Category: 2016 Election

Reform the Supreme Court

The Daily Escape:

Valley of Fire SP, NV – January 2022 photo by Robert E. Ford

Glad to see January go, with it being the anniversary of the Jan. 6 coup attempt and all that came after it. What isn’t going away is the slow and continuing fracture of America’s social cohesion. We also remember that it was FIVE years ago that Trump was inaugurated. That was a sorry time, since it made it clear that he would get to appoint several Supreme Court justices.

The partisan rancor brought to Supreme Court appointments has become another fault line in our social cohesion. That’s due in part to changes in Supreme Court.

One recent trend in these appointments is how much younger appointees are: The typical tenure for Supreme Court justices in the 19th and early 20th centuries was around 15 years. But as the lifespan of American adults has lengthened over the past century, so has tenure on the Court. Since 1975, the average justice has retired from the court after serving 27 years. Breyer, who was sworn in on Aug. 3, 1994, matches the average perfectly. Soon it will be longer than 30 years.

Another issue is the hubris of elderly Justices. Justices Brennan and Marshall, both about 70 years old at the time, decided not to retire when Jimmy Carter was president, thinking he wasn’t liberal enough to appoint their replacements. They decided to wait for a more left-leaning Democratic president that they presumed would come next.

Liberals got lucky when Brennan retired in 1990,and David Souter replaced him. They weren’t as lucky when Marshall was replaced by Clarence Thomas in 1992. Thomas, the first GOP Justice was selected explicitly for his race and youth (he was 43) and still sits on the Court today, 30 years later.

The same scenario played out less than two years ago with Justice Ginsburg. She refused to retire during Obama’s presidency (after a direct appeal from Obama in 2013) when he correctly feared losing the Senate in 2014. She died in 2020 and was immediately replaced by the 48-year-old Conservative Justice Barrett.

Another trend is Judicial Supremacy. Once Justices realized that their power was almost completely unchecked under the Constitution, it wasn’t a big leap to find them ruling according to personal preference.

The Framers never foresaw how formidable the judiciary would become. Once the Supreme Court successfully claimed the right of judicial review — the power to strike down laws it deemed unconstitutional — it went from being the weakest branch to the strongest. Today, virtually every important political controversy eventually comes before the Court.

The public’s opinion about the Court has never been lower. A Gallup poll last September (just before the Texas abortion cases) found that just 40% of Americans say they approved of the Court’s job. This represents a new low in Gallup’s polling, which dates back to 2000.

The chart below shows the results of a new ABC News / Ipsos Poll asking if the Supreme Court’s rulings are partisan:

(Hat tip: Jobsanger) The poll was conducted January 28-29, 2022 and has a ± 4.9% point margin of error.

It’s clear that a plurality of Americans no longer trust the Court with their lives, or with the direction of the country. That’s what makes selecting a Supreme Court nominee such a high-stakes game.

If Supreme Court vacancies were more frequent and regular, confirmation battles would be much less likely to turn into political Armageddon every time. We should be asking whether life tenure for Supreme Court justices still is legitimate, regardless of which Party controls Congress or the White House.

The Framers of the Constitution feared that the judiciary would be the weakest of the federal government’s branches and the most susceptible to political pressure. They therefore sought to bolster the Court’s independence by ensuring justices could stay on the bench for as long as they wished.

But the only alternative to a bad Court decision today is for 2/3rds of both Houses of Congress followed by 3/4ths of all States to change it by Constitutional Amendment. A nearly impossible and time-consuming process.

Instead, we should enact term limits for the Supremes. With nine Justices, one Justice’s position should expire every two years (essentially giving each an 18 year term). After serving on the Court they could fulfill their lifetime appointment by continuing to serve as “Justices Emeritus” on one of the regional Courts of Appeal.

This isn’t a partisan idea. Many Republicans endorse term limits. Among those who have endorsed it is Justice Stephen Breyer. Numerous polls in recent years show widespread support across Party lines for limiting Supreme Court justices’ terms. Everyone can tell that life tenure on the Supreme Court isn’t working. It’s time we replaced it with something better. America’s social cohesion depends on it.

Speaking of social cohesion, spend a few minutes watching this affecting commercial for Heineken. It celebrates communication, listening, and getting to know others who have different viewpoints:

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Rehabilitating Our Democracy

The Daily Escape:

Christmas lights, New Milford Green, New Milford CT – December 2021 photo by Tom Allen. New Milford was founded in 1709.

James Fallows writes a column called “Breaking the News”. His most recent article looks at the growing mismatch between the formal structure of the US government (two Senators per state and the House ceiling of 435 members), and the astonishing population growth in the US since the Constitution was ratified in 1788.

Fallows says the main problem is that modern America is running on antique rules that are too hard to change and too easy to abuse. He sees a Constitutional shift from protecting minority rights, to enabling minority rule, which ultimately means a denial of democracy. A system that is not steered by its majority will not survive as a democracy.

Fallows outlines the changing nature of big vs. small in America. When the Constitution was being negotiated, two issues were big states vs. small states, and slaveholding states vs. non-slave states. At the time, the three most populous original states had around 10 times as many people as the three smallest. That was behind the agreement to the two-Senators-per-state deal. But today, the three most populous states—California, Texas, and Florida—have about 45 times the population of the three least populous, Wyoming, Vermont, and Alaska.

