Mr. Albence must have failed a course in human decency somewhere during his
storied career, or conversely passed with flying colors the course on bringing
Gestapo tactics to America, since his textbook operation terrorized hundreds of the
detainees’ children during their first week of school, children the great majority of
whom are U.S. citizens. It is a huge omission in the U.S. Code: Title 18: Crimes
and Criminal Procedures, that nowhere in that august body of jurisprudence is any
protection provide so that U.S. citizens who happen to be children can be assured
that they will not be terrorized by their own government.

As an example, consider eleven-year-old Magdalena Gomez Grigorio, a U.S.
citizen. On the day of the raids, she didn’t know what had happened to her father.
Then a family friend called Magdalene’s mother and told her that ICE had raided
the plant where her husband worked. That news of course devastated the girl as
well as her mother. The youngster was captured on video saying, “Government,
please [use] your heart. Let my parents be free and everyone else. Please don’t
leave the children with cryingness. . . .” What a sad commentary on our times and
our government that we need a child to implore us to act with common sense and
common humanity.

Part of Acting Director Albence’s textbook operation obviously included the
element of surprise. More than 24 hours after the operation had concluded, as an
article on Huffpost noted, ICE had still not contacted Mississippi’s Department of
Child Protection Services. ICE had also failed to follow “its own guidelines for
coordinating actions with local social service agencies to make certain children left
abandoned were taken care of.” The result was chaos. Some children knew nothing
regarding the whereabouts of their parents. Some were left at school or daycare
with no one to pick them up. Local school officials, church and public service
organizations, as well as ordinary citizens scrambled to make sure that the kids had
a roof over their heads and something to eat. They provided a good temporary
solution to a terrible problem. Now comes the harder part: with their breadwinners arrested, how will these families support themselves? While about 300 of the
approximately 680 migrants arrested were released the next day, most wearing
electronic ankle bracelets, these people can no longer work. Longer term, then, the
U.S. government in essence will be deporting many of its young citizens back to
Central America, a place where these children have never been and where their
safety is in grave jeopardy. For a presidential administration as odious as this one,
such a result is probably welcomed.

Acting Director Albence and other administration officials have justified their
actions on the ground that these illegal workers broke the law. That is true. What is
required of any just government, however, is that in enforcing its laws it not break
other laws and not create greater evils than the evils they are attempting to remedy.
In this respect, Mr. Albence’s textbook operation has been a failure and a moral
outrage. Besides the emotional and financial suffering inflicted on these citizen-
children, their government is also endangering their personal safety. Just about
every legal jurisdiction in the United States has laws against child endangerment, a
crime that occurs, to use typical language, when a person or organization engages
in conduct that places a child in imminent danger of death, bodily injury, or
physical or mental impairment. The federal government endangered the physical
safety of these children by not notifying local authorities so that the immediate
welfare of the children could be assured, but it has also acted in a way that emotionally harms these children in the short and longer term. Any jurisdiction that
had the courage to do so could charge the officials and operatives who conducted
these raids with the crime of child endangerment. Just as a soldier cannot
knowingly commit crimes even during a state of war, government officials cannot
commit crimes when attempting to enforce the law. To remedy a harm does not
permit the committing of a greater harm.

It might surprise some Americans to learn that children have human rights,
rather a full spectrum of them. They are enshrined in the U.N. Convention on the
Rights of the Child. It might surprise more Americans to learn that, of all the
countries upon the earth, only the United States has not approved this convention.
Apparently, the greatness of our country does not extend to protecting children
from harm such as the harm of putting them in dog kennels and telling them to
drink water from toilets. The United States has always had trouble living up to its
own ideals. We must fear now that its collective moral sense will shrink down to
the soullessness of its current president.

Still, their victory, their lies and their pure shamelessness were breath-taking—especially at a time when income-inequality in America is unmatched since the Age of the Robber Barons. Republicans have proved the first part of Abraham Lincoln’s saying, “You can fool all of the people some of the time.” They forgot Lincoln’s clincher, “you can’t fool all of the people all of the time.” That part of the saying has come home to roost. As the Democrats in the House piled into the majority during the November election, it became apparent that a large number of American voters have realized that their allegedly conservative politicians, characterizing themselves as the party of freedom and fiscal responsibility, a party whose tax cut is now set to beget trillion-dollar annual deficits or more in additional debt for the foreseeable future, have betrayed them. Many Americans, including a significant number of Republican voters, have seen their tax refunds grow smaller, by an average of 8 percent, because the fine print in the Republican tax cut is continuing to redistribute wealth to the very rich and take it away from the middle class and the poor.

