The Conservative Game: Owning the Libs and Crushing Democracy

Understanding what drives polarization and the breakdown of social comity appears to be of central importance to understanding the American drift into some form of harsh, demagogic dictatorship. A Politico article offers some possible insight that at least partly explains the mess. Politico writes:

For a political party whose membership skews older, it might be surprising that the spirit that most animates Republican politics today is best described with a phrase from the world of video games: “Owning the libs.”

Gamers borrowed the term from the nascent world of 1990s computer hacking, using it to describe their conquered opponents: “owned.” To “own the libs” does not require victory so much as a commitment to infuriating, flummoxing or otherwise distressing liberals with one’s awesomely uncompromising conservatism. And its pop-cultural roots and clipped snarkiness are perfectly aligned with a party that sees pouring fuel on the culture wars’ fire as its best shot at surviving an era of Democratic control.

But in a post-Trump America, to “own the libs” is less an identifiable act or set of policy goals than an ethos, a way of life, even a civic religion.

“‘Owning the libs’ is a way of asserting dignity,” says Helen Andrews, senior editor of The American Conservative. “‘The libs,’ as currently constituted, spend a lot of time denigrating and devaluing the dignity of Middle America and conservatives, so fighting back against that is healthy self-assertion; any self-respecting human being would… Stunts, TikTok videos, they energize people, that’s what they’re intended to do.”

“I can envision a time where [pro-Trump Florida Rep.] Matt Gaetz could pin a picture of [Democratic New York Rep.] Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to his own crotch, and smash it with a ball-peen hammer, and he’ll think it’s a huge success if 100,000 liberals attack him as an idiot,” says Jonah Goldberg, editor-in-chief of the anti-Trump conservative outlet The Dispatch. “It’s a way of taking what the other side criticizes about you and making it into a badge of honor.”  

“It’s a spirit of rebellion against what people see as liberals who are overly sensitive, or are capable of being triggered, or hypocritical,” says Marshall Kosloff, co-host of the podcast “The Realignment,” which analyzes the shifting allegiances of and rise of populist politics. “It basically offers the party a way of resolving the contradictions within a realigning party, that increasingly is appealing to down-market white voters and certain working-class Black and Hispanic voters, but that also has a pretty plutocratic agenda at the policy level.” In other words: Owning the libs offers bread and circuses for the pro-Trump right while Republicans quietly pursue a traditional program of deregulation and tax cuts at the policy level.  

That’s led to predictable tensions, as the party’s diminishing cadre of wonky reformists lament a form of politics that seems more focused on racking up retweets and YouTube views than achieving policy goals. Even so, Trump-inspired stunt work is, for the moment, the Republican Party’s go-to political tool. “Owning the libs” is no longer the domain of its rowdy, ragged edges, it’s the party line, with the insufficiently combative seen as inherently suspect and outside the 45th president’s trusted circle of “fighters.”

Do liberals really spend too much time denigrating and devaluing the dignity of Middle America and conservatives? That complaint is not uncommon. Is it true? Do people, like me, who heavily criticize the ex-president and dark free speech cross a line from principled political opposition and rhetoric to mere partisan rudeness and hypocrisy? Or, is the republican complaint a propaganda ploy by elites to keep the rank and file riled up, deceived, manipulated and betrayed, all without their understanding of exactly what is going on and why?

“The John the Baptist to former President T****’s all-ownage-all-the-time 

messianic leadership: Rush Limbaugh

Limbaugh regularly filled the three daily hours of his program with invective against women, people of color, LGBTQ people and any number of other groups that didn’t include Rush Limbaugh. .... to his millions of devoted listeners, no remark was too inflammatory to be brushed aside in light of his peerless talent for owning the libs.”

Exactly who is denigrating and devaluing the dignity of who and what?

Intellectual Property in the Pharmaceutical Industry

A Washington Post article focuses on the intellectual property situation that vaccine manufacturers are defending in the face of the pandemic. Again, this emphasizes the moral framework that most companies operate in. For pharmaceuticals in particular, patents and trade secrets (know-how) are critical to maintain high profit margins. WaPo writes:

Abdul Muktadir, the chief executive of Bangladeshi pharmaceutical maker Incepta, has emailed executives of Moderna, Johnson & Johnson, and Novavax offering his company’s help. He said he has enough capacity to fill vials for 600 million to 800 million doses of coronavirus vaccine a year to distribute throughout Asia.

