You’re Overlooking a Critical Issue: It’s Not Just Trump

Trump & Cabinet

This graphic is not up to date. Since these appointments, a lot of people have been fired, eased out, or quit and new ones have been incorporated.

Is Getting Rid of Trump the Answer?

Approximately half of the voting population of the United States is in agreement on one thing: the urgent necessity to unseat President Donald Trump. The other half is determined to maintain him in office and advance his curious agenda, which essentially amounts to dismantling and destroying the government and the country. His recent, “I have second thoughts on everything…”  comment confirms his arbitrariness. It’s almost as if he didn’t have ideas of his own, but was in the business of adopting other people’s programs for a price–notably re-election but also the advancement of his personal business interests and those of his family.

President Trump’s government is not run on ideas, it’s run on personal self-interest and simple-minded ideology, the notion that less government and fewer taxes are better, and that the affairs of the nation are better left to the private sector, to business. His selection of personnel for his cabinet and staff to dis-govern the country is based on a wonderfully-simple idea which is fatally-flawed at its base. The authentic purpose of government is to assure the health and wellbeing of the whole nation, the principal objective of all the countries of the developed world–except one. The purpose of business is to make a profit. It should be clear even to a person of limited intellect that the two concepts are diametrically opposed and that favoring profit over wellbeing, though it’s great for a few rich men and powerful industries, is a ruinous policy for the vast majority of the American people.

Which brings us to the point. The ongoing trashing of the United States for the benefit of sinister powerful interests is not actually Trump’s program. He lacks both the wit and the attention span even to outline such a vast program, let alone execute it. That’s why the powers behind the President have decided he needs a crew that can be trusted to do the trashing, firstly on behalf of the select tribe of business gangsters who put him in power and in second place, in order to benefit his personal interests and those of his family. So, if the people of the American opposition should succeed in ousting  President Trump, either through impeachment or the ballot box, they would still be far from solving the problem. The rest of the Trump team, with the most reactionary powers of the country behind them, would remain intact and active.

A Sea Change in Campaign Financing Changed Everything

73%

Just who are the aforementioned “capitalist gangsters” and how did they manage to concentrate so much political power in the United States? The answers are not hard to find. The gangsters are people, companies, and institutions that have accumulated so much money that they can purchase the power of the US government. This was formerly unthinkable. Democratic institutions were not for sale. Then, in 2010, that reality changed, with the Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, 558 U.S. 310, Supreme Court decision concerning campaign finance. The ruling effectively freed labor unions and corporations to spend money on electioneering communications and to directly advocate for the election or defeat of candidates. Do not be tempted to think that the unions and corporations were therefore on equal terms. American unions were pretty well defenestrated by 2010. That left American corporations an open field for essentially purchasing the US Congress. That wholly-legal power grab started a brief 19 years ago and explains the situation the country finds itself in today.

In my first year in college, there was a required course called American Thought and Language 101. In it, my first left-wing professor introduced 30 or 40 naive 18-year-olds to “Conservatism,” a political philosophy that put property rights before human rights, profit before people. I was stunned. How was it possible that citizens of my own country could adhere to such a monstrous philosophy? Seven years later I changed countries and never looked back, but Conservatism went on to reign in the United States in an ever-more-monstrous version.

Let’s Take a Look at the Cream of President Trump’s Governing Team

Sycophant_in_ChiefAs the President’s cabinet stands today–there has been a lot of to-ing and fro-ing since 2016–the top man is Vice President, Mike Pence, the one who would ascend to the presidency if Donald Trump should die, become disabled, or step down. Michael Richard Pence (born June 7, 1959), a former US Representative and Governor of Indiana, characterizes himself as “a Christian, a conservative and a Republican, in that order,” and as “a born-again, evangelical Catholic,” who, since 1995,  attends the Grace Evangelical megachurch.

