Category Archives: muttering to myself

Can’t shake being all shook up

A friend I hadn’t talked to in a while asked how I was doing. I went down the list of the reasons I’m basically doing fine, my health is OK, the people I know all seem to be healthy, I had the second dose of the vaccine last week, I have enough money to get by, Sekhnet is doing fine, my arthritic knees hurt, but I’m still walking every day, I’m grateful for all this.

Then there’s this feeling I can’t shake, that I am living in Europe in 1932. A student of history, my friend immediately agreed with the comparison.

Weak and badly shaken democracies worldwide are buffeted by constant well-funded lies that agitate millions of angry citizens to rage about their grievances, real and imagined. These weakened democracies try to solve pressing problems for their citizens while an implacable, unprincipled enemy undermines them at every turn, snarling that democracy itself is the problem and arming and organizing itself for violent insurrection, if needed. In the US, these enemies would be willing to sacrifice another 500,000 American lives to the pandemic and kill a bunch more cops, a small price to make the current government look feckless and despicable and ensure their party’s return to absolute political power very soon.

My friend said the Georgia voter suppression law, like the ones passed more quietly in a few other states of the former Confederacy, could not stand a constitutional challenge. I walked him through John Roberts’s blandly dishonest decision in Shelby County v. Holder [1], the infamous 2013 case that threw away the most crucial protections of the 1965 Voting Rights Act in spite of Congress reauthorizing it almost unanimously (98-0 in the Senate), President George W. Bush signing it immediately, with a statement about its centrality to democracy and justice, and the challenged law being upheld by the two federal courts below the Supreme Court.

Roberts also failed to consider (or mention) the provision of the 1965 Voting Rights Act that allows a clean record of ten years with no voter suppression attempts to exempt a state from the preclearance requirement that Roberts threw out. In the Shelby County case itself, plaintiff Shelby County, Alabama (carefully chosen by a consortium of powerful right wing lawyers) had no such clean record. In fact, it had a blemished record. Never mind, John Roberts solved a problem that didn’t exist by taking a gut hook to a law that had been working pretty well to prevent the worst of the voter suppression it was designed to prevent.

The immediate result of throwing away the umbrella that was keeping us dry during a pelting shit-storm (to paraphrase RBG’s famous “throwing out preclearance when it has worked and is continuing to work to stop discriminatory changes is like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet.“) was the instant mushrooming of restrictive voting laws in many states that would have previously needed pre-clearance before passing laws that discriminated against certain voters.

These newly liberated states had the laws all ready to go, signed them into law as soon as John Roberts fixed the Voting Rights Act for them.

In the first three months of 2021, 361 more such laws have been introduced in 47 states, emergency laws needed to deal with an “emergency” that only exists in right-wing media and the fevered hive-mind of Trumpism. These laws, it must always be pointed out, are based on a lie about widespread voter fraud. Their passage preemptively allows Republican state legislatures to intervene to certify the final vote tally, by throwing out thousands of legal votes, if necessary, as Trump illegally sought to have them do in 2020. In Georgia, no more worries about a law-abiding Secretary of State having the last word, the votes in every county will be counted by the GOP as well as all recounts.

This time, Roberts, on a 6-3 Federalist Society court, wouldn’t even have to get involved in upholding the Georgia law as reasonable and narrowly tailored to deal with a hypothetical problem, even one that has never been shown to exist in reality. No longer the “swing vote” on a 6-3 conservative court he can once again demonstrate that he is a principled institutionalist by voting with the three libtard losers that the Georgia law is arguably unconstitutional.

My friend said the court has to be increased to 11. I did the math for him. Georgia law upheld as constitutional 6-5, Roberts for the win, like in Hollywood Squares.

“Fuck,” he said.

The larger problem of institutional injustice is baked into the legalism of the law. A case often turns on an obscure bit of creatively-applied precedent, expressed in jargon the uninitiated have no hope of understanding. An obscure doctrine like the Non-deferential Exception Exemption Standard (a hypothetical doctrine pulled out of my ass) can be deployed by an unappealable Supreme Court to narrowly rule that, for example, a corporation has no obligation to do anything but make money for its shareholders and cannot lawfully be regulated in its pursuit of profit by any government agency or even sued by any consumer in a court of law.

“How can this be?” the average citizen asks. Well, that’s just your ignorance asking, you clearly don’t understand the fine points of the inviolable Non-deferential Exception Exemption Standard as set forth by our most brilliant jurists.

There was a great analysis of this right-wing judicial activism in the New York Times last week. The predominance of Federalist Society ideologues on the federal bench, appointed for life, is the result of a well-organized, well-funded forty year campaign to pack the court with friends of corporate and religious liberty. I clipped out the op-ed at the time, and Heather Cox Richardson mentioned it in her Letter from an American last night:

“By legislating from the bench, Republicans dodge accountability for unpopular policies,” writes Ian Millhiser in a terrific piece in the New York Times on March 30. “Meanwhile, the real power is held by Republican judges who serve for life — and therefore do not need to worry about whether their decisions enjoy public support.”

Ian Millhiser ends his piece:

Yet to understand decisions like Little Sisters and West Virginia, a reader needs to master arcane concepts like the “nondelegation doctrine” or “Chevron deference” that baffle even many lawyers. The result is that the Republican Party’s traditional constituency — business conservatives — walk away with big wins, while voters have less access to health care and breathe dirtier air.

By legislating from the bench, Republicans dodge accountability for unpopular policies. Meanwhile, the real power is held by Republican judges who serve for life — and therefore do not need to worry about whether their decisions enjoy public support.

It’s a terrible recipe for democracy. Voters shouldn’t need to hire a lawyer to understand what their government is doing.

source

Earlier in the op-ed he lays out a few of the prize decisions the Federalist Society Supreme Court has delivered for its ideologically-driven deep-pocketed patrons in recent years:

In the same period, the Supreme Court dismantled much of America’s campaign finance law; severely weakened the Voting Rights Act; permitted states to opt out of the Affordable Care Act’s Medicaid expansion; expanded new “religious liberty” rights permitting some businesses that object to a law on religious grounds to diminish the rights of third parties; weakened laws shielding workers from sexual and racial harassment; expanded the right of employers to shunt workers with legal grievances into a privatized arbitration system; undercut public sector unions’ ability to raise funds; and halted Mr. Obama’s Clean Power Plan.

