MAGA’s Most Powerful Weapons: Threats and Intimidation

 

"I am your warrior, I am your justice… For those who have been wronged and betrayed … I am your retribution."

Donald Trump in a 90-minute campaign speech on March 25th

As prosecutors, judges, grand and petite jurors as well as actual and potential witnesses in the various civil and criminal cases against Trump, have discovered and as we witnessed from Trump’s December 19, 2020, invitational tweet to his base to come to Washington, D.C. on January 6th (“It will be wild!”), an often standard reaction to Trump’s vituperative statements and calls for “justice,” is his MAGA followers’ frequent response of threats, intimidation and even violence… often believing that Trump has effectively asked them to do so. Since the 2020 election “stop the steal” campaign and beyond, this pattern is a standard and expected reaction to Trump’s angry cries against anyone who opposes him. States with “open carry” laws often find Trump followers parading with their assault weapons in and around state capitol buildings, and even near election polling stations.

This almost automatic connection between Trump’s negative pronouncements and intimidation and violence has led to requests from his criminal prosecutors and civil plaintiff’s attorneys for gag orders against Trump to protect the identities of many of those listed above and to stop his vituperative attacks against judges and prosecutors. Hiding behind the First Amendment and claiming as a candidate for the presidency, no judge can limit his speech, Trump seems unable to contain his highly focused wrath. Gag orders have and will be issued, but whether they can be meaningfully enforced remains to be seen. Purported billionaire Trump also seems to be financially immune to fines; his followers are content to fund his legal frolic as he requests.

Trump’s mantra that there are two systems of justice (allegedly to his detriment) is clearly correct, but not as he charges. He has been treated with kid gloves in his flaunting restrictions imposed on him in his criminal trials, words which would have resulted in an immediate revocation of bail or “own recognizance” release for virtually any other criminal defendant (read: sit in jail).

And then there are the new election rules. Red state legislators continue to compete to redistrict to eliminate or marginalize voters likely to lean Democratic. The Supreme Court itself seems to waffle back and forth on the legitimacy of such efforts; it’s clear that these legislators are well servicing Trump’s quest for autocracy under his leadership.

While most voters rejected election deniers in 2022, there was enough “success” in this grouping of deniers (see above statistic) to be troublesome. The toxic legacy of angry cries for retribution has also made life living hell for election workers, particularly individuals named by MAGA extremists fomenting dramatically false conspiracy theories… resulting in defamation actions. Yet with the vast majority of Republican voters believing that our elections are untrustworthy, as anti-democratic voting restrictions poured out of red states, and with very real threats applied to election officials in swing and red states, our future elections may be untrustworthy by reason of these voting restrictions and threats against election workers. The result: election workers are resigning in droves.

Writing for the October 12th Los Angeles Times, columnist Mark Barabak addresses this issue: “[L]iars like Kari Lake, who lost a bid for Arizona governor by parroting former President Trump’s falsehoods and now hopes to flimflam her way to a Senate seat , are only the most visible threat to our system of democracy.

“New research by a political reform group, Issue One, has given us something else to worry about: a troubling exodus of local election officials — those on the front lines fighting for truth, justice and the American way… In 11 Western states, including California, roughly 40% of the chief local elections officials are new to the job since 2020, the study found… In four states — Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico and Utah — the turnover exceeds 50%.

“Why does that matter?... ‘It takes a long time to learn how to do what we do,’ said Ryan Ronco, the elections chief in Placer County and head of the California Assn. of Clerks and Election Officials. Ronco has spent 30 years in the county clerk’s office; 10 of his 15 staffers are new… Running a safe and aboveboard election is not simply a matter of turning on the lights at polling places, or sliding a letter opener through an envelope when mail-in ballots arrive.

“It requires, among myriad responsibilities, learning how to operate specialized voting machines, combating cybersecurity threats and, increasingly, venturing out in public — to town hall meetings, election seminars and other venues — to explain how election operations work. ‘Ensuring elections are accessible, secure and accurate requires trained, dedicated, knowledgeable people,’ the Issue One report stated. ‘When local election officials leave these critical positions, the costs to institutional knowledge and running elections are real. Losing experienced people costs us in countless ways.’” Too many in the governmental election world have faced death threats, doxing and other forms of intimidation… just doing their jobs to the best of their ability.

Barabak continues: “If preserving and protecting the integrity of our election system doesn’t move you, then consider the departure of experienced election professionals from a coldly calculated dollars-and-cents perspective. There’s a price to pay for all that turnover, which requires training a new staffer each time a more experienced election worker departs.

“Earlier reports had warned of an exodus of election officials as the menace from election conspiracy-mongers grew. The latest study suggests it’s now happening — particularly in battleground states where election officials have been targeted by harassment and death threats... It’s not hard to imagine a downward spiral where less experienced workers goof up an election, causing further doubts about the results and leading to even more threats of violence, which causes yet another mass exit of election workers.”

We’ll get through all this, and if MAGA does not sweep the 2024 election and place Trump back into the presidency, I suspect that much of this will be corrected and hopefully fade away. If legislation and dedicated law enforcement can make these forms of intimidation dangerous and filled with criminal sanctions to perpetrators, these is hope. But if these perpetrators win enough in the next election, if Trump’s retribution pledge becomes our new reality, all bets are off.

I’m Peter Dekom, and still there are not enough voters who realize that the 2024 election is not a truly issue oriented vote, that this coming election is really about democracy vs autocracy, pure and simple.

The Post-American Superpower New World Order – "Us" Against "Them"

 

It may not have started with Donald Trump, but he became the spokesman for US withdrawal from international trade agreements (like the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which China then reconfigured in its favor) and treaties (like the UN’s Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, that once contained Iran’s refinement of weapons grade uranium and plutonium, which US withdrawl put Iran back on track developing fissionable material) simply rewarded our traditional foes. His efforts to embrace the dictators in North Korea, Russia and the Peoples’ Republic of China, filled with lots of “only I can do it” braggadocio, failed miserably.

But worse, his MAGA movement fractured the United States into two factions with irreconcilable differences, a polarization that has led autocrats opposing US policies to a “certainty” that the United States would soon unravel into an ungovernable, self-destructive country. In their aggressive minds, all they have to do is wait. Even if Trump were no longer in the Picture, MAGA is now a distinct, faith-driven movement with millions of passionate adherents.

China and Russia have together actually announced a new world order, not surprisingly led by them, to counter American domination of the international financial markets and her deployment of Naval fleets into every corner of the world. This may seem bizarre since China is our number one trading partner ($700 billion/year), but we seem to be able to operate on two levels, even with toxic sanctions going back and forth.

