"The Government Does Not Produce Anything"

 I've looked for books that summarize the hatred of the federal government, without finding exactly what I'm looking for. In the Trump era, populists have been vocal opponents of pretty much everything the government does. Lauren Boebert could not vote for the infrastructure bill because....I don't know. Some amendment she found objectionable.  the bill passed. She goes back to Colorado explaining how she will then direct some of that money to Colorado projects.

We then come to the problem of what does the government do? According to some guy a few years back, running for the senate with cowboy hat on, "the government does not produce anything." He on the other hand produces things. We should not tax him, so he could make more things. Making things is wealth. Taxing and spending is not.

Obama tried to explain it. Mr. Cowboy would not be making ANY things if it were not for government at various levels. The city (as well as the state)  is the most essential. it taxes and builds roads and such.

The only book that I have found to explain the role of government is this:

Of course the Trump  MAGA folk will never read it. They are angry and no book will change their mind. Life changed in the past 40 years. Somebody is to blame. Must be Democrats and the federal government. All those regulations! Soon they will ban gas and oil! Wind power will only work during the day! All that. None of that changed the life of the working poor yet. What changed was wages and the corporate world. Jobs going abroad pushed most of them into service jobs at minimum wage.

It's a ridiculously simplified view of the world. I completely understand the pride people have in doing their own things free of rules and regulations and even support. They want to feel proud of what they do. I did it! No government needed! But you can chop your own firewood, other things are more complicated. You can't make electricity reliably for very long. Only as long as there is gasoline for the generator.

The other major view of MAGA people is that the government providing support for someone else is taking money away from you. Well, it is complicated. But consider a hurricane damaged area such as New Orleans. It is to our benefit that we can provide temporary help in an area. It will come back as the area is restored and people are back to work. This is the world as zero sum game, but they generally do not know the term.

Is this how it is going to be from now on? Well, for a while. But soon you will see a significant portion of the white working class getting jobs from the new energy jobs, from the somewhat badly named IRA bill passed recently. Inflation is something different, and we will always have inflation at some rate. The government does very little to slow it. But jobs are jobs, and unemployment is something the federal government has more effect on.

Lastly, let us look at the seeds of this anti government feel. It was Reagan. The regulations are bad, continue as before. There is no need for government control of our future!

PS: I should have concluded with that. However, I have to point our that some of the things the government does are too complicated. If you are putting up a new mine or a new wind turbine, both end up with years of back and forth documents in the environmental impact statement. The government could help the businesses and outfits doing useful things for us to get through all that. There are costly studies at times. Set up some sort of system where the business and the EPA can sit down and work it out as partners, not as enemies.  Some things need to be done, and soon. Those are slowed down too. Someone has to understand the big picture of the environment in terms of energy, water and all our other needs.

Supreme Courts and Three Legged Cats

 What will the supreme court do with abortion next year? it seems to have taken this right of control of our bodies and thrown it to the states to decide what these freedoms are. 

But, in a year or two, or under a Republican president, they may decide that since this right was not stated in the 14th Amendment in detail, perhaps congress does have some power after all? Let's ban it all over the USA. 

It's a bit like the little girl and the drawing of the cat. Your cat has three legs? we ask.

She says it has four. Where is the fourth? She points to the tail. And where, then, is the tail? She points to the tail. But you said it was the fourth leg. "It was. Now it's the tail."

The work of the Supreme Court seems to be looking at words and punctuation. And looking to see if that word is a "leg" or a "tail."

"A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."

Looking at that, the Republicans see arms and rights. Must not restrict any of those. A Democrat justice would look at "right to bear" and see that it's difficult to control. The court may have been correct in the New York case, so let's leave it at that. But times change. We have permits and things for cars. We have federal permits for many other things. You can control even free speech through the FCC as some speech is very dangerous. Let us then control the ARMS part of the amendment. The federal government CAN control the arms! Let us ban hand guns and AR-15s!

The game of the court seems to be somewhat sophisticated as far reading legal language and precedent. But when the final opinion comes out, it is just word play according to your convictions and beliefs.  Several judges are definitely anti big government, anti rules for all of the USA. Throw in a few fancy words like "egregious" and voila, you have a new ruling. Your ruling is now law. Until another court comes along,

This Will Not Pass

 

Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns have talked to hundreds of politicians from both parties for their book. The time frame covered in the book from Trump’s last year and election to Biden’s first year is somehow strange, as the main event after Trump’s loss in 2020 in politics is this year’s election. However, the book describes the very painful task of getting anything through Congress and then for the President to sign. The authors do not mention the three judges appointed by Trump who have a profound effect on any election law that would come up during Biden's term.

