Opinion Poll

Question 1: On a scale of 1-10, where 1 is lowest and 10 is highest, overall, how do you rate President Joe Biden’s first 100 days in office?

Question 2: What issues are most important to you?

Question 3: What issues are least important to you?

Question 4: What hasn’t happened yet that you’d like to see happen?

 

Thanks for posting and recommending.

How serious is the threat to democracy from liberalism and/or leftist extremism?

Fear of the extremist left, socialist tyranny and more equal distribution of wealth are major drivers of rank and file support for radical right politics and tactics. Democrats, democratic socialists, progressives, political correctness, BLM and Antifa (collectively the 'bad people'[1]) have been vilified for years as threats that are close to or worse than terrorist violence. In the case of democrats and democratic socialists, the vilification has gone on for decades.

Exactly how serious is the threat of tyranny from the bad people? What is the level of threat right now? Does it compare to the threat from the radical right GOP, which mostly supports the 1/6 coup attempt, or rationalizes it into insignificance, and falsely believes the election was stolen?

Some or maybe most conservatives point to Portland and the damage that leftist, BML and Antifa protests have inflicted on that city as evidence of a dire threat to democracy and civil liberties. Is the threat of illegality in street protests a serious threat? Most cities in the US have experiences little or no damage and few street protests. Most of the protestors have been peaceful, but all are tarred as rioters when some thugs join in and start breaking laws. One source asserted that 93% of BLM protests have been peaceful. Not all of the protestors in the non-peaceful 7% were law breakers, but presumably were present at least part of the time that thugs were breaking laws. 

A New York Times article indicates that downtown Portland has suffered significant damage and the city is going to be more aggressive in going after thugs who break laws. The NYT writes:

“Portland was a beautiful city,” said Ms. Carter, who was the first Black woman elected to the Oregon Legislative Assembly and is now retired. “Now you walk around and see all the graffiti, buildings being boarded up. I get sick to my stomach. And I get angry.”

After almost a year of near-continuous protests since the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Portland’s city leaders are signaling that it may be time for a more aggressive crackdown on the most strident street actions.

Mayor Ted Wheeler, himself a target of many of the protests as he oversaw a police department that has repeatedly turned to aggressive tactics, last week put into place a state of emergency that lasted six days and vowed to “unmask” those demonstrators who engaged in repeated acts of vandalism or arson, saying it was time to “hurt them a little bit.”

The crowds the city has seen are often made up of amorphous groups of people who come for different reasons. Chris Davis, the deputy police chief, estimated there were 150 to 200 people among the regular protesters who were prone to engage in property destruction, although the demonstrations often feature smaller numbers.

Some liberal residents of Portland decry an effort to clamp down on the protestors. One complained that protesting activists were focused on saving lives from unwarranted police violence, while city leaders were focused on saving windows. That argument ignores the fact that the city and many Portland residents want the law breaking and window smashing stopped. Public opinion in Portland is not uniform.

The Washington Post writes:

In short, our data suggest that 96.3 percent of events involved no property damage or police injuries, and in 97.7 percent of events, no injuries were reported among participants, bystanders or police. These figures should correct the narrative that the protests were overtaken by rioting and vandalism or violence. Such claims are false.

 
The Black Lives Matter uprisings were remarkably nonviolent. 

When there was violence, very often police or counter protesters were reportedly directing it at the protesters. When the Department of Homeland Security released its Homeland Threat Assessment earlier this month, it emphasized that self-proclaimed white supremacist groups are the most dangerous threat to U.S. security. But the report misleadingly added that there had been “over 100 days of violence and destruction in our cities,” referring to the anti-racism uprisings of this past summer.

