If You Can’t Trust Putin And Kim Jong-Un, Whom CAN You Trust? July 3, 2018 He’s not fond of Canada’s leader or the leaders of the U.K., Germany, or France. But in Putin and Erdogan and Duterte and Xi — and Kim — he finds strong men he can do business with. Has he been played? Let’s hope not. But . . . . . . Despite replete evidence that he was swindled, Trump said during a Fox News interview, “I made a deal with [Kim Jong Un]. I shook hands with him. I really believe he means it.” The problem with a raging narcissist is that he must deny reality in order to avoid embarrassment. . . . Putin, through Trump, has ended the American century. And the Republicans in Congress — who once called him a pathological liar — simply cower. Not the sort of July 4th one would have wished for. (But have a great one.) Cry, the beloved country. Too dark? Stop Mourning, Democrats, writes Joe Scarborough. Organize for November and begin to fix this mess.
Of Pitchforks And Limousines July 1, 2018 I’m as nonviolent as they come. So, too, I presume, Hamilton Nolan, who wrote this piece. But that’s why everyone who shares a desire for peace and civility — for working out our problems with reason and good will and a willingness to listen — should read it. It leads with a photo of a blazing limousine. And begins: Do you think that being asked to leave a restaurant, or having your meal interrupted, or being called by the public is bad? My fascism-enabling friends, this is only the beginning. One thing that people who wield great power often fail to viscerally understand is what it feels like to have power wielded against you. This imbalance is the source of many of the most monstrous decisions that get made by powerful people and institutions. The people who start the wars do not have bombs dropped on their houses. The people who pass the laws that incarcerate others never have to face the full force of the prison system themselves. The people who design the economic system that inflicts poverty on millions are themselves rich. This sort of insulation from the real world consequences of political and economic decisions makes it very easy for powerful people to approve of things happening to the rest of us that they would never, ever tolerate themselves. No health insurance CEO would watch his child die due to their inability to afford quality health care. . . . A well-designed political system would have a built-in feedback system to ensure that those making the decisions are also subject to the consequences of those decisions. Minor versions of this are floated every now and then: Put Congress on Obamacare! Pay elected officials what their average constituents earn! But in aggregate, of course, we have nothing like this feedback mechanism in America. The titans of money congregate on Wall Street and the titans of government congregate in DC and they all make decisions that often disenfranchise and impoverish and frustrate the dreams of people far away, and then they go to nice restaurants and go home to nice houses and have nice, well-paid careers for decades to come. That is our system. There is little incentive for those who work within that system to change it in a way that might create the sort of negative feedback that can be unpleasant. Therefore it is the job of the public to do just that. Doing so is, in fact, a public service. It promotes good government. . . . My politics are a click to the center of Hamilton’s. I’m old. I’m a Harvard MBA. But read his argument. It’s elicited death threats from the right. But what do you think? And maybe this is a good time to re-link to to Nick Hanauer’s Beware, Fellow Plutocrats, The Pitchforks Are Coming. It begins: You probably don’t know me, but I am one of those .01 percenters that you hear about and read about, and I am by any reasonable definition a plutocrat. And tonight, what I would like to do is speak directly to other plutocrats, to my people, because it feels like it’s time for us all to have a chat. Like most plutocrats, I too am a proud and unapologetic capitalist. I have founded, cofounded or funded over 30 companies across a range of industries. I was the first non-family investor in Amazon.com. I cofounded a company called aQuantive that we sold to Microsoft for 6.4 billion dollars. My friends and I, we own a bank. I tell you this to show that my life is like most plutocrats. I have a broad perspective on capitalism and business, and I have been rewarded obscenely for that with a life that most of you all can’t even imagine: multiple homes, a yacht, my own plane, etc., etc., etc. But let’s be honest: I am not the smartest person you’ve ever met. I am certainly not the hardest working. I was a mediocre student. I’m not technical at all. I can’t write a word of code. Truly, my success is the consequence of spectacular luck, of birth, of circumstance and of timing. But I am actually pretty good at a couple of things. One, I have an unusually high tolerance for risk, and the other is I have a good sense, a good intuition about what will happen in the future, and I think that that intuition about the future is the essence of good entrepreneurship. So what do I see in our future today, you ask? I see pitchforks, as in angry mobs with pitchforks, because while people like us plutocrats are living beyond the dreams of avarice, the other 99 percent of our fellow citizens are falling farther and farther behind. . . . . . . So I have a message for my fellow plutocrats and zillionaires and for anyone who lives in a gated bubble world: Wake up. Wake up. It cannot last. Because if we do not do something to fix the glaring economic inequities in our society, the pitchforks will come for us, for no free and open society can long sustain this kind of rising economic inequality. It has never happened. There are no examples. You show me a highly unequal society, and I will show you a police state or an uprising. The pitchforks will come for us if we do not address this. It’s not a matter of if, it’s when. And it will be terrible when they come for everyone, but particularly for people like us plutocrats. . . . Rising inequality doesn’t just increase our risks from pitchforks, but it’s also terrible for business too. . . . There’s more. Read it all. Knowing that he gave this TED talk long before Trump and Putin worked their magic. Long before the Republicans passed yet another massive tax cut for the rich and powerful. And read Hamilton Nolan’s warning, as well. He’s no plutocrat, but he’s on the same page. Click here to help fund the massive turn-out we need in November.
