Quicker than Lightning

         This Tuesday's FBI massacre to the contrary, the Trump regime remains well-ensconced and difficult to dislodge with the President having taken hold of the government's investigative power and busily consulted, as of this writing, Richard Nixon's secretary of state, Henry Kissinger. The corrupt interior nature of politics as practiced is on display and constitutionally implemented remedies could become closeted, making the times at this moment more dangerous than perhaps any other period of history. 

 

         While  questions about the President's competency have been growing in high places (The New Yorker May 8th) they're not shared by the supporters who elected him.   Mental health professionals have been citing instances when Donald Trump seemed confused about where his Navy was sailing or hazy on details of his own health care bill. He is obviously poorly read to the point of near-illiteracy as his recent confusion of Andrew Jackson with the Civil War illustrated. What continues to be missed in this picture, however, is his supporters who consider themselves in a fight to the death because their lives, their families and children have been destroyed by globalization.  It's no small thing unless you work in Silicon Valley.

          What this economically destroyed population that elected Trump sees is that he is lightning quick in his grasp of political opportunities-such as blocking the FBI's investigative power by firing Jim Comey and thus strengthening his hand. They see his intuitive genius for skillfully incentivizing opponents with promises that may be empty. The Rose Garden celebration last week was a case in point. There had in actuality been no passage of health care legislation, no change in Obama Care, and no new jobs to speak of, but it served Trump well as political showboating that, however fraudulent, further strengthened his momentum toward his personal goal: benefiting from the profits of the Wall Street system.

         A totalitarian tyrant, Hannah Arendt observed, claims to be "more obedient...than any government ever was before....pretending to establish the reign of justice on earth... without translating it into standards of right and wrong for individual behavior." That's vintage Trump.

        Essential to his success are these people, long ignored by the Democrats, who are the victims of the nation's vast deindustrialization, off-shoring, and subsequent inequality who are desperate and in their extremis see Donald Trump as their best and only hope for economic recovery.  Yes, they see his crudeness, his compulsive lying, but since that's often been how their own lives have been destroyed they count on his brutalism to do what the democrats haven't, which is to give their lives and their children a new chance. Whether by hook or by crook, no longer matters.

       The Rose Garden charade last week also made the President's congressional confreres happy (and faithful) because it provided momentum for their ambitious plan to reform tax policy which is actually another bullet aimed at the heart of abandoned workers.   Robert Greenstein for 35 years the director of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities wrote an immediate reply: 

"the President's emerging fiscal agenda...features large increases in defense funding offset by cuts in a range of significant domestic programs, substantial tax cuts mainly for people at very high income levels, losses in health care for millions of low- and moderate-income Americans, and potentially deep cuts in entitlement programs outside of Medicare and Social Security, including programs vital to tens of millions of Americans of lesser means."

       Hannah Arendt's words ring true again. In The Origins of Totalitarianism she observes that the uniqueness of totalitarianism was its capacity to "explode the very alternative on which on which all definitions of the essence of governments have been based...between  lawful and lawless government, between arbitrary and legitimate power."

        Lightning quick, this is where we are today. We can see a Trump hegemony expanding internationally and exercising arbitrary power as the former Exxon Mobile magnate Rex Tillerson--now Secretary of State---announces drastically cutting jobs and streamlining his State Department to better represent a firm-handed manager; one prepared to use military threats and money for purposes of guaranteeing Trump's dominion amidst the starvation and growing violence from Afghanistan to Somalia to the Korean peninsula. A global oil executive knows exactly how to do such deals.

        Meanwhile, as noted, the Democrats remain missing in action while this Trump agenda unfolds.  Aside from their new found skill at chortling and jeering Republican missteps they seem no closer today to advancing a reformed agenda than they were on the day they eliminated Bernie Sanders and his reform campaign last June. Silence reigns, as it did in the Hillary Clinton campaign, with no  serious policy reforms offered that could deliver infrastructure job-creating programs, or Medicare for all, or justice-for-all foreign policy goals in regions where inequality is vast beyond imagining.  

