Reclaiming America

In the wake of the November election, I can’t count the number of friends and family members who have declared a moratorium on political news–who have taken a “time out” in order to protect their equilibrium/sanity and avoid descending into depression.

I will admit that I have dialed back my usual immersion in the news, for the same reason. It really has been an act of self-preservation to take a vacation from the evidence that so many  Americans have dismissed the ideals of our founding, and are willing to close their eyes to threats posed to the principles that truly did make America great.

But a vacation is not a departure, and it’s time to determine how each of us can contribute to a massive uprising of people who may have different political affiliations and/or policy goals, but who agree on the importance of protecting civil liberties and participatory democracy in the face of the grifters, autocrats and racists–elected and otherwise– who are preparing to assume control of the government.

If those of you reading this are like me, your inbox has been filling up with notices from political and nonprofit organizations, both local and national, outlining their preparations for sustained activism in the face of those threats. One example–Democracy 2025–lists 280+ member organizations, and over 800 Lawyers, advocates, and experts already engaged in the work.

Despite claims, no President or their allies can just snap their fingers to implement an anti-democratic vision. Our laws and Constitution provide real protections and tools through the courts and in our communities to stop abuses of power and harms to people. Still, these threats are real, so we’re prepared to confront them.

Learn more about the threats we’ve identified, and check back often as we release additional analysis, tracking, and tools to respond.

I’ve received dozens of other, similar announcements, although none with as extensive a list of participants.

Local organizations–including numerous bipartisan and nonpartisan ones– are also gearing up to defend fundamental constitutional values, recognizing that what we are facing is not a partisan political confrontation, but a civic, social and indisputably moral conflict. We can go back to arguing about politics and policy when we have restored the rule of law and respect for time-honored democratic norms.

As Mark Twain once wrote: Patriotism is supporting your country all the time, and your government when it deserves it.

A group of local organizations that define patriotism as Twain did is planning a rally at University Park, in downtown Indianapolis, on January 20th–the same day as the Inauguration and also, coincidentally, Martin Luther King, Jr. day. The rally is intended to reaffirm attendees’ commitment to King’s vision and opposition to the restoration of White Nationalism and patriarchy. There will be uplifting music, readings that remind us of America’s historical aspirations, and messages from clergy of different faith traditions. (Yours truly will also participate in the program.)

We will pledge allegiance to the America we love and believe in–a generous and welcoming country devoted to liberty, inclusion and equal civic participation.

The rally– titled Reclaim, Rebuild and Resist– will begin at 10:00 a.m and end at noon. It is intended to demonstrate a firm and unyielding commitment to the principles of liberty and equality enshrined in the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights, and espoused by Dr. King—to reaffirm our support for the original American motto: e pluribus unum (out of the many, one), and our concerns for the threats posed by members of the incoming state and federal administrations to the values of inclusion, equality and the rule of law.

We will pledge to reclaim the visions of Dr. King and other social justice warriors, to help in efforts to rebuild and reinforce America’s democratic institutions, and resist attacks on foundational American values from any and all sources.

If you live in central Indiana, I hope you will attend. And bring your friends and families.

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And So It Begins…..

As predicted, it’s beginning. “It” is the regulatory dismantling that became inevitable when our rogue Supreme Court overruled “Chevron deference” and held that judges, rather than subject-matter experts, should decide regulatory policies.

A court has now struck down Net Neutrality.

If you are unfamiliar with this policy, or unsure why it matters, Vox had a comprehensive explanation back in 2016, when the Trump administration attacked it. Basically, Net Neutrality prohibits Internet Service Providers (ISPs) from discriminating among users.

Trump’s prior assault on Internet equality was just one of his efforts to make America “great” for the powerful and wealthy. Now, Trump’s remade Court has super-charged the fight against the government’s ability to impose fair “rules of the road.”

As the New York Times reported,

A federal appeals court struck down the Federal Communications Commission’s landmark net neutrality rules on Thursday, ending a nearly two-decade effort to regulate broadband internet providers as utilities.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, in Cincinnati, said the F.C.C. lacked the authority to reinstate rules that prevented broadband providers from slowing or blocking access to internet content. In its opinion, a three-judge panel pointed to a Supreme Court decision in June, known as Loper Bright, that overturned a 1984 legal precedent that gave deference to government agencies on regulations….

The F.C.C. had voted in April to restore net neutrality regulations, which expand government oversight of broadband providers and aim to protect consumer access to the internet. The regulations were first put in place nearly a decade ago under the Obama administration and were aimed at preventing internet service providers like Verizon or Comcast from blocking or degrading the delivery of services from competitors like Netflix and YouTube. The rules were repealed under President-elect Donald J. Trump in his first administration.

