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History’s Biggest Con

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The world’s most successful con man is not in finance or politics. He is the scientist that runs the world’s biggest machine. He has defrauded the US taxpayer of tens of billions of dollars, and he’s not done yet.

This is the story of particle physics and its kingpin, Carlo Rubbia.

A Field Forged in Fear

Particle physics is the study of matter and space. Newton and Einstein are the most famous scientists in this field. For centuries, physicists went about their business largely unnoticed by the public. Then came nuclear weapons.

History’s most famous equation was given to us by Einstein. E = mc2. To military planners, the equation is important because it says that matter can be converted to pure energy. Prior to World War II, chemical munitions only used a billionth of that explosive potential. The atom bomb showed that chemical munitions could start a nuclear reaction that achieved a million-fold improvement. A decade later, atom bombs were used to trigger fusion in a hydrogen bomb, achieving another factor of forty improvement.

Naturally, after World War II, politicians recognized that particle physicists were the most dangerous people in the world. A single hydrogen bomb can wipe out a city like London. Particle physicists were organized under the Department of Energy and told to find out whether even greater horrors were possible. That mission was sustained by the Cold War competition with the Soviet Union.

This work was done at particle colliders. Over time, these became the world’s largest machines, costing hundreds of millions of dollars to build and operate.

Fortunately for the survival of the human race, by the mid-eighties we knew that the hydrogen bomb was the limit. Everything discovered by the particle colliders was unstable, lasting at most a millionth of a second. However, this was bad for particle physicists. They needed a new marketing message to convince politicians to give them billions so they could keep on building and running colliders.

Given that the researchers were inspired by the prospect of blowing up the world, perhaps we should have expected what came next.

The Final Theory of Everything

Every politician knows that politics is a contest of wills. In the halls of Congress and in the White House, palpable energy is generated by these contests. Politicians know that spirituality is real.

Could that energy be tapped? Well, not according to physics. In fact, Einstein’s theories seemed to prove that spiritual energy couldn’t exist. Remove all the matter from space and there is nothing left.

Physicists knew better. Richard Feynman, the quirky theorist from Cal Tech, spoke about going to Princeton to speak before the “Monster Minds.”

This, then, was the pitch: “We know that our theories of matter and space are incomplete. Give us money so that we can find the final theory of everything. Then we’ll know how to harness the power of will.” Now, this was absurd from the start. Will is generated by the human mind, which needs to avoid explosions at all costs. But it worked for a while. Congress is a creature of habit, and it wasn’t too much money, at first. Only a couple of hundred million dollars a year.

Then, in the mid-eighties, came the supercolliders. These were billion-dollar machines. Finally, the international particle physics community banded together into coalitions. In Europe, researchers at CERN promoted an upgrade to their collider. In the US, states competed to host the Superconducting Super Collider. Not surprisingly, George Bush Sr. picked Texas as the winner.

As the price tag went up and up, the particle physics community realized that only one candidate could be built. And this is where the con started – the con that left the US giving billions of taxpayer dollars to CERN.

Nobels Oblige

Alfred Nobel was a Swedish chemist and arms merchant (alas, explosions again) who bequeathed his fortune to fund the Nobel Prize. Winning the Nobel Prize in any science is one of the few ways that a scientist gains public notoriety. With that stature comes access to politicians that funnel taxpayer dollars into research. Universities and laboratories, naturally, compete to hire Nobel Prize winners. When they can’t hire them, they try to create them.

Inevitably, the Nobel Prize is a highly political award. It’s not just the ideas that count.

The Nobel Prize for Physics is dominated by fundamental physics. Discovering a new particle or force is almost guaranteed to be followed by an invitation to Stockholm.

Motive: billions of taxpayer dollars for the next particle collider. Opportunity: given that politicians don’t understand a single thing about particle physics, winning a Nobel Prize establishes prestige that could determine the flow of those dollars. Means: the existing collider at CERN. Sounds like a recipe for crime.

Exposing the grift is difficult because particle physicists speak an arcane language. I will try keep it to a minimum, but to be able to confront the perpetrators of this crime against the American taxpayer, we need to understand some of that language.

