The Destructive Arrogance of American Corporate Greed

 

From its own political arrogance and willingness to distort economic realities, the United States has fomented income/wealth inequality and other forms of economic distortion like never before. Today, CEOs of major companies routinely make 300+ times the compensation of their average worker… up slowly over time from the 50+ multiple in the 1950s. Since the 1970s, US presidents have routinely violated the economic notion of belt-tightening in wartime (the old guns or butter axiom) by cutting taxes when they know they are spending vastly more. A major political party has routinely presented, as a success strategy, the supply-side/trickle down “incent the job creators” theory (under the laughable Laffer Curve) with low taxes, even though it has been totally discredited. Tax cuts are routinely sold under this failed theory even though the benefits go to the ultra-rich, and the resulting deficits (with lots of interest) are passed down to all taxpayers… with no overall benefits to the nation.

We have made increasing educational instruction and/or highly specialized trade school training a major prerequisite for a good job, all the while increasing tuition at a rate that is triple the annual cost of living indices. As we spend increasing sums on executive compensation and wages, willing to borrow to sustain that lifestyle, we are avoiding the very necessary investment in our present and future. Look at how long it took to pass even a modest infrastructure bill, even as our dams, bridges, highways and levees were/are failing at an alarming rate; our power grids are in dire need of replacement… but kicking that can down the road has become an American pastime more popular than football or baseball. Effectively, we are living on the massive post-WWII investments in our future. After WWII, the rest of the world was way behind us, many developed nations deployed their investment capital to repair wartime devastation.

Slowly, the rest of the world not only caught up, their “new” investments represented serious upgrades to manufacturing technology that were far more competitive than American old-world facilities. We hired “specialized” immigrants – now a wildly unpopular theme – to fill STEM requirements, because there were not enough qualified Americans able to fill those jobs. Now we want to push them out… as Canada, the UK, lots of EU nations, Australia, New Zealand, etc. are ready to bring them in to grow those nations’ economies.

We often use the word “Great” in our political discourse, but neither party gets it right. I suspect the MAGA GOP gets it significantly less often than the Dems, but there is no pride in protective efforts to eliminate the need to upgrade our competitiveness. Too many American billionaires got there from artificial financial games: roll-ups, private equity buy and flip strategies, highly leveraged restructuring, off-balance sheet tax-avoidance efforts, weird derivative investments, share buybacks, to name just a few. And no, Donald, tariffs are not paid by foreign nations; their cost is usually borne by US consumers. They are a poor substitute for upgrades to competitiveness… and making cutting-edge manufactures.

So, today, I would like to visit two major American corporations – Ford and Boeing – that are waking up to reality… examples of how the whole country is getting it wrong. The first exploration is based on a September 14th piece by Mike Colias in the Wall Street focused on Ford CEO Jim Farley’s revelation after visiting carmakers in China: “Jim Farley had just returned from China. What the Ford Motor… chief executive found during the May visit made him anxious: The local automakers were pulling away in the electric-vehicle race.

“In an early-morning call with fellow board member John Thornton, an exasperated Farley unloaded… The Chinese carmakers are moving at light speed, he told Thornton, a former Goldman Sachs executive who spent years as a senior banker in China. They are using artificial intelligence and other tech in cars that is unlike anything available in the U.S. These Chinese EV makers are using a low-cost supply base to undercut the competition on price, offering slick digital features and aggressively expanding to overseas markets… ‘John, this is an existential threat,’ Farley said.

“For years, Tesla was the main source of consternation for auto CEOs trying to tackle a transition to electric vehicles. Now, it is the rapid rise of nimble automakers in China that have rattled executives from Detroit to Germany and Japan. Even Tesla’s Elon Musk recently called the Chinese the ‘most competitive’ carmakers in the world.” Viable Chinese EVs are hitting the global market with retail prices from $12K-$25K per vehicle. And no, this is not the result of “cheap” Chinese labor; it’s not cheap anymore. It is instead the result of state-of-the art automation based on sustained excellence in engineering. The United States has killed the potential for substantial sales of these vehicles here with exceptionally high tariffs, a practice mirrored in most of the developed world where car-making is a major industry. But those PRC cars are selling well everywhere else!

Now, Let’s take a look at a typical American practice: substituting quality engineering leadership with cost-cutting “profits are all that matters” financial leadership. Michael Hiltzik’s September 10th editorial brings home the story of Boeing, having left its Washington State manufacturing hub for a finance driven headquarters in Chicago… now moving once against to the Washington, DC area (as a major government contractor): “Reporting on the announcement … that Boeing Co. had reached a landmark contract agreement with its largest union [later rejected by its members] tended to focus on its economic components, such as wage increases of 25% to 33% over four years, a reduction in employee costs for healthcare and improvements in retirement benefits…

“‘This contract deepens our commitment to the Pacific Northwest,’ Stephanie Pope, chief executive of the company’s commercial airplanes division, said in a video message to workers. ‘It is where generations of workers have built incredible airplanes that connect the world.’… Yet there may be more to that commitment: It’s a tacit acknowledgment that Boeing’s decades-long effort to juice its share price and maximize its short-term profits by undervaluing its traditions of superb engineering and rigorous quality control has failed by turning it into a corporation that makes neither money nor trustworthy products.

“Boeing hasn’t turned a profit since 2018. Its aircraft have a troubling reputation for falling out of the sky and coming apart in mid-flight… Its Starliner, which is designed to ferry crews to and from the International Space Station, has been judged so unreliable that NASA determined that it was safer to strand two astronauts on the ISS until February than to bring them back to Earth on the Boeing craft. (The Starliner returned to Earth Saturday [9/14], minus the astronauts.)… The first misstep was Boeing’s acquisition of the failing McDonnell Douglas in 1997. ‘In contrast to Boeing’s culture of engineering excellence, McDonnell Douglas focused on cost-cutting and upgrading older airplane models at the expense of all-new aircraft,’ [said] Bill George, an executive fellow at Harvard Business School…

“Cost-cutting became the theme of Boeing’s operational decisions. In 2019 it announced that it would move all manufacturing of its wide-body 787 Dreamliner to its plant in North Charleston, S.C., ending split responsibilities between that plant and Washington state. The company attributed the change to the need for efficiency, but given South Carolina’s position as a nonunion state, it was widely viewed as a slap at the machinists union, which had staged a 58-day strike in 2008….

“Another cost-cutting move — outsourcing design and manufacturing of Dreamliner components to subcontractors around the world — resulted in a comedy of errors causing so many problems that executives acknowledged it would have been cheaper to keep the work in-house. Some parts manufactured by far-flung suppliers didn’t fit together. Some subcontractors couldn’t meet their output quotas, creating huge production logjams when crucial parts weren’t available in the necessary sequence.

