Vote for Democrats and Go to Hell

It absolutely impossible completely to separate the dictates of organized religion from our political structures. Confirming government officials, witnesses in court proceedings swearing in with bibles and even military and legislative “chaplains” (of differing faiths) are part of our traditions and heritage. Thomas Jefferson, not a particularly religious man himself, made no secret of using Judeo-Christian religious precepts as well as wise philosophical teachings as a basis for his “documents of design” that formed the United States. A U.S. president without a religious commitment is a non-starter, and there we have only had Christians in that office… every serious candidate for that office has also always been a Christian.

Over the past few elections, several religious organizations, including the Arizona-based Alliance Defending Freedom, have enlisted legions of Christian pastors to defy a federal ban on their using their pulpit openly to support candidates who embrace issues that have often galvanized the Evangelical right against Democratic Party campaigns. “Pro-life,” “anti-gay,” climate-change-denial, school prayer and teaching creationism-in-lieu-of-evolution are key to this deeply fundamentalist constituency. Many of these Christian ministers have risked losing their tax-free status by stepping into the political limelight, some even telling their flock that to vote otherwise is an automatic invitation to hellfire.

So what is the law on this issue? Official political endorsements from the pulpit can have serious tax consequences under the so-called “Johnson Amendment” (named for then-Congressman Lyndon Johnson who proposed the bill in 1954, a statute that impacts all non-profits): “Under the 501 (c) (3) section of the Internal Revenue Service Code, it states that churches [and any subject non-profit] may engage in some ‘legislative activity’ and still qualify for favored tax status, as long as such activity is not more than an ‘insubstantial’ part of its overall activity in terms of time and money (e.g., worship service, Sunday school programs, etc.).

“In other words, the amount of permissible legislative activity is somewhat vague. Legislative activity that amounts to 5 percent of all church activity is generally considered ‘safe.” Legislative activity between 5 and 20 percent is less certain and, therefore, less safe. Activity over 20 percent has been found unacceptable by the Internal Revenue Service, although the rule has rarely been enforced.

“Under IRS guidelines, legislative activity is defined as any conduct intended to influence legislation, initiatives or referendums. However, the code places no limitations on the legislative activity of church members – including pastors who act as individuals, not as representatives of the church.

“David French, an attorney with the American Center for Law and Justice, founded by Jay Sekulow, says pastors have every right to personally endorse candidates…. ‘Pastors absolutely have the right to endorse candidates, French said in an email response to The Christian Post. ‘If they do so in their individual capacity, they have no fear of IRS sanction. If, however, they do it 'officially,' as part of their role and duties as pastor, they may endanger their church's tax exemption.’’’ christianpost.com/news/ (10/30/12)

The separation of church and state – the clear impact and intention of the First Amendment which reacted against state-sponsored religion that forced some Europeans to flee to the New World to escape persecution – is a cornerstone of our form of government. Notwithstanding the belief of too many Americans, the United States is not a “Christian nation,” and that the “freedom of religion provision” of the First Amendment was not designed to protect Christians against those of differing beliefs (a common misinterpretation across the Bible Belt). The above codification in the IRS statutes (which is not just directed at religious institutions) may be nothing more than a reflection of what already is, and given the other “free speech” element of the First Amendment, an outright ban on proselytizing from the pulpit would equally fail to pass constitutional muster.

But one of Donald Trump campaign pledges was to remove those IRS restrictions to allow pastors to take official political positions in their religious capacity without consequence. “Warning that religious freedom is ‘under threat,’ President Donald Trump vowed [on February 2^nd] to repeal the Johnson Amendment… ‘I will get rid of and totally destroy the Johnson Amendment and allow our representatives of faith to speak freely and without fear of retribution,’ Trump said during remarks at the National Prayer Breakfast, a high-profile event bringing together faith leaders, politicians and dignitaries.

