Category: government

Trump’s Drug War

The absurdity is overwhelming. Here we are as Americans, all party to the White House’s illegal murder of over eighty (so far) men in boats on the premise they are bringing drugs to the United States. As well remarked elsewhere, there is no evidence these boats are carrying drugs and no credibility in the idea these small vessels with a fuel range of 100-200 miles are embarking on a thousand mile journey to the U.S.

But even more insane is the idea that a nation under any government can stamp out drug use/abuse by ‘interdicting’ drugs enroute to this country. We can’t even stamp out drugs manufactured in within the borders of this country. Anyone who believes such nonsense needs to have these words tattooed onto their forehead: Supply-Demand. If people want a product, no matter how potentially dangerous, there will ALWAYS be a supplier. Basic economic fact. Reducing supply only results in higher prices for said product, i.e. better profits, more incentive to supply.

So let’s get real about illegal drugs. First, “drug users” include people who depend on caffeine in their morning coffee, iced tea at lunch or other caffeinated beverages, persons who ‘must have’ their cigarettes or other tobacco products, and persons prescribed any of a multitude of pharmaceuticals which address any of a multitude of human conditions from depression to headache to cancer. Secondly, there is an enormous difference between the use of and the abuse of any drug. Prohibitionists prefer to consider all illegal drug use as ‘abuse’ in order to justify draconian laws punishing users. We must keep in mind the blurred line dividing legal and illegal drugs is primarily based on their regulatory status and whether their production, sale, and use are permitted by law. Theoretically, this status is determined by government authorities based on factors like medical utility, potential for abuse, and perceived harm to the individual and society. In other words, there is no truly ‘illegal’ drug.

This theory supporting the prohibition of certain drugs has been shown to be a fabrication serving other less savory objectives. The drug war is a tool used by government to carry out activities which are illegal. For example, one might wonder about the president’s single-minded assault on alleged drug smugglers from Venezuela when coca leaf is grown in three other Latin American countries: Peru, Bolivia and Colombia. Surely the fact that Venezuela possesses the world’s largest oil reserves has nothing to do with it. Surely.

Never mind the fact that cocaine is hardly relevant in drug abuse circles since fentanyl hit the streets. In 2023, there were approximately 72,776 overdose deaths involving fentanyl (synthetic opioids other than methadone) compared to about 29,449 deaths involving cocaine.

Postcard showing an underground opium den in San Francisco, pre-1906 earthquake. By 1896, there were around 300 opium dens in San Francisco, mostly in Chinatown. In the 19th century and the early 20th century, opium smoking was common worldwide, especially in Asia, which was one of the sources of the opium poppy.

In order to better understand this absurdity, let’s go back more than a century to the country’s first ‘drug war’. The San Francisco Opium Den Ordinance of 1875 made it a misdemeanor to maintain or visit places where people smoked opium. These places were mainly in Chinese immigrant neighborhoods. Similar racially inflammatory state laws emerged. Soon after came the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which barred Chinese laborers from entering the U.S., a ban expanded to all Chinese people in 1902 and not fully repealed until 1943. The first federal drug law, the 1909 Smoking Opium Exclusion Act, prohibited importing and using opium. It wasn’t that the government suddenly became concerned about opium use. In a nutshell, it was that the railroads powering the economic growth of that period were now built, and thousands of Chinese who had been welcomed to this country to do the backbreaking work of carving tunnels out of rock and laying steel track were no longer of use. Even worse, these immigrants, the primary users of opium, were inviting relatives to immigrate and their jobs were seen as threats to white workers.[1]

Then there was alcohol. After nearly a century of growing religious fervor stemming from massive evangelical movements, especially the “Second Great Awakening,” characterized by fiery camp meetings, frontier revivalism, and emotionally charged preaching, a rising cry against alcohol resulted in ‘prohibition,’ enacted on a federal basis in 1920 but in individual states as early as the 1880s.

Carrie Nation became famous for her attacks on alcohol-serving establishments, using rocks, bricks, and her signature hatchet to destroy liquor bottles, mirrors, and bar fixtures. Before resorting to violence, she would kneel outside saloons, sing hymns, and deliver strong sermons to patrons and owners, sometimes calling herself the “Destroyer of Men’s Souls”.

“A wide coalition of mostly Protestants, prohibitionists first attempted to end the trade in alcoholic drinks during the 19th century. They aimed to heal what they saw as an ill society beset by alcohol-related problems such as alcoholism, domestic violence, and saloon-based political corruption.”[2]

Alcohol prohibition led to massive increases in organized crime (bootlegging, speakeasies), rampant corruption of officials, dangerous unregulated alcohol leading to sickness/death, huge losses in government tax revenue, and a general disrespect for the law, with little measurable public health benefit, ultimately proving a costly failure. Ultimately, prohibition led to the development of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), significantly expanding the role and authority of the FBI’s predecessor, the Bureau of Investigation (BOI), making it central to federal law enforcement by creating massive new criminal enterprises (bootlegging) that required federal intervention, strained resources, spurred corruption, and ultimately led to bigger federal crime-fighting roles and the rise of modern organized crime, impacting federal investigations for decades.

This powerful new agency could have drifted into irrelevance when alcohol was once again legal in 1932, but instead there is evidence that the federal official who spearheaded cannabis prohibition saw it as a way to maintain his department’s relevance and budget. Harry Anslinger, the head of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics (FBN), needed a new focus for his agency after alcohol prohibition was repealed. He launched a public campaign against cannabis (often using the “marihuana” spelling to associate it with Mexican immigrants), portraying it as a dangerous substance to justify his department’s continued existence. Anslinger’s rhetoric carried strong undercurrents of racial prejudice and xenophobia, targeting Mexican immigrants and Black jazz musicians.

Then as the ‘60s ended with massive marches in support of equal rights for minorities and women, against the Vietnam war, and in support of gay rights, President Richard Nixon officially launched the “War on Drugs” in the early 1970s, declaring drug abuse a public enemy and enacting significant federal legislation like the Controlled Substances Act to combat drug production, distribution, and use, though policies intensified under subsequent administrations. 

One of Richard Nixon’s top advisers and a key figure in the Watergate scandal said the war on drugs was created as a political tool to fight blacks and hippies, according to a 22-year-old interview recently published in Harper’s Magazine.

“The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people,” former Nixon domestic policy chief John Ehrlichman told Harper’s writer Dan Baum for the April cover story published Tuesday.

“You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities,” Ehrlichman said. “We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”[3]

A 2017 study showed that police forces which received military equipment were more likely to have violent encounters with the public, regardless of local crime rates. A 2018 study found that militarized police units in the United States were more frequently deployed to communities with large shares of African-Americans, even after controlling for local crime rates. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Militarization_of_police#cite_ref-17

In the next administration, First Lady Nancy Reagan famously addressed the drug “problem” with her “Just Say No.” advice, unwittingly illustrating the parental role now assumed by government over the private, consensual behavior of drug users. Reagan’s successor, George H.W. Bush, took it a step further. He promoted the 1033 Program (Defense Logistics Agency (DLA) Disposition Services) in the early 1990s to transfer surplus military gear to local law enforcement for the “War on Drugs.” Nowhere in this rush to judgement did anyone point out that M16/AR-15 rifles, grenade launchers, armored vehicles (APCs, MRAPs), night vision, tactical robots, and “less-lethal” gear (beanbag/pepperball guns, flashbangs) have absolutely no effect on drugs. These weapons and the “war” in which they are being used are against PEOPLE—American citizens, most of whom simply preferered to toke a joint after work rather than drink an alcoholic beverage.

This despite the fact that in the 1970s and ‘80s, marijuana was by far the most widely used of illegal drugs, was found in multiple studies not to be addictive and also found not to be a ‘gateway’ to harder drugs, as so often alleged in government reports. Even today, with drugs like cocaine and even fentanyl in the headlines, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) World Drug Report 2024, the estimated number of people who used various drugs at least once in the prior twelve months was: Cannabis (Marijuana): 228 million users; Opioids: 60 million users; Amphetamines: 30 million users; Cocaine: 23 million users; Ecstasy: 20 million users.

All the while, the drug war of those decades provided cover for illegal U.S. government operations in Central and South America as those nations began to resist colonization by American corporations seeking to exploit natural resources like oil, minerals, and agricultural opportunities. Fertile land and cheap labor could produce crops such as coffee, bananas, and other foods requiring year-round growing seasons.

