December 2016 Archives

Dear America,

New Year's Day hasn't even come yet and 2017 is already a pox on America's house.   Samantha Power abstained from vetoing the long-overdue resolution condemning Israel's imperialism in its middle-eastern neighborhood and Bibi Netanyahu has waxed self-righteous to the applause of the political grand-standers in the Republican Party in particular, but even among some Democrats, Chuck Schumer for one, there is opposition to the abstention, with concomitant sanctimony.  To put it bluntly, I don't understand why.  Israel's conduct with regard to colonizing the West Bank of the Jordan River is a violation of international law that goes back to 1949 and the Fourth Geneva Convention.  And the hyperbole involved in the criticism of the abstention is completely irrational.  Israel as an entity is not being condemned...just this action they have been taking since 1967--a time at which the consequences of forced annexation should still have been in current memory.  Then, the Israeli ambassador accused one of President Obama's staff, deputy national security advisor Ben Rhodes, of being a habitual fabricator in the course of accusing The Administration itself of inspiring the resolution, which the administration denies.  There followed a claim of extant proof in the possession of the Israelis, but they have conveniently decided to withhold that proof until Donald Trump is inaugurated.  Of course, by then the whole mud-slinging episode will have settled into just one more muddy little pool in the middle-eastern quagmire.  Of course, Donald the Tweeter had to weigh in with his commitment to moving our embassy to Jerusalem from Tel Aviv.   And before that was his insane twitter entry and subsequent interviews inviting the world to resume the nuclear arms race...and presumably the cold war with it.  This is all an inauspicious beginning to a new year. 

In the midst of all this, an Israeli official said of the inclusion in the UN resolution of colonization in East Jerusalem, a primarily Arab community, that it was like condemning an attempt to preserve Paris as the capital of France.  And all the while, no one mentioned that we just "sold" Israel over $12 billion worth of jets and other armaments for about $4 billion, or about one third the price, while The President overtly avowed support for Israel as both a sovereign nation and the Jewish state.  The fact is that Israel still exists at least in part because of the aegis of the United States and its outright auspices.  That doesn't mean that we should withhold our support in the future if Israel continues its ingratitude; the endurance of Israel as a Jewish haven state is essential to all of us.  But there is no reason that we should indulge Israel's figurative solipsism, like a parent spoiling a child at the expense of everyone around him who has to endure his tantrums.  So, we start the year with a parental reproof of an ally so self-indulgent as to be ungrateful for vast largess as if regally entitled.  And at the helm, an imminent presence in the White House who's thoughts are so disordered as to be neurotic at the very least, and quite possibly worse.  Woe is us.

What bothers me most is that this whole scenario seems so other-worldly.  I wake up some mornings and it hits me all of a sudden: we elected Donald Trump.  He was a joke when he first announced his candidacy.  No one...and I mean no one...took him seriously, and here he is on the virtual eve of inauguration into the most powerful, and hence the most dangerous, office in the world.  And he is being advised by a general- emeritus who re-tweeted, even advising his followers to make their own decisions about the rumor that Hillary Clinton was running a pedophilia ring out of a Washington, D.C. pizza joint.  It sounds like the punch line of an awful, distasteful joke, but he apparently believed it.  But Trump's primary counselors are the son of a convicted white-collar felon of the caliber of the mendacious cadre that caused the financial collapse of the world and his own children, who don't seem to have the sense to recognize overt influence peddling when they are a part of it.

We are in deep trouble this year, my fellow Americans.  And it isn't even January 1 yet.

Your friend,

Mike 

Dear America,

It's a bit of an oddity, and frankly, a puzzlement to me, that most of my readers...by a lot...are in St. Petersburg...Russia, not Florida.  Add to that the fact that there was a sudden spike in the popularity of my letters to you, America, when  I started writing about Donald Trump.  In fact, I can trace the beginning of this spike to the very day I first mentioned Donald Trump.  Please understand; I have no illusions, no self-delusions, about my importance.  In fact, I don't even know if anyone, in St. Petersburg or elsewhere, actually reads this blog.  All I know is what Google analytics tells me.  Apparently I am growing in popularity in St. Petersburg, Russia.  So what does this mean.  Well, taking into account that there is a tie for fourth most populous readership for this blog in Samara , also in Russia, and Moscow: I find myself wondering about Trump's claim that the CIA, FBI and Defense Intelligence Agency are all misguided in their attribution of electoral mischief to the Russians.  Again, there is no reason to believe that the people Google identifies as actual visitors to my blog are actual visitors, but I can't help but be suspicious.

