Say No, Now.

If we don’t say NO, now, it might soon be too late and it might be illegal to say anything. No. DT does not have the power to disobey the law or turn the DOJ into his Department of Deification. This Wednesday, 2/26, or all week, call Congresspeople, call the Senate, put a sign in your car, go to the streets.

 

Trumpists argue “The President is the Executive Branch and the Commander in Chief. He can do whatever he wants.” But the constitution says he must swear an oath to “preserve, protect and defend the constitution.” His job is not only to “faithfully execute the laws” (Article 2, section 3) but also obey the laws. The power to try cases is the power of the judicial branch and he must not infringe on that power. To infringe on judicial and legislative powers is to violate not “preserve and protect” the law and the constitution. We didn’t convict DT in the Senate impeachment trial, but we must convict him on the streets and with the ballot.

 

Please share this post and talk with your friends and family. Here are a few phone numbers: GOP: Lamar Alexander: 202-224-4944, Cory Gardner: 202-224-5941, Mitt Romney: 202-224-5251, Susan Collins: 202-224-2523, Lisa Murkowski: 202-224-6665, Portman: 202-224-3353, Ben Sasse: 202-224-4224, Mike Lee: 202-224-5444.

DEMS: Doug Jones, Al. 202-224-4124; Joe Manchin, W. VA. 202-224-3954; Krysten Sinema, AR: 202-224-4521. NY Dems: Schumer: 202-224-6542 & 212-486-4430, Gillibrand: 202-224-4451.

DT’s Revival of the American Spirit Is the Revival of Hate and Divisiveness

I’m sorry but I couldn’t watch the whole annual speech to our nation by the President. I did listen to a few news reports and analyses and read parts online, and a PBS fact check.

 

DT talked about the “Great American Comeback” while for three years he has been destroying our future, undermining the protections on our environment and thus the habitability of our world by rolling back regulations protecting our municipal water systems from sewage or protecting our air quality. He undermines our future by attacking the science that should inform environmental regulations and protections on public health.  He has been undermining public education. He undermines our national security not only by sudden and ill-informed reverses of foreign policy, as in Syria and Iran, but by undermining our relations with allies.

 

He further undermines our health not only with the environmental policies but by withholding monies for agencies that protect us from pandemics. He has cut the National Institute of Health, the Centers for Disease Control, the Agency for International Development, and dismantled the entire White House team in charge of global health security.  He has threatened to cut back Medicare, Medicaid, and, of course the Affordable Care Act.

 

He has been undermining our national union by attacking not only people of color, as in Charlottesville, etc, etc, and stimulating the hate that has exploded in attacks on synagogues, LGBTQ & others, and young people in schools, but also by his fluency with lies, which makes him seem to his followers the origin of all accepted truth.

 

I think his revival of the American spirit is really the revival of hate and divisiveness. But of course, maybe I will get criticized for sowing hate because I point out the truth of his hate.

 

Meanwhile, he claims America is doing well economically, there is high employment, and we have the biggest economy in the world. And biggest military. But his “good economy” serves the rich more than Mainstreet. We have one of the biggest debt rates in our modern history, thus making our nation more economically vulnerable in a crisis and making it difficult for us to come up with the needed money to improve our infrastructure and schools. The debt increases the concentration of wealth in fewer and fewer hands and shifts so much power to the rich that the rest of us will soon be left with little power. And his tax cuts have not only made the debt worse, but he proposes to help pay for these huge handouts to the rich by calling for cuts in the programs that serve and protect the majority of us, not only with the public health protections already mentioned and Medicare and Medicaid, but also Social Security. And meanwhile, half of America is living near the poverty level.

 

He undermines the very system we use to maintain a democracy, by disenfranchising millions of voters, destroying faith in our electoral system by resisting efforts to safeguard our election technology and, as illustrated by his Ukraine scandal, by calling for interference in the election by Russia and China. He undermines the rule of law and our constitution, as shown by his corruption, his impeachment in the House, the Mueller Investigation, his attacks on anyone who opposes him, and his own lawyer basically arguing on the Senate floor that whatever DT does is legal.

 

The House should now call John Bolton and Lev Parnas, and cut off the GOP victory dance. And then expose the GOP agenda of ripping off the American people by discussing health care, protecting Medicare and Medicaid and Social Security.

 

And sometime we need to do something about the lying in the media, the media which  insulates people in information or propaganda cocoons and incites violence. For example, a follower of DT and FOX News threatened to shoot Adam Schiff after his speech on the Senate floor about impeachment. The same person also threatened Mr. Schiff on October 1st, after DT said Schiff should be questioned for fraud and treason. As seen in the movie Vice, which is about Vice President Dick Cheney, once the Fairness Doctrine was ended in 1987, it allowed the media to give up any attempt at balanced and fact-based reporting. And DT continues to threaten Congressman Schiff.