Democrats had a long time to reflect on this situation, and some of their bolder spirits are introducing counter-measures so far beyond the norm that they would make FDR smile¹.  As the New York Times discusses,”Roughly three out of four registered voters surveyed in recent polls supported higher taxes on the wealthy.” Even a majority of Republicans back higher taxes on those earning more than $10 million annually. President Pinocchio was so alarmed by these developments that he used part of his recent, pathetic SOTU speech to pretend that he spoke for the nation when he said, “Here in the United States, we are alarmed by new calls to adopt socialism in our country,” adding, “Tonight, we resolve that America will never be a socialist country,” probably because that condition would interfere with the president’s brand of fascism.

Trump isn’t the only one calling the set of new tax proposals socialist. That term is now applied to any tax increase that singles out the very rich. It’s worth remembering, however, that socialism requires a planned economy, whose planning is at least endorsed if not overseen by the government. Although all of our major allies are held in contempt for various reasons by our current fascist administration, in fact, according to the present generation of Republican politicians, they would all merit being designated socialist countries simply because of the services they provide to their citizens. In current American political pathology, providing healthcare to every citizen is socialist, but more and more Americans are no longer going to be spooked by name-calling, especially since those shouting those names have shown themselves willing to let their fellow citizens die –even as they lie about their intentions—rather than curb the power and greed of the pharmaceutical and healthcare industries. “Who’s going to pay for this socialized medicine?” disingenuous conservatives ask, a question that seems to escape their attention when military or surveillance programs are under review. Programs for poor American children or the disabled are always fair game for the fascists who rule our land in the interests of big money and not in the interests of the American people.

Such was not always the case. Once upon a time, members of both major political parties believed in funding the government and taxing the rich. In 1932, FDR raised the top marginal tax rate to 63 percent. During World War II that rate rose to 94 percent on incomes over what would be $2.8 million in today’s dollars. JRF is credited with showing that tax cuts can produce net revenues, but politicians often ignore that JFK lowered the top marginal tax rate to 70 percent from the previous rate of 90 percent, which is very different matter from lowering that rate from, say, 38 percent to 28 percent and expecting the same kind of benefits.

If tax cuts were always effective economic tactics, then Grover Norquist would have been right when he said, “I don’t want to abolish the government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.” But Norquist is wrong, very wrong, and his point of view makes just and effective government impossible. The American republic, as it existed in the framers’ minds would also be impossible, replaced as it largely has been by a plutocratic oligarchy masquerading as a republic. Conservative Republicans represent a politics of selfishness and greed, one that ignores concerns about justice and shrinks down the idea of freedom to mere economic freedom, putting the profits and benefits of the few ahead of the needs of the many and turning the United States into a false beacon of freedom, where freedom is just a mask for greed, selfishness, power, and moral indifference. President Eisenhower, with his 90 percent plus marginal tax rate and occasional balanced budgets, would find no place in his own party today, nor would Ronald Reagan, whose tax cuts in 1982 lowered the marginal top tax rate to 50 percent. Current Republican thinking about taxes and income inequality take freedom and opportunity away from the great majority of citizens, making a mockery of our pretended values and ultimately working against the interests of the nation. The Democratic effort to reprioritize and reorganize taxes and spending is not only a simple matter of justice. The country’s future is at stake, a future that needs saving from the rapacity and greed of a political party that represents, whatever it may say about itself, only the interests of the amoral rich.

¹ See the fine summary of new Democratic tax initiatives by Patricia Cohen and Maggie Astor, “For Democrats Aiming Taxes at the Superrich, ‘the Moment Belongs to the Bold.’’’ New York Times, February 8, 2019.

George W. Bush must be delighted that Donald Trump is President. Bush no longer lingers in the dark shadow of being the worst president ever in the history of the United States. Now, there is a new champion of stupidity and malice, one not likely to be superseded until the genome of lemmings is engrafted onto the American psyche, and surpassing narcissist stupidity becomes the key quality for high office in the Land of the Free. Under Donald Trump the rich will be richer until the tariffs destroy even a vibrant economy, and they too will be betrayed as are all his loyal followers. Coal is coming back. Miners, you had better check the batteries on your headlamps and polish your boots. Factory workers, get ready to work a shift and a half. Trump addresses natural disasters in an incompetent or lackluster way. He had to perform some ritual compassion before the camera, and thus he threw paper towels at those who had been flooded out of their dwellings. More than a year after the fact, the suffering is only barely abated, but by now the cameras have moved on, and our alleged journalists observe this chaos and misery as old news.

