The Ardennes Counter-Offensive

Watching what is playing out in American politics right now, I am thinking about the Ardennes Offensive, also known as the Battle of the Bulge. Stay with me here.

I’ll give you the briefest overview possible. Stacks of books have been written on it, so hit the library if you like. It started on December 16, 1944. The Allies were slowly pushing eastwards through France and Belgium towards the Rhine. The Nazis were losing ground in the east and the west. Even Hitler realized that the best he could do was a negotiated settlement. His strategy was to secretly mass troops opposite a thinly held section in the Ardennes forest and break through with a lightning strike to the coast, taking the deep water port of Antwerp. That would split the allied forces and deprive them of supplies. The plan was to get from the existing lines to the coast in four days.

Of course, it didn’t go to plan. The Germans pushed a westward bulge in the line, but fierce resistance at key points slowed them down enough for the Allies to send in reinforcements and drive them back. There were striking moments of heroism. An 18 man reconnaissance team held off 500 elite German paratroopers for 16 hours until they ran out of ammunition and had to surrender. It was a vital 16 hour delay. The 101^st Airborne and the 969^th Artillery Battalion held the vital road junction village of Bastogne from the 19^th through the 26^th, although surrounded. Eventually the German attack ran out of soldiers, fuel, supplies, and vehicles, and had to turn back. The Allies finally pushed the Germans back to the pre-offensive lines at the end of January.

The key point of this whole ordeal was timing. The Nazis did not have the reserves or supplies for an extended attritional battle. It had to be a sudden victory. Even though the battle lasted a month and a half, a number of German generals later said that they realized they were defeated when the planned four days became eight, and then sixteen. They had known they were losing the war so they rolled the dice on a final blitzkrieg. Delay defeated them.

And here we are. Anti-democratic forces in the U.S. know that they are losing the demographic war. Their base is aging. Young people overwhelmingly reject their worldview. The base of straight, white, Christian conservatives has witnessed their social superiority eroded by a cascade of rights revolutions. People understand that big business has broken the social contract. The opportunity for them to regain former power is slipping away. So, a roll of the dice. A flurry of executive orders. A plan to wreck the functions and credibility of government. An attack on political dissent, starting with the least popular demographics. An attack on voting rights.

But it has to happen quickly to succeed. In my previous essay about Covid I wrote about how people respond in a disaster: Denial, Deliberation, Decision. The anti-democratic plan is to rush through the changes while the country is still in denial and deliberation mode. They also have to get the job done before the economic destruction hits their base of voters.

We are aided in our resistance by the whim, grudge, and bribe solicitation based economic policy of Trump. He is derailing the economy faster than expected. We still need some political heroics, though. That’s why my heart was gladdened by Senator Brian Schatz (D-HI) using a Senate procedure to put a hold on 300 Trump nominees, as well as a handful of bills in the foreign relations committee. It would have been better to start on January 21^st, but I’ll take it.

That’s how you do it. Make the Republicans spend time, effort, political capital, and attention on our actions and our priorities rather than their own plans. The Republicans spent years obstructing the efforts of Democratic presidents and majorities. They became the party of no. Since the Republicans have become a racist personality cult serving a rich donor class, it is the responsibility of the Democrats to turn the tables.

Every Democratic senator should put holds on every nominee and bill the Republicans propose. They should filibuster like Cory Booker. They should use every parliamentary rule possible to slow down the process. No unanimous consent. All roll call votes.

They should bill troll, like Bernie Sanders with his $17 minimum wage bill. It has no chance of passing, but it forces the GOP to publicly oppose it and try to explain why. The Democrats should look at polling, select the most popular progressive policies, and start introducing bills. Then publicize it when the GOP leadership won’t let the bills  get anywhere. “We wanted to eliminate credit card late fees, but the Republicans serve the credit card companies, not you.”

Policies themselves are less important than using policies as a wedge to separate the identity of a voter from the identity of the Republican political establishment. People make political judgements based on identity, and we need to make the Trump cult an alien minority in American culture. Bigots and billionaires.

What should you do? Email and telephone your members of Congress. Tell them to gum up the works; obstruct, delay, confuse, distract. Tell them to bill troll the Republicans. Tell them to focus on identity; the GOP as the party of the corporate overlords and  the rich, with racist pawns doing the dirty work. Be polite but insistent. Tell them that time is the most important factor. Most members of Congress are careerist cowards. They will only do something if doing nothing is more unpleasant and risky.

Show up at rallies. It’s just a show, but it builds emotional energy and lets people know they aren’t alone. Humanity is all about belonging, and demonstrating that our group is invigorated, numerous, driven, and even fun, is incentive to belong. Find your local political groups.

Support organizations like Public Citizen that are filing lawsuits against the Trump administration over its multitude of legal and constitutional crimes. Fighting crime is the right thing to do, and it imposes a burden on the criminals.

Timing is key. Today, search for the websites of your members of Congress. Find the contact pages and bookmark them. Put their office numbers on your phone. Contact them today. Make it a weekly or biweekly habit to send them a reminder of their responsibilities.

If we can keep the fascists away from Antwerp for a bit longer we will win.

