Defending Democracy

 

For all the news stories that seem to tug us in one direction or another, there is just one overarching story in the news for Americans today. We are in an existential fight to defend our democracy from those who would destroy it. People seem to hark back to films from the 1930s and 1940s and think that so long as we don’t have tanks in our streets, our government is secure. But in this era, democracies die more often through the ballot box than at gunpoint. You can see this in Russia, where Vladimir Putin gradually concentrated power into his own hands. You can see it in Brazil, where Jair Bolsanaro, whose approval rating in late August was 23%, claims that the country’s elections are fraudulent and that “[e]ither we’ll have clean elections, or we won’t have elections.” You can see it in Hungary, where Viktor Orbán has quite deliberately dismantled liberal democracy and replaced it with what he calls “illiberal democracy.” On paper, Hungary is a democracy in that it still holds elections, but it is, in fact, a one-party state overseen by one man. Orbán has been open about his determination to overthrow the concept of western democracy, replacing it with what he has, on different occasions, called “illiberal democracy,” or “Christian democracy.” He wants to replace the multiculturalism at the heart of democracy with Christian culture, stop the immigration that he believes undermines Hungarian culture, and reject “adaptable family models” with “the Christian family model.” No matter what he calls it, Orbán’s model is not democracy at all. As soon as he retook office in 2010, he began to establish control over the media, cracking down on those critical of his party, Fidesz, and rewarding those who toed the party line. In 2012 his supporters rewrote the country’s constitution to strengthen his hand, and extreme gerrymandering gave his party more power while changes to election rules benefited his campaigns. Increasingly, he used the power of the state to concentrate wealth among his cronies, and he reworked the country’s judicial system and civil service system to stack it with his loyalists. While Hungary still has elections, state control of the media and the apparatus of voting means that it is impossible for Orbán’s opponents to win an election. Hungary is in the news in the United States because Americans on the right have long admired Orbán’s nationalism and centering of Christianity, while the fact that Hungary continues to hold elections enables them to pretend that the country remains a democracy. In 2019, Fox News Channel personality Tucker Carlson endorsed Hungary’s anti-abortion and anti-immigration policies; in that year, according to investigative researcher Anna Massoglia of Open Secrets, Hungary paid a D.C. lobbying firm $265,000, in part to arrange an interview on Carlson’s show. Recently, former vice president Mike Pence spoke in Budapest at a forum denouncing immigration and urging traditional social values, where he told the audience he hoped that the U.S. Supreme Court would soon outlaw abortion thanks to the three justices Trump put on the court. Further indicating the drift of today’s right wing, the 2022 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) will be held in Budapest. In their embrace of the illiberal democracy of Hungary, those on the right argue that they are defending traditional American values. Like Orbán, they focus relentlessly on immigration; “caravans” of immigrants have once again made the right-wing news, as they always do before an election. They worry that traditional families are under attack, hence Texas’s S.B. 8, which outlaws the constitutional right of abortion by empowering vigilantes. They insist that “real” America is being destroyed by multiculturalism; hence the hysteria over Critical Race Theory, an obscure legal theory from the 1970s that is not taught in K–12 schools, and the calls for “patriotic education.” And, crucially, those on the right are openly embracing voter restrictions and the replacement of nonpartisan election officials with partisans. Astonishingly, John Eastman, the founding director of the Claremont Institute’s Center for Constitutional Jurisprudence and a member of the powerful Federalist Society, wrote a six-point plan for overturning the will of the voters in the 2020 election. Although he went to the reputable National Review to cover his tracks by saying his plan was just a thought experiment, just tonight a video appeared in which he told an apparent supporter that his ideas were right, and that it was Pence’s establishment biases that made him unwilling to implement them. His plan to overturn the election barely failed. The 33 new election laws in 19 states will not fail. They are designed to replace the idea of democracy with a hierarchy in which a minority will determine our fate. If it seems odd that a group of people who claim to be trying to “Make America Great Again” are taking their cues from a central European country of about 10 million people, it is worth noting that they are not simply talking about Critical Race Theory or Texas’s so-called heartbeat bill. We are in a larger struggle over the nature of human governments. And when American thinkers are praising Hungary, they are tapping into a long history of our own. When the Founders declared it “self-evident, that all men are created equal,” they were making a bold declaration about the nature of governments that flew in the face of western tradition and thought. They denied that some individuals were better than others and had an inherent right to rule the rest. Governments, the Founders said, derived legitimacy not from religion, or heritage, but instead were legitimate only to the degree that those who lived under them consented to them. “[T]o secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,” the Founders said. This was a revolutionary argument. It rejected not just King George III, but all kings, claiming for the people the right to rule themselves. For all its limitations—the Founders could conceive of this idea in part because they excluded from their vision women, Black people, and all people of color—it was an astonishing declaration. And yet, the idea that all men are created equal and that governments derive legitimacy from the consent of the governed began to fall apart in the late 1820s. Southern Democrats wanted to take control of Indigenous peoples’ lands in the Southeast in order to spread the wildly lucrative system of plantation agriculture. Then, when they had displaced the tribes, they spread across those lands their economic system based on human enslavement. But because southern leaders were outnumbered by Americans in the North who objected to their economic system, within a decade they were arguing that true democracy meant not that government depended upon the consent of the governed as a whole, but rather that local or state governments could choose how everyone, including enslaved people, women, Indigenous, and Mexican people, would live. And, of course, they limited voting to a few white men, who voted to keep themselves in power. In 1860, southern white elites declared the American concept of democracy based in equality, government based in the consent of the people, to be obsolete. They declared they were going to start a new country, based in a hierarchy of gender and race, that they believed reflected God’s will. In a speech in March 1861, Alexander Stephens of Georgia, who would soon be the vice president of the Confederate States of America, explained to an audience that Jefferson’s belief that all men are created equal was “an error” and that anyone who still adhered to that idea was an insane “fanatic.” Stephens told listeners: “Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.” And there it was: the replacement of the idea that all people are created equal with the idea that some people are better than others, and that those people, who truly understand God’s laws, should rule. It is not an accident that the insurrectionists of January 6, 2021, carried the Confederate battle flag. We are today in a struggle no less dangerous to our democracy than that of the 1860s, for all that it is fought with Facebook memes and cable television rather than artillery. And when our leaders talk fondly about Viktor Orbán, or Jair Bolsonaro— former president Trump endorsed his reelection today—we would do well to listen.”

