Category Archives: History and Politics

New low for an attack on POTUS

Heard this just now, Amy Goodman stating that the president owns shares in Raytheon, the company that makes Tomahawk missiles, 59 of which were launched from a destroyer in the Mediterranean the other day in Operation Immediate Revenge for Killing Beautiful Babies.   Raytheon stock prices apparently surged after the attack.  Goodman noted that POTUS reaped an immediate, direct financial profit on the missile strike he ordered.

The reader should note, full disclosure, that this armament maker’s stock may have soared recently, but their own website informs us that Raytheon is making outer space a safer place and also remains committed to promoting the interests of women.

Hearing from Amy Goodman that each Tomahawk missile launched costs around $1.4 million (the actual sticker price is a debatable secret, of course, estimates I’ve seen range from $1M to $1.87M ) I took out my calculator.  The recent missile strike, with its fifty-nine Tomahawks, based on Amy Goodman’s middle number, cost an estimated $82,600,000 in fireworks.   That’s about twenty-five presidential trips to Mar-a-largo, which appear to go for around $3,300,000 each.  Or 165 days of protection for the First Lady, who lives in New York City, based on the $500,000/day number reported by the New York Times and adjusted down by Snopes [1].

Of course, conservative die-hards will counter that all this money pales next to the scale of the real cheating that has been going on for years, bleeding our great country dry.  Unscrupulous, immoral, lazy grifters with an unquenchable sense of entitlement who own multiple pink Cadillacs and milk the system like an industrial farm milks its thousands of cows.   Buying filet mignon with their food stamps while the children of other “poor people” belly up to huge free meals at school, climbing on the plush entitlement wagon early at liberal give-away programs like Head Start.

I have learned that it is fruitless to argue with a zealot.  In the long run the missiles blown up in Syria, and the money POTUS allegedly made from his decision, are only distractions from the much darker, deeper story, the “nuclear option” used to install a new Scalia on the Supreme Court, after the previous president was unscrupulously stripped of his Constitutional authority to nominate a replacement when Scalia died.

I saw Mitch McConnell interviewed the other day.  McConnell is the spokesman for partisans who refused to allow hearings on Merrick Garland and invoked the “nuclear option” on Friday to allow appointment, by filibuster-proof simple majority (exceedingly simple in this case) of a reliable right wing corporatist.  McConnell’s side of the interview was a collage of rabbit-faced two beat laughs.  In answer to every question about denying Obama a hearing on his moderate Supreme Court pick, or ramming this new Supreme Court justice through in record time, and changing long-standing rules to do so, McConnell gave that fake, two beat laugh, showing his radiant rodent smile.   Perhaps he was coming under the desk during the interview, that would explain the uncomfortable fake laugh.  He should be excited enough to ejaculate, one would think, after the giddy capers he’s pulled in recent days.  

Showing that he is a man with out-sized testicles, Mr. McConnell [2] has been quick to attack Democrats for “unprecedented” opposition to the new president’s pick, even as his party has taken radically unprecedented steps to thwart the former president, denying so much as a hearing on Garland and even shutting down the government and damaging the nation’s reputation and credit rating in the process (at an ongoing cost of billions of dollars) [3].

What say you about this, Mr. McConnell?  You guessed it, the two-beat, rabbit-faced laugh.  

NOTES

[1]  Police Commissioner James P. O’Neill lowered that estimate in a 21 February 2017 letter to the state congressional delegation, saying that it cost $24 million to protect the First Family between the election and the inauguration, or $11 million less than de Blasio’s request. The letter also included estimates for security costs for both the First Lady and the President:

On days when Mr. Trump is not in the city, the department estimates that it costs $127,000 to $146,000 a day “to protect the first lady and her son while they reside in Trump Tower.” On days when Mr. Trump is in New York City — he has not yet returned since his inauguration — the Police Department anticipates “an average daily rate of $308,000.”

That would come out to about $50 million a year if Mr. Trump avoided returning to Manhattan, or just over $60 million if he began returning on weekends.

source

[2]  The New York Times once referred to Bo Diddley and Eric Clapton as Mr. Diddley and Mr. Clapton.

[3]   I loved this line from FactCheck.org about the actual cost of the 2013 Republican shutdown of the government under Obama, a cost apparently wildly exaggerated by angry Democrats:   

But estimates for total economic cost only range from $12 billion to $24 billion.

source

A vision of hell

Waking up to an explosion, your home on fire.  Men with guns running, crouched like crabs, firing bursts of bullets.  As you shake your head a man grabs your mother from behind and expertly cuts her throat.  The car other members of your family are trying to flee in is hit by a shoulder launched explosive, becoming a fire ball.  You run, imagining how you are going to be killed.

Or a quiet, airless morning, no explosions, no gunfire.  No food.  Flies.  Dying children who expire without a murmur.   Hyenas and vultures casually dining together, no snarling and posing, there’s enough carrion for everyone, with left overs to drag home.

Or a person at a console, pressing a button and pumping a fist watching the screen as the targeted city is vaporized under a dramatic canopy of fire.

We lament all these hellish things even as we sigh at the inevitability of them, debate the correctness of employing them.  Homo sapiens are sometimes monsters, we reason, and sometimes there’s nothing for it but to use every weapon available to destroy these evil creatures.    Obama, who, in fairness to him, I must say I hate mostly for not being anywhere near as great a president as he was a candidate, did his share of this reasoning.  

