We are now thirty years beyond the collapse of governments in Russia and eastern Europe that were, allegedly, based on communism, a philosophy advanced by Karl Marx in the nineteenth century in which the "means of production" were owned by the workers, and not an exclusively investor class. That collapse was touted by global media, especially global business media, and the politicians it supports, as settling once and for all the question of which economic system--capitalism or socialism--was history's "winner." Every major government in the developed world, including the United States, committed itself to expanding the power of market economies throughout the world. And expand they did--beyond the boundaries of anyone's expectations.
History, however, is never a march in one direction. It may be useful to think of it as a kind of spiral, one that moves upwards as we learn more about mastering both ourselves and the world around us, but one that touches many basic points over and over again as the spiral goes around and around. In the current circle, our experience has taken us a long way past the capitalist point on its circumference and back to a word that had been effectively declared a dead letter in 1989:
Socialism.
Socialism has been so often used in our politics as a kind of swear word without meaning or context (except, more often than not, that you should hate people who believe in it, whether in fact they do or not). So it's useful to take a few moments to discuss what socialism is and isn't.
It's been said jokingly that capitalism is a theory of production without a theory of distribution, and socialism is exactly the opposite--a theory of distribution without a theory of production. While there's some truth to the joke, it lies more on the capitalism side. For capitalism truly is a theory of production without a theory of distribution. At its most extreme, in the late nineteenth century and today, its proponents place their emphasis on the need for all property, or the maximum possible amount, to be owned by private actors and not governments or agencies thereof. They have absolutely nothing to say about the distribution of products and services. They simply assume that, so long as private owners are allowed to maximize the profitability, the distribution problem will take care of itself.
But what that latter point means in practice is that distribution "takes care of itself" in the form of excess, excess that has the effect of squandering human potential in both directions. At one end, many people aren't able to acquire enough resources to live minimally decent lives, regardless of how long or how hard they work. At the other end, a handful of individuals are able to acquire a share of those resources well beyond what they could rationally use in a dozen lifetimes--and often end up putting those resources into efforts to leverage their existing power to even greater levels. Sadly, this country currently has a "President" who is the embodiment of this type of individual, as are many of his supporters and many members of his Administration.
Socialism, in contrast to what you may have heard or read elsewhere, is far less interested in the issue of ownership than capitalism is. The truth is that socialism comes in many different forms of ownership--the key linking these forms, however, is the concept of collective benefits, rather than individual ones. A privately-owner cooperative, for example, is a form of socialist enterprise, one in which the economic benefits are not inextricably linked to investors, but are shared by the workers. More common, of course, are democratic socialist economies that use taxation and regulation to ensure the existence of a social safety net guaranteeing that the minimum needs of everyone are met. But, unlike Marx's concept of socialism, these societies don't ban private ownership of businesses; in fact, many of them are the homes of some of the world's most profitable companies.
On the other hand, in the economies of the former Soviet Union, the Warsaw Pact governments, China and Vietnam, governments made attempts to virtually eliminate private ownership of businesses, attempting to put Marx's idea into practice by acting as a "trustee" of the people that owned the means of production to ensure maximum fairness in the distribution of goods and services. All of these societies did so, however, without any form of meaningful democratic input that would serve as a check on the self-serving impulses of the governments--and, as a consequence, much of the output of these economies was squandered in fruitless military adventurism, not unlike our own experiences in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Ironically, in the end, China was forced to salvage its economy by embracing many practices of market economies, while still doing so under the name of "Communism." As a consequence, China has the worst of both worlds: a country controlled by a class of plutocrats pretending to be avatars of the masses, who have no way of influencing the political or economic direction of the country
What can be learned from all of this, and what I've believed for decades, long before the end of the Cold War, is that both extremes are the enemies of a vibrant economy and a world in which the will of the people is a reality. In both cases, corrupt ruling classes answerable only to themselves sabotage the distribution of goods and services so as to prevent them from reaching the maximum possible number of people. However, in the case of democratic socialist countries, where ownership of private property is not restricted by state ownership or political freedom by oligarchical investors, people enjoy the ability to freely participate in all aspects of society and receive a share of its total outcome that ensures the means to participate as well.
In other words, there is no one-size-fits-all answer to the question of how to organize capital or labor in a nation, so long as the extremes ends of the organizational spectrum are avoided. Some societies will lean a little bit more toward private economic ownership, and some will lean a little more in the other direction. Neither is right, and neither is wrong, so long as society is stable and individuals can maintain there own autonomy with it.
What is important to keep in mind, ultimately, is that private ownership of property can never be absolute in any society, if that society is to function at all. Government needs the ability to contract for services and purchase property if it is to have any chance of performing the functions that everyone agrees it should perform: providing a criminal justice system, including police, and a national defense.
And then there's the dirty little secret about property itself: without the existence of government, property rights would not exist at all. In a state of nature, which seems to be what most libertarians are aiming for, there would be no true property, for there would be no government to create rights to ownership that could subsequently be enforced. And, if government is to exist at all, then property rights must give way to that existence, to the maximum extent necessary to maintain it. Think that this is some bizarre, Marxist concept? Nope. Benjamin Franklin, no stranger to property interests, said it himself. Don't believe me? Read all about it here, in an article that effectively argues for a balance of interests when it comes to property ownership.
As a society now in the grip of a shrinking number of plutocrats, it's high time we had a robust but thoughtful discussion amongst ourselves about the future of our economy, and focus on the question of whether "socialism" is truly a dirty word, especially in light of the fact that we already have a good deal more "socialism" than we commonly acknowledge---or, perhaps, care to admit. We are, indeed, an affluent society, to borrow from Galbraith, but that affluence is concentrated in such a way that America may not be the land of the free very much longer.
Our politics, for far too long, has been about labels and personalities, which is hardly the state of affairs the Framers hoped for. We need, in particular, to get past the idea of socialism as a label for some unmentionable evil. The truth is that some greater measure of socialism than what we already have may be the only way toward, to twist a phrase, making America America again.
Monday, September 23, 2019
9/11, And What We've Forgotten
Another September has arrived, and, with it, more commemorations of the anniversary of the event that has done more than anything else to define the politics and culture of our current century. A human tragedy of epic proportions. A shock to our sense of security. And a new understanding of the extent to which our planet has shrunken in a globalized, digitalized economy, and of how connected events in the farthest corners of the world are to each one of us.
I remember thinking to myself, and saying to others, as they and I were attempting to pick through the fog of our emotions to sort out the path forward for us all, that you don't measure recovery from a disaster such as this one in days, weeks, and months, no matter how much all of us wanted to somehow feel better than we did. You measure it in years, and even decades.
Well, we have certainly had years, and almost decades. Two years from now will be the 20th anniversary of the hijacking of four airplanes and their transformation into human missiles against New York's World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and yet another target that was never reached because of the courage of the passengers on the fourth plane, as well as the cellphones that gave them the information they needed to act on their courage, and say goodbye to those who meant most to them.
Where are we today?
Are we safer, stronger, freer, and more compassionate than we were on the day before September 11, 2001?
I wish I could say we were. But I can't.
Because I have seen this nation descend from that day into a cesspool of profiteering and paranoia that threatens the survival of our democracy and our civilization more than any terrorist ever could.
We have seen the need to arm ourselves against new threats turn into an unending stream of public money for a war in Afghanistan that seems without end or achievable goal, a war against Iraq that was based on lies and gave birth to ISIS, and a potential war with Iran that seems perpetually ready to start at any minute.
We have seen a newfound respect for the role that government plays in our everyday lives, as a direct result of the sacrifices made by first responders and their families, disintegrate into the same endless battles about the size of the government that we need. Even though the answer to that question is obvious: In a democracy, the size that the people decide it should have, for the purposes they choose to pursue. People. Not money. And yet, with each passing day, we continue to confuse the two more and more.
Perhaps worst of all, we have allowed the religion and ethnicity of the hijackers to reinforce--and perhaps, to some extent, revive--the bigotry towards people of color and religions other than Christianity that existed long before Thomas Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence that all men are created equal. (Even that limitation to "men," and the omission of a clause denouncing slavery, is a testament to that existence.) We have, in fact, carried that bigotry to the point that we are presently caging children, and allowing them to die, for the sake of a security that does not need to be obtained by those means, which should never be tried in the first place.
And the fear that allows a sizable minority of Americans to make war on anyone who doesn't look, sound, or act like "them" is also allowing moneyed interests--here and elsewhere--to distract us from taking care of each other, and to take from us the means by which to build a better society, and line their already overstuffed pockets with it.
How did we get here?
As Democratic Presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg pointed out, by forgetting how we felt on September 12, 2001. When we felt we were willing to work together at any cause to protect each other, and to rebuild a better America from the ruins of the attacks. When we looked at each other and saw allied Americans, not partisan enemies. When, for a moment, we understood the fact that, in a democracy, the only opponent who could defeat us was ourselves.
And then, slowly but surely, we set out on the path to defeat. By outsourcing our willingness to sacrifice to an all-volunteer army. By believing in an long-discredited theory about self-paying tax cuts. By failing to understand that we are not fighting a race, or a religion, but an ideology that can only be undermined from within, not by fighting on the front lines, but through covert operations that get inside the other sides' operations and planning, and take it apart far more effectively that a clip of bullets ever could.
I'll be blunt. All of this is due in part to a lack of political leadership at all levels of this country, and there is blame on both sides for that lack of leadership. But, far more importantly, it's due to us.
To all of us.
For failing to go beyond jingoistic, once-a-year graphics on social media to stay engaged in what is obviously a complex, stress-inducing issue, and to be willing to give more in time and in treasure. For failing to understand that when a nation goes to war, the whole nation goes to war, and does whatever it has to do to win it. It shouldn't take an entertainer masquerading as a journalist to remind us of our most basic obligations to serve and protect us. But, apparently, it does.
Most of all, for failing to understand what our enemies understand: that fear is a weapon, and it can be weaponized against a nation like ours, one that has taken a long holiday from history in terms of understanding what it takes to protect a civilization, and the ideas that built it.
The War on Terror, as it has been called, will require paying for the government services that protect us on the front lines, and operate behind them and within the enemy camp itself to undermine and ultimately defeat them. It will require political leadership that both requires that level of sacrifice, and offers transparency with regard to its own actions in leading the fight. Perhaps most of all, it will require us to pay not only with our wallets, but also with our hearts. The last thing that terrorists want is an America that continuously strives to live up to its ideals of equality and freedom. They want an America filled with fear, willing to give up those ideals forever if doing so will buy even a little bit of safety.
It won't buy any at all.
We are at the precipice of destruction by our enemies, despite all of the annual exhortations to "Never Forget." We have, sadly, forgotten what we felt on September 12, the day after. We desperately need to remember it, before we let indulgence and fear consume our existence, our legacy, and our place in history.
In other words, before the terrorists have won.
I remember thinking to myself, and saying to others, as they and I were attempting to pick through the fog of our emotions to sort out the path forward for us all, that you don't measure recovery from a disaster such as this one in days, weeks, and months, no matter how much all of us wanted to somehow feel better than we did. You measure it in years, and even decades.
Well, we have certainly had years, and almost decades. Two years from now will be the 20th anniversary of the hijacking of four airplanes and their transformation into human missiles against New York's World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and yet another target that was never reached because of the courage of the passengers on the fourth plane, as well as the cellphones that gave them the information they needed to act on their courage, and say goodbye to those who meant most to them.
Where are we today?
Are we safer, stronger, freer, and more compassionate than we were on the day before September 11, 2001?
I wish I could say we were. But I can't.
Because I have seen this nation descend from that day into a cesspool of profiteering and paranoia that threatens the survival of our democracy and our civilization more than any terrorist ever could.
We have seen the need to arm ourselves against new threats turn into an unending stream of public money for a war in Afghanistan that seems without end or achievable goal, a war against Iraq that was based on lies and gave birth to ISIS, and a potential war with Iran that seems perpetually ready to start at any minute.
We have seen a newfound respect for the role that government plays in our everyday lives, as a direct result of the sacrifices made by first responders and their families, disintegrate into the same endless battles about the size of the government that we need. Even though the answer to that question is obvious: In a democracy, the size that the people decide it should have, for the purposes they choose to pursue. People. Not money. And yet, with each passing day, we continue to confuse the two more and more.
Perhaps worst of all, we have allowed the religion and ethnicity of the hijackers to reinforce--and perhaps, to some extent, revive--the bigotry towards people of color and religions other than Christianity that existed long before Thomas Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence that all men are created equal. (Even that limitation to "men," and the omission of a clause denouncing slavery, is a testament to that existence.) We have, in fact, carried that bigotry to the point that we are presently caging children, and allowing them to die, for the sake of a security that does not need to be obtained by those means, which should never be tried in the first place.
