Category: Economics

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The Great Hack — Is it time to burn the burners?

The Great Hack

Is it time to burn the burners?

July 20th, 2021

The news about Pegasus and NSO Group, its parent company, is horrifying. Pegasus can be used to hack into any mobile phone – Apple or Android – without the operator of the device taking any action. Without so much as a click, it can explore and copy all data on the phone—phones, contact lists, passwords, everything. It can surreptitiously turn on the camera and the microphone and record everything it sees and hears. And of course it knows the exact location of any cell phone it monitors, and can record phone calls—not just the metadata, but the conversations themselves.

The Israeli government commissioned the production of this nuclear spying software, and have been extraordinarily feckless in who they’ve leased it out to. In fact, they’ve been so reckless it’s hard to fathom if they aren’t simply trying a particularly involved form of national suicide. Among the people they’ve entrusted with this software are the United Arab Emirates (better than most middle-eastern governments, but gawds, that’s a low bar) Saudi Arabia, one of the most vicious theocracies on Earth, and Azerbaijan (I wouldn’t trust that government to feed my goldfish).

According to the Guardian, which broke the story, “A recent transparency report released by NSO Group acknowledged the company was ‘closely regulated’ by export control authorities in Israel. The Defense Export Controls Agency (DECA) within the Israeli defence ministry “strictly restricts” the licensing of some surveillance products based on its own analysis of potential customers from a human rights perspective, the company said, and had rejected NSO requests for export licences ‘in quite a few cases’.

I repeat: Azerbaijan? That renowned guardian of human rights? Saudi Arabia? The Emirates?

You have to wonder who the Israelis might consider unfit to have their nuclear spyware. Just the fact that a corrupt fascist pig like Benjamin Netanyahu had control over who got it was alarming enough. The Guardian is reporting that misuse of the spyware has roiled politics in Hungary, Mexico, Russia and other places.

NSO Group claims that it supplies the spyware to governments (51% of leases), police (38%) and intelligence agencies (11%). Given the list (both known and inferred) that the Israelis and NSO deemed fit to possess this spyware, that’s less than reassuring. Intelligence agencies? CIA, SIS or Mossad are bad enough. Russia’s FIS? China’s Ministry for State Security? Turkey’s NIO? We can assume the Ministry of National Security of Azerbaijan is in on the deal. How about North Korea? Kim likes to keep tabs on things, you know.

Police agencies are a concern. I wouldn’t trust Scotland Yard with a cyberweapon like that, and they have a faintly better rep than most national police forces. I definitely wouldn’t want it in the hands of the NYPD or the LAPD. And there’s a lot of police forces that have been surreptitiously infested with Nazis and fascists and other right wing nuts. Hell, I live right next door to Oregon!

Rahul Gandhi, one of the targets of abuse by this program, said: “If your information is correct, the scale and nature of surveillance you describe goes beyond an attack on the privacy of individuals. It is an attack on the democratic foundations of our country. It must be thoroughly investigated and those responsible be identified and punished.”

Edward Snowden felt that Pegasus should be treated like nuclear weaponry because of the mass damage it can do. “If they find a way to hack one iPhone, they’ve found a way to hack all of them,”

They can break in to pretty much any cell phone. You don’t have to click on a dodgy link or call the wrong number. Pegasus does it all for you. I’m told that just turning your phone off is no defense. They can turn it on. About the only way you can ensure your phone isn’t being used to spy on you is buy taking the battery out, at which point you may as well use it as a drink coaster because that’s about all it can do.

NSO Group and Israel say they are extremely careful and screen their clients to ensure that human rights to privacy are not abused. You know. Clients like Azerbaijan. Or the vicious religious cabal running Saudi Arabia? Or India under Modi? Or for that matter, Israel under its far-right government.

What’s worse is that now it’s only a matter of time before it ends up on the dark web (if it hasn’t already) and winds up in the hands of every terror group out there. Or anyone with a nasty sense of humor and a taste for chaos? Or the flat-out psychotic. Even if NSO can safeguard the source code of Pegasus (and Windows’ source code eventually got out), people will realize that the fact that the capabilities of Pegasus exist means that it can be reverse engineered or even reinvented.

It’s only a matter of time, and time may have already run out for 99% of us.

Cell phones are hopelessly compromised. ALL cell phones. Nobody is safe.

So now is the time to start thinking about life without cell phones. They weren’t our greatest cultural advance to begin with, being flooded with spammers and providing poor quality for the price, but now they are an active danger to the security and freedom of our lives.

It may be time to trash our cell phones.

Just be sure to take the battery out and smash the unit with a hammer. That’s the only way you can be sure the personal information it carries isn’t going to Azerbaijan, or the Proud Boys.

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DecPop — It’s been 70 years since 1950

DecPop

It’s been 70 years since 1950

April 27th 2021

Back in 1974, when the average number of births per woman was 3.65, Phillip José Farmer wrote a novella, “70 Years of DecPop”. The premise was that a mad scientist released an aerosol that rendered 99.999% of all humans sterile (world population was about 4.5 billion at that time) and from there studied the devastating effects the immense drop in population would have over the ensuring 70 years.

It was a bit of a gloomy read. Humans didn’t react well to forced sterilization, and few economies were equipped to deal with shrinking markets and less demand on resources.

At that point, the birthrate had already declined significantly from its peak in 1964, when it was at 4.65. Much of the decrease was credited to a decline in religious oppression, the increased availability of birth control, and in a rebuke to Malthus, improved living conditions with greater food and shelter security. People in poor nations no longer had 12 children in hopes that one of them might live to take care of them when they got old.

At that time, sociologists expected the birth rate to climb back up, and there was even a book by Paul and Anne Ehrlich, The Population Bomb, that forecast widespread famine and war as a result of population outstripping resources such as food and clean water.

Didn’t happen. Food production soared, outpacing population growth. And the Ehrlichs hadn’t realized that most famines aren’t the result of actual food shortages, but of politics. The rich stockpile and the poor starve. Nearly all famines were easily avoidable back then. They still are.

And the birth rate continued to decline, against all expectations. By 1993 it had dropped below 3.0. By 1997 it was at 2.5.