Now, a 6-to-3 conservative-majority Supreme Court is likely to reshape the country in the coming decade, exempting favored groups from their legal obligations, stripping the Biden administration of much of its lawful authority, and even placing a thumb on the scales of democracy itself.

I told my friend there would need to be at least 15 justices on the Supreme Court to remove the power of a single “swing vote” like religious fundamentalist Amy Coney Barrett (her first decision was that traditional religious worship is more essential to freedom than state medical precautions during a pandemic), and a bipartisan committee to agree on and transparently vet candidates (no more hiding thousands of pages of prejudicial Brett Kavanaugh legal opinions or spending millions in dark money on a public relations campaign during confirmation, as was spent by Team Boof), and term limits on the justices to ensure that every administration had a pick or two.

“They’d never go for fifteen,” my friend said glumly, probably regretting he’d asked me how I was doing.

[1]

The essential dishonesty of the Roberts decision was its insistence that the debate over the Voting Rights Act relied on forty year old data, data that was largely erased by enforcement of the law he was now gutting. Since it had solved the problem he argued, as demonstrated by contemporary voter demographic data, and, as no pattern of racist voter suppression was currently in evidence, there was no further need to burden formerly racist states with an extra step, pre-clearance, before allowing them to institute restrictive voting laws that could, in any case, always be challenged in court.

His decision omitted many crucial facts that refuted his key assertions in the 5-4 decision (these are from Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s crystal clear, prescient dissent):

The reauthorization of the Voting Rights Act was passed, after 21 hearings and 15,000 pages of evidence of ongoing discrimination in the states under preclearance, by a vote of 390-33 in the House and, after further debate, 98 to 0 in the Senate. Reading the John Roberts decision you’d have no reason to suspect that President George W. Bush approvingly signed the reauthorization into law a week later, as RBG describes:

recognizing the need for “further work . . . in the fight against injustice,” and calling the reauthorization “an example of our continued commitment to a united America where every person is valued and treated with dignity and respect.” 

further reading

Weaponizing common sense against itself to hold on to power at any cost

Trump’s party, as measured, principled and intelligent as Trump himself, has consistently attacked the safety precautions of wearing masks and keeping social distance during the pandemic. They phrase it as an issue of freedom from tyranny, like the unlimited constitutional freedom from any regulation of guns. Republican state governments have pushed back hard against these common sense safety measures, calling them everything from tyranny, to unconstitutional, to communist, to Nazi, to Satanist. The Trump plan (such as there was any plan) was to develop a vaccine at warp speed, everybody would be inoculated, “herd mentality” would be achieved and the pandemic would be over. Until Biden succeeded in stealing the election from Trump, with the connivance of many, many traitorous Republicans. Now the vaccine Trump took full credit for is part of the enemy narrative.

If you have been fully vaccinated there is a much lower risk of spreading the infection, particularly to others who’ve been vaccinated. There is a proposal to have some kind of Vaccine Passport you can show to prove you present limited danger in a restaurant, a movie theatre, a tattoo parlor. People can return to these places confident that they will not get deathly ill or make anyone else deathly ill (it seems). Other countries, including our staunch ally Israel, have done this and it seems to make sense, it moves the economy back toward normalcy while protecting the most vulnerable.

But not so fast, though.

Republican talking heads are addressing their audience with a consistent message that the Vaccine Passport is unconstitutional, an “unprecedented power grab”, “literally the end of human liberty in the west”, and an “unprecedented threat to our freedom”. One of the most extreme of the anti-blood drinking caucus have even stronger words for this Satanist, Nazi-like intrusion on American freedom. Marjorie Taylor Green, always good for an incendiary quote, had two: “Biden’s mark of the beast” and “corporate communism.”

Corporate communism, yo. That’s pretty deep.

The far-right Trumpist governor of South Dakota, Kristi Noem, tweeted this “@joebiden #CovidPassport proposal is one of the most un [sic] American ideas in our nation’s history”. At the same time Noem supports the immunization of South Dakota school kids, and requiring proof of vaccination before they can attend a South Dakota school.

You will look in vain for consistency or coherence in the angry catering to inflamed grievance (even fake grievance like widespread “voter fraud” and a Stolen Election, and the outrage of wealthy pedophiles, like Tom Hanks, drinking children’s blood.) The whole Roger Stone/Trump/Roy Cohn/Bill Barr/Charles Koch game is keeping your base in a constant rage. The GOP are doing an excellent job, even if it appears at times quite desperate.

I’m wondering how stupid and/or cynical Joe Manchin, Kyrsten Sinema and a few other, more quiet, Democratic “moderates” actually are. They believe bipartisan legislation is possible with a group who continues to reject science, fact, videotape, testimony and every other form of proof that cut against their wild statements. I realize the politics are complicated for Manchin, whose state voted for Trumpie by 70 points in 2020 — but, seriously, what the fucking fuck? Nazis who scream that other people are Nazis are about the last people you can negotiate with, are they not?

PTSD

Post Traumatic Stress Disorder was not a recognized psychological disorder when the special forces veteran escaped from prison, carjacked a couple’s car, beat the man unconscious and repeatedly raped the woman. I was working for a criminal court judge at the time, the summer of my first year of law school, when several armed guards brought the shackled, manacled prisoner in to argue his case — PTSD made him do it and he should be released from prison on those grounds.

The prisoner was an imposing man, large, muscular and with a savage looking beard. I recall that one of his three or four armed guards walked ten paces behind him with a shotgun. There were also a few NYC policemen in the courtroom, and the armed court guard had his hand near his gun as the prisoner took his place at the defense table. I was glad the guy was in chains, he was right out of central casting for a scary looking, trained to kill dangerous maniac. He had a passing resemblance to a scowling Liam Neeson, playing against type.

