October 2018 Archives

Dear America,

The PBS program "Frontline" showed the first part of a two part exposé of Facebook's cavalier attitude toward the right to privacy of its users.  Since the 2016 election, much has been made of the nefarious use by the Russians of the data Facebook collects, and for that matter Facebook itself, in the election on behalf of Donald Trump.  The proliferation of canards, calumnies and outright lies on that particular social medium, but on social media in general, has become a cause célèbre across the world, but in this country in particular.  But one has to wonder why it has taken so long for the public to recognize the dangers represented by the rampant theft of our identifying information.  Recall that after the September 11th terrorist attacks, our government enacted the "Patriot Act" for the purpose of protecting our people, and at that time, even with the massive loss of life and shocking details of those attacks, there was controversy, especially when the act's sunset clause came around and its renewal was in the offing, first under the George W. Bush administration and later during the Obama administration.  Civil liberties are implicated by the plenary right to supervise our communications and activities that the Patriot Act comprises, and it wasn't just civil libertarians who were asking questions.  In fact, I would opine that President Obama's advocacy for extension of the Patriot Act was one of the least popular things he ever did, and the nature of our spy agencies' power pursuant to the act is so sensitive that a program about it created by PBS is still unavailable for viewing on television.

The tension between individual rights vis-à-vis the government, either state, local or federal, continues unabated to this day.  Yet we have blithely--not I since I refuse to use social media or even take cookies on my computer and my phone to the extent that I can prevent them from being implanted, but billions of us--sacrificed our right to control data about our lives...sometimes intimate and sensitive data...in the name of narcissism and the ability to shop on-line.  When it was the government intruding on us, we were up in arms...at least many of us were.  But somehow we don't seem so upset when it's Mark Zuckerberg or Bill Gates.  Since Microsoft took over the world of computing in the seventies, we have just rolled over and played dead on this issue in the name of almighty commerce, the American creed.   It seems that if government does it, it is a threat to democracy, but if business and industry do it, it's good for us.  What are we collectively thinking?

The Frontline piece demonstrated an almost perverse aura of epiphany such as might be the case if none of this had ever been revealed much less widely reported on the news and in the papers.  I don't fault Frontline for that; I fault us, America, because we have elected and reelected people to our legislature, and for that matter to our presidency, who do nothing about this, putatively out of concern for our first amendment freedoms while they don't seem too concerned about them at all when it comes to the NSA, and I guess that's actually a consistent approach.  Our government and free enterprise seem to want all of our personal lives out in the open so that they can "protect" us and prey on us respectively.   However, if we stand back and look at the whole constellation of the facts, we see this.  As to protecting us, our government still protects the purchase, sale and proliferation of the things that mad people kill us with.  And as to preying on us, our phones ring every day, pulling us away from the stoves on which we are cooking our meals and awakening our sleeping children on the off chance that we might be stupid enough to give up even more information or in the alternative buy something worthless or give to a bogus organization that claims to be on our side.  And we sit by and let the same people control our lives this way.

But reprehensible as they are, the government agents who watch every move we make right next to the "entrepreneurs" who get rich claiming that they employ and feed us, we put them there and keep them there.  To paraphrase the immortal bard, the fault is not in our stars and our predators but in ourselves.  We go to the polls, as we will next week, and vote on the basis of the suspect information that we individually and in groups chose to believe.  If the congress stays Republican, don't blame them for being self-seeking and disingenuous.  We have only ourselves to blame.

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

A week or two ago, our illustrious president opined that it was possible that the death of a Washington Post reporter critical of the Saudi regime was killed in the course of a "rogue operation," so he was going to give the Saudis the presumption of innocence, which is the wet blanket he throws on any fire involving a friend of his...at least for as long as his loyalty lasts...usually a matter of a few days.  In this case, he must have been prescient as well as loyal, at least at the moment when the words fell out of his mouth, because sure enough, a group of 15 Saudis had gone to the embassy on the day of the murder and, as it turns out, killed him.  Apparently they were, as our president had speculated, "rogues," and the journalist in question, Jamal Khashogi, was a real tough guy because he took them all on in a fist fight...which he lost.  That's the Saudi story, and they are sticking to it, and why not.  The idea came from the president of the United States.  Of course it's absurd, and even Donald Trump can see that.  He has now pronounced what he purported to be an excuse to be the worst cover-up ever (our president has to have a superlative in every sentence).  And why wouldn't it be.  Our president wouldn't come up with the second worst cover-up, much less the third or fourth.  The cover-up Donald Trump devised would have to be second to none; he devised it and he does nothing but the best...or in this case, the worst, ever.  And since you can't put anything past Trump, he now renounces his scenario, the cover-up that is, and vows to get to the bottom of it and apparently, someone is going to get fired.  That's what Donald Trump does.  He looks the person he thinks has failed him, formerly one of his "apprentices," and he says, "You're fired."  Ask Michael Flynn, "the mooch," Reince Priebus and the rest of the former this, that or the other things who were at the White House, but now "sleep with the Bannons."

