A New GOP Platform – Standby to Attack Mexico

 

That US demand for illicit narcotics and the ready availability of guns (including military assault rifles) in and from the United States has fueled the cross-border narco trade and cartel explosion south of our border – from Mexico to South America – is never mentioned. It’s always someone else’s fault, and if they don’t fix it, we will. We’ll bomb them. Invade them. Strafe them. We will fix this! You mean the way we fixed Afghanistan, the great purveyor of opium-related illicit narcotics? I know, I’ve blogged this topic more than once, but increasingly GOP candidates are resorting to threats of violence controlled and directed by US forces against Mexican targets. Even if those malignant cartels are Mexico’s own targets, entering another country with military force unless invited is called: invasion. Like what Russia did to Ukraine to “de-Nazify” their neighbor. Think of the war crimes we would have to commit.

Unlike Europe, where regional wars and both world wars raged among and between continental neighbors, the United States has been blessed for well over a century by two large border neighbors with no wars, no conflicts… nothing more than an occasional trade dispute. More than neighbors and major trading partners. Allies. So much of what we eat comes from Mexico. One of our largest ethnic minorities are Latinx from south of the border. Look at the last names of large segments of our country, especially in those border states, to understand why almost 20% of our own population has those Latinx roots.

None of these factors seems to be even a slight deterrent to the violent rhetoric pouring out of the mouths of so many GOP candidates. Not since Donald Trump’s “rapists” tirade against Mexico and it border crossers has so much violence spittle spewed forth with such consistency from a sizeable majority of Republican presidential aspirants. German Lopez, writing for the July 31st New York Times, provides the details:

“Trump led the way: He asked defense officials about striking Mexico with missiles while he was president, and during the 2024 presidential campaign he has supported military action. Ron DeSantis has called for using deadly force and a naval blockade of Mexican ports to stop drug traffickers. More moderate candidates, like Tim Scott and Nikki Haley, have also backed using the military against drug cartels in Mexico… ‘You know what you tell the Mexican president? ‘Either you do it or we do it,’ ’ Haley said in March. ‘But we are not going to let all of this lawlessness continue to happen.’…

“Taking cues from Trump’s 2016 campaign playbook and presidency, other Republicans have already translated his disparagement of Mexicans and other Latinos into policy, particularly on immigration. In Texas, Gov. Greg Abbott put razor wire, floating barriers and state troopers along the U.S.-Mexico border to deter people from coming into the country illegally. The federal government sued Texas last week [third week in July] to try to stop him…

“Republicans often portray the idea of fully militarizing the war on drugs as an evolution in policy: treating Mexican cartels like ISIS or other terrorist groups. But unilaterally deploying the military to Mexico would be a significant escalation of U.S. policy.

“I spoke to half a dozen drug policy and counterterrorism experts across the political spectrum. All of them criticized the approach as extreme, ineffective and self-destructive. “In 35 years, this takes the prize as the stupidest idea I have ever heard,” said Jonathan Caulkins at Carnegie Mellon University.

“In addition to the likely humanitarian toll and the hit to U.S. standing in the world, any incursion into Mexico could worsen the same problems Republicans are trying to address. To the extent that the U.S. has succeeded in stemming illegal immigration and drugs in recent years, it has relied on Mexico’s close cooperation. Both Trump and President Biden have worked with Mexican officials to stop South and Central Americans from traveling to the U.S. through Mexico.

“Mexico would almost certainly stop collaborating if the U.S. sent troops or let missiles fly. Mexico’s president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, has said that talk of sending the U.S. military south of the border is ‘irresponsible’ and ‘an offense to the people of Mexico, a lack of respect for our sovereignty.’” So, let’s see, such a military effort would turn an ally into a clear enemy, cost billions of dollars, violate international laws… and like most such efforts, fail miserably. We’d be saddled with the consequences of this failed effort for decades, costing us even more in hard dollars… and probably driving a neighbor into greater alliance with China, perhaps even resulting in China’s having a military base in Mexico.

I’m Peter Dekom, and a major American political party is talking about starting a war with Mexico, when we refuse to deal with the root problems right that caused it all: American demand for illicit drugs and our supplying the guns necessary to keep the cartels in power.

The Hoax That Just Keeps Giving – Check Out Your Homeowners’ Insurance Bill

  

“With record-breaking inflation, severe weather events, and reconstruction costs continuing to climb, we are focused on serving our customers while effectively managing our business, to a level consistent with the volume we projected to write each month before recent market changes.” Farmers Insurance said in a statement earlier this summer.

State Farm, Farmers and Allstate aren’t writing new California homeowners’ policies, and for those able to continue or access new policies, average homeowners’ insurance has risen by double digits. Everywhere. There are several factors at work. In high home value states, like California and New York, the cost to replace is soaring. Add the new interest rates for construction and mortgage rates with rapidly escalating building costs (labor and the cost of the underlying materials), and you have the makings of a major, middle-American financial disaster. For landlords, there is obvious pressure to pass these costs on to renters, where they can.

State Farm has requested approval from the California Department of Insurance to increase rates for homeowners by an average of 28.1% in response to wildfire risks and skyrocketing construction costs. The average rate increase there has been 16% since 2019. State Farm is hardly the first to reconsider covering California properties, but it is certainly the largest accounting for more than a fifth of all California homeowners’ policies. Farmers is the second largest such carrier in California.

Two years ago, there was a major exodus of such insurers from the state. Rex Frazier, president of the Personal Insurance Federation of California, an industry lobbying group, “believes that many homeowners will have to avail themselves of the California Fair Access to Insurance Requirements (FAIR) Plan, the insurance option of last resort for high-risk properties that cannot get commercial insurance. It costs more and covers less, but meets the minimum requirements to allow a buyer to get a mortgage and close on a home.” San Francisco Standard, June 1st. If only the costs were relegated to California… but…

If you are into tracking “natural disasters,” you will note in the pink map above that the highest homeowners’ rates seem to track areas suffering the most from the spate of floods, hurricanes, tornadoes, and wildfires. You can understand New York and California, where high housing costs determine much of the premium cost, but the most diehard aggregation of climate change marginalizers and deniers have set rates soaring in those red states. In fact, GOP House members of the Freedom Caucus, heavily represented in those expensive states, have convinced their entire party to hold firm on budget cuts intended to reverse recent Biden signature anti-climate change legislation. And their constituents are being hurt the most!

Writing for the July 30th Wall Street Journal, Jean Eaglesham notes this widespread national trend which is not just about the higher premiums: “‘Beyond [raising premiums], we’re managing terms and conditions,’ Michael Klein, head of Travelers personal insurance, said on a call with investors. ‘Think deductibles, think roof age eligibility, think coverage levels on roof replacement.’

“Tim Zawacki, an S&P analyst, said companies are ‘tightening the screws around the edges on coverage to limit their expenses.’ Some insurers, he said, are limiting coverage for older roofs to their cash value, rather than their replacement cost... Many insurers have cut coverage of wind and hail damage by increasing the deductible—or the first part of the claim that the policyholder has to pay—from 1% to 2% or more, says [Lauren Menuey, a managing director at independent agency Goosehead Insurance].

