When Trump Rallies Go Viral

"Any protesters, anarchists, agitators, looters or lowlifes who are

 going to Oklahoma please understand, you will not be treated

like you have been in New York, Seattle, or Minneapolis.

It will be a much different scene!"

 Trump tweet, June 19^th.

Few if any of the thousands of individuals attending Trump’s Bank of Oklahoma Center (BOK) rally on June 20^th expected to contract the coronavirus. With safe distancing impossible within that enclosed space, still fewer were expected to and did in fact wear masks. To some, wearing a mask had become a political “anti-Trump” symbol, not a prudent health precaution. The President and those in “long lines” to get into the rally clearly ignored the government’s own Public health officials, including Trump administration epidemiologist Dr. Anthony Fauci, who expressed grave concern about Trump’s indoor rally and recommended precautions like face coverings. Even as six Trump staffers (from the advance team) tested positive for COVID-19 before the rally. Asymptomatic CV-19 spreaders? Quite possibly. Color Trump angry red.

But the embarrassment did not stop there. The President was expected to address the massive overflow crowd outside the 19,000-capacity arena before going inside to address the expected packed Tulsa, Oklahoma audience. But there was no overflow crowd, and rally organizers even had to push to make it appear as if there were a full house inside. Lots of empty seats. Bad news for Trump but good news in reducing the number of people risking exposure to the virus. All in a state where Trump carried every single county in the 2016 election. Fear of expected protesters? Too hot to stand outside? People worried about coronavirus with Oklahoma’s latest infection numbers creeping upwards? Especially from older and more vulnerable supporters. Trump’s failing predictions, increasingly obvious incompetence, and his resultant slippage in the polls?

Was the event sabotaged by anti-Trumpers? “TikTok users and fans of Korean pop music groups claimed to have registered potentially hundreds of thousands of tickets for Mr. Trump’s campaign rally as a prank. After the Trump campaign’s official account @TeamTrump posted a tweet asking supporters to register for free tickets using their phones on June 11, K-pop fan accounts began sharing the information with followers, encouraging them to register for the rally — and then not show.” New York Times, June 21^st. That may have had an impact, but traditionally, Trump’s diehard, passionate supporters have always gathered by the thousands outside these rallies with no expectation of getting tickets to enter. That clearly did not happen.

So, given Trump’s proclivity to blame others for his failures, who was his scapegoat for this debacle? He fell back onto the same-old, same-old. “Trump quickly blamed the ‘fake news’ for discouraging turnout and said ‘we had some very bad people outside, they were doing some very bad things,’ intimating that his supporters had been prevented from entering the arena.” Yahoo News, June 20^th. The “bad people” protesters purportedly blocking the entrance to the arena to this rally were a 30-minute walk away! Video footage outside the BOK Center confirmed that no one was blocking anything. Maybe even the protesters wanted to avoid the roiling super-spreaders heading inside.

When anti-Trumpers did mount a credible protest that moved blocks away from the BOK Center, local right-wing hooligans, backed by the police, closed in for some Trumpy fun: “Hundreds of marchers flooded the city’s downtown streets and blocked traffic at times, but police reported just one arrest as of Saturday afternoon [noted above]. Many on foot chanted, and some occasionally got into shouting matches with Trump supporters, who outnumbered them and yelled, ‘all lives matter.’… Later in the evening, a group of armed men began following the protesters. When the protesters blocked an intersection, a man wearing a Trump shirt got out of a truck and spattered them with pepper spray. Police later deployed an irritant gas to try and make the group disperse.” Associated Press, June 20^th. Otherwise: Lots of music. Lots of dancing. Shockingly peaceful.

There were so many empty seats at the rally that it would have been possible to have implemented safe distancing… but the optics for Mr Trump would have been terrible. The Tulsa Fire Marshal estimated 6,200 were in attendance; the Trump campaign said there were over 12,000. The campaign had predicated over 100,000 would show up in Tulsa. So, supporters were jammed into the lower section to suggest a packed house, and the cameras did not stray to empty sections in the upper gallery.

For epidemiologists, completely aware that nothing would stop the first mass Trump rally since the pandemic began – as Trump followers camped for days to gain admission, even as heat seared and rain poured down – this rally became a real-life experiment. This is how they framed the question: “Tulsa, Okla., is about to host an event that scientists call a ‘natural experiment.’ It may offer important clues about one of the COVID-19 pandemic’s most perplexing features: The undetected spread of the novel coronavirus by people who do not appear to be sick…

“Health experts are confident that the potentially deadly pathogen will jump from infected people who show no outward signs of illness to others who entered the arena virus-free… If recent trends in Oklahoma hold steady, 2.1% of those who become sick enough to be diagnosed with COVID-19 will die. And 41% of Oklahomans are at risk of becoming critically ill if infected by virtue of their age or underlying health conditions.” Los Angeles Times, June 20^th.

If the presence of a highly contagious disease in a very dangerous situation weren’t enough, with hundreds of National Guards on station, Tulsa was on full alert pending expected violent protests against the BOK massive gathering. Trump firmly believed he could provoke that nasty but still mysterious “antifa,” and his law and order tough guys would show them a thing or two. But the streets outside the BOK Center were mostly empty once the entire complement of Trump supporters went inside. Tulsa police did arrest a single protester, sitting peacefully on the street (pictured above), on orders from the Trump campaign. Guess those cops worked for Donald Trump and not the city. Strange how that happens.