According to Tim Weiner, the Central Intelligence Agency “has been accused of forming alliances of convenience with drug traffickers around the world in the name of anti-Communism” since its creation in 1947.[4] The CIA has a long, controversial history in South America, primarily during the Cold War, involving covert operations like coups, political destabilization, and support for right-wing regimes (e.g., Operation Condor) to counter perceived communist influence, leading to significant human rights abuses and democratic declines, with operations continuing into recent times, such as those in Venezuela. Key actions included overthrowing governments (Chile, Ecuador, Brazil), supporting anti-communist forces (Contras in Nicaragua, a major scandal where in U.S. operatives sold guns to Iran between 1981 and 1986, facilitated by senior officials of the Ronald Reagan administration. The administration hoped to use the proceeds of the arms sale to fund the Contras, an anti-Sandinista rebel group in Nicaragua.), and involvement in conflicts like the Salvadoran Civil War, with consequences like suppressed democracy and economic impacts.

This kind of interference in the affairs of other nations more or less permeates American history. In the early 20th century, during the “Banana Republic” era of Latin American history, the U.S. launched several interventions and invasions in the region (known as the Banana Wars) in order to promote American business interests. During the Cold War (1950s-1980s), the CIA carried out coordinated campaigns to install South American dictatorships (Argentina, Chile, Brazil, etc.) to track, kidnap, torture, and kill left-wing dissidents, with CIA support and intelligence sharing. In Guatemala (1954), the CIA overthrew the democratically elected President Jacobo Árbenz, linking to U.S. corporate interests, using exile forces and propaganda. In Chile (1970s), CIA efforts undermined President Salvador Allende, paving the way for a military coup. Same idea for Brazil (1964): Supported a coup against President João Goulart, leading to a military dictatorship. Nicaragua (1980s): Funded and trained the right-wing Contra rebels fighting the socialist Sandinista government, with alleged links to cocaine trafficking. El Salvador (1980s): Trained and equipped military units involved in massacres during the civil war.

CIA interventions often resulted in the collapse of democratic institutions, reduced civil liberties, and economic hardship, despite justifications of promoting democracy or fighting communism, according to research. The support ‘troops’ for these political objectives has become de facto occupation of these nations with armed agents of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency, with 87 foreign offices in 67 countries. For example, in the so-called “Southern Cone,” (Brazil, Chile, Argentina, Paraguay, Peru and Uruguay), are considered to be transit zones for the movement of cocaine base, cocaine HCL, and heroin being shipped from Colombia and Peru to markets in the U.S. and Europe, or producers of coca leaves. The end result of these often violent interventions in the affairs of our neighbors is the current and ongoing flood of desperate people arriving at our borders.

Not only are drug laws used outside our nation’s borders as cover for extra-judicial interference in international relations, they also serve domestically to selectively target specific individuals and politically inconvenient groups or based on racism or other prejudices, most recently undocumented immigrants. This is a useful tool for xenophobes determined to turn the United States into a white patriarchal “Christian” nation. The current administration manipulates this demographic by playing up the drug war.

Public support for prohibition policies relies on judgments of morality, that becoming intoxicated is immoral, an echo of the early 1800s temperance movement which reached its zenith with alcohol prohibition, the Eighteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. This same moral judgment about private consensual activity remains a strong current in the United States where prostitution, gambling, and drug use (other than legal drugs) fall under strong government control. While government cannot (yet) spy on the living rooms and bedrooms of its citizens, government agents find such laws useful in targeting specific types of people, as previously illustrated.

“Today, police make more than 1.5 million drug arrests each year, and about 550,000 of those are for cannabis offenses alone. Almost 500,000 people are incarcerated for nothing more than a drug law violation, and Black and brown people are disproportionately impacted by drug enforcement and sentencing practices. Rates of drug use and sales are similar across racial and ethnic lines, but Black and Latinx people are far more likely than white people to be stopped, searched, arrested, convicted, harshly sentenced, and saddled with a lifelong criminal record.

“The wide-ranging consequences of a drug law violation aren’t limited to senseless incarceration: people with low incomes are denied food stamps and public assistance for past drug convictions; states including Texas and Florida suspend driver’s licenses for drug offenses totally unrelated to driving; and numerous other policies deny child custody, voting rights, employment, loans, and financial aid to people with criminal records.”[5]

Despite apparent national political resolve to deal with the drug problem, inherent contradictions regularly appear between U.S. anti-drug policy and other national policy goals and concerns. Pursuit of drug control policies can sometimes affect foreign policy interests and bring political instability and economic dislocation to countries where narcotics production has become entrenched economically and socially. Drug supply interdiction programs and U.S. systems to facilitate the international movement of goods, people, and wealth are often at odds.[6]

  • “We are still in the midst of the most devastating drug epidemic in U.S. history,” according to Vanda Felbab-Brown, senior fellow at the Center for Security, Strategy, and Technology at Brookings Institution. In 2020, overdose deaths in the United States exceeded 90,000, compared with 70,630 in 2019, according to research from the Commonwealth Fund. Yet, the federal government is spending more money than ever to enforce drug policies. In 1981, the federal budget for drug abuse prevention and control was just over a billion dollars. By 2020, that number had grown to $34.6 billion. When adjusted for inflation, CNBC found that it translates to a 1,090% increase in just 39 years.[7]

What if that money had instead been applied to individuals and programs that support individual ambitions and needs—tiny homes for the homeless, for example? What if the costs of our interference in foreign nations had instead been directed toward helping the people of those nations deal with loss of farmland to multinational corporations, climate-change induced drought and hurricane damage, and support for social programs, education, and entrepreneurship, thereby reducing the urgency of people in those countries to flood to U.S. borders in hope of better lives?

Without hot button issues like women’s reproductory rights and drugs, politicians would have to gain votes based on performance rather than propaganda. Stepping away from “government as nannies” and the idea of controlling private behavior would allow taxpayer dollars to support programs that help deter substance abuse in the same way that public education has helped reduce the use of cigarettes. No one knows better than addicts that they, individually, are the only ones who can control their addiction. Ultimately, as free people, we must claim the fundamental right to kill ourselves if we wish it. Most importantly, awareness of draconian drug policies as a cover for illegal objectives both in and outside our nation’s borders would forever eliminate travesties such as the murdering of likely-innocent people in boats leaving Venezuela.

And, in the case of the current administration, understanding the real agenda of the drug war could rightfully turn the public attention fully to the president’s dirty Epstein laundry.

[1] https://muse.jhu.edu/article/240064

[2] Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prohibition_in_the_United_States

[3] https://www.cnn.com/2016/03/23/politics/john-ehrlichman-richard-nixon-drug-war-blacks-hippie

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_drug_trafficking_allegations

[5] https://www.vera.org/news/fifty-years-ago-today-president-nixon-declared-the-war-on-drugs

[6] https://www.everycrsreport.com/reports/RL33582.html

[7] https://www.cnbc.com/2021/06/17/the-us-has-spent-over-a-trillion-dollars-fighting-war-on-drugs.html

Arkansas and the Nation — Do We Have a Constitution?

https://www.5newsonline.com/video/news/local/arkansas-prison/franklin-county-prison-site-may-undergo-on-site-archaeological-work-ahead-of-construction/527-33b60464-ae22-4edf-86ec-a2a6576b58dc

Well, pig soooie y’all, doncha just love Little Miss Gub’ner Sarah and her special skills at getting her way? She decided she wanted a plop a prison down in Franklin County where people are outnumbered by rabbits and deer, so by god she’s gonna have it, by hook or by crook! Methods so far include secret purchase of land and not taking ‘NO!” for an answer. When questioned, her typical non-answer ensued:

No matter what the locals want, Miss Sarah is gonna ram this through. But the legislative committee tasked with approving funding said “NO!”

  • A bill to appropriate up to $750 million for a new Franklin County prison failed in the Arkansas State Senate for the fifth time on Tuesday. 21 voted for the bill on Tuesday, the highest number yet. 9 voted against, and 5 were marked as present. 27 yes votes were needed, as a three-fourths supermajority is required for an appropriations bill to pass. https://www.4029tv.com/article/franklin-county-funding-senate-fails-fifth/64422978

Still ramming, the GOP Gov’ness continued to ignore the will of the people, something she apparently learned at the knee of Mr. Trump, for whom she spent two years lying as his press secretary. Currently, as of May 16, 2025, she (and the Department of Corrections following her orders) have taken the next step, apparently under the belief that sooner or later she’ll successfully run over local (and state) concerns:

  • Franklin County, AR (KATV) — The State Board of Corrections tonight selected builders for a controversial prison project in Franklin County. In a special meeting tonight the board selected Nabholz Construction, a prominent Conway-based construction company, and J.E. Dunn Construction Group, based in Kansas City to partner on the project. They took that step despite the legislature’s unwillingness during the recent session to approve a $750 million request to fund the project. Still the board is armed with $75 million that had previously been appropriated for prison construction – and they’re using it to move the process forward. [By now the estimated cost is $850 million. Stay tuned for further cost escalations.]

