I constantly find myself at a loss to understand what mainstream commentators think about the Republican Party with respect to recent immigrants — most especially Latinos. It really makes me wonder who treats Latinos worse: the Republicans or the commentators. Because you would really have to think that Latinos are idiots listening to the arguments for what the Republicans should do to appeal to them. Thus it is with an article Jonathan Chait wrote last week, How Donald Trump Destroyed the Republican Party’s Best-Laid Plans.

It started by noting that the Republican’s “most important strategic imperative” was to “narrow the gap between its core voting base and the immigrant communities.” That’s just nonsense. The most that the Republican Party has ever been willing to do is try not to go out of its way to insult the immigrant community. There was never any way to narrow the gap between Latinos and the Republican base, because hating immigrants (and just about everyone else) is more or less what defines it. The plan was always to make the party seem softer to immigrants, but not to do a damned thing.

Chait claimed that the first thing that the Republicans needed to do was pass immigration reform. It’s now three years since I started hammering on this issue. Just at the very top, this makes no sense. The Republican approach to it was always, “Okay, we’re going to do this one thing for you, and then we don’t ever want to hear from you again!” This was not something that was ever going to appeal to the Latino community. My argument all along has been that passing some symbolic legislation is not going to fool immigrants when it is only too clear that the Republicans are doing it with great reluctance. As it was, a two decade path to citizenship wasn’t good enough for them. They couldn’t do it cheerfully, so why do it at all?

But the other side of this is that immigrants are like everyone else. Immigration just isn’t that big a deal to them. A Gallup poll back in 2012 found that Hispanics rated healthcare, unemployment, economic growth, and inequality above immigration as their top issue. But I get it: immigration is a disqualifier — an issue that is necessary but insufficient. But that just gets us back to my main point, which is that Latino voters are not going to vote for Republicans because they make one ostentatious display, while being willing to do less than nothing about the issues that harm the poor in this country.

Chait went on to claim that the second thing that the Republicans needed to do was keep control of the debates. Well, if that was the case, they certainly didn’t agree. The party just threw up its hands and allowed the cable news channels to decide how to do the debates. But it is on this subject that Chait brings up Trump — as though there wouldn’t have been at least one major candidate who saw political gold in appealing to the most predictable aspect of the base.

The Republican Party depends upon angry white people for its power. It is not going to release its grip on this base because it sees that in the future this will be untenable. The Republican Party will change when it has absolutely no option to do anything else. Chait is just silly to think that the party’s discussion of immigration reform was ever serious. And he’s unintentionally offensive in thinking that Latinos and others would buy the little con that he thinks the Republicans should be running.

Over at Fed Watch, Tim Duy made, The Case For September. The issue at hand is whether the Federal Reserve will start raising interest rates in September. As Duy pointed out, there really isn’t much of a reason to do this. But sadly, the Fed knows from long experience, that it doesn’t get blamed for low employment levels, but it does get blamed for even the slightest hint of inflation. It’s a very bad situation where the Fed does not get the proper incentives. Nominally, the Fed is supposed to care as much about employment as it does price stability. In fact, employment takes a distinct backseat to inflation. When inflation is absolutely, positively not a problem, the Fed does what it can about employment. Of course, normally when inflation is not at all a risk, there is very little that the Fed can do for employment. Funny that.

Anyway, Duy pointed out that the big issue here is not that raising interest rates will cause the economy to go back into recession. Rather, it might “lock the economy into a sub-par equilibrium.” I’m not sure that any of these people care about that. That’s another part of the screwed up incentives at the Fed. The people there represent the power elite. Almost half of them are directly appointed by the big banks. They define the common good as being what is good for themselves and their class.

But I would prefer that the Federal Reserve raise interest rates in September. At least if they screw up and do throw the economy into a tailspin, there will be time to fix their mess before the 2016 election. I would rather that the Fed decide that if it doesn’t raise interest rates by the end of this year, that it won’t do it for the first three quarters of 2016. Because we know that if the Fed tanks the economy next year, it will result in President Bush or President Walker or even President Trump.

Since at least 1976, the performance of the US economy for the first nine months of the presidential election year has been the single biggest factor in determining who becomes president. It’s depressing. It doesn’t matter what the cause is. For example, the economic collapse of 2008 was not Bush’s fault, but the fact that he was in power when it happened meant that John McCain had basically no chance of becoming president. Or it worked to liberals’ benefit in that case. But I would hate for the Supreme Court to become overloaded with extremists on the right just because Janet Yellen doesn’t have quite as good a grip on the economy as she thinks she does.

