Former President Barack Obama has a tagline that he and others, particularly Democrats, use routinely: “This is not who we are.” Obama trots it out at every perceived tragedy, generally in order to avoid the uncomfortable and, dare I say it, more confrontational opposite message. For example, when gun carnage abounds, Obama and others so inclined prefer to absolve the masses from any responsibility because “this is not who we are.” If only that sentiment were true.

The current presidential election gave Obama a new platform from which he reminded us all of the coming horrors should the unwashed vote for Donald Trump. Then he immediately absolved the unwashed of any responsibility for the impending doom because “this is not who we are.” Unfortunately, it is precisely who we are.

Candidate Kamala Harris was quick to jump on the “this is not who we are” bandwagon. In her “unity” message with the White House as a backdrop, she treated us all to a “this is not who we are” chorus, fanning the flames of absolution in the vain hope that she could reach those who would be offended by a more direct message. In fact, in the waning days of the election, President Joe Biden pretty much nailed it — calling Trump’s racist supporters “garbage” seemed about right to me.

I could go on with this, but it would not bring us any closer to understanding Trump’s grip on more than half the people who actually voted in the election. On one level, it seems that many voters have become so jaded by their personal “plight” that everything from the increased cost of a tomato to a martini to a Bentley offends their personal sensibilities, unfettered by concern for others and their plight. By this line of reasoning, any Trump lie about the economy received a friendly reception unencumbered by facts to the contrary.

Democrats must fight back

On another level, it looks like Trump tapped into a deep vein of fear that changing demographics are eroding the privilege that drives white Americans to a sense of comfortable superiority. This sense of superiority seems to run across economic divides in the white community, providing white voters with the impetus they needed to ignore the actual likely economic impact of specific candidate or political party proposals. Some of the same reasoning may have led “privileged” blacks and Latinos to similar conclusions.

So now that this interminable election cycle has produced a hard fall, it might be time for progressive Democrats to finally get indignant enough to confront, confuse and undermine every initiative of Trump they can find. This is long overdue. Talk of “unity” is the prescription for continued political demise.

Using Latinos as an example, apparently many chose not to hear or understand the racist, anti-immigrant message aimed at them because they voted for Trump anyway. It is time now to stand up to those Latino voters with that message in hand as Trump deports them and spits in their faces on the way out. Then, while the roundup continues, Democrats must not do anything to support any plan to “fix” America’s immigration system. Oppose any such plan every step of the way.

Democrats need to remember how nicely that political dance worked for Trump and his acolytes in this election. That same dance will work for Democrats in the next election cycle, but only if they have the political cojones required to pull it off while consistently advocating for the required components of humane and comprehensive immigration reform.

Likewise, this is a time to forcefully confront the undemocratic aspects of our political system and the inequities that they spawn. This would be a significantly more concrete message about the fight for democracy than all the blather about the cataclysmic clash between “democracy” and “autocracy,” as if winning the labeling war ends the discussion. Actually fighting for meaningful institutional reform in the US is the real fight for democracy that can reap electoral rewards and promote messaging clarity.

The list is long: Champion the simple democratic reform of eliminating the electoral college to provide that a popular vote majority elects the next president; aggressively confront voter suppression measures and seek to enact national voter access standards; force as many open congressional votes as possible on legislative proposals to enact a national living wage and provide for the childcare equity that opens pathways to a higher collective standard of living and demand that government protect the freedom to life and liberty that is threatened directly by ever-present gun violence. Then, work on easy-to-understand legislation that makes access to meaningful healthcare and quality public education a right of every man, woman and child living in America.

Further, as a painful reminder that weaponized hypocrisy has been a powerful tool of Senate Republicans, watch how smoothly they eliminate the filibuster in the upcoming legislative year to use their congressional majority to ensure that their right-wing agenda items reach Trump’s desk. Senate Democrats must use every trick they can find to stop this onslaught. The Republicans will inevitably attempt to manipulate the confirmation process to ensure the Senate confirmation of the parade of troglodytes proposed for high government, military office and the judiciary. Democrats must, for once, outmaneuver them, even as it reveals their own hypocrisy.

Finally, as Democrats reflect on what is to come, we will be treated to another pathetic round of mainstream media self-flagellation, at the conclusion of which celebratory kudos will be passed around for a job well done in difficult times. For this ever to change, we must expose the role of corporate money and its corrupting influence on the nation’s media. We must challenge the news “personalities” aspiring to be part of the story and little more, content “balance” free of context or verification and the ubiquitous presence of unregulated social media devoid of any standards.

Remember what America, sadly, stands for

As with the open and ugly face of racism that Trump’s first adventure in “governing” exposed to the easily deluded populace, this time around we will be treated to the death knell of so many more of the delusions that underpin the most venal aspects of what America has always been and sadly continues to be. So the next time you pledge allegiance to the flag and to the republic for which it stands, think of immigrants rounded up like cattle, of hungry children in our midst, of the homeless, of book bans and the like, along with a flag-friendly nod to the cruelty directed at some of the most vulnerable among us.

Meanwhile, I will be sitting on my perch watching and waiting, hoping that the younger generations finally find something to move them enough to think beyond themselves and put something at risk. It is a shame that an old man has to be the one to continue saying this.

[Hard Left Turn first published this piece.]

[Lee Thompson-Kolar edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Running Scared: Democrats Routed by a Torrent of Hate appeared first on Fair Observer.

I am not sure why, but perhaps putting it under a microscope robs most celebrity of its panache and leaves so many potential heroes floundering in their own detritus. Maybe simple fact-checking has served to dull the authority of yesteryear’s heroes and many of today’s pretenders. Then who can speak for us? Who can move us to action, and who can inspire us to care about those who nobody seems to care about?

It will come as no surprise to many that Senator Robert F. Kennedy Sr. was my last hero. He made me a better human being. In his all-too-brief moment in the sun, he grew, and I grew with him.

Do we still have heroes?

Yet amid all the talk about fallen heroes, usually in the warrior context, we rarely examine how they actually lived their lives for fear of tarnishing their moment of truth. Most importantly, we have no agreed-upon standard for the “heroic” that ensures meaningful recognition of the heroes in our midst.

Is one shining moment enough? Is a neighbor a “hero” who hears the cries of a child who has fallen through the ice on a pond and, at some personal risk, jumps in to save the child. Or does the neighbor need to pull it off again to fully qualify, somewhat like the Catholic Church’s requirement for a second miracle on the way to sainthood?

Given the tragedies that often surround us and threaten imminent harm, there must be a whole lot of regular people out there who always seem to answer the call. Not the usual military “heroes,” but nurses, teachers, first responders and good cops, for example. Yet, are they heroes simply for being good at what they are called to do? I don’t know. But I do know that finding those who seem to innately understand that lifting up, reaching out and seeking equity and justice for all when it may be inconvenient to do so is a good place to start looking for real “heroes.”

Villains are much easier to spot. For them, kindness and empathy are signs of weakness, and personal gain is their only hallmark of success. Greed and corruption run deep in the villain pool. And, so often, the villains are the first to tell you that their self-proclaimed “heroic” acts justify their otherwise self-absorbed lives.

Most of us fit somewhere in between, hoping that our better angels will rise to the moment, but often hoping that the test never comes. What would you do if a pregnant woman was being harassed by some young jerk on a bus? Act, or feel relieved when someone else does?

Do we have heroes… in politics?

You may be asking what any of this has to do with much of anything. Well, in today’s divided and troubled times, it could prove critical to find some real heroes in our political midst, to identify what makes them our heroes and then test their message.

At the core of any message that is going to resonate with me must be a commitment to policies and programs that confront the obvious and ongoing inequities in our society. Somehow, a call to a collective conscience has to replace individual vanity and greed with empathy and active caring.

While I am still wishing and hoping, no new hero has emerged in the high-stakes race for the presidency of the United States. The Democratic candidate, Vice President Kamala Harris, is not one of my heroes yet, but the Republican candidate, former President Donald Trump, is surely one of my villains. Harris seems like she actually might be able to do the job she seeks. Trump is demonstrably incapable of doing the job that he seeks. And that simple equation is good enough for me. 

Unfortunately, parsing every word and expressing every momentary concern is already distracting from the obvious. Every responsible public official should in the immediate days ahead be confronted with one question before any other: “Do you believe that a person who is a demonstrated racist, misogynist and immoral narcissist can be qualified to be president of the United States?” When they waiver or refuse to answer, you will know their answer. Ask your friends and neighbors the same question. If they waiver or refuse to answer, you will know their answer, as well.

None of the rest of the questions that we have really matter in the short time before the election. There is, of course, much that I would like to hear Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, talk about in the coming weeks. I would prefer that they do so without allowing the reporters and news readers on the prowl for sensation and their own glory to get in the way.

The September 10 “debate” between Harris and Trump should have been eye-opening to anyone watching with any doubt about the fundamental basic qualification issue. However, these presidential debates have often proven to be short on both impact and insight. We know who Trump is, and no debate is going to alter the stench that he leaves in his wake wherever he goes. I wanted a debate so that others might see what I already know, but more importantly, I wanted an accomplished black woman to kick Trump’s fat ass. She did just that.

As we have seen in this election cycle and before, policy proposals are often the last piece of the candidate puzzle to reach the voters. This is unfortunate because actual governing is about policies and the skill to design and implement the programs that bring those policies to life. 

This time around, we have to get the initial presidential choice right because we have seen the rapacious plan developed by Trump’s acolytes and the scores of right-wing lawyers and academics who have spent their professional lives undermining America’s institutional capacity to govern itself. If you wonder at Trump’s utter lack of any cohesive public policy statements, be assured that draconian policies are there and ready for deployment if Trump wins the upcoming election.

I will vote for Kamala Harris, hero or not, and I will try to do my part to ensure that others do so as well. And maybe this time, there will be enough collective energy to put her over the top simply because she is the only one in the race even arguably qualified for the job. Maybe then, we will find out if Kamala Harris is really someone special, so much more than the only responsible choice. Maybe even a generational hero.

[Hard Left Turn first published this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Voting for Kamala Is an Easy Choice, but It Needs a Hard Sell appeared first on Fair Observer.

I wish someone would call me, because I would tell them in no certain terms that some old people would make fine presidents and others would be disasters. I surely don’t support a portion of what Biden seems to support, particularly with respect to international issues. However, I just as surely believe that he is capable of doing the fundamental job of being president of the United States — digesting written and recorded material and then listening to trusted advisors as they provide the information and counsel necessary to make critical domestic and international policy decisions. Biden has been doing this for the past three-plus years, and the nation is the better for it.

On the other hand, though I am old enough to know that my mind may not always remember your name, it is surely sharp enough to know that Trump is one of the two or three worst presidents that the United States has ever seen. And I can still tell that he is a rampant narcissist, that he lies without conscience or concern and that he should have been relegated to institutional walls of shame throughout the nation long ago — not to mention outfitted with a prison jumpsuit that matches his faux hair color. Yet it seems that around half of the people who do get phone calls asking political survey questions are blind to what seems so apparent to me.

How did the survey class get so out of touch with the feelings of Americans?

So what’s wrong, where is the disconnect? I wish I knew for sure, but I just have to think that a good chunk of the problem is that the people who design and execute public opinion polls in general, and political surveys in particular, are simply mired in some procedural time warp. They seem to be operating in a time when reaching a viable and random cross-section of the voting public and getting their honest input was as simple as picking up the phone. This wistful ideal cannot exist in a world in which a great section of the populace believes that texting is the most effective means to communicate ideas that are surely more complicated than “Be there soon.” Almost no one answers the telephone anymore, landline or cellphone.

Most importantly, the science of who does what and why is a constantly moving target in a world in which people called “influencers” emerge from their cocoons for a mere moment in the sun before being replaced by a different species of influencer. So, even if you think you have figured out how to reach a representative sampling of the populace to survey, the selection algorithm is likely past its prime before it is ever implemented. And there is still the problem about determining who it is that actually picks up the phone.

Diverging for a moment to America’s pandemic response is instructive. Try to figure out why basic public health messaging failed so miserably during the COVID pandemic and in its aftermath. “We are working really hard to develop a COVID vaccine, but before we do, wear a mask and keep your distance.” This was the distilled and easy-to-understand message from public health officials that never got close to the public acceptance that it should have had. 

Instead, many of the well over a million Americans who died due to COVID did so needlessly, simply by failing to receive and accept the basic public health message. On the other hand, Trump’s message about injecting disinfectant, constantly understating the problem and openly rejecting basic public health measures laid the groundwork for the dunce dance that overtook the nation and continues to this day. Try to take a survey of that morass and even come close to matching statistical reality yesterday or today.

Just this one example should make you laugh every time some commentator or politician says: “Look, voters are smart.” Really? Even if “smart” suggests only an innate intelligence, the American adult population is so saturated with purposeful disinformation and uninformed misinformation that being “smart” can’t keep up with much of the nation’s pathological addiction to willful ignorance. Depending on voters being “smart” is a fool’s errand.

How can progressives ignore the polls and aggressively confront the lies?

So, somehow, there has to be a way to connect those who want to tell us what we think with some strong dose of what many of us actually do think about the issues of the day, in general, and Trump and his cabal in particular. Shouting from rooftops or at the television has failed. Locking pollsters and those who rely on them for contrived commentary in a big room somewhere might help but would leave gaping holes in cable news election coverage. Redoubling our efforts to tell the truth about the dangers of Trump and his cabal and the accomplishments of Biden and his team still leaves an unsettling feeling that the message isn’t getting through. (Remember: “Wear a mask and keep your distance.”)

Even in the present political and social environment, progressives continue to underestimate Trump, as they have since he began his corrosive march into politics. And, perhaps most importantly, progressives have allowed themselves to be both traumatized and hypnotized by the continuing presence of a serial liar, overt racist, psychotically narcissistic grifter in our midst sucking up so much of the political and social dialogue. This is the very dialogue that progressives seem to believe could eventually penetrate the wall of willful ignorance and indifference that rips caring, conscience and morality from the national vocabulary.

In meeting the challenge, it is unfortunate that many of us are simply ill-equipped to lie in the face of lies or even exaggerate known facts to make a point. But lies often penetrate where wise men fear to go. Since meaningful response to Trump’s serial lies has been muted by media treatment of him as a larger-than-life figure, he emerges as a kind of faux hero that is a staple of America’s delusional treatment of its own history and present narrative. The rest of us are left watching sand slip through our fingers.

So, start answering your phones all the time and hope that it is a pollster. At worst, it might be a friend who would just like to chat for a while. After ending the call, get to work on somebody’s campaign and focus on getting out the vote for Biden and Democratic candidates. And, most importantly, feel free to exaggerate the truth in a convincing way for this cause.

[Hard Left Turn first published this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post It’s Time to Answer the Phone and Exaggerate the Truth appeared first on Fair Observer.

Even at this time of year, after the usual holiday season blitz, Americans are continually bombarded with pleas from charitable institutions to feed hungry children, to house the homeless, to fund critical research and to provide the healthcare that the desperate seek. Images of hungry children here and abroad abound amid the pleas for donations — just $19 a month will feed a hungry child for a few weeks. Help out and you get a free blanket that the hungry child could probably use more than you can.

Think about that and then think about just how helpful it would have been for the US government to have invested in feeding hungry children instead of investing in those hundreds of 2000 pound bombs at $16,000 a piece they sent to Israel to be dropped on caged civilians in Gaza. Then start thinking about all those killing machines America’s military-industrial complex so blithely supplies in our name to its eager “allies” around the globe while St. Jude’s Children’s Hospital begs for funding.

The point here is that we have the means to do the humane, the right and the moral, and the only cost to do so is giving up an addiction to the inhumane, the wrong and the immoral. The US constitution does not require the richest nation on Earth to work so hard to create the fiction that it strives to provide a path to global peace and prosperity. The national obsession with firearms and the glorification of the merchants of death speak loudly enough. Add the chorus of Pentagon flaks and their corporate masters and the rest of humanity gets drowned out. And that is just the beginning.

America’s moral foundation is so shaky now that many in the world are finally catching on. However, the harder audience to reach is the nearest one, the simmering swamp of ignorance and delusion from sea to shining sea. If hypocrisy were an actual religion instead of the foundation of most, if not all, religions, the Righteous House of Hypocrisy would be overflowing — pass the plate and grab a genuine bottle of snake oil on the way out.

The US government and corporate America cannot even sort out who the winners should be in the latest inhumanity spectacle in Gaza. So, instead of rendering a clear message that the latest inhumanity must stop before America offers Israel even more death-dealing capacity, Americans and the rest of the world get another dose of America’s latest version of munitions might makes right. How much further down the humanity and morality scale will America sink before the madness of the nation’s unshakable marriage to the merchants of death finds its match.

In the face of the greed, avarice and ignorance driving the nation’s lust for international relevance, a far more aggressive and assertive pushback will be required to even try to change course. But it is hard to identify the initial point in the figurative oyster shell to even try to pry it open. It would surely help to start by ignoring all things Trump, at least until his first sentencing hearing. This Potemkin monster has been created and fed by all of the nation’s worst instincts. Try to imagine another “hero” so flawed by mendacity and narcissism.

How can we get better?

Once we move Trump to his own little personal hell and stop bashing old people for their longevity, there might be an opening to examine humane solutions to inhumane problems and conditions. This could also give the nation a new analytical framework for evaluating the past performance and future potential of politicians, corporate titans, academics and the vast expanse of the professional class, including journalists.

However, examining humane solutions to inhumane problems and conditions in this context has to embrace much more than some academic exercise. It will take new and renewed energy to make America and at least some of the rest of the world a laboratory for diagnosing the problems and conditions, identifying the symptoms and then relentlessly confronting the fundamental inhumanity that always results from inhumane and immoral means. America and so many other countries in the world glibly embrace the notion that there is a path to humane goals that can be achieved through these inhumane and immoral means. There simply is no such path.

For many Americans who like to think of themselves as moral and humane, it will take confrontation instead of acquiescence. It will take learning hard truths and then passing those hard truths on to friends and family and professional associates and co-religionists and the like.

It will take a willingness to boycott those who make money in service of inhumanity. It will take the willingness to tell a local merchant you really like that you are taking your business elsewhere because their business allows guns to be sold next to the butter you buy there. It will take the willingness to tell the parents of a child who is a good friend of your child that your child can’t go to their house anymore because they have firearms in their house.

It will essentially require that comfortable people make the uncomfortable choices necessary to open the oyster. To be sure, this does not require that everyone dedicate their lives to doing good all the time, but it does require the courage to examine choices, make new ones and then keep making them until those choices have a humane and moral impact. While my permission is not essential, it is OK to go to a ballgame, drink a few beers and root for the home team. It is not OK to turn a blind eye to human suffering while telling your children what a great guy you are. You aren’t, and they are less likely to be if you are the role model.

And that in the end is a big part of the problem…

[Hard Left Turn first published this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Overcoming American Greed and Apathy Won’t Be Easy appeared first on Fair Observer.

The United States is complicit in the carnage and has been for decades. The nation is, after all, the world’s munitions purveyor of choice. America manufactures first-rate munitions and then sells and delivers those munitions with impunity, and without a conscience, to anyone who promises not to send them back our way.  We don’t seem to care who those munitions are intended for. We only care that they be launched, dropped or shot in someone else’s land.

Yet it never occurs to any of our fearless leaders that colluding with death merchants rots the national soul. We have become thoroughly desensitized to the gun violence our homegrown arms merchants have baked into our nation. It seems okay to take the violence we accept at home and export it to others.

In this context, it is important to remember that our leaders no longer fight themselves, like in the good old days.  Rather, they send others to bomb, shoot and destroy.  Yet, so anxious are they for absolution that they create the fictions necessary to the self-delusional world they inhabit.  Babies become “collateral damage,” and a festival is a “soft target”.  Precision bombing is another good one. “It’s hard to tell the soldiers from the civilians” is a helpful lunacy.

As bombs rain from the sky, you’re supposed to take comfort that bombs “Made In America” are righteous bombs in service of a righteous cause. Tell that to a mother holding the hand of her child as those hands and the bodies to which they are attached are blown to bits.

World peace demands human progress

Clearly, I despise war, guns and bombs. But what I really hate is that we are so many millennia into the human experiment, yet we still glorify warriors, teach war instead of peace and find no way to end the violent madness. If this issue only pertained to the US, stopping it would be a daunting but possible task. However, since this applies to so many nations across the world, there is no end in sight.

Achieving peace requires understanding and compassion. It requires a level of respect and concern for humanity, in general, and for those who might do harm to us, in particular. The Israeli–Palestinian conflict, as a current laboratory for cruelty, is a horrific case in point. How can Palestinians ever trust Israelis or the Israeli government to humanize those they have for so long dehumanized? Now that the “cockroaches” have swarmed and returned inhumanity with inhumanity, how will Israelis ever trust Palestinians in their midst again?

It will take a monumental effort to reverse course and to seek lasting solutions among the ashes. To begin the process, the cruelty of the past and present has to inform the future. As a historical reference, after hundreds of warring years in Europe, it took World War II to finally reduce the value of human life to so little that the emerging leadership opened its eyes. A miracle happened: The victors chose for once to see all of humanity as the losers and proceeded to uplift the vanquished.

Mourn all casualties, work to reduce them

We now live in a world of images, often taken out of context and unscrupulously used for political, economic and personal ends. Perhaps no pictures move us more than those of children laid waste by the callous indifference of their “protectors.” Imagine America’s school shootings, Ukraine’s orphans, babies caught in barbed wire at the US southern border and children suffering droughts in wretched refugee camps. Now we can add an Israeli village, child hostages and Palestinian youths in bombed-out hospitals to that gruesome portfolio.

Related Reading

This Is Not an “Ordinary” Israel–Hamas Conflict

This carnage is not new, but that fact makes it no less devastating. What stands out now is only made more damning by its antecedents. We have to confront a seemingly intractable human trait: the prevalence of inhumanity as an acceptable response to inhumanity. Sure, share the somber remembrance of those who died in the September 11, 2001 attacks in the US, but then take a moment to reflect on the countless souls who have died in the US response and who had nothing to do with the attacks themselves.

So, no matter the veneer, revenge is revenge. It is generally deadly and often disproportionate. Those who seek a better world, where humanity is valued and conscience is a cornerstone, have much to overcome. Maybe the present Israeli–Palestinian war in Gaza will be the moment that spawns leaders who actually seek to lead their nations and supporters to a better place. By doing so, they will show the rest of us that it can be done.

America’s difficult path to a better world

For such noble leaders to arise, the US government will have to play a uniquely uncommon role. It must start by engaging as a true partner with all the warring parties. It must speak for humane solutions. It must welcome to the table the few resources that can speak for humanity, then help to design and implement those humane solutions. Lastly — and this will be the harder part — America has to commit to no longer arming any of the combatants again. As long as the US is viewed as a collaborative participant in the killing fields, its capacity to seek peace and promote humane conflict solutions will remain hopelessly compromised.

I hope this time will be different. I hope those images endure. I want America to finally see the poison polluting its national soul. It should somehow come to understand that arming humans with killing machines is not an honorable or sustainable moral imperative, nor a humane economic model. I want my country to lead the world in using its vast resources to humane ends and to an increased understanding of humanity.

Maybe, if America tried that, we could reduce the killing at home and abroad, provide outreach and increased global access to meaningful healthcare, engender learning and compassion in the next generations, and provide a framework for actually welcoming those who can benefit from our help and helping those in our midst who require that help.

Maybe then the images would change.

[Hard Left Turn first published this piece.]

[Lee Thompson-Kolar edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Killing “Cockroaches”: Inhumanity Wreaks Havoc on the World appeared first on Fair Observer.

This is no small point. It is the rule of law and the attendant consent of the governed to be bound by it that provides the foundation for effective governance. At last check, humans have not come up with a better organizational plan. Good government requires functioning institutions and infrastructure, with some measure of public acceptance of outcomes determined within a predetermined, procedural framework. That framework is the foundation for the rule of law in any well-governed society.

Trump fanatics undermine America’s institutions

As always, America is confronted with serious challenges at home and abroad. Yet breathless, breaking news routinely unfolds in a definitional vacuum. Information is provided before an acceptable vocabulary has been developed. As an ongoing example, most Republican Party voters and a pandering party leadership still act as if former President Donald Trump was the legitimate victor in a presidential election decided three years ago. An audience of sycophants at the initial Republican Party presidential debate booed the notion of public accountability for wrongdoing. Meanwhile, the candidates on stage declared fealty to the lucky guy with 91 felony charges to his name.

A significant portion of the population seems to think that he is currently the legitimate President of the United States under siege from a venal pretender. So any effort to promote understanding of ongoing developments in Trump’s political, social, legal and financial saga is doomed to failure. The unfolding political and social morass must be addressed without any expectation that our self-touted governmental institutions are prepared to define and enforce an upstanding rule of law grounded in a moral and ethical consensus. There simply is no consensus. This void critically undermines institutional integrity and societal cohesion.

The government’s broken branches

Another current millstone around America’s collective neck is the US Supreme Court. It is a historically flawed but previously respected institution, now reduced to a predictable cesspool of white Christian nationalist orthodoxy. Then, just to make sure that the underprivileged and marginalized fully get the message, there is a palpable overlay of that orthodoxy with old school privilege-begets-privilege rationale. To say the least, the Supreme Court majority rampage of recent years seems purposefully designed to provide legal cover for the worst that America can be.

This is morally dispiriting and makes a mockery of a rule of law that requires aspirational public acceptance to survive. Added to the Court’s decay is an unsuitable ethos, one which greatly resembles an ethos that abounds in the private sector but should never hold sway in the public sphere. Privilege has thrived as a cancer within. Instead of running like the highest court in the land empowered as one of three separate governmental branches, the Supreme Court today operates more like a runaway corporate board of directors. So there will not be much help there.

Yet the Supreme Court is but one failing branch of government. Congressional dysfunction and the poisonous role of corporate, religious and cultural influence peddling in the halls of Congress has only added to the degrading impact of the Court’s recent rulings and its ethical void. You end up with two branches of the government now hopelessly compromised and openly operating outside the confines of a rule of law that should be at the core of their mission. This further erodes the realization of a national moral and ethical consensus.

Amendments are corrupted

The current disconnect between justice fortified by a rule of law and the moral and ethical consensus necessary to give it vitality has profoundly contributed to wildly divergent “moral and ethical” perspectives. This is well illustrated in the national response to the gun carnage that is all around us every day. It makes a mockery of common sense that in 1791, America’s Founding Fathers would have enshrined in the Constitution an amendment that foreshadowed modern issues. They did not envision the armaments of today, the avarice of the arms merchants and the utterly insane thought that the nation’s security would best be protected by an obscene stockpile of firearms in civilian hands.

But here we are, stuck with an institutional void incapable of defining and driving a national moral and ethical consensus to end the carnage. Never mind the constitutionally-enshrined right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness that is being butchered. There is no Supreme Court, judicial system or Congress to pull us out of it. And even if there were an executive branch with a moral and ethical compass — and there may be — the institutional dysfunction of the judicial and legislative branches is routinely undermining the executive capacity of the nation. Add to this the systemic absence of transparent and fair accountability for almost anything, and it should be no surprise that societal discord will fill the void.

Using gun carnage fueled by some morally-bankrupt interpretation of ancient text as an illustration requires little imagination. It poses well the consequences of the nation’s institutional failure to respond. Now fast-forward for a moment. A nation paralyzed by the Second Amendment is about to be further paralyzed by the First Amendment and its “free speech” guarantees.

Again, the fundamental rule of law will be the loser. Already the cherished but ill-defined right to free speech is being bastardized by those seeking to ban for others what they wish to exploit for themselves. Legally, you cannot shout “fire” in a crowded theater and then cover yourself with First Amendment free speech guarantees to avoid responsibility for the resulting damage. However, in today’s America, the retrograde right is fostering the notion that you can publicly shout venal lies to move a crowd to violence while under cover of that ever-popular First Amendment protection.

One bastardized amendment is already killing tens of thousands of our citizens a year, so just imagine the harm that the bastardization of another key amendment could do. And then line up the Fourteenth Amendment and its panoply of due process guarantees, and it is easy to envision an America in which fundamental legal principles are turned on their heads to ensure a dark national future. We never seem to learn.

I would like to end this with some charming homily of hope, but I will leave that to the flag-bearers. The rest of us must accept the challenge of defining for the future a moral and ethical foundation for the present. Without this foundation, there can be no rule of law. Without the rule of law, there can be no nation worth defending.

[Hard Left Turn first published this piece.]
[Lee Thompson-Kolar edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post America’s Important Rule of Law is Floundering appeared first on Fair Observer.

Reality is properly defined as something absolute, free of the tricks of the mind that permeate perception. Definitions of the word “reality” focus on the actual and the factual in our world. Despite common parlance, perception is not reality. Rather, perception routinely produces speculation and opinion that are then recycled as fact, a phenomenon reaching epidemic proportions in the mainstream media and among those seeking to revive an America that never existed.

A case in point is the endless “news” coverage and comment on the current Republican Party effort to find a presidential candidate who can string five meaningful sentences together to explain why anyone should entrust him or her with the presidency. The obsession with any and all things Trump only further pollutes the content and coverage.

An industry of nonsense

After every recent election, there has been a ritual handwringing among those who say they believe in responsible journalism. Each time, this occurs after the handwringers have once again turned political coverage into the equivalent of a horse race. There is always a collective agreement that “we” have to do better. Yet there we go again.

Listen to daily talk of the “lane” to success for Christy today, Ramaswamy tomorrow and who knows who the day after tomorrow. Polls have taken the place of racing forms, sizing up candidates the way we used to size up horses. They provide the almost daily numbers from which only those with deep insight can glean the kernels of “wisdom” that underlie the rank speculation to follow.

This continuous delusion of perception as fact becomes significant because it fuels the narrative of others in the same delusional loop. Until someone in that loop actually challenges others in the same loop, each new round of speculative blather will continue to build on previous speculative blather.