 Heather Cox Richardson, October 26, 2021

8 years of suffering under Barack Obama

8 years of suffering under Barack Obama

Teri Carter

The sentence I hear most from well-meaning, conservative friends since President Trump’s election is this: “We suffered 8 years under Barack Obama.”

Fair enough. Let’s take a look.

The day Obama took office, the Dow closed at 7,949 points. Eight years later, the Dow had almost tripled.

General Motors and Chrysler were on the brink of bankruptcy, with Ford not far behind, and their failure, along with their supply chains, would have meant the loss of millions of jobs. Obama pushed through a controversial, $8o billion bailout to save the car industry. The U.S. car industry survived, started making money again, and the entire $80 billion was paid back, with interest.

While we remain vulnerable to lone-wolf attacks, no foreign terrorist organization has successfully executed a mass attack here since 9/11.

Obama ordered the raid that killed Osama Bin Laden.

He drew down the number of troops from 180,000 in Iraq and Afghanistan to just 15,000, and increased funding for the Department of Veterans Affairs.

He launched a program called Opening Doors which, since 2010, has led to a 47 percent decline in the number of homeless veterans.

He set a record 73 straight months of private-sector job growth.

Due to Obama’s regulatory policies, greenhouse gas emissions decreased by 12%, production of renewable energy more than doubled, and our dependence on foreign oil was cut in half.

He signed The Lilly Ledbetter Act, making it easier for women to sue employers for unequal pay.

His Omnibus Public Lands Management Act designated more than 2 million acres as wilderness, creating thousands of miles of trails and protecting over 1,000 miles of rivers.

He reduced the federal deficit from 9.8 percent of GDP in 2009 to 3.2 percent in 2016.

For all the inadequacies of the Affordable Care Act, we seem to have forgotten that, before the ACA, you could be denied coverage for a pre-existing condition and kids could not stay on their parents’ policies up to age 26.

Obama approved a $14.5 billion system to rebuild the levees in New Orleans.

All this, even as our own Mitch McConnell famously asserted that his singular mission would be to block anything President Obama tried to do.

While Obama failed on his campaign pledge to close the prison at Guantanamo Bay, that prison’s population decreased from 242 to around 50.

He expanded funding for embryonic stem cell research, supporting groundbreaking advancement in areas like spinal injury treatment and cancer.

Credit card companies can no longer charge hidden fees or raise interest rates without advance notice.

Most years, Obama threw a 4th of July party for military families. He held babies, played games with children, served barbecue, and led the singing of “Happy Birthday” to his daughter Malia, who was born on July 4.

Welfare spending is down: for every 100 poor families, just 24 receive cash assistance, compared with 64 in 1996.

