Andrew Johnson's legacy; Trump's whitewash of insurrection

Click here for Heather Cox Richardson's April 15 Substack entry. It describes Lincoln's last evening, when he was shot to death in Ford's Theater by John Wilkes Booth.

How did Americans react after Lincoln's assassination, an attack on the American government itself?

At first, Americans wanted revenge against the men who had slain their president. After a two-week investigation in which they questioned hundreds of people, investigators identified ten people they believed responsible for Lincoln’s death. Booth himself had been killed on April 26 as officers tried to take him into custody. Another conspirator had fled the country. The other eight stood trial for seven weeks before a military commission in May and June 1865. Four were sentenced to death by hanging; four were imprisoned. 

Remind you of anything? After the January 6 attack on Congress, when 140 Capitol policemen were injured in an attempt to prevent the certification of the 2020 election of Joe Biden as president -- an election in which Biden won a 7 million majority of the popular vote -- the condemnation of Trump and the rioters was pretty much universal, just like the reaction to Lincoln's death. But what happened next?

But while Americans mourned Lincoln, the new president, Andrew Johnson, restored the political power of Confederates. On May 28, he issued a blanket pardon for most former Confederates except certain leaders and wealthy southern planters. Those he said could apply to him directly for a presidential pardon, which he promised would be “liberally extended.” They were. By December 1865 he had pardoned all but about 1,500 former Confederate leaders.

At the same time, Johnson either looked the other way or cheered as southern state legislatures passed Black Codes, laws that worked to push Black Americans back into subservience. Congress had adjourned in March 1865, the day of Lincoln’s second inauguration, and Johnson refused to call it back into emergency session after Lincoln’s death. When it convened in December, Johnson told the congressmen that Reconstruction was over. Northern congressmen simply had to seat newly elected southern congressmen—some of whom had led the Confederacy less than a year before—to end the unpleasantness of the war years.

As it turned out, the views of the Confederate leaders were not repudiated; rather, their treason was largely swept under the rug, supposedly in the interest of reconciliation and healing.

By the 1870s, after the establishment of the Department of Justice meant that discrimination based on race could result in federal charges, former Confederates switched their rhetoric from race to economics. Because most Black men were impoverished, their votes for roads and schools and hospitals translated into tax levies on white men with property. Former Confederates argued that Black voting was just a redistribution of wealth from white taxpayers to Black Americans, a form of socialism.

That rhetoric appealed to northern Americans who worried about immigrants voting in cities. Increasingly, they listened as former Confederates began to argue that their fight had not been to spread human enslavement—despite their many declarations saying exactly that—but to preserve individualism from a grasping federal government.

By the 1890s, towns not only across the South but also in the North and West were putting up statues of Confederate soldiers as symbols of true America.

FDR's New Deal programs were universally popular in an economically devastated South. But racist ideas were kick-started back to the mainstream when Truman ordered the integration of the U.S. military in 1948, and were juiced further in 1954 with a unanimous Supreme Court ruling in Brown vs. Board of Education. 

The idea that those embracing the iconography of the Confederacy were simply defending individual liberty against an overreaching government became an article of faith among the radical right, especially as the Republican Party complained that the taxes necessary to run a modern government that included everyone were promoting socialism.

In 2009, Elmer Rhodes started the "Oath Keepers," which HCR describes as "a right-wing gang." They joined the Proud boys in planning and executing the January 6 attack on the Capitol. Rhodes was convicted of seditions conspiracy; "Juries found at least a dozen other Oath Keepers guilty of seditious conspiracy or other serious crimes."

As soon as he retook office in 2025, Trump issued a sweeping pardon to the participants in the January 6 attack who had been convicted of crimes, including the crimes of using a deadly weapon and causing serious bodily injury to an officer, removing accountability for their attempt to overturn the nation’s democratic process and releasing them back into the streets. At the time, he commuted the sentence of fourteen of the leading Oath Keepers and Proud Boys, ending prison sentences that had been as long as 22 years.

Because he did not pardon those leaders, but commuted their sentences, their cases continued to work their way through the appeals court. Yesterday the Department of Justice moved to wipe out the seditious conspiracy convictions altogether. “The United States has determined in its prosecutorial discretion that dismissal of this criminal case is in the interests of justice,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Daniel Lenerz of the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Washington, D.C., wrote.

Like Andrew Johnson in 1865, Trump whitewashed the behavior of insurrectionists. (A big difference between the two: Unlike Trump, Johnson did not actually take part in the traitorous plot.) 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

"Without Precedent" -- a TERRIFYING book

Click here for Paul Krugman's Substack entry for April 11, entitled "Talking with Lisa Graves." He says: 

Lisa Graves is a legal activist and the author of a remarkable and terrifying book, Without Precedent, that documents the assault on democracy via the story of John Roberts. I spoke with her about how America has come to its current state, and what the future may hold.

"A remarkable and TERRIFYING book" indeed. It's a frightening interview about how Bush Jr. stole the election in 2000 with a great deal of help from Clarence Thomas and his wife, Ginni, and the Heritage Foundation. (There were other factors too; Google "Brooks Brothers riot"). Two Supreme Court vacancies came up immediately for Bush to fill. John Roberts became chief justice, and Samuel Alito was appointed as an associate justice. 

 Then came the case of Citizens United:

a 5-to-4 decision issued by the Roberts Court, where Clarence Thomas sat on that case — the fifth vote, in essence, on that case — even though a billionaire named Harlan Crowe had staked his wife Ginni Thomas with $500,000 to launch a group to take advantage of the decision to come in Citizens United, to allow these so-called C4 groups under the IRS code to spend unlimited money to influence elections. And Clarence Thomas did not recuse himself from that case, and even had the audacity to write a concurring opinion saying that disclosure of money being spent by these groups — who the sources are — would chill speech, meaning money, like the money to his wife, which he did not disclose.

