The History of Birthright Citizenship in US

"On the last day of his presidency, in his last speech, President Ronald Reagan recalled what someone had once written to him: “You can go to live in France, but you cannot become a Frenchman. You can go to live in Germany or Turkey or Japan, but you cannot become a German, a Turk, or a Japanese. But anyone, from any corner of the Earth, can come to live in America and become an American.”

He continued: “We lead the world because, unique among nations, we draw our people—our strength—from every country and every corner of the world. And by doing so we continuously renew and enrich our nation. While other countries cling to the stale past, here in America we breathe life into dreams. We create the future, and the world follows us into tomorrow. Thanks to each wave of new arrivals to this land of opportunity, we're a nation forever young, forever bursting with energy and new ideas, and always on the cutting edge, always leading the world to the next frontier. This quality is vital to our future as a nation. If we ever closed the door to new Americans, our leadership in the world would soon be lost.”

Letters from an American Historian 

Even Ronald 'Effing' Reagan got this much. And even if his class war policies against labor and workers, the so-called Reagan Revolution, actually setup the conditions for the backlash against immigrants we are experiencing now. The problem wasn't (and still isn't) immigrants or global trade or multiculturalism but letting capital and big business use global trade and cheap immigrant labor to escape paying living wages and to evade paying taxes for the kinds of public infrastructure that spreads economic growth to all. 

Diversity and multiculturalism are fine, good customer relations, as long as Big Biz is free to monopolize markets and hoard vast fortunes but when democratic pressures for raising wages or spending on infrastructure becomes too much, and mind you any taxes or regulations are too much to the business class, than cultural diversity and liberalism are scapegoated as the problem and austerity measures, cutting spending in the caring economy, demanded. And, to be sure, such public goods and democratic costs, health care, education, public safety, etc, can put a burdensome squeeze on small businesses and workers, but exempting rich corporations from these costs, from Walmart to McDonalds, is actually the biggest factor squeezing the regular economy and polarizing society. 

In a way this lopsided tug-o-war between capital and labor is at least as old as the industrial revolution and is always ebbing and flowing: big shots run the economy into the ground and then the gov steps in to restart the economy, bailing out business interests "too big to fail," establishing some guardrails to hopefully avoid repetition of the latest bust scenario, and everyone goes back to work until another loophole or another market is discovered to exploit and the next boom is on. Rinse and repeat. Of course, economic justice and social justice matter ("No Justice, No Peace"); and the gov should break up the monopolies and establish a living wage floor for all labor employed by large businesses, starting with all gov work and contracts. But the billionaires would rather try to manage a crazy sadistic megalomaniac than even contemplate taking such a haircut to their financial privileges. This struggle is not new. 

What is relatively new are the threats and challenges posed by global warming and climate change. And the problem isn't just that global warming is predominantly a market failure-- externalities, pumping too much carbon into the atmosphere. The problem is that addressing climate change and bending the economy towards environmental sustainability requires industrial policy, environmental regulations, government financing and guidance. But free market political-economy, neoliberalism, the ruling economic orthodoxy in the US, opposes such a role for gov, obstructs and even sabotages gov efforts to address climate change. Just look at the policies of the current administration; burn baby burn, etc. 

The problem isn't poor immigrants. The problem is the rich don't want to pay living wages and taxes necessary to building a sustainable economy and prosperous society. They only know how to get rich by extractive and predatory behavior; the collaborative and collective side of prosperity is completely lost on them. And many, a winning plurality, or 49.8% of the electorate at any rate, believe we're better off with this business mentality running the country. I hope the US can still reverse course but I think this path cuts the US off from a better future, and makes the US weaker and more dangerous. 

Thanks again, HCR! 

To Be Or Not To Be Equal Before The Law

"Here’s the thing: Once you give up the idea that we are all equal before the law and have the right to due process, you have given up the whole game. You have admitted the principle that some people have more rights than others. Once you have replaced the principle of equality before the law with the idea that some people have no rights, you have granted your approval to the idea of an authoritarian government. At that point, all you can do is to hope that the dictator and his henchmen overlook you.

