Month: April 2021

The speech.

The transcript.

The Pie Charts.

Note that the $4 trillion the President spoke of Wednesday is spread out over eight and ten years, for more like $400 billion a year.  Huge — but less than 2% of our GDP.

Is that too much to revitalize our infrastructure? To reverse the 40-year trend toward ever-increasing inequality?

The three richest Americans have a combined net worth greater than the bottom 160 million, according to Tax The Rich.   That’s not a criticism of those three largely-great men; but it does suggest some recalibration may be in order.

Have a great weekend!

SFT:  “Apropos Friday (Unpack The Court!), check out:  Why is Dem leadership so self-defeating on this vital issue?   Mystal’s point is simple: The Dems in Congress should use their power fully.  If they don’t, they may  be responsible for an awful  lot of terrible consequences.”

Try to find time to read it — it’s short — and see whether you agree.  Democracy itself is at stake.

SFT points also to Can Biden Fix the Courts Trump Broke?  “The case for balancing the lower courts by adding judges is arguably as strong and almost as important as balancing the Supreme Court.”

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. . . While previous Republican administrations tried to break government, Donald Trump tried to break democracy. He did this boldly and brazenly, by attacking elections, and he did it less boldly but no less brazenly, by working alongside Mitch McConnell to take over the unelected branch of government that sets the rules for all the others: the federal judiciary. That branch is now stuffed with conservative ideologues masquerading as jurists. . . .

The Republican grip on the judiciary is an existential crisis for the progressive agenda—or it would be if progressives had a better understanding of what conservative judges do for a living. As it is, their interest rarely seems to stray much beyond the Supreme Court. That’s a serious matter. But Trump’s wholesale reshaping of the lower courts is at least as troubling. These courts are the first responders to attacks on our basic freedoms and human rights. They are the places where policies go to be debated, held up, or torn down. And as things stand now, most progressive policies and many of the immediate goals of the Biden administration won’t survive their first contact with the reality of these revamped courts.

This isn’t speculation; it’s already happening. Consider Biden’s number one priority: Covid-19 relief. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention enacted a new moratorium on evictions after the initial one, passed through the CARES Act, expired last summer. But in late February, a single Trump-appointed district court judge, a 40-year-old who graduated from law school in 2005, scuttled the whole thing. He struck down the CDC’s order, and while his opinion is embarrassingly wrong and illogical (he basically said that renting a house is not commerce, as understood through the commerce clause in the Constitution, and therefore can’t be regulated by the federal government, which is like me saying this article doesn’t qualify as protected speech unless I personally read it aloud), it doesn’t matter. He’s appointed for life, and he gets to be wrong and illogical about the law until some other judge overrules him.

The problem is that overruling a judge takes time. . . A bad ruling from a federal judge must first be appealed to one of the 13 courts of appeals, which are regional federal courts spread throughout the country. These courts are supposed to overturn cases only when there’s been a clear error in law (I believe “not knowing what commerce is” would apply). Most disputes about federal law or policy will never get further than a court of appeals. The Supreme Court hears only 100 to 150 cases out of the 7,000 appealed to it every year. This means that for the overwhelming majority, the lower court ruling is final.

In the meantime, those lower courts can act with lightning speed to stop an entire federal law in its tracks. There are 677 district court judges, and every one of them has the power to issue temporary restraining orders (or TROs) blocking the implementation of federal legislation until a full trial can be held about the law or policy. . . .

The courts are the most critical pillar in the Republican scheme to rig elections. Red-state governments pass voter suppression laws knowing they’ll be upheld by courts that conservatives control. . . .

. . . Biden is going to have to work outside of the box left for him by McConnell if he wants to secure democratic self-government. And he is going to have to work quickly.

If he doesn’t, the Republicans’ voter suppression efforts will likely enable them to retake the Senate in 2022 and the White House in 2024. . . .

This gives Biden a very short time to capitalize on the Democratic majority . . .

Happily, there is a solution, and that solution is to expand the lower courts. . . .

. . . since 1990. . .the number of district court cases has grown by 38 percent . . . [b]ut the number of judges has not changed.

. . . We need more judges.

The Democrats have the facts on their side (the courts are overworked), the law on their side (adding judges is something Congress can do), and right on their side (diversifying the bench is a good thing to do). They also have power on their side (they control the House, the Senate, and the White House). The only thing Democrats don’t have is the will. . . .