The alarming lack of self-awareness from people who claim to be better than this is allowed to continue unabated. They fill airtime that could be dedicated to presenting factual accounts of significant events in a far more complete and nuanced way. The cost to meaningful discourse is severe: the drumbeat of drivel drowns out substantive fact-based discussion about important matters that should be routinely considered if America’s “democracy” is going to have any chance of successfully confronting the real issues of the day.

Manufactured, self-referential “news”

As another illustration of the problem, think back to the ubiquitous breathless “special” coverage of Trump’s first federal indictment in June. The indictment was under seal, but reporters assured us that “sources” with knowledge of the matter had confirmed that a seven-count indictment of Trump had been handed down by a grand jury in Miami, going so far as to detail specific charges. Within less than twenty-four hours, the actual indictment was unsealed, and the previous breathless special coverage was only off by 30 counts against Trump.

Of course, as soon as that happened, yet more “special” coverage from the same people completely overlooked the gross reporting error of the previous day. In fact, there was never even a hint of just how inaccurate the reporting had been before the unsealing of the indictment. A new round of breathless speculation, opinion and anonymous sourcing overwhelmed what little verifiable factual reporting was in the mix.

It is just this type of speculative and hype-filled content that undermines the credibility of those who so desperately want to be believed. However, there is no sign of the introspection that would suggest that at least some news anchors and reporters are aware of what they are doing or of its impact on overall press credibility.

So, the next time you hear a reporter or news anchor start to begin sentences with “I think that…” you should grab the remote and change channels. For the most part, very few people care what reporters think about much of anything. If they want us to believe that their reporting is fact-based, what they think about the facts should be saved for family discussions around the dinner table or “panel” discussions clearly labeled for their perception, speculation and opinion content.

It’s the almighty dollar

The media in general is full of robust corporations battling in America’s supposedly free market free-for-all playground. The god of greed and profit rules. Therefore, no one has sought to exercise the authority to separate broadcast fact from fantasy, leaving outrageous speculation to garner viewership and advertising income. How else to explain the popularity of anything Fox News chooses to broadcast? Today, it has gotten so bad that the news networks themselves seem to be competing to be the news, and then report about themselves.

That beauty of a CNN “town hall” with Trump back in May was a new low. CNN spent more time pimping its own upcoming show as theater than it did covering it as the disaster that it was. Even the otherwise generally reliable Anderson Cooper was trotted out to add gravitas to the unseemly cleanup effort. This is of a kind with the overused promise of “exclusive” reporting and the on-air promotion of an intrepid reporter as news creator who often gets more airtime than the content itself.

These days, it seems that everyone on MSNBC or CNN is a “good friend” on the air of everybody else, acting as reciprocal pimps for the latest book, article, podcast or “reporting” by their “good friend.” There never seems to be enough of this, as if “good friend” is the ticket to credibility instead of the ticket to a paid gig. Meanwhile, the viewer is left to wait for one “good friend” to tell another “good friend” that he or she is full of shit. Rather the viewer is left to wallow in a sea of bonhomie with little to no factual presentation to show for it.

For those of you wondering where these observations are headed and have long ago given up hope for something better, the big news here is that this is about greed and profit. Obscene celebrity salaries for news anchors at the micro-level and equally obscene profits and salaries at the corporate level are driving this ship and slowly driving me and others like me away from the product.

The American public deserves something better than this. With almost all media platforms awash in unreal “reality” and unchecked false advertising claims, it is hard to see how a profit-driven journalism can be trusted to seek facts and present them truthfully to those who watch, listen to, download or ingest the content.

Maybe tomorrow, a reporter standing in front of the scene of the latest mass shooting will simply count the bodies and give us the number.

[Hard Left Turn first published this piece.]

[Anton Schauble edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Anchors Away: Media Profit Over Probity appeared first on Fair Observer.

In a country where the criminal justice system is tasked with so much more than it is designed to do and funded to do, it can seem slow to act and too susceptible to manipulation by those with resources. Meanwhile, the poor, the disadvantaged, and Black and Brown miscreants get outsized law enforcement attention that generally results in negative outcomes. 

So, take it seriously when an elected criminal prosecutor confronts evasion, threats, and the rigors of a long road ahead with an uncertain outcome to indict the rich and powerful, not to mention a former president of the United States. 

Trump’s Troubles With the Law

Further, the fraud indictment of Trump in New York is not trivial. The charges are serious and represent the first commitment to seek to impose a measure of criminal accountability on a dangerous and powerful man who has seemingly had his way with the justice system since the cradle.

The New York indictment alleges 34 felony counts of fraudulently falsifying business records to conceal criminal conduct. It is accompanied by a 13-page statement of facts. The case is about fraudulent concealment from the public of critical negative information concerning two of Trump’s alleged adulterous sexual adventures and, most importantly, fraudulent concealment of this information in the critical days before Trump’s unexpected 2016 presidential victory.

Further, there seems to be a growing consensus that there will be more criminal indictments to come and that these indictments will focus on Trump’s misconduct while in office or just after leaving office, not while seeking office. In this context, it is noteworthy that Trump was twice impeached for actions during his presidency without consequence, a backdrop that only adds to the clamor among progressives for a flood of indictments and associated perp walks.

To add to the excitement, Trump was just found personably liable for sexual abuse and defamation in a suit brought by a woman for sexually assaulting her years ago in a department store dressing room and then publicly lying about it. That sure sounds a bit like the underlying notion in the New York indictment – get caught in a messy sexual encounter, and then lie about it to avoid accountability. The New York indictment adds criminal fraud and allegations of hush money payments to the mix.

All of this comes amid the steadily increasing fervor of support from the 30% or more on the far right of the already right-wing Republican Party who are fully committed to a Trump rerun. This stunningly unprincipled patch of humanity seemingly will follow Trump anywhere, support his “vision” for America, and continually fail to get the message that their hero is incapable of sorting fact from fiction.

Republicans Still Love Trump

In today’s political climate, the Republican Party’s incapacity to set Trump adrift provides the best path to the best outcome for Democrats in the 2024 presidential election. Democrats can only hope that the true Trump believers will deliver to him the coveted 2024 Republican nomination for president or at the least remain so committed to a Republican Party implosion that Trump will make it almost impossible for the resulting nominee to win.

While this is hardly a sure path to victory, it may well be the best hope going forward as long as the Biden/Harris ticket remains the only presently viable option for the Democrats. So keep those indictments coming. While the New York indictment is an important and emphatic first attempt at imposing a measure of criminal liability and accountability on Trump, it is cautionary to note that for years Trump has gotten away with whatever criminal misconduct seemed to underpin so much of his successful lifelong grift. Maybe one day soon, in some jurisdiction, we will get a real mug shot and a set of cuffs.

To be sure, there is more to this than my antipathy and that of others toward Trump and his cronies. Rather, it is a deep conviction that if our institutions fail us now, America is headed into an abyss from which it will be very difficult to emerge. So, stopping Trump, his acolytes, his supporters, his donors, and the racist Christian right from realizing their ambitious plan for transforming the nation in their image has palpable immediacy now.

And it is not just Trump. The right-wing “aristocracy” has polluted all three of the branches of the US government with a crush of highly-educated, wealthy, interconnected, and morally bankrupt vermin seeking only the power to impose their will on the rest of us while playing by their own set of rules. Somehow Trump became and continues to be a convenient tool for undermining confidence in American institutions through unabashedly attacking historical facts and creating a threatening national tableau for those ignorant enough to buy into the notion of an existential threat to a way of life that never was.

It would be comforting to believe in cycles and in the someday emergence of new and enlightened interpretations of constitutional fundamentals that could help shape a safe, moral, diverse, and prosperous national future. Or, for the faithful, to believe that there is a god who has chosen this moment in time to screw around with America but who will eventually turn his playful attention back to Nigeria or Pakistan. For my part, however, I don’t believe in inevitable cycles, or in the fundamental wisdom of a document written two hundred years ago, or in god.

Instead, I am trying to believe that the young people of this nation may get off their cellphones long enough to reshape the electorate to reflect an understanding that our collective conscience demands so much more than the dark and shallow version of America in which those young people now live. It is also possible that elements within the aging generation of which I am a part will recognize the tainted legacy we are leaving behind and use some of our time and resources to try to rearrange that balance sheet.

While I await the revolution of the young and a renewed commitment of the aged, I will take a moment to enjoy every Trump indictment and hope that each one makes the right-wing aristocracy and its racist and White Christian collaborators just a bit less sure of themselves as they worry that I am coming for their guns.

[Hard Left Turn first published this piece.]

[Erica Beinlich edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Trump’s Monumental Lies Without Consequences Endanger a Nation appeared first on Fair Observer.

Everywhere we turn, there is some right-wing influence peddler ranting about those who they find to be “woke.” For the record, “woke” is, and always has been, the past tense and past participle of “wake.” It is also used in today’s vernacular as an adjective to describe someone who is aware of and actively attentive to important societal facts and issues (especially issues of racial and social justice). For reasons that are not clear to me, this latter definition has been adopted by the willfully ignorant to disparage political progressives for one of the very characteristics that should make them admirable.

So, I own up to it. I am both woke and happy to have been awakened. As such, I am now embedded in another one of those American cultural curiosities – an entire swath of the population vilifying another segment of the population for being aware of and attentive to issues of racial and social justice. Yet here we are, with Republican presidential wannabees roaming the countryside proposing that those aware and attentive people pose an existential threat to those who choose to be unaware and inattentive to such issues.

Try explaining that to your children. And how you explain it will go a long way toward identifying the depths to which you will go to find evil in your midst in schools, libraries, churches, communities, and even the nation.

We should all want our children to go to school to try to learn, to observe what is going on around them, to give and take kindness and decency, and to develop constructive responses to the big and small problems that they encounter. So, it is hard to understand how this formula is threatened by those who are aware of, and actively attentive to, important societal facts and issues, especially issues of racial and social justice.

Food insecurity shouldn’t only be a woke issue

To get to know woke people better, to try to break through to those proudly wallowing in their own ignorance, to ease the fears of some, and to elevate the aspirations of others, a look at a few woke responses to important issues of the day might be instructive. A good place to start is with the issue of hungry children in our homes and communities.

Woke people like me think it is outrageous that in America there are children who often go to bed hungry. We woke people call that “food insecurity.” It means that real children in today’s real America do not have enough to eat. And woke people think that this is despicable for a nation that seeks to claim so much of the moral and economic high ground. If you are not afraid of that truth, then you should not be afraid of “woke” people like me telling you that truth. And if you succumb to unreasoned fear of that truth, it is likely because of the message, not because of the messenger.

Immigration, inner-city racial inequality among moral issues

Likewise, woke people like me understand that immigrants are needed in this country to supplement the workforce and enrich our communities with cultural diversity. If it weren’t for Latinos in America, finding functioning restaurants and someone to take care of your children or aging family members would be much more challenging. Next time you go out for a pizza, try speaking Italian to the staff. When that doesn’t work, try Spanish.

And then for good measure, spend a little time in America’s inner cities with your eyes open and your prejudices aside. Substandard housing, crumbling schools, decaying infrastructure, the homeless, the hopeless, and the hungry assault the senses. The racial inequity that abounds is a destructive and deeply ingrained component of the American tableau. Unless you believe that Black people are innately inferior to White people, your own eyes will surely see that something is really wrong. If you are not afraid of seeing that truth, then you should not be afraid of woke people like me telling you about that truth. And if you succumb to unreasoned fear of that truth, it is likely because you cannot face your own sordid truth, and not because of the woke person delivering that truth.

In these instances, and in so many others, the often-unstated fear is that good White Christian morality is being threatened by left-wing conspirators taking aim at a society in which a shaky majority embraces that good White Christian morality as sacrosanct. Woke people challenge the sanctity of that morality simply by their attention to elements of its crumbling foundation. When one of the outcomes of that “moral” agenda is preventable child hunger, it becomes necessary to silence those who seek to remind those good White Christian moral giants that preventable child hunger does not meet any standard of morality.

Amplified voices proudly here to stay

I often think about priorities and what our choices tell us about ourselves, our communities, and our nation. Last fall, I participated in a charity bicycling event to raise money for cancer research and treatment at a major university-based cancer care center. While riding in the event after having raised money to help meet fundraising objectives, it occurred to me, and not for the first time, that Americans always seem to find public funds for armaments and seeding killing fields but need charity fundraisers to secure vital funds to support fundamental medical research. It seems way too much like a metaphor for those who mock the woke – a pathetic willingness to cruelly turn their backs on human suffering to ensure more human suffering.

Yet thankfully, the woke are not going away. While others burn books, shutter libraries, stifle teachers, and debase universities, we will find a way to reprint more books, create alternative libraries, and provide support to teaching and learning from diverse and challenging curricula at schools and universities. We will also amplify the voices of those who embrace the richness of diversity in our midst.

We woke people raise children as well, and they will read the books that the ignorant ban, welcome the immigrants that the morally bankrupt shun, and continue to push a reluctant America to a long-overdue racial reckoning. We are proud of our woke progeny and hope that they are proud of those of us who are aware of and actively attentive to issues of racial and social justice.
[Erica Beinlich edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post The New Woke Challenge America’s Moral Foundation appeared first on Fair Observer.

However, before you could get too teary-eyed about how wonderful Christmas was and how proud Jesus would have been of us, perhaps you should imagine yourself on board one of the Washington, D.C.-bound buses full of Latino immigrants during the holidays. There you would have found cold and hungry children sent from Texas by their good “Christian” governor, Greg Abbott, to be dumped on a street corner in Washington, D.C., near the doorstep of the Vice President of the United States on Christmas Eve. If you were on board that bus, you would have been able to touch human beings being treated like refuse.

Then, remember that they may be the lucky ones. They were not shivering on the pavement in El Paso, Texas, or Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, simply hoping that their god would stop the suffering because it is clear that the “wonderful” Americans would not. To get closer, and if you have any doubts, next time you hold your children this winter, wrap them in a blanket and leave them on the sidewalk for a while. Maybe that will help the unconvinced to understand what the American government apparently does not understand – cruelty is cruelty even when the children aren’t yours.

Current American posture is a dereliction of duty

The images are everywhere, individual compassion abounds, and while some reach out to help, our politicians find billions for weapons of war and tens of millions to invest in propaganda and in their own campaigns. And then they find more billions to invest in “border security” that pushes human beings to the freezing side of nowhere. This is, unfortunately, an all hands on deck dereliction of duty at every level of government. It is underscored by a complete disregard for the international norms that seek to impose humane requirements for meeting immigrant pleas for asylum and refuge and the laws of the United States meant to codify those norms.

Then there is the nagging feeling that if these refugees were Italians or Hungarians or Ukrainians, the American government would have figured out a way to keep their children warm, fed, and sheltered. This is in stark contrast to the mindless political drama and legal morass that seems enshrined in America’s response to Black and Brown refugees. As a nation still struggling with any semblance of racial justice, the situation at the southern US border has the similar stench of police violence, housing red lines, and intractable education and health disparities.

More US government officials must get involved 

It would be remarkable if the images of cruelty were enough to say “enough” and for a collective conscience to rise up and figuratively storm the Capitol to stop the cruelty.  Apparently, it finally became just enough for the generally compassionate President Joe Biden to find his way to the southern border. Unfortunately, the brief visit was all show and no substance. Not only were the cold and hungry children and their desperate parents and companions kept away from President Biden, he didn’t even take the opportunity to hold a shivering child in his arms and say to that child, “There is nothing I can do.” While that statement is wrong and untrue, at least it would have been dramatic. 

While it was nice that the President thanked those who “guard” the border for their tireless service on behalf of a threatened nation and that he met with a few beleaguered local officials, it was immediately clear that the problems remained behind as the presidential motorcade sped away.

For some reason, the President seemed to go it alone, with only his ineffective Secretary of Homeland Security at his heels. There was absolutely no attempt at a show of resolve in the face of the crisis at hand, and there was no sign of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the secretaries of Health and Human Services, Housing and Urban Development, Defense, and Transportation, or the Attorney General. At the least, each of them could have said to an additional shivering child, “There is nothing I can do.”

However, there is plenty that each of them could do, but they are choosing not to do it. They routinely condemn cruelty around the globe, but seem blind to that same darkness at home. Tent cities and other temporary shelters go up all the time in other countries to house refugees, but not at the southern US border. Food, clothing, and basic healthcare are provided by governments committed to the humane treatment of human beings seeking asylum and refuge, even refugees nations don’t want in their countries. It happens every day, just not at the US southern border. That border is reserved for chaos-driven cruelty.

Comprehensive immigration reform, not inhumane policies 

To be certain, America needs comprehensive immigration reform that not only addresses those seeking to enter the US legally and illegally, but also addresses those already here. It is estimated that there are over 11 million illegal immigrants within the US, about a third of whom were brought to the US illegally as minors and have lived most of their lives in the US (“DREAMers”).

It is well documented that the vast majority of the illegal immigrant population lead peaceful lives and contribute to the nation’s communities. Yet all live under the threat of inhumane deportation – even the guy who coaches your kid’s baseball team and the woman who takes care of your kids when you are at work. As they drag your kid’s coach to a detention center, remember to tell him that he will be missed.

I could go on, but I think you get the picture. As with so many of the seemingly intractable challenges that face any nation, the easiest to forget are often the cruelest. In America, there are children who go to bed hungry every night, there are human beings walking our streets in front of us without hope or shelter, and there are voiceless immigrants being exploited every single day. Look at them, touch them, and when you retreat to your own safe haven, remember them and forcefully advocate for them.

That some local charities, church groups, or just plain folks step up to help is obviously not getting the job done. America needs these groups, these people, and so many more among us to ignite an angry response to the cruelty being carried out in our names by our government at every level. Sometimes anger is the only thing that works. Ya no más – no more, not anymore – should be a rallying cry to reach the ears of the cold and hungry children at the border and elsewhere and finally reach the ears of the derelict in America’s government who have turned their backs on those children.

If we turn away now from what we have just seen and continue to see, each of us will lose a little piece of our own dignity.

[Hard Left Turn, a blog by Larry Beck, first  published this piece.]

[Erica Beinlich edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post The Truth About America’s “Exceptional” Refugee Response appeared first on Fair Observer.

Then, as a final electoral reminder of how close to the abyss America remains, one of the most unqualified candidates to ever seek a US Senate seat, Herschel Walker, forced a runoff against a decent incumbent Senator in Georgia and then got 48.6% of the vote in that runoff.  So, with the actual midterm elections now finally over, Republican Party headlights are still flashing in our collective rear view mirror.  They are flashing red and remain a continuing threat to obliterate electoral guardrails .

To add to the gravitas of the situation, there is the ongoing spectacle on the international stage of this sanctimonious nation going to great lengths to impose its vision of a more democratic world in faraway places, often at the point of a gun. Meanwhile, corruption, greed and grift have been tolerated in America at levels so high that the very institutions championed elsewhere seem overwhelmed at home.

Can Healthy Conflict Exist in an Unhealthy Society?

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It would be easy to go on in the attempt to draw conclusions about the state of “democracy” in America after the recent elections.  But a simple focus on gerrymandering, the filibuster, a corrupted Supreme Court, kneecapped regulators, election-denying election officials and the like should be more than enough for most people to draw their own conclusions.  Further, even that exercise is unlikely to fully expose the institutional rot and the fundamental human cruelty that it has spawned.

The Democrats avoided a red wave, but is that all?

And, of course, there is omnipresent violence and the threat of violence in the nation’s public arena, public spaces, as well as behind closed doors.  No sooner had some Americans taken a post-election deep breath than our breath was taken away by yet another spate of acts of mindless gun violence, shredding any notion that America may be on a better path.

So, leaving aside discussions of an ill-defined “democracy,” what are the useful takeaways from the recent elections now that the dust has settled a bit?  Of most importance, I share concerns about the sustainability of the Democratic Party’s achievements in the midterm elections.  Too much about their messaging is confused and merely reactive to events. Going forward, I would be far more comfortable with a simple vision that embraces diversity, inclusion, and some healthy measure of social and racial justice.  And, once the vision is clear, presentation of the policy objectives required to implement that vision.

On the positive side, the results are a well-deserved boost for President Biden who was able to crystalize a message that worked in the moment, even though it was completely underplayed by the media until the very end.  Also, there seems to have been some genuine backlash among moderates and independents against Trump, the troglodytes he supported, the message he and they delivered and continue to deliver, and a seemingly corrupt and compromised Supreme Court.  But too many Democratic victories were too narrow to convince me that the Republican Party is on the run or in ruin.  They, their acolytes and their willfully ignorant supporters will not go away anytime soon.

America is Now Awash in Grift

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That brings us to the House of Representatives.  Winning the House by a slim margin would have been a disaster for the Democrats.  Had that happened, expectations of a legislative capacity to deliver on campaign promises and make America wonderful would have been the ongoing narrative.  Meeting such expectations was never going to happen.  In the coming two years of the next election cycle, with minimal margins in both houses of Congress, the Democrats would have been able to deliver next to nothing, and would have put themselves on the chopping block for that failure. 

The worst is yet to come

Now, they can leave it to the Republicans in the House to perform some version of a continued dance with their own demons, devoid of legislative proposals to address real domestic and international issues. Their unifying mantra is to trash the Democrats for everything, even for trying and succeeding. Now, the Democrats will have their own unifying mantra focusing on the governance shit show in the House of Representatives run by the Republicans.  And, it will be a shit show. (It is worth noting in this context that President Clinton’s popularity soared as he was going through his impeachment process because of Republican excess and overreach.) 

So, let that show begin. Bring on Biden’s troubled son, Benghazi, Afghanistan, Dr. Fauci and the Covid response, the border “crisis,” and the daily assault on the sensitivities of White Christian children.

Into this contextual mix, it is worth remembering that today’s American political system goes forward with only two viable political parties, each with its own internal divisions.  The Republican Party remains corrupted by greed and a quest for power without substance, seems committed to undermining governance every step of the way, and has a huge media footprint that the Democrats cannot match.  Further, they have cultivated a committed base of voters that seems beyond redemption and surely will continue to respond to Republican messaging about social issues, diversity, gun violence, immigration, book burning, and phony economic policy alternatives that disadvantage the very people who seem to buy the message.

As for the Democrats, they succeeded only in exceeding a very low bar. The challenge for them is to figure out how to raise the bar and then succeed again.  That outcome is only possible if the Democrats can collectively commit themselves to the institutional reforms required for good governance to have a chance, and for the government itself to meet the policy challenges ahead.  Going forward, the party’s strength is that it has a deep bench of committed activists who understand the depth of America’s institutional morass and are willing to seek solutions.

A Divided America with Liberty and Justice for None

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It would be remiss to discuss the midterm elections without noting that the pollsters, pundits, and news readers got it so wrong again.  Unlikely as it seems, maybe this time they will actually learn something and begin to cover issues as news, stop pandering to anonymous sources, upend false equivalencies, and begin to draw clear lines between reporting facts and commenting about them.  Continuing to fall short at these basic tasks often leaves the truth in doubt and provides fertile ground for so much collective willful ignorance to thrive.  Focusing on content rather than soundbites would be a good place to start.  Instead, the media has seamlessly moved to horse race mode with a finish line of 2024.  

I managed to get this far in the piece — to the very end — only mentioning the corrupt and crumbling Donald Trump once by name.  It seems that for him, his day of accountability for so much corruption, mendacity, and cruelty is finally arriving.  He gave the worst in American society a clear path out of their caves and into our conscience and communities.  Someday, if America can forcefully step back from the institutional abyss, we may even thank him for this.  Maybe we had to see clearly the demons within to exorcise them.

But before we even try to get there, Trump must be paraded through the proverbial streets in shame.  I, for one, among many others, will celebrate that shame amid the hope that it can vanquish the gathering storm.

*[This article was first published on the author’s blog, Hard Left Turn.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post America on the Edge of an Institutional Abyss appeared first on Fair Observer.

The nation is so awash in grifting that most refuse to see it for what it is.  Simply put, to grift is “to obtain money or property illicitly.” While this notion can have a certain charm to it, as we envision a petty crook at work, it has at its core the intent to defraud.  And that fraud can sometimes be on a grand scale. By its very nature, grifting is insidious.  The grifter always puts his/her interests first and always at the expense of others. Today, it is often disguised as entitlement.

We recently watched a hurricane rip through parts of Florida with tragic consequences.  Even as the hurricane made landfall and before damage assessments could be started, Florida’s Governor DeSantis was begging the federal government for disaster relief.  This is the same governor who routinely rails against federal government interference in the affairs of the state of Florida and is a partisan hardliner for limited government and states’ rights.  However, as soon as their proverbial hands are out, DeSantis and others like him always fail to mention their dogma that their entitlement to federal funding is unencumbered by any responsibility.  That is the grift.

Alternate Reality Is All the Rage in Election Time America

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Florida has always had hurricanes and has never had a state or local income tax.  Floridians are always being flooded out, but the state does not require or provide affordable flood insurance options.  As soon as the hurricane is about to hit, the grifter governor and his brethren move in.  You can see their opening pitch: “we are as ready as we can be and Floridians have been here before and know how to weather the storm.”

The problem is that they know that both assertions are simply untrue. Florida was not ready for the hurricane and they did not know how to get through it.  Most importantly, the grifting governor knew that the federal government would bail him out. That is an example of unconscionable entitlement without responsibility.  And the rest of us fall for it every time.  In the blink of an eye, the grifter governor has moved the shells around and found his mark.  And the mark is us. Next up, be sure to watch that same grifter governor quickly pivot to bashing the federal government to score political points in his present reelection bid.

Big Pharma’s master class in grift

Another fertile ground for the grand scale grift is the pharmaceutical industry’s advertising of prescription drugs. This one implies the potential for serious public harm.  Just in case you think that nobody has figured out that greed and deception are at the heart of this advertising, it is instructive to know that the US is one of only two countries in the world that even permits direct-to-consumer advertising of prescription drugs (along with New Zealand).

But if this were just a generally bad idea for medical reasons, we would hardly know of it. What makes it so special is that this is such a good idea for the pharmaceutical companies that they don’t care if it is a really bad idea for desperate people seeking pharmaceutical remedies for serious conditions.  In America, the big pharma grifters are directly marketing their product to countless people desperate to overcome the ravages of cancer, schizophrenia and bipolar depression, debilitating skin conditions, autoimmune disease, and every variety of intestinal disorder, to name just a few.

Big pharma’s strategy is clear. Identify a serious medical condition, target desperate people with the condition, and then provide the chemical fix, replete with photos and staged footage of formerly desperate people now happily cured.  Oh, and don’t forget to tell them about all the things that can go wrong, not to take the fix if you are allergic to its ingredients (incredible),  and to check in with your doctor to get that prescription that will surely restore your health in spite of the risks.  Remember, as well, that the desperate consumers pay for the advertising aimed at getting them hooked and that none of this comes with a money back guarantee.  Is there a more insidious grift imaginable?

The Rise and Fall of US Democracy

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Grand-scale scams like the Florida grift and the big pharma grift are sustained by the steady drumbeat of grifts from advertisers, entertainment and sports “celebrities,” self-promoting “influencers,” and real and fake doctors, chefs, attorneys and the like pushing products and services for their profit.  And without regard for the illusions and deceptions needed to get there.

If you’re American you should be aware of the process. Turn on your television for five minutes or do a little online research about something you might want to buy.  Before you can tune it out, it’s there, the grift.  One telltale sign is a “celebrity” selling something for the common man, something they have almost surely never used, eaten, put on their feet, used to disguise body odor, or soothingly rubbed on themselves.  If not a celebrity, how about an actor playing a sincere smiling everyman ready to share the secrets to the success he only got once he started using some previously unknown product.

Grifters in the consumer’s paradise

Attorneys shilling court cases and supposed doctors and dentists shilling everything are ubiquitous.  Your teeth can be white and your skin can be wrinkle free, if only….  “But wait, order now and you will get a second tube absolutely free,” and they will throw in a toothbrush and free shipping.  All you have to do is order now because the special offer won’t last forever and oblige you and pay some extra and unspecified “handling” fee.

To pay for this and to get that absolutely incredible set of coveted non-stick pots and pans, you need only “call now” and pony up with your credit card.  Or if a lawsuit’s pot of gold is your weakness, just sign on the dotted line with some sincere or angry “attorney” who will surely get you your very own entitlement from the settlement fund that this particular “attorney” is uniquely positioned to secure for you and then share with him.  And don’t forget cryptocurrency, credit cards, apps that do everything for “free,” and dog food that will make you and your dog salivate.

One grift builds on the next.  American society is saturated with this stuff.  So much so that when the grand grifters come along, we are hard pressed to see the fraud within.  And this brings us to the grandest grift of all, the Trump grift.  With Don Jr, Eric, Ivanka, the My Pillow guy, Kanye West, and a band of sycophant Republicans by his side, the sky has been the limit.

To give Trump his due, he is really good at something.  Now it is way past time to make him pay a steep price for the damage done, the lives lost, and the gains fraudulently received.  Further, the steepest price should be reserved for his corrupt assault on the institutional framework of government that the nation requires to meet the needs of its communities and its people.

*[This article was first published on the author’s blog, Hard Left Turn.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post America is Now Awash in Grift appeared first on Fair Observer.

Sharing the international stage with the queen, the war in Ukraine slogs on with cheerleaders continuing to applaud the plucky Ukrainians. Death and destruction continue, badly needed grain shipments rot in silos and ports, and a cold European winter is about to set in with limited fuel options. Even as the usual killing fields suffer carnage, climate change continues to wreak havoc. Children continue to go to bed hungry and preventable disease festers.

Cheap Labor Fuels an Exploitative Economy

Now inflation is added to the mix and is producing excessive hand wringing over the economy in the US and elsewhere. Curiously, this angst seems most acute among those impacted the least. For poor people and poor nations, the global economic system is what it has always been – rigged to serve those with resources at the expense of those without resources.  Meanwhile, there is little sign in the US that major lifestyle changes are afoot among the middle class and surely none to be found among the wealthy. Packed airports and stadiums are a far better barometer of economic hardship than trying to figure out if bottom round is replacing T-bone steak in shopping baskets.