Second, the ceiling on the size of the House of Representatives must change. Fallows observes that when the country was founded, there were 65 members of the House. For the next century-plus, the size of the House increased after the Census, following changes in the US population. Just before World War I, the number was capped at its current level of 435. Today, the US population is about 90 times larger than it was in 1788, but the House is just 7 times as large.

Today there’s a bias against the needs of urban and suburban populations. There’s also a distinct small-state bias in the Electoral College. Each state’s representation in the Electoral College votes equals it’s number of Senate and House representatives. As House membership expanded through the 1800s from 65 to 435, House seats became relatively more important in Electoral College totals, and Senate seats relatively less so. From Fallows:

“To spell it out, in the first presidential election, Electoral Votes based on Senate seats made up nearly 30% of the Electoral College total. By 1912, the first election after House size was frozen, they made up only 18%.”

If the House were expanded, then the Electoral College outcome would more closely track the national popular vote.

Jill Lepore writing in the New Yorker, says that the US Constitution was the first national constitution that provided for its own revision. Article V is the amendment clause. The founders knew that the Constitution was imperfect; Article V left a Constitutional means for making it “more perfect.” Without an amendment provision, the only way to change the rules is to overthrow the government.

But it’s extremely difficult to amend our Constitution. Lepore says:

“The US Constitution has been rewritten three times: in 1791, with the ratification of the Bill of Rights, the first ten amendments; after the Civil War, with the ratification of the Reconstruction Amendments; and during the Progressive Era, with the ratification of the Sixteenth, Seventeenth, Eighteenth, and Nineteenth Amendments.”

She points out that by contrast:

“…American state constitutions have been amended over 7,500 times, amounting on average to 150 amendments per state.”

While state governments freely change, the US Constitution doesn’t. America’s older, but not necessarily wiser.

We could approve the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact. It would guarantee the presidency to the candidate who receives the most popular votes. The Electoral College has 535 votes, with 270 needed to win the presidency. In 2020, had 21,461 Biden voters actually switched to Trump, Trump would have won the Electoral College with 270 votes, despite Biden winning nationally by 7 million votes. Each of those 21,461 Biden votes (5,229 in Arizona, 5,890 in Georgia, and 10,342 in Wisconsin) were 329 times more important than the other 7 million votes.

The Compact would end the “winner-take-all” laws in the 48 of 50 states. If passed, the Compact would award their electoral votes in proportion to the votes the candidate receives. Article II gives the states exclusive control over the choice of method of awarding their electoral votes, so they can reform the system if they choose. The Compact would go into effect when enacted by states comprising at least 270 electoral votes.

Time to wake up America! Our current ineffective federal government must change. Otherwise, democracy is doomed.

To help you wake up, watch “Peace Train”, the 1971 anthem of hope and unity written by Yusuf/Cat Stevens, performed here by Playing for Change. This version features Keb’ Mo’ playing in CA, along with Yusuf playing in Istanbul, Rhiannon Giddens in Ireland, along with musicians from 12 countries:

This song is more relevant than ever.

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Monday Wake Up Call – October 11, 2021

The Daily Escape:

Dusk, Mayflower Beach, Cape Cod, MA – October 9, 2021, photo by Andrei Anca

From Newsday: (emphasis by Wrongo)

“School boards have become the latest political battleground in America, with passions running so high that this week Attorney General Merrick Garland sent a memo to the FBI, US attorneys and state attorneys general asking them to discuss strategies to combat threats of violence against school workers and school board members.”

These school board battles are about Covid-related vaccination and masking policies, and about teaching anti-racism, racial equity, and cultural diversity. Both turn out to be culture-war battles that set groups of parents against each other. Margaret Talbot in the New Yorker:

“…it’s easy to find in YouTube videos, and local news reports by the score—protesters fairly vibrating with January 6th energy as they disrupt school-board meetings, raging against mask mandates and other COVID precautions, or that favorite spectral horror, critical race theory.”

This is not what people had in mind when they said more people would get involved with their local school boards. Adam Laats, professor of education at Binghamton University SUNY, wrote in the WaPo:

“Conservative pundits have talked up these confrontations as part of a larger political strategy….The Heritage Foundation declared July “National Attend Your School Board Meeting Month” and celebrated the “Great Parent Revolt of 2021,” which includes the founding of hundreds of new parent activist groups that might thwart ‘the radical tide of educators, nonprofits and federal education bureaucrats’.”

This is a specific Republican election strategy. CNN reported that Senate Republican minority leader Mitch McConnell told Attorney General Merrick Garland that parents “absolutely should be telling” local schools what to teach during debates over mask and vaccine mandates, the role of racial equity education and transgender rights in schools. Here’s Mitch:

“Parents absolutely should be telling their local schools what to teach. This is the very basis of representative government….They do this both in elections and — as protected by the First Amendment of the Constitution — while petitioning their government for redress of grievance. Telling elected officials they’re wrong is democracy, not intimidation.”

It’s a big issue in 2021’s Virginia gubernatorial election. Republican nominee Glenn Youngkin quickly used comments by Democratic opponent Terry McAuliffe into an attack ad aimed at invigorating base GOP voters and parents ahead of this November’s election.

McAuliffe’s comment was: “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.” Count on a Clinton ally to give Republicans another “deplorable” quote for Republicans to rally around.

This trollification of local politics began in 2009 with the Tea Party taking over politician’s town meetings. In 1970, Tom Wolfe famously referred to the confrontations between militants and hapless bureaucrats as Mau-Mauing the flak catchers. Back then, the militants were Black people who hinted at a Mau Mau uprising in the US, and the hapless bureaucrats who were paid to take their flak.