Meanwhile, a man in Minneapolis accused of arson to a police station during a protest has been fined $12 million and sentenced to 4 years in prison. How many republicans in congress have been fined and sentenced for their role is supporting the 1/6 coup attempt? At least some possibly leftist law breaking street rioters (blue collar thugs) get caught and whacked for their law breaking in protests. Elite republican traitors (white collar thugs) do not face legal repercussions for their protest-related crimes, but maybe some rank and file conservative traitors and thugs just might face some heat from the law. Maybe. 

Other arguments that leftists are just as dangerous or more dangerous than conservatives include:

1. Bad people control universities and they propagandize and brainwash students to believe in socialism and tyranny

2. Bad people want to take away all guns in private hands

3. Bad people want to get rid of Christmas and ban religion

4. Bad people want to limit the influence of Christianity in government

5. Bad people support same-sex marriage 

Other conservative terrors include allegations that liberals believe in government action to get more equal opportunity for all. That argument usually but falsely asserts that wanting equal opportunity necessarily means that obliterates personal responsibility. 

Another terror is that democrats want universal health care, which conservatives see as evil socialism and the path to poor health care for all. That argument ignores the fact that tens of millions of Americans have no access to health care unless they wind up in an emergency room. And then, many or most of them cannot afford it. The American capitalist, for-profit model of healthcare is complex, more costly than any other system on Earth and far less accessible to millions than those evil socialist universal health care systems that people in most those countries generally like.

Another conservative terror is that liberal policies emphasize a need for government to help solve people's problems, arguing that individuals can and must stand up for themselves. That argument ignores the fact that individuals usually cannot stand up to big companies without at least some law that protects them. Usually, government can do far more than an individual in defense of individual's rights.

Another conservative terror is that regulations amount to tyranny. That argument ignores the fact that nearly all conservative deregulation in recent decades shifted power from government to usually powerful special interests. Not all regulations are unnecessary as conservatives usually seem to imply. Deregulation does not necessarily flow power to individuals from government. In fact, power to sue special interests has been relentlessly attacked by conservatives, e.g., the option for class action suits by consumers have been cut back significantly over the years. 

Another conservative terror hold that most or all taxation is theft. That mindset mostly drives what is now a tax cheating (tax gap) epidemic that (1) amounts to about ~$1 trillion to ~$1.4 trillion/year, and (2) has probably cost the US treasury about ~$8-10 trillion since 2000 and will likely cost another ~$7-10 trillion by 2030.

Can a person reasonably argue that if the threat to democracy, the rule of law and social well-being from liberals and their politics and policy choices is X, the threat from conservatives is ~20-50X? Or, is there rough parity and both are about the same, as some people argue based on liberal adoption of neoliberalism after abandoning real liberalism? Or are liberals ~20-50X more threatening than conservatives and their politics and policy choices?

Does individual liberty expand when power flows from government to special interests? Or, does no deregulation ever shift power from government to special interests and power always flows to individuals from government?

Footnote added after posting the OP: 

1. I intentionally chose the label "bad people" for democrats, liberals and progressives after listening to part of a C-Span broadcast in a series that discusses books. The book author was the radical right Christian Nationalist Ken Starr promoting his book. The broadcast was hosted by a Christian group that desperately fights against what it sees as ferocious, deadly persecution of helpless, innocent Christians in America. The host referred to the "liberal judge" in his dissent in a Supreme Court decision as one of the bad guys. The dissent actually fundamentally sided with the Christians. 

Bad people. That is exactly how probably most elite Christian Nationalists see and think of people who oppose their Christian theocratic agenda. I suspect it is also how most rank and file socially conservative Christians see the same people. That is how toxic American Christianity has become in the last century or so. 

A Dwindling Republican Party May Be Doomed to Shrink More

From Gallup comes news that its regular polling on party affiliation shows the largest quarterly gap in major party affiliation since 2012, with 49 percent of U.S. adults identifying themselves as either Democrats (30 percent) or as Democratic-leaning independents (19 percent), while 40 percent call themselves Republicans (25 percent) or Republican-leaning independents (15 percent).

