Tag: Trump

Trump’s Drug War

The absurdity is overwhelming. Here we are as Americans, all party to the White House’s illegal murder of over eighty (so far) men in boats on the premise they are bringing drugs to the United States. As well remarked elsewhere, there is no evidence these boats are carrying drugs and no credibility in the idea these small vessels with a fuel range of 100-200 miles are embarking on a thousand mile journey to the U.S.

But even more insane is the idea that a nation under any government can stamp out drug use/abuse by ‘interdicting’ drugs enroute to this country. We can’t even stamp out drugs manufactured in within the borders of this country. Anyone who believes such nonsense needs to have these words tattooed onto their forehead: Supply-Demand. If people want a product, no matter how potentially dangerous, there will ALWAYS be a supplier. Basic economic fact. Reducing supply only results in higher prices for said product, i.e. better profits, more incentive to supply.

So let’s get real about illegal drugs. First, “drug users” include people who depend on caffeine in their morning coffee, iced tea at lunch or other caffeinated beverages, persons who ‘must have’ their cigarettes or other tobacco products, and persons prescribed any of a multitude of pharmaceuticals which address any of a multitude of human conditions from depression to headache to cancer. Secondly, there is an enormous difference between the use of and the abuse of any drug. Prohibitionists prefer to consider all illegal drug use as ‘abuse’ in order to justify draconian laws punishing users. We must keep in mind the blurred line dividing legal and illegal drugs is primarily based on their regulatory status and whether their production, sale, and use are permitted by law. Theoretically, this status is determined by government authorities based on factors like medical utility, potential for abuse, and perceived harm to the individual and society. In other words, there is no truly ‘illegal’ drug.

This theory supporting the prohibition of certain drugs has been shown to be a fabrication serving other less savory objectives. The drug war is a tool used by government to carry out activities which are illegal. For example, one might wonder about the president’s single-minded assault on alleged drug smugglers from Venezuela when coca leaf is grown in three other Latin American countries: Peru, Bolivia and Colombia. Surely the fact that Venezuela possesses the world’s largest oil reserves has nothing to do with it. Surely.

Never mind the fact that cocaine is hardly relevant in drug abuse circles since fentanyl hit the streets. In 2023, there were approximately 72,776 overdose deaths involving fentanyl (synthetic opioids other than methadone) compared to about 29,449 deaths involving cocaine.

Postcard showing an underground opium den in San Francisco, pre-1906 earthquake. By 1896, there were around 300 opium dens in San Francisco, mostly in Chinatown. In the 19th century and the early 20th century, opium smoking was common worldwide, especially in Asia, which was one of the sources of the opium poppy.

In order to better understand this absurdity, let’s go back more than a century to the country’s first ‘drug war’. The San Francisco Opium Den Ordinance of 1875 made it a misdemeanor to maintain or visit places where people smoked opium. These places were mainly in Chinese immigrant neighborhoods. Similar racially inflammatory state laws emerged. Soon after came the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which barred Chinese laborers from entering the U.S., a ban expanded to all Chinese people in 1902 and not fully repealed until 1943. The first federal drug law, the 1909 Smoking Opium Exclusion Act, prohibited importing and using opium. It wasn’t that the government suddenly became concerned about opium use. In a nutshell, it was that the railroads powering the economic growth of that period were now built, and thousands of Chinese who had been welcomed to this country to do the backbreaking work of carving tunnels out of rock and laying steel track were no longer of use. Even worse, these immigrants, the primary users of opium, were inviting relatives to immigrate and their jobs were seen as threats to white workers.[1]

Then there was alcohol. After nearly a century of growing religious fervor stemming from massive evangelical movements, especially the “Second Great Awakening,” characterized by fiery camp meetings, frontier revivalism, and emotionally charged preaching, a rising cry against alcohol resulted in ‘prohibition,’ enacted on a federal basis in 1920 but in individual states as early as the 1880s.

Carrie Nation became famous for her attacks on alcohol-serving establishments, using rocks, bricks, and her signature hatchet to destroy liquor bottles, mirrors, and bar fixtures. Before resorting to violence, she would kneel outside saloons, sing hymns, and deliver strong sermons to patrons and owners, sometimes calling herself the “Destroyer of Men’s Souls”.

“A wide coalition of mostly Protestants, prohibitionists first attempted to end the trade in alcoholic drinks during the 19th century. They aimed to heal what they saw as an ill society beset by alcohol-related problems such as alcoholism, domestic violence, and saloon-based political corruption.”[2]

Alcohol prohibition led to massive increases in organized crime (bootlegging, speakeasies), rampant corruption of officials, dangerous unregulated alcohol leading to sickness/death, huge losses in government tax revenue, and a general disrespect for the law, with little measurable public health benefit, ultimately proving a costly failure. Ultimately, prohibition led to the development of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), significantly expanding the role and authority of the FBI’s predecessor, the Bureau of Investigation (BOI), making it central to federal law enforcement by creating massive new criminal enterprises (bootlegging) that required federal intervention, strained resources, spurred corruption, and ultimately led to bigger federal crime-fighting roles and the rise of modern organized crime, impacting federal investigations for decades.

This powerful new agency could have drifted into irrelevance when alcohol was once again legal in 1932, but instead there is evidence that the federal official who spearheaded cannabis prohibition saw it as a way to maintain his department’s relevance and budget. Harry Anslinger, the head of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics (FBN), needed a new focus for his agency after alcohol prohibition was repealed. He launched a public campaign against cannabis (often using the “marihuana” spelling to associate it with Mexican immigrants), portraying it as a dangerous substance to justify his department’s continued existence. Anslinger’s rhetoric carried strong undercurrents of racial prejudice and xenophobia, targeting Mexican immigrants and Black jazz musicians.

Then as the ‘60s ended with massive marches in support of equal rights for minorities and women, against the Vietnam war, and in support of gay rights, President Richard Nixon officially launched the “War on Drugs” in the early 1970s, declaring drug abuse a public enemy and enacting significant federal legislation like the Controlled Substances Act to combat drug production, distribution, and use, though policies intensified under subsequent administrations. 

One of Richard Nixon’s top advisers and a key figure in the Watergate scandal said the war on drugs was created as a political tool to fight blacks and hippies, according to a 22-year-old interview recently published in Harper’s Magazine.

“The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people,” former Nixon domestic policy chief John Ehrlichman told Harper’s writer Dan Baum for the April cover story published Tuesday.

“You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities,” Ehrlichman said. “We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”[3]

A 2017 study showed that police forces which received military equipment were more likely to have violent encounters with the public, regardless of local crime rates. A 2018 study found that militarized police units in the United States were more frequently deployed to communities with large shares of African-Americans, even after controlling for local crime rates. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Militarization_of_police#cite_ref-17

In the next administration, First Lady Nancy Reagan famously addressed the drug “problem” with her “Just Say No.” advice, unwittingly illustrating the parental role now assumed by government over the private, consensual behavior of drug users. Reagan’s successor, George H.W. Bush, took it a step further. He promoted the 1033 Program (Defense Logistics Agency (DLA) Disposition Services) in the early 1990s to transfer surplus military gear to local law enforcement for the “War on Drugs.” Nowhere in this rush to judgement did anyone point out that M16/AR-15 rifles, grenade launchers, armored vehicles (APCs, MRAPs), night vision, tactical robots, and “less-lethal” gear (beanbag/pepperball guns, flashbangs) have absolutely no effect on drugs. These weapons and the “war” in which they are being used are against PEOPLE—American citizens, most of whom simply preferered to toke a joint after work rather than drink an alcoholic beverage.

This despite the fact that in the 1970s and ‘80s, marijuana was by far the most widely used of illegal drugs, was found in multiple studies not to be addictive and also found not to be a ‘gateway’ to harder drugs, as so often alleged in government reports. Even today, with drugs like cocaine and even fentanyl in the headlines, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) World Drug Report 2024, the estimated number of people who used various drugs at least once in the prior twelve months was: Cannabis (Marijuana): 228 million users; Opioids: 60 million users; Amphetamines: 30 million users; Cocaine: 23 million users; Ecstasy: 20 million users.

All the while, the drug war of those decades provided cover for illegal U.S. government operations in Central and South America as those nations began to resist colonization by American corporations seeking to exploit natural resources like oil, minerals, and agricultural opportunities. Fertile land and cheap labor could produce crops such as coffee, bananas, and other foods requiring year-round growing seasons.