As well as particles of matter called fermions, the universe contains fields. These fields come in packets called bosons. Bosons allow matter to interact. As a practical example, when you chew food, the atoms of your teeth are not mechanically breaking the food apart, but generating bosons called photons that break the food apart.

How do physicists prove that they have discovered a new fermion?

The concept is built upon Einstein’s equation. E = mc2. To achieve perfect conversion of mass to energy, physicists discovered that they could make antimatter that, when combined with normal matter, annihilates completely.

How to make new kinds of matter? In this regard, the most interesting bosons are the W and Z. Through these so-called weak interactions, any kind of matter can be created. The only requirement is that enough energy exists to run annihilation in reverse. This is called “pair creation.” From the pure energy of the Z, matter and antimatter are created.

To find a new kind of fermion, a collider first manufactures antimatter. It then takes the antimatter and matter, pushing them through voltage that adds energy of motion, creating beams. Finally, the beams are aimed to an intersection point at the center of a detector. Randomly, annihilation occurs. Both the energy of mass and the energy of motion are available to create new fermions.

The process is rote. Build a collider. Use the acceleration to control the energy of the collisions. Analyze the data coming out of your detectors. When you get to the power limit of your collider, go to Congress and ask for more money.

The challenge is that sometimes beams collide without producing anything interesting, filling your detectors up with noise. Fortunately, there is a specific signal that occurs most frequently when creating a new kind of fermion. The detectors will see two photons moving in opposite directions.

Remember that last fact. When a new kind of fermion is found, we see two photons moving in opposite directions.

From the start of particle physics until 1987, eight fermions were discovered. They first six showed a definite generational pattern: a light lepton followed by two heavier quarks. The first triad is known as electron, down, and up. The second generation contains muon, strange, and charm. In the third generation, colliders had detected the tau and bottom. The field was racing to find the third member of that generation, the top.

Along the way, there was another important discovery. The weak interactions are weak because the W and Z themselves have large masses. On the way to finding the top, the bosons were confirmed, at energies of 80 and 93 GeV. (The units are not important. Remember the numbers.) For purposes of understanding the fraud, I emphasize that the W and Z do not produce two photon signals.

The W and Z results confirmed theoretical predictions, convincing politicians that the field was on a solid footing. For this, Carlo Rubbia was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1984.

I was in my last year of my graduate studies in 1987 when CERN announced the discovery of the top, publishing its claim in Physical Review. One of my thesis advisors, Mary Kay Gaillard, had come to UC Berkeley through CERN. That connection brought researchers from CERN who described the result. I was shocked to hear that the data did not demonstrate the required two-photon signal. Furthermore, the accelerator energy during the study was 346 GeV, exactly twice the sum of the W and Z masses.

I trusted Mary Kay. In my presence, she denounced the evils of nuclear weapons. I went to her and voiced my confusion. How could this be a new particle? It looked like a collection of four weak bosons, exactly at the energy that you would predict.

Her answer amounted to, “Go home little boy. The adults are playing politics.”

As the leader of CERN, winner of the Nobel prize, and lead author of the top paper, Carlo Rubbia was the kingpin of particle physics. And CERN won the competition for the next collider.

Higgsy Pigsy

Let’s return to the political context now. Remember: the Cold War was ending. Everyone knew that no new bomb technology was coming out of particle physics. The goal was now a theory of everything. How long would that political motivation last?

Given the abstractness of the motivation, the field needed a long runway in its next accelerator. This was part of the strategy with the top announcement. The heaviest particle to that point was the bottom quark, at 4.2 GeV. That the fraudulent “top” was all the way up at 173 GeV suggested that there was much more to come, if only politicians would fund the work.

The proposed upgrade of CERN was not modest. It set a 20-year goal of attaining a sixty-fold increase in the collider’s power. Bedazzled by Nobel prizes and the pretty pictures produced by taxpayer-funded science propagandists, the politicians were persuaded to comply.

Then came turn-on date in 2012. The machine was ramped up through its energy range, scanning for new particles all the way up to its limit.

Nothing. Zero, Zilch. A ten-billion-dollar boondoggle, funded in no small part by the American taxpayer.

Except then, after a summer spent scanning higher energies, the machine was turned down to 125 GeV. Be clear: this was an energy accessible by the earlier collider. At that energy, the detectors showed a two-photon signal. Detecting this signal is a primary design criterion for every detector. As it occurred at lower energy than the signal announced as the “top,” it must have been known before that study.

