How About a Black Friday of Mourning?

A smidgen of post election arithmetic and a suggestion for Friday, Jan. 20, 2017:

Hillary Clinton, according to the most recent data I’ve seen, won the popular vote by some half a million ballots. If you take those 60.4 million citizens, and add to them the 4.1 million Gary Johnson voters and the 1.2 million Jill Stein voters, you have nearly 68 million adult citizens of the United States who do NOT want D. Trump as their president.

That is a lot of unhappy, disenfranchised folks,

There is also this:  the last demographic data I saw divulged that majorities of young voters, and early middle-age voters voted against Trump.  His  voters were the older crowd, including 53 per cent of white women. What this means is that our side, the side of peace and justice and dignity for all, has the advantage in youth and vigor as well as sheer numbers.

Now let’s do some s’posin’.  S’pose 60 per cent of those people cared enough to want to express their feelings publicly? That’s right close to 40 million folks.

I suggest that  the 68 million disenfranchised Americans declare Friday, Jan 20, 2017 to be the national Black Friday of Mourning for Democracy.  

I suggest that to show Trump that he is not our president, we all don black clothing and go to some public place in our communities and just stand around in silent protest.

Forty million silent mourners wearing black and standing around could perhaps stop traffic in some places.  Maybe a lot of places.  

Even as the new Pussy-Grabber-in-Chief was being sworn into office in Washington, millions of Americans would be saying in silent eloquence, “He is  not OUR president.”

Think about it.

The Task Is Impossible; Let Us Begin

The Democratic Party, like the democratic form of government in Amerika, lies in ashes around us.  Dead.  The Trump election victory did not kill the party; it killed itself when it nominated Clinton.  Yesterday’s vote was merely the last nail in its casket.

Something calling itself the Democratic Party will probably continue to exist in name for a while, home to the zombies of Clintonism.  

Something calling itself “democracy” will probably be on display in Trump’s Washington, but like Trump himself, it will be a chimera.  The people who elected him will call themselves patriots, populists, defenders of liberty, etc. but they are in fact believers in and supporters of virtually all that is antithetical to genuine democracy.

What horrors will this country reap from their success and his governance?  

Probably the worst will be what he does to the Supreme Court.  These are lifetime appointments.  He has said he will appoint justices who are as much like the late Antonin Scalia as possible.  Scalia was, arguably, the worst ideological force on SCOTUS in many generations.  When more Scalias are adjudicating our great issues, there can be no hope for a decent country with “liberty and justice for all.”

Can the United States ever become again a decent place for people, not corporations?

Only if it can find strong leadership within the remnants of its political left. I expect that its battered and tattered progressive elements will align themselves with Sen. Bernie Sanders’s Our Revolution movement.  Out of this may come a new, liberal political party.  Followers of Dennis Kucinich, Russ Feingold , Jill Stein and Elizabeth Warren would naturally gravitate there, especially now, having learned how it must feel to lose a war.

It must begin today to seek out those leaders. It must begin today to build itself into a genuine movement.  By next week it must have begun to develop lists of candidates for city councils, school boards, state legislatures.  People like Mary Gourdoux, of El Paso, TX,  who ran as a Green and lost, and Jeff Steinborn, of Las Cruces, NM, who has stood on progressive  ground in successful elections to the state legislature and now, as of yesterday, to the state senate.  In a bastion of conservatism even among Democrats, he soundly defeated a Trumpish incumbent lout, proving  that progressive seeds can flourish in the arid right wing earth.

The American left must do for itself what the right did after its Goldwater humiliation: build from the ground up.It must take control of the vocabulary of the debate, expose the demons of the other side’s ideology, make inclusiveness the norm and divisiveness the evil, empower the poor and the female and the hispanic and the black and the LGBT and the physically disabled, curb militarism, rein in the over-armed police, take fearsome weapons out of the hands of private individuals, make corporations and oligarchs pay their fair share of taxes, make adequate health care a cost-free right for every citizen,  take big money out of politics . . . the list goes on and on.

The obverse of these democratic principles will have been more hardened and more deeply embedded in the American fabric after one term of Trump; utterly impossible to overturn after two.  So the rebirth of freedom led by the left must move fast, faster than the right wing resurgence after Goldwater.

Already, so much harm has been done under decades of mis-rule by both Republicans and Democrats, that our children may never know what it’s like to live in a genuine democracy, a government that is truly “of the people, by the people and for the people.”  But perhaps a burgeoning New Left can make this country a better place for our grandchildren and their children.

Or perhaps not.  But as John Kennedy said, “Let us begin.”

Now.

