Pro Antitrust – Amazon is Even Bigger than the River

It merits a look back in history to understand how antitrust laws were written (e.g., the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890) and enforced… and what the harm they were intended to curb. From Teach Democracy: "‘Captains of industry’ like John D. Rockefeller and J.P. Morgan formed huge corporations owned by stockholders. The companies grew through two strategies—vertical integration and horizontal integration. In vertical integration, a company operates on more than one stage of production and distribution. For example, the Pabst Brewing Company owned breweries, saloons, and even forest lands for the wood to make beer barrels.

“In horizontal integration, a company expands by merging, usually by buying out rival firms. Between 1897 and 1901, more than 2,000 mergers took place in the United States. This horizontal integration reduced the number of competitive companies in an industry.

“Defenders of ‘corporate bigness’ claimed that the new super-corporations created jobs and efficiently produced and distributed goods and services at a lower cost. They further argued that property and contract rights permitted businesses to pursue their economic interests as they saw fit without government interference. This reflected the laissez faire (let business alone) idea of capitalism.

“Others, however, attacked corporate abuses practiced by those they called ‘robber barons.’ The large corporations sometimes sold their products below cost until they drove competitors into bankruptcy or forced them to merge. Once a dominant firm eliminated most of its competition, it became a monopoly that could charge whatever prices and pay whatever wages it wanted.

“By 1880, John D. Rockefeller had merged about 100 independent oil refineries with his Standard Oil Company. He controlled about 90 percent of the U.S. oil business. (Oil was used to light kerosene lamps, utilized throughout the country.) In 1882, Rockefeller formed the Standard Oil Trust. He set up a board of trustees to take control of all the stock from his many vertically and horizontally connected companies.” The remedies granted to the courts included treble damages and corporate divestiture (breaking up the monoliths). And indeed, those robber barons saw their companies broken apart, and many of those surviving entities endure to the present day.

The Federal Trade Commission and the Department of Justice were given the legal authority to enforce the antitrust laws and bring actions in federal court. Over time, large corporate mergers and acquisitions were even subject to pre-merger review under the 1976 Hart-Scott-Rodino Act that established the federal premerger notification program (filed with the FTC). Unlike the European Union antitrust laws, where mere corporate size and dominance is sufficient to give rise to major remedies, including massive fines and extraordinary divestiture orders, the US statues require abusive mergers (or collusion, including “conscious parallelism”) and/or manipulative market practices (like price-fixing or other unreasonable restraints of trade) to trigger enforcement.

Hart-Scott-Rodino seemed as if it would be a remedy for the merger mania of the 1960s, but it actually made antitrust enforcement much worse. The FTC prereview often required minor merger-acquisition divestiture as a condition of approval under that law, but once such approval were granted (and the approvals were exceptionally lax), the resulting monolith need only be concerned with any parallel issues overseas (most the European Union). For example, when Disney bought 21st Century Fox in 2019, with a price tag of $71.3 billion, the overlaps between Fox Sports and Disney’s ESPN required a divestiture of 22 Fox Sports local cable telecasters. A tiny slap on the wrist, given the magnitude on the entertainment industry.

In the Trump era, antitrust laws were pretty much ignored. When Joe Biden was elected, he appointed an aggressive young lawyer, Lina Khan, to run the FTC antirust unit. Khan’s nascent pledge was to resurrect the Sherman Act and related statutes to rein in massive corporate monoliths now dominating the US market. Often the new corporate monoliths grew mostly organically without relying as much on mergers and acquisitions… they were building in a new Internet-driven space where there literally were no preexisting players. Facebook/Meta, Microsoft and Amazon redefined economic (and political power) at warp speed. Despite a plethora of law review articles and Congressional hearings pointing out the obvious harm, these new monoliths had size and revenues that mirrored the GDP of major nations. As the European Union tackled these giants, the United States held hearings. And nothing happened here.

Having struggled with certain earlier efforts, on September 26th, the Federal Trade Commission, joined by 17 states, filed a massive (174 pages) lawsuit against Amazon. This time, Lina Khan sidestepped the traps that had cost her earlier efforts… and the remedies were not simply limited. On September 28th, LA Times columnist Michael Hiltzik, tackled the case: “The [Amazon]’s public response to the lawsuit is that it would result in ‘fewer products to choose from, higher prices, slower deliveries for consumers, and reduced options for small businesses,’ its general counsel, David Zapolsky, said in a prepared statement, adding that the agency is ‘wrong on the facts and the law.’

“But most of the FTC’s allegations are familiar enough. Consumers know how hard it is to determine whether Amazon’s prices are the lowest available. They know that when they’re searching for an item on Amazon.com, the varieties pushed at them most assiduously are those from Amazon’s commercial partners or marketed by Amazon itself… [It’s] it’s especially important in this case, because there are so very few corporations that dominate their markets so powerfully.

“The FTC points to Amazon’s ability to leverage its various businesses, which include its ‘fulfillment’ services — the warehousing, packing and shipping of sellers’ merchandise — and Prime eligibility, which gives sellers’ products preferential placement on the website and by eliminating shipping charges lowers the cost of their products for buyers.

“That suggests that one answer would be to break up Amazon, say by forcing it to divest its fulfillment operation. FTC Chair Lina Khan dodged that issue in her statements about the lawsuit, possibly because she knows that the remedy to Amazon’s misdeeds, assuming it’s found guilty, would be in the hands of a federal judge… ‘At this stage, the focus is more on liability,’ she told reporters in a briefing session Tuesday [9/26]. On Wednesday [9/27], during an appearance at a Washington, D.C., conference sponsored by Politico, she noted that in the lawsuit ‘we don’t specify any one type of remedy.’… She also observed, however, that ‘the harms here are really mutually reinforcing, and have basically created a really distorted and competitive landscape ... that may require significant relief.’”

You can bet that no matter how many government lawyers and investigators the FTC and the plaintiff states throw into this mix, Amazon can employ more. If a micro-dot of an economic player like Donald Trump can hose the judicial system for years – delay tactics are his signature move – you can only imagine what the phalanxes of Amazon lawyers will do in this case. And if Donald Trump were to win the presidency in 2024, I suspect this case would quickly die.

I’m Peter Dekom, and this case is absolutely the most import government filing in the world of private commerce in America’s history.

Life Under a Democracy vs Powerful Autocracies

“As for the prosecution of Trump, for us what is happening in today’s conditions, in my opinion, is good because it shows the rottenness of the American political system, which cannot pretend to teach others democracy.”

Vladimir Putin

“I like that he said that. Because that means what I’m saying is right.”

Donald Trump, also suggesting he could solve the Ukraine war in a day.