That Vietnam, Iraq (now Iran’s effective satellite) and Afghanistan have gone down in flames against US ambitions, clearly eroded our credibility. And then there’s our long-standing commitment to Israel, our most reliable partner in the Middle east. Israel’s intelligence missteps followed by a brutal and inhuman terrorist attack by Hamas, with lots of war crimes against civilians, provoked a strong and justifiable response from Israel’s military (the IDF), focused on eliminating Hamas once and forever.

The Biden administration rallied forcefully to support Israel, with military supplies and even a UN Security Council veto of a vote for humanitarian cease fire in the conflict. But as Hamas correctly predicted (quite willing to sacrifice its own population in the effort), Israel’s powerful military response quickly turned many nations to flip their sympathies to the Gazan people. Food, fuel and medical supplies were quickly exhausted in Gaza, notwithstanding a trickle of humanitarian aid that passed from Egypt to Gaza in a set of truck convoys. Buildings, including both military and residential targets, were leveled. Some suggested misfired Hamas rockets were partially to blame, but surviving hospitals in Gaza were rapidly taken offline.

Even within the United States, a schism was developing between pro-Israeli retaliation Democrats and Gaza-sympathetic progressive Democrats. And Russia’s Putin, China’s Xi and Iran’s Ayatollah were grinning ear-to-ear. Their vision of that new world order was falling nicely into place. Focusing on the conflicts in Gaza and Ukraine, Los Angeles Times Columnist Doyle McManus, on October 29th explained the impact of these two realities on the creation of that new world order:

“The onetime Russia advisor to then-President Trump [Fiona Hill ] fears that support for Ukraine is gradually eroding, encouraging Russian President Vladimir Putin to try to wait the West out… ‘Putin feels everything is trending in his favor,’ she warns… But she’s worried about much more than that, beginning with Israel’s war in Gaza, which has made the world more dangerous…

“‘These could be global-system-shifting wars, something like World War I and World War II, which reflected and produced major changes in the international order,’ she said. ‘In a sense, the Hamas attack on Israel was a kind of Pearl Harbor moment. It opened a second front.’.. Most of the world’s major powers have lined up in two opposing coalitions: the United States and its allies on one side; Russia, China and Iran on the other. One of those coalitions is supporting both Ukraine and Israel. The other is not…

“The United States and its European allies have provided billions of dollars in weapons and financial aid to help stop Putin’s drive to reconquer the Russian Empire… But Ukraine’s progress has been maddeningly slow , prompting impatience not only in the U.S., but in Europe as well… ‘We put too much weight on Ukraine’s counteroffensive,’ Hill said. ‘This is going to be a long war. Putin thinks we will give up if he holds on long enough’… The Russian leader is also ‘clearly waiting for 2024’ and the prospect that Trump could return to the White House and cut off aid to Ukraine, she added.

“An early test will come in the next few weeks, when Congress considers Biden’s request for $61 billion in new aid for Ukraine. The last time the House of Representatives faced such a request, 93 Republicans voted against it, including the newly elected speaker, Mike Johnson (R-La.)… Now add the second front in the global conflict: Gaza… ‘This helps Putin,’ Hill said. ‘It’s going to distract the United States and European supporters of Ukraine.’…

“‘China doesn’t want to be stranded alone with no other major power as an ally,’ Hill explained. ‘Xi needs Putin and Putin needs Xi.’… But that creates a problem for the United States, she said: ‘We’re not going to have any hope of curtailing Russia’s options and getting the Middle East to calm down if we have a super-antagonistic relationship with China.’… She thinks the Biden administration should try a ‘Nixon to China’ effort to reduce animosity, referring to President Nixon’s opening of a relationship with Mao Zedong in 1972.”

That nascent effort has already begun with diplomatic exchanges, invitations and conversations between China and the US. Our three major issues with China include their wholesale theft of our intellectual property (most hard patents), the integrity of Taiwan which they intend to annex and their support of Russia in its efforts to restore a Russia with a new boundary of the former Soviet Union, now focused on taking Ukraine. The $700 billion of annual trade has to be a motivator. Non-aligned nations are enjoying playing the US-alliance off against the China/Russia cabal. We can work a détente that benefits both nations, but if Donald Trump is reelected, Russia and China really do not have to do much to advance their vision of the world. They will rise as the United States will fall in the eyes of the rest of the world. If that happens, Americans will pay with a serious downgrade in lifestyle and business advantages.

I’m Peter Dekom, and as much as many Americans believe we do not need to be involved with the rest of the world, I am pretty sure they will truly hate the resulting steep rise in the cost of living from any such American withdrawal.

It Happened Before, Is It Happening Again?

“We are at a crossroads in human history. Never before has there been a moment so simultaneously perilous and promising.” 

Carl Sagan

Ask any well-versed-in-the-rhetoric-of-climate-change denier or marginalizer, and they’ll tell you that this pattern of climate-related natural disasters, the rising temperatures around the world, are simply part of a natural pattern that nature has cycled since time began. Mankind’s influence, they insist, played little part in what we face today. Or perhaps, they will point to post-diluvian (the Great Flood, the era of Noah) purported Biblical “pledges” from God not to wreak such global havoc on mankind again… accompanied by other purported Biblical pledges that mankind should use the bounty of the earth as it sees fit. Putting aside the religious interpretations and just focusing on that natural cycle theory, they just may be right… for the wrong reason.

The fact is, “Warming rocked the Earth before. But today it’s worse… At the end of the last ice age, the rate of climate change was roughly 10 times slower than now — and it wiped out species.” According to Michael E Mann – presidential distinguished professor and director of the Center for Science, Sustainability and the Media at the University of Pennsylvania – writing for the September 24th Los Angeles Times. A visit to the famous La Brea Tar Pits here in Los Angeles can certainly confirm the death of many of these now extinct mammals in the transition ending the great Ice Age. That was indeed a global warming event that man had nothing to do with. Indeed, as climate change deniers have correctly maintained, our planet has indeed survived dramatic warming before… and one way or the other, it will again. But there’s a catch. An incalculable number of plant and animal life perished then, some adapted, but even the shape of the earth itself changed.