He never heard back from any of them.

The drug companies that developed and won authorization for coronavirus vaccines in record time have agreed to sell most of the first doses coming off production lines to the United States, European countries and a few other wealthy nations.

Billions of people are left with an uncertain wait, with most of Africa and parts of South America and Asia not expected to achieve widespread vaccination coverage until 2023, according to some estimates.

But drug companies have rebuffed entreaties to face the emergency by sharing their proprietary technology more freely with companies in developing nations. They cite the rapid development of new vaccines as evidence that the drug industry’s traditional business model, based on exclusive patents and know-how, is working. The companies are lobbying the Biden administration and other members of the World Trade Organization against any erosion of their monopolies on individual coronavirus vaccines that are worth billions of dollars in annual sales.

The fights over vaccine supply are not just over a moral duty of Western nations to prevent deaths and illness overseas. Lack of supply and lopsided distribution threaten to leave entire continents open as breeding grounds for coronavirus mutations. Those variants, if they prove resistant to vaccines, could spread anywhere in the world, including in Western countries that have been vaccinated first.

But no coronavirus vaccine manufacturer has agreed to participate in the program, called the COVID-19 Technology Access Pool, the WHO said. Albert Bourla, the chief executive of Pfizer, last year called the concept “nonsense.”

“Unfortunately, only limited, exclusive and often non-transparent voluntary licensing is the preferred approach of some companies, and this is proven to be insufficient to address the needs of the current COVID-19 pandemic,” the WHO said in response to questions from The Washington Post. “The entire population and the global economy are in crisis because of that approach and vaccines nationalism.”

These exclusive franchises are on track to generate billions of dollars in revenue for the companies. The Moderna vaccine, which was co-developed with the United States government and supported with $483 million in taxpayer backing, is expected to bring in $18.5 billion for the company this year, Moderna said in February.

Pfizer, which partnered with Germany’s BioNTech, a company that received German subsidies, has predicted it will get $15 billion from sales of its vaccine, an estimate that is considered conservative. Pfizer did not accept U.S. government funding.

Step-by-step manufacturing instructions are just as important as intellectual property rights, because vaccines require multiple complex steps to produce. It takes highly specialized equipment and workers trained in biopharmaceutical manufacturing.

In a Zoom call on Feb. 3, John Lepore, Moderna’s senior vice president for government engagement, told vaccine advocates the company is reluctant to share details about how to make its vaccine, according to advocates who participated in the call and were interviewed by The Washington Post. Lepore said Moderna sees its mRNA vaccine delivery system as a proprietary platform for other drugs and vaccines in the future, the participants said.

Moderna did not comment on the conversation but referred to the October patent pledge. “Our patent pledge stated that, while the pandemic persists, Moderna will not use its patents to block others from making a coronavirus vaccine intended to combat the pandemic. There was no mention of a commitment to transfer our know-how beyond our chosen partners,” Moderna spokesman Ray Jordan said in an email.

Does this business model still work? The moral imperative here, profit, is crystal clear. On the one hand, Americans got vaccines in record time by assuming most of the risk of vaccine development failure. But on the other hand, if new virus variants arise among billions of unvaccinated people in the next couple of years, we might need to do this all over again with a new vaccine that works against the new variant. That could go one for a long time. The flu virus requires a new vaccine every year, so this possibility is not out of the question.[1]  

One critical component is the know-how needed to make the vaccines. Without it manufacturers cannot make the vaccine, even if the vaccine is patented and the ingredients are known with precision. What the patents apparently do not teach is the know-how needed to make a functioning vaccine on a large scale. It isn't just a matter of adding ingredients together and stirring the vat. The process is far more complex than that. The process probably can be reverse engineered over a period of months, maybe a year, but that would take a lot of money.

What should the US government do, if anything? The government could fund a research effort to discover the manufacturing process. If successful, and it probably would be, that would convert the know-how (trade secret) into public knowledge, free for anyone to use as long as patents do not block sale of the end product vaccine. The vaccines industry has two lines of defense, patents and know-how. Even if the know-how is eliminated by reverse engineering research, the patents will remain there to block vaccine sales.