That's all for now; just a random thought.  Merry Christmas and Happy New Year.  I'll write again next year...unless the Russians get me, or Donald Trump does.

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

This Trump tour of America after he has already won used to be puzzling, but now its significance is apparent to anyone who sees through the self-appointed great man.  Trump is a character who revels in pronouncing his own success; he has done it all his life and the proof is on every building he can get his name on.  Donald Trump is an ego with feet, and for him, his ascendancy to the presidency should have been his crowning glory, and I make reference to a crown advisedly.  The inauguration in a couple of days could have been Trump's coming out party: notice to everyone in the world who didn't already know who he was, but there is this stubborn snag.  He didn't win the election.  He will win the electoral college vote, and under our constitution that is all you need to do to become president.  But he didn't win the election.  In fact, he lost by nearly three million votes; Clinton won 48% to 46%.  That is a fact that he can color, characterize or diminish, but no matter what he says about it, he lost the election.   Some of his supporters make reference to the fact that Clinton won California by more than that gross margin so somehow, her victory, and thus what should have been her mandate, are significant only there, but the same argument could be made about Trump.  Put together three or four states like Tennessee and Missouri, states that Trump won big, and Trump gets the same parochial margin.  That doesn't delegitimize them as disproportionately influential, and even if it did, so what.  Trump did win the presidency, but that failure in the popular election is a taint on his victory that sticks in his craw.  That is why he is gallivanting all over the country singing his own praises, tweeting about it incessantly and puling about the Democrats making excuses on television whenever anyone will let him.  He touts himself as a winner, and a winner only...but he lost the election, and that stain on his success will never go away, but he never will admit it.

So, Trump has embarked on a vindication tour.  His fans can call it a victory tour, but vindication is its real raison d'être, and it won't take long for everyone to realize it.  Even if he wins a second term, he will never live this one down.  In the biggest contest of his life, Donald Trump came in second.  And then on top of that, he has put together a cabinet comprising nothing but billionaire Wall Streeters, burger moguls, and dolts like the former governor of Texas, Rick Perry, who was named to be the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, which he vowed to dismantle when he was running for president himself.  That threat wasn't credible even then since when asked about it at a national debate, he couldn't remember that had made the vow, and presumably, why he wanted to dissolve it.  And all of the rest of the nominees conjured up by Trump's transition team have this in common too: a diabolical disdain for almost anyone who isn't one of them--in other words, anyone who isn't a sanctimonious plutocrat.  So what is the Trump administration going to stand for?  A president supported by fewer Americans than was his calumniated opponent and a group of self-righteous business people and fools who don't know enough to look in the mirror before defining virtue as the aggregate of the qualities they possess.  We are looking at something ugly here, and at the head of the parade is a guy who thinks that prevailing on the basis of a constitutional anomaly is the same as winning.  We have elected for our president an imp who is in the course of manifesting his cupidity with subordinate imps who are like and kindred spirits, and what we will get, America is rule by plutocracy.  The rich will take still more, and we will get still less, and even worse, some of his nominations for high posts are both incomprehensible and dangerous.  His nominee for ambassador to Israel, for example is an ardently and publicly avowed opponent of the two state solution that even Netanyahu endorses, even though one of Trump's self-avowed aspirations is the ultimate deal, peace between Israel and the Palestinians.  His choice for Secretary of Education is a supporter of vouchers and charter schools and his choice for White House budget director is an avowed proponent of shutting down the government if budget cuts that he, an arch-conservative Tea Party member, wants passed, all of which is just a euphemism for social Darwinism.  His choice for Secretary of State is a co-opted acolyte of Vladimir Putin's, which is tantamount to an alliance of convenience with the same Russian government that annexed Crimea and helped put Trump in the White House, and now Putin proposes an alliance with Trump's administration to fight terrorism, and that means doing it the Russian way.  Remember the KGB?  Until now, snarkyness was a sufficient way of expressing dissatisfaction with the results of the 2016 presidential election, but that is no longer the case.  The Trump problem is now a serious, dangerous one.  All kidding aside, we Americans had better start thinking about the survival of our democracy as we know it.

