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Political Rants

Examining the Three Crises Three

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I’m guessing none of you noticed, but I returned to podcasting a week or so ago. It was a slight return, a special episode of Strange Sound – special in the sense that there was no music and no editing to speak of. We had just passed the anniversary of January 6, and I had a bee in my bonnet. Either that or a rat up my ass. Not really sure which.

Anyway, in this special episode I expounded on what I call the Three Crises Three. It’s a bit like the political version of the Three Mustaphas Three, except less funny and no music whatsoever. My main point was that we as a society are facing three very serious crises simultaneously – crises that fuel one another in a toxic feedback loop of destruction. And hell, that can ruin your whole day.

What are these Three Crises Three? Let us discuss them one by one:

Crisis One: The Coup

Though it sounds cliche to say so, we experiencing a crisis of democracy in the sense that our republican constitutional government is under serious threat. Now, I know our system is deeply flawed. The alternative, however, is not something better – it’s autocracy. The right is openly talking about this as a real possibility.

But they are doing more than talking. Last year they identified all of the trigger points in our electoral system (and there are many). This year and every year moving forward, they’re going to apply pressure at those points. They had a plan and it failed. But failed plans are good practice. Clearly, the Autocratic Party (formerly the Republican Party) is building toward a second attempt, starting with the election this fall.

Crisis Two: Trumpatosis

Yes, I call COVID-19 Trumpatosis … because he deserves it. This pandemic is literally killing us by the hundreds of thousands. It is also sickening millions more and rending the social fabric of our nation, making organizing and mutual aid much, much more difficult. The Democrats are proving themselves incompetent at coping with this crisis, failing to take the steps necessary to end it.

On the other hand, the Autocratic Party is the party of denial. They have been from the very beginning. They are building successful political careers on the basis of massive failure and negligence in their response to COVID. What’s more, the Autocrats will be hard to beat if progressive Democrats can’t engage in aggressive GOTV efforts in the upcoming elections. Which means no end in sight for this crisis.

Crisis Three: The Climate Catastrophe

This is the ticking time bomb. The climate crisis underscores the fact that our old model of politics is no good anymore. It the Autocrats take power, they will stop even the most flimsy action on climate change. They will further ramp up oil and gas extraction and restart Keystone XL and other fossil fuel infrastructure investments. We can’t afford that detour. In any previous decade, diversions of this kind could be endured, but now – with less than ten years left to address this crisis – it’s simply unacceptable.

I know that the left in America hates electoralism. They have good reason. But we simply need to do this thing. We need to turn back the political cycle this fall and send more progressives to Washington. It may not be sufficient to address these crises, but it is none the less necessary.

For more on this, give the current episode of Strange Sound a listen.

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

The case for vaccinating everybody.

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Here we go again. Cases are rising, as are hospitalizations and deaths. This COVID-19 catastrophe – the Trump Plague, as I like to call it – is not going away anytime soon.

Why the hell is this happening? I think we all know the answer to that. From the beginning, Trump and his allies played down the seriousness of this illness. The Republican Party and the right more generally have made a political football out of vaccination and wearing PPE. As a result, only a little more than half of Americans are fully vaccinated.

The miracle that wasn’t

Cast your mind back to fourteen months ago. Everything shut down, people were panic-buying toilet paper, etc. – you remember the drill. If someone had told you then that there would be not one, not two, but three highly effective vaccines available within a year, would you have believed it? Perhaps. But what if they had told you that many millions of Americans would refuse to take it? I, myself, would have thought that was nuts.

Well, here we are. We literally have the means to end this pandemic, and we’re choosing not to do it. And mind you, this criticism goes beyond the reluctance of my fellow Americans to take the jab. There’s a whole world out there begging for these shots. It is well within our means to manufacture and distribute enough shots to save millions of lives in Asia, Africa, South America, etc. It is also well within the scope of what can reasonably be defined as our “national interest” to do so. But we’re not. What. The. Fuck.