At least some people understand this. The president of North America’s Building Trades Unions, Sean McGarvey, received a standing ovation when he said to a room full of his fellow union workers: “We need to make our voices heard. We’re not red, we’re not blue. We’re the building trades, the backbone of America. You want to build a $5 billion data center? Want more six-figure careers with health care, retirement, and no college debt? You don’t call Elon Musk, you call us!... And yeah, that means all of us. All of us. Including our brother [International Association of Sheet Metal, Air, Rail and Transportation Workers] apprentice Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who we demand to be returned to us and his family now! Bring him home!”- Heather Cox Richardson

Letters from an American Historian

Fifth Amendment: "nor shall any person be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law"

Note, "person," doesn't have to be a "citizen." If the Grump admin ignores the law, as they are doing now, make no mistake everyone not wearing a red Maga hat is vulnerable. It is family separations all over again but scaled up now by Project 2025's culture war doomsday agenda. It starts with illegal deportations to notoriously brutal gulags in El Salvador, without any due process. We're all just supposed to go on Grump's say-so: they're all "terrorists and violent criminals," which he can't even say without an evil cartoon sneer. 

And now these degrading shit-shows in the WH are apparently going to become part of regular Trump 2 programming. Maga kayfabe. The inner circle braintrust lounging uncomfortably on couches; Grump and his guest in individual chairs, repartee so painfully awkward and smarmy and insulting I can't even watch it straight through. A gaggle of reporters on the side, the doofus chorus in The Thucydides Trap. The scene is the same as the embarrassing ambush of Zelensky a few weeks back. But this time the leader of El Salvador, Bukele, is more like a scary smart powerful drug lord in the Netflix series Narcos. Grump's new global dictatorship alliance: Russia, El Salvador, Israel, Hungary, Saudi Arabia, etc. Trump jokes with Bukele about building more prisons for our "homegrown" criminals, otherwise known as American citizens, but at this point Grump's slinging around charges of criminality at anyone or anything that opposes him. Owning the libs is everything for these guys. 

Even if the regime keeps to illegal disappearances of non-citizens we're still already living in a fascist dictatorship, and will be until further notice. The ruling regime refuses to submit to judicial review and in an aggressively dictatorship way. They could get back Abrego Garcia, of course, they admit they apprehended him mistakenly but they don't want to be told what to do by the court. We are now living under Trump's version of the "Unitary executive theory." It's like Trump still insisting on the guilt of the Central Park Five after they'd been exonerated by DNA evidence. Deporting people, anybody, citizen or not, without due process rights, is authoritarian; targeting and scapegoating groups, DEI, immigrants, women, Trans people, liberals, is fascist. Firebombing political enemies is fascist. Impeaching judges and punishing law firms that challenge your lawlessness is fascist. Courts and media and universities covering for this fake news BS is fascist. 

(As I've said before, Grump didn't invent fake news but he is its greatest practitioner. Certainly the biggest in my life time and has to be on a short list of the biggest liars in US political history.) 

Turns out it not only can happen here but is happening here right now and will go on happening until something stops what to this point has been, with the brief interruption of the Biden admin, an unstoppable force. We're now painfully dependent on the law to at least slow down his lawlessness but the law as an institution, Robert's Court, is probably more responsible for our corrupt police state trajectory than anything else, save the boss himself. 

Resistance is growing but Trump's illiberal reaction has control of crucial legal and media power centers. Most pundits insist now it comes down to the people, most of whom are too busy working and supporting families and trying to keep up with the bills to go on a general strike. But this stuff is so bad, slashing government services, slashing scientific research and education; snatching people off the streets, trampling human rights with sadistic glee. It's so bad people are already protesting in impressive numbers but what about the silent majority, the people whose politics are basically anti-politics?

It's grim but if you're a real glutton for this kind of punishment-- I am but there are much bigger gluttons, of course, real pros--consider this NY Times survey of 13 "independents" about how they think Grump is doing so far. Trigger warning: unbelievably depressing. 

I paraphrase: 

Trump is doing what he promised. At least he's doing something, Biden wasn't doing anything. Illegal immigrant violent gang members and criminals ought to be deported. But shouldn't courts confirm that those picked up are in fact violent criminals or here illegally before they are deported? Isn't due process a basic human right? These questions aren't brought up by the interviewers or the voters surveyed. Trump can be trusted on this is the confident vibe conveyed. 

