Green or Union Lean

    Electric Vehicle  

 Gasoline Vehicle

“The president is in a really tough position… What he needs to be the most pro-labor president ever and the greenest president ever is a magic wand.” 

Erik Gordon, a professor at the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business.

There’s a big difference between the massive job creation represented by the unstoppable shift to alternative energy and the significant job loss among those in traditional fossil fuel-directed industries. Oil and gas workers, autoworkers and users of plants and offices vs remote workers, less labor-intensive manufacturing of electric vehicles and a huge shift to online shopping. And if you are a Democrat, supporting one of these green vectors just might be at odds with the new Democratic shift towards recapturing the working-class populists ceded to Republicans… by supporting unionization and union agenda.

As Biden sides with striking autoworkers, the Democratic green agenda – necessary to stem the existential threat of climate change – seems to propose policy choices that clearly post a challenge to unionized autoworkers. Given that the 2024 election may well hinge on voters in unionized swing states, this is big problem for Dems. Writing for the September 18th Associated Press, Chris Megerian, describes the conundrum: “Biden is trying to turbocharge the market for electric vehicles to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and prevent China from solidifying its grip on a growing industry. His signature legislation, known as the Inflation Reduction Act, includes billions of dollars in incentives to get more clean cars on the road.

“Some in the UAW fear the transition will cost jobs because electric vehicles require fewer people to assemble. Although there will be new opportunities in the production of high-capacity batteries, there’s no guarantee that those factories will be unionized, and they’re often being planned in states more hostile to organized labor….

“The union is demanding steep raises and better benefits, and it’s escalating the pressure with its targeted strike. Brittany Eason, who has worked for 11 years at the Ford Assembly Plant in Wayne, Mich., said workers are worried that they’ll ‘be pushed out by computers and electric vehicles.’… ‘How do you expect people to work with ease if they’re in fear of losing their jobs?’ said Eason. Electric vehicles may be inevitable, she said, but changes need to be made ‘so everybody can feel secure about their jobs, their homes and everything else.’

“Biden on Friday [9/15] acknowledged the tension in remarks from the White House, saying the transition to clean energy ‘should be fair and a win-win for autoworkers and auto companies.’… He dispatched top aides to Detroit to help push negotiations along, and he prodded management to make more generous offers to the union, saying ‘they should go further to ensure record corporate profits mean record contracts.’

“As part of its demands, the UAW wants to represent employees at battery plants, which would send ripple effects through an industry that has seen supply chains upended by technological changes… ‘Batteries are the power trains of the future,’ said Dave Green, a regional director for the union in Ohio and Indiana. ‘Our workers in engine and transmission areas need to be able to move into the new generation.’… Executives, however, are keen to keep a lid on labor costs as their companies prepare to compete in a global market. China is the dominant manufacturer of electric vehicles and batteries…

“Former President Trump, the front-runner for the Republican nomination, sees an opportunity to drive a wedge between Biden and workers. He issued a statement saying Biden ‘will murder the U.S. auto industry and kill countless union autoworker jobs forever, especially in Michigan and the Midwest. There is no such thing as a ‘fair transition’ to the destruction of these workers’ livelihoods and the obliteration of this cherished American industry.’”

There are no easy answers. Federal loans for US battery manufacturers have focused on plants in Tennessee and Kentucky. Workers in Michigan don’t see that as a benefit to them. The need to manufacture charging stations to match the sale of electric cars offers new job opportunities, but will those jobs be created where the mass of autoworkers are located? 70% of automotive components in American cars are outsourced to vendors beyond the Big Three carmakers, another complexity that must be addressed.

Just looking at gasoline vs electrically powered cars in the above illustrations points out radical manufacturing differences. While electric vehicles are heavier because of batteries, they are simpler because electric motors do not need transmissions (expensive and complex) to deliver torque to drive the wheels. There’s about 30% less labor required for an electric car.

Clearly, there are technology challenges needed to address the viability of electric vehicles: charging time and range being primary. Batteries in use today need to be replaced by vastly more efficient upgrades, a potential competitive leveler against Chinese manufacturers. But these paradigm shifting transitions can get ugly, and straddling these two policy vectors is a truly challenge facing Biden’s reelection bid… especially given that the swing states are likely the determinants of the upcoming presidential race.

I’m Peter Dekom, and whatever the challenge within the competing election factions, the one true reality: no one is really going to stop progress… perhaps delay it for a very short while.

Ethics, Money and Power – Wink, Wink

So much of recent focus has been on political leaders in the United States governed by a very separate set of rules, even statutes, than the rest of us. Also at the core of so many claims of racial and ethnic discrimination is the rather dramatically statistically substantiated claim that White, especially those in the middle class and above, are governed by a very different legal system that is applied, for example, to Black Americans. Black teens learning to drive often are given what is referred to as “the talk” – a parental lesson of how to deal with a White police officer pulling them over on a purported traffic stop. “First, always keep your hands on the top of the steering wheel where they are plainly visible.” There a too many stories of Black drivers being shot by a cop thinking that those hands are about to pull a gun.

Supreme Court Associate Justices Alito and Thomas, recipients of lavish travel benefits and even purported direct financial accommodations, correctly claim that they are exempt from “financial restrictions” applied to every other federal judge. But the greatest claimant of “those laws do not apply to me” is Donald Trump whose behavior has drawn two impeachments, four separate criminal indictments and a litany of civil suits and criminal suits against those who worked for him and followed his lead.

But this notion of “we’re not subject to the same rules as everyone else” is hardly relegated to government power. The United States has a general ethos that tends to allow obvious major value generators in the private sector to find an ability to take ethical shortcuts that directly contradict company policies without facing any internal consequences. If the company profits sufficiently, supervisors and even the board of directors are often quite prone to look the other way. If we call the miscreant to account, the reasoning goes, he or she would probably defect to our competitor.

In many nations, corruption is just the way business is done. The US Foreign Corrupt Practices Act requires those subject to American law, no matter where they operate, to adhere to a strict code of permitted anti-bribery restrictions when dealing with foreign governmental officials and their vendors. The UK Bribery Act extends those restrictions to those subject to UK law not just in dealing with governments but also in dealing with foreign businesses. But, as they say, “everybody does it.” With very few prosecutions under these statutes, there is a lot of fudging to all those “benefits” to grease the wheel of business.

But as I have witnessed firsthand, rainmakers, across US businesses, are fairly exempt from strict adherence to internal ethical mandates. My experience in law firms, where ethical rules are embodied both at a state governance level (enforced by the relevant state bar association) and in private internal codes of ethics and responsibilities, simply affirms this practice. In the entertainment industry, the decades of sexual predation and abusive bosses were simply the way the business worked… until the explosion of MeToo# litigation and prosecution. But as Richard Bistrong, Ron Carucci, and Dina Smith, writing for the August 31st FastCompany.com, point out, when you make enough money for the company and cross a few ethical lines, it is often standard procedure for those in charge simply to look the other way and perhaps even help cover up the missteps. And sometimes that looking the other way backfires… badly.

“According to research, when top performers transgress ethical expectations, ‘the ‘preferred’ moral conclusion is to tolerate high-performing employees’ unethical behaviors because of the overall value they bring to the organization and to the workgroup.’…

“There is considerable research to suggest that high performers are more susceptible to ethical risk than others. One reason is that high performers’ ambitions, power, and popularity can increase their sense of impunity. Another reason is that high performers’ may think they have a moral license to rewards. Plus some individuals have cognitive biases such as loss aversion and the status quo bias which can lead to protecting your success at all cost, even if unethical.

