Post Convention Punditalia '24 Political Outlook

 In my post of July 8th  I described how things looked for the upcoming elections, as of early July, and what the choice between Democrats and Republicans entailed.  I have described what has transpired since then in a two-part illustrated piece called Satanic Summer which will appear on my Substack as soon as I can resolve, or work around, the technical difficulties related to my printer/scanner failure.  

The political conventions went on as scheduled and the Democratic Convention in Chicago avoided violence by keeping demonstrators several miles away by use of extensive barricades.  Bibi Netanyahu got to make his speech to  Congress with all the record number of standing ovations he was promised,   I had predicted, to anyone who asked me, that the party which managed to replace its candidate before the election, i.e. Trump or Biden, would win the election.  At first that seemed to favor the Republicans when Trump was convicted on all thirty-four felony charges in New York, and later when there were two attempts to assassinate him.  There was some talk of a conspiracy to kill him, with no evidence to support it.  However, the constant hysteria about the threat to democracy that Trump represented and how he must be stopped at all costs, and such talk by Democratic pundits and politicians including the Vice President, certainly fostered an atmosphere to bring emotional gun nuts out of the woodwork.  Those failed assassination attempts may have offset any election bump in the polls for the Democrats that derived from the Trump felony convictions. 

Meanwhile the principle change in the election outlook was the withdrawal of the candidacy of President Biden after his very shaky performance in the first scheduled debate with Trump in the campaign.  Joe didn't really want to go, as he had convinced himself  that he was the best man for the job, but he failed to convince very many of his fellow Democrats, as well as the major donors to the party and the campaign. His withdrawal came quickly after the debate performance but after most of the Democratic primaries had been held, with virtually no other candidates being allowed on the ballots, so the Democratic Party leadership got together and decided that V.P. Kamala Harris was their candidate.  That decision was announced before the convention, where she would be officially anointed  along with her choice for vice president. 

By late spring it looked fairly certain that Donald Trump would once again be elected.  While that is no longer a given, the result looks slightly more likely to be the opposite, although Democrats are very good at losing elections.  Trump seemed confident of defeating his visibly aging opponent and ridiculing him.  To his dismay, he is now facing a  candidate capable of turning the tables on him, by simply reminding people that Trump is almost as old as Biden and nearly as incoherent. Indeed, should Trump win the election, by the end of his term he will be the oldest US president in history.

Despite the long duration of US electoral campaigns, there is very little discussion of issues by the public, the main stream media, or the candidates.  There is no lack of issues worthy  of debate and in earlier election years I have made my own views on most of them clear.  This year, most of those issues fade into insignificance due to the two issues which are virtually absent from discussion in this campaign.  We are closer than ever to nuclear war which could escalate into a nuclear holocaust making all these discussions irrelevant.  Should we escape that through some rational thinking, which seems to be in short supply right now, we will have to face the devastating consequences of climate change.  This has been discussed a good deal in the past decade or so but in this election year, it has vanished from the agenda.  While we've seen pledges to reduce carbon emissions and to make heating and lighting ever more efficient, the constant push to war and increased military expenditures by the US Empire has more than offset all the efforts made thus far to combat climate change. 

I've mentioned the imminent threat of nuclear war and the effects of climate change as the two issues that make all the others insignificant, but I haven't forgotten the other important elephant in the room.  The new axis of genocide, formed by the US and Israel with the UK and the EU as junior members, shows no signs of going away, at least not due to any US elections.  The US "leadership"  declared its intentions three decades ago to take control of the world through its economic power, backed up by its military might.  The US has roughly 800 military bases spread over three quarters of the countries of the world so it is close to effective control of the planet by now. Ironically, the US government, and I include all three branches, is now controlled by Israel, a small dependency of the United States and the largest recipient of US foreign aid.  

