Is America a Nation of Laws?

“Volume II of the Mueller report is nothing less than a categorical astonishment. A majority of the evidence regarding Trump’s serial obstructions of justice has been in the public sphere for a while now, but because of the avalanche of scandal that has become our daily gruel, much of it has fallen down the memory hole.” William Rivers Pitt, Truthout

It’s dizzying. From William Barr’s performance piece as Trump’s personal attorney on Thursday, to the risible Sarah Huckabee Sanders attributing her lies to a slip of her famously forked tongue, to Trump’s braying about how a report he’s not read -- and could not comprehend even if he did -- completely exonerates him. This is how a once reasonably competent nation fractures. I read somewhere recently that a failed state is one where all the criminals operate from inside the government.

If Trump isn’t impeached, then the United States is a failed state.

I am trying to understand why William Barr would willingly smear himself with Trump’s excrement? Was he offered a condo in Trump Tower, a bag of cash, a lifetime membership at Mar-A-Lago, what? When this mockery of a presidency finally ends, William Barr will be remembered as a partisan hack who lied to the American public to protect Donald J. Trump, the most corrupt, venal person ever to sit in the Oval Office. Why would Barr want to be remembered this way?

It always amuses me when important people in positions of power testify before Congress or in a court of law, and respond to simple, direct questions with, “I can’t recall,” or “I have no recollection.” How do you think that would go over if a 19 or 20 year old African-American male told a judge he couldn’t recall or remember? We have always had multiple legal standards in this country, one for the poor, one for African-Americans and Mexicans and native people, and one for the wealthy and connected. The rule of law in America is as flexible as Gumby, imperfect, as is our ongoing experiment with representative democracy.

At the moment, the American democratic experiment looks like something that stumbled  from Dr. Frankenstein’s laboratory.

Protecting the rule of law as it applies to the government is now in the hands of Democrats in the House of Representatives. Democrats led by Nancy Pelosi and Steny Hoyer. Are you as scared as I am that Pelosi will sit on her hands while she makes endless political calculations about the 2020 elections? That she will sputter about the need for unity and the futility of impeachment given that the GOP owns the Senate? That she will claim the Mueller report isn’t damning enough? Pelosi is busy keeping down the progressive wing of the Democratic Party and assuring Wall Street, pharmaceutical, insurance, fossil fuel, and military-security-surveillance industry donors that the Dems are still faithful servants of the neoliberal project.

In other words, I fear Democrats will fuck this up, let Trump spin and spew his exoneration fairy tale, let this moment pass without any attempt to hold Trump accountable, and still wind up losing the White House to the Orange Menace in 2020, most likely because they will field a Clintonite-retread like Joe Biden or some other cipher who steadfastly clings to the magical, but losing, moderate middle.

What, who, will Democrats blame when they lose the Electoral College again in 2020?

What’s it going to be, politics or the rule of law? Regardless of whether an impeachment proceeding removes Trump from office, protecting the rule of law is worth the effort. The question  is, does Article II, Section 4 of the hallowed US Constitution have meaning or not? The framers obviously understood the danger of the abuse of power and the corrupt use of authority. It’s as if the framers had peered into the future and saw the ugly spectre of a man like Donald J. Trump.

A Crime to Tell the Truth

“Fantasizing limitlessness is a bipartisan practice, almost a constitutional norm, and if there is one consistent lesson from American political history, it is that those who point to limits usually lose.” Jedediah Britton Purdy

Julian Assange has finally been dislodged from the Ecuadorian embassy in London, where he lived in exile, and increasing isolation, for seven years. A lot can be said about Assange, good and not-so-good, but one thing is certain: Assange and WikiLeaks pissed off some of the world’s ruling elite with the publication of documents they wanted kept secret, and we all know how much the elites depend on secrecy and controlling the narrative. It didn’t help the US cause in Iraq, for instance, when we learned from WikiLeaks that American helicopter pilots fired on unarmed civilians, including two Reuters journalists. That distracted from the feel-good, every-soldier-is-a-warrior/hero story the Pentagon sold us through every means possible. Noble, democracy-loving American soldiers would never indiscriminately shoot unarmed non-combatants.

But of course they would, and do, just like American military personnel participate in torture, extrajudicial killings, and other forms of barbarism. In this regard, Americans are not different or special. Americans believe we run the world because our country is the richest, freest, and most militarily powerful, our system of government the best, and our technological prowess second-to-none.