As serious strongmen suggest that democracy is no longer a viable system of governance, that centralized decisions, made quickly and efficiently, are necessary in a rapidly changing world. Democracy, with its byzantine requirement of multiparty voting and elections, they argue, is too slow and too cumbersome to govern, often giving rise to irreconcilable differences among factions with diametrically opposed views. There is no question that democracy, even when well-practiced, is messy, but what exactly are the metrics by which democracy can be compared with other forms of governance. Military and political efficiency, imposed by a purportedly wiser autocracy, or something else.

Indeed, beginning with the Deng Xiaoping era in China (post-Mao, 1981 and following), China’s autocratic leadership brought modern economic reality to the hidden kingdom, lifting over a billion people out of poverty in about 30 years. China adopted a system of sequentially Politburo-elected leaders, each limited by a 10-year term… until Xi Jinping ascended to the top spot in 2012… and sequentially began purging anyone who disagreed with him and ended that 10-year term limit.

China rose in military stature, now having the largest navy in the world, but as Xi consolidated his power against the new barons of industry, faced a pandemic with ineffective vaccines and “zero tolerance,” his policies were failing. He was forced to distract his population with anti-US/Taiwan saber-rattling. He focused on dominating the East and South China seas, building a new military presence in the Spratley Islands. He stifled dissent, persecuted any emerging foe, and watched his economy shudder, younger unemployment soar to 20%, until he ordered that these economic statistics no long be reported

Daniel Hannan, writing for the September 16th The Telegraph, cites numerous academic authors, using statistical analysis, to determine those autocracy-vs-democracy metrics. Is it simply a measure of “good” vs “evil,” or are there more salient standards of comparison? Like happiness. Population growth. Economic well-being. GDP. And when those comparisons are made, does that justify the animosity and conflict that defines the world today? “One way to answer [those questions] is to ask people to rate their happiness on a scale of one to ten. Russians score lower than Westerners. North Koreans are not asked.

“Another is to look at where people choose to live. Here is a striking statistic. On the eve of the Russian revolution, Russia and the United States had roughly the same population. A century later, because of different rates of longevity, migration and abortion (Russia has one of the highest abortion rates in the world) there were twice as many Americans as Russians. I’d say that’s a pretty strong endorsement of liberalism.

“The tyrants (and their Western apologists) might object that this is not a fair comparison, insisting the United States somehow acquired its wealth by war rather than by free contract and property rights. They will struggle to argue that the United States was more imperialist than Russia which, as Henry Kissinger quipped, expanded at the rate of ‘one Belgium per year’, but let’s leave that aside. If you want a laboratory-quality comparison, consider Korea.

“The two Koreas began from the same place in 1953. If anything, North Korea had a slight edge, having been more industrialised, although South Korea had a larger population. But in other respects, the two sides were identical. They had the same language, the same culture, the same work ethic, and both had just come through a devastating war.

“Today, the economy of South Korea is 57 times as large as its northern neighbour’s. Its people live more than 10 years longer (North Korean life expectancy is as low as Russia’s). Its rivers are cleaner, its forests less depleted. Its children are several times more likely to survive infancy – and if that statistic doesn’t correlate with greater net happiness, I don’t know what does.” Hannan.

Yet somehow the lure of a White Nationalist America has become the mainstay of the MAGA Republican movement. Strangely, too many Americans, regardless of political affiliation, are addressing the two political parties along the “business as usual” liberal vs conservative mantras… perhaps not realizing that even getting to vote for those issues requires a functioning democracy. We are looking at age comparisons, which might be more relevant if the coming election were about traditional political issues. But it most definitely is not.

One party in our two-party system favors censorship based on fundamentalist Protestant precepts, ethno-cleansing to pretend slavery never happened, purging perceived gender anomalies, minority religions and cultures, marginalizing the voting power of non-white citizens, and severely restricting what rights women have over their own bodies. In short, White Christian nationalists rule, and elections that do not produce that result must be nullified. American democracy is facing an existential threat. What climate change does not do to us, our willingness to trade democracy for autocracy just might finish the job. Ukraine is willing to fight for that democracy reality. Are we? Does it bother MAGA voters that Trump and Putin are mirror images?

I’m Peter Dekom, and if we truly want to keep America great, then MAGA autocracy must be voted out of existence.

Americans Learned to Distrust Antitrust, and then…

Is Google’s search engine an actionable monopoly that must be stopped or is it simply a big successful organically grown American icon? Unlike the antitrust laws of the European Union, just being a huge dominant company is not enough to find an antitrust violation under US law. There have to be actual efforts to manipulate the market, create barriers for others to compete and/or limit access to obvious markets needed for true competition. And so, in the biggest antitrust case in decades, the Department of Justice is litigating Google’s search engine dominance. You may have seen generic ads on social media and television touting how America’s global economic dominance and power has been government’s willingness to let big corporations do what big corporations do… when governments do not interfere. Is it efficiency, as the ads claim, or simple bullying in a marketplace that government has pretty much left alone for a long time?

Americans tend to be more skeptical about the government and more supportive of corporations, the reverse of the European ethos. But we have decades of experience as big corporations told us that cigarettes did not cause cancer, that air and water pollution were worth the cost to provide jobs, that greenhouse gas emissions from using fossil fuels didn’t matter, that big financing companies were literally “too big to fail” before they did… and there is a slow realization among many that we put away our trust-busting weapons away for far too long. Why and when did the nation decide to push antitrust prosecutions and civil actions in a dusty backroom?

In a September 15th RSS feed, the New York Times explains: “Americans have long been skeptical of big business. Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt and Harry Truman all tried to constrain the power of large companies. Their efforts were part of a national culture that long emphasized individual freedom.

“In the 1960s, however, a group of conservative scholars began arguing that large corporations had been unfairly maligned. These scholars — led by Robert Bork, then an obscure law professor — made the case that big business was often efficient and innovative. And if a large company did try to take advantage of consumers, these scholars said, a competitor could swoop in and lure away those consumers.

“For years, Bork and his allies failed to persuade Washington to embrace their views. But after the U.S. economy struggled during the 1970s, policymakers became worried that antitrust laws were keeping American companies from competing with Japanese and European rivals. Slowly, the Bork view won converts, among both Republicans and Democrats. Since the 1980s, that view has dominated, allowing corporations to grow much larger.” Since that same timeframe, US income inequality soared to unanticipated levels. Tax laws also gave income-inequality breaks to billionaires by not taxing massive wealth. One percent of Americans owned more than half our nation’s wealth. Upward mobility seemed to die. Huge companies now had huge lobbying war-chests. They had their thumbs on a lot of scales.

So, in 2023, the Department of Justice seems to be testing a resurrection of anti-monopolistic policies to begin to level a few playing fields. Why start small? They sure did not! But huge companies, relatively recently formed, have become monoliths in newly developed tech and communications spaces. Facebook/Meta, Microsoft, Apple, Tick-Tok and then Google, which accounts for 90% of Internet searches globally. Ah, Google!

