On today’s BradCast: It’s nice to see hundreds of companies and corporate executives coming out in favor of democracy and voting rights. If only they actually meant it. [Audio link to full show is posted below this summary.]
First up today, however, the Biden Administration announced a spate of new sanctions against Russian organizations and individuals in response to both the massive Solar Winds hack of top U.S. agencies, including including the Treasury, Justice, Energy and Homeland Security departments, as well as for what is described as interference in the 2020 election on behalf of Donald Trump. At the same time, the Administration seems to be going out of their way to downplay the sweeping sanctions by suggesting that they are open to top level discussions to avoid further exacerbating growing tensions between the two nations.
But one of the 32 individuals sanctioned is of note today because the announcement from the U.S. Treasury Department refers to the 2016 election, charging that the individual, Konstanin Kilimnik shared proprietary polling information given to him by Trump’s first campaign manager, Paul Manafort, directly with Russian Intelligence Services. If true, that would be significant new information. Previous reports on Russia’s involvement in the 2016 election from both Special Counsel Robert Mueller and the bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee cite the information Manafort is said to have given to his former business associate Kilimnik, a Russian and Ukrainian political operative linked to Russian intelligence. But neither of those voluminous report goes so far as to say that the data was subsequently given directly to Russian intelligence services. Those reports acknowledge they were not able to learn what came of it after it was handed over to Kilimnik. Today’s announcement of the sanctions by the Treasury, however, notes: “During the 2016 U.S. presidential election campaign, Kilimnik provided the Russian Intelligence Services with sensitive information on polling and campaign strategy.”
As national security website Just Security observes: “The Treasury Department’s new statement raises questions about why this information is coming out now and why the Special Counsel’s office did not have access to it during its investigation. Was it not available then or did it exist but was not provided to the Mueller team?”  So, does this mean the Biden Administration has uncovered details on manipulation of the 2016 election that was previously hidden or withheld by the Trump Administration? It looks like the “Clean up on Aisle 45” will be continuing for quite some time. There is a LOT to clean up.
In not entirely unrelated news, hundreds of companies and corporate CEOs issued a full-size, two-page ad in the New York Times, Washington Post and other papers this week, with a short statement purporting to declare “WE STAND FOR DEMOCRACY,” and noting: “We all should feel a responsibility to defend the right to vote and to oppose any discriminatory legislation or measures that restrict or prevent any eligible voter from having an equal and fair opportunity to cast a ballot.”
Though the statement doesn’t mention any specific states, it was issued in response to Republicans’ recently enacted voters suppression law in Georgia and dozens of other states where similar restrictions on the franchise, in bills sponsored by GOP state lawmakers, are moving forward. All of which is said to be in response to false claims by Trump and Republicans of massive fraud in 2020. Georgia’s new law, for example, makes it more difficult to vote by mail, limits the use of drop boxes, bans the distribution of food or water on long voting lines (which are all too typical in certain parts of the Peach State) and allows the partisan GOP state legislature to replace bipartisan County Election Boards with a single partisan person who will be able to unilaterally undermine elections or even overturn results.
While statements like the one issued this week in the two-page ad — and, before it, by Atlanta-based companies such as Coca-Cola, Delta Airlines — have resulted in good publicity for those signed onto them, they have also brought blowback from the right, leading Republicans (who pretend to abhor so-called “cancel culture”) to demand boycotts of any company which stands up for voting rights.
I have railed in recent weeks about the absurdity of Republicans finally paying attention to concerns about new voter suppression laws only now that a number of corporations have come out in apparent opposition to such laws. Corporate entities, it seems, have far more sway with the GOP lawmakers who ignored weeks of complaints and protests about the new laws from actual voters before the GA law was passed.
But our guest today is seemingly even more cynical about these recent corporate declarations of fealty to democracy. We’re joined today by MICHAEL HILTZIK, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and business columnist at the Los Angeles Times. He argued in his column this week that many of the “vague” declarations recently by large corporations are no substitute for actual action. He cites a host of companies, for example, which, following the January 6th U.S. Capitol insurrection, vowed to suspend donations to lawmakers who had voted to overturn the Electoral College results that same day. Despite those public pronouncements, he details one company after another — from Jet Blue to AT&T to Toyota — which, despite their previous public claims, have since given plenty of money to dozens of Republicans who voted against the certification of Biden’s Electoral College victory.
In his column, he notes that while many companies and executives have come out in opposition of suppressive voting laws, almost none have gone on record to demand the passage of measures which would counteract them, such as the John Lewis Voting Rights Act or H.R. 1, the For the People Act.
“It’s not that unusual for businesses to affiliate themselves on the side of the angels when they feel a lot of popular pressure to do so. But once again the question is, what are they going to do about it?,” Hiltzik tells me today. “Let’s face facts. Many of the companies — if not all of them — that signed on to these statements, these honeyed words, had been assiduous supporters of the politicians who are now out there introducing and passing laws that restrict the voting franchise.”
Criticizing their failure to speak out before Georgia’s law was adopted, for example, he says, “They didn’t really put their reputations on the line when they didn’t think they had to. And, as a result, we have a law in Georgia that’s going to be very hard to repeal because the more these companies come out and say this is wrong, the more the rightwing legislators who passed it are doubling down, saying ‘We’re not going to kowtow to these liberal leftwing corporations’. So they lost their chance. They’re trying to recover. But I don’t think they really deserve a lot of credence just by signing a statement.”
Moreover, he explains, many of these very same companies have been opponents of democracy within their own corporate organizations. “What’s really hypocritical is that these same companies that have said ‘We believe in democracy, we believe in everybody having a vote’ — they’ve actually gone to the Securities and Exchange Commission and asked for, and received, a tightening of the rules that makes it even harder for small shareholders to get resolutions on the annual meeting agenda, and to actually get votes on the resolutions that they submit.”
There is plenty of cynicism on today’s show to go around. And it extends to our discussion of the need for campaign finance reform, and several neat GOP tricks that have long been used to prevent such long-overdue efforts to keep corporations out of our elections altogether.
Finally, Desi Doyen joins us once again for our latest Green News Report, which, as always, is chocked full of important news, including Japan’s announcement that they intend to dump more than a million tons of radioactive water from the crippled Fukushima nuclear plant into the sea. And we close with a follow up to that story from the Guardian today, regarding Japan’s ill-fated attempt to marginalize concerns from their own citizens and neighboring countries, by using a cartoon character dubbed “Little Mr. Tritium” to make the massive release of radioactive wastewater slightly more adorable than it actually otherwise is…
(Snail mail support to “Brad Friedman, 7095 Hollywood Blvd., #594 Los Angeles, CA 90028” always welcome too!)
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