There's No Dealing with the Devil (or the GOP)

 https://truthout.org/articles/us-fascism-is-spreading-under-the-guise-of-patriotic-education/

“The real crisis in history is what we forget to remember.” Henry Giroux, Author, Public Intellectual, Educator

The other day I reminded myself that this blog is in its final year of existence. Twenty years or one thousand posts, whichever comes first, is the promise I made to myself. It’s May, and this is Post 981 of my vanity project, a public diary of mostly half-baked political and social commentary, gripes, ill-informed and angry lamentations, predictions, posts about baseball, which I no longer follow, and football (soccer) about which I’m hopelessly addicted. Some of my predictions have been proved by time or trend, but as Hunter S. Thompson was fond of saying, “Even a blind pig finds an acorn now and then.” 

I remain agitated and annoyed by political happenings in America, the drift toward authoritarianism and single party rule, but also elsewhere in the world. Climate change has been a preoccupation of mine for a long time now because it adheres to no boundaries and each catastrophe affects different people very differently; the wealthy, along with politically and socially connected people usually make out fine, though they may feel some inconvenience. I think about the elites of Germany when the Nazis seized power by force, or Chile and Argentina which fell to authoritarian military dictatorships. For many people, life didn’t change that drastically, and folks with money had what they have in every time and place: Options. Escape routes. Destinations. 

What I sense most is fissure. Splintering. In this age of atomization and social alienation and loneliness the prisons bulge and mentally-ill homeless people walk the streets, live in tents alongside creeks, behind restaurants, beneath freeway overpasses, wherever a person can claim a space and not be immediately rousted, run-off, or arrested. There’s nowhere near enough housing for people who need it -- those of sound mind as well as those of ill and sick and broken mind -- and rents are so high in so many places now, out of reach of most wage earners. Nobody wants low-income or so-called affordable housing on their block, anymore than they want a halfway house or a mental health clinic or a prison, so there’s not enough supply to meet the urgent need, and too many properties are owned by massive, unaccountable hedge funds. 

America has too many billionaires to also have democracy -- the wealthy will never voluntarily share power, and every day the political system slides further away from the people. Extreme views are normalized. Apparently a lot of people approve of this politics of destruction, while many others don’t seem to care if our anemic democracy lives or perishes. Wiser and better educated folks sound the alarm, wave the red flag, but are ignored, shunned, blacklisted. 

I’m no fortunate son waiting for his inheritance. If the House of Representatives in Washington D.C. succeeds in their quest to turn a routine authorization to pay debts ALREADY INCURRED into a war over future spending, most of it for the neediest Americans, children, the elderly (your auntie, grandmother, mother, uncle), Veterans, and the United States defaults on its obligations, the result may be an economic catastrophe as gnarly as the Great Depression. I’m partially retired and will be directly impacted. The last time the GOP played chicken with the debt ceiling, in 2011, when Kevin McCarthy was just a puppy, still learning where and when to lift his leg, the nation lost trillions of dollars in value and thousands of jobs. Average and poor folks suffered the most, as they always do. This time the pain could be even more widespread. The world economy is intertwined, and the crisis McCarthy and the Crazy Caucus seem dead set on precipitating will be felt from Kansas to China. 

This completely manufactured debt ceiling crisis might be America’s Brexit moment, a stunningly stupid self-inflicted wound, all because of one party’s lust for power. 

Something that shows just how far the political system has moved away from the people it purports to represent is this: should the GOP win this cynical joust it’s not hyperbole to say that millions of their own constituents will feel real pain. The Social Security and Veterans rolls are full of dead red, Trump is God, MAGA Forever people who won’t understand until it’s too late that they’ve been used as sacrificial lambs by the party they support, no matter how outrageous, extreme and dangerous that party becomes. McCarthy and Co. don’t care; they’re willing to burn it all down. 

Nothing constructive results when complete fools like Marjorie Taylor Greene and Loren Boebert and cross-dressing George Santos are taken seriously. These people are the GOP’s new breed. They’re Trumpian. Grandiose. Empty-headed. Bigoted. They’re attention whores unfit for any public office. They don’t even go through the motions of pretending to represent the people who elected them; they represent themselves. They’re gambling they can run the bus off the elevated expressway and blame the wreck on Biden and the Democrats. Torpedo the economy, create anxiety and anger and real suffering, even, as I said above, for their own constituents and corporate donors, and then use all their propaganda tools and know-how to convince a gullible public that only the return of Donald J. Trump can save America. 

White America. 

Authoritarian political parties, left or right, bank on their ability to fool masses of people; this is why the GOP attacks public education at every opportunity, why its strategy gurus and data analysts want to prevent college students from exercising their right to vote. Choosing its own voters is the sweet spot for the GOP. They employ every trick in the bag to exclude particular voters from the polls. 

The point of education, as Henry Giroux has argued for years, and does so again in the piece linked above, which I encourage everyone to read, is to teach people to act as citizens in a representative democracy. Critical thinking is the true target of obnoxious people like Trump, DeSantis in Florida, Abbott in Texas, and Kemp in Georgia. 

But don’t take my word for it, read the piece by Henry Giroux and make up your own mind. 