Now we have the government shutdown, and the trailer trash president surveys his glory: public washrooms unfit for use. Garbage overflowing in one of the great capitol cities of the world. And the human suffering of unpaid workers, people charged in ordinary times with keeping the government running, is on full display. Most of them are Democrats the President says, as if that would be excuse enough to inflict pain, but of course it is a lie or one of the truisms his bowels have revealed on command. Whatever goes wrong in America on Trump’s watch, we can be sure of one thing: It will be someone else’s fault. The orange crybaby takes no responsibility for anything bad, and expropriates anything good that happens as if were part of his plan (he has none) since time immemorial.

Trump wants his wall although it would be a boondoggle of immense proportions. In order to achieve his goal, no matter how wrong-headed it might be, he’s willing to shut down the government, causing great financial turmoil among government workers and those deprived of needed services. Trump is willing to inflict pain even on lawful asylum-seekers, in many cases separating children from their parents and keeping them in conditions where so far, in U.S. custody, two immigrant children have died. “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to be free. . . .” Oh, yeah, give those people to Trump’s America if they are white or rich, preferably both.

Donald Trump has assaulted America’s value system, at least that system we idealize. He has criticized all minority groups, calling one black congresswoman “an extraordinarily low IQ person.” His racism is undisguised. He has criticized the FBI, the intelligence community, judges, the news media, Democrats and a host of other groups. His activities are such that the New York Times has revealed that the FBI, after the firing of James Comey, opened a counter-intelligence investigation on Trump to determine whether he was knowingly or unknowingly an asset of Russian intelligence. This is an unprecedented situation. Whether Trump is a Russian asset or not, he has acted consistently in ways that benefit the Russian Federation. So far, mostly during his candidacy and the transition, over 100 contacts between Russians, many with close ties to Putin or the Russian intelligence agency, have been documented. Robert Mueller, the Special Counsel, has all this information. He has already convicted many Trump cronies and indicted more. However, whether Mueller’s report every sees public daylight is another matter. On Trump’s side is a sycophant Acting Attorney General who has the power to block the report’s release. Even if the report were released and Trump were impeached by the newly-resurgent House, it’s not likely that Mitch McConnell, a partisan not a patriot, would allow a vote to convict. That’s the bad news. Trump may never be impeached and never be forced to remove himself from the Oval Office until the voters decided that they have had enough. Even if he were impeached and convicted, the sycophant Mike Pence most likely would immediately grant Trump a full pardon.

Trump, fortunately, will sleep in no bed of roses. At worst, within a couple of years of leaving office, Trump will spend the rest of his life behind bars. The Trump Organization does business in numerous U.S. states. The many ongoing investigations have shown that this organization was a laundromat for Russian mob money. Any state attorney general who wants to make his or her bones has been given a road map of people and institutions to investigate, almost all of whom will save themselves by telling the truth about Donald Trump and his worldwide criminal enterprise.

Donald Trump will spend the remainder of his wretched life wearing an orange prison jump suit, his hair cropped close to minimize head lice. The real Donald Trump will be on display to the world, beyond the power of politicians in high office to pardon. Meanwhile, Vladimir Putin should rejoice. He has paid America back for the sick way our country treated Russia at the time Communism fell. We had a chance to change the international game, to bring about peace and prosperity to the world, to give the Russian people the respect they deserved if, for no other reason, than because they refused to embroil the world in a nuclear holocaust when their political system fell to pieces and chaos ruled their land. Putin has avenged Russian history and American shortsightedness. The thought of a “peace dividend” sent shudders of fear through the boardrooms of major defense contractors. We couldn’t respond as America had responded to its major enemies, Japan and Germany, after World War II. The pressure for increasing quarterly profits in the defense industry triumphed over moral right, the self-interest of America, and a hope for lasting world peace. Whether Putin’s full victory will ever be revealed cannot now be known. If it isn’t, he, his intelligence chiefs and his generals will gloat privately. If it is revealed, he will gloat publicly and America will be disgraced for a generation, until the orange monstrosity in an American prison dies ignominiously and his body is transported in secret to be buried in a grave known to few.

