Grand Tetons early morning â 2011 photo by Wrongo
Two short thoughts for your Saturday. First, hidden in the language of the GOPâs Tax Bill is a something that would change the Johnson Amendment, a provision in the tax code that prohibits churches, faith communities, and other non-profits from outright endorsing political candidates:
âŠThe provision is not a complete repeal of the Johnson Amendment. As written, it would only free up religious communitiesânot all non-profitsâto endorse candidates and appears to prohibit churches from going out of their way to campaign for a candidate outside of their normal religious activities.
The GOP wants to erode the separation of church and state. Letâs see who, if anyone, in Congress is willing to fight for the Constitution.
Second, the Democrats had a grenade go off inside the DNC when an excerpt from Donna Brazileâs new book was published by Politico. She claims that the Clinton administration assumed control over the Democratic National Committee (DNC) in exchange for keeping it solvent, then funneled most of the funds raised into her campaign, leaving the states with very little to support down-ballot races.
The states kept less than half of 1 percent of the $82 million they had garnered from the Hillary fund-raisers the campaign was holding to support state-level candidates. Thatâs about $4.1 million.
When Howard Dean was chair of the DNC he instituted a 50-state policy, saying the DNC would maintain full time workers in each state, to contest seats up and down the ballot from the county, to state legislature to house and senate races.
When Obama won, Dean was out, and the 50-state policy was dismantled. After that, the DNC was reorganized to serve only national level elections. And Obama For America took its place as the funds-raising vehicle for the presidential re-election. And Hillary did much the same with the Hillary Victory Fund, but she went further, as Brazile reveals: The DNC would covertly back Hillary in the primaries.
And now, through these efforts, the Democrats have lost the White House, the Senate and the House, in addition to most state governments.
Itâs hard to decide whatâs worse, that the party is run by incompetents, or that it is just hopelessly corrupt.
Time for a hostile takeover of the Democratic Party.
On to the weekend. You obviously need to go to a happy place that doesnât include continual assaults by our national media. So brew up a cup of London-based Union Hand-Roasted Coffeeâs El Topacio Microlot, El Salvador, available online for ÂŁ8/200g.
Now kick back someplace you can see the natural world outside, and listen to Peter Mulvey playing his instrumental, âBlack Rabbitâ. Mulvey is known for his guitar chops and songwriting. He got started by playing in the Boston metro. This short acoustic gem is executed with ease, and pure musicality:
Those who read the Wrongologist in email can view the video here.
Notre Dameâs (ND) students and employees no longer have birth control covered by their health plan. This from Michael Hiltzik of the LA Times:
Notre Dame thus becomes the first and most important employer publicly to take advantage of the Trump administrationâs Oct. 6 rollback of contraceptive coverage under the Affordable Care Act. The act requires insurance plans to provide contraceptive services without charging a deduction or co-pay. Trump expanded an exemption aimed at religious institutions…to almost any employers claiming religious or âmoralâ objections to birth control.
ND notified students and employees of the change on Friday, according to The South Bend Tribune, that birth control coverage for students will end August 14, 2018. Faculty and staff, however, will lose their coverage on December 31. The school will still cover birth control if itâs used as treatment for a medical condition and not as pregnancy prevention.
Notre Dame has 5,825 employees and 12,393 students. Almost all (90%) of employees are covered by the university insurance plan and are likely to be affected by the policy change (although not all use birth control). Among students, 3,020 â 705 undergraduates and 2,315 graduate and professional students â are covered by the university plan. This means students that have only really had adult material from a site like https://www.fulltube.xxx/ as their sexual education are no longer getting the benefits of free contraception, this could lead to a lot more unprotected sex, the spread of disease and unwanted pregnancies.
ND had been fighting to drop birth control coverage since the ACA was enacted. The rules issued by the Trump administration allowed any employer to request an exemption from the birth control coverage requirement for moral or religious reasons, and ND took that opportunity.
