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Archive of "Democracy" Category
We’re Still Here, 1/20/17, Consumed Most of All by Our Fears
One of my favorite quotes includes the lines “I awoke this morning to find that it was not judgment day – only morning. Morning: excellent and fair.” I think that sums up a part of my thinking, but certainly not all.
A nuclear reckoning, war with China, or anything else quite so violently apocalyptic is imminent, or even underway, as far too many of us think. I live in one of those bubbles, the sum of which make up America now. Many of the people I talk to, in person and here online, seem to believe, truly believe, the world is coming to something of an end. These are by and large educated, once-rational people, some of whom have been voices of reason in the past. They are not that way now.We are however falling, some important threads of our nation being teased apart, and our best days are behind us. But this did not start on November 8, 2016, or January 20, 2017, thoough historians will note those dates as significant milestones (same as September 11, 2001.) But not because of Donald Trump. Because his name just happened to be attached to what has been growing inside us since the end of WWII.
The Russians did not elect Trump. They may or may not have tried to get involved in the election, but we did this to ourselves. As the historian you have probably not read but should read Morris Berman predicted years ago, we are eating each other.
We are consumed most of all by our fears. Fear of what the Soviets, and maybe the Chinese, would do after WWII. We created a nuclear arsenal measured in how many multiples of times it could destroy the world. We dragged our country through disasters like Vietnam, that murdered so many and cracked apart our nation. Our fear of race, our war on drugs, and then of course our fear of a world beyond our control after 9/11. Another quote that seems to fit is “The leader of genius must have the ability to make different opponents appear as if they belonged to one category.”The fears were encouraged at every opportunity by those who profited from them, either by rawly making money, or by acquiring power and control, or in most cases, both. We are unconcerned — it’s normal — that politicians routinely leave office wealthy despite modest salaries. We have so much, and share so little. We enthusiastically abandoned so many of the good things about America, such as our Bill of Rights. America’s pre-WWII Constitutional Era was grossly imperfect. Yet for its obvious failings, there was a sense of the possibility of progress; halting, awkward, unfinished, but, well, for lack of a better word and to use a word that has become a symbol of modern irony, hope.
Of course none of that was close to perfect, but it was good and it is gone in some arenas and going away in most of the rest. We’ll still be allowed to rant on Twitter, a modern day bread and circus, but the real stuff of standing up and speaking back to government will happen only with handfuls of whistleblowers who will sacrifice their lives and freedom to say what they need to say.
I thought we had a chance at change in 2008 but instead was proven to be a dupe. I thought he might turn it all around, in those first weeks he could have asked the rivers to flow backwards and they just might have. He could have grounded the drones, torn up the Patriot Act, held truth commissions to bring into the light our tortures, re-emancipated America in ways not unlike Lincoln did in the 1860s. Slam shut the gates of Guantanamo, close the secret prisons that even today still ooze pus in Afghanistan, stop the militarization of Africa, bring the troops home, all of it, just have done it. What a change, what a path forward, what a rebirth for an America who had lost her way so perilously. One man could have made a difference and when he did not even try, he helped solidify in America a sense of cynicism and powerlessness that empowers evil people further. If there was no Obama there would be no Trump.A new generation, and me again, thought there was another chance with Bernie Sanders. We were stupid. He was a distraction, and showed his true colors throwing away everything he said previously to support a candidate of the same old old school we’ve been voting for since WWII.
Trump is at best/worst a symbol of all this. How powerful people play us against each other and exploit our differences. How fear (currently fear of Trump filtered through fear of Putin) can be used to manipulate us. How the ideas of democracy can be so easily tossed aside so that our most progressive thinkers are convinced elections are illegitimate, and anything from silly name calling to demands for something akin to a coup are justified when the enemy is as perceived evil as Trump. Echoing the famous lines from Vietnam, it is in their minds necessary to destroy democracy in order to save it.
I’ve written here before open letters to my daughters, talking about the world they are maturing into. This is in that spirit. Somebody, maybe them, is one day going to stop and wonder how they got to where they ended up, an oligarchy that profits from mouthing the nice words of our Founders while ignoring them. Maybe they will find this essay, dated for convenience only, January 20, 2017.
Copyright © 2017. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity. Follow me on Twitter!
Martin Luther King Day: Lady Liberty is Black
The United States will release a gold coin featuring Lady Liberty as a Black woman, the first time she has been depicted as anything other than white on the nation’s currency.
“Part of our intent was to honor our tradition and heritage,” stated a spokesperson from the Mint. “But we also think it’s always worthwhile to have a conversation about liberty, and we certainly have started that conversation.”
Good for everyone. Only the most dark hearted could be upset that a fictional character is represented in any particular way. This can’t be bad.
…Unless we acknowledge that America is apparently satisfied with “having conversations,” raising awareness about race, and various other symbolic gestures. The Academy Awards are coming up, and lots of people will be keeping track of how many are given out to non-white men and making much of the tally, their “much” depending on which side the scale tips. Gestures of all types are all good enough on their own, but they never really affect much. The issues of race stretch back to the Founders, well before we elected a Black president and then elected one who throws racist statements around on Twitter. We’re still dealing with the same questions.
The same day the new liberty coin was announced, the Department of Justice released a terrifying report describing the failures throughout the Chicago Police Department, saying excessive force was rampant, rarely challenged and chiefly aimed at African-Americans and Latinos. The report was released as Chicago faces skyrocketing violence, with murders are at a 20-year high, and a deep lack of trust among the city’s Black and white residents. And yeah, of course, the police force is very, very white.Where was this report a year ago, or eight years ago, or ten years ago? Because the implication here is that the Obama administration issued this in its final days, allowing it (and not any solution or progress) to be part of his legacy. Suspecting Trump will not make dealing with these issues a priority, Obama’s DOJ can take credit for “starting a conversation” about Chicago while walking away from the heavy lifting of helping fix it. Hell, DOJ might as well have issued a commemorative coin in lieu of the report.
We all know the rest: 1 in every 15 African American men are incarcerated in comparison to 1 in every 106 white men. According to the Bureau of Justice statistics, one in three Black men can expect to go to prison in their lifetime. Once convicted, Black offenders receive longer sentences compared to white offenders. You can find similar numbers for poverty (nearly a quarter of blacks are living in poverty, almost the same as in 1976), unemployment (double that of whites), life expectancy, and voter disenfranchisement.Clearly over the last seven decades somebody could have fixed some of that. It can’t all be impossible.
Now, there has been some progress. America wrapped up formal slavery in 1865, only 76 years after the Bill of Rights. And then it was only another 100 some years before the Civil Rights laws tried hard to grant Blacks the rights the 1865 victory gave them. We don’t have lynchings and killings much anymore (though the Chicago PD keeps its hand in) and places that wish to discriminate against Blacks have to do it much more subtlety.
I’m not making light of suffering, but I am using sarcasm to show how angry I am about lack of real progress. We seem content to see presence as progress — first Black major leaguer, first Black Supreme Court Justice, first Black _____, first Black president. Again, there is nothing bad there, but now that the top box has been checked, what happens next?
In other words, we get Martin Luther King day as a Federal holiday while at the same time we don’t get the values King embodied. There you go. As one person put it “The Dr. King we choose to remember was indeed the symbolic beacon of the civil rights movement. But the Dr. King we forget worked within institutions to transform broken systems.” Change is not organic; it must be made to happen.
It is hard to come to any conclusion other than we as a society just don’t care. There are so many excuses (he was blocked by the Republicans, they’re still a tiny minority in Congress, the media, etc.) but even America’s Black president failed hard to make much of a real difference. We seem satisfied with symbolic gestures, blowing them out of proportion while the real problems sit in plain sight, unattended. What people will characterize over the next four years as sliding backwards on racial progress seems more like business as usual, albeit without the eloquent speeches.
BONUS: Someone will label me a racist for this. Someone on Twitter will tell me to go f*ck myself. Many people will tell me because of my race I have no understanding, even no right, to talk about these issues. Others will claim I shower with Trump. OK if any of that makes you feel better, but none of that changes what I’ve said.EXTRA BONUS: Just got accused of “white-splaining” because of this. Apparently that is a thing.
Copyright © 2017. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity. Follow me on Twitter!
The Russians, Trump and the Deep State (Rising)
I want to scare the hell out of you.
People talk of the Deep State, a kind of shorthand to refer to the entrenched parts of the government, particularly inside the military, intelligence, and security communities, who don’t come and go with election cycles. The information they hold, and their longevity, allows them to significantly influence, perhaps control, the big picture decisions that change the way America works on a global scale. Who the enemies are, where the power needs to be applied, which wars will start and what governments should fall.
One of the features of the Deep State is that it prefers to work behind the scenes, in the shadows if you like. The big name politicians are out front, smiling for the cameras, and the lesser pols have to tend to the day-to-day stuff of government. The Deep State doesn’t trouble itself with regulating agriculture or deciding which infrastructure bill to fund. That is in large part why there will never be a full-on coup; why would the Deep State want to take on responsibility for the Department of Transportation?
When the Deep State does accidentally expose itself, it is often by accident, such as in the panic right after 9/11 when the president was sitting around reading a children’s book while Cheney, Rice, and Rumsfeld were calling the shots. Same for in the 1980s when a set of cock-ups exposed U.S. arms sales to Iran to pay for U.S. proxy forces in Central America while with U.S. support the Saudis paid for jihadists to fight in Afghanistan, laying the early groundwork for what would become the War on Terror.
Forget for a moment what you think of their actions, but pay attention: both our domestic intelligence service (the FBI) and our overseas intelligence service (the CIA) played significant roles in our election. Still not sure what the Deep State is? It’s that.
Forget what you “agree” with, and focus on what happened. In July the FBI exonerated Hillary Clinton of any wrongdoing in connection with her private email server. Yep, there was highly classified material, but that didn’t matter. Nope, the Russians and/or everybody else never hacked into her server, and nobody on her staff ever clicked Podesta-like on a phishing link. Nothing to see here. And then in October the FBI swung again and said well maybe there was something to see, buried conveniently on known-idiot Anthony Weiner’s laptop already in their possession. Funny about that. Anybody seen once marked-to-go places Huma Abedin lately?
As for the CIA, they managed to leak like Grandpa’s adult diapers throughout the campaign that Trump and Putin… something. Trump owes money to Russia. Trump’s computers communicate with Russia. Trump’s advisors work for Russia. Trump wants to build hotels in Russia. When none of that really stuck, it turned out the hacks into the DNC servers were done by Russians — in cahoots with arch-villian Julian Assange — ordered personally by Putin to elect Trump. All because Trump was Putin’s stooge, as the argument completed its circle.
UPDATE: When last week’s intelligence community report that “proved” the Russians did the DNC hack failed to really do much past a news cycle or two, it should be no surprise at all that this week a leak dropped on CNN that the Russians may have “compromising material” on Trump. Now, that leak supposedly came from anonymous sources from a classified synopsis included in a version of last week’s report that was based on allegation made public in the summer but only very recently “confirmed” by a former British intelligence officer who worked privately doing opposition research for an unnamed Trump Republican opponent.
If Trump could not be defeated, he would be delegitimized. Overnight the left/liberals/progressives/whatever turned into red-blooded supporters of the CIA and 21st century Cold Warriors, with anyone from that one asshole on Facebook you argue with to Pulitzer-prize winning journalists who disagree, labeled as Russian stooges, spies, fellow travelers and the like.
The result? A new Cold War, sold to the American people over the course of about a month.
When the Soviet Union collapsed and the old Cold War wrapped up, there was left a gaping hole for the Deep State. They nearly literally had nothing to do. Budgets were being cut, power in Washington defused. 9/11 was a helpful and timely accident; the War on Terror would provide the much-needed Cause to blow up spending and reconstruct status and power.
And the War on Terror started off with great promise for the Deep State, dovetailing nicely with long-sought Conservative projects such as remaking the Middle East and controlling the Persian Gulf. The future was wide open, Afghanistan a stupid but necessary prelude to the real first act in Iraq.
But despite the power of the Deep State, mistakes are made and nature finds a way. The War on Terror became a global clusterf*ck. Failures accumulated: Iraq and Afghanistan, of course. Libya, Syria, the messy Arab Spring, relations with Pakistan. You can’t really trust any of those folks to get it, we want a war that doesn’t end but looks good. Beheadings on TV simply stir people up at home and there is not much we can do about them.
Now, to be fair to the War on Terror, it had a good run. It normalized domestic spying and the omni-presence of security everywhere in America, and set up a nice bureaucracy to manage all that in Homeland Security. It got Americans used to see armed military, and militarized cops, on the streets.
But what was needed was a global struggle that made us look like we were winning without it ever ending.
If only there was some sort of model for that…
The Russians. Every American fear rolled into one guy, Putin, who might as well come from a Hollywood super-villian workshop. Unlike messy terrorists, who wanted, whatever, Sharia or a Caliphate, damn foreign words, Russia wanted old-fashioned territory, stuff on maps like Crimea and the Ukraine that mattered not a whit to America, but could be played domestically as Struggles for Freedom (C). The Russkies had troops with actual uniforms, and all the old propaganda materials were laying around. The Russians also knew how to play ball, blasting back through their RT and Sputnik channels nobody really watches but are right there to label as threats to our democracy. The Russian version of the Deep State knows a good deal when they see one, too.
Clinton was the perfect figurehead, already warm friends with one of the last dessicated Cold Warriors, Henry Kissinger, and already more than predisposed to cast the Russians into their role. Trump, well, he didn’t seem to get it, and, when it was becoming clearer he might win, he needed to be made to get it. The Deep State appeared to have some internal dissension; that publicly popped up when it appeared the FBI and CIA were not sure which horse to back in the latter days of the campaign and how to do it. Hey, mistakes were made, sorry, even the Deep State is kinda human.