The rally followed standard Trump excoriation, blame and bellicosity at institutions and individuals who oppose him, growing legions it seems with many defectors from his inner circle and his own party. “Settling into a version of the stump speech that he had delivered many times until he suspended campaigns in March as the coronavirus pandemic swept across America, Trump hit all of his familiar themes: his trade deals with China [which were canceled due to the virus], rebuilding the military, his appointment of hundreds of conservative judges, and told a long anecdote about how much money he saved on the purchase of a new airplane to replace Air Force One.

“Missing from his repertoire was his baiting the camera crews to pan the arena and show the size and enthusiasm of the crowd and thanking the fire marshals for letting him exceed the nominal capacity of the auditorium.

“Trump mentioned what he termed ‘the Chinese virus’ nearly 10 minutes into his remarks and gave himself high marks for his response to it, emphasizing the steps he took to shore up the price of oil. ‘It looked like we were in big trouble, and I got it together,’ Trump said, adding that he had called the leaders of Russia and Saudi Arabia and ‘got our energy back to almost $40 a barrel.’

“Trump told his crowd that ‘I have done a phenomenal job’ with the pandemic, pointing to the number of COVID-19 tests administered in the U.S. to date. But he also complained that more testing had revealed more cases of the disease caused by coronavirus.” Yahoo News. Trump’s statement that excessive testing was the sole reason CV-19 numbers seem so bad was vehemently contradicted by the measurable increases in CV-19 hospitalizations, admissions to intensive care units and rising deaths, numbers unrelated to test results. The White House later claimed Trump was “joking” about limiting testing. Either it was believable or a completely inappropriate subject area for humor. Painting himself as a friend of African Americans, unlike the lethargic “sleepy Joe” Biden, eyes around the nation were rolling. Hard Trumpy punches just don’t connect particularly well anymore.

Also good, he made oil more expensive for everybody but not enough to save American oil industry jobs that needed a much higher price for their more expensive fracked product. And that “silent majority” apparently remained silent by not showing up to the rally at all. Then the audience dispersed, perhaps to become super-spreaders in their own communities. Time certainly will tell. If they get sick, they signed waivers relieving the campaign and the BOK Center of liability. I wonder if those they infect would be able to sue, since these innocent secondary infection victims didn’t sign any waivers or assume any risks.

            I’m Peter Dekom, and a stumbling bumbling Trump can’t even muster a rally crowd in the one of the Trumpiest states in the land, a most interesting development that just might become infectious.

COVID-19 Meets Mucho Macho

Is there something bold and defiant in a man flaunting the risk and intentionally venturing into daily life without a mask? Like Donald “get tough, law and order” Trump? Are masks for sissies and metrosexual men? Where common sense meets medical expertise, scientific fact if you will, the power of women in that society often determines how willing that community is to apply social distancing to daily life. While denial or a belief that God will make the decision, not man, often accounts for a rejection of any form of restriction on social interactions, public gatherings, and a wide-open economy, in regions where women are politically powerful, those reactions are rare.

In rural America, woman still have not achieved that “equal status” with their male counterparts. Black and people of color? Forgetaboutit. But all over the United States, from Washington DC to Atlanta Georgia, women are mayors. From Michigan to New Mexico, there is a rising tide of women governors. As well in the US Senate and House of Representatives. The schism is obvious. In a Trumpian era, where opening the economy wide is a GOP mandate, virtually none of those major red states that have opened up actually have met the CDC guidelines to justify that policy.

Where facts contradict the blatant lies from senior red state officials that it is safe to open, the answer all too frequently is to change the “facts.” Texas and Florida, two very large red states that have embraced the fastest reopening efforts, have record-breaking COPVID-19 infection rates. Denial is the rule of the day. Where CV-19 deaths are even reported, there is pressure to list the result of a CV-19 infection – like a resulting bout with pneumonia or stroke (very common among vulnerable CV-19 victims) – as the only cause of death.

When bureaucrats who are simply looking at the actual facts report what they see, they are often simply removed and replaced with a functionary willing to play the lying/obfuscating game on behalf of the fateful deciders. In Florida, for example, “[t]ension built for days between Florida Department of Health supervisors and the department’s geographic information systems manager before officials showed her the door, she says, permanently pulling her off the coronavirus dashboard that she operated for weeks.

“Managers had wanted Rebekah Jones to make certain changes to the public-facing portal, she says. Jones had objected to — and sometimes refused to comply with — what she saw as unethical requests. She says the department offered to let her resign. Jones declined… Weeks after she was fired in mid-May, Jones has now found a way to present the state’s coronavirus data exactly the way she wants it: She created a dashboard of her own.

“White House coronavirus response coordinator Deborah Birx praised Florida’s official coronavirus dashboard in April as a beacon of transparency. But Jones has asserted that the site undercounts the state’s infection total and overcounts the number of people tested — with the official numbers bolstering the decision to start loosening restrictions on the economy in early May, when the state had not met federal guidelines for reopening.” Washington Post, June 13^th. But what is particularly interesting is the difference between regions where urban women run the relevant jurisdiction vs conservative men.

New York Times OpEd contributor, Nickolas Kristoff, took an interesting look at CV-19 death rates, gender and political governance in his June 13^th editorial. “I compiled death rates from the coronavirus for 21 countries around the world, 13 led by men and eight by women. The male-led countries suffered an average of 214 coronavirus-related deaths per million inhabitants. Those led by women lost only one-fifth as many, 36 per million… If the United States had the coronavirus death rate of the average female-led country, 102,000 American lives would have been saved out of the 114,000 lost.