“For instance, EY’s 2022 Global Integrity Report found that ‘42% of board members agreed that unethical behavior in senior or high performers is tolerated in their organizations,’ which is up four percent from two years prior. Another report found that 34% of fraud is committed by executives and upper management level personnel, who we typically consider to be among our high performers.

“What’s more, when high performers commit an act of ethical misconduct, the financial losses are estimated to be almost six times as large as when the unethical conduct occurs among less prominent team members. In addition, violations from front-facing high performers are more likely to make front-page news, potentially causing significant reputational damage.

“There are also numerous anecdotal examples which demonstrate what happens when high achievement and high ethics decouple. Take Tim Leissner, the Chairman of the Goldman Sachs Southeast Asia division from 1998 to 2016. He described himself as wanting to be a ‘corporate hero,’ generated roughly $600 million in fees to the bank, and also conspired with others to loot the Government of Malaysia’s 1Malaysia Development Berhad sovereign wealth fund of 4.5 billion dollars. Of course high-performing misconduct isn’t often or always on this large of a scale. For example, James D. Falkowski, a high-performing director at QVC for five years, was sentenced to thirty months in prison for embezzling over a million dollars from his employer, including more than $200,000 in luxury chauffeur rides for himself, friends, and colleagues.”

As this “wink, wink” ethos becomes business as usual, as those at the highest level in business are actually rewarded for success at the expense of ethics – unless they get caught by some powerful extrinsic source (e.g., the SEC, the DOJ or state equivalents… or just plain business litigation) – this tolerance for success at any cost begins to define society as a whole. It justifies, in the minds of many, different tiers of rules for the success or privileged versus the rest of us. I’m Peter Dekom, and until this “tolerance for ethical lapses among the successful” is challenged at a grassroots level, what you see in government is what you get.

I’m Peter Dekom, and until this “tolerance for ethical lapses among the successful” is challenged at a grassroots level, what you see in government is what you get.

Big Climate Change Realities, Beginning Small Adaptations

The recent climate headlines have featured the continued press of the climate change agenda “hoax” at the GOP debate, severe heat-related fatalities, the Maui firestorm and the flooding from the “once in a generation” assault on the Florida bend by water-laden Hurricane Idalia. Big stories. Big disasters. A strong push from the rightwing House Freedom Caucus to defund prior legislation targeting moderating global warming as a condition to approving interim and final federal budget approvals. As Americans suffer, from property loss, sheer misery and deaths, as taxpayers continue to foot post-climate change disaster recovery costs and major insurers pull out of regions where climate-related disasters are most common, I am puzzled how any non-delusional human being, almost anywhere on earth, questions the escalating realities of man-accelerated climate change.

Aside from desertification, migrating insects and associated diseases (e.g., malaria has returned to American shores), starvation and the rise of intolerable heat, we are facing horrific challenges in the cultivation of myriad crops, plants that are unable to adapt to steadily rising temperatures. Fish populations face depletion as sea temperatures rise – yes those same rising water temperatures that feed and intensify tropical storms – and even our livestock is beginning to wither and die under this constant temperature rise.

There are a few farmers and ranchers who are beginning to understand that their livestock will not survive if temperatures rise much more… which they appear destined to do. It’s not just the loss of feed crops that is at stake, but many animals simply do not survive in sustained heat. One small example of adaptation has taken place in a dairy farm in the warm climate of Puerto Rico, as reported by Katherine Rapin in Nexus Media News, reproduced in the August 28th FastCompany.com:

“[Dairy cows] are most comfortable in temperatures between 41 and 77 degrees Fahrenheit, which means livestock around the world are struggling to cope with hotter and longer summers. Over the span of just two hot, humid days in June 2022, an estimated 10,000 cows died in Kansas. Experts say it will only get worse… Decades of breeding dairy cows for increased milk production have made them even more susceptible to heat…

“At Vaqueria El Remanso, a small dairy farm west of San Juan, Puerto Rico, the cows are different—they have a freshly shaven, suave look. Their short hair is the result of a natural mutation known as ‘slick,’ which Rafael López-López, who runs El Remanso, has been breeding into his cows for decades.

“‘In hot, humid conditions, the slick cows have an advantage,’ López-López said on a scorching spring morning, walking among his herd in the shade of the milking barn. The genetic mutation that gives slick cows a shorter coat and more active sweat glands helps them maintain a healthy body temperature—an asset on a heating planet…

“‘How do they produce more milk? They eat more, they metabolize more,’ said Peter Hansen, a professor of animal sciences at the University of Florida who studies the slick mutation. ‘So any cow that’s producing more milk is going to be producing more body heat, which makes it harder to resist heat stress.’

“When a dairy cow’s temperature rises above her normal core body temperature of 102.8 degrees Fahrenheit—which happens when the heat index is greater than 72—she experiences heat stress, meaning the ability to regulate her internal temperature is compromised. She grazes less (eating about 3% to 5% less per additional degree of ambient temperature) and has greater difficulty getting pregnant. That, in turn, compromises her milk supply. Heat stress also suppresses the immune system, leaving her more susceptible to disease.

“Heat stress costs the U.S. dairy industry as much as $670 million annually, and scientists predict it could cause a 6.3% drop in milk production by the end of the century. To cope, farmers spend thousands of dollars running massive fans, sprinkler systems, and even fog machines to keep their cows cool… Cows with the slick mutation, however, appear to be coping relatively well.” Indeed, this slick mutation, some of it naturally evolved, is present in at least six breeds of cattle around the world. Dairy cows evolved mostly from European stock, obviously from a temperate climate.

Here in the United States, Rapin tells us: “Dairy farmers are paying closest attention to the slick Holstein. Traditional Holsteins are the top milk-producing cow in terms of volume, but the temperate breed that originated in the Netherlands about 2,000 years ago isn’t well-adapted to heat and humidity. However, studies have shown that Holsteins with the slick mutation are able to keep their body temperature about 1 degree Fahrenheit cooler, meaning their milk production and fertility don’t drop as much as non-slick animals during the hottest months… ‘I get 1,800 pounds [more] of milk per lactation from these cows, and they reproduce more effectively,’ said López-López.” Welcome to reality, climate change deniers and marginalizers. This is our future, whether you accept it or not.

I’m Peter Dekom, and while this is a seemingly little story, when our required adaptation efforts to make global warming more tolerable are aggregated, this rear guard resistance to doing what must be done seems almost criminal.

They Want to Replace Us – The Growing MAGA Government in Waiting

Project 2025 Recruiting Tent at the Iowa State Fair

“When your government is evil or out of line, that’s what the sheriff is there for, protecting them from that.” 

 Dar Leaf, chief law enforcement officer for Barry County, Mich.

The conspiracy of the “deep state” – that massive federal bureaucracy of leftwing radicals dedicated to the destruction of the MAGA movement and all things “Trump” – is at the core of our rising Trumpian autocracy. But the reality of recruiting a massive MAGA cadre of replacement government workers is well under way. Thousands of eager applicants are lining up, simply waiting for what they believe is the ascension of Donald Trump as the 2024 President of the United States, one way or the other. It seems like a matter of “our deep state can beat your deep state.”

