More Lies of the Right

 

                           More Lies of the Right

        The Lie: Quoted verbatim From Trump campaign website, Jan 6, 2023:  As president, Donald Trump “marshaled the full power of government to stop deadly drugs, opioids, and fentanyl from coming into our country. As a result, drug overdose deaths declined nationwide for the first time in nearly 30 years."

The truth: while opioid deaths decreased very slightly in 2018, the deathrate per 100,000 increased in 2019 and, in 2020, took the largest increase in the past 20 years and was at an all-time high when Trump left office. Meanwhile, the biggest contributor to opioid deaths — synthetic opioids, which include fentanyl, which Trump referred to specifically in his statement — rose all four years that Trump was in office. Surprise, Trump lied! Note that this is a meaningful (apples to apples) statistic, since it shows deaths per 100,000 population, not as a percentage if the population as a whole.

 Another Far Right liar:

        We’ve all seen the fallout from Damar Hamlin’s sudden cardiac arrest following a blow to the chest in a recent Monday Night Football game. Thankfully he is now recovering, thanks to professional trainers and immediate CPR. However, ever anxious to discredit COVID vaccines, Conservative commentator Liz Wheeler tweeted data which, she claimed, showed Hamlin’s incident was part of a larger trend, linked to COVID vaccination. She claimed: "1 in 5,000 young men have heart issues from COVID vax.” “Yearly commotio cordis cases? ~15. (RARELY over age 20)," Note: commotio cordis is what can happen when a blow to the area of the heart coincides exactly with timing which interrupts the electrical stimulation of regular function. It can cause ventricular fibrillation and, if not immediately dealt with, death within minutes. It is NOT a "heart issue", but an externally caused trauma.  

        Wheeler then proceeded even farther off the rails as she continued: "1,598 athlete cardiac arrests since Jan 2021. 69% fatal. (Average athlete cardiacs before vax was 29/yr)," Wheeler tweeted Jan. 3. "‘Science’ ignores this. That’s why people ask questions."

        Her obvious intent here is to have the reader believe her implication that the number of athlete cardiac arrests has increased by a factor of more than 5,500 percent due to Covid vaccines. This is a classic example of why Mark Twain famously said, “There are three kinds of lies; Lies, Damned lies, and Statistics. Ms. Wheeler has masterfully incorporated all three into one whopper.

The first two data points in Wheeler’s tweet have some germ of truth, however there are issues even with that. The 5,000 figure comes from a September 2021 New York Times story. But the article cited unconfirmed and worst-case assumptions data used by vaccine regulators to create risk/reward estimates and worst-case scenarios. She knows these are not real numbers. She just wants the reader to assume they are.

 The statement that what happened to Mr. Hamlin is rare, is accurate. It is also essentially irrelevant. It (commotio cordis) happens rarely, but more frequently, to boys playing Little League baseball being struck in the chest by a pitched ball. Even so, the most recent figures (2020) for the injury are thirty events annually, not fifteen as Wheeler states. It is also now more frequently recognized for what it is than even ten years ago.

Even the inference that a vaccine is responsible for an injury which has happened just once in a violent sport where currently 1696 and historically, 26,682, NFL players have beat each other up on a weekly basis, is simply ludicrous. Furthermore, there have been no identified instances in the currently more than 73,000 NCAA football players, the vast majority of whom are vaccinated in both cases.

Now for the “Big Lie.” Ms. Wheeler leads with, “There have been 1,598 athlete cardiac arrests since January 2021, with 69% being fatal."   She wants you to believe that these are all due to COVID vaccines. This number comes from an unvetted, unconfirmed, list of global incidents that includes nonathletes of all ages and non-cardiac injuries and deaths.  Numerous actual medical professionals in the specific field of sports cardiology have strenuously rejected these figures and consistently reaffirmed that they have seen no increase in cardiac arrests among athletes in 2021 or 2022 and have found no correlation between cardiac events and the COVID-19 vaccines.

And another whopper: Congressman Scott Perry, R(Pa), stated several days ago (early January 2023) that "We're talking about parents that go to school board meetings for the schools that they pay for with their taxes and having the temerity to question the curriculum, and then they're put on, you know, the red flagged, they’re flagged by the Department of Justice and the FBI for attending a meeting, "That's not what America is supposed to be about. That sounds like some tinhorn Third World dictatorship."