As is often the case, the working poor are present in the inflation discussion but absent from the solution. Watching six-figure news readers carry on about inflation after just getting back from their summer vacations is laughable but only further obscures the depth of the problem for those with limited or no income and rising fixed expenses that they can’t meet.

So, this would be a good time in America to talk about raising the federal minimum wage. That minimum wage is still $7.25 per hour or a whopping $290 for a 40-hour work week. Even so, it seems in America that it is never a good time to raise minimum wages across the board to ensure a living wage adjusted for inflation. The real problem with this good idea is that the cost of the basic services in our communities would likely go up. Imagine having to pay more to the people who clean houses, mow lawns, pick up trash, and generally make our lives easier. While many bitch about the cost of that T-bone steak, the working poor suck it up, work longer hours and multiple jobs, and eat a lot of beans and pasta.

And here is the point: those working poor are shielding the rest of us from what should be the real inflationary costs of our collective excesses and corporate greed. But now there is another catch. There don’t seem to be enough workers hanging around waiting for low wages to fill the low-paying jobs that support those excesses and corporate greed, so we are now doubly screwed. Prices are going up and basic services are going down. However, the long-term solution that seems most popular with many, except the working poor, is for the working poor to have more poor babies and then continue to provide the poor education, indecent housing, and unreliable health care that will ensure another generation of low-wage workers.

Or, how about immigration reform?  Instead of waiting for new American poor babies to grow up, Americans could figure out how to parse out immigrants to communities in need of low-wage workers, gin up some dormitory housing, open a food pantry so they can eat, and then pay them a wage that looks good to them while knocking out any likelihood of low-wage inflationary pressures. Both McDonalds and your lawn will thrive anew.

The Limits of the Right

Maybe you can see where this is heading. I want Governor Ron DeSantis to denude Florida of as many hardworking immigrants as he can find. Like international sister cities, America could develop its own sister sanctuaries program matching a sanctuary for White racists and Christian nationalists with another sanctuary that would welcome the Black and Brown immigrants so abhorrent to those racist Florida communities.

Using the DeSantis model, a matching sanctuary community would be found to welcome the diverse, hardworking, often skilled, low-wage workers that a significant segment of Floridians apparently wants shipped out of state. This would be good news, as well, for those looking for immigrants from White racist communities in Texas and Arizona.

We start there, and the movement grows. All of sudden, politicians willing to cruelly demonize immigrants would find their constituents trash on their overgrown lawns. Then think how inconvenient it would be if a good portion of those low-wage Latino workers in restaurants and country clubs headed out of town to a real welcoming sanctuary community somewhere else. While this all sounds fanciful, it just might work to break the back of the resistance to a humane and inclusive American immigration policy. This would be putting inflationary pressures to good use and remind those doing all the hand wringing that they are doing so at the expense of the working poor.

Maybe, with all of this wreckage around us, there will be a slowly creeping understanding that America’s self-delusional “exceptionalism” is just that and nothing more – self-delusion. Fantasy works sometimes in the movies, but it won’t last in real life. Maybe it took a warped Supreme Court, a dysfunctional Congress, an exposed insurrection, an unraveling rule of law, and a plane load of defrauded immigrants seeking asylum to finally begin to undermine the fantasy.

A New Moral Core for America

Women and thoughtful young people seem to be deciding that they are tired of rich White men and the people they buy trampling on the simple notions of access to meaningful healthcare and the freedom for women to make life choices for themselves. Many seem even more energized about losing access to their own healthcare than they ever were about making sure that everybody had access to meaningful healthcare in the first place. But they care now.

Also, there is some evidence that when essential governance is really threatened, Americans will awaken to protect and promote the governmental institutions required to confront existential problems like climate change and required to ensure the minimum infrastructure and basic services at the core of desirable community life. It is possible that this will be enough in the weeks ahead to see the shameless right-wing vacuum collapse and suck Trump, his acolytes, his family, and his friends into the vortex. However, if their cruelty prevails and the nation’s government continues at a stalemate, there certainly will be additional suffering in the land.

If you have any doubts about any of this, you are likely beyond hope.  But this may be the moment to actually think about the kind of community in which you want to live and who is most likely to lead you there. Think about the gun nut governors working to ensure that another school massacre comes to a neighborhood near you. Think about children without enough to eat and immigrant children bussed like cattle to be someone else’s problem. Think about all of this and more.

It is way past time for Americans to start standing for something with a clear moral core. Put the inflationary hand wringing on hold long enough to vote for a nation that we can start to be proud of. This could, at the least, provide a foundation for confronting the corporate greed, political corruption, White racism and White Christian nationalism that stand in the way of realizing an equality of opportunity and the social and racial justice needed to achieve it.

*[This article was first published on the author’s blog, Hard Left Turn.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Time for Americans to Stand for a New Moral Core appeared first on Fair Observer.

Before we get to what should be done to address the problem, it would be useful to understand the problem in scientific detail. But I don’t. What I see and hear is alarming to say the least. It is alarming at a very personal level, but also at an existential level. On a personal level, I want to spend what time I have left exploring the outdoors, enjoying some of the wonderful places I have been before and finding a few new ones along the way. I want to catch more fish. I want to be able to hike, bike and kayak without fear of heat stroke or hypothermia. I want my 26-year-old son to continue his life on a planet that still brings joy and wonder.

It seems, however, that what I want won’t matter if the planet continues its demise. Just watching the wildfires consume once verdant landscapes and seeing lakes and rivers shrivel to dryness should be sufficient notice to know that something is very wrong with our globe. And it is not just one bad season.

Climate does not affect politics

Part of the problem in the US is that climate-related disasters like the latest deadly flood in Kentucky or the debilitating heat wave in Texas don’t seem to have any impact on the political morass in those states and others like them. Nothing seems to unleash voter outrage at the climate change deniers who continue to get voter support and who themselves are supported by some of the most corrupt corporate interests in America.

While there can be some political backlash immediately after a climate disaster, the type of sustained commitment required to prevent future disasters often wanes as soon as the relief funds begin to flow or attention moves on to the next disaster. I simply don’t understand this.  Watching someone else’s outdated earthen dam burst should result in a critical analysis of the vulnerability of every earthen dam, but it doesn’t. Not even after it happens again somewhere else.

It is akin to Black voters who continue to vote for Republican candidates and Latinos who somehow think that treating their immigrant brethren like so much human waste is a plus. Abraham Lincoln was the last Republican to do anything for Black people, yet some Black people never learn. Some Latinos are so wounded by a sense of generational deprivation that ignoring the immigrant struggles of today seems to add a measure of contrived self-worth for those who have found a path denied to so many.

Through all of these political thickets and surely with regard to climate change, I think that I will be OK. I am old and White and privileged and don’t live near a regularly flooding creek or a drought ravaged forest. There seems to be plenty of drinking water around, and the supermarkets are full of produce from somewhere. It seems a little warmer these days, but it is summertime and the air conditioning continues to work. So, why do I care?

I am not sure why I care about climate change, but I do. Unfortunately, it seems that not enough of us care to demand something much better, like a comprehensive science-based program and the implementation plan and budget required to stem the destruction and begin to reverse the damage. To its credit, the Biden administration is trying to move the country in the right direction, and just-passed Democratic legislation provides some of the resources necessary to meet environmental commitments.

This legislation is a reminder of what can be done when resistance is aggressively shoved aside. It is also a reminder that the entire Republican congressional cohort continues to sell toxic snake oil to future generations. There continues to be way too much political, social and economic resistance to changing the climate about climate change. There is no excuse for this resistance and no excuse for the willful ignorance that drives so much of the resistance.

To get beyond the resistance and move toward a cohesive environmental policy aimed squarely at reducing global warming and the impact of climate change, there must be a coalescence of two critical concepts – community conscience and good governance.  Without both, I fear that the efforts made will fall far short of the goals associated with slowing and reversing climate change. 

Yet, in America, as in much of the rest of the industrialized world, neither a community conscience nor good governance prevails. Nowhere should the absence of the collective will and the institutional framework required to meet the climate challenge be more obvious than in America. As one of the world’s premier polluters by any reasonable measure and with the resources required to do so much better, America’s national failure to aggressively confront climate change looms large on the world stage.

Climate is sacrificed at altar of convenience

On this front, the real enemy is inconvenience. It is America’s antidote to caring. Americans can wallow in outrage with the best of them, but as soon as it becomes inconvenient to do so, the outrage gives way to beer, bourbon, and beaches. The American attention span is so short because the national intolerance for inconvenience so readily diverts attention.

This is particularly apparent with respect to climate change – turning up your summer thermostat for a day or two just won’t get the job done. Meanwhile, corporate greed ensures that any steps will be small and will protect profits instead of people. On the American right, inconvenience rises to the gospel, and truth is hard to find. On the American left, we love a good protest, but can’t seem to block any bridges or boycott any retailers long enough to make a difference. 

Even if inconvenience doesn’t immediately overwhelm outrage, intermittent outrage and then back to the barbecue is almost worse than no outrage at all, because it creates the illusion of caring without any commitment to continue caring. Once a society stops caring about those in the community at large, it will always fail to explore the pathways to positive collective outcomes. 

A large part of the remedy is community conscience. It is a simple concept – think enough about those around you that the decisions you make reflect something larger than yourself. Know a little about who is struggling in your orbit and find a way to help. That family a couple of streets over really does need the snow plowed on their street before yours gets plowed because their 13-year-old child needs to get to the kidney dialysis center. You and your street can wait. When you understand that plowing their street is more important than plowing yours, you are on your way to community conscience.

Good governance is likewise a simple concept – it is centered on the notion that human beings require some organized way to acquire community assets and then direct community assets to meet community needs. The emphasis here is on the “organized” part of the equation. If you understand why some schools are better than others, then you likely understand good governance. You understand the positive impact of sufficient human and financial resources organized in a way to promote the goal of good education, backed by policies and practices that have been proven to work.

To meet societal challenges, community conscience provides the fuel for good governance and the oversight required to protect good governance from those who would corrupt it. Think about this as the next wildfire burns something once beautiful to behold. Then, join the struggle to figure out the challenges that climate change presents and provide the spark that ignites a meaningful response somewhere. 

*[This article was first published on the author’s blog, Hard Left Turn.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Can Political Climate Change to Combat Climate Change? appeared first on Fair Observer.

Not even the slow and tortured historical path to an inclusive reading of the 14^th Amendment to the Constitution could sway these “originalists” from their intrepid march backward. To this troglodyte six-member Supreme Court majority, a march through Times Square with a concealed firearm gets the constitutional nod over women struggling to ensure good outcomes from available options for protecting their reproductive health and their lives.

This, of course, is hardly the first time that the words of the original US Constitution and the Bill of Rights or the absence of words in those documents has gotten in the way of crafting the legal foundation required to meet the challenges of an evolving nation. For example, the US Supreme Court paved the way for corporate money to further overwhelm the nation’s political integrity by finding a corporate persona that had a guaranteed right to free speech.  Yet, the word “corporation,” like the word “abortion” appears nowhere in the Constitution or the Bill of Rights.  So, if we just work with the original text, neither women nor corporations would enjoy the perceived rights.  Yet, today, women don’t and corporations do.

And this doesn’t even touch the original text granting each Black man 3/5ths of the constitutional recognition granted to White men. Somehow, and thankfully, in the 19^th and 20^th centuries and after a Civil War, a “living” document slowly evolved through amendment and court decisions to recognize that the original words of the Constitution on the topic of counting slaves could not meet the fundamental societal challenges of the day. And further, that those words could no longer be given continued legal vitality.

Corruption Taints Institutions

As with most public endeavors, good legal outcomes require a confluence of professional judgment and ethics. Nowhere is this more certain than the exercise of power in the hands of judges. Corruption that undermines confidence in judicial rulings has a negative institutional impact that can touch each of us. The US Supreme Court is no exception.

The annual salary of each of the associate justices of the US Supreme Court is $274,200, with the chief justice earning $286,700 (January 2022, National Taxpayers Union Foundation). Now you would think that an annual salary in that range for a lifetime job with very generous benefits and retirement options would be enough to satisfy Supreme Court justices, if for no other reason than to free them from the real temptation of ethical lapses and the appearance of corrupt influence on the performance of their duties. But you would be wrong.

Seemingly, the grifter mentality that polluted so much of the Trump administration has yielded a palpable sense that way too many public officials are plotting their profitable exits, padding their investment portfolios, and drafting their “profound” memoirs while supposedly serving the nation. Now, and not for the first time, even justices of the Supreme Court seem unable to avoid the temptation of cashing in. Nor it seems can those charged with making definitive and final judicial determinations in America for others police themselves in order to avoid an ethical stench that is today undermining public acceptance of their judicial decisions and the critical role that acceptance of those decisions plays in the rule of law.

Some of the Supreme Court’s ethical shortcomings are finally being vetted in full public view.  Justice Clarence Thomas is so blind to ethical norms that he plunges forward to mindlessly infuse his wife’s hyper-conservative advocacy into his judicial decision making. Her denials of spousal influence peddling should ring hollow since her continued passion to overturn the results of the last presidential election belies the reality that integrity would require. Meanwhile, her husband increasingly hunkers down to rebuild an 18^th century America suited for steamrolling the 21^st century.

Among the many ethical concepts that some of us believe to have escaped Justice Thomas is the pretty obvious notion of recusal from all cases where his spousal connection might appear to taint his judicial neutrality. Now it appears that Justice Thomas’s ethical lapses are nothing new, since there are many cases to which Justice Thomas has lent his support that his unhinged wife might have influenced. Yet it took her participation in a coup attempt to raise the ethical questions that should have been raised ages ago.

No Code of Ethics for the US Supreme Court

Why might that be? Maybe it is because Justice Thomas is not alone. His egregious and continuing ethical lapses stand out at the moment, but surely someone among the other justices with whom he has served since 1991 would have known about the spousal ethical problems and could have internally flagged them for review. But perhaps a book deal was in the works for one or more of the justices that might get ethically squelched if even internal ethical concerns were to be raised by some justices about other justices.

Remember the salaries and benefits of Supreme Court justices noted above?  Well, they appear to have fallen short in ensuring a comfortable life for those toiling so hard on our behalf. It appears that these supreme legal minds have the extrajudicial energy to spew written wisdom for profit at an eye-popping level. Then, just to prove the incredible vitality of those judicial minds, teaching at universities and highlighting national and international conferences in garden spots around the world provide further opportunity to mine the gold of high public office.

Unfortunately, the ethical challenges infect both sides of any perceived political divide in the Supreme Court. This should not be surprising since the US Supreme Court has no code of ethics, unlike the rest of the federal judiciary. It would seem that they are confident enough in each other that no one will tell or supremely confident that no one is watching. It again makes you think of Donald Trump and his band of grifters, a comparison that should embarrass even those otherwise challenged justices who Trump appointed.

Within the limited cohort of informed Americans, some people seem to be catching on, maybe even enough to wake up the chief justice long enough to take notice. In a political environment in which all government institutions have questionable records of accomplishment that are under public scrutiny, the US Supreme Court’s institutional collapse is perhaps most troubling of all.

It should be clear by now that there is eroding public confidence in the US Supreme Court and that a Supreme Court with compromised integrity cannot fulfill its crucial constitutional role.

*[This article was first published on the author’s blog, Hard Left Turn.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post US Supreme Court Decisions Highlight Ethical Concerns appeared first on Fair Observer.

Too Many Weapons With Too Many People

There are over 400 million firearms in civilian hands in the United States.  I am sure that a whole bunch of them are owned by people who hunt something other than humans.  But I am equally sure that a whole bunch of them are owned by people who hunt, own military style weapons, possess military style magazines and ammunition, leave easy access to their guns to anyone around, and fight tooth and nail to ensure their access to even more weaponry.  And I am sure that a whole bunch of them don’t give a damn about the carnage left behind, especially if the dead and dying are Black or Brown souls.

And how about those gun manufacturers and gun dealers.  I’ll bet a whole bunch of them are hunters too. Probably even the guy who thought it was a good idea to sell two AR-15 semi-automatic rifles to the same kid just days after his 18th birthday, not to mention the extended magazines and ammunition necessary to turn those weapons into active killing machines in Uvalde, Texas.  Let’s find that guy and interview him for his take on hunting and gun safety.

And the cops on the scene, likely hunters and heroes all. Surely they are not afraid to plug a deer, but put them up against a hunter of humans with a “long gun” and they wait around for a key to open the door to an elementary school killing field. Behind that door was a room filled with a killer, one of his AR-15 rifles with loaded magazines at the ready, and the pools of blood around nineteen dead or dying children and two dead teachers. Also, behind that door were those children who somehow survived covered in blood and bullet fragments to relive this nightmare for the rest of their lives. 

I wonder whether any of those cops will change their point of view about guns in civilian hands after what they witnessed that those guns, those magazines, and those exploding bullets can do.  Their silence, and the silence of tens of thousands of other cops, says it all.

So save the pious crap for the thoughts and prayers that litter the landscape of a violent land filled with violent people, and a gun culture that always raises the ante and the death toll.  It was easy to find the first deflection.  All those “responsible” gun owners were at the ready to bemoan the dismal carnage and repeat their pious outrage about guns in the wrong hands.  Yet, nowhere in the mix will there be any self-reflection that they themselves bear any responsibility for the carnage.  For somehow, it is the freedom to create that carnage that is more precious to them than someone else’s precious child with a body destroyed beyond recognition by the firearms that those “responsible” gun owners crave.

Examining the Second Amendment

Just what is this precious freedom that is so worth the carnage to so many.  It is the supposed individual right to keep and bear arms.  Some say that this right is enshrined in the Second Amendment to the US Constitution. Yet that Second Amendment doesn’t say a word about individual gun ownership or who among the people shall enjoy the precious right.  Nor does it mention automatic and semi-automatic weapons or what to do when human ingenuity creates high-capacity magazines and exploding bullets.

In fact, the Second Amendment of the United States Constitution is short and extremely imprecise.  It says in its entirety: “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”

So, if you are a member of a well-regulated militia, it seems that you have the right to access a gun or two in order to perform the duties associated with a late 18^th century public militia.  Beyond those merry militiamen, the amendment doesn’t even try to suggest who else might be included among the “people” whose right to keep and bear arms is not to be infringed.

If the revered founding fathers wanted to arm everyone, they probably would have said so.  Remember how purposeful they were in leaving women out of most of the Constitution and how famously precise they were in creating the three-fifths Black guy.  Yet now, all of sudden, the word “people” means everybody. And just to add to the definitional confusion, the Second Amendment doesn’t even try to define the word “arms,” leaving that task to the gun manufactures of the future and their paid flacks and corrupted politicians.

There has been much written about the history of today’s quixotic notion of individual gun rights.  But one thing is certain, in order to get there, whether you are a gun nut or a Supreme Court justice, you have to ignore the entire introductory phrase of the Second Amendment.  Only by doing so can you arrive at the conviction that an individual right to bear any and all arms is enshrined in the US Constitution.

To be precise, individual citizens armed to hunt deer or prairie dogs, protect themselves, and indiscriminately kill and maim other humans, is the antithesis of any notion of a well-regulated militia that is “necessary to the security of a free State.”  America seems so insecure today precisely because of the chaotic proliferation of firearms in civilian hands.

Fear Your Armed Neighbors

At this moment, the gunmen that we should fear are our armed neighbors.  We should fear them because they are gunmen.  We should understand that the ones among them who create the chaos do not act alone. They act with our tacit support when we say nothing about the guns they own, and about the people in our communities who arm them for profit.  They act with our overt support when we buy into their fantasies by doing nothing to disarm them.  The lone wolf idea is nothing more than another useful fiction that keeps us quiet and does a disservice to wolves.  The killers never act alone.

So, save it folks, I want you to know that I am coming after your guns, all of them.  Because I know and you know that that is the only way to truly protect ourselves from each other and our baser instincts that so often turn so deadly only in that instant when a trigger is pulled.  Learn to fish.  It is more satisfying and only fatal to humans who are stupid enough to swallow their own hook.

As we watch America’s legislative gun control charade play out in the days and weeks ahead, it is useful to remember that there are times when something can be better than nothing.  However, sometimes, and this is one of those times, “something” sure looks like nothing.

*[This article was first published on the author’s blog, Hard Left Turn.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Dead Souls in America: Taking Away Guns is the Only Way appeared first on Fair Observer.

Grim Realities and Failing Institutions

This comes in the wake of the US Supreme Court leak that gave powerful voice to a new American tableau that looks even worse than those threatening days before Roe v Wade. In this instance, a cabal of right-wing religious extremist justices now have the gavel and are speaking loudly for a national minority who really believe that men can do whatever they want with their bodies, but women cannot.  And further, that conception produces a life force that must be protected at all costs, except by controlling access to firearms that kill a whole bunch of those blessed fetuses after their flight from the womb, and sometimes while still there.

There is more. Cornerstones of the American myth are under attack and at risk every day now, without a pause.  And there is no meaningful federal institutional response. The Congress can’t function at all.  The executive branch is slow to respond to anything and so compromised by political angst that half measures are the best that can be hoped for. And the US Supreme Court has become a politicized intellectual cesspool providing incomprehensible legal guidance from the 18th century to a nation trying to grapple with the 21st century.

Voting rights are diminished by blatantly racist gerrymandering and erased by new laws making it even harder for the urban poor and people of color to vote. These blatantly anti-democratic measures go unchecked by federal legislation that should unequivocally declare that this will not continue.  Massive campaign “contributions” to promote the very worst that we can be serve to corrupt America’s politics without any meaningful federal response that unequivocally declares that this will not continue.

Guns that kill and maim our people are everywhere in America. It is estimated that 40% of the guns in the world in civilian hands are in the US, which accounts for about 4% of the world’s population.  Think about that for a minute.  Then, be outraged that there has been no meaningful federal institutional response that unequivocally declares that this will not continue, not after Sandy Hook, and not after Buffalo, and not after all the dead bodies in between. And now, nineteen elementary school children in gun nut Texas will be added to the list with no change in sight.

Then think about the less obvious but maybe even more tragic consequences of the failure of federal institutions to confront the preventable and the perverse: poverty and hunger, even war, access to meaningful healthcare and mental health services, dangerous and puerile censorship of the harmless while harmful hatred goes unchecked, a threatening social media framework, cruel and inhumane immigration policies, and the rampant integration of religious dogma into every nook and cranny of our lives. And this is the short list.

Even those of us committed to good governance as a prerequisite to meeting collective societal needs have had enough.  Sadly, their numbers are now added to the numbers of those who have been conditioned for decades to believe that government cannot function effectively to meet their needs and that any effort to do so is part of some conspiracy to undermine the very rights that dedicated public servants are sworn to protect.

Yet it would be hard to deny that a significant element of the anger directed toward government institutions and those responsible for their operations is centered on a palpable sense that government just isn’t working to meet the challenges it was intended to meet.  At the federal level, the absence of a constructive response to so much that is so wrong shouts loudly to many that the last best institutional responders have fallen silent.

While much of the focus on institutional dysfunction is properly centered on recent history and present-day failures, the problem is compounded by its foundational document, the US Constitution.  It was ratified in 1788, and the initial amendments that contain the Bill of Rights were ratified in 1791.  This was long before there were things like corporations, fetal ultrasound, ghost guns, the internet, and nuclear weapons.  Mar-a-Lago wasn’t even a lago back then.  And each Black person in the land was somehow counted as 3/5 of a White person.  Shamefully, these and other historical anomalies have served to provide fertile ground for an ahistorical perspective spewed by those who lust for a purified White Christian world.

The danger to America’s institutions presented by these new Christian soldiers is that their message of fear and doom is so polluting the body politic that it seems to have paralyzed those who know better and who serve in positions bearing the responsibility for generating a meaningful government response.  That paralysis has taken the form of an unwillingness or incapacity to engage with a singular message that will stridently raise the required warning flags and will penetrate the huge cave of the willfully ignorant.  Unfortunately, fear is a far more persuasive motivator than “OK, here is the real problem, now let’s sit down and try to figure out a meaningful solution.”

No one seems able to fully articulate that you cannot be afraid of losing something unless you believe you had it in the first place. And that is where the right-wing politicians, preachers, and their media allies enter the narrative by callously trafficking in the delusion of a past American greatness that is threatened by progressives, liberals, academics, scientists, Democrats, Black and Brown people, Jews and Muslims.  To be clear and unequivocal about this, the new Christian soldiers are most afraid of awakening to find that they are fighting so hard to recapture a moment that never existed.

The Death of Checks and Balances

In the face of this tyranny of a fading minority, the American majority is left to fight back with flawed institutions that have been delegitimized and undermined for decades.  The institutional checks and balances envisioned in the late 18th century seem to check nothing and balance nothing in the early 21st century.

No other foundational federal institution better illustrates this than the US Supreme Court.  There was a day not so long ago when the Supreme Court seemed to be the institution that codified the checks and balances inherent in America’s constitutional framework.  For much of the second half of the 20th century, a majority of the justices seemed to comprehend that a modern nation that was grappling with racial and social justice issues, entrenched poverty, income and educational inequality, and vast healthcare deficits needed a rule of law with a conscience.  It seemed to work for a while.

Now even that institution has participated in its own undoing by operating within a culture of secrecy with no ethical code at its core, and by studiously denying any collective accountability for the impact of their pronouncements.  To make matters even worse, the present Supreme Court is dominated by an obvious right-wing cohort that came to be through the perfidy of a majority of the justices and their political allies.  Blatant lies from individual justices about their adherence to fundamental legal principles served to conceal their adherence to a right-wing social agenda that got them noticed in the first place and now further delegitimizes the Court.

So, in the end, if it seems that modern-day rule of law principles and the sense of social justice that they can spawn are gone and that America’s federal institutions now produce more darkness than light, there may be nowhere left to go to seek that more perfect union.  However, one thing should be certain in this void – that the time for intellectual curiosity about the fate of the nation is long gone.  Those who care about any of this have to find the courage to make those who don’t care very uncomfortable with their complacency.

*[This article was co-published on the author’s blog, Hard Left Turn.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post A Divided America with Liberty and Justice for None appeared first on Fair Observer.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine, however, can be viewed as yet another product of the ongoing damage done when public policy is driven by political agendas adrift from critical factual and historical context. Dangerous us-versus-them narratives abound. And grievance is encouraged to fester for political gain at the expense of an analytical framework that might actually promote problem solving.

Unfortunately, the world continues to be at the mercy of marauding cold warriors seeking yet one more stage on which to play out what should have been a long-discredited geopolitical narrative and the strategic imperatives driven by that narrative. Millions of lives have been lost or destroyed in killing fields scattered across the globe whenever these warriors can find the “bad actors” essential to their mission and can unite that mission with the ceaseless mission of the arms merchants who enable them. In that world, it is mission critical that good and evil be clearly distinguished and defined in the most puerile of terms. Depth and perspective have no place in that world.

It is therefore not surprising that many of today’s international political and security challenges are generated by the conveniently sloppy use of terms like “democracy” and “autocracy” and their juxtaposition as conclusively descriptive of “good” and “evil.” However, a central problem in this equation has always been that the bombs raining from the skies are not painted different bright colors representing good and evil so that those on whom they fall can feel better or worse about the destructive impact.

The danger of binary thinking

In today’s America, no term is bandied about with less clarity and more bombast than “democracy.” America is fighting for it everywhere, trying to save it at home, and still desperately trying to squeeze the nation’s reality into a xenophobic notion of an island of exceptionalism based in the rule of law and the will of the people. With huge gaps between that reality and the dreamy, flaccid “democracy” that has proven so politically useful, there is way too much room for “autocracy” to become its similarly ill-defined opposite.

When this happens in global terms, it is so much easier to go to war, goaded on by the cold warriors and their arms merchant buddies. The Russian invasion of Ukraine and America’s collective reaction to it are just the latest manifestations of this insanity.

To be sure, America and its historical allies have, since the end of World War II, routinely applauded themselves for an international order that they created and maybe even believed would use the lessons of previous wars to achieve an international consensus that avoiding wars was a supreme, shared and worthy goal. Instead of elevating this goal and creating an equitable institutional framework for avoiding wars, wars continued to remain a critical element of the geopolitical equation.

In this context, it is much too easy to accept war as inevitable and then define the inevitable war in the same tired “good” versus “evil” terminology. Today’s war then becomes necessary or unnecessary, humane or brutal, depending upon who is fighting whom and who is seeking to assure whom of the virtue of their cause. The uncomfortable truth may be that neither the United States nor Russia, Great Britain nor China, nor almost any other nation, has ever removed war from its proverbial table of viable options in a clear-eyed way.

It is always on the table and always promoted by those claiming the mantle of “good” in its perpetual battle to defeat “evil.” Just look at how easily America and its allies have ponied up billions of dollars in weaponry to engage the battle with “evil” on the soil of Ukraine. While arming that cause will surely enrich the arms merchants and maybe “save” Ukraine, little will be said of similarly funding universal access to meaningful healthcare at home and abroad, feeding hungry children everywhere, vaccinating the unvaccinated or a host of other challenges in which the unquestionably good are engaged. And certainly not while the battle against evil “autocracies” rages on.

Weapons are no solution

America is not responsible for the carnage in Ukraine, but it is partially responsible for the promulgation and persistence of the good-versus-evil narrative at the heart of the carnage. In this instance, it is Russia that has weaponized the narrative. While it is critical that the United States step up and forcefully participate in confronting Russia’s aggression, it is equally critical that this exercise becomes a springboard to a far more advanced international metric.

There are no “good” and “evil” countries. There can be good and evil leaders; there can be good and evil policies; there can be good and evil marching orders. But in the end, it is way too easy to switch the labels depending upon who is doing the labeling. When loosely-defined good versus evil, democracy versus autocracy, and the like are translated into aggression on the international stage, the only winners are the merchants of death.

