Category Archives: History and Politics

Truth or Consequences

“We’ll take Consequences, please, for forty years.”

“Birchers, Birthers and the Tea Baggers, they switched names but it’s the same people,” Bill Maher said the other night on his show, referring to the lunatic fringe in America, a constant in American political life, ready for any right-wing idea, no matter how in your face idiotic.  Pithily put by Mr. Maher, I thought, and well worth a look.

The John Birch Society, founded in 1958, was an extreme right wing lunatic fringe group of people like Fred Koch, father of the two prevailing Koch Brothers.   It was the signature radical right ring conspiracy group of the twentieth century.  “Koch Industries makes products people use and is dedicated to a level playing field where everyone has an equal opportunity for success,” claims the television ad of the descendants of Fred Koch.  When Charles and David Koch were very young their father hired a Nazi as their nanny, literally, she went back to the Fatherland after Hitler took France.   Fred Koch had done some important work for Mr. Hitler prior to the war, building a refinery that provided  the German luftwaffe with the high-octane fuel it needed to support Mr. Hitler’s blitzkreig.  Fred Koch shared many of the famous German autocrat’s cherished beliefs about humanity and tried to influence his fellow Americans to adopt reasonable policies about unlimited wealth, personal freedom from government tyranny and so forth.  He died before he could do more to advance his important mission, but two of his sons took up his cause and did excellent and effective missionary work, until very recently behind the scenes, over the course of more than 40 years.

The Birthers were largely racist ignoramuses of the far right who tried to attack popular president Barack Obama’s legitimacy by claiming the records of his birth in Hawaii were fake, that Obama was born outside of the United States and therefore that his presidency was illegal under the constitution, his so-called presidency a gigantic liberal fraud against America.   This was reminiscent of Bircher claims that conservative president Dwight D. Eisenhower was a secret, or possibly unwitting, agent of the Commies.  

You see, the main thing is giving angry lunatics an actual thing to rally around, to chant, even if that thing is easily demonstrable bullshit.  “Build the Wall! Build the Wall!” “Lock Her Up! Lock Her Up!”   “USA!  USA!!!”   “Nobel Prize, Nobel Prize!”  “Block that Kick! Block that Kick!”  “Blood and Soil!  Blood and Soil!” — the words themselves matter much less than the popular channeling of violent mass emotion and the bonding communal catharsis it provides.

The heirs of the John Birch Society created a massive public influence machine that transformed lobbying, think tanks, foundations and academia before galvanizing the raw populist power of the “Birthers” to form a national anti-liberal grassroots movement of American patriots called The Tea Party, or as the ever-puckish Bill Maher calls these angry, gullible idiots, the Tea Baggers.   So popular and widespread was this spontaneous mass protest against the illegitimate tyrant Obama, apparently, that it was on the news every night, their colorful and passionate protests televised from every corner of our great nation, during much of the early days of the illegitimate mulatto’s reign.   The candidates who spoke their fiery anti-government words and identified as Tea Baggers swept into Congress in the midterms, funded by Dark Money speaking loudly — and anonymously– under the newly expanded First Amendment the Court created in Citizens United.

Funded, it emerges, by the fabulously wealthy sons of an original Bircher, the Tea Baggers were the creation of strategically brilliant people who, while probably not Birthers themselves, used the rage of Birthers to ignite a national shitstorm that served their purposes of opposing all government regulation and making sure an extreme, corporatist Supreme Court was put in place to protect the rights of the wealthiest and most deserving from the hoard of entitled parasites that do not even deserve prison cells, if we’re going to be brutally honest about it.

So, truth or consequences?  Ultra-right-wing federal judge for life Brett Kavanaugh was not on Trump’s original Federalist Society (think John Birch) list of possible Supreme Court nominees.   Turns out, shockingly, that Trump was lying when he guaranteed he would only appoint someone off that original list.   Kavanaugh’s name was placed at the top of a new list after Trump was presumably read a pertinent excerpt from Kavanaugh’s 2009  law review article  where the judge reverses his former positions about presidential power [1].  Now he believes, as opposed to when he was pressing for aggressive prosecution of sitting president Bill Clinton for lying about a blow job, (not to mention when he was secretly advising Bush and Cheney about the legality of torture, extra-judicial execution, kidnapping and so on) that the president should be immune from prosecution, subpoena, or even investigation, while sitting as president.    The job is just too hard to do that the president must be shielded from the trying distractions as civil or criminal investigations, Kavanaugh wrote thoughtfully.   Instead of “I have changed my beliefs on this 180 degrees since my partisan days working for Kenneth Starr” he wrote, demurely lawyerly, slimily,  “this is not something I necessarily believed in the 1980s or 90s”.  No shit, Sherlock.

Kavanaugh suddenly went to the top of the embattled Trump’s list, for some reason, presumably more than his dependable vote against investigation of the president and his belief in expansive presidential  pardon powers.   All of the judges on the Federalist Society list would appear to be vetted as reliable votes against a woman’s tenuous constitutional right to an abortion, so the Roe v. Wade part is probably not a big thing, though Kavanaugh has signaled clearly that he thinks Roe is a decision that a future court could legitimately overturn.  

It’s hard to imagine that nominating Kavanaugh wasn’t part of Trump’s long sales pitch to get Anthony Kennedy to step down now to give Trump another Supreme Court pick [2].   Kavanaugh had been Kennedy’s clerk (as had ultra-right wing black hole Neil Gorsuch) and Kennedy apparently trusted him to continue his legacy.  It is said that Kennedy himself suggested Kavanaugh.  I understand Kennedy’s son at Deutsche Bank, a man with business dealings with Trump Inc., also became part of the negotiations during the Artist of the Deal’s long deal-making dance with Justice Kennedy.  [3] 

Kavanuagh, unlike Kennedy, who, for all his conservatism was at least not overtly homophobic or misogynistic (hence “swing vote”), is unlikely to ever be a swing vote on anything, unless his right wing colleagues have a moment of moral awakening and appear in danger of voting against any part of the John Birch agenda incarnated in the absolutist views of the clear-eyed, fair-minded Koch Brothers and their impeccable ilk.   Kavanaugh will likely be confirmed 51-49, fair is fair, democracy means majority rule and fuck all that overheated liberal palaver about a true democracy always protecting the rights of minorities.  Fuck minorities.  51-49, get a stadium chanting that, along with “In Your Face!  In Your Face!”    

There is some new urgency now to get Kavanaugh confirmed right away.  A disloyal partisan agent has suddenly come forward, actually outing herself yesterday, claiming that a drunken teen-aged Kavanaugh held her down and pressed his hand over her mouth as he fumbled to remove her one piece bathing suit so that he could grind against her to better effect.  Another traitorous, ideologically-driven bitch like Anita Hill, a professor with a personal ax to grind, and personal problems, taking it out on a great man, a great, powerful, persecuted white man (in the case of Kavanaugh).   

Anita Hill testified about unwanted sexual advances her former boss at the EEOC (talk about ironies) made toward his attractive young subordinate.  The spin among the faithful men of the Judiciary Committee (who to a man treated Hill like a hostile witness, even avuncular Joe Biden did) was He Said/She Claims: inappropriate and uninvited sexual attention, perhaps, or maybe Hill had a mad, schoolgirl crush on her powerful boss and dreamed up all the sexy stuff? Hmmm?  Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac, as Henry Kissinger famously said, perhaps speaking from unthinkable experience.

With Anita Hill and Clarence Thomas,  Thomas claimed indignantly, since he is a black man, that subjecting him to answering Hill’s ridiculous sexual allegations made him the victim of a “high tech lynching”.   Sadly for the minorities of America that lynching was unsuccessful, and the victim has been on the court for decades now.  As Thurgood Marshall (who endured a year-long confirmation battle with segregationists before he finally took his seat on the Supreme Court) noted about blacks who suck up to powerful white racists, “there’s no difference between a black snake and a white snake. They’ll both bite.”

