The 2017 Honor Roll

“The earth is but one great ball. The borders, the barriers, the cages, the cells, the prisons of our lives, all originate in the false imagination of the minds of men.” Mumia Abu-Jamal

This has been a bastard of a year for people of goodwill and common decency, for people who believe in truth, in fairness, in equality of opportunity, and in compassion for the less fortunate. Americans are well into a period of orchestrated cruelty, shocking malfeasance on the part of our political class, and body blows to the tattered remains of our democracy.

Still, we have to live and work, study, take care of our families, and do what we can to resist Trump and his mafia; it’s a hard slog up a muddy hill, and at times it appears our efforts are futile, that the game is lost and that the power of the forces opposing our dreams and aspirations for a better country and world are unstoppable. The good news is that these forces aren’t unstoppable -- or inevitable.

What follows is my Honor Roll of people who fight the brave fight and show no signs of throwing in the towel. This isn’t a definitive list by any means, it’s my list, shaped by what and who I read and listen to. If you take time to make your own list you will undoubtedly recognize different people, and that’s good. The point is that there are many millions of people who know damn well that a better, more just world is possible. Keep battling in 2018. We’re better than Trump and his gang of kleptocrats.

Bill Moyers

Amy Goodman

William Rivers Pitt

Chris Hedges

Cornel West

Sonali Kolhatkar

Arundhati Roy

Matt Taibbi

Dean Baker

Rebecca Solnit

Jeremy Scahill

Sally Yates

Colin Kaepernick

Ralph Nader

Jeffrey St. Clair

Ian Masters

Kshama Sawant

Junot Diaz

Carmen Yulin Cruz

Peter Joseph

Paul Jay

William Barber II

Alicia Garza

Women all over the world

Standing Rock Water Defenders

Climate scientists

All the firefighters and emergency responders who worked on the Thomas Fire in Southern California

Smash, Grab, and Don't Look Back: A Looting on Pennsylvania Avenue

“Nobody can know the full consequences of their actions, and history is full of small acts that changed the world in surprising ways.” Rebecca Solnit

You’re going to hear this a lot over the next year or two from Trump and his handlers and enablers: The tax reform we passed in 2017 is the single greatest piece of legislation in American history! It returns more money to the middle class than any tax cut ever has, and it insures that small businesses and family farmers will not lose everything they’ve built when they die.

And blah, blah, blah, and many other lies, too. If there is any good economic news to be had -- not to fear, it won’t be news of real jobs being created, industries returning to the Ohio River valley, or wage growth, it will likely be the rising stock market, fueled by corporate purchases of their own stock (with the money they are not paying in taxes) -- the GOP will say that the tax cuts are the reason. And if the economy runs off the rails, the talking points are already written: Obama’s fault, naturally, the black guy who wasn’t even a real American left the country in a mess. (In any case, Obama’s two terms are being erased, goodbye ACA, the Iran Nuclear arrangement, the Paris Climate Accord, rules to protect the environment, regulate the banks, etc.)

Trump will undoubtedly begin comparing himself to FDR and LBJ, claim that his tax cuts are as great an achievement as the major parts of the New Deal, and way better than the Civil Rights Act, and that it was all done to help the little guy.

No mention will be made that the GOP-controlled House and Senate rammed these bills through the legislative process like thieves during a blackout: backroom, closed door meetings, favors exchanged, promises made, no public hearings, shoddy analysis, lines of corporate bagmen lined up in the halls for their share of the spoils, flat out lies in the press. The GOP wins because it cheats -- it cheats to get elected through gerrymandering and voter suppression, and it cheats when it controls the levers of power.

Has fucking the American people over ever been so easy?

When the Democrats controlled both houses during the first Obama term the Republicans contorted themselves to block, delay, derail, and undermine Obama’s legislative agenda -- tepid as it was -- even though Obama had what Donald J. Trump will never have, a legitimate mandate from the electorate. All’s fair in love and politics. Shoe now on the other foot and as these disgraceful bills moved I heard nary a peep from the Democrats about the corrupt process.

Oh yeah, for a year or two the propaganda is going to come thick and heavy, laced with deadly, mind-numbing, truth-obfuscating BS. The attacks on Social Security and Medicare will come, the huge burden of these “entitlement” programs (paid for by worker contributions, so technically not entitlement programs at all) will be blamed for bankrupting the nation, ruining our credit standing in the world, our competitiveness, the deficit! Only one possible solution -- strict austerity for the slovenly poor and wage earning class. Cut, cut, cut. The war machine, energy extractors, lords of finance, and the wealthy in general will be exempt from the austerity blues, of course, walked around the velvet rope and right into the VIP section, bitching about the profligate ways of the unwashed masses as they go. Gilded, baby, gilded everything.

The people knew this was coming. Destruction is all Trump and his mafia can do. They cannot build, erect, create, or imagine anything but violence and destruction. They are pirates loose in port, drunk, crazed, rabid, horny, and mean; they’ve got the keys to the armory, the courts, and the treasury, no one to answer to, nothing to slow their roll. In the time it takes to pour a flagon of rum half the town will be in flames.

History says Trump and the GOP will overreach, go too far, grab too much, and the pendulum will swing back toward the safe center, where capitalism, militarism, and imperialism reign. We can change the hands on the levers, a good, necessary step, but until enough Americans realize that we must change the game if we are going to have any chance of surviving climate change and every ill this man-made threat brings in its wake, just changing the party in charge won’t get it done.

