The Marionettes of Christmas

Now that the United States has lost its struggle with Russia in Syria our government would like us to believe in or own innocence;  that this bloody massacre lies at the feet of Vladimir Putin, the Al-Assad regime and Iran.  It’s a very tall tale to sell given the investment of the Standard Oil Company of California in Saudi Arabia’s oil a hundred years ago.  The long history of U. S. supported corporate investment in Middle East oil and frequent U.S sponsored attempts to overthrow oil nation regimes, some of them democratically elected, are well documented; as are profitable arms sales to Iraq, Iran, the Saudis, Yemen and so on--often all at the same time. These have been the bloody standard tools of U. S. foreign policy in the Middle East. 

Here at home there’s a certain similarity with the post-election efforts of one-half of the U. S. population (the Democrats) trying to de-legitimize the other half.   Aside from inviting civil war at home, in both cases we're seeing the same tell-tale signs of death and denial (Bill Clinton dropping his ”Electors” ballot in the slot and blaming it all on the FBI). 

            What’s really happened? There’s been nothing like Aleppo since Hiroshima, really, or Dresden.  Nor has there ever been anything in modern time like globalization and automation destroying  tens of millions of people’s livelihoods.  So who or what did this? The disturbing answer in the interview with Henry Kissinger published this week in the current (December 2016) Atlantic monthly justifies the Vietnam and Iraq wars as expressions of  American exceptionalism. Not unlike Silicon Valley’s claim that exporting jobs is not a moral issue.  The assumption is that the powerful are inherently virtuous.

             Kissinger defines exceptionalism as constitutionalism and dedication to human rights but it’s clear that he rests it on the religious myth of a divine gift to chosen people such as  Americans and Israelis.  This pervasive myth has high utility and is visible today in the Hitlerian drift  of President-elect Trump’s tactic of discrediting the press to an economically wounded population.  Even after the election, Trump’s advisers seem sinister in intent as they send him out again and again to rally these wounded to their future purposes by strengthening  their cultural DNA fantasy of salvation by God’s messenger, Donald Trump.  

             It’s the most dangerous tactic and moment since the Civil War; a demonic absurdity that ironically counts on Christmas and Hanukkah for reinforcement.  Both the calamity at Aleppo and familiar U. S. political practitioners  count on civil society as marionettes whose strings are pulled not by powerful puppet masters but by their own religious myths.  

               It’s the task of people of faith to call these idols and demons by name and know the difference between promises, propaganda and truth. 

How it all Ended (First Draft)

         A perfect storm of congressional, corporate and constitutional crisis looms in this month’s astonishing expose of Exxon Mobile’s decades long strategy of climate change-denial (when they knew better). The corporation’s CEO, Rex Tillerson, may be nominated  as Secretary of State by President-elect Donald Trump.

        The series just published in the New York Review of Books spells-out that Exxon Mobile knew for many years that Climate research was scientifically accurate but carried on an expensive effort to say the opposite publicly. A similar strategy was pursued by big tobacco even when it knew its product was killing people. One of the biggest corporations in the world, EM now admits that climate change is real but because it owns huge fossil assets still in the ground and under the sea, a ban on fossil fuels could represent a gigantic non-recoverable asset.

       So it needs to slow down the process that could affect its bottom line by supporting a profound threat to First Amendment Rights sponsored by Texas Congressman Lamar Smith, “who has taken more money in campaign contributions from oil and gas companies, including ExxonMobil, than from any other industry during his congressional career.  Read More  “Smith is using his chairmanship of the House Committee on Science to deny climate change as fact and chill First Amendment Rights by applying pressure on any who would petition government, speak freely, and freely associate to advocate for responsible climate policies.

“The committee’s actions now force all organizations that would collaborate with others when taking on powerful special interests to consider that they might be ordered to reveal their strategies to any hostile member of Congress with subpoena power.”

        It costs millions to litigate such a threat. For non-profit climate change advocates this is what “chilling” means.  It gets worse. Donald Trump spent the second half of the Army-Navy game in the box of retired Marine Lt. Col. Oliver North, a graduate of Annapolis. During the Ronald Reagan administration, North was the National Security Council aide most directly involved in covertly selling arms to Iran and providing military assistance to the Contras, a group seeking to overthrow Nicaragua's left-leaning government.

        This invites an irresistible history lesson of U. S. hypocrisy that has brought us to this moment of possible civilization crash as bombs go of in the Coptic Cathedral in Cairo, and in Istanbul; as Isis is about to re-take ancient Palmyra for the second time; as Mosul has to be retaken a second time by Iraqi troops. A score card may help you to remember this tangled fossil fuels web and see how today’s lies have deep roots. 

• It was In 1953 that the CIA overthrew the democratically elected government of Mohammad Mosaddegh in Iran elevating the dictatorship of the Shah
• In 1980  the Reagan/Bush administrations permitted—and frequently encouraged—the flow of money, agricultural credits, dual-use technology, chemicals, and weapons to Iraq."
• In 1985 the U. S. sold arms to Iran to finance the undermining of Nicaraguan rebels...
• And in 2003 George Bush invaded Iraq, a nation without weapons of mass destruction.

Why belabor faith communities in a season of Carols and Hanukkah lights with nasty information?  Because the music and lights are about devotion to truth, peace and justice; values whose tenure is fundamentally threatened by the nation-wide habit of mistaking power for truth.  A second draft of how it all ends could be coming sooner than we expect. It's more than time to act in the public square.

Bankruptcy Proceedings

        The emotional trauma delivered to the psyche of middle class main streamers by Donald Trump's election offers many real world lessons, but not free-of-charge. There is a price to be paid when bathroom ethics and locker room porno get more attention than the huge inequality gap or mass incarceration or fossil fuels gassing the planet.  The skewed priorities can be seen in the case of Bernie Sanders' campaign. He spoke clearly and often about exactly those issues and was cast aside on the theory of liberals and the Left that he couldn't be elected. It was a betrayal of biblical proportions to be precise and the price is that Donald Trump is President-elect.

         There were other betrayals, especially by Hillary Clinton, who spoke like a member of Netanyahu's cabinet with tones of disdain for the rights and afflictions of the Palestinians.   When the crisis of racial injustice in Police relations with the Black community came front and center in 2015 with the choke hold that killed Eric Garner on camera, and other instances---and thousands marched all over the country, and every night by the thousands in places like New York City for ten days---Hillary was silent. 