This year it’s expected to reach a magic number: 2.1 Two point one is the birthrate at which population stops growing, known as Zero Population Growth, or ZPG.

Many developed nations had already reached that mark in the 1990s and first decade of this millennium. Almost all of western Europe, Japan, and Canada had native birthrates below 2.1. Population growth came solely from immigration.

In the United States, immigration drove population growth until 2015, but since then immigration has dropped below the level of the birthrate, which means that the next decennial census might show a population drop for the first time in American history.

The preliminary results of the 2020 census show the second smallest rate of growth in American history, with only the 1930s being (slightly) lower. For ten years, population growth was just 7.4%.

A lot of reasons have been given for this. Trump and the Republicans actively messed with the census, hoping to undercount the poor, minorities and anyone else who might be a threat to Republican power. While there’s no doubt that they tried, it’s not clear that they were particularly effective at sabotaging the census. A 2017 projection claimed the 2020 census would show 332,639,000, The actual census was 331,500,00, a shortfall of 1.16 million. Further, the growth rate drop was part of a trend, 7.4 in the ‘10s from 9.7 in the noughts, and from 12.34 in the nineties. Republican buggery had an effect, but a relatively small one. Independent surveys show that the growth rate was under 0.6% for the past three years.

Sorry for all the numbers, but they make a case. Population growth has not only slowed, it has stopped. Even in the US, where population growth came mostly from immigration, is seeing a dramatic decline in immigration, despite the fearmongering from the Nazis on the far right. It’s well under half what it was twenty years ago, and the percentage of non-native-born in the general population has leveled off at 14%.

And it’s the same world wide. Japan is in the early stages of a population crash that may see their population drop by 60% by 2100. Russia had a massive population drop following the collapse of the USSR, brought about by initial chaos and followed by an Ayn Rand gangrape of the country by western corporations during the Yeltsin years. Then Putin came along and turned Russia into an autocratic and repressive nightmare. Russia’s population is down nearly 40% from 1990.

According to the BBC: “Japan’s population is projected to fall from a peak of 128 million in 2017 to less than 53 million by the end of the century. Italy is expected to see an equally dramatic population crash from 61 million to 28 million over the same timeframe. They are two of 23 countries – which also include Spain, Portugal, Thailand and South Korea – expected to see their population more than halve.”

It’s only a matter of time before capitalists, who depend endless unsustainable growth, will realize that their consumer base is both shrinking and aging. (One of the darker elements of that DecPop story is the small number of young people trying to cope with the billions of elders who outnumber them by hundreds to one). Capitalism is ill-equipped for this coming change.

Climate change, disease and war will accelerate the drop in population. Some people believe the population drop is propelled by pollutants—forever chemicals, micro plastics, and the like. If true, that could be an existential threat to humanity.

Remember, this census doesn’t even include the nearly 600,000 dead in America from Covid, and it’s becoming clear that this pandemic will have over 10 million dead before it runs its course world wide.

Population drop is a good thing—the Earth is able to sustain perhaps three billion people comfortably, assuming those billions aren’t as wasteful and foolish as we have been. But the economic and political repercussions led by people unwilling to take a hit in profits, also make it a risky time for humans. We normally spend all our efforts fighting greed and corruption, but capitalism celebrates greed and corruption, and is very willing to be very destructive in preserving such.

Our numbers will drop, but we’ll ensure that it won’t be pretty.

,

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More Chances to Reconcile — Dems get a golden opportunity to break fascist stonewalling

More Chances to Reconcile

Dems get a golden opportunity to break fascist stonewalling

April 6th, 2021

The 1974 Congressional Budget Act had a then-obscure provision in it that allowed the Senate, once a year, to consider a bill involving revenue and/or spending to be fast-tracked through the Senate. Debate would be limited to twenty hours, and required only a simple majority for passage. In an era of bipartisanship and when using the filibuster meant standing and talking against the bill for hours or even days, it didn’t seem at all important. The main item of interest was that of limiting debate to twenty hours, ten on each side. It was then known as “the fast track bill.”

It gained prominence for the majority vote provision when Obama’s Senate used it to pass the Affordable Care Act. Trump’s Senate used it to give a nearly two trillion dollar tax cut to the extremely rich and major corporations.

It was the crafty Chuck Schumer who noticed that not only could the reconciliation process apply this year, but retroactively to last year, since no budget was submitted by the inept and rapidly fading Trump administration.

Democrats seized the opportunity, getting the Covid Relief Package passed on a vote of 51-50. By itself, it was a monumental effort, the biggest piece of public-interest legislation since the days of the New Frontier. In addition to funding the fight to end the pandemic, it pulled a third of American children out of poverty, and improved the standard of living for tens of millions of families. It was immensely popular, with even a plurality of Republican voters supporting it. Of course, not a single Republican Congressional voted for it, although a few did try to take credit for it anyway.

The second reconciliation bill due up next is the Infrastructure bill, now dubbed The American Jobs Plan. It’s a slightly bigger bill, two trillion, and is mostly meant for repair, restructuring and modernization of the infrastructure—energy, water, sewage, transportation, education and communications. No Republican supports it, and Democrat Manchin of West Virginia is upset that it will be funded by rescinding the Trump tax cut because society is there to serve the economy, goddammit, and not the other way around. Biden and Schumer are doubtlessly taking a carrot-and-stick approach to Manchin now, to get him on board. Biden, aware of the fact that the GOP is rapidly collapsing, in the political equivalent of a failed psychotic decompensating, plans to invite Republicans to hear their concerns and persuade at least one to stop marching in lockstep with the demented felon who took over their party.

The nations infrastructure has been largely ignored for over 50 years, and it will take a lot more than two trillion dollars to bring America back to first-world status. But it’s a large step in the right direction.

Then, last night on the Rachel Maddow Show, she broke the news that the Senate Parliamentarian and Chuck Schumer had found an obscure provision in the Senate rules that apparently make it possible to have TWO MORE reconciliation bills this year.

To quote the story from MSN: “Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer’s spokesman told CNN in a statement Monday that ‘the Parliamentarian has advised that a revised budget resolution may contain budget reconciliation instructions. This confirms the Leader’s interpretation of the Budget Act and allows Democrats additional tools to improve the lives of Americans if Republican obstruction continues.’”

