Meeting the Challenges

The eminent British historian Arnold Toynbee devoted the twelve massive volumes of his epic work, A Study of History, to showing how his theory of history applied to twenty-three civilizations. In essence, his theory was that civilizations rise or fall in response to major challenges. If they face no major challenges, they don't rise very far and if they fail to respond to major challenges, they collapse and die.

I wouldn't presume to challenge Professor Toynbee's theory but if he was right, it looks like we're up the creek without a paddle. Rising to overcome a major challenge is difficult but if those threats are not acknowledged, it is all but impossible to overcome them.

There are two existential challenges to our civilization right now, starting with climate change and moving on to the accelerating gap between rich and poor. The first threatens to make large portions of currently inhabited parts of the world uninhabitable while the second will end democracy as the form of society which has characterized our recent civilization, returning us to some new variety of feudalism akin to that of the medieval world. American President Trump has appointed cabinet officials dedicated to cutting back all regulation aimed at protecting the environment and dealing with climate change, as if telling the musicians playing on the top deck of the Titanic to play louder will make everything better. He is also currently engaged in an effort to loot the Treasury on behalf of his fellow oligarchs. The heist, which goes under the innocent sounding name of “tax reform”, is being conducted under cover of an endless stream of public insults of everyone from foreign and domestic leaders to gold star mothers.

While these two challenges may prove to be life-threatening for our civilization, there are others which might provide a start in our efforts to save ourselves. We badly need some good news and if you look really hard, from time to time you can find it.

Sometimes problems are identified that many of us never knew the existence of. Climate skeptics are still saying that about climate change. In March of 2016 the Governor of North Carolina signed a bill into law blocking cities from allowing transgender individuals from using public bathrooms of the sex they identify with. Who knew that there was a problem? Many of us were not even aware of the growing legion of transgender people or, for that matter, what a transgender person is. Not completely unaware perhaps. I recall a person named Christine Jorgensen being prominently in the news in 1952 as an early recipient of sex change operations. She had started life as George. In 2015, Bruce Jenner, the 1976 Olympic decathlon winner, revealed that he had always felt like he was supposed to be a woman and had recently completed a transformation into a woman, now known as Caitlin. Is this recent surge of confusion over sexual identity Nature's way, or God's way, of responding to the impending population explosion? If so, it doesn't seem to have worked, at least in the case of Jenner, who fathered six children during his three marriages, some even after he had started his transformative treatment.

Then again, we're not interested in divine solutions. We're looking to find human solutions. President Trump's recent toying with the possibility of nuclear war may be a subtle attempt to seek an answer to the problems of overpopulation and mass migration but we can do better than that.

The gender confusion issue is apparently more real than some of us thought. Much has been written about it without shedding much light. The most interesting writing on the subject that I've seen is Sons and Daughters, the village where girls turn into boys, by Susan Topol in the August 2017 issue of Harper's Magazine. For those mystified by the whole subject, it's worth reading. There also seems to be a growing movement involved in promoting the confusion. Some might see the phenomenon as a problem that needs attention as such, but that's not our aim in this piece. We're looking for good news and signs of hope.

In March of 2017, just a year after the Governor had signed the NC toilet bill into law, the law was repealed. What happened? Did the citizens of North Carolina have a change of heart or did all the men there harbor a wish to try out women's rest rooms? Not likely. Instead, groups all around the country, seizing the opportunity to speak out against discrimination against another beleaguered minority, rallied to protest the outrage perpetrated by the NC legislature. Entertainers canceled concerts, sport teams canceled All-Star contests, conventions were relocated out of state and corporations canceled plans to move their headquarters to North Carolina. In Charlotte alone, the Chamber of Commerce estimated losses to the city of $285 million and 1,300 jobs. Money talks! We will deal with the deification of the market at another time. For now, we'll just look at the upside.

On October 1^st of this year, a disgruntled white male American brought twenty-three weapons, some of them automatic or semi-automatic, into his hotel suite in Las Vegas and opened fire on a crowd at a concert thirty-two floors below, killing fifty-nine people. More than 500 others were wounded or injured. Thirty-five days later another troubled native-born white American walked into a church in Sutherland Springs, Texas and fired on the congregation, killing twenty-six people. Both of these incidents were horrifying and shocking but not altogether surprising. The US has been averaging about one multiple shooting (defined as at least four people shot) per day throughout the year.

We don't know how many gender confused children were traumatized by public toilet incidents in Charlotte but a huge effort went into saving them from further discomfort. Couldn't a proportional effort be made on behalf of the eighty-five dead people in Las Vegas and Texas and the ones sure to follow? Both places proclaim themselves to be radically pro-gun. Open carry laws proliferate as do military style weapons. All you entertainers who boycotted Charlotte, where are you now? Athletes? I doubt that any of you would want to play in an open carry stadium, and the stadium owners probably don't want to risk damage to their property (including their players) but how about getting to and from the stadium? The Oakland Raiders are scheduled to move to Las Vegas in two or three years. Put your national anthem protests aside and get your agents to stipulate in your next contract that you won't play in an open carry city. Convention organizers, how about crossing open carry places off your list of potential venues. Thousands of people flock to Las Vegas for gambling, divorces and other types of “fun”. Some of them go there for the chance to shoot military style weapons at shooting ranges but if the more normal people all got together and said thanks but we'll do our debauchery in a safer environment, things might change almost as quickly as they did in Charlotte. Ironically, some of us signed petitions requesting that the GOP National Convention of 2016 in Cleveland be an open-carry convention but the politicians, with their own asses on the line, would have none of it. Why should they be more secure than singers, athletes or the general public?