Lest we forget, Trump’s last tenure in office included the severe stripping down of the US Postal Service, the Environmental Protection Agency and consumer protection agencies dedicated to financial and product/service regulation. The new Supreme Court appointments further loosened restrictions on guns, stripped away the most meaningful provisions of the Voting Rights Act, left most gerrymandered districts intact and reversed Roe vs Wade. Lower federal court appointments also limited the power of federal agencies, notably the Food and Drug Administration, and supported actions against all forms of gun control. We must not forget the impact of a Bible college graduate, with a history of railing against public schools, given the helm of the Department of Education, which she promptly tilted toward religious education and charter schools… assisting the Trump policy of whittling down the department with an eye to dissolution.

There is an arrogance among the right, the bulwark of White Christian Nationalism, that their way is not only the best path… but in fact the only path to preserve America as they see it. But it is the MAGA movement, with powerful organized institutional support like the rightwing Heritage Foundation thinktank, often the source of conservative judicial appointment and potential government staffing for MAGA officials in charge, that should concern us all. If Trump 2017-2021 replaced the Washington D.C. swamp as he described it, he absolutely began appointing a designer swamp of his own.

Writing for the September 4th Associated Press, Lisa Mascaro writes of one frightening Heritage Foundation-led effort to staff Trump’s expected “next federal government.”: “With more than a year to go before the 2024 election, a constellation of conservative organizations is preparing for a possible second White House term for Donald Trump, recruiting thousands of Americans to come to Washington on a mission to dismantle the federal government and replace it with a vision closer to his own…

“With a nearly 1,000-page ‘Project 2025’ handbook and an ‘army’ of Americans, the idea is to have the civic infrastructure in place on Day One to commandeer, reshape and do away with what Republicans deride as the ‘deep state’ bureaucracy, in part by firing as many as 50,000 federal workers… ‘We need to flood the zone with conservatives,’ said Paul Dans, director of the 2025 Presidential Transition Project and a former Trump administration official who speaks with historical flourish about the undertaking… ‘This is a clarion call to come to Washington,’ he said. ‘People need to lay down their tools, and step aside from their professional life and say, ‘This is my lifetime moment to serve.’ ’

“The unprecedented effort is being orchestrated with dozens of right-flank organizations, many new to Washington, and represents a changed approach from conservatives, who traditionally have sought to limit the federal government by cutting federal taxes and slashing federal spending.” Civil Service limitations would be swept away, liberals and in fact anyone not on board with Trumpian principles would be purged from every corner of the federal government.

It's not as if this effort is relegated to the federal government, although Project 2025 is hell-bent on hitting the ground running and not wasting Trump’s expected first year of a second term; there are official state scofflaws well-situated everywhere, including in state law enforcement. “[T]he Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Assn., founded in 2011 by former Arizona sheriff Richard Mack… teaches that elected sheriffs must ‘protect their citizens from the overreach of an out-of-control federal government’ by refusing to enforce any law they deem unconstitutional or ‘unjust.’

“‘The safest way to actually achieve that is to have local law enforcement understand that they have no obligation to enforce such laws,’ Mack said in an interview. ‘They’re not laws at all anyway. If they’re unjust laws, they are laws of tyranny.’… The sheriffs group has railed against gun control laws, COVID-19 mask mandates and public health restrictions, as well as alleged election fraud. It has also quietly spread its ideology across the country, seeking to become more mainstream in part by securing state approval for taxpayer-funded law enforcement training, the Howard Center for Investigative Journalism found.” AP. For those seeking examples of where such thinking takes us, I recommend studying the rise of the pre-WWII Fascist Party in Italy and the Nazi Party in Germany. The parallels are frightening.

I’m Peter Dekom, and Americans really need to know how fragile true democracy really is and how close it is coming to being removed by force by well-armed minority White Christian Nationalists who cannot fathom governance except as they unilaterally determine.

Does Size Matter?

   Unmanned US Navy Ship

“Right now, [US shipbuilders] are still building a largely 20th-century Navy.” 

 Bryan Clark, former Navy budget planner who serves as a consultant to the service.

“The U.S. Navy is arrogant... We have an arrogance about, we’ve got these aircraft carriers, we’ve got these amazing submarines. We don’t know anything else. And that is just wrong.”

Lorin Selby, recently retired rear admiral and the chief of naval research after a 36-year career in which he helped run many of the Navy’s major acquisition units.

On December 7, 1941, the Imperial Japanese Navy launched an unprovoked aircraft carrier-based aerial attack against the American Naval fleet docked at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. The US entered WWII. Thousands of sailors and soldiers were killed. Dozens of ships sunk, including several major battleships. But to the shock and surprised to Japanese naval commanders, not a single US carrier was sunk. Our Pacific floating airfields were on a mission far to the north. The pride of the US Navy, the dreaded mega gun platform used to strike fear in the hearts of all who saw them, able to lay siege with massive guns from miles offshore, the most feared naval vessel for many decades – the battleship – suddenly began a rapid and steady march into obsolescence. The era of two fleets battling it out without ships from either side able to see their enemy – the new fleets built around aircraft carriers – had just begun.

Today, a mainstream aircraft carrier costs about $13 billion plus to build, costs between $6 to $8 million dollars a day to operate and years to design and build. Three to four thousand sailors are required to man a modern US carrier. Maintenance costs run $2 to $4 billion every 32 months. Add another $5 billion to cover the cost of the aircraft onboard. The United States has 11 of the 25 major operating carriers in the world, stationed in major fleets deployed in oceans and seas around the world. Oh, and one more thing: US carriers only operate in fleets, including a dozen or more accompanying vessels, ranging from fast attack submarines, frigates, destroyers, supply ships, perhaps a cruiser and other specialized vessels. Most of these fleet ships have one primary mission: protect the carrier. Just think what a rich target a carrier has to be to a well-equipped (or a stealthy smaller nation) foe to take out. Not just the military cost but the massive economic damage.

The US Navy has also wasted billions of dollars designing and building ships designed to operate offshore in shallower water (the contract to the “deep water Navy”), but the results of this littoral effort have been disappointing to say the least. Generally, the United States has prioritized its Navy when it comes to military budgetary allocations, under the assumption that our massive fleets offer the greatest deterrent force we can deploy. While China and Russia deploy a few, smaller and less sophisticated aircraft carriers, their efforts have instead been focused on drones and hypersonic missiles designed to disable our massive carrier fleets.

But building big carriers and the accompanying modern defensive support vessels is huge business. The shipyards that build these vessels, from Maine to Mississippi, are often the largest private employers in some states. The pressure on those elected to Congress, where such industrial power dominates, to vote for big, expensive ships for our Navy is immense and hardly partisan, even as the GOP is the most consistent voice in growing our military budget. Eric Lipton, writing for the September 4th New York Times, presents a most detailed analysis of the rear-guard effort from shipbuilder lobbyists, most senior Navy officers (“we’ve always done it this way”) and members of Congress protecting local jobs: “The 800-acre Huntington Ingalls complex in Pascagoula, Miss., is one of seven major Navy shipbuilding yards across the country…

“A symphony of sorts echoed through the sprawling shipyard on the Gulf Coast of Mississippi — banging, hissing, beeping, horns, bells and whistles — as more than 7,000 workers hustled to fill orders fueled by the largest shipbuilding budget in the Navy’s history… The surge in spending, $32 billion for this year alone, has allowed the Huntington Ingalls shipyard to hire thousands of additional people to assemble guided missile destroyers and amphibious transport ships. ‘More ships are always better,’ said Kari Wilkinson, the president of the shipyard, pointing to the efficiencies that come with a steady flow of contracts and the jobs they create.