This fits right in with the operational mindset of the GOP. In Arkansas, that has meant stifling the voice of the people despite the state constitution’s protection of the right to petition, as described in Article 5, Section 1:

  • The first power reserved by the people is the initiative. Eight per cent of the legal voters may propose any law and ten per cent may propose a constitutional amendment by initiative petition and every such petition shall include the full text of the measure so proposed. Initiative petitions for state-wide measures shall be filed with the Secretary of State not less than four months before the election at which they are to be voted upon; provided, that at least thirty days before the aforementioned filing, the proposed measure shall have been published once, at the expense of the petitioners, in some paper of general circulation.

Since Sanders took office, her handpicked attorney general and legislative minions have made every effort to hamstring the petition process, concluding the 2025 legislative session with the following:

  • Act 153 clarifies that the certification of ballot titles for initiatives, referendums and constitutional amendments as well as the signatures collected for those measures would only be valid for the next general election.
  • Act 154 expands the attorney general’s existing authority to reject a proposal if it conflicts with the U.S. Constitution or federal statutes and prevents the sponsor of a measure from submitting more than one conflicting petition simultaneously.
  • Act 218 requires signature gatherers, known as canvassers, to inform potential signers that petition fraud is a criminal offense.
  • Act 240 requires canvassers to request a photo ID from potential signers.
  • Act 241 requires canvassers to file a “true affidavit” with the secretary of state, the executive branch office that oversees elections, certifying they complied with the Arkansas Constitution and state laws related to canvassing, perjury, forgery and fraudulent practices in the procurement of petition signatures. Signatures submitted without the affidavit would not be counted.
  • Act 273 disqualifies signatures collected by canvassers if the secretary of state finds “by a preponderance of evidence” that they violated state law collecting the signatures.
  • Act 274 requires potential signers to read a petition’s ballot title or have it read to them; failure to ensure this would result in a misdemeanor charge against the canvasser.
  • Act 453 requires canvassers who are paid to collect signatures to be permanent residents of Arkansas. A sponsor of a ballot measure would be fined $2,500 per paid canvasser hired who does not meet this requirement.

This deliberate effort to block, restrict, hinder, impede, delay, inhibit, obstruct, undermine, and otherwise derail the efforts of Arkansas citizens to collect sufficient signatures with which to place a proposed measure before voters is a direct assault on citizens’ rights as clearly stated in the constitution. This most likely is an aftershock of the successful 2016 medical cannabis petition effort, the outcome of 17 years of citizen efforts. The likelihood of citizen efforts to further legalize cannabis, protect women’s healthcare rights, and other non-GOP ideas has driven this outrageous conglomeration of legislative foment and the governor’s veto of legislation that would allow drive-through delivery of legal medical cannabis to qualified patients from licensed outlets.

  • “This legislation would expand access to usable marijuana, therefore I am vetoing this legislation,” Sanders stated.

Never mind that a more informed point of view about marijuana would greatly reduce the need for new prison space… **

This is authoritarian thinking, apparently well learned from Trump and other GOP operatives (Stephen Miller springs to mind) in how to circumvent not only the letter of the law as written in the U.S. Constitution, but also the intent. Apparently the Founding Fathers didn’t know what they meant to say when they wrote “…no Person holding any Office of Profit or Trust under them, shall, without the Consent of the Congress, accept of any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State.”

Also, the Founders also apparently failed to designate skin color when they wrote “that every person born within the limits of the United States, and subject to their jurisdiction, is . . . a citizen of the United States.”  And so forth.

As things whittle down to the bone with these Republican yahoos, We the People are either going to have to settle for a king in the White House, or rise up. It gives some hope that over 200 lawsuits against Trump administration efforts have been filed. But, as repeatedly noted in the histories of democracy, “Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.”

**Possession of 1 ounce (28 grams) or more with two prior marijuana convictions is a Class D felony, carrying a penalty of up to 6 years in prison and a $6,000 fine. A total of 4,976 arrests for marijuana were reported for 2023, the last year available for such data. Huckabee is on record for opposing expansion of the medical marijuana program and legalization of recreational marijuana.

A Not So Modest Proposal

Social Support Programs: Address the Root

People Need Assistance in Accessing Support Programs. Will is a 61-year-old alcoholic who has managed to support himself through his excellent construction skills. After his work partner died four years ago, he lived in the attic of the man’s house until summer 2024 when the man’s 26-year-old son was jailed for beating up Will. When the son was released after four months, the widow chose to protect her son from future conflicts by telling Will he had to move out. He is currently living in a camper on a rural property by the generosity of an acquaintance. A wheel broke off his truck and he has no money to fix it, but without transportation, he can’t earn any money. He needs food stamps but has no computer or other means of applying. His phone ran out of minutes back in August.

Will is just one example of the problems facing people who need social support. What’s needed for Will and many others is an advocate who can assist him through the process but also, more importantly, to assess the person’s situation, capabilities, and needs and to assist that person in moving beyond their current status. Education, job training, mental health care, and/or medical treatment are among the needs often experienced by those seeking government assistance, but rather than actually helping people get the help they need, current programs throw out random packages of aid without any comprehensive effort at addressing the root causes.

An advocate for such applicants could assist in the process of seeking help as minimal as obtaining food stamps, but also gaining access to the full array of needed services, completing the application process properly, or assigning a counselor to help the applicant sort out his/her current life situation (in which case the advocate and counselor become a team). Without expert advocates to steer each applicant through an increasingly complex system, we risk wasting billions on systemic inefficiencies and do nothing to solve the problems that cause these people to need help in the first place.

Dispose of Outdated Laws

Drug laws: The drug war, like alcohol prohibition before it, frames the use of certain intoxicants as a moral failing. The result has been mass incarceration for private behavior.

All natural drugs should be immediately legalized, regulated like alcohol, and taxed. Tax proceeds for legal sales in Colorado, for example, have paid for homeless housing while reducing expenditures for law enforcement and prisons. This should include marijuana, coca leaf, psilocybin mushrooms, peyote, opium, and Ayahuasca, among others. Persons wishing to consume any of these substances should be able to walk into a retail establishment like a liquor store anywhere in the country and buy a product that’s been certified for purity and dosage. Such products should not be controlled by pharmaceutical companies. Individual production of such substances for personal consumption should be allowed without taxation or regulation. Public venues which serve psychoactive drugs should be licensed in the same manner as establishments for consuming alcohol.

Anyone previously convicted or imprisoned for possession, “manufacture,” or sale of these substances should be released from incarceration and their convictions expunged from the record. Unfortunately, due to the massive numbers of persons involved, any compensation for their loss of income or other social costs is not feasible.

Substance abuse, like alcoholism, can become a serious problem for certain people. Currently, only the very rich can afford treatment programs that address the whole person through nutrition, counseling, and exercise, among other things. Tax revenues derived from retail sales should first provide for comprehensive treatment centers in every community where anyone suffering from addiction can be immediately admitted.

Performance testing for job safety should take the place of current drug testing. A brief interface with a computer terminal for tests tailored to immediately show competency to meet job requirements—attention, dexterity, coordination, etc.—should be part of the employee’s work day.  A test failure, no matter what the cause of impairment—hangover, intoxication, fight with the spouse—could become part of that employee’s record with appropriate consequences for repeated failure. Intoxicated driving will be prosecuted.

Sex Laws: Prostitution should be legalized, regulated, and taxed as any other business. If a person wants to sell the use of his/her body for sexual gratification, it should be within his or her right to do so. Government licensing should include regular health inspections to ensure public safety. Houses of prostitution could include luxurious settings, the most attractive employees, or the most innovative approach – for example, offer an immersive experience in an establishment with fantasy themes (medieval, harem, S&M dungeon, etc.). There should be no restriction on how houses of prostitution or individual practitioners might combine their services with other services such as massage, restaurants, intoxication venues (alcohol and/or drugs), or even mental health counseling.

Nudity Laws: Allocation of designated locations where people can go without clothing should be legal in all states.

Facilities/Resources: Eliminating drug and sex laws will result in decreased need for jails and prisons as well as employees of the criminal justice system. Freed-up resources should be redirected to improving public defender salaries and providing for persons prosecuted for other offenses.

Reining in Corporate Greedmasters

CEOs and other top executives should receive pay based on the pay their workers receive. If the company is profitable enough to pay at CEO $27 million a year, workers should be earning far more than $15-$20 per hour. Likewise, prices for products that serve a lifesaving role for consumers should be regulated by the government just as utilities and other vital public services are regulated.

Healthcare: Medicare for everyone. Eliminate insurance companies unless they are non-profit. Hospitals and pharmaceutical companies must be non-profit. Drugs would be price controlled. Research for new treatments and new drugs would operate under federal grants.

Legal Services: Expand funding for free legal aid so that injured parties have full recourse to legal action.

