PUNDITALIA '24 Political Outlook

Since 2008 I have been offering thoughts and recommendations on US elections, especially in presidential race years, on my website punditalia.net. These earlier editions can be seen with the links below. 

2008 – I made 41 numbered proposals, most of which were not implemented. 

2012 – I pared down policy recommendations to a more sharp and forceful 17. 

2016 – dealt largely with Obama’s failed trade policies. 

2020 – Noted the centrality of climate change and our passage from democracy to oligarchy. 

 

In 2024 the US is facing the collapse of its status as the world’s unitary superpower just as the reach of its empire has extended further than any other in human history. It now faces a presidential election, in which the US public will be the loser no matter the outcome, between an incumbent president and a former president. Both are old, unpopular and mostly incoherent in their speech. They performed in what was billed as the first of two presidential debates, in which Biden set the rules and the dates. Neither of these presumed advantages helped him. The shutting down of the opponent’s microphone while one candidate was speaking kept Trump from interrupting in the manner of an adolescent brat, as he had appeared in their debates four years earlier. 

The consensus of pundits and insiders across the political spectrum was that Biden performed very badly, exposing his diminished mental state, while Trump was more vigorous and self-confident, the same bold liar and braggart that we’d come to know during his first term. The type of damage that either man could inflict on the country over the next term can be predicted on what each has already done over his four years. 

Another clue to the future lies in the contrast between the cabinets they’ve appointed in the first go around. Trump’s picks had the air of the division of spoils that a top Mafia boss might dole out. All were picked to downgrade or destroy the agency they were picked to run. 

Louis De Joy, a commercial delivery service executive, was made Postmaster General to run the US Postal Service into the ground and he has succeeded rather well. The fact that he still holds that job can be seen as one of Biden’s domestic failings. 

Mitch McConnell’s wife Elaine Chao, whose family runs a Chinese shipping company, was appointed Secretary of Transportation. 

Betsy De Vos, the sister of Erik Prince, the founder of Blackwater USA, the serially renamed private military contractor, which sought to replace citizen soldiers with mercenaries, was brought in to destroy or at least diminish the public school system and replace public schools with private schools run for profit. 

The post of Attorney General went to Jeff Sessions, an Alabama law and order advocate. He was ousted when he failed to support some of Trump’s more egregious floutings of the law. 

Rick Perry, an ex-Senator from Texas who had spoken of abolishing the Energy Department, was put in charge of the Department of Energy. 

Nikki Haley, the rather non-diplomatic ex-Governor of South Carolina, was named Ambassador to the UN to stir up anti-US sentiment there. 

Scott Pruitt, a lawyer with close ties to the fossil fuel industry, was named Head of the Environmental Protection Agency to take the bite out of its rules and regulations. 

Mike Pompeo, a Kansas Representative with a military background and a Cold War mentality, was named Director of the CIA despite, or perhaps because, of his intention to pursue information on Russian interference in US elections. While in office he shocked colleagues by suggesting the kidnapping and/or murder of Julian Assange. He was subsequently made Secretary of State. 

Tom Price from Georgia, a leading opponent of the Affordable Care Act (better known as Obama Care) was put in charge of Health and Human Services. 

Carl Icahn, a billionaire corporate raider, was made special advisor to eliminate business regulations. 

Rex Tillerson, the retired Chairman of ExxonMobil was made Secretary of State. 

Steven Mnuchin, another billionaire with a shady history of off-shore tax havens for himself, was named Secretary of the Treasury. 

The post of Secretary of Defense was assigned to retired General James Mattis, affectionately nicknamed Mad Dog Mattis. 

Montana’s Ryan Zinke, a former Navy Seal, was appointed Secretary of the Interior to oversee public land development, coal, oil and gas exploration, and policies affecting solar and wind generated power. 

Sonny Perdue, ex-Governor of Georgia where his family was a major player in industrial agriculture, was made Secretary of Agriculture. 

Wilber Ross, a pluri-billionaire and new Secretary of Commerce, said the US must free itself from bad trade agreements, while not addressing the question of bad for whom. His task may have been grounded in the idea that they were not bad enough to benefit him. 

Steve Bannon, media executive currently serving a four month prison sentence for contempt of Congress after defying a subpoena relating to his role in the January 6, 2021 Capitol insurrection, was named Chief Strategist. He currently holds no government post and may not in a future Trump Administration, even though he is popular with the MAGA people, since he is radically more anti-government than Trump. He is an efficient agent for his goals, more than most on this list whose ideological goals tend to take a back seat to dreams of personal enrichment, much like Donald Trump himself, who may not have any ideological goals at all. 

 The list goes on and on, but it consistently elevated people seeking to eliminate the functions of government, especially oversight and regulations established to protect the country from a lawless reign of oligarchs, and the list doesn’t get any better with those I’ve omitted. It looks like a WANTED list posted on a post office wall. Many of these people were fired for not being bad enough and others just quit, notably Rex Tillerson, because working with such a bunch of imbeciles, especially Trump, was just too much for him to bear. 

Joe Biden was crowned the 2020 Democratic candidate by the Neo-Con establishment, including the DNC, the Neo-Con media, nominally affiliated oligarchs and their various foundations, and perhaps most of all, by AIPAC, the Israeli interests group which after all these years of controlling US foreign policy, is still not registered under FARA, the Foreign Agents Registration Act. His elevation to the candidacy and his successful dethroning of Trump brought sighs of relief and hopes for a breath of fresh air after the gang of thugs cited had stunk up official Washington with levels of nepotism and corruption that made the Harding Administration look like it had been run by Snow White. On the domestic front, Biden’s appointees attracted little negative attention and coped reasonably well with the many unusual problems brought on by the pandemic, the huge deficit created by the massive Trump tax cuts, and the out of control military budget approved by an unusually bi-partisan Congress. 

It was only when reading down to the Biden appointments in the State Department and some of the vast departments of Defense and Homeland Security that I was enveloped in a dark cloud of gloom. 

The State Department was straight out of PNAC, that stealth cabal of Neo-Con-Lib crusaders organized in the 90’s to empower the USA as the world’ s solitary superpower to rule the world, under a regime of a rules-based order with rules made by the US and enforced by its powerful international economic institutions, such as the IMF and the World Bank, and by its vast military establishment, backed up by NATO countries and others willing to commit to vassal status. 