The hard problem

Our COVID vaccine standoff reminds me of the politics around climate change. The right keeps working to force the issue into a cultural context. In their view, your position on the salient question becomes a marker for the type of American you are. So if you encourage people to get the COVID shot – literally, to save the nation from this plague – you’re a “woke” liberal forcing your views on others and squelching their freedom of speech/expression/choice.

The same dynamic is at work with climate change. It doesn’t matter how much evidence there may be of already-occurring global warming. Right-wingers despise the idea of doing anything about it because that’s what the other side wants. Even if the policy would help people on the right, it’s more important to them to “own the libs” than to flourish or even survive.

One way out

I tend to be an optimist. My feeling, generally, is that losing hope is basically surrendering to hopelessness. The only thing we have in our favor is that there are more of us than there are of them. Our only chance is to act boldly, take the initiative, and move forward, even if we have to drag them along with us, kicking and screaming.

With respect to COVID, that means requiring vaccines (or a legitimate exemption) to gain access to a wide range of services (short of essentials like nutrition, housing, etc.). It also means making the necessary investments to quickly implement a robust global vaccination program, so that we can not only save millions of lives but head off these variants.

If people are truly tired of masks and social distancing, that’s what we have to do – get at least 85% fully vaccinated. You can have the thing you want, but you need to do this first. Pretty simple, right? DO IT!

Cuba revisited

Just a brief call back to last week’s column. After posting that piece and its Strange Sound podcast companion episode, I commented on some vaguely related Tweet by Code Pink and incurred the dubious wrath of what I call the Mas Canosa chorus. A crowd of right-wingers from the Cuban exile community basically called me a hater of freedom, etc., because I dared criticize some of their number for yelling “Fuck You” at Code Pink.

I typically don’t engage in pissing wars on Twitter, but I looked into this a bit and it seems that the Cuban exile community has invested in some Twitter bots. Were my digital accusers non-human? Hard to say, though their grade-school level virtue signalling could well have been the product of automation. “If you side with the brutal Cuban dictatorship over the people of Cuba, yearning only for the right to speak freely, then you cannot claim to stand against the powerful,” I was told by someone who supports strangling the Cuban people to death with sanctions. Sure sounds like a bot to me.

luv u,

jp

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

Slow progress.

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The election is less than sixty days away, and already I’m sick of thinking about it. More than likely, that’s the predictable result of a news media that is hyper-focused on elections to the point where they literally begin reporting on the next big race before the votes in the current one are even counted. As I’m sure I’ve mentioned before, I think the press likes the horse race aspect of elections – it’s an easy story to report, there are opposing sides, melodrama, jockeying for position, etc. I haven’t done the analysis, but I’m confident that horse-race stories far outnumber more substantive reporting. Whatever the proportion may be, it’s a silly thing to report on, particularly when there are such titanic issues facing the nation and the world, issues that are on the ballot this fall, in some respects.

To be clear, I don’t think electing Joe Biden will be enough to, say, turn the tide back on climate change, or expand affordable health care to everyone, or stop COVID in its tracks. The project of making Joe Number One is more about avoiding bad things than promoting good ones. He still seems married to the concept of employer-provided health care, just as Nancy Pelosi is, and his campaign was positively ecstatic over its endorsement by former Michigan governor Rick Snyder, who condemned a generation of young people in Flint to the depredations of lead poisoning. So yes, we have a lot of hard fights ahead of us, even with a Biden victory. But I think it’s fairly easy to see the writing on the wall this time. Look at the skies over San Francisco. Look at the legions out of work and on the edge of eviction. Look at the kleptocratic travesty that is Wall Street, gorging itself on public dollars like almost never before. This obviously needs to stop, as Trump said, right here and right now.

Still, I feel like the two opposing sides are playing different board games. It kind of amazes me to hear the reporting around Trump’s comments to Bob Woodward, the shock of his admission that he downplayed the virus, etc. Is it shocking? Really? The man’s public statements since the beginning of the year tell you everything you need to know. Did we really need to hear his conversations with Woodward to surmise that he wasn’t taking COVID seriously, or that he wasn’t leveling with the American people? Did we really need that Atlantic article to imagine that Trump would hold uniform military, veterans, or any group of people in utter contempt? While our representatives in the mainstream media project shock and surprise, the Trumpists just continue along their merry way, deconstructing the administrative state stick by stick.

