July 30, 2019: Cruelty And Corruption, Merchants of Detention, Always About The Money

“Is it Cruelty, or is it corruption? That's a question that comes up whenever we learn about some new, extraordinary abuse by the Trump administration—something that seems to happen just about every week. And the answer, usually, is both” (1) So wrote economist Paul Krugman, recently, in The New York Times.

Krugman was writing about “the atrocities the U.S. is committing against migrants from Central America. Oh, and save the fake outrage. Yes, they are atrocities and yes, the detention centers meet the historical definition of concentration camps.” (2)

Krugman contents that tRUMP sees cruelty as serving both a political strategy and policy tool; on the one hand it is hoped to reduce the number of immigrants seeking asylum and on the other hand satisfy the blood lust of his knuckle-dragging political 'base'. But, as Krugman cannot help but noting—there is money to be made. With tRUMP—always the transactional bastard—it's always about the money.

In this case “a majority of detained migrants are being held in camps run by corporations with close ties to the Republican Party.

“And when I say close ties, we're talking about personal rewards as well as campaign contributions. A couple of months ago, John Kelly, Trump's former chief of staff, joined the board of Calilburn International, which runs the infamous Homestead Detention center for migrant children”. (4)

No one emerges from the shadow of Disgustus unsoiled. Everyone becomes a parasite.

This leads us to the question of privatization—a movement that began in earnest during the Reagan years and has quickly morphed into a form of crony capitalism. Everything from school lunches, to local zoning and building code enforcement, to street cleaning, to running the municipal marina has been turned over to the tender attentions of capitalist pigs with wholly predictable results. Not only has the nation gained a glimpse of the horrors of what is transpiring at the border, but reversing a policy started under Obama to de-privatize prisons, the nation once again is on the path of underpaying and under-training personnel, and shaving expenses on food and medical care. Where the I.C.E. Detention camps lead, the federal prisons will soon follow. Soon, like in some banana republic, inmates will be required to pay for their own incarceration making certain that once incarcerated those imprisoned will never again see the light of day.

Slowly, determinedly, step-by-step the nation creeps toward fascism. Behold the countenance of our bloated Caesar as he pauses basking in manufactured adoration. Behold our orange spray-painted Mussolini. Behold the cheap counterfeit posing as the genuine article.

An Br'er Putin, he jus' laugh and laugh

Impeach and Imprison.

____________

1. Krugman, Paul. “Trump and The Merchants Of Detention” The New York Times. Tuesday, July 9, 2019. Page A27
2. ibid
3. ibid

July 29, 2019: Why We're Fucked, A Question of Political Will, Can't Prove a Negative

As I graduated from college in the fall of 1972, I obtained and then read World Dynamics. My biology course in college was not a rehash of High School biology, a study instead of ecology. I had seen reference to the work while perusing the library stacks and went forthwith to the college bookstore and ordered a copy. Then I set down and began reading, pouring over the assembled data and graphs, the explanations, the complexities of what would happen if humanity responded in certain ways to the then known data and trends.

The next spring found me in Worcester, Massachusetts awaiting admittance to Clark University on a full scholarship. It was here, in a rented flat, that the enormity of the task at hand dawned upon me. While holed up in a second floor flat, in what are affectionately termed “triple-deckers” in this working-class industrial town, I was visited by my old friend Larry Hamp.

Hamp and I had spent a couple of years researching the New York City Draft Riots of 1863 and had reached the point where we could complete each other's sentences. Over a bottle of Lancer's wine and a few joints I began one night to lay it out for him. Protesting, he gave me every argument that he could muster before, at the end of a long night, admitting that we are indeed fucked.

The argument went something like this and there has been little in the ensuing nearly half century to change the broad conclusions. Government is reactive, if not reactionary. By the time it becomes universally obvious that the enormity of the looming crisis threatens even the well-to-do—that is the power structure—it will be too late. Conversely, even if governments can be made to be proactive and meet the challenge as it emerges, there will develop a counter-movement that will contend with a straight face that the crisis never existed and that the fraud was perpetrated by their adversaries as a means of gaining and holding power. In this last argument one sees the coming of the modern ReSCUMlickan response first emerging in the shallow countenance of Senator Inhof of Oklahoma and now spread entirely through the ReSCUMlickan ranks.

There are many corollaries to this argument including the exponential nature to the variables, ranging from population growth to resource depletion to pollution meaning that each resembles a half filled glass that when stood on edge will reach a tipping point bringing a swift and violent crash.

Put simply let's use a pond filling with algae as an example. If the rate of growth of the algae doubles every day then the day before the pond is choked it is only half full, two days before it is only a quarter, three days one-eighth, four day one-sixteenth. A few days before catastrophe only a minor problem occurs. This is the nature of many of the variables now facing humanity, and we cannot say for certain where lies the tipping point.

Then there are the notorious “negative feed-back” loops where nasty currents combine to accelerate even nastier outcomes. As an example the warming of the planet melts the polar ice caps. With the melting ice less solar radiation is reflected back into space further speeding the warming process. Indeed the polar regions are warming faster than the planet as a whole. Further the warming of the arctic regions releases methane, a greenhouse gas far more potent than CO2 , again speeding the process of global warming. Lastly the melting fresh water is lighter than sea water and as the ice caps melt the ocean currents—nature's way of expelling heat—become disrupted further heating the planet.

There are many other examples, population impact on food supply which, in turn, affects land use and rising levels of pollution. It is a skein that humanity seems bound to unravel with little or no idea how to weave it back together.