Here’s the language the parliamentarian ruling is based upon, from the Congressional Budget Act: Sec.304. At any time after the concurrent resolution on the budget for a fiscal year has been agreed to pursuant to section 301, and before the end of such fiscal year, the two Houses may adopt a concurrent resolution on the budget which revises or reaffirms the concurrent resolution on the budget for such fiscal year most recently agreed to.

I’m glad we were able to clear that up. Seriously, I’m having a hard time making sense of it, but if I am reading it correctly, it means that when a Reconciliation bill is offered up, the Senate may add on a second such bill, so long at it pertains to or supplements the first bill in some way, and of course, like all reconciliation bills, be subject to the Byrd Act. Senator Harry Byrd was concerned about the amount of pork in reconciliation bills, and so they are limited to revenue and budget, and may not pertain to Social Security in any way.

So there is a huge opportunity for the Dems to continue bringing America into the 21st century and avoid some of the damage caused by the GOP self destructing. (Three examples of how far gone they are just from yesterday: Mitch McConnell, staunch defender of Citizens United, snarled at Coke and Delta and other companies that corporations should just shut up and stay out of politics. In the meanwhile, the GOP declared war on … baseball. You know, that thing with the bats and Dustin May’s hair. Marco Rubio seems to think MLB are stooges of China for some obscure reason. And because he’s annoyed at Amazon for whatever, he wants the union to win the Alabama election. The mind boggles.)

So: two more possible reconciliation bills.

The first one is easy enough: addendum to the American Recovery Act: Medicare for All. Everyone gets Medicare. No “window” no schedule D. We will save millions of lives and trillions of dollars. In any non-fascist state, it would be a no brainer. It should be a no brainer in America, too.

Unfortunately, the Help America Vote Act is outside of the limitations of the Reconciliation Act. But there is a way around that.

I propose a Public Campaign Funding and Voting Infrastructure Bill. Public funding would make up not less than 80% of funding for any political campaign, the amount being a function of the size of the population the office being sought represents. No person could donate more than $500 to any individual running for that office, and must be resident in that office’s zone. Companies and corporations would be limited to $1,000 dollars. Any office-seeker could have access to a pod cast.

Pursuant to that, the US would devise a voting infrastructure. ALL persons eligible to vote would be issued a national Voter ID free of cost, and would be able to use said ID to vote. E-transfer via the card to physical ballots would facilitate absentee and mail-in voting, and voters would have the ability to view their votes and check for accuracy before sending the ballots in. We could rid ourselves of Citizens United and Jim Crow laws in one fell swoop.

Biden has promised to “go big.” He’s done a good job of it so far, but much more needs to be done, and he has just been handed a golden opportunity.

Have at it, Joe.

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Maximizing Wages — How to raise wages without the fascists

Maximizing Wages

How to raise wages without the fascists

3/28/2021

There’s a lot of talk about how to raise the federal minimum wage to a still-inadequate $15 an hour. It’s popular with elected Democratic officials, it’s very popular with the public (around 70% support, including 40% of the voters in the fascist party) and it’s even popular amongst big businesses, who often realize that paying a decent wage would pay for itself in terms of employee loyalty, and decreased theft and absenteeism, not to mention increased business from a wealthier consumer base, but need a level playing field where nastier and greedier competition won’t undercut them by screwing their own employees.

Nobody’s sure how to get this badly-needed raise past the fascists. None of the 50 in the Senate will support it because they believe doing anything to benefit working people is a sign of moral weakness. There’s talk of abolishing the filibuster, or at least making it painful and difficult to use. Old fashioned talking filibusters, for instance. Imagine the look on the face of any fascist Senator who has to stand for hours, even days, in front of cameras and the world, shouting about how $7.25 an hour is plenty for those scummy little workers. Personally, I approve of reinstating the talking filibuster. There are times when a Senator needs to make a principled stand against bad legislation, and so it acts as a safety brake. But fascists will be loath to abuse the filibuster because they will be exposed as always being opposed to the needs and wants of the people.

There’s talk of getting a ruling from the Senate parliamentarian on being able to include the minimum wage raise in the upcoming infrastructure bill, and this comes much closer to a viable answer.

The infrastructure bill is going to happen, because like the Covid-19 relief bill (now the American Recovery Act) it is going through the process of reconciliation, a tactical dodge that allows legislation to pass in the Senate with a simple majority. The fascists can vote against it unanimously and almost certainly will, but it doesn’t matter, because the Democrats have 51 votes.

Now, the infrastructure bill is going to be huge: Anywhere between two and four TRILLION dollars. It will include new highways, new airports, new schools, new water and sewage systems, new bridges, and massive investment in clean and sustainable energy. It will create millions of jobs. Not thousands, not hundreds of thousands—millions of jobs.

Further, large infrastructure projects usually pay for themselves dozens of times over. The Interstate Highway system essentially CREATED the modern American economy. The Tennessee Valley Authority pulled millions out of poverty. The Clean Air/Clean Water Acts resulted in savings to Americans amounting to over $25 trillion dollars by the year 2000, and continue to do so despite the best efforts of the fascists. If we spend $4 trillion now, we can expect a return of $20 trillion by the year 2030—and that’s a conservative estimate!

Back in the day of sane Conservatives in the GOP, it was usually a bipartisan issue. Two of the three examples I noted (Interstate System and CA/CW) happened under Republican administrations. But Republicans are dead, replaced by fascists, and even if they see the economic benefits to be had, they can’t allow Democrats and the government credit for doing things that they could do but won’t.

Yes, there will be pork. Every single rep and senator is gonna want a little bit of sugar for their districts, and that’s ok—after all, that’s what they’re there for. Some will be driven by an earnest desire to better the lives of their constituents, and some will just be looking for an opportunity to steal with both hands. Not just fascists, either. Human nature is human nature. We’re going to have to be vigilant, and keep the grifters in check.

But that brings us back to the matter of wages. It would be nice if the $15 minimum wage were somehow tacked onto this bill, but I’m not holding my breath.

However, all those tens of thousands of projects—road work, construction, upgrading and modernizing—will be hiring. Some may be direct government actions, like we saw with FDR’s Civilian Conservation Corps. Most of the rest will be contract work. In either case, the government has the power to set conditions of work, including such things as time off, vacation time, union membership, health and safety regulations—and wages.