How Fascism Happens (According To The War Department) June 29, 2018June 28, 2018 Three-minute 1943 War Department video warning in re: the insidious appeal of fascism. One-and-a-half minute 2018 video of a California woman and a college grad she correctly took to be Mexican. If you watch both, I think you’ll see the connection. Have a great weekend?
We Need To Play By Senator McConnell’s Rules June 27, 2018 In light of Anthony Kennedy’s announced retirement, it seems to me we should all be saying something like this: Mitch McConnell is the Senate majority leader. Mitch McConnell sets the rules. And here are the rules he set: He said that with Merrick Garland, a moderate consensus candidate, it was not enough to know how the majority voted in 2008 and 2012 . . . the President could not be allowed to exercise his Constitutional right to fill the vacancy. No, he said: with less than a year until the 2016 election, we had to wait to see how they’d vote in 2016. So we did — and millions more voted for the Democrat than the Republican. Not enough to win the presidency, but enough to confirm the nation’s preference. (And still he didn’t give Garland a hearing.) So now – with barely 4 months to November – and by Senator McConnell’s own rules — we have to wait to see how the people feel. Which party gets more votes. If it’s the Republicans, so be it. But if it’s the Democrats, then — even if Senator McConnell retains the gavel — he must work with the Democrats and the President to find a moderate consensus candidate. Perhaps even Merrick Garland.
Joe’s Rant – For the Love of Country: Watch and Share June 26, 2018June 25, 2018 This is 13 minutes, but you just have to watch, and then (if it strikes you as it struck me) share it — respectfully — with any of friends or relatives or co-workers who may be Fox viewers. Scarborough, as they probably know, remains a staunch Conservative who was until recently a lifelong Republican — and for several terms an Alabama-schooled Southern congressman from Northern Florida. Gibraltar, 25 June 2018 – WheelTug plc, the innovative aircraft electric taxi company, announced today the signing of two Russian airlines. The slot agreement is for several dozen narrowbody aircraft. The airlines have chosen to make their own announcements at a future date. The additions bring the total number of WheelTug systems reserved to well over 1,100. Worldwide, WheelTug have now agreed terms with more than two dozen airlines; the Russian airlines are the fifth and sixth WheelTug signings of 2018.