Dr. Christine Blasey Ford, the woman who says she was sexually assaulted as a teenager by drunken classmate Brett Kavanaugh and his friend, will be viciously and personally attacked, worse than Anita Hill was, have no doubt.  It will come out that she has seen a psychiatrist, the crazy broad, has severe personal problems, has admitted going to marriage counseling (wink, wink!), voted Democratic in every election since High School, admitted to smoking marijuana, has read The Communist Manifesto, hates our freedom, is a liar who took a fake polygraph test about her Kavanaugh allegations, administered by a Fellow Traveler (Commie-speak for a fellow Commie).   She has a vagina!   She is disgusting!   The good, virtuous, upright family man Kavanaugh, who comes from great stock, whose mother was a judge, is her victim!   The accusation is ancient history, can never be proved, by her own admission, her own admission!  It should never be mentioned, in the name of decency, for fucksake, besides, the Statute of Limitations has run out literally decades ago.  The Statute of Limitations!   HOW DARE SHE?!!!  Her daughter is a slut, her husband is a promiscuous homosexual (who buggers the occasional male goat, see attached GIF), she brazenly showed young Kavanaugh the provocative outline of her breasts and vulva in that clingy bathing suit.  What was he supposed to do, a red-blooded American boy, and drunk like that?  And if he later lied about it?  SO?!!! What is your fucking point?  His friends all back him up, swore he wasn’t lying, and we have a letter from 65 women who knew him in High School all saying he never once groped them or tried to pull their clothes off or even kiss them against their will.  He was a perfect gentlemen, these 65 non-partisan women all agree, PERFECT.  HOW FUCKING DARE YOU?!!!  Right on the eve of his historically expedited confirmation!  Very fucking convenient, freedom haters!

Get the stadium crowd ready to rumble!   “Lock her up!   Lock her up!!!!”  And God Bless these United States of the Birchers, Birthers and Baggers.   38% lunatic support for unreasoning American values is good enough for their gerrymandered purposes.  51-49 in the Senate, Fair is fair!  Fair is Fair!   Democracy!  Democracy!   USA!   USA!!!!!

 

[1]  Kavanaugh writing in 2009:

Having seen first-hand how complex and difficult that job is, I believe it vital that the President be able to focus on his never-ending tasks with as few distractions as possible. The country wants the President to be “one of us” who bears the same responsibilities of citizenship that all share. But I believe that the President should be excused from some of the burdens of ordinary citizenship while serving in office. THIS IS NOT SOMETHING I NECESSARILY THOUGHT in the 1980s or 1990s. Like many Americans at that time, I believed that the President should be required to shoulder the same obligations that we all carry. But in retrospect, that seems a mistake.

Looking back to the late 1990s, for example, the nation certainly would have been better off if President Clinton could have focused on Osama bin Laden without being distracted by the Paula Jones sexual harassment case and its criminal investigation offshoots.  To be sure, one can correctly say that President Clinton brought that ordeal on himself, by his answers during his deposition in the Jones case if nothing else. And my point here is not to say that the relevant actors—the Supreme Court in Jones, Judge Susan Webber Wright, and Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr—did anything other than their proper duty under the law as it then existed.

But the law as it existed was itself the problem, particularly the extent to which it allowed civil suits against presidents to proceed while the President is in office. With that in mind, it would be appropriate for Congress to enact a statute providing that any personal civil suits against presidents, like certain members of the military, be deferred while the President is in office. The result the Supreme Court reached in Clinton v. Jones —that presidents are not constitutionally entitled to deferral of civil suits—may well have been entirely correct; that is beyond the scope of this inquiry. 

and

In particular, Congress might consider a law exempting a President—while in office—FROM CRIMINAL PROSECUTION AND INVESTIGATION, INCLUDING FROM QUESTIONING BY CRIMINAL PROSECUTORS OR DEFENSE COUNSEL.  Criminal investigations targeted at or revolving around a President are inevitably politicized by both their supporters and critics. As I have written before, “no Attorney General or special counsel will have the necessary credibility to avoid the inevitable charges that he is politically motivated—whether in favor of the President or against him, depending on the individual leading the investigation and its results.”

he also writes, somewhat comically now:

AS FOR JUDICIAL APPOINTMENTS, STRUCTURAL CONSIDERATIONS FAVOR A MORE INTENSIVE INQUIRY BY THE SENATE.   Article III judges are appointed for life and—unlike executive branch officials— are not subordinate to their appointing presidents.   That changes the constitutional dynamic.

full article

 

[2]   In fact, as The New York Times reports, the 81-year-old’s announcement was the culmination of a carefully orchestrated 17-month campaign by the Trump administration to remake the Supreme Court before the 2018 midterms, when there is an outside chance that Republicans could lose their majority.

source

[3]     [Trump] cultivated a relationship with Justice Kennedy’s son, Justin, who worked closely with the Trump Organization in his role at Deutsche Bank as the global head of real-estate capital markets, according to the Times.

see above

Notes about the Law

The years immediately before World War One, then known as The Great War, were known in America as the Age of Optimism.  Progressive idealism was on the rise, but it is, of course, more complicated than that.  Woodrow Wilson, a progressive in many ways, was also sympathetic to the Ku Klux Klan and was mesmerized by D.W. Griffith’s Birth of A Nation, a film glorifying the Klan as modern day knights and saviors.  The Klan was merely doing what was right, bravely defending the south’s honor, particularly the honor of its white women,  against the savage Negro, unaccountably vindictive, brutal and prone to raping, according to the film.   “History written in lightning” gushed Wilson after screening the film at the White House.  Klan membership soared during the Age of Optimism.

This “Second Klan” was also instrumental in the passage of the constitutional amendment that resulted in Prohibition, allying itself with the anti-immigrant wing of the temperance movement.  The Klan burned down bars, beat up or lynched distillers, tippling Italians, Jews, Negroes, what have you.    Meantime Wilson was drumming up American support for the glorious adventure in Europe with the brilliant, cynical, highly effective Committee for Public Information, also known as the Creel Committee, headed by the foremost advertising genius of the day, George Creel.   The progressive Wilson also passed the now infamous Espionage Act of 1917, a law designed to gag his political opponents.   A few years later, at the height of Klan membership (over 2 million proud, card carrying, sheet wearing assholes) the Immigration Act of 1924 was passed, restricting immigration. 

The Age of Optimism would not survive the colossal carnage of The Great War and the events that followed.   It was replaced by the Roaring Twenties, the modernist overthrow of the old ways in an era of wild stock market speculation that could create sudden wealth.   This was happening against the backdrop of widespread lawless consumption of recently criminalized alcohol.   Organized crime was born and criminal fortunes and empires built attendant thereto, then — The Great Depression.  Oh, well.   The generals of our eternal War on Drugs do not see any connection, no lesson of history to be learned here.  Oh, well.

   ii

I heard an interesting discussion of the history of the Fourteenth Amendment, on a non-partisan podcast by the National Constitution Center.  Two constitutional scholars discussed the creation and passage of the post Civil War amendment that ensures no state can deny any American the full rights, privileges, immunities and equal protection of the law.  Neither the scholars nor Jeffrey Rosen, CEO of the Center, mentioned the ninety year judicially imposed coma of the Fourteenth Amendment.  I think they should have.   The Supreme Court nullified the amendment and supporting laws less than ten years after the Fourteenth Amendment became the law of the land.. 

I originally thought “racist Supreme Court judges, the same bitches who decided the sickeningly slavery embracing Dred Scott case in 1857 decided the fate of the 14th Amendment”.  A quick query on google, to Wikipedia, showed me that the Supreme Court had a different composition by 1873 and that a new majority voted to nullify the 14th Amendment’s protections.   Men did not live that long back then.   The second majority ruled that the amendment and its protections simply did not apply, for a convoluted series of uninteresting judicial reasons, to the states of the former confederacy, or to any state.  

Writing for the majority one justice declared that, in any case, the white slaughters who brought the cases against Louisiana were not even the intended beneficiaries of the amendment.   Former slaves were, and as for them, the Negroes were done being the “special favorites of the law” after almost a decade of freedom.   Not until an 1868 enforcement law made under the Fourteenth Amendment was revived in the federal case brought against the Klan members who killed Chaney, Schwerner and Goodman in Mississippi, almost a century after its Supreme Court nullification, was the 14th Amendment ever enforced as originally intended.

The aptly named Slaughterhouse Cases that signaled the end of enforcement of the Fourteenth Amendment are often described quite blandly, as in this circumspect example:

The Slaughterhouse Cases represented a temporary reversal in the trend toward centralization of power in the federal government. More importantly, in limiting the protection of the privileges and immunities clause, the court unwittingly weakened the power of the Fourteenth Amendment to protect the civil rights of blacks.   source

Temporary (only ninety years or so).  Unwittingly.   Like  Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, like the recent 5-4 Supreme Court ruling that enforcement of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 is no longer necessary, since racism is now officially dead here in the USA!  USA!!!!   As proven by the election of an illegitimate Kenyan Muslim to our nation’s highest office.  USA!   USA!!!!  Nothing to see here.  History is fake.  Get Kavanaugh in there before the Republicans commanding 51-49 majority in the Senate is overturned in the upcoming elections.   Hurry, hurry!   

