Seven Bowls of Wrath

“Our powerful weapons are the voices, the feet, and the bodies of dedicated, united people, moving without rest toward a just goal.” Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

This isn’t my favorite time of year. The “Christmas season” is too long, too frenzied, and more often than not, too stressful. In the US, at least, the reason for the season is obscured by commerce and non-stop advertising. I don’t have patience for Christmas shopping and leave that chore to my wife. I’m no help whatsoever when it comes to wrapping presents, as my work resembles something a chimpanzee with two left hands might produce.

And, of course, after the election of Donald Trump, all I see hanging over Christmas in America is a dark cloud. My wife tells me that I have been impatient, caustic, and short-tempered since November 8, and I can’t disagree. Depression has plagued me for more than a month. Frankly, I’m afraid of the damage the Trump gang might do, at home primarily, but also abroad; as it stands, Trump already seems dead set on stirring up trouble with China, and his cabinet picks demonstrate contempt for the very idea of public service.

I don’t feel any nostalgia for the outgoing Obama administration. I lost faith in Obama during his first term, when he appointed many of the usual suspects, like Tim Geithner, to key cabinet positions, and failed to prosecute any Wall Street executives who crashed the economy in 2008. Forgotten in most of the feel good stories about Obama is how he squandered the congressional majority he enjoyed during his first two years in office by constant efforts to appease the GOP. During those first two years Obama appeared weak and rudderless, and he let the opposition run the narrative. This led to a crushing defeat for the Democrats in the 2010 midterm elections, to the tune of six lost Senate seats and 63 lost in the House. While Obama dithered, the GOP obstructed and distracted.

I will not forget other key Obama failures, like the fact that he continued, and even expanded, our failed War on Terror, chipped away at civil liberties in the same manner as George W. Bush, and provided lukewarm leadership on climate change. Pundits call the Affordable Care Act a singular Obama accomplishment, which I would agree with if Obama had first proposed a single-payer system. But that’s not what Obama did; single-payer, the only sane way to provide medical care, never got a hearing. Too radical for the incremental Obama. Better to leave the insurance industry in charge.

I do give Obama credit for negotiating a nuclear agreement with Iran and for opening relations with Cuba.

Unemployment fell during Obama’s terms and the stock market rebounded, as was much ballyhooed in the corporate media, but no one asked the big questions, such as: what kind of jobs were created in the past eight years, permanent or contingent, high wage or subsistence wage, full time or part time? Same goes for the stock market. What has the rising stock market done for working people? Very little. But don’t tell the corporate media.

I’m depressed because no political party represents people like me who work for wages. The Democrats have had a 30 year lovefest with the professional class and affluent donors, to the detriment of working people, and this is one reason -- not the only reason -- that many working people stayed home on election day or decided to roll the dice with Trump.

To become viable again, the Democrats must purge every last vestige of Clintonism from the party, run Clinton loyalists out, and figure out who and what they stand for, and then, most important of all, learn to communicate with voters on an emotional level. Real jobs, economic, social, environmental and racial justice. Blocking and thwarting Trump’s mean-spirited, fear-inspired agenda is important and must be done, but it’s more important for the left and progressives and moderate conservatives to offer a coherent vision of something better. We know what we don’t want. The question is -- can we articulate what we do want?

As the year comes to a close I’m reading The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson, a fantastic non-fiction account of the great migration of black people out of the American south. I’m learning history that I was only vaguely aware of.

I want to thank all the people in Russia, Poland, France and Germany who read this blog. Happy Christmas to you all.

Smoking And Sputtering

“But what does it say about our so-called leadership when they slip into nostalgia for the past when facing the rubble and ruin of their modern ideology? That neoliberalism has peaked and is accelerating toward its inglorious finale?” Jason Hirthler

What and who to believe? Ambiguous claims made by anonymous sources? Mainstream media outlets owned by corporations? Internet crackpots? The CIA?

Why would Russia want to disrupt the American election when it was absolutely clear that we had accomplished this feat all on our own? Our perverted system required no help when it puked up Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. And let’s not forget that the e-mails from the DNC -- whether leaked or hacked -- showed that the Clinton Machine wanted to face Donald Trump more than any other GOP candidate. The Machine’s polling and focus groups and experts and triangulation all pointed to a comfortable victory if Trump was the opponent. Hubris blinds absolutely.

The US establishment seems convinced that Vladimir Putin -- the latest, not-so-new world bogeyman, the reinvigorated Red Menace -- somehow tipped the presidential election in favor of Donald Trump. Why Putin would do this is speculated on but never verified with evidence. Maybe the CIA knows, but why would any American trust the pronouncements of the CIA? Hillary Clinton -- desperate to find an excuse for her failure -- believes that Putin harbored dislike for her personally. Then how to explain the fact the Clinton easily won the popular vote? Are we to believe that Putin’s operation was so sophisticated that it only influenced the vote in states that Trump won?

Now that the establishment is obsessed with Putin and Russia, does this mean an end to our war on Islam, the war that goes on and on and on, with never a declaration by Congress? We are killing people -- directly or by proxy -- in countries that never attacked us, like Pakistan, Yemen, Iraq and Syria, and never far from unleashing our military might on Iran. Of course, when the self-proclaimed indispensable nation does the killing, it is justified on the grounds that we are maintaining the peace, halting a humanitarian tragedy, or advancing democracy. The corporate media and its stenographers echo this sentiment without question. Of course the US is righteous and just.