“‘Countries led by women do seem to be particularly successful in fighting the coronavirus,’ noted Anne W. Rimoin, an epidemiologist at U.C.L.A. ‘New Zealand, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Iceland, Norway have done so well perhaps due to the leadership and management styles attributed to their female leaders.’…

“It’s not that the leaders who best managed the virus were all women. But those who bungled the response were all men, and mostly a particular type: authoritarian, vainglorious and blustering. Think of Boris Johnson in Britain, Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in Iran and Donald Trump in the United States… Virtually every country that has experienced coronavirus mortality at a rate of more than 150 per million inhabitants is male-led.

“‘I don’t think it’s a coincidence that some of the best-run places have been run by women: New Zealand, Germany, Taiwan,’ mused Susan Rice, who was national security adviser under President Barack Obama. ‘And where we’ve seen things go most badly wrong — the U.S., Brazil, Russia, the U.K. — it’s a lot of male ego and bluster.’” Overprotective maternal instincts or simply that women in higher office had to work harder and know more than most of their traditional male opponents? Whatever the reason, the United States got it wrong, and lots of other countries got it right… and remember, the fish stinks from the head.

            I’m Peter Dekom, and COVID-19 richly rewards those who flaunt its infectious proclivities with their own personal opportunity to fight that disease mano-a-mano!

Denial, Deflection & Dishonesty

“If we stop testing right now, we’d have very few cases, if any.”

Donald J Trump, White House, June 15^th

In 1918, as US forces traveled from their Kansas training base by train and then ship to the European theater, they carried a deadly flu virus (born in a nearby Kansas hog farm) to the Continent. The disease exploded, ending WWI as both sides were so decimated with the virus. As the US forces returned at the end of that year, they carried a mutated version of that infectious agent with them. All told, somewhere between 650 and 675 thousand Americans died from that pandemic that did not generate “herd immunity” until 1920. Three years and three waves of infection. The world experienced an obscene 50-100 hundred million deaths from that flu.

An American perspective, one that was shoved onto the leaders of a grateful allied Europe saved from the “Bosch,” was the quickly adopted: President Woodrow Wilson’s demand that the existence of that pandemic not be discussed in public. Strictly enforced censorship was the rule, a restriction that was never officially lifted. It was imposed to keep the enemy from learning of a disease that weakened allied troop strength, and after the war, to keep military morale on high. Newspapers that published even the slightest hint of that pandemic were visited by angry FBI agents, apparently unconcerned that their censorship violated the First Amendment. Despite the magnitude of the disease – the above is just one of many makeshift hospital wards created to “treat” flu-ridden US soldiers – the coverup was dramatically successful.

Even Woodrow Wilson himself contracted the virus, which led to a mild stroke. He was so debilitated from the aftereffects of the disease that his mind was no longer able to concentrate; he was unsteady in his walk. He was so weakened that he died within a year after his presidency. His precious desire to create a League of Nations, to create a livable post-WWI economic world on the vanquished Germans and Austrians, lost their champion. He was not able to articulate and lead the allies in that direction. There was no League of Nations, and the allies imposed such a horrific set of vengeful sanctions on Germany that they actually laid the groundwork for the rise of Adolph Hitler over the following decade.

One country in Western Europe had remained neutral during WWI: Spain. Their press wrote passionately and in detail about this flu virus that was a killing Spaniards by the thousands. Because only the Spanish press wrote about the disease, Americans wrongly assume that the flu originated in Spain. And so the name “Spanish Flu” was the new descriptor… it should have been called the “Kansas Flu.” Not having the same WWI ongoing journalistic analysis within the English-speaking press, historians buried the pandemic into the back pages of their textbooks. The renewed interest in the Spanish Flu arose only with the outbreak of COVID-19.

The parallels of governmental disinformation, a failure to release accurate facts, an inability to design and guide a consistent, coherent and medically sound federal response to the pandemics is astoundingly similar, although the reasons for the disinformation are quite different. Trump’s motivations to hide and distort the bad news and embellish the good news are centered in his obsession with being reelected. Woodrow Wilson try to couch his censorship/failure to act decision in terms of what he perceived to be a military necessity. Wilson probably could have saved the lives of well over half those Americans who perished from that Spanish Flu if he were transparent, had issued proper social distancing policies and mandated the immediate use of masks, which later became pervasive in the second and third waves of the disease.

Only the federal government is equipped to deal completely with major global issues. Governors might be able to struggle to contain infections within their jurisdictions, but there are no borders between states, so their efforts can only go so far. Having a president and virtually his entire party purposely misrepresenting the facts, reopening their local economies too soon and without enforced mandatory safety measures and even sponsoring indoor mass rallies, the perfect breeding grounds for COVID-19 under even the lax CDC guidelines, will probably result in the unnecessary deaths of a hundred, maybe hundreds, of thousand(s) of additional Americans.

Head in the sand, and fire anyone who interferes with the obfuscation! “President George W. Bush famously advocated for testing so we could know if our children is learning. Trump takes the opposite view: If sunlight is the best disinfectant, Trump’s administration is festering. The administration literally shut down the transparency website ‘open.gov’ and another one called ‘open.whitehouse.gov.’ As The Post’s Juliet Eilperin reported, it removed some 40,000 data sets from data.gov in its first few months.

