REWRITING HISTORY

 

The assault on our nation's capital on January sixth of last year was one of the most disgraceful moments in our nation's history.  Never before had violent American insurrectionists openly attacked a national government body with the intention of overturning a democratic election.  Several people died in the attack, and at least eighty one members of the Capitol force and sixty five members of the Metropolitan Police Department were injured. This is how it should be remembered from not only a historical perspective, but also a preventative one; we must never let such a shameful event happen again.

While at times the riot itself seemed like the case of the dog that caught the car, with rioters a bit stunned at how easily they got into the building, then finding all the members of congress gone, decided to mill about aimlessly, engaging in childish acts of theft and vandalism.  Still, it could have been so much worse; if any of those members of congress had not been evacuated in time, they could easily have been overrun and harmed or killed.  And while it may sound like a movie plot, what if those rioters had taken members of congress hostage?  And what if they demanded that they would only release those hostages if Donald Trump were declared the winner of the election?  And what if then president Trump had openly said that they were right?  It's a terrifying thought.

You would think that calling that riot an utter disgrace would be common sense, and maybe it was in the immediate aftermath.  But now that time has passed, the Republican party, still following orders from its deposed leader, has mostly decided to oppose having a congressional committee study how, why and what happened on January sixth.  A bill to create such a committee just passed the House of Representatives,  but only thirty five Republicans voted for it and over a hundred voted against it.  During the debate, some Republican house members made outrageous statements that downplayed the danger of the riot, like when representative Andrew Clyde said that it looked like a "normal tourist visit." (Even more outrageous, pictures have emerged from that day showing Clyde helping to barricade a door to keep out those "normal tourists"!)  After the bill passed the house, Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell formally came  out against it.  Yes, the same man who said on the floor of the senate on February thirteenth that "January 6th was a disgrace. American citizens attacked their own government. They used terrorism to try to stop a specific piece of democratic business they did not like. Fellow Americans beat and bloodied our own police. They stormed the Senate floor. They tried to hunt down the Speaker of the House. They built a gallows and chanted about murdering the vice president."  also adding that "There is no question that President Trump is practically and morally responsible for provoking the events of that day."  But that was then and this is now.  An April fifth poll of American voters found that over half of registered Republicans do not accept the verified fact that conservative protesters, supporters of former President Trump, attacked the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, with many of them believing that the riot was started by left wing protesters (like that all purpose boogeyman Antifa) in an attempt to make Trump supporters look bad, even though the FBI has said that there is no truth to this rumor at all.  Since McConnell takes his orders from the still popular in his party Trump, he too had decided that the riot is something to forget about.

It has become fashionable for media pundits to say that we know live in a post truth society, and it's hard to dispute that when tens of millions of Americans believe something to be true because they want it to be true without any basis in fact.  Although it's easy to blame Trump and his thousands of lies, his ascendancy was really built on decades of the same kind of  lies spewed by right media figures like Rush Limbaugh and Fox News.  Sadly, there really isn't anything that can be done about this situation, as anyone who has ever argued with a Trump supporting friend or family member can attest, changing someone's firmly held belief is very hard.  Really, all we can do is accept that some people are hopelessly caught up in the right wing media bubble, and hope that there aren't enough of them to put  Trump (or someone like him), in the White House.

A CONTINUING INFLUENCE

In America, ex presidents tend to fade away quickly.  Oh sure, they'll write a book and show up at conventions, but for the most part they are seen as yesterday's news.  This is especially true of one term presidents, who are forever seen as losers with little importance in their parties. Once again, Donald Trump has shattered norms, as he continues to influence the Republican party, holding court in his Mar a lago resort while savoring his role as kingmaker and considering another run at the presidency in twenty twenty four.

A few months ago, this all seemed unlikely.  After the violence that occurred at the Capitol on January sixth, it looked like the same Republican party that had shrugged off everything Trump had said and done (from birtherism to multiple sexual assault charges) was finally ready to put him in the rearview mirror.  Even though he was not directly impeached and removed from office, the vote was the most bipartisan impeachment vote ever, and several of his allies, like Senator Lindsey Graham, denounced him on the floor of congress.  It seemed to make sense; Trump was the most unpopular president in modern history, and his leadership of the party had resulted in them losing both houses of congress and the presidency.  Hardly an impressive record.  Add to that the fact that he was banned from Facebook and Twitter because of his comments leading up the riot, and you have a party in need to move on from a one term loser.

