The Left Can't Do A Trucker Protest Because It Lacks The Right's Decentralized Capacity For Violence

ianwelsh  |  The left cannot do what the truckers do because if they did, they would be shut down with extreme violence — if they were even allowed to get going. Remember, the Ottawa police chief let the truckers set up, knowing in advance what they were going to do.

Note also, that the right uses decentralized action a lot. Their shooters are created by their ideology, but act individually. The truckers may have organization, but they are individuals. Each truck has to be seized individually. There is some central organization, and when its visible it’s taken out (the shut down of the GoFundMe) but mostly it’s buried in the financial and third-party weeds. Ezra Levant of Rebel news, for example, hired a lawyer to fight parking tickets for the truckers. He’s not directly involved so far as we know yet, but he is indirectly involved.

Then there’s Ontario’s Prime Minister, Doug Ford. Doug could have this stuff broken up easily, and if it truly does need the military, he’s the person with the authority to call them in (the Feds arguably can’t without passing a new law). Doug’s daughter is with the protesters.

FDR alleged (but only allegedly) once said, “You’ve convinced me. I agree with what you’ve said. Now go out and make me do it.” Doug almost certainly agrees with the truckers, but he knows that polling is against him.

“Make me do it.”

Killing people for the market is economic orthodoxy. Impoverishing people so the rich can get richer is economic orthodoxy. Taking care of people, in the US, Canada, and Britain is against the ruling ideology — it is actually not legitimate. (It is in China and Japan, as people there are viewed as productive assets, not as assets to be mined.)

For unions to do what the truckers do they would have to start by decentralizing. No significant  headquarters, few assets to be seized, and leadership that doesn’t matter because anyone can lead. If the “president” is locked up, it doesn’t matter because someone else steps up, and regular members know what to do anyway.

Plus, there needs to an implicit threat. “If you take us out by force, we will keep showing up, and you can’t lock us all up.” The “truckers” (most truckers disagree with them, including the Teamsters) belong to a movement that shows up at school board meetings, that pickets hospitals & legislatures and threatens nurses, and that is generally perceived as dangerous. Politicians don’t feel entirely safe using force and law against them, though this is (or was) far more true in the US than in Canada. The left has spent generations telling themselves that violence is always bad and that even the threat of it should never ever even be considered because Gandhi, Gandhi, Gandhi.

All people are equal, but some people are more equal than others. All protests are equal, but some protests are more equal. Some ideologies are far more equal than others.

Of Course The Origin Of The Protest Was Economic (As Was Its Ending...,)

bbc  |  If the Ottawa protest has caused maximum community disturbance, then the Windsor protest caused maximum economic disruption by shutting down one of the country's major trade arteries, the Ambassador Bridge linking Windsor with Detroit, Michigan.

More than $323m (£238m) in goods crosses that bridge every day, and for nearly a week, not a dollar has made it to the US or back.

Almost half of that is from the trade of car parts, says Flavio Volpe, president of the Automotive Parts Manufacturers Association.

He does not mince words when it comes to the protest.

"In Windsor we have at its core, several dozen people who are macroeconomically illiterate and absolutely disrespectful of their own community, that they would imperil the economy of the region to make a point," he said.

"Never has a tantrum cost so many people so much."

After the clearance operation, police remained behind. The bridge will reopen on Sunday or Monday.

But Volpe said the harm to the auto-parts industry will last much longer than that, because it will take three to four days to get the supply chain fully functional. The total cost of lost production and shipments he estimates at about C$1b ($790m, £580m).

He also said the damage to Canada's reputation with its US trading partner is devastating, especially as American politicians push for protectionist policies.

In a statement, Windsor police say there will be "zero tolerance" for any illegal activity. But how they will stop further blockades from springing up, while still keeping the bridge open, remains to be seen.

Sergeant Betteridge said he hopes the occupants feel they were heard and realise that further disruption is not required.

"The protesters came wanting to get a message across, and I think they did get a message across," he said.

"If anyone is thinking of breaking the law, they've seen what has happened here."

 

Canadian Vax Mandate Would Damage Owner-Operators Ability To Earn A Living

The origin of the truckers protest was economic – stemming from the  mandatory 14-day quarantine for unvaccinated drivers after crossing the border. As owner operators, this would have restricted their ability to make a livelihood. The protest then morphed into something else.

canada  |   Today, the Minister of Health, the Honourable Jean-Yves Duclos, the Minister of Transport, the Honourable Omar Alghabra, and the Minister of Public Safety, the Honourable Marco Mendicino, issued the following statement:

"On November 19, 2021, we announced that as of January 15, 2022, certain categories of travellers who are currently exempt from entry requirements, will only be allowed to enter the country if they are fully vaccinated with one of the vaccines approved for entry into Canada.

These groups include several essential service providers, including truck drivers. Let us be clear: This has not changed. The information shared yesterday was provided in error. Our teams have been in touch with industry representatives to ensure they have the correct information.

A Canadian truck driver who is not fully vaccinated can't be denied entry into Canada—Canadian citizens, persons registered as Indians under the Indian Act and permanent residents may enter Canada by right.

As announced in November and as we've communicated with the industry recently, starting January 15, unvaccinated Canadian truck drivers entering Canada will need to meet requirements for pre-entry, arrival and Day 8 testing, as well as quarantine requirements.

The final decision regarding entry and quarantine is made by a government representative at the port of entry, based on the information presented to them at the time.

Any individual who is symptomatic upon arrival to Canada will be directed to a Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC) official and will be directed to isolate for 10 days from the time they enter Canada .

As of January 15, 2022, unvaccinated or partially vaccinated foreign national truck drivers, coming to Canada from the US by land, will be directed back to the United States.

To qualify as a fully vaccinated traveller and to enter Canada, foreign national truck drivers must:

• have received at least two doses of a vaccine accepted for travel, a mix of two accepted vaccines
  • or at least one dose of the Janssen/Johnson & Johnson vaccine
• have received their second dose at least 14 full days before they enter Canada
  • For example: if a driver received their second dose anytime on Saturday, January 1, then Sunday, January 16 would be the first day that they would meet the 14-day condition.
• Have submitted all required COVID-19 information into ArriveCAN.

Freedom Is Dangerous - (Ironically Under The Guardian's Old Comment Is Free Banner)

theguardian |  “Freedom” protests similar in form and simultaneously nebulous in broadly anti-vax/anti-mandate political goals have materialised in Britain, France and New Zealand. A convoy claiming to originate from across Europe is making its way towards Brussels. An ongoing gathering that locals alternately describe as “Spring Break for QAnon” or “Camp Covid” is encamped outside Australian Parliament House in Canberra.

Across these countries, protestors appear as a wild herd of “sovcit”, anti-vaxxer, QAnonner and more nefarious fellow travellers, alongside some more ordinary people. Sometimes it’s hard to tell whether social media content about these events has been gathered by extremism monitors, or comedians.

Participants unwilling to be injected with a free vaccine safely used on hundreds of millions of people further advise each other that drinking one’s own wee is curative and somehow “camel urine deals with cancer”. Monitors observe attendees costumed as paramedics, pilots and deceased Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi. Someone really wears a tinfoil hat.

In New Zealand, the monitors themselves hijacked the Telegram and Zello channels the protestors use to organise. They’ve sown chaos and crammed the convoy’s Spotify playlist with songs like Redneck Piece of White Trash, Why Don’t You Get a Job and Dumb Fuck.

