Crime and Punishment

Posted on September 5, 2022 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, September 5, 2022

Some people think Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s 1866 novel delving into the psyche of a criminal isn’t relevant today, but I’m not one of them. When I read it sixty years ago, it had a profound effect on me, perhaps tapping into something in my DNA that remembers the angst of my Russian forebears. It stuck with me more than any other work of literature because of its insights into guilt and human nature.

Punishment has many forms, both external and psychological. Dostoyevsky believed knowledge of our own guilt can punish us far more than any court of law. His protagonist, Raskolnikov, plans his crime, feeling righteous and justified – the murder of a sleazy pawnbroker will benefit the world and the money he steals from her will be put to good use. But having committed the crime, his psyche judges him and finds him guilty. From the reader’s perspective, the punishment it exacts is worse than any court could impose.

This has come up frequently as people are fond of asking me if I think Donald Trump will ever be punished for his crimes (no one says alleged anymore.) I answer that to leave Trump unaccountable for the things he’s done is unthinkable. He has already weakened our standing among civilized nations. If we allow him to walk free and continue to raise hundreds of millions of dollars whining his grievances, our adversaries will rightly think of us as weak and in disarray, while our allies will realize the American dream was just a myth.

A majority of people agree with those general statements, but when we get down to the issue of punishment, it changes. Were Donald Trump to be tried before a jury, we’d face the most glaring weaknesses in our legal system. How would a court define a jury of Donald Trump’s peers? How could a judge be confident that regardless of what prospective jurors said, they were capable of objectively evaluating evidence and putting their emotions aside? Is anyone within reach of a television or the internet objective about Donald Trump?

I believe the Justice Department and the State of Georgia, have no choice but to indict him for a list of felonies worthy of an organized crime boss, only far more serious. He must either be tried and convicted or agree to a plea agreement that acknowledges his guilt for the entire world to see. But what then? People want to see him punished. The most common response I hear is that he should rot in prison, but I disagree. Much as my right brain would love that, my left brain says, “No.” The instant Trump’s guilt is clear to the world, President Biden must and will pardon him.

Lindsey Graham warned of blood in the streets if Trump is incarcerated, notwithstanding the “Lock her up” chants Trump led against Hillary Clinton at his rallies. Graham is stoking the radical Trump base, though he’s a smart enough lawyer to deny that’s his intention. The problem is, he’s right. No matter how desperately Trump needs punishment, our nation needs peace and stability more, which leads me to think about Dostoyevsky.

Were Trump to admit his guilt or be convicted in a federal court, the consequences to him would be devastating. He could never run for office again, and in most business circles, he and his family would be pariahs. Without political and public pressure to patronize his hotels and golf resorts, with banks unwilling to fund his ventures, and with all but his most rabid supporters having abandoned him, my guess is he’d suffer as much as he would in a country-club federal prison.

Raskolnivkov spends most of Crime and Punishment on a painful descent into Hell. His guilt destroys him, as it would most of us with normal values and consciences. Would that happen to Donald Trump? Has anyone ever heard him offer a whisper of remorse over anything he did? There’s been far too much testimony during the last fifty years over his amoral character, sociopathic values, and clinically diagnosable narcissistic disorder. Yet, we keep seeing and hearing reports that as law enforcement tightens the noose around his activities, despite his bluster, the pressure is getting to him.

At some level, Trump will suffer the same fate as Raskolnikov even if he never spends a day behind bars. He’s only human, and likely, when he finally breaks, it will be a total separation from reality. And if not? The only situation we have lived through that is remotely similar was Gerald Ford’s pardon of Richard Nixon for crimes committed with respect to Watergate. The country was badly polarized then, though probably less so than today. Ford’s first priority was ending “our national nightmare.” He pardoned Nixon pre-emptively before the legal system could act, because any other course would have only widened the divisions in the country.

Ford’s decision may have cost him the 1976 election, but he was right. The fact that Trump’s crimes are more serious than Nixon’s doesn’t change that. Indictment, conviction, and humiliation will punish Trump as much as any prison cell, and I’ll help the process along by sending him my copy of Dostoyevsky’s brilliant work.

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Adrenaline

Posted on September 2, 2022 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, September 2, 2022

Last night, President Joe Biden set the tone for the Democrats’ approach to the midterm elections. There was nothing subtle about his message. Democrats are betting that when faced with a choice between the anti-democratic Fascist-like ideology of the MAGA wing of the Republican Party and the core principles laid out by our founders, they’ll realize what is at stake. If anyone listening had any doubt about what that is, they don’t any longer.

What stood out most during the speech wasn’t just its message. We knew ahead of time it would be about saving the soul of America, which Biden defines as the ideas embodied in our Constitution and Declaration of Independence. He laid it out clearly: we’re all created equal with an equal chance to succeed and live a productive, happy life – except, that’s not actually what our founders said, and that’s part of the problem Biden addressed.

