12 APR 2024

The Embarrassing Origins of American Fascism

In Smithsonian Magazine for April and May 2024 there is an interesting article "Taking Up the Torch" written by Jon Grinspan, about how a youth movement out of Connecticut grew rapidly and had an outsized effect on the Presidential Election of 1860, which in turn was the last straw for Southerners who saw the hand-writing and heard the message from the Wide Awakes begun in Hartford and spread across the northern states. There is a larger point he makes early in this article.

Already in January of 1860 the rhetoric of the Republican Party was that of an anti-slavery crusade. Cassius Marcellus Clay, a well-known orator and abolitionist had spoken in Connecticut and riled up the imaginations of Nutmeg State people who tended to see slavery as that problem down south ... a can of worms, in which to not get embroiled. Grinspan writes

Few of these voters were outright abolitionists, but they resented that the interests of enslavers took precedence over those of the Northern majority. Indeed, white Southerners made up barely one-quarter of the American population, and enslavers numbered fewer than 400,000 in a nation of 31 million people. They were (and are) a desperate minority! Their capture of the political system undermined the very fundamentals of democracy. For example, the Three-Fifths Compromise inflated the political influence of enslavers by counting 60 percent of enslaved populations in their congressional apportionments (while denying all enslaved people the right to vote, of course). By 1860, this had allotted 30 extra congressmen to Southern states, which gave them extra votes to add additional slave states—whether by force, as in the Mexican-American War, or by breaking longstanding agreements to keep the Kansas and Nebraska territories free. Even the supposedly independent Supreme Court fell under this nefarious sway. When the court decided, in 1857’s Dred Scott decision, that African Americans could not be citizens of the United States, and questioned the federal government’s power to limit slavery, five of the nine justices were enslavers themselves. [emphasis added]

I felt obliged to mention this, because in the "Ears of the Wolf" essay a few months ago and quite often in any essay where the point is that northerners were not innocent in the matter of slavery, I have said that northern titans of industry who had real power in and over government are due the opprobrium of contributing to the slavery problem. Grinspan's short paragraph begins to cover the rest, the by-standers up north who for three and a half generations stood by and did nothing much about the travesty taking place below the Mason-Dixon Line ... or the distortion of the federal government caused (perpetrated) in the original bargains made in the Constitution of the United States. The plantation owners like Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, and countless members of both houses of Congress managed to bend the nation to their needs.

The point of saying this outloud now is to direct your attention to the very large picture of these southern men indoctrinating those who held no slaves into thinking that southerners had the right to have been fighting for respect and dominance, if possible, for their minority standing in the nation for some 240 years! And, they had managed for 150 years, post-Bellum, to keep their minority interests safe from those who do not respect their claims to White Superiority and White Justice. These people are the vertebrae of the MAGA movement, spoiled by northern indifference and by-standing, left to carry out their work against the Black people who did their work and surely must hate them for it ... and against whom those southerners must, therefore, eternally protect themselves!

There is a conclusion to be drawn from this history and it is definitively NOT that the US Constitution is a holy document to be revered, but rather the highjacked opposite, that judicial "originalism" is another bad joke on everyone ... because, of course, the original document and the system set up over all this time is deeply flawed and deliberately so. It disrespects majority democratic opinion at one turn after another, fathers fillibusters, and the Electoral System, and populates the Senate with minority opinions excluding the voices of the majority of Americans. More to the point, after killing off 700,000 soldiers, the Union quickly allowed the Confederacy to recover! Complicity compounded again and again.

But, of course we are going to vote for President Joe Biden for President for a 2nd term, but we CANNOT ignore the fact that repairing the nation is going to take more courage than any of the news media and very, very few elected leaders have so far shown. What you hear coming from the Arizona Supreme Court must be, if we are to survive, the death rattle of the White Supremacist, Misogynist, Minoritarianism, aka plantation-born American Fascism! We must understand that fixing the US Constitution is not over, ever!

While I am writing and reviewing this I hear on MSNBC's Alex Wagner's hour that 30% of Black males are now thought to be moving over to Trump's side ... because Trymaine Lee said: "at least he tells us where he stands on things!" What?!!! He stands for himself, for revenge, always and only for himself, and under those conditions for an end to democracy — a democracy, Trymaine also said, that has not benefitted Blacks!

People! You cannot stand by and do nothing. You must let Alex know that Trymaine Lee is full of bad intentions — evil — and trying to wangle something out of Joe Biden, and if it is reparations, and it vividly is, it is a very ugly and dangerous, ironic blackmail, an extortion in a year when democracy could be rejected entirely.

JB

Politics

27 March 2024

Takeover: The Rise to Power

The March 25, 2024, edition of The New Yorker has an exceedingly important book review by Adam Gopnik, which in the third column of its first page begins like this

details, week by week, day by day, and sometimes hour by hour, how a country with a functional, if flawed, democratic machinery handed absolute power over to someone who could never claim a majority in an actual election and whom the entire conservative political class regarded as a chaotic clown with a violent following. Ryback shows how major players thought they could find some ulterior advantage in managing him. Each was sure that, after the passing of a brief storm cloud, so obviously overloaded that it had to expend itself, they would emerge in possession of power. The corporate bosses thought that, if you looked past the strutting and the performative antisemitism, you had someone who would protect your money. Communist ideologues thought that, if you peered deeply enough into the strutting and the performative antisemitism, you could spy the pattern of a popular revolution. The decent right thought that he was too obviously deranged to remain in power long, and the decent left, tempered by earlier fights against different enemies, thought that, if they forcibly stuck to the rule of law, then the law would somehow by itself entrap a lawless leader. In a now familiar paradox, the rational forces stuck to magical thinking, while the irrational ones were more logical, parsing the brute equations of power. And so the storm never passed. In a way, it still has not.

And so you have probably guessed that Timothy W. Ryback's book, "Takeover: Hitler's Final Rise to Power" is about 1932 in Germany, and that Adam Gopnik's book review "The Forgotten History of Hitler's Establishment Enablers" is really about Trump's enablers in Congress, in statehouses and legislatures in the states, and out there in the corporate world of agitated elites and the wretched refuse of the recent tsunami, the Great Resession of 2007-2012.

It is clear that most of us have thought about the enablers of Trump, chanting to themselves that "really, history does not repeat itself," believing as the powerful in Weimar Germany believed that they could control the "chaotic clown with the violent following." That belief is exotically stupid, given that the clown knows from Queens how to pit power seekers together with the power of imbecilic lawless domestic terrorists. He knows the fatal arrogance of the seekers like Lindsey Graham and MAGA Mike Johnson will isolate and disarm such women and men. He knows that the ultimate display of terror will be carried out by the mentally ill, but their anonymity will multiply their number exponentially to cow their neighbors and the seekers, the enablers.

NBC's stupid mistake last week tells us that the lessons about mobs and enablers has not been learned, that the stupid never know how stupid they are, and that the power- and position-hungry are the same. It is called a political tragedy of the commons, the willingness to sacrific the common good for one's private good, or more simply, abuse of office and the franchise. The two Achilles Heals of democracy.

We, as we believe our evolving selves to be right now, will not survive a 2nd Trump presidency, principally because the enablers this time know the gloves are off, that this is the time to make their move to aggrandize themselves and shit on their enemies. The November Election is already being contested, and there will be violence before and during and after Election Day. Frightened and weak-minded and weak-willed people will do as Germans did in 1932 and 1933, trust that it will all go away. Trump himself will quickly abrogate the Constitution, at first piecemeal, then wholesale, and he will wreak revenge on me and all those who have opposed him. He will stage a pretend election in 2028 and 2032, or probably and finally someone will become his assassin. Meanwhile our riven country and the sometimes unstable world order will be wrecked, and it will take a century or more to put it right again.

Wake the heck up, people!

JB

Politics

22 February 2024

The Democratic Presidential Candidacy: The Facts

Lawrence O'Donnell is way smarter than most of the professional pundits and aged, amateur essayists like me. I apologize for imagining that my own aging could be a lesson for politicians. Clearly, I think, I have most of my marbles, but I forget stuff and misspell words. I imagined (rather than researched) the rules on campaign funds, and they are not simple or fungible. I imagined that there might be time for switching candidates now or a month from now. Yes, that could happen, but that replacement candidate could never win the election ... and this time we do not have the luxury of waiting four years to get it right!!

Lawrence is absolutely correct and it is high time that I and everyone else get the idea that Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr. is our candidate, the deserving candidate, the only candidate who could run a campaign and win and then save our precious country from the fascists and from the enemies of our nation, especially Putin's Russia.

Lawrence and his staff of producers nailed it last evening, and I am relieved. I watched all twenty-seven minutes live and was trembling with gratitude that someone of consequence finally stood up and said what Lawrence said. His comments about the media are more than just piercingly true.

Lawrence is right to insist that the speech and interview performance coverage must give way to coverage of the skills and acts of governance ... but that is going to be very difficult to do. Political ournalism is often taught as an adversarial profession by disaffected faculty members, and that has to change. Office holders see journalists as how they present themselves—a gaggle of the rude and the obtuse, dedicated to inserting their own observations and politics over and obscuring the facts. The essential trust between journalists and candidates and office holders must be created because in our high-tech communications world ... that trust is absolutely necessary for democracy to survive even in the mid-term.

JB

Politics

18 February 2024

Denouement: The Players and the Plots

It is difficult to say how many individuals are actually players, but most play only small incremental roles in each discrete event. Eventually, they all stand for one thing: self-affirmation through the acquisition and wielding of power: lies, votes, threats, assaults, murder, insurrection, treason.

The plots are sometimes nested forms of the same thing, or sometimes sui generis, but even among the unnamed thousands they can be generalized sufficiently to tell a jury of their peers. The thousands of individual plot-lines converge like a huge ball of snakes seeking mates, if not mates then consciousness of the mass they produce, the primal fear of it.

The goal of all these plots is to assuage a grievance, most of which are motivated by a guilty fear of retribution by a more powerful enemy. The original sin took place in 1619 when the first Black slave was brought to Virginia. Those who did it knew vaguely it was sinful, but saw they were too weak by themselves to survive and prosper.

Slavery was the permanent imposition of will over another human being, but one for whom there were invented signs of inferiority. Indenture was to acquire labor in exchange for experience at a trade. Marriage was to acquire labor and protection for survival including procreative survival. So, slavery was on a spectrum of the normal organization of the civilized. Slavery produced wealth, so we should follow the money and soon the politics.

In the northern colonies and then states, the plantation society of the south was both reviled on Sundays and suborned even on Sundays by the economic interests evolving in the north over the course of two hundred years. As the more industrial society in the north evolved communications beyond their immediate ambits, they evolved rationales for their own existence and slowly in and against this context the anti-slavery movement evolved, spreading and instilling fear in the south that their means of production would be taken from them. Accordingly, in the south the rationale for their existence evolved to include a view of slavery that found justifications in history and founded a myth that even the poor and slaveless in the south could adopt: local liberty. All politics is local. And so it was for a hundred years after the Civil War, through Reconstruction and Jim Crow subjugation of former slaves, and endless violence against their bodies and lives and their reasons for existence.

By the time of the civil rights act of 1964, the politics of the south was entrenched in the organs of national power in Washington: an uneasy, sometimes farcical detente with those goddamned yankees, sometimes a necessary compromise, all to create the illusion of a democracy, but which was, north and south, an oligopoly where everyone participated by the rules of the persons in political power: the rich, the reverend, the charismatic, all of them powerfully persuasive voices of reasons for the entire civilization, and everyone participated, even women, pretending that the patriarchy was better than chaos.

Without all this preparation the current situation would not have occurred.

More than one man has seen the weaknesses of pretended democracy as potentially fatal and, moreover, the direction of its evolution away from pretense as immanently (inherently) and imminently (soon likely) fatal, at least to their own fortunes. The background idea of the American democracy is expressed very subtly by the idea that this is all a glorious experiment, which (aside, always) requires that the powers-that-be take care that guard rails against anarchy remain in place¹. The problem is that, if a multi-cultural "democracy" has become a realized fact—which it has—then are the guard rails against chaos in accordance with principles like the Bill of Rights or not, and if so, are they installed where they must be. Behind that are assumptions that the powerful understand the issues and also understand and respect the points of view of the powerless.

