The Wrongologist – Page 8 – Geopolitics, Power and Political Economy

Can We Make Billionaires Pay More Taxes?

The Daily Escape:

Sunrise, Cundy’s Harbor, ME – May 2024 photo by Eric Storm Photo

Economist Gabriel Zucman is a proponent of a global wealth tax. His column in the NYT explains what that is and how it would work:

“Until recently, it was hard to know just how good the superrich are at avoiding taxes. Public statistics are…quiet about their contributions to government coffers….Over the past few years…scholars have published studies…attempting to fix that problem. While we still have data for only a handful of countries, we’ve found that the ultrawealthy consistently avoid paying their fair share in taxes.”

The problem of billionaires paying very little in taxes is international. In the US, the problem is that billionaires rarely have any salaries to speak of:

”Why do the world’s most fortunate people pay among the least in taxes, relative to the amount of money they make? The simple answer is that while most of us live off our salaries, tycoons like Jeff Bezos live off their wealth. In 2019, when…Bezos was still Amazon’s chief executive, he took home an annual salary of just $81,840. But he owns roughly 10% of the company, which made a profit of $30 billion in 2023.

If Amazon gave its profits back to shareholders as dividends, which are subject to income tax, Mr. Bezos would face a hefty tax bill. But Amazon does not pay dividends to its shareholders. Neither does Berkshire Hathaway or Tesla. Instead, the companies keep their profits and reinvest them, making their shareholders even wealthier.

Unless…Bezos, Warren Buffett or Elon Musk sell their stock, their taxable income is relatively minuscule. But they can still make eye-popping purchases by borrowing against their assets. Mr. Musk, for example, used his shares in Tesla as collateral to borrow $13 billion to put toward his acquisition of Twitter.”

Slashing the corporate tax rate and getting rid of the estate tax have also had dire effects in terms of wealth distribution:

“Historically, the rich had to pay hefty taxes on corporate profits, the main source of their income. And the wealth they passed on to their heirs was subject to the estate tax. But both taxes have been gutted in recent decades.”

In 2018, under the Trump administration, the US cut its maximum corporate tax rate to 21% from 35%. And the estate tax has almost disappeared. Relative to the wealth of US households, it generates only a quarter of the tax revenues it raised in the 1970s.

The effective tax rate (the percentage of someone’s total income that they paid in taxes in all forms) is now lower for the 400 richest American billionaires than it is for the bottom 50% of income earners. Here’s the effective tax rate in 1960 and 2018 for these two groups respectively:

Source: NYT

The US national debt is $35 trillion, almost all of which we acquired during the same period as the reduction of taxes on the rich. That isn’t a coincidence. And since capital and people are both completely mobile, the problem of taxation of wealth doesn’t end at our borders. More from Zucman:

“There is a way to make tax dodging less attractive: a global minimum tax. In 2021, more than 130 countries agreed to apply a minimum tax rate of 15% on the profits of large multinational companies. So no matter where a company parks its profits, it still has to pay at least a baseline amount of tax under the agreement.”

Zucman is proposing we apply a similar minimum tax to billionaires:

“Critics might say…this is a wealth tax, the constitutionality of which is debated in the US. In reality, the proposal stays firmly in the realm of income taxation. Billionaires who already pay the baseline amount of income tax would have no extra tax to pay. The goal is that only those who dial down their income to dodge the income tax would be affected.”

Critics of a minimum tax say it would be hard to apply because wealth is difficult to value. But according to Zucman’s research, about 60% of US billionaires’ wealth is in stocks of publicly traded companies. The rest is mostly ownership stakes in private businesses, which can be assigned a value by comparing them to the value of similar firms.

But the big issue is how to get broad international participation in this billionaire’s minimum tax. In the current multinational company minimum tax agreement, participating countries are allowed to overtax companies from nations that haven’t signed on. This incentivizes every country to join the agreement or lose tax revenue.

The same mechanism could be used for billionaires. For example, if Switzerland refuses to tax the superrich who live there, other countries could tax them on its behalf. Countries such as Brazil, have shown leadership on the issue, and France, Germany, South Africa and Spain have recently expressed support for a minimum tax on billionaires.

This is far from a done deal, although Biden has proposed a billionaire tax with similar objectives. And Zucman’s proposed tax wouldn’t impact the ordinary rich. He says there are about 3,000 people who would be required to give a relatively small bit of their profits back to governments.

Zucman’s closing words:

“The idea that billionaires should pay a minimum amount of income tax is not a radical idea. What is radical is continuing to allow the wealthiest people in the world to pay a smaller percentage in income tax than nearly everybody else.”

Great idea, one that almost everyone agrees with, EXCEPT those who have the power to do something about it. We’re looking at you, Republicans! Also, when a significant percentage of the (relatively) poor in this country support Trump who is dedicated to cutting taxes for the rich, is there any hope that taxes will be raised on the wealthy?

That’s more than enough thinking for this week. It’s time for our Saturday Soother, where we attempt to ignore the latest about the campus protests, or whatever else Gov. Kristi Noem is training her gun at, and gear up for another week in the political and cultural wars.

