Goodbye, Roe v. Wade; Hello, Government Control of People's Private Lives

by MARK GABRISH CONLAN

Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved br>
On May 2, 2022 the U.S. Supreme Court decisively overturned U.S. politics and society, anid put the most intimate decisions of Americans’ private lives (and not just for women, either!) on the political chopping block. A draft opinion of the Court by Justice Samuel Alito, leaked (likely) by a Court staffer and published on the Politico.com Web site (

https://www.politico.com/news/2022/05/02/supreme-court-abortion-draft-opinion-00029473

) revealed that there are five justices – a majority of the current Court – willing not only to strike down the Court’s landmark 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade but to declare it was “egregiously wrong from the start,” according to Alito’s draft opinion.

In a sweeping 98-page draft, including a 31-page appendix intended to establish that America had a long tradition of restricting or outright banning abortion rights until 1973, Alito called into question the whole idea that the U.S. Constitution guarantees individuals a right to privacy in their personal lives, including how they have sex, with whom and how they deal with the consequences therefrom, good and bad. He pointed out that the Constitution itself does not contain the word “abortion,” as if that were enough to argue that Roe was illegitimate.

Nonsense. The Constitution itself says that the naming of individual rights as protected in its text does not bar the recognition of other rights. The last two sections of the Bill of Rights make this crystal clear. The Ninth Amendment reads, “The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.” The Tenth Amendment reads, “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”

The Legacy of “Originalism”

Justice Alito’s draft ruling on abortion in the case now before the court, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization – challenging a Mississippi law that bans abortion after the first six weeks of pregnancy, typically before a woman even knows she’s pregnant – is an example of the so-called “originalist” school of constitutional interpretation. Originalism is based on the belief that the words of the Constitution should be read exactly the way they were written in 1789, or thereafter in the case of subsequent amendments. Thanks to the long-term domination of the Republican Party in selecting and nominating U.S. Supreme Court justices – since 1981 Republicans have appointed 11 justices and Democrats have appointed five – the originalist doctrine has come to dominate American jurisprudence, especially on the Supreme Court.

Originalism flies in the face of the other school of constitutional interpretation, the so-called “Living Constitution” promoted in the early 20th century by Louis Brandeis first as an attorney appearing before the Supreme Court and then as a justice himself. Brandeis argued that the courts should interpret the Constitution in light of what its overall concepts mean now, not what they meant in 1789. He also argued that justices had a social and moral obligation to consider the effects their rulings would have on the real world. The concept of a “Living Constitution” has allowed the U.S. to have the same constitution for more than 200 years, with only one sweeping revision – the Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, adopted after the Civo; War and enshrining the Union’s victory – while other nations have had to revise and throw out their constitutions far more frequently.

But over the last 50 years or so, Republicans have launched a sweeping attack on the whole idea of the “Living Constitution,” to the point where a Supreme Court nominee who proclaimed a belief in it would almost certainly not get confirmed by the Senate. The notion of “Living Constitution” advocates like Brandeis that, for example, in ruling whether a law regulating wages and hours was constitutional one had to acknowledge the gross difference in economic power between the lowly worker and the giant corporation that was hiring him or her has never been popular among conservatives, especially Republicans. In the early 20th century the Supreme Court routinely ruled that minimum-wage laws, laws protecting workers’ health and safety, and laws allowing workiers to form unions were unconstitutional because they violated workers’ so-called “freedom of contract” to agree to work longer hours for less money and under less safe conditions.

Court’s Righ-Wing Role in U.S. History

In fact, one of the most cogent comments on Alito’s draft opinion in Dobbs came from a U.S. Congressmember who’s also a constitutional law scholar, Jamie Raskin (D-Maryland). He noted that throughout most of our history the Supreme Court has been a conservative, even a reactionary. Institution. He pointed to such decisions as Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857), which stated that African-Americans had no rights white Americnas were obliged to respect and a slave could not escape bondage simply by moving to a state where slavery was illegal; Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), which upheld the constitutionality of racial segregation and said that if Blacks felt bad about being segregated, that was their problem; and Korematsu v. United States (1942), upholding the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II, ostensibly as a war measure but really out of racism.

Raskin argued that the 16-year tenure of the late Earl Warren as chief justice (1953 to 1969) gave liberal Americans a much more positive feeling about the Supreme Court. Starting with Brown v. Board of Education (1954), which overruled Plessy v. Ferguson and held that “separate educational facilities are inherently unequal,” the Warren court enacted quite a lot of the liberal agenda, from expanding the rights of criminal defendants (the familiar Miranda warnings stating that you have the right to an attorney, and if you cannot afford one an attorney will be provided for you, came from a Warren Court decision) to abolishing mandatory prayer in schools, ending bans on interracial marriage, and, in the 1965 case of Griswold v. Connecticut, ruling that married couples had the right to use birth control. Griswold was especially significant because it found that the Constitution granted Americans a so-called “penumbral right” of personal privacy, especially in how they chose to lead their sex lives, and it was one of the main precedents Justice Harry Blackmun relied on in writing the Court’s opinion in Roe v. Wade eight years later.

But, Raskin and others have argued, as more and more Supreme Court appointments have been made by Republican presidents, the Court has in recent years moved back to its original position as a bastion of reaction. In large part that has been due to the increasing polarization of American politics and the extent to which both major parties – the Republicans far more than the Democrats – have become ideologically driven. It used to be that Republican Presidents appointed liberal or even progressive Supreme Court justices. Dwight Eisenhower appointed Warren and William Brennan, Nixon appointed Blackmun, Gerald Ford appointed John Paul Stevens, and George H. W. Bush appointed David Souter.

That doesn’t happen anymore, and a large part of why it doesn’t is due to the influence of Leonard Leo, perhaps the most important modern-day American you’ve never heard of. In the 1980’s Leo and others organized the Federalist Society, whose purpose was to identify law students with strong Right-wing politics and shepherd them through their legal careers, ultimately getting them jobs as high-powered attorneys with major law firms and/or getting them appointments as federal or state judges. Today no Republican President appoints anybody to the Supreme Court, or to virtually any lower federal judgeship, unless he or she has the imprimatur of the Federalist Society. While Democrats have tended to appoint more moderate justices in the hopes of gaining bipartisan support for their Senate confirmationd, Republicans have appointed hard-core Right-wing ideologues from the Federalist Society’s membership, and they come with a solidly “originalist” judicial philosophy and a determination to read the Constitution and other laws strictly in what the words contain, without any cognizance of the effects their rulings will have in the real world.

We see this in Justice Alito’s draft opinion in Dobbs, particularly in his withering scorn towards considering the real-world impacts of his decision, While an earlier generation of more moderate conservative justices – Sandra Day O’Connor, Anthony Kennedy and David Souter – drew back from overturning Roe in the 1992 decision of Planned Parenthood v. Casey on the ground that the political effect of overturning Roe would be galvanic, Alito would have none of it. “We cannot allow our decisions to be affected by any extraneous influences such as concern about the public’s reaction to our work,” Alito writes in his draft opinion. “We do not pretend to know how our political system or society will respond to today’s decision overruling Roe and Casey. And even if we could foresee what will happen, we would have no authority to let that knowledge influence our decision.”

Alito also reads the history of Plessy v. Ferguson and Korematsu v. United States quite differently from Jamie Raskin. To Alito, those were two previous decisions that were so totally wrong on their face and so badly decided that they serve as precedents for ignoring stare decisis – the rule that courts should decide cases based on what they’ve decided before – in overturning Roe. Aside from the rather obvious point that Plessy and Korematsu were about treating Americans as second-class citizens based on their race, while overturning Roe essentially turns the female (more than) half of the American population into second-class citizens and slaves to their wombs – there is a striking difference between how Earl Warren reversed Plessy in Brown v. Board of Education and what Alito is proposing to do to Roe.

Warren, who came to the job of chief justice from being Governor of California and had never been a judge before, saw Brown in terms of consensus-building. According to historian Richard Kluger, whose book Simple Justice is the definitive history of Brown. Warren lobbied the other justices hard to secure what he thought would be the best result for the country: a unanimous opinion. He particularly worked hard to persuade Stanley Reed, the last holdout who wanted to keep racial segregation constitutional, to sign on to Brown because it would be the best thing for the country.

By contrast, Alito makes clear in his opinion his sheer disdain for anyone who disagrees with him, including other Supreme Court justices both past and present. He cherry-picks the historical record and quotes the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe as people who expressed skepticism about Roe v. Wade. (They did, but their skepticism was over relying on a Supreme Court opinion instead of continuing the battle for reproductive freedom in state legislatures, where the momentum in the early 1970’s was on the pro-choice side.) Rather than trying to build common ground among the justices the way Warren did in overruling Plessy v. Ferguson, Alito’s draft caters to the other members of his bloc – Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett – and totally ignores the rest of the Court. That includes chief justice John Roberts, who based on his past record would probably have wanted a decision that paid lip service to Roe v. Wade while upholding the Mussussuppi anti-abortion law and giving Roe the death of a thousand cuts.

No, Justice Alito says in the tone of his opinion: we have the votes to do this 5-4 and we don’t care what the other justices (or anybody else) think. To bolster his culture-war arguments, Alito cites the early support of Planned Parenthood’s original founders for eugenics, a 1920’s attempt to “improve” the human race by selective breeding, and he says that Black and Latina women are more likely to have abortions and therefore abortion is a form of genocide against those communities. Nonsense: if Black and Latina women are more likely to have abortions in the U.S. than whites, it’s because of racism, particularly economc racism that relegates them to low-paying jobs that don’t offer enough money or support to raise additional children.

A Salvo in the Culture War

Justice Alito’s draft opinion is yet another salvo in the ongoing American culture wars. In the late President Abraham Lincoln’s phrase, we have become “a house divided against itself” – and the divisions are so extreme that only once, when the Civil War was imminent, were there greater social, cultural and political divisions than there are now. Lincoln’s speech (https://www.abrahamlincolnonline.org/lincoln/speeches/house.htm), delivered in Springfield, Illinois on June 16, 1858 during Lincoln’s unsuccessful campaign to unseat Stephen A. Douglas from the U.S. Senate, directly referenced the Dred Scott decision the Supreme Court had issued a year earlier, and his words were chillingly appropriate for the modern situation:

“I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved -- I do not expect the house to fall -- but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing or all the other. Either the opponents of slavery will arrest the further spread of it, and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in the course of ultimate extinction; or its advocates will push it forward, till it shall become alike lawful in all the States, old as well as new -- North as well as South.”

