Good governance depends in large part on understanding the lessons of history. America’s leaders often forget that.
 
Almost thirty years ago, the federal government declared victory over the savings & loan meltdown that wiped out hundreds of reckless financial institutions and their investors and depositors. One-third (1,043) of all U.S. S&Ls failed, including many whose over-the-top investments encompassed risky loans, self-dealing, cattle ranches, speculative drilling ventures and even Nevada bordellos. An ‘80s deregulation was a major contributor to the debacle.
 
Only a few years after that, having learned nothing from the S&L fiasco, an equally reckless, clueless and “bought” Congress repealed the Great Depression era Glass-Steagall Act that had done a creditable job protecting the U.S. banking system and national economy from collapse for more than 60 years. The consequence of that legislative disaster was the 2008 Great Recession.
 
In 2013, the U.S. Supreme Court gutted the 1965 Voting Rights Act, announcing from the high bench that its protections of the right to vote were no longer needed. We see visible evidence every day of how badly that’s playing out. Voter suppression has since emerged as a bedrock Republican policy, all based on the fake premise of (virtually non-existent) voter fraud.
 
Today we are confronted with three more indicators that history teaches our leaders nothing:
 
First, they tell us that the U.S. banking system is in great shape notwithstanding the eminently avoidable collapse of several institutions and resulting bailouts to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars. Former Representative Barney Frank, co-author of the Dodd-Frank Act that was a reasonable response to the abuses that caused the Great Recession, made his bones through his eloquent polemics about bank recklessness and “moral hazard.” He subsequently retired from Congress, sold out to the Dark Side by joining the board of the late and unlamented Signature Bank, one of the failed institutions that launched the current financial crisis. Worse, he now argues without a shred of evidence that Congress’s 2018 rollback of Dodd-Frank regulations that might have prevented the crisis was a good idea. It appears that thirty pieces of silver still goes a long way.
 
Second, they proclaim that the Covid-19 pandemic, history’s first politicized disease, is behind us and we can all go about our business once again unmindful of any precautions. The extreme polarization that prompted Donald Trump and his team of incompetent bozos to downplay the most serious health crisis in a century and then to disparage life-saving health precautions, resulted in hundreds of thousands of needless deaths and disabilities, and sorrow for families that will last for the rest of their lives.
 
Last I looked, the pandemic is still alive and doing quite well. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report that, at this writing, the weekly total of new Covid-19 cases is almost 150,000. More than 1,700 people died from Covid this week, while more than 17,500 were hospitalized. Only 16.4 percent of the U.S. population has been vaccinated with an up-to-date booster. A new subvariant has just emerged. Meanwhile, little has been done to prepare for the next pandemic.
 
Third, climate change is real and is wreaking havoc with weather patterns, the consequences of which are death and destruction that is guaranteed to get much worse. Places like California are bordering on being unlivable. The United Nations most recent climate change report forecasts nothing but doom, gloom and Armageddon around the corner. Coincident with this scientific analysis, Donald Trump and his congressional lapdogs persist in denying that there is even a problem.
 
Meanwhile, the lessons of history go begging for someone to listen to them and act responsibly.
 
Dick Hermann
March 24, 2023

​It’s not too early to ponder how Florida Governor Ron DeSantis might fare once he actually announces that he is running for President. Some early thoughts on the man who cannot utter a full sentence without including the word “woke.”
 
When the national media reports on DeSantis’s doings, it focuses almost exclusively on his culture warrior persona: banning mask-wearing and vaccine mandates; promoting the “Don’t Say Gay” law; attacking the Advanced Placement course on African-American history; his incessant attacks on LGBTQ Floridians, especially transgender folks; injecting right-wing ideology into the state’s universities; banning books from school and public libraries; and battling Disney and other “woke” companies.
 
That’s really most of what we know about him. However, given his national political aspirations, that is about to change.
 
DeSantis’ theory of the 2024 presidential race appears to rest on two premises: (1) that he can wrestle the MAGA-verse from Donald Trump because a growing number of Trump cultists want a Trump without the crazy; and (2) that his anti-woke culture war message will play just as well nationally as it apparently has in Florida.
 