“Rather than follow its old model of providing parts subcontractors with detailed blueprints, Boeing required suppliers to create their own blueprints. At least one major supplier didn’t even have an engineering department when it won its contract, according to an analysis of the 787 by the European consortium Airbus, Boeing’s top global competitor.” Given the multiple crashes for it 737 Max and the blowout of a badly installed door in an Alaska Air 737 Max, clearly moving the company far from its manufacturing hub, prioritizing cost-reduction above all else, and tanked Boeing’s reputation everywhere. The new CEO, Kelly Ortberg, was hired from the outside. He has a huge problem to fix. But what is reflected in the above problems at Ford and Boeing just may be what’s wrong with America’s corporate ethos: prioritize profits over quality. We all lose.

I’m Peter Dekom, and letting “business leaders” become our political leaders suggests that we just might be able to import losing business strategies into running our nation… into the ground.

Outer Space is Running Outer Money

  

“We have a 20th century infrastructure for a 21st century space program.”

In order to accommodate rich folks and corporations, which most definitely do not need more money, the United States – often under the false premise of indirect job creation – has championed a conservative path to cut taxes for these scions of wealth… while cutting benefits for Social Security and Medicare recipients, while slashing budgets for the real job creators: education and pure scientific research. Rightwing candidates are throwing pablum at the masses (like not taxing tips, overtime and social security, if they can even get those through Congress) while proposing inflation busters like across the board tariffs. And no, nations do not pay those tariffs; the consumers of those impost almost always do.

Even Trump’s alma mater, Wharton, projects that Trump’s tariffs and tax cuts will increase our deficit by over $4 trillion, double the net economic impact of Kamala Harris’ proposals. Remembering that the single largest federal budget item is interest on the deficit (not even reducing principal), it seems clear that Trump is benefitting his rich cronies and saddling everyone with the cost of that cronyism.

Today, however, I want to talk about one particular budgetary item that has had a miraculous track record of creating job-rich cutting-edge technology. But before I dive in, I would like to differentiate between investments and expenses. The former is all about spending money with the hope of a hard-value return. The latter may protect us or pay our bills, but it does not create long-term economic values.

Modern austerity is too often built on refusing to upgrade our productivity necessary infrastructure, increasingly shoving the costs of higher education and trade school on students (or simply dispensing with sustainable quality) and finding scientific and medical research to be a budgetary expendable. Just take a look at the absurd level of student loans, the deplorable plunge in our high school scores on international tests compared to other countries, and our tsunami of dependence on foreign medical/pharmacological research, patents and manufacturing. Our habit of kicking the can down the road seems to be the new American self-inflicted “fentanyl-like” addiction.

For those alive in 1969, witnessing American astronauts walking on the moon, it was a matter of American pride and determination. Born of the American “can do” reaction to the first launch of an Earth-orbital satellite, the 1957 Soviet launch of Sputnik, Republican President Dwight David Eisenhower, with Congress clearly feeling the painful embarrassment, embarked on a multipronged effort to bolster infrastructure, education, research and an invigorate space program. We dug in and built a highway system like no other, our schools became the finest on Earth and NASA brought us a litany of invention an innovation… OK, and Tang orange mix too. Trump may have created a new Space Force, but he sure as heck had no idea what to do with it.

From launch towers to more ancient computers than we are willing to admit, to our space station, NASA’s infrastructure is crumbling like much of what we see every day in our highways, dams, bridges and levees. Military priorities still abound, but everyone is making do with less and older. Corinne Purtill, writing for the September 15th Los Angeles, Times, brings it home: “In a report commissioned by Congress and released [in early September], experts said that a number of the agency’s technological resources are suffering, including the Deep Space Network — an international collection of giant radio antennas that is overseen by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Cañada Flintridge.

“Report authors warned that NASA has, for too long, prioritized near-term missions at the cost of long-term investments in its infrastructure, workforce and technology… ‘The inevitable consequence of such a strategy is to erode those essential capabilities that led to the organization’s greatness in the first place and that underpin its future potential,’ the report said… The choice facing the agency is stark, lead author Norman Augustine said last week: Either the U.S. must increase funding for NASA, or the agency must cut some missions… ‘For NASA, this is not a time for business as usual,’ said Augustine, a former executive at Lockheed Martin. ‘The concerns it faces are ones that have built up over decades.’...

“‘This report aligns with our current efforts to ensure we have the infrastructure, workforce, and technology that NASA needs for the decades ahead,’ NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said in a statement provided by the agency. ‘We will continue to work diligently to address the committee’s recommendations — and drive our cutting-edge work on Earth, in the skies, and in the stars.’

“Another key problem the report identified is neglect of NASA’s facilities, 83% of which have exceeded their designed life span… Attempts to repair and improve the agency’s infrastructure are stifled by a rule requiring a lengthy and labor-intensive review process for all requests over $1 million, a figure that has not changed since the rule’s inception despite a 30% increase in costs from inflation…

“As a key example of a facility whose funding has failed to keep up with its increasing demands, the report highlighted the Deep Space Network, which makes up the world’s largest scientific telecommunications system… JPL manages the network’s three terrestrial sites in Goldstone, near Barstow; Canberra, Australia; and Madrid. The network’s budget has declined from $250 million in 2010 to roughly $200 million today, even as demands on it have increased.” As of this writing, there were 19 astronauts circling the Earth, four are Americans working on NASA-launched projects, and the balance are “astronauts” working on private missions, Russians, Chinese, etc. Iran just launched its first orbital satellite. Four!!!

Not only are such future technologies what have always created jobs at the edge of technology, space-related projects are essential for our own economic survival. If you are wondering what our enemies can do to us from their orbiting satellites, please see my September 6th What Can a Weak and Hobbled Russia Do Against the US? blog for some nasty details. For one of the greatest value investments our federal government has ever made, we sure should be spending a whole lot more than one-tenth of one percent of our GDP investment in our future.

I’m Peter Dekom, and running a government is not remotely like running a business; it has to make sense, but it is not required to make a direct profit.

Who’s Winning – Israel or the Axis of Resistance?

First, let’s state the obvious: Iran and her surrogates (the core of the Axis of Resistance), are a group of anti-Western terrorists who wish to drive Israel off the map and humiliate the United States (generally linked as Israel’s enabler) and our allies… pushing them out of the Middle East. Happily, bolstered by global supporters like Russia and China. Although the driving force behind this Axis is a Shiite-Islamic nemesis – led by Iran – its tentacles have reached into Sunni strongholds (e.g., Gaza), evidencing a willingness to overlook a schism between the mysticism of the Shia faith vs the fundamentalism of the vast Islamic majority Sunni following, destabilizing the entire region. Leaders on both sides of this Israel/Iran conflict seem to believe innocent civilians are expendable.

