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.)

If you are willing to hear a West Virginian’s calm explanation for why Trump won the angry white vote, read this.

It is accurate to say that West Virginia attorney JB Akers’ detailed blog, Trump Won and I Don't Understand Why You Don't Understand, is self-promoting for his law practice, uninformed about the diversity and depth of suffering in urban communities, and disingenuous about the continuing appeal of racism and misogyny to non-college-educated white men whose footholds of security and cultural authority have been shattered.

But it is also essential that you read Akers' explanation of why economically shipwrecked white men and women were willing to vote for a cretin like Trump in their desperate hope for some kind of overturning of the status quo.

It is time for our self-defeating bullshit to stop. Pissed-off progressives and people of color need to be smarter than to anoint Trump’s win as a simple expression of white male supremacy and brutality, although Trump used this toxic lure brilliantly in his fake populist pitch. Furious whites who have been left to starve by the Demopublican economy need to be smarter than to treat the Hillary Clinton platform as any real expression of the hungers of progressives and people of color, although the 2016 Clinton campaign aggressively posed its corporate-friendly political jingle as the voice of “change.”

We know better. White people without college educations know when they’ve been scammed for decades by a crew of Senator Silverhairs from both parties. Blacks, Latinos, and other voters of color know when a toothless “Stronger Together” slogan falls short of what it takes to make them surge to the polls to vote their interests.

To be sure, Clinton’s winning the popular vote and still losing the 2016 election has, once again, ripped the scar tissue off the national deformity of the Electoral College. Add to that James Comey’s coerced interference and the unfathomable capabilities of Vladimir Putin’s digital regime and we have an electoral outcome that meets no trustworthy standard.

But let’s not fool ourselves. Hillary Clinton lost what should have been a commanding advantage from the beginning because she and her party were afraid of what angry drowning people on all sides really wanted: a passionate, fearless rebuke of business as usual in the post-Reagan economic state. And Trump was able to dishonestly occupy that turf because the Democrats, in jettisoning Bernie Sanders, abandoned their last claim to it.

That is what happened. That is what we have to face in order to discern what we do next.

Springsteen cancels concert; bigoted LGBT law continues to cost North Carolina.

From the Guardian:

Bruce Springsteen on Friday cancelled an upcoming concert in North Carolina because of a controversial anti-LGBT law that critics say legalizes discrimination.
Springsteen was scheduled to perform on Sunday in Greensboro, but said he was cancelling the show because he and the E Street Band “want to show solidarity for those freedom fighters” protesting the law.
“To my mind, it’s an attempt by people who cannot stand the progress our country has made in recognizing the human rights of all of our citizens to overturn that progress,” Springsteen said in a statement.

Take Springsteen's dead-on statement -- "it’s an attempt by people who cannot stand the progress our country has made in recognizing the human rights of all of our citizens to overturn that progress" -- and you can apply it to the mobs that ran amok after the  emancipation of slaves, after the winning of suffrage for women, and after the legal end to racial desegregation. As well as those that still run amok over legalized (and perpetually threatened) abortion rights.

Now it's the anti-LGBT mob's turn to revolt against the reality of an advance in civilization -- and to prolong the everyday pummeling of LGBT people for as long as possible. The good news, such as it is in states like North Carolina, is that it appears neither industry nor fair-minded people of all sexual and gender orientations nor Springsteen fans will long tolerate the cost of bigots' temporary unconstitutional maneuverings. Nor can any breathing federal court judge before whom the law will soon appear.       

 

How do we treat police as people?

 

Two stories:

 - A friend told me yesterday about a guy she knows who is a Baltimore City Police Officer. She sees him around in ordinary civilian life, she says, and he's a nice guy, peaceful, friendly, kind, open-minded, funny. Then she saw him again after he had been called to riot duty, lining up in formation to face off against angry city citizens in his shield and armor during the Freddie Gray uprising, and she saw a different guy. He talked with a slightly wild gleam in his eye about the adrenaline rush of being in battle, and how a protester kid had taunted him to his face, and how he had fantasized killing the kid on the spot, and what a fucking amazing rush it all was. My friend felt herself physically backpedal away from him, this genial guy she had thought she had begun to know.

