Category Archives: Random Blogging

Will Obvious Insanity Be A Turning Point?

By now, it should be obvious that Trump is not simply stupid and ignorant (two different conditions), although he is both. He is severely mentally ill. He has not simply pursued mistaken policies, he has pursued petty vengeance–when he isn’t pursuing personally profitable grifts.

The clown show Trump calls a “cabinet” has already inflicted major damage on critical aspects of governance: public health, civil liberties, Social Security and more. Now–with the advent of his insane tariffs–he has begun the tanking of an economy that economists agreed was the best in the world at the end of the Biden Administration.

Even before the announcement of the scale of these unbelievably stupid and damaging tariffs, Paul Krugman wrote what any halfway sentient observer already knew: their imposition is a declaration of an all-out trade war that America will lose.

As I said, I don’t know exactly what will be announced later today. One safe prediction, however, is that over the next few days we’ll see many news analyses purporting to explain the thinking behind this radical change in U.S. policy.

Such analyses will be a waste of time, because there’s nothing to explain. I’m not saying that the Trump team’s thinking is unsound. I don’t see any thinking at all.

Krugman focused on two major internal contradictions in Trump’s intended justification.

Here’s the story: Trumpers are claiming that tariffs

1. Won’t increase prices, because foreign producers will absorb the cost

2. Will cause a large shift in U.S. demand away from imports to domestic production

3. Will raise huge amounts of revenue

If you think about it for a minute, you realize that (1) is inconsistent with (2): If prices of imports don’t rise, why would consumers switch to domestically produced goods? At the same time, (2) is inconsistent with (3): If imports drop a lot, tariffs won’t raise a lot of money, because there won’t be much to tax.

So the public story about tariffs doesn’t make any sense. And Trump’s rants about tariffs go beyond nonsense..

Does he really believe that Canada is a major source of fentanyl? Worse, does he believe that fentanyl smugglers pay tariffs?

But is it all a cover for the real, probably sinister agenda of Trump’s tariff push?

No. There isn’t any secret agenda, devised by people who know that the public story is nonsense. How do I know that? Because who, exactly, do you think is devising this secret agenda?

As he goes on to note, today’s Democrats and Republicans get their policy advice from very different sources: Democrats engage people with credentials and expertise. They still may be wrong, but they’re drawn from pools of folks having recognized expertise. Republicans these days prefer “experts” who are pure hacks–people who can be counted on to support whatever the party says.

Krugman was writing before Trump’s unveiling of his insane tariffs. In the wake of that announcement, former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers posted that “The best estimate of the loss from tariff policy is now [close] to $30 trillion or $300,000 per family of four.”  Former Vice-President (and Trump toady) Mike Pence was quoted as saying that “The Trump Tariff Tax is the largest peacetime tax hike in U.S. history.” Dow futures lost 1200 points. A coalition of 12 countries officially moved to abandon the dollar in favor of local currencies for cross-border trade.

And that was just on day one.

MAGA cultists may not recognize the likely economic devastation, but a majority of American businesspeople do. So do the “profit over patriotism” lawyers who have bent the knee rather than stand up for the rule of law. And so do the economists and related scholars who work for the universities that have cowered and complied in order to retain federal grants.

In barely three months in office, an ignorant and petty madman has done incalculable damage to the rule of law, to the social safety net, to public health, to America’s alliances abroad– and now to a once-flourishing economy.

Increasing numbers of citizens are coming to understand the gravity of these actions. Call me Pollyanna, but I think the tariffs will provide a wake-up call to the cynical plutocrats who have been willing to go along with the mad king–ignoring the incredible damage being done to average Americans– in hopes of profiting from further tax cuts.

There’s an old political adage to the effect that matters have to “hit bottom” before spineless officials will take action. There’s an excellent case to be made that–thanks to our obviously insane Chief Executive–we’re there.

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Welcome To The Gulag

A friend of mine recently called to tell me a chilling story. He has a family member who teaches middle-schoolers in our city’s public school system. The students come from a relatively poor area, and are largely Hispanic ten and eleven-year-olds.

And for the past few weeks, his classroom has been visited, sporadically, by ICE.

The ICE officers who come to his classroom have a standard routine; they take a student–a ten or eleven-year-old–out of the classroom and the school for “questioning” of some sort. Sometimes, that student is returned; sometimes–presumably, if it is determined that he or she is undocumented–that student never returns. In the latter case, according to what my friend’s relative has been told, the student, along with his or her parents, has been summarily deported.

My friend was appalled. His relative, the teacher, is infuriated, but helpless.