Demonstrating their impenetrability to shame, the 125 GeV signal was published in Physical Review and announced as the long-sought after “Higgs particle.”

“Really,” I though, “you are going to double down on your fraud?”

Remember: two photons is the signal for a new particle. The “Higgs” is what the top should have looked like. In fact, by the standards of the field, I should be awarded the Nobel prize for recognizing that it is the top.

None-the-less, the shameless perpetrators began their pressure campaign. They leaned on the Nobel committee to recognize Peter Higgs, the developer of the field’s minimally coherent theory of particle mass. In the background, Marco Rubbia, CERN’s prior laureate, went to the funding panels, demanding, “You know, this Higgs is kind of weird. We need more money for another collider.” The Nobel committee, having acceded to the Higgs award, heard of this and protested, “We are about to award the Nobel Prize for this discovery. Is it the Higgs or is it not the Higgs?” Rubbia backtracked.

Only temporarily, however. Read the popular science press and every week you will see a propaganda piece promoting the next collider at CERN. After all, the full-time job of their taxpayer-funded propagandists is to secure funding for that collider.

Omerta

The question, in any massive conspiracy, is how the community maintains discipline. This is a matter of leverage.

You see, university posts in particle physics are not funded directly. They are funded as an adder on collider construction and operation budgets.

For twenty years, I have been trying to get particle physics out of the rut of superstring theory – a theory that is certifiably insane for its violations of everything that we observe about the universe. In the one instance that I was able to get into dialog with a theorist, I was told “I know that you are right, but if I work with you, I will lose my funding.”

CERN is the only game in town. Anything that does not build to more construction is not funded. Pure and simple, Rubbia is the godfather of particle physics. If you don’t play, he won’t pay.

It is time to stop the grift. The next machine will cost the US taxpayer tens of billions of dollars. Enough is enough. Call your local congresspeople and demand that they investigate and shut this down. We have more pressing problems to worry about.

Social Media: Leviathan Redux

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For those concerned about the divisive influence of social media, this summarizes the main points from a Wondrium presentation on propaganda. You are right to be concerned.

In the aftermath of WW II, the political theorists and journalists were concerned that something similar would happen in America. The flywheel would be propaganda generated by the media. They concluded that this would not occur with print and radio media, because they were broadband (everybody heard the same thing), competed to represent diverse viewpoints, and feedback from consumers was low bandwidth.

These shields against indoctrination have been eviscerated by social media. Agents of authoritarian thought analyze our dialog and determine how best to drive wedges between us. They tailor messages to confirm our biases, in the process creating captive information spaces where they guide users into illusion.

The competition to represent diverse viewpoints is also disappearing as media conglomerates buy up local print and radio operations. We have disturbing nation-wide patterns of editorial synchronization with political campaigning.

What social media companies herald as “information democracy” is only true when we show the discipline to reject anything that is not first-person reporting of experience. Users that build their “knowledge” within a curated environment are almost certainly at risk of indoctrination.

Tyrants and Conspiracies

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A tendency (shared by myself) has been to evaluate susceptibility to conspiracy theories as a psychological defect. I have begun to realize that serves to immunize the tyrants that cultivate and profit from such theories.

Psychologists see susceptibility to conspiracy theories as rooted in social identity. The power of this dynamic is revealed in studies that ask participants to allocate resources equitably or punitively. What the researchers have learned is that even being sorted by odd and even number assignments results in a tendency to eschew a large, equal reward when offered the opportunity to achieve a comparative advantage against the “out group.” The assumptive goal is to pre-emptively starve the members of the out-group — perhaps under the intuitive expectation that when they are gone, our group will no longer need to compete for the bounty of nature.

For a group in social distress, a conspiracy theory creates a narrative that assigns fault to such an external force. The theory provides a focus that channels the need to respond to suffering. That focus may be defined by race, ethnicity, religion, class — or an arbitrary and amorphous label such as “wokeness.”

In “How Minds Change,” David McRaney reports that argumentation based upon facts will not sway a subscriber to a conspiracy. In fact, such argumentation serves to move us into the category of those under the sway of the conspiracy, actually strengthening belief. The only antidote to conspiracy, apparently, is to be offered membership in an alternative and effectively supportive community.