It was the wet dream of all previous world conquerors/saviors from Genghis Kahn and the Roman Caesars to Napoleon, Stalin and Hitler who, with absolute power, could unify and improve the civilization with their ideas and policies. 

The State Department was to be run by Secretary of State Antony Blinken, assisted by the ever-present coup maker Victoria Nuland, wife of Robert Kagan, co-founder of PNAC, with Jake Sullivan as National Security Advisor. While none of them had the luxury of excusing their lame, out-of-touch and absurd statements on the impairment that comes with age, as their boss could, they have continued the barrage of such pronouncements, although sometimes the administration relies on John Kirby, a man who appears to be immune to shame or embarrassment. 

Despite the shocking success of the Neo-Cons in reducing both the EU and the UK to vassal status, in the Biden years they may have bitten off more than they can chew. They got the war with Russia that they wanted, using Ukrainians as cannon fodder and, to the delight of Lindsey Graham and others of his ilk, killing off a lot of Russians. Overconfidence has played a big part in the debacle but as deindustrialization has spread through the western world and NATO is running out of ammunition for a long war, Russia, originally incredulous at the US belligerence, has upped its military production in response and is now involved in organizing the larger and poorer nations of the world into trade agreements not using the dollar. As the administration had barely gotten started with its proxy war in Europe, it started planning the coming war with China, which despite its remarkable economic and industrial success, had made no military moves outside its own confines. 

All of that would have marked the Biden Administration as a catastrophic failure but Israel has now put the cherry on the cake. US imperialism has been shrugged off by most of the American public as a non-issue, as well as by its vassal states, but now that the US Government is funding, supplying and coordinating a highly visible genocide carried out by the Israeli government, just how long can this go on? The bi-partisan US Congress has voted overwhelmingly to support the genocide. There may have been a few dissenting comments, but the funding continues unabated. 

The UK and the EU continue to follow the US position. The French Vichy Government deported more than 72,000 Jews to their death during WWII. That has been a source of embarrassment in France ever since. The EU is now supporting the elimination of more than 2,200,000 Palestinians in Gaza. 

How can the US Congress continue to act like the enabling German Parliament of the 1940’s? Jamaal Bowman, a black progressive incumbent Congressman from the Bronx, had the temerity to publicly criticize Israel for its policy of oppression and to speak out against our involvement in the genocide. AIPAC spent $15 million to defeat him in the most expensive Democratic primary ever and they succeeded in having him lose to an Israeli loyalist. 

That’s the situation in July folks. Three years ago I predicted that neither Trump nor Biden would be standing for election in 2024. My predictions are sometimes influenced by wishful thinking, and here, my wishes are shared by the majority of the American public. While this prediction may now seem doomed, hope is the last to die. Trump may be in prison by November. While hard-core MAGA people will vote for him anyway, a number of traditional Republicans, unless they are more afraid of what Biden and his tone-deaf minions might wreak, would be happy to see Trump off the ticket. I suspect that the backlash against a convicted felon might prevent his election, especially against anyone but Biden. Most Democratic pundits and politicians are distraught about Biden’s collapsing chances and agonizing over how to effect his replacement without looking bad. 

In August the Democratic National Convention will convene in Chicago, where in 1964 there was another controversial convention with significant violence and police brutality. While we all hope that the violence will not get out of hand, I do wish that literally millions of people will be in the streets of Chicago to protest the on-going war-mongering, war profiteering and genocide by the current administration, and to demand an open convention to select a rational and decent candidate. 

Demonstrators can practice up in Washington DC on July 24th when Bibi Netanyahu will speak to the joint Houses of Congress. At his last pre-election speech to Congress in 2020, he received a large number of standing ovations and some of the more perverse GOP leaders have pledged that his earlier record will be broken. Good luck America! 

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Many good writers now contribute to Substack. I too write on Substack and welcome future subscribers. 

For those of you who lean toward supporting Trump, I recommend that you read the work of: 

Robert Reich- objective and rational critic of Trump 

Jim Hightower- a lighter touch but on target 

Thom Hartmann- a highly partisan but accurate critic of Trump. 

 Michael Moore- a rare democratic Democrat

 For those of you who drink the Neo-Con Kool-Aid and support the Biden Administration as a lesser evil, please read: 

Professor John Mearsheimer - a realist point of view

Professor Jeffrey Sachs - 

Scott Ritter - from a military perspective

Caitlin Johnson - a conscience for those in need of one

Joe Brumoli (Euro Yankee)

Shame

Most of us have felt it at some point in our lives, despite an unstinting effort to eliminate it over most of the last century. Shame appears to be a cousin of guilt, which psychoanalysis has sought to seek and destroy, but guilt differs in its associations with legal and judicial issues. A judge may declare you to be guilty, for which you may feel shame, or you may not, but shame essentially comes from within. 

Religious and political institutions have tried to instill the concept of shame to keep the populace in line with the prevailing notions of desirable behavior. The political institutions tend to favor the concept of guilt, along with fear, since they have a whole judicial system, backed up by police and prisons, to channel behavior as needed. Their arsenal has been expanded lately by the internet, with its surveillance apps and social media, as well as by the emergence of new organizations created to combat “misinformation” and “disinformation”. Lacking most of these tools, our religious institutions, which disproportionately focus their efforts to shape human behavior on matters related to sex, usually try to have their members internalize their precepts. 

Remorse, whether genuine or staged, can be useful in sentencing hearings, even if it carries little weight during trials. Shame is real, which means it cannot be called up for effect, but neither can it be easily dismissed once it has made its presence felt. 

Besides personally feeling regret and embarrassment with our own foul deeds, we do encourage feelings of shame in others, certainly more often than in ourselves, and we lament its absence wherever we think it should be. Thus, we are familiar with hearing “shame on her!”, currently out of fashion, and “shame on him!”, now more popular than ever in regard to men’s treatment of women but rarely heard any more regarding other areas of comportment. 

The most forceful public assertion of shame that I can recall was when Special Counsel Joseph Welch turned to Senator Joseph McCarthy on June 9th, 1954, and said “Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last”? The unspoken answer was clearly “no” and that marked the beginning of the end of McCarthy’s vicious career of destroying other people’s lives through lies, slander and innuendo. Shortly after this, he was investigated, censured by the Senate, and left to die in disgrace. It also marked the last time that shame played a major role in American public life. Full immunity to shame has been developed over the subsequent seven decades and has opened the way to breathtakingly new behavioral extremes by the two entrenched contenders for the presidency in 2024, both cheered on by young acolytes who, as members of the Enron generation, have no need to develop an immunity to shame, a concept to which they’ve never been introduced. 

