From Constitutional Rot to Constitutional Crisis

A previous discussion here focused in the concept of what exactly constitutes a constitutional crisis. To help define the concept, experts cite constitutional crisis and the related concept they call constitutional rot. The former includes legal but hyper-partisan hardball politics. The latter encompasses situations where the constitution is has literally failed and the rule of law disintegrates.

Constitutional rot

Constitutional rot (CR) arises when norms that held power in check fall, partisans play constitutional hardball and fair political competition comes under attack. We see this now. For example, it was constitutional hardball by the Mitch McConnell to ignore President Obama's Supreme Court nomination of Merrick Garland. In CR, politicians favor short-term political gains over long-term damage to the constitutional system. As CR progresses, the political system becomes less democratic, e.g., as partisans pass laws to limit voting by the political opposition. State power becomes less accountable and less responsive to the public, while politicians become more beholden to backers who keep them in power. In essence, the country drifts into some sort of usually corrupt authoritarian despotism or oligarchy.

Constitutional crisis

A constitutional crisis (CC) is rare among nations that operate on a constitutional basis. There are three sources of CC. In the first source of constitutional failure, a CC arises when politicians and/or military officials announce they will not obey the constitution any more. That happens when politicians and/or military officials refuse to obey a court order. Once refusal to adhere to constitutional rules has occurred, the constitution has failed.

The second kind of CC arises when many people refuse to obey the constitution. In these scenarios, there can be street riots, or, states or regions try to secede from the nation. This involves "situations where publicly articulated disagreements about the constitution lead political actors to engage in extraordinary forms of protest beyond mere legal disagreements and political protests: people take to the streets, armies mobilize, and brute force is used or threatened in order to prevail."

The third kind of CC arises when the constitution prevents political actors from trying to prevent an impending disaster, which is a very rare event. In these situations, courts usually dream up some way to get around constitutional constraints. The problem with that tactic, is that it usually leaves in its wake a rancid precedent that authoritarians and tyrants can later use to oppress political opposition and dissent. An example is the United States Supreme Court case Korematsu v. United States, 323 U.S. 214 (1944). That very bad decision defended exclusion of Japanese Americans from the West Coast Military Area during World War II. Korematsu has widely been criticized as bigotry and a stain on US law.

On the cusp of a constitutional crisis

The New York Times is reporting that the Trump administration is refusing a court order to turn over 20 emails the NYT demanded under a FOIA request. The NYT filed the demand to get information about Trump administration escapades with Ukraine. The NYT writes:

“WASHINGTON — The Trump administration disclosed on Friday that there were 20 emails between a top aide to President Trump’s acting chief of staff and a colleague at the White House’s Office of Management and Budget discussing the freeze of a congressionally mandated military aid package for Ukraine. 

But in response to a court order that it swiftly process those pages in response to a Freedom of Information Act, or FOIA, lawsuit filed by The New York Times, the Office of Management and Budget delivered a terse letter saying it would not turn over any of the 40 pages of emails — not even with redactions. 

‘All 20 documents are being withheld in full,’ wrote Dionne Hardy, the office’s Freedom of Information Act officer. 

A report on Thursday by the legal policy website Just Security added further fuel to the controversy by revealing what was under some, but not all, of the deletions. The website said it had been shown some of the emails in unredacted form, including an Aug. 30 message from Mr. Duffey to a Pentagon budget official stating that there was ‘clear direction from POTUS’ — an acronym referring to the president of the United States — ‘to continue to hold’ the Ukraine military assistance.”

The White House asserts that the emails cannot be turned over to the NYT because that would “inhibit the frank and candid exchange of views that is necessary for effective government decision-making.” Another thing it would very likely do, is provide additional proof that Trump and his corrupt administration broke the law and committed impeachable acts in dealings with Ukraine. That is the real reason the president is withholding the documents.

This is not hyperbole: America is on the razor edge of a true constitutional crisis. The president openly refuses a court order to hide evidence of his corrupt and illegal actions related to Ukraine. Not only has our corrupt president attacked Iran (and, indirectly Iraq) twice in two days to try to deflect attention from disclosures of his illegal and impeachable actions in office, he also willingly put America on the cusp of a true constitutional crisis just to serve his personal political interests.

This case will probably be appealed to the Supreme Court. If that court allows the president to keep the documents hidden from the public, the crisis will be avoided. If not, then the president can decide to thrown America into full blown crisis or to comply and avoid a constitutional failure.

