NEVER AGAIN WILL I TYPE 2-0-2-0

2020 ENDS NOW

“Be realistic.  Demand the impossible.”  –Paris street graffiti during 1968 spring protests and strikes

“I don’t take responsibility at all.”   –Donald Trump,  March 13, 2020

Yes, even Donald Trump can occasionally utter the truth, not through understanding or honesty, but through self-concern.  He takes no responsibility.  You keep it.

As 2020 becomes a storied year in modern history, we can hope—be it cynically, honestly or foolishly—that 2021 will find some things on this planet getting better.

This has been a killer year.  Pandemic.  More Americans dying of drug overdoses. In the western states there was drought and wildfires. Here in Oregon we suffered forest fires, extremely unhealthy smoke-filled lungs, destroyed homes.  Towns burned include Detroit Lake, Talent and Phoenix (how could the founders have known it would have to rise from the ashes at some distant future?).

I do not fall for the canard that the U.S. is more bitterly divided than before.  I do, nonetheless, believe Trump in the White House has exposed the myth of the shared American Dream as an obvious falsehood, a fake news commentary if you will.  We have always been a violently divided nation.  Genocide of Native Americans so white settlers could take the land, beaver pelts and bison. Wounded Knee. Seizure of land from Californios after U.S. annexed the state.  Slaves imported from Africa.  A constitution that protected such slavery.  Our very own civil war fought uncivilly and giving birth to the machine gun.  Racial segregation and Jim Crow laws.  Still no reparations to those whose ancestors were shipped here as human cargo and then mercilessly exploited. Prejudice against newcomers:  Irish Catholics, eastern Europeans, Italians, Mexicans, Jews. All-WASP clubs, neighborhoods.  Assassinations from Lincoln to Martin Luther King.  KKK. Lynchings. Persecution of Mormons. Sacco and Vanzetti. Joe Hill. America’s Nazi sympathizers like Charles Lindbergh.  Banning Asian immigrants. Internment of Japanese-Americans. 1929. Joe McCarthy. 1968—click here for one guy who says that was worst year ever. I lived through it as a draft dodger who refused induction. Bad but not the worst. 1861 gets my vote as worst year ever–you can look it up.

Birtherism.  QAnon. Police who too often feel they have the duty to shoot dark-skinned people powered by their own training, fear and prejudice.   I would venture to say that the nation has been getting less unified, as usual, since the end of World War II.  A nation founded for religious and political freedom for white men and their households, now turned to worship of money, has a lot of serious flaws to self-examine.  That is not a strength of this culture.  Shut up, get to work, make more money.  Even in the face of this deadly covid crisis, a whole wing of one major political party says it is ok to die for the good of the economy.  At the same time this same party pretends to be the only one to support Christian values. Whatever happened to “Do unto others…”?  Maybe I should look at some modern Bible text to see how that’s been reinterpreted to suit warlord capitalism.

For more on that scary topic, click here for George Monbiot’s insights. Even though Monbiot is focused on Brexit, we Yanks are all over this. Perhaps scariest is how prominent Americans have been in promoting warlord capitalism in Britain, not just here. Ayn Rand’s theories, Rupert Murdoch (we can no longer pretend he’s just an Aussie), Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Robert Mercer (who helped bankroll Trump’s first campaign).

Here is fine piece by Heather Cox Richardson on what the lingering Trumphilia may do to the Republican Party.

Global capitalism–with help from our Supreme Court: money is speech and corporations are people–has further corrupted our money-based election and political system.  There is no longer any discernible line between large donation and bribery.  What Trump has made painfully clear is that much of American law and justice is totally dependent on the quality of people in power.  The separation of powers looks good in a textbook, not so good in reality as a President moves money around to build a wall on the border that no Congressional vote ever approved.

Why did Trump really oppose the defense spending bill recently passed into law over his veto?  The law contains regulations to curtail use of laundered money to do business and political transactions (often identical) in the U.S.  Duh, where do we think Trump Org borrowed those hundreds of millions of dollars it owes?
Corruption even leaks down into “non-profits” like Girl Scouts.

