Can We Survive Trump's Cult of Personality?

“A cult of personality arises when a country’s regime — or, more rarely, an individual politician — uses the techniques of mass media, propaganda, the big lie, spectacle, the arts, patriotism, and government-organized demonstrations and rallies to create an idealized, heroic, and worshipful image of a leader, often through unquestioning flattery and praise. A cult of personality is similar to apotheosis, except that it is established by modern social engineering techniques, usually by the state or the party in one-party states. It is often seen in totalitarian or authoritarian countries.
The term first came to modern prominence in 1956, in Nikita Khrushchev’s secret speech On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences, given on the final day of the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. In the speech, Khrushchev, who was the First Secretary of the Party — in effect, the leader of the country — criticized the lionization and idealization of Josef Stalin, and, by implication, his Communist contemporary Mao Zedong, as being contrary to Marxist doctrine. The speech was later made public, and was part of the “de-Stalinization” process the Soviet Union went through ”….Wikipedia



We are in the grips of this kind of cult right now. I do not believe we ever had been so close to authoritarianism before. Perhaps FDR during the war, but history shows that he faced “loyal” opposition throughout the war even. Certainly before WWII, with the Supreme Court destroying much of the New Deal, Roosevelt did not attain “hero” status. 

The fact that he was crippled probably did not help. It is difficult to be an authoritarian when you cannot walk. And the American People knew he couldn’t walk.

And they did not care. 

But Roosevelt himself had a buffer and stop button on his authoritarian impulses. He spend one whole year in bed recovering from polio, trying to move his big toe. He tried for years to walk to the end of his street at Hyde Park, about 1/2 a block.

And he never did accomplish either. He told confidants that this humbled him, make him aware of the common man, the forgotten man, but not to be manipulated like Hitler did and Trump is doing now, but to be helped, to be protected. 

And of course there was Elenor Roosevelt , who was a governor on Roosevelt’s authoritarian impulses. 

And of course, there is the fact that Roosevelt knew what was going on in Germany. He saw the barbarianism of the German Army. He was briefed constantly on the dangers of fascism as the War wore on.

And he made the war a crusade against authoritarianism; a crusade for democracy. He used the slogans of Wilson, who was a racist authoritarian by the way, without the reality of hatred. In a sense, Roosevelt was the real deal, a leader in the liberal democratic tradition. 

The liberal democratic tradition is NOT the political party, it is the humanitarian liberalism of the French and American Revolution, the idealism that the common man could govern himself through a system of law and Constitutional Governance. This tradition goes back to the Renaissance and even to classical Greece; the basis of democracy.

And this tradition’s mortal enemy is authoritarianism and totalitarianism. 

Khrushchev in the quote above spoke out about the cult of the personality of Stalin and the damage it did to his country. And this was a Communist Dictator speaking. But even Khrushchev understood the danger of one person rule through force and a cult of personality.

In America right now we have a President who is attempting to become an authoritarian. And he is succeeding to some degree; but their ferocious opposition from the majority of the American People; focused of course in the Democratic and Democratic Socialist parties and movements. Trump is attempting to do what no other President has done, become a true autocrat.

And that is the battle that is raging right now in America. And Trump has enlisted, of all people, America’s natural enemy state leader, Putin of Russian to assist him. This would be unprecedented in American history; a foreign adversary’s leader to assist a President in becoming a totalitarian figure.

So far the results are certainly mixed. The separation of powers in the American Constitution seems to be working making it more and more difficult for Trump to maneuver. 

Much depends on a divided and undecided Republican Party, who craves political power, but who has limits

For example, just today the Koch Brothers have broken with Trump because of his economic policies. The alliances holding the Republican Party together are straining the more Trump acts authoritarian. The tentative special interests who coalesced around Trump is not strong and is getting shaky as Trumps misguided tariff attacks take hold. 

And the Democratic Party is not weak, even though it is much criticized. It has been energized by the “Me Too” movement sparked by the misogynist Trump; women hate the man in great numbers.

So it is an open question whether he can prevail long enough to become a true authoritarian. 

But all liberal democrats (political philosophy not party affiliation) are alarmed by how easy Trump was able to rally about 30% of the electorate to abandon completely democratic check and balances on one man rule.

The American system of democratic self government is being tested like never before; it is an open question whether it will be resolved peacefully or through Civil War. This has happened before over slavery, but authoritarian rule was not particularly the issue, no much how the Confederacy complained about Lincoln.

Lincoln had to lead during the Civil War in spite of opposition from Congress, the Press and the American people. The Union won amidst anti-draft riots, open desertion and other hindrances that almost destroyed it's fighting ability.

