Interfaith religious left

The damage the nasty guy is causing and the support for that damage he is getting from the religious right has prompted the growth of the religious left as a political force. NPR reporter Tom Gjelton brought us the story a few days ago. Their primary issues are immigrant rights, universal health care, LGBTQ rights, and racial justice. One might wonder what took them so long since the religious right has been politically active for 40 years.

The right organized as a political force because they felt their deepest values were being taken from them. Those on the left are now feeling the same thing.

An early leader in the religious left is Rev. William Barber, who started the Moral Monday movement in North Carolina. Barber has since expanded that into the Poor People’s Campaign. A new leader is Rev. Jennifer Butler, who founded the group Faith in Public Life, which includes the Poor People’s Campaign.

The religious left has a much smaller base than their counterparts on the right. A big part of that is because a large number of progressives are secular. However, an advantage is that the group has an interfaith emphasis. Yeah, there are mainline Protestants, progressive Catholics, and some evangelicals. There are also Muslims, Jews, and every sort of faith group. An interfaith approach makes sense in a diverse country.

This also means a commitment to bridge building. Alliances can be formed between pro-life and pro-choice because both sides want to reduce the number of abortions (though the proposed solutions can be quite different).

Butler says, “There are over a hundred verses of Scripture that say we are to welcome immigrants and welcome strangers.” Her work is driven by moral values and not by politics.

I’m delighted the religious left is getting organized and I’m also delighted to see they have chosen an interfaith path.

What are we waiting for?

I learned something this morning. My digital indoor-outdoor thermometer has two digits, plus a decimal digit for the outdoor temperature. So when the temperature is below -9.9 it can’t display the negative. When I got up this morning it read 10.2. A while later it read -9.8.

That also means it can’t display temperatures above 99.9 – which it hasn’t had to do in the dozen or more years I’ve had it.

To add a bit more to the cold weather fun: Consumers Energy, a big supplier of natural gas for home heating in the Detroit area, sent out a notice yesterday saying there had been a fire in one of their substations. They were getting concerned about making sure everyone had a sufficient supply of gas. They didn’t think the cause of the fire was related to the cold, though the timing was quite inconvenient. The big auto manufacturers shut down a couple shifts and CE asked all of us residential users to move our thermostats down a few extra degrees. CE sent out another notice saying we can resume normal heating at midnight tonight.



After the nasty guy held government workers hostage for 35 days there have been several bills that propose ways to prevent further shutdowns. Democrats stopped supporting them when they realized what could happen. If bills to fund certain parts of the government are not passed, the shutdown would be prevented by funding at previous levels. So what if the GOP keeps doing this for several years? This mechanism wouldn’t be adjusted for inflation so the affected departments would effectively see budget cuts.



Chris Vickery, in a Twitter thread, is hesitant to point out what bots – robots in the internet – are capable of. But we need to think about defenses. With so much of your info out there here are things that evil people might do: Put your name on hundreds of college application forms so your phone won’t stop ringing for weeks. Emails designed to evade spam filters pour in, hundreds per hour. Faked pornography of you sent to everyone you’ve friended. Your credit score is requested repeatedly, which tanks your score. Voice powered bots call your landlord, boss, neighbors, and friends with stories of how you beat your wife.

And here's the kicker- You don't know why you are being targeted. You don't know who *exactly* the adversary is. That is part of the strategy. You were chosen to be targeted because an algorithm believes you are the right combination of destroyable with effective chain reactions.

You see, they don't need to target everyone. They only need to target the right people, with the right technique(s), at the right time to cause cascading failures which destroy you and everyone else within, or allied with, your nation. That is one coming storm. We need defenses.

Tuxedo Mask has a Twitter thread with a series of charts that explain things – or at least explain why something is wrong – in one chart. He has charts that show the problem with for-profit healthcare, gun violence in America, income inequality, the student loan debt crisis, and who benefits from the 2017 tax scam.



Melissa McEwan of Shakesville is puzzled and highly annoyed that the nasty guy is still in office. What are we waiting for?
http://www.shakesville.com/2019/01/the-time-is-now-get-trump-outta-there.html

What we can observe, in public, on Twitter, every day, is enough to justify Congressional action to begin the legal process for removing Trump from office. There is no reason to wait, and every reason to be urgent and decisive.

People insist we need “proof.” Proof of what? asks McEwan. Things we can see happening every day?

We have the agent of a foreign government sitting in the Oval Office. What greater motivation could we possibly need to take action?

McEwan says this isn’t just a call to House Democrats to speed things up. She also calls on the GOP, even though she knows how improbable that is. And we’re called to action too.

I feel like we exist in this weird half-space, where most people are somehow simultaneously in denial about the gravity of what's happening and also already resigned to whatever happens next.

Sleeping on a pile of rubies

Howard Schultz, billionaire CEO of Starbucks, has said he is exploring the idea of running for president as an independent. There have been lots of people saying this country doesn’t need another billionaire with no experience in government, such as this comment from Melissa McEwan, which sums up my opinion of the rich in general.

"Billionaire" isn't a qualification. It's the description of a person who is hoarding more resources than they could use in 100 lifetimes while other people are starving. It's the name for a human dragon sleeping on its pile of rubies and gold.

Art Schnurple added in a Twitter response:

Seriously. Can there be any trait that more perfectly demonstrates this person does not have the well being of his society at heart?

The thread’s attention turned to Bill Gates and his philanthropic Foundation. More on this in a moment.

San Diego Resistance talked to the rich:

Some 'one' doesn't bring you any of those things. That's the pervading and horrific myth of the 'self-made' billionaire. There are no billionaires without exploited labor, destroyed environment, and co-opted government services & laws. Like Obama said: YOU DIDN'T BUILD THAT.

objkshn added (with some graphics):

If a man has a house stacked to the ceiling with newspapers we call him crazy.

If a woman has a trailer house full of cats we call her nuts.

When people pathologically hoard so much cash that they impoverish others we put them on the cover of Fortune Magazine and pretend they are role models.

McEwan, in her Shakesville blog, adds:

Anyone who is a billionaire is de facto completely out of touch with the lives of the majority of the population. They have no comprehension about what life is really like. One cannot effectively and decently lead people whose lives they fundamentally don't understand.

And, truly, no president of a wildly and wonderfully diverse nation can know and understand the lives, needs, interests, struggles, and successes of everyone in the country. But living in a separate, elite economic stratosphere is insulating, even for the empathic and curious.

Schultz’s comments have been critical of only Democrats, meaning he isn’t running against the nasty guy, he’s running to draw votes from independents who would otherwise vote for the Democrat as commenter SKM notes:

Please note also that Schultz has naught but the vaguest objections to GOP (general "division is bad" hand-waving) yet he's johnny-on-the-spot in attacking right-wing anti-Dem straw men (e.g. AOC's mention of a 70% marginal tax, as though that's a universal Dem position, and as though it's not a very old idea).

He is running against the Democratic party but NOT against the GOP, simple as.

Back to Bill Gates. His foundation prompts the question: Is having a rich guy come to the rescue better than having the government come to the rescue?

Many respondents didn’t think so because they believe government can’t come to the rescue. Part of that sentiment is the line of reasoning from the rich as I mentioned a few days ago. They don’t want government to be the referee, so they try to convince is the government shouldn’t be and then work to make sure it can’t. And one way to do that is through inadequate funding and convoluted rules.

But when the rich guy comes to the rescue… First, there is the damage (exploited labor, damaged environment) done to earn those riches. We would be better off if they hadn’t been so damaging. Second, the rich don’t ever give enough to alleviate the problem and rarely help those who need it most. Third, while their giving might lessen the effects of the oppression it leaves the oppression in place.

Here’s a couple thoughts on that from other people:

First: In a Twitter thread Mikel Jollett comments on a report from Reuters. The report says the $1.5 trillion tax cut (tax scam) had no major impact on improving the lives of American workers. Jollett wrote:

$1.5 TRILLION.

ZERO impact.

In other words, Trump gave away enough money to make college FREE in this country for 20 YEARS and it all just went into the pockets of the rich.

Whenever we need to have a national discussion about investment in education, health care, etc, there is a collective scream: "HOW WILL WE PAY FOR IT?"

But when it comes to money for the rich, it's treated as axiomatic that it's good, "for the economy."

What utter [BS].

Second: The World Economic Forum held Davos, Switzerland has recently concluded. This is where the rich gather to talk about the global economic system they control and defend. A persistent idea at Davos is that they can save the world through charity. If they can one wonders why they haven’t. There was a panel during the forum on The Cost of Inequality (how sweet of them to even entertain the idea!). Rutger Bregman, a Dutch historian and the author of the book Utopia for Realists, said during the panel:

The answer, is very simple: Just stop talking about philanthropy, and start talking about taxes.
I mean we can talk for a very long time about all these stupid philanthropy schemes. We can invite [U2 frontman] Bono once more. But, come on, we've got to be talking about taxes. That's it. Taxes, taxes, taxes. All the rest is [BS] in my opinion.