In 1779, “we’re all” meant all of us white, male landowners, and the MAGA movement believes that’s still what it means. If you’re female, poor, or not white enough, (we might as well throw in not straight enough,) you don’t have inalienable rights. It was those whose rights MAGA politicians and jurists have been attacking that Biden was speaking to. In 2016, an occasional voice asked why any woman, black, brown, or yellow person, or immigrant would support Trump. But the MAGA folks screamed loud enough about Benghazi and Hillary Clinton’s emails and imagined crimes, that everything else was drowned out.

Democrats, with Biden leading the way, realize the truth about MAGA ideology must be shouted loud and long from every rooftop, and those words must come from on high. That the entire, disparate party got the message is a testimony to Biden’s leadership. It’s been a long time since Democrats pulled together against their common enemy, and I don’t mean Republicans. Biden made that clear, separating MAGA adherents from traditional conservative Republicans.

The Right’s version of Us-Against-Them is MAGA against everyone who hasn’t bent a knee to Trump. Biden stated it the same way, thoughtfully addressing the majority of Republicans as colleagues and fellow Americans he serves as President, and describing the MAGA crowd as their enemy as much as everyone else’s. Savvy politicians like Biden don’t need pollsters and talking heads to tell them trends are swinging away from MAGA extremism back toward basic American values. He can smell the sea change and read the results of the recent special elections that show MAGA ideology losing ground.

There’s much work to be done before MAGA is silenced, its adherents returned to their caves. But Biden, who will turn 80 just after the November election, will give his last ounce of energy if need be to save the soul of our nation, which brings me to what I most noticed about last night’s speech. His enemies love to seize on the remnants of Biden’s lifelong battle against stuttering and claim he’s becoming senile and demented. It can be painful to hear him struggle, at times, but anyone who knows him will tell you he’s as sound as he can be when it comes to tackling problems and putting in long hours.

Last night, we saw and heard a president who passionately believed what he was saying. We know because there was no sign of his lingering stutter. He was smooth and articulate, riding an adrenaline high that comes from knowing you’re on a righteous mission that only you can lead. His face was wrinkled, but his eyes shone, and his voice was loud, strong, and compassionate. Not a self-aggrandizing word, no personal insults, and no need for self-serving lies because he was laying out truths that are plain to see if people wake up and look at what’s happening around them.

When Trump told a national television audience that he loved to “grab women’s pussies” and he was so far above the law he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue with impunity, his devoted army of losers thought it was wonderful. But when Biden appropriately compares MAGA ideology to Fascism he’s accused of being obscene and offensive. As many of us have frequently written, comparing the rise and methodology of Hitler’s Nazi Party in the 1930s to the rise of Trump and MAGA yields a shocking result. They are almost identical.

I’m thankful we have a president who’s as thick-skinned as Harry Truman and visionary as Franklin Roosevelt, and equally unafraid to call things as they are – unlike his predecessor, who reacts like a spoiled five-year-old when he doesn’t get his way. The next ten weeks will be tough, but with Biden leading the way at his best, our democracy has a chance.

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The Trends, They Are A-Changing

Posted on August 30, 2022 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, August 30, 2022

For a year-and-a-half, many Democrats criticized President Biden for being too passive in the face of unrelenting attacks from the right and the extremes within his own party. They asked, “Why doesn’t he fight back?” “Why isn’t he out there loudly trumpeting his accomplishments?” “Why can’t he control his own party?”

Fair questions, but our news-bite attention spans and reliance on social media, combined with people who can’t or won’t bother to check facts wasn’t well equipped to answer them. We’re good at collecting data, if not always assuring its accuracy; we’re good at building websites and generating reports, if cavalier about vetting sources; and we’re good at drawing conclusions, though not, as a nation, at applying reason and rational thought to assure that they’re correct.

We have also lost the art of subtlety, of ignoring the noise and seeking less visible and audible underlying changes. In other words, most of us have lost the ability to exercise patience, which is the best answer to those questions. Biden may not be as spry or mentally sharp as he was thirty years ago, but more than fifty years as a politician and high-ranking elected official have honed his governance skills. He ranks with the best, those, like Mitch McConnell, who understand that everything in politics is constantly in flux and what was true yesterday may look entirely different from what’s true tomorrow.

Biden doesn’t brag or bluster. He isn’t derailed by bumps in the road, and his ego isn’t bruised by every setback. Unlike his narcissistic predecessor, he knows when he’s behind and instead of changing the narrative with lies and conspiracies, he waves off the cameras and gets to work.

Dealing with West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin must have been among the most frustrating experiences of his long career, but Biden respects Manchin. He knows Manchin has a responsibility to his poverty-stricken constituency which is still mired in the old fossil fuel economy. He had faith that in the end, Manchin would do his best for his party and the interests of the country, and he was right. He understood, too, that delegating the negotiation with Manchin to Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer could achieve months of apparently leak-proof progress and work better than appearing to strongarm his holdout Senator or resort to bullying and name calling.