“The head-in-sand strategy has become endemic during the pandemic. Florida fired the manager of its virus-data website after she objected to the removal of records showing people had symptoms or positive tests before the cases were announced. Georgia reorganized its data in ways that made things look better than they were. Arizona attempted to stop the running of models showing the virus spreading. And the Trump administration for several weeks blocked the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention from issuing its guidelines for reopening.” Dana Milbank writing an OpEd for the June 16^th Washington Post.

It would be one thing if these decisions were simply a product of incompetence… maybe even just an expression arrogant denial. But when it is absolutely clear that these a “malice aforethought” intentional descriptive manipulations of events, causation and hard statistical numbers, there is an evil shadow cast over these elected officials. Nothing in any GOP platform suggests that lying about survival-based facts, in a high-risk environment that could kill hundreds of thousands of us (perhaps more), is a Party mandate. It certainly prevents the proper containment of the disease. These elected officials have not only betrayed their sworn duty and responsibility to their constituents, they have betrayed both their own Party, distorting a long-standing political structure for personal gain, and their country.

            I’m Peter Dekom, and when distortions of this magnitude become the new normal, it just might be time to relabel them for what they are: high treason.

Attitudes vs an Aggressive Virus

People take serious risks for any number of reasons.  On the battlefield, heroes often sacrifice their lives for their fellow soldiers and sailors. Where a cause is just and a point needs to be made, stepping into harm’s way might be a moral requirement. Think of the civil rights workers and protesters who lost their lives fighting for voting rights and to end segregation in the 1960s. Think of the protesters in 2020, marching against tear gas, pepper spray, rubber bullets and other dangerous projectiles, batons, the threat of arrest and being jailed, and the obvious risks of crowd-transmitted coronavirus to let the world know that we must, finally, end racial injustice and change basic police tactics based on military training, uniforms and equipment (the proclivity to use violence as a first and not a last resort).

Each one of those heroes made a conscious choice to take a personal risk for what they believed to be a higher cause. In today’s environment, there is the secondary risk of becoming a carrier of COVID-19 and thus a potential super-spreader.  Risks. But where the stakes are lower, where flaunting social distancing and wearing a mask in public, or applying safe practices to businesses as they open are merely inconvenient, where is the justification? What do most Americans believe?

The numbers are beginning to tell us that while there are places in the US where the coronavirus infection rates are subsiding, as of June 17^th, there are 21 states where those rates are rising, and in some cases, exploding. The June 11^th near-7% plunge of stock prices on Wall Street, prompted by a bad news presentation from the Federal Reserve on the impact of the pandemic, was a reminder to all of us that worst might not in fact be over… that what we may be experiencing is the beginning of a second and more devastating wave of pandemic infections and deaths.

Indeed, even in “more safety conscious than average America” Southern California, Orange County has changed the mandatory-masks-in-public rule to “strongly advised.” So, lots of folks are strolling, shopping (some businesses still require masks) and playing without social distancing or masks.

Every state of the union is, to one degree or another, relaxing rules to reopen business activities. And as noted in my June 13^th Are We Just Going to Learn to Live with Massive Death Tolls? blog, electing to reopen the economy before there is a cure or a widely deployed effective vaccine is a decision to pursue herd immunity. And that course of action requires that at least 60% of the population be exposed to the virus – currently even New York City is at about 20% – which often takes over a year and two or three waves. What that degree of exposure would wreak in terms of death and destruction is not pretty.

We still do not have sufficient accurate testing to monitor the spread/containment of COVID-19, and thus we are particularly dependent on people voluntarily practicing social distancing and using face masks/hand sanitizer. And since this massive and probably irreversible trend towards reopening the economy is upon us, it becomes relevant to determine how willing Americans are to adhere to safe practices and how seriously they treat the pandemic. ICF, a global consultancy firm that has been around for half a century, often applies detailed surveys and trend analyses to fashion advice for their clients. Three senior ICF executives – Thomas Brassell, James Dayton and John Boyle – summarized their COVID-19 American attitude findings in the June 12^th FastCompany.com. Here are some salient excerpts from that article:

“According to our data from March, Americans were listening to, and placing a great deal more trust in, public health experts (87%) compared to state and local government (78%), federal government (63%), and news media (46%). This remained consistent in April. Further, Americans’ trust in the CDC was high in March (86%), dipping only slightly in April (82%)…

“According to findings recorded at the end of March, nearly 4 in 5 Americans (79%) reported that public health benefits are more important than economic costs. Interestingly, Americans who reported losing their jobs (permanently and temporarily) were even more likely to state that public health benefits are more important than economic costs.

“Public support for government mitigation measures was high in March as well. A majority of Americans felt it was very important to prohibit gatherings of 10 or more people (63%), stay three to six feet away from others (78%), and self-quarantine if exposed to COVID-19 (88%). This remained consistent in April…

“According to findings recorded at the end of March, nearly 4 in 5 Americans (79%) reported that public health benefits are more important than economic costs. Interestingly, Americans who reported losing their jobs (permanently and temporarily) were even more likely to state that public health benefits are more important than economic costs.

“Public support for government mitigation measures was high in March as well. A majority of Americans felt it was very important to prohibit gatherings of 10 or more people (63%), stay three to six feet away from others (78%), and self-quarantine if exposed to COVID-19 (88%). This remained consistent in April…

“A recent survey led by researchers from Harvard Kennedy School, Northeastern University, and Rutgers University supports this trend as well. The study found a majority of people in the U.S. want to continue physical distancing measures, even as the federal government and some state governors are pushing to reopen the economy.

