June 28, 2022

Powerful and Continuing Nationalism

Disdain for Human Rights

Identification of Enemies as a Unifying Cause

Supremacy of the Military

Rampant Sexism

Controlled Mass Media

Obsession with National Security

Religion and Government Intertwined

Corporate Power Protected

Labor Power Suppressed

Disdain for Intellectuals and the Arts

Obsession with Crime and Punishment

Rampant Cronyism and Corruption

Fraudulent Elections

June 24, 2022

We were married on a nice summer day similar to this one on June 24, 1972 in the middle of Hurricane Agnes. Friends of ours were married on the same day in the middle of the same hurricane. For virtually the entire time that we have been married, Roe v. Wade has been the law of the land. Abortion was never something that we fortunately ever had to deal with, but it was nice knowing that the country was taking a more enlightened view to the issues facing women. We were friends in Florida with Sally Blackmun, the daughter of Harry Blackmun, who wrote the Roe v. Wade decision. She had her own personal story that involved Planned Parenthood. Now, we get to share our fiftieth anniversary and every other anniversary to come with the day that Roe v. Wade was overturned by the less than Supreme Court. These six Injustices have unleashed a hurricane, but I suspect this one will not miss us.

I am certainly past my productive reproductive years so one could say I don’t have a dog in this fight, but the reality is we all have a dog. We all know or will know a family member, a friend, or a colleague, who will be adversely affected. We will all hear of a woman, who was forced to deliver her rapist’s baby, or a woman forced to deliver a baby with fatal disabilities. We will know girl’s trying to be mothers, and boys trying to avoid being fathers. We will know girls dying from botched illegal abortions. Here is hoping the next fifty years will be forward and not backward. Happy Anniversary!

June 22, 2022

The Iranian Revolution, also known as the Islamic Revolution, was a series of events that culminated in the overthrow of the Pahlavi dynasty under Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi in 1979, and the replacement of his government with an Islamic republic under the rule of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, a leader of one of the factions in the revolt. The revolution was supported by various leftist and Islamist organizations. An absolute monarchy favorable to the West was replaced by an anti-Western theocracy.

The United States seems to be on the cusp of a religious revolution. The only question left to be answered is whether it will be violent or non-violent. The Republican Party has become a one issue party. It’s defining issue is abortion, which is pushed by the Christian Coalition to the exclusion of all other issues. The Federalist Society has made abortion a litmus test. The Supreme Court is packed with Federalist Society Catholics, who want to make Catholic doctrine the law of the land. The theological takeover of the Supreme Court is complete, and Congress is next if you believe the polls.

The Supreme Court was a peaceful takeover, but things have obviously gotten worse. We had an attempted violent coup by Trump and his white supremacist followers. Republicans in Congress are defiant about limiting their constituents access to guns. MAGA politicians promote violence in support of candidates, who toe the religious line. Over 100 Republicans have used guns in their ads. An Arizona politician recently threatened to assassinate his opponent in a “RINO-hunting” political advertisement. Republicans want to impose their religious views on the rest of us, and are willing to use violence. Isn’t that what the Iranian Revolution was all about, and how did that turn out?

June 19, 2022

Donald Trump apparently believes that the law, like military service, is for suckers only. That is what we are learning from the January 6th investigations. And no, Trump supporters/Fox watchers, this is not an inquisition. An inquisition is when you try to root out and punish heresy, which is what Trump did all the time. The committee is making the case for criminal indictments on many levels. “What did the President know, and when did he know it?” Trump clearly knew what he was doing was illegal as did the people around him. He was told that circumventing the Electoral College vote was illegal and batshit crazy. His attorney, John Eastman, asked for a pardon after he was advised by a White House attorney to lawyer up. And yes, Trump supporters/Fox watchers, it was an insurrection, which is a textbook example of an act or instance of revolting against civil authority or an established government.

Trump has a history of buying his way out of legal jeopardy, or settling at the last minute without acknowledging guilt. He is now in a situation that he can’t buy his way out of even with all of the money he grifted from his supporters, $250 million by some estimates. Trump believes the law is for suckers. Soon, he will discover that the law can really suck.

June 16, 2022

Burden of proof is the legal requirement to establish who is responsible for presenting evidence that proves or defeats a claim. It also determines how much evidence is needed to achieve that goal. If your party has the burden of proof, the law requires you to put forth enough evidence that will support your claim. Given that definition, it seems to me that the burden of proof regarding the claims of rigged elections falls squarely on the election deniers. It is not up to the rest of us to prove that the elections were, in fact, safe and secure even though that fact has already been proven. If you accuse me of something, show me your proof. Put up or shut up.

Republicans from all over the country at all levels of government continue to cling to their election fantasies without offering one shred of credible proof. To say it is so doesn’t make it so. If you continue to repeat a lie over and over again, it doesn’t make it true no matter how loud you yell. Another legalism may better explain the actions of these yahoo Republicans, willful blindness, which involves conscious avoidance of the truth. For them the truth is uncomfortable, and it has become a burden. The truth has become their beast of burden.

June 15, 2022

Now that the January 6th Commission is making its proceedings public, we are all being shocked by the depth and breadth of the criminal wrongdoing perpetrated by Trump and his henchman. Conspiracy theories are as prevalent as ants at a July 4th picnic, and just as annoying. One particular conspiracy caught my eye.

Italygate is one of the more obscure among the theories. Essentially, it holds that people connected to the Italian defense firm Leonardo used satellites to change the votes cast in the 2020 election from Trump to Biden. This is used to explain the large gains Biden reaped from late-night vote tabulations in urban centers in key states — a claim for which there is really no evidence because it was easily disproved by the voting methods used (mail ballots, used significantly more by Democrats) and where the votes came from (urban centers, which are overwhelmingly Democratic).