The point in these columns is that everything, as the Greeks tried to teach, is political. Everything is a consequence of political will, a point lost on all sides of the argument. While the naysayers will contend with near dead certainty that the present crisis requires mustering a still nascent political will to force the confiscation of trillions of dollars of assets in order to, for instance, keep fossil fuels in the ground, it is also worth noting that the very existence of the fossil fuel industry is a consequence of political will. It was governments throughout the world that gave these corporations the legal protections, sometimes the military protections, not to mention the tax breaks and outright grants to build these systems in the first place.

It all boils down to politics and the question has always been and will always remain: will we develop the political will soon enough to intervene and use the inherent police power of the state to put an end to the crisis? The answer: not as long as there is a ReSCUMlickan Party and it's enablers on the other side of the isle.

The upcoming crises demand political action. Severe, consistent and long term political action ranging from draconian cuts in population growth to the outright elimination of fossil fuels to an entirely new ethos of land use. It demands a top-down, not a bottom-up approach because the problems face not just a municipality, nor a county nor even a state or a nation. It demands that humanity voluntarily gets into the harness and pull this wagon as one in the same direction. It demands a level of cooperation and coordination that will swamp the feeble national institutions now in place.

Instead we have the Paris Accords in which the world gathered to survey its fate, decided what to do and then voluntarily committed itself to doing half of it. Then along comes tRUMP declaring undue hardship as he withdrew the world's greatest producers of fossil fuels from the accord.

Finally, a last word. From the Greeks we learned that everything contains within itself the seeds of it's own destruction Within each of us lies the seed of the disease that will, in the end, claim our life. In this context it means that what has served us so well in the past are the very things that will claim our future, in this case the inordinate preoccupations with economic growth, the dependence on current forms of energy, the need to reproduce.

What faces humanity is nothing less than a combination of looming crises that together threaten the perfect storm. To confront what is clearly before us requires nothing less than a new politics, new institutions, but a new economics and new religions. Humanity has always been adept at adaptation but not this adept. Certainly it's institutions have been, if Toynbee is to be believed and the rise of the modern conservative movement are any indication, not so well adaptable.

It certainly means the end of the American Empire, perhaps the end of Western Civilization. It may take out a great swath of the human population—through disease and starvation—in the bargain. All that will be left will be the looming Dark Age, the return of the Hobbesian dog-eat-dog state of nature, where the strong consume the weak, and the thugs rule.

An Br'er Putin he jus' laugh and laugh

Impeach and Imprison

July 28, 2019: Have You Read Toynbee?, It Wouldn't Matter, The Last Revolutionary

We could solve the climate crisis tomorrow—climate change or global warming as it is called—and it wouldn't matter. Oh, it would prevent the rising oceans, and mitigate against the coming droughts, but confronting global warming isn't the end of the crisis—it isn't even the beginning of the end.

You see, every day a city the size of Grand Rapids Michigan erupts on the skin of the earth. The resulting demands for energy, mineral resources, food and water, clean air and the like will continue to inexorably increase the demands made upon mother earth bringing it to a crisis point sometime in this century. And you haven't even begun to address the problems related to human waste and pollution on this scale.

You see, it isn't simply the burning of carbon-based fuel that is driving the crisis. It is also driven by population increase and industrialization. Population increases demand for land, food, air and water; industrialization and the demand for higher living standards combined with population increases exponentially increases the demand for natural resources—water, minerals, energy. Those born in the industrialized world use 20 times the resources of the rest of the world and, with the world clamoring to be similarly comfortable one can easily see how mother nature will be brought to the breaking point.

And, as the old 1970's commercial selling butter used to intone “it is not wise to upset mother nature”. Indeed, mother nature is the last revolutionary, and she is ruthless. If you doubt, consult the Black Plague.

We've known about this coming crisis for nearly half a century. In 1970 a group called The Club of Rome, a group of scientists using the world's first large-scale computer models studying projected population growth, resource use, pollution levels and other variables. They published their results in a book called World Dynamics, a dire warning of what awaits by the end of this century if we do nothing. We have wasted roughly half the time we have left, some say more. If anything, the window of opportunity is closing as various “negative feedback loops” appear—greenhouse gases being one of the nasty surprises that became apparent a decade after the publication of the original work.

During one of my visits to the “farm” my grandmother asked me, when I was young, if I had read Toynbee. Arnold Toynbee was a philosopher and historian, prominent in the mid-twentieth century. He has fallen out of grace in recent years first because his writing style makes difficult reading and secondly because he tended to be disparaging about tribal civilizations. Nevertheless, his study of the two dozen or so recorded civilizations and the reasons for their fall were, I discovered much later in life, well worth the read. Toynbee makes the compelling case that if a civilization can meet an emerging threat soon enough, before it becomes overwhelmed, it can survive and indeed become stronger. But if it is overwhelmed it will collapse upon itself bringing invasion or a dark age.

I have suspected, all these years, that we are on the cusp of such a crisis. Originally, I had thought that perhaps we had a century, or a century and a half, but the intervening years have seen the horizon close in upon us.

And so, as political forces rise in places like Russia, Brazil, and the US, calling upon us to extract and burn ever more fossil fuel; as we continue to roll back environmental protections rather than increase them, as we bury our head in the sand, the storms and the sea threaten to overwhelm us; as political divisions threaten to undermine us; as the international cartels threaten to consume us we tremble at the prospect.

An Br'er Putin, he jus' laugh and laugh

Impeach and imprison.

July 27, 2019: Looking For Oil, Green-washing, Little Cause For Optimism

The most startling statistic I've seen and, if memory serves, I've run across it in at least two publications—The Nation and Harper's Magazine is this: The fossil fuel industries now own the mineral rights to five times the amount of carbon that, if burned, will make this planet uninhabitable. Five times the amount. The question facing humanity is: What are we going to do to keep it in the ground?