“At the end of March, most Americans (81%) believed that the worst of the COVID-19 pandemic was yet to come—and, according to public health experts, they were right… By mid-April, while the majority of respondents still believed that the worst was yet to come with the coronavirus (63%), the proportion who thought the worst was behind us increased from 12% in late March to 31%.”

We’ve been here before, as the above photo from the 1918-20 Spanish Flu pandemic illustrates (675,000 Americans died). And as the above numbers illustrate, we actually know better… but we just can’t seem to bring ourselves to do what we need to do to minimize the harm from a disease with the sole mandate of replicating and infecting as many bodies as it can. We’ll take those risks… hoping it won’t be us. Until it is.

            I’m Peter Dekom, and common sense, a need to earn a living and some good old-fashioned denial make for exceptionally strange and incompatible bedfellows.

Liberals vs Public Worker Unions

The rise of collective bargaining in the United States has a bloody history. Big players in corporate America, including Henry Ford himself, used local police and hired well-armed goons mercilessly to crush efforts to organize his assembly lines. People died in that effort. Employers believed that allowing their workers to organize would kill their ability to make profits, so they employed every tactic they could to prevent that from happening. It took the Great Depression and the right of social legislation to get America back to work to change all that.

“In the United States, the National Labor Relations Act of 1935 [enhanced by the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947] made it illegal for any employer to deny union rights to an employee. The issue of unionizing government employees in a public-sector trade union was much more controversial until the 1950s. In 1962 President John F. Kennedy issued an executive order granting federal employees the right to unionize.” Wikipedia. Corporate America fought this legislation in the courts. Some even had their employees sign individual contracts in order to assert that the new labor legislation took away these employers’ contractual property rights without due process of law. Courts quickly invalidated what they called “yellow dog” employee agreements, and collective bargaining was on its way.

Simply put, when a union is certified as the proper representative of a group of employees (who vote that union as their representative), they address the three mandatory subjects of collective bargaining: wages, hours and working conditions. In a strange way, the resulting rise in effective pay rates created by unionization generated a large middle class that was able to buy more products than ever before. These wages went right back to the same employers who feared destruction in the form of dramatically increased consumer spending. Union workers generally earn 10%-30% more than non-union counterparts. And they spend it!

Half a century ago, almost a third of all American workers were unionized. Today, that number has dwindled to approximately 12.7%, with around 6.2% of private sector workers covered by a collective bargaining agreement. The huge growth has been in public sector unions, where over a third of non-military government workers are now represented by a union. That public sector unionization has generated enormous political power, their coffers full from such sizeable membership dues, often used to lobby and cajole elected officials (state, federal and municipal) to keep wages high and government funding for union jobs high, has been a sore spot for many budget impaired governmental agencies.

Critics of government unions, which are generally not permitted to strike, have argued that unions prioritize seniority and job retention over protecting the public from incompetent, under-performing and sometimes dangerous union members. They point to being unable to fire “overpaid” senior teachers whose students fail upwards, instruction that clearly is second rate or worse.

And for police unions, it is the consistent lock-step combination of using concerted labor actions short of striking (the “blue flu” or simple slowdowns and unresponsiveness to police emergency calls) to secure raised and increase funding with a grievance and arbitration process that pits a union representative (with rank and file encouragement) against the city administrators attempting to discipline “bad cops.” First responders also usually have exceptional defined benefit retirement benefits that are triggered decades before most ordinary workers reach retirement age. Police unions also deploy top-flight lawyers and engage in high-profile assaults in the press to protect even rogue cops. The thought of losing union campaign funding or, worse, generating funding for negative campaigns, has caused a large cadre of elected officials to let cops back into the force… who really should not be there.

While police officers generally are wildly supportive of their unions’ zealous defense of all charged police officers, what used to be a lockstep public support of collective bargaining for government employees has frayed of late. As income inequality has infected our economy over the last few decades, more often than not, public employees make significantly more (with better fringe and retirement benefits) than the average, comparably trained worker in the private sector. But nothing has escalated the rise of a negative public perception of government trade unions than the recent spate of blue-on-black killings and the police response to peaceful protesters. Militarization of police departments combined with seemingly unbridled police union power have turned the public tide.

We have given police too many laws to enforce and saddled them with covering activities – like mental illness, drug addiction and homelessness – which really are much better suited to other governmental agencies. Effectively, society has dumped “stuff no one else wants to do” on cops. For some, “defunding” the police is nothing more than moving these social problems (and that share of the police budget consumed with these social issues) away from cops… to let them focus on what they really should be doing. Additionally, most US police officers receive a fraction of the training that is applied in other developed nations. It shows.

As the partisan response to national anger, which broke loose with the murder of George Floyd, pits “law and order” advocates against “humanize the police and get them closer to the community they serve” policy wonks. But what to do about police unions is now a problem for left, right and center. It’s time, say many, to curb union power both in terms of what is possible within the confines of a collective bargaining agreement and how unions represent rogue cops or cops who have made big mistakes.

Matt Pearce, writing for the June 16^th Los Angeles Times, provides a clearer look at the issue: “Many activists have called for legal reforms to limit police collective-bargaining agreements and union-backed laws that limit transparency into misconduct or make it harder to fire officers for wrongdoing.

“Some union contracts allow departments to erase disciplinary records, give officers access to investigative records before they are questioned or allow the officers to essentially prevent their departments from publicly releasing internal records — making it easier for officers to beat misconduct charges or to prevent the public from knowing about them… One University of Chicago Law School working paper from 2019 on newly unionized sheriff’s deputies in Florida concluded that ‘collective bargaining rights led to about a 40% increase in violent incidents of misconduct among sheriffs’ offices.’

