Coronavirus, Prepare to Move Over, Fire Season is Coming

Make no mistake, the threat from the spread of COVID-19 is massive, horrible and growing. On February 27th, the World Health Organization declared that the virus and the threat of a growing pandemic are now officially a “global health emergency.” As the virus descends into nations with less effective healthcare systems, the mortality and infection rates rise. Even though the numbers in the United States remain modest, the disease is erupting unexpectedly where the source of exposure remains a mystery. Americans, among billions the world over, are clearly unsettled.

Despite this global reality, the Trump administration continues to treat the threat of this highly infectious contagion as an attempt by the Democratic Party to take down the US stock markets to gain political advantage in the coming presidential election. “The coronavirus outbreak’s impact on the world economy grew more alarming on Saturday [2/29], even after President Donald Trump denounced criticism of his response to the threat as a ‘hoax’ cooked up by his political enemies. Skepticism greeted Trump everywhere he turned.

“China's manufacturing plunged in February by an even wider margin than expected after efforts to contain the virus outbreak shut down much of the world's second-largest economy, an official survey showed Saturday [2/29].” Associated Press, February 29th.

Finally understanding that even his evangelical base did not believe Trump’s statements about this virus “hoax,” he held a hastily gathered White House press conference on February 29th, including his coronavirus tsar, Mike “I need something to do” Pence, to assuage the American people. Telling the reporters that he had summoned 50 of America’s top pharmaceutical executives to a White House meeting scheduled for March 2nd, he also said that the United States would have an inoculation for COVID-19 imminently (which is patently untrue as medical professionals have stated repeatedly). He also instituted some additional travel restrictions and advisories relating to nations with recent significant outbreaks of the virus. All this from a man who dramatically defunded the federal team created to deal with pandemics. But the global economic devastation was not remotely reversed by his still-not-credible assurances.

Our stock markets are seriously down because of the “coronavirus adjustment,” but “adjustment” is always the name of that share price game. The popular barometer of the NYSE historical Dow Jones curve tells you that, with regular ups and downs, the overall vector of the US stock market is massively up, regardless of depression, recession or who is in office. That the market has been artificially been bolstered with a massive injection of free cash without any concomitant increase in productivity (the big tax cut), its general upward vector has, at least until now, been a foregone conclusion as the above historical chart proves.

But there is another aspect of this administration’s policies that is rearing its ugly, climate change denying/ignoring, head: the next fire season. Since fires are literally hot and heavy in blue states, notably California, the President continues to blame those states for failing to spend the billions and billions of dollars needed to clear out brush and dead trees from massive Western forests. He always omits that the uncleared brush is equally heavy in the huge tracts of federal lands, over which states have no jurisdiction, that are particularly vast in Western states. The threat of withholding federal aid looms large. And the overall accelerating impact on our economy has yet to reflect the trillions of hard dollar losses that man-induced climate change will impose as our federal government officially ignores the problem. Fires are just part of the problem as Midwestern flooding has recently illustrated.

Even conservative Australia, where climate change had, until recently, been questioned or at least on the back burner, has unequivocally accepted that man-induced climate change is very real and truly much more advanced than they ever imagined. Their questions, you should pardon the expression, vaporized. But “This is Us”: California is one of those blue states facing a combination of another bout with low rainfall, dry forests and deep federal animosity. The tea leaves out west are particularly disturbing. Even after the massive rains from earlier this season.

“California is set to conclude one of its driest Februaries in recorded history, elevating fears the state’s always-unpredictable fire season could arrive early this year — if March doesn’t bring some wet relief… February is typically a prime month for Pacific storms to produce much of the Sierra Nevada snowpack — moisture that sustains wildlife, delays wildfire season and serves as a water bank for thirsty cities and farms. But those storms didn’t arrive in February, with a state survey Thursday [2/27] showing the snowpack was 46% of average.

“After an unusually wet winter last year, many of California’s reservoirs are well above their season average, so state water managers have few fears about near-term shortages. Yet if the coming months remain relatively dry, the state will be dependent on an uncertain future to prevent the state from swinging back into drought conditions.

“‘All it takes is an extreme atmospheric river to end up in a high-water situation even if the broader season is dry,’ said state hydrologist Michael Anderson, who added that a storm is expected to hit the state in the next couple of weeks. ‘The two extremes can now coexist in a warmer climate.’

“Historical data, however, suggest there is just a small likelihood of what some call a ‘March Miracle.’ Over the last 14 decades, only five of the 20 driest Februaries in downtown Los Angeles were followed by Marches with above-average rainfall, said Bill Patzert, a retired climatologist for the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Cañada-Flintridge…

“Because of the enduring dryness, Cal Fire will probably begin staffing its seasonal firefighters and inmate hand crews earlier than last year, when an exceptionally soggy winter was capped with a surprise storm in May, said Mike Mohler, spokesman for the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection.

“A new slate of fuel-reduction and fire break projects are lined up for 2020 to continue last year’s surge of work aimed at protecting rural communities and evacuation routes. ‘It’s a double-edged sword — lots of rain, lots of brush; no rain, dry brush,’ Mohler said. ‘We hate to preach doom and gloom, but it’s the reality we live in… The writing of what could come is already on the wall’… A six-acre brush fire broke out at San Bruno Mountain State and County Park south of San Francisco on Friday [2/28], the remnants of a prescribed fire in Mendocino County grew out of control earlier this week, and there was a 100-acre fire near Lake Tahoe in mid-February.

“After back-to-back catastrophic fire years, 2019 ended up being the quietest year of wildfires in California since 2011, possibly because the state’s largest utilities proactively shut down their power lines most vulnerable to wind events. The strategy triggered blackouts for millions of customers but also potentially prevented some blazes from igniting during high winds.

“In Southern California, where the fire season typically begins at the end of summer, the uneventful winter just gives the landscape that much more time to dry out, officials said. When the month is over, this February will probably rank as the 10th-driest on record for downtown Los Angeles, said meteorologist Joe Sirard of the National Weather Service.” Joseph Serna and Paul Duginski for the February 29th Los Angeles Times.

