Authoritarianism – The Daily Outrage

Cчастливого Рождества!

Cчастливого Рождества, Владимир Путин!

Merry Christmas, Vladimir Putin! Happy Year of the Rooster, Xi Jinping! Congratulations on the Utter Destruction of Aleppo, Basher Al-Assad!

Do you gentlemen (I use the word advisedly) like surprises? If so, you must all be thrilled about the gift that has been made to you by some of my fellow citizens. Who knew an ignorant narcissist could become president of the United States? (Thanks, in part, to you, Vladimir Vladimirovich.)

See? In America, anyone can become president!

Ok, a case can be made that George W. Bush proved that in 2000, but honestly, by comparison with the soon-to-be Twit-in-Chief (TiC), W. doesn’t look quite as awful as he once did. Neither does Richard Nixon, which is a bit disturbing, but more about Tricky Dick in a later post.

Sure, W. and his crew started and then botched a completely unnecessary war in Iraq, based on the false allegation that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction in his hands. (Admit it: Don’t you sometimes wish Saddam were still in charge in Baghdad? Do you ever wonder how the world might be different now, if W. had just left him alone? One thing I’m pretty sure about is that Iraqi nuclear missiles would not have been raining down on New York City. And as for truck-driving terrorists, well, we’ll never know the answer to that one, will we?)

At least W. and most of his advisors and cabinet members knew something about governance, even if, like Dick Cheney, they used that knowledge in inappropriate, and illegal, ways. The TiC, on the other hand, is given to dictating – to say nothing of self-aggrandizement, at which he is particularly skilled. What he is not given to doing is collaborating and politicking, his “Art of the Deal” notwithstanding. It is true that, in the beginning of his administration, President Obama was disdainful of engaging in the sort of political horse trading that has historically been the main way things have gotten done in Washington, DC. Nevertheless, the number of rules and conventions and standards of which the TiC is disdainful is vast, and it grows by the day.

The same is true of a majority of the TiC’s appointments and nominations thus far. They are people who are either stunningly unqualified for the job or they’re committed to destroying the department or agency they will lead – or both. It’s a challenge to have a favorite horror story with this lot, but I’ll delve into it anyway.

Is it the neurosurgeon who didn’t want an important government post? If that’s the case, what was that recent run for the Republican presidential nomination all about? Now, if approved by the Senate, this fellow will run the Department of Housing and Urban Development. The TiC tells us that the reason he chose this particular man is because he grew up in an “inner city” neighborhood. Oh, and he’s black, but the TiC seems to be ignoring that part. Or maybe he’s not ignoring it, and he hopes that nominating Ben Carson will somehow endear him to the millions of African Americans who voted by the busload for Hillary Clinton. I think it highly improbable that such a thing could come about, but then, I didn’t think the TiC could get elected in the first place.

And then there’s Rex Tillerson, currently CEO of ExxonMobil, the sixth largest company in the world, and the largest petroleum-centric corporation on the planet. Every day, ExxonMobil pumps some 3.9 billion barrels of oil out of the ground, from which, in 2015, they made almost $270,000,000,000. Mr. Tillerson has worked for ExxonMobile and its predecessors for forty-one years, which is to say, since he was twenty-three years old. He knows nothing else.

Well, that’s not quite true. He knows Vladimir Putin. They’re great friends. Rex and Vlad go way back; some twenty-five years, in fact. Vlad admires Rex so much that in 2013, Vlad awarded the Order of Friendship (OoF) to Rex. This is the highest honor Russia can bestow on a foreigner, and Rex earned his OoF by virtue of ExxonMobil discovering a huge new oil field for the Russians, in the Arctic. Prior to that, for about five years, Rex was director of a joint US-Russian oil company that was registered in the Bahamas (a.k.a., tax haven).

Sanctions imposed on Russia after its invasion of Ukraine and annexation of Crimea put a stop to the big (300 billion dollars big) Arctic oil project, but Vlad, being such good pals with Rex, did not ask him to return the OoF, because that’s the kind of guy Vlad is. And anyway, he probably figured that Rex would do something nice for him in the future, just to make up for the lost oil billions.

Assuming the United States Senate plays along, Rex will soon be in a position to do that nice thing, whatever it may turn out to be, since he will be the new Secretary of State. Funny how things work out, isn’t it? The moreso, when you learn that Rex, as CEO of ExxonMobil, appears to have made some decisions – purely business decisions, of course – that benefited ExxonMobil and its stock holders (and Rex), but did not benefit the United States. In other words, he placed corporate profit above patriotism. Or, to put it another way, his first allegiance is to his company, not his country. Will he now, after 41 years of faithful service to Big Oil, change his priorities and think first about the good of America? I hope so, but I’ll have to see it to believe it.

Seeing-is-believing is also the case with the TiC, since he has promised a variety of different, and sometimes opposing, things to a whole lot of people in the last year. But I don’t have to wait to see if the TiC is going to change his priorities, because it’s already obvious that he is not going to do that.