I am not offended as an American. I am offended as an Italian-American. I am offended in the same way that I find Rudy Giuliani and Doug Mastriano offensive. One is a drunk, and the other is a terrorist yet they are still embraced as superheroes in the Republican MAGA universe. Why would the country that gave us Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Federico Fellini, Enrico Fermi, the Ferrari and Lamborghini want to get involved in our elections? Italy already went through its Trump-like experience with Silvio Berlusconi.

My advice to the Trumpists. You need to do better job in coming up with your conspiracy theories. You are intellectually lazy. In the immortal words of Attorney General Bill Barr, words that will live forever, BS!

June 6, 2022

One of the first things that every person in the financial services industry learns early on is that investors are motivated by two emotions, fear and greed. In my over thirty years as a practitioner, I can confidently say that fear is a much more powerful motivator than greed. Most investors are more than happy to sacrifice relative performance on the upside for an absolute assurance of limited losses on the downside.

Trump learned this lesson from his days in real estate. He played on the fears of the American people. Immigrants were rapists, Muslims were terrorists, Mexicans were mules, and Blacks were AntiFa. People became afraid of voter fraud, rigged elections, the media, school officials, medical professionals and others. As a political strategy fear worked, and is still working.

Democrats should take a page from the Republican playbook this year and in 2024. The DNC needs to constantly and loudly remind Americans what we really need to be afraid of. We need to be afraid of politicians trying to steal elections. We need to be afraid of white supremacists. We need to be afraid of teenagers wielding AR-15’s. We need to be afraid of hurricanes, tornadoes, and wildfires. We need to be afraid of Republicans looking to roll back civil rights and a woman’s right to privacy. We need to be afraid of political hacks running school committees. We need to be afraid of the war on science. We need to be afraid of conspiracy theories. These are all very real things to be afraid of.

Democrats need to remind voters that this Republican Party is a clear and present danger. This is a Republican Party that totally embraces the ethos that “extremism in the defense of liberty is no vise.” Biden calls it ultra MAGA. No matter what you call it, call it what it is.

May 29, 2022

Tom Brokaw wrote a best-selling book titled, “The Greatest Generation.” In the book, Brokaw profiled American members of this generation, who came of age during the Great Depression and went on to fight in World War II, as well as those who contributed to the war effort on the home front. Brokaw wrote that these men and women fought not for fame or recognition, but because it was the “right thing to do”. The commonweal came before the common. What is my generation going to be called? The moniker “baby boomers” is not very descriptive or helpful. Maybe we should be called the “Rip Van Winkle” generation.

It’s as if an entire generation has been asleep at the wheel while the country has gone off the road. When we fell asleep decades ago, we were making progress on the environment, a women’s right to privacy was the law, voting rights were protected, pandemics were the subjects of text books, and mass shootings were almost unimaginable. An entire generation that was going to change the world has woken up after a deep slumber, interrupted only by careers, children and consumption, to find a country that it almost doesn’t recognize.

When the historians that are produced by Generation Z write our history, it won’t be flattering. They will blame us for despoiling the environment, and not addressing climate change. They will blame us for making it more difficult for them to vote. They will blame us for allowing Roe vs. Wade to be overturned. They will blame us for 1,000,000 deaths due to COVID. And they will blame us for not being willing or able to stop mass shootings. That will be our legacy.

May 27, 2022

Famed founder of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, would have a field day with today’s Republican Party, and I am not even talking about former President George Bush’s Freudian slip about confusing the invasion of Ukraine with Iraq. Freud postulated the existence of libido, sexualized energy with which mental processes and structures are invested and which generates erotic attachments. I think he would find the Republican obsession with long guns very revealing. They cradle them, they oil them, they squeeze them, and they go off. I guess happiness really is a warm gun.

In recent confirmation hearings with Supreme Court nominee, Ketanji Brown Jackson, the Republican inquisitors were uncomfortably focused on pedophilia. What were they projecting? Psychological projection is the process of misinterpreting what is “inside” as coming from “outside”. A bully like Josh Hawley may have been projecting his own feelings onto the Judge, and a person like Ted Cruz may have been projecting his feelings of confusion and inadequacy onto her as well. Matt Gaetz has his own demons.

Finally, they are way too concerned about a woman’s uterus, and not just as it relates to the abortion issue. We now have over 400 ministers of the Southern Baptist church, presumably staunch supporters of the Republican Party, credibly accused by its own convention of sexual misconduct. If we could only know what they dream about.

January 31, 2020

It is a matter of fact that the United States has the most gun-related deaths per capita than any other country in the world by orders of magnitude. And it is also a fact that we do not suffer from mental illness more than any other countries. We love our guns. We also love our cars and trucks. So why can’t we regulate guns the same way we regulate motor vehicles? After all, we obviously consider cars and trucks lethal weapons when in the wrong hands. Here is how we should regulate firearms, which is analogous to the way we regulate cars and trucks.

• Must be sixteen years of age to operate

• Must take and pass a course in gun safety

• Must pass a shooting proficiency test in the presence of a police officer

• Must take an eye exam

• Must have a gun owner’s license with photo ID

• The license should be subject to renewal

• Guns must be registered

• Guns must be insured

• Must have established procedures for transferring ownership of a firearm

• Gun owners must go through a criminal background check

• Gun owners must store their firearms in a secure location.

• Gun owners must report stolen firearms

• Gun owners must not carry a firearm while intoxicated

• The size, characteristics, and capacity of firearms must be regulated

• Guns should be taxed

• Guns should have inspection stickers

• Guns must not be concealed

• Gun owners must be subject to “red flag” laws