Cult Behavior - 2020

Throughout the year of the COVID-19 pandemic, many of us have tried to understand the reactions of those who essentially threw caution to the wind, ignoring calls of public health experts and epidemiologists to wear masks and practice social distancing. The viral images (pun intended) of armed, maskless men shouting at police at the Michigan State Capitol are the tip of the iceberg, as we go about grocery shopping and doing other necessary tasks only to see those ignoring mask mandates and one-way aisles and markings on the floor at the checkout line.

In an excellent op-ed piece in the Washington Post, columnist Megan McArdle discusses the dichotomy between those who are seeking normalcy in their own way. She writes: "One group wanted to feel as safe as they had before a virus invaded our shores; the other wanted to feel as unfettered." She discusses the attitude that causes people to ignore the hurricane evacuation warnings, or grab one's carry-on bag when ordered to evacuate the airplane. And her analysis is fine as far as it goes.

But I believe that 2020 shows us a different dynamic at work. We have all observed the mob mentality, or cult-like behavior, of those who support Donald Trump. We are aware of the different communications channels, from talk radio to news networks to now a new social media thing called Parler. And we see how misinformation spread there becomes gospel.

It's not like folks are simply ignoring the fire alarm calls to evacuate the building because of some personal sense of "freedom." It's like there's a different loudspeaker altogether, telling them that the fire is "fake news" and that they should stay at their desks to "save the economy."

All while the building, or our constitutional democratic republic, is burning down.

The Bait and Switch

The NDAA, or National Defense Authorization Act for FY 2021. According to Monica Montgomery of the Center for Arms Control and Nonproliferation, the NDAA authorizes appropriations and establishes policy for the Department of Defense (DOD), nuclear weapons programs at the Department of Energy (DOE), defense intelligence programs, and other defense activities of the federal government (e.g., military construction projects, homeland security programs). On December 11, the US Senate passed the NDAA - National Defense Authorization Act - by a veto-proof margin of 84-13, after the US House of Representatives passed the bill earlier in the week by a vote of 335-78. 

On December 23, before leaving Washington for his Mar-a-Lago retreat in south Florida, President Trump vetoed the bill. In his veto message to Congress, the President cited three specific reasons for not signing the bill into law:

• The bill did not address Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which President Trump calls a threat to national security by allowing foreign actors to disseminate disinformation online, especially using social media platforms.
• The bill orders the Department of Defense to rename a number of military installations named after men who served in the Confederate army, including Fort Bragg, Fort Lee, and Fort Hood.
• The bill places limits on the amount of money designated for military construction that could be diverted to other purposes during an emergency.

On December 28, the House voted to override the veto by the vote of 322-87, with a handful of Republicans, including Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy of California, abandoning their previous support of the bill in order to support President Trump. The override vote in the Senate is expected on December 29.

While the President may have genuine concerns over these three cited reasons, they don't seem to justify, individually or taken together, vetoing the bill, especially given the overwhelming bipartisan support for the bill in the Congress. So what's really the President's beef?

Tucked into the NDAA is something called the Corporate Transparency Act. This section (in legislative language called a Title) would require certain business entities, such as LLCs, limited partnerships, and other such organizations to report the names of certain beneficiaries (owners of 25% or more, controlling/managing partners, etc.) to an obscure Federal agency called the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network within the Treasury Department. FinCEN tracks financial transactions in order to trace potential money laundering, and LLCs and other similar business entities are the frequent laundromats for such illegal activity. 

The Trump organization is really not a single company, but dozens upon dozens of LLCs and other such companies, layered one over the other. Michael Cohen's payout of hush money to porn star Stormy Daniels was from an LLC set up specifically for that purpose. So the threat of a Federal law enforcement agency being able to unravel who controls the LLCs is a very real and present danger to Trump and his family.

LBJ once said, "If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you." Trump (as others before him) is using the shiny objects of white grievance (confederate sympathy and the border wall) as the pickpocket's diversions.

https://armscontrolcenter.org/the-ndaa-process-explained/

https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/presidential-veto-message-house-representatives-h-r-6395/

https://www.fincen.gov/

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/27/nyregion/stormy-daniels-trump-payment.html

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/lbj-convince-the-lowest-white-man/

Some broadly popular ideas

The COVID-19 relief package deal released last night includes a provision that would end the practice of "surprise billings" from medical providers. Those surprise bills show up when a patient goes to a hospital or ER which is in network, but some of the individual providers contracted by the hospital (ER physicians, anesthesiologists, etc.) are not in the patient's insurance network. Despite wide public support for ending the practice, many legislators face intense lobbying from physicians and private equity firms that own many practices that profit from the status quo. Finally, it looks like the COVID-19 relief bill is the vehicle that will get this done.

