We Have Trump to Thank

The President has been taking apart all previously made progress handling the environment and global warming. His actions will contribute to what has been called the sixth extinction – the premature death of billions of people on this planet, large proportions of our children and grandchildren and the shrinking of any remaining habitable portions of earth, so that few can survive and those who manage to live on the meager remainder will have had to survive the bloodiest war of all against all just for the scraps remaining.

We have Trump to thank for trying to stop California from regulating its environment so that people can breathe in Los Angeles. We have Trump to thank for reversing the decline in greenhouse gasses from car engines and coal driven power plans. We have Trump to thank for encouraging the pollution and garbage that destroy fish and marine life, and poison the water we need to drink. We have Trump to thank for doing his best to put us out of our misery by making sure most of us cease to exist.

We have Trump to thank for making suckers out of those who supported him, putting all the resources which could have provided good jobs, into the hands of the richest among us, people who did everything except spend money on workers, who spent their tax breaks instead on stock buy-backs, dividends, McMansions, and outsourcing. We have Trump to thank for making suckers out of the people who thought he’d rebuild their jobs, their towns, their cities and their ways of life, and sacrificing them instead to twits about foreign countries.

Americans were famous across the globe for our ability to work together in everything from sports stadiums to armies and industry. America built its success on teamwork. But the President’s ego couldn’t stand it because he doesn’t get the credit. So, he found a way to destroy all those accomplishments by dividing us in order to conquer us.

So, we have Trump to thank for encouraging a war among Americans over race, religion, parentage and national origin. Alt-wrong mass killers have murdered a multiple of the Americans killed by any other source of domestic terrorism. They work individually as copy-cat killers, to defy blame and prevention, much like the Communists worked by separate cells. Yet the President praises and encourages them and prevents funding and enabling the surveillance the FBI should be doing to defend us.

We realize it’s very important to him to destroy all the strides we have been making to recognize each other’s strengths, talents and decency, to embrace each other as brothers, sisters, cousins and children of God so that he can stay in power riding a crest of hatred.

Instead, for Trump, only Trump counts. He has become the most corrupt president in the history of the country, the only one whose very loyalty is in doubt, who encourages violence against the public instead of protecting it from violence, and does all he can to weaken, not strengthen America.

I wouldn’t have thought it a good idea to lock up presidents and presidential candidates. It’s dangerous for democracies to do that. But Trump put it on the table by encouraging the chant to “Lock her up” directed against Hillary. It would be better for the rest of us to give him some of his own medicine, locking him up as he would have Hillary, but I’ll be satisfied by any legal means of getting him out of office. Then we can get back to saving our environment, strengthening the position of our workers, and protecting Americans from descending further into violence.

Democratic Presidential Candidates, Voters and Media

Commentators are scoring Democratic candidates by how “moderate” or “far left” they are. That’s nonsense. Let me count the ways.

Perhaps most important is that most voters don’t have a worked out platform. They are actually trying to judge sincerity. Some of us may prefer to choose policies. But most voters feel much more comfortable judging sincerity. So while commentators think Warren is too far to the left, the voters like her. What they are seeing is that she cares about them. That’s important. They want the winner to work for them and they figure that if the candidate cares, they’ll choose the right policies. That after all is the elected leaders’ job. Voters never aligned with Reagan’s policies but they liked and trusted him. That’s one of the reasons Republican appeals to what Reagan did seem hollow. They aren’t Reagan.

There’s another equally important reason. Presidential candidates’ policy preferences tell us what they will try to do, not what will happen. That’s partly out of any official’s control. Legislators, administrators, judges and changing circumstances have a large hand in that. Obama wanted a public option. I still do. But he couldn’t get it. What mattered is that he wanted medical coverage for all of us and he did his best. I appreciate that. And it is a big contrast with the absence of any Republican plan.

So it’s sensible for us as voters to ask whether this candidate will move the political system in a good direction, pulling and pushing despite opposition to get the best possible result. So a candidate like Warren is to the left of the Congress and thank heavens!

What I think the details really can show is whether the candidates are able to think things through. I do understand why she wants Medicare for all even though, if I were in her shoes, I wouldn’t push for it. Medicare for all guarantees a good plan for all of us because equality means that if it’s going to be good for us, it has to be good for them, too. And of course a single payer system is cheaper to administer. So I admire her dedication to getting good care for us all even if I can see disadvantages. But no candidate will get everything they want. So we’ll get a compromise between “moderate” ideas and caring motives. A president isn’t a monarch, and shouldn’t be.

One more reason: moderate and left are sloppy terms. If I like one leftish idea that doesn’t make me a leftist. If sometimes I support competition like Republicans do, that doesn’t make me conservative. Voters might disagree about one thing or another but like and trust a candidate. Or they might mislabel a candidate’s whole platform based on one idea and jump away. The media are being sloppy. There are ideas to the left of current American politics that Americans like and some they don’t. They do like medical care. They do want government to make sure that we all have access to important and essential services, whether or not the proposals started out on the left. Sloppy characterizations don’t help. Clarity and precision are much more useful.

 

Never Again Means Never Again

I joined a demonstration Sunday afternoon. It was called partly to make clear that Jews are not slaves to Trump regardless of his policies toward Israel. It was part of Never Again Action across the country to protest the use of concentration camps to hold people fleeing from persecution, now most urgently on our Mexican border. We were joined by good people of all colors, origins and faiths, many of whom I know and admire.

