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Brexit and the United States Republican Convention Fiasco

February 17, 2023

DEMAGOGUE 

A demagogue /ˈdɛməɡɒɡ/ (from Greek dēmagōgos, dēmos ‘the people’ + agōgos ‘leading’) or rabble-rouser is a political leader in a democracy who gains power by appealing to the passions, prejudices, and ignorance of the common people, tending to undermine democratic procedures and the rule of law. 


With the Brexit vote, we see the ugliest aspect of populism and fear grip the country that has given the world and especially the United States, its dearest character of democracy, freedom and language. The world is in turmoil--uneducated people beginning to understand that their futures lie in great jeopardy because they no longer can compete or succeed in a global market, driven by cheap labor, interconnected information, with hucksters who believe they can empower themselves to even more riches and position preying on the circumstances of the 21st Century unskilled.


Donald Trump is one of these malefactors, determined to undermine the fabric of our tolerant and democratic society through insult, demagoguery and fear, promising to bring back jobs that no longer exist and which are becoming increasingly scarce without the requisite training to succeed. Notable is his disingenuous pledge to bring back jobs to unemployed coal miners, of all things. This is an unforgiveable exercise in bait and switch.  Coal is as dead as the 20th century, yet Trump exacerbates hopes and dreams of West Virginian coal miners, whose interests would best be served by retraining financed by the government for 21st century skills.


David Cameron, the British prime minister addressed parliament, saying that the will of the people should be respected and implemented. He clearly miscalculated, ceding his wishes for advantage in the next election. Backfiring on his political ambitions, the vote has insured his demise and the end of his career in politics.  But wait, maybe not. Maybe this entire fiasco, costing trillions of dollars in market value to American 401ks may not happen. Maybe there will be a second vote, the people realizing that they have shot themselves in the foot. This move does not insure the perpetuation of the British hegemonic entity.  Churchill, the greatest devotee of the empire is spinning in his grave. The 307-year-old union may devolve into tiny England, the Scots and the Irish going their separate ways, considering that remaining in the EU being a more viable alternative than remaining in the UK. The EU, however may not want them, saying that membership only would be offered to sovereign nations.


Whether the majority was in fear of immigrants, a loss of national sovereignty, meeting requirements of Brussels bureaucrats, or trade issues, the British are in a pickle, mostly of their own making, with the demagoguery of the politicians playing upon it. Boris Johnson, Nigel Farage, among others. Thoughtless people who only had their own interests in mind. Remind you of someone here at home?


Let that be a lesson to us every time we listen to Donald Trump, a danger to the Presidency and to American democracy.


The Donald, bolstered by cowardly or self-interested sycophants, think that Trump will make our country great again (not that it was ever not great) by returning to the 1950s.  But even in the 50s, the public was moving toward an internationalist view of American power. President Eisenhower warned of the military-industrial complex, but we rested on the brink of a nuclear holocaust, were it not for the prudence of John F. Kennedy, a voice of reason and restraint. And what ever was so great about the 50s, a Madmen world of cigarettes, cancer, subordination of women, segregation, racism, lynching, a cold war, fear of communism and nuclear winter, Strangelovian politicians, Communist witch hunts, anti-Semitism, blacklists, and, I remember, schoolchildren hiding under wooden desks during air raid drills to protect us from being vaporized by an H Bomb. And don't forget, the nation had just emerged from World War II, and the Korean War.  The good old days?  Not so good.


Believe it or not, things have gotten much better. Nations do not war against each other, only amorphous thugs and Islamic fundamentalists. North Korea? Not mighty Nazi Germany, but bears watching.  Methinks China will rein them in.


The dystopian picture painted by Trump is not the America, as most of our countrymen know it. Unemployment is below 5%, the stock market has never been higher and the markets exhibit optimism about our future as a nation. Productivity has never been higher. There is a greater concentration of wealth at the very top, but that can be cured with a new tax policy and better training to grow the once bigger middle class which is the underpinning of our democracy. Free college education? Why not? Europeans do it. And spend less than we do. And they spend less per capita on health care. And they have more vacations and paid family leave. Sure they pay higher taxes--but they get something in return, including modern infrastructure, better schools, better food for their children in school, free tuition and no crushing student debt.


Yes, there is lingering racism, conflict between African-Americans and an overly aggressive segment of police, but still, most realize that the police are there to protect us as citizens. Increased training and empathy needs more work and many good intentioned chiefs of police are working on programs so that cops do not use hair triggers in situations when heightened fear for their own lives is unjustified.