“Companies are also pulling back from some areas vulnerable to disasters. Many big insurers have exited Florida and Louisiana, both of which have suffered tens of billions of dollars in losses from hurricanes in recent years… In Florida, alongside coverage restrictions and higher premiums, there is a ‘reluctance from insurers to write policies for older homes or homes that don’t have strong wind mitigation,’ according to Miami-based Fred Zutel of brokerage Lockton… Now, he added, ‘we’re seeing similar, albeit not quite as punitive, restrictions from insurers in other low-lying coastal areas, such as Louisiana, Texas, the Carolinas.’…

“Companies are reporting significant home-insurance losses from a series of recent severe storms across the Midwest. Progressive, for example, said catastrophe losses last month [June] ate up 92% of home-insurance premiums earned. The company blamed severe weather throughout the U.S.” Several insurers are using drones to assess risks, looking for older roofs, trees and other foliage growing too close to the main structures and other obvious risks.

What exacerbates this anomaly is our predilection to grow new communities into obviously hazardous environments and to fund rebuilding severely damaged homes in areas where that damage is likely to recur. Even FEMA support often returns to areas where everyone knows the natural disaster is likely to return. We need to stop these practices, which everyone else has to pay for. Climate change is unforgiving, and for every dollar that the Republican Party can cut from state and federal anti-climate change appropriations, we can expect to see individual and governmental disaster relief losses rise to ten or more times the cost that they pretend they are “saving.” That other countries are not moving fast enough can no longer be an excuse not to act in our nation’s legislators. We call it responsible leadership, but somehow, in times of mega-costly disasters, leadership seems to have left the building and locked the door behind them.

I’m Peter Dekom, and as everything you buy or pay for rises in reaction to climate change and the concomitant increase in the cost of natural resources, the resultant explosion in intense natural disasters and the sheer misery that goes along with all that, the answer cannot be “we cannot afford to pay for what we need to do, so why try?”

A Test to See if You Have a Heart – Child Labor Laws

  The issue for many businesses has been a shortage of unskilled labor for many menial jobs, some rather dangerous – as in those who have to clean factories or slaughterhouses overnight – and even undocumented adult workers are becoming hard to come by with recent immigration backlash policies. As the above chart from Zippia.com illustrates, the weekly hours for children is higher than you might suspect. Safety and educational standards for children also vary for states. But what is a disturbing trend, mostly in red states these days, is the lowering of the ages for those children who can work and lowering some of the workplace standards as well. In the past, employers simply “did it anyway” in a world where state enforcement was lax or non-existent and where federal child labor laws might not apply.

Writing from a blue state perspective, Los Angeles Times columnist, Michael Hiltzik, describes the obvious result of putting increasingly younger children at risk in hazardous work environments: “GOP is bowing to industry even as minors are dying in work accidents… If there is a predictable outcome from the rollback of child labor laws now taking place in red states nationwide, it’s that a flood of injured children is on the way. We are now standing on the edge of the water.

“In recent days, reports of horrific child deaths have come from Mississippi and Wisconsin. In the first case, a 16-year-old Guatemalan boy was killed at a poultry plant in Mississippi. In the second, a 16-year-old boy was killed when he got pinned in a wood-stacking machine at a sawmill.

“What may be most horrifying about these accidents is that the work the children were doing is illegal under the laws of both states. But they happened amid a nationwide push by manufacturer and restaurant lobbies to liberalize child labor laws in those states and elsewhere… In April, I reported on this campaign to bring back what Franklin Roosevelt labeled ‘this ancient atrocity.’… Since then the movement has only advanced.

“Child labor laws are among those most frequently flouted by businesses. The number of minors employed in violation of child labor laws in fiscal 2022 increased by 37.5% over the previous year, according to Department of Labor statistics. The number of minors employed in hazardous work in violation of state and federal laws increased by 26% in that period… In the last fiscal year, the federal agency found 835 businesses violating child labor laws. Its fines and penalties averaged about $5,300 each. Do you think that’s stringent enough to dissuade would-be violators? Me neither.

“What’s worse, ‘these numbers represent just a tiny fraction of violations, most of which go unreported and uninvestigated,’ the labor-affiliated Economic Policy Institute observes.

If child labor laws already on the books can be flouted so easily, just imagine what will happen in states that have signaled that they don’t take their own laws seriously…. The prospect of carnage among child workers hasn’t put a dent in the campaign to make them more vulnerable to workplace injuries and death…. The rollbacks are often rationalized by conservative political leaders as promoting ‘parental rights.’

“That’s the argument voiced by spokespeople for Republican Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders of Arkansas, who signed a law in March repealing a rule that required children under 16 to verify their age and obtain the written consent of a parent or guardian before obtaining a work certificate…. The Sanders administration defended the law by stating that ‘this permit was an arbitrary burden on parents to get permission from the government for their child to get a job.

“Another argument emphasizes the virtues of work for teens. On May 26, Republican Gov. Kim Reynolds of Iowa signed a pernicious law allowing 14- and 15-year-olds to work as many as six hours a day when schools are in session, to as late as 9 p.m. During school vacations, they could work as late as 11 p.m. … The measure also removes prohibitions against minors working in industrial laundries and in freezers and meat coolers.”

Indeed “parental rights” are the rallying cry behind much of the “culture wars” – against critical race theory, in favor of censorship and editing historical unpleasantries out of high school history books – championed by red states everywhere following the lead of anti-woke Florida Governor and failing presidential candidate Ron DeSantis. That the children most like to find their way into these mega-dangerous jobs are in impoverished family units desperate for money to survive cannot be much of a surprise to anyone. That the bottom of the economic ladder, where children may be forced by their parents into what seem pretty close to slave labor, is heavily populated with children of color and/or recent undocumented immigrants, also should not surprise you. A more stringent federal control over child labor has been drifting around for well over a century as a constitutional amendment… but…

So my list of White Christian nationalist/supremacist buzz words is growing. From the misuse of the words “patriot,” “creeping socialism,” “incenting the job-creators,” “woke,” “right to life” (from folks who favor the death penalty and automatic weapons ownership), “the only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun,” “stand your ground,” “hoax,” “witch hunt,” “grooming our children,” “anti-CRT” laws, I now have to move “parental rights” to a new elevated (??) status. Did any of this blog tug at least slightly at your heartstrings?

I’m Peter Dekom, and “no,” Ron DeSantis, I do not want the United States to be modeled on the mess you have made in Florida.

Death by Poverty, California Farmworker Style

  

For a blue state, we’ve done a pretty horrible job with our homeless and those living well below the poverty line. OK, we haven’t stooped so low that we have statutes eliminating water breaks for workers during heat waves as Texas has, but we are a major agricultural producer – the vegetable capital of the United States, which requires more direct, worker harvesting. I doubt that has been the motivation for the Ron DeSantis/Greg Abbott (Republican governors of Florida and Texas, respectively) cabal’s sending waves of busses of undocumented asylum seekers by the busload to California. The recent heat waves have already killed more people than we have been able to count. The settlement of the UPS near-strike featured an agreement to air condition the delivery vans that do not yet have that cooling feature, a hot topic as we have wave after wave of record-breaking heat.

And while it is possible to air condition vehicles, offices and even factories – if someone cares – that option is not available for most construction building or farmworker-stoop labor harvesting crops in the fields. They may wear broad hats with neck scarves, but as heat rises, that may just not cut it. But climate change has offered even more challenges to those working outside, especially in agricultural regions. When wildfires rage near agricultural fields, the air can fill with toxic smoke… the fires can also destroy the cropland itself, thus killing even meager jobs harvesting creates. Or once productive land can become water-starved and simply no longer produce crops.