Beyond mere corruption and arrogance there has been an explosion of incompetence in the past four American years.  Bad covid test kits from the CDC.  A pathetic lack of organization in the distribution of vaccines now available.  And Republican values (money, money, money) are screaming from news reports—one place in Florida is offering first-come, first-serve vaccination for old people who are now lined up in wheelchairs!  Welcome to our reality version of “Game of Thrones”.

Covid is the most indelible fact about 2020, here and globally.  Trump will be little more than an acerbic footnote in a 2120 history book if ever there should be one. Covid is part of a great human tradition.  Plague.  Typhoid.  Malaria.  Chlorea. 1918 flu pandemic. 

Disease had a major role in the settling of white people onto lands once populated by Native Americans. In 1803 President Jefferson sent Lewis & Clark and their men out to explore the Louisiana Purchase we had bought from France.  Sure, there were still millions of Native Americans on the land, but they went with the beaver and elk and pelicans. Within thirty years much of the western two-thirds of the eventual US had been de-populated. Former villages along the upper Missouri River were ghost towns by the 1830s.  Diseases brought from Europe decimated native tribes with little or no resistance to these new diseases. Yes, the Spanish and Mexican Missions enslaved California Native Americans, but even then in the late 1700s the locals were dying in epidemics, tribe after tribe.

Nation state failure—I’ve come to view the nation as one of man’s most dangerous inventions.

Some effects of the pandemic may be good.   Online workers are pursing flight from cities—distance earning.  Emissions are down as fewer people need to go to the office.  If we can get all those delivery trucks to go electric…

I expect the GOP rediscovers penury and budget deficits as a curse, a crime, a form of treason.  Anything to keep Biden’s Administration from spending money to help people and smaller government units—towns, school districts, states.

War on drugs—this idiocy should stop. It was started in 1971 by Richard Nixon, largely as an anti-hippie slogan to use before older, white audiences.  We are making drug cartels ever more wealthy, violent and powerful. Legalize and treat.  Guns won’t keep people off drugs, ever.  If we legalize we can test heroin, et al. for fentanyl. Our attempt at Prohibition a century ago should tell us all we need to know. Remember how the anti-pot forces warned that drug cartels would take over Colorado when it was legalized? Nope, efficient local farmers and licensed businesses get product from field to user, and now most of the products are NOT smoked into sensitive lungs. The same could happen for other drugs and treatment for those addictive ones could be open and accessible.

Paranoia in American politics is neither new nor unique. Click here for Hofstadter’s wise essay now almost sixty years old. 

Our technology has outpaced regulation and understanding—social media used by Putin and nihilists to lure the gullible.  Our modern auto tires break down and leach a toxic chemical into streams killing salmon.   Our foods and drugs and cosmetics are full of crap we don’t know anything about.  Styrofoam and plastic pollute our oceans and is not recycled.  We are on track to destroy most life on this planet, including that of our progeny. Climate change.  Nobody has an answer for what we do with tens of millions of Bangladeshi when their land is under the ocean.  All those seaside navy bases, all those homes built in western forests, all the coastal airports built on fill land…

Happy New Year…we need renewed hope and effort and honesty toward ourselves and others.  We can’t buy the future we need, we might try to create it.

SUPER CHUMP

Not since the helicopter airlift from the U.S. Embassy as the last Americans fled Vietnam over 45 years ago has the U.S. been so globally ignominious, humbled, fumbled, tumbled.   Our President at that time was the born-to-fail Richard Nixon.  Today our President is a multiple bankrupt who pretends to be a billionaire, a reality TV performer who pretends everything is just another TV episode, with him as star.

And today we get to relish the fact that he is proudly taking a drug that can cause heart failure!*  Is Pence taking it, too?#  You can bet Pelosi isn’t.

Vanity Fair has published a scathing self-evaluation of the U.S. by an authority who’s been in the top echelon of our federal government and can see how the U.S. is now global chump.  American “exceptionalism” in the eyes of the rest of the world is now that of exceptional incompetence.  It may not be long before some nations ban American visitors in an attempt to protect their own citizens from our infectiousness.

Chumpiness?  Over 1.5 million covid cases admitted.  Over 90,000 dead in U.S.  Sure, Russia and some other nations are obviously lying about their own covid calamity, but it was not inevitable that the U.S. would be world leader in covid corpses.