And so that decision unleashed a tsunami of cash into our elections, where candidates are routinely outspent by the outside groups. And this has given a disproportionate, and extraordinarily disproportionate, power to billionaires in our society, in America, to secretly influence elections in order to get people into positions of power to advance their interests, like the huge tax breaks that Donald Trump signed into law at the behest of Charles Koch and his groups in the first term of President Trump. And again, similarly, in this second term of Donald Trump, the extension of those deeply unfair and destructive tax cuts for the richest few.

Krugman elaborates on the results of the Citizens United decision:

Citizens United was a decision that basically asserted that under the First Amendment, money is speech, and that outside groups that were not coordinating with the candidate — so-called independent expenditures — they could spend unlimited money, and they were not subject to the rules that the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act, BiCRA, otherwise known as McCain-Feingold, sought to put in place to deal with this sort of what they were calling soft money — money that was outside the campaigns that was not required to be disclosed.

So Citizens United and its progeny — a case called Speech Now vs. FEC — that’s what spawned these super PACs, where you have enormous money going into PACs, political action committees. That money can be million-dollar, even $10 million checks. For the super PACs that are operating in a particular way, they have to disclose their donors. But for the C-4 groups, which are these other nonprofits, they don’t have to disclose their donors.

And so what it’s created is a situation in which, on the one hand, a billionaire can now give millions to a super PAC in a way that they could not give directly to the candidate. They couldn’t just write a check to the presidential candidate or congressional candidate. They can do it now in an unlimited amount through the super PACs. And then separately, they can give tens of millions of dollars — unlimited money — secretly to a C-4 group that runs so-called issue ads. Those are the ads that say vote for or against this person, or call them because you oppose their policy. But it’s really obviously about influencing the election, and that’s the dark money that’s being spent in our elections.

Krugman says "The Times found that 300 billionaires represented 19% of all campaign financing in the 2024 cycle."

He goes on to say:

Wow. So if we look at someone like Peter Thiel, who basically bought a Senate seat for JD Vance. I don’t actually know the number, but the numbers we see may actually be only the tip of the iceberg.

 Graves explains the financing shell game:

So for example, the Republican State Leadership Committee, RSLC, has created a subgroup to target state Supreme Court races. And it’s the sole funder of the subgroup. So when the subgroup discloses who funds it, it’s disclosing its parent organization. So it doesn’t disclose how much of that money is from Leonard Leo, or how much of that money is from Charles Koch or Koch Industries or the oil companies that goes into the bigger pool of funds.

And so there are all these ways in which I believe that most of the money that’s being spent in our elections in America is not disclosed. It’s not disclosed under the campaign finance reports of the candidates, of the party, or the super PACs, because it’s the C-4 money that is most potent, because it’s the vehicle that allows them to hide the true funders — the biggest funders of these operations.

She goes on to explain the corruption of the nonprofit infrastructure in the U.S. -- "an enormous part of the U.S. economy" -- and how "a significant portion of that nonprofit spending is going into policy operations, operations that describe themselves as informing the public, as public education — not public schools, but educating the public."

Nonprofit institutions are funded by the fossil fuel industry:

And so it’s a massive distortion machine. We sort of swim in a political environment, a political and social environment, which has been greatly influenced, swayed by the amount of so-called research that these groups are putting out in order to advance the industry’s interests.

And this is part of what’s known as a third-party strategy that the tobacco industry really helped pioneer in America, where they were trying to fend off efforts to regulate tobacco and its cancer-causing effects. And so they didn’t want to run ads, for example, saying “tobacco companies say tobacco is just fine” — although they did say smoking was good for you — but they put forward doctors and, you know, so-called studies saying it was safe, even though the actual independent science was showing that there were carcinogenic effects in some instances of smoking.

And so that third-party tactic is what the fossil fuel industry and its CEOs are using. They don’t think that people would believe them if they ran an ad saying, “Hey, I’m Charles Koch. Trust me, all this fossil fuel money that’s making me the 23rd richest person in the world — it’s great for everyone. The planet isn’t on fire, and we can solve everything.” You know, instead, what happens is they fund these groups that do bus tours and they lobby Congress, or they do all these influence campaigns. And the objective is to protect the industry basically at all costs.

Krugman comments:

Right. And there’ve been some studies— I think by Oreskes and others—that demonstrated how among the alleged scientific papers that disputed the consensus about climate change, the percentage funded by the fossil fuel industry was basically 100. That this is an entirely manufactured thing by special interests. So you place a big emphasis on fossil fuels. Tobacco is kind of where the strategy begins. But fossil fuels are, in your view, at the root of this perversion of the U.S. system. 

Graves agrees, and goes on to say:

The fossil fuel industry is the most lucrative field of business in the world. And they’ve made so much money, you know, selling fossil fuels. And there’s a real intolerance for any limit. And in fact, when you look at a lot of the groups that have been funded in the US that are part of attacks on the EPA, attacks on the power of the Environmental Protection Agency to regulate carbon, when you trace those back, you can see money from the coal industry and coal barons. You see money from the natural gas—otherwise known as the methane gas—producers, the frackers and the compressing companies for those fracking for the gas and oil industries.

And you can see within that what’s happened: a number of these big CEOs — for example, the largest seller of compressed gas compressors in the United States for these big fracking operations — they’re paid an enormous amount for running these companies. And then they create a nonprofit that then fuels groups like the Heritage Foundation, American Enterprise Institute, and these other entities that are at the forefront of trying to stop congressional efforts to regulate carbon or to mitigate climate change.