        "Calculation" remains the lingua franca in both political parties, meaning the Democrats bear strong resemblance to their Republican adversaries in the art of turning access to money and power into policy-making that is personally advantageous.  In winning passage for Obamacare six years ago the Democrats created a system that never laid a hand on the health care industry---which grows today at an annual inflation rate twice the rate of inflation in the Consumer Price Index.  At its passage Obamacare could not find a bi-partisan coalition for ending such profiteering in health care, which is why it is so complicated and vulnerable in the long run.

 

        The question on this post FBI day is how the accelerating momentum toward autocracy, a totalitarian autocracy, can be stemmed. Many desperate people could care less.  Likewise many comfortable people, especially in faith communities, who are buying the idea that faith is about making them safe and comfortable. That's also one of Trump's promises. Of such stuff an Orwellian world can be made.                 

Lost Horizon

        President Trump’s missing naval armada seems the perfect example of traveling in fog without instruments. It’s not his habit alone as illustrated by bundled mortgage credit default swaps, weapons of mass destruction, walls at the border with Mexico, and a growing alienated segment of the public impaled by their loss of expectation and privilege.  All compose the danger in which we now stand

      

        There are complicated questions of strategy: Can the Democrats preserve their voter base which falls mostly into the bottom 90 percent whose incomes have been mostly stagnant the past thirty years and whose children, especially, may no longer be able to earn a secure living? Or there is the shaky vision of faith communities whose interests tend to vacillate between their institutional need to raise the annual budget and disappearing immigrants (led away by ICE agents), or people of color incarcerated en masse. 

      

        Today’s conditions increasingly mirror well known historical examples of failure by communities of privilege to respond to the needs of the common good. The U. S. in the heyday of the robber barons, Great Britain’s colonial policies. Twentieth century capitalism in both the Fascist/Nazi era and during the current era of globalization.  As Trumpism illustrates, illusion can work both ways: deceiving others and deceiving ourselves.  

         Lost Horizon, a haunting tale written by James Hilton in 1931—between the two world wars—captures the tension between hope and illusion. 

A pilot hijacks a plane carrying British diplomats from Khandahar, Afghanistan. He flies toward Tibet but loses visible horizon and crashes. A rescue party leads the survivors to Shangri-la, a Lamasery high in the Himalayas----a place of peace, beauty, fields of plenty where people age very slowly. The High Llama is reported to be 250 years old.  Both diplomats fall in love with an apparently young postulant, Lo-Tsen, who speaks no English but plays the harpsichord. One diplomat wants to remain living at the Lamasery, but the other seeks his help to hire porters and return to civilization. Lo-Tsen agrees to help him find his way out of the valley. On the journey he is taken ill and she leads him to a local doctor who remembers that she was "the most old of anyone I have ever seen" and died soon thereafter.

        Lost Horizon is a critique of a British high culture, we may say modern high culture, that drives men and women to seek new horizons.  Today’s question is whether we can avoid worlds of illusion by focusing all energies on giving people around the world and in our own neighborhoods a better future.

        Economist Paul Krugman has noted that A single Hedge Fund manger earns more than all the Kindergarten teachers in the country  

        According to the World Bank Average Middle East and African Gross National income per capita is $3,456.  In France it’s $41,420. In the U. S. it’s $53,960.  Blacks and Hispanics in U. S. have 60% of white income. Black incarceration rates are six times White rates.  Latino rates three times greater.

  

The Trap

Former CIA director James Wolsey---a sometime Presbyterian famous for arriving at church conferences a few hours before they might vote to divest from U. S. corporations doing business in the Israeli-occupied West Bank---has gone live on CNN today, Thursday 4/6/17, calling for air strikes on Iranian nuclear sites as a way to stop Syria. Bomb Syria at the same time, he said (mercifully omitting to mention if that would halt ISIS but might help Israel's worst leanings).  

