Soft secession is concession

 As the Trump administration cripples the power of the federal government, some Democratically controlled states have floated the idea of "soft secession." They hope to take up the slack for the rescission of federal funds and the gutting of federal agencies that provide essential services to all Americans by instituting state programs and creating interstate compacts to achieve what they can of the abandoned beneficial goals.

Soft secession acquiesces to the concept of "states' rights." It also echoes state initiatives that formed the basis for the progressive reforms at the turn of the 19th to 20th centuries, but the concept of states' rights has been a rallying point for the political forces that have sought to demolish the federal government since the New Deal was enacted. Before that, of course, it was used to justify the spread of slavery in the expanding nation, leading to the Civil War.

Increasingly through the latter half of the 20th Century, and exponentially in the age of the Internet, states' rights has been used as cover for repressive laws enacted at the state level as federal oversight has been crippled. Voting rights,civil rights, women's rights, public health, infrastructure, energy modernization, and more have been demonized by well funded institutions pretending to be about personal freedom while exploiting bigotry and religious zealotry to advance a narrow view of what freedom is and who gets to exercise it.

Soft secession initiatives legitimize the idea that states' rights can be a viable method of organizing the country. The primacy of states' rights completely undermines the concept of the United States as a single nation. The Constitution was supposed to advance the concept of one nation with a set of undeniable universal rights of citizenship, replacing the unwieldy confederation that had been falling apart as the national government after the Revolutionary War. The confederation would have broken into a bunch of little nations, separately easy prey to the larger, powerful, established nations from which the colonies had broken philosophically.

We can hope that soft secession efforts succeed in the interim to navigate through the constant crises brought on us by the corruption and incompetence of the Trump regime, but we must be sure that they are temporary, lest they lead to the fragmentation that the misguided ideologues of the far right have longed for.

The federal government failed in many ways in the latter half of the 20th Century. This led to the distrust that the right wing has turned to its advantage after the liberals abandoned it once the Vietnam War was over. Between leftover lefties who don't trust The Man, and rebellious righties bent on unlimited individual liberty even if it kills us all, the clever institutions seeking control have plenty of handles with which to steer paranoid voters. But we have to look at when, why, and how the federal government failed. Those failures were a product of their era. They also reflect basic realities of the conduct of a nation dealing with other nations. All nations have common and competing interests. All nations present varying levels of threat and opportunity to the other nations.

Life is simple, but foreign policy is a tangled mess. There's no way to have absolute transparency, and you will never satisfy every citizen in a large population in a democratic republic. You'll be lucky to satisfy a majority with what you can say in public. It all factors into the biennial popularity contests that sweep the country with regularly scheduled, mostly bloodless revolutions.

More than foreign policy will require a degree of confidentiality. But most legitimate government secrets relate in some way to managing the relationship with other nations. There are things we don't want them to know in full detail. Make them at least conduct some espionage to find out. It creates jobs in the spy community.

Full and permanent secession -- a reversion to confederation -- would require each little nation-state and sub-confederation to supply its own military and intelligence capability, funded by whatever economic resources the state or confederacy controls. Who gets the former federal military assets in a given state when the breakup occurs?

When the Soviet Union broke up, the United States and NATO stood as a bastion of stability and arbiter of standards. The "free world" and rising Asian powers oversaw the distribution of hardware. Now that Russia seeks to reclaim its imperial glory with the help of a puppet government in the United States, our breakup would be supervised by a rival nation that has sought our downfall for 80 years. At the same time, an ever more powerful China watches and maneuvers to counter both the sabotaged and crumbling United States and the wily chess players of Russia on the global game board.

Nuclear war seems like the big nasty. It serves as the monster under the bed to frighten citizens in every country, while the real horror is that conventional warfare has never ceased. The lives of the general population are expended by governments controlled by rich egotists who feel no shame or horror at maiming and death of thousands. It's good business and great domestic policy to give people the blood sport of war on just the right scale.

Because nuclear weapons exist, the deterrent of mutually assured destruction will probably always be with us. In the name of avoiding it, we are encouraged to accept the heroic sacrifices of brave service members in conflicts below that threshold. We will need those for as long as humanity separates itself into territories and conflicting ideologies.

Small nations will always be vulnerable to the ambitions of the leaders of larger nations. Breaking up the United States does not serve any American well. It only serves the interests of the powers arrayed against what was once our steady march to better express our stated founding ideals of liberty and justice for all. We had much work still to do. Our worst enemies in that work live among us. Don't let their longstanding advocacy for states' rights carry out its true purpose of curtailing individual liberty and dismantling the United States. Your constitutional rights will mean nothing when there is no longer a federal government to act on your behalf.

Like gerrymandering, soft secession should only be considered as a drastic temporary measure to regain our footing as a unified, representative democracy. You can't claim to be a patriot while undermining the principle that our diverse nation draws its strength from the collection of individual citizens into a unified national entity.

It's the economy, stupid. But fixing things is expensive.

 Bill Clinton sailed into office in 1992 on a well-timed wave of hope that his administration would pull us out of the Reagan-Bush recession. It was the first Baby Boomer presidency, and we were the generation that could have whatever it wanted. Our parents had told us so, and the economy of the 1960s and much of the 1970s had revolved around indulging us.

Clinton's campaign promised us, among other things, universal healthcare. Still waiting on that, Billy. And I know it isn't Bill's fault per se, but the Clinton administration's party bus ran into a serious roadblock with the corporate elements that had bought into his campaign based on...I'm not sure what. Maybe they just sensed that the electorate was ready to kick the old fogies out, so they rolled with the change, confident that they could tighten the screws financially the way they always had. And they were right.

Meanwhile, I've long had my own theories about why the economy improved when it did, none of which hinge on the Clinton administration's vast economic acumen. I think it was going to happen anyway: Consumers like to consume, and they'd finally freed up their credit enough after the 1980s binge to start doing it again. So Bill: right place, right time, right message, happy accident. It was the economy. And it was stupid. But it was fun for a while.

If Al Gore had prevailed in 2000, he would probably have presided over the economic belly flop, because that was a product of consumer exuberance and technological hubris uncontrollable by the Fed or any business regulation. Also, the Republican Congress under Gingrich was energetically undermining stability and social cohesion.

Social cohesion is important for a sustainable economy and environment, but it is not profitable in the short term. Certain ideologies object to it as well, because of principles of philosophical purity. They can't let us all get along, because not all of us deserve to get what they claim for themselves.

We will never address the fundamental problems facing humanity if we keep going from election to election looking just at grocery, fuel, childcare, and rent/mortgage prices. But you can't neglect those if you want to get elected. Sure, the Republicans in particular have exploited fear issues, mostly related to race mixing and crime by furriners. But we're seeing now how the economic stuff is getting ready to gnaw on their posteriors, even as they're thrilling their xenophobic base with immigrant roundups, concentration camps, and deportations.

The big trick after getting elected is staying elected. Any administration that tries to start working on essential issues like climate change and environmental protection in general will take heat from the right wing media, and some on the left as well. A subset of people are not driven by simple economics, but the majority feel better when things seem to be improving. Nearly everyone succumbs to normalcy bias when things are going outright well. So there's an ideal level of diminishing discomfort that promotes a willingness to embrace change. Unfortunately, the benefits of some of what needs to be done will not fit neatly into a two-year election cycle.

The House of Representatives and the President are more closely linked than the Senate is to either one. Because there will be a midterm election in each presidential term as well as the ones in which the presidency is up for grabs itself, it destabilizes the power of the executive. And a shaky president can loosen the grip of representatives who get bounced by disgruntled voters who want to whack somebody for how they're feeling.

Try enacting higher taxes on the wealthy, or pushing through real health care reform that sidelines the insurance companies and centers patient care and doctors' integrity within less than a two-year window, because the campaigning starts within months after the last election. You not only have to get it in place, it needs to show clear benefits, while corporate media and right wing influencers are telling everyone that it won't work and will destroy their entire way of life.

After trying to breathe in the deluge of conflicting information dumped on them, voters wind up settling for the promise of cheaper gas and groceries. Life may be long or short, but it's always one day at a time. But we're running out of days for the thornier issues.