The last time I’ve seen a poll on the upcoming USA election, 77% of US voters wanted neither available option. Is that a sign that a majority of Americans still have a conscience, or is it just that they realize they’re being toyed with by the bi-partisan oligarchy? 

Men behaving badly toward women is not a new phenomenon but political “leaders” publicly bragging about it is something of a novelty, as is stealing from charities set up to assist children with cancer. And now we scheme to get countries to fight wars with other countries we openly admit we want to weaken and overthrow. Machiavelli might have approved and Hitler certainly would, but who would have imagined that this would be the policy of the unitary superpower, the upholder of the rules-based order? 

As we’ve removed shame from its role in shaping our actions, we’ve tried to replace it by assigning the role of “friend” to countries, much as we’ve assigned the role of “person” to corporations. Saudi Arabia is a rich friend so when its Crown Prince decided to carve up a US-based Saudi journalist into small disposable packages in its Turkish consulate, the event was treated by both recent presidents as just an erratic episode among friends. Then, when Israel, another friend, but more a member of the family than a friend, opted to try out genocide to deal with neighbors it wasn’t getting along with, we declared our unconditional support, much as we might with a close friend, whose drug-addled son has just gone on a rampage, shooting several classmates and by-standers. “How can we help poor young Hannibal? Do you need a loan to get the therapy he needs, or a good lawyer?” Friendship is a beautiful thing, but it has its limits. President Trump taught us something of those limits. President Biden has pushed the envelope even further. The total lack of shame in both men is, well, shameful. 

For eighty years we’ve wondered how all those good Germans could have lived with the mass exterminations of a chosen people in their midst. This year’s chosen exterminees aren’t really in our midst but they are ever so much more visible in their agony than any previous victims of mass extermination efforts. So now we know. This time it’s us, whether we’re Americans, Europeans or Israelis, or anyone else sending the butcher tools. Those weird pronoun people weren’t all wrong after all. Pronouns can be important. It’s no longer they or them. Right now, it’s us and we, and there’s no relief in sight.

A Solution for Gaza

 

Most people we know, personally or through their writing, live with apprehension over how the rest of 2024 will play out. They seem to harbor more fear of what a second Trump Presidency might bring than horror at what we are witnessing right now. President Biden has been anointed by establishment Democrats with the title of last best hope to save democracy but as the year moves along he keeps digging himself ever deeper into a hole. His bold plan to incite a proxy war war with Russia to weaken and overthrow that large country’s government has not worked out as intended and now, as Israel has taken control of US foreign policy, things are looking bad for American interests and for its good name. By being sucked in to aid the final solution to Israel’s Palestinian problem, the president has made us all collaborators in genocide. 

Many DNC establishment columnists have managed to write glowing reports on the economy while ignoring the death and destruction that are spreading the perception that rather than being the savior of the rules-based order, the US has become a rogue state and the world’s largest agent of state terrorism. The Democratic Party is more likely to promote some democratic concepts than its rival, the Republican Party, now completely dedicated to a selective libertarianism marching in the direction of a Neo-feudal society. The current situation will not be corrected without strong measures, a few of which I will propose. 

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) was formed to provide collective defense against Soviet aggression. With the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, NATO had honorably completed its mission and should have been dissolved but, as with all well-financed organizations, it is easier to search for a new mission than to liquidate all the high-ranking directors in its employ. Thus, NATO was transformed into a large international agent of US imperialism. In the past three decades, to my knowledge, NATO has never intervened militarily to defend any of its member states. Who would they be defending them from? However, over that period, when the US has developed an antipathy toward another nation, after imposing illegal sanctions which often don’t produce the desired effect, it has invoked NATO to launch an attack on the offending country with the goal of overthrowing the government and replacing it with a new Neo-con compliant regime. Of course the CIA has been the silent partner in these operations. The military actions have been conducted under the concept of “shock and awe” and have typically been effective, if a bit extreme. The second phases of establishing dependable puppet regimes have usually been less successful. The pattern has been repeated in Serbia, Iraq, Libya and more of Latin America than we can keep track of. 

Now that Israel has turned itself into the world’s principal pariah nation, repeating the war crimes that we saw eighty years ago and thought that we would never see again, it is time to put our strengths to work. We could halt the genocide in Gaza immediately by simply cutting off all all financial and military aid to Israel, but that would provide no acceptable solution for the future. Therefore, while it may seem distasteful to some of the more successfully indoctrinated subjects of the US and its NATO colonies, should the American president simply declare Israel to be in violation of the US rules-based order and direct NATO to bring “shock and awe” to Tel Aviv, the overthrow of the government could be achieved in a few days, or possibly minutes. A Nurimberg-style war crimes tribunal could be set up to deal with the worst of the Netanyahu cabinet and a new and more humane government could be installed. Israel has made it clear, to all those not willfully deaf and blind, that it has no intention of accepting a two state solution for Palestine, so it will be up to NATO to expel the illegal settlers from the occupied territories and secure the borders as defined in 1948.

The NATO forces will then have to maintain security at those borders for decades to come. If NATO must continue its existence to keep the American economy rolling, it would be far better to have it engaged in a long-term peace keeping mission rather than preparing to act out Lindsey Graham’s nightmarish fantasies of wiping off the planet those nations he just knows are working in the service of the Devil. In addition, a two or three mile wide neutral buffer strip could be created outside the long Gaza border which would house both the NATO peacekeeping forces and a new airport serving both the Israeli and Palestinian communities. It would give them an opportunity to try working together. 

The US has proved successful at bending other small countries to its will, sometimes in clear conflict with their own interests. Israel is a very small country. President Biden has changed course many times in his long political career. He faces ignominious defeat at the hands of a self-admitted tyrant in November. With a few bold strokes as outlined above, he could emerge as the man who created lasting peace in the Middle East and initiated an era of good relations with all the countries of the area. Israel might be the greatest beneficiary of all since its very survival as a nation would be secured. There will be long and loud shrieks of protest coming from Zionists everywhere and in its death throes, AIPAC may lash out to derail the president’s initiatives, but with one more simple act, i.e., the dropping of all charges against Julian Assange, the President would become not only the man who brought peace to the Middle East but also the champion of a free press. At that point the president could glide into next summer’s Democratic Convention to ask the delegates to select his worthy successor and to announce that he will be leaving the White House at the end of year to spend his remaining years basking in the afterglow of his newly found place in history.