No, Jethro, what it actually sounds like is the reaction to the continued and increasing attacks, extending even to death threats, on educational services personnel from bus drivers to teachers to school board members. No one who goes to a school board meeting and engages in a respectful and meaningful dialog is being “flagged.” If, on the other hand, their behavior is sufficiently inappropriate to indicate the possibility of future violent behavior, then that’s a bit different.  A great deal of this concern stems from the deliberate attempts of some, such as our Florida Governor, to generally discredit public education and as the Soviets did under Stalin, teach “modified” or sanitized versions of some subjects such as history. This extends to book banning and simply refusing to allow students to think critically when presented the opportunity.

Think I’m kidding?  This is a note sent to the daughter of a Loudoun County, Virginia, School Board member: “It is too bad that your mother is an ugly communist whore.”  “If she doesn’t quit or resign before the end of the year, we will kill her, but first, we will kill you!”

In Dublin, Ohio, an anonymous letter sent to the School Board president vowed that officials would “pay dearly” for supporting education programs on race and mask mandates to stop the coronavirus. “You have become our enemies and you will be removed one way or the other,” it said.

Must of this stems from the MAGA crowd, who first heard the term “critical race theory,” actually taught almost nowhere but law school, from Trump’s nattering, and definitely not as part of public school curricula. Like most “dog whistle” phrases this further polarizes those most susceptible to such drivel. It raises a legitimate concern when these marginalized and potentially violent folks do things such as rip masks off school officials or other parents at the same meeting.

 In Rochester, Minnesota, members faced continuing threats and outbursts at meetings over mask mandates, critical race theory and other hot-button issues. The board president said her son grew so concerned that he insisted on driving her to board meetings and waiting in the parking lot to ensure her safety.

Northwest Allen County school board meetings in Indiana became so heated last fall that police officers assigned to the district refused to continue providing security unless the board took action to rein in its increasingly unruly meetings, according to an email sent by a school resource officer to the board president. Sergeant Kevin Neher wrote to the board president at the time, Kent Somers, “I truly am concerned for the safety of everyone at those meetings as are the other officers who have worked them.”  

This is, in my opinion, simply an extension of the Far Right wing of the GOP weaponizing dissent by fanning the flames of ignorance with political rhetoric. This was Newt Gingrich’s stock in trade and Trump’s business methodology even before politics. Those who blindly follow are easily manipulated by those who know it isn’t so, but want the reaction they know their exaggerations will evoke within their deplorable and easily led fan base. In any case, taking precautionary action when confronted with the very real threat of violence isn’t government overreach, but rather the fulfillment of its duty to protect its citizens.

How we got here: On Oct. 4, 2021, Attorney General Merrick Garland sent a five-paragraph memo to the FBI and federal prosecutors acknowledging a "disturbing spike in harassment, intimidation, and threats of violence" against school officials. Garland directed the FBI to hold meetings across the country and bring together government leaders to discuss strategies to address those threats. In that directive, Garland specified: "While spirited debate about policy matters is protected under our Constitution, that protection does not extend to threats of violence or efforts to intimidate individuals based on their views." The memo focused on criminal conduct, not parents’ views about COVID-19 policies or school curriculum. A Trump-nominated judge even dismissed a case by parents challenging Garland’s memo. The judge concluded that the memo does not target protected conduct under the Constitution and covers only criminal conduct. And yet, here we are. 

Even earlier, our unindicted Medicare Fraud perp and now Florida Senator, Rick Scott, said this in October of 2021:  "Joe Biden’s attorney general wants the FBI to go after parents for speaking out at school board meetings to protect kids from radical curriculum like critical race theory." Again, dog whistle tactics from a known liar. “Critical race theory” is the new whipping boy. It isn’t being taught in public schools nor in most non-law school college curricula. Remember that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was the subject of the most protracted filibuster in the History of the US Congress. Those who opposed it are the political antecedents of those who now manipulate constituents  into open hostility against current social movements. Thanks Governor DeSantis and Senator Scott.

Finally: Public Education was, at one time the aspect of our societal culture which set us above much of the rest of the world.  It is indicative of the effects of the above internal turmoil on Public schools that 46% of teachers interviewed in a recent survey indicated that they were either already planning to quit or were open to other, less stressful employment. Make no mistake, the children of these parents who threaten teachers and school board members are, themselves, frequently imbued at home with the same predisposition to inappropriate and, all too frequently, violent behavior.   