The problem of political prisoners

 The crimes of the first Trump administration involved not only the occupant of the Oval Office himself, but many others inside the Executive Branch and scattered through Congress and across the country.

Before Trump even lost the 2020 election and began to lie about it, he was impeached for misdeeds in his first campaign and while in office. Some of the offenses in the Mueller Report could have led to criminal prosecution. Certainly his retention and mishandling of classified information would have led to charges. And let's not forget his 34 felony convictions for fraud, and the judgment against him for improperly reporting expenditures related to paying off Stormy Daniels.

Then there's the unresolved matter of the Epstein files. Who knows what's under that scab.

Some small fry were tried and convicted as a result of his crimes, including more than 1,500 people who had taken part in the storming of the US Capitol on January 6, 2021. Only a handful remain in custody after the mob boss in chief issued blanket pardons to the rioters and individual pardons to favored minions he could spring from federal charges.

A majority of Americans seemed to be okay with the convictions of the January 6th rioters. The criminal behavior was plain to see on national television and all over the Internet. However, the acceptance that MAGA operatives had attacked the mechanisms of government at the strong suggestion of their leader was not enough to discourage voters from putting the criminal back into office in 2024.

As Americans we reject political prosecutions. The current criminal regime has taken advantage of this by generating doubt -- not reasonable doubt, just doubt -- among enough Americans to allow genuinely bad elements to take power and remain viable.

The Constitution describes how to get a bad official out of office, but the framers never imagined that Congress would be controlled by a corrupt president's allies, who would prevent any action to remove him. And one person's corruption is another person's ruthless politics. The First Amendment gives wide latitude to political opinion blending with religious freedom. Yes, there are election laws and supposedly guardrails around the proper roles and functions of government, but the infractions can be hard to explain to ordinary citizens. With a powerful propaganda machine pumping right wing messaging into every media channel like a toxic gas, the intellectual atmosphere is foggy and mind-numbing.

Voting out the Republicans at every level is only step one of the national detox from authoritarianism. The second, vital component is prosecution, conviction, and imprisonment of individuals who have been trying to replace representatives with rulers.

Prosecution of the people who have broken government will elicit howls from the people who relished the authoritarian crackdown on the elements of society that they hate. Many of them used to squawk at length about heavy handed government stepping on the little guy, when what they really hated was not being able to kick down themselves. Once the jackboots were aimed the right way, those brave rebels grew docile and smug.

While we are finding out what it was like to live in Germany during the 1930s, we are also finding out why Reconstruction failed after the Civil War. There were no extensive  trials of Confederates. The South did rise again. They bitched and grumbled about having to extend any measure of respect to their former slaves, but they got things mostly their way. It will be even worse this time, because we have the examples of repressive regimes from the early 20th Century onward demonstrating political retribution. Fascist and Communist/Socialist governments as well as independent dictators have shown over and over the dangers of political prosecution. 

In a country where government is "of the people, by the people," a politician has to be very obviously extremely criminally corrupt to avoid the accusation of political prosecution. We've had such figures. Right now we have a bunch of them. But the case has to be carefully made. That was one reason that the current occupant of the Oval Office is where he is instead of in prison: the case was being carefully and thoroughly made, and his lawyers threw enough speed bumps in to get him to the 2024 election. A rush to judgment would have failed. The careful walk failed anyway. And then the voters failed massively.

We don't know if we'll get out of the present mess in any kind of shape to seek legal action against the officials who have dragged us here. We don't know what form the MAGA movement will take after the inevitable demise of its god-king. Recovery, if it happens at all, will come in stages and could fail at any time, like recovery from addiction. For that matter, life is full of addictions. The challenge is to get hooked on beneficial things instead of destructive ones. I don't know if we can even control our predilections enough to choose which path we take. Psychology and physics both offer bleak prospects there. But there is dissent in both disciplines. I'm holding out for the things I like. I have slowly learned to be less of a dick to people, so it's apparently possible, but I guarantee that I have relapses, so maybe it's just chrome on a turd. I hope not. For any of you out there trying, keep at it. For any of you blessed to be be perfect by nature, congrats.

Gavin Newsom's advantage

 California governor Gavin Newsom has delighted the anti-Trump forces in this country by brilliantly mocking the dictator on social media and leading his state in counterattacking GOP efforts to rig the electoral maps in Texas and other Republican-controlled states. He is hailed as the champion we need: not perfect by any stretch, but the guy to face down the bully in the Oval Office and lead Democratic efforts to skew their own electoral maps wherever they can.

Let's ignore the concept that to beat a cheater you need to cheat better yourself. It's fun in the movies when it's a high stakes card game, but when it's an entire country and millions of people's livelihoods it's no longer a game and entertainment. If slithering through loopholes and cherry picking voters becomes the accepted norm, we have won nothing. Newsom is winning another game that does help us all in the moment.

By trolling the dictator on social media, Newsom undermines the image of power and control craved by the weak and failing figurehead of the once-proud Republican Party. He might even be swaying some of the fickle and elusive swing voters, but I wouldn't count on it. He has spotlighted the absurdity of Trump's self image and the image Trump's followers want to project. 

Public image is everything in American politics. It's crucial in all politics, but vastly more so when there is a democratic component. You can be tough, scrappy, knowledgeable, and still lose elections if enough people don't take to you.

Many people have been trolling Trump and MAGA for years without generating the buzz that Newsom has. What gives him the advantage? It's not Newsom as a person. It's Newsom as governor of the third largest state in the country, with the fourth largest economy in the world. Just Newsom himself as a movie-star-lookin' egotist would go nowhere.

Newsom works now against the bloated vulgarian desecrating the White House and devaluing every aspect of American intellectual life, history, and culture. But Trump could die tomorrow, and the forces that welcomed him as a champion in 2016 and have been pushing forward behind him ever since will still be there. Newsom has no such magic power against them. They will take him apart on all of the seams and fissures in his own public image. He may help with 2026. Don't count on anything for 2028 unless Trump is miraculously alive and able to pursue that third term he keeps talking about. And at that point the Constitution would just be a scuffed up throw rug, so the election itself would probably be about as meaningful as it would be in Russia.

Corporations gonna corporate

 Corporations are people. More than that, corporations are completely amoral people with no loyalty except to themselves.

Upper management forms the brains of the beast, but they are programmed to maximize corporate income in the reality of the moment. If they try to exert influence on the future, it will invariably seek to improve the stock price of the company. This may be by increasing income and profits, or through stock buybacks, and always through favorable laws and regulations. It will never be to improve environmental quality or the well-being of the population in general, unless they can see a clear financial benefit from it. If major shareholders are happy, CEO keeps his cushy job. If they expel him (it's almost always a him), he will have arranged for a severance package that would finance most small towns in America for a year or more.

Tim Cook's golden tribute to the current occupant of the Oval Office fits this model of corporations looking out for their own interests while the country at large suffers greatly. Altruistic bullshit like liberty and justice for all makes nifty patriotic commercials to keep the rabble from storming your offices and burning your mansions, but corporations can thrive in totalitarian regimes. Just ask Audi, Bayer, BMW, IBM, Volkswagen, Standard Oil, and many others that either existed in Nazi Germany or did business with the Nazis for some portion of the runup or even the duration of World War II. Look at the American corporations that operate their production facilities in China and other countries vilified by the right wing, but patronized heavily by their top donors.

The bottom line is all that matters to them. Your interests are buried far below that.

For a few decades, the rich played along with the idea that paying the help better turned them from serfs into customers. Henry Ford famously staved off unionization in his plants by paying the help enough to be able to afford one of his cars. He also priced the Model T so that ordinary working folks could enjoy the blessings of motorized transportation, increasing not only his own corporate income, but that of his pals in the oil companies, rubber companies, and a host of other ancillary industries. The surge in middle class lifestyle masked the downsides of increased petroleum consumption, tailpipe emissions, and sprawl development. A privileged lifestyle became the norm. National euphoria after World War II supercharged it for about 30 years

By the late 1990s, the top one percent had figured out that they did not need a thriving middle class. They've been chopping away at the ladder ever since.