When queried about his “military experience,” Pence, a lifetime member of the NRA who never wore a uniform, brings up his family’s military tradition, referring apparently to his father’s service in the Korean War. He emphatically believes in armed solutions, having stated his support of Israel and its right to attack facilities in Iran to prevent the Iranians from developing nuclear weapons, defended the actions of Israel in its use of deadly force in enforcing the blockade of Gaza, and referred to Israel as “America’s most cherished ally.” He apparently hasn’t noticed that Iran is internationally certified as having no nuclear weapons and Israel, the only Middle East country with nuclear capabilities has an estimated 75 to 400 nuclear warheads, complete with a submarine-based second-strike capability. He visited Israel in 2014 to express his support, and in 2016 signed into law a bill which would ban Indiana from having any commercial dealings with a company that boycotts Israel.

According to a FiveThirtyEight rating of candidates’ ideology, Pence was the most conservative vice-presidential candidate in the last forty years. During the campaign Pence stated that his role model as vice president would be Dick Cheney. (Source: Wikipedia)

Vice President Pence visited the McAllen Border Patrol Station in Texas in July of this year, where 382 immigrant men were packed behind chain-linked fences under “sweltering hot” conditions. Many of the men told reporters they had been there for 40 days or longer, saying that they were hungry and wanted to brush their teeth. The cages were so overcrowded that it would have been impossible for the men to lie down all at once, and no mats or pillows were provided so the men slept on bare concrete.

“I was not surprised by what I saw,” Pence said at a news conference. “I knew we’d see a system that was overwhelmed. This is tough stuff. He added later, “While we hear some Democrats in Washington, D.C., referring to U.S. Customs and Border facilities as ‘concentration camps,’ what we saw today was a facility that is providing care that every American would be proud of.” (Source: People.com)

Orange California, West Point, the House, the CIA, Head of US Diplomacy

Mike PompeoPresident Trump’s Secretary of State since April  2018, is Mike Pompeo, born and raised in Orange, California, who graduated first in his class from the United States Military Academy at West Point, majoring in engineering management. After his military service in Germany, Pompeo was president of Sentry International, an oilfield equipment manufacturer that was also a partner of Koch Industries. He was subsequently a member of the House of Representatives (2011–2017) and the Director of the CIA (January 2017 until April 2018).

In March 2019, when questioned regarding Israel’s conflicts with Iran and following a visit to the Western Wall with Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, Pompeo spoke of “the work that our administration’s done to make sure that this democracy in the Middle East, that this Jewish state, remains…I am confident that the Lord is at work here.”

In March 2014, he denounced the inclusion in a telecast of the whistleblower, Edward Snowden, at the South by Southwest conference in Austin, Texas, and asked that it be canceled, predicting that it would encourage “lawless behavior” among attendees. In February 2016, Pompeo said Snowden “should be brought back from Russia and given due process, and I think the proper outcome would be that he would be given a death sentence”

Speaking about climate change in 2013, Pompeo said: “There are scientists who think lots of different things about climate change. There’s some who think we’re warming, there’s some who think we’re cooling, there’s some who think that the last 16 years have shown a pretty stable climate environment.” He also stated that “climate change is actually good for the Arctic, since melting ice caps are ‘opening up new shipping routes’ and thus making it more economically viable to expand oil drilling in the region.” Now we know where he stands.

Pompeo is a lifetime member of the National Rifle Association and has been endorsed by them. He is a member of the Evangelical Presbyterian Church where he served as a local church deacon from 2007-2009 and taught Sunday school. In 2014, Pompeo told a church group that Christians needed to “know that Jesus Christ as our savior is truly the only solution for our world”. In 2015 in a talk at a church, Pompeo said that “politics is a never-ending struggle … until the Rapture.” (Source: Wikipedia)

Investment Banker, Asset Stripper, Home Forecloser, Secretary of the Treasury

Louise_Linton_M_wifeSteve Mnuchin, Trump’s Secretary of the Treasury was born in New York City in 1962, the son of a Goldman Sachs partner. After graduating from Yale University in 1985, he worked for Goldman Sachs for 17 years, eventually becoming its chief information officer. After he left Goldman in 2002, he worked for and founded several hedge funds. Mnuchin was a member of Sears Holdings’s board of directors from 2005 until December 2016, and before that was on Kmart’s board of directors. After Sears went bankrupt, the company that formerly owned it sued Mnuchin and ex-CEO Edward Lampert for “asset stripping” during their tenure. As secretary of the treasury, Mnuchin has been a vocal supporter of reducing corporate tax rates.

