The Republican Party’s anti-democracy cancer is spreading globally

The New York Times writes:

President Jair Bolsonaro elevated his vote-fraud claims from a matter of domestic politics to foreign policy, heightening international fears that he would dispute the coming election.

President Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil called dozens of foreign diplomats to the presidential palace on Monday to tell them that he believed the country’s voting systems could be rigged, a potential preview of his strategy for an election that is 75 days away and that polls forecast he will lose in a landslide.

While Mr. Bolsonaro’s presentation was not new — he has repeated those claims for years — his audience was. He had invited officials from most of the embassies in Brazil’s capital, Brasília, elevating his claims from a matter of domestic politics to foreign policy.

Note that the fascist Republican Party’s democracy killing cancer seems to be of a single kind. Unlike over 100 different human cancers, the GOP’s cancer and close variants all have common pathologies. Prominent pathologies of radical right democracy killing cancer include:

• Attacks on, and subversion of, elections based on fabricated claims of voter and/or vote fraud
• Relentless demagoguery, including outrageous lies and slanders about political opposition 
• Tolerance of corruption
• Contempt and disregard for inconvenient facts, truths and sound reasoning
• Open attacks on the LGBQT community, immigrants, civil liberties and/or democracy, with praise for authoritarian leadership accompanying attacks on democracy 
• Alignment of politicians with wealthy and power elites in business and sometimes religion too

At least the Christian fundamentalists can claim authority from God to destroy democracy and impose his righteous tyranny. What’s the authority the laissez-faire capitalists reply on? Originalism, strict constructionism, deceit, division and opacity are the kinds of things they use to do their dirty work.

Textgate?

As those of us know, who follow politics, the Secret Service did a “phone migration” (update) of all its agents' phones, wiping them clear of data and text messages, after the Inspector General requested that their data from the 1/6 event be turned over to him.  Uhh, say again??

What do you think?  Accident?  Purposeful?  Cover up?  Incompetence?  Oopsi-Daisy?  Nothing to see here, move along?  Other?

Link here

What’s your opinion regarding this "phone migration" event?  

And thanks for posting.

An observer’s comments on ineffective Democratic messaging

“. . . . the typical citizen drops down to a lower level of mental performance as soon as he enters the political field. He argues and analyzes in a way which he would readily recognize as infantile within the sphere of his real interests. . . . cherished ideas and judgments we bring to politics are stereotypes and simplifications with little room for adjustment as the facts change. . . . . the real environment is altogether too big, too complex, and too fleeting for direct acquaintance. We are not equipped to deal with so much subtlety, so much variety, so many permutations and combinations. Although we have to act in that environment, we have to reconstruct it on a simpler model before we can manage it.” -- social scientists Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels, Democracy for Realists: Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government, 2016

Demagoguery (official definition): political activity or practices that seek support by appealing to the desires and prejudices of ordinary people rather than by using rational argument

Demagoguery (Germaine definition): any political, religious, commercial or other activity or practices that seek support by playing on and/or appealing to the ignorance, desires and/or prejudices of people rather than by using rational argument; demagoguery usually relies significantly or mostly on lies, slanders, irrational emotional manipulation, flawed motivated reasoning, logic fallacies, etc.; relevant inconvenient facts, truths and sound reasoning are usually ignored, denied or distorted into an appearance of false insignificance or false irrelevance

A Washington Post opinion piece by Paul Waldman says it better than I can:

Faced with demands to do something about the right-wing revolution the Supreme Court is inflicting on the country, congressional Democrats will hold votes on bills guaranteeing marriage equality and the right to contraception. These are protected at the moment, but many fear the court and Republicans will move to attack them sometime in the near future.

Since these bills will fall to Republican filibusters in the Senate, they are demonstration votes, meant not to become law (at least not yet), but in large part to force Republicans to vote against them and thereby reveal themselves to be out of step with public opinion. As many a Democrat has said, “Let’s get them on the record.” But “getting them on the record” doesn’t accomplish much if you don’t have a strategy to turn that unpopular vote into a weapon that can be used to actually punish those Republicans. And there’s little evidence Democrats have such a strategy.