Of course, from the perspective of sustainable human relationships, we might be right to criticize adherents for failing to understand that they are engaged in a race to the bottom. Any constructive social activity requires the assumption of good will. I think that this lies at the root of my past tendency to see psychological weakness as the cause of susceptibility to conspiracy. To believe is to throw out both the baby of rationality and the bathwater of social cohesion.

But I am beginning to perceive a darker influence in the strength of conspiracy in current political dialog. This is that a conspiracy theory is a tool used by a tyrant to create social pressure that coerces the behavior of his thralls. This is evident in the bizarre competition between Trump and McConnell for control of the GoP — each maintains influence by threatening excommunication of those in dissent. But it also seemed evident in the video from the Tennessee Chamber yesterday, when the Speaker, panicked by the effectiveness of the victims’ oratory, called the question to pre-empt the development of dissent within his caucus.

We think of Russian compromat as a slippery slope greased by money. Certainly, McConnel operates according to this principle. But in Trump and the MAGA movement at large, accession to a conspiratorial lie seems to serve the same end — without the commitment of wealth. The lie is validated by acceptance from the political class, who can expose the lie only at the cost of a career. For the tyrant, a second benefit arises: the constituency, convinced of the need to combat the conspiracy, gratefully fills the tyrant’s money trough.

This shift in understanding leads me to a new prescription for responding to conspiracy theories. Rather than analyzing the traits of the susceptible, I think that we should focus on the propagators and beneficiaries of the conspiracy. This makes them the “out group.” Furthermore, as we are all susceptible by nature, it leaves open the only path to freedom: to open our arms to our fellow victims.

Freedom to Spoil

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On MSNBC, the adjournment of the House last night was interpreted as a victory for Speaker candidate McCarthy. It was not.

The Freedom Caucus, led by Matt Gaetz, waited until the vote closed before swinging the tally toward adjournment. The message that they sent – to both parties – was “We control the outcomes here.”

This is the same strategy used by fundamentalist parties in Israel to control foreign policy. The only way to establish a government is to cater to them.

It is time to stop encouraging them, AOC.

The Ends of the American Experiment

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The Biden Inauguration coincided with the end of the first year of the SARS/COVID pandemic. Lost in the chaos of January 6th was an observation on the Capitol Mall commemorating the landmark of 400,000 dead in that year.

My dreams over that year had been impacted by the trauma. I was confronted by vocal denialism in my community – one resident commanded, “Take that stupid mask off!” Unlike them, I watched news programs that shared video testimonials from health professionals. Trying to catch them up in my heart was bracing. On the other side of the political spectrum, I bore witness to the sorry state of a Democratic Party whose political success depended upon that pandemic to defeat a criminal president.

I eventually realized that I needed to externalize the tension. This manifested in the project pictured here: a wall sculpture title “The Ends of the American Experiment.” The initial inspiration was the paired ribbons, familiar from many memorial programs. The red-white-blue evokes patriotic pride; the rainbow evokes the power of diverse perspectives and responses. There are 400 of them – each representing 1000 dead of COVID/SARS in the first year, becoming 2500 dead (1 million total) at the end of the second year.

The ribbons were formed into chains with pop rivets. The surrounding frame was welded by my son Kevin, and evokes the threat of limiting beliefs (becoming prejudice in the worst case). Bronze chain, held taut by white and black cable ties, was used to build a mesh into which the ribbons were woven to form the field of the presentation. The ribbons are held in place by paracord. To the right on each side are sun and moon medallions, representing the masculine and feminine principles.

On the Oppression side (shown below), paracord was used to support beads that list the oppressive practices that suppressed the virtues of diversity, starting with ethnic minorities but broadening eventually to include the natural order.

The Privilege side, the beads describe the practices that allowed the social and financial elite to suppress the just aspirations of the voting public. These start with forced contract and voting suppression, broadening to suborning of the government to the benefit of the economic elite.

The field is almost overwhelmed, with only a few rows left unblocked. On the last few links of the framing chain, I have attached the names of those that I believe best exemplify the vision that inspired the Founders of the Republic. Politicians such as Washington and Lincoln. Religious figures such as Martin Luther King, Jr. Social activists such as Clara Barton and Rachel Carson. And from the arts, representatives such as Ailey and Winfrey.