Irrationality 101

For most human purposes, rationality takes a back seat.   All that is necessary for human action, most of the time, is a rationale, a slogan, an emotionally resonant excuse.   It is hard to think of a collective misfortune more horrible than war.   Yet every war is always somehow justified, even when it is inexcusable aggression, illegal under the spongey law of nations and conducted solely for the profit of a few who don’t care how many others must die so they can grow richer and more powerful.  Justified.  Read your history book, read virtually any history book.   War, unfortunate, yes, hell, of course, but necessary, you see, because… that guy over there is Hitler.  He’s fucking HITLER!   Nuff said.

My sister and I had a good laugh when she pointed out a howlingly imbecilic line I’d written in an otherwise promising first draft about our family life.   Describing our nightly fights around the dinner table as a battle field I went a step too far.   My sister read the line with beautiful archness: “the brutal battlefield of our family dinner table was as nightmarish as any war scene you can imagine.”    ANY war scene, she repeated, with deft intonation for maximum ironic emphasis.  In the beat it took me to reply she reeled off a string of famous atrocities that left no doubt of the idiocy of my claim.   Instead of a reply I burst out laughing.  We had the best laugh we’ve had together in years.   Then I caught my breath, pulled myself together and deleted the absurd line.  

There I had a rare moment of good fortune, somebody gently pointing out my foolishness, and doing it with humor and superb understatement that made me see it for myself.   The laugh made it undeniable, how laughable my claim had been.   I submit that this moment was an outlier in general human affairs, a rare moment when rational good sense triumphs over a feeling of poetic license, shoddy but justifiable thinking, emotional overstatement.    

Yes, of course, no child should ever be subjected to the mistreatment my sister and I regularly endured from our parents.   Yes, of course, I have a right to be hurt and indignant, even angry, about the abuse we were made to suffer.   But was it really as horrific as Turks on horseback driving helpless Armenians into a river to drown, worse than the Janjaweed, ISIS, the viciousness of the fanatical SS?

Eh, probably not, now that you put it that way.

But there’s the thing about irrationality, as a general rule it doesn’t stop anyone.    We have an irrational chaos-monger insisting he will make our country great again, apparently by wiping out every vestige of decency that people have fought for centuries to achieve here.   All he needs is a slogan and his base will roar, full-throated support, chant anything, no matter how idiotic.  “Drain the Swamp!” which they chanted during his historic presidential campaign, a slogan he told an interviewer he had his doubts about, but then decided was great when he saw how the crowds took to it, was actually translated from the original Italian– it was a mantra of Benito Mussolini as he rose to power [1].  Many people are saying Mussolini was a fascist, but there are many views, on many sides, on many sides.  Just sayin’.

There is no point feeling superior to a stadium full of desperate people chanting “lock her up!” or “Fake NEWS!” or “Suck my ass!!!”.   No reason to feel superior to a strutting, supremely confident-seeming cruel bully with seemingly very few actual thoughts in his head.  As a species, we are no more rational than anyone in that Make America Great Again crowd.   Which is not to say we don’t each have the ability to be more rational — all it takes is somebody stating the truth in a way we can hear it.   After my sister and I had a good laugh, there was no way to deny how laughable my claim about the atrociousness of our family war was.   Is being called a “fucking cobra” as bad as being locked in a church with everybody in your town and having it burned to the ground?   I suppose not.

And so it goes down virtually every issue we constantly debate in our battling society where unfair competition for material possessions is shrugged off as merely the law of nature.  One of the “debates” that drove me most insane during those madcap Cheney-Dubya days was the torture debate.  A fucking “debate” that will not fucking die, I might add.  We had an administration determined to use practices we’d long ago signed on, as part of the civilized world, to ban forever.   All that was necessary to overcome all those treaties was a horrific event followed by convening a small team of partisan lawyers to craft an argument — how idiotic an argument didn’t matter, just a secret memo to justify it in the odd event anyone was ever held accountable for the illegal program.  

In light of the secret torture memo a hard kick in the balls was now “enhanced interrogation” instead of “torture” because it was not as painful as the shutdown of a major organ system.  Nobody in their right mind could argue that a little kick in the balls is as bad as, say, your lungs shutting down.  Are you fucking crazy, you’re going to claim a kick in the balls, or sleep deprivation, or a freezing cell, or stress positions, or “walling” or water-boarding is as bad as your goddamn heart stopping?  Fuck off, peace bitch, we reframed this “debate” and there’s nothing you can do about it.

The other day I had a tiny moment of blessed relief, when a friend who loves to argue somehow drew me back into the fucking torture debate for a moment.   “You’re saying even if you have the person who planted the ticking time bomb that’s about to kill 5,000 children, you can’t use torture to make him talk.”   I took a breath.  

“In that one in a million scenario, where you have the actual guilty fuck strapped to a chair, and in a matter of minutes 5,000 kids will die if you don’t get him to talk– yeah, sure, put the fuck on a water-board, electrodes on his balls, the works.  I’ll fucking torture him myself, if we somehow know for sure that this is the actual psycho who planted the bomb.   The murderous fanatic probably won’t talk in any event, but it’s worth a shot, to save that stadium full of kids.    But the likelihood of that imagined scenario ever happening  is less than a lightning strike, winning the lottery,  inheriting 300 million from dad, like David and Charles Koch did.” 

In that liberating moment I felt free from the moronic “ticking time bomb scenario” hypothetical always used to justify torturing anyone who might possibly “hate our freedom”.   But it was a momentary feeling of relief.  My friend, although he backed off a bit, still seemed to believe that there are situations where, the absurdity of the highly unlikely (how about NEVER) “ticking time bomb” hypothetical notwithstanding, that you would be justified in torturing somebody.   It reminded me of our long ago torturous debate on the subject via email when I eventually asked in exasperation: what next, are you going to start actually torturing me?    To which he wrote something to the tune of: Oh, but I already am…  

So here we have a man, highly intelligent, well-read, a skilled debater, a moral person with nuanced political views, many of them progressive, for whom a “hypothetical” with a likelihood of 0.001% is good enough to justify, in some cases, an otherwise morally unjustifiable position.   Not to say I could picture him torturing anyone (not physically, anyway) but that idiotic hypothetical is all he needs to keep arguing the position of the most vicious, ruthless, cruel and lawless among us.  

Imagine the average person, without my friend’s fine education, generally refined moral awareness, wide reading, long professional experience making and dissecting arguments,  confronted with an irrefutable bit of logical sounding rhetoric like “we got to fight ’em over there so we don’t have to fight ’em here!”   Jesus, that makes perfect sense.   We just need to go over there, kill or capture all of ’em, detain the live ones forever, torture ’em — end of problem!  Next!

You see, they hate our fucking freedom.   They’re not like us.  They don’t love their children, they use them as human shields.  They’re terrorists who hate us because we’re better than them.  You get that?   They have a massive cultural inferiority complex that makes them insane.  Somebody who would do what they do is not a human in the same sense that a middle class white American is a human.   They’d kill us all, and certainly not hesitate to torture us, in much worse ways than the many techniques in the $10,000,000 manual our legal team deemed totally legally defensible.  You see, we’re talking savage, primitive fucking fucks here.   You do understand the difference, don’t you?  

On the other hand, my dear fellow American, you can see the obvious flaws in that stinking pile of horse diarrhea.  I know you can.   You just have to look directly at it, get a real whiff, think of your friend from school, the kid from Pakistan, a self-effacing, warm, funny guy…  well, you would exempt Fahrid from any torture program, if you could…

 

 

[1] According to Madeline Albright in her recent book Fascism: A Warning.

This is Why I Love Naomi Klein

This Sunday the Grey Skank is devoting their entire magazine to a single article about catastrophic climate change.   I heard an interview   with the author of the long article, who seemed a very bright, well-informed and reasonable fellow.   As you would expect from someone who writes for the Grey Lady.   That said, I am always suspicious of the first drafts of history written by the New York Times.   Humankind, the Times apparently concludes, is at fault for the climate mess we are in.   We were not up to the challenges of keeping up the momentum to halt climate catastrophe that was developing up to 1988.  We all failed, it seems, human nature itself dooming us to our doom.

The New York Times often tends to leave out one or two crucial factors, for no doubt excellent reasons that, most likely, have nothing to do with the myopia of their distinctly upper middle class worldview [1].   I always read the Times with an eye toward the story not being told and consult other sources to  get as much of the rest of the story as I can.  My father, who read the Times cover to cover every day,  always supplemented his reading of the Times with other publications.  As an adult now myself, I understand why the Times alone is not enough to keep us fully informed on the pressing issues of the day.

Which is where a journalist like the brilliant Naomi Klein comes in.  I have always been engaged by what she has to say.   When she writes of the Times piece  “this work of history is filled with insider revelations about roads not taken that, on several occasions, made me swear out loud”  I want to know exactly why.   I had the feeling the Times was going to somehow partially miss the mark with their important landmark piece, Naomi Klein was about to tell me how they’d missed it.   You can read her recent article here.