As I have noted before, when the US deposed Saddam Hussein (who led the 20% Sunni majority that ruled a mostly Shiite Iraq), we effectively elevated that Shiite group (Shiite majority Iran and Iraq, Shiite-led Syria and Lebanon and the other Iranian surrogates) to be the dominant power in the Middle East. On the cusp of having their own nuclear weapons, Iran accelerated the development of the necessary weaponized fissionable materials when, in 2018, the United States pulled out the 2015 accord that had theretofore successfully contained Iran’s nuclear enrichment program. It is a matter of time… assuming they do not already have nukes; they certainly have the missiles to deliver that payload.

Now, with an effective second front posing a new, wider war between Israel and that Axis of Resistance, Israeli PM Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu has drawn a red line in the sand against the massive launch of Hezbollah upgraded missiles from Southern Lebanon into Israel. Hezbollah’s escalation, ostensibly in support of Hamas and the civilians in Gaza, pushed Netanyahu to reciprocal escalation, putting the entire region at risk for a much broader war. Facing a continued corruption trial which has been stayed by these conflicts, Netanyahu has made it clear that he would prefer to escalate Israel’s military efforts rather than negotiate with his Shiite enemies.

Can Israel win against the Axis of Resistance? It clearly has a superior military (the IDF), heavily supplied by the US. It has nuclear weapons. But so did the United States when we lost in Vietnam and Afghanistan. So, let’s examine Israel’s position and what it has lost and may continue to lose if they continue this conflict. First, Israel’s economy is hitting its lowest point in half a century. With soldiers called up, so many Israeli companies are teetering. There’s a whole lot fewer consumers with money to spend, and Israel’s export market is thus trashed.

Secondly, despite its strength, Israel seems to have accepted that the Hamas-held hostages in Gaza are expendable and, despite international opprobrium, the slaughter of legions of innocent Gazans (a position seemingly adopted as to Lebanon as well) is just an ugly “necessity” as Israel simply “defends itself against terrorism.” Israel virtually assures a continuing death spiral by refusing entreaties by much of the rest of the world (including the United States) for a ceasefire (with Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon) and a long-term peace predicated on a two-state solution for Palestinians within the land controlled by Israel. Netanyahu is clearly and profoundly against any such negotiations. Yet his track record to date, including an initial promise of a quick victory in Gaza and setting the impossible goal of eliminating Hamas entirely, is one of prolonged failure laced with a tsunami of images of dead children and decimated cities, where innocent civilians once lived.

Third, the best Israel can hope for is what seems to be a pyric victory… one that could make the power of the Axis of Resistance subside… until it regains the strength it may lose. Without a sustainable peace, wars will continue to erupt. But as evidenced by the direct damage in each of Iran and Israel, it is Israel that is suffering the greatest loss by reason of a war of attrition.

Fourth, even within her ally the United States, there is a rising anti-Isreal sentiment among younger voters, in favor of cutting off the US supply of weapon systems to Israel. They are not old enough to remember and admire tiny Israel fending off regional Arab nations fighting wars to eliminate Israel altogether… and surviving in triumph. All they see today is an arrogant and corrupt Netanyahu ordering mass slaughter against hapless innocents. Our November elections will be impacted by this trend. But the longer-term suggests that as these rising generations assume more political power, they will severely curtail US military support for Israel.

Fifth, there is a massive global increase of antisemitism, as Judaism is conflated (sometimes even by Jewish religious leaders) with pro-Israeli Zionism. Hate crimes in the US – and it is much worse in parts of Europe with substantial Jewish populations – have required synagogues to hire private security against a litany of violent antisemitic acts… and amped up police protection on top of that. Yet as anti-Israel campus riots have shown here, there are also many Jewish students who cannot tolerate Israel’s massive retaliatory slaughter of innocents. As polarized as we already were, this Middle Eastern conflict has polarized us further.

What has Iran, leader of the Axis of Resistance, lost? Almost nothing, but it has cemented its ties with America’s great protagonist, Russia, which has trained and supplied Hezbollah directly. Iran’s universities and advanced curricula offer much higher teaching standards than most American acknowledge; Iran has a tradition of academic excellence that goes back thousands of years. They are more than capable of manufacturing sophisticated weapons.

Excepting some relatively minor exchanges directly with Israel – including assassinations of leading Shiite figures by Israel’s Mossad – the vast majority of casualties have not touched Iran itself… but have inflicted serious losses “on the other side” among Iran’s surrogates and surrounding populations, mostly in Gaza, Southern Lebanon and Yemen. As between Iran and Israel, Iran’s greatest internal losses have been inflicted by US-led sanctions with minimal success. Though initially successful, US ties with other regional Arab states are fraying fast. Russia, China and North Korea are smiling. Logic would suggest that there is a much better path out of this. But did Israel’s targeted strike in Beirut, Lebanon, killing Hezbollah leader and founder Hassan Nasrallah, send a message of deterrence… or serve as an invitation to escalate? Not looking good.

I’m Peter Dekom, and while anger has escalated beyond all reason in this Middle Eastern debacle, common sense and realpolitik have left the building.

Whose Supreme Court is It Anyway

Chief Justice John Roberts in

 

Trump vs United States

Whose Supreme Court is It Anyway?

The Dark Legacy of the Roberts Court

Donald Trump cemented control of one of the three branches of government, possibly for decades, with his appointment of three very conservative justices, creating a 6-3 very conservative court. If Trump did not win the 2020 election, his protests that continue to the very day that the election was “stolen,” he most certainly turned the United States into a MAGA-run nation with a very long tail no matter how the 2024 election configures. If Trump is reelected, you can bet that Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas will retire, allowing Trump to ensure his lingering stamp on just about everything for a very, very long time.

Until Trump’s rebuilding the Court into a clear and enduring MAGA legacy, Harvard-law-educated and Chief Justice since 2005 (appointed by G.W. Bush), John Roberts, struggled with a Court that lacked leadership, cohesiveness and effective jurisprudence. A combination of factors – the refusal of GOP Senators to consider Merrick Garland’s nomination and the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg (who simply overstayed on the Court long enough to hand Trump the ability to control the Court) – changed what was clearly a rudderless Court into a rightwing dream. Roberts, who had masqueraded as a swing vote Justice, was no longer that swing vote neutral. His mask came off, and the Court veered heavily to the right. Trump won big.