The judge had a court-appointed lawyer ready for the hearing, but the prisoner angrily declined the help. He made his argument, pretty forcefully, laying out the traumatic SEAL training he’d undergone, including waterboarding, beatings and sensory deprivation he’d been forced to undergo in his counter-interrogation training, and claimed that since PTSD had not been a recognized condition at the time he was tried and sentenced, that he be allowed to present it now in his defense.

The judge considered this for a moment then said “so your claim is that when you were under stress, after escaping from the prison, it triggered your stressful training and you fell back into your learned behavior, you automatically did what you were trained to do?”

“The stress triggered my PTSD and I acted as I was trained to act,” said the prisoner.

“I’m still trying to figure out what in your training caused you to repeatedly rape the woman,” said the judge. The prisoner glared at him, his motion denied, and the armed guards carefully escorted him back to prison. If looks could kill, I wouldn’t be here to tell the story.

Post Traumatic Stress Disorder is a real thing, of course. It is a serious, sometimes deadly, condition that is probably the cause of most of the 22 veteran suicides in the US every day (thank you for your service). It makes sense, if you think about it, that being in a traumatic situation (your best friend having his head blown off next to you, for example) would cause nightmares, insomnia, depression, anxiety and all the rest. Imagine how much worse your PTSD would be if the trauma was prolonged, extended day after day after day.

We don’t think of it this way, being in the middle of it, all of us determined to believe we are handling everything just fine, but this pandemic, exacerbated by the weaponization of medical precautions (anti-masker meet anti-vaxxer), exacerbated by obvious lies being constantly promulgated as “grounds” to suppress the right to vote, while claiming there can be no limits on our inalienable American right to own any kind of gun we like, as American poverty and food insecurity reaches new depths our top 0.1% now owns as much as our bottom 90%, having gained an additional $1,300,000,000,000 during the pandemic… it’s been a dizzying, traumatic shit storm, with no sign of an ending. Even if we reach herd immunity (assuming 49% of Republican men who claim they won’t be vaccinated are actually lying) and the pandemic stops killing so many of us, eventually goes down to fifteen deaths, then none… this has been a deeply traumatic more than year-long ride.

Last month (on Valentine’s Day, actually) the NY Times published a piece called ‘What’s the Point?’ Young People’s Despair Deepens as Covid-19 Crisis Drags On. The sub-headline is Experts paint a grim picture of the struggle with lockdown isolation — a “mental health pandemic” that should be treated as seriously as containing the coronavirus. Nothing in the report is at all surprising, though it is also shocking.

Old folks like me may feel disoriented during these objectively odd, scary, isolated times, but we have a lifetime of experience, and long time social networks, to help us keep some kind of perspective as we stumble through the genuine bizarreness of this extended pandemic. Younger people are affected much more strongly, as we can see all over the world. I can’t imagine the damage this lockdown is doing to young children, teenagers, young adults. The understandable impulse to immediately return to “normal”, against the best medical advice, is endangering everybody right at the point that we are about to finally control this plague and get back to more normal social life.

What is the public response? There are still millions who insist the virus was caused by China, that it was deliberately inflicted and exploited to fraudulently end the glorious presidency of God’s chosen imperfect vessel, that the vaccine, developed at “Warp Speed” under that very president will somehow kill you, that an army of woke zombies is coming to take the assault rifles Jesus said we can all have. Beyond that, and more ominous still, a war of good (protecting children from pedophiles) against evil (sex traffickers of children who drink their blood) is raging, a wild fantasy promoted by some of our most extreme elected officials. This is all part of a response to trauma that creates additional trauma. We are living in a supremely dangerous time.

You can have the shit beat out of you, even be killed, simply for looking Chinese. The violence is not committed by geniuses, even very stable ones. The rioters in the Capitol trying to make sure Trump stayed in power (how, exactly?) were not deep thinkers, they were bold actors looking for the next in line for the presidency to hang by the neck until dead — since he was a coward and a traitor. They had a strong belief (never mind what it was based on) and they took action. Now, of course, powerful GOP officials like Ron Johnson from Wisconsin, and Lyin’ Ted from Texas, are spinning the story of the riot, not even bothering to explain why 600 peaceful sit-in protesters were arrested at the Capitol in 2018 [1] but hundreds more, involved in a violent insurrection (in which 140 police officers were injured), were allowed to leave the scene of the riot unmolested.

To me, and call me a weakling, this all constitutes trauma, the kind of shit that can wake you at night with a sharp pang of the old PTSD. The trauma is ongoing, serious as cancer, corrosive as acid. Some days are better than others, mood-wise, and it is worth keeping in mind, I think, how traumatic the days we are living in now are, for everybody, Nazi and anti-Nazi, klansman and anti-klansman, moderate centrist and fiery radical alike.

[1]

Nearly 600 protesters, mostly women, were arrested on Thursday after they staged a non-violent action in the heart of a US Senate office building in Washington against Donald Trump’s “zero-tolerance” policy towards immigrants and separation of families at the border.

source

Common Sense vs. the Death Lobby

Why can Congress not regulate gun ownership in any meaningful way in this country, even in the face of the disproportionate gun deaths here, including regular mass shootings? Why can we not have laws supported by more than 90% of us, regarding limiting the availability of guns, and banning the most lethal kinds.

Guns (even military assault rifles designed for instantly spraying an area with deadly fire for maximum killing in war-zone firefights) are considered essential to “freedom” and the continual mass shootings (and thousands of one on one gun murders and even more gun suicides here every year) are simply the price we pay for “freedom”. An asshole argument, made by cynical, indifferent assholes, sure, but you can get shot here if you want to argue about it too loudly. Every angry 21 year-old white American male gunman has a right, conferred directly by Jesus Christ Himself, to own as many guns as will make him feel safe and powerful.