Amid all the turmoil caused by Donald Trump’s immoral and dysfunctional administration, John McCain’s funeral allowed the nation to enjoy a rare feel-good moment, at least for those unaware of McCain’s penchant for trying to involve the nation in even more wars than it currently needs to establish its bona fides as righteous superpower and defender of the rich. On the weekend of McCain’s funeral rites, 60 Minutes attempted to extend that moment of celebration by rerunning Norah O’Donnell’s puff piece on Congressman Steve Scalise. In June of 2017 Scalise, the majority congressional whip and therefore the third-ranking member of his caucus, was at an early morning baseball practice with his Republican teammates preparing for a charity game against the Democrats. Soon shots rang out. A homegrown shooter unhappy with the Republican-controlled Congress and a presidential administration exceeding all others in the quantity and mind-numbing duplicity of its lies had opened fire. In an exchange of nearly one hundred rounds, Scalise was hit by one shot that created a devastating wound. He has had numerous surgeries and essentially has needed to learn how to walk again.

No person of good will would wish Congressman Scalise anything other than a full recovery. He has suffered. Fortunately for him, he has benefitted from first-class, state-of-the art treatment that has cost the Congressman virtually nothing out of his own pocket. Surely his treatment cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not millions. We don’t know the full extent of the costs because the Congressman refuses to release redacted copies of his insurance statements and to make those costs a matter of public record. Why the mystery? It isn’t hard to discern. To show the costs involved in his treatment and physical therapy, costs for which he paid a pittance, would show that Congressman Scalise, for all the pain and suffering he has endured, is a hypocrite of the first order and has accomplished his recovery without showing any evidence that he has a moral spine.

Are these strong words merited? Unfortunately they are. Two Capitol Police officers, on Scalise’s security detail because of the Congressman’s lofty status, exchange copious fire with the shooter. Their bravery and quick response saved the lives of numerous other representatives and helped save the life of the Congressman as well. In the firefight, both officers, Crystal Griner and David Bailey, sustained non-life-threatening injuries. They did not require anything approaching the extensive treatment Congressman Scalise needed, but for their relatively minor injuries both officers had to start GoFundMe programs in order to pay their medical bills. One might have thought, whatever the dire health plans Republicans contemplate imposing on ordinary Americans, that they might at least have shown a spark of compassion in this instance, not simply because the officers were indispensible in keeping so many Republican legislators alive but because it simply looks tawdry and immoral for a congressman to be treated like a wounded prince while his saviors, regular folks just doing their jobs superbly well—their treatment and its financial costs are a matter of indifference.

This entire situation is a good example of Republicans’ contempt for ordinary people. Surely someone in the Republican establishment thought of paying for the officers’ treatment, but that moment of gratitude had to be forsaken because to pay these bills would emphasize the immoral character of the Republicans’ healthcare plans for their fellow citizens, whether they act heroically or not.

Here is a summary of the healthcare choices offered to United States Capitol Police. This language is taken from the website to which United States Capital Police recruits are directed:

The FEHB Program [Federal Employees Health Benefits Program] can help you and your family meet your health care needs. Federal employees, retirees and their survivors enjoy the widest selection of health plans in the country. You can choose from among Consumer-Driven and High Deductible plans that offer catastrophic risk protection with higher deductibles, health savings/reimbursable accounts and lower premiums, or Fee-for-Service plans, and their Preferred Provider Organizations (PPO), or Health Maintenance Organizations (HMO) if you live (or sometimes if you work) within the area serviced by the plan.

Apparently, based on their munificent salaries, the officers chose the wrong plan and couldn’t pay their high deductibles. So, the Congressman has hundred of thousands of dollars, if not millions, paid out by his health insurance, the officers who helped save his life have to depend on public largesse to meet  their high deductibles. And this two-tiered health care system is acceptable to our Republican political leaders! Their most important political victory was a not a colossal tax cut for the superrich, but their conquest of any notion of common decency.

On his website, Congressman Hypocrite spells it all out for us. The Affordable Care Act (Obamacare to most people) failed in the congressman’s estimation the American people and their economy, Instead of working to fix Obama’s system, action for which Democrats beseeched their colleagues across the aisle, the Hypocrite’s party thought it would  be more productive to throw rocks at an imperfect system that was fully in their power to improve. The Republican plan that Congressman Hypocrite endorsed would have immediately eliminated healthcare insurance for more than fourteen million Americans, with tens of millions of more Americans awaiting their encounter with the medical abyss. Preexisting conditions would no longer have been covered, or at least not for long. Congressman Hypocrite was willing to sacrifice the health futures of more than half a million people in his home state of Louisiana, a good number of whom have told him and his Republican colleagues that they or their loved ones would die without the imperfect services offered by Obamacare.