It was the Confederacy who tried authoritarianism with Robert E. Lee’s brilliant military leadership, but even Lee shied away from one man rule, leaving the leadership of the war’s policy to a poorly organized and definitely not autocratic leadership. In fact, the divisiveness of the Confederate Government in not being able to tax to run a mass army was a decided weakness that ultimately led to total defeat. 

The game is not yet up on Trump and a critical game it is.  There is a remote possibility that his system of authoritarianism, although clumsy, will somehow overcome his immense unpopularity with most of the American People.  

If that happens we may see a true Civil War.  

Adapt or Die

“The gap between how the economy actually works and how we’d like it to work is a breeding ground for discontent and desperate policy agendas. For our economic ills, Trump blames foreigners — immigrants and imports — along with the American officials who, over the years and according to Trump, engineered disastrous policies.”  (Washington Post Opinion Page July 23, 2018).  

This is the basic paradigm problem.  Baby boomers and their children, all now in middle age, remember the “good ole days” when the economy boomed.  I remember In Redding California, my home town, lumber was king, salaries went up, people traded up houses, constantly getting bigger (which was supposedly better) 

The country embarked on a gluttony of spending that used up resources at a record rate.

Taxes went up, but people made enough money in raises to offset them.  Nobody told us that the high tax rate on the rich was to help pay off WWII and pay for the defense spending of the Cold War, the rich were making so much money that it didn’t matter.

It took Europe and Asia about forty years to rebuild their industries.  When they did, in the mid seventies, the growth in America started to slow, as cheaper imports took over the market place.  One recession after another started, upending the political process as the party not in party used the economy to win elections.  A cycle of failure with brief successes ensued that continues to this day.  

And America swung right, into fascism, from this cycle of boom and bust (mostly bust).  And the cause, the WAR of course, it, just like WWI before it, which caused WWII.  The dislocations of war, that America had missed, was vested on it after the European and Asians economies were rebuilt.  Suddenly the shoe was on the other foot, as cheap products from Asia flooded American markets.  I remember when refrigerators were outsourced to Mexico shutting down factories in the mid-west.  

And Trump was elected to Make America Great Again.  That is impossible since the paradigm has changed.  The global economy has put America in its place, not the top dog anymore, still a powerful economic engine, but not alone.  

It’s 1970 all over again, when Reagan used this simple paradigm change to come to power, overturn high taxes, raise defense spending, and sparking yet another recession and a huge budget deficit.

And still nobody tells the American People the truth:  It’s the damn wars and their aftermath that cause economic problems.  It take years to get over it, and the distribution of global wealth is redistributed when countries rebuild, with new infrastructure and new ideas.

For example, health care;  after WWII Europe and Asia’s health care systems were in shambles...Doctors had been killed in the war, hospitals destroyed (sometimes on purpose).

To deal with this crisis, most European countries experimented with socialized medicine, or single payer systems, that spread a cheaper and more manageable system of universal health care to the population.   In many cases, like Japan for example, this was necessary to deal with widespread burns and even radiation sickness.  

America meanwhile, whose infrastructure was complete intact, stayed with the private medical system, that worked for awhile, until the inflation of post-war America drove health care and pharmaceutical prices through the roof.

So now, America’s economy is stifled by high health care costs in a system that literally rations health care toward the rich.  

Moreover, a deep and resistant poverty hit America, with rampant homelessness recently, reducing the once “shining city on the hill” to a land of panhandling.

And of course, a politician was ready to take advantage of it:  Donald Trump and the Republicans.  

First thing they did was to pass a tax cut, claiming high corporate taxes were the problem of equal distribution of wealth.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  And this will only exacerbate the inequities that are causing the widespread poverty in the first place.

Meanwhile the rest of the world, who are lengthening the lead they have over United States in the critical area of efficient use of renewable resources, are distancing themselves from the “sick giant of America”.

And the quick fix, the momentary solution, that gets demagogues elected works, putting Republicans (the party of Depression by the way) into power yet again, and like the 1920s, overspending, setting the economy up on bets and gambles, and setting us up for yet another  Depression.

And the cycle continues because nobody will tell the American People the truth and if they do tell the truth they are punished by the voters, who keep looking for the “good ole days”.

The good ole days don’t exist anymore.  The world has created a climate change situation, that is the number one threat to survival.  And many countries, especially those who had to rebuild after WWII, get it and are installing more and more renewable energy sources and using cars less and less.

The United States: well we are stuck in the past, still gauging our leaderships by gasoline prices and refusing to adapt to the new paradigm:  global economy competition, new health care paradigm, and finally the need to spread the wealth and adopt policies that help not hurt the “losers” in the new world economy.  Moreover, those countries that adapt to global climate change and the peak oil, that is hitting us right now, will at least survive; those that don’t adapt (the United States is the biggest denier) will NOT SURVIVE!

The solution is there, but it involves telling the American People the truth (true leadership is telling people what they DON’T WANT TO HEAR).  Until we do that we will be stuck in failure.  