Essential Reading June 24, 2018 From lifelong conservative Republican George Will: Vote against the GOP this November Amid the carnage of Republican misrule in Washington, there is this glimmer of good news: The family-shredding policy along the southern border, the most telegenic recent example of misrule . . . has given independents and temperate Republicans . . . fresh if redundant evidence for the principle by which they should vote. The principle: The congressional Republican caucuses must be substantially reduced. So substantially that their remnants, reduced to minorities, will be stripped of the Constitution’s Article I powers that they have been too invertebrate to use against the current wielder of Article II powers. They will then have leisure time to wonder why they worked so hard to achieve membership in a legislature whose unexercised muscles have atrophied because of people like them. . . . And from Anne Applebaum (also in the Washington Post — thanks, Glenn!): It is remarkable, in retrospect, how many and varied were the dictatorships of the past century. Murderous regimes . . . [from] wealthy Germany and impoverished Rwanda [to] Buddhist Cambodia and Orthodox Russia. Yet these different regimes did all have one thing in common . . . the “mania for classification and elimination of different elements of society.” In each one of them, the groundwork for violence against a specific group — whether an ethnicity, an economic class or a political faction — was originally laid by a very particular way of using language. In the first instance, inflammatory language was used to define an ethnic minority and to give it fictional characteristics and properties. In some cases, the targeted “tribe” was entirely fictional, created by rhetoric alone. . . . After the unwanted group had been defined, propaganda was used to demonize and dehumanize it. In the Soviet Union, Vladimir Lenin characterized Russia’s ex-rulers as “former people,” as if their humanity had somehow been dissolved by the revolution. Germany’s Adolf Hitler and Russia’s Joseph Stalin went further, describing unwanted categories of human beings as “vermin” or “parasites” or “poisonous weeds.” The Nazis even made posters, depicting Jews as lice. For the past half-century, memory of where it once led has made this kind of language taboo in Western democracies. Now it is undeniably back. I am not comparing President Trump or his European counterparts to Lenin or Hitler; even to do so gives all of them a significance they don’t deserve. But they have brought back the “mania for classification and elimination of different elements of society,” and this will have real consequences. It is worth noting how often the president repeatedly conflates refugees with illegal immigrants and MS-13 gang members. [It is also worth noting, I would think, that Trump kept a book of Hitler’s speeches by his bedside. — A.T.] This is not an accident: He has targeted a group and given them characteristics — they are violent, they are rapists, they are gang members — that don’t belong to most of them. He then describes them with dehumanizing language. Democrats, he has tweeted, “want illegal immigrants, no matter how bad they may be, to pour into and infest our country, like MS-13.” The image of “infestation” evokes, again, vermin and lice. A few weeks earlier, he spoke of MS-13 as “animals,” once again making it unclear whether he meant actual gang members or simply those who distantly resemble them. Trump isn’t alone. Matteo Salvini, the new Italian interior minister, also recently spoke of “mass cleansing” of “entire parts” of Italy. He was speaking of Roma — gypsies — but again in a way that was unclear. He conflated “Roma” with “foreigners” and then with “children who have been taught to steal.” A bit farther east, the Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orban has achieved an even greater feat: He has whipped up fear of a target group — foreign immigrants — who do not actually exist in Hungary. I don’t believe any of these leaders are, at the moment, planning mass murder. The purpose this time is different: to define and classify a group whose existence can be used to create fear. Social media can be used to give these enemies greater numbers than they have in reality; even when they don’t exist, talk of “no-go zones” and “crime waves” can be used to win votes. These tactics will produce casualties. The border police who took children from their parents at the U.S.-Mexico border were mentally prepared to do so thanks to the language of dehumanization. . . . They will also produce imitators and amplifiers, such as the Oregon woman who called for immigrants to be shot at the border, or the Fox News pundit who said there was no need to worry about those children because, after all, they aren’t American. . . . And, no, apparently, according to Snopes, Mussolini did not make the trains run on time: Mussolini needed to convince the people of Italy that fascism was indeed a system that worked to their benefit. Thus was born the myth of fascist efficiency, with the train as its symbol. The word was spread that Mussolini had turned the dilapidated Italian railway system into one that was the envy of all Europe, featuring trains that were both dependable and punctual. In Mussolini’s Italy, all the trains ran on time. Well, not quite. The Italian railway system had fallen into a rather sad state during World War I, and it did improve a good deal during the 1920s, but Mussolini was disingenuous in taking credit for the changes: much of the repair work had been performed before Mussolini and the fascists came to power in 1922. More importantly (to the claim at hand), those who actually lived in Italy during the Mussolini era have borne testimony that the Italian railway’s legendary adherence to timetables was far more myth than reality. So there wasn’t even that. As always, to help fund an organizer with time to recruit and train dozens of volunteers to register thousands of new voters and help drive many thousands more to the polls . . . click here.
