Category Archives: Political Rants

Political Rants

Who would you sanction?

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We have had Cuba, Iran, and North Korea under sanction for decades; Venezuela under sanction for a number of years now.  These examples are all for political reasons, of course. In the cases of Cuba and Iran, we dole out punishment for the unforgivable crime of “stealing” something quite valuable from us … specifically, Cuba and Iran. With North Korea, it’s basically get-back for their not having lost the Korean war after we reduced their country to rubble in the early 1950s. It was the same situation with Vietnam for a couple of decades, before we half-forgave them for what we did to them. (Not a typo.)

If, of course, we didn’t have a craven foreign policy, who would we call out? I have a few candidates.

Balsonaro’s Brazil. Make no mistake – the reason why there have been more than 70,000 fires in the Amazon this year is because this clown fascist has been encouraging ranchers, miners, loggers, and soybean farmers to clear this irreplaceable resource for further exploitation. Balsonaro is similar to Trump in as much as he represents all of the worst tendencies of his nation, rolled up into one big greasy ball. A sane U.S. foreign policy would oppose this mad regime with every tool in the toolbox, support the freeing of Lula and the aspirations of Brazil’s workers and landless peasants.

Great candidates (for sanctions)

Modi’s India. The BJP Hindu nationalists are flexing their muscles after their electoral win, with Modi at the helm. In the Indian administered sector of Kashmir,  they are engaged in a massive shutdown of free speech and free expression. Modi has cut the region off from the rest of the world and is arresting dissidents, harassing Muslims, and basically encouraging his Hindu nationalist followers to reek havoc on the majority Muslim community. A sane U.S. foreign policy would take issue with this in a big way. It just astounds me the degree to which this story is being ignored in America. If India were an official enemy, you would hear no end of this.

Netanyahu’s Israel. The Israelis are, once again, dropping bombs on people they don’t like, attacking targets in two locations in Lebanon – Beiruit area and the Bekaa Valley (see Rami Khouri’s article in The New Arab). They also bombed a Hezbollah arms depot in Iraq and a purported Iranian position in Syria. They are throwing gasoline on a burning fire and getting away with it. I am convinced that they do not want to fight a conventional war with either Hezbollah or Iran. They want us to fight it.  This, and countless offenses against Palestinians, should carry a substantial cost in terms of U.S. aid … if we had a sane foreign policy.

That’s a big if, regardless of who wins the presidency next year. But I would sooner go with a Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren in the driver’s seat than the current ass-clown.

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jp

Political Rants

Turn right at Greenland.

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Trump may well think there’s something rotten in Denmark, but it’s hard to know for sure. This past week’s strange interlude about Greenland seems more like a textbook study in megalomania as it  gradually unfolds. Where did Trump get this idea about buying this inhabited, now-melting glacial island from the Danes? The first story that I heard was that it was some Danish diplomat, but god only knows where that came from.

The simple fact is, well, Trump is a simpleton; somebody told him that he could buy Greenland, and he believed whoever that was. In his tiny mind, everything is for sale – it’s just a question of price. I’m thinking that as he saw the public reaction and it began to dawn on him how idiotic he looked, he did what proto-dictators always do – they bend every effort to make the world conform with their delusions. Trump doubled down on the claim, and suddenly there emerged some weird proposal about a kind of extended lease, which is essentially what the U.S. already holds with regards to its military bases on the island. Then when the prime minister (herself an anti-immigration freak) called the idea absurd, Trump canceled his scheduled state visit to Denmark.

Big Island Mine!

I know people are tempted to laugh at this episode, but we have to remind ourselves that this is the president of the United States and, as such, someone capable of tremendous harm all around the world. And I know he and his administration are deliberately trying to trigger people like me by acting strangely and saying outrageous things, but I think he is seriously showing signs of dictatorial self-aggrandizement and the autocrat version of shut-in syndrome, where all you hear is the echo of your own voice. This week Trump said, in effect, that either 80 percent of Jewish Americans are disloyal to themselves and to Israel (once again associating them with another country, as he has done before) or they are just plain stupid. Then he repeated a crackpot claim that Israelis see him as “the chosen one.” Oh … and said that he might want to be president for 10 or maybe 13 years. Somebody needs to shut that shit down.

We are dealing with a deranged right-wing nutjob in the White House. Isn’t there a constitutional amendment designed for a situation like that?  The sad fact is, people in Washington could stop this crap show, but they will not. It’s down to us.

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jp

Political Rants

Their man.