Obama comforted families and communities following more than a dozen mass shootings. After Sandy Hook, he said, “The majority of those who died today were children, beautiful little kids between the ages of 5 and 10 years old.”

Yet, he never took away anyone’s guns.

He sang Amazing Grace, spontaneously, at the altar.

He was the first president since Eisenhower to serve two terms without personal or political scandal.

He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

President Obama was not perfect, as no man and no president is, and you can certainly disagree with his political ideologies. But to say we suffered? If that’s the argument, if this is how we suffered for 8 years under Barack Obama, I have one wish: may we be so fortunate as to suffer 8 more.

The Myth

From a Tumblr post:

There is a myth perpetuated by Reaganites that he was an historically significant  President, in some positive sense.  If you are old enough to have voted in 1980, you probably know differently.  If you were born after 1980 you have been raised on this myth.  He sold Americans a fable about a Hollywood movie-like exceptional past and destiny, and led ordinary people around with portrayals of that mirage while his reactionary robber-baron friends set about dismantling 50 years of progressive advancements for working men and women, on their way to returning themselves to the position of unfettered economic domination they held between the Civil War and the Great Depression.  He was a union buster.   He gave us Scalia – need I say more?  He tried to give us Robert Bork (does anyone under 30 even know who he is?).  He lied about Iran/Contra.  He avoided dealing with AIDS.  He sealed the political sham-show between right wing capitalist kings and the evangelical thought-control snake-oil salesmen.  Americans don’t want to hear that they are ordinary citizens of the world, and they don’t want to hear that the aren’t anointed by some deity to lead the world to salvation.  They lapped it up, and they continue to do so.

Discussing Iran

Snagged from Tumblr:

  Wait... are any Americans aware that the CIA overthrew the democratically-elected Premier of Iran in 1953 because he wouldn't concede to Western oil demands... and how the coup was the reason for the Shah's return to power, the Iranian Revolution, and the resulting fundamentalist dictatorship... like, America literally dissolved Iranian democracy and no one knows about it?

 No. No we don’t know about it.

Americans aren’t told this shit.

 The only thing we’re taught about any Middle Eastern country in school is that 1) the region exists 2) it’s where The War is happening and 3) Muslim people live there. That’s it. Maybe if you’re lucky you’ll get into the Hammurabi Code and some early Babylonian stuff but American schools seem to think that if it happened outside Europe and before the colonial period, or makes America look bad and isn’t about A Very Watered Down Version of What Slavery Was, it’s not important.

 Info on this is almost notoriously hard to find. It’s not in any texts on American and Russian involvement in the Middle East during the Cold War that I can find. You have to specifically look for a book about the Shah’s return to power, and even then you’d be hard pressed to find a book like that at your local bookstore. Once you get into some higher level college courses you might know about it, but the people who can afford those are more likely to already be indoctrinated into a certain Way of Thinking (read: they’re racist as shit) by the time they get there. And it’s almost like you have to know about it beforehand if you want to find information on it.

 The only reason I knew about it is because there’s a thirty second summary of the event in Persepolis. Those thirty seconds flipped my entire worldview.

 “All the Shah’s Men” by Stephen Kinzer is a good, accessible text for people who want to know more about this.

I had to explain literally this to one of my co-workers, who is so fuckin racist against Middle Eastern people it’s insane.

She’s 60. She never heard of this.

I was explaining this and how, during the Reagan years, we funded Osama Bin Laden to fight against Russia, leading to the destruction of much of the infrastructure in the region. One of the plant workers came in to get his badge fixed. He works in the quality control lab. He served 15 years active duty in the Army. Super smart guy, has a masters in chemistry and another masters in biology, raises saltwater fish in his spare time for sale, has the saltwater aquarium setup of the gods.  Raises rare corals too, some of which he donates to be used in re-seeding reefs around the world, but that’s a side tangent.

And he listened for a minute, then nodded and said “Yeah. I was there during that. I helped train people to fight. They wanted us to help them build schools and hospitals, after, but we were only interested in them as cannon fodder. Left the whole area in ruins. I wasn’t surprised when they hated us for it later. Told people then it would happen. We let them know then that they were only valuable to America as expendable bodies. Why wouldn’t they resent us for that?

And she just looked floored.

“So…” She started, after a few minutes. “What do you think of Trump?”

“I hate him. He’s a coward and he’s going to get good people killed.” He didn’t even blink.

She looked back and forth between us for a second, and then asked how I knew all this.

“I research things.” I said. “Google is great.” He nodded enthusiastically.