Will mankind survive? Adapt? Will the earth reshape? Yes, to all of these. But it will not be pretty, and that is assuming that we are unable to stop and reverse global warming under so many mantels of denial, from those enumerated above to the momentum of “progress” itself, the unwillingness to accept inconvenience, the power of profits and the joy we seem to enjoy by reveling in ignorance and conspiracy theories. Unfortunately, there are no real signs that our planet will actually do what is necessary to sustain life as we know it. Mann continues with some hard, scientific reminders:

“What threatens us today isn’t the particular concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere or the precise temperature of the planet, alarming as those two metrics are. Instead, it’s the unprecedented rate at which we are increasing carbon pollution through fossil fuel burning, and the resulting rate at which we are heating the planet.

“Consider the warming event that paleoclimatologists point to as the best natural comparison for the rapid greenhouse-driven trend we’re seeing now. The Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum happened 56 million years ago, roughly 10 million years after the demise of the dinosaurs, which itself was caused by climate change (a massive asteroid impact event led to a global dust storm and, in turn, rapid cooling). The PETM warming resulted from an unusually large and rapid injection of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere from volcanic eruptions in Iceland. Global temperatures increased by approximately 10 degrees Fahrenheit in as little as 10,000 years, rising from an already steamy baseline of 80 degrees Fahrenheit possibly up to a sauna-like 90 degrees Fahrenheit.

“That warming rate of about 0.1 degree Fahrenheit per century is extremely rapid by geological standards. But it’s still roughly 10 times slower than the warming today.

“The impact event and Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum were, ironically, fortuitous for humans: They paved the way for our ancestors. The extinction of the dinosaurs (except the ancestors of birds) created a new niche for early mammals, and the stifling conditions of the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum selected for small, arboreal mammals, including the oldest primate identified clearly by fossil materials, a primitive lemur-like creature named Dryomomys. Without either of these two events, our species likely wouldn’t have arrived at this moment — in contrast to the current warming, which plenty of evidence shows is a threat to our existence.

“Extinctions followed another warming period in our more recent past, when the last ice age ended about 18,000 years ago. Driven by Earth’s changing orbit relative to the sun, and boosted by a heightened greenhouse effect as warming oceans gave up their carbon dioxide in the same way an open bottle of warm soda loses carbonation, the planet warmed by about 10 degrees Fahrenheit over the subsequent 8,000 years.”

We’re doing what took thousands of years as the ice age passed in about two centuries… and we are right smack in the middle of it, perhaps past or close to the tipping point where no matter what we do; the pattern of releasing greenhouse gasses will simply feed on itself. Look at what happens at that tipping point. We know that white reflects heat, and dark absorbs it. So as glaciers and polar ice melt, that white ice is replaced with darker ocean water or land mass. So, the planet absorbs more heat rather naturally. That lovely permafrost (tundra), which has encased the rotting plant and animal life (that gives us oil deposits as well) also holds the methane that that decomposition created… would continue to be released into the atmosphere whether we continue burning fossil fuels or not. That methane has about 23 times more ozone-layer blocking power than carbon dioxide is very troublesome.

Mann is a tad more optimistic: “What finished off the dinosaurs and the mastodons was a climate that shifted too rapidly away from what they were adapted to, in the first case cooling and the other case warming. That’s our challenge today… Can our big brains save us this time? They can if we make proper use of them and learn the lessons offered by Earth’s past… The end result is that we can trust these models to peer into our climate future. They tell us that we can avoid a catastrophic trajectory for our global climate if we reduce carbon emissions substantially over the next decade. So this fragile moment in which we find ourselves is in fact a critical juncture.” We can blame other countries, allow well-heeled corporate lobbyists to prevail or… we can lead and solve.

I’m Peter Dekom, and while politicians and their rabid supporters can rail and protest, they cannot change the laws of physics; nature just does not care!

Autocrat 101 – Blame, Distract and Rally

Putin blamed non-existent Nazis in Ukraine and their American NATO puppet master, Xi blames US economic hegemony and hostile acts, and Trump blames the “deep state,” crime (much higher in red states) and hardworking Mexicans and Central Americans escaping the violence fed by US guns in their home countries as “murderers and rapists.” Whatever the blamed group may be, the autocrats or autocrat wannabes are covering failures of their own policies. Today, Putin and Xi have seriously failing economies. Trump just want to justify political power to punish his enemies. And massive shows of force – often military parades – or huge political rallies (lying about attendance if necessary) are meant to give the autocrat the ostensible authority to punish, sidestep local or international laws and make unilateral decisions without any opposition.

The need to blame, distract and rally often leads to wars – the easiest application of that principle – and because nothing like violence makes a strongman seem strong. Since people rally to a threat, strongmen who deploy force distract from their failing policies. They cannot stand to appear weak or be viewed as losers; they can be the most dangerous people on earth. Trump is itching for his “government of retribution,” representing a purge the likes of which the United States has not experienced since the end of the Civil War, but he’s not currently leading the country and so far our constitutional guard rails have held.

Putin has his war, but Xi is saber-rattling at a level that could easily become a war… in Taiwan… His conflict mentality is already a fact beyond, in the lands and waters in the East and South China Seas. Xi has ordered many statistical reports can no longer be published, hiding his 20% unemployment rate among the rising generations, especially college educated, the collapse of major manufacturers and the bankruptcy of major housing/apartment developments. He is desperate for those to blame and to distract. He wants his people to rally to his cause. He is a very dangerous man.

Since Xi has built is expanded military base in the Spratley Islands and escalated his naval and air power over the entire region, he is reinforcing his bogus claims to the land and adjacent sea lanes of several nearby Asian countries. Vietnam, Japan, Indonesia, Taiwan and the Philippines. Even the land border between India and China has seen bullets fly. A dangerous failed leader is using the threat of military force to rally his people… what could possibly go wrong?

But while Taiwan gets the most obvious press coverage and the greatest numbers of naval and air intrusions, China is also challenging international navigation in waters where many ships pass … as mariners have for centuries. It’s brinkmanship that could spark a world war. But there is less reporting of this constant clash … all over those East and South China seas. Like this escalating power grab over fishing rights in what have been Filipino waters for centuries. It not just the US… it our allies as well… and even non-aligned nations.

The September 28th Associate Press reported: “Philippine officials condemned the installation last week of a 980-foot-long barrier by Chinese coast guard vessels at the entrance to the lagoon of Scarborough Shoal as a violation of international law and the country’s sovereignty… The barrier has prevented Filipino boats from entering [their traditional] rich fishing area, they said.

“The shoal lies within the Philippines’ exclusive economic zone just west of the main island of Luzon, but has been occupied by China since 2012 as part of a push by Beijing to lay claim to virtually the entire South China Sea… On Monday [9/25], the Philippine coast guard said it has complied with an order by President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. to launch a covert operation to remove the rope and net barrier held up by small buoys in the mouth of the shoal. China reacted Tuesday [9/27] by asking the Philippines ‘not to make provocations or seek trouble.’