That in itself is not good news for the GOP, though it has managed to stay relatively competitive despite persistently trailing Democrats in party affiliation. As Gallup notes:

Republican advantages have generally been rare and short-lived, but occurred when Americans rallied around incumbent Republican presidents George H.W. Bush after the 1991 U.S. victory in the Gulf War and George W. Bush after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. The GOP also had brief leads in party affiliation in the periods surrounding Republican electoral successes in the 1994, 2010 and 2014 midterm elections.

The bigger problem with a relatively small and slightly shrinking party that has just lost a national election is that the kind of revisions in message and leadership such parties sometimes need to expand their appeal may be more difficult to secure when its membership is limited to its “base.” As I noted recently (playing off an excellent piece from Perry Bacon Jr.), there are a host of reasons the post-2020 Republican Party is disinclined to rethink its “brand” or even conduct an after-action review on its loss of the White House and both houses of Congress over the last four years. But a probable contributing factor on the margins is the fact that once swing voters are deducted from the GOP ranks, the remaining party members are more likely to hail from a party base that is completely complacent about the status quo ante. To put it more directly, a party membership increasingly dominated by MAGA bravos is going to be less likely to take off the red hats and look for a leader other than the 45th president.

And that is why “rebranding” and “autopsy” exercises most matter: When political parties are licking their wounds, their membership can be motivated to look beyond immediate views and reimagine a broader coalition. But if they are waving the bloody shirt of an alleged “stolen election” and find bitter and exclusive partisanship to be their most effective unifying glue, a reevaluation will be the last thing on their minds. That may be where the GOP is right now.

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021/04/fewer-americans-identify-as-republican-in-2021-gallup.html

 

Aw crud -- the tax gap again, sorry :( ---- and the news isn't close to good :(

The Washington Post writes:

Republicans have long sought to shrink the tax-collecting agency, but Biden aides believe hundreds of billions of dollars go uncollected each year. [that's a lie --they know that hundreds of billions of dollars go uncollected each year, everyone on the inside knows that] 

White House officials plan to make a massive [puny -- WaPo is full of baloney on this point] increase in enforcement at the Internal Revenue Service a central component of the tax proposal they will unveil this week alongside a $1.8 trillion spending package, according to four people briefed on the matter. 

But probably the single biggest source of new revenue in the plan comes from dramatically expanding the clout of the nation’s tax agency. It seeks to beef up the number of agents and give the IRS new tools and technology to execute collections and crack down on avoidance, the people said. White House officials have eyed raising as much as $700 billion from toughening IRS enforcement and auditing over 10 years, two of the people said, although the precise amount in the plan remained unclear. Enforcement will be focused on the wealthy, the people said.  

The people spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private administration deliberations. Officials cautioned the plan had not been finalized. White House officials are looking at increasing the agency’s budget by $80 billion over 10 years, a figure first reported by the New York Times.

If approved, the coming White House proposal would represent a remarkable change to the IRS, which has been beset for more than a decade by problems from steep budget cuts and a growing list of responsibilities. The IRS lost roughly 18,000 full-time positions after 2010, due primarily to cuts pushed by Republicans in Congress under President Barack Obama, with the number of auditors falling to lows unseen since the 1950s.  

Those changes have hampered the IRS’s ability to collect taxes even from those who legally owe them, particularly among the rich. Former IRS commissioner Charles Rossotti joined economists Larry Summers and Natasha Sarin in a recent analysis that found the tax agency could raise as much as $1.4 trillion in additional tax revenue with better data, technology, and personnel.

Germaine's analysis

What?? Now it's $1.4 trillion???? WTF! The last time I checked (April 22, 2021), it was a mere $1 trillion/year. A 40% increase in one week? I smell rotting some fishes here.

The latest estimate I was aware of was that each additional dollar the IRS gets to enforce tax law and recovery of unpaid taxes will result in about $4 recovered. So the return on investment is 400% for the tax year that taxpayers paid for additional tax law enforcement. That is pretty good. Right?  