Lincoln described the Dred Scott decision and the 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act, which his opponent Senator Douglas had sponsored, as part of a long-term plan to extend slavery and ultimately make it nationwide. Likewise Justice Alito’s draft opinion striking down Roe v. Wade is the culmination of almost 50 years of Right-wing planning, strategizing and acting. And despite Justice Alito’s attempt to wall off the effect of his opinion exclusively to abortion because it involves “the potential taking of a human life,” the effect of Alito’s and the four other justices in the majority would be to eviscerate decades of legal rulings guaranteeing individuals a constitutional right to privacy. Alito’s ruling that in order to be protected by the Constitution, it must not only be stated explicitly therein but be “deeply rooted in our nation’s history” – which he argues isn’t the case for abortion because all 50 states prohibited the procedure until California allowed it in the Therapeutic Abortion Act of 1967 (signed into law by then-governor Ronald Reagan, who 13 years later cut the deal with Jerry Falwell and other leaders of the radcal Right that made Republicans the so-called “pro-life” party).

It also isn’t true of a lot of rights that previous Supreme Courts have ruled are constitutionally protected. Once Roe v. Wade is overruled and states are free to ban abortion, the next target is likely to be Queer rights. Just as all 50 U.S. states banned abortioin until 1967, all 50 states banned sexual activity between same-gender partners until 1961, when the Illinois legislature did a full revision of the state’s criminal code and inadvertently left out the anti-Queer sodomy law. And the ruling allowing same-sex couples to marry dates back only to 2015 – and Alito has slgnaied that this, too, is on his chopping block.

In October 2020 – with liberal justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg dead and her far-Right replacement, Amy Coney Barrett, before the U.S. Senate awaiting confirmation – Alito joined fellow Right-wing justice Clarence Thomas in reading a statement from the bench saying that the ruling allowing same-sex couples to marry threatened “the religious liberty of the many Americans who believe that marriage is a sacred institution between one man and one woman.” (See https://www.cnn.com/2020/10/05/politics/thomas-alito-obergefell-same-sex-marriage-analysis/index.html.) With Barrett about to be confirmed on a party-line vote, the Thomas/Alito letter essentially was an invitation to anyone who might want to bring a case before the new Court that their “religious liberties” were being violated because the law now allowed same-sex couples to be married.

It’s not only same-sex marriage and, indeed, same-sex sex that are on the post-Roe chopping block. It’s also the right of married heterosexuals to use birth control, which was guaranteed ini the 1965 case Griswold v. Connecticut. The court in Griswold found that the Constitution guaranteed what they called a “penumbral right” to privacy, a phrase abortion opponents have ridiculed ever since, and it was one of the key precedents the Court relied on in Roe. Also on the chopping block is the right to marry a person of a different race, since that was guaranteed by the 1967 case Loving v. Virginia also on “privacy” grounds that will be stripped away if Alito’s draft opinion in Dobbs, or something close to it, becomes the law of the land.

The current Right-wing Supreme Court majority has become a hopeful sign for all sorts of radical-Right crazies on issues that have nothing to do with either medicine or sex. Texas Governor Greg Abbott has announced plans to challenge the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Plyler v. Doe (1982), which guaranteed the right of children of undocumented immigrants – including U.S.-born ones who were automatically citizens under the 14th Amendment, to attend public schools. Abbott and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis have also threatened prosecuting parents who authorize hormone therapy for their Transgender children – as recommended by the medical establishment for treating gender dysphoria – for “child abuse.”

The modern-day American Right is an uneasy coalition between economic libertarians who wanted to abolish worker health and safety protections, labor unions and all social welfare programs under the guise of “limited government,” and radical Christian Rightists who want a huge government to micromanage people’s personal lives, especially their sex lives. Despite its inherent contradictions, this coalition has stayed together for over 60 years and is on the verge of its biggest success to date. For most of these 60-plus years the economic libertarians have been in the driver’s seat – mainly because it was far more important for the big-noeey donors who support the Republican Party to win huge tax cuts for themselves than to deal with abortion or Queer rights.

But now the balance of power between libertarian and evangelical Rightists in the U.S. is shifting. Bob Chapek, the chief executive officer of the Walt Disney Corporation, found this out when he came out against a severely restrictive bill passed by the Republican-dominated Florida legislature and signed by Governor Ron DeSantis that forbids any discussion of sexual orientation or gender identity in elementary school grades one through three, and restricts classroom discussion about sexual orientation or gender identity for older children. It also gives parents the right to sue a school district for alleged violations of the law – which makes opponents fear that cash-strapped Florida school districts will just ban all discussions about Queer people or issues, period.

Chapek originally wanted to keep quiet about the bill, reasoning that buth supporters and opponents of Queer rights spend money at Walt Disney World in Orlando and the company’s other businesses and attractions. Then he faced opposition from Queer and Queer-friendly Disney employees, and he publicly spoke out against the so-called “Don;t Say Gay” bill and pledged that Disney would use lts clout as Florida’s largest private-sector employer to pressure the legislature to get rid of it. Instead, Governor DeSantis and the Florida legislature went out of their way to punish Disney for their bill by revoking the special-district status Walt Disney himself had negotiated with the Florida government before his death in 1966 for the land on which Walt Disney World sits.

Called the “Reedy Creek Improvement District,” the Disney World land was allowed to be virtually self-governing. The law was denounced by Leftists at the time as a giant giveaway to a private corporation, but the Florida legislature enthusiastically embraced it because they’d seen the sensational success of Disneyland in California and wanted their own tourist attraction. Now it’s being attacked on the Right by people who ordinarily support corporate giveaways, but in this case their commitment to an anti-Queer culture war has overcome their commitment to corporate freedom. The message to corporate America couldn’t be more clear: companies that toe the radical-Right culture line, like Hobby Lobby and Chick-fil-A, will continue to get government benefits and sweetheart deals. Companies like Disney that oppose anti-Queer legislation will have those benefits taken away.

The imminent repeal of Roe v. Wade and the possibility that the federal government will impose a nationwide ban on abortion the next time Republicans have control of the White House and Congress are the latest steps towards the “dictatorship of virtue” the Republican Party and America’s radical Right want to impose on the nation. Both Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump ran for President on the slogan “Make America Great Again,” and to them and America’s Right in general, America was “great” when Blacks stayed on the back of the bus, women stayed in the kitchen and Queers stayed in the closet.

The Impending Doom of the Democratic Party

by MARK GABRISH CONLAN

Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

I belong to no organized political party. I’m a Democrat.
– Will Rogers

I don’t care what he has to say,
It makes no difference anyway.
Whatever it is, we’re against it!
– Paraphrase of Harry Ruby’s song lyric for Groucho Marx from the movie Horse Feathers (1932)

This time, it was supposed to be different.

This time, the Democratic Party was supposed to have learned its lesson from 1993 and 2009, years in which they took the Presidency and both houses of Congress and then frittered away their majority pushing through a complicated piece of legislation that had to be compromised in advance to appease both “moderate” and “progressive” factions, while the Republicans circled around them like hungry sharks ready to devour them in the next election.

In 1993, the complicated piece of legislation was an attempt to overhaul America’s bizarre mess of a health-care system and get more people access to medical care. In 2009, after the failure of Hillary Clinton’s attempt to do that, it was another attempt to reform American health care – which actually went through Congress but proved, at least early on, to be so savagely unpopular American voters took control of Congress (one house, anyway) away from the Democrats that had loosed this bill upon them.

One of the reasons it was supposed to be different in 2021 was that the new Democratic President, Joe Biden, wasn’t an outsider like Bill Clinton who’d never held a higher office than governor of Arkansas. Nor was he someone like Barack Obama who had run for President while just halfway through his first term in the Senate. Biden was supposed to be an old, experienced legislative hand who’d served nearly 40 years in the Senate before he left it to become Obama’s Vice-President.

Biden was supposed to be the compromise candidate, acceptable to all wings of his party, sort-of progressive but not so progressive he’d scare off moderate voters. He was supposed to be a skilled negotiator who could reach across the aisle and win at least some Republican support for his proposals and thereby claim the magic mantle of “bipartisanship.” And most of all, he was supposed to be an old hand at getting government to work and actually do things – a sharp contrast to his immediate predecessor, Donald Trump, who with the help of Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell got through a huge tax cut for the wealthiest Americans and packed the federal judiciary with Right-wing ideologues but proved both unwilling and unable to do the nuts-and-bolts work of running America.

Only now it’s all happening again, only worse. This time the Democrats in both houses of Congress are battling over a bill – or, rather, two bills – given the vague title of “infrastructure.” One of them passed the U.S. Senate and even got some Republican support because it’s only about the traditional definition of “infrastructure” – building roads, bridges and other big capital projects to help Americans move themselves and their products across this country and elsewhere. The other is a social-democratic wish list being offered by a surprisingly progressive-sounding President that includes expanding Medicare, universal pre-school (an idea I once argued against on the ground that the kids of well-to-do parents don’t need it), free community college and increased pay for health-care workers, including in-home caregivers (which is how I’ve made my living since 1984).

The bill containing the social-democratic wish list also includes programs to fight human-caused climate change – perhaps the most significant issue there is right now, because if we don’t respond to it adequately enough Earth will become literally uninhabitable for humans in the next century or two (or maybe even sooner). It’s also one of the most controversial because at least one of America’s two major political parties outright denies its existence. Whether it’s because they’re economically dependent on energy industries and other capitalists who would suffer big-time under the economic and social readjustments this country, and every other one on earth, would have to do to tackle climate change, or whether they have personal psychological or religious problems with it (like the evangelical Christians who believe it’s blasphemous to claim that humans can render the Earth uninhabitable because only God can do that), there are millions of Americans who outright deny that current human activities, including fossil-fuel consumption, have or can have any effect on the planet’s ability to sustain us.

One of the strongest and longest-term opponents of addressing human-caused climate change in the Democratic Party is Joe Manchin of West Virginia, not coincidentally one of the two Democrats in the Senate who’s holding up the large so-called “budget reconciliation” bill to fund climate-change prevention, social-service programs and much of what’s come to be called “human infrastructure.” A recent review by Charles Kaiser of New Yorker writer Evan Osnos’s new book Wildland – an attempt to explain just how American politics became so vicious (https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/sep/19/wildland-review-evan-osnos-america-trump-republicans-billionaires) – includes a link to a TV commercial Manchin ran in his first campaign for U.S. Senate in 2010 in which he literally shoots a rifle at a bill to set up a cap-and-trade system, a so-called “market-based” attempt to address climate change.