But sadly, things have changed.  Trump may now be without his much beloved twitter handle, but he can still give interviews and speeches or release statements that read like a longer version of his tweets (that is, rambling, dishonest and full of childish bragging).  And of course he has never taken any responsibility for the Capitol riot and continues to spout the lies about the twenty twenty election that inspired it, while his minions in the right wing media go along with him and even try to downplay the seriousness of the riot.   The result of Trump's continuing demand for attention is that Republican voters have stayed with him, as polls show that over seventy percent of them think that the election was stolen by Joe Biden.  This has put the Republican politicians in an awkward spot of their own making.  With so many of their voters believing Trump's election lies, most of them refuse to say for sure that Joe Biden won, and they are using this doubt by their voters to pass laws that they claim are to stop voter fraud, but that are really aimed at making it harder for non white voters to vote.  Republican politicians also have to support Trump's latest obsession; a recount in the state of Arizona that is being lead by a pro Trump company (with the reassuring name of Cyber Ninjas) that Trump claims will find "thousands and thousands of votes".  Even if this absurd process being carried out by a highly partisan organization were to somehow overturn the vote count in the state of Arizona, there's no way that the election of twenty twenty could possibly be overturned at this point.  But Trump doesn't care, he's just a delusional schoolyard bully who always thinks he'll never lose unless the other side cheats.

As the Republican party continues to be the cult of Trump, any dissention from their chosen messiah has become heresy.  Just a few days ago Senator Mitt Romney was booed by members of his own party, who almost voted to censure him.  This from a party that wanted to make him president in twenty twelve! Right now, House member Liz Cheney is being stripped of her power by her fellow party members in the House for the crime of voting to impeach Trump and refusing to believe the lie that he won.  It's a sad indicator that Cheney, the same woman who has defended her father's disastrous decision to invade Iraq when he was Vice President, and who came out against gay marriage in her first election run back in twenty fourteen (essentially stabbing her lesbian sister in the back), is now seen as one of the few standard bearers of truth in the Republican party, but here we are.

Where we this end?  There's really no telling if the Republican party can ever go back to the land of reality now that their voters have openly embraced Trump's lies.  The only bright spot is that Trump continues to be popular in the Republican party partly because many people are leaving it.  But the Republicans have gotten so good at gaming the system to their advantage, from the electoral college to gerrymandering, that they don't even need a majority to win anymore to retain power.  So the country is stuck with having one of its major political party parties being held hostage by Trump fanatics and Qanon supporters.

What does all this mean for Trump himself?  I think it's entirely possible that he will run again in twenty twenty four.  And while it's easy to think that there's no way that such an unpopular president could possibly win again,  he has so thoroughly trashed our political system that it isn't impossible.  I'll never forget how, back in twenty fifteen when Trump was just starting to run, he insulted  the war record of Senator John McCain ("He's not a war hero").  At that time I thought his political career was finished; imagine if any other politician, especially one who had never served in the military, had said the same thing about McCain.  Obviously, I was wrong.  So with Trump, all bets are off.  If he could win after running a chaotic twenty sixteen campaign that saw members of his own party asking him to drop out after the release of the infamous Access Hollywood tape, then it's possible he could win again.  Although the thought horrifies me, Trump regaining the White House is twenty twenty four is possible.

A TRANSFORMATIVE PRESIDENT

 

Will Joe Biden turn out to the most transformational president since Ronald Reagan?  In just a hundred days he has passed a stimulus predicted to cut child poverty in half, proposed an infrastructure plan designed to both fight climate change and create jobs, and proposed another plan that will increase government spending on child care, including universal pre kindergarten for all children over three. It also  will raise taxes on the rich (and beef up spending on the IRS to go after tax cheats, who are usually rich) to help pay for them.   It seems hard to believe that a long time moderate Democrat who's supported things like the war on drugs in the past is pushing for the largest expansion in government spending on the American people to reduce poverty since Lyndon Johnson in the nineteen sixties (or even Franklin Roosevelt in the nineteen thirties). Is it because the Democratic party has drifted leftward in the past few years?  Or is it just that Biden sees the country's emergence from the pandemic as a chance to push through progressive changes while government spending is suddenly popular?  Probably some of both.  Certainly reporting of the fact that the salaries of that nation's top CEOs have continued to skyrocket during the pandemic has perhaps made the average American more acutely aware of the inequities of our society.