The Great Switch

Ok, you trolls out there, her is political analysis to consider but you will have to dig out your old U.S. History books you never looked at before and READ.  Of course you won’t and I will get a bunch of half WITS with Fox News crap in response.

YOU ARE THE PROBLEM.  YOUR LACK OF READING AND SMUG ME FIRST IS BEING USED AGAINST YOU AND YOUR SONS AND DAUGHTERS WILL HAVE TO FIGHT THE WAR THAT WILL KILL US ALL!
.........

Let me get this straight...the anti-Communist Red hating party of the past, who still stands for a tough foreign policy, lots of Defense Spending, break treaties with Iran etc., is now warming up to Russia; following their fuhrer’s lead the Republicans now like Russia?

Now this is the Russia that has invaded the Ukraine, recently poisoned British nationals and directly tampered with our elections (and has done the same in several democracies).   Russia is consistent, it always attacks democracies and never attacks autocracies.

Why. Because it is an autocracy having shed its brief experiment with democracy a few years ago.

Russia is a fascist plutocracy, with socialist organization of several functions (like health care).  It is no democracy, is a single party state essentially, with a small group of men running things..

It is homophobic to the max, racist to the core, and getting poorer due to its lack of inclusion and diversity.

That’s right inclusion and diversity is a positive thing in governments. IT ALWAYS HAS BEEN.

Immigrants from Europe, Africa, Asia; etc., helped enormously to win WWI and WWII, wars essentially against plutocracy, aristocracy and fascism.

Wilson and Roosevelt after him, depicted the wars as crusades for liberal democracy, for a chance for the common man; etc.

Did it happen:  to some degree yes.  After WWII, which cost over 50 million deaths and untold damage, the world turned to democracy and freedom as it rebuilt.  Fascism was actually outlawed, racism as well,  in Germany and other fascist states.

The most radical “fix” was used on Germany and Japan, dividing Germany up for over twenty years to educate the fascism of of them.  Japan took a pledge that they still adhere to, to not militarize again.

The world saw unparalleled wealth, as the post war baby boom made America into the world’s  only super power and rebuilt Europe and Asia.  Europe and Asia benefitted from the destruction of their infrastructure with an  economic boom, rebuilding the cities destroyed by American  bombers  in record time.

The world was basically rebuilt in thirty years, making a lot of people very rich.  And the Soviet Union, who as the second strongest nation to emerge from WWII in spite of high damage and many deaths, became a rival of the United States in a Cold War, that threatened the atomic destruction of the world.

But that changed when the United States, that had waged a consistent and well thought out policy of containment of Communism (that cost the mistake of Vietnam) stuck to a bi-partisan policy that ultimately broke the Soviet Union and turned it to an experiment of democracy.

Both parties in America had a mutual enemy of Communism, that clashed with their capitalism, and continued for years to oppose Soviet aggression everywhere.  And finally, under a very conservative President, the Berlin Wall came down, the Soviet Union amazingly broke apart into several states, and atomic threats even were reduced.

But then an amazing thing happened.  A right wing movement began in America fueled by the opposition to  Civil Rights advancements of African Americans and other people of color.  A backlash is now in effect in the United States to the election of the first African American President.  Long latent fascist authoritarian tendencies have been reborn under a failed plutocrat, whose racism and fascism is flaunted not hidden.

And the white lower middle class has embraced him as a savior, as someone who will “Make America Great Again.

They are too uneducated and yes stupid, to understand that the diversity of immigrants is what saved the word TWICE during WWI and WWII.  It was America’s immigrants who returned to their home countries to stop the madness that was tearing the word apart.  It was this strength of the United States that rebuilt the world after WWII in the image of liberal democracies that stressed for a time, the well being of their people over preparations for war.

Europe was very sick from 1914 to 1945.  The illness of fascism and autocracy killed 50 million people and almost pushed the world into the abyss.

But the dream of America and democracy saved us.

Now the nightmare of America threatens to kill us all.....

The North State

Right...understand Northern California?  How about understanding tragedy?  As a Native Son of Redding here are things you should  understand:

1.  Redding has a hard glint to it, a meanness that many “newcomers” comment on.  It goes back to the gold rush days, when Old Shasta was the Queen City, where the gold was and Redding was called poverty flats.  The reason for its current  name  was when the railroad came through and the clerk at the train station was a  guy named Redding,  and he got credit for the town that was originally called Poverty Flats.  That’s right, Poverty Flats!

2.  And Poverty Flats is the core of Redding and of Northern California.  Northern California was where the gold ran out, where miners went to find more, and ran straight into the Native Americans who were not welcoming.  The miners turned to cattle ranching instead, clashed with the Natives and a genocide ensued.  And the killings were paid for with bounties.  Killing people for money is a hell of a way to start a town but that is in fact what started it.