The text of the ad, narrated by Manchin himself as he carries a rifle and wears a jacket with a National Rifle Association (NRA) patch on its shoulder, reads, “I’m Joe Manchin. I approve this ad because I’ll always defend West Virginia. As your Senator, I’ll protect your Second Amendment rights. That’s why the NRA endorsed me. I’ll take on Washington and this administration to get the federal government off of our backs and out of our pockets. I’ll cut federal spending and I’ll repeal the bad parts of Obamacare. I sued EPA [the Environmental Protection Agency], and I’ll take dead aim [fires shot] at the cap-and-trade bill, ’cause it’s bad for West Virginia.”

Even before that, when Manchin was governor of West Virginia in the late 2000’s, he publicly endorsed a study concocted by coal-mining companies operating in the state that supposedly “proved” that miners’ wages would go down if mine operators were forced to make their mines more safe. The study was funded by a foundation with money from Charles and David Koch, well-heeled contributors to Right-wing causes. David Koch originally ran for vice-president in 1972 with the Libertarian Party, which believes government’s only legitimate functions are to maintain a military, a police force and a justice system. It’s particularly opposed to Social Security, Medicare and all other programs to tax the rich to benefit the not-so-rich, and argues that these essentially turn rich people into slaves forced to support their inferiors.

Osnos’s book is largely an account of how the Kochs and other super-rich donors to Right-wing political causes – Lee Hanley, Robert Mercer and Richard Mellon Scaife (who in 1993 underwrote the so-called “Arkansas Project” to flood the state with money for anyone who could come up with derogatory information about Bill and/or Hillary Clinton, much of which was made up by Arkansans eager to get their hands on some of Scaife’s money – but just about every nasty thing you think you know about the Clintons came from this source) – have spent the last 50 years dramatically changing how millions of Americans think about themselves, their government and what it can do for – or to – them. “Above all,” Kaiser wrote of Osnos’ book, “this is a story of how mega-rich Americans have invested hundreds of millions of dollars to give themselves the power to pillage the earth, destroy the air and corrupt democracy in a thousand ways without ever being held to account.”

Democrats Box, Republicans Fight Wars

As of this writing (early October) the two major parties are locked in a struggle for the soul and the future of America disguised as a battle over legislation. The Republicans, led by master doublethinker Mitch McConnell in the Senate (“doublethink” was a form of organized and legitimized hypocrisy invented by the Inner Party, rulers of Oceania in George Orwell’s dystopian masterpiece 1984) and opportunist apparatchik Kevin McCarthy in the House of Representatives, announced from the get-go of Biden’s Presidency that they were going to be united in implacable opposition to anything he tried to do. Meanwhile, the Democrats have been fatally disunited, with their ongoing wars between “moderates” and “progressives” sandbagging any chance of getting legislation through that would even begin to satisfy either side.

In order to enact a legislative agenda, one or the other major party has to take advantage of controlling the Presidency and Congress by ending the Senate filibuster, that insane relic of the 1830’s that in its current form requires at least 60 Senators to vote to do practically anything. The only way around the filibuster is an arcane process called “budget reconciliation,” which allows the Senate to pass legislation with a simple majority as long as it somehow relates to the federal budget. The problem with “budget reconciliation” is that it can only be done once a year – though in 2021 the Senate Democrats got special dispensation to do it twice since no reconciliation bill had passed in 2020 – and they used their first crack at reconciliation to pass the big COVID-19 relief bill in March.

In a post on this blog on March 14 (https://zengersmag.blogspot.com/2021/03/bidens-unrepeatable-victory.html), I called the COVID bill “Biden’s Unrepeatable Victory” and predicted that the Democrats would be unable to enact any more major legislation in the face of implacable opposition not just from Republicans but moderate Democrats as well. I mentioned Arizona Senator Kyrsten Sinema’s dramatic vote against raising the federal minimum wage – closely copying the famous gesture of her Republican predecessor, John McCain, in supplying the decisive vote in 2017 to keep the Senate from repealing the Affordable Care Act – as an early warning signal to Democrats that they were acutely vulnerable to any Senator in their caucus who thought the party’s overall agenda was too liberal, too progressive and too expensive.

Sinema and Joe Manchin of West Virginia have emerged as the principal obstructionists in the Senate against the overall agenda of Biden and most of his party. With the staggering power that comes from the even division of the Senate into 50 Democrats and 50 Republicans, these two are essentially dictating the course of Democrats’ ability to legislate in the Senate. “I’m not a liberal,” Manchin recently boasted proudly, announcing that he would personally cap the wish-list progressive Democrats had packed into the second reconciliation bill to pay for programs ranging from universal pre-school and free community college to serious efforts to deal with climate change at $1.5 trillion. It had started out as $6 trillion and already been whittled down to $3.5 trillion, and both Manchin and Sinema have been maddeningly reluctant to tell other Democrats exactly what they want to remove from the bill to bring its cost down.

Part of the problem is the reconciliation process itself: since it can only be done once every fiscal year, both Republicans and Democrats have thrown just about everything they want done into reconciliation bills so it can’t be blocked by the 60-vote threshold. That’s why, instead of actually being able to discuss, debate on and vote the individual proposals in the reconciliation bill, Democrats had to advance them as an all-or-nothing package. The result is that what people are talking about when they discuss the legislation isn’t what it’s actually going to do, or why those things would be good or bad for the country, but that intimidating price tag. It also doesn’t help that since the 1970’s the Senate has shackled itself with what I call “the virtual filibuster,” in which, instead of actually debating a bill, the minority only has to file a piece of paper with the Senate clerk to invoke the 60-vote threshold and keep it from a vote.

Manchin – who’s been at least marginally more open and honest about what bothers him about the reconciliation bill than Sinema – has said he doesn’t mind if the process takes weeks to resolve. Unfortunately, the country doesn’t have weeks. The Democrats must pass some sort of budget reconciliation bill by mid-October because otherwise the U.S. faces fiscal Armageddon in the form of the “debt ceiling,” an arbitrary legislative limit on how much the country may borrow. Mitch McConnell has whipped the Senate Republican caucus into total and implacable opposition to raising the debt ceiling, even though the debt ceiling isn’t (as McConnell has portrayed it) an act of fiscal prudence that puts brakes on the government’s ability to borrow in the future. It’s simply a reaffirmation that the government will pay its credit cards for the money it has already borrowed – including the extra debt Republicans loaded onto the U.S. debt to finance their giant tax giveaway to wealthy individuals and corporations in 2017.

The controversy over the debt ceiling is just one more example of how savagely and unscrupulously Republicans are fighting to make sure that their vision of America – in which corporations are free of tax burdens or any obligation to protect the health and safety of workers and consumers, all laws and rules to protect the environment are either repealed or simply forgotten, women and people of color are once again second-class citizens, and the state is barred from protecting public health while it takes on a major role in regulating how people can have sex, with whom, and how they can deal with the consequences therefrom – is the one that will prevail. The Republicans have been able to maintain this unlikely coalition between economic Libertarians who want limited government when it comes to business and the economy, and highly interventionist government when it comes to sex, for over 40 years (at least since Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980), and with the utter tone-deafness Republicans have built up to their own hypocrisy, they’ve been able to navigate these contradictions just fine.

A case in point: the “My Body, My Choice” signs Right-wingers have been carrying in demonstrations against vaccine and mask mandates to help prevent COVID-19. They’ve appropriated the pro-choice slogan used by defenders of abortion rights even as a radical-Right legislature in Texas passed the most radical bill to control women’s bodies and their lives since the 1973 U.S. Supreme Court Roe v. Wade decision – and the current Supreme Court, dominated by radical-Right justices, gave it an A-OK.

What’s more, the current Republican Party has been absolutely unscrupulous about their strategies and tactics. They have shrewdly used the anti-democratic features of the United States Constitution – the Electoral College, the equal representation of every state in the U.S. Senate regardless of its population, and the near-total control the Constitution gives state legislatures over who can vote, under what circumstances and how the votes will be counted. The Republicans are fighting against demographic changes that are shrinking the percentages of America’s population where they do best and growing the populations where they do worst – people of color, poor people, young people – not by modifying their ideology or their presentation to attract younger, darker people but by passing voter suppression laws to make it as hard as possible for people who don’t usually vote Republicans to vote at all.

The Republicans are taking aim at every unwritten custom they can find that has helped keep the U.S.’s experiment in (small-“r”) republican government together. They’ve weaponized the debt ceiling – threatening the total collapse of America’s and the world’s economy. They turned the normally ceremonial task of counting the electoral votes for President into an attempt at what Latin Americans call an autogolpe (“self-coup”) aimed at keeping Donald Trump in office past the 2020 election even though he lost both the popular and the electoral vote. They’ve mounted a bizarre propaganda onslaught against the whole idea of vaccination against COVID-19 and mask-wearing requirements to keep SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes it, from spreading.

They have not only passed laws making it insanely difficult for generally non-Republican constituencies to vote, they’ve included provisions that will allow state legislatures or partisan officials simply to set aside and reverse any election whose outcome doesn’t go the Republicans’ way. They’ve taken advantage of computer programs that facilitate gerrymandering – the practice of deliberately drawing legislative districts to maintain your own party in power – to a level of precision so great that in 2018, 65 percent of Wisconsin voters voted for Democrats to represent them in the legislature, but Democrats won only 45 percent of the legislative seats. And by continuing to question the legitimacy of every election Democrats win with false claims of “fraud,” the Republicans are deliberately and purposely undercutting Americans’ faith in voting itself.

And, when all else fails, Republicans resort to violence or the threat of violence to maintain power. They did that on January 6, 2021, when thousands of armed vigilantes descended on Washington, D.C. aimed at breaking into the U.S. Capitol and disrupting the electoral count by violence. Their aim was to block the counting of electors and throw the decision of who the next President would be to the House of Representatives, which under the 12th Amendment to the Constitution votes by states, with each state getting one vote. Since Republicans had majorities in 26 of the 50 state delegations, this would have meant Trump would have been re-elected. Republicans also threatened to assassinate the governor of Michigan over COVID-19 restrictions and are intimidating secretaries of state, local election officials and school board members to skew elections their way and ban anti-COVID mask mandates.

