​Kermit The Frog’s lament was right. Witness the lengths that Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) has to go to to rile up the MAGAverse and remain relevant. It clearly was not enough to hound and harangue a 17-year old high school student who was a survivor of the Parkland school massacre; or to go on a less-than-triumphant speaking tour of the nation with fellow reprehensible representative, Matt Gaetz (R-FL), the alleged seducer of underage girls and general all-around nasty person.
 
Having been kicked off of all of her House committees, MTG has little to do in return for the $174,000 of U.S. taxpayer money she “earns,” other than to make life miserable for respectable and responsible colleagues who, unlike her, are not neo-fascists colluding to destroy our delicate democracy.
 
Her latest headline-hogging attempt at relevance was to harass Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY), one of only two Republican members of Congress willing to shine a light on the events leading up to the January 6, 2021 Trump-induced insurrection, for voting to refer Steve Bannon to the Department of Justice for criminal prosecution for contempt of Congress. Bannon is allegedly the gray eminence behind Trump’s foiled (for now) coup d’etat.
 
Pity the people of Georgia’s 14th congressional district. They are represented in Congress by likely the most hyper-partisan and unquestionably least productive member, and that is saying something given Kevin (don’t call me Joe) McCarthy and his band of resident evils who have abandoned the GOP in favor of fascist fealty to the former aspiring despot. The folks in Greene’s district get nothing in return for their votes other than the shame and embarrassment of having sent perhaps the most disgraceful individual to ever pollute the halls of Congress.
 
A year from now, they will have an opportunity to correct their mistake. According to news reports, a good number of Greene’s 2020 supporters are harboring second thoughts. They believed that they were finally getting an advocate for their needs and grievances. Instead, they got a loose cannon conspi-racist whose social media posts are full of unhinged ravings, including: (1) that Jewish space lasers ignited California forest fires, (2) that school shootings that left families devastated for life by the deaths of their children were a hoax; (3) encouraging the execution of Democratic leaders; and (4) questioning if a plane actually crashed into the Pentagon on September 11, 2001. But NO legislation designed to improve their lives.
 
Greene is a shock-jock windbag, a publicity hound disrupter with the empathy, self-absorption and crudity of a female Donald Trump. She cares nothing for improving Americans’ lives. The tragedy and the danger, however, is that she is well on her way to becoming the face of what was once the party of constructive conservative values that could occasionally act as a check on the left’s wilder impulses. We are in very dangerous territory when people like her become Republican stars. With EVERY passing day, her GOP colleagues make it easier to be Greene.
 
Dick Hermann
October 29, 2021

​Britain, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, Portugal, Spain, Italy, Japan and the USA. What do these ten countries have in common? (1) They are all among the world’s richest nations. (2) They all had colonial empires. Several clung to those empires all the way into the 1960s and 1970s. (3) They all shared an outlook that viewed their colonial subjects as less-than-human and treated them accordingly, reducing hundreds of millions of them to what amounted to slave-status and extreme poverty. (4) They exploited their colonial possessions in ways that made themselves wealthy at the expense of their colonies. (5) When their colonies finally became independent, the colonial powers abandoned them, left them to their fates, having to fend for themselves.
 
The pandemic opens up a great opportunity for the former colonial powers to help these countries that they abused and mistreated. The ten former colonial powers are well on the way to herd immunity, having vaccinated large majorities of their populations. Meanwhile, their former colonies have been left far behind in the global fight against Covid-19. For example, fewer than 3 percent of Africa’s more than 1.2 billion people have been vaccinated. At the current vaccination rate, it will be many years before Africa’s protection level reaches a point where it is comparable to that of the former colonial powers.
 
And that poses grave dangers not only to Africans, but also to Europeans and Americans. The only way to bring the coronavirus under manageable control is to vaccinate the entire world’s population. Otherwise, we will be subject to new and likely even more deadly variants than the current Delta strain that has caused so much devastation globally.
 
That can be largely stopped if the world’s rich countries go all out to quickly produce and distribute enough vaccines to their former colonies. They have the capacity to do this and to do it without charging these desperately poor nations for the jabs.
 
Among them, these colonial powers subjugated more than 100 colonies, which included virtually all of Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean and much of Asia and the Pacific. A concerted program of supplying these now independent nations with Covid vaccines is one way to make up for some of the terrible harms they wreaked. Belgium, for example, killed an estimated 10 million Congolese during its rule. In addition, King Leopold II’s emissaries in the Congo brutalized millions more of the people they enslaved, hacking off their hands if they did not meet their production quotas. Leopold’s cruelty was hardly unique. The other nine colonial powers were also guilty of gross mistreatment.
 
“COVID-19 Vaccines Global Access” (COVAX) the international initiative aimed at equitable access to COVID-19 vaccines has been a disappointment. It has fallen far short of its original goal In the 18 months since its inception of distributing 2 million vaccine doses to 92 poor countries. It’s time to try something else. If each former colonial power focused its efforts on directing vaccines to its former colonies, doing something so significant, salutary and morally right would be a huge step toward conquering Covid-19 and a “win-win” for the entire planet.
 
