alias Bruce.

President Trump, Baron Vladimir Harkonnen, and a week of atrocities

Tom McCarthy's Jan 28 Guardian piece is a good peek into President Donald Trump's jealous-toddler view of the world and what drives his policy moves, which are best understood as tantrums. What's most terrifying is that his triggers for his despicable acts rest so trivially, and even randomly, on perceived personal slights and disrespect (does the trajectory of Trump's weeklong tear have anything to do with media having dissed his tiny little inauguration crowd?).

 

Maybe it is ever thus with tyrants. But Trump does seem a wicked prototype for the pasty postindustrial piggycrat. He is eerily reminiscent of Dune's Baron Vladimir Harkonnen (below), right down to the first name and the iridescent hair. Call him King Twitter Thumbs. The tub of lard and lies whose tweets kill people.

 

 

Here is an excerpt from McCarthy's piece on this week of atrocities from His Grand Petulance:

 

Donald Trump's first week: carnage, both real and imagined

Tom McCarthy in New York

 

 

Saturday 28 January 2017 10.38 ESTLast modified on Saturday 28 January 201717.00 ES

What started with an ominous inauguration speech has ended with executive orders on everything from immigration to banning refugees and reigniting the fossil fuel industry. What does it mean for his presidency?

 

The crowd was small, the weather was bad and the speech, which described “American carnage”, was dire. For the tens of millions who voted against him and countless concerned others, Donald Trump’s inauguration as president of the United States felt ominous, no matter how widely Barack Obama smiled and no matter how gracefully he and Michelle Obama made the transition from hosts to departing guests.

 

The feeling of foreboding did not last. It was overtaken within hours by the realization, at the arrival of the first of the new president’s executive actions, that the most outrageous campaign promises Trump had made to the smallest core of his supporters were now official US policy, or about to be.

 

Within a week, the rally chant “build the wall!” had morphed into a phrase published on White House stationery: “impassable physical barrier”. A proposed ban on Muslim immigrants took shape as a suspension of visa programs from countries that, as Trump put it, “have tremendous terror”. Grumbling about excessive government regulation had become, in one document, an exhortation to bureaucrats to help an oil company skip the Migratory Bird Treaty Act.

 

“He’s delivering the goods to his core constituency in a really visible way,” said John T Woolley, head of the American presidency project at the University of California, Santa Barbara. “But there are a lot of things that he’s raising that may be above what he truly has the ability to do.”

 

Seven days into his presidency, the accumulation of Trump’s official actions, at the rate of as many as five a day, has created a new national reality on central policy concerns from the environment to voting rights to international commitments to immigration, healthcare and trade.

 

“You have to consider this a pretty aggressive use of executive power early on,” said Julian E Zelizer, a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University. “Using it not only on one marquee issue, which presidents often do, but on a series of major campaign issues, all within just a few days.

 

“So it’s rapid-fire, but more importantly, each one is a pretty significant decision.”

 

More difficult to assess than the new president’s official actions, but for many Americans just as significant, has been the impact on the public of Trump’s simple presence in office – the finally inescapable fact, as it were, of Donald Trump as president.

 

During the campaign, Trump’s lies about the fake scourge of voter fraud, his vain obsession with the size of his crowds (and his hands), and his explosions of bile and irrelevance on Twitter could be semi-ignored as the faults of a mercurial political figure who was quite likely, at least, to lose.

 

Now Trump is in the Oval Office and his lies are voiced by a press secretary standing behind the White House seal in the Brady briefing room. It was there that Trump’s spokesman, Sean Spicer, falsely declared on the day after the swearing-in that “this was the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration, period”. Trump’s audience was in fact significantly smaller than Obama’s 2009 crowd, but members of the media who tried to brandish evidence of the fact were shouted down.

 

Spicer rolled out another whopper days later, informing the country that the president still (wrongly) believed millions of votes had been illegally cast in November. As supporting evidence, he pointed to a 2012 research report on voter fraud, prompting the author of the report to categorically deny that the report said any such thing.

 

“Of those votes cast, none of them come to me,” Trump told ABC News a day later, embroidering his fantasy. “They would all be for the other side. None of them come to me.”

 

For Americans who doubt his leadership, just as disturbing as Trump’s new freedom to spout untruths with significantly inflated authority were early reports on his conduct behind the scenes, as he made his first decisions as the most powerful individual on Earth.