It is under siege.  Let's just hope that impeachment comes sooner rather than later.

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

I have been on vacation this past week and I have discovered, much to my chagrin, that Donald Trump is in the news every day in other countries as well as our own.  The most recent entries in Trump's hall of shame have been his denunciation of the CIA and virtually all other American intelligence agencies claiming that their suspicions of Russian cyber-manipulation of our election are a Democratic hoax motivated by that party's embarrassment over losing the presidential election to him.  But that story was accompanied by his brash acknowledgement of the Taiwanese government despite decades of a "one China policy" in American politics that was propounded by diplomatic professionals in this country out of national interest in geo-political stability.  And then there was his rebuke of a labor union president for pointing out that Trump had exaggerated both his role in the Carrier decision not to move some jobs to Mexico, claiming that the union and its president had been remiss, which then led to the Carrier decision to ship those jobs to Mexico in the first place.  Of course there is also the most recent one: his decision to nominate yet another billionaire, the CEO of Exxon-Mobil, for Secretary of State, presumably because he has such strong business ties to Russia and Putin's oligarchic inner circle.

I have an in-law who recently said that he couldn't understand why liberals were surprised about what Trump was doing in general, but I held my tongue out of a commitment to family harmony.  What I wanted to say, and still do, is that we liberals are not surprised at all.  In fact, it seems to me that conservatives like him--he voted for Trump, and adamently admitted that he intended to do so in the run-up to the election when I naively confronted him with the fact that James Comey had never said, despite my in-law's insistance to the contrary, said that anyone other than Hillary Clinton would have been prosecuted for her email debacle (I didn't confront him with the fact that I knew that because I had actually heard Comey's congressional testimony of CSPAN rather than being informed by someone else who, to quote the song, heard it from a friend who heard it from a friend as he had)--are now dismissing Trump as an idiot as if they had never had reason to suspect that Trump was a narcisstic bufoon and an ignorant demagogue of a blatherskite.  We liberals aren't surprised at all.  We are just filled with apprehension on account of the fact that just what we suspected would...just what we had warned conservatives of...is not coming to pass. 

Trump has nominated one Billionaire for Secretary of Education, to decide how our public education system is going to be run, when she has professed not to believe in public education in essence.  He has nominated a brain surgeon who once pronounced that the pyramids were actually fuel tanks for aliens to run HUD.  His chosen national security advisor is a retired general who tweeted that people should judge for themselves the story of "pizzagate" rather than either saying nothing or just suggesting the profound idiocy of the idea and the nefariousness of the motivation of those who would spread such a hideous and outlandish calumny out of ultra-conservative zeal for power and complete disregard for the truth.  His nominee for head of the Treasury is a hedge-fund manager who got rich at Goldman-Sachs and by participating in Romney-style corporation flipping at the expense of workers and the consumers of their products when jobs got shipped overseas in order to enhance profitability with no concern for our economy.  Add to those follies portended policies that would result in the end of "Obamacare" and thus of health insurance for about 20 million Americans, a plan to isolate China with tariffs and other punitive economic policies, the practice in his own companies of relying on foreign labor and his entanglements with foreign sovereign investments and you have a recipe for either impeachment, or worse...a nation racing toward the edge of its own destruction with a lunatic at the helm.

When I heard my in-law utter his ill-considered blame-shifting for the catastrophe that is  president-elect Donald Trump, I wanted to tell him that I knew what kind of an idiot he was because he didn't find out that Trump is an idiot too, but I didn't.  In fact, I probably won't ever say that, though there is plenty of time to do so...although maybe not so much.  A disaster that a country votes for usually comes on pretty quick.