          It's time to ask the Tet question again.  But first a brief review: 

          The Russians are busy in the region with their air campaign to help Assad, it's not always clear why.  The battle-seasoned Kurds, whom the Turks despise and fear, are helping the U. S./Iraqi battle with Isis in Holms and Mosul (not going that well). The U. S. promises to look the other way while Turkey continues mass arrests in exchange for keeping our airbase at Incerlik; and on the Arabian peninsula the U. S. and the Saudis are bombing the Shia Muslim minority "Houthis"  in Yemen while the U. S. is selling high performance fighter jets  to Quatar and Kuwait.

             Now the for the Tet question, newly applied:  during the ferocious North Vietnamese Tet offensive and U. S. counter offensive fifty years ago a reporter asked a U. S. General  "Just who's got whom surrounded here?"  As if replaying the Netflix script for "House of Cards," we cannot be surprised to realize that the stupefying killing in the Middle East is tied to the politics tolerated and practiced in the U. S. Hence the Wolsey connection, among many.  Wolsey is inviting us into the trap of a diversion to conceal the continuing U. S. debacle while other goals are pursued, especially world economic dominance.  "So It's the Iranians!" 

        There is so much to conceal.   Please look the other way as the Republicans exercise the nuclear option that condemns the U. S. political style to long-term polarization in which democratic practices are not really on the table anymore.  That's the message down below decks when the Washington Post reports that nine days before the Trump inauguration The United Arab Emirates arranged a secret meeting between Blackwater founder Erik Prince and a Russian close to President Vladi­mir Putin. (Washington Post April 4th).  Prince is scion of a wealthy auto-parts distributor, brother of secretary of education Betsy Devos, big-dollar donor to the Trump campaign, and leader of a giant global company that trains private mercenary forces for foreign governments.

           Below decks, the Financial Times' Edward Luce reports (Feb. 26, 2017)  that "the stocks of private prison companies soared after the Department of Justice scrapped an Obama rule that ended the outsourcing of federal incarceration. They had already jumped after the announcement the Trump administration would detain illegal immigrants in federal centres rather than release them." Likewise, Luce reported that "the new head of the Federal Communications Commission purged key parts of the net neutrality rules put in place to shield consumers from discrimination. The FCC also scrapped plans to open the cable box market to competition. Expect similar field days in the for-profit higher education sector, defense industrial stocks and public housing contractors,"

           It is a matter of the highest moral purpose and an act of faithful witness to see the traps around us, expose them, and resist. 

To the Hitler Station

        Last Friday's Republican debacle as their health care strategy collapsed was momentarily delicious but all the familiar pieces are still on the chess board: a Wall Street cabinet, a divided Congress, a Supreme Court turning to the Right for years to come and a president with no loyalty to truth or moral principle. Our danger continues unabated and in some ways is worse.

        David Frum, a senior editor at The Atlantic and a former speechwriter for President George W. Bush, has been one of the sharpest conservative critics of President Trump and recently noted in a national conference call on March 11 that we have a number of station stops before we get to the Hitler station,” but in the March Atlantic he described how that train could travel on down the line:

“Civil unrest will not be a problem for the Trump presidency…Trump will likely want not to repress it, but to publicize it…conservative outrage…will eagerly assist him. Immigration protesters marching with Mexican flags; Black Lives Matter demonstrators bearing anti-police slogans—these are the images of the opposition that Trump will wish his supporters to see…. nobody in the history of American politics has deployed it as aggressively, as repeatedly, or with such success as Donald Trump.”

And the shift to autocracy, in many instances, won’t be that obvious: elections will still be held, just not quite as fairly; the press will remain free, but its standing will be undermined; life will go on as normal for most, but the economy and culture will slowly bend toward corruption.