And I do believe that’s all I have to say about that.   

Deficit Reality Therapy

 

                 Deficit Reality Therapy

 

We are constantly bombarded with massively misleading rhetoric and outright lies by those of the far right. On the one hand we are treated to bitching and moaning related to the “debt ceiling.” If it were just that simple, I would tend to agree on the principle that spending more than you bring in is unsound fiscal policy. It doesn’t work on the microscopic scale (personal family finance), and it is a dangerous concept in the macroscopic (national policy) as well. 

        One of the recent key differences, with which Adam Smith was non-conversant, is what has become known as “Modern Monetary Theory (MMT), which holds that, as long as an entity can just make (print) more money, they can never run out. The problem with that is that the concept of “full faith and credit” on which MMT relies, is intangible, based on consumer and borrower expectation, not tangible assets, of which we hold some (gold) but nowhere near enough to cover our debt obligation.

 Fort Knox currently holds roughly 147 million troy ounces (4,580 metric tons) of gold bullion, while the Federal Reserve vault in New York houses an additional 6,190 tons. At today’s gold price that means the value of the US gold reserve is about $700 billion. The projected federal deficit or 2023 alone is $1.2 trillion. For the math challenged, that means that we will borrow more than the value of all that gold in storage, and that would still mean an increase in the federal debt, which currently stands at about $31.4 trillion.  Just the annual interest obligation on this monstrous debt as of December 2022, was $210 billion, or 15% of the total federal spending!   

The odd part is that typically, the national debt resulting from deficits usually surges in times of national recession, or war time spending. As an example, in 2008, when the housing bubble collapsed due to grossly underregulated and financially disastrous financial sector operations, Gross National Product decreased as foreclosures spiked unemployment and the outgoing Bush administration enacted a $700 billion “bailout” bill. (remember “too big to fail?”) This coupled with greatly increased unemployment compensation and social service demands led to three years of significant deficits. By the end of the second Obama term, the deficit was back down to a lower level than 2008.

        Enter Donald Trump. While touting the “greatest economy ever” the deficit and, accordingly the debt, soared. In consecutive years the deficit rose, spiked by decreased federal revenues due to Trump’s tax cut, which was a valentine to the wealthy, just to peak at a deficit of $984 billion in 2019, just in time for Covid.  Tax Foundation analysts stated that the tax cuts would cost $1.47 trillion in decreased revenue while adding only $600 billion in growth. In other words, reduce taxes, increase deficit and debt. Which brings me to my second big lie.

The second mammoth falsehood being purveyed by the Right is that the Biden administration request for funding for more IRS agents is aimed at the average taxpayer (read that as “voter”) instead of its actual intent, which is to improve the function of the IRS as specified by law. Understand this:  thwarting the legitimate efforts of the IRS is of essentially no positive consequence to the “average” taxpayer and of none to any honest one. So, what’s the point?

While none of us enjoy paying taxes, as responsible citizens we do so because a free lunch is chimerical. Roads, social services, national defense, etc. all cost money and all are necessary. Oddly enough and overlooked by the “laissez faire” unregulated economy crowd, is the fact that even Adam Smith, himself, opined that those who make more from the economy should pay more for the privilege. While he didn’t use the term “graduated tax,” he implied it, way back in 1776, in “The Wealth of Nations”.

The real focus of current GOP anti-IRS fiction is that maybe, just maybe, those one-percenters who avoid anything close to their fair share (such as paying zero income tax [Trump] for several years while claiming to be wealthy) might actually be held accountable for honestly honoring the tax code. Think I’m kidding?

 Congress has systematically underfunded the IRS. Today, the IRS has as many employees as they had in 1970, and the technological system that they're using to drive tax processing was built in the 1960s before we went to the moon. As a result, wealthy individuals have all of the capacity to be able to try and avoid their taxes, and the IRS has few resources to be able to go after them. They also have armies of lawyers who can help them avoid taxes.

        This also affects the honest taxpayer, but in much the opposite sense.  Last tax year (2021), the IRS received 230 million phone calls and only had 15,000 people to answer those calls, which meant that each person had to answer 16,000 calls. Trust me, the “one-percenters” aren’t those calling the IRS for help. While many Americans, who don’t have tax lawyers, feel that every day, what Congress has actually done is to starve the IRS of the resources it needs to enforce legitimate tax collection from many of the wealthiest Americans, who are the least likely to pay their taxes.

