The American Legacy of Destroying, Marginalizing & Ignoring Our Indigenous Peoples

 Enough with the those old, often black and white, “cowboys and Indians” movies and TV programs. Or “Western” art as pictured above. White settlers, US calvary to the rescue, corrupt general store managers selling alcohol to “resettled Indians,” profiteers trading rifles for precious metals and fur… and aside from a couple of “loyal scouts and trackers,” those “Indians” were always the bad guys. “Indians” because the early European immigrants to the Americas were in search of a shortcut to spice-rich India. They found Native Americans and gave them that name. We don’t produce those kinds of films anymore, but they are readily available on so many digital platforms. 

Older Americans got to view those films and TV programs when they were first released, forming the racial stereotypes that so many of us carry about these indigenous peoples we call “Native Americans” today. The truth about how we killed and decimated these peoples who were so one with their land? So many of our children may never learn the truth of the massive theft of Native American lands, the killing forced migration of tens of thousands of our indigenous peoples living in the eastern part of the United States to vastly less valuable parcels in the West (the Trail of Tears) and how out-and-out genocide and cultural destruction of “Indians” was both sanctioned and even mandated by our legal system. As the red state wave against the teaching of “critical race theory” sweeps across the country, the truth about our historical and present treatment of our indigenous peoples is swept under our ethnically European-culturally biased rug.

Today, the World Population Review tells us: “According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the current total population of Native Americans in the United States is 6.79 million, which is about 2.09% of the entire population. There are about 574 federally recognized Native American tribes in the U.S… Fifteen states have Native American populations of over 100,000. Additionally, 15 states have relative Native American populations below 1.00%... Los Angeles County in California has the highest number of Native Americans, with a total of 233,000. Oglala Lakota County in South Dakota has the highest percentage of Native Americans of any county at 93.9%.” 

Many live on “pueblos” or “reservations,” land that legally belongs to them… usually, isolated and particularly exposed to extreme environmental degradation from climate change. Notwithstanding the proliferation of casino gambling on many of these Native American holdings, substandard poverty, horrible schools (even one-room schoolhouses), and often a lack of modern plumbing, electrical power and Internet access is more than common. The dearth of solid education and opportunity leaves a disproportionate number of residents in these forced enclaves with severe drug addiction and alcoholism… and rampant diabetes. Without hope.

An article published by the Yale School of the Environment (YSE), October 28th highlights a study that begins to provide missing statistics about the contemporary impact of our historical mistreatment of Native Americans: “In a first-of-its-kind study, a team of researchers — led by Yale School of the Environment Professor Justin Farrell — attempted to quantify the massive loss of historical lands by Indigenous Nations across the U.S. since European settlers first began laying claim to the continent. They also found historical land dispossession was associated with current and future climate risks as Indigenous peoples were forced to lands that are more exposed to a range of climate change risks and hazards and less likely to lie over valuable subsurface oil and gas resources. 

 

“‘Everyone who’s read history — or a true version of it — knows this story,’ Farrell says. ‘But this is the first scholarly study that has looked at the full scope of change and tried to quantify it, to systematically geo-reference it at scale.’” The study – Effects of land dispossession and forced migration on Indigenous peoples in North America – is published in the October 28th edition of Science, authored by Farrell and other academics from Yale and Colorado State University. The headlines from that report are deeply troubling and profoundly sad. They attest to the shame we should all feel, not just from the history of how we got here… but from our continued failure to correct the continuing legacy of the past into the present day:

 

“To date, we lack precise estimates of the extent to which Indigenous peoples in parts of North America were dispossessed of their lands and forced to migrate by colonial settlers, as well as how the lands that they were moved into compare to their original lands. Farrell et al. constructed a new dataset within the boundaries of the current-day United States and found that Indigenous land density and spread in has been reduced by nearly 99% (see the Perspective by Fixico). The lands to which they were forcibly migrated are more vulnerable to climate change and contain fewer resources….