Dick Hermann
October 22, 2021

​While congressional Republicans and Democrats battle over spending a few trillion dollars over ten years designed to improve the lives of millions of Americans, both parties think nothing of authorizing more than twice as much for the Department of Defense. They vote by huge bipartisan majorities in favor of spending more than $7.5 trillion (highly likely an underestimate) over the next decade in order to prepare to fight the last conventional war.
 
The end of the Cold War has not changed the deeply ingrained assumption that the future will look like the past. Is it really necessary to spend more than $750 billion a year to maintain a military ill-suited for the battlegrounds of the twenty-first century? We are unlikely to go to war with our nation-state adversaries—China and Iran. Chinese saber-rattling over Taiwan does not mean that the U.S. would recklessly confront China militarily in its own backyard. Similarly, Iran’s inching closer to possessing nuclear weapons, a regrettable outcome of Donald Trump’s imprudent trashing of the Iran nuclear agreement, won’t lead to a war against a regional military power on its home turf 6,500 miles away. Moreover, the havoc Iran could wreak on tankers transporting Middle Eastern oil through the Persian Gulf, which would do incalculable economic damage to Western economies, would give us pause.
 
Our annual defense budgets invariably include absurdly expensive programs and weapons that are at best unnecessary and all-too-often unusable The first proposed Biden defense budget has us spending more in 2021 dollars than we did in any year of the Vietnam War or the madcap  defense spending spree of the Reagan era. This is nuts!
 
The U.S. spends more for defense than the next eleven big spending nations—China, India, Russia, United Kingdom, Saudi Arabia, Germany, France, Japan, South Korea, Italy, and Australia—combined. We have 20 aircraft carriers (a.k.a., sitting ducks); China has two; Russia one. We spend billions on high-tech planes that don’t work, like the snake-bitten F-35 Strikefighter, and on weapons that have proven ineffective in counter-insurgencies against rag-tag bunches of non-state actors like ISIS or the Taliban.
 
A more than adequate defense could be had for only a third of our current outlay. It would still be sufficient to deter any potential adversary. We could then redirect resources to the kinds of conflicts that represent the real threats to us—pandemics, climate change, domestic terrorists and income and wealth inequality.
 
Why do we blindly persist in gross overspending on defense, on focusing our planning on fighting improbable wars against nation-states, on being able to fight two-and-a half-front wars simultaneously, and on developing monumentally expensive weapons systems that are ineffective against the real external dangers we face? The answer is complex.
 
First, the cabal that President Eisenhower warned us against in his valedictory when he left office:  “…we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence…by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.” More than 50,000 U.S. companies provide goods and services to the Department of Defense (DoD). They come from every congressional district and contribute millions of dollars to congressional campaigns.
 
Second, the rivalry between the armed services over budget money. The top minds in the Army, Navy and Air Force are not directed at our external enemies. Instead, they focus on their service rivals. I witnessed this personally during a decade as a DoD employee and consultant.
 
Third, the standard career path for retiring generals, admirals and other top brass is to move from DoD to the “Beltway Bandits,” the thousands of defense contractors willing to pay for easy access to their former DoD colleagues and members of Congress who control the purse strings.
 
Fourth, the fear of members of Congress of being labeled “soft on defense,” a worry especially felt by Democrats despite their mindless enthusiasm for excessive defense spending.
 
Fifth, the unraveling of the nuclear arms control agreements that prior presidents reached with the Soviets and their Russian successors that contributed to maintaining peace between the superpowers for so many years. Bipartisan support for them has eroded as the Republican Party has gone rogue, abandoning its suspicion of and hostility toward Russia, a price of currying favor with its Putin-admiring, autocratic cult leader, Donald Trump.
 
In sum, powerful economic and political interests overwhelm any rational assessment of our defense needs. The public needs to understand that we are wasting tax dollars on defense that could be applied to the crying needs of society that, if addressed, would go a long way to make this country stronger and more secure.
 
The performative hand-wringing by Senators Manchin and Sinema and others over the size of the human infrastructure bill currently before Congress is misplaced. Their real attention should be on the trillions we are going to squander on defense over the next ten years. Defense spending has too long been protected from the scrutiny it deserves. Changing the national conversation about it depends on the media and on voters armed with far better information about what is going on here. It is a very steep slope, but one very much worth ascending.
 
Dick Hermann
October 15, 2021

​Three blockbuster books about the inner workings of government have recently been released. One is definitely worth your time.
 
I’ll Take Your Questions Now: What I Saw at the Trump White House, by former Trump toady and shill, Stephanie Grisham, can best be described as a snarky, pathetic recollection of revelations about pathetic people by a pathetic person. Grisham, you recall, was one of Trump’s four press secretaries, all of whom contributed to dramatically lowering the bar for the job. In her year holding down that discredited position, she never took a single question from the media because she never held a single press conference. Instead, she was consumed by fear of having to voice a daily dose of Trump’s lies about everything. She also served as Melania Trump’s chief of staff and communications director and has a lot of gossipy things to say about history’s most inconsequential first lady. Grisham’s book is a lame attempt to rehabilitate her forever-tainted image while squeezing some bucks out of hard-working Americans after selling her soul for peanuts. Don’t waste your money or your time on this poorly written nothingburger.
 
