Daily Escape – Page 29 – The Wrongologist

Griner Comes Home

The Daily Escape:

Barn before a storm, Walla Walla, WA – 2022 photo by Gary Hamburgh Photography

After 10 months in Russian custody, including time in a penal colony, WNBA star Brittney Griner is on her way home. In exchange for Griner’s freedom, Russia secured the release of Viktor Bout, a convicted Russian arms smuggler. Another American, the former Marine Paul Whelan, remains imprisoned in Russia.

CNN reports that the White House said Griner was released to US officials. From Biden:

“Moments ago I spoke to Brittney Griner…She is safe. She is on a plane. She is on her way home.”

The prisoner swap occurred in Abu Dhabi on Thursday. A joint statement from the UAE and Saudi Arabia said both Gulf countries played a role mediating the exchange between the US and Russia. By the time you are reading this, Griner should be on American soil.

But the result is a mixed bag. It’s very good news that Griner is free. But Viktor Bout is also free to rebuild his arms-dealing network. People are rightly wondering why Whelan wasn’t included in the trade. After all, he’s finishing his fifth year in Russian prison. But negotiation requires both sides to agree and the Russians would only offer Griner.

Of course, the Right-wing chattering class disapproved. First, from House GOP Leader Kevin McCarthy, who tweeted:

“This is a gift to Vladimir Putin, and it endangers American lives….Leaving Paul Whelan behind for this is unconscionable.”

Some Conservative mouth-breather named Jessie Kelly tweeted this:

“She’s a black lesbian who hates America. Biden is just bringing another voter back home.”

Another mouth-breather, Conservative Benny Johnson who has a show on Newsmax, tweeted this with typical Right-wing understatement:

“This is the lowest point in US foreign policy in my lifetime. Collapse of an empire.”

It can’t be a long life for young Benny. What is he, five years old?

You have to love the comments by these wingnuts each of whom say they could have brokered a better deal with their expert negotiating skills. And rather than be happy that one American is returning home, they use their oral flatulence to make comments about what should have happened, and why Biden is a loser.

Poor Paul Whelan’s family shows that most Americans still have decency and class:

“NEW from the Whelan family: “There is no greater success than for a wrongful detainee to be freed & for them to go home. The Biden Admin made the right decision to bring Ms. Griner home, & to make the deal that was possible, rather than waiting for one that wasn’t going to…”

The American people should thank Paul Whelan’s brother David for being so gracious. That isn’t something that we can say about the many Republican mouthpieces who felt it was necessary to weigh in.

People need to stop thinking about this as a trade or a prisoner exchange. The Russians kidnapped Griner and held her for ransom. She was a wonderful target, being a very tall black lesbian woman playing professional basketball in Russia. She was chosen, then convicted, and then sent to the gulag for the very purpose of being bait to spring Viktor Bout.

Does it suck that the price of releasing her was letting an odious killer go free? Of course. It shouldn’t be lost on anyone that as individuals and given their relative “crimes”, they weren’t equivalent assets. Everyone knows that Griner’s offense was simply a pretext to create a prisoner that could be traded. The initial arrest was about finding a small amount of hash oil on a Black gay woman.

Prisoner exchanges usually look like, “You arrested one of our spies and we want him back, so we arrested one of your spies. Let’s talk.” They don’t normally look like: “We plucked a random minor celebrity of yours off the street and she’s gonna do nine years.”

And when they do, it’s important to point out that it’s more like a kidnapping and a ransom than it is like an equivalent exchange.

Two closing thoughts. First, Conservatives always say: “Don’t negotiate with terrorists“. But all nations negotiate with terrorists; that’s just something governments say. Negotiating with terrorists doesn’t incentivize terrorism. It incentivizes terrorists to negotiate. The alternative is that terrorists engage in terrorism that does not involve negotiations. And that only leads to terrible outcomes.

All governments have to decide whether to negotiate or not on a case by case basis.

Second, Americans, especially conspicuous Americans, should stay the hell out of Russia until the Putin government’s current business plan is updated.

Thoughts On Warnock and The Midterms

The Daily Escape:

Mauna Loa erupting, Big Island, HI – December 5, 2022 photo by Deron Verbeck

You’ve heard this by now:

The 3,537.3 million votes cast on Tuesday represented a 45.2% turnout in Georgia. The record was set in the 2020 presidential election at 69.4%.

The Georgia Senate runoff election was uncomfortably close. Wrongo and Ms. Right tuned in to election results occasionally throughout the night and we were very concerned when the partial results often showed Hershel Walker ahead, at least until the Democratic-leaning counties around Atlanta reported results.

