Sometimes we should listen to musicians!

        My good friend since second grade, Richie Reiter, posted what I believe to be a cogent analysis of the current situation. https://www.facebook.com/reiterjazz/posts/10154578417465995

 Just goes to show that well-informed artists are probably the best commentators going.

       There are a lot of comments on Richie’s post, a couple of which I want to respond to at length.  Rather than writing too much as a comment, I am going to just link this blog.  My comments  follow the text of Richie’s post.

Richard Reiter

After WWII, everyone assumed WWIII would be the nuclear holocaust. I don't think so. I think WWIII has started and it could last 100 years. Radical Islamic terrorism is WWIII and it's not just going to go away by water boarding someone. There are deep forces at work here: the upheaval in Middle Eastern countries that have long suppressed freedom and opportunity leaving young men enraged without much hope, looking for a scapegoat; the internet that sucks in suicidal mentally disturbed men and women around the globe; the availability of weapons to anyone.

When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, Americans were horrified and confused. We realized that life had changed and we had to rally. A huge factor in our success was our technology -- we developed weapons and built them in VAST numbers; we broke enemy codes. Today we need to take a deep breath and adapt to this new war. Technology will probably be the main element in our success: surveillance of enemy communications, detecting weapons…And recognizing that we're in a global war. Paris should never have allowed vehicles in the area where masses of people were celebrating France's biggest patriotic celebration.

While this bizarre radical Islamic WWIII is horrible, remember that the odds of a particular person's being harmed by a terrorist are small. So we need to keep living our lives and creating LOVE, the best antidote for hate.

Ira Allen Good analysis, Rich, but by and large Islamic terrorists are neither poor, poorly educated, nor deranged. And terrorism has been a tactic at least since the American revolution. So something else is at work.

My response to Ira Allen: I think you overstate here.  ISIS, like past anarcho-revolutionary movements, is made up of members of the disaffected upper classes (like Osama Bin Laden) and, for want of a better phrase, I would call the New Lumpenproletariat.

 (Those in the 21^st Century lumpenproletariat are different from the 19^th and 20^th Century versions in that while they may not have been pushed below the traditional working class, they are displaced in a way that makes them feel that they may not be productive or that their former positions as respected members of society are threatened.) 

What typically happens is that the upper class revolutionaries who initially fund and/or inspire the movements out of ideological or pathological inspirations, use the lumpenproletariat as cannon fodder.  Of course, without the lumpenproletariat, the upper class revolutionaries cannot accomplish very much.  The upper class revolutionaries do not and cannot create the lumpenproletariat.  The latter, which includes now some people seemingly from middle class backgrounds, are created by other forces.  This is where Richie has it right.  The forces of technological change, globalization, and the destabilization of traditions (including traditions we may think are barbaric or unfair) have created increasingly frustrated people upon whom the demagogues coming from any religion or no religion can and do prey. This dynamic is not unlike the collapse of German society in the 1920s and early 1930s that enabled Hitler and the Nazis to come to power. 

One might call this social trend a Revolution of Declining Expectations on the part of those who began to feel comfortable in the wake of World War II and the decline of formal colonialism, only to fall backwards for reasons that could only dimly comprehend.  This is the soil that enabled ISIS to form (helped considerably by the total destruction of Iraqi society by the ill-considered Bush/Cheney War); it is also the soil that is fertile for right-wing European parties during the last several decades and for Trumpism. They are angry that their expectations have declined, and are desperate to find ways to reverse the trend.

Rich Szabo And Obama and Hillary want to let more into our country.

Joe Lupis Quite right. I know we are not politically compatible, however, don't you think our president should be doing more to neutralize these folks?

My response Rich Szabo and Joe Lupis: Not very many immigrants from the horror of the Middle East are actually coming into the country, and those who are are being checked.  Of the handful of Muslim mass killers in the U.S. after 9/11, I believe that only one (the wife of the San Bernadino county employee who began the shooting rampage there) was not born here.  Blocking all immigration would do more harm than good, giving ISIS the kind of “us against them” propaganda ISIS desires to help their recruitment.  

