Those of us who remain the last best hope of preserving our democracy in the face of assaults by the Trumpian neo-fascists determined to destroy it need to communicate better. All too often, we allow Donald Trump and his gang to get away with their incessant lies. Forget about the Republicans who privately detest him but remain mute because they are terrified for their political futures if they cross him. They sold their spines along with their souls in return for MAGA votes years ago. They are a lost cause.
 
What needs to change is the frequency, loudness and passion of responses by the mainstream media as well as by both large and small “d” democrats to the constant drumbeat of falsehoods. All three of these democracy defenders need to go into overdrive.
 
It is stunning that the mainstream media (as distinguished from the Trump propaganda outlets that reinforce the lies and lunatic conspiracy theories perpetrated by the neo-fascist Right) still ties itself in knots in the pursuit of “fairness.” The time has come for the media to step up to the plate and call out the Trumpian untruths in no uncertain terms. Blind obedience to an antiquated notion of unbiased reporting gives a free pass to the right-wing malefactors intent on deep-sixing democracy and the rule of law. The Fourth Estate may soon need an estate plan if it continues to assert the façade of balanced journalism in the face of this existential threat.
 
The same holds true for the Democratic Party. Too often the party leaves unchallenged the daily outrages emanating from the opposition. Whenever Trump or his lickspittles lie, Democratic leaders should be in front of microphones and TV cameras exposing the lies and liars. The time for silence in the face of attacks on truth is past.
 
Small “d” democrats must also go on the offensive through social media and in their daily interactions with family and friends. The lies and conspiracy theories perpetrated by the extreme Right must be countered with both facts and fervor.
 
This is especially essential with respect to Trump’s “Big Lie”—the fantasy Trump voices every waking minute that through massive vote fraud the 2020 presidential election was stolen by Joe Biden and the Democrats. We must constantly point out that 61 court cases challenging the election results went down to defeat (often accompanied by ridicule), a number at the hands of Trump-appointed judges. In addition, it must be noted that in every state the names of candidates for every contested office appear on the same ballot. It is not as if the presidential contest is severed from the rest and accorded its own ballot to be tampered with. If Democrats were intent on stealing the election, they were lousy thieves.  
 
How is it that Democrats stole only the presidency while getting their clocks cleaned in so many down-ballot races? If there was massive vote fraud, why did it only affect the presidential vote? Did the Democrats only care about winning the White House? The answer is that the Big Lie is Big Nonsense. As the courts that shot down Trump’s attempts at arguing vote fraud demonstrated, there wasn’t any. Trump supporters who believe otherwise are delusional.
 
The January 6 congressional investigating committee is doing a great job of countering the Trump lies. Now it is up to the rest of the cadre that believes democracy is worth defending to do our part.
 
Dick Hermann
June 25, 2022

The Greatest Generation has understandably been put on a pedestal for its World War II service and triumphs. In contrast, the succeeding Baby Boom Generation is increasingly and unfairly condemned for its shortcomings.  This disparate treatment ignores history and the impressive achievements for which Boomers can take credit.
 
But before I get to those, let’s set the record straight regarding the Greatest Generation. While the men and women who were called to arms to defeat fascism deserve our unending praise and gratitude, almost immediately on returning home from the war the Greatest Generation launched the “Red Scare.” A paranoid government ran roughshod over the First Amendment via star-chambers like the House Un-American Activities Committee, loyalty oaths, and blacklists that deprived innocent people of their livelihoods. It also gave us Senator Joe McCarthy, who cowed politicians (presidents included) and the public with his wild accusations about Communists under every bed.
 
Also, we must give discredit where discredit is due to four consecutive presidents—Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon—and their advisors, all proud, card-carrying members of the Greatest Generation who themselves had served in World War II. They perpetrated the most disastrous foreign policy mistake in American history and then persisted in needlessly sacrificing thousands of young American lives and millions of Vietnamese lives long after they knew that the Vietnam War was a monumental blunder that never should have happened.
 
Large polling majorities of the Greatest Generation avidly supported the misguided Vietnam policy all the way to the last months of the war. In contrast, Baby Boomers were the loudest voices opposing the war and its carnage and led the effort to bring it to a halt and stop the killing. This alone should elevate the Boomer generation to a position at least equal to the Greatest Generation.
 
But there is more. It was the Baby Boomers who were the champions of civil rights, women’s rights, LGBTQ rights and human rights in general. Much of the resistance to these positive advances came from members of the Greatest Generation.
 
