Author Archives: Larry Franz

Election Correction

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Almost two years after a defeated president tried to undo the election he lost, Congress has made changes designed to make that kind of thing harder to do. Vox summarized the changes:

States must appoint electors in accordance with state laws “enacted prior to election day” — no mischief allowed after the fact. States have to set the rules of the game before the election, and can’t change them afterward.

The state’s governor has a “duty” to certify appointment of electors. But just in case an election-denying governor plans some shenanigans, … federal courts have oversight over these certifications, and creates a special expedited process by which courts can quickly hear challenges, which could then rapidly be appealed to the Supreme Court.

The vice president’s role in counting electoral votes is “solely ministerial.” He or she “shall have no power to solely determine, accept, reject, or otherwise adjudicate or resolve disputes” over electoral votes.

One representative and senator objecting can no longer break up the vote count — it will take one-fifth of both the House and Senate objecting for that to happen… If the House and Senate do separate to deal with objections, time to debate and vote on each objection is limited to two hours, so no indefinite delays.

The only permissible grounds for an objection are if the electors aren’t lawfully certified, or if an elector vote isn’t regularly given. And Congress must treat certifications from a state’s governor as conclusive except if courts say otherwise….

If some electoral votes aren’t counted for whatever reason, the majority threshold for winning the presidency falls [instead of remaining at 270 electoral votes, since in that situation, 270 would be more than a simple majority].

With a big enough majority, sufficient ingenuity and a lack of shame, future politicians might still find a way to put the loser in the White House. These changes will make that less likely,  but there’s a different, even bigger problem these reforms don’t address: the Constitution sometimes requires that the candidate who got fewer votes wins the election. From The Guardian:

Recent reforms to the laws governing the counting of Electoral College votes for presidential races are “not remotely sufficient” to prevent another attack like the one … at the Capitol on January 6, a member of the congressional committee which investigated the uprising has warned.

In an interview on CBS’s Face the Nation, the Maryland House representative Jamie Raskin … renewed calls echoed by others – especially in the Democratic party to which he belongs – to let a popular vote determine the holder of the Oval Office.

“We should elect the president the way we elect governors, senators, mayors, representatives, everybody else – whoever gets the most votes wins,” Raskin said. “We spend hundreds of millions of dollars every year exporting American democracy to other countries, and the one thing they never come back to us with is the idea that, ‘Oh, that electoral college that you have, that’s so great, we think we will adopt that too’”…

Raskin said the US insistence on determining presidential winners through the Electoral College [which allocates a certain number of votes to each state] facilitated the attempt by [the loser’s] supporters to keep him in power. “There are so many curving byways and nooks and crannies in the electoral college that there are opportunities for a lot of strategic mischief.”

Raskin [argued that the new rules] don’t solve “the fundamental problem” of the Electoral College vote, which in 2000 and 2016 allowed both George W Bush and D___ T___ to win the presidency despite clear defeats in the popular vote….

Many Americans are taught in their high school civics classes that the electoral college prevents the handful of most populated areas in the US from determining the presidential winner because more voters live there than in the rest of the country combined.

[Although] states determine their presidential electoral vote winner by the popular vote, [almost all] give 100% of their electoral vote allotment to the winner of the popular vote even if the outcome is razor-thin. Critics say that, as a result, votes for the losing candidate end up not counting in any meaningful way, allowing for situations where the president is supported only by a minority of the populace….

“I think,” Raskin said, “that the Electoral College 
 has become a danger not just to democracy, but to the American people”.

And therefore to the world.

These People

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To wake up in the morning is to be confronted again by reality, brute or otherwise. Waking up today, I was struck once more by the fact that 147 Republicans (8 senators and 139 representatives) voted to ignore the 2020 election results in Arizona and/or Pennsylvania. They chose to side with the violent mob that had just invaded the Capitol instead of the election officials who submitted the results from those two key states.

How many of them would have voted to install the loser as president, given the chance?

Considering how they responded to a worldwide pandemic, we know many would have.

This is from Brian Leiter’s philosophy blog. He quotes some of an article from The Atlantic:

This is really stark evidence of the pathological dysfunction of this benighted country, in which one of the two major political parties is openly hostile to de minimis public health measures (recall that Americans died of Covid at a rate two to three times that [or more] of other normal countries):

[B]y far the single group of adults most likely to be unvaccinated is Republicans: 37 percent of Republicans are still unvaccinated or only partially vaccinated, compared with 9 percent of Democrats. Fourteen of the 15 states with the lowest vaccination rates voted for D___ T___ in 2020. (The other is Georgia.)

We know that unvaccinated Americans are more likely to be Republican, that Republicans in positions of power led the movement against COVID vaccination, and that hundreds of thousands of unvaccinated Americans have died preventable deaths from the disease. The Republican Party is unquestionably complicit in the premature deaths of many of its own supporters, a phenomenon that may be without precedent in the history of both American democracy and virology….

We know that as of April 2022, about 318,000 people had died from COVID because they were unvaccinated, according to research from Brown University. And the close association between Republican vaccine hesitancy and higher death rates has been documented. One study estimated that by the fall of 2021, vaccine uptake accounted for 10 percent of the total difference between Republican and Democratic deaths. But that estimate has changed—and even likely grown—over time….

