Politics of Fear – The Wrongologist

Crime: Perception vs. Reality

The Daily Escape:

Saguaros and poppies, Catalina SP, Tucson, AZ – March 2024 photo by Paul J Van Helden

From Jeff Asher, a crime analyst based in New Orleans:

“Murder plummeted in the United States in 2023, likely at one of the fastest rates of decline ever recorded. What’s more, every type of Uniform Crime Report Part I crime with the exception of auto theft is likely down a considerable amount this year relative to last year according to newly reported data through September from the FBI.”

We all knew that crime rates skyrocketed between the mid-1960s and the late 1980s. Then they went into a slow 35-year decline. Now, homicide, violent crime, and property crime rates have returned to what they were prior to the latest 20-year increase. This means that if you’re under 55, crime rates have been falling for most of your adult life.

But America perceives that crime rates are high. A Gallup poll released last November found 77% of Americans believed there was more crime in America than the year before. And 63% felt there was either a “very” or “extremely” serious crime problem — the highest in the poll’s history going back to 2000.

Wrongo doesn’t truly believe the polls since Pew revealed that 12% of people under 30 and 24% of Hispanic people who opt into online polls claim they have a license to operate a nuclear submarine, but here’s a chart:

(This is based on Gallup’s annual Crime survey, conducted Oct. 2023)

The question is, why the disconnect? NPR quoted Jeff Asher:

“There’s never been a news story that said, ‘There were no robberies yesterday, nobody really shoplifted at Walgreens….Especially with murder, there’s no doubt that it is falling at [a] really fast pace right now.’”

One theory you might have is that since the Covid pandemic caused social disorder, dysfunction in our government, and all sorts of problems, including that spike in crime, you might expect crime to remain high even after the country went back to work and school.

Another theory is that when people say “crime“, they don’t exclusively mean “people breaking the law“. Instead maybe they mean “behavior which upsets me“. For example, when the Philadelphia DA tries to focus on eliminating bail for simple drug arrests, while opposing police corruption, he’s said to be soft on crime. Then Republicans (and Trump) tried to impeach him, saying that they’re being “tough on crime” and crime remains a politicized news story.

Another theory is that the narrative around homeless people drives perception of crime. The idea that “homeless people have been violent“, or simply that “homeless people live near me and I don’t want any shelters built nearby,” strengthens the perception that crime is everywhere. For people who feel that way, the statement “Crime is a big problem” is equivalent to the statement “I always see homeless people when I go into town”.

This may explain why crime rates “near me” are perceived to be substantially lower than how national crime is perceived. Few of the homeless are encamped in their suburbs.

If you look back on the 1980s, there were a large number of visible homeless people in Washington DC, and Reagan dismissed them as “homeless by choice“. Today, there are plenty of homeless people on the streets in every city. It’s important to remember that when St. Reagan was governor of California, he released mental patients onto the streets.

This was part of “deinstitutionalization”: The emptying of state psychiatric hospitals that began in the 1950s. As hospitals were shut down, patients were discharged with no place to get psychiatric care. They ended up on the streets, some eventually committing crimes that got them arrested.

In 1963, JFK signed the Mental Retardation Facilities and Community Health Centers Construction Act. (It turned out to be the last bill Kennedy would sign.) The law was designed to replace “custodial mental institutions” with community mental health centers, thus allowing patients to live—and get psychiatric care—in their communities.

However, a sufficient number of community mental health centers were never built.

In 1965, Medicaid accelerated the shift from inpatient to outpatient care: One key part of the Medicaid legislation stipulated that the federal government would not pay for inpatient care in psychiatric hospitals. This further pushed states to move patients out of their state facilities.

That’s when homeless people began to be visible to most of us.

Later, in the 1970s, Nixon declared a war on drugs, setting the stage for tough-on-crime policies. Laws, like mandatory minimum sentences for possession and other drug-related crimes, disproportionately affected people of color and pushed incarceration rates to record levels. Between 1972 and 2009, America’s prison population grew by 700%.

The homeless get blamed for the bad behavior of a small minority of their group. But since an awful lot of the dysfunctional are homeless because their families or friends couldn’t cope with their behavior, it’s logical that the general public would also find their behavior a problem.

And it’s more than just the homeless. In Wrongo’s small Connecticut town, long-time residents resent people who have moved in recently. They are appalled by the occasional drug arrest or stolen car that was left unlocked in a driveway.

This scales up to people in our town bellowing about CHICAGO!!!! Or LA or Portland, OR. They see the far enemy as young Black/Hispanic men in certain zip codes destroying each other. And just possibly turning their attention to our tight, white community here in the Litchfield Hills.

It’s a good thing that overall crime and especially violent crime rates are much lower than they were 30 years ago. But we’re still faced with the overriding perception that people see their families at greater risk now.

This has spilled over into how parents treat their children. NO parent today would allow their kids to get on a bike and roam miles from home. Everything is monitored. If you ask why, the near-universal response is: “It just isn’t safe out there. Not like it used to be.”

Used to be? Most kids were tooling around on their bikes Goonies-style during the 1980s, when crime nationwide was at its peak.

People just seem hell bent on seeing the world as a massively scary place, one filled with predators.

There are major political implications, when data aren’t facts, when truths are lies.