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Paul Krugman probably joins me in hoping people will eat less meat (and no octopus!) — but that’s not the point of his latest column:

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Beer, Brussels Sprouts, Bernie Madoff and Today’s G.O.P.

On Friday Larry Kudlow, who was Donald Trump’s top economic adviser, told Fox News viewers that Joe Biden’s climate plans would force Americans to stop eating meat. On July 4, he declared, you’d have to “throw back a plant-based beer with your grilled brussels sprouts.”

Kudlow’s remarks raise several questions. What, exactly, does he think beer is made from? Also, doesn’t he know that grilled brussels sprouts are, in fact, delicious?

More important, why would anyone believe this assertion about Biden’s plans, or expect anyone else to believe it? Why were Kudlow’s claims echoed by many Republicans, from Donald Trump Jr., to members of Congress, to the governor of Texas?

To answer this question, it helps to think about Bernie Madoff, the infamous fraudster who died April 14. Seriously. . . .

The administration has, in fact, said nothing at all about changing America’s diet. Furthermore, anything along those lines would be very much at odds with Biden’s whole approach to climate change, which is to rely much more on carrots than on sticks . . .

So where is this coming from? Kudlow took his cues from a sleazy article in The Daily Mail, a right-wing British tabloid. The article didn’t actually assert that Biden is proposing to restrict meat consumption; instead, it offered a series of speculations about what might happen. Among other things it took the most extreme scenario from a University of Michigan study of how reduced meat consumption could affect greenhouse gas emissions — a study released in January 2020 that had nothing whatsoever to do with the Biden plans. The Daily Mail also used a deceptive graphic to make it seem as if this was an actual administration proposal.

American right-wing pundits and politicians then ran with it. Did they actually believe the nonsense they were spouting? Well, Kudlow’s apparent belief that beer is made with meat is arguably a point in his favor, an indication that he’s genuinely clueless rather than merely cynical.

What’s clear, however, is that neither Kudlow nor other Republicans touting an imaginary war on meat saw any need to check out their story, felt any concern that their audience — Fox News viewers, Republican voters — would find the claim that Joe Biden is coming for their red meat implausible.

Why not? That’s where Bernie Madoff comes in.

The revelations about Madoff’s immense Ponzi scheme and how he pulled it off introduced many of us to the concept of affinity fraud: scams that prey upon people by exploiting a sense of shared identity. Madoff defrauded wealthy Jews by convincing them that he was just like them.

A similar approach has long been an essential part of the Republican political strategy. As the party’s economic policies have become ever more elitist, ever more tilted toward the interests of the wealthy, it has sought to cover its tracks by running candidates who seem like regular guys you’d like to have a (meat-based?) beer with.

The flip side of this strategy is a continual attempt by the G.O.P. to convince voters that Democrats, who represent a much more diverse set of voters than Republicans, aren’t people like them; call it disaffinity fraud.

The goal is to portray Democrats as woke feminist vegetarians who don’t share the values of Real Americans. Hence the right’s obsessive focus on “cancel culture” and Democratic women of color, and the continual assertions that the white male senior citizen who leads the party is somehow a passive puppet.

. . . It doesn’t matter that Joe Biden isn’t actually trying to ban hamburgers or — to take another false claim right-wing pundits and politicians keep repeating — that he hasn’t “taken down” the border with Mexico. Republicans have pretty much given up even trying to make a case against Biden’s actual policies, let alone proposing serious policies themselves.

Instead, it’s all smears. Democrats, declared Kudlow, are “ideological zealots who don’t care one whit about America’s well-being.” That’s pretty rich coming from a man famed for his unwavering commitment to the doctrine that cutting taxes on the wealthy solves all problems, no matter how often his predictions fail. . . .

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BONUS:

Healthy fish farms!

Mass Challenges: The Worst Provision of Georgia’s Very Bad Law.  In part:

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. . . The new law greenlights the type of mass challenges the Republican Party has sought to use for its electoral purposes in the past. By using faulty data and discredited tactics, the GOP can intimidate and inconvenience voters that it wants to exclude from the electorate. It is not hard to see that in the future, the party of Trump will create lists of Black, Brown, and young voters and then find local operatives to submit them as mass challenges to voter eligibility. Those voters will then be required to appear or participate in a hearing or risk being disqualified from voting. Even worse, failure to appear at a hearing will be spun by the right wing as a tacit concession that the voter was ineligible to vote – and may have committed voter registration fraud.