Well, it was messy and dragged on past the actual election, but everything is settled now. The intelligence report that just came out made things clear: Russia is the bad guy, Trump now the cuck of the Deep State, things are back to “normal.” Funding will pour into the military, intelligence, and security communities. Since the war will be a cold one, the U.S. can declare periodic victories just like in the old days over things like the Olympics, chess matches, dissidents saved, spy stuff We Can’t Tell You About but will leak out anyway. We can have proxy wars and skirmishes that seem like huge deals but can usually be managed in scope. Any troublemakers at home, in or out of the White House, can be labeled Russian sympathizers on CNN and Maddow and dealt away quickly.
Overall, the 1950s weren’t that bad now were they?
BONUS: One currently outstanding question is whether the manipulations of the Deep State in our election became public by accident, such as after 9/11, or whether someone (us? Trump? Putin?) was meant to see them for some purpose. Hang on to that question.MORE BONUS: Yes, yes, this is all conspiracy nonsense. The moon landings were faked and 9/11 was an inside job by the Mossad. There is no Deep State, or Trump really is a Russian Manchurian candidate, or the spiders from Mars are actually pulling the strings or I am reading those weird Geocities-like websites for preppers and soon will be posting cheesy animated GIFs of flags waving, whatever. I’m also a Russian, or Edward Snowden, or being paid by someone to write this. Whatever you need to tell yourself, and you should never believe what I say and say how sad it is that this is what I’ve come too. I’ll kill a puppy in your honor. Thanks!
Copyright © 2017. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity. Follow me on Twitter!
End of the World, Progressive Article Edition
For those who would like to become a progressive columnist in the world of Trump, here’s a guide for your first and every subsequent article:
— Everything was pretty freaking close to perfect on November 7. Yeah, tough about Bernie, but Clinton was going to be great.
— Putin, Comey, media, maybe Bernie, everyone you hate and fear, elected Trump because 62 million Americans are white, misogynists, and Nazis. They also are wrong about not having good jobs; don’t people in the Rust Belt read the job statistics?
— Anyway, Trump is an oaf and/or an evil genius.
— He is out to destroy America; riff off this for the next forever.
Your First Essay ExampleAnd if you’d like a good example on how to do it, turn to Neil Gabler’s essay on the otherwise intelligent blog from Bill Moyers.
Here’s how that essay starts:
America died on November 8, 2016, not with a bang or a whimper, but at its own hand via electoral suicide. We the people chose a man who has shredded our values, our morals, our compassion, our tolerance, our decency, our sense of common purpose, our very identity — all the things that, however tenuously, made a nation out of a country.
Whatever place we now live in is not the same place it was on November 7. No matter how the rest of the world looked at us on November 7, they will now look at us differently. We are likely to be a pariah country.
First of all, points for the “bang and whimper” cliche, followed by the happy bullsh*t about how wonderful America was last month as described by phony Hamilton the musical lyrics. I bet the show’s cast could make values, morals, compassion, tolerance, decency, common purpose, and identity rhyme.
Dude, we are a helluva people! Exceptional!
Because prior to the election results we weren’t a nation founded on a slave economy, which 250 years later still has its cops imprison and murder Blacks, who doesn’t have the highest incarceration rate in the world, mostly for small amounts of weed that has been long legalized in other western nations. Our compassion is set to full, except if you are different than me in your race, religion, or views on guns, gays or abortions. Of course we don’t really do much for women, and unlike say India, Israel, the UK, Burma, and a whole mess of other places, have never had a female chief executive.
Yeah, whatever, all that.
And lovely, that bit about American becoming an international pariah. Could happen. Luckily the world has overlooked so far that we are the only nation to have used atomic weapons (twice, on civilians), stayed at war, spied and overthrown governments in their countries pretty steadily for 70 years, set the Middle Easton on fire over fake WMDs, drone kill wherever we like, torture people, and run an offshore penal colony right out of Les Miserables. Man, Trump, amiright?
No More Democracy for YouLater in the article, author Gabler throws in a whopper: “Republicans… haven’t believed in democracy for a long time.”
Yep, one of the two parties in America, in fact the one that’s been out of power for the last eight years and which was voted into office via an election, does not believe in democracy. Makes sense. And to throw us off the trail, the sneaks are conducting a peaceful transition of power!
Luckily the Democrats over the last eight years have only drone killed American Citizens without trial (Fifth Amendment), spied on all of us (Fourth Amendment) and racked up the worst Freedom of Information Act response rate since the Act was created (First Amendment.)
This is the End
Wrapping it all up, Gabler says:
But the disempowered media may have one more role to fill: They must bear witness. Many years from now, future generations will need to know what happened to us and how it happened. They will need to know how disgruntled white Americans, full of self-righteous indignation, found a way to take back a country they felt they were entitled to and which they believed had been lost. They will need to know about the ugliness and evil that destroyed us as a nation after great men like Lincoln and Roosevelt guided us through previous crises and kept our values intact. They will need to know, and they will need a vigorous, engaged, moral media to tell them. They will also need us. We are not living for ourselves anymore in this country. Now we are living for history.
So there you go. It’s pretty much the fault of us white guys, except for great white guys like Lincoln and Roosevelt. Other once-famous white guys like Jefferson, maybe Kennedy and Carter, didn’t make the list. Hell, Carter was even a southerner.
There are going to be troubles ahead. Trump will not be a good president, and he is surrounding himself with inept people. The world is a complex place and even the best of our great white men have struggled with that. But for f*ck’s sake, stop imagining an America that never existed on November 7, and creating a dystopian nightmare that you imagine popped into being a day later.
A clear view of history is a necessary starting point as we edge into 2017.
BONUS: Neil Gabler is not otherwise an idiot. His biography says he is the author of five books and the recipient of two LA Times Book Prizes, Time magazine’s non-fiction book of the year, USA Today’s biography of the year and other awards. He is also a senior fellow at The Norman Lear Center at the University of Southern California, and is currently writing a biography of Senator Edward Kennedy.
Copyright © 2017. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity. Follow me on Twitter!
We Are Still Alive (Non-Hacked Russian Stooge and Terrorism Edition)
This is a version of last year’s January 1 article, updated to reflect the new fears of the World’s Most Frightened Nation.I survived. America, and the world, and you, survived. We awoke the first day of 2017 to find that once again, using the extraordinary power of fear, we again held off the terrorists. And Putin. And Trump, nationalists, racists, hackers, alt-Right fascists, CNN, persons of all colors, genders, shapes, sizes, and goddamn religions.
Fear Classic: Terrorism
Hard as it is to persuade a constantly re-frightened American public, there have been less than 100 Americans killed inside the Homeland by so-called Islamic terrorism since 9/11.
Argue the number, hell, go ahead and double or triple it, and it still a tragic, sad, but undeniable drop in the bucket. Throw in a few mysterious “foiled plots” the government never seems to have many specifics on to share and tack on some more to the terror body count. No matter how hard you drive, you just can’t get the number of Americans killed or even in clear danger of being killed to a very large number.
And do spare the tired trope of “well, security measures such as at our airports have saved us from who knows how many attacks.” Leaving aside the idea that the argument itself demands a kind of negative logic (the “who knows” part) to even make sense, a test by the Department of Homeland’s own Inspector General’s Office, posing as travelers, showed 95 percent of contraband, including weapons and explosives, got through during clandestine testings. If a failure rate of 95 percent did not have planes falling from the sky, one must conclude security does little to affect terrorism.
CNN on the Eve told us that almost two million people were in Times Square to see in the New Year, along with 7,000 cops and 65 giant trucks filled with sand to stop the 2016 fad (actually two cases, in Europe) of car/truck driving terrorists. More Americans died of alcohol poisoning (booze terror!) last night than terrorism.
A shout-out here also to a benevolent Allah, who mercifully did not tell any terrorists that while Times Square was secured on the Eve, the rest of the large crowds elsewhere in New York were pretty much not, and a suicide bomber could have ridden in on a camel. Same as the days after New Year’s, when there is the usual lack of any serious security everywhere but at Trump Tower. Luckily ISIS couldn’t figure any of that out. Whew.
Our New Fears for 2017
And despite the new fears, actually two old ones recombined, our such as it is democracy is still hanging around. The new fears are quite creative, lopping together that old standby, The Red Menace and its global evil genius Vlad Putin, and “hacking,” the computer thingie that scares old peoples and is why you need to go home every Thanksgiving and reboot grandpa’s PC so he can play Solitaire again.
We endured the fear-mongering of the autumn that our Very Way of Life was at risk, because John Podesta’s emails were released and because the Electoral College was full of meanie rats who wouldn’t do something something Hamilton and elect Hillary like the script said they should. If only the Russians and FBI and Clinton Foundation and email server and Bernie Sanders and the nine votes cast for Jill Stein and the recounts that actually cost Clinton a few votes and 62 million Americans hadn’t interfered, we would be entering 2017 basking in the warm and eternal glow of Dear Leader Hillary Clinton leading us from bondage. Dammit.
Trump has also failed (so far!) to start any wars with China, Planet Mongo, or Russia by breaking up with Putin and refusing to give the ring back. He has not instituted Sharia law or martial law or the Nuremberg laws or rounded up people who write liberal tweets or made all LGBTQ people marry illegal aliens and wear boring clothing to NASCAR races. That may come, it’s early in 2017, but so far, not yet.
But don’t believe me. “We should be absolutely terrified in 2017—perhaps more than at any other point in the 20th century,” said Robin Kelley, historian of social movements in the U.S. at the University of California Los Angeles.
Or maybe, believe me. It is all panic-mongering, designed to keep us in a state of fear. Fearful people are easy to manipulate. So stop being afraid.
BONUS: Many have written in to ask what I get in return for being a Russian puppet. To be honest, not much, mostly just a hobby. I do get to crash on Snowden’s pull-out when I’m in Moscow for reeducation sessions, and that saves me a few bucks.
Copyright © 2017. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity. Follow me on Twitter!
The Terrifying Executive We Need for the Wrong Reasons
I understand why all of the often false, usually bombastic, reporting on Trump is angering me.
You know the stuff — take a “fact,” real or fully made up, and conflate it with some apocalyptic prediction. Watch: Trump alternates between wearing boxers and briefs. Will his indecisiveness cause him to pull back when America is attacked by the Russians?
The other story everyone writes now is based on the journalist’s apparent post-November 9 discovery of an element of fascism, racism and/or parts of the Constitution and presidential practice. And so someone is shocked that Trump will be able to choose drone kill targets, or have access to everything the NSA sweeps up about his enemies.
The first type of stories are just pathetic, kiddies with pencils seeing what they can get away with, journalists working out in public their disbelief that someone like Trump won, people witnessing their first presidential transition and not dealing with it well. Those stories will fade away, or move to the tabloids where they’ll find a home aside Elvis and Roswell.The latter stories, the ones worrying about what Trump will do with the power of _____ are more worrisome. The ascribe fear of executive power and a government run amuck to one man, someone they loathe, Trump. They ignore that these powers, of which we should all be legitimately terrified, are not of a man but of our system.
Trump, per se, for example, doesn’t control drone killings, the executive does. Bush killed, Obama killed, the president after Trump will kill. Same for the NSA — they all had, and future presidents will have, the ability to spy on anyone.
By focusing on one man, we imagine any solutions will rest in getting rid of this man (recount! electoral college! impeachment!) That is dangerous.Any solutions (I’m not optimistic) must be changes to the system of ever-growing executive power. In that sense, perhaps the election of someone so obvious in his erratic statements, so oafish in his behavior, may be for the best. A bucket of cold well water to the face might be what’s needed for a citizenry that allowed one president to sell all his acquisition of power via a faux-sincere monologue of fear mongering, and another on the strength of his coolness and personal trust.
The change has to be to the system, not the person. In that sense, perhaps Trump will be the president we need, if not the one we wanted.
Copyright © 2017. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity. Follow me on Twitter!
You Opened the Box…
Once you let the genie out of the bottle, you can’t stuff him back in.
Attempts to overturn the results of our election, or to delegitimize a president before he even takes office, are attempts to overturn the system of transfer of power that has served America since its earliest days. There is no measure of exaggeration here; Americans are questioning the results of the election because roughly half don’t like the guy who won.
Somehow things are… special this year. In most elections, a good-sized group of us see our candidate lose, grumble, and move on to some degree. I don’t think Trump will be a good president, but I also do not think he will burn civil rights to the ground, destroy life on the planet, sell Alaska back to Russia, or invade China with Omarosa some drunk weekend.
In what in another era would be left for conspiracy theorists to contemplate, for the first time in our nation’s history powerful mainstream forces are trying to change the results of an election. Shocked by Trump’s victory, and fearing his presidency, they want to stop him from entering the White House. The belief seems to be that he is such a threat that it is necessary to destroy a part of democracy in America to save it.
Some efforts are silly, online petitions demanding, somehow, Clinton become president (here’s one asking the Supreme Court to invalidate the election,) or bleating that her popular vote victory matters somehow within the existing electoral process. Others call for a magic do-over, a new election.
Political scientists claim they maybe have found untested ways for the Electoral College to vote for Clinton, or to postpone a vote.
But after that it gets very serious. America’s foreign intelligence service, the CIA, via anonymous leaks to the New York Times, NBC, and the Washington Post, declared Russia actively and purposefully interceded in our election in favor of Donald Trump. Trump was elected, in part, by the work of Russian cyber blackops.
It is important to unpack what the accusations driving this are: someone working for the Russian government broke into the Democratic National Committee servers and Clinton campaign head John Podesta’s Gmail account, delivered those emails (which the Clinton campaign by and large said were bogus or altered) to places like Wikileaks, and that the emails few voters read influenced the election such that Trump, not Clinton, won the electoral vote. Trump’s strengths as a candidate and Clinton weaknesses were not significant enough on their own to have swayed the electoral count 74 votes in Trump’s favor. At the same time, for these accusations to matter, President Trump will act in favor of Russian interests (choosing hard liner John Bolton as number two at the State Department already seems counter to that) and against those of the United States.