You recall how hard it was to get tobacco companies to stop pushing cigarettes on children? They were a very, very powerful lobby representing billions in profits with brilliant, aggressive lawyers fighting off pesky wrongful death cases for decades. One of their biggest legal guns, former tobacco attorney Lewis Powell, after writing an influential memo on how Commies want to destroy our freedom by attacking corporations in court — and stressing the importance of having judges who will hold the line on corporate rights — went on to become a long serving pro-corporate rights Supreme Court justice. We have several of them up there now, dedicated corporatists like John Roberts, the self-proclaimed balls and strikes umpire and, before that, the creator of the brilliant, now ubiquitous “arbitration clause” that is in virtually every contract consumers sign with corporations.

Let’s pause for a second to appreciate how brilliant that arbitration clause is, from a corporate point of view. In signing the contract you agree to forego any judicial remedy outside of binding arbitration, for any injury, even death, sustained due to the actions of the corporation you signed the contract with. Instead of a costly class action where a million similarly injured customers can hold a negligent corporation accountable in a court of law, every individual customer agrees to a one on one arbitration, the costs usually shared evenly between the complaining customer and the corporation, and the arbitrator will decide whose rights have been violated and by how much. Plus, the beauty part, whatever the arbitrator decides is binding, no appeal. It’s right there in the fine print you signed, bitch.

Why does every Republican in Congress (and every “moderate” Democrat from a Red State, like right-leaning Joe Manchin) elected in the last 40 years need a triple A rating from the National Rifle Association? Second Amendment, yo! The Second Amendment is considered by millions to be the most important amendment in our Constitution. Its fans (including indisputable legal genius Antonin Scalia) argue that the ambiguously worded amendment that begins with the words “a well-regulated militia, being necessary for the security of a free state” is not about militias at all, but the inviolable right of every individual American to bear as many arms as possible to ensure freedom from all tyranny, including, significantly, the tyranny of a government that would come to take their guns — like they did on January 6th at the Capitol! Pry ’em from my cold dead hands, coercive nanny-state!

Heather Cox Richardson lays out the history of how the once reasonable National Rifle Association (one-time advocates of responsible gun ownership and sensible gun control) became, starting with Reagan, the most powerful right wing lobby in the country (and biggest single donor to our boy Trumpie in 2016, $30,000,000, baby). Heather, as usual, cogent and brilliant.

Why does the United States have such an off the charts number of gun homicides a year? The New York Times published a great article today, zeroing in on the number one cause of all that gun death here in the land of the free and the home of the brave. We lead the world, by a gigantic margin, in the number of guns people have. Read this article, with its spoiler alert headline, Why Does the U.S. Have So Many Mass Shootings? Research Is Clear: Guns, I highly recommend it.

Around the world the opinion is that the US, which has 4.4% of the world’s population and owns 42% of its guns, is a violent, racist nation with a mental health epidemic raging out of control under an overpriced, inadequate health care system. I’d have thought that too, but it turns out, and the researchers make a great case: there is an amazingly strong correlation between the number of gun deaths in an area and the number of guns people own. We may be no more violent, racist or otherwise insane than citizens anywhere else, we just have ten or a hundred, or a thousand times more guns than any other country. Here’s a neatly chilling factoid from the article, an illustration of why so many more of us are killed here by guns, which are almost as ubiquitous as John Roberts’ fucking arbitration clause:

[It’s not that we have more violent crime here than elsewhere…] Rather, they found, in data that has since been repeatedly confirmed, that American crime is simply more lethal. A New Yorker is just as likely to be robbed as a Londoner, for instance, but the New Yorker is 54 times more likely to be killed in the process.

source

Fancy that.

Or, as this raging asshole would say, let the American people listen to the propaganda on both sides, go as deep as they want into any monetizable rabbit hole, and make their own informed decisions, which the lobbyists make sure get translated into the most lucrative possible policies, public and private.

$7,400,000 an hour — Bezos!

The world’s most successful greedy man, Jeff Bezos, made over $65,000,000,000 during the pandemic. That comes out to $7,400,000 an hour [1] for the man who heroically insists on paying his 1.3 million sweatshop workers $15 and hour for their hard work — and manfully advocates for that generous living minimum wage to be forced on all his competitors. We should note that from Jeff’s point of view, he is actually losing money since his wealth was calculated as increasing by almost $9,000,000 an hour just two years ago.

While Bezos is raking in this pandemic-driven windfall he’s fighting Amazon workers’ attempts to organize. He ruthlessly put down one such attempt in NY at the start of the pandemic when workers concerned with contracting a deadly virus spoke up about conditions in his crowded, un-sanitized warehouses, where they worked around the clock without PPE to fulfill the increasing orders of tens of millions of locked-down Americans and increase the vast fortune of world’s second richest man. Amazon warehouse workers apparently have a 100% attrition rate during their first year, because the working conditions are so atrocious. Bezos also clawed back their $2/hour hazard pay bonus in May, at the end of the third month of the pandemic.

Bezos has been spending millions in business costs to fight attempts at unionization of his vast Amazon work force. You can read all about his tactics of threatening and intimidating anyone in his work force who seeks a voice in working conditions, collective bargaining and so forth. A guy like this is generally considered a piece of shit, I certainly see him that way.

And, of course, eventually the political — a powerful greedy piece of shit’s unfettered right to do whatever he sees fit because he has an army of lawyers and will generally face no consequences for any of his actions — becomes personal. Here’s my petty personal anecdote about the genius Jeff Bezos.

I have a small collection of one-hand opening folding knives, assembled over decades. I find it handy to have a knife in my pocket, for picnic use or for opening otherwise impossible to open plastic packaging, for example. I rarely spend more than $40 for a knife, but each time I see a new design innovation that is cool (a new style of lock or improved deployment method), lightweight and not close to something I already have, I pick it up. With the excellence of Chinese engineering and manufacturing in recent years, it’s possible to buy a knife for $40 or less that not long ago would have cost well over a hundred dollars. We are living in a golden age of well-made, inexpensive, one-handed opening folding knives.