In reading up on this, I ran across an article in New York Magazine that listed 7 public policy ideas that, according to polling have broad support across America. A few of these are particularly progressive ideas, and end up getting shouted down in the right-wing echo chamber. Others are a bit more obscure, but important, and don't get a fair hearing either because of their obscurity or because of the kind of lobbying pressure that blocked ending surprise medical billing. 

Here's the article's list:

• Legalize marijuana use
• Workers' representation on corporate boards
• Cap on credit card interest/fees and on other similar loans (title loans, payday loans, etc.)
• Government officials shouldn’t be allowed to own stocks or become lobbyists right after leaving office
• The government should directly finance the development of new drugs, and then allow the breakthrough pharmaceuticals to be sold cheaply without a patent
• 12 weeks of paid family/medical leave for childbirth or serious illness/injury
• Some sort of Green New Deal

I would add a few more:

• Universal background checks for all firearms sales/transfers
• Comprehensive immigration reform, including path to legal status for many, worker permits, etc.
• Comprehensive income tax simplification, including eliminating distinctions on the types of income

All this is really a sad commentary on how disconnected our legislators - even state legislators - are from reality.

If We Make It Through December

On December 2, Worldometer's database counted 2,833 COVID-19 deaths in the United States, bringing the total number of deaths in the pandemic in the USA to 279,867. Hospitals are scrambling to find bed space, and, more importantly, staff to provide care for skyrocketing numbers of COVID-19 patients. The County Judge of El Paso (the rough equivalent of an elected county mayor) imposed strict restrictions, challenging the state's Governor to a showdown as his county faces a true public health emergency.

In Washington, the picture is bleak. The President issued a 40-minute video in which he rambled again about election fraud which his lawyers apparently can't find evidence of to present to court after court. His convicted and pardoned former National Security Advisor, Michael Flynn, suggested yesterday that the President should impose martial law and hold new elections supervised by the military. Republicans on Capitol Hill refuse to speak out against such calls for a military coup, and continue to refuse to provide disaster relief to millions of Americans suffering under COVID-19 economic stress. 

Flynn's remarks were made to some group in Ohio with words like constitution and freedom in their clever name, and many other similar groups seem to be springing up around the country. We have one locally here in Haywood County which is planning to meet and call for rolling back mask mandates and business restrictions, in the name of liberty.

And news came yesterday that the United Kingdom's health agency had given emergency approval for the COVID-19 vaccine developed in Germany by BioNTech/Pfizer. That prompted a call from White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows to the head of the FDA, no doubt to put pressure on the American regulator to hurry things along.

Instead of hunkering down in what could be the worst December in modern history, Americans seem to be ignoring the experts, giving a stiff middle finger to local and state officials, and trying to show the rest of the world just how daft we are.

Understanding the Biden Voter

After Trump's election in 2016, several books came out, including J.D. Vance's overhyped Hillbilly Elegy, which attempted to explain the "Trump voter."

So, not to be outdone, here's my "Biden Voter for Dummies" guide.

First of all, the Biden voter reads lots of good books, old and new. Maybe start with David McCullogh's John Adams, and follow that up with McCullogh's 1776. Try Richard Reeves' President Kennedy: Profile in Power. Add on Braungart and McDonough's Cradle to Cradle, and revisit Rachel Carson's Silent Spring. For some heavy reading, go back more than a century to Alfred Thayer Mahan's The Influence of Sea Power upon History, followed by ADM (Ret.) James Stavridis' Sea Power: The History and Geopolitics of the World's Oceans to get a 21st-century perspective. Instead of Vance, try David Joy's The Weight of This World or Where All Light Tends to Go which focus on meth and opioids in the southern Appalachians. And if you want to learn more about the intersection of racism and economics in the South, Wiley Cash's historical novel The Last Ballad will explain why there were no unions in the Carolina cotton mills.

And the Biden voter listens to music. Iris Dement, James McMurtry, Jason Isbell, Tyler Childers are a good start. The Drive-by Truckers and American Aquarium have new releases talking about politics and life in the pandemic. Try anything, and everything, that has Rhiannon Giddens involved. And most of all, all of John Prine - the entire catalog. Or make it simple by tuning in to WNCW 88.7 FM, or stream at https://www.wncw.org/.