In Canada, protestors have used their vehicles to blockade entire Ottawa neighbourhoods, erecting jumping castles and even saunas. Participants stiffly stage ceremonies to anoint one another faux powers of police. Amid the carnival of crank it all reads like character-based black comedy … but this investment in a parallel reality is not satire. It’s not performance. It’s complete. It’s terrifying.

Wherever this “freedom movement” manifests, a similar cast of characters emerges. Light-in-the-eyes zealots holler conspiracy theories. Grifters solicit to camera like a roll of tabloid clickbait. Burly, closed-mouth types appear to be handling secretive logistics. Around them are impassioned, often inarticulate – and poorly-costumed – clowns.

Don’t let the ridiculousness distract from the threat.

I spent a year undercover in the broadly QAnon movement researching a book; I understand well why democratic citizens may struggle to take seriously the crossed streams of alien lizard aficionados, drink-your-own-wee health enthusiasts and those people who believe democrats eat children’s faces. Even while besieged in his capital and struggling to contain the protests, Canadian PM Justin Trudeau hasn’t yet called in the army; he’s made the point that in more than 80%-vaxxed Canada, those protesting vaccine mandates are indeed a “fringe” – the truckers aren’t backed by their unions, more than 90% of their industry is vaccinated. The tomfoolery in Canberra could not be considered a representative movement of Australians either. Like New Zealanders and the Europeans, we’re a country with a high vaccination rate too.

 

Secret Money, Cross Border Insurgents, Oh My....,

thestar  |  Canadian intelligence and policing has not kept up with the “clear and present danger” represented by these well-funded groups of angry young men.

The most alarming revelation, though, is the large hole that has been blown in our walls of protection against foreign influence in Canadian political life. Conservative hysteria pre-pandemic about American environmental foundations’ funding of green groups here turned out to simply be that — hysteria.

In Alberta, the Kenney government spent millions of public dollars trying to find the secret bank accounts and found pennies. Conservatives’ reactions to the revelation that the militant truckers have access to millions of American dollars — with the promise of millions more from international neo-fascist allies — will be interesting. This flood of cash is a genuine threat to the sovereignty of Canadian democracy.

A chilling incident unfolded before my eyes this week, as I drove by the truckers’ Ottawa compound. Suddenly, two large black SUVs swept past me and turned into the protest command centre. They had New York state plates. Interestingly, they had no insignia, no flags and no slogans anywhere; they wanted to be invisible. It was an almost cinematic moment, with the bad guys surfacing at the scene of the crime.

We now need to reconsider how we prevent the flow of secret money from the U.S. into the hands of Canadian militants — or worse, from there into the war chests of the People’s Party of Canada, or even Conservative candidates. Our current election finance laws were not written to deal with this type of interference. Neither do we have the investigatory or prosecution expertise to track it being washed through third parties.

The successful blockade of three of the nation’s important north-south trucking corridors is ominous. How do we harden our ability to prevent this? Unless this ends soon with fines and even prison sentences, it sets a damaging precedent. That owners of heavy equipment or RVs can blockade a bridge, highway or an entire city is unacceptable in a democracy. Now that heavy tow truck owners have caved to the truckers’ threats, there is literally no one to remove the insurgents.

Former defence minister David Pratte eloquently summed up the inevitable end to this impasse, declaring that Ottawa has every right to use the military. He aptly observed that “when there is no one else to turn to, the military are there as a disciplined, well-trained and professional body to take orders under strict rules of engagement and get a job done. The Ottawa occupation should be treated as a national emergency. If allowed to continue, it will breed disrespect for the law … It will encourage others who abuse the constitutionally protected right to protest and who weaponize the concept of freedom.”

 

The Outbreak Of Civil War Is Political Chess, Not Checkers...,

Societies are subject to revolution when an elite faction wants it, the enforcer class is unwilling to defend the status quo, and there is a significant popular faction who want change. All three are generally necessary.

The Ottawa incident is conspicuously overshadowed by the Ambassador Bridge blockade, because the latter has serious economic consequences. We will soon know exactly how serious the Canadian Conservative Party is if the Detroit-Windsor choke point isn’t rapidly cleared. (It began clearing up Saturday morning - following an enhanced show of force)

The bridge blockades to date haven’t been happening to provinces like B.C or Quebec, but provinces with Conservative Premiers like Doug Ford (brother of Rob Ford) and Jason Kenney. It’s almost as though the protestors know that the authorities in those provinces won’t take steps to rein them in.

If I were among Canada’s current rulers, I’d be worried, not by the left, but by the right. The left doesn’t have an elite faction supporting it or the complicity of at least some police.

The vast majority of Canadian covid restrictions are provincial, not federal. The federal ones (international travel and air transport) are high-profile.

This makes it easy to sort the partisans partisans by the nature of their complaints – if the Feds/Trudeau are at fault for everything, they’re either hard-core conservatives or outright sympathizers. If [insert conservative premier(s)] are at fault for everything, they’re hardcore Liberal (possibly NDP). [Does not apply to Quebec, one half-hour later in Newfoundland.]

Ontario’s premier, Doug Ford, is keeping his head down and wants this all to fall to Trudeau – it’s not like he’s out there actively helping Ottawa, mobilizing police, or clarifying which rules are provincial. He has an election coming up in June this year. This approach is mostly being repeated in other provinces, with some differences (Quebec very different) – blame the feds, duck and cover.

It’s also very clear that Ford and others would far, far prefer the Feds have to mobilize federal resources instead of them – i.e. the military (because RCMP is provincial police force in many provinces). Trudeau does not want to be the second Trudeau to deploy the military domestically (that would drive the right berserk in a bad way).

Provincial announcements lifting restrictions (or setting timelines) have made it pretty clear the convoy protestors/their leadership (widely referred to here as #FluTrucksKlan) really do not care about the policy specifics – the only core, unmutable thing they want is Trudeau’s resignation. Draw your own conclusions.

It has not helped that the conservative party is going through its own throes of deciding between the somewhat-moderate leadership of O’Toole or throwing him under the bus and doubling down on social conservatives and anti_Trudeau everything.

O’Toole’s gone and everyone angling to replace him has been flirting with the protests – swerving back to hrumph-hrumph when they sense it’s getting really unpopular. Not that anyone expected courage from the federal conservatives, but unified party leadership might have kept the twitter-happy from getting too far over their skis and outright associating with the very nasty parts of the protest. (We shall see but I think this will hurt them long-term)

There are lots of ‘normal Canadians’ who symphathize with parts of the ‘movement’ complaints about covid restrictions. Some of those non-awful people are out protesting. Some will come out and hold signs supporting. Some just say ‘I don’t like this convoy stuff, but I am pissed off about …[insert own thing].” No-one I know thinks schools have been handled well – not a single person – but they mostly disagree about what should have been done. (Schools of course entirely provincial responsibility, some delegation to municipalities – but that doesn’t stop about a quarter of the pop from blaming Trudeau anyway).

But the leadership of the convoys is a different matter – they’ve just found a social wave they can surf and grift. Most of these have just been throwing lines out hoping for a hit for ages.

