Showing posts with label politics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label politics. Show all posts

Friday, October 05, 2018

Trump's Great Favor to the Republic

By becoming the obvious boil in the body politic and personifying the most venal characteristics of U.S. plutocrats, Donald Trump has done the republic the enormous favor of stripping bare the power relationships in our society. This is becoming ever clearer with every new outrage as the midterm elections of 2018 approach.

This is one reason that, rather than respond with epithets and anger, the true small-d democrats in the United States must vote against Trump's allies and work to undo the plutocracy in every way. Not for the first time, there is a broad awareness of this reality. We need to defend the civil rights won so far and expand democracy to include economic and social rights.

History teaches us that it is doubtful that the United States was ever a democracy — that is largely an as yet unrealized aspiration.

At its founding, the states, which regulated voting rights, allowed only male, free property owners to participate in electing political decision-makers. By law, this was in theory overthrown with finality by the 1965 Voting Rights Act and a 1972 Supreme Court decision (Reynolds v. Sims, 377 U.S. 533); however, this is being undone by clever, largely Republican-inspired voter suppression tricks.

Moreover, even among the participating great unwashed, there existed a broad group of Americans of Northwestern European origin who lived in a near-poverty of under-education and underemployment. These Americans directed their resentment not at the wealthy who kept them down, but at the easy marks whose skin was darker and spoke with accents other than their own.

Nor has the United States honestly and deservedly been a land of milk and honey with streets paved with gold for anyone with pluck.

Sure, some younger sons of the English nobility, who inherited nothing, became wealthy thanks to slaves. Also, some landless English, German and Irish people became small farmers thanks to land theft from the natives.

Even the great American bonanza after 1945 came at the expense of a Europe mired in rubble and was merely a temporary accident — rather than the fruit of American know-how"; the broad middle class was a temporary myth, it had never existed before and it is vanishing now. Until the New Deal's and Great Society's mildly heroic soft capitalism, it was sink or swim for everyone and most sank.

The true story of American wealth is more aptly told by a famous epigram of Balzac's: "Behind every fortune lies a crime." The American crimes of slavery, land theft and industrial warmaking made a few very wealthy and these few convinced a broader less fortunate group of "whites" that they shared in the bounty, when they never did.

It's the classic Trump con.

Trump inherited money — we now know that it was more than he should have thanks to tax dodges. His own business acumen expanded that by little more than an ordinary savings account would have yielded — as shown by his now discredited feverish attempts to misrepresent his fortune to financial reporters. Moreover, he has publicly spoken of his own base as "stupid," women as something to grab and ethnic minorities as criminal escaping effective outhouses.

Thank you, Donald Trump. The scales have now fallen off our eyes and we can see the work that remains to be done to make the United States reasonably closer to its historic aspirations and goals. First, let's get rid of you and your allies.

Monday, February 06, 2017

What Trump Is Probably Hiding

Donald J. Trump is probably not a billionaire if you subtract his debts from his assets, that is why he is hiding his tax return. He has a smaller wallet than he would like everyone to think; almost certainly he didn't add to what he inherited.

He probably coasted, at best, on what used to be called "gentleman's Cs" in the fancy schools he attended. He got in mostly because his father had money.

He has enough money that he could buy sex anywhere, hence his claim to have better sex than anyone else. But I bet he's not a particularly good performer in bed. Why brag about it otherwise?

As for business, he has been in the easiest, least productive sector of the economy that there is: real estate. Let's face it, land just sits there. It contributes nothing to a society to put one more ugly chrome and glass structure on it. It doesn't help the average consumer do anything.

He doesn't have to hide that he is rude, crude, dishonest and basically selfish. That is perfectly in evidence. As is that he has never opened the Bible for more than appearance's sake -- such as at the inauguration.

Which reminds me, he probably hides most of all that he is not interested in the job of president, at least not as the official described in the Constitution. He would like to be CEO of the United States, but CEOs are neither elected nor particularly accountable to anyone; it's not what the Constitution prescribes.

Sunday, November 13, 2016

Eat, Drink and Be Merry, for Tomorrow We Die

The title phrase draws from a letter of Paul of Tarsus to the Corinthians that uses the phrase ironically, yet it expresses perfectly what the Trump era promises to the physical environment. Go ahead and buy yourself an a SUV, not only has climate change been way past stopping for a decade, but now Trump's malign neglect will speed up and worsen its effects.