When I think about the New York Times, so valuable in many ways, I often think:  fucking earthlings…  If you are in their demographic, it is a wonderful part of Sunday sitting in the cozy family room unwrapping and sharing the gifts of their vast Sunday edition.  If you are poor, disenfranchised, homeless, well, the reading of the Sunday Times is not as great a gift.  Let’s just leave it there.  

Read Naomi Klein’s article in conjunction with the Times magazine this Sunday and you will get more of the picture than the Grey Skank will give you herself.  Here is Naomi Klein’s good news:

And the good news — and, yes, there is some — is that today, unlike in 1989, a young and growing movement of green democratic socialists is advancing in the United States with precisely that vision. And that represents more than just an electoral alternative — it’s our one and only planetary lifeline.

Yet we have to be clear that the lifeline we need is not something that has been tried before, at least not at anything like the scale required. When the Times tweeted out its teaser for Rich’s article about “humankind’s inability to address the climate change catastrophe,” the excellent eco-justice wing of the Democratic Socialists of America quickly offered this correction: “*CAPITALISM* If they were serious about investigating what’s gone so wrong, this would be about ‘capitalism’s inability to address the climate change catastrophe.’ Beyond capitalism, *humankind* is fully capable of organizing societies to thrive within ecological limits.”

Their point is a good one, if incomplete. There is nothing essential about humans living under capitalism; we humans are capable of organizing ourselves into all kinds of different social orders, including societies with much longer time horizons and far more respect for natural life-support systems. Indeed, humans have lived that way for the vast majority of our history and many Indigenous cultures keep earth-centered cosmologies alive to this day. Capitalism is a tiny blip in the collective story of our species.

source

Of course this is an unthinkable thought for the “liberal” New York Times.  After all, it is beyond dispute that Reagan and Thatcher defeated Soviet Communism back in their day and so the only viable economic ideology in the world today, now that socialism was invalidated, you dig, is the global “free market.”  Yes, there are problems with capitalism, the Times seems to agree, but picture your retirement portfolio without the dynamic, ever churning roulette wheel of the stock market making sure you don’t have to eat cat food in your old age. In a certain way the stance of the NY Times is marked by a lack of creative imagination.

Imagining a different and better world, analyzing the clear brutality of this global “free market” we are all being sold, for billions of human beings, animal life and the planet itself , and writing about it vividly, is but one reason I love Naomi Klein.

 

 

[1] In a story about the good news that, statistically, black American are now living almost as long as white Americans, the decisive factors, according to the Times, have little to do with the extreme stresses of institutionalized racism, apparently.   Poor dietary and lifestyle choices of black Americans are the culprit, it turns out.  Jeez, good thing we have the fucking New York Times to enlighten us!   You can read more about that, and the wonderful article itself,  here.

The need for accurate information as the basis for reasonable actions

It is impossible to make a good decision if you don’t have all the facts you need to consider.  Information, it seems absurd to point out, is necessary for making informed decisions.  The partisan oversimplification of complex problems, while good for marketing on hats and bumper stickers, and winning partisan elections (of course) is a big part of the problem of trying to be an effective citizen in a democracy.   “Who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?” is no longer the punchline of a joke, we are up against it daily from the highest levels of our contentious, embattled government.  Nowhere was it more explicitly stated than in the president’s remarks to a Veterans of Foreign Wars convention in Kansas City the other day:

President Donald Trump: “Just stick with us. Don’t believe the crap you see from these people, the fake news. … Just remember, what you’re seeing and what you’re reading is not what’s happening.”   [1]  

I heard a great conversation between Jeremy Scahill and a historian named Nikhail Pal Singh on the podcast Schahill hosts in which the idiotic, ahistorical oversimplification in American politics, which leads to the destruction of political intelligence, was very productively kicked around between them.  The conversation was part of Scahill’s admirable ongoing effort to provide critical historical context. I have transcribed the section of the recent Intercepted podcast that caught my ear (the interview begins at 40:30).

After noting that “POTUS” sees the world in starkly competitive, transactional terms, and has simplistically externalized evil on to the Other, the historian and Scahill discuss the need to have a realistic conversation about solving world problems now, while we have the resources and ability to do it.  The historian, Nikhail Pal Singh, nails a lot of important insights in a row.

Nikhail Pal Singh:  A lot of the ways Americans like to talk about what’s wrong really have the most fanciful aspects to them, they’re almost completely abstract.   The idea that somehow the problem is the porous border, or the problem is Russia, and Russian interference, these don’t connect really to any concrete analysis of what is actually going on in the world, or what is actually going on in the country.    

As long as that’s true we’re always going to be flailing about and casting about for explanations for what ails us that don’t really match up with reality. 

Jeremy Scahill:  (Asks Pal Singh what he thinks about the loose political use of of highly charged words like “treason”.   Scahill then plays clips of Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer and others solemnly comparing Trump’s recent performance with Putin at Helsinki to “Pearl Harbor” and “9/11”, overwrought hyperbole that strips events of their historical meaning and context.)

Scahill asks how this kind of historically tone-deaf rhetoric will “impact our political intelligence going forward, and also our ability to actually keep a grasp on historical context?”

Nikhail Pal Singh:   These kind of remarks just illustrate the lack of knowledge of U.S. history and how profound that is among many of these commentators.  How do we attain political intelligence?   How do we attain the kind of understanding and ability to make assessments in an information environment that’s filled with uncertainty and that’s always going to have dimensions of uncertainty in it?  

How do we create the basis for common action in a period in which many of the most powerful forces in the world are actually invested in the fragmentation of communities, in the fragmentation of people’s ability to think clearly and act collectively? 

How do we build up, or rebuild, collective capacities, because I think the best information comes from people being able to reason in common in a context in which they can inform each other and seek out new information, if they don’t have adequate information. And I think the time frame of a lot of what happens, also makes that very, very difficult to do.

As a historian, you know, when I read those kinds of comments I try not to despair, because I look at it and I think it’s just silly to compare this summit [with Putin] to the worst moments in American history in a country that essentially committed genocide against an indigenous people, dropped atomic bombs on Asia, killed three million people in Southeast Asia,  has barely been a liberal democracy for fifty years, having lived its entire career as a country built on white supremacy.  I mean, these are the broad, basic facts of American history.

I think a lot of people understand now, a lot more people understand, a lot more people, I think, are thinking about what it might mean to try to make the United States into a decent place.  But, obviously, the forces that are arrayed against us in doing this, most of all the Trumpists and white supremacists, but then, also, the centrist Democrats who really would like all of this to go away so they could to get back to business as usual, are kind of in the way of that broader, popular recognition of the need to look at our own country and to think about what it means to heal ourselves, to really correct the course we’ve taken in foreign affairs, and domestically, at the same time.

Jeremy Scahill:  OK “comrade” Nikhail Pal Singh, how much is Putin paying you for that “whataboutism” that you’re pretending is actually history? 

Nikhail Pal Singh:   I’ve said this before, and I don’t think it’s whataboutism to say that the biggest threats in the United States come from decisions that have been taken, legally, in full transparency, within our own system.   Citizens United, Shelby v. Holder [2], one unleashes the power of corporate money and dark money into our politics with no limit and the other guts the Voting Rights Act in a country that has been built on racial segregation and racial violence.    How both those things happen in this moment, I think, is very,  very significant in understanding where we found ourselves in 2016. 

And you didn’t need the Russian intervention for those things to happen.  Those things were driven internally, they were driven by the plutocratic insurgency on the one hand, that equates money and speech, and they were driven by the longer legacy of divisive, racial, white supremacy politics which has never been content with the idea of the United States actually being a democracy that included the diverse people who have been part of building this country for over two hundred years, many of whom were brought here involuntarily.  So we haven’t made our peace, as a country, with that history.

At the end of his life Martin Luther King Jr. outlined the problems we face in becoming what he called a beloved community, a community that could act in concert and think of itself as such.  And he called them the interrelated evils of Racism, Materialism and Militarism.

Racism, Materialism and Militarism are still really what bedevil us.  Neither the Republican party, which is certainly more culpable for the situation we find ourselves in, nor the Democratic party which is certainly equally beholden to materialism and militarism, at the very least, want to deal with these issues.  Neither really wants to address how we’ve lost the ability to function in some way as a polity, addressing the things that are most urgently at stake for most people. 

source

Rarely, if ever, have I heard the issue of America’s historical ignorance, and how it affects electoral politics and policy,  put more cogently or concisely.  These questions make a thoughtful citizen think hard about the predictable price those who never bother to even glance at the lessons of history must pay, along with the rest of us. 

