Chaos and...

 1. Chaos and the Courts

Chaos developed his current approach to everything as a mostly failed real estate developer and business investor.  His priority was always the big gesture to make the biggest headlines.  He cared more about the flashy announcement of a business he started or took over to "save," understanding that when the business failed (as it almost always did), it would be a less prominent story.  He loudly developed flashy buildings and projects that years later failed more quietly, ending in receivership or bankruptcy--mere back page business stories.

His approach to courts and the justice system was the same.  He would announce a huge law suit, often in response to someone calling him out.  Or if he was sued, he would counter-sue for a much larger amount.  He seldom won any of these cases, but that was a more boring story than his flamboyant anger and aggressive assertions.  And the court decision was always much later, when few remembered the original story anyway.  By then he was on to something else that was bigger and brighter.

As President, he is all about attention-getting gestures, including his approach to the courts. He cares only about his assertions, not the decisions against him.  Which is why he stacked up so many defeats challenging various results of the 2020 election.

These days he is losing pretty consistently in federal courts that decide what he's doing or has done is or was illegal.  But really he doesn't care.  He got the attention. He doesn't care that the courts found cancelling Harvard grants was illegal.  That was a story months ago. The chaos it created has already happened. He takes full advantage of the slow process of justice.  It just can't keep up with him.  So sending troops to Los Angeles was illegal?  That's yesterday's news.  Today he's busy using the military to murder people on the high seas.

 Other actions that the justice system (or what's left of it) is likely to stop, such as the malicious prosecution of officeholders he doesn't like for mortgage fraud.  He announces investigations, but then what?  Nobody is going to let it go by that reportedly at least three of his cabinet heads are probably guilty of exactly what he's charging.  But sorting all this out  takes time.  In the meantime, he's created the headlines, the distraction and the chaos he wants more than anything.

There is one big exception.  The federal Court of Appeals declared most of his tariffs illegal, a fact almost no has doubted for months, but the decision was finally just rendered, after the American economy has gone into a decline it may take a long time to reverse, and the world economy is thrown into chaos.  He's appealed to the Supreme Court, and his hysterical rhetoric about this decision indicates how serious it would be if the current decision is upheld. Other decisions of impact would include forbidding his militarizing American cities, and his asserting control over the Fed.

How likely is the Republican majority S Court to hold these thin lines?  A dynamic is being revealed that is profoundly uncomfortable for the Supremes.  While public confidence in the SC is at an all time low, the frustration in most of the federal judiciary is mounting.  It's getting to be evident that nearly all federal judges line up against six members of the Supremes.  Nobody really knows what impact this might have.

2. Chaos and Health

The disastrous Senate hearing Thursday where health secretary Kennedy Jr. was grilled, and during which he called the former CDC head, scientists and Senators liars, dramatized the chaos currently roiling US health and medical systems.  The most proximate expression of chaos is the upcoming updated Covid vaccine, due to be available this month, but nobody knows if it actually will be, who will be able to get it, and what insurance will cover it.  This remains a dynamic that changes from day to day, especially as some states test the limits of what they can do to bypass the federal breakdown.

That Chaos contradicts himself all the time in Orwellian fashion is not new, but the paradox of the Covid vaccine has always been striking.  In his first term, when he was merely a Dictator Wannabe, he was all over the place as the Covid pandemic began.  A scientific ignoramus who recommended lethal remedies, he nevertheless allowed the Warp Speed project to proceed, a fast tracked process to discover, make and distribute life-saving vaccines.  

He later denigrated the vaccine while still (as late as last month) claiming credit for creating it.  But he knowingly appointed Kennedy Jr. who has recently become very aggressive in his vaccine opposition--the anti-vaxer in chief.  At the Thursday hearing K Jr denied that over a million Americans died from Covid, and claimed that more people died from the vaccine than the disease.  And yet...

On Wednesday, the CEO of Pfizer, one of the two largest manufacturers of Covid vaccines, made a slyly brilliant statement.  He said that indeed Chaos should get his coveted Nobel Prize--for Operation Warp Speed. 

So that led to the prime theatre of the absurd moment of Thursdays Senate hearing.  After Kennedy Jr. fulminated on the lethal dangers of the Covid vaccines, Republican Senator (and doctor) Bill Cassidy asked him if he agreed that Chaos should get the Nobel for enabling the effort to develop the vaccines, K Jr. said "Absolutely."

That we're living in Doctor Strangeloveland cannot obscure the health dangers Americans are facing, entirely without necessity, simply from the current chaos that reaches into every pharmacy, doctor's office, hospital and insurance company (including Medicare).  In particular danger are us old folks and vulnerable children.  This is what sliding into the Dark Ages looks like, accompanied by unnecessary anxiety and bewildered laughter.

But there is resistance as well, even from Republicans.  Most Americans, including most Chaos voters, support vaccines.  Also on Thursday, Susan Monarez, the CDC director Chaos fired at K Jrs behest, said that she was willing to testify under oath to what K Jr said she had lied about.  Senate Republicans aren't likely to allow that, but if they do, it might get really interesting.

To The States

Why reclining, interrogating? why myself and all drowsing?

 What deepening twilight--scum floating atop the waters.

 Who are they as bats and night-dogs askant in the capitol?

 What a filthy Presidentiad! (O South, your torrid suns! O North, your arctic freezings!)

 Are those really Congressmen are those the great Judges? Is that the President?

 Then I will sleep awhile yet, for I see that these States sleep for reasons; 

(With gathering murk, with muttering thunder and lambent shoots we all duly awake,

 South, North, East, West, inland and seaboard, we will surely awake.) 