But what are such concerns to a hypocrite or to a national news network that just wants to celebrate another All-American debacle and the feel-good moment that is its disguise? On his website, Congressman Scalise holds out the benefits of Health Savings Accounts, the kind that would have paid for injuries comparable to his own in somewhere between one thousand and ten thousand years. In any case, the Congressman remains supportive of any system that will diminish the costs for medical malpractice, increase access to services for those whom insurance companies deem fit to live, and expand individual choice, including the choice of dying with one’s loved ones in agony under a bridge. The important thing for Congressman Scalise is that no harm be done to political contributors in the healthcare industry. Like the great majority of Republican political leaders, Hypocrite Scalise is full of mumbo-jumbo that makes for a good sound bite. Thereafter, nothing useful is accomplished except for increasing the costs of the present healthcare system. What a shame that his personal suffering could not open Scalise to the effective compassion he received in abundance, but then compassion requires a soul or at least a heart pledged to do good. Congressman Scalise has only his hypocrisy and the companionable hypocrisy of his colleagues to help him through the cold and lonely night.

Alas, that is not the case. The book is competent enough. It rehashes her personal story, the history of totalitarian regimes in the twentieth century, and gives a warning about where we are today—not simply in the U.S, though many of her observations are aimed at Donald Trump, but also against the zealous nationalists in the Philippines, Hungary, Poland, Turkey, Venezuela, and Russia. The world is in danger, Albright warns, of losing the democratic thrust that served so well in Western Europe after World War II and offered hope to much of the rest of the planet after the fall of Communism in 1989.

Albright rings all the right changes, and therefore the political establishment is happy to award her the palm for addressing the issues raised by twentieth-century and contemporary fascism. The reviewer in The New York Times, Sheri Berman, asks bluntly, “Who better to address these questions than Albright, whose life was shaped by fascism and whose contribution to the cultivation of democracy as a stateswoman and private citizen is unparalleled?” In this single sentence Professor Berman has managed to make much of Albright’s professional history disappear while depicting her as a great woman and public official. Would that Berman’s praise were justified!

Albright began her career in a conventional way, and nothing she has done shows any capacity to think critically about herself and the establishment she has represented. She worked as an aide to Senator Edmund Muskie, which earned her a staff position on the National Security Council headed, during the presidential administration of Jimmy Carter, by Zbigniew Brzezinski. From that sojourn, she headed back to academia, returning to a major political role when Bill Clinton won the presidency. She served as U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations during Clinton’s first term and became the first woman to hold the office of Secretary of State during his second. For her deft conformity to the status quo, Barack Obama awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2012.

Here are a few highlights of her political career. While at the United Nations, she refused to designate the horrors occurring in Rwanda as a genocide because to do so would have obligated the U. N. Security Council and the United States to act, which at the moment would have been inconvenient for the U.S. Later, when the evidence was irrefutable, she did so declare, but by then there was nothing to be done. She defended her lack of action by saying that “it was unclear about what was happening in Rwanda”—unclear despite the repeated and increasingly frantic warnings by the head of the U. N. military force in Rwanda, Canadian Lieutenant General, Roméo Dallaire. Likewise, Albright invented one of the great one-liners of the Clinton presidency. When Cuban military pilots shot down two small civilian aircraft manned by a Cuban-American exile group, she said, “This is not cojones. This is cowardice.” The statement has a nice ring to it. It omits the context, however. CIA-trained Cuban-American exile groups planted a bomb on a Cuban airliner in 1976 and committed other forms of terrorism throughout the years, including detonating bombs in various Cuban restaurants in order to discourage tourism. Such acts, however, never merit criticism from Albright, who thus long ago surrendered any pretense to morality in favor of the only values she understands, those that encompass amoral partisanship.

The clincher came on national television during a 60 Minutes segment that aired on May 12, 1996. In it, Leslie Stahl asked Albright the following: “We have heard that half a million [Iraqi] children have died [as a result of the sanctions the U.S. put in place through the U.N]. I mean, that’s more children than died in Hiroshima. And, you know, is the price worth it?” To which Albright replied, “I think this is a very hard choice, but the price—we think the price is worth it.” There we have it, the confession of a Fascist, or perhaps just a psychopath, that anything that benefits the interests of the United States and herself is worthwhile. Would 600,000 dead Iraqi children have been too many? Would one million? It hardly matters. The number of innocents killed might be almost limitless. Any number is justified when a Fascist is performing the calculation.

