The Nation published this timely piece on the Trump Administration draft reinterpreting the religious freedom clause of the U.S. Constitution.
Click HERE to read the plan that would serve as grounds for all kinds of discrimination – until the Supreme Court ruled it unconstitutional.
Today’s email from a respected friend calls attention to a British opinion piece on the American Inauguration.
Today I wish I could find a single line in this post-inaugural Guardian piece (God, even a phrase) that strikes me as false.
I can’t.
I can’t either.
Click to read The Observer view on bullying, aggressive, nationalist Donald Trump
Something is dying today at noon Eastern Standard Time.
Not everyone holding their breath on Inauguration Day is . . . a liberal, a radical, an anarchist, a socialist . . . a whatever. Click “Trump is the waterbeetle of American politics and he’ll keep on flabbergasting” to read conservative columnist George F. Will‘s Washington Post opinion piece. Wednesday’s Washington Post is worth a read today. So is the NYT photo of the President-Elect and new First Lady in front of the statue of Abraham Lincoln (look closely at Lincoln’s face) at the Lincoln Memorial.
I believe in the resurrection of hope. But I experience today as a Good Friday and Holy Saturday kind of day, a day when collective madness delivers the Oval Office and the nuclear codes into the hands of a waterbeetle.
“Drain the swamp” had a nice ring to it, until you realize that a swamp is an essential part of nature. Think Everglades. Think nature undisturbed. Think the spaces that have been drained and filled by real estate developers – pristine places we humans once regarded as wasteland waiting to be cultivated by a more civilized, more cultured species than tadpoles, frogs, alligators and crocodiles.
When Donald Trump promised to drain the swamp, some hearers believed he was talking about the human swamp of Wall Street and corrupted politicians.
Now we know he meant something else. His cabinet appointments are Wall Street billionaires and corporate executives with histories of destroying the natural swamp for the purposes of real estate development, fossil fuel industry profit, and profit.
The Oxford online dictionary defines “trumpery“as:
“Showy but worthless: ‘trumpery jewellery’
“1.1 Delusive or shallow:
“[as modifier] ‘that trumpery hope which lets us dupe ourselves’”
Before getting excited about draining the swamp, ask for clarification about which swamp will be drained, who is going to drain it, and for what purpose. Otherwise, it’s all trumpery, and we’ve been duped.
After a brain stretching week with The Nation‘s Katrina Vanden Huevel, John Nichols, Laura Flanders, Sasha Abramsky, Dorian Warren, Peter Kornbluh, Dennis and Elizabeth Kucinich, my head is still spinning. Too much to write about.
We return to Views from the Edge with this thoughtful NYT Sunday Review op-ed that addresses what The Nation speakers, panels, and guests spent the week discussing.
Click HERE to read “Is Donald Trump a Threat to Democracy?”
Working in his carpenter shop in Florence, Italy, Geppetto, the marionette-maker, could not have imagined that Pinocchio would become President of the United States of America. Neither could Carlo Collodi whose The Adventures of Pinocchio (1881) painted a more complex, less likable Pinocchio than the Walt Disney film version (1940) that popularized the story in America.
My generation grew up on Pinocchio. How could we not? He was eternally boyish. He was charming. When we told a fib to our parents, we empathized whenever poor little Pinocchio’s nose told on him. Pinocchio was a lovable liar in whom we saw our own flawed but lovable selves without the less attractive dimensions of Collodi’s original Pinocchio who, on the day he is born, cruelly snatches the wig from his marionette maker’s head. From his very first day, Pinocchio has a mind of his own far beyond and quite different from Geppetto’s imagination.
Neither Carloddi nor Geppetto could have imagined that on January 20, 2017 Pinocchio would raise his right hand to take the oath of office as President of the United States. If Geppetto were still able to pull the marionette’s strings, it would not happen. Geppetto would remember his stolen wig. And, if perchance, Geppetto were on the dais when the humanized Pinocchio raises his right hand, he might stretch out his own hand to check whether Pinocchio is wearing his wig.
Pinocchio has a way with words. He calls those who question his integrity ‘liars’ and ‘criminals’ He rallies people with his limited vocabulary. He gropes women and brags about it — it’s not every wooden marionette who gets to do what Geppetto would find deplorable. When he makes promises he cannot keep, his nose grows, but not everyone can see it. It grows slowly, inch-by-inch so that the original image blinds people to its peculiar length.
