Courtship from Hell

Please forgive my loan

Jan 6th Stop the Steal Symbol

Sam Alito’s House

Courtship from Hell

A Broken System of Long Appointments and Partisan Judges

Our highest court is rife with what would be criminal corruption in most democracies … as well as festered with conflicts of interest. Without enforceable ethical rules, the Supreme Court’s approval rating has never been lower. The most blatant evidence: Justice Clarence Thomas’ deep wink-wink financial benefits – through the auspicious of Leonard Leo’s rightwing Judicial Education Project, a nonprofit group he advises, and by means of more direct travel, real estate benefits and strategic loan forgiveness – to Samuel Alito’s dramatically open embrace of political philosophies reflecting extreme rightwing bias (evidenced by flags reflecting support for while Christian nationalism and the upside-down US flag, an unambiguous “stop the steal” symbol).

“Leo’s relationship with Thomas is [also] under scrutiny after Leo arranged for Virginia ‘Ginni’ Thomas, the Supreme Court justice’s wife, to be paid tens of thousands of dollars for consulting work just over a decade ago, specifying that her name be left off billing records, according to documents reviewed by The Post. Reporting by The Post shows that Leo instructed the conservative pollster Kellyanne Conway in 2012 to bill the Judicial Education Project, a nonprofit group he advises, and use that money to pay Ginni Thomas. Leo told Conway that he wanted her to ‘give’ Ginni Thomas ‘another $25K,’ the documents show. He emphasized that the paperwork should have ‘No mention of Ginni, of course.’” Washington Post, May 5, 2023

As the virtual carte blanche rulings against meaningful gun control, decisions to support states’ efforts to disenfranchise voters and the reversal of Roe vs Wade attest, the Supreme Court changed daily life in America in a huge way. It’s July presidential immunity ruling in Trump vs United, a case that seems to fly in the face of basic democracy, paves the way for autocracy without a parallel judicial check and balance… under the guise of exempt, colorable, “official acts.” Whatever else is said and done, the power of a president, to influence and literally control our future for decades with lifetime federal appointments, is staggering and unstoppable today.

Writing for the Journal of the American Bar Assn (October 31st), Berkeley Law School Dean and Professor, Erwin Chemerinsky, explains the recent history of such judicial appointments: “Between 1960 and 2020, there were 32 years with Republican presidents and 28 years with Democratic presidents. In this time, though, Republican presidents selected 15 Supreme Court justices, while Democratic presidents chose only eight.

“Much of this was a result of the accidents of history as to when vacancies occurred. Richard Nixon selected four justices, while Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump each picked three. But no Democratic president since Harry Truman has selected more than two justices. Jimmy Carter had no vacancies to fill and President Joe Biden only one. By contrast, every Republican president during this time, except Gerald Ford, picked at least two justices.

“Put another way, while Trump chose three justices in four years, the prior three Democratic presidents—Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama—served a combined 20 years in the White House but selected only four justices in those two decades… It is easy to see how much presidential elections matter, for the Supreme Court, for constitutional law and for people’s lives…” This reality makes Donald Trump, with his 6 to 3 ultra-conservative court, possibly the most important president in modern history. Against a precedent of avoiding election rulings soon before an election, Trump’s lower court appointments and recent “shadow docket” emergency rulings (where no majority opinion is made) may ultimately decide the November 5th election.

“[Under the guise of an emergency/shadow docket ruling, where the majority did not post an opinion, an 11th hour, a] divided Supreme Court cleared the way Wednesday [10/30] for Virginia officials to remove about 1,600 voters from the state’s registration rolls less than one week before the presidential election.” ABA Journal, October 30th.

“In recent years, the court’s conservative majority has been more willing to use its power to intervene in ongoing litigation through its so-called shadow docket. Legal scholars and liberal justices have criticized the practice. The court’s denial of the last of a slew of emergency bids to pause new Clean Air Act regulations suggests the justices are rethinking how they wield these emergency orders.” Jess Bravin for the October 31st Walls Street Journal. What’s worse, the machinations behind extending this judicial legacy are startling, as Ian Prasad Philbrick, writing for the October 31st The Morning (a NY Times newsfeed), explains:

“In recent years, judges have tended to retire in time to let the president they prefer fill their seats. The oldest sitting justices today — Clarence Thomas, 76, and Samuel Alito, 74 — are Republican appointees. If they stepped down during a second Trump administration, the president could choose younger replacements who would cement conservative control of the court for decades… What about lower courts?

“Judges can serve for life. So the more a president appoints, the more he or she can shape the country. The Supreme Court hears only about 80 cases per year, meaning that lower courts are often the final arbiter on many issues. They set precedent on criminal justice, bankruptcy proceedings, corporate disputes and antitrust enforcement, and on whether federal laws and rules are constitutional.