          The heart of the matter can be told in the old story about a first aid station set-up to save half-dead people found floating down a town's near-by river. The tale is that after extensive measures were taken by the town to rescue victims sighted every day floating down the river, someone thought to ask "Where are these bodies coming from?"  It serves as a Rosetta stone for translating  the meaning of the recent elections.  

          Where did this year-long havoc of expected coronation,  ribald oratory and vulgarity originate?  Please don't say with Trump. He didn't stage the primary's carnival of seventeen Republican candidates. Nor did he create Isis barbarism, nor the inordinate killing of Blacks by the Police, nor the central bankers foreclosing on the steel mills and machining industries in Youngstown and Detroit; nothing to do with the tech industry's export of millions of jobs to Asia. It's a much longer list actually. Much longer and that's the point. The problems and needs of this and many other nations lie much further upstream, in the practices of ancient theologies and our now dwindling modern democracies. 

        One of the needs is the hope that faith groups will critique the addiction to ridiculous ideas of divine exceptionalism, rampant from the USA to Israel. Another goal of faith should be to expose the popular addiction to the golden calf whose worshipers---the lower eighty percent of the nation---are more akin to the biblical downtrodden.   They elected Trump but underlying their vote is the dream of gold.  That dream needs lots of exposure and exegesis in the public space of the American democracy before it too is bankrupt. 

The Reckoning

        Two days after the elections the publisher of the New York Times, Arthur O. Sulzberger, wrote to all of his subscribers:

 "After such an erratic and unpredictable election there are inevitable questions: Did Donald Trump's sheer unconventionality lead us and other news outlets to underestimate his support among American voters?"

        Sulzberger never answers his own question (the answer is yes!) but with the Times only weeks away from downsizing its own news room-as has been previously announced-his  unusual letter seems to express the palpable fear that print media is rapidly approaching a terminal condition; threatening to bring us all to the day of a vanished democracy because citizens are increasingly informed only by Twitter-style one liners.  Such a development is as difficult to absorb as Donald Trump's election and may be more dangerous than his election.

        David Lieberman of USA Today writes about the "fear of losing all-important subscribers to its print and digital editions at a time of plummeting advertising revenue and challenges from online news venues."  There are signs all around.  Some newspapers were hit with waves of subscriber cancellations in September after they endorsed Secretary Clinton.   Lieberman reports "at least one city - possibly San Francisco, Miami, Minneapolis or Cleveland - likely will soon lose its last daily newspaper.  It "could be a lot more widespread than people have been predicting," says Mike Simonton, who tracks media debt for Fitch Ratings. "It's hard to ignore that possibility as the pace of newspaper closings accelerates."

"Starting Wednesday, Hearst's 146-year-old Seattle Post-Intelligencer survives as a scaled-down online publication offering mostly commentary. That leaves The Seattle Times as the city's only major paper-and-ink daily.  Gannett...parent of USA TODAY, may shutter the 140-year-old Tucson Citizen, which competes with the Arizona Daily Star, if a buyer can't be found."   

 

        Cable TV has a different but related affliction. Its fierce pursuit of viewers led it to bet heavily on expert panels who were often demonstrably inexpert. Except for a few panelists from the Trump side, they turned out by Wednesday morning to have been dead wrong. David Axlerod, speaking among the large panels of experts on CNN when the evening was yet young on November 9th prophesied "a Trump victory is very, very unlikely."  He had been chief strategist of Barak Obama's campaigns, and Senior White Adviser. If he didn't know what was happening across the country who did? 

        So went this catastrophic failure of a long list of experts and moderators including Rachel Maddow, star of MSNBC, Amy Walter at PBS and many others. After the elections dozens of interviews in states like Ohio, Michigan and Wisconsin uncovered that local citizens had stopped listening to these commentators a long time ago. It turns out that these experts knew mostly their own mirror images. They could not see the inequality suffered by nearly two-thirds of the American people because it had moved beyond their comfortable, "expert" horizons, out of sight. 

        Therein lies a tragedy greater than a Trump victory (if you think it was tragic). It's not only the print media who are at-risk because of lost advertising and diminished circulation, so also are the TV media whose high pitched spiels require us to accept news delivered primarily to sell products by entertaining us. One imagines their budgets for hiring expert panels has dropped lots.

         Russia's Vladamir Putin, and before him Stalin and Adolph Hitler, strengthened their hold on authoritarian government by eliminating a free press. President-elect Trump need take no such steps, even if he wished to, because the chickens of our disdain have come home to roost.  Our preference for well-rehearsed PBS and cable round tables may become the thin soup of an increasingly thinned out journalism. Bad for democracy, even worse for the common good.  Paint Donald Trump ugly if you wish, but the real tragedy is what we're doing to ourselves.

 

The Times - Are They a-Changin?

       Right now the only predictable election result next week is the dangerous public disenchantment stretching from Texas to North Dakota.  After November 8th we are likely to find scattered all over the ground only the remains, the shards, of the Republican and Democratic parties regardless of who is elected to the White House.  That may turn out to be the good news.

        Also broken into pieces after next week may be the long era of U. S. civil religion since 1800 which people thought promised them exceptional treatment but now seems parallel to the empty promises of contemporary political leadership. The unproductive distance between party machine candidates (Hillary) and rebels (The Donald) resembles the lived experience of three-fourths of Americans who for twenty years and longer have suffered an income stagnation that nether Republican Bush nor Democrat Obama corrected. This while the public's money poured into the fifteen year Bush/Obama war which keeps expanding.  

        The massive slaughter of the innocents in the lands of that other denominated religion, Islam, contain the worst kind of news: It's well known, of course, but the ultimate irony must be grasped: that the boundaries of the Middle East and the weapons flowing into it (some from Russia also) were are all determined and made by the Christian West: the boundaries by the European powers after World War I; the weapons by the U. S. after World War II. Essentially they're all ours! The irony is the so-called Christian Western nations fashioned a kind of hell among the Islamic nations.

        It is a hard truth but in the possible collapse of politics as we've known it both believers and non-believers will find themselves reckoning with the end of what had seemed a liturgical guarantee for exceptional America, an everlasting springtime now come to winter.

       The end of Tom Hayden's life last week can remind us of the true vocation of the prophet--whether secular or sacred--who in Hayden's instance shouted out against the hundreds of thousands dying in the Vietnam war while most of the the American churches and synagogues, for patriotic reasons, backed away from what for Martin Luther King, Jr. was a similar cry against that war he could not stifle in himself.  

       A new way must be found amid the ruins to reclaim this prophetic vocation in spirit and in truth. The times are still trying to change, Bob Dylan, and maybe this time you'll be right, in honor of your Nobel Prize.