Yesterday, The New York Times published an essay by Lee Wasserman, Director of the Rockefeller Family Fund, an organization seeking an end to the production and use of fossil fuels. (1) Wasserman notes that:

“Climate change can get complicated fast, but there is really only one question to ask when considering an official's climate bona fides: Will his or her policies lead to an increase or decrease in the amount of fossil fuels coming out of the ground? One peer-reviewed study found that to have a 50 percent chance of meeting the Paris climate accord's target of staying “well below” 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit of additional warming, we must refrain from burning much of the fossil fuel reserves listed as assets on the balance sheets of energy companies”. (2)

I do not have to inform the reader of the stranglehold that the national and international corporations now holding these assets have on the republic, indeed upon the world economic order.

What we are talking about is that to save the planet will require the political will to sequester wealth measured in the trillions, confiscation on a scale greater than the wealth taken from the slave holding South—and that took a civil war costing the lives of one of every 50 Americans.

The truth, as Wasserman pointedly demonstrates, is that no matter how bad is our intrepid Caesar in his erstwhile struggle to wrench us back into the 1950's, “to be honest,” writes Wasserman, “the portraits of most of the world's progressive leaders wouldn't be much brighter. The United States was well on its way to becoming the world's largest producer of fossil fuels before Donald Trump. Even today, with only a few decades left for us to reduce greenhouse gas emissions without potentially catastrophic long-term consequences, far too many officials of all political stripes continue to expand the amount of fossil fuels we are extracting.” (2)

This is true of politicians and public figures across the political spectrum from Dick Cheney to Robert Kennedy Jr., to Obama. Wasserman cites Obama, after all, who described “all of the above” when asked to cite energy sources and who, like Kennedy, “enthusiastically embraced the fracking boom that is now primed to unleash a tidal wave of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. His successful effort to end the country's export ban on fossil fuels encouraged industry to go after every ounce of oil and gas it could find—and it is finding plenty. Taken together, President Obama's legacy is a nation that produces more oil and natural gas than Saudi Arabia.” (3)

Then there's Jerry Brown of California who has been the nation's most active governor at reducing demand for energy, but California is one of the nation's “leading producers of crude oil in the country. Nearly 5.5 million Californians live within a mile of an oil well and of those 1.8 million—nearly 92 percent of whom are people of color—live in areas already burdened by pollution. Relentless efforts by environmental and public health advocates to convince Governor Brown to at least minimize drilling in and around the most congested neighborhoods for health and safety reasons, in addition to sheer climate necessity, failed.

“Certainly,” comments Wasserman, money generated from extraction is an important revenue source for California. But if Mr. Brown couldn't leave a carbon-based nickel on the table, and if, ultimately, the same will be said for his successor, Gavin Newsom, how can we expect Donald Trump to do more?” (4)

How can we indeed.

What we have here is what has come to be called “green-washing”, a practice of adopting the optics but not the substance of the issue. It is a stratagem first employed by the corporations—like British Petroleum's much publicized solar energy initiative—a program in name only designed to burnish it's image but little else—a stratagem soon adopted by many politicians.

Like Canada's Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who made such a show of signing the Paris Accord on Climate Change. Trudeau, Wasserman notes, is a “progressive leader who is creating even greater climate dissonance...just after his government declared a 'climate emergency,' it approved a $5.5 billion expansion of the Trans Mountain Pipeline that links Alberta's tar sands to British Columbia. Mr. Trudeau's government bought the pipeline to ensure its expansion. That the government had to step in underscored the lack of business rationale to support bitumen, one of the world's dirtiest oils, 600 miles across Canada for shipment to Asia.” (4)

Wasserman goes on to say that Trudeau's embrace “of one of the world's most destructive projects” makes Trump's affair with Big Oil look like “a schoolboy crush”. (5)

Wasserman cites only New York governor Andrew Cuomo as a politician who takes the coming climate crisis seriously. Cuomo has banned fracking choosing to leave an abundance of natural gas in the ground—an action waiting the next Republican administration's reversal.

As humanity hurtles headlong toward environmental catastrophe there is, indeed, little cause for optimism.

An' Br'er Putin, he jus' laugh and laugh

Impeach and imprison.

__________

1. Wasserman, Lee. Why Are We Still Looking For Oil?” The New York Times. Friday July 26, 2019: Page A23.
2. ibid
3. ibid
4. ibid
5. ibid.

July 25, 2019: It Won't Take Long, Dogeared Canards, Look In The Mirror

“It won't take long to forget ya

now that you've been gone
it'll be over by Christmas
no, it won't take long”
           -----The Rolling Stones “It Won't Take Long”

It didn't take long. No, it didn't take long for the ReSCUMlickans—here in the form of Congressman Doug Collins of Georgia—to issue his statement written before Mueller took his seat before the Congress to testify.

Collins presents us with the usual talking points, the dogeared canards that fill the airwaves of hate radio and faux news. “Yet these investigators didn't conclude that the president conspired or obstructed justice”(1) he tells us with a straight face.

The report makes no such determination, concluding, in fact, that first on the question of conspiracy, evidence was not conclusive because of the unavailability of witnesses (Russian and other foreign nationals beyond the reach of the FBI), destroyed or encrypted documents and electronic messages, lying and misleading witnesses, and obstruction of justice impeded the completion of the investigation; and, secondly, that there were at least ten instances of obstruction of justice—all serious felonies—that could have been brought but that, according the Department of Justice guidelines, the Special Counsel could not indict the sitting president*. So the first part of that statement that the investigators exonerated the president* on the conspiracy charge is not true. The report as to conspiracy, citing ample evidence of over 140 contacts between the tRUMP campaign and Russian nationals while compelling is not as yet conclusive. The second phrase of the statement implying that he did not obstruct justice is a knowing lie.