According to Tim Weiner, the Central Intelligence Agency “has been accused of forming alliances of convenience with drug traffickers around the world in the name of anti-Communism” since its creation in 1947.[4] The CIA has a long, controversial history in South America, primarily during the Cold War, involving covert operations like coups, political destabilization, and support for right-wing regimes (e.g., Operation Condor) to counter perceived communist influence, leading to significant human rights abuses and democratic declines, with operations continuing into recent times, such as those in Venezuela. Key actions included overthrowing governments (Chile, Ecuador, Brazil), supporting anti-communist forces (Contras in Nicaragua, a major scandal where in U.S. operatives sold guns to Iran between 1981 and 1986, facilitated by senior officials of the Ronald Reagan administration. The administration hoped to use the proceeds of the arms sale to fund the Contras, an anti-Sandinista rebel group in Nicaragua.), and involvement in conflicts like the Salvadoran Civil War, with consequences like suppressed democracy and economic impacts.

This kind of interference in the affairs of other nations more or less permeates American history. In the early 20th century, during the “Banana Republic” era of Latin American history, the U.S. launched several interventions and invasions in the region (known as the Banana Wars) in order to promote American business interests. During the Cold War (1950s-1980s), the CIA carried out coordinated campaigns to install South American dictatorships (Argentina, Chile, Brazil, etc.) to track, kidnap, torture, and kill left-wing dissidents, with CIA support and intelligence sharing. In Guatemala (1954), the CIA overthrew the democratically elected President Jacobo Árbenz, linking to U.S. corporate interests, using exile forces and propaganda. In Chile (1970s), CIA efforts undermined President Salvador Allende, paving the way for a military coup. Same idea for Brazil (1964): Supported a coup against President João Goulart, leading to a military dictatorship. Nicaragua (1980s): Funded and trained the right-wing Contra rebels fighting the socialist Sandinista government, with alleged links to cocaine trafficking. El Salvador (1980s): Trained and equipped military units involved in massacres during the civil war.

CIA interventions often resulted in the collapse of democratic institutions, reduced civil liberties, and economic hardship, despite justifications of promoting democracy or fighting communism, according to research. The support ‘troops’ for these political objectives has become de facto occupation of these nations with armed agents of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency, with 87 foreign offices in 67 countries. For example, in the so-called “Southern Cone,” (Brazil, Chile, Argentina, Paraguay, Peru and Uruguay), are considered to be transit zones for the movement of cocaine base, cocaine HCL, and heroin being shipped from Colombia and Peru to markets in the U.S. and Europe, or producers of coca leaves. The end result of these often violent interventions in the affairs of our neighbors is the current and ongoing flood of desperate people arriving at our borders.

Not only are drug laws used outside our nation’s borders as cover for extra-judicial interference in international relations, they also serve domestically to selectively target specific individuals and politically inconvenient groups or based on racism or other prejudices, most recently undocumented immigrants. This is a useful tool for xenophobes determined to turn the United States into a white patriarchal “Christian” nation. The current administration manipulates this demographic by playing up the drug war.

Public support for prohibition policies relies on judgments of morality, that becoming intoxicated is immoral, an echo of the early 1800s temperance movement which reached its zenith with alcohol prohibition, the Eighteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. This same moral judgment about private consensual activity remains a strong current in the United States where prostitution, gambling, and drug use (other than legal drugs) fall under strong government control. While government cannot (yet) spy on the living rooms and bedrooms of its citizens, government agents find such laws useful in targeting specific types of people, as previously illustrated.

“Today, police make more than 1.5 million drug arrests each year, and about 550,000 of those are for cannabis offenses alone. Almost 500,000 people are incarcerated for nothing more than a drug law violation, and Black and brown people are disproportionately impacted by drug enforcement and sentencing practices. Rates of drug use and sales are similar across racial and ethnic lines, but Black and Latinx people are far more likely than white people to be stopped, searched, arrested, convicted, harshly sentenced, and saddled with a lifelong criminal record.

“The wide-ranging consequences of a drug law violation aren’t limited to senseless incarceration: people with low incomes are denied food stamps and public assistance for past drug convictions; states including Texas and Florida suspend driver’s licenses for drug offenses totally unrelated to driving; and numerous other policies deny child custody, voting rights, employment, loans, and financial aid to people with criminal records.”[5]

Despite apparent national political resolve to deal with the drug problem, inherent contradictions regularly appear between U.S. anti-drug policy and other national policy goals and concerns. Pursuit of drug control policies can sometimes affect foreign policy interests and bring political instability and economic dislocation to countries where narcotics production has become entrenched economically and socially. Drug supply interdiction programs and U.S. systems to facilitate the international movement of goods, people, and wealth are often at odds.[6]

  • “We are still in the midst of the most devastating drug epidemic in U.S. history,” according to Vanda Felbab-Brown, senior fellow at the Center for Security, Strategy, and Technology at Brookings Institution. In 2020, overdose deaths in the United States exceeded 90,000, compared with 70,630 in 2019, according to research from the Commonwealth Fund. Yet, the federal government is spending more money than ever to enforce drug policies. In 1981, the federal budget for drug abuse prevention and control was just over a billion dollars. By 2020, that number had grown to $34.6 billion. When adjusted for inflation, CNBC found that it translates to a 1,090% increase in just 39 years.[7]

What if that money had instead been applied to individuals and programs that support individual ambitions and needs—tiny homes for the homeless, for example? What if the costs of our interference in foreign nations had instead been directed toward helping the people of those nations deal with loss of farmland to multinational corporations, climate-change induced drought and hurricane damage, and support for social programs, education, and entrepreneurship, thereby reducing the urgency of people in those countries to flood to U.S. borders in hope of better lives?

Without hot button issues like women’s reproductory rights and drugs, politicians would have to gain votes based on performance rather than propaganda. Stepping away from “government as nannies” and the idea of controlling private behavior would allow taxpayer dollars to support programs that help deter substance abuse in the same way that public education has helped reduce the use of cigarettes. No one knows better than addicts that they, individually, are the only ones who can control their addiction. Ultimately, as free people, we must claim the fundamental right to kill ourselves if we wish it. Most importantly, awareness of draconian drug policies as a cover for illegal objectives both in and outside our nation’s borders would forever eliminate travesties such as the murdering of likely-innocent people in boats leaving Venezuela.

And, in the case of the current administration, understanding the real agenda of the drug war could rightfully turn the public attention fully to the president’s dirty Epstein laundry.

[1] https://muse.jhu.edu/article/240064

[2] Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prohibition_in_the_United_States

[3] https://www.cnn.com/2016/03/23/politics/john-ehrlichman-richard-nixon-drug-war-blacks-hippie

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_drug_trafficking_allegations

[5] https://www.vera.org/news/fifty-years-ago-today-president-nixon-declared-the-war-on-drugs

[6] https://www.everycrsreport.com/reports/RL33582.html

[7] https://www.cnbc.com/2021/06/17/the-us-has-spent-over-a-trillion-dollars-fighting-war-on-drugs.html

What Democrats Did Wrong

Party leaders failed to see the long term need for younger, more vigorous candidates. The bulk of Biden’s term suffered from his shuffling gait, whispery voice, and apparent mental decline. Not that Trump is so much younger, but his demeanor as a bully conveys a message of strength. Sadly.

Dems also failed to foresee Biden’s inability to win a second term and consequently failed to hold a 2024 primary that would have introduced all best possible candidates. Call it allegiance to a venerable old warrior (Biden) or inability to break out of an established order of candidate precedence, or fear of the unknown, this lack of a so-called ‘fair’ fight in selecting a presidential candidate played a significant role in Harris’ defeat.

Sorry, but Kamala Harris was not popular in the 2020 primaries from which she withdrew for lack of funding. Built-in negatives aside from her mixed race and being female included her speech affectations which make her seem smug. One would think that the defeat of Hillary would have been lesson enough. For now, the fight is still between present day realities which are incomprehensible to conservatives and the “good old days” when men were ‘successful’ if they knew how to saddle a horse.

During Biden’s term, there was no apparent coherent approach to illegal immigration. This played into Harris’ weakness on this issue, which Biden appointed her to address. Whatever policy recommendations she made failed to make news cycles. As noted by the Washington Post, “Harris, in fact, has never been in charge of the border. The Department of Homeland Security manages migration. Her immigration role for the Biden administration has included boosting U.S. aid to Central America, traveling to the region and discouraging potential migrants from making the dangerous journey to the United States.” Be that as it may, if there had been a strong Biden policy on illegal immigration and prominent promotion of those policies, Trump wouldn’t have been able to make that topic a centerpiece of his campaign.

https://abc13.com/migrant-caravan-immigrations-and-customs-story-migrants/4690683/

Yes, boosting U.S. aid to Central America is foundational to stemming the tide, as Harris knew. Sadly, the fact is that coherent immigration policies addressing root causes aren’t enough to stop people seeking better opportunities for themselves and their children. If your children are starving and your home and livelihood are daily threatened by violent gangs rampaging through neighborhoods, you too would leave behind everything you’ve ever known and walk to the promised land.