 

Repeatedly, Trump threw thunderbolts from his Twitter account – threatening to “send in the Feds!” to stop violence in Chicago and impugning Chelsea Manning – immediately following negative coverage of those topics on Fox News, which Trump told the New York Times he watches morning and night.

 

It was TV coverage of his small inauguration crowd that prompted Trump to trot out Spicer. The bad press had not allowed the president to “enjoy” his first weekend in the White House as he felt he deserved, the Associated Press quoted “one person who has spoken with him” as saying. Trump’s decision to act on voter fraud was inspired, Trump told members of Congress, by a conversation with a German golfer.

 

If Trump’s character is immutable, however, his executive actions may not be. His orders have the power to guide the conduct of federal agencies and officials, but cannot contravene existing law.

 

Woolley said: “The question always is – and this is a real question for Trump – whether the president is going beyond the scope of the law, whether he’s infringing on congressional power, and whether he’s infringing on the divides between national, state and local power.

 

“There’s going to be a festival of lawsuits about almost every controversial action that he takes.”

 

Next week, Trump is scheduled to address a joint session of Congress and announce a nominee to fill the vacancy on the supreme court.

 

Here’s what he got done on week one.

 

(McCarthy's entire piece is here.)

This is how stupid Trump thinks his followers are:

- Trump thinks his followers are stupid enough to believe the easily-disproved “alternative fact” that Trump's inauguration crowd in DC was not dwarfed by Obama's in 2008 or by the Women's March in 2017.

- Trump thinks his followers are stupid enough to believe that giving brown people less will give struggling white people more – while the rich boldly suck up even more of virtually everything.

- Trump thinks his followers are stupid enough to believe that going back to giving more power to for-profit health insurance companies will somehow, for the first time ever, give people more generous choices at lower prices.

- Trump thinks his followers are stupid enough to believe that you can gut government (e.g., freeze federal hiring) and wildly expand it (e.g., build a wall, prosecute women for abortion, enforce a ban on Muslims) at the same time.

- Trump thinks his followers are stupid enough to believe that suicide bombers and shooters are a greater danger to each of us than more poisonous air, water, and food.

- Trump thinks his followers are stupid enough to believe that virtually all of the reputable climate scientists in the world are scammers and that the handful of climate denial scammers are telling the truth.

- Trump thinks his followers are stupid enough to believe that a white serial bankrupter who stiffed contractors and ran a phony college is a better ally than a black president who lowered unemployment and favored a higher minimum wage.

- Trump thinks his followers are stupid enough to trust a notoriously greedy billionaire because he repeats the obvious truth that “the system is rigged,” even after he fills his cabinet with greedy billionaires and brazenly pursues policies that favor CEOs over everyone else.

- Trump thinks his followers are stupid enough to continue to cheer on the Trump regime’s increasingly brutal scapegoating (e.g., of women, Muslims, blacks, brown immigrants, and LGBT people) while Trump’s billionaire policies lay waste to the lives of working white people.

None of this is new. Dictators thrive on telling bald-faced lies to desperate people.

But what we don't know is: How many Trump followers will see through the con? How many of we Americans as a whole will actively risk being targeted, fired, jailed, or worse to protect our futures and that of our kids? And how many journalists will actually fight – and by that I mean put their careers and possibly their physical safety at risk – for what is provably true and morally non-negotiable?

Introducing Poemmentary.com.

It's news headlines and political commentary -- but exclusively through poetry. Wherever it is found, seen, heard, or scrawled. Its motto is "Freed Speech."

For a different kind of reporting,  go to Poemmentary.com. The April 6th story, for instance, is "Illegal Immigration Is A Touchstone For Anger."

I launched the site this week after years of daydreaming about it. There is much, much more to come. In all kinds of directions. Please visit as it grows.

After Paris, "an odor of early fascism" in America: the demented appeal of Trump, Carson, and the Republican Party

The wicked irony of our insulation as Americans, living as we do galaxies away from the agonies that daily afflict the global billions affected by our domination, is that we entirely lose our minds at the first sight of our own blood.

One-hundred-thirty, the number of people who died horrible deaths two Fridays ago in Paris, is less than half the number of Iraqi civilians killed weekly by bombs, gunfire and other political murder, and an even smaller fraction of those steadily murdered in the Syrian civil war: 220,000 in the past four years or one every 10 minutes. The chaos that set this colossal carnage in motion was the destruction of the Iraqi state by an American war of choice.