Update On Book Banning

The Daily Escape:

Ashokan Reservoir, Ulster County, NY – February 2024 photo by Dan Mish

The GOP effort at book banning isn’t going well. DeSantis acts SHOCKED that his punitive censorship laws have resulted in chaos and excessive book banning in Florida public schools. DeSantis knows he went too far. Mr. Never Back Down, is in fact, backing down:

“With objecting – if you go to a school board meeting objecting. If you have a kid in school, okay. But if you’re somebody who doesn’t have a kid in school and you’re gonna object to 100 books? No, I don’t think that’s appropriate. So I think the legislature is interested in limiting what the number of challenges you can do, and maybe making it be contingent on whether you actually have kids in school or not. We just want to make sure we’re not trying to incentivize frivolous objections or any type of games being played.”

But don’t get your hopes up. The Propaganda Professor (PP) takes a look at book banning, riffing on a National Review article “Book Curation is Not Censorship”:

“Curation is the process whereby a venue (library, museum, theater, etc.) decides what products to offer its patrons….But curation means making such decisions…on the basis of such factors as quality, relevance, timeliness, and constraints of space and budget. Those factors for the most part do not figure into with what is happening in Florida, Texas and elsewhere. Books are being pulled just because someone chooses to find them offensive….And those choices aren’t being made autonomously. They’re being made under intense pressure from government bodies and their proxy agitators.”

While denying that they’re really banning books, Right-wingers offer attempts to justify the bans they say that they’re not really doing. They often brand the offending book as “pornographic”. They slap the “pornography” label on anything that makes any vague reference to sex. Another common claim is that the books being attacked are guilty of somehow “indoctrinating” kids into…something. Usually some combination of “liberalism”, “leftism”, “communism” or “anti-Americanism”.

“There are two types of books in particular to which they are eager to award the Indoctrination Trophy. One is anything with a gay or trans character, or that even makes reference to a gay or trans character….Such books, they…warn, are indoctrinating kids into the gay ‘lifestyle’…”

A huge problem is banning books that have too much truth about racism. If you write about the horrors of our shameful past, you can expect to be branded as someone who “hates white people”. One of the books removed for “review” was a biography of baseball legend Roberto Clemente because it mentioned the racism he encountered in baseball. Above all is the complaint that so much literacy will indoctrinate our kids into wokeism or leftism — or whatever FOX says is the equivalent du jour.

Libraries Face Political Pressure

The Daily Escape:

Mt. Mansfield, Stowe, VT – February 2024 photo by Micheline Lemay

“If you want to get laid, go to college. If you want an education, go to the library.” – Frank Zappa

Rebecca Gordon has an article at Salon about the growing attacks on public libraries by America’s Right:

“You might think that an apparently harmless public good like a library would have no enemies. But in the age of Trump…there turn out to be many. Some are “astroturf” outfits like the not-even-a-little-bit-ironically named Moms for Liberty. M4L, as they abbreviate their name, was founded in 2021 in Florida, originally to challenge Covid-era mask mandates in public schools. They’ve since expanded their definition of “liberty” to include pursuing the creation of public school libraries that are free of any mention of the existence of LGBTQ people, gender variations, sex, or racism.”

M4L supported Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s 2022 and 2023 “Don’t Say Gay” laws, which outlaw any discussion of sexual orientation or gender identity in public schools, while making it extremely easy for parents or other citizens to demand the removal of books they find objectionable from school libraries.

Copycat laws have since been passed in multiple states, including Tennessee where a school district banned MAUS, the bestselling Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel about the Holocaust, from its curriculum, thanks to eight (now-forbidden) words and a drawing of a naked mouse.

One Florida school district went further. According to CBS News, it also banned:

“Merriam-Webster’s Elementary Dictionary…‘The Bible Book,’ ‘The World Book Encyclopedia of People and Places,’ ‘Guinness Book of World Records, 2000,’ ‘Webster’s Dictionary and Thesaurus for Students,’ and ‘The American Heritage Children’s Dictionary.’”

You never know what is lurking in a dictionary that might turn your kid gay.

Contemporary book-banning efforts now extend beyond school libraries, where reasonable people might differ about which books should be available to children, to public libraries, where book banners are seeking to keep adults from reading whatever they choose.

EveryLibrary, an anti-censorship organization, keeps a running total of legislation that is concerning in state legislatures that relates to controlling libraries and their librarians. Their current list of such bills, highlights 93 pieces of legislation moving through legislatures in 24 states.

More Than The Border Bill Died This Week

The Daily Escape:

Trillium Lake, with Mt. Hood in background, OR – February 2024 photo by Mitch Schreiber Photography

In negotiations, there are four possible outcomes, two for “Yes” and two for “No”. The answers can come quickly or slowly. The fast “Yes” generally means that we offered more than we had to, while the fast “No” means there wasn’t enough in the deal for the other side to truly consider it. The worst outcome is the slow “No”. It burns tons of calories, and delays work on other important things. It is the most frustrating result for a negotiation, always raising the question of whether the other side was really negotiating in good faith.

Welcome to America’s politics in 2024 where if it wasn’t for bad faith, there would be no faith at all. Wrongo is speaking about the so-called border bill. Republicans had insisted that any allocation of funding for Ukraine be tied to an agreement about the border, saying that no money should go abroad until the US has addressed border security concerns here at home. They were also saying that the Democrats would need to agree to deal points that in the past, would have been very hard for the Dems to swallow.

But this past Sunday, Senate negotiators released the details of their hard-fought bipartisan border agreement which is harsher than we would have seen under any Democratic administration or Congressional majority in the last 40 years. The Dems agreed to the terms because it was the price House Republicans demanded in order to fund Ukraine. So naturally, House Republicans immediately declared it dead on arrival. This wasn’t a shock because they’ve been saying that for weeks despite not knowing precisely what was in the language of the bill.