Everyone is responsible

National service: Everyone reaching age 18 must serve whether Peace Corps, military, domestic infrastructure, civic duties or whatever else would benefit the public at large. No exceptions except for significant disability. Higher education, either college or vocational, can wait until the completion of two years’ public service. Serving in such duties should be in a location away from the family home, should provide food, shelter, and a minimal wage, and should result in free college/vocational training at its conclusion similar to the G.I. Bill.

Education

All secondary schools should be required to offer a curriculum that includes literature/language, basic math, basic science, state and national history, speech/debate, music, art, and domestic duties including balancing a checkbook, changing a tire, and nutrition/how to cook. Males and females need the same courses. Domestic duty classes would include thorough sex education with a segment where kids have to carry a baby (doll) around 24-7. Dolls used for this teaching experience should be computerized to function as close to human behavior as possible including messy diapers, hunger, and crying. Birth control pills should be freely dispensed at school health clinics with or without parental permission.

Teacher salaries should be competitive with other professions requiring college degrees even in the most impoverished districts.

States which allow religious schools and home schooling should be required to regularly test home schooled and religious school students for the same course requirements as public schools students. Non-public school students who can’t pass the exams cannot receive a diploma. Repeated failure to pass exams would require the student to enter public schools. Public school students who fail to pass exams would be entered into a special unit of the school system and assessed for need of nutrition, mental health, and family problems, among other things, and individually tutored until learning improves. Vocational training for all trades should be available and affordable as should college.

Homeless Population

An estimated 25-30% of homeless people suffer mental illness. Yet few programs addressing homelessness provide for treatment. Often these individuals end up in local jails because they can’t take care of themselves and there are no longer facilities dedicated to treating them.

“…during the Reagan administration, Federal funding for such institutions was shut down so that our wealthy class could pay less in taxes, and that put many thousands of mentally ill people out on the street corner. We have done nothing since to remedy this. A compassionate nation would care for these unfortunate people, and provide the mental facilities to house them where they could get the help they need that their conditions require.”[1]

Most homeless programs exhaust their resources in simply trying to feed and shelter the homeless. Most of them fall short even of that. Successful efforts to address homelessness are based on meeting physical needs as well as mental health concerns. Addiction is another illness at the root of many homeless situations. Until systemic remedies are put into place, homelessness will continue to plague us.

The more successful programs for the homeless are centered in tiny home villages or converted industrial/commercial properties. As shopping malls have become less viable, some cities and nonprofits have converted these sprawling spaces to homeless housing. Facilities serving the homeless would offer food service, counseling, health care, and job training.

Taxes

Poverty levels should be adjusted annually to meet the real costs of housing, food, and transportation. Persons earning above poverty level should pay income taxes on a sliding scale. Income at some level, say above five million, should pay a very high rate, as much as 70% of income.

In addition to legalized ‘sin’ transactions (drugs, sex) that would generate significant tax revenues, churches should be taxed like any other business. Penalties and additional taxes should be assessed against any corporation or individual found to be hiding income in foreign countries. No tax shelters.

[1] https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-most-successful-homeless-program

What Democrats Did Wrong

Party leaders failed to see the long term need for younger, more vigorous candidates. The bulk of Biden’s term suffered from his shuffling gait, whispery voice, and apparent mental decline. Not that Trump is so much younger, but his demeanor as a bully conveys a message of strength. Sadly.

Dems also failed to foresee Biden’s inability to win a second term and consequently failed to hold a 2024 primary that would have introduced all best possible candidates. Call it allegiance to a venerable old warrior (Biden) or inability to break out of an established order of candidate precedence, or fear of the unknown, this lack of a so-called ‘fair’ fight in selecting a presidential candidate played a significant role in Harris’ defeat.

Sorry, but Kamala Harris was not popular in the 2020 primaries from which she withdrew for lack of funding. Built-in negatives aside from her mixed race and being female included her speech affectations which make her seem smug. One would think that the defeat of Hillary would have been lesson enough. For now, the fight is still between present day realities which are incomprehensible to conservatives and the “good old days” when men were ‘successful’ if they knew how to saddle a horse.

During Biden’s term, there was no apparent coherent approach to illegal immigration. This played into Harris’ weakness on this issue, which Biden appointed her to address. Whatever policy recommendations she made failed to make news cycles. As noted by the Washington Post, “Harris, in fact, has never been in charge of the border. The Department of Homeland Security manages migration. Her immigration role for the Biden administration has included boosting U.S. aid to Central America, traveling to the region and discouraging potential migrants from making the dangerous journey to the United States.” Be that as it may, if there had been a strong Biden policy on illegal immigration and prominent promotion of those policies, Trump wouldn’t have been able to make that topic a centerpiece of his campaign.

https://abc13.com/migrant-caravan-immigrations-and-customs-story-migrants/4690683/

Yes, boosting U.S. aid to Central America is foundational to stemming the tide, as Harris knew. Sadly, the fact is that coherent immigration policies addressing root causes aren’t enough to stop people seeking better opportunities for themselves and their children. If your children are starving and your home and livelihood are daily threatened by violent gangs rampaging through neighborhoods, you too would leave behind everything you’ve ever known and walk to the promised land.

THERE IS NO GOOD SOLUTION to illegal immigration. There is no fence high enough, or military/border guard personnel vast enough to make illegal entry impossible. As climate change advances, more and more populations will face starvation and violent domestic turmoil. The U.S. cannot take them all. No one can. This message must be made clear. Trump’s plan to deport millions WILL NOT SOLVE THE PROBLEM. This is whack-a-mole thinking.

Biden, in the seeming tradition of Democrats and, in the words of Michelle Obama, “went high” when the Republicans “went low.” But we’re dealing with primitive thinking where the hero bashes the villain over the head. With no head bashing, there’s no hero. The villain wins. It’s past time for the Democrats to develop more than one track and start bashing. To greatest possible extent, yes, don’t give up the vision of a better world—peace, love, good vibes. But we also must carry a big stick and when somebody needs to get bashed over the head, bash the son of a bitch. The Biden administration’s justice department took waaaay too long quibbling over how/when/why to prosecute Trump for his shocking illegal acts. He should never have been free to run for re-election.

Not that Biden or the justice department had control over local and state prosecutions, but the failure of appropriate federal action left the door open for Trump to escape from prosecution in lower courts, as is now obvious. It was the first Trump presidency which allowed him to stack the Supreme Court, and that will be the case again. His sponsors are playing the long game, moves that have been feverishly planned since at least the 1950s. The strategy is to whip up fear and hatred to drive conservative voters to the polls, desperate to buy God’s favor by forcing the entire nation into a theocracy. None of this matters to Trump, whose entire plan involves self-enrichment, self-aggrandizement, and eluding justice.

True to their religious belief system, conservatives prefer government which regulates what the population does in their bedrooms and allows the business segment to run wild. The opposite is true for liberals, who believe what people do in their bedrooms is no one’s business and what the business community does can ONLY be regulated by government. Who else can force corporations not to dump industrial waste in our rivers? Ensure clean drinking water and safe food supplies? Mitigate the onslaught of pandemics? Enforce design and construction standards for roadways, bridges, and buildings?

These requirements of government are easily forgotten by a fearful, angry electorate who is not educated to understand these fundamental duties, an electorate even more distracted by a wannabe dictator whose success depends on agitating division with lies and false promises. This can only be effectively countered by an equally vociferous Democrat whose presence and actions meet the pseudo-strength of a candidate like Trump. Potential right-wing demagogues have the advantage of money flowing from a huge array of business interests. Liberals have only the People to carry on the framework for freedom established by the Founding Fathers:

  • We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

Foundational to this vision was EDUCATION. Public education was not an afterthought of the American Revolution – it was a core ideal of our Founders. They maintained that a well-educated population was the only means of ensuring America’s future. The roots of taxpayer-funded public education in the United States can be traced back to the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1647. The colony passed a law that required towns to establish schools, made children attend school, and allowed the state to levy taxes to support schools. This traditional determination now stands at risk from religious forces who have managed to divert tax dollars into support for private, religious schools which often slant their programs to fit a religious agenda.[1]

Could Obama have warded off this SCOTUS situation with his nomination of Merrick Garland for the post by steamrolling the Senate?

  • It is in full accord with traditional notions of waiver to say that the Senate, having been given a reasonable opportunity to provide advice and consent to the president with respect to the [Supreme Court] nomination of [Judge Merrick] Garland, and having failed to do so, can fairly be deemed to have waived its right.  Here’s how that would work. The president has nominated Garland and submitted his nomination to the Senate.  The president should advise the Senate that he will deem its failure to act by a specified reasonable date in the future to constitute a deliberate waiver of the right to give advice and consent.  What date?…90 days is a perfectly reasonable amount of time.