As Democrats appeared to lose battle after battle, Biden understood that allowing right wing extremists a few easy victories that were clearly not the will of the majority of Americans would eventually haunt them, if not break their necks with a nasty whiplash. That’s what age, experience, and patience do for you. Biden let McConnell have his victory over gun control activists. He let critics scream that runaway inflation was his fault. He looked at a seriously divided European Union and it’s military counterpart, NATO, and ignored critics who said he could never undo the damage Trump did to our alliances. He knew Vladimir Putin saw a closing window of opportunity to reconstruct the Soviet Union, and that our unified response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine would define our standing in the world for the next generation.

He didn’t threaten anyone. He didn’t launch ICBMs or stage military parades, and he didn’t warn that he would obliterate our enemies. He quietly went to work rebuilding our alliances. He regained the confidence of European leaders and convinced them that anything less than unanimity in assisting Ukraine was unacceptable. Today, against all odds, Ukrainian forces have stopped Russian advances. Russia is bogged down and unable to move and supply its troops, while Ukraine, using NATO intelligence, has made optimum use of the weapons we gave them, making Russia’s aggression far more costly than Putin imagined.

Inflation has peaked, energy prices are declining as fast as they rose, the job market is strong, and the equities markets are holding up despite claims that our economy is in recession. Unemployment is the lowest it’s been in fifty years, we’re tackling corrupt drug prices, and finally taking serious strides to reduce carbon emissions and slow global warming. And as Trump’s Supreme Court justices appeared to hand MAGA victory after victory, Biden knew patience would win the day, that a small minority can gerrymander voting districts and temporarily force its will on the majority, but when sixty to eighty percent of Americans believe their will has been stifled, they remember what America is all about.

Ten weeks before the midterm elections, Biden’s approval rating is steadily rising, the generic national ballot has swung to a plurality of voters preferring Democrats over Republicans, and master politician, Mitch McConnell is preparing his minions for the likely bad news that the Democrats will strengthen their Senate majority in November. And while Nancy Pelosi continues to impressively hold her caucus together, her Republican counterpart, Kevin McCarthy is in trouble. Unwilling to identify as either a Trumper or a traditional conservative Republican, he is rapidly losing favor in both camps.

Pay attention – the trends are shifting from red to purple to blue with seventy days to go.

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Fighting Dirty

Posted on August 26, 2022 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, August 26, 2022

Michelle Obama liked to say about politics, “When they go low, we go high.” It was a lovely sentiment that endeared her to millions of Americans, because it resonated with what we’d been taught to believe – nonsense cliches like “the good guys always win” and “you make more friends with honey than vinegar.” History proved time and again that good guys don’t always win, and winners care far less about how many friends they make than how well they’ve secured their power base.

When the good guys win, it’s because their backs are against the wall, and they’ve woken up to the reality that they’re fighting for their very existence. For those of us who grew up in the wake of the second world war, that was hammered home in schools, media, by Hollywood and nonstop government propaganda. It’s easy to portray conflicts as good versus evil when our adversaries are racist fascists who murder millions of innocent civilians and preach ideas like master races and genocide.

Major conflicts are not about values or morality. They’re about wealth and power. Greed, selfishness, and the lust to control other people’s beliefs and actions are what drive ideologues and far too many politicians. I love Michelle Obama’s sentiments, but she’s wrong. You can’t fight sewer rats without getting filthy, and you can’t beat adversaries with no moral compass whose only goals are wealth and power by being reasonable and nice.

Democrats and Republicans alike have been painfully slow in waking up to the reality that there was a growing movement in the United States based on fear, envy, ignorance, and belief in charismatic but entirely false ideas of right and wrong. When President Biden called the MAGA movement semi-Fascist, yesterday, he was right on.

MAGAism could have been created by Friedrich Nietzsche or George Orwell. It is based on the notion that repeating lies and deception that tap into peoples insecurities and pain will evventually take root at a visceral level. It manipulates  language, literally changing and reversing the meanings of words, and professes alternate facts (lies) that match the narrative people seeking power try to sell.

Decades of pretending that our democracy was sound and indefatigable have revealed that it is neither. The Republican Party of ten years ago no longer exists, and the Democrats suffer from a long history of lack of unity, perceived weakness, and incompetence. Joe Biden was elected president because there is a majority of Americans who believe we need a decent, moral leader who is committed to meeting the needs of average Americans, who can be trusted to defend the Constitution. He’s not perfect, but cast against the evils of MAGAism – white supremacy, xenophobia, gender inequality, autocracy, undermining elections, greed, denying basic science – he seemed to many of us to be a beacon of hope.

Amid the MAGA noise, it has gone largely unnoticed that against all odds, Biden united his splintered party and passed an impressive legacy of landmark legislation. In an era of normal politics, that would represent the natural swing of governing philosophy, that overreaching actions by either the extreme left or right invariably result in a pendulum swing in the opposite direction – the sociopolitical equivalent of seeking equilibrium. But we no longer live in an era of normal politics. Democracy is up against a movement that will stop at nothing to gain its objectives. They fight dirty, and they will use every weapon at their disposal. They lie and misrepresent, they have no regard for inconvenient laws and precedent, and only disdain for average Americans.

