Category Archives: Political Rants

Political Rants

Unconventional.

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I suppose you heard the big news this week. Excited? Well, you should be. It’s a tremendous accomplishment for a woman of color in this deeply racist nation. Tuesday’s big news practically guarantees another two years of Ihan Omar in the United States House of Representatives. Woo-hoo!

Oh, right … and Biden picked Kamala Harris. Thought as much. Frankly, that could have gone a lot worse. We were hovering very close to Klobuchar territory before the murder of George Floyd, and then it was all over. I’m terrible at predicting things like VP picks, but this one seemed pretty obvious – Biden needed somebody youngish with some star power, experience, and grit. He obviously feels no need to give a nod to the left, and that’s no surprise either. My biggest complaint about her is that she let Mnuchin off the hook over his foreclosure mill in California and that her criminal justice record is not the kind of progressive counterbalance you would hope for in a Biden-topped ticket.

Their announcement event was kind of dismal, largely owing to the fact that COVID is still running wild. I just wish the Biden Campaign would hire someone who can compose a shot. The two-shot as Harris spoke was just weird – Biden in profile, giving that SOTU squint of his, which from the side doesn’t look all that great. I’m not sure I heard anything encouraging in the torrent of platitudes, but be that as it may, I hope to hell they get over the finish line this fall. The Democratic Party is positively expert at shooting itself in the foot, and they may not know it, but they’re taking a big chance on Biden this year. The notion that Harris is going to help light a fire under the activist base is a bit of a stretch, but hopefully there’s something to it.

As we approach the non-Convention, scheduled for next week, there are some worrying signs. First, some progressive grassroots media outlets, like The Young Turks, have been denied press passes …. to a virtual event, for crying out loud. Even worse, anti-choice Bush administration alumnus and former Ohio governor John Kasich, last seen attempting to school yeshiva scholars on the Old Testament, has a major speaking role at the convention …. whereas Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC), leading voice of the progressive left in the party, is being allowed … wait for it … sixty seconds to speak. This tells you all you need to know about their electoral strategy. They appear to be listening more to the partisan flacks on DNC-friendly media than to the masses of people their party depends on for any chance of victory this fall.

What the fuck. We’ve been to this dance before, and it didn’t turn out well. The so-called centrists in the Democratic party need to get their heads out of their 1990s asses and get a clear look at who their constituencies are. And they need to do it fast.

luv u,

jp

Check out our political opinion podcast, Strange Sound.
Political Rants

Richer and poorer.

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This was a week when the Senate saw fit to go home for a long weekend while enhanced jobless benefits expired along with a ban on evictions for federally supported renters. It was also a week when the richest dude on the planet, along with the heads of other monopolistic tech firms, testified in front of a House subcommittee. I realize the focus of this hearing was antitrust, and that is a more-than-worthy enterprise, but I had hoped for at least one exchange that would go something like this:

Congressmember: Mr. Bezos, how much money do you have?
Bezos: What time is it? 11:25 a.m.? Uhhhh … $153 billion.
Congressmember: Don’t you think that’s too much?
Bezos: Excuse me?
Congressmember: Nobody needs anywhere near that much money, Mr. Bezos. Why don’t you leave more of it on the table? Why does so much of it end up with you? That seems like a really strong sign that something’s drastically wrong with the way you run your business. What you need is stronger workplace regulation and confiscatory taxation. I yield back my time.

Yeah, that didn’t happen. Not surprised.

For the Senate’s part, they appear to have rediscovered their concern about deficits, perhaps because they’re anticipating a loss in the upcoming election. Best restart the national debt scare talk now so it doesn’t seem as contrived in January. Still, it kind of amazes me that at a time when we have more people out of a job than we did at the height of the Great Depression – and we got there in a matter of weeks – Mitch and the boys are getting cold feet about spending federal dollars to pump the tires up a bit. Expect this to return to an obsession level policy if there’s a Biden administration next January, and expect plenty of the never Trumpers to be right on board.