There’s no reason the bill cannot include mandated minimum wages for employees, either directly or demanded of private companies seeking government contracts. Twenty an hour for custodial staff or drivers, 150% of prevailing wages for more skilled positions. Millions of jobs, many unskilled or semi-skilled.

And remember, this will pay for itself, many times over. Most immediately through what’s called “the velocity of money” – people who were making $10 and hour and now are making $25 will be hitting the local stores for clothing and household items that they have been denied before. On average, each dollar received in wages above the existing amount results in between 2 and 3 dollars in increased economic activity. And if the town also has an new or improved highway, and clean and efficient power, and safe clean water…well, that’s fat city, folks!

In the meantime, all the cheap-ass minimum wage employers are going to have to raise their game if they want to compete and keep their workers. Why flip burgers for $10 an hour when you can do it for $20/hour plus benefits?

All the Dems need to do is include a provision for direct and contract labour: 150% of the norm, plus health benefits and vacation and the like. It would immediately start paying for itself, and create an economic juggernaut.

Instead of $15/hour, make it 150% prevailing rates. It’s a winner, and even the fascists won’t be able to stop it.

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Joe’s first White House Speech — Reasonable Assurances and Sensible Warnings

Joe’s first White House Speech

Reasonable Assurances and Sensible Warnings

March 11th, 2021

Day fifty of the Biden presidency, and so far so good. Both politically and psychologically, today was a good point for Biden to stop and have a talk with the people. It came a few hours after he signed into law the biggest rebuilding act America had seen since FDR’s first 100 days. The American Rescue Act will, in the estimate of Goldman-Sachs, result in 8% annual growth over the next 12 months. That, too, is a rate of growth not seen since the 1930s. Best of all, it’s going to people and small businesses, what you could call “trickle up economics.” It will save thousands of small businesses, protect millions from hunger and homelessness. It is, as Biden once put it about the AMA, “a big fucking deal.”

In the glow from this massive legislative victory, Biden addressed the state of the country on the anniversary of the Covid pandemic.

After the past year where lies, braggadocio and delusions were all Americans got from the White House, Biden’s cautionary optimism was a gust of fresh air. Biden extolled the immense gains the vaccine program had made in the past 50 days, but didn’t try to pretend it was all his doing. (In a truly pathetic footnote, Trump put out a brief communiqué under a sort-of presidential seal, from The Office of Donald J. Trump, trying to take credit for the vaccine program.) The program has been pretty much miraculous, despite Trump. When Biden first took office, he spoke of 100 million vaccines in the first 100 days (the last day of April). That was considered a high goal, even before we learned that the outgoing administration had absolutely no plan in place for distribution or even procurement of the needed vaccines.

Now, not only are we well ahead of pace for that, but we may have vaccines available for the entire adult population by the end of May, some 500 million shots all told. The CDC is of the opinion that we’ll have herd immunity by the beginning of May, but Doctor Fauci, on the Rachel Maddow show tonight, cautioned that we are in a race against variants, and we may, even with full vaccinations, end up playing whack-a-mole (his term) with those variants, much the way we do with strains of flu and the common cold. It’s evolution, people.

Biden himself made the same cautionary note, and urged people to keep on social distancing and wearing masks for the time being, despite what the “Neanderthals” in the GOP think we should be doing. It’s not a popular request, but Biden has some courage. Things are a lot more hopeful, but we are not out of the woods. He’s right, Fauci’s right, and nearly every expert in the field is right. Tucker Carlson, Alex Jones and Donald Trump are all wrong, and for vicious, self-serving reasons.

Biden spoke movingly of the loss and deprivation hundreds of millions of people suffered over this past year—well over half a million dead (“more than World War I, World War II, and 9/11”), millions of families separated, millions of jobs lost. Even the most cynical of viewers had to admit that he SOUNDED sincere.

He knows, at long last, that there is a light at the end of the tunnel, and he just wants us not to derail ourselves by being reckless as we approach the light. It won’t stop the freedumb morons, but it might just keep enough sane people cautious enough that we might get by.

Fauci and Maddow were talking about monoclonal antibody treatments. Two studies showed respectively 87 and 89% efficacy if administered early in the course of the disease, numbers so convincing that they dropped the double blind nature of the studies on the ground that it was not moral to give half the subjects a placebo based on what is known.

This doesn’t mean that you can run out licking random seats in the New York subway knowing you just need to pop two in the mouth and you’ll be all better. The treatments are by infusion only, and still very expensive. And if you get to the point where the symptoms are life-threatening, then you’re far enough along that the treatment will be of little or any help. Fauci is hoping for a treatment that involves simple injections, or even just pills, but that’s an unknown amount of time in the future. It’s not here, and may not be here for years, but there is a cure.

Not mentioned was the spectre of “long COVID”. Roughly a third of people who become infected develop symptoms weeks or months later, even if they were completely asymptomatic to begin with. And yes, you can still be infected, even with the shots. You just are very unlikely to develop symptoms, and in the beginning, they will be mild. Nobody knows how that will affect development of “long COVID.”

Futher, variants are appearing, and while the evolutionary trend is for such variants to become both more contagious and milder (the weeding-out process of evolution means viruses that successfully inhabit live hosts will outnumber the ones that kill their hosts) that is just a trend. The mutations are individually random, and a variety of Covid could show up that is as lethal as Ebola and as communicable as measles. Worst case scenario, to be sure, but within the realm of possibility. And if we are reckless and go on acting as a culture medium for this virus, the higher the chances that something even nastier will crop up. And the more variations, the more types of vaccines are needed unless and until we can come up with an umbrella shot that can block all Covids. Note: we haven’t been able to develop a shot like that for influenza, and with the common cold, it’s pointless to even try.

Because of this, Biden’s speech was perfect for the occasion. He didn’t tell us what we wanted to hear. He told us what we needed to hear, and for most of us, that’s going to help us a lot through the coming year.