Same goes for tariffs and Doge. Maybe they are going too fast but Trump is just trying to bring back good manufacturing jobs and Musk just trying to eliminate waste in government. The background historical rationale appears to be foreign countries have been ripping the US off since WW2; and business men are all government efficiency experts. As I've mentioned before, these are wildly popular sentiments with the working classes and go back to at least to the mid-20th century; even if never true and never less so than now. 

(And this isn't to suggest their aren't really foreign countries competing with the US for their own economic advantage. It goes both ways, all the time. It isn't crazy for Grump to try to get the US a better deal. It is dumb and destructive beyond belief if, however, Grump single-handedly gets countries to turn away from US trade and the dollar. And I'm not saying that there aren't foreign countries hostile to the US that have to be watched and checked by intelligence and diplomacy. But, point of fact, Trump is actually best buds with the foreign leader most hostile to the US!) 

But Trump wouldn't let Musk screw up Social Security, one of the focus group members concludes. You were not born yesterday, right? That Trump and Musk are actually destroying departments of government that protect consumers and labor or have already removed government officials whose job it is to reduce corruption and self-dealing in government, the kind of stuff the independent voter above is sure Grump would never do, gets not a peep, again, from the NY Times or any of these 13 "independent" voters.     

Trust in Trump prevails. Biden was a do-nothing and Harris a "joke." Russiagate, denying women and immigrants basic human rights, the reckless endangerment of public health, extorting Ukraine to cheat in an election, fake electors, Jan 6, selling out to Musk and billionaires, all just fake news attacks by Democrats trying to bring Trump down.

If these "independent" voters aren't cult members they are encased in a cult world, Trump World, and a conservative stranglehold on media and the courts bares much responsibility for this sorry state of affairs. Anyway, direct contact like this with Trump World can be despairing or I find it so anyway but a couple, hopefully comforting, reminders:  

1) Trump actually won by only 1.5% of the vote, and that was with a bunch of voter suppression and Musk's billions. Less than half of the electorate endorsed this tyranny and fewer still support it now. 

2) None of the stuff they are actually doing polls well; from deporting people without due process, abandoning Ukraine and Nato, trash talking our neighbors, to trade war tariffs and more tax cuts for the rich. Clear majorities oppose this stuff. Unfortunately, it appears most voters will never even realize and/or believe any of this is going on until it explodes in their faces. 

3) One voter attributed much of the current crisis to a civil war between elites, leaving the rest of us on the sidelines. This is especially true in the sense that there are many economic elites, republicans, billionaires that supported and voted for Trump, for reasons we don't need to go into here, that are waking up to a realization that Trump's control of the economy, erratic unilateral trade wars, threatening to take over the Fed, is potentially a catastrophic threat to US leadership in the global economy. (See Krugman's recent interviews with financial infrastructure super nerd Nathan Tankus.) 

Truly Trump 2 has the potential to turn into one of the biggest imperial faceplants in history. Grump is stress testing the US's super privileged and lucrative role of playing the reliable and trustworthy house banker to the global economy. He's counting on the dominance of the American economy forcing US trade partners to submit to his Snidely Whiplash/Mr. Potter machinations. We'll see. 

In the meantime, I do still also find some comfort in books, novels, memoirs, that resonate with the present. During Trump 1 I especially enjoyed Albert Camus's The Plague and Daniel Defoe's Journal of the Plague Year and Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower. And I'd still recommend them. But I've come across nothing that resonates with Trump 2 so far as well as Butler's second book in her Earthseed series, Parable of the Talents. Published in 1998 it's a post-collapse America with an uncanny Trump-like potus character. 

The countervailing positive force to the illiberal catastrophe unfolding around people in Butler's America is spread by protagonist Lauren Olamina in her writings, Earthseed: Books of the Living, and her itinerant teachings, like this snatch of epigrammatic wisdom:

God is change, 

God prevails,

Kindness eases change,

Love quiets fear,

Sweet and powerful,

positive obsession blunts pain, 

diverts rage,

and engages us in the most intense of our chosen struggles. 

Civilization is to groups what intelligence is to individuals. 

The Long View of the American Civil War

"On April 9, 1865, General Robert E. Lee surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia to General Ulysses S. Grant of the United States Army at Appomattox Court House in Virginia. Lee’s surrender did not end the war—there were still two major armies in the field—but everyone knew the surrender signaled that the American Civil War was coming to a close.