ND used to be a liberal Catholic university. In the 1970s and 1980s, when Rev. Theodore Hesburgh was NDâs president, he helped make ND a university that was among the top Catholic academic institutions. Father Ted served on the board of the top-three bank that Wrongo worked at during that period, and Wrongo got to meet him a few times. Father Ted seemed to be a terrific guy. He was identified with progressive thought, and ND, along with Wrongoâs alma mater Georgetown, moved to establish that American Catholic universities should operate with:
True autonomy and academic freedom in the face of authority of whatever kind, lay or clerical, external to the academic community itself.
Hiltzik reminds us that the quote comes from the 1967 Land OâLakes statement, which was signed by ND, Georgetown and Boston College. Its purpose was to balance the universityâs responsibility to modern society with devotion to religious ideals:
The Catholic university of the future will be a true modern university but specifically Catholic in profound and creative ways…
Hesburgh was a prominent supporter during the civil rights era and was known for his work opposing nuclear proliferation and fighting poverty. The current president of ND, Rev. John I. Jenkins, said after the rule change that Trump struck a blow for religious freedom:
Critical issues of religious freedom were at stake…For that reason, we welcome this reversal.
Making the point that life begins at erection.
But Theocracy isnât an asset in an academic marketplace where kids have a bewildering number of choices for college. The Church’s theology around marriage, sex and birth control is incoherent to sexually active people who must disavow much of its teachings in order to live in the real world.
But the larger question is, what is Trump and his Republican fellow-travelersâ issue with birth control? Most Christian churches have no problem with it. As George Carlin said: ânot every ejaculation deserves a nameâ.
Letâs close with Monty Python doing âEvery Sperm is Sacredâ from âThe Meaning of Lifeâ
Key lyric:
Let the heathen spill theirs
On the dusty ground.
God shall make them pay for
Each sperm that can’t be found.
Those who read the Wrongologist in email can view the video here.
Wrongoâs internet was down for a few days, and a lottta things happened before he could get back on the air. We will take up trucks killing tourists on NYC bike paths, and Muellerâs indictments at some point, but today, Wrongo again finds that he just canât quit John Kelly.
You know the headline, Kelly, in an interview with Laura Ingraham, expressed his view that the Civil War was the tragic result of âthe lack of an ability to compromise,â fought between âmen and women of good faith on both sides,â including the âhonorableâ Robert E. Lee.
All of our leaders have flaws…Washington, Jefferson, JFK, Roosevelt, Kennedy– that doesn’t diminish their contributions to our country, and it certainly can’t erase them from our history. And General Kelly was simply making the point that just because history isn’t perfect, doesn’t mean that it’s not our history.
Did you notice that she mentions JFK and Kennedy with one name in between? Or maybe she means John F. Kelly.
Was the leader she referred to Robert E. Lee? We can only hope that some reporter asked Sanders what Lee’s actual contributions to the country were.
Of course, he owned the land that is now Arlington National Cemetery, but that wasnât a voluntary contribution, it was seized. Or perhaps she means the battle at Gettysburg, where he provided generations of military officers with lessons on the importance of managing your subordinates, and not charging fortified positions across a mile of open ground.
Or maybe it is that he lent his name to the 1969 Dodge Charger used in the TV show, âThe Dukes of Hazzardâ.
The next day, Sanders said that Kellyâs comment that the Civil War was caused by a failure to compromise came from Ken Burnâs âThe Civil Warâ documentary. But letâs not go down the rat hole of whether Burnsâ documentary is an accurate telling of Civil War history.
Kellyâs claim that the War was caused by a failure of both sides to compromise is totally undercut by the fact that most of the Confederate states seceded before Lincoln was even inaugurated. The election of Lincoln triggered the conflict; notwithstanding that he had not yet put the question of ending slavery on the table.
John Kelly was 40 years old when the Burns film came out. You would expect that he would have known more about the Civil War than you get from a video, even a multi-episode show. After all, he has a BA from the University of Massachusetts, and an MA from Georgetown. Most educated people do know better.