We love our foundational myths. The rugged individualist who relies only on himself. The “self-made” man. The risk-taking entrepreneur. The benevolent capitalist. The beacon of hope for the world’s tired and poor. Though the myths are tattered and worn, laughably so, and so clearly a pile of BS, many cling to them because accepting limits is difficult, if not impossible, for the American character. Limits? America doesn’t recognize limits. Donald Trump, his fans and congressional enablers, the hacks he has surrounded himself with, think they are in the process of re-creating a great American age, one without limits to American hegemony. An age where the US answers to no other country (except Israel, of course). Where we reserve the right to extradite an Australian citizen for publishing material we didn’t want published. We apply laws that favor us, ignore all that don’t.

Trump and his henchmen are trampling the rule of law; they dance in the gray zone and do their shady deals in plain sight, confident nobody can stop them. Congress can’t, the courts won’t, at least not yet, and the corporate media are incapable of anything except propaganda and celebrity gossip. How much more blatant must the corruption become? Or is there no longer a ceiling? We know the floor is gone, dynamited by Trump the minute he set foot in the White House. President of some of the people, some of the time, and a majority of them white, scared of losing their privilege, their place in line, and their mythology of being better than others based on skin tone alone.

In this age of robust and incessant lies we need truth-tellers more than ever. Journalists and whistleblowers are targeted because they write and publish and leak information that contradicts the Big Lie narrative. Julian Assange. Edward Snowden. Chelsea Manning. If Assange is extradited, indicted, and imprisoned, there will be more names added. Even the mildest forms of democracy perish when it becomes a crime to tell the truth.

Ally Of The Poor

“The Europeans had managed to dirty up the good land and good water around the world in less than five hundred years. Now the despoilers wanted the last bits of living earth for themselves alone.” Leslie Marmon Silko, Almanac of the Dead

What outrage against the human family has the Trump Junta committed today? What laws has the Orange Menace broken or flouted, or demanded others break or flout? How much longer will the failed War on Terror continue? These questions, and many others, dance across my mind as this strange nightmare goes on; it’s like a river of toxic sludge, there’s no waking up from it, no respite or relief. I write to make myself feel better, to bleed my system of anger, despair, and disgust. My country is becoming a full-fledged banana republic, albeit one armed to the teeth and always ready to bomb an enemy real, perceived or contrived. It’s not difficult to see a total collapse, a descent into chaos. The foundation isn’t solid anymore, if it ever was. The edifice might look formidable, but under pressure it will collapse in a cloud of dust. Empires rise, empires fall.

I’m still reading Almanac of the Dead by Leslie Marmon Silko, published in 1991. The book is eerily prophetic. Silko imagined a militarized southern border, streams of refugees from Central American countries ruined by US policy and the brutality of the narco trade. European colonizers were masters of destruction and death and nothing was allowed to stand in the way of their plunder. Slavery, racism, genocide. Millions of expendable indigenous people died. They were god-less, ignorant, superstitious, inferior to the colonizers, so who cared how many were killed? Red, black, brown, yellow, leave the vultures to rip the rotting flesh from their bones, and leave the bones to bleach in the sun. Turn the survivors against one another, distract them, entertain them, bedazzle them with spectacle and make the simple complex, convince them that tyranny is freedom.  

The catalog of horrors grows. Like mold, Stephen Miller’s dark shadow grows longer on the wall of the White House. The Department of Homeland Security -- always creepy and suggestive of a nation under endless siege -- is in disarray, not sufficiently cruel enough for Trump and Miller’s tastes. If you’re not prepared to rip a newborn baby from its mother’s desperate grasp, you’re not made of the right stuff. On his recent trip to the border, Trump apparently encouraged government officials to ignore the law, which is what all dictators do eventually. Yet, Republicans still won’t turn on Trump, as if their instinct for self-preservation has mutated into a desire for a glorious, flaming end under the tattered banners of Christianity and white supremacy and Capitalism.

Everything in America is based on winners and losers, profits and losses. The will of the people is ignored now as it always has been, shunted aside by corrupt judges and crafty politicians, muted by clergy, ridiculed by the corporate media. The precise point at which the arc of the moral universe bends toward justice is very hard to find. Was Dr. King wrong? Is the notion of a moral universe just another fairy tale, like American exceptionalism? The oppressed must always be patient, must always wait, must always accept incremental progress. But as they wait, the plunder continues, day and night, winter and spring, under the rule of Republicans and Democrats, through boom and bust, the greedy hand never stops reaching for what it covets, be it precious stones, oil, gas, young flesh, land, water, gold,  cocaine or the thoughts inside our heads.

I ask again: what outrage against the human family has the Trump Junta committed today? What perversity has Trump normalized?

Give the last word to Leslie Marmon Silko: “All across earth there were those listening and waiting, isolated and lonely, despised outcasts of the earth. First the lights would go out -- dynamite or earthquake, it did not matter. All sources of electrical power generation would be destroyed. Darkness was the ally of the poor.”