 - Another friend of mine is a communist and a member of a self-described revolutionary organization that sometimes refers to police officers as "pigs." She and I have a running argument about this, among other things. I argue to her that police officers, even in service of repressive and racist state power, are human beings and wage slaves like most of us who at some level have a vested interest in not being under the thumb of a plutocracy that purchases American politics, and that even as we fight the role so many cops accept, it will not advance our agenda to pronounce them all "pigs." She argues to me that police officers, particularly in the nation's most poor and vulnerable communities, have made a Faustian bargain to park their humanity on demand in exchange for the rush of personal and institutional power, and that their chosen dehumanizing role deserves a dehumanized label. I am not sure how she feels all of this reflects on the character of actual porcine animals. I need to ask her about that. 

Where the two stories come together is in how we choose to deal with fellow human beings when they occupy more and more starkly opposing roles in an effective state of war. War makes living a life of humanity harder in every way, and American policing in large cities and in majority-white control of black and brown communities has for most of its history been a war. That includes the years since the Reagan 80s, when the full-throated War on Drugs, with its hypocritical approach to urban versus suburban drug use, flooded urban police departments with military hardware, military attitudes, and federal money. In a state of war, it is hard if not impossible to enjoy ordinary human experience with someone who gets a professional hard-on about pummeling people who look like you. It is hard to roll down the street on militarized patrol and not see a potential assassin on every street corner. It is hard to evade the crushing pressure -- or some would say the raw necessity -- to treat others as enemies. 

War. It is what assassinations by police look like. It is what assassinations of police look like. It is what mass imprisonment looks like. It is what armed white convergences on mosques look like. It is what a rush of half-brained presidential candidates shouting "kill them" sounds like. It is what Brown Shirts look like.

We're about there.

The most senseless word about the Baltimore uprising is "senseless."

As in Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake's remark that “What happened with the rioting and destruction of CVS [drugstore in West Baltimore] is senseless. It is destroying neighborhoods."

"Senseless" is the word of choice for many authorities and leaders and residents when they speak of fiery days of rage such as these, when people torch their own neighborhoods. It has been the chosen word for decades for riots and insurrections in Baltimore and Rochester and Los Angeles and Newark and anyplace else where poor people explode on the very streets on which they live -- and then must live with the rubble, the smoldering ruins, the loss, and the brokenness of the ensuing days and years.

But that is where the word "senseless" becomes code for a taboo: the rule that one must not speak of the unchanging realities that make an uprising such as that in Baltimore perfectly sensible. Because in fact the city's leadership has for decades presided over "destroying neighborhoods."

What the mayor and the police commissioner and the business leaders who lead the city's broken economy and broken politics refuse to face is that it is completely sensible for people in perpetually-ignored war-zone communities to finally act out their rage in the one way that will gain attention: burning houses and cars, trashing and emptying stores, and upending the city's oblivious sense of order. It is a perfectly logical response. True, it has not succeeded in the long run in lifting entire communities out of generations of poverty and violence, but then nothing else has, either, and that is a structural problem having to do with who pays for political policy and who is present (and who isn't) in the economic conversations that shape the city. Fact is, tragically, the one thing that will at least draw global media attention to a disastrously depressed black community, and that will push politicians and police to make at least a symbolic try at facing endemic poverty and abusive policing, is a horrific hellfire uprising that makes the long-running war between militarized police and poor communities of color officially visible along its battle lines. Complete with riot gear, tear gas, and the National Guard.

There is nothing "senseless" about people doing the one thing proven to work as a way to draw national notice to the particular form of economic and racial apartheid that has become routine in cities like Baltimore. It in fact makes tragically good sense. And when our society has the courage, if ever, to replace class/race apartheid with approaches that create fairness in education and job creation and law enforcement, the uprisings will cease.

For a glimpse of what the perennial prosperous/poor dichotomy of Baltimore looks like, and how the logic of black insurrection actually works outside the bubble of racial and class privilege, watch the following May 7 airing of PBS News Hour. The segment on Baltimore begins at 31:30. It includes this quote from a young black assistant minister at a large black church: "When they are at that boiling point and it comes to them lashing out -- What's the worst that can happen? [Our community] is already falling down around us."

 

Court records indicating that an officer in the Freddie Gray killing had threatened to kill his ex-partner's husband and himself, and had twice had his weapons confiscated,

point to questions about whether he was qualified to serve and whether the Baltimore Police Department enforced reasonable standards for who it allowed to patrol the streets of West Baltimore with a gun.

The Guardian first broke the story weeks ago of allegations and a protective order issued against Lt. Brian Rice, and followed up with a story yesterday that includes photocopies of the 10-page handwritten complaint in which the husband of Rice's former girlfriend details an armed Rice stalking and threatening him. In one reported episode, police from two departments responded to a 90-minute armed standoff that ended with Rice being allowed to leave. In another, Rice's threat to kill himself and fears that he would harm others resulted in his being taken by police to a hospital for a mental health evaluation. Rice's problems reportedly resulted in his being placed on administrative leave, disciplined, and twice having his police and personal weapons confiscated.