Ottawa Police Services Chief Peter Sloly Is In A Tough Spot

theline |  I don't honestly know the backstory of the how and why the Ottawa protest was allowed to settle into the downtown core the way it did. It was obviously a massive intelligence and planning failure, but what kind of failure? And whose? Did they not have enough information? Bad information? Did they have good information that, for whatever reason, they didn’t accept or trust? That's not the sort of thing you can discover wandering the site. But I can tell you that some of the protesters themselves are surprised by how easy it was for them to set up shop.

I have the terrible feeling, and I've spoken with five separate sources in government roles or in adjacent security positions who all confirmed this, that Sloly is one of the damn few people in Ottawa who understands the situation he's in, and he's trying to get everyone else to notice, or at least to catch up to his understanding. My sources, alas, seem to think that most others involved in decision-making are only just now starting to realize the enormity of the challenge in the capital. Sloly figured it out last week.

The chief is very political. I say that with no disrespect. Becoming the chief of a major police force isn't something that happens because you catch the most bad guys. It happens because you're good at working your way up through the power structures of a very particular institution. Sloly talks like a politician. But if you listen closely, and if you follow along across his briefings, you start to see a theme. From the moment he first mentioned that there might not be a policing solution to this protest, and hinted that we need the armed forces, he's been signalling to the public that Ottawa, as a city, has lost control of itself. That's a blunt description, but as I noted in a Twitter thread after a pretty remarkably stark Ottawa Police Services Board meeting on the weekend, Sloly was clear: the city needs to be rescued. It has lost control, it is outnumbered, and it cannot fix this problem with the resources on hand. 

Rescued from what? The crowd around Parliament Hill is mostly — not entirely, but mostly — peaceful. I grant that; I've seen it with my own eyes. And a few minutes' walk from those sites, now that the horns have been largely silenced by a court order, the city feels quite normal. The idea that Ottawa needs rescuing may seem absurd, but it's not. The longer this goes on, the harder it will become to convince the protesters to leave, and the harder it will be to stop others from joining in. The Ambassador Bridge, which links Windsor to Detroit, is now blocked. Would that have happened if Ottawa had been cleared quickly and decisively?

The inaction that has so infuriated Ottawans, and the very visible displays of police ineffectiveness as protesters fuel trucks from jerrycans despite the city’s stated plan to stop such activity, cannot be easily explained, and no doubt has multiple contributing causes. Some is probably simply political expediency, with all the various leaders wanting someone else to take the blame in case it goes badly (which it likely will). Some is probably just necessary delay while plans are made and logistics arranged. And then there’s just the good, old-fashioned problem of our expectations being a problem, as I’ve written about here. Canadian officials are struggling to realize just how deep in the muck they are, despite what seems like increasingly exasperated efforts by Sloly (and I believe a few others) to get them caught up to the present. I don't think most of our leaders are there yet.

Also, there’s this: there's another element of the protest that's nothing at all like a festival.

 

Freedom Convoy Has Tactics And Strategy Informed By Police And Military Training

cbc  |  For nearly two weeks anti-vaccine mandate demonstrators and their big rigs have entrenched themselves in Ottawa's parliamentary district and its neighbourhoods.

Despite a strategic strike by police to cut off supplies to truckers encamped in the city's downtown core, protesters appear to still have the upper hand on police. 

It's a success that experts partly attribute to the deep knowledge of law enforcement and military tactics that exist in the convoy's organizational structure.

The group Police on Guard, formed during the pandemic, has endorsed the truck convoy. On its website, it publicly identifies more than 150 mostly retired police officers who are against government-imposed public health measures, such as vaccine mandates. More than 50 former Canadian Forces soldiers are also named on its site.

The organization says it has "boots on the ground" in Ottawa and has linked to YouTube videos of its members participating in the protest.

Furthermore, the leadership team for the protesters calling themselves the Freedom Convoy includes:  

• Daniel Bulford, a former RCMP officer who was on the prime minister's security detail. He quit last year after refusing to get the vaccine and is the convoy's head of security.

• Tom Quiggin, a former military intelligence officer who also worked with the RCMP and was considered one of the country's top counter-terrorism experts.

Tom Marazzo, an ex-military officer who, according to his LinkedIn profile, served in the Canadian Forces for 25 years and now works as a freelance software developer. 

The leaders of the Freedom Convoy refuse to be interviewed by journalists unless they consider them friendly to their cause, and CBC News has been barred from their media conferences. In a video posted from one of those news conferences posted on social media, Quiggin gives his assessment of the political and police response in Ottawa, which he calls "the opposition." 

"I would say the opposition at this point doesn't actually have a strategy. They have a sort of weak goal and that they want the streets cleared, but they have no real idea how they want to get there," he said.

In the video, Quiggin says that during his tenure at the RCMP, he worked with the Integrated National Security Enforcement Team (INSET). INSET was created to thwart terror threats following 9/11 and includes top officials from CSIS, Canada's spy agency, the Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) and municipal police forces.

It's unclear what Quiggin's role at INSET was at the time.

In that same video, he referenced the blockades at the border crossing in Coutts, Alta., and parallel protests in Toronto, Quebec City and Sarnia.

Trudeau's Empty Threats - Freedom Truckers Still On The Ambassador Bridge

dailymail  | Freedom Convoy truckers are STILL on US-Canada bridge after both a 7 pm court AND midnight deadline from Ontario police to forcibly remove them came and went

• Freedom Convoy truckers are still on the US-Canada Ambassador Bridge - in defiance of Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's 7pm and then midnight deadlines to clear the road on Friday
• Protesters blocking the busiest land border in North America - the bridge between Detroit and Windsor -  refused to leave, despite a Canadian judge on Friday evening granting an injunction against their presence
• Ottawa police were on the scene with threats to forcibly remove the truckers who have been blocking the busy bridge for days
• But the big showdown never came as police declined to move in on the hundreds of protesters milling around on the comparatively mild 38 degrees Fahrenheit evening
• Police patrol cars were parked with their lights flashing, but few officers were visible. 
• Conservative Ontario Premier Doug Ford on Friday declared a state of emergency, threatening fines and jail 
• US group 'Convoy to Save America' is launching convoys from Nashville and New York City this weekend
  

Juliette Kayyem Said The Quiet Part Out Loud Or Why 3-Letter Agencies Put America Last...,

zerohedge |  Harvard professor, CNN analyst and former Obama admin undersecretary of Homeland Security Juliette Kayyem has called for violence and vandalism against Freedom Convoy protesters who have amassed on the bridge that connects Detroit, Michigan to Windsor, Ontario.

The convoy protest, applauded by right wing media as a "freedom protest," is an economic and security issue now. The Ambassador Bridge link constitutes 28% of annual trade movement between US and Canada. Slash the tires, empty gas tanks, arrest the drivers, and move the trucks ✔️ https://t.co/nvRQTfPWir

— Juliette Kayyem (@juliettekayyem) February 10, 2022

"The Ambassador Bridge link constitutes 28% of annual trade movement between US and Canada," tweeted Kayyem. "Slash the tires, empty gas tanks, arrest the drivers, and move the trucks."

In addition to a monumentally stupid idea considering the logistics of moving trucks with no fuel and slashed tires, one has to wonder if Kayyem is saying the quiet part out loud when it comes to how Democrats respond to non-BLM protests.

The blockade, now in its fourth day, has drawn the attention of Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, who called on Canadian authorities to reopen the bridge, according to the Epoch Times.