Now it’s White militants who are “mau-mauing” their school bureaucrats and the elected school board volunteers who we charge with managing our kids’ education.

We think that social media is where this kind of venom is spewed. But since the Tea Party, people are too ready to boo and jeer others in public spaces who express opinions different from theirs. Some militants even accuse school board members of being part of child-trafficking conspiracies.

America has walked away from its social and political norms.

Trump was among the first national politicians who was willing to say the quiet parts aloud. Those who are resentful in the face of societal change, e.g., having their hate speech corrected, found a voice in Trump. And he’s happily encouraged them. He refused to control his racist, sexist speech and behavior, and they respect him because he never did anything he didn’t want to do.

Don’t want to pay your taxes? Trump’s flouted the tax system for decades.

Tired of dealing with women on the job? Just listen to what Trump does to women.

Don’t like the way the last election turned out? Well, here’s what to do while we’re working on the coup.

And there will always be enough grifters and demagogues to throw gas on this dumpster fire. These Trumpy Americans have such a big emotional investment in their false reality, they don’t really care what’s true.

Time to wake up America. There are reasons for societal norms. They stop us from only focusing on the “I” and allow us to remember the “We.” The We protects us from the worst in ourselves.

To help you wake up, listen to Eddie Vedder’s (Pearl Jam) new single “Long Way” from his upcoming solo album, “Earthling”:

You can hear Tom Petty’s influence in Vetter’s tune.

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Passing Manchin’s Freedom to Vote Act is Critical

The Daily Escape:

Cannon Beach, OR – September 2021 photo by Rick Berk Photography

From EJ Dionne in the WaPo:

“…the next month is make-or-break not only for President Biden and the future of American social policy but also for the right to vote and our democracy itself.”

True. He’s talking about Democrats attempting to pass both the big stimulus package without ANY support from the Republicans, and a voting rights bill that might get some support from Republicans.  Dionne goes on to say: (emphasis by Wrongo)

“Failing to enact Democrats’ social policy plan would be a big problem. Failing to protect democratic rule would be catastrophic.”

The media has focused on Biden’s big social policy package, not on the voting bill. They talk almost exclusively about the bill’s cost. They ignore the bill’s initiatives: On childcare, paid leave, elder care, health care, education, and the pro-family child tax credit, all of which are popular across party lines.

Dionne’s best observation about the big spending package is this: (emphasis by Wrongo)

“Yes, the much-discussed $3.5 trillion price tag is a lot of money. But that number is based on 10 years of spending. Sharon Parrott, president of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, points out that the $3.5 trillion should be placed in the context of an anticipated gross domestic product of $288 trillion over the same period — meaning that this debate is over roughly 1.2% of the economy.”

The politics of the big deal are clear. Democrats must come together and vote as a block in the Senate, or they will fail to deliver on the change they promised in the 2020 presidential election.

The politics for a voting rights bill are less clear. As with the big deal, Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WVA) has opposed the voting bills put forward by Democrats in the House. So, Senate Majority Leader Schumer asked Manchin to come up with a proposal that he could vote for and to find 10 Republicans to support it as well.

Manchin accepted that challenge and working with a group of Democrats including Sens. Klobuchar (MN), Merkley (OR) and Warnock (GA), developed a bill he supports. Marc Elias of Democracy Docket yesterday analyzed Sen. Joe Manchin’s compromise voting rights bill and found it
surprisingly acceptable:

“The Freedom to Vote Act, introduced this morning, reveals a surprisingly good voting rights bill.  It reflects a sobriety and understanding of the challenges facing voters that is worthy of its lofty name. It is not just a reformulation of the prior For the People Act, but in many places, it is an improvement.”

You can read the bill here. With respect to voting by mail, the bill rolls back many of the Republicans’ disenfranchisement schemes. It forbids states from requiring notarization or witnesses to vote by mail. It provides for a free postage system for returned ballots, requires states to notify voters whose ballots are rejected due to a signature omission or mismatch and creates an easy way for voters to cure those ballots.

One of the big objections is that the new bill permits states to decide whether to require voter identification, but it broadens the list of acceptable IDs for states that require them. Under the new bill, states must allow utility bills and leases as well as student IDs and virtually any identification issued by a governmental entity to serve as an acceptable ID.

So, the challenge is whether Manchin will find 10 Republicans to support it. The big question is what will happen If he can’t: Will he and Sinema stick with their refusal to alter the filibuster and thus be complicit in the death of a bill as important to democracy today, as the original Voting Rights Act was in 1965?

Time is running out to save our democracy from a Republican Party that is rejecting it.

We learned in the past few days that our democracy was basically saved from a possible nuclear war and a coup d’état by Mark Milley, an American General with a conscience, and former VP Dan Quayle, who talked VP Mike Pence into not helping the insurrection succeed on Jan. 6.

That alone tells us what real peril we were in. It also should tell us what needs to be done to protect the country going forward.

It would be fantastic to pass both bills, but Manchin’s Freedom to Vote Act must pass, even if it means further weakening of the Filibuster. Wrongo doubts that Manchin and Sinema want to be associated in history with those who failed to stand up for democracy at the hour of maximum danger.

Within the next month, we’ll know where they stand.

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The Supreme Court is Becoming Illegitimate

The Daily Escape:

Sunset, Death Valley, CA – photo by Hasanur Khan

From Paul Campos:

“For a long time, the standard right wing judicial nominee dodge regarding Roe v. Wade was that the nominee considered it “settled law.”

