Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow

Hey News Media. Trump’s Been Quoting Hitler All Along

2023-11-24T15:19:00.000-08:00

To hear the news media, Donald Trump—the twice impeached, four-time criminally indicted former United States president—crossed some imaginary line when, in a Veterans’ Day speech this year, he called those he considered his enemies “vermin.” This, the pundits are saying, is an insult too far, verbiage akin to the hateful rhetoric of Nazi Germany’s Adolf Hitler.

What the press doesn’t seem to understand is Trump has been mimicking Hitler’s rhetoric from the minute he rode down his golden escalator with his trollop of a wife at his side to announce his run for the presidency back in June 2015.

Trump’s campaign slogan, Make America Great Again, came straight from Hitler’s mouth—literally—when the Nazi leader promised he would “make Germany great again.” And Trump’s promise to put “America First,” comes from the pro-Nazi “America First” movement of the late-1930s and early-1940s orchestrated chiefly by Nazi propagandist and secret agent George Sylvester Viereck, who also co-opted some two dozen conservative members of Congress into becoming unwitting agents-of-influence for the Germans.

“Losers” and “Suckers”

In his Veterans’ Day speech, the six-deferment Vietnam War draft dodger—who considers everyone who served in the military “losers” and “suckers”—called those he perceived as his enemies—Democrats, the media, and the FBI—as “vermin” who posed a greater threat to the United States than the authoritarian regimes like Russia, China or North Korea that he so admirers. "We pledge to you that we will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country that lie and steal and cheat on elections,” he vowed.

Such words, the media shrieked, echo the hateful rhetoric of the Fuhrer, who often referred to Jews, homosexuals, Slavs, gypsies and many others as “vermin” who needed to be eradicated. But it wasn’t the first time he mimicked Hitler. In his announcement speech in Trump Tower, Trump promised to build a great wall to keep out immigrants from Mexico who, in his words, were “animals … bringing drugs, bringing crime, bringing rapists.”

In a May 2018 White House roundtable discussion, Trump said of immigrants: “These aren’t people. These are animals.” The following month he equated migrants and refugees coming to the U.S. with vermin who would “pour into and infest our country.” In a video interview this October, Trump said immigrants were “poisoning the blood of our country.”

In his book, Mien Kampf, Hitler described Jews—his favorite target of hate—as “bacillus,” “bloodsuckers,” “parasites,” and “vampires.” He considered Slavs such as Poles and Russians as “subhumans,” “barbarians,” and “vermin” needing extermination. He also decried the “blood poisoning” of the German people by the mixing of races and wrote how “the influx of foreign blood” was “the poison which has invaded the national body,” leading to the decline of Germany.

The Lying Press

Immigration isn’t the only topic Trump has turned Hitler’s vindictive against. Trump has used the tyrant’s words as his own when describing the news media. Hitler often referred to the press as the Lügenpresse, which is German for “lying press,” and accused it of being controlled by “Jews and Communists.”

Both during his Veterans Day rant and before, Trump called the American media “the lying press” and, in his November 11 speech accused them of being controlled by “Jews and communists.” Prior to this, Trump had his own way of paraphrasing Hitler’s attitude to the press, referring to them as “fake news” more than two thousand times during his presidency.

Hitler held democracy in contempt, blaming Germany’s parliamentary government for many of the nation’s ills and equating it with internationalism, weakness, and corruption. He also opposed the democratic principles of human rights, equality, and freedom of speech and press.

While Hitler never used Trump’s favorite term “Deep State”—the idea there is a hidden network of powerful and influential individuals and groups within the government—the Fuhrer did express accusations about the existence of a hidden enemy within Germany and the world that was working against his interests and goals.

Since he entered the White House, Trump too has waged a war against democracy. He repeatedly questions the legitimacy of democratic institutions such as the free press, the judiciary, and the bureaucracy (i.e., the “Deep State”), the validity of elections, and the legitimacy of democratic contests. He has repeatedly exclaimed his admiration for dictators like Russia’s Vladimir Putin and North Korean’s Kim Jong Un and their authoritarian regimes, while deriding democratically elected leaders in the U.S. and Europe as weak.

The Big Lie

Finally, Trump’s attempt to overthrow the results of the last presidential election—first by trying to co-opt members of the House and state legislators, then by stirring up the January 6 insurrection, and by repeating the “Big Lie” that he actually won that election—are all straight out of the Nazi playbook for overthrowing democracies. In May 2021, Trump said “the Fraudulent Presidential Election of 2020 will be, from this day forth, known as THE BIG LIE!” adding that “anyone who doesn’t say that the 2020 Presidential Election was rigged and stolen is either uninformed, naïve, or very stupid.”

Some 50 court cases—many presided over by Trump-appointed judges—ruled the 2020 election was fair and that Trump lost. Still, to this day he repeats this lie, again following Hitler’s rule book.

It was, after all, Hitler who first dreamed up the concept of the “Big Lie.” Hitler said “it is not truth that matters, but victory,” adding “by means of shrewd lies, unremittingly repeated, it is possible to make people believe that heaven is hell and hell heaven. The greater the lie, the more readily it will be believed.”

I was a hard news journalist for more than 20 years. I understand the need for the media to remain balanced and not toss accusations around wily-nilly. But there is a time when you need to take the duck test: "If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it probably is a duck.” If the man thinks like a Nazi, talks like a Nazi, and goosesteps like a Nazi, he’s probably a Nazi.

Anti-vaxxers and the GOP Steal a Page from Hitler's Playbook

2021-11-27T10:19:00.004-08:00

The most prevalent rhetoric of the Covid anti-vaxxers is that government requirement vaccine mandates are fascist. In fact, allusions to Adolf Hitler, the Nazis, and the Holocaust are rampant in their rhetoric. What these protestors don’t understand is that the GOP’s extremists like Greg Abbott in Texas and Ron DeSantis in Florida, as well as the screwball crew at Fox News, are taking a page straight out Hitler’s playbook.

How?

Because the Nazis were anti-vaxxers, too.

Before the Little Corporal became Der Fuhrer, Germany had a long history of compulsory vaccination. In 1847, after a smallpox epidemic killed tens of thousands of Germans in Prussia, the government ordered all newborns and military recruits vaccinated against the scourge as well as other diseases.

The German vaccination programs were quite successful. But in the waning years of the democratic Weimar Republic, an antivaccination movement took root. Called the Lebensreform, or Life Reform Movement, it advocated replacing vaccines with healthier lifestyles such as getting more sun and eating special diets.

The Life Reform Movement was also anti-Semitic. According to its adherents, vaccines were part of a global Jewish conspiracy to harm the German people. This isn’t too far from today’s antivaxxers who claim the Covid vaccines are unsafe (instead, they advocate taking a horse dewormer or drinking bleach) or that the vaccines inject tracking devices into our bodies (while they all carry cell phones by which they actually can be tracked).

Fearing protests, the Weimar government loosened its vaccine policies. When the Nazis came to power in the 1930s, they did not issue mandates for vaccination and what mandates were still in effect were largely ignored. In fact, like today’s GOP, they went out of their way to appease the Life Reformers. In 1935, Hitler’s Reich interior minister, Wilhelm Frick, said, “the popular character of the health laws, which must appear to be absolutely desirable in the National Socialist state, is better served if unnecessary restlessness is avoided in the implementation of the laws in the population.”

In other words, don’t rock the boat. German vaccination requirements under the Nazis became voluntary.

The Nazis’ nonchalance toward vaccination wasn’t just politically convenient. It had a more sinister side. Hitler and his cronies knew that the Germans they considered less desirable—Jews, gypsies, the mentally and physically handicapped—were also less likely to get vaccinated and, therefore, more likely to die. As the black shadow of Nazism spread across Europe and Russia, the party’s antivaccine policies became an even bigger genocidal weapon.

According to Hitler’s Table Talk, a compilation of Der Fuhrer’s droning monologues, this was the Nazi leader’s ideas on vaccines and public health in the occupied countries: “Their conditions of life will inevitably improve under our jurisdiction, and we must take all the measures necessary to ensure that the non-German population does not increase at an excessive rate. In these circumstances, it would be sheer folly to place at their disposal a health service such as we know it in Germany; and so—no inoculations and other preventative measures for the Natives! We must even try to stifle any desire for such things by persuading them that vaccination and the like are really most dangerous!” (Emphasis added.)

Is this so different from the sentiments of the far-right extremists of the GOP or the anti-vax “reporting” of Fox News? They know the Covid vaccines aren’t dangerous. Most of them—hell, probably all of them—are vaccinated. We know the talking head yo-yos at Fox News are vaccinated—it’s a company mandate. They also know Covid is dangerous; at this writing, at least seven anti-vax and anti-mask conservative activists have died from Covid and its complications.

So why all the antivaccination rhetoric?

Could the GOP extremists be taking a page out of the Nazis’ antivaccine playbook? They know Covid deaths are highest among those they don’t consider desirable voters—the poor, people of color, the elderly—people who don’t normally vote Republican. Have the Republicans become so power hungry they are willing to sacrifice their own voters—who are, in fact, dying in droves from Covid—in order to “cleanse” the nation of those they don’t want to cast votes by trying to, in Hitler’s own words, “to stifle any desire for such things by persuading them that vaccination and the like are really most dangerous!”?

Just asking.

Escape from the Graveyard of Empires

2021-08-31T16:22:00.002-07:00

Watching the hurried evacuation of American citizens, troops, and Afghani allies from the Kabul airport in August might seem to be an embarrassing defeat for the U.S. and the Biden administration. However, considering that the “former guy” had nearly a year to begin the withdrawal and did little, America’s exit from Afghanistan is nearly as remarkable as WWII’s Miracle at Dunkirk.

It’s all the more remarkable considering the long saga of failed ventures to occupy Afghanistan by some of the most powerful empires in history, from the Persians to the Mongols. After initial successes, these empires ultimately met with failure if not outright defeat. Even Alexander the Great’s unmatched record of conquering countries met its end in this country that is often called The Graveyard of Empires.

What we today call Afghanistan was Alexander the Great’s last stop on his rampage to conquer much of the known world. After defeating the Persians in Afghanistan, Alexander tried to push on to what is now called Pakistan (then the northern portion of India). Alexander left a good portion of his army lying dead in the Kindu Kush mountains. While trying to tame Afghanistan, Alexander began a physical and mental deterioration that led to a rebellion among his forces, forcing him to pull back to Babylon. He died not long after.

Britain's First Retreat

Britain fought two wars in Afghanistan in the 1800s; both failed to gain control over the region. (A Third Anglo-Afghan War was fought in 1919, but most of the fighting took place in neighboring India.) The First Anglo-Afghan War led to one of Britain’s worst military defeats.

Remnants of an Army by Elizabeth Butler shows the only British solider to

survive Britain's 1842 retreat from Kabul.

After occupying Kabul for three years, British forces were forced to evacuate the city in 1842. More than 16,000 troops and camp followers marched out of Kabul and into the Khyber Pass, a mountainous route through the Kindu Kush that links Afghanistan and Pakistan. Like Alexander before them, the British littered the mountain range with the bodies of their people. Out of the 16,000 troops and camp followers, only one British officer made it out the other end of the pass.

The Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979 intending to prop up a pro-Russian government in Kabul. The ten-year Soviet-Afghan War was not only unpopular in the USSR (it was referred to as Russia’s Vietnam), it was also extremely costly in both blood and national treasure. When Soviet leadership was taken over by moderates like Mikhail Gorbachev, the decision was made pull their troops out.

The End of the USSR

The Soviet pull-out was not as disorderly as Britain’s 1842 withdrawal. The USSR allowed itself nearly a year to slowly evacuate Afghanistan, beginning the withdrawal in May 1988 and completing it in February 1989. While orderly, it wasn’t without problems. At one point, Soviet troops had to fight their way past a recalcitrant Afghan warlord and his fighters.

While the Soviet withdrawal was ultimately successful, the die was cast for the fate of the USSR. In December 1991, the Soviet Union ceased to exist.

In nearly each case, the cause of the occupation’s failure lay in the fact that Afghanistan was never really a country to begin with. The region has always been a hodgepodge of tribal factions led by warlords who form and destroy alliances based on who they saw as common enemies. There was no sense of nationality or common interest. Even when the Taliban “ruled” Afghanistan in the aftermath of the Soviet withdrawal, they still had to deal with dozens of individual warlords who refused to bend fully to their reign.

Trump's Failure

Donald Trump signed a withdrawal agreement with the Taliban in February 2020 after months of “negotiation” in which he handed them everything they asked for. There can be no doubt Trump’s military advisors, pointing to the Soviet example, told him the withdrawal would take as long as a year to accomplish properly. While troops began withdrawing in mid-2020, Trump never ordered the evacuation of nonessential personnel like the families of embassy staff, contractors, and Afghani allies, which should have been the first step.

In fact, Trump policies that made it harder to organize the evacuations. For instance, his immigration policies made it nearly impossible to issue Special Immigrant Visas (SIV) to Afghani who worked for the U.S. and NATO during our 20-year war there, leaving a backlog of more than 17,000 SIV applications when President Joe Biden took over. In fact, Trump refused to even brief Biden and his transition team on the situation in Afghanistan, leaving the new president in the blind until he took office.

That Trump did little to accomplish the withdrawal from Afghanistan for nearly a year—despite the fact he said he want to be out of the country by May of this year—forced Biden into a quick and hasty withdrawal process. The massive C-17 air transports flying out of Kabul this August did not carry military personnel, they carried those people who should have left Afghanistan last year.

Considering how little had been done by Donald Trump after signing the withdrawal agreement, what we watched happening at the Kabul airport was nothing less than a miracle in military logistics and a sign that for the first time in four years, we have real leadership in the White House.

The American Putsch: The First GOP Coup the Republicans Tried to Whitewash

2021-05-25T11:43:00.001-07:00

According to Republicans in Congress, the violent Jan. 6 attack on the national Capitol was little more than a friendly tour of congressional offices by patriotic Americans. On May 12, Rep. Andrew S. Clyde, a Republican from Georgia, downplayed the insurrection as a “normal tourist visit,” despite photographs taken during the attacks showing the retired Navy officer panicking as insurgents tried to bash their way into the House chamber.

Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson claimed it was a “false narrative” to say, “there were thousands of armed insurrectionists breaching the Capitol.” This despite the fact four people died because of the riot, including a Capitol police officer who was beaten and spayed with dangerous chemicals, and that dozens of Capitol and municipal police officers suffered severe injuries, including losing fingers and, in one case, an eye. Johnson’s remark also ignores the fact the rioters were armed with firearms, stun guns, bear spray, even a gallows with a hangman’s noose as they chanted “Hang Mike Pence.”

Some congressional Republicans are trying to deflect blame for the assault away from Donald Trump, who incited his extremist MAGA supporters to riot with his “big lie” rhetoric that the November 2020 election was stolen from him. To them, the Trump supporters were peacefully protesting while outside agitators from Black Lives Matters or Antifa were the actual attackers. (To set the record straight, the FBI said the rioters were all Trump supporters, some 400 of which are currently facing assorted federal misdemeanor and felony charges.)

