Distrust of Government – Page 2

We Can’t Give Up Hope

The Daily Escape:

First snow, Great Balsam Mountains, Canton, NC – October 2023 photo by Brandon Montgomery

“To hope is to risk frustration. Therefore, make up your mind to risk frustration.” – Thomas Merton

Everyone’s talking about Hamas, the Gaza hospital and Jim Jordan. Wrongo is certain to write more about those issues, but today, let’s talk about two polls that seem to be telling us a lot about what Americans are feeling right now.

First, the survey by Pew Research “Americans’ Dismal Views of the Nation’s Politics” confirms that millions of Americans are feeling so exhausted and depressed by American politics that they are disengaging from it just when its important to fully engage. Some highlights:

65% of respondents describe themselves as “exhausted” when thinking about politics.
55% say they are “angry” about American politics.
Only 4% say politics makes them feel hopeful.
Pew also asked people to describe American politics in one word. The second most common description was “corrupt”—behind the first-place finisher, “divisive.”

Here’s the tag cloud from Pew:

Notice that there aren’t any positive words that made the cut from the responses. From Robert Hubbell:

“It is no wonder that people want to disengage and look away. Exhaustion is the point of MAGA extremism.”

Hubbell goes on to point out that Republicans turn every issue into an attack:

“Impeach Trump? We’ll impeach Joe Biden, Merrick Garland, Jack Smith, Alejandro Mayorkas, and Christopher Wray.

Indict Trump? We’ll indict Hunter Biden, Hillary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi, and Joe Biden.

Protect Americans from a deadly virus? We’ll undermine trust in science.

Fight human-caused climate change? We will make it illegal to discuss climate change in the classroom.”

These responses are part of a mind game designed to make Democrats and Independents give up and go away. But his great idea is this:

“We have one job: To endure, to abide, to keep the faith until this moment of reactionary extremism subsides. If we can do that, we will leave to our heirs a healthier, stronger democracy.”

John Dean Also wrote about this:

“…I was thinking about how Barack Obama won the presidency in 2008. The first thing that came to mind was his iconic poster with his image and the word “HOPE.” That differentiated Obama from his Democratic party competitors…and his Republican rival, John McCain. Obama embraced hope and the future, and he won.”

Some people attribute the negative messages offered by current candidates to the fact that today’s world is troubled. But as Dean points out, the world was also deeply troubled in 2008 and only Obama was offering hope. He won two terms.

Cartoon Of The Week

The Daily Escape:

Cascade River Valley, North Cascades, WA – September 2023 photo via WanderWashington

Given how often the Republicans in the House shoot themselves in the foot, Santa better bring them Kevlar shoes. This cartoon expresses the problem perfectly:

The room where it never happens:

Remembering 9/11

The Daily Escape:

This mass includes parts of five floors of the North Tower of NYC’s World Trade Center that compacted on 9/11/2001 during the building’s collapse. iPhone photo by Wrongo taken at the 9/11 Memorial Museum, September 2016.

The above is among Wrongo’s favorite pieces at the 9/11 Memorial Museum. It is a charred and pitted lump of fused concrete, melted steel, carbonized furniture and other, less recognizable elements. It weighs between 12 and 15 tons and is four feet high. If you ever thought that humans who were in the Twin Towers when they collapsed might have survived, consider this pancake.

The 9/11 Memorial’s email today asked this question:

“Did you know that over 100 million Americans have been born since September 11, 2001?”

Although Wrongo has a grandson who was born later that week and who’s now turning 22, Wrongo had no idea that roughly 30% of Americans have no memory of this event that profoundly shaped America in the past 22 years.

What do those of us who do remember 9/11 want to tell those who can’t remember it? Maybe that there’s too much fear in America, and all of that fear is grinding us down. The visible scars of 9/11 are gone, but more than ever, America lives in persistent fear.

We distrust Russia. We worry about inflation. We worry that our budget deficit will bankrupt us. We fear for our kids’ safety while they’re in school. We worry that if we lose our job we won’t find another one. Some of us worry that we’ll never find the job we’re looking for. Some of us think the rest of us are Communists. The Lefties think the Righties are fascists, and we’re still afraid that ISIS will attack us on our streets. We fear the mob outside our gates trying to get in. We fear the immigrants already inside the gates.We think most of the news we see is fake. Many of us distrust our public school teachers.

Hell, we don’t trust our government!