Collins knows its a lie because he goes to great lengths to try to unravel the Gordian knot about the throat of this president*. He claims that Mueller inadvertently, or perhaps intentionally, violated the civil rights of the defendant—in this case the president*--by telling the nation that he could not exonerate him, pointing out that it is not in the power of a prosecuting attorney to exonerate anyone and that this violates the presumption of innocence inherent in American legal doctrine.

“Americans understand our democracy keeps government officials in check by maintaining that everyone is innocent until proven guilty. They understand it's fair and right that every American—including the president—be allowed to carry out their lives and work without being harassed by malicious allegations.” (2)

Collins is quite right about that, but quite wrong in his application. You see, if the president* cannot be indicted or, the indictment must take the form of articles of impeachment before he can be civilly indicted and put on trial, then the Special Counsel, as well as the country, are left with a conundrum. How does one cite the seriousness of the acts and the severity of the threat to the republic if one can only approach the line of indictment but not cross it? In no other American jurisprudence is this the case. Any other American would have been indicted, arraigned and put on trial for these felonies, a position underscored earlier this year by more than a thousand former United States Federal Attorney's who signed a statement saying as much. It is because the president* hides behind the skirts of his office—in effect out of the reach of civil authority—that the Special Counsel worded his report the way he did, telling the nation that if he could have exonerated the president* he would have. Collins and his colleagues cry foul, trying to make political hay with this, but I say let tRUMP come out from behind the skirts of his office and face the music, then we will apply the law. To put it another way, let him drop his unique exemption to the rule of law and we will apply the same rules we apply to everyone else; but as long as the administration insists that he stand above normal legal remedy, then normal procedure simply cannot apply. To do so would have nullified the investigation and entirely neutered its conclusions.

The last phrase of the Congressman's statement is equally troubling, echoing as it does tRUMP's charge of 'presidential* harassment'. Are we to take seriously the position that investigations are harassment and that the president* must be allowed to work without being harassed by malicious allegations? Are we to take that to mean that any allegations (for there is a lot of meat to the allegations facing Disgustus and his fetid administration), are malicious and that somehow the function of congress is to turn a blind eye and rubber-stamp everything blown out of the ass of this bloated clown? To take this statement seriously is to neuter the constitutional oversight responsibility exercised by every congress (except when McConnell and Ryan were in charge) in the history of the Republic.

But, I suppose, this is what happens when one elects and then consistently returns to office men who campaign denigrating the very institutions they inhabit. That every member of Congress is not taking to the ramparts to defend Congressional prerogatives is a testament to the rot that has eaten away at this republic. Congressman Collins, if you want to see the cancer that is eating at the heart of this republic, look in the mirror.

Collins then proceeds, as the parasite that he is, to tell the reader that the nation must move on from Mueller citing all the work he and his colleagues have accomplished or are working on—safeguarding the nation from election interference—among others—all Democratic initiatives as a way of minimizing the seriousness of the charges against tRUMP and distracting us from the task at hand. But he is right about one thing. It is time to move on from Mueller. It is time to drag the principals of this scandal before the nation to testify under oath and move to impeach the bastard.

“An Br'er Putin, he jus' laugh and laugh”

Impeach and Imprison.

__________

1. Collins, Doug. “We're Ready to Move On From Mueller” The New York Times. Thursday, July 25, 2019. Page A25.
2. Ibid.

July 24, 2019: Just The Facts, Kicking The Can, A Collective Yawn

Flashback: It's the late 1950's and early to mid 1960's and Jim Webb portraying Sgt. Joe Friday on television's Dragnet unassumingly interrogates a witness followed by the simple declarative statement delivered in dry monotone 'just the facts, ma'am'. Just the facts.

This was, of course, before Rush Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly, Glenn Beck and a host of other unsavory characters hijacked the media. This was a time before the news became commercialized; a time before News became Drama; a time before the age of Murrow, Severied, and Cronkite gave way to theater.

Robert Mueller is of the old school. He is Joe Friday called to testify today before two House committees, the Committee on the Judiciary and the House Intelligence Committee.

The Democrats have been kicking the can down the road for month now. First, it was held, that when his report came out, a bombshell would be detonated. Now, the 'resistance' is holding its collective breath hoping that when he testifies the end of our Age of Disgustus will be at hand. This is worse than a miscalculation, it is a sorry excuse for doing nothing.

Robert Mueller is Joe Friday and, as it turns out, a tired, drawn and, at times, confused Joe Friday to boot. As Frank Bruni writes in today's New York Times, Mueller's testimony may be a bit too little and a bit too late. (1) But, observes Bruni, that while his testimony (will) not be 'game-changing'...”anyone rightly aghast at this presidency and righteously desperate to move past it needs to recognize that Mueller's testimony probably isn't even the beginning of the end.

“It should be. That's obvious from his report, examined by most voters. It makes clear that while officials with the Trump campaign didn't huddle with Vladimir Putin over vodka and blinis to scrawl a to-do list –column A for the Kremlin, Column B for Javanka—their attitude about help from Moscow was: Here's the Trump Tower address! Use the far-right elevator in the lobby. Wait, wait, you have emails ? Out with them, fast! It's not digital theft. Merely glasnost for the age of Assange.”(2)

Alright, Disgustus didn't fire Mueller, but the litany of his efforts to sandbag the investigation would be illuminating.