Emergency Media Reset

“The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them.”  George Orwell

Today, 7 Dec., is the two month anniversary of the Hamas uprising which killed something like 1500 people in Israel.  As of today the number of people killed in attacks of retribution has approached or surpassed the fifteen thousand mark and is rising, with predictions and Israeli government declarations suggesting that the kill rate will accelerate.  There were from 2,200,000 to 2,300,000 people living in Gaza, a strip of land about the size of the city limits of Philadelphia.  Gaza has been described as the “largest open air concentration camp in the world”.  

Virtually all the media, even those moderately sympathetic to the cause of the Palestinians, refer to the events of 7 October and its aftermath as the war between Israel and Hamas.  I tend to cling to the outmoded concept of wars being a way of nations resorting to conflict resolution through military means when diplomatic means have failed, or have never been tried.  Sometimes it’s a matter of big just rolling over small, but usually it involves two countries, nations or states. There have been any number of warring factions within larger political entities.  From 1948 Israel has existed as a nation, given that recognition by the UN with remarkable international unanimity, although the measure also accorded a Palestinian state, a solution which has never been implemented and one which the current Israeli Government will stop at nothing to prevent.

Gaza is an occupied territory.  Since 2006 it has been condoned off and fully controlled by Israel.  No ships could arrive; nobody could enter or leave without Israeli approval.  Food entering the territory was calculated to not exceed the cumulative minimum caloric levels to avoid starvation of the population.  Perhaps the Israelis hoped that the Palestinians would just become depressed and die off.  They’ve spared no effort to that end but have not succeeded so they appear to have moved on to the final solution, which meets all the international criteria for genocide. 

Our media talk about genocide often, but such talk is usually limited to the big one in Europe in the 1940’s while those in Africa don’t get much mention, just as the slaughter of the Armenians was largely forgotten by the world for a century.  This one is there for all to see, although the Israelis did shut down the internet for a while to stop live reports from getting out.  More journalists have already been killed in this two month old conflict than in all other recent US wars.  

In recent weeks, some hostages on both sides have been released.  Each has his or her own story but some Israeli women, upon release, have even expressed gratitude to their captors for their considerate treatment.  You might have missed that if your news comes from the major media, just as you may have missed the stories of Israeli troops simply blowing up buildings where Hamas was thought to be holding hostages, killing everyone inside, captors, hostages alike, in order to avoid negotiations with the enemy. Illegal settlers in the occupied West Bank have continued murdering Palestinians with impunity. 

In October Josh Paul, Director of the State Department’s Bureau of Military Affairs, resigned saying the Biden Administration’s “blind support for one side “ was leading to policy decisions that were “short-sighted, destructive, unjust and contradictory to the very values that we publicly espouse”.

Israel has been getting a lot of bad press, despite all its MSM and Congressional support, so a propaganda counteroffensive was due.  

On December 6th the New York Times published a story containing the following:

“ President Biden condemned the “unimaginable cruelty” of Hamas attackers who raped and mutilated women in Israel on Oct. 7, and he blamed the terrorist group’s refusal to release its remaining female hostages for the breakdown in cease-fire talks. Hamas has rejected the allegations. …

“Survivors and witnesses of the attacks have shared the horrific accounts of unimaginable cruelty,” Biden said. “Reports of women raped — repeatedly raped — and their bodies being mutilated while still alive — of women corpses being desecrated, Hamas terrorists inflicting as much pain and suffering on women and girls as possible and then murdering them.”

“Matt Miller, a State Department spokesman, said that “a number of people believe” that Hamas did not want to release female hostages because of the stories they would tell about how they were treated. But he said he was “not able to speak with a definitive assessment that that is the case.”

This came two months after the Hamas insurrection and as far as I know that brutal attack lasted a day or two, catching the Israelis, always known for their intelligence sophistication and expertise, unprepared.  A forty page report has emerged showing that an attack by Hamas was known a year before the attack happened, much as the 9-11 attacks in the US were known and reported by US intelligence services but ignored by President Bush.  Was Bibi following the same script?  Bush was hoping to have a war on Iraq.  He got his excuse, even if it was based on knowing lies.  Was this the Netanyahu’s chance to launch the final solution?  

I have no way to know whether or not Biden’s allegations hold any truth.  Perhaps, but we have heard lurid stories put out by the government of babies being beheaded for which there was no evidence.  There is no way to conduct a rage-driven massacre of 1500 people in a gentle humane way, any more than there is a way to humanely bomb a crowded concentration camp holding more than two million people into oblivion.

Meanwhile, the people in northern Gaza were ordered to evacuate to the southern part within 48 hours so that their homes, schools, hospitals and mosques could be destroyed and then, after many arrived, the bombing and artillery attacks started in the south.  A cease fire to exchange hostages was arranged for four days then the assault continued, despite Biden’s urging the Israelis to adhere to international law while getting on with their self-defense activities (i.e. slaughter of the Gazans).  Saturday Night Live couldn’t make this stuff up.  Well, they could, but it would never be aired.

The last time I checked, Biden’s approval rating was 27% and falling.  Economists, even some intelligent-seeming ones, are amazed by this, since while inflation has been way up, it is easing  and the stock market is making a nice recovery.  Unemployment is down as more people are taking second jobs to help with rising costs.  None of the experts even consider that the  the levels of distrust and disgust with the government are harder to quantify in their charts.  As an American who has spent very few of the past fifty years in my native country, it is hard for me to accept that the Americans I knew, who were were mostly decent people regardless of their political affiliation, have nearly all died or mutated into monsters supporting any means to world domination, even genocide if that’s what it takes, but if I look at our political representatives of both major parties, that’s more or less the way it appears.  There are occasional signs of hope such as this letter by White House staffers protesting administration policy.  May their numbers increase.

                                                                           

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Dream Scenarios

 

1.      1.    Neither Donald Trump nor Joe Biden are candidates for President in 2024.  As I write, this does appear to be a dream, but it is one shared by the majority of voters, 77% at last count, in the USA.  I’ve done a cartoon suggesting such an outcome. There are various ways this could come to pass.  One or two of the dozens of indictments of Trump might stick and Biden’s on-going imitation of Dr. Strangelove may tank his polling numbers so badly that nominally Democratic oligarchs will feel the need to pull the plug.  That would be the cue for Congressional Democrats to jump ship in a desperate effort to save their jobs.