Yet other Republicans are saying the country needs to move forward and leave the past behind. These, of course, are the same GOPers who continue to promote Trump’s big lie about the election.

GOP Opposes Investigation

On May 19, all but 35 of House Republicans voted against a bill establishing a bipartisan committee to investigate who was behind the insurrection. The bill passed, but still faces strong Republican opposition.

As unbelievable as this conduct appears to any truly patriotic American, it’s not unexpected. It isn’t the first time Republicans tried to whitewash an attempted coup by their cohorts. They did the same thing 88 years ago in the aftermath of the Republican-backed American Putsch.

Also referred to as the Banker’s Revolt and the Wall Street Plot, the aborted putsch took place shortly after President Franklin D. Roosevelt took office. The plot involved raising a small army to storm the White House, arrest FDR, and establish a fascist dictatorship. And, despite the GOP's attempt to portray the plot as imaginative thinking, it was in fact a well-organized and well-financed attempt to overthrow the U.S. government that involved top members of the party.

Legendary American Hero

Retired Marine Corps Maj. Gen. Smedley
revealed a 1933 fascist plot that the GOP
tried to whitewash.

Retired Marine Corps Major General Smedley Butler was a legendary American hero. A recipient of two Medal of Honors for combat actions in America's Banana Wars of the early 1900s, he was also lauded for siding with WWI veterans when they were attacked by the Hoover administration during the Great Depression-era Bonus March.

In 1933, Butler was approached by Gerald P. MacGuire, a Wall Street broker, and another man representing wealthy and conservative American bankers and industrialists. The men explained they had been sent to Europe to study fascism and how best to bring it to the United States. Their backers decided a coup was the best idea. They intended to raise an army of disgruntled WWI veterans to attack the White House, dispose FDR, and install a fascist government—and they wanted Butler to lead it.

Butler was no fool. Despite being a legend in the Marine Corps, “Old Gimlet Eye” as he was called was a progressive iconoclast with a reputation for butting heads with the big brass. Butler didn’t dismiss McGuire’s plot, but played along and gathered evidence for the FBI which eventually exposed the conspiracy.

Dismissed by Republicans

Butler’s evidence was immediately dismissed as a hoax by the Republicans and conservative newspapers. Nevertheless, Democrats initiated a congressional investigation by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). Hampered by recalcitrant Republicans, the HUAC investigation, at best, was proforma, with only Butler and MacGuire called as witnesses and the involvement of several prominent, politically powerful financiers and businessmen ignored.

Nevertheless, HUAC report concluded, "In the last few weeks of the committee's official life it received evidence showing that certain persons had made an attempt to establish a fascist organization in this country. No evidence was presented, and this committee had none to show a connection between this effort and any fascist activity of any European country. There is no question that these attempts were discussed, were planned, and might have been placed in execution when and if the financial backers deemed it expedient."

In other words, the planned coup was entirely the work of wealthy Americans with no help from fascist governments in Europe.

No one was ever charged in the coup attempt, largely because FDR suppressed the most damning evidence fearing it would cause a public uprising. The Republicans continued to whitewash the plot, dismissing it as a ruse even to this day. Transcripts of the HUAC testimony was finally made public in 1967. The BBC added more substance to the coup story, reporting in 2017 that one plotter was none other than Wall Street investor Prescott Bush, future U.S. senator, and father and grandfather of two American presidents. Bush was a well-known supporter of Hitler's rise to power and was prosecuted for continuing to do business with the Nazis even after Hitler declared war on the United States in 1941.

Unparalleled Parallels

The parallels between the American Putsch and the Jan. 6 Insurrection are obvious: Trump’s incitement of the riot to overthrow the election of President Joe Biden, and Prescott Bush’s and his cronies’ attempt to incite a rebellion to overthrow the election of FDR. Only the Trump Putsch was put into motion, and it was violent. Unlike the American Putsch, Congress doesn’t need to rely on the testimony of two individuals. There are hundreds of hours of video taken by the news media and security cameras. Dozens of police officers have described the viciousness of the attack. Most important, there is video of Trump and several congressional Republicans inciting the seditionists, and evidence some of those members of Congress may have taken part in its planning. In fact, some of the House Republicans who voted against the House investigation are expected to be called as witnesses. Of course, they want to limit their culpability by downplaying the seriousness and violence of the revolt.

All this raises a question too few are willing ask: Should a political party whose members were involved in two coup attempts to overthrow American democracy be allowed to continue?

Hong Kong, Voter Suppression, and Republican Hypocrisy

2021-03-23T08:51:00.005-07:00

The Republican Party is taking a firm stance against China’s anti-democratic policies designed to thwart free elections and autonomy in Hong Kong. The Beijing government is foisting new election laws on the former British colony intended to end the “one country, two systems” policies that allowed Hong Kong to exist as a democratic enclave in an otherwise totalitarian state.

Last year, GOP Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell praised Hong Kong’s pro-democracy, “demonstrations against the repressive grip of the Chinese communist party.” And he hailed the fact that “Hong Kong voters with American flags in hand dealt crushing defeats to Beijing’s preferred puppet candidates in elections last fall.”

McConnell continued his support for Hong Kong democracy this year by criticizing new Chinese laws restricting voters’ rights in the enclave. “The Chinese Communist Party is trying yet again to tighten their grip,” he said. “New laws supposedly related to national security aim to stifle dissent and curtail Hong Kongers’ civil liberties.”

Sen. Ted “Cancun” Cruz, R-Texas, also supported Hong Kong’s civil rights movement, saying last

January, “I’ll continue to support and stand alongside those of you speaking out against tyranny and fighting for freedom.”

China’s authoritarian government and its attempts to destroy democracy in Hong Kong deserve the strongest condemnation. Yet the GOP’s response to the Chinese restrictions would be more admirable if it weren’t so hypocritical.

At the same time McConnell criticized China’s new laws curtailing the civil liberties of Hong Kong’s citizens, the Republican Party was launching a multitude of state-level voter suppression laws to prevent American citizens of color from casting votes in future elections. And, as in Hong Kong, the reason for passing these anti-democracy laws was that the GOP suffered crushing election defeats in November 2020.

In February, the Brenner Center for Justice reported that “33 states have introduced, prefiled, or carried over 165 restrictive bills this year.” In the first two months of 2021, Republican state legislatures introduce four times the number of voter suppression bills than introduce in the whole of 2020. The Center described this anti-democracy legislation as “a backlash to historic voter turnout in the 2020 general election and grounded in a rash of baseless and racist allegations of voter fraud and election irregularities.”

Salon reported that number to be much higher, claiming the “tidal wave of (Republican) voter suppression” included 253 bills in 43 states.

These bills aim to limit mail-in voting, which became popular in 2020 during the COVID crisis; impose stricter voter ID requirements, which makes voting difficult for the elderly and minority voters who don’t drive; slash voter registration opportunities, also aimed at the elderly and people of color; and enable more aggressive voter roll purges, all aimed at removing people of color from the voting rolls.

Georgia—where a massive voter turnout helped give Joe Biden the presidency and sent two Democrats to the U.S. Senate—is one of the states scrambling to make it harder for its citizens to vote. On March 26, the state's governor, Brian Kemp, signed into law a bill that bans automatic voter registration, limits Sunday early voting days and ballot drop boxes, and restricts absentee voting. It also prohibits volunteers from passing out free food and drinks to people forced to stand in lines for hours because of the state's failure to provide adequate polling places in minority neighborhoods.

Georgia’s Republican legislators introduced the bills in response to Donald Trump’s baseless claim of widespread voter fraud in the state.

The Georgia restrictions are so heinous and so obviously aimed at Black voters they are being compared to the Jim Crow laws which existed in the U.S. from the end of the Civil War until 1968. “We know their targets are Black voters,” said Cliff Albright, co-founder of the Atlanta-based Black Voters Matter. "These (legislation) notes are dripping in the blood of Jim Crow.”

Jim Crow laws were state and local laws that marginalized African Americans by denying them the right to vote, hold jobs, get an education, or marry outside their race. Violating Jim Crow laws often faced arrest, fines, jail sentences, violence, and death.

Lest there be any doubt as to the oppressive nature of the Jim Crow laws, they were so admired by Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler he used them as a model for the German racial purity laws that restricted the rights of Jews, Blacks, Slavs, and Roma.

The Republican Party did not suffered setbacks in November 2020 because of voter fraud. Repeated investigations by federal and state agencies declared the election one of the cleanest in U.S. history. Fifty lawsuits filed by Trump supporters alleging voting fraud were found without merit by state and federal courts. The Republicans lost because their presidential candidate was widely unpopular because of his hateful rhetoric, unprecedented corruption, and dictatorial ambitions.

Both the Chinese government and the Grand Old Party need to realize governments only suppress the vote because their policies are unpopular. If you want to win over voters and win elections, don’t restrict people’s right to vote, change your policies.

That Time When Business Greed Nearly Lost the Allies WWII and How It Relates to the Covid Crisis

2020-11-17T09:41:00.002-08:00

We are plunging toward a dark and dangerous winter. A third wave of Covid-19 infections is surging around the world. At this writing, U.S. Covid cases are increasing at a rate of more than 100,000 new infections per day. One thousand Americans are dying from the virus each day. The health care facilities of nearly every state are being overwhelmed by Covid caseloads.

It is a sad fact that all this could have been avoided.

If more state governments had been responsible and closed the bars, restaurants, gyms, and political rallies that act like petri dishes for the virus’s growth, Covid’s impact could have been mitigated. But too many politicians bent to the pressure placed on them by both small businesses and corporations to avoid such lockdowns. Even in states like California, where a lockdown did start to contain the virus, politicians eventually caved and lifted restrictions too early and too quickly.

We’ve seen this same profit-at-any-price mentality in this country before when another scourge threatened American lives, and businesses refused to adapt to the situation to save lives. The last time we saw this kind of thinking, we nearly lost WWII.

Operation Drumbeat

Within weeks of declaring war on the United States, Adolf Hitler launched a U-boat offensive against the American East Coast called Operation Paukenschlag (Operation Drumbeat). On January 14, 1942, the first German sub arrived off the coast of Rhode Island, soon followed by four more. The German sailors were delighted to find tankers and freighters sailing alone without escort. Even more surprising, they found the coast brightly lit by shore lights that provided U-boats with perfectly silhouetted targets.

Blackouts are a necessity of war. Across the Atlantic, blackouts were imposed on every English, French, and German shoreline. Even before entering the war, American military officials realized the potential need for blacking out the Eastern seaboard at night. But local chambers of commerce, fearing a loss of profits, fought every attempt to impose a coastal blackout.

The result was devastating.

In just weeks, those first five U-boats sank 16 ships totaling 104,761 tons. Allied logistics experts estimated the loss in ships, cannon, vehicles, and fuel was equivalent to the damage caused by 30,000 German aerial bombing sorties. And it was just the beginning.

Like the coronavirus, the U-boat onslaught came in waves. The first wave may have come as a surprise—though it shouldn’t have—but there was no excuse to not be prepared for the following waves. But, just as with the Covid crisis today, America remained unresponsive to the threat

The blame can’t be laid entirely at the feet of East Coast business interests—though they fought tooth-and-against blacking out shoreline enterprises. Just as with the Covid crisis, there was ineptitude at high levels of government where bureaucrats would not accept the reality of a U-boat threat in American waters.

The Anglophobe Admiral

Admiral Ernest King, chief of naval operations, was an Anglophobe. A British official described King as “intolerant and suspicious of all things British, especially the Royal Navy.” Before America entered the war, King rejected all calls for preparing for a U-boat attack on the United States, refusing to believe Germany had such a capability despite the fact U-boats had operated in American waters in WWI.

Merchant ship Dixie Arrow torpedoed off Cape Hatteras by U-71, 26 March 1942.

Like Donald Trump’s refusal to accept the reality of the Covid crisis, King refused to acknowledge the threat facing merchant ships sailing in American waters or his own failure to protect them. Even after the first German submarine onslaught, King’s Anglophobia made him resist implementing any of the hard-won lessons the English learned about fighting U-boats in three years of war. He adamantly refused to adopt a convoy system to protect Allied shipping as the British had despite the fact that convoys—groups of merchant ships protected by sub-hunting ships and patrol boats—was used by the American Navy in WWI. King’s attitude, and that of many of his subordinates, was summed up by U.S. Rear Adm. R. S. Edwards. “Americans must learn by their own mistakes,” he told a British colleague, “and we have plenty of ships.”

In fact, we did not have plenty of ships.

By mid-March, the loss of oil tankers was so great that the Petroleum Industry War Council warned the U.S. would run out of oil in six months. By June 1942, Army Chief of Staff George C. Marshall worried “that another month or two of this . . . [and] . . . we will be unable to bring sufficient men and planes to bear against the enemy . . .”

The danger to the war effort posed by King's ethnocentrism prompted General Dwight D. Eisenhower to write, “One thing that might help win this war is to shoot King.”

To the British, the Battle of the Western Atlantic was a “holocaust.”

A convoy system wouldn’t be organized until mid-1942, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt ordered King to implement one.

And still the lights shone

In February 1942, FDR issued an executive order giving the military authority to order coastal blackouts. Once again, seashore businesses pushed back, and the military hesitated to implement the order. Admiral King sent the coastal defense commander a “request” to implement a “dimout” of shore lights, but he still refused to call for a full blackout.

U-boats victories mounted as did merchant ship losses. For the tourists and party clubbers enjoying the well-lit coastal nightlife, the war came home the hard way. At night, they could see torpedoed ships burning offshore. In the mornings, those same fun lovers found the scorched bodies of merchant sailors that had washed ashore. Eventually, coastline businesses began to lose money simply because people did not want to be that close to the reality of war. And still, they refused to execute blackouts until much later in the year.

By then the damage was done. In the first six months of 1942, nearly 400 Allied merchantmen were sunk in American waters at a cost to Germany of only six U-boats. Unlike Pearl Harbor, none of the ships were salvageable. No one was ever held responsible for these terrible losses. It would still take until the first half of 1943 before American anti-submarine warfare capabilities caught up with those of Britain and Canada.

(New York Times)

Today Americans face a similar deadly threat, one that threatens the well-being of us all, not just a relative few merchant sailors. Yet we’re are seeing the same inaction and ineptitude that nearly lost us the war against the Axis Powers. While European countries are seeing positive results by reimposing restrictions on restaurants, bars, and other gathering places, too many Americans still resist taking basic precautions that can slow the spread of the virus and save hundreds of lives (see graph). At this writing, just shy of a quarter million Americans have died from the disease, and the number keeps climbing every day.

In his book Operation Drumbeat, author Michael Gannon concludes, “Civilian avarice and carelessness must take their places on the list of agents accountable for the U-boat triumphs.” When the history of America’s war against Covid-19 is written, what will the historians say of us?

Militia Plots: A Rare but Serious Threat

2020-10-16T15:23:00.001-07:00

The news shocked many Americans. The FBI announced they had thwarted an armed rightwing extremist militia plot to capture local government officials and hold them hostage.

You may think I’m talking about the October arrests of more than a dozen Michigan militia henchmen who were planning to abduct Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and put her on trial for the heinous crime of trying to save Michiganders from the coronavirus.