What is the right thing to do here? Do nothing and let the free market (such as it is) sort it out? Or intervene in hope of protecting the public interest and people generally? Compel licensing of the patents? At what point does the profit moral outweigh the public interest, if ever? Or does protecting the profit motive always best serve the public as hard core capitalists claim?

Footnote: 

1. A couple of weeks ago, I think one source mentioned that flu season this year is about 2% of what was projected because of mask wearing and physical distancing for COVID. That is solid evidence that COVID is far more infectious than this year's flu. COVID is still spreading while flu got clobbered. That COVID is definitely not the typical flu is something to keep in mind.

Regarding the Public Interest: Free Markets Do Not Perform Well

The applicable rule of thumb here: The business of business is business, but the business of government is service to the public interest.

A fascinating New York Times article focuses on why the US is doing better than Europe in terms of vaccine rollouts. It boils down to what one might think: Risk and profits. The NYT writes: 

The calls began in December, as the United States prepared to administer its first batches of Covid-19 vaccine. Even then, it was clear that the European Union was a few weeks behind, and its leaders wanted to know what they could learn from their American counterparts.

The questions were the same, from President Emmanuel Macron of France, President Ursula von der Leyen of the European Commission, and Alexander De Croo, the prime minister of Belgium.

“How did you do it?” Dr. Moncef Slaoui, the United States vaccine czar, recalled them asking on the calls. “And what do you think we missed?”

There is no single culprit. Rather, a cascade of small decisions have led to increasingly long delays. The bloc was comparatively slow to negotiate contracts with drugmakers. Its regulators were cautious and deliberative in approving some vaccines. Europe also bet on vaccines that did not pan out or, significantly, had supply disruptions. And national governments snarled local efforts in red tape.

But the biggest explanation, the one that has haunted the bloc for months, is as much philosophical as it was operational. European governments are often seen in the United States as free-spending, liberal bastions, but this time it was Washington that threw billions at drugmakers and cosseted their business.

Brussels, by comparison, took a conservative, budget-conscious approach that left the open market largely untouched. And it has paid for it.

In short, the answer today is the same as it was in December, said Dr. Slaoui. The bloc shopped for vaccines like a customer. The United States basically went into business with the drugmakers, spending much more heavily to accelerate vaccine development, testing and production.  

The United States made the negotiations easy — its critics say far too easy — by signing away any right to intellectual property and absolving the drug companies of any liability if the vaccines disappointed. Washington paid for the development and the trials; the companies had essentially nothing to lose. (emphasis added)

Vaccine companies did not treat customers or the public interest well unless government intervened with money. They did not want to take the risk of acting without payment and liability protection to protect and defend the public interest. 

The lesson here is not new or subtle. Most companies operate only for profit. They do not operate to make the world a better place or to serve the public interest, protect the environment or anything else related to a social conscience. Profit is what they are there for. That is the only moral imperative for most businesses. 

The ex-president allowed the US to intervene by taking the risk that the new vaccines could fail. The exception was Pfizer, which developed its vaccine at risk, but with a large pre-negotiated supply order from the US government if it succeeded. In that regard, he did this right in relation to the pandemic. He arguably acted too slowly but at least he acted, unlike the European bloc.

With any luck, some lessons are being learned not just in the US and EU, but also in all countries capable of making vaccines. Covid-19 is probably not going to be the last pandemic threat that humans will face. Maybe next time our defenses will be better. 

How Politics Will Play Out for the Foreseeable Future

Remembering just a little of where the modern American fascist mindset and inspiration comes from: The slain military are “suckers” and “losers.” “I don’t get it. What was in it for them?” .... Rank and file supporters are “disgusting people” he was happy to not have to shake hands with due to the pandemic. “The people T**** despises most love him the most. .... The ex-president comments: “Look at these people. It’s literally a little bit sad.”

.Credit...

A Washington Post opinion piece seems to get the future of politics basically right:

Heads I win, tails you lose. That is Republicans’ ominous warning to Democrats working to design and (to their credit!) actually pay for an infrastructure bill.

“I think the Trojan horse will be called infrastructure, but inside the Trojan horse will be all the tax increases,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said this week. “They want to raise taxes across the board.”

For those struggling to decode these comments, here’s the trap McConnell is laying.

