​With the world on the cusp of the Beijing Winter Olympics, it is worth examining where the Olympic Movement stands today.
 
The vision of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) is to “Build a Better World through Sport.” Awarding the upcoming Winter Games to Beijing might be building a better world for the Chinese Communist Party Politburo, but certainly not for the estimated 1 million Uyghurs currently incarcerated in re-education (a.k.a., concentration) camps or the 7.76 million Hong Kong residents whose political and civil rights are being brutally suppressed by Beijing. 
 
By blithely overlooking these rampant human rights abuses, the IOC tacitly endorses them. Of course, bolstering repressive regimes is nothing new for the IOC. Its “hear-no-evil, speak-no-evil, see-no evil” philosophy dates back at least to the “Nazi Olympics” in Berlin in 1936, when it meekly kow-towed to Adolf Hitler and the depraved concept of Aryan supremacy he was peddling. To its eternal shame, its American subsidiary, the U.S. Olympic Committee (USOC), headed by the overtly anti-Semitic Avery Brundage, kept one of America’s best shotputters off the team altogether and, once in Berlin, prohibited Sam Stoller and Marty Glickman, two of the fastest humans in the world, from competing in the 4 x 100 meter relay. All three banned athletes were Jewish. Brundage did not want to offend his Nazi hosts. Interestingly, the Nazis later awarded his construction  company the contract to build the German embassy in Washington. He was also rewarded by election to the IOC presidency.
 
Hypocrisy and allegations of corruption are nothing new to the IOC.  For most of modern Olympic history, it promoted a flagrant double standard, insisting that American and other Western athletes had to be “pure” amateurs while turning a blind eye to Soviet bloc athletes who were full-time professionals. American athletes had to struggle to make ends meet while their rivals were paid.
 
Hosting an Olympics means massive and skyrocketing costs. Longer-term economic benefits have proven dubious. Consequently, fewer cities now compete to play host, increasingly aware that the economic benefits are doubtful. This has led to fewer cities interested in hosting. A 2012 Oxford University study calculated that each Summer Olympics since 1976 suffered cost overruns averaging 252 percent. The 1976 Summer Olympics in Montreal became the poster child for the fiscal black hole of hosting. Its projected cost of $124 million was off by billions, and it took its taxpayers almost 30 years to pay off the $1.5 billion in debt it incurred. Rio (2016) still owes more than $2 billion. In 1972, Denver became the only city to bail on hosting after a voter referendum defeated public spending for the games. Out of 52 Olympic Games, only one host city came through the painful ordeal with a profit (Los Angeles, 1984). Although nothing has yet been proven, credible allegations of payoffs to IOC executives in return for awarding the games to host cities are rife.
 
In contrast, the IOC and USOC (both nonprofits) have done very well financially. The IOC often hauls in over $3 billion in Olympic years, enabling it to pay numerous Committee executives salaries well into six figures. The USOC has at least 15 executives who earn more than $250,000 per year. Meanwhile, both Committees exploit athletes, treating them as pawns, throwing them peanuts and milking their exertions for every penny they can squeeze out of them. In order to train, many athletes have had to survive on food stamps.
 
Seeing an opportunity to cash in even more, the IOC launched the first Winter Olympics in 1924. The first Winter Games attracted only Scandinavian countries. While more countries participate today, they are few in number compared to the Summer Olympics where the sports contested are far more universal. The Winter Games exclude virtually the entire group of nations located in the tropics and subtropics, where biathlon, bobsledding (exception: Jamaica), luge, curling and skiing don’t exist for lack of snow and cold weather. Beijing has had to make virtually 100 percent of the necessary snow artificially for this year’s games.
 
In the 21st century, the IOC scheduled the Winter Games to take place in between the Summer Games, not wanting to wait four full years for its next financial windfall.
 
Adding to the reluctance to host is the risk of violence. Hundreds of protestors were killed by government militias just prior to the 1968 Mexico City Games. The Arab terrorist group, Black September, murdered 13 Israeli athletes during the 1972 Munich Games.  Atlanta in 1996 witnessed a bomb attack resulting in death and injuries. In all three cases, the IOC absolved itself of any responsibility.
 