While he may be correct with respect to Republican primary voters (he has to be because he will be running in the same lane as Trump), I suspect that he is not at all spot-on when it comes to appealing to the majority of general election voters. As in most presidential elections, they are likely to be more concerned with major issues like the economy, crime, the economy, the Ukraine war, the economy, China and…the economy, and wanting to know his views on Medicare, Social Security and Medicaid (as a congressman, he was not exactly all in on entitlements), and the Affordable Care Act.
 
DeSantis has elected to go hard-right during the primary campaign season. Should he win the nomination, his challenge will be tacking back to the middle, essential if he is to win the general election. In 2012, Republican nominee Mitt Romney was unable to do so, and it might have cost him the election. DeSantis, who will have to make that journey from much farther to the right, is going to experience even more difficulty making the transition.
 
While he now looks like the Republicans’ bright, shiny, new object, the sheen may quickly wear off once he ascends the debate stage alongside Trump, Nikki Haley and the other likely GOP presidential wannabes (anyone remember Scott Walker?). During his 2022 debate with Florida Democratic gubernatorial nominee, Charlie Crist, an interminably and incurably weak opponent, DeSantis had to struggle to answer even simple questions, and responded with dead silence when Christ asked him if he would serve a full term as governor. He will have to do much better on the national debate stage. The questions will only be tougher and orders of magnitude more discomfiting. Moreover, Trump will try to rip him to shreds as only he can.
 
So far, De Santis has limited his media appearances to the Rupert Murdoch bubble—Fox News, the New York Post, the London Times, milieus where he is guaranteed softball questions designed to boost his appeal. Even his obligatory pre-presidential campaign book (reviewers call it “robotic” and “boring”) was published by a Murdoch company. A national candidate will not get a comparable pass from the mainstream media, whose questions will not be quite as friendly. Uncomfortable questions will be posed about his Covid response (Florida had the 4th highest number of Covid cases per capita, and the 12th highest Covid death rate among states), election denialism, his views about the January 6, 2021 insurrection and Ukraine.
 
During his most recent trip to Iowa, DeSantis said he doesn’t view Ukraine as a vital U.S. security interest. He wanted the MAGAverse to see that there is no daylight between him and their cult hero, Trump. This not only demonstrates stunning and extremely dangerous foreign policy ignorance, but also must have prompted Vladimir Putin to do a gleeful jig now that he has a second major presidential candidate vying for room in his pocket. What DeSantis has done is to give Putin an incentive to hang on in Ukraine until January 2025 when a compliant Republican might once again occupy the Oval Office.
 
DeSantis’s affect may also not be a plus. He appears to be something of a humorless sourpuss and a bit thin-skinned, traits that, if the past is an indicator, are not conducive to presidential electoral success. It will be fascinating to see how he responds when Trump unleashes on him. It could be quite the awakening.
 
Dick Hermann
March 17, 2023

​“Government should be so small you don’t even realize it’s there.”
--Tweeted by the Republican National Committee, March 6, 2023
 
These are the same people who have spent the last month defaming the Biden administration for allegedly not caring about the people of East Palestine, Ohio victimized by the Norfolk Southern derailment and the possible health hazards to follow. The RNC and its henchmen and women trolling the halls of Congress attribute the fictitious absence of federal concern to the fact that East Palestine is an overwhelmingly white community and thus, a victim of discrimination.
 
If the feds were miniaturized per the RNC, then presumably they should not have shown up in East Palestine at all. Instead of applauding the rapid and continuous federal response to the derailment, their lies exploit it as yet another battle in the war to Make America Hate Again..and again…and again.
 
As even Fox “News,” a.k.a., the Republican Ministry of Propaganda, reported, neither Donald Trump, while President, nor any member of his administration ever showed up at the scene of any of the 5,000 train derailments that occurred during their watch. Moreover, during his calamitous tenure in office, several railroad safety regulations were repealed. Now, as a failed ex-president, he came to East Palestine solely in order to gain political points, a shameless exercise in opportunism for his benighted 2024 campaign.
 