 

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Swine before Pearls — GOP clutches pearls in trivial outrage

Swine before Pearls

GOP clutches pearls in trivial outrage

March 6th, 2021

Of course you’ve heard about the paroxysms of outrage gripping the snake pits of the right this past week. Mister Potatohead has been desexed. Libruls have taken Doctor Seuss and served him up with green eggs and ham. And worst of all, the President called Republicans Neanderthals! (Yes, that was unfair. Neanderthals greatly resembled humans. Republicans do not.)

Of course, there isn’t much else they can talk about. Every once in a while you hear a murmur about pork in the Covid Relief Package (which passed yesterday!) which amounted to 142 million dollars (about 0.07% of the bill). That pork was removed, making no discernible difference in the size of the bill. Similarly, Manchin of West Virginia got his wish, and ¼ of the supplemental payment on unemployment was cut, which amounted to another $100 million or so. Subtract $242 million from $1.9 trillion and you get $1,899,758,000. My god, the republic has been saved!

The Covid relief bill is widely popular, with even 44% of Republican voters supporting it. But the efforts to derail this badly-needed and popular bill started out tawdry and ended up ridiculous. Ron Johnson, as a delaying tactic, demanded that the poor clerks read every word of the 758 page bill to the Senate, a process that took some 10 very dreary hours. It was so boring that by the end, all the Republicans had gone home, including the estimable Senator Johnson. The Democrats spotted an opportunity, and voted unanimously to limit debate on the bill to six hours. The Republicans had hoped to force votes on hundreds of amendments to the bill, and that tactic was eliminated. So the next day, the bill was passed and awaits President Biden’s signature to become law. Yes, Republicans will stand for their beliefs, but luckily for us, they’re all nihilists.

It was a massive win for the Democrats and Biden, and more to the point, it was a massive win for the country. By the end of summer, life may be generally back to normal for most people.

Republicans don’t want to talk about the vaccination program. Biden on his first day in office promised 100 million shots would be given in the first 100 days, a goal many people had dismissed as unlikely even before it was discovered that the Trump administration had left absolutely no plans to distribute the vaccines—a final little nasty bit of vindictiveness from the defeated Trump.

Instead, we have some 75 million shots administered in the first 45 days, and the Biden administration is now promising that everyone will have had both shots by some time in May. Even by the standards of an America that existed before Republicans privatized it, that’s an extraordinary accomplishment.

The infrastructure bill is next on the schedule. It’s even bigger (some 2 – 4 trillion dollars) and most assuredly will have pork, both Republican and Democratic. Back in the Nixon days, Republicans decided that it would be far more efficient and cheaper to contract government road work out to the Sopranos. The results were predictable enough. Most infrastructure projects will end up in the hands of contractors who will skim 40% off the top and use the cheapest materials they can get away with. But it’s expected to include some items that will be hugely controversial (in other words, will annoy the rich) while providing vast improvements to society. It will include a Civilian Conservation Corps project that will employ up to two million people in public works and public improvements projects. It will eliminate most if not all tax credits for the fossil fuels industries and transfer those credits to renewable clean energy projects. On a level playing field, renewable energy is already cheaper than fossil fuels. This will make it MUCH cheaper.

Republicans will fight this, but they know that even with the inevitable flaws, they are on the wrong side with public opinion.

The mad, deposed Trump is going to be a gigantic problem for the GOP. One Trump official was indicted yesterday for involvement with the January 6th crowd, and Trump himself is lashing out furiously and blindly, attacking all GOP members who didn’t support his stolen election fantasy and even going so far as to send a cease and desist order to the GOP to not use his image or name in their promotional materials. Historians didn’t bother to see if any former president did anything like that. It hasn’t happened before. And in the justice system, a tidal wave of evidence is mounting that will sweep Trump into prison, probably for life. A sizable percentage of Republicans have fled the party and will not return until the Trump movement is dead. That will take a couple of more years.

Republican policy, such as it is, is to cling blindly to power, no matter what it takes. Gerrymandering, stacked courts, 258 different bills in 43 states designed to make it harder for people to vote, and endless attacks on the media. People are realizing that they aren’t doing this for the benefit of the people, and public opinion is mounting against that.

Then there’s the matter of raising the minimum wage to $15/hour. Over three-quarters of voters approve of that, and in any real democracy, the outcome would be a no-brainer. But Republicans will continue to unanimously oppose it, even as many of the corporations and rich people they serve approve of it. In that way, they’re a bit like the Japanese soldiers marooned on Pacific islands for 25 year or more, unaware that World War II had ended.

Given all that, is it any wonder Republicans would sooner whine about Potatohead and Doctor Seuss?

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Biden Our Time — Good Trumps Evil

Biden Our Time

Good Trumps Evil

January 21st 2021

At 9:01am PST yesterday I posted a one-word post on Facebook.

The post said, “WHEW!”

It might be the only all-caps post I’ll ever make, since I regard people who post in all-caps to be total idiots. I am quite capable of attaining truly sublime levels of idiocy without artificial aids from my caps-lock key, thank you very much.

We all expected things to turn weird and disgusting between the election and inauguration day, and of course things did. And yes, there were a lot of grim things. COVID continued to explode, with the death toll now well over 400,000, and the Trump regime bungled the vaccine rollout. Trump gleefully sabotaged Open Skies and other treaties, giving a gleeful Vladimir Putin an entire basket of tactical Easter eggs. They had an insurrectionist attack on the Capitol and comprised, for the most part, of meth heads trying to play soldier and absolutely lunatic conspiracy theory freaks. Even more troubling, we discovered that much of the Republican party would rather destroy the United States than share power with those of the wrong race, or the wrong religion, or who were simply guilty of not being rich.

If one good thing came of the Trump regime, it was that he forced America to look in the mirror, and learn that it’s really no better than any other country, and can no longer pretend to be a shining beacon of reason and ethics. Not that it ever really could, but the facade had been torn away.

I don’t envy Joe Biden. He took office yesterday facing a national crisis every bit as great as the one Franklin Roosevelt faced in March of 1933. FDR only had to face the First Great Depression. Biden is facing the Second Great Depression, along with the pandemic, the worst since 1919, and an opposition that is anything but loyal; a large chunk of the GOP leadership are seditionists at best, traitors at worst.

I’m sure I’ll oppose Biden on some items, sometimes vehemently. But unlike his predecessor, I won’t be questioning his loyalty, his courage, or his good intentions. That’s a huge improvement right there. Trump is filth. Biden is not.