I have previously explained why the Loper Bright decision was so wrongheaded–and another stunning departure from longstanding precedent.

Robert Hubbell has addressed the ruling with his usual common sense explanation.

One of the major controversies of the Court’s 2024 term was the termination of the Chevron doctrine that afforded deference to federal experts charged with rulemaking pursuant to congressional regulation. The reactionary majority on the Supreme Court concluded that federal judges—with crushing caseloads—are better equipped to make discretionary policy judgments about rules authorized by Congress to regulate industries as varied and complex as nuclear energy, general aviation, drug testing, coal mine safety, and deep-water oil drilling. See Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo,

In short, the Roberts’ Court substituted itself for tens of thousands of subject-matter experts with hundreds of thousands of years of experience regulating complex industries.

The first significant casualty of the Court’s hubris in Loper Bright was the “net neutrality” doctrine. A three-judge panel of the Sixth Circuit overruled the FCC’s interpretation of whether broadband internet service is “an information service” or a “telecommunications service for purposes of the Telecommunications Act of 1996.” 

Hubbell goes on to quote Chris Geidner’s Substack.

In the relatively brief, 26-page decision, [Judge] Griffin declared that three judges sitting on an appeals court representing four states in the middle of the country were better suited to decide what a law in place since the mid-1990s means than the experts or political appointees at the FCC.

Instead of the executive branch issuing its interpretation, subject to electoral constraints and judicial review (and with the benefit of those subject experts on the agency’s staff), a man who has been a judge since the 1980s wrote the Sixth Circuit’s opinion deciding the matter on Thursday . . . .

Welcome to the brave new world of federal judges overruling experts charged with rulemaking by Congress.

As I have previously explained, Chevron deference was a well-considered judicial doctrine that had been applied for 40 years in over 18,000 decisions. It applied to the multiple situations in which Congress sends “ambiguous” directions to executive agencies staffed with people who are experts in the particular area. That ambiguity is intentional and necessary; Congress isn’t equipped to determine the proper levels of contaminants in water or to identify carcinogenic chemicals–and even if such specifics were part of the legislation, they would be incredibly difficult to monitor and/or update as technical knowledge advances.

Under Chevron, technocrats didn’t have the last word–if a plaintiff could show that a regulation was unreasonable, courts could and did overrule it. The rule simply recognized the complexity of the world we inhabit–and the importance of specialized expertise–an importance this arrogant Court dismisses.

As Tom Nichols has amply documented, in the age of MAGA, education, knowledge and expertise have become unacceptably “woke”–and certainly not entitled to respect.

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Defunding The Police

I’m on record describing the slogan “Defund the Police” as one of the all-time stupidest political phrases ever. Not the actual intent of the proponents, which was more than defensible; as I understand it, it was an effort to limit police activity to a focus on actual crime by creating specialized “helpers” to respond to non-criminal episodes like mental health crises. But the slogan not only failed to convey that intent, it screamed support for lawlessness and a mindless anti-police–even “pro crime”– bias.

After all, sneered Republicans, who–other than those who want to evade the rules– would be interested in hobbling law enforcement?

An excellent question, with a not-surprising answer: the obscenely rich plutocrats who–despite MAGA illusions–are really in charge of the contemporary GOP. Following the fiasco triggered by co-President Musk when he torpedoed a bipartisan bill to keep the government open, The New Republic reported on a true “defunding” of authority that has received far too little publicity:

During last week’s negotiations to avert a government shutdown, Congress quietly slashed $20 billion from the Internal Revenue Service.

Republicans have long targeted the tax agency, and their cuts will hurt its efforts to go after rich tax evaders and improve the IRS’s functionality. It’s their second successful cut from President Biden’s $80 billion funding boost to the agency in the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, as the GOP took away an earlier $20 billion in a 2023 budget deal.

The latest cuts to the IRS will come automatically thanks to the 2023 deal, as the language was repeated in last week’s bill. The Biden administration said the cuts would end up adding $140 billion to the national debt, as they hurt the tax agency’s ability to audit big corporations and the wealthy.

This bit of legislative game-playing shines a corrective light on two of the most egregious lies told by Republicans: that the GOP is a fiscally responsible political party opposed to increasing government debt; and that it is the party of “law and order.”

When Republicans pontificate about excessive government spending, what they are really opposing is anything approaching fair and adequate taxation of the very rich. Deficits, after all, occur when income is insufficient to fund all expenditures. Constant giveaways in the form of tax cuts awarded to the wealthy Americans who disproportionately belong to the GOP increase deficits; the GOP’s “solution” isn’t to raise taxes on the rich; it’s to cut “government waste”–defined as programs that help low and middle-class Americans.