Without information, and a working knowledge of the worst mistakes desperate people have made in the past, various deals struck with various devils in different ages (often weak, tortured, cruel men posing as “strongmen”) you and me, my friend, might as well stick a fucking fork in ourselves.  

As no less an authority than America’s foremost authority points out:

“Just stick with us. Don’t believe the crap you see from these people, the fake news. … Just remember, what you’re seeing and what you’re reading is not what’s happening.”

Ignorance is bliss, fellow citizens, until they send guys with guns to force you to come with them.

 

[1]  source

 [2]  This disastrous, democracy-slashing 2013 Supreme Court decision, another 5-4 partisan decision, hangs on the vote of “swing vote” Justice “My Legacy!  Mr. Trump, my legacy!!” Kennedy who voted with the conservative corporatist block in this stunning, unappealable decision.   The conservative justices decided that in a post-racial society that had already elected a Negro as president there was no longer any need to scrutinize the voting practices in formerly overtly racist states, states that had long histories of unconstitutionally disenfranchising voters based on race and party affiliation (hence the Voting Rights Act of 1965).    The truth of this post-racial state of affairs was “affirmed” by many of the states in question immediately passing new restrictions on minority voting.  

USA!   USA!!!!

A Cause for Optimism about Democracy

I thought I had possibly dreamed this, but apparently not.  

Our president, the man who can’t seem to stop bragging about his historically large 106,000 vote Electoral College mandate (take those close votes in three states and flip them and Hillary wins), was rebuked 98-0 by a viciously divided senate the other day.

It happened like this.  He met with Russian strongman Vladimir Putin last week in Finland.  The strongman apparently easily lifted our large president over his head several times during their secret meeting, greatly impressing our great leader.   After the meeting Putin was wearing the smile of the cat with the canary in its mouth and our president seemed even more childish, confused and foolish than usual.   Putin apparently asked that he be allowed, in return for granting the Mueller team access to twelve recently indicted Russians, to interrogate a similar number of American diplomats including the former American ambassador to Russia.  Our president said he would consider it.   The Senate, bitter partisans who can agree on nothing, immediately voted 98-0 to “shut the fuck up, you imbecilic asshole!”

I find a reason for optimism in that unanimous vote by hacks for both supremely corrupt pay-to-play parties.  There is a limit, ladies and gentlemen, to what someone who has contempt for democracy, fairness and even honesty can be allowed to do, even if he’s the almost unanimously elected president of the United States.  I like to think so anyway.

Here’s a short article about the vote.

 

Healthcare as a human right

The radical right is consistent, most of the time, I have to say that for them.   They latch on to something like “Right to Life” (no abortion under any circumstances) or “Right to Work” (the legal right of the employer to fire your ass at any time, with or without cause) and ride it to the end.   Their disciplined relentlessness is impressive, even if it’s not always good for democracy, people, animals, plants, children, old people, babies, the environment, health, human dignity, human survival.   The important thing is that they give their supporters a rallying cry to scream, a cry that never changes, if it works.   That these phrases may not bear much scrutiny as ideas in the marketplace of ideas is not the point.  Winning is the point, the only point.

As Republican icon Ronald Reagan said, either being pithy or already in the first throes of dementia: “the right to life ends at birth.”   “Right to Life” means that the right of a fetus to be born is absolute, more absolute than a mother’s right not to die from complications of pregnancy, far greater than the right of a fourteen year old girl not to have to go through the trauma of giving birth to her rapist’s baby.   Like every right extended, except to wealth that has perpetual life (corporate folks, persons just like you and me except they never die) it terminates at a reasonable time.   In the case of an unwanted baby, the right to life ends as soon as the poor bastard is born, breathing air and crying.   When the unwanted child is born society says “you’re on your own now, motherfucker, we protected you for nine months, your own mother wanted to kill you, but we saved you from that murderous bitch.  Now get the fuck out and get a job, asshole. And try not to stink so much… can’t you change that sagging diaper already?  No self-respect, you little shitass…”   Nothing to see here.

The way America’s wealthiest and least scrupulous organized themselves to make sure Obama was not able to get bipartisan support for anything, especially his hated plan to give access to healthcare to more Americans; priceless.  Jane Mayer reminds us that when Ted Kennedy’s death in 2009 left a vacancy in the Senate, a flood of dark money was unloosed immediately before the special election in Massachusetts.   After that election unknown Republican Scott Brown would sit in the seat occupied by a Democrat (a Kennedy, in fact, Ted took over JFK’s seat in 1962) from time immemorial.   Read all about it here.  

The Koch influence machine (the Kochtopus, as admirers dubbed it)  had secretly pulled off a stunning, history defying upset in a blue state that hadn’t had a Republican senator in generations.   Wikipedia is pretty even-handed about the invisible tentacles of the Kochtopus:

As of January 8, 2010, Martha Coakley raised over US$5.2 million in total, and had $937,383 cash on hand. Scott Brown had $367,150 cash on hand. Brown spent $450,000 on television advertisements, while Coakley spent $1.4million.[99] A week before the general election, Brown raised $1.3million from over 16,000 donors in a 24-hour fund-raising effort. Reports also indicated that Brown raised an average of $1 million per day the week prior to the election.[100]

The effect of this historic upset was that the Senate, with Brown, was now 59-41 Democratic, meaning Obama’s majority in the Senate, although impressive, was no longer filibuster-proof.   The loophole now existed for the entitled vulture class to defeat the hated president’s hated, albeit mostly conservative-think-tank-created, healthcare proposal.   The compromise that became known as the Affordable Care Act, when it was passed, had many, many faults, none of them ever fixed.  The ACA contained a few huge improvements over America’s past ruthless health insurance regime, the biggest being the abolition of the vicious “pre-existing condition” loophole that allowed health insurance companies to only insure people who were good bets not to need massively expensive healthcare.   The business of America is business, how it is fair that some fuck with cancer expects to get all those expensive treatments and drugs paid by insurance?   Pre-existing condition, totally unfair to make the insurer pay!

Some socialist types, and others, believe that included among the rights of citizenship in a wealthy society is the right to decent, affordable health care, administered through a publicly supervised health care system.   Americans pay by far the highest prices for our health care, far more than the citizens of other wealthy, industrialized nations, yet our health outcomes are no better than most places, except, arguably, at the very top end of American medical care.   Wealthy patients can always seek out and buy that top high-end healthcare, if they want to pay for it (and why not? they deserve it).  

The rest of us believe we have a right to not die of the many preventable and treatable diseases that are always stalking us.  A “right to life” if you will.   50,000 or more dead Americans every year who die because their only access to health care is an emergency room where the ER doc will say to a family member “oh shit, if only we’d seen him two years ago…”   These unfortunate American dead and their loved ones unwittingly make a sacrifice for all of us, a small price to pay for the freedom of eternal, legally created “persons” to live in perfect liberty, enjoying maximum profits protected by a friendly government, with the populist cover of a manipulated mob of confused, angry, powerless people chanting “USA!   USA!!!”.

I get my health care through the problematic Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.  I can tell you dozens of ways the law sucks, and have written about many of them here (click the category Obamacare to read ’em).   Top of my list is the difficulty of actually finding care in this corrupt, lobbyist-written regime.   After years of rabid Republican opposition to the law, and more than fifty attempts to repeal it in its entirety (check ’em out), some elected Democrats are organizing to fight back with the hated “public option” (something that already exists and works pretty well for millions of Americans 65 and older, as well as in most other wealthy nations).   Seventy Congressional Democrats have apparently formed a caucus to discuss lowering the age of Medicare to cover even that fucking unwanted baby who selfishly insists on its right to care after the government has already zealously protected its ungrateful little ass for nine long months.

Here’s the petty detail that bugs me today, as I work on rehabbing my aching knees.  It took me about a month to find and get an appointment with a sports medicine doctor for a referral to Physical Therapy (PT).   A rep for my health-insurance company (think of how fucking asinine it is to give people health care via private, profit-driven insurance companies…) assured me that referrals are no longer required by their company for things like PT.   Every place I contacted about PT disagreed.  Obviously, they said, you have to have a doctor’s referral before we can give you PT.  Made sense.   I finally was able to see the sports medicine doctor who immediately referred me for PT.   Then it was a few weeks of searching, not getting calls back from the “in-network” PT offices where I left  messages, until I finally hobbled over to a place I could walk to that accepted my insurance and where I could have PT.    

Note this:  every week I searched, without finding service, every obstacle I had to crawl over to get to the next step in finding treatment, was money in the pocket of the insurance company.  Multiply my search by a few thousand searches, by a million, and you begin to get the idea of how lucrative it is to make this basic of medical care, finding and seeing a doctor in your “network”, so difficult.