A society is reasonably just if its people don’t have to die for access to health care, decent housing, meaningful jobs at living wages, courts that act independently of politics and ideology, education, food, assistance when disaster strikes, and a fair opportunity to address their legitimate grievances.  

Get ready, people, hard times are coming.

Keeping Faith In Trump Time

“The realization that life is absurd cannot be an end, but only a beginning.” Albert Camus

The massive Thomas Fire has dominated this entire week. The fire has torched nearly 250,000 acres and caused the death of one firefighter, locals schools have been shuttered, and the streets downtown are mostly empty of people. Local merchants are panicking as they watch the holiday shopping season pass. Those of us whose homes are not in danger have dealt with falling ash and unhealthy air quality, and, depending on where in the city one lives, the rumble overhead of helicopters on their way to make water drops. I haven’t left the house without an N95 mask for almost ten days. My 16-year-old daughter is going stir crazy. As of this morning, the Thomas Fire was 30 percent contained, but unless the winds remain quiet and we get some humidity the fire could burn several more weeks. Naturally, there’s no rain in the forecast.

On the political front, the odious Roy Moore did not win election to Alabama’s vacant senate seat; voters repudiated Moore, Trump, and Steve Bannon. Democrats are jubilant but what the party doesn’t seem to grasp is that simply being opposed to Trump isn’t enough for 2018 or beyond. Despite being a complete moron and a first-class creep, Moore lost by a slim margin. After nearly a year of Trump’s idiocy and incompetence, his lies and vulgarity and cruelty, I still don’t know what or who the Democratic Party stands for; working people or Wall Street, war or peace, social justice or austerity, prisons or education, resource extractors or the environment?

The GOP tax rip-off slithers toward Trump’s desk. The Trump FCC voted to repeal net neutrality rules, yet another holiday gift for corporate America, despite opposition from millions of Americans, proving once again, as if more proof were needed, that this country is a democracy in name only. Although, I can’t help but think that this is the last desperate gasp of the insane Republicans -- they are like a pack of looters after a natural disaster, racing to grab as much stuff as they can before the authorities arrive, but they are also planting the seeds of a reckoning. The majority of Americans are better than Donald J. Trump and the cold-hearted GOP. In Trump and Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell, plus a host of others, the dark underbelly of America has been exposed in all its ugliness, greed and cruelty; for now the dark side holds sway, but beware stirring the masses.

And if the masses can be stirred by a set of basic ideas like living wages for workers, education not prisons, crime and reasonable punishment, a complete re-think of America’s legitimate security and military needs, an end to fouling the earth, water and air for private profit, and the humane notion that no person should go hungry, homeless and without access to medical care, and that no elderly citizen should die destitute, then a lot that is good for people is possible, because the majority of Americans are the opposite of Donald J. Trump and his followers.  

He Ain't Heavy, He's Just a Pedophile

“Conflict is the lifeblood of imperial capitalism.” Jason Hirthler, writing in CounterPunch

 Will Alabama or won’t Alabama?

 Elect the alleged pedophile, Roy Moore.

The same Roy Moore who kept a tablet inscribed with the Ten Commandments in his courtroom to remind the sinners and thieves who came before him That he was righteous and tight with the Lord.

Only thing, the Judge was ordered by a higher court to remove his tablet,
Holding the Bible like a shield what did the man do?
Refused, that’s what.

Same way he refused to recognize marriage equality, even when the Supreme Court ruled it the law of the land. Old Roy got himself tossed off the bench until the people, the people! re-elected him.

Time and time again Roy Moore has refused to separate his religious beliefs from his judicial duty. He’s made racist remarks, and even declared that all Constitutional Amendments after the Tenth be repealed. Think about it: the abolition of slavery, equal protection under the law, the right to vote -- forget it all.

Moore’s no fan of the Rule of Law.

This perverse history came before the public allegations of pedophilia, before stories of Judge Moore creeping adolescent girls in shopping malls, believing, so thoroughly in biblical patriarchy that women should submit to their men, and every man deserves a young virgin, that there was nothing amiss with this behavior.

Just gettin’ what God told him he was owed.

Sucking on hubris, high on tax cuts, the morally comatose GOP chucks its support behind Moore, Figuring there’s no electoral downside.

And the Orange Menace, America’s Malignant Tumor, Donald J. Trump, is all-in for Judge Moore, rallying his tribe of racist, homophobic, Islamophobic, misogynistic and aggrieved followers to vote for Moore because he’s needed to Make America Great Again.

(Did you know that we are well on our way to being great again? Trump said so. Must be true.)

Morality, conscience, compassion, commonsense, humanity, the GOP traded its soul for cash, for power, and now the invoice has come due, time to pony up big tax cuts for the donor base.

So the plutocrats can rule forevermore.

Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell laugh hysterically, a pair of sociopathic pranksters who have almost pulled off the cruelest joke -- the free ride for the wealthy will be paid for by the working poor, by children and senior citizens, the disabled, the hungry, the homeless, the sick and infirm.

So funny when you can manipulate people to vote for their own immiseration.

Just talk about God and gays and transgender freaks and liberals and states’ rights and entitlements and welfare queens and the glory of the Free Market and American greatness. Stoke the fires of grievance and envy and fear, never forget fear.

Lie about tax cuts, swear to God that tax cuts for the wealthy produce wonderful jobs for the poor, even though they never have, not ever, not for Uncle Ronnie Reagan, or George W. Bush.

Easy as apple pie. Flat out lies are the New Truth, science is bogus, history irrelevant, memory an aberration.