Come writers and critics
Who prophesize with your pen
And keep your eyes wide
The chance won't come again
And don't speak too soon
For the wheel's still in spin

              For the times they are a-changin

Middle East Passion Texts

       A small similarity can be found between our tawdry presidential campaigns and the West's inability to stop the horror in the Mediterranean, Yemen and Aleppo.  Amid absurd candidate claims about Americans being "good" or "great again," lie hundreds of victims who will never be counted and have never counted:  

                     [courtesy of the NY Times 10/6/16]

       The dozens of innocent victims in this photo were either trampled to death or died of asphyxiation below decks.  "Many of these people had never seen an ocean, did not know what an ocean was" said one refugee worker.  It's a passion play without transcendent ending.  

        These mass crucifixions are happening night and day every day. The one redeeming response could be conversion to a new convergence for the common good among faith and human rights communities around the world. 

        The November election politics suggest little or no hope for such a convergence in Washington.  Under the best of circumstances the possibility of escaping polarization seems low as Trump's shocking success demonstrates.  In a Hillary Clinton victory she may face an ungovernable congress and nation.

        A new diagnostic list toward a cure for our cultures of death and for the common good would include:

(1) Radical desegregation in faith communities, especially among Christian congregations, the imaginary exceptionalism endemic among faith communities set the tone for America's segregated social structure since slavery days.  More about this in a minute. 

(2) Also needed is urgent treatment of "Silo Disease", a habit of nearly everyone that tolerates, permits, and promotes community as a gathering of their personal favorite club. Churches, labor unions, and academics with advanced degrees-among many others--are common practitioners of this in-breeding that weakens the body politic's capacity to meet unforeseen challenges of justice, like inequality.  It's  a sign of human species decline that most people live in silos that separate them from the world.  

(3) Demilitarization. The Middle East has taught us we're not strong  enough, not wise enough to drop our weapons and sue for peacemaking. More about demilitarization in the next Public Liturgies.

On Radical Desegregation:

        Racism and its conflicts in the 1950's and 60's are repeated in the 2010's conflicts and have come to seem irremediable by the comfortable classes.  Earlier remedies such as police-community relations training, inner city job training and access to jobs and housing  often fell short.  These failures have seldom been critically evaluated and are reiterated today in every city where violence breaks out.  It's actually the social stratification and inequality-the disappeared jobs-that guarantees the violence. This stratification and its segregating effect is as rigidly in place today as in the time in 1964 when Martin Luther King described Sunday morning as the most segregated hour in the country. If this does not change, the conflicts and violence are guaranteed and will remain tied to the faith-based segregated culture that has shaped the web of public sentiment since slavery days. 

Churches as the Hinge.

        When  they prioritize justice religious organizations can be the hinge of change.  Every denomination  and diocese could require that each congregation integrate itself by both class and race according to its neighborhood's demographic  profile.  Any non-conforming congregation could be given a few years to change and offered resource to help it do so. Without such change they ought to lose their official denominational designation as church.  It would take several years of study, constructive cross-neighborhood development, but if it's not done the church is not the church, it's an instrument of segregation. "Every tree that does not bear good fruit, is cast into the fire."  [Matthew 7:1]

Silo Disease

 Silo Disease represents a dilution of the communal gene stream by isolating groups of people from one another. We can take it for granted that most labor unions, most community organizing forces, most faith groups and their leaders are running manifold programs of social service, education and confrontation with oppressors, but are not yet skilled at creating a larger social justice movement with many alliances and allies.  Most silo leaders and their followers know terrible things are happening all around them. Their silos have the ironic effect of trapping people by conferring on them a "silo" security that makes them blind to what is outside; and blind to their own sensibilities. The effect is to declaw them at the very moment when they feel called to action in a world tumbling like their candidates without a compass.      

                                      [Photo of Aleppo today by Yahoo.com 10/11/16]

The Year of Thinking Critically for the Common Good

       A mission transfer toward the larger common good begins with a critical evaluation of our own role in the unintended consequence of  a world at war. Everyone needs to be an outsider somewhere, with some dissimilar group. It's already happening in local areas: like the stand at Cannonball River by the Sioux and other Native Americans tribes and growing numbers of supporters who are blocking completion of the Dakota Access pipeline.Or in the PICO uprising against mass incarceration; or alliances between SEIU, Teachers unions and the Teamsters with local clergy and city governments over diesel pollution at the Ports of Newark, Oakland and Los Angele that is poisoning  the air children breathe.

       A debauched congressional process and foreign alliances based on special interests all require a new congress of the people. Not people defined in 19th century terms as a rabid mass, but people in the range from hotel workers to the PhD crowd at Stanford and Harvard.

A New Rising

         Bertold Brecht's heroine in his 1939 play, Mother Courage and Her Children, connived to keep the Thirty Years War going in the 17th century because selling food to the soldiers was the way she would survive. In the end Mother Courage loses her three children to the war. Comparisons are inviting. During the twelve year Iraq War voluntary enlistment has been a route for underemployed or jobless younger Americans to access paid work and some training for the future.  It cost 4,424 of them their lives but made lots of money for the top one percent.

        King Hussein of Jordan, a U. S. ally claims we are already engaged in WW III and Pope Francis has said as much. Evidence is not hard to find: indeterminate borders, war crimes on a growing scale every day in Aleppo with hospitals destroyed and hundreds of children slaughtered; elsewhere scores upon scores of Afghan and Iraqi civilians and soldiers are killed by terrorist attacks when they are not being killed by U. S. friendly fire. Add the fleeing refugees sometimes drowning at sea and women who survive landing in Italy but are then forced into prostitution.

        These tragic events are not being discussed at all by the presidential candidates preoccupied as they are with their personal futures.  The drowning refugees make a mockery of such politics. 

        The real possibility of a Trump presidency cannot be dismissed in spite of recent polls because it is tangibly growing from a different set of priorities that Americans barely understand; priorities with affinities to the sharp razor wire wall Hungary has spread across its Southern border to block further refugee entrance. It includes affinities with the defeat last week of Columbia's peace agreement with the FARC guerilla faction which pollsters didn't predict; and involves affinities with Brexit, Vladimir Putin, and the peril Germany's Angela Merkel faces as the nationalist Right grows across most of Europe.

         Economic stress is now so wide and deep in the U. S. that tactile connection with it has become intangible to the thriving tech and engineering castes from Silicon Valley to Mumbai.  Political writer, Thomas Frank, [Listen Liberal (2016), What's the Matter with Kansas? (2005)], points in scalding terms to what he calls the Democrats who have become"limousine liberals," live among the top 10 percent, claiming for themselves the honorific of being concerned about the bottom 90 percent.  It is their party not their candidate that blocked Bernie Sanders campaign. 