I know the institutional Democratic party wants to make this an election about manners and integrity. But this election, like all elections, is about policy, and we have to drive the distinctions home if we have any hope of getting this loser out of the White House.

luv u,

jp

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

Berned.

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It was a rainy Tuesday, and the revolution didn’t show up … again. Turns out revolutions are hard, even the electoral ones. As I said last week, these primaries are about proof of concept: if there’s a massive constituency for change, as Bernie Sanders has suggested, it should be mobilized enough to carry him into the presidency and to drive his agenda forward in the years that follow. There was no evidence of such a movement this week, and I don’t intend to denigrate the thousands of hard-working people who have powered Bernie’s campaign from the beginning – they have done remarkable work. But they are merely the vanguard – we need to hear from the masses. It is they who have the real power, and thus far they are not showing up.

Building a future, not just a campaign.

As someone who has been on the left all of my life, I am no stranger to political losses. Leftists tend not to be easily discouraged, and it’s a good thing. Make no mistake about the Sanders campaign – we are attempting to elevate to the presidency someone who has never taken part in the Nixon/Reagan conservative framing that has dominated our politics for decades. That is unprecedented in the modern era. It’s a heavy lift, and we should have no illusions about that. But as Bernie himself pointed out on Wednesday, his campaign represents majority positions within the Democratic party. It also reflects the priorities of a large majority of our young people – and by “young”, I mean 45 and younger. There is no question that that is where the party is going, not to some chewy center represented by people like Biden.

The fatal question for us as a society, though, is can we afford to wait another decade or more to see this new progressive majority emerge? I would say that the climate crisis has already answered that question. But I want to emphasize that the most important component of our response is in the organizing and the mobilization. Yes, Bernie Sanders is the only remaining candidate who, if elected president, would need little or no convincing to take on the enormous task of turning this fossil-fuel driven society around. But if we don’t achieve that maximal objective (and we should most definitely try to do so), we will still need the organizational institutions to push policy forward on whomever ends up in power next January. Short of Bernie, it would be better to have Biden than Trump; but either way we have to have mobilization. The Sanders campaign is like a progress indicator on the movement – the degree to which it succeeds is some rough indication of how well we’re doing on the ground. Yes, we’ve made progress over the past few years, but we have a long, long way to go.

My recommendation is simply this: don’t lose heart. We can still win this nomination. But even if we don’t, the effort is not wasted so long as we build on the foundation of this campaign.

luv u,

jp

Political Rants

Week that was (5.0).

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It has been another one of those weeks, packed to the gills with news, mostly bad. Of course, this is not a bug but merely a feature of the times we live in, so I will make my usual lame effort at grappling with a small subset of what has been assailing us over the past few days in the final full week of the third year of Our Lord Trump, king of the chimps.

Debate #7. Not at all sure I see the point of these corporate exercises in superficial political sparring. The CNN questioners were clearly excited to dig in to their “breaking news” story about what Bernie said to Elizabeth a couple of years ago in a private conversation. The moderator who queried Sanders on this when straight to Warren with a question that assumed he was lying in his response. I am disappointed in Warren, frankly, for perpetuating this line of attack. It plays on the odious claim the Sanders and his followers were misogynistic in their race against Clinton in 2016 – something Clinton alumni cling to as one of the rationales for their loss. This is toxic, and I don’t think it’s hyperbolic to suggest that it could ultimately blow the election. WTF, people … time to put the movement above your personal fortunes. Knock. it. off.

When a billionaire has to intervene, you know there's a problem.

Impeachment. A historic week in terms of the delivery of articles of impeachment to the Senate for only the third time in American history, with respect to presidents, at least. It seems like a forgone conclusion that Trump will walk away from this, but not unscathed – impeachment without removal is a kind of accountability. If there is history after this presidency, this action will be indelibly recorded next to his grisly name. As for the trial, well … I expect a relative circus as compared to the already ridiculous Clinton impeachment. The G.O.P. has decayed considerably over the past 20 years, such that there’s some question as to whether all of them will keep their pants on for the entire proceeding. We shall see.