He yielded to military advisors who agreed it was best not to put American “boots on the ground” but to instead use a top secret targeted killing program to assassinate suspected terrorist enemies with missiles launched from remote controlled pilotless aircraft called drones.  Not to do so, or stopping the program, he likely didn’t need to be reminded, would make him look weak.  The numbers of civilians killed would not be revealed.  All dead males of military age, in a generous range from young teenager to middle aged, are presumed to be enemies killed in action, or EKIA.  Fair is fair.  They could very well be!

Many are horrified when they learn that authoritarian governments use Death Squads to terrorize the opposition.   One photo of a pile of slaughtered nuns, their humanitarian mission cut short, is usually enough to get the world press howling.   The armies of freedom will sometimes march against such regimes, provided the regime is not allied with a huge business concern who has a say in the deployment of the armies of freedom.   Most authoritarian governments enjoy such alliances.   The armies of freedom have supported many such monsters over the years.   I realize I’m not going out on a moral limb saying any of these things.  Are you going to argue that Death Squads are cool?

Now the world shudders over videos of workers in a Syrian town desperately trying to save dying babies by hosing them off, in an attempt to wash away the irreversibly murderous nerve gas a power-crazed dictator attacked his own citizens with.  Dead children are carried off and respectfully laid out by stoic rescue workers.  

The current president of the United States, an angry and impulsive man, instantly does what the reflective, calculating Obama, who was lambasted as a weak and indecisive leader for refraining from massive retaliatory killing, did not do.  With the horrific images of the nerve gas attack against civilians, and the dead children, fresh in everyone’s mind, our decisive new leader does not hesitate or ask Congress or flinch in any way, he immediately orders two destroyers to launch more than fifty tomahawk missiles at Syria, presumably hitting some strategic asset of the Syrian dictator’s, the very air base he says the gas attack was launched from.  

Our president glares meaningfully at the camera as he announces he doesn’t need anyone to tell him what the right thing to do is.  After all, this is not some drone-launched missile fired by the well-meaning army of freedom that inadvertently kills a wedding party, severely maiming the few survivors, this is a targeted, proportional response to a regime using poison gas against it’s own children.

I don’t want to jump on this president, who gets so little love from most Americans, who is routinely mocked and ridiculed by every late night comedian.  I am writing this simply to underscore how routine such state violence is, and how little we concern ourselves with it, even abstractly.  

If there is a better way, we reason, there is nothing we can do about it anyway.  Powerful forces, often at the command of raging psychopaths, are regularly unleashed to slaughter anybody who stands in the way of valuable natural resources or anything else the powerful forces want.  Innocence or guilt has little to do with who will live and who will die.  This world is not a meritocracy, after all, nobody but those closest to you gives a rat’s tutu about how moral, kind, empathetic you are.

The guy who is launching the missiles, named after the close fighting weapon of the people slaughtered by the armies of freedom, certainly doesn’t give a shit.  It enrages him that a dictator would kill babies in such an inhuman way and he takes decisive action.  

Thirty-six children are said to have died in the poison gas attack.  Yesterday our ambassador to the UN asked rhetorically “how many more children have to die before Russia cares?”  We note here that according to one source over 700 children have been killed by US and Coalition airstrikes in Iraq and Syria since August 2014.  The recent SEAL raid in Yemen killed a bunch of children, at least one of whom, a pretty little girl, was allowed to writhe in agony, untreated, for hours before she finally died of the American bullet in her spine. 

In fairness to our current president, why should he care what his critics have to say about his unauthorized use of millions of dollars worth of deadly missiles against an unabashedly evil regime?  What are you going to fucking do about it anyway, big shot?

Repurposing “The Deep State”

Because Americans live, increasingly, in echo chambers where our own views are endlessly confirmed– and there is no overestimating the power of the confirmation bias– the same term can quickly become a weapon for each side.   During the recent presidential election much was made of “Fake News”.  Both sides used calculated untruth and incendiary stories composed largely of bullshit to stir their troops,  though the right seemed to use it more, and to more galvanizing effect.

I saw a stat right after the 2016 election, fake news skewed something like 2:1 right, but that’s still a lot of outright bullshit from the left side.  I couldn’t find the original cite for the statistic, but here’s the Grey Skank and Steve Bannon/Robert Mercer’s own Breitbart on the well-known phenomenon.   I must say, both accounts read well and appear to be, without more research that most news consumers don’t have time to do, plausible.  Let us assume for our purposes today, and to avoid the typical distracting argument, that the left and right were equally guilty of lying during one of the ugliest campaigns in our history.

My point is that Mr. Trump and his people, who set new standards for untruth during the campaign and since (hah, so much for my fairness caveat directly above) , introducing us to “alternative facts” and so forth, quickly co-opted the term “fake news” to increase skepticism toward the corporate mass media.  One should be very skeptical of corporate media driven entirely by advertising dollars and the bottom line of shareholder profits and enormous compensation packages for its executives.  But look how quickly the term “fake news” was pointed back at the exposers of right wing ‘fake news’ and neutralized.   Who owns fake news now, bitches?   Two wrongs do make a right, yo.

Now the same has happened to the term “The Deep State”.   This description of the powerful forces that profit mightily from our globalized “Free Market” and the endless wars we are now embarked on, has been captured by the right.  To the right the Deep State is the liberal-biased intelligence community, fanatically determined to bring the new president down. Trump’s people now openly deplore the “Deep State” and everyone is right to deplore it.