--Walt Whitman

Are We The "Good Germans"?

There are armed troops in the streets of the nation's capital. And we check our texts and feeds, and read articles and posts on twenty minute meals, which of 42 tested earbuds is best and how to stop being so judgy. Both National Guard and active military were deployed in Los Angeles, with no enemy to face but the people of Los Angeles. We troop off to the grocery store for increasingly expensive and scarce vegetables--up 38% just in the month of July. And the President of the United States is threatening to send troops to occupy Chicago.

And so I wonder: are we becoming the "Good Germans"?

I was born less than a year after World War II officially ended.  The full extent of what happened in Nazi Germany was still being exposed during my childhood, and there were movies and plays about it.  The Diary of Anne Frank was a hit play in 1955, the feature film came out in 1959 when I was 13, and I recall seeing it, or some other dramatization, on our black and white TV.  Judgment at Nuremberg was an episode on Playhouse 90 in 1959 and hit the silver screen in 1961.  I watched it, breathless, from a fake velvet seat in the Manos Theatre.

One thing I remember being talked about for years was this: everybody knows that Hitler was a tyrannical madman.  Why did the bulk of German people--the ones who weren't Jews and otherwise persecuted, but who didn't belong to the Nazi Party--go along with everything he did?  Hitler was elected, and within months had established his dictatorship. His hate-filled speeches and his actions were increasingly crazed and violent, well beyond the norms of a country whose citizens prided themselves on being the most civilized society in Europe. Why didn't the so-called "Good Germans" stop him?

First, let's review our situation.  As I've been saying for months, one key to dictatorship is control of the army.  The Chaos administration is often called inept, incompetent and clownish.  But that should not obscure what it accomplished in this regard.  It began by boldly and without reason decapitating military leadership, a process that is still going on.  Apart from the intimidation this causes, it leaves leadership gaps to be filled by absolute loyalists.  And so while the Chaos administration turned ICE into the American Secret Police and got it enormous funding from a compliant congressional majority, it was able to send troops to be seen on selected American streets.  With nary a peep from military leadership.  

The US military is already being coopted in the creation of American concentration camps, one of them on the very military installation where Japanese Americans were imprisoned for no other reason than that they were Japanese Americans in World War II.

A second and simultaneous step to dictatorship is neutralizing and defeating those elements of constitutional government and civil society that might stand in the way.  That process reached a crescendo in July with the simultaneous surrender of Congress and the Supreme Court.

So now bolder moves are in process.  The attempted firing of a member of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors will test the extent of the Supreme Court's surrender.  As will any deployment of troops in Chicago, where the mayor and the governor have made it quite clear there will be vigorous legal challenges.  

Another key to dictatorship I've emphasized and followed is the predicted attempt to steal the next election, and eventually to end real elections altogether. That's being very actively pursued, with gerrymandering and direct threats against the conduct of elections, with attacks on the rights of voters to come. Again, the Supreme Court is complicit.  Deploying armed and masked federal troops at an event in California featuring the Governor signals to everyone the likelihood that the fattened ICE and dumbed down FBI and other federal forces will be menacing political events and at the polls in the coming months.  

So far American society has held together pretty well under all these assaults.  But these two actions--as well as any number of other vulnerabilities created by this administration--could lead to real and consequential chaos that will be very hard to stop.  According to Paul Krugman, political control of the Federal Reserve alone could lead to inflation the likes of which America has never experienced, though Germany did in the 1930s.  

Everyone knows that Chaos is a tyrannical madman.  A recent poll shows that nearly half of the respondents strongly disapprove of his actions (with less than a quarter strongly approving), and nearly 60% disapproving. So why aren't the good Americans stopping him?

Part of it is the reality of time.  In one sense this is happening in a continuous assault, meant to stun.  In another it is happening between the necessary events of our lives, and we must deal with it in ways that allow us to keep on living.  But it is emerging that the greatest weapon of Chaos is intimidation.  There are clearly those who are active collaborators, especially the billionaires who seek protection and advantage. Tech billionaires (says Wired editor Katie Drummond) are actively contributing technology to enhance authoritarian control.  Others are simply intimidated and extorted, like every university except George Mason.

But there is also resistance: in Illinois, in Maryland, in California, at George Mason, in the editorial offices of Vanity Fair, and in the streets of cities and towns and suburbs across America.  Three-count 'em, three--separate grand juries in DC refused to indict a protestor accused of the felony of assaulting an FBI cop during the Washington occupation.  The feds were forced to reduce the charge to a misdemeanor.

  Some of the resistance is symbolic but heartening, some of it is creative, and some of it--as in the various efforts to stymie ICE--is locally effective.  But so far it is not enough to stop the madman.

Some are taking major risks, including members of the National Guard who are resisting or speaking out.  More of this needs to happen.  But any resistance is helpful, if only to suggest to others that they are not alone.  As Timothy Snyder wrote in On Tyranny, his depressingly prophetic little book of 2017, twentieth century dictatorships thrived because people and institutions conceded in advance.

There are those who are going to be more active in their resistance.  And there are the many others who for one reason or another will not.  But all of us may at any time be faced with a moment of decision, when tyranny and intimidation confronts us directly. In those moments we will learn if we are among the "Good Germans" or not.

If the Republic survives or reemerges in a world in which history is still written, the long list of names of traitors to democracy will include Roberts, Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Barrett. But if the Republic is to survive, it will require heroes whose names will likely never be known.

All Rivers At Once

Don't unstring the bow.