To bring this analysis closer to home, substitute gun carnage in America for Russian carnage in Ukraine. While it is unclear how many Ukrainians have lost their lives over the last couple of months, it is clear that well over 40,000 people in America lost their lives to gun violence in both 2020 and 2021, just over half of which were suicides. The nation is awash in firearms.

In America’s communities, neighborhoods, schools and shopping malls, firearms are readily available and distributed to the disaffected, angry and fearful among us with little concern for the outcome. The arsenal is the nation, and it is stocked by the unregulated and unchecked greed and avarice that abounds in the nation’s democratic stew.

Contrast America’s internal arsenal and its relationship to “democracy” with the nation’s trumpeted Ukraine strategy, essentially viewing its role as that of an “arsenal of democracy.” Good for us. To the tens of thousands who have died in America from gun violence in recent years, the arsenal of democracy in our midst looks a lot like the autocrat’s gun and bullets destroying communities in Ukraine.

I do not make this point to belittle the efforts of the United States and its allies to provide the weaponry necessary to confront unjustified Russian aggression in Ukraine. Rather, I make the point to show how easy it is to confuse “good” and “evil,” and how the failure to define clear non-binary metrics for national and international problem solving only makes the problems worse.

A civilized “democracy” that seems to accept tens of thousands of unnecessary gun deaths a year can take no pride in its domestic arsenal and has to do something different about it now. In Ukraine, a civilized “democracy” that seems at the moment to yearn for an international order that can prevent bombs falling from the sky on innocent people can take pride in providing an arsenal for democracy now, but has to do something different when the dust settles. If not, any claim to the moral high ground will ring hollow.

Central to claiming the moral high ground in both instances is a recognition that arms are the problem, not the solution. To reach that lofty height, America must finally realize its potential to establish internally, and to promote externally, the institutional infrastructure, programs, and policies that prioritize the common good in terms that are easily understood.

Universal access to meaningful healthcare at home and abroad would be a good place to start. If that seems too much to ask, how about just making sure that no child anywhere goes to bed hungry.

*[This article was co-published on the author’s blog, Hard Left Turn.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Cold Warriors Stoke Another War in Ukraine appeared first on Fair Observer.

Further, after decades of pushing some stylized version of democracy on the rest of the world, often at the point of a gun or spurred on by lucrative defense contracts and arms sales, it has finally occurred to some in America that we are far short of a common understanding of the fundamental elements of democratic governance. Often, those on whom we loudly thrust the largesse of democracy are little more than ruling oligarchs in a rigged system. If that sounds familiar, it should.

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Democracy is generally defined as “government by the people, especially rule of the majority.” In fuller terms, it has been defined as “a government in which the supreme power is vested in the people and exercised by them directly or indirectly through a system of representation usually involving periodically held free elections.”

Finding an institutional fit for this definition of democracy is at best elusive. Unfortunately, almost all of the loose talk of a precious “democracy” in peril is utterly devoid of context and content.

Democracy in America

In the United States, rule of the majority is a delusional joke starkly playing itself out in the procedural charade that is the Senate. The entire Republican Party is committed to drive free elections and truly representational government even further into the fictional realm that it has historically occupied. Meanwhile, the Supreme Court has legalized corporate and special interest influence peddling that openly overwhelms and corrupts any pretense at truly representational government and makes a mockery of the legislative process.

Even today, as America engages in a frenzied response to Russian provocation on the Ukrainian border, we loudly and uncritically assert that there is an actual Ukrainian “democracy” that must be defended. This is only America’s latest chapter in the arrogant advocacy for “democracy” around the world at the point of a gun. What remains uncritically defined at home is doomed to failure when uncritically asserted to justify intervention, arms sales and hostile action elsewhere.

On American soil, democracy has an equally abused cousin in public discourse: “freedom.” It is hard to overestimate the impact of whatever “freedom” means individually and collectively on the perception of “democracy.” One need look no further than the role that perceptions of “freedom” play in the carnage resulting from gun violence in a country in which foundational rule of law should result in a constructive institutional response to that carnage. Or, reflect for a moment on all of the Christian prayers floating about in the public forum in a country whose institutions are supposedly committed to “freedom” of religion that should include “freedom” from religion.

The national response to gun violence is a wonderful gateway issue to examine the health of America’s “democratic” institutions. What happens when your idea of your “freedom” steps all over my idea of my “freedom”? Imagine an America in which everybody agreed that gun carnage was an unacceptable intrusion on a collective freedom. Imagine an America in which that precious handgun gave way to that precious life. Imagine an America in which its “democratic” institutions responded to the 84% of American voters who support universal gun purchase background checks by actually enacting legislation to meet that overwhelming majority goal.

It has been noted above that “democracy” at the point of a gun takes the shine off of the pristine concept. Democratic institutions that cannot respond to majority sentiment with something more than the universal thoughts and prayers that litter our public discourse in response to gun carnage are not, in fact, democratic institutions. Believing otherwise is yet another round of self-delusion on America’s magical mystery tour. In America, Americans die. Elsewhere, the devastation is no less traumatic for those caught in the grip of America’s addiction to violence without meaningful consent of the governed.

Money and Politics

Yet another confounding feature of America’s “democracy” is the incredible amounts of cash needed to even begin to compete for political office. So, on a stage already tilted by voter suppression measures, fundraising becomes the essential component of gaining political power for both the anxious candidate and those seeking to peddle their own influence.

In today’s politically and socially divided America, creating political theater is the surest way to attract the cash needed for electoral success. Think about that for a moment. Since the press and social media networks cannot seem to get enough of the lying, cheating, stealing and fraud at the heart of one outrageous public claim after another, infamy can be turned into instant cash. Tell the public that school libraries are awash in critical race theory, send out a message telling the faithful that you are their champion in the fight for the souls of their children and, most importantly, to be their champion you will need their financial support. The money rolls in and the beat goes on.

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This is not how any constitutional democracy was designed to work. Democratic institutions cannot survive in a sea of public ignorance and indifference. Truly democratic institutions cannot be bought and sold like a used car. So, come one, come all, this US senator is for sale. Listen to his chatter, believe his message, fill his coffers and watch him perform. Get 41 of these elected clunkers in the 100-member Senate at the same time, and gun control is an illusion, environmental protection is eroded and social justice is denied. All filibustered to legislative death by an institutional minority.

It is the hypocrisy of it all that should be apparent to anyone actually paying attention. So, the next time that you see the stars and stripes flying or hear the glorious strains of “God Bless America,” stop for just a moment and think about the meaning of democracy, how precious it could be and how utterly absent it is from America’s shores. The nation is not now, nor has it ever been, a democracy. And loudly declaring it as such should ring hollow every time, because the evidence overwhelmingly suggests otherwise.

Then, stop for just another moment and think about how truly democratic institutions might be able to provide the essential platform for shaping a more perfect union. The success of the struggle to make that happen should be the most significant measure of a great nation.

*[This article was co-published on the author’s blog, Hard Left Turn.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post On the Road in a Divided and Delusional America appeared first on Fair Observer.

Will Joe Manchin Remain a Democrat?

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Into that mix, up steps Joe Manchin, a US senator from West Virginia to put the transformational agenda of the progressive movement in America on life support. Amid the cascade of bad news here, there is also plenty of “democratic” absurdity. In his last reelection in 2018, Manchin won a six-year US Senate seat from West Virginia with a whopping total of 290,510 votes. Joe Biden won the presidency in 2020 with over 81 million votes. So what? In the land of the free, Manchin’s personal agenda, the agenda of the fossil fuel industry and apparently that of a sliver of America trumps that of a president elected by a significant majority of all Americans who voted in the presidential election.

It is largely the ongoing institutional paralysis of the US Senate that gives Manchin and a handful of other US senators veto power over virtually all legislative initiatives. This paralysis is now so deeply ingrained that the results are almost always foreordained. In America’s two-party system, the Republican Party is presently committed solely to a scorched earth drive to political victory at the cost of even the most basic of policy discussions.

West Virginia and More

This is the fertile ground in which corruption and influence peddling thrive. Here again, Manchin steps up to the plate, this time to institutionally piss on the 93% of West Virginia’s children who are eligible to benefit from a child tax credit that is about to expire. Since this should be a huge incentive for him to support the extension of the child tax credit, Manchin’s singular effort to kill the legislation can only be explained by fealty to some special interest that surely doesn’t give a damn about those children.

Moreover, the child tax credit is just one pillar of the transformational safety net legislation that Senator Manchin and those who have likely bought his vote are attempting to bury. Corrupting special interests and their right-wing Republican allies are also hard at work scuttling universal pre-school education, childcare and elder care assistance, increased nutritional security for children, paid family leave, some measure of drug price controls, improved Affordable Care Act access and Medicare and Medicaid benefits, and support for affordable housing alternatives.

Critically, as well, the proposed transformational social legislation that has already been passed by the US House of Representatives includes a significant (yet modest) effort to meet our national and international commitments to confront climate change. In fact, it may be antipathy toward these latter provisions that has pushed Manchin to abandon the West Virginia children and their families he would like you to think he cares about.

Much of this should come as no surprise. After all, the legislative process in America is working as it was designed to work, ensuring that corporate interests, corrupt influence peddlers and wealthy Americans are able to bludgeon democratic reform with impunity. Unfortunately, no amount of policy response will win the day tomorrow in the face of the perfidy that is winning today. It will take a street fight to even begin to turn the tide.

No Other Way Forward

I do not say this lightly, but I see no other way forward. Adding voting rights, abortion rights, gun control and police reform to the scrapheap of history will make the rout complete. So, all Americans who understand the nation’s peril either seize this moment or they will continue to live in a country rife with inequality, racial and social injustice, gun violence, fundamental inequity and corruption. America will never be better if no one forces it to be better.

To start, President Biden has to step up and demand that the key elements of the social safety net and climate change legislation be passed now. He must identify a legislative path forward and demand in no uncertain terms that all applicable legislative tools need to be utilized to that end. He must also make it clear that he will go directly to the people as their president to forge the necessary alliances to meet his legislative objectives. Then, every senator and every representative must be required to cast a vote, for or against. There is no choice.

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If the legislation fails to pass the Congress, then Biden must call the people to the streets. This means that those of us who care on our own behalf or on behalf of others either answer the call or accept an America unworthy of our allegiance. There is no choice.

Meanwhile, it is way past time to eliminate minority rule in the US Senate, not just for the moment but forever. Understand that there will be no voting rights legislation, no abortion rights bill, no gun control measures and no police reform measures if a Republican Party in the minority in Congress can effectively prevent the majority party and its president from confronting the issues they were elected by the majority to confront. Again, back to Biden and his legislative allies, this time to demand an end to the filibuster to move critical legislation forward. There is no choice.

Although much attention has been focused on the social safety net, climate legislation and infrastructure funding, critical voting rights legislation must now be moved front and center. Any talk of seizing the moment based on today’s majority will be rendered meaningless if today’s majority cannot vote in tomorrow’s elections.

Voting

The vilest forces on America’s political landscape are now laser focused on control of the right to vote at all levels of government and then using that control to ensure electoral outcomes that reflect a narrow right-wing and racist agenda. If successful, this path will enshrine economic, racial and social inequality for generations to come. That pernicious work is well underway and advancing with success.

In this context, I am hardly the first person to suggest that a democracy that properly encourages a minority voice in its political discourse ceases to be a democracy when that minority is permitted to rule with no corresponding responsibility to govern. This, unfortunately, is the state of play in today’s Congress. It can only change if President Biden and his allies call us to the streets and we respond in numbers unseen before in this nation.

*[This article was co-published on the author’s blog, Hard Left Turn.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post America Is on the Edge of a Critical Precipice appeared first on Fair Observer.

There is a remedy, but it appears to be absent without explanation. By now, there should be a full-blown and multifaceted investigation led by the US Department of Justice (DOJ) that focuses all of the formidable law enforcement authority of that institution on Trump and his high-level merry band of criminal conspirators. It should have as its driving purpose ensuring some measure of accountability for any and all associated criminal misconduct, especially that of Trump himself.

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When President Joe Biden nominated Merrick Garland to be America’s attorney general, the head of the DOJ and the nation’s top prosecutor, Garland was quick to highlight the importance of the rule of law as a cornerstone of America’s democracy with the imposition of impartial and equal justice as its guiding light. The nomination acceptance speech was a good one, but the application of its principles to Trump and his co-conspirators seems to be missing in action.

Without a doubt, Garland appears to be a man of integrity and considerable legal acumen. Although early in his career he was a prosecutor, he is best known for well over two decades of service as a judge on the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, the last seven years of which were as chief judge of that court.

What’s the Situation Now?

So, where is he in what should be one of the biggest and best moments an experienced and committed prosecutor can imagine? High-level government officials, including an ex-president and his acolytes, almost surely conspired to overthrow the federal electoral process that is so often touted as the critical element of the democratic and peaceful transfer of power. Just to sweeten the pot, they organized and bankrolled a criminal insurrection at the US Capitol as a fundamental part of their conspiratorial efforts. And this doesn’t even touch years of lying, cheating and stealing their way to corrupt ends.

Yet, as best I can tell, a relatively limited and flawed select congressional committee is the only entity focusing investigative resources on the grifter-in-chief and his conspiratorial insurrectionists. I like what that committee is trying to do, but I know what that committee will never be able to do: indict the indictable and drag them into criminal court where they belong. I will happily await the conspirators’ defense in front of a judge and jury while their expensive suits cover up the ankle bracelets that they all should be wearing by that time.

To be clear, it is fully appropriate that those who rioted at and inside the Capitol on January 6 should be held accountable for their actions on that day, as well. To its credit, the Department of Justice seems intent on providing some measure of that accountability, albeit often less than the actions of the rioters seemingly warranted. But much of the fodder for these prosecutions are low-level misfits urged forward and financed by mid-level and high-level conspirators seeking to use them as tools to preserve power and privilege for those who sent them forward in the first place.

Steve Bannon

To begin to understand the impact of the attorney general’s absence from the fray, it is worth taking a look at the interplay between the select congressional committee and a high-level co-conspirator and confidant of the grifter-in-chief, Steve Bannon. There is enough in the public record to establish the relationship between Trump and Bannon and the direct link of Bannon’s actions to the January 6 insurrection. When Bannon refused to cooperate with the investigators, produce documents and ultimately testify before the committee, the committee authorized a subpoena to require that cooperation.

This all sounded good until Bannon, as expected, thumbed his nose at the committee subpoena. This is straight out of the playbook used by the grifter-in-chief for decades. In response, the select committee and the full House of Representatives authorized a referral to the DOJ for prosecution of criminal contempt charges. This action was taken on October 21. Finally, a full three weeks after the referral, the DOJ indicted Bannon for criminal contempt of Congress.

While this may send a message to others in the cabal refusing to cooperate and testify, swifter DOJ action would have sent a much stronger message. And, perhaps most important, neither the indictment nor a conviction ensures that the select committee will get the documents and testimony they sought in the first place.

Viewed through a wider lens, it is now more than 10 months since the insurrection at the US Capitol. It is possible that Attorney General Garland and a prosecutorial team are hard at work on a major grand jury investigation of the events leading up to, during and following that violent assault on the building, on those protecting it and on the critical legislative process that was to take place on January 6. If there is such an investigation underway, there is seemingly no public record of it to this point, no leaks and no witness attorneys complaining about prosecutorial overreach. Meanwhile, it took over three weeks for the DOJ to act on a straightforward and simple criminal contempt referral from Congress that should have been anticipated from the day of the insurrection itself.

Called to Account

So, where is Attorney General Garland, the nation’s chief law enforcement officer, with the nation’s institutional foundation still under daily attack from the very co-conspirators whose actions propelled the insurrection and its criminal aftermath? I do not know. However, I hope that I am wrong and that a federal grand jury is actively investigating the co-conspirators and working its way toward the moment when the grifter-in-chief will finally be called to account.

While there is much general talk about accountability in our society, there has been little serious talk about the consequences of a specific failure to assign accountability at the highest levels for those conspirators inside the government, aided by co-conspirators on the outside. The events of January 6 were not an aberration. While the big show was on television for all to see, that show was camouflage for an attempted coup, an attempted overthrown of the nation’s constitutional order.

How do we know this? We know this because the grifter-in-chief and his acolytes are trying so hard to make it so hard for the rest of us to find out what really happened. Only the US Department of Justice has the authority, the resources and the skill set necessary to extract the full story and hold the responsible parties accountable.

This is a lot to put on the shoulders of Merrick Garland. But there it is.

*[This article was co-published on the author’s blog, Hard Left Turn.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post The Wrong Attorney General at the Wrong Time appeared first on Fair Observer.

Will Joe Manchin Remain a Democrat?

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On the other hand, there are lots of places that claim to have a fealty to democratic institutions dedicated to ensuring free societies governed by some form of majority rule. The United States of America is in the latter group and sees itself as the leader of the pack.

The Senate

Now for some reality. Americans are quick to point to their beloved constitutional framework as a model for the institutional design that can best ensure that the will of the people, majority rule, is enshrined in their political life. I know this may surprise some, but the Founding Fathers didn’t really trust the majority they claimed they were championing, so they created the US Senate.

The least populous state in the nation, Wyoming (with just over 577,000 people, 0.17% of the US population), gets two US senators in the 100-member legislative body. The most populous state, California (with 39.5 million, 11.8% of the population), gets the same two US senators. How is that for majority rule?

When there is some measure of political and social consensus in the nation, America can seem to overcome the senatorial mockery of representational government. Maybe back when there were 13 colonies forming a nation, each of which had a whole lot of land and not many people, the idea of a patrician legislative body with effective veto power over legislation generated by the more representative legislative body could be shoehorned into a viable democratic framework. Well, not anymore.

As the nation seeks to address long-term social, economic, and racial inequities, one senator from West Virginia (population 1.79 million, 0.54% of population) can stand in the way of Senate action on significant legislation meant to benefit the 330 million or so Americans across the entire land. This senator from West Virginia, armed with his vision of the US Constitution, insists that outsiders will not tell West Virginians what to think, while completely missing the irony of an outsider from West Virginia having the singular political and institutional power to tell the citizens of the remaining 49 states what they should think.

Filibuster

On its own, this type of minority gridlock makes it almost impossible for the Senate to function, whether the gridlock is within a single political party or between the political parties. But wait, there’s more. As if it isn’t bad enough that a single US senator representing about half a percent of the US population can bring the legislative process to a halt, the Senate has procedural rules that essentially square the impact of individual senators, often from very small states. Enter the “filibuster.”

While the constitutional framework establishes the Senate and its membership component, there is absolutely nothing in that same Constitution that says anything about the Senate requiring 60 votes to pass legislation. Rather, that notion seems so contrary to America’s constitutional narrative that it should be seen as unconstitutional. A legislative body, already moored in a mockery of representational governance, has established rules to ensure that majority rule is impossible to achieve without a super-majority of adherents. This is fatal for any controversial piece of legislation in a politically divided nation.

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While the full history of the filibuster is in some dispute, its “modern” application is not. It was a rule born in defense of racism and nurtured to this day by racists. So, it is no accident that this anti-democratic procedural contrivance is almost always raised when simple majority rule threatens to provide some measure of the social, economic and political building blocks required to confront the nation’s racial injustice and economic and social inequities.

Voting in 50 States

Nowhere is this more evident than in the discussion of legislation aimed at creating national standards to ensure voting rights. At its core, the nation’s struggle to enhance and encourage access to the polls has been a national flashpoint since America’s inception.

From the outset, women and enslaved people (mostly black people and other people of color) had no right to vote. Women gained the right to vote in 1920 with the passage of the 19^th Amendment to the US Constitution. Black men and men of “color” were essentially granted the right to vote in 1870 with the passage of the 15^th Amendment to the Constitution. Yet ever since then, black people and increasingly others of color have been engaged in an unending struggle to actually gain the right to vote and the unfettered capacity to exercise that right.

Today, once again, a universal suffrage that has never been realized in America is under further attack from a dwindling white majority that simply cannot accept a fully-engaged diverse electorate. As hard as it may be to imagine, the actual eligibility to vote in any election, including national elections, registering to vote and the requirements to cast a ballot are not presently controlled by meaningful federal legislation. Rather each state and many localities in each state set their own voting rules and regulations.

The tortured history of the consequences of this 50-state solution to guaranteeing the most fundamental of democratic rights is probably the subject of more books and studies than any other of the “guaranteed” rights that dot the pages of the US Constitution. But no matter how much is written or how many marches and protests there have been, the Senate is now poised to filibuster to death a modest legislative effort to finally provide a measure of enforceable national voting standards.

Freedom to Vote Act

Just a few days ago, not a single Republican senator voted in favor of the Freedom to Vote Act, this most recent federal voting rights legislative effort. In the evenly-divided US Senate, this is the filibuster death knell for any meaningful federal voting standards. And just for emphasis, this Republican procedural move was on a vote to bar any Senate debate of the legislation in question. So, senators who haven’t yet even heard the debate in this great deliberative body voted overwhelmingly to prevent that debate from happening in the first place.

The institutional failures and the underlying foundational framework that exacerbate those failures are monumentally frustrating to those of us who believe in good governance and government as the principal constructive avenue to meet a nation’s collective challenges. Today, it is impossible to emphasize enough how America’s anti-democratic forces emanate from its deeply-flawed senatorial cesspool.

With regard to voting rights, there is the small ray of hope that the bare majority Democratic Party in the Senate, which controls the procedural rules, will eliminate the filibuster to allow simple majority rule to confront racial injustice. It would be a fitting condemnation of a rule designed to ensure racial injustice.

*[This article was co-published on the author’s blog, Hard Left Turn.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post The US Senate, the Filibuster and the 50-State Solution appeared first on Fair Observer.

On September 1, Texans were gifted with a new law essentially banning abortions in the state, but with a twist sure to be embraced by the unemployed. Anyone who wants to pick up a quick $10,000 bounty is now a key component of the Texas anti-abortion team. And just to make sure that the team is well-protected in the often-dangerous world of bounty hunting, on that same day, Texans with a handgun became free to carry that gun openly without a license, permit or training.

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This means that as that bounty hunter is snooping around trying to locate abortion-supporting miscreants to cash in on the bounty, he/she can have a handgun at the ready if confronted by an angry boyfriend about to head out with his pregnant girlfriend to seek an abortion.

“Accomplishments”

This is, of course, another in a growing list of “only in America” moments. The nation is piling up an impressive list of “accomplishments” on its regressive road to a simpler world in which white guys made all the decisions and many of the rest of the white guys and gals loved the way it worked for them. For context, it should be remembered that some Americans used to lynch other Americans for perceived cultural insensitivity. So, while this new rule of law step backward might look like a creative attempt at reimagining policing, it is instead a return to an even more tribal time when those who perceived themselves wronged took care of things themselves.

To be sure, there are undoubtedly a few other recognized constitutional rights, beyond a woman’s right to choose, that might be ripe for vigilante exploitation. How about that Second Amendment right to bear arms? As with abortion rights, gun rights are controversial in America, rest on a still disputed legal foundation and have passionate activist supporters and opponents. If left to my choice, no individual would be able to own a gun of any kind without certification of gun safety training, a full background check, a specific-use license and a locked gun case for storage at home. No assault weapons or high-capacity magazines would be allowed in private hands.

Because of America’s love affair with guns and the 50-state solution to even constitutionally-protected rights, there are 50 different state governmental responses to the nation’s gun carnage. Again, as with abortion rights, some states are permissive while others are more restrictive, leaving some elements of the gun control package suggested above as the law in some states.

So, while armed Texans are hunting down abortionists and those who aid them, legally armed New Yorkers could be hunting down all those illegal assault weapons for a hefty bounty per weapon. Wouldn’t this be fun: Your neighbor has a slew of guns, purchased without a background check, no licenses and no gun case. Hop on it, sue in your local court and take a shot at collecting that hefty bounty.

This enriched law enforcement concept would not have to be limited to the constitutional realm. How about recycling? For those of you with neighbors who never recycle despite local recycling mandates, this could be yet another fertile ground for vigilante “justice.” And this time, all you have to do is pretend you are walking your dog while actually noting the absence of recycling bins on recycling day. As an added bonus, you get to feel good about yourself because you are helping to save the planet.

“Freedom Lovers”

In addition to a new urgency for a return to vigilante justice, a significant element of the populace also seems committed to limiting the right to vote of some of their legally-entitled fellow citizens. Since free and fair elections are seen by all freedom-loving people as a core element of the democratic process, narrowing the definition of “free” and “fair” is a great way to start a fundamental march backward.

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This idea isn’t new in America; it is just newly-minted in Republican-led states where old ideas get new life. If you have too many people of color taking advantage of present voting laws to achieve electoral gains, you have to change the rules or this will keep happening. Enter a dizzying array of new voter suppression laws.

For those who are true “freedom lovers,” there seems to be a singularly American nostalgic longing for measles, mumps, polio and even smallpox. Remember those days of yore when god alone decided who ended up in an iron lung? Now, a whole new universe of willfully ignorant freedom lovers is roaming the land and killing their fellow citizens.

This phenomenon appears to generate from a frontier mentality that resisting the government was the only honorable way for real men to live. “Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death,” “Live Free or Die” and the like have polluted America’s democratic discourse since the time of the nation’s birth. With a gun in one hand and a beer in the other, resisting the intrusion of organized authority has now become the sick mantra of those who don’t care if your liberty is invaded by the coronavirus, mumps or measles.

Yet this fundamentally anti-liberty message escapes most of its adherents. Freedom and liberty should be viewed as a collective expression, not a dogma that elevates the welfare of the individual over the freedom and liberty of others. On this note, it would be entertaining to engage some of these “resistance” fighters in a discussion about the absurdity of opposing life-giving vaccines while promoting “right to life” bounties for those who interfere with a woman’s freedom to choose.

The Months Ahead

In the months ahead, there will be rancorous debate in America about abortion, about gun control, about protecting the right to vote, about the wisdom of recycling and about vaccine mandates. It will be a confrontation of ideas, with one side looking to project an America that actually lives up to its self-serving narrative and the other side seeking a return to an America blinded to its failures.

Resistance to public health mandates, resistance to universal access to meaningful health care, and resistance to access to the affordable child care, pre-K learning and community college that are central to thriving families will be the hallmark of those trapped in their reverence for the past. To see more, keep an eye on the immigration debate as America’s southern border continues to be an unwelcoming barrier and Afghan refugees flood unwelcoming communities. Those who give voice to that noxious anti-immigrant message also give voice to the realities of America’s past.

Think finally about the notion that for the first time most of us can remember, America may be committed to avoiding declared or de facto wars on the soil of other nations. Sadly, it is continuing to fight a war with itself on its own soil.

*[This article was co-published on the author’s blog, Hard Left Turn.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post America Lurches Toward Its Checkered Past appeared first on Fair Observer.

360° Context: How 9/11 and the War on Terror Shaped the World

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Now that the American political and military exit from Afghanistan has stumbled to completion, a key component of America’s egregious and deadly response to 9/11 is finally ended after 20 years of failed policy. But failed policies should have consequences, and this one surely did, both here and abroad. The loss of life in Kabul during the withdrawal is just the latest reminder of yet another “gallant” American adventure gone bad in some foreign land. For 20 years, throughout the Muslim world, we made enemies we didn’t have to make, and we created a whole new cadre of wounded warriors in our midst ready to vanquish the incoming hoards at all cost to save the homeland from itself.

Imposing Its Will by Force

To make matters worse, there is a shocking ignorance about even relatively recent history and its relevance to the present and the future. Few Americans seem to fathom that in response to the killing of nearly 3,000 Americans on September 11, 2001, the national government set out to extract a bloody bounty to avenge each of those lost lives. While the US mourned its losses, there was hardly a thought or a moment of introspection before the nation’s leaders charted their deadly and destructive course around the world.

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In every far-off land where the US government seeks to impose its will by force, no matter the reason for doing so in the first place, the people in those invaded lands pay a terrible price. And it always ends the same way. It is important to know that America has not won a war since 1945 and has not fought a war on its own soil since the Civil War. Yet in Afghanistan alone, it is estimated that hundreds of thousands of Afghans have been killed, maimed and wounded, with millions more displaced, by an invasion that those men, women and children neither sought nor provoked.

As in Vietnam, US government operatives found elements of the local populace in Afghanistan that they assured themselves were welcoming. Then the killing started. And as always, the people we paid in those lands loved us, and the people we killed maimed and devastated hated us. And here is the lesson to be learned: There are always more of the latter than the former. When the payments stop coming, love is quickly lost, but the hatred of the devastated never dies.

Repeating the Vietnam Playbook

If there is anything to be gained from the crushing defeat and exit from Afghanistan, it is that after 20 years of repeating the same essential Vietnam playbook, while dealing death and destruction at every turn, many in America may finally understand how Vietnam ended as it did. When one nation invades another, it never ends well. When the invading nation has some messianic notion that it alone can succeed in supplanting existing cultural, social and political norms, and does so at the point of a gun, the invaded nation will eventually rebel, unite and drive out the invaders.

So, as another 9/11 anniversary looms, Americans must again try to comprehend that our national loss on September 11, 2001, was not sufficient cause to scream at the world like some out-of-control toddler. It was a horrible day because so many innocent people lost their lives and so many more were left injured and broken. But when the US government set out to exact revenge, the worst that we could be was unleashed on others, many of whom were just as innocent as those who lost their lives in America on 9/11.

In doing so, the US not only failed to wipe out terrorism, but it failed to create even a semblance of a new era of American heroism driven by an army of new American heroes. Rather it succeeded in creating an international force devoid of morality that it then had to sell at home as some group of avenging angels. Selling that narrative became even harder when our own soldiers, as always, started to come home in body bags.

The US Failed

There is a tragic symmetry to all of this. President Joe Biden seems to be a truly decent man, and when faced with a difficult choice that paralyzed his predecessors, he made the right choice and stuck to it. But as he did so, he was unable to seize that critical moment to tell the nation that we had failed, as before.

