The Elite Get More Elite

Washington’s Deeper, Richer & Murkier Swamp

Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry. American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well. But we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense. We have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. Added to this, three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment. We annually spend on military security alone more than the net income of all United States corporations. Now this conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence—economic, political, even spiritual—is felt in every city, every Statehouse, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet, we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources, and livelihood are all involved. So is the very structure of our society.

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together. 

From Republican President (and former five star general) Dwight David Eisenhower’s televised farewell speech to the nation, January 17, 1961.

It no secret how it works. Spread your military bases and your military manufacturing contractors and subcontractors into as many congressional districts as possible – Democrat and Republican – knowing that all appropriations bills emanate from the House of Representatives. Make sure that the military gets first crack at the money, making sure that “national security” is embedded in the minds of every American and their elected representatives. So what if the United States now accounts for almost 40% of the global military budget, more than the next seven biggest spenders combined? $719 billion!

Even as just about every major new weapon system soars vastly beyond even the most inflated going-in budget, even as military tactics and challenges change dramatically, we are saddled with incumbent mega-powerful (campaign-contributing) military vendors who just want to keep that military money flowing into their coffers. Playing close to the bone with legal holdbacks on employing former senior military officers, the ranks of the military industrial complex are filled with ex-admirals and generals with consulting or better offered to former elected officials. It stinks!

Donald “Swamp Thing” Trump administers a much more sinister military industrial complex today. While there certainly are more than enough plants and military bases to pepper a rather dramatically large number of Congressional districts, what has changed is the growing concentration of power in some of this nation’s largest defense contractors. The rich are definitely richer. Trump loves giving money to those who do not need it, taking it away from those who are desperate for it. It’s gotten worse over the years:

“The year was 1989. The Pentagon was under the command of President George H.W. Bush and Defense Secretary Dick Cheney. And aviation giant McDonnell Douglas Corp. was riding high as the top federal contractor, grabbing 4.6%, or $9.15 billion, of all federal contracting dollars. The next two largest contractors, General Dynamics Corp. and General Electric Co., raked in about 4% and 3.4%, respectively.

“Thirty years and many acquisitions later, Pentagon spending has grown far more top-heavy… Today, Lockheed Martin Corp. and Boeing — which bought McDonnell Douglas in 1997 — together reaped almost 15% of total U.S. government contracting dollars in fiscal year 2017, according to the most recent federal numbers. The two aerospace giants are the only makers of fast combat jets in the U.S. and are the dominant players for military transport aircraft.

“The concentrated power of big defense companies became an issue two years ago when longtime Boeing executive Patrick Shanahan was confirmed as deputy secretary of Defense. Then in December, President Trump named him to serve as acting Defense secretary.

“After a monthlong ethics investigation into allegations that Shanahan promoted Boeing while slamming rival Lockheed Martin, particularly in discussions about its F-35 fighter jet contract, the Pentagon’s office of inspector general concluded Thursday that Shanahan ‘did not promote Boeing or disparage its competitors.”

“We did not substantiate any of the allegations,” the report said. “We determined that Mr. Shanahan fully complied with his ethics agreements and his ethical obligations regarding Boeing and its competitors.’… Shanahan is considered a leading candidate for permanent Defense secretary…

“The question of possible favoritism toward Boeing had also been raised by some when the U.S. Air Force, in its 2020 budget, made a surprise request to purchase F-15X fighter jets, an update of that company’s fourth-generation jet. The Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps have all made major commitments to the F-35, Lockheed Martin’s more advanced and pricier fifth-generation fighter.

“The inspector general report said the Pentagon’s mix of fourth- and fifth-generation aircraft was a decision made by former Defense Secretary James N. Mattis before Shanahan’s confirmation to the department. A Defense official told trade publication Defense News that the decision was bolstered by concerns about keeping ‘multiple providers in the tactical aircraft portfolio.’

“But there was no contract competition based on a set of defined requirements — the way business typically works in the industry, said Richard Aboulafia, aviation analyst at market analysis firm Teal Group…‘It’s a duopoly structure business with a lot at stake,’ he said of fast combat jet manufacturing. ‘It’s amazing that no one considered the optics here.’” Los Angeles Times, April 28^th. That Social Security and Medicare are running out of money or that the Trump Administration is trying to use the courts to kill the Affordable Care Act with nothing to replace it? Hey, those programs are for the little guys, and Donald Trump doesn’t represent them!

              I’m Peter Dekom, and history is rife with failed governments (remember Sparta for starters the Soviet Union more recently?) that overspent on their military and ignored their people; are we next?

I Just Don’t Want to Know

 

“It took President Trump 601 days to top 5,000 false and misleading claims in The Fact Checker’s database, an average of eight claims a day… But on April 26, just 226 days later, the president crossed the 10,000 mark— an average of nearly 23 claims a day in this seven-month period, which included the many rallies he held before the midterm elections, the partial government shutdown over his promised border wall and the release of the special counsel’s report on Russian interference in the presidential election.”