It’s not surprising that the Senate Republicans (and most of the Democrats) act in the best interests of their constituents – rich people. There was a time, though, when they tried a little harder to conceal it. Maybe they think it doesn’t have an electoral impact. Maybe with the extremist gerrymandering they accomplished in 2010 and all the voter suppression laws they’ve put in place since article five of the Voting Rights Act was struck down – maybe with all that, they feel they can still pull it out. Well, maybe they’re right, but we’ll see. I kind of think their tactics are optimized for an economic circumstance that’s significantly less toxic than the current state of affairs. Many of the top-tier Democrats still act like it’s the 1990s; I think this is true of the Republicans as well. It’s just possible that their callous disregard for the voting public may well bite them on the ass … hard.

There haven’t been this many people down and out since the 1930s. And the people who aren’t feeling it now will feel it soon enough. That simple fact makes the politics of this moment very unpredictable.

luv u,

jp

Check out our political opinion podcast, Strange Sound.
Political Rants

Muddle in the middle.

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A snapshot from the day’s news – MSNBC is obsessing over Secretary of Defense Mark Esper’s announcement that we’re withdrawing 12,000 troops from Germany. The various former Republicans that populate its talk show panels are lamenting Trump’s undermining of the NATO alliance. In real time, we are seeing the Biden foreign policy take shape. I won’t say it’s a more aggressive posture, as Trump is aggressively pursuing conflict with Iran, Venezuela, Cuba, China, and others. There is, however, a somewhat nostalgic turn to the emerging centrist doctrine Biden will no doubt pursue. It appears we may be in for a slight return of the cold war model, the east-west divide, the Russian menace. If that’s the case, it would be a bitter trade in exchange for the crap show we’re living through now.

I am tentative about this observation because it’s hard to be certain what a Biden foreign policy will be when the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee has consistently avoided posting any details about it on his campaign site. Since it’s likely to be formulated by committee, I’m guessing it will be bellicose, but measured; assertive, but mindful of precedent; proactive, but not necessarily the first to any party. Where will we bomb, drone, invade next under a President Biden? One can only guess. Likely he will re-deploy those 12,000 troops to Germany, whether or not they pony up the Euros for costs associated with the posting. Indeed, the only net positives might be a return to some type of arms control regime with Russia, Iran, and others, and perhaps a re-commitment to the tepid, voluntary goals of the Paris Accord on Climate. Not nearly enough for my taste, but there you have it.

I think the most compelling case for this muddle in the middle, from a foreign policy standpoint, derives from the very nature of the presidency and who holds that office. The U.S. president is too powerful. It is an office that wields force, both military and economic, in unlimited magnitude. No one should be THAT powerful, particularly not someone who is accountable to an electorate that makes up less than five percent of the world’s population. Placing Donald Trump in the cockpit of that titanic killing machine is not only irresponsible, it’s sheer madness. Regardless of any minor departures from the hard-line Republican orthodoxy on foreign relations and national security, Trump has proven his propensity to flub his way through any situation, with disastrous consequences. We’ve seen this in his response to the Coronavirus. Even as he seems inclined to curry favor with Putin, we’ve seen him tear up crucial arms agreements with the Russians, hurtling us back into a deadly arms race.

Plainly, Biden’s foreign policy will likely be as imperial and neoliberal as he can get away with. But every moment Trump sits behind that so-called Resolute Desk, we are in mortal danger. He simply has to go.

luv u,

jp

Check out our political opinion podcast, Strange Sound.
Political Rants

Gaslight village.

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There’s something the president has been saying repeatedly lately that probably shouldn’t be allowed to pass without challenge, like most of his insane utterances. (It amazes me sometimes how much this reminds me of the Reagan years, when old right-wing Ronny used to say truly bizarre things and journalists would just wanly shrug and move on.) He keeps claiming that, in responding to COVID-19, he saved millions of lives. The claim goes something like this: If I (Trump) had not acted as decisively as I did, more than 2 million people would be dead of COVID. Instead, it’s a measly 140,000. Aren’t I a hero, then?