“Trump made a similar pledge as a candidate but has not detailed how he plans to scrap the rule or how quickly he will proceed in doing do… Religious conservatives whose overwhelming support propelled Trump to the White House have been watching closely for him to deliver on promised protections for religious objectors to gay marriage and abortion. Kelly Shackelford, head of First Liberty Institute, a non-profit legal group that specializes in religious freedom cases, said no other presidential candidate was ‘more outspoken on their commitment to religious freedom’ than Trump.” Associated Press, February 2^nd.

Fervent and passionate evangelicals, ignoring the proscriptions of the Johnson Amendment, have often drilled into their flocks the notion that voting for a candidate who opposes their view of “fundamental Christian values” is an offense to God Himself, one that will condemn the voter to hellfire. If Trump succeeds in removing those Johnson Amendment restrictions, a lot of Evangelical pastors have made it very clear what they will do. “God requires a Republican vote.” But then, is that the same impact for a jihadist Muslim cleric whipping up his flock into an angry frenzy?

I’m Peter Dekom, and pushing this nation back into an era when America was very different has way too many unintended consequences that will only serve further to polarize a nation that needs healing now, not more reasons to divide us right.

The Tyranny of Currency

My January 25^th Currency Manipulation 101 blog spoke of governments’ reconfiguring their paper money for various policy purposes – cleaning out bribe money (India), stopping currency hording (Venezuela), curtailing those trying to avoid government watchdogs, etc. – or simply to allow new forms of banking to evolve in very sophisticated countries (Sweden) where paper and coins are just vestiges of past and unnecessary practices or developing nations (Kenya) where traditional banking just cannot reach into the majority of the grassroots population. But there are international political realities, some of them criminal, that are pushing the entire world away from currencies controlled by governments.

The new world order is led by a trend towards virtual currencies, increasingly accepted by mainstream business institutions around the world: Bitcoins and their ilk. This seems to be a natural progression in the history of money and commercial exchanges over time.

The movement into online financial transactions represents an evolution away from ancient in-kind trading societies, sea shells and jewelry, heavy gold, silver and copper coins and paper currency that pretty much is backed by faith (smoke and mirrors?). Even our basic “M-1” money supply (our “near money” or national currency liquidity) today is based on transactional values, money authorized by our Federal Reserve, and about half is reflected in actually issued currency notes. The rest is reflected in deposit accounts, which can be readily transferred into currency… but seldom are. From 1879 until 1933, our currency was backed by gold. The Great Depression and gold hording forced the change. Today, our dollar is simply backed by the full faith and credit of the United States.

But in a world of global turmoil, where mass migrations rip people from their homes and create millions and millions of stateless refugees, where internal factions are pushing parts of countries to reconsider their dependence on central state-controlled banking or where people wish to avoid the watchful eyes of government, we are witnessing the rise of intricately and elegantly  interlinked, Web-based financial transactions (the “blockchain” phenomenon) that are not directly under the control of any governmental entity or denominated in any national currency. These are objective and tradeable “values” that can be converted into traditional currency equivalents but are equally capable of existing entirely on their own. The may rise and fall like any currency and carry with them the inherent risks of deal in values without the seeming reliability of governmental guarantees and controls.

Money values can flow across or within international boundaries in this convenient blockchain – Bitcoin – path, beyond the pale of government currency/trading bans and restrictions, outside of the formality of maintaining traditional bank accounts and not dependent on the political decisions of those trying to control the flow of money. Criminals may smile. Corrupt officials may wink and breathe a sigh of relief. But there are whole lot of mainstream participants in modern economies who have some pretty justifiable reasons for this alternative to traditional currency structures. From a simple and logical view of the evolution of money, the acceptance of virtual international currency just feels like it has to be the next, giant, step in the history of money.

The February 5^th International Business Times examines this transitional phase, pitting sovereign governments trying to increase the control over their money supply and their subjects against those seeking political change, independence or simply a more global way to interact on the commercial stage. Today, most of us determine our economic identity in accordance with our citizenship or residence. But times are changing fast.