The hypocrisy that consumes the IOC and USOC is also evident in its treatment of doping athletes. Ignoring the use of performance-enhancing drugs (PEDs) and other cheating such as blood doping has a long Olympic history. In the 1970s, the East German teams were swimming in PEDs and winning swimming and track gold medals as a result. Despite finding that Russia today harbors the world’s most egregious doping program, the IOC nevertheless allows Russian athletes to participate provided they do so “unattached.”
 
Finally, the IOC and USOC also look the other way when accusations of abuse pinpoint individual sport governing bodies, such as USA Gymnastics, which failed to keep its athletes safe from years of sexual predation by its team doctor, Larry Nasser.
 
I don’t know if the Olympic Movement can be fixed. One simple reform that makes sense would be to hold the Games in the same or a rotating number of cities that already have the requisite infrastructure without having to shell out billions. It will require a great deal of purging in order to clean up the rest of the Olympic mess. Eliminating the Olympics altogether would be a terrible shame for the athletes.
 
Dick Hermann
January 29, 2022

​The overturning of President Biden’s vaccine mandate for large employers by a 6-3 vote of the U.S. Supreme Court, with all of the conservative justices in the majority, is yet another indication that the Court is out of touch with reality. The Court majority resorted to twisted, tortured illogical legerdemain in order to arrive at a decision guaranteed to extend the pandemic and generate additional unnecessary hospitalizations and deaths. Finding that the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) lacked the authority to impose the mandate because Covid-19 is not exclusive to the workplace flies in the face of the whole reason Congress delegates authority to agencies that have the specialized scientific expertise that Congress lacks.
 
The OSHA Act was signed by President Nixon in 1970. Both its language and its legislative history make it clear that Congress authorized OSHA to protect workers from all manner of workplace health and safety threats. The Act also acknowledges that OSHA scientists possess the expertise to determine when the agency must step in to protect workers.
 
No matter. The Supreme Court majority, whose knowledge of science is no better than yours and mine, has interposed its own flawed, non-scientific judgment to reach a misguided decision that will do great harm. This is, sadly, consistent with one of its recent equally irrational decisions to the effect that Covid-19 takes a rest on weekends and does not spread in churches, synagogues, mosques and Sunday schools.
 
The Supreme Court’s right-wing majority was afraid to put their names on this disastrous decision, instead issuing a Per Curiam opinion so that no individual justice had to admit authorship. How lame.
 
Its opinion says that OSHA is limited to regulating “work-related dangers” and then claims that Covid-19 doesn’t fit that definition because it is a broader, virtually universal public health risk. What this perverse assertion proclaims is that OSHA has no authority because the danger transcends the workplace. Unbelievable!
 
Tell that to the 84 million Americans who would have been covered by the vaccine mandate, individuals who must show up at work in order to feed and shelter their families, and do so with trepidation for fear of the virus.
 
The dissent points out the absurdity of the majority’s argument: “…the Court argues that OSHA cannot keep workplaces safe from COVID–19 because the agency (as it readily acknowledges) has no power to address the disease outside the work setting.”
 
To arrive at its calamitous decision, the Court majority had to invent an unstated legislative intent to limit “work-related dangers” to those that can only happen on the job. That’s akin to saying that OSHA cannot regulate to prevent a crane falling on a worker on a construction site because a crane could fall on a pedestrian passing by. Or that OSHA cannot regulate fire hazards in the workplace because fires can occur anywhere!
 
The Court’s reactionaries ignored the 52-year history of OSHA regulation that covers all sorts of health and safety risks that occur at work, but could also occur at home, in school, or anywhere else where people congregate.
 
The bottom line, of course, is that OSHA has a five-decade history of addressing risks that impact the workplace even if they could also arise outside of it.
 
The danger of this Trumpian ruling is that it could be invoked in future cases to decimate Congress’ power to delegate authority and defer to agencies that have the expertise Congress does not possess.
 