"The blockade is having a significant impact on Michigan’s working families who are just trying to do their jobs. Our communities and automotive, manufacturing, and agriculture businesses are feeling the effects. It’s hitting paychecks and production lines. That is unacceptable," the Democratic governor said in a Thursday statement.

"It is imperative that Canadian local, provincial, and national governments de-escalate this economic blockade," she added, without suggesting how. "They must take all necessary and appropriate steps to immediately and safely reopen traffic so we can continue growing our economy, supporting good-paying jobs, and lowering costs for families."

According to Kayyem, slashing tires, stealing gas, arresting the protesters, and somehow moving all the trucks is the way to go.

 

The CIA Architected The Truck Strike And Other Economic Attacks Against Salvador Allende

NYTimes |   The Central Intelligence Agency secretly financed striking labor unions and trade groups in Chile for more than 18 months before President Salvador Allende Gossens was overthrown, intelligence sources revealed today.

They said that the majority of more than $8‐million authorized for clandestine C.I.A. activities in Chile was used in 1972 and 1973 to provide strike benefits and other means of support for anti‐Allende strikers and workers.

William E, Colby, Director of Central Intelligence, had no comment when told of The Times's information.

In testimony today before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Secretary of State Kissinger asserted that the intelligence agency's involvement in Chile had beeen authorized solely to keep alive political parties and news media threatened by Mr. Allende's minority Government. The clandestine activities, Mr. Kissinger said, were not aimed at subverting that Government.

Among those heavily subsidized, the sources said, were the organizers of a nationwide truck strike that lasted 26 days in the fall of 1972, seriously disrupting Chile's economy and provoking the first of a series of labor crises for President Allende.

Direct subsidies, the sources said, also were provided for a strike of middle‐class shopkeepers and a taxi strike among others, that disrupted the capital city of Santiago in the summer of 1973, shortly before Mr. Allende was over thrown by a military coup.

At its peak, the 1973 strikes involved more than 250,000 truck drivers, shopkeepers and professionals who banded to gether in a middle‐class move ment that, many analysts have concluded, made a violent overthrow inevitable.

The Times's sources, while readily, acknowledging the intelligence agency's secret support for the middle classes, insisted that the Nixon Administration's goal had not been to force an end to the Presidency of Mr. Allende.

The sources noted that a request from the truckers union for more C.I.A. financial aid in August, 1973, one month before the coup, was rejected by the 40 Committee, the intelligence review board headed by Secretary of State Kissinger.

Where You Think American Truckers Got The Idea From In 1973?

NYTimes |   The 23‐day truckers’ strike has had “catastrophic” repercussions on Chile's already ailing economy, the Government said today.

The first detailed report on the ‘economic consequences of the walkout said that agriculture was seriously threatened, industry had slowed and supplies of commodities had reached “a crucial point.”

“This is a political strike aimed at overthrowing the Government, with the help of imperialism,” said Gonzalo Martner, Minister of National Planning and one of the chief policy makers for President Salvador Allende Gossens's socialist Government.

Left‐wing newspapers have accused the United States of financing the truckers’ strike and the anti‐Government campaign in the opposition news media in an attempt to carry out an “economic coup d'etat.”

Meanwhile, the Government continued behind‐the‐scenes efforts to reach an agreement with the National Confederation of Truck Owners and bus and taxi associations, who demand guarantees that the transport industry will not be taken over by the state.

There is no official estimate of the losses caused by the walkout but reliable sources put them at about $100‐million —half of the $200‐million that last October's month ‐long strikes were officially said to have cost.

People have suffered more from the current strike because the country had not built up its supplies after the October stoppage. However, the damage is not so great because the movement is not general by any means. Business and professional associations have threatened to join the truckers, as they did last year, but have not yet done so.

Production in general is expected to decline by about 10 per cent this year—if the strike is settled soon.

The official report on the walkout, published by the National Office of Planning, said that half of the country's more than 40,000 trucks were off the road. The striking truckers maintain the industry is totally paralyzed.

If This Fat Bastard Had His Way - There Would Be No Funding For The Freedom Convoy

globeandmail |  The Ontario government says it has successfully petitioned a court to freeze access to millions of dollars donated through online fundraising platform GiveSendGo to the convoy protesting COVID-19 restrictions in Ottawa and at several border crossings.

The province obtained an order from the Superior Court of Justice that prohibits anyone from distributing donations made through the website’s “Freedom Convoy 2022″ and “Adopt-a-Trucker” campaign pages, said a spokeswoman for Premier Doug Ford.

Ivana Yelich said the order binding “any and all parties with possession or control over these donations” was issued Thursday afternoon. She cited a section of the Criminal Code that allows the attorney general to apply for a restraint order against any “offence-related property.”

Hundreds of semi-trucks rolled into downtown Ottawa two weeks ago to protest COVID-19 vaccine mandates and health restrictions and now trucks are also blockading border crossings in Alberta, Manitoba and Ontario.

Donors initially raised more than $10-million through GoFundMe, which announced last Friday it was pulling the plug on the campaign and that the money would be refunded. The site said it initially believed the demonstration was going to be peaceful, but withdrew its support after police and local leaders raised concerns it had become an “occupation.”

Convoy organizers quickly set up new campaigns on Christian fundraising site GiveSendGo. As of Thursday, “Freedom Convoy 2022″ had raised $US8.4-million and “Adopt-a-Trucker” had amassed more than $686,000.

Explainer: The Ottawa protests’ havoc is spreading from Windsor to Alberta. Where are the trucker convoys now?

GiveSendGo posted a statement on Twitter Thursday night about its “Freedom Convoy” campaign.

“Know this! Canada has absolutely ZERO jurisdiction over how we manage our funds here at GiveSendGo,” it said.

“All funds for EVERY campaign on GiveSendGo flow directly to the recipients of those campaigns, not least of which is The Freedom Convoy campaign.”

Organizers have also touted the cryptocurrency Bitcoin as another way to generate funds for protesters and avoid other potential fundraising shutdowns, including during a news conference that was livestreamed to supporters on Wednesday.

Ontario’s move to freeze access to the donations comes the same day as an all-party House of Commons committee of MPs heard testimony from deputy directors of Canada’s financial intelligence hub about how it doesn’t cover crowdfunding sites like GoFundMe.

Justin Trudeau You Know You Done Fucked Up, Right?

AP  |  A blockade of the bridge between Canada and Detroit by protesters demanding an end to Canada’s COVID-19 restrictions forced the shutdown Wednesday of a Ford plant and began to have broader implications for the North American auto industry.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, meanwhile, stood firm against an easing of Canada’s COVID-19 restrictions in the face of mounting pressure during recent weeks by protests against the restrictions and against Trudeau himself.

The protest by people mostly in pickup trucks entered its third day at the Ambassador Bridge between Detroit and Windsor, Ontario. Traffic was prevented from entering Canada, while U.S.-bound traffic was still moving.

The bridge carries 25% of all trade between the two countries, and Canadian authorities expressed increasing worry about the economic effects.

Ford said late Wednesday that parts shortages forced it to shut down its engine plant in Windsor and to run an assembly plant in Oakville, Ontario, on a reduced schedule. 

“This interruption on the Detroit-Windsor bridge hurts customers, auto workers, suppliers, communities and companies on both sides of the border,” Ford said in a statement. “We hope this situation is resolved quickly because it could have widespread impact on all automakers in the U.S. and Canada.”