Maybe the White House will prove Kellyâs view of the Civil War with facts, you know, Hannity-style facts, not fake news out of some liberal text book thatâs not approved in Texas.
Denis McDonough was Obamaâs Chief of Staff for four years, the entire second term. Does anyone know what his opinion is about civil war monuments? About Robert E. Lee? About how a certain female Congresscritter from Florida is an empty barrel?
Kelly has become the empty barrel he complained about two weeks ago.
Letâs close with âAutumn in New Yorkâ by Billie Holiday. After the truck terror attack, we learned that six of the eight victims were foreign tourists. And despite the attack, it is still a wonderful time to be in NYC:
Fall at the Statehouse in Augusta, Maine â photo by Robert F. Bukaty
Welcome to what we may start to call Robert Mueller Monday. Ray Dalio, the founder of the Bridgewater Associates, the worldâs largest hedge fund has serious concerns about the uneven recovery of the US economy.
In a LinkedIn post, Dalio said that if politicians and business people look only at the economyâs average statistics about how Americans are doing, they could easily make âdangerous miscalculationsâ because the averages mask deep differences in how people in various income segments are doing.
Dalio divides the economy into two sections: the top 40%, and the bottom 60%. He then shows how the economy for the bottom 60% of the population, (thatâs three in five Americans for you English majors), has been much less successful than for those in the top bracket.
For example, Dalio notes that since 1980, real incomes have been flat or down for the average household in the bottom 60%. Those in the top 40% now have 10 times as much wealth as households in the bottom 60%, up from six times as much in 1980.
Dalio says that only about one-third of people in the bottom 60% (20% overall) save any of their income. Only a similar number have any retirement savings. These three in five Americans are experiencing increasing rates of premature death. They spend about four times less on education than those in the top 40%. Those in the 60% without a college education have lower income levels, and higher divorce rates.
Dalio believes these problems will intensify in the next five to ten years. The inequality problem is caused by our politics and our fiscal policies, not by the Fedâs monetary policies.
OTOH, Dalioâs concerns arenât a surprise to anyone who follows the political economy. In fact, it isnât a surprise to anyone who has walked through any mid-sized American city, or driven through any small town in the heartland.
The problem is not low wage growth.
The problem is not long-term unemployment, as degrading and humiliating as that is.
The problem is that the US economy has been restructured over the past 30 years as an underemployment, low-wage economy in which most new jobs created are temporary jobs (whether you are a laborer, a technician, a service worker or a professional) with no job security, low wages and few benefits.
The real question is can we solve the problem? Many old lefties argue for a Universal Basic Income, (UBI), but Wrongo thinks thatâs, er, wrong. If the UBI were high enough to provide even a subsistence living for every American, it would be massively inflationary. And it would merely allow businesses to pay lower wages, which is why some wealthy business people, like Peter Thiel, support a UBI.
Wrongo thinks we should support guaranteed work, not guaranteed income. Most people need and want to work in order to keep their place in our society. Getting a check just isnât sufficient. If people matter at all, and if 95% of them lack the means to live without working, society must strive to employ all of those who have been deemed redundant by the private sector.
And there is plenty to do around America. Start with the 5,000+ bridges and dams that need replacing, or the 104 nuclear power plants that are falling apart.
We need real tax reform that can’t be loopholed. Corporations must pay more, not less. Stop the move to give corporations incentives to repatriate offshore earnings by lowering their effective tax rates. That only compromises our future tax stream. Corporations have to pay more in taxes, and agree to increase the wages of average workers.
Economically, we are in a pretty scary place. People across party lines and socio-economic levels are frightened for their financial security. We need a jobs guarantee, not a UBI.
So, wake up America! Letting corporations and the rich dictate our investment in human capital or infrastructure has us on the road to eclipse as a country. To help you wake up, here is Todd Snider performing “Conservative Christian, Right Wing, Republican, Straight, White American Male“, live at Farm Aid 2014 in Raleigh, North Carolina in September, 2014:
Why arenât the Dixie Chicks singing harmony on this?
Those who read the Wrongologist in email can view the video here.
