The Evolution of Reagonomics to Trumpism

Posted on May 4, 2023 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, May 4, 2023

Ronald Reagan was inaugurated during the Iran Hostage Crisis, which damaged our national pride and exacerbated an economic crisis that had interest rates approaching twenty percent. As a movie star, Reagan’s signature image was of an urbane, refined gentleman, even when he was sitting atop a horse. With mortgage rates at nearly seventeen percent, when Reagan adopted Grover Norquist’s supply side economic theory as his own, his temperament and skill as an actor made it sound almost reasonable.

As Wikipedia describes it, “The pillars of Reagan’s economic policy included increasing defense spending, balancing the federal budget and slowing the growth of government spending, reducing the federal income tax and capital gains tax, reducing government regulation, and tightening the money supply in order to reduce inflation.” What we didn’t know in the 1980s was that those relatively benign words would become a rallying cry for a reprise of the economic divide that led to the Civil War. Rich against poor, power vs disenfranchisement, equality vs privilege, order vs chaos.

The ensuing struggle ultimately brought us Donald Trump and a breed of politicians for whom winning, power, and greed are everything. They don’t care about the cost in basic values and decency, or their effect on the rights of women, minorities, the poverty-stricken, and those who depend on the government through no fault of their own. Reagan was a decent man who must be turning over in his grave at the spectacle of how his policies have evolved.

The opponents of supply side economics, the theory that says increasing the wealth of billionaires and mega-corporations will ultimately benefit everyone, noted that our national debt tripled during the eight years Reagan was in office because of huge deficits resulting from lowered tax rates and an unprecedented increase in spending on social welfare programs. Yet, somehow, Reagan remains the Republican symbol of modern conservatism. That sounds like a contradiction, a repudiation of what Reaganism was about, but his likability and skill as a salesman made it work.

Reagan also embraced humility, civility, and fallibility. He didn’t resort to name-calling and cheap shots, and he understood that when you make a serious error, even as president, the best course is to admit your error, apologize, and move on, lessons both Clintons could have benefitted from. Caught in lies promulgated by his subordinates, Reagan invoked the Truman doctrine that the buck stops in the White House, taking full responsibility for their actions. We may have disagreed with him, but most Americans viewed the president who coined the term “credible deniability” as an honest man.

How then, did we get here? Over the following decades, it became clear that Reagonomics was better described as his vice president and successor George H. W. Bush referred to it: voodoo economics. The Clinton administration balanced the federal budget but was never able to overcome the huge debt it inherited. And the policies of Bush 43, in large part an extension of Reagan’s, continued to spiral the national debt. Despite all that, during the Obama years, as our population turned browner and the national mood seemed to marginalize right wing extremism, instead of mitigating our divisions, Republican strategists let greed and lust for power dominate their actions, bringing us Trumpism.

I can’t think of a leader who is more of a polar opposite to Reagan than Trump. Reagan would have been horrified at Trump’s open disdain for truth and his willingness to fight every battle in the sewers. He would have been outraged at Trump’s willingness to undermine our Constitution and his apparent adoration of autocrats like Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, and Kim Jong Un. Most important, he would never have entertained the notion of overturning a presidential election so the forces of greed and corruption could retain control of government. Can you imagine Ronald Reagan rallying thousands of armed insurgents to storm the Capital and take the House Speaker and Vice President prisoner?

We now face the spectacle of defaulting on our nation’s debts which were authorized by both Congress and the White House. Despite warnings by Treasury officials and economists that default would crash America’s, and likely the world’s economy, we find our government held hostage by a ragtag group of extremists and a House Speaker, Kevin McCarthy, who lacks both the will and the skill to govern with integrity. The miscreants who are willing to use their sudden power to take us to the brink of disaster would have been shouted down by the Conservatives of the 1980s. The situation is so surreal, it’s almost as if they’re enemy agents, a dirty dozen of Manchurian candidates programmed to bring down our government.

As Reagan asked when he was running for re-election in 1984, are we better off than we were before he was in charge? Ask that same question about Trump and the movement that supports him.

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If You’re Not Worried About AI…

Posted on May 3, 2023 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, May 3, 2023

If you’re not worried about Artificial Intelligence (AI) you probably haven’t thought about it enough. It’s been around for decades, but only lately has its potential for negative outcomes been publicized.

Half a century ago, we thought of AI’s as self-learning knowledge bases. The theory was that if we collected huge amounts of data about a subject, we could write programs that would enable computer systems to become experts on it. The data would include starting conditions, context, and lists of possible actions. By statistically analyzing real outcomes in real situations, developers hoped computers would be able to infer the likelihood of every possible outcome for every future decision it might make.

I encountered AI twice in my early career as a scientist/engineer. During the three dark years I spent in the Pentagon in the heart of the Vietnam conflict, there was a lot of talk about the Defense Department building AI systems to help fight the war. Security requirements being what they are, most of us could only be certain something was true if we’d worked on it directly, and even then, we were continually threatened with all the ways we could wind up in prison if we shared anything with unauthorized persons. But since that occurred more than fifty years ago, what might have once been classified Top Secret is now just interesting folk lore.