The accusations against Trump can rise to the level of treason (some are speculating Trump was a willing participant in any Russian ops), a capital crime, the most serious crime an American can commit against his country.
All is supposed to be revealed in the form of some sort of investigation.
Leaving how clever use of redactions can present “evidence” in misleading ways, intelligence assessments are rarely black and white, especially when seeking to explain why an action took place, its ultimate political goal. An intelligence service can conclude with reasonable confidence (for example) that Country X executed 12 dissidents last week. It is much harder to say why, or why now, or why those 12, or why not a different group, or what those executions mean in the longer game of local politics. So while technical means may be able to point to a hacker with connections to Russia (though hackers include in their tradecraft leaving false clues), moving from whether any hacks were standard information gathering as engaged in by all sides, or an active part of a campaign to change the course of our election, is a tough job. So those who expect a black and white report on what they Russians did, why they did it, and how it affected the election, are very unlikely to get it.
So what will be done?
The current focus is on the Electoral College voting on Monday, December 19 to put Hillary Clinton into the White House. That would require breaking with some 224 years of practice, moving against the will of about half of American voters who acted in good faith under the current system believing their vote would be assessed by the rules and practices in place, and destroying the orderly transfer of power that marks a democracy.
But if Trump prevails in the Electoral College, what next? There is no Constitutional allowance for a “second election.” Bomb Moscow? Keep Barack Obama in power? Dispatch a lynch mob to Trump Tower?
Well, of course not. Probably.
Instead we will enter a new administration with a delegitimized president, under the shadow of multiple conspiracy theories, accusations, hearings, investigations and likely threats to of impeachment proceedings. Every decision President Trump makes, as with his every Cabinet choice now, will be weighed against the accusations. America’s Russia policy (in Europe, the Middle East, Asia) will be held hostage to rumors and leaks. A divided America will become more divided.
The Bush-Gore election of 2000 was contested right into the Supreme Court. The differences, however, are significant. The post-election fight took place between two men still candidates, to decide a winner. Trump is the President Elect, and the process, whatever it is, seeks to overturn, not decide, that result. In Bush-Gore, once the Court declared a winner, the results were accepted, albeit reluctantly by some, and America moved on. Lastly, the struggle between Bush and Gore took place in open court, not via leaks and classified documents.
There is also the argument, basically a variation of “if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear” that Americans should be willing to submit to post-election recounts and investigations, themselves often inconclusive or subject to another round of questions, to “prove” nothing went amiss. There is danger in confusing a potential body blow to the electoral process, seeking to overturn a completed election, with casting it all as benign verification.
An additional danger is in the McCarthy-esque conflating of opposition to these efforts with a lack of patriotism, and by invalid extension, support for America’s enemies. To remain skeptical is to stand against the United States. To question the CIA is to disrespect our intelligence professionals. Journalists who do not support the accusations are said to be either active Russian agents of influence or “useful idiots” too dumb to know they are being manipulated.
The real impact of all this will be felt long past Trump’s tenure.
Democrats, Republicans, and players such as the CIA will have four years to consider how this process of delegitimizing a President Elect could work more effectively next time. The people who support extra-Constitutional steps now because of Donald Trump will find those same step will be available in later elections, to use against a candidate they favor. Voting can potentially become only a preliminary gesture, with real struggle only starting after the election itself.
Many are deeply upset Hillary Clinton lost. Many are unsure, even fearful, of a Trump presidency. But once you let the genie of trying to overturn an election loose, you won’t be able to stop it next time.
Copyright © 2017. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity. Follow me on Twitter!
Ilhan Omar’s Hate Crime
The pattern is near-identical: a Muslim woman who has very publicly made defeating Islamophobia part of her political work suffers a hate crime after Trump’s election.
She reports the crime only through the media, who sends what she says viral without asking any critical questions, despite some issues that might be worth questioning. The story is added to the tally of such crimes, as another example of what people want to believe.
At issue? If a hate crime is real, it must be prosecuted publicly and aggressively. We live in a vulnerable, volatile time. Anyone who would commit a hate crime needs, within the law, to be made an example of, lest the next one be the spark that starts a larger fire. At the same time, if a hate crime did not occur, that too must be prosecuted fully. Every false or exaggerated report adds to the arsenal of false reports that negate real reports.
Ilhan Omar
Minnesota State Representative-elect Ilhan Omar in January will become the country’s first Somali-American state legislator. She was in Washington DC, including a visit to the White House, last week for a conference. In a post on Facebook and Twitter, Omar claimed she and her sister were victims of a hate crime by a D.C. cabdriver who picked the two women up as they exited the White House. The driver called her ISIS and threatened to remove her hijab.
No Police Report
In her Facebook posting immediately after the alleged incident, Omar stated she would only file a report with the police after she returned to Minnesota, citing concerns for her safety because the driver knew the location of her hotel.
Omar did not suffer any further harassment, and had no further contact with the driver. The story went viral.
Once back in Minnesota, Omar stated she changed her mind and would not file a police report. Instead, saying she “believes criminalizing hate is not a solution and will only strengthen individual malice,” Omar instead only reported the incident in an unspecified format with DC’s Department of For-Hire Vehicles and the DC Office of Human Rights.
The former has the power to suspend a driver after a hearing. It is unclear what enforcement powers the Human Rights office has. Under the heading of “Reporting Taxicab and Vehicle-For-Hire Discrimination,” the Office focuses on denials of service, if, for example, a taxi refuses to pick up a passenger who is handicapped. Omar’s situation does not seem to be addressed.
Questions
— Omar did not address the fact that by posting the incident to Facebook, as well as doing interviews with The Rachel Maddow Show and others, she more than alerted the driver. If he wanted revenge or to attack her, there it was.
— She also did not address that by choosing not to report the act immediately to the police, the driver would be free to continue to harass other Muslim women. In fact, since there was no arrest, he is driving around DC right now. Perhaps he even seeks out Muslim women passengers as targets? Omar seems to have a responsibility here to other women and the public she is ignoring.
— Omar has not provided information about the cab she took, nor a fuller description of the driver who in her statement she described only as an “African immigrant.” Since she was picked up outside the White House, a fully surveilled area, it seems likely Omar’s cab and driver would be relatively easy to identify. Unless the driver told her “I am an immigrant,” it is unclear how Omar would know he was not born in the United States.
— Omar has not explained how the driver might have been able to remove her headcovering given the plexiglass barrier in DC cabs.
BONUS: Omar is in the midst of a swirl of accusations related to marriage fraud she may have committed for immigration purposes. See here and here.
BONUS: Here’s an example of a newspaper who actually pulled a story after realizing it could not verify what happened. But oh, the story was about a guy playing Santa Claus at a sick kid’s bedside, not an alleged hate crime…
Copyright © 2017. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity. Follow me on Twitter!
The Electoral College: A Civics Lesson
We have and have had for 224 years an Electoral College system. The popular vote is not and has never been how we elect a president.
This is the 6th time in U.S. history the candidate chosen has lost the popular vote, nothing new. The country has muddled on, with some of those presidents being better than others.
In addition, because of the electoral college system, candidates campaign for electoral votes, not the popular vote. That is the basis for their strategizing how to allot their limited time and resources.
So, for example, knowing he had little chance to win Democratic strongholds California and New York, Trump did not campaign extensively there even though they are big states. That’s how Clinton won the popular vote, because her campaign aimed at those (big) states where she thought she would win the electoral vote. The size of the popular vote garnered is more a reflection of the way the system works than it is a gauge of popularity.
You just got woke to the electoral college system after napping through high school civics class? Good for you. You don’t like it? Also cool. Now read up on how the Constitution gets changed. It is a long, slow process, and intended to be that way just to avoid knee jerk reaction such as are underway today. So best to contact your legislators today and get them started doing something abut the Electoral College no one has otherwise done in over two centuries.
There is no system or method for overturning an election, and people are very wrong to talk about trying to do so based on claimed Russian meddling. For that to have validity someone would have to show conclusively and without doubt (we’re talking about dismantling a 224 year old system here, folks, not simple WMDs):
The hack took place –> The Russian government did it –> The Clinton campaign lied when they said the hacked emails were frauds and/or altered –> The hack itself was more important than the contents of the emails –> That any of this, if true, truly changed the results of the election in favor of Trump.
That’s a pretty big bite. If you can’t prove that, you have no case to even think about negating the system, throw away the votes of some 62 million people, and plunging the nation into chaos that it may or may not ever recover from.
And while there may be untried methods to make it possible for the Electoral College to vote for Clinton, can vote isn’t the same as should vote. An awful lot of people voted themselves in anticipation that their votes would be reflected by their electors. That was the system they entered the game under, not something along the lines of “let’s see how this voting thing plays out on November 8 and if don’t like it let’s try something else.” You think disenfranchising all those voters is just gonna happen without any problems?
Copyright © 2017. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity. Follow me on Twitter!
Credibility Tips for Journalists
The working journalists of America sh*t the bed with their election coverage this year.For the most part, the media as a whole fetishized the Clinton candidacy (first woman ever! most experienced candidate ever! dynasty!) and treated Trump as an oaf when they weren’t calling him Hitler and parading any person who wished to accuse him of something before the cameras. That pattern continues now, though the accusations have changed from sexual harassment to near-treason on behalf of Putin.
Alongside this circus were scum stories on all facets of the campaign attributed to… no one. “Sources close to the campaign said,” or “Officials who could not be identified” and so forth. It almost gave the impression reporters were just making stuff up. Alongside that were many media outlets that simply reprinted others’ stories, so that a piece of journalistic garbage flew around the Internet without anyone asking any questions or verifying the contents.
It was sad. The result was the media at large has little credibility left with the public. When people have a hard time figuring out whether or not you’re reporting fake news, you have a problem.
So, as a public service, here are some credibility tips for journalists:
— Don’t just write apocalyptic stories warning what Trump might do (impose tariffs, restrict abortion) without also telling us what would have to actually happen for the change to take place. Will he simply need to sign an Executive Order? Get Congress to pass a law? Take a case to the Supreme Court? Because screeching about something that might happen without letting us know how realistic that happening is is poor work.
— Along with the above: go easy on the might happen stuff. Don’t whisk your readers from a phone call with Taiwan’s president to war with China by this weekend. Think twice before publishing any headline that includes “Trump Might…”
— On a similar note, try to work in some of the following to your pieces: context, named sources, perspective, explanation, less undergrad simple conjecture. So, for example, in a story about the Million Woman March being denied a permit to protest on the grounds of the Lincoln Memorial, mention that (to date) no one has been issued any permits, it’s too early. Tell us it has been since at least the 1980s that a large scale protest permit has been issued for the Memorial. Explain that the decision to issue/refuse is made by the National Park Service, which is under the control of Obama, not Trump. Note that since the 1980 Reagan inauguration protest space at the ceremony has consistently been reduced. That makes a much better article than a headline screaming “Trump Denies Women’s Right to Protest.”
— In fact, more fact and less bombast in general is a good thing. Separate fact from conjecture from opinion, old journalism school style.
— Remember the words alleged and accused. Use them not only for criminals, but when an (alleged) victim makes a statement claiming a politician or celebrity assaulted them.
— Alleged and accused are especially important words when reporting on hate crimes. Reports of hate crimes stir up a lot of explosive motions. Report responsibility. Victim shaming is bad; exercising healthy journalistic inquiry is essential. It is your job.
— And those anonymous sources. There are important roles for anonymous sources, but not to report smears, gossip, innuendo, political speculation, or to play into political manipulation. If you don’t have on-record sources, and you’re not reporting on the next Edward Snowden, check to see if you have a story you can report responsibility.
— Question the information, less the source, but stay awake that all sources have an agenda. If you don’t know what it is and how you are playing into it, stop and figure that out before you go to print.
— Control your partisanship. Journalists, remember a few years ago when Fox became so grossly overtly one-sided, and how little you thought of them? That’s what a lot of people think of you now.
Copyright © 2017. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity. Follow me on Twitter!
Freedom’s Just Another Word
Here’s what’s left of democracy in America.
We had an election, and the candidate favored by Washington, media, and many business elites did not win. Here’s what happened next.— CIA unambiguously but without documentation or evidence presented says, via anonymous leaks, that Russia interceded in the election to help elect Donald Trump.
— Democratic Congresspeople, alongside several media outlets, have called for investigations into whether or not Trump colluded with the Russians to influence the election. That would be an impeachable offense, a criminal offense, treason.
— The underlying message is that the Russians believe Trump as president will so favor them (for some reason) that they risk war, or a cyber version of war, to see him in power. Trump’s legitimacy is now undermined, and his every action toward the
Soviet UnionRussia will be tainted.— Though this “information” was known in Washington since at least the election, it was only released 10 days ahead of the Electoral College vote.
— Meanwhile, Jill Stein, as proxy for Hillary Clinton, raised $7 million over a long weekend after claiming the vote count in three key states was wrong and/or the counting machines (not connected to the web) were hacked and cannot be trusted. A recount could have sent Clinton to the White House.
— Clinton supporters continue to try and get the Electoral College to do something it has never done in some 220 years, select a candidate who did not win the most electoral votes.
— Hillary Clinton has re-emerged, making speeches and public appearances, concurrent with all of the above.
— Democrats as a group continue to insist winning the popular vote entitles Clinton to… something.
— Clinton supporters earlier claimed the FBI interceded in the election to defeat Clinton.
— Candidate Clinton claimed during a debate the now president-elect is a stooge working on behalf of Putin, literal treason.
This is banana republic crap, people, that looks to negate the votes of some 62 million Americans. We no longer believe in our own system. When the candidate many people did not support wins, the response is to seek to negate the democratic process, via accusations that make McCarthy in the 1950s look like a sad amateur.
What we have are anonymous voices at an intelligence agency supposedly dedicated to foreign intel saying the Russians helped elect our next president. That says the process is flawed and cannot be trusted, and that Trump will owe a debt to the Russians and can’t be trusted. It will keep alive the idea that Clinton should have won if not for this meddling and undermine for his term the legitimacy of Trump. Via the classification process, the CIA will only need to make public the snippets of info that support its contention.