In fact, the number that Leslie Stahl cited came from a 1995 preliminary estimate developed by the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization. The exact number they derived was that 567,000 Iraqi children under the age of five had died as a result of the sanctions, mostly from malnutrition, lack of medicine, and lack of clean water. Food and medicine were forbidden by the sanctions to be imported into Iraq. The U.S. had bombed most of Iraq’s major dams and made clean water scarce. Osama bin Laden featured images of dying Iraqi children in his recruitment videos. They amount of tribute videos from one terrorist to another.

Albright did not question Stahl’s number at the time of her interview. Later she complained improbably that Stahl had asked a loaded question “amount[ing] to Iraqi propaganda.” Later the U.S. government, showing no shame only the embarrassment of being exposed, commissioned studies that put the death toll much lower, but UNICEFF reexamining the calculations in 1999 kept the number at approximately half a million children. In 2007, Albright agreed to co-chair a “Genocide Prevention Task Force.” We should all be relieved that this responsibility devolved into such knowing hands.

Although she now lacks the opportunity to be involved in mass murder, Secretary Albright has not been idle since she left government. In 2001 she formed the Albright-Stonebridge Group, later allied with Albright Capital Management. With these two organizations at work, Albright is positioned to direct powerful First World interests toward those Third World leaders who need to be bribed or threatened in order to benefit her capitalist clients most effectively.

Madeleine Albright has been an efficient, stentorian mouthpiece, unconstrained by any moral imperative, for promoting American economic interests around the world. Thanks to the worldview she shares along with many in the American political establishment, the USA need never fear that it will run out of enemies or excuses for engaging in endless wars, benefiting only mammoth defense corporations and the economic interests she represents, interests that bear out the unfortunate truth of Mao Tse Tung’s observation that “political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.” Until we Americans insist on creating another world, founded on the ideals we have stated but rarely managed to promote, our government will just be a fascism based on money, one yielding the same monstrous results produced by the fascists who have preceded us.

To him is the right to take and never give,
to him le droit du seigneur, master of all
except his own lusts and petty whims.
To him the right to tawdry imitation,
to a false Versailles, to tastes great only
in their pretension, a laugh to those who know.
His mere presence debases what is good.
The hearts of those around him shrivel and die
as if breathing near his aura took their lives
along with their dignity. He’s got such a deal
for you, this sharecropper of skyscrapers.
He’ll help you look down on all not white or rich.
He’ll fill your heart with scorn, and scorn you when he’s done.

It isn’t easy being him. Give the man his due.
His mind speaks to him like P. T. Barnum before a crowd.
He can’t do anything but oversell and steal
and look down and mock and cheat and lie.
His standard of truth’s so pliable and smooth
even Satan can’t keep all his falsehoods straight.
Self-endorser, self-approver, moron, clown,
we won’t let you go when mortality claims its own.
We’ll stuff you and wheel you around a Hall of Shame,
give you a voice track of your lowest words,
make sure the kids know you were there to sell them out,
put the country up for sale, aggrandized your wealth,
farted away all concern for everyone but yourself.

Thank you, Joe for your stunning insight. America is lucky to have on its airwaves nearly every weekday morning someone who knows so much. With one phrase, you have attempted to diminish the achievement of a two-term President, the first African-American President, and someone who often, despite the unprecedented obstruction of your former party, tried to do the right thing. That is more than can be said for your party, the purveyors of a race-baiting Southern strategy—a strategy embraced in one form or another by Nixon, Ford, Reagan, and George H. W. Bush, and thus there’s no surprise that racism is being fomented on an almost daily basis by President Trump. Your former party, root and branch, is a racist party, and you stand with your party despite having said that you are no longer a member. I’m sure that they’d love to have you back since you have never repudiated their Southern strategy or stood up for social justice, or stood against our endlessly stupid and expensive wars, or showed any moral revulsion against the attack on America’s children and disabled people through the Republican attack on Medicaid. In fact, the only time you seem to show any empathy for the poor or underprivileged is when some well-regarded celebrity is touting a program or book on your show. Then, after that celebrity leaves, your social compassion goes into the deep freeze until the next good-hearted celebrity appears. In the meantime, you embrace American conservativism’s comfortable myths: trickle-down economics is good for everyone, the problem with public education is inadequate teaching and a lack of choices for parents; entitlements such as Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid will sink our great country. As much as possible, you stay on the surface of political process. There seem to be no purely moral issues in your politics, just effective or ineffective political tactics and a pathetic reliance on polls and surveys in place of conscience and value.