The Apparition in The Desert

Out in the desert this morning I settled onto a favorite sittin’ rock to savor the silence while Brandi chased rabbits.  A wave of nostalgia washed over me, nostalgia for the America I used to know.

Times were tough in the Great Depression but we could usually spare a dime for a brother who was worse off than we were. We sang along with the union maid and then one day she became Rosie the Riveter making the weapons for the bloodiest war this old world had ever seen.  The boys from the CCC camps became GI Joes. We knew that the only thing we had to fear was fear itself.  

We danced the jitterbug to swing orchestras.  We sang Rodgers and Hammerstein songs.  We treasured our spacious skies and amber waves of grain.  We liked Ike and we built Levittowns and generations of our sons and daughters got college educations their parents could never have dreamed of.

Things weren’t perfect, especially for people of color, but we were Americans, stuck like a dope with a thing called hope, and there were answers out there blowin’ in the wind. We passed a Civil Rights Act and a Voting Rights Act and proudly claimed the leadership off The Free World.

We asked not what our country could do for us, but what we could do for our country, and we joined the peace corps and went eyeball to eyeball with the Soviets over Cuba.  We went to Woodstock and marched on Washington and finally got the hell out of ‘Nam because we really didn’t want to be mad at no Cong.

We got a lot of things wrong but at crunch time, when the chips were down we got it right.

Come Tuesday, I was thinkin’, there on that sittin’ rock, we’ll do the right thing again.  

Suddenly a figure materialized before me, stompin’ up the hill from Box Canyon.  He wore camo fatigues and  his combat belt held two grenades and a holstered .40 caliber Smith and Wesson.  He had an assault rifle slung over his shoulder,  Rambo style, and his cap said, “Make America Great Again.”

“You got a gun, Old Man?” he barked.

“Nope.”

“Old guy like you, shouldn’t be out here alone without no gun.  We ain’t that far from the border.  All kinds of rapists and druggies crossin’ over every day.  They find an old man with no gun, they’d slit his throat without thinkin’ about it.”

He vanished into the brush.  I heard the sound of an ATV engine starting up.  In a cloud of dust, the apparition vanished.

On the way home my nostalgia gave way to sadness.  Nobody has danced the jitterbug in a coon’s age.  Rodgers and Hammerstein are ancient history.  Only thing blowin’ in the wind is particulate pollution.  Things move fast now and if you can’t keep up, get off the road. 

“You can’t grab pussy with arthritic hands,” I told myself.  “It’s not your America any more, old man.”

What the Yard Signs Told Me

Many years ago, when there were three channels and a lot of snow on your black-and-white television screen, a journalist friend used to predict elections by counting yard signs.

Recently I tried his method during a driving trip through four southwestern states: Utah, Arizona, Colorado and New Mexico.  Somewhere around St. Johns, AZ, I lost count of all the Trump/Pence signs.  Yesterday, back home in New Mexico, I counted my third Clinton/Kaine sign.  It’s a landslide, folks.  Get ready for President Trump. 

"The fault, dear Democrats, is not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings."  We are underlings to a system that has devolved from merely bad to criminally evil and corrupt.  The system gave us two utterly unqualified candidates for the presidency.  The Democrats had an opportunity, in Sen. Bernie Sanders, to choose a candidate who might have swept all 50 states against Trump or any of the other Republicans seeking the nomination.  Instead they rigged the process to put forward Hillary Clinton, knowing that she espoused a foreign policy that would take us to the brink of World War III, had insurmountable problems involving her use of a private e-mail server as Secretary of State, had the baggage of her husband’s marital infidelity trailing her like a hungry jackal, and would be vulnerable to some of the most vile attacks from the right in the history of presidential politics.  Go figure.

The Republicans, having sold their souls to the most extreme right wing elements in their number, had an opportunity to restore their party to the decency and honesty of its Eisenhower years, but could not find within their ranks a single person who reflected the better angels of their own destiny, offering instead the likes of Cruz, Rubio, et al.  They tried to pose as reasonable, honorable men.  Trump instead ran as what he is: an egomaniacal, racist, woman-bitching imbecile. The genuine article took the nomination.  Go figure.

An old comedy monologue punchline goes something like, “Somebody told me to cheer up, things could be worse, so I cheered up, and sure enough, things got worse.”  Cheer up, America.  Things will indeed get worse, much worse, after Nov. 8.

Remember, the fault is not in your stars.  Try to learn from that.  If you can.