Even under the current tax laws that favor the obscenely rich, however, tax “avoidance” strategies (i.e. cheating) employed by those wealthy Americans allows them to evade paying significant portions of what they owe. Their success in evading payment has been largely due to the (intentional) under-resourcing of the Internal Revenue Service.

The Biden administration addressed the obvious problem by budgeting adequate funds for the agency–which led to action by the GOP that can only be described as “defunding the police.” Depriving the agency of funds to audit tax dodgers can only be attributed to one purpose: allowing rich scofflaws to cheat successfully. There is no other conceivable reason.

The cuts mean that the IRS will conduct 400 fewer major business audits each year, and 1,200 fewer audits of rich individuals. Customer services for taxpayers will also be hurt. According to an agency spokesperson, by 2026, the IRS will only have the resources to answer two of every 10 phone calls to its helplines, and wait times will increase to an average of 28 minutes.

The Inflation Reduction Act’s boost to the tax agency helped relieve a long backlog of tax filings, and created a well-liked free tax filing pilot program. All of that is on the chopping block now, fitting in with Donald Trump and Republicans’ plans to weaken the IRS. The president-elect plans to appoint anti-tax extremist Billy Long to take over the agency next year, who repeatedly tried to abolish the IRS as a member of Congress.

These cuts combined with Long’s planned appointment mean that tax season next year will almost certainly result in headaches for the average taxpayer and windfalls for the wealthy and powerful. A ballooning national debt is also on the horizon. The question is whether Trump and the GOP will be able to get away with all of it.

The reason the “Defund the Police” slogan was so idiotic was that it sounded like a plea to protect transgressors, even though that wasn’t what was meant. Defunding the IRS not only sounds like protecting criminals, it has absolutely no other purpose.

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The Walmart Effect

I’ve written before about Walmart-as-an-object lesson. The last time I looked, the company was averaging profits of $15.5 billion dollars annually, the Walton family’s net worth was over $129 billion dollars, and the company was still declining to pay employees a living wage. Instead, it relies on taxpayer dollars to make up the difference between its workers’ paychecks and workers’ cost of living.

After all, when an employee must rely on food stamps or other safety-net benefits, taxpayers are paying a portion of that employee’s wages.

Walmart (including Sam’s Club) is the largest private employer in the country–and one of the largest recipients of corporate welfare. (Walmart employees receive an estimated $6.2 billion dollars in taxpayer-funded subsidies each year.)

Money not paid out in salary, of course, goes directly to the bottom line, so we taxpayers are also funding shareholders’ profits. 

All this is, as they say, old news–along with the recognition that Walmarts located on the outskirts of small towns have emptied out the retail centers of those communities.

Recently, however, research has added another layer to what I’ve come to see as the Walmart scam.

No corporation looms as large over the American economy as Walmart. It is both the country’s biggest private employer, known for low pay, and its biggest retailer, known for low prices. In that sense, its dominance represents the triumph of an idea that has guided much of American policy making over the past half century: that cheap consumer prices are the paramount metric of economic health, more important even than low unemployment and high wages. Indeed, Walmart’s many defenders argue that the company is a boon to poor and middle-class families, who save thousands of dollars every year shopping there.

Two new research papers challenge that view. Using creative new methods, they find that the costs Walmart imposes in the form of not only lower earnings but also higher unemployment in the wider community outweigh the savings it provides for shoppers. On net, they conclude, Walmart makes the places it operates in poorer than they would be if it had never shown up at all. Sometimes consumer prices are an incomplete, even misleading, signal of economic well-being.

As the article notes, it’s relatively simply to calculate cost savings for consumers, but those cost savings don’t represent a company’s total effect on a community.  When a new Walmart opens, consumers change their shopping habits, workers switch jobs, and competitors shift their strategies–or often, close. 

One research project found that In the 10 years after a Walmart Supercenter opened in a  community, “the average household in that community experienced a 6 percent decline in yearly income—equivalent to about $5,000 a year in 2024 dollars—compared with households that didn’t have a Walmart open near them. Low-income, young, and less-educated workers suffered the largest losses.”

In theory, however, those people could still be better off if the money that they saved by shopping at Walmart was greater than the hit to their incomes. According to a 2005 study commissioned by Walmart itself, for example, the store saves households an average of $3,100 a year in 2024 dollars. Many economists think that estimate is generous (which isn’t surprising, given who funded the study), but even if it were accurate, Parolin and his co-authors find that the savings would be dwarfed by the lost income. They calculate that poverty increases by about 8 percent in places where a Walmart opens relative to places without one even when factoring in the most optimistic cost-savings scenarios.

A second study found that the losses weren’t limited to workers in the retail sector. They affected every sector from manufacturing to agriculture. But why would this be?

