“Let’s not mince words here – for too long, the needs of the American people have taken a backseat to the needs of corporations that dump unlimited amounts of money into political campaigns,” said Congressman McGovern. “From gun violence to healthcare costs to climate change, the issues Americans care about have been held hostage by wealthy special interests. No more. We have got to solve this, and we have to overturn the disastrous Citizens United decision to restore the power of the ballot box and get big money out of politics.”
“In Citizens United, five Supreme Court Justices overturned two centuries of jurisprudence to determine that private corporations enjoy the political free speech rights of the people," Congressman Raskin said. "As hundreds of millions of dollars in dark money are spent by CEOs in the name of their unwitting shareholders, we are seeing what Court-ordered plutocracy looks like. But democracy is stirring. As the exciting 116th Congress convenes, it’s time we remind America of what popular government looks like—that’s why I’m proud to support this bipartisan Amendment to rebuild the wall of separation between massive private corporations and the people’s public elections.” https://www.citizen.org/news/twelve-years-since-citizens-united-big-money-

A year ago, a Trump victory was far from inconceivable—the grimly anti-incumbent mood of the American electorate, and the former President’s almost comically easy dispatch of a host of G.O.P. primary challengers who were, for the most part, afraid to criticize him, suggested that it was not only a possible outcome but even a likely one. Yet it is also true that, as 2024 began, Trump’s win was far from inevitable—an alternate reality that, like the half of the country that could not countenance his return to office, has been erased from the Trumpian narrative about his “unprecedented and powerful mandate.” In the weeks since Election Day, it’s been as if Joe Biden and Kamala Harris and all the polite technocratic debates of their polite, technocratic Administration have vanished into the mists of time—were the past four years in Washington all some strange dream sequence, like that entire season of “Dallas” back in the nineteen-eighties? Radical revisionism—by Trump and on his behalf—is a strong contender for the theme of this disruptive year, in which some unique property of political alchemy managed to transform a defeated and disgraced ex-President facing four criminal indictments into a perfectly electable Republican candidate with a quirky communications style, a host of more or less legitimate grievances, and a plan to Make America Great Again by empowering his billionaire sidekicks and rolling back laws, regulations, geopolitical trends, and social norms that he and his voters don’t like. Rewriting history, relitigating old fights, plain old revanchism—these worked for Trump in 2024, and it’s a safe bet that, along with revenge and retribution, they will be the themes of the new Trump Administration that takes office on January 20th.Whether it’s peremptory attacks on a 1977 Panama Canal treaty whose terms he now wants to reject or the resurrection of nineteenth-century economic protectionism or the fantastical reimagining of the January 6th rioters who stormed the U.S. Capitol as innocent martyrs, Trump is a conservative in an entirely different sense than the one we have come to know: he is not a Republican who sticks to the status quo but instead a would-be strongman whose attachment to a past of his own imagining will now, once again, become the country’s governing ideology.

Every year since 2018, I have written a version of this year-end Letter from Washington. What’s striking reading back through them now, on the eve of Trump’s return to the White House, is not so much his continued dominance of our politics as it is the consistency of how he has accomplished it—the manic governing by social-media pronouncement, the bizarro news cycles, and the normalizing of what would have previously been considered the politically un-normalizable. Even his targets are remarkably similar year in and year out—the Radical Left Lunatics, windmills, Justin Trudeau. In Trump’s 2023 Christmas social-media post, he wished the nation a happy holiday while praying that his enemies “ROT IN HELL.” What we have managed to forget about Trump in these past few years would fill entire books about other Presidents. This year-end exercise has been a small effort in trying to remember......read on        https://www.newyorker.com/culture/2024-in-review/the-weird-new-normal-of-donald-trump-in-2024

“I expect the next Canadian election to have an enormous amount of influence from outside the country,” said Aengus Bridgman, the director of the Media Ecosystem Observatory. “And we’re not really ready for it as a country.” While the Tenet Media story shows that Russia is active in shaping media narratives in Canada, Bridgman said that much of the foreign influence on Canada’s online political discourse comes from the United States, although that influence is not state-sanctioned. “It’s really troubling that so many Canadians get their information from these folks and from others like them,” Bridgman said, referring to online influencers who stoke political division. “That’s their choice. But one of the things spending a lot of time in an online ecosystem does is it shifts your perceptions of the world that you live in.” Lawmakers in the United States have been concerned about Russian meddling in elections since efforts to hack databases and push misinformation came to light following the 2016 presidential election.Marcus Kolga, the founder and director of DisinfoWatch, said Russia’s information operations have two aims: they want to undermine support for Ukraine following Russia’s 2022 invasion and destabilize western democracies by focusing on polarizing and divisive narratives. “When we look at these operations, we shouldn’t just be looking for those narratives that advance Russian interests,” Kolga said, “but those that are polarizing and could contribute to the undermining of our democracy.”

Tenet co-founder Lauren Chen is a right-wing YouTuber from Quebec who published several opinion pieces on Russia Today in the last several years. A U.S. Department of Justice indictment alleges that Chen was being paid by RT’s parent company not only for her articles for Tenet Media, but also for some of the videos she made for other social media accounts from March 2021 to February 2022. On Feb. 16, 2022, eight days before Russia invaded Ukraine, Chen wrote an article for RT titled “If You’re American and Oppose War with Russia, Expect to Be Smeared as Unpatriotic.” Her other contributions often focused on culture war topics like race and gender. Chen previously published her work under the handle Roaming Millennial; she’s perhaps best known for interviewing white supremacist Richard Spencer in 2017. Theindictment does not name Chen or her husband, Liam Donovan, instead referring to “Founder 1” and “Founder 2.”The Tyee and other news media have identified Chen as “Founder 1” and Donovan as “Founder 2” based on matching phrases in the indictment and Tenet Media’s website; Donovan and Chen’s social media accounts; and company records.......read on         https://thetyee.ca/News/2024/12/12/Russian-Political-Influence-Campaign-Canada/?utm_source=daily&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=131224                    

As Trump Forfeits US Climate Leadership, We the People Still Have a Role to Play. Many of us can join in a genuinely Gllobal citizens’ Fight for Rapid Action. Bill Mckibbon 13 Nov 2024  Most of those beliefs seem a little silly now. Clearly our political architecture—our Electoral ege, our filibusters, and so on—has some deep flaws.  Clearly we are not magically resistant to authoritarianism—indeed we’ve now embraced a flavor of it. And clearly America is not going to play the commanding role in helping solve the climate crisis, the greatest dilemma  humans have ever encountered. For the next few years the best we can hope is that Washington won’t manage to wreck the efforts of others—and that some parts of this big nation will demonstrate what’s still possible. And that many of us can join in a genuinely global citizens’ fight for rapid action.  “Setbacks are unavoidable, but giving up is unforgivable,” he said. “This is not the end of our fight for a cleaner, safer planet. Facts are still facts. Science is still science. The fight is bigger than one election, one political cycle in one country. This fight is bigger, still, because we are all living through a year defined by the climate crisis in every country of the world.” Which is true—but we also, clearly, won’t be leading the charge into this century’s clean energy transition. As the leading climate scientist Michael Mann put it in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists the day after the election, “the United States is now poised to become an authoritarian state ruled by plutocrats and fossil fuel interests. It is now, in short, a petrostate.” (Not unlike the petrostate of Azerbaijan, whose lead climate negotiator was discovered last week to be using his role as host of the climate talks to negotiate new fossil fuel deals).