War lies. Bernie had it right Tuesday night: our two biggest foreign policy disasters in recent decades were spawned by lies – Vietnam and Iraq. Though with Vietnam, I’m pretty sure he’s talking about the Gulf of Tonkin incident that never happened, with the U.S.S. Maddox and Turner Joy. (There were a lot of lies that preceded that with regard to Indochina.) Of course Trump is lying about Iran … that’s the same as saying he’s speaking about Iran. We are in a similar boat with Iran as we were with Iraq back in 2001-03; elements within the the administration want to have a war for whatever reason, perhaps ideological, perhaps mercantile, likely some mixture of both. It appears that the general population is more against the idea than it was in the case of Iraq 2003, and that that opposition is broad-based enough to make Trump somewhat cautious. Ironic that this heightened tension is taking place in the immediate wake of the release of the Afghan papers, the DOD internal history of the Iraq conflict, and the big Intercept / NY Times scoop on the activities of Iran’s intelligence services in Iraq. (Of course, these were all one or two-day stories at best.)

Natural Disasters. Heartbreaking climate-fueled fires in Australia, earthquakes in Puerto Rico, volcanic eruptions in the Philippines. Jesus H. Christ, what next?

luv u,

jp

Political Rants

Fire hose 3.0.

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Like so many weeks during the Trump era, this one has been dizzying. It started with the massive climate change resistance marches led by Greta Thunberg and other young people, and it’s ending with what appears to be the most brazen example yet of Donald Trump self-dealing in the conduct of his office. Whoa, momma … it’s like drinking from a fire hose …. again.

Let me start with these amazing young climate activists. I have to say, if anyone is going to be able to save our sorry asses, it’s these folks …. and I don’t mean that we should sit back, fold our arms, and wait for them to deliver us from climate catastrophe. I mean that their activism can be the catalyst for real change. It is impossible to argue with people who will inevitably inherit the world that we are so actively wrecking. Their outrage is justified, and we should follow their lead. There have been times when I have fallen into resignation on this issue, I will admit, but they give me reason to rise again.

Our last hope,people.

This week’s convening of the UN General Assembly featured some tough talk by bigots and fascists, not least of which being our cheap-hair POTUS. He called for, in essence, a coalition of the willing against Iran, called out Venezuela yet again, and called himself a “nationalist” while deploring globalism. Strange speech, read haltingly by a man who sounded like he just scaled five flights of stairs. Then, of course, the was Bolsonaro, Brazil’s little wannabe autocrat, who suggested that stories about the burning of the Amazon were “fake news”. This, of course, bears on the first story, which is necessarily the most important story on Earth.

Then, of course, there’s Trump’s Ukraine scandal. Probably the most amazing part of this story is the transcript of his phone call with Ukrainian president Zelenskyy. “The United States has been very good to Ukraine. I wouldn’t say that it’s reciprocal necessarily because things are happening that are not good,” Trump said to the leader of a besieged, small country dependent on foreign aid from the U.S. that was being held up by the President. “I would like you to do us a favor though because our country has been through a lot and Ukraine knows a lot about it.” He then goes on to babble about how Zelenskyy should talk to Rudy Giuliani and implied that Biden and his son had been involved in something that needed investigating. It’s a bit like listening to the Nixon tapes … “Blow the safe!”

That’s the kind of week we’ve had. Whatever will next week bring?

luv u,

jp

Political Rants

Toxic inertia.

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On May 7 of this year, Secretary of State Pompeo made some public remarks in Finland that certainly rank as among the most craven  ever delivered by a high government official since our founding:

“The Arctic is at the forefront of opportunity and abundance. It houses thirteen percent of the world’s undiscovered oil, thirty percent of its undiscovered gas, an abundance of uranium, rare earth minerals, gold, diamonds, and millions of square miles of untapped resources, fisheries galore. Steady reductions in sea ice are opening new passageways and new opportunities for trade. This could potentially slash the time it takes to travel between Asia and the West by as much as twenty days. Arctic sea lanes could become the 21st century Suez and Panama Canals.”