Partisanship affected outcomes in the pandemic even before we had vaccines. A recent study found that from October 2020 to February 2021, the death rate in Republican-leaning counties was up to three times higher than that of Democratic-leaning counties, likely because of differences in masking and social distancing. Even when vaccines came around, these differences continued… Follow-up research published in Lancet Regional Health Americas in October looked at deaths from April 2021 to March 2022 and found a 26 percent higher death rate in areas where voters leaned Republican…

The subtitle of the Atlantic article sums it up:

Party leaders are unquestionably complicit in the premature deaths of their own supporters.

Problems and Solutions: A Brief Recitation

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As 2022 fades away, David Rothkopf, an author and political analyst, presents a few facts to keep hold of in 2023:

Decades of research have conclusively shown that:

–The solution for homelessness is building homes for those who need them

–The solution for poverty is giving money to those who don’t have it

–The solution to our lack of mental health care is providing mental health care for those who need it

–The solution is to the climate crisis to stop using fossil fuels and stop carbon emissions.

I could go on. The point is that very often the solutions are obvious and politics is the art of obscuring them, distracting from them, making those common sense solutions impossible to achieve.

This May Be the Most Disgusting, Disheartening Thing You Read Today

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(Or maybe the second most, since you might read about the fascists and semi-fascists on Fox News and elsewhere attacking Ukraine’s president and being celebrated for doing so on Russian TV.)

For most of us, the company or organization we work for reports our income directly to the government. We’re responsible for accurately reporting deductions and so on and that’s almost always the end of the story. If you’re a certain former president, you can arrange your personal business in such a complex way — making your one company look like 400 or 500 of them — that the I.R.S. will throw up its hands and let you get away with financial murder.

His 2016 and 2017 tax returns show the result.

He claims he lost $32 million more than he earned in 2016. The alternative minimum tax for high income taxpayers still would have resulted in a tax bill of roughly $2 million, but he just so happened to have the same $2 million in tax credits. His total income tax for 2016: $750.

For 2017, his claimed losses were $13 million more than his income. The alternative minimum tax would have been $7 million, but he again had the same amount of credits. The result again: his total income tax was $750.

The New York Times has an explanation:

Before [what’s his name] became president and after, his exceedingly complex and voluminous tax returns came under regular scrutiny by the Internal Revenue Service. The number of agents assigned to the audit team: one.

After he left office, the I.R.S. said it was beefing up the audit team, to three. The tax agency itself acknowledged that it was still overwhelmed by the complexity of [his] finances and the resistance mounted by the former president and his sophisticated army of accountants and lawyers, which included a former I.R.S. chief counsel and raised questions early last year about why even three revenue agents should be assigned to audit him.

“With over 400 flow-thru returns reported on [his] Form 1040, it is not possible to obtain the resources available to examine all potential issues,” I.R.S. agents said … in an internal memo … released by the House Ways and Means Committee this week….

The committee reports released this week highlight how depleted the I.R.S. has become in the last decade, as Republicans starved it of funding. They also show how the agency has become increasingly unable to crack down on wealthy taxpayers who push the legal limits to lower their tax bills and have the means to fend off audits if they get caught.

That has led to a $7 trillion “tax gap” of revenue over a decade that is owed but goes uncollected, in many cases from superrich taxpayers such as [him], who has boasted that he fights to pay as little tax as possible. [The I.R.S. is unable to] match the capacity of an industry dedicated to tax minimization and avoidance.

The agency’s … enforcement staff has fallen by over 30 percent since 2010, and audits of millionaires have declined by more than 70 percent. Its budget has declined by nearly 20 percent, when accounting for inflation, during the last decade.

Republicans have for years accused the I.R.S. of political bias and unfairly targeting conservatives. For that reason [no, the article should say “claiming that is the reason”], they have fought to cut the agency’s funding or, in some cases, called to abolish it altogether.

The spending package that Congress is voting on this week reduces the base funding levels for the I.R.S. by $275 million to $12.32 billion, which Republicans hailed as a victory. However, that does not account for the $80 billion in supplemental funding that the I.R.S. was granted through the Inflation Reduction Act this year to buttress its resources over the next decade and hire more than 80,000 agents and staff members. The Biden administration has broad discretion over how and when to deploy that money to modernize the agency and bolster its enforcement capacity.

The Treasury Department, which oversees the I.R.S., is planning to use some of those funds to hire more auditors who can tackle complicated tax returns.

Charles P. Rettig, who was appointed as I.R.S. commissioner by [the ex-president] and left the post last month, …  suggested in an email to The New York Times that the additional funding the agency is receiving will help it undertake such complex examinations.

“I.R.S. desperately needs additional specialized examiners and related support to conduct additional meaningful examinations of complex individual returns involving partnerships and tiered arrangements of partnerships and similar pass-through entities, foreign transactions, complex financial arrangements and similar,” Mr. Rettig said….