Washington Post, April 29th

I suspect that more than Democrats, criminal investigations of his administration and the enemy-of-the-people-mainstream-media-minus-Fox, facts are the Trump administration’s greatest enemies. Whether it may concern the fabricated or Trump-policy-induced national security crisis at the border, the rising ill-effects of releasing industrial polluters from responsibility from the consequences of their actions, a trade policy that is seriously hurting American producers and consumers, a tax cut that almost exclusively benefited the rich while adding the largest federal deficit increase ever but otherwise with no real benefit to most of us, or the justifications (wink wink) for polarization, racism and hate crimes that are soaring since Trump was elected, truth negates the efficacy of just about all things Trump. Looking at those long lines of coal miners getting their old jobs back? Oh, more mines are closing now than ever before.

As Kim Jong-un cozies up to Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping, openly defying Mike Pompeo and even Trump himself, as Trump alienates allies more than enemies, America’s future turns bleaker by the day. For Trump and that gullible part of his base (remember that 28% of evangelicals voted for Hillary Clinton!), as rally after rally illustrates, they only care about what he says, write off inconsistencies to “that’s just his style” and follow his blame for his many failures to unhinged, radical socialist Democrats. As if most of his followers could actually give you the correct definition of socialism anyway (where government owns and controls the means of production).

Trump’s shoot from the hip, keep an eye on what his base wants to hear, opinion-without-factual-basis, leadership – the same leadership in business that generated well over 3000 lawsuits – runs roughshod over studied expertise, scientific facts, history as well as normal moral boundaries. It’s not as if Donald Trump is sure his assumptions are true; that’s irrelevant. It’s simply what his bases wishes were so, so he simply says that it is! They smile, nod at each other… but facts continue to deploy according to historical and natural laws. And not the way the base wants! Facts are disturbingly neutral. Politics and public opinion have no sway with facts.

When NASA threatened to launch missions to set earth-orbital platforms more capable of ascertaining the ravages of climate change, Trump was enraged. A total waste of money in his mind. Everyone knows what that research will produce; the scientific community has been generating reams of supporting data for decades. Common observations here on here have slowly produced a ring of truth in the warnings in all but the most diehard skeptics. Floods, fires, coastal erosion, massive storm systems, searing temperatures, droughts, radically and rapidly altering weather patterns and consistent global temperature rise are now patently obvious to most of us.

Even the Republican Party, noticing that the rising generations of voters are exceptionally attuned to climate change issues, is beginning to understand that climate change denial is no longer a politically viable path. So Congress, with GOP support, backed NASA. “A NASA instrument designed to track carbon in Earth’s atmosphere is headed to the International Space Station next week, and President Trump isn’t happy about it… He slashed funding for the Orbiting Carbon Observatory 3 [OCO-3 – the NASA rendering above] and four other Earth science missions in his proposed spending plan for the 2018 fiscal year, citing ‘budget constraints’ and ‘higher priorities within Science.’ His budget for fiscal year 2019 tried to defund them again.

“In both cases, Congress decided to keep the OCO-3 mission going anyway… OCO-3 was built at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Cañada Flintridge for less than $100 million, using parts left over from its predecessor, OCO-2… Once the carbon observatory gets to the ISS [International Space Station], a robotic arm will mount it on the underside of the space station so it can keep a close eye on the carbon dioxide in Earth’s atmosphere… That will help scientists answer questions about how and why levels of the greenhouse gas fluctuate over days, months and years…

“The main purpose of OCO-3 is to make sure we have a continuous record of carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere, but we are adding some new capabilities… One of those is to take a snapshot of carbon levels over an area of 50 miles by 50 miles. This will feed a bunch of science investigations of emission hot spots, like cities or volcanoes… We can also look at how plant activity changes over the course of a day, which is something OCO-2 could not do… 

“OCO-3 is a spectrometer that looks at Earth’s surface in three wavelengths: two for carbon dioxide, and one for the type of light your eyes see. Every molecule has a unique way that it absorbs light, almost like a fingerprint, and that’s what we exploit in our instrument…If the CO 2 levels are 405 ppm, we will see a certain amount of light change in the CO 2 band. If it is 406, we’ll see just a bit more… President Trump tried to cancel this mission twice.” Los Angeles Times, April 27^th. And that mission is now “out to launch.”

The United States should be grateful to California. Not only is OCO-3 the product of Southern California’s JPL, but the state is leading the research to counter climate change. Even demon-Los Angeles is figuring out how to deflect rising temperatures in an experiment that might spread a small part of a solution to other cities. “The sludge poured out of giant plastic buckets like gray pancake batter. Workers in neon vests and spiky cleats squeegeed it across a parking lot in downtown Los Angeles, smoothing it into a thin layer beneath a cloudless sky.

“This light-reflecting goop is part of L.A.’s experiment to cool the city as it’s hit by climate change.

If global greenhouse gas emissions keep rising at their current rate, temperatures in L.A. will increase nearly 4 degrees Fahrenheit by midcentury, scientists say. The metropolis is already nearly 6 degrees hotter than surrounding rural areas thanks to its masses of heat-absorbing buildings, paved surfaces and scant shade and vegetation.

“Mayor Eric Garcetti has pledged to cut that difference nearly in half, reducing land surface temperatures 3 degrees by 2035. And he hopes that loads more of the viscous street-coating mixture will help.

“Once the new coating dries, the pavement outside an Arts District warehouse-turned-green-technology campus will become a putty gray that reflects more of the sun’s rays than the dark asphalt it covered up. The material — one of a handful of products the city and the Los Angeles Cleantech Incubator are testing — absorbs less heat, and thermometer readings show it can reduce surface temperatures by 10 degrees or more.” LA Times.

