Half-Baked, Cruel & Craven

“One of the essential explanations for mounting economic inequality in the United States is the increasing monopoly power over the economy.” Robert W. McChesney and John Nichols, People Get Ready: The Fight Against a Jobless Economy and a Citizenless Democracy

As I write this, House Republicans are gathering to cast votes to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act with a half-baked, cruel, craven and crass alternative. I have never understood why the ACA -- a scheme cooked up by right leaning think tanks -- engenders such animosity and hysteria in Republicans. Is it simply because the ACA became known as ObamaCare, and that moniker alone is enough to make Republicans foam at the mouth? Listening to Paul Ryan one would certainly think the ACA has been ruinous to the American character.

Ryan, of course, is purported to be the GOP’s Big Thinker, but this is only because the intellectual bar in the GOP’s ranks is set six inches from the floor. In a room full of dimwits, a nitwit stands out.

The Russia-tampered-with-our-sacred-electoral-process story, and its myriad offshoots, continues to skitter around the newscycle. I still don’t buy it. From the very beginning, the story lacked coherence, and the passage of time hasn’t made it less so. Too many things don’t add up.

Trump’s Supreme Court justice nominee, Neil Gorsuch, gives me the willies.

I wonder if we could have one day with no American made munitions falling anywhere in the world.

Here in Santa Barbara, jewel of the Central Coast, hipsters and gentrifiers, under the encouraging gaze of city planners, continue their assault, demolishing the old, erecting the new; rents are high, vacancies almost non-existent, and tenants are making noises about their rights, some going so far as to whisper the dreaded words, “rent control” out loud, an utterance that freaks out the owner class. There are decent landlords in SB -- I am fortunate to rent from one -- but the stories of greedy, unscrupulous, shitbag property owners are the stuff of legend around here. Many a prospective renter has responded to an advert promising a “spacious, airy, upper East Side cottage offering lovely appointments and off-street parking,” only to discover, on inspection, a cramped, dilapidated hovel with water stains on the ceiling, piss-stained carpeting, peeling paint, and a shower infested with mold.

I was thinking about the online retail behemoth Amazon the other day -- as I was searching for a book -- and got to wondering how many different businesses all over the nation Amazon has sundered. Macy’s is closing stores, including one here in the retail core of SB, and Sears/KMart may be on the brink of the same fate. Technology is a wonderful thing, but technological advances rarely fail to produce unintended consequences. Amazon is too big for our good, but the same can be said for any number of industries which have been allowed to become virtual monopolies. For this we can thank the political duopoly. As a mechanism for checking the size of corporations and their raw power, antitrust laws are a laughing stock.

If I possessed a magic lamp and could make one wish, only one, I would wish that the 99% of American citizens who have been losing economically for 40 years, whether white, black, Latino, female, queer, straight or trans, wake up to the fact that our need for decent employment, health care, affordable education, and housing unites all of us far more than our identity differences divide us.

Are the stock market averages still rising? Are we headed for another burst bubble? Economic growth is anemic and yet the casino economy hums right along. Bankers are delighted. Seems like a warning sign.

And Trump is still in the White House.

Dangerous and Stupid: The New Normal

“Fascism says, disregard the evidence of your senses, disregard observation, embolden deeds that can’t be proven, don’t have faith in God but have faith in leaders, take part in collective myth of an organic national unity and so forth.” Timothy Snyder

While the world watches the bumblings in Trump’s Washington, people in Yemen are dying of starvation. The nation was poor before the US-supported war began, dependent on food imports, and years of war have made the situation dire. The chances for a negotiated ceasefire seem slim. The innocent people caught between the warring factions have no place to turn.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the globe, the disaster that is Fukushima goes on. It’s now six years since the earthquake and subsequent tsunami crippled the nuclear facility. The Japanese government and the operator of the facility have shoved their heads into the radioactive soil. Nothing to see or fear except radioactive water, sludge, and tons of contaminated soil. Return, dispersed former residents, and pick up your lives where you left off. In a few years we will host the Olympic Games and show the world our resiliency!

The world isn’t getting the full story about Fukushima.

Back home in Trump-Land, the Republican majority in Congress, led by the heartless Paul Ryan, is on the cusp of maiming, if not killing, the hated Affordable Care Act, the insurance- industry friendly legislation touted as one of Barack Obama’s signature accomplishments. Since the passage of the ACA, Republicans in Congress have labored to kill it by shrieking hysterically about “socialized” medicine and “government takeover of our healthcare system”. What they actually object to is the ACA’s funding mechanism; the GOP’s pathetic replacement is a boon to the wealthy, who hardly need more tax relief. But this is how kleptocratic regimes operate -- they plunder the state in order to reward their cronies.