Here on the Fields of Wrong, the crab apple trees are in full bloom along with our weeping cherries. There is still plenty to do if we are to finish our spring cleanup before summer.

But, before we start down that backbreaking path, let’s grab a mug of coffee and a seat outside. Now watch and listen to Luigi Boccherini’s “Guitar Quintet No. 4 in D major “Fandango”, G.448”, recorded in the Unser Lieben Frauen Church, in Bremen Germany in 2019. Boccherini was an Italian composer and cellist. He wrote a large amount of chamber music, including over one hundred string quintets for two violins, viola and two cellos:

More On The Campus Protests

The Daily Escape:

Japanese Garden, Portland, OR – April 2024 photo via The Oregonian

On Tuesday night, hundreds of NYPD officers entered Columbia University in riot gear, one night after students occupied the University’s Hamilton Hall.

And in a “you can’t make this s__t up” moment, Tuesday was exactly 56 years to the day when police cleared Hamilton Hall of Vietnam War protestors in 1968. The new clear out happened 13 days after students built their encampment and lit the match that started a student movement against the war in Gaza on college campuses nationwide.

The police crackdown at Columbia isn’t an isolated event. There was a round of arrests at City College in Harlem (NY). And police responded to clashes between pro-Palestinian and counter-protesters at UCLA. On Monday, demonstrators at The New School took over Parsons School of Design. Meanwhile, police cleared an encampment at Yale. Nationwide, more than 1,000 students have been taken into police custody since the original encampment began at Columbia on April 18.

From John Dean:

“More than four dozen colleges now have active protests against . . . against what? Signs demand an end to genocide in Gaza, disinvestment from Israel, and an end of US support for Israel. But Jewish students are also being attacked. For some protestors, Palestinians are the people fighting for freedom, and the Jews are the oppressors.”

As the protests continue, the story grows ever more complicated. House Republicans plan a series of hearings into what they are characterizing as antisemitism on college campuses. House Speaker Mike Johnson announced the hearings and also threatened the loss of federal funding:

“Over the last few weeks, we’ve seen absolute lawlessness and chaos on college and university campuses across America. It’s not right, and everybody in this country knows it. If they don’t correct this quickly, you will see Congress respond in time, you’re gonna see funding sources begin to dry up. You’re gonna see every level of accountability that we can muster.”

Columbia’s leadership took the Republicans at their word. They invited the NYPD to campus to remove students from Hamilton Hall with force.

Before the Columbia students occupied Hamilton Hall and got ejected, and before the UCLA demonstrating groups decided to fight each other, these protests seemed familiar in that they were an echo of the Occupy Movement in 2012. Back then, the vast majority of the violence was caused by police, much like it is today, But it isn’t clear that today’s encampments have sufficient size or strength to achieve their goals. They are certainly not of the scale of 2012’s Occupy, let alone the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s.

If the past tells us anything, we should be skeptical that these protests will actually lead anywhere. The 1968 Vietnam protests eventually fizzled out, particularly when it became clear that students would be shot and killed by police and the National Guard. Occupy ended with a 17-city crackdown by police that happened just two months after Occupy began. The George Floyd protests fizzled out, but not before significant property damage and police crackdowns.

One thing is very clear: The speed with which campus protestors have embraced Palestine is remarkable. These students have never shown interest in the slaughter of Muslim children in Syria, or women and teenage girls in Iran. To Wrongo’s knowledge, none have protested against genocide in Darfur. Is now what we’re seeing the power of TikTok to feed highly curated information to them?

Some might say that the students are expressing normal human empathy, possibly with a touch of ignorance regarding the history of the Palestinians and the Israelis. And certainly with a definite lack of understanding of the limits of free speech in America. Free speech does not permit extended protests on private property.

The purpose of free speech is the absolute freedom to speak your mind. The First Amendment does not grant the right for a person or group to occupy property that doesn’t belong to them. Freedom of speech does not include resisting arrest. Would any of us say that freedom of speech allows protesters to occupy their home? Free speech doesn’t allow making threats to kill a person or members of a group.

In addition to the desire to draw attention to the Gaza carnage, the campus protests seem to be about the role of the US government and American companies supporting Israel. Doesn’t that make their protests difficult to understand? Israel has been a US ally for more than 70 years. In that time, it hasn’t been able to defend itself without substantial US aid. Most Israeli aircraft bombing Gaza targets today are American-made.

Does our support for Israel make the US complicit in the Israeli military action in Gaza? Of course, but should the US now end that support? If colleges divest from Israel, would that help Palestinians? Hard to say, but it’s unlikely to cause any meaningful change.

Wrongo doesn’t think the students’ problems are with Israel the country or necessarily, with the Israeli people. Most of the heat is reserved for actions by Bibi, his cronies and the IDF. From The Economist:

“Two areas where the IDF has fallen short are its responsibilities as an occupying power and its duty to minimize civilian deaths. Some 1.7m people have been displaced; many lack adequate food, water or medicine.”

More: (emphasis by Wrongo)

“…many armies would find Israel’s rules of engagement disproportionate and hence illegal. The IDF is reported to have set the threshold of civilian deaths in justifying decisions to strike a junior Hamas fighter at 20:1 and a senior leader at 100:1. For Saddam Hussein, Iraq’s dictator, America set a threshold of 30:1.”