Once again, it seemed impossible to say that we as a nation must be better and do better. When the end in Afghanistan became most tragic at a cost of American lives, Biden echoed George W. Bush after 9/11 in leading the nation to believe in a new sacred mission to root out and kill the cockroaches who did us harm. This is the worst of who we are, and it never leads to anything good. Biden could have and should have done better at that moment. Instead, he felt compelled to affirm that if you kill us, we will kill you, and it will always be disproportionately tilted toward the others, anyone in the way be damned.

It can only be hoped that no more young men and women, ours or theirs, will be sacrificed on the long-blackened stones of the alters constructed by their elders. There remain many people in the world who do not revere America the way so many here seem to think they should, and some of those will threaten the nation. Yet, after 20 years of fighting terrorism on the soil of others, the threat from afar seems minimally diminished.

Rather, a whole new generation of wounded warriors walks among us. Some are surely heroes and some are surely villains, but way too many of them are integrated into the squads of self-styled patriots in every community, mostly out in the open, dangerously armed and supported by a significant cohort of those who will be most vocal about the ravages of 9/11. I have never quite understood why you get a patriotism merit badge for killing people in far-off lands or for simply wearing a uniform that to many in the world is synonymous with death, not dignity.

The Heroes

But this isn’t about merit or merit badges. Together, as a nation, Americans have to begin to walk away from violence and its always tragic end, whether in Afghanistan, Iraq or Chicago. One image stands out to me from the chaos of the Afghanistan exit. It is the photo of two US soldiers in full battle gear lifting a baby over a razor-wired wall to a place of safety. Those soldiers are my heroes. I hope they come home and remember that moment above all else and find their voice to urge others to lift other babies over barriers to safety wherever they may be.

I give my thanks to Joe Biden for having the courage to end this futile war in Afghanistan. I hope he finds those two soldiers and tells them and the nation that they were the most heroic of all.

*[This article was co-published on the author’s blog, Hard Left Turn.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Remembering What to Remember in America appeared first on Fair Observer.

On the Senate side of the Capitol, both Democrats and Republicans are leaving town with their party balloons still in the air in celebration of a bill to fund repair and replacement of a portion of the nation’s hard infrastructure that has crumbled before their very eyes for decades. It has become so rare that both parties can agree on anything that the celebration far outweighs the accomplishment. After all that hard work, it seems that it is time for a “well-deserved” weeks-long vacation, the other topic that receives regular bipartisan support.

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On the House of Representatives side, things are a little more complicated. That group of dedicated public servants adjourned on July 30 for seven weeks, although a short recall is possible for a symbolic vote or two along the way. To be fair, they did pass some meaningful legislation in the last few months. However, only one such piece of legislation has passed the Senate as well and been signed into law — Joe Biden’s initial COVID-19 relief bill (American Rescue Plan). But at least they tried to find legislative solutions on some significant issues, the most important of which are voting rights and police reform.

With all those senators and representatives now vacationing, it would be easy to conclude from this casual approach to governance that the nation is smoothly sailing to its appointed destiny of renewed greatness. Nothing could be further from the truth.

There is so much that is so obviously wrong at the moment in today’s America that even the appearance of a weeks-long hiatus should ethically disqualify those vacationing legislators from further service. A “grateful” nation should retire all of them. But that won’t happen, in part because each of them will have a spin machine at work full-time rolling out the tale of just how hard they are working on the issues of the day back in their districts.

While You Were Vacationing

Lest you think that I am being a little hard on these self-congratulatory public servants, let’s take a look at what is going on around the nation and around the world while the US Congress has freed itself of its legislative responsibilities.

First, and most obvious, COVID-19 is again ravaging the nation. So, instead of collectively working on urgent public health initiatives, like vaccination mandates, the vacationing legislators are individually on the stump creating more public health confusion. Much of the idiocy makes enough local news that it fortifies those in the caves, covens and churches in Republican districts and states as they go about their communities spreading the disease. The only upside is that many of the vacationing Republican congresspersons are spending their time hanging out with their unmasked and unvaccinated constituents.

Meanwhile, a country that clings to the notion that the current version of universal suffrage has become a critical component of its “democratic” foundation is in the throes of an unrelenting Republican-led effort to do everything possible to make voting more difficult and less universal. The reasons for this are simple: racism and privilege. Universal suffrage to white conservatives is only a good thing if the “universe” is overwhelmingly composed of right-wing white people. Unfortunately for that dwindling crowd, the universe includes a lot of black and brown people, and a whole bunch of young people who see “universal” as a plus.

There is an easy way to stop the reversal of the democratic process in America. It is to pass legislation at the national level that sets clear voting rights standards, that increases access to the ballot for all eligible voters and that provides fierce enforcement measures to ensure legal compliance. But you can’t do any of this on vacation.

While many of those vacationing legislators may come face-to-face with constituents in places where everything is burning, and heatwaves, drought and smoke spread daily devastation, nothing can be done about this either while on vacation. Therefore, environmental laws, climate change legislation, and economic incentives and regulatory mandates remain on hold. The legal framework for cleaner energy production, research and use remains unchanged and woefully inadequate to meet today’s planetary challenges.

While climate change is taking its deadly toll during the congressional vacation season, we should not forget about gun violence and police violence. Hardly a day goes by in America without multiple firearm deaths and some measure of police overreaction or undertraining resulting in the death or serious injury of someone in some community that the cops are supposed to be protecting. It will be hard to get a full tally from these events over the coming vacation weeks, but every congressperson knows that critically-needed federal legislation to address rampant gun violence and police reform will be on hold, as well.

No matter how completely oblivious most Americans have become to gun violence (until it hits very close to home), America remains the most likely developed country in which at any moment someone is being killed or killing themselves with a firearm. Since it has been a few weeks now since the nation’s latest high-profile mass killing, it will be hard to make it to the end of this congressional vacation without another one. Thoughts and prayers are all we get when Congress is in session, so their absence shouldn’t change the landscape much on this one. But we should all be disgusted that these public servants can go on vacation while the gun carnage continues unabated and has remained unaddressed in meaningful federal legislation for decades.

The List Goes On

I could go on. The list is long. But so is the vacation. Think about how a functioning legislature might be able to make some legislative progress in the coming weeks on universal access to meaningful health care, child care and family leave, a living minimum wage, tax reform and access to quality education.

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There might even be the opportunity to debate the crippling and continuing impact of America’s systemic racism and how to do something about it. And maybe if they weren’t all on vacation, they could do something constructive, instead of sound bites, about the implementation of America’s long-overdue withdrawal from Afghanistan and its human rights implications, about immigrants and refugees, and about ensuring that the vaccines that Americans are throwing away get into the arms of those begging for them elsewhere.

They could be doing some of this, but they are doing none of it. They are on vacation.

*[This article was co-published on the author’s blog, Hard Left Turn.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Congress Adjourns While the Nation Burns appeared first on Fair Observer.

So, what happened? First, a lot of ignorant and selfish people decided not only to stay that way, but to avoid COVID vaccinations as well. They started getting sick and dying, but not enough of them did so to end the plague. Instead, they just spread the disease, now a highly contagious variant, to other unvaccinated people. Then, something really bad happened: It was soon discovered that those ignorant and selfish people were also spreading the disease to vaccinated people, who just haven’t started dying in large numbers, at least not yet.

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Meanwhile, the commercial machine and its political allies were ramping up to open everything and let the good times roll. It quickly became hard to find a seat at the bar or a hotel room at the beach. Airports and airplanes were filled again with vacationing families, rental cars were so scarce that it is hard to imagine that turnaround time included a drop of disinfectant, and those ever-popular buffet tables were dusted off for the hungry hoards. Forgetting your mask at home or in the car was deemed to be of little consequence.

The US federal government response was to go all in on vaccines as the obvious path to public health and commercial revitalization. The vaccines are now everywhere to be had and free of charge. The only problem with this plan is that it is playing out in America, where freedom is defined by way too many as not having to do anything you don’t want to do that you can get away with. The well-being of others be damned.

This situation would be easy to ignore if it involved only a fringe group of pock-marked anti-vaccine individualists whose children regularly get the measles and who never go to school. But this time, for some reason, the vaccine-resistant crowd also includes a large percentage of Republicans who are not pock-marked and whose children get a whole raft of vaccines so they can go to school. Then throw in a bunch of members of religious covens whose leaders are chatting with their god about this issue and then let the flock in on the big secret that their god definitely isn’t vaccinated against COVID-19 (even though there seems to be some disagreement about god’s smallpox vaccination status).

“Freedom”

There are more ironies here than I can keep up with. Let’s start with “freedom” of choice. Many of those resistant to vaccines resist government “interference” in personal health choices, even though many of those same people are fully engaged in trying to get that same government to prevent women from making their own reproductive choices. Think about that for a moment.

More ironic yet, many of those in the “freedom” crowd seem untroubled by most government health mandates, yet all of a sudden, putting a vaccine in their bodies to help themselves and others avoid the ravages of a relentless virus has become some political and social litmus test for them. Seatbelt requirements, drinking and driving prohibitions, no smoking in restaurants, a host of required vaccines for employment, travel and schooling all make the good health mandate list. Meanwhile, mindless resistance to life-saving COVID vaccines and masking requirements has become a right-wing badge of honor, generally until the bodies of right-wing family and friends start piling up.

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However, maybe the grandest irony of all is that the leader of the pack of virus resisters, Donald Trump, is himself fully vaccinated, as are at least his wife and the precious Ivanka. It is bad enough that the Trump clan lied its way to prominence and supposed wealth and that when empowered to do the right thing almost always did the wrong thing. Then, when a pandemic was inserted into the mix, the whole crew conspired to undermine any meaningful national response while over 500,000 people in America died on their watch. While others were gasping for their last breath, Trump got vaccinated just to make sure it wouldn’t be him on that ventilator.

You would think that as the actions of the Trump clan played out before adoring eyes, those ignorant and selfish acolytes would be pushing others out of the way to get vaccinated. But instead, they can’t wait to parade their “freedom” from vaccine tyranny at every super spreader event they can find, while the vaccinated and protected leader of the pack cheers them on. This seems to work really well until that stairway to heaven leads to a COVID ward in a local hospital surrounded by other ignorant and selfish people, many of whom now use their last breathes to beg for the vaccine.

Another Wave

In the face of this insanity, it seems that it is slowly dawning on some public officials that another wave of deadly COVID disease and disorder is closing in. Lots of parents are suddenly worried about their children, some private concerns are worried about something other than their short-term bottom line, and lots of people anticipating a return to crowded workplaces and those already there are staying home. There are even a few people with September travel plans suddenly concerned that playa wherever will be a petri dish when they get there. More importantly, it may be sinking in that there is only one way out of this: mandated vaccines wherever the authority exists to mandate them.

To do this, there can be no more coddling of the ignorant and selfish. Get vaccinated or get out. Everywhere that the federal government has the authority to do so should require proof of vaccine for employment and entry. Start with federal buildings, museums and entertainment venues, airplanes and trains, and the military and military bases. Examine every interstate commerce authority for ways to tighten the vise. No vaccine, no entry, period.

In those pathetic states and localities where resistance overwhelms public health, everything that can be done to isolate those populations from the rest of us needs to be done. No conventions in Atlanta, no cruise ships docking in Miami, interstate highway dead zones, hotel and restaurant chains shuttering their venues, testing and mask mandates for those who knowingly come in contact with the unvaccinated while engaging in interstate commerce, and no event licenses or advertising dollars to sports and entertainment venues that won’t mandate vaccines for entry.

If this gets done before the viability of today’s vaccines begins to wane or is crushed by new COVID-19 mutations, Americans, at least, have a chance to put the pandemic behind them. We are lucky that we have this opportunity at all, but we can only take advantage of it if we move swiftly and decisively to mandate vaccines and isolate those who won’t comply. If accomplished, America might then have the moral authority, the scientific and manufacturing strength, and the financial resources to lead the rest of the world to the same place.

*[This article was co-published on the author’s blog, Hard Left Turn.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post “Freedom” Failed to Set Americans Free appeared first on Fair Observer.

Nowhere is this more obvious and dangerous than the way in which the vaccinated dance around the unvaccinated. If you are paying attention, there is simply no good excuse not to be vaccinated against COVID-19 in America, with some very minor medically-sound exceptions. But instead of just saying that in a straightforward way and then demanding policies and programs that mandate vaccinations, we are acting like vaccinations are some prize for knocking over a stack of steel bottles at a carnival stand: “Step right up, little lady, a quick flick of the needle and you are on your way with this keepsake stuffed elephant. Bring that big guy along with you, and you win the daily double, the stuffed elephant and a genuine MAGA hat.”

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It is time to stop begging ignorant people to do something smart, and selfish people to do something selfless. How about: “Step right up little lady and show me your vaccination certificate if you want to eat here. Same for you big guy.” Or: “Mom, your kid wants to play high school football, but he hasn’t turned in the required COVID vaccination certificate.” Or my personal favorite: “I would have invited you to join us, but you are not vaccinated, and adding someone so stupid and selfish to the group seemed like a bad idea that would only serve to validate your stupidity and selfishness.”

Validating willful ignorance is never a good idea, but it is a really bad idea when doing so puts people at risk. Further, most of us usually try to avoid truly selfish people, so let’s double down now to contribute to the common good. For impact, we have to be willing to tell the ignorant and selfish what we are doing and why. We have to be willing to demand that our institutions meet this challenge as well. It is beyond time for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to aggressively mandate vaccinations wherever they are authorized to do so.

Another useful component of the avoidance vocabulary is the word “colleague.” The word seems to imply someone with whom you work, a co-worker. It shouldn’t apply to the SOB in your midst who seeks to undo everything you are trying to do. So, stop using the word “colleague” for those you believe to be willfully ignorant, selfish, dangerous and/or just plain too stupid to get out of your way. This is particularly so in the public arena, where every moron seems to be somebody’s colleague during any discourse — “My colleagues are unable to see that making it harder for black people to vote is racist behavior.” They could either not be your “colleague” or not be “racist,” but they shouldn’t ever be both.

Normal vs. New Normal

How about “normal” and “new normal” to make things sound just great as we surge forward as a nation? Returning to “normal” only works if your “normal” was fine with you. It avoids the uncomfortable truth that many people don’t want to return to their “normal,” because it sucked. As for a “new normal,” it is hard to imagine a less precise way of confronting the critical need for change to actually achieve a more perfect union. It surely creates an easy path to avoiding any measured discussion about hunger, poverty, access to meaningful health care, access to quality education, rampant gun violence, and racial and social justice, among other difficult issues.

So, when I hear people say they want a “new normal,” it sounds a lot to me like they are talking about some vision of a better world that will miraculously emerge if we hold hands and pray a lot. What is needed is not a “new normal” but a new and transformed America where eliminating poverty is more important than giving up a tax break for your vacation home, where health care isn’t rationed by insurance companies and their medical allies, where school buildings and the teachers in them provide the same resources to black children that are provided to white children, and no child, not a single one, goes to bed hungry in America.

That’s the America that I want to see and to which there is so much resistance. “Normal” and “new normal” are comfort food concepts to spare the already comfortable the discomfort of sacrifice for the common good.

And then just when you think you might be getting at least some Americans to turn their attention to a better life on Earth for the community of man, along comes billionaire space “tourism” to further distract a population grasping for the most banal of distractions. If you can’t afford Disneyland, an RV or even a trip to Taco Bell, America’s wealthy can give you the illusion of tourism in space. It is truly heartening to hear the mega brats talk so lovingly of opening up space to the masses, while working so hard to avoid sharing their wealth with those same masses. And take note that this illusion is getting enough attention and gushing goodwill to give us another touchstone on the golden road to “normal.”

While I await my economy center seat with Kim Kardashian on one side and Martha Stewart on the other, I am getting pumped up for the debates to come as schools are about to open and the parental handwringing season of rage is commencing. This is so much fun, because in America’s dysfunctional democracy school decisions are seen as local decisions, thereby ensuring that everything from masks to midriffs, from black books to white books, from defunding teachers to defunding cops and the like, will be on the agenda somewhere everyday beginning now.

This will be fine theater that is inconsistent with informed dialogue and ensures further avoidance of confronting systemic issues of import. Optics again will win the day, and the symbolism of preserving norms will overwhelm the content of change. The real losers this time will be the kids who will have to watch their parents stuff social, political, economic and moral genies back into the bottles from which they have again emerged, while further polluting the minds of the same kids they say they are trying to save.

It seems beyond hope that all of this avoidance of meaningful change and the vocabulary that enables that avoidance will engender an equal and opposite reaction. The reason is simple: Only the forgotten are seeking meaningful change while so many in the rest of the nation want nothing more than continued amnesia.

*[A version of this article was co-published on the author’s blog, Hard Left Turn.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Confronting America’s Drive to Collective Amnesia appeared first on Fair Observer.

So, it was a little disconcerting that during my recent road trip, the Democrats pissed away another month without the courage to act on their stated convictions in the face of the continuing Republican assault on the notion of shared governance for the common good. Talk of progress, incremental change, consensus and bipartisanship continues to be a calling card among those too timid to embrace the national transformation that America’s institutions require to meet today’s challenges at home and abroad.

Biden’s Myth of Bipartisanship Takes a Hit

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Even when not fulminating about rampant socialism, wounded white pride, voter fraud and defunding the police, congressional Republicans and those they seek to embrace continue to invent new fantasies to drive their message and excuse their obstruction. To make matters worse, a significant component of the messaging about a post-pandemic return to “normal” includes the continuing empty promise of positive change for a better future for all. Hello Juneteenth, goodbye the difficult challenge of doing something about the nation’s legacy that created Juneteenth in the first place.

On the Road

Out and about in part of the American heartland for a month, as the COVID-19 pandemic seemed to fade from view, I had the sense that many in America simply wanted to party, seeking some mystical freedom from thought, work and pain. Daily gun carnage, voter suppression, unemployment, pandemic worries, crumbling infrastructure and the like all seemed to blow away in the face of loading the bait, starting the engine and hitting the water. The only mention of climate change was the micro notion that the almost daily temperature fluctuations were mucking up the fishing.

In the meantime, while the water beckoned, a federal judge in California was favorably comparing assault rifles to pocketknives, gun violence beat the coronavirus to the top of the death chart in many communities, the minimum wage was finishing second to not working at all, and heat, drought and wildfires began their annual march to increased human misery. Then just to show the country how best to ensure prosperity amid these evils, the great state of Texas added unregulated wandering wacko gunslingers to its list of model citizens, while doing everything possible to keep real model citizens from voting.

Most disturbing of all, however, is the continued national resistance to public discourse that focuses on collective solutions to address the inadequacies of the present national response to even the most basic national needs. Think how much better off the nation would be if just about everyone got a COVID-19 vaccine. But no, not possible, because way too many people care way too little about the health and welfare of those around them. In its present incarnation as a cultural phenomenon, mindless adherence to non-critical thinking is America’s greatest barrier to collectively defining the common good and then acting to achieve it.

Woke and Cancel Culture

This same phenomenon finds its voice in every corner of the right-wing commentariat. In addition to the unexplained evils of some ill-defined socialism, “cancel culture” and whatever “woke” is supposed to mean are all the rage. As for “woke,” it is way past time for “woke” to be put to sleep. Its popular negative implication is aimed at those who rely to a great extent on an awareness of important facts and some capacity for critical thinking, often related to racial and social justice issues. Vilifying the “woke” surely suggests that those not “woke” are so proud of their ignorance that seeking knowledge is to be avoided at all cost.

As for all those terrorized by “cancel culture,” I have some breaking news. It is nothing new. It has been around for millennia. It is the foundation of virtually every organized religion in the world, as but one obvious example. Further, I imagine that each of us could come up with a list of people and concepts that we would like to see a lot less of, so I suggest we start by resolving never to buy a pillow made in America again and by pretending that TikTok is something special about clocks and nothing more.

On the upside, it is good to see that Biden is still president of the United States, and Vice-President Kamala Harris can still laugh at the wrong time while continuing to work hard at the forefront of immigration reform and voting rights advocacy. But there is so much to do and so few of the institutional components in place to do much of anything.

As if on cue, a condo building in government-resistant Florida “inexplicably” fell to the ground, killing dozens of people who had nothing to do with the decades of failed governance that permitted natural sand dunes to be turned into unnatural high-rise buildings. As hard as it to watch and as tragic as the final outcome is sure to be, the random human suffering that a pancaked condo building can bring to the fore is a vivid reminder that no one among us is immune if government consistently fails to act to ensure public safety.

Vaccinations

That continuing failure remains all around us. It was there before I went on my road trip, and it is there now that I have returned. Progress on COVID-19 vaccination rates has slowed because no one has the political courage to penalize those who fail to get vaccinated for the public good. The Republicans and their police allies still remain silent in the face of a gun culture in America that only grows, along with the stock of armaments in private hands and the unregulated access to those armaments. Bridges and tunnels are no safer today than yesterday. And, by the way, the right to vote continues to be endangered every day in America, just as it is in so many of those countries that we, in America, like to think of as “Third World countries.”

As if to help me sort all of this out, one evening in a forested state park in Minnesota, a porcupine wandered into my campsite. It was a clear evening, but quite windy. The porcupine looked at me and my red solo cup and the campfire and opted to avoid confrontation. All good, as it moved away without damage to my tent or me. Then it made a major miscalculation and headed rapidly to near the top of a thin tree, only to get stuck there dangerously swaying in the wind. It eventually got dark and the wind died down. I imagine that the porcupine breathed a sigh of relief, timidly climbed down from its precarious perch and resolved to try to avoid making the same stupid mistake again.

Like the porcupine, Americans have created their own perilous times, threatened mostly by their fears that have been hardened by willful ignorance. This leaves way too much of the path forward blocked by miscalculation and misinformation, followed by a breathed sigh of relief each time that the nation manages to escape disaster.

The next time, however, the nation may not be so lucky unless more of us commit to making our world less reliant on good fortune and more reliant on the determined goodwill of those around us. Sadly, a nation so awash in willful ignorance is highly unlikely to nurture the requisite collective conscience.

*[This article was co-published on the author’s blog, Hard Left Turn.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Squandered Resolve Puts Transformation at Risk in America appeared first on Fair Observer.

Biden Scores Key Wins in First 100 Days

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I don’t know of anyone who predicted that this 78-year-old lifelong politician could seize the moment and grip the nation. But somehow, he has. It was to be expected that anything would be better than Trump, and Biden could have coasted on that alone. But that is not what is happening.

President Biden has used quiet confidence, competence, compassion and a solid moral foundation to propose the most progressive agenda in decades to try to lead Americans to where they didn’t know they wanted to go. Senator Bernie Sanders, among others, understood and articulated the problems and offered a vision of fundamental reform. Now, somewhat out of the clear blue, Biden may prove to be a leader capable of actually delivering some of that reform.

Biden Has More in Mind

After the election in 2020, there was much talk about the Biden who most thought to be a transitional figure, at best. But while we were talking to each other, it seems that Biden was actually telling himself and maybe a few others that he had much more than that in mind. Progressives like me didn’t even know he was listening to us. Maybe we had become so often disappointed that we never quite understood how far compassion and empathy can take someone when they are empowered with the opportunity to try to make a real difference.

To be clear, it will take much more than compassionate leadership to move America even slowly toward fulfilling its promise. It will take steady and competent administration officials and public servants committed to progressive ideals and then willing and able to turn ideals into public policy. It will take a united Democratic Party at all levels of government to both support and actively promote the policy initiatives. And then it will take President Biden to remind the whole nation that good people not only can accomplish good things, but that there is a moral imperative to do so now.

There will be no help whatsoever from Republican politicians at the national level, and the right-wing media apparatus will only ramp up its bile. Somewhere, around 70% of those who identify as Republicans still reject the reality that Biden is the legitimate president of the United States. With this in mind, Biden should ignore the national Republican Party and its acolytes until there is a clear and unequivocal affirmation of the results of the last presidential election from their political “leaders,” including the disgraced and seditious losing candidate.

In the current political environment, the most basic tenet of democratic governance continues to require repetition, so here goes: No one can be entrusted with democratic governance without a commitment to the democratic process, the rule of law and the resulting government. So, for all of you Republicans who still are waiting for Trump’s “triumphant” return and those who try to diminish the institutional significance of the insurrection that shook the nation, you have earned the right to be ignored. No nation can succeed at governance if those who do not believe in government continue to have a seat at the table.

I have some confidence that Biden knows this as well. And even more confidence that those counseling the president are exploring all of the realistic options to achieve their policy objectives. Further, they know that it will be imperative to negotiate with Democratic officials at all levels of government to increase broad public support for his progressive agenda.

Republican Officials

There may also be some state and local Republican officials willing to sign on. However, Biden and his supporters will have to work much harder than they should have to in order to convince state and local Republican officials of the painfully obvious value of federal support for education, health care, child care, roads and bridges, better wages, affordable housing and the like. After years of local community neglect, most Republican officials still seem willing to reflexively resist any federal mandates, no matter how much those mandates might benefit their constituencies.

In this context, it will not be necessary to fix everything at once. However, it will be essential to initially restore a national faith in the capacity of government to meet collective societal challenges and to convince the nation that solutions to 21^st-century problems require an actively engaged national government.

To succeed at this, Biden will have to directly address the most persistent element of resistance to collective national solutions — the perception that to implement policy changes beneficial to all requires that some give up a little individual “liberty” and a measure of individual “security.” There is only one cohesive response. It is that realizing a better America engenders a collective liberty that provides a more secure future for all of us.

This is what transformation looks like. Over the 40 years since Ronald Regan first stained governance with his disdain for the very government he was chosen to lead, much has been lost. A certain atrophy has set in that has often resulted in government failure, not because government can’t work, but because political leaders never trusted the institutions that were essential to success. It was much easier to find failure than the courage to fix it. And it was even easier to allow delusional waves of national greatness to mask a shameful level of collective despair.

Convincing Americans

If President Biden is to be transformational, he will need to convince a cynical nation that government is worthy of the trust needed to meet the challenges ahead. Then, he will need to fight for the resources required to meet those challenges and to demonstrate that we are writing a better chapter this time because we finally realize the distortion of previous chapters.

To write new and better chapters, the usual national distractions will have to be avoided. Two simple “truths” need to be emphasized. The first is that deficit spending is not a threat to needed reform, while resistance to paying taxes to meet public policy objectives is a threat. The second is that costly international adventures can only be avoided by accepting that “winning” is not a given. In both instances, simple cost/benefit analysis would serve America well and temper the hubris at the core of so much national angst.

Joe Biden may well be suited to rise above the exaggerated pride and self-confidence that has driven many of his predecessors to achieve far less than they could have or should have achieved and that has shattered promise after promise. Maybe Joe is the guy. I sure hope so. It is nice for the moment to feel like some of us are no longer walking alone.

*[This article was co-published on the author’s blog, Hard Left Turn.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Can Joe Biden Convince America? appeared first on Fair Observer.

Using the Chauvin murder case as an illustration, a just result for the deceased George Floyd would be if, somehow, he was restored to life. Justice would be served and society could go on to the issue of accountability for those who caused harm to Floyd in the first place. Justice for other people of color who remain alive would be a new world that does not put so many of them in constant peril.

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Yet the word “justice” is often substituted for “accountability,” perhaps to give some grander notion to the fundamental concept of holding others accountable for their harmful actions. Justice also seems to imply a certain freedom from the retribution that is often a component of the demands of those seeking accountability.

The Derek Chauvin Murder Trial

In the Chauvin case, whether “justice” is served or “accountability” is achieved rests within a singular legal proceeding. We now know that some measure of accountability has been achieved with the guilty verdict just rendered. And we know that George Floyd is still dead. So, in this context, there will be no justice for Floyd or his family and friends.

Not only did the trial itself fail to achieve justice for any of them, but the larger “system” also failed all of them and has not been significantly altered to ensure justice for others. On these broader issues, the distinction between justice and accountability may have a profound impact on the outcome of America’s racial and social conflict.

The “justice” at the heart of this discussion contemplates that which is equitable and fair and impartial. “Accountability” refers to being held responsible for one’s actions. It has nothing to do with equity or fairness, except to the extent that holding someone accountable for his/her actions may seem fairer than not doing so.

Seeking justice seems to be aspirational, a goal. The point at which justice is actually achieved never seems to arrive. Some among us think of the search as a lifelong struggle. That struggle is for me — a lawyer and a progressive — very personal but not personal in the usual sense of that word. Like almost everyone, I want to be treated fairly. Generally, I have been. And that makes me and my view of justice very different from those who believe that generally they have been treated unfairly or that they live in an inequitable or partial world.

The challenge in finding common ground rests at the juncture where my privilege meets the disadvantage and misfortune of others. My world looks pretty fair to me if I am only focused on myself. Not perfect but pretty fair. A black father living in inner-city poverty in today’s America probably doesn’t see his life in the same terms that I do mine and almost certainly questions whether society values his child’s life to the same extent that my child’s life is valued.

Now, take a look at accountability. If someone walks up to me and hits me in the face or walks up to the black guy and hits him in the face, both of us will want some measure of the same thing to happen — that the person who hit us be held accountable.

If justice is aspirational, that leaves it for accountability to act as a deterrent to reckless or harmful conduct. It is pretty clear that “justice” isn’t what America has. We have a justice system that too often administers justice unjustly and is way more suited for determining accountability if that can be done in a just manner.

By any reasoning, accountability is an indispensable component of a system of justice. If America can just start there, those who most often suffer will begin to look at the justice system as a part of government that meets a most fundamental need. Meanwhile, those who are held accountable for their actions will provide a template for the likely outcome of similar misconduct and a deterrent to that misconduct.

Are You Paying Attention?

To highlight how critical the distinction is, it is surely hard to understand how any experienced white police officer, never mind one a scant 10 miles away from where George Floyd lost his life at the hands of a white police officer, could kill an unarmed 20-year-old black man after stopping him for an expired auto registration tag. This occurred while Chauvin was facing decades in prison for the unconscionable escalation of a small-time police intervention to what a jury has now determined to be the culpable disregard for the life of another human being.