You’d be wrong if you did.

What I described above was a 1934 plot to seize control of the San Diego, CA city hall by a rightwing militia of quasi-Christian zealots called the Silver Shirts. Founded in 1933 by William Dudley Pelley (right), a one-time presidential candidate, the Silver Legion of America was patterned after the Italian dictator Benito Mussolini’s Black Shirts with the intention of establishing a “Christian Commonwealth” in America that would exclude all Jews and nonwhites.

The Silver Legion was a pro-fascist/Nazi group, one of several that existed in the U.S. in the 1930s. (See: American Fascists: A Forgotten History.) The local contingent of Silver Shirts concocted a plan to overthrow San Diego’s city government when they heard rumors that a group of communists was making similar plans (they weren’t). Two Marines from Camp Pendleton uncovered the plot when they infiltrated the Legion while investigating a series of weapons thefts from local military units.

Militia coup attempts like those thwarted in San Diego and Michigan might seem rare, but they aren’t unknown, and they are no laughing matter. They pose a very real threat to American citizens and to our democracy.

The first antigovernment militia coup was the 1791 Whiskey Rebellion. Contrary to the belief of many radical gunowners that the Second Amendment was intended by our Founding Fathers to provide for the overthrow the government, the Whiskey Rebellion was quickly put down by a federal force led by then-President George Washington. (See: The Myths that Drive America’s Love of Guns.)

Anti-government militia plots have been the bane of American life, particularly since the 1990s. Several militia plots were uncovered during that decade. Members of a group called the North American Militia planned to bomb several targets in Michigan, including a federal building and an IRS building, and even discussed assassinating various government officials.

In 1997, members of a Missouri militia group planned a July 4 attack on Fort Hood, Texas, as the military base hosted an annual “Freedom Festival” attended by 50,000 men, women, and children. Fortunately, the FBI and the Missouri State Highway Patrol thwarted the plot. (See: The Militia Movement.) And in March 2011, the FBI charged nine members of an extremist militia group in Michigan with seditious conspiracy for plotting to attack law enforcement and spark an uprising against the government. (See: Domestic Terrorism: Focus on Militia Extremism.)

These rebellions were stopped or quickly suppressed before they started. But that doesn’t mean militia coups are not dangerous. In 1898, a white supremacist militia successfully overthrew the biracial city government of Wilmington, NC. There was no response to the deadly coup from local police, the state government, or Washington, DC. Its success is having unfortunate repercussions in today’s presidential politics, as Donald Trump keeps holding up that event as a model for future coups. (See: The White Supremacist Coup that Trump Uses as a Template.)

Many Americans like to believe Timothy McVeigh’s April 19, 1995 bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building that killed 168 men, women, and children was the act of a “lone wolf” terrorist, Timothy McVeigh. In fact, in addition to McVeigh, three accomplices were also charged and tried for the crime. They had hoped the bombing would initiate an uprising that would take down the U.S. government. McVeigh was also a member of Christian Identity, a rightwing, white supremacist militia, which the FBI believed may have also been involved with the plot. (See: Were There More OKC Conspirators?: The Elohim City Connection.)

The last four years saw a rise in militia activity, thanks to the hateful and extremist rhetoric of Donald Trump. Armed militia members confronted peaceful Black Lives Matter protestors and marched to protest social distancing practices implemented by local governments in the wake of the coronavirus. Even before planning to abduct Gov. Whitmer, Michigan militia gunmen marched on the state capitol in an obvious threat to state lawmakers.

Not all rightwing coup plots were the work of militia movements. In 1933, a group of wealthy conservative bankers and financiers plotted to raise a private army and use it to overthrow the American government and establish a fascist dictatorship. Called The American Putsch and The Bankers Revolt, the plot was thwarted by the man they approached to lead their army. Smedley Butler, a retired Marine Corps major general and two-time recipient of the Medal of Honor, played along with the conspirators and collected evidence for the FBI. One of the alleged conspirators was a wealthy, pro-Nazi financier named Prescott Bush, father and grandfather of two U.S. presidents. (See: American Fascists: A Forgotten History.)

Unlike George Washington riding forth to preserve the country and democracy during the Whiskey Rebellion, Donald Trump has done nothing to mitigate the threat from these rightwing extremist groups. On the contrary, Trump appointed self-avowed pro-fascist, white nationalists like Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller to his staff. He’s referred to white nationalist groups as “some good people” and told the Proud Boys to “stand by.” Trump has also called for armed militia members to act as “poll watchers” during the balloting. His failure to condemn these hate groups or their malicious plots only encourages them to continue their terrorist plots. More conspiracies will be on the horizon as long as this irresponsible president remains in power.

And despite the best efforts of law enforcement, the next plot may not be stopped in time.

Hitler and Trump: Two Men With a Single Mind?

2020-10-11T12:10:00.002-07:00

There is a new meme making the rounds on Twitter. It is a quote from a WWII psychological profile of Adolf Hitler commissioned by the Office of Strategic Services, forerunner of the CIA. The quote says, “His primary rules were: never allow the public to cool off; never admit a fault or wrong; never concede that there may be some good in your enemy; never leave room for alternatives; never accept blame; concentrate on one enemy at a time and blame him for everything that goes wrong; people will believe a big lie sooner than a little one; and if you repeat it frequently enough people will sooner or later believe it.”

Obviously, the quote has gone viral because many people believe it applies as easily to Donald Trump as it does to Der Fuhrer. But a close reading of the full OSS report, “A Psychological Analysis of Adolf Hitler: His Life and Legend,” reveals many more similarities between the Nazi dictator and America’s wannabe fuhrer—so many that one could believe they were one and the same man.

Family: Both Hitler and Trump had authoritarian fathers. Alois Hitler was described by Hitler’s British-born nephew, William Patrick Hitler, as a drunk and tyrant who regularly beat his children. Trump’s father, Fred, was also an authoritarian parent, demanding daily reports from his wife on the children’s conduct and dictating disciplinary actions. According to Trump’s niece, Mary L. Trump, Fred pushed his eldest son, Fred Jr., to become as ruthless as he was so he could take over the family business. Fred Jr., however, wanted to be an airline pilot. After that, Fred Sr. “dismantled [Fred Jr.] by devaluing and degrading every aspect of his personality." Mary Trump blames her grandfather’s treatment of her father for the alcoholism that eventually killed him.

In Awe of Authority: Despite his media persona as a man of strength and resolute courage, Hitler was humbled by persons of authority. “From the weight of evidence, it seems certain that Hitler does lose his self-confidence badly when he is brought face-to-face with an accepted authority of high standing…” Yet, he was in constant search for a male figure he could use as a guide. “[T]hroughout his later life we find him searching for a strong masculine figure whom he can respect and emulate.” Hitler was drawn to strong, authoritarian historical figures such as Caesar, Napoleon, and Frederick the Great. According to the OSS report, Hitler was confused by leaders such as President Franklin D. Roosevelt who could lead a country and “still act like a gentleman” without “a great deal of name-calling, shouting, abusing, and threatening.”

It’s well known Trump has never met a dictator he didn’t submit to. Vladimir Putin of Russia, Xi Jinping of China, Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines, Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, Kim Jong Un of North Korea are all authoritarian leaders Trump has praised and, in most cases, provided with preferential treatment over his own country. (See: Nine Notorious Dictators, Nine Shout-Outs From Donald Trump). At home, Trump openly suggests he wants to wield such power and attempts to do so by threatening and abusing anyone who stands up to him.

Young—Very Young—Women: Throughout his political career, Hitler portrayed himself as a man alone whose only mistress was Germany. Trump, on the other hand, has extravagantly exaggerated his prowess as a playboy. Neither depiction is true. Hitler, like Trump, had a penchant for very young, even underage girls.

Hitler’s first tryst was with Henny Hoffman, the daughter of his official photographer. Hitler first met Henny when she was nine. Henny was about 17 when her mother died and she began dating Hitler. He was in his thirties. “The relationship continued for some time until Henny … got drunk one night and began to talk about her relationship with Hitler,” according to the OSS report.

Henny was followed by a mysterious relationship with Geli Raubal, the daughter of Hitler’s half-sister, Angela. Geli lived with Hitler, 19 years her senior, in his Munich apartment. According to the OSS profile, Hitler spent lavishly on Geli and was extremely jealous of any men who paid attention to his niece. The affair did not end well. In September 1931, Hitler traveled to Nuremburg for a party meeting. The next day, Geli was found dead in his apartment of a gunshot wound to the lung. Hitler’s personal pistol laid next to her. Despite suspicions otherwise, her death was ruled a suicide.

Eva Braun was only 17 when she first caught Hitler’s eye, 23 years younger than Der Fuhrer. Theirs was Hitler’s longest relationship with a woman though he tried to hide it from the German people. It, too, was tumultuous, with Braun twice unsuccessfully attempting suicide. They finally married days before the German surrender, then committed suicide inside the Fuhrer Bunker.

Two of Trump’s wives were much younger than he when they married. Marla Trump was 17 years younger than Trump, and Melania 24 years younger. Trump frequently partied with Jeffrey Epstein, a financier and convicted child molester who was charged with sex trafficking minors in 2019 shortly before he allegedly committed suicide in a jail cell. In 2016, a woman accused Trump in a Manhattan federal court of raping her at one of Epstein’s parties when she was only 14 years old. The alleged victim dropped her suit after receiving multiple death threats from Trump supporters.

Trump has repeatedly made lascivious comments about his own daughter, Ivanka. During a 2003 Howard Stern Show interview, he said Ivanka had “the best body.” On the television show The View, Trump said, “I’ve said if Ivanka weren’t my daughter, perhaps I’d be dating her." He also once allegedly asked a friend, “Is it wrong to be more sexually attracted to your own daughter than your wife?” Ivanka was 13 at the time.

Hitler and Trump may have shared another sexual aberration—golden showers. It has long been suspected that Russia’s Putin has video of Trump engaging in sexual urination with two prostitutes in a Moscow hotel. According to the OSS report, Hitler engaged in the same sex games. “His sexual pervasion has quite a different nature that few would have guessed,” it says. “… [A]n extreme form of masochism in which the individual derives sexual gratification from the act of having a woman urinate or defecate on him.”

Draining the Swamp and Other Christ-like Things: Donald Trump ran for office claiming only he could “drain the swamp” in Washington, DC. Hitler, too, came to power claiming he would drain the Berlin swamp. “When I came to Berlin … and looked at the traffic… the luxury, the perversion, the wanton display… disgusted me so thoroughly, that I was almost beside myself,” Hitler said in a speech. He saw himself as a new Messiah who would clean up Berlin the way Christ cleared the moneychangers from the temple.

A Messiah complex is something else both men share. “As time went on,” the OSS report says, “it became clearer (Hitler) was thinking of himself as the Messiah and that it was he who was destined to lead Germany to glory. … Comparisons between Christ and himself became more frequent.” Trump, too, frequently refers to himself with Biblical references, claiming he is “the Chosen One,” “the King of Israel,” and “the second coming of God.”

Unfortunately, both men’s e most loyal followers only encouraged such thinking. It was not unusual for Hitler’s most zealous followers—good Christians all—to hail him with “Heil Hitler, our Savior,” according to the OSS profile. Trump’s biggest group of supporters, white Christian evangelicals, have been all too willing to buy into his egomaniacal self-aggrandizement. A 2019 article in Psychology Today, reported, “a significant portion of his supporters literally believe the president was an answer to their prayers. He is regarded as something of a messiah, sent by God to protect a Christian nation.” (See: The Belief That Trump Is a Messiah Is Rampant and Dangerous.)

Know-It-Alls: Both Hitler’s and Trump’s fragile egos compelled them to act as know-it-alls when, in fact, a better description would be “know-nothings.” In 2018, Trump infamously referred to himself as “a very stable genius” and he repeatedly insists he knows more than his advisors and generals. (See: Everything Donald Trump is an Expert In, According to Him.) Even after contracting Covid-19 and receiving millions of dollars in specialized treatment, Trump still maintained he knew more about the virus than the health experts.

According to the OSS report, Ernst Rohm, head of the Nazi Brown Shirts, said of Hitler, “You try to tell him anything, he knows everything already.” Another of Hitler’s associates is quoted saying, “He has always been a poseur. He remembers things that he has heard and has a faculty for repeating them in such a way that a listener is lead to believe they are his own.”

Normal conversation never takes place around either man. “It is well-known he (Hitler) cannot carry on a normal conversation or discussion with people,” says the OSS profile. “Even if only one person is present, he must do all the talking.” Trump too must dominate every conversation, as seen in the first presidential debate. When he can’t, he sits with tightly cross arms and a scowl on his face.

For both men, this overconfidence in their own “genius” falls apart when confronted by an honest news media asking the kind of hardball questions reporters should ask of a country’s leadership. “Hitler becomes nervous and tends to lose his composure when he has to meet newspapermen,” says the OSS profile. Hitler was unable to answer questions for which he was not prepared and insisted any interviews questions be submitted in advance. “Even then he gives no opportunity to ask for further clarification … he immediately launches into a lengthy dissertation, which sometimes turns into a tirade. When this is finished, the interview is over.”

Trump has never been at ease with the media, criticizing their work as “liberal,” “left wing,” and “fake news.” He does not do well in press conferences when reporters are allowed to ask questions and so rarely holds them. When asked for clarification, he becomes surly and insults the person asking the question, and frequently simply ends the conference. In an August face-to-face broadcast interview Trump tried to convince Australian journalist Jonathan Swan with statistics that under his leadership the U.S. was controlling the coronavirus better than any other country. Swan then proved to Trump that he didn’t understand his own statistics. Trump was left befuddled and speechless. (See: Trump’s attacks on media are influencing Republicans’ attitudes toward press.)

Bring In the Clowns: Neither Hitler nor Trump were taken seriously at first. According to his OSS profile, “Earlier in his career the world watched him with amusement. Many people refused to take him seriously on ground that ‘he could not possibly last.'”

Despite the faux persona of a successful businessman that he built with the help of his pseudo-reality series “The Apprentice,” Trump was never taken seriously as an entrepreneur or a politician. Nowhere was this more evident than his hometown of New York where he was largely considered a clown. On Election Day in 2016, Trump was greeted with laughter and jeers as he arrived at his polling place.

Unfortunately, in both cases Hitler and Trump should have been taken seriously. Hitler’s reign of terror left Germany a country of smoking rubble, devastated by Allied bombings and artillery. In less than four years, Trump’s reign of error has cost the United States its world standing, its economy, and the lives of more than 200,000 American lives.

The White Supremacist Coup that Trump Uses as a Template

2020-09-13T12:31:00.000-07:00

Donald Trump’s reelection campaign platform consists of only one theme: American cities are being torn apart by black mobs and antifa terrorists, and only he—the law and order president—can bring order back to the nation.

The idea that Trump, who has presided over the most corrupt White House administration in history, is campaigning as a “law and order” president would be laughable except for one thing: by spewing his hateful and racist rhetoric for more than three years, he has set the stage for a violent right-wing, white nationalist takeover of the country.