I am not entirely satisfied with the geometry of the presentation – I haven’t been able to prevent the sagging of the paracord. I also need to finish of the lower edge of the field. But the major goal has been accomplished: focusing the psychic struggle that wracks our nation in this era. I hope that it is useful for others. Those of us seeking to serve love need precise insight to prevent a collapse of the moral order. I have tried to cut through the noise to reveal what is essential.

Garbage Collection is Punishment Enough

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How many times a year do you stop to admire your garbage collector? It’s a thankless job, with little or no respect. But if they weren’t there to haul away out excess, how long would it before before the garbage crowded into the photos of our remodeled bathrooms and manicured lawns?

This is the functional equivalent of the GoPs political strategy, copied from the Slavic iron-men who inherited the rump of the Iron Curtain. Create a mess, then build disdainful messaging about those that dare to try to clean it up. The most egregious case was in Ukraine, were a crusading president was blackballed and eventually jailed for associating with those who had promised to turn state’s evidence in corruption cases.

This was the playbook in the Obama presidency, where many blue-collar workers turned to the Tea Party wing of the GoP when Obama didn’t jail Wall Street executives after the 2008 meltdown created by the Bush Administration. It was furthered by Trump’s “Birtherism” crusade. It is occurring now with the investigations of Donald Trump.

Look: the GoP grandees know that Trump was crazy corrupt. It’s just that if they lose the MAGA base, they will never be able to obtain a majority in any chamber of government in the country – gerrymandering or no gerrymandering. So that are sucking it up and refusing to deny Trump’s lies, waiting for the Biden administration to bring charges and usher POTUS 45 off to a federal lockup. They will then spin outrage and myths around the corrupt handling of the case, cementing their control on the MAGA base.

For this reason, I was happy to hear that the Southern District of New York is investigation Oleg Deripaska, the Russian aluminum magnate who promised to build a smelting plant in Kentucky. The only way to take down the stinking trash heap which is the Republican Party leadership is to take out Mitch McConnell. The Senate leader of the GoP caucus uses his control of party money to maintain iron control over his peers, which has turned the “Worlds Greatest Deliberative Body” into a legislative traffic jam. A sizeable portion of that money was funneled into the 2016 election cycle (up to $50 million, by some accounts) from Vladimir Putin’s inner circle through the National Rifle Association. If that can be traced and detailed, we might have enough to put McConnell career in a noose.

The Manchin Candidate

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West Virginia is a state unlike any other. Largely beholden to the coal, tobacco, and chemicals industries, when DuPont was discovered fouling public waters with PFAs (an “immortal” mutagen), the State environmental agency responded by increasing exposure limits. The current governor (Jim Justice) is a “chip off the old Trump” whose billion-dollar wealth is defrayed by $700 million in personally-guaranteed loans and hundreds of millions in estimated coal-field restoration costs.

For years, I have watched with frustration as pundits look at conservative politics and descry the major policy threads of ethno-nationalism, abortion, and trickle-down economics. These are all smoke screens. The animating issue of conservative politics is the proposition that the free market is the only valid forum for negotiating the distribution of power. Democracy is a mechanism that blunts the exercise of their profit motives, and global corporations, organizing through the world-wide-web, have run an organized campaign to undermine democratic processes.

In countries such as Russia and China, that was simplified because democracy was never firmly established. These states operate as kleptocracies, changing rules to allow those closest to the head of state to seize economic sectors as state-sanctioned monopolies. Facing the pressure of monopolistic competition, the response among Western corporations has been to finance movements that narrowly align governmental and corporation objectives.

So don’t fool yourself that Joe Manchin, the senior Democratic senator from West Virginia, really believes that the filibuster is a tool for ensuring bipartisan compromise. That is a smoke screen. Representing a state so deeply corrupted by corporate interests, he is almost certainly constrained by other considerations. Not least being protecting the wealth of men, such as Jim Justice, who (as did Donald Trump) seek office principally to exercise the powers of government to shield their wealth from taxation and contractual obligations.