This raises a few questions: First, how (and why?) would so many Georgians vote for a completely unqualified candidate? OTOH, when we see how many people voted for Kari Lake and Blake Masters in AZ, or Dr. Oz and Mastriano in PA, there’s real reason to worry about what the US electorate thinks.

While Trump’s most visible candidates lost, many others won, and Trump still controls the Republican Party to a frightening extent. The WaPo estimated that 176 election deniers won statewide races, or seats in the House of Representatives.

If things go sideways in America (think a steep recession) there should be little doubt that a few thousand votes could easily swing back the other way and we could be stuck with a full-blown neo-fascist government led by Trump or by one of his clones. Michael Tomasky in the NY Review of Books analyzes the current state of political play:

“This is our new condition—tight races between two armies of voters, each marching to the polls with the conviction that victory for the other side would be not merely an unhappy result but calamitous for the republic.”

Wrongo has been harping on the importance of voter turnout to electoral success. The fact is that turnout is becoming more important as the nation has become more clearly divided. More from Tomasky:

“In the eleven presidential elections from 1972 to 2012…turnout averaged 56.1%. In the eleven midterm elections from 1974 to 2014, the average turnout was just 39.4%.”

Tomasky says that all began to change with Trump:

“…presidential turnout in 2016 was a bit higher than average, at 60.1%. In the 2018 midterm, turnout was 50%, the highest for a midterm since 1914. Then turnout in the 2020 presidential race set a modern record at 66.8%, the highest since 1900.”

We learned three things from the 2022 midterms: First, candidate quality is crucial. Party primaries aren’t set up to necessarily select the best candidate. They often reward candidates who fire up their base, because turnout is usually very low in primaries. Second, turnout in the general election is key in most contested Congressional districts and states. Third, we learned that we could control our destiny despite the pro-GOP “red wave” narrative pushed by the national media.

Axios reports that 2022 is the first midterm election since 1934 when the Party in power successfully defended every one of their incumbent Senate seats.

There was bound to be more turnover in the House, if only because there were seven times as many seats being contested. But it was also the first election after the 2020 census and the follow-on redistricting process. Much of the reason for the change of control in the House is due to redistricting.

This year, some incumbents were pitted against each other, ensuring one would lose. Others were in districts they could no longer win, which caused a few retirements and defeats. Almost all the incumbents (95%) who survived primary challenges won re-election.

And despite so much stability on the surface, Americans are incredibly polarized, and there’s widespread discontent. Given that, we should give credit to Democrats who didn’t dissolve into political infighting and who worked to get the job done against big odds. Georgia in particular was once again a hard-fought contest in which every vote counted. That means every Get Out The Vote (GOTV) organization and every phone call, postcard, text, door knock, made by them also counted. As did your donations.

Georgia isn’t turning blue. It’s important to note that Georgia’s Republicans swept every other statewide race (7 of them) without going to a runoff.

And for this Senate runoff, we should recognize the sacrifice made by Georgia voters who stood in line to exercise a right that shouldn’t be contingent either on completing an endurance race, or an obstacle course. We owe Georgia voters a debt of gratitude for their efforts in the face of voter suppression.

The year of Republicans blowing it has ended, and we shouldn’t expect them to let Trump pick their candidates in 2024.

Trump’s “Terminate The Constitution” Rant

The Daily Escape:

Juniper and snow, near Colorado Springs, CO – December 2022 photo by John Susan Hoffman

(Good luck to Sen. Ralph Warnock in today’s Georgia run-off election for a full term in the US Senate)

In the past two weeks, Trump has pledged solidarity with the January 6 rioters, dined with Holocaust-denying fans of Adolf Hitler, and called for the termination of the Constitution. On his failing Truth Social clone of Twitter, he yelled:

“…the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution” in order to “declare the RIGHTFUL WINNER” from 2020 or “have a NEW ELECTION”

As Mike Pence’s former chief of staff, Marc Short said on Meet the Press, Trump’s attack on the Constitution was consistent with:

“…what he asked the vice president to do two years ago, when rioters were attacking the Capitol and he asked the vice president to overturn the election results.”

Let’s underline this: The likely Republican nominee for president in 2024 called for the “termination of the Constitution”, not to “suspend” the Constitution as several pundits have mistakenly said. And very few in the GOP bothered to call him out on it. As Dennis Aftergut said in the Bulwark:

“Trump writing that we should cancel the Constitution ranks right up alongside John Tyler’s support of the Confederacy as among the most shameful acts by a former president in our nation’s history.”