The IDF appears to be failing in its goal of destroying Hamas. After six months, Hama’s most senior leaders are still alive, and over 100 hostages remain in captivity. Most important, Israel appears to have no strategy to prevent Hamas from rising from the rubble. Without meeting their goal of destroying Hamas, Israel will remain subject to insurgency.

Israel is paying a high price both economically and diplomatically for its Hamas war. There has been a very real shift in support for Israel’s methods of conducting its war with Hamas. If the student protests were to energize America voters to reject supporting an unending conflict, a significant number of American politicians would eventually follow.

Today, Israel is in a doom loop where the operations designed to reduce the number of terrorists will likely attract recruits to replace them. Without a plan for peace, Israel will end up as an occupier or as in the past, repeatedly striking Gaza to tamp down the insurrectionists.

The story of the 2024 campus protests is still being written. The outcome remains difficult to predict. With the end of the academic year approaching, could the calendar be the deciding factor?

Should Dems Worry About Students Disrupting Their Convention?

The Daily Escape:

Sunrise, Iron Duff, NC – April 2024 photo by Rhiannon Medford. Hard to believe those colors aren’t enhanced.

The clashes between Hamas/Israel war protesters and police on college campuses nationwide is spreading alarm among Senate Democrats. They’re worrying that this type of anger will make the Party’s Chicago-based presidential nominating convention a spectacle that will hurt Biden’s chances of re-election. Does that mean we’re looking at Chicago 1968 version 2.0?

From The Wrongologist:

“In 1968, Tom Hayden helped plan the antiwar protests in Chicago that targeted the Democratic National Convention. Police officers clashed with thousands of demonstrators, injuring hundreds in a televised spectacle that a national commission later called a police riot. Yet, Hayden and others were charged by federal officials with inciting riot and conspiracy.”

Those demonstration led to the Chicago Police riot. We remember it for Mayor Richard Daly saying these immortal words:

“Gentlemen, let’s get this straight. The policeman isn’t there to create disorder, the policeman is there to preserve disorder.”

Those of us who have reached a certain age remember too well what happened in Chicago at the 1968 convention. From The Hill:

“A number of Democratic senators are old enough to remember the violent clashes between police and anti-Vietnam War protesters at the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago, where the nomination of Vice President Hubert Humphrey as the party’s presidential candidate was marred by images of police tear-gassing protesters and beating them with clubs.”

The Atlantic’s David Frum explains why the disruptions in Chicago in 1968 are unlikely to happen again. His point is that 2024 isn’t 1968. Protesters presuming to replicate 1968 will find the US government is much better prepared, Frum says: (emphasis by Wrongo)

“…responsibility for protecting political conventions has shifted from cities and states to the federal government. This…was formalized in a directive signed by…Clinton in 1998. The order created a category of “National Special Security Events,” for which planning would be led by the Secret Service.

National Security Special Events draw on all the resources of the federal government, including, if need be, those of the Defense Department. In 2016, the federal government spent $50 million on security for each of the two major-party conventions.

Those funds enabled Cleveland, the host of the 2016 Republican convention, to deploy thousands of law-enforcement personnel….Federal funds paid for police to be trained in understanding the difference between lawful and unlawful protest, and to equip them with body cameras to record interactions with the public. The city also used federal funds to buy 300 bicycles to field a force that could move quickly into places where cars might not be able to go, and that could patrol public spaces in a way that was more approachable and friendly.”

This wasn’t an issue in 2020 when the conventions were mostly virtual due to the Covid pandemic.

Right now, the media are making the campus demonstrations seem like a big deal, and they are, in the sense that university campuses are lightly controlled and lightly policed. Frum adds:

“Pro-Palestinian protesters have proved considerably more circumspect when they march in places where laws of public order are upheld.”

The Feds have also gone to school on the Jan. 6 insurrection that has informed their planning. While the subsequent J6 prosecutions make it much less likely that people hoping to disrupt the DNC convention will ever get much beyond being hopeful. It’s important to point out that the scale of today’s protests are nowhere near the same as the Vietnam protests in 1968.

More on the current thinking of students from Simon Rosenberg:

“…there is not broad support for these protests in America or on American college campuses. Most young people are far more concerned with making a living, their health after a pandemic, loss of reproductive freedom and our democracy, climate change, gun safety and a host of other issues.”

Rosenberg includes an interesting chart from the Harvard IOP Youth Poll:

The only issue where inflation did not win its individual match-up was when it was paired with women’s reproductive rights. Women’s reproductive rights was considered the more important issue, 57% to 43%. Israel/Palestine ranked next to last among the 16 issues.

Wrongo has no idea if the campus demonstrations will morph into something huge, or become a nothingburger, but he agrees with this from Caroline Orr Bueno:

“The stories you hear in the media will be the most extreme examples that can be found, and nearly all of them will be fundamentally misrepresented based on the biases of the person telling the story. This will fuel a cycle of escalation that few people on either side want.”