“But the focus from Washington on producing a stream of new warships is also creating a fleet that some inside the Pentagon think is too wedded to outdated military strategies and that the Navy might not be able to afford to keep running in decades to come.

“Half a world away, at a U.S. Navy outpost in Bahrain, a much smaller team was testing out a very different approach to the service’s 21st-century warfighting needs… Bobbing in a small bay off the Persian Gulf was a collection of tiny unmanned vessels, prototypes for the kind of cheaper, easier-to-build and more mobile force that some officers and analysts of naval warfare said was already helping to contain Iran and could be essential to fighting a war in the Pacific.

“Operating on a budget that was less than the cost of fuel for one of the Navy’s big ships, Navy personnel and contractors had pieced together drone boats, unmanned submersible vessels and aerial vehicles capable of monitoring and intercepting threats over hundreds of miles of the Persian Gulf, like Iranian fast boats looking to hijack oil tankers… Now they are pleading for more money to help build on what they have learned… ‘It’s an unbelievable capability — we have already tested it for something like 35,000 hours,” said Michael Brown, who was the director of the Defense Innovation Unit, which helped set up the unmanned drone tests in Bahrain. ‘So why are we not fielding that as fast as possible?’…

“The Navy’s top brass talks frequently about the need to innovate to address the threat presented by China. The Defense Department’s own war games show that the Navy’s big-ship platforms are increasingly vulnerable to attack… But the Navy, analysts and current and former officials say, remains lashed to political and economic forces that have produced jobs-driven procurement policies that yield powerful but cumbersome warships that may not be ideally suited for the mission it is facing.

“An aversion to risk-taking — and the breaking of traditions — mixed with a bravado and confidence in the power of the traditional fleet has severely hampered the Navy’s progress, several recently departed high-ranking Navy and Pentagon officials told The New York Times.” China has a larger navy than ours based on numbers of vessels, but it is the swarming capacity of smaller ships, the loss of any one of which is a tolerable cost, that suggest that it is China, not the United States, that is building the navy for the foreseeable future. Protecting Taiwan just might not be dependent on having a large US fleet deployed in the region.

While the US Navy is developing unmanned, drone ships (above and below the surface) as well as all sorts of sea-launched drone aircraft – clearly the future of warfare – we continue to build truly large target fleets whose time does seem to be coming to an end. We may not have a Pearl Harbor attack to force the paradigm shift, but we better begin to escalate that transition immediately. We need to stop wasting billions on ships that are obsolescent the day they are launched.

I’m Peter Dekom, and as the rightwing House Freedom Caucus presses for severe budgetary austerity, they are indeed the leaders in continuing the most wasteful and least effective major “big ship” building programs.

When Depriving a Convicted Criminal of Liberty is Not Enough

Since the 18th century, when torture, banishment and execution as the cure-all for criminal offenses were slowly replaced by incarceration, the United States experimented with all sorts of underlying strategies for imprisonment. The Auburn System, based on strict work ethics, total silence among inmates, and everyone placed in solitary confinement with a Bible at night, was one approach that was widely adopted in the 1800s. It didn’t work. Neither did the even stricter Pennsylvania System of total isolation in solitary confinement.

We’ve since devolved into mass incarceration – although we represent only 4% of the world’s population, we house a quarter of the world’s inmates – with expensive per prisoner costs (averaging around $40 thousand per year) – into what has become a segregated, gang-controlled system of ultra-violence and degradation under abysmal conditions. As public mental institutions have closed, housing those with serious mental issues (north of a third of inmates) has shifted to our prison system with vastly inadequate treatment options. Drug crimes, now moderated somewhat with the slow legalization of marijuana, still account directly or indirectly for close to half of all convictions. Prisons are graduate schools for criminal activity, and the stigma of former incarceration all but dooms most released inmates from making a legitimate and sustainable living. Recidivism rates have, as a result, continued to be rather extreme.

For those who are incarcerated, overcrowding, filth, vermin and insect infestation, join fetid cells and terrible food to exacerbate confinement. And then there are the obvious and uncontrolled realities of violence and death that plague almost every American prison. Getting your liberty taken away seems the least negative reality of American incarceration. We just have too many inmates to sustain more realistic solutions to criminal deterrence and rehabilitation, which seem like noble goals… that continue to elude us.

Americans typically have little sympathy for inmates, even those jailed and awaiting trials. The notion of inmates cooking for themselves in reasonable accommodations, found in some Scandinavian prisons, is a non-starter here. Some jails, like the seven-acre "Tent City Jail" in Phoenix used for decades that helped make former Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio a household name were subject to Arizona heat… often running 130 degrees… forcing a court-ordered closure in 2017. But with climate change, that rising heat is creating a hell on earth for so many jails and prisons, most without air conditioning regardless of the temperatures.

The realities are brought home by these thoughts in a September 3rd LA Times editorial: “Prisons are becoming climate change torture chambers… Summer heat turns non-air-conditioned concrete cells into ovens that cook the people inside alive… The purpose of the juvenile justice system in Louisiana is not to punish but to rehabilitate.

“But dozens of young Louisianans were transferred nearly a year ago to the vacant former death row of the notorious adult maximum security state penitentiary known as Angola, where they have suffered through a summer of record-breaking heat — without air conditioning, according to plaintiffs in a lawsuit against the state. As temperatures outside reached triple digits for days, conditions inside the windowless cells became unbearable… This is not rehabilitation, and it’s not even punishment. It is torture.

“Adults are in prison for punishment as well as rehabilitation, but shouldn’t have to endure such conditions any more than teenagers should… Yet intense heat has so affected imprisoned Louisiana adults that officials have had to step up suicide watches. At the Mississippi State Penitentiary in Parchman, a U.S. Department of Justice investigation found indoor temperatures reaching 145 degrees last year. In Texas, where 70% of prison living quarters reportedly lack air conditioning, incarceration becomes execution, as climate change drives already blistering summer temperatures even higher.

“One study found an average of 14 heat-related deaths a year in Texas prisons lacking air conditioning, and none in the relatively few prisons with A/C. The state has seen an average of two prison deaths a day this summer, many of them heat-related despite official insistence that the heat is not to blame.

“Lack of adequate cooling during hot summers has plagued Southern states for decades, but climate change has now made it a problem in Northern states as well — Michigan, Minnesota, South Dakota, Indiana. Brutal heat is especially lethal for aging inmates. It exacerbates already challenging mental health problems, which are rampant in prisons. It alters the effects of some medications. It robs people of sleep. It shortens tempers and increases violent behavior.

“It turns poorly ventilated concrete-and-steel prisons into heat-retaining ovens that don’t cool down at night. Individual fans bought at prison commissaries merely move the hot air around. Desperate residents describe clogging toilets to let the water run so they can lie in it, or soak their clothes in it, or lay their bedsheets in it… Staff, too, are affected by the unrelenting heat and are more likely to become ill or to respond aggressively to incidents.