There’s a method to Trump’s madness. Let’s go back to what he said to Lesley Stahl prior to their “60 Minutes” interview in 2018. From CNBC: (emphasis by Wrongo)

“Stahl said she and her boss met with Trump at his office in Trump Tower in Manhattan…in advance of a recorded sit-down interview for ‘60 Minutes’. At one point, he started to attack the press, Stahl said. There were no cameras in there. I said, ‘You know, this is getting tired. Why are you doing it over and over?….And he said: ‘You know why I do it? I do it to discredit you all and demean you all so that when you write negative stories about me no one will believe you.’”

And to a degree that worked. Trump has now moved on to discrediting the Constitution and the judiciary. While some Trump-appointed judges have done a few helpful things for him, they can’t deliver what Trump needs most: Immunity from prosecution.

He needs to be reelected in order to do that for himself.

Since 2021, the DOJ, the Georgia courts, and the New York courts have been grinding away at the January 6 insurrection, the theft and retention of national security documents at Mar-a-Lago, and the NY tax case. All have become more worrying for Trump.

He’s lost more than once in the US Supreme Court, in the 11^th Circuit, and in courts in Georgia and NY. Regardless of whether it’s rulings on motions related to executive privilege, challenges to warrants and subpoenas, or actual verdicts against the Oathkeepers for seditious conspiracy, the legal wagons appear to be circling in more closely around him.

Trump knows that. So he’s returning to what has worked for him before: Demonizing his enemies.

Instead of the media, this time he’s attempting to demonize our Constitutional order. If he’s successful at doing that before we see any indictments, verdicts, and sentences against his corporation, or himself, he thinks he can survive politically with his base. By going for the Constitution, he’s trying to discredit the judicial system so that the GOP won’t turn against him if/when he’s held accountable.

Targeting the Constitution has downsides – the authority of any judge Trump appears before flows from that Constitution, and unlike the media, judges are backed by the DOJ and the FBI.

Imagine if you’re the DOJ’s Special Counsel Jack Smith, and the biggest target of your career just openly called for the termination of the Constitution. You’re probably thinking that you have a decent shot at convicting Trump of trying to overthrow the Constitution back on Jan. 6.

Some GOP lawmakers who were asked on the Sunday political shows about Trump’s rant said they disagreed. However, most wouldn’t say they’d oppose Trump if he becomes the GOP’s 2024 presidential nominee. They’re saying as little as possible because they believe a large percentage of the Republican base agrees with him.

Trump’s best (his only?) defense is retaking the presidency. That is why we shouldn’t minimize his call to “terminate the Constitution”.

We need to keep pressure on Republican politicians to either disown Trump or embrace him. We should be asking Republican Senators and House Representatives:

“Trump took an oath to support and defend the Constitution, then he said we should abolish it. You also took that same oath. Does your oath require you to defend it against him?”

Mention the oath. In every question.

Saturday Soother – December 3, 2022

The Daily Escape:

Pondicherry Park, Bridgeton, ME – November 2022 photo by Eric Storm Photo

Are the Democrats prioritizing the need to pass the Electoral Count Reform Act? Some are worried that amending the Electoral Count Act of 1887 (ECA) might not get done in what remains of Congress’ lame-duck session. If it isn’t done by January 1, it’s unlikely to be passed at all once Republicans take control of the House.

From the WaPo’s Greg Sargent:

“Versions of ECA reform have advanced in the Senate and the House, but it’s hard to see either passing as a stand-alone bill with only a few weeks left in the lame-duck session. That would chew up valuable floor time with much else left to do, including funding the entire government.

So, the most likely option at this point, a congressional aide tells me, is for ECA reform to get attached to that end-of-year spending bill.”

It’s worth worrying that this might not happen. Roll Call reports that Democratic Sens. Joe Manchin and Amy Klobuchar have said that it should be made a part of the must-pass spending omnibus bill.

The pending ECA Reform bill is the most substantial legislative action trying to deal with the Jan. 6, 2021 attempted coup. Citing ambiguities in the ECA, Trump’s supporters argued that Vice President Mike Pence could set aside some states’ results. You know what followed that.

The pending legislation would clarify that the vice president’s role in counting electoral votes is purely ceremonial, and that s/he does not have the discretion to set aside any state’s properly certified votes. It would also raise the threshold to hear objections to a state’s electors from just one member in each chamber to 20% of both Houses.

ECA reform would also require governors to certify the correct slate of electors. It creates new ways for legal challenges when governors violate that duty, and requires Congress to count the court-sanctioned slate of electors even if a bad-acting state legislature appointed a sham slate.

This is important since right now, we’re seeing Arizona’s Cochise County’s election board simply refusing to certify the results of their midterm election. This shows that election denialism is alive and well in the states and demonstrates the need for ECA reform. Arizona’s GOP is showing us exactly what they plan to do in 2024. We should believe them.