Rumor had it – I don’t know how much of what I heard back then was true – that computers were making decisions about where to send soldiers and what to attack. Rumor also had it that military AI’s didn’t learn fast or well enough, and their decisions often resulted in tragic loss of life and equipment, but the generals were told that was to be expected, and the AI’s would learn from their mistakes. That kind of application for an AI system was premature at best, equivalent to seeking a cure for a deadly disease by randomly injecting people with hundreds of drugs to see if one worked, rather than spending the time to do responsible research…

…which seques into my next encounter with AI. In the 1980s, I worked with a brilliant physician/epidemiologist named Henry Krakauer, one of the pioneers of medical AI diagnostic systems. This was one of the first and most beneficial uses of self-learning systems. They learned by being fed gigabytes of real patient data, including symptoms, diagnoses, comorbidities, treatments, and outcomes, stripped of personal identifying data. The result is that today, when you visit your doctor, they’re probably carrying around a laptop computer. The doctor enters your personal data and symptoms, and the computer instantly informs them of all the possible diagnoses and their likelihoods, including possible treatment options and probable outcomes. That is a very good thing. Sometimes AI is our friend.

But like all powerful tools, it can be misused, and you can be sure that smart people who are ethically challenged will always find a way. Thus, Facebook recently acknowledged that as many as twenty percent of their accounts might be faked; that is, the people identified as their owners were really AI’s or bots, as they’re referred to in the vernacular. Like a rapidly expanding mushroom cloud, bots keep showing up where they shouldn’t. A well-programmed bot can masquerade as almost anything – a teacher, a subject expert, a politician, a lawyer, an advocate – and most of us cannot distinguish them from the real things.

AI’s have been blamed for manipulating investment markets, causing financial crises, spreading false information, undermining governments, and fomenting insurrections. We don’t know how much they contributed to the wave of election deniers that sprung up in the wake of Joe Biden’s defeat of Donald Trump in 2020, but we’ve heard testimony from computer experts and government officials asserting that they have proof that thousands of such bots are active throughout our social media, and predictions that they will pose a much larger threat in 2024.

We were raised on stories of Frankenstein monsters turning on their creators and automated systems evolving into indestructible Terminators. Should we be concerned? Consider all the ways our privacy has been compromised in recent decades, from nearly universal surveillance to identity theft. The popular television series NYPD Blue which ran for twelve seasons from 1993 to 2005, featured good old fashioned detective work, nary a video camera or DNA molecule in sight. Compare that to any modern police drama today, when it’s virtually impossible for a criminal to hide off the grid.

We should be concerned, because only a small fraction of the power of Artificial Intelligence has been realized or even imagined. If there’s a way to use it for evil, you can be sure someone will. The potential for chaos and destruction is limitless.

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Far Right Overreach

Posted on April 27, 2023 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, April 27, 2023

Whenever right-wing extremists gain a foothold of power in the United States they overreach, and it always backfires. But as investment managers like to remind us, past trends are not guaranteed to continue in the future, and the next few months will put that idea to a critical test. We’ll hear cliches flying, about slippery slopes, creeping fascism, the virtues of negotiation and compromise, but none of it will mean anything if responsible people don’t step up and do the right thing.

The responsible people I’m referring to are all Republicans in the House of Representatives. In a world in which Tucker Carlson’s departure from Fox News has received more airtime than Biden’s re-election announcement, Donald Trump’s civil rape trial, and Ron DeSantis’ sudden interest in meeting world leaders, it’s easy to forget that there are fewer than a dozen among the 220 House Republicans who would destroy our Constitution to achieve a political victory. No matter how strongly they may disagree with the president’s agenda, the rest of the Republican caucus understand that the consequences of allowing the country to default on its debts are incalculable. If they let it happen, they will be facilitating the end of America’s influence as a super power.

Of course, they won’t, not because they intend to cave in to the left, but because of their Conservative views. Conservatives believe, first and foremost, in the rule of law and economic stability. Default would raise the curtain on an era of chaos and unpredictability, the anathema of any successful governing philosophy. And even if they manage to lose sight of their principles, their self-interest will force them to step up when it’s time to vote. Default would trigger an immediate financial crisis that could be worse than the 1929 crash that threw the world into a decade-long depression that terminated in the second world war. The billionaires who support those Conservatives would lose trillions of dollars in real wealth overnight according to Moody’s.

So – don’t worry about default. It won’t happen, because if it did, those who enabled it would be severely punished by their wealthy donors. The most likely outcome of the game of chicken the extremists are playing is that they’ll lose, and the biggest loser will be Kevin McCarthy, who richly deserves it – a man with an ego almost as large as Trump’s, but without Trump’s street-fighting ability, wiliness, or shameless lack of decency.