But Mueller is not illuminating. As Bruni so eloquently puts it: “Mueller is neither vivid nor colorful. He takes pride in that, and he twists his fingers into pretzels lest he put them on the scale. He's so emphatically apolitical and nonpartisan that he became inadvertently political and partisan. His report's arid language, gummy syntax and thick riddles dulled its findings of awful conduct. He gave Bill Barr room to spin and Trump the opening to claim exoneration, which he has been doing for four months now.” (3)

Bruni's characterization proved all-too-accurate. Mueller's much ballyhooed testimony, if anything, produced a collective yawn, as his hours of obfuscation and evasion, citing department guidelines and the circumscribed nature of his inquiry; his real-life testimony proving as convoluted and circumspect as his written report. Mueller twisted himself into pretzels explaining how the behavior of the president* as well as his henchmen represent a clear and present danger but citing DOJ rules against indicting a sitting president to justify the failure to declare anything but a double negative: If we had found evidence that he wasn't guilty we would have said so.

This kind of syntax is, for those seeking clarity, maddening. Yes it is, in the age of political theater, too little. Is it no also too late?

Bruni raises, quite rightly, the question of timing. It has been four months since Mueller issued his report, three months since Barr intentionally mischaracterized its findings. “That drawn-out process means that many Americans have grown numb to it, dismissed it as the latest front in a ceaseless war between Republicans and Democrats, or both.” (4) Indeed, it shouldn't have taken this long.

Finally, after a long day of drawn-out testimony the Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, held a news conference and told the nation that tRUMP must be held accountable, that he did indeed break the law, alluding to multiple felonies regarding the obstruction of justice. These are clearly impeachable offenses. But the Speaker, like a general fighting the last war, walked up to the line and then backed away, telling the assembled the the time was not yet right to begin even an inquiry into whether the behaviors of this bastard president* is sordid enough to warrant even an inquest into whether or not they constitute impeachable offenses.

Pelosi thinks she is, through caution, defending her House majority. In fact she is risking it. Failure to act will not only set deplorable precedents as to future presidential conduct, but will guarantee that Disgustus will declare victory, claiming—again falsely—that no crimes were committed and, as proof, even his enemies wouldn't charge him. This will help insure his re-election. Also insuring his re-election will be the three to five percent of the Democratic vote that will stay home reasoning, correctly, that voting won't make a dime's worth of difference.

An' Br'er Putin, he jus' laugh and laugh

Impeach and Imprison.

_______________

1. Bruni, Frank. “Is Mueller Too Little, Too Late?” The New York Times. Wednesday, July 24, 2019. Page A27
2. Ibid
3. Ibid
4. Ibid

July 18, 2019: From The Jaws Of Victory, Hope Is Gone, The House Dawdles

“Never underestimate the ability of the Democrats to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory”.

               ----from The Quotations of Chairman Joe

tRUMP secretary Hope Hicks was recently called to testify before a House Committee. The hearing was held in secret session behind closed doors!

Disgustus, one may recall, famously does not use emails and Hicks was not only his conduit for passing messages handling his business affairs in private life, but also served the same function during the campaign and the first months of the presidency*. Hicks, briefly, became the White House Communications Director. She was at tRUMP's side as he forged a response as the infamous 'Trump Tower meeting' became headline news. She was privy to nearly everything.

Yet here she is, testifying behind closed doors, reportedly invoking fifth amendment protections even concerning where her office in the White House was located. The nation needed to see this stonewalling. It needed to see just how 'transparent' this “administration” is. But it didn't.

Don't ever underestimate the ability of the Democrats to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.

The Democrats have wasted nearly a quarter of this congressional session. It has been six months since Speaker Pelosi has taken the Speaker's gavel. Yet in this time, only Michael Cohen has been called to testify as a principle witness to the crimes of this bastard president*,

Much has been made of the stonewalling of Congress as tRUMP has issued a decree that the administration will not respond to any subpoena of any witnesses, nor will it forward any documentary evidence—not just about the ongoing Russian imbroglio, but about anything. His Department of Justice openly declaring that it will not prosecute the Attorney General, nor the Secretary of the Treasury for failure to comply with congressional subpoenas. These are impeachable offenses on the part of the cabinet officers as well as the president*. Nevertheless, the House dawdles, telling the nation that the House is seeking remedy in the courts.

The House does not need the courts. The House has the power to force compliance. During Watergate, Senator Sam Irwin, Chairman of the joint House and Senate committee on Watergate, wrote the White House that failure to appear before the committee and/or failure to provide requested documents would mean jail for those obstructing the Congressional inquiry. No such ultimatum by the House has as yet been forthcoming. Enforcement of House subpoenas had, until the twentieth century, been done through the congressional sergeant-at-arms. It has since been delegated to the Department of Justice, but it remains a delegated power, one that the House could and should immediately reclaim.

In this context, Attorney General Barr and Treasury Secretary Mnuchin should be arrested by the sergeant-at-arms and dragged before the committee and failure to testify—that is any claims of 'executive privilege' should be cited as contempt resulting in incarceration until the testimony and the information is forthcoming. This especially applies when the question at hand either deals with obstruction of justice or denying the congress information concerning possible international conflicts of interest as it pertains to tRUMP's finances. These are of compelling national interest and demand jail time if information pertaining to them is withheld.

Instead the Democrats are squandering their mandate, frittering away the time, allowing Disgustus to continue his sordid and corrupt ways.

Hicks, tRUMP jr, Flynn, Manafort, Sorsi, Conway, Priebus, Bannon, Sater, Gates, Sessions, Whitaker, Barr, and host of others should by now have been dragged before the kleig lights and made to testify under oath. But no! We are six months into this and, as the fate of the republic hangs in the balance, all we hear are muffled murmurs.