So, is this $80 billion over 10 years is great stuff? Right? 

No, it isn't. It sucks hard. It is an insult to honest taxpayers. 

The annual tax gap is about $1 trillion/year (or $1.4 trillion?). Averaged out, an added $80 billion over ten years (~$8 billion/year) will grab about $32 billion/year from tax cheats. $32 Billion/year out of $1 trillion/year amounts to recovering about 3.2% of the annual theft-fest (less than that if it's $1.4 trillion).

In other words, this is a pissant level investment in vindicating the rule of law and treating honest taxpayers respectfully. Actually, it is an outrageous insult to taxpayers and a slap in the face. But, it's not a surprise. 

An actual pissant -- it is a real thing

The March 24, 2021 post here on Dissident Politics about the tax gap included this prescient insight from Germaine:

Janet Yellen commented blandly that the current gap is running at $600 billion/year and she would take a look at it.

Translation: She will do nothing about it and could not care less.

Well, that prediction turned out to be true, unless one defines this pissant 3.2% act as something and caring in view of the size of annual theft festival.

Of course, one can reasonably shift most of the blame for this outrageous insult to taxpayers to the corrupt GOP in congress. Any more of an effort from Biden and democrats would trigger a crapstorm of who knows what awfility[1] from republicans who want to protect their tax cheats.

One can reasonably imagine that the added tax enforcement dollars will go to low income folks. Rich folks will not tolerate such an intrusion on their sacred feng-shui.

Questions: Who is more responsible for the annual theft-fest, congressional democrats, congressional republicans or are both about equally responsible. Does anyone care?

Footnote:

1. Awfility is not a real word, but my old room mate from Rutgers, a chemical engineer and hard partying friend of the drop trou Rutgers football team*** used the word when appropriate. It stuck in my little brain all these years.

*** The football team my old room mate partied with crashed parties and liked to drop trou before stealing the beer keg(s) and driving off to the next party to crash and steal more beer keg(s) from after dropping trou again in salute to the next party. There was much trou dropping and beer keg stealing in the Rutgers neighborhood way back in the 1970s. Of course, that was far better than what the football team at my old alma mater used to do. Those fine students used to go to a college student bar and randomly pick out some guy to drag out and beat the shit out of him for fun and then go back in and find another victim.

Ahh, college days. What fun, as long as one avoided the fun-filled football teams. I avoided my football team with a vengeance. They were a bit too feisty for my taste and I was a bit too puny to defend myself. Well, OK, way too puny.

Hm. Moral question: What's the worst? (i) The GOP protecting tax cheats in stealing about $1 trillion/year from the US treasury and honest taxpayers, (ii) some high spirited football team members crashing parties, dropping trou in salute and then stealing beer kegs, or (iii) high spirited football team members beating the shit out of people they randomly pick out of a bar? Jeez, who would have known how complicated morality could be.

Democracy is under vicious attack in Arizona

Rot flourishes in the dark, sunlight kills rot

Only the courts and the law, not morals or fairness, can shine the sun on the rot

Context

The next step I've been expecting the GOP to take in its assault on democracy, including elections, is fabrication of evidence to support their crackpot conspiracy theories. Short of engaging in widespread violence, faking evidence seems to be the only reasonable step the GOP has available to it in view of its poor situation in making its run at establishing some form of a corrupt autocracy-dictatorship. From what I can tell, the GOP did not cross the line in the last president's administration or in the ~64 lawsuits they filed to challenge the 2020 election results. But now that they have no choice, it appears that the GOP legislature in Arizona is desperate enough to take the big step to fake evidence to show that the 2020 election in that state was fraudulent. 

The next step in attacking democracy

MSNBC reported last night that Arizona republican legislators have hired a company called Cyber Ninjas to recount Maricopa county votes from the 2020 election. The attack on democracy lies in the company's lawsuit to do the recount in secret because company trade secrets are involved. The argument for secrecy due to trade secrets is a transparent republican lie. 