And she just sat there for a second and then said, really quietly, “I didn’t know.”

She lived through it.

American schools don’t teach you any of this sort of thing.

A Night At The Garden, 1939

Fact-check Challenge

Sometimes a friend spouts a fact that seems fake, sounds fake, and is fake. The following facts however seem fake, but are actually real.

1. Mammoths were alive when the Great Pyramid was being built.

2. Betty White is older than sliced bread.

3. From the time it was discovered to the time it was stripped of its status as a planet, Pluto hadn't made a full trip around the Sun.

4. The lighter was invented before the match.

5. Anne Frank and Martin Luther King Jr. were born in the same year.

6. France last used a guillotine to execute someone after Star Wars premiered.

7. Harvard University was founded before Calculus existed.

8. If you have 23 people in a room, there is a 50% chance that 2 of them have the same birthday.

9. It’s never said that Humpty Dumpty was an egg in the nursery rhyme.

10. The water in Lake Superior could cover all of North and South America in a foot of water.

11. North Korea and Finland both border the same country; Russia.

12. When you get a kidney transplant, they usually just leave your original kidneys in your body and put the 3rd kidney in your pelvis.

13. Oxford University is older than the Aztec Empire.

14. National animal of Scotland is a Unicorn.

15. The Ottoman Empire still existed the last time the Chicago Cubs won the World Series.

16. The lighter the roast of coffee, the more caffeine it has.

17. A speck of dust is halfway in size between a subatomic particle and the Earth.

18. If the timeline of earth was compressed into one year, humans wouldn't show up until December 31 at 11:58 p.m.

19. If you were able to dig a hole to the center of the earth, and drop something down it, it would take 42 minutes for the object to get there.

20. We went to the moon before we thought to put wheels on suitcases.

21. A human could swim through the arteries of a blue whale.

22. If you could fold a piece of paper in half 42 times, the combined thickness would reach the moon.

23. On both Saturn and Jupiter, it rains diamonds.

24. Saudi Arabia imports camels from Australia.

25. You can line up all 8 planets in our solar system directly next to each other and it would fit in the space between Earth and the Moon.

26. The youngest known mother was 5 years old.

27. The Earth is smoother than a billiard ball, if both were of the same size.

28. Nintendo was founded in 1889.

29. If you take all the molecules in a teaspoon of water and lined them up end to end in a single file line, they would stretch ~30 billion miles.

30. In Australia, there was a war called the emu war. The emus won.

Tickld.com

"Abe Lincoln" Got It Wrong

Well, it's July 4th.  Time for the dominionists and nationalists to start flooding Facebook with their versions of American history, which, of course, will include lots of memes with supposed quotes from Founding Fathers and such.  And we know they are true quotes, because there's a picture of said Founding Father next to the quote, right?



Well, Abe that's not exactly true.  Most people have, on their computers, access to something called "Google," which should enable them to look stuff up and find out the real story, even if thy have to wade through a lot of crap to do it.  Quotes are one of the easiest things to fact check, because there are organizations out there that are devoted to the writings of individual historical figures, and they frequently provide information about fake quotes as well.  Beyond that, we have wikiquotes, Brainyquote, and just plain old fact checking sites like Politifact and Factcheck.org.  So if you're posting a fake quote, you really have no excuse.

So, this popped up in my newsfeed today.  I had checked the top and bottom quotes before, so I already knew the were "spurious," as they say.  But I don't just call bullshit; I think it's important to source my info.  So I went to Google and typed in "quote Patrick Henry founded religionists," and came up with several search results, and the very first one was Fake Quotations: Patrick Henry on “Religionists” « Fake History.  The webpage not only gave the origins of the quote, it explained the linguistic problems as well.  And, of course, you cant have a fake quote about religion without the obligatory reference to David Barton.
    For the Jefferson quote, I googled "quote Thomas Jefferson God who gave us life."  Among the results was this one from a website called "The Constitutional Principle," which explored more than one fake quote.  What was interesting about this particular quote is that it was actually comprised of portions of three different real quotes.  And again, at the bottom of the page, another reference to David Barton, this time with a link.  (For those of you who aren't familiar with him, David Barton is a man who makes his living by peddling dominionist history and fake Founders' quotes.)

Before I could get to the third item, second on the meme list, my friend who posted the meme commented, "Just cause you find some clever website in the Internet does not make something true. I could find articles right now that say scientifically the that the sky truly is not blue. These quotes came from history books not the Internet."
    There was no way to answer that without getting into some silly side argument, so I just encouraged him to do his own research.  "Fact checking is not that hard," I said.