Krugman comments how in the '70s oil crisis, part of the government response was price controls and a windfall profits tax on the oil companies; crude instruments that didn't function well, but still, unthinkable today. Graves responds by explaining the Powell Memo in 1971:

... just months before Powell was nominated by Nixon to the Supreme Court. And in that memo, the Powell memo, he wrote that American businesses needed to play a greater role in American society. And I think this is a laughable assertion. He asserted in 1971 that no one had less influence on public policy in America than the American businessman. That wasn’t true then. It’s certainly not true now.

And that memo helped spawn a new generation of investment in trying to capture these levers of power. And so demi-billionaires like Richard Mellon Scaife and others rose to that call to create this apparatus to oppose government regulation. For example, Scaife helped fund some of these early think tanks in the 1970s. But another key figure in that time was Charles Koch, when he had just inherited his father’s company in the late 1960s. He was very involved in these early right-wing movements. He personally, actively objected to those price controls. He started seeding groups in the Libertarian Party, an adjacent movement, before he ultimately tried to co-opt the Republican Party and move this into the mainstream of that Republican Party agenda, you know, with the help of Reagan, who had deeply antagonistic views toward regulation.

When you look at that period, that’s when Charles Koch, as a young man, claimed that America under Nixon was basically socialist because we dared to have any price controls. And then, in response to the efforts of Congress and the White House to address the oil crisis and the challenges that America was facing in terms of the energy crisis and the like, Charles Koch actually opposed the creation of a Department of Energy for the United States of America. He objected to that. And so those are very early parts of this movement that most people don’t know happened. You know, it’s obviously before Google. It was a bit below the radar. But that helped seed decades now — the 80s, 90s, the 2000s into the present moment — where those initial investments really took hold.

And I guess the key in some ways to their success is that I always describe Charles Koch as being the deepest, longest, most enduring funder of this effort to attack the regulation of carbon and the like. And he’s been at it now for, you know, going on 50, coming up on 60 years, really.

Krugman comments that "the billionaires got smarter and learned to play the long game," and "It’s the power of long-term thinking, except not on behalf of the human race."

Graves responds:

Yeah. It’s astonishing, because you can see there’s all these different assessments of progressive funding versus so-called conservative funding, and there has not been the type of investment in this infrastructure to push these fringe ideas into the mainstream on the left. It is just not how the funding works on the left. The right has billionaires and families of billionaires and children of children — proto-billionaires, you know, multi-multimillionaires back in the day — whose families have been at this for decades now. You can see it through the foundation work they’ve done, and how the different foundations have spawned other foundations.

And so on the right you see a very deep investment in moving these fringe ideas into reality, into legally binding rules for us, including to the Supreme Court. And on the left — for example, on the Supreme Court, or in the middle to the left there — there was this effort to not capture the Supreme Court, to try to put people on the court who had a reputation for fairness, and not because they were going to be someone who was driving the law to the left. But the right has been really disciplined in this court-capture plan, along with its plan to capture these other levers of power.

Krugman mentions the power of unions to resist such efforts, and how their power has eroded; Graves says

But can I add in there? Because part of what we saw was how Reagan came in with this hostility to unions, even though he’d led the Screen Actors Guild. He came in with this real effort to try to break the unions. And then that was met, ultimately, in the longer run, with big funding from these big foundations, including the Bradley Foundation, which had one of the biggest reserves in the country, and it was targeting unions to break unions, but also to break their political power, their political influence.

But when I traced this back, this so-called “right to work” movement — which is not about the right to work, but the right to break unions in these states — what you can see in the historical record is one of the early funders of that effort was Fred Koch. Charles Koch’s father, in the 1950s, was one of the big backers of this long-term campaign to limit the power of unions, the power of people to organize in unions, and also to basically try to break their political power.

On the power of the billionaires, Graves comments:

And so what’s happened is we have this political class of super-elite, super-rich people who have extraordinary sums at their disposal. So, for example, one of the richest men in America and in the world is a guy named Jeffrey Yass. He got rich on TikTok and also on these super-fast trades on Wall Street. He’s the richest guy in Pennsylvania. When he drops $1 million, $10 million in a race — let’s just put that ballpark out — it’s a huge sum, but from the standpoint of a dollar per dollar, the ratio is the equivalent of an ordinary American buying a coffee and a bagel once a week. It’s just nothing to them.

The article goes on at length about so much more: the fact that the fossil fuel industry, in terms of influence, is being rivaled by "the new rich" -- the tech industry and the tech billionaires, like Peter Thiel; crypto money, "the darkest of the dark money"; the quack medicine industry, and RFK Jr.'s MAHA movement -- "Make America Healthy Again" -- with its selective science; the rise of the influencer culture in the U.S.; the rejection of vaccines, and how RFK Jr. became very wealthy -- "as he took more and more aggressive positions against vaccines, how much more he himself was paid" -- $500,000 a year from the nonprofit group he was leading, attacking vaccinations. Graves tells of how John Roberts has orchestrated the destruction of large parts of the Voting Rights Act, and how the Act will be damaged even further by a case that will be decided this summer.

But what people don’t realize is that John Roberts cut his teeth on trying to block the extension of the Voting Rights Act, trying to block the repair of the Voting Rights Act after his mentor, Bill Rehnquist, helped destroy a significant component of that act, which was designed to prevent the dilution of Black votes.

Krugman: Right.