Shortages due to the blockade also forced General Motors to cancel the second shift of the day at its midsize-SUV factory near Lansing, Michigan. Spokesman Dan Flores said it was expected to restart Thursday and no additional impact was expected for the time being.

Later Wednesday, Toyota spokesman Scott Vazin said the company will not be able to manufacture anything at three Canadian plants for the rest of this week due to parts shortages. A statement attributed the problem to supply chain, weather and pandemic-related challenges, but the shutdowns came just days after the blockade began Monday.

“Our teams are working diligently to minimize the impact on production,” the company said, adding that it doesn’t expect any layoffs at this time.

Stellantis, formerly Fiat Chrysler, reported normal operations, though the company had to cut shifts short the previous day at its Windsor minivan plant.

“We are watching this very closely,″ White House spokesperson Jen Psaki said earlier of the bridge blockade.

American Truckers Too Broke, Disorganized, And Beaten Down To Attempt A Freedom Convoy

foxnews  |  Multiple Capitol Hill sources tell Fox News they are unaware of any plan for truckers to duplicate anything in Washington. Still, Fox is told there have been conversations about what would happen if 18-wheelers and other rigs paralyzed the Capitol.

Don’t call C.W. McCall and Rubber Duck just yet.

For starters, the U.S. Capitol Police have prohibited large trucks from creeping anywhere near the Capitol complex since just after 9/11. There has been increased surveillance around the Capitol for potential "truck bombs" and other threats after the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing. Police routinely divert or pull over trucks that roll onto prohibited streets.

Of course, you can’t really pull over every truck if a convoy of trucks rolled toward Capitol Hill. That was the problem on Jan. 6. The Capitol Police didn’t have the wherewithal to quell thousands of protesters.

That said, there is historic precedent for an over-the-road, over-the-top, motorized demonstration in Washington.

Farmers routinely began jamming up traffic in Washington, D.C., to protest farm prices in the late 1970s. In the winter of 1978, thousands of farmers rode their tractors to Washington, snarling traffic on I-66 in Virginia. Tractors putted along at 15 mph.

A confrontation between seven farmers and police prompted seven arrests. A group of farmers set off on foot, marching along Pennsylvania Avenue. Choruses of "Let’s go get ‘em out" of jail echoed through the D.C. streets.

The farmers then unloaded goats to graze on the Capitol grounds. Officials declared that the farmers created a "monstrous rush-hour traffic jam." The tactics of the farmers were so aggressive that the stunt turned off lawmakers to their plight.

The Washington Post characterized the farmers as "growing more militant" in their approach. Farmers stormed out of a meeting with House Agriculture Committee Chairman and future House Speaker Tom Foley, D-Wash. Foley told them he favored legislation to help boost prices for agricultural commodities - couldn’t guarantee a bill would turn higher profits for farmers. 

Undaunted, the caravans of tractors returned to Washington in January 1979.

Thousands of farmers lumbered down I-270 and the Beltway toward the heart of the city, driving tractors, combines and hauling everything from planters to balers. Capitol Police brought in extra officers to deal with the farmers and barred their agricultural implements from the Capitol grounds.

 

Unless You're One Of The 9% Owner/Operators - Trucking Is Now A Shitty Gig Economy Job....,

TIME |  It’s hard to imagine another profession where people don’t get paid for hours they spend at work—unless it’s gig economy jobs where Uber drivers don’t get paid for the time they spend waiting for a passenger to order a car. Some of the problems in trucking arose because the job essentially went from a steady, well-paid job to gig work after the deregulation of the trucking industry in the 1980s, says Steve Viscelli, a sociologist at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of the book The Big Rig: Trucking and the Decline of the American Dream.

Deregulation essentially changed trucking from a system where a few companies had licenses to take freight on certain routes for certain rates into a system where just about anyone with a motor-carrier authority could move anything anywhere, for whatever the market would pay. As more carriers got into trucking post-deregulation, union rates fell, as did wages. Total employee compensation fell 44% in over-the-road trucking between 1977 and 1987, he says. Today, drivers get paid about 40% less than they did in the late 1970s, Viscelli says, but are twice as productive as they were then.

Now that truck drivers are gig workers, the inefficiencies of the supply chain are making the jobs worse and worse, as Grewal has discovered. “So much of this is about the inefficient use of time. Is there a shortage of truck drivers? Probably not. But they are certainly being used less and less efficiently,” Viscelli says. “That’s the long term consequence of not pricing their time.”

Ironically, the louder the narrative becomes about the “shortage” of truck drivers, the more resources pop up to funnel people into driving. In 1990, the trucking industry figured it needed about 450,000 new drivers and warned of a shortage; in 2018, before the pandemic, the industry said it was short 60,800 drivers.

 

In The 1970's 70%+ Of Truckers Were Owner/Operators And The Rest Were Teamsters..,

history |  At 10:00 p.m. on December 3, 1973, a 37-year old trucker from Overland Park, Kansas named J.W. Edwards stopped his rig suddenly in the middle of Interstate I-80 near Blakeslee, Pennsylvania and picked up his CB radio microphone. The insurrection he was about to start, using his now-famous handle “River Rat,” would give America’s independent truckers their first national voice and, along the way, elevate them to folk-hero status.

Edwards was beyond frustrated and scared for his livelihood. His job hauling meat from the Midwest to New York had become an agonizing slog because an oil embargo—levied by the Middle Eastern petroleum-producing cartel OPEC against the United States for its support of Israel—had dramatically jacked up diesel fuel prices. With rationing imposed, he was stopping at every virtually filling station along his route. Worse still, the federal government was considering a national maximum speed limit of 55 m.p.h. For long-haul drivers, time lost meant money lost, and oil geopolitics had made Edwards’s $12,000-a-year job even more precarious. Near Blakeslee, his tank reached empty. Out of fuel, but full of frustration that truckers were the forgotten little guys in the global fossil-fuel wars, Edwards decided, on the spot, to take to his CB and make some noise.

In the 1970s, truck drivers commonly used Citizens Band (CB) radio to alert their fellow big-rig drivers to traffic conditions, choice fueling spots and lurking police traps. Without proper FCC radio licenses and reluctant to announce their real names over the airwaves, truckers assumed fanciful “handles” and developed colorful slang. They called diesel fuel motion lotion. They dubbed toll booths cash registers. Police became bears: Smokey bears for state troopers who wore campaign hats like Smokey the Bear, bears in the air for police helicopters. Feeding the bears meant paying for a ticket—something more truckers were doing due to new speed restrictions. The OPEC embargo accelerated the CB’s popularity, mostly because it allowed drivers to share places to find motion lotion.

The protest goes national

As other truckers stopped to help Edwards, he broadcast via CB that he was blocking the interstate to protest high gas prices, limited fuel supply and the proposed speed limit. Instantly, he found sympathy. One trucker stated, “If a man is going to be broke, he might as well go broke sitting still.” Others, with handles like Flying Dutchman and Captain Zag, soon joined in. Within an hour, hundreds of rigs came to a halt on I-80. The action paralyzed more than 1,000 vehicles in a jam that extended 12 miles in both directions. 

News of River Rat’s protest spread, and within hours, trucker demonstrations peppered the nation’s highways, with thousands slowing or stopping their vehicles, snarling travel for miles. By December 4, more than 10 states saw demonstrations by angry drivers who demanded to be heard by the federal government—and weren’t afraid to hold up their deliveries to do so. One quipped that he didn’t think Congress would act “until those people run out of toilet paper.”