Not only do we have to begin to mount an effective global strategy against a climate trend that might even render vast tracts of the earth uninhabitable, but we have to battle those who deny that there is a problem, particularly leaders like Donald Trump. We shouldn’t have to fight to solve an obvious problem… the biggest problem humanity has faced in millennia.

              I’m Peter Dekom, and may we never have another fact-averse president again… ever!

Silicon Valley – They’re Tearing Us Apart

Politics has never meshed well in the workplace, but in the past the clash has mostly been between owners/senior managers, on the one hand, and the mass of blue-collar and clerical white-collar workforce below, on the other. The old-world union vs. management schism. In the above chart, presented in the February 28^th FastCompany.com by survey company Morning Consult and commissioned by the conservative-leaning nonprofit Lincoln Network, are the results of a recent political attitude poll taken in California’s Silicon Valley.

“Among those surveyed, 45% say that their company promotes a political agenda. That leaning tends to be toward the left, with 48% of respondents saying their company has a clear liberal agenda, as opposed to the 38% who reported a conservative agenda.” FastCompany.com But what is a “conservative”? Is Donald Trump’s populism, favoring tariffs and import restrictions and catering strongly to displaced union workers, a conservative position? Is Trump’s withdrawal from global conflicts, often a liberal calling card, the new “right wing”? Because the traditionally-conservative Republican Party embraces this vector, along with traditional conservative values of lower taxes and deregulation, does this make everything Trump effectively the definition of a modern American “conservative”?

As younger generations, who never lived through the rage of capitalism vs socialism (or its de facto autocratic extreme, communism), look at massive income inequality, hideous post-secondary education costs, unaffordable housing where jobs exists, displacement from automation (the equipment is owned by the rich) and a volatile job market, does the fact that the “S” word – socialism – represents a viable political choice for many of them alter the meaning of the word “liberal”? Bernie Sanders’ sustained rhetoric, once considered fringe-radicalism, correctly sounds as if it has been around for a while… an acceptable political choice. He seems lost in a sea of too many “progressive” Democratic presidential candidates towing his left-of-center polices, where the difference between socialism (which involves government ownership of the industrial and commercial institutions) and favoring government-backed social programs often gets lost in translation.

Today, the political polarization is vastly more-evenly spread throughout the work force. And that’s a huge problem that actually impacts the viability of the United States as a cohesive and sustainable nation. Hoi polloi workers are now divided among themselves, often finding their bosses and owners more liberal than they are. Regionally, it is equally difficult to be a liberal at any level and live in West Virginia or Wyoming. But even in urban concentrations in blue states, political beliefs are hardly uniform. Where there is a diversity of political beliefs “on the shop floor,” the workplace is increasingly becoming a place where strongly-held political stands create very nasty friction among and between workers… as well as their management. That friction may ripple up and down the entire strata in the company.

The Silicon Valley isn’t the only place where politics in the workplace are driving wedges between workers, but it is exemplary. Sean Captain, writing for the above-referenced article in FastCompany.com, notes: “Whether they agree or disagree with their company’s politics, fear about ideological conflicts with colleagues runs across all political groups: very liberal, liberal, moderate, conservative, very conservative, and libertarian.

“Nearly half of employees at companies with political agendas said their ideological views impacted their ability to work. At companies perceived to have a political agenda, 63% of workers said that ridicule in the workplace is commonplace if you disagree with a colleague, while only 21% said that happens at their apolitical companies…

“Lincoln leans conservative: Its leaders have been active in Republican politics, and they launched the survey effort in 2017 ‘to collect data on potential anti-conservative bias in Silicon Valley.’ Still, it claims to have no influence on the data itself. ‘Morning Consult, as an independent party, collected all of the quantitative data,’ says Lincoln cofounder Garrett Johnson, who worked for Florida governor Jeb Bush and Senator Richard Lugar of Indiana.

“Lincoln also conducted an online survey of a few dozen tech workers to solicit opinions and anecdotes, similar to its contentious survey from 2017-2018. Some of those quotes pepper Lincoln’s report on the Morning Consult survey. ‘I am happy, with the exception of my time at work where I feel like the choices I have made in my beliefs label me as stupid, a bigot, deplored, and more . . .’ one anonymous tech worker wrote. ‘I am coming to the conclusion that we cannot live or work together any longer.’

“In an op-ed for Fox News on Thursday, Johnson echoed his previous complaints about bias against conservatives in tech, saying the new data ‘confirm a stunning level of viewpoint intolerance in the tech community,’ and ‘reveal an epidemic of polarization and intolerance in Silicon Valley and the broader tech community [that] presents an important opportunity for tech leadership to cultivate a culture of viewpoint inclusion.’

“But I’ve also interviewed a handful or workers from major tech companies–on and off the record–over the past year, who have provided some insight on the results that are more nuanced than Johnson’s focus on bias. And when I spoke with a few survey respondents who agreed to an interview, I found their stories of discrimination less severe than appeared in the short comments gathered by Lincoln Network. Still, they do see their workplaces as much more friendly to colleagues who are openly left than even a bit conservative. (Workers spoke on condition of anonymity due to concern about backlash from colleagues.).”