This is emblematic of the prevailing take on climate change. A catastrophic collapse of arctic ice, caused in large measure by our profit-driven obsession with fossil fuels, is seen as just another opportunity to extend the same neoliberal practices and extract the same resources that are bringing about the collapse in the first place. Nothing about consequent sea level rise, increasing atmospheric CO2, etc. Pompeo’s longtime sponsors, the Koch Brothers, must be very proud of their plump little protege.

Titanic douche ... brought to you by Koch Industries

When they’re not actively working to make things worse, the Trump administration seems bound and determined to ignore, mischaracterize, and deflect any and all evidence of the unfolding climate catastrophe we are now facing. Over the past month, we have seen a record-breaking number of tornadoes tearing through the midwest, the south, and the northeast – thirteen straight days of them as of this writing. Flooding in the midwest is out of control. Fires have ravaged California, with more to come. And still the administration continues to push its version of denialism, both rhetorically and as a mater of policy. Trump is constantly pushing out his idiotic messages about global warming being a hoax, etc. They are doubling down on deregulating particulate pollution from coal plants, limiting the time horizon on climate change research (per the head of the U.S. Geological Survey, a petroleum geologist), opening new areas to drilling and mining, and so on. It is, in many ways, a full court press.

Beyond the administration, our political culture still appears unable to rise to the level of this challenge. It is a bit like the proverbial frog in the pot of water on the stove. The water’s just lukewarm, what are you worried about? My house hasn’t been blown down by a tornado … yet.  We need a million Greta Thunbergs … as V.S. Naipaul put it in an entirely different context, a million mutinies now. It is the hard problem, but we must solve it if we are to survive as a species.

luv u,

jp

Political Rants

The hard problem.

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Senate Republicans tried-on their comedy shoes this week, “debating” something they were breezily referring to as the Green New Deal but which was actually just a straw horse resolution they whacked like a pinata to show how proudly retrograde they are.  In the wake of the Typhoon in Mozambique and other recent climate-fueled disasters, this was a pretty remarkable exercise in ignorance and tone-deafness. No, I don’t expect anything better from what Noam Chomsky has accurately described as the most dangerous organization in human history. The Republicans literally stand alone in the world as the only major party that rejects the science of climate change. Quite a distinction.

Not that there isn’t some value in such a spectacle. It certainly focuses the mind on how much work we have to do. My hope is that all of my leftist and progressive friends and colleagues fully understand just how difficult this climate fight will be. This is not just about developing and advocating for big ideas. We can only move this process forward by mounting an effective inside/outside strategy – organizing a large, broad mobilization out in the communities and electing the most progressive politicians we can possibly elect.  We need to do more than just win power, which will be hard enough. We have to hold and sustain power over the next decade and a half particularly, as that is pretty much all the time we have left to turn this ship around. That will take an enormous effort and, really, a new kind of politics that makes a material difference in the lives of ordinary people.

Note to rookie comedian Mike Lee: don't quit your day job.

How are we going to convince millions upon millions of Americans to go with this Green New Deal framework? Well, part of the challenge is that climate change is what may be called a genuinely hard problem. There’s the tendency to compare climate change to the Great Depression, but that’s kind of misleading. Yes, the Depression affected almost everyone in the country, but its worst effects could be mitigated by some money in your pocket. Massive collective effort in the 1930s had the potential to provide relief relatively rapidly – relief that would be felt by a large segment of society. Climate change is more complicated. We can’t tell people that, if you do this important work, the climate will be noticeably better – that’s just not likely. We’re asking people to save the world for future generations … and it’s just possible that our best efforts might not even accomplish that. So in addition to emphasizing that concern for future generations, we need to flesh out the “new deal” component of the plan … the part that will deliver some level of equity and prosperity to ordinary Americans.

Don’t get me wrong – I am 100% in favor of a Green New Deal. But let’s proceed with our eyes open. This won’t be a cake walk.

luv u,

jp

Political Rants

Cop out.

