Nobody Cares

 

Each day, almost, when Congress is in session the members leave their government offices to go across the street to another office. The Democratic and the Republican parties maintain boiler rooms from which the Members can dial for dollars. They do this because it is against the law to beg for money on government property. Actually, it is against the law for any government official, except the President and VP to do anything political on government property. Wow! Really?

 Whole bunches of people were up in arms about the degree to which the Republican Convention violated the Hatch Act. Forget the rhetoric, the campaign signs, the political posters. The Hatch Act generally prohibits Federal employees from engaging in political activities while on duty, in a Government room or building, while wearing an official uniform, or while using a Government vehicle.[i] Even presidents are expected to make money calls from the residence, not the Oval Office.

The use of Fort McHenry for Vice President Pence’s acceptance speech was against the law. Government officials who attended a political event on government property likely were breaking the law.

The President’s acceptance speech at the White House was spectacular. His team really knows how to put on a show; flags everywhere, Jumbotron screens, bands, orations, and Puccini’s Nessun Dorma sung from the balcony – “Vincero” “I will win.” The evening’s showmanship far exceeded the lack of pomp at the Democratic convention. It was a spectacular evening, it was spectacularly illegal and it was spectacularly offensive.

On Tuesday of this week, a reporter asked Mark Meadows, the President’s Chief of Staff, about the violations of the Hatch Act during the convention. “Nobody outside the Beltway really cares” was his reply. Well, some do care. The White House belongs to the people; it is not a prop for a political convention. Fort McHenry is a sacred place where men fought and died for our freedom. It is not a political prop.

More than 1,500 people attended the President’s acceptance speech on the lawn of the White House, one of the largest gatherings in the country during the pandemic. People were shoulder to shoulder and less than a dozen were seen on TV wearing masks. That is not illegal, but certainly a violation of the recommended behavior required to stem the pandemic. I suppose nobody outside the Beltway cares about that either.

Why does this matter? The list is long, but a broad generalization will suffice. The Hatch Act makes these events illegal; illegal to hold and illegal for government officials to attend, including Cabinet members, police and firefighters in uniform, military in uniform, and illegal for the use of government funds to support a political event. It also matters because these are our buildings. The 18 acres of grounds and the White House have been held non-political for our history. The White House is not the property of the Democratic Party or the Republican Party. Our country is held together by institutions and values. The non-partisan nature of the White House is one of those institutions. It may be a generation before we will again see it as the People’s Home.

 

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[i]  Hatch Act for Dummies – March 31, 2020

The Big Lie!

 

Ours is an ideal, fragile thing really, that can carry the weight of the world on its shoulders. It is a place for people who yearn to breathe free.[i] It is a place where the poor can come with the hope of a better life, it is a place where institutions count. America isn’t easy. People have to trust the police, their leaders; they trust their schools and financial systems. They must trust their unions, their employers, and religious leaders. It works best when it serves all the people equally, the common good. It requires trust that the government and its leaders trust the people, believe in the people, and work for the people. Like any relationship, the people must trust each other, each other’s motives, and each other’s values.

Lack of trust frays the edges of the whole-cloth that we call America. Others from afar see our tattered reality, and we, up close see how threadbare that weaving has become. To work well for everyone, everyone must have the dream, believe the dream, and share the dream. The COVID-19 pandemic lays bare the weaknesses of our frail system. The incompetent management of our national epidemic, its concomitant financial disaster, and a government that tries its best to wrestle control from the people has taken on many of the characteristics of a failed state.[ii]

The House and the Senate might as well be on total shutdown. The Democrats and Republicans can’t agree on whether or not the sun is shining. The Senate has refused to take up hundreds of Bills passed by the House. The members of the Freedom Caucus, the Minority Leader, and the President praise a loony-tunes nominee for Congress, who espouses QAnon conspiracy theories. The sad part of the story, of course, is that she got the most votes by the people of the Georgia13^th district. There is confirmed evidence that points to Russia paying the Taliban to kill American soldiers. The White House said nothing and extracted no retribution. Newspapers showed the digital trail of money transfers and pictures of the piles of Russian money found in enemy bunkers. The White House did nothing. Weeks later evidence showed that Iran also paid our enemies to kill American soldiers. There has been no response from the Leadership. We have lost so much prestige that other nations openly taunt us. Civis Romanus Sum applied to us as well, once.

