JaxPolitix

Rent

Recognizing the reality of the very present question of whether we can still govern ourselves, I offer to you two questions from a Thomas Friedman essay, flavored by a quote from Muhammad Ali:

“Do [we] want a country that is inclusive and capable of offering respect and dignity to all of its citizens or a country based on the negation of the other?”

“[W]hat kind of country do we want to be, what kind of leaders do we want to have, what sort of soul is at the core of America?”

Here’s the Ali flavoring:

“Service to others is the rent you pay for your room here on Earth.”

If Ali was right (and I strongly believe he was), then our answer to Friedman’s questions must be governed by Ali’s assertion. Consider it akin to the Constitution’s “promote the general welfare” phrase in the Preamble, the introduction that explains the “Why” of the Constitution and of our nation. Glad to have your responses to Friedman’s questions. Post them in the Comments section below.

Here’s a fun little experiment,

Pose the Ali-related statement to any of our conspiracy and MAGA folks, our vaccination refusers and our immigration opponents, most of whom are going through life with a raised middle finger:

“How are you paying your rent?”

I suspect many are dramatically in arrears in their payments.

We don’t evict those who freeload and who refuse to lend a hand to others, but somewhere along their path there will be a lot of back rent due as well as substantial accrued interest owed.

Rights

I’m not partisan by nature, but the past 40 years have made me a non-Republican, as that party ran headlong into autocracy mania and embraced it enthusiastically. Even the few remaining so-called traditional Republicans have frequently ducked and run from what is actually traditional, leaving the Democrats the only ones to vote for if we still want a democracy.

But here’s the real deal: keeping our democracy is the only way to preserve our rights. “On that everything depends,” Yoda instructed us.

So, if we are to have rights, we must do everything we can to preserve our democracy, like voting against the authoritarians – the dictator lovers – the Republicans who work every day to end our rights and our democracy.

Nothing So Stupid

O’ the wailing, the indignation, the fury of Republicans in Congress over the bashing and poisoning of our fragile little ones by forcing Critical Race Theory into their impressionable brains. Surely, they will be scarred for life by this perversion of American history, bemoan our extremists, saying that CRT makes so many of them feel guilty for their whiteness.

Out with it! demands Florida Governor Ron “anything to get attention from the extremists” DeSantis. We’ll have none of that in our classrooms of little children. Teaching CRT in Florida is strictly forbidden.

There’s just one thing: There is no grade school or high school in Florida that is teaching or ever taught CRT. I can’t find a single school anywhere in the nation, from kindergarten through 400 level classes in university that teaches CRT. It’s a theoretical construct discussed in law schools by people age 22 and older – i.e. adults. Still, the Republicans are caterwauling their false claims that they are protecting our little ones from imminent harm.

There is nothing so stupid that Republicans won’t say it.

Ronald Reagan, the former patron saint of Republicans, fired off a tax cut blast, the benefits of which accrued almost entirely to rich people. He told us that the wealthy would use that money to invest in businesses, which would then create jobs for we little people and wages would go up. He claimed that the benefits from the tax cut would “trickle down” to the masses and he used the idiotic theory and graphs of Arthur Laffer to justify his predictions. I wish I were kidding about Laffer’s name, because it matches his theory, but I’m not and it does.

Deficit hawks of that time worried that cutting taxes without cutting spending would disastrously balloon the national deficit. Cleverly, Reagan had his budget director reprogram the computers that calculate such things to make them show that a deficit wouldn’t happen. And he passed that lie along in order to sell his giveaway to his fat cat buddies. Here’s the surprise inside.

Lots of money went to rich people and nothing – literally nothing – trickled down to workers. No new jobs. No increased wages. And the deficit ballooned, just as the deficit hawks feared. Oh, golly, as he was fond of saying.

Saint Ronny got his buddies the wallet stuffing they wanted by lying to us and stiffing us. That’s trickle down economics. And it’s been the same story with every tax cut lie since then.

There is nothing so stupid that Republicans won’t say it.

This is about stupid lies constantly brayed by Republicans. Here is just a handful more:

The 2020 election Big Lies

Ivermectin and bleach

Any history that doesn’t favor Republicans and White guys

Claims that vaccines will make you sterile

Obama’s coming for your guns and besides, he wasn’t a “real” American

Biden is senile

There’s no such thing as climate warming

Benghazi – 14 times

Space lasers igniting wild fires

Pizzagate

The insurrectionists were “just tourists”

Mexico will pay for the wall

Anything about Hillary

The FBI planted evidence at Mar-a-Lago

“Witch hunts” that aren’t

Obama tapped Trump’s phone

Democrats are Satan worshiping pedophiles

Trump’s inaugural crowd was the largest in history

Obama “pals around with terrorists”

There are hundreds more, of course, so please post the stupids that come to mind in the Comments section below to entertain us all. Note that some Republican will read what you wrote and will repeat it as though it’s true.