3.  My mother was a dirt farmer.  Now there is nothing wrong with that, but every one was.  And there was no money in Redding once the gold rush petered out; after destroying the watershed and leaving a environment disaster the gold mining corporations (who really mined the gold) simply left the streams and rivers and the mounds of rocks where they had blasted them with hydrological mining and took off.  The North State was an ecological disaster; punctuated with a copper mining boom around what is now Shasta Lake that gave off such toxic fumes that it turned residents hair green; and killed hundreds.  The economy of Redding in the early twentieth century was truly victimized by corporate mining that destroyed it.

4.  Logging became a mainstay after WWII and the completion of the Dam.  Redding became a economic opportunity and the population rose for about 8 thousand to 90 thousand over the decades.   The Dam, its called “The Dam” by locals, had provided thousands of jobs during the Great Depression and literally saved the town.  It also created a conflict between the Dam “Busters” workers who followed the Federal Dam Projects and the locals.  This often resulted in violence, locals fighting the “aliens” in the gutters of California Street, known for its prostitution, gambling and sin.

5.  Then the logging ran out.  Many blamed the “spotted owl” and the “feds” for the economic  catastrophe the run down of logging brought to the north state.  At about the same time, the Cold War stopped and thousands of “immigrants” from the L.A. Basin moved into Shasta County, bringing with them two things:  conservatism and evangelical belief.

Now, Redding had never been a particularly religious town, but in the span of a few years became home to the North Valley Baptist Church, a conservative dynamo that displaced the former New Deal liberal Democrats who ran the town from the 30s to the 70s.  The south state’s  religious conservatism rushed into take the place of the loggers who moved or retired as the wood products industry died.  Union members were replaced with church members.

6.  The last Democrat to win the Congressional Seat was Bizz Johnson who retired in the late 1970s leaving a long string of increasingly conservative representatives that endures to this day.  While the rest of the state reveled in the digital revolution, growing into the fifth largest economy in the world, Redding stayed in the Poverty Flats stage, in fact shrinking in size as thousands of Bay Area residents look for cheaper housing.  They avoid Redding because the economy and political atmosphere is toxic!

7.  And the State of Jefferson madness developed out of this; the evangelicals who once again are trying to run the town, taking the place of the Baptists with the Bethel “movement” that promises redemption if you believe in spirits and particularly white straight people.

8.  Redding always was suspicious of “outsiders”.  But it has got worse.  The “boat people” from Vietnam came to Redding in the late 70s and met with a white supremacy racism that was  very ugly.  The Orange County refugees we called the white ex-defense industry workers, who had fled the south state because of “those people” now had “those people” going to school with their kids and did not like it.  The hard edge on Redding citizens turned into white backlash, as once again the “feds” were blamed for the intruders.

9.  And now Redding sits as a conservative bastion in a North State that is a mix of marijuana farmers, a small liberal faction and the rest wack nut conservatives.  

10.  And global warming, that the conservative faction thinks is bunk, will literally melt the North State away in the coming years with fires and heat that is impossible to live in.  Even with air conditioning you can’t work and live in 120 degree heat.  And solar power, a few have it, but the city who owns its power company refuses to use it, again caught in the conservative malaise.

I finally had my fill of it, my family is a Pioneer Family, my father an ex President of the Shasta County Historical Society.  I taught Shasta Country History.  But when the town twice  turned down a much needed small tax increase to replenish the recession ravaged police and fire departments, the opioid epidemic has turned Redding into a crime ridden zone where no home is safe, I had it.  I had attended Sac State for my credential and Masters and we relocated to Sacramento.  It is my second time here, but the atmosphere, even though a “Big City” was like a breath of fresh air.  The diversity is startling, but refreshing.  And Sacramento has its problems as well.  But there is a strong commitment to governing, to working for diversity and yes the American Dream that Redding once had, when I was a poor kid growing up in a town that had “money” from logging and provided me with the opportunity to rise and attend Stanford University.

And the State of Jefferson?  The lunacy of this movement is beyond belief, it would in one move reduce Redding to the Poverty Flats it used to be.  Redding has already turned its back on the state of California politically but to actually do it economically would end the town.

Finally, a small mention in this article tells it all, the population in Redding is in the low 90,000s.  It was projected to be well over 100,000 ten years ago.  That tells it all...Redding is starving itself to death with in its conservative malaise, the global warming it refuses to acknowledge and the poverty flats designation it can’t or won’t escape is a death sentence.

The Dog Whistle

The “Dog Whistle”.  The political playbook that in the south, in the Jim Crowe south, meant the Democratic Party dominated for over 100 years after the Civil War, was, as LBJ so famously stated, “You got away with saying “N”...”N”..”N” for years to get elected, now (he had just signed the Civil Rights Act) you are going to work for your votes.