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

I don't know why I continue to be so upset about the manner in which so many "experts" are analyzing the election results.  Perhaps discomfited is a better word since I am fearful that the progressive movement is about to become a victim of misguided and belabored fear...partisan hand wringing over loss of power.  In fact, Donald Trump did not win this election, Hillary Clinton did by over 2.5 million votes, and the Democrats did not lose either.  The party picked up seats in both houses of the federal congress, albeit Trump did win the electoral college, and will win the vote there in a couple of weeks.  Setting aside the bizarre analysis of some right wing nut who concludes that over 3 million votes were fraudulent, and moreover that 2.5 million of those fraudulent votes were for Hillary Clinton, if anyone received a popular mandate, it was Clinton, the putative liberal.  And as to the Republican Party, they had a popular masthead on the ticket, Donald Trump, but they still lost ground in both houses of congress.  That doesn't comport with the conservative brag that the nation is turning more conservative.  In fact, if the public wanted what the Republicans are serving up, they would have lined up for more, not less.  So, in the final analysis, or at least in my final analysis, the Democrats did everything right over the past eight years if retaining, or as in this case regaining, power is the legitimate goal of a political party, but the system is as corrupt as it was designed to be by the founding fathers.  It just backfired this time, and populist mania in the incarnation of Donald Trump prevailed, irrational and ill-informed as it may be.  In the end however, the electoral college will do what was intended because while his constituents believe otherwise, Trump is in the course of evicting his adversaries' alligators from the swamp, but he is replacing them with his own.  There'll be no draining.  It's just that new alligators are going to be in power and alligators do what alligators do; they are going to have slightly different appetites when it comes to their human vittles, but they are still going to be carnivores, lovers of human flesh in particular.

So, in the end, it is the Democrats who are in the proverbial catbird seat.  For the Republicans, it is a case of being careless about what they wished for.  With all the cards in their hands now, there is no excuse for failing to serve the American people, though they will certainly contrive a strategy designed to use the Democrats for that purpose, and it is primarily the Democrats' fault that they are vulnerable.  When they had control of The Senate, they could have eliminated the filibuster, which the Republicans used to greater effect than the Democrats ever did to thwart the Democratic Party in pursuing its platform.  That allowed them to point to the feckless Democrats as failures during the Obama years in that every attempt the Democrats made to do something productive was filibustered to death.  Now, the Democrats have only two choices: let the Republicans take credit or let them take the blame.  That usually doesn't work out too well because the Republicans always have an excuse.  The moral is that the next time the Democrats find themselves in the majority, they should do the right thing for us, America.  They should eliminate the filibuster and make everyone take the blame for his votes if they don't favor the common man, and conversely, let everyone take credit for his attempt to do the right thing.  Today, obfuscation is the name of the game in congress; if your party line will not favor the people, just don't vote.  That has to change...among other things.

The root problems though are the gerrymandered congressional district and the electoral college.  There is currently two cases before our Supreme Court about districts in two states, North Carolina and Virginia, where all the black votes were corralled into one or two districts so that all white, conservative Republican districts could be formed around them.  The states deny racial motives, but Republican state legislatures created the districts after the last census, and the Supreme Court at least sees the argument of effected voters that the redistricting was illicit in its racial motivation and thus illegal.   Add to that the conservative efforts to limit black voting in other states and you have a concerted effort to swing every election toward the white right.  And then, of course, there is the electoral college, inspired from its inception by the desire to take elections out of the hands of the masses and control them by giving the final say to the oligarchy of male wealth, which is no longer all male, but continues to serve wealth in that it keeps voters from having the final say.

We live in a culture today in which devious, and I would argue mostly conservative, malfeasors place false news stories on the internet and elsewhere--twitter and Facebook in particular--about such things a Washington child prostitution rings run by presidential candidates in fast food restaurants, which then inspire preposterously stupid right wing nuts to carry assault weapons into those public places thinking that they are true and that they are going to do something about them.   I am starting to believe that Hillary Clinton was right about at least one thing: there is a right wing conspiracy and it trades in pathological ignorance and paranoia.  It has no scruples whatsoever, no matter how righteous it claims to be.  To them I say, Donald Trump wants you.  To the rest of us I say, God help us.