What’s that supposed to mean? It’s a reference to what lawyers call stare decisis, which is Latin for “to stand by things decided”. It’s the doctrine of following legal precedent. The idea is that the Court should follow the existing rulings that it has announced, unless there’s a really good reason not to.

Then the question becomes: How really good does the reason have to be? There’s no formulaic answer to that. The criminal guilt standard of “beyond a reasonable doubt” is similar.

We’re here today because on Wednesday, in an unsigned, 5–4 decision, the Supreme Court effectively overturned Roe v. Wade. The five most conservative Republican-appointed justices refused to block Texas’s abortion ban, which allows anyone to sue any individual who “aids or abets” an abortion after six weeks. Remember, that law contains no penalty for making a false claim or filing a suit in bad faith. The purpose of that part of the law is simply harassment, and it’s up to the accused to prove that she wasn’t six weeks pregnant at the time the vigilante made the claim.

This decision renders almost all abortions in Texas illegal for the first time since 1973.

Although the majority didn’t exactly say these words, the upshot of Wednesday’s decision is that the Supreme Court has abandoned the Constitutional right to abortion. Roe is no longer settled law, even though the five justices who voted not to take the case had all testified in Congress that it was settled law.

Others will write detailed, technical analysis about the Court’s non-decision, and the impact on the Roe v. Wade test case coming to the Supreme Court in September. Wrongo prefers to point out that the subversion of American institutions is happening at a rapid pace, and that includes the Supreme Court.

There was an interesting article in The Prospect about how the US is becoming ungovernable in the basic sense of ‘nothing works‘ and ‘nothing can be done simply‘. It is difficult to argue with that, and although it’s coming at us from many different angles, one of the effects is that every decision today is powerfully affected not only by ‘how will it work’, but by ‘what will the opposition be like?’.

The battlefield is increasingly one where results are determined by unconstrained courts, and the country is becoming unmanageable. This is magnified in the Senate, where two Democrats have reacted to the partisan divide by refusing to act so long as the partisan divide exists.

From Justice Kagan’s dissent: (Emphasis by Wrongo)

“Without full briefing or argument, and after less than 72 hours’ thought, this Court greenlights the operation of Texas’s patently unconstitutional law banning most abortions. The Court thus rewards Texas’s scheme to insulate its law from judicial review by deputizing private parties to carry out unconstitutional restrictions on the State’s behalf. As of last night, and because of this Court’s ruling, Texas law prohibits abortions for the vast majority of women who seek them—in clear, and indeed undisputed, conflict with Roe and Casey.

Today’s ruling illustrates just how far the Court’s “shadow-docket” decisions may depart from the usual principles of appellate process. That ruling, as everyone must agree, is of great consequence. Yet the majority has acted without any guidance from the Court of Appeals—which is right now considering the same issues. It has reviewed only the most cursory party submissions, and then only hastily. And it barely bothers to explain its conclusion—that a challenge to an obviously unconstitutional abortion regulation backed by a wholly unprecedented enforcement scheme is unlikely to prevail.

In all these ways, the majority’s decision is emblematic of too much of this Court’s shadow-
docket decision making—which every day becomes more unreasoned, inconsistent, and impossible to defend.”

Roe and Casey were at least in theory, settled law. Now, they are no longer.

The Court’s majority decided this madness, not just for Texas, but for the entire country. These earth-shattering decisions used to come only after full briefing and argument. No longer. Now, the shadow docket greases the skids for decisions upholding the Conservative Right’s views on personal rights.

One question that needs to be answered: How will the Texas Taliban-empowered Menstruation Vigilantes know when a pregnancy is older than six weeks?

Conservatives say they are all about personal choice and freedom, except when they’re not.

These are very perilous times, and they call for very big corrections. We’re pretty much at the point in game theory which dictates that the only remaining options are to either stop playing the game, or in this case, for the Democrats to destroy the political influence of Republicans.

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More Thoughts on Afghanistan

The Daily Escape:

Mesquite Flat Sand Dunes, Death Valley, California photo by Gerold Guggenbheul

Wrongo is as tired of writing about Afghanistan as you are reading about it, but the time to say what needs to be said is when people are paying attention. So, let’s talk about the media’s response to Afghanistan.

Yesterday, Wrongo pointed out that out of a combined 14,000-plus minutes of the national evening news broadcast on CBS, ABC, and NBC in 2020, the year Trump made his deal with the Taliban, a total of five minutes were devoted to Afghanistan. Now, many more minutes are focused on the withdrawal from Afghanistan, and much of that is critical of Biden. From Eric Boehlert:

“Led by the New York Times’ and CNN’s frenzied reporting and analysis, the media have gone all in with the narrative that Biden’s presidency sits on the precipice of ruin in the wake of US’s long-expected troop departure from Afghanistan. (Fact: It does not.)”

Various Biden critics are engaging in fantasies about Kabul’s collapse: if only we’d used more force, demonstrated more will, stayed a few months longer, then the Taliban would have adopted a different strategy. Ryan Crocker, a former ambassador to Afghanistan, was sharply critical of the withdrawal of the last 3,500 troops. Fred Kagan, of the American Enterprise Institute, argued that “keeping American military forces in Afghanistan indefinitely” would be “worth it.”

Another NYT column recently said that Biden should “save his presidency” in the wake of the Afghanistan controversy. Biden’s ending an extremely unpopular war and is bringing the troops home, at least so far, without a single US casualty. But he must “save his presidency”?