    

        Frank cites the Democratic Leadership Council which "thanks to the deeds of Bill Clinton" now knows how to reduce inequality

Fiscal discipline, global competition, flexible labor markets, transparent capital markets, deregulated business, rapid communications, and limited government interference in markets.   

       This essentially Wall Street agenda intends to drown out the reality of Mike Griffin, a union activist at Caterpillar in Decatur, Iowa-where jobs have been disappearing.  Franks tells what's really happening. "His workers, if they still work

understand that they're working two or three jobs just to get by, and a lot of them can't own anything, and they understand seeing mom and dad forced into retirement or forced out of their job, now they're working at Hardee's or McDonalds to make ends meet so they can retire in poverty. People understand that. They see that."  

       Hence the turn to Trump and to the political Right even with little evidence that Trump will serve their self-interests. 

       While the bad news is that it is possible to attend religious services in many traditions and places these days and never hear a word or a prayer about saving people from inequality or ending the horrible warfare in Syria and Iraq, there is this good news:  that perhaps helped by the prospect of dismal election outcomes a new day of radical, drastic social justice reform is tangible and dawning.   A modern rising never before seen in U. S. history is happening.  Traditionally inactive Christians,  evangelical Christians, radical Black Christians, White intellectuals, Black Lives Matter, radical Jewish groups like Jewish Voices for Peace, GLBTQ and Women's rights groups and many others are beginning to express solidarity and participate with each other along with secular groups who are organizing  new labor movements across the country; environmentalists blocking fossil fuels, and the list goes on.

Mother Courage could grow out of fashion. 

Is the Glass Actually Half Full?

       Last  Monday's horrifying airstrikes on the large relief caravan entering Aleppo show every evidence of having been launched by Syrian and Russian aircraft, according to extensive reporting  in today's September 25th New York Times.   These Middle East tragedies miniaturize the foolish political scenes in the U. S. where endorsements of Hillary Clinton by prominent  Republican newspapers  and visible disaffection of many other Republican loyalists may carry the day for her but to what end? 

        What's not clear at all is if Hillary Clinton offers a new day for Aleppo, Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia, etc.  We must vote for her, but boatloads of drowning refugees and bloodied children ask the question of the relevance of our shameful politics to this horrendous theater of death and dying; as do the Charlotte and Tulsa shootings ask the dreary questions about a nation enamored for centuries with the slave-master relationship.

        Watch for Donald Trump to try to drive Hillary Clinton to the wall over the eight years of Middle East war.  Watch to see if she carries new policy proposals to fend him off.  Just as Donald Trump aligns himself with Putin when it seems useful to him in his usual strange way, as in "someone he knows knows someone else," Hillary Clinton has aligned herself with the team of President Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry and insistently wrapped herself in their colors. Yet their eight years of war in the Middle East and continuing loyalty to Israel and its settlement expansion in the Palestinian's West Bank may no longer guarantee her election .

          Neither Putin's reported brutalities nor the long running fiasco of Israel's settlements any longer defines the staggering complexity of U. S. foreign policy challenges around the globe.   The enormous financial benefits of both the raw materials and land ownership markets are the oceans on which the nations, the regional private-sector oligarchs (from Goldman Sachs to China), and the less powerful actors sail. It's a tide made for mega investors.

           On the other hand, in the "other world" of middle class security the comfortable life prevails, but the stirrings are hopeful.  No one appears any longer to believe that public discussion amid talk television is more than a money-making enterprise.  Growing signs of peacemaking abound: the peace accords in Columbia, the breakout from traditional politics from the Brexit rebellion and in the British Labour party, the Sanders millennial explosions--all suggest that a better and more up-to-date perspective may be coming into view as a glass half full.  The large crowds debating ferociously but peacefully on university campuses, the hundreds marching over inequality and racism, the myriad citizen action groups, the revival of strength in Labor union, and a new generation of cool-headed leaders in the churches and synagogues have become a talented and growing throng of steadier hands.  

          There are connection and engagement problems to be solved, of course. The comfort cells are, well so comfortable.  Still, remarkably impressive new organizations for peacemaking abound among the millennials, who still may not know the route to engagement with the demons of Aleppo and racism.  There's evidence they're starting to get that there is a connection from the prophets to themselves. They're starting to notice that the biblical peace and justice movements happened outside, near the bombing, at the ruins caused by racism and cheap grace.  The prophets could have used more allies, more connections. To rebuild the ruins of Aleppo may be the only route to a new day. No other way, and before it's too late.      

 

The Blood On Our Own Hands

        President Obama's ambition to create a peace process in Syria was always compromised by his administration's other priorities including trying to save Iraq from the demons unlocked by the U. S. invasion of 2003.  While irrationally supporting Israel in spite of its continued settlement expansion the U. S. has tried in vain to thread the needle between theKurdish fighters supporting the war against Isis while Premier Erdogan seeks to destroy the Kurdish independence movement on his southeastern border lands. 

        This has opened the door to a new, impressive relationship for Russia in the region. Its rising star has not only forced U. S. acceptance of its expansion in Ukraine but advanced its role as leading peacemaker when U. S. dogmatics failed to stop the slaughter in Syria.

        It's worth unpacking the symmetry between the horrible Aleppo death spiral and this downward spiral of U. S.  effectiveness in its relations with Russia. Several months ago political scientist  John Mearsheim (co-author of The Israel Lobby) concluded that the U. S. "was incapable of entering into any agreement with Russia." This institutionalized dogma was visible when retired diplomat, Nicholas Burns, last week lamented on PBS not for the hundreds of thousands dying in the Syrian conflicts but that the proposed cease fire "was finally coming down to agreeing with Putin in order to forge the agreement."  

        The dimensions of this rebuff by Russia to U. S. dominance in the Middle East has many moving parts but the result described by the Council on Foreign Relation uses a Moscow journalist writing in the English language Moscow Times to give voice to glaring instability.  Vladmir Frolov underlines the

 

"gaping lack of trust between Moscow and Washington, unruly and suspicious local proxies, unhappy outside players in Iran and in the Gulf states, a hodgepodge of legal loopholes and lack of viable enforcement mechanisms...for Moscow there is so much to love in this deal that it is surprising it took three months to negotiate."

 

        Everyone knows that the bloody roots of all this lie in the centuries old battles for oil among world hegemons, re-enacted in the recent Gulf Wars and in the struggle that continues today in the flawed U. S. preference for Israel as virtually a 51st state. 