– Excerpt from an op-ed column in The Washington Post on April 10 by Washington, D.C., lawyer Gregory L. Diskant, who is in private practice and also serves as a member of the national governing board of the liberal advocacy group, Common Cause.

  • “The Appointments Clause [of Article II] clearly implies a power of the Senate to give advice on and, if it chooses to do so, to consent to a nomination, but it says nothing about how the Senate should go about exercising that power.  The text of the Constitution thus leaves the Senate free to exercise that power however it sees fit.  Throughout American history, the Senate has frequently – surely, thousands of times – exercised its power over nominations by declining to act on them.

 – Excerpt from a commentary about the Diskant column by M. Edward Whalen, president of the conservative advocacy group, the Washington-based Ethics and Public Policy Center, published April 10 on the National Review Online’s Bench Memo.[2]

Equally appalling was the lack of foresight by none other than Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg who refused to retire during Obama’s presidency, which would have allowed another justice to step in on her coattails. Despite her excellent record and unfailing support for liberal causes, a bit of hubris caused her to cheat the future of a suitable replacement.

Democrats need to wake up! Making nice is not always the best course of action when we’re dealing with not only ignorant tyrants like Trump but also foreign bad actors with their thumbs on the scales.

[1] In June 2022, in Carson v. Makin, the high court held that when governments choose to subsidize private schools, they must allow such funds to pay for religious schools. A majority of current justices appear to believe that excluding religious groups from government programs is a violation of the First Amendment’s free exercise clause. Although court precedents prohibit direct funding of religion under the establishment clause, the current court could decide that if the state funds secular public charter schools, religious public charter schools cannot be excluded from such funding.  See https://www.freedomforum.org/government-fund-religious-schools/

[2] https://constitutioncenter.org/blog/constitution-check-could-obama-bypass-the-senate-on-garland-nomination

What Trump Will Bring

In the pending Trump presidency, there will be no support for Ukraine or Palestinians, and it will be the desperate people of those countries who suffer. That suffering will spill over, from Ukraine into more of Europe, from Palestinian lands into Lebanon and the broader Middle East. Trump’s buddy Vladimir Putin is thrilled. The wealth of Ukraine in natural resources and rich cropland will strengthen the weaknesses of Russia and move Putin closer to seeing his lifelong dream realized, the re-creation of the Soviet empire.

If Trump et al succeed in tearing down the U.S. Constitution and all we stand for, pretty soon the war will be on our land, in our towns and farmland. Communist nations like Russia, Iran, and China will simply walk in through the doors Trump is leaving open.

There will be no acknowledgement of climate change or its inevitable, already-apparent crises as insurance rates skyrocket in a futile effort to mitigate losses from flooding, storms, and other weather extremes. If we’re troubled by immigration now, wait a few more years of uncontrolled climate change when entire nations are unable to house or feed their populations due to floods or lack of agriculture. Do we shoot them at the border? Let them starve?

What would Jesus do?

Most telling will be the nosedive of our economy, not just in the four years of Trump’s legal term of office, but thereafter as his exploitation of U.S. oil reserves undermines our future energy independence. Trump’s ‘drill baby drill’ cries ignore the wisdom of alternative energy. He is simply too stupid to understand why we should use anything but oil even though all known reserves will run out by 2070. Theoretically, we may never run out of oil because, given the depth of the Earth’s core, there will be new wells to discover. That said, it’s highly unlikely that the practice of mining such depths will become economically viable.

Trump’s second presidency will expand on his previous dismissal of health crises preparation which left us vulnerable to the COVID outbreak after he liquidated the pandemic preparedness established by previous presidents. What will happen with the next pandemic? Researchers say there’s as much as a 50 percent chance that we’ll see something like this again in the next twenty-five years. Trump’s lack of intellect leaves the entire nation unprepared.

Even more concerning is his ignorance of history, which allows him to pursue his fantasy of shifting civil service jobs to political appointments in direct violation of the United States Constitution. Traditionally, the civil service has been a sector of government that operates under a merit-based system to ensure that government jobs are filled by the most qualified individuals. This system protects civil servants from political influence and allows them to make independent decisions without fear of reprisal. The civil service is a key part of the constitutional framework because it helps to uphold the rule of law and ensure that the government is run by merit, not political affiliation. Trump’s affection for the idea of government work force composed of loyalists completely overturns this tradition.

Trump doesn’t care what happens in the future as long as he stays out of prison for his multitude of felonies. He doesn’t care about the lives of anyone besides himself. He’s eager to turn over the economy to people like Elon Musk, who acknowledges he is autistic, a condition marked by impaired social interactions, verbal and nonverbal communication deficits, and restricted, repetitive behavior patterns and associated with poor emotional control. To place the future of the U.S. economy in the hands of such a person means loss of critical social support for the weakest and neediest among us. Such suffering would not be a concern to Musk. Or Trump, who, when confronted with the disability of his nephew’s son, famously told his nephew ““Those people…” Donald said, trailing off. “The shape they’re in, all the expenses, maybe those kinds of people should just die.”

Similarly, Trump has nominated Robert Kennedy Jr. to head the U. S. departments in charge of public health including the Department of Health and Human Services, the Center for Disease Control, and the Food and Drug Administration. But Kennedy has no science or medical background, other than claiming to have had worms in his brain. He also reported that at one point, mercury poisoning in his body reached ten times safe levels. Studies show that high exposure to mercury induces changes in the central nervous system, potentially resulting in irritability, fatigue, behavioral changes, tremors, headaches, hearing and cognitive loss, and dysarthria (a speech disorder that makes it difficult to speak due to issues with the muscles, nerves, or brain that control speech). Kennedy’s negative attitude about vaccines no doubt attracted voters who were petulantly annoyed by public health measures enforced during COVID like wearing masks and being vaccinated to prevent spread of the virus.

Perhaps the most immediately dangerous is Pete Hegseth, a FOX News commentator and host of “Fox & Friends” now nominated to be Secretary of Defense. An Army veteran of eight years, he plans a “frontal assault” to reform the Department of Defense from the top down, including by purging “woke” generals, limiting women from some combat roles, eliminating diversity goals and utilizing the ‘real threat of violence’ to reassert the United States as a global power.” (ABC News) He has called the United Nations a ‘farce’ and “giant joke’ and believes military action is the best plan to solve world problems. Aside from his warmongering ideas, he has advocated for the pardon of war criminals. He holds no sympathy for Palestinians and embraces Israelis as “God’s chosen people” with “Zionism and Americanism at the front lines of Western civilization.” (Wikipedia) His concept of “civilization” apparently follows the same moral codes as Trump. “Hegseth and his first wife, Meredith Schwarz, divorced in 2009. He married his second wife, Samantha Deering, in 2010; they have three children. In August 2017, while still married to Deering, Hegseth had a daughter with Fox executive producer Jennifer Rauchet, with whom he was having an extramarital relationship. He and Deering divorced in August 2017. Hegseth and Rauchet, who has three young children from her first marriage, married in August 2019.” (Wiki)

Miller, left. Goebbels, right

Even if the new Republican majority in the Senate rejects one or more of these nominations, there’s little likelihood that Trump’s subsequent appointments would be any less unsuitable for government positions. He has already put extremist Stephen Miller in a position that will control immigration, our very own Joseph Goebbels, a German Nazi politician who was the chief propagandist for the Nazi Party and then Reich Minister of Propaganda from 1933 to 1945. He was one of Adolf Hitler’s closest and most devoted followers, known for his deeply virulent antisemitism which was evident in his publicly voiced views. He advocated progressively harsher discrimination, including the extermination of the Jews in the Holocaust.

Finally, there is the nomination of Tulsi Gabbard as the head of our national intelligence agencies. As noted by news media, Gabbard’s record “reflects an alarming pattern of siding with Russia and other authoritarian regimes, raising questions about whether she should serve as America’s top-ranking intelligence official. Her selection has alarmed lawmakers on both sides of the aisle, though most Republicans have refrained from public criticism. …[She] lacks deep intelligence experience and is seen as soft on Russia and Syria. …Among the risks, say current and former intelligence officials and independent experts, are that top advisers could feed the incoming Republican president a distorted view of global threats based on what they believe will please him and that foreign allies may be reluctant to share vital information.” (Reuters)

But Trump’s voters don’t care about such details. He was elected because he made promises to enact policies which reflect old prejudices and enshrine ignorance under an authoritarian ruler. Old habits don’t vanish simply because new opportunities are presented, not when those habits have been ingrained for tens of thousands of years. The brain wiring isn’t there. The ‘conservative’ clings to the past because it is familiar.

Not better.