Biden was able to unite Democrats because they recognized that the MAGA movement was intent on destroying democracy and undermining the Constitution. They saw the result of their indecision and inaction, and a lack of willingness to fight as dirty as their opponents. MAGA states, not satisfied with extreme gerrymandering now seek partisan control of our elections, and years of quiet, insidious packing our courts with extremist, right-wing judges has resulted in a Supreme Court that ignores both precedent and the will of a clear majority of Americans. Democrats finally realize that they are fighting not only for their own power and self-interest, but for the future of American democracy.

We are at a watershed moment in our history. Biden and his newly united army will fight back with no holds barred because they must. They began by calling out the hypocrisy of MAGA members of Congress who railed against partially forgiving student loans for people trapped in an economic system whose principal goal is allowing wealthy Americans to prosper at the expense of everyone else. Each member who claimed outrage at taxpayers subsidizing the debts of low-income students had personally profited, sometimes in millions of dollars, by having COVID PPP debts completely forgiven.

Democrats are engaged in an existential end game. They will spend every day until the midterm elections bringing MAGA leaders who violated our laws to justice, calling out lies, and demonstrating to women, minorities, and hard working Americans that MAGA is not about making America great, but about undermining everything we have accomplished as a nation while seeking greatness. It’s going to be an ugly, dirty fight, but that’s what happens when the sewer rats start taking charge.

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The Double-edged Sword of Technology

Posted on August 23, 2022 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, August 23, 2022

Ask any computer or IT specialist about technology, and you’ll hear a litany of all the ways our twenty-first century world couldn’t function without it. Everything from cars, planes, electronics, televisions – even modern refrigerators and dishwashers rely on computer chips and Internet connections. If your eyes haven’t glazed over by then, you might be treated to an even longer list of the dangers that poses.

The only positive result of my father having to work as a gas station attendant after World War 2 was that after a couple of years, he could fix most anything that went wrong on a car, which included his 1949 Ford. That car gave our family mobility and freedom it couldn’t have had any other way. Cars broke down, and people had accidents, but no one considered owning a car a liability. Is that true today? Cars are far more reliable than they were seventy years ago, but they have evolved to where an automobile mechanic almost has to be an electrical engineer.

One of the world’s earliest warnings about our dependency on technology occurred on September 1, 1859. A “massive solar flare with the energy of 10 billion atomic bombs…spewed electrified gas and subatomic particles toward Earth,” causing the entire telegraph network in North America to fail. It was most people’s first introduction to electromagnetic pulses (EMPs.)

What came to be known as The Carrington Event, after the English astronomer who observed it, was an unpredictable natural phenomenon, and in 2021, scientists warned that the sun was entering a five-year stretch of intense activity that could result in the same kind of event. This time, however, the resulting EMP could destroy every computer chip not properly shielded against it. Everything we own that depends on computer chips would instantly become a pile of useless junk. A rare event, you say, but one of our adversaries could obtain the same end by exploding a high-yield nuclear weapon in space, directly over country.

That’s just the tip of the iceberg. The internet poses a much larger, if subtler risk. There’s not a website or media platform, a corporate or government computer system, or a personal computer or smart phone that cannot be hacked. We can build overlapping levels of security to protect our information, if we have the resources to pay for them, but the very nature of electronic systems means we can never achieve 100 percent security, and that only addresses the overt risks.

The Internet, while changing billions of people’s lives for the better, also introduced an insidious level risk capable of undermining our way of life, if not destroying it completely. The problem is anonymity; when we communicate with someone on the Internet or spend hours on social media sites, even when we believe we’re interacting with entities we trust, do we really know who’s on the other side of the computer screen?

We’ve seen many frightening examples in recent years, from the spread of child pornography to people being robbed of everything they own, including their identities, but those both result from overt events. The worst existential risks are the ones we don’t see coming. Social media platforms are like giant Trojan horses, promising us great gifts and benefits, but hiding a much darker potential. Our government has confirmed, repeatedly, that foreign actors constantly invade our social networks, either as bots (automated propaganda generators) or people with nefarious goals pretending to be someone else. It’s been estimated that as many as one of every five Facebook accounts has a faked identity.

Just as gun advocates claim violence isn’t the fault of guns, but of the people who use them, we might argue that the real culprits aren’t the bots and hackers, but the millions of people who believe everything they read on their computers without checking the facts. Whatever the reason, the effect is devastating. The lack of security in our social media threatens our elections, our personal property, our savings and investments – even our personal and national security.

Today, we have new evidence of how serious a problem this is in a whistle-blower complaint filed by Twitter’s former head of security. Before he was at Twitter, Peiter “Mudge” Zatko was a hacker. He was highly respected throughout the IT world, the kind of character that has frequently been popularized in films and television programs. Some might question his motives, but not his credibility or expertise. Zatko claims Twitter “allows too many of its staff access to the platform’s central controls and most sensitive information without adequate oversight. [He] also alleges that some of the company’s senior-most executives have been trying to cover up Twitter’s serious vulnerabilities, and that one or more current employees may be working for a foreign intelligence service.”

It sounds like a wild accusation, and it remains to be proven. But any reasonable person would ask how much smoke you have to inhale before you wonder if something’s on fire. I believe we’re way past that point. If our major social media platforms don’t clean up their acts, everything we hold dear will be threatened.