“The Justice Department’s case against the company (and a related lawsuit brought by 38 states and territories) argues that Google has unfairly maintained its dominance by paying other companies billions of dollars a year. Payments to Apple, for example, are the reason that Google is the default search engine on iPhones. As a result, the Justice Department says, competitors to Google cannot establish themselves…

“Google responds that its success is simply a reflection of the quality of its products. ‘People don’t use Google because they have to,’ Kent Walker, Google’s top lawyer, has written. ‘They use it because they want to.’… The government’s biggest challenge in winning this case is closely connected to Bork’s framework for antitrust policy. He argued that the most rigorous standard for judging potential monopolies was consumer prices. Only when economic analysis proved that a company was so powerful that it could raise consumer prices should regulators step in, Bork and his allies said. Otherwise, the government was just guessing about when a company was so big as to be problematic.” And maybe, just maybe, Bork’s assumptions and solutions were simply designed for a different era.

The result of this litigation may just redefine American business dramatically. In the Bork era, there were really no rags-to-trillion-dollar valuation companies. The mutual, interlocking dependence of the Internet did not exist. And income inequality was hardly the Godzilla of an issue that it clearly is today. The litigation is the result of a Biden administration’s mandate to rein in the excessive power of companies with such valuations, and concomitant political power, that mirror the GDP’s of a number of entire countries. Is this a Democratic policy that would be crushed under a GOP-dominated government. I’ll let you guess, but this particular case merits your attention… big time.

I’m Peter Dekom, and as the world roils, floods, battles and burns, it’s easy to overlook one of the most important economic cases in American history.

Another Red-Blue Divide – Comparing Crime Rate Data

Choose your metric, create the result you want. Of course, there are more crimes in big cities than in rural areas. There are more people. If you want to compare gun-related homicides, that statistic will still hold up. But if you use the relative populations as your base, it is pretty clear that the more guns exist per capita, and the fewer restrictions on guns in public, those numbers reverse. Rural communities and even cities in gun-rule-lax red states have a disproportionate number of gun homicides per capita than do most rural communities.

The battle, representing a profound schism, is predominantly about gun control. So far the continuing misrepresentation of the 2nd Amendment embodied in the 2008 Supreme Court in Heller vs DC – a case which, after more than two centuries and applying judicial “originalism” (interpreting the Constitution according to the times in which the relevant provision was passed) established a fairly unrestricted right of gun ownership – has produced a litany of federal cases that have almost always ruled in favor of a very free and open permissive view of gun ownership.

As rural communities are often spread out with fewer people per square mile and often distant from law enforcement, frequently embrace hunting in their open space, so large cities have a very opposite reality… where people are compressed and squeezed into constant content with lots of people… where there is no possibility of hunting. Even where urban areas have tried to limit gun ownership within limits that make sense to cities, neighboring rural states are more than happy to sell a gun to a visiting city slicker wanting a weapon, even an AR-15 military grade assault rifle.

But in the battle of crime statistics, as LA Times writer Noah Bierman tells use (September 15th edition): “Democratic and Republican voters differ on which places are safest. But both sides have it wrong… Americans think New York is more dangerous than New Orleans, even though the Crescent City’s homicide rate is 12 times higher this year. Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents rank Washington, D.C., as one of the country’s safer big cities, above cities like Miami, where the homicide rate is much lower. Republicans and Republican-leaning independents see Seattle as ominously dangerous, even though Houston has twice the homicide rate so far this year…

“Americans are worried about crime ahead of the 2024 elections, but few have an accurate sense of the problem, according to a Times review of crime data and a recent Gallup poll that asked adults to judge whether 16 major cities are safe places to live or visit.

“Los Angeles, which has had the fifth-lowest homicide rate this year among the 16 cities in the survey, was ranked as the third-most dangerous, with 41% of Americans polled describing it as a safe place to live or visit — the highest number Gallup has ever recorded for the city… A closer look at L.A.’s results shows that partisanship now plays a huge role in Americans’ perceptions of crime and safety.

“Sixty-four percent of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents ranked L.A. as safe, while only 21% of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents gave it the all-clear — the biggest gap in the poll at 43%... The average gap between the two sides’ assessments of cities in the survey was 29 percentage points. That’s a new phenomenon: Political affiliation barely affected the results in 2006, the last time Gallup asked Americans about big-city safety.

“‘People are bad at perceiving crime rates,’ said Jeff Asher, a crime data analyst and consultant who runs AH Datalytics’ widely used website. ‘They’re not good judges of what is or what is not safe in another city.’… Assessing cities’ safety is tricky. Homicide rates spiked across the country during the pandemic and have since fallen, but are still likely to be higher this year than they were in 2019. Auto theft is surging nationally, but some cities, including Los Angeles, are experiencing a small decline. And rates for almost all types of crime have fallen since the early 1990s.”

Social media, a well-fertilized platform for conspiracy theories and misinformation, often form the hub of highly bias-filtered access to news. In short, if the relevant party leaders present a statement or a statistic, members of that party accept the headline without questioning the underlying data. And dig in their heels. When assault weapons were banned under federal statutes from 1994 to 2004 (when a sunset clause terminated the restriction), conservative 2nd Amendment advocates seemed to have accepted the law. Today, reading MAGA statements, you just might believe that open carry, assault weapon ownership, “stand your ground” laws and even a growing body of red state laws that allow concealed carry without a permit have been part of an American tradition since 1776. The year was actually 2008.

Bierman continues: “Republicans have painted Democratic-run cities as dens of crime and disorder since at least the 1960s. Candidates at the Republican presidential primary debate last month talked over one another to decry “hollowed-out cities,” a “national identity crisis” and Democrats who have been “talking about defunding the police for the last five years.”

“Republican criticisms of Democratic big-city leaders have been bolstered by the claims of tech barons such as Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, who have couched safety concerns as part of a broader argument against the ‘woke orientation of certain cities, their ungovernability,’ said Richard Florida, a University of Toronto professor who has written extensively about trends in cities.

“Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, has tried to channel that energy in his presidential campaign, claiming in a recent video he posted from San Francisco that he had seen people defecating and using crack cocaine and other drugs on the street, and warning of a “collapse” resulting from ‘leftist policies.’… Fox News has reinforced those impressions with frequent segments on homelessness and drugs in big cities on the West Coast.”

Republicans are also fighting to resurrect the 1996 Dickey Amendment, which effectively banned using federal money to collect civilian gun homicide statistics. If that had applied today, we would not know that gun deaths are the leading cause of fatalities among children and teens. When facts and truth are no longer trustworthy, where competing visions of America are at odds of where the truth lies, is there any possibility for a meaningful bi-partisan compromise for our future?