And the fear that allows a sizable minority of Americans to make war on anyone who doesn't look, sound, or act like "them" is also allowing moneyed interests--here and elsewhere--to distract us from taking care of each other, and to take from us the means by which to build a better society, and line their already overstuffed pockets with it.
How did we get here?
As Democratic Presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg pointed out, by forgetting how we felt on September 12, 2001. When we felt we were willing to work together at any cause to protect each other, and to rebuild a better America from the ruins of the attacks. When we looked at each other and saw allied Americans, not partisan enemies. When, for a moment, we understood the fact that, in a democracy, the only opponent who could defeat us was ourselves.
And then, slowly but surely, we set out on the path to defeat. By outsourcing our willingness to sacrifice to an all-volunteer army. By believing in an long-discredited theory about self-paying tax cuts. By failing to understand that we are not fighting a race, or a religion, but an ideology that can only be undermined from within, not by fighting on the front lines, but through covert operations that get inside the other sides' operations and planning, and take it apart far more effectively that a clip of bullets ever could.
I'll be blunt. All of this is due in part to a lack of political leadership at all levels of this country, and there is blame on both sides for that lack of leadership. But, far more importantly, it's due to us.
To all of us.
For failing to go beyond jingoistic, once-a-year graphics on social media to stay engaged in what is obviously a complex, stress-inducing issue, and to be willing to give more in time and in treasure. For failing to understand that when a nation goes to war, the whole nation goes to war, and does whatever it has to do to win it. It shouldn't take an entertainer masquerading as a journalist to remind us of our most basic obligations to serve and protect us. But, apparently, it does.
Most of all, for failing to understand what our enemies understand: that fear is a weapon, and it can be weaponized against a nation like ours, one that has taken a long holiday from history in terms of understanding what it takes to protect a civilization, and the ideas that built it.
The War on Terror, as it has been called, will require paying for the government services that protect us on the front lines, and operate behind them and within the enemy camp itself to undermine and ultimately defeat them. It will require political leadership that both requires that level of sacrifice, and offers transparency with regard to its own actions in leading the fight. Perhaps most of all, it will require us to pay not only with our wallets, but also with our hearts. The last thing that terrorists want is an America that continuously strives to live up to its ideals of equality and freedom. They want an America filled with fear, willing to give up those ideals forever if doing so will buy even a little bit of safety.
It won't buy any at all.
We are at the precipice of destruction by our enemies, despite all of the annual exhortations to "Never Forget." We have, sadly, forgotten what we felt on September 12, the day after. We desperately need to remember it, before we let indulgence and fear consume our existence, our legacy, and our place in history.
In other words, before the terrorists have won.
Saturday, August 31, 2019
The Other Opioid Crisis
You've no doubt heard all about the
opioid crisis. The one involving hundreds of thousands of victims of
opioid overdoses, many of which have occurred in parts of the nation where job
losses from globalization are as epidemic as the deaths themselves are.
The deaths that have driven thousands of lawsuits through the legal system,
lawsuits that are, just now, starting to reach the endgame stage. In one,
in Oklahoma, filed by the state against Johnson & Johnson, regarded as the
toughest litigant among drug companies, the result was a $572 million verdict
in favor of Oklahoma's damages claims.
Despite the fact that the legal theories in these suits are all over the place when it comes to liability theories, and that each one, based on the facts, is wafer-thin at best, they are nevertheless supported by popular opinion. The fact that the state of Oklahoma, no one's idea of a liberal paradise, would file a suit like this is a strong testament to that. For once, big business lost big (although not as big as it could have lost) in a very red state. And the loss is already having a ripple effect on the other pending suits. Just this past week, Purdue Pharma, the makers of OxyContin, offered to fund a settlement pool of up to $12 billion and surrender ownership of OxyContin, in exchange for filing for bankruptcy.
This is precisely the sort of innovation-destroying, consumer-frustrating, blame-everyone-but-the-addicts-screwing-things-up litigation that the lawsuit-abuse folks on the conservative side of our great political divide love to complain about. Here, however, they seem to be curiously silent.
I feel fairly certain that there's a connection between that fact and the fact that a significant number of opioid-related deaths are from Trump country. Putting the matter bluntly, these are the deaths of white people from former factory and farming communities. They see themselves differently from the way they see the drug-related deaths of African-Americans in poverty-ridden inner-city neighborhoods. Those deaths have nothing to do with centuries of racism, and the poverty and despair that stems from it. No, that's just because "those people" are "animals," in contrast to the hard-working white folks of the heartland. If they chose to abuse prescription drugs rather than addressing their misery in a more constructive way (i.e., relocating, going back to school, voting for someone other than self-enriching Republicans), well, Trump voters are privileged folk. Their privilege is as deep as the color of their skin, And, of course, just like their Fearless Leader, there's no arguing with them about it.
But there is, of course, another side to all of this. In fact, there's a whole other opioid crisis that I'll wager you haven't heard about. It's very real. It's created an enormous amount of suffering. And it's suffering that my wife and I take very, very personally.
It's this crisis. The one in which people who, for entirely legitimate, medical, non-economic-distress-related reasons, need access to serious pain medication. And can't get it, because of health care professionals more worried about protecting themselves from specious lawsuits than they are about fulfilling their professional and ethical obligations to the public.
And why do my wife and I take it so personally?
First, a word of full disclosure. My wife and I are both lawyers; in fact, we are both partners in our own law firm. Neither of us is a tort lawyer, so we have no interest or stake in the personal injury-medical malpractice mill. There are no charges of hypocrisy, therefore, that can be fairly lobbed at either of us for what I am about to say.
And both of us have experienced personally the opioid backlash in medical treatment.
In my case, it was a consequence of a referral to an endodontist for a root canal. After the procedure, I assumed he was going to give me a limited prescription for hydrocodone, or something similar. You know what I got instead? An offer for free Tylenol. Tylenol. An over-the-counter pain reliever that is fine for the occasional tension headache, but is less than worthless for the level of post-procedure pain that a root canal procedures. Not only did the pain that the endodontist refuse to treat or even acknowledge keep me awake for nearly an entire week, but, at one point, it made me bite down on one of my rear molars so hard that I literally fractured it in half. And had to go to yet another endodontist to have the fragments of that molar removed. I've still got the empty space in the back of my mouth to remind me about it.
But that's nothing compared to what my poor wife has had to go through over the past four-plus weeks. She had knee-replacement surgery at the very beginning of this month. I remembered how my late father was give a morphine pump to use after his hip-replacement surgeries, so I had some idea of the pain level involved with a joint-replacement procedure. I couldn't imagine that this wouldn't be treated the same way.
Well, guess what, folks? It wasn't. She was give a less-than-full-strength prescription medication--a very, very limited supply--and, you guess it, folks, Tylenol. She's been home for the past few weeks, doing all of her physical therapy, recovering well ahead of schedule, getting back to work and serving her clients, because that's the type of person she is. But she's been doing it without any real pain medication, and consequently with little or no sleep, for the past, I repeat, four weeks plus. That's partly a tribute to her pain threshold, which I am always in awe of. But it's also a tribute to her doctor's refusal to her doctor's refusal to prescribe any serious pain medication. Even after she asked him to do so, he gave her a prescription of 10 pills at a dosage of 5 milligams.
Neither my wife nor I are addicts. We fully understand the risks of addiction with certain types of medication. We have always, in the past, when we were able to get prescription medication, used it in a responsible way, as prescribed, without asking for more than we needed. We want to be able to continue to do so, and there clearly are thousands of Americans who are in exactly the same position we have been. I am writing this on behalf of all of them, as well as for my wife and me. I am pleading with the medical profession, and the companies that insure them, to not try to solve one opioid crisis by creating another--and, in the process, created a black market for opioids that will do nothing but exacerbate the initial crisis.
The mandate to do no harm works in more directions that one. Opioids should not be overprescribed. But they shouldn't be underprescribed, either.
Despite the fact that the legal theories in these suits are all over the place when it comes to liability theories, and that each one, based on the facts, is wafer-thin at best, they are nevertheless supported by popular opinion. The fact that the state of Oklahoma, no one's idea of a liberal paradise, would file a suit like this is a strong testament to that. For once, big business lost big (although not as big as it could have lost) in a very red state. And the loss is already having a ripple effect on the other pending suits. Just this past week, Purdue Pharma, the makers of OxyContin, offered to fund a settlement pool of up to $12 billion and surrender ownership of OxyContin, in exchange for filing for bankruptcy.
This is precisely the sort of innovation-destroying, consumer-frustrating, blame-everyone-but-the-addicts-screwing-things-up litigation that the lawsuit-abuse folks on the conservative side of our great political divide love to complain about. Here, however, they seem to be curiously silent.
I feel fairly certain that there's a connection between that fact and the fact that a significant number of opioid-related deaths are from Trump country. Putting the matter bluntly, these are the deaths of white people from former factory and farming communities. They see themselves differently from the way they see the drug-related deaths of African-Americans in poverty-ridden inner-city neighborhoods. Those deaths have nothing to do with centuries of racism, and the poverty and despair that stems from it. No, that's just because "those people" are "animals," in contrast to the hard-working white folks of the heartland. If they chose to abuse prescription drugs rather than addressing their misery in a more constructive way (i.e., relocating, going back to school, voting for someone other than self-enriching Republicans), well, Trump voters are privileged folk. Their privilege is as deep as the color of their skin, And, of course, just like their Fearless Leader, there's no arguing with them about it.
But there is, of course, another side to all of this. In fact, there's a whole other opioid crisis that I'll wager you haven't heard about. It's very real. It's created an enormous amount of suffering. And it's suffering that my wife and I take very, very personally.
It's this crisis. The one in which people who, for entirely legitimate, medical, non-economic-distress-related reasons, need access to serious pain medication. And can't get it, because of health care professionals more worried about protecting themselves from specious lawsuits than they are about fulfilling their professional and ethical obligations to the public.
And why do my wife and I take it so personally?
First, a word of full disclosure. My wife and I are both lawyers; in fact, we are both partners in our own law firm. Neither of us is a tort lawyer, so we have no interest or stake in the personal injury-medical malpractice mill. There are no charges of hypocrisy, therefore, that can be fairly lobbed at either of us for what I am about to say.
And both of us have experienced personally the opioid backlash in medical treatment.
In my case, it was a consequence of a referral to an endodontist for a root canal. After the procedure, I assumed he was going to give me a limited prescription for hydrocodone, or something similar. You know what I got instead? An offer for free Tylenol. Tylenol. An over-the-counter pain reliever that is fine for the occasional tension headache, but is less than worthless for the level of post-procedure pain that a root canal procedures. Not only did the pain that the endodontist refuse to treat or even acknowledge keep me awake for nearly an entire week, but, at one point, it made me bite down on one of my rear molars so hard that I literally fractured it in half. And had to go to yet another endodontist to have the fragments of that molar removed. I've still got the empty space in the back of my mouth to remind me about it.
But that's nothing compared to what my poor wife has had to go through over the past four-plus weeks. She had knee-replacement surgery at the very beginning of this month. I remembered how my late father was give a morphine pump to use after his hip-replacement surgeries, so I had some idea of the pain level involved with a joint-replacement procedure. I couldn't imagine that this wouldn't be treated the same way.
Well, guess what, folks? It wasn't. She was give a less-than-full-strength prescription medication--a very, very limited supply--and, you guess it, folks, Tylenol. She's been home for the past few weeks, doing all of her physical therapy, recovering well ahead of schedule, getting back to work and serving her clients, because that's the type of person she is. But she's been doing it without any real pain medication, and consequently with little or no sleep, for the past, I repeat, four weeks plus. That's partly a tribute to her pain threshold, which I am always in awe of. But it's also a tribute to her doctor's refusal to her doctor's refusal to prescribe any serious pain medication. Even after she asked him to do so, he gave her a prescription of 10 pills at a dosage of 5 milligams.
Neither my wife nor I are addicts. We fully understand the risks of addiction with certain types of medication. We have always, in the past, when we were able to get prescription medication, used it in a responsible way, as prescribed, without asking for more than we needed. We want to be able to continue to do so, and there clearly are thousands of Americans who are in exactly the same position we have been. I am writing this on behalf of all of them, as well as for my wife and me. I am pleading with the medical profession, and the companies that insure them, to not try to solve one opioid crisis by creating another--and, in the process, created a black market for opioids that will do nothing but exacerbate the initial crisis.
