Category Archives: Political Rants

Political Rants

Our remaining option: A Million Mutinies Now

As you well know, the other shoe dropped last week regarding Roe v. Wade, which is now history. The joyless anti-abortion zealots up the street from me must be enjoying the closest thing they know to a celebration. Maybe they’ll take the baby-float mobile out for a ride. (No, seriously: they had a vehicle with a plastic baby on the roof and P.A. speakers through which they would read anti-abortion screeds, inaudible because of their cheap audio gear. We called it the “baby float”.)

I wrote a post on the impending abortion decision a couple of weeks ago entitled “The Right To Be Forced Into Childbirth“. What I didn’t get deeply into then was the degree of fraud Trump’s appointees to the Supreme Court committed during their confirmation hearings. That was, of course, their way not only of protecting themselves but of offering their supporters cover by gaslighting everyone who had paid any attention to their careers up to that point.

Perjury and Prevarication

Let’s take Gorsuch, son of Anne Gorsuch Buford, Reagan’s EPA administrator who tried to dismantle the agency, partly through sheer incompetence. (Looks like her son is going to get another shot at it via their upcoming ruling.) During his confirmation hearings, Gorsuch acknowledged the power of precedence with regard to Roe, and affirmed that a “good judge” should take it as seriously as in any other case. Then came last Friday.

How about Kavanaugh, lover of beer, bro of Squee, best bud of P.J.? Kavanaugh referred to Roe as “settled law” and an “important precedent …. reaffirmed many times.” Sure, he suggested that he might be persuaded to overturn it, but who reads the fine print? He made comforting cooing sounds, and the senators nodded contentedly.

I’m not sure what Justice Barrett could possibly have said to counteract her part in publishing a full-page anti abortion ad in the New York Times. She bleated some gas about following the rules of stare decisis, and like her reactionary brethren, hid the ball in plain sight so that the politicians in the audience could pretend they did not see it.

The bastards Bush

It’s easy to blame Trump, of course, because he’s so damn blame-able. But the worst justice on the damn court is Clarence Thomas, and he was appointed by George H. W. Bush, or Bush the First as no one calls him. Bush is now roundly praised by centrists as a man of integrity, etc. Justice Thomas is convincing evidence to the contrary. No other recent Republican president has appointed a more reactionary judge to lifetime tenure on the Supreme Court.

And then there’s Sam Alito, the no- so-smart as Scalia clone of Scalia. George W. Bush appointed him, so to those of you whose hearts are warmed by the sight of W. and Michelle Obama goofing about, all I can say to you is …. Iraq. And Alito. And Afghanistan. And …. Suffice to say, if it weren’t for these two losers (W. and H.W.), Roe would still stand.

All is not lost

Fortunately, there are things we can do. One of them is what so many thousands of people did over this past weekend – make your voices heard. Another is to push our Congress members to support legislation by Elizabeth Warren and other progressives that would support the right to abortion services through the establishment of federal clinics in red states, expansion of access to medication, and so on.

The other thing is, well, a million mutinies now. Vote for the most progressive members of Congress you can find. Encourage everyone around you to do the same thing. We need a progressive tidal wave this fall, and it’s going to take everyone doing that simple thing – voting. With a strong majority in Congress, we can pass and expanded Roe in to law, build a better healthcare system, expand the Supreme Court, impeach Kavanaugh, amend the constitution. All we need is the votes.

Impossible? I think not. If people mobilize, we can take over the works within the confines of the current system. With the right numbers, nothing could stop us. We just have to commit to doing it.

luv u,

jp

Check out our political opinion podcast, Strange Sound.
Political Rants

The hot air balloon we call the inflation debate

I saw Larry Summers on television today. That says all you need to know about the corporate media’s state of discourse on the economy. The Democratic leadership in Congress is like a deer in the headlights – they are just effing doing nothing. Didn’t they have at least two shots at reconciliation? Has it occurred to any of them that they should pass something under the Byrd rule, seeing as they plan on leaving the filibuster intact?

I suspect the answer to these questions is a resounding no, and I suspect the reason for that answer may be, well, Larry Summers. The austerians appear to be winning the day in the Biden Administration and the Democratic-led Congress. They are afraid of spending money on anything apart from the military, which is the beneficiary of lavish amounts of public funds in excess of $800 billion per annum.

The notion that social spending is responsible for recent price rises is simply laughable. There are other, more likely causes.

Pumping profits straight from the ground

Gas prices are an obvious driver of inflation. The price at the pump is somewhere around $5, the highest they’ve been perhaps ever. The thing is, crude oil prices are not at a record high, not by any means. Oil peaked in 2008 above $140 a barrel, and yet gasoline in the U.S. was selling at about $4 a gallon. Right now oil’s around $108 a barrel. So …. what gives?

One big factor is refining. During the pandemic, oil refining capacity in the United States fell about 5%, from over 19 million barrels in 2019 to less than 18 million. This was because there was less domestic travel due to COVID, which meant less demand for oil. Now that demand has shot up like a rocket again, the oil refining capacity in the United States is simply not sufficient to meet the need.