Soldiers and sailors of the United States had defeated the armies and the navy of the Confederate States of America across the country and the seas, at the cost of hundreds of thousands of lives and almost $6 billion. To the northerners celebrating in the streets, it certainly looked like the South’s ideology had been thoroughly discredited.

Southern politicians had led their poorer neighbors to war to advance the idea that some people were better than others and had the right—and the duty—to rule. The Founders of the United States had made a terrible mistake when they declared, “All men are created equal,” southern leaders said. In place of that “fundamentally wrong” idea, they proposed “the great truth” that white men were a “superior race.” And within that superior race, some men were better than others.

Those leaders were the ones who should rule the majority, southern leaders explained. “We do not agree with the authors of the Declaration of Independence, that governments ‘derive their just powers from the consent of the governed,’” enslaver George Fitzhugh of Virginia wrote in 1857. “All governments must originate in force, and be continued by force.” There were 18,000 people in his county and only 1,200 could vote, he said, “But we twelve hundred…never asked and never intend to ask the consent of the sixteen thousand eight hundred whom we govern.”

But the majority of Americans recognized that if it were permitted to take hold, this ideology would destroy democracy. They fought to defeat the enslavers’ radical new definition of the United States. By the end of 1863, President Abraham Lincoln dated the birth of the nation not to the Constitution, whose protection of property underpinned southern enslavers’ insistence that enslavement was a foundational principle, but to the Declaration of Independence.

“Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.”

The events of April 9 reassured Americans that they had, in fact, saved “the last best hope of earth”: democracy. Writing from Washington, D.C., poet Walt Whitman mused that the very heavens were rejoicing at the triumph of the U.S. military and the return to peace its victory heralded. “Nor earth nor sky ever knew spectacles of superber beauty than some of the nights lately here,” he wrote in Specimen Days. “The western star, Venus, in the earlier hours of evening, has never been so large, so clear; it seems as if it told something, as if it held rapport indulgent with humanity, with us Americans.”

So confident was General Grant in the justice of his people’s cause that he asked only that Lee and his men give their word that they would never again fight against the United States and that they turn over their military arms and artillery. The men could keep their sidearms and their horses because Grant wanted them “to be able to put in a crop to carry themselves and their families through the next winter.”

Their victory on the battlefields made northerners think they had made sure that “government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

But their conviction that generosity would bring white southerners around to accepting the equality promised in the Declaration of Independence backfired. After Lincoln’s assassination, Andrew Johnson of Tennessee took over the presidency and worked hard to restore white supremacy without the old legal structure of enslavement, while white settlers in the West brought their hierarchical ideas with them and imposed them on Indigenous Americans, on Mexicans and Mexican Americans, and on Asians and Pacific Islanders.

With no penalty for their attempt to overthrow democracy, those who thought that white men were better than others began to insist that their cause was just and that they had lost the war only because they had been overpowered. They continued to work to make their ideology the law of the land. That idea inspired the Jim Crow and Juan Crow laws of the late-nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as well as the policies that crowded Indigenous Americans onto reservations where disease and malnutrition killed many of them and lack of opportunity pushed the rest into poverty.

In the 1930s, Nazi leaders, lawyers, and judges turned to America’s Jim Crow laws and Indian reservations for inspiration on how to create legal hierarchies that would, at the very least, wall certain populations off from white society. More Americans than we like to believe embraced facism here, too: in February 1939, more than 20,000 people showed up for a “true Americanism” rally held by Nazis at New York City’s Madison Square Garden, featuring a huge portrait of George Washington in his Continental Army uniform flanked by swastikas.

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt rallied Americans to oppose fascism by emphasizing the principles that would, he said, provide “the foundations of a healthy and strong democracy: “Equality of opportunity for youth and for others. Jobs for those who can work. Security for those who need it. The ending of special privilege for the few. The preservation of civil liberties for all. The enjoyment of the fruits of scientific progress in a wider and constantly rising standard of living.” He called for “the cooperation of free countries, working together in a friendly, civilized society.”

The gulf between the ideals of democracy and the reality of life in the segregated U.S. during and after World War II galvanized Black Americans, Mexican Americans, and Asian Americans to demand equality. They successfully challenged school segregation, racial housing restrictions, state laws prohibiting interracial marriage, and anti-Chinese laws based in the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act.

