MARCH 2023 IGNOMINIOUS ABUURDITY OF THE MONTH: THE IGGY

1. Republican Finger Pointers. Republicans are well known for passing blame to anyone, or thing, except where facts point or where they might be culpable. There seems no limit to the absurdities of their finger pointing. Now, their latest scapegoat for the collapse of two major banks this month? You got it: “woke” investment practice, once again dragging the effort to address the climate crisis into America’s increasingly polarizing culture wars. It doesn’t appear to matter—like always—that their reasoning” doesn’t align with assessments from leading economists.

“We see now coming out they were one of the most woke banks in their quest for the ESG-type policy and investing,” Kentucky Rep. James Comer, a Republican and chair of the House Oversight Committee, said on a Sunday morning Fox News program--referring to climate-friendly investment funds that take environmental, social and governance factors into account.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis—who is being floated as a potential GOP frontrunner in the 2024 presidential election—also appeared on the Fox show, where he suggested diversity and equity efforts could be to blame. “I mean, this bank, they’re so concerned with DEI and politics and all kinds of stuff,” he said. “I think that really diverted from them focusing on their core mission.”

Other high-profile Republican pundits and far-right lawmakers, including the usual suspects Donald Trump Jr, Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Green, and Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley, chimed in with similar accusations on social media. Suzanne Downing, a former communications director of the Alaska Republican Party, explicitly blamed financial institutions “buying into climate change theology” in a Sunday op-ed.

But those accusations have been broadly refuted by leading economists who place the blame more squarely on rising interest rates from the Federal Reserve’s efforts to tame inflation, plus decisions by the banks to invest in Treasury bonds and other government-backed securities, as well as cryptocurrency like Bitcoin.

“I don’t have a clear idea of what woke is and it seems to change by the day. Maybe government bonds are now woke, but that is what got them into trouble,” Dean Baker, a senior economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research who predicted the 2008 housing bubble crash, told Business Insider.

According to analyses by Baker and other well-known economists, the fall of Silicon Valley Bank, which held some $220 billion in assets and was America’s 16th largest commercial bank before its collapse Friday, was tied largely to the bank’s decision to buy up government bonds amid the tech boom between 2019 and 2022, when many Silicon Valley companies were flush with cash.

With deposits skyrocketing and demand for loans relatively low, the bank chose to invest the bulk of that money in government bonds, he said, which tanked in value as the tech boom faded and the Fed raised interest rates to curb inflation. As clients began asking for their money back, Silicon Valley Bank was forced to prematurely sell $21 billion in bonds at a $1.8 billion loss, triggering an old-fashioned bank run, Rubinstein concluded.

Signature Bank’s collapse can be explained even more simplistically. As the finance trade publication Barron’s noted in its apt analysis, “the bank’s connections with cryptocurrency seem to have spooked depositors after Silicon Valley Bank collapsed, prompting a run on the bank’s deposits which, in turn, prompted action from regulators.” Who warned U.S. banks to stay away from the cryptocurrency business.

These facts, of course, don’t resonate with the GOP’s deregulating faithful. No way would they connect the collapse to the Trump administration’s rolling back financial regulations that aimed at preventing financial crashes. As always, the American public will ultimately pay the price.

2. Fox News’ Tucker Carlson. Carlson hinted at a new conspiracy theory to explain the train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, and it’s that the train coming off the tracks in an area with a lot of white people was probably on purpose.

“East Palestine is overwhelmingly white and it’s politically conservative and that shouldn’t be relevant, but it very much is,” Tucker is quoted as saying.

Andy Levy and Danielle Moodie, co-hosts of The New Abnormal politics podcast, agree on the latest episode of their show that arguing against this type of thinking with logic is futile, but they give it a go anyway.

“Where do these train tracks get put down? Usually in areas that are overwhelmingly rural, overwhelmingly low-income, and where these derailments happen, you hope, ‘Oh, no one will really care.’ You don’t see train tracks running through affluent areas. So to me, this is actually really a conversation about class and capitalism and deregulation than it is one of the white identity. But leave it to Fox News and Tucker Carlson to find something else to whine and complain about,” says Moodie.

But Levy throws even more logic out there.

“He won’t put any of the blame for this on Trump,” he says. “And again, it’s been very well documented, if this train had had this different kind of brake, there’s at least a decent chance it would’ve stopped the derailment, or there’s a greater chance that it would’ve made the derailment less severe. While the Obama administration wanted these trains to have such brakes. they ended up having to drop their requirements to a different level because of lobbying by the rail industry. And then Trump just got rid of the brake requirements altogether.”