A former long-time Republican government budget analyst, Mike Lofgren, spoke to Bill Moyers a few years back about the Deep State.  The permanent shadow government is not a new thing, the interests it represents go back to our original one percent, the Founding Fathers, but it’s entrenched and protected in ways we couldn’t have imagined generations ago.  Lofgren described The Deep State as ‘a hybrid association of key elements of government and parts of top-level finance and industry that is effectively able to govern the United States with only limited reference to the consent of the governed as normally expressed through elections.’  

Lofgren set out the workings of our current deep state*, now organized largely around, and justified by, the so-called War on Terror, that bold war against fear itself.  It operates by deregulation, privatization, deindustrialization, financialization of the economy, Wall Street as the only casino in town, widening wealth disparity,  permanent war, surveillance state, etc.  It all takes on the air of the inevitable, a massive conspiracy, but its only deliberate design is to maximize profits for our wealthiest citizens. 

Like the deal-makers in the administration we have now.   Exxon-Mobil was the first company to research the effects of carbon on our planet’s climate.  They made alarming discoveries, decades ago, about what became known as Global Warming and later was re-branded as the less alarming Climate Change.  Exxon scientists learned that carbon emissions, like the ones from burning millions of barrels of fossil fuel, were indeed making the world a less habitable place for human and other life.  

Then Exxon spent decades funding Climate Change Skepticism. To their credit, and against a mountain of evidence from most reputable climate scientists, they created a sizable block of Climate Change Skeptics including, apparently, our current president.

Exxon knew the lucrative product they were selling was choking the earth to death, but they were making too much money to stop.  You know the old dilemma.  It’s easy to be critical, but don’t forget, Exxon is about the most profitable corporation in the history of the world.  Now their CEO is our nation’s Secretary of State.  How’s that for transparency in government?   You’ve got to love these guys we’ve got now.   They will not let the Deep State get any deeper, despite all the fake news to the contrary.

 

 

*   Lofgren describes the Deep State as “the red thread that runs through the war on terrorism and the militarization of foreign policy, the financialization and deindustrialization of the American economy, the rise of a plutocratic social structure that has given us the most unequal society in almost a century, and the political dysfunction that has paralyzed day-to-day governance.”

 

politics smells like meat

Back in the days when I still thought “artists’ books” were cool, I entitled one Politics Smells like Meat.  Still a good, and accurate, title, since politics decides who will eat steak and whose ass will be served as that steak.  The smell of grilling meat is often delicious and easily overcomes any hesitation to eat what was, until recently, a living, sentient creature.

From the excellent Jane Mayer, investigative journalist and author of the definitive story of our secret torture program, this paragraph, in a profile of reclusive billionaire libertarian Robert Mercer, friend and sponsor of Steve Bannon:

Private money has long played a big role in American elections. When there were limits on how much a single donor could give, however, it was much harder for an individual to have a decisive impact. Now, Potter said, “a single billionaire can write an eight-figure check and put not just their thumb but their whole hand on the scale—and we often have no idea who they are.” He continued, “Suddenly, a random billionaire can change politics and public policy—to sweep everything else off the table—even if they don’t speak publicly, and even if there’s almost no public awareness of his or her views.”

The rest of the New Yorker article is here.

Thwarted Transparency

The reader should keep in mind that Irv Widaen put an uncommonly high value on honesty.   It’s hard to imagine him ever telling a fib, for example, much less calculating a lie to evade having to speak of an uncomfortable true fact.   Honesty was his trademark, he was going to tell you the truth no matter what the cost, since honesty itself was a rare and precious thing.  My father always spoke his mind and could articulate multiple sides of most issues.  He liked putting every available detail on the table for discussion. He had no respect for those who deliberately distorted the facts.

He didn’t need to lie because he was adept at reframing any conversation to his needs.  This way he could remain scrupulously honest without talking about anything he didn’t want to talk about.

You will read of times when my father seems to have been dishonest.   There is no contradiction with his basic honesty in this, though it’s complicated.  

For example, when his eight year-old son came to him with tearful questions about what happened to Grandma’s six brothers and sisters, and Pop’s six brothers and sisters back in Vishnevitz, and their parents, my father did not solemnly lay out what was known of the terrible story.  Instead he angrily told his young son to stop being melodramatic, that nobody knew any of those people, that they were abstractions, that the real problem was that the pampered boy, for some insane reason, wanted to feel like a victim, a childhood victim of the Nazi extermination in the Ukraine and Belarus when in fact he was only a middle class American drama queen who never knew any of these faceless, nameless people, people who disappeared into that night and fog thirteen years before he was even born.

It’s easy to think of this evasion as an act of dishonesty, a betrayal.  I’ve come to see it also as an expression of my father’s disability, his inability to do otherwise.  You can picture a father quietly telling his child:  the parts of Europe where our family comes from had a long history of anti-Semitism;  in the winter of 1942 into the summer of 1943 followers of the mad Adolf Hitler marched into the areas where we lived and killed everybody.  That’s why we fought World War Two, to kill Hitler and his mad ideas.

My father wasn’t able to say something like that. Or perhaps he said something like it, in one clipped sentence like that, and maybe I forced him to say it again, in two sentences, and it was only when I persisted beyond reason that he chided me for being a self-pitying little pussy who just wanted to feel like a victim.  

Someone who’d been raised by tender parents would have instinctively drawn the child close, said he understood how upsetting this terrible true story was, petted and comforted the kid.  My father, raised with his mother’s lash across his face and a father who was a ghost of a man, was never given these human tools.

At eight I was a little young to be an astute historian.   The only notes I took in those days were in the form of disturbing drawings.  Some of them, I recall, scared the shit out of my mother.  The secondary source in my memory recalls only the bad reaction of the overwhelmed father pushed to his breaking point by his anxious young son.