As discussed here yesterday, when a person loses trust in someone or an institution, then that person’s mind is no longer constrained by norms that protect the person or institution to some extent from unreasonable beliefs and reality-detached conspiracy theories and opinions. Given the president’s undeniable track record of making thousands of false and misleading statements to the American people, there is no objective basis in evidence for any trust in anything the president says or does. The president deserves no public trust because he earned no trust.

That's not some unhinged or reality-detached conspiracy theory. It is a logical conclusion of truth based on undeniable empirical evidence in the public record.

Blind mystic Baba Vanga's predictions for 2020 - after foreseeing 9/11 and Brexit

A blind mystic who is said to have predicted 9/11 and Brexit has foretold trouble and darkness for the year ahead.

Bulgarian born Baba Vanga has been dubbed the 'Nostradamus of the Balkans' for her predictions.

Despite dying 23 years ago, those with a keen interest in mysticism continue to revere Baba's work, which some claim looks forward to 5079 - the year she believed the universe will end.

Right before her death at the age of 85 she made a series of predictions for the year 2020.

The most startling revelation is that Vladamir Putin and Donald Trump's lives are in danger.

The Russian president could reach the end of his mortal coil thanks to an assassination attempt made from within the Kremlin.

Almost as dramatically, the US president will fall ill with a mysterious illness which will leave him deaf and with a brain tumour.

Those with long memories may remember Baba foretold that Putin and Trump's lives would be in danger last year, suggesting some kind of cosmic rollover.

Another recurrent theme in her predictions has been the destruction of Asia.

Baba foresaw that “a big wave will cover the shore and people will disappear underwater” in what some interpreted as the destruction of Thailand by a huge tsunami in 2004.

The outlook in 2020 is equally as bleak, with more tsunamis and earthquakes scheduled to hit the continent.

A meteorite is also predicted to fall on Russia.

Perhaps the most ominous prediction of the clairvoyant was that the European continent could reach "the end of its existence" at the hands of "Muslim extremists"

The Bulgarian suggested that extremists would "use an arsenal of chemical weapons against Europeans”.

Supporters of Baba are keen to emphasise how spot on she has been, with "85% accurate" a phrase that regularly crops up in fan forums.

According to baba-vanga.com, the figure is drawn from research conducted by Professor Georgi Lozanov - a former director of the Bulgarian Institute of Suggestology.

Others point to her past successes as proof that she had foresight beyond that of a typical human.

In 1989 she guessed that America would be hit by two 'steel birds' in a terror attack, in what was later interpreted as a reference to 9/11.

She said: "Horror, horror! The American brothers will fall after being attacked by the steel birds. The wolves will be howling in a bush, and innocent blood will be gushing."

Baba's big breakthrough had come a year earlier however, when she accurately predicted the sinking of Russian submarine the Kursk.

Before cancelling Christmas and ordering a nuclear bunker however, readers should know that some questions remain around Baba and her predictions - some of which have been proved to be way off the mark.

Her prophecy that Europe would cease to exist by 2016 was clearly wrong, unless seen through an incredibly generous Brexiteer lense.

Baba's suggestion that the 1994 FIFA World Cup final would be played between two teams beginning with the letter 'b' was equally wrong.

The nuclear war pencilled in for the years 2010 to 2014 also failed to materialise.

Perhaps more damning is the seemingly non-existent nature of her prophecies.

While Baba may have spoken or written down her predictions in Bulgarian, no credible version is available to view.

According to a 2012 Washington Post investigation, the few prophecies that can be traced back to their origins appear to come from Russian social media.

When Bulgarian newspaper 24 Chasa interviewed Baba's neighbours, they said she had never predicted 9/11, the sinking of the Kursk or the big war.

Regardless, her legacy could still be cemented if some of her more unlikely supposed predictions come to pass.

She foretold that in 2023 the Earth's orbit will change, in 2066 the US will unleash a climate change weapon on Muslim-controlled Rome and in 2304 humans will discover time travel.

https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/weird-news/blind-mystic-baba-vangas-predictions-21151259

What Happens When Trust Is Lost

Yesterday's US attack on and killing of Iranian military leader Qassim Suleimani, provoked an immediate personal reaction: What is the bad news that the president is trying to deflect our attention from?[1] The administration’s claim that the killed Iranian was planning imminent attacks on Americans is a diversion. The dead general is always planning attacks on Americans and he had been doing that for years. The president intentionally timed this attack to divert public attention from damaging information from information coming out of federal courts.