 

And all of us who want to live in a nation of laws, who want influence on the political process, who want to be able to live without a threat of violence due to our gender identity and loves, friends, religion, economic class, or race, who want there to be a habitable world for ourselves and our children⎼ we have to not only vote but get others to vote.

 

Creativity and Our Love for Others Can Save Us

This morning, like almost every morning, underneath the rush to run off to do this or that, or to lie in bed and watch the day begin, there is a yearning to create something beautiful and meaningful. Or maybe it’s a desire to write something exciting, to write myself into a revelation of the depths of life, something utterly true, unseen, new, about life, relationships, myself.

 

Then I hear the news ⎼ lawyers for the President, instead of trying to prove his innocence, they try to justify on the Senate floor the subversion of the constitution and the establishment of one-man rule, and I lose all concern for depth. Fear sucks away the creativity.

 

Or I hear John Bolton say DT directed him to pressure the President of Ukraine to announce an investigation into Joe Biden. Or Lev Parnas revealing the tape he has of the President giving the order to “get rid of” Ambassador Yovanovitch is only one of the many tapes he has. Parnas says everyone, including Mike Pompeo and Vice President Pence, “was in the loop” on DT’s Ukraine scheme.

 

And I get excited. I want this to be heard. I want it to shake the depths of our political system. I imagine the dark cloud of the Presidency will be lifted and this threat to humanity removed. I get caught up in hopes and fears and lose touch with beauty and depth.

 

And I fall asleep again because I didn’t sleep that well and a dream comes to me. I am walking on a beach. Several people are around me. It’s awesome. And in the distance, I see waves heading to the shore. And suddenly I notice a wave, a huge wave, getting bigger and bigger coming towards the beach. I yell to the people in the water and those around me, and start running uphill, away from the beach. And from the other side, the hill gets washed out. The land has become water, water to the right, water to the left…

 

And I wake up.

 

The act of creating, whether it is by writing, painting, dancing, cooking, carpentry, film-making, playing music or whatever gives us a sense of strength and meaning. It is an affirmation.

 

I want to write so I can harness the flood. I want to write so the writing itself is a meditation, a door opening into soul territory. I want to write so I remember there’s more to life than anger, regret, and fear. That the possibility to act and affect the world exists.

 

So when we come home from work or school or after hearing the news, after the fact check, we can write to our local newspaper or on social media, speak out, paint a sign to hold aloft in a demonstration.

 

And we can look closely at those we love, listen to them, as if how we relate to them were also an act of creation. As if the sincerity and depth of our caring would somehow strike some politician with sanity.

 

Even fear and nightmares can be the siblings of the urge to create and to live deeply, meaningfully ⎼ and in a nation that listens to and respects our rights and viewpoint. And of our care for and relationships with others. If we didn’t care, we wouldn’t fear.

 

And it is this yearning to create and this love that we have for others that can save us. We have to keep this yearning and care in mind and let it inspire us to also take care of ourselves, as we speak out, keep informed, make political action part of our loving, and hug our friends and family deeply.

 

 

This blog was syndicated by The Good Men Project.

 

DT is Trying to Turn Main Street America into A Second-Class Nation

When I turn on the radio or tv to hear the Senate Impeachment Trial of the President, it is difficult to get beyond my fear, disgust or outrage. But when I do, what has become clear to me is that despite great gains on Wall Street, and the US having the largest economy and military in the world, DT is turning Main Street America into a second-class nation. What do I mean by that?

 

I am using the term “second class” differently than “second, third or fourth world nation.” By second class I mean a nation where:

  • The political system has been or is becoming unstable or inept, too corrupt to function to protect the interests of the majority of citizens, with the power centralized in the hands of one person or group.
  • The national debt is so high as to be destabilizing or potentially so.
  • The rule of money overpowers the rule of law.
  • Investment in the infrastructure is too small to prevent it from crumbling.
  • Public education is undermined or non-existent.
  • Good health care is too expensive.
  • Increasing violence, especially due to poverty, gender, race and religion.
  • Overwhelming wealth divide and concentration in relatively few hands.
  • Where the nation has been or is becoming more and more isolated from other nations.
  • Protection of the environment is severely neglected.

By this definition, the US is now or is becoming a second-class nation in each of these categories.  In terms of the political system being inept, or too corrupt, we need to start at the Impeachment trial. DT is on trial right now for abuse of power or trying to corruptly interfere in the 2020 election, as well as obstruction of Congress.

 

Although the House did not go so far as to call DT’s actions illegal, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) did. They said he violated the Impoundment Control Act by illegally withholding Congressionally approved funds. And he did it in order to extort Ukraine to do his bidding.

 

The number of corrupt acts committed by this president is almost uncountable. This is particularly important now, as DT claims he withheld aid to Ukraine for 55 days due to concern with their corruption. However, he doesn’t care about stopping corruption in the US, so it is not believable that he cares about it in Ukraine. For example, he sought to get rid of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. Newsweek reported in October that he had 2500 conflicts of interest between his job as president and his business holdings. He also attacked and fired the former Ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch, for trying to fight corruption in Ukraine.