“Statistical analysis shows that aggregate land reduction was near total, with a 98.9% reduction in cumulative coextensive lands and a 93.9% reduction in noncoextensive lands. Further, 42.1% of tribes from the historical period have no federally- or state-recognized present-day tribal land base. Of the tribes that still have a land base, their present-day lands are an average of 2.6% the size of their estimated historical area. Additionally, many tribes were forced onto new lands shared by multiple Indigenous peoples, even in cases in which nations are culturally dissimilar and have separate ancestral areas. Many present-day lands are far from historical lands. Migration dyad analysis shows that forced migration distances averaged 239 km, with a median of 131 km and a maximum of 2774 km…

“Tests related to climate change risk exposure, land conditions, and potential economic value reveal substantial differences between tribes’ historical and present-day areas. First, tribes’ present-day lands are on average more exposed to climate change risks and hazards, including more extreme heat and less precipitation. Nearly half of tribes experienced heightened wildfire hazard exposure. Second, tribes’ present-day lands have less positive economic mineral value, being less likely to lie over valuable subsurface oil and gas resources. Agricultural suitability results were mixed. Last, about half of tribes saw an increase in their proximity to federal lands in the present day…

“This research suggests that near-total land reduction and forced migration lead to contemporary conditions in which tribal lands experience increased exposure to climate change risks and hazards and diminished economic value. The significance of these climate and economic effects reflect aggregate changes across the continent, but there is an urgent need to understand the magnitude of place-specific impacts for particular Native nations resulting from settler colonialism in future research.” We maintain those highly inferior Native American “settlements,” ignore and underfund them… and simply do not want to know the truth or teach that to our children. Which just perpetuates the horribles into a permanent abused underclass.

I’m Peter Dekom, and our shame from our past treatment of our indigenous peoples is simply being compounded by a contemporary failure to rectify the current exposure and substandard living conditions we still impose on these fellow Americans… and even refuse to let our children know there is still very much a problem.

Will You Will Rude the Day

 

“Re-entry into polite society is proving to be a little bumpy.” 

Time Magazine (10/15/21)

Whether it’s a scene of right-wing mobs attacking the Capitol on January 6th, unprovoked assaults on Asians, physical confrontations over mask mandates in restaurants and on airline flights or mob threats to school boards trying to wade through divisive issues while protecting the health of their young student charges… we seem to be mired somewhere between a flood of domestic terrorism to out-and-out self-centered rudeness.  Lots of smart phone and CCTV videos, throw in a few police bodycams, all provide ample evidence of this “my rights and my opinions matter; yours do not” escalating social malignancy. It could be a period of adjustment as COVID subsides or it could be a much more serious reflection of a nation unable to hold together. 

For some, it is just a new rudeness that seems to have been ushered in and legitimized by a former president who loved to insult, goad and blame. Simply put, anger management has left the building. COVID escalated our fears. Social media was an unfortunate accelerant, allowing once distant groups with fringe opinions to aggregate into menacing rudeness and out-and-out violent expressions as group-sanctioned or even mandated actions.  We’ve become so jaded and used to social violence that there are even cases where bystanders just watched (sometimes with smart phones capturing the event) but did nothing else.

For example, in mid-October, “A 35-year-old man in Pennsylvania is facing rape and assault charges after a woman was sexually assaulted on board a public transit train Wednesday night as riders witnessed the attack but did not intervene, authorities said on Friday [10/15]… The woman was assaulted… while riding the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority (SEPTA) Market-Frankford line towards the town of Upper Darby…

“Surveillance video captured the entirety of the assault, giving investigators enough evidence to charge [Fiston] Ngoy with rape and assault, [Police Superintendent Timothy] Bernhardt told NBC Philadelphia… The video also shows how riders, who also witnessed the attack, did nothing to help the woman being assaulted, according to Bernhardt.” NBC News, October 16th. What’s going on here? The October 15th edition of Time Magazine addresses this seemingly rising trend of self-centered rudeness that has affected the entire nation:

“September 2021 was a bad month for manners. On the 21st, a woman pulled a gun on servers at a Philadelphia fast food restaurant when they asked her to order online. On the 16th, several women from Texas pummeled a hostess at a New York City family-style restaurant. A few days prior to that a Connecticut mother was investigated for slapping an elementary school bus driver and that same week, a California woman was charged with felony assault for attacking a SouthWest airlines flight attendant and dislodging some of her teeth…

“Of course, it’s the people-have-lost-their-everloving-minds incidents that make the news, but they are also a reflection of a deeper trend; Americans appear to have forgotten their manners, especially with those whose job it is to assist them. Lawyers are reporting ruder clients. Restaurants are reporting ruder clients. Flight attendants, for whom rude clients are no novelty, are reporting mayhem. (FAA fines for unruly behavior have already exceeded a million dollars this year.) So legion are the reports of discourtesy that some customer-facing businesses have been forced to play Miss Manners…

“‘We’re going through a time where physiologically, people’s threat system is at a heightened level,’ says Bernard Golden, a psychologist and the author of Overcoming Destructive Anger. This period of threat has been so long that it may have had a damaging effect on people’s mental health, which for many has then been further debilitated by isolation, loss of resources, the death of loved ones and reduced social support. ‘During COVID there has been an increase in anxiety, a reported increase in depression, and an increased demand for mental health services,’ he adds... ‘Half the people fear COVID,’ says Golden. ‘Half the people fear being controlled.’

“Heightening the anxiety, the current situation is completely unfamiliar to most people. ‘Nobody expected what happened. We didn’t have time to prepare psychologically,’ says Cristina Bicchieri, director of the Center for Social Norms and Behavioral Dynamics at the University of Pennsylvania. Then, just as it seemed like the danger had passed, other limitations arrived; staff shortages, product shortages, longer delivery times… This is an atmosphere which can ruffle even normally very calm people, or in which very slight infractions can set off those with less of a handle on their emotions. (And with an overloaded mental health care system, those who need help may not be getting it.)…

“It’s not a coincidence, psychologists say, that much of the incivility occurs towards people who are in customer service industries. ‘People feel almost entitled to be rude to people who are not in a position of power,’ says Hans Steiner, emeritus professor of psychiatry at Stanford University. ‘Especially when they come at them, and remind them of the fact that they have to do their piece to get rid of this pandemic.’… The workers who are now in charge of enforcing rules are traditionally regarded as caregivers and servers. The power dynamic has been completely upended. And of course, it’s always easier to punch down. ‘It’s displaced anger,’ says Bernard. ‘They’re angry about other things but they take it out in those encounters.’

“‘It wasn’t like Americans were exactly overlooking their differences before the pandemic. Some researchers point to the increase in crude public discourse, both from political leaders and in online discussion—which encourages outsized emotions—as the gateway rudeness that has led to the current wave. ‘We don’t filter ourselves as much as we used to,’ says Bernard. ‘On the internet, people feel like they can say anything. They no longer guard themselves. And I think they transfer that lack of filter into public life. I think from leadership that we’ve had in the last number of years, that’s only been more encouraged.’

“But it goes deeper: Impolite interactions are not the only thing that’s on the rise; crimes are too. ‘We’re seeing measurable increases in all kinds of crimes, so that suggests to me that there is something changing,’ says Jay Van Bavel, associate professor of psychology and neural science, and co-author of a book on social harmony, The Power of Us, that came out in September. He suggests the reasons for the rise in both are structural and profound; America has lost sense of social cohesion, as a result of the widening gaps between the wealthy and working class. ‘The more inequality you get—which has gotten really bad in the last few decades—the less of a sense of cohesion there are across socioeconomic classes,’ he says. ‘That’s something that if that’s not addressed is going to continue to cause turmoil.’” 

I guess this explains why crime is down with one glaring exception: crimes of violence, especially murder (up 30%). Are we really “Americans” anymore? Do we care about others, especially if their opinions and beliefs are dramatically different from our own? And if we do not “get over it,” can the nation last as the United States of America? Will rising generations reject this “era of insults and violence” or perpetuate it?

I’m Peter Dekom, and this trend is not just about rising rudeness; it actually goes to the core of the sustainability of our nationhood.