Climate change horribles tend to compound and increase exponentially in some areas when they are ignored. And maybe we do not react as intensely as we do to a quick and unexpected shock to the system like the COVID-19 outbreak, but the damage that will result by our continuing not to react to climate change issues is so much, much, much, much worse.

I’m Peter Dekom, living in California, and for those in the Western, fire prone United States, “brace, brace, brace!”

St. Bernard – The Other Fracture in America

According to Forbes (6/24/18), US college tuition is rising almost 8 times faster than the rise in wages. For decades, each college-aged generation is proportionately worse off than the preceding generation in terms of college costs. The average college student leaves a four-year institution today with about $40 thousand in student loans, and if he or she continues to professional school (medical, law or business school), the debt rapidly rises to six figures. The aggregate student debt in this country outstrips the total of consumer debt by an increasing margin.

According to CNBC.com (December 13^th, and the author of the above chart), over the past decade, college tuition “costs increased by roughly 25.3% at private colleges and about 29.8% at public colleges.” Public funding for higher education, calculated on a per capita basis, has fallen in all but nine states during that same period.

Add to this reality the rising cost of housing in areas where higher-level jobs are available, and you often find entry-level recent college grads stacked like sardines in shared apartments or even living with their parents. Strangely, in the past year, the unemployment rate for recent college grads, particularly those with non-commercial undergraduate degrees, is actually higher than that of the rest of the workforce. The above scenario is the perception that most recent college grads face, so if that political adage – “it’s the economy, stupid!” – is applied to this demographic segment, take a wild guess at what grabs the focus of these recent grads.

Add to this volatile mix the stark reality of the political platform of the older generation in power denying or ignoring the most obvious and accelerating impact of terrifying climate change, escalating gun violence with millions of semiautomatic weapons in civilian hands, the worst income inequality in this nation’s history (and in the developed world), the death of upward social mobility and the rising of autocratic demands by self-declared white supremacists… and well, you are likely to see a younger generational belief that this country is in dire need of a ground-up do-over. Even Trump-supporting populists, who believe the President’s words but ignore his policies and their obvious results, think this country is going the wrong way. But the two factions clearly see different solutions, a perception gap that is both widening and increasingly polarizing.

For older generations, who lived through the “red scare,” the Cold War and the anti-communist conflicts in which the United States fought and often lost (or stalemated), epitomized by the Vietnam War, the deeply negative notions of communism and socialism are so deeply entwined that a mention of either sends severe chills down their backs. They conflate “socialism” (the government ownership of most everything) with support for “social programs” (like Social Security, Medicare and public education). Communism, so much worse, is a system of leveling classes, often through violent repression by an autocratic elite, where the purported proletariat imposes their vision of socialism on society. These words really scare these old folks.

Some say the “socialist model,” which they think is reflected in Denmark, is the way to go. But in fact, Denmark clearly supports capitalism and commercial success amidst safety nets and social programs; it is labeled as “socialist” when it clearly is not. But with strong social programs, it is one of the most content societies on earth.

Nevertheless, for younger American generations, even for those who have no negative valances regarding pure “socialism,” they do not have those visceral negative feelings about greater government support systems… but they see an irresponsible capitalist system that saddles them with massive debt, generates a deficit that makes ordinary social programs much more difficult to finance, while massive tax cuts and deregulation create huge new wealth at the top and a general decline or stagnation for most everyone else. They watch as corruption for the powerful is legitimized – from Citizens United giving the rich increasing political influence to a US Senate unwilling to have a trial for a President who clearly crossed a self-serving line – and are repulsed by what they see. They see rising racism, gender discrimination, and ethnic cruelty.

Enter the populist demagogue from the left, the elderly “independent” Senator from Vermont, Democratic candidate for the Presidency… Bernie Sanders. The schism is no longer urban vs rural values, business vs society… it is now an angry younger generation hell-bent on shoving the old biased system out the door… one way or the other. Bernie brazenly taunts the incumbent and older generations by calling himself a “democratic socialist,” using a description he knows will inflame so many traditional older mainstream voters. Old Bernie represents the young kids.

But “social democrats,” as evidenced by political parties in Europe, do not completely reject for-profit capitalism; they rein it in and push society to offer a society-leveling program of social benefits for all. Donald Trump, with hints of Russian support, seems to be salivating at taking on a man who uses that “s” word – socialist – in a nation with so much lingering hatred and suspicion of that term, confused and misunderstood… or not.

“Sanders may come across as angry. But young voters consider the problems at hand and figure, why shouldn’t he be?... ‘You have people that actually criticize him for being so passionate and yelling at you,’ said Norma Sandoval, a UCLA graduate student in molecular biology. ‘But you see that he truly does want what’s best for the majority of the people.’

“Ideological affinity, coupled with a head start on youth organizing from his 2016 campaign, has made the Vermont senator a formidable favorite among millennial and Generation Z voters. Sanders won approximately half of voters under 30 in the Iowa and New Hampshire contests, according to the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement, or CIRCLE, a research organization at Tufts University, and two-thirds of younger voters in Nevada.

“‘If anyone is going to try and dig into his lead, they’re going to have to go through the youth vote,’ said Ben Wessel, executive director of NextGen America, an advocacy group focused on youth turnout. Sanders, for his part, has made young people central to his path to victory, arguing that only a candidate that inspires turnout from new and infrequent voters can win the White House. But there has not been an overwhelming surge in turnout in the first three nominating contests.

“‘We’re not seeing some crazy overwhelming storming of the polls by Bernie-stans,’ Wessel said, using the internet parlance of fandom. But, he noted, the candidates who have performed best with young voters — Sanders, followed by Pete Buttigieg — are the ones leading the delegate chase. ‘It’s young vs. old right now in this primary ... and right now the youngs are winning.’