Eventually, this all becomes a tangle of poisonous webs. The American system has broken down under the misapplication of guard rails and rationales, such that a charismatic person can harness the minds of millions toward a dream that all the injustices of the world will go away, if only we trust him to do right by us. Mature critical thinkers reject this as just one more aberrational instance of unbridled ego. Any student of our history, though, can see in the pregnant context the mythology of our imperfect politics.

A deviant mind can see how to harness that mythology for their own benefit, given triggering events that condense the long history of injustices and inequalities and mythologies upon a people to a critical mass.

In the past fifty years we have experienced these revolutions: a disorienting acceleration of the pace of technology (especially in communications), up-ending the relationships of family and community members, then war in Vietnam, in Iraq, in Afghanistan, killing thousands of soldiers mainly of the lower and middle classes in our society, then a world-wide Covid 19 pandemic, the nature and cures of which were verbally manipulated to expand and ruthlessly kill over a million Americans and destroy businesses everywhere.

The power in the chaos we face is held, temporarily-but-effectively, by a tiny minority of politicians whose fear is loss of power, by the hand and vote of a relentless mob of the permanently disaffected, immune from logic or factual evidence. But, also by a minority of politicians who believe the chaos and fear-mongering is a fact they can manipulate to a huge advange for themselves, individually and collectively.²

So we come to this day when the Speaker of the House of Representatives believes that he will lose power and advancement opportunity if he allows a vote on arms to Ukraine, which is fighting for its life against the worst dictator Russia has seen since Stalin. He stands there trembling in the knowledge that millions more will die, but he must survive!

The Speaker must be taken aside and reprogrammed.³

¹Notice that the unspoken assumption in the Declaration of Independence (Jefferson) and the Constitution (Madison, et al) is that anarchy is the natural or basic state of mankind. On the other hand there are powerful arguments and history in the direction of autocracy, which Jefferson and others were less and less hesitantly overturning. What this means is that they were about to establish an unnatural state of being, a limited democracy. They believed that because their educated society was able to ignore even heinous behaviors within their number, and even themselves, but that all levels of society would not. Their ability to rationalize slavery, even to the extent of miscegenative consequences, as Jefferson did, suggests that our multi-cultural and poly-gendered society should beware of the founding assumptions of our country.

²This point is sometimes difficult to keep in mind. Politicians are very much afraid of being "primaried" out of power by an aroused group in substantial numbers within their party. It does not take an entire electorate to change a primary election result, but it takes enough at the margins to change the result and, perhaps to misrepresent the real majority, such that weak opinions are not registered in the results. So, the politician understands that her or his best bet is to visibly identify with the group that controls the margins, even though that is a very small part of the total electorate. So, politicians understand that they must "create and sustain the very thing that they would otherwise fear." It is a very interactive situation.

³Now, given that Trump is being dismembered by civil courts ordering him to pay around half a BILLION dollars in penalties already, with perhaps a full BILLION more in civil cases by Capitol Police and others, like Rep. Swalwell, it should be obvious to Speaker Johnson that it is just about all over but the criminal trials, which as Lawrence O'Donnell says, will definitely take place, because Trump will not win the Presidency, and will be confined and silenced for the remaining years of his life. Therefore, Johnson should screw up his remaining courage and denounce Trump to the world, pass the appropriation for the Ukraine and set himself up as a real leader.

JB

Politics

10 February (Feh-bru wa-ry) 2024

Democrats (rev. 11 Feb 24)

The Democratic National Convention takes place in Chicago, Illinois, (not a battle-ground state) this year from August 19 to August 22, about a month after the Republican National Convention in mid July in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, nominally a "battle-ground state" for presidential electors. The Republicans are owned and operated top to bottom by Donald J. Trump, so the outcome is not in doubt, given that Trump's health and liberty holds until then. Likewise, the outcome of the Democratic event is foretold for the incumbent, President Joseph Robinette Biden, also dependent on his health holding until then ... as well as the expectancy that "until then" and until January 20th, 2029, by which time he will be 86 years old and I 89.

I am too old to run, yet I am 97% lucid down 2% from my 70 year plateau, mobile independently in my brand new EV6, and containing my taste for coffee gelato with chocolate chips to three spoon scrapings a day. Biden has troubles I do not yet have, the principle one is his JUDGEMENT. He is too old to run for office DESPITE the very good job he has done under very adverse circumstances now in his first term as President. His JUDGEMENT is ironically impeded by the clarity of old-age, which is that (to me) wonderful sense of seeing clearly the situations in which we are embroiled, clearly because I no longer am beset with the details of our world, having discovered that 90% of them are irrelevant, and moreover, no longer commanded by the carnality of youth and middle age. He has not selflessly JUDGED that his service to our country is best expressed by stepping aside now for younger generations to take the helm.

Biden's ability to squeeze out of the the Congressional Chaos good programs that have retrieved our economy from two plus years of stagnation and ruin by the world-wide pandemic is the proof that he was the right person—with a thorough understanding of the legislative processes—to achieve the turn-around. He has not been a charismatic hail-fellow-well-met leader, but much more than a technocrat. He had the diplomatic chops to arouse NATO from its dogmatic and self-centered slumbers and has given Ukraine hope for survival. But, tough international situations are surmounting his best efforts now, beginning with Israel.

It is easy to declare our US national policy for a Two-State Solution to the Israeli--Palestian confrontation, but it creates the US electoral contratemps, pitting the US Jewish vote against the much newer US Muslim vote. Stating the policy is much less problematic than actually designing it against the headwinds of the JudeoFascism of PM Netanyaho. Netanyahu clearly now favors a Trump victory and so some (likely small) percent of the otherwise pro-Biden Democratic vote among "conservative" Jews will fade. Moreover, some amount, perhaps half, of the young Muslim Democratic vote in the US will also fade. Given the soft approach of Biden, this has developed into a serious lose-lose proposition. I suspect that his reasoning was to avoid US involvement in a Mid-Eastern Regional War, but at this moment, it has failed, and failed because Biden has tried to have the Jewish vote and a Palestinian homeland, too. He should have politely told (not asked) Netayahu to resign, and taken the reins himself for a moment to guide the ailing polity of Israel into the 2-State path. The fact is that there would be no Israel today, had the US continued its pre-Holocaust neutrality in 1947 and following ... and Netayahu has forgotten that and that there are more Jews in the US than Israel.

We have half a year to convince Biden that his campaign for re-election is the wrong thing to do for the US now in the grip of a fascist uprising on the right, for Israel to survive peacefully, for Ukraine to survive. His opinions about the pose and stand of the US in just about all respects are beginning to look dogmatic. That is another sign of his aging intellect. His inactivity against the Trumpists may have been a policy of First Amendment respect, but hanging over that is the fact that the Attorney General is weak-willed and even less reliably astute, and both the FBI and the sprawling prosecutorial branches are riddled with right-wing conservatives, the which have created an untenable chaos of intention for the entire Department of Justice. James Comey spoke gratuitously about Candidate Hillary Clinton and, this week, Special Counsel Robert Hur's line-crossing commentary about Joe Biden's recall are stark evidence that the Department of Justice desperately needs new leadership and that means it needs a different kind of President who knows that the "ideal of independence" for the Department of Justice is tempered by acknowledging that it very much is part of the Executive and always under the general (not necessarily gentle) guidance of the President.

There is a possibility that Biden-Harris have other plans for the Convention in August. It would be an excellent time to switch roles or decamp altogether. There are plenty of reasons for them to have a strategy that would work effectively and strongly against the barrage of lies emanating from the Trump campaign, and that would be to effectively pull out and thus to trash all campaign fantasies and libels erupting from Trump and his retinue. The Trumpists are already campaigning against Kamala Harris in the most transparently racist way. Whether Biden-Harris are planning or not, pulling the rhetorical rug out from under the fascist MAGA uprising against our democracy would befit us all this strange and all-important election year. Democrats have many well-known prospects back stage; they could disarm the MAGA sloganeers and retain the disconcerted middle and moderates in the Republican ranks.

JB

Politics

15 January 2024

Iowa

Jen Psaki is doing the second hour of her Day of the Iowa Caucuses preview examination on MSNBC as this essay gets off the ground. The three candidates of interest are Donald Trump at around 50% in the polls, Nimarata Nikki (Randhawa) Haley at about 20% in the polls, and Ron Di Santis at about 15%. One of Psaki's guests, Michael Steele, former Republican Party National Chairperson and former Lieutenant Governor of Maryland, now a joint host employee of MSNBC on the weekends and frequent guest before now on news analysis programs up and down the schedule of MSNBC, made a bald statement that was one of the reasons I decided not to watch the second hour of Psaki's program and instead write this. Steele said, "Nikki Haley would beat Biden in the November presidential election!"

You will recall that I have mentioned Haley last year a couple of times, quietly suggesting that my readers should pay her more attention. Since then the former South Carolina Governor, Haley, has told us that the US Civil War was about states' rights. She never mentioned "slavery" in her Lost Cause recollection of our history. She is a former Ambassador to the United Nations, January 2017 to December 2018, and thus the first person of (subcontinental) Indian heritage to serve in a presidential cabinet, Trump's. She has been very careful not to severely criticize Trump during her campaign.

The news that she would (probably) beat Biden suggests that Haley, were she to win the Republican nomination (against all odds) by coming in 2nd in Iowa while Trump does not win over 50% of the caucuses, is based on analyst spin and bias both pro and con on Haley and Biden. One, it assumes Haley would inherit most of the MAGA votes that otherwise would have been Trump's and, in addition, would garner all the votes of Republicans that would have not voted for Trump or more dramatically would have voted for Biden. Who is to say, excepting Michael Steele, whose political instincts are not often very wrong.

Clearly, this, if accurate, puts Democrats into a grim fix. Given the obverse of the expected November defeat of Trump by Biden as predicted by the large number of independents and Republicans not expecting to vote for Trump, can Democrats sanely or ethically hope that Trump is nominated? The answer is a quick and conditional "yes." Trump helps Democrats crystalize the voting behavior of a very large percentage of middle and middle right independent and old-school Republican voters, whereas Haley does not. Trump might well help the Democrats win the House and the Senate.

For Haley, in fact the UN Ambassadorship was predictabley uneventful, and so she loses practically nothing by it, but gains the appreciation of international "experience." Her governorship of South Carolina is roughly the same situation for non-Carolinian voters. It tallys up as "experience." It is ironic that as a person of Indian heritage she faces Kamala Harris of Indian heritage as potentially the first female president, which works in her favor, because Kamala's ("warm spit") experience as VP does not count in contemporary politics as much as the considerable more "empty" experiences of Haley's.

If she were to win against Biden, what would her program be? She would have to pay mete respect to MAGA, so appoint cabinet level people satisfactory to them. She would want to castrate MAGA, too, of course, but how? The obvious issue is immigration, so her chances of doing anything permanent would depend on what is likely to be a Democratic House of Representatives and a Republican Senate (or a 50-50 Senate with her VP making the difference). Abortion? She is a woman, but she is a politician, too, so she could veto any legislation that looked like "Roe" or not, hard to predict. She would protect Ukraine and Israel, but not as intently as Biden will. She probably would not pardon Trump, but she could be pressed hard to do that, or be assassinated for not doing it, expecially if her VP is MAGA Lite.

Her chances of winning the Republican nomination are minescule. Trump might offer her the VP slot, but bury her in endless irrelevance. She might take the bait, because Trump is also quite old and in poor health.

JB

Politics

10 January 2024

Clarity

Retirement suits me very well. I have been doing it for just short of twenty-one years. My physical self is deteriorating, of course, but at almost 84 I still have most of my marbles and take two or three pills a day to help stave off a stroke. I feel like I can go on into my mid-nineties and still remember who I am and was and want to be. One of the things that comes with elderhood is "clarity." Admittedly, clarity is sometimes nothing but a disregard for details, perhaps an obliviousness, too. Memory is affected by age, also, and it is more than just a growing cataloging problem. Nevertheless, it is possible to posit that elder-clarity is real and useful and within natural limits as dependable for actual behavior as the gnarly thought processes of people more concerned with the pursuit of sex than with their careers and families, a phase of life that at its peak suggests that such people not be in charge of anything. One has to imagine the turmoil in the heads of JFK and RFK during the years that Marilyn Monroe became available to them.