The only effective response to global corporatism is the same one that eventually reined in inter-state corporatism: creating regulations that span the domain of their activism. This was accomplished through federal regulation in the first half of the twentieth century, but the corresponding global framework has been propagandized against since before Ronald Reagan (the old “UN Black Helicopters” and “One World Government” canards). It is time for liberal pundits to open their eyes and recognize that this problem cannot be solved one state at a time. The EU has led the way in building multi-national business frameworks, and protecting their market from exploitation by kleptocratic powers. The US should take a serious look at participating.

Trump’s Grand Slam

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With Biden safely ensconced in the Oval Office, the most vocal concern of the political classes is redirect the passions of the dispossessed electorate that Trump seized from the GoP in 2016. This is not principally a political concern, as factors have aligned to undermine the Republican strategy of minority rule. Trump did not certify the census, and with control of the both houses of Congress and the White House, Democrats can act rapidly to impose standards on election and apportionment procedures in the States. Power will tip to the Democratic Party, and the Republicans will confront the necessity of re-inventing themselves.

What are the forces that will define that re-branding? Politically, we focus on the ethno-nationalist minority of the party. As forgotten citizens, they – like seniors – have both motivation and time to organize politically, which brings them disproportionate power in the primary process. But they do not share the motivations that seal the loyalty of most Republican voters. For most Republican voters, the principal drivers are financial entitlement and resistance to reproductive self-determination. The latter is going to be resistant to reform, but the former is far more dangerous. They have money.

While most retrospectives on Trump’s presidency focus on his abusive manipulation of his adoring codependents, I think that we need to remember why Trump sought power in the first place. Trump’s twisted amplification of ethno-nationalism was almost a parody, but he was born into financial entitlement. That concerns provides a fairly coherent explanation for his policies while in office.

Remember that Trump did not enter the race intending to win. He wanted to build his brand. What was the nature of that brand? Trump leases his name to real estate developers around the world. Unfortunately, the brand was not compelling. Investigations of his business dealings in the Arab world showed that they were largely money laundering operations for organizations such as Iran’s Revolutionary Guard. This was also true of many of the investments made by Russians in the US property market.

But it was the only game he had. Remember his nominating convention, with “TRUMP” in 90,000 point font over the stage. This was not vanity. It was a branding.

Trump’s Administration was full of people like him. Mnuchin, Tillerson, Zinke, DeVos, and Ross were all of this mold. Others, such as Ben Carson, played the sport of presidential politics largely for the speaker’s fees. Among them were those who had come under scrutiny by the Obama Administration for consumer fraud or violation of foreign trade restrictions (Tillerson in Russia).

Trump and Tillerson were unique, however, in the global scope of their entanglements. The State Department hosted investigators sent out to scrutinize their activities, and attracted nationals seeking to curry favor by reporting on a man who had made himself Obama’s enemy. At home, the Department of Justice was the principal danger, with numerous investigations in Federal Districts underway. Treasury, auditing Trump’s tax returns, was another threat. All of these institutions were eviscerated or suborned for corruption.

And finally, there was the rest of corporate America, who considered Trump a buffoon. What we saw in Trump’s Administration was lifted directly from Vladimir Putin’s playbook in the aftermath of Boris Yeltsin’s abdication. Yeltsin was abused by the post-Soviet oligarchs, but Putin used his control over the levers of justice to slowly strangle them, eventually becoming de facto owner of Russia. This was Trump’s aim as well.

He almost succeeded. The financial markets soared, and the Wall Street Journal joined FOX News in giving Trump credit. What the market manipulators didn’t count on, though, was the method seized upon by Putin. There is no honor among thieves, and behind every wealthy man are ten underlings that would be happy to take his place. Trump cultivated them, and was perfectly satisfied that the Senate refused to take action on his appointees to vacant Cabinet positions. As for those beyond his reach: Trump’s attack on Jeff Bezos was a fascinating set-piece of global character assassination, and I assume that his Saudi Arabian allies participated with the aim of securing the arms they needed for their war in Yemen.

I am working on a craft project that will eventually manifest as a “Memorial to the Abuse of Privilege.” The foundation evokes the 400,000 COVID deaths in the last year of Trump’s term. The narrowness of the Biden victory should give us pause. It was not superior campaigning or a compelling vision of the future that propelled Biden to victory. Trump’s botched COVID response carried heavy financial consequences. The Lincoln Project sprang up to lead the opposition to his second term. I believe that without COVID, Trump would still be president, and American democracy would have died.