Where The Skeletons Hang

“In the end, there is only one conclusion to reach in this moment: The day I trust the word of a hired flak like William Barr regarding the behavior of a lifelong liar like Donald Trump is the day I flap my arms and fly to the moon. Barr’s missive is merely another salvo in a disinformation campaign that has lasted two years.” William Rivers Pitt

I never expected the Mueller Report to be a bombshell that would convince Republicans that their fealty to Trump is suicidal. Even if the report had flat out declared that Trump colluded with the Russians and obstructed justice to keep that fact from being discovered, Trump would still have claimed that the whole thing was a sham, a deep-state plot to drive him from the White House and deprive the American people of his great leadership.

Many Democrats put their stack of chips on Mueller, who, let’s remember, is a Republican as well as a former FBI Director, and while we’re remembering, let’s not forget the FBI’s long history of attacking and harassing the Left. Talk about an unlikely savior. The leadership of the Democratic Party, people like Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer, have no capacity for reflection. If they did, they would have studied what went wrong in 2016, recognized that the party is beholden to corporate interests, and hasn’t had a coherent political message in decades, certainly not one that motivates rural, working-class, or aggrieved white people. Had party leaders reflected, they would have realized that Hillary Clinton was a victim of her own history, arrogance, and sense of entitlement rather than a victim of Vladimir Putin’s meddling.

Had the party elders done any sort of soul-searching, they would realize that progressives like Ilhan Omar, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Rashida Tlaib, among others, are the future, rather than a force to be marginalized or opposed.

Do you ever get the sense that everything new was once old, like William Barr taking a second turn as Attorney General, and performing the same obfuscation and white-washing he did to save George H.W. Bush’s ass? Barr is a political apparatchik, a Washington fixer who makes bad stuff disappear. The older I become the more I realize that the American government has always been corrupt, has always served the wealthy and connected, has always been murderous. Trained lawyers like Barr and Mueller parse meaning, argue from both sides of their mouths, and protect their clients. The full extent of American “justice” is reserved for the working-class and the poor, not the wealthy and powerful.

Trump is a dangerous criminal. If Congressional Democrats really cared about protecting the Constitution, they would launch impeachment proceedings against Trump. Yes, with the Senate in the hands of a totally spent, brain-dead and corrupt GOP, they would fail to impeach, but going through the process would be beneficial. Nothing is more important than reinforcing that ours is supposed to be a system of laws, with no one above the law, particularly not Donald J. Trump. The GOP had no reservations about trying to impeach Bill Clinton over a blowjob. Compared to Trump, Clinton was a jaywalker.

We should also bear in mind that when it comes to interfering in the American political process no country rivals Israel, but only a small number of journalists ever mention this fact. You’ll never hear a corporate-media talking head mention it. The hypocrisy is stunning.

From the way Trump is behaving he certainly believes he’s skated once again, as he always has, but it’s too soon to put the Mueller Report to bed and forget about it. All kinds of investigations into Trump are underway and one or more of them are sure to bear fruit. The money trail is still the key to the closet where Trump’s many skeletons hang.

In Search of Zen Mind

“Building character is like making bread -- you have to mix it little by little, step by step, and moderate temperature is needed.” Shunryu Suzuki

It’s difficult to stay present in the moment and too easy to drift into the most dire scenarios when the world seems wracked by calamity -- floods, violence, poverty, corruption -- and yet the sun comes up, birds chirp, and spring unfolds. The hills above Santa Barbara are green, and the County recently announced that the drought is over, though we still have a water problem and need to conserve.

The media are breathless about the Mueller Report that is in the hands of the Attorney General. I’m not holding my breath for any shocking revelations about Trump and Russia. What about Trump could shock anyone at this point? Do we need Mueller’s report to know that the President of the United States is corrupt? We already have enough proof of Trump’s disdain for the law. Trump will take to Twitter to deny the report anyway, calling it partisan, a witch hunt, or whatever, and his loyal base of cops, soldiers and bikers will nod their heads in agreement, and the Republicans will remain in line, mute and deferential. Rachel Maddow’s likely to be very disappointed, might even slip into depression.

Although the stock market took a dip yesterday, all you hear about the economy from the mainstream press is how strong it is, how many jobs are being created, and how this strength bodes well for Trump’s re-election in 2020. Incumbents, even one as unpopular as Trump, have built-in advantages, and add to that the near certainty that the Democrats will nominate Joe Biden -- or someone of similar bent -- as their standard-bearer and Trump’s re-election looks even more likely. That’s hard to accept on a sunny Saturday morning. Trump is pushing our institutions to the brink and it’s not certain they will hold for two more years, let alone a second term.

And if the economy is so great, why are so many people struggling and living in precarity?  Great for who?