Our prayers can go to the families of the dead, our letters to the newspapers, and our petitions to our Congressmen. We'll feel better for our good intentions and that will soften our resignation. Maybe Putin can do something to help, as he's credited with guiding most outcomes in the US, but don't hold your breath. Do you have college age children? Don't let them attend any school in an open carry state, much less exposing them to an open carry campus. Money talks. Make it clear to all these places that they can have their guns, or some of your money, but not both.

After the gun epidemic is cured, maybe we can move on to the vital issues of climate change and the new feudalism.

Race to the White House

While I am a big sports fan, I confess I’ve never been able to generate much enthusiasm for bicycle racing. However, I do vaguely recall watching on TV some indoor banked track races, perhaps at an Olympic games competition. The singular quality of those races was that nobody appeared to want to win the race. The cyclists meandered along, as slowly as possible, watching to make sure that no one else started to move quickly. Eventually someone started to move and then the chase was on in the dash to the finish.

As the American presidential marathon grinds to an end, I am reminded of such races. Like the Olympics, the World Cup and the European Cup, this competition is held every four years, and as with those other contests, the qualifying events get started soon after the competition declares its current winners.

The presidential primary races got off to the same slow start as the cycling contests, with a huge field of competitors idling along, burning through campaign contributions while generating absolutely no momentum. Jeb Bush blew through $100 million in sponsorship deals without ever accelerating to more than a walk. He spent the most but he was not alone in never getting to the point where the race speeds up. Unlike the bikers, the political aspirants did not all share the same discipline. Donald Trump peddled to the front of the pack and started to pull away immediately, to the chagrin of both the other competitors and the sports press, who had all considered him a non-contender. His bike carried a bullhorn and he yelled “losers” to the audiences as he hurled his water bottles in the faces of the attending fans. None of the other bikers ever caught up and they got together later to agree that this was no way to run a race. His triumph was like no bicyclist in memory. Trump’s victory inspired reactions closer to those generated by Sonny Liston when he was boxing’s heavyweight champion: fear, grudging respect and a desperate wish to see someone eliminate him from the scene.

In the other heat, Hillary Clinton started very slowly but having friends on the competition committee, not to mention all the sponsors, she started three laps ahead of the others in a six lap race. The NYT and the WaPo sent race tracking vehicles to report on her every move, unmindful of the fact that they were blocking the track for other competitors. The TV reporters wearily, though happily enough, reported on her uncontested glide to victory, even as Bernie Sanders unlapped himself time after time as his ride generated double or triple the speed of the preordained champion. With the competition committee hurling sticks at his wheels, his final sprint fell short.

a race gone wrong

We have now moved on to the final race. The race to the White House. The media have done their part to assure that the race is unsullied by any mention of issues, freeing the track for a perfect race based on the character, or lack thereof, of the two approved contenders. Thus it will be Team Blue versus Team Red; the establishment Democrat, vilified by the opposition as a lying, traitorous, liberal, corrupt, greedy, opportunistic criminal against the non-Establishment Republican, vilified by the opposition, along with most of the MSM and much of the Republican Establishment, as being a shallow, dangerously ignorant, corrupt narcissistic boor with the emotional development of a small abused child and the personality of an eighth grade bully.

Hillary Clinton emerged from the Democratic Convention with a bump in the polls and the endorsement of her vanquished rival, Bernie Sanders. She extracted the latter by modifying the platform to bring it slightly more in line with democratic values, such as support for a higher minimum wage. Earlier, in response to similar pressure she had changed her position from pro to anti-TPP. However, just as she started to pull far ahead, she nominated Tom Keane, the former Governor and Senator from Virginia as her Vice-presidential choice. Tom Keane is by all accounts, a nice man with an admirable record as a civil rights lawyer. However, his two most recent public utterances prior to his nomination were in support of TPP and more banking deregulation, arguably the two most vital issues in this election year. (We must admit that issues count for even less than vice presidential candidates in presidential elections.) This came as a dagger to the heart of the small but energetic democratic wing of the Democratic Party.

Donald Trump was not to be outdone. Shunned at the Republican Convention by the GOP leaders (the Bush family stayed away en masse) and ridiculed in the press, he saw a chance to pick up support from angry Democrats and he quickly maneuvered out of that situation by picking Indiana Governor Mike Pence from the scarier realms of the twilight zone. Pence is best known for saying:

• smoking does not cause death.
• Climate change is a hoax,
• a HIV testing center in his state must be closed,
• he would give personhood status to embryos, and
• he would keep Syrian refugees out of his state.

