Tag Archives: Donald Trump

Political Rants

Who’s the client?

As the Senate moves closer to a veto override vote on the $740 billion defense authorization act, I’ve been thinking about how eager our national legislators are to spend money when it comes to military hardware, consultants, logistics, etc, and yet how reluctant they seem to be to provide working people with the means to, I don’t know, feed themselves and their families, keep a roof over their heads, maybe see a medical professional if they need one, all in the midst of a once-in-a-century (up to now, at least) pandemic. Of course, this $740 billion doesn’t represent the full price tag of our national security posture – no, indeed, there are many billions more going into intelligence, covert operations, and of course the after-market costs of war, such as the Veteran’s administration and so on. All this money to “keep us safe”, and yet here we are – more people dying on a daily basis than in any previous armed conflict.

We have an administration that has dragged its feet on the Coronavirus since the very beginning. They are currently falling way behind on their vaccination campaign, having committed to 20 million Americans vaccinated by year’s end – it looks like they will struggle to achieve ten percent of that. When challenged on this, they shrug – it’s the states’ fault, you see. What a pathetic joke. Take the goddamn money you’re shoveling at the Pentagon and use it to get those fucking vaccines into people’s arms … now. COVID is the national security threat, fool, not a resurgent Russia or China. People are dropping dead all around us, like there’s been an invasion of invisible killer aliens, and fat boy is out golfing while his Coronavirus coordinator Veep is enjoying a skiing holiday. From the start, this phenomenal lack of urgency has been a reflection of the president’s priorities – there’s simply no perceived benefit to him in pursuing this virus, and so he pretends it doesn’t exist.

Someone on Facebook shared that photo of Trump in the oval office with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman, going over the presentation of military hardware that the Prince was committing to purchase from U.S. arms manufacturers. It struck me that what I was looking at was an image of a vendor (Trump) with his client (MBS). Trump was using his office to broker a deal with Saudi Arabia – one that is currently being extended, by the way – so that they will continue to patronize him after he leaves office. How does this serve the interests of the American people? Saudi Arabia is a repressive, dictatorial regime that’s killing thousands of people in Yemen, using our weapon systems and our military’s logistical support. The jobs supported by these purchases are not worth the lives lost – far from it. The only benefit that comes from this relationship is realized by Trump, who has bragged about the money he earns from the kingdom. His entire presidency has been a branding exercise, and he’s ready to start cashing in his chips.

This is a level of cynicism beyond anything we’ve seen before. We are losing thousands of lives every day, and our leaders are too busy feathering their nests to even notice, let alone act.

luv u,

jp

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

Pardoner’s tale.

When I heard the news that Trump had pardoned the perpetrators of the 2007 Nisour Square massacre in Iraq, my first reaction was much the same as when I learned of Chelsea Manning’s conviction: If we’re waiting for justice to prevail with regard to our illegal invasion and wanton destruction of Iraq, we will be waiting a very long time. Of course, this is not the first time Trump has freed mass murderers from accountability. For someone who claims to have opposed the Iraq war (even though he really didn’t back in 2002-03), he never seems to extend that sentiment to entail sympathy for the victims of the invasion. He is, of course, a wannabe autocrat, so any display of weakness is to be avoided. Trump likes a “tough” guy, though how machine-gunning unarmed Iraqi motorists, including a young boy, or stabbing to death a prisoner of war in custody amounts to “toughness” I will never understand. More like cowardice. A lot more.

I, like many, was appalled by the actions of these Blackwater mercenary thugs on that fateful day in Baghdad in September of 2007. And I don’t want to minimize the criminality and cravenness of their actions – not one bit. But it’s important to remember that this was one incident in a massive bloodletting that began many years before the start of the 2003 invasion, and which has continued up to this day. There are plenty of people in the United States who are outraged by Trump’s pardon who also supported the war in Iraq, which was itself a continuous Nisour Square massacre that even a casual glance at the news reporting on the ground at the time would confirm. Even those who did not support the war included many who were either supportive of or indifferent to the economic strangulation of the Iraqi people for the twelve years prior to the invasion. And it’s hard to find people who didn’t wave the flag after the Gulf War, which entailed a destruction of Iraq’s civilian infrastructure, including its water treatment and supply system, that would later contribute to hundreds of thousands of deaths. (I won’t go into our support for Saddam Hussein, which is another long and sordid story.)

Again, I’m not trying to minimize the gravity of the Nisour Square crime. It was a rare case of accountability in the context of a war whose prosecution included many who could legitimately be described as war criminals. Trump’s action this week simply reaffirms what most of the world already knew – that America does whatever it wants, whenever it wants, to whomever it wants, and will never take responsibility for it. They know that, in fact, America will even resent those it invades for not being grateful for its criminal action. Trump has signaled this quite loudly over his tenure in the political spotlight, and he’s not the only one. Our wars are presented as a civilizing mission in a certain sense, not unlike the claims of prior colonial powers, or those of the Europeans who first overran the Americas in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. It’s the same impulse that drives Trump to defend statues of Columbus or hold up the National Defense Authorization Act to keep the names of Confederate generals on U.S. military bases (an example of a snake eating its own tail if ever I heard one).

Trump is a reliable thug and a low-information autocrat, but he is most importantly a reflection and an expression of our worst impulses as a people. It’s best we don’t forget that as we move past this disastrous administration.

luv u,

jp

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

Stop The damn War.

We’ve entered a presidential transition, sort of. Sure, one candidate is crying foul and trying to foment a coup d’etat in the most ham-fisted way imaginable, but inasmuch as our short-attention-span culture has already all but normalized this insane behavior, we can consider ourselves well into the process of transition. And no, I don’t mean the the current president is transitioning to some new identity. I mean that he is in the process of being replaced by his general election opponent, who won the November election kind of hands down, despite all the noise.

Given that Biden is busily appointing members of his executive team – some okay, others pretty bad – this seems like a good time to make our policy preferences known to the President-Elect. Everyone’s getting their two cents in, whether it comes in the form of suggesting new policy directions or pushing potential nominees forward. I personally think people on the left should pick an issue or two and start shouting about it, figuratively speaking (or literally, if you prefer), so that Biden can hear us loud and clear. We will all have our preferences as to what demand should come first, what second, etc. I can tell you where I would like to start: STOP THE DAMN WAR.

As of October of 2021, we will have been engaged in this insane war on terror for twenty years. Obama indicated that he would stop it, and he didn’t. Trump said he would stop it, and he hasn’t. Biden is making some similar noises, but I think we can guess that the same political pressures that were brought to bear on his two predecessors will be applied to him as well. The longer we wait, the harder it gets – the conflict has metastasized to encompass other nations, from Iraq to Somalia to Yemen to Libya to Syria, and with each new “front” comes new bogus justifications for why we can’t leave now, new sets of facts on the ground, new twists and turns in the logic of imperialism. Enough. We need to get out now – that’s what Biden should hear from us.

There’s no question but that Trump has made the process of forging an agreement with other nations more fraught with difficulty. Who will sign on to a treaty with us when they know it may be ripped up by the current president’s successor? Nevertheless, I think we need to act on the knowledge that most Americans are sick of the war in Afghanistan, load our troops onto trucks and planes and head for the border. If we don’t, it will just never end.

That’s my ask. What’s yours?

Check out our political opinion podcast, Strange Sound.