People generally agree that there are national generations at play in society. Tom Brokaw wrote about his "Greatest Generation," an appellation I disputed at the time, and feel vindicated that "greatness" is sometimes bandied about for mere commercial reasons. Clearly, the confluence of bright and ambitious men from several generations in the 1770s was the key to the exciting founding of the United States. Clearer still is the notion that the WWII baby-boom, beginning with the first leaves from the armed services during mid-to-late 1942 and on into 1945, thus establishing the arrival in 1943 and onward, through the remarkable expansion of the US economy post war to perhaps 1960, of millions of babies, producing the Boom Generation. It was unique in American History up to that point. It was larger than any previous and was coherently affected by its circumstances: its SIZE, of course, but also its hitherto unknown level of homogeneity (per radio and especially TELEVISION), and its impact on public schools, and municipal infrastructure, not to mention politics at every level.

My generation, The Silent Generation (Wm. Manchester), sometimes called the generation of vipers (Philip Wylie) or the beat generation (many), began in 1924, so very few from that year were eligible to be in the armed forces, being only 17 on December 7, 1941. I have presumed since I read the Straus and Howe books, and then created the above website, that we Silents have a unique perspective on society, especially since all of us were nurtured in some way in and by the Great Depression and our families's struggles through it, then plunging into the huge and brutal world war. My point is, however, that each coherent national generation experiences the world in distinctly different ways than those who preceded or followed. These differences impact individuals cohort by cohort. Among the crucial differences is the general attitudes about and social pressures affecting the raising of children—the "nurture quotient."

But, this essay is about Clarity, and so the major pending issue of the day is how sure are we about those politicians among us who claim clarity in spite of their annuation. Fintan O'Toole (age 65, late Boom, if he had been an American) has a 3-book review essay in The New York Review, 18 January issue, "Eldest Statesmen", which gets right into this issue that I have addressed several times already.

O'Toole's essay covers gerontocracies everywhere, regimes religious and political, each benefitting from the term-limits implicit in raising old men to major offices. He does not really consider the down-sides and chaos that produces, but the point with respect to Joseph Robinette Biden and our Republic is there. He recognizes the political clock ticking as we sit here wondering whether it is a good idea, or not, to begin talking about this in detail, mentioning alternatives, as I already have. I am impressed with President Biden's first two campaign speeches made this past week. I also watched him leave the podium and felt his unsteadiness.

I wonder if Joe (or I) fully comprehend the impact of him dying during his second term, assuming confidently that he will beat Trump even more handily than in 2020. Kamala Harris would become the first woman to become President and the first person of (partly) Asian heritage and second (partly and non-US) Black to do so. The backlash from Obama's eight years has been the awfulness of the Trump era. On the other hand, what's not to like about what Kamala would represent to us and to the world! More to the point, at nearly mid-January (already) none of the usual suspects to replace him on the November ballot have done anything publicly to indicate that O'Toole's and my anxieties are urgent. Perhaps they are not. Perhaps, though, there is a test of his fitness and clarity: would he be a good candidate, instead, for the US Supreme Court? Rationalize your own answer to that question!

JB

Politics

18 December 2023

We're Two Steps Behind

This afternoon on Deadline White House with Ali Velshi—sitting in for Nicolle Wallace out on maternity leave—the A-block was dedicated to an interesting discussion of the current rhetoric of DJT out on the hustings, plumping for a second term as President. David Jolly former R-Rep from Florida, Dr. Eddie Glaud, Professor and Chair of the Black Studies Department at Princeton University, and one other guest beamed in from elsewhere were discussants. The lede was video of the Hitlerian rhetoric coming from DJT these days, his outright statement that his intent is to rule "on day one" as a dictator, coaxing his Base to understand that immigrants are "poisoning the blood" of our nation. Velshi in a moment of clarity said "we need to think about this in a different way."

American mainstream Journalism (excluding Fox) was until Velshi's partly naive comment 2 full steps behind the reality of the American political situation. There are two steps MSNBC, NBC, CBS, ABC, and CNN must take, because there are now two overtly revolutionary political situations in action in America ... and as many have already said, we are sleepwalking toward the end of our constitutional, democratic republic.

The first revolutionary political situation is the fact that the Republican Party has fully awakened to the bitter fact that now (or before the end of this decade) old style Republicanism cannot survive BECAUSE there are not enough voters subscribing to those ideas to keep them in office, playing by the political rules of, say, 2004, when George W. Bush was re-elected, or as evidenced by Barrack Obama's elections in 2008 and 2012, two hard slaps across the face of the Jim Crow south and their allies among political conservatives and racists elsewhere.

They know they cannot win honestly, so they finally know that they have to hitch their fortunes to a different politics entirely. The likes of Lindsey Graham, otherwise once a thoughtful racist conservative, exemplifies the decision made by conservative politicians—we once could trust to obey the essential rules of constitutional norms and imperatives— who now follow a force, a demogogue, whose populist rhetoric and appeal portends success at the polls. Present day Republicans are no longer dependable as players in the usual kind of American politics. Mere conservatives are intimidated by the far-right-wrong in the Trumpist Base. The emotional and intellectual step that has to be made right now is to accept that Republicanism and a huge number of Republicans themselves are now intrinsicly inimical to our democracy—enemies of the state! This is the most difficult step, but we are certainly lost if you do not take it!

These people were staring into the abyss with little hope for political success after almost a hundred and fifty years of privilege in their local situations, pretending democracy, but paying only lip-service to the electorate and, at times, resorting to whatever-it-takes, locally, to stay in power. DJT understood this situation, and he believed he could use it to his own advantage. He has played the situation in roughly the same costume since his father gave him a huge amount of money with instructions on how the world works, namely through intimidation and numbing fear. He was always a business bully, a boss ... like of a mob, and has figured out that there is a way of looking at public service—including the US Presidency—as a kind of "business," the next obvious step, at least a powerful perch from which he could serve his own appetites fully and endlessly, maybe completely!

Some of the preparation his father, Fred, gave him came from the situation in post-WWI Germany, the Weimar Republic, and the kinds of intimidation used by the National Socialist German Workers' Party to accumulate support and finally to install Adolph Hitler as Chancellor in 1933. DJT is authentically known to have studied Mussolini and Hitler, and is notorious even yet for showing great preference for dictators like Putin, Xi, Kim, and Victor Orban, as of this past weekend's public remarks.

Now the 2nd step for us is to acknowledge that DJT comes by his dictatorial outlook organically, so much so that it was predictable. It was not spoken that way because liberals always believed that it was and always has been obvious that liberal democracy is the best way and honest men and women would always come to that conclusion. Well, no! Not everyone is honest. And, not everyone is willing to reject Patriarchy and Plunder as Darwinian norms. Autocracy is the rule, liberal democracy is the exception. Please understand that our illusions are killing us.

Trump has said out loud he will be a dictator on "day one." Ali Velshi understood and interpreted this as "one day, the first day of a new administration." But, DJT is intent on a career as dictator of the United States and perhaps other countries as well, if he were to live long enough to suck them in by his classical rule by intimidation. Ali Velshi and all of MSNBC must take both steps: acknowledge that contemporary Republicanism and Trumpism are deadly enemies of America. Take those steps! They are not leaps of faith or courage, they are obvious and you have been blinded to them by your own innocence—wherever you live!

JB

Politics

12 December 2023

Dismay

Recently, maybe a week ago, Lawrence O'Donnell of "The Last Word" fame on MSNBC, painted a picture of the difference between now and then—when the country was being founded. He was stridently warning about the slow-motion fecklessness of the modern Judiciary, apparently he had come now to a new, frustrating, and palpable awareness that justices and judges are just beyond our reach in our democracy. His picture of the Founders was of a group of gentlemen creating a country in which people like themselves, educated, genteel, more or less prosperous, half slaveholders, the other half holding their noses, all rebellious in the face of a distant insanity, always would run things. Importantly, they believed implicitly that, as the wealth of the nation expanded, men of a more common nature would rise into their class of public servants, not without hopes of also becoming discreetly consequential.

Lawrence is heard, or at least there are those among the targets he has who jostle justices and judges to act as if they are part of the here and now. The manifest urgency of the day, the possibility that the electorate—being up to here with the modern version of public servants in Congress, in the Judiciary, and the Executive—will hire a demogogue to provide the permission structure and chants and reasons to burn it all to the ground and begin again, this time eschewing the idea of democracy, because gentlemen are a vanishing category and the rest are unreliably civic minded as pigs ... except themselves, of course.

Sherilyn Ifill has an article in the New York Review of Books, "How America Ends and Begins Again" which has some interesting points of view, among them the last two words of her article's title. Yes, whatever happens next year, there will a 2025 to follow and there will be three hundred forty million Americans milling around seeking a more perfect union—or at least several thousand.

The "Union" is not united now. The glue that held it together has worn away or evaporated. What was that glue, we all ask, as if arousing ourselves from a dream? The glue was a consensus that 13 "distinct" British colonies had a common goal of survival on the edge of a god-given new continent, but survival on their own mutual terms rather than those of the Old World and its insanities. Sane gentlemen disagreeing about Black human slavery, found a way to agree about the security of a nation built out of ideas from the Old World, but never put to the test there. Rationality was to triumph over human nature, which they thought they understood.

In the same issue of The New York Review there is an article about Bill Watterson's (of Calvin and Hobbes fame) and John Kascht's new book "The Mysteries" the article, "Out of Time" written by Gabriel Winslow-Yost. The book is, apparently, as abstractly unconventional as books get, and the review article title is a somber pun. The picture here is one of many, mostly by Kascht with constant collaboration from Watterson's agile and sententious imagination. (Watterson was born in Washington, DC, and then lived in Chagrin Falls, Ohio.) Strangely, "The Mysteries" is about a Calvin and Hobbsian kind of "disenchantment" with all the youthfully incomprehensible facts of civilization these days, eventually somewhat "understood" and grudgingly "acknowledged" by all who manage to reach adulthood. For me it approaches "dismay," which is not to say "despair."

It is my Dismay, but I imagine others having very similar notions. This world in its cosmos is agnostic by comparison to the imagery we have of it. We, liberals, have dreamt our way into a crisis and are now discovering that what we thought to be immutable and axiomatic is not. Babies thrown out with bathwater are not attrocities; they are now only data. There are human beings out in their-there who cannot see the babies in that flood.

Their worlds were always different from ours, but we clung to the notion we were at a consensus. So far on the left the objective consensus is that the country has the innate ability to self-correct, to retain its most valued principles. Some in that consensus believe a few of those principles but not all. Patriarchy is one that teeters on the limb of perversity. The Market is the hinge for others. The idea of representative democracy seems ready to grow into participatory democracy or die out entirely.

If nothing else is learned from this, the word "innate" is wrong. Nothing in the affairs of our kind is guaranteed!

JB

Politics

24 November 2023

The Base

Loss aversion is probably due to the probability that for most of human evolution, human beings were closer to the edge of survival than basking in the lands of milk and honey. To bring this old aphorism up to speed for our time, politically in the United States the pivotal words "loss" and "losing" beg the question of what people do under the influence of fear.

The US emerged from the Great Depression and World War Two the richest country ever, and now it's the seventh richest country per capita on this planet surpassed only by Luxembourg, Ireland, Switzerland, Norway, Singapore, and Qatar, small populations totalling less than 9% of the US population. But, being seventh is a real problem for our society where so many are not at all rich, but "used" and "commodified" by unseen and barely inhibited actors in a free-market economy, bought and paid half their value or much less.

The US has been the fulcrum of the world economy since December 7th, 1941, something that Nazi Germany may have suspected, something that Imperial Japan knew and from which they believed the wide Pacific sheltered them. Being the fulcrum of the world economy is not something Americans worry about much. We know in our living rooms that the USD is the principal reserve currency of the world, and some of us know that the Chinese Renminbi (informally the Yuan) has been proffered to some African countries as a substitute for the USD, but only rare householders understand or care.

For at least half of all grievance-political Americans the problem is the 2008-2020 Great Recession, mainly, the continuing event that cut off or reduced or brought their income growth to a standstill. One of the most galling parts of the story is that President Obama was handed the uncontrolled Recession unabated by exiting President George W. Bush. Obama had only Timothy Geithner as Secretary of the Treasury upon whom to lean to clean up a mess that infected the entire world again, since the causes of the world-wide Great Depression are now thought to be mainly domestic. The perps, except for Lehman got away with their outrageous risk-taking and risk cover-ups, while the average household took a hit and through absolutely no fault of their own.

So, Obama and the Democrats were burdened with the moral-economic unfairness that saving the entire world's economies required. The complaint that the US helped the rest of the world before making American whole again tell you that the seriousness of the situation is not yet fully understood in America. Moreover, it tells you that Americans do not really understand how important the US is to the rest of the world and what a huge responsibility that is.