“‘Huangyan Island is China’s inherent territory,’ Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin said at a news briefing in Beijing on Wednesday [9/27], referring to the Chinese name for Scarborough… ‘What the Philippines [has] done is nothing but a farce that entertains itself. China will continue to safeguard territorial sovereignty and maritime rights and interests of Huangyan Island,’ he said.

“Philippine Vice Adm. Alberto Carlos, who heads the military’s Western Command in charge of overseeing the South China Sea, told journalists he was concerned that the Chinese coast guard may also install a similar floating barrier at the entrance to Second Thomas Shoal, which is occupied by a small Philippine navy contingent on a long-grounded warship but has been surrounded by Chinese coast guard ships.”

China has rejected international mediation, most probably because it stands little chance of prevailing. Land claims are based on undersea fingers of land and ancient territorial claims. The claimed waters are part of the mix. It would be a bit like Britain demanding the United States itself as part of its traditional and integral territory. And Russia has more than once maintained that Alaska is their possession, because the Tsar lacked the power to sell the people’s land (remember “Seward’s folly”).

I’m Peter Dekom, and without clear checks and balances, flailing and failing autocrats generally don’t generate good results for their citizens… are often the most dangerous people on earth.

The Big New State Litigation Trend – Treat Big Oil Like Big Tobacco

Simply put, if Big Oil were aware of the escalating damage… that continued use of fossil fuel represented a rapidly rising environmental disaster (climate change)… for decades, took extensive steps to lobby and deny against that reality making billions and billions by reason of such deceptive efforts… and if states and local governments spent billions and billions to deal with the horrific consequences of that climate change, shouldn’t we sue the bastards?!

Well, California State AG, Rob Bonta announced in July that “Oil and gas companies have privately known the truth for decades — that the burning of fossil fuels leads to climate change.” On September 15th, Bonta joined other California jurisdictions, in seeking to hold Big Oil responsible for the consequences of their repressing and denying the truth about vehicular emissions that date back to the 1950s. He filed suit in California Superior Court (San Francisco) against Exxon Mobil, Shell, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, BP and the American Petroleum Institute.

Despite momentary glitches and a massive MAGA effort nationwide to crush efforts to moderate climate change and shift to a prioritization of alternative energy, evidence of knowing suppression and denial of the impact of automotive emissions and the rise in both scientific statistical proof and by a litany of record-breaking climate change-related disasters are now overwhelming and capable of rigorous scientific evidence. Now is the time to press for obvious accountability. Writing for the September 17th Los Angeles Times, Louis Sahagún reminds of the legacy of Big Tobacco litigation in California… and suggests that the cost to Big Oil just might be a vast multiple of that number:

“A growing number of high-profile cases in state court helped pave the way for Bonta’s 135-page lawsuit to hold oil and gas companies financially responsible for their role in climate change and marketing products they know cause injury… They include the record $246-billion settlement with Big Tobacco and a $350-million settlement reached in 2019 that will provide funds to clean up toxic lead paint sold by manufacturers that knew it was poisonous… ‘There is some commonality with earlier cases involving other major bad actors who hurt people and threatened their health with lead paint, tobacco and opioids,’ Bonta said in an interview with The Times on Saturday [9/16]. ‘But every industry is unique.’

“The potential size of the mitigation fund he is pursuing remains to be determined… ‘These defendants must be held accountable for the truths they shared in private while trying to undermine the science in public,’ he said. ‘They cannot pass those costs onto the public, governments or our future.’…

“‘It is going to be a very, very large number,’ he added… ‘With our lawsuit, California becomes the largest geographic area and the largest economy to take these giant oil companies to court,’ Bonta said. ‘From extreme heat to drought and water shortages, the climate crisis they have caused is undeniable. It is time they pay to abate the harm they have caused.’

“Bonta is seeking to create a nuisance abatement fund to finance climate mitigation and adaptation efforts; injunctive relief to protect California’s natural resources from pollution, impairment and destruction; and to prevent the companies from making any further false or misleading statements about the contribution of fossil-fuel combustion to climate change.” California is unlikely to be the only state initiating such legal action.

Economic reality, particularly in fire-prone, flood and coastal erosion states, is pressing the cost of homeowners’ insurance through the roof… and in too many case causing insurers to leave the market entirely. As Anita Chabria and Erika D. Smith report for that same LA Times edition: “It ‘is not even a yellow flag issue. This is a waving red flag issue,’ [California] Gov. Gavin Newsom said Tuesday night when asked about the failure of the Legislature to act.

“This year, multiple companies, including the state’s largest home insurer, State Farm, have announced they are no longer taking on new residential and commercial properties, citing wildfire risk. In fact, seven of the 12 insurance groups operating in California — together, responsible for about 85% of the market — have pulled back.

“But backroom talks among elected officials to figure out a fair and workable path forward to entice insurance companies to write more — or in some cases any — policies didn’t go anywhere. Instead, lawmakers are vehemently pledging to hold public hearings this fall about the shrinking prospects for Californians seeking coverage for their homes and, by extension, their prospects for getting and hanging onto their mortgage during a deepening housing crisis.” Apparently, it’s not just insurance at issue but whether homeowners in severely at-risk areas should even be allowed to rebuild after a disaster destroys their home.

As Big Oil mounts campaigns to showcase their environmental efforts (e.g., Shell’s modest charging station initiative illustrated above), not all are so willing to buy those ads. As the Guardian UK (June 6th) notes: “An ad campaign by Shell promoting its green initiatives has been banned [in the UK] for not telling consumers that most of its business is based on environmentally damaging fossil fuels such as petrol.” Accountability is difficult to achieve when big economic powers or political forces resist, but without accountability and clear solutions, exactly how are we going to be able to survive in the near future and beyond?

I’m Peter Dekom, and if all those responsible for major chaotic costs using batteries of lobbyists, lawyers, campaign contributions and fake news are ever called to pay for their mendacity and disastrous greed, this world would look nothing like what it looks like today.