The occupational projections suggest faster growth in urban areas than in suburbs, and slowest in rural areas. The two sectors projected to have no or negative growth â production and agriculture â are more concentrated in small towns and rural areas. Many technical, scientific, legal, financial, and healthcare jobs are clustered in big, dense cities.
The fastest growing occupations are projected to be in clean energy: solar photo-voltaic installers and wind turbine service technician jobs are expected to double. Four of the 10 fastest growing occupations pay at least $100,000 a year, according to the BLS: physician assistants, nurse practitioners, software developers, and mathematicians.
Indeed combined the BLS projections with 2016 US Census Bureauâs American Community Survey data to show where the faster-growing occupations will be located. That suggests faster growth will be in coastal urban areas, and slowest growth will be in rural areas:
Indeed then overlaid voting patterns on the BLS job growth projections. It is clear that Blue America has a more favorable forecast for future jobs growth than Red America:
So what does this chart tell us? In places that voted for Trump by a 20-point margin, 16% of workers are in occupations projected to shrink, versus 13.2% of workers in places that voted for Hillary Clinton by a similar 20-point margin.
The next decadeâs jobs growth could also increase inequality. The fastest growing jobs include several with the highest average wages, including healthcare, computer, and mathematics occupations. Occupations with the lowest average wages are also projected to grow fast, such as home health aides and personal care aides. Middle-wage job growth is projected to lag, at about half the rate of the highest- and lowest-wage jobs.
It seems that a big slice of Trumpâs supporters will be losers when it comes to jobs and income growth over the next 10 years. Will they stick with the Republican Party when the job situation gets even worse for them? Of course!
Now, here comes the weekend!
This week we watched Jeff (Iâm not a) Flake give a valedictory speech that excoriated the leader of his party. Catalonia succeeded from Spain, and the GOP pushed their tax cut agenda forward. The Trump administration tried to deny a young illegal immigrant woman an abortion, and Hillary Clinton was implicated in paying for the Steele Dossier.
Plenty of hits to the system for a single week, so itâs time to take a break from the reality known as Trumpmerica.
Time to brew a very large mug of Celestial Seasons Bengal Spice tea, put your feet up, and put on the Bluetooth headphones. Now listen to Aaron Coplandâs âQuiet Cityâ from the 1989 album âWorks by Husa, Copland, Vaughan Williams, and Hindemithâ, performed by Wynton Marsalis with Phillip Koch on English Horn along with the Eastern Wind Ensemble.
Copland said the piece was an attempt to mirror the troubled main character of an Irwin Shaw play, who had abandoned his religion and his poetry in order to pursue material success. He Anglicized his name, married a rich socialite, and became president of a department store. But he continually returns to his guilty conscience whenever he hears the haunting sound of his brother’s trumpet.
See if Marsalis can take you inside your conscience:
Those who read the Wrongologist in email can view the video here.
The CIA is expanding its covert operations in Afghanistan, sending small teams of highly experienced officers and contractors alongside Afghan forces to hunt and kill Taliban militants across the country, according to two senior American officials, the latest sign of the agencyâs increasingly integral role in President Trumpâs counterterrorism strategy.
This new effort will be led by small units known as counterterrorism pursuit teams. They are managed by CIA officers from the agencyâs Special Activities Division and operatives from the National Directorate of Security, Afghanistanâs intelligence arm. It will include elite American troops from the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC). But most of the troops will be current members of the Afghan militia.
The NYT quotes Ken Stiles, a former CIA counterterrorism officer:
The American people donât mind if there are CIA teams waging a covert war there…They mind if thereâs 50,000 U.S. troops there.
Well, Mr. Stiles, Wrongo minds quite a bit. And if Americans really don’t mind a covert war over there, then we shouldnât wonder “why they hate us.”
But as with most Trump administration initiatives, it gets worse: The NYT article says that contractors will have a significant role. In August, the former head of Blackwater, Eric Prince, lobbied the Trump administration for a contractor-led effort to defeat the Taliban in Afghanistan. This might be his payday for that marketing effort. Letâs assume until we learn otherwise, that Prince and his contractors will be involved in the CIAâs new campaign.