The bad faith started with House Speaker Johnson (R-Bible) lying to the media by suggesting that he wasn’t consulted on the negotiations, a contention refuted by the principal GOP negotiator, Sen. James Lankford, (R-OK) who said that Johnson had declined his invitation to participate.

That led to an avalanche of slow “No’s” by Republicans in the Senate. The GOP’s default to “No” is for the moment, an election year strategy. They see border chaos as an important weapon against Biden in November. But the GOP often says “No” simply because it can’t figure out what else that divided caucus wants to do. They sometimes prefer foaming rage to solutions, or to victories.

As Sen. Brian Schatz (D-HI) tweeted:

“I’ve never seen anything like it….They literally demanded specific policy, got it, and then killed it.”

You can’t engage in bad faith negotiations and expect that the other side will forget about it when the next issue comes along.

It’s unclear if this is a moment of Republican/Trumpian desperation or madness. But they came out against a serious, bipartisan bill targeted at what they said was required in order to tackle our border challenges. The Border Patrol Union, which endorsed Trump in 2020, has endorsed the Senate bill. The WSJ editorial page has endorsed the bill. Neither of these are Biden supporters.

The GOP is now committed to a policy that will keep our borders, which they say are in existential crisis, in chaos. They believe that chaos serves their 2024 political goals of winning the White House, while sweeping the Senate and the House. Wrongo is re-upping his quotes from Ezra Klein about American’s desire to vote for stability:

“Biden and his allies are framing this election as order against chaos. The party that gets things done against the party that will make America come undone.”

And this:

“…Democrats are right that voters are craving stability. But…Trump is leading in many polls because voters believe that he is the one who might offer it. What Trump is pitching….is a push for order — ‘I am going to be the one who secures the border. I’m going to be the one that cracks down on crime. I’m going to be the one that tries to stabilize your prices.’”

So where do we go from here? It would be nice to think that if they really want stability, the American people will see through all this and realize how the Republican Party has grown so adept at holding hostages. Their MAGA wing represents a minority within a minority, yet our institutional rules permit them to veto decisions clearly favored by a majority of Americans.

But, with all the noise, it’s difficult to understand if voters can hear this even if they’re paying attention. Walking away from the border bill has enormous implications for the presidential election. With Biden’s economy going gangbusters (even Fox News admits that); with the inflation Republicans had expected to run on falling; with unemployment at historic lows and the stock market at historic highs; with the end of Roe trailing Trump like a dark cloud; he (and the GOP) have limited narratives left for waging his 2024 campaign, except fearmongering about border security.

Today’s chaos will become tomorrow’s over the imminent need to fund the government. Speaker Johnson has until March 1 and March 8 to get deals with the Senate and the President if we are to avoid another government shutdown. Right now, it’s difficult to see how any good faith negotiations will occur after what has happened this week with the border bill.

The government funding chaos isn’t on the voters’ radar just yet. So Democrats ought to go on offense about the border bill, describing what’s in it, where the GOP is lying about it, and how even when you meet Republicans more than halfway, they move the goal posts. The Dems need to make every Republican House and Senate member defend killing the border bill vote every day between here and the election, by making the immigration bill a central message of Biden’s reelection campaign.

As the Cato Institute reported last November:

“The Biden Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has removed a higher percentage of arrested border crossers in its first two years than the Trump DHS did over its last two years. Moreover, migrants were more likely to be released after a border arrest under President Trump than under President Biden. In absolute terms, the Biden DHS is removing 3.5 times as many people per month as the Trump DHS did.”

But those are facts, not feelings. Time to dust off this snippet of Stephen Sondheim’s song, “Send in the Clowns“:

Don’t you love farce?
My fault, I fear
I thought that you’d want what I want

Sorry, my dear

But where are the clowns?
Quick, send in the clowns
Don’t bother, they’re here

Will The Law Restrain Trump And The MAGAs?

The Daily Escape:

Shiprock, NM – January 2024 photo by Matt Farber

Does the law matter anymore to Trump and his MAGA followers? As Heather Digby said, the MAGAs:

“…now believe that the law is what Trump says it is.”

That seems patently true if you read anything on Xitter by Right-wing Trump apologists, since they throw all sorts of pasta at the wall hoping some will stick. The latest is about the judge in the E. Jean Carroll case Lewis Kaplan and Carroll’s lawyer Roberta Kaplan (no relation) having worked together in the early 1990s. Somehow that constitutes a conflict of interest in the minds of the MAGATs.

Roberta Kaplan joined the firm in 1992 and left in 2016. Judge Kaplan was a partner there until 1994, so there was a two year overlap that occurred 30 years ago. They’ll try to make chicken salad out of this chicken shit.

A more serious attack on the law is occurring in Texas. Vice News is reporting that:

“A trucker convoy of ‘patriots’ is heading to the US border with Mexico next week, as the standoff between Texas and the federal government intensifies. The organizers of the ‘Take Our Border Back’ convoy have called themselves “God’s army” and say they’re on a mission to stand up against the ‘globalists’ who they claim are conspiring to keep US borders open and destroy the country.”

God’s Army. Vice quotes Ruth Braunstein, professor at the University of Connecticut:

“When people believe that they are working on behalf of God, they might be willing to resort to relatively extreme measures….And so you have a politically volatile situation that could become much more so, in part because of this rhetoric.”