“Many young voters jumped into politics first rallying around an issue — be it Dreamers fighting for immigration reforms or youth-led strikes demanding action on climate change — rather than a specific politician. Philip Agnew founded an organization for criminal justice reform after the shooting death of Florida teenager Trayvon Martin. Recently, he has been on the road for the Sanders campaign, holding events at college campuses in at least eight states.

“‘It is the platform; it is the policies. Those outlast any person, and those are generational ideas,’ said Agnew, 34. ‘To hear them repeated back to them by somebody wanting to be president of the United States is a huge boost of affirmation for [young people].’… For many Democrats desperate to beat President Trump , their paramount concern has been who has the best general election prospects — a calculus that has been difficult to pin down in a volatile political landscape.” Melissa Gomez and Melanie Mason writing for the February 27^th Los Angeles Times.

Like or not, if the United States somehow holds together – which is very much in doubt – the Sanders vision is inevitable. But equally, even if somehow Sanders defies the odds and wins the presidency, congressional and judicial resistance are likely to frustrate his goals. He just might be a little too early in his vision for America.

If the United States does not survive intact, fractures into two or more smaller nations, the surviving blue states are probably better configured for economic success in a world where creeping automation and artificial intelligence are redefining the value of human labor. The surviving red states, still trying to recapture past glory and power, would likely face precipitous economic decline, probably bearing the brunt of climate change disasters. But is it abundantly clear that the world that Trump is promising is completely unattainable and unsustainable. Living with change is a bitch… but living with the assumption that change can be reversed is terminally stupid.

            I’m Peter Dekom, and the issue is not how to reverse or stop change but how to adapt and prosper with those changes.

A Plague of Locusts

So Moses and Aaron went to Pharaoh and said, “This is what the Lord, the God of the Hebrews, says: How long will you refuse to submit to me? Let my people go, so they can worship me.  If you refuse, watch out! For tomorrow I will bring a swarm of locusts on your country.  They will cover the land so that you won’t be able to see the ground. They will devour what little is left of your crops after the hailstorm, including all the trees growing in the fields.  They will overrun your palaces and the homes of your officials and all the houses in Egypt. Never in the history of Egypt have your ancestors seen a plague like this one!” And with that, Moses turned and left Pharaoh.

Exodus 10, as Moses sought to have the Pharaoh let his people go.

The notion of a plague of locusts permeates the bible. There have been books written throughout history, movies made but the real thing is terrifying and often occurs in the most fragile agricultural areas. They literally eat every shred of vegetation in sight, each consuming the equivalent of its body weight every day. Normally solitary insects (grasshoppers), they swarm when a confluence of environmental stimuli triggers mass cohesion. They then act as a group, a humongous devouring machine. There is no regularity for such swarming, but when it comes, it is devastating. What is making this worse is that the situs of expected swarming is expanding with climate change.

Antarctica and North America are the only two continents that have not experienced locust swarms. And while they are everywhere else, their worst damage has been focused in North, East and West Africa and the Middle East. But the heavy swarming is now challenging new areas, as will be discussed below. Controls are best implemented early in the swarm. But what exactly is a plague of locusts?

The phenomenon is cyclical. “Locusts are the swarming phase of certain species of short-horned grasshoppers in the family Acrididae. These insects are usually solitary, but under certain circumstances become more abundant and change their behaviour and habits, becoming gregarious… One of the greatest differences between the solitary and gregarious phases is behavioural. The gregaria nymphs are attracted to each other, this being seen as early as the second instar. They soon form bands of many thousands of individuals. These groups behave like cohesive units and move across the landscape, mostly downhill, but making their way around barriers and merging with other bands. The attraction between the insects seems to be largely visual, but also involves olfactory cues, and the band seem to navigate using the sun. They pause to feed at intervals before resuming their march, and may cover tens of kilometres over a few weeks…

“The desert locust (Schistocerca gregaria) is probably the best known species owing to its wide distribution (North Africa, Middle East, and Indian subcontinent) and its ability to migrate over long distances. A major infestation covered much of western Africa in 2003-4, after unusually heavy rain set up favourable ecological conditions for swarming. The first outbreaks occurred in Mauritania, Mali, Niger, and Sudan in 2003. The rain allowed swarms to develop and move north to Morocco and Algeria, threatening croplands. Swarms crossed Africa, appearing in Egypt, Jordan and Israel, the first time in those countries for 50 years. The cost of handling the infestation was put at US$122 million, and the damage to crops at up to $2.5 billion.” Wikipedia

The relevance of locust swarms combined with the ravages of climate change, particularly as this phenomenon migrates, is a much greater threat to human life than it has ever been. Areas already vulnerable from rising temperatures and drought are now seeing infestations of swarming locusts, consuming basic and already-dwindling food crops desperately needed to feed populations now veering toward mass starvation.

“The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization said Tuesday [2/25] that a small group of desert locusts had entered Congo, marking the first time the voracious insects have been seen in the Central African country since 1944. U.N. agencies warned of a ‘major hunger threat’ in East Africa from the flying pests. Kenya, Somalia and Uganda have been battling the swarms in the worst locust outbreak that parts of East Africa have seen in 70 years. The U.N. said swarms have also been sighted in Djibouti, Eritrea, Tanzania and South Sudan.” Los Angeles Times, February 26^th.

“When swarms are at their nascent stages, containment is more effective. So the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) is appealing for an immediate member contribution of $61 billion to be deployed for East Africa alone. “In January, FAO appealed for $76m. That figure has now risen to $138m. So far, only $52m has been received, $10m of which has this week come from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation...

“Control operations against locusts are under way in 13 countries, from India in the east, all the way across to Mauritania in West Africa… The main threats are in East Africa and [war-torn] Yemen, as well the Gulf states, Iran, Pakistan and India… Most recently, locusts have been seen in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and swarms have arrived in Kuwait, Bahrain and Qatar, and along the coast of Iran.

“The FAO has told us that in three of the worst affected countries, Kenya, Ethiopia and Somalia, they estimate that at least 100,000 hectares in each one needs to be sprayed with insecticide… By the end of January, they were substantially short of this target in those countries in East Africa…

“Vehicles, planes, personal safety equipment, radios, GPS units and camping equipment are badly needed… Aerial and ground spraying combined with constant tracking of the swarms - which are constantly on the move - are viewed as the most effective strategies.