In a future presidential election, a GOP-controlled state legislature could seize on exactly this kind of thing — a local refusal to certify results — as its excuse to appoint a different slate of electors for the losing presidential candidate. If that state’s GOP-controlled House counted those electors, under current law it could lead to a stolen election or major crisis. That must be fixed.

The Democrats are pushing on a string trying to get the bill passed. Attaching the ECA reform to a spending bill is complicated. Right now, 10 GOP Senators support the Senate version of reform, the exact number required to overcome a filibuster. But will those same Senators support the spending bill Sen. Schumer wants to pass in the Senate?

And if not, will the ECA reform bill get a stand-alone vote? More than a few GOP Senators could seek to derail it with poison-pill amendments. What’s more, a stand-alone vote could subject it to attacks from Trump and other Republicans. That might weaken the support of some of the 10 GOP Senators who are for it.

And the Democrats need Mitch McConnell and other GOP Senate leaders to agree to attach ECA reform to a spending bill, and enlist the 10 GOP Senators to support it. That means the GOP controls whether this bill is enacted.

The threat of election subversion won’t disappear in our lifetimes. As Greg Sargent says, Jan. 6 has caused unusual bipartisan urgency for Electoral Count Act reform. It would be the height of folly to let that slip away.

And now it’s time for our Saturday Soother, where we try to forget about power, politics, and economics for a few minutes, and calm ourselves before we rush headlong into the holiday season.

We’ve gotten through Thanksgiving and are heading towards Christmas. Here at the Mansion of Wrong, the faux Christmas tree is up, the Christmas plates are going into the cabinets, and the caviar and good single malts have been stocked. The first overseas Christmas cards have arrived.

Let’s put on our wireless headphones and watch and listen to Saint-Saëns’s “Introduction and Rondo Capriccioso, Op.28” for violin and piano, played in 2017 by Bomsori Kim on violin, and Jeongwon Kim on piano. The piece was written by Saint-Saëns in 1867 as the finale of his first violin concerto, but its success as a solo composition at its first performance led Saint-Saëns to publish it separately. Her violin is a Guarnieri from 1725:

Bomsori Kim is new to Wrongo and is outstanding.

It’s Always About Turnout

The Daily Escape:

Verbena in bloom, Anza-Borrego Desert, CA – November 2022 photo by Frank Sengpiel

The midterms are over and some interesting analysis is now available. Kyle Kondik at Sabato’s Crystal Ball has an analysis of how Republicans took the majority in the House by winning more districts that Biden carried than Democrats won districts carried by Trump. From Kondik:

“There are currently slated to be 18 Republicans in Biden seats and just 5 Democrats in Trump seats.”

Kondik reports that the overall number of “crossover” districts — seats that vote for one party for House but the other party for president — has been generally on a downward trajectory. Back in 2008, Democrats held nearly 50 districts that Republican presidential nominee John McCain carried. But many of those districts went red in 2010 and, aside from 2018, Democrats have won relatively few districts won by the other side’s presidential candidate.

And Republicans have now won more of these seats in 6 of the last 7 elections, as the overall number of crossover districts has generally declined. Kondik says:

“Overall, Republicans won 5 double-digit Biden districts…while Democrats won just 1 double-digit Trump district. If those districts had voted in line with their presidential partisanship, the Republican House edge would be just 218-217.”

Immediately post-election, many Dems focused on New York where six House seats flipped to the GOP in districts that Biden had won in 2020. Democrats may think that a weak campaign by Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul (D-NY) hurt them. But the Albany Times Union recently reported that Republican turnout in New York far outpaced Democratic turnout, with GOP turnout reaching 2020 presidential levels on Long Island:

“Republican turnout was substantially higher than for Democrats, 63 to 47 percent, according to an analysis of unofficial election results obtained by the Times Union from the state Board of Elections.”

This was a problem for Democrats all across the US. Tom Bonier, CEO of TargetSmart, an industry leader in using political data, tweeted about another way to look at the poor turnout by Democrats:

The possibly flippable districts Bonier is talking about are: IA3, NY17, MI10, CA13, CO3. Add to those the other five NY districts won by Biden that flipped, and you could have had a decent Democratic majority in the House.

But instead, we’ll be listening to the presumed House Speaker Kevin McCarthy say things like he did on Wednesday. He sent a letter to the January 6th Committee demanding that it preserve “all documents and transcripts” gathered by the Committee.

You should know that his demand is pointless. The Committee had already announced it will publish all documents and transcripts to ensure that Republicans do not destroy evidence when they take over the Committee.

As you may have already concluded about this election cycle, Pew Research says that in-person voting increased compared with 2020. A clear majority of Americans who voted in this year’s Congressional elections say they cast their ballots in person. Nearly two-thirds of voters (65%) submitted ballots in person, including 44% who say they voted on Election Day and 21% who voted in person before Election Day.