A persistent theme emerged arguing that Trump had really never wanted to be president but simply sought to inflate coverage of his name and his brand. Michael Moore made the most compelling case for this scenario but he was not alone. Moore had also written that Trump would win and why.  For a time it seemed that a total blowout was in the works and Trump would be the biggest loser in history.. Matt Taibbi stated convincingly that the race was over but was being prolonged by the media to boost TV ratings. At about the same time, Hillary’s ratings started to plummet and Matt had to wonder what the hell was going on.

People had once again underestimated Clinton’s capacity to snatch defeat from the jaws of landslide victory. The Keane nomination had been tone deaf but she followed it by naming former Secretary of Interior Ken Salazar as her transition chief, and thus a top advisor, in her new administration. For the uninitiated, Ken Salazar was the poster boy for corporate rapaciousness with regard to the environment. He never saw a proposal to clear cut a forest or sell off government lands that he didn’t like. She followed that with her own Mitt Romney moment. Mitt had sealed his fate in 2012 by claiming that the 47% of Americans who didn’t pay income taxes (because they didn’t have sufficient income to be taxed) were parasites. Hillary thought, and foolishly said, that half of Trump’s supporters were “the basket of deplorables”, i.e. racist, sexist, homophobic or xenophobic. She may have been objectively correct, unless she underestimated the percentages, but it was not a politically correct or even politically clever thing to say.

All conventional wisdom would suggest that this would be a landslide election, even if Clinton is an unpopular candidate to a degree without precedent. She has done amazing things to alienate voters,from her failures as Secretary of State to her gaming the primary, but nothing like Trump. He started off last year by insulting everything and everyone that the Republican Party has venerated for the past three or four decades. He has insulted people of every identifiable racial, religious or ethnic group and lately has taken to suggesting the appointment of people to high office that in another time, when there where more institutions available for the mentally troubled, would not have been permitted out on the street. To be fair to Trump, he was the only Republican candidate who said that Americans need Social Security and need to have access to health care. However to counter allegations of sanity, he came up with a tax plan as deranged as anything that Paul Ryan could conjure. When serial sexual abuser Roger Ailes was ousted as chief of Fox News, he was immediately signed up as an advisor to the Trump campaign. Insulting a couple who had lost their son in military action would have appeared to be a sure path for Trump’s exit from the race but no, Donald Trump seems to be unable to lose support, no matter what he does or says. Many people are so disgusted by the political process, by what government has become and what it has done to the country that they would prefer to see it implode rather than see the status quo given new life.

David Bossie

Peter Thiel

Roger Ailes

If indeed, this is a race to see who can lose, Hillary Clinton has an ace up her sleeve. She has tied her campaign to continuing the legacy of Barrack Obama. That legacy is spiraling downhill fast, as Obama campaigns ceaselessly for TPP, the “trade policy” designed to end all legislative democracy throughout the world in favor of corporate rule. Tying her candidacy to him is about as astute as Trump accepting the support of former KKK Imperial Wizard David Duke but conventional wisdom, or any wisdom at all, seems to have no bearing on this race.

Another race comes to mind. At the Indianapolis 500 in 2011, a rookie, JR Hildebrand, led the race on the final lap, to everyone’s surprise. He was trailed by another driver, Dan Wheldon, who was also not expected to be in contention. On the final curve of the final lap, Hildebrand lost control of his car , crashed into the wall, slid along the straightaway to the finish line just after Wheldon had slipped by for the win. Will we see something like that? Who is leading? Who will crash?

This race cannot and will not end well. Someone must lose and either way, it will be us, the public. Our best hope is that the country, and the world, will survive for four years and have another chance to set things right.

Signs of Life

My last couple of posts haven't been monuments to the Power of Positive Thinking, but that's nothing new. At my college graduation, Norman Vincent Peale, who coined the phase, or at least made a ton of money from it, nearly caused me to throw up when he spoke at the baccalaureate service. Even then, I had little stomach for militaristic expositions of American exceptionalism. Not wanting to end what had been four good years on an openly bitter note, I resisted the impulse to walk out in protest. Maybe that was the kind of mistake that people of my generation made too often.

Barack Obama is still sounding like Norman Vincent Peale. Nevertheless, there have been signs of hope recently. I can recall from trips to Florida, long before my college years, seeing rugged men wrestling alligators.

They would turn the alligator over and rub its belly, inducing a sleep-like trance. Those gators still had big sharp teeth but for the moment they were rendered innocuous. Last week Vladimir Putin seemed to pull off the same trick with President Obama, tranquilizing Obama's inner Fascist just as he was about to launch another ill-considered attack in the Middle East. In addition to Putin's firm hand, the President may have felt the weight of the polls which showed that his imperial appetite had the backing of fully 8% of the American public. Whatever it took, we can all be relieved that the gator sleeps.

Now we've gotten the news that President Obama has been on the phone with Iran's new president, Hassan Kouhari. That makes Obama the first American president to speak with an Iranian chief of state since 1979 when Jimmy Carter spoke with the about-to-be-deposed Shah.

In other upbeat news, the Senate has removed the extension of the Monsanto Protection Act out of an appropriations bill. It's still in the House version of the bill but there has been so much public outrage at this stealthily inserted provision, which had granted Monsanto immunity from all legal action brought against it, that the chances of killing it remain fairly high.