“Stephen Njoka, head of the Desert Locust Control Organization for Eastern Africa, the regional body coordinating the fight against the locusts, told us: ‘We have a challenge in the number of aircraft available - there are not enough. Pesticides are also in short supply.’" BBC.com, February 26^th. That millions of people, already on the edge of subsistence, could die as a result creates a humanitarian crisis of literally biblical proportions. Desperate people with nothing to lose, starving to death. In some of the worst conflict zones on earth. It is a bad mix. And sooner or later, it will impact the United States as crises build on crises, impacting both on a local and a global level.

            I’m Peter Dekom, and not dealing with this now, not contributing to containing this disaster, will cost the world vastly more down the line.

A Rising Tide Sinks More than Boats

Driving up the Pacific coast over the Christmas holidays, I was struck by the vast numbers of “Entering Tsunami Area” signs. Hundreds of them. I am reminded of a Pulitzer-winning and exceptionally well-documented article, written by Kathryn Schultz for the July 13, 2015 New Yorker magazine noting that sooner or later an earthquake at or around 9.0 on the Richter Scale will inevitably slam into the coastal Pacific Northwest, literally sinking vast tracts of ocean-front land into the ocean, potentially killing millions. A massive tsunami will follow, sending crashing waves across the Pacific.

Just look at the above Caltech map of the Oregon and Washington coastline, reflecting a quake of that severity. You can see where the tectonic plate separates from the North American continent, creating a rugged seashore, magnificent islands and the ocean split we call Puget Sound. When the shaking stops, even inland, water, electricity, food supplies, and simple accessibility will be decimated… way past the I-5. All that without global climate change adding to that threat. Add climate change: our future is even bleaker. Earthquakes change it all in seconds. Climate change is vastly worse, more slowly, but it is creaping up on us with greater potential loss.

Nature has a way with the earth, and mankind has an uncanny ability to make things so much worse. Pushing the earth past points of no return, tipping points from which there is no going back. I’ve written about melting tundra (permafrost) releasing masses of very heavy green-house methane into the atmosphere in an unstoppable heat-melt-heat-melt cycle. Worse than carbon dioxide (CO2). We pretend it does not matter. We look the other way.

We do need living plants to turn carbon dioxide into oxygen more than ever. But we’ve all been counting on those massive rain forests and jungles to do that job, particularly in the Amazon where agricultural, mining and lumber needs are absorbing millions of square miles of CO2 eating foliage. Reclaimed land, cleared by intentional burning, adds even more CO2 in the process. Bad news CO2 haters, it looks as if the Amazonia is slowly transitioning from being a net CO2 absorber into being a net CO2 contributor.

The February 11th BBC.com supplies the hard facts from recent long-term surveys: “Results from a decade-long study of greenhouse gasses over the Amazon basin appear to show around 20% of the total area has become a net source of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere… One of the main causes is deforestation… While trees are growing, they absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere; dead trees release it again… Millions of trees have been lost to logging and fires in recent years.

“The results of the study, which have not yet been published, have implications for the effort to combat climate change… They suggest that the Amazon rainforest - a vital carbon store, or ‘sink,’ that slows the pace of global warming - may be turning into a carbon source faster than previously thought… Every two weeks for the past 10 years, a team of scientists led by Professor Luciana Gatti, a researcher at Brazil's National Institute for Space Research (INPE) has been measuring greenhouse gasses by flying aircraft fitted with sensors over different parts of the Amazon basin.”

And while the Gulf Coast and Atlantic sections of the United States seem to show the greatest coastal erosion from rising seas and warming waters, the signs on the West Coast are not particularly good either. We read about the San Andreas and other faults in the San Francisco Bay Area, but collapsing shoreline from climate change seldom captures local headlines. It should.

Rosanna Xia, writing for the February 11th Los Angeles Times presents this frightening view: “When Jeff Moneda first started working for Foster City, where trails wind along the town’s scenic lagoons and the nicest homes perch along its picturesque canals, he received an email from federal emergency officials that jolted him into action… ‘The first thing in my inbox was a letter from FEMA that said: ‘ ‘You need to raise your levee or we’re going to place the entire city in a flood zone,’ ’ said Moneda, the city manager. ‘Talk about stress.’

“For a city of 34,000 that was built on filled-in marshland along San Francisco Bay, the future hinges on the strength of an eight-mile-long levee that for decades has held back the rising sea. But with every tide and storm, the water keeps trying to move back and reclaim the town. Flood maps, even in more moderate scenarios, show much of the city inundated if nothing is done.

“The fate of Foster City and the rest of the Bay Area was front and center last week as state lawmakers grappled with the many threats California must confront as the ocean pushes farther inland. A special committee of state lawmakers gathered — for the second time in two months after years without meeting — to reignite a much-needed discussion on how to better prepare communities up and down the coast from devastating loss.

“Homes are flooding and crucial roads and infrastructure are already mere feet from toppling into the sea, they said, but cities up and down the coast have been paralyzed by the difficult choices ahead. More than $150 billion in property could be at risk of flooding by 2100 — the economic damage far more destructive than from the state’s worst [recent] earthquakes and wildfires.

“Failure to act will result in lost opportunities to be proactive — and much higher costs, according to scientists, local officials and legislative analysts who spoke before the state Assembly’s Select Committee on Sea Level Rise and the California Economy.” While too many red state Americans chortle at the threats to wealthy coastal communities, as they writhe through their tornados, fires, floods, hurricanes, fracking-induced quakes and droughts, the cost in lost food production, new job creation and cutting edge technology will cost every American a bundle… way beyond the direct cost of the devastation itself. We need new flood controls, levees and sea walls, perhaps even relocation. Retrofitting too. Not then. Not after it is too late. Now. And please, stop the fossil fuels and building near vulnerable shores.

