Minority Rule

Almost all the commonsense adages about politics are pragmatic. Like, “Politics is about addition, not subtraction,” or “All politics is local,” “or “If you like laws and sausages, you should never watch either one being made.” In other words, it’s a very human business where success is achieved by calculation, crowd pleasing and a strong stomach.

Yet, we’re experiencing an increasing refusal to compromise, even if you can’t get to 51% without it. This is either pigheadedness or idealism, depending on which side of the argument you’re on. It may make you feel superior, but it doesn’t allow you to achieve your ends.

Republicans, after years of being the minority “Party of No,” apparently can’t break the habit. Now they are saying “No” to each other. Though in charge, they have shown a very limited ability to agree among themselves, and certainly no interest in meeting anyone in the middle, even their own moderate members.

Democrats would seem to have every reason to present a unified front in order to regain a majority and accomplish their goals, but are so riven by disagreements over those goals that they are divided into a number of minorities of the minority.

Thus, both sides risk squandering the ability to govern a big country. To do so they need to win several hundred races. To do that requires two contradictory achievements —crafting a unifying message or agenda with broad appeal, yet winning a majority of votes in many diverse, local constituencies. “Is a puzzlement,” as the King of Siam sings.

You’d think there would be a few bedrock progressive things to which every bickering Democratic candidate could subscribe. Even though we are told America is fundamentally a conservative country, you’d think, after the Great Recession, that the need for robust regulation of the financial industry would be a no-brainer. Yet regulation has been so thoroughly turned into a dirty word that oversight of financial institutions is a 50-50 toss-up among voters.

Still, polls do find that there are some areas of agreement. A large majority of people want to keep Medicare and Medicaid. even 57% of Republicans agree to that. Two-thirds of those polled favor government loans for college, as do even 50% of Tea Party voters.

About 63% of Americans think more needs to be done on climate change. If you change the question, by asking if they are in favor of both adapting to climate change and protecting jobs, 73% approve. Over eighty percent favor more use of renewable energy, yet only 53% favor government regulation to promote it.

This is part of a pattern produced by decades of unanswered anti-government propaganda, largely funded by those likely to profit from a Darwinian society where no one prevents the big dogs from eating the small.

The generations who did not live through the Great Depression and World War II (or listen to their parents’ stories of the experience) take for granted many government programs that have improved life. They have forgotten where their relative comfort comes from. They are like the woman at the McCain rally who demanded that he keep the government’s filthy hands off her Social Security.

Large parts of the electorate seem to have a kind of historical amnesia. They do not quite grasp what America was like before the social safety net. Life was often poor, nasty, brutish and short for the old or disabled, education impossible for many before student loans, jobs dangerous before workplace safety requirements, everyday life risky before regulations to make cars, air travel, food, drugs, water, and air safe. They don’t appreciate that government programs provide these and many there other essentials, as well as guard our national security and economic well-being.

Democrats have seemed to assume this is obvious therefore they have failed to make the case in a personal, particular way that shows how each of their constituent’s lives are better, compared to those of earlier generations with their sweat shops, breadlines, charity wards, orphanages, and ten hour days with no minimum wage. As long as the ayes for government are tongue-tied, the nays have it.

Unfortunately, even if the Democrats get their act together, the hopes for an active, competent representative government aren’t bright. Being on the majority side in issue after issue doesn’t add up to victory. Majorities elected Al Gore and Hillary Clinton. Occasionally, courts have done the right thing, but they too are appointed by politicians, not by a majority vote.

Majorities favor equal justice under law, but never got a vote on issues where it was at stake — same sex marriage, equal pay or any number of other majority issues. Even on a polarizing issues like guns, a majority now favors universal background checks, a ban on assault weapons and high capacity magazines. Will they get a vote? Not bloody likely.

You get to a majority district by district, and to the White House by way of an electoral college based on the same state by state arithmetic. Districts are drawn by state legislatures to favor the party in power. The same bodies also get to control who is eligible to vote, and when and where. Special interests with their own agenda are often behind efforts to subvert majority rule, by means of gerrymandering, voter suppression, and litmus test court appointments.

Why do politicians do the biding of special interests, often casting votes inimical to their constituents’ interests? Because they are elected by means of money from donors (or their opponents are defeated thanks to non-stop smears in ads supplied by the same source).

And now we have a president who gained power, in part, due to the efforts of an anti-democratic donor who manipulated the election and used the Internet to cloud men’s minds, KGB Lt. Col. Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin. This is not the system Madison, Hamilton, and Jay argued for in “The Federalist.”

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Crime, No Punishment

How do you tell if someone’s a white collar criminal? He’s not in jail. We’re talking about securities fraud (including insider trading), bribery, money laundering, various ponzi schemes and scams, tax evasion, cybercrime, counterfeiting, influence peddling, and these days election tampering.