I wish I were making this up, but you’ve heard it, I’m sure. I’m beginning to understand why Trump is so determined to save all of those Confederate monuments. He must have gotten a bunch of loser trophies when he was a kid. Actually, his entire life has been a series of loser trophies and mulligans, starting with the fortune that was dropped into his lap, his various bankruptcies and failed scams, then being shoe-horned into the presidency via America’s ultimate grandfather clause, the electoral college. And yet through all of this (and much more), he has insisted that he is a big winner, that no one could have done what he did, and so on … and so on. At the same time, he whines incessantly (like so many on the right do) about how unfair life is to him. Poor little Donnie!

This is some grade-school level gaslighting, to be sure. I mean, the man is saying that by doing the bare minimum required of him as president of the United States, he prevented a precipitous, uncontrolled spread of COVID that would have cost millions of lives, and for this he should be thanked. I hate to break it to fat boy, but not engaging in massive criminal negligence does not exactly place you in Medal of Honor territory. Next we’ll be expected to thank him for NOT randomly noodling with the nuclear football and accidentally launching World War III. That saved billions! No, as president, you don’t get rewarded for NOT blowing up the world this week. (That’s pretty much expected of you, Don.)

R.I.P. Michael Brooks. When political commentator and leftist thinker Michael Brooks died unexpectedly this week, I thought of the people I’ve known who left this world far too soon – people who seemingly had a brilliant future ahead of them. Brooks was one of those people, and he will leave an enormous hole. Condolences to his family and his colleagues on the Majority Report, TMBS, and elsewhere. This year is for shit.

luv u,

jp

Check out our political opinion podcast, Strange Sound.
Political Rants

Say AAAHHH!

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Here’s a little update on my health crisis from a couple of months ago: I’m still paying the price. Not physically, you understand – nothing noticeable in the way of lingering after-effects of my non-COVID illness. No, I mean I’m literally still paying the price of the hospital stay I experienced in April, the week after my birthday. I think I’ve gone over the numbers before on this blog, but let me just frame it in again so that there’s no mistake: the hospital fee – not the surgeon or anesthesiologist, just the hospital – added up to more than $50,000 for four days. The negotiated rate they charged was more like $37,500, but my portion of it was in excess of $5,000. Once again – I have employer provided health insurance … and the direct cost to me was over $5,000.

I am currently garnishing my own wages to cover this massive fee, adhering to a five month payment plan I agreed to with the hospital. Fortunately – and this is important – I am financially able to afford such an arrangement. But this is the best-case scenario in this cockeyed worker’s paradise known as employer-based health care. I have what has been termed a “Cadillac plan”, mostly because my employer pays 80% of my premiums. (Of course, I am also fortunate that I am not a woman and my employer doesn’t impose its religious convictions on my coverage or that of my wife, because apparently that’s a thing.) As I write this, I can imagine people all over Europe and the rest of the industrialized world scratching their heads over this concept of health care “luxury” – one that entails enormous contributions from the person stricken with disease or injury, regardless of their ability to pay.

I spoke about this issue in a couple of episodes of my podcast, Strange Sound, focusing on presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden’s comments regarding the supposed popularity of employer-based plans. The fact that tens of millions of people have a thing does not mean that thing is popular. A lot of people have foot diseases, for instance. And in times like these, employer-provided health insurance is a lot like a foot disease … it plagues your every step. It’s just a goddamned ridiculous way to distribute health care services, though that very formulation erroneously suggests that that is the goal of our current system. The goal of our system is not to provide people with the medical care they need; the goal is for some people to make a lot of money. The only way you can honestly analyze our healthcare system is by beginning with that realization.

With the COVID-19 pandemic raging through our country, cases on the rise in forty states, we need to seriously reassess this system. And we need to do it quickly.

luv u,

jp

Check out our political opinion podcast, Strange Sound.

Political Rants

Why fat Donnie don’t care.