“The labor movement in the U.S. is facing questions about what its relationship should be with the hundreds of thousands of police officers who make up a major portion of unionized public-sector workers… The AFL-CIO has faced growing calls to disaffiliate from the International Union of Police Assns., and some liberal activists have started calling for Democratic politicians to reject campaign contributions from police unions.

“‘Even for people who have a deep, long-standing, genuine commitment to the labor movement ... there’s a recognition that the power of unionization, the power of collective bargaining, is being abused in indefensible ways by police unions,’ said Benjamin Sachs, a Harvard law professor and faculty director of the school’s labor and work-life program, which will be studying potential legal reforms to collective bargaining by police.

“Police officers are heavily unionized compared with many private-sector workers, and they have enjoyed generally high approval ratings from the public compared with other government services. Police unions can also be a big spending force in political campaigns, like in Los Angeles, giving them influence before they even reach the bargaining table… Like many unions, police officers’ leaders are unapologetic advocates for their members, often willing to wage bare-knuckle political fights, including during the recent wave of protests. But unlike many unions, police unions’ members have the power to arrest and kill, and their central role in public safety gives them immense — and sometimes intimidating — leverage.

“In New York City, the Sergeants Benevolent Assn. violated Twitter’s rules when it tweeted private arrest-record information about Mayor Bill de Blasio’s daughter, Chiara, after she was arrested at a May 30 protest, adding, ‘How can the NYPD protect the city of N.Y. from rioting anarchists when the mayor’s object-throwing daughter is one of them?’ (She had not been accused of throwing anything.) The account had also recently tussled with the city’s health commissioner over a lack of masks for officers, at one point tweeting that she ‘has blood on her hands.’

“In Delaware County, Pa., the local police union posted a warning to potential critics on June 3: ‘If you choose to speak out against the police or our members, we will do everything in our power to not support your business.’ (The union later apologized for the comment.) One member was reportedly suspended from the Media Borough Police Department when he added: ‘Try us. We’ll destroy you.’

“After the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency said June 9 it would no longer transport local police to anti-police-brutality protests, the officers’ union, the San Francisco Police Officers Assn., shot back on Twitter: ‘Hey Muni, lose our number next time you need officers for fare evasion enforcement or removing problem passengers from your buses and trains.’

“Floyd’s death became a breaking point for many labor supporters. As protests swelled in Seattle, the Martin Luther King Jr. County Labor Council, which represents more than 100,000 area union workers, passed a resolution demanding that its affiliated Seattle Police Officers Guild ‘become an antiracist organization’ and acknowledge ‘that racism is a structural problem in our society and in law enforcement’ or risk a vote of expulsion.”

Police unions may be precipitating their own funeral with such actions, but union leaders were elected by their member to take precisely these tough stands. If union attempt to block reform, popular sentiment most major cities will simply reflect a growing frustration among citizens against a once revered category of civil servants… instead of being a constant drain on city budgets to pay off settlements or court judgments against offending officers, many of whom are still on the force!

            I’m Peter Dekom, and for those police officers and union representatives who are fighting to resist this move to improve and change, I say, “get over it or resign; you are on the wrong side of history.”

Living with a Guilty Past

So, I was in Germany about a year ago. I remember driving by a statute of Adolph “the Jew exterminator” Eichmann, right outside the main entrance to Heinrich Himmler Armeestützpunkt (Fort Himmler, military base). A couple of miles away, as we passed the Hitler Memorial, we turned left to pass the Hermann Göring Luftwaffenstützpunkt (Air Force Base). These political and military leaders were the best Germany had to offer in World War II, even as they lost the war. These testaments to Germany’s history rise above the enslavement, religious persecution and mass murder that we associate with WWII Germany. Except they don’t exist. Instead, there is nothing but shame in most of Germany over this brutal period where so many Germans chose to look the other way. That shame lingers… and the German government never wants its citizens, even those yet unborn, to forget that ugly past.

23 years after Germany’s surrender, the now young adult children – forced in public education to read about the horrors of concentration camps and mass extermination of Jews – asked a collective question of their parents and grandparents: “What did you do during the war, mother and father?” Parents stammered to answer, many heads hung low. It was time of rising protests all over the world, against the Vietnam War in the United States, elitism in parts of Europe and against the system that allowed Nazis to rise to power in Germany in the 1930s.

As we have seen so many times before, a violent incident often opens the floodgates of social anger… and so it was in the late 1960s in Germany. “It was the 1967 killing by police of a young activist during a demonstration in Berlin against a visit by the Shah of Iran that apparently persuaded Andreas Baader that the post-war authorities were little better than that which they had replaced… Vowing to mount a violent campaign, he started off in 1968 by detonating home-made bombs in two Frankfurt department stores.

“Arrested and imprisoned, he escaped in 1970 during a library visit with the help of a left-wing campaigning journalist - Ulrike Meinhof - and the Baader-Meinhof gang was firmly established in the public mind.” BBC.UK.co, 2/12/2007. The group later became known as the Red Army Faction, and a groundswell against traditionalism, conservative German values and capitalism exploded into street violence. The “1968 Movement.” Communism and socialism were seen as the opposite of the fascism that allowed Nazi’s to control Germany for those critical years. Essentially, an entire generation woke up to what their parents had perpetrated over two decades earlier… and were completely repulsed by what they learned. They simply rejected everything they thought their parents stood for. It was a startling awakening.