THERE IS NO GOOD SOLUTION to illegal immigration. There is no fence high enough, or military/border guard personnel vast enough to make illegal entry impossible. As climate change advances, more and more populations will face starvation and violent domestic turmoil. The U.S. cannot take them all. No one can. This message must be made clear. Trump’s plan to deport millions WILL NOT SOLVE THE PROBLEM. This is whack-a-mole thinking.

Biden, in the seeming tradition of Democrats and, in the words of Michelle Obama, “went high” when the Republicans “went low.” But we’re dealing with primitive thinking where the hero bashes the villain over the head. With no head bashing, there’s no hero. The villain wins. It’s past time for the Democrats to develop more than one track and start bashing. To greatest possible extent, yes, don’t give up the vision of a better world—peace, love, good vibes. But we also must carry a big stick and when somebody needs to get bashed over the head, bash the son of a bitch. The Biden administration’s justice department took waaaay too long quibbling over how/when/why to prosecute Trump for his shocking illegal acts. He should never have been free to run for re-election.

Not that Biden or the justice department had control over local and state prosecutions, but the failure of appropriate federal action left the door open for Trump to escape from prosecution in lower courts, as is now obvious. It was the first Trump presidency which allowed him to stack the Supreme Court, and that will be the case again. His sponsors are playing the long game, moves that have been feverishly planned since at least the 1950s. The strategy is to whip up fear and hatred to drive conservative voters to the polls, desperate to buy God’s favor by forcing the entire nation into a theocracy. None of this matters to Trump, whose entire plan involves self-enrichment, self-aggrandizement, and eluding justice.

True to their religious belief system, conservatives prefer government which regulates what the population does in their bedrooms and allows the business segment to run wild. The opposite is true for liberals, who believe what people do in their bedrooms is no one’s business and what the business community does can ONLY be regulated by government. Who else can force corporations not to dump industrial waste in our rivers? Ensure clean drinking water and safe food supplies? Mitigate the onslaught of pandemics? Enforce design and construction standards for roadways, bridges, and buildings?

These requirements of government are easily forgotten by a fearful, angry electorate who is not educated to understand these fundamental duties, an electorate even more distracted by a wannabe dictator whose success depends on agitating division with lies and false promises. This can only be effectively countered by an equally vociferous Democrat whose presence and actions meet the pseudo-strength of a candidate like Trump. Potential right-wing demagogues have the advantage of money flowing from a huge array of business interests. Liberals have only the People to carry on the framework for freedom established by the Founding Fathers:

  • We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

Foundational to this vision was EDUCATION. Public education was not an afterthought of the American Revolution – it was a core ideal of our Founders. They maintained that a well-educated population was the only means of ensuring America’s future. The roots of taxpayer-funded public education in the United States can be traced back to the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1647. The colony passed a law that required towns to establish schools, made children attend school, and allowed the state to levy taxes to support schools. This traditional determination now stands at risk from religious forces who have managed to divert tax dollars into support for private, religious schools which often slant their programs to fit a religious agenda.[1]

Could Obama have warded off this SCOTUS situation with his nomination of Merrick Garland for the post by steamrolling the Senate?

  • It is in full accord with traditional notions of waiver to say that the Senate, having been given a reasonable opportunity to provide advice and consent to the president with respect to the [Supreme Court] nomination of [Judge Merrick] Garland, and having failed to do so, can fairly be deemed to have waived its right.  Here’s how that would work. The president has nominated Garland and submitted his nomination to the Senate.  The president should advise the Senate that he will deem its failure to act by a specified reasonable date in the future to constitute a deliberate waiver of the right to give advice and consent.  What date?…90 days is a perfectly reasonable amount of time.

– Excerpt from an op-ed column in The Washington Post on April 10 by Washington, D.C., lawyer Gregory L. Diskant, who is in private practice and also serves as a member of the national governing board of the liberal advocacy group, Common Cause.

  • “The Appointments Clause [of Article II] clearly implies a power of the Senate to give advice on and, if it chooses to do so, to consent to a nomination, but it says nothing about how the Senate should go about exercising that power.  The text of the Constitution thus leaves the Senate free to exercise that power however it sees fit.  Throughout American history, the Senate has frequently – surely, thousands of times – exercised its power over nominations by declining to act on them.

 – Excerpt from a commentary about the Diskant column by M. Edward Whalen, president of the conservative advocacy group, the Washington-based Ethics and Public Policy Center, published April 10 on the National Review Online’s Bench Memo.[2]

Equally appalling was the lack of foresight by none other than Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg who refused to retire during Obama’s presidency, which would have allowed another justice to step in on her coattails. Despite her excellent record and unfailing support for liberal causes, a bit of hubris caused her to cheat the future of a suitable replacement.

Democrats need to wake up! Making nice is not always the best course of action when we’re dealing with not only ignorant tyrants like Trump but also foreign bad actors with their thumbs on the scales.

[1] In June 2022, in Carson v. Makin, the high court held that when governments choose to subsidize private schools, they must allow such funds to pay for religious schools. A majority of current justices appear to believe that excluding religious groups from government programs is a violation of the First Amendment’s free exercise clause. Although court precedents prohibit direct funding of religion under the establishment clause, the current court could decide that if the state funds secular public charter schools, religious public charter schools cannot be excluded from such funding.  See https://www.freedomforum.org/government-fund-religious-schools/

[2] https://constitutioncenter.org/blog/constitution-check-could-obama-bypass-the-senate-on-garland-nomination

In the United States today, apparently…

https://carolbodensteiner.com/2014/01/13/what-did-rural-life-look-like-1910/

Progress came too fast for the evolutionary capabilities of humans. Suddenly, within one hundred years, men were expected to accept women as equals after millennia of their submission. Men were expected to adjust to working with their minds instead of their hands, their bodies eager and waiting for the first throw of the spear, the first clubbing of an enemy. The majority of men needed those physical triumphs to feel like man, and they still do.

A significant percentage of women still believe men are their superiors, the representative of their male god who tells them how to live in submission. It’s too much to expect that suddenly after only 100 years of having the right to vote and the right to contraception, women would universally embrace the responsibility of citizenship, of bodily autonomy.

Sadly, an official return to policies constructed of old fears and prejudices destroys people, most of whom have worked for decades—lifetimes—to ensure that Americans are able to pursue our personal needs and dreams, to become who we want and need to be despite centuries of repression and exploitation. Progress means making the world a better place where people don’t suffer from old hatreds and fears. Now women are losing the right to control what happens to their own bodies. Men and women risk losing their right to live and love as they are—gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender and more. Anyone who isn’t white need not exist.

While attempting to fling us backwards to a time without electricity, running water, or air conditioning, not to mention television, cell phones, and antibiotics, conservatives seem to think society could obtain all those things WITHOUT concurrent changes in social norms. That’s not how it works. Advances in technologies and sciences go hand in hand with social change. In a democratic society, education sufficient to produce people who invent cell phones also produces realization of our innate value as individuals—no matter what gender, skin color, or ethnic background.

Back in the ‘good ole days’ women made the cloth. “Heagerty family members demonstrating the steps needed to spin cotton, Cave Springs (Benton County), about 1900. From right: removing the seeds, carding the fibers, spinning the thread, and winding it on a reel.” Jerry Ritter Collection (S-2004-20-6)

Irony is when people vote for policies that are oppositional to their personal needs. Irony occurs when those voters cherish their cell phones while remaining ignorant of the high levels of education required for their invention or the vast technological network that serves them. Irony occurs when those voters flock to doctors to deal with cancer and other life-threatening conditions whose increasingly successful treatments come about at the hands of highly educated scientists who understand the cellular function of DNA and RNA, terms about which those voters are utterly ignorant. Undoubtedly, key figures in those fields are women and/or LBGTQ+.

It’s called shooting yourself in the foot.

Next: What Trump Will Bring

Our Republican Religious War

Why keep Trump? Why would career politicians bare their rotten souls to the world in order to keep him in office? It makes no sense when they have another Republican in line to take his place.

What is the prize with Trump? Why is he the one and only person who can carry the Republican banner?

Why disgrace themselves and their party by dishonoring distinguished veterans and career professionals? Why hear testimony that lays out sharp and clear the bribery and extortion Trump pursued with Ukraine and then pretend it was nothing? Why manipulate sound bites from witnesses by taunts and interruptions in order to feed misinformation to their hapless followers?