It is a huge relief to find out America has been filled all along with people who know, with 100% certainty, how to properly extract the US from Afghanistan.

From Cheryl Rofer: (emphasis by Wrongo)

“As we try to look past the abysmal reporting on the evacuation from Afghanistan, one of the things that strikes me is the inability or unwillingness of reporters to visualize what is required to make things happen in the real world.”

More:

“An evacuation takes coordination among an enormous number of entities – getting the right people in the right place at the right time, along with the airplanes and their fuel, which involves other airports, air controllers, logistics people keeping track of where the planes are, and the military personnel helping out….And then there are the State Department people who are checking identities and preparing paperwork to get refugees into the US.”

Rofer closes with: (brackets by Wrongo)

“The first inclination of too many reporters seems to be to find someone to backbite someone else. It should be to understand the [physical] situation…”

The criticisms downplay the impact of the deal with the Taliban. Once the Taliban had secured an agreement that the US would be pulling out, and that forces would be reduced to minimal numbers BEFORE Biden’s presidency began, they merely had to wait. Trump’s special skill as president was that he accomplished nothing, or he made things much, much worse, in every way.

So far, the airlift from Afghanistan is performing better than the news media’s record over the past four years, when they were reporting on everything Trump said. Now they’re saying that Biden can’t eat the shit sandwich Trump prepared so well.

But here’s a subject that has gone unnoticed by the media: the cost of caring for our veterans. The Watson Institute researches the cost of the Afghan war. They just released an update on the ongoing costs of caring for the military who were injured in Iraq and Afghanistan:

“Between 2001 and 2050, the total costs of caring for veterans of the post-9/11 wars are estimated to reach between $2.2 and $2.5 trillion….This estimate is double the author’s previous projections in 2011 and 2013.”

They say that most of the costs associated with caring for post-9/11 veterans have yet to be paid and will continue to accrue long into the future. The costs are $1 trillion higher than earlier estimates for two primary reasons. First, the number of post-9/11 veterans with disabilities is far higher than originally projected. More than 40% of the troops who have served in Iraq and Afghanistan have already been approved to receive lifetime disability benefits.

Second, the VA has ramped up their levels of responsiveness. They have expanded the geographical footprint of VA health care, hired thousands of additional medical and support personnel, and expanded clinical specialties in areas such as women’s health, traumatic brain injury and post-traumatic stress disorders (PTSD).

These expenditures are already baked into the system. We should be focusing on the fact that these costs will DOUBLE America’s projected military expenses of $2 trillion for Afghanistan.

The post-9/11 wars were the first major test of our all-volunteer military. On September 11, 2001, roughly one in every four American men were military veterans, but over the past two decades, the number of veterans in the population has declined to fewer than one in eight.

Barring reinstituting the draft, the number of military in our population will continue declining. The Census Bureau projects that the number of veterans will be just 1 in 14 by 2040. By 2050, when the costs of providing medical care and benefits for veterans of the post-9/11 wars reach their peak, few living Americans will have direct relatives who were involved in these wars.

So, two hidden costs of the Afghanistan war: A lazy media, and a 40+% casualty rate which is what happens when you continually redeploy the same soldiers into a 20-year long battle.

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Monday Wake Up Call – August 23, 2021

The Daily Escape:

Chaco Canyon, NM – 2021 photo by Freek Bouw. This is the best collection of ancient ruins north of Mexico.

On February 29th, 2020, the US signed an agreement with the Taliban in Doha that provided for a full US and international troop withdrawal on a 15-month timetable. The Taliban promised to take measures to restrict the activities of other terrorist groups (like al-Qaeda) and to negotiate a ceasefire and a political settlement with the Afghan government. (Read the full text of the agreement here.)

Many in the media are asking how the Taliban succeeded so quickly. They’re blaming the Biden administration’s execution of the withdrawal, but that agreement has a lot to do with why things are so chaotic.

Here is a Twitter thread by Joel Cawley about the agreement: (emphasis by Wrongo)

1/ There’s a lot of disinformation floating around on what exactly was agreed in Doha. The more you read this, the more you realize how amazingly out of touch our current commentary has become.

2/ This document specifically spells out a mutual understanding that the Taliban will negotiate a settlement with the Afghan government, just as they did. Less clear, but 100% tacitly implied throughout, is that the Taliban will be the new rulers.

3/ In other words, we knew those “settlements” were surrender agreements. All the Taliban had to do was show this document to each Afghan provincial leader and they could see we were now backing the Taliban.

4/ We even spell out our intent to then provide the Taliban, as Afghan’s new ruling party, development aid, UN recognition, and immunity from any future US military incursion or even threat.

5/ This wasn’t an intelligence failure. We agreed with them in advance on what they would do. This is a failure to properly advise and inform the incoming administration of a critical foreign policy agreement.

It’s clear that Trump’s failure to agree to an orderly transition may have delayed Biden’s team’s full understanding of their agreement with the Taliban. Michael Semple of the Irish Times writes about the consequences of the agreement:

“The US talked up the prospects of a…settlement and the hopes that it would hand over to a power-sharing administration including the Taliban. But throughout the 2018-2021 peace initiative, the Taliban leadership gave their fighters an entirely different narrative. Unambiguously….Taliban fighters were told that they had defeated the US in the war and that the US had agreed to hand over power to them as they left – ‘the Americans have handed us the keys of the presidential palace’ was a frequently repeated phrase.”

