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A little trip down memory lane

Thursday, May 17, 2018

I keep a journal, in which I catalog the trivial events of my day and, since January of 2017, on most days I document some of the atrocities emanating from Washington. The app I use automatically displays entries from the same date in past years. It’s actually a good feature, since it’s sort of fun to see what you were doing on this day one, two, or three years ago. It’s not so much fun to see what the genius was doing, but it’s generally interesting to recall what, coming from anyone else, would long be remembered, but coming from the genius, had long since slid into the memory hole.

One year ago today, the genius came to New London to address the graduating cadets at the Coast Guard Academy. I noted:

In typical Trump narcissistic fashion his speech was about himself. He actually said that no politician in the history of the world “and I say this with surety” has been treated as unfairly as he. The man has no self awareness. He also talked about how hard he had to fight to get to where he was. The son of a rich man, who probably paid other people to take his tests or write his papers to get through school.

I submit that if Obama had ever said something of this sort, it would have taken longer than a year for everyone in the world to forget about it. The folks at Fox & Friends would be talking about it still. I don’t know if it is part of some conscious strategy, or just the working out of his mental illness, but Trump has hit upon a perfect way of getting away with behavior so outrageous it would be considered too laughable to put into a work of fiction. It wouldn’t be a bad idea for our media to note the anniversaries of the genius’s outrages, lest we forget. The above is just a minor star in the Trump constellation of iniquity, but it happened just across the river, so it got me thinking. We forget about these things at our peril.

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Quit meets quo

Tuesday, May 15, 2018

Yesterday I vowed to do better in cataloging the genius’s criminality, and like manna from heaven, here’s proof of yet another impeachable offense. When the genius tweeted that he was going to help save thousands of Chinesejobs, it set all our spider senses tingling, didn’t it? You just knew there was some sort of corruption involved. The short story is that the Chinese paid for the change in Trump’s policy by lending money to his businesses. The quid is as blatant as the quo. The details are at the link above.

Of course, ultimately impeachment is a political act. While I think it is useful to note each criminal act in which Trump engages, I’m with the Democrats that are arguing that the last thing you want to campaign on in the fall is Trump’s criminality. Let that simmer in the background. It will leave a sour taste in people’s mouths, making them more receptive to campaigns based on progressive ideas, which, whether the DCCC wants to believe it or not, are popular with most voters when packaged well.

Oh, did I forget to say that the odds are increasing that the Democrats will blow it? 

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A new twist on gerrymandering

Monday, May 14, 2018

We’ve all read various news stories about the fact that many of Trump’s policies will adversely and disproportionately affect the idiots who voted for him. Turns out that might not be the case, as Republicans resort to a new twist on one of their favorite ways to insure that the will of the minority prevails.

Let’s step back a bit and recall that it is practically Republican dogma that people who are not working are not working by choice. They are simply lazy. That’s why they argue for getting rid of food stamps, Medicaid, etc., which they claim without end or evidence encourage people to remain in idle poverty. Well, it turns out, much to the surprise of absolutely no one, that white people are not affected by this laziness virus; when they are out of work it is through no fault of their own.

A number of states have asked for permission to impose work requirements on Medicaid recipients, and of course Trump has granted that permission. But they don’t want to impose such requirements on deserving white people, so they have fallen back on gerrymandering. They have proposed exempting people who live in high unemployment areas. Of course, how you define a high unemployment area makes all the difference, doesn’t it:

Those waivers include exemptions for the counties with the highest unemployment, which tend to be majority-white, GOP-leaning, and rural. But many low-income people of color who live in high-unemployment urban centers would not qualify, because the wealthier suburbs surrounding those cities pull the overall county unemployment rate below the threshold.

To no one’s surprise, the end result is that the work requirements will exempt multitudes of white people (who also happen to vote Republican), and almost no black people. If the geographical units used were municipalities rather than counties black people would benefit as well, but of course, in their wisdom, the Republican legislators in the affected states could see that doing it that way would merely encourage shiftless and lazy people to continue to opt not to work.

All of this probably violates the 1964 Civil Rights Act, if current precedent were to be followed. However, I’d say it’s even money that this gerrymandering will be upheld by the courts. We have entered a phase of our history when open racism is once again practiced on the political hustings. Those racists are appointing judges, who will license that racism. It will turn out, against all the evidence, that the acts of these legislatures were both race neutral and devoid of disparate impact. Or, the entire notion of disparate impact will be thrown into the trash.

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A mea culpa

Monday, May 14, 2018

I get very few comments, and I just found out that some comments are being blocked, for reasons I can’t fathom, as it is none of my doing. Anyway, in the course of trying to figure out what I could do about this (and I couldn’t figure it out) I came across a months old comment from a friend of mine (the very one who is now mysteriously blocked), who took me to task for failing to deliver on my promise to catalog the impeachable offenses of the individual who was sworn in as president of the United States in 2017. 