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I’ve been accused more than once of being cynical and of imputing the worst motives in every action of those I dislike. I suppose that’s fair – I’m certainly no better than most people in that particular category of failing. And I’m sure that fans of Donald Trump (yes, I’m looking at YOU) will take issue with what I have to say in this post, just as they are likely to frown at the title and decry it as a cheap shot. Again, it’s a fair cop. I think after what we’ve gone through over the last three and a half years, we’re due a few cheap shots, right? Friends can disagree on that point. As it happens, I take little interest in stories of the president’s personal boorishness, such as some of what is currently being reported with respect to his niece Mary Trump’s new book. Tales of his moronic sexism are as unsurprising as they are nauseating. He said his young niece was “stacked” – shocker! More evidence that he’s a titanic douche. Moving on.

No, I’m guessing that Trump supporters, if they read this blog, would take issue with my contention that the president doesn’t care about what happens to most COVID-19 victims … perhaps more than they would with my observation that he’s fat. Here again, it’s just acknowledgement of an obvious fact. If Trump cared what happened to COVID victims, he would do something about the pandemic (other than brag incoherently about how well he’s handling it). He is not doing anything to prevent these deaths, and in fact is going out of his way to advocate for policies and practices that will result in further spread of the disease. He lies about it incessantly, has done from the beginning, and attempts to push off responsibility for fighting the pandemic on other people, politicians, countries, etc. Why? Why would a president not want to preserve more lives?

I think the answer’s pretty obvious. Trump only cares about how things affect him personally. The people being killed by this virus are overwhelmingly drawn from communities that are less likely to support his re-election. The death rate for African Americans is more than twice that of whites. Indigenous and Latinx are dying at higher rates as well. Frankly, Trump doesn’t give a shit about those people. If more of them drop dead, there will be less of them marking a ballot for his opponent. Trump’s friend Bolsonaro offers an even more crass example of this – COVID is absolutely tearing through indigenous communities, the same people Brazil’s insane clown president thought should have been wiped out even more back in the days of conquest. Trump is a hair more subtle, but it doesn’t take Kreskin to work out his campaign calculus with regard to COVID victims. Fewer old white people, yes, but many, many fewer black people. What you lose on the milk you make back on the oranges.

What can we do? Defeat Trump in November, among many other things. This crisis has cast so many societal problems in stark relief – it’s clear what we need to do, and getting rid of Fat Donnie would be a good first step.

luv u,

jp

Check out our political opinion podcast, Strange Sound.
Political Rants

Intelligence and skepticism.

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I had a weird feeling of displacement this week, hearing commentators and political officeholders talking about intelligence reports regarding the Russians’ alleged payment of bounties to the Taliban for the killing of Americans. Such an allegation is not particularly far-fetched – the United States has been in Afghanistan for almost twenty years, and there are plenty of people there who would try to kill our soldiers without compensation, but they probably would accept payment if offered. Still, listening to the outrage, it felt like some of the conversation in the months leading up to the Iraq war. Powell’s presentation to the UN in February 2003; the insistent claims about evidence of WMDs in Iraq, etc. All bogus, incidentally, and no one responsible for the misinformation was ever held accountable, as far as I know.

Of course, that was an example of an administration using its intelligence services to a specific end – in effect, weaponizing it. In the current case, Trump seems at odds with the intelligence community, but I’m not convinced his administration is. Let me be clear; while I don’t think Trump is some kind of Manchurian candidate programmed by Putin to destroy America, I do think that he’s a tremendously crappy president who wants nothing more than to license a Trump Tower Moscow when he leaves government service. If the stories about the bounty on U.S. soldiers are even partly true, it would be just one more example of Trump putting his own interests ahead of those of the people he is supposed to serve as president. Is anyone surprised by that?