2.      2.    Palestinians take control of Libya.  It is still too early to tell how the genocide in Gaza will work out.  It has been going on for a long time but in early October the people in the world’s largest concentration camp finally put together a major revolt.  Was the huge Israeli intelligence failure a sign of incompetence or were Bibi and company hoping for something bad enough to be an excuse for ridding themselves of the Palestinians for good? Earlier instances of Israeli military assaults on Gaza at three- or four-year intervals were flippantly referred to as “mowing the lawn”. Sometimes even lawn care specialists can get fed up and opt to nuke the whole yard with Roundup.  It is apparent that Bibi and his Defense Minister Yoev Gallant want the Gazans all dead.  They say as much, except when talking to Joe Biden or Antony Blinken, who both repeat that the Israelis are only out to get the Hamas terrorists.  It has been reported that 1500 Israelis were killed in the rebellion. The number of Palestinians killed in retaliation is by now three or four times that but given that the European role models for the genocide used a ratio of ten to one in killing people deemed collaborators in the killing of any Nazi soldier, we probably won’t see the slaughter slow down until the Palestinian death toll reaches 15,000.  There were 2,200,000 people living in Gaza.  Withholding food, water, medicines and fuel, as announced by the Minister of Defense, could kill all of them but there might be some grim regional repercussions which are hard to predict.  Suggestions come from both Israeli and American sources that the Palestinians could be relocated elsewhere, usually meaning somewhere in Egypt.  The Egyptians want no part of that.  I have a better idea.  Since NATO bombed it into the Stone Age in 2011, Libya has been a failed state, a haven for human traffickers, slave traders and warring gangs. Palestinians are a clever bunch.  If they can build in Gaza under severe sanctions, they can thrive anywhere, so the UN could relocate those of them who want to go to Libya.  It may not be their ancestral home but it does have a small population living over a sea of oil. They could probably restore the country to a functioning state and after generations of resisting Israeli attacks, they should have no trouble fighting off the French and English coming to steal the oil.

3.      3.    Donald Trump elected Speaker of the House.  This outcome may have already been derailed by the election of little-known Louisiana congressman Mike Johnson to the post after four or five previous candidates failed to garner the needed votes.  Will Johnson last?  We shall see.  He is seditious enough to gather the full support of the GOP, but such tendencies will assure a compact Democratic opposition when legislation needs to be passed. The Speaker does not have to be a member of congress if I recall correctly.  Trump has a long history of getting people to do things which are good for him while being against their own interests. That’s practically the job description of a Speaker of the House.  His respect for law, as a concept, may be even lower than that of Mitch McConnell, his respect for truth is in the range of ex-Speaker Paul Ryan, and his personal depravity no worse than that of another former speaker, Dennis Hastert. On a combination of the three traits mentioned above, Trump’s performance would seem better than those of Newt Gingrich.  While Trump is despised by a slim majority of Americans, and both feared and ridiculed by people all over the world, his political instincts have been undervalued.  He did, after all, perform two political miracles. First, he managed to outdo Hillary Clinton in her obsequious pandering to Israel, a feat unmatched in the annals of fairy tales. He followed that by winning an unwinnable election against the same Hillary Clinton, former first lady, Senator and Secretary of State, who had the support of legions of women thrilled at the prospect of seeing a woman president. Trump could probably control Republican congressmen enough to get them to vote to pass legislation, no matter how repugnant, but in troubled times it might not be worse than having no functioning legislature at all, relying on a corrupt and senile President and a Supreme Court, still unencumbered by any Code of Ethical Standards, to keep the wheels of government turning. There are some worrisome aspects to a Speaker of the House Trump, beyond the mundane political considerations of a radical GOP platform getting a boost. The Speaker of the House is third in line to the Presidency so if both the president and the Vice President were to die in office, the Speaker would become President. Only a few years ago Trump boasted that he could shoot a person in the middle of Fifth Avenue in broad daylight and his supporters would still support him. Biden already has other vulnerabilities, and the Secret Service agents may have lost their fervor to protect him after his dogs haven bitten eleven of them.  Kamala Harris would be well advised to stay away from Fifth Avenue for the next twelve months.  Trump’s felony indictments may keep him off the ballot in enough states to prevent him from being re-elected but he could have another path to the presidency.

Sweet dreams!

A Tale of Two Nations

In late August of 2023 I celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of my emigration from the USA to Italy.  Most of my grandparents or great-grandparents had made the Atlantic crossing in the opposite direction in the mid-19th Century, also seeking a better life on the other side. 

By now my views and conclusions may be viewed by younger readers as the tedious laments of a grumpy old man but I have come to appreciate my extraordinary good luck in being born in the USA just as its unexpectedly brief golden age of middle class expansion was getting up to speed.  While the US suffered a significant number of casualties in WWII, the war had little material consequences in the country other than bringing more women into the workforce and lifting the economy out of the Great Depression. For most of us growing up in the suburbs it was a relatively carefree and unrestrained life.  Having no awareness of the transient nature of life, I may not have appreciated it at the time, but we had a serene and healthy environment.  We thought that was normal, sometimes even lamenting in adolescence that it was boring,

Our good fortune extended to being able to attend good colleges and graduate schools without having wealthy families or working mothers and without incurring student debt.  The US may have been bland at that time but despite occasional heated arguments between Republicans, who ran the banks and the car dealerships, and the Democrats, who were often union members or other undesirables, there was a shared pride in citizenship and belief in “the American Dream”, a concept rooted in political freedoms and economic opportunity.

Some of us who gravitated to the Democratic side were sarcastic about the Norman Rockwell imagery and the 4th of July parades but while our tastes and preferences varied, a degree of faith in the fundamental goodness of the country was widespread.

My own appreciation of the Homeland was always a bit restrained and when I got to travel abroad, first to Mexico and later to Europe, it was seriously compromised.  Traveling around Europe for a few months following graduation from college and active duty in the Army, I realized that no matter what blessings America had bestowed on me, the prospect of living the rest of my life there was a bad dream.  I was fascinated by all the European countries I visited, each with its own language, food, art, architecture and landscape.  Italy was not the most relaxing place in Europe, but I found the beauty of its cities, its countryside and its people to be magnetic.