“The election of a new and unmeasured type of regime in the US, and the UK voting to stop the flow of people from the EU, have caused hundreds of thousands of people to take to the streets in recent weeks, and also in protest at foul and corrupt governments in Romania [where bribes under $48,000 were decriminalized], South Korea and Brazil. 

“Meanwhile, people in India flocked to Bitcoin late last year after its government shocked and dismayed citizens when they announced the demonetisation of the  of the 500 and 1000 rupee notes.

“The foundation for a potentially better new world will be the next internet generation, and the cornerstone of this will be digital identity. Identity on the internet is currently both centralised and balkanised: identities are piecemeal, differing from one internet domain to another. Systems like blockchain could bring a kind of ontological parsimony to digital identity, because in a digital context, where things can be copied and distributed easily at no cost at all, the Bitcoin blockchain solved the problem of ensuring that one thing (a coin) could be only one place at any time.

“In the world of identity, similar systems could be used to allow any person, organisation or thing to have an identity claim or relationship with any other. Using these identities and resulting relationships, without some intervening authority, is known as self-sovereign identity.” International Business Times. But if your financial reality – your down and dirty buying power – is determined by that digital identity that applies no matter where you are, then the dependency on a national currency – and the political strings that go with it – must fade.

The security and reliability of that digital identity will then move into the full faith and credit accorded within the interlinkage and verification stability within the relevant complex blockchain. Yup, lots of room for abuse. Yup, no one government (or predictable legal system) is standing behind the blockchain structure. But if you disagree with the government you are in or find it distasteful or even just inconvenient, perhaps then it’s not so bad. And if legal reliability can be built into that blockchain, it may actually be preferable to the currency of your domicile.

Here are some basics to understand how one of the most accepted underlying software systems is evolving: “Ethereum is a decentralized platform that runs smart contracts: applications that run exactly as programmed without any possibility of downtime, censorship, fraud or third party interference.

”These apps run on a custom built blockchain, an enormously powerful shared global infrastructure that can move value around and represent the ownership of property. This enables developers to create markets, store registries of debts or promises, move funds in accordance with instructions given long in the past (like a will or a futures contract) and many other things that have not been invented yet, all without a middle man or counterparty risk.” Ethereum.org. Bitcoin was built on the Ethereum platform.

Simply put: we can create new financial jurisdictions that can circumvent existing political cacophony and bridge gaps in banking and cross-border transactions. Think this is something for the distant future? Bitcoin is just one such effort. Even in the United States, companies like Overstock.com, Reddit, Virgin Galatic, Zynga, eBay, PayPal, Tesla, Tigerdirect, etc. currently accept Bitcoins. But there is a necessity for this direction of virtual currencies.

“Extreme circumstances call for extreme measures. During the refugee crisis which is still happening in Europe, a blockchain startup called Bitnation announced that it would issue digital IDs on a blockchain ledger to refugees. This would at least allow them to receive funds in Bitcoin from the family and friends they had left behind.

“Bitnation has partnered with the government of Estonia to work on blockchain identity, and it also offers marriage on the blockchain anywhere for any combination of creed, gender or religion. Bitnation's ultimate goal is grand indeed: the establishment of entire jurisdictions on a blockchain with new governance models and their own decentralised currencies – in other words new ‘nations’…

“Susanne Templehof, founder of Bitnation, said: ‘We have seen a lot more people joining Bitnation and creating their own local versions of it during the protests in Brazil and South Korea. It's an interesting development. People are not satisfied with the status quo. Why should we have to choose in each jurisdiction just one government service provider that lasts for four years?’

“Bitnation's 'governance 2.0' system works alongside the powerful Ethereum public blockchain community. Templehof provides practical advice on starting a nation. ‘Start by looking at governance service agreements. People normally start a nation with a flag and a national anthem. I would say do that last.’” International Business Times. Still, there are criminals and risks… always have been.