“In a typical four-year term, a president replaces about one-quarter of the country’s 870 active federal judges, across both federal district and appeals courts. Trump filled 231 vacancies, and President Biden may equal that number before the next Congress takes over… Partly as a result, Republican and Democratic presidents have each appointed about half of the judges on federal courts. The appeals courts lean slightly Republican, while the district courts lean Democratic (if you count senior judges who work less but still hear cases), according to Russell Wheeler of the Brookings Institution.”

As occurred during the Obama presidency, red state Senators blocked his Supreme Court nominations on a strictly partisan basis. When Trump took office, the floodgates for MAGA judges and justices swung open. Lifetime appointments of biased judges (for which there are ethics rules for federal appointees, but Supreme Court nominees are exempted) combined with an ability for a biased Senate majority to ensure partisan purity above duty to country for a very long time. Add to this horrible is the recent trend of rightwing jurists applying an ambiguous interpretation standard of “originalism,” requiring citing historical precedents to vet constitutional decisions… making judges historical researchers. That was never envisioned by our Founding Fathers. Our federal judicial system is a mess! No one can count on common sense or past Supreme Court rulings with any confidence anymore. Planning becomes a quagmire of partisan ambiguity.

I’m Peter Dekom, and without enforceable ethical rules for all federal judicial appointees, term limits and a mechanism to prevent the bias of extremes from dominating court rulings for decades, our federal courts will continue to devolve into the cacophony of judicial farce.

Mired in Distrust, a Novel System, Our Founding Fathers Weren’t Comfortable with Democracy

Perhaps the greatest flaw in those initial efforts, after rejecting those Articles of Confederation, was the fundamental belief that only good “men” would rise to federal office, particularly the presidency. Fearful of a new excuse for an American monarchy, battling for fairness in what was well over 90% an agricultural/rural nation against those monied urban trade centers, those founding negotiators did not fully understand how to make democracy work. Virginia, New York, Massachusetts and Pennsylvania (with a little New Jersey thrown in) were the power players. In an effort to placate sectional interests, they left us with a bizarre electoral college, lots of election controls relegated to the states, overwhelming requirements to amend the Constitution (requiring a truly united nation), a bow to agricultural power by designating two Senators based purely on land mass (states, without reference to size… an unamendable Constitutional provision) and that wonderful and thoroughly ignored “plain meaning” of the Bill of Rights (the first ten amendments).

That level of trust never anticipated a candidate willing to pull out all the stops to win the presidency. The “good men” have been marginalized, in his autocratic, even fascist efforts; Trump managed a “free speech” killer that will linger well past this election, as the October 29th Guardian UK suggests: “Veteran journalists and media critics are using a very different phrase to describe Soon-Shiong’s and Bezos’s choice: they’re saying the two billionaires, among the richest men on the entire globe, are performing ‘anticipatory obedience’ to Donald Trump… [a] term [that] comes from On Tyranny, the bestselling guide to authoritarianism by Timothy Snyder, a historian of eastern and central Europe. The phrase describes, in Snyder’s words, ‘the major lesson of the Nazi takeover, and what was supposed to be one of the major lessons of the twentieth century: don’t hand over the power you have before you have to. Don’t protect yourself too early.’ It’s a way of describing what Europeans did wrong as totalitarians came to power: by ‘mentally and physically conceding, you’re already giving over your power to the aspiring authoritarian’, Snyder explains.”

Many Americans are justifiably scared of the mega-MAGA focus on subverting and denigrating the election process itself, perhaps a future reality American if democracy survives: “the Stop the Steal movement of 2020 has evolved into the considerably more sophisticated ‘election integrity’ movement of 2024, its success is still premised on persuading election administrators of two things that are not true: that widespread election fraud is a real and present threat to democracy and that they have not only the authority but also the legal duty to do something about it — that they must ‘do their duty’ and deny certification.

“[There is a] growing number of election officials who seemed willing to do exactly that. For them, going so far as to block certification wasn’t a partisan gambit; it was a patriotic duty. Though it might technically be illegal, it obeyed a higher law. Over months of reporting, this is what I heard again and again. For all the cynicism involved in the effort to overturn Trump’s 2020 loss, and the groundwork being laid to challenge a possible defeat this year, many officials I spoke to were clearly motivated by a deeply held belief that a grand conspiracy was underway. In the face of that, how could they agree to certify?” Jim Rutenberg for the October 28th New York Times. How did we get here? Can a form of government and an archaic and currently virtually unmendable Constitution withstand this vicious expert attack on our constitutional guardrails? Let’s look back at the Constitutional Convention of 1787 to see out this all started.