We are fracturing at so many levels within our nation – regional, urban vs rural, populist nationalism vs diversity, rich vs poor, white vs other, evangelical vs other faiths/no faith, etc. There are efforts, noted above, to embrace ideological tolerance, and indeed as the population adds higher levels of education to the average experience (e.g., 59% of millennials have at least some college education), that tolerance grows. But as the tech field leads us into the uncharted world of artificial intelligence, as unchecked population growth meets the decimation of global climate change, we are going to need every bit of ingenuity, every ounce of unified commitment, to advance humanity in future years.

              I’m Peter Dekom, and with the levels of American polarization still growing, will we recover that cohesive level of American acceptance of divergent viewpoints in time to salvage our political future?

Dis-Putin Who Controls the Arctic

Back on April 29, 2017, in my $35 Trillion Antics in the Arctic blog, I noted how Russia has officially claimed most undersea land mass beneath the Arctic ice, even planting a titanium Russian flag under the North Pole on the sea floor, building a fleet of nuclear super-icebreakers beyond the capacity of any other nation, and greedily eyeing what is estimated to be $35 trillion worth of unexploited natural resources as well as a climate-change-melting shipping lane known to us as the Northwest Passage. Russian sea and air military installations increased all across adjacent Russia land. Neither the United Nations nor any other nation bordering the Arctic has accepted the Russian claim… but no other nation really has done anything about it. Certainly not Putin-ophile, Donald Trump.

Russia’s Arctic efforts have since continued unabated. Russian geographers attempted to justify the land grab by tracing ridges deep under the ocean that emanated they claimed from Mother Russia. To Moscow, the Arctic was theirs just as much as was their seizure of Crimea from Ukraine. Pretending to advance regional dialogue over access to and use of the region, Putin addressed leaders from Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden at an Arctic forum in St. Petersburg on April 9^th. Meanwhile, Putin is simply saturating the Arctic with powerful Russian assets, military capability and an existing fleet of four heavy nuclear icebreakers (Russia is the only nation with such vessels) with plans to build 5 more such nuclear vessels (3 of those are being built now) and 8 more conventional heavy icebreakers.

In time, Russian assets, interests and activities will simply overwhelm the region. No other nation, no other combination of nations, has or is developing anything comparable to what Russia has and will have. Russia will control (dominate or actually annex) shipping lanes and mineral/oil exploration sites, probably to the exclusion of all but a token presence from other countries. Russian military bases in the region send an ominous signal to the world.

At the above-noted forum, Putin’s address gave lip service to international law while his highest cabinet officer hinted at reality: “Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said that military deployments in the Arctic are intended to protect national interests… ‘We ensure the necessary defense capability in view of the military-political situation near our borders,’ Lavrov said, noting that a recent NATO exercise in Norway was openly directed against Russia…

“The Russian military has revamped and modernized a string of Soviet-era military bases across the Arctic, looking to protect its hold on the region, which is believed to hold up to a quarter of the Earth’s undiscovered oil and gas.” Los Angeles Times, April 10^th.

Russia is already transshipping 20 metric tons (2018) of cargo through that Northwest Passage in the months where ice flow is minimal; by 2025, Putin brags, that number will increase to 80 million metric tons a year: “This is a realistic, well-calculated and concrete task… We need to make the northern sea route safe and commercially feasible.” Putin added that “his country plans to expand the ports on both sides of the Arctic shipping route — Murmansk on the Kola Peninsula and Petropav-lovsk-Kamchatsky on the Kamchatka Peninsula — and invited foreign companies to invest in the reconstruction project… Other ports and infrastructure facilities along the route will also be upgraded and expanded, he said.

“Russia, the U.S., Canada, Denmark and Norway have all been trying to assert jurisdiction over parts of the Arctic as shrinking polar ice creates new opportunities for resource exploration and new shipping lanes.

“Speaking at the forum, Norwegian Prime Minister Erna Solberg emphasized the need to respect international law and noted that the Arctic Council provides a key arena for dialogue… ‘Now and then I hear the Arctic described as a geopolitical hot spot,’ she said. ‘This is not how we see it. We know the Arctic as a region of peace and stability.’… Solberg and other leaders who spoke at the forum underscored the need for all countries in the Arctic region to focus on areas of mutual interest despite differences.” Los Angeles Times. Like dialogue stopped Russia from annexing Crimea, Ukrainian territory, in clear defiance of an actual treaty that Russia signed guaranteeing that Crimea would remain Ukrainian? The world is threatening Russia’s steel and concrete Arctic ambitions with sweet words and a peashooter.

We have a president with the weakest foreign policy experience and knowledge of any president since World War I. His blind adherence to all things “Netanyahu,” an effort to curry favor with his evangelical base and rich donors from the US Jewish community combined with his attacks on allies while embracing traditional enemies, have made Donald Trump’s international efforts the diplomatic equivalent of the Keystone Cops. As climate-change denial remains Trump’s official policy, Russia has embraced that same climate change to bate a weakened United States and establish a presence right on our international border (Alaska) that truly reflects Donald Trump’s obeisance to a corrupt foreign power with some very nice locations for future Trump hotels and residential towers.

              I’m Peter Dekom, and I find it strange that his story is so completely downplayed in our media and that a once-strong-against Russia Republican Party seems fine with it all.