I’m having grim fun watching the GOP writhe and twist. The militias have come face to face with the fact that no coup can succeed without popular support. Power comes, not from the barrel of a gun, but the will of the people. It’s something the fairy-tale stories about overthrowing evil kings and the like often miss; no regime happens in a vacuum. You need, at the very least, the support of one third of the population, and at least another third willing to not take up arms against you. When 3/4s of the population are openly disgusted with you and want to throw you in jail (or under a guillotine) then your cause is lost. Most people hate the so-called militias, with their open embrace of Nazism and white superiority. Theirs is the philosophy of war, of death camps, of genocides. A large majority of Americans are better than that, and won’t fall to that level except under the circumstances that led to the French Revolution, the Soviet revolution, the Putsch and rise of Hitler, or the final disintegration of the USSR. We aren’t there yet, and with any luck, we won’t be.

The QAnon conspiracy nuts have to come to grips with the fact that Trump isn’t going to be a God-Emperor here to save us from the utterly imaginary depredations of the Clintons, Obama, or the lizard people. Quite a few of them hit a wall of reality beginning on the sixth of January and crashed and burned with the sight of Biden taking the oath of office. Q himself apparently stopped posting shortly after the election. Many will just find a new form of insanity to embrace, but quite a few are wailing that they were misled and lied to, and that their new religion failed them. I imagine Christianity must have faced a similar setback when Jesus’ prediction that many of those living would see his return failed to come to pass. In other words, don’t expect QAnon to just go away. The ability to rationalize is deep amongst the deluded and the insane.

The the ‘sane’ part of the GOP, the ‘good Germans’ are popping up all over the place. “Oh, I never supported Trump.” “I just went along because I was afraid.” “I was just following orders.” Suddenly, they want to talk about unity, negotiation, and compromise. There may even be some who are acting in good faith, but it’s a sure bet that most are just trying to salvage what they can for the ruins of their party, and are probing Biden and the Democratic Party for any signs of weakness. A favorite seems to be “Well, 74 million people voted for Trump and you can’t ignore them.” The reality is 81 million people voted for Biden, and unlike Trump won’t be out to viciously take revenge on the Trump voters. Biden isn’t going to refuse aid to red states, and he isn’t going to address the pandemic only in states that voted for him. He isn’t Trump. He isn’t a monster.

To the Trump voters I say, “Biden is here to govern, not rule. He isn’t going to make you second-class citizens because of how you voted. He isn’t going to turn America into a Soviet wasteland, no matter what the high-paid liars on the right wing media say. He is going to make changes, and you may not like all of them, but if you have any honesty, any decency, you’ll reserve judgment and see what the changes mean in your lives, your work, your schools, your health care and your country. You don’t own America, but America exists to serve you, and Biden seems to be totally aware of that.

“We tried your way, and it was a catastrophe. Trump was the worst president in our history. Expect better with Biden.”

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Solstice 2020 — Hope always rises the next morning

December 21st, 2020

This Solstice piece, like all the others I’ve written over the past twenty years, will deal with hope, always a central theme of the Solstice. But it’s going to be a darn sight easier to write than it might have been six weeks ago, when the outlook was still unremittingly bleak. However, now we see a map to the end of the pandemic, and the end of Trump.

I think it must have felt a lot like this in the autumn of 1944, when it became clear the allies were on their way to victory both in Europe and in the Pacific. There was still a hard slog ahead, and a heavy price to be paid before the final victory, but at least victory was in sight, and the future a lot brighter.

Hope isn’t hard to come by in this dark winter. We have a vaccine. We’ve had an election. Both represent turning points, arresting a dangerous plunge to mass death and horror.

We’re not out of the woods yet, of course. It may be several months before many of us get shots, and at least six weeks before we start seeing the terrifying wave of COVID cases finally begin to break. Even with the shots, a half million people in the US alone will be dead, and millions more—perhaps tens of millions—facing a life of permanent and sometimes crippling medical problems.

I won’t relax about Donald Trump until he is out of the White House and facing trial for his many crimes. The votes have been counted and recounted, the courts have ruled dozens of times, and the few remaining sane Republicans have agreed—Biden won by a huge margin, and Trump needs to leave.

And yet Trump apparently believes he did win, as do his followers—the more ignorant ones, to be sure. He’s ordered the Pentagon not to give Biden any briefings even as the country grapples with the worst security leak in its history.

It’s quite possible that Russia controls our nuclear weapons right now, and there is a suspicion that Trump is complicit, either proactively (setting it up to happen) or reactively (knowing it happened, and doing nothing about it.) Perhaps both. In addition to his deep corruption, cruelty and incompetence, it seems likely that Trump is a gleeful traitor, destroying the country that made him possible, for tawdry profit. He’s even trying to suggest it was China on behalf of his Russian master.

There are fears generated by this despicable man, fears that living Americans have never experienced before. There’s a small but finite possibility that by this time next year, we could be in camps, or fighting for our lives and freedoms in a contrecoup. It’s been 150 years since such thoughts have been anything other than paranoid drivel, and I would love it if I read this a year from now and think of my words, “Jesus. Cut back on the coffee, man!”

What I expect to see, a month from now, is Joe Biden taking office and working hard to be a wise and just president, facing down the daunting problems left by his predecessor. I hope to see the daily count of new cases dropping day by day, and hospitals regaining the ability to handle the influx of sick and dying.

2021 will be a year of recovery. The deliberate cruelties and viciousness of the Trump regime will be reversed, and wanton executions, desecration of national parks and selling of our children and our sick to for-profit entities will abate. We will regain control of our compromised cybernet infrastructure. Eventually we might enter stores, attend parties, hug friends and family without fear of it being a death sentence. The strutting Nazis who make up outfits such as the Proud Boys will be cowering under their rocks, licking their wounds and planning for the next time society is sick enough for their opportunistic moral sickness. The vile acronyms of the Republican Party, MAGA, 6MWE, perhaps even GOP itself, will be consigned to the dustbin of history, along with other such loathsome utterances as “Got Mitt Uns” and “The People and Party are One!”

We’ll always have conspiracy theorists, of course, but by this time next year they may be back in their accustomed position of providing amusement and some puzzlement.