A person's struggling with mental health issues, in and of itself, is never a reason to stigmatize or punish them. But violent personal behavior, stalking, and armed threats are more than enough reason to suspend or revoke a person's authority to patrol the streets as a law enforcement officer. And the looming question underneath becomes: Just how stringent, or how lax, has the Baltimore Police Department been in its standards for who is fit to scrutinize, arrest, and occasionally shoot residents of mostly-black neighborhoods in West Baltimore? Is a cop with a clear record of violent mental disturbance somehow judged good enough to police a black community -- or any community?

This is not only an explosive policy question, but a colossal lawsuit waiting to roar into motion -- with Billy Murphy, arguably the most-feared attorney in Baltimore, already signed on as counsel for the family of Freddie Gray.

Read the most recent Guardian story.

Baltimore Freddie Gray rally May 2, 2015: Malik Shabazz speaking and being heckled.

Eloquence can be like romance: in honest and loving hands it can ecstatically liberate, and in dishonest and selfish hands it can be the worst kind of betrayal. And you know what they say about believers scorned.

Malik Shabazz appears to be neither eloquent nor abominable enough to qualify for either extreme. As president of the Black Lawyers for Justice, he works and speaks for some causes that direly need and deserve support, including resistance toward racist policing. But as a man with an ego that seems the size of Nebraska and with an apparent tone-deafness to how repugnant it is to use events like the brutal deaths of black ctizens for his own self-promotion, he cannot help but tip his hand as someone whose leadership is suspect.

That is why, at Saturday's Baltimore rally following the filing of criminal charges against six police officers for the death of Freddie Gray, Shabazz, the keynote speaker, was roundly heckled by spectators. Some hecklers were organized, with agendas of their own, but many were clearly spontaneous: strangers in the crowd rolling their eyes at one another and yelling annoyed comments at this shameless guy who just couldn't seem to get enough of using the word "I." At one point after Shabazz bragged about how much of his own money he had spent to sponsor the event, scattered audience members began yelling at him, "It's not about you."

This matters. Not just because manipulative attention-hoggers are obnoxious, but, more importantly, because they are destructive. They give ammunition to the stale old rulers' story of how "outside agitators" are the source of trouble in cities afire, a tale that has been used for ages to try to dissuade well-behaved black folk from aligning with a man named King who led a bus boycott in Montgomery, or a woman named Tubman who led slaves through the woods to freedom.

To paraphrase what Lloyd Bentsen said to hopeless veep candidate Dan Quayle, Shabazz is no King and no Tubman. But the tepidly mixed reception Shabazz received at Saturday's rally with his blend of fiery advocacy and clichéd preening, while parent and advocate Erica Marks brought the crowd to a righteous frenzy when she took the stage and declared that she would spend no more of her afternoon listening to male patriarchy, said plenty. (I missed getting it on my video of her speech, but trust me, she said it and the crowd got it.) Powerfully received as well were the remarks by veteran national organizer Carl Dix, who drew his loudest cheers when he called for women to be treated as full human beings instead of as "sexual objects and punching bags" in the fight for a just society. I will post audio of Dix and others in the coming days.

Meanwhile, here are two videos from Saturday of keynote speaker Malik Shabazz revealing the limits of sheer sloganizing.

 

 

 

 

 

Baltimore Freddie Gray rally May 2, 2015: photos and videos.

I will say only three things before I turn this post over to the faces and voices of the Baltimore rally I attended Saturday in front of City Hall, one day after State's Attorney Marilyn Mosby announced bringing criminal charges, including murder, against the six officers involved in the death of Freddie Gray.

1.) Black Lawyers for Justice president Malik Shabazz, the rally's keynote speaker, was not only overshadowed by speeches by young people and mothers of those killed by Baltimore police, he was roundly heckled by audience members for his transparent egoism and microphone-hogging. He is just good enough a demagogue to shove himself into the limelight and just clumsy enough to be obvious about it. At one point, after he bragged about his family lineage and his having contributed $5,000 toward the day's event, audience members shouted back, "It's not about you!" I will have video up of him as soon as I can; it has gotten hung up at YouTube, thanks perhaps to unseen protocol or the ghost in the machine.