Graves: And so you have a person who was chosen for the Supreme Court not because they thought he would be fair, but because they thought he would be a ringer. And he spent his early days in the Reagan administration as a Reagan revolutionary at the top of the Justice Department, trying to block the renewal of the Voting Rights Act with the amendments to overturn a Supreme Court decision. He spent time at the White House counsel’s office for Reagan, trying to block civil rights enforcement. He has devoted his life to advancing this very far-right agenda.

And he was someone who, when he was nominated, was not met with any of the howls of “No More Souters,” which was the sort of campaign mantra from the Federalist Society of not wasting a Supreme Court seat on a fair judge. And so after Roberts was confirmed, Bush nominated his counsel, a Republican lawyer named Harriet Miers, to the bench. Robert Bork and these other right-wing leaders screamed that this was a betrayal of their movement, to appoint a Republican lawyer and not a loyalist. And so her nomination was pulled down and Alito was swapped in, and again, “No More Souters” was not chanted at him.

And so the Republicans were able to secure a court that is now operating like a lever of power, aiding Donald Trump, aiding the Republican Party at almost every turn. And that includes the counter-constitutional ruling John Roberts orchestrated in 2024, giving Donald Trump unprecedented immunity from criminal prosecution. And then he and his fellow Republican appointees married that decision with 24 rulings last year on the emergency docket, the shadow docket, basically telling Donald Trump he could go forward with extreme actions, extreme assertions of presidential power, that were contrary to the Constitution, statutes, regulations, but that he could proceed over the temporary restraining orders that lower court judges had issued. And so this court, in my view, is out of control. It’s in desperate need of reform. And John Roberts is helming this court that is on a path of destruction against our rights.

Krugman then asks her to explain the Supreme Court's "shadow docket":

So what most people don’t know is that the Supreme Court has about 8,000 to 9,000 petitions every year, and it only takes about 60 cases. It chooses 60 cases. These are all matters of discretion. They’re not required to take any of these cases unless it’s a state versus state case. And so the court is taking fewer cases, and it’s basically creating a docket where one year it’s about destroying the separation of church and state, another year is destroying reproductive rights, another year it’s destroying regulation of industry and carbon.

And then it has this emergency docket, which typically has been used for death penalty appeals. Someone claims at the last minute, “Please stop my execution,” and the court will issue a ruling, without full briefing, without oral argument, on an emergency basis. That emergency docket has been deployed by John Roberts and his fellow appointees as a shadow docket to basically change the law in America in significant ways over this past year in terms of policies on immigration policy, or allowing these mass firings to go on, allowing the gutting of funding for sciences and more. The court has allowed those things without having full briefings, without having a full opinion on it. They’ve just reversed the decisions of lower court judges.

And it’s significant in many ways because—as Judge Michael Luttig has talked about—this is a huge lack of transparency, a way in which the court is operating outside the bounds. But also, it’s the case that in almost every one of those shadow docket cases — where, again, no oral argument, no real public discussion, no opinion written — the court has intervened and overturned lower court rulings that temporarily blocked Trump, after those lower courts made factual findings that people would suffer irreparable harm and that under the law they were likely to succeed. What the Roberts Court is saying is: “you’re not likely to succeed. We are basically pre-reversing those cases.”

Then they discuss the 2024 "immunity decision": 

Krugman: So now let’s talk about the immunity issue. There’s been a lot of stuff in this since 2004 that is really horrifying. But the immunity for Trump is kind of the most glaring of them. And just tell us about that for a second.

Graves: Yes. This case that was issued by John Roberts — it was a 6-to-3 decision right before the election in 2024, and it invented immunity from criminal prosecution for a president. That’s never been the law in America. Ever. Not since the beginning. And that’s why there was a reaction to that decision, in part to have the introduction of the No Kings Act, because that immunity decision basically made Donald Trump king-like in his powers, by saying that he and any future president could not be held accountable for any crimes they committed.

When John Roberts wrote that opinion, he basically effectively pardoned Trump for the crimes he had committed. But he larded that opinion with additional assertions, trying to set the pardon power beyond any judicial or congressional review, asserting that there’s no limit on how a president can direct the Justice Department in its prosecutions, even though there have been longstanding limits in order to protect from the weaponization, the politicization, of the Justice Department to go after political enemies.

And so you have a situation now where you have a president who can commit crimes—and has committed crimes, in my view, and in the view of Jack Smith—who can commit crimes under John Roberts’ opinion. Hopefully this will be ultimately repudiated. He can pardon his co-conspirators, which is what he did when he pardoned the January 6th people who were convicted. But in essence, he could pardon any of his cabinet members or others—people on the ground in Minneapolis, for example—if he wanted to. He could pardon people who were engaging in illegal activity at his behest in foreign policy, war crimes, or domestically. And that would be okay under John Roberts. That is the essence of the destruction of the rule of law. If a president can break the laws, and he can order people to break the laws, and he can then give them immunity or pardon them for doing so, basically no law can hold.

And on top of all that, you know, it’s John Roberts who swears in Donald Trump on January 20th, 2025, where Donald Trump takes an oath to uphold the Constitution, to defend the Constitution. And yet John Roberts has just allowed Donald Trump to violate the Constitution in that immunity decision. A lot of people haven’t read the Constitution all the way through. I’m certain Donald Trump has never read more than maybe a sentence of it. But there are two duties in particular of the president in Article Two of the Constitution, and one is to uphold the Constitution. And nothing could be further from upholding the Constitution than breaking the law, than violating our criminal laws. And so John Roberts orchestrated this. It is a truly destructive decision that puts us all at risk.

They end on an upbeat note, talking of a reform movement that is working against these issues -- but all in all, I think "terrifying" is a good adjective to describe the article. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Krugman: "Ignorance and Ignominy"

Click here for Paul Krugman's Substack entry for April 8, entitled "Ignorance and Ignominy."