In New York State, for whatever convoluted reason, a knife that is opened with a flipper, a little tab on the back or front of the blade used to pop the knife open, is illegal. An axis lock knife (like the Benchmade mini Griptilian) that can be flipped open in a milli-second, with a flick of the wrist, is legal, as are assisted opening knives that have a spring that makes them fly open in a similar quick blink of an eye. A thumb stud is fine, and there are many knives that have bearings in them that allow them to be whipped open instantly with a flick of the thumb stud. For whatever twisted reason, NY and Massachusetts do not allow you to order a knife that opens with a flipper.

I saw a video of a cool looking flipper knife, made by the reputable CRKT, that was very inexpensive. The couple doing the video loved this knife, and lovingly demonstrated its smoothness opening and closing one handed. It indeed looked cool and I didn’t have one like it. Plus, the price was a steal, a knife that could easily sell for $50 was selling for about $12.

Apparently it was made by CRKT for a cut-rate gun company called Ruger and that company was selling this model on its website for about $12. I immediately went to the website, found the knife (LCK) and, seeing it was not available for shipping in NYC (the site did specify New York City), called a friend who lives ten miles out of the city and arranged to send them there. I ordered three or four, and with the shipping, they were about $15 each. Two would be gifts, one would live on the kitchen table, the other I’d carry around in my pocket.

A short time after I placed the order I got an email from the company informing me that my order had been cancelled, since it could not be shipped to an address in New York State.

I began arranging to send the knives to a friend in Tennessee, who would keep one and send the others on to me in a postage paid box I’d send him. But I was too slow. Bezos never sleeps.

These knives are presently only available on Amazon, at $49.95, because a good businessman is a sucker to leave money on the table. The worlds’ greediest piece of shit apparently bought out the inventory on this LCK flipper knife and priced it according to what the market would bear. Why would he not? Even assuming he paid full retail for the knives (he surely did not), that’s still a rather nice 300% profit– so, again, why not?

Fair is fair, y’all– you snooze you fucking lose. The greed of the greediest among us never sleeps.

Hopefully Bezos will have to deal with his first unionized shop, after the final votes come in on March 29th from his predominantly Black work force in Bessemer, Alabama.

[1]

This comes as a new study, out today, from Americans for Tax Fairness and the Institute for Policy Studies has found Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has seen his personal wealth increase by $65 billion since the pandemic began a year ago. That means Bezos’s wealth increased on average by over $7.4 million every hour for the past year.

Meanwhile, Amazon workers in Bessemer and other locations are being forced to work 10-hour shifts with just two 15-minute bathroom breaks.

source

Elegant schematic

I’ve been wrestling to put the mechanism of abuse into the fewest possible words. Abuse comes in many forms, and every one of them involves (among other things) the violent suppression of someone else’s rightful feelings. There is a common element to all abuse: whatever you think happened to you, whatever you can show me actually did happen to you — fuck you!

It may be helpful to see it set out this way, as I did toward the end the final draft of my letter to my former lifelong friend Paul:

I have to say, though, the schematic of your method is quite elegant. One friend sets out to prove to the other that people are deeply flawed brutes who cannot change in any fundamental way, salutes his friend for his years of efforts to be less brutish, thanks him for his mildness in the face of an angry confrontation, keeps professing ignorance of what his friend’s actual issues are, no matter how clearly stated — eventually provokes an angry response from his ahimsa-deluded old pal. Game and match! Elegant, man, you win. It must feel great.

It doesn’t feel great, obviously, and I am just being a sarcastic dick to say so to this poor, eternally besieged, black and white seeing, zero-sum calculating fucker. However, raising the bar on what constitutes “fundamental change” from becoming much more difficult to rile up (a difficult but attainable goal) to becoming impossible to provoke (a virtually impossible one, given enough time and perverse persistence) is damned clever, it’s what enables the abuser to insist he is right — and to prevail — no matter what the facts of the case show otherwise.

It’s the same as the game run by racists, the segregationists, those afraid and angry at Black Lives Matter for their cruel insistence that our society is ravaged by racism just because cops are continually killing unarmed Blacks with no consequences. Segregationists blame the victims, it’s all they’ve got.

“We don’t have slavery anymore, haven’t for more than 150 years, and these savage thugs are so ungrateful! What did we do? What did our generation do? A few of them get killed when they disobey cops, it happens to everybody, it happens way more to whites than to them [1]. Yet THEY angrily demand a special right to be treated like their lives matter so much more than anybody else’s. That’s why we hate them!”

That evil kid who decided his uncontrollable sexual urges made it necessary to murder seven women and a man? Police spokesman told every potential juror in the country that the poor little mass-murderer had had a “bad day”, and he wasn’t going to go into whether the slimy mass-murderer had expressed remorse, though he pointed out solemnly that the killer was aware of the “gravity” of what he’d done.

In the mind of the abuse/murder justifiers: Asians who are upset about this recent mass killing of Asian women? Here we go again with the “identity politics” and the “politics of victimization.” We don’t even know if this kid was motivated by specific ethnic or racial hatred when he sprayed these Asian women with bullets. Sheesh.

It’s like McConnell, using political power with unprecedented cynicism and a maddening double standard, threatening to release the Kraken and leave only “scorched earth” if Democrats vote to make minority obstruction more difficult for the obstructionist minority. How dare radical Democrats threaten to break the thing I spent a decade smashing with a sledge hammer!!!

Jesus, it must feel good to be that kind of winner, mustn’t it?

Assholes will be assholes, I suppose. The best we can do is the work of trying to making ourselves better, gentler, more attuned.

[1]

This is what the treacherous Bill Barr kept insisting, as they tried to turn the nationwide, predominantly peaceful, protests against the continual murder of unarmed Blacks, by police, into a sinister, violent anarchist conspiracy to riot against Law and Order, one that justified deploying massive military force to put it down, counter-insurgency style. Barr insisted many more whites than Blacks were killed by cops every year (note: Blacks are 13.4% of the population, so just statistically, that better be true) and you don’t hear whites whining about it — only Blacks. He pulled a number out of his ass, a small handful of unarmed Blacks killed by police each year, and claimed irrationally enraged Blacks were using this tiny number of people like Breonna Taylor, tragically killed, as a pretext to start a violent revolution. Like that large crowd of protesters by the White House that had to be cleared with chemical irritants, horseback charge, batons, riot forces, when they balked at their First Amendment right to peacefully protest being threatened with chemical irritants, horseback charge, batons, riot forces.