Dollars and No Sense

Trump's U Penn (Wharton) Graduation Picture

The tracks of “friends of Donald Trump” convincing various schools he attended to destroy or keep secret his grades are everywhere. His father had money, a key to admission to many colleges in the 1960s, but wherever he attended a school or college, Donald Trump was always a terrible student. Bullying and street smarts came easily to him, lessons from his father, but anything that required critical thinking or deep research and understanding… not so much. His academic track record suggests that Trump was anything but a gifted student at the top of his class as he claims and as Fox News repeats without the slightest supporting fact.

“In 2011, days after Donald Trump challenged President Barack Obama to ‘show his records’ to prove that he hadn’t been a ‘terrible student,’ the headmaster at New York Military Academy got an order from his boss: Find Trump’s academic records and help bury them.

“The superintendent of the private school ‘came to me in a panic because he had been accosted by prominent, wealthy alumni of the school who were Mr. Trump’s friends’ and who wanted to keep his records secret, recalled Evan Jones, the headmaster at the time. ‘He said, ‘You need to go grab that record and deliver it to me because I need to deliver it to them.’ ’

“The superintendent, Jeffrey Coverdale, confirmed Monday that members of the school’s board of trustees initially wanted him to hand over President Trump’s records to them, but Coverdale said he refused.

“The former NYMA officials’ recollections add new details to one of the allegations that Michael Cohen, the president’s longtime personal lawyer and fixer, made before Congress last week. Cohen, who told the House Oversight and Reform Committee that part of his job was to attack Trump’s critics and defend his reputation, said that Trump ordered him ‘to threaten his high school, his colleges and the College Board to never release his grades or SAT scores.’

“Trump has frequently boasted that he was a stellar student, but he declined throughout the 2016 campaign to release any of his academic records, telling The Washington Post then, ‘I’m not letting you look at anything.’” Washington Post, March 5^th.

“Fordham University is confirming it received a letter from Donald Trump’s then-lawyer threatening legal action if Trump’s academic records became public… Fordham says the letter from Trump’s lawyer was preceded by a phone call from a campaign staffer. Fordham says it’s bound by federal law barring the release of student records [anyway]… Trump attended the Roman Catholic university in New York City for two years. He graduated from the University of Pennsylvania… Penn and the College Board declined to comment.” MarketWatch.com, March 1^st.

In Donald’s mind, abstract concepts seem to fly far above his mental powers. But where he can anchor those issues in dollars and cents, he creates an “understanding” solely based on hard dollar metrics – even if incorrectly applied – and creates what inevitably turn out to be fallacious descriptions, taking credit as success for the disasters that have become the footprints of his administration. North Korea, which has played Trump like a yoyo and still has every single nuclear weapon and ballistic missile they have had since the outset of the “peace talks,” has “wonderful beaches” and potential to build magnificent, dollar-generating resorts, notes Trump. No Donald, Kim Jong-un isn’t going to relinquish weapons he deems essential for his regime to stay in power in order to trade up to a Trump golf course and resort strategy.

Give rich people huge tax cuts and they will invest that capital to create more jobs, said the Donald. Trickle down economics. Trump gave them the tax cuts, and the rich repaid him by using that windfall to buy back their own shares… soon running out of capital to make any of those promised investments. Tariffs are a huge win for Americans, screams Donald Trump, when every economist on earth knows that a tariff is a consumer tax. And Mexico is not paying for that wall, one way or the other.

But Trump is so good with money. He’s a billionaire many times over. We should trust his instincts. Really? Then let’s see his tax returns to verify his wealth claims and make sure what he told the government is true. Why have Trump companies gone bankrupt so many times? Why have there been over 3500 lawsuits over money in Trumpland? Why did Goldman Sachs say that if Trump had simply invested his inherited wealth in the stock market, he would be vastly wealthier than even he claims to be now?

Donald cannot separate policies that are good for America, insure global power and influence plus the ability to protect American interests worldwide from a dollar-based profit-loss analysis. His latest rant, which will struggle in the Democratically-controlled House, is to insist that our allies pay hard cash for our defensive troops stationed in their countries. Puppet-master Vladimir Putin, Trump-manipulator Kim Jong-un and PRC strongman Xi Jinping must be cheering. If genuinely pressed, how many of those “allied” countries would simply invite U.S. forces to leave? We just might squander our last few shekels of credibility and influence in this latest Trump suggestion. Do you hear the cackling in the background? Even Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro must be chortling.

We are even more the laughing stock of the world than we have ever been, a track record few politicians would point to with pride. Donald does. Remember this speech The Donald made before the United Nations General Assembly on September 25^th? “In less than two years my administration has accomplished more than any almost administration in the history of our country… So true.” The gathering of seasoned diplomats and world leaders immediately erupted into laughter.

Make those no-good allies pay for U.S. soldiers on overseas bases? This inane policy doesn’t even sit well with Trump’s GOP supporters. “Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.), the third-ranking House Republican, on Sunday [3/10] criticized President Donald Trump’s reported plan to force U.S. allies to pay billions of dollars more for hosting American troops on their soil… Under a new formula devised by the president, allies such as Japan and South Korea would potentially pay Washington the full cost of stationing U.S. troops in their territory, plus an additional 50 percent.

“The formula, which Trump has dubbed ‘cost plus 50,’ could cause affected countries to contribute five times what they currently do, according to The Washington Post.