“Welcome to the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon, otherwise known as frequency illusion or recency illusion. This phenomenon occurs when the thing you've just noticed, experienced or been told about suddenly crops up constantly. It gives you the feeling that out of nowhere, pretty much everyone and their cousin are talking about the subject -- or that it is swiftly surrounding you. And you're not crazy; you are totally seeing it more. But the thing is, of course, that's because you're noticing it more.” HowStuffWorks.com. For those angry young Germans, it was realizing that their parents, one way or another, had enabled Adolph Hitler.

Over the years, as these Boomer generation youngsters got older, they did not follow the traditional pattern that applied to virtually every other nation on earth in dealing with atrocities. They did not sanitize their textbooks and downplay the horribles that Germany had implemented. They did not ignore the horribles of the past; they made damned sure every German child learned of the horrors. They were committed to “never again.”

Shortly after the turn of the new millennium, perhaps too young to remember the disgusting reality over half a century before, a neo-Nazi movement began in Germany. The Boomers-in-charge were horrified. After a neo-Nazi group attempted to assassinate a high-ranking police official in Bavaria (around Munich), in 2009 the district implemented a new mandatory change in the local public school curriculum. Here’s how it was carried in the press: “School children in the German district of Bavaria will be forced to visit Nazi extermination camps as part of their school curriculum, the London Times reported …

“According to the new program, school children will be obligated to visit a concentration and death camp at least once, and history classes will include trips to museums and archives that present Germany's Nazi past… The Bavarian students will likely visit the Dachau camp near Munich … The program will also include a state-funded project to encourage youngsters not to join extreme rightists groups.

The Bavarian Education Ministry believes that many youths are drawn to such groups and become members in them due to peer pressure.” YNetNews.com, 1/8/09. Today, such visits are compulsory for all German school children. Tough scrappy teenaged boys break down in tears all the time. But Germany will not let any rising generation forget. Oh, and Nazi flags and swastikas are actually illegal all over Europe and are considered deeply offensive as occassionally used by rising right-wing groups.

I guess you have figured out where this is going. Americans have long-since dismissed the mass murders, the lynchings, the Jim Crow laws and the notion of slavery that built much of the United States, including the White House itself. Too many Americans, many whose ancestors immigrated to the United States well after the Civil War, rail at the thought of collective guilt for the cruelty of US slavery. A favorite topic of such ultra-right-wing opinion-makers, like Rush Limbaugh. But as yet another recent spate of blue on black violence and the ensuing protests evidence, the vestiges of slavery, of second-class citizenship and the deep differentiation between the application of justice in so many jurisdictions between white and people of color remain astounding.

Children’s books (see above) and textbooks often depicted a gentle bucolic life for slaves… or simply gloss over that practice with a wildly inaccurate euphemism and/or a cursory summary. “Educational publisher McGraw-Hill said it will revise and reprint a geography textbook that refers to African slaves in America as ‘immigrants’ and ‘workers,’ after a complaint by the mother of a Texas high school freshman, reports KTRK-TV.” Los Angeles Times, 10/5/15. Typical.

No other country elevates those who have committed legions of atrocities with memorials, statutes, naming rights and other forms of nobility or glorification. The losing side in a brutal conflict. Just us. Confederate generals and political leaders. Notoriously cruel slave owners. Adopting the losing’s side symbol of the right to own slaves would seem an obviously unacceptable symbol in general use across the United States. It’s not nostalgia!

Yes, the Confederacy is a part of American history. And yes, the Nazi rule of Germany is equally a part of German history. And if so many of us are offended, particularly Jews, at the use of the swastika, often smeared by hatemongers across Jewish temples, how do you think the ancestors of slaves, ripped from their homes and brutalized into subhuman conditions, feel about the wide use of the Confederate flag and the proliferation of idolatry dedicated to those who battled for the right to continue to own and repress slaves? Remembering history or longing for a return to an era of unbridled and very legal white supremacy?

It’s not hard to understand why Germans are aghast as senior American political leaders continue to support racist practices and defend as “nostalgia” or “historical” what even Germans see as obviously deeply offensive symbols and memorials.

I’m Peter Dekom, and it shouldn’t take a genius to figure out which symbols and memorials are obviously offensive to substantial segments of society.

Truly Fake News

There’s a lot of stuff going on in the world. A horrific pandemic that seems to be beginning a second wave. A nation confronting its racially biased past. A battle between white traditionalists and progressive leftists with most of America caught somewhere in the middle. While all of this is going on, as the November election is already bubbling and brewing with controversy, some pretty important issues seem to be falling through some pretty wide cracks, social fissures actually. Between the most untruthful President in American history and incredibly accelerating technology that pretty much allows anyone with the right skills to create a recording (audio with or without video) that is virtually indistinguishable from reality, our nation is at risk.

There’s the basic stuff. Creating conspiracy theories out of whole cloth and disseminating them to receptive and gullible readers likely to spread the theory as fact. The Russians are pretty good at that. Sure you can distort by slowly a video down, making the speaker sound drunk (the infamous Nancy Pelosi incident) or simply use pictures from one event, change the label on them and present them to support your case for an entirely different place. For example, Fox News was clearly in support of the President’s threat to send US Army forces to take down a purported violent antifa stronghold in Seattle, CHAZ (“Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone”), that had been sanctioned by that city’s mayor and chief of police. So, they created a little misleading visual to bolster their case. Except they got caught.