That grievance is still ripe in many places, and almost everywhere labeled Democrats as "not to be trusted"— the bad guys. Working, formerly firmly middle-class, members of the electorate changed their voting choices, just as racist Dixiecrats became Reagan Republicans densely concentrating previously unorganized racists and the congenitally under-informed.

Upsetting and destroying masses of people, the world economy suffered yet another trauma, the Covid Pandemic, out of which we are all still faintly struggling. In America already aggrieved households took another harrowing hit, while the propagandists of the new administration subborned outright lies about everything including medical answers (when finally they came) to meet the pandemic with vaccines.

The economic consequences were exacerbated by the Trumpist nucleus of the Republican party, already committed to a massive reorganization of American politics and elimination of the so-called "administrative state." Specifically, Trump initiated a psychological-political solution— mind control straight out of Orwell's 1984.

Some of "his people" were aggrieved by two issues, the economic trauma just described and a longer termed grievance about their position in society as leading members in the face of rising numbers of voters with demands of minority and immigrant populations. Trump's response was an 8 trillion tax break for the richest sector, allowing Republicans to decry the deficit they had just created, and a draconian policy toward immigrants, particularly Latinx and Muslims, a ploy to create or exacerbate "the other" in American society.

The perps of the 2008 destruction of US finance institutions and, incidentally the US automobile industry, were not disabused of their "right" to become billionaires while massive numbers of workers were pauperized. Today Oxfam International says that 8 individuals own more wealth than 50% of the total population of the world, and that gap is widening every second.

In the second quarter of 2023, 69 percent of the total wealth in the United States was owned by the top 10 percent of earners. In comparison, the lowest 50 percent of earners only owned 2.5 percent of the total wealth, according to Statista.

Ironically, and due to the psychology of grievants-accepting-a-much-wanted-champion, especially one supposedly a new rebel-brand from the tycoon class, the charm of being told incessant lies, deliberately designed to destroy trust in logic, cause and effect, and the ability to discern the real from the merely and barely plausible or outright fantasy, there is a sizable congeries of people now supporting a simplistic (and unsurprisingly) non-democratic solution to the problems of our times. The media refer to them as his Base.

"Simplism" is the essential idea, the central illusion, of their new politics.

They all believe that the endless complications of representative democracy are no longer tolerable—gross paralytic inefficiency, big money, dark money, endless pleas for money, lobbyists, corrupt representatives, barely understood primaries elections, hidden elites, unfair representation in the US Senate, minority voices, gaping wealth gaps. They believe their ideal situation cannot be sustained within a democracy. They believe a regime (oligopoly) of themselves can direct or at least constrain a figurehead dictator, but they do not yet understand that dictators can do virtually anything they want and have no incentive to be loyal to anyone but themselves.

Almost nothing of the reasons for the forming of this democracy-scorning, fascist Base is truly unknown or counter-factual. Their grievances are real, often wildly exaggerated, under-reported and under-addressed by governments at every level under every kind of political persuasion. And, the real problem is that addressing all the grievances in a way that will be responsive to the ego wounds and traumas received may be impossible—and some of them may know it already.

The other part of the problem is that their racist grievances are unacceptable and nevertheless are pervasive in the psychology and mechanics of our isolating individualistic capitalism.

The third problem is that there is no example anywhere in the historical record of any kind of dictatorship being able to manage the problems identified in this essay. Fascism destroys itself, but destroys much else along the way.

The final issue is that the Base must be dissolved and convincingly brought to understand that without a functioning democracy to represent them, they will never be heard, only told fairy-tales and exploited by dictators and their hangers-on and the ever present criminal element in society. Convicting Trump and confining him as the clear and present danger he manifestly is will begin this process.

JB

Politics

16 October 2023

This Crisis is Real!

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists Doomsday Clock was set in January 2023 at 90 seconds to midnight, because of Putin's War against Ukraine. It should be reset immediately to 30 seconds—half of a single minute, because now we have a war in Israel, a country the US will protect with whatever it takes. The enemies of Israel have vowed to extinguish it completely. Hamas has decided the rules of this battle—utter savagery!

If the other Levantine terrorist organization, Hezbollah—the tip of the Islamic Republic of Iran spear—attacks or even flinches significantly, Israel will have very few options, having sworn now after the barbaric attack of 10/7 to utterly destroy Hamas in Gaza. A two front war for Israel will be bloody beyond imagination!

The US Sixth fleet in the eastern Mediterranean and the US Fifth fleet in the Persian Gulf/Indian Ocean, cannot stop Prime Minister Netanyahu of Israel from taking preemptive action to protect northern (and indeed all of) Israel from Hezbollah. Israel has nuclear weapons, and in an attack on Hezbollah in Lebanon or Syria it is unlikely to use them, but in the more important, universally expected, preemptive strike on Iran itself is very likely to use them and use them effectively. Once they are used, there are no guarantees for anyone on this planet.

Meanwhile Democrats in the House of Representatives must seriously consider coopting Republican votes for Hakeem Jeffries for Speaker of the House—again, whatever it takes. If Jim Jordan is elected instead, an intolerable situation will have come to pass and the United States will stand at the very precipice of dissolution. Call your Representative now and ask them not to vote for Jim Jordan.

So now my personal warning to you.——
Last week I was surprisingly rude to two employees of Target, both about 65 years my junior, for a thoughtless mistake they made. My rudeness surprised me, and I apologized, but have been considering the tension and fear that has enveloped me (and perhaps them) since the barbarity of 10/7 carried out by Hammas against innocent civilians in Israel. I imagine that other Americans are now very tense and disputatious and unaware of how close to the edge they now are.

I am very fearful that the murder of a six y.o. child in Chicago yesterday—a "reprisal" against a Muslim mother and child, is the last warning we will get that America has become a tinderbox of tension and focused hatred, with lone wolves strung out beyond their own control, but now with permission from Trump to carry out mayhem among us.

JB

Politics

30 SEPT 2023

4th Ohio

The 4th Congressional District of Ohio is in the north center of the state, and borders Ohio's largest city on its north, Columbus, the capital of Ohio and the location of Ohio State University and its 50,000 students. Currently the district goes a bit further than Lima in the NW and contains Mansfield in the NE. It has I-75 in the west and I-71 in the east.

The US Representative of Ohio District 4 since 2007 is the former assistant wrestling coach at Ohio State (1987-1995) Jim Jordan, who was a high school wrestler and won 156 matches and lost just 1. He wrestled at 134 lbs. He wrestled at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and earned the Baccalaureate degree in Economics there. He got a Master's in Education at Ohio State, and a Juris Doctor degree at Capital City Law School, but never took the bar examination. Nevertheless, he is Chairman of the Judiciary Committee of the US House of Representatives.

Ohio is an interesting state, admitted to the Union in 1803, it is now the 7th most populous state in the US at 11.8 million. Thousands of westbound settlers passed through Ohio before and after it was partitioned from the Northwest Territories. In otherwords, those who settled there, settled early in the history of America, before the surges of southern and eastern Eurepean migrations of the 19th century. It was never a slave state, although the Ohio River, forming in Pennsylania at Pittsburgh, separated Ohio from the major slave-trading and slaveholding Commonwealth of Kentucky. Ohio now has a nearly 80% White people and 12.5% Black, with the remainder mostly in the cities immigrants from the middle east and southeast Asia. Currently, Ohio-4 is 88% White.

We stopped in July 1970 traveling west from Washington just north of Dayton, to meet the Smiths, parents of our good friend's wife. We played horseshoes out back, had fried chicken, corn on the cob, mashed potatos and gravy, apple pie, the whole "thing" of the legendary middle America. Mr. Smith seemed an affable pater familias. We heard years later that in one way or another he had abused every member of the family including the dogs. So, his kids were a bit mixed up. Except for this late breaking information, I had thought of Ohio as most people think about butter on toast, that is, "normal" but by no means the whole story of breakfast.

Jim Jordan reminds me very much of the high school wrestling coach and my 10th grade PE teacher. We called him "Bullet." He became the Principal of the high school during the first peak of troubles with drugs and integration in the Virginia suburbs of DC. (Years later the President of the United States visited that high school twice to observe how the melting pot was faring, because there had been race trouble there, and Obama had a program mounted to fix things like that.) But, Jim and Vic were of a type, it seemed to me. They had the wrestler's attention to the muscular poise and carriage of people, even those with whom they were simply chatting. In those days we had no vocabulary for what that was like to experience, if you were able to pick up on it at all, but there was an organic armed mousetrap intrusiveness that faded in and out. As a teacher, Vic comported himself with reserve, and it always seemed like he was holding back.

Jim Jordan, of course has denied any contemporary knowledge of or responsibility for abuses in the wrestling program at Ohio State while he was assistant coach. The Woody Hayes epoch at Ohio State and the institutional response to it—that is, the overall institution-wide imbalance of ethical concerns—suggests that Jim very well might have known more than he has let on. The question resists being cast aside because of the continuous need to assess Jim's character as he rises to more and more responsibility in the US Congress.

Prompting this essay is the interview with Cassidy Hutchinson by Rachel Maddow on MSNBC on Monday of this week. What happened in their conversation went by quite fast. The topic at that moment was what was happening in the Chief of Staff Mark Meadow's office and the Oval during the first hour of the insurrection at the Capitol. The two events were successive in-coming telephone calls, answered by Cassidy, but only after many earlier calls had already been refused by Trump and/or Meadows. The calls came in, and either Meadows or Trump or both asked, "Is it Jim?" ... Hmmm!

It is an easy inference that they were expecting it was Jim Jorden. Both Rachel and then Cassidy said so. Why? What was Jim Jordan's role in the insurrection? We do not know. Some in Congress and maybe the DoJ may know. My admittedly speculative but reasonably informed answer is a) Jim Jordan had a role to play in the events of that day, and if so, b) Jim Jordan, being probably the closest Congressman to Trump, his role was in furtherance of Trump and Co.'s plot to overturn the election. Jim Jordan is a significant leader in the House delegation of MAGA far-right Trumpists. He is accorded deference even by the media. Given that 147 Republicans voted to overturn the election results anyway after the insurrection failed, what must Jordan's role have been before the failure?

One thing about politics is that it does take place among people—plural. That means that others, maybe many, upwards of dozens or scores, know what he was planning to do. It seems inevitable that what it was (and maybe still is) will come out. Let's hope DoJ has the moxie then to arrest Jim and his ilk, if they can show and prove that he and they were up to no good, in violation of their oaths of office, and participating in a conspiracy to destroy our democracy!

JB

Politics

19 SEPT 2023

Crossroads
~850 words

Monday on Deadline White House, and again today, Nicolle Wallace again watched the panel of expert contributors come to the inescapable conclusion that, so far, it is not a fair fight. The MAGA Republicans control the narrative out of shear cheek and ugly threats against society including the putative moderate Republicans. Those are the leaders, but out in the hustings around twelve million committed to Trump and Trumpism are watching the liberals stumble through their paces in the courts and internationally, not oblivious, but un-armed for the fight they are in to preserve the constitutional order. What these Trumpists see is disarray and pretense and honorable and stupid behaviors, as if Democrats taking up the fight against those who are supporting our adversaries would undermine the sort of nation we want to have. There is a sort of truth to that, but it is not a suicide pact. The Republicans have First Amendment and Second Amendment rights, but they do not share the foundation that gives us all those rights. They are demonstrably and vocally committed to a different form of government than we now have. We must stop treating them as if they were colleagues, committed to a thriving inclusive democracy. If they think that sitting it out is their only way, Representatives and Senators who have not stood up for democracy are not colleagues in the fight for freedom and democracy!

First point—By supporting Putin they are acting treasonously against the national security of the nation. Senator Tuberville should be removed. By undermining Ukraine support they are acting against the democratically established foreign policy of the nation and providing China with courage to act against Taiwan and the US. And the rest of the world is afraid the US will let them down and withdraw into its infamous isolationism, leaving them as bait for the crush of Chinese and the rapacious Russians. They are, in every sense of the words, setting us up for a world war!