While the future of the infrastructure and childcare bills aren't set (once again, thank Senator Joe Manchin and his love of the filibuster), some version of them should pass in the near future.  All economic indicators indicate that they will create a shift in wealth from the rich to the poor, that, in my opinion, has been a long time coming.

Really, this kind of spending goes to the core of what's wrong with the American brand of free market capitalism: the problem is that the pay you get for your work is not based on the quality or importance of it, but the pure raw dollar value you bring to an employer.  While this works just fine in many jobs (if you're a trained lawyer than you can make a lot of money for a law firm, so they pay you a lot), its when it comes to jobs that are hard to assign a simple dollar value to that things get tricky.  Take daycare workers for example; we all know that they have an important and essential job and perform a service that many parents rely on, and yet, because daycare centers can only charge the parents so much, they can only afford to pay their workers so much.  Meaning that most daycare workers are paid little more than the minimum wage, causing many daycares to struggle to keep a consistent level of care because many of their workers leave for better paying jobs.  Having a  universal government  pre k program that provides decent pay for the workers without charging the parents is really the only solution to this problem.

Quite a  bit has been written about how the Biden spending plan will help to bridge the enormous economic racial gap that exists in American society (and already some Republicans have started griping about so called "reparations"), and while I think that's a good thing, it also should be pointed out just how this will benefit American women.  Along with the most recent plan's call for universal childcare, the infrastructure plan calls for spending on better pay for eldercare workers; these two jobs are overwhelmingly held by women, and have been systematically devalued because of that.  Paying women more for the important work they do is sure to have a positive effect on the country. And having daycare paid for by the government would be an  economic windfall for working mothers. It would be a great benefit all around.  A lot of positive attention has gone to the fact that, for the first time ever, the president gave a state of the union address flanked by a female vice president and speaker of the house; while symbols like that are nice, passing a bill that would improve the lives of millions of women in this country would be even better.

The nice thing about social spending is that once is starts, it becomes popular and people get used to it.  In the nineteen thirties conservatives opposed Social Security, in the sixties they did the same for Medicare.  Now those two programs are so popular that politicians often talk of expanding them.  If both of Biden's tax and spending packages pass, I imagine the same thing will happen.  Honestly, I'm surprised it has taken this long.

A GOOD START

 

Beginning in two thousand and two, the city of New York implemented a crime fighting program known as "stop and frisk" in which the police were allowed, without probable cause, to stop, question and possibly search criminal suspects on the street. Within a few years, hundreds of thousands of people were being stopped by the program each year.  Inevitably, the program proved controversial, with its "guilty until proven innocent" attitude being used disproportionately against men of color.  The program began to lose popularity when lawsuits began to filed against the police department, and since twenty fourteen, the number of people stopped under the program dwindled to around a little over ten thousand.  Now that the harassment of  people walking down the street has been curtailed, can we start using the same principal for people driving too? 

Recently, as the emotional Eric Chauvin trial continued, there were two recent incidents of violence committed by police officers on men of color that started with cars being pulled over.  The first happened in Minnesota, when twenty year old  Daunte Wright was shot and killed by a twenty six year veteran officer who claimed that she was reaching for her taser gun and accidentally pulled her pistol instead.  Wright had been pulled over for hanging an air freshener on his rear view mirror.  The second incident was less tragic but still shocking; in Virginia Caron Nazario, an off duty member of the military, was pulled over, harassed and pepper sprayed because  the police wrongly thought that his car's license was expired.