Succumbing to so much fear has enabled the growth of internal threats that could end our democracy:

We’re so angry that we’ve lost much of our social cohesion
We aren’t willing to deal with income inequality
We’re seeing overt racism grow before our eyes
We see clear threats to the right to vote, or whether our votes will even count if we cast them

So today’s wakeup call is for America, particularly for those Americans born after 9/11. Don’t forget the heroes and the victims of 9/11, but please, learn to stop letting fear drive you as much as it drives those of us who are old enough to remember 9/11.

Here’s a 9/11 tune: The October 20, 2001 “Concert for New York” can’t be beat. It was a highly visible and early part of NYC’s healing process.

One of the many highlights of that 4+ hour show was Billy Joel’s medley of “Miami 2017 (seen the lights go out on Broadway)” and his “New York State of Mind”. Joel wrote “Miami 2017” in 1975, at the height of the NYC fiscal crisis. It describes an apocalyptic fantasy of a ruined NY that got a new, emotional second life after 9/11, when he performed it during the Concert for New York:

Check out the audience reaction to Joel’s songs. That doesn’t look like fear. That’s where we all need to be today in 2023. It isn’t hyperbole to say that the city began its psychological recovery that night in Madison Square Garden. Please visit the 9/11 Memorial and Museum if you haven’t been there yet.

Why The Polls Are Wrong

The Daily Escape:

Belle, a water taxi in Camden, ME – September 2023 photo by Daniel F. Dishner

Happy Saturday, hopefully, you are getting a great start to a restful Labor Day weekend! This past week, we had friends from Los Angeles stop by the Mansion of Wrong. We had a few bottles of a delightful wine, and the question that never goes away came up again: “Why is Biden doing so badly in the polls?”

There really isn’t a good answer. The economy is doing fine, much better than the pundits expected it would be in the third quarter of 2023. But as Dan Pfeiffer points out:

“…somehow — against all common sense — the 2024 election between a competent President and an incompetent criminal — will be incredibly close. The Real Clear Politics polling average has Biden up by only 1.4%. Biden won the popular vote in 2020 by 4.5%. Given the strong Republican lean of the Electoral College, a Biden popular vote win of this size would likely mean that Trump ends up with 270 electoral votes.”

Now, Wrongo never relies on Real Clear Politics’ average of polls, but they’re not alone in offering up grim polling data, and the one thing Trump beats Biden on in surveys is running the economy, a very scary number :

While the actual economic numbers are good, people mostly look at how much money is in their pockets, asking: “What can I buy, given what I’m earning”? The August jobs report showed continued solid gains in aggregate pay for nonsupervisory workers even after inflation is taken into account. From the Bondad blog:

“Average Hourly Earnings for Production and Nonsupervisory Personnel increased $.06, or +0.2%, to $29.00, a YoY gain of +4.5%….”

YoY is year over year. By comparison, the most recent Consumer Price Index for July was 3.3%. Pay increases have been outpacing overall CPI inflation this year. So wages are creeping up, inflation is almost under control, and there’s no recession on the horizon.

A helpful statistic is that spending on pleasure boats is near previous highs, Axios reports:

“Why it matters: You don’t buy a boat unless you’re feeling fairly confident the economic wind is at your back. So this is a good sign for the economy. The ongoing boat-buying binge — which began during COVID shutdowns — is another strike against the once dominant “looming recession” narrative.”

One million used boats sold in the last 12 months! One guess as to who’s buying all of these boats: It isn’t the antifa-BLM Marxist globalists from big cities and blue states. Florida and Texas are in the top three states in revenues from boating.

And you won’t buy a boat unless you’re fairly confident that the economic wind is at your back. That means despite what people are telling pollsters, people are feeling pretty good about the economy.

Pfeiffer notes that all isn’t lost. As of now, Biden is in better shape politically than Obama was at this juncture. August of 2011 was the first (and only) time Obama’s approval dropped below 40%, and he was losing to a generic Republican. More:

“The primary reason for the statistical tie in the race is that Trump is holding onto more of his 2020 vote than Biden. In a NYT poll, 91% of Trump’s 2020 voters are supporting him again while only 87% percent of Biden’s voters plan to vote for him in 2024.”

“Among Biden’s 2020 voters, only 77% percent of Democrats in the poll have a favorable opinion of Biden, compared to 80% of Republicans for Trump.”

But Pfeiffer says we shouldn’t panic, because convincing people who have already voted for Biden to vote for him again is doable, and easier than convincing a Trumper to vote for Biden. But despite that, given the Reddish tilt to the Electoral College, we should assume that 2024, like the 2020 presidential election, will depend on a number of voters smaller than the number of attendees at a Taylor Swift concert.