People are free to believe whatever damnfool notions they want, as the saying goes. But they aren’t free to make it public policy.

Chemtrails? Moon Landing Hoax? Poison Vaccines? No such thing as COVID? Your opinions, your right. You can even hold public office with nutball beliefs like those, like the idiot I’m stuck with for my Congressman. But don’t try to make them beliefs WE must live by. We have the right to tell you to go to hell—and we will!

And yes, this includes religious beliefs. Most churches are just conspiracy theories with money.

Perhaps by next year I’ll be marveling that we are in a world where food, shelter, water, clothing, medical care and education are rights, and not something to be begged for from scowling billionaires. Perhaps we’ll be on our way to a world were both billionaires and hunger no longer exist.

Yes, these are scary times. Nobody’s going to dispute that. But these aren’t end times, and history shows that the brightest sunrises happen after the longest night. It’s times like these that lead to human renaissances. Our greatest eras followed the Inquisition, the Black Plague, Civil Wars and Hitler.

I hope by next year I can write pieces, including the Solstice letter, that don’t include politics. I miss writing about Iceland and Elves, Shackleton and Exploration, and other Solstice themes. Let’s resolve to get the miserable creatures of the right off our necks so we can live free and free from fear!

We will overcome the twin plagues of COVID and Trump. We won’t only prevail; we will prosper.

Don’t lose hope. Never lose hope.

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The Burning Man – Trump’s 42 days in the desert

October 10th 2020

The real polls are shifting, and the shift is enough that I’m starting to feel reasonably secure that the Republican fascists may not be able to steal this election. I figure that what with the gerrymandering (both built-in with the Electoral College or created by corrupt state legislatures), the powerful propaganda arm, the sabotage of mail-in voting and further sabotage of in person voting, the Dems would need about an 8 point lead in the polls to actually win over the fascists.

Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight.com, the most accurate of the aggregate pollsters, had Biden’s lead over Trump rock steady between 5.5 points and 7.5 points for three months following the end of primary season. Normally, that would be an unassailable lead, but the extent of Republican malfeasance made it, at best, too close to call.

At the beginning of the GOP convention, it was at a seven point lead. The Democrats had run a extremely well-crafted four-day infomercial, and the GOP was going for a semi-live show with small audiences rather than the virtual effort by the Dems. Manly men don’t fear the reaper, even if at the time it had already killed some 170,000 Americans. The polls, I reasoned, would have to be above five points for Biden to for him have any chance at all to make up the three more points needed to overcome Republican cheating and lying. And given how entrenched both sides appeared to be, that would take a miracle.

But a week after the convention, the polls hadn’t budged. Seven points. The American public, which largely avoided the four day Donald Trump Show, was unimpressed by all the screaming and lying the GOP put on.

I watched, and during the show I tried pretending to think like an average Republican voter. China and Iran wanted war with us. Russia was our friend, and we could deal with North Korea as equals. The deficit didn’t matter, and Trump was good for the economy. Trump was a godly man who just happened to be a genius at business negotiations. Dems wanted to take everyone’s guns and tax us all to death. Liberals really did sell children as sex slaves in the basement of pizza joints…well, ok. Not even Republican voters believed that one. But they did believe that Hunter Biden was up to no good, abusing his father’s connections, but Don Jr, Eric and Ivanka weren’t.

Even trying to wear that mind set, I found the show unconvincing. From a more sane perspective, the show was an orgy of loud lunacy.

I was pleased, but I misinterpreted that unwavering result. I assumed it meant the body politic had become utterly intransigent, and nothing was going to change anyone’s mind. Anyone who still supported Trump at that point either dismissed or accepted the utter chaos, incompetence and dishonestly of his administration. Hell, the First Lady could tear up the Rose Garden, or get taped saying “Fuck Christmas” and it wouldn’t change anything, right? Well, funny story…

The turning point came an eternity ago—September 20th. That’s when Ruth Bader Ginsburg died. Yeah, just three weeks ago. Hard to believe, isn’t it?

Her death horrified liberal Americans. What followed horrified most other people. Trump and McConnell, in a massive fireworks burst of hypocrisy and willingness to commit a massive power grab, immediately nominated a replacement for Ginsburg. Not just another tiresome and in all likelihood corrupt neoliberal hack like his first two; this time he picked a god-struck woman whose closest literary cognate is the mad Ignatius J. Reilly from Confederacy of Dunces. The cult she is a member of apparently formed the basis of the cult that destroyed America and enslaved women in Margaret Atwood’s A Handmaid’s Tale. Her position is so extreme it overcame America’s reluctance to attack Christians on the basis of religion.

The willingness of the Republicans to set aside legislation desperately needed to keep thousands of people alive, fed and in shelters in order to ram though the nomination of this viciously unsuitable woman dismayed a large majority of voters—including Republicans, who uneasily remember the Republican stance of no nominations during a presidential campaign that the Republicans used to ignore the nomination of Merrick Garland in Obama’s final year. It was such rank hypocrisy that even the shills at Fox News had trouble selling it, pretending instead that the Garland nomination never happened.

Then the presidential debate showed the world that Trump was a braying, vacuous bully with no answers but lots of empty demagoguery.

Then he got sick. Under just about any other circumstances, a sick leader would have gotten a sympathy bounce in the polls. But his attitude had been so reckless and foolhardy, and so damaging to the country, that most people thought he brought it on himself. People were appalled at the sight of him recklessly endangering the lives of others around him in his mad drive to show that this disease that has killed 215,000 people in his own country is no big deal and can be safely ignored.

There were a dozen other self-immolations. Dissing the troops. Attacking Gold Star families. And finally, becoming totally unhinged and largely incoherent.

So yeah, suddenly, Trump has managed to fall to 10.1 points behind Biden. It seemed impossible three weeks ago, but Biden now seems to be beyond the point where Republicans can steal it.

But remember. This all happened in three weeks. That’s an eternity in politics. We still have three more weeks to go before the election.

Don’t relax.

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Trump Hits the Wall — Flacks find defending his record…difficult

October 7th 2020

Every once in a while, one of those endless screeds that right wingers love to pass around comes across my screen, and I think, “Oh, what the hell. Let’s blow this ignorant dirtbag out of the water.” I’m just a sucker for low-hanging fruit, I guess.