Betsy de Vos Has Oodles of Money

Trump_DeVosElisabeth Dee DeVos, born January 8, 1958, was President Trump’s choice for Secretary of Education. DeVos’s claim to fame is primarily that she is rich, having fallen into a vat of family money when she was born, and then again when she was married. Suffice it to say that members of her immediate family own ten yachts. What concerns us here is the fact that every aspect of her education activism was designed to undermine public education. That means she favors school choice, school voucher programs, and charter schools. All of these are thinly-disguised mechanisms for subverting and supplanting public schools by diverting parts of the education budget to religious models. Vouchers are popular with conservative Christians, and Vice President Mike Pence had expanded taxpayer-funded vouchers, as well as charter schools when he was governor of Indiana. According to the NY Times, DeVos has announced that she will no longer enforce a provision in federal law that bars religious organizations from providing federally-funded education services to private schools.

See What You’re Up Against?

Are these the best people President Donald Trump can find to lead the country? They all seem limited to just a couple of priorities: making (or inheriting) money and introducing religion systematically into the American government. I can detect no hint of dedication to public service in any of them, starting with the President, himself. Are these are the people who will take over the country when the President is no longer around? One wonders if there is an opposition think-tank committee somewhere trying to figure out how to get rid of them when the time comes. But, given the number of layers of Trump appointees and Congressional big-money lackeys that the opposition committee would have to sift through, the job would be like attacking a haystack full of needles.

You Have a Choice Between Two Solutions

From here, I can foresee only two possible solutions, one miraculous, the other military.

  1. The miraculous theological solution: Pray.
  2. The military solution: In the Army they prepared us for extreme situations such as this or seeing a blinding flash followed by a mushroom cloud. In these cases, the instructions were: “Bend over, put your head between your legs and kiss your ass goodbye.”

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USA, the Entropocracy

entropy_degrade

entropy

ˈɛntrəpi/
noun

PHYSICS

“A thermodynamic quantity representing the unavailability of a system’s thermal energy for conversion into mechanical work often interpreted as the degree of disorder or randomness in the system.
“The second law of thermodynamics says that entropy always increases with time.
Lack of order or predictability; gradual decline into disorder.”

 

Time Flies

Nearly three decades ago, when our son was an undergraduate geology student, he came home one day bubbling over with enthusiasm. “Did you know that everything can be explained by thermodynamics?” he said. “Everything?” I squinted. “Everything!” he repeated. So it’s ironic that today, a generation later, I should start this piece with a definition of entropy, in an effort to explain the “decline and disorder” in the country where I was born and raised, baptized, deflowered, drafted, and discharged, the United States of America.

One possible definition of a “country” is a group of people with an abiding sense of shared destiny, a conviction that they’re all in it together. That goes for all of the countries of Europe and a lot of others around the world, most of them actually, except for the United States. They’re almost all in it for themselves. Seen from here, the state that comes closest to the world norm in this respect is Massachusetts. They actually had the audacity to call themselves a “commonwealth.”
Nor is toxic American individualism a recent phenomenon. This is from Alexis de Tocqueville’s book, Democracy in America (1840):

…a new expression to which a new idea has given birth … a deliberate and peaceful sentiment which disposes each citizen to isolate himself from his fellows and to draw apart with his family and friends … [abandoning] the wider society to itself … [sapping] the virtues of public life … [and finally being] absorbed into pure egoism.


