O Pioneers! (With Apologies To Willa Cather)

2020 can now be measured in hours, and those hours can't be counted down fast enough for me.  I vividly recall New Year's Day a year ago, the lion's share of which was spent in an emergency veterinary hospital in a sadly futile effort to save the life of our diabetic cat.  Moral of that story:  when G-d gives you a big hint on New Year's Day of what kind of year lies ahead, believe Him.

I've spent a good deal of time today thinking about what I should say to sum up the year, to point us toward the future in a positive way.  I know there's no way to sugar-coat what we've all been through, nor would I even attempt such an effort.  I do, however, think that I can talk about the way forward in a positive manner.  But caveat lector:  I didn't, and will not, say anything about it being easy.

Among the many losses of beloved public figures in 2020, the loss of David Dinkins, the first African American mayor of New York City, looms large in my mind for a number of reasons.  In part, that's because, in a year that highlighted the country's structural racism to an extent that cannot be reversed, he is a reminder of what can be accomplished when people are willing to fight that racism, as is Barack Obama.  Much as the unprecedented level of voter turnout, in a year of pandemic and poverty, is a reminder of what can be accomplished when the majority of Americans refuse to take democracy for granted.

Dinkins, and Obama, were pioneers in a nation built on the work of generations of pioneers.  We tend to romanticize what it means to be a pioneer.  Our culture depicts our forbearers in highly sanitized ways, making it seem not much different than a road trip or a camp-out.  But make no mistake:  being a pioneer has always meant being willing to sacrifice one's comfort and even one's safety in the service of a larger goal.  Those who can before us endured disease and death, over years and decades, and often did not live to see the fruits of their sacrifices.  But they were willing to look beyond themselves, believe in a world that did not exist, and give everything they could to make it real.  And they succeeded.

Dinkins was reviled by conservative (translation:  white) forces, especially by the Rupert Murdoch-owned New York Post, and was denounced as a failure by those forces when he was replaced after a single term by the current President's mouthpiece, Rudy Giuliani.  Yet, in hindsight, it's clear that he laid the groundwork for much of the changes in the city that Giuliani subsequently took enormous and substantially undeserved credit for accomplishing.  You can read about Dinkins' work here.  In the end, even the Post lionized Dinkins in reporting his death.

My point?

Being a pioneer is hard work.  But being a pioneer is necessary work.  And the need for pioneer work never ends.  And, in a country with our history, we owe it to those who have gone before us, and those who will follow us, to be willing to make sacrifices as well, especially since we have received so much from those who have gone before.  In the relay race of life, our primary job is to hand off the baton in good shape, hopefully in even better shape, to the runners in the next generation.

And, while I hate to say this, I have no choice:  Donald Trump, and the suicidal hatred of government off of which he feeds, aren't going to go away in 2021.  There truly is no rest for the weary.  There is going to be a runoff election in Georgia next week that will determine not just whether we can make progress in addressing our long term problems, but whether we will even get past the short-term (hopefully, pu! pu! pu!) problem of the pandemic.  If you want to make a difference in that election, and especially if you have not done so already, please click here and here.  (Yes, both of them.)

And, above all, no matter what happens in the runoff, stay involved.  Take nothing for granted.  Being a citizen in a democracy is always a full-time job.  I'm hoping that we've learned that this year to a degree that has never been reached before.

Don't be afraid of the price of being a pioneer.  Be afraid of the cost of not being one.

That's how to make the New Year, and those that follow, worth celebrating.

I wish all of you who have stopped by over the past 13 years to read TRH, and those who have not, the happiest and healthiest 2021 possible.  I am grateful to all of you.  I look forward to what all of us will achieve together.

Dum spiro spero.

The Real "Border Crisis"

We are rapidly, but not rapidly enough, approaching the end of a year whose departure will dismay no one, as well as the beginning of a year which we hope will be a deliverance from the nightmare called 2020.  So it's time to feel a bit retrospective, to once again try to look at the last twelve months and ask ourselves where we are, and where we are going.  

It's unfortunately hard to do that, because events at this time of year normally slow down enough to permit a period of reflection.  But when the President of the United States is still Donald Trump, and the dumpster fire of his time in office is coming to an end, his rage at the unraveling of his life of deception is so great that he is finding new and increasingly troubling ways to add fuel to the dumpster.  Four weeks before he's exposed to the absence of immunity from (at least) State prosecutions, and the deceptive tweets, the destructive pardons, and the distracting attempts to meddle in the work of legislative grown-ups are multiplying at a pace that makes the thought of keeping up almost impossible, even as it increasingly becomes more and more necessary.