. . . Republicans in Georgia don’t want Black, Brown, and young voters to vote because when they do, Democrats win. Expanding the opportunity to engage in discriminatory mass challenges should offend anyone who cares about participating in our elections. Yet this provision has received scant attention from the media and the public.

. . . No state should permit mass challenges, much less expand them. Voters who submit challenges should be required to do so based on their own personal knowledge and should be subject to sanctions for filing frivolous or bad faith challenges. . . .

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Can you imagine being forced to take a day off from work, ride a bus or two, and appear at a hearing to secure your right to vote?  Georgia’s legislators should be ashamed.

BONUS:

Younger Next Year: Live Strong, Fit, and Sexy — Until You’re 80 And Beyond — as reviewed here by my pal Jesse.

Give it up for conservative David Brooks . . .

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. . . When asked in late January if politics is more about “enacting good public policy” or “ensuring the survival of the country as we know it,” 51 percent of Trump Republicans said survival; only 19 percent said policy.

 The level of Republican pessimism is off the charts. A February Economist-YouGov poll asked Americans which statement is closest to their view: “It’s a big, beautiful world, mostly full of good people, and we must find a way to embrace each other and not allow ourselves to become isolated” or “Our lives are threatened by terrorists, criminals and illegal immigrants, and our priority should be to protect ourselves.”

Over 75 percent of Biden voters chose “a big, beautiful world.” Two-thirds of Trump voters chose “our lives are threatened.”

This level of catastrophism, nearly despair, has fed into an amped-up warrior mentality.

“The decent know that they must become ruthless. They must become the stuff of nightmares,” Jack Kerwick writes in the Trumpian magazine American Greatness. “The good man must spare not a moment to train, in both body and mind, to become the monster that he may need to become in order to slay the monsters that prey upon the vulnerable.”

. . . Liberal democracy is based on a level of optimism, faith and a sense of security. It’s based on confidence in the humanistic project: that through conversation and encounter, we can deeply know each other across differences; that most people are seeking the good with different opinions about how to get there; that society is not a zero-sum war, but a conversation and a negotiation.

. . . [A]pocalyptic pessimism has a tendency to deteriorate into nihilism, and people eventually turn to the strong man to salve the darkness and chaos inside themselves.

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→ Read the whole thing?

Share with your Trump friends and family?

Our cities are not burning!  The economy has not collapsed!  Your first $400,000 of income will not be taxed more heavily!  No one’s coming for your guns!  We love you — and share so much common ground!

Speaking of common ground . . . what fun listening to John Boehner’s new book.  How one longs for a Republican party one could disagree with on many issues, yet still sit down to have a beer with.

BONUS:

It is a big beautiful world: Betty Lou?  You bought yaw last pair o’ shoes!!!

Take Back The Court is terrific but should perhaps change its name.

We don’t want to take back the court, we want to dep0liticize it!

“Nevva gonna happen,” I hear you say — and I grant that it’s long-shot.

But don’t virtually all Americans believe the Court should be above politics?

Right now, it’s packed with Republican appointees — six Justices out of nine — even though Democrats won the popular vote in seven of the last eight presidential elections.

So how do we fix this?

One way would be to shrink the Court:

Thank three Republican-appointed Justices for their service and give each $25 million to retire . . . leaving the Court at three and three . . . six, in all, as under Washington, Adams, and Jefferson . . . who would then propose three centrists for the President to nominate and the Senate to confirm.  Instantly a balanced, nonpartisan Court.

The more likely fix would be give Democrats three more seats . . . bringing the balance up to six and six . . . and then have those 12 agree on three centrists, for a total of 15.  (This idea is not, of course, original with me.)

Final thoughts:

[1.]  One of TakeBack’s advisors is Evan Wolfson, who conceived the notion that “gay marriage” should be legal, then fought for decades until it was.  He knows something about impossible causes.  Two guys on a wedding cake?  Probably 80% of the country, if asked when he first proposed this, would have said no.  Maybe 95%.  The difference here is that on the question of whether the Supreme Court should be “above politics,” 80% would say yes.  Maybe 95%.