Throughout history, criminals have tried to pass false gold, forgers have created realistic paper currency, and most recently, hackers have stolen and ransomed their way to wealth, a threat that is not going away. Blockchains can be very complex verification systems, but… As the next generation of hyper-fast computing comes online over the next decade or so – quantum computing is just over the horizon – we are going to have to rethink most of the currently effective encryption systems that global economics currently rely upon. But then, you expected a permanent security solution? It is simply the next phase of how money will flow through society. It is clearly the “big next.” The IRS is also trying to figure out how to get its share!

It is a new world with new options for those who want very different possibilities and choices in their economic and political reality. Virtual currencies can unlock large groups of people from the tyranny of nationalistic economic systems with harsh political agendas. And it just might be how you will have to buy a cup of coffee… beyond Apple Pay and Android Pay smart phone solutions that are so common already. Get used to it!

I’m Peter Dekom, and in nations with growing dissent, you can expect a growing reliance on virtual currencies.

Erosion in Global Alliances

As the Congress begins to address important domestic policies, which clearly are focusing on deregulation, dismantling the Affordable Care Act and tax reform,  our military and political allies are reaching some pretty serious conclusions about the likely unraveling or weakening of our mutual defense treaties. With the President-Elect doubling down on his denial of Russian hacking and influence in the recent election, despite unanimous findings to the contrary by all of our intelligence agencies, there is fear among our allies that the US is now following the Russian playbook.

Even after a full intelligence briefing on January 6^th, Trump maintained: “There was absolutely no effect on the outcome of the election including the fact that there was no tampering whatsoever with voting machines… China, relatively recently, hacked 20 million government names. [Referring to the Office of Personnel Management breach in 2014 and 2015]. How come nobody even talks about that? This is a political witch hunt.” Tampering with voting machines, which are not even connected to the Web, was never the issue. This was all about a complete Russian effort, under the direction of Putin himself, to discredit Trump’s opponent by leaking both private information and falsehood that were rapidly picked up by the Web and spread like wildfire. Why was getting Trump into the White House so important to Russia? More on this later.

Having totally trashed our national intelligence services, Trump held out a minor, fingers-crossed, olive branch to those agencies to come up with an anti-hacking plan within his first 90 days in office. Having denied the impact of this cyber-plan, Trump still sent shivers of concern among Western leaders over his excessively close relationship with a very threatening modern Russia. This “It’s an existential moment for all of Europe’s leaders, most of whom are only just beginning to grapple with the fact that Russia wants to destroy the Euro-American alliance.” Anne Applebaum, Op-Ed, Washington Post, January 5th.

“The US has identified the Russian agents behind alleged hacking ahead of the presidential election won by Donald Trump in November, reports say… The agents, whose names have not been released, are alleged to have sent stolen Democratic emails to WikiLeaks to try to swing the vote for Mr Trump… According to CNN, the Washington Post and NBC News citing intelligence sources, agencies had intercepted communications in the aftermath of the election showing senior Russian government officials celebrating Donald Trump's win over rival Hillary Clinton…

“Mr Trump has repeatedly rejected allegations that the Russian government was behind the hacks. On Wednesday [12/4], he repeated a suggestion that ‘a 14-year-old’ may have been responsible for the breach… On Thursday [12/5], he said he was a ‘big fan’ of intelligence agencies, but later went on to raise questions about how they responded to the security breach…

“The pro-Kremlin media line is that the US authorities have failed to present any evidence to substantiate their presidential campaign hacking accusations… The official Rossiya 24 TV channel says the ‘US secret services have still not supplied a single piece of evidence,’ while the popular Gazeta.ru web site says Washington has ‘still not provided any convincing technical data.’… Opposition websites largely cover what the major US networks are reporting, and all note the Kremlin's denial of involvement.” BBC.com, January 6^th. Yet that hard evidence was indeed pouring out of our intelligence agencies.