Any major upgrade of America’s roads, bridges, broadband network, water systems and other infrastructure will be expensive. That’s part of the reason “Infrastructure Week,” though much hyped in recent years, still hasn’t happened, despite the obvious need for more infrastructure investment and the popularity of such proposals. If Democrats try to undertake this expensive project without paying for it, Republicans will no doubt accuse them of running up the debt and thereby stoking out-of-control inflation.

How do we know? Because that’s the critique McConnell and other Republicans levied against the recently enacted $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan. Not a single Republican voted for the bill because, they said, they were concerned about “adding all this money to the national debt” (per McConnell), since unfunded spending of that magnitude would “unleash inflation” (South Dakota Sen. John Thune). Deficit-financed spending would “pour gasoline on the inflationary fires” (Iowa Sen. Charles E. Grassley) and ultimately lead to a “day of reckoning” (Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson). Republicans made similar arguments a decade ago, too, when refusing to support President Barack Obama’s plans for combating the Great Recession. 

Today, Democrats are addressing concerns about debt and inflation risks by brainstorming ways to pay for their ambitious infrastructure plans — likely through increases to individual and corporate income taxes. Anticipating this, Republicans have preemptively accused Democrats of using infrastructure as a “Trojan horse” for tax hikes. By this twisted logic, tax increases are Democrats’ secret ends, not merely the means for paying for stuff that Republicans demand be paid for.

According to Republicans, a big spending program such as an infrastructure bill can’t be financed by deficits, and it can’t be financed by new revenue. Presumably the only option left is to cut spending on Medicaid or Social Security or some other popular safety-net program Republicans have long salivated over slashing. But in the (extremely unlikely) event Democrats ever proposed such cuts, Republicans would clearly use that against them in attack ads, too.  

Republicans have, of course, adopted a different strategy when pushing through their own fiscal priorities — such as the 2017 tax cut, which added nearly $2 trillion to the deficit. They didn’t bother trying to come up with offsets because they promised that the policy would “pay for itself” through gangbusters economic growth. This growth never materialized. In recent years Democrats have sometimes toyed with their own version of this voodoo economics, and they should be praised when they resist the temptation. This is what they seem to be doing now, in contemplating at least partial pay-fors for both infrastructure and other priorities. (emphasis added)

Going forward, there will be no good will, no good faith, no honesty and no compromise from the radical republican authoritarians that now control the fascist GOP (FGOP). There will be endless divisive dark free speech. The entire FGOP leadership goal is winning power and exercising it. The terrifying end goal is concentrating power and wealth among insider elites and wealthy in-group White people and businesses. The FGOP really does want to get rid of Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, food stamps, welfare and most or all other domestic spending, also including most public health and pandemic spending. 

Their sacred solution and ideology is replacement of distributed power and wealth under democracy and the rule of law and replacing it with concentrated power and wealth under some form of authoritarian anti-democratic White Christian Nationalist kleptocracy operating in the name of laissez-faire capitalism. 

One can argue that what we have now does not constitute distributed power and wealth. That may be partly or mostly true. It depends on how one defines the concepts. But what we have now will look like semi-utopia compared to their vicious final solution. It will be imposed and maintained by a minority using brute force, not by majority democratic consensus.

How some (most?) on the right falsely sees the threat based on 

endless radical right conservative propaganda

What the real threat looks like, part 1

What the real threat looks like, part 2

Fascist US senator Ron Johnson (R-WI) was not concerned:

“Had the tables been turned, and President Trump won the election and 

those were tens of thousands of Black Lives Matter and Antifa protesters, 

I might have been a little concerned.”

About the Mass Shooting of Asians Yesterday

The Atlanta shooter blamed a specific race of people for his problems, and then murdered them because of it. If that’s not racism, then the word has no meaning. pic.twitter.com/4gIKN5hM28

— The Daily Show (@TheDailyShow) March 18, 2021

The New York Times writes:

The backlash began with the sheriff spokesman’s statement to reporters that the mass shooting suspect was having a “bad day.”

“He was pretty much fed up and kind of at the end of his rope. Yesterday was a really bad day for him and this is what he did,” Cherokee County sheriff’s office Capt. Jay Baker said Wednesday. He was describing the 21-year-old man accused of killing eight people, mostly Asian and almost all women, in a rampage across three Atlanta-area spas.