The Auctioning of Paradise

Come, Pilgrim, come up through the gate and across the slickrock, come up to the summit of Comb Ridge and admire the grandest landscape on this earth.  Due west, the icons of Monument Valley.  Turn ever so slowly, Pilgrim. The gooseneck meanders of the San Juan. Valley of the Gods where mighty spirits shaped huge rock sculptures. Cedar Mesa where the Ancients built their finely crafted houses and granaries of stone, and inscribed their stories on the red-rock cliffsides where they still speak to us today. The Comb itself stretching northward into infinity.  Golden cottonwoods in Butler Wash.The Abajos, blue and misty beyond the Bears Ears tall in the forest.  Sleeping Ute Mountain, sacred to the tribes. Ship Rock. The Big Rez.  Gaze reverently, Pilgrim.  Take  photographs. More precious still, Pilgrim, are your mental images, how the air smelled, how the breeze felt on your bare arms in the autumnal sun.  Drink deeply of this, Pilgrim, and keep it inside you, where it will be safe.

* * *                                                                                      

On Oct. 19, the State institutional Lands Administration of Utah, amidst great controversy, sold a section (360 acres) of Comb Ridge to a privately-held corporate entity, Lyman Family Farms. The section, which straddles Utah highway 163, has for generations been precious to hikers, naturalists, conservators of cultures, lovers of the outdoors and citizens of Bluff, the historic Mormon town six miles to the east.

Sixty-five million years ago, shifting tectonic plates deep beneath the earth's surface forced up an 80-mile long, one mile narrow ridge of jagged peaks and steep canyons, tilting almost 20 degrees to the west.  Known today as Comb Ridge, it runs in jagged, multi-colored splendor from Kayenta, in the Navajo nation in Arizona, to the Abajo Mountains 11 miles west of Blanding, UT.

From roughly 800 A.D. to about 1300, it was part of the homeland of early puebloans sometimes called "Anasazi."  They were remarkable stone masons, astronomers, potters and weavers.  Priceless remains of their buildings and artifacts of their civilization remain on and around Comb Ridge, as throughout the Four Corners area.

In 1879, a party of Mormon pioneers set out from Salt Lake Valley to found new settlements in the San Juan River valley.  Seeking the most direct route, they manhandled their livestock and heavy wagons down a sheer cliff -- the Hole in the Rock -- south of Escalante to the Colorado River where Lake Powell has since been created. Their mission, planned for six weeks, took more than six months, taking them through wild, uncharted mesas and canyons until, on the point of exhaustion, they founded the city of Bluff.  Their last and most daunting task before reaching their destination was to cross Comb Ridge, at a point which they called San Juan Hill after the nearby river.

In 1976, Comb Ridge was designated a National Natural Landmark.  

Early this year, the Hole in the Rock Foundation of Bluff petitioned the State Institutional Land Administration to auction its land holdings on Comb Ridge, intending to buy the tract and use it as a starting point for tours commemorating the San Juan Hill crossing.  Signs opposing the deal popped up all over Bluff and southern San Juan County.  Worse, as several local publications put it, the auction "opened a Pandora's box" by attracting monied private interests.  The deepest pockets belonged to Lyman Farms, which not only outbid the Hole in the Rock Foundation for the Comb Ridge land, but also snapped up several other choice parcels close to national parks and monuments.  Nobody seems to know what the corporation intends to do with its acquisitions.  The Lyman Farms corporate filings with the Utah secretary of state identify its business interests as "vegetable and melon agriculture."  A local rancher pointed out, "you can't even put cows up there," let alone grow melons or carrots.

A Bluff resident who seemed to favor the sale remarked that the Lyman corporation is "a bunch of entrepreneurs and businessmen, so you can't expect them to reveal their plans." But a Bluff business owner reported dark rumors that the Comb Ridge site would become "a training camp for survivalists."

A member of the Hole in the Rock Foundation said his group is "in close contact with the Lyman  group."  Everything will work out for the best, he suggested, and future generations will have the opportunity to "go up there and learn how their ancestors survived the rigors of their journey." The State Institutional Land Administration's holdings, he said, were "set aside (when Utah achieved statehood) to provide money for the schools,” so that last month's sales would provide a landfall for Utah public education.

Utah has 899 public schools with close to 500,000 students.  Lyman Family Farms paid $500,000 for the section of land on Comb Ridge, which would yield each school in the state about $500, or a dollar per student.  Pencil money.

 * * *

These are god-fearing folk, Pilgrim, Bible readers who gave  places names like Moab and Jordan.  Tell them, Pilgrim, tell them to go back and re-read Genesis 25: 29-34 (wherein Esau sells his birthright for pottage).

* * *

The Comb Ridge land and other parcels acquired at auction by Lyman Farms are part of a much larger area and a much larger controversy, with the landmark called Bears Ears at its center.  A coalition of native American tribes, ardently supported by environmental, historical, scientific and conservation organizations, has asked President Obama to use his powers under the 1906 Antiquities Act, to designate some 1.9 million acres of public land in Utah as what would be the nation's largest national monument.  Republican state and local governments have countered with their own plan for the land -- highly favorable to the extraction industries -- which they hope will soon come to a vote in Congress. "If we fail," one of them said, "San Juan County will become Bears Ears County."

Some right-wingers seem resigned to the probability that their plan, despite the vast wealth and political power of  the extraction industry, nevertheless will fail in Congress.  They expect that Obama will create the new national monument before leaving office, as President Clinton did 16 years ago with the Grand Staircase/Escalante National Monument elsewhere in Utah.  Even so, some precious places will not be protected because they are now in private hands.

Proponents of the national monument are acutely aware of the residual anger up north over Grand Staircase/Escalante, which some ranchers still refer to as "the stealth monument." The Lyman  purchases have kindled new fears about the future of the public land in the Bears Ears plan. Could that auction have been part of some intricate and well-financed conspiracy to prevent federal protection of the lands from ever happening?

* * *

Treasure your memories of these places, Pilgrim.  Lock  them deep inside you, where they will be safe.  Perhaps some day they will be all that we have.

Outrage in North Dakota

It’s sad that the ugly entertainment spectacle we call an election has diverted public attention from what at least some of the mainstream media might have recognized as an important story: the protest by thousands of native Americans against the Dakota Access dirty crude pipeline.

Only one journalist — Amy Goodman of “Democracy Now!” — was in North Dakota with a camera crew to record the violence against the protesters by private contractors and their attack dogs last Sept. 3. Her horrifying video and reportage were seen by millions and picked up by some of the mainstream TV networks but the entire situation, including the pollution threat to sources of drinking water for millions of people, still has not received the attention it deserves.

Goodman, meanwhile, was charged with criminal trespass for going to a news scene and reporting on it.  This is activity that is specifically protected by the First Amendment.  She flew to Bismarck Friday and traveled to Mandan, N.D. early today to turn herself in to authorities, face and fight the charges.  She was informed that the prosecutor, Ladd Erickson, had dropped the class B misdemeanor trespassing charge and would instead be filing some sort of riot charge.  It had not been filed as this post is being written.

Goodman delivered her morning broadcast from a lawn across the street from the Morton County court house, where the new charges, if any, would be filed.  

Erickson wasn’t talking today, nor did he respond to messages left by news organizations.  But, a la Trump, he had a lot to say after Goodman’s shocking report aired online.  Goodman, he said, was “a protester basically.”  He asserted that everything she reported “was from the position of justifying the protest actions.”

However, the affidavit he filed with the trespass charges said, “Goodman can be seen on video identifying herself and interviewing protesters about their involvement in the protest.”  Psst.  Ladd, baby; that’s what reporters do.  They identify themselves and their news organization and they interview participants in the news event.

It’s called journalism, Ladd.  And it is protected by the First Amendment to the United States Constitution.

The Standing Rock Sioux Tribe has contended in a court filing that the pipeline route desecrates  burial grounds and other sacred sites.  Standing Rock Sioux Tribe Chairman Dave Archambault II said Goodman’s reporting “took a lot of courage,” and opposition to the pipeline wouldn’t be where it is today without her reporting.

Carlos Lauría, senior program coordinator for the Americas for the nonprofit Committee to Protect Journalists in New York,  said Goodman was clearly working as a journalist when she filmed the Sept. 3 incident, and the committee is “really concerned” about the potential rioting charge. “I think authorities in North Dakota should drop the charges and ensure that all reporters are free to do their jobs without fear of reprisal or intimidation,” Lauría told the Fargo Forum newspaper.

In North Dakota, trespassing is a Class B misdemeanor punishable by up to 30 days in jail and a $1,500 fine. Inciting a riot is a Class A misdemeanor punishable by up to a year in jail and a $3,000 fine.  Ladd Erickson clearly wants to inflict all the pain he can on the uppity journalist who dared to report on the injustice in his back yard.

Someone in North Dakota should give him a copy of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution and suggest that he study it.

Bulletin

North Dakota District Judge John Grinsteiner rejected today the riot charge Erickson sought against Goodman.  The judge, at least, is familiar with the First Amendment.

Post-Election Is the Real challenge

Oozing sleaze from every pore, Donald Trump has taken political demagoguery to depths unplumbed since Hitler rose to power in Germany.

Will he be as successful as Der Fuhrer?

Blessedly, polling suggests not.

Frighteningly, the same polling suggests that at least 40 million adult United States citizens support him, many with the same crazed, racist zeal of the Nazi partisans who supported Hitler.

Even if, as it now appears, Trump fails to win the presidency, how will it feel to be one of the saner Americans living amidst the four in ten who are shouting “Kill the Bitch!” and “Fuck Your Feelings” and “Lock Her Up” and far, far worse at the 70-year-old adolescent’s campaign rallies?

My wife and I both know how it feels to be professed liberals in a right-wing zoo.  Even registered Democrats and Democratic candidates in our part of New Mexico are ideologically far to the right of, say, Dwight Eisenhower. When we became open and unabashed critics of George W. Bush and the so-called Tea Party we heard muttered obscenities and thinly-veiled threats to our safety.

These reactions were mild compared to what’s going on now in Trumpland.  The Trumpistas include virtually all of the gun-toters, all of those who advocate the killing of medical professionals who help women terminate unwanted pregnancies, all of those who call for physical harm to Colin Kaepernick and other athletes who advocate ending racial violence, all of those who want our borders sealed and immigrants incarcerated, all of those who think Trump’s sexual assaults on women were OK and Arizona Sheriff Arpaio is a hero . . . the most dangerous elements in our society.

What happens when they don’t get their way in November?

Will they vent their anger with violence against those of us who openly opposed Trumpista candidates?  Will there be shooting and bloodshed?  Will many streets and parks and public venues be unsafe?

That neighbor with the Trump/Pence sign in his yard.  Would his frustration turn to anger?  Would he shoot your dog?  Would he shoot you?

Other elections in this country have been marked by nastiness, by anger, by ugly pushing and shoving.  Most of the worst of it evaporated after election day.

There’s something different about the slime this time around.  It looks like it will linger.  It seems to have eaten into the core of a vast segment of our population.  It has sickened them, blinded them to injustice, made them bloodthirsty, told them that assaulting women and threatening minorities is a perfectly acceptable way of objecting to those perceived evils, political correctness and respect for people of color.

It has taken this country to a new and abysmal place.  Simply defeating Donald Trump in the presidential election won’t end it.

Someone must come forth to lead the country — even the Trumpistas — in another direction.  Hitler’s Germany never produced such a someone.  Can the United States of America do so in 2016?

Trump Gonna Sue! Trump Gonna Sue! (Heh-heh)

Oh, how I hope Trump sues the New York Times.

You sue a news organization for libel and the news organization’s attorneys are entitled to conduct a legal process called “discovery,”

As an editor, I worked with many of the best libel lawyers in the business on processes of discovery.  The late, great Ken Murray of the Detroit Free Press specialized in written interrogatories.  I’ve seen high-powered lawyers in their aluminum suits and alligator shoes burst into the Free Press newsroom and throw down their legal papers in a barrage of insults and threats. I’ve heard their clients shout to the heavens alleging falsehoods in our reporting,

I’ve seen those same clients cringe, and their lawyers melt, reading Ken’s probing interrogatories, which would have required them under oath to divulge their dirtiest secrets and worst tax scams.  Lawsuit withdrawn.

Ken never lost a libel suit that went to trial.  Once, the Free Press was found not guilty of libel but the judge did hold that a single statement in the article being litigated did in fact defame the reputation of the litigant.  The judge ordered the paper to pay the value of the defendant’s tarnished reputation — $1 — which Ken paid out of his own pocket.

He never coached reporters before they were deposed by opposing counsel in the discovery process.  “Just tell them what you told me when we were discussing the story before publication,” he would say.  Once, a wealthy businessman sued us after he had been named in one of our stories about profiteering during the Detroit riot.  Undeterred by Ken’s interrogatories, the  businessman’s lawyers went ahead with discovery, deposing one of our reporters, a doe-eyed, soft-spoken beauty who was as ruthless an interviewer as Sy Hersh.  The lawyer waded in while Ken — who was entitled to object if the questioning went out of line — simply smiled and remained silent.  Our ice maiden turned the bullying lawyer into a sweat-stained wretch, who broke off the deposition and withdrew the lawsuit.

I suspect the same fate lies in store for Trump’s lawyers if they were to actually follow through on their threat to sue the Times. I’ve worked with  Times lawyers vetting sensitive stories before they were published.  I know how they operate in discovery.   I presume today’s Times lawyers are as skilled as the ones back then.  The amount of damaging information they might unearth about Trump is almost beyond comprehension,  No doubt Times reporters are salivating at this very moment in anticipation of getting their hands on some of that stuff.

And then there’s the matter of deposing witnesses.  Some poor bastard representing Trump will have to go after Jessica Leeds in a legal setting.  It’ll be the ice maiden v. the shark all over again.

I know how that one turns out.  

Leeds was asked during a CNN interview with Anderson Cooper if she was afraid of Trump and his lawyers, who are boasting that they have “devastating evidence” against Trump’s accusers.

Leeds looked for all the world like the doe-eyed reporter who disemboweled a legal shark in that Detroit case years ago.

“We’ll see,” she said with a disarming smile.

Don't Pester Merikins with Serious Stuff

The American voter has been dumbed so far down that he no longer cares about issues any larger than Trump’s, er, “hands” or his own wallet.

Thus issues on which the very fate of the human race and its planetary home may depend barely register, if they register at all, on the Richter scale of political polling.

In the so-called “debate” between Trump and Clinton, for example, there was no reference to climate change. Yet, for the first time in more than 4 million years, the concentration of carbon dioxide in Earth’s atmosphere is above 400 parts per million and staying there.  (In one million pounds of the air we breathe, there are 400 pounds of CO2.) Carbon dioxide stays in the atmosphere for hundreds to thousands of years. Even if emissions were to drop to zero today, we would be aware of no positive effect in our air for almost a century.

Before the Industrial Revolution, when humans first began spewing masses of CO2 into the atmosphere, fhe carbon dioxide level io earth was about 280 ppm.  The allowable level for human health is thought to be between 250 and 350 ppm.  We have now entered dangerous territory, not just because greenhouse gases accelerate climate change, but also because too-high levels in themselves constitute dire threats to our health. Since humans weren’t around the last time Earth had such high levels, we are sailing on uncharted seas, not knowing where be dragons.  But the soaring frequency of extreme weather events, the rising seas, the wildfires, the monster storms and floods are dramatic warning signs that we cannot afford to ignore.  Perhaps when the last Manhattan skyscraper goes under water, or all of Louisiana and parts of Mississippi are wiped out by cholera, some genius debate moderator will think to ask a political candidate a serious question about climate change.

Or about nuclear policy.

Toward the end of the last so-called debate, the moderator asked, "On nuclear weapons, President Obama reportedly considered changing the nation's longstanding policy on first use.  Do you support the current policy?”

Trump replied first.  Russia, he said, has “a much newer capability than we do; we have not been updating from the new standpoint."  Yes, he actually said that: "updating from the new standpoint." Still more gibberish followed, with Trump insisting that China could prevent North Korea from using nukes and prevent Iran from getting them.  Or something.  Clinton said, well, we Americans need to keep our word.  Or something.

Nobody challenged either candidate’s nonsense or demanded elucidation of their positions.  

Debate over.

The fact is that the world is closer to nuclear war right now than at any point since the Cuban missile crisis.  Clinton’s record demonstrates a propensity to push potential enemies so far that we will be forced into conflicts likely to escalate quickly into nuclear ones.  Trump has no real “record” on nuclear policy or any other serious topic.  He has a record of vile middle-of -the-night telephone calls.  One can easily imagine his ringing up the palace in Pyongyang around 3 a.m. and saying to Kim Jong-un, "Hey, you fat little slanty-eyed prick, guess what button I’ve got my finger on?"

Does anyone care?

Did the U.S. Sabotage Colombian Vote?

Because it has been there so often and for so many years, the black hand of U.S.corporations and government agencies is always suspected in Latin American political events.

So it is with the stunning defeat by voters in Colombia of the agreement to end more than half a century of conflict between the government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (Farc) —the longest-lived armed insurgency in the Western Hemisphere. The vote was extremely close — a margin of barely 60,000 votes out of 13 million cast — and the opposition was led by a pal of Washington’s neoliberal crowd, former President Alvaro Uribe. 

Uribe’s successor, President Juan Manuel Santos, succeeded where several predecessors had failed, negotiating a peace agreement that had been secretly brokered by the  Communist government of Cuba. The negotiations came after Santos had irritated Washington by normalizing his country’s relations with the Venezuelan government of Hugo Chavez, another target of Washington’s regime-change hawks.  Santos and Uribe had been political allies, but when Santos ran for re-election in 2014, Uribe supported his opponent. Santos pledged to intensify the quest for peace with Farc and won a close run-off for re-election.

Now the worm has turned, as it has elsewhere in Latin America, generally with a nudge, or more, from the vast U.S. bag of dirty tricks.  Would that we in the U.S. had a reliable source of good journalism about our Southern Hemisphere neighbors.

Instead, we must rely on non-aligned journalists like Chris Hedges, a former award-winning correspondent in Central America.

“A decade ago,” Hedges writes, “left-wing governments, defying Washington and global corporations, took power in Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay, Venezuela, Uruguay, Bolivia and Ecuador.  .  .charismatic leaders such as Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, Luiz Ina'cio Lula da Silva in Brazil, Evo Morales in Bolivia and Rafael Correa in Ecuador, won huge electoral victories. They instituted socialist reforms that benefited the poor and the working class. They refused to be puppets of the United States. They took control of their nations' own resources and destinies. They mounted the first successful revolt against neoliberalism and orporate domination. It was a revolt many in the United States hoped to emulate here.

“But the movements and governments in Latin America have fallen prey to the dark forces of U.S. imperialism and the wrath of corporate power. The tricks long practiced by Washington and its corporate allies have returned -- the black propaganda; the manipulation of the media; the bribery and corruption of politicians, generals, police, labor leaders and journalists; the legislative coups d'e'tat; the economic strangulation; the discrediting of democratically elected leaders; the criminalization of the left; and the use of death squads to silence and disappear those fighting on behalf of the poor. It is an old, dirty game.

“President Correa, who earned enmity from Washington for granting political asylum to Julian Assange four years ago and for closing the United States' Manta military air base in 2009, warned recently that a new version of Operation Condor is underway in Latin America. Operation Condor, which operated in the 1970s and '80s, saw thousands of labor union organizers, community leaders, students, activists, politicians, diplomats, religious leaders, journalists and artists tortured, assassinated and disappeared.

“The intelligence chiefs from right-wing regimes in Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Paraguay, Uruguay and, later, Brazil had overseen the campaigns of terror. They received funds from the United States and logistical support and training from the Central Intelligence Agency. Press freedom, union organizing, all forms of artistic dissent and political opposition were abolished. In a coordinated effort these regimes brutally dismembered radical and leftist movements across Latin America. In Argentina alone 30,000 people disappeared.

“Latin America looks set to be plunged once again into a period of dictatorial control and naked corporate exploitation. The governments of Ecuador, Bolivia and Venezuela, which is on the brink of collapse, have had to fight off right-wing coup attempts and are enduring economic sabotage. The Brazilian Senate impeached the democratically elected President Dilma Rousseff. Argentina's new right-wing president, Mauricio Macri, bankrolled by U.S. hedge funds, promptly repaid his benefactors by handing $4.65 billion to four hedge funds, including Elliott Management, run by billionaire Paul Singer. The payout to hedge funds that had bought Argentine debt for pennies on the dollar meant that Singer's firm made $2.4 billion, an amount that was 10 to 15 times the original investment.”

Latin America has long been fertile ground for populist movements of the left, largely because it has for so long been cursed with inequality. The outrages of big land owners against small, struggling farmers gave birth to the Farc movement in Colombia in 1964. Santos’s peace deal with the revolutionaries would have given them seats in the national parliament, and other incentives to lay down their arms and commit to what Santos has called a “long-lasting peace.”

Once again, the dream of peace has been shattered. Given the shameful record of United States interference in Latin american affairs, why wouldn’t there be suspicions that Yankee black ops somehow sabotaged the Colombian vote?

Politics in Amerika in 2016

Debates be damned.  Election be damned.  This is already Donald Trump’s country, in far too many ways.

The police just killed another unarmed black man, this one in El Cajon, CA.  Just as they have done with equal impunity inNew York, Florida, Missouri, Maryland, Ohio.  Cops in this state of chaos have killed more than 700 persons this year, most of them black, most of them innocent.  That’s fine with Trump who says we need to kill more people of color to solve a “crime problem” that does not exist.

A professional football player began dignified, silent, peaceful protest of such killings.  He has been vilified, lost income and received death threats.  Other athletes — even 11 and 12-year-olds on a team in Texas — have received death threats for acting in support of him.

Hatred and threats of violence ooze from the idolators who attend Trump rallies. They are mirror images of Trump himself.  He once telephoned a Philadelphia journalist after midnight to call her a c**t (rhymes with “runt.”) The New York Times and others have documented similar pus oozing from crowds at his campaign rallies. 

Kaepernick kneels and gets death threats.  Trumpistas vomit hate and advocate violence and their man rises in the presidential polls.

Go figure.

* * *                                                                        

The lesser of two evils crowd holds that Hillary Clinton has to win this election.  She has accepted fees of a quarter-million dollars to give a single speech to Wall Street bankers. Do you suppose those greedy bastards bestow such sums on her because they fancy her hairdo?  Admire her diction?  Find her agreeably humorous?

Not bloody likely.  They expect tits for their tats and when she’s int he Oval Office she will repay them with interest.

A thoughtful friend who writes history for a living tells me he hopes that Clinton will win the election, serve one term and then decide that age and health warrant her stepping aside.  My friend hopes that by then the Democratic party will be ready to nominate a “real Democrat” for the presidency.

It is tempting to want to believe in such a narrative.  Doing so requires the parallel belief that the nation can avoid war with Russia, China, North Korea et al for the duration of her term.  Nothing in her record as senator or secretary of state suggests that this is likely or even possible. All of our likely enemies in Hillary’s war possess nuclear arms.  Reassuring thought, isn’t it?

* * * 

A moderate Republican friend — yes, a few such animals remain in this sorry land  — says he intends to assuage his conscience by voting for the Libertarian candidate, Gary Johnson, onetime governor of New Mexico (a job he performed somewhat satisfactorily, especially when compared with the current occupant of the office).

Johnson is a classic libertarian: he has staked out many admirable positions on important issues, including a proposal to end this country’s obscene overspending on war and the military, but his arrows go badly astray when they are aimed at, say, the  need for social democracy in government.

And then there is Aleppo, the Syrian city where all the worst horrors of war have come together with thick layers of guilt for every side in a multi-faceted crime against humanity.  “What is Aleppo?” Johnson asked an interviewer seeking his views on the Syrian conflict.  A few days later he compounded the error.  Asked to name one foreign leader of whom he had a favorable opinion, Johnson stood silent a while before saying, “I’m afraid I’m having an Aleppo moment.”  Granted, in this bloody world it’s hard to name a single leader worthy of unmitigated admiration, but still . . .  this man is asking voters to place him in the highest office we have.

Is it fair to wonder what he’s been smoking?  He does, after all, advocate legalization of marijuana.

* * *

The Green Party candidate for president, Jill Stein, has offered detailed, realistic proposed solutions to this country’s problems of injustice, economic inequality, endless war and chronic unemployment.  She has been bullied by police, and even arrested, for airing these views in public.

Is this a great country or what?

There's a New Man in the Fight

Welcome, Colin Kaepernick, to the real home of the brave.

It’s not an easy place to walk, but those who walk there walk tall.  Tommie Smith walked there.  And John Carlos.  Peter Norman.  Others, too.

You hadn’t even been born yet when those three — Smith, Carlos and Norman — walked the walk.  It was 1968.  The Olympic Games.  Mexico City.

Smith was, in a manner of speaking, the Usain Bolt of his times, arguably the fastest man on earth.  He had just won the 200 meter sprint in world record time.  Norman placed second; Carlos, third.  They mounted the podium to receive their medals.  The national anthem of the United States, as is the tradition, was played for the presentation of the gold to Smith.  He and Carlos were without shoes, wearing black socks.  They raised their black-gloved fists in what was known back then as the black power salute.  They did it to call attention to segregation and racism in the United States, and to stand in silent protest against it.

Norman, a white man, represented Australia in that Olympiad.  Back home, he had opposed his country’s “white Australia policies,” which restricted non-white immigration and persecuted the its black aboriginal population. He knew that Smith and Carlos had decided to make a silent statement if they got to the podium; they would wear black gloves.  Norman wanted to make a statement of his own on that podium.  He approached Paul Hoffman, a U.S. Olympic rower, and asked to borrow his badge for the “Olympic Project for Human Rights.”  Wearing it would be his statement of solidarity with Smith and Carlos.

Avery Brundage, the Nazi-loving head of the American Olympic committee, ordered that Smith and Carlos be suspended and banned from the Olympic Village.  They were vilified in the media.

Norman, too,  paid a heavy price for his role.  “As soon as he got home he was hated,” his nephew, Matthew Norman, said.  Although he qualified in both the 100 meters and the 200 meters, Norman was not invited to represent Australia in the 1972 Olympic games.

Peter Norman died of a heart attack in 2006.  Tommie Smith and John Carlos gave eulogies at his funeral and served as pall bearers. 

Smith and Carlos had brief professional football careers.  Both later became educators and coaches.  In 2008 they shared the Arthur Ashe Award for Courage for their action forty years earlier in Mexico City.

When you refused to stand for the national anthem before a football game the other night, Colin Kaepernick, you stood instead beside Tommie Smith, John Carlos and Peter Norman. "I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of color," you said. "To me, this is bigger than football and it would be selfish on my part to look the other way. There are bodies in the street and people getting paid leave and getting away with murder."

As Carlos told an Occupy Wall Street gathering on Oct. 10, 2011, “There’s a fight still to be won.”