 

And at the heart of impeachment is DT’s attempt to get Ukraine to announce an investigation into former Vice President Joe Biden, who might just run against DT for President. Also Biden had pressured Ukraine to investigate corruption more thoroughly (not less, as Giuliani claimed) and remove a corrupt prosecutor named Victor Shokin, who DT had described as “that very good prosecutor”.

 

An article in GQ states that DT corrupted the American Presidency in every conceivable way, “turning the highest office in the land into one crooked cesspool.” “Throughout his tenure in the White House, DT has leveraged the powers of his office… to enrich himself at every opportunity” from profiting greatly from the GOP and foreign leaders staying at his hotels, charging the Secret Service and the American taxpayers for golf carts and for his own vacations or for advertising for his properties, etc., etc.. According to New York Attorney General Barbara Underwood, he used his own charity in a “shocking pattern of illegality,” including using it to buy a portrait of himself.

 

He has interfered in court cases, and undermined the rule of law, in the Mueller Investigation, and of course, in his threat to Adam Schiff last weekend, and in his Impeachment.

 

We can also see DT’s attitude in the statements of his defense attorneys. On Saturday, attorney Mike Purpura tried to argue that the President did nothing wrong. According to CNN & other fact-checking organizations, Purpura is at best deceptive, if not lying. He says there was no pressure on Ukrainian President Zelensky, a fact supposedly supported by Zelensky himself. This ignores the fact that without DT’s support, Ukraine would fall to Russia in a short time. If Zelensky acknowledged the pressure exerted by the U. S. President, his nation would die.

 

Purpura said Ukraine did not know the aid was even withheld. However, evidence shows some Ukrainian officials knew about the holdup by the day of the July 25th phone call.

 

There are even more ridiculous claims: as outlined by the CNN fact-check, one of DT’s other lawyers, Pat Cippolone, said that the President was “locked out” from participating in the House hearings. The House made a formal offer to have the President’s attorney present, but Cippolone himself wrote the letter rejecting any participation. And GOP Congresspeople participated both in the closed door and public hearings.

 

Another of the President’s attorneys, Jay Sekulow, repeated the claim debunked by our own intelligence services that it was the Ukraine, not Russia, that interfered in the 2016 election, and that they did so for Hillary Clinton’s interest. And Rudy Giuliani, a fourth lawyer for DT, traveled in Ukraine and other places to spread the disinformation. Compelling evidence was released in November that all this disinformation was part of Russia’s effort to frame Ukraine for the interference.

 

And what is the supposed evidence for Ukraine interfering in the election that the GOP is citing? Ukrainian officials liked Hillary Clinton and made insulting comments about DT. If this is evidence that Ukraine interfered in the election, then is the fact that 52% of the American public voted against DT evidence that half of the American public interfered in the election?

 

The disinformation campaign by Russia sought to spread lies that Ukraine was responsible for the hack of the DNC. DT and his lawyers also claimed Hillary’s campaign was directed by Ukrainian oligarchs and her server was in the Ukraine. There is no evidence for any of these claims. They are so ridiculous I can’t believe that members of DT’s legal team are still speaking lines written as Russian propaganda.

 

All this shows not only that the corruption of this administration is beyond anything ever seen before in this country, but the utter contempt DT and his party have for democracy, the truth, and the rule of law.

 

As far as the other criteria of a second-class nation:

 

The tax cut passed by the GOP in 2017 created a looming deficit in government income, causing the debt to double from 2015 to 2019.  Newsweek reported that over the last three years of DT, the debt increased by $3 trillion; the US Debt Clock has the debt at over $23 trillion. The tax cut served large corporations and the wealthy and scores of Republican lawmakers, not the middle class (whose gains, if any, were small and temporary).  To pay off the debt, the U. S. now pays more than $1 billion each day on interest payments and the amount paid per day will continue to rise.

 

Based on data by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), the deficits over the next 30 years will rise to “unprecedented levels.” This will deprive the nation of funds needed for infrastructure, public education, health care and social programs. It will reduce economic opportunities for individuals and make it more difficult to get money to finance homes, college education, cars, and anything else. The CBO estimates that if we reduced the debt to the historical average level, the income per person would rise on average as much as $5,500. This is one measure of what DT’s tax cut is costing most of us.

 

The high levels of debt also reduce the government’s ability to respond to any future crises, which puts our nation in a potentially threatening situation.  Who benefits from this?

 

I could go on and on, about how DT:

 

DT is not making America great but undermining our security and future. He needs to be impeached before he becomes a dictator⎼ and over a second-class nation.

 

 

This post was syndicated by The Good Men Project.