We don’t know anything more about this invasion of a public school classroom. We don’t know whether the child or the parents are afforded any sort of due process, or whether they have the services of legal counsel. (According to a recent article, routine denial of due process in immigration cases is an intentional part of Trump’s effort to undermine the rule of law.) We don’t know whether they are simply taken, like the widely-reported case of the Massachusetts graduate student with a valid visa who was accosted by plain-clothes ICE officials on a city street, arrested and flown to Louisiana for the “crime” of writing an op-ed with which our current dictator disagreed.

Undocumented immigrants have, by definition, broken the law. They’ve come to the United States without submitting themselves to our incredibly complicated and lengthy legal immigration process. In most cases, that is the only law they’ve broken. The middle-schoolers who are being “disappeared” from the classroom of my friend’s relative are innocent of any intentional lawbreaking, as are the thousands of DACA kids who were brought here as small children.

It is one thing to agree with the administration that undocumented immigrants who have been convicted of crimes while on our soil should be deported; it is another thing entirely to stand by and watch hard-working and otherwise law-abiding people–and their children–being summarily snatched from their lives and their classrooms and taken…where? How?

All my friend really knows is what his teacher/relative is experiencing. His relative doesn’t know any more than the fact that ICE periodically appears in his classroom, takes a child away, and sometimes brings that child back.

And sometimes, doesn’t.

But thanks to the media, we do know about the graduate students (lovingly referred to as “lunatics” by Marco Rubio, our new and especially despicable Secretary of State) who are being rounded up and stripped of their entirely legal residency for the “crime” of expressing opinions with which that our madman President disagrees. Despite assertions to the effect that these students have assisted Hamas and other terrorist organizations, none of them has been credibly accused–indeed, accused at all– of any such activity. No evidence of terrorist support has even been offered. It has become abundantly clear that the only “aid and comfort” offered has come in the form of opinions–the expression of which, at least until the advent of our current fascist regime, has been constitutionally protected.

Is it possible that my friend, his relative, and yours truly are jumping to unwarranted conclusions? All we know, as I’ve said, is that ICE is routinely visiting a largely Hispanic public school classroom, taking individual students out for interrogation, and returning some but not all of them. Perhaps the fact that this is occuring during a time when we are seeing reports of unconstitutional behaviors nationally is making us more suspicious than we would otherwise be.

Perhaps.

Since I have only the information I have shared above, I’m asking any of my readers who might have additional information to share it. (I doubt any ICE personnel read this blog, but if there is such a reader, I would especially welcome a comment correcting any erroneous suppositions. I would be extremely happy to have those suppositions corrected–and the picture I’ve formed of terrified ten-year-olds expunged.)

If, however, the conclusions we’ve reached, based upon what we do know, turn out to be accurate, that would suggest that Trump has taken the U.S. much farther down the path to a fascist autocracy than most of us have thus far recognized.

I hope to see a lot of you at tomorrow’s protest….

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The Time Is Now

I woke up yesterday to heartening news: the liberal candidate had won the race for Wisconsin’s high court, and won it handily, despite the twenty-five million dollars spent by Elon Musk to support her opponent. (Actually, that is an inaccurate statement–she won, at least partly, thanks to Musk’s obscene financial support of her opponent.) And although Democrats lost the special races in Florida, they vastly over-performed in those deep Red districts.

Cory Booker had just stepped down from making the longest recorded speech in Senate history–a speech in which he laid out the myriad dangers posed by a lawless and enthusiastically corrupt administration.

News of these events came as civic activism has continued to rise. Town halls across the country have been filled with angry Americans. As I write this, a nationwide protest warning the administration to keep its Hands Off our governing institutions and constitutional order is scheduled for this Saturday, April 5th. That event will join an unprecedented number of prior protests: the Harvard Crowd Counting Consortium reports that “in 2025 our research shows that street protests today are far more numerous and frequent than skeptics might suggest.” In fact, “since 22 January, we’ve seen more than twice as many street protests than took place during the same period eight years ago.”

There’s a tendency to discount the impact of these gatherings, but they are extremely important: not only do they offer “aid and comfort” to citizens who might otherwise consider themselves alone in their righteous anger, research confirms that such events make both participants and onlookers much more likely to vote.

I’m not aware of any research documenting the effect of lengthy and impassioned Senate speeches, but it certainly seems that the incredible performance by Cory Booker on the Senate floor should resonate with the millions of Americans who are disheartened and terrified by the daily disasters caused by this insane administration–and  evidently it did. The Hill reported that more than 350 million people had liked Sen. Cory Booker’s floor speech on TikTok live as he approached 25 hours, and according to the Washington Post, before he was through, his speech had been liked on TikTok 400 million times.

Those are stunning–and heartening– numbers.

There was a lot to like in Booker’s oration, as Heather Cox Richardson reported. Booker began by invoking John Lewis’ admonition to make “good trouble.”