Damn the poor, the elderly, single mothers, children.

The cruelty of Trump and the Republicans is staggering and we are only in the early stages. Trump’s budget plan, euphemistically titled his “America First” budget, includes huge cuts to a range of social programs, almost all federal agencies except the military and the internal security apparatus, the arts, public broadcasting, foreign aid (surely Israel will be exempt) and even Meals-On-Wheels. Any voter who cast his or her ballot for Tiny Hands Trump must now have at least some inkling of how utterly they were conned.

Trump blathers on about safety, security and protection, as if our country is under constant siege from within and without; the Big Bad World is targeting the US and only Tiny Hands can save us from the blood-thirsty hordes. If it wasn’t so dangerous, Trump’s strongman posturing would be hilarious. I wonder if Trump and his cabal are preparing the ground for a Gulf of Tonkin type pretext and imposition of draconian measures in the name of “security.” It could happen. Like all authoritarians, Trump is fixated on strength, on appearing strong, never weak or soft, on winning grand victories, whatever this means in his muddled, second-class brain. His language is violent, reactive, and overwrought, his posture and facial explanations are those of a classic bully.

And what word from the Democrats? Have they learned how to speak to ordinary people yet, to step outside their wonky, insider bubble and articulate what they are for rather than what they are against? Do the Democrats realize that if they slide left, away from banksters and corporate donors and the military-security complex, they could become relevant again to millions of voters. If Democrats talked about making the economy work for the 99% rather than the 1%, they might find a reason for their continued existence.

The US has held the title of most dangerous nation on the planet for a long time. Now we are stupid as well as dangerous, a combination that is sure to produce terrible consequences.

The Deranged Matador

“For more than an hour, Trump resembled a man on electronic detention, going cautiously through the motions, careful not to violate the terms of his invitation: no freelancing or potshots, no vulgarisms or mad gesticulations. For the most part, his big speech, in both substance and tone, could have been given by Jeb Bush or Hillary Clinton. It was pure political boilerplate." Jeffrey St. Claire

I remain skeptical about the hysteria surrounding Russian influence of the November election, a very sacred process according to our Imbecile-in-Chief, because hacking the DNC seems a weird route to take to tip an election. If it can be proven that Russian operatives corrupted voting machines and flipped votes from Clinton to Trump, that’s a different story.

My second observation about this entire controversy is the sheer hypocrisy of US ruling elites. How many foreign elections has the US meddled in over the last half century? It’s never an issue when we do it, but when the tables turn we get all sanctimonious and reverent about democracy. The fact is, like ruling elites anywhere in the world, “democracy” in America is tolerated as long as it doesn’t interfere with business interests, including the business of war, and private property.  

Third, the Russian angle diverts attention from a simple fact: Hillary Clinton ran a terrible campaign based on nothing more than not being a petulant man-child by the name of Trump. The fact that millions of Americans are sick and tired of the neoliberal economic policies favored by the Democratic Party since the early 1970’s, turbo-charged under Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, never penetrated Hillary Clinton’s thick arrogance. Utterly tone deaf and out of touch, Clinton believed she could coast to the White House by pledging more of the same.  

There has been no reckoning in the Democratic Party, no reflection on what really went south in November or why Republicans rule, not only the White House and Congress, but a majority of state governments. Like someone lost in the woods, Democrats need to find a clearing and reorient themselves to the sun, and what that means is they need to turn left -- away from Clinton and Obama -- and return to being a party of working people.

Not to worry, they won’t, Democrats are far too obdurate and tied to corporate and Wall Street money.

Trump is a buffoon and a joke and an embarrassment, but as I’ve written many times, he is a logical product of neoliberalism, of corporate media and a culture awash in infotainment and fantasy, of corrupt politicians and purchased elections. William Greider, a writer I have long admired, wrote recently in the Nation that Trump is not the worst president we’ve ever seen, and though this may be true, Trump is the worst president in my lifetime and the shit he’s hawking will impact the lives of my children, and that bothers me.

I assume from Trump’s recent allegation that Barack Obama ordered the electronic eavesdropping of Trump Tower last fall (a ridiculous claim) that there may be something to the whispers and hints of contacts between Trump campaign officials and representatives of the Russian government. The timing of the allegation struck me as a classic attempt to divert the media’s attention from the very real possibility that Attorney General Jeff Sessions lied under oath. The move was so typical of Trump, and reminded me of a deranged matador waving a cape to draw the bull’s attention. Does Trump sense that a noose is tightening around his neck?

Let us hope.