“Cheney told NBC’s ‘Meet the Press’ that the impact of this plan would be ‘absolutely devastating’ to U.S. diplomacy… ‘We benefit tremendously ... [from] our bases and our cooperation with our allies,” she told host Chuck Todd. “The notion that we are somehow now going to charge them cost plus 50 is really, it’s wrongheaded and it would be devastating to the security of our nation and to our allies.’” Huffington Post, March 10^th. Hey, Donnie, if money is the metric of international diplomacy, I’ve got an idea. Why not let Vladimir Putin pay billions, even trillions, to locate Russian military facilities inside the continental United States?

The harsh aversion that Trump and his base share over qualified expertise, preferring shoot-from-the-hip decisions and catchy slogans to facts, have brought the United States to one of its weakest and least globally influential periods in its post-World War I history. We are horribly polarized and seemingly ungovernable. The damage from the Trump legacy may not even be reparable; who is ever going to trust the United States and its treaty commitments ever again?

              I’m Peter Dekom, and if this bothers you as much as it bothers me, then make your vote count!

Meritocracy

Many equate “democracy” with “meritocracy.” But history teaches us that the longer a social system remains intact, as individuals garner “success” – power and wealth – those who climb to the top of that socio-political ladder almost uniformly use that accumulation of success to hold their position and make sure their children inherit their status as well. Economic aspects of social structures divide values in terms of labor, capital and land. Landowners were the mega-wealthy when our nation was founded, but over time and with technological improvement, capital supplanted land use as the big American value-creator.

The use of “corporations” accelerated the ability to turn capital ownership, sometimes combined with land ownership, into fungible and tradable currency. Likewise, that ability to accumulate value within a larger corporate structure also enhanced the further capacity to borrow and raise additional funds not available to most of us.

So, when you examine how power and wealth are used, particularly in the American system of governance, those who own capital and productive real estate – including those who service those sectors by sharing in the values generated (e.g., bankers, lawyers, financial advisors, etc.) – have the ability to buy more land and capital equipment, while the vast bulk of the population provide labor. But technology is imbuing the capital sector – though artificial intelligence and implementing automation – with an ability to eliminate labor and absorb the values that labor once created into their ownership and control of capital equipment.

The net impact of this macro-trend, combined with global outsourcing (less of an issue today because of automation), is a job displacement that serially eliminates so many tasks, from routine and repetitive manufacturing to mathematically-determined analytics and consumer interaction. Looking at this another way, it is a ground-up contraction of the middle class, starting with blue-collar labor and working its way up the skilled labor market. Labor values are replaced by automated equipment values, and income shifts away from wages and salaries to those who own the capital equipment. We call this “income inequality” or “polarization,” but technology is making things worse very fast, and the capital markets are rewarding capital and punishing labor.

China’s Mao Zedong watched as cadres with power used that success to further distance themselves from the masses. He watched senior members of the Communist Party use political stature the same way rich global capitalists used money. Though his methods were unthinking, distorted and particularly cruel, Mao loved shaking up China’s power structure – The Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, for example – to take that sense of the entitled communist elite down, to level society by elevating those at the bottom to the top. Having untrained incompetent ideologs run a nation is clearly a recipe for disaster, and by the time Deng Xiaoping took over the People’s Republic, his first efforts were directed at restoring competent leadership and a functional bureaucracy. Deng was the father of the success you see in modern China, a system that lifted over a billion people out of desperate poverty in about 30 years.

Yet there is something alluring about thinking that a social structure, an ideal government, should be fair. People should be equal. Particularly to Americans, most of whom once thought of their country as a land of opportunity. But as the blue-collar segment of Donald Trump’s base will tell you, the notion of upward mobility in America has degenerated to historical myth, such that most Americans believe that future generations will not live up to the same economic quality of life as past generations. Those blue-collar members of his base have long-since been displaced, clearly out of the middle class, but many kicked out of their traditional livelihoods. Under the current socio-economic structure, despite Trump’s promises to the contrary, the middle class will continue to contract.

But as we all know, America has moved increasingly away from being a true democracy. Our system of government is skewed to rural voters. E.g., California and Wyoming each have two US Senators. Income inequality has never been this polarized in the entire history of the United States. Just watching rich folks bribe their kids into college tells you how bad the “entitled” in this country believe they can act without consequences. You can read my March 13^th blog, The Real Entitlements: Privilege, for more of the grimy details.

But Americans still rail at unfairness and mistakenly believe that people can earn their way to success. Clifton Mark, writing for the March 13^th FastCompany.com, explains: “Meritocracy has become a leading social ideal. Politicians across the ideological spectrum continually return to the theme that the rewards of life–money, power, jobs, university admission–should be distributed according to skill and effort. The most common metaphor is the ‘even playing field’ upon which players can rise to the position that fits their merit. Conceptually and morally, meritocracy is presented as the opposite of systems such as hereditary aristocracy, in which one’s social position is determined by the lottery of birth. Under meritocracy, wealth and advantage are merit’s rightful compensation, not the fortuitous windfall of external events.

“Most people don’t just think the world should be run meritocratically, they think it is meritocratic. In the U.K., 84% of respondents to the 2009 British Social Attitudes survey stated that hard work is either ‘essential’ or ‘very important’ when it comes to getting ahead, and in 2016 the Brookings Institute found that 69% of Americans believe that people are rewarded for intelligence and skill. Respondents in both countries believe that external factors, such as luck and coming from a wealthy family, are much less important. While these ideas are most pronounced in these two countries, they are popular across the globe.