A second point we talked about was Biden’s age. There are two referendums that will be a part of the 2024 presidential election. First, on Trump and his 91 counts. Second, on Biden’s age and whether he seems up to the task going forward.

It’s one thing for Biden to tell us about all that his administration has accomplished in 3 years. His results should be pitched to turn his vulnerability as an older person into a perception of wisdom. He needs to convince voters that the country is on a good path and that Biden, our captain, with his age and experience, has steered us to where we’re starting to see success.

Charlie Sykes suggests the pitch should sound like this:

“We’ve done the hard work. We took the punches. We had a plan and now it’s starting to turn around. So the question is, as we come back, who do you want in charge for the next four years?”

And when Republicans spew their litany of racial hatred, and class warfare, Biden should be saying:

“Working folks like you need cheaper prescription drugs, you need to be able to spend more time with your family by getting better wages for your labor…”

Ultimately 2024 will be about voter turnout. Convincing younger voters and those who aren’t fired up about Biden to come out to the polls will decide America’s fate.

Now take a beat and forget about the many crises we face. Let’s focus instead on our Saturday Soother. We’re expecting beautiful weather in the northeast, and much of our time will be spent outside. So join Wrongo in pulling up a comfy chair in the shade and spend a few minutes watching this lovely video of a Loon family swimming on a lake in a thunderstorm. It’s guaranteed to improve your outlook. You may want to bookmark this video to use whenever our politics are driving you nuts:

Monday Wake Up Call – June 5, 2023

The Daily Escape:

Blue Ridge mountains, NC – June 2023 photo by Michele Schwartz

It’s getting to be long enough into our economic recovery that we’ve started to ignore the monthly jobs report by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). Luckily, Simon Rosenberg doesn’t let us forget: (brackets by Wrongo)

“The…BLS jobs report is out and it’s another good one – 339,000 net new jobs, [plus] 432,000…upward revisions from previous months. With this new data my monthly jobs tracker clocks in at:

-33.8m jobs – 16 years of Clinton, Obama

-13.1m jobs – 28 months of Biden

-1.9m jobs – 16 years of Bush, Bush and Trump

Biden’s 13.1m jobs is almost 7 times as many jobs as were created in the 16 years of the last 3 Republican Presidencies, combined.”

Since the end of the Cold War, the US has seen 49 million new jobs created. Remarkably, 47 million of those 49 million jobs were created under Democratic Presidents.

On the Democratic Party’s watch we’ve seen strong economic growth. OTOH, during the same time, Republican presidents have overseen three consecutive recessions. It’s not a stretch to say that the GOP’s economic track record over the past 30 years has been among the worst in US history.

Consider Biden’s record of economic growth:

GDP growth under Biden is 3+%, or 3 times what it was under Trump.
Almost 7 times as many Biden jobs as last 3 GOP Presidents combined.
Best post Covid economic recovery among the G7 countries.
Lowest unemployment rate in a peacetime economy since WWII.
Lowest poverty/uninsured rates ever.
Real corporate earnings up in 2022.

Despite what the GOP is saying to the press about their being deficit hawks, the federal deficit went up every year under Trump, and has come down every year under Biden. Rosenberg adds this helpful chart of GDP growth by president:

So why is it that Americans aren’t convinced that the economy has improved since the pandemic? In a new poll from the AP-NORC, asking if the nation’s economic conditions are in good shape, the percentage who agree is down from 30% last month to 24%. Only a third of Americans in the new survey approve of how Biden’s handling the economy, while two-thirds disapprove.

In the survey, Democrats were more likely than Republicans to view economic conditions favorably, but just 41% of them say the economy’s good and only 7% of Republicans agree. And both numbers are down from the previous month for both Parties.

Now this may be at least partially due to the Republicans scare tactics about the Debt Ceiling. The Hill reports that this AP-NORC poll is in line with other recent surveys that suggest most Americans think the country’s economy is in poor shape, Other polls also indicate low confidence in the economic leadership team.

Axios suggests a different way to view the economic issue. They looked at Federal Reserve survey data from 2017-2022, which shows that people think they’re personal economy is doing just fine, while they think the national economy is in terrible shape:

This is most likely because of the media’s awfulizing about our economy. Obviously, consumer prices are high, but inflation is coming down. But even if inflation went to zero, today’s prices will still be much higher than Americans were accustomed to pre-pandemic, so people will be complaining.