2.) I will follow up soon with audio recordings I made of Tawanda Jones (whose brother, Tyrone West, was killed by Baltimore Police Officers and who with her family has mounted a weekly protest for nearly two years), mothers of young people slain by police, longtime justice advocate Carl Dix, and others. Sadly, I missed recording the afternoon's most moving oration -- by young Tanara Collins, who looked to be in her teens and electrified the audience with her fierce run-down of the history of white policing from slavery to now -- when my phone ran out of data space. That'll teach me to squander precious recording time on the headliner. If I find her speech online I will pass it on to you.

3.) For the record, it appears, from photographs, that three of the six officers charged in Freddie Gray's death are black. As many of us have written for years, cops of color are not exempt from the racist militarized police culture that has dominated American policing from the War on Drugs forward.

Now have a look and listen:

 

 

 

Above: Crops and Bloods together onstage

 

 

"Supreme adventure" for LGBT rights

Here are photos from a friend's sister who drove from Upstate New York to Washington, D.C. and back IN ONE DAY to stand in front of the U.S. Supreme Court in support of gay marriage, which the Court is now considering. She calls it her "Supreme Adventure."

As demonstrators 40 miles north in Baltimore stand up for the right to not be summarily beaten and killed by police, it all fits together.

 

Baltimore curfew, night two, with notes.

One of the twisted things about the two-days-and-counting Baltimore lockdown is that this city is now probably a safer place to be a black person than it is during a normal day. Reporters are everywhere, every incident brings another question for beleaguered Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake and still-in-rehearsal Governor Larry Hogan, and angry citizens are marching, shouting, and issuing demands with the strength of numbers. Contrast that with any normal day, when being poor and black and beaten by Baltimore Police happens in the privacy of any given alley or squad car, and is newsworthy only to those to whom it happens.

The normal Baltimore Police routine of jacking up black folks with impunity and anonymity will have to wait until the media crowds go back home. Right now there is a script to be followed.

With that in mind, here are my margin notes on the first section of a Baltimore Sun story that ran online in the early hours of Thursday. The indented gray text is the Sun. The flush-left blue text is mine.

As masses of mostly peaceful demonstrators marched on City Hall, officials on Wednesday began their own offensive to prevent violence from flaring again Friday, when police are expected to turn their investigation into the death of Freddie Gray over to prosecutors.

This was PR damage control for the mayor's and police commissioner's powerlessness to stem the BPD's long-standing culture of brutality in poor black communities, which is what caused the uprising in the first place, and for the sheer ineptness of the mayor in trying to display both her own caring and the city's progress in the Freddie Gray case.

Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake and others tried to tamp down mistaken expectations that the public will be told Friday how Gray, 25, suffered a severed spinal cord and crushed voicebox while in police custody.

The city succeeded in letting us all know that an investigation would report its findings on Friday -- but not in making people aware that they might remain secret. There are good prosecutorial reasons for keeping such information under wraps. But my guess is that during the explosive onset of the uprising the city talked up the coming report to try to quell rage without thinking much about how secrecy might play out later.

On a relatively subdued day, when the Orioles resumed play but in an empty Camden Yards and police and National Guard troops remained in force on city streets, city officials and lawyers for Gray's family worked to explain what to expect in the coming days.

The absurdity of a major-league baseball contest played out in a completely empty stadium is like something from a dystopian novel about a post-apocalyptic city that has outlawed the word "irony."

They stressed that the police findings would not be released to the public, and State's Attorney Marilyn Mosby would not announce whether she would file criminal charges against the officers involved in the arrest.

Can't blame the State's Attorney for this one.

"People misunderstood [Friday] to mean something else," Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake said outside New Shiloh Baptist Church, where she met privately with Gray family lawyers and community leaders to discuss how to prepare for what Friday might bring.

"Misunderstood" is one word for it. What is saddest here is that the Gray family is caught in a public drama that goes against their wishes but that has become much bigger than their loved one.

Attorney Hassan Murphy said Gray's relatives are "all terribly concerned" that those expecting a major break in the case could allow their disappointment to explode in anger.

At this point, I doubt that even the family's heartbreak over these events will sway the public here. When the uprising subsides it will not be because the family requested it.

"We don't want a repeat of Monday," Murphy said, when gangs of mostly young people rioted, looted businesses and set fires.

Problem is, some people do, and the accrued community anger goes back decades.

For the rest of the Sun story, including what Attorney General Loretta Lynch, Hillary Clinton, and tone-deaf Maryland Governor Hogan had to say ("We want things to get back to normal"), go here.