“Pepper spray is NOT a chemical irritant, (you irritating bitch!)” snarled Trump’s always pompous, often unapologetically irrational, bagpiping, culture warrior Attorney General, William Pelham Barr, on national TV.

More proof of the already conclusively proved

The New York Times released this, eh, surprising news yesterday:

WASHINGTON — President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia authorized extensive efforts to hurt the candidacy of Joseph R. Biden Jr. during the election last year, including by mounting covert operations to influence people close to President Donald J. Trump, according to a declassified intelligence report released on Tuesday…

…The reports, compiled by career officials, amounted to a repudiation of Mr. Trump, his allies and some of his top administration officials. They reaffirmed the intelligence agencies’ conclusions about Russia’s interference in 2016 on behalf of Mr. Trump and said that the Kremlin favored his re-election. And they categorically dismissed allegations of foreign-fed voter fraud, cast doubt on Republican accusations of Chinese intervention on behalf of Democrats and undermined claims that Mr. Trump and his allies had spread about the Biden family’s work in Ukraine.

source

The line we often hear, about shady things done by powerful people, is that it’s not the crime itself, it’s the cover-up that gets you. Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller wasn’t appointed because of well-founded suspicions that the Trump campaign had had strategic help from and over a hundred contacts with Putin’s agents during the lead-up to the 2016 election — he was appointed when Trump fired Jim Comey for not dropping the investigation into Trump’s former National Security Director Mike “Lock Her up” Flynn. Flynn had been reluctantly fired by Trump for lying about his own contacts with Russia, then Trump attempted to squash the investigation and gloated by immediately celebrating Comey’s firing with a bunch of Russians in the Oval Office. It all looked so openly corrupt that Robert Mueller had to be appointed.

Mueller, of course, wound up having to write an entire second volume on Trump’s repeated attempts to interfere with his investigation, cover up his attempts to cover up widespread contacts with Trump’s benefactor Vladimir Putin, instruct his people to stay strong and say nothing, his obstruction of justice. Mueller was forced to do this because Trump’s people lied to him over and over, people like Paul Manafort who Trump later pardoned for not “singing” like a “rat”. Mueller’s short summary of the Obstruction of Justice volume would have made an excellent article of impeachment, but Nancy Pelosi and the Democratic braintrust did not have the stomach for that fight, banking instead on American outrage about Trump’s attempt to shake down the new president of a country few had ever heard of.

One star of the new revelations about Putin’s attempts to sow discord and secure another four years as American president for his pliable friend is slippery Russian intel officer/spy Konstantin Kilimnik:

The report also named Konstantin V. Kilimnik, a former colleague of Mr. Trump’s onetime campaign manager Paul Manafort, as a Russian influence agent. Mr. Kilimnik took steps throughout the 2020 election cycle to hurt Mr. Biden and his candidacy, the report said, helping pushed a false narrative that Ukraine, not Russia, was responsible for interfering in American politics.

During the 2016 campaign, Mr. Manafort shared inside information about the presidential race with Mr. Kilimnik and the Russian and Ukrainian oligarchs whom he served, according to a bipartisan report last year by the Senate Intelligence Committee.

“Kilimnik was back at it again, along with others like Derkach,” Mr. Schiff said. “And they had other conduits for their laundered misinformation, including people like Rudy Giuliani.”

Neither Mr. Giuliani nor his representatives returned a request for comment.

source

You know, this guy:

Kilimnik was mentioned hundreds of times in the bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee report about massive Russian interference in the 2016 election that came out in five volumes, the last of them well after Mueller’s discarded work was done. The Republican led committee documented meetings and constant communications between then Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort (Roger Stone’s former partner in political dirty tricks) and Kilimnik, the man the FBI is now seeking for Obstruction of Justice and Conspiracy to Obstruct Justice. They documented how Manafort had shared detailed polling data with Kilimnik, information that might have come into play when Trump’s surgically precise Electoral College victory was engineered. Though he lost he popular vote, he won every district he needed to win for his 78,000 vote Electoral College mandate.

The Republican led committee got much more detailed information on Trump’s collusion/coordination/close work with Russia than Mueller was able to find. And, because Americans are not sophisticated consumers of information, the Republicans on the committee publicly distanced themselves from their own findings, repeating the mantra that it was all a big nothing fabricated by vicious partisans who hated Trump, no matter how much so called evidence of this collusion they themselves had turned up.

Can anyone really be surprised about this “news” that Putin wanted his guy reelected in 2020? During the 2020 campaign Trump and Barr constantly echoed the incendiary and baseless Putin talking point about mail in voting fraud. Evidence? “It’s common sense,” snorted Barr on national TV, more than once. Draw a straight line from that lie about massive potential fraud by those who voted against Trump, through Trump’s constant carping about a rigged election, to his open attempts to sabotage the US mail system by having his megadonor dismantle hundreds of urban high speed mail sorting machines, remove mailboxes and slow down mail delivery by other shenanigans, through literally hundreds of baseless lawsuits to prevent voting or contest electoral losses, to the well-funded months’ long Stop the Steal publicity blitz, to the riot organized and launched to prevent the certification of the election results, to the screaming about the cancellation of Dr. Seuss and the snarling threats of “scorched earth” in the Senate — and… well, Putin’s laughing, anyway.

Maybe he’s right, comrades. This nation may be too fucking stupid and weak to remain a democracy.

The often subtle nature of abuse

If you get punched in the face, although the puncher can claim it was an accident, you know without a doubt that you’ve been punched in the face. The same goes for a beating with a belt, or a stick. The damage done by physical beatings is something I can only imagine, not having experienced them more than a couple of times over my long life. The abuse I’m more familiar with is the emotional variety. This kind of expression of rage can be very subtle, and practitioners of this form of abuse are often very good at justifying themselves, making their mercilessness appear to be entirely your fault.