Sure, they’ll issue some news releases and talk about it on cable news. And here or there the vote might find its way into a campaign mailer (“Congressman Klunk voted against contraception! Can the women of the Fifth District really trust Congressman Klunk?”). But I fear that too many Democrats think getting them on the record is enough by itself.

The reason is that unlike their Republican counterparts, Democrats tend to have far too much faith in the American voter.

People in Washington, especially Democrats, suffer from an ailment that is not confined to the nation’s capital. It plays out in all kinds of places and in politics at all levels. It’s the inability to see politics from the perspective of ordinary people.

This blindness isn’t a matter of elitism. The problem is that it’s hard to put yourself in the mind of someone whose worldview is profoundly different from your own. If you care about politics, it’s almost impossible to understand how the average person — even the average voter — thinks about the work you do and the world you inhabit.

Here’s the problem: Most Americans have only a fraction of the understanding you do about these things — not because they’re dumb or ignorant but mainly because they just don’t care. They worry about other things, especially their jobs and their families. When they have free time they’d rather watch a ballgame or gossip with a friend than read about whether certain provisions of Build Back Better might survive in some process called “reconciliation.”

In fact, the very idea of “issues” — where a thing happening in the world is translated into something the government might implement policies to address — was somewhat foreign to them. Because I was young and enthusiastic but not schooled in subtle communication strategies, I couldn’t get beyond my own perspective and persuade them of anything.

.... most Democrats I know are still captive to the hope that politics can be rational and deliberative, ultimately producing reasonable outcomes.

Republicans have no such illusions. They usually start from the assumption that voters don’t pay attention and should be reached by the simplest, most emotionally laden appeals they can devise. So Republicans don’t bother with 10-point policy plans; they just hit voters with, “Democrats want illegals to take your job, kill your wife, and pervert your kids,” and watch the votes pour in.

If Waldman is right, how can one craft messages with the emotional impact of Republican messaging without demagoguing it or lying?

I think it is now possible for Dems to do gut-wrenching messaging without much or any demagoguery or lies. Just be blunt and relentless about reality. Be candid about the thoroughly morally rotted, fascist Republican Party, its cruel Christian nationalist dogma, its rapacious laissez-faire capitalist dogma and the radical right propaganda Leviathan, e.g., Faux News, that the stinking anti-democratic threat significantly or mostly rests on. Just say it straight without lies or slanders. There is plenty of evidence in the public record to support harsh, emotional but truthful messaging.

Qs: 

1. Is Waldman right? 

2. Is there such a thing as gut-wrenching messaging without much or any demagoguery or lies, or does wrenching guts always require demagoguery and/or lies?

3. Is demagoguery still demagoguery even if it is based on truth and sound reasoning? (I think not)

What childbirth can do to young women and girls

The New York Times writes about some of what the fascist Republican Party and its heartless Christian nationalist wing will be forcing on some young pregnant females:

After the account of a 10-year-old Ohio girl crossing state lines to get an abortion drew national attention last week, some prominent abortion opponents suggested the child should have carried her pregnancy to term. 

But midwives and doctors who work in countries where pregnancy is common in young adolescent girls say those pushing for very young girls to carry pregnancies to term may not understand the brutal toll of pregnancy and delivery on the body of a child.

“Their bodies are not ready for childbirth and it’s very traumatic,” said Marie Bass Gomez, a midwife and the senior nursing officer at the reproductive and child health clinic at Bundung Maternal and Child Health Hospital in Gambia. 

The critical issue is that the pelvis of a child is too small to allow passage of even a small fetus, said Dr. Ashok Dyalchand, who has worked with pregnant adolescent girls in low-income communities in India for more than 40 years.

“They have long labor, obstructed labor, the fetus bears down on the bladder and on the urethra,” sometimes causing pelvic inflammatory disease and the rupture of tissue between the vagina and the bladder and rectum, said Dr. Dyalchand, who heads an organization called the Institute of Health Management Pachod, a public health organization serving marginalized communities in central India.

“It is a pathetic state particularly for girls who are less than 15 years of age,” he added. “The complications, the morbidity and the mortality are much higher in girls under 15 than girls 16 to 19 although 16 to 19 has a mortality twice as high as women 20 and above.”