When the opposite happens, record-breaking rains and snowmelts, dams can overflow or break, streams and rivers can breach their banks, sending destructive flooding that takes out crops and the modest homes or housing for those farmworkers, many of whom are American citizens. Small farmers can watch their modest livings simply wash away. Among the hardest hit are already marginalized, Indigenous peoples pursuing a way of life that embraced their family for a very, very long time. It happened this March in Monterrey Count on the north central California coast, where annually $4 billion worth of crops find their way to our dining room tables. Pictured above.

An old levee that contained the Pajaro River, built shortly after WWII, failed. “The poorly maintained levee proved no match for a waterway transformed by winter’s relentless succession of monsoon-like atmospheric rivers. The breach sent a tidal wave of mud and water through Pajaro, stranding cars, damaging hundreds of homes and small businesses and forcing the town’s 3,000-some residents to evacuate, just as it had nearly to the day, in 1995. The March floods inundated more than 8,700 acres of cropland worth $264 million, according to the Monterey County Agricultural Commissioner’s Office, bringing total damages from winter storms to $600 million.” Science/environmental journalist, Liza Gross, writing for the July 23rd Inside Climate News. Those whose homes were slammed, whose farmland was washed away, and those who worked the land saw their life change dramatically as floodwaters staked their own claim over them.

These weren’t the corporate mega-farms owned by well-capitalized conglomerates. The homes, the land and the hope they engendered crashed though the lives of locals, many Indigenous Americans, including farmworkers who plied their season trade across California’s productive farmland. These farmers have been pawns in what have become a combination of trade wars and climate disasters, with a touch of political in-fighting to make bad so much worse. “Indigenous farmworkers are finding themselves at the mercy of cascading climate disasters, bouncing from one hellscape to another like characters in a dystopian climate novel. But the catastrophic flood has made the devastating toll these disasters take on their lives and livelihoods all too real, with no relief in sight.

“Migrants dispossessed by decades-old free-trade agreements in the mountains of Mexico risked their lives to eke out a better living picking strawberries for dollars a day only to become dispossessed by climate change. They played no role in global economic policy or the climate crisis yet are reeling from the repercussions of both. Robbed of the means to make a living at home, they now struggle to survive life-threatening floods, heatwaves and wildfires without a safety net in one of the richest countries in the world. The federal government, which relies on the cheap labor of unauthorized workers to keep food prices low, has done almost nothing to help them, leaving a state saddled with a budget deficit and under-resourced local governments and nonprofits scrambling to do what they can.” Liza Gross.

We need these food crops. We need these farms. We need these farmworkers. The United States is the largest agricultural exporter on earth. We take care of those mega-farms, and they also have the financial ability to survive many of these disasters. But just as we incurred trillions of dollars of federal net deficit increases from the one-sided gift to the rich corporate tax cut of 2017, the Republican-dominated House of Representatives continues to push for reduced spending to fix life for those at the bottom of the economic ladder and is even pressing to reverse Biden-era legislation aimed at addressing climate change itself. Oh, they’d like further to cut taxes for the rich, the purported “job-creators” when they pay lower taxes, even as the underlying theory of creating jobs by cutting taxes has never worked. Or as I like to put it, “a rising tide only floats all yachts.”

I’m Peter Dekom, and it truly galls me as those Republican Congress-people, who voted against all these infrastructure and climate initiatives… and are attempting to repeal much of them… love to point out these new federal construction projects to their constituents as evidence of how they are working for the people who elected them.

The New Medical Hazard in Our Hospitals – Getting Shot

 

Texas open carry laws allow guns even in mental hospitals.

With angry antivaxxers, furious COVID deniers, legislated restrictions on treating LGBTQ+ patients and pregnant women and increasing gun violence in our streets coupled with increasingly lax gun-carry laws, one of the most dangerous places to be these days is a hospital. Not for patients. For hospital personnel, from nurses and medical techs to doctors. It is happening all across the United States, red and blue states are facing new dangerous reality, although states with open carry laws face even higher risks. Hospitals are generally not geared for risk of attack by outsiders or even those within the structure. Emergency rooms cannot stop victims in dire need of treatment for security clearances. They react quickly and automatically. Often the victim is brought to the ER by someone else, a family member or friend… or sometimes by a police officer.

The problem today is that we have highly politicized medical treatment, now considered a legitimate target even for some of the most prominent elected officials, from the president on down. Members of Congress and major political party leaders have strong beliefs, many profoundly medically incorrect, that have become viable election campaign pledges and have often resulted in legislation and/or judicial rulings that restrict previously long-standing and legally accepted medical standards and practices.

Antivaxxers and those have marginalized the impact of COVID have pushed against federal regulations and championed red state governors and legislators who have eliminated pandemic safeguards (even on a voluntary basis) and lifted vaccination requirements for public school children, raising the risks to parents who would like their children to be safe from preventable serious disease. Those involved in any way with providing access to abortion to residents of red states with anti-abortion laws face criminal sanctions as do physicians who provide gender treatment support of trans patients in states where such treatment is banned. Nineteen red state governors are pushing to allow them to track their residents if they travel to blue states for abortion services.

But risks exist merely because of the proliferation of guns, Supreme Court rulings that have all but eliminated common sense gun control laws, and the fact that interstate transportation of guns is without any restrictions to speak off. Places of work everywhere are increasing their security because of mass shootings and angry and well-armed individuals with some sort of retribution in mind.

Hospitals are, unfortunately, caught between being open to treat those in dire need and angry individuals and criminals with an agenda. But even where law enforcement officers are bringing injured criminals, in cuffs and under arrest, things can go badly. Paul Sisson, writing for the July 24th LA Times, notes: “One year ago, a prisoner receiving treatment at Scripps Mercy Hospital in San Diego wrested away the gun of the deputy sheriff who was guarding him and fired three rounds before a nursing assistant helped disarm him… Internal documents reveal that the incident sent caregivers scrambling for cover. Fortunately, no one was hurt. But even today, many who suddenly found themselves in harm’s way relive those moments…

“While there are plenty of anecdotes to illustrate the point, such as this month’s fatal shooting of a Tennessee hand surgeon or the 2022 killing of a Tulsa, Okla., surgeon by a patient angry with the outcome of his back surgery, the numbers also document a growing trend… ‘According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the number of intentional injuries against healthcare workers and technicians has increased from 6.7 to 12.9 per 10,000 workers from 2011 to 2020. A survey of healthcare workers nationwide conducted in early 2023 found that 40% reported that they were directly involved in workplace violence in the previous two years…

“Dr. Asia Takeuchi, an emergency medicine specialist at Sharp Memorial Hospital, attended the meeting and shared that her facility has been calling “code green” more often than used to be the case. That’s the phrase that goes out over the facility’s announcement system when a medical provider urgently needs assistance from security personnel… From January through May, she said, the lowest number of code green calls that Memorial experienced in a month were 34. The highest was 64. That’s one or two incidents of significant violence per day.