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It’s been a summer of discontent, to be sure, and the signs aren’t good for this fall. Internationally we appear to be on the brink of major upheavals, from India’s escalation of the conflict in Kashmir to uprisings in Hong Kong, Russia, and elsewhere. India-Pakistan is particularly worrisome, as these now nuclear armed states have already fought three wars over founding disputes like Kashmir; with Modi in control, this could end very badly. What a great time to have Donald Trump as president, right?

As much as pundits have tried to paint Trump as an atypical GOP politician with regard to foreign relations, his administration is doing about what you might expect a president Rubio to do; bellicose rhetoric, imperial policies, and arrogant attitude. The only question about Trump is whether, at any given moment, he may be pursuing his own narrow self interest or following the directions handed to him by his neocon national security team. It is hard for TV commentators to hold both administration positions in their heads at the same time.  Trump speaks nicely about Putin, while his cabinet officials tear up arms control agreements signed by Reagan. Trump exchanges notes with Kim Jong Un while is Pentagon plans military maneuvers in South Korea. Trump appears to resist the march to war with Iran, but the confrontation continues. The net effect of all of this is basically a mainstream Republican foreign policy, with a few fewer diplomats.

Trump, King of Greenland? Nice.

The fact is, I would far rather Trump and his administration start having a dialog with Russia over nuclear arms and nuclear materials. The mishap they had in the northeast of the country, at the Nenoksa test site, this past week underscores that need. Putin’s proposed nuclear-powered cruise missile is a tremendously destabilizing and toxic program. Think of it: even if it works as planned, you would have a missile with a conventional payload spewing radioactive fuel all over the place when it strikes its target, rendering it basically a dirty bomb. We are playing a similarly dangerous game with the development of low-yield nuclear “bunker busters”. Both of these weapons amount to a backdoor introduction of nuclear isotopes into common use in a conventional war. We need to put nuclear disarmament back at the top of the agenda … and right now, we’re heading in the opposite direction at full speed.

When the Trump administration is finally over, no doubt the GOP will attempt to distance themselves from this dumpster fire, claiming Trump was, at heart, a lifelong Democrat. Nothing doing. We need to hang this around their necks for as long as they remain the party of right-wing extremism, climate change denial, serial invasion, etc.

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jp

Political Rants

American carnage.

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It is possible to kill people with your mouth, particularly when you’re president of the United States. I’m referring to the kind of rhetoric that has broad public impact rather than speech that sets deadly official policies in motion – both kill, and we should take both very seriously. In the wake of the El Paso shooting, it’s that first kind that calls for extra examination. A president’s public expressions of hate, bigotry, whatever, provide space for extremists and overzealous citizens to act.  Nixon called student anti-war protesters a bunch of bums, and before long we saw Kent State. Now Trump has done the same thing, except to a much more explicit degree.

As he did three years ago, Trump is centering his campaign on fear of brown immigrants. Not immigrants in general, you understand – he doesn’t seem to have a problem with people from Canada or “Normay”. The president claims repeatedly and consistently that the United States is being “invaded” by large numbers of undocumented aliens bent on committing serious felonies. He and his administration have implemented multiple scare campaigns about dark caravans moving northward, populated by Muslim terrorists and criminals from “Mexican countries”, your placid suburban backyard squarely in their sites. They have pushed for a Great Wall of Ignorance along the southern U.S. border, though I have yet to hear of any corresponding structure along our northern border (or, for that matter, around our airports, as that is how so many people who overstay their visas enter this country).

Photo of sociopaths posing with orphan infant

We’ve all heard the administration’s childish gaslighting on this issue, as well as that of their supporters in Congress. Good luck with that. They can’t run away from their own shouted words. They have been waving the bloody shirt since before they arrived in Washington … it’s a little late to claim that they don’t mean to rile people up with their contant talk of demographic Armageddon. In his poorly-crafted inaugural (honestly, Steven Miller is objectively the worst speechwriter ever to serve a president), Trump spoke of “American Carnage”. What we are seeing now is exactly that – a continuation of the mindless death toll generated by our gun-obsessed society, but also a resurgence of right-wing violence directed at the targets of Trump’s tirades. Ordinarily these movements fade during Republican presidencies, but this time around they know they have a friend in the White House, regardless of his hostage-video statements of condemnation against white supremacy.

This administration is an American fascist’s dream come true. Now all they have to do is keep him in office. That’s what we’re up against.

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jp

Political Rants

Muddle in the middle.