There was one last hoop to jump through on my ailing knees, now weeks and weeks, months, in fact, after they’d become acutely painful.  I’d have do be “evaluated” for PT for my knees, by doing a half squat with my back against the wall of the PT room.  I did the half squat and was told now all I had to do was go home and wait to see how many sessions my insurance company would approve.  You see, the doctor is not the one who decides what’s medically necessary, nor is the physical therapist, it is someone at your insurance company who decides exactly what course of treatment, under the current law, you are entitled to.  Fair is fair, they’re the ones paying, you dig.

They decided I was entitled to seven sessions of PT, twice a week.  If you do the math, the approved PT would last just over three weeks.  Not much time to fix a problem that had taken a year or more to get this bad, now I just had to wait until they got the go ahead from my insurance company.  A week later I was able to start PT.  It is slow going, physical therapy.   No long-festering physical ailment can be cured in seven sessions.   After session six I asked the receptionist at the PT place what I had to do to get more sessions.  Another referral, she told me.   I contacted the office of the sports doctor I’d seen for a second time a week or so earlier.  After session seven of PT I was told that once the referral arrived I would have to be re-evaluated.

Stand against the wall in the room where you’ve completed your seven sessions of PT and squat as far down as your creaky knees will take you, then just go home, without further treatment of any kind, and wait.   In about a week, if all goes well, they would get the OK from the insurance company, if your particular insurance policy authorized more physical therapy for you.  Then, the following week you could continue your PT, with only, at most, a short one or two week gap.   You see, it’s impossible to determine if you’ll need more than seven sessions until you’ve completed seven sessions, right?  That’s just basic logic, right?   No matter what your fucking know-it-all sports medicine doctor might have to say about it (the rehab could take several months of hard work, she told me sympathetically).  No matter what.

God fucking bless America, boys and girls!

Book review preview: Dark Money by Jane Mayer

(my first book review since elementary school:)

Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right,  Jane Mayer (January 2016)

Dark money is tax deductible, it turns out.  If you anonymously contribute a very large sum of money to a political cause, funneling the cash through a non-profit 501(c)4 corporation, in the worst case scenario you get a gigantic tax deduction against your income.  If you advance your political agenda with a skillful bet on the right politicians, you can reap an even higher return on your tax deductible investment. Win-win, if you know what I’m sayin’.

It is hard to empathize with somebody you will never share an experience with.   Being born into generations of vast, inherited, well-invested wealth means you have no need to ever make contact with the great unwashed, heading home in crowded subway cars with their grubby little problems.   The world of the super-wealthy, the top 0.01%, is hard for the rest of us to picture.  It is apparently also very, very challenging to be that rich in ways the rest of us cannot begin to imagine.  

Some indomitable men in this tiny group of the very richest, very best American families, led by the secretive Charles Koch, autocratic son of a founding John Birch Society member, realized that in order to eventually own literally everything in America, without interference from parasites of every stripe, they would need to control the government that was trying to put tyrannical limits on their freedom.   Charles Koch’s wealth, now highly diversified, was originally, and mainly, from oil refining.  His father had developed a process for refining the cheapest, dirtiest, source, the most energy intensive to extract, and selling the finished product for much higher profit than their competitors could.   The EPA, in particular, was a bone in the reclusive billionaire’s throat.   Government regulation was the only thing standing in the way of virtually unlimited profits for Koch Industries.

It would take thirty or more years for Charles Koch’s radical agenda to yield a bumper crop (The Year of Trump), but the beneficiaries would be very happy with the results and well-reimbursed for their tax deductible political spending over the decades.  Look at what they’ve already achieved: abolishing profit-killing “environmental” and “safety” regulations,  limiting the size of, and trust in, a government of severely limited powers, decimating labor unions, “primarying” all moderates out of office and out of politics, ending ‘class warfare’ with a decided flourish, redistributing wealth steeply upward to themselves.  Along the way they crafted and sold a larger, widely accepted public narrative that justifies all this as right and proper, even highly moral and exceptionally American.  It isn’t that all this pollution is doing anything bad to the environment, you understand, fellow sophisticated climate change skeptics, it’s a conspiracy by rich liberal eco-hypocrites to kill jobs using fake science to do so.

Dark Money, by the  great Jane Mayer, pulls together a million details of how and what this tiny, infinitely wealthy group did to ensure that their privilege is preserved in perpetuity.  Mayer details the more than thirty year strategic campaign, mucho, mucho dinero very productively spent in a brilliant, deliberate, coordinated, disciplined long game of lobbying, swaying public perceptions and spending fortunes to put people in power who would advance their cause.  This largely successful campaign to bypass electoral democracy and take control of the government directly, by other means, is finally paying off big time.   All perfectly legal, these extraordinary means, the Supreme Court said so in a series of indisputable 5-4 decisions.   Extra-democratically grabbing power makes it sound so harsh, so dirty, almost fascistic, like a tiny, secretive clique imposing their will on the other 99.9%.   Let us simply say, these intrepid protectors of the 0.01% deployed their oceans of money very wisely.    

A lot of the world Jane Mayer lays out is sickening stuff, but, damn does she lay it all out.  It is one skill to be a good researcher, to dig up and read everything and to find and master a lot of interesting, complicated material, selecting and organizing the most crucial of it.  Being able to weave the raw materials into a flowing, compelling narrative is another skill entirely.   Reading a book like Dark Money it hits me over and over — this writer is really fucking smart.  I think it’s the sense that, in addition to the book being beautifully written, everything you are reading has been set so perfectly in context by everything you’ve learned to that point in the story.  It is an immensely complicated, yet, on another level, elementally simple, story.  Jane Mayer tells it clearly, smoothly and with virtually no editorializing.  I offer this example, as a placeholder for a more detailed review I will complete at a future time.

Mayer describes the great revelation Charles Koch and his friends had, along with a major change of strategy, after David Koch badly lost his vice-presidential bid in 1980.   Since Koch ran for vice president, rather than president, he could use a loophole in the law to legally finance his campaign with as much of his own unlimited cash as he chose to spend.  One of the planks of his vice presidential platform was abolishing all limits on campaign spending, (which is now the law of the land via the partisan 5-4 Citizens United ruling).   When the Koch platform, skewed toward the freedom of the wealthiest to acquire more while shrinking oppressive government and its socialistic programs to insignificance,  got less than 1% of the vote (ironic– he probably drew 100% of the top 1% vote) the Koch brothers [1] (along with their allies from the best of the top 0.01%) understood that their ideas were too unpopular to ever prevail by electoral means.  

They began to set about influencing public discourse by different means.  They drew up a long-term battle plan, with the help of a cunning graduate student named Fink.  They created a network of influence and public relations operations. They funded prestigious think tanks, numerous non-profits, endowed academic chairs, sponsored courses and student societies in the colleges across America, eventually found their way onto Ivy League campuses (to correct the distressing left-leaning tendency of these influential institutions), unleashed an army of lobbyists, paid advocates, psychological warfare experts like wordsmith-for-hire Frank Luntz (attack Global Warming “myth” by attacking the non-unanimous scientific consensus [2] — Luntz later recanted this bullshit).   They advised political candidates, funded their campaigns, took over state houses, got odious laws and regulations overturned, drafted model laws in corporate/legislative partnerships that advanced their cause, vetted Supreme Court picks, created and funded non-profits for specific political attacks, like the Swift Boat Attackers, funded the ‘grassroots’ radically anti-Obama Tea Party, and so on.  36 years of hard, dedicated, singleminded work later, et, voila!

Fred Koch, father of all of four battling Koch brothers, like Fred Trump, father of our current president, was a brutal, demanding, loveless autocrat and an admirer of Mr. Hitler who shared many of Hitler’s views on how things should run and who deserved to rule.  Fred Koch performed a heroic, well-paid service for the Fuhrer before the war, building a high tech oil refinery in Germany that ensured  the luftwaffe would have a ready supply of high octane petrol for years to come.   Fred Koch hired a German Nazi nanny (literally, she adored the Fuhrer) to strictly discipline the young Koch boys.   She was apparently very severe in her methods while she was the primary caretaker of the boys for the long stretches when the parents were away.   The nanny proudly returned to the Fatherland after the fall of France.   Talk about Nazi bastards, these boys come by it honestly.

I will amend this review a bit when I am done listening to the book.  It is hard to stop listening to the well-read audio version I have on my listening device.  I’ve already made dozens of notes.  

If we have any hope of fighting back against the monsters now in seemingly locked-down control, a book like this provides essential knowledge we need for understanding the fight ahead.

