A lot of talk the past few weeks about refugees flooding into southern and eastern Europe, mainly people from the hell that is Syria and the catastrophic landscape of post-revolution Libya. First reaction of the right-wing government in Hungary was to thug them with riot police and hastily build a border fence. One of the more memorable videos was the one where Hungarian officials are tossing baloney sandwiches into a corral filled with hungry migrants, including young children. Then there was the Hungarian broadcast journalist who deliberately tripped a fleeing refugee. Nice. People.
The thing is, you need to listen to their rhetoric. They’re talking about “illegal immigrants”. They’re echoing the applause lines of our own crackpot politicians. No surprise, because we’re witnessing the same experience on our own southern border. People fleeing from the neoliberal aftermath of our bankrupt Central America policy, starting with support for decades of regressive, kelptocratic Mexican governments to our serial interventions in El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, and elsewhere, pouring into this country in hope of a better life. And we’ve got freaks like Donald Trump calling them rapists, murderers, etc., and not just him. Those Hungarian xenophobes? Turns out, they are us.
The plan to expel something like 11 million people from the United States is, well, something tantamount to ethnic cleansing. It’s clear that a major party candidate advocating racial profiling raises very few eyebrows these days. Take, for instance, Trump’s town hall event this past Thursday, when one attendee called for the expulsion of all Muslims, to which the candidate said he would be looking at this once elected. Really? As Chris Hayes and Charlie Pierce pointed out the other day, this business is like having a wolf by the ears. When you play with racism and xenophobia, it tends to play back … and hard. Easy to lose control of that particular sentiment. There are plenty of historical precedents.
Here we go. I have to say, as someone who watched a good bit of the second Republican debate, we are headed for some very troubled waters. Beware what a nation will do when it’s effectively fear-mongered.
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I think the part that’s most flabbergasting is the level of hysteria over the Iran deal. You expect to hear overheated rhetoric at an event that features Michelle Bachman and some dude from “Duck Dynasty,” but this was way the fuck over the top. Ted Cruz suggested that the Iranians, once they have acquired the nuclear weapon they so LUST after, will blow it up off the coast of the U.S. to create an electromagnetic pulse, shutting down our electrical grid and killing MILLIONS! What. the. fuck. What a fantasy! And this from a sitting Senator.
Right, so … Barry let Gulf oil start drilling in ocean recently freed up by the effects of burning hydrocarbons, but that’s okay, because he renamed Mount McKinley and talked about how we’re not moving fast enough on climate change. Yeah, no shit, Mr. President – there’s an obvious solution to that, of course. Stop dragging your own damn feet. Obama’s efforts to address the impending climate catastrophe are progressing so slowly that those glaciers he visited seem speedy in comparison. He should have named that mountain “Denial-ly”.
The danger in this is that we have developed a political economy around this practice of perpetual elections. One leg of this stool is the pay-to-play culture of political fundraising. Office holders are spending increasing amounts of their time with potential donors, dialing for dollars and addressing $10,000 a plate dinner crowds. Another leg is the media feeding frenzy that attends every twist and turn of the competition. Plenty of news to be served up, with lots of red meat. And then there’s the ad revenue, in the billions of dollars, ultimately.
First, Trump. As someone who was once a contract employee of this individual (yes, he can say that I too took money from him at some point), I know this guy is more than just a cartoon show for our amusement. What he says and does can have real consequences for people who don’t ride in limos and private jets. So when he talks about forcing 11 million people to leave the country, understand that he is articulating a point of view that is held by a very vocal, substantial minority of Americans. There’s nothing ‘silent’ about this ‘majority’. They want ethnic cleansing.
Schumer’s gambit. Senator Schumer has defended his decision to oppose the nuclear deal with Iran by suggesting that a deal more favorable to the U.S. and Israel can be forced through extension and intensification of sanctions and – I suppose – more aggressive negotiations. In this respect, he is channeling Trump. What’s sad about this is that even the administration, in its defense of the pact, buys into the same imperial mindset that has defined our relationship with Iran since 1979.
This crowded clown car is such a stunning illustration of the extent to which the national Republican Party has lost control of their own electoral process. Either that or they have completely lost their minds. There was a day when the party could take someone aside and say, “No, no. Not this time. Next time, maybe,” and the ambitious pol would refrain from competing. Now the process is being driven from the outside; it’s being pushed by talk radio, conservative bloggers, and Fox News, as well as foundation-funded think tanks and 401(c)3’s and 4’s. If I were a Republican, I would be disgusted by this lack of discipline. There is no way to foster a meaningful televised debate between 10 egotistical people, let alone 17.
Living in a tiny little burg in upstate New York as we do, you tend to intellectualize big problems like climate change. Nothing makes it more concrete than an afternoon on the Garden State Parkway or the New Jersey Turnpike. Millions of vehicles in a mad crush, turning the road into a massive parking lot around the major exits, everyone struggling to get just one car length ahead of the next fucker. At one point in a particularly slow-moving traffic jam on a railroad overpass I was flanked by a tractor trailer carrying fuel while beneath us passed one of those amazingly long tanker trains. When no one’s moving, there’s little to do but think, and it’s moments like that when I start thinking … we have a little problem.
The video of this incident is chilling, and instructive. It is a window into the mentality of entrenched white domination of black people; nothing less than this. Irritation should not be sufficient cause for arrest, whether it’s being projected by the motorist or the arresting officer. Sandra Bland was not doing as she was asked. She was not bowing and scraping. At the same time, she was not violently confrontational. The Texas State Trooper could have just handed her the ticket – or a warning – and walked back to his cruiser. Once he decided to be a dick about it, there was no backing down – not as the white cop disciplining the black miscreant.
Before anyone accuses me of it, I am not a fan of the clerical regime in Iran. The Iranian people have, however, been subjected to sustained attack by the United States since we expanded our empire during and after World War II. We have caused them immense suffering, through the overthrow of their democratically elected government in 1953, through the imposition of our close ally, the Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, through our support of Saddam Hussein in his murderous war against Iran, through decades of draconian sanctions. There are many Americans – some friends, even – who will list for me the strikes against Americans attributed to Iran (all in the context of various military adventures on our part), but in all honesty, they pale in comparison to what we have done to them.