[2.]  Reform really is needed if we want the Court above politics.  From R. Hubbell’s daily newsletter:

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. . . Pretending that the Court does not reflect the political philosophy of the president making the appointment is fantasy. Why does Justice Breyer believe that Justice Kennedy resigned during Trump’s presidency? Breyer should follow Kennedy’s lead and retire now, allowing President Biden to make at least one appointment to the Supreme Court.

Finally, I should note that the Court rejected arguments by California that the challenge to its regulation was moot because it had been rescinded. Despite the absence of a “case or controversy,” the Court nonetheless issued an injunction against a rule that is set to expire on April 15^th (six days after the Court’s ruling on April 10^th). Compare the treatment that the conservative majority gave to this controversy to several lawsuits against Trump. There, the Court allowed those lawsuits to languish until Trump was no longer in office, then declared them to be “moot” and ordered dismissal. See, e.g., Yahoo News, “Supreme Court dismisses as moot case questioning Donald Trump’s blocking of critics on Twitter.”

Got that? The Court moves with lightning speed to issue an injunction that will be relevant for only six days in California but sat on a claim against Trump until he was out of office so it could dismiss the claim as moot (after the lower courts had ruled against Trump). It is difficult to see those two outcomes as anything other than a mobilized conservative majority distorting procedure to achieve political outcomes. As Justice Breyer said, “If the public sees judges as politicians in robes, its confidence in the courts . . . can only diminish.” That’s how I see the Court from where I sit. I believe we should accept that reality and move quickly to dilute the power of the conservative majority. . . .

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[3.]  “Take Back the Court” suggests “us versus them.”  How about “Balance The Court”?   Is BalanceTheCourt.org taken?  Oh, wait!  It is now! I just grabbed it for $9.99.

[4.]  There’s some reason to think that just trying to get Congress to depoliticize the Court can be of value — as argued here. (“Court reform doesn’t come exclusively from changing the size and structure of the bench. It can also come informally, from the people exerting pressure on the current justices—and there’s good evidence that’s already happening.”)

Have a great weekend.  To help depoliticize the Court, click here.  (Here, if you need the tax deduction.)

. . . Happy Earth Day, to you.

The last two days’ perspective on our tiny spaceship, here and here, might better have run today.

I’m taking the day off, but on the off-chance you have time — and are old enough for this to resonate — here’s The Girl in the Kent State Photograph.  Absorbing reading.

BONUS:

Noted Norwegian COVID Conspiracy Theorist Dies of COVID.

You’ve seen My Octopus Teacher.  Now, from Wired: What Octopus Dreams Tell Us About The Evolution of Sleep.

And tomorrow begins Secrets of the Whales, from National Geographic and Disney+.  Take 54 seconds to watch the trailer — you may want to watch more.

Several of you liked Google’s time-lapse photography at the end of yesterday’s post . . . 37 years in two-and-a-half minutes.

Here’s another planetary overview to enjoy.  (Thanks, David!)

And here’s perspective on majority rule, by Marc Elias.

Don’t we want to live in a country governed with consent of the governed?  And when the governed disagree, don’t we want most disagreements resolved by a vote of the majority?

Wouldn’t it be odd, for example, to say that, in an election, whichever candidate gets the fewest votes wins?

Do Constitutional compromises born of slavery still make sense now, when virtually no one believes slavery is worth defending?

RECAF

Ed: “You and your pals can rationalize almost anything if there’s a hot stock involved. Is it your belief that there is no exploitable sun or wind in Africa? I have been there and can tell you that’s not true.”

→ I’m all for wind and solar in Africa. But I wouldn’t bar Africans from reaping their oil wealth while allowing the Saudis and Texans to reap theirs.  I’d rather see oil-producing nations build Africa a renewable grid in exchange for keeping their fossil fuels buried.

But first . . . read Maureen Dowd if you doubt the President’s decision to withdraw from Afghanistan.  (It’s also worth noting that we will still provide intelligence and other “over the horizon” aid to help keep the Taliban from, among other things, re-enslaving Afghan women.)

And now . . . I’ll be more than a little interested to see how RECAF, which more than doubled last week, does this week.