Now no less than in 2015, the followers cling to any slim suggestion that Trump is the best man to lead the country. Unbelievable as it may seem, all the evidence of his misdeeds then—stiffing workers, molesting women, cheating on all three wives, an endless stream of bankruptcies and financial shenanigans—and now in the impeachment hearings of his cavalier risk of national security, none of it disrupts the fond narrative that he is the Chosen One who can lead this nation toward some glorious future.

What glorious future do they envision?

It’s a story of turning back the clock and at the same time fulfilling prophecies. We’ll put women back in the kitchen without birth control — that’s keep ’em busy and out of the jobs men need. (Never mind the immediate crisis in household income…) We’ll put Bibles in every classroom and pray hourly at the nation’s capitol. We’ll end the rights of LGBTQ individuals and push back the tide of people of color, declaring once and for all the America is a nation controlled by and for white heterosexual males.

Nothing can be said, apparently, to penetrate the religious fervor of this mindset. They are the monkeys who can hear and see nothing. God works in mysterious ways, and Trump is the way, the unrecognized messiah, the one who has been selected by God Almighty to work His powerful agenda of bringing America back to its reason for existence.

This narrative was carefully constructed over decades of Republican manipulation, a frenzied backlash to the ’60s generation with their free love, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll. It was outrage over legalized abortion. It was the pushback to the defiance of an entire new generation against an agenda of conspicuous consumption and materialism at any cost. The Silent Majority were sitting ducks for clever spinmeisters who needed their votes to put the corporatiers in the driver’s seat.

The rewards have continued to flow—destruction of workers’ unions, profits over people, wildly skewed income inequality, continuing devastation of the environment in pursuit of wealth, incarceration of the poor and non-white.

Trump is stupid enough to accept the risk of exposing his inadequacies but smart enough to know he’s being used. He doesn’t care that he’s the mouthpiece of larger forces. He’s in it for himself, his family, and the profits they can generate in one scam after another. He has no concept of right or wrong, no shame, no conscience.

None of that matters to the Devin Nuneses of the world. They have hitched their wagons to the myth of the Chosen One and can’t back out now. The two opposing camps of our nation, one seeking to generate public policy framed in science, compassion and forward thinking and the other seeking to generate policies of near-term greed and blind faith, have never been more clearly defined since at least the 1860s.

This is a religious war.  Even though many people of faith have not given up rational thought in order to serve their religious doctrine, those who long for Someone to rule with a strong hand are dedicated to Trump. His braggadocio stands in for strong character among those willing to compromise in order to worship their golden calf.

Will awake voters show up at the polls in November 2020? Will one side have to kill the other in blood-drenched battlefields, hand to hand combat in our streets and cities? Or are there enough people of good faith and common sense to wrest this nation’s direction back from extremists determined to ensure the prophecies of Revelations, their sacrifice to an angry God with whom they bargain in hopes of walking the promised Streets of Gold?

I ask myself, what can I do today to bring my country back to the Founders’ vision of liberty and justice for all? Quite honestly, I don’t know. I’d like to think that through better education and economic opportunity, people can learn how to think past superstitions and myths, that they would embrace rationalism and equanimity. Sadly, just last week a law was passed in Ohio that permits wrong answers to be counted as correct if the error is based on religious teachings.

Newspeak

From an article published July 19, 2019, in The Week, image Illustrated | Collection Christophel / Alamy Stock Photo, Alex Wong/Getty Images

“Newspeak is the language of Oceania, a fictional totalitarian state and the setting of the novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), by George Orwell. To meet the ideological requirements of English Socialism (Ingsoc) in Oceania, the ruling Party created Newspeak, a controlled  language of restricted grammar and limited vocabulary, meant to limit the freedom of thought — personal identity, self-expression, free will — that threatens the ideology of the régime of Big Brother and the Party, who have criminalized such concepts into thoughtcrime, as contradictions of Ingsoc orthodoxy.”

Friends, I have nothing to say here that you haven’t thought before. I say it now because it is worth reminding ourselves.

I was watching FOX News Thursday afternoon, amused at the Republican politicos and elected officials huffing about Sondland’s shift in testimony. Their conclusion? Schiff got to him.

HA! “Schiff got to him.” How much easier can it be to see that the principle at work here is to accuse the other side of what you’re doing?

I was reminded of my thoughts on many previous occasions when one or another Republican from the White House on down has blamed Democrats for some particular sleaze or shady move, none of which were true. It’s not only that they subconsciously act out an elaborate projection of their own misdeeds. It’s also that they intentionally seek to distract by assigning their bad acts onto their opponents.

It’s almost as if they’ve been forced to lobotomize themselves in order to exist as a Republican under their Dear Leader. The upper chambers of their brains are shut off.

Which makes it even more understandable that these so-called righteous conservatives would feel threatened. When your brain isn’t fully functional, any threat feels overwhelming.  Trump threatens them. The situation threatens them. They’re feeling very defensive.

Projecting their bad acts, even if they’re only a complicit bystander, is a form of self-protection.

That broken vase? No, I didn’t do that. Me and boys didn’t do that. It was them, those guys over there.

My renewed awareness of this calculated misdirection by those who purport to be our leaders and their willing corruption of our nation’s laws and institutions requires the rest of us to hear the news with a built-in translator in order to understand what we’re really hearing.

Schiff got to Sondland? Trump’s cabal got to Sondland first. Then when faced with a felony charge of perjury, Sondland had to tell the truth. Oh, snap.

The impeachment inquiry is a witch hunt, a fake news event? Trump’s attempted smear of Biden was the fake news event, along with a long list of other manufactured ‘corruption’ accusations against anyone standing in Trump’s path, starting with Hillary Clinton.

(Or probably, starting in his childhood when Don the Con learned this habit. Evidently he was a dullard from the start, a frustration to his parents who couldn’t face the fact that their supposed superiority wasn’t exactly proving out for their kid. So much for those prized blood lines breeding pure.)

That ‘perfect’ phone call to the Ukrainian president? Exactly what testimony has overwhelmingly shown so far – coercion, bribery and extortion by the president and his minions.

I know I’m not the only person watching events unfold with this translator in place. It makes the day-to-day horror almost amusing.

Reaping What We’ve Sown

https://truthout.org/articles/capitalisms-bullets-in-latin-america-invisible-empires-state-power-and-21st-century-colonialism/

On one side of the current migrant crisis we have rabid haters eager to see blood spilled on the border as desperate people try to storm our boundary fences in illegal entry. On the other side we have kind-hearted sympathizers wanting to bring them in, feed them, and let them apply for asylum.

Some news reports say it could take two to four years of processing to verify whether any of these folks deserve asylum. What happens in the meantime, no one knows. Trump wants this to be a warning shot to all of Central Americans — don’t come to the U.S.

What Trump could have done is to send a team to work with these folks when the caravan first crossed into Mexico, giving the U.S .government time to process their claims before they ever neared our southern border. He could have made provisions but instead preferred to incite fear in order to portray himself as some kind of hero.

He could have expanded what other U.S. presidents have done, which is to work within those countries to help those governments get control over violent gangs, build better infrastructure, and enhance job opportunities. Instead, he has threatened to cut programs offering that kind of support, virtually guaranteeing that more people will flee their homelands in search of safety and economic opportunity.

Now we have a situation where all these people can’t possibly be processed fast enough to keep them from starving or spreading disease in ramshackle encampments. As they become more desperate, some will attempt entry. Trump’s solution is to shoot them, which might please his cult of hate, but will remain a blood stain on our nation for the rest of time.

And it won’t solve the problem.

I’m reminded of something my dear friend Virginia said to me back in the early ‘70s. We’d been talking about U.S. foreign policy in Africa and the problem of hunger. Somehow the conversation came around to how many people were starving as Ethiopia and the west African Sahel suffered drought.

“They’re going to come after us someday,” she said.

“What?” I said, thinking there was no way starving people of sub-Saharan Africa were going to swarm our shores.

I couldn’t imagine it. But I’ve remembered her words.

Her premise acknowledged the colonial and imperial mindset of the U.S., the centuries-old tradition of Western European nations who as early as 1500 began raiding less advanced places and looting their wealth. It didn’t matter if the wealth was gold and other precious metals and gems, slaves that could be exploited or sold, or mostly unspoiled land where the Europeans/Americans could commandeer the natives into producing crops of sugar, coffee, tea, bananas, cotton, tobacco, and much more.