Already Present in the World

“In an age of almost unparalleled extremism, violence and cruelty, authoritarianism is gaining ground, rapidly creating a society in which shared fears and unchecked hatred have become the organizing forces for community. Under the Trump regime, dissent is disparaged as a pathology or dismissed as fake news, while even the slightest compassion for others becomes an object of disdain and subject to policies that increase the immiseration, suffering and misery of the most vulnerable.” Henry Giroux

Ash from the Thomas Fire in Ventura is falling like snow outside my window. The air quality is unhealthy and the sun is the color of a ripe peach. The wildfires raging in various parts of California are clearly exacerbated by anthropogenic climate change, but don’t bother telling Scott Pruitt or the other venal nitwits in the Trump Administration -- they refuse to believe the evidence right in front of them.

People walking in downtown Santa Barbara wear dust masks or bandanas. Is this what the apocalypse will look like? The schools in the unified district have been shuttered for two straight days. There has hardly been any wind, so the smoke from the fires lays over the city like a malevolent blanket. Some fire officials believe the Thomas Fire could burn until Christmas. More than 130,000 acres have burned thus far. There’s no rain in the forecast, even though this is supposed to be our “rainy” season. When and if rain comes, it will likely produce mudslides, but not to fear, this has nothing to do with climate change, that Chinese hoax.

This is the age of cruelty and stupidity. As I noted on this blog many months ago, Trump and his band of kleptocrats will do enormous damage to the nation, exacerbate our most pressing problems, and fuck things up but good for a generation -- if not longer. Despair is an easy emotion to fall into, and I have been guilty of this many times in the last 12 months. In normal times -- and these are anything but normal times -- I tend to brood and see the world through a dark lens; cynicism comes easy to me. These are not traits I’m proud of, but I recognize them for what they are. But sunny optimism without an understanding of the work required to make any kind of change -- personal, social -- seems naive. Wishing will not make something so, effort is required, and not only effort, sustained effort, through setbacks and failures and dead ends and dark nights when any progress seems impossible.  

The writer Rebecca Solnit whose book, Hope in the Dark, I am reading now, says this: “What we dream of is already present in the world.” I dream of a world less bent on its own destruction, a world where cooperation is more valued than competition, a world in which the pursuit of money isn’t the highest ideal, a world where one human life isn’t deemed more valuable than another, a world of far less wealth inequality, one in which large numbers of people can satisfy their basic needs for food, shelter, medical care, clothing, work and education, a world where a person of color in a hoody and baggy pants and white sneakers  can walk in a predominantly white neighborhood and not be considered suspect, dangerous, a threat.

Come off your corner stool, move to the middle of the ring, start punching. Don’t stop.

The Uses of Fear

“The chief principle of banana-ism is that of kleptocracy, whereby those in positions of influence use their time in office to maximize their own gains, always ensuring that any shortfall is made up by those unfortunates whose daily life involves earning money rather than making it.” Christopher Hitchens

Demagogues throughout history and the world over understand the use of fear, and how to stoke fear in order to manipulate their subjects or followers. When he’s not at war with black athletes, the NFL, CNN, Elizabeth Warren or members of his own cabinet, or insulting indigenous people with his breathtaking stupidity, Donald J. Trump never misses an opportunity to raise the spectre of crime, immigrants, and Muslims. The litany goes: soft on crime, soft on the border, soft on terrorism, yada yada. In reality, the crime rate in the United States is down, immigrants are not pouring across the border to pillage, rape and plunder, and we have far more to fear from deranged homegrown white men armed to the gills than we do from Muslims. But fear works on a large segment of the American public that doesn’t think, read, or know much, if anything, about history.

Trump bangs on endlessly about the threat of Muslim terrorists, but where did he go on his first overseas trip as President? Right, Saudi Arabia, that bastion of moderation and tolerance. As Al-Jazeera journalist Mehdi Hasan noted recently, “The Saudi Arabians have been exporting their particularly puritanical, intolerant brand of Islam to the rest of the Muslim-majority world since the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s.” Naturally, Saudi Arabia is our bosom ally, and naturally, Trump is far too ignorant to see the hypocrisy of American policy.

I noticed the other day, quite out of the blue, a sudden surge of disquiet followed by a flash of white hot anger, and I realized the source of these feelings: Trump, the immoral GOP tax scam, the smirk on Paul Ryan’s face, the ongoing genocide in Yemen, aided and assisted by the United States. These are all people or events that take place far from my everyday life, but they feel real, bothersome, and often infuriating, primarily because I am powerless to do much but write my elected officials, sign on-line petitions, and write this blog. Might as well spit into a Category 5 hurricane. I’m not alone in feeling politically impotent; it’s obvious that the views of the majority of Americans are completely disregarded by political, financial and media elites. The people are only needed every few years to legitimize the system by casting votes in sham elections that are bought and paid for by corporations and the super wealthy.  

The proposals and proclamations issuing from the Trump kleptocracy are so heinous and cruel that it makes me wonder if people in Washington sit around thinking of the most damaging things they can inflict on the nation. How can we punish senior citizens, children, the infirm or disabled? What can we do to foul the environment and hasten the effects of climate change? How can we make it more difficult for young people without piles of cash to attend college? How can we get the masses to pay for the excesses of corporations and the wealthy? It’s as if there is a diabolical think tank around the corner from Pennsylvania Avenue where morons and fucktards hatch schemes…Trump has no respect for his office, the Constitution, the rule of law, basic decorum, and he’s even incapable of awarding commendations to elderly American Indian war veterans without making an ass of himself. If Trump were the president of Trinidad and Tobago or the Marshall Islands, I might be less troubled by his penchant for fouling everything he touches, but he’s the President of the United States and his buffoonery isn’t a laughing matter.