The Baby Boomers are not, however, free of blame for some of the worst and most shameful failures of our times. Our four Boomer presidents—Clinton, George W. Bush, Obama, Trump—have a lot to answer for with respect to calamitous policies and horrific outcomes.

• Clinton and Bush did not take jihadist terrorism seriously enough despite what their government experts were telling them. The consequences were the African embassy bombings, the USS Cole attack and 9/11.
• Bush pushed the second most catastrophic foreign policy bungle in our history, the invasion of Iraq, based on false premises that the president and his advisors knew were false. He also botched the response to Hurricane Katrina and did much to launch The Great Recession, the worst economic calamity in almost 80 years.
• Obama spoke eloquently about red lines in the Syrian sand, but turned out to be “all hat and no cattle” when Syria resorted to chemical weapons to kill thousands of its citizens. His inaction regarding Russia’s aggression against Georgia and Ukraine emboldened Vladimir Putin to initiate his current war to annihilate Ukraine.
• Trump? I don’t have sufficient space or time to list the hundreds if not thousands of lies, misbehaviors and generally evil conduct and initiatives that rendered him the worst president in US history by several parsecs.

 
Both Boomers and the Greatest Generation have much to answer for. But assigning all virtue to the Greatest Generation while denying any to Boomers and blaming them for their stumbles to the exclusion of any credit for the immense good they have done is unfair.
 
Dick Hermann
June 18, 2022

​As Benjamin Franklin walked out of Independence Hall after the Constitutional Convention in 1787, someone shouted out, “Doctor, what have we got? A republic or a monarchy?”
Franklin responded: “A republic, if you can keep it.”

Franklin’s words still resonate almost 250 years later.

In the second century BC, Roman Senator Cato the Elder concluded every one of his Senate speeches with this phrase: Carthāgō dēlenda est ("Carthage must be destroyed"). Cato understood that a still functioning, viable Carthage, with which Rome in the preceding two centuries had fought two brutal wars, would always be an existential threat to Rome. In 149 BC, Rome launched its third war against Carthage. Three years later, Carthage was wiped from the pages of history.

Today, two thousand years later, Americans who still value democracy, the rule of law and the precious freedoms and rights that define our republic need to understand what Cato was telling his contemporaries—namely that national survival depends on not allowing a clear and imminent danger to persist and fester.

In a world where our enemies are trying to destroy us, countering their assaults with hesitant half-steps does not cut it. What is required of us today is to forge equivalent responses to the many challenges we face. For example:

Ukraine. Vladimir Putin is determined to wipe an independent Ukraine off the face of the earth, an essential step in “bringing the band back together,” i.e., re-establishing a powerful successor clone to both imperial Russia and the Soviet Union, with all that this implies for the free world. As the war increasingly appears to be a long one, NATO’s resolve to oppose Russian aggression is weakening. French President Emmanuel Macron recently said "We must not humiliate Russia.” In addition, a number of NATO nations are calling for a negotiated settlement that would involve ceding those parts of Ukraine Russia currently occupies.

Making a deal with the devil—in this case Putin—will only encourage him to continue his assaults on former Soviet territories and eventually former captive nations now part of NATO. Putin must be humiliated.

Guns. The Supreme Court’s tortured perversion of basic English usage has led to endorsing gun mania and resulting mass shootings. At this writing, a bipartisan group of senators are negotiating towards a bill to meekly expand what few “common-sense” federal gun regulations exist. Leaks from the negotiators indicate that a ban on assault weapons and high-capacity magazines are off the table. Whatever the group comes up with will do very little to reduce gun deaths. The epidemic of mass shootings will continue unabated. Meanwhile, Republicans have signaled that they are willing to accept mass shootings as the cost of preserving their so-called Second Amendment rights.

In the absence of a much-needed repeal of the Second Amendment, gun control advocates need to abandon such terms as “common-sense,” get tough with the gun lobby and throw its minions out of office so that serious gun legislation can be enacted.

Saudi Arabia. While human rights will always be “at the center of what we’re doing,” a White House official recently said, “we need our relationships to deliver for the American people.” Translated, that means we will no longer consider Saudi strongman Muhammed bin Salman a criminal pariah for murdering American citizen journalist, Jamal Khashoggi. Instead we will suck up to him in return for more oil. This will only encourage MBS to continue to suppress human rights in his country, continue the Saudi slaughter in Yemen, and continue to hold the West hostage to OPEC. Whatever the cost, he and his country must be pressured to change their ways.