Coming soon: What the Democrats Did Wrong

The Rich and Social Security

I’m sorry to burst everyone’s bubble about the rich and Social Security, but I believe it’s flat out wrong to think it’s as simple as the rich should pay “their fair share.” Compared to everyone else, they already pay their fair share because what each of us pays in Social Security tax is based on our income. The rich earn more, so they pay more.

The sticking point is the cap, the amount of the tax to be collected before the assessment stops. So what “pay their share” actually means to those hoping for reform is “get rid of the cap.”

But what would that mean?

“In 2024, the maximum amount of earnings subject to Social Security tax is $168,600, which is up from $160,200 in 2023. This limit [cap] is also known as the contribution and benefit base or the taxable maximum. The tax rate for wages paid in 2024 is set by statute at 6.2 percent for employees and employers, each. This means that an individual with wages equal to or larger than $168,600 would contribute $10,453.20 to the OASDI program in 2024.” And no more.

“The federal government adjusts the Social Security cap annually to keep pace with inflation based on changes in the National Average Wage Index. Earnings above this amount are not subject to Social Security tax or factored into Social Security payments in retirement.”

So at the maximum level of taxation this year, a person would pay a total $10,453.20 into the system.

And what does this person draw in benefits?

“The maximum Social Security benefit depends on age, earnings, and when benefits are taken. In 2024, the maximum benefit is $3,822 per month for those who retire at full retirement age, which is between 66 and 67. For those who retire at age 62, the maximum benefit is $2,710 per month, and for those who retire at age 70, the maximum benefit is $4,873 per month.” 

To earn the maximum Social Security benefit, individuals must have been a high earner for 35 years and wait until full retirement age to claim benefits.

The ‘high earner’ contributing to the fund based on $168,600 for 35 years would have a pension balance of over $5,901,000 by retirement. At the $4,873 maximum monthly payout for the retiree, this amount would be depleted in 100.87 years, hardly a likely remaining life span after retirement age. Even living 20 years past retirement age, that person would only recoup about 20% of what he paid in.

On the other end of the tax calculation, a low income earner of $35,000/year might contribute far less than he/she will actually be able to receive at retirement. An employee sees 6.2% of his earnings withheld from his paycheck while his employer pays another 6.2%, for a total of $4,340/year based on $35,000/year. A self-employed person has to pay the entire 12.4% into the fund. Either way, thirty-five years later, that person will have accumulated $151,900 in his benefit fund.

Depending on the age at retirement, let’s say 66 years, his monthly benefit amount would be $1,846. Fortunately for him, if he lives twenty years after retirement, he will receive a total of $443,040 in benefits, a total of $291,140 MORE than he paid into the system.

Yes, there are significant numbers of men who die before they can claim any benefits, although their widows and/or minor children can draw on those accounts. A widow who never earned an income can live on her dead spouse’s benefits for the rest of her life, an amount which can easily skyrocket into large sums as about 16% of the men and about 34% of the women live to ninety or beyond.

Currently, life expectancy for women is 80.2 years while for men, it is 74.8 years. About half of women drawing benefits receive amounts based on their husbands’ earnings. Calculating by averages alone, the 5.4 years that women live past the male average death age creates a disproportionate amount of benefits paid that exceeds taxed earnings.

There is no cap on how many years a person can receive benefits. The benefits continue until death. The longer we live, the more benefits we receive.

So there’s no method by which the “rich must pay their fair share” when it comes to Social Security. Nor is the equity in promising widows a lifetime of benefits based on the husband’s contributions.

But wait! Aside from Social Security, a far simpler method of taxing excessive wealth is a more effective income tax rate. Consider the following:

  • According to a 2021 White House study, the wealthiest 400 billionaire families in the U.S. paid an average federal individual tax rate of just 8.2 percent. For comparison, the average American taxpayer in the same year paid 13 percent.
  • According to leaked tax returns highlighted in a ProPublica investigation, the 25 richest Americans paid $13.6 billion in taxes from 2014-2018—a “true” tax rate of just 3.4 percent on $401 billion of income.[1]

That’s not paying your fair share. Instead of rewarding wealth over work, our tax system should ensure that billionaires play by the same set of rules as the rest of us. It’s good for the planet, and it’s essential to the preservation of our democracy.[2] An easy method of capturing a greater portion of excessive income is the wealth tax plan advocated by Sen. Bernie Sanders:

Key Points:

  • Establish an annual tax on the extreme wealth of the top 0.1 percent of U.S. households.
  • It would only apply to net worth of over $32 million. Anyone who has a net worth of less than $32 million would not see their taxes go up at all under this plan.
  • This would raise an estimated $4.35 trillion over the next decade and cut the wealth of billionaires in half over 15 years, which would substantially break up the concentration of wealth and power of this small privileged class.
  • Ensure that the wealthy are not able to evade the tax by implementing strong enforcement policies.[3]

Aside from higher income taxes on the 1% super wealthy, another major misconception about Social Security is the idea that the government has “borrowed” money from the fund and that’s why it seems to be running out. Yes, the federal government borrows Social Security funds. This is a mechanism that was built in when the program began. The point being, the government is required to pay the money back with interest.

  • Social Security income is deposited into two financial accounts called trust funds – the Old-Age Survivors Insurance (OASI) Trust Fund and the Disability Insurance (DI) Trust Fund. The trust funds are used to pay out Social Security benefits and cover administrative costs.
  • The trust funds hold money that isn’t needed in the current year to pay benefits and other expenses. By law, that money is invested in special Treasury bonds that are guaranteed by the U.S. government and earn interest. This adds to the fund. The Treasury is obligated to pay back the money it borrows with interest, according to AARP and the Congressional Research Service, and the SSA says the federal government has never failed to do so.[4]

Another misunderstood program is the Supplemental Security Income, or SSI, similar to Social Security, which guarantees a minimum level of income for aged, blind, or disabled individuals. It acts as a safety net for individuals who have limited resources and little or no Social Security or other income. Individual States have the option to supplement Federal payments for SSI. Currently, states fund about 33% of the program while the federal government puts up the remaining 66% ($55.4 billion in 2021). SSI is financed by general funds of the U.S. Treasury — personal income taxes, corporate taxes, and other taxes. Social Security taxes collected under the Federal Insurance Contributions Act (FICA) or the Self-Employment Contributions Act (SECA) do not fund the SSI program.[5]

We can and should argue for change. But we need to start out with the facts.

[1] https://www.oxfamamerica.org/explore/stories/do-the-rich-pay-their-fair-share/

[2] Ibid

[3] https://berniesanders.com/issues/tax-extreme-wealth/

[4] https://www.verifythis.com/article/news/verify/social-security-verify/how-government-borrows-social-security-trust-funds/

[5] https://www.ssa.gov/pubs/EN-17-008.pdf

Next Step

On Thursday, May 9, 2024, Senators Katie Britt (R-AL), Marco Rubio (R-FL), and Kevin Cramer (R-ND) introduced the More Opportunities for Moms to Succeed (MOMS) act. Britt … said the measure would provide a federal database of resources for pregnant women and women parenting young children, but that information excludes anything that touches on abortion. The measure is clear that it enlists the government in opposition to abortion, but more than that, it establishes that the government will create a database of the names and contact information of pregnant women, which the government can then use “to follow up with users on additional resources that would be helpful for the users to review.” Heather Cox Richardson, May 13, 2024 (Monday)

Then,

  1. Create a database of all females of child bearing age.
  2. Require monthly reports of pregnancy tests from all females in the database, on penalty of felony prosecution.
  3. Once pregnancy is reported, the female will be confined in a gestation facility.
  4. Any employment or domestic duties of that female will be suspended until she gives birth.
  5. If complications occur in the pregnancy, the embryo/fetus will be the priority consideration.
  6. Upon birthing, the female and newborn will be returned to her former place in the community.

Pity the True Believers

Washington Post 2016

What will happen to them, these lovers of Trump, the men and women who act as if he is the next risen Christ, or at least the best man possible to lead the United States of America? What will happen when the inexorable turn of the wheels of justice finally finally grind him into the ground?

Will they weep? Yes. Will their anger grow exponentially to the point of ignition? Yes.

When the inevitable happens, and yes, I believe in the Constitution and our system of laws that have steered this nation through war and despair for over 200 years. I believe that Trump will finally be held accountable for all his lies and frauds and empty promises that continue to spill from his deteriorating mind, mouthed in nonsensical phrases and welcomed with open arms into the aisles of churches and the homes of the True Believers. I believe that the witnesses and the attorneys and the juries and judges will do their duty, that he will be convicted of his crimes against the people and the nation, that he will at some point have to face the truth about himself.

Nothing could be more terrifying for a man like Trump than to face the truth about himself, that his life was wasted in harming his fellow man, that he was a thief and an adulterer and a rapist, that he could produce nothing of value in this world. That he had every material advantage given to him by emotionally-vacant parents, and he squandered that gift in his ignorance, in his greed and desperation for his life to hold some meaning but never did.