I read the end chapters of the book first. They describe Biden’s leadership as weak, although the response to the early pandemic and the funding during that time are praised. The Build Back Better program was so huge that its collapse due to two of his own senators was a huge loss. Now what remains of the bill is on hold, but the momentum has stalled for the goals of the Democrats. When the bridges and roads are built, a year or two from now, voters will not remember that Biden funded the construction projects.

No election law can be wrapped up before the important election. Many of those things are covered in the book. If the politicians mentioned are not familiar with television programs, the reader will not be able to remember everything and flip to later pages. It should be noted, however, that the congressional process now is normal and that Republicans have not supported Democrats since 2009 when the Obama term began. A few few centrists (Collins, Murkowski) could come along for a few laws and there was a consensus in the stimulus package after the recession of 2008. This time, even during the pandemic, financial support for their own states did not result in much consensus. Of his own politicians, Biden always had to deal with Manchini’s demand for a “bipartisan” effort, he always needed a few Republicans to support him. Biden’s skills as a mediator almost paid off, but he can’t do anything for the two senators. They end up opposing the final bill, but for two different reasons.

 The attack on the Capitol in January of 2021 is described from all angles. After January 6th, with an initial shock and denouncement of Trump, the Republican concern was mainly for keeping their own seats and any reaction from Trump voters. There was no consensus, weeks later McCarthy and McConnell began to take back their words, like many Republicans. McConnell was an exception, he is not talking to Trump anymore. No photos of him with Trump at Mar a Lago. Trump did indeed lose some supporters in Congress, with several announcing his retirement.

At the beginning of the book is a detailed account of the final stages of Trump, about a hundred pages long. The pandemic and the loss of the election were the only things on his mind. He is mainly a cartoonish figure with no desire to hash out a solution that takes effort or new laws. There is a lot of insider talk from politicians and their staff. The book mentions Trump as party leader a year after the election. The goal is only to win the 2020 election, again.

His revenge for opponents in his party via primary candidates is currently underway, but in the book there is only a long list of Trump’s enemies in his party. They are now being retaliated against. No 2022 events are covered. McConnell is now Old Crow for Trump. A good number of senators are safe, as they have a six year term.

Nothing very new is published here, but criticism of Trump is all over the place, no longer hidden. Sometimes a direct quote is missing, but all Republicans have been identified and rated through interviews with staff and related parties.

On the Democrat side there is less inside stuff, as the criticism of the issues and Trump is all in the open. The relationship between Biden and Harris is not always positive and their close associates have been questioned.

Why they need AR-15s to preserve their way of life

Liberals, atheists, Beto and all are jumping on this one isolated shoot out. He was deranged! (Yet, they want no back groud checks.)They need the AR-15s! Or so they think. The Trump voters and the Marjories and Boeberts need the rifles for a symbolic stand against a flood of liberalism and flavor of Christianity they can't subscribe to. The world is a zero sum game. I use the word flood, as it was clearly spelled out by a New York Times journalist, Charles Blow. The flood at their door includes all liberals, minorities, and thanks to Trump, foreigners.

White people have been isolating themselves in the suburbs and smaller cities and rural areas, mainly to feel that the world has not changed. And to have the kids go to "good schools." I admit we did the same as far as schools are concerned. But I wanted the kids to get a realistic view of the world. I did not isolate them, and they have traveled enough and seen other cultures. They know we are a small part of the world, us white folks. The Boebert family has no idea what the world is like. And no interest in finding out. Isolation and sadly, guns, are the solution for them.

Simple solutions to gun violence should include very restricted weapons, not AR15s, in the hands of people under 25. You can include the routine rifles to shoot a deer, for example. But nothing will happen, as all Republican senators and their voters will resist it. The banning of any gun right is considered part of a domino effect of eventually taking all your guns away. "I could need an AR-15 some day. You never know."

The entire business of more guns is explained by a few memes.

The NRA supporters have endless excuses. Just so there is no nitpicking of all I presented, I'll run through just one. "If you ban AR-15s, only criminals will have AR-15s." 

It might seem like that is the case, as there are still a lot of them around, and they will be part of our story for a decade more. The ones owning those guns will keep using them for a hobby and will find some way to get ammunition. But it is not much of a gun for robbing a store or killing single victims. You want to make as little noise as possible when committing a crime. It is only good for mass killings as we see monthly in the US, as well as drive by shootings by gangs patrolling their areas by car. If there is a car coming by shooting randomly, the "good guy with a gun" is not going to be there. Gun owners will only have hand guns available, not AR-15s, as you walk outdoors. Vigilante shootings of illegals at the border are not a legal form of "protection."

Racists: They were there all along

 I live in a state that votes Republican governors. It goes about 60% Republicans, 40% Democrats. I live in a city, so we are closer to 50/50. That still means that one out of two neighbors will fully support a white supremacist candidate, if that is the Republican candidate.