In addition to the convoluted legal argument which the Court’s right-wing majority had to invent, it is clear that these public servants don’t care a whit for our health and safety. Ignoring the repercussions of a decision is the height of irresponsibility.
 
Dick Hermann
January 22, 2022

It is conventional wisdom that, beginning 50 years ago,  the (capital “D”) Democratic Party, began shedding a big chunk of its traditional base—rural middle class and both urban and rural working class voters in favor of the urban meritocracy. Consequently, it created a breach into which the ever-opportunistic Republicans marched, thus flipping what had been the normal order of political things. And then along came Donald Trump who, for all his towering ignorance, quickly grasped that a combination of growing poverty, hopelessness and disinformation could be a winning combination in a presidential election.
 
The remarkable thing is that his 2016 opponent, Hillary Clinton, despite having lived in Arkansas, one of the most rural, impoverished and hope-deprived states for almost 20 years, came away from that experience utterly clueless about this ominous combination and its implications. Moreover, she very publicly insulted the voters who fell into this category. Her obliviousness proved the axiom that intelligence encompasses much more than being “book-bright.” The truly bright combine academic intelligence with situational, creative and social emotional awareness.
 
While the odds 10 months before the 2022 mid-term elections appear daunting for Democrats, it is far too early to write their chances off. There is still time to right the Democratic ship while simultaneously saving our precious (small “d”) democracy.
 
It will not be nearly enough to run against Donald Trump. He will not be on the ballot, although many of his fear-motivated acolytes will be. Having been largely banned from social media, he is becoming an afterthought.
 
Instead, Democrats need to acknowledge that, to win elections, they must be able to appeal to the core concerns of the rural, post-manufacturing voters and peel off enough of them to add to their meritocratic base. Here is a four-pronged plan that Democrats should implement:

1. Accelerate the expenditure of funds under the recently enacted Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act that will have the most impact on rural America--$65 billion for broadband so that every American will have high-speed access to the Internet; $55 billion to expand access to clean, safe drinking water; $110 billion to repair roads and bridges; $65 billion for upgrades to the electric power grid; $50 billion to protect against droughts, extreme heat, floods and wildfires, and for weatherization projects; $21 billion to clean up Superfund and brownfield sites, reclaim abandoned mine land and cap orphaned oil and gas wells.
2. Re-institute the Obama Manufacturing Initiative that then-Vice President Biden oversaw, the centerpiece of which was 12 regional re-training hubs designed to prepare laid-off manufacturing workers for jobs in the “new” economy. President Obama did this via executive order, budgetary transfers and re-programming, all well within a president’s authority without having to go to Congress for funding. The constraints that hampered this program then—jobs far away from the hubs—would be considerably eased by universal broadband.
3. Focus laser-like on “kitchen table issues” instead of becoming embroiled in partisan squabbling over cultural divides and obsessing about Trump. In addition, Democrats should stay away from appeals to voters to save democracy. Families who must worry day-to-day about putting food on the table and a roof over their heads have no energy to focus on other issues. Warning voters about democracy’s demise are wasted words.
4. Pare down the Build Back Better bill now stalled in the U.S. Senate to those few provisions that Senators Manchin and Sinema could support, namely those aimed at family expenditures: extension of the Child Care Tax Credit; free universal pre-K for 3- and 4-year olds; and reducing child care expenses.

 
If Democrats institute an electoral strategy such as this, they would have a shot at retaining the Senate and House and winning state and local races that currently appear to be long shots, while also preserving our (small “d”) democracy.
 
Dick Hermann
January 15, 2022

The United States has in front of it the opportunity of a lifetime to do a world of good and regain its global leadership along with the world’s esteem.
 
Unless virtually every human being is vaccinated, Covid-19 will never go away or even become endemic like the cold or flu. The Delta and Omicron variants are examples of what can happen when vaccines become the province of only rich nations. Vaccination rates of at least 60 percent could not keep the West safe from these variants that began in other countries where vaccination rates are miniscule. Unless we are all protected, none of us will be protected. Variants will keep on coming and we may never put Covid-19 behind us.
 