 

 

Anger at Boomers: We Can’t Allow Ourselves to be Manipulated Into Setting One Generation, Race, Religion, Gender Against Another

In writing and publishing two of my last three blogs, I ran into people angry at Boomers or the 60s. The anger was sometimes loud and aggressive, and it was difficult, when it was in a one-on-one situation, to say anything in response that the attacker would hear. One person criticized my post on resolving to vote and imagine a true democracy, claiming I was glorifying the Boomers and blaming Millennials for the situation we are in today. I never mentioned Boomers anywhere in the piece, although I clearly spoke from a Boomer perspective, being part of that generation myself. In the other post, I described someone who blamed Boomers for DT.

 

Where is the anger and blame coming from? Certainly, people are feeling hurt, possibly that they were treated unjustly. But what is the source of that hurt?

 

At the heart of one critique was a study by Yascha Mounk at Harvard who had found that the people of the 1930s who fought the Nazis said democracy was extremely important to them, and people born much later (like Millennials) did not value democracy as highly. One reason for this difference, speculated Mounk, was that Millennials and Gen-X’ers had not fought against Nazis or against other non-democratic governments in order to safeguard democracy. The younger generations of Americans were not familiar with the threat to our freedoms these other governments could pose.

 

The critic said I had claimed Boomers had fought the Nazis and thus knew what it was like to face a threat to our democratic institutions. Maybe I wasn’t as articulate as I could have been, but clearly we Boomers could not have fought against the Nazi Germans. We weren’t alive yet. Once alive and speaking, we certainly heard about the war and Nazis quite often, from relatives who had fought, as well as from the news and literature, as we were born right after the war had ended.

 

All of us alive in the US in the 1950s felt the threat of Soviet Russia daily, whose leaders threatened to destroy US democracy. We went through the McCarthy Era, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and “duck and cover drills” that were created in fear of a nuclear war. Likewise, people today are feeling the threats of gun violence, global warming, increasing terrorism, the loss of democratic institutions, etc.

 

While young people in general tended in the past to vote at lower rates then older people, as I said in my earlier blog, this is changing. The Pew Research Center, whose statistics showed, for example, that the number of millennials who voted nearly doubled from 2014 to 2018 ⎼ and more voted than older generations of Americans. Things are changing quickly, and I welcome this particular change. Young people today are leading in several fronts, including the environment and ending gun violence.

 

Boomers are attacked for dropping out of society and also for dropping in and becoming greedy capitalists. For being too idealistic and for not caring at all about democracy. For drugs, sex, and rock’n’roll or being without morals and for being too judgmental. I was attacked for dropping out of society to return to the land as well as for supposedly claiming Millennials were responsible for all the ills of our society today, or for DT ⎼ but I never said they were responsible. Neither are all the Boomers or Gen-X’ers. The people who support DT are responsible.

 

The 60s decade was alive with experimentation, protests, art, music, and the promise of great political and social change, of increasing equity and opportunity. It was the decade that saw not only the anti-war movement but civil rights advanced, and the passing of the Voting Rights Act, Medicaid and Medicare. And early in the 70s, we saw the women’s rights and environmental movement grow, the Clean Air Act passed and the EPA created. The Clean Waters Restoration Act was passed in 1966 and the Clean Waters Act in 1972, all resulting in a great improvement in air and water quality. There was Woodstock ⎼ and there was Altamont, the assassination of a President, his Presidential candidate brother, as well as civil rights leaders.

 

But although we heard President Eisenhower’s warning in 1961 about the Military-Industrial Complex, the people of the 60s grew up in a capitalist society, as did everyone else who was born in the US alive today. Some of the super-rich capitalists are Boomers, but you can’t blame Boomers for capitalism.

 

But much of the promise of the 60s rebellion never bore fruit and fell apart, and there is anger about that. The 60s became the 70s. And then the 80s, Ronald Reagan, and the economic divide between the top 1% and the rest of us started to increase once again. The limitations on the rich that were enacted just before and during the war and were extended through the 60s and 70s, were undermined or terminated in the Reagan years, and the economic divide has been getting worse ever since. And the Boomers did not stop that injustice.

 

According to a study by the Boston Consulting Group in 2017, around 70% of the nation’s wealth will be concentrated in the hands of millionaires and billionaires by 2021. Matt Bruenig of the Peoples Policy Project, said “…the top one percent owns nearly $30 trillion of assets while the bottom half owns less than nothing, meaning they have more debts than they have assets.” And according to CBS news, the rich pay a lower tax rate than most in the middle class. If my math is correct, and we took the total income earned in the US in 2018 ($17.6 trillion) and divided it by the number of full-time workers (128.57 million),  we get $136,890. Imagine that as the salary of each worker. All this accumulation of wealth in so few hands is undermining the future for most Americans.

 

Many factors contribute to the ease by which we attack each other, but one could be social isolation, which can negatively affect our physical and emotional health. How we use social media and other technology plays a big role here. For example, instead of going out to the movies, or to work, or to shop, or even gather with friends, more of us stay home on our computers, Prime or Hulu or Xboxes or FB or texts or whatever. This makes it easier for us to experience loneliness, anger, and lose sight of the humanity of others. Face to face communication is so much more than words. It is the felt presence of a breathing being, and texts, written words, even images cannot replicate that.