As it happens you chose the week before Dr. Martin Luther King II Day to disparage our only African-American president. The scores of millions of Americans who voted for Obama should be ashamed of themselves. Forgive them, Joe. They didn’t understand the subtlety of your argument about understanding the frustrations of Washington as a prerequisite to advancing to the nation’s highest office. The immediate stimulus for your outburst appears to have been Oprah Winfrey’s well-regarded speech at the Golden Globes Awards. That speech had many Americans wishing that someone like Oprah, someone with a moral compass, were leading the country instead of the brutish thug who resides in the White House when he isn’t playing golf. Although Oprah has disavowed any interest in running for president, you needed to do your best to cut her off at the pass. The next shot at the Presidency shouldn’t belong to another charismatic black person, a woman no less. It belongs to you, someone who will stand up proudly for the status quo and make sure that the country is governed in behalf of its prevailing economic interests.

A new phenomenon has emerged in the United States: 64,000 people died in 2016 of a drug overdose — with 80 percent from opioids — with levels of addiction nearly 500 percent higher over the last six years. Behind this epidemic is a multibillion dollar industry, that feeds drug manufacturing giants, distributers and more. With the US government failing to address the crisis, one law firm has taken to a massive lawsuit. Head of that case is Mike Papantonio, who also won major lawsuits against big tobacco, chemical corporations and more. Abby Martin interviews him about this new suit, and why he is pushing for many executives to go to jail.

Courtesy of Telesur English and Abby Martin

Still, who can be against honoring our nation’s military veterans? No doubt just about every one of them serves with honorable intentions. Ordinary Germans also served their country with honorable intentions in World War II, but their service was decreed not honorable at the Nuremburg Trials and what they did was no excuse because their cause was not just. Are the causes for which Americans fight around the world today honorable and just? The argument always goes that the military are keeping the nation safe from terrorism. Would that it were so. The weekly news gives the lie to that. America has home-grown terrorists in its midst, and all the bombing, strafing, and drone strikes in the world aren’t going to keep America safe from that, especially since the nation has gun laws that can only be called a sick joke on the American people. Until al-Qaeda develops an air force and ISIS a navy, large-scale military action against them will be a waste of money and lives, mostly civilian lives, and will not keep the nation one bit safer than it would be with Special Forces operations in the field and well-coordinated police actions around the world, actions headed up by civilians.

Despite the pieties lavished on the nation’s veterans, especially during occasions like Veterans Day, their country treats them very shabbily indeed. The nation’s serving military personnel and its veterans are instead treated as human shields by its politicians. Do we need to have a War on Terror as it is presently constituted? How have the American people benefited from it? Are they materially safer? Has it been worth the lives of nearly 7,000 American military personnel, tens of thousands with physical wounds, and hundreds of thousands with PTSD and Traumatic Brain Injury. Since 1965 more Americans have died through gun violence than have died in all our nation’s wars. Has the War on Terror been worth the trillions of dollars spent on it when the nation’s politicians are trying to figure out how to cut down on school lunches for poor children and to shorten the lives of the chronically ill through neglect and lack of services?

The problem with honoring the nation’s veterans is not the honor itself. It is what the honor masks. It masks America’s unjust, fruitless, and endless wars. Today’s veterans have not served their country because a foreign power threatened to destroy the Constitution and the freedoms guaranteed by it. We need no help destroying the Constitution. Many members of the Republican Party especially are ready to do the job themselves. Instead of saving our republican form of democracy, today’s military is fighting imperialistic wars in defense of securing natural resources for large corporations, most of them global, whose reverence for America’s fighting men and women is a fig leaf for their corporate ambitions. America’s major allies are happy to support this effort because they too will benefit from it, and they will benefit from it while providing social services for their citizens that Americans can only envy from afar.  The only loser in this imperialistic enterprise is the American people, who live in a society of extreme income inequality, one that experiences a dearth of social services and a prohibitive access to the courts that for any substantive matter costs too much for middle-income Americans to access.

Congress has a constitutional duty to authorize military action abroad. It has failed to do so because its leadership recognizes that some lowly congressman or woman might, as hearings were being held, begin to ask a series of embarrassing questions such as, what the hell is all this expense for? A surprisingly large number of Congressional representatives didn’t know that we have fighting forces in Niger, didn’t know that is until four of them were killed in an ambush. It’s hard to keep track of where all our military people are since they are in over 170 countries, supporting the powers that be who will play ball with us, the great majority of whom are tyrants or grifters. Thanks to the service of American military men and women, we are keeping democracy down in scores of countries, all in the name of supporting it.