“At sweltering, non-air-conditioned public schools, parents can at least take their children out of class. Tenants in non-cooled apartments can, at least in theory, go to the mall or an emergency cooling center during a heat wave.” So American taxpayers are paying for jails and prisons that do not rehabilitate, increase criminal expertise, result in alarming recidivism, and create super-angry and bitter inmates who are then released after serving their time… into the general public. Oh, and which literally torture those incarcerated in ways that defy any moral justification.

I’m Peter Dekom, and it’s hard to understand why taxpayers are willing to spend billions that represent pure waste, impose brutal torture… and then simply look away.

The Failed Red State Solution to School Shootings: Armed Teachers and Campus Police

That old NRA mantra that “the only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun” just won’t die… even as increasing numbers of shooting victims do. That second NRA axiom “guns don’t kill, people kill” seems hypnotically etched in the minds of red state legislators and Second Amendment zealots. The corrected version should be “bad guys without guns, especially assault weapons, kill a whole lot fewer victims than those bad guys who do.”

The uniform red state response has been effectively to turn law enforcement over to a massive and largely unregulated cadre of civilian gun owners – released from all sorts of prior legal restraints and encouraged to have and use their weapons (e.g., “stand your ground” statutes) – to take down those bad guys. Those “civilians” are left with an individual choice of whom they consider to be a bad guy… and perhaps some of those good guys get angry enough or crazy enough to transition from good guy to a bad guy at a moment’s notice. It’s the Wild West with enhanced weapons. Chaos and an underlying NRA suggestion that having a ubiquitous spread of weapons – over 320 million guns, including about 30 million military grade semiautomatic assault rifles – is necessary for civilians to overthrow an unpopular government only make bad situation so much worse. Self-righteousness has replaced common sense.

Despite decades of Republican efforts to suppress the collection of statistics about civilian gun homicides (e.g., the 1996 Congressional Dickey Amendment), we now know that the leading cause of death among children 18 and younger is gunshot. Any cold, objective analysis of such numbers supports the unambiguous conclusion that our policies place gun ownership above any notion of protecting our children from harm. Red state “right to life” arguments seem to crash and burn under this most basic analysis.

The cry of “arm our teachers” was the immediate response to so many shootings in public schools. No one asked the teachers if they wanted to carry guns, knew how to use guns and whether all those teachers were sufficiently mentally stable, not prone to strong reactive anger, to be trusted to make the right decisions. Leave it to Texas – the “we’re taking over the Rio Grande,” an international waterway, with barbed wire floatation barriers against the exclusive federal government control of our borders – to come up a BIG OLD TEXAS STYLE solution to school shooting. Put an armed and trained police officer in every Texas public school. Does that including giving them AR-15s too?

The September 3rd Associated Press looked at the Texas “eyes were so much bigger than their stomach” solution, a post-Uvalde shooting piece of Governor Gregg Abbott’s rightwing legislative agenda: put a cop in every school: “A vision of armed officers at every school in Texas is crashing into the reality of not enough money or police as a new mandate took effect Friday [9/1], showing how a goal more states are embracing in response to America’s cycle of mass killings is proving unworkable in many communities.

“Dozens of Texas’ largest school districts, which educate many of the state’s 5 million students, are reopening classrooms without meeting the state’s new requirements of armed officers on every campus. The mandate is a pillar of a safety bill signed by Republican Gov. Greg Abbott, who rejected calls this year for gun control despite angry pleas from parents of children killed in the Uvalde school massacre.

“Texas has nearly 9,000 public school campuses, second only to California, making the requirement the largest of its kind in the U.S…. ‘We all support the idea,’ said Stephanie Elizalde, superintendent of the Dallas Independent School District, which has more than 140,000 students. ‘The biggest challenge for all superintendents is that this is yet again an unfunded mandate.’

“The difficulties lay bare limits of calls to put armed guards at every school, more than a decade after the National Rifle Assn. championed the idea in the face of an intense push for stronger gun laws following the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre in 2012… The new Texas law allows exceptions and does not require districts to report compliance, making it unclear how many schools are meeting the standard… But by all accounts, many are not.

“The Associated Press contacted 60 of Texas’ largest school districts about whether they were able to start the school year in compliance. The districts, which cut across a wide swath of Texas, from rapidly growing suburbs to the U.S.-Mexico border, enroll more than 2.7 million students combined… Not all districts responded and some declined to discuss staffing levels, citing security concerns. But statements to the AP, along with a review of school board meeting actions and statements made to local media, show at least half have been unable to comply with the law’s highest standard…

“Local school officials say the additional funding Texas gave districts under the new law, about $15,000 per campus, is hardly sufficient. In Dallas, Elizalde said an extra $75,000 is needed for each additional officer in Texas’ second-largest district… In the scramble to comply with Texas’ new standards, options some districts previously never considered are now on the table: Some are turning to private security firms or arming more teachers and other staffers.”

Indeed, guns have become so easy to obtain in red states, particularly Texas, that the flood of “anyone who wants a gun can get one” reality has seeped into the massive cross-border smuggling of American-made guns south into Latin America to make regional drug cartels rich, powerful, with politicians south of the border bought and paid for… to fuel that massive drug trade that has so infected our nation. 90%+ of cartel weapons seized south of our border came from the United States.

Tourists are beginning to avoid our country under official warnings from their governments that the US represents a very dangerous country by reason of out-of-control civilian gun ownership. If the Supreme Court can reverse Roe, it sure as hell can reverse the first case in over two centuries to sanction ubiquitous gun ownership – Heller vs DC (2008) – and bring this nation back from the bring of gun violence hell.

I’m Peter Dekom, and the only clear and obvious solution to escalating gun US gun violence is increased regulation of gun ownership and the complete removal of assault weapons from civilian ownership (as was our law from 1994 through 2004).

Water, the Southwest and Post-Hilary Reality

 

It’s not as if the United States is alone in facing an increasingly parched future. Large swaths of Africa and Asia, particularly desert regions, may soon be rendered uninhabitable as sustained high temperatures hit rising record highs. There are parched areas of Europe where crop failure has replaced the once verdant visions of rolling croplands. Cape Town, South Africa, a lovely and once thriving city, staggered to the brink of total water loss… and staved off that horrible reality with a last-minute spate of rainfall.

But even with the flooding associated with tropical storms, questions about water availability continue, from the dramatic reduction of water stored in aquifers and wells across the land, particularly in that heartland between the Rocky Mountains and the Mississippi, to the desert Southwest. And the price we have to pay for precious s water generated by the increasing intensity of tropical storms is reaching exorbitant. Idalia and Hilary absorbed vastly higher levels of seawater, creating slow and heavy hurricanes/tropical storms for one terrifying reason: the rising temperature of ocean water, well above the 81-degree Fahrenheit line of demarcation for hurricane intensity. 100+ degree water off Mexico in the Pacific and the Gulf off Florida created storms that were labeled as “once-in-a-generation” anomalies… but the record water temperatures threaten to create our new normal.

Insurance rates in communities suffering the greatest damage are soaring to unaffordable, insurance carriers are leaving in droves, where flooding and fires are expected, and mortgage rates and shorter terms reflect the new reality. But didn’t Hilary end the great Southwestern drought? The answer if “yes, but not really.” Huh? Writing for the August 29th Los Angeles Times, Grace Toohey addresses the “yes” part of that answer: “Almost all of California is finally drought-free, after Tropical Storm Hilary’s rare summer drenching added to this winter’s record-setting rainfall totals.