She makes the point that university administrators are not prepared to handle the demonstrations while at the same time, facing donor anger. From the London FT:

“Donors are withdrawing millions of dollars in planned funding to punish US universities for their responses to Hamas’s attack on Israel, in a stand-off over free speech, higher education funding and academic leaders’ public responsibilities.”

The FT also reports that:

“Such actions have highlighted the influence of donors, who last year contributed $60bn to US universities…”

Time to wake up, America! Let’s not get twisted up by the potential for demonstrations in Chicago by students protesting the Hamas/Israel war. How about focusing instead on the antidemocratic extremists who speak at the Republican convention to renominate Trump? We shouldn’t fear this debate. We should welcome it.

To help you wake up on a warm Tuesday, watch and listen to the late Peter Green, former guitarist of Fleetwood Mac, play “Albatross”, originally from FM’s 1969 album “The Pious Bird of Good Omen”. Here Green plays it with the Peter Green Splinter Group in England in 2003:

The late, great BB King said of Peter Green: “He’s the only white guy to ever make me sweat.”

Cartoons Of The Week – April 28, 2024

(The Monday Wake-Up Call will appear on Tuesday)

Many cartoons this week about the Supreme Court’s ridiculous views of presidential immunity. As reader TMcK says:

“They are creating some grand explanation for what is a way to avoid admitting the fruit of the conservative movement is something vile and corrupt.”

On to cartoons. Why is Clarence Thomas allowed to hear this case?

Supremes get behind delaying the Jan. 6 trial:

Supremes seem to agree Trump is above the law:

NY judge seems reluctant to find Trump in contempt:

Are the student protests as bad as the media is portraying them?

The campus demonstrations seem more like Occupy Wall Street than a political movement:

TikTok ban signed by Biden. Politicians once again focus on the wrong thing:

The Supreme Court Is Officially Corrupt

The Daily Escape:

Moonrise, Boston, MA – April 2024 photo by Kristen Wilkinson. The Jenga-style building is Boston University’s Data Science Center.

Wrongo spent part of Thursday morning listening live to the oral arguments at the Supreme Court (SCOTUS) over Trump v. United States, which concerns former president Trump’s claim of absolute immunity from criminal charges for “official acts”: In this case, whether Trump can claim immunity as a defense in the Jan. 6 case brought by Jack Smith, the DOJ’s special prosecutor.

While the decision in this case is unclear at this point, the questions the Conservative justices asked of both sides were very disheartening.

A short walk through the history of this case: The Conservative majority granted Trump a victory before the hearing began by refusing Jack Smith’s request to skip the intermediate step of an appeal to the DC Circuit Court of Appeals. Then the Court improved on that by refusing to hear the matter on an expedited schedule. Finally it appears that the Court probably won’t issue what pundits think will be a fractured opinion until the last possible day (June 30). It’s possible that the Court will order the DC trial court to engage in pre-trial fact-finding about the difference between “private” and “official” acts. Meaning further delays, possibly until after the November presidential election.

And if Trump were to win, the Jan. 6 case will be quashed by the incoming DOJ.

So even if the Supremes don’t grant Trump a total victory, they have already granted Trump what he most wanted: a lengthy delay. Their lackadaisical approach to resolving the question of immunity smells of the current politicization of the Court. From Jamele Bouie:

“Rather than grapple with the situation at hand — a defeated president worked with his allies to try to overturn the results of an election he lost, eventually summoning a mob to try to subvert the peaceful transfer of power — the Republican-appointed majority worried about hypothetical prosecutions against hypothetical presidents who might try to stay in office against the will of the people if they aren’t placed above the law.

It was a farce befitting the absurdity of the situation. Trump has asked the Supreme Court if he is, in effect, a king. And at least four members of the court, among them the so-called originalists, have said, in essence, that they’ll have to think about it. “

Chris Hayes reminded us when Republicans aggressively took the other side of the immunity argument:

Taking a wide view, Alito is 74. Thomas is 75. Roberts and Sotomayor are 69. The next president could be in a position to nominate four replacements for these justices if Trump wins, or if Biden wins a second term. If it’s Trump, say goodbye to the SCOTUS for at least 30 years, and say goodbye to your Constitutional rights. That would also mean that Trump can commit crimes with impunity, including a complete dissolution of the Voting Rights Act, implementing legalized voter suppression, and much more.

Is it totally lost on the American people that the very same Supreme Court who ruled that 172 million women should no longer have the freedom to decide their own pregnancy choices, is now, suddenly, struggling with the idea whether ONLY ONE MAN in America should have the freedom to commit crimes without punishment?

Watergate and Nixon doesn’t come close to the stench surrounding today’s Supreme Court and its propping up of Trump. Josh Marshall had this to say:

“The Roberts Court is a corrupt institution which operates in concert with and on behalf of the Republican Party . . . That’s the challenge in front of us. . . . But things become more clear-cut once we take the plunge and accept that fact.”

But, there’s really nothing you can do about it individually. So relax and cruise into our Saturday Soother, where we turn off all political news for a few minutes and try to find the will to rejoin the fight next week.