My guru on this gamble thinks that if the second of ReconAfrica’s three planned test wells comes in like the first later this year, the stock will double again.  And that “when they cut a deal with some giant entity to develop it all, it could jump fivefold from there.  Who knows?”

Who indeed.  As always: only with money we can truly afford to lose.

The extra wrinkle here are the ethical ramifications of buying this stock.  Fossil fuel consumption is, after all, the engine of climate catastrophe.

I’d offer two lines of thought:

> The first is simply that our buying RECAF shares has absolutely zero impact on whether the wells are drilled.

I make efforts to limit my energy consumption because that does impact greenhouse gas emissions.  Likewise, my meat consumption.  But had I bought not a single share of RECAF last month, it would have impacted nothing at all . . . except my ability to support things like The Climate Reality Project, the Amazon Conservation Team, and the party that believes the climate crisis must be urgently addressed (with the happy by-product of good jobs and greater prosperity).

To me, there’s zero ethical reason to shun the stock.

> The second question, less clear cut, is whether RECAF should be drilling those wells; and whether, if an ocean of fossil fuel is confirmed, it should be exploited.

Leonardo DiCaprio says no.  Read his view.  And others’.

My guru responds:

“I agree that oil is not the future.  I spent my whole career in the oil biz and feel slightly awkward about it.  Most of my young geological colleagues are liberal-thinking, climate-aware people.   Still, Africa has nearly 600 million people who live off the grid because they’ve never had a grid.  I think it’s unfair to suggest that living without electricity is their problem to solve and that they have to skip over the hydrocarbons that powered our own development.  The world will develop its carbon solutions, but they will come from technologically advanced countries.  While we get to that good place, we have to allow ourselves to burn a few more hydrocarbons.”

It’s also worth noting that RECAF is not fracking — that’s part of their license agreement (and why would they need to?) — so those fears, at least, are unfounded.

ReconAfrica’s website features Voices of Kavango — Namibians who appreciate what RECAF is doing.

“This is a different kind of oil company,” says my guru, Andy T. (not me; another Andy T.).

“They had a UNESCO World Heritage Site within their initial lease boundaries.

“Botswana said, ‘Hey, we need to exclude this area that we already leased to you.  We need to take it back.

“RECAF said, ‘OK.’

“Botswana said, ‘Wait, you don’t understand.  We are taking back a quarter million acres.’

“RECAF said, ‘We know that.  It’s the right thing to do.  Draw up the papers.‘”

So:

Buying their shares is an ethical no-brainer.

Drilling in Africa?  Reasonable people can disagree.

Should Namibia and Botswana be expected to forego the wealth that lies below their land while the Saudis keep pumping — and Texans keep fracking — theirs?

One solution would be for the Saudis, et al, to build the Namibians and Botswanans the modern, all-solar electric grid that would allow them to skip over hydrocarbons . . . in return for keeping theirs untapped in perpetuity.

If they did that, and I lost all my money in RECAF, I’d say hurray for the world . . . and thank heavens I had bought my shares only with money I could truly afford to lose.

In a similar vein:

Barry B.:  “Have you seen this Open Letter to John Kerry from People Living in Energy Poverty?  I wonder if we Dems will self-destruct in next year’s midterms.”

→ Urging India to move more quickly to a sustainable future, as Kerry has done, is asking them to weigh the interests of the next 1,000 generations of Indians as they weigh their own.  I’m guessing many thoughtful Indians were already wrestling with this trade-off.  After all, most of those next 1,000 generations will never even be born if humanity gets this wrong.

As for our elections, voters left right and center may applaud.  The left, because we are long-time and whole-hearted believers in combatting climate change; the right, because they bridle at our being forced to use more efficient light bulbs (for example) when the Chinese and Indians, they wrongly believe, are not making changes of their own.

As for the open letter’s criticism of Kerry’s travel . . . had he flown “commercial” to accept his award — or not flown at all and accepted by Zoom — he might have sent a useful message, but would have had an infinitesimally small physical impact on carbon emissions.  Likewise, Leonardo DiCaprio and others who have faced similar criticism.

Finally, speaking of the climate crisis, watch 37 years of Google Earth time-lapse photography.

Have a great week!

[HOUSEKEEPING: The little “trademark” superscripts in Friday’s post showed up as gargantuan graphics for those who received it by email.  Only Microsoft knows why.]