Money for Your Soul, Your Country & Your Freedom

 If the 20th century was the story of slow, uneven progress toward the victory of liberal democracy over other ideologies—communism, fascism, virulent nationalism—the 21st century is, so far, a story of the reverse. 

                                                                                                                The Atlantic November 15th

“If we are going to have one nation under God — which we must — we have to have one religion… One nation under God, and one religion under God.”                                                                                     

Former Trump era National Security Advisor (and former Lt. General/pardoned felon) Michael Flynn at a November 13th ReAwaken America tour-stop in San Antonio, Texas

"Facebook said it was looking out for our children and weeding out online trolls, but in reality was creating misery and divisiveness for profit… We are not people to Mark Zuckerberg, we are the product and we are being used against each other out of greed." Ohio Attorney General David Yost in a Press Release as he filed a major lawsuit against Meta/Facebook on November 15th.

Promulgating vigilantism as “patriotism,” encouraging domestic terrorism, creating and then living by false narratives, spreading unprovable and society/life-threatening conspiracy theories, fostering notions of incumbent (white) political entitlement, undermining legitimate authority, marginalizing or completely eliminating opposing voices and votes, placing false blame, defaming and degrading caring individuals and leadership, attempting to seize political power by negating election results, slamming the door to compromise, making teaching truth illegal, mocking and rejecting science, elevating seditionists and murderers to hero status, crushing free speech, truth and non-Christian religious freedoms, refusing to obey or enforce laws that are contrary to “the way I see it,” fabricating individual rights and then demanding them, legitimizing violence and searing ethnic, religious and racial hatred as acceptable political expression… and making billions and billions of dollars from this massive democratic unraveling… America 2021 et seq.

Would the strategies enabling pockets of screaming extremists, well-funded and better armed, to usurp what the majority of Americans really want of the nation and impose the above realities have been so successful without social media? The truth began pouring out when former Facebook employee, Frances Haugen, blew the whistle against Meta/Facebook to major media (the Wall Street Journal, CBS’ 60 Minutes, etc.) and in testimony before Congress and the UK Parliament. More whistleblowers followed, and Meta’s stock plunged. See also my October 11th Which is the Next Big Tobacco - Petroleum or Facebook blog.

Haugen noted how the minimal and often short-lived Facebook efforts to counter damaging posts were cast to look as if they were genuine and massive internal efforts to control the problem. In fact, she noted, Facebook thrived on fomenting conflict and lies, because those efforts generated the most eyeball time that maximized ad revenues. She also confirmed that Facebook, especially its Instagram component, knew that its posts were seriously undermining the self-images and self-confidence of pre-teen and teenaged girls… but did nothing to contain that growing psychological harm.

“Ohio's Attorney General filed a lawsuit [the first post-Haugen testimony] against Meta… on Monday [11/15], accusing the company of violating federal securities law by failing to disclose internal research about its platforms' harmful effects on children to investors… The case was filed on behalf of the Ohio Public Employees Retirement System and Facebook investors, who collectively lost more than $100 billion in market share since employee-turned whistleblower Frances Haugen first leaked internal documents to the Wall Street Journal, AG David Yost said.” YahooNews, November 15th. 

But if Facebook’s/Meta’s efforts against damaging distortion and disinformation were minimal in its English-language posts, efforts in other languages and in other nations were/are, for the most part, non-existent. Writing for the November 16th Los Angeles Times, Brian Contreras and Maloy Moore express the general frustration of those organizations who are trying to contain this Meta malignancy: “It was October 2020, election conspiracy theories threatened to pull America apart at its seams, and Jessica González was trying to get one of the most powerful companies in the world to listen to her… It wasn’t going well… After months of trying to get on their calendar, González — co-chief executive of media advocacy group Free Press — had finally managed to secure a meeting with some of the Facebook employees responsible for enforcing the social platform’s community standards. The issue at hand: the spread of viral misinformation among Latino and Spanish-speaking Facebook users.