Semple adds: (brackets and emphasis by Wrongo)

“Critically, the 2020 deal between the US and Taliban severely curtailed the use of American air power against the Taliban, although [it allowed] the Taliban…to fight on against the Afghan government.”

The US basically quit the battlefield a year before our troops actually left. In the last year, when the US should have been building the resilience of Afghan forces, we reduced our financial support for the Afghan government, weakening a key military advantage which Afghan forces had enjoyed over the Taliban. And after the agreement was signed, the Taliban enjoyed full freedom of movement across the country and started to build their military pressure.

Sarah Chayes, a former NPR reporter who covered the fall of the Taliban in 2001, subsequently ran two non-profits in Kandahar for 10 years. She speaks Pashtu, and eventually went to work for two NATO commanders, and later for a chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Her blog post about the fall of Afghanistan is well worth your time:

“Two decades ago, young people in Kandahar were telling me how the proxy militias American forces had armed and provided with US fatigues were shaking them down at checkpoints….I and too many other people to count spent years of our lives trying to convince US decision-makers that Afghans could not be expected to take risks on behalf of a government that was as hostile to their interests as the Taliban were.”

She notes that the Taliban are a creation of Pakistan:

“The Taliban were a strategic project of the Pakistani military intelligence agency, the ISI. It even conducted market surveys in the villages around Kandahar, to test the label and the messaging. “Taliban” worked well. The image evoked was of the young students who apprenticed themselves to village religious leaders.”

About Hamid Karzai, America’s first puppet president, she says: (brackets and emphasis by Wrongo)

“During my conversations in the early 2000s about the Pakistani government’s role in the Taliban’s initial rise, I learned….[that] Hamid Karzai, the US choice to pilot Afghanistan after we ousted their regime, was in fact the go-between who negotiated those very Taliban’s initial entry into Afghanistan in 1994….Karzai may [also] have been a key go-between negotiating this surrender, just as he did in 1994,”

She also wonders about the role of Trump’s chief negotiator for the agreement, US Special Envoy Zalmay Khalilzad. He’s an old friend of Karzai’s. She asks:

“Could…Biden truly have found no one else for that job, to replace an Afghan-American with obvious conflicts of interest, who was close to former Vice President Dick Cheney and who lobbied in favor of an oil pipeline through Afghanistan when the Taliban were last in power?”

Chayes concludes: (emphasis by Wrongo)

“I hold US civilian leadership, across four administrations, largely responsible for today’s outcome. Military commanders certainly participated in the self-delusion. I can…find fault with generals I worked for or observed. But the US military is subject to civilian control. And the two primary problems identified above — corruption and Pakistan — are civilian issues. They are not problems men and women in uniform can solve. But…no top civilian decision-maker was willing to take either of these problems on. The political risk, for them, was too high.”

When you read all of this, you realize that America’s end game in Afghanistan was bound to be a clusterfuck!

Wrongo has a problem with those who are treating the instantaneous collapse of the Afghani government and army as some sort of argument against Biden’s decision to abide by Trump’s negotiated agreement. The media has now decided to cover the withdrawal, but out of a combined 14,000-plus minutes of the national evening news broadcast on CBS, ABC, and NBC in 2020, a total of five minutes were devoted to Afghanistan.

Those five minutes covered the February agreement between the US and the Taliban.

It shouldn’t be a surprise that Americans are shocked at what the media are now feeding them. And isn’t it astounding how the people who were totally wrong about Afghanistan keep being invited back on TV to tell us what we should be thinking about what’s happening now?

Time to wake up America! We need to acknowledge the errors by giving them a true perspective, even if it doesn’t fit the Blue vs. Red agenda.

To help you wake up, listen to this new tune by The Killers, “Quiet Town”, about the good and bad in small town life:

The animated video is very nice.

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Saturday Soother – August 21, 2021

The Daily Escape:

Portage Glacier, outside Whittier, AK – August 2021 photo by nowake

Yesterday, Wrongo finished Michael Lewis’s book “The Premonition”, that tells the story of our failure to contain COVID-19. It is told through the eyes of a cast of compelling characters, including a California public health officer, a couple of idiosyncratic MDs who are White House advisers and a brilliant academic scientist whose lab revolutionized the identification of viral pathogens.

We learn how the pandemic exploited the gaps in the public health system of the world’s most advanced country that Lewis shows to be fragmented and weak politically. Moreover, he shows that the CDC’s response was almost inert when it came to reports from the states that were seeing the first Covid cases.

Early on, the CDC basically had two positions on the pandemic. First, that it wasn’t a big deal, it was overblown. And later, they made a quick pivot when it started spreading in the US. That change came far too late to contain the spread of the virus.

Lewis says little in The Premonition about the US official pandemic response. The organization that comes off the worst is the CDC and its leadership. The White House and Trump are mentioned in passing. Dr. Fauci is mentioned only a few times, while Deborah Birx is entirely absent. The White House COVID task force is seldom mentioned.

The book’s takeaway is mostly about how we have built organizations that are excellent for studying “what happened” and publishing papers about past problems. But are incapable of real time response in a true public health emergency. This is because the top CDC job has been a political appointee since the Carter administration. Lewis told NPR how the institutional failure at the CDC came about:

“The brave ones have all got their heads chopped off. So, it’s sort of institutionalized a cowardice that we’re going to need to face up to so that this business of punishing people who are doing their damnedest to try to save us from ourselves has got to stop.”