Minorities of color were increasingly susceptible to unchecked voter suppression. Gunowners were able to stomp on sensible gun control, even after a litany of mass shootings (including on many campuses – death-by-gun became our leading killer of children and young teens). Women faced a loss of reproductive freedom and medical choice (even in emergencies) in one-third of American states, and doctors faced criminalization of their sworn duties, after Roe v Wade was reversed. Administrative agencies, laced with seasoned and educated experts, were eviscerated and replaced with rightwing Trump appointee-judges with fact-averse and uneducated judicial opinions. The separation of church and state was fading away. The President of the United States was accorded unprecedented immunity for undefined “official” acts, a status usually reserved for absolute monarchs and autocrats. 1/6/21 rioters, who inflicted massive damage to the Capitol and death and serious injury to Capitol police officers, were given new relaxed standards for criminal responsibility. “Originalism” – which limited constitutional interpretation to the historical circumstances at the time of enactment, requiring judges to delve into history, well outside of any legal inquiry – became the required judicial standard for review. Justices who clearly embraced political biases in their personal life were not required to recuse themselves where those biases were at issue. And the Justices themselves discovered that bribery from biased sources, representing parties and issues that frequently were before the Court, was “A-OK.” There were no ethical boundaries on Supreme Court justices.

Read the above, extra-long, paragraph again. It is long for a reason; a rogue Supreme Court under an unmasked bias Chief Justice, was hell-bent on rewriting the Constitution and bending or repealing a long litany of Supreme Court rulings and standards of interpretation. Even as the sizeable MAGA faction in Congress was struggling to implement MAGA values (read: white Christian nationalism), the Supreme Court had no problem imprinting MAGA values everywhere. Perhaps a President’s greatest power is indeed appointing Supreme Court justices.

But after Trump lost the 2020 election, Chief Justice Roberts quickly became Donald Trump’s unequivocal ally on the Court. Eschewing the normal careful read and review of the pleadings and briefs on specific cases before taking a stand, Roberts became “all Trump, virtually all the time,” even well before cases were submitted to the Court. Doing a deep dive into the Court’s internal practices, this Trump-shifted Chief Justice became the basis for a September 15th investigative report for the New York Times, vetted by several other credible periodicals, by Jodi Kantor and Adam Liptak: “Last February, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. sent his eight Supreme Court colleagues a confidential memo that radiated frustration and certainty.

“Former President Donald J. Trump, seeking to retake the White House, had made a bold, last-ditch appeal to the justices. He wanted them to block his fast-approaching criminal trial on charges of attempting to overturn the 2020 election, arguing that he was protected by presidential immunity. Whatever move the court made could have lasting consequences for the next election, the scope of presidential power and the court’s own battered reputation.

“The chief justice’s Feb. 22 memo, jump-starting the justices’ formal discussion on whether to hear the case, offered a scathing critique of a lower-court decision and a startling preview of how the high court would later rule, according to several people from the court who saw the document.

“The chief justice tore into the appellate court opinion greenlighting Mr. Trump’s trial, calling it inadequate and poorly reasoned. On one key point, he complained, the lower court judges ‘failed to grapple with the most difficult questions altogether.’ He wrote not only that the Supreme Court should take the case — which would stall the trial — but also how the justices should decide it… ‘I think it likely that we will view the separation of powers analysis differently’ from the appeals court, he wrote. In other words: grant Mr. Trump greater protection from prosecution.

“In a momentous trio of Jan. 6-related cases last term, the court found itself more entangled in presidential politics than at any time since the 2000 election, even as it was contending with its own controversies related to that day. The chief justice responded by deploying his authority to steer rulings that benefited Mr. Trump, according to a New York Times examination that uncovered extensive new information about the court’s decision making.

“This account draws on details from the justices’ private memos, documentation of the proceedings and interviews with court insiders, both conservative and liberal, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because deliberations are supposed to be kept secret… The chief justice wrote the majority opinions in all three cases, including an unsigned one in March concluding that the former president could not be barred from election ballots in Colorado.” Roberts also pulled decisions to be written by Samuel Alito, following the latter’s overt symbolic MAGA flag messages flying over his residences… but Roberts was equally clear in his Trumpian vision as he took over writing those opinions. It appears obvious this pro-Trump bias defines Roberts’ legacy as Chief Justice… and points out the danger of lifetime appointments of biased judges.

I’m Peter Dekom, and it is deeply offensive to me as a lawyer when the highest judge in the highest court in the land moves from necessary judicial neutrality to becoming the greatest advocate for a single individual person, reinforcing the notion that there at least two systems of justice in this land: one for Donald Trump…. and another for everyone else.

Is DEI the New N-Word, Pretending to Be the New Equality Standard?

Is DEI the New N-Word, Pretending to Be the New Equality Standard?

"We know what the tools of domination look like. More of our future hinges on this election than at any point, and more of our future will depend on what even happens if Harris wins or the Democratic Party secures the White House — it's not over. It ain't over… There's way more to come, much more work to do, and looking at what's happening at the state-level tells us all we need to know about [how the 1025 Project reflects the Heritage Foundation’s] vision is for the entire nation." 

 Khalil Gibran Muhammad, a Harvard University professor of history, race and public policy

I recent read a study (Slaveholder ancestry and current net worth of members of the United States Congress by academics Neil K. R. Sehgal and Ashwini R. Sehgal, published August 21st in PLOS) that examined the entire 2021 Congress focused on a truly interesting question. Is there a lasting link between those whose lineage traces back to the era of slavery in America, notably slave-owning families, and their subsequent generations… looking at that clearly identifiable and measurable cohort. The results paint a stark picture of wealth disparity. The median net worth across all 535 Congress members was $1.28 million. However, legislators whose ancestors enslaved 16 or more people had a median net worth of $5.62 million – more than five times the overall average.

In a recent study at the Yale University Institution for Social Policy Studies (ISPS), published on September 12th, reacted to an earlier statistical analysis of demographics in major cities from Harvard-based nonprofit group (Opportunity Insights) that found that: “recently published data linking parent and child tax records, [showed] a significant gap in economic mobility attained by Black males compared with white males. However, data for females showed no racial mobility gap. And the racial mobility gap between Black and white males varied from city to city….

“[ISPS fellow researchers] Rourke O’Brien, an associate professor of sociology, and Manuel Schechtl, assistant professor of public policy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill… found that the racial mobility gap increased in relation to the per capita size of a city’s police force — for males but not females. In addition, they found that the increased exposure to police personnel during the teenage and young adult years of people studied led to a higher likelihood of incarceration for Black males compared with white males.