I’m Peter Dekom, and there are too many powerful forces on both sides of the aisle in horrible denial of the most important facts needed to guide this nation into a viable future.

A Billion Here, a Billion There… Soon You’ll be Talking About Real Money

Damage in Florida from Hurricane Idalia

Maui going up in flames

The strangest position from many of those in government and their supporters is that the belief that cutting the federal and state budgets … culling all those “unnecessary” and “woke” commitments to challenge and reduce global warming, including those job-creating infrastructure and automobile incentives toward alternative energy… is absolutely prudent in the name of fiscal responsibility. The necessary implementing rules and regulations, they believe, also hurt businesses and result in a massive reduction in jobs. Wow! Add to that the suffering those rich fat cats making all that money will impose on their own children and their future generations, but then, if enough people believe that climate change is a hoax, they won’t even have to worry.

Let’s dive a bit into history, focusing on what was necessary to counter the Great Depression that began with the stock market crash in 1929. Between the Depression and the Dust Bowl (farming-induced climate change of the 1930s), millions of Americans lost their livelihoods. Unemployed masses begged for food, looking for any kind of work. Newly elected President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a Democrat, pushed back against his Republican predecessor’s (Herbert Hoover – 1929-1933) laissez faire attitude that focused on just letting market forces solve the problem.

FDR believed that the Depression was so severe that it would not adjust anytime soon. Instead, he instituted the greatest job creation program in American history. The New Deal. The Civilian Conservation Corps. With fixing and rebuilding America’s infrastructure, millions of Americans found dignity and work. The result? Massive new sources of hydroelectric power, upgraded national parks and government buildings. New roads. A much better America. Well, it does seem as if fostering developing infrastructure, along with shifting to alternative energy, would have the opposite effect of costs us jobs; it has a well-proven history of creating jobs.

And then there is this cost-saving mythology that needs to die a hard and permanent death. We are now living in an era of more super-destructive “natural” disasters, virtually all related to climate change, than the United States has ever experienced… by a wide margin. The number of billion-dollar+ disasters, replete with death and destruction on an unparalleled level, is vastly more costly in hard dollars than any possible savings to government budgetary allocations.

“The deadly fires in Hawaii and Hurricane Idalia’s watery storm surge helped push the U.S. to a record for the number of weather disasters that cost $1 billion or more — with four months still to go on what’s looking like a calendar of calamities.

“The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said Monday [9/13] that from January through August, there have been 23 extreme weather events in the U.S. that cost at least $1 billion, eclipsing the entire-year record of 22 set in 2020. So far, this year’s disasters have cost more than $57.6 billion and claimed at least 253 lives.

“And NOAA’s count doesn’t yet include Tropical Storm Hilary’s damage in California and a deep drought that has struck the South and Midwest — those costs are still to be totaled, said Adam Smith, the NOAA expert who tracks billion-dollar disasters… ‘We’re seeing the fingerprints of climate change all over our nation,’ Smith said in an interview Monday [9/13]. ‘I would not expect things to slow down anytime soon.’

“NOAA has been tracking billion-dollar weather disasters in the U.S. since 1980 and adjusts damage costs for inflation. What’s happening reflects a rise in the number of disasters and more areas being built in risk-prone locations, Smith said…. ‘Exposure plus vulnerability plus climate change is supercharging more of these into billion-dollar disasters,’ Smith said.

“NOAA added eight new billion-dollar disasters to the list since its last update a month ago. In addition to Idalia and the Hawaiian fires that killed at least 115 people, the agency newly listed an Aug. 11 Minnesota hailstorm; severe storms in the Northeast in early August; severe storms in Nebraska, Missouri, Illinois, Indiana and Wisconsin in late July; mid-July hail and severe storms in Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio, Tennessee and Georgia; deadly flooding in the Northeast and Pennsylvania in the second week of July ; and a late June outbreak of severe storms in Missouri, Illinois and Indiana.” Associated Press, September 14th.

This “event” analysis doesn’t even cover the sheet misery of so many days across the United States of sustained record-breaking heat. It does not measure the extra draw of electrical power that those who have air conditioning place on our nation’s electrical grid. It fails to take into account those school days lost when schools without air conditioning were forced to close. But note, it is probably going to get a whole worse from now on.

“Experts say the U.S. has to do more to adapt to increased disasters because they will only get worse… ‘The climate has already changed, and neither the built environment nor the response systems are keeping up with the change,’ said former Federal Emergency Management Agency director Craig Fugate, who wasn’t part of the NOAA report… The increase in weather disasters is consistent with what climate scientists have long been saying, along with a possible boost from the current El Niño pattern, University of Arizona climate scientist Katharine Jacobs said.” AP.

Wildfires and tropical storms will continue to increase in both frequency and intensity. Intolerable heat will put more strain on our electrical grid… for those who can afford air conditioning. Plant and animal life will either migrate (along with the diseases they carry) or die in untold numbers. Millions of people will die. And exactly what will life be like for the fattest of the fat cats who fought a meaningful containment of climate change?

I’m Peter Dekom, and when will the quality of our lives become more important than corporate profits?

A Tale of Two Police Forces – Real Cops and GOP Enforcers

Florida’s State Guard’s 1st graduating class in July

Most militaries and police forces on earth are technically governmental entities that report through the normal hierarchy of their elected officials exercising their appointment functions. There are exceptions. For example, Mao’s 1949 vision for China, which endures into the present day, is that the People’s Liberation Army – literally China’s entire military (navy, army, air force) – reports to the Communist Party, and is not technically part of the government. That does seem to run contrary to most of the world, particularly the United States. But is it? Florida and Texas have autocratic governors in well-gerrymandered states who desire direct control of police and military forces, even if such formulations seem to run afoul of federal and state constitutional limitations.

The US Constitution gives the federal government, through Congress, the exclusive right to establish the army and the navy. Even state national guard units, which otherwise report to state governors, can be called up and made subject to control by the President of the United States. Several particularly autocratic state governors want military units that cannot be coopted by the federal government. They’ve created what they believe are workarounds, using seemingly benign labels, to form such military units without threat of takeover by the fed. Two red state governors, in Florida and Texas, are pushing that envelope particularly hard.

“A Florida state guard established by the rightwing governor, Ron DeSantis, under the guise of a civilian disaster relief force is instead being trained as an armed, combat-ready militia under his personal command, according to military veteran recruits who have quit the program…Several veterans resigned after an encampment last month having become concerned at the ‘militaristic’ training and ‘abuse’ one disabled veteran suffered at the hands of instructors… Promoted by DeSantis as an ‘emergency focused, civilian defense force’ when it was established in June 2022, the state guard has quickly morphed into something quite different, the report found.