In contrast, Biden’s EPA, FEMA, and Department of Transportation have been to the scene of the derailment more than ten times and have been pouring aid and assistance into the community since the day after the mishap. If anything, the federal response and the State of Ohio’s encouragement of it demonstrate that there are many times when government must go big.
 
Moreover, the RNC is peopled by individuals so obtuse that they do not see the inconsistency between endorsing a minimalist government while at the same time promoting government intrusion into the most personal of individual and family decisions (abortion, gender-affirming care, LGBTQ rights).
 
This notion of a ghostly government is nuts. It is also the height of shameless hypocrisy.
 
Dick Hermann
March 11, 2023

​One year into Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, we are close to a tipping point. The U.S. and its allies do not appear to have thought through what they want the endgame to be or how to get there.
 
There is unlikely to be a negotiated settlement given Putin’s oft-stated commitment to “putting the band back together” in the form of the old Soviet Union, of which Ukraine was an integral part. Also likely not in the cards is an outcome similar to the stalemate that ended the Korean War, with Russia retaining control of almost 20 percent of Ukraine. That would be unacceptable to either party.
 
This war is a clash of civilizations, the third such collision between the world’s autocracies and democracies in a little over a hundred years. Both earlier conflicts ended with the total defeat and eradication of the autocracies—the German and Habsburg Empires in World War I (and collaterally the Russian Empire); Germany, Italy and Japan in World War II. This time around the only way for the democracies’ Ukrainian proxy to win a comparable total victory is for the Russian autocracy to be eliminated. Should it survive the outcome of the war, any Ukrainian “victory” will only be temporary.
 
Ukraine cannot win if the war goes on for years and becomes a war of attrition. The human and economic toll will eventually overwhelm Ukraine. Putin’s war crimes—attacking civilian targets; kidnapping thousands of Ukrainian children and “russifying” them; and destroying Ukraine’s infrastructure—will have the inevitable effect of forcing Ukraine to its knees. Eventually, Russia’s overwhelming manpower advantage alone could tilt the scales in its favor.
 
While fear of arousing Putin to more desperate and draconian measures than he has employed so far, including the deployment of tactical nuclear weapons, is real, it has to be balanced against the calculus regarding what it will take for Ukraine to actually win this war. Interestingly, the most vocal advocates of such an approach are the front-line NATO states bordering Russia, the same ones with the most to lose should Putin turn his attention elsewhere if he is successful in Ukraine. He is already moving against Moldova, Ukraine’s tiny, impoverished, and weak neighbor to its South.
 
The best case that NATO and the West can hope for is Russian regime change, i.e., a coup d’état that topples Putin in favor of a more reasonable and realistic leadership cadre. The Russian military is probably the only entity equipped to bring this about.
 
Meanwhile, the West must tighten the economic, diplomatic and legal screws on Russia “until the pips squeak” (per British First Lord of the Admiralty Eric Geddes, speaking of Germany in 1918). The UN General Assembly has the authority to establish a special war crimes trial commission for Russia by majority vote. It should do so immediately, and try Putin and his cronies in absentia. We also need to employ all of the carrots and sticks at our disposal to deter China from providing Putin with weapons and to persuade India from remaining neutral and from continuing to buy Russian oil.
 
While President Biden and the Western alliance deserve great credit for their response to Putin’s aggression, their piecemeal approach to doling out the weapons Ukraine needs for bare-bones survival is quickly becoming inadequate to the task. The country needs much more if it is to have any chance of prevailing—weapons that enable it to better protect itself and take the fight to the Russians. That means state-of-the-art advanced defensive—and offensive—weaponry: jet fighters; drones; long-range artillery; cruise missiles; an Israeli-like “Iron Dome;” and adequate ammunition supplies.
 
The only thing a murderous thug and bully like Putin understands is strength. The time has come to show him what that means.
 
Dick Hermann
March 3, 2023