The Most Dangerous Country in the World is Still China

Israel vs Hamas. Russia vs Ukraine. Terrible places with terrible consequences. Easily expandable conflicts drawing global attention. North Korea continuously saber-rattling and testing her submarines, rockets and nukes. Iran’s surrogates battling it out as she cozies up to Russia. Deploying a drone carrier. But the most dangerous country on earth, with the largest navy in the world and a determination to own the oceans and seas in her region. With a network of industrial and government spies bringing technology and manufacturing capacity that threatens the very industries she stole patents from. Letting ally Russia fight battles to drain NATO and force the United States from supporting nations beyond her borders. Hacking purportedly “secure” computers everywhere, sowing mis- and dis-information to distort elections in democratic countries, particularly the United States. The PEOPLES’ REPUBLIC OF CHINA (PRC).

While the world is distracted, China is using her air force, navy and her man-made island military base in the Spratley Islands to circle the regional navigable waters and traditional territorial waters of other nations… and claim control of those waters as belonging exclusively to China. For purposes of mining undersea wealth, harvesting fish and totally controlling passage against any other nation. British and American naval vessels have been followed “danger close” by the PLA ships. (China’s armed forces are all assembled under the name “Peoples’ Liberation Army” or PLA). US naval aircraft have had similar confrontations with PRC jet fighters.

While we tend to focus on airspace and sea-based military incursions by the PRC in and around Taiwan, which China has repeatedly stated is and always has been a legitimate province of China – oddly a “one state” narrative that is technically supported by the US – China is staking her regional claim over local seas in direct challenges to other regional nations. Most recently, the Philippines. Again. As Jim Gomez and Simina Mistreanu, writing for the October 23rd Associated Press, explain, after Chinese naval vessels blocked and collided with two Filipino ships off a contested shoal in the South China Sea:

“Philippine diplomats summoned a Chinese Embassy official in Manila on Monday for a strongly worded protest following Sunday’s [10/22] collisions off Second Thomas Shoal. No injuries were reported but the encounters damaged a Philippine coast guard ship and a wooden-hulled supply boat operated by navy personnel, officials said.

“President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. called an emergency meeting with the defense secretary and other top military and security officials to discuss the latest hostilities in the disputed waters. The Philippines and other neighbors of China have resisted Beijing's sweeping territorial claims over virtually the entire South China Sea, and some, like Manila, have sought U.S. military support as incidents multiply.

“After the meeting, Defense Secretary Gilberto Teodoro blasted China in a news conference for resorting to ‘brute force’ that he said endangered Filipino crew members and for twisting the facts to conceal its aggression… ‘The Philippine government views the latest aggression by China as a blatant violation of international law,’ Teodoro said. ‘China has no legal right or authority to conduct law enforcement operations in our territorial waters and in our exclusive economic zone.’

“Marcos ordered an investigation of the high-sea collisions, Teodoro said, but he refused to disclose what steps the Philippine government would take… ‘We are taking these incidents seriously at the highest levels of government,’ he said, adding that the government called for a news conference to provide accurate facts. ‘The Chinese government is deliberately obfuscating the truth,’ the defense chief said.

“The Philippines also plans to raise its alarm over the Chinese ships’ dangerous maneuvers in talks between China and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations on a proposed nonaggression pact — a ‘code of conduct’ — to prevent a major armed conflict in the South China Sea. Beijing is hosting the three-day negotiations starting Monday [10/23], two Philippine officials told The Associated Press on condition of anonymity because of a lack of authority to publicly discuss details of the talks.

“Teodoro said it was ‘very ironic’ that China was hosting the talks that aim to prevent major conflicts at sea when they just committed “a blatant disregard of international law."… The territorial conflicts involving China, the Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia, Taiwan and Brunei have long been regarded as a flashpoint in a delicate fault line in the U.S.-China rivalry.

“About five Chinese coast guard ships, eight accompanying vessels and two navy ships formed a blockade on Sunday to prevent two Philippine coast guard ships and two boats from delivering food and other supplies to Filipino forces stationed at Second Thomas Shoal aboard a marooned navy ship, Philippine coast guard Commodore Jay Tarriela said… During the standoff, one of the Philippine coast guard ships and a supply boat were separately hit by a Chinese coast guard ship and a vessel. Only one of the two Filipino boats managed to deliver supplies to Philippine forces, Tarriela said.”

This confrontation is nothing new. China defaulted in an arbitration resulting in 2016 decision by a tribunal set up in The Hague under the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea after the Philippine government complained in 2013 about China’s increasingly aggressive actions in the South China Sea. The United States repeated that it would defend the Philippines against any PRC attack as it is obligated to do under the 1951 U.S.-Philippines Mutual Defense Treaty. What makes China even more dangerous is the need of de facto President for life Xi Jinping for distractions from his massively failed domestic economic policies resulting in exceptionally high unemployment among younger workers and the serial collapse of real estate values across China. An angry, defensive dictator with a huge military and a history of brutality should put us all on red alert.

I’m Peter Dekom, and with all of the conflict in the world, sometimes it’s easy to miss even the raging elephant in the room.

Blaxit - The Darker the Skin, the Less Accepted You Are in the United States

 

Trump’s “fine people” marching in Charlottesville

Protest against “I can’t breath” murder of George Floyd 

One of my closest friends, a highly educated patent attorney who born in Tehran who speaks three languages without any accent (Farsi, English and German), a US citizen, finally elected to move most of his legal practice to Germany. Why? Eschewing a flashy lifestyle (he is quite successful), he drove an older car. As a person of color, over the years, he tells me he was pulled over 38 times for no good reason here in Los Angeles. The officers seldom believed that he was a fully licensed attorney, even when he produced his bar admission card. He still maintains a very successful international patent law practice, but most of his time is spent in Munich, which he describes as much more tolerant and more of a democracy than blue, multicultural Los Angeles.

Sad, but as MAGA has risen to define an entire political party, racial and cultural discrimination, which has always been an American problem, has gotten so much worse. And as Kate Linthicum, writing for the October 10th Los Angeles Times tells us, an increasing number of people of color, particularly African-Americans who can trace their American lineage back hundreds of years, are emigrating to nations all over the world, from Latin America and Asia, some even to Africa. The pattern of Black writers, artists and performers moving overseas - Paris has always been a favorite - is nothing new, but since the MAGA movement has stood tall as White Christian nationalists embrace white supremacy, the emigration of gifted and educated Black Americans has increased considerably.

“There are no official statistics on how many have left the country. But academics say it may be one of the most significant emigrations of African Americans since the first half of last century, when many Black artists decamped to Europe… The late writer James Baldwin, who was part of that earlier wave, said he moved to France in 1948 ‘with the theory that nothing worse would happen to me there than had already happened to me here.’