“Recently, she said, the hospital instituted a Taser protocol in its emergency department for situations when a patient can’t be calmed down with words or medications. One incident, she said, involved a severely agitated patient who picked up a metal medical stand and threw it into the light fixture of his room… ‘Unfortunately, he just continued to escalate and escalate; he required restraints and, unfortunately, ended up having to be tased,’ Takeuchi said. The hospital also has recently added metal detectors, she said... It’s not hard to find other local examples.” Few hospitals scan admitted patients for weapons, but among those that do, a widening trend, often detect large knives and guns, generally illegal in blue states and allowed in red states.

The notion of “freedom” as embraced by rightwing ideology – when it comes to guns and medical requirements – often puts a whole lot of people who disagree with such ideologies (the majority of all Americans, by the way) at severe risks, which they cannot mitigate and of which they might not even be aware. Human life, even the lives of children, are secondary to these rising legislatively-permitted threats as they stop medical care and make gun ownership (even assault weapons) a priority above all else.

I’m Peter Dekom, and we are very much departing from the norms of just about every other democracy on earth with our willingness to put everyone in harm’s way to preserve rights that were never contemplated by our constitutional authors but are cherished by a minority with extreme views protected by extreme laws and judicial rulings.

A New Hell – Transgender in a Red State

 

One of the myths that refuses to die among religious fundamentalists in this country is that LGBTQ+ behavior is a choice, often foisted on children by predatory adults (a classic in conspiracy theories like QAnon), not a genetic reality. Perhaps nature has some answers, although clearly the animal kingdom does not have medical and surgical options for transgender transformation. It is thus far easier to measure same-sex coupling in the wild. There has been significant research in this arena of late. According to the July journal of Nature Ecology and Evolution, field studies “suggest that same-sex behavior is not only natural in the animal kingdom, it can also be socially advantageous… Scientists have observed same-sex sexual behavior among more than 1,500 animal species, including penguins, giraffes and elephants…

“The study ‘puts to rest the doubts of same-sex behavior occurring naturally in nature,’ said senior author Vincent Savolainen, a biology researcher at Imperial College London … To find out, he and his colleagues visited a colony of about 1,700 free-range rhesus macaques living on a wildlife preserve in Puerto Rico. The colony has been monitored for the last 67 years, providing researchers with a comprehensive family tree of the primates.

“The researchers defined same-sex behavior as the act of mounting because it was the most frequent — and most identifiable — form of sexual contact. Although it occurs in both male and female macaques, it is much more frequent in males… Over three years, the study team observed 236 males who belonged to two distinct social groups within the colony. During that time, they documented 1,739 instances of mounting — 722 involving male-female pairs and 1,017 involving same-sex pairs. The research team had expected to catch some same-sex couples in action, and Savolainen said he wasn’t surprised their pairings outnumbered those of male-female couples.

“Among male macaques, same-sex sexual behavior isn’t necessarily about sex, but more about social interaction. Male macaques mounted each other after grooming, eating, fighting, playing and resting as well as while traveling, according to the study. The activity could be a way to strengthen bonds between males, making them more likely to form alliances and ultimately gain access to more females, the researchers said.” Gina Errico, writing for the July 24th LA Times. OK, this one characteristic in the list of LGBTQ+ behavior that has become the target of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’ led litany of red state statutes and judicial challenges aimed at eliminating what he calls “woke” practices, as part of his “culture wars” to force America into what he believes are necessary traditional American values.

With the above as an introduction, I would like to drill down on what it is like to be transgender person in a red state with anti-trans-treatment/restroom legislation. As in most red states. Aside from parents not knowing where to turn for their children who were undergoing now-banned medical treatment for what the parents and the children fully acknowledge is an unambiguous transition reality, just being an adult in such states has moved into “unbearable and filled with fear.” Writing for the July 24th Los Angeles Times, Jaweed Kaleem explores his harsh reality in DeSantis’ home state: “As a transgender woman in a state where the governor declared war on ‘transgender ideology,’ Violet Rin felt her image of Florida as an idyll fading. She became a near recluse, doubtful that much outside was worth the risks.

“Then she got a message from the clinic where she obtained her estrogen prescriptions… A new state law restricting who could give medical care to transitioning adults ‘went into effect immediately,’ it said. ‘We will not be able to provide care for transgender patients’… Rin had called Florida home for nearly all of her 27 years. But now she felt like the state wanted to destroy her… Would she join the nearly 1 in 10 transgender individuals in the U.S. who have left their neighborhoods or states because of new laws restricting the rights of LGBTQ+ people? An additional 4 in 10 have considered a move, according to a recent survey by the left-leaning think tank Data for Progress.

“The American battle over transgender rights has focused on minors and their access to puberty blockers, hormones and surgeries. Florida, along with 19 other Republican-led states, banned those treatments for people younger than 18. But it went a step further than most by also targeting transgender adults.

“That’s led many people to ration or stockpile estrogen or testosterone, turn to the black market or raise money to flee to states with recently passed ‘trans sanctuary’ protections… ‘This is where I grew up, where I went to school, where my family lives,’ said Rin, who was raised in Middleburg, an unincorporated community of 12,000 outside Jacksonville.

“Her embrace of her identity as a transgender woman coincided with Florida lawmakers’ targeting of a community that, according to the Williams Institute at UCLA, numbers 111,000, or about 0.5% of the state’s 22 million residents… This spring Gov. Ron DeSantis, a 2024 presidential hopeful, signed the most extreme laws in the nation focusing on transgender people, praising the legislation as the means for the state to ‘remain a refuge of sanity.’” Indeed, DeSantis’ use of the word “freedom” and holding Florida out as the “model for America” is a form of draconian autocracy, where the state inserts itself into the minutia of individual lives, violating privacy at unprecedented levels. It seems that “freedom” only means “freedom from woke” and what evangelicals consider unacceptable personal traits that really are not hurting anyone.

Red state legislatures and rulings from a very rightwing Supreme Court have taken away women’s rights to control their own bodies as well as LGBTQ+ individuals from simply being themselves and having access to now-banned medical care. Discrimination against LGBTQ+ has now been sanctioned by the Supreme Court as long as the discriminating party has a religious basis for that bias. Where is the American value of individual liberty? How does the GOP, which has long argued against governmental intrusion into our daily lives, justify a spate of laws and conservative judicial appointments that have triggered the greatest government intrusion into individual lives in our history. Autocracy is never pretty.

I’m Peter Dekom, and the resounding hypocrisy of the MAGA GOP continues to defy our Constitution as it was intended apply and has reached levels of anti-democratic mandates that threaten to unravel our entire political system.

Making College Increasingly Unaffordable or Valuable

 

Over half of Gens Y and Z have at least some post-secondary-school formal training or education. But we make young minds pay through the nose for those opportunities at such exorbitant rates that we are beginning to question the value of that education. As the July 17th CNN notes: “College tuition has increased almost 750% since 1963, and it's only getting more expensive. At highly rated or selective schools — like Harvard — undergraduates can expect to pay more than $95,000 a year, including housing and other expenses.” These costs have been rising at three or more times the cost-of-living over that same time period!

And costs continue to rise. Student loan debt, $1.6 trillion, exceeds consumer debt. Those entering the job market are facing absurd housing costs, jobs that pay “OK” but with limited opportunities for advancement and soaring costs for everything else that matters to them, from food to electronics. Many are postponing marriage or having children, and for those living in crowded but job-rich urban centers, buying a car is no longer part of the American dream.