It’s clear that today’s Republican Party will literally stop at nothing to regain and keep power. The gap between the Republicans and the Democrats in this regard has been told in various metaphors – the Democrats bring a soup ladle to a gunfight, the Democrats are student council officials while the Republicans are stone-cold killers, or (my favorite) the Democrats are still trying to play politics by Marquis of Queensbury rules while the Republicans see politics as all-out war. It is clear that today’s Republicans see the Biden administration and the temporary razor-thin (but hapless, due to the Democrats’ inner divisions) Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress as mere hiccups on the road to what former George W. Bush advisor Karl Rove called “full-spectrum dominance” of American politics by the Republican Party.

The Republicans’ goal – ironically, given their ostensible stand against immigrants in general and Mexican immigrants in particular – is a situation very much like the one in Mexico in the last two-thirds of the 20th century. Americans are used to a situation in which multiple political parties exist but only two, the Republicans and the Democrats, really matter. What the Republicans are after is a political universe in which multiple parties exist but only one party really matters. They are bound and determined to use any means necessary to make the Democrats a permanent opposition party, tolerated but essentially powerless. And with the likelihood that they will regain both houses of Congress in 2022 – partly because the usual pattern in American politics is the President’s party loses seats in the midterms, partly because the Democrats’ majorities in both houses are so razor-thin Republicans can take them with only one more Senator and three more House members, and partly because the Republicans are thoroughly and industriously suppressing the votes of their opponents – they are well on their way to regaining the White House in 2024 and casting the Democrats into permanent political oblivion.

It Didn’t Start with Trump

The point Evan Osnos is making in Wildland is that Donald Trump, his presidency, his continuing hold on the Republican Party and the ever-growing odds that he may return to the White House in 2024, were not the beginning of the super-rich radical Right’s campaign to reshape American politics. Rather, his election was its culmination and the ultimate badge of its success. According to Osnos, in the last 50 years rich Right-wing Americans have “launched a set of financial philanthropic and political projects that changed American ideas about government, taxes and the legitimacy of the liberal state. … In every element of his commercial and political persona, Trump was a consummation of that project. … Most of all, of course, he stood for a belief in unbridled self-enrichment, and on that basis some of his most genteel supporters were willing to overlook” the tawdrier aspects of Trump’s character and career: his vulgarity, his racism, his open demeaning of women, his lumpen-bourgeois origins and his lousy business record.

Indeed, for most of its history the U.S. has been a center-Right country, exalting wealth and success in a way that goes back to the original Puritans’ concept that material success in this world was God’s way of showing who were the “elect” destined for salvation in the next. There have been brief periods when more progressive forces have gained ascendancy – notably between 1932 and 1964, when the successive crises of the Great Depression and World War II made Americans more sympathetic to progressive ideals (and when at least some rich people saw the threats from Communism on the Left and fascism on the Right as indications that they needed to make some compromises instead of grabbing most of America’s wealth and income for themselves) – but for the most part America has been a capitalist nation whose people, as much as they might rail against certain aspects of how it operates, support it overall and regard attempts to alter it as dangerous.

The relatively liberal era that began with Franklin Roosevelt’s election in 1932 and ended with Lyndon Johnson’s in 1964 unraveled for several reasons. First, the major parties switched their historic positions on civil rights and racial equality in the 1960’s. The Democrats, who had been the party of slavery, secession and segregation, pushed through the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. This left a whole lot of racists, not only Southerners but white working-class Northerners as well, who no longer felt at home in the Democratic Party. The Republicans rushed in to fill the gap and build a national majority on racism and opposition to the counter-culture – which in the 1960’s meant hippies, but later meant “liberated” women and Queers.

Over the last 50 years, ever since Richard Nixon and Senator Strom Thurmond (R-South Carolina) concocted the so-called “Southern strategy” that turned theirs from the “Party of Lincoln” to the party of American racism, the Right has essentially dominated American politics. Backed by super-rich donors’ money and a whole network of organizations created with it – from “dark money” political action committees to think tanks and national organizations like the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), which writes Right-wing bills and offers them to elected legislators at all levels of government; and the Federalist Society, which recruits Right-wing law students to rise through the legal profession and ultimately become judges – the Right has become the dominant force in American politics.

Since 1968 the Republicans have won nine Presidential elections to the Democrats’ six. Since 1994, when they broke the Democrats’ 40-year majority hold on Congress, they have controlled either or both houses for all but five years (the first two years of Clinton’s Presidency, the first two years of Obama’s and the first year, so far, of Biden’s). Even more destructively, the Republicans, their corporate funders and their handmaidens in the media have created an entire Right-wing media ecosystem consisting of Right-wing talk radio, Fox News, Web sites like Newsmax and One America News (for people who think even Fox is too liberal for them) and an entire social-media infrastructure. Its purpose is to keep Right-wing voters in line by making sure either they are never exposed to any information other than Right-wing propaganda; or, if they are, they are trained to dismiss it as “fake news.”

When They Go Low, We Need to Go Lower

Political scientists who studied American elections in the 1950’s and 1960’s – after there was enough scientific polling data to discern American voting patterns and enough computers to crunch all those numbers – classified American Presidential elections into four groups, “maintaining,” “deviating,” “reinstating” and “realigning.” The theory was that one of the two major political parties that have dominated the U.S. through its history as an independent nation would have the larger base of support among the American electorate, and their ideas would be the principal drivers of U.S. politics and decision-making. As American political scientist Samuel Lubell put it in 1951, one would be the “sun party” and the other the “moon party.”

A “maintaining election” was one in which the dominant “sun party” kept the Presidency and, most often, a majority in Congress as well. A “deviating election” would be one in which the less dominant party would win, but for reasons that didn’t change the overall alignment. A “reinstating election” would bring the dominant party back into power after a deviating election. A “realigning election” would be one in which one party accumulated so overwhelming a majority of voters and officeholders that it would become the dominant “sun party.”

Examples of realigning elections included 1860, in which the looming crisis over slavery and secession brought the Republican Party to power in only the second election in which it fielded a Presidential candidate; and 1932, in which the economic collapse of the Great Depression brought the Democratic Party to overwhelming power. I would argue that 1968 was also a realigning election that definitively voted the Democrats’ “New Deal Coalition” out of power and put together a new one. A lot of people were fooled by the narrow margin (less than 1 percent of the popular vote) by which Republican Richard Nixon beat Hubert Humphrey and his failure to win a majority in either the House or the Senate. But the combined vote total of Nixon and arch-Right-wing racist George Wallace was 57 percent to Hubert Humphrey’s 43 percent – an indication that the American electorate had overwhelmingly rejected the Democrats’ liberalism.

Not that the voters who cast Right-wing ballots for either Nixon or Wallace in 1968 – or the 61 percent who voted to re-elect Nixon in 1972, the most overwhelming Presidential landslide to that point – were all that clear on what they wanted to replace Democratic liberalism. That wouldn’t happen until 1980, when Ronald Reagan won what was more than just a reinstating election; it was a capstone that completed the realignment 1968 had begun. The 1980 election cemented the alliance between economically conservative Libertarians and the radical Christian Right that has essentially dominated American politics ever since. It has given the Republican Party an oddly schizold and self-contradictory internal politics – for “limited government” when it comes to workers’ and consumers’ health and safety, protecting women and people of color against discrimination, and weakening (and ultiamtely eliminating) the social safety net; for highly interventionist “big government” when it comes to dictating people’s private lives, especially their sex lives.

It’s true that some political writers, notably David Brooks and Jonah Goldberg, have questioned whether Lubell’s “sun party/moon party” analysis really applies to today’s American political alignment. Goldberg published an article in the December 25, 2019 issues of the Chicago Tribune and Los Angeles Times (https://triblive.com/opinion/jonah-goldberg-we-have-2-moon-parties-no-sun-party/) claiming that Democrats and Republicans had both become “moon parties” because neither one is willing to make the compromises between its members to govern effectively as a “sun party.” As Goldberg wrote:

“[T]he most committed members of each party have a decidedly lunar mindset. Progressives and conservatives alike are convinced they are victims of the Powers That Be. One of the main arguments that propelled Trump to the White House and sustains his GOP support today is the feeling that the Right has lost every important battle of the last 40 years.

“As political consultant Luke Thompson notes, minority parties tend to obsess about unity because without it they are even more powerless. This makes ideological purity a vital source of cohesion. Majority parties have both the luxury and the burden of power. To govern is to make policy choices, and choosing A over B will always disappoint the backers of B.”

The modern-day Democrats are indulging in the luxury of disunity – and putting themselves on the verge of collapse from it – because they don’t have the luxury of defections. Biden came into office with razor-thin majorities in both houses of Congress, yet he’s trying to push through a sweeping agenda similar to those Franklin Roosevelt did in the 1930’s and Lyndon Johnson in the 1960’s – only without the overwhelming Democratic Congressional majorities they had. Meanwhile, the modern-day Republicans have played a far longer game, trusting in their ability to exploit the anti-majoritarian, anti-democratic features of U.S. politics to force their will on the American people and become a permanent dominant party. As historian Leonard Schapiro wrote about the Russian Bolsheviks, who seized power in 1917 and held it for 72 years, the modern-day Republicans are “a minority determined to rule alone.”

Though many Republican voters may think, as Goldberg claimed, that “the Right has lost every important battle of the last 40 years,” they really haven’t. They’ve lost a few of them, some in the economic sphere (like the passage of the Affordable Care Act, a major expansion of the social safety net which ideological Republicans had wanted to shrink and ultimately eliminate, even though many of their voters are dependent on Social Security and Medicare) and more in the cultural sphere. But for the most part, Republicans have won most of the ideological battles over the last 40 years, confining Democratic Presidents to what Bill Clinton called “small ball” and radically restructuring the nation’s tax system to make social programs and government spending in general unsustainable. After hard-core Libertarian Paul Ryan pushed through the Trump tax cuts in late 2017, he announced his retirement from Congress and said, “My work is done” – meaning that those cuts had destroyed the ability of future Democratic Presidents and Congresses to fund even already existing government programs, let alone expansions of them.