In the process of capitalizing on virgin landscapes for timber and crops, Europeans destroyed local traditions, religions, and social structures.  What we’re experiencing now is the fallout. In our rush to grow rich on the wealth of undiscovered lands and defenseless natives, we assumed that the people would either remain subordinate to us and/or that they would assume the traditions, religions, and social structures of the West. Because we were, after all, the ‘most advanced’ societies of the world. Who wouldn’t want to be like us?

Well, it’s now obvious they do want to be like us, but they don’t have 2,000 years of Western Civilization to back up their desires. There is no tradition of capitalism in El Salvador or Ethiopia or anywhere else in these so-called Third World countries. No tradition of schools and literacy, central authority, or democratic institutions predates the invasion of European conquerors. Generally speaking, the conquerors did not see any reason to instill those traditions among those considered useful only to the extent they could work the plantations we built for our benefit, not theirs.

Oh, we might have appeased our consciences with the idea that instilling our values and traditions among these ‘savages’ constituted a beneficent act. We might have believed, as some still do, that without us, they’d still be living in dirt floored huts without any of the advances we enjoy. We ignore the fact that for hundreds and in some cases thousands of years, these natives had gone about the business of life in well-ordered societies with their own spiritual beliefs, hierarchies of governance, and social traditions that served them very well. It was our arrogance to believe that we could impose our culture onto them and expect it to work out.

Here’s just one example of where it’s ended up.

When Donald Trump said [in January 2018] he would end temporary protected status for almost 200,000 Salvadorans, the number of immigrants standing to lose protections under this president approached the 1 million mark. This includes people, like those from El Salvador, that now stand to be deported to countries where their lives could be in danger. El Salvador has one of the world’s highest homicide rates—due in no small part to the policies of the country now trying to expel them.

In the early ‘80s, El Salvador was receiving more such aid than any country except for Egypt and Israel, and the embassy staff was nearly as large as that in New Delhi. For Reagan, El Salvador was the place to draw the line in the sand against communism.

Many Americans would prefer to forget that chapter in American history; those under the age of 40 may not even be aware of it. Salvadorans haven’t forgotten, however. In El Mozote and the surrounding villages of subsistence peasants, forensic experts are still digging up bodies—of women, children, and old men who were murdered by the Salvadoran army during an operation in December 1981. It was one of the worst massacres in Latin American history. But while Trump might smear the country’s image with crude language, today El Salvador has a functioning legal system—more than three decades after the event, 18 former military commanders, including a former minister of defense, are finally on trial for the El Mozote massacre.

The U.S.-fueled war drove tens of thousands of Salvadorans to flee the violence for safety in the United States. In the mid-90s, Clinton allowed their “temporary protected status” to expire. This decision contributed to the gang violence that marks El Salvador today—not long ago, when a day passed without a murder, it was banner news. Thousands of the refugees sent back were young men, who had either deserted from the army or the guerrillas during the war. And when they got back to El Salvador, with little beyond their fighting skills, they formed the nucleus of the gangs. (Citation)

These gangs were shaped by the decade-long civil war that began in 1980. Leftist groups battling the government materialized as gangs when hundreds of thousands of young Salvadorians fled to Los Angeles, California. They formed gangs to protect themselves from other marginalized minority groups in the city. Many members were deported from the U.S. years later and brought the gangs with them back to their home country. (Citation)

An informed and thoughtful president thinking in terms of our nation’s future would have acknowledged our history of exploitation in Latin American. A president determined to “make America great” would have brought in the best and brightest advisors to develop and implement foreign policy that would address the problems forcing people to flee their homelands. Instead, Trump has done nothing to work toward solutions. He evidently can’t be bothered to become informed on the root cause of these migrant caravans.

At the margins of the mainstream discursive stalemate over immigration lies over a century of historical U.S. intervention that politicians and pundits on both sides of the aisle seem determined to silence. Since Theodore Roosevelt in 1904 declared the U.S.’s right to exercise an “international police power” in Latin America, the U.S. has cut deep wounds throughout the region, leaving scars that will last for generations to come. This history of intervention is inextricable from the contemporary Central American crisis of internal and international displacement and migration.

The liberal rhetoric of inclusion and common humanity is insufficient: we must also acknowledge the role that a century of U.S.-backed military coups, corporate plundering, and neoliberal sapping of resources has played in the poverty, instability, and violence that now drives people from Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras toward Mexico and the United States. For decades, U.S. policies of military intervention and economic neoliberalism have undermined democracy and stability in the region, creating vacuums of power in which drug cartels and paramilitary alliances have risen. In the past fifteen years alone, CAFTA-DR — a free trade agreement between the U.S. and five Central American countries as well as the Dominican Republic — has restructured the region’s economy and guaranteed economic dependence on the United States through massive trade imbalances and the influx of American agricultural and industrial goods that weaken domestic industries. Yet there are few connections being drawn between the weakening of Central American rural agricultural economies at the hands of CAFTA and the rise in migration from the region in the years since. In general, the U.S. takes no responsibility for the conditions that drive Central American migrants to the border. (Citation)

So yes, Virginia, you were right. They’re coming after us.

Widely circulated image off tear-gassed migrants trying to gain entry to the U.S., Nov 25, 2018. https://www.express.co.uk/news/world/1050269/migrant-caravan-border-US-news-mexico-tijuana-update-trump-live-2018-pictures-video

 

 

Kill the Messenger — Predictable Attacks on Christine Blasey Ford

Appearing on multiple extremist websites, this image purportedly from Christine Blasey Ford’s high school yearbook is meant to convince viewers this is her. It is not.

A fervent effort is now underway to discredit Dr. Christine Blasey Ford in her testimony about her sexual assault by SCOTUS nominee Brett Kavanaugh. The people involved in this smear campaign are no more interested in the background of Ford or Kavanaugh than in the price of wallpaper. Their interest is in protecting their revered lord Donald Trump and their collective agenda of shifting the nation’s highest courts to an extremist majority.

If they weren’t so pathetic, these efforts would be laughable. Consider, for example, this recent Facebook post:

Go to Google and type in ‘Dr. Ford’s high school yearbook’. The high school erased it offline Sept 17 but someone has copied and pasted the pages. It is printed in the yearbook, in her own words about how she was walking drunk down the middle of a busy highway and passed out, and the drinking games they’d play (naming them) of which she said she usually passed out and couldn’t remember things. It said she was a priviledged white girl that was racist and a sexual preditor of younger boys. She was permiscuous…

Several points bear mentioning about this particular post. Nothing is cited as “her own words.” No confirming citations are included. No matter what Dr. Ford’s sexual activity might have been, that does not mitigate Kavanaugh’s assault. She did not choose to have sex with Kavanaugh. Therefore what he did was an assault.

Secondly, the person posting this comment evidently believes anything she sees online. A blog named “USA REALLY” posted photos and quotes supposedly taken from Ford’s yearbooks. The blog post dated September 21, 2018, begins as follows:

Those accusing Kavanaugh went through his dirty laundry in order to accuse him of heavy drinking and call him “a hard-drinking party animal in high school.” “A little Princess Diana” and a lover of a “good science party” – this is how they called her, Kavanaugh’s accuser, unnecessarily pointing out she regularly goes surfing as if it adds weight to her last minute accusation. Not only did the senators appear to be skeptical about Blasey’s allegations, so did some bloggers who were resourceful enough to take a guess that those who form the group of the current resistance to Kavanaugh’s moving up the ladder will never let any ‘inappropriate’ facts from Ford’s biography come out in the media. Now, having copied some of her high school yearbook pages, we are given much food for thought.

There are no images or mention of Ford in this material.

The same person also alleged that Dr. Ford’s second entry door wasn’t added because she was afraid, but rather for rental property. In fact, she and her husband remodeled a garage into a master bedroom and added an entry door to the space under the same circumstances Dr. Ford described in her testimony. Later, the couple decided to rent out this room to Google interns, as she stated in the hearing.

Another website, The Washington Standard, repeats the slander on Ford’s high school years.

In a final republishing of a series of articles on Dr. Christine Blasey Ford’s High School Yearbooks, which were scrubbed from the internet via Google’s blogspot Cult of the 1st Amendment, the unknown author demonstrated the racist nature of yearbook, possibly something that the school sought to avoid just as much as they did the binge drinking and promiscuity that was laden throughout the yearbook, as well as a motor vehicle accident that could have turned deadly.

The blog focuses on allegations of racism that are so ridiculous it’s hard to read. Pop-ups on this site include a photo of a nice white man with the caption: CO-AUTHOR OF PRESIDENT TRUMP’S TAX PLAN: TRUMP WILL BE RE-ELECTED WITH 40 STATES.

