They Aren’t New

In 1967, I’d about played out my rock & roll pipedreams and my father and step-mother had confiscated my coerced “college savings” (US Savings Bonds compulsorily taken from my paper route earnings as an 11-through-13-year-old plus a couple years of summer farmhand work) and written a $5,000 check (about $47,000 in 2024 money) to a fly-by-night for-profit (is there any other kind?) Texas “computer school.” I was deposited, with $100 cash to tide me over until my first after-school job’s paycheck, in a Dallas flophouse that the school pretended was a “dorm.” I was barely 19 years old. Lucky for me, there were several other Kansas students/victims in the “dorm.” After a few nights of cowering inside our rooms with furniture stacked against the doors to keep the roving drunks out, we found a house to rent together.

That turned out to be an unsatisfactory arrangement because the oldest-and-wisest of us (a very low bar to exceed) decided to to back home to Lawrence, Kansas and finish his accounting degree at the University of Kansas. Soon afterwards, the next-sophisticated of our remaining quartet of Kansas bachelors decided to move to rented room in a house across town. Not wanting to be stuck paying rent for the guy who had broke up the study-band, I followed the twins and rented a single-car garage apartment behind the house they were renting. Calling that room “an apartment” is a huge compliment. It was nothing more than a tiny room with a camper-style “bathroom” and a single-burner stovetop, sink, and micro-refrigerator kitchen. It cost $10/week, which was all I could afford with $10 going to rent, $10 going to school tuition, $10 for food and transportation, and the rest to taxes and other uncontrollable expenses on a $50/week income. So, when I got the occasional invitation to a free meal, I always took it.

My new across-the-driveway neighbors were the first people I had ever met from Alabama. They rented the entire downstairs apartment, with a quartet of kids, and were the “apartment managers.” They were also the worst people I had ever met at that point in my life: with Confederate flags, racist posters and KKK memorabilia, and swastikas on their walls. They had invited me to dinner one evening and, when I entered their apartment, I was immediately struck with so much radical-right artwork that I thought it was some kind of sick joke. I must have stood in the backdoor way for several minutes, staring at the horrific, nightmare  interior of that living room.

I was mostly stunned throughout the evening. I am often stunned into incomprehension by the vile behavior I have witnessed from my “fellow” human beings. But that hadn’t happened so blatantly in my previous 19 years. For the next three years, my bar-of-expectation became lower by the experience on a constant and relentlessly disappointing interval. I was exposed to poverty at third world country levels. I was exposed to racism, brutality, corruption, and unexpectedly selfish and vile behavior. Dallas was a real college-of-the-streets experience for me. I thought I had seen some bad shit, worse than most people ever experience, before Dallas, Texas, but life was just getting started with me.

Meeting the two twenty-something people from Alabama was the beginning of what formed my increasingly low opinion of human beings. Up to then, I had never experience overt, hateful, racist people. Probably lots of discrete variations of that theme, but these folks were not even a little bit shy about flauting their hate. Today, November 5, 2025, many Americans (the good ones) are stunned to learn how awful their neighbors and countryfolk (sadly, and certainly not “fellow” countryfolk) really are. This election is a repudiation of every professed “Christian value” I ever heard on my way to atheism. This election voids 248 years of spoken, if not acted upon, traditional liberal values of equality, equal opportunity, decency, fairness, civil responsibility, patriotism, obligation, and gratitude.

As a friend wrote this morning, “Welcome to Ameristan. Manipulated by affirmation---and that’s a wrap on the US as we’ve known it.” We can never go back to anything resembling the country most of us thought we were building. From here out, everything will be different.

Fooled Again?

Today’s big left issue is Biden’s “collaboration” with Israel and Netanyahu’s Gaza-and-beyond expansionist war. Lots of voters, who might be Democratic voters, are abstaining or tossing their votes into the sewer for alternative “candidates” in protest. It struck me that they are likely falling for one of the oldest Republican tricks in the Treason Book.

Republican far-right politicians have been pulling off red-herring voter scams using treason as a tactic since before our involvement in WWII. The Foreign Agents Registration Act that ensnared Paul Manafort was a byproduct of that period. Disinformation was a pretty common weapon in their toolbox, too. The 1940’s America First Committee propaganda organization included several congresscritters, including Representative Hamilton Fish III (R-NY), who used congressional franking privileges to publish and mail disinformation to their constituents. Lucky for the world, they were unsuccessful; back when the US empire was likely at its intellectual peak.

Skip forward to 1968 and Republican candidate Richard Nixon sent Henry Kissinger and Anna Chennault to Paris to sabotage President Johnson’s desperate attempt to end the Vietnam War. Liberals and middle-of-the-road voters were conned into imagining that Nixon’s “Secret Peace Plan” actually existed. Back then the Soviet Union was afraid of Republicans and they were pressing North Vietnam to participate in the peace talks. Nixon’s tactic worked and he buried the nation in war debt, that is still unpaid, and corrupted the federal government. American democracy took a series of hits from Nixon’s Republican gangsters that set us up for the next treasonous Republican regime; Ronald Reagan.