“Seven decades later, the U.S. is still grappling with racism, with Black people twice as likely as white people to be killed by police and Black workers earning less on the dollar than their white counterparts. In Florida, a new law forces teachers to downplay the impact of slavery, and across the country, far-right activists are seeking bans on books touching on Black history.” Linthicum. That ugly American proclivity is hardly relegated to Black Americans. As Asian-Americans found themselves under attack, unprovoked and often brutal, as Black churches were fire-bombed or attacked by white extremists armed with AR-15s, as Latinos were referred to by Donald Trump when early in his initial candidacy as border-crossers who were criminals “bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They're rapists,” it became ok to shoot them and ask questions later. Racism, often disguised with other words, was legitimized.

But for Americans, black by skin tone, who have been in the country far longer than most other ethnic groups, this exodus should make most White Americans take a closer look at what we have become. And as I point out in my recent Extremists’ Basic Tool: Vilification and Dehumanization of Chosen Targets blog, this rising tendency to attack and demean people of color or people of minority faiths is an unhealthy trend not just for the targets of the resulting discrimination but even for those who represent that class of White Christian traditionalists.

Simply put, democracy cannot work where people are divided into privileged and unprivileged groups - with vastly different rights and access to opportunities - based on their basic ethnic, religious beliefs and/or biological traits. This acceptance of strata of privilege, while raising barriers to upward mobility, is about as un-American as you can get. Yet the practitioners of this profoundly class-driven demarcation refer to themselves as “patriots” and real “anti-woke” Americans.

The trickle has become a flood. “Americans of all races have been leaving the U.S. thanks to the pandemic shift to remote work. But for Black Americans, many of whom were distraught over the political and racial divisions the pandemic years highlighted, the decision to move abroad is about more than just saving money or having an adventure.

“‘It gave people time to question,’ said Chrishan Wright, who launched a podcast in 2020 that documented her move to Lisbon. She now works as a relocation consultant and is helping about a dozen families restart in Portugal. They are mostly Black professionals with children, she said, in search of ‘a better quality of life without the emotional and psychological strain.’” Linthicum.

We’re truly not sending our worst to other countries; our best are leaving because life in a racist environment has become intolerable: “Filmmaker Jameelah Nuriddin was locked down in Los Angeles during the pandemic, watching as the nation convulsed in protest over the murder of George Floyd, when she had an epiphany: ‘America does not deserve me.’

“As a Black woman, Nuriddin always tried to work twice as hard as those around her, thinking: ‘If I’m smart enough, pretty enough, successful enough ... then finally people will treat me as a human being.’… But as she grieved yet another unarmed Black man killed by police, she decided she was done trying to prove herself to a society that she felt would never really love her back.

“So Nuriddin, 39, packed her bags and left… She ended up in Costa Rica, in an idyllic beach town on the Caribbean coast that has become a hub for hundreds of Black expatriates fed up with life in the United States.” Linthicum. Our diversity, a lettuce bowl that generated a cultural mix which elevated and accelerated invention and creativity, is what made America great, an economic powerhouse like no other. What are we when all that matters in that lettuce bowl is one giant indiscriminate leaf? Who are we today? And who are the real “patriots”?

I’m Peter Dekom, and the march to autocracy and eventual decay is built on the quicksand of bias, discrimination and blame.

Ostrich Head in the Beachy Sand: Florida, the Biggest Loser

It’s quite an assumption as to which state’s reality and its priorities in governance qualify it to be the biggest loser. We have states devasted by wildfires, vast swaths of agricultural lands succumbing to permanent desertification, unbridled poverty in states where citizens seem to be left behind with, massive flooding in other areas – in blue and red states – so let me provide the basis for my “loser” assessment. I have focused on the greatest economic and value losses impacting the greatest number of people. Sure, New York City experienced sequential unprecedented flooding from recent tropical storms, but the damage was not widespread across the state, and life has pretty much returned to normal. Not to mention that NYC has financial resources to target future devastation, albeit a very expensive effort.

Florida, on the other hand, is the third most populous state (behind California and Texas) with lots of large urban areas spread across the state with the majority near or on the coast. It sits in a hurricane alley that continually gets pounded by some of the worst tropical storms anywhere. So much of the state sits on very porous limestone that is a major conduit for underground water and coastal seepage, giving rise to sinkholes and underground collapse for buildings not properly anchored against that reality. It is also one of the flattest states in the union, with estimates that coast erosion will continue to claim very valuable real estate, perhaps even as much as a third of the entire state, within a century. Mortgages in coastal areas are often limited to 10 or 15 years and property insurance in these coastal communities is either unavailable or with premiums and deductibles soaring into the stratosphere.

Once considered a political “swing state,” Florida has drifted solidly into MAGA Republicanism. Climate change is marginalized. COVID is considered irrelevant to the point where government has disallowed mask mandates and suggested that vaccines are both dangerous and ineffective. Led by a governor with strong autocratic leanings, Florida has mounted an “anti-woke” campaign that bans books from schools and public libraries, requires teachers to follow a strict curriculum that distorts current and past racial and gender realities (including whitewashing slavery itself), but not only ignores fixing educational failings and teach shortages but mounts a campaign that makes recruiting new teachers very difficult.

With 22 million people, mostly residing in large coastal cities, Florida has faced a disproportionate number of catastrophic hurricanes, undeniable coastal erosion, and its future only suggests “more of the same only much worse and more frequent.” Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, whose fall in the GOP candidacy polls can only be described as precipitous, has been one of the most vociferous anti-educational/particularly medical and scientific “elite” critics, you’d think he was a high school dropout. Instead, he is a Yale (BA history) and Harvard (Law School)-educated high school dropout wannabe. COVID should have been left without vaccinations (he got them, though), and climate change just requires raising a few highways and buildings, an easy fix.

But Florida is beginning to lose values and money by the billion-load: Climate change is affecting communities nationwide, but Florida often seems like ground zero. In September 2022, Hurricane Ian devastated southwest Florida, killing at least 156 people and causing an estimated $113 billion in damage. Then Hurricane Idalia shut down the Florida Panhandle in September 2023, augmented by a blue supermoon that also increased tidal flooding in southeast Florida.

Communities can adapt to some of these effects, or at least buy time, by taking steps such as upgrading stormwater systems and raising roads and sidewalks. But climate disasters and sea-level rise also harm local governments financially by increasing costs and undercutting their property tax bases. Local reliance on property taxes also can discourage cities from steering development out of flood zones, which is essential for reducing long-term risks.