Here on the Fields of Wrong, we had a hard frost on Friday morning, and expect 80° on Monday. It’s weather like this that keeps us from planting the vegetable garden until early May. To help you get into a proper frame of mind, grab a seat by a south-facing window. Now watch and listen to “Suite Opus 34 for flute, harp, violin, viola and cello” by Marcel Tournier. Tournier is among the relatively few important composers who were also virtuoso harpists. He composed several dozen solos for harp, and a few chamber works that feature the harp. Tournier wrote this Suite in 1928. He died in 1951.

Here is his “Opus 34” performed by the Cracow Harp Quintet:

Wrongo and Ms. Right first learned about Tournier and saw this live last summer as part of a local concert series by the Washington Friends of Music.

Thoughts On The Student Protests

The Daily Escape:

Orca #T99C Barakat breaching very near shore, Point No Point Beach, WA – April 2024 photo by Hongming Zheng. Yes, the Orca was really that close. The photographer says it was about 10’ from shore.

The US media is giving front-page treatment to the wave of pro-Palestinian protests on university campuses across America. From the NYT:

“University administrators from Texas to California moved to clear protesters and prevent encampments from taking hold on their own campuses as they have at Columbia University, deploying police in tense new confrontations that already have led to dozens of arrests.”

“At the same time, new protests continued erupting in places like Pittsburgh and San Antonio. Students expressed solidarity with their fellow students at Columbia, and with a pro-Palestinian movement that appeared to be galvanized by the pushback on other campuses and the looming end of the academic year.”

Protesters are saying that their demands include divestment by their universities from companies connected to the Israeli military campaign in Gaza, disclosure of those and other investments and a recognition of the continuing right to protest without punishment.

There are many questions raised by these protests. Does protesting by students against what Israel is doing in Gaza equate to antisemitism? Are the protesting students’ free speech rights being violated by the several universities when they are arrested for peaceably protesting?

Wrongo hates writing about Israel and Gaza. It’s very emotional on both sides, maybe more than for any other topic. It’s possible to be accused of being complicit in a genocide and/or accused of being insensitive to the killing of Jews or of being antisemitic.

From Margret Sullivan:

“Can we be clear about a few things? Protesting this slaughter is not expressing antisemitism. It is not engaging in hate speech. It is not endangering Jewish students. It is doing what should be done on a college campus — taking a stand against a perceived wrong, at least provoking discussion and debate.”

Wrongo thinks students have a right to protest. As Robert Reich says:

“The most important thing I teach my students is to seek out people who disagree with them. That’s because the essence of learning is testing one’s ideas, assumptions, and values. And what better place to test ideas, assumptions, and values than at a university?”

Non-violent student activism is a great way to learn and to participate in our democracy. While activism shouldn’t violate school rules, if you are a student and your school makes rules about student protests like: “you can’t protest on this lawn or at this time,” and you break that rule, you should be prepared to get suspended or arrested.

The schools are responsible for not making rules that effectively restrict or end student activism. And students are responsible for following all reasonable rules.

But there’s another big question: Why are the media and politicians treating these protests as very important problems? It’s true that the Israel/Gaza war is very important. It could plausibly lead to a regional war or even to a wider war. But what’s happening on college campuses in the US is relatively minor, particularly if they’re compared to the student protests during the Civil Rights era or during the Vietnam era.

Yet, the Israel/Hamas war and the campus protests about it are receiving nearly the same amount of media coverage. We never see headlines that read “Another Peaceful Day On 99% Of US College Campuses” even though that headline could run on any day of the year. This is the shape of the media today, and it’s difficult to understand why so many reporters and politicians are so deeply concerned with a relatively minor story. More from Robert Reich:

“Education is all about provocation. Without being provoked — stirred, unsettled, goaded — even young minds can remain stuck in old tracks.”

Protests that call for boycott, divestment and sanctions are perfectly rational ways to protest Israel’s war against Hamas. However, getting Columbia (or other universities) to sell an investment in a US defense contractor, or in an Israeli company isn’t going to change anything.

Also, it’s a stretch for protesters to say that any university, its professors or anyone on its faculty are “complicit” in anything Israel decides to do in Gaza. But, non-violent forms of protest offer important objections to policy. And when the university criminalizes or stifles non-violent protests, that often leads to violent protests instead.

In the Columbia University case, its president called in the police (against the vote of the University council) telling the NYPD that the students had been suspended and thus were trespassing. But at that point, the students had not yet actually been suspended, although they WERE arrested. Then Columbia suspended them because they had been arrested:

“The suspension notices that the students received now cite the arrests themselves as part of the cause for suspension. In other words, the logic was circular. They called in the New York Police Department on the premise that the students were trespassing, when they hadn’t yet been suspended…”

Perfectly circular logic. If campus authorities need to act to protect the safety of any of their students, then they should. But when a university is facing pressure from pro-Israel donors and elected officials to shut down the protests, because the powerful find the protesters and their demands offensive, the university goes too far.

If that isn’t bad enough, consider Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR): (emphasis by Wrongo)

“On Monday, the Arkansas senator demanded that President Joe Biden send in the National Guard to clear out the student protests at Columbia University against the Israel-Hamas war, which he described as “the nascent pogroms at Columbia.”

