Tag Archives: American Politics

Check the Kool-Aid

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If Iran had actually wanted to build an atom bomb, it could have done so years ago. They were using that threat as a bargaining chip in getting sanctions lifted against their economy imposed by Western powers. The existence of Israel has been an irritant to Islamic nations since it was forced on the region. The hidden issue, as in most things in the Middle East, is oil. Iran is a founding member of BRICS, a consortion of nations including China, Russia, India, and Brazil, challenging America’s dominance of the world economy, and has called for a Muslim embargo of crude oil into Israel. For those who remember when members of the Bush Administration were sharpening their knives to divide up the oil fields in Iraq, there are untapped oil reserves in Palestine. Meanwhile, the starvation and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in Gaza rages on. Iran’s real threat to Israel was not nuclear; it is economic. Controlling the production and flow of oil is the reason behind Israel’s attack on Iran. For Donald Trump and the Art of the Deal, “having the cards”, in this instance overwhelming military intelligence and air power, made his choice easy, and we are now “all in” on climate change and global warming denial and the continuation of fossil fuel extraction and burning. Our modern world was built on its power. Mother Earth is now clearly casting doubt on the wisdom of that choice, but no one wants, as in “whistling past the graveyard”, to pay heed to those voices. Power over the flow of oil must be maintained at all costs.

RP

Christian Values vs. Political Power: A Critical Look

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It is becoming difficult not to feel cynical about the trajectory of the nation and the world as propelled by the “visionary” concepts of Donald Trump. A first concern is the environment. Climate change and global warming will not cease to exist because he claims it is a hoax, nor is it the inevitable cost of having a vibrant economy. Droughts, floods, and violent storms are the new everyday life on Earth. Denial of reality is an addict’s path. A second is the Conservative Right’s claim that America is a Christian nation. In my Sunday school education, I learned that the Beatitudes of the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus’ stress on compassion, forgiveness, empathy, and charity, were the core essence and distinguishing exception of Christianity over earlier religions. This is in sharp contrast with hard-right beliefs, be they evangelical or Catholic, which are more in line with the exercise of vengeance and power portrayed in the Old Testament, wherein humanity is a tooth-and-claw struggle for dominion. Care of the Earth and of those less fortunate are dismissed in today’s social and economic stratification. The power of wealth is valued above all. That this ethos thrives foremost with the President, in the halls of Congress and Justice, and in corner corporate offices leaves little optimism for the future of humanity in America, or, for that matter, life on planet Earth.

RP

Clash of Titans: Trump and Musk’s Impact on America

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The Elon Musk/Donald Trump Alliance appears to be holding for now. Both are serving the other’s needs, such as they are. Elon dreams of colonizing Mars and being a messenger of the salvation of humankind, while Donald, oblivious to the suffering loss of Palestinian lives and homes, envisions a Trump Hotel and golf course rising from the rubble of the Gaza Strip. Both of these egocentric sociopaths, hungry for power and certain of their brilliance, are off the charts of psychiatric normalcy. Both have severely damaged psyches enthralled with wielding power. Thus far, they are working in tandem to lay a broad axe to the structures of American government, an act no less globally unsettling than that of the Trotsky/Lenin overthrow of the Russian Tsars. Some speculate that a Clash of the Titans is inevitable, perhaps an Alien Versus Predator scenario raging through the halls of the White House and Congress. Someone has to emerge as number one. In the meantime, confusion and anxiety over the ramifications of Trump 2.0 hang over everyone’s future.

Racing apace

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Everything everywhere all at once. The breakneck speed and urgency of Donald Trump’s first days of imposing his will on government and the American people is dizzying to anyone trying to analyze and comprehend what is emerging. Confusion is enervating and Trump is the master of manipulation, adept at bending anger and mass hysteria in his favor, and tweeting doublethink for and against nearly every issue. All the while, Congressional members are trembling in their suits in fear of stirring his anger. Welcome to 1984. George Orwell was eerily prescient in showing the overwhelming power of Doublespeak in propaganda messaging when it is omnipresent and unquestioned. With the rise of social media and data mining, personal privacy no longer exists, and Big Brother, aka Donald Trump, is ever watchful and demanding.

RP

Wave Boarding

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Leaders of nations around the world, autocratic and/or elected, are all riding varying waves of political and cultural history and momentum. The United States is no exception, but what Donald Trump has ingeniously done is change the American ethos from one of being an amalgam “Melting Pot” of diverse peoples and cultures to the earlier one of “Manifest Destiny”, the belief that the bounty of New World was God’s gift to enterprising, primarily white immigrants claiming ownership of land and utilizing the newly arriving labor to create personal wealth and build a nation of winners and losers based on capitalist exploitation. Black slavery was eventually abolished, but “people of color” and women have long belonged to a distinctly lesser class to be put to use. In Donald Trump’s view, America has always been a white man’s world.

For those who thought and hoped his semi-coherent rambling was merely political bluster and posturing are today waking up to the realization that America has elected an ego maniac who fully intends to do everything he said he would do in leading the free world into the 21st Century. Those less zealous riding his coattails into the future should be questioning just what exactly they have signed up on.