In recent years we have learned the word “gaslighting” — from a 1939 film in which a husband convinces his wife she’s going crazy by, among other things, turning down the gas light in their home over the course of time and pretending the light is the same as it ever was. It is a smooth variation on reframing, a technique by which whatever you’re upset about is recast from another perspective that makes you unreasonable. You say you’re upset about this, well, actually, THIS is why you’re really upset and that makes you a dishonest, confused idiot simply lashing out irrationally because you’re a jerk.

The damage done is the nagging feeling of self-doubt it creates about your right to your feelings, which can be crippling. You honestly don’t even see you are being abused until very far into the game, if ever. It is easy, many times, to doubt your own lying eyes and ears, when the pressure is kept constant by someone intent on keeping you off balance at any cost.

Many people don’t ever fully recover from this kind of abuse, tending to blame themselves throughout their lives for pain they didn’t cause and mistreatment they did little or nothing to deserve. Lately, during this lockdown I’ve had too much time to brood as I work through an interesting book about evil, which concludes that evil consists, in its essence, of a damaging lie told without contrition. Being less and less able to go for my customary long walks due to the arthritis in my left knee, I keep coming back to my own inability to see bad things for what they are sometimes. Sekhnet tried to reassure me by chalking it up to my good character, my desire to see the best in people, to extend the benefit of the doubt, my attempt to first cause no harm, but it doesn’t feel like a satisfying explanation to me.

There is a masochistic aspect to my unwillingness to let go of people who have shown themselves to be, at best, callous about other people’s feelings and determined to be right at all costs. I keep coming up short when I consider why I didn’t finally cut a very neurotic old friend loose once he, face fully a’twitch, blamed me for deliberately trying to destroy his hellish marriage. Or why I kept trying to explain myself to a very smart old friend who continued to plead ignorance to what exactly he’d done by expressing rage at my anger, precisely how this had hurt me so much, no matter how clearly I explained it to him. It’s this second guy I feel like throwing against the wall a bit now, though our long friendship was shit-canned months back. Though both were adamant in their denial of my right to feel the way I did, or their role in the escalating tension between us, the first guy is already in hell, to a more obvious extent than the second, who remained smugly superior throughout.

I saw a concise little presentation on gaslighting the other day (see below) and as I watched I saw each of this very smart old friend’s responses, set out one after the other. A textbook case of bullying by trying to make me doubt even my own ability to express myself clearly. The point was not whether or not I’d made myself clear (I had) the point was, no matter what I said or wrote, he had a ready reply that dismissed or ignored it outright and he kept falling back on his inability to understand, asking me to please, if I’d be willing, explain it to him again, a little clearer this time. In the end, in telling me how cruelly I’d hurt him (by eventually making clear what a desperate, irredeemable asshole he was?), he insisted none of the thousands of words I’d written him gave him any “clue” why I had felt it necessary, in the end, to be so hurtful to him. Now, because I had been so patient with this guy, acting in good faith with someone who was hellbent on being right, no matter what the facts, I am left with a desire to simply hurt the perennial bully.

The ten examples of gaslighting from the video below are a good starting point, I suppose, for a tart little final fuck you, since he employed every one of these lines over the months I took him at his word that he honestly wanted to repair our friendship. I should be able to get over this anger I am still feeling, but since I am not able to, inflicting a little last bit of hurt may be the best I can do to finish processing it. Let’s run through the list as I mentally prepare my fuck you to this unfunny clown:

“What did I do to you?” This is a good one, my mother used to use this one all the time. I have an image of her, sitting next to me at the kitchen table when I was a kid, screaming in a weird cadence (which makes me think she may have been shaking me to this rhythm) “what… did… anyone… ever… do… to …. you… to make you… so… fucking angry?!”

“Everyone around you isn’t the problem, the problem is you.” In the case of someone who lies at your expense, the problem isn’t that they lied, the problem is that you are such a self-righteous and judgmental prick. This is a newly familiar one to me, and a very hard one to swallow.

“I’m sorry you feel that way.” This is a great one, sometimes expressed in the conditional “if-pology” form “if you felt bad, if I hurt you, I’m sorry.” Neatly dismissive of your right to feel the way you do, leaving open the possibility that nothing bad happened, and beautifully evasive of any role in causing the feelings you are conditionally apologizing for the other person having, if they actually even had such feelings. A classic.

“I don’t remember saying that, I think you made that up.”

“It’s your anxiety that made me do it.” A variation on the theme that you deserve what you get, because it’s all you’re fault, none of it mine, and if you have a problem, you caused it, because you are the asshole, not me!

“You need help.”

“It’s your fault.”

“You’re too emotional” (sorry if you feel that way, asshole)

“It’s not a big deal.”

“Why are you so defensive all the time? You keep attacking me.” This is the last refuge of a gaslighting bully, to make themselves the victim of you. It is this last one, more than another other single reason, that makes me feel like delivering one hard, unequivocal punch to this smart, eternally argumentative fellow’s smug, combative face. I’m not proud of this feeling, but I understand it. There is a certain value, I have to think, to providing this motherfucker with the unambiguous clue he pretended not to have.

Centrist Democrat

What is “centrist” or “moderate” about a Democrat who believes Americans should not be guaranteed a living wage for full-time work? Every news outlet I’ve seen refers to conservative Democrat Joe Manchin (Trump won his state by 40 points in 2020, so there’s that) as moderate or centrist. According to Mr. Manchin $440 a week is more than fair pay for an unskilled worker, and, as you’ll hear reported everywhere, it is the position of a moderate centrist.

“Times that $400 by 50 weeks (we’ll give her two weeks vacation, unpaid) and that’s a nice, let’s see… $22,000. NOT BAD for someone without a high school diploma! A nice raise from her current $14,500! I’d like that kind of 30% raise myself!! And, yes, I know you can look on google and find out the median American income last year was around $34,000, but that’s factoring in all those folks making $14,500, so you can kind of throw out those numbers.”