The full quote is: "If after the manner of men I have fought with beasts at Ephesus, what is the gain to me, if the dead rise not? let us eat and drink; for tomorrow we die." In other words, if you don't believe in God, Christ, salvation or an afterlife, don't waste your time trying to be upright.

Donald of New York might have written to those two guys from Corinth, of whom he seems to have been fond, something like: go grab yourself some pussy and, oh, yes, some beer.

Bring it on!

Let's turn on all the lights, burn all the gasoline we can, buy all the furs we can afford, run all the air conditioners we want, throw away all the plastics we can think of ... the planet is doomed.

Before Trump the first serious effects of climate change were due by 2050 -- a date likely to be after my death. Now, with a little help from me, I can live to see it. Hurrah!

Wednesday, November 09, 2016

Amerikkka has taken off its mask

For Hispanics, who watched Barack Obama deport about twice as many people as George W. Bush, this is refreshing. Turns out the United States was always about white, not so white and black. The white liberals and the dog-whistling conservatives aren't that much different if you're not a non-Hispanic white.

Trump is no dog whistler. Trump has made clear he will encourage the hate. At last an honest man, Dionysus!

Sadly, I have to accept that the country I have loved and hoped in doesn't want me and never wanted me.

My real name is Cecilio José Morales. Do you think I call myself Cecilieaux Bois de Murier because I want to be French? The French are a nation of sissies who never saw German to whom they couldn't surrender.

No. I am Cecilieaux Bois de Murier because I have been told repeatedly online, by idiots with losing arguments that they would have me deported. My words were just Spic talk when said by Cecilio Morales.

Right. Deport me to New York City, where I was born.


Sunday, September 27, 2015

Why the angry U.S. middle class sees Trump as their spokesman

Below is a graphic representation applied to Argentina by citizens of that country who posted it on Facebook. It also applies in modified form to the USA.
To understand, change “Viene un gobierno popular” (a populist government is elected) to the Democrats take the White House. Let’s set aside the arguments among the three lefty Americans as to whether the Democrats are populists; in comparison, and within the conventional spectrum, they are.

Next, merely translate “aumenta la clase media” (the middle class increases).

In Obama’s case, the middle class was very slowly pulled out of a hole the banks (and Republicans dug); more importantly still, the middle class was saved from altogether disappearing permanently, which in 2009 was a distinct possibility. People forget that for a while it looked as if we were headed for becoming, in socioeconomic terms, the United States of Bangladesh.

“La clase media empieza a creerse oligarquía y apoya la derecha” at the bottom right means: the middle class begins to think of itself as the oligarchy and supports the right-wing.

In the USA we have to adjust for the fact that even the 1% don’t have the guts to call themselves “the oligarchy.” (Besides, what’s  an oligarchy? Rule of the few). Nonetheless, many middle class people who are benefited by the Democrats' middle class social programs have begun to identify with the poster children for the 1%, Republican politicians.

 “La derecha destruye la clase media” means the right-wing destroys the middle class. Think 2007-08.

“La clase media empobrecida vota a un gobierno popular” means the impoverished middle class votes for a populist government. Think the presidential elections of 1992 and 2008.

We return to the beginning. I think we may be in the next stage, if the Republicans manage to cleverly misdirect the middle class into thinking that they are poorer because of immigrants. As Trump seems to be doing.

Welcome to the United States of Argentina.

Tuesday, September 15, 2015

What is wrong (or missing) with Obama; Why Hillary seems like more of the same

Consider this: “the Obama administration’s approach to governance: politically rational incrementalism that reinforces the existing power structures and is grossly insufficient given the scope of the problem.”

With that quote, the left-leaning magazine Jacobin has finally distilled for me, in an article about energy policy (which I do not normally follow much) the essence of the practices of the Obama presidency and its problems.

It fits. This is what is wrong with everything Obama has done: the audacity of audacity. Obama is basically The Man’s man.

Apply it to health policy. Remember “health care reform”? The hope in electing Obama was to change the economics of health care so that it was a universal, rationally purchased set of goods and services—“single payer” or what the British and I prefer to call it, socialized medicine.

I’ve used the United Kingdom’s National Health and it was wonderful before Thatcher. I can say the same for the Canadian system of a similar era.

The thing is there is nothing boring, cabbage-like or—horrors!—Soviet about nationalizing and making medicine available to all as a human right. Our closest neighbors and cultural kin have done it without waving red flags.