Of course, it is almost inconceivable that the economy will grow enough over the next year that inflation actually becomes a problem. Currently, the employment to population ratio for prime age workers (age 25-54) is 3.2 percentage points below its pre-crisis level. It is 4.8 percentage points below it’s Clinton level peak when the inflation rate was roughly 3%. It is even 3.2 percentage points below its’ Reagan-era peak when the inflation rate was 5%, and people thought that was fine. The the economy is actually still really depressed regardless of what the U-3 rate says.

But the truth is that there aren’t a bunch of unemployed people talking to Yellen and her minions. They are only talking to really rich people who are not happy that bonds aren’t paying as much as they want. And so there is constant pressure on the Fed to raise interest rates, even though clearly, the right thing to do is to wait until after the next election. And maybe that will happen. We’ll see. But Yellen seems to have been itching to raise interest rates for the past year. And the urge only gets stronger.

Sandra Bland, a young African American woman, was pulled over for “improperly signaling a lane change.” The officer then arrested her for assaulting a police officer. She was in jail for three days, and then right before getting out, she apparently hanged herself. I love the “assaulting a police officer” charge. The police commonly brutalize people during arrests, but if they get accidentally slapped in the process: “Police brutality!” But we know it is all nonsense, because the police department put the arresting officer on “administrative duty” because they claim that the arrest was improper.

The question is why did a simple traffic stop turn into an arrest. Bland was not some street kid. She was a college graduate who had recently moved to Texas for a job working at her alma mater, Prairie View A&M University. But she was from Chicago, so maybe she was just too sassy with the officer. In fact, I’m 99% certain that is what happened. The greatest crime in the United State is to not show the police enough respect. And as the police get less and less respectable, they demand this respect more and more. They think they deserve it. I think they deserve unemployment.

Many people don’t accept that Bland killed herself. I don’t have as hard a time accepting this. People who are not used to being in jail have a tendency to freak out about it. And even after three days in jail, it may have simply occurred to the 28 year old Bland that her live was over. Now she would have an arrest and almost certainly a felony on her record. It is quite understandable that she would not see the situation in perceptive. She was, after all, someone who had done everything right: went to college, got a good job. And now this.

What I fear will happen in this case is that the jail video will show that she did in fact kill herself. And that will be the end of it. But that isn’t the end of it. People don’t just end up dead in jail cells. She was there because a wimpy police officer got his fee-fees hurt because the woman from the big city didn’t treat him right. And then, they put her in a badly maintained, under staffed jail where a number of other people have managed to kill themselves without being noticed.

The original sin was with the arresting officer. And he brutalized her. As is seen in a video of the incident, Sandra Bland says, “You just slammed my head into the ground, do you not even care about that?” But of course they don’t care about that. They have bigger issues on their minds. They have egos the size of Manhattan that are fragile as a sickly egg. And if it takes beating up young women and oppressing them into suicide, that’s okay. Because the police must be respected. And young Africans Americans like Sandra Bland don’t matter.

Afterword

I am not a violent man. And this feeling won’t last. What’s more, I know this is a systemic problem. But right now, I so want to see that police officer publicly whipped. If that happened, it would perhaps have an effect on the systemic problem that is our racist and fear-based policing.

Jonathan Bernstein explained something important, Why Obama Won’t Stop Talking About Iran. The situation right now is that Congress has 60 days to pass a law killing the deal. I’ll come back to that. But the main thing is that Obama needs Congress to do what it does best: nothing. Of course, when it comes to really bad things, Congress is usually eager to act. So this bill should have little problem making it through through the House. In the Senate, the Democrats might be able to filibuster it. But in the end, Obama will probably have to veto it, and that means he can’t allow 290 votes in the House — and that would require only 43 Democratic defections.

Bernstein explained that under normal circumstances, when presidents talk about pending legislation, it just causes more polarization. But in this case, that’s exactly what he wants. All he needs is for the Democrats to remain cohesive. So the more he talks, the more that should happen. And in this case, he has nothing to lose. The Republicans hate him and everything he does. Other than some must-pass legislation like the debt ceiling and continuing resolutions, there has basically been no Republican support for anything that Obama is in favor of.