It happened here once before on a smaller scale. It happened in 1898 in Wilmington, NC.

As it neared the turn of the 20^th century, that North Carolina city was hailed as a prime example of the New South. The state’s largest city, its population was mostly black and prosperous. There were African American doctors, educators, and entrepreneurs, and it was run by black elected officials. In fact, North Carolina in general was more progressive than other southern states, having sent four black Republicans to Congress between 1875 and 1899.

This success was the result of a political coalition of Republicans—including black Republicans—and the Populist Party, which was comprised white farmers hit hard by a bad economy.

The Racist Democrats

That didn’t well with the conservative and racist Democratic Party.

Yes, back then the Democratic Party was largely the party of the South and that meant the party of racist white men. Most black voters cast their ballots for the Republican Party. We wouldn’t see the ideological line up we see today until the mid-20^th century, when progressives began taking over the Democratic Party and “Dixie Democrats” the Republican Party.

Trump, a Republican who filled his campaign staff and White House staff with self-avowed white nationalists like Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller, would feel quite at home with the Democrat Party of 1898. The North Carolina Democratic state party handbook for that year stated, “This is a white man’s country and white men must control and govern it.”

State GOP leaders Furnifold Simmons, a future U.S. Senator, Charles Aycock, a future North Carolina governor, and Alfred Moore Wadell developed a plan to break up the Republican-Populist alliance: stoke white anger and resentment against blacks.

Their plan was supported by a FoxNews-like North Carolina newspaper which published racist political cartoons warning of “Negro domination” and the need to protect “white womanhood” from black men.

Red Shirts and other white supremacists pose
following a violent coup that overthrew an interracial
city government in Wilmington, NC.

The Democrats also had a private militia called the “Red Shirts.” Much like Trump’s support from white supremacist militias today, the Red Shirts used threats and violence to intimidate black voters. Armed Red Shirts attended Republican rallies to frighten away attendees, and patrolled polling places to keep black voters at bay—much as Trump is currently recruiting “an army” to guard polls today.

Shortly before the election, Alfred Moore Waddell addressed a Democratic rally announcing that “negro office-holding ought at once and forever be brought to an end. Even if we have to choke the current of the Cape Fear River with carcasses.”

The Democrats overwhelmingly won the election, taking over every city office that was open. But the coup didn’t stop there.

Following their election “victory,” the Democrats then forced any remaining coalition office holders out, with a show of force by marching 2,000 armed Red Shirts through the streets. Then they set to destroying the black economy. Any protests were met with violence, living up to Waddell’s promise to block “Cape Fear River with carcasses.” No one knows exactly how many black Americans were killed. Estimates vary from 40 to 60, but the death toll was probably higher.

On September 10, in a threat that sounded reminiscent of Waddell’s promise, Trump declared that if he wins, he will invoke the Insurrection Act to “put down” any protests with military force.

Same Rhetoric

The violence in 1898, of course, was blamed on black “instigators” just as Trump blames the riots raging about the country today on black activists and the largely mythical “antifa,” despite FBI reports that much of the violence is the work of white supremacist militias.

Following the violence, the Democratic victors announced a “White Declaration of Independence” declaring, “We will no longer be ruled, and will never again be ruled, by men of African origin.” Jim Crow laws, including literacy tests and poll taxes, were enacted to prevent blacks from voting. Wilmington, once a shining example of black opportunity, was now the domain of white nationalists.

And today, the nation has a president with a long record of open hostility toward black Americans who preaches hate-filled rhetoric about people of color and finds succor and support from the KKK and other white nationalist groups. He has spent more than three years driving a schism between the races, encouraging enmity between fellow Americans, lighting U.S. cities ablaze, and setting the stage for what he and his racist allies hope to be a white supremacist victory in November.

Trump Not Alone in His Attitude Toward the Military

2020-09-06T11:04:00.005-07:00

For it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' "Chuck him out, the brute!"

But it's "Saviour of 'is country" when the guns begin to shoot

—Rudyard Kipling (Tommy)

Recent reporting by The Atlantic magazine that Donald Trump referred to U.S. Marines killed during WWI as “suckers” and “losers” hardly comes as a revelation to anyone who has followed his comments and actions toward the military. From claiming the late Sen. John McCain was “no hero” because he was captured during the Vietnam War, to disparaging Gold Star parents of service members killed in Iraq and Afghanistan along with the country’s senior most leadership, to summarily firing Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman and his twin brother for simply performing their sworn duties, Trump has shown nothing but disrespect to anyone who ever served in uniform. (See: Every time Trump has attacked American veterans or military families)

The sad truth, however, is that attitude toward service personnel is not uncommon among the American people, especially rich Americans.

I experienced some of that attitude when, as a young Coast Guardsman, I was stationed in Virginia in 1973 just as the U.S. began its withdrawal from Vietnam. The local population was so jaundiced toward military personnel, we were ordered not to place base access stickers on our vehicle windows. To do so invited baseball bat-toting redneck good ol’ boys to bash in your car’s windows. We also could not wear our uniforms off base for fear of having those same bats used against our heads. Signs saying “Sailors and Dogs Keep of the Grass” spotted the landscape.

While some Vietnam vets complained about being disrespected by hippies and war protesters, my discussions with other vets of the period showed just as many experienced the same hostility I did from the good, God-fearing people of the American South. Apparently, people in the South—the same South that committed treason by seceding in 1860—felt those of us in uniform toward the end of the Vietnam War needed to be taught a lesson for “losing the war.” In fact, David Morrell’s post-Vietnam thriller, First Blood, featured a Vietnam veteran named Rambo targeted by a Southern sheriff and his town folk. Morrell said news reports about the mistreatment of vets in the South gave him the idea for his book. (Ironically, the movie made from the novel moved the story to the Pacific Northwest to spare southern feelings.)

Not Limited to Modern Times

This attitude toward the military isn’t limited to modern times. On March 15, 1783 officers under George Washington's command discussed mutinying because Congress failed to provide them with long-promised back pay and pensions for serving during the Revolution. The mutiny was averted when Washington addressed his officers with a speech about the sacrifices they all made that brought tears to the officers’ eyes.

In the aftermath of the American Civil War, thousands of disabled Union veterans were left hanging while Congress argued over whether pensions or other remuneration should be provided to the former soldiers. It was years before Union veterans received any benefits; Confederate veterans received nothing—notably, not even from the southern states they fought for.

Following the Civil War, soldiering as a career fell into disfavor. If you watch a western movie about the U.S. cavalry, with few exceptions all the soldiers will be white. However, in the real Wild West one out of every three soldiers—cavalry and infantry alike—were black, members of two regiments of the segregated U.S. Colored Troops, the legendary Buffalo Soldiers.

Even among the white troops, there were few patriotic Americans. Most were immigrants from England, Ireland, Poland, Germany, and other European countries because soldiering was widely considered beneath a “real” American. (The same was true about police officers; hence, the stereotype of the Irish beat cop.)

During the Spanish-American War, Buffalo Soldiers—by now professional fighters—stormed Kettle Hill and San Juan Hill alongside Teddy Roosevelt’s untested volunteers, the Rough Riders. Yet it is the Rough Riders, led by a wealthy socialite, who received the most credit for that battle victory.

When America belatedly entered WWI, her soldiers were sent “over there” with parades and patriotic songs. Once home, however, they were less heralded. In 1932, suffering from the indignities of the Great Depression, veterans marched on Washington, DC, demanding payment of bonuses Congress promised them for their service. The veterans were treated as traitorous “Reds” by the Hoover administration, which launched a deadly military attack on them. (See: Nearly 100 Years after the Bonus March, Trump is Making the Same Mistakes)

Veterans of WWII were treated better—if they were white. The GI Bill provided them readjustment and educational benefits. But 1.2 million black veterans were denied the full range of benefits provided by the bill, thanks to racist Southern Democrats who feared it would provide African American vets with a chance to socially advance. (See: How the GI Bill's Promise Was Denied to a Million Black WWII Veterans)

A Deeper Chasm

The end of the Selective Service draft in 1973 created an even deeper chasm between those who serve and those who don’t. According to the U.S. Census Service, 18 percent of the U.S. population were veterans in 1980; by 2016 that was down to seven percent. Some of that decline, of course, was due to older vets passing away. But during the height of the Vietnam draft, there were 3.5 million men and women on active duty; today there are only 1.3 million on active duty, or less than .5 percent of the population.

In the days following the 9/11 attacks, I was discussing whether the draft would be reinstated with a fellow veteran I worked with. I pointed out that if it were brought back, it would have to include women. A young female colleague became horrified at the idea she might be drafted to fight in a war. “Why me!” she shrieked. “There are people who enjoy doing that.” Doing what? we asked. “You know,” she said. “Killing people.”

So, that’s what she thought about us.

In the cluster-you-know-what that became the Bush administration’s response to the terrorist attacks, yellow ribbon magnets with “Support Our Troops” were displayed on cars, and people started thanking us for our service (I was on a reserve Coast Guard boat crew, and later became a medical service corps officer in a component of the California National Guard). Sailors, soldiers, Marines, and airmen were suddenly “warriors,” as if they belonged to a separate social stratum. And still the Bush administration forbade the media from photographing or videotaping aircraft filled with flag-draped coffins bringing home our country’s honored war dead.

It’s gratifying to see America’s outrage over Trump’s reported comments about our war dead, but I wonder how long it will last or if it will have any impact at all. Despite Trump’s multiple Vietnam draft deferments—the last due to a spurious diagnosis of bone spurs—and despite his dismissal of John McCain’s military service, and despite so much more, he was still “elected” president. And the bulk of those who voted for him were the good, God-fearing people of the American South and other rural areas, the same people who treated those of us in uniform so badly 47 years ago.

And that’s why I fear Trump’s slandering those who served and sacrificed as “losers” and “suckers” won’t make a difference at the polls.

A Novel More Prescient Than Fiction

2020-08-22T12:21:00.004-07:00

In 1935, American novelist and playwright Sinclair Lewis published a novel he meant to be a cautionary tale about the rise of an authoritarian government in the United States. But when read in today's political climate, the book seems less a work of fiction than a prescient foreboding of what was to come.

The basic plot of It Can't Happen Here involves a pompous, blustering, populist politician who gets elected president running on a platform that is anti-woman, anti-Jew, and anti-black, by making promises he can never deliver on, by accusing the news media of spreading lies, and by proclaiming only he can cure the country's ills and "make it great again." Once he takes office, he begins issuing orders that by-pass the law-making powers of Congress and the legal review of the judiciary, and strips the rights of millions of people.

What sounds like a plot torn from today's headlines was actually written 80 years before the election of Donald Trump to the White House.

Sinclair's bitingly witty story holds so many parallels to the results of the 2016 election and its aftermath as to be unnerving. Written at a time when fascist governments were popping up throughout Europe, the book was inspired by the naïve belief of Americans at the time that what was happening across the Atlantic "can't happen here."

Berzelius "Buzz" Windrip is a populist U.S. senator loosely based on the bombastic southern Senator Huey Long, whose quest for the presidency was ended by an assassin's bullet in 1935. Windrip curries the favor of Americans disgruntled over the economic blight of the Great Depression by claiming he would end unemployment, much as Trump promised to "bring jobs back" to America.

Men of Little Intellectual Curiosity

A man of little intellectual curiosity, Windrip claims his autobiography is the world's greatest book next to the Bible, the same claim made by an equally incurious Trump about his ghostwritten autobiography The Art of the Deal. Windrips' political base is a rag-tag group of agitators called The Minute Men, or MMs for short. Think of the MMs as a combination of the Tea Party radicals and Alt-Right white supremacists who helped put Trump into office.

Windrip runs for office, much as Trump did, with promises of taking power in Washington away from industrialists and bankers and giving it back to the little man. Once in power, however, Windrip begins appointing incompetent cronies to key government leadership roles.

Sound familiar? Trump, who promised to "drain the swamp" in Washington, filled his Cabinet with controversial D.C. insiders, family members, wealthy financiers, corporate CEOs, and lobbyists—most of whom were appointed to their offices without approval from Congress.

Almost immediately, Windrip by-passes Congress and begins issuing executive orders ending President Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal social programs, stripping women of the right to vote, and Jews and blacks of their civil rights. He replaces key military leaders with buffoons from the Minutemen, and abolishes all regulations on businesses.

In the first few days of his administration, Trump used executive orders to strip regulations on banks, industry, and polluters; demanded the repeal of President Obama's Affordable Care Act; ordered the mass deportation of undocumented immigrants (at least those who are non-Anglo); began caging Hispanic immigrant children, and removed the nation's top military and national security leaders from the National Security Council, replacing them with his Alt-Right strategist, Steve Bannon. Bannon, a self-professed white nationalist, didn't last long, of course, and as of this writing he is facing federal criminal charges for fraud.

To consolidate power, Windrip sends handpicked "commissioners" to assume the leadership of local governments. The move is very similar to the Nazis use of gauleiters to take control of areas of Germany. Trump hasn't done that—yet—but several Republican governors have dispatched "emergency managers" to take over local government bodies in their states. (Two such emergency managers were charged with felonies for their roles in the Flint, Michigan drinking water fiasco.)

Windrip fails to make good on any of his campaign promises save one; he ends unemployment by sending the unemployed to labor camps. Workers from labor camps are provided to companies for a small fee. This, of course, means those companies lay off regular workers who, now unemployed, are sent to labor camps.

As one of his first acts, Trump rescinded President Obama's executive order to withdraw federal prisoners from privately operated prisons, which have been criticized for bolstering their profits by outsourcing inmates as prison laborers.

Building Walls to Keep Us In

Windrip fulfills one of Trump's campaign promises when he strengthens border security to prevent illegal immigration out of the United States into Canada and Mexico. Walls, after all, keep people in as well as out. Trump has not succeeded in building his promised border wall, but his incompetence during the Covid-19 crisis forced the bulk of Europe to ban U.S. travelers from visiting their countries—essentially building a wall to keep us in. The only wall Trump succeeded in building so far is an "unscalable" wall around the White House grounds.

Eventually, as Windrip consolidates his power, he does away with all political parties except the new Corporatist Party, whose members are called Corpos. The country is now ruled by and for corporations and wealthy oligarchs, the very definition of fascism as defined by the father of fascism, Italy's Il Duce, Benito Mussolini.

Trump stuffed his Cabinet with wealthy and mostly incompetent corporate donors. His economic policies have benefited major corporations at the expense of American workers. His trade war with China did nothing to hurt that country while devastating a large part of the American agricultural sector. Even before the pandemic, Trump's job numbers were plunging despite burgeoning corporate profits.

Lewis narrates his story through the disbelieving eyes of Doremus Jessup, a middle-aged newspaperman who cannot believe his fellow citizens don't see the slow creep of growing totalitarianism in the country. When MMs begin to terrorize the citizenry, people assume they are just a small minority of rabble-rousers. Even when Windrip establishes concentration camps to house his enemies, many in the country simply cannot believe the United States is falling victim to corporate fascism. They continue to believe "it can't happen here." By the time they realize it has happened here, it is too late.