But, with G-d's grace, and a certain amount of luck, Trump will be gone soon.  And it will be time to take stock of the damage that has been done to us, and to our democracy.  And that damage will take years to repair.  Maybe decades.  And there's the question of whether all of it can be repaired.  So we might as well avert our eyes and our attention from the long con of the Donald for a little bit, and take some stock.

I'm taking the Rachel Maddow approach with this, in which I start light-years away from Earth, ultimately land on a specific spot, and thereby hope to connect the big picture with the moment at hand.  So here we go.  

I've spent much of the fifty or so years in which I've discussed politics preaching that economics is never a simple capitalism-versus-socialism frame of analysis.  Economics requires the perspective and initiative of individuals, but no less requires cooperative efforts as well that channel those characteristics into productive channels, and help to avert them from producing destructive results.  So, some mix of private and public enterprise needed in order to make things work.  And there's no perfect "middle ground" in calibrating their respective roles, either.  Sometimes, we need more of one; sometimes, we need more of the other.  And one of the trickiest calculations a political leader can make is deciding where the emphasis needs to be placed, as well as when and how it needs to be changed.

In that sense, economics is no different from any other aspect of our experience.  Human history is a story defined and propelled by different forms of conflict.  Between faith and reason.  Between conquest and settlement.  Between construction and destruction.  Between two fundamental choices:  the betterment of humanity, or the advancement of venality.  It's why, for a number of years, I used to make a point at about this time of year of watching "Things to Come," a 1936 science-fiction epic based on a screenplay by H.G. Wells, which endeavored to depict the next hundred years of human progress.  Wells based it on his understanding of history as a struggle between those who advocated those fundamental choices.  Despite the film's flaws, including one scene reflective of Wells' anti-Semitism, it's worth watching at least once.  I think Wells' fundamental analysis of how human history works is sound, and applicable to an analysis of our present circumstances.

We are where we are, in the middle of a deadly pandemic with no clear end in sight, despite the recent emergence (thankfully) of vaccines that may help to build a path to a new normal.  That pandemic has led to the biggest economic collapse since the Great Depression, and exposed beyond any doubt the existence of structural racism that perverts our supposed founding values and virtues.  All of this--all of it--demands action on a national level, a coordinated plan and program carried out by the federal government that reflects the size and scale of the crisis as well as the solution to it.  This fact has been screamingly obvious to the majority of Americans, to Democrats and Republicans, which s why we are now counting down the days until Joe Biden's inauguration.

So why didn't we get it?  And, even worse, why is there still a sizable possibility that we still may not get it, going forward?

Because of the border crisis.

No, I'm not talking about the border crisis as reflexively covered by our woefully inadequate, co-opted media.  I'm not talking about what Trump calls "hordes" of people of color ready to stampede across the Rio Grande to take jobs away from white people.  The world isn't being threated by immigration; if anything, the right to travel is one of the oldest, most recognized, most fundamental human rights on Earth, one that has continually reshaped the world and always for the better.  Yet now, more than ever, that right has been restricted to the point, even prior to the pandemic, that people could only move around the world at the speed of sludge.

But money is a very different story.  Money has an unquestioned right to move around the world that makes light look like a slowpoke.  That's been true for at least half a century, and probably longer, ever since the rise of the modern multinational corporation.  However, since the end of the Cold War, and with the subsequent creation of international trade agreements that facilitated the existence and growth of the global economy, money has assumed an unprecedented role in its control of our lives.  And that's because global companies, and the global investors that control them, feel no need to be constrained by the decisions of government.  An international consensus had emerged that government was less essential to the affairs of humanity than the needs and concerns of the marketplace--a marketplace that covered the entire globe.

That consensus, and the extent to which our national government has attempted to adhere to it over the past several decades, has dragged our standard of living and even our level of civility down to the lowest international common denominators.  On both of these fronts, this nation used to lead by example.  Now, its "example" is one that many of its long-standing friends openly shun.  Instead of organizing the world into a noble crusade for the benefit of humankind, as we did during the period from the end of the Second World War to the close of the first Gulf War, we are now allowing ourselves to be stripped for parts and auctioned off to the highest bidder.

And that is far from all.

Our leading corporations, including ones like Boeing, whose bombers helped to save the world from Hitler, now openly and systematically compromise safety to wring a few extra dollars onto their balance sheets.  And they co-opt the state referendum process to not only defeat proposals that would restrict their ability to oppress workers, but do so in ways that can only be overturned by impossible-to-achieve supermajorities.

Our national legislature has seriously considered and advocated budget provisions that would not only allow corporations the right to systemically endanger the public, but give those corporations the right to sue you if you try to fight back against the danger.  And it has likewise advocating changing the powers of the Federal Reserve so that it will always be there, if needed, to provide socialism for the rich, but not for anyone else.