Instead, we got a worthy, viable, somewhat fairer—but to those already insured—not inexpensive form of health insurance reform. Medicine is still nowhere near universal and the costs of the system run by the mafia known as the American Medical Association (when you find a middle-income doctor, let me know) are skyrocketing still.

Sure, Obama was an eminently better choice than McCain or Romney. I voted for him twice for obvious reasons. He’s smarter, wiser, more adroit. He has never had decent congressional relations people—I can’t fathom why—but he has been a pretty decent president

However, to those of us expecting what he promised—remember what one idiot called the “hopey-changey thing”?—Obama let us down.

This is what makes me leery of Hillary. Sure, she will be better than Trump or Jeb if it comes to that. But might not Bernie Sanders be better and a real change? I am beginning to come to that line of thinking.

Friday, June 28, 2013

Sex trumps democracy with gay marriage but locked ballot boxes

It only dawned upon me in 2008 that the all-Monica news of 1998 was really a cover for the dismantling of safeguards against the reckless speculation that led to our current long economic slump. One would think we would learn, but here it is happening in front of our eyes all over again.

In the late 1990s, Bill Clinton was allowed Oval Office oral sex, which had no bearing whatsoever on national policy, in exchange for signing away the economy to big banks. Now, the same Supreme Court that gave corporations the right to buy elections has handed the white Republican South a get-out-of-jail-free card whenever its politicians want to win against the will of voters who are too dark, too poor or too liberal.

The Clinton presidential pen's ink was just barely dry on Financial Services Modernization Act of 1999, as was the spunk on Monica Lewinsky's blue dress, when investment bankers were freed to go on the spree that eventually gave us the Wall Street crash of 2008. The 1999 law was the final nail in the coffin of the Glass–Steagall Act, the 1930s statute that barred the merger of banks, brokerage houses and insurance companies, which was one of the major causes of the Great Depression, as well as our current lesser one.

Similarly, this past week four white bigots on the Supreme Court, plus one hell of a self-hating Uncle Tom, gutted the 1965 Voting Rights Act, one of the signature legal achievements of the civil rights movement. The court effectively ended federal supervision of states with a historical record in living memory of denying the most essential democratic right to African-Americans, Hispanics, women or whomever fancy tickles them.

The powers that be are smart, no doubt about it in these allegedly post-racial days.

They gave us the Monica circus when they wanted to set us up for an economic free fall. Now, in exchange for a free hand to white Republican to suppress the black and Hispanic vote, they give us the Gay Men's Chorus of Washington outside the Supreme Court on Wednesday to serenade us with an unquestionably beautiful rendition of our national anthem.

Makes one want to sing those immortal words: O, say, can you see, how they screwed us again ...

The court opened the legal door another slim crack for gay marriage, very slightly, very indirectly, putting no finality to the issue in a majority of the states. They gave gays and lesbians the right to eventually have nasty divorces and rampaging child custody battles just like the heterosexual idiots who get a marriage license.

Woot! Woot!

Gay marriage will cure the creeping socioeconomic inequality and the coming vast underclass of dark, underpaid masses turned away at the voting station.

Wednesday, March 27, 2013

Abolish all legal marriage

The Anarchists were right. Marriage, like wage slavery, is a legal device designed to oppress women. Now it is being claimed by gays. Rather than open up this instrument of oppression and discontent to gays, why not simply get the State out of the business of weddings?

Of course, the Anarchists would have abolished the State, in favor of voluntary social associations. That might be going too far. Or perhaps not?

But let's not get distracted from my main point: marriage under civil law in a religiously neutral system of government is, at best, a contract. It does not have a track record of working very well and as soon as people found a way to get out of it, they have done so in enormous numbers.

In the United States, one out of every two marriages ends in divorce. By various soundings, a majority of men and women admit to adultery. Domestic violence is a rampant social problem.

Why have marriage at all?

I'm not saying people would be forbidden to go to a church and promise the lifelong fidelity that most will not observe. Go, have your church wedding with all the nine yards -- or do some ceremony on a hilltop reciting poetry or whatever.

Why do I, and every taxpayer you don't know, have to be involved in this?

I'm not saying that we should abandon all child protection laws that are built around marriage. Children still need all the protection society can offer -- which at present is not stellar.

Nor am I saying that cohabiting couples should not have a claim to insurance for cohabiters, or parents or whatever; nor that a longstanding cohabiter should have some priority in inheritance.