What happens next could play out in either of two ways. And actually the second way kind of grows out of the first one.  Corporations that have decided to stop funding the American middle class because it's increasingly expensive to feed will shift to more grateful consumers among the rising economies financed by the jobs exported from here. Lifestyles will improve in the countries that have received the jobs, as they deteriorate in the country laid off en masse by Corporate America.

 Because people keep making more people, the population will continue to rise here, creating a conveniently desperate labor pool willing to work itself to death for the mirage of a better life for their kids. This would create a de facto standard of affordable labor pricing for corporations worldwide. Big money will still occupy the top spot, as always. Income inequality will become a global norm. The range will probably stabilize with little to no upward mobility. A few scions of the wealthy will always tumble from the nest to crash on the rocks below. But a well managed corporation lives forever.

Even people who live outside of the corporate consumerist economy as much as they can are herded by it. Only its complete collapse would allow society to reinvent itself. This is not only unlikely, but what follows might not be any more humane than anything was before. "Peak humane" probably hit somewhere between the late 1970s and the mid 1990s. After September 11, 2001, tolerance for diversity in the United States started diving steeply. Legislation advanced rights and freedoms, but the backlash in general society grew exponentially stronger. Corporations see this as neither good nor bad, only as something to exploit for profit or manage to reduce loss. Profit is defended by kissing up and kicking down.

Duelling gerrymanders

 The recent move by Texas Republicans to draw up new election districts for Congress and Democratic proposals to counterattack in states where they have the power to do so shines yet another bright light on the damage done by the "team spirit" mentality in our politics.

The paradox of the House of Representatives is that the members are supposed to advocate for their fellow citizens in their districts, but their partisan affiliation gives national advantage and international influence to one party over the other. Personal political ambition and perceived usefulness to the national party can turn a measly little district representative into a national celebrity and party darling overnight. Party needs advance to the detriment of the people the House is supposed to represent.

One party may "win" the gerrymandering war, but ordinary people will lose.

Democratically elected government exists to meet the needs and wants of citizens. Congressional districts were supposed to represent a manageable number of citizens living in similar enough circumstances to be able to select an individual to go to the national government to reconcile localized wishes with national needs. The representatives would get together to compose legislation and make appropriations that a majority of them would support. The senate was meant to be the more deliberative body considering matters on a statewide basis merged with the priorities of the nation as a whole.

Congressional representation is based on population, but the total size of the House of Representatives was capped at 435 members in 1929. The more people there are in the country, the less personal the representation can be. But increasing House membership would lead to an unmanageably large legislative body.

As news media increased their reach from the late 19th Century onwards, they have had a stronger and stronger influence on local politics. National media today, mostly broadcast, can reinforce prejudices, creating division between factions by bolstering loyalty within them. Party loyalists tend to be insanely loyal, making them attractive to political campaigns. Partisan districting allows politicians to choose their voters rather than voters choosing their representatives. Districts become echo chambers, leading to more and more radicalization.

Because right wing values are so much more militant and simple-minded, right wing districting is easier to accomplish. The elusive swing voter may have an open and intellectual mind, wanting to weigh issues on their merits, but a bunch of them just seem to be paranoid and suspicious, both traits that skew to the right. Paranoid and suspicious tends to favor being armed and dangerous, both poses embraced by the right. Don't tread on me, God, Guns and (insert third item here), and so forth.

 Lots of things make people paranoid and suspicious, not the least of which is the popular mythology about our outlaw past. It's funny how we honor both the smugglers and rebels defying authority and the fast-shooting sheriffs and hanging judges of summary frontier justice. The only difference between a lynching and a lawful execution is who happens to be holding the rope. Too often it was the same people at different times of day.

Out of all of this and more -- slavery, genocide of the natives, civil war, robber barons, labor organizers, et al -- has come a system of bizarre and meandering electoral maps, shifting with every census. It's front and center now. Could this be the final affront to get voters to insist on non-partisan redistricting in every state?

The Constitution screws us a bit here by leaving the conduct of elections up to the individual states. A law passed by Congress might not make it past the Supreme Court, leaving us either to pursue a constitutional amendment or campaign for laws in every state, perhaps amending their constitutions. It's a cumbersome process in any case, requiring great unity among disparate voters. When will we start to recognize common interests again in this country?

I have heard people wonder how we got to the current state of polarized distaste slopping over into hatred. It's simple, really. The tensions created by the emerging acceptance of one marginalized group after another have exhausted the patience of hard core opponents who waited at first for the inevitable failure and reset that never came. The limits of people's tolerance vary from person to person, but most people do have limits. Once they reach them, they seek allegiance with anyone who will help them put the brakes on what they perceive as excesses. If that means throwing in with authoritarian goons, so be it. It's hard to come back from that, but people dragged beyond their comfort zone tell themselves that they can sort out the differences later.

Campaign finance reform and neutral election districts will do a lot to lower the heat. Make the candidates explain their policies fully rather than relying on in-group signals.

Really effective government is very boring and detailed. It's hard to turn that into catchy election slogan. It's so much easier to manipulate emotions, with fear very near the surface in all of us. A social media post glibly stated that you should not vote for a party that wants you to live in fear, but choose one that calls for you to proceed with courage. But there is no courage without fear. Courage is the strong person's response to a frightening challenge. Courage without fear is just being foolhardy.

The future will always be scary if you think about it that way. We could get slammed today by an asteroid that NASA overlooked. Any one of us could have a stroke in the next few seconds. Your body could be growing cancer undetected until it's too late. You could get hit by a truck. A terrorist could sneak a nuke or a bioweapon into your city. Has your area had an earthquake lately? Is it overdue? Could a senile, self-centered old man order a nuclear strike on Russia and have loyalists in the Navy carry out the doomsday command? Could people who are overly serious about their weird religion warp your country so that you no longer recognize it? Oh wait, that one's happening.

We the people have a number of common interests that have been buried under the propaganda generated by the wealthiest to strengthen their hold on the nation's resources. Demanding and getting nonpartisan congressional -- and state legislature -- districts can go a long way toward making government more responsive to people as people, not party pawns.

Tariffs are the key to happy taxpayers

 No one loves to pay their taxes, but the right wing is particularly responsive to the lure of tax cuts. For the rich, this gratifies their lust to be richer and richer and richer. The majority of tax cuts go to them. In return, they fund the election campaigns that recruit the small fry who will get a token markdown from time to time.

For the small fry, hatred of income taxes stems largely from their dislike of doing math. Underfunding education serves a key function in this. Not only does it appease the cheapskates to cut a major cost like schools, it also creates generation after generation of voters who will leap at a promise of tax cuts because they never learned how the system works.

No one likes sales taxes, either. You see a price, you go to check out, and blammo: you have to pay more. This is where tariffs are the ingenious solution to all of that.

Do away with income and sales taxes. People get to take home all of their pay. Maybe retain the deduction for Social Security and Medicare for a while... but for the most part, what you see is what you get, and the ticketed price on any item is what you pay. However, the price of any item has been jacked up by the tariff amount. It's an invisible tax. A loaf of bread might be $25. A car might cost a hundred grand. But the price is the price, and you never have to do extra math. Everything will cost a lot more. People won't really be better off financially. Probably worse, in fact, especially because tariffs and sales taxes always hit lower income people harder than they hit the rich. But it won't matter, because "other countries are paying."

Republican mouthpieces are already crowing on social media about the billions that the current regime has raked in from tariffs. As long as they can keep a significant percentage of people believing that tariffs bring in money from outside the country, and that the resulting inflation is somehow the fault of the opposing political party, they can rule over a happy populace in their "tax free" paradise.

Rental rabbit hole

 It wasn't a rabbit hole so much as a nostalgia well. I read an article about ridiculously high rents contributing to homelessness among people with full time jobs. I started thinking of my all-too-brief slum-dwelling days before I let my doting Dad entice me back into the family home because he was frightened and grossed out by the apartment I could barely afford on my full-time wages.

This wasn't last week or last year, or even last decade. It was 44 years ago. The problem of "workforce housing" has been going on far longer than it's been a trendy buzz phrase among planners, politicians, and sociologists. Homelessness was already getting bad then. It's gotten steadily worse.