The God’s Army website is “Secure Our Borders.” It is calling on:

“…all active & retired law enforcement and military, veterans, mama bears, elected officials, business owners, ranchers, truckers, bikers, media and LAW ABIDING, freedom-loving Americans…”

To join in the march on Texas. This has stoked civil war fantasies on fringe forums, as well as favorable comments on the social media accounts of GOP lawmakers and right-wing political commentators. And no surprise, this has bled into politics. The Daily Beast reported that on a news show, Oklahoma’s Republican Gov. Kevin Stitt and Newsmax host Carl Rigbie mused about the possibility of a “force-on-force conflict” erupting between the federal government and the Texas National Guard.

They should be careful what they wish for. Sen. Ted Cruz, (R-TX), was quoted in the Dallas Morning News saying he expects to see continuing escalation in the legal battles between the state and the Biden administration:

“It’s striking that Texas Democrats are willing to side with Mexican drug cartels invading the state of Texas over their own governor and over the people of Texas…”

And most Republican governors recently signed a statement backing Abbott:

“We stand in solidarity with our fellow Governor, Greg Abbott, and the State of Texas in utilizing every tool and strategy, including razor wire fences, to secure the border….We do it in part because the Biden Administration is refusing to enforce immigration laws already on the books and is illegally allowing mass parole across America of migrants who entered our country illegally.”

Wrongo has written many times about the faction of MAGATs who sport flag lapel pins and show you copies of their pocket Constitutions. The irony is that these (mostly) dudes haven’t really accepted the words of the Constitution and its Amendments. They want to interpret the law based on referendums orchestrated by Trump and Fox News.

What Abbott, Trump, and the MAGAs are attempting with the “southern border resistance” is testing to see how much buy in they can get from red state governors, truck drivers, law enforcement, and “patriots”. Can they sow enough chaos that the presidential election is difficult to conduct?

Here’s a theory: Trump doesn’t expect to win in November. In fact, he may not even care about the November election. Why wait until November 2024 and/or January, 2025 to make his move? What if he can mobilize his followers to strike now? How would Biden and the federal government respond to multiple domestic attacks occurring simultaneously within our borders?

If the GOP and Trump can’t beat Biden one-on-one, why wait? Waiting means that Trump will likely be incarcerated. Both Trump and the GOP certainly know that time isn’t on their side.

It’s time for the federal government to step in and knock this shit off before somebody gets killed. All Guardsmen at the border should be federalized immediately and then ordered to assist other federal officials in enforcing the Court’s decision.

That’s the only legitimate authority in play here. The GOP Constitutional reading favoring the states against the federal government is laughable. What would the fallout be if the National Guard, federalized by Biden attacks Texas law enforcement along with guys who drove their pickups to the border?

Time to wake up America! The Gospel According To CB Radio isn’t an authority on anything! Ask Trump and Abbott how many federal law enforcement officers enforcing a Supreme Court ruling are you willing to kill for your political stunt?

To help you wake up, we recognize the passing of the 1970s singer Melanie Safka who died this week at 76. Melanie was one of the surprise stars at Woodstock in 1969. To Wrongo, her best tune was “Lay Down (Candles in the Rain)”. She would later say that the sight of people in the Woodstock crowd lighting candles in the rain inspired her to write the song which she recorded with gospel-style backing from the Edwin Hawkins Singers. It was released in 1970 and became her first hit.

Here she performs it live with the Edwin Hawkins Singers in Amsterdam, Netherlands in 1970:

The song was anthemic, in the same way the Edwin Hawkins Singers’ “Oh Happy Day” had been the summer before. And the Edwin Hawkins Singers are also the chorus on “Lay Down (Candles in the Rain).” The song is alternately hugely upbeat and dark.

Sample Lyric:

We were so close there was no room
We bled inside each other’s wounds
We all had caught the same disease
And we all sang the songs of peace

Lay down, lay down, let it all down
Let your white birds smile up at the ones who stand and frown
Lay down, lay down, let it all down
Let your white birds smile up at the ones who stand and frown

Americans Dread The Future

The Daily Escape:

Manhattan Beach Pier, CA – December 31, 2023 photo by Michael Franich

Welcome to Wrongo’s first column of 2024. Let’s dispense with the reviews of last year and the forecasts of this year. Let’s try to describe what we’re all feeling as we say so long to the presidential campaign of 2023, and welcome in the presidential campaign of 2024.

What’s the overwhelming feeling that comes to mind for Americans when thinking about the upcoming presidential election? Dread, according to a Yahoo News/YouGov poll:

“The survey of 1,636 US adults…offered respondents seven emotions — three positive, three negative, one neutral — and asked them to select any and all that reflect their attitude toward the 2024 campaign.

Dread, the most negative option, topped the list (41%), followed by exhaustion (34%), optimism (25%), depression (21%), indifference (17%), excitement (15%) and delight (5%).”

Here’s the relevant chart:

“In total, a majority of Americans (56%) chose at least one of the three negative feelings (dread, exhaustion or depression), while less than a third (32%) picked at least one of the three positive feelings (optimism, excitement or delight).”

Wrongo test marketed the idea that “dread” was the watchword for 2024 at a New Year’s breakfast with people who span the political spectrum. They universally hated it, but after a short discussion felt it was arguably, the dominant feeling that they had about what will/might happen in 2024.

From the issue:

“We are feeling an acute sense of loss….But what do you call the feeling of watching your society being taken over by fanatics, monsters, and lunatics? How about the feeling of watching democracy crash and burn—remember, it’s declining by the stunning rate of about 10% a decade, putting its extinction within our lifetimes.”