I’m reading Almanac Of The Dead by Leslie Marmon Silko and 2 Prospectors: The Letters of Sam Shepard and Johnny Dark. At first I had trouble keeping the relationship of the characters straight in the Silko novel, but I’m getting into it now; it’s a long one. The Shepard and Dark letters are fascinating, a 40-year friendship between two men who bare their souls to one another and examine their lives through lenses that are by turns humorous and deeply philosophical. For men of a certain age, the observations made can bring you up short -- these were well read men who examined themselves rigorously and had life experience as well. I’ve read a fair amount of Shepard’s writing, the play Simpatico, Motel Chronicles, Cruising Paradise, and Great Dream of Heaven. His letters provide context for his work, glimpses behind the stories. I’m old enough to know the excitement of receiving a letter from a friend, the sense of intimacy that an email or text message or social media post lacks. A letter provides a more tangible sense of connection, allows for a pause between receipt and response.

Humans need pause, need time to stop and reflect, but this modern, hyperactive, interconnected society we live in hates any pause and fills any silence with noise. My daughter’s connection to her phone scares me. I’m happiest when I don’t have my phone around, my daughter can’t be without hers without feeling anxious and unmoored. I remember being dependent on pay phones (and having change) when away from home, my daughter barely knows what a pay phone is, or was, since they are few and far between now. So much change to navigate, so little silence in which to do so. We can’t eliminate the pause.

Think I’ll go out and have a look at this day, scan the sky, turn the compost, and empty the trash. Maybe in doing so I’ll find my elusive Zen mind.

Business As Usual

“I was tired of greed in particular and the ostentatious display of wealth that characterizes our times, and the justifications for despoiling the earth and injuring our fellow man.” James Lee Burke, The New Iberia Blues

I have struggled of late to write anything. It’s not due to a lack of interesting topics or a lessening of outrage at the steady decline of the United States driven by the stupidity, incompetence and venality of the Trump Junta and the GOP. That’s a constant for any reasonably conscious citizen today. Day after day Trump defiles the White House and embarasses our country and pulls us deeper into the morass. But how many times can I say that Trump is only a symptom, not the cause, of a much more pernicious disease? The incessant appetite of so-called free market capitalism for more, for bigger, for gaudier, is the disease.

The recent revelations of a sophisticated college admissions scandal angered, but didn’t surprise me. Of course well-heeled people cheat, lie, buy off pliable officials -- that’s the very essence of our hyper-competitive, dog-eat-dog, cat-eat-mouse system, it happens every day in all manner of circumstances. For many years in America, college was reserved for wealthy elites, liberal and conservative, blue-bloods, professionals, WASPs, for the most part. Harvard and Yale and Princeton became elite because they devised admission standards to keep the unwashed masses, predominantly Jews and Catholics, from queuing at their ivy-covered gates. Other schools followed suit. The Civil Rights movement, Affirmative Action, and feminism knocked down many of the admission barriers, but then, once the Market assumed the mantle of God in America -- and higher education became just another commodity, like deodorant or soap or suppositories, albeit a commodity with major economic implications for a person’s life -- and the cost of higher education rocketed into the stratosphere, money emerged as a significant barrier to a college education. Competition for entry got tougher, the stakes became higher and more unforgiving, the enormous student loan debts enervating.  

The best book I’ve read about the dismal state of American higher education is Excellent Sheep by William Deresiewicz. He covers it all: students turned into consumers, colleges and universities catering to “customers” rather than students, the emphasis on courses and degrees that lead to profitable careers rather than self-exploration, critical thinking, and engaged citizenship, the neutering of the humanities, the explosive growth in administrative positions, the use of low-paid adjunct faculty and teaching assistants, massive classes. And what happens before college with the test prep industry, admission “counselors”, enrichment programs. It’s a bullshit system that does terrible things to kids and makes parents go crazy with fear and worry. I remember attending “college night” at my daughter’s high school when she was a freshman or sophomore. There were probably 150 parents and guardians in the cafeteria, counselors from the school, representatives from local colleges, UCSB, City College, etc. The fear in the place was suffocating, the absolute neurosis on the part of parents who were deathly afraid, or so it felt to me, that their offspring might fail the great university admissions test and be forever left behind, consigned to the register at Taco Bell or taking inventory at Bed, Bath & Beyond just poisoned the atmosphere. I never attended another college night after that.

The wealthy buy their way out of difficulty and I suppose this isn’t new. In a jam with the law, write a check to the attorney and the charge is lessened or dismissed; your kid can’t handle the SAT or ACT, no problem, you can pay a ringer to take the test, and buy off an admissions official with another check. In Excellent Sheep Deresiewicz writes, “For the elite, there is always another extension: a bailout, a pardon, a stint in rehab. The fat salaries awarded to underperforming CEO’s are an adult version of the A-minus.”