Krugman compares Iran's economy (GDP $0.5 trillion) to that of the U.S. ($28.75 trillion), and says "Yet Iran won. The Iranian regime has emerged far stronger than it was before, controlling the Strait of Hormuz and having demonstrated its ability to inflict damage on both its neighbors and the world economy. The U.S. has emerged far weaker, having demonstrated the limitations of its military technology, its strategic ineptitude and, when push comes to shove, its cowardice."

I like what he says next:

How did this happen? Naturally, the Iranian Minister of War credited divine intervention, declaring that “God deserves all the glory.” His nation, he said, fought with the “protection of divine providence. A massive effort with miraculous protection.”

Well, theocrats gonna theocrat.

But I lied. That wasn’t a quote from an Iranian official. That’s what Pete Hegseth, our self-proclaimed Secretary of War, said while claiming that one of the worst strategic defeats in American history was a great victory.

He goes on to say:

We were led to disaster by the boastful ignorance of men like Trump and Hegseth — boastful ignorance made even worse by claims that God supports whatever they want to do.

 

Trump guts U.S. Forest Service

April 9, 2026: The U.S. Forest Service announced that it is shuttering dozens of research stations and relocating its headquarters as part of a massive reorganization." (From left-center SFGate, a Bay Area news website.)

The article goes on to say: 

The agency’s headquarters will be moved from Washington, D.C., to Salt Lake City, according to a news release published last week. Sweeping closures are also set to take place across its research division: 57 of 77 research facilities across 31 states are set to close, and any remaining facilities will operate under a single research station in Fort Collins, Colorado. 

Six research facilities in California — located in Anderson, Fresno, Chico, Fort Bragg, Mount Shasta and Hat Creek — will close, according to the Forest Service’s website. All nine of the agency’s regional offices will also be closed and consolidated to operations centers located in Albuquerque, New Mexico; Athens, Georgia; Fort Collins, Colorado; Madison, Wisconsin; Missoula, Montana; and Placerville, California.

According to the Forest Service, these changes are taking place as part of an effort to “unify research priorities, accelerate the application of science to management decisions, and reduce administrative duplication.” Public land advocates, however, said the restructuring could be disastrous for an agency already faced with over a year’s worth of workforce shortages and budget cuts. President Donald Trump’s administration fired thousands of Forest Service workers in early 2025, a move that sent shockwaves through rural communities that depend on the agency for employment opportunities and the management of nearby public land. 

“This is nothing more than intentionally trying to create chaos,” Tracy Stone-Manning, the former director of the Bureau of Land Management and the president of a conservation nonprofit called the Wilderness Society, told SFGATE over the phone. 

Click here for an article in the Glenwood Springs, Colorado, PostIndependent, by Ryan Spencer, titled "U.S. Forest Service reorganization prompts concerns of further employee loss, impacts ahead of fire season." The article says:

All 10 of the Forest Service’s regional offices will close and move their operations to a “network of operational service centers” in Fort Collins; Albuquerque, New Mexico; Athens, Georgia; Madison, Wisconsin; Missoula, Montana; and Placerville, California, according to the plan. The reorganization also calls for closing more than 50 research centers across the country and “consolidating” research operations into a single organization headquartered in Fort Collins. 

This is coming "as the West faces record-low snowpack conditions that could make for a particularly dangerous wildfire season," and goes on to say:

The National Association of Forest Service Retirees — a nonprofit that includes hundreds of former agency employees, including seven previous chiefs — is among those that have raised concern about how the reorganization will impact the agency.

Bill Avey, the nonprofit’s chair, said he’s heard that thousands of the agency’s employees have received letters notifying them of possible relocation, though it’s unclear how many will actually be required to move.

“First and foremost, we’re concerned about ensuring that current employees have the support, both the technical support and leadership support, they need to do the important work the public expects on the public’s national forests,” Avey said.

 

 

 

Response to those who say Europe freeloads on America's military

A Twitter account called Very Brexit Problems posted the following:

MAGA calls Europe freeloaders. Here’s what they’re not telling you. ​

1. Ramstein Air Base, the most important US military hub outside America, is built on German land provided rent-free, with Germany contributing hundreds of millions to its upkeep. The US couldn’t replace it anywhere in the world. 

2. Every US military operation in the Middle East, Africa and Central Asia flows through Ramstein. Lose it and US power projection in the Eastern Hemisphere is crippled. 

3. The UK provides and maintains RAF Lakenheath used almost entirely by the US Air Force. Italy provides Aviano. Greece provides Souda Bay. Turkey provides Incirlik. European land. European infrastructure. American operations. 

4. The US Sixth Fleet depends entirely on European ports for fuel and supplies. Souda Bay, Naples, 11 Greek ports. Without them the Sixth Fleet cannot operate in the Mediterranean or project power into the Middle East. 

5. The majority of NATO’s intelligence and surveillance capacity is hosted on European soil and fed directly to the CIA, NSA and Pentagon. 

6. Early warning radar at Fylingdales, UK. Missile tracking in Greenland. Norwegian monitoring stations near Russia. All dependent on European goodwill. 

7. It would cost America MORE to bring the troops home than keep them here. European hosts subsidise roughly a third of all basing costs. 

8. Europe is America’s largest arms customer. Stop buying American and part of their defence industry goes bankrupt. 

9. The bases aren’t charity. They’re America using European soil, European money and European goodwill to project power across the world. 

10. We’re not the freeloaders.

"A whole civilization will die tonight" -- Robert Reich's reaction

Friends.