“‘For other groups — Black females, white males, and white females — there were better outcomes,’ Schechtl said. ‘For them, more policing might have primarily meant less crime. But our findings are consistent with a large body of research showing that where there is more intensive policing, Black males are more likely to make contact with the criminal justice system, negatively impacting their levels of educational attainment and ability to secure a good job.’” Convict a Black man and kill his future and his family. These results pushed my mind in a different direction. All this controversy over whether the vestiges of long passed slavery is long gone – where even the US Constitution held a slave to be 3/5th of a person for Census purposes – may instead have been perpetuated racism way beyond Reconstruction and Jim Crow restrictions and been preserved into the present day. Some folks have an advantage that never ends; others have a disadvantage that never ends.

It appeared that even other darker skinned minorities (ethnically from India, Latin America, etc.) were effectively dumped into this “less than a full person” paradigm. As immigration mounted and the number of African American and other darker-skinned minorities became significant voting blocks, it seemed that white Christian traditionalists began to amp up their demands on police specifically in neighborhoods with darker-skinned minorities, increased their pressure to exclude voters of color with voting requirements that would cull the darker-skinned herd, created new pressures to rewrite or even ban history books and lesson plans that dealt candidly with slavery and the continued discrimination that was anything but eliminated by an era of civil rights legislation. White Christian nationalism was reborn and slowly usurped an entire political party, which became a MAGA dominated GOP. Civil rights were being reversed by the courts and legislated away by state legislatures and even by our own GOP members of Congress.

But touting white supremacy was now socially unacceptable – no one wanted to admit to being a racist – so new “wink-wink” buzzwords were developed. It seemed that obvious racial bigots, even marching with torches chanting “they will not replace us” were “fine people.” Any books, politicians, teachers or journalists that presented an accurate history of slavery or modern-day discrimination against all sorts of minorities were labeled “woke,” a word that was left without a clear definition, although everyone understood it to support the supremacy of white Christian nationalism. Efforts to assist those who faced inferior schools or were raised within a community which had been treated as second class citizens were also labeled as “woke” and unacceptable.

And for those people of color who rose to level of success that negated those assumption of inferiority (the 3/5th of a person feeling that still lingered) were now cast with a new label to reinforce their assumed inferiority to whites. As Kimberly Richards, writing for the September 15th Huffington post notes: “Conservatives have turned the term DEI — which refers to programs that promote diversity, equity and inclusion — into a disparaging dog whistle, and use the phrase ‘DEI hire’ to suggest members of marginalized groups don’t actually earn their achievements… During the 2024 presidential campaign, Republicans have lobbed attacks against Vice President Kamala Harris, now the Democratic presidential nominee, referring to her as a ‘DEI hire.’” And so, for those believing that as long as they did not directly use the “N” word, and thus that they were not racists, a new improved “N” word came into being with sufficient plausible deniability that racists could hide behind it.

But these words underpin efforts to add voting restrictions to keep those non-white minorities away. Efforts to require a birth certificate may seem innocent, but so many Indigenous Peoples and Blacks were born in backwater venues or reservations, not in hospitals, where birth certificates were never secured. It does not take much more than a mild scraping of history to know what these voting restrictions are intended to effect. “Woke” and “DEI-hire” – and actions based on the underlying assumptions – are racism: “Still, if United States history has imparted anything, it’s that this language isn’t isolated to just words. It often materializes in action that works to the detriment of the people the language is meant to exclude. Against a backdrop of a national effort to eliminate diversity, equity and inclusion policies in schools, universities and corporations, the right's mobilization around ‘DEI’ and ‘DEI hire’ appears all the more dangerous.”

I’m Peter Dekom, and simply put, the embrace by legislatures and courts against DEI opportunities or Woke books and lessons enables, justifies and perpetuates racism pretty much the way the discriminatory words and phrases were used to justify the Jim Crow era racism.

Dictators Love It – Citizens and Investors Don’t: Emasculating the Judiciary

  

Tens of thousands of Israelis protesting Netanyahu’s efforts to subjugate the judiciary to a political override (Spring 2023) 

Mexican protesters attempting to block a legislative vote to require only elected judges

"The party with the majority could take control of the judicial branch, and that would practically be the end of democracy… They want to own Mexico." 

Protester Javier Reyes, a 37-year-old federal court worker.

If a dictator or dictator wannabe cannot directly take over all the checks and balances that could indeed limit his power – effectively ruling as a complete autocrat – then the next best thing is to declaw the judiciary’s power over him… usually under the pretext of returning control of the judiciary to the people or their elected representatives. This limited control over the judiciary allows the autocrat (real or wannabe) to pretend to be in a democracy. And it is the modern trend of seemingly democratic nations moving to elect “strongmen” where I am focused today.

In the middle of a corruption trial, long before the Gaza attack, PM Benjamin Netanyahu sought to allow the unicameral Knesset (Israel’s parliament) to override judicial decisions. Israel also has never enacted a constitution. As Netanyahu’s coalition controlled the Knesset, we all know the PM’s obvious intent. The images above left show how dramatically unpopular Netanyahu’s reform efforts were with Israelis almost everywhere, but his ultra-rightwing coalition seemed ready to defy these popular sentiments.

Of course, the October 7, 2023, brutal attack on innocent Israeli citizens and the massive subsequent Israeli counterattack, which seems to have resulted in the deaths of over 40,000 equally innocent Gaza civilians, gave Netanyahu a rallying point to get the Israeli population behind him… and the continuation of that war allows Netanyahu to delay his trial and perhaps get that right to override the courts. Or not.

In Hungary, a member of both NATO and the European Union, autocrat Viktor Orbán has spent considerable time (well over a decade) and effort to reorganize his nation’s judiciary to the point of total subjugation to Orbán’s will. In the fall of 2022, Áron Demeter, program director at Amnesty International Hungary, said: “If you go against the government or your case interferes with political goals, there is definitely a chance that [the government] can put either formal or informal pressure on the court.” Orbán used courts to bankrupt and arrest his political opponents, to silencie critical media entities, which have been conveniently resold to Orbán’s cronies.

We tend to expect less from developing countries, especially those lacking in a history of democratic representational governance. That’s bad enough when it occurs far from our shores, but under Mexico’s populist President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, whose is termed out on Oct. 1, we have a neighbor nation that finds having an independent judiciary abhorrent. Under the guise of fighting corruption, Obrador is getting rid of existing judges to be replaced in an election. Since the power that sweeps in a new Mexican President into office, especially in this era of autocratic populism continuing under an increasingly false mantle of democracy, the winner of that national election will effectively sweep his/her chosen judges into office too. Put another way, it is overwhelmingly likely that whatever this populist regime wants to happen will never be opposed by partisan judges.

Obrador’s successor, Claudia Sheinbaum, is seen as an extension of his legacy. As Obrador convinced his legislature shortly before the end of his term to implement that judicial election format, the Wall Street Journal (September 15th) noted: “The main concern among investors is that by replacing all of the country’s federal judges and Supreme Court justices through elections, the ruling Morena party will have control over all three branches of government, compromising the independence of the judiciary and eroding the system of checks and balances. Under President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, whose term ends on Oct. 1, the courts blocked a number of government actions that favored state energy companies over private operators. Many fear they may no longer have that recourse.

