First let’s finish the second Robert Reich item we began yesterday. Then the drones.
Robert Reich, 13 Dec 2024: America’s four stories (Part 2)
VI. The Democrats’ Reluctance to Tell the Truth about the Rot at the Top
The Democrats’ weakest story has been the Rot at the Top. Democrats have been reluctant to condemn economic elites who have grown richer than ever and who have used their affluence to corrupt the political system.
This should not be surprising. Since the 1980s, Democrats have been drinking at the same funding troughs as Republicans — big corporations, Wall Street, and wealthy individuals. And as the Supreme Court opened the spigots of big money into politics, those troughs have become far larger, for both parties.
Soon after he was installed in the White House, Obama branded Wall Street bankers “shameful” for giving themselves nearly $20 billion in bonuses as the economy was deteriorating and the government was spending billions to bail out their banks.
In a private meeting, the CEOs of the biggest banks reportedly sought to explain to him why they and their top executives deserved the bonuses. Obama stopped the conversation short. “Be careful how you make those statements, gentlemen. The public isn’t buying that. My administration is the only thing between you and the pitchforks.”
Ultimately, some 10 million homeowners lost their homes to foreclosure. This was not an inevitable result of the financial crisis. It was a policy choice.
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Between 1972 and Trump’s election in 2016, the pay of the typical American worker dropped 2 percent, adjusted for inflation, although the American economy more than doubled in size. At the same time, the richest one-tenth of 1 percent owned more wealth than the bottom 90 percent put together.
Americans born in the early 1940s had a 92 percent chance of obtaining a higher household income than their parents, once they became adults. They would live out the American dream. But those chances steadily declined. Americans born in the 1980s had only a 50-50 shot at doing better than their parents.
This is the real story of the Rot at the Top — rigging the economy against average workers, cutting taxes on the top and raising them on everyone else, making it harder to form labor unions, and creating vast monopolies.
Democrats have benefited from this system too.
The Democrats’ failure to tell this story has enabled Republican cultural populism to fill the void, offering Americans who were growing distrustful of the system an explanation for what had gone wrong and a set of villains to blame — immigrants, “coastal elites,” “woke”ism, the “deep state,” transgendered people, “communists,” “socialists,” the “Left,” Critical Race Theory, “cat ladies,” and other bogeymen.
With examples from Trump, DeSantis, and Vance.
Republican cultural populism is entirely bogus. The biggest change over the previous four decades, the change lurking behind the insecurities and resentments of the working middle class, has had nothing to do with identity politics, “woke”ism, or any other Republican cultural target.
The biggest change has been a giant upward shift in the distribution of income and wealth; in the power that has accompanied that shift; and in the injuries to the pride, status, and self-esteem of those who have been left behind.
What’s holding us back from remedying this? Concentrated wealth and power to a degree we haven’t witnessed in this nation since the late 19th century.
Yet Republicans, in particular, are egging it on.
Mammoth corporations and hugely rich individuals have abused their power and wealth to corrupt our democracy, take over much of our media, give executives stratospheric pay packages while firing workers, and pad their nests with special tax breaks and corporate welfare.
In this, they have been helped by a Republican Congress and White House whose guiding ideology seems less capitalism than cronyism, as shown time and again by Trump and his lackeys.
Donald Trump has already named more billionaires to his pending administration than any administration in history, starting with giving the wealthiest person in the world responsibility for identifying and cutting out so-called government “inefficiencies.”
Ending:
Unless or until Democratic candidates tell the real story of our time — the corruption of our system of self-government that has been the direct consequence of record inequality — and vow to take it on as their central mission, they will have failed the nation.
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The Drones! The Drones!
NY Times, 14 Dec 2024: Weeks of Drone Sightings Leave New Jersey on Edge, subtitled “In the Garden State, where the rash of sightings started a month ago, residents are looking to the skies, wondering why they still don’t have definitive answers from officials.”
And it’s in the national TV news too. I’m coming to the provisional conclusion, based more on circumstances than evidence, that this matter if just another “scare” from people who don’t realize what they’re seeing. Just as many UFO sightings turn out to be Venus, by people who rarely look at the night sky or realize what planets in the night sky look like.
Federal officials have said that there is no evidence that the sightings pose a threat to public safety, or that a majority of them are even drones. Many of the sightings have actually proved to be manned aircraft mistaken as drones, according to officials with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and the F.B.I.
But official assurances have done little to quell public concern in New Jersey, and many residents say they feel frustrated by the lack of information from state and federal authorities.
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CFI, Center for Inquiry, Benjamin Radford, 16 Dec 2024: Return of the ‘Mysterious’ Drones and the Twilight of Ambiguity
It’s easy to forget in an era of attenuating attention spans and a continual churn of news, but these drone scares are nothing new. Almost exactly five years ago, as 2019 came to a close, news reports spread about nearly two dozen “mysterious” drones sighted in the night skies over rural Colorado and Nebraska. Despite the (presumed) drones apparently operating legally under Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) regulations (and not, for example, at a high altitude or near a Colorado airport or government buildings) authorities launched investigations. Concerned—and/or annoyed—residents asked if it was legal to shoot the drones down and were told it was not a good idea; it is considered an aircraft and someone else’s property. Still, people were understandably unnerved.
The new sightings follow the same pattern. As The New York Times noted, “For weeks, federal authorities investigating the sightings have provided few answers about what the objects are or their origin, leaving residents unsettled and local leaders frustrated. Alejandro Mayorkas, the head of the Department of Homeland Security, confirmed in an interview with ABC News on Sunday ‘that there’s no question that drones are being sighted.’ Mr. Mayorkas said the Federal Aviation Administration changed its rules last year so that drones could fly at night — a possible reason, he said, for the recent uptick in sightings along the East Coast.”
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This hasn’t stopped the right-wing extremists from making random charges. Charlie Kirk wants to shoot them down (see the CFI post). And:
JMG, 16 Dec 2024: Fox Host Suggests Chinese Migrants Are Behind Drones
Conservatives blame anything alarming on people they don’t like, without evidence.
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From Connie Willis’ CW Daily column on Facebook, December 15, 2024:
The big story as far as MAGA is concerned is those mysterious lights around New Jersey, which Trumpers in the Midwest now claim they’re starting to see:
— Fox is now covering this story non-stop (I think to distract from Trump’s terrible nominees and other awful news stories) and it’s whipping their viewers into a frenzy.
— They’re convinced the lights are drones and that it’s the Russians or the Iranians (or aliens.) Chris Christie claimed he saw a drone directly over his house. He, like Trump, wants the state police to “bring those drones down and find out why they’re doing what they’re doing.”
— State and federal officials say they’re just airplanes and helicopters and not a threat to residents, but they’re not listening.
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(Note: over half the UFO sightings turn out to be Venus, which people simply can’t believe is that bright. And add to that the fact that in the sky it’s almost impossible to tell how large something is (witness the moon, which looks huge on the horizon and then mysteriously shrinks as it rises in the sky, but if you put your thumb up to cover it, it’s exactly the same size all the time) and or how far away it is. I once saw a meteorite that looked like it was headed straight for downtown Denver that turned out to have fallen in Utah, over 350 miles away. And many of the things people are saying about the lights are exactly what they’ve said about UFOs in the past — they hover and disappear and change direction. (This does NOT mean they’re UFOs. I spent several years researching UFOs for my book, THE ROAD TO ROSWELL, and never once read about a credible sighting or saw any video that looked like anything but an airplane — or Venus.)