Bregman said about his experience at Davos:

It feels like I’m at a firefighters conference and no one’s allowed to speak about water.

All this reinforces my understanding that the rich get rich not because they want more money, but because they want to keep money out of the hands of the poor. They want to reinforce the social hierarchy.

More red in the recent maps

Snow through the daylight hours today here near Detroit. I haven’t been outside to measure how much. Why shovel the stuff while it’s still falling? Besides, since I didn’t rush out one of my neighbors used his snowblower and saved me the trouble. Great neighbors.

The forecast is for really cold temperatures. High tomorrow of 16F, -2F on Wednesday, and 4F Thursday with frightful wind chill numbers all week. And rain next Monday with a high of 43F.

So this weather forecast for Richmond from 2012 put a smile on my face.



Speaking of weather…

Robert Rohde is a lead scientist at Berkeley Earth. He has an updated chart of global warming 1850-2018. The chart has 169 images of the world temperature map, one for each year. Each one is too small to see any detail. But it is obvious the maps from the last 20 years have significantly more yellow and red than the ones showing the world before 1910.



The Pew Research Center has released a survey of what Democrats and Republicans think are the highest priorities. The differences are sometimes quite large. The GOP top priorities are terrorism, economy, Social Security (perhaps a priority to end?), immigration, and the military. At the bottom of their list is: climate change, environment, and race relations. For Dems the top priorities are health care costs, education, environment, Medicare, the poor and needy, and climate change. Their lowest priorities are the military, global trade, immigration, and reducing crime. The topics with the biggest difference between the two parties are climate change (46 point spread), environment (43 point spread), and the military (34 point spread).



Meteor Blades creates a roundup of news pundits for Daily Kos. For his roundup for last Thursday he quotes a piece from Elizabeth Zach of Rural Community Assistance Corporation. She will soon marry and move to Cologne, Germany, where her future husband lives. She’ll take her mother with her, so has looked at care facilities there. After a tour she talked about price. The German social worker was afraid the price would scare Zach away. But it’s half of what she’s currently paying in Sacramento.

We laughed, but joking aside, agreed: Growing old—or falling ill—in the United States is not for the poor.

Benjamin Verghe of Caring Across Generations explains:

There is no organized system for eldercare in the United States, while Germany has a social insurance program. Also, healthcare in the United States is mostly private providers, and since individuals have no leverage to bargain, costs are higher. In Germany, there is a budget for healthcare, whereby the government negotiates prices with providers. Everyone pays in, creating a whole nation of clients and a viable business model.

Want affordable care in your old age? Leave the US.

Three generations of peace

A couple smaller items.

Jeff Stein, a reporter on policy and taxes at The Washington Post tweeted:

Sources: Government watchdog estimates IRS needs 12-18 months to recover from shutdown.

IRS faces:
-- 5 million unopened pieces of mail
-- Massive (precise #s unknown) flight of IT personnel to private sector
-- Need to hire 8K workers, train 2K more

Adriana Grande Strategy responded:

Losing over 100 IT workers (if lost at ~25/week) in any organization is a major problem. Losing over 100 IT workers in a federal agency, hampered by glacial hiring speeds, is a catastrophe.

Matthias Bergmann of Hamburg, Germany starts off a long Twitter thread talking about his grandparents. One grandfather stayed an avid Nazi until he died in the early 1990s. Another grandfather was broken by experiences on the Eastern Front. A grandmother’s apartment received a direct hit by bombs three times. His parents met protesting Nazis. He and his siblings were evacuated four times because of found WWII bombs. They were encouraged to see the world and his best friend is a Jew.

A united Europe is our legacy. The EU is a guarantee of peace and prosperity, not an economic project.

Seeing my father play with my nephew I am witnessing the first three consecutive generations of Germans living in uninterrupted peace. Ever. Nobody is going to endanger that unopposed.

In addition: when the Berlin Eall came down in 1989 my parents woke all the kids. We sat in front of the TV sipping our first Champagne and looking at our parents cry. My father told me that this is the day WWII truly ended. And our European friends made it possible.

They don't like government

I’ve written before one of the big purposes of the government of a sound democracy is protecting the little guy from the big guy. I wrote about that when I reviewed the departments of the federal government when they were first endangered two years ago.

In a Twitter thread Jeff McFadden expands on that idea:

The government is the referee in society. The government's main job is to protect the weak from the strong, the unarmed from the armed, owners from thieves, eaters and drinkers from poisoners.

Many industries are (more) profitable because they can poison air and water, let someone else clean up after them, rig the financial system to cheat, and make sure they and their competitors pay nobody a living wage.

When your income stream is derived from destroying the planet, the atmosphere, the biosphere, society and any shred or memory of fairness, it behooves you to see to it that there is no referee. The government was the referee

I hope you don't believe that the month-long shutdown was about a wall. It was not about a wall. The month-long shutdown permanently weakened "the administrative state." It gave organized crime, which literally does include so-called legitimate industry, a huge head start.

What we call "organized crime" sells you drugs, hookers, and gambling. What we call "legitimate business" pollutes your air, your water, poisons your children and old people, and steals your wildlife. They sell you guns.
There. Is. No. Difference.
They don't like government.

Do you know why they could pull off the longest shutdown in history? Because they have spent 39 years convincing the not-very-smart and the I-love-the-poorly-educated that government is their enemy. So sure, shut it down. It ain't no good to me.

And we played right into their hands. We usually do. We talked about the "800,000 people not getting paid." And they said, "Fuck them. They work for the government. They're a bunch of free-loaders who don't do anything for anybody."

We have a giant uphill battle on our hands, should we choose to engage it. We have to sell the concept that government is good, to a huge voting public who is positive that government is their worst enemy.
...
It's not just Trumpov. He's a pissant, a small time mobster. He's just there to piss you off. And he's good at it. But. An entire, corrupt, whole worldwide organization is what stole your country. They're smart, they're ruthless, and they're winning. Notice them. Stop them.

Feeling powerless

An important question from my thinking about those who become obsessed with social hierarchy (by obsessed I mean those who are willing to do a great deal of harm to others (or a whole nation) to maintain their place at the top of the hierarchy): Why are they that way? Why become a supremacist?

A good person to give an answer is a former supremacist, one who lived the life, realized his harm, got out, and now works to draw others out of that life. Such a person is Tony McAleer. He’s former organizer for the White Aryan Resistance and helped start Life After Hate, which I’ve mentioned before. McAleer talked to Lulu Garcia-Navarro on NPR’s Weekend Edition Sunday this morning.

McAleer says he got into it because he felt powerless. At age 10 he caught his father with another women and rejected all authority figures. His parents and the school cracked down on authority. Because of that he became angry. The skinheads offered toughness. A survival skill is to befriend and become the bully. That made him feel safe. And then…

Once you're that far into it, you become that far disconnected from your own humanity in the process of getting there - that human life, especially if it's not white, doesn't mean anything. You know, if you see yourself as very small and insignificant in the world deep down inside - you look at, you know, anyone who's done these mass killings in the name of the white race. They become legendary. And people want to emulate them. You know, when you've got nothing going on in your life, you know, the fantasy of going out in a blaze of glory to have your name forever etched in the history books, that can be enticing.

What brought him out was becoming a father at age 23.

For the first time in my life, I started to make decisions for someone other than myself because I was a complete narcissist. And the crazy thing about children is their love is unconditional. They didn't care that I was a neo-Nazi. They didn't care that I had assault rifles in the closet. They don't see that. They just see the human that's interacting with them. And that's sort of what compassion does. And it allowed me to thaw. And when we're compassionate with someone, we hold up a mirror and allow them to see their humanity reflected back at them when they're incapable of seeing it on their own. And I think that's the power of compassion. It's at the power - it's - compassion is at the root of, you know, what we do at Life After Hate.

McAleer reinforces my understanding that a big component of supremacy is that we’re taught. Garcia-Navarro comments that men, especially white men, aren’t taught to deal with feeling powerless. However, I note that the parents around him were more interested in projecting power than dealing with the person in front of them with love. McAleer responds:

That's definitely part of it. I mean, who teaches white men? Most of the time, it's fathers. And who teaches those fathers? Their fathers' fathers. And so the thing about, you know, these negative attitudes is they cascade through generations, right? If my father is misogynist, if I observe my father belittling and treating my mom poorly and, you know, he puts stuff onto me, chances are I'm going to continue the family tradition. And, you know, I've seen that the way roles are transferred through generations that people and families have to play. The job, I think, we have to do is we have to break these cycles.

But with people who profess violence it doesn’t work to simply be compassionate.

Compassion only works when it's accompanied with healthy boundaries and consequences. It has to have that component of healthy boundaries and consequences. Otherwise, it's an invitation for abuse and re-abuse.