Not so....the south simply switched parties, used the Republican Party’s frustration in their quest to over turn the New Deal, to switch to the “southern strategy” and the Republican Party started the “NNN” chant that worked to elected a solid south; only this time as Republicans.

The Party of Lincoln, the Party that won the Civil War, shifted to the racist party, the dog whistle party.

It took years for it to mature, and it culminated with the Tea Party, a nakedly racist organization ostensibly against taxes, but really against people of color.

And the Democratic Party obliged, by veering into the diversity camp.

What did it?  Pete Wilson.

Good ole Pete realized that the only way he could continue the Republican Party’s presence in California was to use the immigrant dirty Mexican ploy....Rather than chanting N N N, he chanted Mexican Mexican Mexican.

He mis-calculated however, taking advice from the Hoover Institute (that should be kicked off the Stanford Campus by the way) about the numbers.  He stupidly forgot that California had once been a part of Mexico and the fifth generation Californians were often of Mexican descent.  And the “dirty Mexican” chant backfired!

And pow.....the Republican Party became an after thought...the party of Reagan controls about 25% of the vote in California right now and is declining still.  

The national Democratic Party saw that, saw the diversity of California’s Democratic Party and decided that template would work nationally.

And with the election of Obama, it sure looked that way. 

But California did not have a Deep South, a Bible Belt, and the  Evangelical  base.  And the Tea Party started within weeks of Obama’s election.

They used the Health Care Bill as a rallying issue, but really the issue was N...N....N..The real reason for radical conservatives is using race to regain power for the whites in this country!

And along came Trump, who started the Birther Movement to dovetail with the Tea Party, and took over the Republican Party completely from the remnants (there wasnt’ much left) of Lincoln’s Party.  

It isn’t that the Democrats are bad strategists or bad planners, it is that the Republicans are now using the dog whistle of N...N..N...and Mexican Mexican Mexican to rally the white supremacy base.  It has always worked, especially when the other party is run by people of color.  

And of course this uneducated ignorant Republican base does not know that this formula the Dixiecrats used for years meant economic deprivation for millions of poor white “trash” (as the rich southerners  delighted in calling poor whites) and riches for a small white privileged elite (many descendants of plantation owners).  

Slavery was never fair, especially for poor whites.  Slaves took all their jobs, leaving them to starve.  

But the threat of being below the “darkies” was always enough to keep the ruling white privileged elite in power.  The south was economically depressed, still is in many areas, because the wealth is not distributed even close to fairly.

And now we have Trump, who wins because he uses the same dog whistle of white supremacy to gain power.  It doesn’t take an rocket scientist to figure this out, and Trump is no rocket scientist.

And the Democrats cannot do much, because they adopted the “California Model” and have sold out for diversity and justice...not a bad idea, a moral one indeed, but it loses in America because racism wins in America...IT ALWAYS HAS!

No Exceptionalism

I responded to the constant “We are better than this” with:

WE ARE NOT!

The point is America’s false narrative that we are somehow exceptional is extreme bullshit. We are the exceptional all right in our history of brutality.

If you take slavery and genocide of indigenous peoples there simply is no exceptionalism.

Trump is considered an anomaly by many. Is he?

How about Nixon. Or Wilson.  Hoover?  And Pierce?

Our Constitution that we will celebrate in a few days, has a slave catching provision still in it!  Only abolishing slavery abolished it!

And those slaves built an economy that led the world and the reward?  Perpetual poverty!

And what other exceptional nation on the planet elects a President who can literally end all life on earth with a slavery era provision in the “exceptional Constitution” that elects him with 3 million less votes!???  And we celebrate that and our Independence by getting drunk and blowing up things. (See Vietnam below).

And the Supreme Court that just ruled keeping certain religions out was ok while their ancestors migrated to America to avoid religious prosecution.

Good law?  Plessy v Ferguson or Dred Scott. Or the hundreds of gay bashing legislation of the past. 40 years?  And a woman will soon need a coat hanger to abort a fetus, in a dark alley, because a religious zealot is pro life, who owns an arsenal of assault weapons and cheers when black kids are shot?

Interracial marriage was finally ruled legal by the Supremes in what, 1947?  Native American women could not give birth in a California Hospital until 1927. They could not vote until 1925!  They were THE original Americans!

The reason we hear exceptionalism is White privilege that gives a huge advantage to the color of a child’s skin over all else.

We are more segregated now than in 1952.

And Vietnam?   This country determined success in that war with a body count, the same approach used in the Philippine Insurrection and the Indian Wars.   But today, the Red Wave we were promised would engulf us, sees Televisions, furniture and baseball caps made in Vietnam that proclaims Make  America Great Again. 55,000 died so we could buy that cap?