The objective basis for that instant reaction is the president’s track record of constantly lying to the American people and his track record of trying to deflect public attention when bad news about him and his corruption becomes public. So far, the president’s public track record includes over 15,000 false and misleading statements he has made to deceive, confuse, distract and polarize the American people. He relies on tactics of lies and deceit to try hide his constant stream of crimes, corruption, incompetence and golf course sloth.

His non-existent golf outings have cost taxpayers about $115 million so far

More evidence of lies and illegal activities

It turns out that there is massive bad news that the president is desperate to deflect public attention from. Newly released documents the courts have forced to be made public show overwhelming evidence that the president obstructed justice. That evidence could easily be the basis to start another impeachment proceeding in the House against the president. Also newly released is unredacted documents proving that Trump and the administration was breaking the law in looking for dirt on Joe Biden from Ukraine. That could also constitute grounds for new House impeachment proceedings.

Kate Brannon at Just Security reported yesterday:

“‘Clear direction from POTUS to continue to hold.’ 

This is what Michael Duffey, associate director of national security programs at the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), told Elaine McCusker, the acting Pentagon comptroller, in an Aug. 30 email, which has only been made available in redacted form until now. It is one of many documents the Trump administration is trying to keep from the public, despite congressional oversight efforts and court orders in Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) litigation. 

Earlier in the day on Aug. 30, President Donald Trump met with Defense Secretary Mark Esper and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to discuss the president’s hold on $391 million in military assistance for Ukraine. Inside the Trump administration, panic was reaching fever pitch about the president’s funding hold, which had stretched on for two months. Days earlier, POLITICO had broken the story and questions were starting to pile up. U.S. defense contractors were worried about delayed contracts and officials in Kyiv and lawmakers on Capitol Hill wanted to know what on earth was going on. While Trump’s national security team thought withholding the money went against U.S. national security interests, Trump still wouldn’t budge. 

Thanks to the testimony of several Trump administration officials, we now know what Trump was waiting on: a commitment from Ukraine to investigate Joe Biden. 

But getting at that truth hasn’t been easy and the Trump administration continues to try to obscure it. It is blocking key officials from testifying and is keeping documentary evidence from lawmakers investigating the Ukraine story. For example, this note from Duffey to McCusker was never turned over to House investigators and the Trump administration is continuing to try to keep it secret.”

Also, documents related to the Mueller report were released. Buzzfeed reported yesterday that 356 pages of documents were obtained from FOIA litigation after a long legal fight between Trump’s corrupted Justice Department and the House Judiciary Committee. The House committee wanted to get an unredacted copy of the Mueller report and grand jury testimony from the investigation, along with FBI summaries of 33 interviews. Corrupt Justice Department officials claimed the impeachment inquiry does not entitle the panel to see those records. Buzzfeed commented: “A federal judge disagreed, ruling in October that ‘DOJ is wrong’ and that the White House and the Justice Department were ‘openly stonewalling’ the committee.”

But wait, it gets much worse

Release of all of that information is the real story the president is desperate to distract public attention away from, regardless of the cost or damage to American interests it causes. The president thus attacked and killed a bitter American enemy at this time to try to distract the public from the fact that there is plenty of new evidence for another impeachment proceeding in the House. The counts could include (1) obstruction of justice, and (2) illegally withholding aid to Ukraine. The two counts the House impeached the president on are (1) abuse of power related to Ukraine, and (2) obstruction of congress. If the House wanted to get aggressive, it could also add to the list the president’s stunt yesterday in trying to deflect public attention from his political problems at the cost of new Middle East unrest and maybe a new war.

That harsh assessment of the attack on the Iranian general yesterday is how an American could see it as a blatant attempt to deflect attention away from the newly released information that is very damaging to the president. That kind of thinking is what can happen when people lose trust in a corrupt chronic liar like Donald Trump.

Is that belief unreasonable or irrational? Opinions will obviously differ. But at the very least there is solid empirical evidence to believe this version of reality.

Footnote:
1. The president has a well-know track record of trying to distract public attention from his problems.

“PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP was facing a potentially very bad news cycle, with special counsel Robert Mueller preparing to testify before Congress and a past friend, Jeffrey Epstein, charged with sexually molesting underage girls. So he went on a rant about four minority, female members of Congress, calling on them at rallies and in tweets to "go back" to their countries of origin. It was a classic Trump move: distract, divert, repeat. When a presidential problem surfaces, the president finds a way to move the problem out of the public eye, relieving pressure on him to solve the actual problem.” (emphasis added)

“Don’t let Donald Trump’s antics distract you from what’s really important. He’s paying fraud fines and collecting bribes — and distracting you with Hamilton tweets. .... Foreign diplomats are booking rooms at Donald Trump’s hotel in Washington, DC because they believe that directly putting money in the pocket of the President-elect of the United States will serve as a bribe that helps them curry favor with him and influence foreign policy.”

Continuing Conservative-Trump Attacks on Science

One of the more blatantly false and damaging partisan aspects of conservatism, conservative populism and the president is their rejection of science they dislike. Conservative attacks on inconvenient truths go back decades but the trend is intensifying under our anti-science president. Attacks on the EPA are not new.

The New York Times reports that the president’s appointees to the EPA posted a draft letter criticizing the president's anti-environmental policies as not supported by science. This was unexpected because Trump appointees presumably were yes-people chosen for loyalty, not adherence to facts, logic or scientific principle. Some of the scientists that the president appointed had ties to the industries they were supposed to regulate. It is reasonable to think that the president will fire and replace these scientists with scientists who will claim that modern climate science is clear that there is no such thing as anthropogenic global warming or that science contradicts any regulation that the president wishes to gut. The NYT writes:

“WASHINGTON — A top panel of government-appointed scientists, many of them hand-selected by the Trump administration, said on Tuesday that three of President Trump’s most far-reaching and scrutinized proposals to weaken major environmental regulations are at odds with established science. 

Draft letters posted online Tuesday by the Environmental Protection Agency’s Scientific Advisory Board, which is responsible for evaluating the scientific integrity of the agency’s regulations, took aim at the Trump administration’s rewrite of an Obama-era regulation of waterways, an Obama-era effort to curb planet-warming vehicle tailpipe emissions and a plan to limit scientific data that can be used to draft health regulations. 

A forthcoming rule on water pollution “neglects established science” by “failing to acknowledge watershed systems,” the scientists said. They found “no scientific justification” for excluding certain bodies of water from protection under the new regulations. 

Many scientists on the advisory board were selected by Trump administration officials early in the administration, as President Trump sought to move forward with an aggressive agenda of weakening environmental regulations. During the first year of the Trump administration, more than a quarter of the academic scientists on the panel departed or were dismissed, and many were replaced by scientists with industry ties who were perceived as likely to be more friendly to the industries that the E.P.A. regulates.”

Regarding the president’s proposal to limit scientific data in health regulations, the EPA scientists wrote that “key considerations that should inform the proposed rule have been omitted from the proposal or presented without analysis.” The Trump administration is receiving increasing criticism that policies ignore, distort or unreasonably downplay scientific data despite contrary environmental, public health and legal requirements.

This is more evidence of the corrupt, irrational ideological anti-science corruption that our president brings to bear on policy. Under Trump, the office of the US presidency has become an immoral disgrace.

Book Review: Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes

Jacques Ellul’s 1962 book, Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes, expresses a dark vision of propaganda, democracy and human nature. Ellul was a professor of law and social history and he built a reputation on social and political philosophy. Propaganda is written from a sociological point of view and sees propaganda as a sociological phenomenon. Although technology and society have changed enormously since 1962, some of Ellul’s insights about propaganda and human nature are disquietingly close to what modern experience and science is revealing in real time.

Two caveats merit mention. First, some of the social norms that were in place have since fallen away. Norms that constrained propaganda and how propagandists used it in democracies have weakened or disappeared. In this sense, the situation we live in today is more perilous that what Ellul described in 1962. Second, some of his arguments run counter to current conventional wisdom. Changed technology and social circumstances have rendered some of Ellul’s assertions somewhat or mostly no longer true. Ellul seems to struggle with a period of flux where technology and social norms were rapidly changing, while the impacts of the recent Nazi and Stalinist past still echoed powerfully in his mind. Ellul fought the Nazis as a member of the French resistance.

Like others who study propaganda, Ellul sees propaganda as sometimes capable of obliterating truth and creating fake reality. He writes: “History shows that plain truth can be so thoroughly snuffed out that it disappears, and that in certain periods the lie is all powerful. . . . Propaganda, in fact, creates truth in the sense that it creates in men subject to propaganda all the signs of true believers. For modern man, propaganda is really creating truth.” That is conventional wisdom today.