Your friend,

Mike     

Dear America,

Michael Cluck and his wife, of Edwardsville, Illinois, bought insurance through healthcare.gov in 2015 and it saved them $300 a month over what they were previously paying.  But his insurer dropped out of the program and he was left with only one choice for 2017: Blue Cross/Blue Shield.  The premiums and deductibles aren't bad, but the plan only covers doctors within his state, Illinois.  It happens that Mr. Cluck developed prostate cancer some years ago, and the doctors who put his disease into remission and followed him subsequently were in St. Louis, which is in Missouri...but only about 30 minutes away.  But Blue Cross/Blue Shield requires that he get treatment in-state, so he will have to go to doctors in Illinois for his semi-annual checkups, and he complains that they are farther away.  Cluck now complains that the Affordable Care Act promised him that he could keep his doctors and still save $2,500 a year, but it has failed him, or so he claimed to the NPR reporter interviewing him.  That's among the reasons why he voted for Donald Trump, he said.  He said that, since the "health care companies"...that was the phrase he used, health care companies...were making record profits...again, his phrase, not mine...they shouldn't be dropping out of the program.  That's it.  The interviewer didn't ask Cluck any more questions, but there is a significant number of facts that Mr. Cluck left unstated, or at least that didn't get recorded in the interview: how much was he paying before the ACA and how much is he paying now; how much farther are his new doctors going to be than his old ones were; how much profit was the insurance company he used to have...the one that dropped out of ACA participation-- making and how did he know; if Blue Cross/Blue Shield allowed him to see his old doctors, would he still think the ACA had to be scrapped or seriously modified; is he still saving money over what he was paying before the ACA, and there are probably several more relevant questions that could have been asked, but apparently weren't.  That's how Donald Trump got elected.

That may seem a brash statement, but the media allowed this kind of half-assed reporting to suffice as Donald Trump roamed the country claiming that the ACA was "a disaster," as he put it on every other nightly newscast we saw, and on NPR too.  Donald Trump won on the basis of disinformation...not misinformation...disinformation, and the news media--media is plural incidentally, so the term doesn't refer to a single entity but rather to the mass of entities that we assume will actually give us the news, among other things, not just what we want to hear and what will generate ratings-- helped him disseminate it.  We owe Trump's election to the media, not to misdirected Democratic policies, not to poor demographic data, not to an electorate that was dissected and parsed until every attempt to ascertain what should have been done over the past eight years but wasn't became unintelligible babble.  The news media, which now apparently compete with unfettered sources of information like facebook and twitter among those who ostensibly want to inform themselves, failed to inform the great mass of American voters so that they could make an intelligent choice.  Instead, they made the unfortunate, uninformed choice that Mr. Cluck made.

If you read sources like "The Federalist Papers" to ascertain what the founding fathers were thinking, you will discover that they weren't the populists conservatives want us to believe they were, and thus, the conservatives aren't the populists they want us to believe they are either.  In number 62 of the Federalist Papers, Hamilton describes The Senate as necessary to damp the power of The House of Representatives because of the probable radical nature of a body elected directly by the people.  The Senate therefore would be elected by the state legislatures, which would be composed of the more substantial and stable members of our society: the elite and wealthy.  That was the original purpose of the electoral college too: to mitigate against the unpredictable nature of the American people as an electorate, and maybe they were right.  The election of Donald Trump demonstrates that the people of this country are capable of almost incomprehensible caprice when electing presidents.  And The Senate, since the constitution was changed about a hundred years ago to permit the people to choose senators too, The Senate has become gradually more partisan, irresponsible and ineffective as far as instituting the popular will in the form of law.  The popular meme has been that this election was about change and the ascension of either the working man, the rural populace, or old white guys like me, but none of that is true.  This election was about the willingness of the great mass of our people to be misled because they are too lazy, ill-informed or disinterested to find out what the truth is before they vote on the basis if what they think and believe. 

If the electoral college was a buffer against that intellectual indolence, I would be in favor of keeping it.  But in this day and age, long after the three-fifths compromise and the decision to let only men vote by our founding fathers, it serves no purpose at all.  Hillary Clinton was the choice of the American people, and she should be our next president.  She was bad enough, but Donald Trump? To coin one of his favorite phrases, he is going to be a disaster, and we have the electoral college and the founding fathers to thank for it.

Your friend,

Mike