The mandate to do no harm works in more directions that one. Opioids should not be overprescribed. But they shouldn't be underprescribed, either.
Friday, August 23, 2019
The Rule Of Guns Has Replaced The Rule Of Law
And so we can now add El Paso and Dayton to the list of American cities, towns and communities that have been the victims of the NRA and the deranged individuals that it enables.
It was a tremendously, tragically long list prior to the addition of those two cities, one that included the names not just of places, but people. People who did nothing to deserve being victims of random slaughter. People whose dreams will never be fulfilled. People whose potential, personal and vocational, will never benefit their families, their neighbors, or their country. People whose absence, instead, leaves holes in the lives of all who were touched in any way by them, and the worst holes of all: in the hearts of their families and friends.
As someone who believes both in the right to own and use firearms for legitimate, lawful purposes, and who has no less believed in common-sense gun regulations to prevent their illegitimate, unlawful purposes, I have despaired for decades about our ability as a society to move beyond "thoughts and prayers" and to enact legislation at a national level to ensure that Americans spend less time mourning the loss of innocent life, and more time living their lives outside of the shadow of random gun violence.
In particular, I have despaired over our national inability to recognize that the lion's share of gun rights advocacy does not stem from respect for the Second Amendment, but from a sick, deep-seated need to maintain the aristocracy of race that was baked into the foundation of the Republic at its inception. I have written in the past about the slave patrols, but it is a point that cannot be underemphasized, especially in today's deeply divided political climate. Here is an op-ed piece from the New York Times that discusses this disgusting piece of history in some detail.
I have to admit, however that, to a degree, that despair has been mitigated by recent sightings in the media of gun sanity.
I mean, it's one thing when Paul Krugman adds two plus two, and comes up with the connection between mass shootings and white nationalism. He's been doing it for a while. Or to see a network like CNN do the same thing. CNN makes at least some effort, unlike Fox, to truly be fair and balanced.
But, in the wake of El Paso and Dayton, Krugman and CNN have found some unlikely company.
Take Joe Walsh, for example, who was part of the Tea Party wave that ended Nancy Pelosi's first reign as Speaker of the House of Representatives. Back then, the Tea Party defined right-wing extremism in national politics; it almost looks tame compared to the forces that D***** T**** has unleashed. Still, Walsh was and is no one's idea of a bleeding-heart liberal.
Except, perhaps now, on this issue.
And he's not alone.
He's been joined by David French of the National Review, the magazine that was founded by William F. Buckley, Jr. to redefine modern conservatism, and did so successfully. French's new-found place on the side of the angels is evident not only in the pages of NR, but also on Twitter.
They've been joined, in turn, by S.E. Cupp, a CNN and Twitter personality who leans right on most issues, but can't at this point be said to do so on this one.
For crying out loud, they've been joined by Rupert Murdoch, the main press agent for the Reagan Revolution and everything that has followed in its wake. I never thought I'd live to see the day when his New York Post would carry a cover editorial advocating the banning of assault weapons sales to the public. But here we are.
And the scope of the gun violence problem in this county is not just reflected in the conservative voices finally calling for sensible gun regulations. It's reflected in the pervasive fear we all now have that, every time we go out in public, we are a potential target. All it takes now is a vehicle backfire in Times Square to make everyone feel the need to run for cover. And not everyone feels safe venturing out to Times Square in the first place; people of color, in particular, are fearful of even the most seemingly harmless of pursuits, like going to the movies. Or even the holiest of pursuits, like going to church.
How did we get here?
Well, as my earlier reference to slave patrols should tell you, we've always been here.
America began its existence as a frontier society, one that depended on a combination of violence and cheap labor for its economic growth. In such a society, owning a gun is no more unusual than owning a horse--perhaps even less so. And slavery provides the cheapest possible labor, short of automation, the human mind can devise.
As America expanded westward, and its economic growth began to depend less on the land and become more mercantile in nature, dependent on innovation and trade, guns and slaves became less and less a part of life in some parts of the nation. If anything, they were viewed as obstacles to growth, as antiquated aspects of a more primitive, less peaceful society. In other parts of the country, however, addiction to the potential of exploiting land for crops and natural resources took hold. And, despite a Civil War that allegedly decided whether Americans were meant to be a free people, and not one defined by the master-and-slave relationship, that addiction never ended.
Why? Who can really say? I'm not writing here to provide a definitive answer, one that has eluded better historians than me. But there seems one possibility that is blindingly obvious.
America was initially settled by Europeans who came from countries that had aristocracies, segments of the population that had their own legal and economic rights given to them at birth. These rights were denied to those who were not aristocrats, or, at the very least, were restricted in their application to others. Our Constitution, of course, was written to exclude the European idea of an aristocracy from the nation it helped to create. Indeed, those who come to our shores from other counties are, as part of the naturalization process, required to renounce any aristocratic connections in order to become a citizen.
But that doesn't mean that all Americans don't aspire to an aristocratic lifestyle, even if it is one without formal titles. And slavery, I contend, is the key to the development of the aristocratic mindset among many white Americans, especially white males. After all the antebellum South had all of the formal characteristics of the old European aristocracies. Legal and economic rights--indeed, personhood itself--were vested in the hands of a privileged few solely on the basis of hereditary characteristics, skin color in this case. Those without privileges, those who were in fact viewed as property, took all of the risks and made all of the sacrifices, and those with privileges reaped all of the rewards. All that was missing to link the American aristocracy of slavery to its European counterparts were courtesy titles. And even variations of those made their way into the system.
And, on a fundamental level, that's what today's "economic discontent" is really all about. It's not the unvarnished cry for social and financial justice that many in and out of the media try to pretend that it is. If it were, they would leave behind the red states that have been bankrupted by decades of failed Republican policies, end their dependency on social programs largely funded by tax dollars from blue states, and start a new life based on a willingness to take whatever work might be available. They would line up to do the work they claim immigrants are "taking" from them. They would, in short, do what the best Americans--native-born and otherwise--have done for centuries before them.
But they won't do it. In fact, they don't truly begrudge the work being done by people of color, instead of themselves. They don't even mind receiving government aid, even as they decry creeping socialism. They won't face the fact that they've voted for decades for a party that systematically exploits them. What they really want is to be in charge. Because, as white people, they see it as their birthright. And lacking, in many cases, much in the way of formal education, they have no ability to grasp the complexity of the world around them, or the skills needed to survive in it. Their entire view of life is, by modern standards, incredibly primitive. Which is why it is not surprising that, as was the case with Mao Tse-tung, they see all power as coming out of the barrel of a gun.
You can find a more detailed analysis of the link between gun violence and white nationalism here; in fact, I have no objection to your taking a break from reading this post to read it (so long as you come back here afterwards, of course). You can also see, here and here, how incredibly primitive the thinking of white nationalists is, especially when it comes to guns. How in the world can anyone, with the most pro-gun political party in history in full charge of the federal and most of the state governments, legitimately feel that their Second Amendment rights need to be "double-checked" by a random display of firepower in an otherwise peaceful setting? This is not the action of someone with confidence in civil authority. This is the action of someone who believes it's everyone for themselves, because they're convinced that all that matters is G-d being on the side of white men.
This is the scenario that serial killers with semi-automatic rifles with bump stocks and high-capacity magazines take advantage of. We have been told by gun-rights advocates, over and over again, that all we need to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun. But how are we supposed to tell? The man in the Wal-Mart described in the linked articles above could have been either; fortunately, someone intervened before he had a chance to identify himself through casualties. This is madness. The only answer to the madness is the one that gun advocates believe in, but don't dare say out loud: "You can tell they're good guys; they all have white skin." Does that sound prejudiced to you? Shouldn't it? Do you doubt that the Wal-Mart incident would have been as peaceful if the man with the piece had been black?
Then consider this.
The wave of gun violence that has dominated our national conversation and filled all of us with fear began after the election of the first African-American President in our history. It began slowly, largely with single-victim attacks, and almost all of them involving young men of color. Florida even passed a law modifying the common-law definition of self-defense, allowing people to "stand their ground" anywhere based on an entirely subjective view of personal danger. In practice, the law has become a hunting license to kill young men of color with impunity.
And then, with a minority of the popular vote, D***** T**** became President, with a Republican Congress and most of the states under Republican control. And the gun violence exploded to epidemic levels.
Why should anyone be surprised? T**** came to office with a history of racism--and not just against African-Americans--as long as your arm, that continued right into his Presidency. The civil rights violations by his family's real estate company. The war against the Central Park Five, even after their exoneration through DNA evidence. The anti-Semitic remark about wanting his money to be counted by men with "beanies." The vicious mocking of a disabled reporter. The references to Mexicans as criminals and Central Americans as animals. Do I have to go on?
The point is this: T**** has never hidden who he is when it comes to race. He's practically beaten the rest of us over the head with it. He has always worked overtime to market himself to his core audience. He has basically told them to come out of the woodwork and from under the rocks, because, whether by rhetoric or pardons, he'll protect you. And they have absolutely gotten the message, while the rest of us pay for that fact dearly. Which is why no one, no matter the tenor of T****'s more recent remarks, should expect anything to change so long as he is President.
Or so long as Mitch McCONnell is the majority leader in the U.S. Senate.
Recent changes in polling data has led McCONnell to write an op-ed piece for the New York Times, warning Democrats not to completely do away with the filibuster should they take control of the Senate after the 2020 election. If they do, they'll regret it in the long run, as they did when they ended filibusters for federal district and circuit court nominations the last time they controlled the chamber, then lost it to the Republicans, who promptly extended the new rule to all presidential nominations, including Supreme Court justices.
In the piece, which you can read here, if you haven't done so already, McCONnell attempts to make the case that the filibuster, although not a power explicitly granted by the text of the Constitution, is one that the Constitution's overall design actually encourages, in order to ensure than any legislation passed by Congress is supported as broadly as possible. While it's true that the rule was designed to promote debate, and to prevent radical changes by slender majorities, the facts demonstrate that these goes have not exactly been at the forefront of McCONnell's leadership of the Senate.
Let's leave aside the fact that, if the framers of the Constitution wanted all legislation to be approved by a congressional supermajority, they could very easily have done so, as they did in fact with respect to treaties. As the late President Gerald Ford once said, quoting the late Governor Al Smith of New York, let's look at the record.
McCONnell interpreted Democratic filibusters of some underqualified judicial nominations made by then-President George W. Bush as an excuse in the Obama era as a justification, at a moment of crisis not just in the United States but the world, to filibuster nearly every single initiative of Obama's that needed to move through through Congress, once the afterglow of the change in Administrations had faded. Stop me if you've heard this one before, Mr. Majority Leader:
Indeed, the only real reason McCONnell hasn't tried to eliminate the filibuster altogether is that he knows that the legislation that would get through a Republican Congress, especially with input from a President like T****, would ultimately wipe his party almost completely off the map once the American people learned how that legislation would affect them. Far better to have Senate Democrats serve as a foil to disguise the ambitions such legislation would advance, while McCONnell and his cronies focus on what does the most to get them out of bed in the morning: appointing right-wing judges to lifetime seats in the federal judiciary, so that those judges can, without opposition, wreck havoc on the future of this country--especially when it comes to sensible gun regulation.
This, unfortunately, is what we are facing. A national culture of random violence that potentially menaces every single American. A culture that is fueled by the ancient divisions that form part of the bedrock of our history. And a political system that, for the moment, is frozen in paralysis by men who represent the minority view not only on gun legislation, but on almost every area of public policy. Even worse, they may not even represent their own country. T**** alone does not suffer from this problem; so does McCONnell.
If this feels too much like a lengthy rhetorical journey to despair, it needn't be. It shouldn't be. For the sake of all the lives that have been needlessly lost, and for the sake of the lives we may be able to proactively save by our actions, despair is a luxury we truly cannot afford.
I have written at this length, in this level of detail, in the hope of emphasizing the importance of being a part of next year's election in every possible way you can. Lives are at stake. Democracy is at stake. America is at stake.
Don't believe that there's nothing you can do to take the target off of your back, and all of our backs. You know what you need to do. Do it.
It was a tremendously, tragically long list prior to the addition of those two cities, one that included the names not just of places, but people. People who did nothing to deserve being victims of random slaughter. People whose dreams will never be fulfilled. People whose potential, personal and vocational, will never benefit their families, their neighbors, or their country. People whose absence, instead, leaves holes in the lives of all who were touched in any way by them, and the worst holes of all: in the hearts of their families and friends.