“Across the country, a pipeline of misleading media had been pumping lies and half-truths, in both English and Spanish, into local Latino communities. Sometimes the misinformation mirrored what the rest of the country was seeing: fear-mongering about mail-in ballots and antifa vigilantes, or conspiracy theories about the deep state and COVID-19. Other times it leaned into more Latino-specific concerns, such as comparing candidate Joe Biden to Latin American dictators or claiming that Black Lives Matter activists were using brujería — that is, witchcraft… Much of the fake news was spreading on social media, via YouTube, Twitter and, pivotally, Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram. All three [of the latter] are owned by the same umbrella company, which recently rebranded as Meta.

“‘The same sort of themes that were showing up in English were also showing up in Spanish,’ González recalled. ‘But in English, they were either getting flagged or taken down altogether, and in Spanish they were being left up; or if they were getting taken down, it was taking days and days to take them down.’

Free Press had briefly flagged the problem in July 2020 during a meeting with Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg. González had spent the months since trying to set up another, more focused conversation. Now, that was actually happening… In attendance were Facebook’s public policy director for counterterrorism and dangerous organizations, its global director for risk and response, and several members of the company’s policy team, according to notes from the meeting reviewed by The Times… Yet the talk didn’t go as González had hoped.

“‘We had a lot of specific questions that they completely failed to answer,’ she said. ‘For instance, we asked them, who’s in charge of ensuring the integrity of content moderation in Spanish? They would not tell us the answer to that, or even if that person existed. We asked, how many content moderators do you have in Spanish? They refused to [answer] that question. How many people that moderate content in Spanish are based in the U.S.? .... No answer… ‘We were consistently met much the same way they meet other groups that are working on disinformation or hate speech: With a bunch of empty promises and a lack of detail.’

“Free Press wasn’t alone in finding Facebook to be a less-than-ideal partner in the fight against Spanish-language and Latino-centric misinformation. Days after the election, it and almost 20 other advocacy groups — many of them Latino-centric — sent a letter to Zuckerberg criticizing his company’s ‘inaction and enablement of the targeting, manipulation, and disenfranchisement of Latinx users’ during the election, despite ‘repeated efforts’ by the signatories to alert him of their concerns.’” If takedown efforts were failing within the Latinx community in the United States, efforts in other non-English-speaking nations were virtually non-existent. 

Just as falsely crying “fire, fire” in in crowded theater does not fall within the notion of First Amendment protected speech, so much unbridled dissemination of democracy-destroying false messaging must also be banned. Meta and its social media brethren must be held seriously accountable, even if that accountability decimates the shareholder values they have built by supporting terrorists, liars and democracy destroyers to make lots and lots of money.

I’m Peter Dekom, and it does appear that we have come to a fork in our nation’s democratic path: Meta or a working democracy… they are mutually exclusive as configured today.

Rainbows against Hurricanes – Democratic Bumbling & and Messaging

 

Look around you. Feeling good about the country? Think it’s going in a good direction? The harsh political reality is that the party in power – the Democrats hold the presidency and a slight majority in Congress – gets the blame for anything that goes wrong, even if the problems result from the legacy of past administrations. I think that while the Afghanistan exit will create some minor lingering negativity, voters are more likely to be swayed by domestic issues (and those international issues that have crucial domestic impact). America is truly more in the middle than many Dems might like. While southern border immigration matters, the body politic is getting tired of the story. But even as COVID consequences are falling, too many moderate-to-conservative voters believe that, despite a surge in job opportunities, whatever economic difficulties that continue are a direct result of excessive vaccine and mask mandates and “inflationary” spending in a liberal administration. 

Statistics and mathematics say otherwise, but internal bickering by young and inexperienced Democratic purists against blue dog Dem hardliners in states with serious conservative leanings has produced nothing in the cold hard light of “what have you done for me lately?” metric. They had to wait unless they lost the Virginia gubernatorial race by a nose for the Democratic House to pass the bipartisan “part-one” of the infrastructure package. The GOP has figured it out with tough and consistent messaging: killer “inflation” from reckless Democratic spending, creeping “socialism,” economic madness against fossil fuels that drive the nation and wasted money spent in our public schools to turn children into America-hating puppets by assessing blame under “critical race theory.”

