Lost at Sea

“The prime constant factor in American politics across the past six decades has been a counterattack by the rich against the social reforms of the 1930’s.” Alexander Cockburn

All week I’ve felt this terrible sense of foreboding, even though my personal life, and that of my family, is fine, nobody sick or living in poverty, nobody going hungry or struggling to find  clean water, nobody running for their lives because of political or environmental upheaval. Right now mornings in Santa Barbara are cool, but by midday the sun is out, the sky is blue, and all is well.

I’m prone to bouts of depression, dark, somber moods. I’d be better off if I stopped reading dozens of online news sources every day, but it’s hard to look away from the most bizarre political era of my life. I think Trump fatigue is as real as any ailment the pharmaceutical industry hawks during the evening news. If only there was a little oval -- purple, blue or white -- pill to cure Trumpism. The Orange Menace must be worried about the midterm elections because he’s really gone off the rails this week, even by his lofty standards of sheer madness. Provoking a nuclear arms race with Russia and China. Promising his supporters a tax cut before the midterms, even though Congress isn’t in session until after the election. Opening the Alaskan coast to oil drilling. Identifying himself as a nationalist, which means “white” nationalist. Calling for unity after spending nearly two years pouring gasoline on the flames of division. Claiming that the ranks of a Central American caravan of migrants headed toward the US are infiltrated with MS-13 gang members and Muslim terrorists, hell-bent on “invading” the country that spends more on its military than any other on the planet. The corporate media, playing along with Trump, calls the migrants an “army.” (If it’s an army, it’s an army of the desperate, the fearful, the displaced, and the impoverished.) Spewing utter nonsense about the great US jobs his proposed arms sales to Saudi Arabia will produce, pulling numbers out of his ass and flinging them at reporters, all fabrications, of course.  

A nation is in deep trouble far at sea when facts don’t matter, when a president makes stuff up on the fly, and the media more often than not accepts the mindless drivel, rather than calling BS, loud and incessantly.

Trump is a laughingstock. His administration is a shambles, a cruel, dangerous shambles. What about the children in custody at our border, separated from their parents, in limbo in cages? Have we forgotten them? Yes. The media moves on, fascinated by the next shiny thing, the next outrage, the next scandal, the next heaping pile of lies. What about Fukushima? What about the oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico, spewing oil as I write these words? What of our endless war in Afghanistan? Silence. Not shiny enough, not as interesting as Trump’s latest Tweet.

I worry about the malignant seeds Trump is spreading in our soil, some of which will wither and die when he finally leaves or is forced from the stage, but others that will take root and grow, with the fruit not to appear until ten or twenty years from now. Sometimes the real danger is unseen. Trump didn’t come from nowhere. He’s the result of a political and economic system turned corrupt and unresponsive to the needs of the people. The tinder was there when Trump rode his escalator down, primed and waiting for a match.

This Week in the Kleptocracy

“In public relations, perception becomes the highest value, just as in capitalist societies, profit is the singular ethic.” Jason Hirthler

EAR TO THE GROUND:

“I don’t have any financial interests with Saudi Arabia, never have.” Donald Trump

“We don’t know what happened to Jamal Khashoggi. Just because he disappeared inside a Saudi consulate doesn’t mean the Saudis had anything to do with it. Could have been a lot of people, many different people, maybe Turks, maybe Greeks, maybe rogue elements we don’t know about. The fake news media is jumping to conclusions, as usual. The King of Saudi Arabia and the Crown Prince, both fine men, very fine men, told me they had nothing to do with it, and I believe them, very strongly, very bigly.” Donald Trump

“I, Donald Trump, do solemnly swear to uphold and defend the Constitution of the United States, unless doing so interferes with my personal business interests.” Donald Trump  

RECENT HEADLINES:

Trump Humiliates Chinese Panda, Calls for Sanctions.

Trump Compares Crown Prince Salman to George Washington.

Trump Mocks Deaf-Mute Student at White House Ceremony.