And we can’t discount the negative impact of Congressional dysfunction about the Debt Ceiling, or all the news bunnies crying about our unsustainable national debt.

Still, our economy continues to do better than even the economists think. The May employment report marked the 14th straight month that more jobs were created than economists expected. Our GDP continues to grow (it’s up more than 5% from its pre-pandemic peak), even after accounting for inflation.

The average US employee now makes $33.44 per hour, 17.5% more than before the pandemic. The stock market is up 10% so far this year, but still, Americans aren’t buying it. Axios’ Felix Salmon reports that while Americans say that they’re broadly happy with their personal finances (above chart), in other polls, a majority consistently think (erroneously) that we’re currently in a recession.

Time to wake up America! Things are rolling along reasonably well, even if they’re not fantastic. We have the best job market in 50 years, and there’s no recession on the horizon. As the Rolling Stones said: “You can’t always get what you want…”. Maybe it’s time to look at the glass as half full.

To help you wake up, watch and listen to Alan Jackson cover Eddie Cochran’s 1958 “Summertime Blues” in 1994. The Blue Cheer had the radio hit with it in 1968. Wrongo loves three versions of this song: Blue Cheer, the Who, and this Allen Jackson cover:

Saturday Soother – February 25, 2023

The Daily Escape:

Death Valley sunset, Death Valley NP, CA and NV – February 2023 photo by Leila Shehab Photography

From the NYT:

“To Democrats, the train derailment and chemical leak in the hamlet of East Palestine, Ohio, is a story of logic, action, and consequences: Rail safety regulations put in place by the Obama administration were intended to prevent just such accidents. The Trump administration gutted them.

To Republicans, East Palestine is a symbol of something…more emotional: a forgotten town in a conservative state, like so many others in Middle America, struggling for survival against an uncaring mega-corporation and an unseeing government…”

If you follow FOX news you can be forgiven for thinking that the federal disaster relief teams just got around to dealing with the hazardous materials spill in East Palestine, Ohio.

Actually, those federal teams have been on the scene since it happened.

Republicans are trying to make a political meatloaf out of Biden’s visiting Ukraine rather than visiting Ohio. Or why it took Pete Buttigieg three weeks to visit the site. Even the East Palestine mayor Trent Conaway said Biden’s trip to Eastern Europe was “a slap in the face.” But if Biden had visited, you know the mayor would say he had better things to do than shepherd around a bigwig.

Their message is that Democrats are indifferent to working-class voters.

But maybe there’s something under the surface of these politics-as-usual arguments. The derailment presents issues that Republicans rarely like to grapple with: Corporate power and a clear need for government regulation.

What may be brewing is a new and different message by the GOP’s populist wing, one that breaks with Party orthodoxy and targets corporate America. And Norfolk Southern, owner of the derailed train and also behind a clear lobbying effort to keep the government from improving rail safety, is a big and very easy target.

Vox quotes Saurabh Sharma, the president of American Moment, a public policy organization that aims to influence young conservatives to become more populist:

“I think that this tragedy that happened in East Palestine is an opportunity for Republicans that have been looking for opportunities to distinguish themselves from the neoliberal set in the party to do so.”

The execrable JD Vance was in East Palestine with Trump, and told Axios afterwards that figures like Trump, Tucker Carlson and himself recognize that East Palestine residents and those like them were the GOP’s voters:

“The three of us, in our own ways, recognized instantly: This is fundamentally our voters, right? These are sort of our people. It’s a reasonably rural community. It’s been affected by industrialization,” Vance said. “These are the people who really lost when we lost our manufacturing base to China, And these are the people who are going to be forgotten by the media unless certain voices make sure that their interests are at the forefront.”

Wow, Yale grad Vance, trying to speak mid-western English says: “This is fundamentally our voters, right?”

The question is: Can Republicans build an economic populist base within their Party? It’s clear that Trump deserves criticism from the Democrats over the accident, since it’s easy to connect the derailment to Trump’s deregulation of ineffective train braking systems, the cause of the accident. That means Trump wouldn’t be exempt from political attacks by economic populist Republicans.

Conservatives like Jon Schweppe, the director at the American Principles Project, a conservative think tank, tried to link a few ideas together:

“There is a growing sense that all of these corporations are against us — not only are they trying to screw us over on the woke stuff, but generally, they just don’t care about ordinary people.”

The American Principles Project is virulently anti-woke, anti-trans and anti-voting rights. Can they also be anti-corporations? And how close are they to mainstream Republicans?

