Posted on by mikecronin2013

Destruction from Within (and from Without)

Image result for America tearing itself apart

By Mike Cronin

President Lincoln once said: “At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.”

That’s not quite catchy enough for meme culture, so it was “massaged” by netizens into a more digestible tidbit: “America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we lose our freedoms it will be because we have destroyed ourselves from within.”

So now there is talk of Russia interfering with our presidential politics again. The difference: This time Russia is supposedly seeking to help Bernie Sanders, currently the front-running Democrat, AND President Trump.  You might be wondering which side has it wrong – after all, Russia wouldn’t support opposing candidates, would they?

They might indeed.  Russia can’t defeat us conventionally, and there would be nothing to rule over if we nuke each other. If you are Russia, how can you get what you want with the mighty USA always in the way?  How can supporting both sides of the presidential power struggle be of any benefit?  If they are doing it, it’s probably because it helps us to destroy ourselves from within. Joseph Stalin and Nikita Khrushchev both openly proclaimed that destroying us from within was on the table.

Destroying America from within is probably the favored strategy for any enemy or competitor of the US. Since the US has the most powerful military, most powerful economy, and controls the global commons, asymmetric strategies are all that’s left to enemies or competitors.  Where we are united, turn us against ourselves.  Where we are divided, drive the wedge in further. Where we have moral weakness, stoke it.  Use memes, fake news, cyber intrusions, donations, corrupt business deals, blackmail, identity politics and the like to taint our politicians, influence our media, corrupt our institutions, and keep us bickering among ourselves. That way, we won’t have as much energy to spare watching and worrying about what the Russians or any other bad actors are up to. And if the US has another Civil War, or has a wave of successions and breaks up into several smaller countries?  So much the better.

The Russians have a name for this doctrine. They call it Reflexive Control.  In the ancient Chinese volume, The Book of Qi, an essay called “The 36 Stratagems” refers to it as “Let the enemy’s own spy sow discord in the enemy camp.”

The moral: Whenever you feel like we are coming apart at the seams over Trump, immigration policy, gun rights, free speech abortion, LGBTQ issues, race, religion, wealth and income gaps, and so on, just know that Russia, China, Iran, Islamic Fundamentalists, and/or other enemies and competitors have the motivation to keep stoking the flames.

Posted on by mikecronin2013

Trial and Error

Image result for impeachment cartoon"

By Mike Cronin

The Senate trial of President Trump is fertile ground for misinformation and disinformation. We can’t fix the politics here, but at least we can examine the battlefield and the likely outcome. While the proceeding is a “trial,” it’s as much political theater as it is a legal hearing. Certainly, it does not operate under the same rules and standards as a criminal trial:

  1. The judge (Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts) may bang the gavel and make initial rulings on evidence and witnesses, but he has little or no standing to make final rulings on case law, facts, objections, and so forth. He is basically reduced to facilitating. His presence is essentially ceremonial. The Senate is “borrowing” the prestige of the court.
  2. The alleged offenses don’t necessarily have to be violations of any specific US Code. The House of Representatives can attempt to align almost any charge as a “misdemeanor” in order to meet the constitutional standard for impeachment:  “Treason, Bribery, and High Crimes and Misdemeanors.” In effect, this is what the House did by charging the president with “Abuse of Power” and “Obstruction of Congress.”
  3. By the same token, the Senate can acquit the president on the grounds that the charges in the Articles of Impeachment are not Treason, Bribery, High Crimes, or Misdemeanors, or indeed crimes at all, and thus are not impeachable offenses. As of press time, all indications are that this is what will occur.
  4. The Standards of Evidence are whatever the Senate agrees they are. Witnesses can be called, or not, according to the whim of the Senate. (Indeed, the Senate did not call witnesses.)
  5. The standard for conviction is not “proof beyond reasonable doubt,” or even “the preponderance of the evidence.” It is whatever 2/3rds of the Senate says it is.
  6. Jurors at trial are supposed to be impartial. However, Senate Jurors don’t don’t take the same oath us regular folks take to sit on a jury. The Senators’ oath says the following (emphasis added): 

“Do you solemnly swear that in all things appertaining to the trial of the impeachment of Donald John Trump, president of the United States, now pending, you will do impartial justice according to the Constitution and laws, so help you god?” 

Jurors for cases in a US District Court take an oath to decide the case “upon the law and the evidence.”

Senators are compelled to “do impartial justice according to the Constitution and laws.”  Note that they are not precisely compelled to actually be impartial about the facts, the evidence, the the defendant, or the allegations, only about doing “justice.” You might think that the distinction is hair-splitting. You might even be right – but meticulous adherence to the exact meaning of words and phrases – hair splitting – is the bread-and-butter of lawyers, no? 

So what does that bode for the trial?

The safe bet is that 100 Senators will split into two camps as to what “do impartial justice according to Constitution and laws” means. One camp will see “doing justice to the Constitution and laws” as “requiring strict interpretation of the standards for impeachment,” while the other side will interpret “doing justice” to mean something more along the lines of “disposing of something offensive.” 

In other words: All but a handful of Republican Senate Jurors will vote to acquit the president. They will justify their action by asserting the Speaker of the House initiated the impeachment investigation without consent of the full House, which alone has sole authority to conduct impeachment proceedings; and that the House did not follow its own rules during the impeachment investigation, did not provide the president with due process, and failed to even allege the president committed actual, citable violations of US Code, let alone prove he committed impeachable offenses. Meanwhile, all of the Democrat Senators and perhaps the aforementioned handful of Republicans, will vote to convict, justifying that decision with their belief that the president is an offense who deserves to be convicted of something, and that the allegations in the Articles of Impeachment were impeachable and were already adequately “proven” by witness testimony in the House investigation. The votes to convict are highly unlikely to meet the required threshold of 66 (2/3rds of the Senate), so the president is all but sure to be acquitted.

Posted on by mikecronin2013

Pie from the Sky?

By Mike Cronin

In the video linked above, CBS uses an actual pie to show casual passers-by how wealth is unequally distributed in America. Predictably, the answer is stark. The wealthiest people have virtually all of the pie, and the poorest have no pie and are in debt. But CBS’s model neglects to address a few crucial points, and thus is just another beat in the long history of wealth envy.

  1. Whose pie is it? CBS lumps all of the household wealth in the US (almost $100 trillion dollars) into one pie in their model, as if all the wealth in this country belongs to everyone in the country. Thus they sneak in the idea that an unequal “distribution” of pie is automatically an unfair “distribution” of pie.
  2. Where does the pie come from? Was it just “distributed” unfairly in a spray of sparkle dust by a magic pie fairy in the sky? Was it stolen? Who from? The poorest never have any pie, so it didn’t come from them. So where?

The envy mongers don’t want you to understand the truth: There isn’t one communal pie being “distributed” unfairly. Pie has to be made. The people who have all the pie have it because they made it.  It’s their pie, not mine or yours. It has not been “distributed” unfairly, because it hasn’t been “distributed” at all! Another, less important factor CBS neglected to mention: People generally move “up the pie scale” as their careers progress, because they learn how to make pie!

If CBS (whose anchors and owners are among the pie makers!) wants to reduce the wealth gap, perhaps they should expose and work to close the unequal distribution of pie-making know-how. But they won’t, because they make their own pie by encouraging envy.