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The Greatest Threat to America

Posted on August 18, 2022 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, August 18, 2022

Former president Donald Trump’s son, Eric, is routinely mocked by stand-up comedians as being dimwitted. I have no idea why, but it’s one more testament to the media’s ability to influence the opinions of Americans who choose not to think for themselves. I have little interest in Eric Trump, but his comments, yesterday, on Newsmax, got my attention. He described his father’s political ambitions in terms of overthrowing the Republican establishment, RINO-hunting, and killing off what he called political dynasties: the Bushes, the Clintons, and now, the Cheneys.

Eric would have liked his audience to believe he was referring to changing ideologies, but if that were true, he would have mentioned that his father violated every tenet of Ronald Reagan’s Conservative dogma, which virtually every Republican politician referred to with reverence until Donald Trump came along. Many of us disagreed vehemently with Reagan’s domestic policies, but no one I know would describe him in the same terms as Trump.

The same is true for those who populated the dynasties Trump vanquished. No one ever accused either George H. W. Bush or his son Jeb of being morally bankrupt during their tenures as our 41st President and Governor of Florida. We’ll probably never know the extent to which Bush 43’s ties to Saudi Arabia influenced his horrendous miscalculation concerning weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, but despite that, “W” is viewed as a decent man. Bill Clinton, for all his accomplishments, was flawed in his personal conduct and irresponsible in ways that proved damaging to the country, but no one would suggest that he was disloyal either to the Constitution or to the concept of democratic governance.

Dick Cheney, was an unscrupulous businessman/politician who people loved to hate, but whether or not he was guilty of profiteering from the Iraq/Afghanistan disasters, his worst sins may have been ultra-patriotism and a belief in unfettered capitalism. His daughter, Liz, showed us that it’s still possible for Republicans to possess integrity and dedication to Conservative principles. If that’s the kind of ideology Eric Trump believes his father destroyed, there is no stronger endorsement of those who would assure that Donald Trump never holds office again.

If Liz Cheney runs for president, I will register as a Republican so I can vote for her in my blue state’s Republican primary. I disagree with much of her Conservative philosophy, but some things are more important. The greatest threat to our nation is not Vladimir Putin or Xi Jiinping, but the 30% of our country that believes rigging elections, gun violence, racial separation and discrimination, and subjugating women are the “real” American values. Donald Trump didn’t create that horror, but he enabled, energized, and legitimized it. He continues to feed his base’s hatred of everything we were raised to believe in: equality, fairness, the rule of law, and compassion.

When Eric Trump talks about overthrowing dynasties, he means replacing basic American values with the ones that enriched his family and brought them unimaginable political influence. He would have us live in a country in which one man’s word is law, no matter that that man is a sociopath with no regard for truth, law, or common decency. He would further have us believe the Republican party no longer exists, but has been replaced by the Trump Party which values power and wealth over principle.

The media trumpet Donald Trump’s continued hold over his party, pointing to the fate during this year’s primaries of most of the people who opposed him in Congress. Business Insider examined opposing points of view and concluded that Trump’s influence may not be as strong as Eric thinks it is, citing a New York Times report that, “Of the more than 200 Republicans Mr. Trump has endorsed this year, many ran unopposed or faced little-known, poorly funded opponents. He has also waited to make some endorsements until a front-runner emerges, strategically picking the candidates most likely to win…”

Insider also noted that many high-profile former Trump Associates are speaking out against him and cooperating with Congressional or law enforcement investigation of Trump’s actions. His loyal Vice President, Mike Pence, while reluctant to criticize Trump directly, has launched a campaign to support candidates who oppose Trumpism, and Republican Maryland Governor Larry Hogan believes Trump’s support is over-rated based on the poor showing of Trump’s candidates in contested gubernatorial primaries. Even Alex Jones, who has as little respect for truth as Trump, and who spoke at his January 6th rally, abandoned him in favor of Florida Governor Ron Desantis.

Trump’s focus, other than staying out of prison and extorting millions of dollars from his supporters, is bringing down Joe Biden’s administration and reversing the legislation passed in the eighteen months he’s been in office. Medicare benefits, our Constitution, drug and gasoline prices, energy independence, carbon emissions, Russia’s undeclared war against NATO – none of that matters to Donald Trump as much as regaining power, and that makes him the greatest threat to America in the world today.

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Inflection Points

Posted on August 16, 2022 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, August 16, 2022,

President Biden often says we are at an inflection point in our history. In mathematics, an inflection point defines when a downward trend turns upward, or vice versa. That sounds very technical, but applied to our lives and history, it couldn’t be more profound. An inflection point can be the moment when despair turns to hope, when the half empty glass suddenly appears half full, when dawn breaks after a long, dark night.

The first half of 2022 felt like a period of encroaching darkness. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, out-of-control inflation, an obstructionist, dysfunctional Congress, a Supreme Court set on undoing much of our social enlightenment, a Party appearing unable to support its own president, the revelations of the January 6th hearings, increasingly violent threats against law enforcement by right wing extremists – the list of depressing events seemed to grow longer every day.