The U.S. could and should manufacture and deliver enough Covid-19 vaccines so that the entire global population can address the pandemic. Thus far, the COVAX initiative, the worldwide effort to get vaccinations into the arms of the global population, has only been able to deliver a small percentage of vaccines to the world’s developing nations. It has fallen far short of what is necessary.
 
Only the U.S. has the wherewithal to get this done. We have the manufacturing facilities that have produced the strongest Covid-19 vaccines. We have the means of dramatically stepping up production via the Defense Production Act. And we have the best delivery systems in the world.
 
U.S. global positioning and influence has taken a big hit in the 21st century. Our leading foreign policy “exports” have been George W. Bush’s disastrous Iraq War and Great Recession, Barack Obama’s Syrian “line in the sand,” Donald Trump’s capricious pulling out of the Paris Climate Agreement, the Iran nuclear weapons treaty and the Trans-Pacific Partnership, along with his self-defeating “America First” policy among other inanities, and Joe Biden’s chaotic Afghanistan withdrawal.
 
Perhaps the only positive among all this negativity was Bush’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), through which the U.S. provided $90 billion in funding for African HIV/AIDS treatment, prevention, and research, making it up to then the largest global health program focused on a single disease in history. PEPFAR was a huge success, saved millions of lives and garnered the U.S. both gratitude and positive carryover from beneficiary countries. It was the poster child for winning global health diplomacy.
 
Now we have an opportunity to do it again.
 
Although the two most effective vaccines—mRNA-based Pfizer and Moderna—have some challenges—Pfizer requires extreme cooling during shipping and storage; and the government is embroiled in a patent dispute with Moderna—there is an alternative: Corbevax, a more traditional vaccine developed by two Texas Children’s Hospital/Baylor College of Medicine physician-researchers. Corbevax has been shown to be 90 percent effective and is being used in India. It is incredibly inexpensive to produce and easy to ship and store. The costs of such a program are small compared to the costs of a continuing pandemic.
 
By vaccinating the world, we would save millions of lives and relieve the enormous stress on under-resourced national healthcare systems. We would also benefit ourselves by taming Covid-19 here at home and eliminating potential new and lethal variants that could continue to jeopardize our own citizens and our economy.
 
Moreover, this should not be a one-time initiative. We should also commit to providing boosters as long as they might be needed. For this component of the program, we could urge other developed nations to join in.
 
It is only the U.S. that has proven vaccines and delivery capability to bring this off. Russia’s Sputnik V vaccine and the two Chinese vaccines that their countries have distributed widely have been a disappointment. They are of questionable efficacy and have disappointed most of the world’s developing nations.
 
The benefits of such an ambitious U.S. program extend far beyond health. America’s geostrategic influence will carry over into other areas of global competition: rebuilding trust in U.S. competence; the democratic battle against the totalitarian onslaught now afflicting the West; and empowering our burgeoning rivalry with China.
 
Everyone would profit from a generous U.S. global vaccination initiative.
 
Dick Hermann
January 8, 2022

​Francis Fukuyama gained a lot of acclaim in the 1990s with his best-selling book, The End of History. He argued that history was over because democracy had triumphed virtually worldwide, heavily influenced by the fall of the Soviet Union. His thesis was premature. Today, that book title is far more appropriate to the times in which we are living, but for very different reasons.
 
The global rise of populism, right-wing reaction, the drive toward fascism and the locking in of the will of the minority via questionable methods smacking of the same totalitarian impulses that democracy fought to suppress in the twentieth century make mincemeat of Fukuyama’s thesis. However, now we may be witnessing the actual end of history, but in a very different and far more dangerous sense.
 
If this is the end of history, it is because (1) it is declining as an academic subject in both K-12 and college classrooms, deemed not particularly relevant to the kind of education needed; (2) there are fewer historians, (3) Americans (as well as citizens of other countries) are increasingly ignorant of what went before, and (4) increasingly our political leaders, the people who should be most aware of and sensitive to history, are both clueless and uninterested in learning its critically important lessons.
 