*Hydroxychloroquine.  I can fine no evidence that the U. S. actually makes the ingredients that allows concoction of this drug.  Anyone taking it should thus be concerned that we do not start ill-conceived trade wars with our drug dealers, no?

#Click here for Pence’s statement that he is NOT taking the dodgy drug Trump trumpets.

END OF AUGUST, THAT’S A WRAP…UP

Wrapping up this month that should be in summer doldrums, should be the dog days, is to realize how intense has been the action in the reality TV show that is the Trump Regime.

This month marked the fiftieth anniversary of the Chicago Police riots during the anti-war demonstrations around the 1968 Democratic Party Convention…it was there and then that the Dems nominated Hubert Humphrey, insuring the election of Richard Nixon.  Nixon, a veteran of the McCarthy Era red-baiting, was an excellent hater. His character enabled the Republican Party to attract all the angry white folks who hated the LBJ Civil Rights legislation and thus began the process of making the Republican Party ever-more white, anti-liberal, anti-progressive, anti-government, against any kind of protective legislation that might be good for ordinary citizens.  Nixon was the last Republican who could afford to sign into law any legislation to protect the environment.  By the Reagan Era racism and pentecostal religion and hatred of government were folded neatly into the Republican agenda…and half a century later we are still paying the price for the Democratic Party’s stubborn plunge into the dark hole of the Vietnam War in 1968.

THE FELONS LIST

The list of guilty parties grows.  This month alone we added Cohen, Manafort, W. Samuel Patten (guilty pleas today).  Rick Gates had admitted guilt back in February to several crimes, but this month jhe got to describe them in detail, in court testimony in the trial of his erstwhile boss, Paul Manafort.  Manafort, of course, faces one more trial in September.  Today’s plea came from Patten who admitted funnelling Ukrainian money into President Trump’s inauguration, click here for description.

We are now up to seven men guilty of crimes in this spreading scandal–Van Der Zwaan, Manafort, Cohen, Flynn, Papadopoulos, Patten. Rick Gates.  Now Carter Page is claiming he will be charged soon and he will NOT squeal on Trump.  
Do not expect this list to stop growing.  Remember forty guilty characters were finally harvested from the Nixon Administration.

And there are still numerous possible state charges against various and sundry members of the Trump Gang. Click for look at those possible charges and how they would evade all of Donald’s FEDERAL pardon power…dual sovereignty.  If this begins to happen you can bet the Republicans will suddenly want a constitutional amendment doing away with states rights…just as they love states rights when it comes to prayer in school, keeping some of “those” people from voting or negating civil rights… the same party truly hates states rights when those wild Californians decide to limit auto emissions.

One thing to watch: will New York state get rid of its law that protects any body with federal pardon from being prosecuted for the same crime in that state?

OTHER HAPPENINGS

Apparently Attorney General Jeff Sessions will survive until November 8 or 9. The same cannot be said for White House Counsel, Don McGahn, forgotten but not quite gone.  He leaves with his license to practice law intact.  Michael Cohen’s legal career is likely over.

Now, click here to read about what could happen if Sessions goes.  If Sessions resigns Trump can transfer any other Senate-approved official into the Attorney General’s position. Say Pompeo or DeVos or Perry.  If Trump fires Sessions it is an open question…and his ability to make a temporary appointment while Senate is adjourned…even a minority of Senate Democrats could prevent that with a filibuster.

WALLED NATION

Surely nobody rational believed that Mexico would pay for the wall.  But the Stephen Miller’s anti-immigration regime is erecting as many paper barriers as possible… and is now targeting some U.S. citizens who are Hispanic, challenging their birth certificates!  Stephen Miller means there will be no legislation approved on immigration that is not completely anti-immigrant…for now.  He is now being called “President of Immigration.”

LYING TO SELF-PROCLAIMED CHRISTIANS

The current President of the United States hates the nation he governs. He wants to recreate it to match an unrealistic image of a nation that never existed. Even under George III this nation was home to Quakers, Huguenots, Jews, Puritans, even secret deists like Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin. But this President ignores reality, is ignorant of history and fact, is bordering on an ignoramus. He may be ignorance personified.

