Banks, abortion and Trump
Current events concern the topics, such as politics or weather or culture and all the rest, that are important to present to public consciousness so that there is an informed citizenry. But because newspapers have to fill so many pages and tv and cable media have to fill up so many hours and because the readership and viewership have to be entertained, also covered by current events are the police blotter, zoo animals, “human interest” stories about an old haunted house, snow storms when it's winter and heat waves in the summer, adding a bit of dread so as to appeal to those apocalyptically inclined, as well as important political assassinations and wars and scandals, leading back from Hunter Biden’s laptop to Sherman Adams, whose wife was gifted with vicuna coats when he was the first white house chief of staff, adopting for eisenhower as president the title used from the military where Beedle Smith had been chief of staff when Ike was head of eto. Different news organizations cull what appeals to their ideology, as when Fox News reviews or invents Biden scandals, but that does not mean, as Morning Joe on MSNBC suggests, that we are in a post information age. Newscasters and news reporters have always culled information, and offered their slants even if Fox News is the only network that deliberately lies about what its broadcasters know. Back in the old days, New York’s Daily News presented one take of the world and the mainstream Herald Tribune took another and Dorothy Schiff’s Liberal New York Post took an exposure to Joe McCarthy early on. Pick your silo commuting to and back from work on the subway.
Some stories that make it as current events are short-lived. That is the case with the Chinese balloon and its aftermath, which involved shooting down three small balloons after radar had been rejiggered parameters so as to notice them, and then where the military didn’t bother to continue trying to recover them though after having recovered the Chinese one. All gone except for current event nerds, a closed incident rather than a continuing story, just a way to illustrate that the past was a strange thing. Then there are very long term current events stories, the relationship between Blacks and whites going at least as old as when the Founding Fathers decided to punt on slavery so as not to jeopardize the unity of the colonies, assuming slavery would die out for natural economic causes but which persisted through a Civil War by taking the guise of Jim Crow and remaining a cultural, social and economic problem through the present day and discussed in the press and other media throughout. And some current event stories are middle range, covering a generation or so, as happened with Prohibition, that not meaning no one had learned from it in that the anti smoking campaign was more sophisticated than was Prohibition not by abolishing an evil addiction but by making it more a nuisance, restricting smoking in restaurants and offices so that people had to take their cigarette breaks outside office buildings. Behavioral modification was more impotent than banning smoking entirely nor was addressing the problem of the rights rather than the addictive personality, a favorite way to address all kinds of drugs during the Sixties. Now smoking is not a prominent social problem even though percent of Americans continue to smoke and percent of Blacks continue to smoke, perhaps because of the stress of continuing Black poverty.
Here are three present day current events, the first of which may already be over. There are any number of reasolns that are offered for why Silicon Valley Bank failed. Its tech depositors were greedy and wanted special favors. The tech indfustry was retrenching anyway. Bank regulators were slow to respondc to dangers. People at the bank had relied on interest rates remaining low and James Powell had not considered the impact on banks of having the Federal Reserve Bank raise interest rates. Middle sized banks like Silicon Valley were allowed to have fewer nreserves than before because Trump laws eased those required by the Dpodd-Frank Bill. And right wingers said it was because of Chinese investors or that Chuck Schumer was involved in itg. There were plenty of culpritgs and people worried that there might be a general banking collapse as in 2007 but that didn’t happen, very fews banks in question and thpose saved by FDIC and Treasury Department guarantees about savings. The crisis is over in that it was front pagde news for only several days.
The question that remains is how uncertain experts were about what was happening and when it would end. It reminds me of what Steven Jay Gould said about evolutionary biology: it is a history rather than a science. He meant that evolution explained what had changed over time rather than predicted what would happen in the future. One organ developed from one particular antecedent rather than another because it happened to do that in that way. Something different could have evolved. There is no overall intention for evolution. I am dubious about this because once the eye develops all more advanced species pick it up as a maximum kind of organ and brain power increases do seem to be generally more adaptable even if there could be a biological evolution that never developed higher consciousness. But that point may be applicable to economics where its study is of history rather than science. Macroeconomics charts what happened in depressions and slowdowns and inflation and deflation rather than what will happen under particular economic situations because economists are lousy at prediction even if they are the only people who politicians rely on, daybed because they calculate a lot of numbers. We can forget the economists until the next crisis.
Another current event that is current has to do with the possible ban by a Texas judge for a national ban on one of the drugs sent through the mails that make up for today most abortions of a majority bet66ter than they do local ones, are not because people know federal of abortions. So much for the conservative idea that states rather than the federal government should have jurisdiction over social officials issues because states are “closer to the people'' even though they probably are more familiar with federal officials than they are with local ones, conservative legislators have moved to create a national ban ob abortion and, as would the texas judge interfere with interstate commerce so as to eliminate abortion everywhere. It was the same argument that said states rights rather than slavery was the issue for the civil war even though those who supported slavery wanted to expand it .