       If you follow the news from North Carolina you know that no one can vote there without a photo ID.  News stories over last weekend described pro Trump parades violently attacked by Trump opponents. Last November (2016) CBS anchor Scott Peley observed that “The quickest, most direct way to ruin a democracy is to poison the information.”  

       Corruption abounds.  The New Yorker reported on March 7^th that their business reporter Adam Davidson spent months investigating the Trump Hotel deal in Baku where “Trump did business with corrupt partners who also did business with Iran's Revolutionary Guard. This would be in violation of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.”

        The money-making schemes of Paul Manaford, today a senior Trump aide, range from managing the abrupt rise of the pro-Russian oligarch, Viktor Yanukovich, to the presidency of Ukraine (subsequently forced to flee from office by outraged Ukrainians) and selling his services to Putin during the Russian invasion of Eastern Ukraine two years ago. 

        This is without mentioning that the concentration of wealth in the U. S. and the weakening of regulatory controls and leadership at the Securities and Exchange Commission create the easy means for big money to buy the loyalty of legislators and judges at both state and national levels.

       There’s one big  thing that could slow the Hitler train. It’s the churches and their interfaith colleagues who could pick up the mantel of Moses who defied Pharoah, of Jeremiah who opposed state corruption, of John the Baptist who called the chief priests and scribes of the Temple a “brood of vipers,” of Jesus who drove the money changers out of the Temple, of Paul who got tangled up with the Roman Empire.  If modern history is any teacher we know that great religious leaders have emerged to combat racism, the Vietnam War and globalization’s inequality; BUT we also know that the rank and file believers resisted losing their comfortable religion and its walled enclosures and so they withdrew, stranding their leaders and leaving society to make war, practice racism and accept unjust economic life as an act of nature.

        If good people----clergy and congregations----do nothing now, bowing to their local church or synagogue board, it is these nice people of faith who will be responsible for the triumph of evil as the Hitler train moves on to the next station.   

Thin Ice

        Recent reports that the Republican priority for repealing Obama Care, overhauling the tax code, and securing the U.S.-Mexico border will delay the trillions promised by President Trump for infrastructure projects until 2018 signals that the people in small cities and towns in Ohio and Pennsylvania, where Trump signs are still pegged into front yards, face the hard reality—along with the rest of us—that modern governments serve as executors for Wall Street’s priorities. Remember, the Obama Attorney General, Eric Holder, never prosecuted a single bank CEO for the catastrophic mortgage finance collapse of 2008 that drove millions of people out of their homes.

        This agenda of Trump’s Wall Street billionaire cabinet is unfolding rapidly. The Republican replacement for the Affordable Health Care Act announced yesterday turns health policy into a money-making sorcerer for the Wall Street-based private insurance industries, the pharmaceuticals and the health technology companies. Dodd-Frank and SEC regulatory functions are slated for downgrading along with weaker EPA enforcement.

        The furious U. S. airstrikes underway this week against Yemen and Syrian dissident groups (whatever their merits may be, or not) are self-fulfilling strategies requiring huge increases in the military budget to replace the expended munitions; and of course North Korea and China loom.

        Meanwhile Trump-inspired ICE (Immigration and Custom Enforcement) sweeps are terrorizing  the eight million unauthorized immigrants in the U. S. labor force-- 2 million of them doing migrant farm work. (Pew Research Center, November  2016). The political lie feeding anti-immigration sentiments today belies the reality that much of the U. S. agricultural economy would collapse tomorrow without a steady supply of these migrant farm hands, who often have no legal status.

        This scene of moral desolation is reminiscent of the remark, attributed to William Faulkner, that the essence of racism in the South was the failure of the white man to call his darkly-born child, “my son, my son.”