Diversity and peace

Today’s episode of Hidden Brain on NPR discusses the effect of diversity on creativity. Professor Adam Galinsky at the Columbia Business School has seen that people score more highly on tests of creativity when they have deep relationships from people from another country. This includes dating partners, spouses, or business colleagues. The first part of the episode discusses the Silk Road Project, created by cellist Yo Yo Ma who gathered together musicians from a wide variety of cultures. This diversity link to creativity is also noted in scientific research teams and in major fashion houses.

However, it was the last third of the program that was the most interesting. It is also the part not mentioned on the episode’s webpage, so I don’t have details and I didn’t want to listen again. There is first an Israeli soldier who became annoyed with the way he and his fellow soldiers could occupy a Palestinian home for security reasons no matter the consequences to the families living there.

Then we hear about a Palestinian professor trying to create peace. His students don’t admit to the humanity of Israelis. He begins to teach them about the Holocaust. He thinks it is weird that his Palestinian students know nothing about the biggest influence on the creation of the state of Israel. But that still doesn’t get through to his students. So he takes his students on a field trip … to Auschwitz. As they tour the grounds the professor sees the students get it.

But while they’re gone the professor gets emails from the university that there are death threats against him and he shouldn’t come back. He did go back. And lost his job.

I’ve long been annoyed with the modern state of Israel. The state was founded as a refuge for the oppressed. One might think that since they know oppression the would want to avoid perpetuating it. But they have become the oppressors. They say it is because of security, but there are better ways to achieve security than through oppression.

A common way to battle oppression is to try to flip the oppression. To do that one must continue to portray the oppressor as evil and less than human as the Palestinians have been portraying the Israelis. But that trip to Auschwitz told the students the Israelis suffered too. They’re just like us.

This discussion of experiencing another culture reminds me of my two years of living in Cologne, Germany. It was an historic time – I moved there just before the Berlin Wall opened (and was in the city five days later) and saw protests against the first Gulf War. It was during these two years I changed from feeling like a citizen of the United States to a citizen of the world. That was an important step in my life journey.

Though I see my time in Cologne as an important step in my understanding of the world, I hadn’t thought about how it might have affected my creativity in problem solving or in my music composition.

Gravedigger of American democracy

Senate Majority Mitch McConnell could have done something to lessen the length of the government shutdown, such as actually be a leader with the country’s welfare in mind. His missing in action through most of the shutdown has prompted commentators to focus attention on him. Here are three progressive views, all from Daily Kos.

Kerry Eleveld quotes and comments on Holocaust historian Christopher Browning. Browning thinks McConnell will be remembered as the “gravedigger of American Democracy,” citing:

* Stoking the hyperpolarization of politics.

* Obstructing the Obama presidency.

* Refusing to confirm Obama’s nomination to federal courts and blocking the nomination of Merrick Garland, thus stealing seats he and the nasty guy are working hard to fill.

* Making the Congress dysfunctional and disrespected and ensuring the judiciary is also dysfunctional and disrespected.

Eleveld concludes:

McConnell, through his degradation of institutional norms, has taught Americans not to trust the very institutions that were devised to protect them and defend the rule of law. In short, McConnell has corrupted our democracy. Exactly how to restore it remains unclear, especially in the current climate, which includes his continued presence as Senate Majority Leader.

Joan McCarter says McConnell has broken the Senate.

Part of the problem is population growth in Democratic states that, no matter how many more people they have, still have only two votes each in the Senate. There used to be an average of 68 votes for a bill and those senators represented about 68% of the population. In 2017 the average was down to 58 senators and those represent only 49.5% of the population. This is minority rule.

A highlight of that minority rule is the last election when voters voted for Democratic candidates 60% to 40%. Yet, they still lost a few seats.

McConnell figures into this because of his ways of getting around the filibuster so that a lot of bills are passed with just GOP votes, lowering the average to 54 senators representing just 47% of the country.

And none of this “both sides do it” nonsense. Back in 2013 with Democrats in control judicial confirmations got support from 80 senators representing 85% of the country. Part of that is because Democrats listened to GOP objections and didn’t bring judges up for a vote that didn’t have strong support.

In our third story Joan McCarter shows us that the collaboration between the nasty guy and Vladimir Putin would not be succeeding if it didn’t have the cooperation of McConnell. He knew Russia was trying to help the nasty guy get elected (and donating to his own leadership PAC) but prevented the CIA from warning the country.

Did he cave?

This morning LaGuardia Airport in New York was shut down over concerns of air traffic control staffing issues. Olga Lautman tweeted:

Imagine air traffic controllers who work 10 hours a day 6 days a week for FREE with the unbearable stress of evictions, paying for food, mortgages, and life expenses and making sure planes don’t crash into each other.

Gail Diane responded:

This morning on @NPR an air traffic controller said that if they are 99.9% accurate in their job they'd lose 50 planes a day. Can you even imagine that kind of stress? Add financial stress and its impossible.

So air traffic was disrupted.

By mid afternoon a deal was worked out to end the shutdown.

All but one of the government departments are to be funded to the end of the fiscal year (end of September). That one is Homeland Security. It is to be funded until Feb. 15, giving everyone three weeks to negotiate a permanent deal. Lots of pundits are calling it a cave.

I’ve heard a bill will be introduced in Congress to eliminate shutdowns. If a new funding bill isn’t approved then a continuing resolution to fund the government at the old level is automatically in place.

But this isn’t over.

The nasty guy said that if he doesn’t get funding for his border wall he’ll shut down the government again (which would be only Homeland Security, the people protecting our southern border, the ones actually on the job protecting us from the supposed national emergency) or declare a national emergency and attempt to build the wall without Congressional approval.

Ksenija Pavlovic McAteer tweeted:

.@realDonaldTrump did not “cave” nor “surrendered”. What he’s doing right now is a standard tactics in torture. They torture you, then they give you a break to see if you will start to cooperate. If not, the torture continues.

Sarah Kendzior, who studies authoritarian regimes, agrees that is exactly right.

When the wealthy get their tax cut

David Akadjian of Daily Kos lists the 11 ways that costs are shifted to us after the wealthy get their taxes cut.

Increases at the local level

1. Sales taxes. The rich don’t pay any more in food and consumer products than the rest of us, so most of these taxes are collected from average people.

2. Property taxes. School funding has to come from somewhere. These taxes also get passed through to renters.

3. Sin taxes (tobacco, etc.). Popular as they target “undesirable” behavior, but are paid by average people.

4. Tolls. More bridge or highway projects are funded by tolls.

5. Fees – passport, copyright, parks and museums, license fees, parking, permits, sewage, etc.

Services that used to be free.

6. School supplies – band and sports uniforms, field trips, textbooks, transportation.

7. Privatized police and fire.

Mortgaging the future

8. Deficit spending.

Socialized risks

9. Climate change.

10. Increased pollution. See Flint, MI.

11. Decreased public safety.

Akadjian discusses the term *moral hazard* – someone gets rewards without the costs or risks. The financial collapse of 2008 was because of that. Banks lent recklessly because they could resell the loans into privatized securities. And I remember well that at the time the rich were complaining about the moral hazard of releasing the poor from loans they never should have gotten.



Oxfam International works to reduce poverty and to aid people stuck in it. They released a report on January 21 saying 26 people own as much wealth as the bottom half (3.8 billion) of humanity. The wealth of billionaires increased by 12% last year – that’s $2.5 billion a day – and the poorest half saw their wealth decline by 11%.

Talk to the people

Sarah Kendzior, who studies authoritarian regimes, has been saying it is time to start impeachment proceedings against the nasty guy. The reason is to get the investigations underway, which the Democratic House appears to be doing, even if they’re not calling it that yet, and to make sure the investigations are public. Kendzior adds (with what might be the quote of the month):

Officials need to bring evidence of Trump administration crimes directly to the people. The best format is impeachment hearings with open debate and no media filter.

Our media is largely sponsored by dictators or dictated by sponsors. Talk to the people directly.

Maybe you should wait to buy that plane ticket

Some of the latest things my sources are saying about the shutdown, now in day 34.

Commerce Secretary and rich dude Wilbur Ross was puzzled about federal workers needing to use food banks. Why not just get a loan? He also said 800,000 workers is not a big deal in our economy. That prompted Paul Krugman to tweet a chart showing the 800,000 unpaid federal workers, the 1,200,000 unpaid federal contractors (who probably won’t get missed paychecks), and the less than 100,000 steel industry workers the nasty guy so wanted to protect that he raised tariffs on steel. Priorities!

Sara Kendzior tweeted about a week ago quoting a bit from her podcast Gaslit Nation:

Why is the FBI not acting with any urgency? We have a Russian asset who shut down the government. We know the FBI was purged -- that was predictable. Why not act *before* you're purged? Why not act before the country collapses?