Speaking of oil, his selection of Rick Perry to be Secretary of Energy reinforces what I have already written about the TiC’s priorities and his much (self) vaunted wisdom. Mr. Perry, besides being a former governor of Texas (the Republic of Oil), also sits on the board of the corporation that is attempting to build the Dakota Access Pipeline. The same pipeline that was opposed by Native Americans, over whose land the pipe would be laid. The Corps of Engineers has put a hold on the pipeline being routed beneath the Missouri River, which is the primary water source for the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe. I wonder what the new Secretary of Energy will think about all this?

Coincidentally, during his own recent run at the presidency, Mr. Perry, in one of the primary debates, could not recall the name of one of the federal departments he wanted to eliminate. Oh yeah … the Energy Department. As I said, funny how things work out.

I do not think there has been any other in-coming presidential administration that has encompassed the range of incompetence, and hostility, if not outright malevolence, towards the government, that we see in the TiC’s choices. Incompetence is bad enough, but malevolence is dangerous, both to ourselves and to other nations.

At least with incompetence it’s out in the open, so you have a chance to withstand attempts to turn back the clock 40 or 50 years, such as this crowd proposes to do.

Malevolence, on the other hand, hides in the shadows. It is threatening, and it is subversive.

A lot of folks who supported and presumably voted for the TiC have been accusing people like me of anti-Trump hysteria for suggesting that the path the TiC is going down could lead to authoritarianism in this country; that it could lead to a diminution of free speech, oppression of the independent and questioning press (to say nothing of certain minority groups), and a weakening of our place and strength in the world community.

This is not hysteria. This is a profound concern about the malevolence I see and feel in the TiC and his followers (TiCists?). Their attitudes and potential policies – Muslim bans, loosening of libel laws, destruction of environmental protections, and repressing women’s power over themselves, among many other things – can lead to a creeping regime change that is undemocratic; a change that is antithetical to everything we have believed America stands for, everything it has represented to the rest of the world.

The TiC would love to shut down the New York Times, and get Saturday Night Live off the air, because he feels they are being mean and unfair to him. I have to believe that the good people who voted for the TiC did not think they would be sending a thirteen year old boy to the White House, but that, essentially, is what they have done. A thin-skinned, spoiled, and marginally educated thirteen year old boy, who wants everyone to love him and be nice to him, even when he taunts and mocks other children, and bullies them, and threatens them with violence.

Well, silence is the best weapon we could hand to this annoying and dangerous child, and I have no intention of remaining silent. I hope you won’t either.

The Man in the Chair

Donald Trump: Time magazine’s “Person of the Year” for 2016?

For those inclined to make such comparisons, it should be noted that Time’s then-Man of the Year seventy-eight years earlier, in 1938, was Adolph Hitler.

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1938 vs. 2016

Of Herr Hitler, they wrote, “To those who watched the closing events of the year it seemed more than probable that the Man of 1938 may make 1939 a year to be remembered.” Nine months later, he did just that.

In like fashion, I think we can expect Herr Trump to make 2017 a memorable year. Hopefully, this will be done without him instigating World War Three, or attempting to stifle what free press we have left, or packing the Supreme Court with Scalia- (or perhaps worse yet, Thomas-) like justices.

I have written earlier about the talk encouraging people to “give him a chance;” to wait and see how he will actually govern. I’m waiting to see if he will govern at all, or if the next four years will be a stream-of-consciousness Twitter tirade, interrupted at times by photo ops with foreign businessmen and politicians at one of Herr Trump’s golf resorts, punctuated with pronouncements engineered by the regime’s éminence grise, Steve Bannon. If this pre-governing phase provides any clues (and it emphatically does), we should consider ourselves fortunate if that’s all the worse it is.

Other things written about Herr Hitler in that 1938 Man of the Year article should also give us pause. Among them is the description of Hitler as “moody, brooding,” “half educated,” and a “man of no trade and few interests … whose reading has always been very limited.” The people inspired by Hitler were described as a “demagogic, ignorant, desperate movement,” satisfying the “craving of large sections of the politically immature German people for strong, masterful leadership.”

Are you concerned yet? Well, there’s more.

Time pointed out that Herr Hitler’s solution to unemployment (the relocation of factories and jobs to Italy, or Mexico, not being an issue at the time) was “a far-reaching program of public works; … an intense rearmament program, including a huge standing army;” and “… putting political enemies and Jewish, Communist and Socialist jobholders in concentration camps.”

Oh, wait, that last one doesn’t apply to Herr Trump. Right? Well, there was that now-supposedly-disavowed letter to the Energy Department, a 74-point demand looking for, among other things, the names of all employees who have worked on President Obama’s climate initiatives; in other words, people who actually believe in science.

But, oh no, nothing to see here. No witch hunt, no inquisition. Move along now.

The potential for serious damage to our country and our democracy is real, and looming. The keys to the various departments of the federal government are being handed over to people who dislike the mission of the department they will soon head, or who haven’t the slightest clue about the workings of government, or both; and they will be led (insofar as leading will be done) by a man who knows little about, and cares less for, the laws, customs, and strictures of our government. I know: Some people have been saying for years that the government should be run like a business, and that a non-politician should run it. That theory will now get a test run, in real time, with real consequences, and we will all have a front row seat.