Standing for the next 25 hours and 5 minutes, without a break to use the restroom and pausing only when colleagues asked questions to enable him to rest his voice, Booker called out the Trump administration’s violations of the Constitution and detailed the ways in which the administration is hurting Americans. Farmers have lost government contracts, putting them in a financial crisis. Cuts to environmental protections that protect clean air and water are affecting Americans’ health. Housing is unaffordable, and the administration is making things worse. Cuts to education and medical research and national security breaches have made Americans less safe. The regime accidentally deported a legal resident because of “administrative error” and now says it cannot get him back.

Booker ended his marathon speech by reminding listeners that, in America, We the People are sovereign.

It starts with the people of the United States of America—that’s how this country started: ‘We the people.’ Let’s get back to the ideals that others are threatening, let’s get back to our founding documents…. Those imperfect geniuses had some very special words at the end of the Declaration of Independence…when our founders said we must mutually pledge, pledge to each other ‘our lives, our fortunes, and our Sacred Honor.’ We need that now from all Americans. This is a moral moment. It’s not left or right, it’s right or wrong.

Millions of Americans are recognizing the truth–and the import–of that last sentence.

We are not engaged in political policy disputes. The folks offering admonitions about “listening to MAGA’s discontents,” or “finding middle ground” have missed what has become ever more obvious, missed the point with which Booker concluded. The choice we face is not between policies A and B and policies C and D. We are not choosing between efficiency and waste. What we face is a stark choice between Constitutional governance and autocracy, between human-kindness and cruelty, between destruction and continuity, between progress toward civic equality and a return to the 1950s and Jim Crow. For Christian Americans, it’s a choice between actual Christianity and Christian Nationalism. For women, it’s a choice between individual autonomy and “the problem that has no name.”

This is a moral moment.

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The Rubber Is Meeting The Road

Paul Weiss, an enormous and influential law firm, and Columbia University, long considered a top-rank institution of higher education, have bent their knees to the bully in the White House. They didn’t offer even token resistance. (Many in the legal community now mockingly refer to the law firm as “Paul Wuss.”)

Their cowardice threatens all Americans.

A recent essay in The Contrarian  quoted Rachel Cohen, a young lawyer who organized a letter of protest against Donald Trump’s unconscionable attacks on lawyers and law firms, and who subsequently resigned from her job at Skadden Arps, which has evidently also bent the knee. (She’s not alone; see The Telegraph, Junior lawyers revolt after bosses bow to Trump ‘intimidation’.)

“Big law has a huge collective action problem,” she said. “[I]t’s because we are so risk averse.”

As the Contrarian notes,

In a real sense, the collective action problem—no one stands up to the MAGA onslaught because no one else is doing it—now permeates much of civil society (including the press, law firms, and universities). Tech barons feel compelled to cough up $1M for Trump’s inauguration because they don’t want to risk being left off the podium. Paul Weiss capitulates for fear other firms will do the same. Faced with oppressive, powerful forces, it is much easier to go along to get along, keep your head down, and not call attention to oneself. (Hence, the entire Republican Party capitulating to Trump.)

At a time when too many Americans measure their worth by comparisons to others’ wealth, status, and influence, the fear of losing something–access to a politician, research grants, social status, or blue ribbon clients–can become paralyzing. “It is called a collective action problem for a reason—it is hard to break the passivity cycle. But that does not mean it is impossible.

The essay suggests changing the incentives. Law firms bending the knee can be ostracized by associates; universities like Columbia should be shunned by students, faculty, and alumni who understand the degree to which compliance undermines intellectual integrity. When institutions face a downside–shaming– for doing the wrong thing, they might be more inclined to stand by their principles.

Meanwhile, other universities can eschew the ground of least resistance. They can pledge to reject attacks on academic freedom. If and when even one prestigious university lays down such a marker, it will cement its own status as a prominent academic institution that leads with integrity. (Also, one or more schools can offer Columbia students the opportunity to transfer, or could agree to hire researchers whose grants were cut. The loss of prestige, students, and top-notch faculty can be a disincentive to cave.)

I would note that incentivising moral/legal behavior is only necessary for institutions lacking the integrity to act on their purported principles without outside pressure.

The Association of American Law Schools has published a blistering letter denouncing Trump’s unprecedented attacks on legal and educational institutions.

Taken together these actions seek to chill criticism, silence those who may seek to hold the executive branch accountable and intimidate lawyers…. The independence of our universities and judiciary, and the ability of lawyers to fully represent their clients, are at the core of our democracy and have long been supported by all Americans, regardless of political party.

The letter called for collective efforts to push back against the Trump bullies, including coordination with alumni, judges, local bar associations, and other schools, and for public and private demonstrations of support for those Trump targets.