 

With all the talk about different generations of Americans, it’s easy to pit one generation against another.  But a generation is simply a group of people born at a certain time in history under a certain set of conditions, and we need to remember that. Any statistics about a generation can be useful to know, but it is just a generalization. In-between the generalizations are the truths about individual people, and it is those individuals who we meet in the gym or on the street ⎼ or who write blogs.

 

There is cause for anger, but it should be directed at the actions of those super-rich people who are trying to undermine democracy right now by setting one generation, one group of people ⎼ or one race, religion, or gender ⎼ against another. And we can’t let ourselves take part in that manipulation or allow it to succeed.

 

 

This post was syndicated by The Good Men Project.

 

 

 

 

 

For the New Year, Imagine A True Democracy and a President We Can Respect

What are your resolutions for the New Year? Before I discuss one of mine, let me give the  context.

 

Last week, did you read DT’s letter to Nancy Pelosi about his impeachment? Or listen to the impeachment hearings? Many of us talk about the constant lies by DT and how the GOP has become his army of deception. Or we joke about it because the deceptions are just so blatant and outrageous that it’s too incredible to believe that he said what he did, or we don’t want to believe it. But it’s true. We are witnessing the GOP defining truth as whatever DT says it is as they attempt to create a dictatorship right before our eyes.

 

DT’s letter to Speaker Nancy Pelosi is so full of lies and distortions stated so forcefully and blatantly that I cringed reading it. The GOP during the hearings were so off base in most of their comments that it appeared to many news commentators that we were witnessing an alternative reality.

 

We’re facing the possibility that anyone who opposes DT will get investigated or arrested as a traitor. DT called any GOP who oppose him, as well as FBI officials who investigate Russian interference in our election, “human scum.” He has accused Democrats of treason for opposing or impeaching him, a label he earlier applied to the New York Times.

 

His Attorney General, William Barr, has been acting as the President’s agent, appointing US attorney John Durham to investigate former CIA Director John Brennan for his stated views on the investigations of DT’s Russian connections. Barr’s DOJ also opened a criminal investigation into the origins of the Mueller probe of Russian Interference in the 2016 election.

 

We’re facing the possibility of our public schools being further undermined by the GOP and replaced with private, yet publicly funded, Charter and Christian schools where education quality is formally tied to economic class and/or race and critical thinking is limited and controlled through standardized testing. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos has worked for years to end public education and build “God’s Kingdom” here in the US.

 

Back in 2016, Diane Rehms had three guests (Moises Naim, Alina Polyakova, Yascha Mounk) on her NPR radio show who discussed their analysis that many Americans had been taking democracy for granted. Yascha Mounk said that when Americans born in the 1930s were asked how important it was to live in a democracy, over two thirds said it was of top importance, ten on a one-to-ten scale. When, for example, Millennials in the US were asked the same question prior to 2016, less than one third thought democracy important.

 

Maybe some Millennials did not understand then what they understand now, namely how it would be like to live in a dictatorship, Fascist state or an oligarchy, where the majority of citizens of a nation had no institutionalized power. They never fought a Fascist government, for example. They did not understand that democracy in a large and diverse nation meant compromise and required effort and were focused only on the negative side of US politics. They did not understand that once the institutions of a democracy were undermined, it would be extremely difficult to build them back. Now, 2 years later, I think more of them, and us, recognize the value of democracy ⎼ as we see it murdered before our eyes. According to the Pew Research Center, the number of millennials who voted nearly doubled from 2014 to 2018 and outvoted the older generations of Americans.

 

Even though 49.3% of eligible voters voted in 2018, the highest percentage since 1914 to vote in a midterm election according to the United States Election Project, the number of Americans who do not vote is astounding. In 2014, the turnout was 36.7%, the lowest in 72 years. In the Presidential election of 2012, it was 58.6%. In 2016, it was 60.1%. This means about 40% of Americans didn’t vote. Why?

 

The Pew Research Center says 4% of voters did not vote in the past due to “registration problems,” like being expunged from the voter rolls or due to having a criminal history, and the problem is getting worse. The Brennan Center found 4 million were purged between 2014 and 2016 and more are being purged in GOP controlled states right now. In fact, one of DT’s advisers said on tape that voter suppression was the key to the GOP’s efforts in 2020. Other people are apathetic, too busy, think the system is corrupt or they lack information. Some argue that the vote is meaningless, the Dems are just as bad as Republicans, or the vote doesn’t affect their daily life.

 

Imagine everything that you think is wrong or falling apart now getting worse ⎼ police attacks on people of color, or the court system being biased, or more children of immigrants being separated from parents, or public schooling destroyed, or roads, water supply, and electric becoming even more undependable or unsafe. Imagine being jailed for speaking out against a politician’s corruption. Imagine tanks…

 

Or imagine the opposite future. Imagine education being considered as important as military defense and schools being designed to promote the well-being and expand the critical thinking capacity of each individual student. Imagine higher education and vocational training easily affordable by everyone.