Psychology Today gives us a frame to think about dread in their 2023 article, “How to Overcome the Sinking Feeling of Dread”: (emphasis by Wrongo)

“A sense of dread may be due to an abstractly internalized experience of external volatility called “disembedding”….This phenomenon refers to our ability to interact with one another without having to make face-to-face contact. The result is an overabundance of information that comes our way. It becomes abstracted and metaphorically slips through the fingers of our minds in trying to grasp what it is. With a few clicks through an Instagram feed, scrolling through Twitter, or even just opening your web browser to search for something, your brain becomes a dartboard for world news.”

“When one experiences this, there are often repeated attempts to secure a firm base. People will reassert their values as moral absolutes, declare other groups as lacking in value, draw distinct lines of virtue and vice, be rigid rather than flexible in their judgements, and punitive and excluding rather than permeable and assimilative….Another consequence of disembedding is the possibility of scapegoating: the underclass, racial minorities, new-age travelers, addicts, people with unusual behaviors, and other vulnerable social groups risk being singled out and demonized as the source of society’s problems.”

Dread makes us less tolerant of differences, and as a result, we punish them. This is the emotional backdrop for 2024, and the road ahead looks murky as hell. And facts increasingly don’t matter, since whichever side posits a fact, the other has a prepared rebuttal that says the source (even if its official statistics) are misleading if not outright lies.

The NYT’s Krugman notes that overall, the country’s in pretty good shape. The challenge is that people so far continue to blame Biden for the chaos and ugliness that Trump and his cult are creating: (brackets by Wrongo)

“The big question…was whether America would ever fully recover from that shock. In 2023 we got the answer: yes. Our economy and society have, in fact, healed remarkably well. The big remaining question is when, if ever, the public will be ready to accept the good news….America’s resilience in the face of the pandemic shock has been remarkable, [but] so has the pessimism of the public.”

The big question going forward is whether the grim narratives will prevail over our relatively sunny reality when we get to the 2024 election. Unfortunately, we are bathing in the hideous cultural nastiness caused by the Republican Right and it’s spread despair throughout the country.

Overcoming that mood (and the dread people feel) isn’t going to be easy, but disaster is certain if you give up. Individually, we each can do more than we think we can to keep America in good hands.

Start by no longer buying into the bullshit spewed by the mainstream media, in particular, the NYT. Their both sides coverage of Trump’s crooked behavior demonstrates their inability to let us know how real his threat is to the public.

The rest of the corporate media’s coverage is the same, with a few exceptions. Don’t overlook outlets abroad which had good reputations for thorough and unbiased reporting. In the age of the internet with translation capability at your fingertips, it’s not absurd to look outside of the US news rut for different perspectives.

As long as the GOP can paint the Democrats as the bigger enemy, Independent and anti-Trump Republican voters have an out; they can justify staying on the sidelines. The mainstream media’s complicit role in broadcasting the GOP strategy can’t be overstated. And the Democratic Party leadership’s long-term paralysis in the face of this simple equation is one reason why we’re in the situation we are in now.

Stop ascribing superpowers to the GOP. The Republican Party is a hot mess.

No matter what you read, act! Make a plan and act. It can be surprisingly easy to become a thought leader on the local level. Inside both Parties, the leaders are the people who show up and do the work. That’s it, that’s all it takes to begin making change happen. Show up, do the work.

We’re heading into what will be the toughest part of an existential fight for this democracy. It’s going to be an ugly, messy show, one that is certain to add to those feelings of dread. Plan on it and then show up to do the work it will take to beat back the fascists.

Think about the toll Americans will endure in 2024. How many women will die of complications from a pregnancy they couldn’t end? How many trans persons will give up because they can’t live as human beings with autonomy over their bodies? How many persons will die from Covid this coming year because of right-wing propaganda supported by elected GOP officials? How many futures will be shortened because children may not get the food, health care, or education they need?

How many families will be split up because they couldn’t find shelter?

Our message when we’re doing the work has to be about unity. It’s clear right now that Democrats are splintering in all directions. Some don’t want Biden because he’s pro-Israel. Young people find Biden to be too old. Some feel he’s too middle-of-the-road. We all need to remember American novelist Rebecca Solnit’s mantra:

“Voting is a chess move, not a valentine.”

More Immigration Disinformation

The Daily Escape:

Pemaquid Point Lighthouse, ME – December 2023 drone photo by Rick Berk Photography

There are plenty of newsworthy items as we end another week. You can read about them all over the internet. Wrongo wants to highlight just one: The Dow Jones index is up 29% since bottoming on Sept. 30, 2022, climbing to a new all-time high.

This is mostly due to the announcement by the Federal Reserve on Wednesday that in all likelihood, there will be no more increases in interest rates, and that there may be as many as three interest rate reductions in 2024.

Professional investors aren’t following the Dow, but it remains a mental benchmark that many Americans use to gauge the health of the stock market and the economy. So accept good news when it shows up.

Today we return to the topic of illegal immigration. As Wrongo writes this, there is still no deal on immigration, which is thought to be the hold-up on funding for Ukraine and Israel. From Semaphore:

“GOP negotiators said they believed they were making progress in securing a border policy package that’s tilted toward conservative priorities….They also welcomed the…Democratic attacks on the negotiations…..’There are several Democrats that have spoken against it,’ GOP Sen. Thom Tillis, (R-NC) told Semafor. ‘That means we’re hitting the right sort of tone.’”