Look, Trump is not some kind of unicorn. Anyone who has worked at a small business knows who Trump is. If you’ve ever worked for someone who had their name on the door, you know what I’m talking about. Trump’s ignorance, arrogance, impatience, arbitrariness, bullying tactics, self-aggrandizement, and parsimony are familiar to all former employees of America’s beloved small businesses. They’re not all that way, of course – some are benevolent dictators – but the American myth of the self-made man is a compelling one, and I’ve heard versions of it spouted to me over the years. They all pulled themselves up by their bootstraps, no help from anyone.

Though I’ve never met the president, I did briefly work for him in 1987-88, when I worked with a band that played Trump Plaza in Atlantic City. His company was terrible to employees, bands, etc. Now we’re seeing the same thing on a national scale – relentless self-dealing and an almost cult-like belief in himself. What. A. Freak. But at the same time, I recommend skepticism with respect to the information products of the intelligence agencies, even if the asshole-in-chief says it’s bullshit. The enemy of your enemy is not necessarily your friend.

luv u,

jp

Check out our political opinion podcast, Strange Sound.
Political Rants

Donald’s law.

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Based on their rhetoric of late, it seems clear that, with the economy in very rough shape, the Trump administration is opting for a law-and-order driven campaign for re-election. Trump has always been fond of “tough on crime” rhetoric, partly because he likes to present himself as “tough”, but also because he is very much a product of his 70s, 80s, and 90s heyday when political careers were made and broken on the issue of crime and harsh punishment. He has a base, very rudimentary mentality, and one that is laser focused on visceral political issues. His rally speeches are like fascistic comedy routines during which he trots out tried and true laugh lines that pull directly from his generously proportioned sack of prejudices – the same exclusionary and self-aggrandizing posturing that resonated so deeply with his base in 2016.

Can that work in today’s America? I don’t freaking know. It seems like perhaps not, but maybe it can. All I know is that Trump is simply the most prominent standard bearer of this militarist approach to what’s called “public safety”, not its author. And while the Republican party seems most heavily invested in this madness, it is not their sole province; many Democrats have made their political bones on the …. well, bones of generations of young black, brown, and poor white men and women who populate our prisons and wear the chains of the carceral state after they’re released. Joe Biden is one of them. So is Amy Klobuchar. There are many more.

I recently re-listened to an interview of the well-known advocated for prison abolition Mariame Kaba on Chris Hayes’s podcast, and frankly she blew me away. Her critique of our current mess of a system – a system that fails nearly everyone – is spot-on, in my opinion, and she offers both a vision of a better alternative and a theory of change – in effect, a pathway to the vision. We pour $170 million into law enforcement, almost zero into alternatives to incarceration or community investment, and somehow expect things to improve on their own. And as she points out, it’s a system that does not even succeed on its own terms. Severe punishment for murder is meaningless when only 13% of those who murder are serving time, as is the case in Chicago. And policy built from trauma is almost definitionally bad. That’s how political careers are made – developing laws that punish whole classes of people on the basis of a single crime. That’s what Trump will leverage this fall – count on it.

We need to send Trump back to his shabby golden tower. But we can’t stop there. We have to follow through with what he’s telling his Klan rally audiences is the crazy agenda of the far left: building towards an alternative vision of public safety that provides for minimal application of force and maximal investment in under-served communities. That’s the path to a more just society.

luv u,

jp

Check out our political opinion podcast, Strange Sound.
Political Rants

Eyes open.

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We’ve reached a moment in American life when blindness is no longer an option. When I say “American life”, I’m referring to the world of relatively comfortable white people, a world I inhabit. A lot of the people in this world were skeptical of the notion that racism is a feature of our society, not a bug. Many still are, I’m sure, but not as many as at the beginning of this year. We’ve seen race-based murder on the part of police and vigilantes many times in the decade prior to January 2020, but like mass shootings, they never seemed to move the needle on public opinion. And again, by “public opinion”, I mean the views of relatively comfortable white people, whose preferences and sentiments drive public policy (not as much as corporate power does, but to some degree).