“But despite all that drought-busting precipitation, California continues to capture only a percentage of that water. Much of the abundance in rain from Hilary ended up running off into the ocean — not captured or stored for future use, when California will inevitably face its next drought.

“‘We’re not even coming close to capturing all the runoff,’ said Mark Gold, the director of Water Scarcity Solutions for the Natural Resources Defense Council. He still called Hilary’s rainfall ‘an unexpected boon’ for Southern California’s local water supplies, but said too much of the storm’s water washed away — the latest reminder of the state’s urgent challenge to better capture rainwater to help refill vital groundwater resources.” Even with full or nearly full reservoirs, California mere bought a little time.

And then there is the loss experienced by the regional aqueducts and rivers from evaporation alone – somewhere north of 10%. “States at the end of the river would see their Colorado River portion shrink based on the distance it travels to reach users. The farther south the river travels, the more water is lost as temperatures rise and water is exposed to the elements for longer…. The Southern Nevada Water Authority estimates that roughly 1.5 million acre-feet of water are lost to evaporation, transportation and inefficiencies each year in Arizona, Nevada and California. That’s 50% more than Utah uses in a whole year.” Associated Press, January 30th. The cost of covering those aqueducts is in the billions of dollars, although the coverings could be used to house power-generating solar panels.

At the heart of the Southwest’s water woes is obviously the reality of the Colorado River, which feeds water needs to seven regional states. Not only does a decline in the river’s water table impact water usage, but if that level drops sufficiently, the massive electrical power generating capacity of Hoover Dam could slow if not stop entirely. Sure a few Hilary-related raindrops raised the Colorado less than an inch, which helped stave off an immediate disaster, but governmental studies tell us that we are unlikely to have the benefits of even recent river level for very long. Writing for the August 17th LA Times, Ian James explains:

“But the [federal] analysis highlights warnings from experts who say that even though the Colorado River has benefited from one of the wettest winters in years, the long-term gap between heavy demands and limited supply will require significant reductions in water use… Lake Mead and Lake Powell, the two largest reservoirs in the country, remain at historically low levels. Even with the rise in water levels this year, the reservoirs are just at 36% of capacity.

“‘The problem on the Colorado River does not get erased with one wet year. And in fact, climate change pretty well ensures that this problem continues,’ said Jennifer Pitt, director of the National Audubon Society’s Colorado River program. ‘While there is a temporary reprieve, and while there will always be wet years and dry years, the overall trend is warmer, drier, and less water availability.’” It’s hard to reconcile the flooding all over southern California (picture, above left) with the Colorado River levels that terrify resources planners across the basin. The photograph above right shows what the water at Hoover Dam looked like in 2021… but even after Hilary, that tiny additional waterfall hasn’t changed that view at all.

Construction in the Phoenix, AZ area has been curtailed, even stopped, as a 110-degree month set new records. Hilary did not change that. Some of those regional states were able to see some marginal improvement in their aquifers, but water shortages will define the commercial viability for the entire region for decades to come. A serious reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, even a process for removing such gasses from the atmosphere, accompanied by conservation and smart infrastructure and architectural development are now beyond mandatory.

I’m Peter Dekom, and if avoiding massive costs, sheer misery and major reductions in the qualify of our lives matter, it is time to shove all those climate change deniers or marginalizer out the door… and bolt it shut.

Victims, Real and Imaginary

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"I would certainly say, as I think I've said consistently in the past, that racially motivated violent extremism specifically of the sort that advocates for the superiority of the white race is a persistent evolving threat. It's the biggest chunk of our racially motivated violent extremism cases for sure and racially motivated violent extremism is the biggest chunk of our domestic terrorism portfolio." 

Trump-appointed FBI director Christopher Wray testifying before congressional committee in March of 2021

The United States is developing a rich if not profoundly checkered history of defining victimhood. The great polarization is built on the premise of those to be blamed and those who are destined to be suffering targets. The entire notion of anti-CRT legislation is to erase teaching of a racist past enforced by violence perpetrated by White settlers under the color of laws and practices they imposed on everyone in the land. The goal: not to make White children today feel guilt for the past legacies of slavery and discrimination, which were purportedly eliminated by the passage of Constitutional amendments and the spate of civil rights legislation and judicial rulings of the mid-1950s and beyond.

MAGA doctrine explains that today’s racism is practiced against White Americans, the “true” victims, in the form of diversity practices in university admissions and discriminatory favoritism towards people of color. The Black Lives Matter movement, now fading from power anyway, is viewed as radical socialism aimed at suppressing rightful White dominated political power and pushing for the defunding of police. A completely fabricated “organization” – Antifa (“anti-fascist”), with no formal membership or other physical presence – is blamed for fighting law and order and attempting to marginalize true American values. Police bodycams, smartphone videos and CCTV cameras have produced massive tangible proof of continued discriminatory practices, including the tsunami of video evidence of the January 6th insurrection, often generating a MAGA response of complete denial.

Where White perpetrators have mounted serial shootings against those of minority ethnic, religious or racial status, the standard response is to blame “lone wolves” for the carnage… even those such “lone wolves” are almost uniformly linked to others of similar persuasion in online social media and chatrooms where their toxic philosophies and weapons experiences are widely shared. There is no notion that voter suppression, anti-diversity rulings, anti-CRT statutes, silencing Black legislators in red states sessions, enabling wider ownership of unregulated or lightly regulated guns (including the toxic “stand your ground” laws) and the “fine people” message of the highest MAGA leaders in the land have any provocative or survivalist impact on those minority communities. Law enforcement that does not adhere to these White values is uniformly seen by many MAGA Americans as the enemy.

As Jaweed Kaleem, writing for the September 1st Los Angeles Times puts it: “Racist attacks now a way of life in the U.S… From Charleston to Pittsburgh to Jacksonville, killings inspired by hate mark a disturbing trend… In a report released this year, the Anti-Defamation League tallied extremist mass killings and attempted ones, finding that 46 took place since the 1970s. Each was at the hands of extremists motivated by far-right, far-left or radical Islamist ideology, with a small number connected to lesser known extremist ideas. But since 2011, it’s been right-wing extremists behind the majority of attacks. Most of those were carried out by white supremacists.

‘We not only have an epidemic of gun violence in this county but rising activity by white supremacists trying to spread their ideas, which can also be seen in more white supremacist attacks,’ said Oren Segal, director of the ADL Center on Extremism. “Since 2011, excluding Jacksonville, there were 26 mass casualties tied to extremism. In the 40 years before that, it was 20.’… The ADL found two recent years — 2021 and 2020 — when no deadly mass shootings or violent attacks spurred by extremism took place. Still, the civil rights group found that right-wing extremist violence and activity grew overall each year.” Kaleem goes on to list the more prominent such mass killings this year, with way too many involving legally purchased assault weapons. I hardly have room in this blog even to list those cowardly murders.