Wrongo mentioned that it is very difficult to find facts from either side in the immigration debate. One constant refrain from the Right is that terrorists are slipping over the southern border, posing an existential threat to America, and it’s all Biden’s fault. From CBS:

“Republican lawmakers, GOP White House hopefuls and conservative media figures have argued that the Biden administration’s border policies have given terrorists an easier way to enter the US and harm Americans. On Monday…Trump claimed that the “same people” who killed or abducted more than 1,000 civilians in Israel are coming across the southern border separating the US and Mexico…”

And Media Matters added:

“Since the October 7 attacks on Israel by Hamas and the subsequent bombing campaign in Gaza, Fox News has seized on the chaos in the Middle East to revive its relentless fearmongering campaign suggesting that migrants crossing into the US at the southern border are terrorists, this time from the Middle East. Fox’s toxic rhetoric follows “a spike in hate incidents” against Muslims in the US.”

There has been an increase in Border Patrol apprehensions of individuals who are on the US terror watchlist over the past two years. But they represent a tiny fraction of all migrants processed along the southern border. From the NYT: (emphasis by Wrongo)

“From October last year to this September, officials at the southern border arrested 169 people whose names matched those on the watch list, compared with 98 during the previous fiscal year and 15 in 2021, according to government data. But that is a minuscule fraction of the total number of migrants who were apprehended at the border over the past year, more than two million.”

That fraction is less than 0.01% for those of us without calculators. Finding illegals who are on the terror watch list is far more common along the US-Canada border, despite much lower levels of unauthorized migration there. Here’s a US Customs and Border Protection chart:

Customs and Border Protection recorded more than 430 watchlist hits along the northern border in fiscal year 2023, the vast majority of them at official ports of entry.

Still, there are concerns. In its homeland threat assessment for 2024, the intelligence branch of DHS said:

“…record encounters of migrants arriving from a growing number of countries have complicated border and immigration security…”

The assessment also said a recent increase in apprehensions of migrants from the Eastern Hemisphere, while still significantly lower than those from the Western Hemisphere, has “exacerbated border security challenges” because those individuals require more vetting and processing and because it’s more difficult to deport them.

There’s also the question of migrants who aren’t apprehended. The Border Patrol estimates more than 1 million individuals have entered the country surreptitiously over the past two years.

Republicans in Congress now talk about the southern border primarily as a national security issue rather than largely as a collective fear of the “great replacement”. If hundreds of thousands of migrants are evading apprehension, these national security fears have merit. But since terror watch list apprehensions are tiny and a lot higher along our northern border, that border most likely poses an equal threat to national security, if not more, since the security along the northern border is lax. We don’t really have any idea how many evade apprehension by crossing it.

Despite the constant hammering by Fox and the Right, since 1975 no one has been killed or injured in a terrorist attack in the US that involved someone who came across the border illegally. Whenever Congress gets around to dealing with illegal immigration, the solution will require more manpower both for the border patrol and immigration services.

Immigrants will keep on coming. Migration is a part of human nature. Europeans came to North America before America was a country. The peoples of the UK are not the peoples that were there 5,000 years ago. The vast majority of UK citizens have little DNA from the original peoples of those islands. That is also true in the US.

History shows that trying to stop immigration all together is a fool’s errand.

Regardless of how successful we are at controlling immigration, the US demographics of the past 250 years will look VERY different from the US demographics of 100 years from now. That doesn’t mean we should give up on controlling the process as much as possible. Part of that is to increase the costs of crossing the border, which we are doing today with instant expulsion and denial of asylum claims.

And once people are here, we must do all we can to get them integrated into US society.

Why People Say The Economy Is Terrible When It Isn’t

The Daily Escape:

Sunset, Thumpertown Beach, Eastham, MA – November 2023 iPhone photo by friend of the blog, KO.

We keep looking for good news that will buoy Biden’s polling numbers, and on Tuesday we learned that the Consumer Price Index (CPI) was flat in October. From Axios:

“Overall prices rose 3.2% in the 12 months through October, slowing from the 3.7% in September and well-below the peak levels reached last year. Core CPI rose 4%, compared to 4.1% the prior month.”

Among the good news was that last month, prices for gasoline and used cars and trucks fell outright, helping cool over inflation. Meanwhile, shelter costs rose at a much slower pace last month, possibly signaling that inflation could be ending in the next few months.

That gave investors reason to pile back into the stock market, since it may be a sign that the Fed won’t continue to raise interest rates.

But as always, analysis of the economic news could show why Biden polls so badly on the economy, and in particular why he hasn’t consolidated support among younger voters. Let’s take a different look at how some important economic indicators have performed under Biden.

From the Bonddad Blog:

“Below is a graph in which I compare average hourly earnings (nominal, not real) for non-supervisory workers (in red) vs. house prices (dark blue) and mortgage payments (light blue).”

It is important to note that Bonddad has set all of the values to 100 as of January 2021 so that we’re looking only at what has happened during Biden’s Administration. Bonddad compares the changes in average hourly earnings to the rate of fixed price mortgages and the price of homes. These are nominal rates:

Average wages have increased 16% since Biden took office, but existing house prices have increased by 32%, and monthly mortgage payments for new buyers have increased 279% (!), from roughly 3% to roughly 8%. Housing is close to unaffordable for many in America.

Turning to cars, new car prices have increased by 20%, and used car prices by 23%, compared to that 16% for wages. And new car loan payments (dotted line below) have increased almost 70% (from about 5% to 8.3%):

Houses and cars are the two biggest purchases that most average people make. And sorry to say, affording them has gotten much harder since Biden took office.

Finally, let’s look at the cost of two things people see every day: groceries and gas. First, grocery prices are up 29% since Biden took office in January 2021 (again, vs. 16% for average wages):

And gas prices, although they have come back down recently, are still up 55% since January 2021:

Looking at the economic data this way, would you be more likely to vote for or against Biden? This is a big Biden problem with voters who live paycheck to paycheck.