One of our two leading national parties has, as its primary organizing principle, the systemic restriction of the popular vote by any means necessary, undoubtedly operating under the theory that, if the people vote, the party's donors will go looking for even more supple politicians to do its bidding.  And it goes out of its way to cripple government's ability to fund itself and conduct what even Richard Nixon once called "the people's business."

And the Fourth Estate?  Please.  If only.  That formerly worthy institution is now dominated by, of all ironies, a naturalized immigrant whose systemic willingness to abuse women in print and through the airwaves serves as a demonstration of his confidence that Biden and the incoming Administration does not pose a threat to his ongoing destruction of American journalism.

Pretty bad, huh?  So, you ask, what's to be done?  How can we push capitalism back to the "middle ground"?  Especially now that it operates on a scale larger than any one government can operate?

Wells would have advocated, or at least supported, the creation of a worldwide government to constrain the more destructive aspects of capitalism.  "Things to Come," in fact, implicitly presupposes the existence of such an entity, although its details are not explicitly spelled out.  Rather, they are reduced to glittering generalities, like the slogan "Wings Over The World" (and now you know where Paul McCartney got that from).  That's just as well, perhaps.  An entity that attempted to operate on that scale would almost, by definition, be too cumbersome to effectively respond to the rapid pace of change in the 21st-century world.

I think that what would be better, and what should certainly should be attempted, is something that provided some of the basic ground rules and at least some of the enforcement procedures that a world government might possess, but that relied in a fundamental way on the actions of participating nations to make short-term responses to changing circumstances.  What I would envision, and suggest, is that this should be based on international treaties not unlike the trade agreements that came together in the 1990s, but that addressed concerns typically addressed by national and local governments, such as voting rights, living wages, health care, and environmental issues.  

Obviously, some of these structures already exist.  But what's needed to find a "middle ground" for our times is something that has to function more like a cohesive system of regulation and enforcement, but that still allowed nation-states certain rights of regulation over domestic affairs and unilateral (as well as multilateral) action in international ones.  The closest thing we have right now to something like this is the EU, which is not a particularly encouraging example.  And yet, it is precisely because the EU has thus far limited itself to addressing economic issues that its effectiveness has been thwarted.

And what role can the U.S. play in this?  Our own experience at the domestic level with the type of federalism I am advocating on the international level has, to put it politely, been something of a mixed bag, to say nothing of its willingness--or lack thereof--to date to participate in international agreements.  It would help if there were changes in the elected political class; there are already signs that this may be in the offing.  In turn, it might help if the workers of this country could finally come to understand that unity, and even short-term sacrifice, are the only way to create a climate for fundamental change.  That has always been the case, and it is no less true now.

Beginning in 2021, we all need to come together to move the "middle ground."  We can only do that, however, if we start by recognizing the nature of the border crisis that we actually face, and the increasingly desperate need to address it.

Oh, and Happy Holidays.  I'll be back before the New Year.

Why Georgia Should Be On Everyone's Mind

In last month's post-election post, I discussed the disappointing results in U.S. Senate races for Democrats, relative to the predictions being made in pre-election polls.  I considered the possibility that voters, fed a steady diet of bothsiderism by the MSM, decided at the last minute to declare a plague on the houses of both parties, despite the fact that only one party was clearly responsible for the existence of an actual plague.  I've had a few more weeks to think about it and, somehow, it still seems like the likeliest explanation.  

How else to explain the fact that pandemic politics clearly were decisive in the voters' rejection of Donald Trump (and just to be clear:  they really, truly have rejected him), while still allowing them to vote in Senate races for incumbent (and replacement) Republicans who have done everything possible to enable Trump's worst tendencies?  And not just with regard to the virus, but everything else.  The re-election of Susan Collins in Maine is particularly disturbing.  Collins did everything she could to stand by Trump, and thereby forfeit her well-polished image for independent thinking, and still won re-election by a decisive margin.  

In fairness, it may be the case that the large amounts of out-of-state money flowing into her opponent, Sara Gideon, and other Democratic challengers made it easier for Collins and other Senate Republicans may have made it easier to emphasize their local roots.  Still, if the question is independence from Trump, where is that revealed in her voting record over the last four years?  Where is it revealed in the voting record of any Republican Senator over that period?  Mitt Romney's vote for one article of impeachment?  Commendable, but hardly enough to suggest any real independence in the caucus as a whole.