In the war of words, the GOP hammers their buzz words hard with every election campaign. Red states see COVID as “over” and not requiring “forced” preventative measures. As successful Virginia GOP gubernatorial candidate Glenn Youngkin also discovered, staying on buzz-word message without a toxic Trump presence in this swing state worked. Democrats, meanwhile, refused to pass the bipartisan infrastructure bill and were hamstrung by coal-state “moderate” Democratic Senator (WVa), Joe Manchin (see my November 2nd Manchin-ian Heresy blog) in passing their greater and second $1.75/$1.85 trillion infrastructure legislation. 

Dems, you have facts on your side, but you just do not know how to explain them or ordinary voters. Simplify. Create new buzz words. Explain your new “putting new hard dollar values into the pockets of those not in that top 5% of money and wealth.” Stop “GOP special interest politics”… rewarding the rich. It’s not just about running against Donald Trump anymore. Americans are scared, frustrated and deeply divided! What’s in it for America and me, they ask?

For those who believe that the nation is just fine without continuing to address the pandemic, here is a sobering report that tells us all how we got it so very wrong in the first place… and how we might continue. The November 3rd BMJ (formerly the British Medical Journal) examined the impact of COVID on life expectancy in 37 countries. Not only does the United States have the highest number of COVID deaths on earth (now heading towards 800,000), but it has had the second highest reduction in life expectancy: 2.3 years for men, 1.6 years for women. The odd aspect of the report shows that these negative statistics reflect a greater infection/mortality rate for younger people than in most of the other nations studied.

Researchers in the US have discovered that the two-month ebb/two-month surge pattern of recent COVID outbreaks is most extreme in Republican states where vaccine and mask mandates are not required. What has been true since vaccines (plus the boosters) have become available and widely deployed, the economy and pressures on the healthcare system are negatively impacted most in those states. And what has been true since the pandemic began – the economy needs national COVID containment to grow normal consumer/business behavior – continues as red state resistance among the remain unvaccinated solidifies even more. It’s the economy, stupid! Link COVID containment to the economy!!! We so close to the end of COVID: new treatments, boosters and shots for 5-to-11 year old kids! Next mega-issue. 

Manchin and GOP stalwarts believe that the dollar could face an untenable inflationary surge from these infrastructure expenditures. Really? Ah, Dems, your messaging is so far off. Aside from touting what these bills would obviously do if passed… above and beyond fix roads, bridges, levees, our power grid, dams, etc…  tell us they also support childcare and early education – a boon to working mothers – and cap prescription expenses and provide coverage for hearing aids for seniors on Medicare. The battle about taxing billionaires is tilting toward Republican values, even as most of the country agrees that this should be the easy button in funding. When specifics in the bills are explained to voters, these resonate exceptionally well. Simplify. Describe the everyman benefits.

Dems also need to explain the difference between an investment – money which generates growth and a rate of return – and a pure expense, a naked cost. The infrastructure bills reflect a belief in the future of America; they are investments which are expected to make us more productive and globally competitive. And as for inflation, not only are these dollars going to be spread over many years, even at the revised $1.85T level, “part 2” (Build Back Better) of the infrastructure package, if passed as a budget reconciliation measure, actually represents a relatively small effective impact on our budget and deficit as Michael Hiltzik, writing for the November 3rd Los Angeles Times, explains:

In the context of federal spending, however, the size of the “Build Back Better” package comes to relative pennies. As I’ve reported before, in any context its benefits far outweigh its costs… [P]olitics is about compromise, especially with Democrats holding razor-thin control of the Senate, so we can mourn the provisions that have been dropped to cut costs and still appreciate what’s still in (so far)… Let’s start our inquiry by explaining what’s meant by $1.7 trillion in federal spending. That’s over 10 years, so on average it comes to $170 billion a year. That’s the number that needs to be compared to other claims on the federal budget, which are typically given as annual figures.