It’s hard to overstate the importance of viewing the Biden economic performance like Bonddad does above. Much of the blame for these specific price increases belongs to corporations who took advantage of the breakdown in the global supply chain to raise their prices. Some belongs to the Biden administration’s pumping money into the economy.

Bonddad provides a ton of perspective regarding how the Democrats shouldn’t be talking to voters about how fantastic the economy has become under Biden. Dems can’t simply talk about the aggregate economic numbers, since many will not fully believe them.

At the risk of piling on, Wrongo recently saw this October Experian survey which asked:

“I suffer or have suffered from financial trauma”

A staggering 68% of US adults replied that they had. You can view the survey here. The stress was felt more strongly by younger generations, namely Gen Z adults and millennials, with 73% of Gen Z’ers and 77% of millennials experiencing negative thoughts and/or anxiety about money.

The idea of “financial trauma” goes beyond mere stress. America’s seeing multiple social crises afflict it. Friendships are cratering, loneliness is soaring, deaths of despair are skyrocketing. Half of American young people say they feel “persistently hopeless.”

Now tie this to how the majority of voters are saying that America is on the wrong track. The prevailing attitude in America is that our systems are rigged against working people. If you work hard, play by the rules, try to be an honest, decent and productive person, but the reward is that you get financially, socially, emotionally traumatized, well, maybe you’d be pessimistic, too.

The result is that most Americans feel they are living precarious lives. When asked, they say they need north of $230K to feel “comfortable” while the average yearly income for a full-time worker is about $75,000 today. That means feeling stable and secure is completely out of reach for the vast majority of Americans.

Most of this happened over time and surely wasn’t caused by Biden, or the Democrats. And little of it can be fixed by him.

There’s some good news in the fact that history shows us that voters generally focus on how the economy has performed during the last 6 to 9 months before the election. In 2012, the economy improved a lot, and when the unemployment rate finally fell below 8% one month before the election, it helped Obama to get reelected.

On the flip side, the economy was weakening as we closed in on the presidential election in 2016. GDP growth and wage and job gains were weak. Strong stock market gains were a positive. Adding the pluses and minuses suggested that the economy was weak, and the insurgent Trump won the election.

Better news on inflation in 2024, particularly for groceries and gas, will mean Biden’s polling on the economy will be much better.

Trump Could Be President Even While Serving Time

The Daily Escape:

First fall foliage, Cox Brook, Northfield Falls, VT – September 2023 photo by John H. Knox

First, although we may know if Trump has been convicted prior to the 2024 election, it’s highly unlikely that he would be serving time by then, because his convictions (if any) will be appealed. The appeal process will take us well beyond when the Electoral College votes are counted in DC.

Second, The Constitution (before it was amended) contains just three requirements to become president: the person must be a natural-born citizen of the US, 35 years or older and a resident of the US for at least 14 years. That’s it.

In 1868, the 14^th Amendment added Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment to the original text that:

“no person shall … hold any office, civil or military, under the United States … who, having previously taken an oath … to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof.”

UCLA law professor Richard L. Hasen, a leading expert on election law, told CNN that Trump has a path to serving as president if he wins the election in 2024: (emphasis by Wrongo)

“The Constitution has very few requirements to serve as President….It does not bar anyone indicted, or convicted, or even serving jail time, from running as president and winning the presidency,”

And while some states prohibit felons from running for state and local office, those laws do not apply to federal elections. More from Hasen, on whether a president may serve from prison.

“How someone would serve as president from prison is a happily untested question…”

If Trump were in jail and prevented by law from leaving jail while his sentence was carried out, that would make running the government impossible. It wouldn’t necessarily prohibit him from serving as president from a cell, at least until he could pardon himself, another untested loophole.

If he tried to pardon himself, or to commute his own sentence, we’d wind up at the Supreme Court. From the NYT:

“Either action would be an extraordinary assertion of presidential power, and the Supreme Court would be the final arbiter of whether a “self-pardon” was constitutional.”

Trump would certainly sue to be released from jail, saying (correctly) that imprisonment prevented him from fulfilling his Constitutional obligations as president. Trump’s lawyers would argue that keeping a duly elected president in prison would be an infringement by the judicial branch on the operations of the executive branch. Again off to the Supremes we’d go.

So time for a few brief reminders: Trump faces no significant opposition to winning the 2024 Republican presidential nomination. Plan A among those who really don’t want Trump to win is to say:

“…he will lose in the general election.”

And there’s no Plan B. So, what will your options be if he wins? In general, your options are: Knuckling under, taking part in political violence, or leaving the country. And understand that, regardless of how submissive you are, the number of people who will die in police custody or while “resisting” will go way up. Let’s take your options one at a time:

Leaving the country is something only rich people can do and it wouldn’t dislodge Trump. It will make him more secure.
Political violence is personally risky. It requires moral compromise that makes our regular politics look almost pristine. And unless it’s large and well organized, it will fail.
Knuckling under to tyranny will probably be the response of most Americans, even though most would say that’s incompatible with their conscience.

But all that said, Ukraine’s limited success against a superpower shows that using today’s technology makes it relatively easy to hold large swaths of a country despite the other side’s having a much stronger military.

Wrongo thinks that after a Trump win in 2024, US citizens will have to think seriously about how to handle life under an authoritarian regime. Trump will start out with a soft form of authoritarianism. But later? Who knows what it becomes. A lot of people around the world live under authoritarian regimes, so while it’s awful, it’s also survivable for most people.