“Investors also anticipate an increase in international arbitration and disputes under the U.S. Mexico Canada Agreement, which comes up for review in 2026. The trade pact has been key to foreign direct investment decisions and to Mexico becoming the biggest foreign supplier of goods to the U.S.

“Moody’s Ratings said this week that the overhaul could be particularly damaging to prospects for nearshoring and private investment in infrastructure, which President-Elect Claudia Sheinbaum is banking on. The proposed elimination of independent regulators, including the energy and antitrust commissions, adds a further layer of concern.”

The official US position is most definitely negative. Having this instability in one of our greatest trading partners, a huge source of our imported manufactured goods and agricultural products, is troubling. We should remember that having a reliable Mexico is an essential ally in securing our southern border, today not so much from Mexican residents who are only a minority of those seeking entry into the US, but mostly Central Americans fleeing their violence-prone nations as well as immigrants from other nations all over the world.

Yet even as we cast a worried eye to Mexico and its loss of a truly independent judiciary, we have our own country as an example of a “dictator on day one” who plans on weaponizing the Departments of Justice and Defense against a critical press, his political opponents, and anyone he believes might be an undocumented alien, even the Dreamers who have never lived anywhere else. All this is possible from the same Supreme Court that reversed Roe v Wade and has allowed states to chip away at voting rights, particularly those likely to vote for Democrats. Justice may be one of Donald Trump’s early swamp-draining targets. An independent judiciary is his enemy.

If reelected, Trump would have the ability to further extend his rightwing populist mandate for decades, simply by allowing the elder conservatives on the Court to retire (in fact as to all federal courts)… and replace them with exactly the kind of judges he appointed the first time around. Young, and since they are appointed for life, likely to remain justices for decades. Oh, and then there’s the Supreme Court’s immunity ruling… giving Trump effective prosecutorial immunity (short of an exemption from impeachment and the impossible hurdle of Senate conviction) for all actions in his “official” presidential capacity… a word that is both left underdefined with a strong sentiment to keep presidential communications to federal officials away from prying judicial eyes.

I’m Peter Dekom, and if you care about having the possibility of a return toward an independent judicial system, know that your vote on November 5th may determine that result.

 

Terrorist Recommended: American Style Banking

 

Terrorist Recommended: American Style Banking

We Seem to Have Done It to Ourselves

After the US and her allies triumphed against Iraq following their 1990/91 invasion of Kuwait in the first Gulf War, former Director of the CIA and then President, George H W Bush, did not depose Iraq’s Sunni leader, Saddam Hussein, for a very good reason. Sunnis – Islam’s Quranic literalists representing 80% of the Muslim world – and Shiites – Islam’s spiritualists (only a cleric of the highest order can tell you what the Quaran means), representing 20% of Islam – intensely dislike and mistrust each other. Since Iran is well over 90% Shiite, it is at odds with most of the rest of Muslim countries (like Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Pakistan, etc.). Iraq, being 60% Shiite was well contained by a Sunni dictator and very much not under the influence and control of Iran. This nasty Hussein Sunni government was a good counter to Iran and her expansionist goals. Until…

That 20% Sunni minority government was blown out by the Second Gulf War that began in 2003, Saddam Hussein was deposed and ultimately executed, and the United States, under George W Bush, imposed both a transitional and later a more permanent “constitutional” government in which that 60% Shiite majority effective took control. Iraqi Sunnis suddenly found themselves investigated and arrested where they posed even a slight threat to the Shiite-dominated government. And here’s the headline: despite feigning an alliance with the United States, Shiite Iraq rapidly fell within Iran’s Shiite hegemony.

Shortly after the departure of US troops, the most powerful Iraqi Shia militia (the Mahdi Army, pictured above) created by Muqtada al-Sadr, was merged into the Iraqi military structure and disbanded as a separate force. Iran rapidly became the most powerful nation in the Middle East, committed to containing the United States and her allies, an avowed enemy of Israel, began developing nuclear weapons (always denied). With the use of surrogates in the Middle East and Africa, Iran spread its regional power with military aid and instruction. In short, by deposing Hussein, under our false premise of non-existent weapons of mass destruction, the United States destabilized the Middle East, in my opinion, for at least a century. The Gaza War is an obvious off-shoot of America’s de facto enabling of Iran’s rise to power by eliminating her Sunni enemy next door.

But there is another toxicity that developed as the US continued to pretend that “liberated Iraq” was/is our ally. Heavily sanctioned Iran, cut off from most of the necessary trade and banking from much of the world, was/is able to use that “American ally Iraq” whenever it required access to global banking, a fact that has made more than a few terrorist groups smile. According to David Cloud, writing for the September 9th Wall Street Journal, “Iraqi Banks Used U.S.-Created System to Funnel Funds to Iran… New York Fed’s process to move Baghdad’s oil earnings lacked key money-laundering safeguards, resulting in illicit transfers that financed terrorist groups for years…

“Among Iraqi banks overall, as much as 80% of the more than $250 million in dollar wire transfers flowing through them on some days were untraceable and some portion of that amount went secretly to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and the anti-U.S. militias it supports, according to U.S. officials.

“A top U.S. Treasury official told Iraqi officials at a Baghdad meeting in January that Iraqi banks ‘deliberately exploited’ their access to U.S. dollars to support the Quds Force, a paramilitary arm of the IRGC, and also the militia groups operating in Iraq that the Iranian government backs, according to U.S. officials familiar with the discussions.

“The militias were involved in ‘ongoing attacks’ on U.S. forces, including some that have caused casualties, Brian Nelson, undersecretary of the Treasury for terrorism and financial intelligence, told Central Bank of Iraq officials at the meeting, the officials familiar with the discussions said… The U.S. has taken action to block the suspected Iraqi banks from using the Fed system to transfer dollars, Nelson told the Journal in an interview. ‘It’s been important for Treasury to ensure those funds are not diverted in support of the Iranian regime.’ Nelson, who left Treasury in August, declined through a spokeswoman to discuss his talks with Iraqi officials.

“The crackdown on Iraqi banks started in late 2022 after more than a decade of U.S. inaction, even after warnings by the Pentagon inspector general as long ago as 2012 of potential fraud on the order of $800 million a week. Current and former U.S. officials said that over the years the U.S. implemented temporary restrictions on cash flows to Iraq, but feared that tight or permanent controls would plunge Iraq into economic chaos and set back its fight against Islamic State.