Nor am I saying abolish love. Although, seriously, what does marriage under civil law have to with love?

Just abolish the pretense that the State has an inherent interest in marriage that it does not have. Marriage may be a religious idea, but the State has no business with religion -- nor, I would argue, marriage.

Wednesday, October 24, 2012

The real foreign policy issue is that Americans don't care

Pretending for a moment that the nation witnessed candidates discuss foreign policy, let's examine the real missing piece: caring about the rest of the world. That Americans never have is illustrated by the career of the late Sen. William Fulbright (D-Ark).

Fulbright, he of the international exchange scholarships, held what today would be regarded as wildly liberal views -- for a senator. He came to be a vocal opponent of the Vietnam War and a voice of reason in favor of foreign aid. He opposed the Bay of Pigs intervention against Cuba, and was just as critical of President Johnson's offhand dispatch of troops to the Dominican Republic in 1965.

Less well known, Fulbright also voted (alone) against funding the investigative committee from which Sen. Joseph McCarthy (R-Wis) carried out the witch hunts that still bear his name, McCarthyism.

Yet guess what?

Fulbright also joined the Southern filibuster against two Civil Rights Acts (1957 and 1964) and voted against the 1965 Voting Rights Act. he wrote an impassioned "manifesto" against the Brown v. Board of Education ruling by the Supreme Court in 1954.

Why was Fulbright a schizophrenic, a racial segregationist domestically and internationally a liberal? Because the folks back home in Arkansas never cared about foreign policy, so long as they could keep their white bathrooms separate from the facilities for the "colored."

That same apathy and uncaring for the world is how two candidates managed to speak about United States foreign policy without mentioning the European economic crisis or Africa's continuing civil wars and failed states, with the inhumanity they cause, including recently a "rape epidemic" (since when does such a thing even exist?).

How come the only thing said about Latin America, by Romney, is that we can sell more American goods there (never mind the pauperization and corruption brought on by the insatiable U.S. consumption of illegal drugs grown there)? Oh, Romney is great at putting the squeeze abroad and humiliating even Britain. Great diplomacy, Mittens!

But he's not alone.

How come Obama couldn't come out and flatly contradict Romney regarding "dictating terms," precisely the reason millions hate our government and, by proxy, us? How come he couldn't say the Islamic world would never receive a visitor who came from or was in route to the hated cousins in Israel no matter how much sensitivity he expressed? How come he didn't tell Romney that his view of China's currency manipulation is badly out of date and that China has been experiencing an economic slowdown?

The answer is that Americans, the only people who get to vote for the effective President of the World, don't give a damn about anything happening in the next county, let alone Canada, Mexico or the other several hundred nations out there.

And them furriners are clever critters. They watch our TV and see our movies. They know most Americans think people in Buenos Aires speak Portuguese.

If we don't respect or even know anything about them, what makes us think we should lead them?

American leadership is really the result of a set of huge historical accidents, not the mythological know how, not kindness, not superiority of any kind. Perhaps it's time a leader showed us that.

Tuesday, September 11, 2012

September 11 lesson? Don't squander goodwill

I was working a block from the White House that clear Tuesday morning, with weather almost identical to today's (at least in the Boston-Washington corridor). What most amazed me was the unexpected sympathy from every corner of the globe.

Not since John F. Kennedy's assassination had the world been with us. For a moment we Americans stopped being to other peoples brash and uncouth, exploitative and money-grubbing, violent and warmongering or, to borrow a Maoism, "running dogs of capitalism."

They saw us as just human beings in the United States.

Canadians, particularly English Canadians who can't shuck off the fact that they're really just like us as much as they hate that, and Mexicans, of whom Carlos Fuentes said are too far from God and too close to the United States, had nice things to say about us.

People from every corner expressed sympathy for the tragedy, for the people  undeserving of such deaths.

We had a president I had not voted for who could have transformed this moment into a giant turnaround in the world. Instead, he called for a "crusade" (Dubya, you do know that the medieval crusaders lost, right?), and the rest is history.

History as usual. Dreary, jingoistic bluster. Bush went all-out to prove the American-haters overseas right.

Just when almost all the world was with us. Let's never do that again.

Wednesday, September 05, 2012

Democrats and Republicans even look different

One of the most striking differences between the convention speeches by Ann Romney and Michelle Obama, was not the oratory, at which the latter is obviously more adept, but the audience. The Democrats listening to the First Lady looked like America.