Ruthless Competition, Maximum Profit, Powered by Patriotism

How did the Americans manage to miss the common-good boat? Early on they adopted individualism as a national philosophy. That, of course, precluded any form of collectivism or joint solutions to the challenges of their society. As time went by the American people assimilated that gravely flawed–in terms of uniting, consolidating and advancing a country–idea. Not only that, they elevated it to a virtually religious belief, one that cannot be questioned. Any deviation from the gospel of American individualism is seen as sinful. It didn’t take long for powerful special interests to adopt the self-made-man mantra and adapt it to their own needs, starting with no-holds-barred competition. Profit became king and commonwealth was replaced “patriotism,” a much more flexible, less specific concept that could be easily converted into a tool of manipulation. This phenomenon is most evident in the process of arming and training young American men and women for war and sending them to far-off foreign lands, then bringing them back in black, heavy-duty-plastic body bags.
Without patriotism, it would be much more difficult to embark them on such a fool’s errand. Patriotism soon morphs into a variety of nationalism capable of justifying everything, from the extinction of most of Guatemala’s indigenous people to reducing Iraq to rubble and anarchy. What to say about their penchant for starting wars and then losing them? Considering their military wherewithal, is losing even a possibility? More recently the Americans were driven out of Syria. And just a few days ago we are informed that President Trump has decided to “withdraw” from America’s longest war, in Afghanistan. Justin King, “Beau,” the genial southern journalist who presents his lucid take on the news daily on YouTube, admonished recently., “Don’t believe that ‘withdrawal.’ What has happened to the Americans in Afghanistan is that they have been defeated.”

A Recipe for Ruin

The very notion of a country based on laissez-faire, every-man-for-himself principles inevitably brings with it the loss of national consensus, coherence, identity, and general wellbeing. Absent these factors that give meaning and direction to national policy–to the commonwealth–what happens next responds to pure thermodynamics. Remember the second law? “Entropy always increases with time,” which aptly explains what’s going on politically in the United States today. Seen in terms of plain everyday logic nothing seems to make any sense. Voters vote against their own interests. Initiatives to thwart voter turnout are rampant. Congress passes tax cuts for the rich. Bare-faced lies pass for truth. Trickle-down economics is alive and well. Issues that affect all citizens equally–the environment, climate change, racial equality, universal education… have either been abandoned utterly or are in the process of being mutilated beyond recognition. Candidates arise from seemingly random, highly unqualified sectors of the society, and obey criteria that don’t make any sense. Highly-placed-but-culturally-limited figures in the American administration under President Donald Trump speak in terms of “sound theological principles” in government and in private rely on “The Rapture” to solve all the country’s problems. This is not just a violation of the separation of church and state, it’s rule by nonsense. Good government shouldn’t depend upon miracles or biblical prophecy, and to pretend that it should is to drive the country even further down the road to ruin.

What the Americans Are Best At

Not surprisingly, the things that Americans are best at have to do with mind control: advertising, persuasion, brainwashing and, above all, fabricating and selling their quintessential lies. If they decide to implement a long-term regime-change project in an oil-rich country–say Venezuela–they must have, of course, a good reason. They do have one, and it’s always the same. It’s a lie but they can skip lightly over that hardly-relevant detail. They’re going into those countries (or sending their proxies in)  to oust repressive dictatorial regimes and replace them with democracy. It’s not about oil. It’s about freedom.

That weary old saw–or some variation on it–has been used time and again over many decades to justify American conceived and financed wars, proxy wars, takeovers, subversions, false-flag operations, genocides and other violations of international law. Legality is irrelevant to them. They have absolute veto power in the United Nations since its creation in 1945, and they refuse to recognize the authority of the International Criminal Court. Does this sound like the very definition of a rogue country? Well, yes, but the formula continues to work for them. Is that because they are big, have paved the world with military bases, and are armed to the teeth? That’s a possibility, too.