But the reliance on victimization argument is at the heart of the MAGA GOP, and the Trumpian “I’ve done nothing wrong” but the “deep state is out to get me… and you’re next” oft-repeated mantra is now the gospel to legions of the MAGA base, estimated to be around 30% of the American voting constituency. Indeed, a supermajority of that base believe Trump’s presentation of the “facts” over any other source… being family, pastors or even the hard visual evidence that is abundantly available. Thus, tens of millions of Americans believe that the true modern day American “victims” are White traditionalists and their leaders, particularly the Trump crew of indicted election-charged miscreants. This notion of White victimization is the underlying rational for so much conservative vitriol, violence and even legislative/judicial rulemaking.

Watching Trump’s legal team foist delaying tactics on various courts, in the hopes of vitiating federal prosecution (pardons or simply switching off the DOJ) and even sweeping away state prosecutions under notions of federal preemption or a rising red tide of angry voters and state legislators ready to terminate the Georgia prosecution by hook or by crook. Getting the House Judiciary Committee, under the leadership of Republican Jim Jordan with his own spate of scandals, to focus on crushing both state and federal anti-Trump prosecutions is just part of this massive MAGA effort to play the victim “weaponization of the justice system” card as somehow a effort to preserve essential American values.

Even Trump’s Chief of Staff, Mark Meadows is fighting for a notion that as Trump’s federally employed aid, his actions cannot be prosecuted under any state law. It is a claim that many of the indicated co-conspirators seem to have adopted. To me it does seem like a usurpation of the fully rejected claims of the Nuremberg Nazi defendants following WWII that they were not guilty because they were just “following orders” from their superiors. We are watching those for unlawfully trying to reverse the results of the 2020 election increasingly rely on a theory of “immunity under the Supremacy Clause, which identifies the U.S. Constitution and federal laws as ‘the supreme law of the land.’ The argument is that no matter how offensive Meadows’ conduct might have been to the state, the supremacy of federal law prevents charging him with a Georgia crime.” Harry Litman writing for the September 1st LA Times.

The vulnerability of all of these prosecutions has to be to find entire panels of jurors all willing to be impartial, not driven by political preferences or conspiracy theories, in evaluating the evidence against the former highest leadership in the land. A lone dissenting juror on such panels can throw a giant monkey wrench in this search for accountability and justice. So let me be perfectly clear, those MAGA defendants screaming as if they were the true victims in America today are among the most serious threats to democracy this nation has ever witnessed. I’m Peter Dekom, and in the end, the real victims in all of this have to be those American who believe in democracy, fairness and equality… assuming there are enough of us.

An Angry Flailing China vs Highly Polarized United States

The Canadian frigate HMCS Ottawa, on a joint patrol mission with U.S. and Japanese warships in the East China Sea, soon threatened by PRC guided missile destroyers

From the 20th century on, as the machines and weapons of war rose to inflict increasing levels of death and destruction against enemies, foreign and domestic, there arose a new threat from angry, mentally unstable narcissistic strongmen, seeking power and lacking a moral compass. In the earliest years of that century, the egos of monarchs placed their populations at risk to wage very personal wars to prove such leaders had powers. The parallel phenomenon was the rise of shrewd narcissists taking advantage of the anger of those ignored masses of citizens who were the victims of the resultant wars.

On the military technology side, when Britain commissioned the HMS Dreadnought in 1906 – a massive, large-gun, thick ironclad battleship – all existing naval vessels were rendered obsolete. That gave every existing nation a blank slate to build a ground-up navy. WWI added enhanced artillery, tanks and the beginnings of air power. These factors allowed nations – from the United States to Russia to Germany – to build the massive engines of global military power… and woe to such nations that were led by a new generation of Napoleonic narcissists. History provided the harsh results. Nuclear power combined with the United Nations were thought to be the post-WWII deterrent based solution. But the Cold War turned hot in Korea, Vietnam and across the Middle East.

What most Americans have let slip from their focus is the most recent transition in the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Under “I want to be the new Mao” leadership of President Xi Jinping, now unrestrained by the 10-year term limits and able to wipe his opponents from the Politburo, China changed. Big time. The emergence of the “some must get rich first” economic reforms, initiated by Deng Xiaoping and the intervening heads of state until Xi, gave rise to some of the largest and most successful corporations and mega-powerful Chinese billionaires, leading global economists to project China’s permanently surpassing the United States as the largest economy on earth by 2040. While the PRC may ascend to that status for a very short moment, that will not last under the revised legacy of President Xi.

Just as Xi was allocating massive resources to build the largest navy on earth, updating her aircraft and ocean-based technology, her nuclear capacity and her army, Xi focused on repressing and reining dissent: the Muslim Uighurs, and even ignoring his treaty obligations to crush Hong Kong. Those billionaires had too much power, so Xi decapitated those captains of industry, requiring them to sign pledges that prioritized doctrinaire communism over their economic wealth. Many disappeared. Those who were allowed to resurface ceded ownership to the state and faded into relative obscurity. Economic growth through capitalism was no longer a priority. And Xi had so consolidated his power under a revised police state that true dissent was marginalized or ended.

Xi’s COVID policies began with denial, soon replaced by a zero-tolerance lockdown/arrest program that stubbornly clung to an inferior vaccine. The lives of ordinary citizens plunged in quality. The deprioritizing of economic goals, the repression of big companies combined with global sanctions from Xi new militancy over the East and South China Sea, exacerbated the economic harm from the pandemic. Growth slowed to a crawl. Unemployment soared, reaching such a high rate of unemployment among the Y and Z Generations (20%) that the government stopped reporting negative statistics entirely. The Chinese economy was flailing, the new policies were wreaking havoc among now educated middle class workers, apartment complexes lay empty, real estate prices began to fall and a new feeling of hopelessness settled across China. China’s Belt and Road initiative over regional interconnectivity also failed to deliver. Yet still, today, China is a $700B/ year trading partner with the US.

So, what does a strongman do when his policies are failing miserably… but he has a massive military? Putin did his best imitation of Hitler with efforts toward annexation. Xi, it turns out, was no different, but a bit more shrewd and able to fall back on the long-held PRC position that Taiwan was an essential part of China and would be brought to heel by military force if necessary. A military airbase built by landfill in the Spratley Islands gave substance to China’s claims over its “legitimate” control of the region’s seaways and underlying riches. And China recently upped its claims by declaring that it had complete control of the Taiwan Strait… challenging any naval vessel that dare cross.

“Many nations — including Canada — want to protect the Strait as an international waterway. Under international law, China has exclusive jurisdiction over the 12 nautical miles (22 kilometres) off its coastline. It also claims the zone off Taiwan's coastline… But as a signatory to the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, China does not have exclusive navigation rights beyond this area.” CBC, September 6th. But China does not care. As Western naval vessels ply the strait, China’s naval vessels press menacingly close. And strongmen facing failure often revert to extreme positions to distract and rally their citizens to the sacrifice needed to battle foes.

China could attempt rapprochement with the West, attempt to deescalated tensions to reinforce its economy and address global issues like climate change. Instead, Xi is doing a Trumpian double down, watching the United States weakened by the red-blue divide, unable even to promote US senior military officers as a former college football coach and now a senior US Senator is attempting to subject the entire country to his religious beliefs. But the signs of a new but likely more violent Cold War are increasingly serious. As Michael Schuman, writing for the September 9th Atlantic observes: “[Early in September, the] world’s most powerful leaders gathered in New Delhi for the year’s premier diplomatic event—the G20 summit—but China’s Xi Jinping deemed it not worth his time. His absence sends a stark signal: China is done with the established world order.