Many GOP leaders, having spent much of their political careers opposing Russia, were caught between those efforts and a desire to support their president. There was even consternation within the Trump camp itself. “Meanwhile, former CIA director R. James Woolsey Jr., a veteran of four presidential administrations, resigned yesterday [12/5] from Trump’s transition team because of growing tensions over the president-elect’s vision for intelligence agencies.” Daily 202, Washington Post, January 7^th. Whether or not Russia is able to change enough votes directly, she very much benefits from the distrust and confusion – a pernicious fog, if you will – which results from her support of hacking and spread of disinformation… along with Trump-like consistent denial of any involvement despite virtually indisputable hard evidence to the contrary.

“Moscow has made information and asymmetrical warfare central to its foreign and military policy. When asserting itself in Georgia and Ukraine, Russia has used a hybrid strategy that involves the funding of local politicians and militias, fake news and cyberattacks. Leading German and Polish politicians assert that Russia has engaged in some such activities in their countries as well. And now there is the apparent involvement in America’s election.” Fareed Zakaria, Washington Post, January 5^th.  And it’s not as if the United States were singled out for such rather damaging intrusion into the election process. Russia seems to be mounting a full-on assault against Western democracies with a rather thinly-veiled effort either to dissolve NATO or render its policies weak and ineffective.

Thorsten Benner (Co-Founder and Director of the Global Public Policy Institute, in Berlin) and Mirko Hohmann (project manager at the Global Public Policy Institute), writing for the December 16^th ForeignAffairs.com, explain the underlying Russian goals in their hacking campaigns: “In  recent weeks, politicians and intelligence officials in France and Germany have stepped up their warnings of Russian interference in the national elections both countries will hold next year. In late November, Bruno Kahl, the head of Germany’s Federal Intelligence Service, told the Süddeutsche Zeitung that Germany had ‘evidence that cyberattacks are taking place that have no purpose other than to elicit political uncertainty.’  German Chancellor Angela Merkel has expressed similar concerns, suggesting that Moscow may attempt to influence Germany’s parliamentary elections, which are slated for September 2017. French politicians have been more circumspect about the specific threats posed to their country’s presidential elections, which will be held in April and May. But Guillaume Poupard, the director-general of France’s National Agency for the Security of Information Systems, has indicated that Paris, too, is concerned about the prospect of foreign interference. Western democracies face ‘the development of a digital threat for political ends and for destabilization,’ he told Le Monde in early December…

“The use of incriminating information to publicly discredit opponents is widespread, but Russian intelligence services have a particularly strong penchant for the tactic. During the Cold War, the practice was common enough that the Russian term kompromat (a portmanteau combining the Russian words for ‘compromising’ and ‘material’) entered the Western vernacular…

“Kompromat operations do not always seek to promote particular candidates, even though Russia’s interventions in the U.S. election clearly meant to elevate Donald Trump. (French officials should expect similar moves in support of National Front leader Marine Le Pen in the coming months.) The goal is usually broader: to corrode democratic norms and institutions by discrediting the electoral process and to tarnish the reputations of democratic governments in order to establish a kind of moral equivalence between Russia and the West. From the Kremlin’s perspective, attacks on democratic political institutions are a form of payback for what it perceives as the West’s longstanding attempts to hem in and undermine Russia—most recently, the leak of the Panama Papers, which pointed to the cronyism of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s inner circle and which Russian authorities attributed to Washington, and the anti-government demonstrations that roiled Russian cities after the country’s election in 2011. Putin accused Hillary Clinton, then the U.S. secretary of state, of instigating those protests.”