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Overwhelmed by all the mainstream news coverage of the COP conference in Katowice, Poland? I thought not. It’s possible that the international climate negotiations in Poland have been covered in passing by the evening news shows, etc., but I haven’t seen a single mention of them on the various talk shows, most notably on MSNBC, which is purported to be the centrist-liberal network. Their constant obsession is the Mueller probe, and while I can understand the temptation to follow such a strongly narrative-driven story, to do so to the exclusion of all other news is craven on the part of any organization that lays claim the mantle of investigative journalism.

Old King Coal.Probably the best source on what’s happening at Katowice is DemocracyNow! – Amy Goodman and her crew have been broadcasting from Poland all week, covering the activities of the American delegation. Yes, there is an official U.S. delegation, even though our lord emperor Trump the first has chosen to withdraw from the weak as dishwater (but better than nothing) Paris Accord. The delegation is headed by former Priebus aide Wells Griffith, who ran a failed campaign for congress in Alabama recently. Goodman chased Griffith around the hall at one point, asking him to comment on the administration’s hallucinogenic policies on climate change – he refused, walked faster, practically ran to get away from them. (Worth a look.)

What are they doing there? Same thing the conference is doing in Poland – making every effort to legitimize coal as a usable energy source. Recall that Trump’s EPA administrator is a coal industry lobbyist (I would add “former” to that title, but honestly, he still is). Poland’s government, too, is a big promoter of coal – that’s why they are hosting COP 24 in a building designed to look like the inside of a coal mine. Not too subtle. Though it has announced its intention to leave the Paris Accord, the U.S. government is doing all it can to steer the negotiations away from any serious effort at attacking this problem, teaming up with other bad global actors and hawking its extractive industries. It’s not all that different from Obama’s ridiculous “all of the above” policy, except that Trump’s all of the above doesn’t include renewables.

Mind you, this meeting has been going on for 24 years and we are still waiting for serious action on the greatest threat to confront us in the history of humankind. That’s why the corporate media pays no attention – they no the intention is to do nothing while looking like you’re doing something. Unacceptable.

Not Too Soon. I think Greg Grandin did a great job of remembering George H.W. Bush in all of his patrician glory in last week’s Nation. Check it out.

luv u,

jp

Political Rants

Paradise lost.

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The California town of Paradise was wiped out by climate change this week. Now even network weather forecasters are saying that these wild fires that have now claimed 59 lives and counting are fueled in large measure by global warming. When I see the images of this catastrophe on television, it makes me wonder what the national response would be if these homes had been destroyed by a terror bombing or a hijacked plane. No doubt we would move heaven and earth to hold the perpetrators accountable (along with anyone even tangentially associated with them) and to prevent future attacks. What has the federal response been to these fires? Initially, blame the victim. Trump was in an election-related snit and so resorted to parroting his Interior Secretary on the matter. Classy, as always.

A bomb goes off in California.Thousand Oaks, California – located in one of the wild fire zones – had to deal with three national policy failures in the same week. One was the lack of national gun control legislation and strong enough restrictions on gun ownership at the state level. The second was foreign policy – the shooter was a veteran of the Afghan war, though it’s not entirely clear that this was a factor (he had mental issues before going into the service). Then, of course, Thousand Oak residents had barely begun to grieve for their lost loved ones when these fires descended on them. Just an astonishing confluence of hardships, all representing the abject failure of our government to take meaningful steps on any of these issues.

Meanwhile, the president is busy spinning out nonsensical lies about voter fraud, making as much noise as possible in order to distract and deflect from the collapse of his one-party rule that took place over the last week. About the only value there is in listening to the man’s spew is that it offers some rough insight into their electoral strategy moving forward. The losses hurt a great deal, but the close races in formerly red states are what really worry the Republicans. Their shrinking advantage can only be preserved through the usual methods of voter suppression and intimidation, some of which we are seeing right now.

How do we fight back? Like we did last Tuesday, except harder. It’s the only chance we have to stop this toxic regime that’s so dedicated to making our most difficult problems worse.

luv u,

jp