Trump has praised white supremacists, neo-Nazis, and QAnon conspiracy theorists. He ordered federal police and troops to attack peaceful demonstrators so he could be photographed holding a Bible outside a Washington church. His followers have attacked synagogues and mosques, and gunned down cops. Federal agents clad in unmarked military uniforms kidnapped peaceful protesters in Portland, Ore., threw them into unmarked vehicles, and held them without just cause. Alt-Right armed militia are being allowed to patrol American streets. One of those "minutemen," a 17-year-old teenager with an illegal weapons, is now accused of murdering two people.

And still too many Americans refuse to see this country's slide into authoritarianism. They still believe "it can't happen here."

Lewis's inspiration for this book was simply the time in which it was written. In the 1930s, the United States was still recovering from the Great Depression. Ninety percent of the country's wealth was owned by only three percent of the population. (Today, after 30 years of Reaganomics, only one percent of Americans own the bulk of the nation's wealth).

Dissatisfaction over the slow economic recovery spawned several populist movements, many of them pro-fascist. In 1932, a group of wealthy conservatives attempted a coup to overthrow the government and establish a fascist government. (See: American Fascists: A Forgotten History on this blog.)

Lewis doesn't spare any political movement in this book. He views any strongly held belief system, political or religious, as potentially authoritarian. All it takes is a populace too wrapped up in their own lives to not recognize what's happening about them, or not caring what's happening as long as it doesn't happen to them.

There is no happy ending to this book. There is no great uprising of patriots; many of those who most loudly proclaimed their patriotism in the beginning of the book end up in the MMs or working for Windrip, just as the Republican Party—which initially opposed Trump's candidacy—is now his greatest enabler.

Far more than Orwell's 1984 or Huxley's Brave New World, It Can't Happen Here is a cautionary tale all Americans should be reading—and heeding—today.

Trump’s Nero’s Decree: How He Is Planning a Scorched Earth Policy for America

2020-07-26T16:34:00.009-07:00

In the dwindling days of WWII, as Russian artillery battered Berlin, Adolf Hitler hunkered in his bunker and pouted over how the German people failed him. Believing the deutsche Leute had betrayed the Thousand Year Reich by being too weak, he determined they no longer deserved the Fatherland. If he were going down, Hitler would make sure all of Germany went down with him.

Der Fuhrer turned to his armaments minister, Albert Speer, who had just reported that the German economy could not hold out for more than two months and said, “it is not necessary to worry about their [the German people’s] needs for elemental survival.” Hitler issued an order to destroy Germany’s entire infrastructure, including transportation facilities, docks, public utilities, factories, and mines. Leave nothing was to rebuild Germany after the war.

Fortunately, Speer and the German generals refused to follow such orders, which became known as Hitler’s Nero Decree.

The order was named after the Roman dictator who, according to legend, fiddled while ancient Rome burned. While historians dismiss the idea Nero set Rome ablaze or played music while it burned, they do agree the disaster fit nicely into his political agenda. He used it as an excuse to clamp down on Christians whom he blamed for the fire, and tortured and killed hundreds.

Such “scorched earth policies” are often the last resort failing dictators reach for before the end. Libya’s long-time dictator, Muammar Gaddafi, invoked a scorched earth policy in 2011 as his regime started disintegrating amid the Libyan Civil War. Gaddafi ordered the nation’s oil fields set ablaze, pummeled entire towns to dust with artillery fire, and ordered his army to “shoot anything that moves.”

Hoping to maintain his regime, Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad repeatedly has used chemical weapons against his own people, laying toxic waste to large parts of his country.

For the past four months, Donald Trump appeared to be executing his own Nero’s Decree. Since emerging from his White House bunker—to which he fled on May 31 when confronted by unarmed, peaceful demonstrators—and as he trailed his presidential campaign opponent, Joe Biden, by double digits, Trump’s actions reflected those of a tyrant facing his demise and demanding revenge.

Now that Biden has been proclaimed the president-elect, Trump will have two more months to promote his scorched earth policy.

Now before anyone flames me for calling Trump a tyrant, I am not using that word lightly nor am I the only person who believes that’s what he wants to be. There are definite attributes for fascism and tyrants. In February 2020, Stephen M. Walt wrote in Foreign Policy that Trump has nearly check off each of those attributes. And Trump’s persistent extreme right-wing rhetoric itself has been described by pundits as a “scorched earth policy.”

Besides checking off the dictator’s do-to list, Trump’s decisions—or the lack of decisions—appear intended to do the greatest harm to the U.S.

Weaponizing Covid-19

Trump’s failure to lead during the current Covid-19 crisis goes beyond mere incompetence; it borders

Donald Trump rips off his mask after arriving
back at the White House despite being contagious.

on premeditated mass murder. Even the dumbest, vain man—seeing the pandemic turn into, as one health expert called it, “a wildfire”—should be able to admit defeat and turn to his science advisors for guidance. Trump’s repeated refusal to listen to the experts or implement even the simplest means of slowing the spread of the virus looks more like active sabotage. Does he hope the virus will continue to ravage American citizens after they vote him out of office?

Apparently, that is exactly what he is hoping. After contracting the Covid-19 virus in October, Trump continued to attend a political debate, a campaign rally, and a celebration party for his latest U.S. Supreme Court candidate—all without masks or social distancing. Hospitalized for treatment, Trump insisted his Secret Service security detail drive him around the block in a sealed presidential limo so he could wave to his followers, thus exposing his own bodyguards to the virus. After three days in the hospital, Trump checked himself out and returned to the White House where—still refusing to wear a mask or remain in isolation—he continues to spread the virus.

As of this writing, Trump's arrogance and ignorance has resulted in several members of his own staff down sick with the virus as well as several senior senators and many of his security detail. The entire Joint Chiefs of Staff who control our national defense are now isolated because of their exposure to the virus through Trump and his associates. His recklessness has essentially decapitated our government.

And yet Trump continued holding campaign rallies, exposing more of his mask-less supporters and more of his Secret Service detail, and more of his staff to the virus. He even tweeted to his followers there was nothing to fear about the coronavirus, a disease that has killed more than 200,000 Americans so far.

We can expected Trump to further endanger the country to the Covid virus. He promised to fire Dr. Anthony Fauci after the election, leading the country war again the virus without its most competent leader. He will encourage more super-spreader events such as protests and rallies, all designed to sicken more Americans.

Militarizing American Streets

In May, Trump ordered federal troops to attack and disperse peaceful protesters outside the White House. Shortly after leaving his bunker, Trump threatened to unleash federal troops and law enforcement on the American people.

At the time I wrote that Trump was making the same mistake President Herbert Hoover made in 1932 when he unleased federal troops on the Bonus Marchers, WWI veterans demanding money Congress had promised them. Hoover’s disastrous actions cost him his reelection.

I didn’t expect Trump to listen and he didn’t.

Supposed federal officer photographed as they
snatched a Portland protester and shoved him
into an unmarked van. Source: Wikipedia

In July, Trump sent heavily armed federal officers in combat gear to Portland to confront peaceful protesters demonstrating in front of the federal courthouse. He did so without conferring with state or local offices. The administration said Trump sent the officers to protect federal property.

Shortly after their arrival, the feds started kidnapping protesters off city streets and shoving them into unmarked vans. The demonstrations became violent, largely due to the federal forces’ own heavy-handed and unnecessary tactics. Both local and state officials say those actions are exacerbating the protests. Despite their mission to protect federal property, local officials now say those federal forces are patrolling far beyond the courthouse and are trying to enforce local laws over which they have no jurisdiction.

The actual identity of many of those federal forces remained unknown for weeks. The military garbed officers wore no patches or badges identifying their agencies other than a small patch saying “police.” That raised questions whether they are actual law enforcement officers or private security contractors or even right-wing "militia." Indeed, a group of armed pretend soldiers did make an appearance, but it now appears most of the military-garbed troops were from the Department of Homeland Security.

Trump’s dispatching federal officers to Portland set that city ablaze and put Trump’s poll numbers into free fall. Even with their eventual withdrawal, the city has yet to find peace. Trump threatened to send more federal agents to other cities. No city has requested such "help" and some threatened to meet the agents with their own law enforcement forces. Trump is very likely to make good on his threats for the next two months.

As he loses the power over the federal law enforcement apparatus, expect Trump to turn to his personal armed militias, those right-wing, white supremacist terrorist cells he once described as "some good people." During one of the debates, he told these latter day Nazi Brown Shirts to "stand by," presumably meaning to prepare for violence at his command.

Trump's refusal to acknowledge the accuracy of the vote, coupled with numerous meritless lawsuits he filed to stop the vote, is designed to create mistrust of the election process among his so-long misled followers. Trump hopes to propel his followers, particularly the militias, into the streets to commit acts of violence. Even as the vote was continuing, Trump stirred up unrest in his supporters, causing them to gather in angry protests around vote-counting centers, even threatening voting officials and counters. Two Trump supporters armed with rifles drove from Virginia to Pennsylvania intending to stop the vote with blood shed.

No Peaceful Transition

Trump says he will not concede the election and will take his fight for continued power up to the U.S. Supreme Court, which he has packed with ultra-conservative justices. Whether the court supports Trump or not, his legal shenanigans will further erode trust in our democracy and fill our streets with both anti-Trump protesters and pro-Trump protesters, the latter probably armed. Pro-Trump agents provocateurs will initiate violence, just as the FBI said they did in Portland and elsewhere. Make no mistake about it, if he can, Trump will start another civil war and leave the nation in flames.

If Trump continues his scorch earth decisions, the result will undoubtedly be more violence. Cities, like Portland, will burn. The coronavirus, fed by the violence, will spread. Americans will suffer and die.

And Trump will have his revenge.

This article was updated on November 7, 2020.

Conservatives Snapping at the Hand that Feeds Them

2020-07-09T14:40:00.004-07:00

A few years ago, the New York Times published two pieces shedding light on the most mysterious—and, to Democrats, the most frustrating—fact of American political life: that those conservative-voting “red” states consume far more federal government “entitlements” benefits than liberal-voting “blue” states.

This is both mysterious and frustrating to the Democrats because the Republican Party— including Donald Trump and Senate Leader Mitch McConnell—rails against what they call “the welfare state.”

According to the GOP, the so-called “welfare state” discourages Americans—in their view, blacks and Hispanics—from seeking honest work. But, as the Times article pointed out, most of the recipients of government benefits are white conservatives who are retired or disabled. What makes people such as these vote against their own interests?

Shortly after the first article appeared, Paul Krugman, the Times Nobel Prize-winning economist columnist, also explored that conundrum.

Krugman points to an Indiana University study showing that residents of the 10 states ranked by the Gallup Poll as being the “most conservative” received 21.2 percent of their income from government entitlements, compare to only 17.1 percent for the 10 states Gallup ranked as “most liberal.”

“Wasn’t Red America supposed to be the land of traditional values, where people don’t eat Thai food and don’t rely on handouts?” Krugman asks.

Forty-four percent of Social Security recipients, 43 percent of unemployment benefit recipients, and 40 percent of Medicare recipients claim they have never used a “government program.”

Many people receiving benefits, Krugman says, either don’t know or won’t admit they are, as conservatives would say, “on the public dole.” He quotes a Cornell University professor’s study that showed 44 percent of Social Security recipients, 43 percent of unemployment benefit recipients, and 40 percent of Medicare recipients claim they have never used a “government program.”

I think conservative voters who refuse to admit they’re receiving benefits—even vote for politicians who pledge to take those benefits away from them—do so because they simply can’t admit to themselves they are “on the dole.”

There persists in this country—particularly among conservatives—the idea of “rugged American individualism,” that real Americans pull themselves up by their own boot straps (and other nationalistic clichés). The problem is “rugged American individualism” is more myth than history.

From the very founding of this country, the United States has been a collaborative effort. The U.S. Constitution established this union because the original loose confederation of states wasn’t working.

While mountain men like Jeremiah Johnson may have gone it alone, the majority of those who settled the frontier territories did so as a group. They came in wagon trains for mutual protection, built towns with communal schools and churches, and helped each other build their homes with “barn raisings.” How socialistic can you get?

Yet the more conservative a person gets, it seems, the more they suffer from denial. As a former business newspaper editor, I’ve repeatedly seen business owners and CEOs talk about how they made their fortunes on their own. They never give credit to the government tax breaks and federal small business loans they used to start their businesses.

Yet this “corporate welfare” amounts to hundreds of billions of dollars each year. Federal corporate welfare alone amounted to $80-$100 billion dollars a year in the late 1990s—and that didn’t count the corporate welfare delivered at the state and local levels. No one knows how much the federal government spends on corporations today, but with George W. Bush’s $15 billion bailout of the airlines after the 9/11 attacks and his $700 billion bailout of his Wall Street cronies in 2007, followed by Donald Trump's massive tax cuts for corporations and the richest American citizens, it has undoubtedly ballooned.

Like their citizen supporters, conservative politicians criticize these programs while holding their hands out for more.

Republican Senator Mitt Romney is a perfect example. In his book, Romney compared Social Security to a criminal enterprise. He tells the story about grandparents who create a trust fund to provide for their grandchildren’s education. As the kids grow up, the bank is spending the money from the trust fund on something else. When the kids are ready to go college, there is no money in the trust fund.

“What would happen to the bankers responsible for misusing the money?” Romney writes. “They would go to jail.”

Besides the fact that Romney appears ignorant of how banks do business—they do, in fact, spend your savings on something else (they call them investments)—it also shows he doesn’t believe he ever drank from the public trough.

Yet Bain Capital, Romney’s infamous vulture capitalist firm, received a $44 million federal bailout in 2001 when the senator was its CEO. Ten years earlier, in 1991, Romney negotiated a $10 million federal bailout for Bain that kept the corporation from bankruptcy and dissolution.

The GOP's hypocrisy on government welfare was well on display this month after the Treasure Department disclosed who was receiving forgivable loans from the Paycheck Protection Program. The program was established to help small businesses—that is mom-and-pops—keep their employees on the payroll during the current coronavirus crisis.

Treasury's disclosure, however, showed much of the money is going to large corporations, billionaires, and churches—including the Church of Scientology—and to Trump's friends and family. In fact, businesses tied to Trump’s family and associates stand to receive as much as $21 million in PPP loans. Several businesses tied to Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner have been approved for up to $6 million in loans, while a business backed by Trump's son, Donald Jr., could received up to $150,000 in loans.

During a June 6 virtual public round table, Romney promised that the Small Business Administration would be "flexible" in determining which loans would be forgiven (i.e., not paid back).

Yet at the same time, news reports indicate Romney is secretly working behind closed doors to put the ax to Social Security and Medicare. Despite the fact American workers put their own money into these government insurance programs, Romney still considers them government handouts. Yet the Utah senator still does not believe the bailouts Bain received or the forgivable PPP loans Trump's friends and family members received are the true “public dole.”

Like other conservatives, Romney can’t be honest with himself either.

GOP the "Party of Lincoln?" Not So Fast There...