Larry Summers, President Obama's favorite financial adviser and one of the chief architects and beneficiaries of the Great Recession of 2008, removed his name (or had it removed) from consideration for the position of Chairman of the Federal Reserve, the post Ben Bernanke is stepping down from in January. Although he had his supporters in the White House and on Wall Street, Summers faced opposition from politicians in both parties, as well as from virtually all non-comatose members of the general public.

The other big story of the week is that the Tea Party Taliban is plotting a terrorist attack on the US Government through its Congressional jihadis refusing to fund all government activities (already approved by Congress). Their main target appears to be Obamacare, but some seem determined to cripple Social Security as well. Better to collapse the government than to see the masses having access to health care. If they get as lucky as the nineteen terrorists of 9/11, they could manage to reverse the slow economic recovery and plunge the nation into a sea of rising debt and accelerated collapse. The 9/11 guys probably exceeded their wildest dreams when they brought down the twin towers. Do you suppose that any of them could have imagined that they would end Constitutional democracy in the USA as well? When terrorist strikes begin, it's hard to know where they will end or where they will lead to. Even McConnell and the Congressional loner, John Boehner, seem a little spooked by the jihadis in their midst, but they've lost control.

This story may not appear to fit in with the upbeat nature of the earlier items. I may be simply succumbing to a bout of irrational optimism. The crocuses are coming out of the ground; I've recently experienced a wonderful new jazz festival growing out of the ashes left behind by the “austerity” ordered up by the plutocracy; and despite the planet being under unremitting attack environmentally, economically and politically, I've received the news that I have another grandson on the way. Unprecedented optimism or not, I'd like to believe that the GOP jihadis will just blow themselves up (politically speaking that is) without too much collateral damage. I doubt that Ted Cruz will set himself aflame on the Capitol steps if Obamacare isn't repealed, and if his fiery rhetoric does cause him to ignite, he'll get the best health care the country can provide.

It seems that even without this debt limit bomb going off, Mitch McConnell, the Minority Leader of the Senate, has only about a 50-50 chance of being returned to the Senate in the next elections. If the bomb creates unanticipated havoc, he and his co-conspirators are toast. With people like Paul Ryan and Eric Cantor still on the loose, the defeat of one McConnell won't restore the country to political health but it would be a start.

Please take a moment to call or write your Congressman to urge that the Republican National Committee be added to the State Department list of terrorist organizations.

The Wreck

It's a good time to be in Umbria. It's festival season and people are visiting from all over the world, setting off a long cycle of dinner parties, concerts and varied food fests. We also have to prepare for our our village festa. I have lines to learn for the play in the piazza and an art show to organize. That's more than enough to fill my day, even without a paying job to make demands on my time, but somehow it's been hard to find enough time to get these things done. I just can't break away from my computer. Getting through my emails these days is like creeping along on a highway past a particularly gruesome series of car wrecks. You feel bad about gawking but you just can't bring yourself to turn away. Should you stop and help or would you only be getting in the way? Among the things that have grabbed our attention in just the past few days are the following:

• Daily Kos reported that on July 12^th as the Texas State Senate voted on an anti-choice measure, state troopers ordered all women seeking to attend the session to surrender their tampons and diabetic supplies. Guns were permitted inside as long as their owners held a concealed weapon permit.
• The trial of self-appointed security man George Zimmerman, who fatally shot unarmed 17 year-old Trayvon Martin, ended with an acquittal on second degree murder and manslaughter charges.
• CNN reported that in another case in Florida, a young black woman, Marissa Alexander, had fired a warning shot into the ceiling to discourage her husband from attacking her again (she'd already had a restraining order against him after prior assaults). She was denied the “Stand Your Ground” defense afforded Zimmerman and was convicted of aggravated assault, for which she is now serving a 20 year term in prison.
• Also in Florida, a 51 year-old black man named Alan D. Hicks suffered a stroke while driving along a highway. His car came to rest against a guard rail and police arrived at the scene. When asked for his documents, he couldn't manage a reply but tried to point at the compartment where he had put his wallet. He was dragged out of the car, hand cuffed and deposited in a jail cell overnight lying face down in his own body fluids. He was taken to a hospital the next day, where he fell into a coma and died three months later.
• The defense rested in the Bradley Manning trial, conducted in a partial news blackout due to the judge denying access to real reporters, as well as to the unwillingness of the main stream media to cover the story.
• Edward Snowden remains in a transit lounge of the Moscow airport after being granted asylum by a number of countries, but not the means to get to them, since the US has threatened retribution on any country assisting the whistle-blower's movement.
• The list of jailed and/or persecuted whistle-blowers grows. The ex-CIA agent John Kiriakou, now in prison, wrote an open letter to Edward Snowden advising him to never, never trust the FBI.
• The official plane of the President of Bolivia was hijacked and illegally searched in Vienna after a coterie of European states, including France, Italy, Spain and Portugal were cowed into denying the plane entry into their airspace. This act of war (or piracy if you prefer) was initiated by President Obama.
• Student loan interest rates in the US have been doubled from 3.4% to 6.8% as Congress failed to act to avoid the increase.
• The Iowa Supreme Court upheld a ruling that a dentist acted legally in firing an assistant when he found her too attractive to resist and claimed she was a threat to his marriage.
• The New York Times reported that the nation's Surveillance Court (FISA) has created a secret body of laws giving the National Security Agency (NSA) the power to amass vast collections of data on Americans.
• Bloomberg News reports that all eleven members of the FISA Court have been appointed by one man, Chief Justice John Roberts, without a confirmation process conducted by Congress or any other body. All but one member are Republicans and they serve seven-year terms. From 2001 to 2012 the court approved 20,909 surveillance and property search warrants while rejecting ten.
• Der Spiegel reported an interview with Edward Snowden, in which he claimed that despite protesting US espionage against their country, the German intelligence service works closely with the NSA. Indeed, the NSA has a special department, the Foreign Affairs Directorate, to coordinate spying activities with other nations, most notably Germany and the UK.
• Salon reported that a 38 year-old optometrist, Sal Culosi, was killed by a SWAT team in a raid instigated by Detective David Baucum, who had talked Culosi into raising the stakes on friendly sports betting. When Baucum arranged a meeting at the victim's house to collect his winnings, he brought along the SWAT team.
• It's come to light that back in 1998, another Virginia SWAT team had killed a security guard, Edward Reed at a private club being raided.
• Dave Lindorff reported that according to a Houston FBI document, in October 2011 as Occupy Houston demonstrators took to the streets, the FBI had obtained knowledge of a plot to kill leaders of the movement (by sniper attack). None of the targets were warned. Nor was anyone named or charged in the plot.
• 80% of processed foods sold in the US are banned in other nations, for using ingredients such as Olestra and brominated vegetable oil.
• Director of National Intelligence James Clapper appeared to testify under oath before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence on March 12^th, 2013. When asked by Senator Ron Wyden “Does the DSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?” Director Clapper replied “No Sir”. Although we now know from documents released by Edward Snowden that this was an unambiguous lie, no perjury charges have been lodged against Clapper.
• From William Boardman we hear that a working 18 year-old in Texas, who was a bit of a wise-ass, was jailed for making a tasteless joke on Facebook. Bail is set at $500,000 and he's been charged with making a “a terroristic threat” with a potential penalty of two to ten years in prison and/ a $10,000 fine.
• Journalist Barrett Brown faces 105 years in prison for reporting on files hacked from private intelligence firms.
• A 20-year-old female student at the University of Virginia was arrested in a near fatal mix-up with police. Alcoholic Beverage Control agents thought the sparkling water she was carrying out of a store was a six-pack of beer. One agent jumped on the hood of her car and another pulled a gun as she tried to flee in panic. She grazed two agents with her car, was charged with three felonies and jailed overnight. The charges were dropped the following day.
• Former Enron CEO Jeffrey Skilling had his sentence reduced from twenty-four to fourteen years. His company went from No. 7 on the Fortune 500 to bankruptcy amidst waves of fraud.
• According to Bloomberg News, the big banks are being subsidized by the federal government to the tune of $83 billion per year by way of the lower interest rates that they pay due to their “too big to fail” status. The food stamp program, which feeds tens of millions of hungry Americans, receives $76 billion.
• Abusive offshore tax havens cost the US Government more than $150 billion every year, i.e. more than ten times what Obama's proposed cuts to Social Security, via the chained CPI, would save the Treasury.
• The Environmental Protection Agency is to allow consumption of toxic fracking wastewater by wildlife and foodstock. The proposed permits ignore the EPA's own rules requiring the listing of the types of wastes to be treated or dumped.
• Paul Buchheit writes that while the US is near the top of the developed world in average wealth, median level adults get a lower percentage of their country's wealth than in any countries other than China and India.
• The Treasury Secretary of the US is lobbying on behalf of the big banks to persuade European countries not to levy a financial speculation tax, despite overwhelming public support for such measures.
• Private corporations in the security/intelligence/surveillance field make up a growing sub-sector of the Military Industrial Complex, and it's now a $56 billion a year industry. The leading contractors are all heavy contributors to politicians from Barack Obama to John McCain.
• Corporate tax rates are now at a 60 year low. Corporate profits are now at a 60 year high.
• More news keeps emerging of the the “leukemogenic” properties of the pesticides found in many of the foods that Monsanto, with the help of the Department of Agriculture and the State Department, is trying to force into the diets of people all around the world.
• Wells Fargo got $8 billion in tax breaks although its subsidiary Wachavia admitted to laundering more than $378 billion for Mexican drug cartels. None of the bank's officers have been charged or prosecuted.
• The exact proposed location of the KeystoneXL pipeline is not known to the State Department, where approval of the pipeline is currently under consideration.
• The Supreme Court eviscerated the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Several states, including Texas and Florida, immediately moved to restore voter suppression laws that had been considered unconstitutional prior to the decision.
• The TPP (Trans Pacific Partnership) is being secretly negotiated by the US and eleven other countries to give more money and power to corporations while threatening food and environmental safety regulations of the sovereign states.
• The City of Detroit has filed for bankruptcy, in what is by far the largest US city bankruptcy is US history.
• On July 18^th, in the Bradley Manning trial, despite Manning's guilty plea to releasing classified information, Judge Denise Lind refused to drop the “Aiding the Enemy” charges against him.
• At a meeting in Atlanta sponsored by Atlantik Brueche, a German association established to create stronger ties between Germany and the US, former President Jimmy Carter said that “America at the moment does not have a functioning democracy”. His remarks were not picked up in the American media but were reported by Der Spiegel.