It is easy to see this now:  my questions hurt him too much, frightened him, left him feeling powerless, desperate, angry.   I get that now, though it’s taken more than fifty years.

ii

The personal, of course, is political.   Consider the powerlessness, desperation and anger of the average American voter right now.  Those who voted for the president are disgusted about how little respect the bad people in the media are showing their guy.  Those who voted against the president are despondent that it could have come to this sorry pass in America.

Truth is the first casualty of war.  “Truth” is now seen by most Americans as synonymous with Point of View.   Coming to this opinion is simple if you live in the right Social Media echo chamber, and we all do.  The same set of facts now automatically leads to two sets of irreconcilable opposite “truths” that trolls will endlessly goad each other about.  

If the president in the blue hat orders the killing of far-away strangers based on a high-tech remote surveillance and profiling process, and you wear a blue hat, you’re unlikely to press for an investigation into possible war crimes when innocents are blown to bloody shreds.  If the president ordering the extra-judicial executions is wearing a red hat, the man in the blue hat might get up on his hind legs about these high-tech assassinations that are radicalizing more and more of the world against us.

There are, still, true things.  There are things as they exist beyond spin, beyond their commercial and political uses.  Facts: where I was born, what day, what year.   Facts: what I ate today, what I drank.  Likewise in the world: if it is raining, what Cairo’s average temperature was each of the last thirty years, whether there is a law against racial discrimination in America.  

Fact: the United States has the highest infant mortality rate of any wealthy industrialized nation.   The political is also personal. 

My father was the second child born to his tiny, red-haired, angry, religious mother.   The first was a girl who died either in childbirth or immediately afterwards.  This would have been in a tenement slum or a filthy, crowded maternity ward on the impoverished Lower East Side of Manhattan in 1922 or ’23.  

I wonder if my father ever thought about this tiny, dead sibling he never knew.  I doubt it. Speculation on such things takes you quickly beyond the realm of fact.  In these pages I have tried to stay as close as I could to the facts I knew and limited my leaps of conjecture to things that were truly unknowable, like the nature and extent of my father’s love affair with the amorous young Christian widow in Connecticut.  

The photos suggest they saw each other over the course of many years.  I never heard my father mention her, I never heard her name.   I have Eli’s quick story about breaking up that love affair and a total of three suggestive black and white photos of them together, found after Irv’s death, in a shoe box of miscellaneous photos.  In one, they are captured wrestling on a picnic blanket and I’ve never seen my father look happier (the photo is  here, at bottom of page).  Or, here:

Irv and his shiksa.JPG 

One photo appears to be from before the war, in the summer of 1941, when my father was 17.  He is skinny, in a white shirt and tan pants, sitting jauntily on the railing of the porch next to his landlady/lover.  In another he’s clearly a college student after the war.  The skinny boy in the first picture, renting a room in her Connecticut house, pumping gas to pay his bills becomes, over perhaps ten years, the happy, round-faced young college graduate in the last photo.  The woman appears to have made the long trip up to Syracuse to see him.  The graduate wears the optimistic expression of a young scholar heading to an elite graduate school and his life of ideals beyond.

iii

A couple more details about this impulse to thwart transparency and why this thwarting bugs me so much, personally and politically.  

Reframing was my father’s favorite technique — if you aggressively pursued some matter with him — ju jitsu! — shift the ground of the conversation to a pointed interrogation about why anyone would pry into such things in the first place, or whatever will make the person most uncomfortable.  Put the inquisitive fucker on the defensive, there’s no defense like a good offense. It’s kind of like a mini filibuster, just keep talking, run out the clock.  You can see virtually every politician today do this maneuver when in a tight spot, spout prepared talking points about something utterly unrelated to the question asked.  This tactic is most often coupled with an indignant attack on the character of the person asking the uncomfortable question.

The logical extension to this technique is to preemptively vilify and delegitimize the truth-seeker.  If the truth is disquieting, shameful, criminal, best to be circumspect about it, have others respect the secret.  Indiscreet persons shall be blamed and attacked immediately.  You can bet your nest egg that someone is making a lot of money on the deal if it is disquieting, shameful, criminal and ongoing, and you’d be wise to dummy up.

The personal is political.  Bradley Manning tried to report the evidence of probable war crimes by Americans that he was seeing on his computer screen night after night.  When he made the evidence public, after being silenced by his superiors, he was made to pay a steep price: prosecution as a traitor to the United States of America.   Before his court martial they kept him naked in an outdoor cage, to show he was no better than any other terrorist and just as guilty under  a statute that does not allow arguments about intent.  

The main thing here is punish the leaker, don’t worry so much about the crimes exposed, no need to probe into those.  The probe would likely lead to good, patriotic people being punished for well-meaning mistakes made in the fog of war.  The news cycle will focus everybody’s attention back on the real malefactor.  Make sure everyone knows the fucking illegal leaker is the traitorous enemy, not the people nonchalantly killing in the leaked videos.  Our new president, like our previous one, focuses on these fucking illegal leaker felons, understandably.

In family life, if someone considers a fact embarrassing, say a divorce nobody mentioned to the children, or quietly sitting on tens of millions of inherited dollars, or some other ticklish thing, it is a fact best left unspoken.  If you mention the taboo fact in any context, you are a betrayer of shameful secrets, whether you understand the shame or not.  

In a family conversation about bankruptcy, for example, if you mention that so and so once declared bankruptcy, and his adult children, who are there,  don’t know about it (they were kids at the time), you may have unwittingly whacked a hive of wasps in front of some fast tap-dancing in the family room.  