The biggest single discretionary expenditure in the federal budget is on defense. In September, Congress easily passed a $768-billion defense budget, adding $25 billion to President Biden’s request even though the U.S. is actually winding down its defense presence overseas. That’s about 4½ times the average annual cost of ‘Build Back Better”; projected over 10 years, it would come to nearly $7.7 trillion. Manchin… voted for every defense bill for the last decade, $9.1 trillion over 10 years.

[Manchin and Republicans] fretted about the prospect that more federal spending would trigger more ‘rising inflation [and] crippling debt,’ creating ‘a disastrous future for the next generation of Americans.’… Is that so? The average U.S. inflation rate over the last decade has been about 1.73%. If anything, that’s healthy — it’s well below the Federal Reserve’s target of 2% a year and high enough to avoid harmful deflation if the economy weakens. It’s also well below the annual average over the previous three decades, which was 3.5%.

In other words, Manchin’s [and the GOP’s] inflation concerns are just specious. The economy hasn’t been overheating, and there has been no ‘inflation tax’ in recent years… It’s also proper to consider the Biden program in the context of the federal budget as it is today — about $6.6 trillion in fiscal year outlays. That’s about 31.6% of GDP. Add [the annualize infrastructure] $170 billion to the sum, even without covering it with higher taxes, and the budget’s share of GDP rises to 32.4%. So, Dems, pass it already!!! Next mega-issue.

“Creeping socialism”? Merriam Webster defines “socialism” as “a system of society or group living in which there is no private property [and] a system or condition of society in which the means of production are owned and controlled by the state.” That does not include social programs like public education, Medicare, childcare or Medicaid. Dems, get that message clear! Nothing in any of these programs gets the government to take over our land or our industries!

Fossil fuels? If our paying trillions and trillions of dollars to undo the damage that such fuels have caused – through clearly demonstrated climate change, costing federal and state emergency services, insurance companies (funded by all of us) and decimating private land and businesses –  is acceptable, then by all means stop trying to reduce carbon emissions by eliminating fossil fuels, especially coal. But remember, our consumer-driven economy makes the United States the greatest per capita polluter on earth. Wildfires, searing heat, coastal erosion, killer droughts, intense tropical storms, flooding, etc., etc. These all have hard dollar costs to each and every American. This is not just a mega-issue for rising generations; it is a “here and now” tax on all of us. Dems? Are you listening? Call it the “Our Huge Hidden Republican Tax.” 

The Dems should easily agree that proselytizing Marxism and false anti-American rhetoric should not be supported in our public schools, but the ban on so-called critical race theory (CRT) is throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Teaching hard facts, exploring history as its actually occurred, is what education is all about. Let’s find a better way based on “truth,” a precious commodity in our current world than CRT. See also my October 26th An Underlying Notion of Superiority blog. Simply put, let’s stop throwing gasoline on the fire with what have now become fighting words and just fix what is obviously wrong… including containing and controlling what everybody knows is out of control, the false narratives that define Facebook and other social media today.

Sure, there are other issues – like affordable housing, student debt, rising food and fuel costs – but the battlelines are focused on the above for now. The overriding issue that the Democrats face is that their “rainbow” of constituencies – from liberal progressives to blue dog moderates, from anti-abortion Roman Catholics to climate change activists – are pressed up against a new single and monolithic consistent constituency in the GOP. 

Just picture Fox News (plus OAN and Newsmax as minor right-wing networks) against a plethora of what Republicans call biased liberal media, like MSNBC, CNN, CBS, PBS, Vice, NBC, ABC, etc. One massive Republican voice versus the cacophony of what the GOP considers to be Democrat-leaning television. Run that through Web-based media, and the result is the same. The GOP hurricane has moved solidly to the right; the Dem’s rainbow coalition is still battling internally for a platform, a message and “one” clear direction. Stop the bickering. Stop focusing on Trump. Get your messages strong and clear! Now!

I’m Peter Dekom, and perhaps Democratic politicians might, and I repeat might, learn that this divisive bickering, will cost them the coming elections hands down as Virginia has just illustrated.