A couple days ago Kendzior added:

Now the FBI says they can barely act at all in the shutdown. *This was predictable*. It was also predictable that an autocrat would try to eliminate or co-opt any agency with prosecutory or investigative power. Why did no one have a back-up plan?

Seriously, this is the dictator's playbook. Yes Trump will shut down the govt, yes he will purge the FBI and other agencies -- that's why they had to act *early*, so the country doesn't collapse and citizens don't suffer even more.

Melissa McEwan of Shakesville shares a report from the National Air Traffic Controllers Association. Staffing at air traffic control facilities was already a problem with many controllers working 60 hours a week. Hiring is frozen, the training academy is closed (I think this happened long before the shutdown) and almost 20% of them are eligible to retire. Safety inspectors, TSA agents, and federal cyber security staff are not up to full strength. There is low confidence in safety reporting data. The situation deteriorates daily.

McEwan adds:

It has been an explicit objective of the conservative agenda to shrink the federal government for longer than I've been alive. They have actively endeavored to defund, disempower, and destroy the federal government. Failure is the point.

Two bills, one GOP, one Dem, were voted on in the Senate. Neither passed. But that exercise seems to have prompted discussions by senators, giving a bit of hope. About the GOP bill Greg Sargent tweeted:

The WH deliberately got poison pills inserted in Senate GOP bill reopening govt, NYT confirms. "WH officials conceded privately they had tacked on controversial proposals anathema to Dems that would block many migrants from seeking asylum"

Now that we've seen text of Trump's plan to reopen govt, it's clearer than ever that this "compromise" is a sham.

Max Kennerly tweeted a reply:

People other than @sarahkendzior need to start discussing how Trump *wants* the government shut down. People also need to start asking Republican members of Congress why they are in favor of the shutdown -- not "the wall," but the shutdown itself.

Meaning, GOP in the Senate want this.

Judd Legum, as reported by Daily Kos contributor Bill in Portland Maine, explains the nasty guy’s negotiating tactics:

A man slashes your car tire and then demands you buy him a Rolex. You refuse and then he offers to “temporarily” patch your tire if you buy him a Rolex. Trump thinks this is what it means to “compromise.”

Just and unjust laws

Today is Martin Luther King Day, an American holiday to ponder what he did in his all too brief life. A lot of people would be glad to “interpret” him for us – to cleanse and sanitize his words so we can continue to ignore what he stood for.

To resist that we should read his words directly. Several people, such as Melissa McEwan of Shakesville mark today by posting Dr. King’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail, written in 1963. It is long, but well worth reading. Even if you read it last year and the year before. It is worth reading because what is primarily in my mind this year is different from what was in my mind in previous years, so different parts of the letter resonate more strongly.

The letter talks about a great many things. I’ll focus today on what he wrote about civil disobedience and how a person should obey a just law but disobey an unjust law – and be prepared to take whatever punishment is given for that disobedience. The question is how to tell a just law from an unjust law? King wrote:

Now, what is the difference between the two? How does one determine whether a law is just or unjust? A just law is a man made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law. To put it in the terms of St. Thomas Aquinas: An unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal law and natural law.

I need to stop there for a moment. Over the last 30 years as we LGBT people were fighting for our rights to live as we want and to love who we want our oppressors said that we violated eternal and natural law. They claimed natural law because they said having a sexual relationship with someone of the same sex was a violation of nature. Never mind that researchers found that more than 400 species had been observed to engage in same-sex relations.

As for eternal law, King surely means religious law. And conservative Christians still oppress us, claiming religious law. For example, about a month from now the United Methodist Church will hold a General Conference to decide how to treat LGBT people, or split because they can’t come to an agreement. There were recent news articles about the wife of the vice nasty guy got a job at a religious school that bans LGBT students and teachers.

So I don’t agree that a law should be determined to be just or unjust by whether if follows eternal or natural law. Thankfully, Dr. King goes on:

Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust.

Sigh. I can hear people saying (though not in these words) that discriminating against someone uplifts the perpetrator because that action allows them to feel superior and isn’t that uplifting? King says no.

All segregation statutes are unjust because segregation distorts the soul and damages the personality. It gives the segregator a false sense of superiority and the segregated a false sense of inferiority.

Ah, there we are.

Segregation, to use the terminology of the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber, substitutes an "I it" relationship for an "I thou" relationship and ends up relegating persons to the status of things. Hence segregation is not only politically, economically and sociologically unsound, it is morally wrong and sinful. Paul Tillich has said that sin is separation. Is not segregation an existential expression of man's tragic separation, his awful estrangement, his terrible sinfulness? Thus it is that I can urge men to obey the 1954 decision of the Supreme Court, for it is morally right; and I can urge them to disobey segregation ordinances, for they are morally wrong.

Let us consider a more concrete example of just and unjust laws. An unjust law is a code that a numerical or power majority group compels a minority group to obey but does not make binding on itself. This is difference made legal. By the same token, a just law is a code that a majority compels a minority to follow and that it is willing to follow itself. This is sameness made legal. Let me give another explanation. A law is unjust if it is inflicted on a minority that, as a result of being denied the right to vote, had no part in enacting or devising the law. Who can say that the legislature of Alabama which set up that state's segregation laws was democratically elected? Throughout Alabama all sorts of devious methods are used to prevent Negroes from becoming registered voters, and there are some counties in which, even though Negroes constitute a majority of the population, not a single Negro is registered. Can any law enacted under such circumstances be considered democratically structured?

Yes, legal is not the same as moral. Thank you, Dr. King, for the lesson.

Manhood is easy to lose

This week on the NPR show Hidden Brain hosted by Shankar Vedantam, discussed sexist stereotypes. The first part of the program was about professional poker player Annie Duke, frequently the only woman in the World Series of Poker Tournament of Champions. She experienced two sides of sexism. First was the blatant sexism directed against her and her own feelings of deserving to be where she was. This included making plays and be afraid that others would say the play was dumb and therefore she played just like a girl. Second was knowing her opponents were going to be sexist and have these stereotyped assumptions about her, and then being able to use that to her advantage.

The last part of the episode was about Robert Vaughn. Growing up without a father he was quite the boy scout. He then went into the Navy. When deciding what college to attend his father-in-law suggested nursing as a profession. But he thought that’s a woman’s job. He went into it anyway. He had to deal with patients who were uncomfortable with a male nurse (though not with a male doctor, hmm...). But many said later he was their best nurse. He said it was because he was more consciously nurturing to overcome the stereotype.

In between the two there was a discussion of gender roles with psychologist Jennifer Boss.

Men avoid professions dominated by women. When I heard that I was sure social hierarchy was behind it. Even when the show said this isn’t misogyny I was sure there was an element of ranking and superiority. The show continued. Men avoid “women’s professions” because they see it as a threat to masculinity. This is how the world restricts the choices of men.

For example, Susie likes Dave and asks Mark whether he thinks Dave is attractive. Susie assures Mark it isn’t about her thinking he is gay. But Mark still says as a man he is incapable of telling whether another man is cute. Susie is astonished at Mark’s statement.

The obvious conclusion is that guys go out of their way to appear macho because of a combination of homophobia and sexism (both symptoms of enforced hierarchy). But Boss has developed a more nuanced view.

She conducted an experiment. She asked men and women to write about a time when they violated gender roles. Women talked big concepts – working in a male dominated field and were made to feel uncomfortable by coworkers. Men talked about wearing a pink shirt to work or holding a girlfriend’s purse for a while or getting a cocktail with an umbrella and being teased – all mundane things.

Why make such a big deal of trivial things?

I was right. It is about hierarchy. Boss says the male gender role is a more precarious status. Manhood is hard to earn and easy to lose. The emotion is fear, defending something that is fragile. Women are allowed to take their femininity for granted and men cannot take their masculinity for granted. Men’s social status is more hierarchically organized than women’s. Men are more motivated to attain social status and end up with a chronic anxiety about their status.

She did a second experiment. One group of men were to braid a mannequin's hair, including adding pink bows. Another group was to braid rope. Both groups are then given a choice of doing a brain puzzle or put on boxing gloves and hit a punching bag. Men who braided hair were much more likely to choose the punching task. They wanted to redeem their loss of masculinity by punching something.

“The societal messages that constrain men have been developed – by men. … Men can be trapped by the gender roles that they themselves have authored.” Men can be stuck in a world that makes no sense to them. The struggle for status that men feel they must participate in – it sucks.

In an emergency

The nasty guy seems to have pulled away from threatening to use emergency powers to get his wall built. But while that was an active threat Mark Sumner of Daily Kos discussed where that power came from. Yeah, there is an actual National Emergency Act that’s been around for a while. But Sumner talks about where the idea came from. And it came from Rome about 2500 years ago. The Roman Senate instituted a lot of checks and balances to preserve their democracy. But, they recognized there were times, such as when an army was approaching, that the gears of democracy turned too slowly.