      All of this is very serious penultimate business as Trump forces fight back against the image of Obama’s purity on wire taps and the secret worlds of government intelligence that leak.  Claiming “everyone does it” opens the door further to the demons of a daily kleptocracy. Here’s one example: The Yarborough case in Arizona. He’s President of the Arizona Senate:

        The Arizona Christian School Tuition Organization (Acsto) is one of the state’s largest voucher-granting groups. From 2010 to 2014 (the latest year recorded in federal tax filings), the group received $72.9 million in donations, all of which were ultimately financed by the state.

        Arizona law allows the group to keep 10 percent of those donations to pay for overhead. In 2014, the group used that money to pay its executive director $125,000. His name? Steve Yarbrough. Forms filed by the organization with the I.R.S. declare that he worked an average of 40 hours per week on the job — in addition, presumably, to the hours he worked as president of the State Senate.

       Yet the group doesn’t do all the work involved with accepting donations and handing out vouchers. It outsources data entry, computer hardware, customer service, information processing, award notifications and related personnel expenses to a private for-profit company called HY Processing. The group paid HY Processing $636,000 in 2014, and millions of dollars in total over the last decade.

        The owner of HY Processing? Steve Yarbrough, along with his wife, Linda, and another couple. (The “Y” in “HY” stands for “Yarbrough.”) According to The Arizona Republic, Acsto also pays $52,000 per year in rent. Its landlord? Steve Yarbrough. In June 2012, Mr. Yarbrough bought a car for $16,000. In July 2012, Acsto reimbursed him the full amount.    [NY Times March 2, 2017]

        But this is chump change compared to Wall Street where hedge funds engage in trading deal in trillions of dollars. Not just a few trillion, but many, many trillions of dollars.

       Don’t worry. We’re still needed.  Wall Street still needs the people’s money to buy retail, to borrow in the rental and mortgage markets. The reason the new White House squad of Bannon, etc. are filled with joy is that they are embarked on dismantling and  taking hold of an economy filled with the people’s money to provide collateral for their “puts” and hedges.

      Take this lesson to your Sabbath school next week. 

Faith Communities: Blessing or Curse

         The President has already rounded second base in his campaign of public disenchantment with the news media. The Pew Research Center reports "a quarter of American adults (26%) haven't read a book in whole or in part in the past year, whether in print, electronic or audio form."  Worse, some 29% of adults, ages 50 and older, also haven't read a book in the past year"  

   
          Add to this the finding of the U.S. Department of Education and the National Institute of Literacy that thirty-four million adults can't read at all and twenty-one percent read at only the 5th grade level and you can believe the President recognizes the roots of this "natural" constituency and is calculating carefully when he teaches the evangelicals (25-35 percent of faith communities according to Pew) to put their trust in him because like them, he is chosen!

           While the fall of Mike Flynn as director of the NSA shows the not so invisible hand of the intelligence agencies at work, it is no guarantor of their future results because the obsessions of President Trump include this large measure of calculation aimed at both voters and the apparatchik of Washington.

           The biggest potential obstacle to the Trump advance along the base paths should be the faith communities, especially faith groups that have realized that the idea of "chooseness" is more liability than asset.  Shedding that liability means cleaning up some commonplace illusions; one of them being the high degree of believer self-regard that turns the god idea into a personal possession. This personal "get out of jail free" theology guarantees deliverance even when righteousness has not been practiced.  

           If it is fair to say that the rise of Trumpism represents the greatest threat to democratic institutions since the civil war 150 years ago, it is important also to say that it was the long stand of faith communities for Abolition that set the moral stage for Emancipation. Such faith groups weren't in the majority, but standing against slavery and for Abolition put them into the long arc of justice. It was their vocation.

          What is not yet clear today is whether new energies in the faith communities will now take an immovable righteous stand for the human rights of all their immigrant neighbors.      

            Bear in mind that the pivotal part of the Trump era authoritarian anti-media stance counts on the passivity of faith communities whose first loyalty is usually to their institutions.  Even more liberal segments among the faithful think it's an emergency when the church roof blows off but not an emergency if democracy might fall or racism continuies to be tolerated because it's too political to talk about.