McCarthy is not as dangerous as Trump overall, but his antics can do serious damage to the country if no one in his conference breaks ranks. If we’ve learned anything throughout our history, whether it’s a playground or the Capitol, once you start submitting to bullies, you might as well give up the whole game. The example of Matt Gaetz says it all. Gaetz makes outrageous demand after demand, and McCarthy caves every time because he can only afford to lose four votes from his caucus. Yet Gaetz votes against him anyway and then does a mockery dance in front of the press. At a time when almost everything can be streamed on television anywhere in the world, it’s an appalling display of how dysfunctional our Congress has become.

While Biden and his European counterparts work behind the scenes to find an off ramp that will enable Vladimir Putin to end his war in Ukraine, the right-wing terrorists in McCarthy’s caucus continue to put on a show for the world that can only undermine those efforts. Putin knows more about the workings of our Congress than most Americans. Why, seeing the spectacle of an incompetent House Speaker who is constantly humiliated by our media, would Putin imagine that America will have the fortitude to continue its defense of Ukraine? It was McCarthy who told the world he would oppose giving the Biden administration a “blank check” to fight the war, while Ron DeSantis, who obviously has his eye on the White House, told the press that Russia’s dispute with Ukraine was a regional matter that we should stay out of.

While we’re on the subject of how the world views us, imagine the rest of the world watching Trump’s civil battery and defamation trial for a rape he is accused of committing thirty years ago. If media reports are correct, the accuser, E. Jean Carroll will have two other women who claim to have been raped by Trump testifying on her behalf in open court. Add that to the election deniers and the hundreds of people convicted of taking part in the January 6th insurrection, and I shudder when I think of how the way the rest of the world sees us has changed.

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Why Joe Biden?

Posted on April 25, 2023 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, April 25, 2023

It’s painfully early to talk about the 2024 presidential election, but I’ve never been one to bury my head in the sand. I’ve always thought ostriches were weird, creepy birds.

Let’s recap where things stand. Today, President Biden announced that he will run for re-election, and no other Democrat has indicated an intention to challenge him for the nomination, despite polls that suggest Democratic voters wish Biden wouldn’t run again.

On the Republican side, Ron DeSantis’ belligerent, bull-like, extremist approach to every issue costs him supporters on a daily basis. The two South Carolina entries, Senator Tim Scott and former Governor and U. N. Ambassador Nicki Haley have thus far gathered negligible support. Donald Trump’s most rabid supporters reacted to his New York indictments and the likelihood that Georgia and the U.S. Department of Justice will soon follow with indictments for far more serious felonies as if he were a persecuted martyr. And former Vice President Mike Pence, who is contemplating a run, just spent five hours testifying about his conversations with Trump prior to January 6th. Watch for fireworks.

Political pundits, most of whom have been consistently wrong since 2015, predict Biden will face off against Trump next year. It’s a sign of our dysfunctional  politics that not a single pollster thinks Trump can be re-elected, and Biden’s approval rating hovers in the low forties. 2024 could mark the third presidential election in a row in which neither major candidate was the first choice of voters. After much thought, I can’t figure out why.

Could the polls be wrong? There are a lot of competent pollsters – Gallup, Harris, Rasmussen, 538 – they’re professionals at the top of their game. But in a nation whose communications are dominated by social media, cell phones, electronic messengers, and scammers, finding representative polling samples is much more difficult that it was even twenty years ago. Most of us treat snail mail solicitations as spam, and those of us who have land line phones don’t answer them if we don’t recognize the caller. So how do pollsters come up with random sample populations that truly represent the American electorate?

I had an opportunity to talk to Professor Harris about that late in 2005, after George W. Bush was re-elected. Most pollsters were using phone listings to identify their sampling universe, but cell phone users already outnumbered land line users, and their was no national directory for cells. Didn’t that bias sampling toward older, more conservative users? Yet, the polls were quite good predictors of the 2004 election. When I asked Professor Harris how they pulled that off, he said he really didn’t know – maybe they were just lucky.

That’s a chilling thought, and I haven’t trusted polls since. I’m so concerned about polls turning elections into self-fulfilling prophecies, I and many others I know lie to pollsters. Polls don’t reach deep enough to understand why voters think the way they do or why pandering is so effective for politicians like Trump. If we knew what voters believed, how many on the right would be found to be primarily motivated by racism, xenophobia, religious extremism, or greed? How many on the left by socialist leanings or a desire to live off the system and avoid responsibility? I believe the result would be disturbing.

When we take those factors out of the equation, we’re left with the objective reality that Biden has been our most effective president since Franklin Roosevelt, but that gets lost in the noise of far-right grievances. Biden took a strong stand against right-wing economic philosophies that have been proved ineffective for four decades. COVID made the world face harsh realities, the most important of which was that the old economic models were no longer reliable. Models only work when the real world doesn’t diverge appreciably from the baseline data they were built on. Total lockdowns, disrupted manufacturing and agriculture, and broken supply chains aren’t reflected in the modeling data because they represent a situation we haven’t seen before.