The battlefield for the women’s movement is how to treat women who are dependent and has not yet been resolved, similar to the institutionalization of black servitude that has not yet ended because of their continuing conditions with gang violence and poor infant mortality and low Black student test scores. The women’s movement has had to shift dramatically in just the last few years. Then, under the flag of the #Metoo banner, the issue was sexual harassment, the customs of how to hook up or court, women subject to micro as well as major aggressions, while today the issue is the consequence, a pregnancy, rather than the occasion for it, and whether the potential child is under the potential mother’s control, perhaps a more important form of victimization even if changing sexual mores are also important for allowing women to feel and be independent. But this attack on women is not about which sex dominates when it comes to sex, which is forever an issuer, women able to outtalk men even if men are stronger and as old as Adam and Eve and as modern as a romcom, but about what is to be done about women who are pregnant and don’t want them, whether it is economically or socially or emotionally so. Have the baby in all respects or only for health reasons, or for economic reasons, given that throughout history poor women bore their children or aborted them only at great risk. Maybe times have changed but that is a very major one and it takes absorbing.
So it seems to me that it will take a long time for the issue of abortion to be resolved. The reason abortion will remain an issue is not only because it is so fundamental and there is no way to easily resolve when life begins because parturition is a sui generis product of mammal biology, no point in it definitive rather than on a gradual slope towards development. So despite the fact that safe abortions have only been available for, let’s say, a hundred years, and was legal for half of that, the political and social issue will persist because abortion is now possible and so it is hard to put the genie back into the lamp.
Here is what can be said, objectively, which is that the two sides go past one another. The pro-life and pro-choice supporters do not engage in Socratic dialogue whereby they appreciate one another’s point of view so as to modify their own, though many Pro-life people make an exception for rape and incest even though a fetus resulting from those are no less worth their protection if they are already human beings. Rather, what happens for the most part is that they adopt terminologies which deny the possibility of the alternative. Pro life people insist that life begins at conception but do not engage with funerals for miscarriages. Pro-choice people speak of reproductive health when pregnancy is not an illness but perhaps an inconvenience and requires medical monitoring or medical intervention. The two sides are in a race to rhetorically eliminate their opposition and so not even recognize that there is a legitimate opposition and so the opposition will likely be long lasting for many generations probably until the vast majority of the population is secularized, which may be never, people more taken with awesome customs than what is practical. Take your choice as to which is most satisfying.
The third current event topic is a person, Donald J. Trump, who will be indicted this week, so it is said, as the first ever ex-President ever to be indicted, as remarked by social commentators, and I predict that this phrase will lead on his obituary. The legal entanglements are endless, including whether he should be subjected to a perp walk. Should an ex-President be given some extra dignity and if so why not? Rudy Guiliani did it for white collar criminals. At any rate, this indictment and the others expected to follow, for attempted voter fraud in Georgia, a Justice department indictment for insurrection and one for misappropriating secret information and then lying about it. Some might say that the issues have become old, politics moving past Trump’s hold on the public and so might seem irrelevant. The grist of justice grinds exceedingly slow. It is more than two years since the insurrection, the central matter, and what with motions and counter-motions up to the Supreme Court which is now a mischievous body, there is no telling what may happen. It would be undignified to put an ex-President in the clink, but it might be useful to disgrace him for having done what he did during his Presidency. Moreover, it is unfortunate that the first indictment is a tawdry one having to do with hushing up sex with a porn star. It is below the dignity of their government to pursue an ex-President for such matters just as it was too trivial to go after Bill Clinton with Impeachment for his affair with Monica Lewinsky because Ken Starr could not get the goods on Clinton for a real estate issue. Don’t entice a President to engage in perjury. But then again, no prosecutor should do that with any defendant.
If we are lucky, the reverberations in the public for Trump having been President will not last for more than a generation that resulted because of this unfortunate fact, unexpected by the Founding Fathers, that someone elevated to President would not try to serve the country. That state of distrust in legitimate government will last so long as Congress includes people who deny that the Biden election was legitimate and that there was an insurrection. I take it that a third of the Congressional Republican Caucus think so or are silent about it and so I think them traitors to the Constitution even if they think themselves patriotic. When that ilk passes from Congress, then the Republicans can again become a legitimate party, a loyal opposition, even if all they do is follow their usual course to give tax breaks to their rich contributors and soak the poor as much as possible. By the time that happens, I hope Congress will limit the President the mischief he (or she) can do though that will be harder than just limiting him to two terms so as to keep some FDR figure getting too long into office. Also, the national bad feeling and cynicism of Trump may also have passed, however much the scar remains on the American body politic that there was such a man in office.