It is remarkable, in retrospect, how many and varied were the dictatorships of the past century. Murderous regimes . . . [from] wealthy Germany and impoverished Rwanda [to] Buddhist Cambodia and Orthodox Russia. Yet these different regimes did all have one thing in common . . . the “mania for classification and elimination of different elements of society.” In each one of them, the groundwork for violence against a specific group — whether an ethnicity, an economic class or a political faction — was originally laid by a very particular way of using language. In the first instance, inflammatory language was used to define an ethnic minority and to give it fictional characteristics and properties. In some cases, the targeted “tribe” was entirely fictional, created by rhetoric alone. . . . After the unwanted group had been defined, propaganda was used to demonize and dehumanize it. In the Soviet Union, Vladimir Lenin characterized Russia’s ex-rulers as “former people,” as if their humanity had somehow been dissolved by the revolution. Germany’s Adolf Hitler and Russia’s Joseph Stalin went further, describing unwanted categories of human beings as “vermin” or “parasites” or “poisonous weeds.” The Nazis even made posters, depicting Jews as lice. For the past half-century, memory of where it once led has made this kind of language taboo in Western democracies. Now it is undeniably back. I am not comparing President Trump or his European counterparts to Lenin or Hitler; even to do so gives all of them a significance they don’t deserve. But they have brought back the “mania for classification and elimination of different elements of society,” and this will have real consequences. It is worth noting how often the president repeatedly conflates refugees with illegal immigrants and MS-13 gang members. [It is also worth noting, I would think, that Trump kept a book of Hitler’s speeches by his bedside. — A.T.] This is not an accident: He has targeted a group and given them characteristics — they are violent, they are rapists, they are gang members — that don’t belong to most of them. He then describes them with dehumanizing language. Democrats, he has tweeted, “want illegal immigrants, no matter how bad they may be, to pour into and infest our country, like MS-13.” The image of “infestation” evokes, again, vermin and lice. A few weeks earlier, he spoke of MS-13 as “animals,” once again making it unclear whether he meant actual gang members or simply those who distantly resemble them. Trump isn’t alone. Matteo Salvini, the new Italian interior minister, also recently spoke of “mass cleansing” of “entire parts” of Italy. He was speaking of Roma — gypsies — but again in a way that was unclear. He conflated “Roma” with “foreigners” and then with “children who have been taught to steal.” A bit farther east, the Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orban has achieved an even greater feat: He has whipped up fear of a target group — foreign immigrants — who do not actually exist in Hungary. I don’t believe any of these leaders are, at the moment, planning mass murder. The purpose this time is different: to define and classify a group whose existence can be used to create fear. Social media can be used to give these enemies greater numbers than they have in reality; even when they don’t exist, talk of “no-go zones” and “crime waves” can be used to win votes. These tactics will produce casualties. The border police who took children from their parents at the U.S.-Mexico border were mentally prepared to do so thanks to the language of dehumanization. . . . They will also produce imitators and amplifiers, such as the Oregon woman who called for immigrants to be shot at the border, or the Fox News pundit who said there was no need to worry about those children because, after all, they aren’t American. . . .
Cause For Hope June 21, 2018June 20, 2018 Democrats are appalled by today’s Republican Party (obviously), but so, too, traditional Conservatives . . . George Will publicly quit, Joe Scarborough publicly quit, William F. Buckley, Jr. is rolling over in is grave . . . and, yes, traditional Republicans. E.g., Steve Schmidt, who ran McCain’s campaign against Obama. He just quit, too: 29 years and nine months ago I registered to vote and became a member of The Republican Party which was founded in 1854 to oppose slavery and stand for the dignity of human life. Today I renounce my membership in the Republican Party. It is fully the party of Trump. And my Uber driver, a former Missouri Republican legislative assistant. He told me, as he dropped me off on a ride in from Long Island (where he is represented by this appalling guy) that he couldn’t help overhearing my phone conversation (wherein I extracted big bucks from a San Diego couple) and asked, with some urgency, that I have someone contact him about volunteering. There are, of course, a great many people cheering Trump on, from out-and-out Klansmen to the corrupt and greedy (and worse and worse and perhaps worst of all) to tens of millions of really wonderful people struggling to make ends meet, looking for someone they think feels their pain (I would argue Trump feels nothing for anyone but himself) and who they think has a solution to their problems. If only he can vanquish the bad guys on their behalf (the press, the FBI, the Canadians) he will get them “great health care at a tiny fraction of the price.” He claims he never read the compendium of Hitler’s speeches by his bedside, though (because he constantly lies) it is more likely that he did, as Ivana alleged. Either way, it’s Germany 1934. (General background here.) Which is why everything turns on the mid-term elections. Will “checks and balances” be restored? Will the better angels of our nation’s nature prevail? Will we be the America that massacred native Americans and broke our treaties with them? Or the America that rode to Europe’s rescue and then conceived the Marshall Plan? The America that lynched thousands of Negros? Or the America that elected Barack Obama? The America of Senator Joe McCarthy and his reptilian aide Roy Cohn (Trump’s mentor)? Or the decent, hopeful America of Abe Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt and Dwight Eisenhower and Gerald Ford and George H. W. Bush and Colin Powell? And, well, Steve Schmidt and Joe Scarborough and George Will and my Uber driver? I think we will be the latter. Reason #1: I inherited the happy gene. Reason #2: I believe in the American people (millions more of whom, even with Comey’s interference and Putin’s massive attack, voted against Trump than for him). Reason #3: We have so many great candidates. Beto O’Rourke to beat Ted Cruz in Texas! Former Governor Phil Bredesen to flip Bob Corker’s seat in Tennessee! While it would be very close if we can pull it off, we have a much better chance of taking the Senate than most people realize. And the House? Take the time to enjoy these short videos introducing two of the many wonderful candidates who could help us win it big: MJ Hegar’s story about “doors” — like the one from her helicopter the Taliban shot down and the one her father threw her mother through. Scott Wallace’s story — what a family history of service to this wonderful country! You will be inspired and given fresh hope. As always, if you’re in a position to help, click here. Each organizer hired now has time to snowball, via the volunteers she or he recruits and trains, into thousands of incremental voter registrations and many thousands of incremental votes.