“Dad never declared bankruptcy!” mom will quickly, falsely, assure the children, giving the urgent eye-bugging, throat slashing sign for you to clam up.   Picture the look you should try to have on your face when the adult children look at you next. 

Transparency is an ideal that our culture of constant selling and spinning makes difficult to uphold.  You can’t have a real discussion, effectively explore options, solve problems, without free access to all the pertinent facts.   Forget about the uninformed populace of a democratic republic having anything like democracy without access to what their elected officials are doing in their name, without informed public debate.  

For reasons that should … be obvious… much as transparency is to be desired, the plain facts, set out, just like that, would be… in many cases, too destructive.   You can hear our thoughtful former president B.O. carefully dancing out that explanation.   National security. Sovereign immunity.  State secrets.  Classified.  Espionage Act, no defense against treason based on your actual motives in disclosing.

After all, some of our wealthiest, most lucrative corporations have staunchly guarded trade secrets that are worth billions.   And if it’s not technically a trade secret, it should be, particularly if certain demographics would be outraged, and we’ll continue to treat it like one.  

As I have noticed so often, opacity and misdirection are all that’s needed for every form of mischief and corruption to flourish.  The worst among us love it when no difficult questions are asked.

stage-managed liberty

“When you have stage-managed elections with the public relations industry determining what words come out of people’s mouth, candidates decide what to say on the basis of tests that determine what the effect will be across the population, somehow people don’t see how profoundly contemptuous that is of democracy”

Noam Chomsky to Bill Moyers (here)

In Fairness to Barack Obama

Let me try to be fair, for just a moment, then back into the trenches, snarling.  No, that sentence betrays too much, doesn’t seem fair, or balanced.  Let’s wind it back a bit, shall we, make it a little more personal?    

I voted for Barack Obama twice.  The first time I was actually optimistic that he might be the capable agent for overdue change he presented himself as.  The second time I voted for him on the theories of “fool me twice, shame on me” and the old chestnut of casting a vote for the lesser of two evils.   Evil, surprisingly, has become a relative thing in our desperately polarized society.  Mel Brooks’ genius definition of tragedy and comedy comes to mind: tragedy is when I break a fingernail, comedy is when you fall down a manhole and die.   Evil is now seen as who is doing what to whom and how does it affect me directly?  

We have been living for a while in increasingly partisan echo chambers.  In one chamber we find it absolutely sickening that obstructionist politicians can brazenly ignore their Constitutional duties when it is politically expedient and offer ‘explanations’ that sound startlingly like “we don’t have to do shit because this illegitimate Muslim non-American is a fucking ‘n-word’.”  This was the position publicly stated (sub silento, as they say, dog whistled) by Mitch McConnell and other prominent Republicans when Obama took office: our goal is to make him a weak one term president who can’t get anything done.  True we can’t lynch him, but we can certainly fuck him up and erase any legacy he tries to leave behind as soon as we get rid of him.

In the other echo chamber there is little question that Barack Obama was an insidious Kenyan-born Muslim intent on destroying America at all costs.   There is no doubt that he is a Negro, the son of an African from Kenya, that’s something even Hussein Obama himself cannot deny.  Many who hate Obama are undoubtedly racists, others are just, to be fair and charitable, skeptical of any Democrat who speaks well, appears thoughtful, ponders nuance, displays charisma and does not openly support the urgently needed policies they hear called for on talk radio during a time when terrorists are killing one out of every five Americans on a daily basis and violent crime plagues our once-great nation as it is overrun by hordes of threatening non-white aliens.   To be even more fair, some in this right wing echo chamber are just decent wealthy people who reasonably fear a loss of income from any policy that protects the weak at the expense of the wealthy via marginally higher tax rates.    

The divisions in our country, and the deep corruption of our pay-to-play lobbyist-driven political system, resulted in the election of a vain demagogue who seems completely unencumbered by principle, outside of increasing his own wealth, fame and power.  During the presidential campaign he promised to repeal and replace Obamacare.  He promised to create a terrific health policy that would protect every single American, not including, of course, the millions at his own rallies that will be without health care once he rams through the urgent repeal of Obamacare and restores large tax cuts for the rich.  While giving no specifics, he assured the gullible that his plan would cover all Americans, cost less and deliver much better health care.  He often ended this promise, like so many honest people reflexively do, with the tagline “believe me, believe me.”

I don’t like to think we live in a stupid country.  I prefer to think we live in a cynically manipulated country.  There’s a lot of money in cynical manipulation. The genius of America, if I may modestly say so, has long been cynical manipulation.  Look, we had this great continent with vast natural resources and incredible wealth.  There were savages living on it, attacking our settlers, impeding our ability to exploit all this wealth.  Manifest Destiny, et, voila!    

I don’t like to think we live in a country that could easily return to a lynch mob mentality, even with the increased crowing of White Supremacists and the recent surge in hate crimes.  I prefer to think we live in a country where, during desperate times, the homo sapiens fear and rage-driven instinct to mass violence sometimes understandably occurs.  Americans are no better, or worse, as a group, than the far away brown people we kill by remote controlled drones.  Americans are fair people, to the extent anyone can be fair in a world like ours.  

The plan the Republicans have slapped on the table to replace the conservative, corporation-friendly health care compromise that critics called Obamacare and vowed to repeal over and over while our nation was ruled by that tyrant, should not pass the sniff test.  It includes billions of dollars in ‘tax relief’ to the wealthiest 2% while cutting millions of low income Americans off health insurance, or making it completely unaffordable for those who had no option before Obamacare.  