Because with each of these, there is nothing so stupid that Republicans won’t say it.

Saving the Best For Last

We face episode after episode of law breaking, lying and fabricated outrage in search of greater power for the authoritarian wannabes. Worst of all are the elected and appointed officials in whom we placed our trust and who betrayed us and our country.

These are the people who swore an oath – most often with their hand on a Bible – to protect and defend the Constitution. Instead, they’ve done everything they could to subvert it. Their self-serving reasons are meaningless and are evidence of both their treachery and their cowardice. They are a grotesque stain on our nation and we are left to decide how to deal with that.

I have argued many times in these posts for strict accountability, not only because the absence of it proclaims our stated values to be false, but also because lack of accountability invites still worse in the future.

The New York Times editorial board has taken the clearest and most patriotic stand on this issue. I urge you to read Donald Trump Is Not Above The Law.

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Our governance and electoral corruption and dysfunction and our ongoing mass murders are all of a piece, all the same problem with the same solution:

.

Fire the bastards!

.

The days are dwindling for us to take action. Get up! Do something to make things better.

Copyright 2024 by Jack Altschuler
Reproduction and sharing are encouraged, providing proper attribution is given.

A new report in STAT details the financial support that hospitals and medical centers are receiving from FEMA. That’s the federal agency tasked with dealing with ordinary stuff like tornadoes, earthquakes, hurricanes and massive fires. You know, the once-in-a-century stuff we now experience several times a year.

The Rs assure us that there is no global warming, or at least their fallback position is that we aren’t contributing to it or we don’t know for sure what’s up. That’s why Val Demings is impressively challenging Marco (“It isn’t proven science”) Rubio, hoping to drive more substantive climate programs before Florida becomes Atlantis. But I digress.

That FEMA funding for medical institutions has been needed because of the enormous costs that hospitals have incurred fighting the Covid pandemic and keeping Americans alive. It’s the massive overtime, the enormous PPE requirements, ventilators, meds and the rest that could otherwise force into bankruptcy these institutions which protect you. Thank you FEMA, but there’s a problem.

There are hospital systems that are very – as in: VERY – profitable. While they’ve had massive Covid cost increases, too, they have not been and are not in financial distress. In fact, they’re financially just fine, but they’re peeling billions from the FEMA wallet, anyway. That okay with you?

The problem is that nobody seems to be wailing great buckets of tears over enormous piles of cash going to already wealthy medical institutions. Now, why is that? Gotta ask where the means testing is.

Taking this one step further, Republicans wail great buckets of tears over cancelling student debt, saying that tax payers shouldn’t be paying for some trust fund baby’s Harvard education, which actually makes sense to most of us. On the other hand, there aren’t that many trust fund babies with big student debt, so nearly all of the relief from cancelling student debt would go to we ordinary folk. Republicans would hate that. Still, means testing would make sense. If you’re rich, you shouldn’t get college debt relief. Means testing, baby. Means testing.

Looking at this from another angle, why did we allow trillions of dollars to be diverted to – ripped off by – Iraqi and Afghani warlords, politicians and crooks? That went on for decades.

Regular readers of these posts know that I bash Republicans (so many reasons, so little time),* but this issue is largely one of equal opportunity bashing. What is it about us that allows for such enormous misuse of our tax money?

So, yes, cancel debt for those who’ve done the hard work to advance their education and better themselves and our country. John Kennedy was right: college is America’s best friend and that’s critically important now, as China is graduating as many engineers every year as we have in total. And I think Bernie Sanders has it right, too. Make public universities and colleges tuition free. Provide public funding for them just like we do for grade schools and high schools and for the same reasons funding the lower grades makes sense. Today’s jobs require better educated people, especially because this is and will remain a global competition.

For those who want a private education, go right ahead – and you pay for it. No public money for any private schools, be they secular or religious. Ever. And no, I don’t care whether it’s Dubya’s support of “faith-based initiatives” (money going to parochial schools and other religious institutions) or today’s Evangelical know-everythings or our “my religion is the law” Supreme Court.

Yes, I know that the fat cats won’t like that because they love getting fatter, like from Trump’s despicable tax cut, 83% of which went to the hugely wealthy and to corporations, which bought back their stock with that windfall cash and that artificially boosted stock prices, which made the fat cats fatter. And those guys love fossil fuels, because their short term gain is just so nifty to have, even as those fuels imperil the lives of all of our Gen Zs and whoever comes after them. They’re the same as with the wealthy private hospital CEOs who love digging into FEMA’s wallet.