I rented apartments in Gainesville, Florida, from the fall of 1976 to the spring of 1979. I moved three times, once within the same complex, then to another complex closer to campus and a big grocery store. For one summer during college I was essentially homeless in Miami, couch surfing and sleeping in my car while I worked my summer job, after arrangements proposed by a high school friend fell through. Another summer I rented an apartment with two other people in Orlando, while working for The Mouse. Then there was a summer where I bunked in the half-furnished attic of the family's new home (new to them, built in the 1920s) in Annapolis, and one where I just stayed at school. Throughout that time, I had a general idea of apartment rents based entirely on the scale of a state university town in a state that never has to deal with frost heaves and snow removal. 

After graduation, I based the housing portion of my meager budget on those impossibly friendly numbers. I had moved back to Annapolis in pursuit of job leads that proved to be mirages, before settling into grunt jobs as a sailmaker, then a house painter, then a general maintenance dude at a yacht club. I wanted jobs that would be easy to leave when I took off on all of the boss bike tours I was going to take, and that wouldn't demand too much of my creative faculties, as I tried to launch a career of cartooning and writing. By Gainesville economics I should have been able to land something, but roommates are always a problem.

The Slum was a grubby but spacious box I rented with a bike racing and house painting colleague after I'd gone over into another sail loft job and he had started working seriously toward his goal to become a carpenter and contractor. We were so low budget that we did not run the heat in the winter. I slept in my pride and joy 5-below-zero sleeping bag on a mattress on the floor. He went and got a girlfriend who could afford utilities, leaving me to enjoy the comforts of our drafty castle and chip the frozen soap off of the soapdish for my morning showers.

It was a pleasant, monastic existence. I was a five-minute bike ride or a 15-minute walk from work. I could come home and work on my novel until about 10 p.m., when the lady upstairs would pound on the floor because my typewriter was too loud. Then I could read and revise until I nodded off. I had no car, no phone, no money, and, therefore, no social or sex life. Highly economical. If you wanted to become invisible, having no phone and no car was a great start.

 My roommate paid his rent until the lease ended. That left me unable to afford the place, minimal as it was. Goodbye, closet-size kitchen with an exhaust fan that would electrocute you when you tried to turn it off. Goodbye, living room furnished with a scratchy couch, beat-up coffee table, and four bicycles leaned up against the walls. Two were my roommate's. Girlfriend's place didn't have room for his fleet.

The place disgusted dear old Dad so much that he wouldn't even get out of his car when he came over to scoop me up and convey me back to the family homestead for a home-cooked meal. I would have to keep looking out the window toward the parking lot to see if his car was there. His choice. I could have biked over. I hadn't had my nasty night-riding crash yet. Not that that reformed me anyway... I just got better lights and a little more caution.

The other worker bees around me had various group living arrangements. Some of them just made more money, either with a partner equally better employed or as the senior financial partner. There were cheaper apartments further out of town or in certain more distant towns, but that would have meant getting a car and paying its attendant expenses.

Most of the blame falls to me for not majoring in something marketable as the 1980s loomed. Creative aspirations are an expensive luxury. I could have folded a lot sooner and gone into construction, or something like that, but I hadn't really liked the scream of circular saws, or the steady march of sprawl that was already starting to obliterate most of what made Annapolis nice. I kept making tiny advances as a writer, which lured me further and further into the cul de sac of failed dreams. But this failure has also given me first hand experience of the tenuous life of a low-level worker. I did climb into the lifeboat of the family home for a few years until those little breakthroughs selling articles and drawings combined with my first marriage to convince me to launch my own leaky dinghy and row away.

Twice, my first wife and I had rental houses sold out from under us, once in Annapolis, once in New Hampshire. We moved from the Annapolis rental house into a basement apartment not even fully separated from the house upstairs. The landlord was easy to get along with, but the place flooded during a heavy couple of storms, destroying among other things a lot of the pages of one of my journals. It doesn't have to be exquisitely crafted deathless prose. A journal is a writer's junk drawer from which occasionally emerge suddenly useful items.

We moved to New Hampshire in the summer of 1987 because I had taken a job with a startup outdoor magazine. The publisher started writing rubber paychecks before Christmas. The 1980s boom in New England was starting to crumble at that point. When the owners of our rental house put it on the market, we took a rental that included an obligation to work as farm help. Because I had lots of "free time," I ended up doing a lot of the work that was really more interesting to my wife, but her skills as a bookkeeper landed her a series of full-time jobs. She only got sexually harassed at one of them. I found a nice part time position as a copy editor for the local weekly paper, did some substitute teaching (my apologies, kids), and fell into another part time job at a bike and cross-country ski shop.

Rental properties were already hard to find in the late 1980s in this part of New Hampshire. The real estate boom had inspired a lot of people to sell their property. Speculators slapped up hastily-built, overpriced condos to suck in the newly affluent residents of Massachusetts, pulling in fat salaries in the tech boom that was about to bust. Those mostly clustered near feature attractions like mountains and lakes. Not exactly convenient to what remained of employment, and often still priced out of reach as overextended investors tried to cover their losses.

The house we finally bought was 576 square feet. Into it we packed two adult humans, two dogs, and a cat. This later expanded to two cats. When we divorced, we split the pets.

Various lucky breaks have left me with the home and land, but I couldn't afford to move anywhere else. And the house is bigger now, to accommodate the next life partner. Fortunately, I like where I am. On the way there, though, I was buried in credit card debt, and fully dependent on having someone with whom to split rents. We had to bum money from relatives and borrow from short-term lenders. Buried in credit card debt, on the hook to short term lenders, are classic elements in the setup for a self-help book from the 1980s. Shit like that was everywhere: "I was down and out and then I stumbled on this sure-fire way to a life of wealth and leisure! Just buy my book for $19.99 and you too can have a Porsche and a hot tub and endless vacations!"

I wonder how many get-rich-quick writers ended up in the financial dumpster because they couldn't compete in the crowded market of get-rich-quick books. Nowadays it's financial YouTubers, TikTokers, Instagramaticists.

I don't recommend that anyone do things the way I did, because my escape from the wheel was a unique accident. Because I didn't manage to turn the windfall into an investment bonanza or otherwise open the valve on the money pipeline, I'm back living paycheck to paycheck, more or less. I will certainly never retire, just die.

Barbara Ehrenreich published Nickel and Dimed in 2001. Since then, the income gap has become a canyon, and real estate as an investment has far outstripped the concept of real estate as a place to live. There are more than twice as many people in the United States alone than there were when I was born, and more than a hundred million more than when I went full time into the labor pool and housing market. That has an effect, no matter how much the cheerleaders for unlimited growth will insist that it does not. People wherever they are have to find occupations that attract enough money to pay livable wages, while the planet has to provide sufficient resources to feed them all, at the same time that the ecosystem continues to function to support us. Growth advocates have little value or respect for the natural world. Open space is "wasteland." Nature can take care of itself, or we'll devise some scientifically engineered, streamlined set of indispensable species and the others are free to die off. Except our knowledge doesn't advance nearly as fast as our need does.

Way back in the mid 20th Century, when we briefly acknowledged that there was a population problem, my answer was that we should slow down everyone's birth rate and focus on providing quality of life worldwide. Coast the population down to coexist with the complex machinery of nature, and use our technology to take the pressure off of every person as much as possible. Instead we got the winner-take-all fuckfest of the 1980s. We inherit the results of that now. My philosophy still holds; we just have to accommodate a much larger population from which to coast down.

Winning and losing and fighting dirty

 I've caught some chatter about Democrats pushing their elected representatives to fight more like Republicans. You know: dirty.

While Republicans are great at obstructionist politics, it's mostly because conservatism has really degenerated into nothing but obstructionism, combined with outright reversion to much uglier, less free, more violent past forms of our national and state governments. This is painted as some idealized, moral society of small town virtue and agricultural wholesomeness. It never existed, and its architects know that. They're just selling the fantasy of manly men and appreciative women to an audience hungry for a simpler moral landscape than reality ever provides. Conflict resolution goes from strong words to bare knuckles to six-guns. Might makes right.