But, as it turned out, that wasn't necessarily true.  There doesn't seem to be any actual information regarding James Madison's thoughts on Isaiah 33:22.  There are lots of sites that state as a matter of fact that the verse was his inspiration for the three branches of Government, but they provide no references to his writings to verify it.  Nor do the websites that document his writings even mention the concept.  There are reasons to doubt: the fact that he was a STRONG proponent of the separation of church and state is heavily documented.  But I didn't find anything pro or con on the subject I was researching.  I don't want to get into a Russell's teapot argument, so if any of you readers out there can find proof one way or the other, I'm interested.
On a side note, I really didn't have to go to all the "clever websites" to find the info on the other two; as it turns out, I could have just gone to Snopes.

There is a principle of logic that says that you cannot prove logic with illogic. It is this principle that makes us understand that the question "can God create a rock so big he can't lift it?" is a stupid question.  But I think there should be a similar adage governing the use of false information.  In our court system, witnesses swear to tell the truth, because it is understood that the presentation of false testimony leads to injustice.  So why is it okay to use demonstrably false information to support one's version of truth?  If something is truly good or bad, desirable or undesirable, why is it necessary to make up stuff to prove it?  If something is true, shouldn't the real data support it?

But if the lie supports our beliefs, do we even care?

The Guilty Parties of Foxworld

In Foxworld, internment camps were the justifiable, logical response to the attack on Pearl Harbor,

and not a hysterical, xenophobic over-reaction at all.

Having Withdrawals

Fact Check: Did Obama Withdraw From Iraq Too Soon, Allowing ISIS To Grow?

It was President George W. Bush who signed the Status of Forces agreement in 2008, which planned for all American troops to be out of Iraq by the end of 2011.
"The agreement lays out a framework for the withdrawal of American forces in Iraq — a withdrawal that is possible because of the success of the surge," he said in a joint press conference with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki at the time.
Moments later, an Iraqi journalist threw his shoes at the president. It is important to remember most Iraqis saw the Americans as occupiers and blame them for civilian deaths.
Maliki summed up the sentiment at the time, thus:

"The incomplete sovereignty and the presence of foreign troops are the most dangerous, most complicated and most burdensome legacy we have faced since the time of dictatorship. Iraq should get rid of them to protect its young democratic experiment."

Thousands of American troops had died, and by the time Obama announced the withdrawal, fully three-quarters of Americans supported the withdrawal (though a majority of Republicans did not).
Still, many had real concerns al Qaeda wasn't done for. And there were some, including U.S. senators, saying the troops should stay just in case things went downhill. They say Obama should have sold the idea, hard, to Maliki.
...
The State Department's lawyers said troops couldn't stay in Iraq unless the Iraqi parliament authorized them to do so, including granting them immunity from Iraqi law. The Iraqi parliamentarians would never OK such a decision, with Iraqi popular opinion staunchly against U.S. troops staying.
[Iraq analyst Kirk] Sowell saw State's decision as a deliberately insurmountable obstacle.
"It was a barrier that was very high," he said, "and there was no way it was going to be jumped over."

But, does Obama bear responsibility for the timing of the troop withdrawal? On balance, no.
He was following through on an agreement made by Bush and abiding by the will of the Iraqi and American people.

Iraq rejects US request to maintain bases after troop withdrawal

The US suffered a major diplomatic and military rebuff on Friday when Iraq finally rejected its pleas to maintain bases in the country beyond this year.
Barack Obama announced at a White House press conference that all American troops will leave Iraq by the end of December, a decision forced by the final collapse of lengthy talks between the US and the Iraqi government on the issue....
Obama attempted to make the most of it by presenting the withdrawal as the fulfilment of one of his election promises.
"Today I can report that, as promised, the rest of our troops in Iraq will come home by the end of the year. After nearly nine years, America's war in Iraq will be over," he told reporters.

But he had already announced this earlier this year, and the real significance today was in the failure of Obama, in spite of the cost to the US in dollars and deaths, to persuade the Iraqi prime minister Nouri al-Maliki to allow one or more American bases to be kept in the country.

Obama was formally told of Maliki's final decision on Friday morning in a video conference.
Speaking later to reporters, Obama glossed over the rejection, describing it as Iraq shaping its own future.
He told reporters that the "tide of war is receding", not only in Iraq but in Afghanistan and in Libya.
"The United States is moving forward to a position of strength. The long war in Iraq will come to an end by the end of this year. The transition in Afghanistan is moving forward and our troops are finally coming home," he said.