 

Imagine health care that is comprehensive and affordable. In France, for example, health care is much less expensive and open to everyone. Two of my cousins live in France part of the year and have described to me how easy it is to see a doctor and how much less it costs. Doctors have even made house calls for them.

 

Imagine the costs of phones and phone service (which is much higher in the US than Europe, for example⎼ DT’s FCC, headed by Ajit Pai, has worked to decrease controls on providers and increase costs to consumers) and the quality, speed and cost of internet service improving. Imagine alternative energy being cheaply available to everyone.

 

Imagine scientific research into medicine, alternative energy, and simply a better understanding of our universe being applied to political policy and admired alongside emotional intelligence, diversity, and compassion. Imagine friends and neighbors getting together in groups to advise politicians. And imagine voting is encouraged so much that it is a national holiday. Imagine a President we can respect, who knows the facts and will speak truthfully (even most of the time) about the state of the world.

 

This is why we vote. The difference between one future and the other is largely up to all of us, up to our votes, and up to how much political action we take. And it might be up to how willing we are to talk with anyone who claims voting and politics don’t matter.

 

So, if this is how you feel, this is the year to act.

 

This post has been syndicated by the Good Men Project.

It’s So Easy to Lose Our Heads: The Need to Secure and Advance Democracy

It is so easy to lose our heads. To get angry or depressed or want to run and hide. Or blame someone ⎼ that’s always been a strategy to clutch at. Blame this person or that group. Blame Muslims, if you’re a supporter of T, or blame Congresswomen of color or just women. Or just people of color. Or just journalists. Or people who actually examine the news and think critically about it. Or scientists⎼ that’s a clever strategy. Blame the people who actually study our universe and invent things and keep our technology and healthcare, etc. advancing.

 

Or blame the Democratic Party and DNC. But wait. Some of my FB friends do that, too. Fellow progressives, liberals and lefties. Afterall, the DNC has certainly been despicable at times in the past. Some even claim the Democrats are no better than the Grand Old Party, the party which is no longer republican, but despotic or dictatorial, or the party of denial, denial of global warming, of the facts in the Ukrainian scandal, of facts, period. The GOP will deny global warming, but the Democrats just won’t act, they say.

 

This equation of the two parties distorts the reality and undermines our ability to act effectively. Just compare the efforts of the GOP, for example, to undermine voting and women’s rights and public education while protecting foreign interference in our elections and increasing the wealth of the wealthiest Americans, with the record of legislation passed by the House since the election of 2018.

 

We know the costs to ourselves and others of the blame game. When we look inside ourselves, we can see and feel it. It is the deadliest game out there in terms of creating suffering and delusion. To blame like this we build a wall between ourselves and the rest of humanity and the rest of the world, between what we see and feel and what we won’t. And we use emotions like fear and hate for the construction materials. The more we use fear and hate, the more we crave it.

 

We should support Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Cory Booker, Pete Buttigieg or Joe Biden or any of the other Democrats for President. Support whomever we feel will do the best job at building a truly democratic nation, creating a sane environmental and energy policy, providing good, affordable health care for all ⎼ and will support an equitable and meaningful public education system. But support them in a way that doesn’t undermine the other Democratic candidates in the general election if our favorite is not chosen.

 

Above all, we must keep in mind that without defeating T and his supporters, all that we hold dear might literally be destroyed. We can’t allow ourselves to lose our head or hope. Getting a little depressed might be common sense but we can’t let it go further than that. It’s just not an option we can afford. We must all put in time not only for getting T impeached, but for winning the Presidency and the Senate, getting out the vote and educating people about what’s at stake.

 

And we can’t allow ourselves to destroy possible alliances with would-be allies in the effort to unseat T and his followers. No matter how much I want Elizabeth or Bernie or Pete or Cory, I don’t want T.

 

We, those of us who truly value and want to strengthen democracy in this country, need someone in the White House who will listen to us, the people, not just rich white men. Who will give us a chance at saving our environment and thinking clearly about the problems we face, and who care about the other people and species that live in this world with us.

 

Many of the old Democratic politicians were bought out by corporate interests. But this is a different time. And this is a different party. Even if Democrats weren’t focused enough in the past on global warming, gun violence, etc. we have a chance with them, right now, that we will never have with T’s GOP. We must use this chance. Maybe we can also make the Democratic Party the party of democrats.

Is It Arrogance, Ignorance, An Impeachment Wish, Or All Three?

Hiding Investigations Crucial For the Rule of Law Behind Ones That Undermine that Rule

 

Last week was dramatic and this week more of the same has been occurring. We have heard clear evidence, once again, of possible criminal acts by T, lies and distortions topped with extortion. We’ve seen the President and his minions try to cover up, obfuscate, or distract our attention from what T did and attack those who reveal what occurred.