I am your four-feathered arrow

 that has not been used yet. 

 I am a strong knifeblade word,

 not some if or maybe,

 dissolving in air.

I am sunlight slicing the dark.

 Who made this night?

 A forge deep in the earth-mud.

 What is the body?

 Endurance. 

What is love? 

Gratitude. 

 What is hidden in our chests?

 Laughter. 

 What else?

 Compassion.

 --Rumi

The Immiseration of America

 It's begun, and it has nothing directly to do with Marxist theory or external or unpredictable forces.  The Immiseration of America is starting to happen now because of policies and actions taken by the Republican administration and the Republican Congress, aided and abetted by what must accurately be called the Republican Supreme Court.

Immiseration in this sense means what it sounds like: making people's lives a misery by making them poorer, more vulnerable and less able to support a decent life.  

The most recent Bureau of Labor Statistics numbers on employment--which may be the last honestly assessed numbers we are likely to get for the foreseeable future--showed that most businesses are not hiring and many are shedding jobs.  Heather Long's analysis in the Washington Post begins by noting that large revisions in the job data, as happened this time, typically occur during a recession or just as one is starting.  Long, along with Paul Krugman and others, see this downward plunge in the job market as chiefly a result of the US tariffs threatened and exacted, but the random kidnapping of non-citizen workers has also created chaos in such major sectors as farming and construction. Unemployment insurance claims are up, and the GDP has slowed to less than half of what it was last year.

At the same time, economists such as Jared Bernstein in the New York Times note that the tariffs "are now clearly fueling inflation"  in the prices of food, clothing, home appliances and cars. The prospect is for the kind of "stagflation" (stagnant economy with inflation) that bedeviled the 1970s, though that time the causes were the oil embargo and then the massive price hikes in oil from foreign sources.  This time it is all due to Chaos.

There is another difference this time, a very disturbing one.  Though wealth inequality was increasing, the US had a vibrant consumer economy, and something like 60% of Americans had middle class incomes in the 1970s.  But now the concentration of wealth in the top 10% and top 1% is overwhelming that economy, as the middle class has shrunk by at least 10%.  Right now, according to Long, "The economy is increasingly dependent on a small sliver of superstar companies and wealthy consumers to stay afloat because these are the only firms and families able to withstand the tariff onslaught."

So while the stock market is driven by big tech companies besotted with the growing AI bubble, fully half the consumer economy is driven by spending by the very rich, the top 10%. (To suggest the difference, half of the consumer economy in the 1970s was accounted for by mostly middle class spending in shopping malls alone.)  While overall consumer spending is declining, this dominance masks the real trouble the non-huge companies are in, and especially the plight of the non-rich 90% of families and individuals.  

The immiseration of America will target them--and the further down the wealth continuum a family or a person is, the more misery is likely. But as gloomy as the general economy data may be, it will not truly reflect the economic misery--not only because data from the federal government can no longer be trusted--but because spending by rich people and rich tech companies will make things look better than they are for most Americans.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, the Republican Congress tax breaks for the wealthy and immiseration of everyone else bill accelerates a trend has been going on for decades, greatly aided if not caused by Republican policies such as slashing taxes on the wealthy: since 1981, over fifty trillion dollars was redistributed from bottom 90% of Americans to the top 10%.  (Although it must also be mentioned that much if not most of the federal money allocated by the Obama administration to save the American and world economies in the Great Recession, and by the Biden administration to re-start the economy after the pandemic shock, ended up in the pockets of billionaires.) 

The implied peril in this one fact and trend is simple: if the economy depends so much on the rich who can accommodate tariffs and inflation, there may be less urgent motivation to fix the economy when it primarily hurts--and immiserates--the rest of us.

A further danger--federal deficits are increasing, due partly to insane spending by the not so secret police, the military and other Chaotic agents. But they won't be blamed.  What remains of government support for the 90% will be scapegoated.  That's a Republican go-to.

And these general trends are only part of the story.  While people lose jobs or can't find them, and prices go higher, especially for basic necessities, government support that provided some necessities, made other more affordable, or provided some help in emergencies, is being systematically withdrawn, with programs cancelled or subverted, funding erased or cut, and agencies that provided vital services internally attacked, decimated and corrupted.  

In short, if this administration had deliberately set out to immiserate America--to create havoc and misery for most Americans--it could hardly have done a more thorough job.

For the vulnerable middle class inflation is hitting the price of food and clothing and shelter.  Seniors and others on fixed incomes are especially vulnerable.

Another basic necessity in today's world is medical care. Soon Americans that get health care insurance through the overwhelmingly popular and successful federal program unofficially called Obamacare will see huge premium increases, and eventually claims and continued membership will become vastly more cumbersome and difficult.  Some of us with health insurance related to Medicare have already seen big premium increases--mine is 17% higher.  

Americans in the lower 50% and certainly the lowest 10% are hit with the same inflation and employment recession, but more immiseration is being added on. Millions of lower income Americans will lose Medicaid, and because these programs help support clinics and hospitals in smaller and rural communities, the loss of those clinics and hospitals will affect everyone in those communities.  Except of course the very rich who can fly anywhere, except perhaps when they need emergency medicine.  And this is separate from the crisis in reproductive care and related women's healthcare already caused by draconian state laws and the Republican Supreme Court.

For the last 10%, the Congressional Budget Office estimates that changes in Supplemental Nutrition Assistance (SNAP) and other food assistance programs, such as restricted eligibility and added requirements, will push some 2.4 million Americans off food stamps altogether. The CBO also quantifies the total impact of loss of food support and Medicaid, estimating the poorest 10% will lose about $1200 a year from their already meager incomes, while thanks to new tax cuts for the wealthy, the richest 10% will see incomes increase by some $13,600 a year.

