Pragmatic politics focused on the public interest for those uncomfortable with America's two-party system and its way of doing politics. Considering the interface of politics with psychology, cognitive biology, social behavior, morality and history.
Etiquette
DP Etiquette
First rule: Don't be a jackass. Most people are good.
Other rules: Do not attack or insult people you disagree with. Engage with facts, logic and beliefs. Out of respect for others, please provide some sources for the facts and truths you rely on if you are asked for that. If emotion is getting out of hand, get it back in hand. To limit dehumanizing people, don't call people or whole groups of people disrespectful names, e.g., stupid, dumb or liar. Insulting people is counterproductive to rational discussion. Insult makes people angry and defensive. All points of view are welcome, right, center, left and elsewhere. Just disagree, but don't be belligerent or reject inconvenient facts, truths or defensible reasoning.
Real Clear Investigations put together a comparison of the two things. Some polling indicates that most Americans want to see congress investigate both, but so far only the 1/6 insurrection is under investigation.
The comparison of fallout links BLM riots with a dramatic nationwide increase in homicides but decreasing arrests. It's not clear how linkage between BLM riots and increased non-BLM homicides was made, so causation maybe not be strong or present at all. The BML protests led to over 16,000 arrests, while only ~570 arrests came from the 1/6 coup attempt
Question:
1. If the 1/6 coup attempt is seen as an unwarranted partisan political attack on democracy and the central government, while the BLM protests are seen as sometimes violent responses to alleged unwarranted police use of lethal force, can the two be directly compared in terms of overall threat?
The US presence in larger towns and cities was different than its presence in rural areas where most of the fighting was done. The Washington Post writes:
SINZAI, Afghanistan — The white flags flutter in the apple orchards of this serene hamlet ringed by oatmeal-colored mountains. They mark the precise spots where U.S. airstrikes killed Afghans. In the village center lies the destroyed shell of a building that once housed shops; down the road is a mangled, rusted car.
There are white flags there, too.
Together, they’re reminders of the legacy the United States has left in many rural areas across Afghanistan.
“Everyone here hated the Americans,” said Zabiullah Haideri, 30. His shop was shattered by an airstrike in 2019 that killed 12 villagers. “They murdered civilians and committed atrocities.”
In Kabul and other Afghan cities, the United States will be remembered for enabling two decades of progress in women’s rights, an independent media and other freedoms. But in the nation’s hinterlands, the main battlegrounds of America’s longest war, many Afghans view the United States primarily through the prism of conflict, brutality and death.
Here in Wardak province, 25 miles southwest of the capital, the U.S. military, the CIA and the ruthless Afghan militias they armed and trained fought the Taliban for years. Trapped in the crossfire were villagers and farmers. Many became casualties of U.S. counterterrorism operations, drone strikes and gun battles.
They [the Taliban] were abetted by the harsh tactics of U.S. forces and their Afghan allies and by the corruption and ineffectiveness of the U.S.-backed Afghan government. Exacting any justice or compensation from the U.S. military or the government was elusive.So the killings of their relatives and the lack of accountability drove many villagers to support the Taliban.
To be certain, the Taliban controlled the villagers through fear, intimidation and their own brand of viciousness. But rural Afghan society is largely conservative, and residents mostly agreed with the militants’ harsh interpretation of Islam.
With the departure of U.S. forces and the fall of President Ashraf Ghani’s government, there’s now a calm unlike any the villagers have experienced in two decades. With the conflict ended and the Taliban in control, the violence has stopped.
“The major change is there is peace and security now, and the killings of the people have stopped,” Mohammed Omar, the village imam, said in front of a mosque peppered with bullet holes. “You can move freely now anywhere. Death has disappeared.”
“There are no airstrikes, no night raids, no bombings,” said Haideri, tall and wiry with a black beard and wavy hair. “But the problem now is there is no work and no money. People here are facing hunger.”
The Taliban, by then [2015], controlled much of Nerkh. The government was entrenched in the district’s center. The villagers were caught in between. Even mundane tasks became matters of life or death. If Haideri shaved, for example, would the Taliban consider him loyal to the foreigners and the government? If he grew out his beard, would the government or U.S. forces consider him a spy?
“Whenever we left our homes we told our families, ‘goodbye,’ ” he said. “We didn’t know whether we would return home alive.”
This is an unusual bit of reporting about what some rural Afghanis saw, experienced and believed about the war. This fits with other, limited reporting from rural areas that suggested there was significant public support for the Taliban. It adds to the reporting about (i) the kleptocracy and incompetence of the Afghan central government, (ii) the brutality of US military and allied operations, and (iii) the arrogance-plagued futility of the entire US enterprise. To this day, the pentagon refuses to answer villagers’ questions about the status of investigations into allegedly unwarranted killings of villagers by US forces.
Question: What the hell did the US government think it was doing there all those years?
Two bits of stuff help put this fun discussion in context.
First bit: We all remember this from the scintillating Senate hearings in 2017 during Brett Kavanaugh’s delightful confirmation hearings.