        The domestic political lock-down behind this is one of the reasons for the deepening paralysis of political life in the U. S. with its corrupt practice of buying and selling votes to please favored factions for very narrow reasons. Two weeks ago such corrupt politics was on display when the California Assembly and Senate voted 69 to 1 and 270 to 1 respectively to block any California company from doing business in California if it boycotts or divests from U. S. companies doing business in the illegally occupied West Bank Settlements. This irrational behavior may get worse with both Clinton and Trump promising to fully support the U. S. "understanding" with Israel, no questions asked.  

        That's not all that's on lock-down. The moral incapacity to see the deepening complexity and the absurd choices that Americans keep making suggests that in faith communities where ethics and morality are supposed to be taught there is a retreat underway from understanding faithfulness as a critical appraisal of the demonic. The result may be a surprise to contemporary worshipers who could discover the blood of Aleppo is also on their own hands. It may even help open the door to possible catastrophe in the form of a Trump victory. 

The Trifecta Shift: Who Will Tell the People?

        The widely shared desperation growing from fears of a Trump victory has trapped reporters and talking heads such as Rachel Maddow and David Axelrod in a continuous loop that leaves the issues after the election largely untouched.  In the equally desperate rush for ratings most people know they are being entertained more than informed.  E. J. Dionne writes this week in the Washington Post that people  "don't expect more from their political leaders than posturing, positioning and captivating media circuses."  Which continues to make Trump's chances harder to guess than pollsters may believe. 

        Mostly untouched is how the racism habit and an economically stranded middle class open flood gates to a volatile, dangerously large audience that makes the next question not just about the November election but about what comes afterward.  The deep pathos of news as entertainment disincentivises the public  from filling sand bags against the coming storms. 

        Just over the horizon when post election days finally arrive are the nation's ineradicable mentality derived from slavery; a disabled congress; and a major shift of political power from Washington to state governments.   

        Take the example of North Carolina where its Research Triangle and great universities compete with Silicon Valley, but where the federal appellate court had to intervene in the Republican's toxic war against the Democrats with their large constituency of African American slave descendents.  Last Wednesday (8/31), the Supreme Court deadlocked 4-4 when asked by the Republicans to reverse an Appeals Court order that was forcing them to redraw their deeply racist voting district rules.   The Court had struck down as unconstitutional "the effort to target African Americans with almost surgical precision."  

        The Supreme Court deadlock seemed like great good fortune because it left the Appeals court order in effect requiring North Carolina to redraw its gerrymandered districts and election rules. Here's the kicker: the Court placed responsibility for redrawing those rules in the hands of 100 local county election boards all controlled by Republicans. 

        How did this happen? It turns out that three years earlier the infamous Koch brothers oligarchy had financed a Republican take-over of the state house that ultimately led to a "trifecta," i.e., control of both houses of the legislature and the governorship; which is why "trifecta" is no longer about a horse race but a measure of national political power shifting away from Washington.  As of September 2016, according to Real Clear Politics, there were 7 Democratic and 23 Republican trifectas. The GOP now controls68 out of 98 partisan state legislative chambers.

        The ironies are abundant.  The NY Times reported a week ago that In North Carolina's Lenoir County  where Democrats outnumber Republicans better than two to one, and four in 10 voters are black, the new Koch-style election plan limits early voting to a single weekend day, bans voting on Sunday (They wouldn't want to desecrate the Sabbath!) and on weekdays demands that residents, including those who are poor and without cars must make long trips to cast their ballot. "Republicans, who wrote and passed the 2013 law...deny the rules reflect anything inappropriate." 

        It's not hard to see where this leads. Republicans may have a fool for presidential candidate, but their growing control of states is the answer to their dreams: trifectas in state capitals, control of elections, and oligarchic domination of public policy by means wealth. 

        Who will tell the people? Who will fill the sandbags to resist this coming flood?  Hillary?  We shall see. In faith communities the predictable pattern will be to flee complicated issues, hand out food, and keep churches as safe sanctuaries. There is of course the Pauline alternative: "put on the whole armour of God, that you may stand against the wiles of the devil,"  (Ephesians 11 again)--the better to resist what's coming down.

Principalities and Powers

        Regardless of possible calamities with the Fall elections the two part series in the NY Times this week makes clear who’s in charge. It’s the Brookings Institute, or the American Enterprise Institute, or the Center for International Studies, etc. Two of them are building new hundred million dollar office complexes with annual budgets running over a hundred million dollars according to the Washington Post.

         "...donors like JPMorgan Chase, the nation’s largest bank; K.K.R., the global investment firm; Microsoft, the software giant; and Hitachi, the Japanese conglomerate” all  donate to “Think Tanks” and they in return help the companies with myriad tasks like calling in university researchers without disclosing that they’re being paid for their so-called objective testimony about their next big project or blocking or altering  government regulations that threaten their profit margins.

 “On issues as varied as military sales to foreign countries, international trade, highway management systems and real estate development, think tanks have frequently become vehicles for corporate influence and branding campaigns….setting up events featuring corporate executives with government officials, according to documents obtained by The New York Times and the New England Center for Investigative Reporting.”

        The Think Tanks hire professors from our great universities to be consultants for the projects of the nation’s largest corporations. The public and Congress is usually unaware of these compromised relations.

“This is about giant corporations who figured out that by spending, hey, a few tens of millions of dollars, if they can influence outcomes here in Washington, they can make billions of dollars,” said Senator Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts, a frequent critic of undisclosed Wall Street donations to think tanks.”

        This helps to explain the huge pressures faced by presidents and congresspersons, including the larger failures of the Obama-led liberal democrats that neither prosecuted nor curbed the banks, did not raise taxes on the rich, did not emphasize the shrinking market for middle class workers.  Mark Shields on the PBS News Hour has repeatedly pointed out over the past six months that Hillary Clinton’s candidacy wrapped itself in Obama’s legacy, preceded by her own husband’s NAFTA legacy.  

        What’s not to hate among those left behind who lean toward Donald Trump?

         Even if Trump is forced out or resigns from the Fall elections he has given further articulation to a rising clamor in the countryside raised by left behinders, a very large segment of the population.  OpEd columnist, Roger Cohen put it succinctly

“America…whose fault lines Obama…stepped across 12 years ago, is perhaps more divided than ever….There was something about Obama’s blackness, his intellectualism, his cool distillation of problems that was intolerable to a wide swath of the white working class angered by lost jobs, lost wars, lost security and lost pride. These Americans have felt left behind. They have perceived not outreach from Obama’s White House but condescension.”  [Roger Cohen August 1 NYT]

        This is not substance but mirrors that conceal how the so-called democratic process often leaves us with a picture of what is actually small scale politics—however lethal—that conceal the principalities and powers of our age. 