That’s life in America.    

This Is What You Do

”It’s what people do. We tell stories that proclaim our innocence. All of us. We tell them to ourselves and to anyone who’ll listen.” Russell Banks, Lost Memory of Skin

The sun’s out this afternoon, a slight breeze blowing, part of the sky is cloudy, part is clear. My backyard is soaked. Lake Cachuma must be over 60% of capacity by now, the highest it has been in years. In the land of fire, this is a good thing. I worry about climate change a lot, can almost feel the clock ticking down till the reckoning, because when it happens, and it might happen much quicker than we think, I don’t know if my family will have the resources to adapt. There’s so much uncertainty in this world of interconnected technology, wealth inequality, cold-hearted justice, Trump and his gang, and potential nuclear annihilation. How’s the story going to turn out? I assume most people want to know this, though we never will; we’ll only know our little part in the bigger play. In the meantime, we do all sorts of shit we don’t want to, work for people we can’t stand, stay in jobs or homes or marriages or relationships that either bore us to tears or make us crazy. It can be fucking hard, and I’m one of the luckiest guys around, and I know it, because there are places in this world, some closer to us that we know, where human life is dirt cheap, and nobody with their hands on the controls really cares if a man, woman, or child suddenly vanishes. India and Pakistan are facing off again in Kashmir, both sides nuclear armed. Cooler heads seem in short supply. It’s all advertising and marketing and hits and views and ratings, so we only get a limited view of what matters and unlimited attention on what doesn’t.

Trump’s unfortunate former attorney and all-around-bag/hatchet man, Michael Cohen, testified before Congress about his former boss. The Republicans went all apeshit about the process and the fact that Cohen “lied” to Congress! The same Republicans must have missed the appearance of Elliot Abrams the week prior. Republicans have no ear for irony. Trump doesn’t believe it’s fair for Congress to hold hearings about him when he’s not in the country. Yep, the Congress should shut down and do nothing any time the president is away. Separation of powers is becoming more tenuous all the time. Most Republicans are willing to follow Trump over the cliff. It’s astonishing.

The scariest aspect of the Cohen reality show was when Cohen warned the politicians that Trump might not go easily if he loses in 2020. In other words, Trump may not let go of his powers, even if that means instigating violence among his most ardent followers. The gut reaction is to say this will never happen here, but we said that during the election and Trump won the Electoral College. Trump is enamored of leaders who hold the title, President for Life. Citizens beware.

Quiet sunday afternoon. Sunlight in the eucalyptus trees. This morning I was standing on the deck reading William Rivers Pitt’s latest article on my iPhone, and a blue-jay landed on the railing two feet from me. The bird seemed at ease. He or she hopped to the far railing, then poked around the base of a potted plant. I went inside and came back with a few sunflower seeds that I lined up on the railing. The bird and I watched each other. The blue-jay took one and flew off, only to return a moment later for another. First time this has happened in all the years we’ve lived here. My wife is working on her laptop; my daughter is in her room, most likely watching YouTube; my son is in San Francisco, his second major foray away from home, but one that is quickly to come to an end. The boy is bound for Los Angeles and the next chapter of his adventure in life. Make all your mistakes now, kid, when the stakes are lower and your defeats don’t feel permanent. You’re 22, it’s OK to slow down and take it all in, figure out who you are, what you’ll stand for, and what and who you’ll kneel for.

David Cay Johnston has been reporting on the Trump crime family for more than three decades. Johnston has a Pulitzer. He knows how Trump operates as well as anyone, and couldn’t have been surprised by anything Cohen revealed. Johnston has been talking about Trump’s tax returns for a couple of years, confident what they will show is a man far less wealthy than he claims, and with significant debts to some very shady actors. Once someone with a subpoena starts yanking on that one dangling thread, the whole jacket is going to come apart and spill its lining. In the end, it will be all about money, the only thing Trump cares about because it’s all that underpins the man. Money equals power and influence and favors and loans and, most important of all, TV time, screen time, tabloid and New York Times headlines. Get ahold of that and you can rule the world. Even if you’re a spent human being of second rate intelligence and zero ethics.

My wife turns 57 in a few days time, which also means that my 60th is approaching with a fair tailwind. I guess this is the fabled land of adulthood. This is what you do, man. Laundry, shopping, cleaning the bathtub, the toilet, the basin; you shake out throw rugs and roll the recycling bins out every sunday; you go to a job and try to do something productive, and if that’s not possible, at least not harmful. This can be difficult in a bureaucracy, with a hierarchy. Some guys play golf, fix cars, surf, fly drones, ride motorcycles, fish or hunt, hike, camp, travel, scuba dive, I lift kettlebells and swing steel maces and hang upside down on gymnastic rings, kickbox three mornings a week. I read and review books and watch football (soccer) as much as I can. I’m half bad and half good, blind and sighted, and less and less sure what any of it means.