As the military fought fascism in Europe, schools and churches at home emphasized that democracy depended on acceptance of racial, ethnic, and religious differences. Rallies championed diversity, and government-sponsored films warned Americans not to succumb to fascist propaganda. Posters trumpeted slogans such as “Catholics–Protestants–Jews…Working Side By Side…in War and Peace!” and reminded Americans not to “infect” their children “with racial and religious hate.” In a 1947 radio show, Superman fought a Ku Klux Klan–like gang trying to keep foreign-born players off high school sports teams, and in 1949, comic book artist Wayne Boring portrayed him on a poster urging a group of American schoolchildren to defend their classmates from “un-American” attacks on their race, religion, or ethnicity.

In the 1950s those ideas had produced a “liberal consensus,” shared by most Democrats and Republicans alike. The government should regulate business, provide for basic social welfare, and promote infrastructure: in other words, it should reflect democratic values. But when the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision tied the federal government not just to economic equality for white Americans, but also to civil rights, opponents of the liberal consensus resurrected the same argument former Confederates had used after the Civil War to couch their ideology in economic, rather than racial, rhetoric.

Rejecting the idea of equality, they argued that the government’s effort to protect civil rights was tantamount to socialism because it took tax dollars from hardworking white men to provide benefits for undeserving Black people who wanted a handout. This idea gained momentum after Congress passed the Voting Rights Act in 1965, and gradually came to include people of color and women who demanded equality. In 1980, Ronald Reagan rode the idea that the liberal consensus was simply a way to redistribute wealth to undeserving Americans of color or women—or both, like Reagan’s “welfare queen”—into the White House.

As more than $50 trillion moved from the bottom 90% of Americans to the top 1% between 1981 and 2021, Republicans deflected attention from the hollowing out of the middle class by demonizing racial, religious, and gender minorities. By 2012 they were talking of “makers” and “takers,” and by 2016 they were feeding voters ideas and images straight out of the nation’s white supremacist past.

By 2021 the idea that some people are better than others and have a right to rule—the same ideology that had driven the Confederates—created a mob determined to end American democracy. The rioters who attacked the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election believed they were writing a new history of the United States, one that brought to life the hierarchical version of American history claimed by the Confederates before them. On that day, one of the rioters accomplished what the southern troops during the Civil War had never been able to: he carried the Confederate battle flag into the United States Capitol.

At the end of his life, General Grant recalled the events of April 9, 1865. “What General Lee's feelings were I do not know,” Grant wrote. “[M]y own feelings, which had been quite jubilant on the receipt of his letter [asking to surrender], were sad and depressed. I felt like anything rather than rejoicing at the downfall of a foe who had fought so long and valiantly, and had suffered so much for a cause, though that cause was, I believe, one of the worst for which a people ever fought, and one for which there was the least excuse.”-Heather Cox Richardson 

Letters of an American Historian

Concise US History connecting the Civil War to Jan 6, tracing the white supremacist betrayal of the promises of the democratic revolution that founded the United States; and exposing the anti-CRT and anti-DEI, the anti-science and education scams being perpetrated now by Maga's alliance of billionaires and bigots. 

"Cash Rules Everything Around Me," Wu-Tang Clan (1993)

From "Money (That's What I Want)" to "For the Love of Money" to "Paid in Full" to "C.R.E.A.M.," a venerable tradition in pop music history; a dose of gotta get paid urgent realities and cautionary tales set to some delectable funk. I clump Wu Tang and the Geto Boys and Outkast and E-40 together. Post-golden age of hiphop, post-NWA gangster rap, lots of fuck this and bitch that; rap seemed to be going in a pulpy cartoon hardcore direction I wasn't sure I liked that much. No way my wife at the time liked it. But my sister, now passed, more fluent with popular rap, made me this mix tape including those groups and others. I hesitated listening to it much at first; partly because I wouldn't have the occasion to unless I was driving somewhere alone. But two or three times through I was hooked and it became a regular driving to and from work, especially on the way home. Harder, darker than the golden age stuff but also more cinematic and more authentically underclass ethnography in the crack era in a way, say, Salt & Pepa or De La Soul could not be. Wu Tang was emblematic of a shift. The golden age days of cramming samples of esoteric old pop tunes, cut and spliced into small bits, was over. Wu Tang collaged the mood or feel of old soul hits, not the words, and then layered on top snippets from kung fu movies and spoken word interludes from TV history. It felt like DIY Black arts for the '90s. Their first album, Enter the Wu-Tang, was undeniable.   