In a better world somebody would just buy some TV time, invite Paul Ryan into a pay-per-view boxing ring, and simply whip the snot out of that snotty intellectual, settling the matter once and for all.  Ryan is an intellectual in the same way that a four foot tall man is a giant in Lilliput.  He read at least one very long book, a novel he bases his political philosophy on.  That he is driven by principle is reflected in his ongoing refusal to cooperate with Mr. Trump, the candidate he thoroughly repudiated during the campaign. 

I began this piece in fairness to Obama.  Here is that fairness, the PPACA is better than what existed before.  The PPACA is a deeply flawed compromise that left greedy corporations in charge of most of health care, sure.  But in fairness, it contained a few good and long-overdue things; eliminating the obscene ‘pre-existing condition’ insurance loophole, extending affordable health insurance to millions, focusing on cost-saving incentives based on preventative care, saving the lives of some of the thousands of Americans who still die every year for lack of affordable medical care.  The big flaw was that it left the gorged, rabid foxes in charge of the henhouse, but we can’t let the perfect be the enemy of the demonstrably better than complete shit, can we?    

Americans like the ACA, particularly those who were uninsured before the law took effect, even if many raise their torches and pitchforks and scream for the overdue repeal of tyrannical Obamacare.  That’s OK, at Tea Party rallies Americans angrily held signs telling the government to keep their evil hands off Medicare.  

I don’t like to think badly of my fellow Americans.  I am counting on the stink of this bill, hastily prepared and designed to give money back to the richest Americans who the Kenyan Muslim simply mugged like the common criminal they always said he was, to ensure it does not get out of the House of Representatives.  There are political maneuvers available to a party that did not hesitate to shut down the government when that Negro president insisted on trying to be the president, but the backlash should be too much to allow their use.  

On the other hand, the spineless opposition party is mostly blowing bubbles of saliva so far, and making those humming sounds you sometimes hear in a Special Ed class.  Don’t forget, they depend on the same billionaires who supported Trump for their reelection campaigns.   I guess the odds are 50/50 this big winner gets to win again.  Who among us will be surprised if a few million losers lose again?

 

History and the Serenity Prayer

Watching the Ken Burns masterpiece The Civil War fills the curious mind with questions.   Brave men, pawning their own lives in the cause of bravery, charging against superior numbers in hopes of taking a hill.   Is this the greatest use of courage?  We are told it is, over and over, the ultimate sacrifice under inhuman conditions.  They may have been fighting for a despicable cause, people on both sides concluded, but you have to admire their courage.   You follow the details of one futile slaughter after another and, horrible as each detail is, you actually do have to admire their courage.  

Once black soldiers were allowed into the Union Army, after, midway through, the war was rebranded into a war to end slavery, the tide of the war began slowly, inexorably turning toward the Union.  Black soldiers fought for freedom, literally.  Eventually the Confederate side offered blacks freedom in exchange for military service.  

The Confederate army never stopped slaughtering the black troops at the end of a battle when the Union men who were not black were allowed to surrender.  Picture the bravery of a black soldier, facing death in battle and then certain death if the battle was lost.   Other Americans, captured as prisoners of war, were subjected to an American Auschwitz.  In the starving South the care and feeding of Yankee prisoners, men the Union stubbornly refused to exchange for Rebel prisoners as long as surrendering black soldiers were butchered, was an afterthought.  

After the war Henry Wirz, commandant of Andersonville prison, became the first American (though Wirz was born in Zurich) tried and executed by America for war crimes.  Almost a third of the 32,000 prisoners of war in the unsanitary open air prison died in a little over a year of the prison’s operation.  Wirz reportedly complained about the deadly conditions at the camp, but then did his duty.  Ken Burns’s narrator adds this after a shot of Wirz hanging by the neck until dead:  he pleaded he had only followed orders.  

Wirz was tried and executed, Wikipedia informs us, at the federal prison that later was demolished to build the present day Supreme Court.

We look at history with some hope of learning from its tragedies. One pretty good working definition of insanity, after all, is doing the same thing over and over and hoping for a different outcome.

I read this just now, on the second page of an introduction entitled Roots of Empire: “War is a Racket”, and it speaks as well for me as it did for the authors of The Untold History of the United States, Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick.  The most obvious questions remain unasked much of the time. I will now practice my transcribing skills:

Why do such a tiny number of people– whether the figure is currently 300 or 500, or 2,000– control more wealth than the world’s poorest 3 billion?  Why are a tiny minority of wealthy Americans allowed to exert so much control of U.S. domestic politics, foreign policy and media while the great masses see a diminution of their real power and standards of living?  Why have Americans submitted to levels of surveillance, government intrusion, abuse of civil liberties and loss of privacy that would have appalled the Founding Fathers and earlier generations?  Why does the United States have a lower percentage of unionized workers than any other advanced industrial democracy?  Why, in our country, are those who are driven by personal greed and narrow self-interest empowered over those who extol social values like kindness, generosity, compassion, sharing, empathy and community building?  And why has it become so hard for the great majority of Americans to imagine a different, we would say a better, future than the one defined by current policy initiatives and social values?  These are only a few of the questions we will address in these pages.  Although we can’t hope to answer all of them, we hope to present the historical background that will enable readers to explore these topics more deeply on their own.

Well asked!

Let us briefly tickle, if not tackle, just these last two.

Why, in our country, are those who are driven by personal greed and narrow self-interest empowered over those who extol social values like kindness, generosity, compassion, sharing, empathy and community building?  