I have never seen a political convention the likes of the RNC last week.  Our country was on the brink of defeat in all areas in which it is engaged, NATO, ISIS, health care, the economy, the absence of a strong leader at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and only Donald can come in, fire everyone and make it better in his first 100 days, including a huge wall on the Rio Grande. What he does not say is that the wall will keep people from leaving, not coming in, since the net flow is the other way. But Trump's speech sounded like Batman, the Dark Knight Rising, as one conservative commentator on CNN stated. We are all doomed unless we elect Trump because as he said, "I am the only one who can fix everything on day one."  Even the wall will be built with Mexican dollars.  So Trump has a bridge to sell you, for sure.


But Donald has no specifics on how he is gong to complete his plans, nothing the voter can understand, anyway,  He is a classic demagogue, resembling Mussolini both in ideas and in facial expression and demeanor. That upward curling of his lips and upraised head, that inability to change or to apologize. Fascist is a strong word, so forgive me.


We do not need a strongman president. We need a president who is able to work with both sides of the gridlocked aisle, run in the senate by the odious Mitch McConnell, and in the house, by trickle down advocate Paul Ryan, offering the same bromides as McConnell, in a more appealing manner. The problem is that they are the same non-workable solutions as ever.


On the other hand, Hillary has her own problems. A reputation for untrustworthiness, secrecy, and not releasing her speeches made to Goldman Sachs and other Wall Street firms, undoubtedly for big bucks, not to mention the email "scandal," blown out of proportion by Republican Hillary haters.  She should release them at the same time Donald releases his tax returns.


Many Republican stalwarts I know, detesting the Donald, and hating Hillary refuse to vote for either.

Some conservative columnists such as Bret Stevens of the Wall Street Journal, resentful of the hijacking of his party is probably voting for Hillary.


Republican former Presidents, both Bushes, John McCain and Ohio Governor John Kasich have refused to show up at the Trump three ring circus, where his Stepford kids and ding bat wife, sat as though in a prisoner dock at a Stalinist show trial.  It was cringe worthy, if not downright ludicrous.

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GOP Hypocrisy at its Highest

By Engage Team • February 17, 2023
So the Supremes, appointed by Republicans, Bush I, Bush II, and three justices appointed by the Donald, who lost the popular vote by 3 million voters and who probably will soon be indicted in Georgia for election fraud, and maybe Federally for a failed coup d’état, have decided that 50 years of precedent be damned, that there is no constitutional right for a woman to make her own reproductive choices. Never mind an entire generation of women who have grown up under Roe. So let’s socially engineer by judicial fiat, what has been law for generations.N Let’s face the facts. The “justices” make up their own minds, and then build a constitutional rationalization to support their position from an infinite variety of decisions throughout the centuries of common law. And by the way, Bush II, like Trump, was also a minority president, except in the anti- democratic electoral college, designed originally to allow slave states to remain so. Our Constitution also ensured that woman and black people could not vote. So all you originalists and textualists can go back to where we were before Roe v. Wade, to that wonderful mid 20th century where segregation ruled, or the early 19th century where slavery ruled. Why not overrule Brown v. Board of Education to keep America white and segregated Justice Alito, that righteous avatar of Catholic abortion dogma rests at one of the pinnacles of governmental power, believes that American women should be the victim of state gerrymandered legislatures, representing a minority of the American polity. When Thomas Jefferson said famously, “keep the preachers away from government,” he surely should have included Alito. Let’s not forget the notion that the court is or should be not politicized. That train left the station in the early 20th century. When FDR’s National Recovery Act was shut down by the conservative Court, a court packing threat from the Democrats in congress caused the conservative majority to back off from shooting down the progressive programs that were to help the nation out of the great depression. The problem is now that there are not enough votes in the Senate to do any such thing because of successful Republican moves to suppress the vote; instead packing the court with ideologues, the most notable of whom is the handmaiden herself—Amy Coney Barrett, whom the Donald picked to fill the seat of a progressive giant, RBG. Never mind the hypocrisy of dissing Obama’s selection of Merrick Garland, not even given a hearing thanks to Mitch McConnell and his lieutenants, including Chuck Grassley, who should be in a nursing home feeding on double doses of Prevagen. Mitch at the helm has seen to our current “Justices”, helped by disinformation emanating from Rupert Murdoch’s FOX news, a money-grubbing Australian oligarch, no better than the Russian ones. Mitch’s net worth has increased ten-fold since he was elected and not on his Senate salary for sure, his wife benefiting from Chinese largesse to and from her uber wealthy family. Oh, and don’t forget Clarence Thomas, a black man who hates his own people, abetted by his wife, Ginny, encouraging the rioters to storm the capitol, sending emails to insurrectionists and GOP party leaders to stop the certification of the vote by the Senate. Thomas is all bent out of shape because of the dastardly leak, impugning the “integrity” of the court. But he will probably not recuse himself on Trump’s appeal if he is convicted of felonious conspiracy to precipitate an insurrection. Other dramatis personae include the repulsive Ted Cruz and the vituperative Josh Hawley, who voted against the purely ceremonial certification of a lawful election, necessary to enshrine the vote. Also, lets not omit a Bronx cheer for Bret Cavanaugh, the beer swilling frat boy, credibly accused of waving his penis in Christine Blasey Ford’s face at his fraternity house, assaulting her. While admittedly a college escapade, it does not speak well to his character. But no matter, he has absolved himself by joining in this sadistic exercise of Republican misogyny. “I like beer, Senator Klobuchar, don’t you?” Cavanaugh hubristically asked the Senator whose father died of alcoholism. No matter, there is no right to privacy in the Constitution, says the red spider veined nosed icon of the religious right. Now, poor women who live in Texas, Mississippi, or other places of enlightened Republican legislators will have to book an airplane flight or drive to a place where it is legal. But wait! They do not have the money to do so, instead they can carry them to term and drop their newly born at the nearest police station or underfunded Mississippi or Texas childcare facility. Thanks a lot, Amy. Perhaps you want to adopt some more children. This whole sordid episode of “Making America Great Again,” curdles the blood even of the most casual observer.