Yet another site alleging misbehavior by Dr. Ford is Freedom Outpost, a blog stating that, “We are a scrappy group of God’s people networked together to see the Kingdom break open in this region and around the world.  Those who are a part of this come from many different life experiences and church backgrounds. They are leaders and individuals hungry to learn how they can move in an awareness and expansion of the Kingdom of God.”

This is very important that the truth of these articles remain in the public square due to the libelous and slanderous accusations that have been leveled at Supreme Court Judge Brett Kavanaugh during his confirmation hearings.

Among Freedom Outposts’ proud accomplishments in its work on God’s behalf is a post by Andrew G. Hodges, M. D.

I am a psychiatrist and forensic profiler. Utilizing my training in the unconscious mind, I read between the lines of people’s statements, speeches and written messages.

Among his other revelations, Dr. Hodges claims he mentally obtained evidence that Michelle Obama secretly confessed that her husband was an illegal president.

Consider the Shad Olsen Show website which offered “proof” of Dr. Ford’s sordid past.

As Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh’s rape accuser today finally reaches terms for an invited offer for Senate testimony Thursday, (after initially refusing a Monday testimony deadline, saying through her attorney that a Monday timeframe set by Republicans was quote, “arbitrary,”) the inevitable levy [apparently the author meant ‘levee’] break of background information allegedly reveals Christine Blasey-Ford as a prolific high school party girl who is alleged to have bragged to a friend of having 54 sexual partners prior to college.  If true, the emergence of five high school yearbooks from exclusive college preparatory school, Holton Arms (Bethesda, Maryland) destroys Blasey-Ford’s self portrayal as an innocent coed “church mouse” taken advantage of by an aggressive sexual predator.

But I repeat myself.

Another theme of far-right lunatic responses to the Kavanaugh hearing is that Dr. Ford isn’t really a doctor, that she was an employee of the corporation that produces abortion drugs, and that she holds stock in companies that produce abortion drugs—which only goes to show the real agenda of these posts, the belief that Kavanaugh will be key to overturning Roe v Wade.

I read that she has a PhD and can teach, but she did not take the test required in CA and cannot call herself a psychologist. Like going to law school and saying you’re a lawyer without taking the bar. If this is true she lied to the Senate in her first sentence…

“If this is true…” Yet the person commenting made no effort to learn whether or not this is true. The commenter seems incapable of understanding how a person can be a psychology researcher and not a psychologist.

Accusations like this come from sources such as “Dangerous,” a website owned and operated by Milo Inc., “a 360-degree media company conceived of and founded by Milo Yiannopoulos, a far-right agitator. His profile on Wikipedia refers to his work for Breitbart news and states:

Much of the work at Breitbart which brought Yiannopoulos to national attention was inspired by the ideas of neo-Nazis and white nationalists. In October 2017, leaked emails revealed that Yiannopoulos had repeatedly solicited neo-Nazi and white supremacist figures on the alt-right for feedback and story ideas in his work for the website Breitbart.

Wikipedia’s biographical profile of Dr. Ford clarifies her professional credentials and activities.

[Dr. Ford is] a professor of psychology at Palo Alto University and a research psychologist at the Stanford University School of Medicine. Widely published in her field, she specializes in designing statistical models for research projects. During her academic career, Ford has worked as a professor at the Stanford University School of Medicine Collaborative Clinical Psychology Program.

She earned an undergraduate degree in experimental psychology in 1988 from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She received a master’s degree in clinical psychology from Pepperdine University in 1991. In 1996, she received a PhD in educational psychology from the University of Southern California. Her 1995 dissertation was entitled Measuring Young Children’s Coping Responses to Interpersonal Conflict. In 2009, she earned a master’s degree in epidemiology, with a focus on the subject of biostatistics, from Stanford University School of Medicine.

[In her work through]… the Pacific Graduate School of Psychology (PGSP), Ford teaches subjects including psychometrics, study methodologies, and statistics. She has also performed consulting work for multiple pharmaceutical companies. Ford worked as the director of biostatistics at Corcept Therapeutics, and collaborated with FDA statisticians. Ford is widely published within her field.

Ford “specializes in designing statistical models for research projects in order to make sure they come to accurate conclusions,” as summarized by Helena Chmura Kraemer, a Stanford professor emeritus in biostatistics who co-authored a book and several articles with Ford. Ford has written or co-written several books about psychological topics, including depression. Her other research topics published in academic journal articles have included child abuse and the September 11 attacks. In 2015, she co-authored a book entitled How Many Subjects? Statistical Power Analysis in Research…

It is the link to Corcept Therapeutics that opens Dr. Ford to accusations of having a vested interest in Kavanaugh’s potential seat on the SCOTUS. As the blog site headline at Gateway Pundit announces, “Christine Blasey Ford Published Eight studies about “Abortion Pill” and Works for Company that Produces It,”  the story goes on to post information about the chemistry of mifepristone (the so-called abortion pill) and research that shows its efficacy in treating Cushing’s Syndrome, retrograde amnesia resulting from electroshock therapy, psychotic depression, and weight gain resulting from anti-psychotic medications.

So yes, Dr. Ford worked for Corcept Therapeutics and performed research on mifepristone. But none of it had to do with abortion.

Which just goes to show that a fool is born every minute, easy victims of extremists with a not-so-hidden agenda. Which is why Donald Trump is currently president.

What’s the Goal?

[Note: All images posted to this article are efforts to damage Democrats and/or progressives.]

Hardly a day goes by on my Facebook newsfeed that doesn’t include a bashing of Democrats. And this by those who consider themselves liberals or progressives. This is deeply troubling.

For one thing, what other party has a chance of stopping the Republican power play that has brought us Trump? Some of my friends who post these tirades against Democrats like to believe that the Greens, or the Democratic Socialists, or Libertarians are a viable alternative to Democrats. To that I say, what are you smoking?

No third party has won a presidential election since … uh, never –

The last third party candidate to win a state was George Wallace of the American Independent Party in 1968, while the last third party candidate to win more than 5.0% of the vote was Ross Perot, who ran as an independent and as the standard-bearer of the Reform Party in 1992 and 1996, respectively; the closest since was Gary Johnson in 2016, who gained 3.3% of the vote running as the Libertarian nominee. The most recent third party candidates to receive an electoral vote were Libertarian  Ron Paul and Yankton Sioux Nation independent Faith Spotted Eagle who received a vote each from faithless electors in 2016.[1]

You’ll note that among those names of third party ‘winners,’ not one of them has become president.

Not that this bit of logic holds any sway with rabid anti-Democratic Partiers who insist on calling themselves progressives.

Note the not-so-subtle bow tie signaling the likelihood this man is gay.

Oh, I get it. We’re tired of not getting the reforms we’ve championed for a generation. Corporations have become more empowered, not cut down to subhuman status where they belong. We need universal healthcare, an end to the drug war, and foreign policies that do not involve our military in 150 countries around the world. It’s a long list of disappointments for a generation of idealists.

Never mind the advancements Democrats have achieved in reproductive rights, gender rights, labor rights, healthcare, and minority rights, to name a few.

The visceral anger voiced against Democrats seems to stem from many sources. Sadly, one of the loudest voices in that anger is that of people who see themselves as progressives, perhaps most notably those who supported the failed campaign of Bernie Sanders. An entire industry of conspiracy theories has sprung up to explain why Bernie did not win the Democratic nomination rather than Hillary Clinton. The most popular of these theories is that she and her henchwoman Debbie Wasserman-Schultz somehow changed votes in key states in order to cheat Bernie out of the nomination.

There has never been a shred of evidence that anyone changed votes or didn’t count votes in the Democratic primary elections which ultimately gave Clinton the nomination. Intense scrutiny by multiple interested parties has concluded that no laws were broken. The “yeah, but” claims rise from the Ever Faithful Bernie Supporters who argue that Bernie didn’t get a fair shake, no matter whether laws were broken or not.

But there’s a larger context that is more important than what happened at the DNC and is getting lost in the back and forth over joint fundraising agreements and staffing power. The Democratic Party — which is a different and more complex entity than the Democratic National Committee, and which includes elected officials and funders and activists and interest groups who are not expected to be neutral in primaries — really did favor Hillary Clinton from early in the campaign, and really did shape the race in consequential ways. ..The irony is that Sanders was a prime beneficiary of this bias, not a victim of it. The losers were potential candidates like Vice President Joe Biden, Sen. Warren, or Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper — and, thus, Democratic primary voters, who ended up with few choices in 2016… [2]

A similar conclusion by the Washington Post stated:

Clinton received 3.7 million more votes than Sanders did — and it is questionable that this was due solely to the timing of debates. For this reason, there is an important difference between the DNC’s preferring one of the presidential candidates and its rigging the nomination process.