Second, what more should we do to “neutralize these folks”?  We are already drone bombing all over the Islamic world, maybe even creating more terrorists than we kill.  And we seem to already be watching home-grown terrorists pretty closely.  We could do better, and I think that is the direction the Obama Administration is taking.  By being careful to not alienate the entire Muslim community in America, we are in a better position to identify terrorists and to make it less likely that more will be created. 

Third, it bears remembering that the Oklahoma City federal building bomber Timothy McVeigh and the Charleston Mother Emanuel Church shooter Dylan Roof were white Christians who were part of the New Lumpenproletariat.  In the long run, we, here in the United States, may be at greater risk from more white Christian McVeighs or Roofs than from terrorists who cloak their evil in Islam. 

The Party of Lincoln Is Now the Party of Donald Trump and Tony Perkins

FRC Founder James Dobson, Donald Trump and Tony Perkins

The Party of Lincoln is now clearly the melding of the Party of Trump (and  his mentor Roy Cohn) and the Party of Tony Perkins (whose early political connections were to David Duke). In other words, the Party of Meanness, Selfishness, Hate, Fear and Ignorance.

Trump, who just recently asserted that he would be "much better for the gays" than Hillary Clinton, is perfectly happy to run on a platform dripping with the full panoply  of homophobic and other right-wing social doctrines pressed by the most extreme members of the Republican Party, led by Tony Perkins, who is president of the Family Research Council (FRC), which justifiably has been labeled a “hate group” by the Southern Poverty Law Center. (No matter that Trump has been on  both sides of just about every issue pressed by the FRC. 

And Perkins, in turn, is perfectly happy to support as his Party’s standard-bearer a thrice-married skirt-chasing narcissistic, mean-spirited billionaire who has never held a position of public trust, for whom the truth is irrelevant (including bogus and clearly racist allegations attacking President Obama’s eligibility for the Presidency), who routinely cheats those with whom he does business, has lived a life that makes a mockery of Republican-vaunted “family values,” and has no sense at all of the reasons for the greatness of the American Experiment.  Check out the video testimony at https://www.facebook.com/historiansondonaldtrump/

These elements of the Modern (post-1964) Republican Party -- Meanness, Selfishness, Hate, Fear, and Ignorance -- all have been present ever since the Party decided to use opposition to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 as the basis for its anti-black Southern Strategy in the 1968 election.  Still, until now, those elements have always coexisted with at least some semblance decency and good faith.  Indeed, my first vote for the Senate was for Republican Charles "Mac" Mathias in Maryland in 1968.  But Republican politicians like Senator Mathias increasingly have vanished from the scene.   Speaker Paul Ryan, trying to channel the late Congressman Jack Kemp, at times has been an example of the effort to at least appear to be, in President Bush I’s words, a “kinder and gentler” conservative presence, however wrongheaded his Ayn Rand economic policies are.  And the Bush Family at least tried to project a modicum of decency even when pushing disastrous policies like the post 9/11 Iraq War; President Bush II made a strong effort to stem Islamophobia after 9/11. 

But there is no shred of decency apparent in Donald Trump.  And that personality combined with platform positions that are even more mean-spirited than those of recent Republican platform takes the Party into the nether reaches of politics.  The Bushes at least have the decency to opt-out of the Party this year.  Ryan, McConnell, et al. someday will have to answer for their political cowardice.

Many Trump voters will vote for him more out of Fear and Ignorance than out of Meanness, Selfishness, and Hate.  But the byproduct of Fear and Ignorance is too often Meanness, Selfishness, and Hate.  Even if Trump is beaten soundly in November, we still will have to deal with the legacy of the division sown by his campaign.