For the first time in my long life, I feared for the future of our country. Then, something changed. It was as though the massive organism that is our country had reached a critical mass of negativity and decided it had had enough.

The oil companies, reacting to disclosures that their windfall profits and stock buybacks were the primary cause of the huge rise in fuel prices, realized they’d been caught red-handed. Gas prices dropped more than 21% from their June highs. Voters in one of our reddest states overwhelmingly rejected a constitutional amendment that would have set women’s rights back fifty years. Congressional Democrats started behaving like lawmakers, stopped squabbling among themselves, and passed a major piece of Biden’s legislative agenda which will make serious strides toward mitigating climate change and assuring our energy independence without the use of fossil fuels. Congress will finally take on the most egregious price-fixing practices of the pharmaceutical industry and begin to repair some of the harm done to our veterans. And the inevitable downward spiral into recession now looks far less certain, as the job market is booming and unemployment is the lowest in seventy-three years.

The January 6th committee, spearheaded by Republican House members Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, and testimony almost exclusively from law enforcement and Republicans who were in former President Trump’s orbit exposed horrifying details about a president willing to overthrow our constitutional democracy for his own selfish ends, and worse, is still being supported in his lies by politicians clinging to his coattails. After excruciating months of investigation, Georgia appears ready to indict Trump’s personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, and likely, Trump himself for election fraud; New York appears equally likely to indict Trump’s senior people for fraudulent business practices and tax evasion; and Attorney General Merrick Garland is investigating Trump for major violations of our espionage laws, leading an insurrection, and the attack on Congress.

We see, too, that Biden’s efforts to re-unite and strengthen NATO have paid off in a huge way. NATO support for Ukraine has stymied Russia’s invasion and severely weakened Russia’s influence in the world, including the prestige of Vladimir Putin. Future historians may well view standing up to aggression by a major power with the threat of nuclear war a real possibility as a major inflection point in the evolution of a new world order that goes hand in hand with pushing back against the rise of nationalism and right-wing populism. Standing up to a serious threat like Russia’s disregard of international norms and its willingness to risk major conflicts may also have taught us a more important lesson.

Donald Trump awakened and empowered the very same kind of dangerous, anti-democratic elements of our own society. Celebration of an unregulated gun culture, White Supremacy, racism and bigotry, xenophobia, the abrogation of women’s rights, anti-semitism, and attacks on the LBTGQ community have all increased sharply since Trump entered the political scene seven years ago. And now, some of the most dangerous groups in our country are threatening revolution and civil war, openly encouraging violence against law enforcement, politicians, and judges with whom they disagree.

As the Biden administration recognized that regardless of the risk, standing up to Russia was an existential necessity, drawing a line in the sand against fascist, autocratic politicians here at home, and standing up to those who support them with threats of armed violence is equally important to our survival as a nation. Perhaps the hypocrisy of Trumpism’s pretense that its followers believe in law and order will finally energize traditional Republican conservatives to stand up and take back their party.

Biden is correct that we are at an important inflection point in our history. He is also right that the policies he has pursued and been able to execute have reversed the trend of negativity and restored hope in the future.

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Republican Midterm Sweep (or Not)?

Posted on August 14, 2022 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, August 14, 2022

Given their dismal record overall, the last few years, when the last few holdout pundits jumped on the Republican sweep train concerning the midterm elections, something felt off. With Trump under criminal investigation by two states and the Department of Justice, the revelations of the January 6th committee, and wide popular disapproval of the direction in which newly appointed Republican Justices have moved the Supreme Court, continued predictions of doom for Democrats seemed at odds with reality. It also didn’t feel right that given all of the above, President Biden’s approval rating was mired in the high thirties.

Much of the reason for those negative outlooks is the media’s need to stir interest through controversy. Their ratings and income depend on it. Worse is the effect of social media, whose clients often eschew thinking for themselves, and whose active users seriously over-represent fringe points of view. It’s never been more important for Americans to pay attention to facts and remember the priorities set forth in our Constitution and Declaration of Independence.

Changes in our public mood take time, but trends are shifting. Consider the most recent report of Biden’s approval rating by the Rasmussen Group, which is viewed as biased toward Republicans, and rated “Lean Right” by AllSides.com. According to Rasmussen, Biden’s approval rating based on polls taken between August 10th and August 14th show a sharp increase. The respected website 538.com, which adjusts raw numbers to eliminate known biases and sampling issues, says Rasmussen rates Biden’s current approval at 45% and his disapproval rating at 49%. Both numbers show huge improvement in recent weeks, and look a lot better than Trump’s were, approaching the midterm elections. Perhaps more important, while they reflect much of Biden’s recent success, they motly pre-dated the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act which is supported by a large majority of Americans.