Officer Kim Potter, the white veteran police officer 10 miles away, had to be aware of what was going on in the Chauvin trial when she escalated a minor infraction to a deadly encounter. Did she not care? Did she think that she was a much smarter and better cop than Chauvin, or that her moral compass was somehow fixed somewhere differently than Chauvin’s? She shot a 20-year-old black kid at point-blank range after a traffic stop. I expect that she wishes that she had kept her weapon where it belonged and that, maybe even in memory of George Floyd, had told that young black man to go home and make sure to update his auto registration. And, oh, by the way, you missed a court date and you need to get that taken care of as well.

I don’t know if she will be held accountable, but she probably wishes she didn’t have to find out. While this was festering, the public learned that cops had killed a 13-year-old boy in Chicago and a 16-year-old boy in Maryland. Then, minutes before the announcement of the Chauvin verdict, a 16-year-old black girl in Columbus, Ohio, was shot dead by a cop. If you can’t see something terribly wrong here, you aren’t paying attention.

The core of the problem is the justice part of the equation. Unfortunately, the justice system is working exactly as it was designed to work. Way too many police officers seem to believe that America’s justice system will protect them from accountability because that is how it is designed and how it has generally operated. It seems that the only accountability they fear is rejection by fellow officers operating within the same entitled system. Rarely do cops believe that another cop has gone too far.

Is Justice Possible?

In Chauvin’s case, fellow officers testified against him, some apparently believing that his actions were beyond what they could countenance. But what Chauvin’s trial did not include was any evidence about the seemingly lengthy record of official misconduct allegations against him. If he is a “bad apple” now, why did it take the agonizing video of George Floyd begging for his life for the supposed “good apples” to finally step forward?

And more importantly, where are the good apples now that the Chauvin trial is over? Will we see them in other trials? Will we see them stand up publicly against the bad apples in their midst? Will they become vocal and visible advocates for serious gun control so that every cop on the street isn’t running around so fearful in the moment that whatever judgment and compassion they may have fails to engage?

I know what the answers to these questions have been. I know there can be no justice if the justice system remains unjust. And I know that accountability is the only path to a systemic transformation that will begin to look like equal justice for all.

*[A version of this article was co-published on the author’s blog, Hard Left Turn.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post America’s Moment of Reckoning on the Path to Justice appeared first on Fair Observer.

So, now that the mass shootings have started again in earnest in America after seemingly taking a small break during the height of pandemic restrictions, it is again mostly white guys out front depriving lots of others of their lives and sense of security. Of course, who can forget the hordes of white guys storming the US Capitol a few months ago trying to prevent their fearless leader from the perceived insult of a permanent return to his beloved mansion in Florida.

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It is worth asking who these white guys are who continue to board their trains to nowhere, callously leaving misery, destruction and even death in their wake. Some are among the really challenged people in America. Among other things, they seem to be intellectually incapable of seeing the connection between incredibly easy access to firearms and mass human slaughter in the American landscape. Find an assault weapon, and you are likely to find a challenged white guy.

However, those white guys fueling the nation’s resistance to humane immigration policies, to easy access to the polls to affect democratic change, to a racial reckoning and equal opportunity, to universal access to meaningful health care, and even to a comprehensive public health response to the pandemic are all on the same trains to nowhere, along with their gun nut buddies. Tragically, they enable America to fail and they empower each other to add critical mass to their efforts.

Many of these white people live in neighborhoods with a lot of other white people, only some of whom share their views. Some live in more diverse neighborhoods or pockets of poverty where they often hide their views until, for some reason, they have had enough of “others” and snap. But a whole bunch of these white people were among the 74 million people who voted for Trump in the last election.

Thwarting Efforts to Govern

Worse yet, they and their Republican cohorts are now determined to thwart any Biden administration effort to govern. Governing is not the same thing as being a government. Governing is, in its most basic sense, the exercise of authority thru the making of policy and the administration of that policy. President Joe Biden often has the authority to act, but to exercise that authority within America’s constitutional framework requires collaboration with, and the cooperation of, other institutional elements of that framework.

Take immigration policy as an example, since there is often talk of “comprehensive immigration reform.” The Biden administration can determine policy and administer elements of that policy through executive action. It can humanely allow Latino children to enter the United States and then make sure that they have a bed, a blanket and enough food to sustain them. After that, figuring out how these immigrant minors should be processed and treated becomes much more complicated, unless it is viewed as a component of a much larger US immigration problem that requires “comprehensive reform.”

Enter Congress, enter the Republicans in Congress, enter the white guys on the trains to nowhere and that comprehensive reform is almost certainly doomed. So, what happens to the children? With some luck, they disappear into the fabric of the world of undocumented immigrants striving to find a place in a nation where a lot of white guys don’t want them to be.

Although the immigration example is bad enough, there is more bad news from the white guys on the trains to nowhere. They don’t seem to want anybody but themselves to have a go at voting. It would be nice to say that this effort will fail in that exceptional “model democracy” known as America. But hold on, the white guys have a plan: You change the voting rules to get better results. This is easier than changing the policies, programs and personalities that many of the voters rejected under the old rules.

Just to make sure that nobody mistook the latest white guy effort at voter suppression for a serious effort to make voting easier, those wacky Republicans in the Georgia legislature, aided and abetted by the Republican governor, just criminalized providing food and water to their fellow citizens waiting in voting lines. That is, of course, only part of what they did, but enough to fully demonstrate the lengths to which the white guys on the trains to nowhere will go to preserve their shrinking political influence.

You see, prior voting practices in Georgia often left voters of color waiting in longer lines than their white counterparts, so instead of legislating to reduce wait times for everybody, someone came up with the bright idea of making it harder to wait in line. (This plan will work even better if the white guys also make it a crime to sell those little cooler bags to anyone who isn’t a white guy.)

The Key That Unlocks the Door

I wish I were making this up, but I am not. The Biden administration’s capacity to govern is being challenged not by people who have a sincere agenda of constructive reform for the nation, but by those same kind of white guys on their trains to nowhere who have just criminalized giving grandma a drink of water while she waits in line to vote.

Even some things as potentially lifesaving for white guys as wearing masks and seeking COVID-19 vaccines seem challenging to way too many of them. While they should overwhelmingly embrace these measures if for no other reason than if only people of color get vaccinated and white guys die off, their situation gets even more desperate. Yet the world has watched while many white guys on their trains to nowhere have overtly contributed to tens of thousands of COVID deaths in the US and continue to try to thwart coordinated government efforts to address the nation’s pandemic and public health crisis.

For some reason, even their significant contribution to the deaths of so many has failed to pause the white guys on their trains to nowhere long enough to stand back so that those of good will in government have the space they need to function and the support they need to govern.

For as long as the mindless obstruction continues, the nation’s governmental institutions will be significantly impeded from pursuing the long-delayed promise of a more just and equitable America. And it will be that much harder to demonstrate that good government is the key that unlocks the door.

*[This article was co-published on the author’s blog, Hard Left Turn.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Obstructing Governance as a Substitute for Public Policy appeared first on Fair Observer.

Equity, in the sense of fairness and impartiality, has never been an American strength. Rather, the nation’s history glorifies those who grab what they can get, even when what they can get is at the expense of others. “Success” itself is prized above a fair and impartial process for achieving it that has equality of opportunity at its core. While there is nothing new about this observation, its application to both the COVID-19 vaccine distribution issues and the more general drive to confront societal inequities that the coronavirus pandemic has dramatized is worthy of discussion.

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After failing at every turn to create a national urgency to adopt and implement recognizable public health measures to address the pandemic, and amid a dizzying array of inadequate state and local solutions, it became apparent that most Americans were in it for themselves. This provides the oxygen on which privilege thrives. So, for many, making individual decisions has been freed from any collective moral imperative. The Biden administration, with quiet competence, is trying to use a new national response to the pandemic as a foundation for altering this key impediment to a more equitable society.

People with resources, a good job, a good computer and good internet access have thrived, while many “essential” workers were left to fend for themselves. The privileged know that “essential” was often just shorthand for interchangeable people required to put themselves at risk, frequently for low pay and no benefits. Humanity wasn’t a big consideration. Worse yet, the privileged didn’t seem too troubled to know that these “essential” workers frequently headed home to a crowded apartment or multi-generational substandard housing, increased health risks and limited access to meaningful health care. The joke was clearly on them.

Those for whom testing and contact tracing would have been paths to some measure of health security seemed less likely to have access to either, while some of those wanting to take a break in Mexico or Disneyland easily found a test and cleverly avoided the rigors of contact tracing. So the beat goes on. But to what end?

Three Threads

While there will be a day when masks, social distancing, testing and maybe even COVID-19 vaccines will no longer be a part of daily life for most of us, it is not clear at all that any real lessons will have been learned about how best to engender the collective will necessary to meet critical national societal needs. There are three threads that seem to be coalescing to ensure that a return to “normal” is a return to a stratified society where the privileged almost always win and the underprivileged most often lose.

First, there is the power of “normal” itself. The people with the most influence want a return to their normal while those with the least influence generally want something better than a return to their normal. This is understandable, but guess which team is going to win unless good government and good people step in to level the playing field.

Second, to successfully confront inequity, it is essential to understand the impact of inequity and the value that it brings to privilege and the impediments that it brings to those without privilege. Then, those with privilege have to be willing to part with some of it. (Not necessarily a zero-sum game.) For this to occur at the systemic and institutional levels required for enduring change, some awakening will have to occur. There is a small possibility that when some of those with privilege lose anyway, as with the vaccine distribution, it may engender a deeper empathy for those who seem to lose all the time.

Third, there is the morally bankrupt Republican Party and its shameful indifference to the suffering of even those who still seem to believe there is something there to admire. The Biden administration, Democrats in Congress and progressives everywhere have gone big and actually gotten important things legislatively accomplished to meet the current pandemic crisis. But that effort demonstrated how tenuous a hold any effort to make America better for all actually has on the nation’s essential legislative process. With all that we have gone through as a nation in the last year, you would think that maybe some moral light would have been lit in some recesses where it had not previously penetrated, yet I don’t see much evidence of that.

A Big Deal

For now, President Joe Biden’s American Rescue Plan has been signed into law providing the legislative framework and funding for the critical elements of a national plan to confront the coronavirus pandemic and its economic fallout. And, perhaps even more significant for the future of the nation, Biden and congressional Democrats have given legislative gravitas to a progressive and activist agenda for confronting economic and social inequality in America. This is a big deal.

As with every advance in a deeply divided nation, there will be pushback from those who have for decades cratered meaningful attempts at progressive social and economic legislation. Even the obvious inequities driven by pernicious systems and exposed in big bright lights by the pandemic haven’t broken the stranglehold that the pushback machine has on large segments of public thinking.

In this context, the national response to every drive for racial justice in America’s history is instructive as progressives strive to use the lessons of the pandemic to inform a full and appropriate response to it and to the underlying inequities that helped fuel America’s pandemic response failures. Every time that racism boils its way to the surface, it readily becomes apparent that it is the systemic racism deniers in our midst who rally together to ensure that systemic change is avoided.

Think of it in these terms: America wallowed in pandemic response failure not because some idiot didn’t wear a mask, but because coronavirus deniers stood in the way of a collective public health response. To alter this formula, Americans have to be separated from the cherished notion that they are all good people at heart. While it is undeniable that there are many good and decent Americans working every day to serve others at some risk to themselves, it is also shockingly obvious how easy it is for individuals to separate themselves from the common good.

Unexamined privilege is the vehicle that often allows those who separate themselves from the common good to somehow feel good about themselves. Until this dynamic is changed, it will be hard to see how America can change for the better.

*[This article was co-published on the author’s blog, Hard Left Turn.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post The Privileged Path in America appeared first on Fair Observer.

It should be easy to start with two simple propositions, each of which by now must be considered essential to any principled American social order after having been fully exposed like never before by the pandemic lens. It is way beyond time for universal access to meaningful health care to be the law of the land, not some dumbed-down public/private partnership, but the real thing. And it is way beyond time to double the minimum wage because no one can be expected to meet even the basic necessities of life at a pay rate of $7.25 per hour. That amounts to $15,080 per year, generally without benefits or paid leave, so don’t get sick, feed your kids from a real grocery store, live in a decent place or go anywhere.

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I don’t care about handwringing, I don’t care about the national debt (only raised as a problem when America tries to spend more on social programs), I don’t care about compromise, and I sure as hell don’t care about sanctimonious talk of incremental change where these two issues are concerned. The only people in favor of incremental change are those who already have access to meaningful health care and those making a whole lot more than $7.25 an hour. If you want to see what unanimity looks like, take a poll on these issues among those working for minimum wage pay with no benefits.

Moreover, even with respect to these two most fundamental components of any moral and just society’s collective response to those in the community writ large, there will be no Republican Party legislative support at all. So, Democrats, sit down and have a meeting, draft legislation to address these two priorities now, and then ram it down the legislative throats of anyone in the way. President Joe Biden will sign the bills, and then we can move on to other priorities, having finally demonstrated that Democrats can promise what is right and deliver on that promise.

There will be a lot more because there is a lot more that needs to be done and because progressives have long studied the problems, have responsible solutions, and they and their constituencies are really tired of waiting. With the COVID-19 pandemic still raging and causing continued disease, death and economic disruption, it goes without saying that a broad range of public health and economic relief measures will be an overarching priority in these early days of the Biden administration. However, these are mitigation and relief measures seeking to restore a way of life for many that is always secured at the expense of weaker others.

“Build Back Better”

That is another way of saying that it is impossible to restore a balance that never existed in the first place. As we watch the battle play out in America for something as fundamental today as vaccine distribution equity, try to project your view onto the daily lives of those who almost always are on the inequity side of the balance equation. Many of these people aren’t even on the vaccine playing field because they are too busy looking for food for their family, affordable housing, enough education to give their kids a chance in life and enough wages to meet basic needs. When they get that taken care of by the end of the day, they can go online to check out the latest vaccine opportunities and the multiple bus routes needed to get there.

It isn’t just that inequities exist — it is that way too many among us seem to believe that to be an acceptable norm. I don’t know why this pisses me off so much, but it does. For how long and through how many pitiful iterations of America’s “greatness” have Americans of supposed goodwill noted the poverty and hopelessness in their midst and bemoaned racial and social divides that dehumanize, all while happily building monuments to consumption and unregulated capitalism that always attempt to give greed a good name? No more. Ya no más.

There is so much to change for the better and so little apparent political will to change much of anything that it is hard to imagine what Biden means when he says he wants the nation to “build back better.” To my ear, that sounds a lot like a slogan to inspire Americans to create little more than a glossier version of whatever the nation looked like “before,” maybe even something like making America “great” again.

To many people of color, the poor, the homeless, the hungry, the undereducated and the sick, what it looked like “before” will take more than a catchy slogan to fix. In the weeks ahead, watch the public discourse, the constant reference to an undefined return to “normal,” and most importantly, how quickly any broad consensus about the need to confront long-neglected fundamental reform gets lost in detail and division.

More Than Words

Beyond the pandemic’s public health and relief measures lie critical commitments to invest now in America’s failing infrastructure, to implement comprehensive and humane immigration reform, to develop a meaningful and likely inconvenient national and international response to climate change, to address the nation’s epidemic of gun violence, and to renew and reinvigorate regulatory frameworks for the financial, energy and communication sectors. Then, if any of this is to be truly transformative, it will have to be done with racial justice and economic equity at the core of meeting each of these critical commitments.

The challenges are great and the moment may be fleeting. Democratic Party leadership and its progressive allies have to actively drive each other to take advantage of this moment to give birth to another round of renewed hope in America. That having been said, it will take more than words to do so, after so many failed promises.

The place to start is with those two simple propositions mentioned earlier. Demonstrating that universal access to meaningful health care can be realized now and that the dignity of work and economic participation inherent in a living wage can be realized now could do much to convince those in need that the rest of the progressive policy agenda is possible to achieve.

In a political world filled with hyperbole, credibility is a good foundation on which to build the long-term political power necessary to deliver on the promise of a more just and equitable society.

*[A version of this article was co-published on the author’s blog, Hard Left Turn.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post The Time for a Just and Equitable Society appeared first on Fair Observer.

In this case, it might just be the best outcome. The fringe has morphed into the identity of the Republican Party so completely that somewhat hinged used-to-be Republicans don’t stand a chance of turning this around. But they don’t deserve another chance, having previously sold their souls to Ronald Reagan’s vision of undermined governance and unchecked capitalism as a means to a better end. Many Americans are just now beginning to figure out how poorly that has actually worked out for them.

How Tough Is Biden Prepared to Look?

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The spectacle of the Republican Party dancing around their new poster child, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, is a bit like watching some moron taking a selfie at the edge of a cliff only to realize as she falls that the rope around your waist is tethered to her waist. Republicans should have known that they would be in trouble when their old Uncle Mitch warned them that that rope was a bad idea.

Since Greene is no ordinary moron teetering at the edge of a cliff, she has been empowered to drive the Trump narrative as a creed for both the party and the nation. Then there is the newly crowned “conscience” of the Republican House leadership, Representative Liz Cheney. She covered herself in “glory” by voting to impeach Trump for sedition and inciting an insurrection, and then a few scant weeks later covered herself in dung by failing to take the minimal step of removing Greene from her committee assignments. I can only guess, but maybe she used up her family allotment of “conscience” on that first vote.

If you are wondering about the top guns in the Republican congressional orbit, you would be wondering about Mitch McConnell, now Senate minority leader, and the wannabe speaker of the House of Representatives, Kevin McCarthy. These two supported the whole Trump national trauma for four years and then, faced with armed insurrection inside the Capitol, still can’t say never again. And they still can’t clearly and unequivocally hold Trump responsible for his incitement of the mob.

Republican Frauds

Let me be clear about one thing: Even though there are those trying to proclaim themselves newly-crowned “heroes” of the Republican Party, they are all frauds of one kind or another. This includes the Lincoln Project crowd and the host of “former” Republicans trying desperately to resurrect their right-wing version of their right-wing party. Today’s self-proclaimed Republican heroes did everything they could to torch the Affordable Care Act, have for decades pushed scandalous tax relief for the wealthy, and have promoted some version of unregulated capitalism through which their personal greed could thrive amid the economic distress of so many others.

And that doesn’t even reach the infamy of a political party and its adherents who have for those same decades fueled racial animus and anti-immigrant sentiment in the country for political and personal gain. Before trying to find virtue amid the wreck of the Republican Party, remember that the party and its minions are now, and have for those decades, promoted the delusional “American exceptionalism” so comforting to their white base and so destructive of a meaningful confrontation with the nation’s past that is rooted in the truth.

As with the racists in their midst that Trump legitimized and encouraged, any welcome unmasking of these new Republican “heroes” is long overdue. Some of them served a useful purpose in giving voice to the national disaster that was the Trump presidency. But none of them has given us any reason to believe that the recent past has engendered a new and truly inclusive vision for a policy partnership with Democrats that could begin to legislate a better future for those who have watched and waited for so long.

The coronavirus pandemic has done more than even a close reading of history and outraged truth telling could have done to lay bare the moral and institutional bankruptcy that is America today. Systemic racism is finally on the lips of a US president because it has to be. Huge health care, housing, educational and economic deficits are everywhere to be seen, and now so obvious that ignoring them again would be yet another epic betrayal.

To understand the depth of that betrayal and the Republican Party’s role in it requires a clear understanding that the kind old Republican “hero,” Ronald Reagan, cravenly gave white America a clear path away from the promise of the civil rights movement. That same national “hero” told the nation that government was the problem, not the solution and then set about to prove it on the backs of those most dependent on good government to realize a share of America’s bounty. Other Republican Party “heroes” willingly followed in those soiled footsteps.

This is not to say that there is a purity of vision or spirit in the Democratic Party. Rather it is to say that America’s way forward cannot depend on either the cooperation or the acquiescence of Republicans. If you doubt this, the spectacle of the Trump impeachment trial in progress will again demonstrate the depths to which the Republican Party has sunk in its drive to regain power at all cost. A disgraced former president with the blood of hundreds of thousands of citizens already on his hands who delivered insurrection to the Capitol will continue to command Republican loyalty and get it.

A Message for Biden

So, President Joe Biden, don’t waste a minute on them. Don’t repeat the mistakes you and Barack Obama made from 2008 forward. Go all in this time. With those same Republicans already at work legislating new voter suppression measures where they can, your time to act may be short. In doing so, remember every day that closing the human value gap in America is essential to any attempt to reach for a better nation.

And whatever else you do, President Biden, remember every day that systemic racism is the original sin that begat today’s deeply flawed America. Telling the truth about that is America’s irreplaceable first step forward.

*[This article was co-published on the author’s blog, Hard Left Turn.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post The Fringe Feeds a Familiar Narrative appeared first on Fair Observer.

For a moment, watching Trump skulk out of the presidency to the tune of a 21-gun salute that he ordered for himself was too poetic not to enjoy. Then, it fell quickly to the new president, Joe Biden, to pick up the pieces of a nation in turmoil. Every commentator and pundit, including me, has a long list of what is wrong and a shorter list of how to make it right. So much was wrong before Trump, and four years of Trump and his cabal have made so much that was wrong so much worse.

Will American Democracy Perish Like Rome’s?

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President Biden has one big immediate advantage going forward — he is not Trump. And for a nation watching its soul die a little more each day amid the pandemic, just having a national leader with a heart that beats and a moral compass that projects empathy and understanding will lift the nation on its own for a little while. To sustain the advantage, Biden will have to prove that he and his administration can deliver a national plan for confronting the pandemic.

The sad truth is that Americans, lots of them, have done their part to make the nation what it looks like today. I cannot help but remember all those unmasked boobs who shouted about their freedom as they took away mine, all those callous young people who thought “their” party would be just fine and then went home to spread disease and death to loved ones and anyone else who got in their way, and all the people who still don’t want to pay those “essential” workers a living wage after seeing what they did for us every time we made it to the grocery store or put out the trash.

America Is Not Done

The nation is not done with its turmoil, not by a long shot. The allure of “normal” can be a prescription for a return to normal. However, what was normal to the fortunate can never again be allowed to overwhelm the reality for so many for whom “normal” is defined by poverty, racism, poor education, substandard housing and limited access to limited health care. If you are comfortable with that normal for so many, you are likely to continue to be unmoved by the image of hungry children on your next journey to the spa, country club or suburban church.

It was easy to be hopeful for a day as a beautifully choreographed presidential inauguration unfolded. On January 20, President Biden gave a galvanizing inauguration address and then immediately set to work undoing the symbols of as much of Trump as he could touch with the stroke of a pen. But, amid the pomp and celebration, here we are again, where we have been so many times before — seeking unity, seeking a moral response and seeking justice.

Every “renewal,” almost every protest march, and almost every Martin Luther King Day, someone reminds the nation that “a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.” Now, yet one more time, America is beginning the long journey with that first single step. How come we have to do this over and over again? What about the steps that follow if the journey is ever to be completed? It remains so disheartening that Americans need to take that first step again in the fight for a nation that is finally unchained from the fundamental lies that stain its collective soul.

Some of these lies are old lies, some are as new as yesterday. America is a shining beacon on some hill to some because it has loudly proclaimed itself to be. America is the world’s last best hope to some but only because it has loudly proclaimed itself to be. And Americans have always been ready to indiscriminately kill others for our nation’s honor or cause, without ever making the connection between them and us.

While this discussion needs to be about more than systemic racism and racial justice, the homegrown lies about race in America are so profound and so undermine any moral high ground that those lies have to be collectively addressed before addressing any of the other lies will be taken seriously by those who understand the pernicious impact of the lies. When all is said and done, white Americans can only be freed from the burden of the lies by moving far beyond their continued repetition.

Racial Reckoning

Much will be said in the months ahead about “reckonings” in both the racial context and the accountability context. Racial reckoning has long been a subject of fierce debate in America, and now, with pandemic negligence, corruption and insurrection leading a parade of official misconduct, accountability will need to be reckoned with as well. Centuries of failed racial reckoning can serve as a guide to the difficulty of national reckoning in any context. Lies have been allowed to overshadow history when repeated over and over again, when believing them seems so much easier than confronting them.

While it is hard to define a formula for success, reckoning is not a process — it is an end result. The journey to reckoning is the hard part, with racial reckoning and accountability among the most difficult journeys to complete. While neither may require the full journey of a thousand miles to be achieved, neither will ever be achieved after only one step and a few more to follow.

To escape the past, Americans have to seize the present moment and finally take something more than those first steps on the long journey forward. It would be a good start to simply commit ourselves to the truth.

*[A version of this article was co-published on the author’s blog, Hard Left Turn.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post America Is Not Done Yet appeared first on Fair Observer.

A Perspective on America’s Imperfect Democracy

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However, neither a good government nor actual good governance is even close to being assured. First, there will be those, maybe President Biden himself, who will speak to a moderate response to what we have witnessed over the last days and years, and the terrible toll it has taken on so many people. I hope that voices of immoderation prevail when order is restored, at least until the seeds of public accountability have taken root. The good news will not last beyond the virtual inauguration parade unless the new president has nerves of steel and no, I repeat, no illusions about governing in partnership with Republicans in some faux display of “unity.”

Immoderate Actions

Moderated responses to immoderate actions are doomed to fail and serve only to further enable those willing to destroy to achieve their ends. In the instant case, there must be a quick and decisive immoderate response, albeit a non-violent response freed from revenge as its motive. That response must be seen as urgent and restorative. If not, this moment will be lost, and the nation will again descend into governmental dysfunction in the face of the multiple challenges of the pandemic, economic disarray, systemic racism and social injustice.

As we anticipate a new day dawning, one of the vestiges of days past should disappear from our discourse — the notion of alternate reality. Not only is there no such thing, but there cannot be such a thing, unless there are also alternate facts. There is reality and there is fantasy. When willful ingestion of fantasy overwhelms reality to drive political agendas and actions, you get the United States of America. It is simply time for this to end.

The nation cannot expect to move forward while treading water beneath the surface. We must find a way to rescue those souls drowning in a sea of fantasy largely of their own making. I love the First Amendment, but this crucial foundation of America’s constitutional democracy was adopted in 1791. Other than falsely shouting “fire” in a crowded theater, there is little public knowledge about the limitations of free speech, including the extent to which provoking insurrection in a crowded city is protected by the First Amendment. Further, it bears noting that neither the internet nor social media was around in 1791, and that the First Amendment is a prohibition only of governmental activity even in its broadest reading.

Without attempting a First Amendment primer, it is safe to say that a great many people in America’s delusional home of free speech believe that the right to freedom of speech is some kind of absolute. Since it is not an absolute and has next to nothing to do with private action, it should be safe to note that there is a lot of room to debate the extent to which America’s vile social media cesspool can be subject to limitation and control. Whatever else can be said, the First Amendment is not a license to monetize “free” speech, nor is it a shield that amoral peddlers of snake oil can use to avoid responsibility for the damage caused by their wares.

Postmortem

Since much of the fantasy at large in the land, including the fantasies that brought armed thugs to the US Capitol, has been well documented for quite some time, the postmortem review should take a hard look at why it took an armed insurrection to expose a fundamental flaw in the notion that “moderation” can be an effective response to venal delusion when that delusion takes hold in the body politic. And, further, it should consider why it took an armed insurrection to finally raise the stakes on those who generate, spread, consume and defend the fantasies.

Then there is the tactical disconnect apparent in law enforcement planning and the initial response to what readily should have been seen as a clear and present threat of violence. A mob of white insurrectionists storms the Capitol, with little to no resistance. Meanwhile, pleas for assistance are slow-walked, and the insurrectionists are allowed to calmly walk away from the battered scene of their crime carrying their spoils of war. The inciter-in-chief is absent from the fray, watching it all on television, while his Marie Antoinette seem-a-like is finishing a White House furnishings photo shoot.

So it goes in benighted America. I can hardly wait for the next Black Lives Matter protest that threatens prompt service at a coffee shop where the police move in to forcefully restore “law and order” at a point of a gun and arrest everyone who is black or cares about pervasive racism. Being a black protester in America just got even more perplexing. Perhaps the key to “peaceful” protest is to wrap yourself and your cause in the American flag or some flag-branded garb that says you and your cause are not a threat to law enforcement or to its cause.

There finally may be enough palpable outrage among some in the nation’s political class, maybe enough to ensure the security of the presidential inauguration. Meanwhile, the scum is fleeing from Trump’s orbit, leaving in their wake a dysfunctional national government, over 380,000 coronavirus deaths, a vaccination free-for-all and ever-lengthening food lines. I hope that all will be investigated, their professional lives ruined and the guilty eventually charged. That is what accountability looks like to me.

However, accountability cannot be complete until Donald Trump, his grifter family and his acolytes are driven from our midst, charged with crimes where applicable and shamed into irrelevance. Trump’s second impeachment should be just the beginning. That may seem immoderate, but so be it.

*[This article was cross-posted on the author’s blog, Hard Left Turn.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Trump’s Impeachment Should Be Just the Beginning appeared first on Fair Observer.

The Problem of Food Security in America’s Consumer Society

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While I also had some rough patches, I got through most of them because I had enough good fortune and the resources to help it along. But I have got to tell you that the year that has now drawn to a close has often seemed like a long winding dark tunnel that might never end. While I am sure that there are those not paying much attention, who aimlessly go through life caring only about their moment, I believe that even that comfort seemed hard to find.

Assault on the Human Spirit

It is not just the pandemic that has blighted the landscape for those paying attention. It was a year that assaulted the human spirit. I can imagine that Americans are not the only ones feeling this way, but we sure managed to eviscerate what could have been a national spiritual awakening in the face of adversity. Well over 350,000 Americans have paid with their lives for our national failure, with many more to come.

But one thing haunts me more than anything else. It is the reality that there are children in America and elsewhere who do not have enough food to sustain their health and allow them to dream and thrive. I always had enough food to eat when I was a child, sometimes way too much. My son always had enough food too, and he eats a lot. Yet somehow, I have always hoped that you didn’t have to suffer hunger to care a lot about those who are hungry. But here I am, amidst so many still with so much, angry as hell that there can be a projected 18 million children going hungry here and now in America.