The Hypocrisy of the Chamber of Commerce

U.S. Chamber of Commerce Headquarters, across Lafayette Park from the White House

Recently, Thomas Donohue, President of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, wrote an op-ed for the Washington Post, headlined Trump and Clinton are both wrong about trade. He asserts that Donald Trump's and Hillary Clinton's "anti-trade rhetoric [appealing] to popular anger and a nationalist mood" ignores the fact that trade is "good for the country. It is vital for our economy."

True.

Donohue goes on to say that it "is also true that some workers have been displaced by trade, and they should be given the help they need to compete and succeed in the 21st-century economy."

Also true.

But where has the U.S. Chamber of Commerce been for the last quarter century since the enactment of NAFTA? It has opposed Democratic measures to help the workers who the Chamber now recognizes need help. Since the Democrats have controlled both the Congress and the White House for only four years since the end of the Carter Administration in January 1981 -- due, in significant part to the Chamber's opposition to all things Democratic -- Donohue's statement now is disingenuous. The Chamber should have thought of this years ago. Actually, it sort of did by putting these banners on its headquarters:

But banners are not policies, and the Chamber's policies have been consistently anti-worker. So I am skeptical that the Chamber now really means to help those workers who are hurt during the inevitable transitions to a globalized, technologically advanced economy. The Chamber follows the Ayn Rand philosopy of Speaker Paul Ryan. And it has not shown it is willing to change.

The festering, unaddressed needs of those left behind by technological change and globalization -- people who were going to be in bad economic shape whether or not we had trade deals -- are now coming home to roost. The failure of the American Establishment to deal with those needs has created a situation in which demagogic appeals (principally from the incipient Republican nominee for President) could destroy needed trade arrangements without actually helping the condition of the workers who, often justifiably, feel that they have been abandoned by the economic elites of our country.

The hypocrisy of the Chamber of Commerce and other economic plutocrats is now clear.

It is the job of Hillary Clinton (and Elizabeth Warren, as her Veep, I hope) to call out the hypocrisy and make real help for American workers who have been left behind a centerpiece of the campaign. The Democratic Party needs to zero in on this issue.

A Facebook Friend Asks Why I Like Hillary Clinton

A Facebook friend from high school recently asked, “How many of my friends feel the way I do? I am interested in learning on FB why my friends like certain candidates. I have no interest in learning on FB how snarky they can be about the ones they don't like. Just wondering...”  Here is my response:

           I start with the premise that I want to have a President who agrees with me on the most basic important issues, most importantly, the need:

** To respond aggressively to climate change;

** For government to protect us (and capitalism) from the excesses of capitalism (for example, toxic pollution, income inequality in which those at the top skim or ladle off obscene amounts of money at the expense of everyone else, outright fraudulent activities)

** For government to perform communal tasks that the private sector is not equipped to handle, and that there a number of such tasks;

** To maximize equal opportunity in a world in which some are born on third base, while others start out at not even on first base;

** To respect people and protect civil rights regardless of one's race, ethnicity, religion, gender, sexual orientation, or gender identity;

** To recognize that international trade agreements are an essential part of economic health in a globalized economy and that we can do a bit better regarding the terms of those agreements, but that, at bottom, the best way to deal with the displacement caused by such agreements and technological change is to act aggressively to help those negatively impacted to find new careers and cushion the transitions;

** To carefully navigate our foreign policy in a very messy and dangerous world while trying to maintain ethical standards of behavior.

            Hillary Clinton's long-standing views fit my own, and that, obviously, is very important to me. 

            Secretary Clinton has proven herself to be committed, worthy, and usually trustworthy over the course of her entire life. She has a wealth of relevant experience and knowledge, beginning with her work as a field organizer in Texas for the McGovern Campaign and her work for the Children’s Defense Fund, continuing with her work on education in Arkansas, health care and women’s rights issues while First Lady, the full range of issues while in the Senate, and international affairs as Secretary of State. 