My wife clings to the idea that only the arts can save us from our worst impulses, live theater, plays, music, dance, painting; I want desperately to believe her. In a time of darkness, we must look for the light wherever we can.

The Air-Conditioned Nightmare

What powerful man will be toppled next over charges of sexual misconduct, and why hasn’t the stain of misconduct reached our Groper-in-Chief, Donald J. Trump? Obviously, sexual harassment in the workplace pre-dates Trump ascending to the Oval Office, but Trump has altered the zeitgeist like no president before him. Trump continues to call his accusers liars, and claim, as only Trump can, that nobody respects women more than he does. Right. Trump respects women as long as they give in to his ego, narcissism, tiny, wandering hands, and boorish behavior. Isn’t it curious how the corporate media largely give Trump a pass at the same time they go on endlessly about movie moguls, actors, and other politicians?

I don’t know what to make of this flood of accusations, other than this is still a male-dominated world, and certain men in positions of power and authority seem to believe they can act as raunchy as they want without fear of consequence. Even an old goat like Charlie Rose is in on the act, pawing women at office parties, flashing his sagging member at co-workers, and who knows what else. All over the world, in offices, factories, hospitals, City Halls, and schools, women suffer at the hands of men -- and mostly in silence, behind closed doors, out of sight, and far too often when they do come forward, they are not believed.  

Depressing vibe for a holiday week, when the sun is shining here on the Platinum coast, and there’s cold beer in the fridge, Champions League football on the tube, and my daughter bugging me to raise our Christmas tree before the end of November, which I resist doing with all my being. I don’t believe in the holiday “season,” the ceaseless exhortations to buy, spend, and get the deal. We need to buy more stuff like we need to spend more money on the war machine. We’ve got enough stuff, enough wars. What we lack is a sense of balance and proportion, of fairness and equity, of empathy and compassion. Thanksgiving doesn’t get it’s due any more -- as dubious as the holiday is -- it’s just a springboard to the interminable Christmas season, the day before Black Friday. How many scenes of  shoppers surging through the doors of Wal-Mart or Target will the mainstream press feed us this year? Get your diamond tennis bracelet, your Lexus tied up with a red bow, the new iPhone whatever…

The air-conditioned nightmare is what Henry Miller called America back in the early 1940’s. Not sure what Henry would say if he were to come back for a visit with the living. The American nightmare is much, much worse now, and the air-conditioning sputters on and off. We are a hollowed-out hulk of an empire, a rust-bucket aircraft carrier running out of fuel and drifting wildly off course. The President is a dangerous fool and his party is a collection of hacks, perverts, pedophiles, and hard-hearted ideologues. The Republican-controlled Congress is very close to passing a breathtakingly hideous tax plan that will benefit a small number of wealthy people at the expense of the many. This disgraceful legislation will, when its effects are fully realized a few years down the trail, immiserate millions of average people.

And that’s when the air-conditioning switches off for good.

The Amnesia of Power

“It is time that we stopped our blithe lip service to the guarantees of life, liberty and pursuit of happiness. These fine sentiments are embodied in the Declaration of Independence, but that document was always a declaration of intent rather than of reality. There were slaves when it was written; there were still slaves when it was adopted.” Martin Luther King, Jr.

“I can’t recall. I don’t remember. I don’t have a specific recollection. In fact, I don’t even have a vague recollection.”

The white Attorney General of the United States of America can get away with this two-bit BS’ing of Congress. Imagine an African-American defendant trying these lame responses on an all-white jury. How quickly do you think the jurors would return a guilty verdict?

When the rule of law becomes a farce and a carnival show, and one class of people set themselves above the law, all is pretty much lost. The poor routinely experience the full weight of the law on their necks, even for relatively minor crimes, while the wealthy and well-connected plead amnesia and pillage with impunity.

Like a Greek tragedy, these are dark and perilous times. Trump returns from his jaunt to Asia and declares that American prestige and honor has been restored, and that the fecklessness of his predecessors has been vanquished. With the exception of the murderous president of the Philippines, most Asian leaders would disagree. What did Trump achieve? Next to nothing.

Why isn’t the disaster in Yemen in the mainstream American news? Saudi Arabia, with considerable assistance from the United States, is perpetrating genocide on millions of human beings, with death from the sky and cholera and famine on the ground, but we can’t be bothered to pay a minute of attention.

The detestable Roy Moore, candidate for United States Senate from Alabama, hides behind his Bible while he defends himself against accusations of sexual predation lodged by multiple women; but, hey, no problem, because according to Moore, the girls he creeped gave their consent. Grown men marry and fuck teenage girls in other nations, so why not in America? What’s wrong with a 32-year-old pervert stalking 14-year-old-girls in a shopping mall? Sounds like the perfect training ground for a United States Senator in this Age of Trump, himself a serial groper.

Hundreds of people, including journalists, who protested the inauguration of Donald Trump, are on trial and face decades in prison for engaging in one of the most fundamental acts a citizen in a democracy can engage in: dissent. Once dissent is criminalized we are finished as a democratic republic. You can shut out the lights and close the door and declare the American experiment over.

Russia, Russia, Russia. Talk about a distraction. I must be stupid because I still fail to see how Russia tipped the electoral college for Trump.

Trump embodies everything that is vile and loathsome in the American character, the ugly American writ large, loud, bombastic, ignorant, and dangerous.