He’s right.

In my own defense, I can only plead that the impeachable offenses have been coming so fast and furious that no one can track them all, at least if he has a day job, and I still do. I mean, the man gets up in the morning, tweets a confession to an impeachable offense that we were’nt quite sure about the night before, and then commits a few more offenses in the course of the day. By the time I’ve gotten home from work, the list is a mile long and every blog and newspaper in the land has already moved on waiting for the next shoe to drop. Half the time, I feel like there’s no point writing about the morning’s crime, because it’s old news by the time I have a spare moment and no one is talking about it anymore.

And that, perhaps, is the genius of the very stable genius. He has all but normalized habitual lying, criminality and corruption. Once again, this brings to mind a shocked John Chancellor, reporting on the Saturday Night Massacre, saying over and over again with a stunned look on his face: “Nothing like this has ever happened before”. Perhaps it’s a measure of the decline in quality of television journalists, but if words to that effect ever pass through the lips of television reporters today, they’re likely to have a bored look on their face, since practically every day brings more destruction of our institutional norms. 

Notwithstanding the foregoing excuses, I am going to try to do better in the future. Just to check off a few of the obvious offenses, here’s a few impeachable offenses I don’t think I’ve specifically cited as such previously: conspiring with the Russians to subvert the electoral process; soliciting, through his “attorney”, Michael Cohen, cash for favorable governmental action; and continuing to obstruct justice by attempting to subvert the Mueller investigation. As to the second of those, there’s no direct proof yet, but you know he’s guilty, don’t you?

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Friday Night Music-A dynamic duo

Friday, May 11, 2018

It really is fun wandering around youtube looking for music. I never knew these two guys played together. George Harrison and Paul Simon, one song penned by each.

 

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A curious phenomenon

Wednesday, May 9, 2018

This morning’s Boston Globe recounts the fateof a bill that would have modernized the sex education curriculum in the state of Massachusetts:

At a time when everybody, everywhere, seems to be talking about sexual misconduct, Massachusetts is still having a hard time talking about sex ed.

A bill that would modernize sex education in Massachusetts schools appears ready to die a quiet death for the fourth legislative session in a row — despite its timely attention to healthy relationships and affirmative consent.

Massachusetts is one of 26 states where there is no requirement to teach sex education in public schools — and no way of knowing whether the schools that are teaching it are using unbiased, medically accurate information.

“This seems like a no-brainer,” said Gina Scaramella, executive director of the Boston Area Rape Crisis Center.

This is yet another example of a curious phenomenon that is observed nationwide in this country. Legislators often panic at the thought of legislating on subjects that have become fairly non-controversial among almost all of their consitutents, except possibly the fringe right. The same Massachusetts legislature has tied itself in knots over marijuana legalization, often attempting to scuttle it, despite the expressed will of its voters, in a referendum.

I would submit that this is yet another example of an asymmetry in American politics. I can’t think of any issue on which there is a widely shared consensus that is opposed solely on the fringe left of which any legislator is afraid. Of course, that may be because there is no fringe left in this country, but the point still stands.

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Gilded Age, part 2

Tuesday, May 8, 2018

A few days ago, I said I’d be putting up a series of posts comparing our present Age of Corruption, Plutocracy and Kakistocracy to the Gilded Age. Herewith, installment two.

Back around the 80s, the Republican Party began promoting itself as the party of new ideas. The ideas seemed to consist of inventive ways to prove that Billie Holliday was right, and that “Them that’s got shall have; Them that’s not shall lose”.

But in fact, most of those new ideas were simply recasts of old ideas; ideas that had proven disastrous in the past and have or will prove disastrous in the present.

I’ll concentrate on just one of those ideas here: Privatization.

There’s nothing innovative about the concept of privatizing what should be governmental services. Indeed, at some point, reformers must have spent a lot of time and effort de-privatizing various government services. In the Gilded Age, privitization took a number of forms, but the end result was the same as it is now. Those performing what should have been government functions took advantage of their positions to line their pockets, delivering poor services at greater cost in the process.

In many cases, this took the forms of fee based “services”, in which nominal government employees were paid primarily by fees they imposed on their “customers”. Before Chester Arthur became president, he was the beneficiary of the patronage largesse of the corrupt New York Senator, Roscoe Conkling, who got him appointed Customs Collector of the Port of New York. Customs Collectors didn’t simply get a salary, they got half of the penalty on goods undervalued for import. White, in The Republic for Which it Stands, cites an example of a penalty of $271,000 (a lot of money back then) on goods undervalued by a mere $6,000.00, which translated into a revenue loss of $1,600.00. Arthur and his cronies (with a kickback to Conkling) split $135,500. And Arthur was comparatively honest.