In the Republican Tampa audience, it took scouring the crowd to find someone younger than 40, female, not to mention of a coloring other than deathly pale. Ann Romney herself reflected the weird white people motif of the GOP, with her obvious wrinkle tucks and her pill popper demeanor.

When the Republicans tried to go Hispanic, suddenly the in-thing for political duopoly, they chose a Cubano, the most un-representative of all U.S. Hispanics.

Think about it: the overwhelming majority of Cuban Americans are here because they or their parents were admitted to the United States under an open-ended "parole" program. All they had to do was say they were Cuban and didn't like the bearded guy over there.

The Republicans wore cheese-head hats, held up ridiculous signs and brought in a famed aged actor to make a fool of himself. Where did they get these people? Of course Romney looked passable in that crowd! A monkey would have.

At the Charlotte, N.C., gathering last night and the next few days, I'm seeing the much broader variety of human beings that make up the U.S. of A. The Hispanic speaker came from among the Mexicans, who account for two thirds of all Hispanics.

Although her came from recent immigrant stock, do note that many Chicanos' ancestors had been in what today is the United States for decades when the Jamestown settlement was established, let alone when the Puritan Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock.

As for the Republican slogan "we built it," African-American slaves built the house that Obama lives in, not white businessmen. Irish and Chinese immigrants, treated worse than slaves for a generation or two, built the railroads. And the list goes on ...

You could see the heirs of these and other immigrants at Charlotte, as much as you could not their absence at Tampa. Oh, yeah, Paul Ryan is Irish Catholic, but he's the kind of Irish Catholic who has turned his back on the unions and the solidarity that allowed the Irish to survive ethnic and religious prejudice in this country.

Michelle Obama said it: we can't slam the door behind us when we rise (as Ryan has). We have to reach back and help others. That's the real the United States of America. It's at the Democratic Party's convention.

Monday, September 03, 2012

We don't need or want a CEO for president

Think about it: have you ever elected your boss or voted on the price tag for the goods or services you produce? Of course, not. Business functions pretty much as a dictatorship, not a democracy. Bosses command, employees obey.

That's not the way democracy is supposed to function. Democracy is about people governing themselves. We have elections, discussions, votes. The more the merrier.

Montesquieu was fond of saying that democracy was like a raft going down rapids, always on the verge of overturning; even if it does, the raft will float on. Monarchy, he added, was like a stately ship capable of sailing the seven seas; but fire one cannonball at a precise spot and it would sink like a rock (this was especially true of the galleons of his day).

Today, democracy's antagonist is not monarchy but plutocracy, which is government by the wealthy (and their corporations).

The style of plutocracy is that of corporations -- slick, shimmering, always promising the rainbow's end with each new product. The yardstick is money. You're smart if you have it; dumb and lazy if you don't. In plutocracy, everything should make a profit, even your family, your friendships and your leisure.

Everything should be efficient: if some way could be found, all the rich people would have one servant, a single person pushing the buttons of immense machinery to make them happy. The rest of us ... well ... we're dumb and lazy and didn't beat the button-pusher to the job, we should all be unemployed and poor, but grateful for any bone they throw us.

In plutocracy, money has disparate and unrepresentative weight in policy decisions. Elections are won by whomever spends the most.

Democracy is the very opposite. It's always trying to improve on itself and its ability to serve people well, which is the yardstick by which it is measured. Every person counts, no matter what. Because people are self-contradictory and riddled with flaws, democracy is usually very messy, slow, unglamorous and full of disagreements.

The best person to run a plutocracy is a chief executive officer.

The best person to run a democracy, however, is a a president, someone who merely steers the messy, inefficient and unprofitable collection of human beings we call society according to the will of its people.

Tuesday, August 21, 2012

What Akin should have said is ...

... "All abortion is wrong." The Republicans who want to oust Missouri GOP candidate for U.S. Senate Todd Akin also want to avoid discussing that they don't really want to ban abortion, they just want to keep demagoguing abortion for decades.

All the Tea Party folk and all the Born-Again Christians out there who vote based on the pro-life banner won't be able to put the GOP together again, if people open their eyes and realize the game Republicans have been playing.

Look at the record.

What has the allegedly pro-life Republican party done to reverse Roe v. Wade in the three decades since Ronald Reagan became president? After all, since 1981, there have been several years of Republican majorities in both houses of Congress along with a sitting Republican president.