Every four years we elect a president to lead the nation, to be its guiding light, to unite any divide and to protect its place in the world order. The US, since the end of World War II particularly and regardless of which party in power, exercised its influence because we were the best because we could do what had to be done and because we kept our word. We were the model for a world seeking freedom and prosperity. Today, we have disengaged from the rest of the world. We have extricated ourselves from every major treaty and agreement made in the last several years or generations. We joined over 100 nations agreeing to try to do something about the changing climate. We pulled out. We no longer stand by our word. We and several other nations negotiated an extensive treaty with Iran, not a country we can call a friend, but which agreed not to build nuclear weapons for ten years if we would lift economic sanctions and free up their money in Western banks. We pulled out. We no longer stand by our word. Iran is now free to make as many bombs as it wants, although the other countries in the treaty are sticking to their word, and are now the nations of influence. We were part of a multinational trade agreement that ensured markets for our goods and had elements of free trade for our goods and services. We pulled out. People can’t trust our word. The other nations continue to abide by their agreement and are trading goods with each other at better prices than ours. We started a trade war with China, which like all trade wars ended up costing us more for foreign-made goods and lost markets for our goods and services. We broke our agreement. People can’t trust our word anymore. Moreover, the President lied to the people when he said that China was paying billions in tariffs for the goods they sold us. The seller never pays the tariffs; the buyers pay the tariffs when the goods land on our shore. It was a “big lie.”

If other nations can’t trust us, they will establish lasting relationships with each other and leave us out. We are no longer the leader of the free world because we encouraged the downfall of most of the alliances that kept the relative peace for decades.

During WWII the US Office of Strategic Services prepared a profile of the leader of Germany.  “His primary rules were: never allow the public to cool off; never admit a fault or wrong; never concede that there may be some good in your enemy; never leave room for alternatives; never accept blame; concentrate on one enemy at a time and blame him for everything that goes wrong; people will believe a big lie sooner than a little one, and if you repeat it frequently enough people will sooner or later believe it.” The “big lie” strategy is effective more times than not. When the leader of the country and his minions repeat lies day after day that are repeated night after night of biased talk shows, people start to believe the lie.

It is campaign time again. What could go wrong? There has been speculation that the federal government would do what it could to mess up the USPS so that voting-by-mail (VBM) would be ineffective. Speculation morphed into reality when the President announced that he wouldn’t sign a bill authorizing more money to help make VBM more effective. The head of the postal workers union reported that mail sorting machines are not only being taken out of service all over the country but also taken out of the buildings. The USPS was caught removing mailboxes in Iowa neighborhoods that tend to have more Democrats. Come to find out it was a plan to be implemented across the country until they got caught. Forty-six states were notified that the USPS could not deliver mail-in ballots on Election Day. The Post Master General, to his credit, told Congress that no more machines would be removed and that all mail-in-ballots can be processed in a timely way and delivered on time. This was and is an example of “the big lie.” The constant repetition of the lie that VBM is a bad thing was starting to become fact in the minds of many, irrespective of the facts.

There have been allegations that Russia interfered with our 2016 elections, allegations strongly denied by the President and his campaign staff. Investigations by Special Counsel showed collusion, but the day to day denials was accepted by much of the public and even members of Congress. The big lie was told often and over again. This month, after a nearly four-year investigation, the Senate Intelligence Committee published their nearly 1,000-page report that confirmed the Russian interference in 2016 campaign and outlined what they are doing already in the 2020 election. The bi-partisan vote was 14-1. No word from the White House yet. The “big lie” about Putin’s denial of interference is more reliable than our intelligence agencies blows up for all to see, but still no word from the President.

When a candidate for the presidency wins the election, the country should accept policy changes and legislative actions to implement their view of how America should be. Usually, the opposing party isn’t happy with the changes, but they accept their role as the “loyal opposition” and start working on their four-year plan to recoup the leadership. Transparency forces me to state that I don’t like about 99% of Trump’s policies. I don’t like the fact that he is doing much of what he said he would do. He has reduced taxes for the richest people, he has bludgeoned laws designed to ensure fair treatment in the workplace, reduce air pollution, put more vigilance into the banking systems, threatened to take us out of NATO which is designed to protect Europe from invasion by Russia, and the list goes on and on. But, there are a lot of people who think that these policies are good things. I disagree.

The United States is no longer the leader of the world, as we knew it. China’s aggressive influence peddling and infrastructure programs in Africa and the Middle East outmaneuver us at every point. Germany and France are now the go-to nations for economic stability programs. Our approach to the COVID-19 pandemic showed how little united we are, and how little influence the national President actually has. The George Floyd death exposed police brutality against minorities that was hidden to too many for too long. The economic shutdown was wasted for lack of a national program and a disregard for science. For lack of a national program, each governor vied against the other for PPEs and ventilators, for the most part, manufactured in China. The ‘big lie’ approach to communications put our institutions at risk.

The next election will determine the kind of country we want to be. It will determine if we will be the shining light on the hill, the land of the immigrant, the land of opportunity or the land that operates in a too similar fashion to the despots who rule other nationalistic but un-free nations, most of whom came to power through the election process. Then they rigged the voting system and keep getting re-elected. Do we really want to be another Belarus?

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[i] The New Colossus – Emma Lazarus - 1849-1887  - 

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.

"Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

[ii] Wade Davis, University of British Columbia Chair of Cultures and Ecosystems at Risk – The Unraveling America – Rolling Stone, August 6, 2020