The tragically routine nature of these two incidents just highlight the absurdity of having armed law enforcement officers pull over cars for minor infractions.  Why do we have the police wasting their time and the taxpayers dollars going after people who are not endangering the lives of others?  Many intersections have cameras, and when people make a wrong turn or run a red light, they take a picture of the car and send them a ticket in the mail.  Police and parking attendants  have cameras, so why don't they do the same thing?  Sure, if a person is driving recklessly or appears to be under the influence of drugs or alcohol, then it's fine for the police to pull that person over, given that they are a danger to themselves or others.  (And even in that case the police should film the reckless driving to prove the need to pull the driver over).  But for running a stop sign when there's no pedestrians around?  For failing to signal soon enough?  It's an overreach for the people who are supposed to protect and serve the public.

Since two thousand and fifteen, the Stanford Open Policing Project has sifted through the data of over two hundred million police stops, and their findings are far from surprising:  African Americans are more likely to pulled over than white people across the country.  And after the pull over is made, they are also more likely to be searched, and, of course, more likely to have force used against them.   Speaking for myself as a white man, I have been stopped for running stop signs four times in my life, and I was never asked to get out of my car or verbally harassed in anyway.   Compare that to Philando Castile, an  African American man who was shot and killed during a routine pull over in twenty sixteen; in his thirteen years of driving he had been pulled over forty nine times.

America has the highest prison population in the world  (and the highest per capita), and thirty eight percent of that population are African American, despite them making only thirteen percent of the population.  The inherently racist nature of our legal system in this country is, of course, not just the fault of the police themselves.  It has a long sad history, from feed slaves being jailed on trumped up charges and then forced into prison labor, to the unfair enforcement and sentencing laws of the war on drugs, to the privatization of prisons in the nineteen eighties, which gave us corporate for profit prisons that lobbied congress for tougher sentencing laws.  Obviously, reforms of not just the police department are needed in the future to make America a more just society.  But one simple place to start is to stop having the police pull over someone because they have a air freshener on their rear view mirror.  There's no excuse for it.  

MANCHIN ALMIGHTY

 

Although Donald Trump lost the twenty twenty election, his loss was less than the polls predicted.  And his loss did not hurt down ballot Republicans, who gained seats in the house and did better than expected in the Senate.  In fact, after election day it looked like the Democrats wouldn't take the Senate at all, with two   runoff election victories in Georgia needed.  It seemed like a tall order, but they did it.  While part of that is thanks to the great work that Democratic voting rights activist Stacy Abrams did in that state, another factor was that Trump himself was sending a mixed message to his supporters in Georgia; simultaneously saying that the vote against him there was rigged, but that Republicans should still get out and vote in the runoff.  This confusion did the party no favors in those runoffs, and is a perfect example of the chaos that our former president has unleashed on both the country and his party.

In any event, the Democrats now have both the House of Representatives and the Senate, but the Senate is split down the middle with only Vice President Kamala Harris there to break ties.  One of the fifty Democrats is Joe Manchin of West Virginia, who is probably the most conservative Democrat in the Senate and a thorn in the side of democracy.  It is currently possible for the Senate to get rid of the filibuster rule that mandates sixty votes for any bill to get passed, and allow bills to pass with a simple majority, but only if all Democrats vote to remove it.  And Manchin wants to keep it.  At one point he did consider making filibusters more difficult by supporting a talking filibuster (currently all a Senator has to do is announce they want to use it), but recently he wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post stating  there is“no circumstance in which I will vote to eliminate or weaken the filibuster.”  To be fair to Manchin, I understand that he is a tough position, somehow he has remained in office for over ten years as a Democrat in a very red state that Trump won with almost seventy percent of the vote in the last election.  And his desire for bipartisanship sounds niee on the surface.  But the modern Republican party is not one for compromise as we saw so clearly during the Barack Obama years.   Under  Obama, the Republican's use of the filibuster skyrocketed.  The Republican Senators tried to put a hold on his judicial appointments and successfully blocked  one of his Supreme Court nominees from even getting a hearing in the Senate ten months before the twenty sixteen election.  Years later the same Republicans  shoved  Trump's nominee Amy Coney Barrett  onto the court just a month before the  twenty twenty election. And there are still Republican members of congress who won't publicly  admit that Joe Biden won the election legitimately.  Do you really think that they want to work with him?  There may be a rebel or two (Mitt Romney?) but  ten Republican Senators  will be needed to override a filibuster, and that will never happen to any significant bill pushed by the Democrats.