            Criticism of her regarding (a) the decision to withdraw troops from Iraq in 2011 rather than to continue to be the target of the contending Shia and Sunni factions there, and (b) the 2012 decisions regarding Libya are way overblown.  It was never clear, even in hindsight, how to handle those awful situations; no one can say with any certainty that a different course of action would, on balance, have been better.  As for her apparent internal disagreements with President Obama on our response in Syria, I would say the same thing.  People who state with assurance (and in good faith, which is not always the case) that continuing a significant military “presence” in (really, an occupation of) Iraq would not have led to the same sad outcome we see now – perhaps worse, with thousands of dead Americans – are, I think, being blinded by their own predispositions of what they wish were the case.  Ditto regarding Libya: Had we done nothing, we would be faulted for allowing Qadafi to slaughter tens of thousands of people; had we gone in full force, we could have been in another Iraq quagmire. As for Syria, President Obama may have been correct in his assessment that there were no credible non-terrorist groups in Syria that we could have joined forces with to stop Assad’s mass murder, and that any attempt to do so would have only led to more American weapons in the hands of terrorists, whether Al Qaeda or ISIL.  That Hillary Clinton would have been more aggressive is not necessarily a good thing; we simply do not, and cannot, know.

            Hillary Clinton is not perfect. Her 2002 vote on the Iraq War – which seemed to be a close call at the time (even Paul Wellstone, who voted against authorization, said it was the toughest vote he ever had to make) – appears to me to have been based more on political caution than a clear-eyed assessment of the situation. And her ham-handed attempt to keep control over the confidentiality of all her e-mails, notwithstanding the Freedom of Information Act, was foolish – even though paranoids do, in fact, sometimes have venal enemies.  (Lord knows, she does).  She should have known that any risks involved in just using the State Department server for work e-mails were far less than the sh--storm caused by the virtually inevitable reveal of her use of personal e-mail. 

          Her shortcomings do not, in my opinion, interfere with her ability to be an excellent President.  I have heard enough of her speeches, and know enough of her record, to be confident that, at bottom, she is still the idealistic woman who first came on the national scene with her Wellesley graduation speech when she took on the pretenses of pro-Viet Nam War Senator Ed Brooke. (FWIW, two of my best friends from high school were good friends of hers at Yale, and before that during college, and always had nothing but praise for her.)  I have no reservations about supporting her and voting for her this Novedmber. 

           But even if she has been so scarred by experience that she is not as honest as we would wish –- a fault which, at worst, goes to trimming on the issues at times (an occupational hazard of being in politics) and being overly protective of her private life and communications – she would still be preferable to any conceivable Republican candidate, since the entire 2015-16 field proclaimed views that I find very ill-conceived:

** They either reject the fact of climate change altogether or say there is nothing we can do about it.

** They mostly reject the idea that the government can or should protect us (and capitalism) from the excesses of capitalism, instead taking an Ayn Rand view of the economic world, in which the race is to the swift (or corrupt) and the devil take the hindmost.

** They believe that there are few communal tasks that the private sector is not equipped to handle -- that Adam Smith's "invisible hand" -- the market place -- will take care of virtually everything.

** They mostly ignore the fact that there is unequal opportunity, or that the government should do anything to try to make the playing field more level.

**  At best, they give lip service to respecting people’s civil rights, but are not willing to do anything to effectuate such respect – even to the point of approving state action to interfere with the right of those at the bottom of the economic ladder to vote.

** They either mindlessly argue that all of our international trade agreements have no value, or, at the other extreme, argue that “free trade” means trade utterly unfettered by communal concerns.  All of them rejected any significant governmental action to help those hurt by trade agreement to transition to the inevitable new world.;

** They either wished to return to the Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld policies of military intervention, even when the downstream impacts are far worse than the problems such interventions seek to remedy; or they were isolationist in their assertions.  (One candidate, the presumptive nominee tried to take both positions!).

            So, for me, even if Hillary Clinton were more flawed than I believe, I would, on policy grounds, favor her over a Jeb Bush, a Lindsay Graham, a Marco Rubio, or a John Kasich.  And, in addition to policy grounds, I certainly would favor her over like Ted Cruz, Ben Carson, and Rick Santorum, whose policies and allies would, with “moral certitude,” force gay people back into the closet and make them permanent second class citizens. 