Racist homophobia has elected a ruling elite of rich pampered white people to a permanent majority even though they are not.   Mixed race people vote for racist leaders whose parents lynched their parents. What madness is this?

And white seniors are right now killing themselves at a record pace with overweight and opioids, but their last wish is that police shoot another black kid.

And guns we all need assault rifles while schools; 1st graders are gunned down by 2nd Amendment madness.

Oh and right now, I MEAN NOW, the most expensive health care system on earth has an infant mortality rate that is surpassed by third world nations in a negative way. And what about Homelessness?  I have friends who with a straight face call homelessness a life style decision. Honestly, living in a gutter is a desired life style?

That right there is the hatred, the smugness of privilege that makes this country a hell hole for many!

Oh and the gasoline economy has again kicked into overdrive using up fossil fuels so our grandchildren will starve to death. Nobody I mean nobody in this shining city on the hill dared mention that we are running out of gas.

The fact is US preeminent standing after WWII wasn’t because of our successes,it was because the rest of the world was destroyed!  We just survived by dropping a radioactive firestorm on the “Japs”. Dropping it on white people was ruled out!  We had the thing and could of used on another practitioner of genocide but....well Germans were white!

Trump is NOT AN EXCEPTION!  TRUMP IS AMERICA AND WE NEED TO ADMIT IT!

But my ancestors in their dying breaths foretold a Reckoning. A time of consequence, of accounting for the brutality.  And it is coming every time you rev up that engine!

The Rumors

The G.I.s had heard rumors.  All during the war there were rumors, but the national press did not print them.  The rumors were that Nazis were killing thousands of people because they were Jews, or retarded, or Russians, or Poles.

But war is war, and the allies were not totally innocent either; enemy soldiers who surrendered were shot down sometimes, especially by Polish and Russian soldiers.

And boatloads of migrant Jews had been turned back by the United States, returned to Germany, in yet again another spasm of nativism in the United States (it is inflicting us now as a matter of fact).

And most WASPs didn’t like Jews anyway.   They didn’t know why, their parents taught them.

So the war went on and on, and finally it ended in Europe.  And at the end, the G.I.s found them, the camps.

Many still don’t realize that the concentration camps were purposefully put close to urban areas.  One reason is that rail transportation served the death camps and terminals were in cities; but Hitler wanted the populations to know the fate of resistance and what it would be.  Hitler had the German people scared of him constantly; just like Trump.

So the smell of the crematoriums was present for years.  People knew  what was going on, but they just didn’t talk about it...

But like Ms. Barr, they ignored it.  They made up stories justifying it, the Jews caused the war, the Jews ate Christian babies, (Mexicans are murderers and rapists)....

And so German citizens lived in blissful knowing ignorance, seeped in racism and prejudice.  But Nazis were on top, they promised and delivered at first, nearly winning the war and returning the spoils of war to Germany who prospered....for about three years.

And then came a reckoning, defeat on all fronts.  And the camps ramped up their “production” killing millions.

I was born right after the war.  I grew up watching the films reacting to the horrors the G.I.s found when they liberated the death camps.  I saw the German citizens who were forced to clean up the camps because they still denied what THEY had done; and they had excuse after excuse.

Just like the hater Barr.  They had been so propagandize that just like Barr and millions of Americans today, they believed what the leader said without question.  And when called on their hate, they usually turned on the dissenter, which was a death sentence.  Citizens snitched on other citizens, being patriotic, hurling hate at their “enemies” who had been created by propaganda.

And that is EXACTLY WHAT MS. BARR DID...AND THAT IS EXACTLY WHAT FOX NEWS IS DOING AND THAT IS EXACTLY WHAT TRUMP IS USING CONSTANTLY!

Look it isn’t rocket science.  Using hate and lies to motivate and scare people, who don’t need much scaring because they are racist anyway, isn’t hard.  

Trump used the white backlash against an African American President to motivate the broad reserve of white supremacists in the country....and Barr was right there to take and use the bait.

So she knew EXACTLY what she was doing, just like some of my neighbors and friends know what they are doing right now.  It is not her sleeping medicine!  

It is not hard to understand and can be described in one sentence:  They are scared because more diversity is taking place around them and rather than accept it, they reject it with hate and prejudice.  They voted  for a racist.

And one day, the reckoning will come...Ask Germany and Japan how that went.

Supply Side Madness

And this demonstrates the huge disappointment digital economy leaders have been to all of us.  I understand they are all business types, with heavy emphasis on digital tech, stand for “progress”..

But they also are behaving like the J.P. Morgan’s of old, the “robber barons” who were the scourge of the 19th century economy.  These crooks dominated the economy until the Great Depression, that broke the public’s illusions about the “wonders” of mass production and of “the assembly line”.