In short, two things can be true simultaneously: The DNC tried to help Clinton’s campaign, but this did not have much impact on whether Clinton won the nomination.[3]

These details and scores of other similar conclusions carry no water for the Bernie faithful. Every possible conspiracy against Bernie is held aloft as his supporters do their best to undermine the Democratic Party. “Oligarchy” is the buzz word for this angry cohort–any wealth that supports Democrats is evil.

It’s not just that the DNC subjected itself to unfavorable opinion doing what other political parties have done since the beginning of time. It’s that key figures from Clinton on down have been singled out for hate campaigns, arguably incited in part by Russian propagandists who have seized on any and all means to eviscerate the progressive movement in the U. S.

This image and the article attached was posted on Facebook by a progressive friend of mine who apparently never questioned the source. The image has been altered to make Pelosi look evil. Not surprisingly, the origin of this post is the Free Beacon, an extremist rightwing group. http://freebeacon.com/politics/pelosi-trashes-inconsequential-democrats-new-leadership-following/

But why do otherwise intelligent liberal/progressive voters suddenly despise the Democratic Party?

It’s as if they don’t understand that the party is made up of local committees peopled by hard-working volunteers who elect local representatives to go to state conventions where decisions are made about the position of the party in that state. At the state level, delegates are elected to carry out the party’s wishes. These people then go to the national convention where they become active voters on the party’s platform and formalize the primary vote into an elected candidate.

So we’re pissed that the Democrats lost and want to blame anyone within range. That anger is directed not only to Clinton, but to party officials like Tom Perez and Democratic Congressional leaders.

Is it Bernie’s fault for taking advantage of his outsider status to undermine Clinton’s support?

Is it the DNC’s fault for allowing Bernie to run as a Democrat?

Is it Hillary’s fault for her pattern of support for big money interests and political maneuvering and being Bill’s wife and whatever you want to say about her work as Obama’s secretary of state?

Was Hillary a flawed candidate? Yes—she’s the perfect example of an empowered woman lacking the charisma that political figures must have.

Did unconscious gender bias impact her campaign? Of course it did. Women are supposed to be nurturing and submissive, not aggressive and powerful. Did this cognitive disconnect cause her to seem dishonest, i.e. not a ‘real’ woman?

Would Bernie have won the election if it weren’t for the bad acts of the DNC?

Personally, I think it’s highly unlikely. Even with the full support of the Democratic Party, Bernie would have suffered massive campaign assault for his embrace of socialism, even if it was/is ‘democratic socialism.’ It’s the word ‘socialism’ that makes this position vulnerable, not necessarily the policies it espouses. It’s too fine of a point to expect a majority of voters to understand the difference between communism, socialism, and democratic socialism.

Bernie’s continuing call for raising taxes wouldn’t have helped either. Whether his identity as a Jewish American would have been a factor remains unknown, but it is worthwhile to note that a Jew has yet to be elected to the presidency. Not to be forgotten, also, is his out-of-wedlock son and a honeymoon visit to the Soviet Union in 1988.

It’s easy to romanticize a curmudgeonly white-haired man who says all the things the left wants to hear. But it’s foolish to lose sight of the real question here. Losing sight is what put Trump in office.

Yes, the Democrats have done plenty to provoke progressive ire starting with the devastating 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago where the party’s powerbrokers allegedly encouraged Mayor Daly’s assault on protesters, undermined the candidacy of Eugene McCarthy, and defeated the anti-war effort. The result was the election of Richard Nixon.

Similar angry disenchantment with the Democratic Party came into play when Bill Clinton not only did nothing to advance progressive causes like marijuana legalization but also managed to get caught messing with an intern. Then there were Hillary’s actions as Obama’s secretary of state that caught her in the web of controversy in big money, corporate maneuvers, and foreign debacles like Benghazi. Evidently neither Clinton recognized the potential for their enemies to use such activities against them.

Which is another big complaint about the Democrats — we’re not mean enough, not vicious enough, in fighting the oligarchs/conservatives/fascists of our day.

But none of that compares to the harm caused by Republican administrations, a list that needs no repeating here.

Nothing would please our adversaries, foreign and domestic, more than to convince us not to support Democrats.

What matters is the outcome. With the help of hate toward Democrats, we now have Trump.

Two factors must rule the end game in any political contest: (1) Which is the more progressive choice and (2) Which more progressive choice has an actual chance of winning. Compromise, whether we like it or not, is the bedrock of politics.

The choice is simple–move forward toward a better future (progressive) or step backwards toward a mythical ideal past (conservative).

 

~~~

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_third_party_performances_in_United_States_presidential_elections

[2] https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/11/14/16640082/donna-brazile-warren-bernie-sanders-democratic-primary-rigged

[3] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2017/11/04/no-the-dnc-didnt-rig-the-democratic-primary-for-hillary-clinton/?utm_term=.2a736b57ee42

A Presidential Stain

Just like in every other aspect of his privileged yet miserable life, Donald Trump can see only the surface. His “shithole” description of nations like Haiti or those in Africa is apt if you only see the poverty and political chaos. A thoughtful educated person would see beyond that surface to the culpability for all that of white Europeans.

African tribes lived fruitful happy lives in their native state, just as did the natives of the Americas. But their natural progress was interrupted by those from more developed cultures who took them as slaves and exploited the resources indigenous to their lands. Since emerging from the dark ages, European countries have sailed around the world trying to enforce their religious beliefs while at the same time seeking slaves and resources to enrich their nations.

That’s how Haiti became a predominantly black society. When Spanish explorers arrived in 1492, they found a widespread population of the Taino people, a Native American tribe. Disease and genocide pretty well eradicated the Taino by 1625 when Spain’s grip on the island loosened in the face of French, English, and Dutch incursions. France seized control of Haiti and by 1700, France had established plantations for tobacco and cotton and imported African slaves to work the fields. Within the next century, the agricultural focus turned to sugar cane.[1]

Intimidating slaves with unimaginable brutalities didn’t require many whites. Accounts of horrific tortures are preserved in Haitian histories. The island’s populations suffered not only the brutalities of enslavement but also the irregular devastation of earthquakes and tidal waves. The current status of Haiti resulted from the most recent earthquake eight years ago with “a death toll estimated by the Haitian government at over 300,000, and by non-Haitian sources from 50,000 to 220,000.” The quake destroyed the country’s capital city and in the intervening years, hundreds of thousands have died of starvation.

Clone this story of Haiti into a long list of other “shithole” countries referenced by our Moron-in-Chief, with a few tweaks and details thrown in. No one in Africa asked for Europeans to come into their midst to enslave their people and steal their natural resources. Just as Native American tribes had enjoyed a sustainable lifestyle in the lands now called the United States,  African tribes maintained long-held religious practices and lived in stable communities.

Facts about the exploitation of places now referred to as “Third World” are available to anyone with a modicum of curiosity and reason. In a world before Trump, knowledge of these facts by a person elected president would have been taken for granted. Such knowledge would inform attitudes as well as foreign policy, most especially our immigration policies as, allegedly, the most advanced nation on earth.

Slavery became common within much of Europe during the Dark Ages and it continued into the Middle Ages. The Dutch, French, Spanish, Portuguese, British, Arabs and a number of West African kingdoms played a prominent role in the Atlantic slave trade, especially after 1600. David P. Forsythe wrote: “The fact remained that at the beginning of the nineteenth century an estimated three-quarters of all people alive were trapped in bondage against their will either in some form of slavery or serfdom.”[2]

The conquest of African nations occurred for two reasons: Christian zealotry convinced of its supremacy and the acquisition of wealth. Christian and Muslim missionaries still plague Africa, preaching sin and redemption to people who originally possessed sophisticated spiritual beliefs that had served them well for millennia. Social disruption and war resulted—my religion is the true one and infidels must die. Much of the warfare in Africa today is based on conflicts between Christians, Muslims, and tribal traditions. This serves several objectives—it keeps the local people at a disadvantage so they’re more easily exploited and it sells weapons of war, fattening the wallets of First World industrialists.

As for the direct acquisition of wealth, in the ages before modern machinery, slaves were the machines who tilled, planted, cultivated, and harvested the crops. Crops for food, crops for textiles like cotton, and crops for rope and other industrial materials enriched farmers. More slaves equaled more money. If advancing social conscience hadn’t eliminated slavery, likely the advance of the machines would have accomplished much of the same thing. (Or, arguably, the elimination of slavery helped push the development of machines.)

More maps in this series at http://exploringafrica.matrix.msu.edu/colonial-exploration-and-conquest-in-africa-explore/

But slaves weren’t the only wealth captured from these “shithole” countries and exploited by European conquerors.[3] “Africa has a large quantity of natural resources, including diamonds, salt, gold, iron, cobalt, uranium, copper, bauxite, silver, petroleum and cocoa beans, but also woods and tropical fruits.”[4] Once European nations discovered these resources, they couldn’t keep their hands off. Using primarily enslaved indigenous people to perform the labor in mining these resources, European nations built their wealth on the backs of African people and their native wealth.

This smash-and-grab mentality continues today. Much of the chaos of Central and South American countries is a result of American agricultural interests controlling the vast majority of suitable cropland. Here in these winter-free zones, crops can grow year round and keep the supermarket shelves full even in January. The story of American exploitation and criminal interference among our neighbors to the south portends a timebomb waiting to go off in our faces.

Under previous presidents and as the United States has tried to become more than an imperialist power in the world, programs to help improve conditions in “shithole” countries have been an important objective. Unlike our current president, previous holders of that formerly-prestigious office have supported programs to help improve conditions for native peoples. Education, health care, and social reforms have been part of an outreach that included a proportioned immigration quota.

The denigration of nations and even an entire continent by racist labeling shows nothing about those places or their people compared to what it shows about the person uttering the denigration. What Trump’s profanity reveals is a man totally bereft of curiosity, respect, and knowledge about the world around him, a man whose only goal in life is self-aggrandizement. That his petulant narrow vision should spread such shame over our entire nation is a horror that can end none too soon.