Donald Trump won the election of 2016 in large measure by outpandering Hillary Clinton in her attempt to be Israel's strongest supporter.  We may see a repeat performance.  Genocide has bi-partisan support and US efforts at world hegemony may run into opposition as its alliance with a pariah nation destroys the trust, the good will and good reputation the United States has built over the past eight decades.  

We've seen who Donald Trump is and the damage he can wreak.  The only conceivable positive trait we've seen in him is that he may be less enthusiastic than the current regime about promoting unending war.  We know little about Kamala Harris and how she might handle the decision making in the White House.  She was a candidate for the Democratic candidacy in 2016 and she was a terrible candidate who dropped out early.  So far she's given no indication that she would deviate from the policies of the Biden Administration.  Both candidates fully back the genocide that we're participating in. At the Democratic Convention, Harris announced a new politics of joy.  A little joy may be needed in these dismal times, but at a moment when our country is participating in the most visible genocide in eighty years and we're spending precious resources on the promoting, inciting and escalating of war all over the globe, speaking of the politics of joy appears tone deaf. Hillary Clinton was tone deaf about all the "deplorables" and she lost an election regarded as one she couldn't possibly lose.

We've seen some bizarre reversals of positions in recent years, especially this year.  Whereas the Democratic Party has traditionally been seen as the party of the rights of minorities and of civil rights in general, and the GOP as the party of business interests and of the wealthy, that been reversed to some degree.  The GOP has always tended to have an authoritarian element, and abortion enthusiasts will correctly point to its promotion of restrictions on abortion as evidence of that, but recently, the authoritarian push to limit free speech, promote censorship and illegal surveillance has come from what used to be thought of as the Left, but in reality is the ever more right-wing Democratic Party.  The oligarchs can claim to be Democrats or Republicans but they are much the same in promoting their own interests by investing in both. 

Other radical reversals of associations have been popping up all over.  Robert Kennedy Jr., who has deep family ties to the Democratic Party, after being kept off the ballot in Democratic primaries, and then being kept off state ballots when trying to run as an independent candidate, all by lawfare brought by the Democratic Party, has now joined the Trump campaign where he hopes to have a say in Trump Administration policy.  Similarly, Tulsi Gabbard who was a Democratic Representative from Hawaii, as well as being a member of the Democratic National Committee until she resigned from that ruling body in 2016 in protest of its corrupt and undemocratic procedures, has joined  the Trump campaign, just a year or two after resigning from the Democratic Party. She has been, and remains, among the most vocal critics of Kamala Harris.

Not to be outdone, the Democratic Party has been seeking Republican turncoats who oppose Trump, and there are plenty of them.  That they have abandoned Trump is reasonable but it would be more honorable if they just stayed out of sight and prayed forgiveness for backing him the the first place.  That some popular person who seeks public service in a red state might go along with the local party is understandable, and the same could be said in Democratic states.  However, the recent headliners are Liz Cheney and her father Dick, the Acting President for much of the Little George Bush Administration. While I may obsess about when he and Bush will be brought up on War Crimes charges in an international tribunal, he doesn't usually occupy much of my thoughts. 

However, in recent weeks Liz Cheney has been out campaigning with Kamala Harris and Dick Cheney has announced his support.   Politics can make strange bedfellows and unlikely coalitions are not a new thing but is there anyone whose support Kamala Harris would reject?  I, for one, would not vote for anyone who accepted the support of Dick Cheney.   

Usually I am free with my voting suggestions, which too often involve picking the least awful candidate.  This time is different.  Both major party candidates are totally totally unacceptable.  Most people will vote with the party they identify with.  I usually do that myself.  However, I will not vote for a pro-genocide candidate for president or senator or representative.  After one or two anti-war and peace candidates have been eliminated through bureaucratic maneuvering, there is only one presidential candidate on my ballot who opposes genocide.  Thus, Jill Stein will get my vote again.  Her chances of winning are about the same as my chance of winning a big lottery.  She is running ahead of Kamala Harris in recent polls in a few places in the country where our involvement in genocide is regarded as an issue.  The results of this election will change little or nothing but we can just send a tiny message that the status quo is unacceptable.