Really, Manchin's editorial couldn't have come at a worse time for the Democrats.   In the wake of their twenty twenty loss, the Republican party has decided to double down on voter suppression, targeted at African American voters.  Although they claim that this is because so many Americans are "concerned" about voter fraud after the twenty twenty election,  they don't mention that that concern comes from Donald Trump continually lying about his loss.  A more honest reason for these laws was given by Michael A. Carvin arguing in the Supreme Court on March second when he defended a voter restriction law in Arizona by stating  that overturning the law “puts us at a competitive disadvantage relative to Democrats." Republican legislators in Iowa and Georgia have already passed such laws, with Texas, Arizona and Florida ready to join in.  In response, a bill that expands the right to vote on a national level has been written by Democrats in the Senate.  It's a sweeping endorsement of the right to vote, and, as it now stands, it has virtually no chance of passing.  There is no way that any Republican would support such a bill, and with the filibuster in place, no way that it can get past the Senate.

Putting it simply, Manchin's support of the outdated filibuster rule will allow Republicans to pass restrictive voting laws to help them retake congress in twenty twenty two and freeze the Biden administration from doing anything legislatively.  You would think that, as a Democrat, Manchin would care about that, even if he himself is not up for reelection until twenty twenty four.  Instead he clings to this notion of bipartisanship that just doesn't exist anymore.  The Republican Party is still lead by an unpopular, one term president who cost his party the White House and both branches of Congress, and is made up of people who think that Biden only won because the election was rigged, when they aren't following Qanon.   The days of Republican compromise, and really, sanity, are mostly gone.

THE PUSH FOR INFRASTRUCTURE SPENDING

 If you had told me two years ago that Joe Biden would be president, and that he would follow up the most progressive spending plan since the New Deal with another ambitious plan to rebuild the nation's crumbling infrastructure, I never would have believed you.  But here we are. 

Yes, hot on the heel of the stimulus, Biden has now released another big spending plan that proposes to spend around two trillion dollars, paid for by an increase by fifteen years of an increased corporate tax rate.  

The plan basically breaks down into three broad areas of spending: the first is in basic infrastructure, that is, one hundred and fifteen billion dollars for roads and bridges, fifty billion for  disaster resilience, twenty billion to improve road safety, and so on.  Honestly, it's hard to argue against this kind of spending.  Clearly the public needs decent roads and bridges, and the American Society of Civil Engineers consistently gives the public low marks on that score.  Even conservatives know this, remember Trump's pathetic attempts to have an "infrastructure week"?  Another piece of this is an investment in domestic manufacturing and other jobs programs, which, again, should be something that the "America first" crowd should support. 

It's the other two branches of the spending proposal that will cause anger from the right: the first is basically the green new deal, that is, an attempt to shift the country away from gas, oil and coal reliance.   So there's one hundred and seventy four billion dollars for electric vehicle incentives, eighty five billion for public transit, and another hundred billion dollars for electric grids and clean energy.  Some people on the left have already complained that isn't enough, but certainly it's a good start, and it shows a clear design of intent, a blueprint to move into renewable energy sources to do something about climate change. And the spending plan also includes forty billion dollars for new dislocated worker program, to help out people who work in the oil and coal industries.  Obviously the Republican party, with their donations from oil and coal companies, would prefer that America continue to do ignore climate change, but with more and more Americans seeing the urgency of the problem (and the evidence of climate change getting worse with each passing year of record setting natural disasters), this seems like common sense spending.

Finally, there is what appears to be an attempt to undo the terrible legacy of red lining, that practice dating back to the nineteen thirties in which city planners would make sure that poor neighborhoods of color were given the bare minimum of government spending on infrastructure.    So there's over two hundred billion for  affordable housing, one hundred billion for public schools, forty billion for lead pipe removal, and twenty billion dollars to help out underserved communities.  And there's a very interesting part that calls for four hundred billion dollars  to expand access to caregiving for those who are older and those with disabilities, and to improve pay and benefits for caregivers; most of those caregivers are poorly paid women of color.  It's safe to imagine that the Republican party will oppose much of this spending, and get ready to hear cries of "reparations!" on the floors of congress when the proposal is debated.  Which is a shame because these kinds of improvements in poorer neighborhoods will eventually benefit all of America when healthier, better educated children grow up to join the economy.