When Walmart comes to town, it uses its low prices to undercut competitors and become the dominant player in a given area, forcing local mom-and-pop grocers and regional chains to slash their costs or go out of business altogether. As a result, the local farmers, bakers, and manufacturers that once sold their goods to those now-vanished retailers are gradually replaced by Walmart’s array of national and international suppliers. (By some estimates, the company has historically sourced 60 to 80 percent of its goods from China alone.) As a result, Wiltshire finds, five years after Walmart enters a given county, total employment falls by about 3 percent, with most of the decline concentrated in “goods-producing establishments.”

I wonder what will happen when Trump’s China tariffs force Walmart to raise prices…

For now, Walmart is a monopsony— a company that can pay low wages because workers have few alternatives. This helps explain why Walmart pays lower wages than competitors like Target and Costco.

In a properly functioning capitalist system, we taxpayers wouldn’t be subsidizing monopsonies.

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Can We Talk?

It’s a new year, and Americans need to talk. But communication is hard. It has always been hard, even between people who speak the same language.

It isn’t just the crazy, although in the era of Trump, crazy seems to dominate. A recent article in the Atlantic,  titled “Let’s Talk About Trump’s Gibberish,” noted the insane stuff that comes out of his mouth and then becomes subject to the media’s “sane-washing.”

For too long, Trump has gotten away with pretending that his emotional issues are just part of some offbeat New York charm or an expression of his enthusiasm for public performance. But Trump is obviously unfit—and something is profoundly wrong with a political environment in which he can now say almost anything, no matter how weird, and his comments will get a couple of days of coverage and then a shrug, as if to say: Another day, another Trump rant about sharks.

The article quoted one of Trump’s frequent departures from rationality. In a campaign speech, his digression focused on a fanciful encounter with a shark. “I say, ‘What would happen if the boat sank from its weight and you’re in the boat, and you have this tremendously powerful battery, and the battery’s now underwater, and there’s a shark that’s approximately 10 yards over there?’”This bizzare detour from the ostensible subject of the speech went on–and on– with Trump clarifying that–assuming he had his choice, he’d rather be zapped than eaten. 

Evidently, people who voted for Trump simply discount his looney-tunes digressions (along with yesterday’s list of appalling behaviors). More to the point, the proliferation of disinformation, distortion and click-bait has desensitized us to “communication” that ought to alarm us–or at least signal that the speaker is mentally ill.

What, if anything, can we do about an information environment rife with intentional lies and propaganda and the purposeful “flooding of the zone”? (I believe it was Hannah Arendt who observed that propaganda isn’t intended to make us believe X rather than Y–it’s meant to destroy our ability to believe anything.)

Countering the ocean of disinformation we swim in was the subject of a December article in Common Dreams.

It’s a crisis. America is now among 11 nations deemed most threatened by both mis-and disinformation.

Little wonder that almost 90% of us fear our country is on the “wrong track.” And, President-elect Trump has led the way with 492 suspect claims in just the first hundred days of his first presidency. Then, before the 2020 vote, in a single day he made 503 false or misleading claims. By term’s end he’d uttered 30,573 lies, reports The Washington Post.

Now, he is joined by his promoter Elon Musk who is flooding his own platform X with disinformation—for example, about the bipartisan end-of-year funding deal.

Irish philosopher Vittorio Bufacchi distinguishes between lies, which are about a particular event, and “post -truth,” which is a “shift to another reality” –one where facts simply don’t matter anymore. 

The article tackles the important question: what can we do to restore the centrality of fact to our discourse? 

One key will be more independent and public journalism, including PBS and NPR, driven not by narrow profit or partisan agendas. As local journalism—perhaps easiest to hold accountable—has suffered a sharp decline in the past decades, state and local governments can step up with financial support and incentives. Here, many peer nations can inspire us.

The article points to an experiment from New Zealand, which it calls a “unique approach.”

Since 1989, its Broadcast Standards Authority has offered an easily accessible, transparent online platform for any citizen to call out disinformation. The authority is tasked with investigating and requiring removal of what is both false and harmful material.

The BSA seems to have been both cautious and effective.

In the early years, complaints were upheld in 30% of cases. But by 2021-22, those upheld had shrunk to just under 5%. That’s a big change. And, a possible implication? Knowing one can be exposed for harmful lies can discourage perpetrators.

Such a mechanism would help the ordinary citizens who cannot afford the financial cost of a lawsuit for defamation, which is our (expensive) remedy for such harms. Requiring courses in media literacy in the schools is a longer-term but important effort.

The problem–as I have repeatedly noted–is our very human proclivity for confirmation bias. People who share Trump’s hatred for “others” and don’t want to believe he is unfit for public office will gravitate to sites that characterize his “shark” episodes as humor and his ugly attacks as “locker-room jokes.”

If “post truth” is “pre fascism,” as Timothy Snyder asserts, we’re in a lot of trouble.

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