Now, thanks to a laser-like focus on “packing” not only the U.S. Supreme Court but the entire federal judiciary with Right-wing Republican judges, almost all from the Federalist Society (an organization formed in 1982 specifically to identify young law students with Right-wing politics and mentor them as they rose through the legal profession and eventually became judges), the Republicans are poised to win their biggest and longest-term victory in the culture wars: an end to the U.S. Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision and an ability for state governments to take control of women’s bodies by denying them the right to abortion. The Supreme Court has lost its liberal members through attrition and its thoughtful conservatives (people like Sandra Day O’Connor, Anthony Kennedy and David Souter) have been replaced by Right-wing ideologues. Every Republican President since Ronald Reagan (who, ironically, signed into law the U.S.’s first abortion-rights bill in 1967, when he was governor of California) has pledged to appoint only Supreme Court justices who would overrule Roe v. Wade – and they now have a majority of justices committed to doing just that.

As the battle stands at this writing (October 5, 2021), the Democrats are locked into a mini-war between progressives tired of being “rolled” in big pieces of legislation – as they were in 2009, when they were forced to support the Affordable Care Act even though it locked the U.S. even tighter into its system of private, profit-driven health insurance progressive Democrats have long wanted to eliminate – and moderates who hold the balance of power, largely because progressives have simply not been able to elect enough people to outvote them. “You want more liberal outcomes? Elect more liberals,” Joe Manchin rather snippily – but accurately – said, reflecting that the 2020 election was hardly a walk for the Democratic party. Republicans kept control of most state governments and slashed the Democratic House majority from 40 seats to four, indicating that this remains a center-Right country and many Biden voters were repudiating Trump but remaining basically Republicans.

Joe Manchin’s latest break with his party’s nominal leadership was an announcement he made October 4 (https://www.cnn.com/2021/10/04/politics/manchin-debt-ceiling-biden-economic-package/index.html) that he would no longer join his fellow Democrats in resisting an immediate vote on the reconciliation bill. With Republicans blocking any extension of the nation’s debt ceiling except through reconciliation, Manchin and Sinema can either trigger a “vote-o-rama” session in which they can join the 50 Republicans to strip out most of the Democrats’ social-spending wish list from the bill, or – even worse – force the Democrats to pass a reconciliation bill just to keep the nation from defaulting, meaning any big reconciliation package can’t be taken up again for nearly another year. He’s also said that he won’t support a reconciliation package that doesn’t continue the ban on federal funding for women seeking abortions – while House Progressive Caucus chair Pramila Jayapal says she won’t support a bill with the ban.

No doubt the Democrats will realize that their already slim chances of keeping Congress in 2022 will be annihilated completely if they don’t pass some part of the Biden infrastructure agenda – both the $1.25 trillion bipartisan “hard” infrastructure bill that’s already cleared the Senate and at least some shell of the reconciliation package – and if they allow the U.S. government to default on its debts for the first time in its history. They will take whatever they can get and call it a victory, and limp along through the rest of Biden’s presidency as they face a Republican Congress that, as Senator John Thune (R-South Dakota) has promised, will turn Biden into a “half-term President,” unable to get anything more done before the 2024 election. The “progressive” Democrats who have held up the “hard” infrastructure bill in the House will have to give up their resistance – as, 12 years ago, they gave up their resistance to the Affordable Care Act and sullenly voted for it – and let it go through because the consequence of doing so will mean that neither bill succeeds and the Democrats in general will look like incompetent fools.

If that happens – if this unwitting coalition of implacable Republicans, irresponsible “moderate” Democrats and obdurate “progressive” Democrats blocks either infrastructure bill from passing and makes Biden look as hapless in the White House as Jimmy Carter – Donald Trump will sweep back into the Presidency in 2024 and run as an avenging angel. He will use the power of the Presidency to destroy all his real or perceived opponents and complete the task of ending American democracy he and the Republican Party have been engaged in for many years. And, since one of the big priorities of the modern-day Republican Party is to block any programs to slow down human-caused climate change, and also to do virtually nothing of substance to slow down or stop pandemic diseases, Mother Nature, which always bats last, will render the Earth no longer inhabitable by humans in the next 100 years or so.

It’s Not “Boeing’s Fatal Flaw” – It’s Capitalism’s

by MARK GABRISH CONLAN

Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

On September 14, 2021, after the British racial documentary 400 Years: Taking the Knee, KPBS showed an episode of the long-running documentary series Frontline called “Boeing’s Fatal Flaw,” written and directed by Thomas Jennings and featuring several New Yorkn Times journalists who worked on stories exposing the Boeing 737 Max airliner’s design and equipment flaws that led to two dire plane crashes that killed almost 350 people between them in 2018 and 2019. The first took place in October 2018 in Jakarta, Indonesia and involved a plane, fully loaded with passengers, that suddenly started diving to earth shortly after takeoff. According to the so-called “black box” flight recorder (something of a misnomer because we got to see footage of it and it was not black, but red), the plane had suddenly started diving and the pilots had tried to pull it back up, but the plane’s controls refused to let them. Indonesian aircraft analyst Gerry Soejatman told Frontline, “The plane went up to about 2,000 feet, just over a minute after takeoff, and the plane had a bit of a dive. And then the plane climbed to about 5,000 feet. But then, at 5,000 feet, the plane was fluctuating up and down. And then the plane just started diving. It just didn’t make sense. You don't see planes diving on departure. I was baffled. Why did it go down?”

In March 2019 a Boeing 737 Max being flown out of Addis Ababa, Ethiopia on a routine flight to Nairobi, Kenya did the same thing: as its pilots were trying to get it airborne the plane suddenly started diving to earth and nothing the flight crew tried to do could stop it. Joe Jacobsen, aviation safety engineer with the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) – the agency that is supposed to regulate the aircraft industry and ensure that planes are safe – said that when he looked at the black box recordings from that crash, “It didn't take long — just a couple of minutes — to see that there was rapid movement of the horizontal stabilizer. … [T]he fastest way to kill yourself in an airplane is to have the stabilizer malfunction.” If you know what a plane looks lille, you’ll be aware that in addition to the big wings midway down the fuselage (the main body of the aircraft), which has flaps (called “ailerons”) that control the plane’s direction and allow it to turn, there’s a big tail at the back end and two little wings under it. Those are the horizontal stabilizers, and their purpose is to control the plane’s vertical motion and make it go up, go down or stay horizontal as the flight plan specifies and the pilots direct. If it doesn’t do that – especially if it goes down while the pilots are trying to get the plane to go up – the result is often a catastrophic crash.

New York Times reporter James Glanz saw the reports on the black-box data from both 737 crashes and decided there was a story in it. “The plane continually tried to push the nose down, and the pilots were trying over and over again to stop the plane. And in the end, they lose that battle,” he told Frontline. Boeing officials blamed the crashes on pilot error and they sent an advisory to the airlines that were using the 737 Max and the pilots that were actually flying it, but their advisory was incomplete and didn’t let the pilots know what they were up against. What they were up against was a new piece of computer software called Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System, or MACS for short. MACS had originally been designed for use in military fighter planes that cruise at high altitudes and frequently are flown in high-risk maneuvers to fight off or elude enemy planes. Its purpose was to take over the controls automatically if the plane stalled in mid-air and threatened to fall out of the sky and crash. The New York Times reporters on the 737 story – James Glanz, Natalie Kitroeff, David Gelles and Jack Nicas – identified MACS as the problem with the 737 and the likely cause of both crashes after examining the radar records of both flights that had crashed, and finding them eerily similar. They learned that after an early test flight of the 737 Max had been unusually bumpy and the pilots complained that the plane hadn’t handled smoothly, Boeing management decided to extend the MACS system so it would work not only in high-altitude flight but at low altitudes, including take-offs and landings. Doug Pasternak, a staff member for a Congressional investigation into the 737 Max crashes, found a tell-tale document of a pilot who had “flown” in a test simulator of the 737 Max’s controls in November 2012 and had had the same problem the real-life pilots did six and seven years later: he lost control and, had he been flying for real, the plane would likely have crashed and killed everyone aboard.

But instead of either modifying MACS or eliminating it altogether, Boeing management decided on a “don’t ask, don’t tell” strategy: they simply omitted any reference to MACS from the manual given to 737 Max pilots. The reason was that Boeing was in a fierce competition with the European company Airbus, the world’s only other major supplier of large aircraft to airlines, and they wanted the 737 Max out not only as soon as possible but as cheaply as possible. At least one customer, Southwest Airlines – which had ordered 200 737 Max’s – demanded a rebate from Boeing if their pilots had to be retrained to handle the new aircraft. So Boeing simply didn’t tell anyone – the airlines, the pilots, or the government agency supposedly regulating them – that there were fundamental differences between the way the 737 Max handled in the air and the way previous Boeing 737’s had. What made it even worse was that on the 737 Max, the MACS was set to trigger in case there was an anomalous reading from one of the so-called “Angle of Attack” (AOA) sensors on either side of the back end of the plane. AOA readings from a single sensor are notoriously inaccurate; that’s why planes have two of them. Boeing eventually modified the MACS so it wouldn’t turn on unless both AOA sensors were reading deviations from the correct flight path, but it was too late for the victims of the Indonesian and Ethiopian crashes.

The FAA missed the possibility of a MACS failure with catastrophic consequences because for decades it and other government agencies supposedly in business to regulate private industry no longer do so. Instead they do something called “delegation,” which basically means outsourcing the task of regulating giant corporations to … the corporations themselves. Michael Huerta, former FAA executive, defended this process to Frontline. “There are those that believe it is the fox guarding the henhouse. Here is why it’s not,” he said in a masterpiece of Orwellian doublethink. “The company has an organization whose responsibility is to ensure that it is in compliance with the standards that are set by the FAA, and it has a level of independence from the entities that they’re overseeing.” Various countries – first China, then several other countries, then finally the United States – grounded the Boeing 737 Max in the wake of the Indonesian and Ethiopian crashes. Boeing CEO Dennis Mullenburg lost his job and was replaced by another clueless middle-aged white guy, David Calhoun. Boeing eventually modified MACS so it would only be triggered if both AOA sensors reported anomalies, and it also offered pilots more instruction on how to handle the situation if the MACS sensors kicked in and sent the plane downwards regardless of what the pilots wanted it to do. They were told to handle it as if the plane’s stabilizers had malfunctioned normally and grab a little wheel in the cockpit to turn the stabilizers manually. If you can imagine driving your car when the power steering suddenly goes out and you have to steer the car manually, imagine trying to do that in a huge airplane in which the part you suddenly have to move by your own muscle power is a huge piece of metal weighing several hundred pounds.