What I am interested to see is how this plays out on Thanksgiving.  We're having it at our house this year, and in the crowd of twelve to fourteen people will be at least two Trump voters.  We will all be sitting at one long table together, so the odds that the subject won't come up are just 14 to 2.  I'm going to sit there and keep my peace because the two in question are my wife's relatives.  I don't want to pay the price when we go to bed that night for the fact that my in-laws voted for Trump, so I'm going to keep mum...unless...  Sometimes I can't help myself.  Someone says something absurd, usually one of them, and in response, I start a sentence with something civil, like, "Well, maybe..." with the intention of leaving it there.  But often times, after the maybe comes something that is code for, "you idiot."  Then, the uncomfortable silence sets in, and for my wife at least, it can last until the next morning...or the next month in a surreptitious form.  If you are married, you know what I mean.

The bottom line is this.  Donald Trump is a threat to my marriage, not to mention the rest of the world, so how are you going to vote in 2020, not to mention 2018.  We have one chance to limit the havoc he is trying so hard to wreak, and that's to vote him out when he runs again, if he's not impeached first, but to change the partisan hegemony of at least one house of congress in the meantime.  He's already got the Supreme Court stacked with his nominees, who seem the type of guys who will feel beholden to the capo if the subject of his wrong-doing comes before them, so impeachment seems out of the question, much less indictment and conviction, so the vote is the only defense we are left with.  Of course, some of you think Trump is a great president; how you came to that conclusion I can't say, but you did.  In fact, that's probably the way in which the Thanksgiving wars are going to begin at my house.  They'll say that Trump has done some great things, and I'll say, name one.  They will, and I'll say, and that's a great thing why?  Anyone who has a good, genuine answer should feel free to vote for Trump and the congressional Republicans.  Everyone else, make sure you're registered and don't forget to go to the polls.

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

A few days ago, Mitch McConnell uttered an oft used canard about Social Security and Medicare, that they were the real cause of the federal deficit, not the tax cuts that McConnell, House Speaker Paul Ryan and Donald Trump had shepherded through congress.  In fact, the federal government has never paid "one penny" of Social Security benefits or Medicare in that both are funded by working people who pay into a trust fund.  And just to put appropriate emphasis on the point, I put one penny in quotes because that is the phrase used by Ronald Reagan in an October 1984 debate with Walter Mondale on national television.  You can find the debate and that utterance on the internet for yourself.  I know because I did.  So, who is responsible for the credence that people like McConnell, Ryan (he has made the same claim in the past to misdirect blame for deficits from his then current political agendas related to tax cuts) and many Republican and conservative politicians are given?  We are, America.  We don't educate ourselves.  We don't check the facts that our politicians shamelessly lie about.  We don't their erroneous claims of law, and most importantly, we don't publicly call them out on their indefensible deceit.

But that's Medicare and Social Security.  There isn't really anything that McConnell, Ryan and Trump can do about the facts, so our benefits are safe from budget cuts, though recalculation of the amount that earners have to pay to keep the system solvent will likely be necessary within a decade or two.  However, both Trump and McConnell have been throwing around the right to be considered innocent until proven guilty as if to demonstrate for everyone's benefit that they don't know what they are talking about.  That right is a constitutional right that is derivative of actual clauses and phrases in our constitution.  They relate to criminal guilt and innocence.  They relate to the right to a public trial and/or a jury of one's peers.  They relate to the right to be at liberty unless you are properly convicted of a criminal act.  They do not relate to confirmation to a seat on our Supreme Court.  And they certainly do not relate to the likely murder of a member of our free press by a foreign government.  Yet, both McConnell and Trump have invoked that purported right in favor of now-Justice Bret Kavanaugh and most deplorably, the son of the monarch of Saudi Arabia, who likely ordered that murder in a Saudi consulate in Turkey.  

Set aside the fact that our president, the controlling, Majority Leader of the U.S. Senate, and by implication Senator Lindsey Graham don't know better than to misappropriate what is probably the single most crucial protection from tyranny that any American has.  Forget that they all valued a misguided, political attempt to endow a probable attempted rapist and certain liar with a cloak of immunity more than the integrity of the institution that the advise and consent clause was intended to protect...if you can. Their lack of understanding of our fundamental rights and the nature and guaranties of our personal liberty is a cause for despair, but what may be more disturbing is the willingness of our president to sell our morality as a nation for some contracts to build jets in this country.  Are our souls now to be monetized in service of economic expediency?  Is our president, and are those who elected him by extension, so meretricious that the commission of a despicable, abhorrent atrocity of a murder, almost unimaginably involving dismemberment and probably torture, to be swept under our national carpet?

We have seen Donald Trump's "moral flexibility" in action many times since he started running for the presidency.  We have watched him apparently manipulate the government he leads to enrich himself.  We have heard him tell outright lies and then essentially admit that they were lies by attempting to explain them away, or even retract them, and in some cases deny that he ever said them despite the fact that his lie had been heard tumbling from his greedy lips on television by hundreds of millions around the world.   But this thing he has done on behalf of Saudi royalty is an abomination.  I am at a loss for more words than that even though I feel a raging need to say more.

America, this should be the last straw for even Trump's most ardent supporters.  The prince in Saudi Arabia who ordered this is as odious as Stalin or Hitler, and our president has aligned himself with that crown prince, Mohammad Bin Salman Al Saud.  If we don't reject Trump's demonstration of this ultimate kind of immorality, we are to blame for all that he wreaks on us.  No one else.

Your friend,

Mike