What kept them from passing a constitutional amendment declaring that human life begins at conception? If they did that they wouldn't be able to keep ranting against abortion and picking the ripe, juicy votes of folks who don't realize that without a constitutional change, there is nothing any president can do to ban abortion.

Or, what kept them from simply ratifying, without reservation, the American Convention on Human Rights, which contains such a clause ("Every person has the right to have his life respected. This right shall be protected by law and, in general, from the moment of conception.")? If they did that, they couldn't sell weapons to Latin American regimes that torture in a most anti-Communist fashion.

Akin knew very well that the GOP's stand on this principle is riddled with more holes than Swiss cheese. That's why he fell into the fiction that "legitimate" rape is a method to prevent conception.

Friday, June 01, 2012

"The butler did it" and other Vatican follies

Anyone wondering why the pope's butler secretly leaked evidence of entirely unsurprising Renaissance-style corruption in the modern Vatican need only weigh the history of authoritarian power styles such as that of Joseph Ratzinger.

Think about it: the pope is the last absolute divine-right monarch. What caused the fall of so many of his royal peers, their dynasties gone? One lost his head quite literally, another was gunned down in a basement with his family. Lots more where that came from.

Just as surely as Freud was right that suppression of desires breeds sublimation and rebellion, a tyrannical demand of absolute loyalty from one's subordinates breeds intrigue, double dealing and ultimately the collapse of any respect for authority.

This isn't new.

Dictatorship was always short-lived. The original Roman dictators were given extraordinary powers to cope with emergencies, then unceremoniously dismissed by the Senate once danger was gone.

The authoritarian boss, mafioso, president, king or pope forces his (they're usually men) subjects to obey without question no matter what, setting off tensions between individual needs or desires and social duty.

Most people end up cheating a little or a lot, depending on their power and means. Eventually everyone is part of a wide circle of dishonesty and disobedience that wrecks the social fabric.

The elected parliamentary systems of governance by laws of Britain and North America have the longest continuous history since very ancient times precisely because they strive for compromise, a safety valve for dissenting minorities,  pluralities and the individual.

This is also why, like sex-starved teenagers, most people lie outrageously to themselves and others when their urges or needs are fiercely and unreasonably suppressed, persecuted or disregarded.

Yet this is exactly what Ratzinger set up the Vatican to do.

Thoroughly indoctrinated in top-down order as a Hitler Youth, he rose under the tutelage of the most authoritarian German bishops. When he finally went to Rome he was quickly dubbed "the Panzerkardinal" as he  steamrolled over anyone with whom he disagreed.

His entire papacy is a venture dedicated to reducing the  Catholic Church to the tight-knit, goose-stepping 10 percent of Catholics who obey every rule (or fake it well and self-righteously).

Even nuns aren't allowed to care about the poor, whom a Galilean woodworker of long ago called "blessed." They must fight abortion and s-e-x first!

It can't be done? Pretend. Oh, and make all the financial shenanigans behind the operation go away.

This authoritarian illogic is how, as even Cuba's Prensa Latina reported, Castro's comrades practiced "sociolismo" (partnership in misappropriation of state property or funds) rather than socialism.

This is also how conservative Newton Leroy Gingrich attempted to overthrow President Clinton for sexual escapades while Gingrich himself was cheating on his dying wife with a woman from a church choir.

What made the man I none-too-affectionately call Papa Nazinger think that his own wrongheaded fanatical agenda wouldn't become the refuge of scoundrels?

Maybe it was his butler's benign smile of submission.

Monday, May 14, 2012

Let's be for something, Americans!

The Sunday papers and various trailing debates suggest to me that the principal difference between Republicans and Democrats is that the GOP is against nearly everything, while the party of Jefferson is in favor of a broad range of ideas to solve problems.

For at least a century the Democrats have been the doers and the Republicans the undoers.

Truman set in motion economic expansion, Eisenhower sat on it. Kennedy and Johnson expanded civil liberties, Nixon curtailed them. Carter was the voice of human rights throughout the world, Reagan squelched them wherever he could find the cronies to do so. Clinton ushered in the largest economic expansion ever, Bush gave us this century's first depression.

Now Obama is trying to get us out of the ditch and to prepare us for challenges ahead. The Republicans have done nothing but obstruct and hatemonger.

I understand, Republicans, that you need a party for lazy-minded people who don't believe that anything should be done for the first time. But that's the party leading the USA to become Argentina.