To hear the speeches of major politicians on Veterans Day or some such fete, one might think that when their military service is over, veterans have the life of Riley waiting for them. That’s probably why 22 of them kill themselves on average each and every day—life is just too beautiful to bear anymore. Of course, some of them have health problems, over and above direct war wounds, PTSD and TBI. Some of these health problems occur because their country treats its military service people as guinea pigs. It deliberately exposed them to atomic radiation in the 1940s and 50s. In Vietnam, it exposed them to Agent Orange, whose basic ingredient dioxin is the most toxic and teragenic substance known to humanity, and then it spent decades denying that this exposure was harmful. That delay greatly limited the government’s and its corporate contractors’ liability since 20 years was about the time when those most seriously exposed would die, but not before they lived for years in agony and produced thousands of genetically deformed offspring, whose lives were usually painful and short. In its piety to its veterans, the nation’s government took as little responsibility for this heinous circumstance as it possibly could. In Gulf War I, it exposed hundreds of thousands of its service people to a radically under-tested cocktail of chemicals meant to ward off the worst effects of chemical warfare. Because the testing was so spotty, the government didn’t know how the immune systems of many service personnel would react, but, hey, it was an experiment—and it produced hundreds of thousands of debilitated American veterans, who when they complained where for many years labeled as malingers, their sheen of heroism darkened into cowardice. Had he known of this American incompetence, Saddam Hussein would have rejoiced. Today in Iraq and Afghanistan the military fights, besides a determined enemy, the effects of depleted uranium munitions, open burn pits, and exposure to whatever aftereffects are created by blowing things to bits. Recently a story appeared about an ex-Marine dying of cancer. He as well as 600,000 of his comrades had been exposed to highly toxic drinking water at Camp Lejeune. Despite the fact that the Camp’s drinking water was next to one of the nation’s most toxic waste sites, the Marines didn’t think this location was matter for concern. They pride themselves on leaving no comrade on the battlefield. That’s true. But when that comrade is in a cancer ward, that’s another story.

So, the question emerges, how best to honor America’s military personnel and its veterans? The easy answer is, take better care of them during their active duty and throughout their lives. The Government doesn’t want to do this. Well, it wants to do this but only in a way that doesn’t interfere with the budget for an ever-larger military force and for the national security state. It currently uses the VA as its whipping boy. Congress doesn’t provide enough money for the VA, and therefore the computers and systems are ancient. Then too, despite thousands of well-meaning and dedicated workers, many of who are veterans themselves, these people are tied up in a bureaucracy that would thwart anyone’s best intentions. When Vice President Pence tells veterans not to worry, what he means is that the politicians will lavish money on contractors who will privatize the VA in return for their political contributions. Veterans will be no better off. In fact, they will be worse off because they will now be cogs in a for-profit system that will put profit over people every time. The VA needs more resources and enlightened management with the power to get things done. It lacks these and veterans suffer grievously for this lack.

The single best way to honor veterans is to stop creating so many of them and stop using them as human shields in a fight for empire and political power rather than in a fight for the nation’s survival. Veterans need a tribune empowered to go directly to the people and tell them the truth, no matter how painful and how contrary that truth might be to the official narrative. The VA needs resources and an intelligent management that will give willing workers the tools they need and the systems that will make them most effective. The last thing veterans need is another for-profit level of bureaucracy looking out for its own best interests and putting the interests of veterans beneath the interests of their bottom lines.

Will Donald Trump go down due to his dubious ties to the former Soviet Union? The president seems to be getting in deeper and deeper. Special prosecutor Robert Mueller, who is investigating if Trump colluded with Russia in order to win the elections, is also digging into Trump’s past as a business man. In that past, one of Donald Trump’s business partners plays a crucial role, Felix Sater. A convicted felon who has ties with the Russian mafia. Last May, Zembla disclosed how an American real estate company, run by Sater, used Dutch mailbox companies within a network, which has been suspected of laundering money. Allegedly $1.5 million dollars had been diverted. Donald Trump developed hotels and apartment complexes with this suspicious company.

In the last few months ZEMBLA received indications of a greater fraud. A billion dollar fraud. And here Sater, Trump’s questionable business partner, shows up, as well. The money trail leads to Kazakhstan, to real estate projects in New York and again to the Netherlands. ZEMBLA investigates: How compromising is this case for the current president of America?