Can the East Palestine accident cause Republicans to embrace truly populist issues? Would the GOP tie corporate graft and greed to bureaucratic incompetence and Democratic indifference? They seem to fit easily within existing Tucker Carlson messaging.

BTW: All of it also fits very easily into Democratic messaging.

But let’s forget about who’s woke or, how will the second year of the Ukraine war go? It’s time for our Saturday Soother, when we disengage from the world as completely as possible and focus on finding a calm state to prepare us for the week to come.

Here in the Mansion of Wrong, we spent time upgrading our internet service to fiber optic. That wasn’t the promised slick changeover touted by the provider, but it’s finally working.

To get soothed, settle in a big chair by a south-facing window and watch Lang Lang play Debussy’s “Suite Bergamasque, or Clair de lune”. This performance was part of an album launched in Paris on Valentine’s Day, 2019. Listen as Lang Lang performs on a boat cruising along the Seine while you enjoy Paris at night:

Monday Wake Up Call – February 20, 2023

The Daily Escape:

Oatman, AZ on Route 66 – February 2023 photo by Laurel Anne Lindsay

Some of you may have heard about a study called “The Hidden Tribes of America” by the group More in Common. It’s trying to understand the forces driving political polarization in America today. They classify the American electorate into seven distinct groups, they call “Tribes”.

But their key conclusion is that most people don’t belong on the far left or far right: (brackets by Wrongo)

“…the largest group that we uncovered in our research has so far been largely overlooked. It is a group of Americans we call the Exhausted Majority…representing a two-thirds majority of Americans, who aren’t part of the Wings….most members of the Exhausted Majority aren’t [simply] political centrists or moderates. On specific issues, their views range across the spectrum.”

“But while they hold a variety of views, the members of the Exhausted Majority are also united in important ways: They are fed up with the polarization plaguing American government and society….. [they] are so frustrated with the bitter polarization of our politics that many have checked out completely….. they aren’t ideologues who dismiss as evil or ignorant the people who don’t share their exact political views. They want to talk and to find a path forward.

This chart from the study graphically illustrates the seven tribal groups of the American populace. As you can see, there is a left-wing group that is about 8% of the US population. And there are two right-wing groups that equal about 25% of Americans. That leaves four groups in what the authors call the “Exhausted Majority”. They are 67% of the American populace.

Here are some demographic characteristics of the seven groups:

Progressive Activists: younger, highly engaged, secular, cosmopolitan, angry.
Traditional Liberals: older, retired, open to compromise, rational, cautious.
Passive Liberals: unhappy, insecure, distrustful, disillusioned.
Politically Disengaged: young, low income, distrustful, detached, patriotic,
Moderates: engaged, civic-minded, middle-of-the-road, pessimistic, Protestant.
Traditional Conservatives: religious, middle class, patriotic, moralistic.
Devoted Conservatives: white, retired, highly engaged, uncompromising,

Wrongo identifies as one of the Traditional Liberals, their description rings true.

The authors say that in their research, this tribal membership predicted differences in Americans’ views on various political issues better than demographic, ideological, and partisan groupings. You can read or download the whole study here.

An “Exhausted Majority” may be a positive political development. Wrongo spends nearly every day thinking that there are just two opposing camps. And that they each view each other with fear and loathing, refusing to listen to anything that doesn’t fit their existing narrative. As we’re entering the next presidential campaign, it’s good to know that Wrongo’s view of our polarization might be well, wrong.

Is the “Exhausted Majority” merely a new response to our dysfunctional politics? Wrongo isn’t alone in thinking that what’s wrong with our country will take decades to overcome. Faced with that, people start to look for quick fixes, or a way to stop listening to the wrangling. And you don’t have to be unaligned with either Party to share this sense of exasperation.

The people described in the “Exhausted Majority” are similar. It’s also true that for most people, politics isn’t the be-all-end-all of their lives. They’d prefer that the business of government didn’t require their involvement. They’re trying to get their kids educated, and to keep them safe. They prefer to see political compromise happen without needing to be involved.

But if you can walk away from politics when it frustrates you, then you’re in the lucky minority:

There are large numbers of parents who have discovered that their child is addicted to opioids.
There are many people who had lost their health insurance when they were laid off.
Many sent their daughter to college in the South only to learn that she no longer has any reproductive rights.
Many are worried that books are being taken from public school libraries.
Some fear that they may lose the right to vote.