So Rome created an emergency act, to be used for military reasons. The act was first invoked in 458 BC when two armies advanced on Roman towns and the Roman armies in the area ended up surrounded. Rome gave power to Lucius Quinticus Cincinnatus. He gathered up some troops, defeated the attackers, went back to Rome, … and relinquished the emergency power. He kept it not a moment longer than he needed it.

George Washington is called the American Cincinnatus because of two events. After the Revolutionary War, he chose not to leverage his military leadership and popularity. Instead he turned in his sword and returned to Mount Vernon. After he served two terms as president, he refused a third, though many urged him to run again. Washington kept the power no longer than he needed to.

That’s the proper use of emergency power.

Cutting off noses to spite … everything

The Doomsday Clock has been around since 1953 when both the U.S. and Soviet Union tested hydrogen bombs. Since then every year atomic scientists use it to convey their opinion on how close we are to the end of the world. Last year they set it to 11:58 pm, two minutes to doom. This year’s clock setting will be revealed in about five days.

The actions of the nasty guy reminded Virginia Heffernan of the Los Angeles Times of previous online discussions about the clock. A guy wrote, “Better nuclear winter than more letters in LGBTQ.” Heffernan wrote:

His words laid bare the Death Logic that suffuses the philosophy of Trump and his supporters. The idea is that even the annihilation of humankind is worth it if it owns the libs.

This thinking is now regularly satirized in memes that illustrate how Republicans are cutting off their noses to spite … everything. Throw the nation into massive debt to own the libs. Align with fascism to own the libs. Crash the government to own the libs.
…
This is the logic of suicide (or a school shooter or mass murderer), willing to kill and be killed over something so petty that pettiness is almost the whole point.

To translate to terms I frequently use, the guy’s need (and the nasty guy’s need, and the need of every member of the GOP) to be at the top of the social hierarchy is so strong he wishes (or attempts to bring about) death and destruction on the whole world (and, likely, himself) rather than face a threat to his social standing. That guy may have been speaking in hyperbole. The nasty guy isn’t.

Physical comedy

Detroit had its first major snowfall of the season. Yeah, that usually happens in December and many times in November. To have our first storm when January is about 2/3 over is rare. My exercise today was shoveling 3-4 inches off my driveway.

This storm was well predicted. So I didn’t go out today, just let it snow. Instead, I went to the Detroit Institute of Arts yesterday. I looked through the new Asian wing, which seems to have space for more art than what is actually on display.

I also went to the Detroit Film Theater to see The Great Buster a documentary about Buster Keaton. He was born in 1895 to a Vaudeville family and was part of the act at a very young age. He is best known for the comedic silent films he made in the 1920s, first films of about 30-40 minutes, then in 1925-28 feature length films. Those are considered some of the best films of the silent era and he is known as a master of physical comedy. After that he joined MGM, which was a disaster. He recovered to be featured in a few more films and was still working up to his death in 1966 at age 70.

But going yesterday meant I saw only the documentary. Today they were to also show a couple Keaton films. It would have been nice to see both the films and the documentary. So this afternoon I watched one of the films, Sherlock Jr., online. The other, Seven Chances, is also online, but will have to wait. Of course, many of his other films are also online.

Toxic masculinity is boring

Other things to bring to your attention:

To honor Martin Luther King on his 90th birthday Bill in Portland, Maine, a Daily Kos regular contributor, posted a few MLK quotes:

The function of education is to teach one to think intensively and to think critically. Intelligence plus character---that is the goal of true education.

"When evil men plot, good men must plan. When evil men burn and bomb, good men must build and bind. When evil men shout ugly words of hatred, good men must commit themselves to the glories of love. Where evil men would seek to perpetuate an unjust status quo, good men must seek to bring a real order of justice."

Rarely do we find men who willingly engage in hard, solid thinking. There is an almost universal quest for easy answers and half-baked solutions. Nothing pains some people more than having to think.

Morals can’t be legislated, but behavior can be regulated. The law cannot make an employer love me, but it can keep him from refusing to hire me because of the color my skin.

Melissa McEwan of Shakesville writes a lot about toxic masculinity. She offers another take on the subject: toxic masculinity is boring.

Defending one very specific and limiting and impossibly rigid notion of masculinity is like arguing that there shouldn't be greyhounds or dachshunds or keeshonds or mutts because EVERY DOG SHOULD BE A LABRADOR. AND NO HORSES, EITHER!

Why would anyone want that kind of world? And the assholes who do don't even have the sense to realize that it's their fiercely guarding an oppressively stifling set of dehumanizing rules that makes them aggressive and resentful and cruel.

The evil of banality makes them vicious.

Stop being boring. Be creative. You don't have to be a labrador! Go be a poodle!

(My apologies to labradors, who are very accepting.)

Sarah Kendzior has quotes from another episode of her Gaslit Nation podcast:

We discuss Trump's conception of death: "He's like a caricature of baby boomer narcissism: he literally cannot imagine the world continuing without him. He's so resentful of death that he needs to take everyone else down with him.

Trump has always believed that the world will end in nuclear war. But what started out as a desire for non-proliferation turned into a desire to use nuclear weapons. Trump can now assauge his life-long fear by being the one who pushes the button.

Trump is surrounded by religious fanatics obsessed with the rapture: Pence, Pompeo. When it comes to things that might really end the world, like climate change, they won't act. When it comes to nukes, they might use them.

I guess one would have to listen to the podcast to find out how she knows that.

For those not familiar with this use of the term rapture, it is a part of a conservative Christian belief that that there is an End Time for the world that would be a massive battle between Good and Evil. Just before this massive battle begins, true Christians would be raptured, they would be pulled from earth up to heaven to protect them. Some of these people believe they can make the rapture happen sooner by encouraging catastrophic war to happen. All of it is based on them being better than everyone else, being at the top of the hierarchy. They get to escape the chaos they inflict on the rest of us.

When this government shutdown started – it’s now in its 27th day with no end in sight – the stated reason was to get the border wall built. Many people now think the reason is something else. Yeah, I covered some of this last week. It all seems more dire this week.

Sarah Kendzior is saying it clearly.

The GOP ideology of the 2013 shutdown -- weaken government, deem federal services unnecessary, and ultimately privatize and profit -- has merged with the kleptocratic agenda of a Russian asset who wants to not only destroy federal services, but destroy the US itself.

It's not a shutdown as a means to an end; the shutdown is its own end. Once again, people are relying on norms and expectations that do not apply to Trump. There is no leverage in poll numbers; this is not about the base. This is not about the wall. This is about the end.

Was that a bit over the top? Brad Craig adds:

Every News organization should ask one simple question of every Republican if border security matters why they didn’t fund the wall or have built when they had the budget and control the three branches of government?

So what is this shutdown about? Spreading hate against immigrants. Trying to distract from Mueller and upcoming indictments. Creating daily chaos no matter who gets hurt.

Kendzior links Jennifer Dlouhy:

Trump's Interior Dept is bringing furloughed employees back on the job to prepare sales of offshore oil drilling rights, arguing that failing to hold the auctions would have a negative impact on the federal treasury & investment in the Gulf of Mexico.($) Employees also are on call to help process permits authorizing seismic surveys hunting for oil in the Atlantic and develop a new 5-year program for selling drilling rights in U.S. coastal waters, according to a newly revised contingency plan.

The shutdown hides that effort. Gary Kasparov says it well:

Yes, the shutdown can have the effect of spray-painting the security cameras before robbing the bank. Or does anyone still think this is about an actual wall? It’s always power & money.

Another goal is to shrink the government, long a GOP goal. One way to do that is to get employees to leave. Stonekettle says he worked for the government until the second shutdown in a year. He liked what he did for the government. It saved money and made people’s lives better. But he needed a steady paycheck.

That means a lot of federal employees are making a calculation between hoping their job restarts soon or finding an outside job. Employees are also dealing with what good is a job that doesn’t come with a paycheck? A lot of them will quit.

And then your government will become even MORE broken, more dysfunctional, more inefficient, more expensive, and even less accountable. In that failed state, the oligarchs run free, the ruthless rise to the top unchecked, the rich get richer and the poor get so very much poorer and the middle class vanishes.

And we become Russia.

We become America of the Robber Barons, the America of the 1920's, when a handful of the fabulously wealthy owned everything, there was no middle class, and the poor paid the rich for the privilege of eating out of their garbage cans. That's what's coming.

I’ve heard news about various agencies, such as the IRS, being called back to work without pay so the general public doesn’t feel much pain, reducing the calls to end the shutdown.

Sarah Kendzior, quoting a bit from her latest podcast for Gaslit Nation:

People are talking about the shutdown in terms of poll numbers, Trump's base, Democrats' potential compromises. All of that is irrelevant. No one has leverage. Trump doesn't care about his voters. The shutdown is not a means to an end. It is the end.