The fee based system also incentivized the continued enslavement of black males in the South. Sheriffs got a share of the fines assessed on criminal defendants. Since poor black defendants (and of course, they were always guilty)could not pay the fine, the sheriff’s “leased” them to work under brutal conditions where they were treated worse that slaves, since as one of the leasee’s noted, there was a difference between owning a slave, in which you had an investment, and leasing one, since “we don’t own ‘em. One dies, get another.” And die they did, in staggering numbers.

It’s hard to believe-well, no it’s not really hard to believe- – that this sort of thing goes on to this very day. Read thisand this, about two Southern sheriffs (two among many) who have starved prisoners (and you know they’re mostly black) so they could pocket “excess” food funds under a state law that actually authorizes the practice, thereby actually incentivizing starvation. It makes the almost universal practice of corruptly overcharging prisoners for phone calls seem benign.

In one of his final acts, Obama made an attempt to abolish the private prison system, at least on the federal level, but Trump, of course, reversed that. If you make your money imprisoning people, you have a vested interest in creating new prisoners, and in keeping them for as long as you can, so you do what you can to get more people in prison. They don’t whip or kill (at least as brazenly) their prisoners anymore, but the financial incentives in the private prison industry mimic the incentives that doomed generations of “free” blacks to a more brutal form of slavery than existed before the Civil War. And, as always, people of color are disproportionally affected today, just as they were in the Gilded Age.

Getting back to my introductory paragraphs, the whole “privitization” idea is not only not new, it’s pretty much how we started, and stank of corruption. We are now heading into an era where even the public schools will be privatized, something even the Gilded Agers, bless their little hearts, would never have countenanced. You couldn’t get more Gilded Age than Hartford (after all, that’s where Twain wrote the book), and it was during that period that the good folks in Hartford built a high school (HPHS, say it louder we’re the best!) that they intended to be the best, determinedly public, school in the nation. And it was! Once the charter school industry gets a lock on school funding sources, corruption in that sector will flourish, teacher salaries and quality will decline, and our educational system will be far worse than it is today. And depend on it, once they get their hands on the school systems, they will buy up the legislatures and school spending will go up, while school quality declines.

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Does she contradict herself?

Saturday, May 5, 2018

As the Republican Party in Connecticut becomes ever more like the national party, Republicans running for office here must play an ever more delicate game. They must convince what John McCain’s former campaign manager called “low information voters” that they are not at all like those other Republicans, while acting precisely like those other Republicans when it really matters to the corporations and autocrats that own the party. In the highly gerrymandered districts in other parts of the country, Republicans can let their freak flag fly, but that happy state of affairs has not yet arrived for our locals, which sometimes makes life difficult for them.

Case in point is Heather Somers, the state Senator from the district in which I have the misfortune to reside. Judging just by her actions, Heather is quite ready to sell herself to the Koch Brothers at the earliest opportunity. The first thing she did when she got elected was to propose two bills: one to end the estate tax in Connecticut, and one to end the public financing system for our elections. But as I say, if she wants to keep herself on offer to the Brothers, she has to convince her constituents that she is actually a reasonable person, so she must walk a fine line indeed. It’s not easy. She tried to duck the question during the 2016 campaign, but ultimately had to explain that she voted for Trump, because: 1) while she didn’t like what he said, what Hillary had donewas even worse, and 2) local elections such as the 18th Senatorial District in Connecticut are far more important than presidential elections anyway, so the whole question is trivial. As to the first, we’ve seen how that’s worked out; as to the second, well, no comment necessary.

During her term Heather has taken up the challenge of trying to appear to be all things to all people while, in fact, being nothing but a typical Republican. She has made nice to the local open space folks, but hasn’t done a thing for them, and she’s even tried to curry favor with the Resist groups, from whom, I suspect, she heard complaints about the end of net neutrality. Very likely knowing nothing about the issue, or its importance to her corporate masters, she stepped into a trap.

Heather signed on as a sponsor to a bill to require net neutrality here in Connecticut, yet when push came to shove, she voted against the bill she had sponsored. My wife pointed this out on our local Democratic Facebook page, and got a number of responses from Heather’s Republican apologists. Heather, they said, no doubt giving us a preview of Heather’s own talking points, had voted against the bill because George Jepsen had written a letter saying it was unconstitutional, …and should she simply ignore the opinion of the Democratic Attorney General!!! What self respecting Republican would ever do that???

Well, that seemed odd, because if Jepsen had written such a letter it would be very surprising if not a single Democrat had taken such a warning to heart while all 18 Republicans cast their votes in sorrow in deference to the opinion of a Democrat. So, we did a bit of digging, and not at all to our surprise, Jepsen did no such thing. What he did do was say that if the bill passed, it would likely be challenged in the courts, and he would be happy to defend it. Not only that, he made that statement in December (that would be 2017), while the bill Heather sponsored bears a 2018 bill number, so she knew or should have known about his opinion when she signed on.