Over the past few weeks, average voter sentiment by Party, nationally, has Democrats and Republicans in a dead heat at 41% each, hardly a right-wing tsunami. Given how badly many states have gerrymandered their electoral districts, that still portends Republican gains, although nearly a fifth of likely voters are still undecided. The fate of Republicans who spoke out against Trump during his impeachments and concerning the January 6th insurrection is tough to evaluate. Most have either retired or been defeated in primaries by Trump loyalists, but that reflects the divide among Republicans in states where Trump’s hold on the party is strongest. On further reflection, many of the Trump-supported candidates who won their primaries are not given much chance of winning in the general election.

It’s worth noting that until now, there has not been a united push by Democrats to influence public opinion. Additionally, it’s not Biden’s nature to brag or heap adulation on himself, which many Democrats fear makes him look weak in the face of a constant barrage of attacks and criticism from the right. Biden’s strategy has been to work quietly behind the scenes, not letting setbacks deter him from persevering, and that strategy has finally paid off.

The passage of two sweeping, watershed pieces of legislation he championed from the start reflect Biden’s legislative skills and seemingly infinite patience with renegades within his own party, and they significantly changed the direction of the country. We will now have the capacity to produce the billions of computer chips on which our economy and basic survival depend here at home instead of outsourcing them to countries that are potential adversaries. We will force our largest corporations to pay taxes on their earnings, and we will cut into pharmaceutical cartels’ ability to set drug prices that harm both our senior citizens and our treasury.

Finally, we are providing veterans with the support they deserve, especially against harm and injury caused by our own military practices; we are investing massive resources in reducing carbon emissions and assuring national energy independence; and Biden’s quiet, unspectacular uniting of Europe and NATO against Russia’s aggression in Ukraine and it’s ability to extort European policy based on dependence on Russian gas and oil has worked what many viewed as miracle six months ago. The massive Russian military has been stalled, and Russian casualties in its war with Ukraine are reportedly approaching 100,000 killed, while NATO appears to be expanding and strengthening.

With DOJ and the states of New York and Georgia appearing to move closer toward indicting Donald Trump for serious crimes that would be slam-dunk convictions against anyone else, I wouldn’t jump to any conclusions about the November elections yet. We still have critical problems in states that are attempting to put Republican partisans in charge of elections, but change is clearly in the wind.

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Forecasts and Outcomes

Posted on August 6, 2022 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, August 6, 2022

When historians write about the last few years, “forecasts and outcomes” might well be the tag line. As marketing and government systems, social networks, and statisticians collected mountains of data, and computers crunched them, we experienced a massive change in the way we process information. You almost have to be a meteorologist to understand a weather forecast, dozens of software packages help investors predict stock prices, and we’re fed so much quantitative information during sports events we barely have time to watch the games.

Recently, while I was watching a baseball game on television, a ball was hit over the center fielder’s head. He took off, leapt through the air, and snagged the ball just as he hit the ground. Within seconds, my television screen informed me that the fielder had had less than an eight percent chance of catching the ball, and the route he reflexively took to intercept its path was ninety-seven percent accurate. No one even questions how they know that stuff. People seem to trust everything they read on a computer or TV screen, unless they have a vested interest in believing an election was rigged.

Mathematical forecasting models have become extremely reliable as the amount of data and computer speeds grew, but they’re far from perfect. Last week, my town’s weather forecast predicted rain every day. We never got a drop. The reasons predictions fail fall into two categories: insufficient or inaccurate data and a faulty model. When a model fails, it’s usually not the math that’s in error. Forecasting technology and data modeling have been around forever, and they’ve been vetted and tested countless times.

What goes wrong is that models become obsolete, It can happen quickly, and even when the best minds in the business sound alarms, many people ignore them because they have too much invested in the status quo. A good forecasting model has a database of many years of historical information from which to identify and model trends. If the data are good and the underlying forces that produce the outcomes we track remain constant, predictions improve over time. But if the fundamentals change, the whole basis of the model can be undermined. That’s happened, notably, with climate change. Global warming changed the way energy flows in our atmosphere, making predicted outcomes (weather forecasts) less accurate because the new conditions weren’t included in historical data.

The same is true for economic data, politics, and social trends. The emergence of a political force like Donald Trump is totally unpredictable. An economic dislocation due to a temporary shutdown of the economy because of world-wide health crisis makes accurate forecasting nearly impossible because, nothing like it exists in our historical database.

All this matters a lot right now. Economists use historical trends to predict future GDP rates, inflation, job growth, and unemployment. Even determining when our economy is in recession is based on arbitrary definitions and past trends. Political forecasters spent 2022 predicting the outcomes of the midterm elections, and it’s important, in our sound-bite culture, that we rememeber it’s our votes that control the outcome, no matter what the polls say.

No model or expert could have anticipated how moving most of our manufacturing overeas would result in broken supply chains when COVID struck. No model could have anticipated the political divisions over a president leading an insurrection that threatened the basis of our democracy. Nor could it have predicted how the actions of a reactionary Supreme Court would affect how Americans cast their votes. The result, for forecasters, is chaos.

Seven weeks ago, the average price of a gallon of regular gasoline peaked at $5.016, triggering panicked forecasts that inflation would cause a catastrophe for Democrats in November, yet today, the average cost of the same gallon of gas is $4.084, down 18.6% and dropping every week. Despite predictions to the contrary, our economy added nearly a million new jobs in June and July, with modest increases in wage growth. And last week was the biggest shock of all, when Kansas, one of the reddest states in the country voted to preserve abortion rights in its state constitution.