Prompting this reply from JackAttack

It makes you wonder if they’re hoping to push people to the edge and then manufacture a civil disobedience crisis that will require them to step in and restore order thru martial law - and that American Kristallnacht will be the end

A few related comments. From OnsightIT

The Wall is a ruse to create an impasse with the Democrats. The shutdown is permanent.

From Old Man Down The Road:

What you are talking about Sarah is a man so toxic that a government shutdown is a win-win for him.
Shutdown continues...WIN!
Gets wall money........WIN!

From Luna Dyana:

Actually TSA workers have leverage. If they went on (wildcat) strike, it would close down air terminals. Shutdown would be over w/in hours. Workers have leverage but labor has been so weakened that they don’t know how to use it

Kendzior again:

It feels like there are two parallel political Twitters: the one of 2020 candidates running in a flawed yet essentially stable future US. And the current reality: a constitutional crisis, a catastrophic federal shutdown, and an existential threat to our country's survival.

Many have asked why Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has essentially disappeared. The reason is one I’ve given several times. He and the rest of the GOP as well as all their financial backers want what the nasty guy is selling. They’ve been working towards this for about 40 years.

Making the hierarchy crumble a bit

I write a lot about people who (try to) enforce a social hierarchy. Here’s a story about someone who undermines the hierarchy. Alas, it is just a story.

When visiting family, especially when small children are involved, there’s always a bit of downtime when one isn’t engaged with the family. The kids need a nap. Sometimes the parents do too. This was true when visiting my niece’s family after Christmas. So in that downtime I looked over what books were in the house. One of them was Little Lord Fauntleroy by Frances Hodgson Burnett. It was first published in 1885. I held a modern edition. I didn’t finish it while I was there, so read the rest through the online Project Gutenberg.

Though it is a children’s book, the cover blurb sounded intriguing. At about 150 pages I would think it would be for age seven to pre-teen.

Cedric Errol is seven and lives with his mother in New York City. His father has died and he had been told his father was English. Cedric is an outgoing boy and makes friends with Mr. Hodges the green grocer, Dick the bootblack, and many others in his neighborhood.

One day a lawyer shows up. Cedric’s father, the Captain, was the third son of the Earl of Dorincourt. The lawyer says the older brothers have also died, making Cedric the heir. The Earl would like the boy to come to England to receive a proper education to become Earl when he dies. The heir of this particular Earl is designated Lord Fauntleroy, which gives us the title of the book.

The lawyer says Cedric will be rich and he can begin to indulge his whims now. And his whims are to improve Dick’s business and to help a family friend through a financial difficulty.

I saw this as a story of hierarchy. The Earl is close to the top and would be quite interested in maintaining that position. That means those under him are probably oppressed. At the start of the story Cedric is towards the bottom of the hierarchy and isn’t particularly interested in moving up. So, would this be a story where Cedric is taught the ways of maintaining the hierarchy or would the system of hierarchy crumble at least a little bit through Cedric’s actions?

As Cedric and his mother arrive in England the tenants on the Earl’s estate see him as not a very nice person. The Earl is irritable and not kind. He has spent his life seeking pleasure and, nearing 70, all he has to show for it is loneliness and gout. The tenants fear his anger. The Earl doesn’t want to meet Cedric’s mother because she is American. She’s installed in a house away from the castle. Cedric can visit, but the Earl won’t. The Earl wants to meet Cedric alone – in case the boy is a disappointment. And he is not.

Cedric doesn’t know the Earl is grumpy. The lad has been told the generosity he was able to give to his American friends is because the Earl is generous and kind. He thinks his grandfather is a wonderful man. The Earl is first bemused by the affection, but soon feels he needs to live up to it.

The village pastor comes to call because of a tenant behind in rent. The Earl lets Cedric decide what to do. And he decides to tell the manager to be nice to the family, to not kick them out. Cedric sees a few of the cottages in the village are in in really bad shape and says the should be pulled down and rebuilt. The Earl allows it to happen. Cedric makes friends with the workmen. The villagers are delighted in the way the Earl has changed. Before Cedric’s eighth birthday the Earl realizes he is rather fond of the boy.

In this story we see love and compassion as an antidote to hierarchy and its oppression. The boy doesn’t care about his position. The money is great – because it can help people. The Earl’s mood and outlook are considerably softened. He begins to see his tenants as people, not as a source of money.

The hierarchy is definitely not abolished. At that time in England the idea would seem absurd. But the Earl, under the guidance of a boy, is no longer enforcing the hierarchy, no longer asking how something will maintain him above the divide between his position and that of his tenants.

Though we know the solution, it would be quite difficult to apply that solution to America’s current oppressors. A young boy might single-handedly charm an Earl and do it in a year. It is quite another to apply the solution to the entire GOP and their supremacist backers. One reason is they won’t let us get close enough to try. Though we may not be able to show love and compassion to the oppressors, we can show it to each other.

A moral problem of punishing the rich

New Rep. Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez has started demanding that the top tax rate for rich people be switched back to the pre-Reagan 70%. Leah McElrath notes that AOC has by herself changed the discussion and spooked the rich and their defenders. McElrath and others talk about the Overton Window, a concept that says some ideas on the extreme right and left are too far out there and won’t be discussed. Shifting the Overton Window means a shift in what is permissible to discuss – extreme ideas aren’t so extreme anymore.

Of course, as McElrath reports, GOP Congresscritters are already misleading the public – the government will take more of your money!!! Well, no. This only affects people who earn more than $10 million in one year.

Patrick Iber notes that the 70% tax rate was in effect “through some of the best years of growth for the US economy in the postwar era.”

I’ve heard it explained elsewhere (I’m dredging it up from memory, so no link) that a high tax rate means corporate executives have a low incentive to skim the profits of the company for themselves and their stockholder cronies. Instead, they invest the money in their companies and in their workers. Everyone benefits, not just those at the top.

Of course there is pushback with the worn out phrase, “a moral problem of punishing the high income earners.”

Twitter user toast magnate handles that one:

How is still being extremely rich after paying higher taxes “punishment”? Take a look at these two graphs & tell me who suffers more when the rich don’t contribute back to society vs when they pay taxes. Trickle down doesn’t work. Hoarding wealth is bad for society.

I’ll let you click on the link above to look at the graphs.

More pushback: this forces a man to pay more than his fare share. They don’t have access to the dollars they earned. Good friend toast again:

Severe income inequality is detrimental to the economy and to society. Even conservative economists understand this. Allowing the extremely rich to hoard at the expense of society in general will ultimately harm the extremely rich, as well.

Another defender of the idea noted that the Reagan tax cuts in 1981 “also tracks closely with the rise of the current Republican Party and the start of the wealth inequality insanity leading up to now.”

Dianna Anderson, in a Twitter thread, notes the rich are freaking out, so let’s do the math.

In America we have a tax system based on a bracket. Only money above the bracket limit is taxed at a higher value. The rich won’t have to give up 70% of their income. The GOP is depending on you to misunderstand that 70% is not a flat rate.

Anderson uses Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson as an example. He earned $65 million last year. Let’s assume that 70% applies to income above $10 million. That means $55 million taxed at 70% leaves $16.5 million. $10 million taxed at much lower rates leaves maybe $5 million. Anderson rounds it to $20 million in income for the year.

Johnson bought a Florida house for $3.4 million in 2012. He has, perhaps, $104K in annual property taxes. Says Anderson:

He could buy that same home over and over every two months for a year and still have money left over to put a weight room in each property. That’s with the money he has LEFTOVER after a 70% tax rate.

Put it another way:

The Rock would pay almost enough in taxes in a single year to completely solve Flint’s water crisis.

He could fund the Smithsonian’s annual facilities maintenance budget for 7.5 years.

And that’s the Rock. He’s the second highest paid actor in the country (or was, in 2017). Imagine what would happen if we were able to tax ALLLLLLL billionaires, and people above 10mil/yearly at that rate.

We could fund hospitals. We could fund libraries. We could fix broken infrastructure. We could implement so many programs to ensure children don’t go hungry. And yet, somehow, we don’t, because it’s important that The Rock be able to buy his own house 7x over annually. Somehow.

Of course, there is pushback – we might need to get people off the dole. Mike Evans has that one:

Corporations make additional revenue by not paying their workers a living wage (i.e. a wage where basic needs can be afforded) & forcing the rest of us to supplement the working poor's income using welfare. That's socialism benefitting corps instead of citizens.

Minimum wage workers didn’t used to need welfare. But minimum wage hasn’t kept up with inflation.

Dina Finato adds:

What if we just... didn't let rich people get that rich? I'm not saying the Rock doesn't work hard, but what about Bob at the factory? Why should Bob's CEO Pete make 20000x more than Bob does? Does Pete work 20000x harder than Bob? Without the 100s of Bobs on the factory floor Pete wouldn't make any money at all. It seems like labor should be valued. People doing their jobs should be paid. CEOs should not be allowed to exploit their labor. Bob shouldn't have to live in a rundown shack when Pete lives in a mansion. Bob deserves a nice house.