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If you’re as obsessive about politics as I am, you probably watched the “CNN Democratic Debates” this week, brought to you by CNN, hosted by CNN, and did I mention CNN was somehow involved? What the hell ever happened to the League of Women Voters, anyway? This notion of presidential debates being treated like commercial media properties is beyond ridiculous. Debates should not be some pre-packaged product served up by powerful corporations who benefit from the free-for-all media environment our bought politicians have built for them over the years. As if that wasn’t bad enough, the three purported journalists moderating the event were hell-bent on getting the various candidates to mix it up, posing questions that were, at worst, the equivalent of “Are you just going to stand there and let her say that about you?” and, at best, cheap rehashes of Republican party talking points. (Jake Tapper is such a freaking waste of space.)

Night one had the two progressive candidates plus what seemed like a legion of also-rans and never-heard-of-ems. Bernie and Warren both did fine, given the full-on frontal attack both were subjected to from the Frackenlooper chorus and the “moderators” (they kind of gave that term a new meaning, come to think of it). I thought Warren was, once again, particularly sharp, agile. Delaney appeared to be the main foil, and he got roasted once or twice, despite Tapper and company’s best efforts to cue him up as the reasonable alternative to what they consider to be radicalism, but which is no more radical in the main than the types of policies Eisenhower was comfortable supporting. Night two was cast as a re-match, in essence, between Harris and Biden – I saw CNN’s run-up to the main event, and it was a cross between reality show and prize fight promo. Ridiculous.

Never-Trump windbags attempt to school dems

The whole spectacle told us more about our prevailing media culture than it did about the candidates’ positions. One small example – in a brief discussion of the Green New Deal and related legislation, one question centered on the idea that the bill would entail guaranteed government jobs with benefits. As the candidates responded, the super showed the question as something like: “Should the Green New Deal include guaranteed government jobs with paid vacations?” These people are so steeped in the neoliberal myth of our current “prosperity” (based on millions of crappy jobs) that the very concept of stable work with benefits seems bat-shit crazy to them.

Speaking of bat-shit crazy, the CNN shills were outdone by their counterparts on Morning Joe on Thursday morning. Joe, Mika, and the whole crew were appalled by the previous night’s performance, saying the candidates were attacking Obama all night. Not sure they saw the same debate as I did, but this is the type of input Democrats should expect from never-Trump Republicans like Scarborough: We should rewind back to 2008 and stay right there, folks. Take that from someone who endlessly criticized Obama from one end of his presidency to the other. Oh … and here comes uber-moderate Claire McCaskle (sp) to tell us how to win in swing states like Missouri, which she lost only last year.

What an enormous pile of shit.

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jp

Political Rants

Ugly truth.

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He did it again. Trump flapped his jaw and violated the UN charter without even blinking. This past week, he was sitting in the White House with the Pakistani leader, chatting with reporters, and out came this:

“We’re not fighting a war. If we wanted to fight a war in Afghanistan and win it, I could win that war in a week. I just don’t want to kill 10 million people. I have plans on Afghanistan that, if I wanted to win that war, Afghanistan would be wiped off the face of the Earth. It would be gone.  It would be over in, literally, in 10 days. And I don’t want to do that—I don’t want to go that route.”

I don’t have a lot of Afghan friends or acquaintances, but the one I have any regular contact with was appalled by this, and rightfully so. This, of course, isn’t the first time Trump has casually tossed out the notion of blowing some country sky-high, whether it was North Korea or Iran or Venezuela. But I believe this is the first time he has made this careless threat against an allied (if invaded and occupied) nation. The man is just a total sociopath, and one in possession of nuclear launch codes. It’s a sobering thought.

More of this for Afghanistan?

Of course, what’s interesting about this utterance is more in what it says about the power of the presidency than about the madness of this president, and in this respect Trump is almost performing a public service. When he says he has “plans,” he’s likely talking about actual contingency plans the Pentagon has presented to him – I’m certain they have contingency plans to reduce every nation on Earth to rubble. That is the underlying threat that makes every President a potential mass murderer (or an actual one, in many cases). The part about “winning” by destroying is largely self-inflation and imperial hubris, but it’s not that different from the kind of arrogance we’ve seen from America’s leaders in the past, as well as its military commanders. “It became necessary to destroy the town to save it,” as one U.S. unnamed U.S. major famously said of the bombing of Ben Tre in Vietnam in 1968. The formula still applies.

Since the dawn of the atomic age, our government has consciously chosen the path of greatest risk, not because it meant greater safety and security for the people of the world, but because to do so conformed to the logic of global empire. And because Trump says the quiet parts out loud, we can see this madness on full display. Yes, I am grateful that he apparently doesn’t think the mass killing of Afghans is a good way forward. What bothers me is that such a policy remains an option for this … or any president.

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jp

Political Rants

Fading to black.