The vast majority of dissenting truckers were independents who owned and operated their vehicles, unlike unionized Teamsters who typically hauled for large shipping companies. Independents hauled about 70% of the country’s freight, according to Interstate Commerce Commission estimates. Most had their entire lives mortgaged into their expensive rigs and had the most to lose from the embargo. Ironically, River Rat Edwards was not an owner-operator himself. 

 

 

 

Brandon Says "Every Single One Of YOU Chatty Busters Is A Terrorist Threat!"

alexberenson |  The White House has begun an extraordinary assault on free speech in America. It is no longer content merely to force social media companies to suppress dissenting views. It appears to be setting the stage to use federal police powers.

How else to read the “National Terrorism Advisory System Bulletin” the Department of Homeland Security issued on Monday? Its first sentence:

SUMMARY OF THE TERRORISM THREAT TO THE UNITED STATES: The United States remains in a heightened threat environment fueled by several factors, including an online environment filled with false or misleading narratives and conspiracy theories... [emphasis added]

You read those words right.

The government now says “misleading narratives” are the most dangerous contributor to terrorism against the United States.

The bulletin’s next sentence:

These threat actors seek to exacerbate societal friction to sow discord and undermine public trust in government institutions to encourage unrest, which could potentially inspire acts of violence. [emphasis added]

You read those words right too.

A federal agency says that to “undermine public trust in government institutions” is now considered terrorism. Speech doesn’t even have to encourage rebellion or violence generally, much less against anyone specific. It just has to “potentially inspire” violence.

Potentially.

Later, the bulletin explains exactly what speech the government now considers a terrorist danger:

Widespread online proliferation of false or misleading narratives regarding unsubstantiated widespread election fraud and COVID-19.

There’s that word misleading again.

Who’s defining “misleading”? Misleading to whom? Misleading how?

DHS February 2022 bulletin

—

I have no doubt whatsoever that I fit as a terrorist threat under these guidelines.

So does Joe Rogan. And Tucker Carlson. After all, we’ve “undermine[d] public trust in government institutions” about Covid and the mRNA shots (I try not to call them vaccines anymore).

This bulletin marks an extraordinary escalation of the war on speech and the First Amendment.

People's Convoy To Washington DC Gathers Steam...,

politico  |  Organizers have dubbed their movement "the People's Convoy" and say they are working with two groups — Freedom Fighter Nation and Restore Liberty — whose founders are closely tied to right wing politics, based on POLITICO's review of social media and online records.

That includes Leigh Dundas, a California lawyer and founder of the Freedom Fighter Nation, who gave a speech on the eve of the Jan. 6 Capitol Hill riots calling for Trump supporters to kill those whom she claimed had aided foreign governments in undermining the 2020 presidential election, based on a video posted on Twitter.

"A lot of this has worrying parallels to the build-up to the Jan. 6 riots," said Ciaran O'Connor, an analyst for the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a think tank that tracks online extremism and which has been following the global protests. "It's concerning how this may play out if they get to D.C."

The goal of the U.S. convoy is to push back at vaccine and mask mandates — messages that have been repeated widely by right wing politicians and supporters since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic in early 2020.

In communication channels on Telegram, an encrypted messaging service, anonymous social media users have railed to tens of thousands of channel members against the alleged Covid-19 oversteps of President Joe Biden's administration and shared videos and other posts from the Canadian truckers' convoy to boost support for similar action in the U.S.

It is unclear if, or when, the U.S. convoy will reach Washington, though within these encrypted messaging channels, supporters routinely offer food, supplies and other logistical support, based on POLITICO's review of the online discussions.

After GoFundMe, the crowdfunding site, removed the fundraising page for the Canadian convoy, far-right influencers like Jack Posobiec shared links via their large social media followings to alternative funding sites. A similar page on GiveSendGo — a rival crowdfunding site frequented by the far right — has so far raised $7.2 million out of a goal of $16 million.

The California-to-Washington protest is not the only anti-mandate convoy that has sprung up to mirror the ongoing mobilization in Canada.

On Feb. 14, similar protests from across the European Union are expected to descend on Brussels — home to the bloc's main political institutions — to rally against mask and vaccine mandates as the region continues to struggle to cope with the Covid-19 pandemic.

 

In Canada The World Sees The Internal Weakness Of The Western Empire

SCMP  |  People don’t vote for realities, they vote for dreams, said Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson. That’s why democratic politicians usually overpromise but under-deliver. In these populist times, people also vote out of anger.

In the United States, Donald Trump is staging a credible presidential return, and the Republican Party is rallying behind him. In Canada, Justin Trudeau, a classic Canadian liberal moderate, has been blindsided by a bunch of truck drivers. Right-wing politicians understand and know how to exploit voter anger; liberals in North America and social democrats in Europe have no idea why they have become the focus of that same anger.

The never-ending Covid-19 pandemic has one terrible, if not fatal, political consequence for the Western political establishment; that is, its on-again, off-again lockdowns and restrictions have upset everyone from small business owners to homemakers. Such voters tend to be right of centre or conservative.

The virus is not lethal enough to scare or kill off a big chunk of voters, yet is serious enough to disrupt and undermine their livelihoods, and living standards and routines. It doesn’t take a genius to realise that people are angry. And they need to blame someone for their plight. Why is my business failing? Why can’t my kids go to school? They may curse the virus and China, but they blame their politicians.

For more than a week, a long line of big trucks, cargo carriers, pickup vans, recreational vehicles and any number of cars have jammed central Ottawa, the nation’s capital. Ostensibly, the protest is against the federal government’s vaccine mandate for truck drivers entering Canada, first imposed in the middle of last month.

Compared with America, Canada’s angry populism is, to an extent, moderated by a more generous social welfare system and universal health care. But Canadian Medicare, the equivalent of the British National Health Service, is decentralised with each province and territory operating its own system. Outside of rich Ontario, public health care has been overwhelmed by Covid-19. With each passing decade, welfare is more restricted, queues for medical services grow longer and the list of totally free drugs gets shorter. The widespread use of generic drugs, while keeping costs down, has raised serious questions about quality control. Interestingly, it has been a source of national pride to compare them to the high, often unaffordable, costs of brand-name drugs in the US.

Polarised politics now threatens to degenerate into violent civil strife in the US. In Canada, at the very least, consensus politics is becoming a thing of the past. But its politicians are blind to the new emerging reality while its liberal mainstream press remains arrogant and complacent.

 

Pompous, Overweening, Canadian Fascist Elites Have Created A Situation They Can't Control...,

thefederalist  |  News media in both Canada and the United States have worked hard to portray the protesters as far-right conspiracy theorists and white supremacists, despite little evidence that the protests are motivated by anything other than sincere opposition to Covid vaccine mandates. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, taking his cues from the press, last week condemned the protests as an “insult to memory and truth,” and implied they were motivated not by objections to vaccine mandates but by racial animus. Canada’s conservative politicians seem divided and rudderless, unable to provide the protesters a voice or meaningful support, let alone a legitimate democratic outlet for their grievances.

The situation, in short, is a powder keg. There are no clear off-ramps for the protesters, and no one in a position of authority seems to know how to deescalate the situation. Having accepted the Canadian media’s near-uniform portrayal of the protesters as racists and bigots, it’s unlikely Trudeau’s government will be willing to compromise. What happens next is anybody’s guess, but it will likely involve violent clashes between police and protesters.