Nascent Pogroms? What is Cotton seeing at Columbia that the rest of us aren’t seeing? Apparently every Republican Senator knows that the military must be called in to end left-wing insurrections, but never for right-wing ones! We should understand that there’s a possibility that any military response might lead to Kent State 2.0.

A final thought. We need to differentiate between protestors who show up and do terrible things and the idea that the current rules of discourse focus mainly on the complainant’s subjective state of mind (“I felt unsafe!”). Without turning this into a rant, once a member of any so-called victim class makes that accusation, the burden of proof falls on the accused to prove they didn’t do something wrong. They have to prove a negative. That’s a game that the accused can rarely win.

That isn’t to say that some students aren’t doing objectively awful things during protests.

The vast majority of student protesters probably are good kids who are horrified by the things they see happening in Gaza. They log onto social media and see heartbreaking videos and feel compelled to do something, even though as individuals they are powerless. That’s a normal human, empathetic reaction to war. War is horrific.

Having that reaction doesn’t automatically make them Jew-hating terrorist-lovers.

What’s past is prologue. Remember how protests morphed into killings at Kent State and elsewhere in 1970? Today’s demonstrators aren’t trying to avoid getting drafted for the Vietnam War; they’re protesting what they see as a genocide in the Middle East.

Wrongo’s Vacation Report

The Daily Escape:

Footbridge, Magnolia Plantation, Charleston, SC – photo via itstartedoutdoors

Wrongo and Ms. Right are back at the Mansion of Wrong after a 16-day trip to visit siblings. One feature of the trip was that we didn’t watch TV, read newspapers, or visit social media during in the entire visit. We experienced withdrawal, but we felt refreshed by the time we returned home. Highly recommended.

We stayed in three cities, Gettysburg, PA, St. Augustine, FL and Charleston, SC. These cities are a kind of throughline in that they each represent a snapshot of America’s past with slavery, and the efforts of modern-day citizens to place the good and bad of that past into a current context.

Let’s spend a few moments talking about each city. St. Augustine has been a part of the Wrong family history since the early 1970s, when Wrongo’s parents and his sister and her husband moved there. It was founded in 1565 by the Spanish and is the oldest continuously occupied settlement of European origin in the US.

The enslavement of Black people in the Americas is a large part of St. Augustine’s history. The Spanish had no moral issue with using slaves to build the city and its fortifications. For three centuries after its founding in the late 16^th century, most Black residents of St. Augustine were enslaved. Thirty Spanish crown slaves arrived in St. Augustine in 1582 from Cuba. They were sent to carry timber for the constant rebuilding of forts. Around 1672, Spanish royal slaves were transferred from Mexico to work on the building of the masonry fortress, Castillo de San Marcos, which still stands in the center of town.

There is much more information about the role of slaves in St. Augustine here.

In 1670 English colonists established the colony of South Carolina and the town of Charleston (Charles Towne) about 300 miles north of St. Augustine. Almost immediately, slaves began to escape from British Carolina to Florida with the hope of finding freedom with the Spanish. Those who reached St. Augustine were baptized as Catholics but weren’t freed.

In the middle of the 20th century, St. Augustine’s Black residents were still being denied the vote, they were barred from Whites-only public accommodations, and their children forced to attend segregated schools. St. Augustine was like many other towns and cities in the US with racial restrictions. MLK Jr. was arrested in St. Augustine in 1964 while trying to integrate a motel’s restaurant.

On to South Carolina. Despite the aesthetics of the above photo, Magnolia Plantation also has a deep-rooted history in slavery. The major crop of the Plantation was rice, and it was home to many enslaved families from 1850 until the late 20th century. Today, the plantation does a nice job of placing slavery in a modern context through a 45-minute “From Slavery to Freedom” tour where docents speak about the people who were forced to live and work on the property.

The Plantation’s main house was destroyed three times, including once by General Sherman’s troops. Each time it was rebuilt with slave labor.

Charleston’s significance in American history is closely tied to its role as a major slave trading port. During the African slave trade, South Carolina received more slaves than any other mainland colony. As many as 260,000 enslaved Africans entered South Carolina from 1670 to 1808, almost one-half of slaves imported to the US.

Most of those slaves disembarked at Gadsden’s Wharf, located on Charleston’s Cooper River. The wharf complex was built by Christopher Gadsden, a prosperous merchant who is known today for having designed the “Don’t Tread on Me” flag. Gadsden’s Wharf was the largest in North America, able to berth six ships at once and the capacity to hold up to 1,000 slaves on land.

The plantations and an economy based on slavery made Charleston the wealthiest city of the original Thirteen Colonies. In 1770, the city had 11,000 inhabitants (half of them slaves). It was the 4th-largest port in the colonies, after Boston, New York, and Philadelphia.

In 2018, the city formally apologized for its role in the American slave trade. Today the city has an International African American Museum, sited at the original location of Gadsden’s Wharf, now part of an ancestral garden. Black granite walls mark the outline of a former storage house where enslaved humans perished awaiting their transport to the slave market. The walls are emblazoned with lines of Maya Angelou’s poem, “And Still I Rise”:

Today the very idea of Black people’s survival through slavery, racial apartheid and economic oppression being a quintessential part of the American story is being challenged by Conservative politicians throughout the US. Bans or limits on instruction about slavery and systemic racism have been enacted in at least 16 states since 2021. That list includes South Carolina.