I wish I knew how to get the attention of voters who are so caught up in their personal grievances, they can’t see that divisiveness and polarization are destroying our country. Biden saved our economy from disaster. He saved our traditional alliances from catastrophe and may well have prevented a full-scale war in Europe that could lead to a nuclear holocaust by being the driving force that re-united NATO as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine loomed.

I’m as concerned as anyone about Biden’s age. I’m six months younger than he is, and you couldn’t pay me enough to take his job. But his long years of experience and his history of being generally evenhanded and willing to compromise – even some embarrassing mistakes he’s learned from – make him unique among those who want it. We can deal with his age by electing a vice president who will work hand-in-hand with him and be ready to step in on a moment’s notice if need be – someone like Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar.

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Kevin McCarthy is Engaged in a Fight He Can’t Win

Posted on April 20, 2023 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, April 20, 2023

I can’t recall a better case study for the aphorism, “Be careful what you wish for,” nor a better example of Former White House Counsel John Dean’s warning about succumbing to blind ambition. As leaders go, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy is remarkably unremarkable. He lacks both a clear ideology of his own and any shred of talent for inspiring his Republican Conference.

The only consistent theme associated with McCarthy since the start of the Trump administration was his undaunted determination to hold the speakership, a role that fell to him only after it was clear that he allowed himself to become a puppet of his party’s most extreme elements. He is supposed to lead the 222 Republicans in the House, but he responds only to the handful of his colleagues who want to destroy everything the government has built since the New Deal of the Great Depression and the great social revolution begun By John F. Kennedy and finished by Lyndon Johnson.

No one said the Speaker’s job was easy. The last two Republican Speakers, Paul Ryan and John Boehner, both quit and gave up their seats in Congress because they were frustrated by the politics of the House. Ryan never wanted the job because he recognized that his party had evolved to a place that wasn’t politically viable unless it acknowledged having no principles except preserving the wealth and power of billionaires and large corporations. Boehner left because of a no-confidence challenge from the Freedom Caucus, the very same group that has taken McCarthy hostage. Boehner understood that it was impossible to control or manage radicals who were willing to burn everything down if they didn’t get their way.

Apparently, McCarthy doesn’t understand what both Ryan and Boehner did, and the fault is entirely his. Like her or not, Nancy Pelosi proved that it’s possible to be an effective Speaker, even with a Party that’s more diverse in its views than the Republicans. Whatever undefinable magic she possesses, she got the job done by successfully making the case that a unified Democratic Party was in the best interest of the country, that its extremist elements could best serve and govern by compromising their demands.

But McCarthy faces a group whose views are simply shocking, who serve in districts that are so gerrymandered, they need have no fear of being censured by their own voters. They’re playground bullies who are allowed to create chaos and discord because the person whose job it is to corral them and assure that the majority of American voters are properly represented has left himself impotent. Thus, instead of moving ahead with a constructive agenda and preparing a budget that reflects it, McCarthy has let himself become the fall guy for a disastrous fight he can’t win.

Responsible people who understand government have consistently reminded us that increasing the federal Debt Ceiling to allow the country to pay debts it has already occurred is non-negotiable by definition. Unlike many government policies and disagreements, this one couldn’t be simpler. Either Congress raises the Debt Ceiling or America goes into default, a catastrophic situation we would never tolerate from any of our allies or trade partners.

Domestically, defaulting on our debts would cost millions of jobs according to nonpartisan Moody’s. It would spike already high interest rates, and could result in a national unemployment rate of nine percent, where it was during the COVID lockdown. Most perplexingly, forcing the nation to go into default would crash our equity markets, causing the the people and corporations the radicals represent to lose trillions of dollars in real wealth. And in addition to the problems default would cause at home, it would destroy our international trade relationships. Would you sign a trade policy with a nation that defaulted on its debts? The situation is so bizarre, we’re already so far down the rabbit hole, nothing makes sense.

There’s no mystery about this. All the non-radicals in the Republican Conference who have thus far chosen to remain silent know that if their constituents lose the very thing the Republican Party has been committed to since the Reagan administration, they’ll turn on them in the next election. They will never permit that to happen. Therefore, in the end, they will not support McCarthy’s attempt to extort drastic cuts in all the programs the ultra-MAGA radicals want. McCarthy knows that and so do President Biden and the Senate leadership of both parties.

Biden will not give in to blackmail. Democrats in the House and Senate won’t, and neither will Mitch McConnell or John Thune. So why is McCarthy waging a battle everyone knows he can’t win that can only increase the divisiveness that is undermining our ability to function as a nation? That’s what happens when an incompetent leader gets in over their head.

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Dangerous Corporate Policies

Posted on April 10, 2023 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, April 10, 2023

While my wife was running errands this morning, she side-swiped a curb, leaving a two-inch tear in her right front tire. The way her car came to rest, she couldn’t see the rip, so she thought she’d run over a nail. She made two phone calls, one to AAA and one to me to come rescue her. She told the AAA dispatcher she needed a tire changed. They asked if she had a spare, which sounded like an odd question. Doesn’t every car have a spare tire?

Being someone who never leaves details to chance, she opened the hatch of her 2018 Toyota Prius to look for a spare. There was none in sight, so she began to disassemble the tools that came with the car, but it was more than she could handle. I finished what she started; there was no spare. But there was a folded up jack and a sealant pump that can sometimes make a tire drivable for a short distance until it can be repaired.

With a gaping hole in the sidewall, that wasn’t going to work. I waited an hour for AAA to show up. The technician, a good guy, was genuinely distressed to learn that he’d been sent out to replace a tire in a pickup truck, only to discover the was no tire to replace the damaged one. He called his dispatcher and requested a tow truck. I’d given my car to my wife.

Three hours after I arrived to rescue her, I finally reached the Toyota dealer. My service rep advised me to replace two tires so the tread on both front wheels would be the same, but the matching tires were out of stock. Don’t you love days like that? I purchased two Goodyears to replace the Toyos. $400 and ninety minutes later, I got home. If you’re a fan of pyrrhic victories, you’ll appreciate that I was offered free coffee, popcorn, and a car wash.

Wasting an entire morning was annoying, but the real problem is that car manufacturers have been phasing out spare tires for years, and there seems to be a silent conspiracy to avoid publicizing that. My 2020 Camry Hybrid doesn’t have one, either. If you bought a new car within the past few years, chances are, neither does yours. The chances are even greater that no one bothered to tell you that, not your salesperson, the financial officer who took your check, or your service rep. Like most us, you probably never thought to ask. It’s like asking if the car has brakes.

But let’s not jump all over Toyota – they all do it. It’s industry policy, and it’s a dangerous one. I got together with the guy who sold me both cars and the guy who services them. When I asked why neither of them told us when we bought the cars, they seemed dumbfounded. I know both of them well. I like and trust them, which made it all the more surprising. Maybe the corporate executives chose to leave the lack of a spare tire out of their orientation training on features of new models.

It’s bad enough that the lack of a spare tire is a major inconvenience, but if you think of all the ways you can get a flat tire, it’s clear that many situations would put the occupants of the car at risk. If my wife had been driving alone in a remote area late at night, the consequences of not have a spare might have been catastrophic. The sales and service guys agreed completely, baffled that no one had ever raised the subject before.

This is particularly irking because of a similar incident we experienced twenty-five years ago. We were driving in my wife’s Nissan Stanza on a cold March night, with snow and slush piled up on the side of I-95 in Maryland, in one of the worst traffic mixing bowls I know, with cars and big trucks merging at high speed from two freeways into one from both sides. The perfect place for a timing chain to break.

Timing chains aren’t supposed to break, at least that’s what everyone thought. When one snaps under those conditions, it can be life-threatening, because everything goes dead – the engine, the power brakes, and the power steering. When I spoke to the service manager at our Nissan dealer the next day, he got a stricken look on his face. He closed his office door and took a folder from his desk, handing me a copy of a memo he’d received from Nissan headquarters in California. It ordered dealers not to mention the well-documented flaw in Nissan’s timing chain to customers unless it was clear that they already knew about it.

Nissan had made a corporate decision to maintain secrecy, putting drivers’ lives in jeopardy. I appealed to the Maryland Attorney General’s office for assistance. They contacted their counterparts in California, the only state in which Nissan had a corporate presence, and were obscenely told to mind their own business: “No one in this office f**ks with Nissan.”

If I were you I’d check my trunk.

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Tipping Points

Posted on April 6, 2023 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, April 5, 2023

History teaches that most things about our society are cyclic. Politically, things swing left or right every generation, the economy goes up and down, fashions and fads appear and disappear. Those in power continually seek ways to increase and perpetuate their influence, which invariably leads to trying to enact more and more radical laws and policies that enrich themselves and their benefactors, which eventually backfires. Both major parties fall prey to that, but since Ronald Reagan was elected, the Republicans have been on a relentless mission to alter our political landscape permanently, even at the cost of trashing our Constitution.

Our political swings are driven by a number of things that echo our less than proud past. The most important are wealth and racism, both of which are inextricably tied to immigration. The majority of people seeking to enter the United States, either as immigrants or refugees are nonwhite, something Donald Trump was quite vocal about during his presidency. He loudly proclaimed that we need to stop accepting “losers from shithole countries” and increase the number of immigrants coming from Europe – as long as they look like white Americans.

We reached a tipping point when the Statue of Liberty’s promise that America was a haven for the oppressed caused the pendulum to swing so far toward black, brown, and yellow people, that voting majorities in many states and the nation as a whole were flipping from white to nonwhite. Republicans, who had evolved to become a party of wealthy individuals and powerful corporations, and had either been supporting racist and misogynistic policies overtly, or looking the other way when others did, realized that if women and minorities held critical majorities, they would never hold power again unless they changed their policies.