 

How Trump Could Dethrone the Dollar

"The dollar has not always been the world’s reserve currency or the currency of choice for international trade. In the nineteenth century, it was the pound sterling that enjoyed that status, and British financiers would have felt secure in its reign. The United Kingdom had deep, liquid capital markets, and the British Empire was the world’s largest economy and the central player in global trade. Yet after two world wars and decades of political and economic decline, London watched as sterling’s global status ebbed away. There was nothing inevitable about the pound’s slide or the dollar’s emergence, just as there is nothing inevitable about the dollar’s potential demise today. Choices, not destiny, determine reserve currencies; if the dollar is finally dethroned, it will be a disaster of the Trump administration’s own making. 

A serious impediment to adoption of the Chinese renminbi is the rule of law, or rather the lack of it: companies would rather end up in an American courtroom than a Chinese one any day of the week. Should this U.S. advantage erode, the results could be catastrophic."

Foreign Affairs

The biggest takeaway here, really, in spite of the title, is the ongoing dominance of the dollar in the global economy. It will not go down easy and has a long way to go before being dethroned. Nearly half, 45-50%, of all global financial transactions are in US dollars; 22% Euros, 4-7% Japanese yen and British pounds, and then more Canadian and Australian dollars, the Chinese yuan/renminbi, and the Swiss franc in the low single digits. Business people especially like old reliable ways of doing things that work, reliable ways of conducting their business, and for going on eight decades, going back to the Bretton Woods conference after WW2, the Keynesian dream of stable, expanding, prospering global markets running on dollars have more or less worked; surviving Nixon abandoning the gold standard and several banking crisis, including the Great Recession of 2007-2009. The book Underground Empire tells the story of the US weaponizing the Swift system for facilitating global transactions after 9/11, the electronic plumbing undergirding nearly all global financial transactions today. You'd think this would have increased alternative systems of currency exchange. And it has in Crypto, for a popular instance; primarily for money laundering and tax evasion, apparently. But in fact global dollar transactions as a share of all global financial transactions has grown by 10-15% since the Bush era. It is generally recognized most every where else in the world that Bidenomics led the strongest economic recovery after Covid but this wasn't persuasive enough for the US electorate. But now can the US dollar standard in global trade survive Trump? Remember, this is a guy who bankrupts casinos, which people say is extremely hard to do. This is a guy for whom dominance is everything; and zero sum dominance displays his single-minded conception of the "art of the deal."  If anybody can dethrone the dollar Trump can. 

Mass protests against Trump & Musk

 

"If one of us stands up, they can pick that person off. If ten or a hundred or a thousand, they can pick those people off. And they're picking off people--immigrants, dissidents--to make an example of them. But if ten million people stand up, they cannot stop us all. And today we are millions. We stand up with each other, for each other, and for those who cannot stand up because they are in ICE detention or a nursing home losing its funding or gulags in Guantanamo and El Salvador; we stand up for the people who just lost their AIDS treatment in Africa and those who just lost their jobs in the federal government here; for the trans girl who just wants to play softball and the educators who just want to teach history. We speak up with them to tell the real history, the true history, as histories are being erased and corrupted. 

Are you in? Are you going to see this through with me? Are we in this together? Are you here for the duration? Tell me, are we in this together? Are we here for Abrego Garcia, who was illegally deported to El Salvador, for Rümeysa Öztürk, who was grabbed off the street by ICE? Are we here for those who cannot be here?

Right now Ukrainians are fighting for their freedom; Bangladeshis and Syrians are figuring out what comes after toppling an authoritarian regime; huge crowds are protesting in the streets of Turkey, Hungary, Serbia, the Republic of Georgia; Chile is governed by a young president who rose to prominence in student protests against a right-wing regime. South Korea just impeached and deposed a president who attempted a coup; the dictatorial former president of the Philippines is under arrest by the International Criminal Court for his human rights abuses. Across the world, time and time again, civil society has taken history into its own hands and written a better ending to an authoritarian story. Now it's our turn."