A House Divided Against Itself Cannot Stand

By Engage Team • February 17, 2023
"A house divided against itself, cannot stand..." - Abraham Lincoln From California to New York, from Oregon to Florida, a frightening division has descended upon our country. From rural to urban America, people wonder whether the nation and its institutions can survive this polarity. There have been times in American history that the nation was divided, never more so than in 1860. Throughout that history, there had been bitter partisanship and division. From the heat of the constitutional convention in steamy 1787 Philadelphia, the founders fought bitterly to a compromise that actually welded two nations into one in a constitution which just ninety years later devolved into a insanely bloody civil war, brother against brother, father against son, family against family. A partisan press with countless newspapers and pamphleteers spewed hatred and vituperative allegations against their countrymen both at the founding and throughout the years leading to the Civil War. Twitter has nothing on them. A rural south, an industrializing north, both parts of which employed slavery, regarded Negroes as inferior, abetted involuntary servitude and a racist ethos, challenging even the most enlightened of our citizenry. During the time between the founding and the Civil War forged compromises kept the Union together. The Missouri compromise (1820) and the Kansas-Nebraska act (1854) failed as attempts to reconcile admission to the Union of new states as either slave or free. The Constitution itself had slavery baked in to its original ratification (Article 4 sec. 2.3) imposing that, " No person held to Service or Labor in one State under the laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in consequence of any Law or regulation therein, be discharged from such service or Labor, but shall be delivered up on Claim of the Party to whom such Service or Labor may be due," Later, the Fugitive Slave act of 1850 imposed the duty on citizens and officials of the individual states themselves to return slaves to their owners or face civil fines, and that persons harboring slaves to criminal penalties. Slave catchers roamed the North, collecting bonuses for bringing slaves in; captured slaves were not permitted a jury trial. Sound like a rickety Constitution? Of course, the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments cured some of that, but still, it took the bloodiest war in the history of the Republic, 700,000 dead and wounded to get the amendments passed and only in the last few years was the Confederate battle flag removed from South Carolina government buildings. The Civil Rights act of 1964, race riots in Los Angeles, freedom riders, political assassinations of civil rights leaders, and a frothing George Wallace standing in the schoolhouse door shouting "segregation forever!" interceded in the 1960s, almost 100 years after the end of the war and ten years after the landmark Brown v. the Board of Education outlawed segregation in the public schools. Well, that same Constitution has given us the Electoral College, a Federalist exercise in balancing the interests of the various states, and which now presents us with a highly undemocratic underrepresentation of large populations, California for instance, with its 40,000,000 people and North Dakota with its 500,000 each carrying two senators. Do the math on fair representation. Yes, I know the House is supposed to do that, but with present gerrymandering, the Democrats are obliged to win by much bigger majorities than Republicans. With Republicans dedicated to disenfranchising voters in Florida, for example, contrary to the will of the voters, Democrats must win votes in far greater numbers than Republicans to achieve a working majority. We now have entrenched minority government. With an unleashed president, sociopathically bound to his vindictive agenda, extreme anxiety pervades the Democratic Party, fearing that this president will be re-elected, boasting that "he alone" is claiming responsibility for the booming economy, acquitted from his misdeeds by a kangaroo court, comprised of quaking GOP senators afraid of tribal banishment to an ignominious gulag of GOP opprobrium, losing their congressional health plans, positions, prestige and power andthe ultimate loss of the dignity which they inartfully tried to preserve. Instead, they have lost it anyway by their surrender to political expediency. We need either a constitutional convention or a huge movement among voters to recognize that the divisions among us are not the result of a political agenda, but instead, tribal cultism. Many of the policy agendas result from identity politics, rural against urban, wealthy against poor, a displaced working class losing out in the battle against inevitable technological displacement, climate change and nuclear proliferation, the greatest threats to the world. A leader who can heal these divisions and create forbearance and a spirit of compromise is what we need more than ever. A president of either party who can understand reality, not phantasmagorical narcissism. It is said that great crises manufacture an FDR, a Winston Churchill, an Abraham Lincoln. Where may he or she be?