Upon returning to the US to study architecture, I was able to audit classes in Italian.  I hardly excelled at it but it moved me along the path to becoming an Italophile. A further push came from an Italian-American roommate who taught me most of what little I knew about cooking.  His mother was born to a family from the Province of Parma.  At that time, New York was full of Italian movies which drew me in as no cinema had before or since.

I might have adapted to living in the US, and almost did while living in San Francisco for a year, but once again my nearly supernatural good fortune intervened.  By pure chance I met a young Italian while on vacation in Rome who had all the Italian traits that I had been so intrigued by: beauty, personality, taste, intelligence, and independence of mind.  Also, lots of character.    In short order she came to the US where we were married and fifty years ago we moved to Italy with our two very young daughters. It was a big cultural adjustment, most of it enjoyable.

Where the US had a shared patriotism and belief in its form of government, Italy had little of that.  Italy had remained largely a loose confederation of city states, each with its own history and traditions. The country had only been unified around the time of the US Civil War and unification did for much of the southern regions what the potato famine had done for Ireland, i.e., it brought poverty and mass emigration.  While Rome was a wonderful place to be in the 70’s, there was an uncomfortable amount of violence between the youth of the far left and the far right.  Terrorism emerged then, long before it was felt in the US.

I grew up in a rather anti-Catholic atmosphere.  It was never so in a violent way, just a veiled prejudice which showed itself in a sense of disdain and distrust.  Marrying a serious Catholic required some adjustment on my part and brought significant attitude modification to my family.  Regardless of my upbringing, I did come to recognize the Roman Catholic Church as the unifying element in Italian life, much as the allegiance to the flag was in the US.  Almost everybody in Italy was Catholic and even those who were not were bathed in the culture and rituals of the Church.  There were devout Catholics, ex-Catholics, priest-hating Catholics, going through the motions Catholics, good, bad, rich and poor ones but at least on major holidays and weddings, they showed up together in the same place and to some extent tried to conform to a modicum of decorum imparted to them by their priests in childhood.  For at least one hour they would put aside their personal postures and interests and join in a communal act of devotion.

While 1973 saw the birth of our second child and our move to Italy, in the public sphere the news was taken up by the hearings on the criminal activities of President Nixon.  His Vice President Spiro Agnew had been investigated for corruption and forced to resign in time for him not to accede to the presidency upon Nixon’s resignation.  The year also subsequently appeared in many economists’ graphs marking the downturn of median incomes and the start of the permanent growth of the wealth gap.   

The US has often been called the most religious of the western countries because it has more regular church goers.   While most of the people who (voluntarily) emigrated to the US before the mid-Twentieth Century came from Europe, once an almost exclusively a Judeo-Christian territory, the Founding Fathers were often deists, men of the Enlightenment whose speech often mentioned “the Will of God” or “Divine Providence”, but who showed little adherence to any specific religious denomination.  The vast number of religious sects tended to create social division and rivalry rather than creating a shared set of religion-based values.

In recent decades, people, often described as liberals, have made claims that religious teaching has had no place in American law or American government.  Yet for at least the first two hundred years few citizens of the US would openly challenge The Ten Commandments or the teachings of Jesus Christ.  They might not conform to them, but they would not deny their validity.  Indeed, my own public school days started with a short reading from the Book of Psalms and the Pledge of Allegiance to the United States.  

Perhaps the most definitive contribution to US culture from a religious movement came from the now despised and ridiculed Puritans, whose rather stern work ethic was a major factor in the nation’s development.   However, that mindset was detached from any particular religious denomination early on and often absorbed and internalized by immigrants from all over the world.   

Italy and the USA have changed a great deal over the past half century.  Both have had their difficulties as well as moments of glory.  In the ‘80’s Italy surpassed both France and the UK in terms of GNP to become Europe’s second largest economy, but its success was short lived, undermined by corruption which emerged in the Mani Pulite scandals of 1992.  It had been governed by what was unofficially known as the partitocracy, wherein a large collection of theoretically opposed political parties would agree to maintain the status quo and divide the spoils, doing little or nothing.  In the aftermath, most of the existing parties, including the Christian Democrats, who ruled Italy for most of the post-war era, went out of existence, while the Communist Party changed its name twice to carry on as today’s Democratic Party.

Over my fifty years mostly here, that seemed to be the low point, at least until now.  Many things in Italy have improved, mostly through advances in technology rather than by better government.  However, the country seems to have lost its soul, its direction, and mostly its independence.  The Covid pandemic, followed by the proxy war in Ukraine, have combined to form a new wave of authoritarianism, not seen in Italy since Mussolini came to power a century ago. In response to corporate and foreign domination, the most common response has been resignation and obsequious passivity to the predations of the foreign neo-cons and the domestic quislings.  Italy was the most enthusiastic participant in the foundation of the European Union but by now there is widespread though mostly silent frustration that the EU has become one large Vichy Government, faithfully towing the line of its North Atlantic master.

The US has experienced many ups and downs in the cyclical economy, with each downturn shifting more resources from the poor to the rich.  The epochal event of these past fifty years was the end of the Cold War, with the collapse of the Soviet Union.  It should have been a time for rejoicing and a peace dividend to improve life across the globe.  Instead, the old Cold Warriors could not face change when they could see how profitable endless war could be.  The US had plenty of war hawks throughout the Cold War, probably more and worse than even those of today.    However, at the beginning of the new century a group was formed by Bill Chrystal and Robert Kagan, calling itself the Project for the New American Century, advocating what both Stalin and Hitler had tried and spectacularly failed to do, namely conquer and control the entire world by exerting unmatched military and economic power. 

The PNAC has completely dominated US foreign policy for a quarter century through two Republican and two Democratic administrations.  Millions of people around the world have been killed or displaced by their policies, although it must be admitted that those millions are far fewer than the millions wiped out by the activities of Stalin, Hitler or Mao.  The new imperialists have been terribly successful, as three quarters of the countries of the world are now under US military occupation.  Of course, the US doesn’t use that language.  It is all about mutual defense agreements among allies and friends.  If you’re a country with a small population and a sizable territory, you may prefer to see it that way but just how much autonomy do you have?  And who are you being protected from?    When the US decides to attack and destroy a country it has taken a disliking toward and it uses its NATO bases to launch the attack, how much does the country hosting those bases have to say about it?  But why would the US do anything like that, you ask.  You will have to ask a member of PNAC.   If I were to be asked, I could only suggest that the State Department is run by psychopaths.  You might better ask a Libyan, an Iraqi or an Afghan.     

