February 2017 Archives

Dear America,

I thought that once Donald Trump was inaugurated we would hear, and especially see, less news about him, but it just goes on and on.  He is on the front page of the paper every day, and there is also usually some story of autocratic behavior inside each day's edition of, for example, the New York Times, as if his picture on the front page weren't enough.  I keep thinking that he is heading for a Hitler-like moment when he will abandon all pretense of freedom from delusions of grandeur and just admit that he isn't the president, he is dictator for life...doing it all for us.  Hunter S. Thompson was the embodiment of what he called "Gonzo Journalism," and both the man and the idea were a sort of comic relief from the tensions of the day.  But I never thought I would see a Gonzo President; there's no comic relief in that.  It's not that it is of any particular significance to me; our life...my wife's and mine...isn't really effected by Trump's madness much.  We have a decent income and I am retired while my wife has only about eight years to go.  She comes home and closes the door behind her every night and we live a halcyon life.  Our kids are on their own and both of them now seem to have good significant others and stable home environments, so we have passed the torch and now we can just concentrate on home improvement projects and vacations--one out of the country each year.  But I am a child of the sixties, and I was raised to care about what happens to those around me, so each day when I read about the most recent madness of King Donald, I feel this remotely-present distress.

There are millions of people--tens of millions in fact--who have insurance that they couldn't manage without "Obamacare," but Trump and his newly-enabled acolytes are hell-bent on making it cheaper.  That's just a euphemism for taking much of the benefit of the ACA away from the people who need it most so that the people who have plenty already don't have to pay what amounts to nickels and for them in increased taxes.  I think it should be a moral imperative to keep the poor from dieing of things for which there are cures that are expensive...too expensive for the less fortunate to buy.  That's just how I was raised, but that is getting farther and farther from mainstream thought as each day with Trump in power...President Trump who is now everywhere all the time, right under everyone's nose, or should I say rubbing everyone's nose in his ubiquity.  And then thee are all the other issues on which he is now scaring even the voters who  voted for him only reluctantly.  Tax reform, foreign relations, refugees, immigration, reversing the constraints placed on the financial industry that damn-near ruined the entire planet with its "greed is good" mantra and cognate behavior: those things and many more are all sort of in the wind, and anything could happen from here on out.

The stress is really taxing.  I always feel like a need an alprazolam--that's generic Xanax for those of you who are a little more relaxed than I am--and even when I take one, all it does is help me sleep.  I still wake up realizing that the nightmares I suffered throughout the night weren't dreams.  They were flashbacks, and the whole cycle starts over again.  But now I am beginning to fret about the fact that people like Jason Chaffetz, the Congressman from out west somewhere who is chairman of the House Oversight Committee will never do anything about Trump's corruption.  The powerful, all Republicans right now and all pandering to the conservative movement by claiming to be conservatives themselves, are turning a blind eye to what Trump is doing.  And just to make it clear that I'm not indulging in hyperbole, consider this.  Mar-a-Lago--Trump's "winter White House"--is a privately owned country club; Trump is the private owner.  Until January, it cost $100,000 to join, and that money went into Trump's pocket.  It's his club.  But in January, the initiation fee went up to $200,000, and the people who have that kind of money started snapping up memberships like children eating cupcakes, and what are they getting for their money that makes these memberships so desirable?  Well, it's been on the front page: Trump in a circle of sycophants holding court on what turned out to be confidential foreign policy matters.  And the room was full of feasting plutocrats, all of whom came to try to meet the Prez.  All of them needing something, I have no doubt, and all of them hoping to have a private moment with The President and his big ear.  If that isn't influence peddling, I don't know what is.  The conflict of interest represented by Trump using his ascendancy to line his pockets because he is exempt under the conflict of interest laws is one thing.  But his selling access to the office is another.  That requires inquiry, but who's going to do it.

Donald Trump and Boss Tweed have something in common, but there is a difference of scale in their levels of corruption.  Tweed just had New York and Tammany Hall.  Trump has a whole country and Mar-a-Lago.   This may sound familiar, but this is what I say.  Lock him up.

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

The chickens are coming home to roost for all those Trump voters.  They weren't careful what they wished for.  They are reaping what they sowed.  But I like another chicken metaphor the best.  I can just see them walking back across the road saying, if I had known what was on the other side, I never would have crossed the road in the first place.  The executive orders fly, and so does all the progress of the last eight years and more.  That must be what they are feeling, those chickens going back across the road to whence they came.  We had this enormous financial catastrophe, to use a word that the Trumper favors, and in its wake, congress passed and President Obama signed the Dodd-Frank Act, which admittedly was not the Glass-Steagall Act, but was better than nothing.  Then the Republicans took over the House of Representatives, and the regulations that they were supposed to pass pursuant to Dodd-Frank underwent a dilatory process in which Republicans in The Senate in particular did all they could to interdict the implementation of aspects of the law like the creation of a consumer protection agency with the power to sanction banks that abused their clientele.  Part of that agency's mandate was to enforce the "fiduciary rule" that was part of Dodd-Frank, which made it incumbent upon the investment banks and lenders to act only in ways that were in their clients' and customers' best interests.  But as all regulations are anathema to the financial industry barons, they argued against it from the beginning, until they got a gift this past November: Donald Trump won the electoral college vote.  He took that as a popular mandate despite the facts that he lost the popular election by nearly 3 million votes, and the Democrats gained six seats in Congress and two in The Senate.  So, since he ran his mouth constantly about Dodd-Frank being disastrous, another favored word in Trump's hyperbolic vocabulary, he started right in on ordering repeal of the regulations he didn't like, like the fiduciary rule, which he now has ordered reconsidered by the agencies charged with implementing it.  How could a regulation that puts Americans first, to borrow a phrase from the Trump campaign, be a bad thing?  Don't expect the chickens to answer that question, but I suspect that they are wondering the same thing, though the hew and cry seems to have been more of a shrug and a whimper.