From the Jaws of Victory.

“An Br'er Putin, he jus' laugh and laugh”.

July 16, 2019: Permanent Political Gridlock, World On Its Head, The Cauldron Boils

In case you are wondering why the the political process in the United States stands paralyzed in what seems like permanent political gridlock, consider this:

“Number of the twenty least prosperous US congressional districts that are represented by Republicans : 16

Number of the twenty most prosperous US congressional districts that represented by Democrats:20” (1)

That's right! The 'workingman's party' known as the party of Labor, the Democratic Party, now represents all twenty of the most prosperous congressional districts in the United States. Conversely, the party of Wall Street, now represents 16 of the twenty least prosperous districts. The political world has been stood on its head.

Consider the case of our most prominent congressional curb-crawler Mitch McConnell. Economist Paul Krugman writing about an entirely different subject—whether the Democrats are tracking 'too far leftward'--writing that rich states subsidize poor states in the federal scheme of things, had this to say about McConnell's Kentucky:

...”In 2017, the state received $40 billion more from the federal government than it paid in taxes.

That's about one-fifth of the state's G.D.P; if Kentucky were a country, we'd say that it was receiving foreign aid on an almost inconceivable scale.

“This aid, in turn, supports a lot of jobs. It's fair to say that more Kentuckians work in hospitals kept afloat by Medicare and Medicaid, in retail establishments kept going by Social Security and food stamps, than in all the traditional occupations like mining and even agriculture combined.” (2)

So here you have old Mitch, assaulting the Affordable Care Act, moving to savage Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare. Here he stands for all to see servicing the interests of his billionaire paymasters as well as the shipping company owned by his wife's family, representing a state on the public dole. Meanwhile, Chuck Schumer, Senator from Wall Street meets with his counterpart, the Speaker of the House representing one of California's richest districts.

The problem is that America is dealing with political schizophrenia. While the old Republican guard clings precariously to power, buying time by supporting and enabling a faux populist, the progressive Democratic insurgency, likewise impotent, rails against the mossbacks representing not the 'people' but the money. Meanwhile the cauldron boils.

“And don't speak too soon

for the wheel's still in spin

and there's no telling who

that it's naming

and the loser now

may be later to win

for the times they are a-changin”

                         -----Bob Dylan.

'An Br'er Putin, he jus' laugh and laugh”

Impeach and Imprison.

_______________

1. Harper's Magazine Vol. 338, No. 2027. April 2019. Page 9
2. Krugman, Paul. “The Moochers of Middle America” The New York Times. Tuesday, July 2, 2019. Page A19.

July 12, 2019: Lessons in Demolition, A Night At Old Comiskey, Spectacle Becomes Vandalism

Forty years ago today, the world witnessed the end of the cultural abortion known as 'disco'. It all came crashing down on that hot and humid night in July, but little did we know what would come in its wake: hip-hop and rap, as the culture spirals ever downward toward national oblivion. Here then, is a reprise of a piece I wrote in 1979 and published in these columns in March of 2010:

When at last we had found our seats it was the middle of the 7th inning of the first game of a twi-night doubleheader. Comiskey Park was packed. I hadn't seen it like this since that game with Cleveland way back in 1960—and that was “fireworks” night. People were literally hanging from the rafters. But there was something different about the the old ball yard. I could sense it as I walked among the ragged bare-chested crowd the half mile to the park, but I couldn't put my finger on it. Inside the park I took stock of the situation and things began to take form.

The time: Thursday, July 12, 1979. The place: Comiskey Park, Chicago. The mood: sullen. It was hot—very hot—and it was humid. Draped over the face of the upper deck were sheets upon which were painted “Disco Sucks” and other epithets to Western Man's most recent cultural achievement. As my eyes swept the arena, I could feel the “thud” of exploding firecrackers, m-80's—the equivalent of a quarter of a stick of dynamite—thrown unto the field, sending ominous reverberations through the surely crowd. As the first game was winding to an end I could feel things getting out of hand. Instinctively I sought the “Box” seats for safety, for gathered here were the lowest elements of Chicago's South Side clearly in search of an EVENT!

The rest, in a manner of speaking, is history. The mob sat restively through the first game, contenting itself with consuming drugs, setting off firecrackers, and intimidating ball players. During intermission it joyously engaged in a raucous display as 50,000 rose to their feet singing “Disco Sucks” to the tune of “Disco Duck” serving as a kind of ritual chant imploring distant gods to save them from the likes of Donna Summers and the Brothers Gibb. But, alas, as the box of disco albums was ceremoniously and, I might add, anticlimactically exploded in center field the much heralded event was met with dead silence. For this, Bill Veeck was soon to learn, is not the stuff of which great events are made. Moreover for a crowd that had virtually terrorized two major league teams for nine solid innings, in an absolutely meaningless contest, to be relegated the role of distant spectators was more than an affront. It was, quite simply, a bore. Soon the mob, possessing an almost singular mind, trickled then poured over the railings driving the players and groundskeepers from the field. Here in an ugly display of defiance they had at last seized control of the games. It was a grand spectacle, possessing all the attributes: humor, pathos, excitement, tension, anger, control and, as one witnessed the defiling of sacred ground once tread upon by the great demigods of baseball more than a full measure of tragedy. For the GAMES had degenerated to THIS! It became clear to me as I watched the mob in ritual dance about the bonfire they had set in center field that a certain perversity pervades the land.