It is possible that this campaign will be a boon for the Taliban. It will certainly kill a few of them, but it will also alienate quite a few Afghans. Think about it: Most Taliban fighters are locals. Killing them creates new local recruits for the insurgency.
The worst part of this is that weâve been here before. During the Vietnam War, we stood up something called Operation Phoenix:
[Phoenix] was designed to identify and “neutralize” (via infiltration, capture, counter-terrorism, interrogation, and assassination) the infrastructure of the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam (NLF or Viet Cong). The CIA described it as “a set of programs that sought to attack and destroy the political infrastructure of the Viet Cong”.
There were two components of the program. Provincial Reconnaissance Units (PRUs) and regional interrogation centers. PRUs would kill or capture suspected NLF members, as well as civilians who were thought to have information on NLF activities. Many of those captured were then taken to interrogation centers where some were allegedly tortured in an attempt to gain intelligence on VC activities in the area.
Phoenix operated from 1965 to 1972. By 1972, Phoenix had neutralized 81,740 suspected NLF operatives, informants and supporters, of whom between 26,000 and 41,000 were killed. We had the body count,but the passive support for the Viet Cong in South Vietnam increased because of Phoenix.
And of course, we went on to win lose the war.
So, we are starting down a road that we shouldnât, because we havenât learned from our past experience. Perhaps CIA Director Mike Pompeo could open a book, and learn something about the CIAâs history before he jumps at the latest shiny idea.
For years, the primary job of the CIA in Afghanistan has been training the local Afghan militias. It also used members of the militias to develop informant networks and collect intelligence. This means the CIA has few independent sources of intelligence in the country. It will have to depend on the people it has trained in the militias, each of which are local, and have their own agendas. Success in this campaign depends on reliable intelligence. Who in this or that hamlet is a member of the Taliban? Without trusted local sources, the militia, whether under CIA or contractor command, will likely use torture to get answers they need.
It is predictable that this campaign will end up with big body counts just like Operation Phoenix, and without having made Afghanistan secure for its people.
Itâs supposed to be some combo of Brett McGurk, who has the jawbreaker title of: Special Presidential Envoy for the Global Coalition to Counter ISIS, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and Secretary of Defense Mattis. But the Syrian fighters we back just went rogue. From Oil Price:
In a move that surprised many observers of the ongoing war for Deir Ezzor province, the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) handed over one of Syria’s largest gas fields to Russian forces on Thursday, possibly as the result of unprecedented direct talks between high ranking Russian officials and Kurdish leaders in Qamishli in northeastern Syria.
The information, disseminated by Syrian military reports, claims that an agreement has been brokered between Russia and the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces whereby the Syrian government will be allowed to assume control over the gas field.
Itâs pretty clear that the Russians continue to run rings around the US in Syria. Does anybody in DC know what the US strategy is in Syria? If so, can they tell the rest of us?
The Kurds may have decided that their best bet is to make bi-lateral deals with Russia, Iran and Syria to hedge against their possible fight with Iraq and Turkey over independence, particularly if the US plans to watch from the sidelines. The Kurds now know that their hopes that the US would support their drive for independence was in vain, since we sided with Iraq when forced to choose between them.
Maybe the Russian/Syrian deal offers some protection to the Kurdâs desire for self-rule.
The remaining question is: was this deal part of some backdoor agreement between Moscow and Washington?â If not, how could this happen without the US knowing about it?
Oil Price says that on Wednesday, Russiaâs Deputy Foreign Minister was spotted in the Kurdish autonomous zone of Rojava meeting with Kurdish and Syrian leaders in the northern city of Qamishli. No one has said what was discussed, but it was probably big, and our man McGurk wasnât on the guest list.