It's fairly obvious that a constitution, born of a citizen army with no real guidance as to how to fashion a democracy, was not designed to contain an autocratic party, led by a messianic zealot using a false Biblical interpretation, willing to ignore its dictates and do whatever he could to rule under a strict and profoundly undemocratic mantle. Writing for the October 29th Los Angeles Times, Joseph J. Ellis, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and author of an upcoming book, Realities and Regrets: The Tragic Side of the American Founding, describes these founding failures as the albatross of limitations they contain:

“As we travel back in time, there are a few features on the historical landscape unique to post-revolutionary America that will strike us as strange… One is the ghost of Britain’s King George III. The debate over executive power, as recorded in contemporaneous journals, letters and articles, is difficult to follow, like watching a soccer match played with three balls and no referees. The one conviction the delegates could all agree on was that the president must not be a monarch who stood above the law. (The recent Supreme Court decision, Trump vs. United States, fragrantly defied that core conviction.)

“The second strange-to-us feature, even more disturbing to our current political presumptions, is a deep suspicion of democracy. Throughout the American founding the word “democracy” was an epithet, and remained so until the Jacksonian era. The watchword during the founding era was ‘republic,’ from the Latin ‘res publica’ meaning ‘public things.’ The public interest, for Madison, Jefferson, Washington and the others, was the long-term interest of the people, something the founders thought the bulk of voting Americans (white male landowners) would seldom comprehend because of their limited horizons and susceptibility to conspiracy theories, misinformation and demagogues. (Sound familiar?)

“When the question of how to elect a president arrived on the agenda in August 1787, suggestions included election by the Senate, by state Legislatures and finally by popular vote in all the states. Multiple critics objected to the latter option on the grounds that popular opinion was notoriously unreliable… These raw and misguided opinions needed to be filtered through more informed and educated minds. James Madison stepped forward to coin the term ‘filtration’ and then ‘Electoral College’ to describe state legislators capable of comprehending the long-term public interest, and, if necessary, over-ruling the popular vote in the states. Alexander Hamilton endorsed this ‘filtration’ approach in Federalist 68.

“Filtering the presidential choice through electors was not designed to enhance the political power of the Southern, pro-slavery states, but that in fact is what it did. During the debate over how to count population for representation in the House, the delegates passed the three-fifths clause, basing representation on ‘the number of whites and three-fifths of the blacks.’ The political advantage the three-fifths clause gave to Southern states in presidential elections was the main reason that Thomas Jefferson was referred to as ‘the Negro president’ after his narrow victory in the election of 1800.

“The ironies of the electoral college abound. The founders did not foresee the emergence of political parties and their winner-take-all slates of electors, which make a mockery of all presumptions of virtuous choosing by a select few. What’s left is indeed a filtration of the popular vote, but one that has morphed into a device whereby the minority defeats the majority… As a result, the very outcome the founders most feared, namely election of a demagogue by a gullible cult of true-believers, has been made possible because of the electoral college, which was originally designed to avoid precisely that outcome.”

As contemporary elections have resulted in victories for presidential candidates who lost the popular vote, as the first such constitutional democracy produced a constitution that was inflexible and in polarized times, unamendable… unscrupulous candidates have exploited these weaknesses, further eroded by the current US Supreme Court bending and twisting to impose rigid conservatism in a way never intended; the fallacy of “originalism” for constitutional interpretation is a rightwing trope to ensure permanent control.

I’m Peter Dekom, and what can we do with an old, very old constitution constructed in the era of muskets and centuries before social media, where clever lawyers chip away at the clear intentions of our Founding Fathers?

New Politics American Style?

New Politics American Style?

Who Has the Guns and is Ready to Use Them

In the back of my mind, as I catalog all the threats of civil war or armed insurrection based on the election, I needed to remind myself of how many firearms are in US civilian hands and where those weapons are concentrated. According to AmericanGunFacts.com (January 22nd), “With over 434 million guns privately held… According to Pew Research, among Americans that own only one gun, 62% own a handgun versus 22% who own a rifle, with the majority of those being AR-15s. The remainder own shotguns.”

There are an estimated 20-30 million AR-15-style semiautomatic firearms in that mix, and they are the preferred weapon of mass shooters, trained militia (most of which are MAGA-oriented) and are the likely firearms of choice in a civil war or an insurrection. According to a recent poll from Quinnipiac University, 27% of Republicans support an assault weapons ban and 70% oppose, while 88% of Democrats support the idea and 11% oppose it. In terms of gun ownership in general, Republicans own more than double the number guns owned by Democrats, and only blue states have tried to limit or ban such assault weapons. In recent years, AR-15 sales have exploded, so the above ownership splits suggest which side is more likely to shoot in forcing a leadership change that does not jibe with actual voting results. 

Recently, Newsweek pulled an article from December 20, 2021, noting that “Millions of Angry, Armed Americans Stand Ready to Seize Power If Trump Loses in 2024.” The earlier piece, written by David Freedman, began by presenting a disabled Vietnam vet, armed with an AR-15, as he moved towards Trump’s speech at the Ellipse on January 6th, “[He] is no loner. His political comments on the social-media site Quora received 44,000 views in the first two weeks of November [2021] and more than 4 million overall. He is one of many rank-and-file Republicans who own guns and in recent months have talked openly of the need to take down—by force if necessary—a federal government they see as illegitimate, overreaching and corrosive to American freedom.