The United States currently collects less tax revenue as a percentage of GDP than at most points in recent history, in part because owed but uncollected taxes are so significant. The so-called tax gap has surged in the last decade. The last official estimate from the I.R.S. was that an average of $441 billion per year went unpaid from 2011 to 2013. Current estimates are more than double that. Most of the unpaid taxes are the result of evasion by the wealthy and large corporations. In short, we don’t need more tax legislation, we simply need all of us to pay their fair share under present laws. This has essentially no negative impact on the average honest citizen, but then we don’t have paid lobbyists greasing the palms of sleazy GOP legislators.

The tax gap also has meaningful implications for fiscal policy. These unpaid taxes mean policymakers must choose between rising deficits, lower spending on important priorities, or further tax increase to compensate for lost revenue—which will only be borne by compliant taxpayers. According to Charles Rettig, the Internal Revenue Service commissioner, The United States is now losing at least $1 trillion in unpaid taxes every year, Mr. Rettig further states that the agency lacks sufficient resources to catch tax cheats. Referring back to the beginning of this essay, that uncollected $1 trillion would essentially erase the annual deficit. Add to that allowing Medicare to negotiate drug prices, which could save about $300 billion annually and the deficit is a memory.   

        Of course, the GOP doesn’t want to do the first, (rigorously enforce tax codes) because fat cat donors would have to pay their fair shares, or the second, because Pharma companies spend much more on advertising and lobbying than on research and development, thus their extortionate pricing. Want to reduce the pain on US consumers as well??  Void the Trump China tariffs, which in addition to supply chain issues are costing the average US household about $800 annually for a total of around $93 billion.

 Note: no social service or “people programs” were injured during the proposal of these measures.

Women

 

                                            Women

 

Several years ago, I chanced upon an essay written and posted to Facebook by an individual who styled herself as “Lila.” Her thesis was that the status of women as secondary to men was ordained by Heavenly guidance and any women who pursue careers outside the home or take issue with male dominance are somehow heretical and/or violating what she views as the “natural order” of things. At the time, I was focused predominately on national political issues or related subjects such as COVID and economics. I made some notes, but the issue languished until I recently  found the notes in my “documents” folder while searching for something else. After a review, I decided I was remiss in letting this one slide, so I’ll begin with my original opening sentence, which I wrote as the beginning of a brief response to the individual, whose actual, identity I do not know, and enlarge considerably on the subject continuing in that vein. If this sounds a bit like a history lesson that’s because it is. It’s what I do.        

 

Lila, this may well be the most well phrased and yet almost nonsensical defense of the deprecation of women I've ever read.

I must assume from your post that you are a Christian, which means that nothing related to how we treat others (some of which you include in your apologia) which derives from the Old Testament is valid anyway, since your boss described a “New Covenant”, consistent with his teachings and personal behavior as described in such of the synoptic gospels as we have traditionally been “allowed “ to read.

        The secondary status of women which evolved in early Christianity, and continues to a great extent in Evangelical settings, doesn’t stem from Jesus in any sense, but rather generally reflects the personal opinion of Paul; and even more so, the early Bishops who were, by the third century, creating a hierarchy (translates as "positions of authority and power") for themselves. As non-royalty, the only other option for a power-driven person in the Roman Empire was religion. This continued even into medieval Europe and later, where, typically, the eldest son inherited land and title and the second son entered the priesthood. If the family was "connected," he could become a bishop in no time at all.  As recently as 2022, twenty-five Church of England Bishops are still automatically granted seats in the House of Lords in the UK. There is only just very recently a proviso that one of the minor Bishops seats may be filled by a woman. Even a Methodist and a Chief Rabbi, (men only!) have been so seated. All this was cemented by the early systematic reduction of women to relatively inconsequential positions in the Church. Even those women who were sainted and were reverenced, had essentially no temporal authority over males.

Note: She ("Lila") then alleged that anyone who read the Bible with a different interpretation was “reading someone else’s mail.” As a cynic who is, nonetheless, more than passing familiar with the document in question, I decided to engage her on her own turf. 

Your claim that someone who sees the matter differently than you do is "reading someone else's mail" would seem to indicate that you believe that the Bible was written not for the world, but for select individuals (like you), not for anyone who can think critically. That’s just sad. It also implies than no one who is not already a believer could read the Bible and become one.  And finally, remember that the Bible you read isn't all the writings from the period which relate to Jesus.