He saw the US, Russia and China as the world’s main sources of propaganda, with other regions and nations being less influential globally. Ellul argues that propaganda in earlier times was often based mostly on blatant, outrageous lies, but the propaganda of his time was more sophisticated and based on more truthful content because the public was too educated. Thus truths, truths out of context, half-truths and mixed truth-lies was the dominant form of propaganda. However, even with propaganda that starts out as lies-based morphs into content that contains some truth because truth sometimes has power if it is positioned properly.

Ellul makes a disturbing assertion that for propaganda to be effective, the people it is used on must be educated. Unfortunately, it isn’t clear what he means by educated, but he seems to imply college graduates. That assertion appears to go against mainstream current belief that the more education a person has, the more resistant to propaganda they tend to be. Ellul argues that intellectuals are the most susceptible to propaganda in part because they falsely believe they cannot be deceived or used. There may some truth in that. Nonetheless, it isn’t clear that educated intellectuals, whatever that means, are more or less susceptible to propaganda than other groups.

Disappointingly, Ellul refuses to define propaganda. At various places he says what traits it has or does not have, but what it is remains a matter for personal interpretation of his heavy prose. That is unsatisfying. Another concern is that Ellul does not rely on empirical experiments or statistics to assess what propaganda does and doesn’t do. Instead, he relies on personal observation and logic. That is suspicious. Nonetheless, some of his observations intuitively ring true and/or have some empirical support in later research.

Ellul does assert some qualities of propaganda that modern research has supported as true. For example, he claims that propaganda can generate beliefs mainly through provoking emotional responses and not by facilitating reasoned thinking or logic. He also argues that as time passes and propaganda narratives are adopted and internalized, there is a tendency for affected minds to (1) harden and become resistant to inconvenient or contradictory facts, truth and logical reasoning, and (2) become unable to discern detail and nuance or their relevance. Loss of detail and nuance allows for simplification of issues and moral questions and that leads to greater persuasive power for more propaganda. Regarding the weakness of facts, Ellul comments that “even a proved fact can do nothing against crystallized opinion.” The same holds for sound reasoning. All of that is undoubtedly true. It accords with empirical findings from modern cognitive and social science research.

Ellul sees propaganda as the greatest danger to democracy and civil liberties. He argues that propaganda inherently and necessarily tends toward totalitarianism. Lies and deceit take away the ability of deceived people to consent or object to what they have been deceived about. That is authoritarian, not democratic. In this regard, he anticipates one of the key arguments that Sissela Bok asserts in her 1999 book, Lying: Moral Choice in Public and Private Life (my book review is here) is the reason that lying to the public is immoral. Ellul predicts that over time with the advance of mass communications, both authoritarian and democratic governments will increasingly resort to technological tyranny to infringe on and attack fact, truth, reason and civil liberties. He claims that nations that do not resort to propaganda will weaken. In democracies, this is necessary simply because the masses participate in governance and the government itself must have some way of communicating both facts and its preferred narratives.

Ellul predicts that because of the increasing cost of propaganda, political parties would be forced to turn to private sources of wealth. In turn, that will “indenture themselves to a financial oligarchy.” That prediction has turned out to be true. It also reflects a truth that, with few exceptions, money is power. Because propaganda is power and money can buy it, the logic seems solid and unassailable. In addition to money buying power in political parties, wealthy people and interests can cut out the economic waste of buying a middleman and go directly to government to buy favors, advantages and influence. That is something that is done in abundance these days.

What Ellul leaves is the critical unanswered question: Assuming it is possible to do so at all, how can propaganda be used in defense of democracy, the rule of law, civil liberties, social civility, facts, truths and sound reasoning? The political playing field favors tyranny-oligarchy-kleptocracy. It is heavily stacked against democracy, the rule of law, etc. If Ellul is basically correct in his vision of the future, he projects a sobering, frightening vision. American democracy has not yet arrived at a satisfactory answer, or any answer at all.

Update on Disqus Technical Problem

As most of you know, Disqus notifications have stopped due to an unspecified technical problem. I asked about the status of the fix and got this reply:

Hey Germaine - status is still 'partial outage' and 'degraded performance.' Sorry.  

 https://status.disqus.com/ 

It is reasonable to think that notifications will be coming back in the next few days. Patience Grasshoppers.