            Thus far, I think I have satisfied my Facebook friend’s admonition to not be “snarky.”  But I find it impossible to discuss the additional problems I have with Donald Trump without sounding snarky.  But I must say that Donald Trump, as the presumptive Republican nominee, makes my choice even clearer – if that were possible.  Mr. Trump has shown himself to be an ignorant and cruel bully, an egotistical demagogue with no record of public spiritedness, a man whose lies are so outrageous and numerous that one’s head spins keeping track of them.  He is the embodiment of Joe McCarthy, without a drinking problem – although in fairness to the late, but not lamented Senator from Wisconsin, McCarthy might have actually believed he was doing the best thing for the country. (Note that Mr. Trump chose McCarthy’s top henchman, Roy Cohn, to be his mentor when he (Trump) entered the world of Manhattan maneuvering.  See, e.g., http://billmoyers.com/story/trump-virus-dark-age-unreason/)

Donald Trump has proven a very important thing, a thing that in my mind puts him beyond the pale, regardless of policy positions: That, throughout his life, he only wants what is best for Donald Trump.

Governor Cuomo's Executive Order on BDS

Today, my younger son Dan posted this on Facebook, in response to Gov. Cuomo’s announcement of an executive order by which the State of New York would boycott those who support the BDS Movement, which is aimed at the Israeli Government and Israeli businesses :

When I was growing up, I was constantly told that if Palestinians created a mass non-  violent movement against the Occupation, that they would win their struggle easily. 

Well, we've had a massive, international, non-violent movement for Palestinian human rights for the past 11 years, and not only is it being trampled at every turn, but our own state governments are participating in this repression.

I was the one who “constantly told” this to him.  I still believe that if a non-violent civil disobedience movement had emerged in the 1980s or even the 1990s, it might well have worked.  But every year that the Israeli government keeps and expands settlements on the West Bank, the harder it is for such a movement to succeed.  This is a tragedy for both Israelis and Palestinians.

Nevertheless, I oppose blanket BDS (as opposed to a boycott of Israeli goods produced in the Occupied Territories of the West Bank, which might make sense to me).  I do not think that blanket BDS will influence this Israeli government, or any likely future government, to change its West Bank policies. I applaud efforts of BDS supporters to resist the flat-out anti-Semitism of other BDS supporters, for whom BDS is a front for a general desire to throw the Israeli Jews into the sea, or worse. But I fear that may be a losing struggle.

Still, I am very troubled by Gov. Cuomo’s executive order.  Activists in New York should consider the impact of a 1995 Supreme Court case, Rosenberger v. Rector and Visitors of the University of Virginia, 515 U.S. 819,  829 et. seq. (1995). There, the Supreme Court ruled that where a state government establishes a public forum for discussion of public issues, the state may not condition participation based on the viewpoint of a group. 

In that case, the University of Virginia (UVA) funded student publications, provided the student applicants met certain standards.  Students wishing to secure funding for a magazine with a religious viewpoint met all those standards, but UVA denied their application based on the proposition that it should not, under the First Amendment, fund religious magazines.  The Supreme Court disagreed, concluding that when a governmental institution creates a public forum, it may not discriminate based on viewpoint.

One of the questions raised by Gov. Cuomo’s executive order is whether, with respect to arts groups which get state funding, the state may condition continued funding on the groups’ commitment not to provide a forum for those opposing BDS.  We need more debate on BDS issues, not less.  It seems to me that Rosenberger may well preclude such conditions.

A way to look at this would be to work through the following hypothetical:  Suppose that, during the South African Apartheid period, a state chose to divest from companies doing business with the Apartheid Regime and to defund any group, otherwise receiving state funds, which provided a forum to those supporting Apartheid.  If a defunding of such groups participating in state-supported public forums would have been unconstitutional, the same reasoning would apply here.