More pushback – Bob should get an education and a better job. Finato again:

That is the myth, of course, that Bob doesn't deserve living wages. You're assuming that everyone can go to college. You're assuming everyone can be a CEO if they just work harder. You can't have CEOs without workers. We need janitors and clerks and maintenance workers etc.

Again, the claim of punishing the successful. Daniel Hazard this time:

Not letting a ceo earn several thousand times what a factory worker makes is not “punishing” them. Who would ever think that??? Crazy CEO rates are a recent phenomenon. They did just fine in the past w/o earning $100 mil a year for downsizing companies.

From my perspective all this talk making sure we don’t “punish” the rich means we do “punish” the poor. Giving the rich high salaries and letting them keep it is a way of taking the money away from the poor.

A stack of executive orders

I had mentioned that Michigan’s new Governor Gretchen Whitmer issued a stack of executive orders in her first days in office. I specifically mentioned the one that protects LGBT workers. Dawn Wolfe of Daily Kos has part of the list.

* The first one requires employees to immediately report threats to public health, safety, and welfare. This is to prevent another mess like the Flint water crisis.

* Requiring pay equity for women working in her administration.

* New ethics rules – don’t accept gifts, can’t have an outside job that conflicts with government duties, can’t have business transactions that benefit anyone other than the state, can’t use confidential state info for personal gain.

* Direct the Department of Technology, Management, and Budget to do more business with “geographically disadvantages” businesses.

* That LGBT protection order drops exemptions for religious organizations. This one was signed at the Affirmations LGBT community center in Ferndale. I wonder how that will play out with Catholic adoption agencies that refuse to let LGBT couples adopt.

* Sent requests to the new Attorney General to review some of the bills passed in the lame duck session, such as the one that created yet another school ranking system and one that authorizes an oil line across the Strait of Mackinac to be rerouted through a tunnel yet to be built.

I like her style. Alas, she faces a GOP majority in both houses of the legislature.

Do anything he wants

Some of the blogs and Twitter feeds I follow (and quote) are saying some dire things about the shutdown and the state of the country. It is much more than a dispute between the nasty guy and the Democrats.

Mark Sumner of Daily Kos notes that Americans conclusively demonstrated that they support Democrats and do not support the nasty guy, do not support his wall, do not support the direction he is taking the nation, and do not support his vision of autocracy.

And that’s exactly what makes the second week of January 2019 such a pivotal moment. Because Trump isn’t listening to the result of that vote. He isn’t negotiating with the new Democratic majority in the House. He isn’t pulling back or calming down. He’s going for broke. Or broken.

If Donald Trump does what at this moment seems almost certain—declares a national emergency over his inability to push Congress into giving him exactly what he wants—it’s wrong to think of it as a token victory, soon to be repealed by the courts. Or a limited action, allowing Trump to save face on one of the fist-pounding slogans of his campaign.

It’s precisely because “the wall” is so pointless, so needless, so much a non-starter that any declaration of a national emergency on that basis is so dreadful. Such a declaration will *fundamentally alter* the balance between Congress and the White House, putting America into territory that we have never experienced.

To summarize, if the nasty guy declares a national emergency and if Congress doesn’t cut him off (which is rather difficult for Congress to do and more difficult because of GOP senators who support him) then the nasty guy has shown he can do anything he wants and is not constrained by anyone or anything. He has shown us what he wants – to impose and enforce misogyny and white supremacy. He would be a dictator.

David Greenwald, in a Twitter thread, reminds us the nasty guy has already been shrinking the government by intentionally not filling all positions. This has been a story since the start of his term in office and hasn’t gotten much notice for about a year. And now, because of a lack of paychecks, federal workers will quit. They probably won’t be replaced. Greenwald concludes:

If you were undertaking a foreign-backed fascist coup of the American government, you would try to shut down as much of it as possible for as long as possible while ramming through your partisan judges to break the legal system and maintain your criminally obtained power.

This is worst-case scenario stuff but it's also just what's happening.

Sarah Kendzior, in another Twitter thread, responds to Rep. Elijah Cummings, who noted that the shutdown is affecting the Census Bureau, who is preparing for the 2020 census, on which federal funding of communities depends.

Pay attention to the long-term, cumulative damage of the shutdown, including the effect on the census.

The Trump admin has long sought to manipulate the census in an effort to reallocate resources and annihilate rights. This isn't just a shutdown -- it's a hostile restructuring.

I warned from the start that this was a deliberate plan. There are some things we may be able to recover: voter rights, jobs. There are others we may lose forever -- like some of our national parks. And most importantly, we lose lives. The admin kills, the shutdown accelerates.

The scope of loss from the shutdown is staggering. Already we lost FDA inspection; FBI and TSA protection from terrorism and violent crime; food stamps for needy families; paychecks for desperate workers; the national parks system…

It's unsustainable and that's the point.

By “from the start” Kendzior refers to what she has been saying since before the 2016 election.

In another thread Kendzior adds:

GOP has long sought to privatize federal industries and profit off the pain of citizen deprivation. What makes Trump distinct is his loathing of the USA and deference to hostile foreign states. His goal is to strip the country for parts and sell it to international kleptocrats.

It's irrelevant to Trump whether the US continues to exist. That is what distinguishes him from GOP predecessors.

But the GOP has increasingly moved toward Trump's perspective -- toward a globalised fascism where the nation-state is subsumed by international criminal elites.

Jen Hayden of Daily Kos wonders why the border wall is a national emergency. Rep. Mo Brooks says it is because of 15,000 Americans dying at the wall each year. Never mind that number is almost surely made up. And never mind that Brooks objected to Obama’s use of executive orders. One wonders if it has been a problem of this magnitude why didn’t the GOP controlled Congress do something before now? And if 15,000 at the border are a national emergency why aren’t the 40,000 who die every year through gun violence a national emergency?

I noted above one difficulty in opposing a national emergency is support from the GOP. But that support has slipped a bit. Senators are worried about a future President Kamela Harris invoking a national emergency to lessen those 40,000 gun deaths a year. Or President Harris declaring a national emergency over climate change. Or demanding transgender bathrooms be built in every elementary school in America.

Shh, don’t tell these GOP critters that if the nasty guy succeeds, there won’t be any future presidents.

Notorious again

Last May I saw the documentary RBG based on the life of Supreme Court Ruth Bader Ginsburg. The movie showed that before she became a justice she won several cases overturning gender ineqality. Today I saw the movie On the Basis of Sex which is mostly about the first of those cases. This was a docudrama – some of the scenes were altered for dramatic effect. RBG was played by Felicity Jones and her husband Marty was played by Armie Hammer.

The movie starts with her first day at Harvard Law School where she is one of maybe 10 women in a large classroom of men. As the class is assembling the soundtrack is the Harvard Glee Club singing, 10,000 Men of Harvard. The women are invited to the Dean’s home for dinner and each woman is asked to introduce herself and explain why she is worthy of taking a man’s place in the class. Yeah, sexist, but this was the 1950s.

We see her trying to get a job as a lawyer and is turned down. She ends up teaching at a law school in Newark. Then the first case, mentioned to her by Marty, gets her involved in the ACLU and she takes it.

At the time federal law said that if a woman is a primary caretaker for a child or parent and needs to hire someone to help the cost of that hired help could be deducted from taxes (the movie doesn’t get into the details of when this deduction can be taken). The point was a woman could take this deduction. A bachelor man could not. She tackled sex discrimination by using a case in which the man was discriminated against.

Of course, there are a lot of parallels between the sexism in her life and the cases she took.

I recommend this one.

I’ll grapple with it until I can wrap my head around it

Lake Superior State University has issued its annual list of words that should be banished for “Mis-use, Over-use, and General Uselessness.” This is their 44th annual list. A few of the words in this year’s list:

Yeet – a word I hadn’t heard. Maybe it’s a Lake Superior thing. It means to vigorously throw or toss. Banished before I have a chance to use it.

Wheelhouse, as in “It’s not in my wheelhouse to …” But most people have never seen a wheelhouse.

Wrap my head around – a physical impossibility.

Grapple – wrestlers grapple, issues don’t.

Eschew – nobody actually says it. It’s just a written filler.

Thought leader – thoughts aren’t ranked or scored. How can someone hold a thought-lead?

Most important election of our time – a phrase that has been applied to the last seven elections.



Senators and representatives display flags outside their offices. There is the American flag and the state flag. There is also room for one more.

New Representative Jennifer Wexton, Democrat from Virginia, chose as her third flag the pink, blue, and white trans pride flag. She chose it because she is the aunt of a trans child and Danica Roem, a transgender member of the Virginia House of Delegates, is one of Wexton’s constituents. Said Wexton:

This is personal for me. We're talking about my family and friends. I want everyone in the trans community to know that they are welcome and loved even in the face of this administration and its attacks on who they are.