In the 2020 presidential election that took place during the Coronavirus, a smaller majority (54%) submitted ballots in person, including just 27% who cast ballots on Election Day.

Absentee and mail-in voting declined from 46% of voters in 2020 to 35% this year. Republicans (52%) are more likely to say they voted in person on Election Day than Democrats (35%), but the share of Democrats voting on Election Day 2022 doubled compared with 2020 (17%).

There were large differences in how voters cast ballots by age and racial or ethnic groups. Nearly two-thirds of voters ages 65 and older say they either voted in person before Election Day or voted by mail or absentee.

That compares with narrower majorities of voters in younger age groups, who were more likely to vote in person on Election Day. In addition, White voters were more likely to report voting in person on Election Day (46%) than Black (40%), Hispanic (32%) or Asian voters (21%).

Overall, the big takeaway for Democrats, both for the Warnock vote on December 6 and for the 2024 Presidential and Congressional elections, is that TURNOUT wins close elections.

And we must expect that all future Congressional and Presidential elections will be decided by razor-thin numbers in many places.

Give your money to groups that are committed to growing turnout.

Russia’s New Ukraine Strategy

The Daily Escape:

Dune Evening Primrose, Anza Borrego Desert SP, CA – November 2022 photo by Paulette Donnellon. This flower only blooms at night.

The war in Ukraine has entered a new phase. Early predictions that Russian forces would roll over token Ukrainian resistance didn’t last long. Confidence grew in a possible Ukrainian victory after Kyiv took advantage of America’s HIMARS artillery and other highly capable Western equipment began to degrade the Russian logistics and command systems.

Then, Ukraine launched a series of counter-offensives that have liberated formerly Russian occupied territory. November’s evacuation of Kherson by Russia showed that Moscow hasn’t yet found a way to stabilize its front lines in the face of Ukrainian military ground tactics.

But the ground has now shifted. The newest Russian commander, General Sergei Surovikin, in October began a bombing campaign on Ukrainian utilities throughout the country. It soon became clear that Russia is attempting to take out as much of Ukraine’s electrical grid as it can.

The WaPo said in late October:

“Russia’s ongoing attacks on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure have been so methodical and destructive that administration officials say they are being led by power experts who know exactly which targets will cause the most damage to Ukraine’s power grid.”

Tactically, Ukraine’s weapons and ammunition can be replaced by the west. Troops can be trained to use new systems; cash can be transferred from Washington and/or Brussels. But the electric grid infrastructure cannot be easily fixed with replacements or money. There isn’t a large inventory of Soviet-era power generating and transmission gear laying around Europe that can be marshaled to fix the Ukrainian grid.

The grid destruction is taking place primarily by precision missile strikes launched from aircraft flying within Russia. We’ve seen that Russia continues to struggle in the land battle, but they have much more latitude to strike against Ukraine’s society and economy from within their own country.

We may have to refine our viewpoint about who is winning and losing this war. The US and NATO have focused on the land battle, which now favors Ukraine. But Russia seems willing to use air bombing to grind western Ukraine into a wasteland. The precision bombing of infrastructure can go on all winter, while the movement of ground forces will largely come to a halt as winter deepens.

Russia could make western Ukraine so close to uninhabitable that many of its citizens leave for Europe. No electric power in western Ukraine also means no water. That would mean the only people who could continue to live there would be the hardiest.

Russia can do all of this while the ground war is literally frozen in place. Russia can do this without a major commitment of additional troops, tanks, or new logistics paths into Ukraine.

If this is Russia’s plan, it makes sense. It’s incremental, has flexibility and fully utilizes Russia’s current advantages, including control of its own airspace. And since NATO and the US haven’t supplied Ukraine with weapons that could reach Russian soil or airspace, Russians are invulnerable to sustained Ukrainian attack.

Russia isn’t acquiring and defending new territory; it’s degrading much of Ukraine instead. Whether this is a winning strategy or not, it’s evidence of new and higher quality military thinking on Russia’s part.

It isn’t necessarily a winning strategy if the west supplies Ukraine with better air defense weaponry or with weapons that have the range to reach into Russia. There are two types of weapons to consider. Those that have a range that could strike behind Russian lines, and those that could reach into Russia itself.

Longer-range weapons raise concerns that the conflict could escalate to include NATO. But at the currently underway Bucharest NATO meeting, Lithuanian Foreign Minister Gabrielius Landsbergis said that Ukraine should be free to strike military sites inside Russia as it fends off attacks on its critical infrastructure. Washington has previously denied Kyiv’s request for the 185-mile range ATACMS missile, which can reach into Russia.