        Martin Indyk is the supreme Think Tank prototype: Vice President and Director for Foreign Policy at the Brookings Institution, chief architect of U. S. foreign policy toward Israel, formerly  deputy research director for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), special assistant to President Bill Clinton as senior director of Near East and South Asian Affairs at the United States National Security Council. While at the NSC, he served as principal adviser to the President and the National Security Advisor on Arab–Israeli issues, Iraq, Iran, and South Asia. He was a senior member of Secretary of State Warren Christopher's Middle East peace team and served as the White House representative on the U.S. Israel Science and Technology Commission. Today at Brookings he directs programs such as their Global Cities Initiative. This, a Brookings senior fellow explained “must mean a marriage between JP Morgan Chase corporate interests” and “Brookings continued thought leadership.”

        JPMorgan, in a document dated a month before the agreement was signed, said the pending donation to Brookings “deepens/extends relationships with important client base among business and civic leaders both in the U.S. and abroad.”

        The lengthy two part series in this week’s NY Times should be read thoroughly and you can do that by clicking on these URLs

Part I.  Think Tank Scholar or Consultant? It Depends on the Day  http://p.nytimes.com/email/re?location=InCMR7g4BCJTYuyKqXu41vAkMIWfA6rd&user_id=2e01af80f96bffbd607768c4547f7ab3&email_type=eta&task_id=1470863064812753&regi_id=0

Part II.  How Think Tanks Amplify Corporate America’s Influence http://p.nytimes.com/email/re?location=InCMR7g4BCJTYuyKqXu41o8Me/5hd4gV&user_id=c4b68bb7cbdc5711a37a5ddb2eb23cf5&email_type=eta&task_id=1470862091479220&regi_id=0

You can also read the apostle Paul’s description of the situation in his letter to the Ephesians (6:12)

¹² For we are not contending against flesh and blood, but against the principalities, against the powers, against the world rulers of this present darkness, against the spiritual hosts of wickedness.

The Democrats’ Maginot Line Illusion

       In case you don’t remember or never knew, the Maginot Line was a famous French delusion after WW I that if they built a seventy mile long defense line on their border with Germany they would be invulnerable while maintaining their own superiority.  Instead of working to create an equitable balance among European nations for an enduring peace the Maginot line was built that continued the confrontation.  Every possible military and technical device was installed in the line, further fortified by French convictions about their cultural and moral superiority.  The combination of moral virtue plus military power seemed unconquerable.

        Nevertheless the day of grand disillusionment came. On May 10^th 1939 the German blitzkrieg-style attack simply went around the Maginot line with high speed motorcycle brigades and light tanks, trapped the British army at Dunkirk, and within a month marched through the streets of Paris.  

        A similar delusion seems to stalk both political parties today. The grave danger to U. S. stability is composed less by the rivalry between the presidential candidates than by their shared national delusion about America’s God-given exceptionalism. Both parties repeatedly pronounce the U. S. to be great; greater than all others; headed for greater greatness!  Although warned in Michelle Obama’s speech Tuesday evening about the centuries of White racial superiority baked into American culture, that her family lived in a “White” house built by slaves, it appears to have done little to deter the preening delusion of a special American contract with God.  

       The net result is that for the Democrats it has become inconceivable that they could lose in November. So much political organization partnered with God cannot fail!  They also hope their skillful oratory (setting Bill Clinton loose to go on forever on the second night) will provide cover for the large failings of the Obama years in spite of its several successes and the President’s oratorical prowess. The Trump followers do not hear these Democrat speeches which have become illegible to them in any case. Instead they see what Sanders’ followers see:

·         the failure to prosecute a single banker/CEO after the 2008 crash--several of them clearly culpable for practices that destroyed millions of lives as people lost their homes.

·          the failure to stop the huge export of jobs out of the country;

·         the catastrophic failure of both the Bush and Obama war efforts in the Middle East;

·         the profound hypocrisy of a Congress voting billions annually for Israel that support their occupation of the Palestinian lands.

·          Above all, the failure to address the expanding disease of racial violence, an issue with global echoes.

       This is the picture Trump supporters intuit to be why they want to “take America back.” It’s also why the resistance of Sanders supporters cannot be counted on to blow over. Considering themselves the rationalists in the crowd, the Democrats with their skills in the arts of political theater have actually blinded themselves to how deeply disillusioned and fearful many Americans are.  They orate to themselves.  

       The shadow of tragedy is following the Clinton candidacy. She is the first woman to be this near to breaking the last glass ceiling but is besieged by unpopularity among both her opponents and in her own party because of her complicated record and ties to Wall Street money.  It is not so clear how much of the Sanders reforms she claims to now embrace will receive her enduring support.  The decision to answer the Sanders revolution with more Clintons may have built another Maginot Line.

The Mask of Sanity

      The Republican leadership has come to see their outrageous candidate, Donald Trump, as their best opportunity to sweep the liberals out of the Supreme Court, the Congress, and the Presidency. While this strategy continues their stance the past eight years to completely stonewall Barack Obama and the Democratic Senate, the reality of terrorism is their ace in the hole. 

      Trump’s red-faced ranting during much of his presidential nominating speech conforms to the definition of full blown psychopaths famously developed by Psychiatrist Hervey Cleckley forty years ago. In “The Mask of Sanity” he described psychopaths as persons who can “typically tell vivid, lifelike, plausible stories that are completely fraudulent, without evincing any element of delusion….When confronted with a lie, the psychopath is unflappable and can often effortlessly pass it off as a joke.”

      During the Trump nomination speech PBS's Judy Woodruff counted fifty promises Trump had made. Of course, he will not have to deliver on any of them until next year, if elected.  A psychopath, Cleckley wrote can be

  

“a perfect mimic of a normally functioning person, able to mask or disguise [their] fundamental lack of internal personality structure, an internal chaos that results in repeatedly purposeful destructive behavior…”

      Cleckley revised his analyses seven times between 1947 and 1976 but always believed such personalities were not capable of fully organized productive behavior. Trump proves he was wrong about that. Trump is highly organized in his unique way and that’s the problem: Donald Trump is sane and very dangerous because his character portrait is of an obsessed and highly narcissistic personality who can’t distinguish right from wrong.

