, on the inner life of white-collar workers, on feminist theory—but Ehrenreich’s most influential work may have been the 1977 essay on “The Professional-Managerial Class,” an essay published in Radical America that analyzed the group interests of the “salaried mental workers who do not own the means of production and whose major function in the social division of labor may be described broadly as the reproduction of capitalist culture and capitalist class relations.” These are the people who now dominate the industries of Progressivism, party politics, the American cultural apparatus, D.C. think tanks, and the media. The concept was met with hostility from Ehrenreich’s comrades—one of whom accused her of having “done more than anybody to destroy the possibility of revolutionary socialism in this country”—but has since become a term of both analysis and abuse. As Gabriel Winant put it in n+1 in 2019, “Spend time in the forums of socialists who’ve long been loyal to Sanders and critical of ‘identity politics’—Jacobin readers, say, or in the listeners of Chapo Trap House—and you’ll see ‘PMC’ everywhere, a sociological designation turned into an epithet and hurled like a missile.”
Ehrenreich, however, was “taken aback” by Winant’s piece, largely because she had also been attending to the challenges faced by the PMC—particularly well documented in Bait and Switch but still of interest and concern in her later thinking. In a wide-ranging discussion of the concept of the professional-managerial class with Alex Press in Dissent, she spoke of the PMC as a class “in ruins”:
Law schools fake the number of their graduates who end up with jobs that are even related to the law. You of course know what’s happened to journalists; we don’t get paid. College teaching [has been] totally undermined by essentially minimum-wage adjuncts. So I would say that what happened to the blue-collar working class with deindustrialization is now happening with the PMC—except for the top managerial end of it, which continues to do very well and perhaps amounts to about 20 percent of the population.
Batting away Press’ invitations to weigh in on internecine left-wing debates, Ehrenreich ignored petty politics in the interest of analyzing the conditions of U.S. workers. She wasn’t always popular, but Ehrenreich saw what was happening in the United States, where one class after another has had to work harder just to tread water, with unusual clarity. Notably, in the obituaries for Ehrenreich that appeared in preeminent organs of the PMC, like The New York Times and TheWashington Post, there was, perhaps fittingly, no mention of her work on the professional managerial class.
I learned a lot from this article -- thank you.
"Her notion of the professional-managerial class—a term she coined with her then-husband in 1977 that seemed to capture the new bourgeoise of post-industrial societies—has helped define a new class-based mode of politics that can be found on the right as well as the left."
Uhh...on the right, at least, Burnham's "The Managerial Revolution" (1941) and his follow-ups, were far, far more influential than Ehrenreich.