The other flimsy pretext for American meddling in other countries’ affairs is “anti-communism,” the eternal constant in the American muddle. Communists are not necessarily the devil, though they have been demonized in the US as if they were. In fact, the world’s most civilized countries–those of Western Europe–have drawn many principles that have contributed to their highly-successful social-democracy model of society straight from Marx and Engels. European workers have a month’s vacation from day one. Is this why the United States is out to break the back of the European Community, starting with the British Brexit?

What Happened to the American Dream?

The American Dream is the Americans’ most wonderful lie, the magical gossamer strand that sustains their whole house of cards. “You, too, can be rich! If you’re not rich it’s because you don’t work hard enough, or you’re somehow defective.” And that bit of cheap doggerel is what powers a presumably-well-educated, first-world country of more than 300 million people. At this stage in the first quarter of the 21st century, the American Dream has succumbed to entropy. It was inevitable, due to the very nature of American society from the beginning.

Do you have trouble relating to physics? This same message can also be expressed–perhaps even better–in poetry:

The Second Coming

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
William Butler Yeats, 1920
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Let’s Give Julian Assange What He Deserves, Treatment as an American Hero

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US “Justice” Wants to Crucify Australian Journalist for Revealing the Truth

The cruel and unusual treatment accorded Julian Assange over the past seven years is not an isolated incident. It forms part of a worldwide revenge operation by the usual American hands-on-hips, we-are-very-very-miffed crowd. So, what is Assange accused of? Is he guilty of anything? Let’s start at the beginning.

Julian Assange Has Been on the Lam Since Childhood

Julian Assange, today’s journalist, computer genius, activist and wanted man, is the product of an atypical boyhood. Until the age of 16, he lived an enforced nomadic life all around Australia with his divorced mother, Christine, who was fleeing from an abusive relationship. During that time he attended 37 schools. His mother gave him a computer when he was 16 and he quickly became an accomplished hacker. He first got in trouble breaking into the systems of the Nortel communications company. Accused of more than 30 counts of hacking, he got off with a fine. He went on to study mathematics at the University of Melbourne but dropped out before graduating.

Time_cover_Dec_2010Despite his unusual background, Assange became a world-renowned success. In 2006, he began work on his revolutionary internet project, an effort that would put his face on the cover of Time magazine four years later in December of 2010. The project was WikiLeaks, a website for collecting and sharing confidential information on an international scale. The site, which featured carefully encrypted communications with sources, launched in 2007 and released later that year a U.S. military manual that provided detailed information on the Guantanamo detention center. (Source: Biography.com)

WikiLeaks Blows the Lid Off the Putrid Pot

 What followed subsequently was a series of millions of journalistic scoops based on leaked documents, not only from the United States government but from other countries around the world. Perhaps the one with the greatest impact was a video from Iraq that showed an American Apache helicopter gunship wipe out a group of civilians, including two Reuters reporters, on a street in Baghdad, complete with live audio of its crew gleefully celebrating their kills. The gruesome spectacle included a second pass in which the gunship attacked and killed the Iraqis who rushed to help the wounded.
None of the Apache helicopter crew has been brought to even military justice for murdering those civilians, yet Julian Assange continues to deteriorate in a London prison cell for disseminating their story.

Sexual Assault Controversy, Political Asylum at London’s Ecuadorean Embassy, Forced Removal and Incarceration in Belmarsh Prison

Infantile Auschwitz Anyone?

Click to enlarge
Immigrant detention centers around the country
Dormitory beds for migrant children at the Homestead “temporary influx facility” outside of Miami.
A two-year-old Honduran asylum seeker cries as her mother is searched and detained near the U.S.-Mexico border on June 12, 2018 in McAllen, Texas. They had rafted across the Rio Grande from Mexico and were detained by U.S. Border Patrol agents before being sent to a processing center. The following week the Trump administration, under pressure from the public and lawmakers, ended its contraversial policy of separating immigrant children from their parents at the U.S.-Mexico border. Although the child and her mother remained together, they were sent to a series of detention facilities before being released weeks later, pending a future asylum hearing.

What Can We Do About American Concentration Camps for Children?