The OT, of course, was not written contemporaneously, but as much as a thousand years after many of the described "events," so it is much less "history " than fable. Heck, even Homer was writing of events (The Trojan War) at a time much closer (within about 400 years) to the alleged events.

Likewise, the synoptic gospels were not written by the apostles who accompanied Jesus, since almost all of them (like Peter) were semi-literate. It is a sure bet that Peter never wrote in Greek, if at all. Additionally, some of the most powerful scenes in them (the synoptics) cannot possibly be even first-hand accounts such as Jesus' conversation in the wilderness with Satan, for which there is no witness, (yet there is verbatim dialogue!), or the scene in the garden where even with all the Apostles asleep, we again have verbatim dialogue between Jesus and God? Really? and who wrote that down? Paul, however, raised in a well to do family in a formerly Greek, later Roman city (Tarsus)  was schooled in Tarsus and later, Jerusalem, was well educated, and literate in Greek and used that skill to create the image of Jesus as he wanted the world to see it, yet he never met the man either (don’t give me that “Road to Damascus” bunk).

So, in summary, claiming to "know" what Jesus said, or even meant, was wishful thinking. Even if we assume that what is attributed to Jesus is what he actually taught, it was soon distorted into a different focus, from a personal religion to a “corporate” one. Every nation state (all of Europe) which made Christianity the state religion also derogated and relegated women to secondary status, while (exclusively male) Church primates quickly became advisors to kings.

The first step was to make the scriptures unavailable to the common person, who, being almost universally illiterate, were reliant upon the newly empowered, literate, clergy to read it and interpret it for them. (This would result in the Catholic Church continuing the Mass in Latin, understood by essentially no one not of the elite, from, at the latest, the 6^th century, into the late 20^th century (1965), when the first vernacular Mass was celebrated in Ireland.

By the late 200’s AD, most of the “traditional” Gospels which supported the new theme of a male dominated clergy and a secondary status for women, were accepted as such. Reasons for this are several. First off, converting Jews and Greeks, both of whose cultures subordinated women by religious credo, custom and tradition, was much easier if Christianity followed suit. Secondly and just as important was the opportunity for men, in societies already male dominated, to gain power without being born to it. This became even more obvious after Constantine's commission in 331 of fifty copies of the Bible for the Church at Constantinople. Now, endorsed by the Emperor, Christianity’s early power brokers had the highest authority to form the Bible as they desired, regardless of those “other books, which tell a slightly different story. At the Council of Hippo, held in north Africa in AD 393, a group of church leaders recognized a list of books that they believed to be scripture. They cherry picked those which fit their desired narrative.  

The "gospels” (Mary Magdalene, Timothy, Peter, Levi and around thirty other scriptural writings which didn't "make it" were rejected by that early Church council. What do they have in common? All differ from the “accepted” version as early church power brokers wanted it. More significant for the purposes of this discussion, several show the importance and equal status of Mary Magdalene as an apostle. Here is a snippet of the “Gospel of Mary” in the Nag Hammadi library (discovered near the Upper Egyptian town of Nag Hammadi in 1945.) :” “Levi answered and said to Peter, Peter you have always been hot tempered.  Now I see you contending against the woman like the adversaries. But if the Savior made her worthy, who are you indeed to reject her? Surely the Savior knows her very well.”  Why might Peter have acted as he did? Perhaps the “also non-included” Gospel of Philip is instructional. Here’s a verse or two: “And the companion of the [savior] was Mary Magdalene. He loved her more than all the disciples and used to kiss her often on her mouth. The rest of the disciples… [damaged text]. They said to him "Why do you love her more than all of us?" The Savior answered and said to them, "Why do I not love you like her? When a blind man and one who sees are both together in darkness, they are no different from one another. When the light comes, then he who sees will see the light, and he who is blind will remain in darkness." Apparently, in Jesus case, he liked what he saw! Apparently author Dan Brown did also, since this forms one of the principal premises of “The DaVinci Code,” condemned, naturally,  by The Roman  Catholic Church.

So, Lila, whomever or wherever you are, feel free to rationalize why you accept or condone the Far Right’s relegation of women and their right to control of their own bodies to the trash heap of religious dogma, but don’t claim it’s because the Jesus you claim to worship wanted it that way. It’s far more likely Josh Hawley, Mike Pence, or Matt Gaetz you’re thinking of.