How did this happen? The idea that the Canadian capital would become the site of such a standoff in 2022 seems frankly unbelievable. But the chaos now unfolding in Ottawa can be traced directly to the harsh treatment of unvaccinated Canadians by their government over the past six months or so.

It’s true that Canadians have largely embraced the Covid vaccines, with a vaccination rate of about 85 percent nationwide, and large majorities also support vaccine passports and say they don’t trust the unvaccinated. But this has given Canadian political and media elites cover to threaten the unvaccinated in what often seems a gleeful tone.

As my friend David Agren has reported, Canada’s federal jobs minister in October stated bluntly — and without a hint of sympathy — that Canadians fired for not getting the vaccine would also lose their unemployment insurance. Indeed, threatening the livelihoods of the unvaccinated, or threatening to tax them, has become commonplace for Canadian government officials at the federal and provincial levels. 

However, a significant minority of Canadians are staunchly opposed to getting the vaccine, and likely won’t get it no matter what the government threatens to do to them. The unwillingness or inability on the part of Trudeau to compromise with these holdouts has arguably precipitated the current stand-off in Ottawa. Some, like Canadian pollster John Wright, have been warning of this outcome for some time now. Over the weekend, Wright noted that even if only one out of 10 Canadians refuse to get the vaccine, that’s still a major problem.

ChiFresh Kitchen - Fresh Food, Living-Wage, Community Solution

bignewsnetwork  |  Owned and operated primarily by Black formerly incarcerated women, ChiFresh prepared healthy, culturally relevant meals with food that is grown or raised at nearby farms. They are 100 percent employee-owned and operated, and all employees are eligible for ownership stake after 18 months on the job, after which they can start paying toward a $2,000 membership share.

Of their first day of operation in May 2020, they made jerk chicken strips and red beans and rice, with onions and peppers, as a practice run for friends and family, and as founding member-owner Edrinna Bryant told NextCity.org that week:

"'We were so excited about the fact we were going to cook our first meal together and people can taste it,' Bryant says. 'That's so exciting to me as a young Black mom who was incarcerated. For my child to know that his mom was in a situation that felt like the end of the world and look at her now Ain't no food going to go wasted here. Each day each of us will pick somewhere on the South Side or West Side and bring some food to people who need it.'"

In addition to providing an alternative food contracting option to local facilities by introducing a locally sourced and prepared food option, they are also providing jobs, agency and ownership stakes to one of the most commonly marginalized groups in the country.

ChiFresh Kitchen is part of a growing BIPOC-led movement, via urban farms, food operators, worker centers, policy advocates and other community organizations in Chicago focused on food sovereignty, racial justice and equitable food access.

While the business planning for ChiFresh began in 2018, the business became operational just prior to the pandemic. They'd initially planned to launch in the summer of 2020, but launched earlier than planned in March 2020 via a contract with the Urban Growers Collective, which had received funding to address pandemic-related food insecurity in their communities. Less than a year into operations they were prepping 500 meals per day.

The demand for what ChiFresh offers has only grown since, and in December of 2020, they bought a 6,000 square-foot building (their current space is about 600 square feet), which they are working to renovate, funded through a series of grants. They plan to move into the new space in the spring of 2022, and expand their capacity so that they are able to prepare 5,000 or more meals per day.

ChiFresh Kitchen founder Camille Kerr-a workplace democracy/worker ownership/solidarity economy consultant-says the project began when a small group of people, herself included, were looking into the ability of worker cooperatives to create a "liberatory, dignified workplace for formerly incarcerated people, and specifically Black women."

April M. Short of the Independent Media Institute spoke with Kerr about ChiFresh Kitchen and future potentials of local, worker-owned food sovereignty projects like this one to bring the food industry up to date with the real, current food needs of communities across the U.S. and beyond.

Civil War: Private Family Capitalism vs. Public Corporatism

dissentmagazine |  At this point we need to ask whether the growing militancy of the Republican right can be adequately explained by the triumph of small over big business, as Tea Partiers and Trump himself would have us believe. Even the most sophisticated commentators have taken the Tea Party at its word on this matter. But as Trump’s example reminds us, what is at stake here is less an alliance of the small against the big than it is an insurrection of one form of capitalism against another: the private, unincorporated, and family-based versus the corporate, publicly traded, and shareholder-owned. If most family enterprise was confined to the small business sector in the 1980s—when public corporations accounted for the bulk of big business—this shorthand does not apply today, as more large companies go private and dynastic wealth surges to the forefront of the American economy. The historian Steve Fraser has noted that the “resurgence of what might be called dynastic or family capitalism, as opposed to the more impersonal managerial capitalism many of us grew up with, is changing the nation’s political chemistry.” The family-based capitalism that stormed the White House along with Trump stretches from the smallest of family businesses to the most rambling of dynasties, and crucially depends on the alliance between the two. Without its network of subcontracted family businesses, the dynastic enterprise would collapse as a political and economic force. Meanwhile the many small business owners that gravitate toward Trump are convinced that their own fortunes rise and fall along with his.

It is no accident that Trump’s most significant donors hail from the same world of privately held, unincorporated, and family-based capitalism as he does. In 2020, Forbes named Koch Industries as the largest privately held company in the United States. The Mercers, who did so much to underwrite Trump’s rise to power, owe their wealth to Renaissance Technologies, a privately held hedge fund that was subject to the so-called “small business” tax on pass-through income. Trump’s education secretary, Betsy DeVos, was born into a business dynasty that made its fortune through the privately held Prince Corporation. When she married Dick DeVos in 1979, she sealed an alliance between the Prince family and Amway, still one of the largest private companies in the country. Most of Betsy DeVos’s personal income derives from pass-through entities like LLCs and limited partnerships, which means that the Trump tax cuts would have saved her tens of millions of dollars. Amway itself is structured as an S-corporation, a type of pass-through that also would have qualified for Trump’s 40 percent marginal tax cut to small business.

As the scions of private dynastic capital invest the halls of power, they have also inflated the fortunes of their own trade and political associations. Organizations such as the Koch-funded American Legislative Exchange Council and the theocratic Council for National Policy (the latter with its close connections to the DeVos and Prince dynasties) once existed on the far fringes of the American right. Today their progeny—from Americans for Prosperity to FreedomWorks and the Family Research Council—dictate the form of Republican Party politics, while the once all-powerful Business Roundtable and other corporate trade associations watch from the sidelines. The newly ascendant organizations would like to convince us that theirs is the voice of small family business ranged against the vested power of the corporate and bureaucratic elite. More plausibly, however, they represent a shift in the center of gravity of American capitalism, which has elevated the once marginal figure of the family-owned business to a central place in economic life at every scale. If the large publicly listed corporation was still the uncontested reference point for American business at the turn of the millennium, it is now being increasingly challenged by a style of family-based capitalism whose reach extends from the smallest to the most grandiose household production units. The infrastructural basis of today’s far-right resurgence is neither populist nor elitist in any straightforward sense: it is both. The collapse of the public corporation into a thicket of privately contracted commercial relations has weakened the old union-mediated bonds among workers and created real economic intimacies, however fraught, between the small family-owned business and the dynastic enterprise. To prevent the emergence of some more dangerous version of Trump, we would need to build an alternative set of economic and affective solidarities potent enough to dismantle this clientelist symbiosis of households.