Saved by the Blues

“Fear? I know not fear. There are only moments of confusion.” Hunter S. Thompson

The feckless mob that calls itself the United States Congress has kicked the battered debt ceiling/budget can down the road. Round Two of fiscal roulette won’t happen until after the holiday “season.” Republicans may be mildly chastened by their recent debacle and plummeting poll numbers, but the Tea Party nut-bags will return in force to tilt once more at the windmill. Come January, the same bogus arguments will ring out in the halls of the capitol. We must live within our means! Solution: slash Medicare and build another aircraft carrier. Entitlements are bleeding the federal treasury! Solution: reduce benefits and expand our military footprint in Africa. America is a welfare state! Solution: lower taxes on the wealthy.

It’s madness, pure and simple, lifted straight from the pages of George Orwell: black is white, war is peace, destruction is progress. Our government has divorced itself from the people in favor of political elites and wealthy interests, defense contractors and resource extractors, pharmaceutical companies, lobbying firms, and corporate-controlled media. Though we are called to the polls every couple of years, more and more our votes are meaningless; outcomes are decided in advance, by money and access to the apparatus of one of our corrupt parties.

No political leader will level with us about how bad things really are; we’re far down the road to third world status.

President Obama and the party he heads are faithful servants of the status quo. Even when Democrats controlled both houses of Congress they behaved timidly, like a minority party, ever deferential to Tea Party kooks and neo-Nazis like Eric Cantor. Don’t look to the Democrats for bold ideas or a cogent, passionate explanation of what and who the party stands for. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren do their best, but crackpots like Ted Cruz control the big megaphone and the headlines.  

Near the end of his life Hunter S. Thompson called the US the Kingdom of Fear. That moniker may have been true in the aftermath of 9/11, but a dozen years on the Kingdom of Fear has become the Kingdom of Stupidity. We play the same cards again and again and expect a different outcome: cut taxes on the rich and expect jobs for the poor; do nothing about climate change and act bewildered when the floodwaters rise; murder innocents with drone strikes and wonder why we are despised in the Muslim world; offshore US manufacturing to China and wonder why our tax base has eroded and the dollar is looked upon with suspicion on world currency markets.   

What is to be done to halt this insanity? The next financial meltdown isn’t far off, and I fear it will be even worse than the 2008 version. Our leaders engage in magical thinking, rely on myths and the pronouncements of false prophets, while spasms wrack the body of the American empire. The gulf between rich and everyone else inexorably widens, ho hum, and our leaders shrug, as if to say, it’s just the way it is.

It’s not the way it is; it is the way corrupt Money has made it. The American people have been played, duped, and robbed.

I was feeling low about all this, pessimistic about my children’s future, losing hope, until bluesman Kelly Joe Phelps came to town with two guitars and his voice; that voice and the way Kelly Joe worked those guitars for an hour and a half restored some of my faith in the human species.

For the time being, I’ve been saved by the blues.

The Eloquent Ankle Grabber

The news is full of details about the debt ceiling compromise reached in Congress and my BP is moving into dangerous territory. Breathe, baby, breathe. Most of the reporting in the mainstream media is sloppy, warmed-over BS passed along as truth or wisdom, neither of which can be found in Washington D.C. today. Let’s be clear: this manufactured crisis is a new low point in American politics, an insult, a slur, an epithet against the people. Today the New York Times repeated the fantasy that economic “catastrophe” has been averted, even though the deal was based on extortion from extreme members of the GOP. The Times also stated that no deal might have triggered a new “recession.” Huh? New recession? The only people who think we are not now mired in a recession are the big shots at Goldman Sachs, a few nitwit economists on the payroll of right-wing think tanks, and maybe the hacks President Obama takes advice from.

I have written several times before about Barrack Obama’s weak spine and teeny-weeny testicles, but this man of empty eloquence has outdone himself this time. To put it in blunt playground terms: Barrack Obama is a pussy. In the face of extortion, he caved; in the face of overheated rhetoric, he capitulated; in the face of a terrible plan that will have dire consequences for the country, he channeled Jimmy Carter and at the same time moved right of Richard Nixon. How the fuck he managed this bizarre contortion is beyond me, but he did. The cause of the deficit is inextricably linked to Republican policies of tax cuts for the rich, a stupid, endless global war on Muslim terrorists, and the financial implosion orchestrated by Wall Street bankers and speculators. Instead of mounting a ferocious counter-argument from the biggest bully pulpit on the planet, Obama meekly bends over, grabs his ankles and begs for more of the same: “OK, boys, give it to me harder this time. Ram it up there. Harder. Faster. Make it hurt so good.” My grandmother once told me that Richard Nixon had the instincts of a Mafia don; as much as I despised Tricky Dick, I have to admit that he would never willingly bend over and take it up the ass.

Obama is John Boehner’s bitch. Obama allows congressional Republicans to line up and piss in his face. This isn’t the hope and change I voted for in 2008. Obama has moved far beyond being a mere disappointment; he’s now a joke and a disgrace. Candidate Obama bears no resemblance to the serial coward and habitual capitulator that occupies the White House. Might as well elect Sarah “Shit-for-Brains” Palin or Michelle “Homosexuality-is-a-Sin” Bachmann in 2012 and crash the republic all at once rather than bit by bit. Watching Boehner and Eric Cantor and Mitch McConnell bitch slap Obama whenever they wish is painful. Why won’t the man stand up and fight? Does he really believe that there’s nothing he can do because the GOP controls one house of Congress – or is he, at bottom, a fellow Kool-Aid addict who believes that Republican prescriptions for the economy will help put people back to work?

Now that the burning question of the summer – will Harry Potter finally vanquish Lord Valdamort, save Hogwart’s and hook up with Ginny Weasley – has been answered, we need to find out who stole Obama’s soul and how we can get it back.