I always appreciate what Paul Street writes. I only very occasionally send
things on to my children. They don't want to read the stuff I send. I think
it's really generational. I've been reading a novel which begins in the early
60's with two young women who meet in college. It has to do with how they react
to the political issues of the time and it's a book that I can really relate to
personally. It made me realize that as a young person, first just starting out
in the work world and then married and pregnant, my attitude, like that of
other people of my age backthen, was that if something was wrong, you tried to
change it. We supported all the people who were active in the civil rights
movement, even if we, ourselves, weren't doing something specific. We
demonstrated against the Vietnam War. My children, now adults, one in her
fifties, the other in her late forties, accept things as they are. They may not
like things as they are, but they would never go out on a limb to change
anything. They would never demonstrate against anything. They would never stand
up to power. Whenever I talk about how something should be different, could be
better, their typical response is, "Mom, that's how things are now."
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
<blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
Sent: Friday, February 14, 2020 3:42 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: Is Trump the Worst of the Worst?
Thanks, I appreciate this one. I sent it along to my three children, my three
eldest grandsons, and my kid sister(83).
Carl Jarvis
On 2/14/20, miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Is Trump the Worst of the Worst?
(Gage Skidmore / Flickr)(CC-BY-SA)
I've been as focused on the Trump impeachment and presidential primary
dramas as any other American political commentator in recent months
and weeks. At the same time, I've been keeping notes on developments
overshadowed by the non-defenestration of Donald Trump and the
candidate contests in Iowa and New Hampshire. The Trump-led march to
apocalypse has been continuing apace beneath the bigger headlines, my journal
suggests.
Most reasonably attentive U.S. citizens know that Australia was struck
in January by epic and lethal wildfires that followed extreme drought there.
Far fewer Americans know the drought and fires were the consequences
of anthropogenic (capitalogenic, really) global warming driven by the
excessive extraction and burning of fossil fuels. Fewer still know
that Australia is a leading climate change culprit thanks to its
large-scale mining and export of coal and that its Prime Minister
Scott Morrison has stood with Trump and Brazil's eco-fascist President
Jair Bolosonaro as a leading global climate-denier.
Even mildly observant American news consumers know Trump murdered a
top Iranian military commander in a targeted assassination drone
attack in Iraq last month - an action that brought the U.S. to the
brink of a major war in the Middle East. Few Americans know this
reckless and provocative attack crossed a new (anti-)"constitutional
Rubicon." The open U.S. execution of a governmental military leader
atop a foreign state with which the U.S. was not formally at war was
an unprecedented U.S. violation of national and international law.
That the murder took place without the permission of Iraq's government
made Trump's transgression more audaciously criminal.
Most Americans are certainly aware a deadly coronavirus broke out in
China and has spread around the world, including to the U.S. Far fewer
Americans know the Trump White House's war on "the administrative
state" (really on those parts of the federal government that don't
serve concentrated wealth and power or that punish the working and
lower classes) has rolled back the federal government's ability to respond
effectively to pandemics.
Trump has slashed funding for the federal Centers for Disease Control
and Prevention and its infectious disease research. For 2020, he
proposes cutting the CDC budget by $1.3 billion, 20% below the
previous year's level, raising serious concerns among public health
experts about the nation's capacity to protect the citizenry against a
deadly contagion.
"Cutting the CDC in the middle of a pandemic," writes Esquire's
Charles Pierce, "is not viable in a functioning republic. We do not
currently have one."
Government-imposed poverty could also finish you off. Also lost in the
news fog of impeachment and presidential primaries were two cruel
White House assaults on the poor. In December, Trump issued an
executive order that will remove 700,000 deeply impoverished American
adults from SNAP (food stamp) benefits. Charities and churches are
gearing up to try to meet a fraction of the need this vicious policy
will produce among "surplus" Americans who have been deemed disposable
by the administration.
Two weeks ago, the right-wing U.S. Supreme Court (on which two Trump
appointees confirmed by the right-wing U.S. Senate have swung the
balance of judicial power to the far-starboard side) ruled the
Department of Homeland Security can implement Trump's nativist,
Stephen Miller-drafted "public charge rule." This malicious policy
lets U.S. immigration officials deny green cards, visas and/or
admission to the U.S. on the grounds that current or prospective
immigrants might be "likely" to use government benefits, including
food stamps, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, Section 8
housing assistance, federal housing vouchers and Supplemental Security
Income. The rule makes past or imagined future receipt of public
benefits (including state and local cash assistance) a barrier to
legal status. It lets immigration officers consider low English
proficiency, low income, bad credit scores, medical problems and lack
of private health insurance as reasons to deny immigrants green cards and
visas.
This spiteful "wealth test" will affect an estimated 4 million
immigrants a year. According to the American Friends Service
Committee,
This change will force immigrant families to choose between their
health and well-being and lawful immigration status: an impossible
choice that harms everybody. If they access benefits, they may leave
their family vulnerable to separation. Or they may forgo needed
assistance.
Another underappreciated story takes us back to climate and the
southern reaches of the planet. It was recently reported to little
fanfare that West Antarctica's massive Thwaites Glacier has been
melting at a dramatically rising rate thanks to warming ocean
undercurrents. The cause of this ominous erosion, which could raise
global sea levels by 10 feet, is the kind of capitalist-led climate
change the Very Stable Genius tells the world not to be "alarmist"
about even as he shreds environmental regulations, forbids federal
employees from mentioning climate change and otherwise acts to
accelerate the transformation of the entire planet into a giant
greenhouse gas chamber.
