Ukraine: Peace In Our Time and Climate Change, Too

This is outside my usual ambit, but it seems important enough to comment on.

Germany is apparently preparing to throw Ukraine to the tender mercies of Vladimir Putin. Germany, remembering World War II, is all for not fighting, as long as someone else is doing the not-fighting. Besides, they want that gas. Germany should have kept those nuclear reactors going. France, on the other hand, is equivocating, though my earlier remarks, based on an inflammatory Politico article, were incorrect. (For future: do not trust Politico.)

“Peace in our time” and climate change, too – what's not to like?

Energy budget charts: France, Germany.

Aristocracy in the United States

About two weeks ago I found myself wondering how it was that the deadlock in Congress in our time looked so remarkably like the deadlock in Congress in the antebellum period. Different players, but still the same game. This is my attempt to explain the game. This is a historical opinion piece; it runs from the founding of the United States of America to our time. For a blog post this is a long piece. Printed, it would run six pages. Bear with me, please. There is a lot of ground to cover.

Contents

1. The Slaveholders Constitution
2. After the ratification: the fight for the government
3. Postbellum
4. The Great Depression
5. World War II, the Cold War, and After
6. In the Second Gilded Age
7. Prospect

Brief Note on For-Profit Health Care

When the whole health care system’s goal is first to make a profit, and when the state also supports the health care system in that goal, the system becomes an extortion racket. This doesn’t mean that individuals or organizations in the system must be forbidden to make a living or even a profit, but that their goals cannot be allowed to override the goal of keeping people healthy.

The Biden administration’s solicitude of health insurance and pharmaceutical industry profits is discouraging, though it is probably politically necessary. Yes, Jeff Zients, Biden Administration White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator, I am looking at you.

Taney Court II: the Right to Infect

And once again, the Supreme Court's liberals are acting like jurists, while the "conservatives" are acting like Twitter trolls. Dahlia Lithwick, writing at Slate, offers a horrified summary. It seems that the conservative wing of the Roberts Court is ready to declare that the emergency measures the Biden administration is undertaking to control covid are to be forbidden under doctrines that cannot be found anywhere in precedent, statute law, or the Constitution. The Roberts Court is living up to my description as Taney Court II.

Three-and-a-half years ago, I wrote: “Federal law is now a matter of whim. The full extent of this failure will be felt in all aspects of our lives. Our very lives will be in danger.” And now, it seems, the Supreme Court is ready to declare plague-spreading a constitutional right, or at least one that can only be forbidden by a deadlocked Congress.

The CDC, Seat Belts, the US National Character, and the Shadow

The Biden administration’s CDC has been, I think, consistently too cautious and optimistic in their efforts to control covid and this is at least partly because there is only so much the public is willing to do.

CDC director Walensky: the new covid restrictions “really had a lot to do with what we thought people would be able to tolerate.” The CDC is being blamed for not adopting recommendations the public is unwilling to carry out. I am reminded of the introduction of seat belt customs and laws. It took a generation to go from “seat belts save lives” and “we will put seat belts in every new car” to the laws which mandate the wearing of seat belts. I find it hard to imagine ways by which the CDC could get the public to undertake more stringent Covid precautions – it is hard enough to get people to to comply with even inadequate practices.  

It is an expression of a flaw in our national character that we want the CDC to order us to do what we are not as a nation willing to do. As a nation, the USA is not willing to confront its shadow, the parts of itself that it does not want to know. The Trump administration was able to take advantage of this, and got and is still getting a pass from our news media, very much to our nation’s shame.

The Second Civil War

I say it has already begun. The first battle was on January 6^th 2020 and the second is the deliberate spreading of covid by state governments.

If one reads the history of the start of the first Civil War, there was politicking on the way to the war. As President Lincoln did in 1861, President Biden faces a hostile Supreme Court. Also as in 1861 there was conflict in Congress, though in 1861 this was alleviated by the rebel states leaving Congress. As a result the then Republican-dominated Congress was then able to pass (per Wikipedia) “the Morrill Tariff, land grant colleges (the Morrill Act), a Homestead Act, a transcontinental railroad (the Pacific Railroad Acts), the National Bank Act, the authorization of United States Notes by the Legal Tender Act of 1862, and the ending of slavery in the District of Columbia” and the first income tax, which funded the military effort to put down the rebellion. The South was not only pro-slavery, it was anti-federal in policy, much as our current Republican Party is.

Returning to our current situation, it is not yet clear to me what the next move of our would-be traitors will be. Perhaps a campaign of domestic terror on the lines of the first Klan? That seems all too plausible and there seem to be plenty of Republicans willing to participate.

I am concerned that the Democratic leadership does not seem to understand what they are up against. Governor DeSantis of Florida, Governor Abbott of Texas, and Governor Noem of South Dakota are traitors, responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands, yet I see no calls from the Democratic leadership for their resignations, let alone prosecution. Perhaps, like Lincoln, they are negotiating while waiting for some decisive act on the part of the traitors. If so, they will lose the initiative. One unanswered question: Biden turns out, unexpectedly to me, to have the stuff of greatness, but he is an old man in a situation whose stresses would tax a much younger person. Does Harris have the stuff of greatness? What will she do when faced with a further insurrection?

As I suppose is normal in such unsettled times, much remains unclear. But I fear for my country.

Are They Crazy?

(In writing this, I have the horrible sinking feeling that there ought to be a book on this subject, but I am not aware of that book. So here are my short remarks.)

– 1 –

Every so often on Twitter, Jim Wright (@stonekettle) remarks that some Republican who believes some obviously mad thing seems mentally ill. A discussion of the sanity (or lack thereof) of Republicans who believe strange things then ensues. It seems that on the left there are many amateur psychologists, much as on the right there are many amateur constitutional scholars, and much fact-free verbiage is thereby generated. But the question remains, “Well, are they?”