There is no trade secret about counting ballots. Most everyone on planet Earth realizes that counting ballots means looking at ballots using eyeballs and/or scanning machines to verify ballot and signature authenticity, count votes and decide what to do about questionable ballot markings. There is no basis for a trade secret(s) in any of that. But, what recounting ballots in secrecy does do is permit ballots to be remarked and rejected, thereby faking evidence that the ex-president won Maricopa county, when he in fact lost.

The rancid stench of republican desperation and duplicity in this is overpowering. Only Maricopa county is being recounted, not the rest of the state where the ex-president won. The court has ordered the company to describe how it is going to do the recount. The company refuses and is fighting against disclosure while continuing to do its "recount" or "audit." During the 2020 election, republicans demanded and received full access to both voting and vote counting in the name of transparency and election integrity. Now republicans demands taxpayers pay (~$150,000) for vote counting in secrecy in the name of pure partisan political bullshit, not election integrity.

Cyber Ninja's sympathies are clear. The company believes the 2020 vote was stolen and it supports QAnon conspiracy crackpottery and lies. It is being or has been hired by some other republican state legislatures for possible vote "recounts" or "audits" in those states. On top of all that anti-democratic partisan sleaze, private donors who demand their names be kept secret are giving Cyber Ninjas money for God only knows what. The company refuses to disclose anything related to that sleaze.

Part of the sleaze in this attack on democracy includes the fact that "reporters" working for OAN news are part of the machinery that is pumping money into Cyber Ninjas. Apparently in return for the cash, the radical right OAN propaganda and lies business will be the only "news" source allowed to report on the vote audit. 

This clearly looks like the time the republican party will officially embrace actual fabrication of evidence to support lies in furtherance of its relentless attacks on democracy. The GOP is on the verge of crossing the line to advance its corrupt, dictatorial political agenda. Moral constraints are not relevant in current republican politics. Maybe the only thing that can stop this attempt at massive vote fraud in Arizona is the courts. 

One can reasonably wonder what rank and file republicans in Arizona and all other states think of this new tactic. Do most who are aware of this approve? If so, what does that make the republican party, mostly democratic and rule of law-based or mostly demagogic, corrupt and tyrannical? Inquiring minds want to know.

Why The Republican Party Isn’t Rebranding After 2020

 

Typically, after losing a presidential election, a political party will undertake an intense intra-party debate over why it didn’t win and how the party needs to change to take back the White House. Democrats did so after losing in 1988, 2000, 2004 and 2016. In fact, even after winning in 2020 — taking control of the White House and U.S. Senate and maintaining control in the U.S. House — Democrats are having an intra-party debate, trying to figure out why they didn’t win more House seats and struggled with Latino voters. Republicans, too, have had such debates, after losses in 1996, 2008 and 2012. 

But not this time.

Despite Republicans losing the White House and Senate in 2020, and thus being totally swept out of power in Washington,¹ there’s been no official “autopsy” or widespread consideration of appointing new leaders or anything else. In the period after the 1988 presidential election, the Republican Party has lost the popular vote in all but one presidential race (2004). It has lost three of the last four presidential elections and allowed itself to be dominated by former President Donald Trump, who was twice impeached for breaking with democratic values. But it is moving forward like none of that really happened.