I was blessed throughout my educational journey with a number of magnificent history teachers. What I learned from them has both greatly influenced my life as well as my reading, research and writing, as well as my public policy predilections. I have experienced at a granular level how history affects everything we do and every direction our nation and world takes. Today, as history has receded as an academic subject, my kind of experience might no longer be possible.
 
No historical parallel is perfect. But some are so aligned that immensely important lessons can be drawn from them, or ignored at their peril. One of the best examples of this was Hitler’s June 22, 1941 invasion of the Soviet Union, Operation Barbarossa, likely the disaster that more than any of his other mistakes, led to his and Germany’s ruination. The century prior, Napoleon’s 600,000-man Grand Armée invaded Russia at around the same time of year, only to run smack into Russia’s typically early winter, which decimated Napoleon’s army. He left Russia with 9,000 troops. Hitler had all of the information about Napoleon’s folly, but ignored it. He chose poorly.
 
There are also plenty of examples where learning from history’s mistakes led to remarkable triumphs. The World War II allies were acutely aware of the terrible mistake made a quarter of a century before by the World War I victors—namely, treating defeated Germany harshly, a calculus that led to Hitler’s coming to power and setting the planet on fire. This time around, the conquerors were magnanimous towards the losers and both they and the world have profited hugely for 75 years as a result. The Allies chose wisely.
 
Neither an individual nor a nation can learn from history if they are ignorant of it. Surveys uniformly indicate that today’s Americans are woefully uninformed.
 
In fall 2020, the American Historical Association conducted a national survey of 1,816 people. Two-thirds of respondents considered history to be little more than an assemblage of names, dates, and events. More than three-fourths of high schoolers responded similarly. The idea that the past has lessons for us or that it should stimulate questions and critical analysis was virtually non-existent. All of this says nothing about attempts by outside groups to thwart the study of history by banning certain subjects, e.g., the impact of race. What has been happening recently at school board meetings serves to make teachers afraid to teach history. Instead of addressing possibly controversial subjects, they avoid them.
 
The shift away from history likely began on October 4, 1957, when the Soviet Union’s launch of its Sputnik space satellite prompted the U.S. government and public to panic that we had fallen behind the Russians in science and technology. Educational priorities shifted dramatically toward science and mathematics. History, which had been deemed one of four core subjects along with science, math and language, was suddenly viewed as having no immediately applicable, practical use and was de-emphasized.
 
There are, however, a handful of holdouts where history education is still highly valued and is nurtured by academic administrators and eagerly embraced by students. It remains a top major at Yale, Brown, Princeton and Columbia. Meanwhile, it is being downgraded at the vast majority of universities. We cannot afford to so limit the pool of historians to graduates of a few Ivy League institutions.
 
It is very troubling that one of our major political parties depends on voters’ inability to apply their sense of history to assessing its policies. Immigration is a classic example. Trump turned immigration into the reason for most of the country’s problems even though history shows that it has been one of our biggest pluses, responsible for tremendous innovation and economic progress. Republicans and other despotically-inclined groups are really good at this. The Nazis rode the bogus “stab-in-the-back” falsehood (re: who lost World War I) to power. The Communists’ 65-volume Great Soviet Encyclopedia, every entry virtually a lie, contributed to brainwashing an entire population. Donald Trump’s MAGA illusion and Big Lie are having a similar effect on the willingly conned. Whitewashing history for nefarious ends is, sadly, a highly successful political strategy.
 
The end of history is a bad portent for the future of this nation. A healthy democratic society and polity requires a constant, questioning examination and understanding of yesterday. The absence of “critical historical thinking skills” can only lead to tragic policy follies like the Vietnam and Iraq Wars. Re-injecting these skills into the curriculum would go a long way toward making America great and vastly improving the quality of our decision-making.
 
Dick Hermann
January 1, 2022