When the Boeing 737 Max crashes first occurred, I thought they were an object lesson in how we’ve become too dependent on computers and how we’ve incorporated them into our lives whether they really help make things more convenient or not, especially in systems like the 737 Max’s MACS where we’ve given the human controllers little or no way to fight back when the computer reacts to faulty data and makes a mistake. This Frontline presentation shows that the 737 Max crisis had a lot to do with the fundamental evil of capitalism and the futility of any attempt to regulate it. From the initial development of the 737 Max to the deliberate concealment of the MACS system from the pilots expected to fly the plane, “Boeing’s Fatal Flaw” is an indictment of capitalism itself and also the decisions by government regulators to cozy up to industry and basically let giant businesses like Boeing regulate themselves – which (sorry, Michael Huerta) is putting the fox in charge of the henhouse. Maybe I was a bit more sensitive to it after having watched 400 Years: Taking the Knee, but there seemed to me to be more than a bit of racism in Boeing’s attitude, blaming the crashes on pilots of color (Pacific Islanders in the Indonesian crash and Blacks in the Ethiopian one) and suggesting that fine, upstanding white American boys could have avoided the crashes and kept the planes safely under control. Frontline’s reporters directly asked Boeing CEO David Calhoun that very question, and he said, “We made a decision in December [2019] to recommend simulator training everywhere in the world because of the regulators and the pilots in the developing world. Not because the U.S. airlines needed it. They probably don’t.” When they pressed him on whether he thought American pilots could have bypassed the MACS and avoided the fatal crashes, Calhoun demanded that his answer not be filmed or recorded – and when Frontline refused to go along, Calhoun cut short the interview. (An American pilot interviewed on the program reviewed the radar data from the Ethiopian crash and told Frontline the Ethiopian pilots did everything he would have done in the same situation.) Today the Boeing 737 Max is once again in the air, flying passengers all around the world. Maybe additional pilot training and the minor modifications Boeing made to the MACS are enough to keep the plane’s passengers safe and give the pilots the tools they need to avoid another catastrophe like the ones in Indonesia and Ethiopia. Maybe they aren’t.

Dr. Huxtable and Mr. Hyde

by MARK GABRISH CONLAN

Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

The news that broke June 30 that the Pennsylvania Supreme Court had decided to set Bill Cosby free and reverse his conviction of drugging and raping Andrea Constand, an athetic director at Cosby’s alma mater, Temple University, in 2003 was shocking. A bare 4-3 majority of the Court’s seven justices seemed to deal a body blow to the whole idea that rich, powerful and/or famous men can ever be held accountable for their shabby (to say the least) treatment of women.

It wasn’t like there was really much room for doubt about Cosby’s guilt. This wasn’t a case like R. Kelly’s, in which a cable TV network put him on trial and found him guilty before the legal system has even had a chance to indict him, much less try him. It wasn’t like Michael Jackson’s case, in which he was actually acquitted in court – through the mechanism we have as a society to settle these things – only to have two people who testified for him come out of the rocks they were hiding under and claim they lied under oath to protect him … after he was dead and, conveniently, after the statute of limitations for perjury had expired so they couldn’t be punished for lying under oath.

It’s not like the case of Woody Allen, who’s been accused of unspeakable crimes by a vengeful ex-partner and the children of whom she’s the legal guardian and who was there when the kids were interrogated. Maybe he did exactly what his accusers said he did, but I take it with a grain of salt given that the accusers’ adoptive mother was there while they were being interrogated (as is required by law when the police question a minor) and the kids knew exactly what she wanted them to say.

When Bill Cosby was first charged – in the nick of time because the 12-year statute of limitations was about to expire in Constand’s case and had already run out for all his other victims – the Los Angeles Times and other publications quoted him as speaking in his own defense. The moment I read the bizarre tale he told – that he had got Constand’s consent to engage her in a weird sort of necking in which he claimed he brought her to orgasm without climaxing himself – the story was so preposterous and so outrageous I read it and thought, “He’s guilty as hell.”

It’s not that we hadn’t had clues before that. One magazine published a cover photo of Cosby on one side and the 60 women who had accused him of drugging and raping them on the other. The headline read, “He said … they said.” Women’s advocates often complain that police and other legal authorities don’t take complaints against rapists seriously if there’s only one complaining victim. That’s a bad thing, but the good thing (assuming you can call anything to do with sexual assault “a good thing”) is that this isn’t a crime most people who do it commit just once. Almost always there are other victims, and it should be the job of law enforcement to find them and bring justice to everyone the perpetrator attacked and abused.

I do remember thinking it seemed all too typical of American racism that the first celebrity charged and actually put on trial for sexual crimes in the #MeToo era was an African-American. Though I was convinced Cosby was guilty, it also smacked of the racist stereotype that all Black men have uncontrollable sex drives and will literally put their dicks into anyone or anything just to get off. Ironically Cosby himself had dropped a big hint of what he was up to all those years in a late-1960’s comedy album called It’s True! It’s True! which featured a routine called “Spanish Fly.” I had to ask my mother what that was. She said it was a (hopefully) mythical aphrodisiac men could slip to women and give them so uncontrollable an urge for sex that they would sit on a car’s gearshift lever and insert it into themselves just to have something up there.

On the album, Cosby expresses his sheer delight at the prospect of his TV show I Spy, in which he and Robert Culp played globetrotting secret agents disguised as tennis bums, was going to film an episode in Spain. He literally played a man who couldn’t contain his excitement over being in the land of this all-powerful sex drug. “This is the land of Spanish Fly, Spanish Fly, Spanish Fly,” Cosby said over and over again as part of his routine. Not that we took it seriously; he was a comedian, after all, and when that album came out it seemed at worst just a blip in the carefully constructed image of wholesomeness and child-like innocence Cosby had carefully built up for himself.

America has long had an odd love-hate relationship towards celebrities. “You Americans! You build up idols just for the fun of tearing them down!” a legendary celebrity once complained. His name was Rudolph Valentino, and he said it in 1923. For someone like Bill Cosby who’s been around as long as he has, we follow the ups and downs of his life as if he was part of our own family. We buy into the image he presents to us – and that only magnifies our sense of betrayal when he doesn’t live up to what he said, and got us to believe, he was.

A number of people who’ve been long-term fans of celebrities accused of sexual abuse of women – or men (quite a few of the most controversial allegations against people like Michael Jackson, Kevin Spacey and X-Men director Bryan Singer, have involved male victims) – have responded with a palpable sense of personal injury. “I played R. Kelly at my wedding!” one person complained to the media. Another wrote a weird mea culpa to the Los Angeles Times letters page questioning whether they should still listen to Michael Jackson, and ultimately deciding that they’d put aside his other songs but “Billie Jean” had been too much a part of their life to give up.

For me the celebrity whose #MeToo-inspired downfall was the most traumatic was Bill Cosby. During my own adolescence in the 1960’s my mother, my brother and I owned all of Cosby’s albums and played them over and over again. We responded to the down-home wit with which he retold the Biblical story of Noah and the Flood, and the silliness of his comments about Seattle – where, he said, people went out for “rain tans” and when the sun came up, they asked, “What did we do?” Mostly, though, we cherished the stories Cosby told of his own childhood in the mean but ultimately benign streets of Philadelphia, the “Buck Buck” games and the rivals that gave up when the huge “Fat Albert” was about to jump on them – a character so many people identified with and found lovable he spawned a children’s animated TV show called Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids.

This was the Bill Cosby I remembered, took to my heart and cherished. This was the Bill Cosby I saw perform live in 1965, when I was just 11. I saw him under unusual circumstances: he was coming to San Francisco to perform a benefit for the civil-rights organization SNCC (the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee) and my mom, a heavy-duty civil-rights activist until SNCC was taken over by “Black Power” leaders who didn’t want white allies as part of their movement, was involved in organizing it. I remember the jazz singer Carmen McRae and the SNCC Freedom Singers – whose album we owned – were also part of the program. Cosby performed his “Noah” bit and was every bit as lovable as he seemed on his records.

When the news that Cosby regularly drugged and raped women first broke in 2018, I remember one of his victims published an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times in which she said she resented that Cosby was portraying himself as an early supporter of the Black civil-rights movement and a personal friend of Martin Luther King, Jr. But Cosby was an early supporter of the civil-rights movement and a personal friend of King, and he put his career at risk giving money to civil-rights groups and performing benefits for them.

It’s occurred to me that the very entertainment industry in which Cosby made his fortune and achieved fame is responsible for this peculiar way of looking at humans and their behavior. We’ve been conditioned by the stories we’re told in movies and on TV to divide the human race into heroes and villains. The idea that a person can be a hero in some parts of their life and a villain in others is hard for our entertainment-conditioned minds to swallow. Bill Cosby was honorable and courageous in his early support for equal rights for African-Americans – and totally despicable in the way he treated women. But we’ve become so intolerant of moral complexity that when a story like this breaks we simply want to move Cosby from “hero” to “villain” in our moral lists.

I started losing interest in Bill Cosby in 1969, when he left Warner Bros. Records and started his own label, Tetragrammaton. I heard a local avant-garde radio station broadcast one of the four sides of his first LP for his own label, 8:15 12:15. The gimmick was that he had recorded it live in Lake Tahoe and had done two sets of shows, a family-friendly one at 8:15 p.m. and a considerably raunchier one at 12:15 a.m. The side I heard was from the 12:15 show and contained an interminable and highly unfunny skit ridiculing Gay men – and though this was well before I confronted my own sexuality, it still sounded insulting and not at all what I expected from the man whose tales of his childhood had been such an important part of my own. An Amazon.com reviewer named “Michael” wrote that this album was “out of touch with the warm, inoffensive quality that his later work is known for” and suggested that was why it was never reissued on CD.

Evidently Cosby himself wanted to retreat from the heavy-duty sexual content of this record, for in the 1970’s he did a 180° turnaround on his image. He starred in a number of TV situation comedies, most notably the sensationally successful The Cosby Show (1984-1992), in which he played Dr. Heathcliff “Cliff” Huxtable, upper-middle-class family man with a wife (Phylicia Rashad) and kids at a time when it was a novelty to see well-to-do African-Americans in any entertainment medium. When he wasn’t starring on The Cosby Show or indulging his well-known love of jazz by having great musicians like Dizzy Gillespie as guest stars (about the only reason I ever watched The Cosby Show), he was making public statements urging young Black people to stay in school, get good grades, avoid drugs and the “gangsta” lifestyle, and not listen to rap music.