2020-06-30T14:45:00.002-07:00

During his poorly attended, virus-ridden June campaign event in Tulsa, Oklahoma, Donald Trump once again pulled out the GOP’s favorite meme, that the Republican Party was the “party of Lincoln.” Republicans love this claim because it fits so nicely into the grade school lessons most people remember—that is Abraham Lincoln was elected president in 1860 on the GOP ticket and reelected again in 1864 on behalf of the Grand Old Party.

Republican Lincoln ran for
reelection with Democrat Johnson
as his running mate.

The problem is Lincoln did not actually run for reelection on the Republican Party ticket. And if you remember back to your high history lessons, you'll remember Lincoln's running mate in 1864—Andrew Johnson—was a Democrat. A Democrat running on a Republican Party ticket? How could that be?

When confronted with that fact today, the GOP simply claims they temporary changed the party’s name for that one election. It wasn’t that simple. The National Union Party was comprised of both Republicans and Democrats.

Party Schisms

This bizarre fact of history came about because by 1864 a political schism slashed through the Republican Party. First, Lincoln was a dark horse candidate that no one in the party ever expected to rise to be their presidential nominee. Even after his election, Lincoln never really received the full support of his party.

One reason for that was a faction of the party called the Radical Republicans who were strong proponents of abolition, the enfranchisement of blacks, and—after secession—ensuring the South paid dearly for its treason. They disliked Lincoln and his call for a gentle reintegration of the South after the war. And in a political case of you can't win for losing, many Republicans were outraged by Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, especially since four Union states— Maryland, Missouri, Delaware, and Kentucky—were still slave states. Those who opposed Lincoln's policies demanded he step down after his first term.

On the other side of the aisle, the Democratic Party was experiencing its own policy split. Before the war, the Democrats were the party of the South and of slavery. After the Southern secession, those Democrats who remained loyal to the Union were split into two categories—the War Democrats who supported Lincoln’s war to force the South’s return into the Union, and the Copperheads, or Peace Democrats, who opposed the war and demanded a peace settlement with the South.

For the 1864 presidential election, both parties experienced so much division it was impossible for the traditional two-party balloting to take place. The Radical Republicans formed a separate party, the Radical Democracy Party, and nominated John C. Frémont, famed explorer and the Republican presidential nominee in the 1856 election. War Democrat John Cochrane, a former Union Army general, was his running mate.

Other War Democrats joined Republicans in forming the National Union Party, which nominated Lincoln for president with War Democrat Johnson as his running mate.

The Democratic Party, now largely a Copperhead party, nominated former Major General George McClelland, whom Lincoln had fired as head of the Union Army, as its presidential nominee.

National Union
campaign poster

Couldn't Win as a Republican

As much as today’s GOP likes to describe itself as “the party of Lincoln,” the truth is Lincoln faced losing reelection if he ran solely on a Republican Party platform. Many of the National Unionists would not vote for a Republican candidate. Robert Jefferson Breckinridge, chairman of the National Union Party’s convention, declared to Lincoln, “As a Union party I will follow you to the ends of the earth, and to the gates of death. But as an Abolition party, as a Republican party, as a Whig party, as a Democratic party, as an American [Know-Nothing] party, I will not follow you one foot.”

The Radical Republican’s attempt to win the presidency did not last long. Realizing that his third-party candidacy might hand the White House over to McClelland and the Democrats, Frémont withdrew from the race. McClelland himself did not agree with the Copperheads’ platform demanding a peace settlement with the Confederacy, but the National Unionists used that platform to discredit the one-time hero of the Union.

Lincoln won reelection by a landslide. The Republicans and the Democrats of the National Union Party returned to their former entities, as did the Radical Republicans and the Copperheads. By the end of April 1865, Lincoln would be dead, assassinated by John Wilkes Booth. But, for the few remaining months of his presidency, Lincoln was not a Republican president or a Democratic president, but a National Union president supported openly by members from both traditional national parties.

So, when today’s GOP claims to be “the party of Lincoln,” they are simply wrong. Lincoln transcended any one party. Unlike Trump, Lincoln was a president for the nation.

Ayn Rand's Corrosive Influence on American Politics

2020-06-13T11:09:00.006-07:00

The three and a half years he’s been in the White House, Donald Trump has shown himself to be a greedy, self-involved, narcissistic, sociopath. At the same time, Republican leadership in the U.S. Senate to be of like mind with Trump. It’s not difficult to understand why; their brand of political conservatism is, at its heart, sociopathic.

But the true inspiration behind their hard-edged conservatism is neither Pinochet nor Friedman, but a mediocre, early 20th century novelist and self-proclaimed philosopher named Ayn Rand. Rand’s brand of social Objectivism has been the center of extreme right philosophy. GOP Senator Rand Paul, along with his former Republican congressman father, Ron Paul, are hard-core adherents to Ayn Rand’s philosophy. Her belief system was also behind the Tea Party movement.

Her novel, The Fountainhead, is one of the few books Trump said he enjoyed reading. When he became president, Trump proclaimed he would appoint Rand acolytes to cabinet posts. One of those, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, told the Washington Post, “One of the very first serious books I read when I was growing up was Atlas Shrugged, and it really had an impact on me.” Pompeo is said to be currently facing multiple internal corruption probes.

The problem is, Ayn Rand’s philosophy and writing are sociopathic.

The Russian-born Rand has been poisoning the minds of self-absorbed adolescents for decades with her philosophy of the individual as the center of the universe. That philosophy holds well with high schoolers who truly believe the universe revolves around them. Most people say adieu to Rand and her rants as they mature. Those that don’t become sociopaths— as Rand was herself.

The terrorist-hero of The
Fountain was based on a
real-life psychopathic killer.

Had she ever laid herself on a psychiatrist’s couch, Rand no doubt would have been diagnosed as sociopathic. Throughout her life, Rand—like the heroes in her best-known books, The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged—believed whatever was good for her was right. She once wrote the basis of her philosophy stemmed from her childhood in post-Revolution Russia when her parents refused to buy her a dress she wanted or give her a cup of tea like the grown-ups were drinking. She believed if she wanted something, she should have it. It is said she once took money that her family needed for food to buy tickets to the theater.

Rand was so enamored with the idea of the unfettered self, she developed an infatuation with the notorious psychopathic serial killer, William Edward Hickman. In 1928, Hickman kidnapped his last victim, a 12-year-old girl, and held her for ransom. When the girl’s father paid the ransom, Hickman dumped the girl’s eviscerated and dismembered body in the street. At the time, it was considered one of the greatest crimes of the century.

Psychopathic 'Superman'

Ayn Rand felt otherwise.

In her notebooks, Rand wrote admiringly of Hickman. “Other people do not exist for him, and he does not see why they should,” she wrote. She added, using words eerily prescient of what the Nazis would be saying a few years hence, that Hickman had “no regard whatsoever for all that society holds sacred, and with a consciousness all his own. He has the true, innate psychology of a Superman. He can never realize and feel ‘other people.’”

Hickman, who was executed in 1928, became the model for Rand’s Fountainhead hero, Howard Roark, a self-absorbed architect who wins a woman’s devotion by raping her, and ends up committing an act of terrorism—blowing up the Fountainhead building—because he didn’t get his way.

Howard Roark, like his real-life model, was one sick puppy.

Rand’s self-proclaimed Objectivism philosophy basically says man makes his own reality. Whatever he determines to be, is. Evidence of how wide-spread this narcissistic philosophy is among the extreme right of the Republican Party was seen when Karl Rove, then chief advisor to President George Bush, told journalist Ron Susskind, “we create our own reality … we’ll act again, creating other new realities.”

Former GOP House speaker Paul Ryan, also an Ayn Rand fan, carried that same philosophy to the podium at the 2012 Republican Convention when, as Mitt Romney’s running mate, he delivered a diatribe on the Obama administration that was so separated from reality that even Fox News criticized its lies.

Kindred Spirits

Ryan, in fact, has a lot in common with Rand. Like her, Ryan likes to bite the hand that fed him. Ryan, youngest son of an upper middle-class family, received Social Security survivors’ benefits after his attorney father died of a heart attack. Since his family didn’t need those benefits to survive on, Ryan stuffed them away and used them to pay for his college education. Later he advocated doing away with Social Security for those who do need it.

Ryan's home in Wisconsin was declared a national historic site, meaning the Ryan family receives a taxpayer subsidy to maintain it. Since graduating from college, Ryan drew a government paycheck, first as a congressional aid, then as a congressman. Now retired from Congress, Ryan continues to collect a government pension and tax-payer subsidized health care.

Ayn Rand, too, took advantage of a government-sponsored education in the Soviet Union, and then turned against the system as soon as it no longer benefited her. She was the beneficiary of many government programs in the United States, as well. When her first play abruptly closed in 1938, the Works Progress Administration took it on a nationwide tour and paid Rand a weekly salary. In her old age, Rand regularly criticized those living on Social Security, even though she was receiving Social Security benefits under a married name.

Like Trump, Ayn Rand was an amoral, narcissistic, sociopath, and her poisoned pen continues taint American political thought and corrupt American political morals.

_____________________

UPDATE (July 8, 2020): Like the woman whose juvenile rhetoric they advocate, the Ayn Rand Institute admitted on July 7 that it had received up to $1 million in forgivable loans from the Paycheck Protection Program approved by Congress to help businesses during the Covid-19 crisis. The institute, which continues Rand's criticism of government welfare of any kind, used twisted logic to rationalized why it took the bailout. Apparently it isn't enough for the institute to keep Rand's childish philosophy of greed and selfishness alive, they also follow her hypocrisy, too.

For further reading:

Trump Administration Embraces Ayn Rand's Disdain for the Masses

US Republican leaders love Ayn Rand

The new age of Ayn Rand: how she won over Trump and Silicon Valley

Ayn Rand-acolyte Donald Trump stacks his cabinet with fellow objectivists

Romancing the Stone-Cold Killer: Ayn Rand and William Hickman

‘We Took PPP Funds and Would Do It Again’

In sign of the times, Ayn Rand Institute approved for PPP loan

American Fascists: A Forgotten History

2020-06-11T10:57:00.003-07:00

As many American cities burned in the wake of the police killing of an unarmed black man, videos taken by news crews and private citizens revealed a part of America that has been hidden—or more accurately, ignored—for decades. But since the election of Donald Trump, Americans brandishing swastikas and raising their arms in the Nazi salute have become almost a daily sight. Many patriotic Americas have asked who are they and where did they come from?

The appearance of these cretins doesn’t surprise me. Fascism, in its various forms has been part of the American underbelly for the better part of a century. The 1920s and 1930s saw the rise of fascism not only in Europe, but in the United States as well.

Members of the German American Bund parade
through Camp Norland in New Jersey. (Source: National
Archives)

Throughout Thirties brown-shirted and jackbooted thugs of the German American Bund—essentially the Nazi Party affiliate in the U.S.—marched proudly through American streets, spreading their religion of hate and racism. There were Nazi enclaves in the woods for training, and summer camps for the children of American Nazis. In 1939, 22,000 Bund members held a massive rally in New York's Madison Square Garden. The Bund also affiliated with America’s first terrorist group, the Klu Klux Klan.

They Weren't Alone.

Even before the Bund, there was the Fascist League of North America, an umbrella group composed primarily of Italian-American supporters of Italy's dictator Benito Mussolini, considered by many to be the father of modern fascism. Mussolini coined the word fascism, comparing the rule of government by corporations for corporations to a fascine, in which weak sticks bound together create a strong foundation.

The Silver Legion of America, also known as the Silver Shirts due to their uniforms' silver camp shirts, at one time boasted at least 15,000 members. They owned a militarized compound in the hills surrounding Los Angeles in which they expected Adolf Hitler to stay after the Nazis took over the U.S. In 1936, their leader, William Dudley Pelley, ran for president on a third-party ticket.

The German-American Businessmen's Association, commonly called the DAWA (the German acronym for the Deutsch Amerikanischer Wirtschaft Auscbuss), focused primarily on ruining Jewish-owned businesses. Instead using the physical brutality the Nazis in Germany did on Kristallnacht in 1938, the American DAWA used boycotts to destroy Jewish businesses.

Closely allied with these groups—particularly the Bund—was the Christian Front which, despite calling itself Christian nevertheless sowed violence throughout New York. The Front denounced Jews and other non-Christians, and praised Hitler and Spain's fascist dictator Francisco Franco.

Included Members of Congress

It would be easy to dismiss these groups as simply a fanatical political fringe, but the bloody fingers of fascism reached deep into 1930s American politics. Many members of Congress—mostly Republican but also some conservative Democrats—openly supported in speeches these American fascist groups as well as the rise of fascism and Nazism in Europe. In 1942, mystery novelist Rex Stout published The Illustrious Dunderheads, a collection of pro-fascist speeches given by conservative American politicians during the 1930s.

There were some American fascists who chose action over words. In 1933, retired Marine Corps Major General Smedley Butler, a two-time recipient of the Medal of Honor, was approached by two men representing wealthy and conservative American bankers and industrialists. The men explained they had been sent to Europe to study fascism and how best to bring it to the United States. Their backers decided a coup was the best idea, and they wanted Butler to lead it.

Butler played along and gathered evidence for the FBI and a subsequent Congressional investigation by the House Un-American Activities Committee. Known by many names—The Business Plot, the Wall Street Plot, and The American Putsch—the plot was largely swept under the Capitol's rug, since so many well-known millionaires (and political contributors) were apparently involved.

In 2007, the BBC reported Prescott Bush, father, and grandfather of two American presidents, was one of those wealthy financiers involved in the American Putsch. Bush was a well-known supporter of Hitler's rise to power and was prosecuted for continuing to do business with the Nazis even after Hitler declared war on the United States in 1941.

Forgotten History

In the aftermath of WWII, many wanted to forget the exuberance with which they embraced fascism in the 1930s. The rise of the Soviet Union as the next great enemy gave many conservatives what they needed to distract Americans from the recent past. The McCarthy Era with its numerous and unsubstantiated claims of "commies everywhere" was simply a means of making voters forget the sins of the conservative right prior to the war.

Since WWII, American fascism had lain hidden in the political shadows. Certainly, over the decades, overt images of it—neo-Nazis, KKK, and so on—were occasionally seen in the media. But there also was a latent vestige of fascism that shunned the term "fascist" but cheered the concept of "nationalism"—one of the markers of fascist thought—and its memes like "American exceptionalism." Sinclair Lewis predicted this in his book, It Can't Happen Here, when he wrote: "[T]he worst Fascists were they who disowned the word ‘Fascism’ and preached enslavement to Capitalism under the style of Constitutional and Traditional Native American Liberty.”

Decades ago, American writer George Santayana warned us, "Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it."

As seen at the top of this blog, those words are the motto of this site. And they are good words to live by.

References and further reading:

German American Bund: http://rarehistoricalphotos.com/american-nazi-organization-rally-madison-square-garden-1939/

Fascist League of North: America: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.2050-411X.1977.tb00427.x/epdf

Silver Legion: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2116684/Hitlers-Los-Angeles-bunker-planned-run-Nazi-empire-war.html

German-American Businessmen's Association (DAWA): http://archive.jta.org/1934/05/13/archive/jewish-merchants-in-yorkville-ruined-as-dawa-presses-war

Christian Front: http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=9F04EEDF1E3EE23ABC4A51DFB766838B659EDE&legacy=true

Illustrious Dunderheads: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6261112-the-illustrious-dunderheads

House Committee report on the American Putsch:

http://www.claytoncramer.com/primary/other/HUAC1.pdf;

http://www.claytoncramer.com/primary/other/HUAC2.pdf;

http://www.claytoncramer.com/primary/other/HUAC3.pdf.

