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.

Your Dishwasher Is Killing Your Grandchildren!

Currently California, that ‘leads’ the United States in renewal electricity energy production, uses about 75  percent coal and natural gas to produce our electricity.  The rest comes from renewables.  A tiny fraction is from solar.

Solar is the least expensive and easiest renewable electricity source but has one big drawback...it is basically free because the sun’s energy is free.

Corporations can’t figure out how to ration it.  They can’t figure out how to turn a profit.

If you are a solar panel owner, you know your electric company moves heaven and earth to charge you for the problems your putting electricity back into the grid causes...leaving out that basically this is a ruse since power lines can run in two directions and the real costs were paid a long time ago.  But many California cities are their own power company, providing electricity to their customers and running the police departments with the revenue.

We have starved cities and counties to death with our Prop 13s and our tax cuts, blaming government for everything and approaching revenue like its killing our souls (the recent 12 cent gas tax that is desperately needed for highway repair and mass transit development).

But we continue as idiots ignoring the FACT that right now over 70% of our electricity is produced by sources that are running out fast.

And sources that can be used to power automobiles, trains and buses are going into your air conditioner!

But it will never run out right?

WRONG!

Put up the solar panels, insist on wind power and tell your idiot conservative friends to SHUT UP...when they complain about bird deaths that allegedly happened from wind power (sound diversion keeps the birds away).

The FACT is greedy and morally bankrupt cities and corporations are quietly fighting solar and wind rather than investing public dollars in them instead of fighting them.  Many  small cities (like Redding, ,CA) own vast areas of public land that could easily hold solar arrays but refuse to invest the money (our money by the way) in solar arrays.

What is wrong with this picture.  We are right now killing our grandchildren right now every time you run your dishwasher.

Trump is no Truman!

First of all Truman was no Trump.  Truman reigned in MacArthur  who stupidly was attempting to invade China.  Good ole Dugout Doug decided on his own that goading China into a war was a good idea in 1950, advancing toward the Chinese Korean border.  This also coordinated with the “lost China” crowd, Republicans who decided that the only way to stop the New Deal was to subvert it through criticisms of foreign policy.

Their constant call for a “get tough” and win back China disregarded the nationalism of the Chinese, was racist from the start, and almost got us into a land war in Asia (which we were trapped into with Vietnam).  

The reasons for this were simple, nothing else worked for the Republican Party that had not only caused the Great Depression but left the country totally unprepared for WWII.  

China warned us several times, then allowed our troops to advanced up the valleys toward China while the Chinese infantry took the high ground, causing one of the worst defeats in United States Army history.

The survivors of that stupidity were able to escape, preserving enough presence to fight the Korean War to a final stalemate that persists today.  Truman fired MacArthur who was scheming to run for President in 1952, as a Republican of course.  

The disaster that he led destroyed his political career.

And Truman had the fortitude and integrity to take a very unpopular stance which preserved the President as Commander in Chief.  MacArthur was a renegade and had to be stopped.  Truman fired him.

Truman also integrated the Armed Services, quite an accomplishment for a man from Missouri, a border state with strong connections to the KKK.

There is absolutely no comparison between Truman and Trump.

Truman was, for the time, a mainstream Democrat, a New Dealer who was selected by an ailing Roosevelt to continue his policies; which he did.  The country may have appeared to be tied fo the New Deal, but the REAL reason for Eisenhower’s election was the disaster of the the Korean War.

People were tired of war.  Many WWII vets had joined the reserves after the war, where a few years into an enlistment and found themselves back on the front lines; with growing families at home.

A long conflict was the LAST thing they would tolerate. 

That was why the Democrats lost in 1952, the same reason they lost in 1968; stuck in an unpopular and costly war.  

Truman was no populist...but he was a great President because he continued the policies of one of the greatest Presidents of all time.

Trump?  He is a shadow of a leader and does not deserve to be mentioned in the same article with Truman.