This is an attempted coup as sure as it would be if there were tanks on the White House lawn. The CIA might as well have tried to shoot Trump during his next trip to Dallas.
To date, all of these accusations have been based on anonymous sources and leaks. The president of the United States remains silent.
And we are so easily manipulated — liberals/progressives who have rightly attacked the CIA for decades for domestic spying, WMD lies, overthrowing foreign governments, torture, drones, renditions, etc., overnight now believe and support every word the Agency says.
America, our goose is cooked. You worry about an autocracy? It doesn’t have to be in one man. It can be via an Agency.
Copyright © 2017. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity. Follow me on Twitter!
Requiem for the Obama Administration, Trump Edition
The problems many are now predicting under the Trump administration did not start on November 8. The near-unrestrained executive power claimed by the Obama administration will be transferred to the president-elect. Here’s what that means.
Torture
Obama did not prosecute, fire or discipline anyone for torturing people on behalf of the people of the United States. He did not hold any truth commissions, and ensured almost all of the government documents on the torture program remain classified. He did not prosecute the CIA official who willfully destroyed video tapes of the torture scenes. He has not specifically disavowed secret prisons and renditions, just suspended their use.
As with the continued hunting down of Nazis some 70 years after their evil acts, the message that individual responsibility exists must stalk those who would do evil on behalf of a government. “I was only following orders” is not a defense against inhuman acts. The purpose of tracking down the guilty is less to punish and more to discourage the next person from doing evil; the purpose is to morally immunize a nation-state.
Because of these failures President Trump can, as he has proposed, restart the torture program at any time. Some claim the CIA won’t participate. Some always will of course, and if not at CIA, then a contractor will be found. And if another terror attack or two take place, then people at CIA and elsewhere in government will be lining up to conduct the torture as they did last time. They know they will never be held accountable. Indeed, Trump is apparently considering the CIA official who destroyed the torture tapes, Jose Rodriguez, to head up the agency.
Assassinations
Obama legalized, formalized, and normalized drone assassinations on a global scale, including the killing of American citizens without due process in direct violation of the Fifth Amendment, on the president’s order alone. The only real restraint he codified is self-restraint. When you leave a door open, you never know who will walk in.
Because of this President Trump can do the same thing. Trump is unlikely to blow up the entire world with the nuclear codes, but please do not act surprised when his choice of American citizen targets may not match up with yours.
Guantanamo
Obama never closed Guantanamo as he promised. He could have, simply by depopulating it regardless of what Congress might have said. In 2014 when Obama needed to trade five Taliban from Gitmo for U.S. Army soldier Bowe Bergdahl in Afghanistan, Obama simply ordered those Taliban freed. He could do the same with anyone else there. He could have applied the full pressure of the U.S. on various countries to accept freed prisoners. He could have ordered the show trials to be conclude.
Obama did not do these things. He instead normalized indefinite detention as a policy of the United States, and alongside that, as with torture and drone assassinations, the use of secret, convoluted legal opinions to justify such executive powers.
So if President Trump choses to start refilling the cells at Guantanamo, and reminding the world of the lengths a frightened America is willing to go to imprison a single man, it should not be a surprise. And with the “legal” opinions, including ones still secret, behind such policies, stopping Trump will require years of counter-litigation never even begun under the Obama administration.
Espionage Act
Obama prosecuted more federal whistleblowers as spies under the Espionage Act than all previous U.S. presidents combined. He sent to jail people who exposed torture, and people who allegedly leaked information to journalists showing American complicity in dangerous acts abroad. He had Chelsea Manning prosecuted for exposing war crimes in Iraq. He used the Espionage Act to destroy the lives of others who under any definition except his own would be considered political heroes.
Obama and his Justice Department created the playbook for how to use the hereto obscure Espionage Act to do these things.
So if President Trump, perhaps with an attorney general Rudy Giuliani, uses that playbook to lock up whistleblowers, journalists, and people you might call dissidents and political prisoners, remember to again look the other way.
Freedom of Information Act (FOIA)
The Obama administration set a record for redacting government files or outright denying access to them in fiscal year 2014 – some 77% of FOIA requests were redacted or denied outright. More than any previous administration, Obama took longer to turn over files, said more often it couldn’t find documents and refused a record number of times to turn over newsworthy files quickly absent lawsuits brought to force the government’s hand. In the case of Hillary Clinton, files considered “unclassified” in one context were redacted in whole in another.
Though the backlog of unanswered requests grew by 55%, the administration cut the number of full-time FOIA employees by nine percent. Despite the critical nature of the documents, the State Department was allowed to do its FOIA screening of the Clinton emails largely with an ad hoc crew of retirees. The impact on journalists, and the right of the people to know, was immeasurable.
So don’t be surprised if the Trump administration does not end up as the most transparent one ever.
NSA
Obama never realistically reigned in the NSA after the Bush-era Patriot Act allowed the agency to turn its surveillance tools on the Homeland. Absent a few cosmetic changes, NSA continues to gather the full spectrum of Americans’ communications in violation of the Fourth Amendment, abetted by the secret FISA court and vaguely Constitutional tools such as National Security Letters and parallel reconstruction. Information lives forever, and the NSA is building bigger data warehouses to keep storing it.
President Trump will have that information about you at his disposal. And so all who bleated “they had nothing to hide and thus have nothing to fear” during the Obama (and Bush) administration, out of trust for a president or fear of terror, well, now you can join the rest of us who have been terrified for a very long time.
Copyright © 2017. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity. Follow me on Twitter!
Trump and Social Media: Welcome to the New World
Did you see what Trump just tweeted out? Buzzfeed’s got it, and some guy over at Daily Kos is totally losing his mind replying. It’s Donald Trump’s Internet, and we’re allowed to watch. And retweet.Trump has done more than become the most prolific social media communicator in political history. He has discovered the Holy Grail of presidential-media relations: the ability to ignore the whole damn Fourth Estate. This is a new paradigm for political power, one that at a minimum pushes the media another circulation drop closer to irrelevancy. Oh well, they’ll always have the weather and sports to report. Craigslist already took the classifieds away.
The latest online thrust by Trump has been a series of tweets directed personally against a reporter who said the president-elect claimed without evidence his popular vote total suffered because of extensive voter fraud. Jeff Zeleny, CNN’s chief Washington correspondent, said Trump was a “sore winner,” adding the president-elect had “zero evidence” to back his claim he won the popular vote. Commentators agreed with Zeleny, saying Trump’s ego couldn’t accept the insult of losing the popular vote.
Trump responded with a series of tweets and retweets condemning Zeleny. All of the tweets saw “likes” in the tens of thousands, and endless websites excerpted and embedded them out to an even larger audience. Just another episode in the Trump reality show, right?
Wrong.
As the media missed the overall populist appeal of Trump right up until election night, so are they missing the populist power he is wielding and likely will continue wield via social media for the next four years.
While Obama claimed the title of first “Internet president” by virtue of his online fundraising, brilliant datamining, and seeding of the 24-hour news cycle, the bulk of his efforts were essentially repurposing technology to do the traditional things politicians have always done, albeit faster and better. Evolution, not revolution.
Trump has discovered something much, much bigger: he does not need to depend on the media to communicate to the electorate. As the once-upstarts such as HuffPo, Buzzfeed, and the Daily Beast pushed the TV networks into the background, so now is social media Trump-style stepping forward.
Sure, OK, the Internet is a powerful tool for global communication, social media blah blah blah, Kanye something something Instagram, this stuff’s taught now in Communications 101: The Modern Age at community college.
But social media for Trump is not simply a display board to pin policy statements to as Obama has used it. Social media is a tool that first allows Trump to bypass everything and speak to individual citizens/voters, and then force the traditional media to amplify what he says as part of its own thirst for “content.” There really isn’t any news anymore when Trump has it on Twitter as his own scoop. Ignore the tweets so as to starve the beast? The worry is more that the audience will ignore you because they can read the tweets themselves.
Every president who’s left a record has expressed some level of disdain for the media of his day, and a desire to circumvent it. But no president could afford to ignore them, or to truly anger them. Influence them, of course: presidents would leak juicy stuff to one reporter, cut off another, but at the end of the day media and the president needed each other to do their respective jobs. A president would once upon a time have had to be careful chiding a columnist for the New York Times to her face for fear of being slaughtered on the editorial page. President Lyndon Johnson, after hearing CBS anchorman Walter Cronkite had spoken out against the War in Vietnam, famously said, “If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost the country.”
Access now only has to be courted one way. Trump can afford to insult reporters because he no longer has any real need for them, except perhaps as foils for his anti-establishment rhetoric. He treats them with contempt because in his mind, all they really do is retweet him. Who cares what CNN’s Jeff Zeleny, thinks of you? How many followers on Twitter does he have anyway? Zeleny = 135k. Trump = 16.3 million.
Trump has also mastered, via social media, the art of Internet logic. His tweets often read like the “Comments” section on some political blog. Make a bold statement unsupported by facts. When challenged, demand the challenger provide proof you’re wrong (often meaning to prove the negative) and then mock them if they don’t respond. Dispute sources, not facts — X can’t be true because it was reported by a media outlet that favored Clinton. Attack ad hominem, and goad others into doing the same. The enemy isn’t just CNN, it is Jeff Zeleny himself. Then stand back and disavow what happens, up to and including death threats. And, for the triple score, issue an appeal for calm with a conspiratorial wink.
Social media Trump-style also offers the unprecedented ability to control the agenda. Should a troublesome story appear, a handful of bombastic tweets changes the conversation. If no one seems to be listening after some rude remarks about the musical Hamilton run their course, just yell louder — flag burners should lose their citizenship! All in real, real time; Trump is no stranger to sending out 140 characters of white noise at 3 am.
With its reliance on “friends” and “followers,” social media also creates a personal bond between Trump and individual Americans not really experienced since Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Depression-era fireside chats. As those radio broadcasts brought Roosevelt into the living room, Trump’s tweets put his policies, opinions and rants into the same feeds as Aunt Sally talking about Christmas plans. It creates intimacy, and by association (who doesn’t like Aunt Sally), may increase trust.
And make no mistake about it; unlike most politicians’ social media, which sounds like robotic ad-speak, Trump’s tweets come from Trump. It’s him talking to you. Look at many of the responses to Trump on social media; people are writing back to him in the first person, using the informal language of the web. This is a personal connection. He is part of your world and part of your day. And unlike TV, you can speak back to him, and maybe get an answer of sorts; Trump has been known to retweet messages from his followers.
While many will advise him to tone it down, or perhaps switch his Twitter to a more “presidential model,” it seems unlikely Trump would set the whole thing aside when the clock strikes midnight on inauguration day. These are very powerful tools. They played a significant role in electing Trump. They will allow him for four years to pick and choose how and when, or if, he wants to engage with the traditional media. With that on one side of the scale, and with Trump being both the president, and, well, being Trump, who is going to make the argument that pulling back is in Trump’s interest?
Copyright © 2017. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity. Follow me on Twitter!
A Brief History of the Election OMG PUTIN IS TAKING CONTROL OF THIS ARTICLE!!!!!!!!!!!
Media ignore Clinton’s weaknesses and Trump’s strengths for 18 months to epically blow election predictions.
No calls for recounts.
Clinton concedes.
No calls for recounts.
Despite over 200 years of the electoral college system, and this being the fifth presidential election where the winner did not receive the majority of the popular vote, Clinton supporters begin bleating about her winning the popular vote so, whatever, she should become president. Many seem surprised to learn of this “electoral” system;
No calls for recounts.
Clinton supporters hold street protests.
No calls for recounts.
Effort made to talk electors out of voting for Trump fails to gain traction.
No calls for recounts.
Two weeks after the election in the midst of the Trump transition OMG the Russians hacked the election Putin is controlling America with RT.com thought waves and fake news so we gotta recount it but only so faith in American democracy is restored.
Jill Stein, who received zero electoral votes and has absolutely nothing to gain from a recount somehow raises more money in a few days than in her entire previous campaign.
We gotta have a recount!
Clinton campaign joins in demand for a recount.
(Standby for cries that the recount, which will show Clinton still losing, is itself crooked as it was done by the same local election officials under the same mind control of the Soviet Bear)
BONUS:
My point is nowadays (i.e., 1950) any criticism of the Clinton is taken as de facto “evidence” of Russian agency. The Catch-22 is that if it cannot be shown that you work directly for the Russians, it is said you are a “useful idiot” too dumb to realize you are secondarily under their influence. Everybody is thus part of the Soviet global threat.
Copyright © 2017. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity. Follow me on Twitter!
A Media Blacklist, Courtesy of WaPo: Now I’m Afraid for Our Democracy
In most third world societies, when people don’t like the results of an election, they take to the streets. In America, we take to the Internet.
But the end result is the same. The system is undermined because we do not like the results it yielded. Accusations of something unfair having happened are slung around, usually either unsupported by facts, based on faux “statistical anomalies,” or via a small data set that is blown up into something general to prove “the system is unfair/corrupt/wrong/inaccurate” to people who already believe that to be true but need talking points for their Facebook pages.This is the thought process that is driving the wishful thinking behind the recount efforts, and campaigns to push the Electoral College into voting Hillary Clinton into the White House.
Of course a nice tag-along is if this can all be blamed on an outside third party. Dissatisfied people have little interest in blaming themselves, their flawed candidate, or acknowledging the strengths of the opponent among a large segment of voters. Nope, easier to blame someone else. For that, a person who has been molded into a one-word symbol of, well, everything and anything Americans fear, Putin.
And so a recent article in the Washington Post terrifies me. It is at a level of journalism that previously was reserved for conspiracy theories on Geocities’ style web sites. Here’s a selection from the article:The flood of “fake news” this election season got support from a sophisticated Russian propaganda campaign that created and spread misleading articles online with the goal of punishing Democrat Hillary Clinton, helping Republican Donald Trump and undermining faith in American democracy.