“The phenomenon goes well beyond the growth of militias, which have been a feature of American life at least since the Ku Klux Klan rose to power after the Civil War. Groups like the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers, which took part in the January 6th riot at the Capitol and may have played organizational roles, have grown in membership. Law enforcement has long tracked and often infiltrated these groups. What [that Vietnam vet attending the January 6th Washington, DC gathering] represents is something else entirely: a much larger and more diffuse movement of more-or-less ordinary people, stoked by misinformation, knitted together by social media and well-armed. In 2020, 17 million Americans bought 40 million guns and in 2021 were on track to add another 20 million. If historical trends hold, the buyers will be overwhelmingly white, Republican and southern or rural.

“America's massive and mostly Republican gun-rights movement dovetails with a growing belief among many Republicans that the federal government is an illegitimate tyranny that must be overthrown by any means necessary. That combustible formula raises the threat of armed, large-scale attacks around the 2024 presidential election—attacks that could make the January 6 insurrection look like a toothless stunt by comparison. ‘The idea that people would take up arms against an American election has gone from completely farfetched to something we have to start planning for and preparing for,’ says University of California, Los Angeles law professor Adam Winkler, an expert on gun policy and constitutional law…

“Absent a strong response from some combination of police, National Guard and military, it's easy to see how Republicans would be in a position to essentially take control of the country simply by virtue of their massive arsenal. ‘Both sides might be equally convinced of the illegitimacy of the other's actions,’ says Winkler. ‘What's asymmetric is the capability to inflict violence.’… Let's hope it doesn't come to that, and that there's a relatively peaceful resolution to what's likely to be a contentious, hotly disputed election. But that result isn't assured. And even if any conflict ends quietly before it gets too far, experiencing a near-miss might leave our already fragile democracy more weakened and vulnerable. It's hard to say what it would take to repair it.”

Well, there a whole lot more AR-15s in civilian hands today, and there are militia who “stand back and stand by” ready to use those guns to force Trump into the presidency even if he loses the election… with significant grassroots support from the MAGA base. According to a September national poll from PRRI, about a quarter of Republicans and 1 in 7 Americans overall believe force of arms should be undertaken in the event that Trump loses. A plethora of open carry laws, mostly in red states, send a clear and intimidating message to Trump’s opposition.

As the election neared, Trump’s cries for retribution, setting aside constitutional limits – using the Department of Justice and even the military to round up and arrest clearly named senior Democrats as well as any body of protestors that may oppose him or his policies, while shutting down Trump-critical news media – have ratcheted up both in frequency and overt hostility. His followers are repeating his threats, many willing to do whatever it takes if the election results do not produce the results they demand. Even a highly respected four star general and Trump’s former chief of staff, retired Marine Gen. John Kelly – describing the former president’s plans, practices and focused intentions as making Trump a “fascist” – have only incented the extreme MAGA base to force the creation the United States as a clear white Christian nation where their interpretation of the Bible overrides the Constitution.

I’m Peter Dekom, and yet a vast majority of voters still see this election as based on underlying issues and not the Trump oft-repeated threat that would effectively end our democracy, to be replaced by a white Christian nationalist (fascist) political system.

Replacing the Administrative State of Experts with the Layman’s Courts of Angry Biased Judges

The United States has become the land of powerful, culturally biased amateurs, railing against educated “elites” and those who believe major policy decisions should be anchored in facts and scientific probabilities. Many believe that they can vote and revoke the laws of physics, decades of massive scientific and medical research and experience, with rulings based instead on religious beliefs or conspiracy theories. Or that their politically driven judicial appointments can do the dirty work for them. The 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization Supreme Court reversal of Roe vs Wade gave these zealous extremists hope that all of what they believed were anti-Christian laws and decisions could be eliminated. Science be damned!

These anti-elitists insist that their beliefs can be forced on fact-driven experts and the majority of Americans who know better, even when such mandates decimate personal choice and individual freedom. Unfortunately, Mother Nature doesn’t care. If humanity opts for self-destruction, so what; Nature started with nothing and clearly can start over again. Only the hardy cockroaches are smiling… right along with the antivaxxers, DEI opponents and the climate change deniers.

We’ve seen a lowly, deeply evangelically-driven federal judge in Amarillo, Texas, U.S. District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, challenged two decades of medical safety for an FDA-approved birth control pill – mifepristone – by banning the drug in 2022, overruling that long-standing FDA approval (FDA v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine). While the Supreme Court threw out his decision, it did so simply by stating the plaintiffs lacked standing to sue. The merits of the case were not addressed. Kacsmaryk seemed to ignore a 1984 Supreme Court ruling, in Chevron USA v. National Resources Defense Council, that held where there was ambiguity in statutes that accorded administrative agencies with the power to implement Congress’ mandates in specialized arenas, courts should defer to the agency experts’ interpretation of that ambiguity: the “Chevron deference.”