Second point—Republicans are publically and vocally committed to radical surgery or, as they see it, a "mercy killing" of our constitutional order. White Christian Nationalist Patriarchy is the strong CENTER (not the fringe) of contemporary Republicanism. That ideology does not include the kind of democracy we now have. Most people in America will lose in such a system as we had a hundred years ago, even Republicans, especially and certainly those in the lower economic levels! For Trump it is for personal power and some largesse for those who prop him up, but for those supporters and hangers on and those in the hustings who have given up on liberal democracy to give them a new or a fair deal in the economy, the answer is what they hope will be only a "modest dominion" over "lesser people" of color and liberal persuasion. We cannot continue to pretend that Republicans on any part of that political spectrum are earnestly committed to democracy. There are many among them have been saying this out loud for many years: "We are for a republic, not for a democracy." As for Trump himself, he said three months after taking office: "When somebody is the president of the United States, the authority is total. And that's the way it's got to be. It's total."

Third point—Joe Biden is statistically too old to run for a second term as President. He was born November 20, 1942. On Inaugeration Day, January 20, 2025, if he were to win, he would already be 82, and 86 in his last year in office. The odds are not good for him, and with him neither is the nation. He is increasing likely to encounter mental problems as he bores into his mid-80s. He is more likely to have sudden physical disabilities and illnesses and life-ending events. It happens, but the cirumstances are that losing a sitting President in the current and decaying domestic and international situations will be very dangerous, if not fatal to our efforts to maintain our democracy and economy. His stubborn pride cannot be our undoing! VP Harris is an excellent prosecutor, but she has not been adequately groomed for the Presidency. The proposed Biden-Harris ticket for 2024 is not the best we can do! More on this soon.

The 2024 election will be fraught with corruption, prevarication, damned lies, violence and terror. Republicans everywhere will try to cow American Blacks, Latinos, Asians, and Women in general, into not voting. They all know their votes are essential and will make the difference, and that without their votes the gains made in the 20th century will be lost. The only democratic solution is what I wrote not too long ago, a huge bipartisan ground-swell vote against Republican candidates, but for constitutional government, reproductive freedom, civil rights, international strength, democracy, amendments to the existing Constitution where needed to preserve individual liberty.

The number must be huge and must remove this repugnant breed of Republicans from the political stage completely, forever! It will take more than the hundred million (100,000,000) I said earlier it would take. The 2024 election is the best, maybe the last, chance to save the United States from this vocal, rabid and corrupt political conspiracy.

JB

Politics

24 August 2023

One Party System
~600 words

At long last, Nicolle Wallace on MSNBC's Deadline Whitehouse managed two panels of contributors to accept the idea, today, that Donald Trump's political party is no longer a political party in the common and historical meaning of the term. She and others have been hedging around the edges of this break-through journalistic point of view for well over a year—more like seven years. The description went to the details of what the otherside-hopefuls said in Milwaukee last night in their so-called "debate."

Two members of that group asserted that they would not vote for Trump, if he were convicted of the charges already brought against him in the "Florida Documents" case or the "DC Electoral Coup Plot" case or the "Georgia RICO Election Tampering" case or the "New York Hush-Money" case. The rest of them, Nicolle's panel agreed are fundamentally no longer committed to the rule of law, the US Constitution, or any of the norms and traditions of the American democratic system evolved since 1787.

Accordingly, Nicolle said, we as defenders of the US Constitutional government and society should dispense with the convenient falsehood that we still have a two party system in America, the one committed to progressive politics and moderately regulated economics and the other to conservative but darwinian politics and economics. We have the former party, but the latter has morphed into a cult of personality committed to preserving an undemocratic system of white, christian power for the entire nation, not just the deep post-Confederacy south. Republicans are no longer in favor republicanism, defined as a representative democracy, composed of a three equal and separate branches of government.

As journalism goes, the idea is long since overdue, but as a practical matter, there are vestiges of the status quo ante that are undeniably and inconveniently in the way. For one, the President of the US has not publically subscribed to this idea, and moreover, has been successful in conducting his legislative goals as if the political opposition were still actually Republicans like those of the 1950's or 1980's.

Nor can one easily imagine Joe Biden standing up one day soon to say that DoJ must arrest all members of both houses of Congress who have demonstrably violated their oaths of office, which would include the Speaker of the House, at least eight of the Republicans in the Senate and 139 in the House who voted against the certification of the electoral votes in the 2020 Presidential election, or who have by public utterance or deed otherwise obstructed or attempted to obstruct the lawful operations of the federal or state governments.

The awful fact is that the Democratic Party, although it is a very large-tent accumulation of political points of view, is confronted by a political entity not just inclined to, but vocally in favor of "burning the effing thing to the ground," or (as the lady said in New Hampshire recently) separate (again) and this time go our separate ways ... in other words (since those minority views are completely unacceptable, intolerable, and internationally suicidal), means civil war again, which we must at almost any cost avoid.

As this is being written, the former President is arriving in Atlanta, GA, to be arrested, finger-printed, his mug shot, and his martyrdom established for all his friends to honor and obey. It is historic and yet the math is still on the side of justice, but the aftermath may be more than even vigilant citizens of our country can withstand. Nicolle is right, the forces arrayed against the continuation of our constitutional government should not be under-estimated nor considered worthy of the respect they might have had in the last century. Accordingly, let it be said now across the land that we, the loyal majority will not tolerate their behavior and will pursue them by all the legal means available to us to their vanquishment.

JB

Politics

11 August 2023

The Single-Minded Right
~900 words

Over the last weekend the leading candidate in the Republican presidential primary contest in New Hampshire held a rally and a reporter for NBSNBC interviewed a late middle-aged woman sporting the tee-shirt of her candidate. Reporter: "... what if Donald Trump is not elected?" (slight pause), whereupon she said: " ... Civil War! It is obvious we cannot live together, so we should separate ...."

It was the quick matter-of-factness of her response that struck me, the binary nature of the response devoid of gray nuance that chilled me and angered me. My first thought was that Civil War is essentially a suicidal idea on her part, that she knows so little about ware and its ravages for civilians or militias untrained in warfare. And I thought about the international consequences of another real rebellion from among these people of limited intellectual means and among the better-equipped cynical among them hoping that, out of it all, they will achieve power in communities otherwise unavailable to them or no longer be democratically constrained by a constitutional system.

There are the footsoldiers of the single-"minded" political right and there are those who control them and the information getting to them, mostly propaganda framed as infringements to their liberty, based on falsehoods and mammoth lies about the democratic middle and progressives in this country. As the featured link in this essay attests, this situation is not new in the 21st century, or even in the 20th. It is "simply" the latest phenomenon of the practice of dividing to weaken and to fa, ilitate local control, to preserve slavery, to resist Reconstruction, and to maintain the baseline premise of White Nationalism, which is that America was created by White people for White people, superficially tolerant of lower status White people, but always subordinating others than White Christians.

The August 17, 2023, issue of The New York Review of Books contains two articles, the most important of which is "American Carnage", by Sean Wilentz. This piece is nominally about Timothy McVeigh who bombed the Federal Building in Oklahoma City in April of 1995. He is presented as an archetype of the Single-Minded Right, completely committed to destruction of what he was taught about the meaning of democracy in American politics. The opening paragraphs of this account are an excellent description of the beginning of Reaganism and the right's Gingrichean commitment to "taking no prisoners."

The second article is "Invasion of the Democracy Snatchers", by Fintan O'Toole, who represents an Irish-European view of the situation that has devolved under the guidance of Donald Trump, which is to say: the existential nature of the charges so far brought against Trump by Special Counsel, Jack Smith. It is obvious in the media that Trump has chosen (or has no other realistic way forward but ...) to wage his defense politically to a jury of his base—including the ones like Timothy McVeigh and the lady in New Hampshire—and those members of our society who waffle around in the middle, convinced that there are simple answers to complex questions ... and to potential witnesses and jurors in all of the cases in FL, GA, DC, and NY in which Trump is indicted.

Last night, Alex Wagoner, host at MSNBC's 9pm EDT news show, asked the awkward question of whether news about Hunter Biden and GOP fuming about him and his unfortunate tax situation should be ignored "at one's own peril," given that rightwing and center media are giving it ("fair and balanced" and undue) attention. It was awkwardly put, but the question is really, can Donald Trump paint the story of Hunter on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel? Clearly, if Joe Biden were not President, the issue would never arise. Relatives of elected officials are not the issue. Unless and until Joe Biden is actually linked to Hunter Biden's issues, the matter should not be "perilous" for news anchors, producers, or corporations.

The media, including MSNBC (aka MSDNC in Trumpland), are in the awkward position of reporting on the most consequential evolving threat to the American democracy ever, but it is moving very slowly—now approaching three years since the "contested" election of 2020. One needs a law degree to truly understand what is going on, and experts are provided at MSNBC and other "cable"-news outlets. But, there are things happening all over the world that are being neglected as the antics and lies of Trump are combed over endlessly it seems.

The most overused word these days is "unprecedented." Each new morning is, in fact, sort of unprecedented, that does not mean they are unpredictable, or that "norms" are real and decisively correct ways to guide our behavior or our curiosity or our politics. Trump is not getting the average treatment in court, and we should be angered that he is getting favors. Trump chose to run for President again, it was his personal option ... his "want" not his "need"—truly optional—and fortunately Judge Tanya J. Chutkan, presiding over the January 6th indictment trial, seems to have recognized that Trump did so to seek special treatment. If he had chosen other "want" options for this period, they would not figure in the conduct of the trial. As Rachel Maddow says in an MSNBC advertisement, the main question for history is "how did such a man ever get elected President?"

The answer is given in all the history of the political right from Jefferson and the other slaveholders through the Gilded Age, the Dixiecrats, McCarthyism, Reagan, and Gingrich to Trump. It was not inevitable, but sometimes it feels like it.

JB

politics

22 July 2023

Capitalism, Fascism, and Socialism
~1600 words

Back in mid-February, 2009, I wrote an essay under the title above because I had found an article (of 2/16/09) by Thom Hartmann on FDR-era Vice President Wallace's remarks about whether Fascism "... It Can Happen Here". Hartmann's article at OpEdNews has lost its paragraphing and is very difficult to read now, but you might try anyway. And, so, I will pick up my essay now and make some necessary revisions along the way.

It [the Hartman article] did force me to realize that the issue is really "afoot," as they say. As everyone knows explicitly or "in their bones" we are now in "very interesting times," the outcome of which could go in any of several undesirable directions.

Moreover, the issue is not straightforwardly explicable. There are a lot of good and true reasons to think that Capitalism is different from Fascist Corporatism. And, equally, there are a lot of people who, believing themselves to be "capitalists," are really more simply "entrepreneurs." And, there are "capitalists" who are already "corporatists" and don't even know it. Finally, there are rational people in politics and in the press who believe their job is to mediate the ... Administration away from any "socialistic" tendencies the Democrats may have "under their tent" and in so doing these members of the press are misrepresenting "capitalism" and, wittingly or not, playing into the hands of people who are committed "corporatists" and lacking only the propaganda means to accomplish their aims.

Capitalism has become by the beginning of the 21st Century a complex creation of human ingenuity. Even in its early modern days in the Dutch Republic of the 17th century, Capitalism was complex and already linked culturally to Calvinist religion. It was, thus, something of an ideology with assumptions established in different parts of the Dutch culture. The Dutch were, arguably, the first modern country to dominate world trade. In a sense they defined what mercantilism was and, in so doing, gave a modern definition to "capital." Fundamentally, the study of macroeconomics begins to take shape during this period, that is, "mercantilists" began to understand the larger implications of the accumulation of capital and the necessary role of the state in the accumulation and preservation of capital.

Capital is according to 19th century analysis the accumulation of "surplus value," which is, in the simplest terms, the difference between cost of "materials, production, distribution" and price. Capital has two important functions: one is to simply exist, accumulated, and to represent potential, and the other is as investment, that is, capital committed to discrete purpose. Capitalists are, therefore, persons who accumulate surplus value and persons who commit that value toward some kind of enterprise. Capitalists are not necessarily entrepreneurs and entrepreneurs are not necessarily capitalists, although entrepreneurs seek and must have capital.

Capitalists naturally are aware of the environment in which they operate and so they seek safety for their accumulations of capital and they seek to minimize the risk associated with the capital they commit into investment. In other words, since the beginning, Capitalists have not and do not exist in a vacuum; they exist in cultures and polities and like every other being on the planet they do what they can to control their cultures and polities. The activities of control are what interests us here most.