The Biden administration has emphasized its ambitions of modernizing the antiquated technology at the I.R.S. and improving its customer service. In an August memo laying out how the money would be deployed, Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen said the agency would be focused on cracking down on rich tax dodgers and big companies that have long evaded paying what they owe to the federal government.

She also promised that middle-class households would not face more onerous scrutiny and that their audit rates would not rise. “These investments will not result in households earning $400,000 per year or less or small businesses seeing an increase in the chances that they are audited relative to historical levels,” Ms. Yellen wrote. “Instead, they will allow the I.R.S. to work to end the two-tiered tax system, where most Americans pay what they owe, but those at the top of the distribution often do not.”

The revelations about [the I.R.S. not properly auditing the ex-president’s returns] laid bare the difficulty that the I.R.S. has had in auditing the rich. The former president proved to be particularly uncooperative, as his team failed to provide facts needed to resolve certain issues and threatened to protest or appeal the process….

The report suggested that as the I.R.S. tried to work its way through [his] maze of tax returns, revenue agents [took] for granted that the assertions made by [his] accounting firm were true. Michael J. Graetz, the deputy assistant secretary for tax policy at the Treasury Department from 1990 to 1991, said the acquiescence of the I.R.S. to big accounting firms was striking…..

An agency memo that was recounted in the report described an audit team manager laying out the daunting nature of [the ex-president’s] returns.

“This return has about 400 flow-through returns reported on Schedule E and, since some of these are tiered, report a total of about 500 flow-through returns,” the auditor said. Underscoring the need for more resources, the memo went on to say that to “do a thorough review of these returns, we would need a team much larger than the current team.”

However, as you would expect:

The funds for the I.R.S. are expected to become one of the first big fights in Congress next year when Republicans take control of the House, as Representative Kevin McCarthy, the California Republican who is seeking to become speaker, signaled in September.

“On that very first day that we’re sworn in, you’ll see that it all changes,” Mr. McCarthy said. “Because on our very first bill, we’re going to repeal 87,000 I.R.S. agents. Our job is to work for you, not go after you.” In November, Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas, [declared:] “I think we ought to fight an epic, knock-down, drag-out fight over stopping the Democrats from funding 87,000 new I.R.S. agents…”

Free Will and the Unmoved Mover

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Steven Nadler is an expert on the 17th century philosopher Baruch (or Benedict) Spinoza. He was interviewed for the Elucidations philosophy podcast in 2017. Here he talks about Spinoza and free will:

Spinoza had a very idiosyncratic conception of freedom: idiosyncratic because of the larger metaphysical picture in which he discusses the issue of freedom. Remember that for Spinoza, we are all modes, or in God or nature—and so human beings don’t have this kind of ontological autonomy that we ordinarily think that things have. We are no different from other parts of nature….We are governed by nature’s laws, and this is just as true for our states of mind. Our mental states, our emotions, our passions, our acts of volition, our imaginations—even our intellectual thoughts—are all bound together by the laws of nature, just as much as our bodies are.

Spinoza does not think that there is such a thing as freedom of the will, … in any sense in which all things being the same, one could have chosen otherwise than as one did. So if you are looking for the kind of freedom that gives you independence from the causal determinism that governs most of nature, you’re not going to find that in Spinoza. What freedom does consist in, for him, is a kind of spontaneity, or self-governing autonomy. Not ‘spontaneity’ in the sense of uncaused events—there are no such things (for Spinoza) in nature—but, in a way, very much like a Kantian autonomy, where the things you do, the choices you make, the decisions you make, the goals you pursue follow not so much from how you are affected by other things—that’s passivity—but from your own knowledge of what’s really good, and what is in your own best interest….

Maybe the most precise way to put it is: it’s the difference between being acted on and being active. We’re always active to some degree, because we are always striving. That’s sort of our core essence, for Spinoza….

Things strive to maintain themselves. Other things strive to maintain themselves. Sometimes they come into conflict and these strivings push against each other. We as a part of nature are always being impinged upon by other things, and we’re always being passively affected by the objects in the world around us. But because we’re also striving ourselves, we’re in a way pushing back. And so, our lives are a struggle between being acted upon, and being active, or acting. The more free we are, the more active we are. The more we are determined by things outside of us, the more passive we are, the more we are in bondage to the world around us.

So, according to Spinoza, we are only free in the sense that we can do what we want to do, especially if we have good reasons for doing so. This is what philosophers call “compatibilism”, the idea that everything that happens — including human behavior — is caused by something else, yet we are truly free if nobody has a gun to our head and we decide for ourselves what to do.

I think what Spinoza and others call “free will” feels like free will but really isn’t. In order for an action to be free in the purest sense, there has to be a gap between what’s happened before (even the prior state of your mind) and the choice you finally make. You choose to do something – possibly after a great deal of deliberation – but nothing causes you to make that choice, other than your own free will. The result is that you truly could have chosen otherwise.

This is what Aristotle called the “unmoved mover” or “prime mover”. He thought of it as the primary or first cause of all motion in the universe. The unmoved mover moves other things, but is not itself moved by any prior action. To have free will in this pure sense, each of us has to be an unmoved mover.

Are we? It’s hard to believe that we are.