I feel helpless. With the creation of prison camps for children including toddlers, the United States has taken us to a new low, a sordidness that humanity has seldom seen before. We have to do something, but what can we–you, I, and the rest of us–do? My usual resort is to sit down and denounce these abuses writing them up, which is about the best I can do from here, thousands of miles away from the action. I should be sitting on the White House lawn, dousing myself with gasoline and touching it off with a match. But I’m too cowardly for that. Besides, it would serve only to give President Trump something to snark at. So I’ll write it up. Continue reading “Infantile Auschwitz Anyone?”

The American Metastasis

Trump_with_Troops

Who’s in Charge of the World and How?

Just who are the most retrograde elements in the United States government to dictate policy to sovereign countries in the rest of the world? Where does their authority–and it appears to be absolute–come from? Who are they to lay down unilateral trade bans and tariffs, promote “regime change,” grab sovereign funds in American banks, or sponsor false-flag operations, proxy wars, torture venues, and far-right regimes worldwide? Or to propagate their climate-change criminal negligence?

Are they duly empowered to decide who can buy Venezuelan or Iranian oil, or to impose their grim version of “democracy” all over the world by means of armed drones? Of course, they’re not. All of this supposed authority they have simply arrogated to themselves, like greedy children grabbing all the toys in the nursery. They’re having us on, running rampant across the world while at the same time denouncing the very policies they regularly practice themselves. They deplore Russian signals intelligence at the same time the NSA is tapping the telephone of German Chancellor Angela Merkel, an important European ally. Continue reading “The American Metastasis”

A Better Mousetrap

Mousetrap1

Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door.

Americans believe in better mousetraps. That’s because they used to build the best ones in the world. Nowadays things are changing and they build mainly military products, which are great for killing people and enriching arms peddlers but not so great for making friends. Nor are all their military projects successful. Take the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter project, for example, the fattest military procurement operation in history. That atypical multi-purpose fighter plane, known among insiders as “the plane that sunk the Pentagon,” is a lemon in all of its unwieldy versions. According to one qualified critic, Pierre Sprey, “Its only purpose is to channel billions of dollars to Lockheed Martin.”  Continue reading “A Better Mousetrap”

What Went Wrong, America? 2/2

maga

The West Virginia Coal Wars 

The West Virginia Mine Wars are a dramatic and often overlooked chapter of American history. In the early 1900s in the coalfields of Southern WV, miners faced desperate circumstances. Below ground they withstood some of the worst working conditions in America. Above ground they dealt with brutal mine guards and a mine guard system that controlled the politics and economy of the region.

In 1921 mountaineer families from the nearby hollows, African Americans from the Deep South, and immigrants from places like Hungary and Italy all came together to fight for the right to unionize and basic constitutional rights. From August 20 of that year, miners began rallying at Lens Creek , approximately ten miles south of West Virginia state capital of Charleston. Estimates of total numbers vary, but on August 24, between 5,000 and 20,000 miners began marching from Lens Creek into Logan County. Many of the miners were armed. Continue reading “What Went Wrong, America? 2/2”

What Went Wrong, America? 1/2

Wizard_America

Most Everything, Actually

Why is the United States, allegedly the richest, most-advanced country on earth, so out of step with the rest of the first world? Why does a significant part of its citizens live on the streets in cars, tents or cardboard hovels? Why are prisons occupied by an unnatural preponderance of people of color? Why are its gun homicides off the chart? Why are its elections so dubious and its religions so militant and mercantile? Why is such a wide swath of the population without health care? Why is the economic inequality so grotesquely pronounced there? What gives the American behemoth the right to impose–or try to impose–its will on any sovereign nation it pleases? Why does the United States need 800-1,000 military bases around the world? Why is the country controlled by a fiendish cohort of industrialists and financiers, headed up by a lowbrow President who was actually elected? Why doesn’t somebody do something about all of these glaring anomalies? They’ve done it in the rest of the First World. What went wrong with you, America? Continue reading “What Went Wrong, America? 1/2”

USA: Surveillance, Denial and the Apocalypse

pentacostals

Beware of Trump’s Magical Mystery Tour 

The list of people and agencies who are scrutinizing your personal data and Internet habits is a long one. There’s the FBI, ICE, the CIA, the NSA, the GCHQ, the KGB, Cambridge Analytica, Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, and a whole raft of politically rabid American billionaires. And me. I’m studying your comportment on Facebook to see if there’s anything I can learn about you and your fellow Americans.