If you are not hungry and your children are not hungry, then you should have the energy to be angry with me about those who are hungry and angry enough to demand that your government do something about this and angry enough to pay more taxes so that it can. Food banks, food charities and individuals buying an extra bag of groceries for someone who is hungry are both part of the problem and part of the solution. But it can only be part of the solution if we do not allow ourselves to be pulled away by our charity from the image of a hungry child.

So many have said so often (it was an Obama favorite) that “We are better than this.” I hope that we have proven to ourselves — and I know that we have proven to others — that we simply are not better than this. Americans are what they have proven to be. Hungry children in our midst are the easiest barometer of our collective immorality.

There is much more going on, of course. The unmasked continue to roam our public spaces, food lines and queues for COVID-19 tests continue to grow, health care is being rationed even to those with supposed access to it, systemic racism has not taken a vacation, and our “democratic” institutions are crumbling while the repair crew may not be up to the rebuilding task. For others, there may be even more. This just passed year of assault on the human spirit is likely to continue well into the new year.

End of This Tunnel

I know about the vaccines — and we will get to that — and the tunnel that the vaccines are supposed to be the light at the end of. Before that, it is worth noting that the impending Biden presidency and some of his cabinet selections promise a return to some measure of competent governance and the ethics and empathy required to accomplish it. For sure, there will be time to debate specific policies and programs and to sound the alarm if the forgotten remain forgotten in a rush to return to “normal.”

And we can hope that Joe Biden and his team see the clear need for public accountability for those in the Trump administration, foremost Donald Trump himself, whose corruption and mendacity poisoned our nation and paved the way for disease and death to overwhelm us. There can be no pardoning this if the nation is to move forward.

Then, before celebrating the light, there will be the challenges posed by the vaccines. First, there will be the simple medical questions with complicated answers: Do the vaccines provide immunity and for how long? Do they prevent the transmission of disease to others? Are they safe? Next up will be the logistical challenges: How do you get enough vaccines from manufacture through delivery to inoculate 330 million people? Most importantly, assuming that the vaccines are effective and safe, and assuming that the logistical challenges are met, who will get which vaccine and when?

The answers to the safety and efficacy questions likely will emerge in the coming months from scientists given a new lease on integrity by the Biden administration. Meeting the logistical challenges will have to await a national plan that overrides the already-emerging chaos of the present 50-state solution. But the most complex challenge and the one that America has failed time and again is the equity challenge — who will get which vaccine and when.

I have no hope at this moment, after so many failed moments in just the past year, that large swaths of Americans will wake up one morning and start thinking about something beyond themselves. It is most likely our individual selfishness that both propelled Donald Trump to the presidency and gave him a compelling voice that gave so many Americans the space to stand idly by and watch so much suffering of others in their midst. To the unmasked and their ilk, I say screw you. To those who have tried, I say keep trying and keep your distance from those who aren’t.

Then, when the vaccines come, don’t stand idly by this time, as the selfish find a way to jump the line. To those who every day have provided essential services at great personal risk, you are going to have to fight for those vaccines in this America. If you don’t, your luck will run out and the unmasked will be laughing at you as they party on.

I am not sure where America is in its dark tunnel nor even the full measure of that tunnel. I am sure that way too many Americans are unwilling to sacrifice much of anything for the well-being of others. There eventually will be a light at the end of this tunnel, but what of the next one?

*[This article was cross-posted on the author’s blog, Hard Left Turn.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post 2020 Has Shown That We Are Not “Better Than This” appeared first on Fair Observer.

Soul-Searching for America’s Broken Ethics

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Meanwhile, the presidential election and its aftermath have seen political intrigue and political immorality play out before our eyes to detract from any effort at an effective plan to confront the economic and social costs of the pandemic. While this is yet another scarlet stain on America in crisis, it also serves to render less visible the extent to which the pandemic has further exacerbated the historic failure of the nation to achieve some measure of domestic equality and real progress toward a more perfect union. In some perverse way, the pandemic and the political paralysis have put the progress genie back in the bottle.

Race to the Cure

For today, “progress” is being breathlessly measured by winning a race to the cure. Amid all the talk of a return to “normal” that is just around the corner, children that were going to bed hungry in “normal” times have now been joined by way too many who weren’t going to bed hungry before. The media parade of grey-haired Mr. Roger’s lookalike doctors offering feel-good futuristic homilies would be truly funny if it weren’t so tragic. Keep your holiday eyes on these guys as they assure us that all we have to do is hang on through Christmas, and they will deliver the cure to a grateful nation waiting anxiously to shop again.

Time will tell if whatever vaccines are being touted today will ever meet the ultimate challenge of ending the pandemic. In the US, we have so far been unable to meet the lesser challenges of providing readily available testing and sufficient personal protective equipment to meet public and professional needs. While this is largely due to the absence of a national pandemic plan from the Trump administration and reliance on the 50-state solution that has no place in meeting 21^st-century national or global challenges, the simple arrival of the Biden administration will not miraculously correct any of this.

More importantly, as America stumbles its way toward more effectively confronting the coronavirus pandemic, the “return to normal” mantra is likely to overtake any serious attempt to define a better normal. Those hungry children will likely stay hungry.

This brings us neatly back to the notion that there is so much to do and so much opposition to doing it. First, of course, and fully expected, is that a morally bankrupt Republican Party will only double down on its opposition to real progress toward that more perfect union, clinging to a strategy that continues to appeal to large swaths of white America. Joe Biden is likely to become the new Barack Obama. This time the perceived threat will be creeping socialism instead of scary diversity. But in the right-wing echo chamber, the impact will be the same: Kill it before it poisons you.

The Enemy Within

Yet perhaps the most pernicious enemy will be the enemy within. No, not the progressive and activist wing of the Democratic Party, but that same dizzy notion that we are all in this together and that surely if we put aside our differences, there will be enough common ground to realize a better America for all. I hate to say it, but that is bullshit. Obama believed it and lived it to the detriment of the country and those so in need of a better “normal.” I do not know why, but Biden seems likely to follow the same discredited track. It is a now well-worn path that has contributed to decades of national failure.

Joe Biden can believe in that path all he wants, but he will get no further than Obama did. There simply is no path to a national reconciliation in today’s America unless reconciliation means nothing more than capitulation to those who have already paved their way to their own gated communities.

So what can be done? First, President-elect Biden should spell out in clear and unequivocal terms what his vision is for America. Not how he is going to get there, but the vision itself. With that in hand, those with a different vision will make their voices heard, including not only the right-wing troglodytes, but those with a different vision on Biden’s political left. Then, armed with his vision and in the full view of his critics, President Biden will have to get to work to realize his vision.

I may not like parts of that vision, particularly any return to an aggressive international fight for the “democracy” of others at the point of a gun. On the domestic front, however, there is so much to do that almost any Biden vision will have plenty for all on the left to engage with and support.

The list is long and often recited: universal access to meaningful health care, increased support for public education and affordable housing, real policing and criminal justice reform, a full-throated recognition of the national disease that is systemic racism, aggressive measures to address income inequality, comprehensive initiatives to reduce gun violence and disarm the public, and regulatory frameworks that confront corporate greed, reduce pollution and promote clean energy alternatives. Carefully targeted infrastructure projects are also critical.

Whatever elements of that list that are elements of President Biden’s vision should receive ample support from progressives on the left. However, each and every one of them is certain to be opposed by the Republican Party and their even more extreme cave-dwelling comrades.

Much has been said about a fight for the soul of America. More needs to be said about actually finding that soul and then nurturing it to strength. To do so, President Biden and his administration will need the armor to fend off those with neither conscience nor moral foundation. Then, they will need the compassion and the strength to lead those who can be led on a collective journey to simply make America a nation that recognizes its riches and uses them to enrich its own community and those in need around the globe.

I can write the speeches, but I have seen way too much of the failed promises to believe in them. This time, it would be nice to be wrong. Maybe this time, with so much disease and death in our midst, and the task so daunting, Americans can come together to fulfill the nation’s promise. Maybe right now this “great” nation can come together to vaccinate itself, vaccinate others and even save its soul.

*[This article was originally published on the author’s blog, Hard Left Turn.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Can America Come Together to Fulfil Its Failed Promise? appeared first on Fair Observer.

Worse yet, since the national response to the coronavirus pandemic was clearly on the ballot, you have to assume that most of those “enlightened” souls were impressed enough with Trump’s pandemic response that they continued to support him. And despite overwhelming evidence that COVID-19 was exponentially rampaging through the populace as the election approached and that well over 200,000 Americans were already dead on his watch, they voted for him anyway.

Where Do We Stand With the Pfizer Vaccine?

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Now, Trump is splitting time between a post-election bunker and the golf course, refusing to do anything to advance a national plan to confront the coronavirus, while continuing to support the coronavirus denial narrative. That leaves those 73 million souls in a quandary — wear a mask or give up all of your freedoms. What to do?

Too Little, Too Late?

An initial national plan to move forward has been repeatedly articulated — a mask mandate, enforced social distancing in public places, readily available testing and contact tracing, and consistent messaging from public officials and the scientific community about personal hygiene and the dangers of indoor gatherings of any kind. Starting there and starting now is critical, particularly with the news that there may be a vaccine on the horizon. While this is good news for sure, it cannot be allowed to provide yet another excuse for the nation to avoid the inconvenience of collectively trying very hard to save some lives and protect so many others from tragic outcomes.

However, the potential for future vaccination of the populace is so fraught with serious logistical and public health challenges that not even the most optimistic vaccine purveyors believe that vaccination will happen in large numbers before the spring. That leaves almost 60 days until the Biden inauguration and four months before spring arrives. At the current rate of over 150,000 new coronavirus cases a day, that is over 9 million new cases by Inauguration Day and more than double that to the first day of spring. The COVID-19 death numbers are equally staggering at a present rate of over 1,500 humans a day.

There has been and continues to be so much wrong with the US response to the pandemic and the resulting casualties that it is hard to know where to start. But to be clear, Trump and his acolytes are now standing in the way of the development and implementation of any cohesive national plan, only adding to the blood on their hands from the daily death count. As a nation, we were ready to go to war, raise the flag and trumpet our national might when 3,000 of our own were killed by terrorists on 9/11. Now, 73 million Americans seem content to sit on their “patriotic” hands while that number are dying preventable deaths every two days and counting.

To illustrate how we got here, it was not so long ago that the governor of South Dakota, a full-throated cheerleader for the coronavirus denier crowd, welcomed Trump and thousands of guests to a big old July 4th rally at Mount Rushmore. Freedom was everywhere, in every unmasked smile and virus spewing cheer. No need for social distancing, it was all one big Trump-crazed family taking one for the unmasked emperor.

And then to follow up and reinforce the messaging, how about a huge motorcycle rally in the midst of a pandemic? Another good idea from the governor of South Dakota — bring tens of thousands of drunken and drugged Trump biker “patriots” from all over America in August to celebrate this great country of ours in a place called Sturgis, population 7,000. Well, as of today, the COVID-19 test positivity rate in the great state of South Dakota is just under 50%, and there is still no mask mandate from the governor.

By looking back just a little and trying to comprehend the present, it should be clear that President-elect Joe Biden has quite a challenge ahead of him. Planning can begin now, but a national plan cannot begin to be implemented until Trump gets out of the way.

Since Trump and his acolytes are unable to accept being losers, let’s tag them as killers and see if we can get their attention. Now, even more than before, that is surely what they are. They are killing people in America who don’t have to die. While this may not be the time for legal niceties, “negligent homicide” seems to fit the bill. And it is surely time to make it part of the conversation.

COVID-19 and the Holiday Season

I am certain as I write this that the number of coronavirus deaths will soar in the days and weeks ahead. This is not a medical conclusion. Rather it is the only conclusion that reason suggests as we watch millions of Americans gather together for the holidays believing that “they” are immune from tragedy, kind of like people who text and drive and keep loaded guns in easy reach of the children they say they love. But more than that, it will be the price that the nation pays for its flailing and failing collective morality.

As freedom rings and holiday bells jingle, as choirs sing and families gather around a tree sharing good cheer, this will also be the season for many to visit hospitals and funeral homes trying to figure out how it is possible that daddy is dead. Well, let me tell you, daddy is dead because a nation with the resources to keep daddy alive and well collectively failed to do so.

It is also because of a failure of national leadership that has no historic precedent. Let me repeat this: Trump and his acolytes have blood on their hands. Those who support his continued refusal to cede authority immediately to the incoming Biden administration for implementation of a national pandemic response should check their hands as well.

Yes, I am a Trump hater, and I will cheer the day that he is held accountable for his crimes.

*[This article was co-published on the author’s blog, Hard Left Turn.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Can America Confront Its Deadly Failure? appeared first on Fair Observer.

Add to the equation that there is a deep sense among progressive activists, people of color, the underprivileged and the under-represented that over 71.5 million votes for Trump was a direct repudiation of their demands for a dynamic push forward for social, economic and racial justice in America. And this doesn’t even get to the immediacy of confronting a rampaging pandemic at home and an abundance of global challenges.

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Amid the chaos, let me be clear that I hope an armed confrontation can be avoided and that there will be enough leadership and institutional integrity to force an orderly transfer of power. However, the election results make clear that many more people voted for Trump this time than last time. Targeted right-wing messaging works, and there is no apparent antidote. Those 71.5 million votes for Trump are a terrible outcome for a nation at war with itself and in which only the right-wingers have the guns.

As Biden’s victory sets in, there will be those who cheered on Trump and his toxic message who will not rest until they try to blow something up along with the country itself. As that unfolds, there is likely to be the first foundational test of America’s political and military institutions since the Civil War. I am not sure those institutions will hold. It is certainly not clear that those institutions can ensure a peaceful transfer of power.

Healing the Nation

At some point, something will have to give. At that point, a crippled America will harvest the rancid fruit of decades of delusion about how “exceptional” the nation was as it grew intellectually lazy, willed its future to greedy and corrupt capitalists, and utterly failed to invest in a sustainable system of governance that could meet the challenges of an evolving world. Picking up the pieces will not be easy.

The 50-state solution so beloved by those wallowing in the 19th century simply must be discarded, and some new foundation for national governance must be designed and implemented. Unfortunately, with the coronavirus pandemic ripping its way through the populace and a court system packed with those 19th-century wannabes, the time for wishful thinking will have to wait. The 50-state solution will have to be urgently junked to address the pandemic with a national plan and national mandates. Maybe afterward, America can study the results of the coordinated national response and find the way to a new, vibrant, 21st-century federal system.

Meanwhile, there will be an enormous amount of focus on how America got to this point, but I want to get out front that years of “false equivalency” disguised as “balance” or “fairness” has poisoned the nation’s well of fact-based knowledge from which any democratic nation would hope that its citizens could draw. Much has been said about willful ignorance, but not enough about the fountains of falsehoods that feed those unwilling to learn much of anything that requires factual focus. Repetition of belief is no substitute for acquisition of knowledge.

The impending national convulsion has just begun. A reckoning with collective ignorance and the arrogance of ignorance is essential as the starting point for a meaningful national dialog about how America so completely lost its way. The responsible mainstream media and social media outlets have to stop honoring falsehood with repetition and that most ludicrous of questions — “What’s your response?” And to try to rebuild lost credibility, real and transparent sourcing of news reporting has to again become the rule.

Then, if government institutions are to be resurrected and strengthened, there must be some measure of accountability for those who worked so diligently to undermine governance, often to enhance their own wealth and power. Today’s list of the corrupt is really long. Trump is a sick symptom, a tool used by so many others to achieve corrupt ends. But he is also symbolic of so much of what is so wrong that his accountability is an essential component of any national reckoning.

It is important that Trump be charged with the crimes he has committed both in office and in his corrupt life that led to his election in the first place in 2016. It is equally important that those in his inner circle, including his family, his enabling aides, his attorney general and his secretary of state, all find themselves under criminal investigative scrutiny.

This will surely further divide the nation. But it will be impossible to begin the healing if there is no accountability for the intentional wrongdoing that has led to so much suffering and dysfunction. Those who corruptly profited from the past should have to pay in the present if there is to be a future with the rule of law restored to its proper place in the national pantheon of virtues.

Joe Biden’s Inauguration

However, the critical first task ahead is to ensure Biden’s inauguration on January 20, 2021. Unfortunately, that date is over 10 weeks away. Ten weeks of an angry and “victimized” Trump still empowered to “govern” will bleed so much more blood from the nation. He will have to be thwarted at every turn each and every day, so the hard work of restoration can begin now.

This must start with a national plan to confront the coronavirus pandemic that is raging across America and much of the globe. This cannot wait 10 more weeks. There is no need for a “balanced” discussion because we have no choice. We have seen how a venal leader can lead so many to their demise and so many more to a participatory march to more death and disease.

Biden must try hard to convince those participatory marchers to turn around, look at those they care about and start protecting themselves and others. This will be a hard sell, and those of us who have already seen this light will have to step up our game as well. It is no longer fine for corporate sloths and all those endangered small businesses to wink at their “no mask, no entry” signs. It is time for local governments to publicly out those businesses that do not enforce mask mandates and social distancing in their community and publicly support those that do.

I am hardly certain where any of this will end. But I am certain that the false narrative of a caring, giving and committed people has now finally been ripped from our delusional midst. America is not now, nor has it often been, much of anything to be proud of.

*[This article was co-published on the author’s blog, Hard Left Turn.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post America’s Moment of National Reckoning appeared first on Fair Observer.

I have just recently been on the road a couple of times in the US. First, for 10 days, trying to dodge COVID droplets in three deeply-divided states: Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Michigan. My car radio provided the backdrop for the journey, filled with right-wing radio, Christian radio (often the same thing), oldies and some country music. I stayed in motels, carried some of my own food, ate in some restaurants and did some take-out.

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The second trip was to western Maryland, a red zone in a blue state. This trip included some time in the outdoors on popular hiking trails, one of which was a microcosm of everything wrong with America’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic. On a beautiful fall day, hundreds of people clogged a one and a quarter-mile path along a stream and river with four distinct waterfalls. At least two-thirds of those on the trail carried on as if they and their families were immune from COVID-19. No masks, no effort at protective distancing and no concern about the vulnerable people in their midst, often including small children and aging parents.

“No Mask, No Entry“

On the road, I did find one motel that actually seemed to do everything I could think of to protect me, their staff and their other customers. Otherwise, it was a very mixed bag. Almost no motel cleaning staff wore masks — they are going into the rooms of strangers right after they have left to gather up bedding, towels and trash. They breathe it in and then just to make sure that everything that can go wrong will go wrong, they breathe it right back out while sanitizing. Great idea.

Bartenders with masks perched just below their noses were another common feature. I never saw a single owner, manager or employee of any establishment ever tell a customer to put on a mask or leave. Every place I went into had a big sign on the door requiring masks inside — no mask, no entry. I saw a guy with a gun on his hip but no mask on his face taking a leak at an Interstate rest stop — no mask, no entry. I left that rest stop quickly for a whole bunch of reasons.

These trips provided ample evidence of just how sick the American body politic is. Words like “choice” and “freedom” permeate conversations from those resisting government measures to control the coronavirus pandemic. These words have been perverted to create a space for some of the most alarming elements of the national divide. It is but a small leap to fighting “tyranny” for those willing to angrily confront their own government.

It should not be news to anyone that America is in the midst of a pandemic that is taking close to 1,000 lives a day and now infecting more than 50,000 Americans every day and getting worse. Wearing a mask in these times is a really good idea, according to every public health professional in the world. Every single one of them. No exceptions. Yet, here in America, the mask message is still not taking hold. Among some segments of the populace, a Halloween mask is good, but a cloth mask to protect yourself and the health of your family, friends and a bunch of strangers is somehow bad.

The key concept at play here is “choice,” as an easily recognized variant of “freedom.” This is OK if you are choosing between milk chocolate and dark chocolate, coffee or tea, Nationals or Dodgers, and the like. It is pathetic as a response to a public health crisis — your choice, wear a mask or sneeze directly into my soup. It obviously isn’t as simple as this, but it should be a lot easier than it appears to be.

I am telling you this because there will be no end to the pandemic here until the vector segment of America either dies off or can be corralled and enclosed in one or more of the vector states. There is just too much stupidity and willful ignorance to be overcome by anything short of enforced mandatory masking, lockdowns and serious contact tracing. None of the above is on the menu yet, mask or no mask.

Some of this would be funny if it weren’t so tragic. For example, many people who identify as “pro-life” turn out to be “pro-choice” when it comes to masks, and often choose the path that leads to more death. On the other hand, as absurd as it sounds, it seems that “Zoom” meetings have actually increased human face time for those whose lives are defined by the latest ping on their supposedly “smart” phone.

A Political Symbol?

But let’s not be fooled. Large swaths of America and the world are living restricted lives circumscribed by disease while losing ground socially and economically. A nation in need of some measure of collective conscience finds itself sinking ever deeper into a world in which delusion substitutes for judgment and care for others is no longer part of the equation, if it ever was. Sadly, those who seem to have benefited most from prosperity and privilege are often those whose contempt for community puts those less prosperous and without privilege at even greater risk.

Too many of those with the opportunity to enjoy that waterfall trail seemed so unable to even consider a different way, a safer way. As long as callous people continue to wander dangerously in public places, it is hard to see how enough of these people will allow themselves to be organized to accept the type of vaccination mobilization program that will be necessary to finally end the pandemic.

To better understand the challenge, it is essential to recognize that wearing a mask in public has become a political symbol in America, and nowhere else. Parents choose to ignore the safety of their own children and children ignore the safety of their own parents to proclaim their “freedom” from government oppression and their support for a president who has abandoned them to disease. These people are choosing to endanger others. (Unbuckle those seat belts and watch the bodies fly.)

As the US presidential election approaches and the pandemic worsens, each of us has a clear choice to make. Side with the candidate whose venal face can be seen in full or the other candidate who wisely hides part of his face and shows all of his heart. This should not be hard.

*[This article was co-published on the author’s blog, Hard Left Turn.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Traveling on America’s Dangerous Path appeared first on Fair Observer.

This doesn’t leave much to fall back on. Progressives will allow for a moment of silence to celebrate Justice Ginsburg’s life. And then, it will be time for her death to propel our determination that Trump be deposed and his acolytes dethroned. We will need to get even angrier than we have been and more committed to the singular objective of winning the presidency.

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Many progressives surely wish that these were different times. Then, we could focus on social and racial justice, on a national plan to confront the coronavirus pandemic, on universal access to meaningful health care, on economic equity, on affordable housing, on quality public education and on reimagining good governance. But we cannot do that now.  Now, we have to do everything that we can to get Joe Biden elected president.

On the plus side, there continues to be a somewhat encouraging sense in America that maybe, just maybe, all the lies, all the ignorance and incompetence, all the corruption and all the chaos are finally catching up with the demonstrably worst American president in modern times. And that is saying a lot given that George W. Bush, Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon would be the competition. So with that said, and only Biden to choose from, staying focused on the singular goal will be easier.

The Inspirational Candidate?

To reach that goal, it would be nice to be able to say that Biden is an inspirational candidate who can will the nation to a better place, can open the eyes of the willfully blind, and define an agenda of transformational change. But he is not that candidate. Rather he is a candidate who can win the presidency, surround himself with honest and committed advisers, and begin the long and difficult trek toward undoing the Trump damage.

For me and many others, being the only serious candidate not named Trump is enough to ensure my vote and to ensure that I will do what I can to get him elected. For others, however, it may be important that Biden be for something, not just against Trump.

As Biden tries to define his agenda and demonstrate his policy priorities, he will have to do so carefully. The effort may win over some wavering or undecided voters, particularly if he focuses on health care issues and articulating an understanding of the intractable racial morass that is today’s America. Appealing to a tired nation with calm and a resolve to simply make things better could help as well.

However, there is peril for Biden in detailing much of anything beyond broad general policy themes. This peril lies primarily on his left. For the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, too much “visionary” detail of a future beyond November 3 can provide more insight than may be healthy for Biden’s campaign. For now, since it remains critical that “all the roads of our discontent must merge at this time to meet the singular threat” of a Trump reelection, progressives can and likely will stay focused on this prize alone.

Yet, as Biden begins to define the policy goals of his future administration, the details as they are emerging crushingly disappoint. The goals are so connected to yesterday that it is hard to envision a better tomorrow. It will be easier, for sure, to live without the daily lies and the pernicious undermining of the nation’s institutions, but it will be no easier for those in need to live with a return to “normal.”

To provide early solace, Biden and his administration will surely strive to return some measure of good governance to federal institutions, a key metric if there is ever to be the transformational change that America’s outdated and tired “democracy” so critically needs. However, it will all seem so incremental, especially to those in need now who have waited so long and to those who have spent a lifetime advocating for those in need.

Final Tribute for RBG

This is where Justice Ginsburg as that beacon of conscience can enter the fray anew. She never gave up on her extraordinary drive to simply right things that were wrong. She is gone, but her zeal has to live on in enough of us to get this election right and then move on to the hard challenges that lie ahead. As I have moved from sadness to resolve, I have looked at a lot of what Justice Ginsburg had to tell us. There is something about the following quotation that seems worthy of the moment: “Yet what greater defeat could we suffer than to come to resemble the forces we oppose in their disrespect for human dignity?”

Maybe it is respect for human dignity that so separates Biden from Trump, Democrats from Republicans, and progressives from conservatives. Look at the quotation again, and then reflect on the sickened and dying in our communities in the midst of a crippling pandemic. And then take as a clarion call that Trump, the Republicans and the conservatives in those same communities are fighting to deny access to health care to millions yesterday, today, and tomorrow. That is depraved. That is inhumane.

If Joe Biden does not win the presidency, those with a palpable disrespect for human dignity will surely further stain America. If Biden is victorious, there will be a renewed urgency for progressives to step to the fore to stress that any new administration must commit to a respect for human dignity as the core principle required to elevate America to be so much better than it is. If Justice Ginsburg knew this, maybe the rest of us can learn it, some for the first time.

We must make that commitment for ourselves, for our nation and as a final tribute to the extraordinary Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

*[This article was co-published on the author’s blog, Hard Left Turn.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Justice Ginsburg Secures Progressives for Biden appeared first on Fair Observer.

First, there were “alternative facts.” Now, the oxymoronic notion of “alternate reality” is exploding its way into the vernacular. There used to be something called “parallel universe” that seemed to sum up the world inhabited by delusional people, particularly during delusional episodes. “Alternate reality” somehow seems more dangerous.

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What we are witnessing in America at the moment is nothing short of the normalization of fantasy, delusion, illusion and fakery as a substitute for facts, truth and content in public discourse. Once this happens to a society, the negative impact on public policy cannot be overstated. Historic examples are everywhere, but just take a moment to reflect on the rise of Nazism in Germany and the destructive pathology of McCarthyism in mid-20th-century America. Those examples and the toxins they injected into the body politic still resonate.

The persistence of white supremacy in America and ethnic purity in Europe is the spawn of one earlier “alternate reality.” The highly charged message that leftists and Marxists and socialists are burrowing into every corner of American life is the grotesque spawn from the other earlier “alternate reality.”

A Critical Time

So, at this critical juncture in America’s political journey, there should be no tolerance for any normalization of any “alternate reality.” Yet everywhere one looks, words are being reworked to create the space in which fantasy and delusion can reign supreme. Just two examples should be enough to make this point.

First, when did an assault rifle become a “long gun”? Just within the last few weeks, a 17-year-old in Wisconsin murdered two protesters with an assault rifle — not a long gun or a short gun, an assault rifle. Second, when did “walked back” enter the vocabulary to describe someone trying to correct blatant falsehoods purposefully uttered?

Within the same few weeks, and even more of a threat to public safety, the current commissioner of the US Food and Drug Administration “walked back” a blatant public lie about the efficacy of a therapeutic treatment for COVID-19 offered originally to please Trump while knowingly posing a threat to the rest of us.  “Walked back” sounds like the first step on a road to redemption for some minor miscue, not an effort to excuse a purposeful falsehood that never should have been uttered in the first place.

With a presidential election looming, what passes for the responsible media in America now features more “fact checks” than facts. Now, with “alternate reality” apparently all the rage, the media have cleverly added “reality checks” to their arsenal.

It is long past the time when anyone should believe that the nation can be saved by tortured linguistics. It is time for a new and long overdue reverence for facts to simply overwhelm the untrue and delusional that pollute our public discourse. It is time for direct and specific language that may make some people uncomfortable. And it is surely time to stop trying to save the sensibilities of those who wallow in their own “reality.”

Trump is a venal and pathological liar, and those who lie for him are at best dangerous collaborators. So, enough pretending it might be something else, hoping that if enough apologists get airtime, fiction will morph into truth. For those who are made uncomfortable by these uncomfortable truths, it is time to suck it up, admit that you have been conned and make those who took advantage of your ignorance pay a price for the harm that they and you have caused the nation.

Discomfort Is Everywhere

These are harsh words, and they are not written with kindness at their core. They are written at a time when fear and anxiety are being peddled by Trump, the Republican Party and all those smarmy people in their orbit. The rest of us are the losers, big time. The list is long but should not need to go any further than the almost 200,000 dead souls sacrificed in the American coronavirus pandemic at an altar of incompetence, narcissism and mendacity.

Americans have reached a point where discomfort is everywhere, but is it enough discomfort to act individually and collectively to confront the unfolding threat of another four years of the Trump scourge and Republican Party complicity? Anyone who thinks that some cathartic unity will emerge from all of this isn’t paying much attention. Rather, all the roads of our discontent must merge at this time to meet the singular threat.

It is for sure that if the effort is successful, some of those same roads will diverge again. But then, if our institutions hold, there will be new paths to progress and a much clearer picture of the reality of today’s America and the factual foundation that must inform this place and time. In that reality, some of us will again be able to dream of transformational change.

But make no mistake. If the nation does not collectively act now to rid itself of the rot at its core, the road to the national discomfort required for transformational change will get even darker.

*[This article was cross-posted on the author’s blog, Hard Left Turn.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Alternate Reality Is All the Rage in Election Time America appeared first on Fair Observer.