America is at a similar point in the Ukraine war to where it was in the Afghan war: The enemy is striking it from another country, and our policy is not to pursue them inside their political borders.

The difference is that America was doing the fighting in Afghanistan and Ukraine is doing the fighting inside Ukraine. But in both cases, the US policy is strategically flawed. Russia must be made to pay real costs if they are going to use stand-off weapons to grind Ukraine into dust.

The challenge for NATO’s and America’s generals is to recognize that the Russian war strategy has changed, and to adapt to it. Russia wants to make it into a war of attrition. Ukraine wants to retake its lands.

How should Biden and NATO respond? Can the West sustain Ukraine in a prolonged existential conflict like this without changing its strategy?

Workin’ On The Railroad

The Daily Escape:

Pikes Peak with Garden of the Gods in foreground, Colorado Springs, CO. View is from the reflection pool at Garden of the Gods Club and Resort – November 2022 photo by John Susan Hoffman

On Monday, Biden called on Congress to prevent a rail workers’ strike. Railroad workers are threatening a nationwide strike on December 9, which could deliver a crippling blow to the American economy. According to the Association of American Railroads, a nationwide rail shutdown could cost more than $2 billion per day. Passenger rail transportation would also stop, disrupting hundreds of thousands of commuters.

The unions have rejected a tentative agreement that had secured a pay increase of 24% over 5 years for rail workers, but wages don’t appear to be the primary sticking point. The outstanding issue is paid sick leave. The railroad companies have adamantly refused to include any more short-term paid leave. That means rail workers must report to work, even when they are sick, or forfeit their pay.

The essence of the unions’ position is that rail workers must use accrued paid time off (PTO) for their sick time. Actually, they use PTO for ANY days off. They get about 21 days of PTO annually. The rest of their time, including their weekends, is tightly controlled.

The context is that rail workers do not get weekends or holidays off unless they use their PTO. They’re on call 24/7, and if they refuse a shift after a designated (12 hour) rest period, they are docked points. Since the rail carriers have laid off more than a third of their workforce in the past decade, every shift is understaffed, and on most shifts, everyone who is eligible is likely to be called in.

Rail workers have jobs that often require them to be on the road for weeks at a time. From Heather Cox Richardson: (brackets by Wrongo)

“…[the unions]…oppose a new staffing system implemented after 2018, which created record profits for the country’s main rail carriers but cost the industry 40,000 jobs, mainly among the people who actually operate the trains, leading to brutal schedules and dangerous working conditions.”

The Precision Schedule Railroading (PSR) system made trains more efficient by keeping workers on very tight schedules. Any disruption in those schedules, like a family emergency, brought disciplinary action and possible job loss for the worker.

In the US, the 40-hour work week provides on average, 104 weekend days off per year, plus federal holidays. How many American workers would accept the total of 21 days off that most rail workers will accrue in PTO under the now-rejected Tentative Agreement?

The Railway Labor Acts of 1926, 1934 and 1966 control not only railroad labor disputes but also airline labor disputes. There is a series of steps that must be taken by both sides, and the final steps are where a union may strike, and Congress can step in and enact a law codifying an agreement between the companies and the unions.

The US Chamber of Congress and some 400 business groups, representing a wide range of industries, have sent a letter calling on Congress to intervene before the strike deadline if a deal is not reached to “ensure continued rail service.”

You would think that puts Democrats in a bind. They’re pro-union, but in this case, they’re jumping to the tune of big business. And why did Biden make his announcement a week in advance of the possible strike? A good negotiator would create some uncertainty in the minds of both the companies and the unions. There should be at least the appearance of a strike being possible.

Shouldn’t the “most pro-labor president” in a generation (in 1992, he was one of only six Senators to vote against legislation that ended another strike by rail workers), demonstrate that he’s proud to be on the workers’ side, at least until he isn’t?

Congress also has the option to dictate a cooling-off period, allowing parties to continue negotiating until they reach an agreement, or force both sides to enter arbitration, where a third-party mediator gets involved.

The unions knew that Congress would likely intervene. So workers would rather have a bad deal forced on them than to vote for it.

Four paid sick days is nothing. The fact that the rail companies are unwilling even to give four sick days says everything you need to know about American corporations in 2022.

We Kill More People With Cars

The Daily Escape:

Sunrise, with Mt. Hood in background, Vancouver, WA – November 2022 photo by Sanman Photography

The NYT has an article showing how the US tolerates a high number of auto-related deaths:

“The US has diverged over the past decade from other comparably developed countries, where traffic fatalities have been falling….In 2020, as car travel plummeted around the world, traffic fatalities broadly fell as well. But in the US, the opposite happened. Travel declined, and deaths still went up. Preliminary federal data suggests road fatalities rose again in 2021.”