 

But this latest series of revelations regarding the Ukrainian affair is so obvious a violation of what any President should do and so obviously screams for impeachment, I wondered, once again how much of T’s behavior is from pure narcissistic arrogance and the craving for absolute power, how much from ignorance, and how much is it an impeachment-wish?

 

The most obvious evidence that the phone call between T and President Zelensky of Ukraine is impeachable (aside from the transcript of the call itself) comes from State Department official David Holmes who testified last Friday behind closed doors and will testify before a public hearing this Thursday. If you haven’t heard about his testimony, he overheard a phone call from the Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland to T on July 26th, the day after the infamous phone call that is at the heart of the impeachment proceedings. This second phone call took place on Sondland’s non-secure cell phone in a restaurant in Kiev. Holmes could hear Mr. T clearly, as the Ambassador held the phone at a distance from his ear because the President was speaking very loudly.

 

In the July 26th call, T asked Sondland if the Ukrainians were “going to do the investigations?” Sondland replied that they were ready to do anything T asked of them. Later on, Sondland told Holmes that T only cared about “the big stuff.” When asked if the war in Ukraine was “big stuff” Sondland clarified that “big stuff” referred to anything that personally “benefits the President, like the quote, unquote, ‘Biden investigation’ that Mr. Giulani was pushing.” Saving Ukraine from Russia or supporting democracy were not “the big stuff.”

 

Earlier last Friday afternoon (11/15), I also felt a mixture of outrage and disbelief when I heard about the President’s tweet attacking Ambassador Yovanovitch during her testimony to Congress.  This tweet destroyed any pretense that the President cared about the law. It was not only a clear and very public example of witness intimidation, but it was done on the day it was announced that T’s adviser, Roger Stone, was found guilty of witness intimidation and other crimes.

 

The main point of the phone call between T and President Zelensky, as David Holmes and others made clear, was to force the Ukrainians to do T’s bidding. If they wanted a public meeting with the U. S. President and the military aid passed by Congress, they would have to announce they were undertaking two investigations, one into the Bidens and one to create evidence supporting the Russia backed claim that it was Ukraine that interfered in the 2016 election, not Russia.

 

This is a strategy often utilized by the T administration and other Republicans in the past. Remember months of investigation into Benghazi and the eventual revelation that Mrs. Clinton followed procedure and that responsibility for the deaths at our embassy lay elsewhere? Remember “Lock her up” and T’s continual attacks and calls for investigations not only of Hillary Clinton but President Obama?

 

In the end of 2016 and beginning of 2017, possibly to detract from Russia working to help him win the election as well as to counter the fact that he lost the popular vote, T claimed that millions of people voted illegally, despite there being no evidence to back up that claim. David Becker, from the Center for Election Innovation & Research, and others have examined Trump’s claim. They found no evidence of any massive illegal voting or fraud.

 

Despite the lack of evidence, T went on to appoint a White House Commission into voter fraud. The commission, despite being conducted by T supporters, also found that no state in the union uncovered any significant evidence of voter fraud and the commission was disbanded in 2018.

 

This strategy has been used to smear Democrats and undermine the rule of law. It is being used to attempt to make any investigation of T meaningless by creating counter and unwarranted investigations of their own. It is part of his larger tactic of attacking anyone who disagrees with him and creating fear in his political or economic opponents.

 

All through the Mueller Investigation, T claimed, without any evidence, that the investigation was a “Witch-hunt”, that it was based on shoddy intelligence or illegal wiretaps or a bias against him. When the Mueller Investigation was coming to an end, T and his GOP sycophants pushed to “investigate the investigators.”

 

The Trump DOJ has started several investigations to advance their agenda to hide the facts of T’s abuse of power and utilizing Russian interference to win an election. Inspector General Michael E. Horowitz has been examining how the FBI obtained a warrant to wiretap Trump campaign adviser Carter Page.

 

The DOJ has now opened a criminal investigation into the origins of the Mueller probe into the Russian Interference in the 2016 election. This investigation is being overseen by the Attorney General himself, William Barr, although it is being officially run by John Durham, the U. S. attorney in Connecticut. The targets of the investigation include FBI officials like James Comey, or anyone that was part of the Mueller team that could be accused of anti-Trump bias. Durham has been asking witnesses if the CIA somehow tricked the FBI into opening the Russia probe. Mr. Barr has personally participated in the investigation. According to the New York Times, he has flown to Italy to speak to their Prime Minister, and also contacted officials in Australia and Britain, and possibly Ukraine.

 

A recent blog by Mark Sumner for Daily Kos speaks about this and Barr’s efforts to protect T with a report on the Russia investigations. The report is due to come out before Thanksgiving and aims to re-write history and distract from the impeachment proceedings. It will repeat Russia’s claim that it never interfered in the 2016 election and attempt to discredit the evidence of 16 U. S. intelligence agencies to the contrary. And it will claim that T has been unfairly attacked ever since he was called the winner of the 2016 election.