In the fifty years since I came to Italy as an American ex-patriot married into an Italian family, I’ve had an unusual vantage point to observe the changes in both countries. Italy is the most wonderful place to live that I know of, if you can make a living here, but the latter part is difficult, which explains how I came to live in Saudi Arabia for a year or two and later return to the US for a few years.  For all my love of Italy, I’ve continued to read, speak and work in English most of the time and despite living in a small Umbrian village, I socialize mostly with the foreign community whose shared language is English, regardless of their country of origin.

Eighty or ninety percent of our foreign community are conventionally secular in outlook, with most quietly so, but a vociferous minority aggressively hostile to the Church, past or present, while being remarkably tolerant of other failed institutions.  They may visit the many glorious churches in every Italian town or city as they would visit a museum or Disney World.  If there is a new faith to replace those that have faded, it would seem to be a belief in and dedication to good food.  Italy is a fine place to adhere to such a faith since it is so widely shared here.

The secularization of Italy was spearheaded by an unusually charismatic politician, Marco Pannella, the Secretary of the Partito Radicale.  He was an intense promoter of direct democracy, i.e., the making of major decisions by public referendums.  In this way, both divorce and abortion were legalized despite the protestations of the Church.  He may have even been behind making Roman Catholicism no longer the official state religion.  The effects of these three changes have been dramatic and not especially positive.  While many unhappy marriages were ended, a relief to most of the people involved, statistics have shown that widespread divorce increases the number of children raised in poverty, and that many of the divorced are devastated economically.   For a long time, the birthrate in Italy has been far below that needed to replace the existing population.  Only Spain has a lower birthrate in Europe at present.  In the period after the legalization of abortion, the population crisis has worsened.

As for the detachment of the Church from the State, most democratically inclined people would agree that this was a step forward.  Nonetheless, the most visible result of the change was the removal of nuns from the hospitals, which they ran rather well.  Their administration could be severe, but the hospitals were orderly and clean.  My recent experiences in Bologna and Umbria have found modern hospitals well run, especially in Bologna, but the same is not true in some of the other major cities.  One hears grim stories of chaos, neglect, and violence in the major hospitals of Rome.  Even in Bologna, doctors and nurses will tell you that they are seriously understaffed, and they fear for the future of the health system.

The Church has changed much more from other causes.  Church attendance is sharply down although there are still many devout Catholics and others continue to go out of habit.  There are many churches, but the lack of priests to run them is much more severe than the lack of parishioners.  Standards of comportment imposed by the priests have been relaxed out of fear that today’s people will no longer accept limitations on their conduct.  Italians have always been a bit anarchic and the discipline of the Church has been something of a corrective.  The cycle of sin, confession, and forgiveness has suited the Italian temperament very well for centuries.  That cycle has been broken and we now see brides arriving at the church as though they just stepped out of a sleazy discothèque, and pudgy little Lolitas parade around the churches as if dressed for sale to sex tourists in Bangkok. The men are often little better.  Some show up as if they just climbed off their tractor, even those who work in offices, with their drooping baggy pants exhibiting their ass cleavage  with the same lack of inhibition as the women showing off their more attractive assets.

Marco Pannella was a charming and energetic man, who got things done.  It’s a shame that he wasn’t born in the US rather than Italy.  His extreme devotion to a government responsive to the will of the people and to the Constitution could have done a lot more good there.

I mentioned the decline in the US starting in 1973 but Ronald Reagan’s devastation of the labor movement helped it along.  Bill Clinton kept the economy going but his incarceration of a high percentage of young black men on minor offenses did vast harm to the social fabric.   With the new century came the unrelenting horror of the Enron Generation and its devotion to making big money with no regard for neighbors, the country or the environment*.  We’ve had a string of four presidents* vying for the title of the worse US president ever.  It appears that next year we’ll see a presidential election between, in the red corner, a bloated narcissistic degenerate who believes in nothing other than the art of the deal, his deal, and maybe a good deal for others rich and powerful enough to be of use to him, up against, in the blue corner, from the PNAC wing of the party, an old mafia machine style pol, more or less out of the Spiro Agnew mould.  Unfortunately, he wasn’t removed when leading the remarkably corrupt Clarence Thomas though his Senate hearings, nor when he served as chief Democratic cheerleader for the barbaric and truly unprovoked war on Iraq.

The majority of American citizens want neither of these candidates, but the two parties, the Republicans and the Democrats, or the Bloods and the Crips, as I choose to call them, want no interference by the public in selecting their candidates.  There is a long tradition in America of voting for the lesser of two evils.  It’s a hard call this time.  Both the Bloods and the Crips are trying to take out the opposing candidate through criminal indictments, a cynical approach, but reasonable in both cases under the circumstances.  Can anyone envisage a way out of this dilemma? We can only suggest a mutual plea bargain where all criminal charges would be dropped against both candidates in return for their disqualification to seek public office.

The multifaceted oligarchy runs the United States and the Congress is a fully owned subsidiary of the oligarchy.  The spoils are divided among the financial sector, the health and pharmaceutical sector, and the Military Industrial Complex with its unlimited, unaccountable and unchallenged budget. The voting public has no real voice in anything of consequence and can effect no significant change. American military and cultural imperialism is changing the face of the earth, usually for the worse. Its health care system is both the most expensive and the least effective in the developed countries of the world.  People have grown frustrated and angry about these shortcomings, but they appear unable to articulate their complaints or find a way to fix them. Belief in democracy has become as rare as belief in God has in Italy.

 In 1882 Friedrich Nietzsche proclaimed that God is Dead. That was sad, since God was the most noble concept that mankind has come up with.  There have been other noble concepts: truth, beauty, justice, and in that list was democracy. Now democracy is dead!  Some of those others are on life support. What’s left to be believed in?  Well, we have pride, right off the top of Dante’s list of Seven Deadly Sins, and currently the most trendy of them.  There’s even a National Pride Month.  Next on his list was either lust or greed, so will we be having a Lust Month or a Greed Month?  Given the dropping birth rates, sperm counts and growing gender confusion, maybe a Lust Month could be useful, but since we are promoting our most rampant sins, why not follow up with a Greed Month?