This means less adequate medical care and even food for families, and particularly children.  Families and children have suddenly lost other elements of the so-called safety net as well. Many children will no longer have the guarantee of at least one nutritious meal a day in school. Together that means lots of needlessly hungry children.  It means that the Republican Congress took food out of the mouths of helpless children to feed billionaires.

  Many seniors will no longer have access to nutritious food through Meals on Wheels programs. Social Security is more vulnerable.  Housing costs remain high and inflations is likely to particularly hurt renters, while electricity and energy costs for heating and cooling are likely to go up for everyone. 

The list goes on. Cuts in day care and other programs that support students, parents, schools and teachers will harm children. The chaos created in the matter of loans for college students may well mean that fewer high school graduates will be able to afford higher education. Access to medical care for veterans is and will be increasingly more difficult due to VA cuts and confusion.  

The chaos in the medical system caused by the insane policies of federal health, the depletion and the outright stealing of funds slated for the increasing number and severity of emergencies caused by extreme weather, fire and flood--all outcomes of the climate crisis--can affect families and communities anywhere (and in the next epidemic or pandemic, everywhere.)  And the war against immigrants makes the precarious lives of those families even more threatened.

The logic of recession is inexorable: more misery and fewer customer dollars for businesses leads to higher unemployment, and more misery. That also happens to be the logic of inflation. Add to the general trends the specific sectors thrown into chaos by Chaos policies on immigration, foreign aid and so on, as well as union-busting efforts beginning with attacks on government labor unions (with the blessing of Republican courts) that can soon end job protections that very much helped create the American middle class over the past 60 or 70 years. 

All of this affects anyone in the 90%.  But non-white Americans within it face additional pressures and difficulties.  Workers (and small businesses) in specific sectors most affected by capricious tariffs as well as the chaos caused by the fascist ICE campaign also face other unnecessary problems that affect jobs and the existence of these businesses, as well as (for example) the needed construction disrupted and the food missing from grocery stores.   

So for a growing number of families having less money and fewer resources--soon to be a majority if they aren't already--can easily become members of "the precariat"--whose uncertain and low paying employment and lack of services makes their very lives precarious.

What economic numbers don't measure is the constant anxiety, the despair, the actual physical pain that immiseration causes.  Some numbers may someday measure some effects: in the decline of childhood health and health in general in America, including mental health; in early deaths and declining life expectancies (already underway in the US), and a further increase in the homelessness that is the moral bane of the American system.  But before then there will be pain and death and ruined lives, that even six months ago would not be so endangered.  This is in more than one sense an elective crisis.

The Old Days

In the old days it stayed light until midnight

 and rain and snow came up from the ground

 rather than down from the sky. Women were easy.

 Every time you'd see one, two more would appear,

walking toward you backwards as their clothes dropped.

 Money didn't grow in the leaves of trees but around

 the trunks in calf's leather money belts

 though you could only take twenty bucks a day.

 Certain men flew as well as crows while others ran

 up trees like chipmunks. Seven Nebraska women

 were clocked swimming upstream in the Missouri

 faster than the local spotted dolphins. Basenjis

 could talk Spanish but all of them chose not to.

 A few political leaders were executed for betraying

 the public trust and poets were rationed a gallon

 of Burgundy a day. People only died on one day

 a year and lovely choruses funneled out

 of hospital chimneys where every room had a field

 stone fireplace. Some fishermen learned to walk

 on water and as a boy I trotted down rivers,

 my flyrod at the ready. Women who wanted love

 needed only to wear pig's ear slippers or garlic

 earrings. All dogs and people in free concourse

 became medium sized and brown, and on Christmas

 everyone won the hundred dollar lottery. God and Jesus

 didn't need to come down to earth because they were

 already here riding wild horses every night

 and children were allowed to stay up late to hear

 them galloping by. The best restaurants were churches

 with Episcopalians serving Provençal, the Methodists Tuscan,

 and so on. In those days the country was an extra

 two thousand miles wider, and an additional thousand

 miles deep. There were many undiscovered valleys

 to walk in where Indian tribes lived undisturbed

 though some tribes chose to found new nations

 in the heretofore unknown areas between the black

 boundary cracks between states. I was married

 to a Pawnee girl in a ceremony behind the usual waterfall.

 Courts were manned by sleeping bears and birds sang

 lucid tales of ancient bird ancestors who now fly

 in other worlds. Certain rivers ran too fast

 to be usable but were allowed to do so when they consented

 not to flood at the Des Moines Conference.

 Airliners were similar to airborne ships with multiple

 fluttering wings that played a kind of chamber music

 in the sky. Pistol barrels grew delphiniums

 and everyone was able to select seven days a year

 they were free to repeat but this wasn't a popular

 program. In those days the void whirled

 with flowers and unknown wild animals attended

 country funerals. All the rooftops in cities were flower

 and vegetable gardens. The Hudson River was drinkable

 and a humpback whale was seen near the 42nd Street

 pier, its head full of the blue blood of the sea,

 its voice lifting the steps of people

 in their traditional anti-march, their harmless disarray.

 I could go on but won't. All my evidence

 was lost in a fire but not before it was chewed

 on by all the dogs that inhabit memory. 

One by one they bark at the sun, moon and stars

 trying to draw them closer again.