I can recall radical regime changes in Cuba, Iran, Chile, Spain, Portugal, the Soviet Union, South Africa and more recently in Iraq, Tunisia, Libya and Egypt. I've watched them all with curiosity but not very much involvement because they were not my countries and I had little contact with them. After abrupt government changes, with the notable exception of the Soviet Union, most countries kept their names, languages and their territory. Some of these coups, revolutions, wars and revolts have been bloody, others not so much, but although life goes on in the affected countries, the changes have been real and often dramatic. Now it's my country's turn. I have no idea how it will turn out, any more than I can know the future of Syria. I only know that the government of my country, like that of Syria, has lost all credibility, and appears to have been taken over by sociopaths, intent on its self-destruction. There is no longer an operational constitution; the three branches of government are all now in the hands of the multi-national corporations; the regime is the most heavily armed in history and it can track our every move and communication. The USA has become unrecognizable to anyone who has grown up there more than thirty years ago. We can expect to experience growing pressure for revolt as the country's spiral into Third World status accelerates, but the fantasies of gun enthusiasts, who worship the Second Amendment while having little regard for the other parts of the Constitution, will prove small consolation in dealing with the military might of the corporatist regime. The landmass isn't likely to change soon, except perhaps for the immersion of the southern half of Florida, but what will emerge in the post-Republic phase of the United States of America remains to be seen.

Sexual Politics

Here in Italy our recent parliamentary elections featured as many as 16 different political parties offering up full lists of candidates for the 918 seats in the two houses of Parliament. While this may represent a wide range of political opinions, issues and interests, it more realistically results from the fact that electoral expenses of all the parties are paid for by the Government. The fragmentation of the electorate has led to coalitions of parties under the umbrella descriptions of center-left and center-right, in order to allow the possibility of alternating administrations, such as the two-party system has historically created in the United States.

Meanwhile, in the US people are clamoring for a third party, or even a move to a multi-party system. Based on the Italian experience, this may not be a fruitful as imagined. The two party system has been made up of Democrats and Republicans since the latter replaced the defunct Whigs in 1860. Republicans traditionally represented business interests and the wealthy, while Democrats have represented put-upon minorities, the term minority originally associated with all people of non-British descent.

Three of my grandparents were of Dutch origin. The two best-known Dutch names in the US are Roosevelt and Rockefeller so I can't say I ever felt the sting of minority status. Nevertheless, I always tended to identify with the underdogs, possibly influenced by my Uncle Martin, a union carpenter who may have been regarded as the black sheep of the family, but who had democratic tendencies rare among his siblings. Our WASP Republican family lived in the New Jersey suburbs, well within the hegemony of the NY Yankees. It must have been my contrarian nature that led me, from an early age, to become a life-long fan of the Boston Red Sox, and equally a foe of the dominant pin-striped Yankees.

While I was spared from minority discrimination myself, I did hear stories of how my German grandfather's delicatessen had been vandalized and my mother's German language lessons curtailed during WWI. For a time Germans were also considered a minority, although I believe their contributions to the US gene pool were even larger than those of the English. In any case, Irish, Italians and Jews all had it much worse, and people of African descent had it worse by another whole magnitude. All have been embraced by the Democratic Party, although for blacks the embrace wasn't extended for a century, until FDR and LBJ came along. I've felt solidarity with them all, with a possible asterisk for the Irish resulting from their unsettling over-representation in local police departments. In any case, I've been proud to call myself a Democrat and vote accordingly.

With the three decade long transformation of the Republican Party from a bastion of the middle class to a single-minded advocate for the richest 1%, one might suppose that the GOP (Grand Old Party for the non-American readers and the very young) would be facing extinction but the One dollar-One vote policies recently enshrined by the Supreme Court have gone a long way toward keeping the party afloat. Most of the above-mentioned groups no longer consider themselves minorities, nor are seen as such, so their Democratic roots have withered. We just don't hear much about Irish-Americans, Italian-Americans or other hyphenated Americans any more. That is not the case for blacks (of all shades) whose stubborness in voting for Democrats at something like a 95% rate has made it easy for them to be gerrymandered or disenfranchised out of political relevance, allowing the outnumbered Republicans to seize the White House in 2000 and 2004. Most humiliating of all, they've been tricked into providing the margin of support needed to get a half black, big business Republican, disguised as a liberal Democrat, elected President, twice. None of the certified GOP Toms, from Alan Keyes to Herman Cain, managed to pull off that trick, but it seems they didn't really need to.