Sitting here in California, waiting for the other combat boot to drop, feeling sick to my stomach every time I see Donald Trump on the TV screen, or hear his voice. While I know that it probably never will, I’m old enough to want my country to live up to its exalted ideals, not bow to its basest and most venal instincts. The veneer of participatory democracy has been ripped away like a tin roof in a hurricane, and now all can see the tyranny of the wealthy minority over the struggling majority. This is the new feudalism. I am a serf, no doubt about it, landless and without title. Look at the massive tax giveaway the GOP-controlled House of Representatives just approved for the wealthiest individuals and corporations. Never mind the cruelty of this bill, what of the utter hypocrisy? Any time Barack Obama proposed to spend money, every GOP representative squealed about the budget deficit and accused Obama of saddling future generations with ruinous debt. Remember the Tea Party?

We have the worst government money can buy, of the rich, by the rich, for the rich.  Those of us who live out here in the real economy of rents and medical bills and student loan payments and every other expense it takes to survive, are going to bear the burden if the United States Senate follows the House. Best prepare to bend over. And make no mistake -- this will hurt.

A Dubious Anniversary

“Be it ancient Rome or modern-day America, you’re either citizen or slave. Lion or Jew. Guilty or innocent. Comfortable or uncomfortable.” Paul Beatty

Another day, another mass shooting by a disturbed white man with a history of domestic violence. As always, the NRA and its political enablers wring their bloody hands, offer thoughts and prayers, or like Vice President Pence, vow to stand against evil, whatever that empty statement means, and then proceed to go about their deadly business. The problem isn’t the prevalence of firearms, they always say, in fact, what we need are more people armed with guns...

How much more proof is needed that this is a sick society? Plagued by an excess of rage and animosity, fueled by people like Donald Trump. Mass shootings won’t stop any more than the oligarchs and plutocrats will stop parking their loot offshore to avoid paying US tax. There are myriad forms of violence at work in America, Inc, against the poor, people of color, the working poor, and the environment. We live by Hellfire missile abroad and the AR-15 at home. The rage bubbles like a pot of stew on the stove. But do we stop and consider the systemic causes of our maladies, the impact of savage capitalism on flesh and blood human beings? Rarely. Getting to root causes takes time, effort, reflection, and critical thinking. The party that wields political power over the country disdains intellectual activity, ridicules anyone who searches for truth or questions prevailing orthodoxy, who points out the hypocrisy of our leaders. It’s much more comfortable to believe in myth and fairy tales, the Garden of Eden and the Yellow Brick Road, magic beans, the Lone Ranger,  Superman, and the Big Myth -- American Exceptionalism.

King Donald I is in Asia hawking American-made weapons. Big, beautiful, shiny, weapons. South Korean protesters tell Trump to shut up and go home.

Meanwhile, Trump stooges like Steve Mnuchin and Paul Ryan are spewing lies about the GOP tax plan, the latest blatant giveaway to our wealthiest and least deserving citizens, by alleging that slashing taxes for the wealthy will create jobs for everyone else. This is the tried and true and discredited, let-me-trickle-my-piss-down-your-leg idea that only leaves wage workers standing in a noxious puddle.

A year since the anti-democratic Electoral College went for Trump. The Orange Menace, who lost the popular vote, let’s not forget, and has no mandate, has flailed and failed on all fronts, his approval rating is in the toilet, historically low for a president in the first year of his first term. Of course, in Trump’s alternative universe, he is winning like no president before, his ratings are fantastic, the stock market is soaring, and America is on course to be great again. The hacks, sycophants, incompetents, and criminals who surround Trump scheme day and night to rob the treasury and make millions of Americans absolutely miserable.

As Jeremy Scahill says, history and context matter. The Orange Menace didn’t rise from a vacuum -- he was vomited up by a system of predatory capitalism, racism, and militarism.

J. Edgar's Ghost

“The FBI took a shotgun approach to target and harass protesters partly because of its belief that dissident speech and association should be prevented because they were incipient steps toward the possible ultimate commission of an act which might be criminal.” 1976 Senate Report on the FBI

The FBI has come up with a new threat, BIE, which means Black Identity Extremists. Echoes of cointelpro in the 1960’s and 70’s when the FBI spied on civil rights activists and leaders, including Martin Luther King, Jr. If you actively protest the killing of unarmed black people by white police officers this might make you a “black identity extremist.” If you march, picket, hold a sign at a rally or follow Black Lives Matter on social media you might land on the FBI’s radar. Are black human rights activists -- because that’s what we are really talking about here, human rights -- a threat to the republic? More than the resurgent KKK and white supremacists armed to the gills? As far as I can determine, Black Lives Matter doesn’t advocate for the wholesale killing of white people; it’s goal is to stop the unjustified killing of unarmed black people by police officers.

What is missing in all the media furor over presidential condolence calls to the kin of fallen service members? Put aside the Orange Buffoon’s idiotic blathering -- by now we should know that Trump will always say the wrong thing, then lie about what he said, then attack someone when they question his lie. The question not being asked is why the United States deploys military personnel to places like Niger. Why are we there? Why are US military forces still based in Japan and Germany, Italy and England and South Korea and Turkey? Why are US soldiers in Kuwait? Why is the US still in Afghanistan after 16 years of futility? These are the questions that should be asked, debated, and justified.

Such a debate will never happen. The empire is a force that can only be perpetuated, never questioned. The military budget is sacrosanct. To argue against military spending is to be branded as someone who “doesn’t support our troops.” OK, I don’t, because I see America’s military power as a destabilizing force in the world, a force that is used to impose America’s brand of cut-throat capitalism and market domination.