Since the advent of the eight hour day the single most subversive force facing the modern state is not poverty, it is not injustice, it is not technology, nor is it the looming energy crisis or climate change. It IS pure and simple boredom. Boredom is an evil that plagues every paradise. Against boredom the gods themselves struggle in vain. Boredom, moreover, gives birth to though. Thought, born of leisurely contemplation produces, in turn, ideals. Ideals produce dissatisfaction and social unrest. Is it any wonder then, that conservatism has waged a ceaseless battle, then, to restore the working conditions of the nineteenth century? Thoughts born of leisure, occuring outside the realm of the corporate state are, by definition, bad thoughts. Moral: all thoughts are bad thoughts. Answer: the masses shall not think. All else follows.

Boredom, that great scourge of mankind, has at last overcome the “Great Society”. Americans have put down their shovels, moved into the suburbs and exurbs, mortgaged their asses and declared that this is the promised land. But now, with the struggle at and end, we are overcome with a collective sense of purposelessness, what our 39th President would come to call “Malaise”. We have become directionless, confused, in a word bored. As the mob at Old Comiskey we have become part of meaningless rituals and unimportant struggles. It is a catharsis that offers no release. The mandarins of the State have intuitively grasped the central problem of our time: Boredom—born of leisure, father of unrest. The answer was at once paradoxical and obvious: if paradise is painful, let's have more paradise! Pain, it has been widely held, is deleterious to thought. It was a solution at once beneficial to both rulers and the ruled: consumerism. The strategy became at first to placate the masses with a veritable cornucopia of consumer goods. But, alas, even this did not suffice for in the immortal words of Mick Jagger “the pursuit of happiness just seems a bore”. We were back to square one. Enter: the GAMES!

De ja vu. We in the West have been here before. A similar crisis faced the ancient Romans. As the aristocracy bought up the land and introduced slave labor, people were uprooted from the soil and gravitated to the large cities in search of livelihood. Soon the State was confronted with large masses of dispossessed, unemployed people which the Romans called the Proletariat. Given plenty of time to contemplate their station, the Proletariat likewise began to trek upon the subversive road of thought. Dissatisfaction grew. They began to adopt strange new religions, to worship different Caesars. There were rumblings in the streets. The army was brought in. Desperately the leadership groped for a solution and stumbled upon a brilliant stratagem: “Let us put an end to this subversion, let us destroy it at its roots”, whispered the leadership to itself. “Let us consume their leisure time and entertain them as well. For it is writ: the masses shall not think. Therefore, let us give them the GAMES”!

At first the spectacles were unassuming. Circuses, freak shows, mock naval battles were organized to placate the Proletariat. But as the masses became satiated a curious phenomenon developed—a certain perversity overtook the event. The Proletariat began to demand to take part in the spectacle. A certain thirst developed that could only be quenched by blood. Gladiators were brought in and the mob assumed the role of Caesars, if not the gods themselves, deciding who was to live and who was to die. Here was the grandest spectacle of them all, the martial glory of Imperial Rome groveling before the feet of the Proletariat! But such sacrifices began to grow costly, whole species of animals gathered from around the known world were sacrificed, and more blood and treasure would be spent in the Coliseum, it was feared than in the conquest of Gaul. But the Roman Senate understood, as modern historians do not, that the military was here facing the most serious, most subversive threat to the realm yet encountered. The games must go on. At last they fell upon an answer: throw a few Christians to the lions. The solution had an efficiency that would please a modern industrial engineer. Here, in one move, not only would competing loyalties be eliminated, but the mob would be placated as well. It was a small enough price to play given Roman sensibilities. Have I been understood? Christianity was not the subversive force Christians and historians have made it out to be. Constantine would prove that soon enough. No, imperial Rome was threatened by a more powerful and elemental force than Christianity—Boredom. It was to alleviate boredom and incidentally to direct the ire of the mob toward the “foreignness” of other creeds that the Christians were thrown to the lions. GRAND SPECTACLE. Enter the GAMES.

America is finding itself in the same crucible of history. With the advent of economic prosperity and a great deal of leisure time the State is confronted with a crisis similar to that faced centuries ago by the ancient Romans. The first solution was, of course, consumerism, an advantage of modern capitalist enterprise not available to the Romans. But, alas, the populace has grown satiated. Only the most recalcitrant now openly hold that the Winnebago and the snowmobile are the end products of civilization; the culmination and ultimate justification for the human experiment. Indeed when America began to lose faith in Buick the corporate heads of state began to tremble. Therefore the mandarins went about presenting us with a new diversion, one patterned after the experience in Rome. Enter the National Football League, the Super bowl and the Political Arena.

Corporate America has for some time now offered us the spectacle of the Super Bowl, and the introduction of professional sports into the fabric of American life gives the masses an opportunity to not only vicariously participate in masculinity, but in glory. It was a similar heady experience felt by the hapless denizens of Rome in years gone by. It is splendid diversion. It is splendid fantasy. But it has its limitations. With the exception of throwing refuse unto the field, garbage and bottles at umpires and judges, or epithets at the players, the mob cannot participate in the action. But the masses feel frustrated at the limitations of being mere spectators. Like the Roman Proletariat it demands to become part of the action, indeed determine the outcome. It must, in the words of that classic anthem of the modern proletariat gets some “satisfaction”.

It has long been held that in America politics is a spectator sport. Indeed it has been said that politics is the largest spectator sport in America. The Presidential election, that quadrennial spectacle is the playoffs and the Super Bowl wrapped into a long melodrama. The masses not only participate as spectators but, as the Roman Proletariat, here decide the outcome. It is here that the greate gladiators of the political stage pit against one another for the favor of the multitude. And, like the gladiators of old, everything now rests on the performance. For the chemistry of the event involves the interaction of the principle players and the crowd. Indeed it is upon the success of the modern gladiator turned politician to inspire the mob—that is to overcome boredom—to fill the emptiness in their lives that the fate of the modern Caesar now rests. To wit: the single most devastating criticism leveled at Jimmy Carty—he cannot inspire the crowd!