But talk to a Trump voter and QAnon conspiracist and you might be shocked. They want to go back to work because if we don’t, small business will die in America. They are not classically ethno-nationalist; they believe that the aggrieved ethnic and racial minorities have forgotten indentured servitude and corporate towns and the labor abuses of industrialization and violent suppression of unions and fighting in foreign wars and the deflationary gold standard and corporate welfare and globalization and think “Well, if you deserve restitution and opportunities, what about us?”

In other words, they recognize that the enemy are those that abuse privilege. They bet on Obama, and felt betrayed by his lax treatment of Wall Street raiders in 2009. If the Democrats choose to expose and fight global corruption, they’d win them back, and the Republican Party would have to drag its libertarian corporate pay masters back into a sustainable social contract.

Remember to Heal, Learn to Protect

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At the Capital Mall memorial for the 400,000 dead of COVID, President Biden opined that remembrance is necessary to healing. This reflects the institution of Holocaust memorials, and the Vietnam Memorial wall. Great tragedies reflect a tearing apart in human nature, a locus in which dogmatism (Nazism, Colonialism, or Trumpism) tries to force society to conform to its views. To remember, as a psychic practice, is to confront lies with truth. Upon that foundation, we can then project the love that heals.

But healing is not enough.

We are on the “path of the knowledge of good and evil.” We cannot just paper over the past. Our burden is to understand it, and prevent its repetition.

Prior to the Sack of the Capitol on January 6th, Biden promised that he would “focus on the future.” That is an error. The perfidy of the last four years must be exposed, analyzed, and measures taken to guard against its repetition. While the Republican caucus – led by McConnell, Grassley, Nunes, Rosenstein, Graham, Sessions, and Trump – managed to squash full investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election, the DoJ must be tasked with completing a full national security and financial review. The FEC (Federal Election Commission) must be reconstituted and tasked with a complete review of campaign finance during the Trump Administration. Every Cabinet officer must be tasked with exposing self-dealing by their outgoing predecessors. Congress, which is allowed to define the framework under which States conduct their elections, must expose bias in existing practices and ensure all voters are represented. And apportionment, manipulated by the GoP’s “Red Map” algorithm following the 2010 census, must be constrained by fairness algorithms that prevent gross bias in favor of any political party.

Much wrongdoing will be exposed, and it might be politically importune to pursue legal sanctions against the perpetrators. But without knowledge, we cannot learn, and the last four years will be repeated.

Biden’s desire for comity is laudable, and the olive branch should always be held out. But that olive branch should not be a used as a shield by the enemies of democracy to prevent exposure of their wrong-doing. At the very least, Biden must allow Kamala Harris, long known as a lion in the fight against corruption, to exercise her skills to maximum effect.

Republican Anarchy

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The lack of an organized Republican response to the anarchy at the Federal Capital Building helped to bring this into focus.

While reading outside the CB&TL this morning, I overheard a Republican witnessing that he believed that “people should be free to do what they want.”

The GoP has invested money in demonizing the word “socialist,” and wields it as a tool to attack any program that attempts to protect people from the consequences of irresponsible choices by others.

For example, if your co-worker contracts COVID and continues to come to work, and you catch COVID, should you be responsible for your ICU bill? Or should they be forced to pay? Isn’t that why we have insurance, because often serious accidents can be traced to the choices made by others? For example, to drive drunk, or install slippery surfaces at entrances that are highly trafficked on rainy days, or employ unskilled labor to construct buildings, or to pay exorbitant executive salaries that destabilize corporate finances leading to collapse and loss of jobs.

It is time to call a spade a spade: most Republicans are not “conservative” in the sense that they believe in preserving institutions that serve the common welfare. Rather, they are anarchists. I would encourage Democratic policy-makers to wield that word in like a knife in policy debates. The endpoint of libertarian politics, as financed by the Koch brothers and implemented by Reagan, Rove, DeVos, and Trump, is anarchy. Resistance to common-sense social policy measures should be labelled as anarchist, and those such as Hawley, Cruz and McConnell should be tarred with that epithet.