The temperature soared to 102 degrees in Santa Barbara yesterday, a record, The heat was thick, oppressive. I watched the hills for signs of smoke, but thankfully saw none. The winds were calm. I sat on the deck with a cold IPA and listened to a podcast on FAIR.Org. Inside the apartment every fan was going full bore but having no real effect. I thought of the memoir I’m reading, For Love of the Dollar by J.M. Sevrin, an undocumented immigrant’s tale of survival in the northeast of America in the last decade of the 20th century, around the time Disney was scrubbing Times Square in NYC, making the area safe for tourists and small children. This made me think of the gentrification happening here in SB, on Haley Street and along Milpas, big projects on small lots, with limited parking and the usual exorbitant price tags that no wage worker can afford. Across the country affordable housing is in short supply, but in SB the supply is infinitesimal. The retail corridor on State Street is struggling mightily, and losing, the battle against behemoth Amazon and many storefronts sit vacant, windows staring. City fathers and mothers and the merchant class lay the blame for State Street’s woes on the homeless, demand the police run the homeless off to places where they can’t be seen by tourists. Out of sight, out of mind, but still a problem, only for someone else. The five mayoral candidates talk about leadership, vision, water, and housing, but the problems faced here are much larger than any of them will admit. The SB I was raised in died many years ago and is never returning. Another foodie joint, craft beer hall, wine bar or yoga emporium isn’t going to save the city.

And so it goes.

Harvest of Disaster

“We have no right to sit silently by while the inevitable seeds are sown for a harvest of disaster to our children, black and white.” W. E. B. Du Bois

Leave it to Du Bois. A “harvest of disaster” is precisely what we are facing in this time of Trump and the collapse of American empire. Following the House, Senate Republicans voted on a tax plan that will stand as a massive rip-off of the public treasury all so “tax relief” can be delivered to their wealthy benefactors. What is left of vital social programs like Medicare and Medicaid will take a gut punch. The glee on the faces of the mostly white, male, and wealthy Senate Republicans after the party line vote was nauseating. If any more evidence of the fact that we are ruled by oligarchs was needed, Senate Republicans just delivered it. If a national budget is a map of a nation’s priorities then it is very clear that the only priority in America is to give more to those who already have the most.

The war machine gets its money. The fossil fuel extraction industry gets its tax subsidies, as does big pharma and agriculture, and of course the finance boys and girls -- best represented by Goldman Sachs -- reap all manner of perks at our expense. The rich will get even richer, wealth inequality will deepen; the poor and working poor will bear the burden, as they always do.

Year after year we sow the same seeds, reap the same harvest. Trump, as I’ve written many times, is not the cause, he’s a symptom of a diseased, corrupt and compromised system. Trump is only hastening America’s decline and laying bare for all with the will to see that this country has misplaced its soul. Writing on the Truthout website William Rivers Pitt put it this way: “You are certainly a man of the times, The Man, avatar of all that ails us. You are, among other things, the end product of a decades-debunked economic model that consigns a vast majority of Americans to poverty and stasis while lavishing trillions on the wealthy. This we call ‘trickle down,’ and we've waited half a century now for the rain that never comes.”

I feel like I’m watching a train wreck in super slow motion. Sparks and flames, metal twisting, glass shattering, and bodies tossed around like trees in a hurricane. I don’t understand how we can be so blind, so ignorant, so cruel. Has the US always been this fucked up and I just didn’t see it? We seek peace and stability by waging endless war; we propose to stop senseless gun violence at home by making it easier for more people to own more guns; we purport to blunt the jagged edges of climate change by denying science and the evidence of our own senses.

The Democratic Party, ever willing to render itself inept and irrelevant, tacks steadfastly to the failed ideology embodied by Bill and Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. So much for the best and brightest.

Despair is a bitch. Staring into the abyss for hours on end is exhausting. We must still rise from our beds, do whatever work is before us, pay bills, help children with homework or with navigating the treacherous shoals of social life, take care of elderly parents, and deal with the unexpected. In other words, though our ears are ringing and our face is battered, we have to keep coming off the corner stool and walking to the center of the ring.

California Burning, America Vanishing

Parts of California are burning. October and November are fire season in the Golden State, but what has happened in the Napa area boggles the imagination -- some neighborhoods look like they were bombed by an invading army. Houses reduced to smoldering ash, cars torched, as if Mother Earth pitched a temper tantrum and decided to retaliate for how shabbily we have treated her. Climate scientists have been warning for years that one potential result of human-caused climate change will be fiercer storms, floods, and wildfires. Houston, Puerto Rico, Napa. Get the idea now?

I have Trump fatigue. How about you?

The Orange Buffoon embodies the most reprehensible and vile aspects of the American character: ignorance, bombast, greed, cruelty, racism, arrogance, and violence. In less than a year, Trump has turned the White House into a risible shitshow. His approval rating is in the low 30’s and will not climb any higher unless he launches war against North Korea or Iran, in which case the political class and corporate media will grovel at his feet and a majority of Americans will rally around him as if he were the reincarnation of George Washington. All occupants of the Oval Office understand this reliable escape route from tanking poll numbers or domestic scandal.