Politicians lie. You have to filter for the percentage of lies, the persistence of the lies, and rhetorical goals of the lies. You have to vet the truth, too. It's hard, because a candidate for office, even if they're the incumbent, is asking you to believe that they will bring you what you want, when they haven't yet. And these better things have to be the result of a widespread cooperative effort among a majority of the elected officials. No single savior can do it, not even an imperial President.

The critical difference between Republicans and Democrats is that Republicans only want their team to win, whereas Democrats want the whole country to win. The Republicans view their team as the only true Americans, while the Democrats have taken the position that the United States is a work in progress, evolving by absorbing a diverse population enjoying individual liberty responsibly in a cooperative endeavor to create a more perfect union.  

Each political party's vision of the future is quite different. Individual humans regardless of party affiliation are susceptible to human failings of greed, lust, and denial, but that doesn't mean that "both parties are the same." Horny Bill Clinton was not the same as horny Newt Gingrich when it came to governing philosophy.

Elections are sales campaigns. Politicians are service providers who carry out their jobs more or less constantly in the public eye. The House of Representatives is full of people you may never have heard of unless they do something stupendous or outrageous, but the voters of their districts mostly know who they are and what they do. Senators have higher profiles, because there are fewer of them. Thus we are all affected by the decisions of people we have no chance to vote for. We have no leverage except to appeal to their morality or intellect. And legislators among themselves have to negotiate constantly to make laws and otherwise fulfill their duties while remaining electable at home. When voters periodically heave a bunch of them out, the deal process has to start all over again.

Universal access to the same information, through broadcast media and the internet gives people in vastly different circumstances a deceptively uniform portrayal of the world outside their immediate surroundings. People collect in their echo chambers, but the chambers channel each other's messaging to stitch into the fabric of the tailored message to their followers. We argue in general about the same broad topics regardless of where we live. The issues might be real, but the life experience of the audience is not the same. Come election time, only the voters in each Congressional district get to vote for the politician who will carry their standard to DC to help make things better or worse for people who live in the myriad of other districts all over the country.

Democrats have an image problem that won't be solved by becoming more like Republicans. They tried that in the 1990s and ended up with more corporate influence as we got dragged further to the right. On the other hand, political power ultimately does originate in the voters. One could infer that the shift to the right reflected the overall character of the majority of voters. The key phrase there is "majority of voters." Especially in midterm elections, voter turnout represents less than half of registered voters in most states, sometimes much less than half. And that's only registered voters. Adults who are eligible to vote but don't register don't show up in statistics. But they do show up in the bitching and moaning.

Voting is a process of elimination. In an election where the winner has 52 percent and the loser has 48, 48 percent of the winning total just went to cancel out the loser's votes. The more people who actually show up and cast a ballot, the more accurately the results represent the beliefs of the adults in the district in question, whether it's local, state, congressional, senatorial, or presidential. The electoral college sucks, but it would matter a lot less if voters turned out en masse every time, and voted on more than a single issue or two. Voting can be discouraging when you don't see the improvements you were hoping for, or keep losing over and over because sports fan mentality has replaced critical thinking.

Meanwhile, elections have consequences. In Missouri, voters passed a ballot initiative to raise the minimum wage and require sick leave. One and done, right? Wrong. The Republican legislature and governor decided that they rule over the mere voters, so they passed legislation reversing the decision. This is a pitfall of our representative democracy, when the elected officials decide that the disadvantaged minority they really answer to is rich donors. Voters install the officials, but the officials then have the power to implement the policies and laws under which ordinary citizens live. I would have said under which everyone lives, but we all see how the system goes lightly on prominent people. And legislators all too often exempt themselves as well.

Some Democrats are operating more aggressively, but it's a fine line between beating the other team at their own game and becoming as bad as they are. As Texas prepares to gerrymander their state even more aggressively to counter the losses Republicans expect in Congress as a result of their unpopular and destructive Big Steaming Pile of a Bill, California has floated the notion of redistricting to dilute republican power there, to counteract the expected shift in election results in the Lone Star State. That's fine as far as it goes, but it's only a battle tactic. The real winning strategy for the country as a whole would be a law requiring nonpartisan redistricting nationwide at all levels. Make politicians run on the issues, not on their party affiliation. Good luck getting that passed when so many members of Congress got there from gerrymandered districts, but we can dream.

In New York, mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani has run a thoughtful and energetic campaign to promote the ideas as well as the candidate, to put a human face on the bogeyman of a progressive Muslim vying to head the government of the most populous city in the United States. It's not fighting dirty at all. It's communicating intelligently. If the Democratic Party is going to turn the tide of authoritarianism being driven by the current degenerated state of the Republican Party, thoughtful communication will be at least as important as clever and hostile political maneuvers. Successful hostilities gratify party faithful, but they make genuine mutual understanding less and less possible. "They kill one of ours, we kill one of theirs..." This only creates two committed minorities, each incapable of winning a free and fair election on their own, fighting for the uncommitted voters increasingly turned off by both of them.

The Republicans were the good guys in the Civil War, but by the end of the 19th Century they had become the tools of plutocracy. Democrats notoriously presided over rigged towns like Chicago, and were the power behind Southern racist politics throughout most of the 19th Century, and well into the 2oth. General party characteristics of either side blend with local variations, so you have to pay attention to the details where you happen to be. Listen to what the candidates say. Pay attention to what they actually do when they get into office. Communicate often, in clear and constructive terms.

I hate talking to people, especially about politics and government. I would much rather take some time over a piece of writing than have to think fast on my feet, summoning up the examples I know someone will ask for. I greatly admire people who can do that and bring receipts. It's especially gratifying when those receipts will stand up to fact checking. Communicate in your preferred way.

The Americans who want to get us back on track to save the small-d democratic portion of our great republican government have no immediate choice but to back capital D Democrats in large numbers. We can sort the rest out later, but right now we're fighting the battle with the troops we have, and the weapons they bring. The system needs a reset to make Congress take its job seriously, make the courts independent again, and the President less of a quasi-monarch. We won't get there in one or two elections, but we won't ever get there if we don't take the first step. Vote for Democrats and then don't just release them into the wild. Stay on them and hold them accountable, as you would with anyone you hired to represent you. It's a nuisance and a pain in the ass, but it's the basis of the Constitution from which comes your beloved right to yap off and carry a gun. If they let you down, don't flip to the other party without checking out their plans thoroughly. Instead, vote in primaries, to refine the trajectory, not turn the gun on ourselves.

Indentured servitude for the poor

 Trump administration Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins has proposed tapping into the "34 million able bodied Americans" on Medicaid to fill out the labor pool of agricultural workers drained by the mass deportation program masterminded by White House Chief of Staff Stephen Miller. This is forced labor. While it's a nice reality check on anyone in the working poor who likes to bitch about immigrants receiving public benefits, it also exploits a cycle of poverty in underpaid labor, largely for the benefit of corporate agriculture.

Tying health care financing to employment is already discriminatory. Tying it to specific employment further divides the workforce into haves and have-nots, as some get better "benefits" than others. Don't like your insurance plan? "Get a better job," say the cheerleaders for the free market, as if you could just skip merrily over to that more generous employer who surely exists somewhere.

Medicaid is not a cushy free ride. Neither is Medicare. Big gaps are left solely for the benefit of private insurance companies and skinflint tax-haters who think that depriving fellow citizens of essential services and gouging them for the supplemental coverage expresses some virtue in social Darwinism and the glorious profit motive. In their idealized vision, the magnificent labor herd runs, harried by wolves and cheetahs and lions that pick off the weak while strengthening the survivors. Some of us are obviously nearer the top of the food chain than others.

Moves by the MAGA government to consolidate power should not surprise anyone, but they should never elicit a yawn, either. The freedom and future of anyone alive today faces serious threats from the unholy alliance of the immensely wealthy, authoritarian religion, and tireless disinformation aimed at voters too busy pulling together a living to do a lot of comparative research about the news selected for their direction.

As for the conscripted workforce of low-income Americans, we're still talking about public money spent only to address part of a problem that could be solved by a more organized program of national service.