And think twice about resistance. As a thought experiment, list out the historical examples of a citizenry that successfully resisted a fascist takeover once the fascists had a firm grip on the judiciary and half of the legislatures.

America has one great shining example of what not to do when Bush v. Gore was decided in 2000. No Democrat (looking at you Bill Clinton!) told the Supremes to fuck off. Even Gore didn’t say “just keep on counting” in Florida. Instead, he crumbled. In a democracy, no court should ever tell the political branch to stop counting votes.

That election was stolen, but Democrats collectively just let it happen. Worse, two years later almost all of the Democrats in Congress voted for Bush’s nasty authoritarian terror bills and a war to avenge 9/11.

Wouldn’t it be much better this time around to make sure Trump doesn’t get the votes of any of your friends, family or neighbors? And better yet, that you get most of them out to vote?

Please don’t plan on sitting back and waiting for a conviction to deliver us from Trump. Why is it in the DNA of Democrats to keep looking for some external solution to our political problem?

Wrongo is an elderly white, married, upper-middle class male living in a Blue state. He’s going to be fine no matter what. He’ll worry about his kids and grandkids, but personally, Wrongo has nothing to worry about. His taxes may even go down again.

But he plans to resist, no matter what.

Romney Exits

The Daily Escape:

Northern Lights, Malletts Bay, Lake Champlain, Colchester, VT – September 2023 photo by Adam Silverman Photography

By now, everyone’s heard that Mitt Romney (R-UT) isn’t going to run for a second term in the Senate. From the WaPo:

“Romney, 76, said his decision not to run again was heavily influenced by his belief that a second term, which would take him into his 80s, probably would be less productive and less satisfying than the current term has been.”

He used the opportunity to say that Biden and Trump were too old to be the presidential candidates of their Parties, and they, like him, should stand aside and let the next generation of politicians take center stage.

But the big news was generated from a few quotes Romney made to McKay Coppins, who’s book about Romney is coming out in October. Coppins has a teaser article in The Atlantic in which Romney lets loose his ire against Trump (who Romney carefully cultivated in 2016 and 2017, when he was angling to be Secretary of State):

“So many Republican Senators privately expressed their support for Romney’s public criticism of Trump that the Utahan began keeping count, telling staffers he’d had more than a dozen nearly identical exchanges. He recalled one senior lawmaker complaining to him: “[Trump] has none of the qualities you would want in a president, and all of the qualities you wouldn’t.”

Romney told Coppins:

“Almost without exception, they shared my view of the president.”

This has earned Romney accolades from the media and from a few Democrats. Karen Tumulty in the WaPo credits Romney with “paving the way for national health-care reform…” This ignores the fact that Romney ran for president in 2012 promising to repeal Obamacare.

Yet, after reading The Atlantic article, the media used terms like “noble,” “principled,” and “courageous.” But there is nothing courageous about saying the right thing only when you’re on your way out the door.

Wrongo has had issues with Romney since his run for the presidency in 2012. In May of 2012, Wrongo wrote:

“Over the past few days, Mitt Myth Romney has taken credit for GM being alive and Osama Bin Laden being dead.”

On the auto bailout Wrongo had previously reported what Romney actually said about the auto industry bailout: (emphasis by Wrongo)

“On February 12, 2012, Romney said: “Three years ago, in the midst of an economic crisis, a newly elected President Barack Obama stepped in with a bailout for the auto industry. The indisputable good news is that Chrysler and General Motors are still in business. The equally indisputable bad news is that all the defects in President Obama’s management of the American economy are evident in what he did.”

/snip/

“The president tells us that without his intervention things in Detroit would be worse. I believe that without his intervention things there would be better.”

Romney lied or changed his positions throughout his 2012 campaign against Obama. America is better off because he only received 206 votes in the Electoral College to Obama’s 332. He always was a plutocrat who’s political philosophy is basically trickle-down economics, low taxes and traditional religious cultural values.

There is room for those views in our politics, but Romney, who was the only Republican who twice voted to impeach Trump, could have done more to rally his fellow Senators to confront Mr. 91 counts. But, he’s gone from being the Republican nominee for president to being forced to leave politics just a decade later.

You may say “Thank God for Brave Men like Mitt Romney”, men with strong spines willing to stand up for what they believe and then march forward right out of the room!

Enough for this week, it’s time to let go of whatever is happening to Hunter Biden and his impeachable dad, and center ourselves for the government shutdown that’s coming at the end of the month. It’s time for our Saturday Soother!

Here in northwestern Connecticut, we’re seeing nights in the high 40° as summer draws to a close. Despite the threats from Hurricane Lee, let’s spend our Saturday Soother outside, sitting on the deck. To help you let go of the many insults of your week, listen to “Winter” (“Invierno”) from Astor Piazzolla’s “Four Seasons of Buenos Aires” (“Las Cuatro Estaciones Porteñas”). Piazzolla was an Argentine composer who is credited with developing the nuevo tango.

Wrongo and Ms. Right were fortunate to attend a concert last week which featured Vivaldi’s Four Seasons followed by Piazzolla’s Four Seasons of Buenos Aires. Piazzolla’s classical work often features tango like rhythms. Here is his “Winter” played by Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra in Amsterdam, NL in 2014. The soloist is the conductor Liviu Prunaru:

The Wrongologist

Geopolitics, Power and Political Economy

Category: Politics of Fear

Update On Book Banning

Libraries Face Political Pressure

Why People Say The Economy Is Terrible When It Isn’t

Romney Exits