These people can’t simply throw up their hands and walk away. Only political action will help them. We all know that the political radicals are irredeemable. We also know they make the most noise, but they’re a minority.

The fed-up people on both sides and in the middle have to find a way to take the country back from the radicals, instead of allowing ourselves to be herded into existing opposing camps.

Time to wake up America! We can’t simply drop out. There’s too much at stake. Democrats need to find candidates and a message that can motivate an additional 5%-15% of the “Exhausted Majority” to vote with them. To help you wake up, watch, and listen to the RedMolly band play a very nice cover of Richard Thompson’s “Vincent Black Lightning 1952”. It’s a surprise how beautifully it adapts to a bluegrass idiom, and the dobro work makes it:

“Vincent Black Lightning” is one of the most perfect songs ever written. We saw Thompson perform it live at Tanglewood last summer.

Ohio’s Airborne Toxic Event

The Daily Escape:

Roan Mountain, NC – February 2023 photo by Spencer Carter. Roan Mountain has the largest naturally growing gardens of Catawba rhododendrons in the world.

Back on February 3, a Norfolk Southern (NS) train carrying hazardous materials derailed near the town of East Palestine, Ohio. Federal investigators say a mechanical issue with a rail car axle caused the derailment. After several days of underreporting, we now know what happened.

Here are some facts: The derailment included 50 cars, 20 of which carried toxic materials, 14 of those contained vinyl chloride. The subsequent fire burned for three days. Then there was a “controlled release” of poisonous gas. And finally, effects of the poison were felt on locals, their animals, and local waterways.

The axle problem is important since it is the cause of all the hardship in East Palestine. Trains use steel wheels on steel rails because they produce 85+ % less friction than rubber truck tires do on roads. The contact point of a wheel on the rail is about the size of a dime. Compared to trucks, trains are cheaper (4 cents vs 20 cents per ton-mile in the US), and more sustainable: One ton of freight can be moved over 470 miles on a single gallon of diesel fuel.

But sustaining that economic advantage requires the railroads to maintain all that steel in good working order. Otherwise if things go wrong with a train that’s 4.5 miles long, they can go very, very wrong. And reporting seems to indicate that NS didn’t maintain its steel wheels correctly.

Also, the derailed NS train was not classified as a “high-hazard flammable train,” despite its hazardous and flammable cargo. Such a classification would have lowered its speed and affected its route. From Lever News:

“Though the company’s 150-car train in Ohio reportedly burst into 100-foot flames upon derailing — and was transporting materials that triggered a fireball when they were released and incinerated — it was not being regulated as a “high-hazard flammable train,” federal officials told The Lever.”

Apparently when current transportation safety rules were first created, a federal agency sided with industry lobbyists and limited regulations governing the rail transport of hazardous compounds. That decision effectively exempted many trains hauling dangerous materials including the NS train in Ohio, from the “high-hazard” classification and its more stringent safety requirements.

Generally, workers want safety and the bosses want money. Safety requires additional time, more workers, and money. Deregulation contributes to the lack of safety. Using vinyl chloride in a chemistry lab requires safety equipment. Tank cars containing thousands of gallons of it should require more than the government apparently thinks is safe.

Wrongo always looks at the politics in these sorts of industrial disasters because they are usually caused by the economics created by politics.

Given how dangerous these chemicals are, and given how they are used and transported, we have to expect accidents like this to happen. But the government should be able to tell us whether the current accident rate is higher or lower than expected, and if higher, what should be done to correct the problem.

We trust the bureaucrats that make the rules to balance safe operations against the risk of an airborne toxic event like this. Wrongo’s brief look into this one incident doesn’t evidence that kind of trust. It appears that the bureaucrats who make the rules on railroad safety were influenced by the industry and wrote a rule that puts the economics for the railroad industry ahead of public safety.

These issues exist everywhere in the relationship between industry and government. There’s always pressure by the industry on the bureaucrats to deregulate. In a man-made disaster, that can place greater burdens on the communities, like just happened in East Palestine.

This is what the Michael Lewis’s book “The Fifth Risk” is about: People who go to school, get extensive training and then work in obscure corners of the government. Lewis talks about how important these people are, and how for decades they’ve been denigrated, vilified, and ignored, largely by Republicans.

This is another area in which the GOP is awful in a completely lopsided way to Democrats.

The existence of corporations who can impose risks on the rest of us is what happens when there is unequal political power. We need a state with a strong regulatory system to protect us. The state must build regulatory regimes for chemical spills that shift the risks back onto those who create them.