Things sometimes change quickly but in June of  2021 I posted a cartoon that commented on the US Empire and its relationship with Israel.  You can see it here.

 

Lewis Lapham and Other Heroes

 

In the midst of this summer from Hell, sandwiched between the withdrawal from the presidential race of Joe Biden and the speech by Bibi Netanyahu to the assembled Houses of Congress in the Nation’s Capitol, came the news that Lewis Lapham had died. 

At this dark moment, when there are few protagonists on the world stage who project anything that could be regarded as heroic and most news makers appear to be competing to reach never before seen levels of incivility, it seems obligatory to publicly note the passing of one of the best writers and editors of the past hundred years. 

foto by Nicole Bengivino for the New York Times

Lewis H. Lapham was one of my heroes and will remain so as long as I am able to read and write. Do we need heroes? Should we have them?  Blind devotion to to imperfect people can lead to irrational and dangerous cults. We saw that a few decades ago with the Jonestown Massacre and more recently politics have come to be dominated by personality cults in place of policy discussions. However, most of us do look to people we respect and who can serve as models for how we hope to conduct our lives and achieve the goals we set for ourselves. 

In my experience, boys’ early heroes are often sports figures, and those early enthusiasms can sometimes last for a lifetime. For me, Ted Williams remains the greatest baseball ever and as soon as someone figures out how to bring his carefully frozen corpse back to life, everyone will get to see what I mean. With adolescence, the sex drive comes into play and all the many variations of the mating game begin to take over and often dominate the consciousness of newly energized youth. Music plays an integral role in these mating rites and it is no accident that one’s lifetime musical enthusiasms are shaped by our experiences of adolescence and those post-adolescent years, lately extended to the edge of middle age by ever longer periods of academic study and economic dependency. Our heroes in this period are often musicians and usually about a decade older than we are. They will have achieved fame as up and coming artists of their era in the genre to which they were assigned. Decades later, you can usually tell the age of people, regardless of their state of conservation or decline, by knowing their musical heroes. 

As we develop our own interests, the people we esteem tend to be those whose work and goals set an example for what we hope to achieve. Being an architect, my architectural hero was Frank Lloyd Wright, as he probably was to more than half the people in the western world who went on to become architects over the past one hundred years. With the possible exception of Albert Einstein in the realms of physics and mathematics, I can’t think of a similarly dominating figure in any other field. 

While as a boy I had sports heroes across all popular sports, none of them had much of a tangible effect on my life because no matter how strong my interest in sports, I just wasn’t very good at any of them. However, I did go on to draw and to paint, activities which spawned a whole new personal Olympus of inspirational figures, from Rembrandt to Klimt, with Thomas Nast, George Grosz and Giorgio Forattini stimulating my appreciation of the art of cartooning. While I would never claim to have equaled any of the work of these role models, they have all influenced what I do. 

Most of the heroes of my lifetime have been musicians. As with all the sports heroes, they have had little direct effect of what I do since I am even less of a musician than I am an athlete. At least I tried to play basketball, even breaking a hand once in the effort. However, the musicians, even more than the sports figures, brought me an abundance of joy and a fuller appreciation of the gift of life that we have received. 

 I’ve thought of myself as a an architect, a painter and a cartoonist, but I’ve rarely thought of myself as a writer. We all write! Sometimes it’s to friends, or lovers, teachers or government officials, impersonal corporate offices, or even in a diary, but we all write. I’ve been writing this blog for nearly twenty years and before that I wrote two books, never published, first on the joys of Italy, and later on the darker side of life here. In the course of doing some of this writing I started to recognize what it was I appreciated in writers. 