      The strategy of the Republican leadership has now accepted Trump because of his potential as the law and order candidate whose campaign will fit hand in glove into the reality of terrorism.  He’s their cynical linchpin to defeat Hillary Clinton, finally throwing back the progressive, diverse, liberal wave. 

       It may happen. 

       

        As terror attacks multiply Trump becomes more likely to defeat the highly unpopular Hillary who will have to struggle with the high energy her campaign lost when it ambushed Bernie Sanders, who had electrified millions of young supporters.  There’s  little electricity in the Clinton campaign now, hobbled by her mistakes in Iraq, Libya and her not so confidential email messaging.  If there’s going to be new energy in her campaign for election its fear of Trump that may be her ace in the hole.

Inequality Is Firing the Guns

       In the nearly half century between an infamous shootout in Cleveland in 1968 and the five Dallas policemen ambushed and killed yesterday the fundamentals of race relations in the U. S. have not changed.

 

        Forty-eight years ago in the Glenville district of Cleveland three police officers were killed in a shootout with Black Nationalists. Three of the Nationalists and a bystander were also killed. Fifteen other police, gunmen and bystanders were wounded; twenty-one casualties total!

       During these forty-eight years hundreds of encounters have occurred between police and people of color that mirror this past week’s killing by police of Philandro Castile in Minnesota, killed for a tail light violation, Alton Sterling shot point-blank while pinned to the ground by the police in Baton Rouge, La.  Among the worst was 12 year old Tamir Rice shot dead in Cleveland within milli-seconds of Police arrival, for which they were later exonerated.  On and on.

       We need not be clueless about the underground forces that feed ambushes or impulse shooting. One clue is that the ranks of police are filled by men and women who might have chosen some other, safer occupation if there were such job options; but the fact is that good career job alternatives are scarce, meaning jobs that pay healthcare and retirement benefits. What is making racism grow is the disappearance of good jobs from the whole American economy. That’s the underlying story of Dallas and Cleveland and everywhere else. Even in booming Silicon Valley there are clues to how racism is being fed. Murder rates are growing sharply and about 35 percent of the workforce make only minimum wage or less and have jobs with no substantial benefits.

       Three-fourths of African Americans fell below the definition of middle class in the 2010 census. The master-slave relationship that is central to American culture over hundreds of years is tragically reinforced by widening inequality.   While the parallel development over the past fifty years of wider opportunities for people of color (from president to corporate executive) is making for a new Clinton-Obama tribe of masters, the slave status of the workforce is deepening and growing.

       Before stating the obvious it needs to be underlined that four-fifths of world population occupies this same lowly status and it is increasingly clear that the guns of Isis and Dallas are cousins by virtue of their shared plight.

        Most obvious of all, it is Capitalism that creates the fertile ground where racism grows and because of increased inequality now grows worse.  Bernie Sanders remains one of the few U. S. politicians who have given clear voice to this obvious role of Capitalism feeding both inequality and racism.  His now dwindling candidacy can still become the beginning of a national and global campaign about regulating capital.  With the guns out around the world and Trump’s candidacy (read also the National Rifle Association) on an ascendant path the situation is very dire.  This age of grotesque wealth must be wound down, and quickly.  Strong coalitions must be formed now among faith groups, labor groups, progressives in academia and in government. 

       It was Jefferson, the slave owner, who nevertheless seemed to know that a revolution now and then in a democracy is a good thing.  

We Are All Refugees

       A Brexit omen hangs over the coming U. S. Fall elections but in a foreign language whose key few seem to know.  Gone is the progressive Sanders momentum; gone the dominant Democratic party; gone a coherent Republican opponent.

       The latest Quinnipiac Poll today (6/29/16) is verification of the approaching danger, showing Clinton and Trump deadlocked, even after a week of bizarre Trump pronouncements (Waterboarding?).  This may not be a surprise to everyone, but aside from Elizabeth Warren, Hillary Clinton and the Democrats seem to be winning very few new friends.  Trump on the other hand is gathering-in the sheaves and seems already to have a solid Brexit-style support community. Like the “leave” majority in Britain, a growing dangerous number of U. S. voters have stopped listening to the professional political leadership and media pundits. They’ve stopped caring about the Marquis of Queensbury rules of combat.  The Brexit majority has much in common with Donald Trump’s supporters. 

        This emerging landscape created by the 52% to 48% vote in Britain to leave the European Union reflects a British population that is refugee averse, increasingly caught in the stagnation of declining income prospects, fearful of terrorism within and without.  The truth in plain terms is that the anti-refugee movement in Britain and the United States is fired by the dawning realization that they themselves have become refugees in a world of obscene inequality. Brexit is the name of the new god,

        It is both sign and graven image: a sign of possible disaster approaching and a bit like an economic futures contracts—you might win but you’ll have to take large risks, and the Brexit God is making no promises; but then neither have Cameron or Clinton.

       A case of very bad mythical theology has created this 1 percent God who reigns over the trampled majority who only lately have stopped believing in the respectability of the 1 percent.  Assistant New York Times business editor, Gretchen Morgensen, describes a now familiar example of acceptable fraud in U. S. banking, giving the particulars of just one case. Writing last Sunday, June 26^th—she describes how Angelo Mozillo, former CEO of Countrywide Mortgage, had over-charged 600,000 of its customers and was at the center of the 2008 mortgage crisis meltdown.   She asked

“What about thousands of loans with exploding interest rates made to unsophisticated borrowers who had no ability to repay them? The abusive foreclosure practices that increased the burden on struggling people? The shattered lives?”

        The answer of the Obama administration? Mr Mozillo was told last week by the Justice Department  “that he was no longer under investigation in connection with civil mortgage fraud.”

        While the Brexit vote is an omen of rebellion the question is whether it can do more than replicate the unjust system that has prompted it.  Can high principles of justice, equity and fairness be adopted by this emerging revolution, or will it be consumed by a desperate search by the disenfranchised for another idol made of clay to be worshiped until it too collapses?

For the time being we are all refugees in a strange land.

Roosevelt's Ghost

       It’s worth betting real money that the Trump candidacy may blow up before or at the Republican convention.  If it does his replacement would probably be Governor John Kasich of Ohio—a prominent participant in the Primary contests with the mojo to defeat Hillary Clinton.  Absent a rejected Trump remaining in the race, a Kasich-like nominee would face the Democratic leadership with the possibility of seeing Hillary Clinton not only lose the election but lose her anticipated momentum to maintain and enlarge Democratic control of the Senate. This is why the Sanders candidacy remains in play.