As someone who believes both in the right to own and use firearms for legitimate, lawful purposes, and who has no less believed in common-sense gun regulations to prevent their illegitimate, unlawful purposes, I have despaired for decades about our ability as a society to move beyond "thoughts and prayers" and to enact legislation at a national level to ensure that Americans spend less time mourning the loss of innocent life, and more time living their lives outside of the shadow of random gun violence.
In particular, I have despaired over our national inability to recognize that the lion's share of gun rights advocacy does not stem from respect for the Second Amendment, but from a sick, deep-seated need to maintain the aristocracy of race that was baked into the foundation of the Republic at its inception. I have written in the past about the slave patrols, but it is a point that cannot be underemphasized, especially in today's deeply divided political climate. Here is an op-ed piece from the New York Times that discusses this disgusting piece of history in some detail.
I have to admit, however that, to a degree, that despair has been mitigated by recent sightings in the media of gun sanity.
I mean, it's one thing when Paul Krugman adds two plus two, and comes up with the connection between mass shootings and white nationalism. He's been doing it for a while. Or to see a network like CNN do the same thing. CNN makes at least some effort, unlike Fox, to truly be fair and balanced.
But, in the wake of El Paso and Dayton, Krugman and CNN have found some unlikely company.
Take Joe Walsh, for example, who was part of the Tea Party wave that ended Nancy Pelosi's first reign as Speaker of the House of Representatives. Back then, the Tea Party defined right-wing extremism in national politics; it almost looks tame compared to the forces that D***** T**** has unleashed. Still, Walsh was and is no one's idea of a bleeding-heart liberal.
Except, perhaps now, on this issue.
And he's not alone.
He's been joined by David French of the National Review, the magazine that was founded by William F. Buckley, Jr. to redefine modern conservatism, and did so successfully. French's new-found place on the side of the angels is evident not only in the pages of NR, but also on Twitter.
They've been joined, in turn, by S.E. Cupp, a CNN and Twitter personality who leans right on most issues, but can't at this point be said to do so on this one.
For crying out loud, they've been joined by Rupert Murdoch, the main press agent for the Reagan Revolution and everything that has followed in its wake. I never thought I'd live to see the day when his New York Post would carry a cover editorial advocating the banning of assault weapons sales to the public. But here we are.
And the scope of the gun violence problem in this county is not just reflected in the conservative voices finally calling for sensible gun regulations. It's reflected in the pervasive fear we all now have that, every time we go out in public, we are a potential target. All it takes now is a vehicle backfire in Times Square to make everyone feel the need to run for cover. And not everyone feels safe venturing out to Times Square in the first place; people of color, in particular, are fearful of even the most seemingly harmless of pursuits, like going to the movies. Or even the holiest of pursuits, like going to church.
How did we get here?
Well, as my earlier reference to slave patrols should tell you, we've always been here.
America began its existence as a frontier society, one that depended on a combination of violence and cheap labor for its economic growth. In such a society, owning a gun is no more unusual than owning a horse--perhaps even less so. And slavery provides the cheapest possible labor, short of automation, the human mind can devise.
As America expanded westward, and its economic growth began to depend less on the land and become more mercantile in nature, dependent on innovation and trade, guns and slaves became less and less a part of life in some parts of the nation. If anything, they were viewed as obstacles to growth, as antiquated aspects of a more primitive, less peaceful society. In other parts of the country, however, addiction to the potential of exploiting land for crops and natural resources took hold. And, despite a Civil War that allegedly decided whether Americans were meant to be a free people, and not one defined by the master-and-slave relationship, that addiction never ended.
Why? Who can really say? I'm not writing here to provide a definitive answer, one that has eluded better historians than me. But there seems one possibility that is blindingly obvious.
America was initially settled by Europeans who came from countries that had aristocracies, segments of the population that had their own legal and economic rights given to them at birth. These rights were denied to those who were not aristocrats, or, at the very least, were restricted in their application to others. Our Constitution, of course, was written to exclude the European idea of an aristocracy from the nation it helped to create. Indeed, those who come to our shores from other counties are, as part of the naturalization process, required to renounce any aristocratic connections in order to become a citizen.
But that doesn't mean that all Americans don't aspire to an aristocratic lifestyle, even if it is one without formal titles. And slavery, I contend, is the key to the development of the aristocratic mindset among many white Americans, especially white males. After all the antebellum South had all of the formal characteristics of the old European aristocracies. Legal and economic rights--indeed, personhood itself--were vested in the hands of a privileged few solely on the basis of hereditary characteristics, skin color in this case. Those without privileges, those who were in fact viewed as property, took all of the risks and made all of the sacrifices, and those with privileges reaped all of the rewards. All that was missing to link the American aristocracy of slavery to its European counterparts were courtesy titles. And even variations of those made their way into the system.
And, on a fundamental level, that's what today's "economic discontent" is really all about. It's not the unvarnished cry for social and financial justice that many in and out of the media try to pretend that it is. If it were, they would leave behind the red states that have been bankrupted by decades of failed Republican policies, end their dependency on social programs largely funded by tax dollars from blue states, and start a new life based on a willingness to take whatever work might be available. They would line up to do the work they claim immigrants are "taking" from them. They would, in short, do what the best Americans--native-born and otherwise--have done for centuries before them.
But they won't do it. In fact, they don't truly begrudge the work being done by people of color, instead of themselves. They don't even mind receiving government aid, even as they decry creeping socialism. They won't face the fact that they've voted for decades for a party that systematically exploits them. What they really want is to be in charge. Because, as white people, they see it as their birthright. And lacking, in many cases, much in the way of formal education, they have no ability to grasp the complexity of the world around them, or the skills needed to survive in it. Their entire view of life is, by modern standards, incredibly primitive. Which is why it is not surprising that, as was the case with Mao Tse-tung, they see all power as coming out of the barrel of a gun.
You can find a more detailed analysis of the link between gun violence and white nationalism here; in fact, I have no objection to your taking a break from reading this post to read it (so long as you come back here afterwards, of course). You can also see, here and here, how incredibly primitive the thinking of white nationalists is, especially when it comes to guns. How in the world can anyone, with the most pro-gun political party in history in full charge of the federal and most of the state governments, legitimately feel that their Second Amendment rights need to be "double-checked" by a random display of firepower in an otherwise peaceful setting? This is not the action of someone with confidence in civil authority. This is the action of someone who believes it's everyone for themselves, because they're convinced that all that matters is G-d being on the side of white men.
This is the scenario that serial killers with semi-automatic rifles with bump stocks and high-capacity magazines take advantage of. We have been told by gun-rights advocates, over and over again, that all we need to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun. But how are we supposed to tell? The man in the Wal-Mart described in the linked articles above could have been either; fortunately, someone intervened before he had a chance to identify himself through casualties. This is madness. The only answer to the madness is the one that gun advocates believe in, but don't dare say out loud: "You can tell they're good guys; they all have white skin." Does that sound prejudiced to you? Shouldn't it? Do you doubt that the Wal-Mart incident would have been as peaceful if the man with the piece had been black?
Then consider this.
The wave of gun violence that has dominated our national conversation and filled all of us with fear began after the election of the first African-American President in our history. It began slowly, largely with single-victim attacks, and almost all of them involving young men of color. Florida even passed a law modifying the common-law definition of self-defense, allowing people to "stand their ground" anywhere based on an entirely subjective view of personal danger. In practice, the law has become a hunting license to kill young men of color with impunity.
And then, with a minority of the popular vote, D***** T**** became President, with a Republican Congress and most of the states under Republican control. And the gun violence exploded to epidemic levels.
Why should anyone be surprised? T**** came to office with a history of racism--and not just against African-Americans--as long as your arm, that continued right into his Presidency. The civil rights violations by his family's real estate company. The war against the Central Park Five, even after their exoneration through DNA evidence. The anti-Semitic remark about wanting his money to be counted by men with "beanies." The vicious mocking of a disabled reporter. The references to Mexicans as criminals and Central Americans as animals. Do I have to go on?
The point is this: T**** has never hidden who he is when it comes to race. He's practically beaten the rest of us over the head with it. He has always worked overtime to market himself to his core audience. He has basically told them to come out of the woodwork and from under the rocks, because, whether by rhetoric or pardons, he'll protect you. And they have absolutely gotten the message, while the rest of us pay for that fact dearly. Which is why no one, no matter the tenor of T****'s more recent remarks, should expect anything to change so long as he is President.
Or so long as Mitch McCONnell is the majority leader in the U.S. Senate.
Recent changes in polling data has led McCONnell to write an op-ed piece for the New York Times, warning Democrats not to completely do away with the filibuster should they take control of the Senate after the 2020 election. If they do, they'll regret it in the long run, as they did when they ended filibusters for federal district and circuit court nominations the last time they controlled the chamber, then lost it to the Republicans, who promptly extended the new rule to all presidential nominations, including Supreme Court justices.
In the piece, which you can read here, if you haven't done so already, McCONnell attempts to make the case that the filibuster, although not a power explicitly granted by the text of the Constitution, is one that the Constitution's overall design actually encourages, in order to ensure than any legislation passed by Congress is supported as broadly as possible. While it's true that the rule was designed to promote debate, and to prevent radical changes by slender majorities, the facts demonstrate that these goes have not exactly been at the forefront of McCONnell's leadership of the Senate.
Let's leave aside the fact that, if the framers of the Constitution wanted all legislation to be approved by a congressional supermajority, they could very easily have done so, as they did in fact with respect to treaties. As the late President Gerald Ford once said, quoting the late Governor Al Smith of New York, let's look at the record.
McCONnell interpreted Democratic filibusters of some underqualified judicial nominations made by then-President George W. Bush as an excuse in the Obama era as a justification, at a moment of crisis not just in the United States but the world, to filibuster nearly every single initiative of Obama's that needed to move through through Congress, once the afterglow of the change in Administrations had faded. Stop me if you've heard this one before, Mr. Majority Leader:
We have a new president with an approval rating in the 70 percent area. We do not take him on frontally. We find issues where we can win, and we begin to take him down, one issue at a time. We create an inventory of losses, so it’s Obama lost on this, Obama lost on that. And we wait for the time where the image has been damaged to the point where we can take him on.These are not the words of someone who wants to move legislation supported by a broad majority, or even a simple one. Those are the words of a man whose goal, in an era where the political and social culture of the country has turned against him, is to block as much legislation as he possibly can. In short, they are Mitch McCONnell's words, at the beginning of the Obama Administration. Take a look if you don't believe me.
Indeed, the only real reason McCONnell hasn't tried to eliminate the filibuster altogether is that he knows that the legislation that would get through a Republican Congress, especially with input from a President like T****, would ultimately wipe his party almost completely off the map once the American people learned how that legislation would affect them. Far better to have Senate Democrats serve as a foil to disguise the ambitions such legislation would advance, while McCONnell and his cronies focus on what does the most to get them out of bed in the morning: appointing right-wing judges to lifetime seats in the federal judiciary, so that those judges can, without opposition, wreck havoc on the future of this country--especially when it comes to sensible gun regulation.
This, unfortunately, is what we are facing. A national culture of random violence that potentially menaces every single American. A culture that is fueled by the ancient divisions that form part of the bedrock of our history. And a political system that, for the moment, is frozen in paralysis by men who represent the minority view not only on gun legislation, but on almost every area of public policy. Even worse, they may not even represent their own country. T**** alone does not suffer from this problem; so does McCONnell.
If this feels too much like a lengthy rhetorical journey to despair, it needn't be. It shouldn't be. For the sake of all the lives that have been needlessly lost, and for the sake of the lives we may be able to proactively save by our actions, despair is a luxury we truly cannot afford.
I have written at this length, in this level of detail, in the hope of emphasizing the importance of being a part of next year's election in every possible way you can. Lives are at stake. Democracy is at stake. America is at stake.
Don't believe that there's nothing you can do to take the target off of your back, and all of our backs. You know what you need to do. Do it.
Sunday, July 28, 2019
What We Can Learn From Puerto Rico
The events of the past several weeks in Puerto Rico, leading to the ouster of the island's corrupt Governor, ought to be an object lesson for all of us in the rest of the United States. And yes, this is your periodic reminder that, contrary to what the crypto-fascists in social media tell you, Puerto Rico is part of the United States, even if it isn't yet an actual state itself.
As if the residents of Puerto Rico haven't suffered enough at the hands of Hurricane Maria, and the far tinier hands of T****, it has also had to deal with extensive abuse of power within its own territorial government, abuse that has added to the slowness of the island's recovery from Maria. Puerto Rico, in that sense, has been a mirror image of government on the mainland, where we have a national government that is paralyzed by Republican corruption and Democratic fecklessness.