I, who have been to Argentina and ran away as fast as I could, would like to belong to a party that thinks through solutions and is daring enough to write the next volume of America's history. That's the Democratic Party, the party in favor of believing, thinking and doing.

Wednesday, March 07, 2012

Let's bury the Reagan myth once and for all

"Obama is now trying to imitate President Reagan," said the cabbie. "That was a great president!" I asked why. "Well, he balanced the budget, for one." This is an exact misremembrance about Reagan, the president who added more to the national debt than all his predecessors combined and never balanced a budget.

"Actually, no," I told the cabbie.

"But what about his foreign policy?"

"OK, what about it?"

"Well, he defeated the Soviet Union."

"Actually, no, again. The Soviet Union collapsed from the weight of its own internal corruption, which started long before Reagan was ever president," I said.

I was recalling what had been whispered to me in the 1970s about Russian "partner-socialism" between workers trading what they skimmed off their workplaces. The last two decades of Soviet government had been rife with dishonesty and theft from the public till, from top to bottom.

"Oh," the cabbie insisted. "But Reagan gave me a green card."

He was referring to the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act, which Reagan dragged his heels on for four long years. Reagan was no friend of the immigrant.

But wasn't the economy better?

Not if you recall the 1982 recession, which led to mass layoffs in manufacturing and the beginning of the off-shoring of millions of jobs. Nor if you recall the 1986 stock market crash. Nor if you recall the hundreds of billions of deficit spending proposed and pushed through each of eight years by Reagan.

Wasn't he the Great Communicator?

Reagan was a good reader of scripts. He was an actor, after all.

But his material included lots of lies. The "welfare queen" he cited as proof that public aid induced fraud never existed. The "freedom fighters" he encouraged in Nicaragua were accomplices of drug dealers. The "heroes" in his administration, whom he praised as such, lied to Congress and thereby to the people.

Reagan was easily one of the worst presidents in living memory. He pushed millions into poverty, took food from infants to pay for sweet deals with military contractors.

He was an evil and immoral man in every dimension of these words. Yet the propagandists and their media have developed a fantasy story that many good people of good faith are being convinced to believe was history.

All in order to enthrone and semi-deify the actor whose best role was that of president.

Saturday, September 10, 2011

Obama could have done better, but he could have done worse

I won't go into the economics, which I cover professionally. Nonetheless, after a few days I feel that politically the speech was brilliant; it threw the gauntlet to Republicans: "Come on, be obstructionist and make my day." They have to pass Obama's bill or get blamed for a double dip.

The numbers, which the White House took its sweet time to release (a clever idea: don't let the opposition nickel and dime you to death before you negotiate), look good in the aggregate. I still want to see details.

This demonstrates to me that Obama's political genius is still there. The Saturday previous to the speech, on the very humorous NPR radio program "Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me" one guest predicted we would all learn from Obama's jobs speech how he is planning to hold onto his own.

My guess is that he still has a few rabbits in that hat.

Monday, August 15, 2011

Time to call Allard K. Lowenstein back from the dead

Remember Congressman Lowenstein (D-NY) from Nassau County? OK, how about the architect of the "Dump Johnson" movement in 1968 that ended the political career of one Lyndon Baines Johnson, who was then the sitting 37th president of the United States. That's the guy we need now.

Some courageous liberal Democrat in conventional, professional politics has to start the "Dump Obama" movement. What am I saying? Courageous, liberal, Democratic, professional politician ... isn't that an extinct species?

Sure, there was hell to pay back then. In 1971, Lowenstein, who became head of Americans for Democratic Action started the less-successful "Dump Nixon" campaign. And Lowenstein was eventually killed at 51 by a deranged man. A tragedy.

Oh, and Nixon, I wouldn't have voted for him (was too young, anyway), but today he looks like a liberal firebrand. Of course, his Republican Party political operatives (who, according to one Donald Segretti, called their work "ratfucking") were the guys who wrote the playbook for the neocons of the 1980s and the stolen election of 2000.

But think about it: Barack Obama vs. Michele Bachmann. Aiiiiieeeeeeee!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

There has to be a better reasonable, Democratic Party choice than Barack Obama. A candidate who has the guts and the talent to stand for what he believes in and occasionally win one. A choice of someone who is not running for in-house counsel at Goldman, Sachs.

First things first, however. Let's Dump Obama.