The characters in Lewis’s book have fascinating life stories: A thirteen-year-old girl’s school science project on how airborne pathogens spread, morphs with her scientist father’s help, into an important model of how Covid spreads.

A California public-health officer uses her skills and experience to see what the CDC misses and reveals important truths about our public health system. An informal group of doctors, nicknamed the Wolverines, have the skills needed to fight the pandemic: brilliant backgrounds, world-class labs, prior experience with the bird and swine flus  ̶  everything except official permission to implement their findings on behalf of the American people.

One series of facts that floored Wrongo was how important children are to spreading a virus in our population. These insights started with the kid’s model mentioned above. From pages 90-91:

“…there were more than 100,000 K-12 [public] schools in the country, with 50 million children in them. Twenty-five million ride a bus to school….There were 70,000 buses in the entire US public transportation system, but 500,000 school buses. On an average day, school buses carried twice as many people as the entire US public transportation system.”

Moreover, school bus aisles are narrower than normal buses, and better for spreading disease. They observed that when kids stand at the bus stop, they crowd together, unlike adults who give each other personal space. In the halls at school, kids also crowd together. The conclusion was that kids’ different sense of personal space has a key role in the spread of viral disease. More:

“…each elementary school child spent the day in a space with a radius of just 3.5 feet, which when they reached high school, expanded to four.”

The discoverer of this insight is one of the Wolverines, Carter Mecher, an MD who worked at the Atlanta VA hospital system. His conclusion?

“I couldn’t have designed a better system for transmitting disease than our school system”

Wrongo didn’t know that school closure was the most effective strategy to contain the spread of Covid before reading this book. We all know that few families wanted their kids to stay home from school. We know how politicized the issue of school closure became, even in states where it was mandated. There are 130,930 schools in America, all individually and locally managed. And it’s impossible to enforce a mandate on them from afar.

Between a weak public health system, an ossified CDC, and an inability to control the disease transmission in the 130k+ schools in America, Lewis’s book is a devastating look at our ability to deal with Covid and with whatever the next pandemic brings.

With Afghanistan, the delta variant and a looming hurricane hitting the northeast this weekend, it will be difficult to settle down for a Saturday Soother. But let’s give it a try.

Take a seat by a window and listen to “The Last Rose of Summer” by Leroy Anderson. It is part of his Irish Suite, and was arranged in 1947:

This is as beautiful to watch as to listen to.

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Afghan Finger Pointing – Part II

The Daily Escape:

Sunset, Mt. Hood, OR – August 2021 photo by CampsG. Note the haze from wildfires.

Biden’s effort to reframe the Afghanistan conversation to a decision-to-withdraw narrative rather than an execution-of-the-withdrawal narrative – at least for now – hasn’t controlled the narrative. But it’s still early days of media spinning about our failure in Afghanistan.

Kevin Drum reminds us:

“Withdrawing from Afghanistan was always going to be a bloody, chaotic affair no matter what. That’s why no one wanted to do it: It was pretty obvious how it would go down, and no one with any sense wants that as part of their presidential legacy. But the bloodshed was inevitable once the decision to leave was made.”

But are the events of the past few days horrific? Maybe you should re-think that – they haven’t been. Remembering how the Taliban operated when they were in control in the 1990s, we should have expected much worse. The Taliban’s takeover has been far smoother and less vicious than at least Wrongo expected.

That isn’t a pro-Taliban comment. But maybe 20 years of being hit by US bombs and drone attacks has moderated them, at least temporarily. Things could change rapidly. And the chaos we’re seeing, and that the media are complaining about, is simply what happens when a military must withdraw under armed pressure.

A harsh truth is that any US evacuation from Kabul airport requires the concurrence of the Taliban. The US controls the military side of the one runway airport. Here’s what the Kabul airport looks like:

The plan, as articulated by the Biden administration, is that evacuations will continue at least until August 31 at roughly 5000 a day, or 70,000 people in total by then. That of course, depends on the continued cooperation of the Taliban.

This once again calls into question the competence of the US military’s contingency planning. We have a supposed agreement with the Taliban that allows the US to continue to control the airspace and the Taliban to cooperate in allowing foreigners and Afghans who want to depart, safe passage to the airport.

Again, we should question General Milley’s decision to shut down Bagram airbase in July, apparently without ensuring Kabul would be defensible in a worst-case scenario. As Wrongo stated, Bagram is more easily defended and has longer runways and greater capacity than Kabul. Planning of this type is Milley’s job. Early indications so far are that it wasn’t done competently.

Think about how we plan to evacuate our ± 5,000 soldiers protecting the Kabul airport once all of the people we’re trying to evacuate leave. Who protects their exit? Has Milley planned for that?

Let’s look at some curious facts about the Afghanistan end game. Since 2014, the US has provided about 75% of the $6 billion annually needed to fund the Afghan National Security Forces while the remainder of the tab was picked up by US partner nations and the Afghan government.

However, for fiscal year 2021, the US Congress appropriated only $3 billion for Afghanistan’s fighting forces, the lowest amount since 2008. Remember that the fiscal year started on October 1, 2020. This diminution of US support came after Afghan President Ashraf Ghani said his government cannot support its army for even six months without US financial aid. This practically guaranteed that the front-line Afghan troops wouldn’t be paid. What was the Trump administration thinking?

Link that to comments by Afghanistan’s Central Bank head, Ajmal Ahmady, who said that the country’s supply of physical US dollars is “close to zero.” Afghanistan has some $9 billion in reserves, mostly held outside the country, with some $7 billion held in the US. These funds are now frozen.