While the proposal is obviously not a done deal yet, and the inevitable unified Republican opposition will mean that all the Democrats in the Senate will have to support it, it certainly a bold first step in both moving the country into a greener future while also improving the lives of millions of poor and middle class people.  The amazing thing about this proposal is that it is truly progressive in that it literally taxes the rich to help the poor, finally reversing the era of tax cuts for the rich and spending cuts on social programs that Ronald Reagan ushered in back in the eighties.  It's taken a long time, but a plan like this can reverse the widening gulf between the rich and the poor in this country.

THE POWER OF WORDS

On April nineteenth, ninety ninety five, a young white man named Timothy McVeigh exploded a truck outside of a government building in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma.  The explosion killed one hundred and sixty eight people, making it the worst terrorist attack in American history prior to 9/11.  McVeigh, (who was later given the death penalty) was a former army veteran of the first Iraq war who had been radicalized by the white supremacist novel The Turner Diaries, claimed that his motivation for the attack was to strike back at the overbearing federal government.  He was especially disgusted by the raid that had been carried out by the FBI against a cult in Waco, Texas two years earlier. 

In the aftermath of the attack, then President Bill Clinton began to hint in some speeches that part of McVeigh's hatred of the federal government could had been fed by the right wing media's continual demonization of "big government."  When right wing media figures began to fire back, he quickly moved on to other things.  But was he wrong?  When you have a media system that pumps out hatred everyday, is it wrong for them to at least be held partly responsible when that hatred leads to violence?  While I'm certainly not calling for any kind of censorship, and McVeigh's anger seems to be as much  linked to his bitterness at being single and in debt than any messages from the right wing media, it's not wrong to say that words can matter, and inspire people to commit terrible acts.

Which brings us to the horrific recent shooting of eight innocent people in Atlanta three days ago.  The confessed killer, Robert Aaron Long is, like McVeigh, a deeply confused young man who killed innocent people out of some alleged transgression.   The victims were all people who worked at massage parlors, and Long claimed that he killed them as a way to remove the temptation he had to visit such places because of his sex addiction.  Six of the eight victims were Asian women, although Long claimed that there was no racial motivation to the killings.

Whatever his crazed justification for these killings, this tragedy draws a sharp focus to the terrible rise in anti Asian violence that has been occuring in this country in the past year.  And, like the right wing media's anti government rhetoric that may have fueled McVeigh's hatred, we once again have a right wing media demonizing a certain group of people.  But this time it's even worse,  this time the hateful speech used to come from the President himself.

Ever since the coronavirus first hit our country, Donald Trump has been calling it "the China virus" and the "Kung Flu."  From his point of view, there were two benefits to this: firstly, by constantly reminding people that the virus began in China, he could deflect criticism of his administration's disastrous response to it, shifting the blame to another country.  The second benefit was that this kind of thinly disguised race baiting was extremely popular with his base.  For a chilling example of this, watch any speech he gave in which he used the term "Kung Flu" and just listen to the crowd roar with laughter and excitement at the words.  To be fair, he did tweet out last March twenty third that  "It is very important that we totally protect our Asian American community in the United States, and all around the world."  But that didn't change his tone in his speeches, and he  used the term "China virus" in an interview on Fox News just four days ago.  

And his terrible words have led to terrible actions by some people:  The Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism found that anti-Asian American hate crimes reported to police rose 149% between 2019 and 2020.  Overall, over three thousand and eight hundred hateful incidents (some of which were not  crimes) have been reported recently, and the center says that many more go unreported.  They range from screaming epithets to the pushing and shoving of innocent older people.  While nobody in the world has enjoyed all the lockdowns and difficulty that the pandemic has brought, blaming and lashing out at innocent people because of their race is morally despicable and inexcusable in any decent society, displaying the worst aspects of human nature. 

So what do we do?  Sadly, this is no easy answer other than to speak out against such hatred and compel out elected officials and media outlets to do the same.  The fact that President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris (who is herself half South East Asian) have given speeches condemning both this shooting and the rise in anti Asian hatred in general is a good start.  Let's hope that as the pandemic begins to draw to an close, the hatred that it inspired will also diminish.