And yet, cushioned here in the plush headquarters of global capital and war -- with oceans and empire shielding we Americans from anything like the cascading catastrophe of parts of Africa and the Middle East and even Europe -- our politics now teeter, at even the threat of one or more attacks, into panicked flirtation with fascism. Go ahead, say the word out loud. It is, horribly, the accurate term for a national conversation in which journalists have begun soberly quoting politicians' calls for forced internment of selected immigrants, religious tests for immigration, banning certain nationalities, treating people from some countries like "mad dogs," and suspending checks on state power. The ease with which many of our news media accept this new lexicon is chilling.

It is as if this American readiness to panic and lunge toward authoritarianism is in direct proportion to the outsized privilege the nation has for so long taken for granted: North American conquest and genocide, white supremacy, global riches with little cost, foreign invasion with impunity, a guaranteed satisfactory consumer experience. 

Sasha Abramsky, in The Nation, puts it this way:

Over the past several days, one Republican governor after another has closed his state to refugees from Syria—or, since they technically do not have the legal power to prevent the federal government from admitting refugees, has pledged to refuse all state resources to aid in this process. A Republican mayor in Virginia has called for using the World War II internment system that was used against Japanese Americans—itself one of the most widely discredited and shameful episodes in recent American history—as a model for how to approach the Syrians. 

Jeb Bush has said we ought to prioritize refugee status for Christians. John Kasich has called for a government agency that would beam “Judeo-Christian values” over Middle Eastern airwaves. In Congress, the GOP-led House, with a shockingly large number of Democrats in support, just voted on a bill that would make it virtually impossible, in practice, to admit Syrian refugees into the country. And Donald Trump has used the crime against humanity that occurred last week in Paris as a prop in his vicious campaign of demagoguery: Because of Paris, he has said, we must get serious about building a wall to close off Mexico. Because of Paris, we must put security first above all civil liberties. Because of Paris, we must start up again the few post-9/11 surveillance programs that were curtailed by courts and politicians because of their abusive properties, and must maintain and expand a raft of others. A surveillance state briefly put in the dock by Edward Snowden will, in this vision, be fully unleashed and unchecked. And because of Paris, we ought to consider registering American Muslims in a special database.

There is an odor of early fascism, or rather of the hysteria that precedes the march away from democracy, to much of this Trumpian rhetoric. An odor of the street fight. An odor of the iron fist.

Three-year-old Aylan Kurdi drowns. We watch. For centuries.

400 years ago, West African mothers and fathers cradled dead children in their arms on beaches as slave ships bucked in the surf.

It is 2015. How much longer will you and I and the world stand for this?

Little three-year-old Syrian Aylan Kurdi drowned, his tiny sneakered feet dangling from the arms of a soldier who picked him up out of the sodden Turkish sand, because his own nation’s government did not belong to him, and because governments from the United Kingdom to the United States do not belong to those whom they purport to serve. They belong, instead, to strongmen and CEOs and senators who prosper when international capital makes money from a fragmented and corrupt Africa and  a politically leaderless Middle East and an obese and self-obsessed America.

The power brokers work with available materials. In a Europe now destabilized by plutocratic greed, we see the tip of a resurfacing iceberg of racist xenophobia that we last saw rise in the ascent of the Third Reich. We also see anti-immigrant xenophobia in the United States, as a portion of the white electorate, for whom Donald Trump is the present demagogue, clings with venomous desperation to its legacy of privilege.

We know, too, that this worldwide crisis of displaced and suffering people is part of the continual wreckage that began with pre-colonial European conquest of the global South and continues through the havoc wreaked upon entire regions of the world, including the Middle East, by centuries of Western-capitalist-fueled war. From Columbus to G.W. Bush, it’s about destroying local sovereignty and sucking all we can from the resources that are exposed.

Yesterday I sent an email to the Hungarian Ambassador to the United States, H.E. Réka Szemerkényi, registering my disgust with the actions and baldly racist statements of Hungary and its Prime Minister with regard to the Syrian refugees who suffer there:

September 4, 2015

To: [email protected]

Dear Ambassador:

Shame, shame, shame on Hungary for your treatment of Syrian migrants, your disingenuous excuses for your actions, and your Prime Minister's contemptibly racist statement in a radio interview on Friday that "We may one morning wake up and realize that we are in the minority on our own continent." 

You bring shame upon your citizens and your nation. I shall surely not travel as a tourist to Hungary as your website so cynically assures readers that we can. And I have lost all respect for your moral stature. 