Civil War: America's Local Gentry

patrick-wyman  |  Commercial agriculture is a lucrative industry, at least for those who own the orchards, cold storage units, processing facilities, and the large businesses that cater to them. They have a trusted and reasonably well-paid cadre of managers and specialists in law, finance, and the like - members of the educated professional-managerial class that my close classmates and I have joined - but the vast majority of their employees are lower-wage laborers. The owners are mostly white; the laborers are mostly Latino, a significant portion of them undocumented immigrants. Ownership of the real, core assets is where the region’s wealth comes from, and it doesn’t extend down the social hierarchy. Yet this bounty is enough to produce hilltop mansions, a few high-end restaurants, and a staggering array of expensive vacation homes in Hawaii, Palm Springs, and the San Juan Islands.

This class of people exists all over the United States, not just in Yakima. So do mid-sized metropolitan areas, the places where huge numbers of Americans live but which don’t figure prominently in the country’s popular imagination or its political narratives: San Luis Obispo, California; Odessa, Texas; Bloomington, Illinois; Medford, Oregon; Hilo, Hawaii; Dothan, Alabama; Green Bay, Wisconsin. (As an aside, part of the reason I loved Parks and Recreation was because it accurately portrayed life in a place like this: a city that wasn’t small, which served as the hub for a dispersed rural area, but which wasn’t tightly connected to a major metropolitan area.)

This kind of elite’s wealth derives not from their salary - this is what separates them from even extremely prosperous members of the professional-managerial class, like doctors and lawyers - but from their ownership of assets. Those assets vary depending on where in the country we’re talking about; they could be a bunch of McDonald’s franchises in Jackson, Mississippi, a beef-processing plant in Lubbock, Texas, a construction company in Billings, Montana, commercial properties in Portland, Maine, or a car dealership in western North Carolina. Even the less prosperous parts of the United States generate enough surplus to produce a class of wealthy people. Depending on the political culture and institutions of a locality or region, this elite class might wield more or less political power. In some places, they have an effective stranglehold over what gets done; in others, they’re important but not all-powerful.

Wherever they live, their wealth and connections make them influential forces within local society. In the aggregate, through their political donations and positions within their localities and regions, they wield a great deal of political influence. They’re the local gentry of the United States.

We’re not talking about international oligarchs; these folks’ wealth extends into the millions and tens of millions rather than the billions. There are, however, a lot more of them than the global elite that tends to get all of the attention. They’re not the face of instantly recognizable global brands or the subjects of award-winning New York Times profiles; they own warehouses and Applebee’s franchises, concrete companies and chains of movie theaters, hop fields and apartment complexes.

Because their wealth is rooted in the ownership of physical assets, they tend to be more rooted in their places of origin than the cosmopolitan professionals and entrepreneurs of the major metro areas. Mobility between major metros, the characteristic jumping from Seattle to Los Angeles to New York to Austin that’s possible for younger lawyers and creatives and tech folks, is foreign to them. They might really like heading to a vacation home in Bermuda or Maui. They might plan a relatively early retirement to a wealthy enclave in Palm Springs, Scottsdale, or central Florida. Ultimately, however, their money and importance comes from the businesses they own, and those belong in their localities.

Gentry classes are a common feature of a great many social-economic-political regimes throughout history. Pretty much anywhere you have a hierarchical form of social organization and property ownership, a gentry class of some kind emerges: the local civic elites of the Roman Empire, the landlords of later Han China, the numerous lower nobility of late medieval France, the thegns of Anglo-Saxon England, the Prussian Junkers, or the planter class of the antebellum South. The gentry are generally distinct from the highest levels of a regime’s political and economic elite: They’re usually not resident in the political center, they don’t hold major positions in the central administration of the state (whatever that might consist of) and aren’t counted among the wealthiest people in their polity. New national or imperial elites might emerge over time from a gentry class, even rulers - the boundaries between these groups can be more or less porous - but that’s not usually the case.

Gentry are, by definition, local elites. The extent to which they wield power in their localities, and how they do so, is dependent on the structure of their regime. In the early Roman Empire, for example, local civic elites were essential to the functioning of the state. They collected taxes in their home cities, administered justice, and competed with each other for local political offices and seats on the city councils. Their competition was a driving force behind the provision of benefits to the common folk in the form of festivals, games, public buildings, and more basic support, a practice called civic euergetism.

MeidasTouch

rollingstone  | Last August, in the midst of a presidential battle that would determine the future of America, an upstart liberal group called MeidasTouch sent its supporters an urgent call to action. “Tonight is a huge night,” MeidasTouch declared on Twitter. “We are giving half of our contributions directly and immediately to Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. We are proud to have already chipped in 25K to their campaign. RT and chip in here.”

For MeidasTouch, the pro-Biden blitz was part of a rapidly expanding political action committee that turned viral tweets and posts into campaign contributions. Founded by three brothers, the group says it has generated more than a billion views on social media, mocking and humiliating Trump and his enablers. Crowd favorites included “Creepy Trump,” “Bye Ivanka,” and “Bye Don Jr: Love Me, Daddy!” Its podcast has become a popular destination on the anti-Trump circuit, with recent guests including Democratic Reps. Eric Swalwell and Ted Lieu, and Mary Trump, the former president’s estranged niece. All this exposure translated into more than $5 million in contributions from #Resistance donors desperate to oust Trump and his Republican collaborators.

The three brothers who founded MeidasTouch sell themselves as the progressive breakout success of the 2020 election cycle, weaving a narrative of a start-from-scratch operation that — thanks to a gift for creating viral anti-Trump videos and a unique understanding of the digital tides — rapidly blossomed into a behemoth of Democratic politics. “We’ve become the most recognizable and impactful brand name in progressive politics in the 30 days since we launched,” Ben Meiselas, the eldest brother, told Adweek in June. They aren’t, per their own telling, just the top brand, they’re also pioneers of a radical transparency model that the notoriously opaque world of Super PACs could stand to learn from. “I knew that PACs in general, political action committees, have a reputation about them,” Meiselas said on a recent MeidasTouch podcast. “And I wanted this to be so different from every other PAC, starting with the fact that me, who works for this every day, doesn’t get paid. But, two, to have the most ridiculous amount of transparency possible.”

But the full story of MeidasTouch is more complicated. The group spent more than $1 million on an advertising strategy that it calls revolutionary but campaign veterans and independent experts say is nonsensical and a more effective tool for fundraising than for helping Democrats win elections. And despite its promised transparency, MeidasTouch’s financial structure makes a dollar-for-dollar accounting of its spending impossible — and, according to a former Federal Election Commission attorney, raises some of the same legal issues that got the Trump campaign into trouble in 2020.

It’s not hard to find examples of how MeidasTouch’s grandiose self-promotion doesn’t match reality. Take, for example, the fundraising plea blasted out last August. The Super PAC, per its own disclosure forms, didn’t donate $25,000 to the Biden campaign — and indeed, a direct donation from MeidasTouch to Biden would have violated campaign-finance laws. Instead, the donations came from people who clicked on an embedded link in Meidas’ tweet and were given the option to split their donation between the Biden campaign and the Super PAC. Donors gave $31,623 to the Biden campaign, and MeidasTouch received nearly $30,000.