As a former lawyer and academic, I found the immediate, craven surrender of Paul Weiss and Columbia incredibly depressing.  A law firm unwilling to defend the rule of law has shamed itself; a University (especially one with an ample endowment, like Columbia) that sells its integrity for a grant betrays the central purpose of academia.

If I were in the market for legal services, I would not employ a law firm that has shown itself unwilling to defend itself. If I was once again seeking an academic position, I would avoid any university unwilling to defend academic freedom.

Several law firms attacked by Trump (Covington and Burling, Perkins Coie, Jenner and Block, and most recently, Wilmer Hale) have refused to fold, unlike Paul Weiss and Skadden Arps. At this juncture, I was able to find only five universities that have publicly spoken out against Trump’s vendetta. The president of Wesleyan, Michael Roth, was first and loudest; he’s been joined by presidents of Mount Holyoke, Delta College in Michigan, Trinity Community College in Washington DC, and Princeton.

Their ranks must increase. The rubber has hit the road.

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How Resistance Succeeds

The number of protests has been skyrocketing nationally. Does it matter?

I described the massive turnouts at Town Halls in Indianapolis last week to my youngest son; he responded “for all the good it will do,” dismissing the effectiveness of such events. But there is scholarship showing that non-violent protests by a sufficient percentage of the population have succeeded in overcoming autocracies elsewhere.

And what is a “sufficient percentage”? Three and a half percent of the population!

If turnout at the past week’s nationwide town halls is any indication, reaching three-and-a-half percent should be very do-able. According to Google, there were 340 million Americans as of 2024. Three and a half percent would mean that we need to turn out 11 million 900 thousand nonviolent protestors.

The pre-eminent researcher in the field of protest efficacy is Erica Chenoweth of Harvard, who co-authored the book, “Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict.” In the linked interview, she explained why civil resistance campaigns that are non-violent attract many more people than violent insurrections like the horrifying one we saw on January 6th (as she notes, it’s in part it’s because there’s a much lower barrier to participation compared with picking up a weapon). It isn’t sheer numbers, of course–she explains the other factors that were necessary to successful resistances in the countries she’s studied.

There are four of them:

The first is a large and diverse participation that’s sustained.

The second thing is that [the movement] needs to elicit loyalty shifts among security forces in particular, but also other elites. Security forces are important because they ultimately are the agents of repression, and their actions largely decide how violent the confrontation with — and reaction to — the nonviolent campaign is going to be in the end. But there are other security elites, economic and business elites, state media. There are lots of different pillars that support the status quo, and if they can be disrupted or coerced into noncooperation, then that’s a decisive factor.

The third thing is that the campaigns need to be able to have more than just protests; there needs to be a lot of variation in the methods they use.

The fourth thing is that when campaigns are repressed — which is basically inevitable for those calling for major changes — they don’t either descend into chaos or opt for using violence themselves. If campaigns allow their repression to throw the movement into total disarray or they use it as a pretext to militarize their campaign, then they’re essentially co-signing what the regime wants — for the resisters to play on its own playing field. And they’re probably going to get totally crushed.

As she notes–and as the emerging American resistance has found– protesting can take many forms other than street demonstrations.

People have done things like bang pots and pans or go on electricity strikes or something otherwise disruptive that imposes costs on the regime even while people aren’t outside. Staying inside for an extended period equates to a general strike. Even limited strikes are very effective. There were limited and general strikes in Tunisia and Egypt during their uprisings and they were critical.

Chenoweth cautions that preparation for most of these methods is essential, noting that successful strikes or other methods of economic noncooperation have often been preceded by months of stockpiling food, coming up with strike funds, or finding other ways to engage  community mutual aid while the strike is underway. Here in the U.S., organizations like Indivisible have demonstrated that capacity for planning and organization, and together with other grassroots organization, they’ve proven their ability to turn out large numbers of citizens.

What is so encouraging about Chenoweth’s findings is that “large numbers” does not equate to “large percentages.” As she says,

a surprisingly small proportion of the population guarantees a successful campaign: just 3.5 percent. That sounds like a really small number, but in absolute terms it’s really an impressive number of people. In the U.S., it would be around 11.5 million people today. Could you imagine if 11.5 million people — that’s about three times the size of the 2017 Women’s March — were doing something like mass noncooperation in a sustained way for nine to 18 months? Things would be totally different in this country.

April 5th should provide us with an initial indication of whether engaging that percentage will be possible. On April 5th, Indivisible and several allied organizations are mounting a nation-wide Day of Action, telling this lawless administration “Hands off our healthcare, our social security, our democracy!” Here in Indianapolis, it will take place at the Statehouse, from noon to 4:00.

I plan to be there, and hope to see many of my local readers.

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