But the Republican Party, which is firmly in the grip of people whose values are alien to those most Americans share, instead of evolving toward the center became more extreme. Their greed and lust for power, and the defacto power of racism that still pervades our institutions made changing their philosophy a nonstarter. For forty years, they have repeatedly doubled down on policies and attitudes that look more fascist than democratic. Everything the radical Republicans who have steadily gained influence over their party policy have done over that time has benefitted the wealthy, removed restrictions on corporate activities, worked against the interest of women and minorities, and attempted to make it harder for them to vote. Worse, they have undermined many Americans’ faith in science and adopted a blatant policy of drowning out facts and truth with lies and hyperbole.

This kind of overreach only has two possible outcomes. Either it will succeed in destroying our democracy, or it will infuriate voters enough to pull them away from their social media accounts and football games to fight back. Another tipping point, just in time, before the same people who attempted to undermine our Constitution and overturn the 2020 presidential election can fine tune their act for 2024. The pendulum is now further to the right than it has been since the Civil War, and still, the far-right radicals want more. They won’t stop until their wealthy sponsors and white supremacist backers are in complete, unassailable control.

Are there more tipping points? When Donald Trump called his white supremacist supporters to arms to protest his arrest and indictment in New York, most of the small crowd who showed up cheered his arrest. His right-wing militias saw nearly a thousand of their own convicted and imprisoned after January 6th, and many realize how the MAGA movement has ripped them off. Last year’s midterm elections presaged a change when the red wave that was supposed to give Republicans a huge majority in the House and control of the Senate failed to materialize. And it led to an embarrassing spectacle when one of their number, George Santos, was revealed to have been elected based on an entirely fraudulent resume. But the Republican majority is so thin and devoid of ethics, an obedient chimpanzee would be permitted to keep his seat.

The Tennessee legislature appears to be out of control, as the latest murder of school children by a lunatic with an assault weapon has awakened the gun-loving state to the reality that some regulation is needed. In response, its Republican legislature chose to expel its members who advocate gun control, but a lot of average Tennesseans aren’t buying it. Another tipping point. And perhaps the most optimistic sign of change is that not one of the forty-nine Republicans in the Senate openly supports the extremist agenda being put forth in the House.

2023 will be a critical year. The right-wing radicals know their best chance to win in 2024 is through chaos and misinformation. It’s up to us to prevent that.

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In Normal Times…….

Posted on April 5, 2023 by alanpzendell

Alan zendell, April 5, 2023

In normal times, the election of a state Supreme Court Justice in a mid-western state would either pass unnoticed or soon be forgotten by most of the country, especially if the justice’s name looked impossible to pronounce. That will not be the case for Janet Protasiewicz, the judge who won Liberals their first majority on Wisconsin’s Supreme Court in fifteen years, but the victory has far greater significance than that. Wisconsin was to have been the first domino to fall in a nefarious plot funded by right wing billionaires, Charles and David Koch.

The goal was to assure long-term political control for Republicans in more than a dozen states, the next step in right wing activist Grover Norquist’s blueprint for assuring that the wealthiest Americans pay little or no taxes, and that power at both the federal and state levels remain in Conservative hands indefinitely. The plan had multiple phases: first, maximize gerrymandering favorably to Republicans to assure that Democrats never hold majorities in those states again; second pack the courts with friendly judges committed to supporting the election district maps that result from the gerrymandering effort; third, when the first two phases result in complete Republican control of the states’ legislatures, immediately pass new voting laws to restrict the opposition party’s ability to get out their constituents’ votes, with the assurance that the now-friendly courts will support those laws.

Massive conspiracies like this one often make considerable headway initially, because most voters take a wait-and-see attitude toward dire predictions of doom. Moreover, our media are so dominated by political spin and the media outlets’ lust for profits, it’s often difficult for voters to know who to believe. A nation as large and powerful as the United States has enormous inertia – unless we see killer asteroids or enemy ICBMs on an unavoidable collision course, we’re slow to enact major changes, and in most situations, that’s a good thing. Economic stability and public safety require that our leaders avoid knee-jerk responses.

Over time, however, if we judge by results, American voters are both resilient and smart. They usually do a pretty good job of re-adjusting when either party appears to dominate policy for too long. British historian, Lord Acton, accurately warned over a century ago that “power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” Human nature is such that power is addictive, creating a perpetual need to expand and strengthen itself. Over time, then, when voters see the negative effects of one-party dominance, they become the court of last resort to restore balance.

That’s why most midterm congressional elections tend to shift power back toward the party that lost the last presidential election, and it’s why voters in ruby-red Kansas voted to preserve a woman’s right to an abortion in their state constitution after the shocking overreach of the right-wing Supreme Court that reversed Rowe v Wade. That’s why Israeli voters are turning on Prime Minister Netanyahu after seeing the result of decades of corruption and sabotaging efforts to achieve lasting peace with their Arab neighbors. And that is why Wisconsin voters went to the polls and said NO to those who would steal their democracy, yesterday, by a ten-point margin in a state where Democrats hold a three percent edge.