Ford is a good example.  He is considered the father of the modern American automobile, but was a visceral opponent of unions.  The oil and coal industries same thing.  

The idea was then as it is not, maximize profits.  Find more profitable markets, ignore the labor that is making your riches possible, cut costs, drive up productivity; etc.etc.

And then the supply and demand cycle kicked in, the supply was huge, the demand dropped because the non union underpaid workers on the assembly line could not afford the products they were producing.

This is the same phenomenon almost 100 years later that we are seeing with Tesla  and with every other corporations  in America right now.

They have taken over the political process with the same lies they used 100 years ago, that unions were evil, that low wages were good and huge profits and salaries for themselves was the “promised land”.

Except it wasn’t.  Two products came of this:  1.  A huge division between rich and poor and concentration of wealth in a few; Depression.  2.  War.

Why war?  Really is is not difficult to see why.

War drives up demand.  It is what WWII did, ending the depression but killing 55 million in the bargain.  Then after the war, rebuilding and the growth of America’s middle class, caused a boom in consumer goods and growth of a thing called a “global economy”.  

And until about 20 years ago, this worked to spread the wealth so to speak.  And then, our business elite decided to make the whole damned mistake all over again!

The virgin economy of digital came on the stage, with its promise of democratic economic growth, spreading access to the digital economy to all.

And guess what, the robber mentality came into play once again.

Tesla , who also makes solar panels and batteries, who is the electric car guru, claims to be an environment champion, a “trust us” we know solar.

And yet, the democratization and equity spreading promise of solar panels is yet to be realized.  The CEO of Tesla is consumed with the idea of a tunnel in Southern California that will help in his commute to work, not in the selling of solar panels to the wider population.

And the demand side, is ignored for the supply side; with coming disastrous results.

Years ago, the leader of the auto workers in exasperation during negotiations shouted out, “You can continue cutting our salaries and cutting workers, you can continue making huge profits you spend our yourselves, my question is, once everyone else is broke who will buy your damned cars?”

Now its Oil, it’s the oil stupid.  We cannot produce the petroleum to run our economy anymore.  It isn’t there anymore.  Wind and solar are our only chance, coupled with yes, electric cars, buses and trains.  But this huge threat to civilization itself is ignored by the business elite.  They are deaf, dumb and blinded by greed.  

The  robber barons are consumed with cutting workforce to fight unions, who are working for equity to the digital economy.  Really they are fighting to drive demand up so the economy works.  

And what  we get are housing prices so high in the Bay Area that ordinary workers can’t live there.  So, rather than unionize and pay workers more, the idiots decide to fight the unions, cut demand to drive up supply; it’s  the same mistake that caused the Great Depression.

We did not have a paradigm template in 1929.  We could be excused as a species for being stupid.  We don’t have that luxury now.

The failure of our economy is, make  no I mistake about it, in the leadership of our economy.  And as long as they behave like Rockefeller, Henry Ford, and Morgan, we are doomed again to disaster.

True insanity I is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.

Hoover Wrong Again

Victor is a member of the Hoover Institute; a cabal of right wing fools who are paid a high salary, get to live near Stanford University, all because the name sake of a hideous building (Hoover Tower) purports to be an academic research center.

In fact, it is a bastion of right wing politics.

And in this article it shows its base stupidity.

The same stupidity, actually ignorance on poor Herbert Hoover’s part, that saw the world in the paradigm of the 1920s.  This ignorance plunged the United States into a tariff ridden depression in 1929; just like Trump is doing now.

After the war the paradigm was heavily influenced by the disaster that was WWI.  

The war had begun like all European squabbles, a local dispute that led to an assassination and then dragged related monarchs into a localized war.  These wars usually resolved themselves in short order, more ritual than violence.

But America’s Civil War had happened about 50 years earlier.  And it taught the practitioners of war new techniques: rapid fired weapons, artillery and even airplanes.

The Civil War, the first “modern” war was won by attacking civilians and destroying the capacity of the enemy to make war.  Sherman’s “March to the Sea” that was really a practice of “total war” destroyed the south’s civilian capacity to make war.  It ended with mass casualties and a level of violence not seen in mankind’s history.

And that was what first Germany and then other European nations practiced for 1914 to 1918.  The war was almost won at first in the old way, a glorious offensive that out maneuvered the enemy, with minimal casualties, then a brokered peace.  Unfortunately for the youth of Europe, that quick end did not happen, and the artillery and machine guns took over, reducing the war to a killing machine.  

And entire generation of young men died in that war.  Cities and towns were attacked more and more; killing the enemy meant killing ALL the enemy, including women and children.  

Only the entry of the United States, who used the budding technology of the next war, tanks and airplanes, maneuvered around the trenches that had chewed up a generation and defeated the Germans.