Peril, by Bob Woodward and Woodward wannabe, Robert Costa, reveals a bevy of shocking details about Trump’s unrivaled corruption and contamination of the highest office in the land. These two exceptional Washington Post journalists managed to squeeze out extraordinary items of information about what loathsome wretches Trump and his team of bootlicking mediocrities were, items that should upset every American and make us all pine for the day these criminals finally get their comeuppance. But we already know that the former president and current democracy slayer is evil incarnate and abused his office like no one before. Consequently, we learn little that is really new from this book. Don’t bother reading it. You already know all the juiciest stuff from news reports. Simply take away the underlying message: the only way to avoid a total catastrophe in the near term is to put Trump and his team of troublemakers behind bars…and soon.
 
The Afghanistan Papers, by Washington Post reporter Craig Whitlock in contrast, is a must-read for every American. It should be required reading in every school, university and military war and command and general staff college. The book details with painful precision the folly and duplicity that three presidents perpetrated in bogging America down in an unwinnable war and the cascade of lies they and their people barraged Congress and the American people with for 20 years. If you thought the Pentagon Papers, the secret files that hid the truth about the Vietnam War, were shocking and appalling, The Afghanistan Papers will have you wanting to make certain that George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Donald Trump are somehow called to account for their betrayal of the soldiers they sent to fight and die in Afghanistan and the tens of thousands of innocent Afghans who died due to their contempt for the American public. Read this book.
 
Dick Hermann
October 8, 2021

Why is it that Democratic successors so often need to rescue the nation following Republican presidential train wrecks?

• Republican Herbert Hoover slashed federal spending in a wrong-headed and disastrous attempt to temper the Great Depression, thereby contributing to a 25 percent unemployment rate. Democrat Franklin Roosevelt dramatically boosted spending in order to arrest the downturn and put people back to work so they and their families could survive.
  
  
• Republican Richard Nixon turned government into a corrupt den of iniquity. Democrat Jimmy Carter restored integrity to the White House.
  
  
• Republican Ronald Reagan ballooned the federal deficit, followed by Republican George H.W. Bush’s deficit-financed wars in the Middle East and Panama. It behooved Democrat Bill Clinton to balance the budget that his two Republican predecessors allowed to go out of control.
  
  
• Republican George W. Bush twice slashed taxes on his wealthy benefactors, launched two wars he refused to pay for, botched the federal response to Hurricane Katrina, and midwifed the Great Recession, leaving it to Democrat Barack Obama to clean up his multiple messes.
  
  
• Republican Donald Trump’s reckless tax and spending policies spiraled the deficit and debt to unimaginable levels. His utter incompetence, ego-driven meanness, odiousness and psycho-sociopathic behavior allowed a pandemic to run wild and kill more than half a million Americans. He capped the worst-ever presidency with an attempted coup d’etat in order to cling to power despite losing an election by 7 million votes. It will take more than just one successor Democratic administration to clean up his manifold disasters. This is assuming our suddenly delicate democracy survives the continuing Trump onslaught. There are no guarantees.
  
  
• It is also incumbent on the current administration and its congressional allies to attempt to clean up the existential mess and dystopian chaos Republicans have wrought over the last 40 years. Their coddle-the-rich/impoverish-the-middle-class/destroy-the-poor policies require a massive correction.

 
The trickle-down effect of Republican callousness and ineptitude, to which they have added concerted attempts to subvert the republic, is now causing the same phenomenon to happen at the state level.
 
With few exceptions (Massachusetts’ Charlie Baker; Ohio’s Mike DeWine), Republican governors nationwide have made a complete hash of dealing with the pandemic. They are personally responsible for thousands of avoidable deaths. The latest example: Brad Little, Idaho’s stunningly hopeless Republican governor, has even had to call on neighboring, Democratic-run Washington State to step in and try to help stave off Armageddon. Idaho’s 40 percent vaccination rate, one of the lowest in the country, has swamped its hospitals with Covid patients. The crisis is so bad that Idaho hospitals have resorted to rationing healthcare. Sarah Palin’s fantastical, misplaced death panel hysteria about Obamacare has come home to roost in disease-ravaged Idaho.
 
Note. If hospitals are forced to ration healthcare, unvaccinated Covid patients should be at the bottom of the list, not the top.
 
These same state-level GOP unworthies spend most of their time destabilizing democracy through bills intended to suppress Democratic votes and, should Democrats prevail regardless, designing schemes to steal future elections from the winners. Despite this revival of the Nazi Nuremberg Laws playbook (where the Nazi-dominated Reichstag legislatively enacted a spate of anti-Semitic edicts that conferred a veneer of legality on blatantly unethical and unconscionable laws), congressional Democrats are not taking this existential threat seriously enough. They need to enact federal legislation to preserve democracy and stop the impending steal. Saving the nation from this scourge is the most important matter on the table. Nothing else comes close.
 
Dick Hermann
October 1, 2021