Capital and capitalists are but one part of the equation, however. You will find many definitions of what constitutes an operational economy, but the traditional view is that land and labor are the other two main components. There is not time to fully argue the reason for doing so, but I am going to substitute the term "commons" for the term "land" in this essay, because I think we need to understand the materiality of enterprise as also embodying the air, the water, the ecosystem, the planet. Perhaps we have come to this substitution too late.

The commons is the neglected part (the corporate "externalities") of the human enterprise equation, and the insertion of a partisanship for the commons is not only necessary, but has been largely misunderstood and too often deliberately suppressed. (A dozen years later, the misunderstanding now proves to have been deliberate corporate policy across the planet, ostensibly to protect investments already made, and markets fashioned to perpetuate and multiply sales.)

Labor is no less complex, but the directly human "variable." The Marxist analysis comes to the more than slightly simplistic conclusion that "surplus value" is actually the congealed value of the work of Labor. Taking that as a moral point, which Marx and Engels do (which is why Marxism has been so acceptable to many), they (along with the even less precise predecessor utopian socialists) arrive at the conclusion that control of the polity and its economy (a community like Oneida or a nation like, say, Sweden) ought to belong in the control of Labor, not in the control of culturally and religiously "irrelevant" or "unnecessary" individuals whose main aim and virtue seems to be acquisitiveness and more acquisitiveness through accumulation of capital and then investment. Once the role of the capitalist is partly revealed, it becomes easy to see a way to replace him within the "division of labor" with technicians. It should be obvious at this point that these technicians will learn to call themselves "management" and that they have exploited both Capitalists and Labor to a calamitous fare-thee-well ever since.

When Labor takes over the function of accumulating the surplus value of an economy and the function of determining how that value is to be invested, we call that Socialism. The idea that our elected representatives in Congress represent Labor is only partly correct, of course, so the current bailout situation (from the Great Recession) is only by a long stretch of the imagination Socialism. Socialism is "social" only in the sense that the private accumulation and investment ambitions of individuals is replaced by those elected to government to do what Capitalists did before, but cyclically botched again and again. It is important to see that Socialism does not obviate the need for capital or "capitalists." It is merely a different mode of control over the economy and the polity and the culture.

So then what is Fascism and Corporatism? In brief, it is the control of the polity and the economy and, accordingly, the culture, by a combination of the Capitalists in collusion with Management (now separating itself from the category of Labor), and importantly with "management" being defined and conditioned by the organized enterprises in which Capitalists have invested, that is, the corporations. The control of government, whether elected or not, is achieved by well-known indirect means, of which we have ample experience in the past sixty years. Rather than allowing themselves to be "dispossessed" by the threat of Labor taking matters into its own hands, Capitalists and Management use the government and economy to control Labor ... and to provide enterprises into which they can safely invest.

Almost needless to say in such a short essay, Corporatism is not a whether, but how much, and like Capitalism and Socialism, it has already happened. The control of the polity is always a balance (or imbalance) among the contesting members of the economy. However, you should notice that of the three methods, Fascist Corporatism has the least moral authority ... only that which the Capitalist brings in from the remnants of Calvinist discipline over one's fellow man. (Or, employs race or nationalism or in America religious pretence, as available in the epoch.)

The current Corporatists and Capitalists complain that Socialism provides no "incentives" for individuals to excel. They are incorrect, of course, since under Socialism a person typically receives only a bare minimum above which his benefits are measured by his work, not some Communist apparatchik's determination of his "needs."

One of the ideas that has affected modern culture is the concept of "complexity" and how confusing, and how often it is baffling to the normal woman or man, considering whether and if to vote, how to decide. Things are complex and rarely fully understood, even by those working tirelessly to make systems work correctly in sync with thousands of other systems. Moreover, complexity can be seen as chaos, and so it is easily so described by demagogues whose explanations draw on stereotypes and mythologies and suggest that only he understands.

I have been considering the situation described to us by good souls in the media using the term "unprecedented." There is no question that things are happening that have never happened before, some are the result of quantitative changes—the fact there are now (November 2022) 8 billion human beings on our planet seeking a reasonable life. Some are the result of qualitative changes, that is, activities we can accomplish now through technology that were unheard of a single generation (30 yrs) ago. "Unprecedented" means there is no previous example and no picture of how it evolved and what it required of people. Let me assert that every moment is unprecidented, that Life itself is an adventure into the unknown, some of the unknown being trivial, but some being amazing or fatal or just plain complicated again.

Let me also assert that most of what seems to be unprecedented is analogous or easily compared to previous experience—but for one glaring thing. What we have learned from the media is that people are mesmerized by "shiny objects," celebrities, sex, and all manner of unexpected—but definitely familiar or easily understood things and events—and so they lose their trains of thought and fall prey to complexity. News hosts over-use "unprecedented" in their description of the events of our epoch. It is because they are dazzled by shiny things. Don't be!

JB

Politics

30 June 2023

SCOTUS (Again!)
~900 words

If it were not crystal clear before this week, it should be clear now that the greatest danger to the Rule of Law, the Constitution, and the Nation itself is the Supreme Court of the United States, which has taken up the billionaires' and White Christian Nationalists' views of what our nation should be. The Court is legislating, exactly what the Framers feared and tried to prevent. SCOTUS should be about the processes of justice, that is, that justice should done as best human beings can do it, that they make sure that the law is applied correctly, fairly, and with compassion.

SCOTUS abandoned that idea long ago (1803). But now there is a super-majority of "radical-conservative" members on the court and a House of Representatives that is supposed to be ready to apply checks and balances on the Court, but cannot tie its own shoes, being run by incompetents and law-breakers, and a few who are mentally ill.

The solution is an overhaul and reform of the SCOTUS. The Chief Justice will not move his dominant pinkie a centimeter in that direction, although given the principle of "separation of powers," the better way to accomplish what must be done would be "internally." So, it falls to the checks and balances branches of Constitutional government to accomplish what must be done as the rights of one group after another are destroyed by zealots!

I would vote for Joe Biden for President in 2024, but I will not vote for him in the California Primary Election. I cannot agree with him that expanding the Court to 13 members as proposed—by Senators Ed Markey, (D-Mass), Tina Smith (D-Minn), Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass) and Representatives Jerry Nadler, (D-NY), Hank Johnson (D-GA), Cori Bush (D-MO), and Adam Schiff (D-CA),—in a current bill now called the Judiciary Act of 2023, would establish a precedent of politicization, as if it were not egregiously politicized right now!

The SCOTUS is a Constitutionally mandated body, its membership appointed by the President (Executive Branch) and confirmed (or not) by the Senate (Legislative Branch) and is, therefore, ipso facto political. Biden says expanding the SCOTUS will politicize it, as if it were not already. The Court began with 6 members, then 10, then 9. The court is overloaded and unable to carry out is functions in terms of its mandate to insure swift and sure justice is obtained in our country.

The four new members authorized by the Judiciary Act under consideration would be appointed with a mandate to fix the Court. New members would be explicitly required to state the principles with which they would, if confirmed, act as members of the Court. Of these would be a statement of adherence to the judicial principle of stare decisis, precedent, without which opinions of the Court become legislation, and by the meaning of "separation of powers" unconstitutional.

I have been criticized by attorneys, officers of the courts in their jurisdictions, for stridently asserting that the SCOTUS (and all other courts) do not have the power or authority to declare acts of Congress signed into law by POTUS unconstitutional. I say this again and again because the history of the framing of the Constitution is that the concept was promoted and deliberately and firmly dismissed. The Constitution of the United States as amended does not provide the Judiciary with that authority or power!

Well then, they say, who is to see to it that the bills, acts, and the law as approved do not conflict with provisions of the US Constitution? The answer is that the branches of government empowered by the Constitution to enact legislation: the Legislative and the Executive. And, if they make a mistake, or given that from time to time either or both are incapable or unwilling to correct mistakes, what then? The answer is that a case before a court must be ajudicated toward the least harm to living human beings AND the supposed conflict between a law and a provision of the Constitution be referred back to the Speaker of the House of Representatives and to the President Pro Tempore of the Senate for the necessary repairs.

Biden is fixed on, and exceedingly competent within, the institutions of the federal government. He is what we now call "an institutionalist," a point of view that is congruent with the over-arching principle of "the Rule of Law." Institutions, are human creations and sometimes crumble and fail. Moreover, we are a democracy of women and men, and we depend on the rationality and compassion of women and men EQUALLY with the stability usually achieved by our institutions.

Biden is younger than I, and I am not quite yet headed out to pasture, but I recognize that I am less than I was ten years ago, mostly in body, but also partly in memory and mind. Not to worry, I am good for another ten or so years doing —this—. At the same time, Joe has been exceedingly successful in Congress and in the Executive in the White House. I think he has done remarkably well as the President in the era of a world-wide pandemic, its economic consequences and aftermath, and the consequences of Russian international misbehavior. A second term will not thwart the younger generations, but it will provide a certain amount of unnecessary anxiety and possibly crisis. He should stay in the race and give due respect to those who contest him in the primaries. He should open his mind to the idea of the Judiciary Act and bring it into his campaign as we wait to we see what kind of a Congress we get in January 2025. He should publicly tell the members of the Supreme Court that their terms of office are during "good behavior," not for life. That is what the Constitution actually says.

JB

Politics

11 June 2023

Rage?
~750 words

Some Republicans have long held that Trump should be taken seriously, but not literally—that while the rage he channelled is real, his threats and proposals shouldn’t be accepted at face value. The DeSantis campaign is taking Trump literally. The central proposition of DeSantis’s career in Tallahassee and, it appears, of his Presidential candidacy, is that he can actually deliver the social retrenchment that his rival has promised. The issue for DeSantis is whether this prospect will appeal only to conservative insiders, as his Twitter Spaces rollout seemed to do, or whether his maximalist war on progressivism is really what Americans want.
New Yorker Magazine, June 5, 2023, "Florida Machine" (the title in the paper edition) by Benjamin Wallace-Wells, in the "Talk of the Town" section, the lead article.

Politics is endlessly complex and, perhaps, less spontaneous and "pure" as some would like you to believe. At dinner last evening we discussed Florida briefly and the intensity with which its Governor and its Legislature are carrying out their idea of a "retrenchment," one of the key words in the last paragraph of Wallace-Wells discussion of Ron DeSantis's behavior. In the first sentence there other key words: "rage," "channelled," "threats," and in the rest of paragraph words like "war" and the key expression at the very end of the article the question "whether ... [this war] is really what Americans want." Ending with a period not a question mark, suggesting that the question is rhetorical, and leaving readers suspended for a moment above the fray, dangling over the glowing coals of what probably is not rage at all, but willingness to be herded into a coma of self-satisfying peavishness.

"Channelled" is a loaded word that implies voodoo or massive earthwork. "Threats" are face-value assertions about the future, whether they are realistic or could be attained is asserted by what, for instance, DeSantis has already accomplished in his war against Woke.

We discussed briefly how inept the Democrats are at waging politics, a fact that usually leads to the conclusion that the well-educated leaders do not know how (or even what) to say to the polloi to win their hearts and minds like the brash Trumps and Gingriches do among the continuously wary, more than slightly change-disoriented conservatives. Union leaders fail to bring the level of discourse up to a level where the bigger picture emerges.

The success of Trump is that he has understood the unspoken disequilibrium among the millions as fairly simple disorientation, the natural product of progress toward goals held by some but not all under the sprawling tent of our culture. The "silent majority" concept rests for its silence on a lack of vocabulary. Trump gives them permission to borrow from their more homely vocabularies, taken in the main, these days, from television and the internet. He gives permission by using those words and themes right in front of them, the dialogues of cops and robbers, traitors, real-housewives, ninja, nostalgia, community status and caste, and so on. Whatever adrenalin can be called out of these terms Trump uses to bind his audiences into believers that his goal is to help them defeat their imagined and probable enemies right there in their own neighborhoods.

Rage? Let us be completely clear! The rage stoked by Trump IS NOT REAL! There is rarely rage until discontent is stoked, until permission is given to convert discontent to rampage. The fact that millions of Americans are lumped into a category of "raging militants" is because they have been herded into that category by stoking very common misapprehensions humans have about life "in the big city" or "out in the sticks" and the differences between those two. There is no lack of misapprehensions in the modern world. Children very rarely grow into milkmaids and cowherds these days, they learn about Life from television and the social media on the internet, which of course is rarely the standard version of what is really out there. The generations part ways earlier and more profoundly and families quite often lose their balance of ideas.