What we see is a President/climate-change denier/marginalizer focused on cutting taxes, constructing a 15th century castle wall and building up a military at the expense of everything else. But if nature comes to collect, to confiscate and reclaim, what exactly will that wall, that military be protecting? And exactly how does cutting taxes make our land safer and more productive for us all?


I’m Peter Dekom, and we are suffering from a massive unwillingness to confront reality, to prioritize our very survival.

March to Elected Autocracy – Brazil

Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte is firmly entrenched as an authoritarian but elected president dedicated to encouraging extra-judicial killings of drug users and dealers by local vigilantes or police authorities. He has silenced critics, crushed the free press and seared his populist control into every facet of Philippine life. This island nation has a track record of electing such brutish leaders – remember the Marcos regime?

In Hungary, recently reelected populist president Viktor Orbán, a virulent opponent of immigration, has so decimated free speech and reconfigured his country’s legal system that the entire nation now faces sanctions from the European Union itself. “Orban has taken near total control over Hungary's news media. He has used financial pressure to silence independent outlets and has consolidated the rest to create a state media machine that is loyal to him. 

“Orban has also radically changed Hungary's courts, relentlessly chipping away at judicial independence. In 2018, he created an alternative court system that gives his executive branch power over the judiciary, where Orban himself can pick and choose his own judges. 

“In another move that was bitterly criticized by proponents of free speech, Orban recently closed Central European University in Budapest because it received funding from its founder, the Hungarian-native billionaire philanthropist George Soros. Critics have pointed to Orban's demonization campaign against Soros as being filled with anti-Semitic tropes and false accusations.” CBSNews.com, May 13^th.  

It’s becoming a global epidemic, electing authoritarian leaders, even here in the United States. An “acquitted” impeached president is wreaking as much havoc as he can against anyone who may have participated, however truthfully, with pressing the case against him. He believes himself to be so far above the law that he can dictate leniency and even pardons for his political cronies who have committed felonies to support him. He has chastised his own Attorney General for thinking otherwise. Mainstream media still remains, in the President’s words, the “enemy of the people.”

But what we are seeing – autocrats who achieve power through democratic elections – is a growing pattern that has devastated once thriving democracies throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. You can see additional supporting details in my January 15^th Can a Constitution Based on Honor and Trust Still Work? blog. We just did not expect the United States to fall into that category. That’s Africa or Latin America, right? Like Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro.  Not the United States of America. Right?

While banana republics and corrupt dictators have endured this patterned behavior for most of modern history in South America, a reaction to corruption at the top of what was thought to be a democratically elected government gave rise to anger in a majority of Brazilians. Their response is similar to the frustrations of voters in many nations. Brazil elected an ultra-right wing probusiness autocrat to clean house. President Jair Bolsonaro, who took office on January 1, 2019

.

Boldonsaro has clamped down on the press, blamed and arrested those who have criticized him and launched into vitriolic attacks against even international leaders who had offered him help to extinguish raging fires, decimating Brazil’s oxygen-creating Amazon forests. He continues in his offensive denial of climate change itself. His very election campaign was to reclaim massive portions of the Amazon jungle for commercial use: mining, oil extraction and creating new farmland. That is was Jair Bolsonaro himself who ordered those fires, to clear out forested land for these other uses, was met with government denial… although even his local supporters knew that was true. To put it mildly, those set fires soon exploded out of control. Even the jungle rainfall could not stem the damage.

Conservation charities (non-governmental organizations or NGOs) and foreign governments have pleaded with Bolsonaro to preserve plant-rich Amazonia in the global battle to convert carbon emissions into oxygen, knowing that Brazil’s rain forests are the largest remaining accumulations of trees able to make that contribution. Bolsonaro lashed out at both these foreign governments and the NGOs to mind their own business, that Brazil was quite capable of taking care of its own crises. But since it was Bolsonaro who caused this, like our own President, he needed to find others to blame that he could crush and punish. Scapegoats. His choice of victims is astounding.

“Last summer, as fires were raging and French President Emmanuel Macron called on wealthy nations to help put them out, Bolsonaro demanded an apology and rejected offers of international aid… Some of his worst scorn has been reserved for nongovernmental organizations, which often team up with indigenous communities to protect the Amazon.

“During his campaign for president, he vowed that such NGOS would get no government funding and that indigenous communities would not get ‘one centimeter’ of protected land… Though scientists have attributed the fires in the Amazon to efforts to clear forest for farming and other uses, Bolsonaro has suggested that NGOs could be setting the fires in retaliation for losing funds under his administration.

“[Then Bolsonaro begin accusing and demanding the arrest of the firefighters themselves… as arsonists!] The morning after police in the state of Para arrested the brigadistas, as the volunteer firefighters are known, Bolsonaro tweeted: ‘In October, I declared that many fires could be linked to NGOs. Now the Para police are arresting some suspects for the crime.’

“That same day, federal prosecutors investigating the fires issued a news release stating that they found no evidence that ‘pointed to the participation of brigadiers or civil society organizations.’… Two days after the firefighters were arrested, the same local judge who authorized the ‘preventive detention’ of the brigadistas determined it was no longer necessary and released the four men while the investigation continued.

“They walked out of jail with shaved heads holding hands and were greeted by their families and television cameras… Police in Para say the evidence against the firefighters includes wiretaps as well as a video that purportedly shows members of the brigade starting a fire… The video, according to the police, was discovered on YouTube but has since been taken down and was not shared with the media.” Los Angeles Times, February 17^th. Sound familiar? Internet spread conspiracy theories anyone? A tweeting president blaming innocent scapegoats for his nation’s ailments, some caused directly by his own policies? Autocratic solutions for everything?

            I’m Peter Dekom, and as history has so often proved, democracy is fragile institution that requires competent, trustworthy and honest leaders to keep it alive and make it work.