Tuesday, August 09, 2011

We've seen the ideology of Norway´s shooter and it's right here at home

Upon reading 2083: a European Declaration of Independence, the online manifesto of Anders Behring Breivik, the July 22 Oslo murderer, I knew I had seen this movie before. I flashed back to my university research in the early 1970s on the political theory origins of Franco's Spain where — presto! — there were a whole series of connections that fit perfectly.

Essentially, Breivik's harkening to medieval Christian Europe — with his reinvention of the Knights Templar — ties back to a rather broad stream of European political thought last popular in the 1920s and 30s that looks back to a golden age of Christendom, of which a former Hitler Jugend, one Joseph Ratzinger (aka the pope), is also fond as a basis for a revised unified Europe.

In Spain, the movement that Generalissimo Francisco Franco used but discarded — Franco was always a pragmatic Franquist and little else — known as the Falange Española y de las JONS, combined three streams of thought common to the right-wing ideologies of the time.

First, there was authoritarianism, the notion that Spain (put Italy and Germany here and you'll see it fits with minor modifications) was traditionally a society of order that was ruled by one monarch and one faith and one social order.

Second, democracy was a newfangled, humanist, relativist idea that had put individual opinion above the capital-T dogmatic Truth handed down in holy writ and interpreted by the Holy Mother Church, who guarded it, and enshrined it in the upward gazing society of Gothic cathedrals.

Third, the history of the last 500 years is that of a silent siege by a vast, insidiously concealed army hankering to impose a progression of heresies and perversions leading to the money-changers' capitalism and its stepchild, communism.

Never mind the bad history and worse theology — nor the scapegoating of the usual suspects (heretics, Jews, Marxists) as well as laissez faire capitalists and bohemians of various stripes.

None of this was alien to Norway, any more than it was to Germany, Italy and Spain. Remember Vidkun Quisling, the Norwegian politician who in 1940 helped Nazi Germany occupy his country without firing a shot so he could be top dog? His name has become synonymous with treason.

Nor, as Stieg Larsson's most entertaining fictional trilogy showed, was it alien to that other Scandinavian paradise, Sweden. Indeed, the whole Wikileaks episode, and now the Breivik affair, seem taken from one of his novels.

Nor, finally, is it that alien to the United States. We have a so-called "Tea Party" — largely an invention of K Street corridor corporate lobbying firms and Fox News — that stamps its boots in the Weimar Reichstag that the U.S. Congress has become, trying desperately to push the country economically off a cliff, so a popular clamor for order will usher in a Cromwellian regime.

Monday, June 06, 2011

Why change-hopers should join the GOP

Sarah Palin was right. That changey-hopey thing didn't really work out for us on the Left, after all. Of course not. To get the kind of destruction fierce enough to pull out capitalism by its very roots we needed a Republican, and not just any mild-mannered, Amtrak-hating former POW, but a Tea Partier.

After all, it takes a Republican to really ruin things, not just merely mess them up.

Herbert Hoover gave us the Great Depression. A little more Republican inaction could just have thrown capitalism overboard for good in the 1930s. If only that fast-talking Franklin Delano Roosevelt hadn't come along!

Indeed, in the mid-1930s as the economy began to sprout its first buds of recovery, the Republicans in Congress started rending their garments over deficit spending (sound familiar?). They put the brakes on the New Deal and prolonged the Depression by five years.

As Archie Bunker used to sing, we sure could a man like Herbert Hoover today.

Then there's Ronald Reagan, who gave us more national debt than all his predecessors combined, preached morality and dealt drugs (remember Iran-Contra?) and, for all his bravado, didn't stop a single solitary abortion. Now there's a man who understood the Vietnam War notion of destroying a village to save it!

And Dubya ... George W. Bush deserves a unique altar in the pantheon of Republican gods. He started two wars. Allowed a major U.S. city to be wiped out. Got the United States in the dock for torture. Plus he turned surpluses that ran as far as the eye could see into debt that made Reagan's look puny.

One more term of Dubya and there would be nothing left standing.

Think all that glorious maleficence is in the past? Think again. The Tea Party stands ready to get the United States to default on all its debts and get us all placed in the same deadbeat dock as Argentina.

So here's the choice, my fellow Good Lefties, are we just going to keep letting the Democrats take us for a ride? Or will we let the Republicans run this capitalist system into the ground as only they can do?

Lefties for Republicans, unite! We have nothing to lose but our votes.