Trump Claims Jamal Khashoggi On Vacation In Istanbul, Says Murder Allegation is Fake News Hoax.

The murder of Jamal Khashoggi looks more and more like an episode of the Blacklist gone awry. Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, darling of corporate America and New York Times sage Tom Friedman, is, like Donald J. Trump, a rich fuck-up, thin-skinned, not very bright, who relies on brute force to have his way, and makes most everything he touches turn rancid. No wonder Trump admires him. By most accounts, Khashoggi didn’t earn the “dissident” label hung on him by the Western media; he was a relatively mild critic of the monarchy, but he obviously got under bin Salman’s skin, and paid the price for it. Trump and the US Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, who reminds me of a self-satisfied mob bagman, claim the Saudis are innocent until more evidence is unearthed, like video or audio recordings said to be in the hands of Turkish authorities. Sober observers seem resigned that such evidence will not see the light of day, and that Prince Salman will escape this gruesome episode with no more than a black eye. The “special” murderous relationship between Saudi Arabia, Israel and the US will continue.

Journalist Mehdi Hasan believes hostility toward Iran is what unites and animates this trio. Although no Iranian has been accused let alone convicted for murdering Americans on American soil, Trump and many in the war establishment view Iran as the next great bogeyman that must be vanquished. Conveniently forgotten is the fact that 15 of the 19 9/11 hijackers were Saudi nationals. How is it the Kingdom got a pass for that? Oil, money, influence with the Bush family and in the corridors of Congress buys a lot of amnesia.

Trump’s fawning, servile and solicitous treatment of the Saudis makes for interesting speculation about the extent of his business ties with the Kingdom. As Ian Masters, host of Background Briefing, said the other day on his program, it’s not about country-to-country relations under Trump, it’s family-to-family -- or more accurately -- crime family-to-crime family. Unravel Trump’s financial dealings and it’s likely that his dependence on Saudi money -- and possibly Russian money -- is more significant than we realize. Trump is a walking, talking, breathing, snorting cesspool of corruption, a human ethical violation, who started cheating in the sandbox in kindergarten and has never done differently since.

Meanwhile, while all eyes are glued to the Khashoggi affair, Mitch McConnell and his band of thugs have set their sights on gutting Social Security and Medicare, a long held wet dream of the whacky right. The talking points are making the rounds, with amplification from Trump, and it’s the same BS story the GOP has hawked for 40 years. Budget deficits are caused by overly generous Social Security and Medicare benefits and must be slashed or America will collapse. Absent from the GOP’s logic are the billions of dollars handed to the wealthy and corporations in the form of tax cuts, subsidies, and other types of “relief.” Also missing is the bloated, wasteful, but sacrosanct Pentagon budget, which accounts for more than half of all Federal outlays. And no mention at all of the legal tax avoidance schemes practiced by major corporations like Apple, Amazon, Verizon, AT&T and so on. Ironic that corporate CEO’s and Trump himself, who talk so lovingly of America and our military machine, our freedoms, blah, blah, feel no obligation to support our country with their tax dollars. For Trump and others of his ilk, paying taxes is for suckers.  

The game is rigged in a 101 different ways and the wealthy elite win when they lose, at the break of dawn and the fall of dusk, as they sleep and when they wake.

We’re nearing the midterm elections, the TV ads are heavy, the mailers arrive in the mailbox daily (and go straight into the blue recycling bin), and I still have no idea what Democrats stand for, save for tepid opposition to the Trump crime family, and a fairy-tale belief that Russia stole the 2016 election for Trump and is planning to do it again. Little proof is offered amid the dire warnings. Progressive Democrats fight through a thicket of the old guard led by Pelosi and Schumer, who insist on keeping the Democratic Party on the same losing trajectory. Corporate campaign money is as addictive as heroin. Schumer is hopelessly addicted and until he, Pelosi, the Clintons, Obama, Feinstein and others are expelled from the party, the Democrats will continue to wander in the political wilderness.