Neal Gabler wrote a piece for the Bill Moyers website recently that put forth the idea that we are viewing Trump and his entourage of miscreants through the wrong lens. We can’t, Gabler wrote, view Trump through the standard political lens but must view him through the lens of entertainment, of ratings and clicks and social media traffic, the same lens through which we see Kim Kardashian. Trump, with his incessant demand for attention and adulation, is flipping the usual script, replacing politics with entertainment, and as long as people keep tuning in, he will keep attacking African-American athletes, US senators, the mayor of San Juan, Puerto Rico, the people of Puerto Rico, his own Secretary of State, and the corporate media; he will constantly up the ante and create false drama with arch comments like, “You’ll see.” An approval rating in the low 30’s matters little when you can still command all the media attention, and when that attention is all you care about. Gabler’s hypothesis is intriguing and might be the only way to understand the disaster that is Donald Trump.

While Trump preens, postures, lies, attacks, threatens, and makes an ass of himself, the kleptocrats around him are doing serious damage to the nation, making every economic, social and environmental problem worse by dint of their greed and incompetence. The Trump Administration’s response to the devastation of Puerto Rico is criminal, but no matter how many Puerto Ricans suffer or perish, you can bet that no one will be held accountable. That is, unfortunately in this awful year of our lord 2017, how our system works -- the political and economic elites, the wealthy, play by a completely different set of rules. Like white police officers who gun down unarmed black men, there is never a penalty to pay.

When our country is this jacked up and corrupt, nobody is obligated to stand for the national anthem, salute the flag, or recite the pledge of allegiance. No matter what Trump and Mike Pence and Jeff Sessions say, dissent is never unpatriotic. Dissent is the essence of patriotism. If we don’t demand an end to predatory capitalism, rigged elections, shitty medical care, endless wars, racism, gun violence, jingoism, and ecocide, nothing will change. Kneel, sit, bow your head, turn your back, raise a clenched fist, be an American, stand for something and demand better before it’s too late.

World Leader in Death

“Violence runs through US society like an electric current offering instant pleasure from all cultural sources, whether it be the nightly news or a television series that glorifies serial killers.” Henry A. Giroux

Columbine. Virginia Tech. Aurora. Sandy Hook. San Bernardino. Orlando. Las Vegas. By some estimates I’ve read, there are 300 million firearms in the United States, and every single day in this country, 92 people are killed in firearm related incidents. After a mass shooting I always feel the same sense of unreality, numbness, and then outrage because no matter how murderous the rampage -- and the scope of the Vegas massacre is almost impossible to wrap one’s mind around -- nothing changes. The NRA still presses campaign donations on easily purchased members of Congress, and launches a PR blitz designed to blunt any criticism, and of course remind us all of the sacred Second Amendment. Politicians wring their hands, offer prayers, tell us to honor the innocent victims, but in the next breath declare that now isn’t the time to have a debate about sensible firearm protections. (If not now, when?) Whoever the sitting president is makes a speech condemning the violence, knowing full well that the carnage will continue in another place, at another time. Obama’s rhetoric after a mass shooting brought people to tears, but his beautiful words never changed a thing. (As emotionally stunted and inappropriate as ever, the current occupant of the White House offered his “warmest condolences.”)

Firearms are historically, politically and culturally embedded in our American DNA. Violence is as much a part of our creed as the Declaration of Independence and the Star-Spangled Banner, as college football and NASCAR.  

More details about the Vegas shooter emerge in fits and starts, as they always do in the aftermath of a mass shooting, though his motive remains murky. Was his intent only to inflict death and pain and trauma, to forever alter thousands of lives, or just to etch his name in the history book as the architect of the deadliest mass shooting in modern American history? Job accomplished on all counts. The man is in the annals now, the latest, but not the last, deranged white man with demons running around his brain and a huge cache of weapons and ammunition in his garage.

The numbness returns. A woman who trains in the dojo I attend was at that concert in Las Vegas on Sunday night. She survived unscathed, physically, but her husband told me that she has descended deep within herself, suffering from wounds unseen.

This madness never ends. America has never been great, and only good when it suits the powerful, but nobody can argue that we are not the world leader in death, at home and abroad.

Take a Knee

“But even he knew that things would turn out all right in the end. They would, because they had to.” Arundhati Roy, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness

Where to begin? Puerto Rico? The NFL? College basketball? Another week of Donald J. Trump’s vicious idiocy. Another week in which the United States is diminished in the eyes of the world. The mind reels, the gut convulses, but this is a logical juncture in a country that rewards the most perverse incentives, that puts profit above human life, that wages war indiscriminately, that thinks tax cuts for those with the most is sound economic policy, and that refuses to come to grips with the fact of climate change.

Which brings me back to Puerto Rico, our island colony. I wrote an angry e-mail to my congress person, complaining about the tepid response from Washington to the humanitarian crisis on the island. Imagine, I wrote, if Santa Barbara County had been hit by back-to-back magnitude 7.5 earthquakes. Would you accept the foot-dragging currently on display in Washington? Our idiot president is too busy attacking African-American athletes for exercising their first amendment right to protest injustice, racism, and violence to fret about Puerto Rico; besides, we’re not talking about aiding white Americans, right? Puerto Rico was in distress before Irma and Maria devastated the island, held in bondage by an unelected Fiscal Control Board hellbent on extracting every last nickel to satisfy bankers and hedge fund managers and God knows who else. Capitalism and humanitarian impulses are not compatible. But don’t worry, Puerto Rico, Trump is going to pay you a visit soon. Don’t be surprised if he tries to sell you some hats.