In a newly published study and supporting online StoryMap, we present the first-ever municipal fiscal impact assessment of sea-level rise in Florida and combine it with a statewide survey of coastal planners and managers. We wanted to know how sea-level rise would affect municipal tax revenues and whether coastal planners and managers are accounting for these fiscal impacts.

Our study finds that more than half of Florida’s 410 municipalities will be affected by 6.6 feet of sea-level rise. Almost 30% of all local revenues currently generated by these 211 municipalities come from buildings in areas that will become chronically flooded, potentially by the end of the century. Yet planners and managers remain largely unaware of how much climate change will affect local fiscal health. Some communities with the most at risk are doing the least to prepare...

Property taxes are critically important for municipal governments. Nationwide, they provide 30% of local revenues. They are one of the few funding sources that local governments control, and climate change directly threatens them.

As climate change warms ocean waters, it fuels hurricanes and increases their reach and intensity. Climate change also is raising sea levels, which increases coastal flooding during both storms and high tides, often referred to as sunny-day flooding. Unlike storms, sea-level rise doesn’t recede, so it threatens to permanently inundate coastal lands over time.

Property tax revenues may decline as insurance companies and property markets downgrade property values to reflect climate impacts, such as increasing flood risks and wildfires. Already a growing number of insurance companies have decided to stop covering some regions and types of weather events, raise premiums and deductibles, and drop existing policies as payouts rise in the wake of natural disasters. Growing costs of insuring or repairing homes may further hurt property values and increase home abandonment.

Climate change also makes it more expensive to provide municipal services like water, sewage and road maintenance. For example, high heat buckles roads, rising water tables wash out their substructure, and heavier rains stress stormwater systems. If cities don’t adapt, increasing damage from climate-driven disasters and sea-level rise will create a vicious fiscal cycle, eroding local tax bases and driving up services costs—which in turn leaves less money for adaptation.

However, if cities reduce development in vulnerable areas, their property taxes and other revenues will take a hit. And if they build more seawalls and homes fortified to withstand hurricanes and storms, they will induce more people to live in harm’s way… In Florida, we found that these theoretical dynamics are already occurring. Linda Shi, assistant professor of city and regional planning at Cornell University, Tisha Joseph Holmes and William Butler, associate professors of urban and regional planning at Florida State University, in FastCompany.com, October 8th (reprinted from The Conversation).

Indeed, all coastal communities will face ocean erosion to one degree or another. Florida is an extreme example, with its limestone underpinnings under land that is mostly at sea level, but it is cursed with one of the least effective state governments that simply refuses to deal with what is already happening. What are your state and local governments doing to contain or deal with seemingly unstoppable climate change?

I’m Peter Dekom, and denial and marginalization have never impressed Mother Nature … ever… and Florida is the poster-state for how do it all wrong.

Ban a Book for Christ!

The American Library Association celebrates… er… recognizes the Banned Book Week in early October every year. Fortunately, most of the young students facing book banning are mature enough to read the banned books and smart enough to understand their relevance for life in the world as it really is. Unfortunately, those in the school districts and public libraries where books are banned are joined in a countervailing commitment to ignorance and toxic judgmentalism. Rewriting history, a hallmark of autocracies, is a high priority. Racial injustice and LGBTQ+ references are among their favorite targets.

Apparently, they do not want their educational system to teach tolerance and understanding of all sorts of real-world people or to learn from the horrors of the past in order to prevent such horribles from happening again. Oh yes, and they do not see the connection between slavery, brutal discrimination, and cruelty from past historical events, even matters that continue into the present day, in the likes of mass shootings here, the Ukraine invasion and, most recently, the horrors of the Hamas/Israeli war where thousands of innocents have died and will die.

Writing an OpEd for the October 4th Los Angeles Times, Michael Hiltzik expounds further: “Over the last year, according to Deborah Caldwell-Stone, director of the [American Library Assn.’s] Office for Intellectual Freedom, what has been most striking is the pivot of censorship advocates from books in school libraries to books in public libraries… ‘Last year, about 16% of demands to remove books involved public libraries,’ Caldwell-Stone says. ‘This year, to date, it’s 49%.’

“We’re seeing groups go to school or library board meetings to demand the removal of multiple titles all at once — 25, 50, 100 titles or more, often based on lists they get from advocacy groups on social media… That’s a sea change, she told me, because ‘public libraries are the places that we’ve created for freewheeling inquiry, for the marketplace of ideas. Demands to remove books because they don’t comport with someone’s beliefs or their political or religious agenda are attacks on the very thought of a library as a place that protects 1st amendment rights to access a wide variety of views.’… These amount to demands that ‘the government tell us what to read, what to think, what to believe,’ she says…

“Other than that, not much has changed in the last year about demands for censorship of material accessible in public, except for two things… First, there’s more of it: This year through Aug. 31, the ALA has tracked 695 attempts to remove or otherwise restrict access to library materials, aimed at 1,915 titles. That’s an increase of 20% in the number of titles challenged, making 2023 a high-water mark in a database that dates back 20 years… The association says most of the challenges concerned books written by or about a person of color or a member of the LGBTQ+ community.

“The second change is that a backlash has been gaining strength among parents and others who don’t want their kids or themselves deprived of access to books because fringe members of their communities want to impose their beliefs or political ideologies on everyone else.

“It’s a ‘multi-pronged’ fight, says Suzanne Nossel, chief executive of PEN America, the advocacy group for writers, readers and free expression generally, waged in court and state legislatures as well as before city, county, school and library boards… ‘Overwhelmingly, Americans reject book bans,’ Nossel says. ‘They know this is not the concept of free speech that we all are raised with and that we are proud of. When they point out that students have rights and that ‘parents’ rights’ are not just the rights of a single individual who may be objecting, but the rights of the overwhelming majority of parents who want their children to have the freedom to read, they can assert themselves and get these bans reversed.’”

As suggested most frequently book-banning laws, like those in Florida, can cause bans to be triggered by single parent or a single student who might be “uncomfortable” with a book or even a lesson plan. It’s no secret that such efforts to ban books are almost exclusively in venues with very high evangelical constituents who have elected very MAGA politicians to most of the salient elected offices. They impose their personal religious values on those of all other faiths, proselytizing that Christianity should be the designated US official religion, that while tolerating those of other beliefs, but governed by their interpretation of Christian values.

Hiltzik continues: “Things began to change in the 1970s. In that period, the school board in a district neighboring the one I grew up in, following along with a right-wing parents organization, ordered nine books removed from its secondary school libraries as ‘anti-American, anti-Christian, anti-Sem[i]tic, and just plain filthy.’