Donald Trump is a symptom of internal gangrene. Our neoliberal, market-obsessed, financialized economy and bloated military and surveillance machine is smoking and sputtering like a 1963 VW bus ascending a steep grade, and the public is choking on lies and myths and fantasy. We are buckling under the weight of empire. Trump and his gang will accelerate this trend.

Trump's Royal Scam

“But some of us are not content to have a gap in opportunity and income that drives a wedge between rich and poor, causing the rich to become ever more callous and complacent and the poor to become ever more wretched…” Alice Walker

With every Trump Cabinet or advisory appointment I become more convinced that we are in for an orgy of crony capitalism. As if the oligarchs needed more power than they have already, corporations, hedge fund managers, the finance, insurance and real estate industry, and resource extractors, will wade into the public sphere up to their chests, and squeeze even more private gain from public assets.

Trump is loading his Cabinet with millionaires and billionaires, characters like Trump himself, who believe the rich are better and more deserving than the rest of us. Because of this belief, the Trump Gang will hardly bother to disguise their intentions -- they will simply pillage our nation, impoverish our future, and exacerbate human caused climate disruption. Of this I have no doubt. We are in for at least two years of staggering rip-offs and ethical malfeasance.  

Nomi Prins, a writer who knows a few things about Wall Street, calls Trump’s Cabinet picks one of the great bait-and-switch jobs in US history. Like Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama -- and Hillary if she had prevailed in the undemocratic electoral college -- Trump says one thing and does the exact opposite. For instance, he talked a lot about bringing jobs back to America, and then nominates for Secretary of Labor a corporatist hostile to workers in general and what’s left of organized labor in particular. Bill Clinton and Barack Obama were masters of this bait and switch, gifted orators who made you think they understood your problems, pain, anguish and hopes, so much so that you hardly felt it when they plunged the dagger in your back.

Trump is more direct, less polished and urbane. Trump embodies the worst traits of the capitalist system -- an insatiable hunger for money and power, a hunger that recognizes no boundaries or limits, a hunger incapable of regulating itself.

Someone, I think it was Chris Hedges, said that regardless of who sits in the Oval Office our corporate system functions quite independently, pursues similar neoliberal policies designed to either protect the wealthy from taxes and regulations or transfer money to the wealthy. The challenge for the rest of us -- if we are to mount a credible resistance -- is to critique the system of power and wealth concentration, not the personalities the system vomits up. This will not be easy because the corporate media rarely -- very rarely -- allows any critique of American-style capitalism. Instead, capitalism is deemed to be the only possible system, as sacrosanct and unassailable as the notion of American exceptionalism.

The concentration of wealth into few hands over the past 40 years has strangled our democracy and rendered millions of people disposable. The Trump Gang will deepen our class and racial problems and immiserate even more of our citizens in misery.

Hold on, it’s going to be ugly and mean.

Restocking the Swamp

“When we look back on this sad, pathetic period in American history we will ask the questions all who have slid into despotism ask. Why were we asleep? How did we allow this to happen? Why didn’t we see it coming? Why didn’t we resist?” Chris Hedges

You knew, didn’t you, that Trump would surround himself with odious characters, hacks, and ciphers hostile to the very idea of government, privatizers who see government as a cash register? Trump campaigned on a vague promise to drain the DC swamp -- and now he is busy restocking it.

For what it’s worth, Trump lost the popular vote by a wide margin, so the carnival barker can’t claim a popular mandate -- not that he isn’t doing just that -- the fool went on an ill-fated “victory” tour, after all, the kind of empty spectacle he excels at, but if it wasn’t for our undemocratic, 18th century system, Trump wouldn’t be president-elect.

I mused on this blog a few months ago that maybe America deserved Donald Trump, that Trump was the logical result of our corrupt democracy and our equally corrupt institutions. Accountability is dead. Our leaders can invade other nations on false pretenses, torture prisoners, murder people, even American citizens, without charging them with crimes or affording them a shred of due process. We wage war on the poor and vulnerable. We try to do the impossible and make oligarchy and democracy work. We falsely believe that the hurt we put on others will never come back to haunt us. But is has, or will.

The oligarchs live in a parallel universe and play by a different set of rules. Laws that apply to you and me don’t apply to them. The man that rips-off taxpayers to the tune of millions walks away while the poor person who steals a loaf of bread experiences the full weight and power of the State.

Hard not to despair, harder still to accept that the highest office in our land, an office held by George Washington, Abraham Lincoln and Franklin D. Roosevelt, will very soon be occupied by Donald Trump. How we have declined.

I heard Chris Hedges say the other day in an interview that the last US president to fear the people was Richard Nixon; perhaps this is why some of Nixon’s policy positions sit to the left of Barack Obama. How far we have moved to the right.

Remember this about the American system: no matter who occupies the White House, Goldman Sachs always wins. Always.

Individually, we are toast; it is only when we act together that we have any agency.

Don’t go near the swamp after sundown.