So, it appears that the FBI has determined that some NCAA basketball programs are cheating. The shock! Of course NCAA colleges and universities cheat. They do it because there is inordinate pressure to win, to build a team that can go far into the annual March tournament and thereby rake in big money for the school. I hate college sports. I don’t watch them. The day I might watch is the day college athletes are paid to play the games. As it stands, many college athletes are being exploited, as are most workers in a capitalist system. Add the NCAA to the long list of American institutions soiled and compromised by greed.

I don’t watch NFL games either, not simply because I find American football utterly boring, which I do, but because the NFL -- more than any other professional sport league -- is a die-hard promoter of the American war machine. If the NFL wants to hawk beer, automobiles, cell phones, carbonated beverages or artery-destroying fast food, go ahead, but get the hell out of the war promotion racket, tell the Pentagon to fuck off.

Ah, but are we not Americans who love violence? Yes, we are.  We can’t live without bloodsport. Our president acts like he’s a tough guy, but it’s clear that Trump is a pussy who wouldn’t last 10 seconds in a street brawl. Sad, pathetic excuse of a white man, draft dodger, insecure blowhard. Can you imagine Trump as a soldier in a war zone? He’d shit his fatigues in thirty seconds and start wailing like a baby, probably call for his nanny or Melania.

Don’t be surprised that Tom Price has resigned in disgrace for flying in luxury on the people’s thin dime. If you are a regular reader of this page you know that I refer to the Trump administration as Trump and the Kleptocrats. Every last one of these motherfuckers signed onto the Trump team thinking it would lead to a trip to the bank. These people are punks and thieves.

Take a knee, and then rise up.

Welcome to Oregon

I made a short trip to Tillamook, Oregon to visit my brother. We hadn’t seen one another for eleven years. I flew into Portland, rented a car, and drove west in the rain. When I crossed into the Tillamook city limits I was pulled over by an Oregon State trooper for speeding. The trooper politely introduced himself and said he clocked me doing 68 in a 45 mile per hour zone. I didn’t realize I was traveling that fast. The trooper asked what brought me to Tillamook, I told him, he handed my license back and advised me to slow down.

Welcome to Oregon.

My brother’s first house in Tillamook was located on Trask River Road, a stone’s throw from the Trask River, but he has since purchased a manufactured home on a cul-de-sac in the city proper. The street is crushed rock and full of potholes, and without sidewalks. The houses of his immediate neighbors are well maintained, but many homes on the adjacent streets are weather-beaten, sagging, yards littered with rusted cars, refrigerators, and motor homes. Maintaining a house in that wet climate isn’t easy, and some folks don’t bother trying. Why park your truck on the street when you can park on your front lawn? Coming from Santa Barbara, a city obsessed with its appearance, its beauty and refinement, and the astronomical cost of its real estate, where the crappiest house costs a Midas-sized fortune, I wasn’t used to seeing dilapidated houses, pot-holed streets or trucks parked on lawns.

About 5,000 people call Tillamook home. There’s an elementary school, junior high, and high school (Home of the Cheesemakers!) in town, a big Hampton lumber mill, the Tillamook cheese factory (major tourist draw), a hospital that appears to be fairly new, and the air museum just outside of town, a relic from World War II. There’s not much to see downtown. On my first day we drove up to the Trask River in my brother’s Subaru station wagon. In less than ten minutes we were in the country, passing dairy farms, houses that were set well back from the road with plenty of distance from their nearest neighbor, pastures where cows grazed on green grass. It rained off and on. I saw a few houses that appeared to be abandoned, overgrown with wild blackberry vines; an excavator parked in a field was suffering the same fate, and I wondered who had parked it and how long it had been sitting there. My brother told me that most of the dairy farmers were members of the Tillamook Creamery Association. We saw some log trucks and some trucks hauling milk. We hiked along the Trask for a mile or so. My brother has a degenerative back ailment and he moves slower than he once did. Water dripped from Douglas firs that towered 60, 80, even 100 feet above our heads onto the damp forest floor. Ferns, tangled vines, rotting logs; thick moss -- thicker than I’d ever seen -- hung from the branches of trees, like long beards. We didn’t see another soul. The sound of the Trask followed us. “The river is pretty tame this time of year,” my brother told me, “but come January and February it rages like you can’t believe.”

My brother is experiencing serious fear and loathing of Donald Trump. I have never known him to be a political person, I didn’t know he voted, but Trump and his band of kleptocrats have knocked my brother for a loop, and, like many, many Americans, he feels an intense embarrassment almost every time Trump opens his mouth or takes to Twitter to spew his violent, vapid, vicious idiocy. He rations the amount of corporate news he watches; most of the time, his television is tuned to the Weather Channel. He doesn’t own a computer, a tablet, a Kindle, a laptop, an iPhone, and has no electronic footprint; he still writes a paper check when he does his grocery shopping at the Fred Meyer store.

We drove all over Tillamook county in the two days I spent there, from the forest to the coast, Netarts, Cape Meares, around Tillamook Bay to Garibaldi. It rained, hard at times, and then the sun would make a brief appearance and steam would rise off the pavement and the pasture land. After nearly 50 years in California I don’t know if I could live in a wet, damp, chilly climate like Tillamook but I enjoyed the beauty and diversity it had to offer, and the experience of walking in the deep woods was rejuvenating. My brother is happy there and lives a simple existence. He manages his back pain by swimming every morning at the YMCA, but by 6:00 p.m. or so he needs to get off his feet. He reads a lot. He fishes for cutthroat trout on the Trask when he can.

It was good to get away, good to renew the ties of blood, good to step off the treadmill of daily routine, work, chores, obligations. When I returned home I felt wealthy.