When we got rid of the military draft -- which was a very good decision -- we took away a shared rite of passage endured by young men for decades. The volunteer military functions much better than one filled with unenthusiastic conscripts. But it removes that direct connection to the nuts and bolts of citizen government and the responsibilities of maintaining the Land of the Free. I have thought for years that a broader based national service requirement, providing subsidized labor to a wide array of necessary functions like agriculture would create a sense of greater ownership of the general welfare of the nation. Programs like Americorps and the Peace Corps (and others) have functioned relatively invisibly to most of us. If they had the same level of public image that the military enjoys, and were coordinated into an admired and valued complete package of public services, we would create another whole category of veterans, hopefully less exposed to traumatic violence. As a species, we should be working toward phasing out the traumatic violence.

Such dreams will have to wait until we are no longer held under the rule of a regime that values traumatic violence and the threat of incarceration as tools to enforce order. Welcome to the Land of the Free and Obedient.

United States unleashes the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse

 Pestilence, War, Famine, and Death. The United States has become the harbinger of death, the agent of suffering and evil across the globe. Trump voters must be so proud.

We invite disease back into our own country through anti-vaccine bullshit. We facilitate its spread in the world by cutting funding for AIDS treatment and withdrawing funding from medical research.

We allow our Defense Department to strut and pose, and drop expensive bombs on regions already volatile, where the detonations will not quell the anger that dwells there. Tough guy rhetoric from the television host who was hired to portray the Secretary of Defense reinforces the bombast from the reality television character portraying the President.

The cruel tyrant, aided by greedy billionaires, cut foreign aid, throwing millions of people, including children, into deeper poverty and the certainty of famine.

This regime is centered on death. Its supporters pride themselves on their cruelty toward the people they deem inferior, in their own eyes and in the eyes of their god.  They detain and deport children with cancer, cutting them off from their treatment Everything they do is geared toward the destruction of millions, billions of people, so that the survivors can have lebensraum. They don't have allies. They have enemies and subordinates. They don't have a vision of shared humanity, they have a dream of monoculture enforced by conquest.

Would-be conquerors have had thousands of years to try to make it work. Their efforts have always ended in a tide line of dried blood where they crested and fell back, or simply dried up in place. The story of empire is ultimately one tragic failure after another. From the mid 20th Century, super power has only been held through the threat of murder suicide. It's a global abusive relationship.

The United States had a chance to be something different. There was a lot wrong in our past, but some of us were trying to make it right as best we could. Instead, the current party in power wants to return to the wrong and intensify it. Choose your world.

Impeach and remove the rogue president

 The best message the United States could send to the world right now would be to impeach and remove Donald Trump from the office of the presidency. It won't happen, because the Republican congressional majority has neither the will nor the skill to fulfill its role as a potent and vital component of our government, but it would demonstrate clearly that the American people do not support the unauthorized military action ordered by the current occupant of the Oval Office. It would prove that the government described by Abraham Lincoln in the Gettysburg Address is not dead, it's just been very sick for a while.

Our current chief executive is an embarrassment and a danger to every American citizen, everywhere. Military personnel and other Americans operating outside the country, particularly in and near the Middle East, are in the most immediate danger, but anyone, anywhere, could get caught in retaliatory actions by Iranian-aligned operators, as well as other entities with a beef against the United States. When the United States acts like a threat to world stability, the world will respond by trying to contain and neutralize the threat. Little countries, mostly through non-state actors, will strike with a sense that they have nothing to lose. Major powers will move with more deliberation, to exclude the US from cooperative endeavors that it used to support and now undermines.

The military will not save us by "refusing an unlawful order." They all take an oath to the Constitution, but there's nothing in the manual about exactly this situation. No one ever imagined a president as bad as Donald Trump actually making it all the way into power. Long before the thin-skinned aspiring dictator could order something truly horrific from the nuclear arsenal, he will have put armed forces not just into harm's way but into guaranteed losses, as commanders who were unable to talk him out of these adventures do their best to carry out their assigned missions. Congress could shut it down, but the majority party doesn't have the sense to do it.

The only sure way to end the threat of Donald Trump's instability is to remove him completely from office. That leaves us with the rest of the right wing coalition still embedded and entwined in the government. They have been building to this point since at least the 1970s, and really gained their foothold in 1980. However, they're not a solid bloc. They all like being able to rule rather than represent, but their motivations fracture their unity. The arguments would go back to being about policy more than personality.

No one should have the power that Donald Trump has usurped for himself. That's the bottom line. He is a threat to the people of the United States. The people of the United states must demand that their representatives in Congress use their constitutionally mandated power to remove that threat.

Bitching about the age of Democrats

 The age of Democratic elected officials is a symptom, not the disease itself. It's a troublesome symptom, a side effect of inconvenient truths about the party itself and the psychology of American voters.

Jeet Heer in the New Republic wrote: "The party is a heterogeneous coalition of centrists and progressives that has failed to define a core goal." This is and has been a simple truth since the party shifted to the left in the 1960s, as the Republican Party became the party of business over individuals, property rights over civil rights, and truculent conservatism in general. Those are some great core goals. Their evolution has led to the current authoritarian regime.

Heer pointed out that three House Democrats have died this year, all from states that Trump won or that have a Republican governor. This implied that more youthful presence of Democrats in those states might have improved the party's standing overall, but I think it says more about the states themselves, and voter psychology. 

Representative Raul Grijalva of Arizona died at age 77, from cancer. He had represented his seat to the satisfaction of the majority of voters in his district for more than 20 years. Seventy-seven seems old when you're 35 or younger, but wait until you're in your upper 60s, still working and feeling pretty energetic, and have some respect for the value of experience. If someone has been doing an acceptable job, gets the votes, and contributes to the party's national presence, why not keep sending them? Arizona is full of old people. It takes a particularly persuasive whippersnapper to get old farts to switch their allegiance. Grijalva was a reliable Democratic seat in the House. Maybe the district is drawn to keep it that way. But if a fresh-faced newbie hops in there and makes a mess, all of those calculations fall apart.

Gerry Connolly drew ire earlier this year when the party chose him as the ranking member of the House Oversight Committee instead of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Then he up and died of esophageal cancer, which he knew he had. He was 75. He had been an effective legislator for more than 16 years. 

The current occupant of the Oval Office will turn 79 on June 14, and is a babbling wreck. His backers will keep pushing him along as long as they can, because he is a reliable brand for them.

Most voters hate to think. I'm with you. My life is a testimony to my lack of mental discipline. Also, when you're busy busy busy, either scraping out a living or trying to have enough fun in your time off to feel ready to go back to scraping, you don't want to dig through the dense language of policy analysis. You want someone to tell you that everything will be okay if you put them in office. Public prominence brings with it an automatic assumption of some level of competence. Look at how Joe Biden was alternately a drooling bumbler and the evil mastermind of a vast criminal conspiracy. Anyone who makes it to the top has to have done something right. Right?

Hardworking, solid, prosperous citizens who put aside the artistic dreams of youth and became corporate lawyers are just as pressed for time as dishwashers, shop clerks, and bicycle mechanics.

An analysis of Kamala Harris's loss in 2024 stated that her voters were mostly "super voters" -- people who are more attentive and engaged in politics than average voters. We spent more time reading and absorbing analysis of the threat presented by another go-round with MAGA at the helm, and did what we could to prevent it. Added to that would be habitual party voters. But her race and gender were too much even for some of the regular partisans. Those regulars who sat it out did not believe that the current regime would be bad enough to warrant setting aside their core prejudices to elect a woman, especially a non-white woman whose voice they might not like.

Democrats re-elect old farts because they keep being electable. I've dunked on electable Democrats before, but even a dead weight like Joe Manchin at least held a seat that added to the technical majority. Yes, it's a coalition party. It always will be, because it collects all of the people and sub-groups that don't move in lockstep: the true exemplars of individual freedom of thought. We are the reason that the Constitution was written and amended as it is. The lesser of two evils is still less fucking evil.