Italy has long been addicted to style, “la moda”.  Unfortunately, in its insatiable quest to be at the forefront of what’s “In”, it has imitated every bad idea exported by the United States, among them drug addiction, slob culture, single motherhood, chemical castration, gratuitous profanity, obesity, self-mutilation, and a forced obsession with diversity, as well as privatization and dismemberment of public resources. It even emulates American efforts to suppress free speech, usually through groups formed to protect us from disinformation, and spy on its people with the help and guidance of large corporations. This entails total submission to the theories and tactics of US Neo-cons and Neo-libs. Will the country find a spine?  There’s not much to put one’s hopes on, although Italy does still have a number of good independent minded journalists, but they are seldom seen or heard in the mainstream media, just like in the USA.

I started this essay by stating how fortunate I have been. I have a wonderful wife and family and live in what I consider the most beautiful place in the world, and while I have enjoyed good health for most of my life, my doctors tell me that that is no longer true.  Again, my good luck puts me in the country with the best health care system I know of.  We all must face our mortality at some time. Just in case I haven’t, I am frequently asked the year of my birth.  Following my answer I often hear a  cheerful “complimenti”, as if they are surprised that I’m still alive and walking on my own.  I take it as a compliment but it does lead to thinking about the end getting closer.   That facing of reality is eased by the sense of continuity that comes with starting as a child and moving through the stages of marriage, parenthood and then seeing grandchildren start the same cycle.  Well into the fourth quarter on my game clock, I can’t help thinking of all the people whose lives were interrupted by the wars and political crimes of the earlier attempts at world domination.  They died without knowing if, how, or when the calamity would end.  By now, whether I die of natural causes or am taken away with everyone else in a nuclear holocaust, it won’t change the story of my life very much.  I thank God for what I’ve had.  I also thank my parents for giving me life and I thank all those who built the world in which I’ve lived.  They are all dead too. If my allotment of good fortune hasn't been exhausted by now, I hope to live long enough to see signs that the planet will survive and that the two countries that I’ve spent my life in will somehow rise from the depths of nihilism they’ve fallen into.

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The Biggest Leak

 Earlier this month (June 2023) the most important story in the history of humankind leaked out.  A self-proclaimed whistle-blower named David Grusch held a press conference to report that the Pentagon had a special secret department to investigate UFOs and to store the remains of Unknown Flying Objects and their occupants.  Grusch reported that while he had worked in the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office of the US Military, he had not personally seen the preserved artifacts but various colleagues had separately reported to him the existence of such materiel.

Mankind has wondered, since we evolved sufficiently to consider such thoughts, if we were alone in the universe or if there were other forms of intelligent life out there somewhere.  Finally, after millenniums of speculation, we finally appear to have an answer.  It may be top secret but somewhere in a warehouse in a desert the Pentagon has an answer, or some answers.

To their credit, the New York Times reported the press conference, and its most reviled columnist, Ross Douthout, added some commentary about the revelations on June 16th.  Douthout is what passes for the office “conservative” at the NYT, writing about issues which raise more questions than answers, in contrast to the other NYT columnists whose role is to dispense the current positions of the establishment on economic policy, foreign policy and gender and identity politics.  Although some of them write about more than one of those areas of interest, they have remained notably silent on the story of the millennium, almost as quiet as they’ve been on the attack on the Nord Sea 2 pipelines.

The breaking of the story, and its subsequent disappearance, involved a number of bizarre coincidences.  The whistle-blowing press conference was reported on June 6th , almost the same day as the  death of Daniel Ellsberg, the man who turned “whistleblower” into a household word.  More mysteriously, in contrast to consistent US Government policy to persecute, prosecute, assassinate or incarcerate all whistle-blowers reporting on major government malfeasance, there has been no attempt to persecute or vilify Grusch for his revelations.  There have even been testimonials to his reliability and character from numerous government employees.

This is the first year that I can remember there being widespread concern over the dangers of Artificial Intelligence and now we’re hearing that there is evidence of alien creatures and their vehicles but all the evidence is secretly maintained by the Pentagon.  The Department of Defense, formerly the War Department, was rechristened with its current name in 1949, just after George Orwell published his most famous book “1984”.  Grusch stated that while the particular department he worked in was established in 2022, the military establishment has been collecting UFO information and related artifacts for something like ninety years.

Rep. James Comer, the current Chairman of the House Oversight Committee, says that while he doesn’t know much about the subject, there will be hearings.  I confess that I don’t recall hearing Rep. Comer’s name before, and I was also unaware of evidence that the House Oversight Committee still existed.  We do know that the DOD has never passed an audit and that the first attempt only came in 2017.  Despite the talk about polarization, the US Congress is always in near total harmony in authorizing increases to the “Defense” budget.

The silence that this story has generated is unprecedented, including its disappearance in the media. By now we would have expected to hear Mitch McConnell or Kevin McCarthy denouncing the breakdown in the national security institutions and Adam Schiff demanding more transparency but we do understand both the Bloods and the Crips, also known as the Republican and Democratic Party officials, being momentarily perplexed about how to turn this story to their partisan electoral advantage.  If Marjory Taylor Greene has been struck speechless, maybe there is a just God after all.  We’ve grown accustomed to our political representatives ignoring our basic concerns to speak out on things their advisors tell them will give more tangible electoral results but still, how come we’re not hearing Senator Lindsay Graham screaming into any available microphone “How many aliens have we killed and what did it take to kill them?”  “I want more money appropriated for the development of new weapons to kill aliens.”    Is the Senator not feeling well?  Why this silence?

The biggest story in human history may turn out to be a hoax, as many of us, including most of our journalists, appear to have concluded, but hoax, mind control experiment, or hidden truth, whatever it turns out to be, it remains one of the greatest scandals in the history of the USA.  

We have an unlimited military budget which dwarfs those of the rest of the world, allowing us to maintain a military occupation of ¾ of the countries of the world (I believe it is officially referred to in terms such as cooperation or alliances) and the ability to bomb into submission those who are not, or at least to subvert their governments, all in the name of spreading democracy, and yet this same military establishment is keeping secret from us and from our elected representatives, evidence of other forms of life.  That’s a curious type of democracy, even if the secrets they’re keeping just turn out to be another expensive hoax.

Sixty-three years ago, when leaving office, President Eisenhower warned against the growth of the Military Industrial Complex.  His warning was ignored.  While prescient, I doubt that even he could have imagined just how far out of control it could become.

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