This follows last month’s secret US-Russia military to military meeting about Syria. The AP reported:
The meeting, however, also suggests an expanded US and Russian effort to coordinate their efforts, raising questions about how the Pentagon is adhering to an American prohibition against military-to-military cooperation with Moscow. Congress enacted that law in the wake of Russiaâs annexation of the Crimea region of Ukraine in 2014.
And the unexpected transfer of the gas field by the SDF to the Syrian government raises the question if additional cooperation between the Syrian Arab Army and Kurdish-led militias to seize control of the much larger Al-Omar Oil Field from ISIS further south will occur. Last week, control of that oil field was thought to be a competition between the two forces.
The US endgame in Syria is the million dollar question. Before, it looked as if the goal was permanent US bases in a Syrian Kurdish federated zone. But if the Kurds are cutting separate deals with Russia and Syria, a US exit from Syria could be happening sooner rather than later.
We know that there are great complexities in these relationships in the Middle East, and that the Administration is hamstrung by its anti-Russia, anti-Iran ideologues.
Unless that goes away, we can just call the Trump administration âIncapable of Agreements,â while the Kurds, the Syrians, the Russians and Iran are all very capable of making them.
Autumn at Nictaux Falls, Nova Scotia – photo by Keith Doucet
Wrongo canât let go of Gen. Kelly, or his comments in the White House Briefing Room.
Kelly said during his briefing that most Americans didnât even know anyone who was in the US military. He then told the press corps that only those who knew someone in the military could ask questions. As if on cue, the first reporter who spoke started with the phrase âSemper Fiââ the motto of the US Marines in his question to the four-star Marine General.
So here, Kelly required a form of loyalty oath by reporters in order to answer their questions.
Does this concern any of you? There are risks in both our reliance on an all-volunteer military, and on our veneration of them as warrior-kings.
The all-volunteer military creates many different problems. Most important, a volunteer military has dangerously skewed the demographics of the military compared to the country. There are now big demographic differences between the professional military and America at large. Charles J. Dunlap Jr., a retired Air Force major general at the Duke Law Schools says: (emphasis and brackets by the Wrongologist)
I think there is a strong sense in the military that it is…a better society than the one it servesâŠ[The military is] becoming increasingly tribalâŠin the sense that more and more people in the military are coming from smaller and smaller groups. Itâs become a family tradition, in a way thatâs at odds with how we want to think a democracy spreads the burden.
By the end of the draft in 1973, military service was distributed pretty evenly across regions. But that is no longer true.
Changes to the home towns of people in the military since 1973 align closely with todayâs red states. The uneven pattern of military service is part of the cultural differences that characterize different regions of our country. This has broad ramifications for our democracy.
In other words, many Republicans believe a military coup might be necessary, and they can see themselves supporting it. This is a dangerous disconnect. A fascinating poll question was: (emphasis by the Wrongologist)
Should active duty members of the US military always follow orders from their civilian superiors, even if they feel that those orders are unconstitutional?
Should . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .18%
Should not . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49%
Not sure . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33%
The answer implies that Republicans at least, think that our members of the military are Constitutional scholars.
The weakening of support for many of our institutions is clear: Every year Gallup asks Americans about their confidence with 15 major segments of American society. The police and the military routinely top the list with overwhelming support, while no other government institution inspires confidence among the majority of voters, including the presidency, the Supreme Court, public schools, the justice system, and Congress.
We all want to believe that those at the top of our military are too principled to launch a coup against the civilian government. But itâs clear that there is a current of thought running through the GOP and a significant minority of the military that believes there may be a better way to run the government.
And a highly persuasive General might easily find political support for a coup.
Time to wake up, America! The role of an all-volunteer military must be debated, as well as our veneration of them as warrior-kings.
The possibility of surrendering our democracy has rarely seemed as close as it is today. To help you wake up, here is The Who with âWonât Get Fooled Againâ, the last cut on âWhoâs Next?â released in 1971.
Takeaway Lyrics:
I’ll tip my hat to the new constitution
Take a bow for the new revolution
Smile and grin at the change all around
Pick up my guitar and play
Just like yesterday
Then I’ll get on my knees and pray
We don’t get fooled again