But in June, “[the Supreme Court], in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, ruled that Chevron ‘defies the command’ of the Administrative Procedure Act, requiring that ‘the reviewing court’ rule on issues of fact and questions of law relating to agencies… [Their] landmark ruling overturning Chevron deference has introduced vulnerability into the power of federal agencies—but attorneys are conflicted about the significance of the outcome, which they say may be much ado about nothing…

“The now-defunct doctrine, however, had not been utilized widely in recent years. One of the last cases affirming the Chevron doctrine was 11 years ago in City of Arlington v. FCC, relating to the Federal Communications Commission’s interpretation of the 1996 Telecommunications Act amendments to the Federal Communications Act, says Will Dodge, managing partner and CEO of [the law firm of] Downs Rachlin Martin in Burlington, Vermont.

“This changed following a recent fishing lawsuit. In Loper, fishing companies challenged the enforcement of fishing limits set by the National Marine Fisheries Service, which falls under the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The plaintiffs argued that the costs associated with government-required monitors on commercial fishing boats were unfairly burdensome. The core issue: the interpretation of who should bear these monitoring costs.

“The Supreme Court ruled in favor of the fishermen, deciding that courts shouldn’t defer to an agency’s interpretation and should instead exercise independent judgment.” Danielle Braff, writing for the October 14th Journal of the American Bar Assn. The law Chevron deference had been so ingrained in legal practice that litigation challenging that Chevron deference was considered a futile waste of time. But that was before Donald Trump’s judicial appointments, including the reconfigured US Supreme Court now with a 6-3 rightwing majority, offered Luddites, religious extremists, gunowners who cared little for gun safety, the January 6th Capitol insurrectionists and even white Christian nationalists an opportunity to impose their will, their vision for American, on everyone.

The more moderate view is that Loper may force clearer administrative rulings with less political bias. “Some attorneys are optimistic that going forward, the litigation playing field between regulators and the regulated has been leveled. For the last 40 years, says James Tysse, a Supreme Court and appellate partner with Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Field, agencies had the primary power of interpreting statutes that were less than crystal clear. But after Loper Bright, he says, courts now have the responsibility to determine what interpretation is best.

“‘For clients on the fence about filing suit, we are telling them that their likelihood of success has just increased,’ Tysse says… They can even challenge older regulations, including potentially previously affirmed as reasonable cases under Chevron, he adds.” ABA Journal. Maybe moderation will rise, or Loper just might have opened the door to rich corporate interests who oppose financial or environmental limits and white Christian nationalists to press their beliefs as mandates on us all.

I’m Peter Dekom, and while I can hope for moderation, the decisions of the Trump judicial appointees strongly suggest otherwise.

Modern Democracy – Transition of Power from Land to City

European countries, for the most part, are smaller nation states, more compact and focused on their major cities. As their political systems evolved into representative democracies, even as they may have designated states and provinces, political power rested primarily with the heavy concentrations of people in large cities. Even as rural constituencies felt marginalized, decisions still continued to favor the urban population centers. By way of example, in modern France, the “yellow vest” protestors, farmers whose trucks and tractors closed in on Paris, blocking roads and streets, failed to move the needle much in their direction.

When the United States adopted its founding governance and underlying documentation (the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the Electoral College, Congressional districts, etc.), it was a nation that was 97% based on agriculture, with heavy suspicion from states with vast rolling land with few urban interruptions against manufacturing and trading centers concentrated in cities. Slavery, uncommon in Europe even as European nations dominated the slave trade, was deeply embedded into the American political system, even though “slavery” is not mentioned by name in our pre-Civil War Constitution.

The early battle between urbanized states (most northern states did not permit slavery) and the rural states addressed slavery in a battle over proportionate representation in Congress and allocation of federal benefits. The South wanted slaves to count in districting without according them any rights. The negotiation produced Article 1, Section 2, Clause 3 of the US Constitution: “Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons.” Hence slaves were effectively 3/5th of a person but completely powerless unless a state provided otherwise.

According to a Princeton University historical analysis of US demographics: “From 1830 to 1930, the pace of urbanization substantially accelerated: the share of the population living in an urban area increased six-fold to 60 percent. After a decade of stasis, the urban share again increased rapidly from 1940 and 1970 and then more slowly from 1970 to 2010, reaching 80 percent in 2010.” By 2050, that number is expected to hit 90%, and even today fewer than 2% of Americans are directly involved in farming. But in 1789, farming states remained deeply concerned that states with increasing urbanization be restrained from altering a status quo that gave farm states disproportion power. Wyoming, with under 700,000 people, has the same two US Senators as does California with approximately 40,000,000 people.