--Jim Harrison

painting by Rene Magritte

A Dreaming Up Daily Quote

 " A noise in the hallway interrupted his thoughts, and he glanced up to watch Chiara disappearing down the corridor towards her room and her hermetic world of social media.  Love and fear for his children fell upon him, followed by a surge of hope for a good future for them, despite the damaged world in which they would live out their lives."

Donna Leon 

Give Unto Others (2022)

The Party of Delusion

It's not as if Democrats don't delude themselves plenty, but delusion is not the central feature of that party and its principal policies as it is of the Republicans.  And as usual, Chaos has amped it up so far that he is pushing the entire world into crazy territory.

On Friday, the Bureau of Labor Statistics released new and revised figures that showed a weakening job market, harbinger of a weakening economy.  The downward revision of new hires was particularly steep. Chaos responded by firing the chief statistician, claiming political bias in the numbers.

I've seen several different analyses for the meaning of those numbers--a couple of the more credible suggest that the uncertainty brought about by the capricious on again/off again Chaos tariffs is discouraging employers from investing for the future.  (One story also suggested that the numbers had to be revised so sharply because the Bureau was shorthanded, thanks to the Chaotic cuts of 20% of its employees, so gathering the statistics in the first place was troubled.)

Analysts suggest other contributing factors to these weak numbers, such as immigration chaos affecting entire sectors, and the effects of withdrawn federal funds on employment in education. The only growth was seen in the health care sector, which seems unlikely to last, as hospitals and medical providers disappear thanks to major Medicaid cuts.

But the Chaotic response to these numbers by firing the chief statistician and casting doubt on the integrity of her permanent successor may prove most costly.  By firing a impartial professional for political reasons (or ego, which for Chaos amount to the same thing), the integrity of future numbers is now in doubt, and everyone sees this already--judging from the quoted comments of business executives and conservative politicians. Global capitalism depends to a large extent on a set of numbers that rightly or wrongly, corporations depend on in making their decisions.  Whatever their rhetorical support for anti-government politics, they also depend on basic stability, on confident consumers and stable costs that suppliers can depend on.  Especially now that the real or imagined tariffs are coming into effect, Chaos is coming to the world economy.

(Business also, by the way, depends on the rule of law to keep a level playing field, as well as government support for common services, like highways.  Not that some capitalists can't exist in a lawless world of corruption and force, but maybe not in an economy like the one we depend on now.)

Chaos has governed by means of lies and intimidation, but also with heavy emphasis on delusion.  Things are what he and his minions say they are, and whether he really believes what he says or not, those who accept his words are accepting delusion.  What he says about South Park or even Jeffrey Epstein may not matter much, but when he cast doubt on the reality represented by honest (if flawed) numbers, it's a different disorder of things. 

But the Republican Party has been trading on delusions for decades.  In the 48 years between 1932 and 1980, Republicans held the White House for all of 16 years.  FDR was first elected in 1932 and saved the country and the western world, twice.  He did so by effectively confronting the Great Depression, and then the fascist threat in World War II.  His policies were embattled but popular, because they worked.  He simultaneously created jobs that supported families in real time, and by creating that employment through building to meet current and anticipated need and opportunity, he built the infrastructure for a larger, modern future. 

In some ways, Republican President Eisenhower continued that work, for example with the Federal Highway program.  Even President Nixon, while expanding a ruinous war, did not substantially undermine the role of the federal government in the FDR consensus domestically.

But in 1980, Ronald Reagan won the White House on the basis of a few feel- good delusions, like government was evil and cutting taxes for the wealthy would still result in higher revenues to finance the remaining government functions .  After eight years of those tax cuts plus privatization and cuts to services for the poor and middle class, the federal budget deficit ballooned.  

So the economy George Bush the First inherited was weakened and eventually resulted in recession. Despite the demonstrable fact that cutting taxes for the rich did not increase tax revenue but helped cause big deficits and economic downturns, every Republican since Reagan insisted it would work. With the election of Bill Clinton in 1992, a pattern emerged so simple that it calls into question the cognitive abilities of the voting public.  After Republican administrations increased deficits and debt and trashed the economy, a Democrat would be elected and would spend 8 years or (in Biden's case) 4 years fixing the mess he inherited. And then voters would fall for it again and elect a Republican. (Although in the case of George Bush II in 2000, there needs to be an asterisk called the Supreme Court.)

Meanwhile all those tax cuts did was fuel a disreputable trend: from 1981 to 2021, over fifty trillion dollars moved from the bottom 90% of the American public to the top 1%.

Now Chaos has taken this to a new level with the latest tax giveaway to the 1%, accompanied by deeper cuts to programs supporting not only the 90% but the entire American economy.  As well as the slash and burn to the foundations of the federal government, the rule of law.  

What's next?  Well, democracy. Another delusion that has a long Republican history is that Democrats are cheating at the ballot box (as Heather Cox Richardson recently pointed out.)  There has been zero evidence that any but a few individuals have cheated--and often enough they were Republicans, including officeholders-- but that hasn't deterred the selling of this delusion either.  And the selling of that delusion is about to get worse, as will the actions to control those elections.  It's going to be a major focus for Chaos as the 2026 congressional elections get closer.

Chaos brings sinister new delusions to this process, but in fact Republicans have been very focused for years on obtaining and institutionalizing electoral supremacy, regardless of the popular will. They've been working at it especially at the state level, controlling the gerrymandering of congressional districts to increase their advantage.  That also continues again, with threats of mid-decade redistricting.