 

Barr has often attacked the Democrats and the courts for working against the President’s agenda and, according to NPR and in his own words, working to “cripple the T administration from the beginning.” His position is that there are almost no legal restraints on T’s presidential power. He accused Democrats of the “systematic shredding of norms and undermining the rule of law.” According to Neil Kinkopf, a law professor who testified at Barr’s confirmation hearing, Barr believes that any dissent or opposition to the president is contrary to democracy. This is in line with T calling for Democrats to be arrested for treason for opposing him or calling for his impeachment.

 

So, this is what we face. I don’t know if T has a secret wish to be removed from office or not.  But I do know that if I had had any doubts about why T must be impeached or legally removed from office, ASAP, this evidence would convince me. The fight here is to preserve the rule of law, preserve our rights, freedoms, and the principle that political power resides in the people of this nation as a whole, not one person, party, class, race or gender, and not Russian or other foreign agents. And we must be prepared to defend those rights.

 

 

This blog was also published by The Good Men Project.

 

 

 

 

 

Impeachment Tremors

Since the news broke about T’s latest abuses of power in the Ukraine, and the Democrats in the House started their more formal impeachment investigations, I keep switching from being ecstatic, sad, and terrified. Ecstatic that what I and millions of others have wanted for the last two years might finally take place, namely the impeachment of a would-be dictator. Sad and angry that our nation and political situation has sunk so low and so many people are suffering because of the actions of this administration. Terrified by the realization that this man would risk destroying our nation and system of constitutional law in order to maintain his personal power or serve his personal interests, as we’ve possibly seen not only in the Ukraine but in Syria.

 

Syria, despite the latest cease-fire, is at best an example of incompetence, at worst a direct sell-out of our allies and security. But let me stick with the Ukraine phone calls.

 

You probably know the general story of the dramatic and chaotic events that have taken place and been revealed this month regarding Ukraine. President T withheld the money Congress had allotted to them to fight for the preservation of their nation against a Russian invasion. He then pressured the President of the Ukraine to investigate Joe Biden and come up with information to support his fabricated claim that Russia never interfered in the 2016 election in order to get that aid. The White House released its own summary record of the conversation between T and President Zelensky of Ukraine, which took place in July, 2019.

 

T’s guilt is shown not only by his actions and public comments but by his way of dealing with anyone who opposes his immoral, unlawful, or abusive behavior. He attacks, without any evidence, anyone who tries to hold him accountable of whatever it was he himself apparently did, and calls for investigations, unwarranted investigations, of his own.

 

He inappropriately, possibly illegally, and certainly in a manner that threatens US interests, withheld the aid needed by Ukraine. Although he shouted many times “No quid pro quo,” his own words, his chief of staff, and records released by his own White House show he did just that….

 

 

To read the whole post, go to the Good Men Project.

The International Strike to Save Our Planet: A Time to Act

Many have wondered what it would take for the general American public to go on strike. We have seen countless examples over the last two, almost three, years of this president violate the humanity of children and immigrants, lie, sacrifice our national security, act in support of misogynist judges (or ones who have credibly been accused of sexual assault) and White House employees who have done the same, support white nationalists and demonize minorities, fail to act to prevent massive incidents of gun violence even against school children—although this last did lead to huge demonstrations ⎼ and act in ways to undermine the constitution and rule of law. And now, tomorrow, an existential threat to the environment might lead to a strike of school children and hopefully thousands, maybe millions of people.

 

Why don’t we act? Are we too wrapped up in our social and work lives, or working too hard to put aside the time, or just feeling hopeless or overwhelmed? Or, regarding the climate, the warming of the planet, the weird weather, the changes in the environment, changes that happen so slowly that we don’t notice it until weird weather becomes hurricanes, floods, droughts, tornados and fires? Or is it that some of us can read and digest the science while others believe the lies by T, his GOP sycophants and some corporations that there is no scientific consensus on global warming, and we imagine what we see before our eyes is just bad weather or bad luck?

 

Americans increasingly understand the threat posed by Global Warming. A poll by The Washington Post and the Kaiser Family Foundation  reveals that 8 in 10 people understand that human activity is fueling climate change and about half state that action is needed immediately.

 

Tomorrow, thanks mostly to young people like Greta Thunberg, a 16 year old Swedish student and activist, the Global Climate Strike will begin. There will be strikes throughout the US and other nations. New York City will excuse students absent for the strike. And it won’t be just children, but adults, indigenous groups, workers, seniors, etc. Everyone who can, should. Everyone who can’t strike can make phone calls to politicians and CEOs, send in photos of signs proclaiming your view on protecting our earth, write letters to the editor, sign petitions, etc.

 

Actions will continue next week. On Monday, 9/23, the UN will hold a Climate Action Summit, to ramp up efforts to curb greenhouse gases set out in the 2015 Paris climate agreement, which Mr. T opposes. A second strike will be held on September 27th.

 

Tomorrow’s our chance to energize the nation to what we must do to save our planet ⎼ and democracy. To find events in your neighborhood, go to the GlobalClimateStrike website.