Russia’s increasingly sophisticated propaganda machinery — including thousands of botnets, teams of paid human “trolls,” and networks of websites and social-media accounts — echoed and amplified right-wing sites across the Internet as they portrayed Clinton as a criminal hiding potentially fatal health problems and preparing to hand control of the nation to a shadowy cabal of global financiers.
So: Clinton lost because Russia wanted Trump to win because Trump will favor Russia so Russia created fake news which influenced over 62 million Americans to overlook Trump’s flaws and vote for him. Got it.
Proof? Stuff on Facebook. Main source of that proof? A group of unknown origin, financing, and makeup (“an independent team of concerned American citizens”) called PropOrNot, i.e., propaganda or not. The group also “strongly suspects that some of the individuals involved have violated the Espionage Act, the Foreign Agent Registration Act, and other related laws.”A second source quoted by the Washington Post is Clint Watts, a fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute (which has been around in one form or another since the 1950s, dedicated to the Cold War), who says of the Russians “They want to essentially erode faith in the U.S. government or U.S. government interests.” Watts’s report on his work appeared on a blog this month as Trolling for Trump: How Russia Is Trying to Destroy Our Democracy. That piece claims without any real evidence at all that “Russia is actively trying to put Donald Trump in the White House… And the evidence is compelling.”
I encourage everyone to read some of the linked articles. This is seriously scary Cold War paranoia stuff.
And guess what? The ProporNot group has created a (black)list of websites that it claims are controlled/influenced by the Russians. While — dammit — this website in not included, I take some solace in noting that I have written for or been reprinted by 11 of them.“They use our technologies and values against us to sow doubt,” said Robert Orttung, a George Washington University professor who studies Russia, quoted in the article.
And that sounds dangerously close to saying our First Amendment’s freedom of speech provisions seem to be the root of this threat to American democracy.
Copyright © 2017. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity. Follow me on Twitter!
By the Numbers: The Recount Scenarios (It is a Long Shot)
Green Party candidate Jill Stein (Disclosure: I voted for Stein) is calling for a recount in key states, and has raised some $3 million for that purpose. Her funding page estimates the total cost, including lawyers, will be $6-7 million.
There is a lot of media being generated by all this, but I haven’t found anyone who did some math. Here it is.
DeadlinesThe deadlines in the three key states Stein is seeking recounts for are fast approaching. This Friday, November 25, is the deadline for requesting a recount in Wisconsin, where Trump’s winning margin stands at 0.7%. In Pennsylvania, where his margin is 1.2%, the deadline falls on Monday. In Michigan, where the Trump lead is 0.3%, the deadline is Wednesday, November 30.
Because of the numbers (below) if Stein fails to file in all three states for a recount, there is no way for Clinton to win.
To date, no other candidate has publicly called for a recount. It has been over two weeks since the election.
The NumbersAs for electoral votes, Pennsylvania has 20, Michigan 16, and Wisconsin 10. Trump won 290 Electoral College votes to Clinton’s 232. If all three states’ votes went fully to Clinton, and all electors voted “faithfully,” Trump would lose the electoral vote.
A recount could yield more votes for candidates other than Clinton; the presumption is that any “hacking” unfairly favored Trump. Scenarios, such as Wisconsin only going to Clinton, would not change the final election outcome. If Michigan and Wisconsin alone went to Clinton, neither candidate would have the required 270 electoral votes to win.
Current vote counts show Trump leading by about 27,000 votes in Wisconsin, over 68,000 in Pennsylvania, and more than 10,000 in Michigan. In some ways not massive leads, but they’d all have to go Clinton’s way.
If no candidate receives a majority of Electoral votes, the House of Representatives elects the President from the three Presidential candidates who received the most Electoral votes. Each state delegation has one vote. Thus a tie is technically possible. In reality, the state-by-state party tilt is decidedly Republican.
There are clearly scenarios through which Clinton could win, but they seem long shots.
The Outcome?So for the recount to change the results of the presidential election, the only reasonable scenario would be for all three contested states to shift their vote totals from advantage Trump to advantage Clinton. That would almost certainly trigger additional calls for re-recounts, as well as possible Supreme Court actions as with Bush v. Gore in 2000, or perhaps simply mass chaos across the U.S. It is unclear how long all this would take.
BONUS:
Recounts are not free.Wisconsin states that if the vote difference is less than 2% (as it is), then the fee is $5 per ward. There appear to be 70 wards in the state, meaning the filing fee is $350, not the $1.1 million Stein is requesting for the state without legal fees. I cannot account for the discrepancy.
The fees for the Michigan and Pennsylvania recounts are $500,000 and $600,000, respectively. These match with the amount requested.
Copyright © 2017. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity. Follow me on Twitter!
Acts of Quiet Desperation: Wisconsin Recount Edition
It is quite sad to see so many well-meaning and otherwise intelligent Americans embarrassing and deluding themselves that Hillary Clinton didn’t lose the election held over two weeks ago.
I hear many using words like mourning, markers of the kind of feelings that follow an actual death. If that is the case, then it is time to move on into some form of acceptance.
In addition to the clueless bleating about the electoral vote not matching the popular vote (you win at baseball with more runs, not more hits), Hillary Clinton is now being urged by a group of prominent computer scientists and election lawyers to call for a recount in three swing states won by Donald Trump. The story, somehow, despite the scientists not speaking on record and only to the Clinton team in private, has gone viral across the same media (HuffPo, Vox, you know them) that never saw the flaws in Candidate Clinton and still doesn’t.
The group believes they’ve found “persuasive evidence” results in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania may have been manipulated or hacked. Let’s take a look at that.
The sole evidence presented so far, according to New York magazine, which broke the story is (emphasis added):In Wisconsin, Clinton received seven percent fewer votes in counties that relied on electronic-voting machines compared with counties that used optical scanners and paper ballots.
Based on this statistical analysis [NOTE: this is not a statistical analysis, just counting], Clinton may have been denied as many as 30,000 votes; she lost Wisconsin by 27,000. While it’s important to note the group has not found proof of hacking or manipulation, they are arguing to the campaign that the suspicious pattern merits an independent review — especially in light of the fact that the Obama White House has accused the Russian government of hacking the Democratic National Committee.
So let’s unpack that:— Assuming the counting is accurate, there is no known connection between the vote tally and anything else. At best this is a correlation, in likelihood it is just a tally. There is no evidence of any suspicious pattern. Ballots are not “patterns.” They’re just ballots.
— There is no evidence of any hacking or manipulation. Even if it is true (a big if given the lack of evidence) that someone connected with Russia hacked the DNC, that does not in any way connect to a handful of voting machines in Wisconsin reviewed as a very small sample.
— Though pitched as a “Save Hillary” effort, there is no evidence to suggest any recount would favor Clinton.
— The reporting on this says the scientists have shared the information only with the Clinton campaign. Why not the Justice Department? If they really have something, it is evidence of a grave felony. Why not share it with the people who can really do something about that? Put up or shut up time.
— Are these otherwise intelligent scientists really, truly, claiming that Russian hackers reached into individual voting machines in Wisconsin somewhere to throw a small number of votes Trump’s way?
Bottom Line: Some people didn’t like the election results so they are throwing themselves on the ground like a soccer player trying to claim a faux foul.
Disclaimer: I hate Trump. I hate racism and sexism and nazis. I am not now, nor have I ever been, a racist, or sexist, or nazi. This is not a pro-Trump article just because it criticizes Clinton in part. Stop acting like *ssholes. Please.
Copyright © 2017. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity. Follow me on Twitter!
Apocalypse Then, and Now, Cracker Revolution Edition
Chris Hedges just wrote this about the Trump Era:“The repression of dissents will soon resemble the repression under past totalitarian regimes. State security will become an invasive and palpable presence. The most benign forms of opposition will be treated as if they are a threat to national security. Many, hoping to avoid the wrath of the state, will become compliant and passive… exonerating militarized police forces for the indiscriminate murder of unarmed citizens, while he unleashes the fossil fuel industry and the war industry to degrade and most probably extinguish life on earth.”
Um, Chris, your verb tenses are all wrong.
These things have been ongoing for the past 15 years. Obama prosecuted more dissidents, er, “whistleblowers,” than all previous presidents combined, and he did by calling them spies under the 1917 Espionage Act. The NSA as state security has been monitoring you under two administrations.
Militarized police forces received their tanks and other weapons from two presidents. All of the terrible events that lead to Black Lives Matter took place before the election, and the killers were for the most part left unpunished by both the judiciary for criminal murders, and by the Federal-level Department of Justice for violation of civil rights. Unlike during the 1960s when the Feds stepped in and filed civil rights charges to bust up racism among local and state governments, the last two administration have not.
When people do bad things and know they’ll get away with them, that is “normalization,” not just some hate words we have sadly all heard before.
As for war and fracking, um, the U.S. has been engaged in global wars for 15 years, and set the Middle East on fire. Fracking has been destroying our nation for years, and oil dumped into the Gulf back in 2010.
Fascism did not start on November 8. We have been living in a police state of sorts for some time before you all discovered it will start next year.
BONUS: As for the idea that Trump was elected by dumb white men, here are some statistics from the New York Times on the vote count. Yes, yes, most are above 50%, but really not that much above half that the claim that this is some sort of cracker revolution holds up.
For Trump, 58% of all whites, 53% of males, 50% of suburbans of all flavors and, yes, 67% of whites without college.
As for this election being a vote for misogyny, can you at least allow for the possibility — just that, the possibility — that people were not opposed to a woman president, they were opposed to one specific person who happened to be a woman, and that opposition was not based on gender but on a range of issues? Just maybe?
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Let’s Get Uncomfortable, Election Edition
For the people now protesting, good for you to make your views known. It is important.
May I also suggest you use the remaining time to protest Obama’s refusal to prosecute torture, curtail the NSA, fail to close Gitmo, his jailing of whistleblowers, his decision not to use his Justice Department to aggressively prosecute police killers of young Black men under existing civil rights laws, his claiming of the power to assassinate Americans with drones, and his war on journalists via gutting of FOIA?Because silence on those issues means Trump inherits all of that power.
May I also suggest volunteering for some of: homeless shelters, LGBTQ and vet’s crisis lines, Planned Parenthood, Congresspeople who will work for these causes, ACLU, Occupy (who addresses the economic inequality that drove many Trump voters) and the like?And make a long term commitment, because many of those groups are used to people showing up for a few days after some bad event happens and then disappearing soon after.
Please also unsubscribe from media that fed you false narratives for 18 months about those damn emails, the Clinton Foundation, pay-for-play, etc., leading to the election “surprise.” Check the election results. Apparently they all did matter and you should seek out new information sources so you are not fooled again.
To educate yourself during the coming years, consider foreign media. Look at the range of choices and start reading. Many present a much more dispassionate and balanced view of America than our own corporate infotainment. FYI, the “Daily Show” is satire and comedy, light commentary at best. It is not news. A warning, though, that some of what you read will be challenging and make you think outside your own bubble.
Stop embarrassing yourselves by claiming “well, Hillary won the popular vote.” True but irrelevant. We’ve had the albeit imperfect electoral college system for some 220 years. The fact that you recently discovered it when your preferred candidate lost does not impress. This election is the fifth time in U.S. history a candidate won the popular vote but lost the election.
May I also suggest you read the full text of Roe v. Wade (not just Wikipedia!) so you are prepared to rebut in detail the various state-allowed restrictions, particularly the balancing tests, because that is where the attacks may likely come.
Nothing wrong with “solidarity” and “raising awareness,” but stopping there, like wearing safety pins, like changing your Facebook profile photo, feels good, but working for real change hurts.‘Cause talk is cheap.
Copyright © 2017. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity. Follow me on Twitter!
American Exceptionalism, Under God: Pledging Allegiance to the Homeland
Among the exceptional things about America is that, along with North Korea, we are one of a very few nations that have our schools begin the day with a pledge of allegiance.
Unlike North Korea, however, our pledge also includes a reference to God. We do enjoy pretending all of this is optional because of “rights,” just as we pretend that the reference to God is perfectly “OK” in a nation that claims it is secular.
(Fun Thing: Have your child substitute “Allah” for “God” in the pledge at school and see what happens!)
Under GodThe pledge is a short expression of allegiance to the United States. Originally written in 1887, Congress formally adopted it as the official pledge in 1942 as the U.S. was entering WWII. On Flag Day 1954 the words “under God” were added, in time of the Cold War and McCarthyism.
In signing the words “under God” into law, President Dwight Eisenhower said:
“From this day forward, the millions of our schoolchildren will daily proclaim in every city and town, every village and rural schoolhouse, the dedication of our nation and our people to the Almighty… In this way we are reaffirming the transcendence of religious faith in America’s heritage and future; in this way we shall constantly strengthen those spiritual weapons which forever will be our country’s most powerful resource, in peace or in war.”
The pledge is recited out loud, typically with one’s hand over one’s heart. Want an example of how the pledge is used as a vehicle for a whole range of “patriotic” indoctrination? Here.
The Right Not to Pledge
The most common place for reciting the pledge is in public schools. Teacher’s are not required, and in most cases do not, inform little kids they have a right to not participate.
Most schools’ policy does allow students who otherwise learn about their rights outside of class to refrain from participating as long as they don’t interfere with other kids from doing so, generally interpreted as not protesting or acting in an affirmative manner and just standing with their damn mouths shut. There is a wide dollop of leeway on what constitutes “disruptive behavior,” as seen recently in the fury over some people’s decision to take a knee during the playing of the national anthem, another American ritual.