Running from Ennui

By Engage Team • February 17, 2023
Passion seems to be bestowed as a blessing on few people but seeking it is a not inconsiderable chore conferred on the many. I am not officially retired, but it seems that way. The clients call less and the work I did as a trial lawyer has become less and less appetizing. Business has diminished, not only because I am seventy-nine years of age, but because I have zero desire to market myself like a snake oil salesman. I leave that particularly odious practice to well-funded and battle stationed Morgan and Morgan and others, whose legions of paralegals, investigators, paid experts and well-staffed soldiers battle with insurance companies, and “fight for you,” its overworked lawyers all the while complaining to their colleagues and family that they hate what they do. Fifty years at the bar, and I do not mean Flanagan’s, is enough, so I leave the task of transferring wealth from one party to another and taking a piece of the action the alleged passion of the many. I do still consult with clients, if I can be of help them. I wonder if I can achieve a modicum of mastery the piano, considering that when I took violin lessons as a youth, the bandleader working at my dad’s upstate New York hotel, a Catskill fiddler by the name of Billy Rogers (nee Rosenberg) who, admittedly, was not a music teacher, told my father, that I was the “dumbest, most tone-deaf child he had ever met.” But then again, he was no Isaac Stern nor even a music teacher. Music teachers do not scream at their beginning ten-year-old students. The sole reason Dad asked him to teach me was because a guest had left a violin in one of his hotel rooms. Before my dad’s discovered violin aspirations for me, I had expressed neither the interest nor the inclination to play the most difficult, annoying instrument, or torturing everyone within hearing distance. “Press the strings until your fingers bleed and you develop callouses,” said Billy. I do not recall what happened to the violin or Billy, although he was aged in 1952. Dad either sold the violin or most likely, gave it away. Another serial disappointment from his son, I guess. After becoming a lawyer, I decided I would learn to play tennis. And I loved it. I was addicted. I became reasonably competent, starting at the age of 35, and playing regularly until I hit 70 and had spine surgery laying me up a few years. I was never the best, but I was pretty good, had a good serve and tried to play again a few years ago, losing to a younger fellow who had been playing just a few years. I had beaten him soundly before. Never fast on my feet, my molasses-like movements said, time to hang up the sneakers. Life is a series of things being taken from you. At 55 I had taken up golf. I think I have a pretty good swing, but athletically, I needed time to learn, ( a nice way to say I am a slow learner) and time is running out. Although that would not stop me, if I had some agreeable companions with whom to play. Many of the friends whose company I enjoyed have died or fallen away. There is nothing worse than spending 18 holes with someone monumentally annoying. “Nice putt,” they said, as my ball sped past the hole. Plus, most golfers do not share my politics and, inevitably, an afternoon of enjoyment turns into a dumpster fire. Most players who are Republicans, cheat. The shoe wedge or miscounting the score is a frequently insufferable habitude of the right-wing selfish, individualist, “let them eat cake” crowd. Now, when my days are not consumed by interminably long doctor’s visits or some new ailment appears, I am seeking something to do with my spare time. Going to the hospital or delivering goodies to the ill and infirm is too depressing, since I already am depressed about most people walking past me as though I did not exist. I have become irrelevant and invisible, both not particularly enviable results of my wrinkles and weathered skin and increasingly whitening hair. A grey ghost. I suppose I should take comfort that a geezer like Joe Biden could be president, gaining inspiration from him. But he seems so delicate, so frail now, that a stiff breeze would blow him over or he might stumble coming down the stairs of Air Force One. It is frightening to behold. Still, Joe beats the alternative--the orange-colored crook who is still peddling the big lie. The country is in the worst crisis since the great depression, and Joe is not FDR.  Which brings me back to the piano. I asked a neighbor who is a music teacher at an exclusive private school, “Is learning the piano at 79 doable?” He replied, “definitely, it will be good for your mind. Always keep two hands on the keyboard and learn musical notation.” I replied that I had purchased a book that said I will be able to play a Bach prelude within six weeks if I practiced 45 minutes per day. Encouraging. I guess I will find out if it can be my new passion.
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