Prescott Bush and the American Putsch:

https://timeline.com/business-plot-overthrow-fdr-9a59a012c32a

Nearly 100 Years after the Bonus March, Trump is Making the Same Mistakes

2020-06-03T16:08:00.001-07:00

A beleaguered president, facing an uncertain reelection amid the worst economic crisis of the century, unleashes the U.S. Army to attack nonviolent demonstrators protesting the president’s policies in front of the White House.

If you think I’m talking about Donald Trump’s June 1 use of federal troops to clear the streets in front of the White House of protesters, you’d be right. But there was another failed president who also used federals troops to attack demonstrators. If Trump thinks a “show of force” against recent protesters—not to mention his threat to send federal troops into states to quell demonstrations and riots—will get him reelected, he should look back on how such actions worked for one of his Republican predecessors, Herbert Hoover.

Nineteen thirty-two was an election year. Hoover was beleaguered by the Great Depression which started in 1929 when the stock market crashed. The last thing Hoover needed was a horde of ragged protesters setting up shanty towns in Washington, DC, and calling them “Hoovervilles.”

Promised Bonus for Veterans

The protesters in this case were veterans of the First World War, then known only as The Great War. In 1924, Congress authorized compensating war veterans for the wages they lost while serving in the military. However, this “bonus,” as it was called, would not be paid out until 1945.

As the Depression flung much of the country into poverty, war veterans began lobbying Congress for an earlier pay out of the bonus. Congress agreed to provide the veterans half of their bonuses as “loans.” That, however, was not enough and the veterans began marching toward Washington demanding the remainder of their bonuses. Thus, began the Bonus March.

The first Bonus Marchers reached D.C. that May and set up camps along Pennsylvania Avenue and other parts of the city. By summer, the number of protesters swelled to more than 40,000. Only around 17,000 were actual veterans; most of the rest were family members of the marchers. Though the vets fought the war in segregated units, there was no segregation among the Bonus Marchers. Black and white veterans marched shoulder to shoulder.

On July 28, then Attorney General William Mitchell—in a move that Trump’s attorney general, Bill Barr would repeat nearly 100 years later—ordered Washington police to disperse the protesters. The veterans resisted, and two were killed by police. Hoover then ordered the U.S. Army to clear away the marchers and their Hooverville campsites. The man in charge of the operation was then-Army Chief of Staff Gen. Douglas MacArthur.

MacArthur organized a force of 500 infantrymen, 500 cavalrymen, and six tanks backed by some 800 police officers. Leading the cavalry was Maj. George Patton, Jr. Both men would go on to become WWII legends. But they had something else in common.

Unusual Army Officers

MacArthur and Patton were both wealthy officers in a time when the U.S. Army was woefully underfunded and most officers and enlisted men were little better off than their civilian counterparts. MacArthur was the scion of Lt. Gen. Arthur MacArthur, Jr., a Civil War hero whose rose to one of the highest ranks in the Army. Patton was born into a modest family, but married a wealthy woman and adopted her family’s political views.

MacArthur viewed the veterans as traitors, accusing them of being communists and saying, “Pacifism and its bedfellow communism are all around us.” Patton also saw the protesters as “reds” and told his men, “If you must fire do a good job—a few casualties become martyrs, a large number an object lesson…”

Among the marchers was Joe T. Angelo, who had been Patton’s orderly during the war. Angelo received the Distinguish Service Cross for saving Patton’s life on the battlefield.

Bonus Marchers flee Army tear gas.
Source: National Archives

In the late afternoon, the federal troops began to move against the bonus marchers. Patton’s cavalry led the assault, followed by the infantry and tanks. The horse soldiers charged into the protesters with sabers drawn. The infantry followed with fixed bayonets and lobbing tear gas at the marchers. Tanks rolled over the shanty towns. Soldiers set the remains ablaze.

Two veterans died in rout, and dozens more were injured. A baby also died, apparently asphyxiated by the tear gas.

In the aftermath of the battle, Angelo approached his former commanding officer whose life he’d once saved. Patton refused to acknowledge the veteran, saying, “I do not know this man. Take him away and under no circumstances permit him to return.”

The next day, Hoover’s election opponent, Franklin D. Roosevelt, read a newspaper account of the attack. He turned to campaign aide, Felix Frankfurter, and said, “Well, Felix, this will elect me.” FDR went on to win in a landslide.

Repeating Mistakes

Nearly 100 years after the Bonus March, we are now seeing many of the same social elements that created that disaster—joblessness, poverty, and economic and social repression—compounded by a deadly pandemic and the unprecedented incompetence of Donald Trump and his fellow travelers. Trump blames the violence of the demonstrations on the today’s “reds,” the anti-fascist Antifa. (In fact, there is evidence agitators from the misnamed and extremist right-wing Patriot Movement may be to blame.) Desperate to look in control of the situation—or in his defense secretary’s words “dominate the battle space”—Trump has and continues contemplating turning the American Army on the American people.

One can almost hear Joe Biden turning to one of his campaign aides and saying, “Well, this will elect me.”

Cops are Being Targeted, but Not by Whom They Think

2020-05-30T09:43:00.007-07:00

Once again, a nonviolent black man has died at the hands of police officers. As Minneapolis burns in the wake of the death of George Floyd, who was being arrested for allegedly passing a forged $20 check, the question arises again—are white cops targeting people of color?

Unfortunately, the answer seems to be yes. In whole numbers, the number of white men versus black men killed by police officers per year is largely comparable. But when looked at in terms population ratios, black men are 2.5 times more likely to be killed by law enforcement; for black women that number is 1.4 times more likely. According to a Rutgers University study, 1-in-1,000 African American boys and men will be killed by police in their lifetime; for white boys and men, the rate is 39 out of 100,000.

Contentious History

But why? Historically, law enforcement has had a contentious relationship with Black Americans going back to the antebellum South when constables, sheriff’s, and state militia were responsible for hunting down escaped slaves. In the postbellum South, those same figures of authority were often the night riders of the Klu Klux Klan. Southern cops were also charged with enforcing the South’s notorious Jim Crow laws.

But that was then; this is now. So, are police officers today more likely to shoot African Americans because people of that race kill more cops than Caucasians? According to FBI statistics, of 556 persons charged in cop killings between 2004 and 2013, 289 were white, 243 were black, and the rest were Asian/Pacific Islanders or Native Americans. Again, in whole numbers, there is statistically no difference in the number of white and black cop killers. Yet, according to the Census Bureau, African Americans comprise only 13.4 percent of the American population. So, police could say they are more fearful of encounters with black suspects than white suspects, hence the outcome of those encounters are more likely to be violent.

Gunning for Cops

Yet, because America’s gun culture is largely a white phenomenon, Caucasian suspects are more likely to be armed, and heavily armed at that. And some of those armed whites are out gunning for cops.

According to a study by ThinkProgress, 33 officers shot between 2007 and 2017 were targeted by far-right extremists, including white supremacists and anti-government sovereign citizens. Statistics compiled by the Anti-Defamation League showed right-wing extremists killed 51 police officers between 1990 and 2018. Left-wing extremists, including black nationalists, killed 11.

These statistics and incidents do not include the dozens of alt-right extremists who, over the past two decades, planned attacks on local police and federal agents but were arrested before the attacks could be executed.

In June, police in Northern California arrested an active duty Air Force airman on charges of

Suspected alt-right extremist Steven Carrillo
was charged with ambushing Santa Cruz
sheriff's deputies.

ambushing and killing a Santa Cruz sheriff's deputy and wounding other. Steven Carrillo is also suspected in other recent attacks on local and federal law enforcement officers. Carrillo is suspected of having right-wing extremist belief based on statements on his social media. When arrested he was in possession of a semiautomatic rifle and home-made bombs.

Voting for Their Own Killers?

Generally, law enforcement officers tend to be conservative and vote as such. But these officers may be supporting the very people targeting them for death.

In December 2019, Washington State Rep. Matt Shea, a Republican, was accused by his own state legislature of secretly taking part in the 2016 six-week Malheur National Wildlife Refuge standoff between law enforcement agencies and members of the so-called “Patriot Movement.” Shea was accused of planning the deadly standoff as well as two other violent incidents over a three-year period.

The Patriot Movement is a notorious coalition of hard-right extremist groups including neo-Nazis and other white supremacists, anti-government sovereign statists, and armed militias. It’s members are responsible for most of the two decades of attacks on police mentioned earlier. Two members of the movement, Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols, blew up the Oklahoma City federal building in 1995, killing 168 people including many children.

These are the same people Donald Trump referred to as “some fine people” following the 2017 white supremacist demonstrations in Charlottesville, VA.

Shea Not Alone

Shea is not alone in the GOP in his support of the movement. According to Political Research Associates, numerous members of Oregon’s state legislature are either members or supporters of the Patriot Movement. So are many local law enforcement officials, meaning some day cops may be killing cops. In May 2019, the Arizona Republic reported that the Patriot Movement was pushing for more influence in the state’s GOP.

The Patriot Movement has gained renewed momentum from the current pandemic, using stay-at-home orders and business closures as a cause célèbre for their anti-government rhetoric. The corona crisis has also given these terrorists a new weapon. According to a March 2020 FBI intelligence report, white extremists who contract the virus are being encourage to spread it among the population by using spray bottles filled with their bodily fluids. Their primary targets? Jews and police officers.

Look, I have a law enforcement background from the military. Being a cop is hard, dangerous, and sometimes unrewarding work. But if I were a police officer today, I’d be less nervous about dealing with a black guy than I would a white guy. Especially if the white guy had a spray bottle.

Americans Must Learn the Lessons of the Spanish Flu

2020-05-24T12:13:00.003-07:00

Makeshift hospital for Spanish Flu victims.
Source: National Archives

Few people were prepared for the worldwide scourge thrust upon us by the sudden advent of the novel corona virus SARS-COV-2, the virus that causes the deadly COVID-19 disease. Yet despite repeated use of adjectives like “unprecedented,” and “extraordinary,” the fact is just 100 years ago the world faced a similar plague, the so-called Spanish Flu, which swept over the globe for the same reason today’s corona virus has—thanks to government secrecy and incompetence, and the inability for some ordinary citizens to look after themselves or care a damn about their friends and neighbors.

Yet the same virus that devastated the world a century ago can also teach us the way we can—and must—fight the current pandemic.

In America’s head-long rush to war in early 1918, few paid much attention to the growing number of soldiers reporting in sick with high fevers, body aches, and chills. It was, after all, flu season, and wartime expediency would not allow common influenza to slow down military training. Within a year, however, that flu would kill would vastly surpass the number of soldiers and sailors who died in combat on all sides during all four years of World War I.

So-Called Spanish Flu Death Toll

From August 1914 to the signing of the armistice in November 1918, about 16 million military personnel and civilians were killed or died of diseases associated with combat. From the spring of 1918 to the spring of 1919, the Spanish Flu claimed the lives of at least 40 million people—far more, too, than were lost in the Black Plague. Some estimates of the number of persons who succumbed to the Spanish Flu reach as high as 100 million.

Just as health experts today are warning of subsequent waves of SARS-COVID-2, the Spanish Flu came in three waves, with infection rates rising and ebbing, then rising again. At its height in the fall of 1918, the Purple Death, as it was also known, could kill a person in mere hours. Unlike most influenza variants, this flu killed more than just the very young and the very old. It was also particularly harsh for victims 20 to 40 years old—the very population that was fighting at the front.

And like today, there was no cure, no vaccine, and little support that medicine could provide other than prayer.

Flu Epidemic: Where Did It Come From?

Even today, no one absolutely is sure where such a virulent avian H1N1 flu virus came from. Some researchers believe it may have started in China. Others theorize the virus had been around for years, with minor outbreaks occurring in France in 1916 and England in 1917.

What we do know is that in January and February 1918, flu swept through rural Haskell County, Kansas. Between late February and early March, three recruits from Haskell County reported for training at Fort Riley, Kansas. Many historians believe one or more of these recruits carried the virus. By the end of March, thousands of Fort Riley soldiers were ill. Soldiers transferring to other military camps carried the virus with them, and soon 24 of the nation’s 36 largest military installations were suffering large outbreaks of influenza.

Though highly contagious, at this point the flu was still relatively mild. Though the death rate from this was somewhat higher than the normal rate of 0.1%, it wasn’t high enough to cause alarm. Infected and uninfected soldiers were packed into cramp troop ships for the voyage to the French port of Brest. By the time the ships arrived, even more of the soldiers were infected. They, in turn, carried the virus into the trenches.

Once brought into the trenches, the virus quickly spread through the British, French, and German forces. In wartime, however, casualty rates, even for illness, are kept secret. Media censorship prevented journalists from reporting on the large numbers of soldiers coming down ill in both the training camps and trenches. The families of soldiers who died of the flu were simply notified that their love one “died on the field of honor. “Whether on the battlefront or the home front, few people knew there was a flu epidemic. And no one realized how quickly it would become a global pandemic—or how deadly it would be.

By spring, the flu reached Spain, probably brought across the border by returning Spanish laborers who had been working in France. Because Spain was neutral in the war, there was no press censorship, and the Spanish media reported freely on what the news service Agencia Fabra called a “strange form of disease of epidemic character. “When the citizens of the belligerent countries finally became aware of the epidemics in their own nations, the flu had a new name. “Under the name of Spanish influenza, an epidemic is sweeping the North American Continent,” reported the Canadian Medical Association Journal. “It is said to have made its appearance first in Spain, hence Spanish influenza.”

The Second Wave Arrives

The flu subsided during the summer months of 1918, so much so that British military authorities declared the end to the Spanish Flu on August 10. But that—just as we’re seeing today—was merely wishful thinking. The influenza virus was only in waiting; changing itself, mutating into a more efficient predator.

Today, scientists understand that viruses can become more virulent as they pass from one human to another, a process called “passage.” The 1960 Nobel recipient Dr. Macfarlane Burnet estimated the relatively mild virus seen in the first wave of Spanish Flu had gone through fifteen to twenty human passages, emerging in the fall of 1918 a much more lethal disease than before. It would be this mutation that would give the Spanish Flu the nickname Purple Death.

As American soldiers continued to arrive in France in late August, French military authorities saw another eruption of influenza among their troops. So many sick French and American soldiers were hospitalized that the hospital had to turn away new victims.

And then, victims were dying in large numbers—20 times higher than normal flu—and many only hours after first showing symptoms. It was not unusual for a victim to wake up feeling fine, then collapse a few hours later. By dinner they would be dead. In between, bloody fluid filled the lungs, preventing the exchange of CO2 for oxygen. Cyanosis turned the skin blue, then purple, and sometimes nearly black, as the victim literally drowned in their own bodily fluids.