So, it seems fairly clear that someone explained to Senator Heather that she could not vote for this bill, as it displeased the constituency of the Republican Party, in this case the telecom companies who want to squeeze ever more money out of us. It speaks volumes about Heather’s incompetence that she did not see this coming. It also speaks volumes that she fell right into line, but that’s only to be expected. The “moderate Republican” oxymoron still plays well around here, so Heather may be tough to beat, even if the blue wave reaches the shores of Southeastern Connecticut. But we won’t let her forget this vote, and we’ll be calling her out on it.

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Friday Night Music

Friday, May 4, 2018

Last week we were on the road, so I didn’t post any music, but we’re back, so here goes. When this song came out I listened to it over and over, and to this day I don’t think a lot of the verses make a whole lot of thematic sense. There’s lots of allusions, and there’s a pervading sense in the song that there’s been a loss of something, innocence maybe, but I defy anyone to explain it in a coherent way. But that’s okay, it’s still a great song, and here’s two versions. One from, if I’m not mistaken, the year it came out (I remember listening to it over and over my senior year in college)

and one more recent, with a much older Don McLean. It should be noted, however, that the crowd, or a major portion of it, is quite young (compared to McLean, anyway), and they appear to know all the words, proving once again that we had the best music ever. Anyway, take your pick, or watch them both.

 

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Looking back: The First Gilded Age

Wednesday, May 2, 2018

Having finished Grant,about which I recently wrote, I am now slowly but steadily plowing through The Republic for Which It Stands, a massive history of the Gilded Age, from The Oxford History of the United States, written by Richard White. I highly recommend it. You could build an entire semester course around it.

I don’t know if it’s still true that the Gilded Age (defined for purposes of this book as 1865 to 1896) is fly-through territory when American history is taught in our schools today, but I suspect that it is. In my day they taught us that those terrible carpetbaggers were put in their place and, eventually, so were the monopolists, but we were spared the gory details. We skipped from war to war, and the war against Native Americans didn’t count, so there wasn’t much to say about this period.

As I’ve been reading this book, I’ve been struck more than once by the parallels between then and now. So, since this is my blog, and no one reads it anyway, I’m thinking of writing a few posts about those parallels.

One surprising thing I’ve learned, and I am surprised I’ve never run across this before, because I’ve read a lot of history, is the change from then to now in what it means to be a “liberal”. A liberal in 1876 was, roughly speaking, a Paul Ryan type, right down to his willingness to sacrifice other alleged principles in the cause of comforting the comfortable and afflicting the afflicted. I don’t know when the meaning flipped, presumably it was a long, slow evolution. Anyway, it is somewhat jarring to have to mentally readjust when I see the word “liberal” in this book.

First, one minor difference between the two periods. It truly was a pundit heaven, because Both Sides Really Did Do It! Nowadays, one party has the sole monopoly on race baiting and immigrant hating (plus a dollop of LGBT hate, which the Gilded folks pretty much swept under the rug), but in the Gilded Age, the parties split the pie. Democrats hated black people. Republicans hated Catholics and immigrants. Everyone hated the Chinese. So, just about all black men (sorry girls, no vote for you) were Republicans, and just about all Catholics and immigrants were Democrats. The Chinese simply were not allowed to vote. Give the Democrats their due, they at least gave some of the fruits of the endemic corruption to their immigrant base, while the Republicans pretty much abandoned their black supporters (who continued to support them in the North until at least the Great Depression) in 1876.

I’m on page 406 as I write this, meaning I’m not even half way through, but so far, there are no heroes in this book, and many dimly known, but generally favorably viewed figures, have feet of clay. Actually, some of them are all clay. The cartoonist Thomas Nast, for instance, was a perfect pundit for his times. He didn’t play favorites. He was a racist and anti-immigrant, thus landing safely on Both Sides. Even Wyatt Earp, it turns out, was a “a pimp, probably a horse thief, an embezzler, an enforcer at bordellos, and a gambler”, before he went into the law enforcement business, which was, at the time, more of a protection racket. Once again, it looks like the Landmark Books let me down. I don’t remember any of that, and I’m pretty sure I read one about Earp.

I’m going to return to this occasionally, for some more specific compare and contrast. It’s worth pointing out that it sort of turned out okay, at least to a certain extent. The Progressive Era reversed some of the excesses of the Gilded Age, the New Deal others, and the Civil Rights movement, others, though over the course of the past 38 years (i.e. since the election of Saint Ronnie) many of those gains have been reversed or nullified, leaving us where we are today. There’s always hope that this repetition of history will be succeeded, as was the Gilded Age, by a somewhat more enlightened and less corrupt period. It remains to be seen whether that can be done in an age in which mass propaganda can be so much more effectively disseminated.

Stay tuned for part two. If I ever actually write it, I’ll get down to cases.

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