Inflation. Releasing some of the oil in the National Petroleum Reserve has had little impact. Moreover, the Fed moved much too late to raise interest rates in order to quell inflation. How it could have been so deeply asleep at the switch with all its resources and hundreds of staff economists is incomprehensible.

The federal government has yet to suspend the gas tax and terminate Trump’s China tariffs, both of which would go much further to reduce inflation than the baby steps it has thus far taken.

Climate Change. The entire Western world has thrown in the towel vis-à-vis what is sure to be the greatest crisis the planet will face in this century. It is already suffering from its head-in-the-sand inaction to date. The damage of unprecedented weather events—storms, floods, droughts, sea level rises, climate refugees, etc.—has already begun and will get much worse.

Having ignored the problem, the nations of the world will not be able to ignore solutions, which now take the form of mitigating the certain devastation just around the corner. Protective measures must be taken, despite their prohibitive expense.

The Threat to Democracy. Republicans (“the Party of Death”) have abandoned all pretense of being a responsible political organization replete with principles and policies in favor of a scorched earth pursuit of power for its own sake. Democrats, the mainstream media and the remaining concerned public nevertheless persist in pretending that politics hasn’t changed and believing that they can reason with this cult of autocrats, demagogues and reactionaries.

The only way our democracy can survive is the complete and total destruction of this Party of Death. Every Democratic strategy and media report must be geared toward this end. Otherwise, sieg heil!

Trump. His treasonous conspiracy almost succeeded in upending the key foundational element of our democratic system—the peaceful transfer of power. He continues to undermine our democracy with his lies and bombast. Accountability is far from certain.

Attorney General Garland must indict him for his criminal conspiracy and seditious acts and bring him to justice if the precept that “no man is above the law” is to have any meaning at all.

Dick Hermann
June 11, 2022

​Tariffs don’t get a lot of attention outside of economics and political science seminars that bring up the 1920s Smoot-Hawley tariffs as object lessons in terrible government policy mistakes. Those tariffs contributed to launching the Great Depression. Although tariffs are not the most exciting topic, they need attention now because they are not limited to history books. At present, Trump’s ill-conceived, impulsive and disastrous China tariffs are still having profound negative effects on American consumers and the broad economy.
 
The China tariffs, like all tariffs, represent a tax on every American family. Forbes magazine, a mainstream conservative journal, calculated that the China tariffs cost Americans $259.2 billion each year, or $2,031 per year for the average household. Imposed on China beginning in 2018, they have thus far cost the average family more than $8,000. Moreover, they are a highly regressive tax passed through to consumers by affected companies that import and distribute Chinese goods, and disproportionately impact the poorest Americans. They amount to one of the largest tax increases in decades. In addition, the tariffs have reduced economic output (GDP) and incomes and caused the loss of 173,000 jobs.
 
The other key fact to know about the China tariffs is that they hurt businesses that export their products to China because that country retaliated against the Trump tariffs by reducing imports and imposing countervailing duties on U.S. goods. This especially affected American farmers. Trump eased their pain with massive bailouts to farmers of more than $50 billion of taxpayer money, most of which went to big agribusinesses as opposed to family farms.
 
When Joe Biden campaigned for president in 2020, he took every opportunity to quite appropriately lambaste Trump for imposing hundreds of billions of dollars of tariffs on Chinese goods. So why has the Biden administration kept most of the Trump tariffs on China in place? Particularly given that eliminating them would have an immediate positive impact on inflation. The Peterson Institute on Economics estimates that canceling the tariffs would immediately bring down inflation by more than 1 percent.
 
There is no good reason why Biden hasn’t acted to terminate these punishing tariffs. Surely he and his advisors understand that they harm the U.S. economy, American consumers and thousands of firms that do business with China. The only reason for allowing them to continue to wreak havoc, I suspect, is Biden’s fear that Republicans would attack him for being “soft on China,” a Republican lie about Democrats ginned up more than 70 years ago when Mao Tse-tung’s Communists took control of China. This myth has made Democrats skittish about China ever since. Today, it is an unwarranted angst. The pluses of doing away with Trump’s tariffs vastly outweigh any potential Republican criticism. It’s time for Democrats to let go of the Chinese albatross and get rid of the Trump tariffs ASAP.
 
Dick Hermann
June 3, 2022