Ben Sasse (R-NE) said this: “. . . . . the people don’t have a way to fire the bureaucrats. What we mostly do around this body is not pass laws. What we mostly decide to do is to give permission to the secretary or the administrator of bureaucracy X, Y or Z to make law-like regulations. That’s mostly what we do here. We go home and we pretend we make laws. No we don’t. We write giant pieces of legislation, 1200 pages, 1500 pages long, that people haven’t read, filled with all these terms that are undefined, and say to secretary of such and such that he shall promulgate rules that do the rest of our dang jobs. That’s why there are so many fights about the executive branch and the judiciary, because this body rarely finishes its work. [joking] And, the House is even worse.”
For the most part, Sasse is a far right radical fascist extremist, but in this instance he nailed it dead on. Congress does not like to legislate because it might upset some voters and imperil re-election. Sasse was frustrated because the refusal of congress to actually legislate competently and coherently shifts a huge amount of power from congress to federal agencies. Sasse, hates, hates, hates federal agencies, mainly because he hates government just as much. In large part, federal agencies are the federal government. His logic is impeccable. Except for the Department of Defense, federal law enforcement and federal courts to protect sacred property rights, Sasse wants to see most or all of them obliterated. One can certainly feel his pain and frustration.
Second bit: We all also remember how hostile fascist Donnie and his mendacious cadre of crooks and thugs were to the federal government. People like Betsy DeVos and Louie DeJoy were put in charge to destroy their agencies, Education Department and Post Office, respectively. The animosity was blatant.
It is a huge mistake to believe that the FRP (fascist Republican Party) is not radical and extremist in its animosity to the federal government and its intent to gut it. FRP hate of government is aimed at nearly everything, including Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, environmental regulations, workplace regulations, and on and on and on. The goal is to shift power to the business sector and the states and to shift wealth to elite White Christians and authoritarian White faux Christians, e.g., fascist Donnie, at the top of society.
Buggs bunny voice: Meeaaah, what’s on the docket, doc?
Yesterday, a segment on the NPR program 1A discussed some of the cases the Supreme Court has accepted for review and decision in this term. Given the court’s current political makeup, radical right fundamentalist Christian and staunch extremist Republican ideologue, one can pretty much guess what’s on the docket.
Wait! What?? Obliterate federal agency power? Yes, check, check . . . . . . can't you read?
OMG, what fresh fascist hell is this!?
The court will hear an obscure case, Becerra v. Empire Health Foundation, which centers on FRP demands to limit the power of federal agencies to interpret congress’ often incomprehensible statute language. In the past, federal agencies had the Supreme Court’s blessing to do this based on a major 1984 case, Chevron.
Wikipedia: Chevron U.S.A., Inc. v. Natural Resources Defense Council, Inc., 467 U.S. 837 (1984), was a landmark case in which the United States Supreme Court set forth the legal test for determining whether to grant deference to a government agency’s interpretation of a statute which it administers. The decision articulated a doctrine now known as the “Chevron deference.” The doctrine consists of a two-part test applied by the court, when appropriate, that is highly deferential to government agencies: “whether the agency’s answer is based on a permissible construction [emphasis added] of the statute”, so long as Congress has not spoken directly to the precise issue at question.
Well, if congress writes a law that is ambiguous or incoherent, license to interpret it according to what can be seen as a “permissible construction” is shockingly broad. That is what Ben Sasse was complaining about in 2017. This is what the FRP refers to as the “deep state.” According to the FRP, the deep state is experts in federal agencies interpreting the incoherent slop that congress routinely produces in the form of statutes it passes. The court in Chevron decided that federal agencies with actual experts should turn incoherent congressional blither into at least semi-coherent regulations.
So, in the Becerra case, the FRP is asking the Supreme Court to reign in, or overturn Chevron, thereby neutering the power of federal agencies to recycle congressional garbage into something useful in the form of usually mostly understandable federal regulations.
Wait a minnit! What about power? Where will it go?
Usually power does not just go away. If the court does gut Chevron, the power that federal agencies used to have can go one of four basic places. It can revert back to congress, but since congress refuses to be competent and does not have the expertise even if it did try, power won’t go there. Besides, there are those pesky socialist-communist tyrant Democrats in congress who would interpret laws the wrong way if they ever got power. That’s no good.
Power could flow to the people, but as a whole, the American public seems to be a herd of uninformed, perpetually grumpy cats. That doesn’t seem to be a promising place for power to go. Besides, the FRP is authoritarian and wants power concentrated at the top, not distributed to the people. Power to the people is a non-starter.
What’s left? The private sector and the courts themselves.
The power could go to special interests who are affected by federal laws. They do have the experts needed to be coherent. Unfortunately, the business sector would make damn sure that federal law gets interpreted as they see fit, i.e., in social and environmental damage and profit-maximizing, and regulation and cost-minimizing ways. The business community would love that outcome and presumably so would the FRP.
According to the person A1 interviewed, Leah Litman a professor at U. Michigan law school, surmises that the FRP is angling for power to flow to the courts. The radical Republicans that dominate the Supreme Court would give legal interpretations the FRP and the business community would want. Even though the courts do not have the expertise to regulate, they would be free to decide case by case based on the briefs that the disputants submit. The courts would be free to decide in favor of Christian churches and the business community, which is what the FRP wants.