“The board was slapped down by the Supreme Court in a landmark 1982 opinion finding that decisions to remove books once they had been acquired could not be ‘exercised in a narrowly partisan or political manner,’ as was the case there. That was the last time the court ruled on a book ban, and it remains binding precedent.

“Defenders of book-banning often conceal their points behind a scrim of rhetorical hair-splitting or other pettifoggery. After the Florida Department of Education (possibly the most misleadingly-named government agency in the United States) released a list of 300 books removed from school library shelves in 2022, a spokeswoman for the department declared, ‘Florida does not ban books.’ ’” But the recently reconfigured US Supreme Court, representing a dramatic shift to the far right, is reversing precedents and issuing distorted views of the plain meaning of the Constitution in favor of state and local control regardless of constitutional limits, especially in allowing religious doctrine to prevail over First Amendment rights. Stand-back and stand-by!

I’m Peter Dekom, and if you believe in theocracy as “good government,” you are in luck, even though the MAGA-dominated majority in Congress does not seem to know how to govern… at all.

Insurance, the Last Straw or the Final Frontier

 

There are very few levels of consumer familiarity with insurance: life, personal property, automobile and… the big ones that are seriously out of control: homeowners and healthcare. And was we watch the MAGA vs Dem conflict from a top-level litany of major disagreements, way down in the weeds are the “us vs them” issues over insurance company profits and practices (the MAGA side) vs consumer coverage and benefits (the Democratic side). MAGA inherited the Republic success on supporting insurance companies and has seized on the irrational “creeping socialism” misnomer as justification for siding with private insurance companies to the severe detriment of even most MAGA adherents.

But as inflation remains a key issue, as housing affordability strangles the hopes and dreams of so many Americans and as uninsured medical costs cripple and kill millions of Americans, insurance is vastly more important issue that it has ever been. Today’s blog focuses on homeowners and healthcare insurance, both of which are beginning to break the backs of average Americans… and are making the corporations that depend on consumers to accept these limitations take a second look; they are increasingly discovering that their own core businesses are severely negatively impacted. Mortgage lenders risk a tsunami of principal loss, and corporations that provide health insurance are finding the cost unbearable.

“Twelve percent of homeowners in the U.S. don’t purchase homeowners’ insurance. About half of them have annual household incomes of less than $40,000, according to a 2023 survey by Insurance Information Institute, an industry trade group, and the reinsurer Munich Re… Others opting to ‘go bare,’ in industry parlance, say they are doing so because their policy hasn’t been renewed by their insurer as a result of increased risk of severe weather damage. Owners might not want to get a state-run policy that typically offers higher premiums and less coverage…

“If a homeowner has a mortgage and doesn’t purchase insurance, the lender will typically buy lender-placed insurance for that property, says David Sampson, president and chief executive officer of the American Property Casualty Insurance Association. Lender-placed insurance is generally more expensive than the coverage homeowners would buy for themselves, financial advisers say… The higher cost of policies is a blow to both existing and hopeful home buyers… Homeowners are increasingly forgoing home insurance, gambling that the likelihood of a disaster isn’t high enough to justify the cost of a policy.” Insurance report referenced in the August 28th Wall Street Journal.

To make matters worse, while 20% increases in homeowners policies is the new normal, but if you live in wildfire or hurricane targeted areas, particularly where the cost of rebuilding is very high, a 70% increase or a complete withdrawal by insurance carriers from those markets is the new normal. While Ron DeSantis rails at inflationary price increases, Florida remains one of the major states where the new rates are unaffordable or unavailable for homeowners in large swaths of the state. But then DeSantis doesn’t think climate change matters are a priority.

On the healthcare front, companies that provide employee healthcare are beginning to realize that current state of affairs is untenable. “Most working-age people get their health coverage through their jobs, and employers either pay an insurer to provide the benefit or bear the cost of medical claims themselves. The cost now tops $22,000 a year for a family on average, according to the health-research nonprofit KFF.

“Hospital care is the single biggest component, amounting to about $449 billion in 2021, the federal government estimates… Gloria Sachdev, who is chief executive officer of the Employers’ Forum of Indiana, launched research that produced a stunning takeaway: They paid the most out of all the states studied… Sachdev was shocked that her members often didn’t know what prices they were paying for surgeries or other medical services, because hospitals and insurers kept them secret.” Wall Street Journal, September 28th. That private cost is two or three times the cost in the Medicare program.

In the last two decades of the 20th century, Detroit migrated a very large segment of manufacturing to nearby Ontario, Canada, where workers were on par with US wages but where government universal healthcare effectively knocked an average of $2000 from the cost manufacturing a single car. That the US is the only developed nation without universal healthcare, a status that MAGA has sworn perpetual opposition to, has created a complex set of choices for both consumers and their employers who provide health insurance.

But these employers are looking for alternatives, even in MAGA land: “Corporate giants from Amazon to CVS are investing billions in primary-care practices. It is part of a sweeping shift in U.S. healthcare to a more value-based model. Here is what that means for doctors, patients and health insurers…

“In places including Texas, Florida and Maine, employer groups are pushing for legislation blunting hospital costs, saying they are fed up with increasing rates and fees, as well as the failure of private efforts to contain them… Employers ‘haven’t had a voice saying, ‘We’re mad as hell, and we’re not going to take it anymore,’ ’ said Chris Skisak, executive director of the Houston Business Coalition on Health..

“In Texas, Skisak’s group helped create an advocacy organization known as Texas Employers for Affordable Healthcare, which is pushing for policies it says will bring down hospital costs. “Employers in Florida are setting up their own group to lobby on issues of healthcare expense and quality. The Healthcare Purchaser Alliance of Maine has begun closely tracking legislation and testifying on bills that could affect cost and pricing transparency.” WSJ. In short, this inflationary bubble is bursting, and government’s failure to contain healthcare costs (which the GOP pledges to resist to the benefit of pharmas, private for-profit hospitals and private insurance carriers) is accelerating inflation and making the United States that much less competitive than every developed country on earth.” WSJ.

The land of Mercedes, Porsche and BMW (Germany) – not exactly socialists – has a first-rate universal healthcare program that costs significantly less per capita than US figures. The old GOP and its MAGA replacement are costing Americans billions extra per year, all of which goes into high corporate profits and the highest CEO pay in history anywhere on earth. We can and must do better. It’s not about cutting government spending if you are shifting those same costs at higher rates to the private sector and all consumers!

I’m Peter Dekom, and if you like inflation and lower taxes for the rich, MAGA’s got the perfect program for you!