The social consequences of these forces are staggering. The live-birth-replacement rate (2.1 births per couple) is plunging, looking very much as if it will settle at 1.6. The political climate is profoundly against former immigration policies, and exclusion is the new watchword. As Fareed Zacharia announced on this July 16th telecast on CNN, our new exclusionary immigration policies will cost our economy $5 trillion a year, in the very near term.

AI notwithstanding, we have and will continue to have millions of unfilled STEM jobs, and the cost of ordinary labor will continue to push costs through the roof… even as we have settled on a 3% annualized inflation rate. The rising generations, who do not have an ownership stake in their homes, are in their earliest earning years and are bearing the brunt of these policies. If companies depend on a growing population to generate business, the numbers are not looking very good.

You can get an excellent college education in Germany for literally the cost of books and a token registration fee. They have enough engineers and doctors. We do not. Nicole Goodkind, writing for the July 16th CNN.com, drills down on our absurdly and rapidly rising cost of a college education: “[B]etween 1980 and 2020, the average price of tuition, fees, room and board for an undergraduate degree increased by 169%, according to a report from the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce… That far outpaces wage increases.

“Over the same 40-year period, earnings for workers ages 22 to 27 only increased by 19%, the report found… That might explain why Americans’ confidence in higher education has dropped to a record low, according to a Gallup poll released this week. The June poll found that just 36% of Americans have confidence in higher education, down more than 20 percentage points from eight years ago… ‘While Gallup did not probe for reasons behind the recent drop in confidence, the rising costs of postsecondary education likely play a significant role,’ said Megan Brenan, a research consultant at Gallup…

“Real wages for US skilled workers have outpaced inflation by a couple of percentage points for long periods of time, but other industries have been able to offset those labor costs through productivity advances that reduce their reliance on skilled labor — things like AI and robotics… But there aren’t many robots teaching college classes. You still need professors with expensive degrees to do that.

“‘We pretty much produce higher education the way we used to, which is a faculty member in front of a class of anywhere from 20 to 40 students,’ said [Catharine Hill, an economist with the education nonprofit organization Ithaka S&R and the former president of Vassar College]. ‘That means that there haven’t been efficiency gains to reduce that cost.’

“Some universities have been leaning more heavily on contingent, non-tenure track faculty with low pay and no access to employer-ee benefits in an attempt to save money. The higher education system has become increasingly dependent on this temporary labor, according to the National Education Association. Nearly 70% of US faculty members held a contingent position in fall 2021, up from 47% in 1987.”

Lower quality, underpaid faculty, disillusioned and disincented, have taken over responsibility for the next generations of educated Americans? All the while, conservative forces at both the state and federal levels are pressing to cut educational budgets, particularly to state colleges and universities, and pushing to increase student loan burdens to unsustainable levels, fighting federal loan forgiveness tooth and nail. “The average American saved $5,011 last year. That means it would take them about 75 years to save up enough cash to send one child to a top-rated US university.” Goodkind.

To make matters so much worse, there are too many red states prioritizing anti-CRT culture wars in state institutions, rather than spending money improving the quality of their instructional programs. But while these MAGA politicians will not raise taxes against the absurd income-inequality wealthiest, they make every one else bear the cost of the rising deficit and the plunging quality of life for the rest of the country. “In 2021, the top 10% of Americans held nearly 70% of US wealth, up from about 61% at the end of 1989, according to the Council on Foreign Relations. The top 1% of earners in the United States now takes home 21% of all the income in the United States, according to the Economic Policy Institute.” Goodkind.

So let me get this right. We are a contracting population with serious labor issues cutting off economy-saving immigration, and we are providing a declining level of college education as we need so many more STEM-skilled workers to create economic growth and upgraded job opportunities for us all. We have cut the quality of our most needed education to accelerate income inequality and kick our federal deficit into the stratosphere. What an amazing self-destructive path to a much lower standard of living with severely curtailed opportunities. Indeed, upward mobility has left the building.

I’m Peter Dekom, and that these negative vectors are being led by a political party that was once seen as a champion of economic growth and opportunity is nothing short of amazing… in a very, very bad and self-destructive way.

Don’t Be a Lawn Wolf; It’s Killing Us

For a while, the Department of Water and Power in Los Angeles was subsidizing homeowners to replace their lush green lawns with “anything but” replacements. Desert landscapes, artificial turf, rock gardens, etc. We all knew it was to save water in our parched “city in a desert” environment. Made sense. Penalties were assessed against rich estates where the owners did not care about water-over-usage fines. Some cities (e.g., Santa Fe, New Mexico) have banned building swimming pools, and hottest cities in the land – Phoenix and Las Vegas in particular – have put the brakes on building new homes. Sustaining very long periods at temperatures above 110 degrees Fahrenheit suggests that… maybe… perhaps… building massive cities in the middle of scorching deserts might not been a good idea even when these areas were “less hot.” Phoenix is the most populous state capital and the fifth most populous city in the nation. Summer in Phoenix? Who needs a cooktop?

But oddly enough, while water-sucking lawns are hardly appropriate for so many searingly hot cities facing water crises, the reality of growing and maintaining rich grass lawns that are so much fun for kids to play on… well, they are also major contributors to greenhouse emissions. If you try grow a healthy lawn without using any chemicals, the bugs will thank you and you will probably be richly rewarded with massive ugly brown spots that simply defy all attempts to convince grass to grow there. Writing for the July 22nd Los Angeles Times, Diane Lewis, MD and founder of the Great Healthy Yard Project, explains exactly what most yards growers do to make matters so bad:

“If you’re like many Americans, you got it through the use of synthetic weed killers, bug killers and fertilizers. As renewable energy and electric cars are gaining a foothold, oil and gas companies are filling the void by ramping up petrochemical production, and that includes pesticides and fertilizers…. Gardeners and homeowners have to do their part in walking that back.

“Petrochemical production and sales have doubled since 2000, and the market is expected to double again over the next 10 years according to the Global Chemical Outlook published by the United Nations. Derived from hydrocarbons, petrochemicals are the basic ingredient in synthetic pesticides and fertilizers (and plastics, but that’s another op-ed). Their manufacture releases greenhouse gases and toxins into the air, and their use contributes to making agriculture the second-largest source of climate pollution. Pesticides are worse than fertilizer, requiring 10 times more energy to synthesize.

“Obviously, farmers are the major market for fertilizer and pesticide, but according to NASA satellite data, there are actually more lawns than cornfields in the United States. And homeowners use up to 10 times more chemicals per acre than farmers, which means yards and gardens are also a huge contributor to greenhouse gas emissions.

“It gets worse. One of the key impacts of using synthetic pesticides and fertilizers is an increase in nitrous oxide production. The greenhouse gas impact of N2O is 300 times more powerful than carbon dioxide’s. Additionally, nitrous oxide attacks the ozone layer, our key defense against the sun’s ultraviolet rays… Too much fertilizer, which is packed with nitrogen, is a large part of the problem. Crops can only use about half of the nitrogen currently applied to farm fields, and homeowners’ overuse only compounds the situation.

“Advertising presents images of perfect lawns, leading us to believe that more and more fertilizer will turn our yards into landscaping showpieces. The reality is that excess nitrogen just runs off fields, fueling algae blooms and poisoning rivers, streams and lakes and seeping into groundwater. What doesn’t run off stimulates soil microbes to produce much larger amounts of nitrous oxide than they would if left to their own devices. Pesticides aren’t as big a nitrogen culprit as fertilizer, but their use also increases nitrous oxide release — sevenfold.