NS in this case, has said that they will be fully responsible for the damages caused in East Palestine.

That’s encouraging, but how does that little town with a population of less than 5,000, or even the state of Ohio hold NS to their word?

Monday Wake Up Call – February 6, 2023

The Daily Escape:

Sea smoke, South Portland, ME looking towards Portland Head light – February 2023 photo by Benjamin Williamson Photography

On Saturday, Wrongo and Ms. Right went to a dinner party with friends and two generations of family. The after dinner talk turned to how quite a few of the kids and grandkids weren’t planning on having children.

We tossed around ideas about why they were unlikely to procreate, and somethings stood out. First, they see climate change as an existential threat that society is unwilling to solve, even though the technology already exists. Why bring a kid into that?

Second, society seems broken. Our group meant that we face simultaneous crises, layered on top of each other. This situation involving simultaneous global challenges, for which we have few solutions, is called Polycrisis.

And a crisis in one global system can spill over into other global systems. They interact with each another so that each new crisis worsens the overall harm. The Polycrisis environment weakens every individual’s sense of security and their place in the world.

One impact that seems related to the simultaneous climate, health, economic and geopolitical challenges are the effects on children. The needs for special education and special services for the very young has never been greater in America. It’s forcing big changes in public school budgets across the country.

No one is really sure why this is happening.

Wrongo isn’t proposing a solution, just suggesting we need to think more about how the problems of declining birth rates, coupled with the growing issues our young children are facing, might be interrelated.

Noah Smith an economist, has an interesting newsletter about how we define community:

“In the past, our communities were primarily horizontal — they were simply the people we lived close to….Increasingly, though, new technology has enabled us to construct communities that I’ve decided to call vertical — groups of people united by identities, interests, and values rather than by physical proximity.”

Smith says that in the past few decades, Americans became disengaged from their local communities, hunkering down in their houses, and failing to interact with the people around them. That led to a well-documented decline in Americans’ participation in civic organizations, local clubs, etc. Our neighbors can also be stifling and/or repressive because they impose uncomfortable community norms on us.

We’ve always had Smith’s vertical communities: “the Jewish community”, “the LGBT community”, and many others. But in the past, an identity grouping wasn’t a true community. We all have identities that connect us with faraway people — other Irishmen, other Taylor Swift fans.

Prior to the internet, we couldn’t have much contact with them. These loose vertical communities weren’t efficient ways to exchange ideas. Before email, text and streaming video, getting the word out was very slow, and our horizontal communities would decide whether what we wanted to share was worthwhile.

Now, we’re no longer isolated. The internet brought us a world of human interaction: social media feeds, chat apps, and so on. Suddenly we’re surrounded by people through their words, their pictures, and their videos.

Now we organize much of our human interaction around virtual vertical communities. Former occasional connections became Facebook groups, subreddits and personal networks on Twitter. And like our small towns back in the day, vertical communities use social ostracism to punish those who deviate from consensus norms.

But vertical communities can’t provide things like public education, national defense, courts of law, property rights, product standards, and infrastructure that we all depend on.

These require a government to administer them. And governments are organized horizontally; mostly defined by lines on maps. But what if we socialize, cooperate, and fall in love with the people from our vertical community? What if we grow apart from the people next door and the relationship is irreparable?

We see this every day in America when citizens go to a PTA meeting and discover a bunch of strangers saying things that they despise.

Wrongo isn’t saying that vertical communities are another enemy. But they can and do exacerbate the polycrisis by making truth harder to see. And by making effective action more difficult.

If you doubt this, remember how powerful the anti-vaxx vertical was at the height of the Covid pandemic. Today’s vertical communities are strong enough to keep our government from getting much of anything done. How can we work together with neighbors when we share few common bonds?

America today is a predatory society. We predate on politics, ideas, values, and culture. Biden’s trying to change this, but can he succeed? How many of us are trying to help? Changing a society that’s this broken, one that’s moving deeper into vertical communities will be a very heavy lift.

Time to wake up America! What can we do to maintain what Lincoln in his first inaugural address said:

“We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection.”

To help you wake up, listen and watch the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band’s 2022 cover of Bob Dylan’s “I Shall Be Released” with Larkin Poe (Rebecca Lovell and Megan Lovell) on vocals and a fabulous slide guitar solo:

Sample of Lyrics:

Standing next to me in this lonely crowd
Is a man who swears he’s not to blame
All day long I hear him shout so loud
Just crying out that he was framed

There Are No Partisan Facts

The Daily Escape:

Roaring Mountain, Yellowstone NP – January 2023 photo via Yellowstone NP. The steam vents are called fumaroles. With a limited water supply, the water in steam vents turns to steam and makes noise before reaching the surface.