Provoking anxiety and then rage is different from yelling "Fire!" in a crowded theater, but the effect can be much, much worse. That politicians like Trump and DeSantis and Jordon and Cruz do it daily suggests that it may be time to fight fire with fire after all it is suicidal to sit back and just watch as our hard work building a regime of civil rights taking years and decades, even centuries, is sullied, battered, and destroyed!

JB

Politics

11 MAY 2023

How Complicated is Politics
~1200 words

When I watched this 48 minute video about infinities and the cosmos the first time —"What is Beyond The Edge?"— it struck me that even our current politics is, to say the least, daunting, almost infinitely complicated, and especially since virtually the entire Republican Party has given up serious thinking about it, especially given the "impossibly" large numbers involved in things like national debt, debt ceilings, and cost of campaigns, for three complicated matters. The Republicans have discovered the national "cosmos" is not at all to their liking and, moreover, they have chosen to believe in entirely different rules from what the rest of us have been using for 247 years. They now believe they can go back in time to an era where they were almost always in charge, a concept that overturns and defies Democracy. We are at the edge of a terrible disaster!

The Edge! Colombus grew up when Europeans believed there was an edge, but after considering evidence, he was pretty sure there was no edge, a profound change of worldview and human cosmology, which eventually combined with Renaissance and Enlightenment ideas about who should rule humanity. The United States, given its inheritance from Britain and France, took the next step and introduced democracy to the modern world.

There are, indeed, cosmic processes taking eons, during which reality is relatively stable or steady or balanced even, yet in a constant state of change. And there are those super-nova moments of annihilation and redistribution of matter. So far physics has discovered that the rules of behavior within processes in our cosmos are two, namely Newtonian-Relativistic processes and Quantum processes, the two of which are coeval, two sets of rules cosmologically overlapping always or only during our own period of evolution of our cosmos, or—who knows?—maybe just one single as-yet-not-understood process. The important discrimating factor between the two processes we know about is spacial, in fact size. Daunting! But is it relevant? Possibly!

What any of cosmology has to do with human political opinion is debatable. In fact, though, all of human opinion, cosmological and political, is constrained by the logic apparent from the observations we have been able to make about how things are and how they behave over time. But, the universe with which we must be concerned is the universe of the United States, which is neither infinite in space nor in time, in fact in both of paltry insignificance compared to the real cosmos, yet it is what we and our world have, and we have to accept reasonable logic to understand it.

So, the population of the US is in 2023 very close to 340,000,000 live persons, with about 8000 deaths per day (2.92 million/yr) and a birth rate of 12.4/1000/yr (in 2023 in the US about 4.21 million/yr). The single most important fact of which is that the US population is expanding, whereas Japan's, China's, and Russia's and those of other European countries are declining. The second most important fact of which is that the US is the third largest and most populous country in the world after India (1,426,778,002, up about 9.5m) and China (1,425,721,307, down about 160k).

The number of registered voters in 2020 was 168.31m, but in 2022 161.42m! 2022 was a General Election not a Presidential Election year. 2024 promises by extrapolation to be close to 174m registered voters, given the stakes for the Republican Party and, more important, the Democratic Party and the Nation itself.

We are dealing with nothing like an infinite number of political positions about which to vote for or against. The practical number of opinions by the 1st of November, 2024, will have reduced to two times the number of candidates for those registered voters who actually vote, that is, yes, no/abstain. The number of actual voters set a record in 2020 when 154.6m of 168.1m registered voted. That was just a fraction short of 92%. Let's posit 94% in 2024 if Biden (D) and Trump (R) are the main candidates. If Trump is in jail or does not get the Republican nomination, but runs as an Independent (I), then we do not know whether the voting rate will go up or down, which is to say that the context is very, very important, and the Democrats will win handily, or there might be bloody insurrection. Republicans keep backing into that corner!

Opinions about Presidents, Governors, Senators, Representatives, state legislators depend on endogenous and exogenous factors. Biden is old and Trump is an unhealthy 75+. Biden is steady and experienced and Trump is a volatile liar and outwardy non-conforming and internally focused on his own interests. Biden is often inarticulate while Trump is undisciplined loquacious. Biden is a centrist and Trump is a narcissist, campaigning as a revolutionary conservative. Harris is a Black woman and "Gov" Christie is a White male. Harris knows the ropes, and Gov DeSantis is known to be crafty and Christian. Harris has strong Justice credentials and served in the Senate, while Sec. of State Pompeo is seen as arrogant, military capable, and maybe a cunning administrator. Democrats are all-in for Ukraine, but Republicans are no more than 65% with Trump favoring Putin. Democrats have to explain the inflation and Republicans do not, even though the Covid caused it and capitalists have profited from it. Blacks overwhelmingly favor the Democrats, while well-to-do and older people tend to be more conservative regardless of race. Women's Medical and Reproductive autonomy—Abortion and Choice—are supported by 85% of Americans, but Republicans find reasons to vote against Pro-Choice candidates. Guns and Police and Civil Rights Abuse issues are at this moment hot issues, as Democrats campaign for meaningful reforms, while Republicans will ignore these last three main issues as much as they can.

I think that is a fair assemblage of the top issues all in one medium-sized paragraph, much easier to see as a tractible porridge now than as an infinitely complex and intractible toss-up and mess. In the case of the visible Presidential candidates the "person" seems at the moment to be more important than the issues, except for the glaring fact that Trump and any number of GOP replacements represent destruction of the nation and its Constitution. Governors and legislators have personalities, but they—as usual—carry the platform of vying opinions about the issues. Biden is the widely esteemed village elder, Trump is the town big-mouth hot shot with noisy, rabid fans. I think Village elder is not what this situation requires, even though I would vote for Bernie in a Vermont second. Nevertheless, the issues totally outweigh the person, so Biden will win overwhelmingly.

Then there is this: institutions that the Democrats are depending to hold, might not. The Supreme Court is undependable and the House also will be in corrupt hands until 2025. The media are a very mixed bag of profit-oriented news companies, the original broadcast news organizations are still playing "fair and balanced," as if Republicans' declared goal of destroying the "administrative 'nanny' state" were just talk. Cable news has strong players like MSNBC as CNN begins to lean toward Trump's base and Fox sees their audience as willing co-conspirators for the MAGAFar Right.

The economy will be receding, inflation will have scarred lots of people. The Rule of Law depends on institutions functioning dependably. Merrick Garland holds the balance scales of Justice trembling. And the likes of Jim Jordan and Ted Cruz and MTG abide. For Democrats, Independents, and moderate Republicans the 2024 ballot is easy to calculate, but the politics may be violent ... again!

JB

Science

7 April 2023

Tennessee
~500 words

Tennessee is a very long state. The drive from Memphis to Bristol is almost as bad as driving to get out of Texas. Many of the same or similar reasons apply. I have done it twice, once in a bus from Corpus Christi via Little Rock and once going back east to see relatives in DC. As you all heard on TV today, Tennessee is the place where the KKK was founded and organized. Until TVA was founded in the 1930's and built a system of hydroelectric power in the 1940's, Tennessee was very, very backward. To help with that problem Cornelius Vanderbilt put his University in Nashville and the state put UT in Knoxville which really got going when nearby Oak Ridge National Laboratory began purifying pitchblend ore into fissionable U-238 for atomic bombs. But most of the state whose legislature voted to join the Confederacy against the strong popular opinion not to do so was and still is (thanks to gerrymandering) led by the Victims of the Emancipation Proclamation and the Losers of the American Civil War, who are still fighting for their Lost Cause.

Ejecting two State Representatives from the State House of Representatives today, Tennessee has abrogated the Constitution of the United States once again. Article IV, Section 4 of the US Constitution says "The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government, and shall protect each of them against Invasion; and on Application of the Legislature, or the Executive (when the Legislature cannot be convened), against domestic violence."

As a participating state in the Union Tennessee, benefitting from the programs of the federal government more than they ever pay for, they and all states have the obligation to see to it that their Republican Form of Government remains a "constitutional representative democracy." This is the very definition of Republican Form of Government. Tennessee has failed, utterly and despicably today, to do so.

The instant cause of this controversy is the failure of the government of Tennessee to take appropriate action "against domestic Violence," that fatally visited on six persons in a Nashville school, 3 nine year olds, and 3 adult members of the staff of the school. The House of Representatives of Tennessee does not fairly represent the people of Tennessee. Their gerrymandered election districts assured them of that.

But it is the US Constitution I have been quoting. That means that the Federal Government must go well beyond thoughts and prayers toward redressing the causes of non-compliance with our (and their!) US Constitution. The Department of Justice must immediately sue Tennessee to rescind the racist ejection of duly elected persons (albeit in violation of a House rule about demeanor—never since the Civil War ever applied). That suit must be made plain by arrest of the Speaker of the Tennessee House for direct and egregious unconstitutional behavior and speech.

The World is Watching!

JB

Politics

7 March 2023

Making the Choice
~800 words

As most of the readers of Iron Mountain know and understand, I am not in favor of the position that the United States is now an acceptable version of a "more perfect union." There is much to be done yet, and we are not even close to living up to the United Nations document, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. I think it is important to draw on the wisdom of all of our planet's people for this kind of statement. It is modern, well-considered and argued, and contains direct reference to situations that mire us down even after centuries of hopeful thinking.

In the United Stvates we now have a vocal and intractible minority of people who do not understand and respect the goal of having a democratic system of government. They are the MAGA Republicans and their supporters who make billions of dollars spouting the lies that deliberately wear away at the confidence people have in their fellow citizens. It seems apparent now that Donald J. Trump saw the enormous potential for political disruption lying latent among a large swath of people, whose motivations are primarily and essentially self-preservation, meaning that they wish to have their own way, their lived experience, that experience that subjected so many more to poverty and indignity and degradation! In a phrase, they want the White Christian hegemony that existed in what has been the United States for nearly two hundred and fifty years —and one hundred fifty years before that—to continue.

They are afraid of a situation in which people of other cultures will get "their way," afraid because deep down they do not believe these "others" are as good as they are, and so the influence of the "other culture" can only be bad. They do not subscribe to the idea in the UN document about "the human family." They reject it, more and more overtly lately. It seems they have finally made a choice: it is more important to them to have that old, abusive, White culture, than to have a democracy that by definition includes the cultures of others: the brown, blacks, LGBTQ+, and anyone else that does not conform to their narrow notions of what life really is.

The rest of us want change, and we are divided not only from the fascist, White Christian Dominion people, but also among ourselves. Most of us are content to work it out within the limited confines of our democracies here in North America, Europe, and the rest of the world, hoping, by the way, to be supportive of like-minded people. For me the problem is that "the existing system" is weak and corrupt and fragile, and yet there is a consensus, (often poorly attended to,) that the the system is sufficiently neutral that we still can and might do what must be done. There are those in power who do not share the urgency.

There have been fascists among us since the beginning: people who do not and cannot cede themselves to the cooperation necessary for a democracy to function correctly. They instantly see their life chances as a pie with only "six" reasonable slices; they take "their slice" and then pretend to cooperate with the hungry, or they have a streak of that in their personality and become the people without the urgency. People accommodate to the pace of change differently. The pace is now faster with many more to consider than when we were born and "conjealed."

Kevin McCarthy, "Speaker" of the House, walked Saul's road to Damascus, but he—also a Pharisee—walked it in hubris rather than humility, in fear rather than hope and empathy. He had seen the end of his days on Earth and his hubris said "become Speaker and you will be forgiven all your mistakes; you will be famous!" And, so he made his choice. The choices of Josh and Ginny, Margorie, Ron, and Ted and countless others were just as bad, but they have made them. They now seem to be playing by the rules, but they know within and among themselves that this is, and must be, for "keeps!" They are our implacable, meaning unredeemable, unpersuadable, enemy now. They despise us, and they still fear us in our vast numbers and each individual strength.

Politics is like any human relationship situation. It only takes one to break faith. We are not required by any doctrine or compact to blame ourselves for their apostasy, their abandonment of loyalty to our democracy. But likewise, they do not get to ruin our system as they try to deceive us into thinking they are still loyal citizens. It is a painful thing to do, but we must. We need to understand the fascists are real and present and out to destroy us! And we need to understand that they have made their choice!

JB

Politics

7 February 2023

Grass Roots Briefing
~1400 words

What would it be like to wake up one morning and the neighorhood in which you live was strangely different? We can think of a tthehousand ways this would happen: new neighbors, different kids, different noises, smells, styles and fashions, and any of these plus the differences in thinking and dreaming that goes on behind it all. You turn to your spouse and say something like "I wish those people would learn to 'keep holy the sabbath'. It bothers me that they don't seem to give a shit about how we think and believe."