The elements gathered into the Democratic Party have been fighting to defend their lives since the 1970s. Even as the work to expand civil rights and full citizenship to women and minorities has gone on, public perception has morphed and modified under the influence of changing media and economic pressures. And public perception is the foundation of electoral politics. Facts matter, but opinions get you into office.

The young have vision. The old have experience. The old also have the memory of their younger visions, many of which might match surprisingly well to those of the young today. 

If I'm still alive at 75 or 77, I fully expect still to be working, because I was too much of a dumbass to secure a lucrative retirement package. Or maybe AI will have set up a robot army to cull out the slower members of the herd. We can be processed into any number of useful things. A lot of us out there expect still to be working if we haven't been forcibly removed by some ageist purge.

Burdened by the bullshit of Thomas Jefferson

 "When the public fears their government, there is tyranny. When the government fears its people, there is liberty." 

Snappy, right? Punchy. Memorable. And so true. What a genius.

The first premise is true. A government that rules by fear must back it up with violence and repression. But the second part oversimplifies the relationship and validates anarchy and lawlessness in which the people end up fearing each other. Unity is lost. Democracy is lost. Faith in government is lost. The nation defaults to tyranny as the void is filled by ambitious, opportunistic leaders.

The mess we are in now is the direct result of the 1980 Reagan campaign undermining the legitimacy of government. Generations since have been trained to be contemptuous of government.

The Reagan administration was full of shit, using their anti-tax, anti-government rhetoric to round up voters disillusioned by the mistakes of the Vietnam era and constantly paranoid from decades of the Cold War. All they really wanted was to make rich people richer. And they had no strong objection to racism and homophobia as long as those sentiments continued to bring them a reliable voting base. But the main objective was always wealth concentration.

Government that served the people broadly cost too much money that the rich could spend more wisely on more real estate, and whatever gratified them personally. This includes high profile philanthropy as well as gaudy, shameful ostentation like gold toilets. The underlying premise was that rich people were the elite. They deserved all the money they could attract and were free to spend it as they wished. Their expenditures would magically create jobs and prosperity as the money dripped from their fingers with every wave of the hand.

Every young person who gets their first job learns about taxes. They sign on for X-amount per hour, and then their check is a lot smaller than the product of simple multiplication. Stuff gets taken out. Once a year, you have to take a math test to get some or all of what was withheld refunded to you. Often, they get this first job while they're still in school, perhaps struggling with math, as I did. It doesn't seem fair, especially when you learn that the more you earn, the higher percentage of your income goes to taxes. Whaaat? The more I make the more you get? Fuck you! The concept of progressive taxation takes too many words. What do you mean when you say that the businesses that generate income also burden the public and should pay for services? Huh?

Then there are the other deductions. To a young worker, Social Security seems remote. The money deducted for that doesn't get refunded the way overpaid taxes do. The return on it sits too far off to seem justifiable when you could use that money now. It's easy to believe various charlatans who assure you that you could make far more playing the market with private retirement investments. Forget volatility and untimely market corrections. Don't ask how the brokerages make their cut. You'll do great! Just keep the government off of everyone's back. The great Thomas Jefferson said that the government is supposed to fear the people. Keep them on the back foot! They're the enemy.

Bumper sticker philosophy rules public opinion. A popular one says, "Become ungovernable." This glorification of immature oppositional defiance strikes at the foundation of our constitutional system, but it sounds so damn cool. Yeah! Ungovernable! Don't tread on me! I'm a badass!

Jefferson is also credited with saying that the roots of the Tree of Liberty need to be refreshed with the blood of patriots and tyrants from time to time. This was written at a time when the meat on your plate at supper might have been walking around your farm that morning, and you might have slit its throat yourself. Human history is drenched in blood. At least the cause of liberty is a worthy use of the violent death in conflict that you might face anyway at the whim of a king or emperor. It was also written when war on a global scale was held back by the transportation and weapon technology of the time.

After World War II, the survivors of that conflict all seemed to agree that we didn't want to do that again. We've had almost constant warfare since then, but on a smaller scale. Hard to say how the score sits between the tyrants and the patriots. But we do know a lot more about post traumatic stress disorder and how to reconstruct physically maimed people. So there's that.

Regardless of the political labels, elected representatives have to deal with the details when they enact policies that will affect the entire operation of the country. They put lives at risk in the military and intelligence services. They kill or save millions inside and outside of our borders. Every two years, the voters kick the table and open the door to strong winds that blow the papers around. They base their decisions on whatever they can hold in mind about the people they're voting for and the beliefs they represent. A lot of them skip it altogether and hope for the best.

If fear is valued, fear will be cultivated. If the choice is only between a government fearing its people or a people fearing their government, we will only live in a constant climate of fear. That doesn't lead to good decisions.

Quit publicizing racist twats

 A racist twat in Rochester, Minn., recently dropped repeated n-bombs on a Black child she suspected of filching something from her bag in a city park. The boy is five years old and reportedly has special needs.

A bystander took video and confronted her. I won't link any of it because you can find it easily, and I don't want to give her any more publicity. I also omit her name, because she has raised a reported $500,000.00 so far, based on the claim that she has been doxed and fears for her safety.

First off, she has a right to say anything she wants, including racist epithets against a child, as long as she doesn't slide into criminal threatening. Representatives of the child might sue her for slander regarding the allegations of theft, but the First Amendment gives her plenty of latitude to spew ignorant garbage. This should never have become a cause celebre.

Our zeal for public shaming has begun to backfire spectacularly. A video meant to embarrass this loser instead gave her prominence to attract her fellow racists to protect a poor waif beset by threatening Black people and their terrorist white allies.

The racists and other far right adherents constantly shift between presenting themselves as badasses that you should just surrender to outright, and poor, noble victims of a legal system perverted by miscegenated Communists. They might walk around with firearms draped all over them, and talk about how they ask and grant no quarter, only to whine piteously when someone publishes their home address. What part of "no quarter" don't you get, tough guy? Total war is total war. Are you advocating for it or not?

America is basically a nation of shit-talkers. In the course of a day, how many thousands of death threats are flung back and forth in the heat of a moment and never go anywhere? In that mix, some may be credible. Most are not. In angry discourse, it's more common to oversell and under-deliver than vice versa.

Racism won't go away if you ignore it. But individual incidents of it won't turn into fundraising opportunities if you give it less air. Racists are not ashamed. Why do you think that a particular club is called Proud Boys? Putting a racist in a viral video is no longer a good strategy.

Along with hardcore racists come fashionable racists and the business interests that simply follow the money. Those business interests were into diversity when diversity seemed to be winning. Now that racism seems to be on top, business interests are okay with it. Corporations have no morals. They try to appeal to buyers with whatever seems to be attracting them at a given time. Some business interests will hold onto their support for diversity because they know that a solid percentage of consumers will choose them on that basis. Rather than compete in the more crowded arena of racist businesses, the "good guys" can depend on a loyal customer base to tide them over until things swing back to favor diversity overall. It is morally right, but also safe business.

I originally headlined this piece Nonviolence versus Violence because of reactions I read from the anti-racist community as the story about the Rochester bitch plays out. Certain Black activists called out their white supporters for a lack of resolve. Supposed supporters take down their Black Lives Matter signs and flags of support for marginalized groups. This may in fact indicate a weak will among some of those allies, but it also acknowledges a sad and frightening reality: the right wing likes to use violence and vandalism more than the left does.

The right wing cites the left's lack of violent propensities as a sign of cowardice and weakness. Paradoxically, they also accuse the left of perpetrating violence or of threatening it as an excuse for their own armament. Back in the Cold War, we did wonder whether the Soviets would outright invade us. Long before that, in the rise of Marxism in the 19th and early 20th centuries, Communists did engage in violence. They also didn't act very communistic wherever they gained power, but that's a tangent for another day.

Nonviolent protest emerged as a powerful tool in the 20th Century. However, it was only one tool. Outbreaks of actual violence in support of civil rights, for instance, showed the government that the costs of maintaining the racist status quo were higher than the costs of expanding the rights of full citizenship under the full protection of federal law. Gay rights got their big kick forward from the Stonewall riots in New York City.