This is all more or less in line with the landmark 1943 Supreme Court ruling in West Virginia Board of Education v. Barnette, where the justices voted 6-3 on behalf of Jehovah’s Witnesses refusing to stand for the pledge on religious grounds. The Court held that expelling the students, as was done in a West Virginia school, violated their First and Fourteenth Amendment rights.Justice Robert Jackson, who wrote the opinion, didn’t believe the government, including school officials, was constitutionally allowed to use punishments to make people say things they don’t mean:
“To sustain the compulsory flag salute, we are required to say that a Bill of Rights which guards the individual’s right to speak his own mind left it open to public authorities to compel him to utter what is not in his mind.”
Not every justice on the court agreed, however, Justice Felix Frankfurter wrote in dissent “freedom of religion did not allow individuals to break laws simply because of religious conscience… Otherwise each individual could set up his own censor against obedience to laws conscientiously deemed for the public good by those whose business it is to make laws.”
And an exceptional free nation certainly could not have citizens running amok acting on their consciences.
So How’s That Working Out for Ya?
In late October, only 73 years after the Supreme Court decision, word apparently has not yet reached Florida, because a middle schooler in Tampa was kicked out of the classroom after refusing to stand for the Pledge of Allegiance.
Mark Dawson was yelled at by his teacher and made to leave the classroom after he refused to stand for the daily pledge at the ironically-named Liberty Middle School. A school spokesperson quickly admitted the teacher didn’t know the school district’s policy — as well as the actual Constitution of these United States — allowed for Dawson’s behavior.
Or did they?Florida state law actually requires students to get written permission from parents if they want to abstain from the pledge.
Although the Supreme Court holds that the Bill of Rights applies to minors, Florida says well, it sort of doesn’t. Florida state courts have upheld the local law by technically treating the matter as an issue of parental authority, as granted or withheld by the state legislature. The law operates under the assumption parents would make their kids stand for the pledge if they happened to be in the classroom at the time.
Florida’s actions have not yet been tested before the Supreme Court.
Do Other Countries Say Some Sort of Pledge of Allegiance in School?
Despite America being “the essential nation” who serves as that “shining city on the hill” (we do have a lot of those kinds of expressions, don’t we?), America more or less stands alone in sort-of, kind-of, compelling/pressuring kids into stating out loud in the presence of their peers allegiance to the nation.
North Korea also has its school kids say a daily pledge, but that’s a bad thing. The Guardian described the scene as:
“They are barely seven years old, but these glum-looking children are already being drafted into a tyrannical regime hell bent on waging nuclear war with the world. Standing in arrow-straight rows, their faces are hardly the picture of happiness as they are forced to pledge their allegiance to North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un and call him ‘father’.”
Yeah, yeah, I get it, different words, but basically the same idea: a stated pledge to a national symbol. Only kids in North Korea aren’t happy because, whatever, like the U.S., their country has nuclear weapons.
Fun Fact: South Korea has a pledge, too. But not Canada, Britain, France or the other democracies of Europe.
Exceptional Homeland!
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How Did Donald Trump Win?
It’s not about left and right anymore, not about Black and White. It is all about up and down. And it elected Donald Trump via a bumpy road. The next candidate to really figure it out will sweep into power.
And what it is is stated succiently by former McCain campaign chief strategist Steve Schmidt: jobs, specifically the loss of jobs to technology and globalization, and the changes to our society that that is causing.The defining issue of our times, says Schmidt, is the displacement of workers, particularly those who traditionally held working class roles. America is watching a leveling down unprecedented in its history, a form of societal and economic devolution.
“I think that’s going to be the new fault line in American politics,” Schmidt said. “And the voters, the Bernie Sanders voter and the Trump voter — like fish netting, the fish can swing through the netting from left to right very, very easily.”
Schmidt focuses on Silicon Valley. “Let’s look at the Silicon Valley wing of the Democratic party and be clear about the partisan nature of all of these companies. We have these arguments about minimum wage — $12, $15. We’re 18 months away in this country from a robot in the window at the McDonald’s handing you your cheeseburger.”
“The number one job for not-college educated men in America is driving something somewhere. So when we talk about an era now of driverless trucks, driverless cars, where do those jobs go? Where’s that displacement?” Schmidt continued.
In essence, the growing irrelevance of American workers.
What started with the globalization of the 1980s, the literal export of jobs to places abroad chasing cheaper labor, is transitioning into its next phase, the “export” of jobs into the hands of automation. Traditional employment once considered secure (albeit low paying) that cannot be physically exported because it needs to happen at a specific geographic location, such as with service tasks, is doomed as sure as those jobs that used to be done by steelworkers in Ohio but now are performed in Shenyang.
Of course someone reading this will be mumbling something about to hell with those workers, let them get an education, retrain, whatever Darwinian crossed with dystopian curse they can conjure. The problem is long after you take away the jobs the people are still going to be there.
And while no one in Washington really cares about what happens to those workers per se, as long as they can vote they will matter to politicians.
It takes a special kind of demagogue, one with even more cynicism than usual, to fully exploit those workers’ literal fears for their lives, but s/he will emerge. Think of Trump as version 1.0, a kind of beta test. Trump likely never knew what he had within grasp, and spoke to this displaced group largely cluelessly and without the sophistication of a proper strategy.
But the next Trump will have the “advantage” of another four years of economic displacement, a slicker media profile undistracted by Trump’s crude buffoonery, as well as advisors like McCain campaign chief strategist Steve Schmidt, whispering lines in his or her ear that sound like bastardized versions of Springsteen lyrics. The hate mongering, racism, and name calling will be toned down for wider appeal.
Now there’s something to be afraid of.
Copyright © 2017. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity. Follow me on Twitter!
The Day After: How to Renounce Your American Citizenship
Well, sure, it is an extreme course of action, and not one to be considered with the same hangover I have this morning, you may want to keep your options open. So, here is a basic guide to renouncing your American citizenship.It seems like the most basic of things: the ability to give up one’s American citizenship. But it’s not; the American government must approve your renunciation of citizenship and can say NO, no matter how loudly you say YES. Of course, there are forms to be filled out.
And taxes. Potentially lots of taxes.
The Very Basics
You have to be an American citizen. If you only think you might be, no matter that the Swiss authorities say you are, or what grandma told you, you have to be a full-fledged, documented American, or the renunciation process stops. You can only renounce while overseas. You must have another nationality, and be able to prove it, because the U.S. government will not take part in something that will render you stateless. Only an adult can renounce, and no one can renounce on behalf of someone else, including children.
You can’t renounce your citizenship for the explicit purpose of avoiding U.S. taxes, or to try and skip on an arrest warrant, go AWOL from the military, or otherwise evade the law. You also can’t be of unsound mind.
The Other Basics
Despite what you may see on TV or in the movies, there is only one way to voluntarily renounce citizenship. You can’t do it by tearing up your American passport, or writing a manifesto. It’s done by appointment only.
You start by making an appointment at the nearest American embassy or consulate. You technically can complete the renunciation procedures anywhere a properly-empowered American diplomat will meet you abroad, but in reality it is unlikely s/he will drop by your villa, or come by your prison cell.
At the embassy (the rules are the same at a consulate) you’ll fill out some forms. You can Google and complete, but not sign them, ahead of time if you wish: DS-4079, DS-4080, DS-4081, and DS-4082. Have a look; most of the requested information is pretty vanilla stuff, and is largely to make sure you understand what you are doing and the consequences of doing it.
The reason for making sure of all that making sure stuff is two-fold.
One, the State Department, who handles all this, has been sued by people in the past who claim they were tricked or mislead and did not know what they were doing, and want their citizenship back. The other reason is that barring certain highly-specific situations, renouncing citizenship is a one-way street. The U.S. government considers it a permanent, unrecoverable, irrevocable, decision. You gotta get it right the first time.
At the embassy, one or more staff will go over everything with you, you’ll swear to everything and sign everything. You can usually (but not always, practices vary from embassy to embassy) have a lawyer with you, but often all of the interaction is between you and the embassy people, and is pretty straightforward.
At larger embassies, particularly at the American embassies in places like Canada and the UK, renunciations are frequent, regular parts of a day’s business, and are handled in most cases almost mechanically. Expect them to have to look stuff up and maybe call you back the next day if you try this in some remote African post.
That’s why some Americans suggest more cumbersome processing has taken place at smaller consulates unfamiliar with the process. Persons far from home, such as an American resident in Japan seeking to renounce in Portugal while on vacation, may encounter difficulties. The overall feeling most renunciants encounter is that of a bureaucrat more concerned with getting his paperwork in order than really caring about your life-altering decision. It is rare that the embassy official will actively try to dissuade you, though some may poke at it. Just smile and say thanks.
Who Decides?After your brief appointment at the embassy, all the paperwork goes off to Washington, where your renunciation is approved or denied. The embassy can but is not required to write a memo regarding your case. Those memos, when written, usually argue against approval. In an extreme version, such a memo might say “Mr. Roberts appeared unorganized in thought, and was unable at times to focus on the documents in front of him. He referred often to a Swedish dog who was guiding his actions, and stated his goal in renunciation was to assume the Swedish throne.” It happens.
No one at the embassy can approve or deny your application to renounce. That is done by someone you will never meet, located in Washington, DC. Without that approval, you remain an American citizen. Approval is formally made by issuing a DS-4083, called the CLN, Certificate of Loss of Nationality. Think of this document as an “un-birth certificate.”
CLNs are processed slowly; it can several months or more for yours to be approved or denied. They are usually mailed out to you.
Oh, yes, one more thing.
You have to pay a fee for all this. Note it is a “processing fee,” meaning you pay it whether or not your renunciation is ultimately approved. As the world’s exceptional nation, the U.S. also has the highest fees in the world to renounce citizenship, a cool $2,350 per case, with no family discounts. By comparison, Canada charges it’s soon-to-be-former citizens only $76; for the Japanese and Irish it is free.
Despite these hurdles and costs, in 2015, 4,279 Americans bid Uncle Sam farewell, up 20% from 2014. That’s the third year in a row that’s set a new record. While the U.S. government generally states that every case is a unique, heartfelt choice, the not-so-secret reason behind most renunciations is America’s rapacious tax laws.
Taxes, Taxes, Taxes
If you are a high-wealth individual, this stuff gets complicated, and expensive, very quickly.
After losing your American citizenship, you file a final tax return for your time as a citizen for the period January 1 through the day your renunciation is approved. In addition to all the other tax forms needed for your situation, you must also include IRS Form 8854, the Expatriation Information Statement, otherwise known as the exit tax form. Almost no one files this without help from a tax professional.
Form 8854 is targeted at “covered expatriates,” former American citizens who have a large net worth, certain tax burdens or owe back taxes. The numbers vary from year-to-year and are subject to all the manipulations the U.S. tax code is full of, so actual figures can be slippery. As a very rough guide, while net worth for this purpose is measured in the millions, a yearly tax burden of about $160,000 can trigger things.
There are many, many websites and forums discussing taxes for former American citizens. Many of those sites are well-meaning, some even accurate to an extent. One of the oldest is run by the non-profit group American Citizens Abroad.
But taxes in the American scheme are very much based on an individual’s personal situation, so anything short of specific advice from a competent tax professional is sort of just a way to pass time waiting for your CLN to arrive.
Other Things
A good way to think of the process of renunciation is that you need to exit two American systems — passports and taxes — and join another set of foreign ones. Miss a step and trouble will follow. This is not a quick process. Patience and good legal/tax advice are requirements.
After you have successfully renounced your American citizenship, you are, well, no longer an American.
That means (for example) as Swede you must follow all the U.S. immigration laws applicable to Swedes visiting, working or otherwise in the U.S. You suddenly become a Swede in the eyes of wherever in the world you do live, whatever that means for say, a Swede living in Mongolia. So if your working visa for Mongolia was in your U.S. passport, you may not have a valid visa anymore. Some former Americans instantly become eligible for a military draft in their “new” country.
And dammit, you may still have tax obligations in the U.S. depending on what you own there in terms of investments and property and…
Renunciation of citizenship is an extremely significant decision, with life-changing social, economic and other considerations. This article is for general information purposes only, and is not legal advice. Persons considering renunciation should consult an attorney and financial-tax planner. Any opinions expressed here are the author’s personal beliefs and do not represent those of any former employer.
Copyright © 2017. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity. Follow me on Twitter!
Why I’m Voting Third Party
I’m going to vote for a third party candidate on November 8. I don’t think I’m alone in my decision, and I don’t think it is the wrong one. Here’s why: I’m looking past Clinton or Trump.
I am pretty sure most people considering third party candidates are/were potential Clinton voters. I’m guessing that because I don’t hear a word from the Republican side chastising me for my choice, or anyone right of center claiming a vote for a third party candidate is a de facto “vote for Clinton.”I do hear loud and clear Democrats, from Obama on down, along with independent Bernie Sanders, telling me in various ways I am wrong to vote third party, maybe naive, clearly a closet Trump supporter.
Trump, if president, will have the nuclear codes, so I will literally be responsible for Armageddon. I guess one vote does matter.
In one of the most horrible of the ten presidential elections I have been eligible to vote in, I guess one vote does matter. At least eventually, because after months of ignoring issues that matter to many now voting third party, the Democrats are down in the polls and suddenly very interested in my one vote.
I am not casting a protest vote. I am not voting for Hillary Clinton because she has not earned my vote.She has refused to substantively explain her private email server and what to anyone who has held a security clearance (as I did for 24 years) are clear violations of national security. She has refused to substantively address the tangled relationship among many State Department decisions, access to her as Secretary of State, and the Clinton Foundation. She refuses to substantively address the vast sums of money she earned from the Wall Street firms she promises to reign in. She has not explained the hypocrisy of accepting large sums of money from foreign governments in general, and in the specific how her claimed support for the rights of women and girls can coexist with millions of dollars of Foundation donations from Arab nations with some of the worst human rights records toward women.
Her core argument — none of that was illegal — ignores the more important questions of what kind of honesty, ethics, and transparency I want to vote in favor of. I believe I should judge a candidate not just on examples of past competency, but with an eye toward the core things of character, values, honesty, humility and selflessness. “I am not a crook” as a core excuse went out of style with Nixon.