And part of the intended effect of the whole anti-D.E.I. campaign (aimed especially at blacks) and the terrorizing of brown people by ICE is political: to discourage and actually get rid of minorities that traditionally vote Democratic.  It's also a factor behind getting rid of the Education Department and firing a huge proportion of federal government workers .  Fewer jobs in education and in government means fewer members of the big teachers' unions and government workers unions that usually support Democrats, both with money for campaigns and with actual votes.  It worked very well in the Reagan era--when deindustrialization plus active anti-union policies greatly diminished the labor unions that had supported Democrats since FDR.

Delusions are at the heart of Republican policy--and that's even before we get to policies on the environment, energy and the Climate Crisis.  But in Chaos they've created a monster that might be going way too far--like the vacuum-cleaner monster in The Yellow Submarine that vacuumed up the entire world and then itself.  The novelty of the moment is that it's the capitalist business sector that normally supports Republicans now fearing chaos, and Chaos.

Chaos is the king of delusion--living and breathing it relentlessly every moment of every day. His enthusiastic support for cryptocurrency and especially AI is perfectly understandable because the first is the delusion of money and the second could well become the greatest and most pervasive purveyor of delusion the world has ever seen.  When an increasing proportion of what's on the Internet is phony and delusional, what else is AI going to organize, express and provide?    

Postscript: My use of the word delusion is of course a charitable one.  It may well be grievous deception in many if not most cases.  An additional key to what it is about is the assertion that the American economy is now dependent to large degree on the excesses of spending by the very rich.

A Tale of Two Pirates

 Today four players were inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame, including Ichiro Suzuki (who I saw play late in his career in San Francisco) and Dave Parker, a name perhaps only diehard fans, or diehard Pittsburgh Pirates fans remember.  But I sure do.  He once personally threatened to beat me up.

Dave Parker died on June 28, less than a month before he would belatedly be inducted.  He was a key player on the Pirates 1979 World Championship team that won the World Series between two Pittsburgh Steelers Super Bowl championships, inaugurating Pittsburgh as the City of Champions.  

His accomplishments are major: National League Most Valuable Player, two batting championships, seven All Star appearances, including (if I remember correctly) an All Star MVP. He was a complete player: he hit for power as well as average, he fielded well and especially had a rocket arm, something he shared with the right fielder for the Pirates he succeeded, Roberto Clemente.

But he was not altogether a popular player in Pittsburgh.  Pittsburgh has had complicated relationships with its black athletes over the years.  It seemed that for every hero they loved, there was a villain they irrationally hated.  The beloved hero in those days was Willie Stargell.  Not only was he a superstar but he was a warm, magnetic personality, with a big smile and a generous reputation.  He was loveable, especially in these mature years..  

Dave Parker was not so easily loveable.  He was younger and brash, always with something to say. He got called arrogant and ungrateful.  He was the first million dollar a year player in sports and some fans resented him for it. 

In 1980, on Willie Stargell Day, during the eighth inning of the first game of a doubleheader at Three Rivers Stadium, someone in the stands threw a 9 volt battery at him as he stood in right field, almost hitting his head. He took himself out of the game.

 I was there that day, on assignment to the New York Times Magazine for a story on the relationship of Pittsburgh's championship teams to the city, otherwise reeling from the collapse of its steel industry.  I saw him in the locker room afterwards, a sad and sobered man.

Earlier--maybe that day, maybe an earlier game--I was in the locker room before the game.  It was a notoriously raucous scene, loud and a little crazy.  Someone smashed one of the wooden stools they each had in front of their lockers, and someone else picked up the big round seat of it and threw it across the room like a discus or a frisbee.

I was trying to interview players.  I think I only succeeded getting a quiet Bill Robinson to talk to me. Dave Parker was among the loud and rambunctious.  He told me that he was hated, that tires on his Mercedes were slashed and similar acts, but warned me not to print this or "I'll come after you, Big Bill."  The last had a mocking tone--he was clearly much bigger than me.  

But I do recall it was after that double header when in a much softer voice he apologized.  I hadn't taken him seriously, I thought it was funny.  There was something about him--he was exuberant, not a bully--that communicated itself to me. 

About five years later he testified against a local drug dealer, admitting that he had been a cocaine user, and the conduit for coke in the Pirates locker room.  Somehow that wasn't a surprise.  The difference of his affect before the game and after it told the story.  

I still think of him as one of the most dynamic players I'd ever seen, certainly up close.  But when he left Pittsburgh as soon as his contract was up also wasn't surprising.  He never got his due there.

Another vintage Pittsburgh Pirates star I saw play a number of times was also in the news this summer. For some reason, this year everybody wrote about Bobby Bonilla Day.

That same dynamic, of the beloved black star and the reviled black star on the Pirates, was repeated when Bobby Bonilla and Barry Bonds patrolled the outfield on a 90s team that was always in the playoffs but never quite made it to the Series.  This time it was the glowering Bonds who was the villain, and the sunny, smiling Bonilla the hero.

Just as a fan in the stands, watching Barry Bonds hit was amazing.  I recall a game when I was in the upper deck looking down at the diamond, watching him spray six scorching hits to all fields.  But on a lucky day I got a special thrill watching Bobby Bonilla hit, entirely because of where I was sitting.

I was living and working in the city of Pittsburgh then, and on impulse I walked over to the ball park one sunny afternoon.  Since I got there after the game started, a scalper outside was desperate to sell his ticket, so I got a very good seat for a pretty good price.  I recall barely sitting down just a couple of rows behind home plate when Bonilla came up.  A switch-hitter, he was batting left handed which, when I played as a kid, was my side of the plate.  A pitch came screaming in at his head, and he dived and fell in a cloud of dust.  But the next pitch he hit a line drive home run.  I was so close when he swung and connected, and I could follow the ball more or less from his point of view, all the way to the right field stands: it was the closest I could ever come to feeling what it was like to hit a big league homer.