“For Iran, which has been sanctioned for illicit nuclear activity and for supporting terrorism, access to dollars is critical for buying weapons and parts for drones and missiles, and financing armed groups it supports around the Middle East, U.S. officials said.”

Indeed, what was obvious to me (and to former President George H W Bush), eliminating Iraq’s Sunni leaders was clearly predicated on profound ignorance of regional politics and the rather clear tension between Shiites and Sunnis in the Iran/Iraq theater. Even Iran’s ally Syria, which is 80% Sunni, is led by a super-oppressive Alawite (a branch of Shiites) Assad regime, representing a mere 10% of that nation’s faith. Russia is a heavy supporter of Iran and Syria… and de facto, Iraq. We made this happen. We enabled Iran to grow out of control. Those within that professional cadre of dedicated American civil servants, in both our intelligence agencies and the Department of State, absolutely knew what was happening… but a headstrong president and his advisors simply ignored what was obvious to the experts. The chaos we call the Middle East was thus further significantly derailed and exploded by bad decision-making at the top. 

I’m Peter Dekom, and as Donald Trump calls for disbanding the civil service and turning the Department of Justice on his political opponents, it is no wonder that those malign forces interfering with our upcoming election favor Trump to win.

Truth, Accountability and Manipulation

  

As a lawyer and legal scholar for a very long time, I long struggled with the conflicts inherent in analyzing the free speech provisions of the First Amendment (extended to states under the Fourteenth Amendment) against other provisions of the constitution (which, for example, gives copyright holders a monopoly in their works), using words to commit crimes (like fraud) and “obvious reality” (like not falsely yelling “fire” in a crowded theater). Our Founding Fathers could never have envisioned a world of mass media, much less highly slanted and often flagrantly wrong social media, and the profoundly negative impact on democracy that has resulted… some of the most basic reasons the Constitution needs to be reconstructed or replaced.

But there are nasty issues in what the replacement for the wide berth of free speech might be. What are the outside parameters, the red lines that could make falsehoods truly accountable? What form would that accountability take? Civil? Criminal? The free speech provisions of the Constitution do not apply to individuals, per se; they apply only to governmental efforts to contain or limit free speech. Does that include the book bans in red states? Who would be the arbiter of those red lines? As we know, there is a very different perception of what the First Amendment means depending on the politics of the deciders. How can neutrality in determining what can and what cannot be communicated be ensured… if it can. And if it cannot be ensured, is democracy a doomed philosophy of governance, one that is already teetering and withering against a sea of mis- and dis-information, well beyond the simplistic application of the laws of defamation?

Savvy politicians have learned that if you repeat a falsehood enough, never veering from the lie, and if you have some claim – charismatic or otherwise – to a wide enough platform, it becomes the gospel to your followers. It can lead to insurrection, murder, severe and inflexible polarization from extremes from the left and right. So many contemporary politicians can use their power to impose their lies on society and punish those who challenge them. Major public platforms have pretty much failed at content moderation – after all, controversy and extreme positions draw a larger audience, which is most appealing to advertisers… often reflecting the biases of owners and senior management anyway (X to Elon Musk, Fox to Rupert Murdoch, Meta to Mark Zuckerberg, etc.). Complaints made by those in power usually track very much along party lines.

Europe respects free speech, but there is no equivalent of our First Amendment. Symbols of Nazi power are usually banned, in France wearing clothing that reflects particular religious beliefs is not permitted in certain places, and social media platforms are held to much stricter standards… not given the wide leeway of Section 230 of our Communications Decency Act of 1996 (where social media platforms are given a large “safe harbor” from liability for third party postings). Proseltyzers of hate speech face vastly stricter containment in Europe than in the United States. There is a balancing act in all this, and no one has really got it right, but among true democracies (are we still?), the United States is a particularly highly polarized failure.

Russia clearly recognized the power of the First Amendment when the funneled lots of money to podcasters in the US who were already sympathetically aligned with Russia’s vision for the US (and their obvious preference to see Donald Trump reelected). The US federal government has recognized such obvious and overt efforts to fund these US voices, most of whom had no idea they were Moscow’s pawns. They use the First Amendment as a shield to their toxicity.

The US has just added new names to our Russian sanction list. Like: “Margarita Simonyan, the editor-in-chief of state media outlet RT [once also cable channel in the US], is among the Russian media managers sanctioned by the US for allegedly interfering in the 2024 presidential election… The 44-year-old has been described as the Kremlin's top propagandist and ideologue, almost more Putinist than the Russian president himself… Ms Simonyan responded to her name appearing in the US Treasury's sanctions list this week. ‘Oh, they woke up,’ she said on X. In reference to other RT employees on the list, she stated: ‘Well done, team.’” BBC.com, September 5th.

OK, we’re use to the “stolen election” mantra, parroted by Donald Trump and the MAGA faithful, and which “we won by a landslide” helped trigger an invasion of the Capitol on January 6, 2021. That Trump recently modified that statement – “we won by a whisker” in a recent interview – does not seem to have impressed his followers as relevant. But so many of these fabricated “alternative facts” (never supported by reality) are causing real harm. One of the most troublesome such fabrications casts climate change as a natural cycle… and that humanity has experienced this level of heat before and easily recovered. Thus, we don’t have to deal with it.

In fact, humanity has never experienced such increases in heat… ever. A few pseudo-scholars suggest that “that it was warmer in the Holocene, Roman, and medieval eras than it is today. The Holocene epoch covers human civilization and began almost 12,000 years ago… Rosh [D’arcy, a doctoral candidate with degrees in Earth and climate science] showed how there were warm periods in the recent past, including in the Roman and medieval ages, ‘but they weren't anywhere like as warm as today — and particularly on the global scale,’ he said… ‘If you look at the data for the Holocene, you can quite clearly see that modern temperatures are well above anything in the Holocene period, so this idea that it's been warmer in the Holocene is just wrong,’ Rosh said.” TCD.com, September 6th. You have to go back to the era of dinosaurs to see higher temperatures.

But the belief that climate change is just “nature’s normal cycle” is disinformation, pushed heavily by MAGA believers in amping up our production of fossil fuels, and is actually killing millions of people a year (from heat, more intense and frequent tropic storms and wildfires, spreading disease, starvation, conflicts over resources, flooding, etc.)… allowing more emissions and more toxicity as if such climate fabrications had the remotest truth. Cities like Phoenix, Dallas and Houston watched hundreds of heat-related fatalities in the early September.

Rightwingers and populists have a stake in making sure these truths are never allowed to take root. Where academic researchers, even at prestigious universities such as Stanford, are outing truth from social media fabrications, they often find their funding vaporizing. According to the mainstream, France-based AFP (from September 5th), “academics and think-tanks facing lawsuits by right-wing groups and subpoenas from a Republican-led congressional committee.