The song says “This land was made for you and me,” not just you, rich guys. And as Elizabeth Warren cautioned, you didn’t build it on your own. We the People built the infrastructure that has allowed you to prosper.

Means testing says that a poor kid in the inner city gets help and you don’t, trust fund baby. It means that we should be in a Manhattan Project to build sustainable energy, even if the fat cats don’t get their oil, gas and coal dividends. And we should be rooting out all the cheaters who took so many millions of dollars from the Paycheck Protection Plan and stuffed it into their pockets, stiffing so many people who needed help. That’s fat cats in Congress helping their fat cat donor buddies.

We have screaming needs right now and, honestly, I don’t care who doesn’t like our doing what must be done, including the ending of yet more cash for the already rich.

Speaking of Rip-offs

I know you’ve wondered why Donald Trump stole at least 30 boxes of records containing at least 300 classified documents. Be clear that these items weren’t souvenirs or cocktail napkins, as Sheila Markin Nielsen writes. She’s an attorney, a former prosecutor, she’s politically astute and her essay lays out a broader picture of what happened and why it happened as it did and why pursuing Trump’s theft is critically important.

It’s clear that he is guilty of at least 3 crimes. First, by taking the records – any records –  he is in violation of the Presidential Records Act. Second, his lying to federal agents about having returned all the documents when, in fact, he had retained at least half of them, he committed another felony. And in taking classified documents he is guilty of violating the Espionage Act.

And none of that even touches on laws that apply to what he may have done with those national security documents, some of which would surely be worth billions to a U.S. adversary.

Think about it: Trump has demonstrated it’s a constant that he doesn’t care about rules, consequences to others or even legality. And he loves to cozy up to American adversaries, like Putin, Xi and MBS. And there he was in Mar-a-Lago with his stolen Top Secret documents. What could possibly go wrong?

If you want better clarity on this in a religious context (and you do in this age of Christian theocracy threats), read Thom Hartmann’s essay, Is Donald Trump the Antichrist? Come to think of it, read that piece, regardless or your motivation. It offers a startling and valuable perspective.

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* So, just to be consistent, here’s a shot across the bow.

Democrats passed the Inflation Reduction Act, which

 –  Reduces prescription drug prices

–  Caps pharmacy costs at $2,000

–  Insulin costs for Medicare beneficiaries are capped at $35 per month

–  3 million more Americans will have health insurance and care

–  Tax credits for using clean energy

 –  Provides up to $14,000 direct consumer rebates for installation of energy efficient appliances

–  Tax credits for installing solar

–  Promotes clean energy

–  Reduces greenhouse gases by 1 gigaton in 2030

– 15% minimum tax on corporations

–  $0 increase in taxes on individuals making less than $400,000 per year

 –  There’s lots more – click here for the official tally

EVERY REPUBLICAN IN CONGRESS VOTED AGAINST THIS ACT!

Instead, they focused on:

 –  Banning abortion

 –  Banning books

 –  Passing anti-CRT in our grade schools, even though none of them teaches CRT

 –  Passed Don’t Say Gay laws

 –  Voted against the Promise to Address Comprehensive Toxins Act of 2022 (“PACT”) which is designed to help our veterans exposed to toxins and toxic burn pits

 –  Voted to take away voting rights with more gerrymandering, limitations on voting by mail and closing of voting places

–  Voted to permit Republican secretaries of states and Republican legislatures to ignore the will of the people and instead select their own candidates for elective office.

–  And, of course, there’s lots more

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Our governance and electoral corruption and dysfunction and our ongoing mass murders are all of a piece, all the same problem with the same solution:

.

Fire the bastards!

.

The days are dwindling for us to take action. Get up! Do something to make things better.

Copyright 2024 by Jack Altschuler
Reproduction and sharing are encouraged, providing proper attribution is given.

You might reasonably wonder why Neil Steinberg recently wrote in the Chicago Sun-Times that he found a frightening comparison of sociopath and mass murderer John Wayne Gacy and sociopath and democracy murderer* Donald Trump (my descriptor).

Trump has gotten away with so much because he has appealed to long simmering American anger and because he is in reality an autocrat – a dictator. He removes those still clinging to a shred of integrity and replaces them with sycophants. He issues threats and intimidation to everyone else, all of this to the cheers of the angry mob. It’s just what autocrats do. Think: the Nuremberg rallies.