With disappointment and disgust,

Bruce A. Jacobs

Baltimore, MD USA 

Please email the ambassador yourself at [email protected] .

But what will it take for we Americans, fat within our padding of Big Gulps and Big Macs and Big Savings, to walk out of our front doors and actually do what citizens do when our government is not ours, and when Syrians’ government is not Syrians’, and Hungary’s government is not Hungarians’?

I'll be on the radio discussing "America: Land of the screwed?" with

psychologist Pamela Brewer, host of the MyNDTALK radio podcast, on Friday November 14 and on demand thereafter. We will talk about race, money, fear, Ebola, ISIS, and the aftermath of the American midterm elections. She is an incisive interviewer. Give a listen if you care to.

Ebola + ISIS = brown fever.

It is time for more people to call it out. Right now in the United States, what whimpers just beneath the surface in everyday sidewalk throngs and crowded bars and restaurants is, "Are they here yet?"

You know: Them. The Africans carrying the Ebola virus. The ISIS operatives ready to transmit beheading videos from American hotel rooms in which they have taken ordinary folks hostage. You know what I'm talking about. You know people are thinking it. You know the volume is building toward a wider shrieking sound.

Days before the stories broke about people presumed African reportedly being shunned in retail establishments and neighborhoods in Dallas amid that city's Ebola panic, I and I know many others, particularly people of color experienced in being profiled, were already muttering to ourselves that it would only be a matter of time before the African profiling started. I considered blogging about it in advance but, again no doubt like many, I didn't want to be among those planting the suggestion to folks who are already too suggestible. That was a silly reservation on my part: it's not as if anything I do on this little blog could alter the motion of American public impulses that are so deeply ingrained and so continually remanufactured. That machinery is built to last, baby.

The same goes for our view of the ISIS conflict. While we Americans worry about being snatched in an alley by an ISIS sleeper cell, the actual cataclysm has now embroiled Turkey as well as Syria and Iraq in real and bloody war and internal insurrection -- including, as I write, violent tumult in Turkey over whether to join the battle for Kobani, a city on the Syrian/Turkish border. If the ISIS juggernaut continues to gamble successfully on the cynicism and patience of Western corporate powers for whom continually decimated nations of color and a fearful American public are just part of the dirty job of managing global capital, then we can expect more howling and jostling here in the Homeland beneath the threatened encroachment of the Black Flag. And we can brace for a lunge into frothing hysteria if any local acts of ISIS-sympathist terror actually take place here.

Meanwhile, we quietly accept that more Americans will die by gunfire per capita than in any other industrialized country, that this month alone 50,000 of us will die of heart disease and another 50,000 of cancer,  and that the corn- and cattle- and chemical-fueled enterprises that underpin our deadly diet continue to enjoy the subsidied, panic-free favors of the state.

Call it Brown Fever. Watch for it in your neighborhood.

The U.S. is not willing to do anything meaningful about ISIS.

This is not an ideological claim. It's a fact.

Mere air power against ISIS is doomed to fail, as most of us have thought from the start and as Kurdish fighters have now said out loud. You cannot fight a war without fighting a war. Air power alone, unless you are willing to reduce an entire region to dust with nuclear weapons, is not a war and it will not win.

A U.S.-led ground war is not an option. Neither the U.S. nor any other major power has the resolve or the capacity to take the kinds of awful casualties that ground combat with ISIS would mean. Nor would a ground war change the dynamics that led ISIS to gain recruiting appeal and structural power.

And changing the actual situation that fostered the growth of ISIS -- that situation being a global corporate sucking machine that leaves huge portions of the world's population unpaid for their regions' riches and throttled in their desire for dignity -- is also off the table in the West. There is simply too much money to be made from corrupt extractive economies in the Middle East, Africa and South America.

So there is basically nothing that President Barack Obama, his corporate backers, and his cooperative "allies" are willing to do that will actually beat back ISIS. Nothing. Despite ongoing beheadings, the now tortuously familiar appeals by Western families for their hostage loved ones to be spared, and ground gains by ISIS in areas conquered through force of armed ruthlessness and abdicated governance.

Obama will speak with righteous fury and will act with hog-tied resignation. He has no good options and he knows it. He and his sponsors will wait, watch, and take what losses they feel they must. The winner, as before, will be whatever satisfactorily profitable arrangement Western capital can manage with this latest convolution in a portion of the brown-skinned world.

It's the cost of doing business.