Young maternal age is associated with an increased risk of maternal anemia, infections, eclampsia and pre-eclampsia, emergency cesarean delivery and postpartum depression, according to a 2014 evaluation published in the Journal of Neonatal-Perinatal Medicine.

“They go to labor for three days, four days, five days, and after that labor, usually the baby is dead. And then when the head is collapsed, then the baby is delivered,” said Dr. Syed, who is one of South Asia’s pre-eminent experts on the repair of obstetric fistula, a common outcome of obstructed labor in pregnant girls.

In nearly all these cases, the girl has developed vesicovaginal fistula, a hole between the wall of the bladder and the vagina. In a quarter of cases, the prolonged labor will also cause fistula of the rectum, so that the girl constantly leaks both urine and feces.

The evil that the GOP, radical Christian fundamentalism and their raging leader the ex-president has unleashed is spreading and sinking deep into our society. The callous Republican Party and its Christian supporters should be paying for 100% of the medical and mental health costs and child rearing costs that their morally rotted Christian fundamentalist agenda (😈) has forced on Americans who do not want to have a birth or baby. Or is that assessment too harsh or unreasonable?

Dropping out of school and raising the baby

in poverty will be loads of fun, or maybe not 

Send the bills to the Christian Church and the 

Republican National Committee

Is inflation partly business-inspired?

An article by staunch liberal Thom Hartmann at RawStory posits that our current inflation is at least partly due to politics and the power of big business cartels with at least semi-monopoly power to control prices. Hartmann writes:

“[T]he monopoly which our manufacturers have obtained against us … like an overgrown standing army, has become formidable to the government, and upon many occasions intimidate the legislature.” — Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, 1776

How is it possible that the rest of the world is recovering from the Covid/Oil/War inflation bump, but things are getting worse here in the USA?

The one variable nobody seems to be positing — but I’m going to go there — is that it’s political, at least in part.

So how did we get here?

Prices in America used to be regulated by something called competition.

If one company raises prices above a reasonable level, another company will offer products at a lower price and take away their customers. As long as there are multiple companies in every market sector, and new businesses can easily enter the marketplace to compete with larger companies that have gotten lazy or greedy, competition regulates prices very efficiently.

What blows this up is when companies get large enough that they can use their size and market dominance to keep competitors out of the marketplace.

All of that anti-trust activity came to an end in 1982 when President Reagan appointed William C. Miller III, his former executive director of the Presidential Task Force on Regulatory Relief, to take over the FTC. Miller was the first pro-corporate leader in the nation’s history to corrupt the agency that was supposed to regulate corporate misbehavior.

That year (as it had been since the 1930s) most of this nation’s business activity was centered in the cash registers of our small- and medium-sized companies. The total value of America’s largest corporations — those listed on stock exchanges — was equal to just 39.4% of the entire nation’s economic activity or GDP in 1981.

Miller, however, declined to continue enforcing our anti-trust laws and in 1983 Reagan instructed the DOJ to, essentially, stop prosecuting companies that were violating those laws through mergers and acquisitions, and to only go after the most egregious and flagrant acts of corporate collusion and price-fixing.

As a result, large companies became behemoths, and pretty much every industry in America is today dominated by a small handful of companies that carefully monitor each other to function, essentially, as cartels. When United raises ticket prices by $50, for example, American does the same three hours later.

As Jonathan Tepper pointed out in The Myth of Capitalism, fully 90% of the beer that Americans drink is controlled by two companies. Air travel is mostly controlled by four companies, and over half of the nation’s banking is done by five banks.

In multiple states there are only one or two health insurance companies, high-speed internet is in a near-monopoly state virtually everywhere in America (75% of us can “choose” only one company), and three companies control around three-quarters of the entire pesticide and seed markets.

The vast majority of radio and TV stations in the country are owned by a small handful of companies, and the internet is dominated by Google and Facebook.

This has handed enormous power to the CEOs and senior managers of America’s largest companies, all of them multi-multi-millionaires and many billionaires.

These are not people who want to pay more in taxes. Nor do they want unions or to have their industries regulated in any meaningful way; they’d like things to stay the way they’ve been since the Reagan Revolution.