I’ve had a Facebook account for more than a decade. Mostly I’ve used it to look up old schoolmates, post curiosities, share human interest stories and music videos, relate to other dog-and-cat people, and generally waste time. When I started writing my geopolitical blog (Trump and All the Rest) a few years ago I began publishing my political posts simultaneously on Facebook. I also shared articles that I considered valuable on the subjects of American domestic and foreign policy, stories by excellent critical thinkers like John Pilger, Robert Fisk, Noam Chomsky, Seymour Hersh, William Blum, and lately, Umair Haque.

What’s Important, Puppy Dogs or Total War?

It seemed to me that my fellow Facebookers were ignoring the posts that I considered important. Fair enough, most of what I write is critical of the United States government’s wickedness at home and abroad. So I wasn’t surprised to find that the dog-and-cat videos generated more feedback than the political articles. What did surprise me, however, was to what extent my Facebook friends ignored any content critical of the United States. There are exceptions, of course. But the vast majority of the English-speaking Facebook universe, which I consider a fairly representative cross-section of American society, flatly doesn’t want to know.  It’s as if they were in amnesia mode, anesthetized, indifferent to every day’s vitally-urgent realities, or worse, in denial, at the top of a slippery slope.

What’s behind this amnesia/denial phenomenon? Have most Americans simply given up? Has the dramatic right-wing shift in their country taken all the wind out of their sails? Are they convinced that their future is limited to permanent war, caged children, miraculous end-times religion, and the dismantling of the American government as we know it?

Blame It on “Southernization?”

There’s another possibility. Maybe the American majority has switched its loyalty to what Kevin Phillips refers to in his 2006 book, American Theocracy, as the “southernization” of American politics, the adoption by a desperate, undereducated electorate of simple good-ol-boy southern values, magical fundamentalist-religious solutions, and silly logic like advocating all-out war in the Middle East in order to bring about the Apocalypse. This is where leading American politicians like Mike Pence, Mitch McConnell and Mike Pompeo originate, the Rapture crowd, and there’s a lot more where they came from.

It’s not quite clear where President Donald Trump fits into this scheme of things but he’s at least opportunistic enough to hitch his wagon to a movement that includes many millions of true-believing voters. According to a piece published on Vox.com on November 2018, 81% of white, born-again evangelical Christians voted for Trump in the 2016 presidential elections. That same article affirms, “White evangelicals continue to be one of the most reliable voting groups in the country. Even as their numbers are shrinking in the general population, their affinity with and enthusiasm for President Trump has so far allowed them to hold their numbers steady at the ballot box.”

This End Game Is Not a Game

A 2014 Pew study categorized 25.4% of the American population, which stood then at 318.6 million people, as white evangelical protestants. These numbers are not to be taken lightly. This link between fundamentalist religión and presidential politics goes a long way to explain President Trump’s fawning allegiance to Bibi Netanyahu’s ruthless right-wing Israeli Likud party which millions of American evangelical and pentecostal voters are counting on to initiate the long-awaited end-times war. This massive swamp of ultra-religious voters is too important to President Trump’s political future to be ignored.

So here we are, all of us, kneeling on the biblical brink.

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Jimmy Carter on American Militarism and China’s Incredible Progress

“For old men to be taken seriously they must resort to telling the truth.” Bart Sedgebear

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Trump’s Phonecall Prompts Jimmy Carter to Reply Candidly

When President Donald Trump phoned Jimmy Carter earlier this month to talk about China he didn’t expect the result to be a damning declaration of American militarism. But that’s what he got, pronounced the following Sunday by the former President during his regular Sunday School lesson at Maranatha Baptist Church in his hometown of Plains, Georgia.