One other parallel with ancient Rome must now be drawn. Like the Roman Proletariat, the American electorate is beginning to develop a distinctive perversity born of the need to be entertained by increasingly spectacular events. In the last 40 years we have seen one president murdered, several assassination attempts, one President forced to quit, one impeached on the most ridiculously transparent grounds, two lose re-election. We have witnessed “landslide” victories on both the “left” and “Right”. Lets put this in perspective. Watergate was not seen by most Americans as a constitutional crisis. It was not seen as a violation of civil rights or constitutional guarantees, of law or ethics. Watergate was seen by America as pure and simple entertainment. Here faced with a period of minimal political activity, America was swept away by the fascination of high political drama encompassing as it did all the hallmarks of a popular pulp novel. Here we bore witness to humor, farce, drama, tragedy, all rolled into one. It was a splendid diversion and a GRAND SPECTACLE. The same could be said of the Clinton impeachment. And, of course, Ronny....well he was our first television star turned president. The others....Johnson, Ford, Bush the Elder....failed the test and were in due course shown the door.

As I left the grand old ball yard on that dark humid night, I took a deep breath of the sultry air as I passed the line of patty wagons that ringed the arena and gazed over the plains of the mid-west. I thought I could sense in the rolling thunderclaps in the East and the South that in the words of Robert Kennedy these are not ordinary times. Indeed they have not been now for some time. With the proliferation of primaries and caucuses the political process has long been taken over by the masses. With the low voter turn-out in these contests the process has, in due course, been hijacked by single-interest groups and ideological purists as each party has turned to “litmus” and “loyalty” tests in a misguided effort to placate the mob. Recently with the help of right-wing talk radio, Fox noise, and corporate funding the town-hall meeting places have been ransacked by the so-called “Tea Baggers” employing brown-shirt tactics seeking to silence discussion and debate as payment for their full measure of participation in the GAMES. Herein lies the paradox, too much participation threatens the process, perhaps the republic itself. It has all the ingredients of Greek tragedy but promises to be a grand spectacle. With the elections of the likes of Ronny Reagan and Jim Bunning America has already demonstrated a proclivity for confusing celebrity with substance. Now, as with the crowd at Comiskey, the “Teabaggers” and other assorted brown shirts threaten by taking the field to destroy the very institutions of the republic and, with the arrival of Donald tRUMP, the vandalism is proceeding at record pace. If recent history is any guide, mere spectacle—as at Comiskey all those years ago—is being replaced with real vandalism.

Whatever happens, it promises to be interesting. It sure beats the hell out of two and a half innings of baseball.

An' Br'er Putin he jus' laugh and laugh

Impeach and Imprison.

July 5, 2019 Crossing The Rubicon, Under The Gun, Parasite Turned Tyrant

One cannot read The Federalist Papers, the compendium of newspaper essays written by Madison, Hamilton and Jay advocating the ratification of the Constitution drafted by the founders at Philadelphia in the summer of 1787 without a deep appreciation of the knowledge the founders had of ancient and medieval history.

I bring this up because the founding fathers would have known that not only were the Romans, under the ancient republic, wary of standing armies but that the Roman Senate—always fearing a military coup-- forbade a military commander to cross the river Rubicon and descend upon the capital unless invited to do so by the Senate. To do so was a capital offense and such a military commander risked execution for violating the law. Therefore, as the phrase suggests, 'crossing the Rubicon' has come to mean that to take such an action risks everything, even life itself, and that there is no undoing it; there is no way back.

Indeed, the founding fathers were wary of standing armies for just this reason: that they pose a clear and present danger to any republic, that their very existence puts the republic under 'the gun', as the sorry history of many a republic ancient, medieval and modern testifies. And it is for this reason that the U.S. Military—until the mid-twentieth century—was intentionally small.

It is in this context that one views the spectacle of tanks rumbling through the streets of the capital (albeit on tractor-trailers) with alarm. The founders would have likewise been alarmed. Our Caesar Disgustus has called out the military to enforce domestic law at the Southern Border. This is in violation of the Posse Commitas Act passed a century and a half ago, but that the military obeyed those orders. And now this. He has taken a national 'birthday' celebration and made a military spectacle of it, transformed a day of hot-dogs, beer and baseball into a jack-booted display of militarism; transformed a civic holiday into a nationalist orgy, where the military becomes the nation; a celebration of not who he are but whom we can destroy. The founding fathers, all of them, would be—if alive today—appalled.

The military is taught to obey orders, and Disgustus has no qualms about issuing such orders even in violation of law and constitution. In, perhaps, a dry run leading to a coup de tat in the event he loses the next election, the military—even over the objections of the top brass—is following his orders, even to the point of parading military hardware down the thoroughfares of the nation's capital. Even to the point of crossing the Rubicon.

Fascism by degree. First the military violating long-standing federal law and mustering at the border to enforce domestic law, next the military parade on the nation's birthday, then comes the concentration camps and the separation of families at the border. Now Disgustus proposes rounding up 'illegals' in massive dragnets sweeping our major cities.

Shades of Nazi Germany.

This is what happens when one is found sleeping with a collection of Hitler's speeches at one's bedstead. The parasite has turned tyrant.

“An Br'er Putin, he jus' laugh and laugh”

Impeach and Imprison.