I’m as cynical as the next person, but this election instead of even nominally selfless public servants who care about our country, we instead find a government, Republicans and Democrats equally, full of self-serving men and women who exist only as appetite. They see “public service” only as a stepping stone for their own advancement, either in terms of money, power, prestige, or all of the above. The most significant cause they support is themselves. They are cynical about it, openly mocking the democratic process with flip-flops, fact-free personal attacks, and shoddy fundraising.
Clinton has set up a loss scenario that involves Putin hacking our election systems to the benefit of the other candidate. And each major candidate is supported by patrons who have so, so much money already but somehow still want more.
Choosing the lesser of two evils means I am still choosing evil. That seems a limp thing to do in a democracy.I would not look forward to a Trump (or Clinton) presidency. But America having survived other dangerous and unqualified presidents in office (you pick your favorites, I have mine, the argument beyond the scope of this article), I worry more about the longer term than the medium one.
This election cycle makes clear that our system is broken. A global-record setting long primary season produced the two most disliked major party candidates in modern history. A significant number of voters see both as dishonest. The campaign since the nominating conventions has been flooded with mud slinging, literal name calling and personal attacks. Money from a very small number of Americans dominates the process.
The first debate devoted less than two minutes to climate change, no minutes to America’s longest war (15 years and more in Afghanistan), no solutions to Islamic State other than bomb more, and little specific about creating jobs, confronting racism, militarized police, and fixing the developed world’s only health care and education systems where money determines how smart/healthy you can afford to be. These are critical issues of our time and neither major party appears ready to address them.
I have heard “A vote for Hillary is a vote for Trump.” Well, let’s try “A vote for Hillary or Trump is a vote against the possibility of ever having a viable third party.”
Like many, I would prefer stronger third party candidates for 2016, and why Bernie Sanders chose not to run as an independent will be a topic of undergrad poliSci classes for many years to come.A strong showing for third party candidates will be a wake up call to both the Democratic and Republican establishments they have to deal with real desire for change, not ignore voters, or try to scare us into abandoning our conscience and principles by trading (again) short term goals for long term progress.
For those who truly support Clinton, please, vote that way. But don’t disparage the rest of us for believing we can do better, even if that road is a long. Too many have accepted, election after election, the long con of no third party.
Copyright © 2017. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity. Follow me on Twitter!
A Tale of Three Foundations: Carter, Clinton and Trump
Seen the latest front-page Jimmy Carter Center scandal? Hear about the six figure fees speaking former president Jimmy Carter pulls in from shady companies and foreign governments? An oil painting of himself he bought with charity money? Maybe not.
Take a moment to Google Jimmy Carter. Now do the same for Bill Clinton. The search results tell the tale of two former presidents, one determined to use his status honorably, the other seeking exploitation for personal benefit. And then throw in Donald Trump, who of course wants to someday be a former president. Each man has his own charitable foundation. Let’s compare them.Three charitable organizations enter, only one emerges with honor. Let’s do this!
CarterCarter’s presidency carries an uneven legacy. Yet his prescient but unwelcome 1979 warning that the country suffered a crisis of confidence, preventing Americans from uniting to solve tough problems, anticipated the faux bravado of Reagan’s “Morning in America.”
Many feel Carter has been a better ex-president than he was a president. His Carter Center focuses on impactful but unglamorous issues such as Guinea worm disease. When Carter left office, the disease afflicted 3.5 million people, mostly in Africa. Now it’s expected to be only the second disease, after smallpox, to ever be eradicated worldwide.
Carter, 90, still donates a week of his time each year to Habitat for Humanity. Not a photo-op, Carter goes out without the media in tow and hammers nails. Carter also tirelessly monitors elections in nascent democracies, lending his stature as a statesman to that work over 100 times already. Summing up his own term in office, Carter said “We never dropped a bomb. We never fired a bullet. We never went to war.”
He is the last president since 1977 who can make that claim.
ClintonBill Clinton pushed the NAFTA agreement through, seen now by many as a mistake that cost American jobs. He pointlessly bombed Iraq and sent troops into Somalia (see Blackhawk Down.) Clinton’s legacy most of all is his having an oral affair with an intern, then fibbing about it, and then ending up one of only two American presidents ever impeached as a result.
As a former president, Clinton is nothing if not true to his unstatesman-like form. Bill makes six-figure speeches to businesses seeking influence within the U.S. government, earning as much as $50 million during his wife’s term as secretary of state alone. He used a shell company to hide some of the income.
His own charity, humbly known as the Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Global Foundation, is a two billion dollar financial tangle. It spent in 2013 the same amount of money on travel expenses for Bill and his family as it did on charitable grants. Instead of volunteering for Habitat for Humanity, Bill takes his big donors on executive safaris to Africa. Many of those same donors also give generously to the Hillary Clinton campaign and its constellation of PACs.
TrumpTrump refuses to be very specific about who his charity donates to. We know its off-shoot, the Eric Trump charity, donated to a wine industry association, a plastic surgeon gifting nose jobs to kids and an artist who painted a portrait of Donald Trump. Trump-owned golf resorts received $880,000 for hosting Trump charity events.
Reports show Trump donated money from his foundation to conservative influencers ahead of his presidential bid, effectively using funds intended for charity to support his own political ambitions. The New York Attorney General ordered Donald Trump’s charity to immediately halt fundraising in the state, following reports that it had not submitted to routine audits.
Voters should judge a candidate not just on examples of past competency, but with an eye toward the core things that really matter: character, values, honesty, humility and selflessness. Perhaps this tale of two presidents and a wanna be has a lesson in it for 2016.
Copyright © 2017. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity. Follow me on Twitter!
Will the Media Reset After the Election or Are We Stuck With This Tabloid Stuff?
The venerable New York Times ran a story saying Donald Trump lies about the height of his buildings.
For no apparent reason, the Times resurrected some information from 1979 saying Trump insisted on counting the basement levels of his signature Trump Tower in the overall count of how many floors the building has. The Times compares this lie to “reports” that Trump adds an inch to his actual body height in his bio materials, and also repeated the gag line that he boasted about how long his penis is (no word on whether it is or is not actually longer than expected.)You have to wade down to paragraph 12 to learn other New York developers use the same count-the-basements levels gimmick to be able to advertise their buildings as taller. There is absolutely no news.
The RussiansHead over to Slate, which published an “investigative piece” alleging a Trump computer server was secretly communicating with a Russian bank. The story had previously been debunked by the New York Times and The Intercept, but Slate ran it as if they had uncovered the smoking gun proving Trump is under the control of the Russians.
At Mother Jones, another article alleged that an anonymous, former intelligence officer provided the FBI with information on a Russian scheme to help Trump win the presidency.
“There’s no way to tell whether the FBI has confirmed or debunked any of the allegations contained in the former spy’s memos,” the story said. “But a Russian intelligence attempt to co-opt or cultivate a presidential candidate would mark an even more serious operation than the hacking.”
One more example, from Vox, which wrote without even bothering to source it at all “There is basically conclusive evidence that Russia is interfering in the US election, and that this interference has been designed to damage Hillary Clinton’s campaign. There is strong evidence linking Trump’s foreign policy advisers to Russia, and Trump’s stated policy ideas are extremely favorable to Russian interests.”
Journalism Much?
I’ve chosen these examples because they are from publications that have in the past enjoyed decent reputations for reporting, and because these stories were run as “news,” not opinion columns, where the standards go right through the floor. Even Mother Jones, which clearly works left-of-center, used to do so with some solid journalism.
Not any more.
These places (never find fringe publications) are now working with the same standards once reserved for reporting on aliens at Roswell, Elvis sightings and the Illuminati New World Order. It is apparently now within the bounds of mainstream journalism to build a story out of, well, nothing, such as a factoid from 1979, or essentially accuse a presidential candidate of treason based on a single, anonymous source, or claim the Russians have taken over our electoral process based on no sources at all.
And Clinton…On the other side, reporting on Clinton by many of these same publications swerves between hagiography and poo-pooing away anything unfavorable. Emails? Who cares! Questions about what her accomplishments as Secretary of State really were? If you ask, you hate women. Pay-for-Play with the Clinton Foundation? Hah, everybody does it, it doesn’t matter. The standard seems to be absent a notarized receipt for a donation matching an arms sale, or a criminal conviction, nothing matters.
Next?So be it. The media has fully sh*t the bed this election. That’s where we find ourselves.
But what’s next? Will the media reset itself after November 8, or will they run President Trump is Putin’s dog stories for the full term? Will President Clinton be given a pass on, well, everything, for four years, with apologists and explainers on the front page of the Times, never mind in editorials?
At what point will the media dig themselves out of this and start real reporting again?
Copyright © 2017. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity. Follow me on Twitter!
Why It All Matters for Hillary
With the new information about the new emails that may involve Hillary Clinton, found via Clinton aide Huma Abedin’s spouse Anthony Weiner’s sexting with an underage girl (jeez, what a sentence…), let’s resolve this tonight. The emails appear to be between Hillary and Huma, which means both of them have the messages. We know Weiner did. So Huma and/or Hillary can release everything tonight and America can see for itself. No delays, no filters, just get those messages out. I offer to host them here on my blog if that helps.
Or, if Hillary and/or Huma or Weiner wants to issue a statement that 100% of the emails have nothing to do with her business, and have no classified whatsoever in them, then that’ll be fine also. Close the door on this before bed time.
Occam’s Razor, simplest answer is best. And if that does not happen, why not?
The arguments of “everybody does it” and “well, it wasn’t illegal” in regards to the email server, the Clinton Foundation, pay-for-play, donor access, dirty tricks against Sanders, the many well-timed coincidences of Trump revelations, and more, are strawman logic.
Leaving aside the idea that people usually say “everybody does it” and “well, it wasn’t illegal” only when their own candidate gets caught doing something, what was done matters.
It really does.
Everyone in the world knew from the day she dropped out in 2008 with Secretary of State as a consolation prize that Hillary Clinton was running for president in 2016. Simply because she played coy is a very weak place to make a stand that her’s and Bill’s actions up to the official announcement of her candidacy didn’t matter from that day forward.The reason this all matters is that Hillary will be president, and Bill will be arguably the second most powerful person in the United States (please don’t try and argue that a popular ex-President back in the White House will just be arm candy.) That there exists even the appearance that the president of the United States and Bill are for sale is to the detriment of the United States. Many of the world’s governments are corrupt, and people seeing the same in America puts us in league with Nigeria or Pakistan, not other First World democracies.
We can hide behind the semantics that donations to a self-named foundation, and excessive fees for speeches, are not bribes. We can pretend that nations like Saudi Arabia, which thrive on some of the worst records for women’s rights and treatment of LGBTQ people, donate millions of dollars to an organization like the Clinton Foundation which promotes women’s rights and better treatment of LGBTQ people, simply because it’s the right thing to do.
Sure.
To expose to the world even the appearance of such impropriety is a disgrace. The president has as one of her roles setting the example for the federal workforce. Is the example that as long as it skirts the edge of legality it is fine behavior? If I was a contracts officer in the Social Security Administration and allowed a vendor to donate crazy amounts of money to my spouse’s non-profit as I was considering a contract award, would that too be OK?What about if I was paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to make a speech to that organization? What if I would not let anyone know what I said? All OK? Does everyone really do that?
We can imagine Bill Clinton having a private meeting with the Attorney General just days before her agency exonerates Hillary Clinton is OK. We can pretend the State Department slow-walking the release of Clinton emails is keeping within the spirit of the Freedom of Information Act. We can pretend Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe, a longtime ally of Bill and Hillary Clinton, gave nearly $500,000 to the election campaign of the wife of an FBI official who later became involved in the investigation into Clinton’s email use because he simply supported her candidacy.It is also OK for the federal government to prosecute one U.S. Army private for documents found on Wikileaks while claiming there is no evidence that the documents about Hillary Clinton now on Wikileaks are authentic or unaltered. We can pretend the Russian intelligence services hacked John Podesta’s email to rig the election while saying those same services did not touch Hillary Clinton email server?
And do you really, really believe this is all a right-wing conspiracy, and that it has been, continuously, since the Clinton’s entered public life decades ago? That is an ingenious plot by Putin? That it is all driven by misogyny?
It all matters. It matters who we put into the White House because if you think all of this will cease just because Inauguration Day comes around, you really are a foolish. Hell, you’ll believe anything.
Copyright © 2017. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity. Follow me on Twitter!
A Government is Seizing Control of Our Election Process, and It Is Not the Russians
There is an attempt underway for a government to take control of our election process and throw the election to Hillary Clinton. It is not the Russian government. Mark this day — it is when we came to understand that the American government decided to elect a president.
(Note: I understand in the minds of the mass media the most important issue in America today is Trump’s crude remarks, but there are indeed real things to be concerned about otherwise.)Here’s how:
— Two days before the second presidential debate, the government of the United States officially accused Russia of a hacking campaign aimed at interfering in the U.S. election. In a joint statement, absent any specifics or technical details, the Department of Homeland Security and the Director of National Intelligence stated “the recent [hacked email] disclosures… are consistent with the methods and motivations of Russian-directed efforts… based on the scope and sensitivity of these efforts, only Russia’s senior-most officials could have authorized these activities.”
— The statement goes on to detail how only Democratic servers were attacked, meaning the American government is claiming that Russia is trying to throw the election to Donald Trump, plain and simple. It is left unsaid why the Russians would risk cyberwar with the United States to do this, as many have suggested Trump is a neocon in spirit whose loose finger will be on the nuclear button from day one. Clinton is much more of a political realist, comfortable with the business-as-usual of the past eight years that has gone in Russia’s favor in the Ukraine and Syria. She in fact seems like the stable known known, always a preference.
— Though the first “Russian” hacks were reported in July, it is only 48 hours before the second presidential debate that the statement was released. It could easily have been held until Monday, there is no national security urgency for this to come out Friday. However, with the timing, Trump, essentially tied with Clinton in the polls, will now spend much of the debate defending himself. Since the statement includes no details, only accusations, it is hard to see how anyone could defend themselves. It would be near-impossible for Trump to come out ahead Sunday night; this is a near-coup.