As to the coal industry, President Obama administration's EPA issued a regulation controlling how coal mining companies could dispose of the debris created by cutting off the tops of mountain tops to get at the coal.  That debris contains pollutants that could pollute about 6,000 streams by the agency's reckoning, so they imposed standards for disposal of the debris in some regulations...also the subjects of a Trump anti-regulation executive order.    How could the prevention of pollution of small streams along which miners and their families live in places like West Virginia be a bad thing?  Again, the chickens may be dubious, but they have limited their displays of concern to nothing more dramatic than scratching their heads...again, no hew and cry.  Of course, there has been a hew and cry relative to Trump's immigration order, but there, there has been actual resistance...from a federal judge no less.  The order included a travel ban on persons from the seven countries whose populations have now been denominated a terrorist threat--notably, Saudi Arabia, from which many of the 9/11 murders came was not on the list--even if they had visas or green cards, on which that judge has now imposed a stay.   Refugees from those seven countries were also included even though in the past twenty years there has never been a terrorist incident in this country involving a refugee.  The San Bernardino killers were an American born man of Pakistani descent and his wife, who was born in Pakistani but had a green card stemming from the fact that she had married an American man...again, a terrorist, like American-born Timothy McVeigh.  You will also note that Pakistan is not among the seven countries on the list.

It comes to this.  The irrational chickens, who don't know why they crossed the road,  elected an irrational fool to do their irrational foolishness, and now he is doing it...foolishly.  No wonder they can't figure out what they can do about it, or more importantly, what they were thinking if they were thinking at all when they cast those votes.  Once again, as always, the American people got what they deserved on election day...actually what the founding fathers who invented the electoral college deserved.

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

Once again Donald Trump has demonstrated his commitment to the dog and pony show as a political strategy.  His pre-naming reception for two candidates for the Supreme Court nomination that he had announced that he would announce yesterday evening was like a scene from "The Apprentice," both in its crassness and its potential to promote its host.  Replete with unending applause when Trump entered the room--no one seems to notice that the room is packed with family members and staff who are the only ones clapping, doing so without apparent glee I might add--it was de rigueur for our new president, who doesn't seem to know the meaning of the word, unseemly.  But that is what we can expect for the next week to four years, depending on whether the few voices being raised in the name of impeachment become a chorus or not, and besides, Trump wasn't really the issue; his nominee, Neil Gorsuch was, and not necessarily in the obvious way.

Everyone who watches Trump knows that his idée fixe is domination of his opposition.  It is a tactic that he apparently learned from his father, Fred, and from a past master of the art, Roy Cohn, who was Donald's lawyer and one of the most venomous, Machiavellian and unprincipled people ever to practice law and politics.  But there are more subtle aspects of such motivations than frivolous but expensive law suits that get dropped when exposed for what they are only after doing their financial damage to the intended victim.  One of them is the physical domination.

Trump is a fairly large man at 6' 3", albeit more like the Pillsbury Dough Boy than "Ahnold" Schwarzenegger.  In service of his self-image, you can see him posing as if he actually is imposing when he ambles John Wayne-like into the room, and in how he swaggers even when he is standing still, swaying his shoulders and cocking his stance so as to look askance at his audience.  It's all part of the attempt to cow his adversaries with feigned formidability, just like his use of the ad hominem attack and his incessant self-promotion, which he actually touted in "The Art of the Deal" as "truthful hyperbole."   But whether that is so in business or not, now, in the realm of politics he has found a place where what is euphemistically called "optics" is an accepted part of the deal.   You may have noticed that he takes every photo opportunity he can get, with many of which our media gladly oblige him, including when he surrounds himself with acolytes as he signs one executive order or another, many of which have been nothing more than displays of pseudo-power as only congress can do what he is purporting to do.  Last night, most of his optics went as planned except for the occasional stumble in his "I am a man of my word" speech, but at the end of his gala affair, a subtle but important one failed.

If you watch Trump shake hands with people, you will notice that as he does so, he pulls them toward him.  As he is tall, that act serves to impinge on the personal space of his intended victim as he towers over many of them, and his bulk connotes, at least in his mind, some kind of critical mass.  But when he shook Neil Gorsuch's hand, the intended Supreme Court Justice stood his ground, leaving Trump to tug on the good judge's hand to no effect or avail.  And as this transaction occurred, Gorsuch looked straight into Trump's eyes with a dispassionate expression as if to say, that bull s--t might work in New York real estate, but it don't mean nothin' to me.

So as to the course the Democratic Party is going to take regarding Judge Gorsuch's nomination to the highest court in the land, he is as conservative as the justice he is replacing, but not more so.  He also seems fairly bright, so he may be amenable to reasoned opposition to his point of view.  But most importantly, by consenting to his nomination, the Democrats lose nothing, and they can reserve the threat of a filibuster for the next nomination so that they can eschew the criticism that they are acting solely politically in an attempt to embarrass the Republicans and stand on principle.  Gorsuch is more like Alito than Scalia in my estimation, but he is in between, and as such, he might be susceptible to a change of heart over the years.  It has been known to happen in the last fifty years or so.  Thus, if any of you are Democratic senators, I suggest that you pick your battle...and that it be the next one.  

Your friend,

Mike