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We all knew he would get an early start, and true to form, sixteen months before the general election, Donald Trump has completely poured himself into being Drunk Uncle Twitter Troll, spewing overtly racist attacks on duly elected members of the House of Representatives while his Republican colleagues lamely play rhetorical defense, desperate to hold onto their party’s precious rubber-stamp chief executive who is giving them all they ever wanted and more. Pretty amazing to hear the likes of GOP congressman Tom Cole on NPR gaslighting us all on the issue of whether or not Trump is race-baiting (clue: Cole says “no”), then engaging in some truly ridiculous what-about-ism (speaking to NPR correspondent Noel King):

KING: You just don’t think it was racist.
COLE: No, I don’t.
KING: OK.
COLE: And frankly, I also think that if you – you have to remember here, too, there’s – we’ve had colleagues that are routinely called down by presiding officers for using inappropriate language toward the president. We’ve had people that have said federal workers are running concentration camps. We’ve had people that have said if you support Israel, you do it for the money. We’ve had people that have referred to the president with vulgar epithets and said they’re going to impeach him. None of those people were subject to resolution. So the double standard here, in terms of accepting comments on your own side of the aisle and criticizing essentially – what, you know, others might think are a similar thing to another is just – you know, it’s breathtakingly inappropriate.

(NPR Morning Edition, July 17, 2019)

See what he did there? He literally attacked the same four representatives Trump baited on Twitter. Cole predicated this on his earlier statement that the president’s tweets about the four congresswomen of color were “inappropriate” and “offensive”, but not racist. That little twist makes the president’s comments equivalent to, for example, Rashida Talib’s using the word “ass” when talking about impeaching Trump, or Ilhan Omar making virtually the same observation about the effect of AIPAC political contributions that Thomas Friedman made without any negative reaction. This is a standard package of what-about-ism that Republican strategists whipped up quickly over the last day or two, and they’re all reading from the same hymnal.

Drunk uncle twitter troll strikes again.

Of course, the corporate media spends a lot of time pondering whether or not Trump is racist. That’s immaterial. We should have zero interest in what that fool thinks or how he feels. It’s what he projects and works to engender in other people that should concern us. It’s no accident or mere caprice that he chooses the targets he chooses, as I’ve said here before. It all follows the same theme, from the birther conspiracy, to bashing immigrants from Mexico at his campaign launch, to announcing his Muslim ban, to telling the toxic lie about Muslims celebrating 9/11 in New Jersey, to calling out Colin Kapernik or any one of a dozen women of color in Congress. It’s about othering people. It’s about framing black, brown, and non-Christian people as not true Americans, somehow disloyal, a fifth column, from somewhere else. Even his claim that 3 million undocumented immigrants voted in 2016 rolls into this – he’s basically saying that the margin of popular vote victory for Clinton was delivered by people with no right to vote … people of color.

This is not just Trump being Trump. This is his 2020 campaign, and it will get worse, just wait and see.

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jp

Political Rants

Skin game.

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Not so very long ago – within the span of many Americans’ lifetimes – crossing the southern border wasn’t that big of a deal. People from Mexico and points south would make their way into the U.S. for seasonal work mostly, do the jobs Americans tend not to want to do, then make their way back. Most of them wouldn’t stay very long because they had families back in Mexico, so they might travel back and forth as their work allowed, bringing their meager earnings back with them. There was an explicit guest worker program during World War II, but otherwise it was kind of an informal, administrative matter for many years.

Gradually, though, immigration across the southern border became more heavily policed. The option to harass migrant workers and other visitors was always available to law enforcement, but in more recent decades it became a matter of policy. As PBS journalist John Carlos Frey details in his new book, Blood and Sand, the crackdown really began in earnest during the Clinton Administration, reflected most shockingly in Clinton’s second State of the Union, which included a section on undocumented immigrants that might have been ripped from Trump’s current playbook. There were a couple of things going on in those days. Implementation of NAFTA was decimating rural agriculture in Mexico, pitting small farmers against U.S. agribusiness conglomerates. But most importantly, politicians were re-discovering the efficacy of targeting brown people. Clinton and the Republican Congress funded the construction of walls in major border cities, forcing migrants into the harsh desert and mountain terrain that straddles the border between populated areas.

Not the desired effect.

Similar to Trump’s policies now, Clinton’s approach was formulated specifically to discourage people from even attempting to cross into the U.S. The result was a spike in migrant deaths as families and individuals continued to be driven north by need and in search of safety and sustenance. That policy set the template that we have operated under ever since, though Bush, Obama, and now into Trump. Of course, Trump has ratcheted up the pressure, making it impossible to adjudicate asylum claims, incarcerating immigrants regardless of their personal histories, treating all crossers like murderers, rapists, gang members, etc., holding terrified people – even children and infants – in squalid, dehumanizing conditions under the hateful eye of bigoted officers.