The mainstream media have taken to lamenting that there is no bi-partisanship in government and nothing can be achieved. Whether this stems from naivetè or collusion we can't say but there is bi-partisan agreement on most of the main issues that the US faces today. The need to keep the big banks safe from their own colossal gambling mistakes, the need to keep our military expenditures above those of the rest of the world combined, the need to slash all civilian services and programs; the need for de facto adjustment of the Constitution to accommodate the growing demands of the surveillance state, with the concomitant suppression of whistle blowers; the desirability of preemptive remote-control bombing of possible enemies worldwide; the need to open up trade to obtain the benefits of slave labor; the need to slash taxes and, of course, the need to balance the budget, are all accepted on both sides of the aisle, with minor differences in the details. With President Obama in the White House, Jack Lew at Treasury and Penny Pritzker at Commerce, the big banks are safe.

So with all this unprecedented bi-partisanship around, what can the Democratic Party do to restore its traditions and keep the two-party system alive? There is a fast growing Hispanic minority, exploited and discriminated enough to qualify as Democrats, but it

looks like they will be represented by rich emigrè Cubans, most of whom belong to the GOP.  Eminent Senators have declared, and a number of Supreme Court justices have suggested, that there is no longer any need or justification for affirmative action legislation since the US is now free of racial discrimination.

With racial and ethnic discrimination a thing of the past, in an effort to find new minorities to represent, the Democratic Party has now become the refuge of the LGBT (Lesbian, Gay, Bi-sexual and Transgender) coalition. The party's entry into sexual politics is hardly a new thing. It's been the standard bearer for all feminist issues for several decades.

The Democratic embrace of the LGBT coalition has been fully reciprocated. In a move reminiscent of that historic moment a decade ago when Colin Powell and Condolizza Rice showed the world that the US Government was no longer just a bunch of old white men lying to and misleading the public, the SF Pride Board Chairman, Lisa Williams, organizer of the San Francisco Gay Pride Parade, declared that no demonstration of support for gay whistle-blower Bradley Manning would be tolerated, thus putting the LGBT alliance solidly into the ranks of the political mainstream. Manning, who is currently on trial for whistle-blowing, had been named Grand Marshall of the parade but that decision was rescinded, setting off some demonstrations. This event may prove to be closer in nature and historic relevance to the 1968 Democratic Convention, where Chicago Mayor Daley came down heavily on anti-war demonstrators, paving the way for the phoenix-like rise from the ashes of one Richard M. Nixon.

While I welcome the LGBT folks into the fold and I'm happy to see the rights of gay friends as keenly advocated as were those of previous minorities, I do have a few concerns. This embrace does have some electoral logic since the foot soldiers of the oligarchy, as well as its voting base, tend to come from the ranks of gun nuts and non-Muslim religious zealots. Neither of these groups has shown much solidarity with the LGBT movement. Unfortunately, the LGBT vote, even if as solidly Democratic as the black vote, probably doesn't reach 15%, maybe not even 10% of the electorate. Why not build a bigger tent?

Much discussion of same-sex marriage has been mislabeled as “marriage equality” Who's kidding whom? Ask Mitt Romney. His grandfather was run out of the country for his religious beliefs and personal practices regarding marriage. Who knows what might have happened had Mexican-born George Romney, Mitt's father, won the 1968 GOP primary? Republicans may consider Mexico to be an American colony, much like Panama, John McCain's birthplace, but apparently haven't extended such imperial blessings to the State of Hawaii, the birthplace of the current President. What about all those Bin Laden family members spirited out of the country the day after 9/11 during the air traffic lock-down. They may have had special treatment getting out but were their marital rights respected when they entered the country? I doubt it! The US has suppressed the traditional customs of polygamists for centuries, be they Mormons, Muslims or hippies. Let's call them “pollies”. Why don't pollies have the right to marry those they love?

Current progressive thinking is that people are born straight, gay or bi-sexual but no one seems to have considered that some people are born asexual. Asexuals may not have readily identifiable needs nor prominent issues but still, what political entity is speaking up for “Aces”. Without getting into another nature-nurture argument, we can see that people are living longer, eating and drinking more while exercising less, enduring more daily stress, suffering more and more from prostate ailments, and becoming aces at an increasing rate, regardless of their sexual status at birth.  Perhaps people who are more interested in money than sex just naturally gravitate to the GOP, but why should Democrats concede this growing slice of the electorate without a fight?

Once we tended to think of aces as being mostly priests and nuns, as if all aces were born Catholic, but does anyone speak for Protestant and Jewish aces? In recent years it has emerged that many priests haven't been the aces we thought they were. While our culture now glorifies sexuality in all its splendid variety, it struggles to accept that priests have needs too, and that sometimes their love extends to young people of all sexes.  Lonely football coaches have also come in for harsh approbation when their affections or private parts have been exposed. The term pedophile carries heavy negative connotations. Offering sweets to their sweeties has gotten many older men into deep trouble, even though our laws are confusing and conflicting.

Some young women in the teaching profession are now in prison because in addition to algebra they taught their young charges about love. “Sweets” would be a far less negative term for people whose love knows no age limits.

Much has been made of accepting or rejecting gay Boy Scouts. As I recall, the entry age for Boy Scouts was twelve. When I was rejected, it had nothing to do with sex. I simply failed to memorize the Boy Scout Oath or the Boy Scout Code, I can't remember which. With all the chemicals and hormones in the environment, kids are reaching puberty earlier these days, but is sexual identity cast in stone at twelve? The age of consent in the US ranges from 16 to 18 with some states providing exceptions from prosecution when, for example, the older offender is not more than two years older than the “victim”. Girls can now get over-the-counter day-after birth control bills at any age, a big step toward protecting them from unwanted pregnancy but who is working to decriminalize their partners?