Rebecca Solnit @ Meditations in an Emergency

I don't like crowds. I've always tried to avoid them. But as Solnit argues there comes times when people need to show up and be counted; I also agree more or less with all of Jay Kuo's reasons for the Hands Off protests in his Calling Their Bluff post on substack as well. If this is not one of those times when people need to resist then I don't know what possibly could be?! Shutting down government services, firing government workers, as Musk's Doge is doing right now; circumventing the democratic process and the authority of congress is against the law. Deporting people from the US without due process (a report this morning claimed that 75% of the group sent to some hell hole prison in El Salvador have no criminal records at all) is against US law, contradicts the UN's universal declaration of human rights, and is blatantly fascist. And even Trump's counter productive trade war, assigning tariffs and regulating trade are supposed to be the job of congress, not a platform for his stupid dominance displays. Unless, apparently, we are in a state of emergency; or at war. But, as should be obvious to everyone by now, Trump is the emergency. There are problems with global trade, to be sure, privileging capital over labor and the environment, primarily, but global trade is not in a state of emergency; or, again, wasn't until Trump made it an emergency. The problem isn't just that Trump and Musk's policies are dumb, people make dumb mistakes, I make dumb mistakes, it's that they are so dangerous and destructive and corrupt. Shutting down government, trashing human rights, trashing our allies, and fluffing up murderous dictators will not make the world safer and will not make America stronger; it will make the world less safe and America weaker. I have really never been much of a flag-waving kind of guy, stamping my foot down about law and order, norms, traditions, and such, but I am now and I am because I think freedoms and human rights protections I have always taken for granted are under siege and at risk of disappearing. For me, once Trump's relationship to Putin was exposed that should have been more than enough evidence of treason for any truly patriotic American. But here we are. The opposition is planning another protest for Saturday, April 19th. I don't know what to do about this terrible mess but I know I do not want to go along with any descent into a fascist dictatorship. Going to protests is a way to be counted with the opposition and resistance. That's it. We are stronger together. Also, lots of cool signs.    

Down Goes Duke!

What a wild ending to the Duke vs Houston game. I can't remember the last time I saw a Final Four game, or for that matter any March Madness tournament game, where a full court press at the end of a game was so decisive. You see more of this in high school basketball but much rarer in college and, practically never, in the pros. 

Duke led by 5-10 points for most the game. Houston had an obvious edge down low-- the Cougars J'Wan Roberts had 12 rebounds and Blue Devils Khaman Maluach zero; and the Cougars out-muscled the Blue Devils by over ten boards-- but every time Houston would pull close Duke responded. Cooper Flagg and Kon Kneuppel, for most the game, seemed to score at will; and when Duke were on a roll they'd whip passes around the horn for wide open shots. Houston's L.J. Cryer and Emanuel Sharp, in the end, scored as many as Duke's scoring duo but it didn't look that way for most the contest. Every scoring opportunity for the Cougars was hard fought. They looked like no match for Duke's offensive firepower.  

But the Cougars hung around, wiping out a 14 point deficit in the final eight minutes, and in a crucial sequence with only a minute or two remaining, applied a full-court press so smothering Duke appeared incapable of even inbounding the ball. You could call it "winning ugly," it certainly wasn't pretty to any Duke fan, but it was devastatingly effective. 

Apparently, the Cougars have some history of turning on their defense like this and when getting three stops in a row they call the third the "kill stop." 

Indeed, Duke never recovered from the onslaught and looked discombobulated and defeated in the remaining moments of the game. At one point, Tyrese Proctor and Flagg were leaning on each other after a whistle, consolingly, before the game was over; as if they already knew it was over. And it was. Flagg got a final look, point blank, a short jumper in the key and came up short; a telltale sign of fatigue. 

The Cougar press appeared to be man-to-man, no zone; just in your face pressure. Houston's coach Kelvin Sampson waved his troops forward and they stormed Duke's inbound. Duke finally bunched up all their players on the baseline trying to help with the inbound, oddly it appeared they were not running any kind of over the top action to get one of their guys free. And Houston was absolutely mauling them; like white on rice, as the saying goes. 

It was like the late rounds of a fight, both fighters trying to hang on, win out on points, and the fighter slightly behind, watching the clock running down goes for one last frenzy of attack and a TKO. A "kill stop"! Duke had nothing left. 