The billionaire rogues’ gallery of the Trump administration is a reminder of just how prevalent flouting the law is in political and corporate circles, but how rarely the perps are successfully prosecuted. It includes fortunes built on pyramid schemes, abuse of bankruptcy laws, predatory lending, housing discrimination, money laundering and so on. Many have been engaged in their legally questionable behavior for decades, including the family of Secretary DeVos, Wilbur Ross, and the many Goldman alums.

The Special Counsel’s investigation has brought to light actions by Kushner of dubious legality (like his jailbird father before him), the Trump’s organization’s connections to money laundering and tax scams, and the tax evasion and other crimes of Paul Manafort.

In the aftermath of the 2008 Wall Street meltdown, many firms that were conducting criminal conspiracies or corrupt practices paid large fines or ceased to exist, other were judged too big to fail and survived under new management. Together, Countrywide, Washington Mutual, Lehman, Citi, AIG, Bank of America, Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley and friends ruined tens of millions of lives, lost people their homes, fortunes and jobs.

The criminality ushered in a lost decade for a whole generation due to a damaged economy. Yet there were no indictments, trials or jail time for any bad actors. The guilty corporations paid a fine which came out of the hide of shareholders, but not out of the guilty executives’ golden parachutes.

How is this possible? Warren Buffett has wittily said, “You don’t know who’s swimming naked until the tide goes out,” as it does in a downturn. That is, criminality, mismanagement, and financial weakness aren’t always apparent until a faltering economy reveals the rot. But that’s why there are supposed to be rules to limit criminality, systemic risk, and to deter misbehavior, by the threat of punishment. No punishment, no deterrence.

Some crookedness is blatant enough to attract attention. In the 1980s, Wall Street malefactors like Michael Milken and Ivan Boesky were prosecuted and served time. In the case of the S&L scandal, 1,100 bankers were brought to trial; and 800 jailed. In 2002, Enron went belly up, a few of its managers were incarcerated, and the company and its complicit accounting firm ceased to exist.

Yet even in these cases, the transgressions were going on for years before the crooks were caught. In this war, the lawmen are outgunned. White collar crimes are hard to detect, complicated to explain to juries, time consuming to prosecute and embarrassing to lose, so only open and shut cases go to trial. The state has finite resources to deploy, while vast corporations operate across many jurisdictions, are defended by phalanxes of legal talent who obfuscate, delay, plead and appeal And they pay for it all with the profits resulting from the crimes in question.

The result is a case like that of HSBC, the world’s seventh largest bank wth assets of $2.4 trillion. In the past decade it has laundered millions for the murderous Sinaloa drug cartel, profited from business with corrupt politicians, dictators, tax evaders, dealers of blood diamonds and arms, laundered KGB-related funds, set up offshore accounts for drug-dealers and other criminals, engineered a $3.5 billion scheme to manipulate the foreign exchange markets, and violated sanctions on doing business with Iran, Libya, Sudan, Burma and Cuba.

Since all of this has come to light, HSBC has obviously been punished severely. Right? Au contraire. The DOJ decided not to pursue criminal penalties, perhaps because the CEO said he was “profoundly sorry” for the bank’s past “mistakes.” Well, that’s comforting. But no employee of the corporation lost a dime or spent a day in jail, and the seemingly large fine of $1.9 billion amounted to about 12% of the company’s annual profits. That’s what’s called a cost of doing business.

Is it possible that there’s a further reason for the impunity with which white collar criminals commit their crimes? Maybe. They do belong to the donor class, and the legislators who write the laws affecting them, and conduct investigators into them are on their payroll. Too cynical?

Well, since the Citizens United decision in 2010 created a flood of corporate money to politicians, the purchasing of elections has increased and the number of prosecutions have dropped. The Trump administration and the Republican Congress have weakened the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and just this week they began to roll back the safeguards against financial industry malpractice in Dodd-Franks.

Perhaps it takes a satirist like Kurt Vonnegut Jr. to capture a reality this grotesque. In “God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater” from 1965, he described an America where “a handful of rapacious citizens…controlled all that was worth controlling.” Meanwhile, “honest, industrious, peaceful citizens were classed as bloodsuckers, if they asked to be paid a living wage. And they saw that praise was reserved henceforth for those who devised means of getting paid enormously for committing crimes against which no laws had been passed. Thus the American dream turned belly up….”

If that sounds eerily like the Gilded Age oligarchy of Trump, the time is probably overripe for another Progressive Era of reform, trustbusting, muckraking and equal justice under law. But so long as the money power is the only power that counts, with control over every important institution, the citizenry is stuck with tarnished idealism, disappointed hope, fake news, and a rising tide of unfocused anger that could lead to something even worse.

President Rorschach

You may have noticed President Trump likes to call people names. It is clearly a way to assert power, one of the instruments in the bully’s tool kit. But the habit also suggests that Trump sees people as inkblots. When he looks at them he doesn’t see what’s objectively there, individual humans. He sees what’s in his own head.