           Also bear in mind that much is required of People of the Book. The Trump game won't change even if Trump falls sooner rather than later. His success demeaning the news media is attracting understudies who will take his place for at least four more, maybe eight more years of near total Right wing control; long enough to establish a new autocracy and send discouraged people of faith back to the old self-regarding faith in a god acting just for them.

            Today's Trump order (2/21/17) requiring ICE to arrest any undocumented person they encounter should be the end of such cheap grace.  As if floating on a metaphorical raft in the Mediterranean millions of our immigrant neighbors face mass deportation. Blocking ICE's path may divide faith groups, impair annual budgets, but it can give fresh definition to people of the book by defining righteousness and its requirements: loving justice, doing mercy, walking humbly. [Micah 6:8]

The Long March

        Even as the Trump administration in its first thirty days self-destructs unassisted, a recovery of footing can be expected from a party in control of Congress, thirty-two state houses and 34 governorships and in a position to shape the Supreme Court.  The good news is that this Republican supremacy will face the same turbid sea of quandaries their Democratic party rivals famously failed to resolve.  In the Republican victory the seeds of their defeat are already growing; witness their discovery that the Affordable Health Care Act—Obama Care—is turning out to be very difficult to replace. Immediately, they’ve been faced with tumultuous town meetings and something worse from a Republican perspective: given the enormous inequality across the country it is impossible to deliver health care for all without state and federal subsidies drawn either from cost reductions or tax revenues. 

Of course who believes our new leaders want health care equity for all?  Many Republican states (and maybe also some Democratic ones) will be thinking about reducing benefits to lower income families by increasing deductibles; which will simply mean in the preferred language of the new head of Health and Human Services, Tom Price, you will have health care “access” when and if you can afford it. That’s why they’ll call it win=win.

            

             Both parties face this impending catastrophic predicament as a huge and growing inequality problem engulfs the country and the world. According to Oxfam the richest eight men in the world have as much wealth as the bottom half of humanity.  This road ahead for all of American politics and both parties is full of deeply seated negatives involving the declining standards of living for eighty percent of the population and pervasive racial inequality.   

Demos, a public policy organization advocating equality in democratic practice, released a study lasrt week on “The Asset Value of Whiteness” reporting that  “according to data from the Survey of Consumer Finances, the median white household possessed $13 in net wealth for every dollar held by the median black household in 2013. That same year, median white households possessed $10 for each dollar held by the median Latino household. “

Black adults with at least some college had $11,100 in wealth at the median, Latino adults had $20,500 in wealth at the median….dwarfed by the $79,600 in median wealth held by whites who attended at least some college.

          These mountainous inequities make the Trump era seem like a nasty blip compared with the longstanding failure of American politics over centuries to do the right thing. Neither the old parties: Democrats, Whigs, Republicans, Bull Moose Progressives, nor the new Democrats from Wilson to FDR to the Clintons changed this pattern.  It amounts to a global ticking bomb feeding new dictatorships from Turkey to Syria to African nations to ISIS and an age of terrorism. Or, in this week’s (3/14/17) suggestion of Times columnist David Brooks, it could mean rule by Kleptocracy.

           The American mind has always been on something else: getting ahead, getting a little better off, if not more so—all the while embracing the permission our theology of exceptionalism gives us.

It’s a lie, one that gives sway to new generations of political liars. 

           Put another way, while our demise may be imminent it is not inevitable.  Thoughtful resistance to these negatives must go to the heart of our American disease of “great” and we must teach each other, learn together as a priority in neighborhood community action groups, activist congregations and among marchers in the streets.    

            We are therefore best advised to re-tool, make all our associations places of talk, study and strategic action planning so that we give birth to a new story about ourselves as advocates for our brother’s and sister’s welfare around the world.   The problem ultimately is not with Trump but with us.