What will these people do who hold him up before themselves and now will find him cast down into the filth of human failure, deceit, corruption? When the revelation of his amoral guilt opens their eyes with blinding light, will they refuse to believe the truth? Will they take up arms and storm the courthouses and prison, crying out for his release, demanding a new day still grasping for that promise, that fable of his greatness?

They believed. They tied their lifeboats to his ship, that great phantasm of belief that he was the strong man, the savior of our times, that their lives could be made meaningful and fruitful under his leadership. As the seas heave and roll, tossing his ship into wreckage, will their boats also capsize, splinter into driftwood to drift back to the littered beaches over the coming weeks and months?

Somewhere deep inside, most of the True Believers sense the truth, that Trump is a fool, an emperor without clothes. They know in that secret room of themselves that they have followed a lie. But for many of them, the truth is too painful, too terrifying, and their solution is to speak of war, that they will take up arms to defend their savior, that they will emerge triumphant in a new America led by God Almighty with Trump seated on His right hand.

These are the fantasies of those who have never seen war, who know nothing of the price we paid in the last civil war when 620,000 men died fighting their neighbors and even their kinsmen over a belief that had long since lost any claim to righteousness. In their glorious imaginings of redeeming the nation, the radical right imagine the fight as taking down the Bidens and the Clintons and Nancy Pelosi and other figureheads of ‘liberal’ democracy without realizing that the fatalities they wish to bestow will instead be their neighbors and their kinsmen.

“Confederate dead Miller Farm, Antietam Battlefield, September 19, 1862,” House Divided: The Civil War Research Engine at Dickinson College, https://hd.housedivided.dickinson.edu/index.php/node/32956.

Will justice for Trump open the door to insight, even epiphany, for his True Believers? Will they be able to accept the truth of his malfeasance or the rectitude of the courts’ judgement? Some will. Some already have. But some will not, and for them we probably should feel compassion for their loss of a dream, of a self-made parody of a god, a feeble man who misled them, made promises he couldn’t keep, presented himself in a fictional persona simply to aggrandize himself no matter the price to be paid.

The private, personal cost will be great for those True Believers unable to let go of the fantasy, that they alone stood by a true hero. They will not be treated kindly by history.

2024

Joe Biden wanted to do the right thing, make a bold move, and so he promised to make his vice president a woman. While, as a woman myself I applaud the sentiment, I now see that he has painted himself into a corner. I have nothing personal against Kamala Harris—I’m sure she’s intelligent, skilled in her profession, and has all the right motivations in her heart.

BUT – and you knew a ‘but’ was coming, right? But she has zero charisma. And in a job where it’s not cool to upstage the president with policy ideas or championing big issues, she can only come across as a silly token. With a younger president, this wouldn’t carry as much punch, but with Biden’s age already past the average life expectancy for men in the United States (77.28 years), it’s relevant that observers on either side of the aisle would be concerned about Harris as a potential president.

This is why so many Democrats (not to mention everyone else) are voicing concerns about the current Biden/Harris ticket for 2024. It’s not just that Kamala Harris seems less than forceful or skilled—we really haven’t seen her shine because that’s not the role of a VP. It’s that these are terrifying times we live in, and it’s human nature to look for a strong leader especially in such times. This alone accounts for much of Trump’s appeal. Despite the fact that he understands virtually nothing about the job of a president or the many important aspects of the United States in world affairs, he comes across as a strong leader. This is all smoke and mirrors, of course—the fake tan, architectural comb-over, and elevated shoes make him appear to some as if he’s a healthy sportsman; the loud authoritative voice (well, mostly, until his words trail off into a familiar whine); and the positive spin he puts on his daily tribulations, obviously wishful thinking coming out as fake news.

Biden, on the other hand, is often speaking in public in a whispery voice. His footsteps across a stage, up or down stairs, or anywhere else, are slow and careful. His haircut somehow manages to look unkempt with that little layer of hair that sticks out around his back collar—he needs to give up some of his hair for a closer cut. These are visual/auditory obstacles to any hope of showing him as a vital, strong man. In a perfect world, we would not be misled by these obstacles. Instead, we would pay attention to his abilities and accomplishments—unquestionably major achievements that result from his long career as a statesman dedicated to a just society.

Sadly, I’m worried that no matter how well the campaign might illuminate those accomplishments, many voters will judge on appearances.

One solution would be to replace Kamala Harris with a more dynamic vice-presidential candidate. I can think of several experienced Democrats who would reassure voters of competent leadership in the circumstances of Biden’s incapacitation. I floated this idea on a Facebook post and was immediately excoriated by some of my female friends. Harris, they say, deserves more respect. Well, yes, of course she does, but you’re living in a dream world if you don’t see that the General Public does not share that opinion.

In short, it is my opinion that no amount of touting Biden’s accomplishments or respecting Kamala Harris is going to reassure voters that this is the leadership they want or need. By default, the most horrific possible candidate has a chance of winning a second term, and the nation will never recover from that.

Never.

The forces driving public anxiety are greater than ever before. It’s not just the conservative-progressive debate, burn books versus read more, cut government programs or continue working toward a more just culture, leave-it-all-to-God versus progress and evolve as humans, etc.

It’s that this was the hottest summer on record, evidence of the long-heralded advance of climate change.[1]

It’s that right now, Russia is led by an autocratic psychopath who dares the world to stop him from a) taking over neighboring nations, b) using nuclear weapons, c) enabling Kim Jong Un, d) murdering any domestic opposition, and e) blockading international waterways.[2]

It’s that Artificial Intelligence technology has arrived at the threshold of independent thought and action that could threaten human existence.[3]

It’s that the majority of Americans don’t understand the scientific method, or how science works, meaning that technologies we all use—Internet for example, or cell phones, or GPS, or targeted chemotherapy—are mysterious useful toys but not compelling enough for us to respect the science that has created them.

It’s that a significant portion of the population is too lazy to read or learn beyond their set prejudices and ignorance, thus remaining easy prey to rumor, fake news, and magical thinking (God will take care of us). A select few power brokers take advantage of these deficiencies by using hot button issues (abortion, gay marriage, racism) to instigate fear-driven voting.

It’s that the core of conservative voters are facing statistics showing that the nation is moving inexorably toward a non-white and non-Christian majority. “Remember, the predicted and projected end of a white Christian majority in this country is what’s driving most of our worst political trends right now. It’s not ‘economic anxiety’. It’s the arrival of minority-majority America.”[4]

The Seattle Times https://www.seattletimes.com/opinion/fox-news-spins-lies-in-the-service-of-greed/

Worst and most tragic of all, now in the United States of America, there is not an accepted source of factual news. As famously remarked by Trump’s press secretary, there are facts and then there are “alternative facts.”[5] FOX News is the mainstay for conservative audiences, even though court judgments have confirmed that the network lies repeatedly, and more such cases are in the pipeline.”[6] FOX itself has defined their “news” as “entertainment,” not a source offering factual information by any journalistic standard. Yet despite losing nearly $800 million in penalties in one case and expected to lose even more in upcoming trials, FOX continues its campaign of fake news. One wonders about the motivation of FOX owner Rupert Murdoch; the New York Times reports on Murdoch’s accomplishment with Trump’s presidency which, “cemented Murdoch’s global influence.”  

What Murdoch expects to accomplish aside from his “global influence” remains a mystery. Is $5 billion not enough? He’s built a family empire that has resulted in animosity between his children. He’s created a crisis in the United States not only in politics but in the growing chasm between segments of the society which has led to the current level of daily gun violence.

  • In the 22-year history of the network, the Fox News Effect had never been more pronounced. A March study by Navigation Research, a Democratic firm, found that 12 percent of Fox News viewers believe that climate change is mostly caused by humans, compared with 62 percent of all other Americans. At the same time, 78 percent of Fox viewers believe that Trump has accomplished more than any president in American history, compared with 17 percent of other Americans.[7]

Meanwhile, the Biden/Harris White House lists its achievements and the world pays little attention, or in the case of Republicans, outright deny the veracity of the list.