Now it’s 1980, and President Carter is entangled in the Iranian Hostage Crisis; another marginally significant event that captured more attention than it was worth. There is substantial evidence that William Casey, who would become Reagan’s CIA head, and Joseph Verner Reed, who was Reagan’s ambassador to Morocco, negotiated with the Iranians to hang on to the hostages, 52 US diplomats, until after the election. Later, that turned into the Arms-for-Hostages payoff that established Reagan’s “Teflon President” credentials.

Now, it’s 2024 and President Biden, and Vice-President Harris, are tangled up in Netanyahu’s war on Gaza’s civilians and Netanyahu’s desperate attempt to stay out of jail (like his parallel in the US, Donny Trump). As Matt Brooks, executive director of the Republican Jewish Coalition, said in 2019, “There’s not much daylight between Netanyahu and Republicans, at least Republican elected leaders.” When President Obama was attempting to apply some leverage on Israel in 2015, Netanyahu’s speech to the Republican congress was both an insult to Obama but to the intelligence of the United States citizens. By 2015, US “intelligence” was in such decline that at least half of the country received the insult as a compliment.

There is absolutely nothing about the herd of Republicans, in either the House or the Senate, that should inspire confidence in their honesty, decency, or patriotism. If you don’t think that Netanyahu is talking, regularly, to Mike Johnson, Mitch McConnell, and everyone who will listen in the Trump campaign, you are a gullible fool. These clowns would sell out their own mothers for a reasonable bid. Sadly, what remains of the US investigative “press” has been co-opted by Republican billionaires and it could be a lot longer than it took to uncover the details of Reagan’s treason before we learn about today’s misdirection.

Most Americans, including the so-called “educated” left, don’t know how our government works. They imagine that the President has ultimate power to direct aid, the military, and civil service. Even Donny whined (surprise!) about how little power the President has to wreak things and get his way. If Republicans want to sabotage Biden’s attempts to end the Gaza invasion, they have a more than willing accomplice in Netanyahu. Netanyahu has zero interest in stopping his war because, if he does, he’s in the same kind of corruption legal mess as Trump. It’s a long term bet, like 10 years, but I’d bet $100 that, eventually, we’ll learn Republicans are encouraging Netanyahu to keep up his invasion and illegal war until, at least, after this election.

Fixing the Left Coast’s Taxation Inequality

The Left Coast—California, Oregon, and Washington—are grossly under-represented in the US federal government.  “The coastal counties in the United States are home to almost 40% of the country's population (50M people), even though they make up less than 10% of the land mass.”  Those three states make up a huge portion of the US economy: In 2024, "California is once again the sixth-largest economy in the world.  If you add the GDP’s of Washington and Oregon, California would surpass the United Kingdom to become the fifth-largest economy in the world."  In 2023, California's GDP was nearly $3.9 trillion, making it the fifth largest economy in the world for the seventh year in a row. California's GDP growth rate was 6.1% from the previous year.  Oregon's GDP was $318,884B a slight increase from the previous year, when the state's GDP was $254.71B.  Washington's GDP was $807,864B.

In 2023, the federal government collected $4.44 trillion in total income taxes. The residents of California paid over $234 billion in federal personal income taxes in 2023. That's about 15% of the national total, and nearly 95 times as much as paid by residents of Vermont, for example. Washington paid $44.2B in personal income taxes and Oregon paid

This is just a partial list of the dependent states (only the top 10), but it’s pretty obvious that the majority of freeloaders are Republican states. Even some of the so-called “Blue States,” like New Mexico, are geographically red states, they are mostly rural and the rural, uneducated, and gullible areas are solidly Fox/NewsMax territory. Sadly, that is also true for the Left Coasts’ rural areas in the eastern portions of the states.

But, imagine if those Left Coast states quit paying those billions of federal taxes and invested that money in their own defense systems, infrastructure, economic development, education systems, and world trade. The rest of the US would suddenly be buried in its national debt (currently at more than $34T) with no functional economy with which to repay any part of that mountain of paper. Skilled immigration to California, especially from Red States, would likely blossom into a massive brain-drain from the remainder of the US.

The rising price of real estate would purge even more of the economic losers from the states to the massively dependent and unproductive Mountain West. About 40% of California’s homeless were born in other states (or countries) and the new Left Coast nation would be under no reasonable obligation to support them. As of February of this year, “of Californians feel they'd be happier if their state was no longer part of the United States.” The threat of suffering another episode of Trump is a driver, too: “"If Donald Trump is elected, the number of people who think California should become its own country will undoubtedly go up in California," Michal Strahilevitz, a California business professor, explained. "If Joe Biden is reelected, or really anyone other than Donald Trump, the number is unlikely to go up and may even go down. As in many blue states, most residents of California are terrified of another four years under Donald Trump." Another overthrow of the popular vote by the Electoral College could be the event that really trips this trigger.

It is not inconceivable or impractical. The flame-throwing MAGAots like to imagine they are brave patriots, but when they are asked to support themselves and be responsible for their actions they will be like their “fearless leader” Donny and bankrupt themselves and their futures. We could be in for an ugly, exciting future.