Nymphomaniacs, the patron saints of adolescent boys, and another unprotected sexual minority, are often targets of verbal abuse. Calling them sluts or hos should be just as unacceptable as using other terms of derision such as wop, kike, nigger and faggot, but what is the Democratic Party doing about it? With Post Traumatic Stress Disorder becoming an epidemic and more American soldiers committing suicide than being killed in battle, the government could be mobilizing our “nymphs” to restore morale in our ailing troops and letting them live to fight another day. We haven't even mentioned the rights and problems of our professional sex workers but they vote too.

Even with an expanded sexual campaign, the Democratic Party still needs to widen its base. The fastest expanding demographic group is made up of the morbidly obese. “Bigs” are still a minority for the moment but they need representation. Campaigning for larger airline seats and fighting Mayor Bloomberg's anti-soft drink crusade could go a long way toward rescuing this group from the clutches of New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie while creating a permanent Democratic majority.

With the expanded battle for full sexual rights and privileges, and support for Big issues, I believe the Democrats can regain control of both Houses of Congress and perhaps even the Presidency. If not, America may see the growth of one issue splinter parties howling in the dark about bank regulation, the environment, habeas corpus, economic justice, job creation, climate change, infrastructure collapse, social security, immigration, war crimes, education, unending war, corporate personhood and any number of other wedge issues. The US could even end up as politically fragmented as Italy finds itself today.

Blind Justice

Pfc. Bradley Manning's trial moves ahead- slowly. He has agreed to plead guilty to various charges of releasing classified information, while not accepting a guilty plea for charges such as espionage or aiding and abetting “the enemy”. The information he released revealed criminal and unethical activity by personnel within the Department of Defense and the State Department, as well as criminal activity by private military contractors. No evidence has surfaced that Manning profited in any way from his actions, or that he was motivated by any prospect of personal gain. Rather, he felt compelled to act to reveal evidence that he had access to of outrageous activity of the part of people working for the US Government. Some of the activities revealed were simply routine diplomacy, i.e. duplicitous acts and statements by diplomats of the US and countries it deals with, and the revelations may have caused some embarrassment all around. However, more central to the activities unveiled were torture, murder, incitement to torture, and official cover-ups of criminal acts. For his actions Manning was held in solitary confinement without charges for a year and a half and he remains in custody today, with no possibility of bail. While his living conditions have improved significantly after a public outcry over his treatment, which a number of psychiatrists have said amounted to torture, he now faces formal charges which could lead to life imprisonment, if not the death penalty that some members of Congress and other media luminaries have called for. The formal charges were only lodged in late February of 2012, nineteen months after his arrest. To the best of our knowledge, there has still been no prosecution of any of the perpetrators of the crimes that were disclosed, and there seems little desire on the part of the Department of Justice to investigate.

Against that backdrop, the news has emerged that HSBC, one of the world's largest banks, has agreed to pay a large fine, described by different sources as either $1.25 billion or $1.9 billion, for illegal banking activities over a three or four year period in which the bank laundered money on behalf of Mexican drug cartels and Al Qaeda Given that the US is in a permanent War on Drugs and another permanent War On Terrorism, this would seem to qualify as aiding and abetting the enemy, if anything can ever be considered as such.

Loretta Lynch, US attorney for the Eastern District of New York, issued the following statement:

Loretta Lynch: We are here today to announce the filing of criminal charges against HSBC Bank, both its U.S. entity, HSBC U.S., and the parent HSBC group, for its sustained and systemic failure to guard against the corruption of our financial system by drug traffickers and other criminals and for evading U.S. sanctions law. HSBC, as you know, is one of the largest financial institutions in the world, with affiliates and personnel spanning the globe. Yet during the relevant time periods, they failed to comply with the legal requirements incumbent on all U.S. financial institutions to have in place compliance mechanisms and safeguards to guard against being used for money laundering.

HSBC has admitted its guilt to the four-count information filed today, which sets forth two violations of the Bank Secrecy Act, a violation of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, or IEEPA, and violation of the Trading with the Enemy Act. As part of its resolution of these charges, HSBC has agreed to forfeit $1.256 billion, the largest forfeiture amount ever by a financial institution for a compliance failure.

The Justice Department has allowed the bank to avoid prosecution. Old habits die hard. None of the top officials of the bank will face charges, much less be seized and thrown into solitary confinement. If you want to see more detail on this case, see the entire Matt Taibbi article here.

It seems that Pfc. Manning's worst crime was to not make enough money through his whistle-blowing disclosures to buy his way out of jail. With the government strapped for cash these days, $1 billion clearly buys a lot of immunity. Who knows, perhaps a few million would have been enough to swing our laissez faire Department of Justice. Maybe, with a little more cash, Manning, like HSBC Chief Executive Stuart Gulliver, could have just apologized for his actions, handed over whatever profits he'd made through his actions, and promised to do better in the future.