This is a fairly easy one, our country defines people in the first category, if they, or their ancestors, have succeeded in acquiring enough wealth, as winners.  The second category, very nice people though they well might be, are mostly losers who did not inherit and cannot amass great fortunes and therefore often engage in dewy-eyed class warfare against the winners.  The American Dream is about winning, not losing, asshole.  Check out the giant winner we have in the White House now, if you doubt that.

Now we come to their thorniest question, and one that underlies many of the others:

And why has it become so hard for the great majority of Americans to imagine a different, we would say a better, future than the one defined by current policy initiatives and social values?   

I think this great failure of collective imagination is the direct result of the other values and practices cited above.  American society is organized to put winners on pedestals and to keep the tens of millions of losers invisible, or, if they insist on trying to make themselves visible, vilified.  After all, the real problem is not that we can spend trillions to prosecute faraway wars that fly in the face of evolving international law while so many in our country are in want, but that we have a savage class of human predators stalking the streets of our impoverished ‘inner cities’ and making things unsafe for the rest of us.  You see how easy that sleight of hand is?  

History, it is said, is written by the winners.  It is hard to imagine the alternative to the official story and what we cannot imagine we cannot aspire to.  We are sold the crippling myth that there are but two ideologies in the world — Free Market Capitalism and Communism.  Communism, it was proved over and over, does not work, particularly if the Free World declares unending war against it.  The Commies who flourished were as corrupt and ruthless as the Captains of Industry here, men who sometimes became great philanthropists at the end of lifetimes of ruthlessness.  The fucking Koch brothers are patrons of the arts and science, in addition to shrewdly buying political influence coast to coast to increase their already beyond obscene wealth.  

By creating this false dichotomy of Freedom vs. Totalitarianism our elites have been able to convince us of our exceptionalism in a way that forecloses the bigger argument: is this really how we want to be exceptional?  For having the most people on earth in prison for nonviolent crimes?   For having more children in poverty than any comparably wealthy nation?  For electing a man who is making America a laughing stock, if also a terrifying one?

The oversimplification of reality presented in the consolidated, corporate mass media would make a very stupid person blush, but we are exceptional that way too.

Saddam Hussein was Hitler, we had a moral duty to liberate his people from him, even if it cost millions of Iraqis homelessness and forced migration, and countless thousands of Iraqis their limbs and lives.  We are just that kind of exceptional nation.  Don’t forget to tip your veteran on the way out.

Memory– Vishnevitz

The surprisingly thin canvas of the large painting eventually had a triangular rip where a long nail had pierced it.  It was a framed painting that hung in the basement of our house in Queens, by a wire attached to its back.   The walls of the basement were wood, installed in vertical strips, by a guy named Hymie in the years before I had any memories.  I was told Hymie did the work, though I have no idea who Hymie was.  The painting hung on a large nail driven into the wood.  It was no doubt this nail that gouged the painting toward the end.  I may, as a teenager, have had something to do with that inadvertent rip.   

The painting had belonged to my grandmother, had hung over the couch in her living room in Kew Gardens, Queens.  When she and my grandfather moved to Miami Beach, the large painting was moved to our basement.   I remember my grandmother once smiling at the painting, already in our basement, and looking at me and saying that’s exactly what her home looked like, the painting was exactly Vishnevitz.   I  can picture that smile today.   

The painting was of a wide dirt road, surrounded by huge, lush trees.   There may have been a wagon traveling through it, I think there was.  What I remember are the lush, leafy trees, painted toward the glorious end of an early summer day.  It was an idyllic painting, an idealized homage to nature and the goodness of the universe.  I didn’t particularly care for the sentimental painting, but my grandmother clearly loved it.    Though it was painted, sold and purchased in New York, it was the best, and to my experience, only, souvenir of her home town, Vishnevitz in the Ukraine.    

The letters from Vishnevitz stopped coming some time in 1942, when Einsatzgruppen and local anti-Semites began collecting the local Jews in towns like Vishnevitz.   All I was ever told was that the letters had stopped coming, those unanswered letters stood in for the rest of the untellable story.  It would be fifty years before I stumbled on the Vishnevitz Yizkor book, on-line, page after page of narratives from survivors of the torture and destruction of the writers of those letters that stopped coming.  The details are horrible, every one of them.    

Watching Ken Burns’s documentary on the Civil War, a 1990 masterpiece, I learned of the massacres of surrendering black soldiers.   Ulysses S. Grant demanded this practice stop, that the Confederates treat black prisoners of war as both sides treated white prisoners of war.  Confederate president Jefferson Davis refused.  Grant stopped prisoner exchanges with the South.   As a result, prisons began overflowing with American prisoners on both sides.  One notorious Confederate prison camp, Andersonville, designed to hold 10,000 prisoners, soon had more than 30,000.   The commandant, a German-Swiss fellow, turned the place into an early version of Auschwitz.  More than 10,000 died of starvation and disease in a short time, the rest only wished for death. 

Ken Burns does the Ken Burns pan up a photograph of the skeletal body of a survivor of Andersonville.   Every moment of the pan is horrible.  A narrator reads an account by a southern woman.  She is sure of God’s terrible vengeance against the Confederacy for this crime of reducing humans to living skeletons.   Americans did this to Americans.  