Often what he sees in others appears to be what he most fears might be true of himself. That is, his name-calling is a classic case of projection whereby people “deny their own unconscious impulses or qualities while attributing them to others.” So the name-calling offers a better glimpse inside his anxieties than a whole battery of Rorschach’s and MMPIs could.

He calls his hometown paper the “failing” New York Times, no doubt to minimize its power over his psyche, but also because he has had a long series of failures reported there. So if they are failures, it must mean he isn’t.

Failing is also undoubtedly a favorite insult because of the way this twig was bent by his father. He espaliered Trump into believing life is a binary proposition. You are either a killer or a loser. Since he can’t bear to believe he might be a loser, a failure, a dummy, a weakling, he brands others — particularly his opponents or detractors — wth those dismissive epithets. George W. Bush, Hillary Clinton, Ted Cruz, James Comey, Mitt Romney, Karl Rove, the Daily Beast, the Times and many more are failures.

Weakness is also terrifying to Trump, who must always be the strongest ape in the jungle. And he sees it everywhere. The Republican National Committee is weak, so was the Obama Administration, as are Paul Ryan, Chuck Schumer, Ben Carson Jeff Sessions. And a close cousin to the weak are the lightweights like Rand Paul and Marco Rubio.

Most of these people have in common not agreeing with Trump or supporting him, so they must be weak, lightweight failures. Similarly, those who call into question his intelligence, competence, correctness, behavior are obviously dumb. If not, then it might mean that they are right and he is dumb.

As a result, dumb is a large category for Trump. It includes a few from the political left — Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Mark Cuban, Frank Bruni, and Mika , but a lot more from the right — Morning Joe, David Brooks, The Club for Growth, Rich Lowry, Scott Walker.

Trump is also surrounded by a lot of dishonest, crooked, fakes, criminals and liars, This is comically revealing in a man who lies incessantly, and has spent much of his life in court for various scams. So, the least honest president in history has branded the following crooked — the Democratic Party, Iran, the FBI, NBC, ABC, CNN, the electoral process, Meet the Press, Mexico, Adam Schiff, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post..

Women, especially those who stand up to him or are not amenable to his brutish charms, are dismissed as weak, lightweight, insecure, neurotic and, especially, crazy. You’d have to be crazy not to adore him, so Oprah, Hillary, Kirsten Gillibrand, Meghan Kelly have come in for such dismissal. Women to Trump are playthings or balm to his ego or libido. Those unwilling to play the part must be unworthy of his attentions.

It is also noteworthy that in a list that goes on and on, Trump never calls anyone kind, decent, intelligent, honest, selfless, or humane. Such concepts have no place in his vocabulary. Losers are like that; killers aren’t. Thus those who work for him are rarely praised, more often bullied, berated, demeaned and disrespected. He has to show everyone he’s is charge, the big cheese, potent, powerful, worthy of unquestioning respect, obedience and loyalty.

If what comes out of Trump’s mouth is really a snapshot of what’s in his head, it must be a terrible place to live — terrified every day that people will find out he’s a fake, a fraud, a liar, a crook, a dummy, a lightweight, a loser, a crazy. When he was just a real estate conman and reality TV barker, the reviews were in the bank balance or the ratings, but as president he can’t hide from constant scrutiny by the press, public, opposition party, foreign adversaries and law enforcement. The critical reviews never end.

This is why Trump is so unhappy as president, so unsuited to the job, and envies autocrats. If anyone questions the intelligence, virility, power or wisdom of a Putin, Erdogan, or Xi, they are unlikely to live to tell the tale. And since the strong men control the media and the system of justice there’s no nasty editorials, mean tweets, embarrassing question or pesky indictments to worry about.

Trump has derived psychological comfort so far by living in a bubble bounded by Mar-A-Lago, campaign rallies with red state crowds, tame fake news media like Fox, and yes-men who tell him what he wants to hear, but as his support group shrinks through attrition, falling out of favor, disloyalty or indictment, he must feel reality beginning to bite. No more Hope Hicks to hold his hand, Kushner and Ivanka to delegate governing to, and when he messes with guns and trade, fewer friends in the NRA and on Wall Street.

The more he is left to his own devices and forced to listen to people telling him he is wrong or failing on issues such as Russian cyberwar, Korean missiles, immigration, healthcare, guns, the environment, economics, trade, the more likely he is to hunker down, reflexively ignore critics and do the opposite.

So if Putin is said to be playing him for a fool, he must embrace Putin. If tariffs and trade wars are insane, he must enact them. If guns are a problem, but due process gets in the way, take them away first and worry about legalities later. If Mueller has got the goods on him, eliminate him. If advisers are disloyal, dump them.

At the end Hitler’s general began to disobey his lunatic orders from the bunker — to blow up Paris, to fight to the last man, woman and child. Before too long, it may prove necessary for patriots of his own party, or the FBI, the armed forces or the courts to stop Trump from proving he’s not a dummy, a loser, a lightweight, a failure in ways damaging to the prosperity, well-being, and survival of the country and its people. Will they dare? Do they posses the means?