Even now, flush with enthusiasm from an unexpected victory, Collins is bent on pretending that it has given her some sort of new-found political significance, and is now pushing a compromise pandemic bill with a handful of her Republican colleagues and some Democrats that is supposed to prove that a spirit of kum by yah has descended over Capitol Hill.  Not likely.  Not while Mitch McCONnell is still insisting on approving no more than one-sixth of the amount approved last spring by House Democrats for pandemic relief.  Not while, in addition to that paltry figure, he is insisting on iron-clad immunity for his donors from COVID-related litigation AND the nationalization of legal standards for personal-injury law.  Interesting, don't you think, to insist on nationalizing access to justice, while refusing to do the same for public health and safety?

It's precisely that latter refusal that has made this nation, which formerly set the global standard for public health and safety, an international pariah and an internal menace to everyone living in it.  As I write this, we are now north of 280,000 COVID-related deaths, with no end in sight.  Even if the promised vaccines live up to their potential, we will still have lost over half a million souls before we can say that this is over.

And while the President-elect, and his Democratic colleagues in both houses of Congress are pushing for badly-needed financial aid to Americans in every state, red or blue, what are Republicans actually doing?

Continuing to rubber-stamp Trump's judicial and executive appointments, while making negative noises about their plans for people Joe Biden will nominate.  Those appointments will no doubt live up to the unbelievably low standard being set by his current Supreme Court Justices, who are demonstrating their own unconscionable misunderstanding of how to balance religious interests with those of public safety.

Looking the other way while Trump attempts to use the pardon power of his office to give the criminal apparatus he has installed around himself a series of get-out-of-jail-free cards, including a big fat one for himself.

And otherwise pretending that there is still some level of doubt about the outcome of the presidential election, thereby wasting precious time in addressing the needs of a nation in crisis, while simultaneously enabling Trump's efforts to undermine democracy and push a slow-motion coup that may leave us stuck with him indefinitely, until everything finally comes crashing down on our heads.

If there's one thing we absolutely need to do--and, frankly, there are many--we all need to get one thought all the way through our heads and hearts, and act as though our lives depend on it, which they do:

Both parties are NOT the same.  And there is absolutely NO reason to doubt this.

Not while Trump is throwing crowbars into every aspect of federal machinery for the sole purpose of making life miserable for his successor.

Not when Trump's Bond-villain excuse for a Treasury Secretary is taking nearly half a trillion of federal dollars already approved by Congress for COVID relief, and putting it beyond the reach of the incoming Administration.

Not while the nation as a whole teeters on the brink of a level of economic disaster not seen in just under a century.

And absolutely, positively, not while the former party of Lincoln, and now the party of Trump, is pushing the one philosophy for which it stands:  the systematic suppression of democracy, by any means necessary.

Which, in an admittedly roundabout way, brings me to the matter of Georgia's two runoff races for its Senate seats, the outcomes of which will decide which party controls the Senate, and perhaps the federal government as a whole, for at least the next two years.

If the results of the Senate races on Election Day were in fact a conscious effort at ticket-splitting, the Republicans are trying to make the Georgia races all the more so.  There's already a great deal of right-wing rhetoric, including from Trump himself at a rally last night in the state, about how the GOP needs to take both seats in other to have a firewall against what they call socialism (and what the rest of the world calls SOP).  Right this minute, I could probably turn on my TV, select a news channel, and find some random talking head uttering the words "checks and balances."

You know who really needs checks and balances?

McCONnell and his Senate partners in crime.

For over a decade, he has done everything he can do stonewall the functioning of the Senate, turning the World's Greatest Deliberative Body into a deathtrap for any proposals that might even hint at being a threat to his monopoly on power.  Or, in other words, anything that might actually make the lives of the American people better.  And, as I've already mentioned, nothing about the results of this election thus far have done anything to change his mind.

Indeed, even if the Democrats take both Georgia seats, effectively making a 50-50 Senate one under Democratic control by virtue of Kamala Harris' tie-breaking vote, there's no guarantee that McCONnell will allow them to be seated.  The Constitution, and related Supreme Court decisions, allow the Senate to have the final say over whether newly-elected Senators will be seated.  And McCONnell, who will be the majority leader prior to the outcome of the elections, will be able to take advantage of any election "irregularities" ginned up by conservatives, and other Trump devotees, to argue that either of the Democratic candidates, if victorious, should still not be seated.  Think that sounds far-fetched?  Think about what McCONnell has done over the past five years with Supreme Court nominations, and then ask yourself if it sounds far-fetched.

And so, once again, as it was on Election Day, it's up to us.  As it always is and should be, in a democracy.  Especially in a democracy as evenly divided as this one.

Here is a quick and easy reference outlining how you can help Jon Ossoff and the Rev. Raphael Warnock check-and-balance Mitch McCONnell and the Republican criminal cabal and give America, for at least two years, a puncher's chance to become America again.

Whatever you can do, for the next month, until January 5th, keep Georgia on your mind, and in your heart.  Your nation, your life, may very well depend on it.