“The researchers are accused of colluding with the government to censor conservative speech online under the guise of fighting disinformation. They deny the claims and denounce the sweeping offensive as an intimidation campaign… AFP spoke with Renee DiResta, author of ‘Invisible Rulers: The people who turn lies into reality.’… She was formerly with the Stanford Internet Observatory (SIO), a non-partisan disinformation research project… Following the Republican-led investigation, her contract, along with those of many other staffers, was not renewed, leading to reports that the group was being dismantled under political pressure.”

To MAGA Trumpers, anything that seeks an inconvenient truth is a “witch hunt.” While amending or replacing the Constitution is a severe and perhaps impossible task, it seems equally clear that the way the United States is dealing with lies, that are seriously detrimental to us all, is not working. 

I’m Peter Dekom, and there are so many aspects of our now-ancient Constitution that are eroding our democracy at a hideous speed that we really need to get real or lose our freedoms completely.

Parables, Hyperbole, Lies and Political Manipulation

"They [Democrats] support abortion up to and even beyond the ninth month… The concept of having an abortion in the later months, and even execution after birth. And that's exactly what it is. The baby is born, the baby is executed after birth is unacceptable, and almost everyone agrees with that“ … “

[Legal Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio are] eating the dogs! The people that came in. They're eating the cats! They're eating, they're eating the pets of the people that live there." Trump statements during the September 10th presidential debate.

“The American media totally ignored this stuff until Donald Trump and I started talking about cat memes. If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do, Dana [Bash of CNN], because you guys are completely letting Kamala Harris coast.”

Ohio GOP Senator & Trump VP Running Mate, JD Vance in CNN interview on September 15th

"There's a lot of garbage on the internet and this is a piece of garbage that was simply not true, there's no evidence of this at all… These are positive influences on our community in Springfield and any comment about that otherwise I think is hurtful and is not helpful to the city of Springfield and the people of Springfield… Springfield is a good city, they [our citizens] are good people, they are welcoming people. We have challenges every day we are working on those challenges," 

Ohio GOP Governor & Trump supporter, Mike DeWine, on the September 15th ABC's This Week

Let’s begin. Where did this egregiously and obviously false premise of baby killing come from? Well, in 2019, former Democratic Virginia Governor “Northam began by explaining that third-trimester abortions come into the discussion when there are ‘severe deformities’ or ‘non-viable’ fetuses. In other words, babies that cannot survive outside the womb without extraordinary life-saving measures. He spoke about infants being kept ‘comfortable.’ He even pressed that multiple physicians being present is advisable in such cases because of how challenging it is to decide whether to keep a baby alive who will soon die anyway…

“Northman’s stance isn’t controversial, and we’ve already seen glimmers of what happens when abortion bans go into effect. Case in point, more infants died after Roe V. Wade was overturned simply because women couldn’t access abortions for fetuses that had little chance at survival. When Texas banned abortions in early pregnancy, infant and newborn deaths increased by 13%. Therefore, rather than terminating nonviable or risky pregnancies, women in Texas had to carry babies they knew would not survive outside the womb, only to watch those babies die after birth.

“Either way, trimester abortions are not as common as Republicans would like us to believe. In reality, less than 1% of abortions happen after 21 weeks of pregnancy, most commonly due to a health concern like a fetal abnormality or a risk to the mother’s life. Overwhelmingly, most abortions (93%) take place in the first trimester…. While the ‘post-abortion’ execution lie’s continuous circulation is odd, it’s not the first time Republicans have leaned into misinformation about abortion. Lies about ‘partial-birth abortion,’ which is not a medical term but a political one coined by the National Right to Life Committee (NRLC), being rampant have been repeated in the same way. ‘Partial birth abortion’ describes a D&X procedure—once a medical technique for terminating a pregnancy after 21 weeks—and has been illegal since 2003”. Sarah Bregel, writing for the September 11th FastCompany.com, adding “No, babies are not being executed after birth.”

Still, legions of MAGA Republicans stubbornly cling to the belief that the statements in the first quote above are true, even as they have been thoroughly debunked by leaders on both sides of the aisle. OK, but those illegal Haitians are eating local pets, right? First, these Haitians are not illegal (they have 18 months of temporary asylum), and there are no instances of such pet-eating. Springfield’s Republican Mayor Rob Rue and Ohio’s Republican Governor, Mike DeWine quickly debunked the above lies, the local police found the Haitians hardworking temporary residents that appeared to be a genuine value to this small town. What the Springfield locals did get is bomb and school shooting threats, as apparently nasty rumors continue being spread by local extremists like the KKK. DeWine demanded that GOP leaders “stop” spreading these lies.

But J.D. Vance’s admission that he and Trump routinely make up stories simply to get the press to focus on their issues is extraordinary. Writing for the September 16th Los Angeles Times, columnist Michael Hiltzik finds parallels in past propaganda efforts of rising autocratic regimes: “One that came up was a judgment by the Nazi Party’s chief racist ideologue, Alfred Rosenberg, about ‘The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,’ an antisemitic tract wholly fabricated by officials in czarist Russia.

“In 1934, Rosenberg wrote that the issue ‘was less the so-called authenticity of The Protocols than the inner truth of what is stated.’… When I first encountered this quote in a posting on X, I found it so overdetermined that I thought it must be apocryphal. It’s not. It has been documented by Holocaust historians. Indeed, Rosenberg’s thinking reflected the general approach to the ‘Protocols’ among Nazis. They included Hitler’s propagandist Joseph Goebbels, who wrote in his diary in 1924: ‘I believe in the inner, but not the factual, truth of The Protocols.’

“The Jewish community will recognize these statements as related to the ‘blood libel’—the persistent assertion that Jews used the blood of Christian children to bake matzoh or for other ritual purposes. A core tenet of Nazi antisemitism, it was designed to stir up anti-Jewish reaction with a visceral intensity. Of course it was completely fabricated… This is what Vance and Trump are up to. Vance surely knows that the poison he has injected into political discourse has no resemblance to truth. Pressed on the issue by CNN’s Dana Bash, he claimed to have heard about the pet kidnappings in Springfield from ‘a dozen’ constituents, 10 of whose stories are ‘verifiable and confirmable.’”

Admitting that such statements weren’t verifiable or true did not give the Trump/Vance ticket justification to continue to lie in a horrific effort at political manipulation. Yet, their most committed followers just do not care… some are even willing to bear arms to restore Donald “a dictator on day one” to the presidency.

I’m Peter Dekom, and even Vance’s on-camera admission that he and Trump lie to gain political advantage still isn’t enough to give Kamala Harris a clear and convincing lead in this election, which seems to be deadlocked in those necessary battleground states.