I highly recommend Dark Money.  Good reading on a subject even more vital to know about now than when she released it in early 2016.   Goddamned good work, Jane, and another very important book (The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned Into a War on American Ideals, about Cheney’s torture program, is another, also highly recommended) that deserves to be widely read and talked about.

 

[1]  A Note on the “Koch Brothers”

The until recently secretive right-wing billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch are known as The Koch Brothers.   Their oldest brother, Freddie, was cut out of the picture years ago after an ugly family power play, featuring an attempt at blackmail by his other three brothers.   David Koch’s twin brother, Bill Koch, after decades of savage litigation against his brothers Charles and David, and some chicanery written into their demented mother’s will, finally signed a non-disparagement agreement with Charles and David, formally ending their long, bitter legal wars.  A family of goddamned princes, really.  Of these four brothers, only two have become “The Koch Brothers.”  You could argue that no two brothers have ever had a larger say in the public life of their country.

 

{2]  Mayer writes:

In a 2002 memo, the Republican political consultant Frank Luntz wrote that so long as “voters believe there is no consensus about global warming within the scientific community” the status quo would prevail. The key for opponents of environmental reform, he said, was to question the science—a public-relations strategy that the tobacco industry used effectively for years to forestall regulation. The Kochs have funded many sources of environmental skepticism, such as the Heritage Foundation, which has argued that “scientific facts gathered in the past 10 years do not support the notion of catastrophic human-made warming.”

Simple vs. Complicated

Complicated is hard, simple is so much easier.   It’s no wonder that buzzwords and the wearing of different colored hats so often carry the day in human affairs.  

Keeping the countless gnarly complications in mind, remembering contradictions, comparing everything to your own situation and remembering that while you may be lucky, many just like you are cursed… the endless nuance and supreme challenge of trying to remain fair-minded, pursuing justice, mindful of history’s famously slippery slopes, the dependable unreliability of history, of homo sapiens —  it is exhausting just to map it out in a sprawling sentence.  

Complicated is difficult, takes too much goddamned work to work your way through, there is no end to complicated.   Simple is better, clearly.

Hence the soundbite.  The tweet.  Slogans.   If your slogan does not parse well and fit on a hat, the marketing folks will nix it.   A great ad is supremely simple.  It hits some essential truth we recognize immediately.   The best of them bring tears, so simple, so true!   We should make that long distance call to the poignantly adorable child who misses us.  Oh, God, it’s all so simple.

Except, of course, that it’s not at all simple.  “What do you think of Bernie Sanders?” someone asks simply, though it’s not likely you dislike Sanders or what he stands for based on the way you talk.    So, carefully, sensing a mine field as the first few critical comments about him fly around the table, you say:  if we remove the personality and the things you just said from the equation and put all the actual issues his campaign raised on the table, I think we’d all agree about most of them.   I got as far as the importance of addressing catastrophic climate change before the heavy guns were wheeled into place.    Sanders is a self-hating Jew, he only uses his Jewishness for his own purposes, he hates Israel, supports BDS  (Boycott, Divest and Sanction Israel) [1]  One raises his voice to say he’d vote for Trump before he’d vote for the hypocrite Jew-hater Sanders. 

Now everything is simpler, easier to understand.  My reflexes were a tad too slow, though I know the right thing to do at a moment like this.   It is time to get up from the table and start washing dishes, or at least to clam up.   Perhaps sit on a nearby chair and play the ukulele a bit, as this little storm passes.   All these options I hope to keep in mind should this kind of thing arise again any time soon.  There is no point, no nuance that can be brought up once somebody is peeved enough to say Trump is a better choice than Bernie because Trump loves Israel and Bernie is a grumpy old Jewish Nazi. 

Simple:  Anyone critical of Israel’s long, often brutal, occupation, and the ticking time bomb of millions of encamped enemies living close by, generations of haters, many raised in hellish, hopeless poverty, many living in camps, literally, with state violence the only means of keeping a lid on the anger of now literally generations of these hopeless and dispossessed people — anti-Semite.  

We can agree that Bibi Netanyahu is clearly not an exemplar of the highest Jewish values.  He’s a putz, a schmuck, a much smarter Israeli Trump.  Fine.  Perhaps we can agree that the mildly racist Avigdor Lieberman, former extremist now Israeli Minister of Defense, and his party, to the right of Netanyahu’s right wing group, is not a legitimate force for de-escalating tensions in the seemingly eternal war between former neighbors.  

But, let’s keep this simple.  BDS, Boycott, Divest and Sanction, the same economic tactics used to exert enough pressure to bring down apartheid in South Africa, is plainly anti-Semitic.  Any Jew who thinks it might be a legitimate tactic to employ is simply a Jew hater, end of story.

Sitting here calmly, reflecting dispassionately, it is beyond dispute that there are numerous issues involved in this particular issue of BDS.   It equates Israel to the racist South African regime — not entirely fairly.    This equation requires its own long, sober conversation.    It involves uncomfortable levels of candor, perhaps, or tamping down an angry reflex to dismiss anything comparing Israeli military policies and THINGS THE FUCKING NAZIs used to do.  

Breaking down doors at night, grabbing and torturing suspects, an off the books detention or killing when required, doing secret violence here and there to keep the opposition from organizing, or bulldozing an entire block of homes because a terrorist was harbored in one of those homes, or forced relocation, or whatever you want to bring up, are reminiscent of things ruthless armies of occupation routinely do.  There is a much larger discussion to be had of the particulars of all these policies.  

All this is very uncomfortable terrain to negotiate, even among people who agree about most things in American politics, you have to walk through it very, very slowly, reassuring the other party of your good will at every step.   Easier to just say Israel, eternally menaced by a world of haters, is justified no matter what or the equally emotional position that Israel is acting just like the fucking Nazis.   The tic to view everything as a dichotomy blinds you to any truths that fall along that human gradient, seamlessly from black, to dark charcoal grey, to grey, to paler, mouse grey, to ash-colored grey, to white.  

Truth is hard, true belief is easier.   That ease is the reason so many still support their president, even as his policies are already starting to fuck them hard.

There are Israeli peace groups (example) working tirelessly against the right wing forces in Israel which have controlled the government, and the narrative, since a right wing religious fanatic murdered Itzhak Rabin more than twenty years ago.   These right wing Israeli officials argue it’s perfectly fine, even restrained, to shoot protesters with live bullets if they come too close to the fence in Gaza.  This policy is controversial and complicated, many difficult discussions can be had over whether it’s the best way for Israel to proceed toward any kind of peaceful resolution to the long conflict between Palestinians and Israel..    

But, for the moment, let’s keep it simple, folks.  Israel is a democracy and our greatest ally in the Middle East (along with Saudi Arabia, but why mention those publicly beheading motherfuckers?)   Our U.N. ambassador applauded Israel’s restraint in killing and wounding so relatively few Palestinians in the recent outburst of mass ugliness between these enemy neighbors.   Soon after her comments we [3]  left the U.N. Human Rights Council who wouldn’t stop bitching about Israel’s use of deadly force against unarmed civilian protesters, even suggesting the shootings by sniper might constitute a war crime.  

To cite but one example of the complexities involved.   One Israeli peace group, The New Israel Fund, supports the right of people to use protest methods like BDS, or, more precisely, it opposes the proposed U.S. criminalization of BDS  (their position is much more nuanced, New Israeli Fund actually explicitly OPPOSES BDS).  

Yet to those Jews who seek to keep it simple at all costs, the New Israel Fund supports terrorism by opposing “pro-Israeli” laws to criminalize BDS, thereby supporting BDS and hatred of Israel.  The New Israel Fund is a target of angry American Jews who believe Israelis who oppose their government’s extreme right wing tactics are traitors and anti-Semites, no better than Nazis, really.   I actually heard this view expressed by a tiny gaggle of disgruntled protesters outside a Palestinian-Israeli peace concert we attended.  

Keeping it simple: the New Israel Fund supports terrorism.   Boom.  End of story, synagogue hosting event is giving a forum to anti-Semites! The great David Broza, anti-Semite.  Anyone looking for peace with the enemy– traitor!

The Israeli government’s moral position on the mass shootings at the Gaza-Israel fence is that it gave the Hamas-inspired protesters fair warning: come within this distance of the 37 mile long reinforced fence [2] and we will use deadly force.  The warnings were dropped in the form of leaflets, plainly written in Arabic for anyone to read.  Fair warning.  Come near my fence and I will shoot you, even kill you.   Still they came, protesting by the thousands, surging toward the hated fence, threatening to breach it and cause a bloodbath in Israel, whose right to exist they angrily deny.  