It is statistically possible for under 20% of the United States to elect 50% of the Senate. Our 1789 solution – called the Connecticut Comprise – sealed the voting supremacy of rural America defining Congress: the Senate, granting equal voice to every state, and the House, based on population. Added to this was the ultimate protection for rural states’ rights: equal state representation in the Senate is the only provision in the Constitution that remains singled out for protection from the amendment process; no state can lose its full complement of senators without its permission. To make matters vastly worse, the United States has the least amendable constitution among democratic nations. Simply put, land mass trumps urban population centers in voting power. An American rural voter has about 80% more voting power than an urban voter. While Europe focused on population centers in its allocation of voting power, the United States concentrated on land mass.

The very images of American culture, from food (“as American as apple pie”) to the imagery of our “wild, wild West” (embedded in a litany of American films and television programs) to NASCAR and rodeos… are rural based. It is within this context that the MAGA strategy is brilliantly based. White supremacy and the marginalization of people of color (also generally associated with “immigrants”) is drilled into the basics of our political heritage, with immutable protectors against “upstarts” rocking that white Christian nationalist “status quo.”

Contemporary suspicion of educated elites, almost always a product of high-end urban university training, is deeply embedded in the very definition of being “American.” An image of a farmer plowing his fields is so much more a symbol of being “American” than a scientist holding a test tube. Farm vs city. Open spaces and vast resources vs universities with too many “elites.” Modernity vs getting back to basic values linked to the land. Rural communities subject to the vagaries of nature (drought vs rain) are united around their churches, cities around their corporate centers and artistic venues.

Some of the lesser-noted protests reflect this urban rural schism. Writing for the October 4th FastCompany.com, Devin Liddell defines a new rebellion against hallmarks of impersonal but rising technology, very much focused in cities, as “modus non grata.” And while this is a global phenomenon, it is heavily manifest in American cities: “Los Angelinos hurling e-scooters into the ocean. Residents of San Francisco and Chandler, Arizona sabotaging driverless cars. Barcelonians squirting cruise ship passengers with water pistols. Borrowing from the Latin term persona non grata for labeling an unwelcome person, modus non grata describes when modes of transport are similarly ostracized and made into proxies in conflicts about the futures of cities.

“The origins of these aggressions are straightforward when we consider that the transportation we use reflects our values. This is true for us as individuals and as communities, and this is especially true when a mode of transport becomes a symbol of adjacent socioeconomic and ecological conflicts. Los Angelinos hurled e-scooters in the ocean because those scooters are emblems of gentrification. Residents of San Francisco and Chandler sabotaged driverless cars because those vehicles are exemplars of an erosion in public trust. Barcelonians harassed cruise ship passengers because cruise ships are representations of over-tourism.

“The conflicts are about something else, but transportation is the way we fight about them. So far, this era of modus non grata has emerged within individual cities. But there are signs that it will go global with transformative effects.” Yet change is inevitable, though its consequences usually leave a large segment of the population behind. Neo-Luddites, perhaps but rural populations – cast under a MAGA spell – are feeling their oats, experiencing growing Schadenfreude at the pain of cities… and doing everything in their power to exacerbate that pain in ugly “retribution.” Even in red state Texas, most of its big cities are Democratic strongholds, marginalized by ample application of gerrymandering. With our archaic political system, cities need to grow even bigger to stop this built-in rural tilt so well-protected by the Constitution.

I'm Peter Dekom, and all this talk of ending polarization and reuniting Americans faces strong resistance among rural voters who continue to revel in their disproportionate political power.

If Economists Struggle with Economic Trends, How About the Rest of Us?

October 8th LA Times Projection of Trump’s Immigrant Deportation/Tariff plan

It’s so strange to watch as purportedly fiscal conservatives are voting to reduce economic growth, raise prices and eliminate low-cost labor from our manufacturing, construction and service sectors. Fighting hard to get elected, immigration has been hoisted as the main crime-creating, job-sapping and culture-eroding horrible for our nation. The numbers scream otherwise. On a macro basis, the United States is a mature marketplace. As 2.1 live births per woman is replacement value, the US is at 1.62. That contraction has been accommodated in the past with immigration, but the anti-immigration vector here will tank that relief valve, raising costs further (lowering discretionary income) with the loss of low-cost labor. Did I mention that the crime rates for nascent immigrants is actually lower than apply to the incumbent population?

This contraction pushes harder towards searching for growth markets overseas, even as other nations put barriers on foreign business in their countries. Pursuing raising tariffs, which is almost always a hidden sales tax paid only by consumers, as a panacea for job creation, neglects the retaliatory trade wars that benefit no one. This profound failure to understand how overall markets generate revenue growth has inevitable consequences for those who think they can legislate substitutes for genuine growth (especially, growth for all). Of course we can reshore manufacturing; we are a “can-do” nation with the ability to make the complex products of the future better, more efficiently, HERE. Look to the real job creator: education!!!!