Which brings to mind a question I have been asking myself many times, as I look at the streets of this country, and especially the streets of our nation's capital:
Where are the people?
In earlier times of crisis, the people--the ultimate government not just of democracies, but of any society, as the end of the Cold War demonstrated--took to the streets, just as the people of Puerto Rico did over the past fifteen days.
They marched.
They demonstrated.
They occupied buildings.
They made themselves the focus of media attention, not just here but around the world.
And, perhaps above all, they did one thing that was perhaps more important than all of the other things.
They didn't go away.
Woody Allen is famously credited with saying that 80 percent of life is showing up. Woody is a former cultural hero of mine (former for reasons that I hope are obvious), so I would like to be able to attribute that quote to a better human being. As it turns out, I probably can't.
And that's a shame, because it's absolutely true. And, when it comes to protecting the rights of all of us, it's absolutely essential.
Almost from the miserable moment T**** was elected, perhaps by the Russians, the MSM mantra has been that American institutions are big enough, powerful enough, and enduring enough to contain and repair any damage that might be done to our system by the Slumlord-in-Chief. The MSM wanted to believe it, and, frankly, so did the rest of us.
The ugly truth of the matter is that, when it comes to the need to fight for freedom, a necessity that the founders of this nation were not afraid to look right in the eye, we've become fat and lazy. We are victims not only of our accrued political, military and economy power, but also of our own material standard of living, which has successfully managed, to a far larger extent than we realize, to separate the words "hard" and "work" from each other. We have so many devices taking care of so many aspects of our lives that we assume our political system works the same way, and that (for better and for worse) it will just keep running on cruise control without any need for us to do more than perhaps press an occasional button by voting. But only when we're in the mood, of course.
Well, folks, if running on cruise control worked for us in the recent past (and I'm definitely a dissenter on that point), it sure isn't working now. Because our institutions are, literally right and left, failing us.
Wall Street? It's too busy licking its chops at the fruits of tax cuts and deregulation, even as basic services wither away and our planet melts around us. The media? Yes, the supposedly knee-jerk-liberal MSM. Please. Give me a break. They're so completely corporate in their outlook on life that they only care about getting clicks and eyeballs. Say whatever else you will about T****; he routinely delivers those with Prussian efficiency.
And our national government? Our marvelous system of checks and balances? It's almost entirely a system of donor checks and campaign account balances. This is why we have a Supreme Court stuffed in the least democratic way possible with right-wing ribbon clerks. This is why the White House has a Grifter-in-Chief leading an Administration of lobbyists and other grifters. It has, for all practical purposes, become a henhouse not merely guarded by foxes, but full of them--and all of them whining that we haven't been cooperative enough in feeding them.
And, perhaps worst of all, it's why we have a Congress divided into a Senate led by a Senator who almost surely is a foreign agent, and a House led by a Speaker more enamored of keeping her job rather than keeping the Republic a Republic, hoping that Robert Mueller will do her job for her.
Well, he tried. He did his loyal and honest best, in testifying last week before then House Judiciary Committee. And, because he stammered a little and had to walk back one answer to a question, the right-wing echo chamber was ready to declare him an incontinent puppet of Hillarycrats. So much for Mueller. So much for the Democratic House. So much for the willingness of the Republican Party and its supporters (with a handful of noble exceptions) to put country first, and party second. For that matter, so much for the willingness of Mueller's detractors, who overlooked the withering substance of his testimony, to obey the law and not diagnose a patient they have not met, nor one that they are qualified to diagnose.
Do you get it now?
Do you really wanted to be saved from the T**** nightmare that continues to unfold? The one that may very well never end with the next election?
Then be like Puerto Rico.
Take to the streets, as its people did.
As your ancestors did.
As your grandparents, parents, aunts, uncles, cousins, and in-laws did.
And, above all, before it's really too late.
As if the residents of Puerto Rico haven't suffered enough at the hands of Hurricane Maria, and the far tinier hands of T****, it has also had to deal with extensive abuse of power within its own territorial government, abuse that has added to the slowness of the island's recovery from Maria. Puerto Rico, in that sense, has been a mirror image of government on the mainland, where we have a national government that is paralyzed by Republican corruption and Democratic fecklessness.
Which brings to mind a question I have been asking myself many times, as I look at the streets of this country, and especially the streets of our nation's capital:
Where are the people?
In earlier times of crisis, the people--the ultimate government not just of democracies, but of any society, as the end of the Cold War demonstrated--took to the streets, just as the people of Puerto Rico did over the past fifteen days.
They marched.
They demonstrated.
They occupied buildings.
They made themselves the focus of media attention, not just here but around the world.
And, perhaps above all, they did one thing that was perhaps more important than all of the other things.
They didn't go away.
Woody Allen is famously credited with saying that 80 percent of life is showing up. Woody is a former cultural hero of mine (former for reasons that I hope are obvious), so I would like to be able to attribute that quote to a better human being. As it turns out, I probably can't.
And that's a shame, because it's absolutely true. And, when it comes to protecting the rights of all of us, it's absolutely essential.
Almost from the miserable moment T**** was elected, perhaps by the Russians, the MSM mantra has been that American institutions are big enough, powerful enough, and enduring enough to contain and repair any damage that might be done to our system by the Slumlord-in-Chief. The MSM wanted to believe it, and, frankly, so did the rest of us.
The ugly truth of the matter is that, when it comes to the need to fight for freedom, a necessity that the founders of this nation were not afraid to look right in the eye, we've become fat and lazy. We are victims not only of our accrued political, military and economy power, but also of our own material standard of living, which has successfully managed, to a far larger extent than we realize, to separate the words "hard" and "work" from each other. We have so many devices taking care of so many aspects of our lives that we assume our political system works the same way, and that (for better and for worse) it will just keep running on cruise control without any need for us to do more than perhaps press an occasional button by voting. But only when we're in the mood, of course.
Well, folks, if running on cruise control worked for us in the recent past (and I'm definitely a dissenter on that point), it sure isn't working now. Because our institutions are, literally right and left, failing us.
Wall Street? It's too busy licking its chops at the fruits of tax cuts and deregulation, even as basic services wither away and our planet melts around us. The media? Yes, the supposedly knee-jerk-liberal MSM. Please. Give me a break. They're so completely corporate in their outlook on life that they only care about getting clicks and eyeballs. Say whatever else you will about T****; he routinely delivers those with Prussian efficiency.
And our national government? Our marvelous system of checks and balances? It's almost entirely a system of donor checks and campaign account balances. This is why we have a Supreme Court stuffed in the least democratic way possible with right-wing ribbon clerks. This is why the White House has a Grifter-in-Chief leading an Administration of lobbyists and other grifters. It has, for all practical purposes, become a henhouse not merely guarded by foxes, but full of them--and all of them whining that we haven't been cooperative enough in feeding them.
And, perhaps worst of all, it's why we have a Congress divided into a Senate led by a Senator who almost surely is a foreign agent, and a House led by a Speaker more enamored of keeping her job rather than keeping the Republic a Republic, hoping that Robert Mueller will do her job for her.
Well, he tried. He did his loyal and honest best, in testifying last week before then House Judiciary Committee. And, because he stammered a little and had to walk back one answer to a question, the right-wing echo chamber was ready to declare him an incontinent puppet of Hillarycrats. So much for Mueller. So much for the Democratic House. So much for the willingness of the Republican Party and its supporters (with a handful of noble exceptions) to put country first, and party second. For that matter, so much for the willingness of Mueller's detractors, who overlooked the withering substance of his testimony, to obey the law and not diagnose a patient they have not met, nor one that they are qualified to diagnose.
Do you get it now?
Do you really wanted to be saved from the T**** nightmare that continues to unfold? The one that may very well never end with the next election?
Then be like Puerto Rico.
Take to the streets, as its people did.
As your ancestors did.
As your grandparents, parents, aunts, uncles, cousins, and in-laws did.
And, above all, before it's really too late.
Sunday, July 21, 2019
D***** T****, Would-Be Editor-In-Chief
There have been times in the past when I have praised the New York Post for publishing stories that not only acknowledged the reality of climate change, but the extent to which it is actually happening in real time. I've been surprised by these stories, inasmuch as the Post is a staunchly conservative paper, and climate change denial is the default position modern conservatism takes on the issue, viewing it as essentially a backdoor path to some sort of "socialist' nightmare.
Recently, the Post did it again, publishing a story about the record heat from last month that also contained a prediction that this month might set yet another record. I added the story to my Diigo account, where I save stories to be incorporated in a blog post. Today, I sat down to do exactly that with the Post story.
And what did I find?
This.
Yep, you guess it. The Post took down the story. Curiously, the URL lingers, like a ghostly reminder of the story and its heretical content. But the actual article has digitally disappeared.
I smell a whiff of desperation in this. Not quite so much on the part of the Post, or its right-wing billionaire publisher, Rupert Murdoch. But on the part of the President that Murdoch and the Post are doing everything they can, against their better judgment, to try re-electing.
D***** T**** is an anti-environmentalist. He is this, of course, only because the better President whose skin color he despises, Barack Obama, accomplished more for the cause of a clean environment and clean energy than any President before him, and incorporated his effort to do so into the economic policies that led to the economic recovery T**** is now taking credit for. Obama is, in fact, T****'s only frame of reference for any decision he makes; he's too full of hate, and too lacking otherwise in judgment, to run his Presidency in any other way.
D***** T**** also follows conservative media religiously, including the Post, for daily updates on changes (up or down) in his popularity, the only concern that gets him out of bed at 11 a.m. every day. And he is narcissistic enough to bully anyone he feels he needs to bully in order to promote himself--the only person he cares about.
So you can be sure about how and why the story was "disappeared."
Which is exactly what will happen to you, me, and everyone else, if T****''s willingness to destroy the world for the sake of re-election is thwarted.
Recently, the Post did it again, publishing a story about the record heat from last month that also contained a prediction that this month might set yet another record. I added the story to my Diigo account, where I save stories to be incorporated in a blog post. Today, I sat down to do exactly that with the Post story.
And what did I find?
This.
Yep, you guess it. The Post took down the story. Curiously, the URL lingers, like a ghostly reminder of the story and its heretical content. But the actual article has digitally disappeared.
I smell a whiff of desperation in this. Not quite so much on the part of the Post, or its right-wing billionaire publisher, Rupert Murdoch. But on the part of the President that Murdoch and the Post are doing everything they can, against their better judgment, to try re-electing.
D***** T**** is an anti-environmentalist. He is this, of course, only because the better President whose skin color he despises, Barack Obama, accomplished more for the cause of a clean environment and clean energy than any President before him, and incorporated his effort to do so into the economic policies that led to the economic recovery T**** is now taking credit for. Obama is, in fact, T****'s only frame of reference for any decision he makes; he's too full of hate, and too lacking otherwise in judgment, to run his Presidency in any other way.
D***** T**** also follows conservative media religiously, including the Post, for daily updates on changes (up or down) in his popularity, the only concern that gets him out of bed at 11 a.m. every day. And he is narcissistic enough to bully anyone he feels he needs to bully in order to promote himself--the only person he cares about.
So you can be sure about how and why the story was "disappeared."
Which is exactly what will happen to you, me, and everyone else, if T****''s willingness to destroy the world for the sake of re-election is thwarted.
It's A Very, Very, Very, Very, Post-MAD World
The recent news that MAD Magazine is shutting down publication after nearly 70 years of making mostly young Americans--including me, back in the day--laugh at the various foibles of our country and its culture hit me very hard. Part of that, of course, was nostalgia for my long-lost and occasionally misspent youth. Of greater significance to me is what the departure of MAD means for the current state of satire in this country.
MAD began in the 1950s not as a magazine, but as a comic book published by EC Comics, a comic-book company known for its willingness to push the boundaries of acceptable content, especially when it came to graphic violence, but also in presenting plots that increasingly mirrored liberal concerns about modern society. That willingness, and the willingness of other companies to experiment in less radical ways with the art and storylines they put into their comic books, led to a form of '50s insanity that was a kind of second cousin to Senator Joe McCarthy's Communist witch-hunts in Hollywood. Alarmed by some of the "revelations" about modern comics in a book called "Seduction of the Innocent," Congress began to investigate the industry to the point of putting several companies out of business. This led to the creation of the Comics Code Authority, a kind of Good-Housekeeping-type of seal-of-approval for comic companies that abided by certain restrictions on content.
