Pam Peirce

     Here is another example of seeking an emotional response from voters rather than an educated one. Trump gets his followers laugh at people who "know things"—educated people. In his speech to congress, he spoke of canceling a grant that was meant to aid the nation of Lesotho. He added, intending for people to laugh, that nobody has ever heard of Lesotho. Well, I have. It is a mountainous nation completely surrounded by South Africa. Wikipedia says it has a population of 2 million people that are 99.7% of one tribal group, the Basotho. It has 2 official languages, that of the tribal people and English.
 
     The nation of Lesotho was not amused. Representatives of the nation have complained loudly, wanting the world to know that they are a member of the United Nations, with a permanent U.S. diplomatic mission and a previously positive relationship with the U.S. They are not a rich nation, and the sudden end of U.S. aid will be extremely disruptive to their efforts to combat HIV AIDS. They had been depending on U.S. aid to help them fight that scourge, though they say they recognize the right of the U.S. to discontinue its aid. (They have the second highest rate of HIV AIDS of any nation, and women are a high proportion of the infected.)
 
     The current president often throws out such comments in his speeches. I generally take them to mean that he, himself, had never heard of whatever he says others have not heard of. (Whether he actually has not heard of what he claims he has not is moot, but I think is quite possible that he has not heard of it, or if he once learned it, maybe in a school class,  he has quite forgotten it.)
 
     The political reason he says "nobody even knows what that means," or "nobody knows this" is to signal that  "I am one of you. I am also poorly educated."   He can get away with this at his rallies. In fact, at one Las Vegas rally, in 2016, he said, "I love the poorly educated." But with a national (and international) audience, such nonsense plays less well.

I am angered when I hear politicians cite the price of eggs as an index of inflation. Yes, eggs are very expensive. But they are an exception that has nothing to do with inflation in general. I do not know all of the reasons for general inflation, but I am sure they have to do, in large part, with the economy trying to recover from the Covid 19 crisis, The prices of eggs are high because a virus, bird flu, is leading to the killing of many egg laying hens. By law, if bird flu appears in a flock, it is "culled," a polite term for killing the whole flock.
     "Isn't there a vaccine?" you may ask. Well, yes, there is a vaccine. However, some markets will not buy chickens intended for meat if they have been vaccinated, so the vaccine goes unused. 
     The big fear is that the bird flu virus will mutate such that it can be transmitted human to human. So far, it has only infected humans who work with animals, such as chickens or cows, which can spread the virus to a human. (And domestic cate, which eat infected wild birds, leading to the irony that people may keep their cats inside, not to spare the wild birds, but to protect the cats.) It could happen that the bird flu virus could become transmissible between humans, and then the clamor for using the vaccine would probably outweigh the resistance to using it, however, by then the time would have passed that using the vaccine might prevent human deaths due to human-to-human transmission.
     Trump used the example of the price of eggs in his speech to Congress--blaming it on Biden. I also get fundraising emails from candidates representing the Democratic Party implying that egg prices are a part of a general inflation that the current president cannot bring down. I am equally outraged by both uses, because they depend, for their power, on an emotional response that is not influenced  by facts that explain why eggs are so expensive.
I don't know if the price of eggs went up because some producers, or wholesalers, would go out of business if they didn't raise prices, or if the problem is price gouging, but I do know that egg prices are a special case and that politicians are trying use them for political gain without educating the electorate about bird flu and helping people see the dilemmas it introduces.
(Details of the bird flu situation were recently reported on National Public Radio.)

I have been paused in my posts on this blog by the shocking beginning of the current presidential administration. I have to keep reminding myself that the president did not win with a majority, that there are many, many people as disturbed as I am. I believe that this man won with a coalition of those who do not pay any attention to politics (so they have no idea whether a governmental action is consistent with the Constitution or the law), those who are not rich but hope to be rich soon (so they vote with the truly rich), and a minority of Americans who are rich enough to actually gain by current national political actions, and know they will. Oh, and the fundamentalist Christians who, for reasons not clear to those looking at it from the outside, think the new president represents the Second Coming. And the racists, oh my, there is probably considerable overlap among them with those who do not pay any attention.
How does one convince such an electorate that this is not the administration they want? One way is to educate those who do not know when the President is ordering something that is not in keeping with the Constitution or that is advocating breaking a law. There is some effort in this direction, and more is better.
Another avenue is to address the voters who think they will become rich in the face of strong evidence that they will not. This is a major difficulty in the U.S. Many people vote with the wealthy because they hope to be wealthy themselves. They don't want to tax the rich, for fear that they too will be rich one day. This is despite the fact that bills intended to "tax the rich" are generally talking about a level of income these people will never see. People with good jobs that make a comfortable income often think they are just a promotion, or an enterprise scheme, or an invention away from true wealth. People with a lower income may think they are only a lottery ticket, an invention, or an inheritance away. all of these are unlikely possibilities, and if they happened, they are not likely to result in the kind of income or wealth to which congressional moves to tax the rich are aimed. It is hard for the average person to wrap their head around how much money a multi-billionaire makes. I think there is a chance of showing people who think they will be rich, and so reject taxing the very rich, that they are not rational, but it is difficult, because people will think they are giving up on a dream of riches, no matter how unlikely it is that such a dream will occur.  
The fundamentalist Christian voters are probably unreachable, dedicated as they are to a nonrational belief system, and the racists are likely to go on being racist.
A group that opponents of the current administration should also consider reachable is those who didn't vote because they are cynical. The point to make is that cynicism that leads to inaction has the same political outcome as complacency. If a person opposes racism, homophobia, and climate complacency, they should vote for the party that opposes racism and homophobia and embraces ways to fight the climate crisis, and go on being cynical about other issues all they want.