In July of 2014, Eric Garner was choked to death by a New York City cop. It was an arbitrary, racist killing shockingly caught on video, and yet very little happened as a result. The cop was eventually fired, that’s about it. George Floyd was killed in a similarly arbitrary, racist manner, caught on video, but as if to underline the heinousness of the abuse of power that took Garner’s life, Floyd’s murderers affected a kind of casual air as they choked the life out of him, keeping the knee on his neck minutes after he stopped breathing. And the effect was like, listen up, white people, this REALLY is a thing. If you didn’t get it when you saw Eric Garner heinously murdered by a choke hold, here’s the same crime plus a kind of devil-may-care attitude and mutilation for good measure.

In 2015, Walter Scott was shot in the back by a cop. The heinous crime was, again, caught on video. The cop went to jail, but still, not a lot changed. Now, five years later, Rayshard Brooks was killed in a similar way, under similar circumstances in some respects, but with the added outrage of physical abuse of the wounded victim. When Scott fled, his assailant shot him, then dropped his taser next to his dying victim in an attempt to substantiate his bogus police report. When Brooks fled, his assailant shot him through the heart, then kicked him as he lay dying while another cop put his boot on Brooks’s shoulders. So here again, it was as if the gods were saying, take another look, white people – Walter Scott’s death was not some kind of unicorn. This shit happens all the time.

Obviously, it takes a lot to get through our thick skulls. But if the recent wanton murders of George Floyd, Rayshard Brooks, Breonna Taylor and others have opened some … perhaps most white people’s eyes a bit, well, better late than never, I suppose, though distinctly not better for the families of those we’ve lost.

luv u,

jp

Check out our political opinion podcast, Strange Sound.
Political Rants

Vox populi.

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I’m going to open with a line from the late Trinidadian author and Nobel laureate V.S. Naipaul (no leftist, btw): a million mutinies now! The primary election this past Tuesday in Georgia was an utter disaster, thanks to a republican-dominated political class dedicated to denying the vote to people of color and anyone else inclined to vote against the GOP. Once again, we’re seeing endless lines in predominately black districts, people waiting for three or more hours, standing in the rain, coping with dysfunctional machines and poorly trained poll workers. It’s a system designed to fail, and it did not disappoint. The combination of this chicanery and striking half a million people from the voter rolls was enough in 2018 to ensure Kemp’s election as governor, and it appears they have the pieces in place to game the November races as well.

The proximate reason for this meltdown was a precipitous replacement of all of the voting machines with new, touch-screen devices designed by a small company connected to the Governor’s campaign manager. Of course, they didn’t work properly. Poll workers were not properly trained on the devices, as they had only just been installed. Access keys were not working, so poll workers and voters were locked out of the machines. In many locations, provisional ballots were in short supply, so it’s likely that many thousands of people were disenfranchised, despite the court orders to keep the polls open beyond the designated closing time. In addition (or I should say, in subtraction), many polling locations had been eliminated prior to the vote, a decision that was not subject to prior review thanks to the Supreme Court’s striking down of the pre-clearance provision in Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (Shelby County v. Holder).

I’ve said this numerous times on this blog: when the Republicans win office, the first thing they do is try to lock the door behind them. With the presidency, the senate, many state legislatures and more than half of the nation’s governorships in their hands, they have been able to rewrite the rules, gerrymander the living shit out of districts, appoint hundreds and hundreds of reactionary judges, and basically stack the deck against progressive or even watery centrist challengers. On top of that, the President has been setting the predicate for crying fraud in the event he loses his re-elect this fall. That means the Democratic ticket, Biden presumably, needs to win big in order to overcome the shit-storm of challenges and heated rhetoric from the Trump camp. Because of the power dynamic between the two major parties (Republicans fanatically aggressive, Democrats a bit on the limp side), the GOP can afford to win narrow victories, like 2016. Democrats can’t. They need a blowout this November.

Can that happen? We shall see. Biden’s a bit fragile looking for a landslide, but hell … anything can happen. We know that, right? Til then, a million mutinies now!

luv u,

jp

Check out our political opinion podcast, Strange Sound.