We are giving Trump a bit too much credit, though his cult of personality also appealed to these voters.

This thing has been developing since Reagan, amplified by Fox news and the internet. Before that republicans had boring ideas: lower the taxes and support law enforcement. Which back then was white policemen.

The segment of our country now supporting this "white people are being hurt" idea now makes up 40-45% of voters, depending on who is president and what is going on in the world (Ukraine, etc.) and gas prices.

John Oliver covered the Fox news thing well:

Link:

https://youtu.be/XMGxxRRtmHc

And the "white working class"? They were racists too. They may have voted Democrat when they had a union job. Democrats are important in local elections for that and for other things. Once that union job was gone, there was no reason to vote Democrat anymore. In their racism, the working classes were barely tolerant of sexual minorities as well. Anything outside their white Christian bubble was alien.

Moving away from racism and jobs, the white working class also is not quite so liberal as college educated Democrats. It's easy for the GOP trolls and congressmen tot raise hell about parents' rights, gay teachers,  the masks and vaccination thing and all the local stuff dealing with school boards. Those are not items that congressmen and senators deal with, those are local issues. But the party has been well marked and labeled as "exrteme liberals" in matters that are quite trivial to the actual lives of these people.

Public health and the Pandemic

 I've been waiting for a book to explain the Covid pandemic in a sesnsible way for the USA. I like Michael Lewis's book that focused on public health administrators in California.

It covers the early pandemic well, and describes the thankless job of those with any authority. Our quarantine effort was pitiful. The CDC was pitiful. Only states functioned well. We do not have an effective federal program. As far as the pandemic, it only covers the start and going toward the peak.

I have seen a dozen health care professionals push some idea in a book. Not the pandemic in numbers, just some solutions. There are a few well written books on vaccinations.

The first book to give anyone a reasonable summary is by Kate Messner.

She has written a book for middle schoolers on pandemics. Pages 155-186 cover the covid pandemic in such a manner that it merely states the facts. Pick one up if you have grandkids or school age kids.

No trashing of Fauci and masks, although we still have a hard time measuring how much masks helped. The real problems vaccines might have are listed in a paragraph.

I won't summarize the book further, because I think it is such a good book all should read it. It explains infectious diseases well, including the discovery of germs and all that. Enjoy! Kids are not afraid of science, and pandemics will not end there.

Putin

 The war in Ukraine does not really affect our local politics much, other than most Republicans running for office seem to have dropped Trump as far as foreign policy goes.

Putin is the result of 30 years of corruption. The wealth in Russia comes from a small number of industries. They apparently do not even know how to deal with the technical aspects of oil drilling without American help. Rachel Maddow covered all this in her book Blowout. Anyway, the oligarchs all got wealthy by starting with something they knew a little about. They bought state industries after the Soviet Union collapsed. Once you got some chunk of it, you kept buying in that area, still at low prices compared to the world. Eventually a small number of people got very wealthy. Russia also has mining that brings in income, such as palladium and platinum, and other metals. Uranium was largely left in Kazakhstan.

The common people got jobs in the consumer markets that thrived as money flowed into Russia. Some are in the energy industry. Russia grows some food, but the best lands are actually in Ukraine. That side improved as well, with Ukraine exporting the food to neighboring Russia.

Things were fine. Then Putin started thinking about his legacy.

One must understand that it not only Putin that feels somehow the lesser leader and his country as someone who struggles compared to all of Europe and the USA. It is all of Russia that lacks self esteem. Trump was a quirk, and Putin felt comfortable next to him. He was not a real threat. Never mind what Putin had on Trump, he felt like the stronger man.

Now past Trump, Putin is back to the old routine of puffing up his chest and feeling OK as long as he flexes his muscle sometimes. Putin can only show strength in the face of neighbors. And there was only one that used to be part of Russia for most of the 1900s. Finland had been apart longer. Therefore Ukraine was the victim this time.

So, as I said, it was not just Putin. It is all of Russia that has been lacking self esteem for 30 years. Even with all the Western goods coming in, Russians did not feel like an equal just yet. Well off people in Moscow and St Petersburg have been approaching the West as far as freedoms and democracy goes. Most of Russia has also improved manyfold as far as material wealth and standard of living goes. But Russia is still big, some 150 million people. Nationalism is the thing that keeps it together. Putin has to make a show of it to impress the masses in Russia. Thousands of men, tens of thousands of men, tanks and weapons, those are irrelevant losses. Russia thinks the same way it always has. Big sacrifices, such as seen in WWII, are necessary for their self image.