But there’s another dimension to Pinocchio’s personality that is largely unknown to the general public. He loves to play Pinochle, the game for four that is includes a trump suit, with his family. It’s harder to lie to three family members than it is on stage, and it may be that Pinochle may yet shrink the length of Pinocchio’s nose. Ivanka and Melania didn’t appear in Collldi’s The Adventures of Pinocchio or the Disney version of the story, but their parts in the ongoing story may save us yet.
Those who cringe at the thought of Pinocchio with his groping hands on a nuclear arsenal can always hope Pinocchio’s third wife and favorite daughter will transform the evening Pinochle game as a way to serve the people. In Pinochle the trump suit get spread among the players; no one can dominate. If we’re lucky, Ivanka and Melania will gentle the meanness Pinocchio exhibited when he snatched Geppetto’s wig the day he was ‘born’, keep his nose short, and do for Pinocchio’s what Eva Braun was never able to do: keep his right arm from rising to a salute.
Goldman Sachs former partner “Steven Mnuchin, a financier with deep roots on Wall Street and in Hollywood but no government experience, is expected to be named Donald J. Trump’s Treasury secretary . . . .”. – NYT, Nov. 30, 2016.
Here’s a memory jogger about Goldman Sachs from 2012.
“THE WALL STREET TATTLER” – Gordon C. Stewart — March 15, 2012
How could he do this? Is Greg Smith a tattler? Or, perhaps, Judas?
How could one of Wall Street’s own go to the New York Times (“Why I am leaving Goldman Sachs”) to publicly denounce the company’s culture? “He just took a howitzer and blew the entire firm away,” said Larry Doyle of Greenwich Investment Management.“ (“Wall Street Exec Quits with Public Broadside“).
According to the LA Times article, Goldman Sachs’ CEO Lloyd Blankfein suggests that Mr. Smith – Goldman’s executive director and head of the firm’s United States equity derivatives business in Europe, the Middle East and Africa.- is a “disgruntled employee.” William Cohan, author of Money and Power: How Goldman Sachs Came to Rule the World, says that “there are lots of disgruntled people who leave Wall Street, and they don’t do this” (i.e. open their mouths.) “What I’m hearing (on Wall Street),” said Cohan, “is sour grapes. You just pigged out at the trough for 12 years and you don’t have enough sense to keep your mouth shut.” (underlining mine)
Keeping one’s mouth shut is the name of the game on Wall Street.
Conscience may have its place so long as you keep it to yourself. You can have a conscience on Wall Street, just don’t exercise it. You’re part of an elite gang. Whether on the Street corners of impoverished neighborhoods like Watts in LA and Bedford-Styvesant in NYC, or in the center of crony capitalism that is Wall Street, gang members don’t rat on other gang members. If you don’t like it, swallow hard and keep your mouth shut.
Goldman’s rebuttal to Mr. Smith’s statement -“It makes me ill how callously people talk about ripping off their clients,” referring to their own clients as Muppets – hardly has the ring of strong denial. “We disagree with the views expressed, which we don’t think reflect the way we run our business.”
Hmmm. “…don’t think…”? Why not “don’t”?
It’s a rare thing for a spokesperson for a corporation with the best legal counsel in the world to say anything than a flat-out denial. “We don’t think” sets up the issue as a matter of perception, not fact. It’s Goldman’s perceptions of itself versus Mr. Smith’s disgruntled perception.
Mr. Smith’s refusal to live by the Wall Street gang code of conduct will lead to a barrage of attacks on his character calculated to divert the public’s attention from an institution that eats people’s investments and life savings to the Judas who is without integrity.
Goldman understands that for most of us the world is personal, not institutional. We don’t like tattlers and turn-coats, disgruntled employees who never learned the lesson of kindergarten that you never tattle on your friends. You don’t go running home to tell momma. Part of the code of the playground is not to tell.
What’s even more unusual in this case is that Greg Smith dealt in derivatives. Remember them? Derivatives – a complicated form of financial market gambling so convoluted that even the people who manage them can’t explain how they work – were at the center of the Wall Street meltdown in 2008. They were legal then. They are legal now. Goldman Sachs and the rest of the Wall Street gang of crony capitalism are still calling the shots with the highest paid Washington lobbyists money can buy.
Greg Smith is a Wall Street Judas who betrayed his gang not with a kiss but with a howitzer.