We have to take the administration at their word that they’re doing this to discourage migrants fleeing the remnants of the countries we worked so hard to destroy in past decades. That makes Trump and his crew terrorists, plain and simple – they are deliberately terrorizing people for political ends, and the longer we tolerate it the more complicit we are in these crimes against humanity.

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Political Rants

The unitary peril.

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Happy Independence Day, everyone … and welcome to the next phase of our slide towards authoritarianism. It’s a track we’ve been on for decades, frankly, and our pace has accelerated with the dubious election of Donald Trump (a.k.a. Drumpf) as our president. Trump is taking the concept of the unitary executive, popularized under Bush II, to a whole new level, testing institutional constraints on presidential power, many of which apparently boil down to voluntarily-observed norms of behavior, ethical standards, etc., but very little in the way of black-letter law. Even in the case of explicit legal constraints, this president is demonstrating that there is very little in the way of available recourse to a chief executive that ignores or even violates the law. Who holds the president accountable, particularly if the Senate is a perennial no-show?

Now, as Trump prepares for his big, honking, tank-infested fourth of July show in D.C., his administration is contemplating an executive order that would violate a Supreme Court decision regarding exclusion of the citizenship question on the U.S. Census. If they move forward with this, welcome to the dictatorship. When our institutions cannot compel a president to comply with a duly-rendered opinion handed down by the highest court, that amounts to a constitutional crisis far beyond anything we have seen up to this point. What higher authority is there to compel a change of behavior on the part of the administration? There’s no inspector general, no ombudsman overseeing the presidency – just Congress … and honestly, if Congress finally gets up on its hind legs and tells Trump “enough!”, what happens if he ignores them?

Trying to keep the mad king happy.

We have a long tradition of republican rule in the United States, obviously attenuated by a foundational regime of racial, ethnic and gender-based exclusion that has kept whole classes of people from participating in the political process (and continues to do so). But that long, troubled history does not immunize us against dictatorship. Military rule in Chile was once thought impossible in a country with longstanding civilian rule, then came their September 11th (1973) and the Pinochet dictatorship. The fact is, it not only can happen here, it almost certainly will happen here if we don’t stand up and resist.  It is cliche to say that democracy is not a gift – that it must be fought for. Let’s remove that notion from the context of pointless wars. We need to fight for our freedom right here, right now.

How? Stand up. Call, visit, petition your representatives to hold the president accountable. March, protest, and participate in strikes when tactically appropriate. Make your voice heard. We have to turn this thing around and put authoritarianism back in the box … before some slightly more competent “Great Leader” comes along and takes up the reins from our current clown-president.

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jp

Political Rants

Debatable.

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I’m starting this post while watching the first Democratic debate.  Too many candidates, of course – I think that’s obvious. It’s kind of dizzying, frankly. John Delaney wants to double the earned income tax credit … whoopdee doo, right? What the hell is that fucker doing there? He wants to keep what’s working, like … private health care? What the fuck. This is like some kind of game show.

Highlights? Well, on night one, Elizabeth Warren put in a strong performance, but with nine colleagues to compete with on time – and sixty second answers – it’s hard to get to a substantive level on any issue. Foreign policy was, as always, a rough spot, with questions about “red lines” and “duty to protect”. In my mind, this points to one of the biggest drawbacks of these corporate-sponsored, major network hosted candidate forums. The questions strongly reflect what the mainstream media considers the broadly held political consensus on major issues.

With respect to foreign policy, when Lester Holt asks candidates where they would draw a “red line”, he’s drawing on the Syrian war debate during the Obama administration, when hawks backed the president into a corner of his “red line” comment, hoping to get another American invasion of the middle east out of it. Obama disappointed them, but has been called out for “fecklessness” ever since by the Joe Scarboroughs of the world. The idea that there should be some “red line” beyond which we plunge ourselves into a murderous, costly, and self-destructive conflict is simply ludicrous. I’m not a huge fan of Tulsi Gabbard, but she was the only one on that stage that seriously pushed back on that and on the “humanitarian intervention” question.

Probably six too many.

Then there was the question, again from Holt, to Elizabeth Warren about whether she would agree to any restrictions on abortion. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to work out the premise for that question. Trump has been running around the country, describing with glee his fairy stories about newborn infant executions at the hands of craven women and their nefarious abortion doctors.  This question was an attempt to get the candidates to weigh in on mythical late-term abortions, and thankfully no one took the bait, though I wish one of these candidates would just swat that bullshit down, once and for all.

The second debate was kind of a crap show. I will return to that in next week’s installment.

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jp