By the way, in case you are wondering, I made up the quotes and headlines. Just having a little fun in these dismal times.

Interview - Rudy Valdez

Rudy Valdez directed the documentary, The Sentence, airing now on HBO. It's a powerful film about the American system of criminal justice, or, in this case, injustice. I interviewed Rudy for the Santa Barbara Independent.

https://www.independent.com/news/2018/oct/15/interview-sentence-director-rudy-valdez/

Poem: War on Men (Not)

As usual Trump gets it wrong

The war isn’t on men, it’s on decency

Respect, civility, and the rule of law.

White men need to get in line

Behind African-Americans, the indigenous, Chinese and Japanese,

And all the Women down the decades

who have borne the oppression and

violence

Of white male privilege

Trump apologizing to Brett Kavanaugh

On behalf of the nation

Is another example of crazy Trump World

Where up is down,

Evil is good

And lies are truth.

Most of the nation views Kavanaugh for what he is

A symptom

Of a corrupt ruling class desperate to hold its

Privilege and power.

What’s needed is accountability

Not an apology.

Sooner or later the smug powerful

Overreach, take too much and cast too

Many into misery.

The revolution is underway

And it will be led

By women

Sick and tired of being

Scorned.

The Impunity of Privileged White Men

“There are few things under heaven more unnerving than the silent, accumulating contempt and hatred of a people.” James Baldwin

Imagine if a female nominee for the United States Supreme Court acted like Brett Kavanaugh did last Thursday. Angry, belligerent, accusatory, self-pitying, whiny. How would that behavior have gone over if it had come from a woman? Yeah, think about that for a moment, think of the double-standard, and think of the courage it took Dr. Christine Blasey-Ford to walk into that lions den of mostly old, closed-minded, judgmental white men, who hired a woman to question Ford so they wouldn’t look like a gang of bullies. The drunken frat boy, son of privilege, white-skinned, always has the benefit of the doubt, the presumption of innocence. Not so the woman, the accuser. She misremembers. She can’t be certain. She is distraught, emotional, easy to dismiss. Or she invited the man, laid a trap, cast a spell to which the man succumbed. Go home, my dear, bake cookies and polish the furniture.  

Brett Kavanaugh, like Donald Trump, is a symptom of a disease, the disease being hoary old white privilege, the presumption -- so persistent in America -- that whites, particularly prep school Ivy League whites like Kavanaugh - are the superior race, ordained by God to run the affairs of this world, and who are schooled in the notion that their behavior, no matter how obscene or injurious to others, carries no consequences, for they are the chosen, above the law, masters to whom lower mortals must submit. Members of the superior race cannot even be questioned about their behavior, their lies, their crimes without becoming outraged and indignant.

Kavanaugh’s White House sponsor, the lying, boastful, tax and draft evading, misogynistic and idiotic Donald J. Trump, is cut from the same bolt of fabric, also a son of privilege and wealth, saved from failure repeatedly by his daddy’s money and connections, who has never had to account for his boorish behavior and criminal deeds. Privileged white men like Trump and Kavanaugh defy the laws of nature and fail upwards. Trump is so morally and ethically bankrupt and debased that at one of his weird “rallies” in Mississippi, home to some of his stalwart supporters, he mocked Christine Blasey-Ford. The irony of the coward Trump mocking a woman who had the moral courage and fortitude to act on her conscience isn’t shocking or astonishing or breathtaking, it’s simply repugnant and despicable. That Trump can’t keep his mouth shut about the Kavanaugh confirmation process, like a normal sitting president, isn’t surprising; the man is deranged and cannot help himself.

I have, like most Americans of good will and decency, grown accustomed to the daily stupidity and idiocy oozing from the White House and Trump’s mouth, just as I am now accustomed to Trump’s nonsensical boasts about peace agreements and trade deals and the booming economy, but what I refuse to get used to is the cruelty, venality and mendacity of Trump and the people around him, and the moral indifference of his most ardent followers.