Bonilla was in the news because July 1 is now famously called Bobby Bonilla Day.  Years ago when he signed a contract with the New York Mets and they mutually agreed to part company, they made an unprecedented bargain.

  Bonilla was owed nearly $6 million.  But he made a deal--he would take exactly nothing.  Nothing at all, for ten years.  But after that, he would be paid annually based on the accrued value of what they owed him, which eventually came to a total of over $1 million a year, every year until 2035.  So every July 1, he gets this annuity.  In New York it became known--ironically if not cynically-- as Bobby Bonilla Day.  By now however it's become something else, a little more joyful.

Deferred payment has since become a thing for sports contracts and contracts in other fields. Today's biggest star, Ohtani, has a deferred contract with the Dodgers--he gets a measly 1 or 2 million a year, but many years from now, that balloons to something like $50 million a year. It makes sense for him--he can get all the endorsement money and other fringe benefits from his current fame, but after his playing days, he's got an assured very decent retirement income, even if grocery prices continue to go up at their present pace.

Bonilla, who was a great hitter for the Pirates and even later, is proud of that contract, not only for what it means for his family, but for the example it set and suggests beyond baseball--about the benefits of a guaranteed income, and security later in life.

One of the Butterflies

The trouble with pleasure is in the timing

 it can overtake me without warning

 and be gone before I know it is here

 it can stand facing me unrecognized

 while I am remembering somewhere else

 in another age or someone not seen

 for years and never to be seen again

 in this world and it seems that I cherish

 only now a joy I was not aware of

 when it was here although it remains

 out of reach and will not be caught or named

 or called back and if I could make it stay

 as I want to it would turn into pain

--W.S. Merwin

Six Months That Shake The Republic

 It's coming up on six months since the reign of Chaos began.  Six months!  Only three and a half years to go, if we even get there.  

Things weren't going great for Chaos towards the end of June until two very important things happened: In a series of devastating decisions, the Supreme Court majority erased all doubt that they are functioning as an independent judiciary.  They are toadies of Chaos.  Similarly, a narrow majority of the US Congress demonstrated the same, by moving from a passive to an active support of Chaos with its ruinous omnibus bill, the Monster, which (among other things) is a massive redistribution of wealth upward to the billionaire class, and a sentence of suffering and many early deaths to millions of non-billionaire Americans who depend on Medicaid and Obamacare, food stamps and other support.  So they can join the least of these elsewhere in the world suffering and dying because food and medical aid has been mindlessly and heartlessly disappeared.

Thus Chaos is back on track towards full-blown dictatorship, accompanied by corruption and tyranny.  As part of the Monster, Congress passed an enormous budget for ICE, the Chaos secret police.  At $170 billion, it is a larger budget than all other federal "law enforcement" combined. Larger than the military budget of most countries.  It is expected to pay for some 19,000 new ICE thugs.  

According to Josh Marshall, ICE has long been known in Washington as the dregs of federal law enforcement.  The thugs who can't get jobs anywhere else wind up with ICE.  They already show up armed to the teeth as if in a life-threatening war zone, to prey on helpless unarmed civilians, often women and children.  In this they resemble those other brave warriors who rapid-fire slaughter school children and old people at prayer.

Let us not lose track of how extraordinary this moment is.  We have a domestic armed force who show up masked, refusing to identify themselves, who scoop up brown people without probable cause and often without warrants, who then hide their prisoners and deny them legal representation, depositing them in concentration camps far from their homes and families, often  out of the country entirely.  Their inept and sudden blitzkreig-style assaults on neighborhoods and public places cause dangerous chaos and violence. 

While some of their victims face active torture (as did Abrego Garcia) in the unobservable gulags in other countries, others are disappeared into domestic concentration camps that are already a scandal.  Apart from their obvious deficiencies, a Wired magazine report detailed the lack of adequate and timely medical care. As for-profit operations their incentive is to keep costs low, so overcrowding, inadequate food, medical care and sanitation often result. 

The ostensible excuse for these raids used to be to get violent lawbreaking immigrants off the streets, but studies show that less than 10% of those disappeared have any criminal record.  Even more telling, NBC News reports that of known undocumented who have been convicted of sexual assault and homicide, ICE has managed to get only 6% of them.

Chaos and his minions suggest a range of motives for all this, including racism and backdoor eugenics, but the profit motive is pretty prominent, too.  In a story that hasn't gotten the play it deserves, Rolling Stone has reported that Stephen Miller, the spawn of Satan and Roy Cohn, who is running this war on the helpless unfettered from the White House, has "a substantial amount of stock" in one of ICE's "most prominent contractors" for its concentration camps.  If you google "human trafficking" you will see several definitions that come from the Justice Dept. and elsewhere in the federal government.  It's hard to see that this isn't exactly that, by those definitions.

Very recently, an ICE raid in California led to what the NYTimes called "chaos" with one man dead, and a pitched battle with the families and local witnesses involving chemical agents and possibly a shot fired.  On or about that day however, a federal district court judge ordered such raids ended in LA and six other California counties, because of evidence suggesting they are the product of racial profiling.