Those not completely agreeing with Putin nevertheless are going along with this because of a lack of options. No election will make a big change. Also, they lived through the Yeltsin years, 91-99, and it was unstable. Conditions were barely better than in the Soviet Union. Putin brought stability, even if most people knew of all the corruption and had to maneuver that to get consumer goods.

Putin is where he is for a reason. There is no majority to rebel at this point. And I suspect that removing Putin would end up with some guy whos seems "reasonable" but turns into Putin again in 20 years.

Critical Race Theory

 If you read the Wikipedia article on CRT, you will be a little confused. You get that it has some legal meaning in court cases, that's about it.

There are bout 2 black scholars who came up with the term. One is a feminist, the other is a lawyer. They explain it in...many words.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kimberl%C3%A9_Crenshaw

It simply means that the current laws and regulations are ineffective in preventing all but whites being discriminated. Even some liberals just say "we took care of that." We did not.

It never says it plainly but you would need to be quite dim not to grasp that a good chunk of white people are still racist.

I do not know what it says about blacks. But there is jealousy of those blacks that became part of the elite.

Three Things Voters Rely On

We have a midterm election coming. The voters always think of the president two years before and their promises. If things are not clearly better, and there is a bit of a crisis like a pandemic, they tend to punish the sitting president. That is, if they are voters that change parties from election to election.

Biden has a steady flat 50-52% disapproval.

But even the party voters need something to quickly make up their mind. Mostly about whether to vote at all. The things are 1) how are things for me? 2) how is the economy? and 3) what are people I talk to saying?

The economy thing ALWAYS tends to punish a president, unless we have 9-11, are at war or some other big thing is taking over the news. House Republicans have a twitter account and keep telling us Biden ruined energy and gas is therefore more expensive. And he caused inflation. The second one is not ever true. Occasionally a president can bail out an industry or save voters from being evicted. But Biden's influence is otherwise little. We have a highly competitive, capitalistic economy. There is nearly no "socialism" going on, other than Obamacare.

But even the energy claim is false. We are mining fuel as before and fossil fuel has not suffered. I've marked the Trump presidency with a blue dot.

This is from a government website. Just google the words in the caption to see full figures. We are going full steam ahead. The dip is the pandemic when the whole economy was slowed down and we did not drive as much.

The claim by the Republicans about the Keystone XL pipe affecting prices is also false. First of all it never got built, so there is nothing that got shut down. Secondly, the tar sands oil going thru now (existing pipe lines) makes very poor diesel type of oil not even used for trucks and all goes to export. You cannot improve tar sands oil to make it more like normal fuel, as the cost of doing that no longer makes it "cheap oil" and it will not compete with oil we import. It would also waste sources like propane or methane that we use for heating.

But back to the voter. The republican voter is fully convinced that Biden is bad for fossil fuels and we are paying more, if the House republicans just keep repeating the mantra. 

Social Psychology: It's not that difficult to change a group member's attitude

Who knew? There are experiments from the 1930s onward testing the will of people when faced with a rigged experiment or placed in groups. Terms such as groupthink appeared. This was difficult material for me to accept, as I have lived the past 50 years in a culture I was not born into. I have resisted conforming in a quiet way. In work type of situations I did in fact become part of the group. My training lumped me with my kind against "engineers" and "business types" to achieve results in my field of science. It was also useful in job interviews. Every job I got was due to a link to the interviewer, we were equals. However, with things like politics and religion, I never made any waves in a group of strangers. Just get on with what we were doing and don't bring it up. I never had to change my attitude for a group. In any test of psychology I would be the outlier.

As it happens, this one area of  behavior where the right and left are equally susceptible to group pressure. You might be a libertarian, hang out with liberals and appreciate personal freedoms. Then global warming comes up. You have not had the time to read the books to find out 1) is it warming? and 2) what are the predictions? Those are separate problems, you realize. You went to college. But it has become dogma in your group. So you just accept that. The election comes up and you do not make any complaints against a political candidate that places climate high on the agenda. Although sexual minorities and freedoms as well as your suspicious attitude to "big government" may be more strongly part of your thinking. And the cute girl in the group is a liberal. You start tolerating climate change as a big topic, as well as the health and exercise attitude you share. You and your partner are building a better planet with healthier people.

The field is social psychology. It is possible to look at the individuals, it is even possible to use neurobiology and other experiments. But still, it is an empirical field. You can measure the activity of groups with polls and tests of groups in lab settings. You measure trends. This causes that. You don't entirely know why. Conformity, response to strong leaders, obedience, all these things can be measured. As it turns out, rank in your gang also matters. It is easier to influence a low ranking member.

Want more? Try the Richardson book. Not the best book on the topic, but easy to read for the layman.  The rest of the classic books are rather dated. Wikipedia will go a long way with Milgram. See also the entry for the man there.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment