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.