• Republicans on Capitol Hill and at the state level are returning to their Obama-era strategy of opposing everything the incumbent Democratic president does; 
• Republicans at the state level are adopting laws that make it harder for left-leaning people to vote, just like they did before and during the Trump presidency; 
• Republicans in Washington and at the state level are sticking with the party’s positions on issues of identity and race, which are a big part of the reason that the GOP is struggling among the growing parts of America’s electorate, namely people of color and white college graduates (this marks a change from the post-election periods in 2008 and 2012, when Republicans talked about how to better appeal to nonwhite voters); 
• State-level Republican officials, in particular, are taking other extreme actions, from casting Democratic women as “witches” to trying to bar Democratic-controlled cities from requiring residents to wear masks to prevent the spread of COVID-19; 
• And, perhaps most surprisingly, Republican Party officials are largely continuing to align themselves with Trump, even though the former president was both an electoral drag on the party and also a moral stain, with a string of racist comments and undemocratic actions that culminated in him encouraging his supporters to storm the Capitol in an attempt to overturn the election results. 

1. The party’s core activists don’t want to shift gears. 

This is the simplest and most obvious explanation: The GOP isn’t changing directions because the people driving the car don’t want to. 

2. Trump is still a force in the party. 

After the 2012 elections, prominent Republicans sharply criticized Mitt Romney and his campaign. Democrats did the same to Hillary Clinton after 2016 — and sometimes included former President Barack Obama in their criticisms, too. For a political party to change direction, it nearly always has to distance itself from past leaders. 

Or put another way: For there to be an autopsy, there has to be a dead body.

3. Republicans almost won in 2020. 

To torture this “autopsy” metaphor even more: There’s a good argument that the party is still very much alive.

Trump would have won reelection had he done only about 1 percentage point better in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin and about 3 points better in Michigan.

4. Republican voters aren’t clamoring for changes. 

5.  There aren’t real forces within the GOP leading change. 

MORE:

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/why-the-republican-party-isnt-rebranding-after-2020/

American entrepreneurialism: The slander industry

Investigative reporter trolls self

This is just too good to not mention. The New York Times writes:

My colleague Kashmir Hill and I [New York Times reporter Aaron Krolik] were trying to learn who is responsible for — and profiting from — the growing ecosystem of websites whose primary purpose is destroying reputations.

So I wrote a nasty post. About myself.

Then we watched as a constellation of sites duplicated my creation.

Egad!! IT'S ALIIIIVE!!!!!

To get slander removed, many people hire a “reputation management” company. In my case, it was going to cost roughly $20,000.

We soon discovered a secret, hidden behind a smokescreen of fake companies and false identities. The people facilitating slander and the self-proclaimed good guys who help remove it are often one and the same.

Part 1:The stain

At first glance, the websites appear amateurish.

They have names like BadGirlReports.date, BustedCheaters.com and WorstHomeWrecker.com. Photos are badly cropped. Grammar and spelling are afterthoughts. They are clunky and text-heavy, as if they’re intended to be read by machines, not humans.

But do not underestimate their power. When someone attacks you on these so-called gripe sites, the results can be devastating. Earlier this year, we wrote about a woman in Toronto who poisoned the reputations of dozens of her perceived enemies by posting lies about them.

One woman in Ohio was the subject of so many negative posts that Bing declared in bold at the top of her search results that she “is a liar and a cheater” — the same way it states that Barack Obama was the 44th president of the United States. For roughly 500 of the 6,000 people we searched for, Google suggested adding the phrase “cheater” to a search of their names.

The unverified claims are on obscure, ridiculous-looking sites, but search engines give them a veneer of credibility. Posts from Cheaterboard.com appear in Google results alongside Facebook pages and LinkedIn profiles — or, in my case, articles in The New York Times.

The NYT interviewed one brave smear site owner, whose credentials include a criminal with a couple of stints in jail, e.g., for making death threats on one occasion and trying to pepper spray police in the face with Sriracha Dorito dust in another. He calmly explained why he does not feel bad about slandering people online. “Teach children not to talk to strangers, then teach them not to believe what they read on the internet.” Apparently, he sees himself as a life coach just trying to help the children of America.

The article is long and heavy with details, but mind-blowing. The astonishing high level of sleaze in this fine American industry arguably rivals that of the ex-president's personal life, business operations and his administration. Once again, the moral values of unregulated markets shine through for all to see.