We don’t know whether the Trump or Cheney factions of the Republican Party will dominate, or how independent voters will react in November. The Democrats’ success this week in passing the CHIPS and PACT bills, and reaching an agreement that will allow passing the Inflation Reduction Act in the Senate under reconciliation have thrown yet another monkey wrench into forecaster’s predictions. And there is still a huge unknown that could change everything. If former president Trump were to be indicted either by the state of Georgia or the Department of Justice, how would that affect the November vote count?

The truth is, no one knows. Americans need to do their own thinking for a change. Turn off your damn social media, and if you must let your favorite news channel fill your head with propaganda, at least listen to the other side and decide for yourselves what’s best for our country.

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Unintended Consequences

Posted on August 2, 2022 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, August 2, 2022

Some people plan everything they do in agonizing detail. Others, like me, play things by ear, trusting that we can adapt to changing conditions as they arise. That’s not to say we never think about outcomes – the key to surviving with minimal planning is always being aware of the worst-case possibilities and taking sufficient precautions to avoid them.

Forty-five years ago, my family took a seven-week-long road trip that required considerable negotiation between me and my wife, who is an inveterate planner. Thus, we agreed to travel off the grid, going from place to place without advance reservations, but we made exceptions, like assuring we had a place to stay at the Grand Canyon. We also tempered our free-spirited attempt to fly blind by purchasing a CB radio, which saved us from calamity – it kept the kids occupied chatting with truckers, and it saved us from disaster when we ran out of gas outside Union Gap, Washington.

One reason I avoid detailed planning is that no matter how much I prepare or how many hours of research I do before making important decisions, the events that have the greatest impact on my life are usually things I couldn’t have anticipated. Even our most carefully planned actions have unintended consequences.

When President Franklin Roosevelt, fearing that the Nazis would develop an atom bomb first, launched the Manhattan Project, he couldn’t have known that the Germans would abandon their development of the A-bomb in 1943 or that our own use of those weapons to speed the end of World War 2 would trigger the Cold War and the nuclear arms race we live with today. When a progressive-looking Congress passed the Civil Rights and Social Security Acts in the 1960s, their focus was on improving the lives of senior citizens, the poor and the disabled, and removing inequities that had existed since the days of slavery. They didn’t know those laws would trigger a new era of struggle between people who believe in equality and beneficent government, and those who put states’ and individual rights ahead of what is best for the majority of Americans.

We didn’t know that when the Supreme Court issued its initial Roe v Wade decision, it would spark a fifty-year battle among religious conservatives and the politicians who pander to them to reverse it. We didn’t realize that supporting despots like the Shah of Iran would eventually lead to today’s Ayatollahs, or partitioning Korea would lead to the nightmare of today’s North Korea. We didn’t know President Reagan’s massive increase in defense spending would ultimately bankrupt the Soviet Union, or that thirty years later Vladimir Putin’s principal ambition would be to reconstruct it.

When Donald Trump revealed that the divisions in our country were much deeper than we realized, and that the election of Barack Obama had energized the underground movements of White Supremacy and right-wing militias, we began to realize we were at the edge of a precipice. When millions of independents and centrists, upset with progressive extremism, were fooled into believing that Trump’s fantasy of autocracy, guns, and enriching billionaires would make America great, they had no idea he would try to overthrow the government and undermine our Constitution. When Trump championed the mentality that science is fake news, we didn’t know a half million Americans would unnecessarily die of COVID, or our efforts to offset the global climate crisis would be set back for a decade. And when Trump attempted to extort Ukrainian President Volodymir Zelensky into smearing Hunter Biden, we had no idea he was playing into Putin’s plan undermine the Ukrainian government.

All of that has contributed to the worst pandemic of pessimism in America since the Civil War. Even I, for the first time in my life have felt pessimistic about our future, but I forgot that things don’t always turn out as we fear or expect. What I thought was a dark future now looks streaked with the first rays of dawn. Trump’s base is cracking, and millions of his supporters understand how he betrayed them. The Republican Party has been forced to re-define itself, and more Americans identify as centrists and independents than ever before. I never believed Andrew Yang had a chance of founding an effective center party, but I’m changing my mind.

I never really believed Ukraine had a chance to defeat Russia, but nearly a half-year into Russia’s invasion, it’s clear that Russia has lost far more than it gained, and standing tall against aggression, autocracy, and the threat of nuclear war was the right decision. If we look further, it may turn out that the long-term impact of Putin’s obsession with Ukraine will be to force all of Europe off dependence on fossil fuels decades earlier than they would have otherwise.

Finally, there is the result of the primary election in Kansas, one of the reddest states in the country. Kansas Republicans turned out in unexpectedly huge numbers to defeat a proposed amendment to the state constitution that would have outlawed all abortions. It’s never a good idea to disregard the wishes of voters, ignore the Law of Unintended Consequences, or forget that it works both ways.

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