How did EC respond? By abandoning all of its books except MAD, and changing MAD from a comic-book to a magazine format. By doing so, they liberated themselves from the authority of the CCA, and were free to say what they wanted about whatever they wanted to talk about. And, in more ways than one, and without going beyond the parameters of "obscenity" laws that were still on the books, they exercised that freedom fairly liberally.
That's not to say that MAD was a part of a vast, left-wing conspiracy. It lampooned politics, but always in a way to make sure that politicians in both major parties (and, sometimes, in some minor ones) got their just desserts. It made fun, sometimes gently (and other times not so gently) of everyday American life, whether bowling, barbecuing, baseball, or anything else. Most especially, it mocked our cultural life, most especially in its parodies of popular films and TV shows. I don't presume to speak for everyone, but the lampooning of plots and caricatures of actors (the latter most notably by the great Mort Drucker) made me feel that I hadn't really, truly seen the movie or show in question until I had seen MAD's take on it. Even when they blatantly mocked one of my all-time favorite movies, I still felt that way.
Just take a look at what MAD did to the famous--or infamous, if you will--"horse's head" sequence from "The Godfather." Every time I think of it, I think to myself "Leave it to MAD to take a classic movie moment, and turn it into a classic moment of satire."
Satire.
Does it have a place in America anymore?
Is it possible to poke fun at a society in which everything seems to be more and more of a joke? Or, at least, a society in which there are no true boundaries? And where the boundaries that are left feel more and more vulnerable with each passing day?
It's a question I find myself asking when I watch "Saturday Night Live," which I do these days with decreasing frequency. Yes, Alec Baldwin's imitation of T**** is spot-on. But so what? The outrageousness of the original is almost impossible to surpass. And even a lot of their original material seems more and more unconnected to the experience of the show's audience.
Satire depends on the ability to go at least one step farther than the original. It relies on the idea that there's a range of human behavior that's "out-of-bounds" in the everyday lives of most people. And it's within that range that satire finds the freedom to openly laugh at what happens in those everyday lives.
Where is that range now? Does it even exist, in a world of social media where people are constantly destroying old boundaries, setting new ones, and then tears those down without a second thought? Can it exist, in a world in which the only surviving "ism" is narcissism? Where we can laugh at everything except ourselves? In a world in which a President like T**** is possible?
I don't think so.
And that's why I'm not surprised about MAD's demise. Saddened, of course, almost as if I have lost an old friend. But not surprised.
I am, however, far sadder about the thought, the likelihood, that we now live in a world that no longer has the ability to laugh at itself. I hope I'm wrong.
MAD began in the 1950s not as a magazine, but as a comic book published by EC Comics, a comic-book company known for its willingness to push the boundaries of acceptable content, especially when it came to graphic violence, but also in presenting plots that increasingly mirrored liberal concerns about modern society. That willingness, and the willingness of other companies to experiment in less radical ways with the art and storylines they put into their comic books, led to a form of '50s insanity that was a kind of second cousin to Senator Joe McCarthy's Communist witch-hunts in Hollywood. Alarmed by some of the "revelations" about modern comics in a book called "Seduction of the Innocent," Congress began to investigate the industry to the point of putting several companies out of business. This led to the creation of the Comics Code Authority, a kind of Good-Housekeeping-type of seal-of-approval for comic companies that abided by certain restrictions on content.
How did EC respond? By abandoning all of its books except MAD, and changing MAD from a comic-book to a magazine format. By doing so, they liberated themselves from the authority of the CCA, and were free to say what they wanted about whatever they wanted to talk about. And, in more ways than one, and without going beyond the parameters of "obscenity" laws that were still on the books, they exercised that freedom fairly liberally.
That's not to say that MAD was a part of a vast, left-wing conspiracy. It lampooned politics, but always in a way to make sure that politicians in both major parties (and, sometimes, in some minor ones) got their just desserts. It made fun, sometimes gently (and other times not so gently) of everyday American life, whether bowling, barbecuing, baseball, or anything else. Most especially, it mocked our cultural life, most especially in its parodies of popular films and TV shows. I don't presume to speak for everyone, but the lampooning of plots and caricatures of actors (the latter most notably by the great Mort Drucker) made me feel that I hadn't really, truly seen the movie or show in question until I had seen MAD's take on it. Even when they blatantly mocked one of my all-time favorite movies, I still felt that way.
Just take a look at what MAD did to the famous--or infamous, if you will--"horse's head" sequence from "The Godfather." Every time I think of it, I think to myself "Leave it to MAD to take a classic movie moment, and turn it into a classic moment of satire."
Satire.
Does it have a place in America anymore?
Is it possible to poke fun at a society in which everything seems to be more and more of a joke? Or, at least, a society in which there are no true boundaries? And where the boundaries that are left feel more and more vulnerable with each passing day?
It's a question I find myself asking when I watch "Saturday Night Live," which I do these days with decreasing frequency. Yes, Alec Baldwin's imitation of T**** is spot-on. But so what? The outrageousness of the original is almost impossible to surpass. And even a lot of their original material seems more and more unconnected to the experience of the show's audience.
Satire depends on the ability to go at least one step farther than the original. It relies on the idea that there's a range of human behavior that's "out-of-bounds" in the everyday lives of most people. And it's within that range that satire finds the freedom to openly laugh at what happens in those everyday lives.
Where is that range now? Does it even exist, in a world of social media where people are constantly destroying old boundaries, setting new ones, and then tears those down without a second thought? Can it exist, in a world in which the only surviving "ism" is narcissism? Where we can laugh at everything except ourselves? In a world in which a President like T**** is possible?
I don't think so.
And that's why I'm not surprised about MAD's demise. Saddened, of course, almost as if I have lost an old friend. But not surprised.
I am, however, far sadder about the thought, the likelihood, that we now live in a world that no longer has the ability to laugh at itself. I hope I'm wrong.
Saturday, July 13, 2019
Nancy Pelosi, Continued
You might think that, after devoting the entire contents of my blog for the month of June to lecturing Nancy Pelosi on the subject of impeaching D***** T****, I was entirely done with the subject of Madame Speaker.
But you would be wrong.
At the end of June, after pressure from an outraged public that had finally seen enough of the worse-than-deplorable conditions in the concentration camps T**** has built at the border for Central America refugees, Congress passed a bill that provided additional money to alleviate, if not exactly improve, those conditions.
But the bill that was passed was passed was a bill that was forced on Pelosi by--you guessed it--the Senate's majority leader, Mitch McCONnell, who insisted that the legislation not include any restrictions that would restrict the use of the money for so-called "enforcement"--translation: "torture"--purposes.
In my "open letter" to the Speaker, I had pointed out that, on the subject of impeachment, McCONnell was manipulating her and the members of the majority caucus into refraining from using a power that not only is manifestly theirs, but for which popular support was far greater than they were allowing themselves to believe. In conjunction with that, I expressed concern that Pelosi's supposed "prudence" on the subject of impeachment was in fact telegraphing weakness to her opponents--a weakness that could end up limiting what House Democrats can do with regard to other issues.
That's why I'm writing about this now. It was in the back of my mind when I was writing my "open letter." because the kerfuffle over the bill took place just a few days prior to my doing so. But I needed space to catch up on and address other aspects of the failure-to-impeach crisis, and so I'm keeping a promise to myself that I would come back this month and address the migrant funding legislation.
And, as the fallout from the passage of the bill has shown, there's no reason to not do now, and expand on the points I made previously.
All the more so because, in addition to illustrating how T**** and McCONnell are exploiting the vacuum Pelosi has created by not leading on the impeachment process, it also illustrates how they are using that exploitation to weaken, and potentially destroy, the fragile unity that Pelosi has (to her credit) thus far has created and maintained between progressive and moderate Democrats. For, in the final House vote on the bill, while three-fourths of all members voted for it, it was passed with far more Republican votes than Democratic ones.
Who were the Democrats who voted against it? The progressives, who saw through McCONnell's bluff about the absence of restrictions on the use of the money. They felt that the facts, combined with the Administration's well-earned lack of support, justified their inclusion. Moderates, on the other hand, worried about the prospect of holding children hostage for the sake of what they felt their constituents would perceive to be little more than a political food fight.
In doing so, however, the moderates failed to take into account the fact that McCONnell had, in effect, already taken the children hostage, and was merely including the lack of restrictions at the behest of T****, for whom he has become little more than a legislative ribbon-clerk. This should have been a fight worth having, and one that could easily have been explained to most if not all Americans. But, for reasons that continue to elude many people, including me, moderate House Democrats are afraid to do that.
Is their fear of T**** that great? Do they perceive has power to actually be that great? If they're unable to go to the proverbial mattresses for the sake of children whose lives are at risk, the answer to that question has to be "yes."
I don't know what can be done to get them past that fear. Maybe nothing. Maybe they're so afraid of T****'s "hidden power" (e.g., dark money from Russia) that they don't dare fight him and his political allies on anything. Even something that all of us should be willing to support. Like, for example, doing the most we can for vulnerable children at our doorstep.
I have no illusion that there's a path to getting a House of Representatives with 218+ AOC's is going to happen in the short-term. Or even the long-term. It would be easier to get to a Senate that has 51 members with a "D" after each of their names, and that seems impossibly hard to imagine right now. But we, as a part and a people, have simply got to do much better than this.
And, in the short run, the responsibility falls on the shoulder of one person: Pelosi.
And, rather than stepping up to meet the crisis, she seems to be shrinking further and further away from it. Or attempting to.
Take, for example, her handling--or, for the moment, her failure to handle--of the fallout of the Jeffrey Epstein child abuse scandal on T****'s Secretary of Labor, Alex Acosta, the former federal prosecutor who let Epstein spectacularly off the hook in an earlier child abuse case. As ever, Pelosi quickly telegraphed her willingness to be timid in the face of a need to act. Luckily, Acosta resigned anyway, which is a tribute either to public outcry or the potential for the Epstein case to expose even more T**** perfidy. That sound, in any case, like a blog post--or, perhaps, a series of posts--to be made at a later date.
But, even worse, Pelosi seems to be willing to use her press contacts to go on the offense against the progressive members of her caucus. Take, for example, this interview with Maureen Dowd, in which she dismisses four of the most progressive, and politically intriguing, members of her caucus as "four votes," with their "public whatever and their Twitter world." With that quote, she became every bit as rhetorically hard on them as she has been on her Republican opponents.
To what end? This is beginning to feel more than anything like Pelosi is more concerned about the generational gap within the Democratic Party than she is about advancing causes that a truly focused leader could use to bring Democrats together. She's term-limited herself to January of 2023, by which time she hopes a Democratic President, coupled perhaps with a Democratic Senate, will allow her to finish her career with a flourish.
Is she willing to do that with what amounts to a coalition of moderates in her party and Republicans, as she did with the migrant relief bill? Is she so focused on the short-term finish of her career that she is willing to sell out not only the future of her party, but also the most sensitive needs of those with the most to lose?
I'm afraid that Madame Speaker may very well find that, if she continues to run from the clear and present danger that T****, McCONnell, and their cronies pose, she may never get to that future glorious send-off she imagines. If she continues to act more like a Republican leader than a Democratic one, the power she's trying to protect may evaporate right in front of her eyes--and, with it, the shared hopes of most Americans of different ideological stripes.
For G-d's sake, Nancy, fight! Find some of your father's guts, and use them. Otherwise, the future that you want, and the future that all members of your party want, may never arrive.
But you would be wrong.
At the end of June, after pressure from an outraged public that had finally seen enough of the worse-than-deplorable conditions in the concentration camps T**** has built at the border for Central America refugees, Congress passed a bill that provided additional money to alleviate, if not exactly improve, those conditions.
But the bill that was passed was passed was a bill that was forced on Pelosi by--you guessed it--the Senate's majority leader, Mitch McCONnell, who insisted that the legislation not include any restrictions that would restrict the use of the money for so-called "enforcement"--translation: "torture"--purposes.
In my "open letter" to the Speaker, I had pointed out that, on the subject of impeachment, McCONnell was manipulating her and the members of the majority caucus into refraining from using a power that not only is manifestly theirs, but for which popular support was far greater than they were allowing themselves to believe. In conjunction with that, I expressed concern that Pelosi's supposed "prudence" on the subject of impeachment was in fact telegraphing weakness to her opponents--a weakness that could end up limiting what House Democrats can do with regard to other issues.
That's why I'm writing about this now. It was in the back of my mind when I was writing my "open letter." because the kerfuffle over the bill took place just a few days prior to my doing so. But I needed space to catch up on and address other aspects of the failure-to-impeach crisis, and so I'm keeping a promise to myself that I would come back this month and address the migrant funding legislation.