Games come down to players and what they do on the floor, to be sure. But this looked like Kelvin Sampson, Houston's coach, outfoxing Duke with a full court press in the last minute. He saw something in the way Duke was playing and turned the screws. His press was a knockout punch. In the aftermath, Duke looked as though they didn't know what had hit them. 

Houston holds the record for going to Final Fours without winning a national championship. They get another shot on Monday against Florida. On paper, and from what I've seen in the tournament so far, I'd say Florida has the edge. But I thought more or less the same about Duke until the last four minutes of the game last night. So I don't know but look forward to finding out. 

Transcendental Bubblegum Mature Kitsch

 "Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! (A Man After Midnight)," Abba (1979)

To watch this video without sound you might think it was Abba doing the Brill Building. Turn it up and it's a galloping cheesy crystal ball of late classic era disco, right after "Disco Duck" has stormed the Senior Centers and Schlager disco like Abba rules the cruise ships. And how Stellas and Bellas and Agnethas and Fridas get their grooves back, I think, to this day. Begins with some classic rock fanfare. An Arabian Nights chug raises the pace when some big synths kick in, augmented by frilly keyboards. The vocals start out drab cliches, Abbaesque vocal group harmonies, we know this formula. And then, as if waking up, Agnetha leans into the cliches, ripping off a stem-winding couplet, "Not a soul out there/no one to hear my prayer," and the chorus lifts off, "gimme gimme gimme a man after midnight/won't somebody help me chase the shadows away/gimme gimme gimme a man after midnight/Take me through the darkness to the break of day." SOS! Man overboard: Transcendental bubblegum mature kitsch! And, again, 1979! TGIF.  

'Trust in Trump' is an Anti-Science Bigot Cult

Breaking News! Cory Booker is filibustering the Senate right now about the Trump/Musk demolition (Dept of Grotesque oligarchic inEfficiencies) and desecration (taking down Jackie Robinson public commemorations, really?!) of the US government, and lots of clever protest signs supporting the Tesla Takedown this past weekend.

Try to remember this, the illegal destruction of government services, the idiot trade war economics, the attack on free speech and the persecution of minorities, all of this has been brought on by the Captain of Industry, Tech Bro, Leon, and The Boss (on reality TV, anyway) and WWE idol, Grump, 8 out of 10, and the top 7, donor class Billionaires, and voters who trust the republicans more on the economy. They're doing this. This is their economy and it is NOT a pro growth and working class living wages economy. 

This is a desperate bid by Billionaires to go on destroying the environment with impunity, evade paying their fair share in taxes for essential public infrastructure, and avoid the antitrust prosecution of their monopolizing asses. This is a sick neoliberal fantasy that government should be stripped down to the studs, leaving nothing but a police and military that protects the absolute private property rights of the billionaire oligarchy. And then riding on top this big shambolic wrecking ball is a sadistic orange clown bully who thinks mafioso-like shakedowns and extortion are winning art-of-the-deal economics. 

Any other kind of government spending, social security, health care, scientific research, public education, national parks, consumer protections, foreign aid helping poor people, anything other than military spending and Musk's contracts and tax cuts: Total waste, feed it into the woodchipper. If turns out we needed it, we'll add it back later. Maybe, just maybe, this is a good way to tinker with a production process or stress test a lab experiment but this is no way to support human communities. And, as should be obvious, this is no way to run a government or an economy.

Grump & Leon's response: Anybody that doesn't like it gets police state crackdowns. Musk claimed recently that a problem with Western Civilization is too much empathy. I'm assuming 2/3's of the global population living through the legacies of colonialism and imperialism would beg to differ. And such a person should not be in a position of authority in government, reviewing programs and services helping workers, consumers, woman, scientists, health care patients, discriminated against groups; because we know, he told us, he doesn't think they deserve the government's empathy. 

At any rate, buying elections and suppressing opposition at this scale is costly and, bottom line, this is not growth economics and it's hard to see how they sustain their assault going like this. 

What this is is market fundamentalist shock doctrine at a scale never been tried before, and not coincidentally just when it has become increasingly clear that such policies squeeze and impoverish the many and obstruct democratic government. They don't promote general prosperity but promote billionaire hoarding and, actually, protect industrial activities that are destroying the planet.