“Synthetic fertilizers and pesticides are also biocides — meaning they kill bacteria and fungi in the soil, including the good ones that make up the normal, healthy microbiome… In healthy soil, as beneficial bacteria and fungi reproduce, thrive and decay, the process sequesters carbon and naturally feeds the plants. This benefit is removed when the organisms are killed by chemicals. At the same time, when biocides disrupt the soil microbiome, they remove natural protections that defend plants against harmful bugs and bacteria.

“Synthetic pesticides in particular create a vicious cycle that releases more greenhouse gases: Insects and weeds become resistant to the chemicals, growers use more, killing even more beneficial soil organisms and incentivizing more pesticide manufacturing and releasing more greenhouse gases.

“What’s a gardener to do? We can each make huge dents in our greenhouse gas contributions and enjoy beautiful gardens without chemicals. Here are some simple techniques that support soil health without fertilizers and pesticides… First, landscape your home and garden with native plants that are already well-adapted to local conditions. Replacing grass with natives is one of the easiest and most beautiful ways to landscape without chemicals. As a residual benefit, you will see a marked increase in birds, butterflies, bees and other wildlife in your gardens, making them even more alive.

“If you stick with grass, grow less of it and aerate it. Spread grass seed, instead of fertilizer, to keep it lush and to out-compete weeds. Throw away the bag on your electric lawn mower, leaving clippings and leaf mulch on the lawn as compost…. If you stick with grass, grow less of it and aerate it. Spread grass seed, instead of fertilizer, to keep it lush and to out-compete weeds. Throw away the bag on your electric lawn mower, leaving clippings and leaf mulch on the lawn as compost.

“Garden naturally and engulf yourself in the dividends: hummingbirds hovering at your manzanita blossoms. Bees so busy you can watch them up close without danger of being stung. A cedar waxwing with a toyon berry in its mouth. Western bluebirds that do you the favor of eating caterpillars off your tomato plants. A kaleidoscope of butterflies that glide together to sleep in the trees as dusk settles in.”

Lawn wolves, be aware that after a good rain, if you live in an area that actually has good rain, or after your have over-watered your lovely lawn, all those lovely chemicals are in significant part washed into… wherever your regional drains go. Rivers, lakes, aquifers, the oceans, all presumably after being cleaned and scraped of debris and toxins. Sometimes those massive deluges overwhelm water treatment plants. Sometimes those water treatment plants are older than your great grandfather or have not been updated to cover all those marvelous new chemicals. Fish? Plants in those bodies of water? Who cares? If we are killing ourselves, we should take all those nasty life forms with us! Fight global warming with global worming!!!

I’m Peter Dekom, and if you really do care about global warming and the environment, and if you indeed have a lawn that fits the above description, you really can make a difference by doing what really must be done!

How’re You Gonna Keep ‘Em Down on the Farm?

How’re You Gonna Keep ‘Em Down on the Farm?

The School Summer Vacation Mythology

School all year round? Only for those who need remedial help? Allows parents to plan family vacations? Teachers are paid less, because they have so much time off? Hell, if we expand the school year to embrace summer too, are we simply spreading a malfunctioning system across an entire calendar year? What about those summer jobs teens yearn for? Does this apply to colleges too? Will it keep more kids engaged and off the streets? Writing for the July 18th Los Angeles Times, University of Pennsylvania education history professor, Jonathan Zimmerman, challenges the oft-repeated notion that summer breaks are a vestige of an agricultural America that no longer exists… and hasn’t for a very, very long time.

Indeed, when the United States was formed, it was 94% agricultural, and that was a world of mostly family farms. But the bulwark of public education was not born yet. Zimmerman notes: “We’ve heard that [agricultural] argument over and over again from politicians and other critics of summer vacation and all its parental and educational discontents. The COVID-19 pandemic, which spawned dramatic learning losses for America’s students, only heightened concerns about long summer breaks. Our kids need more school, the reasoning goes, and summer is an obvious time to start.

“They might be right about that, but the oft-repeated folk history is wrong. When our common school system began, in the early 19th century, students actually went to school in the summer. And if we want to bring them back today, we’ll need new ways to teach them.

“When most Americans lived and worked on farms, the busy seasons were spring and fall — for planting and harvesting, respectively. So kids attended school in the winter and, yes, in the summer, as historian Kenneth Gold has explained… That changed after the Civil War, during America’s great industrial boom. As more families moved into cities, educators worried that summer school terms would make children susceptible to smallpox, diphtheria and the other epidemic diseases that flared in the hotter months.

“Educators also argued that keeping children inside during the summer would prevent them from enjoying the bounties of free outdoor play. ‘Let Mary run and be as hedonist as she pleases; let Tommy roll in the mud,’ a Massachusetts observer wrote. ‘They will be all the better for it, more hardy, blooming, and vigorous when vacation is over.’

“There was just one problem: America’s cities were filthy. Despite the romantic nods to nature and health, children who lived in urban areas were more likely to encounter grime and disease and, if left unsupervised, get into other kinds of trouble as well… ‘Scores of the children will be seen sitting listlessly on the steps of the tenements or playing half-hearted games on the streets,’ a New Yorker worried of city summers in 1903. ‘Many will be seen pitching pennies, or at games of cards, or playing craps. ... The sight of boys stealing fruit is not infrequent.’”

Yet schools represent a massive investment in physical plants and infrastructure. While there might be partial use for summer school, the underutilization of these facilities is an obvious waste. Many argue that to open or expand school use will require more teacher and administrator pay, mandate that schools be air conditioned putting more pressures from rising electric bills and will bring online support systems that have typically used the offseason to repair and rebuild back before they are ready. The air conditioning excuse seems rather absurd in this era of record-breaking heat, hardly relegated to the summer months these days. As for electricity, school buildings are particularly well-suited to rooftop solar or wind power generation. That may cost more in the short term, but the longer-term savings are obvious.

In the earlier part of the 20th century, many schools were open for students seeking “something to do” and were not used as academic make-goods. Zimmerman responds: “As the 20th century continued, however, vacation schools lost their alternative edge. They evolved into summer school, which provided remedial instruction for kids who fell behind. And they also provided academic credit, subjecting them to all of the bureaucratic rules of regular school. That gave summer school a negative taint that it has never lost.

“If we continue to treat summer school as an extension of regular school, we’ll reinforce the stigma attached to summer school and the kids who attend it… ‘Why should they have to sit in a building and do math all day while their higher-income peers are off in some fancy camp?’ asked Rand Corp. researcher Catherine Augustine, who studies summer education.

“It’s a good question, and there’s only one answer: Summer school has to provide the kind of enrichment activities that well-to-do kids already receive in privately run summer camps and schools. Taking a page from the vacation school example, we should imagine it as a respite from the academic year rather than simply a recapitulation or extension of it… Some of that is already happening . In Orange County, Fla., summer schools are providing music and art enrichment alongside academic instruction; in Texas, they teach canoeing and swimming.

“Much of this activity is funded by federal COVID aid to schools, 20% of which must be used to combat learning loss. That shouldn’t be the only goal, however. The most successful summer schools will be the ones that look the least like regular school… We would also need to bring teachers aboard, which might be the biggest challenge of all. Exhausted and demoralized in the wake of the pandemic, most teachers have been cool to the idea of summer school.