“Volunteers have been trained for military combat, including the use of weapons; khaki polo shirts and pants were replaced by camouflage uniforms; and recruits were ‘barked at’ by boot camp instructors at the joint training base who woke them before dawn and imposed lights-out by 10pm.

“Additionally, DeSantis’s compliant, Republican-led state legislature has contributed to the change of direction, this year approving a massive expansion in the force’s funding, size and equipment. Its budget increased from $10m to $107.5m, and its maximum size more than tripled from 400 recruits to 1,500… On the governor’s shopping list were helicopters, boats, police powers and reportedly even cellphone-hacking technology for a force outside of federal jurisdiction, and accountable directly to him… ‘The program got hijacked and turned into something that we were trying to stay away from: a militia, Brian Newhouse, a retired navy veteran with 20 years’ experience, told the reporters.” Guardian UK, July 15th

We have witnessed Republicans elected to Congress rail against the Capitol Police, champion rightwing rioters who injured and even killed those officers on January 6, 2021, suggest that a GOP president would pardon those attackers, and actively suggest the both the Dept of Justice and the FBI be defunded. So, I suspect these new state-sponsored militia aren’t really aimed at “law and order,” a traditional GOP rallying cry. They would seem more in tune with governors who oppose federal policies and are committed to an anti-“woke” culture war.

In Texas, Governor Greg Abbott, in a state where over a third of its citizens are of Latin heritage, has been a “champion” of pushing asylum-seekers coming across our southern border back out or, instead, shipping them off to blue states by the plane and busload. Despite the fact that the US Constitution gives exclusive control over our international boundaries, Abbott unilaterally decided that Texas could and would float concrete anchored barriers, wrapped in barbed wire across our Rio Grande River border with Mexico… barriers which are under federal court order to be removed.

Profoundly gerrymandered, Texas’ major cities are mostly blue under Democratic mayors. But even when such mayors, in good faith, have accepted state offers to provide state law enforcement officers to help the local police, somehow Greg Abbot’s less than subtle commitment to White Christian nationalism seems to be unstoppable. The August 7th, J. David Goodman of the New York Times tells such a tale about the bluest big city in the state, Austin: “Scores of state highway troopers, usually found on roadways across Texas in their distinctive cowboy hats and black-and-white patrol vehicles, have descended on Austin, the state capital.

“At first, they were welcomed by the city’s Democratic leaders, part of a plan to address violent crime and make up for a shortage of more than 300 officers in the Austin Police Department… But in a booming city known for its progressive politics, the partnership between the local police, steeped in the language of reform, and the Texas Department of Public Safety, under the direction of Republican state leaders, soon began to raise concern.

“Statistics emerged showing that those arrested on misdemeanor charges by state troopers were mostly Black and Hispanic. In May, there was a fatal shooting by troopers after a chase. In July, another trooper shot at a fleeing, unarmed man, wounding him. Days later, two troopers drew their weapons on a father and son during a car stop… After that stop, Austin’s mayor suspended the partnership with the state police. But instead of the troopers leaving, they were joined by dozens more when Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, ordered a fresh deployment.” Bolstered by angry conservatives with open carry weapons, including AR-15s, autocrats like Ron DeSantis and Greg Abbott are prepared to use force against Democrats and their mayors to crush any notion of challenge to the MAGA-GOP commitment to complete dominance and control. Even against majorities of Americans who oppose their policies, a fact made abundantly clear as red states press for stricter anti-abortion laws despite the fact that a clear majority of American oppose that belief.

I’m Peter Dekom, and autocracy succeeds when those narcissist leaders are allowed access to significant militia under their exclusive control, charged with side-stepping the legal system to impose their will.

The Pharmaceutical Generic Game – Profits or Fair Healthcare, Pick One

I am sure you have never wondered why large corporations employ large cadres of in-house and outside lawyers. LOL To put it mildly, it’s not to improve the lot for consumers, to provide transparency or ensure that the company pays its fair share of taxes. It might be for senior management to generate a CYA opinion on a decision that makes them squirm a bit, but generally, this legal horde is there to maximize profits, minimize transparency, side-step regulation and deal with the world when litigation or claims rear their ugly head. The use of holding companies, multiple corporate structures on and offshore, often allows big companies to pretend that they are dealing with third parties (“hey, what can we do about that?”) that are charging what appear to be outrageous prices… when in fact, these entities operate under a single ownership umbrella…

As has been a common theme in my blogs, Americans pay the highest prices for healthcare than any other country on earth. Our prices for prescription drugs are often vast multiples of prices for the same prescriptions in most of the rest of the world. We are the only developed nation without universal healthcare, often referred to by the radical right as “creeping socialism” in an effort to turn hardworking Americans against their own best interests by horribly misusing the word “socialism” – which really means government ownership has replaced virtually every significant form of private ownership and has nothing to do with social programs that every country has.

I am trying to picture a German millionaire driving a German Porsche or Mercedes or a Swiss banker wearing a Swiss Rolex thinking they are living in a socialist country. But these nations have universal healthcare, considered to be among the best on earth, and spend less per capita on healthcare than we do… by a substantial margin. Still, with no real restriction on campaign contributions (Citizens United v. FEC, 2010 Supreme Court decision, made that really clear) and backed by those cadres of lawyers noted above, the pharmaceutical industry plays fact and loose with pricing structures. Indeed, just to get the 2010 Affordable Care Act passed, the Obama administration was forced to cave to Big Pharma’s demand to let them set whatever prices they wanted for their drugs. When they claim they need that money for “research,” ask yourself why they pay so much to advertise their prescription drugs.

And notwithstanding a recent Biden-administration mini-victory, getting Medicare to be able to negotiate freely with the big pharmas over the 10 most expensive but universally prescribed drugs for seniors, the pharmas have your wallet in their sights. When patents expire, generally within 20 years, the underlying prescription drug generally falls into a statutorily unprotected category allowing “generic” versions of the drug to be manufactured without fear of patent infringement. Clearly, this was intended to open the markets to free competition and save consumers tons on those expensive prescriptions. Well… that’ s what was what was supposed to happen, but as Joseph Walker, writing for the September 11th Wall Street Journal, reality for consumers is quite different:

“Pharmacy-benefit managers [PBMs] frequently steer patients to use their in-house pharmacies to fill prescriptions for specialty drugs like generic Gleevec… The cancer drug Gleevec went generic in 2016 and can be bought today for as little as $55 a month. But many patients’ insurance plans are paying more than 100 times that… CVS Health and Cigna can charge $6,600 a month or more for Gleevec prescriptions, a Wall Street Journal analysis of pricing data found. They are able to do that because they set the prices with pharmacies, which they sometimes own.

“Once the patent on an expensive medicine runs out, lower-priced copies go on sale, promising significant savings. But certain generic drugs—for cancer, multiple sclerosis and other complicated diseases—are still costing thousands of dollars monthly... Across a selection of these so-called specialty generic drugs, Cigna and CVS’s prices were at least 24 times higher on average than roughly what the medicines’ manufacturers charge, the Journal found.”