— Despite the certainty with which the U.S. government has accused Russia of trying to influence the election by hacking into secured email servers, the FBI maintains there is no evidence the Russians or anyone else accessed Clinton unsecured, unencrypted email server laden with actual classified materials, including during Clinton’s first trip to Moscow when she sent and received encrypted email over the Internet and WiFi.
— In the first presidential debate, Hillary Clinton broadly speculated that Donald Trump had paid no taxes. Days later, several pages of Trump’s tax returns, documents that had been sought unsuccessfully by the media for over a year, arrive at the New York Times, who front pages a story. In the Vice Presidential debate which followed, Trump’s running mate spent time on the defensive defending his boss’ deductions.— Clinton sent and received classified material on an unsecured, classified server. That violated the most basic rule of information security. She lied about it. She deleted emails and “lost” both the majority of her devices and many, many emails. The FBI and the Department of Justice, ahead of the Democratic nominating convention, found she violated no law. The Department of Justice granted broad immunity to key Clinton staffers, and allowed two of them to destroy their devices. No further investigation will thus be possible.
— The State Department aided and abetted Clinton for over four years in hiding her private server, and avoiding her responsibilities under the Freedom of Information Act and the Federal Records Act. Only under court order has the Department stopped slow-walking its “review” process to release emails publically. There has been no investigation.
— Emails released show a tangle of interests among State Department decisions, the Clinton Foundation and access to Hillary as Secretary of State (“pay for play”). Clinton sought Pentagon and State Department contracts for Chelsea’s friend. There has been no investigation.
— The State Department and White House coordinated to “crush” Clinton’s email coverage.
If you can add it up any other way than direct interference by the White House, the State Department, the Department of Justice, the FBI and the intelligence community, it would be interesting to hear how that works. The comments are open to make a benign case for these actions.
Copyright © 2017. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity. Follow me on Twitter!
It’s Personal Now: Apologizing to My Daughter for the Last 15 Years of War
I recently sent my last kid off for her senior year of college. There are rituals to these things, and because dad-confessions are not among them, I just carried the boxes and kept quiet.But what I really wanted to say to her — rather than see you later, call this weekend, do you need money? — was: I’m sorry.
Like all parents in these situations, I was thinking about her future. And like all of America, in that future she won’t be able to escape what is now encompassed by the word “terrorism.”
Everything is OK, But You Should Be TerrifiedTerrorism is a nearly nonexistent danger for Americans. We have more of a chance of being hit by lightning, though fear doesn’t work that way. There’s no 24/7 coverage of global lightning strikes or “see something, say something” signs that warn about reporting thunderstorms. I felt no need to apologize for lightning.
But terrorism? I really wanted to tell my daughter just how sorry I was she would have to live in what 9/11 transformed into the most frightened country on Earth.
Want the numbers? Some 40 percent of Americans believe the country is more vulnerable to terrorism than it was in 2001, the highest percentage ever.
Want the apocalyptic jab in the gut? Army Chief of Staff General Mark Milley said earlier this month the threat has not lessened. “Those people, those enemies, those members of that terrorist group, still intend – as they did on 9/11 – to destroy your freedoms, to kill you, kill your families, they still intend to destroy the United States of America.”
All that fear turned us into an engine of chaos abroad, while consuming our freedoms at home. And it saddens me that there was a pre-9/11world her generation and all those who follow her will never know.
Growing UpMy kids grew up overseas while, from 1988 to 2012, I served with the State Department. For the first part of my career as a diplomat, wars were still discreet matters. For example, though Austria was a neighbor of Slovenia, few there worried the Balkan conflicts of the 1990s would spill across the border. Suicide bombers didn’t threaten Vienna when we visited as tourists in 1991. That a war could again consume large parts of the world and involve multiple nations would have seemed as remote to us vacationers that year as the moon.
Even the big war of the era, Desert Storm in 1991, seemed remarkably far away. My family and I were assigned in Taiwan at the time, and life there simply went on. There was no connection between us and what was happening in the sand far away, and certainly we didn’t worry about a terror attack.
It’s easy to forget how long ago all that was. Much of the Balkans is now a tourist destination, and a young soldier who fought in Desert Storm would be in his mid-forties today. Or think of it this way: either Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump entering the Oval Office next January will be the fifth president in succession to bomb Iraq.
On September 11, 2001, I was assigned to Japan, and like everyone, as part of a collective trauma, watched the terrible events on TV. Due to the time difference, it was late at night in Tokyo. As the second plane hit the World Trade Center, I made sandwiches, suspecting the phone would ring and I’d be called to the embassy for a long shift. I remember my wife saying, “Why would they call you in? We’re in Tokyo!” Then, of course, the phone did ring, and I remember running to grab it not out of national security urgency, but so it didn’t wake my kids.
My daughter’s birthday falls on the very day that George W. Bush launched the invasion of Iraq. I missed her celebration in 2003 to stay at work preparing for the embassy to be overrun by al-Qaeda. I missed her birthday again in 2005, having been sent on temporary duty to Thailand to assist the U.S. Navy in setting up a short-term base facility there. When the naval officers mentioned the location they wanted to use to the Thai military liaison accompanying us, he laughed. That’s taken, he said, but you didn’t hear it from me, better ask your own people about it.
Later, I would learn the location was a CIA black site where the country I then represented was torturing human beings.
Looking back, it’s remarkable to realize that, in response to a single day of terror, Washington set the Middle East ablaze, turned air travel into a form of bondage play, and did away with the best of our democracy.
Nothing required the Patriot Act, Guantánamo, renditions, drone assassinations, and the National Security Agency turning its spy tools inward. The White House kept many of the nastiest details from us, but made no secret of its broader goals. Americans on the whole supported each step, and Washington then protected the men and women who carried out each of the grim acts it had inspired. After all, they were just following orders.
Protocols now exist allowing the president to select American citizens, without a whit of due process, for drone killing. Only overseas, he says, but you can almost see the fingers crossed behind his back. Wouldn’t an awful lot of well-meaning Americans have supported an aerial drone killing in San Bernardino, or at the Pulse club in Orlando? Didn’t many support using a robot to blow up a suspect in Dallas?
Back in the HomelandThe varieties of post-9/11 fear sneak up on us all. I spent a week this summer obsessively watching the news for any sign of trouble in Egypt while my daughter traveled there to visit some old embassy acquaintances. She had to risk her life to see a high school friend in a country once overrun with tourists.
So, I want to say sorry to my daughter and her friends for all the countries where we Americans, with our awkward shorts and sandals, used to be at least tolerated, but are now dangerous for us to visit. Sorry that you’ll never see the ruins of Babylon or the Great Mosque of Samarra in Iraq unless you join the military.
Arriving back in the U.S., my daughter called from the airport to say she’d be home in about an hour. I didn’t mention my worries that she’d be stopped at “the border,” a new name for baggage claim, or have her cell phone confiscated for having traveled to the Middle East. She was, in fact, asked by an immigration agent her purpose in going there, something that even the Egyptians hadn’t bothered to question her about. We don’t yet say “papers, please,” but we do refer to America as the Homeland.
I also wanted to apologize to my daughter because she will never really know what privacy is in our new surveillance world. I needed to ask her forgiveness for how easily we let that happen, for all those who walk around muttering they have nothing to hide, so what’s to worry about. I wanted to tell her how sorry I was that she’s now afraid of the police, not just for herself but especially for her friends of color. I wanted to tell her how badly I felt that she’d only know a version of law enforcement so militarized that, taking its cues from the national security state, views us all as potential enemies and so believes that much of its job involves repressing our most basic rights.
I’m sorry, I want to say to her, that protesting Americans can be confined in something called a “free speech zone” surrounded by those same police. I want to tell my daughter the Founders would rise in righteous anger at the idea of the police forcing citizens into such zones outside a political convention. And that most journalists don’t consider such a development to be a major story of our times.
As I sent her off to college, I wanted to say how sorry I was that we had messed up the world, sorry we not only didn’t defeat the terrorists the way Grandpa did the Nazis but, by our actions, gave their cause new life and endless new recruits. Al-Qaeda set a trap on 9/11 and we fell into it. The prison American occupiers set up at Camp Bucca in Iraq became a factory for making jihadis, and the torture chambers at Abu Ghraib remain, like Guantánamo, an infomercial inviting others to pick up a weapon.
The New NormalMy daughter is not naïve. Like most of her classmates, she is aware of most of these things, but she has no point of comparison. What fish truly sees the water around it? And it’ll be even harder for her kids to try and do so. Her adult life has been marked by constant war, so much so that “defeating the terrorists” is little more than a set phrase she rolls her eyes at. It’s a generational thing that is too damn normal, like Depression-era kids still saving aluminum foil and paper bags in the basement after decades of prosperity.
I’m truly sorry that her generation copes with this by bouncing between cynicism and the suspension of disbelief. That allows many to accept the idea that invading Iraq was a reasonable response to an attack on America by a group of Saudis funded by Saudi “charity donations.” And by now, “well, it wasn’t actually a crime” is little short of a campaign slogan for acts that couldn’t be more criminal. That’s a world on a path to accepting 2+2 can indeed equal 5 if our leaders tell us it’s true.
We allow those leaders to claim the thousands of American troops now stationed in Iraq are somehow not “boots on the ground,” or in the newest phraseology, “ground troops.” Drone strikes, we’re told, are surgical, killing only bad guys with magic missiles, and never on purpose hitting civilians, hospitals, children, or wedding parties. The deaths of human beings in such situations are always rare and accidental, the equivalent of those scratches on the car door from that errant shopping cart in the mall parking lot.
Cleaning Up After Her DadIf anyone is going to fix this mess — I want to tell my daughter — it’s going to have to be you. And, I want to add, you’ve got to do a better job than I did, if, that is, you really want to find a way to say thanks to me for the skating lessons, the puppy, and for me not being too mad when you almost violated curfew to spend more time with that boy.
After the last cardboard boxes had been lugged up the stairs, I held back my tears until the very end. Hugging my daughter, I felt I wasn’t where I was standing but in a hundred other places; I wasn’t consoling a smart, proud, twenty-something woman apprehensive about senior year, but an elementary school student going to bed on the night that would forever be known only as 9/11.
Back home, the house is empty and quiet. Outside, the leaves have just a hint of yellow. At lunch, I had some late-season strawberries nearly sweet enough to confirm the existence of a higher power. I’m gonna really miss this summer.
I know I’m not the first parent to grow reflective watching his last child walk out the door. But I have a sense of what’s ahead of her. Fear is a terrible thing to be sorry for. And that can be scary.
(Photo is for illustration only; it is not my daughter)
Copyright © 2017. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity. Follow me on Twitter!
Help Me Choose a Nominee for the Hugh Hefner First Amendment Award
The Hugh M. Hefner First Amendment Awards were established in 1979 to honor individuals who have made significant contributions to protect the First Amendment rights of Americans. They are looking for nominees for this year’s awards, and I’d like to send them a name.Who should it be?
Nominees traditionally come from the fields of journalism, arts and entertainment, education, publishing, and law and government. They are honored at a reception at the Playboy Mansion, and receive $5,000 to continue their work. Readers here know some of the past awardees: Whistleblowers Thomas Drake, Morris Davis, Norman Lear, Michael Moore, Bill Maher — the whole list back to 1980 is here.
I suspect Edward Snowden and those connected to him as journalists and lawyers will already have a long line of people ready to nominate them. Any would be people who deserve the honor. But let’s put our heads together and see if we can come up with someone not so much in the public eye, someone working for our rights who could really use the attention that even being nominated will bring.
Ideas? Put them in the comments. If the person is not well-known, a link would be helpful.
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Florida Forces Students Without Parent Note To Stand During Pledge, National Anthem
Florida’s Orange County Public Schools announced this week students must have parental permission if they want to kneel during the national anthem at football games or otherwise silently protest, such as refusing the say the pledge of allegiance.The move comes after students in a single school district knelt in solidarity with 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick’s protest against social injustice in America.
Exercising First Amendment rights in Florida now requires parental permission.
As Unconstitutional as They ComeThe school announcement is so wholly unconstitutional as to be laughable, except that it is Florida, the state immune from reality.
Previous decisions in the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals already found the portion of Florida law requiring students to “stand at attention” during the anthem violates the First Amendment. The Supreme Court has long upheld not participating in the pledge, or remaining seating during the anthem, is protected speech under the First Amendment.
West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette, 319 U.S. 624 (1943), was the courageous wartime decision by the Supreme Court holding that the Free Speech Clause of the First Amendment protected students from being forced to salute the American flag and say the pledge of allegiance in school. The Court stated constitutional rights are to be “beyond the reach of majorities and officials.” It held that the state did not have the power to compel speech for anyone.
Barnette overruled a 1940 decision on the same issue, Minersville School District v. Gobitis, which said dissent was to try to change a school policy democratically — i.e., through the same system that imposed the restraints being challenged.
The Court has also upheld that the Bill of Rights applies to students in Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District (1969).
Florida, 2016
Officials claim they are following a state law regarding the pledge of allegiance that requires participation in patriotic gestures (they are of course following the exact law the 11th Circuit has ruled unconstitutional, which makes it not really a law anymore, but whatever, Florida uber alles.)
And so in sweaty Collier County one principal is telling students that they’ll be sent home if they don’t stand during the anthem at sporting events.
“You will stand and you will stay quiet,” Lely High School Principal Ryan Nemeth announced. “If you don’t, you are going to be sent home and you’re not going to have a refund of your ticket price.”
Ouch! No refund of the ticket price for you, commie ISIS terrorist students, unless you have a note from home.
I want to read about the first student, who, when asked for his note giving him permission to remain seated during the pledge, hands over a copy of the Bill of Rights and says f*ck you, Florida.
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