“But maybe, just maybe, a new take on summer schooling could connect more teachers with the passion and idealism that brought them into education in the first place. Our kids went to school in the summer when the nation was young. With the right approach — and the right people to teach them — they can do so again.”

But the most poignant reason to expand the school year has more to do with the nation’s failure to prepare the rising generations for life in a competitive world. Austerity and wasting funds on inane “culture wars” has dropped our global educational standards for public education. We’re not even in the top 20 in international public-school metrics. See my July 9th A Fading American Value: Public Education blog for some of those statistics.

Exactly how do you sustain an economy with plunging educational quality? Is upward mobility as dead as I believe? And why don’t parents want a better future for their children enough to demand a functional public educational system? With about 13,000 school districts across the land, and with state and federal educational funding sliding increasingly lower, why isn’t the public up in arms about this?

I’m Peter Dekom, and it seems between school shootings, cuts to public school budgets and making higher education less affordable every year, our children are not remotely a national priority anymore.

Assault on our Batteries

Most of the “we don’t need air conditioning” regions in the United States – like the coastal Pacific Northwest – now absolutely do. 100-degree temperatures did not happen “up there,” but now there are days when these temperatures rage even in the windswept islands in Puget Sound. More AC requires more electricity but the heat often lowers the water levels that drive massive hydroelectric power generation. It’s a big story all over the United States as we experience the hottest periods in recorded meteorological history… and probably well after the Ice Age. Alternative energy – from wind to solar – is making a big difference.

Yet one of the most important developments in containing greenhouse emissions – ending automotive exhaust fumes by switching gas/diesel engines to electric motors – is facing its own new major issue as heat levels rise across the land. While the motors themselves are largely unaffected, the same cannot be held true for the batteries that power them. Extreme heat not only renders the batteries dramatically less efficient, sustained excessive heat can destroy the battery itself.

Heat has long been a challenge to implement the super-fast levels of car chargers (600-900 volts). The heat generated by these “can charge your car to 80% in minutes” facilities is so intense that you cannot touch the “hose” that carries the charge into your EV. Even the “hose” requires its own cooling system. Read: Top Level 3 chargers are very expensive. Heat is a big problem. Add our record-breaking temperatures this summer, and Houston, we have a very big problem.

Writing for Bloomberg/LA Times (July 14th), Kyle Stock explains: “An EV in a hot climate has to work harder to keep its battery and its passengers cool, but the car will function just fine. On a chemical level, though, extreme heat is akin to heart disease for EV batteries, or a slow-moving form of cancer… That’s because when temperatures climb, the ions in a car battery speed up. Once that happens, they often have trouble attaching to the anode or cathode. The pressure and speed can also create small cracks, which slow chemical reactions and make for less usable battery life…

“[On] extremely hot days, the ions in an EV battery whiz around even when the car isn’t driving or plugged in, and that can curtail range irreversibly… ‘The worst case really is a car that sits in an unconditioned garage in Phoenix all summer without being plugged in,’ said Scott Case, co-founder and chief executive of Recurrent, a startup that generates battery health reports for EV customers and dealers. ‘That will cook the battery really quickly.’ If the car is plugged in, it can use charging power to keep its battery cool.

“Cold weather also affects EV batteries. The colder it is, the slower the chemical reactions and the less charge a battery holds. But those losses are short-term; come spring, a battery in snowy Michigan or chilly Maine will recover its full function, whereas heat can bring down maximum range in perpetuity… ‘You can coach people, but you can’t say ‘Don’t live in Phoenix,’ ’ Case said. ‘That one feels a little bit unfair.’… ‘Manufacturers are competing on three axes: overall range, charging speed and cost,’ Case said. ‘They’ll be held accountable for a fourth axis and that’s ‘How long will these things last?’ ’

“Regulators in California are already weighing a proposal that would require a measure of battery health on each EV for sale… To date, some of Recurrent’s best customers are dealerships in hot climates, where the difference can be stark between actual range and the official, “certified” range as outlined by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency… ‘EPA range certifications are wrong on day one, because they don’t account for temperature variations,’ Scott said. ‘This is a huge transition that everybody needs to see.’” Reality.

While EV cars are required to have an average battery life of at least ten years, that life expectancy might not make it in this new hostile environment. With the cost of replacing all the batteries in an EV running well over $10,000 (often double), the EV aftermarket value looks bleak. Battey engineers, who are making serious headway in increasing range by increasing battery efficiency, have a new challenge that I suspect few anticipated. As so many of us swelter. So do our cars.

I’m Peter Dekom, and it still amazes me that an entire mainstream political party continues to hack away to stop government expenditures to contain and reverse the obvious ravages of climate change.

Shoot and 'Bomb the Mexicans' is Resonating More with MAGA Voters than 'Build a Wall'

 

If you ignore the fact that US addicts have created the demand and cashflow to fund the drug cartels south of our border and that guns purchased in the United States and smuggled south have created some of the best armed criminals in history, perhaps you can blame the Mexico and points south for the drug crisis here in the United States. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, almost 110,000 Americans died in 2022 from fentanyl overdoses, often imported across our southern border. While the United States is nowhere near taking the bulk of the responsibility for this horrific statistic, GOP candidates are suggesting some equally horrific solutions.

Sending US troops into Mexico, without Mexico’s consent, is high on that list for some. Not only would that effectively be a US invasion of another country, but the global anti-American sentiments all over the world would make us seem a bigger pariah than we are considered now. Not to mention the very low probability of anything resembling success. We spent two decades in the heroin/opium capital of the planet – Afghanistan – with not even a dent in that drug trafficking nation. Next.

Ron “Please Let Me Be America’s Autocrat” DeSantis, joined by several prominent Republicans, seems to carry the rising de facto state motto (“shoot first, ask questions later”) to a new level. Writing in the July 3rd Los Angeles Times, Jean Guerrero writes: “When then-President Trump proposed shooting migrants in the legs and firing missiles into Mexico to destroy drug labs, he did so in private… Republican politicians are now expressing their bloodlust in public. As ‘Build the Wall’ loses its edge, ‘Bomb the Mexicans’ is becoming mainstream in the GOP.

“[In late June], Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis — Trump’s top challenger for the Republican presidential nomination — promised to deploy the U.S. military against transnational cartels in Mexico and advocated for executing people crossing the border who are carrying drugs. ‘You absolutely can use deadly force,’ he said.

“All of the party’s top presidential contenders endorse a counter-terrorism operation against cartels in Mexico, in some cases regardless of Mexico’s desires. Trump has called for ‘battle plans’ targeting drug traffickers ‘just like we took down ISIS.’” Except ISIS was not even a country. The precedents he should be looking at are Iraq (now anti-American and very pro-Iran), Afghanistan (we just plain lost), and Viet Nam (another big loser). Bombing cartels will, of necessity, take out innocents since these toxic gangs live and operate in villages where ordinary people live. Some cartels fund local public works that their government is not willing to cover.

Guerrero continues: “The idea exploits the grief of tens of thousands of Americans who’ve lost loved ones to fentanyl, sometimes made in Mexico with chemicals from China. Republican bills introduced in both chambers of Congress seek to authorize military force in Mexico. Other legislation would designate cartels in Mexico as foreign terrorist organizations or classify fentanyl as a weapon of mass destruction, among other things.