That was fine by me – I can’t stand rap in general and “gangsta rap” in particular, and I can’t imagine why anyone would want to listen to it except the general rule that each new generation has to come up with a sound that pisses off the previous one. What I didn’t know, of course, is that Cosby’s pattern of drugging women and raping them would ultimately be documented stretching as far back as 1974. Neither I nor the rest of America knew that in his private life Cosby was a sex-hungry scumbag who was leaving a trail of women victims behind him: get him alone with a woman (whom he usually lured with the promise of some sort of favor the rich, well-connected can grant) and Dr. Huxtable turned into Mr. Hyde.

And now, though he served three years in prison on his original conviction, he’s got away with it at long last. Progressive activists sometimes say America has two systems of justice, but as the late Senator Eugene McCarthy said, we really have four: the one we learn about it in American civics classes, the one enforced against people of color and others official American society deems “less than human,” the one that protects police officers and the others who execute street justice (and sometimes literally “execute” it by killing them) against the people of color and other victims of system number two; and what McCarthy said was the worst of all, military justice.

African-Americans don’t usually get to be the beneficiaries of that third system of justice – the one that protects the rich and powerful from answering to their misdeeds. Usually they’re on the receiving end of system two – like Michael Brown of Ferguson, Missouri, Eric Garner and Amadou Diallo of New York, and George Floyd of Minneapolis, all executed by police (or, in the case of Trayvon Martin in Florida, a Neighborhood Watch activist and police wanna-be) who are usually protected by white judges and juries. (The actual conviction of Floyd’s principal killer, Derek Chauvin, was a genuine surprise despite the nationwide protest movement Floyd’s murder sparked – and I wouldn’t be at all surprised if Chauvin’s conviction is reversed on appeal because in the U.S. cops usually don’t get punished for killing Black people.)

But sometimes it happens that a Black American reaches the stratified heights of wealth and celebrity that enable them to avoid suffering for their crimes. O. J. Simpson amassed enough money to hire the greatest defense lawyers in America – there were so many high-powered attorneys working for him they became known as the “Dream Team” – that he escaped conviction for two murders he almost certainly committed. Likewise Bill Cosby could afford the attorneys who managed to persuade the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, against all considerations of right and justice, that he should be released because a former Philadelphia district attorney had promised not to prosecute him for his assault on Constand and the current D.A. was bound by that, like a blood oath.

The initial coverage of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court decision freeing Cosby seems like a pathetic parody of legalese that turned justice on its head to free a well-to-do, well-connected defendant with enough money to hire lawyers to think up this sort of bullshit on his behalf. According to Justice David Wecht (a name which should live in infamy), who wrote the court’s opinion, “an affront to fundamental fairness, particularly when it results in a criminal prosecution that was foregone for more than a decade.” It said justice and “fair play and decency” required that district attorney Kevin Steele, who brought the case against Cosby for assaulting Constand, stand by the decision of the previous district attorney (Bruce Castor, whose other contribution to criminal justice in the U.S. was representing former President Donald Trump in his second impeachment trial) not to prosecute.

The problem was that after Castor chose not to prosecute Cosby for assaulting Constant, but before Steele reopened the case, Constand had sued Cosby in civil court. Under oath, Cosby had given a deposition containing that weird and frankly unbelievable account of their interaction that, when I read about it in the media, convinced me he was guilty. The four (out of seven) Pennsylvania Supreme Court justices who backed Cosby argued that if he had thought he still might be criminally prosecuted, he could have taken the Fifth Amendment and avoided giving that testimony. The Court said that overturning the conviction and barring any further prosecution “is the only remedy that comports with society’s reasonable expectations of its elected prosecutors and our criminal justice system.”

Never mind the “fair play and decency” Cosby should have shown towards Andrea Constand and all the other women he drugged and had his way with while they were helpless to resist. (My understanding of how date-rape drugs like Rohypnol work is they keep you conscious but incapacitate you, so you know what is being done to you but you’re powerless to stop it.) Aside from the sheer sickness of the crime – raping a drugged partner, like raping a child, is so far from my ken I can’t imagine why anyone would want to do it – and its Mr. Hyde-like opposition to everything Bill Cosby had told us he was and used his powerful gifts as an entertainer to make us believe it, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court’s decision to free him on the ground of “fair play and decency” is an insult to any person who has been sexually assaulted and gone to the police in the vain hope that justice would result.

In the past I’ve been critical of certain aspects of the #MeToo movement. I’ve questioned the temptation to believe that mere allegations constitute proof, and I’ve been even more critical of how people have been effectively blacklisted on the basis of unproven accusations. I was appalled when people who thought they were being politically progressive started campaigns like “#Mute R. Kelly” that aimed to take his songs off streaming services. It should be your decision – not that of a corporation or of political groups pressuring a corporation to censor him – whether you still want to listen to R. Kelly or not based on the charges against him. He should have a fair trial, and if he’s convicted he should be punished like anyone else, but organizing pressure groups to take away his livelihood smacks too much of the 1950’s Hollywood blacklist, in which liberals and Leftists were tarred with the brush of “Communism,” became unemployable and had their names taken off films they’d written.

But Bill Cosby had his fair trial. Indeed, as a rich man he had more of a chance to prove his innocence than most Black men accused of crime in America. He was duly tried and sentenced – and then his attorneys figured out a way they could persuade the Pennsylvania Supreme Court to let him off the hook. They earned whatever Cosby paid them, but justice suffered. And so did the overall task of holding powerful people accountable for their sexual abuse and exploitation of non-powerful people.I can’t help but wonder if Harvey Weinstein and the other #MeToo targets will also be able to weasel out of accountability for exploiting people and using them as animate sex dolls – just as I can’t help but wonder if an appeals court will let Derek Chauvin off the hook after his righteous conviction for killing George Floyd.

Sometimes appeals courts are necessary protections against judicial abuses. Other times, as in the Cosby case, they are second bites of the apple given to rich, powerful and influential defendants even after trial courts and juries have proven their guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. Erwin Chermerinsky, legal columnist for the Los Angeles Times whose writings I generally admire, took Cosby’s side in a June 30 column (https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2021-06-30/bill-cosby-case-overturned-fifth-amendment-court) that read, “The Pennsylvania court’s ruling is disturbing in allowing Cosby to go free notwithstanding his sexual assault convictions, but it is correct in applying a crucial constitutional right.” I couldn’t disagree more: just because a previous Pennsylvania district attorney decided not to prosecute him, that shouldn’t have given a rapist a perpetual get-out-of-jail-free card.

“Frontline” Exposes Cruelty of Religiously Motivated Leaders in Afghanistan, India

by Mark Gabrish Conlan

Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

This post was originally intended for my movie and TV blog, https://moviemagg.blogspot.com, but it dealt with so many serious political and social issues – especially in terms of how we treat women and people of different ethnic and religious backgrounds – that I felt it belonged here in my more serious Zenger’s Newsmagazine blog as well. – M.G.C.

Last night at 10 p.m. I watched a fascinating, if also incredibly depressing, documentary on the PBS series Frontline about two grim stories in the Asian region of Afghanistan and India. The two stories they combined into the program were “Leaving Afghanistan,” about the chaos the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan is leaving behind and the likelihood that Afghanistan will either fall under the total control of the Talban (incidentally the word “Taliban” just means “religious students” – it’s as if the U.S. were taken over in a violent revolution led by a guerrilla army called “The Seminarians”) or the sort of civil war that afflicted the place in the 1990’s among various factions that led to many Afghans regarding the Taliban’s takeover with a sense of relief. Anyone even remotely aware of the news from the late 1990’s knows what Taliban rule will be like for the Afghan people – women draped in blankets and denied education, health care, employment or even the right to go outside; destruction of priceless historical landmarks because they pre-dated the existence of Islam; a ban on all public entertainments except for mass executions in Kabul’s former soccer stadium which Afghans will be forced to watch; and the littering of Afghanistan’s streets, mountain paths and landscapes with people killed arbitrarily on the Taliban’s orders because they weren’t considered sufficiently “Islamic” – including the Hazara, a minority tribe of Shi’a Muslims whom the Taliban have marked for genocidal extermination because they don’t consider Shi’a Muslims to be real Muslims.

“Leaving Afghanistan” had very little to do with the politics surrounding the U.S.’s unilateral withdrawal from what’s become America’s longest war – when he announced the pull-out President Biden said he was the fourth President to preside over the U.S. involvement in Afghanistan and he was going to make sure there wouldn’t be a fifth – or the big issue the U.S. media have been covering, which is the likely fate of the Afghan interpreters and others who served the U.S. presence and have immediately become marked for death by the Taliban now that American forces are no longer around to protect them. Instead the reporter, Najibullah Quarishi, focused on the likely outcome of the U.S. pullout for Afghans themselves, including the increasing involvement of Iran in Afghan politics. According to Quarishi, the Iranian government is pulling their militia force, the Fatemiyoun, out of Syria (where they were organized to fight in support of the Bashir al-Assad regime against the attempted revolution the U.S. was kinda-sorta backing), and infiltrating them into Afghanistan, ostensibly to protect the Hazara from extermination at the hands of the Taliban. Quarishi managed to get an interview with the Taliban warlord Mullah Abdul Manan Niazi, with whom he got “cred” in a fascinating way. After passing through 12 checkpoints to get to Niazi’s camp 500 miles west of Kabul, Afghanistan’s (nominal) capital, going through a 90-minute mountain hike and getting placed in a holding cell under a flag reading, “Welcome to the Taliban Court,” he heard the muezzin call the Taliban faithful to prayer – and joined in, thereby establishing that he was a faithful Muslim and therefore someone Mullah Niazi could trust.