The political party that is desperately trying to cut any federal budgetary allocations to fight greenhouse gasses and attempt to moderate global warming, that has fought tooth and nail against any notion of universal healthcare or cost-cutting on prescription drugs – despite a 2016 campaign pledged to do reduce those prices, there was nary a bill introduced that would do so – and has effectively culled Medicaid and subsidized health insurance at every turn… loves repeating that false “creeping socialism” mantra as if that is sufficient justification for their “creeping socialism” for millionaires and billionaires. Walker continues:

“Cigna, CVS and UnitedHealth said that the prices they charge for drugs varies by pharmacy and location, and that most patients end up paying less out-of-pocket through their insurance than they would buying the drugs at lower cash prices offered by low-cost pharmacies. .. The companies own the three largest pharmacy-benefit managers in the U.S. PBMs manage drug spending for employers as well as government programs. .. In the name of keeping down drug costs, PBMs decide which medicines a patient’s health plan will pay for and how much the patient will have to contribute to the cost, in the form of out-of-pocket expenses like deductibles and coinsurance… PBMs also often direct patients to take lower-priced, generic versions of expensive brand-name medicines to limit the spending.

“Generics are a cornerstone of American efforts to tackle high drug costs. Once patents on the branded drugs expire, generic manufacturers can jump in. The competition usually causes prices to plummet… Yet the prices don’t always fall when PBMs own their own pharmacies. And for specialty drugs like generic Gleevec, the PBMs frequently steer patients to use their in-house pharmacies to fill prescriptions.

“PBMs try to pay as little as possible for drugs distributed through independent retail pharmacies. But when their own pharmacies dispense prescriptions, PBMs profit from the higher prices… ‘The incentive is there for the PBMs and the specialty pharmacies to keep prices as high as possible,’ said Shannon Ambrose, co-founder and chief operating officer at Archimedes, a company that competes with PBMs to manage specialty drug spending... Even when their health insurance picks up most of the cost of a drug, patients can face a larger expense from higher priced generics if they have an out-of-pocket contribution like a deductible or coinsurance pegged to the price.” It seems that while our elections really are not rigged, except for the voter restrictions and gerrymandering, our healthcare pricing system most certainly is.

I’m Peter Dekom, and as an average American doing their best to make a living and live a normal life, it has to be galling that so many powerful and wealthy sources at the top want to make sure that doesn’t happen anymore.

The System vs Most Americans

 

Unless someone in power seeks retribution or wants to make an example of you – with an occasional sacrificial lamb to placate the masses – the United States has absolutely created two distinct legal/economic systems of governance: one for the mega-mega-rich and another for the rest of us. It started during the Reagan era, when well-heeled lobbyists for the mega-rich suggested a plausible, but since proven false, economic theory. The misplaced belief maintained that if you did not tax the super-rich, that excess money would “trickle down” to the rest of us. More rightwing sophisticated economists referred to it as “supply side economics,” conservative lawmakers referred to it as “incentivizing the job creators,” and many would simply call it “fiscal responsibility” to rein in government spending. But the rising tide did not float all boats, only yachts. Trickle down economics has never worked to benefit anyone but the rich!

That notion has since become the most fundamental platform, immutable, of the Republican Party. Without using the dictionary definition of the word “socialism” (predicated on ubiquitous government ownership of land, business and all significant economic values), Republicans mislabeled programs aimed at helping most of us – like universal healthcare (we are the only develop nation without that) and support for higher education (the real job creator) – as “creeping socialism.” Unamerican, they called it.

Back in the 1950s, major corporate CEOs were compensated somewhere between 30 to 50 times the pay level of their average employees. By 2023, that multiple is north of 350. Take a look at the strikes we have faced of late: writers, actors, autoworkers, etc. The common thread in these labor disputes is the disproportionate pay increases to senior management versus the long-term practice in settling labor disputes by just correcting for inflation. No real raises.

At the heart of this core issue, more alive in the United States than any other nation on earth, is the blank check accorded to mega-rich in pursuing their agenda of wealth maximization and tax/ regulation minimization. Nothing screams legitimized corruption like the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United vs FEC – a ruling that uncapped issue and candidate campaign contributions (not directly controlled by candidates)… a practice that is illegal in most of the rest of the world. The obvious corruption of sitting US Supreme Court justices, receiving millions of dollars in benefits to themselves and their families, from clear rightwing supporters with an even clearer rightwing agenda that benefits their coffers and their values, should be an embarrassment to those judges. It does not appear to phase them in the least.

One of those powers, one that submits lists of preapproved judicial candidates with rightwing views, is also at the heart of the Clarence Thomas scandal. The Federalist Society’s Leonard Leo, the generous Thomas benefactor, is also a leader of just such an organization. Trump’s appointees were all on that Federalist list.

Major American industries, notably tobacco and fossil fuel-related monoliths, have lied, covered up their own research proving toxicity and found resonance in candidates on both sides of the aisle with their hands outstretched for campaign contributions. Millions of Americans have died or been relegated to lives of suffering by reason of those lies, and the politicians paid to look the other way. Tobacco was somewhat tamed by litigation brought late in the game, and BIG OIL and GAS are just now beginning to see some litigation that seeks accountability.

Meanwhile, reflected in the minority ultra-rightwing bloc in our House of Representatives attempting to impose their tiny minority will on the majority of Americans and in Congress, we have a massive federal deficit of approximately $33 trillion, a number that rises even though we are not at war. Why? Are we too poor to pay our annualized governmental carrying costs? Do we have to borrow just to live? But we are the richest nation on earth, so that cannot be the case. When you realize that the deficit is a national debt, amortized across the economic power of every single resident of the United States, but if we were to generate the necessary offsetting taxes to prevent that from happening, the burden would be applied primarily, in a progressive tax system, to those earning the most.

So, we keep taxes for the mega-wealthy low and foist the burden generated by maintaining those low rates… on everybody. The mega-wealthy maintain phalanxes of extremely well-educated tax lawyers and accountants, supported by the most extensive and effective team of lobbyists on earth, to keep the taxman from auditing them or assessing them proportionate to their net worths. Except on death or sale, we do not tax wealth in this country. One of the most fascinating deep dives into IRS records, not easily obtained, came from access to IRS records assembled by ProPublica. In an April 25, 2022, interview of one of those “deep divers” – Jess Eisinger, who with ProPublica's Jake Bernstein won a Pulitzer Prize in 2011 for their reporting on questionable practices on Wall Street – revealed the secret tax realities of the mega-rich in these excerpts:

What you do is you buy or you build your asset like Amazon or Berkshire Hathaway or Tesla, and then you borrow against the asset. And there's no evidence that Bezos or Buffett has done this. But Musk discloses this in his SEC filings that he does this. And Larry Ellison, another mega billionaire, also has borrowed billions and billions of dollars. So this is a common technique. You buy, borrow, and then you can keep those debts as long as nothing catastrophic happens to your stock or your asset. You keep those debts rolling and rolling and rolling until you die.