“Ditching the summit marks a dramatic turn in China’s foreign policy. For the past several years, Xi has apparently sought to make China an alternative to the West. Now Xi is positioning his country as a full-on opponent—ready to align its own bloc against the United States, its partners, and the international institutions they support.

“Xi’s break with the establishment has been a long time coming. His predecessors integrated China into the U.S.-led global order by joining its foundational institutions, such as the World Bank and the World Trade Organization. For much of his tenure over the past decade, Xi has kept a foot in the door to that Western order—even as China’s relations with the U.S. have deteriorated. China even participated (though grudgingly) in G20 efforts to help alleviate the debt burden on struggling low-income countries.

“But over the course of his rule, Xi has grown hostile to the existing order and intent on altering it. He has focused on developing alternative institutions that Beijing could lead and control. Xi formed the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank to rival Washington’s World Bank, for instance, and promoted competing international forums, such as the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, whose membership includes Russia and Iran.” As Congressional gridlock defines the United States, as China watches the 2024 US election intensify internal hatred, can the United States even deal with the challenges it faces from global autocrats? And if not…

I’m Peter Dekom, and as our nation struggles with domestic terrorism, a trial of its former leaders’ in an attempt to usurp the elective process, there are even darker forces looking to challenge a world order that once embraced freedom and democracy.

Scofflaw States and Municipalities Inconvenienced by Constitutional/Legal Restrictions

There’s talk of such a polarization within America that we are on the verge of a civil war. Sometimes the statements of some pretty famous politicians – like former Alaska Governor and VP candidate, Republican Sara Palin – who suggested that if Trump is convicted anywhere, that would trigger that “civil war.” But what, exactly, could a civil war within the United States even look like? A clear, even uniformed, demarcation between two massive and clearly defined segments of American society – a literal blue-gray delineation with marked borders? Armies facing each other? Or something else that could vary between state and local jurisdictions that simply defy federal mandates to that “two major parties” simply killing each other?

US miliary bases, many with nuclear weapons, are scattered throughout the 50 states, with many bases and warships overseas. What happens to those installations and military forces? Forgetting about the complexities of “two Americas” (tax base, national debt, federal assets, currency, international trade agreements, treaties… well beyond just military assets), what else can civil war look like? Texas Governor Greg Abbott marking the Texas border with barbed wire floats across the Rio Grande, then defying a federal order to remove them? Add Texas law enforcement guarding against federal troops removing those barriers? Local (mostly rightwing) militia using armed force to resist legal mandates from the feds? Individual citizens, armed to the teeth, defying federal orders that contravene their values? Does the defiance grow, linked by social media, into a larger skirmish/all out war? We don’t know.

The Civil War of the mid-nineteenth century was a totally different era. The United States, like most of the rest of the world, was not defined by global communications, ships and aircraft that could cross continents in hours, a profound global interrelationship based on trade and treaties, and weapon systems capable of destroying entire cities if not more. The rise of wealth from corporate growth was decades away. Borders were vastly easier to defend without the threat of aircraft and paratroopers. But many Americans who contemplate the possibility of our polarization rising to the level of a civil war still cling to a visualization of a simplistic “us vs them” civil war, often forgetting about how the rest of the world would react to a violent American internal domestic dispute.

What would Europe do? Russia? China? North Korea? Israel? The rest of the Middle East? Would there be foreign forces literally aligning and supporting those violent American factions? But my belief is that this civil war is more clearly understood as civil strife arising locally in defiance of orders and mandates from the federal government or even state power over local rulings. It’s messier, not as easily assessed and may more resemble nations where chaos rises and regional warlords battle for regional turf. More banana republic and less organized and clear unified factions.

There are little disagreements, like those found in frustrated red communities within blue state California. School districts applying Florida anti-CRT/woke restrictions on lesson plans and assigned reading in defiance of state rules. Local communities refusing to accept state laws mandating looser building restrictions to address housing affordability… but decimating upscale communities fighting to preserve their long-standing way of life. The metastasizing of conspiracy theories is the fuel for the transition of polarization into ultra-violence. Look at the examples of such defiance today.

There’s the “control of our border” dispute between Texas and the feds. Or the ferrying of undocumented immigrants from Texas to blue states. Red states’ seeking to extend the reach of their anti-abortion laws by following and then prosecuting their own citizens to cross a border to reach a “free choice” state to secure an abortion. This nascent more formal resistant to unpopular laws and judicial rulings can be found in the rising popularity of so-called “sanctuary” cities and states, where local authorities formally announce a local refusal to follow such outside mandates from higher authorities.

One of the most interesting municipal acts of defiance has been the decisions of the very conservative Shasta County Board of Supervisors against a liberal statewide set of mandates. Writing for the July 31st Los Angeles Times, Redding resident Susanne Baremore explains: “In any other county, a resolution proclaiming a 2nd Amendment sanctuary might have been interpreted as a routine symbolic gesture allowing veterans, gun owners and sundry other ‘patriots’ a public moment of pride in their heritage and rural lifestyle. In Shasta County, which passed such a resolution [in late July], there is a lot more to it.

“Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, Shasta County’s Board of Supervisors has made global headlines for strange happenings and curious decisions… There was the meeting in which local militia member Carlos Zapata told county supervisors and citizens that overcoming the supposed ‘oppression’ unleashed by public health precautions could necessitate ‘blood in the streets.’ There was last year’s recall of longtime conservative Supervisor Leonard Moty for not ‘standing up’ to the state over COVID guidelines — never mind that Shasta County never really shut down commerce the way others did. There was this year’s misinformation-driven decision to remove Dominion voting machines from the county’s elections office without devising another system to take its place.

“The Board of Supervisors is currently led by a 3-2 majority that is ideologically further right than anything that used to be called Republican. Its members are also extreme examples of the Dunning-Kruger Effect, whereby a lack of knowledge leads to an overestimation of one’s competence.

“In dumping the voting machines, for example, the board largely dismissed county Registrar of Voters Cathy Darling Allen’s nearly 20 years of relevant experience. A recent “elections town hall” held by Board Chair Patrick Jones did not even include a presentation from the registrar but did feature a discredited election denier.

“Likewise, during the same meeting in which the board declared the county a safe space for the 2nd Amendment, it approved a 30-year agreement with a local Native American tribe to provide public safety services at a future resort casino next to Interstate 5 south of Redding. This agreement was passed without input from the county sheriff, fire chief or district attorney and without the approval of the county counsel or risk manager.” The small agricultural counties in California have been striving for years to separate and create a new state, one that would redefine the red-blue national divide and one that most Californians are very unlikely to accept.

But it is in this microcosm of defiance that the potential for violent reactions, local at first, then striving for some kind of nationwide linkage, resides. This could be a fractionalizing that decimates the United States, pulls it out of the ranks of a world power, and creates a long-lasting roiling level of violent strike… without any short-term solution. When we are willing to replace democracy with autocracy, we just might disable our entire American values forever. Special interests, which currently are funding much of the polarization, just might begin to understand that in doing so, they jeopardize their very existence… and the very existence of the United States of America.

I’m Peter Dekom, and unless we wake up and accept the notion of democracy and the standard of a “loyal opposition,” we face a future where politically and environmentally, we lose it all.