“No politician has proposed bombing the U.S. corporations behind thousands of opioid-related deaths, but why would they? To rally American support for state violence, bloodmongers need racism… A new NBC News poll found that military force against cartels, at least at the border, was more popular than all other policy positions in the survey, including anti-transgender messages. About 86% of Republican primary voters and 55% of all voters favored using troops at the border to stop drugs.

Rep. Joaquin Castro (D-Texas) has been sounding the alarm about Republican proposals that lay the groundwork for an invasion of Mexico. During a House Foreign Affairs committee meeting about a bill to classify fentanyl under the Chemical Weapons Convention, he argued that it gave victims’ families false hope.

“‘There’s literally a black hole in this piece of public policy that doesn’t address the American side at all,’ Castro said. He was referring to the U.S. demand for drugs and government data showing American citizens represent the vast majority of drug traffickers, despite the popular perception of cartels as Mexican.

“Republican legislation also ignores the fact that cartels in Mexico operate almost exclusively with guns smuggled in from the U.S. in defiance of Mexico’s gun laws, some of the most stringent in the world. Imagine if Mexico were planning to invade the U.S. to attack American gun companies, which make products known to kill tens of thousands of Mexicans each year and which refuse to take basic steps to stop gun smuggling. Instead, Mexico is merely suing the gun manufacturers.

“‘If we really want to fight criminal organizations and drug traffickers, we need to decrease their firepower,’ Alejandro Celorio Alcántara, legal advisor for Mexico’s foreign ministry, told me.” The arrogance of American gunmakers is evidenced by weapons bearing images of infamous Mexican bandit emblazoned on the gun (see above rifle stock). As the second photograph illustrates, Mexican police, frequently outgunned or simply relegated to cartel payrolls, find major caches of cartel assault weapons.

But given the MAGA need for seemingly simple solutions, which are usually unlikely to work, and the proclivity to blame “others” (especially when racial attributes are possible), there is absolutely nothing is the proposed violence that will remotely make the drug problem go away. As Guerrero noted from one White victim of a drug crime inspired by the tough talk: “She had thoroughly internalized the GOP’s scapegoating of Mexicans. ‘If it stops the drugs from coming across the border, I will bring a gun down there and I will start shooting,’ she told me.

She broke into sobs. ‘I’ve never felt that way,’ she said, ‘it’s not because I hate — I don’t hate immigrants. I don’t hate them as people. But I hate what they’re doing to our country. They’re invading our country, stealing our livelihoods, murdering our children.’… If President Biden doesn’t stop the drugs, she said, it’s only a matter of time before private citizens organize an offensive at the border. ‘Me, my family, my husband, and everybody I know is ready to do it,’ she said.” Ask these “patriots” to take semiautomatic assault rifles off the market… and they scream like stuck pigs.

I’m Peter Dekom, and the battle over killer narcotics has to start here, against drug companies, our own drug gangs and our out-of-control gun trade.

Americans, the Economy and Unhappiness

According to a February Zillow survey found that two workers with full-time, minimum wage jobs can only afford a two-bedroom apartment in 10 out of the 50 biggest cities in the U.S. That’s two workers combined. 34% of households are renters, and the typical U.S. renter is 39 years-old, has never been married, with at least 4-years of college education, and earns a median annual income of $42,500. We have one of the lowest jobless rates in recent memory (with a 3.6% unemployment rate), the recent average and minimum wages have just undergone the highest increases in decades, and so many economic indicators are positive.

According to former Labor Secretary Robert Reich and current UC Berkeley Professor, writing for the July 10th Guardian UK, the good news is pretty robust: “In the four years of Donald Trump’s administration, total investment on manufacturing facilities grew by 5%. During the first two years of Biden’s administration, manufacturing investment more than doubled… This has created about 800,000 manufacturing jobs.

“These remarkable results are the outcome of Biden policies – the Inflation Reduction Act and its green technology provisions, the infrastructure bill and the Chips Act… What about inflation? Yes, Biden’s stimulative spending did boost prices. But the big news that’s not getting through to most Americans is that inflation has been dropping. It has declined significantly from its mid-2022 highs above 9%... Consumer prices are now rising by about 4.9% annually – still a problem but not nearly the problem it was.”

Yet the man most responsible for this continuing positive news, President Joe Biden, continues to have horrible approval ratings, and Americans are anything but optimistic or happy with the American economy. While global economic statistics reflect this feeling of economic uncertainty, the United States is achieving positive results well above more of the rest of the world. Reich continues to look at voter malaise in these good economic times: “So why do so many Americans continue to think the economy is awful?

“According to the Gallup economic confidence index, Americans haven’t felt this bad about the economy since the financial crisis of 2008 and 2009. The University of Michigan’s Consumer Sentiment Index is similarly downbeat… In an NBC News survey conducted a few weeks ago, at least 74% of Americans said the country is on the wrong track… Given all this, it’s not surprising that Joe Biden’s approval numbers have been stuck at around 43%... History shows that incumbent presidents tend not to be re-elected when about 70% of Americans think the country is on the wrong track. (They tend to win when fewer than half of Americans think that.)”

The problem continues to be a notion that the rich get richer, while everyone else either stagnates or actually lives with lower expectations. Upward mobility is now relegated to the history books, the cost of that class-leveling advanced education is layered with intolerable debt, and the vast majority of Americans in the X-generation and younger never expect to generate the earning power of their parents. Housing costs are skyrocketing, and few younger workers will ever own their own homes. Inflation is eroding buying power, CEOs of major corporations are earning over 350 times the earnings of the average worker (vs. 10 times in the 1950), and, as Reich tells us, “Much of the remaining inflation is due to outsized corporate profit margins. The IMF recently found that almost half the increase in Europe’s inflation over the past two years is due to rising corporate profits.”

But concerns also revolve around the uncertainty created by our political polarization, that recent Supreme Court decisions are trending against younger citizens (retirees are not particularly concerned about anti-abortion rulings and statutes, but younger voters are) and the realities of climate change that are very clear to younger members of the labor force even as older generations have large constituencies of climate change marginalizers or deniers. Reich summarizes this destabilizing reality: “Add in the effects of the climate crisis, and you get more gloom. (This week, the earth’s average temperature reached the highest on record.) A recent study found that headlines have grown starkly more negative… Then, too, many of us are still suffering from pandemic-related PTSD.

”But I think the deeper reason Americans don’t feel very good about the economy is that is that the vast number of working non-college grads – some two-thirds of the adult US population – are still bogged down in dead-end jobs lacking any economic security, while struggling with many costs (such as housing, childcare and education) that continue to soar.

“In other words, the economy is getting better overall – but overall has become a less useful gauge of wellbeing as the rich get richer, the poor grow poorer, and the working middle is under worsening siege.” Gen Z is plagued by unhappiness in the workplace, sensing a dearth of opportunities and too many dead-jobs. They may be working, but their hope for the future is decidedly negative, as illustrated by the largest numbers of Gen Z who quit their jobs or a looking to leave. America’s place in the world is slipping, as China (with its own serious economic issues) is saber-rattling, building its military capacity and seems on track to displace the United States as the largest economy on earth. How much will this destabilization challenge Biden in 2024, and will it enhance GOP power as an alternative, albeit the party that may have created the instability? Time will tell.

I’m Peter Dekom, and I am concerned over the simple and totally unworkable solutions posited against liberal America… and the very real possibility of an new American autocracy that will only make everything so much worse.