How significant was Janet Protasiewicz’s victory? Because Wisconsin’s voters scuttled the Koch brothers’ long-term scheme, right-wing extremist Ali Alexander predicted that Republicans would never have a voting majority in the foreseeable future. In normal times, that would concern me. No matter which side you support politically, it’s always dangerous when one side holds too much power for too long. But because Donald Trump shattered the traditional Conservative movement, replacing it with his philosophy of greed, bigotry, misogyny, and white supremacy, the traditional rules had to change to preserve our Constitution and our republic. At least until the Republican Party puts itself back together and re-asserts its support for our Constitution, the country needs Democrats to win.

The MAGA crowd have ruled by intimidation, threats, noise, and a complete disregard for laws, either those that maintain order or those prescribed by science and nature. They have sucked all the air out of most rooms for seven years, dominating our attention to such a degree that concern over ratings brought CNN and other cable networks to a new low of journalism, yesterday. Not since 1991, when a nation of soap opera-addicted housewives sat glued to their televisions watching the LAPD follow O. J. Simpson along Los Angeles’ freeways had we seen such an imbecilic spectacle. While Wisconsin was setting the nation back on track, television viewers were treated to endless replays of Trump’s motorcade taking him home after he was arraigned in New York on thirty-four felony counts.

How appalling!

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Our Fragile Democracy and Trump’s Indictment

Posted on April 3, 2023 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, April 3, 2023

Our democracy is based on two simple notions: every American has the right to cast a vote, and once cast, that vote is equal in importance to every other vote cast, no matter who you are or where you live. What happens, then, when one of the two major political parties decides to pursue a strategy of rigging elections? What happens if, in addition, several major media outlets forego their primary responsibility to accurately report news based on facts, and instead support efforts to nullify our two-party system?

It would be naïve to assume either party would avoid taking any advantage that would help win an election. But it’s one thing to be opportunistic and quite another to spend millions on expert consultants and software to disqualify votes for the opposition. That is exactly what Republicans have done under the tutelage of Grover Norquist since 2010, and to a lesser degree since the Reagan administration.

The most egregious form of election-rigging is gerrymandering, a procedure based on mathematical and statistical analysis that causes one party’s votes to count more than the other’s by re-writing district boundaries. For example, we know most large cities have significant majorities of Democratic voters. Gerrymandering re-draws boundaries so that most of those voters are packed into a small number of districts that are up to 70-80% Democratic. The result is that Democrats win huge landslides in a small number of districts, but Republicans eke out 51-52% victories everywhere else.

Red states have been doing this successfully, and because several have also packed their courts with sympathetic judges, legal challenges to redistricting maps have almost always been rejected by the courts, including the U. S. Supreme Court which Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell remade into a right-wing mouthpiece.

The state considered most seriously biased against Democrats is Wisconsin, where Democratic voters outnumber Republicans, but because of gerrymandering, Republicans nearly have a supermajority in the legislature. Boston College historian Heather Richardson summarized this beautifully. In 2018, Democrats elected Tony Evers as Governor, and won 53% of the votes cast for state assembly, but won only 37% of the seats, and a nearly nonexistent presence in the state senate.

This kind of outcome is possible because statewide (and national) elections aren’t affected by gerrymandering. Thus, a Democrat was elected Governor, and with the same districts in place in 2020, Democrat Joe Biden won the state in the presidential election. Obviously, statewide elections in which every voter has an equal opportunity to vote are the most accurate reflection of a state’s population, but once Republicans seize control of a legislature and pack courts with friendly judges, they immediately change election laws to make it more difficult for some constituencies to vote.

Wisconsin’s Supreme Court is currently politically deadlocked at 3-3, with one vacant seat that will be filled by state-wide election today. The candidates for that seat have been quite vocal that Wisconsin voters will either set the state on a course to fairer district maps, or perpetuate the state’s slide toward one-party dominance. The outcome will be viewed as a model for Republican attempts to permanently take over other red states. Common sense says that since the election to fill the supreme court seat is statewide, if Democrats care enough to turn out they should win this one, but no one who values democracy can ever stop being vigilant.

A similar situation applies to the Trump-hijacked national Republican Party. Trump lost the popular vote in both his presidential runs by margins of four million and nearly eight million. But because the outmoded, Electoral College functions like state voting districts, Trump won the 2016 election. The balance is so delicate that in 2020, by increasing his popular margin by four million votes, two percent of the total, Biden flipped the Electoral College, winning by exactly the same count Trump won by in 2016.

Imagine – if Thomas Jefferson’s concept of one person one vote applied to presidential elections: Al Gore would have defeated George W. Bush, Hillary Clinton would have defeated Trump, and there would have been no reason for Trump to incite the January 6th insurrection. No wonder Republicans feel the need to cheat! Our best hope for saving democracy is that the majority continues to speak with its full voice.