They helpfully include a chart that shows America’s relative ranking vs. other developed countries since the start of the pandemic in 2020:

(chart is truncated for viewing purposes)

Monday Wake Up Call – November 28, 2022

The Daily Escape:

Thanksgiving Day, Brewster, MA – November 2022 photo by Anne Marie

There was plenty of news over Thanksgiving that Wrongo was itching to talk about, but instead, he decided to take a complete break. Here’s something that’s been on his mind.

Despite all of the self-congratulating by Democrats, the Cook Political Report shows that Republicans received some 3.5 million more votes than Democrats in the midterms. Republicans received 54.13 million votes compared to the Democrats’ 50.79 million votes. Republicans did better in 2022 than they did in the 2018 midterms by 3 million votes, while Democrats got 10.3 million fewer votes than 2018, when they won control of the House by 235–199. Much of this is turnout.

Despite this context, the narrative is that America rejected the far Right by defeating election denier candidates. And most Trumpist candidates were defeated by significant margins. Democrats shouldn’t rest on their laurels or assume “the Trump fever has broken”. It hasn’t. America comes out of the midterms with voters evenly divided between the Parties.

Now, there are only four swing states left: Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, and Wisconsin. These four only account for 43 Electoral Votes. Stanley Greenberg, a Democratic pollster points to the striking “continuity among the elections” since Trump emerged as a national political figure:

“We’ve now gone through 2016, ’18, ‘20 and ‘22 – and all looked pretty much alike….And it has locked in the coalitions.”

So we’re not only evenly divided, but we’re also deeply divided politically.

Looking at the Electoral College, the midterms offered some optimism to Democrats when 2024 comes around. The five states that decided the last presidential race did so by flipping from Trump in 2016 to Biden in 2020. Those five (Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin) moved more toward the Democrats in 2022.

The Dems won six of the eight Senate and governor races across these states, and Dems could notch a seventh victory if Sen. Raphael Warnock defeats Herschel Walker in a Georgia run-off next month.

But Republicans made Ohio, Iowa, and Florida Redder. Each now appears securely in the GOP’s column for 2024 (and most likely beyond). And the Dem’s perennial hope of turning Texas Blue still looks like it’s another 10 years away after Republican Gov. Greg Abbott’s double-digit victory against Beto O’Rourke. Republicans again won all of Texas’ statewide offices, continuing a Dem shutout that stretches back to the 1990s.

It appears that the offsetting and hardening partisan strengths of each Party could again give the power to decide the presidency to a few hundred thousand voters, in a very few close counties in a few very balanced states.

CNN’s Ron Brownstein says that a 2024 presidential race with just Wisconsin, Nevada, Georgia, and Arizona as true battlegrounds would probably begin with Democrats favored in states holding 260 Electoral College votes (including Washington, DC) and Republicans in states with 235. That means Democrats would need to win just one of Arizona (11 votes), Georgia (16), or Wisconsin (10) to reach an Electoral College majority. But that’s far from a certainty.

This division will make for tons of political stress over the next two years. Each Party understands that our nation’s future is now controlled by the choices of a tiny minority of people living in a few contested political districts: White-collar suburbs of Atlanta and Phoenix, working-class Latino neighborhoods in and around Las Vegas, and the mid-sized communities in Wisconsin’s so-called BOW counties (Brown County, Outagamie County and Winnebago County).

No GOP presidential candidate will concede Michigan or Pennsylvania just because of the midterm results. But the magnitude of those 2022 Democratic wins show how difficult it will be for a Republican nominee to take them in 2024 – particularly if the GOP candidate supports further restrictions on abortion.

It’s likely that Democrats will target North Carolina to expand their roster, while Republicans will target Minnesota and New Hampshire. But flipping any state will be difficult, depending upon candidate quality.

This shrinking list of competitive presidential states could increase political tensions for the next two years. Time to wake up America! Think about how your indifference to politics and to voting in our elections has put the country on a knife edge. The threat posed to America by the MAGA extremists remains very real.

It’s going to take tremendous effort in every single election until this dynamic shifts. And that could take a full generation. To help you wake up, watch “People Get Ready”, a Curtis Mayfield tune that foretold the turning tide in the battle for racial equality. It hit the top of the R&B charts after its original 1965 release by The Impressions.