The problem, however, is not only that is Donald Trump cozying up to master-manipulator Vladimir Putin, but he is spouting rather clear statements that seem to mirror Putin’s disdain for NATO itself and other comparable alliances. “The ideas that the United States should ‘strengthen democratic nations against aggression’ and maintain a network of ‘free states and free peoples’ around the world led to the [post WW2] creation of powerful alliances in Asia, as well as a whole host of transatlantic and European institutions that have kept Europe safe, free, prosperous and allied to the United States: the North Atlantic Treaty Alliance, the Council of Europe, the European Union. Some of these institutions came with costs for the United States, but because they are the bedrock of American power in the world — because America’s allies promote American values and its interests around the world — no U.S. administration in seven decades has ever sought to undermine them.

“When Donald Trump is inaugurated this month, that will no longer be the case. Trump has made clear that he is no longer interested in promoting America’s ‘democratic faith,’ or an America that maintains a special relationship with ‘free states and free peoples.’

“In the past few weeks, some of America’s oldest and closest allies in Europe have begun to fear that Trump’s White House may not just neglect them, which has happened often enough in the past, but will actually seek to undermine them and their institutions. The link between Trump, his senior counselor and chief strategist Stephen K. Bannon and Breitbart News, the website Bannon was running until he went to work for Trump, is what worries them most. Flush from its success in the United States, Breitbart now seeks to monetize anti-immigration and racist sentiment in Europe, too, promoting it, selling it and using it to elect populist politicians who are just as skeptical of NATO as Trump, and who will do their best to destroy the European Union as well.” Applebaum.

Will Trump actually disband NATO or withdraw the U.S. from those treaties? Unlikely, but he may in fact pledge to Russia not to expand NATO further and to reduce U.S. participation in military exercises as well as underlying funding for the organization. This may very well promote our (former?) allies to seek alternative defensive structures or alliances that no longer involve or depend upon the United States. This stance would undoubtedly lessen American influence in global affairs and may ultimate diminish the role of the U.S. dollar as the global reserve currency, a reality that would create rather severe negative consequences for our economy. Not to mention how quickly China and Russia will react to fill the void at our expense.

I’m Peter Dekom, and a single term from a policy-reversing U.S. president could effect a permanent and irrevocable change in American power, prestige and influence all over the world.

But It’s the Farmers and Fishermen Who Feel Climate Change the Most

There’s a lot of irony in our discussion of climate change, whether mankind had anything to do with it and the tide of Trump supporters who have now made climate change denial official federal policy. But farmers and fishermen are the ones who most face the impact of bone-dry aquifers, flooding elsewhere, massive new storms (and storm surges), sea-life migration, dead zones, fires, drought, new insect migration and new temperatures where their traditional crops and livestock cannot survive. Strangely, decades after Republican conservationist President Teddy Roosevelt cherished the land with his national parks, it was Republicans who began the modern era of environmental protection. Republicans?!

“The climate has not always been such a partisan issue. Richard Nixon, a Republican president, set up the Environmental Protection Agency and signed the Clean Air Act. Ronald Reagan ushered in the Montreal Protocol, the first global treaty to protect the global atmosphere.

“Much of that consensus has broken down, in no small part because of a well-financed push by fossil-fuel interests, together with influential Republican allies, to attack well-established research on topics like global warming and push back on environmental regulation. That push began in earnest during the George W. Bush administration as attempts to undercut the Clean Air Act, and since then, the divide has widened.

“President Trump has famously said he believes that climate change is a hoax invented by the Chinese, and his administration has purged nearly all mention of climate-change programs from the White House and State Department websites. It has also ordered a freeze on federal grant spending at the E.P.A. and other government agencies.” New York Times, January 28^th. Over time, the GOP learned that it needed social conservative support to win elections, so their policies officially drifted into fundamental evangelical orthodoxy.

A whole lot of diehard evangelicals will tell you that after the Great Flood, God promised mankind no more global catastrophes and that the earth’s bounty is there for unlimited exploitation by man. These diehards coopted the Tea Party first and then overwhelmed the Republican Party with this message. For Republicans who simply could not embrace that interpretation of Biblical meaning, ignoring the billions and billions of hard dollar agricultural loses and FEMA emergency funding after devastating “natural” events, they simply argued that economic reality simply made environmental compliance too expensive to contemplate.