  • Lowering Costs of Families’ Everyday Expenses
  • More People Are Working Than At Any Point in American History
  • Making More in America
  • Rescued the Economy and Changed the Course of the Pandemic
  • Rebuilding our Infrastructure
  • Historic Expansion of Benefits and Services for Toxic Exposed Veterans
  • The First Meaningful Gun Violence Reduction Legislation in 30 Years
  • Protected Marriage for LGBTQI+ and Interracial Couples
  • Historic Confirmation of Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson and Federal Judges of Diverse Backgrounds
  • Rallied the World to Support Ukraine in Response to Putin’s Aggression
  • Strengthened Alliances and Partnerships to Deliver for the American People
  • Successful Counterterrorism Missions Against the Leaders of Al Qaeda and ISIS
  • Executive Orders Protecting Reproductive Rights
  • Historic Student Debt Relief for Middle- and Working-Class Families
  • Ending our Failed Approach to Marijuana
  • Advancing Equity and Racial Justice, Including Historic Criminal Justice Reform
  • Delivering on the Most Aggressive Climate and Environmental Justice Agenda in American History
  • More People with Health Insurance Than Ever Before
  • Lowering Costs of Families’ Everyday Expense
  • The Inflation Reduction Act Infographic

For each item on this list, there’s a link to a greater explanation of these efforts.[8] But who is reading this?

Really, who reads? The public is conditioned to pay attention for maybe a 15-second sound bite.

The truly alarming reality is that our primal instincts are engaged in this time of unprecedented crisis, personal, national and global. We want a strong leader we can believe in. It seems extremely risky to depend on an enlightened element of our population to do the reading and thinking necessary to continue to support Joe Biden when there is a dedicated segment swept up in mindless support of a man who presents himself as a strong man.

We can always hope for quick justice on any of Trump’s many indictments and/or a firm ruling on the 14th Amendment which states, in part, that any American official who takes an oath to uphold the US Constitution is disqualified from holding future office if they “engaged in insurrection or rebellion” or have “given aid or comfort” to insurrectionists.       

We can also hope that ole Sleepy Joe and Ms. Harris somehow figure out how to sell themselves as a dynamic duo, but I wish there was a Plan B waiting in the wings.  

[1] https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasa-announces-summer-2023-hottest-on-record

[2] https://www.newsletter.co.uk/news/politics/psychologist-putin-is-a-psychopath-and-loves-bloodshed-3606460

[3] https://www.forbes.com/sites/bernardmarr/2023/06/02/the-15-biggest-risks-of-artificial-intelligence/?sh=29f9a17b2706

[4] https://twitter.com/axios/status/1703223852539474292

[5] “’Alternative facts’” was a phrase used by U.S. Counselor to the President, Kellyanne Conway, during a Meet the Press interview on January 22, 2017, in which she defended White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer’s false statement about the attendance numbers of Donald Trump’s inauguration as President of the United States. When pressed during the interview with Chuck Todd to explain why Spicer would “utter a provable falsehood”, Conway stated that Spicer was giving “alternative facts”. Todd responded, “Look, alternative facts are not facts. They’re falsehoods.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_facts

[6] https://www.axios.com/2023/02/27/rupert-murdoch-admits-fox-news-hosts-peddled-election-lies

[7] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/04/03/magazine/new-fox-corporation-disney-deal.html

[8] https://www.whitehouse.gov/therecord/

Some Painful Truths

Above, supporters of former President Donald Trump are seen protesting his indictment in Manhattan, New York, on Monday, April 3, 2023. KATHERINE FUNG / Newsweek 4.3.23

Others have said how, once a person has been duped, it is almost impossible to convince them they have been duped. They’ve bought in, hook, line and sinker. Never has this been more true than in the present day. Despite all our education and media and news report, our ‘advanced’ culture, nearly 40% of the U. S. population still holds a favorable view of Donald Trump.

Who are these people?

While they tasted the bait, times were glorious! They owned the world, vindicated in their every idea, belief, and prejudice. Racism wasn’t really racism while they tasted the bait, but rather the righteous validation of their belief in whiteness.

Thus it was for the role of women, made from Adam’s rib to be his helper. Subordinate. The weaker vessel, made to suffer the agony of childbirth to give man his offspring, a punishment for Eve’s original sin. Not to speak in the church of God Almighty—white male, of course.

It goes without saying that the homosexuals and transwhatever were scum of the earth. Hardly worth mentioning, not worthy of recognition much less any right to exist, work, marry, or enjoy life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Equally unworthy of mention were the heathen believers in Allah and other blasphemies, seeking to secretly infiltrate America with their insidious brown-skinned conspiracies to destroy the great God-given white nation we call America.

And so it continued for four glorious years as time after time Trump’s words and acts magnified and validated the prejudices. Never mind that God sent a plague, that over a million people died, under Trump’s watch. Never mind that he oversaw, indeed, implemented, a continuous scroll of misdeeds and treachery that threatened the very foundations of the U. S. Constitution. None of that mattered while the bait was ingested, while all the validations of hate surged through the hearts and minds of the true believers—the duped.

Now, with the efforts of honorable leaders eager to restore the nation to its solid foundations, its core philosophy that all of us were created equal, the duped refuse to accept the evidence. Refuse to read the indictments. Refuse to think that some, all, of the allegations might actually be true. No doubt even a trial and conviction will be denied by these folks.

Is this a matter of willful ignorance? Yes, but that’s not all.

In academic studies, subjects asked to distinguish truth from lies answer correctly, on average, only fifty-four per cent of the time. This is a result of several mitigating factors, not least of which is a sense of allegiance to the people and information sources we have already trusted. For example, in a Stanford University study,

  • A third type of bias comes from our existing political alignment, in the form of partisanship. When it comes to news and information generally, one’s identification as a Democrat or Republican, or one’s self-image of being liberal vs. conservative, has a big impact on what we readily believe or reject in the news, regardless of its truthfulness. As uncomfortable as this may be to accept, abundant research shows that people frequently reject news that’s inconsistent with their political ideology, and are prone to accept news that’s consonant with their political orientation. Like it or not, research demonstrated quite clearly that most politically-oriented fake news during the 2016 US election campaigns was consumed by conservatives, with Donald Trump supporters being especially likely to encounter and visit fake news sites. …Hillary Clinton supporters were more likely to visit fact-checking websites and less likely to visit fake news websites. Trump supporters were less likely to visit fact-checking websites and more likely to visit fake news websites.[1]

Similar conclusions have been confirmed in multiple studies. Lee McIntyre, research fellow at Boston University, has published several books on the conundrum of duped people.

  • One of the deepest roots of post-truth has been with us the longest, for it has been wired into our brains over the history of human evolution: cognitive bias. Psychologists for decades have been performing experiments that show that we are not quite as rational as we think. Some of this work bears directly on how we react in the face of unexpected or uncomfortable truths. A central concept of human psychology is that we strive to avoid psychic discomfort. It is not a pleasant thing to think badly of oneself. Some psychologists call this “ego defense” (after Freudian theory), but whether we frame it within this paradigm or not, the concept is clear. It just feels better for us to think that we are smart, well-informed, capable people than that we are not. What happens when we are confronted with information that suggests that something we believe is untrue? It creates psychological tension. How could I be an intelligent person yet believe a falsehood? Only the strongest egos can stand up very long under a withering assault of self-criticism: “What a fool I was! The answer was right there in front of me the whole time, but I never bothered to look. I must be an idiot.”[2]

Trump supporters are not the first group to suffer this terrible cognitive dysphoria. The Civil War is not over for many who cannot accept that what their ancestors fought and died for might have been wrong. In their multitude of righteous excuses for the Confederate cause, the war was not about slavery. Rather, the Lost Cause was based on six tenets:

Credit: Cook Collection, The Valentine
Original Author: Unknown
Created: ca. 1907
Medium: Photographic print
Publisher: Valentine Richmond History Center

1. Secession, not slavery, caused the Civil War.

2. African Americans were “faithful slaves,” loyal to their masters and the Confederate cause and unprepared for the responsibilities of freedom.

3. The Confederacy was defeated militarily only because of the Union’s overwhelming advantages in men and resources.

4. Confederate soldiers were heroic and saintly.

5. The most heroic and saintly of all Confederates, perhaps of all Americans, was Robert E. Lee.

6. Southern women were loyal to the Confederate cause and sanctified by the sacrifice of their loved ones.[3]

The fundamental truth is that the war was about the South’s determination to continue its use of enslaved people to generate the bulk of its wealth. Tens of thousands of people of Southern heritage have bought into the falsehood of the Lost Cause, continuing to display the Confederate flag and nurse their invisible wounds.

Likewise, millions of people today are standing firm in their belief that Trump can do no wrong, that he was the legitimate winner of the 2020 election, and other similar dross. Don’t bother them with facts. Their minds are made up and their egos depend on it. One can only hope that enough of them will overcome the cognitive dissonance to accept that Trump was not sent by God Almighty to bestow an all-white conservative dispensation on the United States of America, but rather that he was and is a corrupt man clever enough to dupe 61,943,670 voters (2016 election).          

                                                            

Whether Twain actually said this remains an unproven irony.

[1] https://www.cits.ucsb.edu/fake-news/why-we-fall

[2] https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/how-cognitive-bias-can-explain-post-truth/

[3] https://encyclopediavirginia.org/entries/lost-cause-the/