But President Joe Biden has been working with Senator Bernie Sanders (Chair of the powerful Budget Committee) to create a whole plethora of progressive legislation that would raise corporate and billionaire taxes and increase corporate regulation. Not to mention Democrats’ advocacy of those hated unions.

Is there any doubt in your mind that most of these titans of industry don’t want monopoly breakups, unions, regulation, and higher taxes? Every president since Reagan, Democratic and Republican, has gone along with this neoliberal deregulation, anti-union, and low-tax scheme.

Big business doesn’t want the Reaganomics gravy train to stop and, so far, they’ve been able to buy enough politicians to keep it that way. Until this unholy alliance of Biden and Sanders.

So, is it really possible that our largest corporations and their leaders are ripping us all off and jacking up inflation on an ongoing basis just to stick it to the Democrats and hand the GOP the reins of power in 2022 and 2024?

If political power was the only thing they got out of it, the answer is “possibly.”

But when you realize that they also get massively larger profits at the same time, and billions of that will flow down to CEO compensation, that twofer raises it to “probably.”

.... much of the explosion in corporate profits is made possible by market consolidation: giant companies no longer subject to the pressures of inflation.

I’d add that there’s a big reward down the road for all those CEOs if they can help America dump the pesky Democrats who want to tax those windfall profits and replace them with Republicans who are again demanding more tax cuts for the morbidly rich.

Last Tuesday, Nobel Prize-winning economist and NY Times columnist Paul Krugman wrote a particularly fascinating op-ed wondering out loud why the economic data for the United States doesn’t make sense any more. If the economy is in trouble, so should be American companies; if the economy is doing well, so should the American consumers.

But the companies are doing great while consumers are getting screwed.

Qs: Is Hartmann basically right, or as Republicans and big business would all say, he is simply paranoid and wrong at best, and a bald face, slandering liar at worst? Do Republicans and big business deserve much or any credibility in view of their past history and disregard for inconvenient truth?

The businessman's moral mindset

To punish or not to punish?

Same concept, different context?

A New York Times article, Biden Administration Retreats on Threat to Withhold Arizona Relief Funds, raises the question. Despite Arizona using aid money to undercut school mask mandates, the Treasury sent $2.1 billion in pandemic aid anyway. That came after a federal warning warning that the aid might be withheld for Arizona fighting against measures to deal with COVID. 

Don't punish and send the aid

Sending aid is a no-brainer. By sending aid, the government signals it is trying to be reasonable. Sending aid signals there is no ill-will and Americans are all in this together. The federal government is not the aggressive tyranny that the radical right constantly paints it to be. This is an open gesture of unity and trust. Acts like this slowly build trust and good will.

Punish, don't send the aid

Not sending aid is a no-brainer. By sending aid, the government signals it is weak and unconcerned about wasting tax dollars on unjustifiable, stubborn stupidity. Arizona committed irrational acts that directly undermines public health. Arizona's irresponsible acts unjustifiably killed some and caused others to suffer from serious long-term diseases. Sending the aid signals capitulation to an aggressive brand of anti-democratic, anti-science culture and politics that can reasonably be called theocratic fascism. Signals of unity are ignored and change no minds that believe the federal government is tyrannical. Appeasing Arizona is similar to (a lot like?) Neville Chamberlain[1] trying to appease the intractable tyrant of his time.

Qs: Should Biden have sent the aid? Is sending the aid an insult to people who believe in trying to reasonably defend public health on the basis of science (not politics, tribe or culture)? 

Footnote: 

1. Arthur Neville Chamberlain (1869 – 1940) was a British politician of the Conservative Party who served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from May 1937 to May 1940. He is best known for his foreign policy of appeasement, and in particular for his signing of the Munich Agreement on 30 September 1938, ceding the German-speaking Sudetenland region of Czechoslovakia to Nazi Germany led by Adolf Hitler. Following the German invasion of Poland on 1 September 1939, which marked the beginning of the Second World War, Chamberlain announced the declaration of war on Germany two days later and led the United Kingdom through the first eight months of the war until his resignation as prime minister on 10 May 1940.