National Emergency: The Long Death of America's Soul

“The even larger problem is that a chronic complacency has been rotting American liberalism for years, a hubris that tells Democrats they need do nothing different, they need deliver nothing real to anyone -- except their friends on the Google jet and those nice people at Goldman.” Thomas Frank, Rendezvous With Oblivion

For me, living in America right now is like watching a train wreck in super slow-motion. The daily insanity coming out of Trump and the Republican Party, the outright cruelty, racism, stupidity, intolerance, corruption, and incompetence is real, and yet, unreal. It hasn’t directly impacted me yet, or the city I live in; Santa Barbara is still gilded, full of well-to-do, smug hipsters, wine bars, craft breweries and gourmet noodle shops, upscale boutiques, and yoga studios. Like they do elsewhere, the rich live well here. The City debates the scourge of electric scooters and the fate of the Paseo Nuevo shopping mall. The latter is a big deal because the Paseo anchors the State Street retail core and a large space once occupied by Macy’s has been vacant for nearly two years. The City and the Paseo’s operators have struck a deal, a lease extension in exchange for $20 million in renovations and upgrades and some dough for services for the homeless -- presumably to keep them away from the Paseo during business hours. The renovations are said to include fire pits and a bocce ball court. When I read this I burst out laughing at the absurdity, but this is the Age of Amazon, 1-click satisfaction, and retailers must resort to all manner of gimmicks to lure people into actual stores; not only do they have to sell products, they must provide the customer an “experience.” No wonder this country is so fouled up. Mindless and endless consumption is our true religion.  

The Orange Menace, unable to garner support by legitimate means for his vanity wall, has declared a National Emergency and will pursue his personal Moby Dick without the consent of Congress or the citizens, who overwhelmingly oppose this monument to racism, xenophobia and fear. The only emergency on the Southern Border exists in what remains of Trump’s fevered brain. His insipid declaration will wind up in the courts, but Trump will no doubt claim a great victory anyway. That’s how he operates, always characterizing his failures as big wins. His gullible followers cheer and wave their red MAGA hats. Senate Majority leader Mitch McConnell, a man as debased and detestable as Trump, backs the president’s play though he probably understands that the courts will throw a spanner in the works -- which will allow Mitch to shake his head and say, what can you do about the courts?

God, how working people in this country have been had, played, manipulated, lied to and betrayed. We let the neoliberals destroy unions, ship jobs overseas, create powerful monopolies, and privatize the commons upon which we all depend. We are overworked, underpaid, spied upon; our votes are almost meaningless, if we are able to vote at all. America is an oligarchy, owned and operated by the rich for the rich. How many of the people who represent us in Congress are multi-millionaires? You think they care about working-class people? They never have. Not Bill-I-Feel-Your-Pain-Clinton or Barack-Hope & Change-Obama. Not Nancy Pelosi. Definitely not Chuck Schumer. With a few rare exceptions, the American working class has given the game away without a fight. We lost our sense of solidarity, allowed ourselves to be torn apart and divided, pitted against one another by neoliberal promises of great jobs manipulating data, boundless opportunity for entrepreneurship. In the meantime, damn near everything we need -- medical care, education, child and senior care, clean water and air, basic services in our cities and towns -- have been privatized by the relentless force of capitalism. The rich and corporations declared a tax holiday for themselves many years ago and barely pay any now compared to what they ponied up in the 1950’s and 60’s. The result? Massive income and wealth inequality, with just a handful of people owning as much wealth as the other half of the entire nation. This is a massive, legal but immoral shift of wealth to people who need it least. Read Martin Luther King, Jr., he knew, he saw it coming and he called the rich out. Then he was killed.

The oligarchs have hijacked our language. Profit, loss, cost-benefit, branding, leverage, synergy, curating, thought-leading, though-partnering bullshit that has spread like a virus. Public agencies now talk like corporations. It’s despicable.

We are down to one functioning political party -- and the Democrats function at a low level of effectiveness because their leadership is corrupted by money -- a bad spot for a so-called democracy to be in. The GOP is now a criminal gang, forcing their minority views on the majority of citizens, giving the government away to special interests, lobbyists, and the Pentagon, which devours about 57% of our total federal spending, an obscene, unjustifiable amount that benefits resource extractors and defense contractors and all the other parasites who suck at the War Machine’s teat. Our wars go on and on and the citizens could care less because too few of us pay attention and none of us are being drafted. The Trump junta is right now doing everything it can to gin up a war against Iran, a nation that isn’t a threat to the United States or any other country at the moment. But taking Iran out has been a wet dream of the neocons for decades. Wars of choice, people, how fucking insane is that?