Here’s this week’s screed, which the author pulled down himself within an hour. I guess he had some regrets. Well, we all do.

ATTN LIBERALS: I call this the Biden Challenge!. I Am going to list 25 Things that Trump has done to improve all of our lives as well as the entire world! The challenge to you is to see if you can do the same for BIDEN!.. And you can even use Biden’s whole 47 years as A base!. As well as what you think he will do as Pres, So here we go!!… 1) Lowered Taxes for all of us ( Not just the rich ). 2) Killed Solimantie 3) Killed Al Baghdadi 4) Defeated 100% of ISIS 5) Moved our embassy to Jerusalem 6) Rebuilt our military 7) Got us out of the paris accord 8) Got rid of NAFTA 9) Replaced it with a new trade deal the USMCA ( Much Better for the USA ) that required a deal with Mexico And Canada 10) Got out of the IRAN Nuke deal 11) Has made the EU And Germany pay there share for defence 12) Cut regulations to allow our economy to boom 13) Made the USA #1 in Gas production in the world 14) Broke records on the stock markets almost daily 15) Best unemployment rates for Blacks ever 16) And Asians 17) And Mexicans 18) Is building the wall and securing our southern border 19) Little rocket man is Not Testing Nukes and more ( For Now ) 20) Has been tough on China And has made the USA hundreds of Billions in Tariffs ( 1st Pres to do so) 21) Gave Billions from the tariffs to our farmers that were targeted by China to make them right !!. 22) The Trump tax cuts allowed large co, to return to the US an build there new factories and businesses here. Creating good paying jobs. 23 ) wages are up under Trump !!. 24) Created a new branch of our military The Space Force 25) And pre Covid19 we had the best economy ever and had no signs of slowing down. And he can do it again. There is the 1st 25 I can come up with another. Lets see what you can do with Biden . I bet none of you will. But look forward to see if you even try !!

OK, I’ll take that one on:

1) Trump lowered taxes 93% for the top 10%. He greatly reduced benefits for the rest of us, exploded the deficit to quadruple what it was under Obama. Biden led the task force that guided Obama in lowering the annual deficit over his last five years. 2) Soleimani was engaged in talks with US when Trump ordered his assassination. It was a cowardly act by the US. 3) Biden was part of the task force that killed Osama bin Laden 4) ISIS is still quite alive and just as dangerous. Taking the cities didn’t kill the movement or the philosophy, and only a daft fool would think otherwise. 5) Moving the capital to Jerusalem was a Netanyahu-inspired bit of political theater that guaranteed no peaceful ‘two-state’ solution in the middle east. 6) The military didn’t need rebuilding, but it does after three years of Trump. Morale has never been lower than it is now, what with Trump sucking up to US enemies and disrespecting the troops. 7) The Paris accord will go ahead without America, and guarantee America will just be left behind economically, outside looking in. 8 & 9) Replaced it with NAFTA II which had only minor cosmetic differences 10) Trump violated Iran nuke deal which allows Europe to assure that Iran is not developing nuclear weapons, and now America has no say in a process to prevent trouble there 11) Utter nonsense. Trump weakened NATO, to Putin’s delight. 12) Cut regulations on environment, health and safety. Regulations that saved Americans over a trillion dollars a year in health costs and personal safety. 13) Fossil fuels are the answer to climate change, or so Trump would tell us. 14) We know the billionaires and big corporations made out great. At our expense 15, 16, 17 & 18) Black unemployment briefly was good, but nothing to do with Trump. It was only a hair better than it was the day he took office, but it’s in the crapper now. Unemployment is well over 8% overall now, and not likely to improve until the US is ready to deal with COVID. The wall (the 2,500 mile wall that Mexico was going to pay for) is all of thirty miles long, and some of it is already falling down because the contractor was crooked. 19) North Korea tested a nuke earlier this summer. Kim Jong Un regards Trump as a cheap date—which he is. 20) Tariffs are a tax American consumers pay. Anyone with a high-school education knows that. 21) Farmers got a few billion in aid, but lost hundreds of billions due to protectionist programs. They are not happy. 22) Nobody forced manufacturing to leave—they just wanted cheap labor and no health and safety regulations. They screwed America, not the Chinese. And they haven’t come back. They’re parasites, and America isn’t a good host. 23) Wages are stagnant under Trump and now dropping overall because of unemployment. The bottom half of the working community only got 20% of the raises back when they were still happening. 24) Space Force is a joke. 25) Economy grew faster in the final three years of Obama/Biden than it did the first three years of Trumppence. Again, Trump was just riding Obama’s coattails.

I’m guessing you’ll run away now, but I just refuted every single one of your talking points.

I won’t play the silly game of “What did Biden do with his presidential powers” because Biden was never more than one of a hundred Senators and then Vice-President, a notoriously powerless position. But I will note some other things Trump has done that Biden has not done in 46 years—or ever.

Things Biden hasn’t done that Trump has:

He’s never had to pay off porn stars to cover up sex affairs with them weeks after the birth of his son.

He’s never had to pay out a settlement for swindling black people out of fair access to rentals.

He’s never had to settle for a billion dollars for a class-action suit for swindling people through a fake university.

He’s never been banned from ever running a charity again because he swindled a children’s charity.

He’s never killed over 150,000 people pretending that a national health crisis isn’t real because that would be bad for business.

He’s never turned America into a pathetic joke by sucking up to filth like Vladimir Putin, Kim Jong Un or Rodrigo Duterte.

He’s never tried to blackmail, extort or subjugate the American people.

He’s never threatened to “lock up” his political opponents, or found a corrupt lackey to investigate political opponents in hopes to locking them up.

He’s never been impeached.

He’s never been accused to cheating the government out of hundreds of millions in taxes.

He’s never made a media circus out of cheating on his wife.

He’s never called for the execution of young men even after their innocence was proven.

He’s never tried to get government employees to sign NDA’s to cover up his criminal acts.

Biden is a decent person who, at worst, will be an average president.

Trump is utter filth and he has been an unmitigated disaster for and to America.

 

So: That’s what I can do with Biden. I bet no Trumpkin will dare challenge it!

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