       Both the Democrats and the liberal news media have had trouble moving from opportunistic day-to-day political coverage to the badly needed deeper probe into growing inequality in both the American and global community.  Sanders’  progressive policy proposals stand out because the ghost of the FDR New Deal version of the Democratic party—a party aligned by Roosevelt with working class and middle class folks—haunts today’s Democrats.  Thomas Franks, author of “What Happened to Kansas” and a new book, “Listen Liberal,” asserts that the FDR version of the Democratic Party has become the Bill and Hillary Clinton party of the top ten percent with deep commitments to the new class of technocrats, professionals, Wall Street wizards and Silicon Valley CEOs.  

       These are the CEOs who shipped millions of jobs to China to make their unprecedented fortunes.  It was a shift that left a third of Silicon Valley, South Chicago and the South Bronx with an irremediable jobless population. It’s terrible for the permanently jobless or underemployed, but working and middle class folks are almost equally stricken--the ones who teach in your local school or work on the fire department—but can’t afford a house to live in-town.  

        Lest a line form to cast the first stone, this class line can be found from Asia to your local church or synagogue.  Virtually every church in the United States (there are notable exceptions) holds services for their middle class congregants just a few miles from the bullet-infested narcotic-laden streets of their city, or from the migrants bent-over in the fields to pick their strawberries. Everyone can see that the political tempest is growing more violent from Afghanistan to the assassination of labour party MP Jo Cox in England to the Orlando madman equipped by Congress with an AR-15 automatic rifle.

        At the bottom of the Mid-East crisis is the vast inequality that creates unspeakable wars and that has so far killed 400,000 people in the Syrian conflict.

“the International Organization for Migration said that thousands of migrants had died trying to cross seas and deserts…. Along one of the busiest sea routes to Europe, a third of the dead were children.” 

       This global humanitarian and economic inequality crisis shattering communities world-wide is the real issue but it’s not clear that today’s Democratic party wants to face that storm.   While Bernie Sanders’ stance about economic injustice can belong to Hillary as well, she is very unlikely to win without a partnership with him.  Roosevelt’s ghost this week made it plain that this will be a hard sell. Sanders will be in Philadelphia with 1,900 delegates!  

Unable to Mourn the Other

    Two thousand refugees drowned in the Mediterranean last week; briefly noted, easily forgotten. Their deaths are hardly mentioned if at all by candidates and the silence of faith leaders speaks volumes. Apparently these are “the others.”

        David Miliband, CEO of the International Rescue Committee, provides context: two different desperate refugee streams are fleeing violence: one stream from Syria, Lebanon and Iraq trying to cross to Greece. Another fleeing from countries like Egypt, Somalia, Libya and Ethiopia on a longer journey trying to reach Sicily. Refugees who survive the sea passage say they did not understand in advance the terrible danger of turbulent seas, their flimsy inflated raft, and possible death.  But they say “If we don’t go we will die here.”  An interfaith fellowship of dieing?

There’s a profound analogy here to rich nation failures to see the mortal danger of letting growing domestic and global inequality go unaddressed. The dots can be connected from inequality to desperate acts and more warfare. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) reports income inequality now is at its highest level in half a century

“The average income of the richest 10% of the population is about nine times that of the poorest 10% across the OECD, up from seven times 25 years ago.”

        Perhaps the end of the long Primary Elections season will make it possible for people to see what is really at stake in their political decisions including, the refugees experts tell us, those  who may die in coming weeks.

        It is a colossal disaster and there is such silence in the faith communities, to say nothing of the candidates. It suggests that the inability to stop and mourn is the real death knell of civilization because it is the end of a moral common thread.  Consumed by self-absorption, the policy debates fail if “the others” can be so easily dis-remembered.    Not even a Bach chorale can express the sorrow of boatloads of hundreds of drowning children, men and women because they are “the others.” The Christian tradition Bach expressed easily lapses into a liturgy that helps people mourn for Jesus and themselves, but not for “the others.” The dangerous quicksand of Jewish tribalism likewise subjects “others” to subsidiarity to a chosen people. 

       Of course we will not mourn unless the others become our brothers and sisters, our children.  The ancient texts require a new song, a new chorale, that defines an inclusive and whole global family in moral terms, that compels action and elects governments that will enact it.

Backs to the Wall

       Maybe it will all blow over, especially if Bernie Sanders does not carry California, but as things stand today he has drawn even with Hillary Clinton and his surging candidacy is pushing democratic liberalism up against a possibility that their preferred candidate may be unable to defeat Donald Trump in November. Their careers and much more are at stake. 

       This looming twilight of the gods is creating intense hard feelings. Knives have been drawn. Famous figures like NY Times columnist Paul Krugman, Dodd-Frank’s co-author, Barney Frank, and Senators Schumer and Feinstein believe it to be true that Sanders’ proposals are impractical campaign pie-in-the sky promises. However, they are up against a different truth: that Sanders has created a social change movement of biblical proportions.  He intends to overthrow the status quo in ways the Clinton era has been unable to accomplish, and he’s caught a big wave.    

       A political revolution is underway. The Sanders movement has parallels  with the intense dissatisfaction in the country mirrored in the Trump candidacy.  Both candidates are drawing upon the “fed-up” crowd in both party traditions.  The Trump constituency is diverse in its own way, attractive to many and also growing.  

       Although thousands in the crowds Sanders now attracts several times every day show a lot of young college age faces, the California Board of elections this week reported the astounding number of 850,000 new voters have registered in California since January 1^st.  That’s one reason why the Sanders campaign last evening (Friday the 27^th) sent a formal letter to the DNC asking them

“to remove Connecticut Gov. Daniel Malloy and former Massachusetts Rep. Barney Frank as the chairmen of two Democratic National Convention Standing Committees….Malloy serves as the co-chairman of the Platform Committee and Frank is the co-chairman of the convention's Rules Committee….”

“Their criticisms of Senator Sanders have gone beyond dispassionate ideological disagreement and have exposed a deeper professional, political and personal hostility toward the Senator and his Campaign"

       A New Yorker cartoon years ago pictured a conversation between two goldfish in a bowl. “Okay,” says one, “if there isn’t a God who changes the water?”  In the common person’s political theology the fish have to figure out how to look after themselves. In the democratic establishment view it’s better to count on the experts in power, but it’s their twilight the Bernie Sanders movement is threatening to make real.

       We've observed before that historically speaking social movements not well-anchored politically often fail. If Bernie Sanders wins California watch for the burly Barney Frank to start throwing the fists before and at the Convention in Philadelphia.  His problem will be that the youthful spirit of the times, if defeated, could put Trump in the White House.