This particular court finding and action may not survive the appeals court, and seems likely to be reversed by the bent-over majority of the Supreme Court, even assuming that ICE pays any attention to it. But it highlights another feature of this extraordinary moment. A significant part of the federal judiciary is finding that the federal executive is acting unconstitutionally in a dizzying array of areas. That this conflict is ongoing and persistent is something new in our time.  A suggestion that the federal executive is pursuing racist policies is also highly unusual and highly significant. As well as highly accurate.

  The New York Times compiled a set of acerbic court comments by 48 different federal court judges (D and R appointees), including several on the order of "this is a path of perfect lawlessness." This observation is amplified in another historically significant statement made by a sitting member of the Supreme Court who wrote in one of her dissents that a Court decision threatens "the rule of law," and publicly warned that American democracy is in peril. 

"Wall of Shame" sculpture in Brooklyn with crimes of pardoned Capitol insurrectionists

The rule of law! Nothing much is more basic to how this country functions, as well as its appeal to people from other countries--prosperity is of course a draw, but the rule of law especially as it is applied to individual liberties and democratic processes is just as important: it is exceptional and a model.  Without it, there is chaos.  And therefore Chaos.

The basic belief (as analyzed by Heather Cox Richardson) is that, contrary to the major premise of the nation's founding document so recently celebrated, the Chaos tyrants don't believe we are all created equal.  Some are (in the words of George Orwell's fable) more equal than others.  I'm not sure that, like Richardson, I'd apply this belief to all of Magaland, but it certainly seems to be held by highly placed federal operatives like Stephen Miller and v.p. Vance.  

Chaos himself rhetorically expands the people, institutions (right now it's often universities) and categories he considers evil, preparing ground for his expanding Secret Police and weaponized Justice Dept. to come after them. Blatant extortion may not work so well with all universities or businesses as it did with, for example, the spineless Paramount brand. Considering how much damage has been done in just six months, more stringent measures may not be so far away.  All that ICE money includes lots of bucks earmarked for more concentration camps.

Meanwhile, Chaos policies become increasingly unpopular.  The most recent Gallup poll shows a walloping 79% of Americans say immigration is good for the country, including 64% of Republicans.  Only 38% support the stated Chaos policies of deporting all undocumented.  The capricious tariffs bringing chaos to the world and higher prices to the American economy continue to be highly unpopular, and in the latest polling, that includes Chaos supporters.

The Monster bill passed by Republicans is widely said to be deeply unpopular with everybody, even including businesses it is meant to benefit.  Why Rs did it anyway is partially answered by the revelation that the Medicaid cuts don't hit until after the 2026 congressional elections.  But there's also a suspicion of something darker: that those elections will not be permitted to be fair.  You can generally figure out what Chaos is doing by what he accuses his opponents of doing--the same thing.  He's been harping on fixed elections for years.  This next year will likely see more aggressive moves aimed at fixing 2026. 

not entirely fair but...

Even establishment types like James Carville are warning of this.  Whether Democrats can actually do anything about it remains to be seen.  Many if not most of its leaders are being criticized. Governor Gavin Newsom for leaving California (a state that is at war with the Chaos regime) at a critical moment to politic in South Carolina for a presidential election more than three years away.  Even Barack Obama, for not stepping up as the one Democrat with the popularity and gravitas to lead. 

So six months in, let us not lose sight of how different this all is. By standards of the previous 249 years, we have in the office of President someone who makes James Buchanan look good.  Or if you need more recent comparisons, he makes Ronald Reagan seem like an intellectual giant, Richard Nixon a paragon of moral virtue, G.W. Bush a genius of foreign policy.  He writes on the level of a distracted third grader, and cannot express a continuous thought, let alone a complex one. Whether or not he is demented in a clinical sense, his words and actions are convincing in that regard in a practical sense. That he and his minions have institutionalized overt cruelty as federal policy is perhaps their most depressing and dangerous accomplishment. 

It is true that his government of Fox faces could implode at any time, as infighting is already obvious, and there seems to be some splintering in Magaland. Normally such a high point as the week that Chaos took control of both Congress and the Supreme Court would--especially for a Republican-- precede a massive and self-destructive act of hubris and overreach.  But Chaos has done nothing but overreach for six months, and nothing has stopped him yet.  Slowed him maybe.  But such glitches don't seem to have thrown off the momentum of chaos. 

My Hand

See how the past is not finished

 here in the present

 it is awake the whole time

 never waiting

 it is my hand now but not what I held

 it is not my hand but what I held

 it is what I remember 

but it never seems quite the same

 no one else remembers it

 a house long gone into air

 the flutter of tires over a brick road

 cool light in a vanished bedroom

 the flash of the oriole

 between one life and another

 the river a child watched

--W.S. Merwin

What This Day Is About

 The Fourth of July celebrates the signing of the Declaration of Independence in 1776.  Here is the familiar part of that document:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.-

Here is the interesting part that immediately follows:

That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. 

Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.-

The Declaration lists the grievances against the King of England who was their absolute ruler, or dictator.  Among them are:

He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.

He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his Assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.

He has refused to pass other Laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of Representation in the Legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.

He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.

He has obstructed the Administration of Justice, by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary powers.

He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.

He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harrass our people, and eat out their substance.

He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures.

He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power.

The document then lists acts to which the monarch has assented, including

For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury:

For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences:

This began an experiment in government based on certain principles and protections, which on this anniversary is more endangered than it has ever been of perishing from this Earth.

It would be another 13 years before an independent United States created its government under the Constitution...and arguably another 236 years before an elected tyrant, with the active connivance of a Supreme Court majority and the majority of a hapless Congress, actively began to trash and dismantle that Constitution.  Suggesting the next American Revolution may be something of a restoration.  Maybe.