There were a few models that I related to, starting with Jean Shepherd, who wasn’t so much a writer as he was a speaker, running an hour-long radio show every night for many years featuring nothing and no one other than himself telling stories about a remembered or invented youth. Through all those years he revealed nothing about his rather singular private life. His fame was never really acknowledged by the cultural establishment, except by the fact that his program continued for years on New York’s most powerful commercial radio station. His silent band of listeners, Night People he called us, ran to the hundreds of thousands, a fact which he played with, exhorting his listeners to show up at a given time and place to do something both harmless and mysterious to all those not in on the prank. 

Another writer who I identified with was Bill Bryson, an American from the Mid-West who has become something of a fixture in the UK Establishment. You can now hear his recorded voice explaining every British tourist attraction to the tourists. However, in his earlier books I had the sensation of identity theft, that is, I had the sense that he’d written exactly what I had wanted to say before I had the chance to write it down. If he needs a ghost writer, I’m always ready to help; if I need a ghost writer, well, I couldn’t afford him, but I do try to keep a similar sense of humor, along with a bit of an edge. Maybe that’s the common denominator in all the writers I admire. 

Tom Wolfe was another fitting that description but I have no illusions about being able to match his colorful creativity in language usage. He satirized the cultural elite that he succeeded in becoming a part of, creating his own celebrity identity for a celebrity culture. 

I’ve been reading Harper’s Magazine for most of my life, starting, if I remember correctly, back in my college days. I’ve let my subscription lapse a few times when I moved from one place to another, but I’ve always managed to return to the fold. Lewis Lapham was managing editor or editor-in-chief of the magazine from 1971 til 2006, with a year off during the magazine’s economic crisis of 1982. That long period covered much of my extended readership of the nation’s oldest continuously published monthly. IMHO it remains the best publication produced in the United States, filled with excellent essays on all manner of subjects, poetry, paintings, photographs, book reviews and readings from sources you would never be exposed to otherwise. It was, and still is, where the work of America’s best writers first appeared, among them Mark Twain.

Lewis Lapham had his own heroes, the most important of which was Mark Twain, whose honesty, sarcasm, irony and humor shaped Lapham’s own writing and outlook. He retired from running the magazine to found his own Lapham’s Quarterly, but his impact on Harper’s lives on in its outlook and in several features he introduced. The Harper’s Index, a one-page list of statistics which provides a snapshot of the state of the world at the moment; Annotation, a line-by-line analysis of documents that usually do not draw much attention; and Findings, a random but carefully curated sampling of curious happenings in the natural world. Featured writers may have an agenda to promote or a partisan view regarding a particular topic under discussion but the magazine seeks to present thoughtful essays on issues that exist now with the goal of informing the readership of what drives the issue at hand. That’s a role that the major media have abandoned some time ago. 

Bicentennial Heroes

About forty years ago I did a painting, Bicentennial Heroes, to celebrate my favorite Americans of the first two hundred years. Lewis Lapham does not appear in it. Indeed, until I saw his obituary in the New York Times, I don’t recall ever having seen a picture of him. The last time I visited the United States, ten years ago, I did visit both the offices of Harper’s, and the offices of Lapham’s Quarterly, in a vain effort to get some writing of mine published. In subsequent years I was not even sure if he was still alive or not. Now I know from his NYT obituary that he moved to Rome with members of his family in January of this year and he died there on July 29th. For a classical scholar, which he was, that seemed like perfect planning. 

I’ve mentioned a few of my heroes and how they’ve influenced what I do. With Lewis Lapham, it’s slightly different. I try to think about how he would say what I want to write, but more than that, I feel that he’s looking over my shoulder offering comments, maybe not spoken aloud, just thoughts, like the cat’s comments in some of my cartoons. “wordy”, “clumsy”, “too long”, too emotional”. I do try to make the adjustments that seem to be called for but it’s like having a very exacting English professor standing over you and watching your every word. Lacking a flesh and blood proofreader, I am grateful for this otherworldly presence. Lewis Lapham, rest in peace, but may your spirit endure.

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 Khan 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! 

                                                                 *** 

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 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.