I don’t know how better to put this than to say Trump’s threat this morning to “wipe out a whole civilization” of Iran puts America into a new immoral universe.

He is directly threatening a war crime. And every one of us is complicit in it, in the sense that this threat comes from the President of the United States, threatening to utilize our nation’s military power to exterminate an entire people.

Regardless of whether Trump follows through on this threat, it needs to be repudiated immediately. No civilized nation threatens to wipe out another civilization. No people, through their head of state, threatens to exterminate another people. No human being vested with official power by human beings threatens to wipe out another part of humanity.

Those of us who are silent right now — whether we call ourselves Democrats or Republicans, whether we are in the military or are civilians, whether or not we hold public office, whether we like Donald Trump or detest him — must not remain silent.

It is our responsibility as citizens of this nation to say unambiguously that what Trump is now threatening is truly evil. It’s our responsibility as human beings to demand that Trump repudiate this threat to other human beings. It is our responsibility to call on all other Americans, in whatever capacity, to stand up against this despotic act of pure immorality.

Write. Phone. Shout. March. Trump has moved beyond indecency into the realm of insanity. This must be stopped.

Which civilization may die tonight?

Click here for Paul Krugman's second entry for April 7, this one a video, entitled "Our Darkest Hour." Here is the text, in full:

This is America’s darkest hour.

Hi, Paul Krugman with an update Tuesday morning. Earlier today, Donald Trump posted on Truth Social,

A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.

Not going to be a problem if we ever do get the war crimes trial that all of this deserves. A statement of motive, intent is completely clear.

I don’t need to say how vile it is. It is shocking, although at some level, if you didn’t see this as a real possibility, then you weren’t paying attention. Not much to say here except to talk about how those of us who are not Donald Trump should behave.

First of all, any military commander given orders to start destroying civilian infrastructure in Iran should disobey that order, should say it, should not even quietly resign. This is a time to stand up and make it clear that this is totally unacceptable. This is a violation of everything that the military stands for. It’s a violation of everything that America stands for.

Second, any member of the Trump administration: to continue in your position doing your job as Trump takes America on the course of becoming a criminal nation, a criminal terrorist nation, you cannot continue in good conscience.

Particularly, if you play any role in making this happen, then you are a war criminal too. Then you ought to be brought up someday before an international tribunal. But even if you’re in a peripheral role, even just putting your head down and saying, well, I’m an assistant secretary at the agriculture department or something like that, that’s not good enough. This is not a regime that you can serve in good conscience.

Republican politicians, any Republican, I mean, there are people already saying, “oh, you know, I don’t approve of destroying civilizations, but” — that “but” makes you an accessory to the crime, if you are failing to stand up against it.

And I really don’t like this notion that only Democrats have agency. This is a very common thing. All of this is made possible by the lockstep slavish obedience of Republicans. Nonetheless, Democrats have a role here, too. And this is not a time to attack Trump’s war because it costs too much money or to attack it because it’s bad for energy markets or raises the price of groceries. I mean, it does do all of that. All of that is true. But we’re way past that point now. We’re at the point where you need to unambiguously condemn the immorality and criminality of what’s going on. No mincing of words.

Damned if I know what’s going to happen. I mean, at some level, I think that the civilization that may be destroyed tonight is our own. I mean, are we civilized if we do this kind of thing? If America as a nation doesn’t stand up against this, what are we?

So, God help us. Normal life will continue. It’s going to be a really weird thing to be out there, you know, grocery shopping and taking the subway and all of those things. But this is, in a way, the defining moment. The fate of the whole American idea is on the line.

I have no idea how this ends.

 

MAGA vs. Science (science is losing)

Click here for Paul Krugman's Substack entry for April 7, entitled :MAGA Is Winning Its War Against U.S. Science."

With all the other terrible news right now, you may not have noticed that Donald Trump is in the process of killing American science.

OK, that’s an exaggeration — but not that much of an exaggeration. The Trump administration’s latest budget proposal calls for a gigantic increase in military spending combined with severe cuts to social programs. But as the chart above shows, it also calls for debilitating reductions in research funding.

Furthermore, Trump appointees have already been strangling science by sharply reducing the rate at which research grants are approved.

Krugman has graphs for proposed budget changes, 2025-2027; number of new grants approved by the National Science Foundation (more or less steady from 2015-2024, with a precipitous drop in 2025); student visas issued (steep decline), institutional location of authors of papers published in top 5% of journals (U.S. in steep decline since 1980, though far above all others; parity with the EU in 2020, and China surpassing strongly); percent trusting the scientific community (Republicans dropping steeply since 2009, then precipitously since 2017; Democrats steady until 2009, then rapidly rising); fractions of donations going to Republicans, by scientific field (physical, life, health, and social dropping sharply).

Why are there almost no Republican scientists? It’s not a mystery. GOP political orthodoxy includes positions that are at odds with the scientific consensus on multiple issues, ranging from the validity of the theory of evolution, to the reality of climate change, to the efficacy and safety of vaccines. In each case the scientific consensus is solidly grounded in evidence. But even before the rise of MAGA the U.S. right was increasingly hostile to evidence-based policymaking — especially, of course, where the evidence is unfavorable to fossil fuel interests or quack medicine, both financial mainstays of right-wing politics.

So scientists don’t support Republicans, and the feeling is mutual. Today’s Republican Party doesn’t like science or scientists. It doesn’t like having its preconceived views challenged by appeals to evidence. It knows that very few scientists are on its side electorally. In general, it sees scientific research as a threat to its grasp on political power.