The first checkpoint for the nation on the road to Election Day is to see if anyone has learned anything from the national pandemic response disaster. The same Trump playbook that has left more than 170,000 dead souls in its wake is being dusted off again. And this time, it is the presidential election that is going to take a massive hit if Americans do not collectively and forcefully demand something better.

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Remember back in early April, less than five months ago? By then, it had become obvious to virtually every public health official and every identified Democrat in America that the coronavirus pandemic was a serious threat to the health and well-being of the nation. All but Trump and his minions demanded a national plan to limit the spread of the disease that included development of treatment protocols, adequate and timely availability of supplies, a uniform and aggressive national testing program with contact tracing, and the federal funding necessary to do all of this. The nation is still waiting for that plan.

Fast forward to August, now less than three months before the scheduled November 3 presidential election. Even while death and disease ravage large parts of the nation and subvert economic and social well-being, there is an urgent national need to prepare for and ensure a free and fair election process. 

This should be obvious, even to Republicans who show little interest in free and fair elections. It should be equally obvious that an efficient and uniform national plan for mail-in balloting, early voting and a reduced number of polling places is more critical in this election cycle than ever before, including national standards and the federal resources to ensure compliance. So, why isn’t it happening?

Human Loss

The reason is as simple as it has been with the pandemic response: A venal cabal led by an ignorant narcissist will not use the institutions of the federal government to confront urgent problems unless any proposed solutions are sure to work for them and can be defined in politically advantageous terms. Neither human cost nor institutional integrity is part of the calculus.

As with the federal government’s pandemic response, there is readily at hand the time-honored way to deflect federal government responsibility in America. Make a speech about the urgent problem and then consign responsibility for solving the problem to state and local “laboratories.” This is always done with a pious nod to the US Constitution.

The result has been a patchwork and often conflicting response to gun violence, educational deficits, poverty, health-care reform and infrastructure inadequacies, to name a few. So, Florida, do your own pandemic response. So, South Dakota, bring on the motorcycle madness in the midst of a pandemic. And then just to top it off, make sure that the federal messaging gives each state the right to define “freedom” for its own denizens in a nation with no internal borders. Does this make any sense? Of course not.

After an initial burst of Trump testosterone and the conjuring of miracles, someone told Trump that if he took charge of the nation’s pandemic response like a real president, he would also bear responsibility if it didn’t work out. And that playing golf while people were dying on your watch would be difficult for someone actually in charge. Back in April, that quickly ended any effort to design and implement a national pandemic response plan.

So now, it is time to apply the same “logic” to the upcoming presidential election. Someone has told Trump that he is losing the election because he failed to implement a national response to the pandemic. From there, it was a short crossed wire to the message that you can’t lose if there is no election.

Back to 50 States

What will save the day for Trump and his minions? That same 50 “laboratories” strategy that has undermined the national pandemic response will now be unleashed to ensure that electoral freedom rings. All Trump has to do this time is the same thing he did in April: undermine any cohesive message, create institutional confusion, and provide neither standards nor resources to ensure a free and fair election. In short, pass the problem to the states and localities and do everything possible to ensure chaos.

And then, for an insurance policy, appoint a political hack to run the US Postal Service into the ground just when it will be needed most. (Remember the once-proud Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, now reduced to offering compromised pandemic “guidance” as soon as some unnamed Trump acolyte gives them the nod.)

Even while running around the rest of the world telling other countries that voting and fair elections are singular components of democracy, America has never had a national plan that even begins to address its most fundamental democratic failure, pathetic voter turnout. Further, there are almost no national standards that control voting practices and procedures, even for national elections. In this ambiance of neglect, voting in each of the 50 states has been blighted to some degree by gerrymandering, voter suppression measures and dubious procedures that have thrived to undermine the equity of the US election process.

The nation does not have the luxury of electoral neglect this time around. In the 2016 presidential election, only a little over 55% of the voting-age population actually bothered to vote. Think about that and how easily chaos thrives when so many don’t care enough to resist. Many will argue that there are lots of reasons for low voter turnout, from ignorance of process to impediments to voter registration and actual voting. Whatever the reason, we are back again to 50 states, 50 voting systems, 50 different sets of impediments to voting and a relatively mobile population.

Thus, any attempt to undermine the voting process has a lot of entry points and almost no up-front vigilance. It seems that counting the votes of those who do vote is much more important than ensuring that most eligible voters can actually vote.

The Playbook

The Trump election playbook is clear: incite division and chaos, divert responsibility to the states and localities, undermine the credibility and capacity of the US Postal Service, repeatedly and falsely disparage the integrity of mail-in ballots, and most importantly, provide daily conflicting messages that will be gobbled up by the press. And this doesn’t even get to Trump’s open-door policy to foreign influence in the election process.

If somehow Trump seems to have won the election, he will heroically claim victory after having vanquished all the impediments to such an unlikely event and quickly forget that he rigged the election. If Trump seems to have lost the election, he will angrily announce that he cannot honor the results of a rigged election and quickly forget that he was the one who tried to rig it in the first place. The surest path to avoiding either of these outcomes is a forceful institutional response, quickly setting forth a national plan for ensuring a free and fair election. That will have to come from Congress and be reinforced by the media.

America cannot allow the 50-state “solution” to overwhelm what is left of the country’s democratic foundation. That is the same “solution” that now has over 170,000 corpses crying out for something better. 

*[A version of this article was cross-posted on the author’s blog, Hard Left Turn.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Pandemic Voting Needs America’s Full Attention appeared first on Fair Observer.

Armed and empowered federal government personnel with absolutely no training in dealing with citizen protests or protesters are being unleashed to confront largely peaceful demonstrators in America who are imploring their government to reduce police violence and address racial injustice. Local leaders and police commanders are confronted with an armed force that they have not asked for and that they do not want. This is American citizens being terrorized by American government personnel, ironically at the command of the federal Department of Homeland Security established to protect us from terrorists.

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To be sure, this is largely theater. But it is theater that should shock anyone in America who smugly thought that the “land of the free” would never look like “other” despotic lands. It has been a very long time since America has come this close to rock bottom. As a nation, America is an international laughingstock, mocked by all those despots we bribed over the years to transform their way into our way, the American way. But guess what? We didn’t see it coming, but their way has now become our way.

Turn on the news anywhere in the world, and it will feature some daily tale of woe from America. Turn on the news in America, and it is all a tale of American woe. Yet despite the perception that America has found new lows, amid pandemic and social strife, there is a palpable disconnect between the depth of the problems and a serious consensus about the solutions. As is often the case in America, this situation is a big problem in search of a label that will ensure that not much changes anytime soon.

Every politician and pundit in the land seems to have settled on something called the “culture wars.” It seems so easy in the facile world in which we live to provide cover for complex problems by finding a meaningless catchy phrase that everyone can define for themselves instead of facing reality, particularly the reality of others.

“Culture Wars”

Today, everywhere you turn in American politics, “culture wars” are trotted out to explain away all manner of dysfunction in government and society. I am not sure what that term means. “Culture war” has been defined as “a conflict or struggle for dominance between groups within a society or between societies, arising from their differing beliefs, practices, etc.” The “etc.” at the end of this definition should be a clue that “culture war” means essentially whatever you want it to mean. What kind of definition is that?

Before there was the coronavirus pandemic, there was culture everywhere. Want to see a play, go for it. If art or anthropology is your interest, museums abound. Even a movie, particularly when called “cinema” or “film,” can qualify as a good solid cultural experience. Then there is the whole world of international and local cuisines, more cultural experience. Wines, beers, whiskeys, full of culture. When I think of culture, this is what I think of, along with the rich tapestry that defines some of who we are. 

Somehow a war based on a film I like, what cuisine I choose to eat or the sports team I choose to root for seems trivial and even unlikely. So, a “culture war” must mean something deeper than that. It must mean, for example, that if you pay attention to public health experts in response to a pandemic, you are on one team and if not, you are on the other team. What a clever way to gloss over stupidity and ignorance.

“Culture war” also implies something ingrained that cannot be altered or influenced by new ideas, new knowledge or new experience. However, the paralyzing conflict that we are enduring in America is routinely influenced by new ideas and new experiences. It is a policy conflict, a conflict over how best to address real human problems with a policy response. And much of it is driven by an individual’s momentary perception of the role of government in meeting these human challenges. 

I truly dislike Senator Mitch McConnell, but we are both old white men who drink quality bourbon and could share a cigar now and again. What we disagree about is not culture, but content.

As another example of what I am trying to convey, the urge to own a gun in America surely does not reflect the groupthink at the core of the “culture war” definition. The reasons for arming oneself or choosing not to cross every demographic and social line — that rich white couple in Missouri armed and ready in their front yard as protesters walked by would share little of cultural significance with a poor white subsistence hunter or a young, inner-city, Latino gangbanger. It is highly unlikely that these disparate gun owners ever cross each other’s paths except as casual observers inspecting the oddities of each other’s cultural foundation.

I am sorry to take a dump on everyone’s latest label, but I am really tired of labels being used as a substitute for responsibility. If you choose to be ignorant, you can meet others like you at your church, your country club, your gym or your city council meeting. Willful ignorance is found in all cultures. It is a shame that it is so common and so misunderstood as the root of much of what separates us.

That is not a cultural statement. We are not engaged in a “culture war.” We are engaged in a confrontation to define a better America and to find the policy solutions that will lead us there. This is America’s “war” for its future, not some wistful search for cultural reconciliation.

*[A version of this article was featured on the author’s blog, Hard Left Turn.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Content, Not Culture, Separates Americans appeared first on Fair Observer.

Independence Day is celebrated on July 4, the date in 1776 when the Continental Congress ratified the text of the Declaration of Independence. However, it is a safe bet that most Americans know more about the contents of a margarita than they do the Declaration of Independence.

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Some will note Thomas Jefferson’s stirring words near the beginning of the document: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

Practically no one will know that immediately following these words, the Declaration goes on to state: “That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, –That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.”  

Much of the rest of the document is a list of grievances against the British king and his minions leading to the conclusion that the colonies should be free and independent states absolved of any allegiance to the British Crown and free of any political connection to Great Britain. So there you have it, a quick history lesson. But before moving on to the US Constitution, pause a moment and actually think about what should be the cornerstone of this document: “Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”

We know that the “self-evident” language was never actually self-evident, and that the notion that all men are created “equal” remains at the core of America’s living historical lie, birthed even before there was a Declaration of Independence. But the part that presents the solution, the path forward, is a declaration that government deriving its powers from the consent of the governed should be how a nation organizes itself to provide for and protect its sovereignty and its people, how it defines and enables life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Broken Government

Now with America’s national government completely broken, the consent of the governed nowhere to be found, and the actual right of the people to alter or abolish their government at issue with every new and imaginative effort to suppress voting, the Declaration of Independence rings hollow. But if it means anything today, it is to be found in the concept that human beings living within some demarcated landmass should be free to institute a “new” government around a set of principles and organizational mandates required to protect public safety and provide some foundation for societal well-being.

There have been times before, and surely now it is America’s time again — the time to wrest power from the corrupt and corrupted, the venal and the vengeful. There is Trump’s Independence Day performance, practically begging the nation to again take up arms against itself. There is significant social unrest because aged institutions have failed for centuries to include a huge swath of those supposedly equal folks. There is the daily inventory of undermined governance rendering the present government incapable of protecting public safety and promoting social well-being.

And most of all, there is the sight of our government “leaders” standing by unmasked as the fools that they are, while death and disease permeate the land. I want to be clear about this: Trump has blood on his hands, McConnell and most Republican politicians at the national and state levels have blood on their hands. And, those around Trump who have enabled his vile ignorance to prevail have blood on their hands. America’s present government is literally draining the life from this land.

Today’s catalog of legitimate grievances is even stronger than those of 1776, for they demonstrate just how far the nation has strayed from its lofty ambition. Today, when we well know that the words “all men are created equal” rang hollow then but seem even more devoid of meaning now, the failure to fight hard enough for that ideal in modern times dwarfs the earlier willingness to fight for words that meant so much less then.

A New Revolution

Without wishing for a renewed revolutionary war, I do wish for a new revolution. The time has come to stop America’s national retreat from an imperfect union to an even more imperfect union. In a nation that loves its Constitution, just reading the Preamble should be enough to know that the text to follow has failed us miserably: “We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.” 

Not one objective set out in that Preamble to the US Constitution is happening now. The institutions brought to life by that document in the text that follows are not working today to meet any of the lofty goals set forth in the Preamble. Think about it, read each one carefully, reflect on gaping societal divisions, reflect on today’s attorney general, reflect on marchers in the streets demanding racial and social justice, reflect on US allies discarded like vermin, reflect on poverty and lack of access to meaningful health care laying waste to many, and reflect on warriors in our streets supposedly “protecting” us from ourselves.   

It is truly unfortunate that the world had to watch a black man die in the street before our eyes amid a raging tableau of disease and despair for many finally to see what America has become. When national institutions born centuries ago fail so completely to protect lives and save lives, they have failed in their original purpose.

Now is the moment for we the people to argue loudly that the time has surely come to fundamentally alter what we have and replace it with something much better.

*[A version of this article was cross-posted on the author’s blog, Hard Left Turn.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post America Is a Nation in Darkness appeared first on Fair Observer.

With this in mind, “defunding” the police seems like a good idea. If I can’t call them with confidence in a good outcome, what good are they? Further, with less funding, the likelihood of an annoying speeding ticket would be lessened, as would the likelihood of getting arrested for falling asleep in the drive-through lane of a fast-food restaurant.

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On the other hand, if police funding were to be reduced, things could get worse. The police might decide that the only way to stay in business is to make policing even more of a focused business than it already is. The new business model could get even uglier than the present one.

There is plenty of blame to go around, particularly now that video emerges on an almost daily basis of our warriors in blue reacting to citizens of color as if they were some enemy who they have been tasked to vanquish. Over much of the last 60 years, as legal segregation slowly lost its legality, “policing” became the means to a segregated end. Constant political pressure to increase funding for enforcement of the law in order to save us from the savage criminals and terrorists in our midst became a key element of political orthodoxy in America.

The Wrong Word

Today, America’s police departments continue to get in line for another armored vehicle or another collection of grenade launchers without ever questioning why this expensive military weaponry is needed or whether the weaponry they already have is enough. By definition, warriors always need more weapons. Maybe “guardians” or community service officers would not.

Yet the weaponry issue just scratches the surface. “Defunding” is the wrong word. “Reimagining” is a far better one for now. This is not about reimagining a better world, although that would be nice. This is about the hard work of reimagining policing and the policing function.

As an example, what impact on policing would likely occur if police officers were required to live in the communities they are responsible for policing? For one thing, it would almost surely result in more policemen looking like the people they are being asked to protect. Further, that amped-up SWAT team might not look so good if it were targeting the residents of a neighbor’s house.

So, with just this one idea as an example, this one reimagining moment, we could open the discussion to reprogramming the tank money and the SWAT team money to upgrade housing and educational opportunities in some of the poorer neighborhoods where the police would be required to live. And with better housing and educational opportunities, everyone, including the cops, would likely be more invested in guarding the community than “policing” the community. 

However, there is much to overcome. The police continue to believe they are needed in our communities to fulfill their version of our safety. And they cling to this belief because their version of our safety fits their version of who they are. To change this dynamic, there is much talk about a “guardian” model for the police function to help define the community role that the community wants for its police. This would provide space for allowing cops who think only of themselves as frontline warriors to leave and go back to the military or to policing outposts where there is no community. Most importantly, it would provide a foundation for identifying police leaders and new policing candidates who embrace the new community role.

When the dust settles in the latest round of national racial angst, there will still be police departments. The present challenge is to redefine their role as part of a broader effort to confront the layered and systemic racism in America that has existed since the nation’s founding. As statues fall now, those seeking to take them down can be seen as mindless desecrators of some delusional heritage, or they can be seen as a vanguard opening our minds to a racist past far more depraved than we ever wished as a nation to examine.

Seizing the Moment

But there is a real danger that this critical discussion will get sidetracked by a debate over Christopher Columbus’ role in the devastation of the Native American population or the obvious idiocy of naming a present-day US military base for someone who fought against the US military to destroy the nation to preserve slavery. The objective of finally confronting systemic racism in America will demand a lot more than this from each of us who cares.

We must seize this difficult moment to change what must be changed. Somehow, in a sea of disease, the breadth of the problem seems so much clearer. If we take a hard and uncomfortable look at how America was so ill-prepared at so many levels to confront a pandemic in its midst, the layered and systemic racism at the core of so much of what is wrong with America will not only bubble to the surface but flood the discussion. 

Policing issues are, most of all, only one barometer of the depth of the problem. Income inequality, public health and health care disparities, educational disparities, and depressed housing and job opportunities are the deeper legacies of racism in America. In this context, the historical policing model should be viewed as the means used by the white and powerful to ensure that people of color learned their place and stayed in it.

With the US federal government led for over three years by an overt racist who has succeeded in using racism to divide the nation, many eyes have been opened. Now, it seems, that watching a black man have his life squeezed out of him by those sworn to maintain law and order has finally opened our minds and maybe even our hearts.

Yes, reimagine policing. But much more importantly, start doing what is necessary to reimagine America.

*[A version of this article was cross-posted on the author’s blog, Hard Left Turn.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post America’s Problem With Racism Has Become Clearer appeared first on Fair Observer.

In a moment, America was talking about something even more threatening than a pandemic. And it was no kinder to a nation in chaos than the pandemic in its midst. It would actually have been nice to talk about something other than a pandemic for a little while, along with each day’s Trump snake-oil sale and the absence of the familiar in our lives. But not this, not a race-based homicide thrust before our very eyes and awakening again a powerful and visceral response that lit the sky with flames instead of stars.

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Before George Floyd’s life was forced out of him, I was slowly getting comfortable with the idea of heading to a restaurant again, just to be somewhere else passing time with people I didn’t know. I was OK with everyone wearing a mask for a while to help everyone stay safe.

But even then, and before George Floyd’s life was forced out of him, I was not OK with pretending that a return to “normal” was an answer to anything, unless “normal” when seen through the deadly lens of a pandemic was finally perceived as a deeply-flawed foundation to a crumbling structure.

Before George Floyd’s life was forced out of him, I could have gone along with “normal” for a month or so while we all took a deep breath. But I knew even then that if America just went back to where it was, it would have been a terrible waste of renewed insight into the real America for so many. It would have only added new depth to the shame that is America’s “normal.”

Then, George Floyd’s life was forced out of him, and suddenly it seemed that there could not and should not be a return to “normal,” not even for a moment. I will continue to hope that this time, this time, there can be no turning back. But that hope will only linger until some politician or some preacher reminds a troubled nation that “this is not who we are.” For those words are the death knell of transformative change.

Sandy Hook

Until so many absent Americans can see and feel themselves in the narrative, that this is precisely who we are and what we have allowed ourselves to become, there will be no transformative change. Sure, a few cops may be held accountable, kumbaya will have a short revival, and there will be much talk about not getting another chance to get it right. But it will be for naught unless Americans can grasp what America is for far too many in our midst and simply accept it no more.

Remember Sandy Hook Elementary School, the sickening depth America reached almost eight years ago, where 20 elementary school children and six staff members were gunned down in a moment by a deranged young man firing an assault rifle fed bullets from high-capacity magazines. It was his mom’s assault rifle, legally-owned, apparently as a kind of mother/son bonding contrivance. We will never know how proud she was of her choices because the young man shot her to death on the way to the elementary school.

I bring this up now because I thought then that finally something so horrible had happened that America’s love affair with guns and gun violence would be aborted. That, at the least, America would never return to that “normal.” I hoped that such a searing moment would shock so many to see what we had allowed ourselves to become. And yet nothing happened. Oh yes, there were marches and protests and angry people. A few gun nuts laid low for a while. Then nothing, no new laws, no assault rifle ban, no high-capacity magazine ban, not even universal background checks to identify the wannabe gun nuts.

So now, America, here we are again. Before George Floyd’s life was forced out him, all that many wanted was a large dose of “normal” in the face of a deadly pandemic. After George Floyd’s life was forced out of him, many others want so much more.

Suddenly Aware

It seems like all of a sudden, America has been made aware that poor people and people of color have worse health outcomes than wealthy and middle-class white people. A pandemic will do that. It seems that their diets are worse, their access to health care less and sometimes not at all, their levels of addiction, diabetes and heart disease all higher. Oh, and don’t forget that poor people live on top of one another in substandard housing, and that doesn’t help in a pandemic either. Then, pandemic hunger replaced “normal” hunger for some little children in America. And they are still hungry.

Sticking with just this snapshot, if it were a snapshot of you and your family, would you want to go back to “normal”? But that snapshot was never going to be enough to make a difference. All we wanted was a large dose of “normal.” And instead, we got a big and unwelcome snapshot of “other” people’s “normal.”

I am disgusted now, disgusted that we are here again, disgusted that another human being could not breathe the same air that I breathe. And, for the record, I have been disgusted with this and with this America since I got off a bus in Durham, North Carolina, in 1963 on my way to college and saw with my own eyes a bathroom for men, a bathroom for women and a bathroom marked “colored.” Not even “colored people,” just “colored.” I don’t know why it struck me so hard, but I have never found in all the years since then an America that embraces each human being as a part of the community of man.

Eric Garner never found that America either, nor did Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, Freddie Gray and many “others” in just recent memory. Nor will George Floyd ever find that America.

Author’s Note

To try to better understand, learn or relearn about Emmett Till, a 14-year-old black child brutally killed in 1955 in Mississippi. The image of his open casket is as searing as the video of George Floyd’s last breaths. And that was 65 years ago.

*[A version of this article was cross-posted on the author’s blog, Hard Left Turn.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post America Faces Its Past With Eyes Wide Open appeared first on Fair Observer.

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The American death count from the pandemic in just a couple of months has soared past the Vietnam figure that took over 10 years of venal incompetence to accumulate. And this is with no end in sight and a human toll that far exceeds the death toll. There are reasons for this, some of which are shared by other countries struggling to confront the coronavirus, but some of which are so painfully unique to 21st-century America.

The Worst President

The list is long and every pundit has their own, but any worthy list would include at the top that America now has the worst president at the worst possible time, a perfect storm in and of itself. Never in the nation’s history have presidential incompetence, ignorance and utter self-absorption so corrupted the national response to a major crisis. America has had terrible presidents before at key moments in history (Herbert Hoover and the “Great Depression” come to mind), but we have never had a president so woefully unprepared to meet a national challenge as Trump has proved to be.

This should not come as a surprise given Trump’s pre-pandemic performance. However, every once in a while, even woeful leaders become what is needed in the moment, somehow able to rise above their obvious flaws. With Trump, the nation watches as he drags us further into an abyss, surrounded by a small army of toadies unwilling to tell the naked emperor that he is not the emperor. The daily deference to this fool warps the capacity to collectively respond to the pandemic, to keep people safe and alive, and to provide an empathetic backdrop to the real tragedy in our midst.

Perhaps if America’s democracy were institutionally sound, Trump could be removed or at least marginalized, but the balance of powers that are supposed to rest with Congress and the judiciary is providing no balance at all when the nation needs it most. Congress cannot even develop a plan that will allow it to do its job. If the checkout clerk at the grocery store is so essential that he/she has to show up each day, how can those elected to lead be so inessential that their absence from the job site is countenanced, allowing the incompetent executive to blunder on without meaningful legislative challenge and oversight?

Meanwhile, the judicial branch seems so paralyzed that it cannot respond to any of today’s urgent national needs while it struggles to unravel yesterday’s dilemmas drawn from a world model that may not exist anymore. If you are waiting for some judge to order something that will force Trump to do something today that would have saved lives a month ago, you are assuredly still waiting or dead.

Even the military — so often portrayed as America’s guardians in an uncertain world — has been largely left in its barracks waiting for the orders to help protect a fearful nation from an invisible enemy. But apparently Trump, their bumbling commander-in-chief, can’t even get them rolling to do the one thing we should be able to count on them to do well in the present crisis — procure stuff, gather the stuff together, put it in a warehouse and move it to where it is needed.

The Coronavirus in America

So, with our national leadership and national institutions in chaotic freefall, the nation is left to wallow in 50 uncoordinated human experiments in life with COVID-19 being conducted by the politicians and public health community in the states. Just to understand how this is likely to end, many of the most ambitious experiments are being conducted in some of the worst governed states in the nation. Would you trust the governor of Alabama to educate your children? Of course not, now you are left to hope that somehow her COVID-19 experiment will protect their lives.

With this invisible enemy in our midst, much of the American myth is in tatters. Our public delusions of the past decades are now in plain sight for all to see and our “exceptionalism” has become our albatross. Confronting reality is made more difficult by a skewed national moral compass. 

A significant component of that skewed moral compass is that America is a nation that has somehow conditioned itself to accept preventable death — war is good when we fight it, universal access to meaningful health care is too expensive, and rampant gun violence is the price the unarmed pay so that the armed can protect us all from our own government.

Think about this: In 2018, over 48,000 people in America died of suicide, but that won’t happen in your family until it does. Throw in another 67,000 drug overdose deaths that same year, and the combined figures are more deadly than COVID-19 to date. While these numbers are always jarring, the national response to suicide and opioid deaths has been next to nil, with Americans idly standing by while underfunding and political indifference undermine a meaningful national response that could greatly diminish readily preventable death.

Now, with the coronavirus pandemic in our midst, we are at it again. While you watch this time, know that people in your community will die on the altar of a frontier culture that glorifies the freedom to put others at risk over the inconvenience of public health initiatives that seek to preserve human life.

So, America, take a walk on the wild side and break loose from negative news and body counts. It is time to head for the beaches where the sunlight will cure us and where enough booze will allow us to forget that we have no cure and no federal government capable of executing anything but us.

*[This article was cross-posted on the author’s blog, Hard Left Turn.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post The Worst President at the Worst Time appeared first on Fair Observer.

For decades, there have been voices in America concerned about our “exceptional” and growing income inequality, our “exceptional” health care delivery system that excludes so many, and our “exceptional” institutional infrastructure that has been in steady and unrelenting decline. And this is just part of the list.

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Most, if not all, of these voices in the wilderness have been voices from the left, often critical and always criticized. It seems that we just didn’t get it, how great a nation America is and how grateful we should be to live in such a land of bounty. But alas, as every fissure, every disconnect and every delusion in our society has been exposed, maybe it is time to pay more attention to those old, blackened canaries in the proverbial coal mines.

It is sad to say that even Trump’s three years of undisguised efforts to show an “unsuspecting” nation his greed, his corruption and his racism and the stain of it all on our society, it just doesn’t seem to have appeared in enough mirrors to have mattered much. Will it matter this time, when a pandemic has created vivid images of a failing and flailing America, magnifying many times over the terrible devastation that unchecked greed, corruption and racism has wrought on so many among us?

America will see more body bags filled with dead people of color than ever before, more people in line to get the food they and their kids need to survive, real people dying without access to meaningful health care, kids trying to learn who don’t have access to computers and the internet, and an institutional infrastructure that barely works in good times that cannot respond to save lives and livelihoods in difficult times. What will happen to these images when the bars open again, the stock market is on the upswing and those country clubs, gated communities and private schools are all revved up to again celebrate wealth and privilege?

The Old Left and the New Left

It would be easy to say that Senator Bernie Sanders got it right but that not enough people were paying attention. The problem with that formula is that there simply are not enough people in America who even listen to any message that suggests at its core that each of us is only better off when all of us are better off. This core message is the only springboard there is to a better America. And this core message is now, and has always been, the touchstone of leftist thinking in America and elsewhere.

So maybe it is time to listen. Maybe the old left can embrace a new left with its ranks swelled with yet another generation ready to try hard to be heard above the “me first” messaging that has brought us to where we are today. Maybe the grocery checkout clerk and the migrant farmworker and the sanitation worker will be the new voices of a new left, this time with cops, nurses, teachers and medical technicians not only cheering them on, but joining them in the streets.

That having been said, it is a time to be wary, to understand that any hope for a better America can slip away in a moment. As many in America make common cause with those seeking a collective and compassionate response to the chaos of the coronavirus pandemic, Trump and his acolytes are unleashing the worst in America to undermine that effort. His “liberty” brigades will glorify their guns and their churches, their ignorance of knowledge and science as a virtue, and their individual valor in not shrinking before an invisible enemy that has the rest of us trembling as the threat overwhelms us.

Be very wary. If food shortages ensue, “valor” and guns are a dangerous mix. Be very wary, the anti-vaccine crowd will try to keep the invisible enemy in our midst, even as cures arise, by spreading their venom of distrust. Be very wary, those for whom greed has become a way of life will double down on their moral deficit to take advantage of every opportunity to ensure their continued “success” — from stockpiling toilet paper and other essentials, to hedge funds, for-profit colleges and boutique law firms lining their pockets at the front of each line for public funds intended to relieve suffering.

In response, the blackened canaries in the coal mines have to dust themselves off and try again, even harder, to open the eyes, minds and hearts of those among us with the capacity to look beyond themselves and beyond the calming thought of a return to “normal.” “Normal” should be no good anymore. It wasn’t good enough before the pandemic and it will be even worse afterward.

A Better Future

Now is the time to fight for a better future, for young people to actually join in with something more convincing than an emoji, for those workers on the front lines now to stay there and demand more, for the doctors who have seen the abyss to get all doctors to finally fix our health care system, for the teachers, child care workers and service workers to stop working until they are paid, have access to meaningful health care and a good education for their children. And, for goodness sake, for all of us to demand that everyone is paid a living wage and that no man, woman or child in our midst is without a place to live.

As part of the old left, I can deliver the message, but the new left will have to deliver the transformative change. It will not come from the center in America — that is where the “normal” is nurtured. It can and will only come from a new left in America committed first to taking back the nation from the corrupt who have hijacked it and then taking to the streets to demand a much better future for everyone.

*[A version of this article was cross-posted on the author’s blog, Hard Left Turn.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post In the US, Returning to “Normal” Is Not Good Enough appeared first on Fair Observer.