Ahmady said the country did not receive a planned cash shipment last week. From the NYT:

“On Friday, the central banker received a call saying the country wouldn’t get further shipments of US dollars, though the next one was supposed to arrive on Sunday. The next shipment never arrived…Seems like our partners had good intelligence as to what was going to happen.”

Facts don’t lie: the US believed things were heading south and didn’t send the usual cash infusion. So, the administration can’t say they were completely surprised by the speed of the Taliban takeover, somebody high up had figured it out.

A key question that politicians and the media are asking is: “When did we know that the government would fall?” Some would say they knew it from the early days of the war. This from Laura Jedeed:

“I remember Afghanistan well. I deployed there twice — once in 2008, and again in 2009–2010. It was already obvious that the Taliban would sweep through the very instant we left. And here we are today.”

There are many, many military who deployed there who share that view.

For Wrongo, it was clear in 2020 when Trump and Pompeo negotiated a deal with the Taliban, without the Afghan government in the room. That insured that their government would fall.

The military loss of Afghanistan isn’t the end of the world. It’s awful, but there’s a difference. So everyone should calm down. Afghanistan is gone. We’re out of there, and the Taliban are back.

But stop the anger. That’s only a reflex. Think about what country this describes:

“A fractious country comprised of warring tribes, unable to form an inclusive whole; unable to wade beyond shallow differences in sect and identity in order to provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to themselves and their posterity, and so they perish—in the span of a breath—without ever reaching the promised shore.”

Today, it describes Afghanistan. Tomorrow, is it us?

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Monday Wake Up Call – August 16, 2021

The Daily Escape:

Bear Sculpture, Kent CT – August 2021 iPhone photo by Wrongo

ProPublica reported that: “Secret IRS Files Reveal How Much the Ultrawealthy Gained by Shaping Trump’s Big, Beautiful Tax Cut”. The article shows how billionaire business owners deployed lobbyists to make sure Trump’s 2017 tax bill was tailored to their benefit: (emphasis by Wrongo)

“In the first year after Trump signed the legislation, just 82 ultrawealthy households collectively walked away with more than $1 billion in total savings….Republican and Democratic tycoons alike saw their tax bills chopped by tens of millions, among them: media magnate and former Democratic presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg; the Bechtel family…and the heirs of the late Houston pipeline billionaire Dan Duncan.”

Trump’s Tax Cuts and Jobs Act was the biggest rewrite of the tax code in decades. It is arguably the most consequential legislative achievement by any one-term president. It was crafted in secret, with lobbyist input, and then rushed through the legislative process.

ProPublica says that as the draft of the bill made its way through Congress, lawmakers and hired lobbyist friendly to billionaires were able to shape the bill’s language to accommodate special interests. The final version of the bill led to a vast redistribution of wealth to the pockets of a few wealthy families.

This siphoned away billions in tax revenue from the nation’s coffers. Here’s a chart of the tax savings of the big winners:

This gets a little technical. Corporate taxes are paid by what are known as C corporations, including large firms like AT&T or Amazon. But most businesses in the US aren’t C corporations, they’re what are called pass-through corporations. The name comes from the fact that when one of these businesses makes money, the profits are not subject to corporate taxes. Instead, the profits “pass through” directly to the owners, who pay taxes on the profits on their personal returns.

Pass-throughs include the full gamut of American business, from small barbershops to law firms to, in the case of Uline, #2 on the list above, a packaging distributor with thousands of employees.

Republicans touted the Trump tax cut as boosting “small business” and/or “Main Street,” and it’s true that many small businesses got a modest tax break. But a recent study by the Treasury Department found that the top 1% of Americans by income have reaped nearly 60% of the billions in tax savings created by the provision. And most of that amount went to the top 0.1%.

That’s because most of the pass-through profits in the country flow to the wealthy owners of a limited group of large companies. The tax break is due to expire after 2025, and Democrats in Congress want to end the provision early.

Senate Finance Chair Ron Wyden, (D-OR), has proposed legislation that would end the tax cut early for the ultrawealthy. He wants to end the gravy train for anyone making over $500,000 per year. It would be extended to the business owners below that threshold. Wyden’s proposal would make the policy both fairer and less complex, while also raising $ billions for priorities like childcare, education, and health care.

Time to wake up America! The current complaints by Republicans about the Biden efforts to rebuild the economy say that we shouldn’t have the nice things Biden has promised. They now (again) complain about the federal deficit. They continue to sit on their hands about raising taxes on their donors, despite those same donors reaping most of the benefits not only from the Trump tax cut, but from the surge of the national economy since it bottomed while Trump was managing the pandemic.

To help you wake up, watch and listen to “Patria Y Vida” (homeland and life)  the song that has defined this summer’s uprising in Cuba. The title is a take-off on the slogan used by Fidel Castro, “Patria O Muerte” (homeland or death) for 62 years, since the start of the Cuban revolution.

This song of summer is also a deep protest song:

This is a rough time in Cuba. Trump’s sanctions policy sharply restricted the foreign remittances on which many Cubans rely. Then came the pandemic, which decimated the tourism industry. Cuba’s GDP has dropped roughly 11% since 2019.

In response to a recurring chorus saying, “It’s over now,” the singers call to Cuban officials and tell them: “Your time is done, the silence has been broken
we’re not afraid, the trickery is over now, 62 years of doing damage to our country.”

They add, “Let’s start to build what we’ve dreamed of; of what they destroyed by their own hand.”

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