When Pope Francis rather directly confronted mankind’s cavalier attitude over the emission of greenhouse gasses, pretty much dismissing the above evangelical Biblical interpretation, only American evangelicals were left gloating over the new federal policy. They also chortle as rain-soaked California is no longer drought impaired, at least for now; God has provided “as promised.” This doesn’t exactly explain “all the rest,” but these evangelicals are not looking for explanations.

Even overseas evangelical movements have, for the most part, long since accepted mankind’s responsibility for climate change. The antipathy to climate change semantics now runs particularly deep, probably the best exemplar of the great left-right polarization that has redefined the United States today.

The “whatever they want, we’re against it” polarization of the Rust Best and the southern and Midwestern states from urban centers has made the climate change divide that much more intense. You cannot even utter the words “climate change” in conservative venues without incurring local wrath at “selling out to liberals.” But fishing waters are watching traditional catches migrating away, once productive lands now fallow, eroded or slammed by massive new weather patterns that make life in farm country that much more perilous.

The impact on farmland is real, so for those who cannot accept the notion that we caused climate change, there has to be another approach.  The answer to many is to change farming techniques to conserve soil from being blown away, plant hardier crops and change water-retention/ irrigation techniques. Folks in the Kansas breadbasket have learned to talk about the impact of their changing climate without calling what is happening “climate change.” But as things get worse, it is clearly going to take more than simply modifying growing practices.

“Here in north-central Kansas, America’s breadbasket and conservative heartland, the economic realities of agriculture make climate change a critical business issue. At the same time, politics and social pressure make frank discussion complicated. This is wheat country, and Donald J. Trump country, and though the weather is acting up, the conservative orthodoxy maintains that the science isn’t settled.

“So while climate change is part of daily conversation, it gets disguised as something else… ‘People are all talking about it, without talking about it,’ said Miriam Horn, the author of a recent book on conservative Americans and the environment, ‘Rancher, Farmer, Fisherman.’ ‘It’s become such a charged topic that there’s a navigation people do.’…

“Regional politicians and business leaders speak of pursuing jobs that clean energy may create, rather than pressing the need to rein in carbon emissions. A science teacher at a community college — whose deeply religious students sometimes express doubts about the trustworthiness of science that contradicts biblical teachings — speaks to his class about the positives of scientific discovery (electricity) in order to ease into more contentious subjects (global warming)…

“Still, ‘it would be a huge mistake to think people voting for Trump were voting against the environment,’ Ms. Horn said. If Trump follows an aggressive anti-environment agenda, she said, ‘there will be a big backlash in the heartland.’” NY Times. Not anytime soon, unfortunately.

But despite Trump’s overall falling popularity in the polls, his hold on those primary voters who pushed him into the White House has never been more solid. He is doing their bidding, point by point. This reality is shaking establishment Republicans to their core, who seem to believe that they cannot retain their offices unless they adhere to Trumpism.

Every time there are liberal demonstrations, screams from the liberal community, even court orders striking down his executive orders, rather than backing Trump down from his policies, they reinforce that he is implementing his campaign pledges to his constituency… evoking his double down response. Liberal protests are merely signs to Mr. Trump and his voters that he is on the right track.

Unless and until Trump loses traction with this base, not likely any time soon, there is little in the way of reversing his attempts at even his most extreme policies. Those that stand in the way will be the recipients of Mr. Trump’s extraordinarily-well-honed “blamed and destroy” skill-set. He will continue to push, perhaps push harder. Think of how bad things have to get before there is enough power among Republicans to reverse course. Don’t hold your breath. Democrats still have not moved the needle. Will it take global boycotts of American companies, good and services to change the message? Is that even possible? Is there anything that can reunite us? Anything?

            I’m Peter Dekom, and there are very, very few pure “Americans” anymore, just “______ Americans” with strong conditions from each faction for continued support of what they perceive is “their country.”