If we have to endure this (and we do), it would at least have been nice if the businessman elevated to the presidency had been truly successful, and had not presided over a family-run operation that was treated like a personal fiefdom, or a piggy bank, part of whose success has rested upon stiffing people who provided them with materials and services. But that’s not who 107,105 voters in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan have given us (yes, only 107,105), and it’s going to take the vigilant efforts of hundreds of thousands – no, millions – of us to remind Herr Trump and his cohorts that the laws of this country apply equally to all of us, even him. Especially him, in fact.

The need for this vigilance has been made clear by the thin-skinned Herr Trump’s distant relationship with the truth, and in particular his constant efforts to shape the truth to reflect the high regard in which he holds himself. Among these was a comment made during a New York Times interview on 22 November of this year, in which he said, “The law’s totally on my side; the president can’t have a conflict of interest.”

This is eerily reminiscent of something Richard Nixon claimed in May 1977, during an interview with David Frost. In the course of discussing his actions as president, Nixon said, “If the president does it, that means it’s not illegal.”

Oh, really? And how exactly did that work out for you, sir?

As Mr. Nixon found out, the Constitution, and other laws of our country, really do apply to the President of the United States, despite what, in his hubris and self-proclaimed exceptionalism, he may want himself and all of us to think. While not given to calling up the Bible, I feel compelled to quote now from Matthew 5:45, which says that god (or rather, God) “maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust.” As it is with the sun and the rain, Herr Trump, so it is with the law.

We have before us an on-going, four-year challenge (and please, god, don’t let it be eight). It’s a multi-faceted challenge, one of which it would be easy to tire, to give up, to surrender to the rightward-lurching onslaught of revisionism that is headed our way. I won’t be doing that. I simply cannot sit quietly and let Herr Trump and his wrecking crew destroy what has been built up here, at the cost of so much effort, so many lives, so much time.

If you find yourself filled with a desire to stop listening to the news, if you feel overwhelmed by the tweets and the casual dismissals of law and precedence, I will understand, because I too will be feeling that. So, in those times, know that you are not alone in your feelings; know that it is not just you, not just me, but rather, millions who care deeply about this country, and who are resisting, in ways both large and small, the turning back of progress represented by the man in the chair, in the Oval Office.

One last thing: As the early twentieth-century labor activist and song writer Joe Hill wrote in a telegram to Bill Haywood, just before Hill’s execution, “Goodbye, Bill, I die like a true blue rebel. Don’t waste any time mourning. Organize!”

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Mr T. & the Wrecking Crew

“Red sky at morning …”

You probably know the rest of that quote. What you may also know is that a storm warning was issued for America on 8 November 2016.

Unless you have been sequestered on a tropical island, completely bereft of news from the outside world (and if you have, lucky you!), then you know we will soon be saddled with a thin-skinned, incompetent blowhard for our next president. This is bad enough, but of course Mr. T

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(no, not that Mr. T)

will not arrive in Washington, DC, alone. He will bring with him, to oversee and direct the various departments of government, an assortment of conspiracy fantasists, anti-government government employees, inhabitants of bubbles, sellers of snake oil, privatizers, insiders, major political donors, and the wife of a prominent Republican senator.

Among these, we find: a chief advisor and strategist who has encouraged racist, anti-Semitic and anti-Muslim statements, to say nothing of proclaiming his most recent business venture a platform for white “nationalists” (i.e., KKKers and Neo-Nazis); a future Secretary of Education who hates public education; a National Security Advisor who hates Muslims; a Treasury Secretary who used to work at Goldman Sachs (I wonder if he was present for any of Hillary Clinton’s speeches there?); for Secretary of State, the CEO of the largest oil company in the world and BFF’s with Vladimir Putin; an Assistant National Security Advisor whose main qualification seems to be that she donated a lot of money to our future president’s campaign; a Health and Human Services secretary who wants to destroy the Affordable Care Act and reverse Roe vs. Wade; a Secretary of Housing and Urban Development who knows nothing of government, except for a once-held desire to be president; a Labor Secretary who is opposed to raising the minimum wage and dislikes unions as a matter of principle. And so on.

Despite Hillary Clinton having won approximately 2.8 million more votes than Mr. T, she lost the election due to the nature of the Electoral College. So, we shall have to live with the results of the election. Living with it does not, however, mean we have to accept it. It does not mean that now we should all just link arms and sing Kumbaya.

To the contrary, I think it very important that we resist the calls we are hearing, to give our next president a chance to govern, a chance to succeed. That’s a nice, can’t-we-all-just-get-along sentiment, but I don’t want him to succeed, because his success, and that of his appointees, would be built atop the ruins of eight decades of social progress in this country. Therefore, I am going to do whatever I can to resist the coming attempts to return America to the supposedly bucolic days of 1956, and I encourage you to do the same.

One facet of that resistance is this blog. I’ve started this as an alternative to shouting at the television, which has accomplished little, except to scare my cat. While I may be outraged every day (and so far, I am), I will probably not write here every day. Nevertheless, I invite your comments and observations, as we move deeper into the storm that is about to envelop our country and, as a consequence, the rest of the world.

Thanks for reading!