But, given that context, Charleston offers an invitation to dialogue and discovery. And there can be no better site for a museum dedicated to that purpose.

Finally, consider Gettysburg, the site of the most famous battle of the US Civil War. The battle was fought from July 1 to July 3, 1863. After Lee’s great victory over the Union army at Chancellorsville, he marched his Army of Northern Virginia into Pennsylvania in late June 1863. On July 1, the advancing Confederates clashed with the Union’s Army of the Potomac, commanded by General George G. Meade, in Gettysburg. The next day saw even heavier fighting, as the Confederates attacked the Federals on both left and right. On July 3, Lee ordered an attack by 15,000 troops on the enemy’s center at Cemetery Ridge. “Pickett’s Charge” eventually failed at the cost of thousands of rebel casualties.

Lee was forced to withdraw toward Virginia on July 4. Following the nearly simultaneous Union victories of July 1863 at Vicksburg, MS and Gettysburg, PA., Grant’s victory in Chattanooga tightened the noose on the Confederacy, opening the door to Sherman’s march to the sea in 1864 and the end of the Confederacy.

The war ended and Lincoln was assassinated. But the effects of slavery remain, as does our seeming inability to leave the divisions of the 1800s behind us. It’s possible to look at the entire history of the postbellum South as a long struggle over whether American Blacks really are equal in the eyes of the White Working Class. This shows in the continuing debate in the South over whether to embrace or resist becoming more like the rest of the country.

NPR has a report on historical markers. There are more than 180,000 of them across the US:

“Across the South, markers honor notable men and notable houses without mentioning the forced, free labor that made both the homes and the men’s wealth possible. NPR found that nearly 70% of markers that mention plantations do not mention slavery.”

That wasn’t true at the Magnolia Plantation on Wrongo’s visit.

NPR’s analysis showed more than 500 markers describe the Confederacy in glowing terms, vilify the Union, falsify the reasons for the war or recast Confederate soldiers as the war’s true heroes. At least 65 markers appear to promote the Lost Cause, which claims that Black people enjoyed being enslaved.

As Faulkner said: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”

How we tell the American story will always be subject to an ongoing debate. Despite the reluctance of some in the South to be willing to leaving the past behind, there are plenty of new Southerners who have relocated from the North and West who are trying in hard to be Southern paradigm-shifters.

Great trip.

Cartoons Of The Week – April 14, 2024

The Daily Escape:

Salt Run, St. Augustine FL – April 2024 iPhone photo by Wrongo. This is a tidal inlet fed by the Atlantic Ocean. The far shore is a protected state park and the ocean is just over the dunes in the distance.

Wrongo has been enjoying the spring weather here in Florida, the second stop on our caravan of sibling visits in the south. This view is from my sister’s home.

Many cartoons this week about OJ’s death, along with lots about Arizona’s new anti-abortion bill. Here’s the best that I found. First, a leftover about the eclipse from earlier in the week:

OJ left the building, but isn’t home yet:

OJ’s running just like back in the day:

Ukraine Will Lose If Republicans Have Their Way:

School voucher money is shrinking public school funding:

With a few exceptions, those private schools that far outpace the public ones have the advantage of being able to pick and choose their students. Also, the public gets the schools it demands.

The Arizona fallout won’t be limited to abortion:

Is This What The Final Straw Looks Like?

The Daily Escape:

Atlantic Ocean, St. Augustine FL – 2019 photo by Wrongo. (Wrongo and Ms. Right are on their annual trip to visit siblings who moved from the Northeast to Southern climes. Columns will be light and variable until April 22.)

With Israel’s killing of the seven humanitarian aid workers from World Central Kitchen (WCK), did Netanyahu deliver the final straw to the US and the Biden administration’s unconditionally having Israel’s back in their war with Hamas? From Axios:

“Israel’s killing of seven World Central Kitchen aid workers has the makings of a watershed moment — rapidly accelerating a decline in U.S. support for the war in Gaza, Axios’ Zachary Basu writes.

The big picture: Frustration with the Israeli government has been building inside the White House for months as the humanitarian crisis in Gaza has worsened. It’s now boiling over.”

It’s difficult to say what is actually policy and what is political theater when parsing the words of Biden and Blinken about what Israel needs to do next in order to keep the US supplying armaments. You may vote for theater when learning that CNN has two stories that seem to indicate it will be business as usual with Netanyahu and the Israeli government. First Natasha Bertrand reported:

“…the Biden administration is close to approving the sale of as many as 50 American-made F-15 fighter jets to Israel, in a deal expected to be worth more than $18 billion…”

Second, CNN’s Bertrand also reported that:

“The Biden administration recently authorized the transfer of over 1,000 500-pound bombs and over 1,000 small-diameter bombs to Israel….adding to its arsenal despite US concerns over the country’s conduct in the war in Gaza. The transfer authorization of the MK82 bombs and small-diameter bombs, more than 2,000 munitions in total, occurred on Monday…”

These aren’t the biggest bombs, but a 500-pound bomb will destroy your apartment building. Monday was the same day that Israel killed the seven WCK staff. Chef José Andrés took to the NYT to express his view:

“We know Israelis. Israelis, in their heart of hearts, know that food is not a weapon of war.