And, as the fallout from the passage of the bill has shown, there's no reason to not do now, and expand on the points I made previously.
All the more so because, in addition to illustrating how T**** and McCONnell are exploiting the vacuum Pelosi has created by not leading on the impeachment process, it also illustrates how they are using that exploitation to weaken, and potentially destroy, the fragile unity that Pelosi has (to her credit) thus far has created and maintained between progressive and moderate Democrats. For, in the final House vote on the bill, while three-fourths of all members voted for it, it was passed with far more Republican votes than Democratic ones.
Who were the Democrats who voted against it? The progressives, who saw through McCONnell's bluff about the absence of restrictions on the use of the money. They felt that the facts, combined with the Administration's well-earned lack of support, justified their inclusion. Moderates, on the other hand, worried about the prospect of holding children hostage for the sake of what they felt their constituents would perceive to be little more than a political food fight.
In doing so, however, the moderates failed to take into account the fact that McCONnell had, in effect, already taken the children hostage, and was merely including the lack of restrictions at the behest of T****, for whom he has become little more than a legislative ribbon-clerk. This should have been a fight worth having, and one that could easily have been explained to most if not all Americans. But, for reasons that continue to elude many people, including me, moderate House Democrats are afraid to do that.
Is their fear of T**** that great? Do they perceive has power to actually be that great? If they're unable to go to the proverbial mattresses for the sake of children whose lives are at risk, the answer to that question has to be "yes."
I don't know what can be done to get them past that fear. Maybe nothing. Maybe they're so afraid of T****'s "hidden power" (e.g., dark money from Russia) that they don't dare fight him and his political allies on anything. Even something that all of us should be willing to support. Like, for example, doing the most we can for vulnerable children at our doorstep.
I have no illusion that there's a path to getting a House of Representatives with 218+ AOC's is going to happen in the short-term. Or even the long-term. It would be easier to get to a Senate that has 51 members with a "D" after each of their names, and that seems impossibly hard to imagine right now. But we, as a part and a people, have simply got to do much better than this.
And, in the short run, the responsibility falls on the shoulder of one person: Pelosi.
And, rather than stepping up to meet the crisis, she seems to be shrinking further and further away from it. Or attempting to.
Take, for example, her handling--or, for the moment, her failure to handle--of the fallout of the Jeffrey Epstein child abuse scandal on T****'s Secretary of Labor, Alex Acosta, the former federal prosecutor who let Epstein spectacularly off the hook in an earlier child abuse case. As ever, Pelosi quickly telegraphed her willingness to be timid in the face of a need to act. Luckily, Acosta resigned anyway, which is a tribute either to public outcry or the potential for the Epstein case to expose even more T**** perfidy. That sound, in any case, like a blog post--or, perhaps, a series of posts--to be made at a later date.
But, even worse, Pelosi seems to be willing to use her press contacts to go on the offense against the progressive members of her caucus. Take, for example, this interview with Maureen Dowd, in which she dismisses four of the most progressive, and politically intriguing, members of her caucus as "four votes," with their "public whatever and their Twitter world." With that quote, she became every bit as rhetorically hard on them as she has been on her Republican opponents.
To what end? This is beginning to feel more than anything like Pelosi is more concerned about the generational gap within the Democratic Party than she is about advancing causes that a truly focused leader could use to bring Democrats together. She's term-limited herself to January of 2023, by which time she hopes a Democratic President, coupled perhaps with a Democratic Senate, will allow her to finish her career with a flourish.
Is she willing to do that with what amounts to a coalition of moderates in her party and Republicans, as she did with the migrant relief bill? Is she so focused on the short-term finish of her career that she is willing to sell out not only the future of her party, but also the most sensitive needs of those with the most to lose?
I'm afraid that Madame Speaker may very well find that, if she continues to run from the clear and present danger that T****, McCONnell, and their cronies pose, she may never get to that future glorious send-off she imagines. If she continues to act more like a Republican leader than a Democratic one, the power she's trying to protect may evaporate right in front of her eyes--and, with it, the shared hopes of most Americans of different ideological stripes.
For G-d's sake, Nancy, fight! Find some of your father's guts, and use them. Otherwise, the future that you want, and the future that all members of your party want, may never arrive.
Sunday, June 30, 2019
An Open Letter To Nancy Pelosi
Dear Madame Speaker:
So, yes, I'm wondering: what the hell are you waiting for?
If you're waiting for the supposedly liberal press to somehow save you, forget it. No matter what the Republicans say to the contrary, they're simply not all that liberal. I'm not sure they ever were; freedom of the press, as the saying goes, belongs to the person who owns one. It's a property right, and Republicans are nothing if not the party of property rights. And the Republicans who own the presses, and the airwaves, and the Interwaves, and all the other marvelous means of communication that we take for granted make sure that their employees (i.e., reporters and editors) know on which side their proverbial bread is buttered.
Which is why those employees, for the most part, are past masters at the art of sucking up to the powerful, the recently powerful, and the perhaps-soon-to-be-again powerful. Case in point: Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who arguably falls into all three of these categories. She is the daughter of a former Governor of Arkansas, she was recently (and memorably, in a bad way) the White House press secretary, and she is rumored to be in line to run for her father's old job in the near future.
In her most recent job, she earned the reputation of being perhaps the worst press secretary in the history of the White House. She was dishonest to a fault, she was abusive to reporters without regard to the fact that press secretaries often depend on the goodwill of those reporters when their boss is in political hot water, and she was far too eager to do little more than carry water for a boss who himself practises the art of deception at an Olympian level.
So what did the White House press corps do for Ms. Sanders, upon her departure from their midst? That's right, exactly what everyone would do for such a reprehensible human being--everyone, that is, in Washington, where every second of everyone's life is a potential career move. They threw an enormously expensive farewell party for her, on the grounds that lying and abusive conduct can easily be overlooked for the sake of "civility." Never mind the fact that both press secretaries and reporters have an obligation to the public that transcends any obligation they might have to each other. It's all about civility. In fact, it's all about access. After all, if you expect to see each other again ...
And then, there's the question I don't want to ask, but feel that I have to ask: does T**** have something on you? Or someone you care about? Or someone you know? I don't want to believe that, but I need you to understand that your conduct in connection with the impeachment question is so out of line with reality on the ground that I have no choice but to raise it. And, as I said earlier, you have always been someone who understands things from the ground up. Which is why I don't think I have to explain to you that, if I'm right on this point, you owe it to yourself, all of your supporters, and everyone in this country to come forward and come clean. Even if that means resigning from Congress.
I don't want that to happen. But I need to get your attention. Literally millions of us need to get your attention. And, since you are a politician, there's only one sure-fire way to do it.
I'm responding to your e-mails. By not responding.
That's right. In the words of a disappointed parent to a child who has underperformed in college, I'm cutting you off for the time being.
No more contributions. Not. One. Penny. Until you and your House colleagues can show some understanding of your constitutional duties AND IMPEACH T****. NOW.
If you cannot impeach this President, you can't impeach any President. It is impossible for me to believe that the Framers had that intention when they wrote the Constitution. They put the Impeachment Clause in there as a fire alarm for those rare but real moments in our history when the Constitution itself is on fire. And, right now, we're in the middle of the biggest five-alarmer we've ever had.
Madame Speaker, you hold a constitutional office. You are a party boss, but your first allegiance is to our system of government. You and your colleagues have sword an oath to protect that system. In the words of the Avengers from their most recent movie, whatever it takes. You did not sign up for the easy task. You signed up for the necessary one. Do it. Or I and my like-minded, deeply disappointed Democratic voters will find someone who will.
But I want it to be you. I'm begging for it to be you. I'm begging you to make the author of the words in this column eat them. Don't wait. Your America, and my America, can't afford any more delays.
Sincerely,
Stephen Rourke, actor, lawyer, theater preservationist, and lifelong Democrat
I am a registered Democrat, who has voted for Democratic candidates in every election since I was 20, when I voted in my first election (1976). There was one exception, one year, but don't ask: it's a long story, and has absolutely nothing to do with why I'm writing this today. I have given money for Democratic and progressive causes for decades, to the point where it hurts, simply because I believed (and still do) that it was the right thing to do, and that the fate of the nation and perhaps the world depended on as many of us as possible doing so. I have been, in person and in print (including online, in social media and on this blog) been a strong and steady advocate of the aforesaid candidates and causes, frequently leading to more arguments (and insults) directed at me than I can count. I'm not saying all of this to complain, by any means. I simply want to let you know where I'm coming from, politically speaking, before I go any further with what I have to say today.
And, before I get to that, I have two other things to say, specifically addressed to you.
First, as a fellow native of Baltimore, I have been an admirer of you and your career for a long time, You do our city an enormous amount of credit. You are the daughter and sister of two mayors of Baltimore, and learned from an early age how politics works at the most basic level: the streets and blocks on which ordinary citizens live, love, work, fight, and build a future for themselves and their families. You then, as an adult, went all the way on the other side of the nation to build a separate political career for yourself, and rose through that career to become the first female Speaker of the House of Representatives. You lost that position for a time largely by fighting for something you believed in very strongly, the Affordable Care Act, but you continued to lead your caucus for six more years and become Speaker again early this year. I know you are willing to fight against tough odds on a matter of principle. I know that you know how to survive in a business that can be very unforgiving in its setbacks. As is the case with everyone else in our city, I am proud of you and what you have accomplished.
And second, although I'm sure that you would have no way of knowing this, yes, I've read your e-mails.
You know which ones I'm talking about. The ones in which you say you haven't heard from me lately. Of course, I'm well aware of what you actually mean when you begin your e-mails in that fashion. It's my money that you haven't heard from lately. You, and, with a few notable exceptions, a lot of politicians and political organizations to which I have, in the past, been what could be considered generous.
And yes, there's a reason lying behind my recent lack of generosity. I'm here today to tell you all about it.
Last fall, when your party won back control of the House, but failed to do the same in the Senate, I was fully prepared for legislative gridlock. I knew that you and your Democratic colleagues were prepared to pass a number of bills that, legislatively speaking, were doomed to die in Mitch McCONnell's Chamber of Horrors. I was fine with that, and knew that you were as well. After all, legislating for a party is a way of setting an agenda for the public to see, even when the legislation has no hope of becoming reality.
But what I did expect--indeed, demanded, under the circumstances--was a no-holds-barred effort to investigate, hold accountable, and if necessary (and this necessity seemed pretty damned strong to me) impeach the current Criminal-in-Chief, D***** J*** T****.
And, boy, have I been disappointed. Me and several other million people who wrote, phoned, knocked on doors, gave money, advocated in various ways and, above all else, voted with that one goal in mind: to fully expose the corruption of the most corrupt occupant of the Oval Office in the history of the Republic (and yes, I am including Richard Nixon, whose corruption I didn't think could be surpassed).
True, there have been few timid attempts at investigations. True, there have been a few Democrats in the House who have made it clear they are willing to go much further than that, that they are in fact ready to take the I-word and put it front and center in the House's agenda.
But, as the leader of the House, the buck stops with you. And you have blocked that buck with the ferocity normally shown only by NFL players in the final minutes of a Super Bowl.
Your reason? It's too "divisive." In your stated view, impeachment doesn't happen until around 80%, maybe even 90% decides it's OK for it to happen. This despite the fact that it took an actual impeachment proceeding in the case on Nixon to get a consensus on impeachment that was anywhere close to being that size. And this despite the fact that the Republicans, when they controlled the House in the '90s, launched impeachment proceedings against then-President Bill Clinton with far less than a consensus that size.
Well, then, let me walk you through a few facts in what has by now become, in my mind, a near-desperate attempt to change yours.
To begin with, Madame Speaker, you are waiting for
a bipartisan consensus that is already here.
The Republicans would not hesitate to describe one of their proposals as
bipartisan if they could enlist the support of a single Democrat. The Joe Lieberman era, of which I do not have
fond memories, was rife with such moments.
You now have a single Republican Congressman in favor of an impeachment
investigation. Actually launching such
an investigation would, as it did in the Nixon-Watergate case, bring along a good many more, especially in those swing districts filled with freshperson
Democrats filled with fear at the thought that doing their constitutional duty
would imperil their job security.
Actually, you could start by
showing them that T**** voters are not uniformly lined up behind T****, as is
the case here.
And this gentleman is far from
alone. T**** likes to brag about the
stock market, but his voters, the ones who care about “jobs, jobs, JOBS” just
aren’t feelin’ it. Take a look.