What fed this human calamity was a paradigm shift that nobody could see in warfare (except for the state of Georgia that had endured Sherman’s war crimes in 1864).  This total war and attacked on civilians was a key factor in the new paradigm of warfare that killed 55 million twenty years later.

And Victor doesn’t see any of it.  He is still stuck in that paradigm of 1914; he sees nationalism as a manifestation of democracy somehow.  He doesn’t even notice the danger of modern warfare, that this time, holds the real threat of the end of mankind.

But he sits in the phallic  Symbol of Hoover Tower and writes his nonsense, paid well and ignored by a University that should know better.  

For Whom the Bell Tolls

Sometimes Politics has to stand aside.  That happened this afternoon when we watched “John McCain For Whom The Bell Tolls” an  HBO Documentary.

The politics don’t matter, they really don’t.  The leadership does and the service does.  At the end of the day, and that is where McCain is now, that is what counts.  Character does count.

McCain admits over and over again that he made mistakes, that he is human, that he made errors in judgement; etc etc.  He was no saint, but he admitted it.

And he is dying of the same disease that took Ted Kennedy.

I remember the day after Kennedy died.  I was on the putting green at Gold Hills and one of my right wing Republican Friends said cruelly about Kennedy, “They shot the wrong Kennedy many years ago”.

Now there were two Kennedys who were shot dead, but the only one who wasn’t shot was Senator Ted Kennedy.

I told the perpetrator of hate what I thought of him and his lack of humanity and  reminded him that my wife had died of cancer and left.  I didn’t play golf that day.

I did, in my friend’s defense, receive a profuse apology for his stupid statement.  I would like to think he grew a little that day.

But partisan politics is why the statement was made.  And sometimes politics clouds our humanity and our feelings for one another. And politics is an means to the true end: the public interest.

Democracies are messy and clumsy in getting to the public interest.  Often they can be so cumbersome they never get there.  But the alternative, authoritarian fascism is so harmful to the public interest that it simply cannot be allowed.

We are in a very dark place right now.  President Trump has the knack of turning people against one another like no other politician save McCarthy in the 1950s.  And McCarthy did not have access to immediate media, social media and the rest.

And the country is groaning in agony of division and hate.  And the public interest is harder and harder to define.

  And McCain is dying in Arizona with the same cancer that killed Ted Kennedy.

And Ted Kennedy made mistakes; he was involved in a fatal car accident that killed a woman and led to the basic end of his political career.  And we all watched in sorrow as two brothers before him were buried in Arlington, victims of assassination.

I read the review of the HBO documentary about John McCain.  Several reviewers were unkind to the man even now in a political way.  It is as if making more political points even now on a man who is definitely down, who was an American hero by any stretch of the imagination, somehow what, makes you what, superior?

It makes you a spiteful ignorant fool.

Look, the WE  is more important than the ME.  McCain got that.  He fought in an unpopular war,  but for which he convinced  the government later in life, to recognize Vietnam as a country in spite of the politics.   He worked to recognize a country that had tortured him for years.

 He ran for President twice and supported yet another unpopular war, but came to make comments about the fact that it was unwarranted.  He admitted that he was human and made mistakes.

And  he lost  to the first African American elected President.  He famously did not condemn the Confederate Flag, doing what he admitted later was the wrong thing, he did the politically expedient thing; and it didn’t work.  But he apologized for it.  He apologized!  And he also famously took the mike from  deluded woman who claimed Obama was an “Arab” and commented that he was a good man and he would not stoop to that level to get elected; and he didn’t.

Trump stooped to that level with his Birther crap.

He was a hard right conservative in many things.  But that right was not racial, it was political and economic.  He truly believed  in personal liberty unfettered by government.

That of course in my political view is wrong, because again the WE  is more important than the WE.  I sometimes think John knows that in his bones as well.

And McCain agreed with me there, valuing friendship and bipartisan effort as “the regular order”.  The regular order is a government that works for the public good.

Finally, my memory of this American Hero will always be his walking to the podium to cast the deciding vote to destroy the law that was his biggest political rival’s accomplishment.  He could have voted yes and wiped out Obama’s Health Care Bill, the ACA….but he didn’t.

 He put his hand in the air and gave the thumbs down sign.  And that vote saved millions of people’s health care.  And he voted that way not because he agrees with government sponsored health care; he doesn’t.  He voted that way because the public interest was at odds with the proposal,  he knew it, and the power in the Senate had gone around the regular order to get something that would hurt a lot of people.

And all the politics be damned.  For McCain  the country counted first.

And I will stand and salute the man and his honor with that one McCain like demonstration, that one thumbs down movement was his high point.  And he voted that way because it was not in the “regular order”.

That, my fellow citizens in the We not the Me; the regular order is working together for the common good.

And Senator McCain did that more than the other, much more in his life for Whom the Bells Toll.