Add in MAGA’s combination of rabid anti-intellectualism and allergy to any hint of criticism, and one has the makings of a drastic anti-science turn in policy. “Ignorance is strength” might was well be an official MAGA motto.

And as I said, we aren’t talking about something that will happen over the course of multiple years: The U.S. scientific enterprise is threatened with severe damage, even collapse, over just the next year.

There are many reasons to find this prospect horrifying: Think of all the beneficial advances, affecting almost every part of life, that won’t happen because U.S. science — still crucial to the world — has been eviscerated.

But think, also, of America’s international standing. Can a nation that has forfeited its role as a leader, or even a contender, in global science, still be a Great Power?

No.

Krugman calls Trump a terrorist

Click here for Paul Krugman's Substack entry for April 6, entitled "The Terrorist in Chief." Here's the text of Trump's tweet from Easter Sunday that he's responding to:

Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell – JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah. President DONALD J. TRUMP

Characterizing Trump's tweet as terrorism, Krugman says:

... terrorism is a strategy of the weak. It’s what extremists do when they lack the ability to achieve their goals through military action or other non-criminal means.

And that’s where Trump and his officials find themselves. They inherited a powerful military (which they are rapidly degrading), but for all its firepower this military lacks the wherewithal to open the Strait of Hormuz to normal traffic. So the Trumpists are gearing up to impose suffering and death on innocent civilians instead, even though this suffering and death will do nothing to achieve America’s objectives.

He suggests that military officers may invoke their right and duty to disobey illegal orders. (He doesn't mention the possibility that they may be asked to drop a nuclear weapon.) 

He concludes:

The horrible but undeniable fact right now is that America has a terrorist president. And the whole world knows it. But we still have a chance to show the world that he is an aberration, that we are not a terrorist nation. And we can do that by standing up for the values that have always defined us. 

 

 

R. Buckminster Fuller (1895-1983) had it right.

Wikipedia calls him "an American architect, systems theorist, writer, designer, inventor, philosopher, and futurist." He coined the terms "Spaceship Earth" and "synergetics" and popularized the geodetic dome. 

R. Buckminster Fuller’s words, “It is now highly feasible to take care of everybody on Earth at a higher standard of living than any have ever known,” are as timely today as when he first said them. Fuller’s belief that humanity has the tools and the resources to create a better world for all is not just an idealistic dream – it’s a practical reality waiting to unfold. We have the technology, the knowledge, and the innovation needed to ensure that everyone has access to clean water, food, shelter, and healthcare. What’s missing is the collective will to make it happen.

 

Fuller’s vision challenges us to rethink how we approach global problems. In his view, the systems we’ve built are outdated and increasingly irrelevant. We no longer need to operate under the mindset of scarcity; with the technology at our disposal, we can create abundance for all. His vision isn’t about redistributing what we already have, but about unlocking the potential that already exists within our society. It’s about using our collective resources to build a world that works for everyone.

 

He argued that selfishness and war are unnecessary in a world where technology can provide for everyone. If we can transform the vast amounts of resources at our disposal into tools for living rather than weapons of destruction, we can change the very course of humanity. Fuller believed in the potential for a utopian society – not through force or war, but through the thoughtful application of science, design, and cooperation.

 

This is the essence of Fuller’s philosophy: a world where technology serves people, not the other way around. As we continue to advance, we must challenge the status quo and strive for a future that reflects the abundance of possibilities rather than the limitations imposed by outdated systems. The world that Fuller envisioned is within our grasp – we simply need the courage to build it.

His words are a call to action, urging us to shift our focus from competition and conflict to collaboration and innovation. It’s time for a new kind of thinking, one that embraces the potential of humanity and technology working together for the common good.

 

Trump steals $1.25 billion in taxpayer dollars to bolster him as king of the world.

Click here for an article at MSN by Michael Rainey titled "Trump shifts $1.25 billion in State Department funds to his board of peace."

The Trump administration has redirected $1.25 billion from the State Department to President Trump’s Board of Peace, according to a report in Semafor Thursday. The money was intended to fund disaster relief and peacekeeping operations but is now being used to help fulfill Trump’s pledge to provide more than $1 billion for the board.  

According to Semafor’s Eleanor Mueller, the Trump administration moved $1 billion from international disaster assistance at the State Department to the Board of Peace. Another $200 million was shifted from peacekeeping, and $50 million from international programs. 

Trump established the Board of Peace by executive order earlier this year as a vehicle to oversee the planned reconstruction of Gaza, though the mission has expanded to embrace the general promotion of peace in areas marked by conflict. Trump named himself as chairman of the “public international organization,” which nations can join permanently after paying a $1 billion initiation fee. 

Trump said last month that ultimately, he wants the U.S. to give $10 billion to the organization, which he described as “the Greatest and Most Prestigious Board ever assembled at any time, any place.” 

 

 

Billionaire Political Influencers

Click here for Robert Reich's Substack entry for April 3, entitled "Who's the Biggest Money Behind the Throne?" It's a discussion of the major billionaire contributors to Trump and other right-wing causes.

As of March 1, according to a new report from Americans for Tax Fairness, the 50 biggest-spending billionaires in American politics had already contributed over $433 million to the upcoming midterm political campaigns.

Not surprisingly, 80 percent of this haul is in support of Republican candidates or conservative issue groups.

Reich gives an overview of the five major contributors: 

1. Elon Musk, $72 million, who  "contributed a total of $278 million in the 2024 election cycle, mostly for getting Trump reelected. His 'investment' has paid off nicely. Musk’s net worth has grown 220 percent since Trump won in 2024"; 

2,  Jeff Yass, $55 million: a Wall Street financier, major investor in Tik Tok, whose donations came "as Trump repeatedly delayed the sale, saving Yass’s lucrative investment";

3, Greg Briockman, $25 million, an AI tech mogul;

4. Dick Uihlein,  $15.8 million, to various right-wing causes; 

5.  Stephen Schwarzman, $15 million, private equity mogul (Blackstone). who has built a career on predatory business practices and disregard for the public good, while leveraging his immense wealth to rig the system in his favor."