Locking ourselves into rigid, now-archaic, practices that desperately need updating or replacement also undercuts the assumed model, valid in the 1930s through 1950s but fading fast after that, that funds Social Security: younger workers supporting older retirees. A graying nation with a contracting population absolutely needs to update its funding model. The existence of so many billionaires, even those transitioning to trillionaire status – disproportionate wealth and income inequality at a vast multiple of past wealth disparity – provides an obvious solution. Republicans cutting taxes that profoundly benefit only the rich can no longer be carried as the “tax cutting” party to attract… the rest of us.

To add additional cost vectors to this mess, we are paying for the ravages of climate change disasters… through the nose. Aside from the direct and visible destruction and the cost to “build and replace,” add the rising cost of electrical power (for AC) and insurance (from more natural disasters), and the pressure to contract consumer spending rises. Raising prices does not make up for policy failures. Expect seismic shifts in our overall economy. Undocumented workers have accounted for about $5T/year in economic flow. Exactly why are we so hell-bent on expelling these value creators from jobs Americans will not take and cutting a vast pool of consumers and taxpayers? Yes “taxpayers.” Economics are tough to understand, but…

Even as I present a GDP chart above – it’s the best estimating measure we have – GDP may be the worst "success metric" imaginable; the mega rich at the top are making so much money that the averages look good. So many are living in an economic/technology denial bubble, not understanding the overall reality vectors. In a contracting consumer base, the only way to make money is to take earnings away from someone else. As this contracts, growth no longer creates the escape value. When a consumer faces having to cut spending, where will the budget cuts land? Who loses? New quote: Those who do not understand economics are condemned to repeat its mistakes. Blaming political opponents for global economic realities, over which no one has simple control, may win elections… but the resulting required realpolitik to right the ship does not happen, making the problems that much worse as the horribles simply accumulate.

It’s understandable why few truly understand macroeconomics. Emotional reactions and global changes are hard to quantify even for the Federal Reserve. Writing an editorial for the October 8th Los Angeles Times, columnist Michael Hiltzik applies all this to the current election assumptions: “Long story short: Trump’s would be much worse in terms of increasing the federal debt than Harris’. According to the study issued Monday by the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, Harris’ policies would expand the debt by $3.5 trillion over 10 years, Trump’s by $7.5 trillion… These are eye-catching figures, to be sure. They’re also completely worthless for assessing the true economic effect of the candidates’ proposals, for several reasons.

“The disappearance of migrant workers...dries up local demand at grocery stories, leasing offices, and other nontraded services. The resulting blow to demand for all workers overwhelms the reduction in supply of foreign workers.

“One is the committee’s single-minded, indeed simple-minded, focus on the direct effect of the proposals on the federal deficit and national debt. That’s not surprising, because (as I’ve reported in the past) the CRFB was created to be a deficit scold, funded by the late hedge-fund billionaire Peter G. ‘Pete’ Peterson… For instance, the CRFB has been a consistent voice, as was Peterson, in campaigns to cut Social Security and Medicare benefits on the preposterous grounds that the U.S., the richest country on Earth, can’t afford the expense. (Peterson’s foundation still provides a significant portion of the committee’s budget.)”

But Americans love simple solutions to complex problems with catchy but profoundly misleading phrases, often based on totally false “alternative facts” and appealing “theories.” For example, the GOP “axiom” over supply-side, trickle-down economics – the “justification” given by the rich as to why they should have lower taxes – has NEVER worked. The rich do not take tax cuts and create lots of new, high paying jobs. They never have… and that’s clearly not how they got rich. Let me rephrase the common statement about that. “A rising tide floats all yachts.”

I’m Peter Dekom, and hard facts, from climate change to dollars-and-sense reality, can neither be wished or legislated away, regardless of repetition, passion or loud voices to the contrary.

A Nation of Immigrants: Dehumanize, Deny, Fabricate & Deport

“It’s an unsolvable issue… The U.S. has a 2,000-mile border with Mexico. We need more asylum judges to process cases faster. People are waiting three and four years, and the geography of where they’re coming from is changing. The majority of people we’ve been seeing are Africans. We’re having to speak French instead of Spanish.” Nicholas Matthews, 24, a Tucson Samaritan who has opened his apartment to asylum seekers

There is no question that there are criminal immigrants at our southern border, but the statistics, for anyone seeking more than mere anecdotal evidence, tell us that such migrants commit far fewer violent crimes when they cross than American-born citizens. As our population contracts (US birth rates are 1.62 live births per adult women, while replacement requires 2.1), until recent years, immigration has been the growth safety valve that has kept out economy humming. As the US tightens immigration even for STEM-educated applicants, countries like Canada and UK can’t lap them up fast enough. Estimates suggest that we would lose about $5 trillion a year if Trump’s deportation initiative were implemented. For those who crossed from Latin America in recent years, they make up the backbone of our low-cost labor pool doing jobs Americans won’t take: agricultural stoop labor, grueling unskilled construction work, working in slaughterhouses, etc.