The whole thing makes me very sad. I really do think that the Republican Party has it out for America. They believe that they must destroy the America that is in order to create the “America” of their delusions. I seriously wonder if 9/11 happened today, how would the Republicans respond? Would they fall in line and decide we are one big country? Or would they instead start impeachment proceedings? This is a serious question. But it is most concerning that I’m no longer sure of the answer. As it is, conservatives are linking the Iran deal to what looks like some kind of ISIS wannabe attack in Chattanooga. I think these people would see Obama as part of the attackers, not the victims.

It reminds me the moral of Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Mother Night, “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.” This speaks very much to the Republican Party of the last two decades. I’ve never thought that Newt Gingrich actually believed the nonsense that he spouted. He’s just a power hungry jerk. He figured out a way to get people to vote for him. And 20 years later, not only is the Republican base in a constant state of fear and outrage, now most of the establishment Republicans are too. The biggest change in the House is not how many seats the Republicans control, but just how fanatical the people who hold those seats are.

So here we are with what looks like a good deal with Iran. Yet the Republicans are against the deal on principle. A lot of them would only be happy with a war with Iran. But few of them have the strength of their convictions. And that means in practice, they don’t want to do anything: no military engagement but also no diplomatic engagement. It’s the same old thing: just pretend that the situation doesn’t exist and hope it goes away; in the mean time, talk tough but do nothing. And this is apparently what the American electorate wants. It doesn’t want war, but it wants to feel “strong” to ease its constant fear of, well, everything.

We are lucky that in this case, all we need to get something done is nothing. But I won’t feel good until this is all done. Because I can easily see the Republicans grabbing a handful of Democrats in the Senate or a few dozen in the House. Fear, outrage, and stupidity is not something that the Republicans have a lock on. Keep talking Mr President; it may well be our best way forward.

Last week, Matt Taibbi wrote, Eric Holder, Wall Street Double Agent, Comes in From the Cold. I will admit to not staying up on matters of corporate malfeasance. But I find it especially outraging whenever I do read about it. And I’ve long had major problems with Eric Holder. Taibbi summed him up this way, “He institutionalized a radical dualistic approach to criminal justice, essentially creating a system of indulgences wherein the world’s richest companies paid cash for their sins and escaped the sterner punishments the law dictated.” That’s what so terrible about it all: the double standard where the poor get prison and the rich get, well, nothing.

But I didn’t know that Holder came from a top corporate law firm before he became Attorney General. He made $2.5 million as a partner at Covington & Burling, the last year he was there. And for the six years he was gone, they left his old office empty, waiting for the day that he would return. And now that day has arrived. And we can only assume that the corporate criminals that Holder consistently let get away will be very happy to pay him and his law firm back now.

Taibbi figures that the amount of money that Holder saved the banking industry amounts to billions of dollars, just based upon what happened to bank share prices after each wrist slap was announced by the Justice Department. But it doubtless goes deeper than that. After all, what is the value of not going to prison for a bank CEO? It’s got to be huge for them. Not only are people like that terrified of prison, but every year they were in prison would have been tens of millions of dollars that they weren’t getting paid. So I have little doubt that the bankers are indeed very pleased with Holder, and thus Covington & Burling is too.

As Attorney General, Holder invented a concept called “collateral consequences.” According to it, the Justice Department should avoid criminal prosecutions against banks “if they believed prosecuting them might result in too much ‘collateral’ damage.” This is exactly “too big to jail.” And think about that. When a father is sent to prison, it has huge consequences beyond those of the man imprisoned. His family is devastated. The consequences span generations. Yet no judge cares about this. But when it comes to the richest, most powerful people, well, considerations must be made.

Another thing that Holder pushed was the “extrajudicial settlement.” These were agreements with banks that circumvented the judicial system. The reason for this is so that even judges aren’t able to stick their noses in the process. You see, some judges would occasionally look at the giveaways that Holder and company were offering to the banks, and balk. The banks didn’t like this because the deals were great for them. And Holder didn’t like this because it highlighted what a farce he was as Attorney General.

There are plenty of other things like Holder allowing banks to call fines for wrongdoing “remedial payments,” so they could write them off (that is, make taxpayers pay part of them). But the picture is clear. On the other hand, Holder was the perfect Attorney General for Obama: a man totally beholden to the power elite, who thinks that being beholden is the right thing to do.