How could he do this? Why didn’t the guy who ate at the pig trough for 12 years just kiss and say good-bye? Why did he make his money and then break the code? Unless…unless…unlike so many of those who were taught not to tattle, Greg Smith couldn’t live with himself and decided not to run home to tell momma but to run to the New York Times. He’ll never again be allowed on the playground.
POSTSCRIPT, November 30, 2016: So much for the howitzer. Like Jimmy Stewart in “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” in 1939, Greg Smith was a hero. Donald Trump is no Mr. Smith. So much for “draining the swamp.”
“The larger the mob, the harder the test. In small areas, before small electorates, a first-rate man occasionally fights his way through, carrying even the mob with him by the force of his personality. But when the field is nationwide, and the fight must be waged chiefly at second and third hand, the force of personality cannot so readily make itself felt, then all the odds are on the man who is, intrinsically, the most devious and mediocre — the man who can most adeptly disperse the notions that his mind is a virtual vacuum.
“The Presidency tends, year by year, to go to such men. As democracy is perfected, the office represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. We move toward a lofty ideal. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.”
Vote today! If you’re still considering who to support for President, consider good old Pat Paulson, America’s savior. Then vote.
Exhausted by the 2016 election, and knowing that undecided voters are few and are unlikely to be persuaded by anything I might say, I nevertheless decided to speak up one last time here. There’s a knot in my stomach. Silence only makes it worse. Silence – even for a day – would contribute to evils I’ve long deplored.
From the time I became conscious of the world, I have asked how Hitler could rise to power.
Now I know.
A child of World War II, I have learned that the questions are more important than the answers, and that sometimes the answers don’t come. Yet, as I look back on my life story, the question was not about Hitler. It was about the German people who elected him.
It still is. But this year, it’s not about the Germans. It’s about us, the Americans.
I’ve spent a lifetime living in the shadow of Adolf Hitler and the societal madness that elected him, determined from very early in life to oppose the darkness, the terror, the long shadow of Dachau, Buchenwald, and Auschwitz. Of nationalism, militarism, Arian racial superiority, global imperialism, and the startling echoes that still ring out from the gas chambers and gallows of the same society that bequeathed the world with the high culture of Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, Schopenhauer, Hegel, and Thomas Mann. How, I have asked myself forever, could this have happened? I’ve looked inside myself and wondered what I might have felt and done during the rise of the German Third Reich.
Now I know.
The question is no longer hypothetical. No longer abstract. No longer just philosophical, psychological, or sociological. It’s immediate and practical. It’s staring me in the face every day as I watch the crowds clapping for a presidential candidate whose name is on everything he’s ever touched as a businessman and who has made it his business to put his hands where they have not been welcome.
The crowds that support Donald Trump are drawn by an irresistible force to make America great again. In Germany it was the same. It’s a page out of Hitler’s playbook, but the differences between the United States in 2016 and Germany in 1930s are strikingly different. Germany had been defeated in World War I. America was victorious. Its economy was in shambles. Ours is the envy of the world. Germany’s post-war sovereignty was limited.Ours is not. The German people perceived the Weimar Republic as weak, powerless, and ineffective, a refrain echoed in the American far right’s cacophonous contradictions that charge the Obama Administration with too much power in domestic policies, on the one hand, and weakness against international terrorism.
During the 1920s and early ‘30s, the people of Bach, Beethoven, Mozart and Hegel felt humiliated, their national pride had been assaulted. But. . . assaulted by whom?
Jews, gypsies, and homosexuals became the scapegoats against which the pure Germans could define themselves and make Germany great again. Today in America Muslims, Mexicans, and LGBTQ have become the equivalent scapegoats of the Donald Trump campaign, and a copy of Hitler’s speeches is in the Trump master bedroom.
If the German people were drawn like iron to a magnet by a charismatic personality who gave singular voice to their grief and anger, it was not the last time a nation would go down that road to fascist madness. It begins as a kind of love affair. Looking into the human psyche, Schopenhauer (1788 – 1860) wrote:
The ultimate aim of all love affairs … is more important than all other aims in man’s life; and therefore it is quite worthy of the profound seriousness with which everyone pursues it. What is decided by it is nothing less than the composition of the next generation …. (The World as Will and Representation, Supplements to the Fourth Book).
The next generation and generations to come are at stake in the U.S.A. on November 8, 2016.
As every American president has said, “May God bless the United States of America.” I add, and may God save us all from the worst in ourselves.
Views from the Edge 