Living On Borrowed Time

Republicans have fought for decades for balanced budgets and deficit reduction. Their Reagan era experiment with “supply-side” or “trickle-down” economics – where extra money funneled to the rich (the purported “job creators”) trickles down and lifts everyone else – failed then (and deficits rose), failed even more dramatically recently when Kansas implemented a state tax cut and failed again after the Trump administration shepherded a 35% down to 21% corporate federal tax cut. Most of that latter windfall went to share buybacks, dividends and corporate mergers and acquisitions. A tiny amount went to new jobs, most of which were not exactly at the top of the pay scale.

In fact, the real wages for 70% of Americans haven’t budged more than a percentage point in decades. The Trump tax cut may have made folks who depend on the stock market for their incomes/wealth ecstatic, all it did for the rest of the country – now that the glitz and glitter of the effort has all but vaporized into market pricing – was saddle us with the highest peacetime deficits in our history, deficits that show no sign of dissipating any time soon. Income inequality took one more giant step toward rewarding the super-rich, separating them ever farther from everyone else. Upward mobility is a barely visible memory in our nation’s rearview mirror.

As Republicans now cry for deficit reduction, as the President has sent a “dead on arrival” $4.8 trillion federal budget request to the House, reality seems to have left the building: the military gets more money, the deficit interest payments soar, but the proposal aims at cutting social programs, including Social Security and Medicare benefits, long-since earned by the people who paid into their accounts, and slamming healthcare (the federal government has now officially joined in the 20 red state litigation to terminate the Affordable Care Act) with absolutely no replacement despite pledges to the contrary. The deficit Kings – GOP – want the rich to get the benefits and the middle and lower economic classes to pay for it.

The efficacy and danger of rising deficits has been hotly debated for years. Some economists look at the strength of the US economy and tell us that deficits are very affordable. Others say that traditional economic theory requires a thoughtful “how is this going to be repaid” analysis. The old notion that you do not have to sacrifice when you fight wars – the old “guns or butter” theory – started with the Vietnam War and continued right into the present with the conflicts in Central Asia and the Middle East. Expanding a military that already accounts for 41% of the entire global military budget while cutting taxes is seen by many economists as self-defeating folly.

This economic path deprioritizes growth engines generated by investments in education, research and infrastructure. Add environmental and financial deregulation to the mix and you have the rising threat of another “too big to fail” crash combined with the obvious mega-costs that come with ignoring climate change. Thus, the emphasis on today’s blog is on the impact of our federal budget deficits on all of us. I would like to present a well-encapsulated analysis by Yale University Professor in the Practice of Finance, William B English, in the February 7^th edition of Yale Insights:

The specific deficit number is not really the thing we should be concerned about. We need a tax system that will raise the revenue over time that we need to pay for the government services we want. And it should do so in an efficient way—that is, without unduly discouraging working, saving, and investing. The non-partisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projects that federal spending will run about 21% of GDP over the next few years, while taxes will run under 17% of GDP. That leaves a deficit of nearly 5% of GDP each year—unprecedented for a period of such low unemployment.

While the deficit is very high, interest rates remain extraordinarily low for a range of reasons, including the aging of the American population and elevated foreign demand for U.S. assets. That’s good news because interest rates determine the cost of government borrowing. And there’s every reason to believe that interest rates will stay low for a long time to come. (Indeed, last week the CBO marked down its projection for the trajectory of interest rates, reflecting the persistent low level of rates that we have seen in recent years.) As a consequence, the United States can operate with substantial deficits for some time. 

But ultimately very large deficits year after year are a problem—there are limits to how large the national debt can be, though exactly what those limits are is not clear. Currently the national debt is about 80% of GDP, its highest level since the period after the Second World War. But at that time, the government was running surpluses, and the national debt was on a firm downward trajectory relative to GDP. By contrast, the CBO projects that deficits will grow over coming years, reflecting in part interest payments on the outstanding debt, demographic changes, and higher healthcare costs. Even in the absence of a recession, the CBO projects that the national debt will be near 100% of GDP by the end of the decade…

With large deficits in good times and the resulting high and rising level of federal debt, we may not have the flexibility to use fiscal policy aggressively in the next downturn, either because politicians may be uncomfortable with large deficits when the debt is already so high, or because financial markets become concerned about our ability to get deficits onto a sustainable path. If both fiscal and monetary policy are constrained, then recessions will be longer and deeper than would otherwise be the case, which is incredibly costly for our society. 

Of course, if the current large deficits reflected heavy government investment in infrastructure and human capital—investments that would pay off in terms of higher growth and productivity in the future—then the deficits could well be appropriate. However, the problem we face is that we are running large deficits while underinvesting in infrastructure and human capital. We need to use our fiscal resources wisely to support a stronger, more stable economy over time…

[The] Federal Reserve takes the fiscal policy decisions of the Congress and the Administration as given and then decides on the monetary policy that will best foster its objectives of maximum employment and stable prices. Thus, larger deficits will, all else equal, lead the Fed to set a more restrictive path of monetary policy in order to hit its objectives.  

The last time we saw budget surpluses was in the Democratic Clinton years. A George W Bush “guns and butter” approach, followed by the Great Recession that began during his administration where government support was infused into the system, started a deficit trend that ultimately exploded in the Trump years. As those in the middle and the lower rungs of the economic ladder are angry at this give-away for the rich, as they are now demanding that the federal government address their needs, something has got to give. The upcoming election will dramatically decide who gets and who gives. But one thing is for sure, if we do not invest now in future growth, we won’t have it. And without growth, paying down the deficits becomes close to impossible.

            I’m Peter Dekom, and understanding the economic reality, separated from the political rantings of “promise them anything to get elected” politicians, just seems to have faded from the radar of those expected to cast votes this November.

Dam, But it Might be the Only Way

Water just might be the second biggest, but related, issue for the balance of this century. After climate change. Water conflicts within even California – the reconfiguration of the environmentally sensitive San Joaquim Delta against the water requirements of Southern California for example – threaten to escalate and redefine state politics, even more than partisan divides. Melting polar ice caps pour excess fresh water into the oceans. The resulting salinization makes that water generally unsuitable for agriculture or drinking. Desalinization consumes lots of electricity and dumps lots of toxic salt into the adjoining seabed. Not efficient or completely environmentally safe yet. Water is life. Access to water is changing. Flooding some places… drought and fires in others. Water wars just might be the future of global conflict.