Quarishi said that in person Mullah Niazi was quite personable and charming (so were Hitler and Stalin, according to people who met them and lived to tell the tale), and after making the obligatory statement that America “should go back where it came from: (an ironic parallel to the cry of anti-immigration Americans that one part or another of our polyglot population should “go back where they came from”), he told Quarishi of the Iranian Fatemiyoun, whom he said the Taliban were killing almost as fast as Iran could send them but still constituted a threat. Niazi claimed – and showed footage on his cell phone to prove it – that his Taliban forces had ambushed a Fatemiyoun detachment and killed 150 of the estimated 700 fighters Iran was trying to infiltrate. Quarishi also got an interview with a Fatemiyoun member who said, “Right now, I know that 5,000 men have already been placed inside Afghanistan, in every military division. Even inside the government there are Fatemiyoun. Five thousand are inside. Three thousand are in the police. Another thousand like me are in regular jobs.” Much of the reporting about the U.S. exit from Afghanistan has focused on how quickly the Taliban are sweeping through Afghanistan – they claim to be in charge of 80 percent of the country already, though other estimates say they have 55 percent, and much of the U.S. media have portrayed the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan as similar to the speed with which the North Viet Namese army and Viet Cong guerrillas overran the supposedly sovereign government of South Viet Nam once the U.S. was no longer around to protect it, and the resulting scenes of people hanging on to helicopters in a last-ditch attempt to flee what they imagined would be Communist retribution. Actually, the Viet Namese went through a relatively peaceful reunification and the United States lost the Viet Nam War but won the peace (just as the Confederacy lost the U.S. Civil War but won the peace – within 12 years after the end of the war they were able to get the federal troops out of the South, restore white supremacist governments to power, take away African-Americans’ voting rights and civil rights, and reduce America’s Black population to the penury and permanent servitude Southern whites – and a lot of Northern whites as well – thought was their proper “place”), Afghanistan has little or nothing to offer the Western world other than its strategic importance as the so-called “Gateway to Asia.”

So there is little reason for the advanced world to do much of anything for the country or its people except let them stew in their own juices and strike back only when they pose a threat to some person or country outside their borders, as they did when they gave safe harbor to Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda to (among other things) plan and stage the September 11, 2001 attacks. The supposed “Afghan government” is a pipe dream – when Biden said he thought they had enough soldiers and equipment to hold out against a Taliban attack once we withdrew he was being uncharacteristically naïve and idiotic. I suspect most of those people in the so-called “Afghan army” are there to get their hands on American training and equipment so they can desert and fight for one warlord or faction or another – just as America’s carefully trained and painstakingly built “Iraqi army” largely deserted en masse and took their American-trained skills and American equipment to ISIS. A brutal and long-running civil war with the rest of the world deciding we’ve already invested too much money and energy in Afghanistan is one of the few things for the country that would be even worse than a total Taliban takeover; for all the horrors of their rule, at least the Taliban brought stability and order out of the chaos of civil war that followed the Soviet Union’s withdrawal in 1989. Ironically, just weeks after Quarishi interviewed Mullah Niazi, he was killed in an ambush and his son took over his force – and the son seemed more cosmopolitan (I briefly got the impression he was speaking English; his dad didn’t seem to know any Western language but was fluent in both Pashto and Dari, the common languages of southern and northern Afghanistan, respectively) but equally dedicated to the Taliban’s cause.

The second segment of last night’s Frontline was just as chilling, albeit in a different way: it had to do with the ruling party of India, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), whom the New Yorker ran a story about a couple of years ago and described as a Hindu fundamentalist party seemingly determined to make India Muslimrein the way Adolf Hitler and his Nazi associates were determined to make first Germany, then Europe and finally the whole world Judenrein. One of the particular evils of authoritarians in general and warriors in particular is that they regard rape as one of the privileges of conquest, and they enlist people into their causes with promises of all the money they can steal, all the enemies they can kill, and all the women (and, if they’re interested in that, boys) they can force themselves on and abuse to their heart’s content. The story told by correspondent Ramita Navai deals with two cases of rape in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, which she describes as “the most populous state in India and the most electorally significant. It also holds a less impressive statistic: It has the second-highest reported number of rapes in the whole country.” One of the victims she profiled was an incredibly courageous woman Navai agreed to call by the alias “Jaya” because she’s still in danger of retribution and therefore can’t allow her real name to be used. Jaya was personally attacked at the home of a leading BJP politician in the state, Kuldeep Singh Sengar, whom Navai describes as “then a powerful politician in India’s ruling BJP party. He’s now in prison for Jaya’s rape but still has a loyal following. … Even though Sengar's in prison, he and his family still control the area,” which Navai explained made villagers in Jaya’s town unwilling to talk to her because she’s a foreign journalist and word might get back to Sengar’s friends. In June 2017 Jaya, only 16 years old, went to Sengar’s home, ostensibly for a job interview.

“The door opened,” she testified in his trial. “We reached the courtyard. Sengar caught me by my hand and dragged me to his room. He stripped me of my clothes. He closed the door and subjected me to a sexual assault. When I opposed, he said, ‘If you raise a voice, I will murder you.’” Though she initially reported the rape only to her aunt, word must have got out because within s few days of being raped by Sengar, Jaya was kidnapped, taken to another village, locked in a house and regularly gang-raped for a week. “The men took turns to rape me,” she told an Indian journalist. “I recognized two of them as Sengar’s men. They kept me on sedatives. Once I even tried to flee, but I was caught and sedated again.” When the police finally found her abandoned in the house after eight days in captivity, they took down the names of the people who had gang-raped her but refused to register her rape allegation against Sengar. What followed for Jaya was a Kafka-esque ordeal as she tried to report her rape to the state government of Uttar Pradesh – only the state’s chief minister, Yoga Adityanath, whom Navai described as “a senior member of the ruling BJP party and often touted as a future Indian prime minister.” Within a year of taking office as essentially the governor of Uttar Pradesh, he dismissed thousands of criminal cases pending against BJP politicians – many of whom had been accused of rape or other forms of violence against women. Jaya continued her allegations despite the retribution not only against her but her family; in April 2018 her father, Surendra, was attacked by a gang whose leader he recognized as Sengar’s brother. Jaya was so desperate that she publicly soaked herself in kerosene, intending to commit suicide by immolation.

Fortunately, not only was she rescued, the publicity surrounding her attempt to kill herself led to a reopening of her case and a transfer of Sengar’s trial from Uttar Pradesh to New Delhi, India’s capital. India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi – the leader of the BJP and a key player in their attacks on India’s Muslim population – proclaimed “zero tolerance” for rape and ordered Sengar to turn himself in. But Jaya’s ordeal wasn’t over; a month before she was scheduled to testify against Sengar in court, the police detail that was supposed to protect her was suddenly withdrawn. She was traveling in a car with her lawyer and two aunts to a meeting. A truck rammed the car and the other three passengers were all killed. Ultimately Sengar was convicted of rape and manslaughter and sentenced to life in prison. The men charged with kidnapping and gang-raping her are still awaiting trial. In September 2020, another rape scandal broke in the Hathras region of Uttar Pradesh. Navai spotted tweets on her Twitter feed alleging that a 19-year-old woman, Manisha Valmiki, had been gang-raped by four neighbors and injured so severely in the attack she was left paralyzed. “When we got there, there was zero press,” said Indian journalist Nidhi Suresh. “Her mother and her aunt walked us to the crime scene. … It was just a small clearing — which, by the way, the police had not sealed. It was open completely. [The victim’s mother] just kept saying, ‘Something bad happened to my daughter, something bad happened to my daughter,’ and she spoke about how she found her without any clothes.”

According to Navai, one reason the rapists thought they could get away with assaulting Manisha and leaving her for dead was the continuing power of India’s caste system, its highly regimented and brutally enforced class divisions that have brutally been enforced for thousands of years. She explained that Manisha and her family are from a lower caste. “The men she said raped her are Thakurs, an influential high caste who own the majority of land here and include many police officers and politicians like the chief minister, Yogi Adityanath,” Navai explained. The accused rapists’ families defended them by saying Manisha’s own family had beaten her for having consensual sex with one of the men. The police refused to register the rape allegations or do a rape kit on Manesha, so crucial evidence was lost. Eight days later – thanks to the involvement of the Bhim Army, an organization that advocates for equal rights for lower-caste Indians, and its leader, Chandrashekhar Azad Ravan – Indian media finally took notice. “Our local team went to the village and realized that the police were not taking action because of pressure by local politicians and the government,” Ravan explained. When Ravan went to see Manisha in the hospital, he recalled, “The police had blocked the whole area. I reached the hospital by motorcycle. I had to fight my way through and I demanded to see the girl.” When he finally got to see her, she could barely speak, her oxygen and blood pressure levels were fluctuating, and it was clear to Ravan that she didn’t have long left to live. Her family had her make a videotaped statement so there would be a record of her allegation after she died. When she finally passed away on April 29, 2021, Manisha’s mother, Rama Valdiki, was appalled that the authorities insisted on cremating her almost immediately instead of turning her body over to her family for the prescribed burial rites under the Hindu religion. “I want to take my daughter home,” Rama said. “I want to respect our Hindu traditions by performing her last rites. I want to apply turmeric on her before the cremation. I want to do this one last thing. She will never come back.”

Later senior officials in the BJP state government, including at least one senior police leader, denied that Manisha had ever been raped, and a district magistrate visited Manisha’s family and tried to pressure them to withdraw the rape allegation. According to Navai, Manisha’s deathbed video “went viral and fueled more unrest around the case. Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath blamed the outrage on opposition parties and an international conspiracy to undermine him. The trial of the four men Manisha accused has been delayed by COVID. Their lawyer claims Manisha’s video statements about the rape were fabricated. There have been allegations that the Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath's office has been trying to cover up this gang rape and has been trying to protect the accused. … Cases like Manisha’s and Jaya's continue to polarize India, pitting politics against families’ search for justice. One of India’s most respected and senior legal figures told me these cases should be a wake-up call for more accountability when it comes to violence against women.” The official she was referring to was former Indian Supreme Court Justice Madan Lokur, who told Navai, “It's completely inexplicable. Why should anybody—not only the prime minister, or not only the chief minister — why should anybody remain silent when something like this happens? They should speak out. It doesn't matter who the perpetrator is. The government, the state, the police machinery, everybody should come out in the open and say that this is wrong.” But the way India’s authorities treat allegations of rape and other forms of sexual assault – and the good old boys’ network that forms around highly placed perpetrators and protects them – should be a warning to us Americans not to be too complacent. The more power people, including religious fundamentalists, and others who deny the basic humanity and equality of women – whether it’s by condoning and protecting rapists (as the U.S. military has been accused of doing routinely when servicewomen are raped by higher-raking servicemen) or enacting laws threatening women with prison if they make the “wrong” choices concerning their bodies and how to deal with sex and pregnancy – achieve, the harder they will work to enslave women to men’s lusts and their own wombs.