~~~

This post is dedicated to Martin Luther King, a man who rose to the pinnacle of human achievement, unlike the man current soiling the White House.

 

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Haiti

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_slavery

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exploitation_colonialism

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_resources_of_Africa

Conscious Evolution

Conscious evolution. We know enough. We know why. We know how.

Back when we wore skins and only knew our own tribe, we needed clues to identify the ‘Other.’ They would kill us, take our women and homes and food. We noted their skin color, how they dressed, what insignia they carried. We didn’t need to greet them or get to know them. We killed them before they had a chance to kill us.

Our fear and hatred of Other has followed us. It’s embedded in our DNA. Our survival depended on it.

Today, our survival no longer depends on fearing and hating Other. Now our survival depends on recognizing shared humanity. The majority of people understand this. But there’s that tiny minority, emboldened now by Trump, who just don’t get it.

We need to investigate what some white men fear that pushes them to march in the street with torches. Why they resort to violence. Why they feel oppressed.

They fear losing their concept of themselves as the best, most important, top-of-the-food chain guy. Their very identity is threatened.

Their fear derives from

  • Ignorance, a failure of our public schools in educating about history and anthropology. Supremacists assume that because whites have been predominant in the development of machines and other hallmarks of modern civilization, whites are therefore superior. This view fails to acknowledge the advanced machinery of ancient cultures like China, India, and the Middle East—non-white civilizations. This view also fails to reflect the harm machines have brought to all life forms on the planet—pollution, disease, and arguably a pace of living that destroy human peace and health.
  • Rapid change in requirements for earning a living. It’s no longer enough to hunt, fish, manage livestock, plow fields, and stack rock fences, occupations that served men well for thousands of years.
  • Loss of primacy in male-female relationships. That’s not to say alt-right men don’t seek out submissive women who will stroke their egos. Many do, and sadly there are plenty of women who accept, even enjoy, this kind of relationship. But in the workplace, on the streets, and elsewhere in our culture, women have gained a more equal position. They can vote, earn a living, and walk away from men who refuse to relinquish outdated ideas. They can abort rape impregnation, an age-old tool of male domination.
  • Loss of control over formerly subordinate groups. Such as slaves (African). Such as field workers (Hispanic). Such as ethnic groups (Jew). Now their kids go to school together. At least, until pressure from the alt-right succeeds in shifting sufficient tax dollars to private and ‘religious’ schools to allow low and middle income racists to send their kids to the same segregated right-wing private schools that the more affluent racists have been sending their kids to since integration.
  • Loss of power to control the terms by which our society operates. Through the courts, America’s promise of liberty and justice for all has gradually gained greater implementation. This has fueled the swelling alt-right push to place sympathetic right-wingers on the SCOTUS as well as lower courts across the country. They want courts that will give men the primacy they once enjoyed over women. They want courts to reinforce alt-right beliefs about marriage, sexuality, race, and all the other arenas where white male dominant beliefs have been challenged.
  • For many modern men, their ability to consider themselves men has been compromised by loss of sexual function or diminished genitalia as a result of exposure to toxic chemicals. This is only going to get worse as exposures increase. If such exposure doesn’t affect them personally, it may affect their sons. If they have any. Researchers confirm that sperm count continues to drop at a rapid pace. They also remark on the increase of boys born with compromised genitalia, now up to one in 350 male births. ‘Endocrine-disrupting chemicals are substances present in the environment that can interfere with normal hormonal balance and thus exert potentially adverse health effects on the human organism. Male reproductive system development and function may be susceptible to the effects of such environmental toxicants.’ Endocrine disruptors include multiple chemicals routinely appearing in pesticides, herbicides, plastics, and many other products as well as in chemicals that have now been outlawed such as PCBs, DDT, and atrazine, to name a few. Effects of exposure to these chemicals can carry through to subsequent generations.  (Also this article.)
  • Fear of Other derives from conscious and subconscious effects. A man may have a normal penis size and function fine sexually yet still feel insecure about his sexuality. He may experience urges that he can’t explain, which repulse him and defy his religious beliefs, such as same-sex attraction. In many cases, a man’s ability to feel secure in his sexuality depends on his ability to see himself in a dominant role both at home and in society. Yet many jobs require men to work under the supervision of a woman or a gay man or a racial or ethnic minority, all of which some men consider subordinates.
  • Desire for clear lines of authority. Hierarchy serves men well by defining exact ranks of dominance. Men can accept not being at the top of a hierarchy if at the same time they see that others rank below them. With hierarchy come prescribed methods of moving up through the ranks as well as methods for working within the system. Complaints flow up the chain of command. Men know who they’re working for and what to do if problems arise. In our modern world, traditional chains of command have been interrupted. Even in the military, men today may find themselves working alongside or even in lower rank than a woman or a transgender person. This flies in the face of many men’s instinctive expectation that those within the hierarchy are their peers, their own kind. Admiration and support for Trump derives in part from his authoritarian stance, his willingness to invoke violence, and other aspects of his personality which hearken back to old white hierarchical traditions. Hierarchy as a mind-set also dictates that people believe what their parents believed, and before that their grandparents.
  • Authority for racist views are encoded in the Old Testament, at least as alt-right adherents believe. “Genesis 9:18–29 has been popularly understood to mean that Ham was cursed, and this understanding has often been used to justify oppression of African people, the descendants of Ham. In this view Ham offended his father, Noah, and because of this his descendants are also cursed, and Ham is presented as the father of African people. The text does give the impression that Ham was cursed, but a more careful reading of the passage reveals that this is not so.” (quote source)

Efforts to stamp out alt-right beliefs only succeed in escalating the problem. We must re-think our approach to this threatening yet benighted portion of the population and consider them as injured children who must be nurtured through a re-training process. Many are under-employed, and must be taught how to perform jobs that fit into the modern workplace. Many are suffering severe emotional and psychological problems and need the best therapy our professionals can provide. Many also suffer illness including obesity, sexual dysfunction, and other medical conditions that impinge on their ability to feel whole. Many may suffer the effects of poor nutrition either from ignorance about proper diet or insufficient income.

For all these ills, men of the alt-right seek someone to blame other than the person they see in the mirror.

  • It can’t possibly be that they themselves have fallen into poor health through lack of exercise or poor nutrition. Rather, the reason they feel bad is that ‘commies’ and Jews have taken over their country.
  • It can’t possibly be that their workplace exposure to hazardous endocrine-disrupting chemicals has caused their impotence. Rather, it’s ball-busting women in general.
  • It can’t possibly be that their lack of curiosity or inability to learn has caused them to slip to the bottom in job skills or educational achievement. Rather, it’s the government sending their jobs overseas. It’s immigrants taking up jobs they might have had.

The alt-right is a manifestation of a pervasive illness affecting a certain portion of our population. They are the unevolved among us. We need to immediately start to design interventions that will effectively address their fears and failings. We need to tighten the standards of education to significantly limit homeschooling and improve curriculum for political science and history. We need to implement laws that punish those advocating violence against others and require attendance in appropriate therapy, job training, and/or health and nutrition treatment, just as in earlier years we have required certain groups to attend ‘sensitivity’ training.

These challenged humans suffer from delusions that they alone see the truth. Without an effective strategy to encourage their conscious evolution, there will be more blood in the streets.