The politics of water has been the subject matter of movies – Chinatown – and books – like Mark Reisner’s prescient Cadillac Desert – but the real life implications of drought range from the disaster of the Depression era Dust Bowl here in the United States to, believe it or not, the raging ISIS debacle in Syria and Iraq. Both Shiite-led nations faced interminable drought among farmers in predominantly Sunni agricultural regions. These farmers’ pleas to their respective anti-Sunni government leaders for dire assistance fell on deaf ears. Farmers were forced to abandon their farms and livelihoods. Rebellion rippled. Regional Sunni jihadist militants, particularly ISIS, heard the cry. You know the rest.

As part of America’s failed policies in Iraq, where our war based on a fabricated stash of weapons of mass destruction displaced Sunni control of a predominantly Shiite nation  (20% Sunni under Saddam Hussein against a 60% Shiite population), Iraq’s newly US-installed pro-Shiite “elected” government (the simple majority) almost immediately gravitated into Iran’s sphere of influence. Iran is almost 95% Shiite, so our losing a nation we fought and died for (Iraq) to our rather clear anti-American Iranian theocratic enemy was among the worst strategic errors in recent US history. For most regional scholars, the shift from a pro-US stance to clear encampment with Iran was the new Iraq we would just have to learn to live… without. Mass migrations. Ultra-violence. Political realignment. All because of water shortages.

The Middle East and neighboring Central Asia are likely to experience the greatest levels of average temperature rise. Water is even more critical, long-term, than oil! And as bad as the border region between Iraq and Syria might be when it comes to drought, make no mistake that other nations in the region face equally harsh futures, some to the extent that they make actually become thoroughly uninhabitable within the lifetimes of people already born.

On the other side of Iran, in the war-torn nation where the United States also intervened and installed its currently failing form of government, is Afghanistan. Drought is slowly pulling arable land into intractable desert. The situation is intolerable. Afghanistan is strongly Sunni; the Taliban, for example, are Sunni fundamentalists on steroids. They truly hate Iran and its apostate (to them) Shiite interpretation of the Qur’an. Sunnis are literalists, where the faithful are expected to read the Holy Book (or, if illiterate, have it read verbatim to them) and connect directly with God. Shiites are more mystical, believing that only the holiest of clerics are capable of reading the Qur’an and interpreting its meaning for the masses.

The above Wikipedia map shows a little red area, Nimruz Province in Afghanistan, just north of the border with Iran. This is a very dangerous and volatile place, particularly since the Helmand River flows out of Afghanistan and provides critical water to Iran. So far, Afghanistan and Iran have worked out a reasonable modus vivendi. But that may change. As Afghanistan has dried out, it is now building a dam to retain more of that vital water for Afghani farmers.

“Men across this windblown, lawless desert have fought over opium, God and gasoline, but now, Said Mohammed, a wheat farmer with a shovel and a rifle, senses a war brewing over water… The conflict runs along the dangerous border between Afghanistan and Iran… The nearly complete Kamal Khan dam would provide Afghan farmers with steady irrigation in dry seasons. But Iran, claiming the dam may significantly reduce its downriver water supply, is seeking to undermine the project.

“‘There just isn’t enough all year around,’ said Mohammed, digging in his soil. ‘This year, we were told that the new dam would be finished, and it would regulate our water supply through irrigation canals. But our neighbor [Iran] is stronger and might prevent it. They are already stealing our water. We’re fighting a water war, and we have little hope.’

“Mohammad can see Iran from his fields. He lives just outside Zaranj, the capital of Nimruz province, a city of mud buildings and hard men; a terrain of spies and opportunists… Afghanistan’s lifeline is the Helmand River, constituting more than 40% of the country’s surface water. The river crosses into Iran here, and while the water dispute isn’t new, it’s intensifying as Afghanistan moves to complete the Kamal Khan dam this year. It is expected to irrigate 432,000 acres of Nimruz’s farmland and generate eight megawatts of electricity for the province. Power is now imported from Iran.

“Iran says the dam will further contribute to the drying up of the Hamoun wetlands, a once biodiverse area rich in fish into which the Helmand River flows. Much of it has become arid and desolate. Afghanistan has built two other dams along the Helmand River. Iran has constructed more than 30 dams on rivers flowing into Afghanistan.

“Water has been a source of conflict between the two countries for decades, but droughts and climate change are aggravating a dangerous atmosphere that could further menace the U.S.-backed government. The land echoes with recrimination and suspicion. Afghan officials have accused Iran of bribery in a bid to delay the dam’s completion. In 2011, a Taliban commander reportedly claimed that Iran offered him $50,000 to blow up the dam…

“Over the last year, water authorities from both countries have been trying to resolve the dispute… But tensions and new narratives frighten farmers such as Mohammed. His land feeds his seven children and he worries about bribes, sabotage and bloodshed over the dam. ‘We were told we’d have our dam this year, but I don’t believe it,’ he said. ‘If we had a regular water supply, we could farm more — we could even export food to Iran. But for now, that’s just a dream.’” Los Angeles Times, February 6^th. Dreams can become nightmares.

Is this a microcosm of expected violent struggles for water? Is this the explosive part of our future that seldom makes its way into the headlines of expected climate change disasters? Given the millions of casualties linked to the recent Middle East/Central Asian conflicts – all driven by unforgiving drought – can there be any doubt? It certainly isn’t going to get better given the harsh statistics of cumulative damage from rising global temperatures.

            I’m Peter Dekom, and there does not seem be the slightest reasonable justification for our continued blind eye toward the accelerating devastation of global climate change.

Does R.I.C.O.* Apply to the White House?