Now he has blatantly lied to a bunch of church leaders, Christian one and all.  He told them he had done away with the law that prevents American religious organizations, with their tax exemptions, from openly endorsing or campaigning for political candidates.

In his mind he is the greatest President one could even imagine, and now he has the powers of a 15th Century monarch.  Of course, this is only in Trump’s fictional universe.  

The ignorance comes in because this President knows nothing of the separation of church and state and why and how and where it came into being.  Hint: in a bunch of British colonies that rebelled for independence and freedom. 

FAKE NEWS: TRUMP CANCELS BRENNAN SECURITY CLEARANCE 

This has not happened…will it?  Not even the President himself could tell us the truth.

WE ARE BECOMING GREAT AGAIN…SEXUAL DISEASES RISING

All the budget cuts, all the anti-sex education efforts, all the decrease in public health spending, have given us a renewed growth in sexually transmitted diseases.  Opioids, guns, cars, obesity, STDs–our health problems are self-inflicted.  We may not need climate change to make our lives unnecessarily difficult.

Any good American knows money is more important than public health, education or even treatment; good Repubs go for spending cuts every time…govt. over-reach is coming for your kids. Do you really want the govt. telling your college age offsprings to have safe sex, after all, isn’t it everybody’s right to get as sick as possible?  Besides Secty. DeVos wants sex education now to “Just say NO.”  We all know how well that works.  Look at our President’s maginificent self-control when it comes to matters sexual.

And for a good feeling of austerity, now that the wealthy and corporations got their tax cut, let’s not give federal civilian workers a pay raise.  Could this fuel the first hint of a general strike?

TRUMP’S PROBLEM IS NOT COLLUSION…IT IS COMPULSION

He has to be the center of every spotlight, of all TV shows, or every conspiracy theory among his followers. He has a compulsion to be the center of attention and will lie and self-destruct before our very ears, just so everybody is watching and listening to him.  So today he gave an interview to the Trump Office of Propaganda (TOP, otherwise known as Faux News), and he again claimed that though he knew about the payments to two women who claimed sex with Donald (that he still denies) he didn’t know about the payments until after they happened, though surely in the mountain of evidence the feds now have from Michael Cohen’s records, the feds can disprove Donald’s latest version…we’ve already heard one phone call where the Donald talked of pay-off with Cohen before it had happened.  Remember a few months back when this affair never happened and the payment was made by a lawyer for no apparent reason and without any Trumpian knowledge.  Comments from the White House about anything seem to be simply ways of underlining the Theory of Relativity in Politics.  Giuliani is right about one thing, in the White House, “truth is not truth.”  It’s simply the newest lie. We call it Giulianism.

Omarosa’s strongest claim so far is that lies are the currency of the White House.  And the current lie only lasts until it needs to be changed to maintain media attention.  If the story never changed, the cameras might go elsewhere for something new…

You gotta pity Bob Woodruff’s timing.  His White House books is due out next month and he will have to fight with Cohen’s latest recording or revelation…Omarosa’s hottest audio or video…Manafort’s second trial (unless he cops a plea and ceases being on Trump’s brave man list)…and all the shenanigans in the Trump Syndicate.   Unless Bob has proof that Donald did actually kill somebody on Fifth Avenue with video and a Facebook page, old Bob is gonna have to fight for a share of the media frenzy.

The Republican Party becomes ever closer allied with the fate of the Trump Crime Syndicate (five guilty so far) as it aims to overcome the numerical advantage still held by the Nixon Administration for criminal behavior.  Eventually forty people from that syndicate ended up in jail.  As with this current regime & Russiagate, many of those were not directly linked to Watergate, there was plenty of freelance criminality in the Nixon Gang.  It’s that special felonious scent only they can detect, that mutual attraction of like for like.

MAGA–my attorney got arrested.