1. Should partisan political federal courts or experts in federal agencies interpret incoherent congressional language, or should congress actually try to do its job better?
2. Is it credible to think that congress could ever obtain the expertise to regulate in complex areas, e.g., because congress is broken, or because the FRP hates government and has no intention of ever governing in the public interest?
3. Does this help bring into focus why the people that FRP elites coaxed fascist Donnie to put in power were there to attack and subvert the federal agencies they in charge of, not to make their agencies function better or work for the public interest?
4. How good, bad or ambiguous a job has the MSM done on informing the American people of what the Supreme Court is up to? (here's one source, E&E News, that discusses some upcoming cases the Supreme Court has decided to hear[1])
Footnote:
1. E&E News writes on how the radical right court thinks about environmental regulation:
But the real blockbuster environmental battles could come through a series of pending petitions for the Supreme Court to get involved in legal fights over the scope of EPA regulations under the nation’s bedrock clean air and water laws.
“The fight about the environment at the Supreme Court significantly overlaps with the fight about executive power and agency power,” said Sean Marotta, a partner at the law firm Hogan Lovells. “What we see in the court’s environmental rulings is not so much strong feelings about the environment but fears of agency overreach.”
With the FRP, “agency overreach” is synonymous with the despised “deep state.”
The dictator shakes hands with the dictator wannabe in 2019 --
they really do see eye to eye and share a love for unrestrained power
Context
For most businesses, the business of business is business, i.e., profit. For the most part, the morality of business is profit. In theory, the business of the US government is protecting the public interest, which includes protecting the environment and business interests. Government is a balancing act. For the most part, business is a really big bulldozer that only moves toward profit and flattens or weakens things that get in the way, e.g., environmental regulations. Of course these days, the business of government is mostly business because business has mostly bought government.
Obviously, that is just my opinion, but there is evidence to support it. It is not just made up mindless crap like "Argggh!!! The election was stolen!!!" or "GADZOOKS!!! The Democrats are a bunch of lying, cannibalistic pedophilic lizard people who are going to take our guns away and force us into re-education camps and turn us into GODLESS atheists!!!" The point here is simple: Money, protected as free speech, can and does buy influence in government and society. It does not matter if the free speech is pure crap, lies and anti-democratic nonsense. Dark free speech gets just as much protection as honest speech, and these days arguably somewhat more.
And, in case anyone is unsure about it, the business of US propaganda companies is business, i.e., profit, not defense of democracy, liberty, truth or civility.
One way to influence government and society is to hire professional propaganda (public relations) companies to make up lies, crackpot conspiracies and outrageous nonsense and then help spread that poison as truth. Interests who hire these propagandists include foreign dictators. The New York Times writes on how this is playing out in real time in the US:
Former Vice President Mike Pence turned up in Hungary last month to speak to a conference on conservative social values hosted by the far-right government of Prime Minister Viktor Orban.
Jeff Sessions, the former attorney general, was another recent visitor. Tucker Carlson did his Fox News show from Hungary for a week this summer. The American Conservative Union is planning a version of its CPAC gathering in Budapest early next year.
Those are among the more visible recent fruits of a well-funded campaign by Mr. Orban in the United States that stretches back a decade and now stands as a case study in how governments around the world seek to shape policies and debates in Washington, sometimes raising concerns about improper foreign influence in U.S. politics.
Carried out by a network of government offices, Washington lobbyists, Hungarian diaspora groups, educational institutions and government-funded foundations, the effort’s main impact has been to bolster Mr. Orban’s image as a conservative leader on the world stage — and to counter his reputation as an authoritarian nationalist who is cozying up to Russia and China.
It has also notched some tangible, if fleeting, policy victories for Mr. Orban, including the withdrawal during the Trump administration of a State Department grant to nurture independent news media in Hungary and the securing of a long-coveted Oval Office meeting for Mr. Orban in 2019 with President Donald J. Trump.
Much of what the Hungarian network has done is legal and standard operating procedure in Washington. But some of its activities touch on gray areas, including transparency requirements for those acting on behalf of foreign interests, concerns arising from overseas efforts to sway presidential campaigns, and the ethics of think tanks accepting money from governments or their proxies.
That is more evidence of the anti-democratic authoritarianism of the modern FRP (fascist Republican Party). Prominent Republican politicians, political groups and media entertainers (Carlson) have bought in on the dictator's lies about what a great thing his brand of kleptocratic dictatorship is and it should be installed here in the US. A few Democrats also like Orban's dictatorship, but that party has tried to distance its self from them.
Questions:
1. Is this relevant evidence that (i) professional US propaganda companies are happy to work for anti-democratic dictators, and (ii) the FRP is more than just sympathetic to dictatorship, e.g., actively supporting dictatorship in the US and abroad?
2. Should US companies that work for anti-democratic dictators he taxed more heavily, e.g., as a sin tax for fighting against democracy and truth, sort of like a heavy tax on cigarettes? What about the FRP, higher tax on it due to its anti-democracy ideology and rhetoric?