It’s been covered by scores of artists, including Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen and here in 2009 by Rod Stewart and Jeff Beck at the El Rey Theater in Los Angeles. Beck’s reaction when Stewart comes on stage is priceless. Stewart served as vocalist for the Jeff Beck Group back in 1969:

Sample Lyrics:

People get ready
There’s a train a-coming
You don’t need no baggage
You just get on board
All you need is faith
To hear the diesels humming
Don’t need no ticket
You just thank the Lord

Thanksgiving Week

The Daily Escape:

Turkeys on the fields of Wrong – November 2018 photo by Wrongo

(This is the last column before Thanksgiving. Words from Wrongo will resume on 11/28.)

Thanksgiving is Wrongo’s favorite holiday. As a secular holiday, you’re not required to do anything. The celebration is subdued, and around here, we focus on gratitude. Wrongo always thinks about how grateful we should be to live in this wonderful country of ours, and how grateful we are for all of America’s gifts.

We’re lucky to live in a land of plenty: Most of us have employment, most have access to quality healthcare. Most of us have a warm place to sleep at night, most have hope for their kids’ future.

There are many of us who do not have those things, and it is our collective responsibility to help them get to a place where they are physically and mentally secure. They need our help. And we know what to do, and we know how to do it.

This is our 2498^th column. Wrongo wants to thank all who have stuck around since the beginning in 2010. He thanks all of you who read it now, and that includes readers in more than 60 countries. Special thanks to long haulers Monty B, Fred VK, David P, Pat M, and Terry McK, among others. Wrongo is very grateful to all of you!

Wrongo’s wish is that you allow yourself to feel gratitude today and share it with those around you. The secret of life is to affect others in a positive way.

We’re truly grateful for those who came before us, and to our family members and friends who we can’t be with today. We’re thankful to those who are on the front lines in military service, or at home in our hospitals, schools, firehouses, and police stations. Happy Thanksgiving!

The NYT has an article about how online gambling companies have gotten their noses under the tents at colleges and universities:

“In order to reap millions of dollars in fees, universities are partnering with betting companies to introduce their students and sports fans to online gambling.”

The Times says that Michigan State University’s athletic department inked a deal with Caesars Sportsbook in 2021. Caesars proposed a deal worth $8.4 million over five years. Michigan signed on the line. Other schools have also struck deals to bring betting to campus. More from the NYT:

“After Louisiana State University signed a similar deal in 2021 with Caesars, the university sent an email encouraging recipients — including some students who were under 21 and couldn’t legally gamble — to “place your first bet (and earn your first bonus).”

Since the Supreme Court’s decision in 2018 to let states legalize online betting, gambling companies have been working to convert traditional casino customers, fantasy sports aficionados and players of online games into a new generation of digital gamblers.

And universities, with their captive audience of easy-to-reach students, have emerged as an especially enticing target. So far, at least eight universities have become partners with online sports-betting companies.

And a dozen other universities’ athletic departments and booster clubs have also signed agreements with brick-and-mortar casinos. For example, Turning Stone Resort and Casino is the official resort of Syracuse University’s ‘Cuse Athletics Fund. These gambling partnerships bring in funds that schools can use to sign marquee coaches and build their sports teams.

Wrongo rarely gambles, but he has a mostly lassiez faire attitude about it. He’s skeptical about prohibiting it. But the idea by universities of “let’s introduce our students to online gambling for our profit” sounds, well, wrong. The hypocrisy here is that the sports betting companies are offering “a piece of the action” to schools that not long ago swore that gambling would ruin college sports.

It isn’t exactly the same, but do you recall that back in the 80s, banks introduced credit cards and credit card debt to students? And how did that work out? You can almost imagine hearing: “Want to go double or nothing on those student loans, kid?” The most relevant quote from the NYT is:

“College athletics have become profit maximizing opportunities for athletic directors and coaches.”

Wrongo thinks this has nothing to do with the educational mission of colleges and universities. OTOH, the ol’ ball coach is saying: “Wanna bet”?

Let’s cruise into the holiday by listening to a tune that is new to Wrongo, Josh Groban’s “Thankful” performed live from his “Noel” album. It’s on point with Wrongo’s thinking about Thanksgiving:

Lyrics:

Somedays we forget
To look around us
Somedays we can’t see
The joy that surrounds us
So caught up inside ourselves
We take when we should give.

So for tonight we pray for
What we know can be.
And on this day we hope for
What we still can’t see.

It’s up to us to be the change
And even though we all can still do more
There’s so much to be thankful for.

Look beyond ourselves
There’s so much sorrow
It’s way too late to say
I’ll cry tomorrow
Each of us must find our truth
It’s so long overdue

So for tonight we pray for
What we know can be
And every day we hope for
What we still can’t see

It’s up to us to be the change
And even though this world needs so much more
There’s so much to be thankful for

The Wrongologist

Geopolitics, Power and Political Economy

Category: Daily Escape

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