Theater Appreciation June 20, 2018June 19, 2018 Did you miss that course in college? Here it is in 12 minutes. It begins in Greece, 2500 years ago. Theater and democracy — and respecting our friends in the red states.
Glam Up The Mid-Terms June 19, 2018June 18, 2018 Fareed Zakaria is must-watch TV every Sunday morning. Here (beginning at 1:20) is his 4-minute take on North Korea and the Pacific region. We are ceding the field (and much of the rest of the world) to China. It’s hard to guess who is more thrilled with Trump: Putin, China, North Korea’s dictator or (though I digress) America’s white supremacists. To help break the Republican stranglehold, click here. To glam up the mid-terms, click here.
The Death Of Democracy June 18, 2018June 18, 2018 George Packer in the New Yorker: Donald Trump Goes Rogue . . . In four days, between Quebec and Singapore, Trump showed that the liberal order is hateful to him, and that he wants out. Its rules are too confining, its web of connections—from trade treaties to security alliances—unfair. And he seems to find his democratic counterparts distasteful, even pathetic. They speak in high-minded rhetoric rather than in Twitter insults, they’re emasculated by parliaments and by the press, and maybe they’re not very funny. Trump prefers the company of dictators who can flatter and be flattered. Part of his unhappiness in Quebec was due to the absence of President Vladimir Putin; before leaving for the summit, Trump had demanded that Russia be unconditionally restored to the G-7, from which it was suspended over the dismemberment of Ukraine. He finds nothing special about democratic values, and nothing objectionable about murderous rulers. “What, you think our country is so innocent?” he once asked. . . . Trump imagines that America unbound, shaking hands or giving the finger, depending upon short-term interests and Presidential whims, will flourish among the other rogues. After his meeting with Kim, he flew home aglow with wonder at his own dealmaking prowess, assuring Americans that they could now sleep in peace. In fact, Trump had secured nothing except the same vague commitment to dismantling North Korea’s nuclear program which the regime has offered and routinely betrayed in the past. Meanwhile, he gave up something real—joint U.S.-South Korean military exercises, which he called “provocative,” the language of totalitarian and aggressive North Korea. Without allies and treaties, without universal values, American foreign policy largely depends on what goes on inside Trump’s head. Kim, like Putin, already seems to have got there. Power politics is not a system that plays to American strengths. For all our lapses, we thrived for seventy years by standing for something. . . . When the next global economic crisis or major war or terrorist attack happens, America will be alone. And Timothy Snyder reviewing THE DEATH OF DEMOCRACY: Hitler’s Rise to Power and the Downfall of the Weimar Republic in the New York Times: How Did the Nazis Gain Power in Germany? . . . We take for granted that the Germans of the 1930s were quite different from ourselves, and that our consideration of their errors will only confirm our superiority. The opposite is the case. . . . . . . The Nazis, in Hett’s account, were above all “a nationalist protest movement against globalization.” . . . In their 1920 program, the Nazis proclaimed that “members of foreign nations (noncitizens) are to be expelled from Germany.” Next would come autarky: Germans would conquer the territory they needed to be self-sufficient, and then create their own economy in isolation from that of the rest of the world. As Goebbels put it, “We want to build a wall, a protective wall.” . . . Please vote. And if you can, help.