I once thought that despite America’s very checkered history we were a country with a decent heart and soul, that though we had the capacity to do tremendous harm, and frequently did, waging war wasn’t our first inclination when faced with a problem. I thought there were some things we agreed on, like the dignity of work, a fair wage, reasonable security from want, care for our young and our elderly, a shared sense that we were together. No more. Capitalism has destroyed America’s soul because it is a soulless system. We have become monstrous, deluded, cruel and belligerent. Trump’s bloated, snarling face is our face. America is in its death throes and our democracy is soon to be completely extinguished.  

A Synthetic Scandal: Ilhan Omar & AIPAC

“That victim who is able to articulate the situation of the victim has ceased to be a victim: he, or she, has become a threat.” James Baldwin

Maybe AIPAC, the powerful Israel lobby, doesn’t directly buy political favors in the way the NRA does, but that doesn’t mean that politicians from both parties aren’t influenced to  outright support AIPAC’s aims or remain silent about them for fear of landing on the wrong side of the lobby. And you can see by the hysterical reaction to Ilhan Omar’s comments about AIPAC how quickly bipartisan indignation and righteousness gets ginned up. How dare this first year congressperson from Minnesota criticize AIPAC! The temerity. Naturally, anti-semitism must be Omar’s motivation. What else could it be in our black and white world?

Omar apologized but you can bet money that she will be forever fighting the anti-semitic label, which is one way AIPAC wields influence. On their best days, Washington D.C. politicians are a pusillanimous lot, and for the majority of them the idea of crossing AIPAC is about as welcome as a colonoscopy. Get smeared with the anti-semite brush and you can kiss your career goodbye. An AIPAC endorsement can spell the difference between winning or losing an election or reelection bid. And it hardly matters if the charge is baseless. You just can’t criticize Israel, period. You can’t compare AIPAC to the NRA though they both practice and benefit from influence peddling. You can’t bring up the fate of the Palestinians in Gaza or the West Bank without having anti-semitism thrown in your face. I can think of no other nation in the world that can squelch even the mildest criticism as quickly as Israel can. The Israeli Defense Forces shoot and kill unarmed Palestinian protesters without consequence. This is a fact, not an anti-semitic statement. I don’t contest Israel’s right to exist as a nation and have security for its citizens. I don’t question the reality of anti-semitism in the world; it is real. I do question whether Israel has a right to forcibly expel Palestinians from their land, wall them into pitiful enclaves, restrict their freedom of movement, torch their olive trees and take their water, or strangle the life out of them in Gaza; I also question the Netanyahu government’s support for democratic values.

But just try having this debate in the United States, or Britain, for that matter. You can’t. No critique of the government of Israel is allowed. The subject is off-limits. The second you raise the question of the Palestinians you are deemed to be hostile to Israel, and if you’re hostile to Israel you will be chased from the editorial pages of the New York Times, from CNN, MSNBC, CBS, and all the rest. You will be silenced. Ask Angela Davis or Mark Lamont Hill. Ask Noam Chomsky. Ask Jeremy Corbyn. Ilhan Omar is in good company.

MJ Rosenberg, a contributor to the Huffington Post, wrote the following: “AIPAC uses the same tactics as the NRA to ensure that the United States never deviates from support for whatever policy the Israeli government is pushing at the moment.” It’s assumed that Israel’s foreign policy objectives are indistinguishable from those of the United States, and that the United States will always, and forever, provide diplomatic cover and military aid to Israel.

Donald Trump has called for Omar to resign over this synthetic scandal, a ridiculous thing for him to say but hardly unexpected from the most corrupt person to ever inhabit the White House. Less than two years ago Trump was apologizing for neo-Nazi’s who chanted “Jews will not replace us!” Pelosi and others in the Democratic Party leadership have extracted an apology from Omar, that’s enough. Like the NRA, the fossil fuel lobby and Big Pharma, AIPAC uses all the means at its disposal to influence the United States government on behalf of Israel. This is a fact and nothing to apologize for. If supporters of Israel are so certain of their righteousness and morality, why are they afraid to engage in debate and discussion?

Presidential Harassment

“Old evils return with new names.” John Gray, Seven Types of Atheism

Poor Donald Trump. The pussy-grabber is himself a pussy, whining about harassment from Democrats armed with subpoena power. The Republicans didn’t do this to Obama, Trump cries. No, the GOP wasn’t able to use scandal against Obama because there wasn’t any to speak of. Obama had many faults and his administration failed on many fronts, but for eight years it was never a cesspool of corruption and self-dealing like Trump’s criminal enterprise. Obama got a different brand of treatment. He was burned in effigy by Tea Party supporters, called a liar by Representative Joe Wilson of South Carolina during a State of the Union address, and, most notably, hounded about his birth certificate by one Donald J. Trump. He’s not an American, Trump said, he’s a foreigner, not one of us. Trump beat this racist drum for a long time.