Then — as the violence stirred fears in an Asian-American community that already felt under attack — Internet sleuths and journalists found Baker’s Facebook posts promoting shirts that called the novel coronavirus an “IMPORTED VIRUS FROM CHY-NA.”

One person’s reaction on Twitter: “I think Capt Jay Baker is going to have a really bad day.”

Is Baker a racist or just exercising his White Privilege? Will he have a bad day, or will he be promoted to Chief Baker? Is the mass murderer a racist, or merely distressed about his urge to fornicate? Did the mass murderer really think that by murdering women he was attracted to, it would make this fornication urges go away? Or is he just stupid, a liar, and/or a racist?

Another tragedy. So many questions. Probably not much will change. Here is how one source valiantly described America's mass shooting situation in 2019, the NRA is not to blame, liberals are:

Mass shootings and firearms violence greatly increased as the destruction of morals and family values was followed by violent TV and videogames, social media, attacks on Christianity, excess legal and illegal immigration, multiculturalism, political correctness, excessive legal and illegal drug use, and the creation of “gun-free school zones.” Since 1950, 98% of all school shootings have occurred in these zones. Liberals shoulder the blame for virtually all of these causes. The National Rifle Association (NRA) is not to blame.

State Republican Attacks on the COVID Relief Bill are Starting

The Washington Post writes:

Twenty-one Republican state attorneys general on Tuesday threatened to take action against the Biden administration over its new $1.9 trillion coronavirus stimulus law, decrying it for imposing “unprecedented and unconstitutional” limits on their states’ ability to lower taxes.

The letter marks one of the first major political and legal salvos against the relief package since President Biden signed it last week — evincing the sustained Republican opposition that the White House faces as it implements the signature element of the president’s economic policy agenda.

The attorneys general take issue with a $350 billion pot of money set aside under the stimulus, known as the American Rescue Plan, to help cash-strapped cities, counties and states pay for the costs of the pandemic. Congressional lawmakers opted to restrict states from tapping these federal dollars to finance local tax cuts. 

Lawmakers included the provision to ensure Washington isn’t footing the bill on behalf of states that later take deliberate steps to reduce their revenue. But the guardrails frustrated many GOP leaders, who said in a letter to the Treasury Department that the law’s vague wording threatens to interfere with states in good financial standing that sought to provide “such tax relief with or without the prospect of COVID-19 relief funds.”

The attorneys general from Arizona, Georgia, West Virginia and 18 other states called on the Biden administration to make it clear that they can proceed with some of their plans to cut taxes, including those that predate the stimulus, in a seven-page missive sent to Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen on Tuesday. Otherwise, they said, the relief law “would represent the greatest invasion of state sovereignty by Congress in the history of our Republic” — and they threatened to take “appropriate additional action” in response. 

A White House official late Tuesday said Congress had acted appropriately in seeking to stipulate conditions on the federal stimulus funding, emphasizing in a statement the law “does not say that states cannot cut taxes at all.” Rather, the official said, it “simply instructs them not to use that money to offset net revenues lost if the state chooses to cut taxes.”  

“So if a state does cut taxes without replacing that revenue in some other way, then the state must pay back to the federal government pandemic relief funds up to the amount of the lost revenue,” the official added.

This is an interesting turn of events. States want to cut taxes, some even before the relief bill became law, but the federal government does not want COVID relief funds to pay for tax cuts. Money is fungible. How does one deal with this paradox, or is it not a paradox at all? Republican tax cuts can be used to negate pro-economic effects of the relief bill, leaving the GOP free to argue the relief bill was a failure and a waste of money. On the other hand, states need to be free to change their tax policy as a matter of state sovereignty. In theory, the constitution's Supremacy Clause would make the federal law controlling and valid.

If the GOP would act in good faith, this could be worked out. But with a party that refuses to compromise or even negotiate in good faith, this disagreement could eventually wind up before the supreme court. There the court will have a chance to kill at least the contested provision of the COVID relief bill. 

I checked the text of the relief bill to see if it contains a severance clause that allows a court to nullify a contested part of a law without trashing the entire law. I could not find one. Thus, if the court invalidates this provision of the law, maybe the entire law falls.

Wouldn't that just take the cake? The first major bill out of the democratic congress is fatally flawed. I hope the clause is in there somewhere. Maybe we're going to find out.