Israel is better than the way this war is being waged. It is better than blocking food and medicine to civilians. It is better than killing aid workers who had coordinated their movements with the Israel Defense Forces….The Israeli government needs to open more land routes for food and medicine today. It needs to stop killing civilians and aid workers today. It needs to start the long journey to peace today.”

Chef Andrés’s words have resonated deeply with many Americans. In some ways it reminds us of the late Gen. Colin Powell’s famous Pottery Barn rule that he cited in the summer of 2002, warning President GW Bush of the consequences of the planned invasion of Iraq:

“You are going to be the proud owner of 25 million people,….You will own all their hopes, aspirations, and problems. You’ll own it all.”

Israel must be shown how they “own” the humanitarian crisis in Gaza. They’ve pulverized the buildings. They’ve killed most of the now-dead civilians. They’ve prevented food and medical assistance from reaching the sick and the starving. Therefore, they should own the humanitarian solution starting immediately.

BTW, think of all the suffering we’ve heard about in Gaza. Now recall just how little of it you have actually seen via western media. Many of the same videos run day after day on US media. Why? Because Israel has made it a priority to conduct the war largely beyond the sight of Western cameras, beyond the scrutiny of the press.

If we knew more and saw more, we might be even more horrified.

The Israeli military has dismissed two officers and reprimanded three others for their role in the WCK strikes, saying they had mishandled critical information and breached the army’s Rules of Engagement (ROE). The Guardian reports that the IDF’s ROE are classified, but reporting by the Israeli media and human rights organizations suggests an exceptionally high tolerance level for civilian casualties.

In the current war, observers suggest, ROE rules that were already permissive in previous conflicts in Gaza have been loosened further, as evidenced by the number of civilian casualties in high-profile strikes. America faces a serious moral dilemma and Wrongo has been feeling it for a while. Wrongo still thinks it’s possible to be committed to Israel and to its right to defend itself. But at the same time we need to be highly critical of the Israeli response in Gaza.

There are times when a friend, a family member or a neighbor asks you to help them solve a problem. You go along, thinking that you’ll be able to help out, only to find you’re deeply involved in something that has become either a reputation killer or possibly, something life-threatening.

And this is where America sits with Israel in their war with Hamas. Our friend has caused us to get badly stuck in something awful. And it’s become very difficult to see how to get our partner to stop the bombing, killing and starving.

Wrongo suspects there have been more than a few final straws among Israel’s friends in recent months, since Israel seems oblivious to the damage they’re doing. It has been gut wrenching to watch America go from responsible support for Israel on 10/7 to becoming likely complicit in Israel’s crimes against humanity in Gaza. We must change course now.

Biden needs to follow through on his message to Netanyahu.

It’s Saturday, so it’s now time for our Saturday Soother, where we attempt to pull back from the fire hose of news and opinion and grab a few minutes of calm. On the Fields of Wrong this weekend, we’ve seen snow, an earthquake and on Monday, we’ll witness a solar eclipse. We’re certainly operating in interesting times.

As the Wrong family takes off for a few days, let’s listen to a road song of sorts, “The Drinking Gourd”, a song of the open road. It was originally used by Underground Railroad operatives to encode escape instructions. In the1950s and 1960s, it played a role in the Civil Rights and folk revival movements. Here is the folk singer Eric Bibb performing the song for the television series, “God’s Greatest Hits”, airing in Canada on VisionTV:

We’ll see you down the road!

Updates On Baltimore Bridge And Trump’s Stolen Documents Case

The Daily Escape:

Japanese Garden, Portland, OR – April 2024 photo via The Oregonian

Here are two stories that we’re following that need updating. First, the Baltimore Key Bridge collapse. Many Republican House members have questioned why the US government (and the taxpayers) should have any financial responsibility for cleaning up the mess and rebuilding the bridge. From The Hill:

“…the idea has sparked an immediate backlash from conservative spending hawks, who are already up in arms over Congress’s recent approval of a massive 2024 spending package….Key Bridge, they argue, is a regional matter to be tackled by regional governments.”

Rep. Ralph Norman (R-SC) told The Hill:

“The very thought of having the Federal Government pay for the Baltimore bridge is TOTALLY ABSURD!!”. “This exemplifies the old slogan ‘ROBBING PETER TO PAY PAUL!!’”

From The Lever:

“The company that owns the ship that crashed into the Francis Scott Key Bridge…is trying to use a 173-year-old law to cap the damages it may have to pay, including potential compensation to families of the six workers killed in the disaster.”

This is because big oil and shipping interests successfully lobbied in 2010 to block reforms to the so-called “Titanic Law”, or the Limitation of Liability Act from 1851. The Singapore-based Grace Ocean, owner of the container ship Dali wants to argue that the damages it owes for the crash should be capped at $43 million — the remaining value of the ship and its cargo.

This is crazy, given the fact that it’s likely to cost hundreds of millions of dollars to rebuild the bridge. Still, on Monday, Grace Ocean filed an action in federal court using the Titanic Law.