All Carlson cares about is project the appearance of protecting Trump, a man he allegedly despises.

3. Daily Wire Host Michael Knowles.  At the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) last weekend, Knowles said that “for the good of society…transgenderism must be eradicated from public life entirely—the whole preposterous ideology, at every level.” He worded his statement in such a way that it would inevitably create outrage that he could then angrily refute by insisting that “eradicating transgenderism” was not the same thing as eradicating transgender people. This sort of word game is a well-known right-wing tactic for garnering media attention.

Make no mistake: this attack on transgender people represents a deadly attack on the fundamental principle of American democracy, the idea that all people are created equal.

These right-wingers see the government institutions that defend these democratic tenets as part of a totalitarian system designed to destroy national virtue. If this were truly the case (it is not), it would be an act of heroism to try to destroy those systems altogether. Right-wing attacks on the FBI, the Department of Justice, and even the government itself over the arrest of January 6th rioters who they insist were peaceful tourists shore up the idea that the FBI and DOJ are part of a government determined to crush Trump supporters. That ideology invites those who believe it to continue to attack our government.

Knowles’s statement last week that transgenderism must be eradicated from public life was not simply an attack on transgender individuals, although it was certainly that. Tapping into the anti-LGBTQ sentiment that Trump and those like him have used to win voters, the statement was a crucial salvo in the attempt to destroy American democracy and replace it with Christian nationalism.

But there is a very simple answer to the radical right’s attack on LGBTQ people that also answers their rejection of democracy. It is an answer that history has proved again and again.

Once you give up the principle of equality, you have given up the whole game. You have admitted the principle that people are unequal, and that some people are better than others. Once you have replaced the principle of equality with the idea that humans are unequal, you have stamped your approval on the idea of rulers and subjects. At that point, all you can do is to hope that no one in power decides that you belong in the lesser group.

In 1858, Abraham Lincoln, then a candidate for the Senate, warned that arguments limiting American equality to white men and excluding black Americans were the same arguments “that kings have made for enslaving the people in all ages of the world…. Turn in whatever way you will—whether it come from the mouth of a King, an excuse for enslaving the people of his country, or from the mouth of men of one race as a reason for enslaving the men of another race, it is all the same old serpent.”

Either people—men, in his day—were equal, or they were not. Lincoln went on: “I should like to know if taking this old Declaration of Independence, which declares that all men are equal upon principle and making exceptions to it…where will it stop?”

4. Governor Bill Lee and the Tennessee State Legislature. If there ever was a time to boycott a state, now would be it. On Monday, the Tennessee House of Representatives passed a law that allows county clerks to refuse to marry same-sex, transgender, and mixed-race couples if they disagree with the union, The New Republic reports. 

The bill, which now moves to the state Senate, reads: “a person shall not be required to solemnize a marriage if the person has an objection to solemnizing the marriage based on the person’s conscience or religious beliefs.”

In December, President Biden signed the Respect for Marriage Act, but the new law in Tennessee takes advantage of religiously affiliated organizations’ long refusal to issue licenses for same-sex marriages. State Rep. Monty Fritts sponsored the bill. According to the Memphis Flyer, Fritts told the Children and Family Affairs Subcommittee Tuesday that a “big reason” he put forth the bill was to help block elder abuse.

“When you look at some of the research that we have found on this, that … young folks are trying to marry older folks to get to their financial accounts … I think there are other things that we need to do.”

Tennessee Stands, a conservative religious group, offered its support and hope in favor of passing the bill.

“Our religious beliefs are sacred, and the exercise of those beliefs is a right that has been given to us by God and is protected by our Constitution.” …. “Therefore, all those who perform marriage ceremonies in the state of Tennessee should not be forced by law to perform a ceremony that falls outside of their religious beliefs. They should have the ability to object to participating, without fear of reprisal.”

Many supporters of full marriage equality have expressed fear that Biden’s Respect for Marriage Act doesn’t go far enough. The act protects the laws of the 15 states that permit same-sex marriage, but it equally protects the laws of 35 states that restrict LGBTQ people’s rights, as MSNBC reports. Essentially, it gives religious groups and states way too much room for bias against LGBTQ people.

The passage of this latest bill adds to the long list of attacks on the state’s LGBTQ community by its conservative Republican governor, Bill Lee.