Why not reopen some of that refining capacity? Well …. that would mean more supply, lower price, less profit. Get the grift … I mean, drift?

From every misfortune a fortune is made

Why are prices rising? Over the course of 2021, corporate profits were up by more than 25%. There’s some serious profit-taking going on here, obviously. While everyone else was struggling to get through the pandemic, these fuckers have been cleaning up. Jim Hightower talks about Proctor and Gamble’s diaper business, an industry they and maybe one other mega corporation have a corner on:

Procter & Gamble Co. announced a year ago that COVID-19-driven production costs were forcing it to raise the price for its Pampers brand. At the time, it had just posted a quarterly profit of $3.8 billion, so P&G could easily have absorbed a temporary rise in its costs. But instead of holding the price to ease their customers’ economic pain, the conglomerate used a global health crisis to justify upping diaper prices. Six months later, P&G’s quarterly profit topped $5 billion. And—in that same quarter—P&G spent $3 billion to buy back shares of its own stock.

Just one of many examples. Bottom line is, as working families are stripped of the modest benefits they received from the Child Tax Credit, they must now contend with rising prices driven by the greed of monopolistic companies that contribute heavily to our leaders’ campaign coffers.

Asleep at the wheel

Why isn’t the mainstream press reporting on this? Too busy reporting on the many challenges of air travel – Turmoil at the Terminal! As I’ve mentioned previously, corporate journalists are disproportionately focused on the airline industry. That’s because they make up the seven percent of Americans who fly regularly (once a month or more). Maybe Jim Hightower should hang out in airports and talk to the correspondents as they wait impatiently for their flights.

luv u,

jp

Check out our political opinion podcast, Strange Sound.
Political Rants

How the hearings stack up against hearings past.

As someone who tends to pay attention to these things, I watched the first night of the January 6th Committee hearings with some interest. MSNBC spent a week winding up to these public meetings, and the committee did not, in my estimation, disappoint. I don’t know who in America remains persuadable on this issue, but it’s hard to watch the proceedings and not come away thinking about what an outrage January 6 was.

When I say January 6, I mean the whole enchilada. The day was just the culmination of a long process which the president at the time set in motion. As shocking as the attack was – and I, like many, watched it unfold with disbelief – Trump had long demonstrated his contempt for elections, and spent much of 2020 undermining the credibility of mail-in and absentee ballots. This was because he knew that Democrats were more likely to opt for vote by mail than to show up at the polling place. The hearings are highlighting this dynamic, and it’s all to the good.

Haldeman’s racist lawyer

Not surprisingly, many commentators have invoked the Watergate hearings back in 1973 to give context to the current proceedings. I’m old enough to remember these being broadcast on television, though I can only recall the high (or low) points, like when Haldeman’s shriveled old lawyer called Senator Dan Inouye – a wounded WWII veteran – “that little jap”. That was world-class.

The thing that’s notable about the Watergate scandal was its iceberg-like quality of revealing just the tip of what was hidden from view. Author Jefferson Morley talked about this on Majority Report this week. Several of Nixon’s “plumbers” were CIA assets or agents with a long history of involvement in the Agency’s abuses at home and overseas. More of the truth came out during the Church Committee investigation a few years later, but it was kind of a controlled burn, according to Morley. (Practically at the same time as Church, Cuban exile Agency assets blew up Orlando Letelier on Embassy Row in D.C. and the Cuban Olympic Fencing team in mid-air.)

Reagan’s little game

Perhaps the second most well-known Congressional investigation was Iran Contra during the Reagan administration. This, too, represented a tiny corner of a much larger enterprise. The select Committee (led by Inouye, incidentally) looked into Reagan’s circumvention of the Congress’s law barring direct aid to the Contra terrorists operating in Nicaragua with our assistance. (We had essentially created the force out of thin air.) The crime was breaking the law passed by Congress, not the persecution of Nicaraguans.

Beyond that, though, Reagan’s team headed by Oliver North and General Secord sold TOW missiles and some spare parts to the Iranian government, which was defending itself against an invasion by Saddam Hussein’s Iraq – an invasion supported by the United States! Interestingly, very little about America’s role in the Iran-Iraq conflict came to light through these hearings. Neither did the committee touch on how the U.S. government was supporting murderous dictatorial regimes in El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and elsewhere.

Old fashioned grift and graft

The January 6th Committee proceedings are looking at something kind of different. This is more garden variety corruption and authoritarian tendencies, though as always, racism is part of the story. Trump tried to lie his way into permanent status as president, and has thus far failed. He bilked his own supporters out of hundreds of millions of dollars, saying they were contributing to a legal defense fund. Guy has no shame.

I guess the thing that ties them all together is authoritarianism and a strong desire to override the will of the people, either by discounting their votes or ignoring their elected representatives. That much hasn’t changed.

luv u,

jp

Check out our political opinion podcast, Strange Sound.