Justice Jackson, chief prosecutor at the Nuremberg Trials, told the world in his opening statement that “civilization cannot tolerate … [the Nazi’s wrongs] being ignored, because it cannot survive their being repeated.”[1] Never again and condemnation of the Holocaust was never just about Jews. These were crimes against all humanity. ICE, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and Trump get no atrocities pass.

Never Again protested holding kids in cages, separating children from their families, keeping immigrants in concentration camps, plus denying them everything from soap to medical care. It is not OK to do that to people whatever they look like or the language they use to speak or pray. It’s not OK to refuse to help people who are fleeing for their lives. It’s not OK to rename refugees “illegals” and treat them as if they have no rights even to the basics for survival. And it’s not OK for Sheriff Russo to assist ICE to round up decent, law-abiding people fleeing for their lives to the country that promised the world to advance life, liberty, freedom from fear and freedom from want. And yes, I did call them law-abiding – it’s not a crime to cross the border.

So we congregated at a park in South Troy and then marched to the Rensselaer County Correctional Facility. Rabbi Gordon reminded the crowd that when Rabbi Heschel was criticized for marching on the sabbath in the Civil Rights Movement, he responded, “I prayed with my feet.”  We prayed with our feet, as appropriate when our voices are not enough.

When we reached the jail, we were reminded of the names of people who died in US custody near the Mexican border. We remembered them with the Kadish, the ancient Jewish prayer for the dead. It’s a prayer I recite tearfully as I have recited it for my parents and others I held dear.

The march was peaceful and we had been instructed to obey the laws. But a group sat across the road leading to the jail and eventually people from the county police came to talk to those blocking the road. I saw Mark Mishler, as attorney for the demonstrators, come to join the discussion. I heard them discuss alternatives available to the police. When they got to the possibility of arrest, I heard Mark tell the officer that “There are people here who lost their families in the holocaust…. As Jews we have seen these things before and we are not going to be like the ‘good Germans’ who stood by and let it happen in Germany, that we will not allow detentions and family separations happen in our country without taking a stand. And, that’s why the people blocking the road are not going to leave.” If they left, they would be tortured by the thought that they had not done everything they could to stop others from being confined in inhumane conditions as their families had been.

Never again means never again, anywhere. It means that at home as much as anywhere else. We will not be complicit.

[1] Opening Address to the International Military Tribunal at the Nuremberg Trials (10 November 1945).

The irony of excluding Iran

Paul Barker sent me a wonderful note about the latest Iran-related news:

“And in the irony of ironies, via Khalilzad [an Afghani-American diplomat and Special Representative for Afghanistan Reconciliation at the State Department ] the Trump administration is effectively negotiating terms of surrender with the Taliban — and it is the US that is surrendering.  Yet Trump wants the flexibility of the 2001 AUMF to justify totally unrelated action against Iran which is a natural enemy of the Taliban, al-Qa’eda and ISIS

“If Trump wanted a responsible way out of Afghanistan, he’d find a way to work with Iran.”

Absolutely right. Yet another cost of isolating Iran.

What’s up with Iran?

This Administration continues to try to inflame the relationship between the US and Iran. So let’s look at how we got here, for which we have to go back to about 1981. We could start earlier but that’s about the US and Iran screaming about which was worse and which was justified – our deposing their Prime Minister and installing the Shah in 1953, or their seizure of the Embassy and holding Americans hostage in 1979. Both sides are equally convinced they win that argument. So let’s start with 1981.

Iran tried several times since 1981 to meet, discuss, and work out our differences with everything on the table, calling one such effort a “dialogue of civilizations.” We largely refused or scuttled their efforts. More than refused, we did our best to isolate Iran, to leave them out of any and all discussions about the future of the Middle East. Finally Obama sat down with them and got to a deal which not only restricted their enrichment of nuclear fuel, but also created a platform for confidence building between us and them, only to have his successor rip it up – actually rip up our obligations while trying to leave theirs intact!

What is Iran supposed to do? For all but a few of those 40 years there have been no meetings, discussions or deals, and when we and they reached an agreement, the US dishonored it. What are they supposed to do?

Trump seems to think they should role over and say “Uncle” but why shouldn’t they expect the Eric Garner treatment: Iran, “I can’t breathe”; US, “OK, die.” The very idea of unconditional surrender is not one they could trust or accept, not one the Iranian public would trust or accept, and not one that any reasonable Iranian could believe was a good idea. In other words we have spent most of 40 years teaching them that they have no option but to push back.

We are not their only problem – a Shia nation in a sea of Sunni countries, they need allies. Israel is helpful because a number of countries in that area hate the Israeli occupation of lands the Palestinians owned. By arming guerrilla armies, Iran makes itself look like a shining white knight among Islamic countries, and it also makes clear that Iran is not powerless and has to be taken into account, at least about affairs of that region. The US hasn’t gotten that point but we’ve been stung anyway – to cheers, open or muffled, of others in the Islamic world.

Scholars and diplomats, understand the problem, by the way, and have been writing about the effect of isolating Iran. But American prejudices don’t allow realism about the Middle East.

So asking what Iran should do puts the focus on the wrong country. Iran was willing to work with us. There is a lot of latent fondness and admiration for this country among the Iranian people. Iran has in fact worked with Israel – until we upset the Middle Eastern balance of power by crushing and eliminating Iraq from the calculus. Indeed American diplomats were stunned when Iran and Israel pulled apart after the US crushed Iraq.

The real problem is that since 1981, American policy toward the Middle East has been governed by prejudice rather than intelligent analysis and careful calculation. In other words, America, know thyself.

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Full disclosure, Professor Gottlieb’s wife is now president of the Peace Corps Iran Association, and he is a member of its Advocacy Committee.