And they’ve got good reason to feel
that way:
None of this should be surprising. T**** is and always has been an economic fraud, which is illustrated not only by his
so-called career as a business person, but also by his so-called “accomplishments”
as President.
His primary legislative accomplishment, the tax-cut bill (sorry, Paul
Ryan, but it was never a “jobs” bill) has been shown by every measure to be an utter failure. And this at a time when even millionaires are willing to argue for tax increases.
He promised to bring back the coal industry, but the coal industry is still going under.
He promised to get better trade deals, but all he has done is pushed this
country to the brink of a world-wide trade war on multiple fronts, for which
the American people are receiving no benefits except higher prices for consumer
goods
T**** is, in fact, a grifter, a con
artist who has separated thousands of people from their money by promising them
the moon and failing to deliver even a slice of green cheese. And that self-dealing tendency trickles down
to the type of people who are attracted to working for him. This is the personnel dynamic of any
organization: good people attract other
good people, and bad people attract bad people.
Case in point: Kris Kobach, who
wanted a lot more than the moon in order to be T****’s immigration czar.
Further case in point: Jerry Falwell, Jr., carrying on his father’s
legacy of serving God and mammon by denouncing any actual Christian who opposes T**** of the unpardonable sin of being an “employee.” I’m guessing that the second Reverend Falwell
only values employees when they are pool boys willing to pose au naturel with his wife.
Even worse, T**** is not merely,
like his predecessor-in-impeachment, Bill Clinton, a serial philander; he is,
unlike Clinton, a serial rapist, whose victims keep coming forward one by one
to testify to his physical perfidy. E.
Jean Carroll has most recently done so, bringing the number of publicly-known
victims of T****’s appetites well into double-digits. Can you, as a woman, look the other way at
this? Can you expect the women members
of your caucus to look the other way?
Can you expect their constituents, or yours, to do so? More importantly, should you have any such
expectations?
T**** is presiding over the
systematic destruction of the planet, by dismantling the system of
environmental regulation that was put into place nearly 60 years ago by a
Republican President (one who, in fact, was nearly impeached himself), and has
been supported by governments of both parties throughout the intervening
decades. That this destruction is proceeding
apace is even acknowledged by publications that support T****, such as the New York Post. And this, mind you, is the same New
York Post that tried to suppress the Carroll story. I never thought I’d live to see the
day when I would see photographs of polar bears going through dumpsters,
wandering outside of their habitat because we have systematically destroyed
it. But here we are.
T****, charged by the Constitution
to ensure that the laws are faithfully executed, including treaties by which
the United States has bound itself, has effectively become an international
criminal, along with members of his Administration, by detaining potential
asylees in camps that not only deny those imprisoned their rights to petition
for safety, but directly imperil them and the children who are brought along
with them. Even worse, T**** has cut aid
to the countries from which these people are fleeing, forcing them to flee in greater numbers than would otherwise be the case.
The cruelty on display here is not
inadvertent or accidental; it is systematic cruelty as a policy tool, and,
given some of the venom T**** has spewed at immigrants, calling them “animals”
from “s---hole countries,” it may very well be cruelty for its own sake. Why else would conditions like
these
be considered acceptable? Especially when the funding currently
available is more than enough for at least adequate facilities. Why else would public donations of
necessities be turned away?
And why would anyone, let alone
anyone with a connection to T****, be allowed to make a profit off of it?
No one ever told T**** that one can
seldom, if ever, make a dog hunt by beating it.
Yet these people are being treated in these camps at a sub-human level, one that has already lead to the
known deaths of seven children. How many
more children do we not know about? And
yet, rather than responding humanely to these tragedies, we waste time and
decency debating what the camps should be called. That debate can save neither a single child,
nor the increasingly endangered soul of the nation. Perhaps this is why, despite the
perception that immigration is T****’s signature issue, it has become the issue
on which he gets the greatest disapproval rating of his presidency:
And, when it comes to families from
other parts of the world, T****’s abortion policies may be spreading the same kind of misery.
In short, T**** is a crook. As crooked as can be. And I haven't even gotten into his love affairs with foreign tyrants that advance his ego at the expense of American interests. Or his willingness to sell his office, its powers and its perks, in ways that advance his private business (to which he shouldn't even be connected while President). Or ... well, I'm pretty sure you get the general idea at this point.
Madame Speaker, your behavior under
the weight of the public case for impeachment hearings is no longer reasonable
or otherwise prudent, if it ever was at all.
It merely telegraphs weakness, which allows people to libel you with impunity. It creates a vacuum that, even when
handed an opportunity to hold Trump to account such as the concentration camps
on the border, is instead filled by Mitch McCONnell in a way that might
actually subject more children to harm, or even death, as recently happened. And all because, as pointed out by Joy Reid
on Twitter, you are by your inaction effectively giving McCONnell, and Senate
Republicans, veto power over a process that is supposed to be initiated and
controlled in the first instance by the House, of which you are the leader.
This is the same veto power that
McCONnell asserted over the Supreme Court process during the last year of Obama’s
Presidency. At the rate of inaction currently
being set by Congressional Democrats, the American people may be subjected to
one-party government on a permanent basis—and by default, not defeat at the
polls.
If anything, McCONnell’s
unwillingness to pursue any legislation that protects the integrity of our elections is itself a damning admission of guilt not simply on the part of T****, who McCONnell is clearly protecting, but the entire Republican Senate caucus,
and perhaps the entire party itself.
That caucus, and the party, seems to function less like a political
movement and more like a criminal enterprise, as the conduct of McCONnell’s wife (a T**** Cabinet secretary) amply illustrates.
Contrast both your behavior and
that of McCONnell with the more forthright statements of the evidence against T**** by Robert Mueller, the special counsel assigned to investigate T****’s
Russian dealings, in the report his investigation produced and in the press conference he recently held to discuss his findings, to say nothing about his
planned testimony next month before the House Judiciary Committee.
For that matter, look at how cowardly T**** acts when the subject of Muller’s report comes up.
A Republican, Mueller has been
subjected to a tremendous level of abuse by members of his own party, but it
has in no way and to no extent dissuaded him from doing his duty. I have sometimes found myself thinking that,
if it is the fate of this nation to be governed by no one other than
Republicans, let it be governed by Republicans such as Mueller, who are
motivated by things that are above rubies.
And the fact that a McCONnell-led
Senate trial would undoubtedly acquit T**** in record time, and despite the
fact that some have used that reality as an admonition for not impeaching him,
that fact is that is all the more
reason to pursue impeachment like the Hound of the Baskervilles going after its
hereditary prey. McCONnell’s political
genius—to the extent that it can fairly said to exist—is in finding ways to
shield his caucus from difficult votes.
Impeachment, on the other hand, is perhaps the only tool provided by the
Constitution, apart from the budget process, that allows the House to force the
Senate to take a difficult vote. For G-d’s
sake, Madame Speaker, use that tool.
Can’t you see that McCONnell is desperate to
make you NOT want to use it? Does it
take the potential for an open rebellion from within your own caucus, the one
you supposedly rule with an iron fist, to make you understand that, if all
of the dithering on your part is about a desire to keep your job, the path to
keeping your job lies in this instance in doing it in the first place? Especially since Trump has all but confessed
that the things he “didn’t do”—collusion, obstruction—are things he would willingly do in the next election, without any sense of wrongdoing about it. Even his own Congressional defenders
took him to task for doing so.
This further reinforces the point
that, between now and Election Day 2020, if T**** is not held to account, he could conceivably act out in a way that could do enormous harm not only to our
political system, but to our country and even the world. A war with Iraq? T**** could conceivably order that or worse
if he thinks that it would give him even five more seconds of public adoration. His short-term thinking may have already put him in the position where he has no choice but to pursue that option. And, let’s face it, when it comes
to his “thinking,” especially regarding the subject of Iraq, T****’s thinking
is something less than razor-sharp.
If you are worried about a rerun of
the Bill Clinton impeachment episode, which cost Republicans a number of seats
in the 1998 midterm election, you’re making a major mistake.
Clinton was a popular President,
which shaped the public reaction to his impeachment, along with the lack of
connection between his offense (lying under oath during a deposition related to
a civil suit) and his public office.
And, in fact, the impeachment process did have a delayed political
effect: two years after those midterms,
Republicans won both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue. Impeaching T**** just might give history a
chance to repeat itself here. Only, this time, in favor of the Democrats.
And it may prevent something even
worse: the collapse of our entire system
of government into armed camps, ready to shoot each other rather than to work
together for the common good. Have you
looked at what has been going on in Oregon, over the fate of something as
innocuous as a climate change bill? In
order to deny the Democratic supermajority in the state Senate an opportunity
to consider the bill, the minority Republican members walked out of the
statehouse and into the protective arms of Idaho militias, leading to the shutdown of the state house for security reasons, and with the full blessing and approval of the state GOP. This in turn lead the Governor to send state police after the legislators, and caused some observers to
wonder whether our entire democracy may be at the breaking point. In the short run, all of this lead the minority to successfully bully the majority.
So, yes, I'm wondering: what the hell are you waiting for?
If you're waiting for the supposedly liberal press to somehow save you, forget it. No matter what the Republicans say to the contrary, they're simply not all that liberal. I'm not sure they ever were; freedom of the press, as the saying goes, belongs to the person who owns one. It's a property right, and Republicans are nothing if not the party of property rights. And the Republicans who own the presses, and the airwaves, and the Interwaves, and all the other marvelous means of communication that we take for granted make sure that their employees (i.e., reporters and editors) know on which side their proverbial bread is buttered.
Which is why those employees, for the most part, are past masters at the art of sucking up to the powerful, the recently powerful, and the perhaps-soon-to-be-again powerful. Case in point: Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who arguably falls into all three of these categories. She is the daughter of a former Governor of Arkansas, she was recently (and memorably, in a bad way) the White House press secretary, and she is rumored to be in line to run for her father's old job in the near future.
In her most recent job, she earned the reputation of being perhaps the worst press secretary in the history of the White House. She was dishonest to a fault, she was abusive to reporters without regard to the fact that press secretaries often depend on the goodwill of those reporters when their boss is in political hot water, and she was far too eager to do little more than carry water for a boss who himself practises the art of deception at an Olympian level.
So what did the White House press corps do for Ms. Sanders, upon her departure from their midst? That's right, exactly what everyone would do for such a reprehensible human being--everyone, that is, in Washington, where every second of everyone's life is a potential career move. They threw an enormously expensive farewell party for her, on the grounds that lying and abusive conduct can easily be overlooked for the sake of "civility." Never mind the fact that both press secretaries and reporters have an obligation to the public that transcends any obligation they might have to each other. It's all about civility. In fact, it's all about access. After all, if you expect to see each other again ...
And then, there's the question I don't want to ask, but feel that I have to ask: does T**** have something on you? Or someone you care about? Or someone you know? I don't want to believe that, but I need you to understand that your conduct in connection with the impeachment question is so out of line with reality on the ground that I have no choice but to raise it. And, as I said earlier, you have always been someone who understands things from the ground up. Which is why I don't think I have to explain to you that, if I'm right on this point, you owe it to yourself, all of your supporters, and everyone in this country to come forward and come clean. Even if that means resigning from Congress.
I don't want that to happen. But I need to get your attention. Literally millions of us need to get your attention. And, since you are a politician, there's only one sure-fire way to do it.
I'm responding to your e-mails. By not responding.
That's right. In the words of a disappointed parent to a child who has underperformed in college, I'm cutting you off for the time being.
No more contributions. Not. One. Penny. Until you and your House colleagues can show some understanding of your constitutional duties AND IMPEACH T****. NOW.
If you cannot impeach this President, you can't impeach any President. It is impossible for me to believe that the Framers had that intention when they wrote the Constitution. They put the Impeachment Clause in there as a fire alarm for those rare but real moments in our history when the Constitution itself is on fire. And, right now, we're in the middle of the biggest five-alarmer we've ever had.
Madame Speaker, you hold a constitutional office. You are a party boss, but your first allegiance is to our system of government. You and your colleagues have sword an oath to protect that system. In the words of the Avengers from their most recent movie, whatever it takes. You did not sign up for the easy task. You signed up for the necessary one. Do it. Or I and my like-minded, deeply disappointed Democratic voters will find someone who will.
But I want it to be you. I'm begging for it to be you. I'm begging you to make the author of the words in this column eat them. Don't wait. Your America, and my America, can't afford any more delays.
Sincerely,
Stephen Rourke, actor, lawyer, theater preservationist, and lifelong Democrat
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