When the unelected million/billionaire Tech titans are seated in the front row with the incoming Cabinet members behind them at the inauguration, it is clear who Trump sees as the best Americans to be rewarded, those making the most money. His pardon of the Capital rioters indicates his concept of law-and-order is that criminals supporting him are heroes, not criminals, and he intends to “weaponize the Justice Department” against his perceived enemies. The talk radio spin and doublethink on all this is mind boggling, but having January 6th made a national holiday looms as an actual possibility. Further, on the subject of mania and beyond, Elon Musk, the Buck Rogers dreamer of space travel and the colonization of Mars and self appointed Czar of government efficiency is not the first genius mind in history to go off the rails. His dalliance and embrace of Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany is more than sadly disturbing. It is dangerous in our next four year journey into the future.

RP

Destiny in Question

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Donald Trump, his MAGA acolytes, and his millionaire/billionaire supporters are simply a continuation of America’s “Manifest Destiny”, the belief that this New World continent was God’s gift to White men. That the birth of the United States included the genocide of the America’s First People, slavery, women regarded as second class citizens, and the exploitation of the Earth and human labor is not important to these “true” American patriots. Everything was for the taking, a concept that has not left the country. With its belief that racial and cultural diversity leads to the undoing of American values, the Trump phenomenon has deep roots in our history and heritage, and can be seen as an heirloom fruit of the Founding Fathers. Countering that embedded cultural momentum and its resulting concentration of wealth and power, and addressing human-caused global warming will require a monumental shift of national and human ingenuity and identity. It is not just us, the entire world faces a daunting future. There will be no easy sailing for whoever is the next President.

Media Machine

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Between Elon Musk’s Twittersphere and the country-wide talk radio echo chamber Donald Trump’s Republican Party has a media propaganda machine equal to that of the Communist Party in China, Vladimir Putin’s autocracy in Russia, and Big Brother in George Orwell’s 1984. Information available to the public is to be tightly controlled and manipulated to favor the ruling regime. 1984 explores, in combining Orwell’s experience and insights expressed in two earlier novels, the callous oblivion of British capitalism in Burmese Days and Stalin’s betrayal in the Spanish Civil War of a truly populist people’s rebellion in Homage to Catalonia, the end of truth, love, and caring in power politics. Like Big Brother, Trump continually expresses an aura of absolute certainty of his correctness. More than ever Orwell should be required reading for everyone of voting age.

The Future of Trumpism

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The MAGA rioters who stormed the Capitol and the Neo-Nazi Fascist Klansmen marching at a Trump rally in Charlottesville regarded themselves as patriotic revolutionaries acting under a romantic illusion that brute force was a realistic means to keep Donald Trump in the White House. The real insurrectionists today are the authors and proponents of Project 2025 who recognize that the true power in capitalist America is money, even more so since the Conservative majority on the Supreme Court ruled that it had unlimited “free speech” power. Project 2025 is structured around a Libertarian ethos of freedom from regulation, maximum profit, and concentrated wealth that will radically alter the historical arc of American democracy. It has deep pocket corporate and individual backers. Donald Trump aspires to personal autocratic power, able to hire and fire as he sees fit, but at the forefront of Project 2025, he is largely a storefront manikin and incoherent entry level drug to an authoritarian rule of wealth. J D Vance has had a few opening glitches, but with his manly White embrace of religious and family values, his roots in the Midwest, and time spent in the tech world of Silicon Valley, he stands as a reliably malleable successor to lead the Project 2025 revolution. In this election, America stands at a crossroads of its self-definition.

RP

Avatar

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Religious and exploitive, white supremacy has been at the core of the American ethos since the first European colonists arrived. The New World was God’s gift to enterprising freedom seekers, and what a grand gift it has been. Waves of entrepreneurs, religious and economic, swept across the continent, pushing aside all standing in their way. Donald Trump, thus, is not an upstart anomaly in the American experience. He is the embodiment of a segment of its ethnic and cultural psyche and history. That he has millions of America First, true believers enthusiastically supporting his candidacy shows how deeply embedded bullying white supremacy remains in the hearts of much of the American public. He is their avatar, and it is he and his followers who are the true victims of injustice in today’s morally and technologically evolving world. “We represent all that is great in America and we are under attack spiritually, emotionally, and economically. We are its anchor”. If there is weakness in Trump’s drive to power it is his blatant need of acceptance and love, and that white supremacy no longer abides below the radar and now needs a heroic figurehead. A nationwide admittance of Truth and Reconciliation concerning the dark side of American history is possible but perhaps a bridge too far. Further, there is in Moby Dick, that most American of novels, the example of the sailors on the Pequod, open-eyed, casting their lot with the mad obsession of Ahab. America’s future awaits.

RP

On and on

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Cultural momentum, be Chinese and Russian authoritarian imperialism or Euro-American colonial white supremacy, remain primal driving forces in world political history. The same must be said of the religious institutions of Islam, Christianity, and Judaism, each claiming being the favorite of God, and equally so of the global consumption of the life and riches of the Earth for survival and power. War and violence, profit and larceny, have been part and parcel of human history from its onset. As for American democracy being “a shining city on a hill”, armaments and munitions sales are soaring, fossil fuel drilling and consumption are booming, Andrew Jackson, father of the Trail of Tears, remains the face of the $20 bill, and Donald Trump aspires to an autocratic Presidency and has an avid following. The trajectory of mankind, increasingly technologically accelerated, seems ever more virally spiraling out of control, trending toward an uncertain end. The meek may well be destined to inherit the Earth or at least what is left of it. A basic law of physics states that a body in motion remains in motion until meeting a countering force. The heart of humankind is divided, at best bipolar, in imagining the future. Where we eventually land is narrowing precipitously.

RP