“On Friday [6/12], Fox News posted a photo of a man holding a rifle in front of a store with broken windows. Another picture showed a burning car and store with a person running down the street with the caption ‘Crazy Town.’ It was featured alongside an article about protests in Seattle, but the photo was actually from St. Paul, Minn., taken on May 30, according to The New York Times, CNN and The Seattle Times.” Variety.com June 13^th. The real CHAZ was totally peaceful.

But these techniques are primitive. The “deepfake” – which has its main value in fake celebrity porn videos – often creates visual documentation that is hard to defeat without delving into the source codes, not anything most of us would ever do. But as that ability to manufacture credible audio-video “evidence” gains in sophistication, democracy is challenged to its core… and even court cases based on purported recordings begin to become questionable. How do you prove anything?

“Deepfakes have seeped into our culture and politics but are most often found in pornography. According to a Deeptrace Labs report, The State of Deepfakes: Landscape, Threats, and Impact, 96% of manipulated videos on the internet are pornographic.

“As the technology grows in complexity, making it more difficult to spot fakes, attorneys and judges will have to decide how to manage deepfake evidence and authenticate it, says Riana Pfefferkorn, associate director of surveillance and cybersecurity at the Center for Internet and Society at Stanford Law School. She warns that deepfakes could erode trust in the justice system… ‘My worry is that juries may be primed to come into the courtroom and be less ready to believe what they see and believe what they hear and will be more susceptible to claims that something is fake or not,’ says Pfefferkorn.” Matt Reynolds writing for the June 9^th Journal of the American Bar Association. The technology was born in the special effects labs for the motion picture industry, accelerated with cute smart phone apps and has evolved into readily available, off-the-shelf software capable of some astounding fake vocal and photographically accurate false imagery.

“In the past decade, the courts have ruled several times on procedures for authenticating digital evidence, Pfefferkorn says… In the 2010 case, People v. Beckley, the California 2nd District Court of Appeal ruled that prosecutors should not have admitted a MySpace image claiming to show the girlfriend of a defendant flashing a gang sign because neither a witness nor an expert authenticated it.

“Ruling in a different criminal case, the California 1st District Court of Appeal disagreed with the approach taken by the 2nd District. The court relied on a California Supreme Court ruling four years after Beckley to find that eyewitness or expert testimony may not be necessary.

“More recently, a Colorado appeals court ruled that an audio recording of a man’s voicemail to his victim was admissible in a murder case, despite his claims that prosecutors did not authenticate it… ‘Developments in computer technology and software enable almost any owner of a personal computer with the necessary knowledge and software to falsely edit recordings,’ wrote Judge Michael Berger for the Colorado court. ‘But, the fact that the falsification of electronic recordings is always possible does not, in our view, justify restrictive rules of authentication that must be applied in every case when there is no colorable claim of alteration.’

“Pfefferkorn says courts have shown that they can be ‘robust against generations and generations of fakes.’ The photo-editing software Adobe Photoshop has been around for decades, and long before deepfakes, courts have handled everything from forgeries to doctored photocopies, she says… ‘As long as there’s been evidence in court, there’s always been fakes, and the courts have come up with rules to deal with those as they come up, and are aware that there’s always the possibility that somebody is trying to hoodwink them, Pfefferkorn says.

“According to Jason Lichter, director of [litigation] discovery services at Pepper Hamilton in New York City and member of the ABA’s E-Discovery and Digital Evidence Committee, deepfakes are ‘in many respects just the next iteration or an evolution of a trend or a risk.’

“‘That being said if a picture’s worth a thousand words, a video or audio could be worth a million. Because of how much weight is given to a video by a factfinder, the risks associated with deepfakes are that much more profound,’ Lichter says…

“There is another feature of deepfake technology that could be overlooked. The existence of deepfakes could allow anyone to question whether evidence is real or faked. [Authors of Deep Fakes: A Looming Challenge for Privacy, Democracy, and National Security, Robert Chesney and Danielle Citron] call this the ‘Liar’s Dividend.’… ‘Deepfakes will make it easier for liars to deny the truth in distinct ways. A person accused of having said or done something might create doubt about the accusation by using altered video or audio evidence that appears to contradict the claim,’ their paper states.” ABA Journal.

But the reality remains, particularly as the specialized software gets even more refined, that really smart players with the cutting-edge tech can create videos that cannot be absolutely clearly determined to be fakes. “As the technology evolves, and becomes cheaper and more widespread it could end up in the hands of anyone with access to a smartphone. Hany Farid, a digital forensics expert and professor at University of California at Berkeley, admits that the work of detecting deepfakes is a ‘cat-and-mouse’ endeavor.

“‘I will probably never be able to stop the state-sponsored actors, the Hollywood studios, the highly talented people and forgers from manipulating content,’ Farid says. ‘I’ll absolutely take it out of the hands of somebody who’s downloading some code from the internet and running it on their laptop and then trying to fool the system.” ABA Journal.

We see these “truth vs facts” issues all the time. In the rebellion at Facebook where senior staffers find the company’s practice of posting everything the President wants without question to the recent practice at Twitter where viewers of Presidential falsehoods are given a link to a site where actual facts that contradict his fabrications can be found. But if voters act on lies as if they were truths, if juries convict based on audio-visual “recordings” of events that never took place, can any democratic society survive? Are we simply caught in an uncontrollable First Amendment free speech right where rogue manipulative liars effectively control society?

            I’m Peter Dekom, and there is a common sense constitutional balancing act that better be deployed soon… or we can watch treasonous actors use the Constitution itself to unravel America.