Trump's 2021 fiscal-year budget proposal slashes funding for the
Environmental Protection Agency by more than 25%. This is hardly
surprising.
Trump has issued executive orders undoing regulations that protect
children from mercury poisoning and try to preserve the nation's water
supplies and public lands.
Along the way, Noam Chomsky notes in a recent interview, Trump
continues "to dismantle the last vestiges of the arms control regime
that has provided some limited degree of security from terminal
nuclear war." Even worse, perhaps, Trump has recently furthered
prospects for such war by deploying a highly provocative new,
"low-yield tactical'" nuclear weapon (the W76-2, requested, designed
and produced under the Trump administration) aboard a U.S. nuclear
submarine.
Not content merely to smite the poor, immigrants, his political
enemies, constitutional checks and balances and the rule of law at
home and abroad, the president seems dedicated to bringing forth the
collapse of a decent and organized human existence - and indeed the
downfall of life on Earth. It's no wonder Chomsky calls Trump "the
most dangerous criminal in human history."
Hitler's goal, Chomsky notes, "was to rid the German-run world of
Jews, Roma, homosexuals and other 'deviants,' along with tens of
millions of Slav 'Untermenschen.' But Hitler was not dedicated with
fervor to destroying the prospects of organized human life on Earth in
the not-distant future [along with millions of other species]."
A socially and environmentally concerned Christian I know
half-jokingly muses if "the president of the United States is the Antichrist."
Sadly, the corporate-imperial Democrats seem to have been determined
to indirectly reelect "the most dangerous criminal in human history"
by handing him the long diversionary gifts of RussiaGate and
UkraineGate and working furiously to prevent the presidential
nomination of Bernie Sanders - the presidential candidate most ready,
willing and able to mobilize enough lower-, working-, and middle-class
voters to defeat Trump (forcing him to act on his clear threats to
defy an electoral count that doesn't go his
way)
in November.
None of Trump's worst crimes were included in the Democratic-led House
of Representatives' case against "the most dangerous criminal in human
history." As with the Richard Nixon impeachment hearings, the charges
centered not on the president's most terrible transgressions bur
rather "on his illegal acts to harm Democrats," as Chomsky puts it.
The Democrats never had a chance of removing Trump through
impeachment, thanks to Republican control of the Senate.
My nomination for either the stupidest or the most cynical thing said
by a U.S. senator so far this year is Susan Collins' statement that
Trump will change his authoritarian ways since impeachment by the
House taught him "a pretty big lesson." The truth is quite the
opposite. Trump learned yet again as throughout his long criminal
career that he can get away with yet more nasty shit. As the Trump
presidency's incisive chronicler Michael Wolff observes in his latest
book, "Siege: Trump Under Fire":
One of the many odd aspects of Trump's presidency was that he did not
see being president, either the responsibilities or the exposure, as
being all that different from his pre-presidential life. He had
endured almost countless investigations in his long career. He had
been involved in various kinds of litigation for the better part of
forty-five years. He was a fighter who, with brazenness and
aggression, got out of fixes that would have ruined a weaker, less
wily player. That was his essential business
strategy: what doesn't kill me strengthens me. Though he was wounded
again and again, he never bled out.
Trump's longstanding modus operandi has been validated again: he can
tough it out and emerge more powerful than before.
Hence the "shocking" aftermath of Trump's Senate "exoneration": the
cold but unsurprising firings of impeachment witnesses Gordon Sondland
and Alexander Vindman along with Vindman's twin brother (authoritarian
rulers like to punish whole families); the announcement that 70 "Obama
holdovers" were or will be dismissed from the National Security
Council, and the "rule-of-law"
meltdown involving Trump and his attorney general's norm-smashing
intervention to veto federal prosecutors' sentencing recommendations
in the case of convicted Trump thug Roger Stone.
Pardons loom for Stone and other top Trump crime associates not named
Michael Cohen. Is the president planning purge trials for after the
election?
Faced with this openly authoritarian, barefacedly transgressive
"beyond the rule-of-law" behavior, liberal cable-news types can do
little more than shake their heads and tell viewers that ordinary
Americans "only have one recourse left:" our holy,
once-every-1,460-days chance to spend two minutes in a major party
voting booth. In "liberal"-bourgeois media outlets, it isn't just
about keeping the ballot box sanitized against Sanders "socialism"
(New Deal social progressivism). It's also about keeping the people
from protesting out in the streets, which millions of them really
ought and need to be doing when the world's most powerful office is
held by "the most dangerous criminal in human history" - and when the
normal bourgeois-constitutional and electoral mechanisms for containing and
removing that criminal are being revealed as dangerously inadequate.
Chomsky's above-quoted interview on Donald "Worse Than Hitler" Trump
ends by praising Sanders for sparking a movement that "would proceed
beyond the narrow realm of electoral politics to far broader and
constant activism and engagement in public affairs." That strikes me
as more of an aspirational than an accurate description of the Sanders
phenomenon, which by my observation is 97% electoralist so far. The
sooner it goes beyond and becomes what Chomsky says it is, the better.
Nothing Sanders is calling for will have a snowball's chance in hell
without massive mobilization beneath and beyond the election cycle.
Paul Street
Contributor
Paul Street holds a doctorate in U.S. history from Binghamton University.
He
is former vice president for research and planning of the Chicago
Urban League. Street is also the author of numerous books,.
Paul Street