Feedback Loop

You may have noticed an article in the Washington Post comparing the popularity of various institutions to that of Congress. The approval rating of the U.S. Congress, at 9%, beats Fidel Castro (5%) and ties Hugo Chavez, but is below the approval for the concept of the U.S. going Communist, at 11%. The fact that at least one in ten Americans is willing to reverse the Cold War is interesting in itself. However, my focus is on Congress, and why even BP during the Macondo oil spill (16%) beats their approval rating.

I have written in earlier posts about the concept of hyperscopic life. (You may wish to review here, here, here, and here.) The short version is that a corporation fulfills all the qualities that scientists use to identify a living organism. My conclusion – if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, etc. The problem with corporations is that a duck is a lot smarter than a corporation but a corporation has political power.

Human beings serve corporations, and so naturally corporations have many of the characteristics of human beings. To be more specific, psychopathic human beings, as defined by their behaviors and psychiatric literature. One thing that humanity does very effectively is to modify our environment. We cut down forests, drain swamps, build roads, dam rivers, and blast the tops off of mountains. We build houses and breakwaters and other barriers against the forces of nature. Corporations modify their environment as well, but we must consider that their environment is both physical and legal. We might say that the legal environment is as physical to them as air, water, and land are to us. Law is also DNA and connective tissue to a corporation, meaning that it can modify both its internal and external environment.

As with the physical world, there is resistance to this modification. It is institutional, active, and consequential. By institutional I mean that human beings put into place legal strictures that limit corporate agency. These could be campaign finance laws, lobbying restrictions, conflict of interest laws, and transparency laws. By active I mean groups of citizens actively opposing corporate reach into legislation. By consequential I mean that corporations are too short sighted and narrow of vision to properly calculate the consequences of their actions. If either law or enforcement is inadequate they end up like Enron or Lehman Brothers, collapsing from the excess they pursued.

The tide turned for corporations back in 1976, with the Buckley vs. Valeo decision by the Supreme Court. The Court decided that donating money was the constitutional equivalent of political speech, thus making plutocracy official and ending our progress towards democracy. Corporations have gained ground continuously since then. It is a positive feedback loop. As they gain more political power they are able to reduce the resistance to their modification of their environment. This includes all three of the modes of resistance I outlined above.

The millionaires and billionaires who engage in symbiotic parasitism on the corporate herd have veto power over entry into politics. Candidates have to raise those two-thousand dollar donations in order to stand a chance. This restricts the boundaries of legislation to initiatives acceptable to corporate remoras, which means fewer restrictions on corporate power. Once enough presidents and senators have been elected this way, then the Supreme Court can be stacked, and the Constitution gets interpreted to benefit further corporate power. Witness the Citizens United decision.

Similarly, information (or, more likely, disinformation) is supplied to citizens by a shrinking handful of ever larger communications conglomerates. Citizens can’t oppose what they don’t know about, and they won’t oppose what they have been convinced is in their interests. The internet has provided some outlet for human voices, but the behemoths of the business are always making efforts to fence that in as well. The latest outrage is the ProtectIP/SOPA bills, which would allow the big media players to shut down competing sites without due process.

Even the consequential restrictions on corporate action have been buffered by massive government intervention. Instead of taking over bankrupt financial firms and writing down mortgages to market prices, the government just stuck a funnel in the top of the banking industry and poured in a trillion dollars.

So there is a feedback loop going on. The accelerating accumulation of power by corporations allows the increasing acceleration of their accumulation of power. The problem for corporations in this situation is that some restrictions are necessary to prevent them from destroying their own environment. The idiocy that culminated in the 2007 financial meltdown is one symptom of corporate self-direction. Another symptom is the congressional approval rating.

Corporations are so short sighted and so programmed for self interest that they habitually overreach. Eventually even the cleverest psychopath buries too many bodies in the backyard and it begins to stink. The stink of political corruption has gotten so obvious that even the propaganda efforts of corporate media can’t cover it. In good times a certain amount of corruption can make it past the public with a knowing eye roll, but when everybody knows (or is) someone who is one of the long term unemployed, and when everyone knows (or is) someone on the wrong end of an underwater mortgage, public consciousness shifts. As long as most people were on an upward economic trend, or at least there was a promise of upward mobility for the next generation, people could put up with their lot. Now we’re looking at structural unemployment and underemployment, while college has become too much of a financial burden for too many, with no reasonable guarantee of a benefit. Corporations and their elite parasites have simply sucked too much wealth out of the economy.

This has given them the power to change the economic rules so that they can suck out even more. Up to a point. Another symptom of the ever tightening feedback loop is the Occupy Wall Street movement, as well as dozens of other movements focused directly on taking power away from corporations. Review any number of opinion polls from the last decade and you’ll find that a consistent 75% (or more) of respondents say that big business and their lobbyists have too much power. The question is whether these various political movements can turn this sentiment into real action and a real power shift. The corporate grip on the means of communication and legislation is firm. On the other hand, who would have thought a couple of years ago that Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya would have pitched out their dictators? I have no conclusion here, except to note that the fight is out in the open now. I guess that’s half the battle.