And begin and end with the Bible. Start with Isaiah and Ezekiel and Micah to get a glimpse of what God might have to say about what a just and righteous society should look like.

Reading and listening to all that will help you understand the Biden voter. 

Good luck!

A Principled Conservative Party

A common thread through many op-ed columnists that I read these days is the need for the rise of some kind of "principled conservative" political party. It's really more difficult to dig down beyond the label to find out what that means. There are catch phrases thrown around like "fiscal conservatism" and "limited government." These sound harmless enough, but in practice (at least in my adult lifetime) they have been empty promises (or threats, depending on one's perspective). And using the word "principled" seems to suggest a rejection of more than a half-century of the Southern strategy, where the conservatives embraced the Southern segregationists.

Yet those of us who grew up in the Jim Crow south (schools in Union County, SC were segregated until my 9th-grade year), understand that without the segregationists and their ideological descendants, the current Republican Party as we know it would go the way of the 19th-century Whigs and Know-Nothings. If the GOP decided to reject the Southern strategy and confess much as Lee Atwater did on his deathbed, what appeal would "principled conservatism" have? More importantly, what would be the major policy planks in a "principled conservative" party platform?

Well, some might start with fiscal conservatism as a significant plank. That one is pretty easy to rip up, as for all their talk of fiscal conservatism, in practice the GOP has run up huge deficits in the cause of tax cuts for the wealthy, and using the plank as a bludgeon against the economic safety net.

Advancing free market capitalism might be a plank. But taxpayer-funded giveaways to profitable corporations doesn't fit into any textbook definition of capitalism, at least without the modifier "crony" attached. At it's worst, such crony capitalism turns into oligarchy, or in the extreme, fascism.

Law and order might be a plank. But law and order without aggressive protection of the people's 4th amendment right coupled with the equal protection of the laws descends into the kind of police state that the most vile tyrant would applaud.

Limited government might be a plank. But, like with law and order, those were planks of the segregationists, who used them as baseball bats (sometimes literally) against those who marched to advance their 4th amendment and equal protection rights. In the segregated South, that was a dog-whistle, saying, "Don't let the big bad government make my little Susie go to school with those people."

So I would like the details filled in. What would a principled conservative party look like? To whom would it appeal? Who are some current prominent politicians that would represent this principled conservative party? 

Inquiring minds want to know!

Swearing Off Trump

 I posted on Facebook over the weekend that I am done with Trump - no more comments, no more rants, no more railing against his manifold sins and wickedness. Instead, I'm looking forward to January 20, 2021. On that day I believe we will see reborn the promise of America, as Joe Biden and Kamala Harris take their oaths of office. What can we look forward to?

• Restoration of American influence on the world stage. The election results have brought a collective sigh of relief to our traditional allies in Western Europe, signaling a renewed vigor in the NATO alliance. As a result, we are likely to see the Iran nuclear deal restored, putting the brakes on Iran's ambitions in a multi-national effort that President Obama crafted. Recommitting the United States to the Paris Agreement could spur the United States into world leadership in the 21st-century global energy transition. 
• Renewed vigor in environmental policy. President-elect Biden outlined an assertive environmental and energy policy during the campaign, signaling restoration of the Clean Power Plan, breathing new life into the Environmental Protection Agency, and building on nearly a half century of the triumvirate of environmental legislation: the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, and the Endangered Species Act.
• Sensible, comprehensive immigration reform. Early in his term, President-elect Biden will reverse harmful executive orders put in place by Donald Trump. Then he will push Congress to enact comprehensive immigration reform along the lines of the Border Security, Economic Opportunity, and Immigration Modernization Act of 2013. That bill passed the Senate with bipartisan support, but was blocked in the House by then-Speaker John Boehner. 
• Restore and improve the Voting Rights Act of 1965. If preclearance was unfair because it didn't apply to all states, then revise the law to require the Justice Department to clear every state election law change before they take effect. Establish Federal standards for election technology, absentee ballot handling, early voting, and other critical matters for Federal elections.
• Respect for the separation of powers and our norms and traditions. With deep experience in both the Legislative and Executive branches, Biden is steeped in institutional history. He knows how to make the deals that need to be made to improve the lives of the American people. 

Most of all, I'm looking forward to a President who does not seek to be the center of attention all day, every day.