Most Republicans now cling to the talking point: “no evidence of collusion by Trump.”  They are doing two things here: throwing Donald Jr. under the bus as he most clearly wanted to be involved in collusion, but NOT his dad.  And the Rs are absolutely ignoring any and all evidence of the conspiracy between Cohen and Trump to violate campaign laws which Cohen has admitted to. So these white collar crimes are on the books just in case they can get some social democrat thrown out of office, but old, rich white guys should be able to do whatever they want?  Is that now the policy preference of this erstwhile law and order party?  Guess what Republicans, collusion or no, a felony is a felony whether Putin approved it or Donald did it on his own. Trump is one of the most self-destructive people in public office at a high level in American politics.  Hoover, Andrew Johnson, Nixon, Gary Hart, John Edwards, Warren Harding–Trump is a sick combo of the worst of the lot.  But he is the best at getting attention.  All his failed businesses and bankruptcies and lawsuits over non-payment are an indication of just how he can run full speed into a wall.  This time he has a busload of faithful Republican politicians on board with him.  They will do nothing to stop the zig-zag runaway White House until or unless the Republicans get creamed in the November election. Otherwise power and money TRUMP all other concerns, like honesty or national interest.

Finally, the worst thing (for Trump) that is happening to Trump is not the line-up of felons forming around the perimeter of his defenses, it is the on-going investigation by New York State of the possible illegal maneuvers of the Trump Foundation.  Let’s see a show of hands of those are certain that Trump and his family never once violated any laws in using Trump Foundation money for themselves or their commercial operations…

Mueller could defect to the Seychelles tomorrow and take all evidence with him…but Trump can do NOTHING to stop a state investigation and he (nor President Pence if it comes to that) has no state level pardon power. Now both Trump’s CFO and former lawyer are being questioned…

Here’s one commentator looking forward to a resignation.  That would mean The Donald cuts a deal where he pleads guilty but gets parole, and a free ticket to the Seychelles.  Here’s one precise insight about the Trump Opera contained in the above-linked Guardian piece: “If only Trump had not run for president, his minions could have continued laundering Russian money, evading taxes and paying hush money until he tweeted off this mortal coil.”

More than wise person has now noted that if Trump had not run for President all the white collar crimes by Cohen, Manafort, Trump Foundation and whoever else…all would have been ignored, few million here or there, pshaw…but the compulsion drove him to be at the center.  That center turns out to look a lot like a bull’s eye from up here in the bleachers.

” Irrationality spreads through Washington…”

I recently read this from a prominent American political magazine…strong words for troubled times:

“[President XXX] should not seek re-election. The Administration is in a truly alarming state. Irrationality spreads through Washington like a contagion. The nerves of key officials are frayed. They are no longer thinking, only reacting, and their reactions are mechanical and predictable.

“Their troubles are bound to multiply, for they are prisoners of their own views… in which they have invested so improvidently and recklessly that they can no longer see a way out. The President is jeopardizing not only the country but his own party, even while he keeps insisting that only the [YYY] Party (with himself at its head) can save the country.

“The fact is–and now it must be obvious even to President XXX–that he himself is the divisive issue in the country, and matters have reached a pass where nothing he can say or do will change the situation. He is more keenly and universally disliked and distrusted than any President in modern times. Franklin D. Roosevelt was indeed hated, but there were millions who loved him, Who loves XXX?

“He can plead ill health or whatever will make the pill less bitter to swallow, but he should take the medicine that thoughtful and patriotic men prescribe.”

So where did I read this?  It is from The Nation. It was published on March 11th…fifty years ago, l968.  XXX was LBJ.  YYY was the Democratic Party.  The ellipses cut out a reference to the Vietnam War.  Once again, after half a century, we live in an Age of Rage.

From the time of this editorial it took another six years to get the rid of both the Vietnam War and Richard Nixon.  His presence on the political stage prompted this words from The Nation, again seemingly meant for today:
“The marks of a demagogue are many, but the principal ones are an appeal to the emotions, the lower the better; a contempt for consistency–which also implies a contempt for the voters–and reckless promises so worded that they will sound plausible to the inexperienced. Drawing on the last, the new Nixon promised to “end the war.” He gave no details. When asked just how he would end the war, Nixon came up with the most impudent of all his ploys–that since he may well be the next President of the United States, it would not behoove him to say what his plans were at this time. Voters are a smart lot on the whole, but the ones who swallow that excuse must be at the lower end of the intelligence curve.”
Lower end?  Today we might say “deplorables” and mean it.