And then when you die, there are a couple of tax loopholes that come into play that allow you to wipe out those capital gains for the purposes of taxes. And then you never have to pay taxes on the gains at all… Well, often, what they do is they borrow against their wealth. And if you're borrowing against your wealth, that's not taxed. So ultimately, what we found was that the ultrawealthy in this country, they had wealth growth of $400 billion from 2014 to 2018, and they paid about $14 billion in taxes. And so average people pay roughly 15% in federal income taxes effectively, and the ultrawealthy paid 3.4% when compared to their wealth growth…

So for the billionaire class, what's really important is how much their wealth grows in a given year. The rest of us, we have income, and we need income to live. But for the billionaire class, they don't actually need income. They avoid income. If you avoid income, you avoid taxes. And so it turns out that the billionaire class pays much less in tax than average people. And what we found is that Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk and Michael Bloomberg and Carl Icahn, they literally, in recent years, paid zero in federal income tax. And what you do is you let your mountain of wealth grow over time. You let Amazon stock grow. Or if you're Warren Buffett, you let Berkshire Hathaway go up and up and up. And you never sell. And if you never sell, you don't take any income….

So real estate - commercial real estate moguls barely pay any taxes. We saw this with Donald Trump's taxes. And the owner of the Miami Dolphins is a billionaire named Stephen Ross. He developed Hudson Yards in New York, one of the biggest developments in recent years in New York City. And he's gone almost 20 years never paying any federal income tax. In fact, he tells the IRS in a given year, I've lost $400 million.

Well, is he actually losing that money? No. What's happening with commercial real estate people is that their buildings often are appreciating. They're going up in value, and they're throwing off income when the renters give them income. But they get to tell the IRS that the buildings are falling in value, they're depreciating, because over time, assets are considered to depreciate….

You are more likely to be audited if you are earning $70,000 a year than if your income is in none figures. Why? The IRS faces teams of lawyers and accountants for those big audits and frankly lacks the staff to handle it. This is why the ultra-rightwing House Freedom Caucus, which is holding up the government interim funding gap, seeks to repeal the $80 billion in funding for the IRS passed under Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act. Preserve that two-system anomaly!

I’m Peter Dekom, and Donald Trump is completely correct about two systems of justice and a rigged election configuration… one he has taken advantage of for decades.

A College Degree – Meh!

We started with a little erosion of the financial cost of higher education… the ripple became a flood, until the cost of college slowly increased to triple the published federal COL escalations. Scholarships faded at most universities, minimized or eliminated, often replaced by Pell Grants for the lowest rung of the economic ladder but mostly student loans, public and private. Back in my day, where there were student loans at all, generally they would get retired with reasonable payments within a decade of graduation. Today, loans among those my Millennial son’s age and younger, have repayment rates that reach well into middle age, decades past the relevant graduation dates. With the roughly $40K in average undergraduate loans, easily escalating to serious six figures when you add graduate or professional school debt, the aggregate of outstanding student loans now exceeds the aggregate of American consumer/credit card debt.

Stories about college dropouts, like Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, becoming billionaires with entrepreneurial risk-taking, has taken some of the “you need a college degree to have a well-paid future” off the glittering educational rose. There has been a serious backlash against college- educated “elites” as being the mainstay of killing upward mobility for the rest. California’s Governor Gavin Newsom has even removed the requirement of a college degree from many state jobs where that degree was once mandatory. That represents a liberal press for greater income equality.

But there is an equal and opposite vector coming from the conservative side, as MAGA Republicans have noticed that college-educated people, other than the super-monied class that seeks reregulation and lower taxes, are much more inclined to vote for a liberal candidate. So expensive tuition without affordable financial aid tends to prevent that educated class from growing. Education specialist, Paul Tough, writing for the September 5th New York Times, observes an opposite trend in other developed countries, as education values are slipping here:

“Britain and Canada are not the outliers on this point; we are. On average, countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development have increased their college-degree attainment rate among young adults by more than 20 percentage points since 2000, and 11 of those countries now have better-educated labor forces than we do, including not only economic powerhouses like Japan and South Korea and Britain but also smaller competitors like the Netherlands, Ireland and Switzerland. Americans have turned away from college at the same time that students in the rest of the world have been flocking to campus. Why? What changed in the last decade to make a college education — and higher education as an institution — so unappealing to so many Americans?

“When it comes to higher education worldwide, the United States is an outlier in more ways than one. In Canada and Japan, public-university tuition is now about $5,000 a year. In Italy, Spain and Israel, it’s about $2,000. In France, Denmark and Germany, it’s essentially zero. A few decades ago, the same thing was true in the United States; government funding covered much of the cost of public college. Now students and their families bear much of the burden, and that fact has changed what used to be a pretty straightforward calculation about the economic value of college into a complex math problem….

“In the fall of 2009, 70 percent of that year’s crop of high school graduates did in fact go straight to college. That was the highest percentage ever, and the college going rate stayed near that elevated level for the next few years. The motivation of these students was largely financial. The 2008 recession devastated many of the industries that for decades provided good jobs for less-educated workers, and a college degree had become a particularly valuable commodity in the American labor market. The typical American with a bachelor’s degree (and no further credential) was earning about two-thirds more than the typical high school grad, a financial advantage about twice as large as the one a college degree produced a generation earlier. College seemed like a reliable runway to a life of comfort and affluence.

“A decade later, Americans’ feelings about higher education have turned sharply negative. The percentage of young adults who said that a college degree is very important fell to 41 percent from 74 percent. Only about a third of Americans now say they have a lot of confidence in higher education. Among young Americans in Generation Z, 45 percent say that a high school diploma is all you need today to ‘ensure financial security.’ And in contrast to the college-focused parents of a decade ago, now almost half of American parents say they’d prefer that their children not enroll in a four-year college.

“The numbers on campus have shifted as well. In the fall of 2010, there were more than 18 million undergraduates enrolled in colleges and universities across the United States. That figure has been falling ever since, dipping below 15.5 million undergrads in 2021. As recently as 2016, 70 percent of high school graduates were still going straight to college; now the figure is 62 percent.

“Outside the United States, meanwhile, higher education is more popular than ever. Our global allies and competitors have spent the last couple of decades racing to raise their national levels of educational attainment. In Britain, the number of current undergraduates has risen since 2016 by 12 percent. (Over the same period, the American figure fell by 8 percent.) In Canada, 67 percent of adults between 25 and 34 are graduates of a two- or four-year college, about 15 percentage points higher than the current American attainment rate.”