What could be more moderate than that? Particularly when the left wing of your party keeps pointing out that adjusted for the cost of living, the federal minimum wage, (which hasn’t been raised since 2009, when it was increased by 70 cents an hour [1]) should be raised to an outrageous $24 an hour. So, radicals want $24. The president wants $15. The GOP presumably wants to keep it at $7.25. So a moderate centrist proposes a compromise of $11. You see?

I can understand FOX news calling Manchin a “centrist” and a “moderate” or a “voice of reason” since he’s basically a Republican in most things — but the NY Times, Washington Post, NPR, CNN, MSNBC? What the fuck? Call the thing what it is.

He’s from West Virginia, an impoverished state that voted for Trump by a 40% margin, even after his disastrous first term, a state that recently had a Ku Klux Klansman as one of its senators. He may be independent, he may be a maverick, he may be as politically shrewd as Mitch McConnell, it may be perfectly understandable that he is enjoying his sudden, outsized power and the way everybody is bowing down to him, but one thing he isn’t is a centrist or a moderate. Words fucking matter.

[1]

Check out this handy chart of the federal minimum wage (established under FDR in 1938) at the Department of Labor and see how it changed over the decades.

$15/hr federal minimum wage — truly a modest proposal

You can almost do the math in your head. $7.25 an hour times forty hours: $290 a week. $15 an hour times 40: $600. Raising the federal minimum wage to a modest living wage, we are told by Trump’s party (and at least two selected Democrats) would somehow be calamitous.

The Senate parliamentarian advised Democrats yesterday that raising the federal minimum wage by reconciliation (which requires 51 votes) as part of their $1.9 trillion pandemic relief/stimulus program is a violation of the Senate’s arcane rules [1]. There was no such ruling, of course, when Trump’s GOP, in a 51-49 vote, gave a similar sum to our richest families, partnerships and corporations in tax give backs in December, 2017. If there was, nobody mentioned it, it derailed nothing.

In the richest country in the world, our lowest paid workers are currently free to work full-time and live in poverty. How is paying workers a modest living wage controversial?

If the real concern is bankrupting small businesses that will be unable to make payroll, there are ways to subsidize those businesses to keep them solvent and profitable. Government support to help small businesses who would be burdened by paying a living wage to their workers would be similar to, and benefit many millions more than, the massive subsidies our government already gives to highly profitable fossil fuel conglomerates and other corporate beneficiaries of taxpayer generosity. But concern for small business is not the real concern here, folks.

It’s a hard to understand the rationale of those who don’t want America’s poorest working people to be able to afford clothing, shelter, healthy food and health care. I don’t understand it as anything more than an expression of disdain by the born-comfortable for anybody who was not prudent enough to be born into reasonable financial circumstances. The children of the poor in America have steeper odds of ever escaping poverty than poor kids in most other wealthy nations, plus they and their parents are routinely vilified as lazy freeloaders who refuse to do the impossible– “pull themselves up by their bootstraps”.

How does the existence of millions of full-time workers who struggle to support themselves and their children, even if they work two 40 hour jobs a week, help anyone? How did slavery help the masses of American workers? Yet, there would be a long, bloody fight to the death to preserve the Peculiar Institution. This fight over a living wage seems to be part of that same struggle, a vicious and well-funded fight to benefit a small group of highly privileged individuals.

The parliamentarian’s ruling yesterday took the most conservative Democrat in the Senate, West Virgina’s Joe Manchin, off the hook, for the moment. His vote is needed to pass any law or confirm any nominee in the divided Senate, even 51-50. Manchin seems to be enjoying his new status as a kingmaker. He announced the other day that he opposes the $15 dollar minimum wage, advocating for a compromise $11 an hour federal minimum wage. Only 4 dollars difference, only $160 a week. Why bitch about $640 a month? Show some class! Let’s show our bipartisan spirit and compromise, y’all. Where I come from, $11 is a lot of money!

Where you’re going, Joe, $11 won’t even buy you a blowjob from one of Satan’s lowliest.

I didn’t forget about Joe Manchin’s fellow conservative Democratic kingmaker, Arizona’s senior senator (in office since 2109), Kyrsten Sinema [2], I just can’t think of anything the staunch defender of the filibuster might try to buy for $11. Maybe a Big Mac, super-sized fries, a giant Coke and a nice dessert from a good bakery.

In other news:

Lynch mob victim and former Senator Al Franken cracked “I like Ted Cruz more than anybody in the Senate does– and I HATE Ted Cruz.” Here’s Ted, doing thirty seconds of standup for his peeps:

[1]

The Senate parliamentarian ruled that a plan to gradually increase the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour by 2025 does not fit the complicated rules that govern budget bills in the Senate. House Democrats included the measure in a $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief bill that is expected to be the first major legislative act for President Biden.

source

[2]

from: Kyrsten Sinema’s Self-Defeating, Nonsensical Defense of the Filibuster: The Arizona senator is almost single-handedly keeping Democrats from wielding their majority power—and the party may well lose that power as a result.

This year, all around the country, Republican state lawmakers are pushing an alarming array of bills that are designed to make it harder to vote. They’re targeting absentee voting, early voting, voting by mail, and virtually every other means to cast a ballot. Though their stated justification is the illusory threat of voter fraud, the goal is to reduce turnout in ways that suppress Democratic votes. In short, it’s a cynical move against basic tenets of American democracy.

Democrats have an answer to this challenge. For the past two years, they’ve put forward H.R. 1, a sweeping bill to reform American elections. It would enact automatic voter registration nationwide, expand early voting and vote-by-mail, and more. And it doesn’t stand a chance of passage, as long as the Senate filibuster remains intact.

The case against the filibuster has been made ad nauseam lately—including in these pages, by me and others. But there’s a reason the argument has become unavoidable: The filibuster is the most decisive force in American governance and policymaking today. It decides—by virtue of requiring 60 votes to pass most legislation, rather than simply a 51-vote majority—the outcome of countless policy debates before they can even begin.

source