Fortunately, the public is getting wise to Trump lying, falsifying facts, and accusing the opposition of doing everything he does. Consider his current efforts to raise money based on claiming that his indictment on thirty counts of criminal behavior by New York City is a political witch hunt. He doesn’t appear to be fooling anyone outside his gullible core base. A poll released today showed that more than 60% of Americans believe Trump should have been indicted, and only 10% said Trump is not guilty of either breaking the law or acting unethically. My faith is in the other ninety percent.

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Two Small Steps in the Right Direction

Posted on March 31, 2023 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, March 31, 2023

During a week in which I focused on getting home from a winter in Florida, I still checked the news (as opposed to rabid political rhetoric) every day. It made me feel like the fabric that keeps our civilization intact was unraveling. Valdimir Putin announced that he would position tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus, which shares Ukraine’s northern border. He also begged Xi Jing Pin for support for his underperforming military, while Xi treaded the line between economic aid and weaponry, seeking leverage against America’s support for Taiwan.

There was another mass shooting, in Nashville, in which a lunatic with an assault weapon killed three nine-year-old children. Tennessee is a very red state whose right wing politicians constantly play on the Second Amendment to court voters. Thus, instead of a of reasonable response to President Biden’s appeal to re-enact the ban on assault weapons, all we got from them was condolences and advice to mourning family members to pray. There were deadly tornadoes in Mississippi, clearly exacerbated by climate change, which the crazy wing of the Republican Party thinks requires no government action.

Finally, there’s the two-ring circus of Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu dancing to avoid criminal prosecution. We learned throughout Trump’s presidency that Netanyahu has no more respect for truth and the rule of law than Trump does. Both attempted to subvert their nation’s legal system, placing their constitutions and democracies in serious jeopardy. Whether you love or hate their politics, the ego-driven lust for power that drives their behaviors makes both men unfit to lead nuclear armed countries that spend every day on the brink of hostilities. It was easy to imagine all of us slipping downhill toward catastrophe and powerless to do anything to stop it.

And then – we saw evidence that we might have passed one of the inflection points President Biden likes to refer to. (An inflection point occurs when negative trends turn positive, or vice versa.) In response to Netanyahu’s attempt to undermine Israel’s judiciary by granting the legislature full power to overrule court decisions on elections, Israeli citizens staged massive protests across the country. Both Israel and the United States have constitutions that assure a separation of powers to prevent democracy from turning into autocracy. If successful, Netanyahu’s action would nullify a critical lynchpin of Israel’s democratic political system in the same way Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election would have. Israelis have made it clear they won’t let that happen.

And then – a long awaited shoe dropped. The New York District Attorney’s grand jury voted to indict Donald Trump on thirty criminal charges. That indictment came down yesterday, to predictable reactions. All of Trump’s closest supporters, mostly people who would profit if Trump defeats all charges, are screaming about political persecution and weaponizing the legal system.

Richard Nixon famously asserted that anything a President does is legal by definition. That didn’t shield Nixon from justice, and it shouldn’t shield Trump. No one is above the law, and the legal system must be allowed to proceed. Two weeks ago, anticipating his arrest and indictment, Trump flooded his social media outlets with appeals to his supporters to come to New York and hold massive protests. He predicted that his arrest would result in death and destruction, a delusional attempt to re-enact the January 6th insurrection at the New York courthouse.

It’s striking that not a single Senate Republican has said anything about Trump’s indictment, and not one of Trump’s outraged supporters says a word about whether Trump actually committed the crimes he’s accused of, not a single word proclaiming his innocence. Fox News, OAN, and Newsmax all know the source of their revenue is hard core Trumpers. As usual, it’s greed and power over the rule of law.

Long-time Conservative S. E. Cupp summed it up perfectly. Addressing the outrage of Trump’s supporters, she said they were not outraged by Trump’s attempt to overturn a legal election, by the violence and death at the Capitol that resulted from Trump calling his supporters to arms, by the illegal phone calls to Georgia election officials, or his illegal attempt to extort political assistance against Joe Biden from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. They weren’t outraged by the shocking number of accusations by women of sexual harassment and assault, by Trump’s sexist, bigoted, homophobic, xenophobic behavior, or his white nationalism, his defense of antisemitism and support for neo-Nazi groups.

When he pre-emptively pardoned Richard Nixon for crimes he committed while serving as president, former President Gerald Ford said he did so to avoid exactly what we are seeing concerning Trump. Nixon had already been declared guilty by his own supporters led by Senator Barry Goldwater. Nixon’s former White House counsel John Dean said, however, that Ford didn’t act out of compassion or to aid Nixon as much as to protect his ability to govern and maintain order. While I believe that President Biden should pardon Trump if he is convicted and faces potential prison time, the nation’s long-term health depends on the legal process proceeding to a conclusion so we can all see the evidence.

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