“Although widely held, the belief that merit rather than luck determines success or failure in the world is demonstrably false. This is not least because merit itself is, in large part, the result of luck. Talent and the capacity for determined effort, sometimes called ‘grit,’ depend a great deal on one’s genetic endowments and upbringing…This is to say nothing of the fortuitous circumstances that figure into every success story.” The American playing field has never been more tilted toward the “haves.” There is a seething anger in America, growing by the day. We now feel that the notion of a meritocracy is dying if not dead in the country.

              I’m Peter Dekom, and Americans are mad as hell but are they ready to make the seismic shifts necessary to restore fairness to the system.

GOP 101: How to Kill the Affordable Care Act

Donald J. Trump‏@realDonaldTrump

The Republican Party will become

“The Party of Healthcare!”

9:58 AM - 26 Mar 2019

With not a single page of a comprehensive alternative healthcare plan presented to anybody, feeling his oats after stating that the Mueller Report totally vindicated him, Donald Trump made the brash tweet noted above. Trump then directed his Attorney General to side with 20 red state attorneys general who secured a federal district court ruling that the entirety of the Affordable Care Act (ACA aka Obamacare) is unconstitutional (see below). Let’s look at the history of Republican opposition to this healthcare legislation.

Republicans in Congress have voted well over 50 times to repeal the ACA since it was passed in 2010. While the Supreme Court gutted the requirement that individuals have healthcare insurance (subsidized for those who needed help) or pay a fine, there have been no successful congressional or judicial efforts to terminate the entire statute. However, on December 20, 2017, the individual mandate to have health insurance was repealed by a GOP Congress starting in January 2019 under provisions of the gigantic tax reform legislation, the "Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017.”

Still, those 20 Republican attorneys general had filed suit – Texas vs. United States – in a Fort Worth Federal District Court – known to be “GOP-friendly” – to hold that the rest of the ACA, not limited in an earlier Supreme Court decision, is unconstitutional and now unfunded without that individual mandate. Simply Congress de facto defunded the ACA by that tax act, so continuing an unfunded law (effectively a repeal, they said) was unconstitutional. To everyone’s surprise, Federal District Court Judge Reed O’Connor agreed in a ruling on December 14, 2018. Was the ACA dead?

Even with GOP control of both houses of Congress, the last serious direct attempt by Republicans in Congress to repeal the ACA went down in flames when the late John McCain cast a deciding vote: “Sen. John McCain stunned much of the US and his party leaders on [July 27, 2018], when shortly before 2 a.m. ET he voted against a ‘skinny’ plan to repeal parts of the Affordable Care Act.

“McCain joined two other Republican senators, Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, who voted against the bill and quashed Majority Leader Mitch McConnell's plan to upend the US healthcare system after 20 hours of debate.” BusinessInsider.com, 7/28/18. Ever since, President Trump, who promised affordable quality healthcare for all – directly or through his minions at the Department of Health and Human Services – has slowly dismembered the statute at every turn, frequently reversed by pro-ACA judicial rulings. But did the tax bill effectively kill the ACA by defunding it? Trump had tried different approaches over his short time in office.

His efforts at sabotaging the rest of the ACA, his own braggadocio that he will watch that healthcare program collapse and help that happen, have been legendary. But Trump’s latest effort tops all of the Trump administration efforts to circumvent the ACA’s mandates against denying coverage or imposing higher costs or caps for pre-existing conditions by approving (exempting) “skinny” plans that simply limit coverage to stated diseases and ailments, by implication eliminating everything else by not mentioning them.  

Even judges appointed by Republican presidents tend to see through that Trump ruse – his pretending to present cheaper alternatives to ACA plans but effectively eviscerating statutory protections. Like this most recent example: “U.S. District Judge John D. Bates on Thursday [3/29] blocked new rules governing so-called association health plans, which let businesses and individuals band together to create group plans that offer less expensive coverage than the Affordable Care Act — but without some of its protections.

“The ruling is a victory for nearly a dozen Democratic state attorneys general who sued to block the policy last year. The judge’s findings come as the Trump administration is renewing its effort to unwind Obamacare by declining to defend it in court… ‘The final rule is clearly an end-run around the ACA,’ Bates, a 2001 appointee of Republican President George W. Bush, said in the ruling… ‘Indeed, as the president directed, and the secretary of Labor confirmed, the final rule was designed to expand access to AHPs in order to avoid the most stringent requirements of the ACA.’” Los Angeles Times, March 30^th.

With the House under Democratic control, the President also knows that another “repeal” or “repeal and replace” bill to undo the ACA can never pass Congress. And even though the GOP probably lost control of the House over its increasingly unpopular stand against the ACA, Trump believes that if the U.S. Supreme Court – now with a conservative majority – hears the appeal in Texas vs. The United States, it just well might rule in support of the Judge O’Connor’s ruling. The ACA would die. If he couldn’t kill the ACA directly by Congressional vote, Trump now had a path through a judiciary that his appointments have moved severely to the right.