President Carter’s remarks were recorded and transcribed by Emma Hurt, a reporter for National Public Radio affiliate WABE and published on NPR.com. The President said, among other things, that the United States is “the most warlike nation in the history of the world…” This is not a jihadi terrorist speaking, nor a hot-headed young anti-war demonstrator. This is America’s most-respected and best-loved elder statesman, a Nobel Peace Prize laurate and veteran campaigner for free and fair elections and human rights worldwide.

Is it possible that President Carter’s compass is failing him as he reaches 94 years of age?Is he off the mark with this perception of the United States as history’s prime killer? He certainly doesn’t seem addled. Let’s see what he had to say and how he expressed himself in an interview last year when he was 93 years old:

The implications of President Carter’s most-warlike-nation evaluation are massive, perhaps even biblical. It was no coincidence that these thoughts should have been presented in a Sunday school class. “The history of the world…” is a long time, and there have been many warlike nations, extending down to our own lifetimes. It is true, however, that only one of those nations saw fit to drop two atomic bombs on  innocent, unsuspecting civilian populations; men, women and children.

Atom bombs Japan
Little Boy and Fat Man

Why two bombs? Wouldn’t one have been enough? Yes, probably, but America’s nuclear scientists had two models prepared, Little Boy (Blast yield‎: ‎15 kilotons of TNT) and Fat Man (Blast yield: 21 kilotons), and President Truman and his advisors wanted to take advantage of the opportunity to test the destructive results of both. Hence Hiroshima and Nagasaki marked a lugubrious before and after in world history.

President Carter’s remarks extended to the domestic implications of American militarism. Aptly comparing the progress of China and the United States since relations between the two countries were  normalized during his administration in 1979, the President Emeritus pointed out, “Since 1979, do you know how many times China has been at war with anybody? None. And we have stayed at war.”  What Carter was too modest to say was that the only five-year period that America was free from war during the 20th century was the last year of the Ford presidency and all four years of his own.

Defense_spending_2017According to President Carter, China has made giant strides forward in every aspect of their society while the United States has stagnated gravely due to its outlandish spending on “national defense.” What possible justification can there be for the US maintaining nearly 1,000 military bases abroad (compared to Russia’s 21 which include mainly former Soviet republics), or military spending that is the equivalent of the sum of the next seven countries combined? Economic experts predict that China will overtake the U.S. as the world’s strongest economy by  2030.

“How many miles of high-speed railway do we have in this country?” Carter asked the congregation.

“Zero,” they answered unanimously. According to Wikipedia China has the largest network of high-speed passenger trains in the world extending over 18,000 miles.

“We have wasted, I think, $3 trillion,” Carter said, referring to American military spending. “China has not wasted a single penny on war, and that’s why they’re ahead of us. In almost every way.”

President Carter’s summary was devastating:

And I think the difference is if you take $3 trillion and put it in American infrastructure, you’d probably have $2 trillion left over. We’d have high-speed railroad. We’d have bridges that aren’t collapsing. We’d have roads that are maintained properly. Our education system would be as good as that of, say, South Korea or Hong Kong.

Many Americans might be shocked to read that the United States can only aspire to education standards as high as those of South Korea. They might also be envious of South Korea’s automobile production of 4 million vehicles, compared to US’s 2.8 million–not to mention China’s 23.5 million. If these figures shock you it’s because you’re still living in the glossy past of the United States. In more recent times America has made mainly war while the rest of the world has made progress.

It’s an apt time to thank President Carter for this frank and valiant reminder and for his years of service, both during and after his time in office. If the American people had enjoyed half a dozen presidents of Carter’s stature at critical junctures in the history of their country today’s United States would be a far, far better place.

most warlike country
Just in case you were doubting the magnitude of the problem.

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