Jeremy Moss, the first openly gay member of the Michigan Senate, has been selected as the Assistant Minority Leader.



New Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer has been issuing a series of executive orders defining how her administration will act. In the top ten is an order to protect LGBT state employees and to also require recipients of state contracts, grants, and loans to also protect their LGBT employees. In addition, the order also prohibits discrimination in state services.

Lie. Lie. Lie.

The nasty guy gave a speech about the partial government shutdown and his border wall. He thought it was so important he used the Oval Office as a prop. I didn’t watch (nor watched the rebuttal). Saved my sanity.

The most succinct summary of the speech is offered by Melissa McEwan in a short Twitter thread. The first tweet:

Lie. Lie. Lie. Fear-mongering. Lie. Lie. Alarmism. Lie. Racism. Lie. Lie. Lie.

In the rest of the tweets, between calling out more lies she also mentions Nativism, Projection, Scapegoating, Pandering to bigots, Fear-mongering, and Deflection.

In another tweet she wrote:

Reminder: All of Trump's rationales for the wall, and thus the shutdown, are complete lies. That should be the starting point for all punditry. The reasons cited for this pain are bullshit.

Martina Navratilova tweeted:

I can tell you all this for sure- whatever ridiculous propaganda we were fed in then Czechoslovakia, which was mandated by Soviet Union- pales next to the lies being told and repeated by trump and his ilk. I am not kidding… trump truly trumps the communists. And that’s not easy

Anya Malkiel responded:

I agree. And I am from the USSR. Those lies were more coherent and they had a benefit of the iron curtain, so they couldn't be contrasted by facts.

And Navratilova replied:

Exactly. And here we have the benefit of fact checking yet still a higher percentage of people believe the liar in chief than those that ever believed the communist BS…

About that punditry… The Associated Press Politics tweeted:

AP FACT CHECK: Democrats put the blame for the shutdown on Trump. But it takes two to tango. Trump's demand for $5.7 billion for his border wall is one reason for the budget impasse. The Democrats refusal to approve the money is another.

Which prompted historian Kevin Kruse to reply:

AP FACT CHECK: Bank officials put blame for the hostage crisis on the bank robbers. The robbers’ demand for “all the money you have” is one reason for the crisis. But the bank officials’ refusal to pay up is another.

Sarah Kendzior, who studies how authoritarian regimes come to power, explains the quality of that punditry. In one thread, she starts with:

During the presidential campaign:
* WSJ killed op-ed on Trump's mafia ties
* Multiple outlets, most notably NYT, lied about Trump's Kremlin ties and FBI investigation after being briefed on them
* Multiple outlets killed Trump porn star and hush money stories
Those are just the stories on Trump we *know* were killed. There are likely more.

The obvious question: Why?

I've said this before, but it bears repeating: media acquiesence to Trump is not about ratings. Spy, mafia, and sex crime stories sell -- and they killed Trump stories on those topics for years. Standing up to Trump also sells, and most won't do it. The motive is something else.

So these media outlets, who are desperate for income, aren’t doing stories that would bring income. Twitter user Carl Krash asks:

So which is it? Bribery, money laundering, sex trafficking for the 1%, treason? Or all of the above?

Kendzior replied:

I lean toward "all of the above" and is varying as to each outlet and individual.

Now that we know not to trust the mainstream media, we can look at alternative voices to describe the speech.

TV personality Jimmy Kimmel suggested the networks should have at least run a disclaimer:

The following presidential address is a work of fiction.
All personalities, incidents, events, locations and facts were pulled directly from the president's ass.
Any resemblance to reality is entirely coincidental.

In an article for the Globe and Mail, Kendzior wrote about the consequences of the shutdown – workers without pay, inadequate security, damage to national parks. Others have added things like restaurants who have lost customers and our food not being inspected. Kendzior adds:

The unsaid words of every Donald Trump demand are the most important, for they never change: “Or else.”

We are beginning to see what the “or else” is. Kendzior concludes:

There is no life more valuable than another, no victim unworthy of grief – but Mr. Trump’s zero-sum, xenophobic rhetoric tries to convince you there is. This calculated cruelty is also used as a rhetorical bludgeon against his actual enemy, the Democrats, whose attempts at accountability impede Mr. Trump’s apparent attempts at autocratic consolidation.

Their dispute is not about national security: the only security Mr. Trump is concerned with is his own. With the government shut down, he can capitalize on chaos and operate with greater impunity. His speech was not a public address: it was a shakedown proclamation built on venom and vengeance. It will not be his last.

On Twitter Kendzior wrote as part of a link to an episode of her podcast Gaslit Nation:

Do not be fooled: Trump and the GOP know *exactly* what they're doing with this shutdown.

The episode summary elaborates:

We debunk the myth that Trump did not understand what the shutdown would entail and argue that this is exactly what he and his camp have wanted: controlled chaos that allows him and other operatives to more easily strip the country down and sell it for parts. With Trump raising the prospect of a “national emergency," we stand on the precipice of something we’ve dreaded for a long time, and that in other settings has been how dictators consolidate power – by fabricating a massive crisis and exploiting it with a show of force.

I haven’t listened to Gaslit Nation yet. I’ve been reading about so much of this stuff I didn’t also want to spend an hour listening to it as well. Even so, it is highly recommended by those resisting the nasty guy as an explanation of what is going on.

For those who don’t know the term, gaslighting is

a form of psychological manipulation that seeks to sow seeds of doubt in a targeted individual or in members of a targeted group, making them question their own memory, perception, and sanity. Using persistent denial, misdirection, contradiction, and lying, it attempts to destabilize the victim and delegitimize the victim's belief.

The term comes from the 1938 play Gaslight and 1940 and 1944 movies of the same name in which a husband attempts to convince his wife she is insane by changing her environment and claiming nothing has changed and that she remembered thing incorrectly. It’s definitely a form of abuse. Does the term describe anyone you know?

Leah McElrath tweeted:

Looks like we’re headed to an escalation of the ongoing Constitutional crisis as Trump paves the way to declare a national “emergency” because he hasn’t been guaranteed money for his pet construction project.
…
It’s important to understand: Malignant narcissists THRIVE on conflict. Especially when they don’t have access to an endless supply of adoration. They will often sabotage a situation as soon as a given conflict approaches resolution. Think Lucy with the football.

Trump knows he’s holding Americans hostages. He doesn’t care.

They thrive on conflict because conflict brings attention, usually lots of it.

NcEwan, in her Shakesville blog, notes that after the speech a poll of voters found 47% blame the nasty guy for the shutdown and 33% blame Democrats. She adds:

Trump has border-walled himself into a corner, and he now faces a major problem: Even among people who agree with his premise that there's a "crisis" at the southern border, there isn't overwhelming support for building a border wall to solve the problem. And yet he's staked everything on this bullshit border wall idea.

If he backs down now, it will be a major defeat — and Trump cannot tolerate being one of the "losers" he so frequently derides from his rally podiums and Twitter account. He also can't abide being seen as weak by his deplorable cultists.

But he can't win. The longer this goes on, the more power shifts to the Democrats, who aren't backing down and refuse to give him the money to fund the wall.

Which leaves his only choice declaring a national emergency, which is such an immense abuse of power that even some members of his own party balk at the very notion.

As an example of this no way out… Democratic leaders Chuck Shumer and Nancy Pelosi went to visit the nasty guy on next steps. The nasty guy said, “Will you agree to my wall?” Pelosi said no. He said, “Then we have nothing to discuss,” and walked out.

So the nasty guy is talking about invoking a national emergency to get his wall built. And many of us are wondering … the GOP has long expressed their wish to shrink the government. Perhaps they leave it in a state of shutdown?

In the meantime the nasty guy has the military installing concertina wire along the border. That stuff is also known as barbed wire or razor wire. It has sharp points or cutting edges sticking out of it. A lot of people are going to think that’s no big deal, or laugh because the “wall” turned out to be a fence.

But McEwan reminds us razor wire is not benign. She quotes an article that appeared in The Guardian about such wire along the border between Morocco and Melilla. The article quotes Juan López de Uralde:

It's just criminal, because it won't stop people trying to cross the fence. The only thing it will achieves is to cause horrific injuries. On a recent visit to the temporary migrant centre in Melilla I spoke to people who said that when these blades were used before they had to treat people with serious injuries. It is inhumane to do this.

Which, McEwan says, is why the nasty guy is using it.

This isn't neutral. It's designed to do harm to people who are seeking safety.

I’ve seen people begin to wonder, is this big dispute our equivalent to the Reichstag Fire? From the Wikipedia prologue on the term:

The Nazi Party used the fire as evidence that communists were plotting against the German government, and the event is considered pivotal in the establishment of Nazi Germany.

And from the end of the article:

The term "Reichstag fire" is used by some writers to denote a calamitous event staged by a political movement, orchestrated in a manner that casts blame on their opponents, thus causing the opponents to be viewed with suspicion by the general public.