But for political reasons, immigration is now a topline issue. Assuming somehow, we can deport all those undocumented workers without a massive mega-billion-dollar program (a huge and unjustifiable assumption), what happens to some of our most basic costs – from food production to construction – if we have to replace those workers with US-born workers… probably at triple or more the cost? What happens when that massive cadre is pulled from the US consumer base? How much lost tax revenue do we suffer by forcing them to remain below the radar? But MAGA continues to refer to these hapless migrants as “vermin,” violent criminal drug dealers, “murders and rapists,” and other horrific epithets, renascent of WII-era Nazi descriptions of Jews, spewed to justify the Holocaust.

We easily forget that US addicts supply the dollars to fund cartels, who are powerful because of the firearms they were easily able to purchase in the US… easily smuggled south. Cartels with lots of money, lots of American-made weapons, making life in so many nations south of the border a hellish nightmare forcing their citizens to flee for their lives. We don’t even talk about that.

Obviously, there is a problem at our southern border. But there has been no major serious immigration reform since legislation passed in 1986 during the Reagan era. For Republicans, keeping that problem unsolved, has become a political issue that they have run on for decades. Trump went so far as to force his MAGA sheep in Congress to vote against their own immigration bill, one that Democrats were willing to accept, to keep the issue alive for the 2024 election. But with horrific problems all over the world – murderous conflicts to decimating realities as climate changes kills agriculture and habitability – migrants are now coming from everywhere.

Writing about this horror at our southern border for the October 23rd Los Angeles Times, Jeffrey Fleishman tells us: “[More] than 11 million undocumented people in the U.S. are at the volatile center of the November election… The number of migrant apprehensions and other encounters with Border Patrol agents at the southwestern border has fallen sharply — from nearly 250,000 in December to 58,000 in August — since President Biden’s crackdown on asylum seekers in June. Over that same period, the monthly number of encounters with migrants from Guatemala fell 81% — from 34,693 to 6,420 — and there was a 76% drop, from 18,993 to 4,465, in those from Honduras, according to a Pew Research Center analysis. But decades of failed policies and Republican Donald Trump’s incendiary rhetoric against migrants have kept the issue a top priority for voters, prompting Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris to take a tougher stand on the issue.

“A drive with Tucson [Arizona] Samaritans along 21 miles of the rust-colored, slatted border wall in Arizona highlights the economic, political and human complexities in stopping a flow of people at a time when climate change, authoritarianism and economic uncertainty grip much of the globe.

“Immigration animates the American conversation on schools, jobs, crime, housing and the cost of healthcare. It is an unsteady balancing act involving compassion, the nation’s economic needs and bipartisan calls for stricter regulations often distorted by weaponized statistics and divisive politics… For men such as Jim Chilton, whose 50,000-acre cattle ranch runs near the Arizona border, it’s a matter of security: “We need to finish the border wall,” he said. “Our nation is built on immigrants. We need them. But we have to have legally accepted ones, not people coming in and saying, ‘I’m here. Process me.’… “There’s some really bad guys coming onto our ranch,” he continued. They’re packing [fentanyl] and guns. I don’t like it. They’re coming to poison our country.’

“Chilton’s concerns resound in [Arizona, a] critical battleground state. Democrat Joe Biden won here by fewer than 11,000 votes in 2020. Although border encounters have fallen across the country, they remained persistent here over much of the last year, rising about 40% in the Tucson region to roughly 450,000. Those figures have dropped significantly in recent months, but furor over immigration has led to a November referendum, known as Proposition 314, that would allow state and local-level officers in Arizona to arrest and deport undocumented migrants…

“At the height of the migrant influx last year, up to 1,500 asylum seekers a day passed through Tucson, whose network of churches and nonprofits helped provide temporary shelter and supplies. Mayor Regina Romero said the U.S. ‘immigration system is completely broken. The House and Senate need to fix it.’.. A Democrat and daughter of immigrant farmworkers from Mexico, she said that Trump and Republicans have turned immigration into a ‘wedge issue’ while ‘spewing lies’ about migrants with ‘cruel and dehumanizing’ language.”

Yet his horror, which actually can be solved with well-funded preventatives and appropriate processes, just might elect a president whose stated disdain for immigrants (he married one!) and promised policies just might make the whole matter so much worse… while slamming the US economy. We choose not to… and it is a choice. We are talking about suffering flesh and blood human beings. To hate them and fight to harm them appears to be a wholesale condemnation of essence of Christian charity, the underlying vector of the entire New Testament of the Bible. Is the mission of MAGA evangelicals?

I’m Peter Dekom, and the scurrilous anti-immigrant rhetoric – mostly driven by fabrications and conspiracy theories – just might elect the most dangerous man to the presidency that we have ever had.