Today let’s delve into the right-wing mind. Sadly we can’t go in too deep, because you know. Wrongo will try to connect the dots on a few ideas that three interesting people wrote about last week, First, the headline in Phillip Bump’s piece in the WaPo:

“There’s actually only one conspiracy theory: Democrats are evil.”

He’s writing about all of the online conspiracy theories surrounding the hammer attack on Paul Pelosi, and then generalizes from the specific:

“Last year, Pew Research Center found that 1 in 8 Republicans (12.5%) liked it a lot when their leaders called Democratic leaders “evil.” Another 16% said they liked it a little.”

So, 28.5% of Republicans think Dems are mostly evil. Bump offers the long laundry list of Democrat conspiracies propounded by Republicans.

For example, the 2020 stolen election shows that Democrats are dishonest and will do anything to retain power.
The “deep state” is out to get Trump and the Republicans. This leads to demonizing the FBI and CIA as liberals out to get Trump. This year, we can add the National Archives who just wanted their secret documents back.
These conspiracies have led the new Republican House majority to create a committee to look at weaponization of the FBI, DOJ and other agencies against Republicans.

Next, let’s look at recent polling on the economy. Matt Yglesias provides two charts that show the US partisan divide on the economy. First is how Democrats view their family’s economic situation over the past 8 years:

On Election Day (ED) 2016, 50% of Democrats said their family’s situation was about the same. On ED 2020, 50% said it was the same. After two years under Biden, it was 52%, so no change. On ED in 2016, about 32% of Dems said their financial situation had gotten better. That fell to about 10% by ED 2020 and is now about 23%.

Contrast that with what Republicans think now and what they thought on Election Day 2016:

From ED in 2016 when Trump won the White House until ED 2020 when he lost it, the percentage of Republicans who thought their financial situation was about the same went from 45% in 2016 to 55% on ED 2020, meaning that they were pretty satisfied with the state of the overall economy. But with Biden, that dropped precipitously to 21% in just two years.

Republicans who thought their personal financial situation had gotten worse stood at 47% in 2016, and just 10% in 2020. But in January of 2023, after two years of Biden, 74% say their financial situation has gotten worse!

But what really happened with the economy? Paul Krugman has thoughts about what we learn from watching only cable news: (brackets by Wrongo)

“Would you know that real gross domestic product has risen 6.7% under President Biden, that America gained 4.5 million jobs in 2022 and that inflation over the past six months, which was indeed very high last winter, was [growing at] less than 2% at an annual rate?”

How does Krugman explain the disconnect between actual economic data and perceptions? More:

“Partisanship is clearly part of the story….. 90% of Republicans said the national economy was poor. A longer view, from the Michigan Survey of Consumers, finds Republicans rating the current economy worse than they did in June 1980, when unemployment was above 7% percent and inflation was 14%.”

Welcome to the United States of Cognitive Dissonance.

There always has been cognitive dissonance in the world. It’s part of being human. But today, people sincerely love to complain and persist in wanting to see the bad side of everything. Egg prices are up? This economy sucks. All that Americans seem to be capable of seeing is the downside.

The country Wrongo grew up in is still here, but its culture has changed. As a member of the Silent Generation, Wrongo and most others wouldn’t have bet against the USA, or its people. But today, we can’t be certain. This dumbing down of American citizens has happened in rapid and spectacular fashion, and the fact-free perception divide is weakening our institutions. This will be extraordinarily difficult to bridge.

Wrongo has no silver bullet for fixing this, but a very basic way to start is to read up on the big problems. Speak up whenever you hear bullshit spewing. That takes courage, but it can’t go uncontested.

Attend your town meetings. Join groups that sponsor educational exchanges on issues. And vote. Vote in every election no matter how trivial.

Wrongo lives in a semi-rural town. When he overhears political talk, it can be staggering to learn what some otherwise smart people believe.

We don’t have to convert all of them, maybe getting 10% to land on the side of the actual data would create a permanent change in our politics.

The Wrongologist

Geopolitics, Power and Political Economy

Category: Distrust of Government

Cartoon Of The Week

Why The Polls Are Wrong

Monday Wake Up Call – June 5, 2023

Saturday Soother – February 25, 2023

Ohio’s Airborne Toxic Event