The United States is woefully short on STEM graduates; jobs in those field go begging. Hospitals cannot find enough medical personnel, particularly doctors and nurses, to service the demand for their services. It’s getting desperate, and the political polarization and anti-immigration rhetoric has made recruiting experts from overseas increasingly difficult. Recently, Canada capitalized on that reality, offering immigrants speedy visas for themselves and their families if they had the right STEM/medical credentials.

Long gone are the post-WWII benefits that put hordes of returning GI’s into college. The educational reward for that effort was a most rapid rise in the productivity and creativity of American business that cemented our role as the world’s greatest entrepreneurial economy. We had engineers and scientists creating new economic splendor for us all. After the Soviets launched Sputnik in 1957, the American commitment to higher education redoubled, and the nation’s GDP soared accordingly.

But today, as the above Pew Research chart illustrates, education has become heavily politized for all the reasons set forth above. Our public primary and secondary schools, based on international test scores, have fallen from first place to somewhere between nineteenth and thirty-eighth, depending on subject matter. While our top “elite universities” still rule the international roost, lesser state colleges and universities are producing graduates with skills often generated overseas at a high school level. There is no way to sustain our economic strength by relying on our pass successes without investing heavily in a cadre of experts to build a solid future.

I’m Peter Dekom, and you really have to ask yourself who really benefits from increasingly unaffordable college tuition coupled with a profound decrease in state and federal funding for higher education.

Barbarism and Subjugation of Women Under the Guise of Religion?

Barbarism and Subjugation of Women Under the Guise of Religion?

Taliban – There… US – Getting There

I don’t believe that I have witnessed such a surge in hypocrisy in a political party in my lifetime. The party of the “right to life.” One of the main new planks of the GOP is a cry for the expansion and enforcement of the death penalty. They scream about reinforcing our southern border to repel rapists, murders, criminals, terrorists, and most of all drug smugglers, but completely ignore that American guns, from a mostly uncontrolled US gun market, smuggled south have empowered the cartels to corrupt control of so much of Mexico and Central America. All in support of servicing mostly American addicts and social drug users.

Just as they call for pardons for the well-video-recorded insurrectionists, convicted of serious felonies, attacking the Capitol on January 6, 2021 and defunding the DOJ/FBI, they pretend to be the party of “law and order.” A party that claims to be supportive of women also has decided to control women’s bodies at a most intimate level. That guns have are now the leading cause of death among children in the US is met with a chorus of more civilian guns are the answer. Clearly the GOP’s “right to life” has been relegated to a meaningless slogan.

By the standards of the developed world, where there is virtual uniformity even in Roman Catholic countries, of a right to an abortion, the United States is moving ever closer to a barbaric theocracy, which fosters teaching “ethnically cleansed” false historical narratives, allows discrimination against LGBQT+ under the color of law, and where disenfranchising non-White traditional voters is the focus of so many red states. Who are we kidding? Every day we move away from the edicts of Western democracy and closer to an intense personal control maintained by the religious zealots in Afghanistan.

Our neighboring Canada and Mexico have embraced a woman’s right to control her body, even as that right has been taken from American women. Even devoutly Catholic Mexico? “Mexico’s Supreme Court decriminalized abortion nationwide Wednesday [9/6], two years after ruling that abortion was not a crime in one northern state… That earlier ruling had set off a grinding process of decriminalizing abortion state by state. Last week, the central state of Aguascalientes became the 12th state to decriminalize the procedure. Judges in states that still criminalize abortion will have to take account of the top court’s ruling… Wednesday’s sweeping court decision comes amid a trend in Latin America of loosening restrictions on abortion, as access has been limited in parts of the U.S.

“Mexico City was the first Mexican jurisdiction to decriminalize abortion 15 years ago… The Information Group for Chosen Reproduction, known by its Spanish initials GIRE, said the court decided that the portion of the federal penal code that criminalized abortion no longer has any effect…. ‘No woman or pregnant person, nor any health worker will be able to be punished for abortion,’ the non-governmental organization said in a statement… The ruling also means the federal public health service and any federal health institution must offer abortion to anyone who requests it, GIRE said. The court ordered that the crime of abortion be removed from the federal penal code.” Associated Press, September 7th.

Indeed, in June of last year, in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, the US Supreme Court reversed the almost half-century right-to-abortion of Roe v. Wade, telling us that the matter of any right to an abortion would be relegated to state law. Virtually every red state legislature, mostly with vast majorities of older White men, negated abortion rights as quickly as they could. Rightwing religiously driven zealots in some of those legislatures promised to hunt down offending women, their abortion enablers, even if they had to cross states lines to implement enforcement. Criminal statutes, even including “murder,” were rapidly embraced. The GOP, in contravention of Dobbs, is now seeking to impose a national ban on abortions.

With this level of explosive imposition of a purportedly religious fatwa against abortion, including limiting the use of a morning after pill that had been safely on the market for decades by judicial fiat, you’d think there would be fewer abortions as a result. While the above chart from the New York Times (9/7) shows a steady decline in abortions since 1990, that trend just reversed. That NY Times presentation was puzzled. “How is that possible? New data from the Guttmacher Institute, a nonprofit specializing in reproductive health, implies that more people are traveling across state lines or using telemedicine to get abortions, including through the use of abortion pills. The increase in use of those options has offset the decrease in abortions resulting from new state bans, [Times writers Amy Schoenfeld Walker and Allison McCann] found.”

The above map, put together by the Guttmacher Institute and reproduced by the Times, shows where abortions have increased – states bordering states banning abortions and states where voters rejected the anti-abortion fatwa from their legislatures. Guttmacher was not able to collate statistics on illegal abortions in those abortion-banning states, so the numbers are clearly under-reported. The Times continues: “For abortion rights advocates, this is a mixed outcome. Not everyone can afford to travel across state lines or access telemedicine, so it’s likely that some people who want to get an abortion still cannot do so. And while the overall count is up, abortions were rising before the Supreme Court’s decision. ‘They may have continued to rise even more steeply than observed if it weren’t for the bans,’ Caitlin Myers, an economist at Middlebury College, told Amy and Allison.”

It's not as if a fair vote of American voters would sustain the repeal of Roe. Consistent credible polling suggests that such would be the clear majority result. But through red state gerrymandering and voter suppression aimed at non-White Christian nationalists, all of which is on the upswing, the Supreme Court has opened toxic and polarizing wounds that make the United States of America an increasingly religious theocracy ruled by a minority of zealots.

I’m Peter Dekom, and the 2024 election is about preserving a democracy with majority rule (while protecting minority rights) as opposed to opting out of the democratic model into a religiously driven minority autocracy.