What would it be like to waup knowing that, despite your "best efforts" to keep the magnitude of the policy restricted, the immigration policy of the country, which was designed to bring in workers to do stuff that we do not like to do or to practice advanced work such as medicine, engineering, and music, ... that that policy included that these new people would have rights just like your own?

What would it be like if your grandfather's family and even your own parents spoke in public about how unworthy many of these new immigrants and their kids were to have civil rights and how dangerous some of them could be, how resentful of us Americans they are, even as they partake of the good things of life alongside our kids and their classmates in public schools?

What would it take, do you think, to get you to hear yourself thinking and talking about how jealous you arre of these people who have found a place to have a meaningful life, but you—having grown up in it—never did or no longer find it meaningful or satisfying?

Let's say you are a Lutheran, born and bred, happy as a clam that there is a refuge from the "injustices" and "injuries" of a life among ruffians like yourself and, especially, those others. Or, maybe, you are a Baptist, thoroughly believing in the rituals and dogmas of your belief that the long-awaited Christ came to earth and then was tortured and killed, but will return one day—maybe sooner than many people think—and fix everything to the way it is supposed to be. What, you wonder, is going to happen to all those people who do not believe it? You decide at last it is not your problem, but theirs, and that you have no responsibility for them "missing the boat," so to speak. Or, you believe that when you speak of the slight glimmer of responsibility you could have—if others also had it—that you must drag them kicking and screaming to the truth that you know.

Let's also suppose that your family, being from Europe a half dozen or fewer generations back, and white is one of the ways you assure yourself that people with that similar experience and appearance are more likely to agree with you. You understand your own race to be advanced over all others, despite the fact that your country has been the unloading zone for the tired and humble masses of your own white race, poor people under-educated, raised by parents whose main experience was like their parents' experience, but clearly not your experience, mainly because of all these other kinds of people, their styles, smells, and dreams.

All of that is called White Christian Nationalism, although it is much, much deeper and habituated and rarely spoken of, except by small instances of the abuses by The Others. White Christian Nationalism is as old as the nation and even the colonies that grouped together to get their freedom from Great Britain. It would take hundreds of volumes to detail every expression of it, and so far the White Christian Nationalists have been quite successful in keeping the story of it suppressed. Now though, it is out in the open as The Others, you and I, have seen how pernicious and toxic it has become to the lives of them and us.

The next election, somewhat like the last, will be a contest for the narrative of our nation. On the one side a very large group of people whose intent it is to suppress the narrative and the people about whom it tells. On the other side are the Progressives and Liberals and Moderates and thoughtful Conservatives that understand that change happens, that we have espoused fundamentally excellent principles, and that we must make this multiracial and multicultural society work.

Here are some of the keys to understanding how to understand what is going on beneath the top surface of the conflicting narratives. Every seat in and of the US House of Representatives will be up for election (or re-election). It is essential that the White Christian Nationalist narrative not be given power again—ever! This means that if you have limited time or funds or both you must choose your candidates early, so they know that the grassroots are supporting them.

The US Senate will elect or reelect 33 of its 100 members. Over two-thirds are Democrats or Democratic, which means twice as much jeopardy as the GOP.

Here is a chart of the Senate races in 2024. Study it.

Democrats could oust Sinema in AZ. In CA Feinstein is almost certain to retire, so either Porter or Schiff are good choices. CT is solid blue. Delaware is Blue. FL is a red mess and will get a lot of press. Hawaii is solid blue. IA is Red. Maine might tilt blue, but not likely. MD is blue. MA is very BLUE. Michigan is newly blue--watch this race. MN is blue. MS is a mess. MO is the White Christian home base. Red! Montana is Red but John Tester is likely to run again, TBD. NV is blue. NJ is blue. NM is blue. NY is Blue. ND is red. OH is mostly red but Brown is Blue. PA is blue and slightly crazy. RI is Blue. TN is Red. TX is RED. UT is RED. VT is Ind/BLUE. VA will be blue, but watch this state. WA is blue. WV is red but Machin is stradling-blue. Wisconsin is blue, but chaotic. WY is RED. What the Senate does is approve the Judiciary of the country. The GOP has tried to take over the Judical Branch, but only the SCOTUS so far. We have to turn this around. Actually, we need to redefine the Court.

The '24 election is a Presidential Election and so the big questions are whether Joe Biden really will run again. He is younger than I am, but quite old for the heat and cold of national and world politics. Most of us think he has done an excellent job, despite polls that say only 36% (Jan2023) think so. The dozen people who were on the Democrat's stage in the 2020 campaign are all (but a few) likely candidates and will run in the primaries against Joe. So the corresponding question is whether Trump will make it past the GOP primaries and, if not, who will run besides Florida's DiSantis and Nikki Haley, former Gov. of SCarolina. Personally, I think the GOP will come close to completing their suicide by Nov '24 and, short of a successful insurrection, will fail.

The other national question mark is Kamala Harris, and whether she brings anything at all to a Biden ticket or her own ticket. I have written that Joe has not done what he needed to to bring her along. The NY Times raises this question. Personally, I thought she would have taken this VP opportunity to make a national name for herself. Biden, (cynically?) gave her the job of figuring out Immigation and the Borders. I will not fault her for not drowning in that, which as I mentioned at the top is the central issue of our time about what American is to be and become. If she manages to survive and prosper in the next 18 months, she could be the "continuity" part of a Klobuchar/Harris or a Sanders/Harris Democratic ticket or a Buttigieg/Harris ticket, although I am pretty sure Nikki Haley could win that one.

Local and statewide elections are, perhaps, more important. Social issues like Women's Rights and Choice, economic issues, and democracy are right there. Here is the place to walk the grassroots for a local candidate or do the telephone work.

The five main national issues: The Supreme Court; Climate Change; Russia and China; Poverty and Homelessness; Fascism and Guns and Policing. Each of these requires focus and intelligence and hopefully experience.

JB

Politics

23 January 2023

Grass Roots Homework
~1100 words

There hundreds of things that come to mind as "homework" for those of you who want to participate in politics beyond your steady record of voting. There is the possibility of volunteering for service. You could be one of those people who works the telephonhinges from a list of the party's registered voters to urge them to support candidates by contributing a few dollars, or maybe a smaller amount each month. Or, you could walk precincts, knocking on doors to hand out posters, bills, and voter information, especially on election eve to "get out the vote." I have done both. Phoning was more fun, but if you are younger or have a younger person to go with you, door-to-door in good weather is good for you and enlightening. You have to be reasonably "social" to either one. Having a partner helps in the process of refining both your presentations. Volunteering is not exclusively a near the end of the campaign operation. So, you might inquire early and see what happens. If volunteering is not your best suit then donating some of your income is always appreciated.

Donating money has its rewards, too. You do not get to take donations or volunteering work off your federal or state taxes. You do get the satisfaction of knowing that every bit helps. If you are well-healed, then make sure you stay within your personal legal limits per candidate. You might want to discuss this with the candidate(s) of your choice.

So the main thing about donations is how much you intend to donate in toto. Then you need to decide when you want to do it, perhaps all at once, or monthly, or as the campaign encounters other than ordinary needs. So, let's say you want to keep it under $1000 dollars total for this round. The round is two years long for the House and six years for the Senate, states vary, but thinking at a two year pace will usually work out for you.

If you donate you are going to be asked to donate again and again and again, until you get pretty sick and tired of seeing your email inbox overflowing with asks. My advice is to restrict email access to each candidate or organization when you first donate to them. This last time around I was getting 200 emails each morning and then another batch by bedtime that day. It was way too much and mostly my own fault, but as I will write in the third essay on this subject, the campaigns staffs are mostly young and volunteers and they do not give a flying effword how many emails you get. They just want your money. Candidates share their knowledge of your donations with other candidates. They even offer split donations for two or more candidates.

In my previous Politics essay I included the internet addresses of the principal Democratic Party general purpose donation targets. (Scroll down to the next previous essay to refresh your memory.) I think the average grass-roots person should donate $10 per organization per month, so that's $40 a month for, say, 18 months: $720 for that two year cycle! For a family of four that is about two and a half trips to the grocery store. And, it means that you have only $280 left to stay under 1K for the cycle. One way around that is to budget $1000 per year, not per cycle. Yeah? you exclaim! Figure out what is likely to work for you given the circumstances you see around you economically and politically. It's pretty easy. Incidentally, what's iffy about your household finances is infinitely less than the trouble we have with keeping our democracy.

There are candidates you may know personally or, perhaps, would like to. How far is $280 going to go with your handful of candidates. Umm... seriously, not very far, so plan carefully. In addition to these, there are party leaders like Hakkim Jefferies and Chuck Schumer, both have access to the DCCC and DSCC funds, respectively, but they have special knowledge from sitting Representatives and Senators that helps them direct funds. You might put them on monthly allowances. The $280 for direct donations per cycle or per year is not going to go far enough, so you have two choices. Put aside funds for very special needs—and every election feels that way to the candidates. Or, you can just call it a day, year, or cycle and stand your ground. It's okay! The point is to get involved and support candidates.

Homework: look up the candidates you are interested to support directly and know what they are advocating. Candidates have pet ideas, just like you do, and the reason they are running for office is to get that idea into the fray. Their other reason is that they believe in themselves. One might surmise that some are ego driven. You want some of that, but not too much. People with ego, like "Wiley Coyote," sometimes go off the edge. Ego helps them survive the fall. If, though, the dude is a fatuous ass, then do not support him in the primaries or the general election. Tell others why you think so. Be convincing and back it up with factual anecdotes. Trust your homework. Fox News does not do homework. It is the propaganda network for Rupert Murdock, the very, very rare Australian misanthrope who thinks Americans are fools and their proud democracy a farce.

If you get in over your head, quit. If you have looked up Act Blue and like the feel of it, you should know you can stop a monthly donation program instantly. Do not get in over your head. It is important that you have placed your bets on the good runners you selected. All you have to do is wait to see if they won. I won every race I supported directly, except one. Val Demings, down in Florida, got ambushed. I think she should run for governor when Ron runs for president. Then, of course, there is the Cuban Crowd in Miami, who do not understand democracy or America.

Finally, the point of party politics is to congregate people of like minds, people willing to compromise some of their agenda to see the main points get a better chance of success. Grass roots volunteers, donors, and voters must balance party against personality. The fact is we rarely know which person will actually turn out to be an outstanding leader or law-maker. We deceive ourselves if we believe we can divine the character of a candidate without doing serious homework. For executive positions like governors and presidents, lieutenant governors, and others, Party is very important, for these candidates will be surrounded by others, and appoint others, with views closer to yours.

JB

Politics

17 January 2023

Grass Roots Donors
~600 words +

Politics is expensive, which is to say: Democracy is Expensive. One of the reasons running for office is expensive is that "air-time" is expensive, unless the candidates manages to attract news cameras, but that has its own prcablems of focus and messaging. Some politicians prefer the news-camera pathway because their message is unmistakable. It used to be kissing babies to show how human they are. Now it is being seen next to people or things that have their own message ... or being over the top and doing things that are unmistakable, usually short of violent.

The other main reason for the expenses of running political campaign is campaign staff who need to be able to support themselves during two year camyigns. Travel and lodging are also significant in senatorial and presidential elections. Those running nationally for the House of Representatives usually have more compact territories to cover.

There are several ways to donate to candidates. The one I have used is called Act Blue. I have trusted Act Blue to carry out monthly donations alongside single instance donations. It works. The problem is how to decide which organizations to support and how much to spend on them. The decision process usually involves your own savvy about issues and prominent candidates and the stage of the campaign. So, for US House of Representatives every member is up for every election every two years. Back in 1789 through, say, 1869, that made some sense, now it does not. The most serious issue with the House is that members must devote so much attention to funding that they are less attentive to legislation and more liable to succumb to easier ways to accumulate money: K Street lobbyists, corporate donations, PACs and superPacs, which amount to incremental or wholesale buying of the Representative's or Senator's vote.

My own experience is that I have had a strong belief that members of the national legislature should not be choosing which candidates to support, and with some caveats I have changed my mind completely. The Senators and Representatives are far more closely in tune with with politics on the ground than I am, so I contribute monthly to each of the Democrats' four organizations that you need to consider after doing your homework: (homework will be discussed in the next of these essays)