Down that idyllic dirt road, through the lush, beautiful forest, we are just outside Vishenevitz in 1920, when Yetta, my grandmother was an idealistic, ambitious young woman.  In the war after the Russian Revolution Yetta’s family had housed cossacks, Bolshevik cossacks, men who had behaved like perfect gentlemen, according to her.  They hung blankets down the middle of the house to leave the family some privacy.  Perfect gentlemen, of course, do not rape the young women, or the older ones either, as many other cossacks were known to do.  These gentlemen cossacks were idealists, they inspired Yetta and her generation to envision a world of brotherhood among workers who threw off the yoke of oppression that keeps everyone killing each other for the war profits of a few cynical rich people.

“Why are you writing this, man?” asks a disembodied voice, possibly the driver of the wagon in the lost painting.  “Why don’t you call friends, make a plan, enjoy this bracing, sunny Sunday of your life?”    

I have no good answer, except that I saw the painting in my mind, with its triangular rip.   Through that rip the rest followed, as naturally as overturned Jewish gravestones followed the election of a presidential candidate endorsed by the Ku Klux Klan.   The founder of the Klan, a self-made millionaire who made his fortune in land speculation and slaves, was also a self-made general of undeniable military genius.   He led small bands of men against large armies and inflicted terrible damage as thirty horses were shot out from under him during the course of countless battles.   He killed 31 men in hand to hand combat and figured he came out ahead in that count of killed horses and killed men.  

“Why are you writing this, man?”  

One day the letters from Vishnevitz just stopped.

Legislative Fix

We often complain about problems, with little ability to do anything about them.   This is particularly true in the area of politics, which while always local, is increasingly controlled by psychopaths, many of them not even persons, except in a convoluted legal sense, thousands of miles away.  I don’t want to get started on this issue of local sovereignty, because I have a large fish to try to figure out how to fry (proposing needed legislation for the publicity hungry AG to propose), but just a toe-dip into it before I begin.    

When the slave states seceded from the Union in the months before Lincoln was inaugurated, their issue was “states rights”.   In many areas; criminal law, family law, business law, each state is its own sovereign, by the design of our republican government.   Under our law community standards govern many things, like what is or isn’t pornographic. [1]   This is why the federal government had to step in after the Civil War to ensure community standards weren’t imposed on people who had been slaves a year or two earlier.

The “states rights” argument has most often been used by right wing types to claim exemption from federal meddling.   “We know best how to handle our own damn Negroes and don’t need you meddling liberal troublemakers coming down here telling us how to treat them,” as indignant southern states rights advocates said for decades, while standing on the same principle to prevent debate on federal anti-lynching laws.   

Of course, now that we are living in an open corporatocracy, certain universal rules are required for maximum profit.   The doctrine here is called “federal pre-emption”– on certain extremely important issues where a uniform national law is necessary, federal law preempts the wishes of the state and locality.  

Organic farmers in local communities, for example, had better shut up about pesticides and pesticide-resistant genetically modified crops, because the Supreme Court is about to sign off on Monsanto/Bayers’ right to sell their products everywhere with no interference from local bigmouths.  Same goes for marijuana, your local preference for a moderately harmless drug of choice has nothing to do with Nixon’s 1969 federal classification of the drug as a dangerous narcotic with no medicinal uses in his infamous Controlled Substances Act (“CSA”).  The CSA allows federal prosecution of pot smokers and the arguably arbitrary imprisonment of countless Americans in a decades’ long war against “Drugs”.   Same goes for anything we say it goes for, ass wipe.

One right-wing, states’ rights objection to the conservative private industry-protecting Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act is that the federal law mandates the purchase of health insurance by millions of newly eligible citizens.   Takes away the right of the local government to decide how best to protect its disposable class of asshole citizens too stupid to have corporate jobs, or public sector ones, that provide health care.  

But enough of the critique of the easy to ridicule right-wing, I’m here to propose legislation to fix a specific problem: 

that NYS insurance companies routinely deny healthcare services to mandated low-income health insurance buyers utterly unprotected by New York State law, in spite of the fig leaf of administrative supervision by the Department of Financial Services.

Just before New York State adopted the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (“PPACA”) it abolished the New York State Insurance Department and removed all traces of oversight from the New York State Department of Health.  The functions of these agencies were merged into the New York State Department of Financial Services.  This agency has sole responsibility in New York State for oversight of health insurance companies, as well as all fraud investigations related to consumer fraud against insurance companies, and all complaints about the practices of financial institutions, banks and brokers.  

Everything but, according to a fraud investigator for the Department of Financial Services, who referred me to a non-responsive phone tree number, investigations into colorable fraud committed by insurance companies against mandated health-care “consumers” in New York State.

Granted, the PPACA was written by health industry insider Liz Fowler.  It is only sensible that it tilts toward protecting industry profits over the rights of individual patients.   In light of this, it is a grave oversight, and a direct threat to the health of its most vulnerable citizens, that New York State does not have an independent agency dedicated to resolving the countless daily denials of purchased health care services. The need for this agency is particularly acute now that we have a president determined to eliminate most government regulation of private industry.

A health insurance consumer in New York State looks in vain for a forum where these complaints can be adjudicated.   At minimum a well-staffed Ombudsperson’s office should be created– and the 800 number prominently displayed on the New York State of Health Marketplace homepage.  Consumers of mandated health insurance in New York State should not be subjected to the arbitrary abuse of power by unaccountable private corporations whose primary business is increasing their profit margins.  

Proposal: create an agency dedicated solely to enforcing the rights of defrauded health insurance consumers in New York State.  

I mean, seriously, dude, how hard would that be, in the looming age of Trumpcare?

 

[1]  The Supreme Court recognizes that what is titilatingly pornographic to a hipster from Brooklyn might actually induce vomiting in someone from Kenosha, Wisconsin.