The failing NY Times reported on the many Palestinian deaths, at least sixty, in the days around Ivanka and Jared’s photo op with Bibi Netanyahu as they cut the ribbon on the controversial U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem.  Palestinian and international sources give much higher numbers of dead and wounded at the Gaza fence.   Easy enough to dismiss these numbers as fake news, anti-Israel propaganda, since it comes from people who have historically had a bloody ax to grind against Israel.   Is there a number of medics shot that is justifiable?   Is it legitimate to fire on medical personnel because they are aiding and abetting, by trying to save the lives of, those who surge toward the guns of their hated enemies?

It is so much easier to pick a side and just be on it than to try to consider all sides in an extremely complicated and intractable situation and take nuanced positions on a case by case basis.  We can raise arguments about the Palestinian definition of refugees, as the Jerusalem Post apparently did recently.  Simple, these fucks are not actual refugees, they just pretend to be victims under a definition they came up with.   They can’t leave Gaza?   Good for them!   The simple view sees good guys and bad guys and good people stick with the good guys.  Simple.

I was reminded, even sitting around a table with good friends, warm friends, people I love, all old friends who speak Hebrew and love Israel as much as I do, that some innocent questions are, to be simple about it, not innocent.   Say the wrong thing and the conversation is over.   Forget the fact that we all likely agree, to one extent or another, about the school to prison pipeline, intergenerational poverty going back directly to slavery,  the fossil fuel industry-created denial of plainly observable climate catastrophes as part of a of pattern related to centuries of escalating human pollution, vast, escalating income inequality, the anti-democratic curse of concealing information of great public concern from the voting public, the recent gift of billions in tax breaks to the wealthiest, at the cost of cutting the social safety nets for the most vulnerable, our unforgivable and unaddressed national racism (we can pat ourselves on the back for banning the hateful word “nigger” and replacing it with the great neologism “n-word”, much less offensive!), the imminent dismantling of a woman’s federal right to choose to terminate an unwanted, or dangerous, pregnancy, the inevitable corruption of a democratic system where unlimited campaign money is “free speech” and dark money — if donated in a large enough pile — needn’t ever have its source exposed, as the recently rewritten law provides.  

We did not get to this cruel president and his blundering administration by chance. The extremest, greediest billionaires found their donkey to ride to the promised land they’ve been dreaming of since the days of the John Birch Society.   The Koch brothers’ wealthy, distant father was a founder of that society.  The John Birchers were rich, paranoid men who suspected Dwight D. Eisenhower might be a secret Commie, or at least an unwitting dupe of the goddamned Commies.  These canny billionaires built a national infrastructure over the last thirty years or more, methodically, think tank by think tank, state house by state house, created legislative/corporate partnerships, and finally, as the Kochs head toward their reward in heaven (both are old men now) their long-cherished dream has become reality for all of us.  The cancerous chickens of our materialistic, profit-worshipping “libertarian” democracy have come home to roost.

It is a certain kind of torment to live in a world as inured to violence as our world is.  Millions die violent, hopeless deaths, it’s just the way it is.   Cherished principles are so easily tossed aside when policies are addressed directly to our terrors.   THEY ARE GOING TO KILL US!!!!   So we are morally justified in killing them first.   THEY HATE US.   Therefore, we can torture them, because if they hate us, fuck them, you know?   They already hate us, so torture them, what are you being so squeamish about?   They’d do the same to us, probably much worse.  

At the same time, when we are calm, we can recognize that hate never conquers hate, that an eye for an eye leaves everybody blind, that we need our most creative, empathetic, ingenious solutions for intractable, historically violent problems, but those are just abstractions.  All very exhausting abstractions!

BUILD THE WALL!   BUILD THE WALL!!!!   BUILD THE WALL!!!!    Feels pretty good, actually.

 

 

 [1]   Not only is this a sticky factual issue, with many sources stating that Sanders actually opposes BDS, but there is a related and completely separate issue that is easily elided into “support for BDS”.   Do you oppose a law criminalizing BDS?   I do, vigorously.   Do I support BDS?  I don’t.  What is Bernie’s position?   Truly, I have no fucking idea, though it appears he doesn’t.   I’m pretty sure he agrees that criminalizing selected nonviolent political expression is anti-democratic.  Which in my book, makes Bernie Sanders no more an anti-Semite than I am– trying my best to live by my Jewish values, including dedication to protecting the weakest among us and not doing what is hateful to us to others.

[2]      The fence is actually two parallel barriers built by the Israelis: a formidable one of barbed-wire within Gaza and a 10-foot-high metal “smart fence” packed with surveillance sensors along the Israel demarcation line. A restricted buffer zone as wide as 300 yards is between them. Israel has warned that people in the zone without authorization risk being subjected to deadly force.    

source   (Lying NY Times) 

[3]  We, the People.

Searching for Ancestors

It is late at night, has been a long day, an emotionally challenging day, but I wanted to get back to my cousin in Israel, so I dropped him an email just now.   He has been searching for the traces of our family and recently found some real clues.   The hamlet our people came from, on a fork in a marsh south of the Pina River a short ferry ride from Pinsk, has been erased from history, wiped off the map–  the people who lived there and the name of the hamlet that all those who lived there called it by.  

Truvovich was the name, wiped from every map in existence, as far as my cousin, and I, and a friend who lives in Poland and is a pretty fair researcher himself (and who searched in Polish), have been able to ascertain.  Between us we turned up one map, with a Jewish star and the letter T at the place we suspect may have been that site where one of my grandmothers, and one of my cousin’s grandfathers, were born.  The link I sent my cousin to that map no longer exists, though we have my screen shot of the pertinent section of the map.  

Pinsk Street Map - circa 1925.png

This takes us into the realm of What the Fuck?   We know the Nazis were fucked up, that the einsatzgruppen, the special killing units that followed the Wermacht, the army, as the secret police state was imposed in one occupied territory after another, were merciless (until they started going mad, becoming alcoholics, became unable, most of them, to continue murdering unarmed civilians and their children, usually by shooting them into ditches).  

The Final Solution, with its mechanized extermination camps, was put in place partly because the number of Jews and others believed by those insane Nazi fucks to be genetic poison was too great to be wiped out by shooting alone, and partly because the killers they sent to massacre these folks just couldn’t keep doing it, psychologically.  Those rare sadists among them who loved to kill became another kind of problem.  Easier to just put them in charge of a crew in one of the death camps, where their perversion would be a virtue.

But I am getting ahead of the story.   At one time all of my family members were alive and supremely insecure in the impoverished little shit hole in the marsh where they lived.  Of two of them, Harry Aaron (who I always knew as Uncle Aren) and my grandmother, Chava, I know what can be known.  Aren fled the Russo-Japanese war, made a life for himself in America, had three children, all of whom I knew.   My cousin in Israel is the son of Aren’s daughter.  I remember Aren too, he lived until I was eleven.   Chava, Aren’s youngest sister, begat my father and my uncle and died in Peekskill a few years before I was born.  There was a cousin, Dintsche, who had two kids in America, both still around,

Beyond that, the fate of the rest of our family is a statistic.  The einsatzgruppen rounded up all the Jews of Pinsk, and the outlying areas, and wiped them out in two major aktions, a few months apart, in 1942.  The details are here.

It is late, and airless, the humidity is like a continual punch in the face.  Outside the sky is black.  I haven’t the strength at the moment to follow all the thoughts that led me to begin to write this.   Except to note the mystery, as we are alive here in this wink of an eye, and the need to know.   The desire, like a serious thirst, to find something out, to learn even a single detail.  It is too maddening to know nothing.  

Recently my cousin learned that one of his great-uncles, a man I’d heard of as Volbear, a man he names Wolf Bear on his family tree, is listed in Yad Vashem as killed in 1942.   This was big news, to see the testimony, our ancestor’s name in writing.  The testimony consisted of a few names: Wolf Bear’s (born 1888), his wife Tzirel’s (age unknown), their two children, Leah Reizel, 14, and Yisrael, 10, and the year they died in the slaughterhouse that was Nazi-occupied Belarus in 1942.  This is far more detail than we have about the fate, and lives, of Aren and Chava’s other brother Yudle or their sister Chaska.

The other day my cousin sent me this photo, taken in 1938, found among his mother’s papers (she lived to 104!).  The niece and nephew of our common ancestor, named for the matriarch and patriarch as far back as our family tree goes (four generations).  Those ancient ancestors would be my great-grandparents on my mother’s side, Leah and Azriel [1].  The nephew and niece in this photo are Azriel and Leah.  Look at them:

Azriel & Leah (Nephew & Niece) - 1938.jpg

1938, before Hitler’s war, the war the madman insisted the Jews made him start. Their photo, taken that year, came with a note, in Yiddish, which my cousin had translated into Hebrew.   My cousin wrote: they state that life is difficult and they are looking for help.  

 

[1]

Leah and Azriel Gleiberman.png