Lee has been at war with drag performers in his state. He’s openly said he plans to sign a recently passed bill restricting “adult cabaret performances” and banning gender-affirming care for the state’s minors. This is the same governor who himself was photographed wearing women’s clothing while in college. (I know, boys will be boys.)

The Tennessee ACLU writes that the anti-transgender bills are not only in violation of the First Amendment to express oneself, but they’re “written so broadly and vaguely that they would allow government officials to censor performers based on their own subjective viewpoints of what they deem appropriate on any given day,” and describes the bills as a “malicious attempt to remove LGBTQ people from public life. These bans are being fueled by the same paranoia banning books and censoring teachers.”

Instead of focusing on the issues that Tennesseans care about, radical politicians are wasting their time and using their power to target the LGBTQ+ community… These bills are not about protecting children, and they are not about religious freedom…They’re about stripping away the basic human rights that LGBTQ+ people have fought for over decades.

It’s worth noting that this is the same state legislature has passed legislation, which Lee signed, to totally ban abortions, making it a felony to provide an abortion, with no exceptions for rape or incest. In cases where a mother’s life is threatened, it only includes “affirmative defense” that puts the burden on the doctor to prove in court that an abortion was necessary to prevent death or debilitating injury. But the defense would come after criminal felony charges.

5. Right Wing Political Commentator Dinesh D’Sousa. D’Sousa has been dishonest his whole life. As a student at Dartmouth, his pieces for The Dartmouth Review were so consistently false his peers called him Distort D’Newsa. With experience, he has become an even bigger liar. He has prospered as a conservative gadfly and fabulist.

It is easy to work his side of the street. You do not need to bear the expense of fact-checkers — or the burden of logic. Take his reaction to the latest American school massacre. He trots out the meaningless pablum that “Guns don’t kill people. People kill people”.

However, he reveals his true nature through his confident assertion of complete bullshit — to wit, his tweeted statement, “Well, cars kill more people than guns do.”

Not only is that a lie, but it is also an easily provable lie. In 2021, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration estimates 42,915 people died from car accidents. For the same year, the Gun Violence Archive reported 45,166 gun deaths.

It is true that more people used to die on the road than they did by gunshot, but American gun-nuttery, combined with a concerted effort to reduce car deaths, has flipped that coin. Politicians took the devastation wrought by car crashes and did something about it.

They passed laws requiring automobile safety features — like mandating seat belt use and frontal air bags. Traffic experts redesigned roads and signs. And the authorities took on one of the leading causes of crashes — drunk driving. Although, they needed a kick in the ass from a civilian to get on it.

From 1980 to 2021, the US automobile fatality rate declined by 64%. From 2000 to 2021, American gun deaths increased by 56%.

It was not smooth sailing. The car lobby, much like the gun, tobacco, lead, and fossil fuel lobbies, was ferocious in protecting profits no matter who got hurt. Lee Iacocca, the creator of the Ford Mustang and the man who rescued Chrysler, was adamantly opposed to saving lives with mandatory airbags. Although, he became a convert, and thousands of Americans are alive today in part because of his “epiphany.” 

Engineers had talked about airbags for years. However, the car companies were unenthusiastic — supposedly because of technological doubts, but probably because of perceived market implications: “Safety doesn’t sell,” was a familiar Iacocca refrain.

Iacocca eventually changed his mind, mainly because the American car consumer proved his dictum about safety wrong — it did sell. During the 1980s, Volvo stressed its reputation for safety, and its sales increased while other imports declined. Today, the idea of a car not having both front and side airbags is hard to imagine — even though side airbags are not mandatory.

Nowhere did this welcome rise of sanity require anyone to ban cars. Why? Because we achieved the result by requiring driver's licenses, written and road tests, and safety lessons. In addition, the law requires drivers to carry insurance and cars to pass safety inspections.

In the case of automobiles, politicians paid heed to what the majority of Americans supported — safer cars, driven by qualified drivers, bound by laws and regulations limiting the damage a few anti-social gits could do.

Industry groups and the AAA have embraced life-saving measures. In contrast, the gun lobby, rallying around the NRA's bloody standard, has bribed craven conservatives to thwart the will of the majority with a cynical embrace of the Second Amendment.

Their fundamentalist interpretation of that poorly worded passage would have horrified the Founders. I wager that, if they were alive today, they would look at the massacre of children and the daily grind of gun deaths with horror. They would roll up their sleeves and fix it — whatever it took.

Thomas Paine would say that was only common sense.  

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And the March IGGY winner is:

I’m going with Republican finger-pointers, by a pinkie, over Tennessee law makers.