Reich lists 10 more major donors, 3 of whom favor Democratic causes and candidates. The names are Singer (D), Warren, Simon Rickets, Koch (the Koch family has spent $12 million; how the mighty have fallen), Reyes, Wynn, Winklevoss, Pritzker (D), and Eychaner (D). 

Reich concludes:

Billionaires are not singularly responsible for corrupting our system of government, of course — and not all billionaires are doing this.

But as wealth continues to concentrate at the top, America finds itself in a doom loop in which giant campaign donations from the super-rich buy political decisions that make them even richer.

 

 

The Cornerstone Speech; U.S. Senator Alexander Stephens, 1861

Click here for Heather Cox Richardson's Substack diary entry for March 21, 2026.

On March 21, 1861, former U.S. senator Alexander Stephens of Georgia delivered what history has come to know as the Cornerstone Speech, explaining how the ideology and power of elite enslavers in the American South were about to usher in a new era in world history.

Speaking in Savannah, Georgia, just before he became the vice president of the Confederate States of America, Stephens set out to explain once and for all the difference between the United States and the Confederacy. That difference, he said, was human enslavement. The American Constitution had a crucial defect at its heart, he said: it based the government on the principle that humans were inherently equal. Confederate leaders had fixed that problem. They had constructed a perfect government because they had corrected the Founding Fathers’ error. The “cornerstone” on which the Confederate government rested was racial enslavement.

 And then:

Less than a month after Stephens gave the Cornerstone Speech, the Confederates fired on a federal fort in Charleston Harbor, and the Civil War began.In 1863, using his authority under the war powers, Abraham Lincoln— now president of the United States— declared enslaved Americans free in the areas still controlled by the Confederates. In 1865, Congress passed and sent off to the states for ratification the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, prohibiting human enslavement except as punishment for crime and giving Congress the power to enforce the amendment. The states approved the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution in 1865. 

And finally:

Rejecting the worldview Stephens thought would come to dominate the globe, Americans used the moment in which men like Stephens reached for supremacy to enshrine the principles of the Declaration of Independence into the American Constitution. The Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth amendments ushered in a very different sort of new era than Stephens imagined. It was, in large part, the tearing apart of old political systems under those like Stephens that permitted the rise of new ones that redefined the United States. Stephens thought he was heralding a new world, but in fact he marked the end of an era.

The shaping of the next era belonged not to him, but to others with a clearer view of both the meaning of the United States of America, and of humanity.

 

Fraudster pardons fellow fraudsters, promises to eliminate fraud

On March 17, Trump signed an executive order creating a Task Force to ELIMINATE Fraud.

According to Ron Shillman on Twitter, here are people convicted of fraud and pardoned by Trump this term -- and he's only been in office a little over a year: 

Jason Galanis — ~$200M+ 

Joseph Schwartz — ~$38M 

Lawrence Duran — ~$205M (Medicare fraud)

Carlos Watson — ~$60M investor fraud

Trevor Milton — ~$20M+ investor losses 

Todd Chrisley — ~$30M bank fraud 

Julie Chrisley — ~$30M bank fraud 

Devon Archer — ~$60M tribal bond scheme 

George Santos — ~$44K–$1M+ (multiple fraud schemes) 

Michele Fiore — ~$70K charity fraud 

Brian Kelsey — ~$90K campaign finance fraud 

Scott Jenkins — ~$75K bribery/fraud scheme 

Paul Walczak — ~$10M+ tax fraud 

Adriana Camberos — ~$1M+ counterfeit/fraud 

Trump's "Save America Act" explained

Click here for an article in The Guardian by Rachel Leingang, March 13, titled "What does Trump's restrictive voting bill include -- and does it have a chance of becoming law?" The subtitle is "Every voter would be affected by the Save America Act, as people would face more barriers to voting: 'It's a recipe for disaster.'"

Senate Republicans say they don't have enough votes, so the bill will fail -- but "While the fate of the legislation remains unclear, the damage may already be done. If it doesn’t pass, the talking points surrounding it will play into false election narratives for Trump and his allies, giving fodder for ongoing conspiracies about stolen elections."

Here's the problem:

Even if the bill doesn’t pass, talking points around it will animate the midterms. Trump is likely to use his bully pulpit to falsely claim noncitizens are voting en masse in US elections, and that Democrats and some Republicans stood in his way to prevent addressing the problem through the Save America act.

The bill is another way Trump has tried to assert more control over elections, which are run by state and local officials in manners set by state and local rules.  Trump has suggested that the US government should federalize elections. An executive order he issued that attempted to enact many of the Save act’s provisions has largely been blocked by the courts. In early February, he said on a podcast that Republicans should “take over” and “nationalize” elections in 15 states to protect the party from being voted out of office.

Voting rights advocates are concerned that he will claim election results are invalid in places that don’t require proof of citizenship, Bedekovics said. The bill relies on a false narrative of voter fraud by noncitizens, and the Save America act gives another way to revive that narrative and dispute results, Persad said.

“This is likely an attempt to sow the seeds of doubt about an election that the president appears to believe his party is going to lose,” Becker said.

The Republicans are trying to end democracy in the U.S. They want a North Korean-type state, where there is no dissent and everyone bows to The Dear Leader, and where Democrats can never win another election.