Riots are battlefield actions. The combatants form ranks under their banners on a piece of ground that's publicly accessible, often completely public: streets, parks, business districts. There have been spectacularly bloody exceptions in which mobs descended on residential areas. This has most often been white forces attacking minorities individually or collectively. A handy list is provided here.

Slavery in the United States was not ended by peaceful protest. It was ended by a bloody and wasteful war between factions that conveniently lined up with geographical boundaries, allowing the South to secede and pretend to be their own country for four years. They spent those years proving that their economic system couldn't support a long-term military conflict against an industrialized power. They were not only morally wrong, they were economically inferior in an era when business competition was evolving rapidly. But they were so in love with their hateful ideology that they let thousands of their men get killed and their land was laid waste by Union forces. And afterward they merely shifted their tactics  -- still to their own detriment -- in order to maintain racial hierarchy.

Meanwhile, the rest of the country received both Black residents and racist ideologies. Exposure to both has led somewhat to acceptance of Black and brown people as a part of normal society, but also to the persistent cancer of racism. If the Civil War happened today, battles would break out all over the country. You would also find out in a hurry who really had the stomach for it.

When Timothy McVeigh bombed the Federal Building in Oklahoma City, he thought that he would trigger a revolution against the tyrannical United States government. Instead, he set the militia movement back ten years as people recoiled at the horror of his act. We had those dopes walking around our town in their little Confederate hats, and then poof! they all ditched the regalia and shut the fuck up for a while. It was nice. They probably still met in private. You can tell by the signs and flags around town today that a good chunk of them suck up conspiracy theories and far right propaganda. And the few years of relative peace were bought at the price of innocent people killed and maimed in the Oklahoma City bombing.

My point is that large scale violence is the best advertising against itself. Too bad that it does not inoculate against small scale violence.

Bad actors on the right in this area have engaged in vandalism against targets that they could identify as holding opposing views: roofing nails in driveways, political signs cut down with a chainsaw, slashed tires, broken windows, occasional arson. During one dispute in the tiny town where I live, people were advised to put a padlock on their well cover (if they hadn't already just for general prudence) so that someone on the other side of the dispute didn't drop something unpleasant in there.

Whether to display symbols of a political position calls for a cost-benefit analysis. How many people will be swayed toward your point of view compared to the odds that some destructive, hateful chud will damage or destroy something you depend on, like your car or your house or an outbuilding containing tools you use?

The same Black activist noted that racism always attracts more funding than anti racism does. Anti-racist endeavors depend on mostly small donors. As a small donor myself, I can tell you that I view the many problems that our species faces as interlocked. Racists and destroyers have the benefit of their simple minds to help them focus their contributions on the narrow front pushed hard by their narrow minds. Saving things is much more complicated and delicate than destroying them. Because I tried to be content with a frighteningly modest income, I don't have the money to toss monthly donations totaling a couple of hundred dollars once I have paid my routine expenses and set aside some for non-routine expenses. Before I put a target on myself, I ask what my sacrifice will do to advance the greater good.

Once violence breaks out, it shapes reality to itself. The conflict becomes more important than the stakes in it. Combatants fight for their lives. We talk of the sacrifice of heroes who fall in battle, but that's a very different act from the human sacrifice celebrated by Christian churches, in which their pure messiah was executed just for being too darn good.

In either case, the gruesome deaths don't have a lasting good effect. One dead on a cross in 33 CE and millions dead by 1945, and yet here we are. Thousands obliterated in the 1860s just so some racist twat can raise a half a million dollars on the n-word and speculation that she might receive pizzas she didn't order on a few nights in 2025. I don't know what -- if anything -- will smarten up the racist dipshits. It's reached the point of unreasoning hatred, so no reasoned discourse will sway them. The death toll of racists is in the millions just since the 1860s, and yet there are still millions of them, so you won't "kill the problem out," as violent right wingers like to say.

Should the racists manage to rule the world, they will discover that they cannot make it into their utopia any more than we progressive dreamers could. Maybe the technofascists will achieve their fantasy of entirely automated labor serving a handful of actual humans living in luxury. In that case, the vast majority of people will have died out. It seems like a long term goal at best, except for the part where most humans die out. That part is too easy to achieve.

I can see it: Jesus comes back in about 2075.

"Hey, I'm back! Hey! Where did everybody go?" And then some AI planetary defense system vaporizes him.

In the meantime, we're alive now. How nice or not nice we make it is up to us. One more war or era of bloody skirmishes won't fix a goddamned thing.

Jumping off a cliff won't hurt you

 It's the landing.

Experts and concerned citizens have been warning us for years about the threats presented by the right wing elements currently in complete control of the federal government and many states. They described the dire consequences well in advance, attempting to sway voters after the 2020 election to keep up the pressure to hold back the MAGA faction and their allies and backers. They have failed at every step. Voters gave the House of Representatives to the Republicans in 2022 and the whole shootin' match to them in 2024.

Now that the Trump regime is energetically demolishing many decades of progress, we're starting to feel some consequences, but nothing like the devastation we were told to prepare for.

No one wants to see store shelves bare and businesses closing. No one wants to be part of massive layoffs. Not everyone wants a white ethno-state. Nor does everyone want to see women relegated to dependent, subservient status. I will venture that a minority of people want to see more dangerous workplaces, rising pollution, loss of cropland, privatization of national parks and other pubic lands, and unregulated drilling, mining, and transportation of resources through communities that happen to be in the way. But none of that has happened yet. Or not much. If you happen to live where lots of federal workers haven't suddenly lost their jobs, or where farmers have suddenly lost contracts they were counting on, maybe life seems pretty normal.

We're in midair right now. Feeling weightless, enjoying the view...

It's over in seconds.

What "Made in America" means

 Goods made in the foreign countries selected by Corporate America when they shipped the jobs off to maximize their profits are produced by low-paid labor, often in unsafe conditions. Sort of like the way factory workers were treated in this country in the Gilded Age, before unionization and health and environmental concerns delivered a one-two punch to corporate corner cutting.

Low priced consumer goods depend on exploited labor. In the countries where the factories are, the labor might feel well compensated for now, but if they get a taste of better and better living conditions they might upset the equation. In the meantime, anyone operating an industrial facility in the United States has to pay more for personnel, even if they don't pay particularly well by US standards. 

It's easy to say that you would gladly pay more for a US made item instead of one from China, until you start doing all the math and figure out how little you could afford. And it won't necessarily be made with better materials and workmanship. So you'll be paying more to get something that is only as good as you were getting from overseas. Meanwhile, the workers will face constant pressure from management to produce more for less. At the same time management will be fighting with regulators to ease up on pollution and safety standards.

Look at automobiles: You shell out five figures for even a dinky one, and with the best of care it starts letting you down within 3-5 years. We're talking about cars made in America. Consumer goods manufacturing is designed to make you buy things. It doesn't matter where the factory is. The calculation is the same.

We're awash in consumer goods: Televisions, computers, mobile phones, kitchen and household appliances, clothing... some stuff is produced here. Most is not. If companies tried to move the volume of production here that feeds our level of consumption, it would not only drive the prices of everything way up to cover the costs of establishing that infrastructure, it would require more land area than industry previously occupied at the height of domestic productivity. There are many more consumers now.

On the plus side, consumers now have less money to blow than in the latter part of the 20th Century, so they have less ability to gorge on the output of consumer goods manufacturing.

Economy is tricky. For all of the bullshit about "wealth creation," we're working with a finite planet. In nature, good times for any species are generally followed by a population collapse. The exception might be cockroaches. They seem to be able to thrive no matter what. When times are good, they eat the best garbage. When times are tough, they eat their own dead, and cast-off exoskeletons. As humans, we're more like the predators whose numbers boom when their prey proliferates. Those predators die off after they have eaten their prey population down to its low point. In the case of humans, we're preying not only on animals that we eat, but on each other, metaphorically, in economic competition.

Big companies don't really care where the factories are, as long as the numbers work in their favor. Since we have exalted obscene wealth as the ultimate marker of success, corporate leadership is only concerned with paying as little as possible to achieve whatever their business model calls productivity. Productivity only means how much money gets sucked in and funneled to the top.