As Steinberg writes, “In a totalitarian state, the leader is the king and his word is truth. His word is law. Period.” He rules “unhindered by any pang of conscience or shred of humanity” with “an unshakable sense of superiority.” That’s how fascist leaders roll and that is what the GOP is threatening to unleash full throttle upon all of us. Indeed, as Steinberg writes,

“A vote for most Republicans is a vote to end voting.”

Gacy wasn’t too different from that narcissism and at least 33 people died in agony by his hand. Now consider the potential headcount of a sociopathic narcissist with the nuclear secrets in boxes in his basement.

My day job is to deliver keynotes and workshops, mostly to C-level people. These sessions are focused on how they can be better leaders producing more engaged, happier and more productive followers. The foundation for that is a basic human behavior thing – call it a priciple of Human Being 101: “See leader, emulate leader.” The way the leader shows up, how s/he behaves, is how followers will behave. The intensity of emulation varies, but the principle holds.

So, if the leader lies, followers will lie. If the leader is cruel, followers will be cruel. If the leader denies easily observable facts and reality, so, too, will followers. And that is exactly what we’ve seen in Trump followers since we heard the hate-filled 2015 carnage claims and finger pointing brayed from an escalator. Nothing is quite as satisfying and exculpatory as blaming others for our own shortcomings and failings, so autocratic leaders do that and their followers follow. See leader, emulate leader.

The leaders of the Confederacy (not a democracy, but an “oligarchic police state”, per Thom Hartmann) called on the indignation and rage of those who would have to renounce their mastery over an entire race of people if the abolitionists were to get their way. The calls to their rage by their leaders led to over 600,000 dead Americans. It was as though John Wayne Gacy had been the leader of the slave states. See leader, emulate leader.

Steve Bannon announced from the start that he wants to “tear it all down,” and he made it clear that by “all” he meant American institutions, our democracy, our values and more.

From Rep. Jamie Raskin’s book, Unthinkable:

“But Trump and his operatives [including Bannon] had worked to destroy every well-established constitutional rule, legal and ethical norm, and customary tradition that might have been an obstacle to imposing his will on everyone else.”

Bannon and Trump are smart and clever with their explanations and their furious attacks and they have led millions to want to do their will, to tear it all down. It’s all cloaked in red, white and blue, a liberty and justice for all mantle, a “USA!” chant and a demand for election integrity, but they are about none of that. Those who emulate them aren’t about that either, although they appear to have deluded themselves sufficiently to believe that they are patriotic, even as they call for the destruction of it all. Ref: January 6.

The crowd of MAGA extremists hears, “Stop the steal!” There is no evidence that anything was stolen. There are no facts. Only baseless claims and indignant, angry chants that amplify grievances. Yet they chant, “Stop the steal!” every time they’re told to do so. No thought. Just Pavlovian fury.

The message of this writing is simple:

If we are to have a better America, we must have better leaders, not the autocrat wannabees.

.

I don’t mean leaders who are better liars or who are more cruel or who are more deft at reality denial. I specifically mean leaders who, rather than drawing out our most base, most selfish and cruel instincts, instead those who call on us to be what Lincoln prayed for in his first inaugural address, that we be led “by the better angels of our nature.”

We are at a great and critical crossroads in our national history and, dangerously, we will be here for a while. It is a crossroads as perilous as that of April 12, 1861, when Confederate troops fired on Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor.

There are many hundreds of elected leaders and self-certain, self-promoting pundits firing on America right now, calling for violence, insurrection, even a new civil war, and invoking what Lincoln called a “mobocratic spirit.”** And there are millions of wildly engaged followers of these would-be autocrats thumping chests and repeating lies fed to them over and over, emulating these leaders.

Neil Steinberg is right: “A vote for most Republicans is a vote to end voting.”

If we are to have a better America, we must have better leaders, not the autocrat wannabees.

.

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* Trump, the MAGAs, the conspiracy propeller hats, the militias – these people are a threat to democracy and you understand that threat. I know you do because you keep yourself informed – you wouldn’t be reading this unless you wanted to be informed. But most Americans are not well informed. Their concerns are their kids and the price of gas and food and housing and what’s on cable and perhaps finding a better job. With all their concerns, they just don’t have the bandwidth to think about democracy. Besides, it’s already here, secured, they believe, by prior generations. Yet it is so very fragile.

** From The Perpetuation of Our Political Institutions: Address Before the Young Men’s Lyceum of Springfield, Illinois, January 27, 1838.

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Our governance and electoral corruption and dysfunction and our ongoing mass murders are all of a piece, all the same problem with the same solution:

.

Fire the bastards!

.

The days are dwindling for us to take action. Get up! Do something to make things better.

Copyright 2024 by Jack Altschuler
Reproduction and sharing are encouraged, providing proper attribution is given.