If the ACA could be gone, reasons Trump, Democrats must be aware that healthcare will thereafter be defined by what can pass a Republican Senate and a be signed by a Republican president. Medicaid expansion will collapse, exemptions for less than full coverage will be allowed (hence blasting those with pre-existing conditions), anything related to women’s reproductive rights will vaporize and expect reduced if any coverage for addiction and mental health issues. And that’s assuming that the GOP can do what it has dramatically failed to do in a decade: offer up a genuine national healthcare plan at any level. Republicans have never been remotely able to come together on a viable plan; those on the extreme right (the Freedom Caucus, for example) do not want any ubiquitous government plan at all, so they have stopped a GOP proposal every time.

The March 26^th Journal from the American Bar Association explains Trump’s plan to support Judge O’Connor’s ruling to take down the ACA completely: “The U.S. Department of Justice told a federal appeals court [5^th Circuit] Monday evening [3/26] that it agrees with a federal judge who struck down the entire Affordable Care Act as unconstitutional.

“The DOJ stance is a ‘major shift’ from its position when Jeff Sessions was attorney general, CNN reports. Lawyers under Sessions had argued that only parts of the Obama-era health care law were unconstitutional after Congress effectively repealed its tax penalty in 2017 for people without insurance. Other publications with articles include the National Law Journal, the Washington Post and Politico.

“The U.S. Supreme Court had upheld the law’s individual mandate in 2012 under Congress’ taxing power… After Congress reduced the tax penalty to zero, Sessions had refused to defend the law’s requirement for individuals to buy health insurance, known as the individual mandate. He had also refused to defend provisions that ban insurers from denying coverage or charging more to people with pre-existing conditions.

“But in a letter filed with the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals at New Orleans, DOJ lawyers said the appeals court should affirm a decision striking down the entire law by U.S. District Judge Reed O’Connor of Fort Worth, Texas. O’Connor had ruled in December that the elimination of a tax penalty made the entire law invalid. He did not enjoin the law, however, while his decision was appealed.

“According to CNN, the new stance ‘doubles down on stripping away all the protections that were a hallmark of the landmark heath reform law.’… The DOJ’s new stance would strike down additional provisions that allow children to have coverage on their parents’ policies until age 26 and that guarantee ‘essential health benefits’ such as mental health, maternity and drug coverage. The stance also would eliminate an expansion of Medicaid and free preventive services for people on Medicare.”

It is interesting to note how the passion with which Republican zeal governs their anti-ACA actions, knee-jerk dramatic actions not remotely well-considered, produces some unusual results. Under a most interesting example of the law of unintended consequences, the Justice Department was prosecuting a billion-dollar medical fraud case against one Philip Esformes, who ran a chain of skilled-nursing and assisted-living venues in Miami-Dade area of Florida.

“Prosecutors claim in Esformes’ indictment that the health care executive paid kickbacks to health providers ‘in exchange for medically unnecessary referrals’ to Esformes’ facilities. Esformes and co-conspirators then allegedly submitted ‘false and fraudulent claims to Medicare and Medicaid in an approximate amount of $1 billion for services that were medically unnecessary, never provided, and procured through the payment of kickbacks and bribes.’ All of Esformes’ co-conspirators plead guilty, according to the Miami Herald.

“On Wednesday [3/27], Esformes’ lawyers filed a motion in a federal court in Florida arguing that the case against their client must be dismissed — effectively ruining three years of work by prosecutors — because ‘the Justice Department has admitted that the health care offenses at issue in this trial are unconstitutional.’ Alternatively, Esformes’ legal team suggests that the judge should declare a mistrial.

“The problem arises because O’Connor did not simply strike down the core provisions of the Affordable Care Act. He declared that every single provision of the law is invalid, including relatively minor provisions amending the statutes governing Medicare fraud and kickbacks paid to health providers. Though Esformes alleged actions may also be illegal under the unamended versions of those statutes, Esformes was charged under the amended versions.” ThinkProgress.org, March 28^th. Hmmm… to win that motion, the DoJ prosecutors would have to disavow their own boss’ claims filed with the 5^th Circuit noted above.

The irony of all this is further embodied in Republican President Richard M. Nixon’s message to Congress on February 4, 1974, which reads in part: “In the last quarter century, we have made remarkable progress toward that goal [greater equality for all Americans], opening the doors to millions of our fellow countrymen who were seeking equal opportunities in education, jobs and voting… Now it is time that we move forward again in still another critical area: health care.

“Without adequate health care, no one can make full use of his or her talents and opportunities. It is thus just as important that economic, racial and social barriers not stand in the way of good health care as it is to eliminate those barriers to a good education and a good job.

“Three years ago, I proposed a major health insurance program to the Congress, seeking to guarantee adequate financing of health care on a nationwide basis. That proposal generated widespread discussion and useful debate. But no legislation reached my desk.” Obviously, no legislation made it to any president’s desk until Barrack Obama signed the ACA into law on March 23, 2010. And now, a Republican president is seeking to dismantle a law that somehow is working, albeit in need of adjustment that everyone agrees is necessary, by substituting a Swiss cheese bill that will leave Americans with much worse, mega-more-expensive healthcare system than they have now, already a system that is still the worst in the entire developed world.

              I’m Peter Dekom, and if there is a ray of hope to a seriously factionalized Democratic Party, seemingly unable to consolidate behind a unitary platform, it is that Donald Trump has made healthcare the most serious issue for the 2020 elections.