*Racketeering Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act

It may not bother Trump’s base or the 49% polled recently who gave Donald Trump a stamp of approval, but the last time we saw this much criminal activity in and around the White House was during the Nixon Administration, forced out of office by the burglary and subsequent cover-up from the 1972 break-in at the Democratic National Headquarters in the Watergate building. President Richard Nixon was so quickly out of office that he did not get a chance to pardon the massive pile of felons, most of whom did serious prison time. Gerald Ford issued a gracious pardon to Nixon himself.

The staggering pattern of President Trump’s distortion of the rule of law that has governed this nation from inception, and the terrified and fearful lockstep endorsement of unambiguously unlawful actions by GOP Senators and political appointees to significant federal offices, just might be undoing of the entire system itself. I watch as constitutional professors from prestigious law schools speak of the robust resiliency of the American legal system, a system that will resume as a nation of laws applicable to all once Trump leaves office. Seriously?

First, the last time we had this level of out-and-out gridlocked political polarization in the country, we fought one of the bloodiest conflicts in our history, against ourselves! They didn’t even have the 15 million AR15 semi-automatic rifles or the 316 million guns that exist in our civilian population today.

Second, history – without contradiction – consistently shows that no governmental system rules forever. Whether it is by reason of complacency, economic collapse, pandemics, allowing rising embedded elites to sap a nation of most of its power and wealth, wars (from within and without), political fracturing or natural disasters, all governments come to an end. Inevitably. That the leadership was installed by a popular election does not mean that even under that circumstance democracy rules. Think Hitler, Putin, Erdogan, Maduro, Orban, etc. All elected. When the underlying fabric, the trust that enabled a country to sustain as a republic even for centuries, frays beyond repair, the risk of “the end” becomes more probable than a simple return to the rule of law required for a democracy to survive.

Third, history also teaches us that when an elected leader believes himself (so far no women) to be above the law or, worse, is in fact the law, if the system does not immediately contain those proclivities, the damage to the system either tears it apart or requires such a ground-up fix that what continues bears no resemblance to what once was.

With a virtually unamendable constitution – where the requisite supermajority of a supermajority of states is well nigh impossible in a severely polarized era – trying to work a fix from the inside just might not be a possibility in contemporary America. Indeed, even the Equal Rights Amendment, on the brink of securing that number after decades of effort, has long since passed the outside date for such an amendment to be ratified; it is likely to fail on that basis alone.

Trump has repeatedly stated, and his lawyers have pounded the point home is his recent Senate trial, that under Article 2 of the Constitution, the president can pretty much do as he pleases, is immune from indictment or criminal investigation and is not beholden to either of the other two branches of government. Senate Republicans obviously agreed with Trump and accordingly refused to hold him responsible. Trump has pardoned tyrannical bureaucrats, praised white supremacists, ordered assassinations without consulting the required government officials, executed executive orders that even he knew were unlawful and engaged foreign powers to support his domestic political ambitions and influence our elections.

He has repeatedly slapped a once immutable Trump-favoring military in the face. Pardoning a murderous Navy SEAL, whose own teammates found to be a horrific criminal, in defiance of a full-scale military process (the Secretary of the Navy and the Admiral who headed the SEALs quit), allowing his own soldiers to abandon Kurdish allies to a murderous government, soldiers who fought side-by-side with our soldiers and who implemented the ground component of our air attack on ISIS strongholds, labeling soldiers suffering severe brain injuries from a massive missile attack as suffering from mere “headaches,” and firing a decorated Army officer for telling truth when queried by congressional committees.

Shyster-Trump-crony, convicted felon Roger Stone, faced a US Attorney-recommended 7 to 9-year sentence after a federal conviction for seven felonies, including lying to a House committee, obstructing Congress and witness tampering. The rationale was carefully articulated in a 25-page detailed sentencing brief filed with the court. Attorney General William Barr, with or without direction from the White House (or just doing what he thought the President would like him to do by instinct), promptly overruled his own legal team, filing a very poorly-drafted 4-page withdrawal of that sentencing recommendation, substituting a vastly more lenient sentence request. Four assistant US Attorneys immediately withdrew from the case immediately, one of whom resigned from the Justice Department as well.

Trump almost immediately tweeted that whole Stone conviction was a “miscarriage of justice,” criticizing the prosecutors, the federal judge and even the forewoman of the jury, suggesting she “had significant bias.” Whether it was merely for show – to appear that the Department of Justice was still truly independent – or possibly even sincerely, Barr spoke on camera (ABC News) on February 14^th saying that President’s tweets and public statements on criminal cases were making his job “impossible.”

Trump, who so clearly believes that he is the law, tweeted back, saying Barr had not asked him to intervene in a criminal case. “This doesn’t mean,” Trump added, “that I do not have, as president, the legal right to do so. I do, but I have so far chosen not to!” The “lock her up!” Trump rally cry resonates; the belief that whistleblowers, protected under federal statute, should be prosecuted for treason for denouncing Trump and a belief that all government lawyers are directly accountable to the president and his directives sit at the heart of it all.

That Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani, along with his indicted partners Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, were generating “new information” on the Bidens from a clearly-acknowledged fount-of-corruption, a disgraced and dismissed former Ukrainian prosecutor, is evidence of Trump’s apparently now justified belief that he and his immediate and acknowledged personal lawyer can act with impunity, in disregard of the law and proper diplomatic policies and channels to pursue Trump’s personal political goals using threats. Watching how Joe Biden has slid down the polls, the hounding has apparently worked.

As the Senate has now confirmed, Donald J Trump is now much more than a mere president. He now stands above both of the other formerly equal branches of government: the judicial and legislative arms. But what is even worse is the Donald J Trump is truly a “don,” the head of a substantial and now uncontained criminal enterprise with a whole lot of convicted felons to show for it. The Mafia would be proud! A godfather with orange hair. But lest the right rejoice in this triumph, they have sown the seeds of their own demise… and perhaps even the demise of the United States itself. They may get their way… over that portion of a fractured “formerly United” States that they might rule without blue states to get in the way.

            I’m Peter Dekom, and apparently, we no longer live in a country where keeping the nation as a whole together is remotely relevant anymore.