On the one hand it’s amusing to hear Trump moan about how unfair it all is, this man who constantly boasts about how strong he is, how tough, how macho, and on the other it’s infuriating. Trump is sitting in the Oval Office today for many reasons, a few of them valid, but he lost the popular vote and wouldn’t be in the White House except for the un-democratic structure of the American political system. The iron grip of the two political parties, the flow of dark money, pervasive gerrymandering, blatant voter suppression, the fact that Montana has the same number of senators as California, and that almost every presidential election is really contested in only 15 or so states. American democracy is anemic, at best, entirely based on personalities instead of substantive ideas.

Emails keep appearing in my in-box about 2020. They want to know which Democratic candidate I might support. I have no idea. Thinking of another marathon presidential election season, an American tradition that benefits campaign consultants and media types and PR flacks and the TV networks, but not voters, is nauseating. I can’t go there yet. What I know for certain is that whoever the Democrats nominate to take on Trump, he or she will be an enthusiastic supporter of the American Empire, of endless wars never declared by Congress, of obscene Pentagon budgets, of law and order on the domestic front, and of capitalism as the only economic system. He or she will pledge undying devotion to Israel, no matter what outrageous crimes against humanity that tiny nation commits. If Trump is the naked face of empire, a bloated and ugly one, the Democratic nominee will wear an elaborate mask, as Obama did, as Hillary Clinton tried to do though hers was cracked and worn. In one hand an olive branch, in the other a cruise missile. It’s never easy to pull the status quo down; too many people are invested in it, profit from it.

No savior is going to rise from this swamp to set the world right. The American Empire has had a long and bloody run and now this heavily armed frigate is headed for the reef at full speed. The crash might be spectacular. The masts will snap in two, the canon and the barrels will go over the side, the hold will fill with water. There will not be enough lifeboats. As the boat slowly sinks the plaintive wail of all the innocent victims of the American Empire will be heard. Koreans and Guatemalans and Salvadorans and Iraqis and Afghans and Yemenis and Panamanians and Palestinians and Vietnamese.   

 

Lie-Fest 2019

“We read to remember. We read to forget. We read to make ourselves and remake ourselves and save ourselves.”  Maria Popova

The economy is fantastic thanks to our rollback of useless regulations. Manufacturing jobs are flocking back to our great country by the millions. Eight beautiful new steel mills have been built and are producing gorgeous American-made steel. Oil and gas exploration is off the charts. Our healthcare system is the best on the planet. We gave the middle-class the largest tax cut in history. Foreign leaders now know without any doubt that America is back, that we are strong and getting stronger, that our military is the greatest and our airplanes the fastest. We have great relationships with our allies, including the magnificent nation of Saudi Arabia. In two years my brilliant administration has accomplished more than any administration in American history, and we’ve done it by following the highest ethical standards. America is winning on every front, every single day and when we have border security...when we stop the flow of drugs, murderers and terrorists who stream across our southern border...

I know how Trump’s turn in the spotlight will go. If he manages to read from the teleprompter he might, maybe, make more sense than he does when speaking extemporaneously. The Republicans in the House chamber will have been instructed by their leaders to clap raucously, no matter what drivel comes out of Trump’s mouth and to rise to their feet on cue. Democrats will likely sit very quietly, hands in their laps (or covering their eyes). Nancy Pelosi will stare at the back of Trump’s head, searching for clues to his comb-over. Others will stare at their phones, pissed at having to bear witness to an empty spectacle, in the company of a lazy, incompetent, brutish and cruel man with a dead soul. They will wonder how much longer  this will go on. How many lies can one man tell in less than an hour? Do those people across the aisle, mostly men, mostly white, believe anything he says? Ninety-two percent of political life is pure bullshit, benign lies, words designed to sound substantial but evaporate like morning dew, fake smiles and false promises. I feel your pain tripe, I’m with you, you have my support. This guy is 100% Grade A bullshit. On his best day he’s barely coherent. He doesn’t read! He trusts no one! My toddler has a longer attention span. What do the Russians have on him? It can’t be a pee tape, that wouldn’t embarrass him in the least. Has to be money, dirty money that came to Trump for a wash. American banks cut him off, remember, because he ran every one of his ventures into the ground. Jesus Christ, Trump couldn’t make money in the casino racket, what does that tell you? He’s still talking, how can he still be talking, and about what? How can this guy be president? Who turned the world upside down?

I won’t be watching. I’d rather watch an iron pipe oxidize. We need to turn Trump off, kill the microphone and the lights, and simply ignore him, let him wither like a vine in need of sunlight.