The current belief regarding today’s SARS-COVID-2 virus is it damages the capillaries (small blood vessel) that line the lung and the alveoli sacs, preventing proper gas exchange. Similarly, some victims of COVID-19 die only a few hours after falling ill.

The Flu Comes Full Circle

In September the virus came full circle, returning to the U.S. with a vengeance aboard troop ships and warships returning from France. Once again, wartime expediency help spread the disease. On September 25, 3,108 soldiers boarded a troop train at Camp Grant, Illinois. By the time they reached their destination at Camp Hancock, Georgia, a 950-mile trek, 2,000 of the soldiers had to be hospitalized with the flu. Dozens died.

On September 28 Philadelphia held a patriotic parade featuring thousands of soldiers, sailors, Boy Scouts, and civic group members. Within three days, every hospital room in the city was filled with flu victims. As many as a quarter of the victims died every day, only to be replaced with new victims.

Similar results were seen in every large city in the nation. Like today, public health officials ordered stores and theaters closed. Businesses shut down. Public coughing and hand shaking were prohibited. Outside their homes, people had to wear cloth masks over their faces. Field hospitals like those normally seen on battlefields began popping up across the country to take in the overflow of flu patients from brick and mortar hospitals.

Mandatory face masks helped prevent the spread
of Spanish Flu. Source: National Archives

Many today think social distancing orders are excessive, but the extreme means Gunnison, Colorado took to save its citizens demonstrated its effectiveness. The city literally sealed itself off from the rest of the world. Armed guards prevented any outsider from entering the city limits; the also prevented any resident from leave. Extreme, yes, but it worked Gunnison was probably the only town in the U.S. to avoid the Spanish Flu.

Eventually, the country’s leaders realized the best way to stop the flu was to stop feeding it. The military draft imposed to build up America’s small peacetime army was halted, and by October almost all military training was halted. The pipeline of fresh troops headed for the trenches of France began to dry up. Fortunately, the war ended on November 11.

Historians estimate about 700,000 Americans died from the Spanish Flu—more than all the American skilled in combat in WWI, WWII, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War together.

A Pandemic of Global Devastation

But America was not alone in its suffering. This second wave of influenza spread throughout Europe, Africa, and Asia. In Spain, which gave the pandemic its name, Catholic Masses held to pray for deliverance only helped spread the virus faster. Twelve hundred flu victims died daily in Barcelona alone; eventually more than 260,000 Spaniards would perish. Churches and funeral homes could not keep up with the dead.

When the killing stopped on the battlefields, the dying from influenza and secondary infections continued. A week after the November 11 armistice, the number of flu-related deaths in England soared to 19,000; eventually some 200,000 would die in the United Kingdom. India lost 5 million to the flu. Between 30,000 and 50,000 Canadians died. Many more perished in Africa, Latin America, Asia, and the Middle East. Then, by the end of November, it was gone. The virus that arrived in the third wave in December was a mere shadow of its former self. The virus had undergone an antigenic shift, creating a less virulent mutation. The third wave swept over New York City and San Francisco, California. It lingered throughout much of 1919, causing outbreaks here and there, but never the devastation the second wave wrought.

Spanish Flu: Aftermath

Despite its devastation, the Spanish Flu was largely forgotten until recently. Even the deadly outbreaks of the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) virus in 2003 and the Novel H1N1 “swine flu” virus in 2009 did little to prepare us for the novel corona virus that plagues us today. (I survived the 2009 virus. Ironically, I contracted it while attending, as a U.S. Navy analyst in military medical operations, a class on responding to pandemics held aboard the hospital ship Mercy.)

Many factors tribute to the world’s slow response to the current virus, but they weren’t new or unprecedented factors. First was China’s secrecy about the virulence of the disease. That was exasperated by the leadership of too many nations failing to recognize the health disaster looming before them—including Donald Trump’s ongoing inability to deal with reality or to care about anyone or anything except himself and his re-election.

But by understanding what worked and didn’t work to combat the 1918 flu, we can understand better what’s working—and not working— today. Today’s politically-motivated demonstrations against stay-at-home orders forcing an early reopening harkens back actions that help spur the virus in 1918. The success of Gunnison to avoid any flu victims at all demonstrates isolation works. In the end, public health should always trump politics.

The Myths that Drive America’s Love of Guns

2012-12-25T16:57:00.006-08:00

Americans love their guns – love them so much there are actually more guns in this country than there are people. Love them so much that, when dozens of people – mostly children – were slaughtered at an elementary school in Newtown, CT, the media became filled with politicians and gun nuts defending lax gun control laws by claiming guns are an American heritage, an inherent right – why, even a God-given right. (I must have missed the part in the Bible about the Arsenal of Eden.)

Americans love their guns, though, not because it’s a right or heritage. They love their guns because of a mythology that has grown around them, a mythology inspired by cheap novels and cheaper movies. Most of what Americans think they know of their history is pure myth, and no where else in American history is there more mythology than the history of guns in this country.

Myth #1: The Second Amendment was written to protect the right to own guns.

Fact: The original intention of the Second Amendment was not to protect gun ownership, but to prohibit a standing army. Many of our Founding Fathers felt a standing army would tempt future leaders to indulge in foreign adventurism. In this they were right. Just think about Iraq.

Originally, the first line of the Second Amendment was worded something like, “Congress will make no provision for a standing army, but will rely on the militia of the states for the country’s defense.” Because of this reliance on militias, it continued, “the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”

The amendment, as originally written, was strongly opposed by George Washington and his lieutenants. Washington was well aware of the failings of the militia. In 1754, when Washington was a colonial militia officer, undisciplined militiamen under his command killed a French envoy, setting off the French and Indian War. Nor did the performance of rebel militia during the Revolution change his mind.

Because of Washington’s opposition, the wording prohibiting a standing army was removed from the Second Amendment, leaving just the last enigmatic line: “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”

In the end, the Founders believed each state would maintain its own militia by requiring each male citizen to serve a certain number of years in the organized militia. It was essentially a military draft of sorts. Today, however, there is no mandatory military service in the United States. Less than one percent of Americans ever serve in the military, so a “well regulated Militia” cannot be the answer to America’s love for guns.

Myth #2: A ragtag Patriot militia beat the most powerful fighting force in the world, the British Army.

Fact: After the battles at Lexington-Concord and Bunker Hill, the militia played at best a minor role in the Revolution. It was a well-trained, professional Continental Army led by George Washington – and backed up by the French army and navy – that defeated the British.

Contrary to popular belief, Minutemen were not born of the American Revolution, but were part of colonial forces since the mid-1650s. They were not ordinary militia, but an elite force of well-trained military reservists capable of responding instantly to attacks from hostile Indians or Frenchmen. Some American rebel militia usurped the name “Minutemen” in the months leading up to the Revolution, but the real pre-Revolution Minutemen actually ended up on both sides of the war.

Most Americans are unaware there were both rebel and loyalist militia in the Revolution. According to Thomas B. Allen, author of “Tories: Fighting for the King in America’s First Civil War,” both sides had roughly equal numbers of militiamen at their disposal, though the Tory militiamen were better armed, uniformed and trained. One of the best-known Tory militia units was the British Legion, a vicious, rampaging force commanded by the British officer Banastre Tarleton and, ironically, portrayed in Mel Gibson’s movie “The Patriot” as a British army troop.

The Patriot militia, on the other hand, was much less effective. In a 1776 letter to the president of the Congress, Washington wrote: “To place any dependence upon militia is assuredly resting upon a broken staff. Men just dragged from the tender scenes of domestic life, unaccustomed to the din of arms, totally unacquainted with every kind of military skill ... makes them timid and ready to fly from their own shadows.”

And fly they did – frequently. At the Battle of Camden, the militia that made up half the Patriot force broke and ran at the first shot, causing a defeat for Maj. Gen. Horatio Gates. Such performance was so much the norm that in the Battle of Cowpens in South Carolina, Brig. Gen. Daniel Morgan used it to lure British forces, including Tarleton’s legion, into a trap.

Morgan placed his greenest militia at the front of his lines and, knowing they would break and run, pleaded with them to fire just two volleys before retreating. Tarleton’s forces chased the militia into the teeth of Morgan’s lines, composed of Continental soldiers, including the general’s famed Morgan’s Rifles, and more experience militia. Tarleton’s forces were annihilated.

In his article, “Militia or Regular Army,” published in the European Journal of American Studies, historian Tal Tovy points out that Washington’s early strategy of hit-and-run tactics was based entirely on his need to rely on militia with unreliable fighting abilities. It was only after he had time to develop a professionally-trained Continental Army that Washington began confronting the British head-on.

It was that Continental Army, with the backing of several thousand French troops, which brought about the surrender of the British Army at Yorktown, VA.

Myth #3: Our Founding Fathers believed an armed citizenry was needed to defend liberty against a tyrannical government.

Fact: As discussed earlier, Washington and his lieutenants convinced Congress that militias could not be relied on alone to defend the country against foreign invaders. Why then would they think the same unreliable force would be able to defend the Constitution against their own government, tyrannical or otherwise?

Furthermore, when the Whiskey Rebellion erupted in 1791 – just three years after the Constitution was ratified – it was harshly put down by an army composed of federalized state militia led by President George Washington. The harsh response to the rebellion was applauded by Americans and proved the new U.S. government would brook no unrest among the states.

Several more such rebellions were similarly suppressed. Most notable was John Brown’s attack on Harper’s Ferry, also put down by well-trained federal forces (U.S. Marines) led by U.S. Army Col. Robert E. Lee.

Myth #4: Gun control is a modern liberal plot to take weapons away from honest citizen gun owners.

Reenactment of the Gunfight at OK Corral.
(c. James G. Howes, 2008)

Fact: Gun control laws date back to at least the 1820s, and they were widespread in the western frontier. In fact, gun violence was far less tolerated in the Old West than most people think. After all, shootouts were not good for business.

Far fewer cowboys carried guns on the trail than you might expect. In fact, many cattle barons prohibited their cow hands from carrying personal weapons to avoid violence among their workers, and also to prevent an accidental gunshot that could stampede the cattle.

Still, it was conceivable that out on the range, a gun might be a necessity. But once in town those guns had to be turned into the local sheriff’s office. Even in towns without gun control laws, saloons normally wouldn’t serve you until you first turned over your gun to the bartender.

Gunfights, in fact, were relatively rare in the not so Wild West because of these strict gun control laws. The most famous shootout, the gunfight at the OK Corral in Tombstone, AZ, ironically was fought over Tombstone’s gun control law. The Clanton gang refused to turn in their guns and the Earp brothers and Doc Holliday set out to force the issue.

Gun laws in old Tombstone, in fact, were stricter than they are in Arizona today where citizens are allowed to carry handguns nearly everywhere they go. It makes you wonder if the Clanton gang hadn’t actually won the OK Corral gunfight.

So where did all this Old West gun lore come from? Dime novels written in the late 1800s to entertain tenderfoots in the East were notorious for exaggerating the myth of the cowboy and his six shooter. Self-serving books written by or about legendary lawmen like Wyatt Earp and Pat Garrett added to the mythology. A fledgling Hollywood added to it by making idealized cowboy movies a mainstay of its early films.

But the worst perpetrator of these gun myths is the National Rifle Association. The NRA and the gun manufacturers it represents have pushed these myths down the throat of Americans for decades. They call weapons like the Colt .45 revolver and the Winchester repeating rifle the guns that won the West. And the massive amounts of money they give to politicians make many a lawmaker a true believer.

In fact, relatively few people in the Old West owned handguns. They were expensive and hard to shoot accurately. Repeating rifles were also too expensive for most folks. Rejected by the U.S. Army, repeating rifles largely ended up in the hands of hostile Native American warriors. The most widely used gun the in the Old West, in fact, was the unglamorous double-barrel shotgun.

But the NRA has succeeded in making too many Americans believe you can’t be a good American unless you’re heavily armed at all times. And that puts the lie to the last great gun myth.

That the good guys always win.

UPDATE: On Aug. 6, 2020, New York Attorney General Letitia James, filed a lawsuit seeking to dissolve the National Rifle Association and charging its leadership with years of corruption and misspending that irreparably undermined its ability to operate as a nonprofit. The lawsuit alleged NRA CEO Wayne LaPierre and other senior leaders diverted millions of dollars from the organization's fundraising organization to support their lavish lifestyles. Among the claims is that LaPierre, who despite years of dismissing gun violence, illegally used NRA funds for his own security to keep him safe (wait for it) from gun violence. Maybe the good guys are winning after all.

Why the South Cannot Rise Again

2012-11-19T08:06:00.006-08:00

I have often argued that had the Confederacy successfully seceded from the Union, the American South today would be part of Mexico. The South was never in a strong position for war. It was an agricultural region with little capability for manufacturing war materiel. Had it been sprung from the Union, the French Army occupying neighboring Mexico would have marched into the South in such a way as to make Sherman’s March to the Sea look like an afternoon hike.

In the aftermath of President Barrack Obama's election, a bunch of Obama-hating post-election dead-enders passed around petitions in all 50 states calling for secession from the Union. Most of the action, of course, was in the Red states, those that vote most often for Republicans. And most of those Red states are in the Old South. Since Donald Trump took up domicile in the White House, his racist-bating rhetoric has only encouraged those same dead-enders.

I stand by my conjecture above. If secession succeeded today, the result would be the same as it would have a century and a half ago—the South would still end up part of Mexico.

But it won’t succeed. It won’t even get a start. Bigotry might still be alive in Dixie, but the sociological

conditions that allowed the secession of the South in 1860 simply don’t exist today.

A Rich Man’s Movement

The southern secession movement in the mid-1800s was largely a rich man’s movement. The South has always been more oligarchic than the North. Plantations owners wielded great political power. They used their wealth to finance “filibusters,” mercenaries armies sent to take over Latin American countries to turn them into future slave states. Abolition threatened their cheap source of labor and that, in turn, threatened their profit margins.

The average southern man, however, was simply poor and ill-educated. He had little knowledge of the Union, or anything beyond a few square miles of the state in which he lived. Typically, he had no concern about slavery one way or another. To him, his state was his country. The idea of blue coats marching into his state was simply an act of aggression against his country. As a result, southern men were easily fooled into becoming cannon fodder for slave owners looking to save their profits.

To begin with, African Americans are no longer an enslaved people in the South. Minorities of all races are becoming the majority in the United States. Unlike the 1800s, they have a voice—a strong voice. And they vote.

The populace of the South today is also much better educated and much more aware of the rest of the country, if not the world. Far more of them were raised in other states, or studied in other states. They have a world view that just didn’t exist in the 19th century.

Moreover, those better educated Southerners are well aware that their very livelihoods depend on spending from Washington, D.C.

Dependent on Washington

Federal spending on such programs as defense, aerospace, agriculture, energy, Social Security, and Medicare is heaviest in the Red states. As much as some of their citizens might think of themselves as independent and self-reliant, they are actually the biggest “takers,” receiving far more federal funds per person than they send to Washington in taxes.

According to research conducted by the business website 24/7 Wall St., Red states make up eight of the top 10 states receiving the most federal dollars: North Dakota, West Virginia, Alabama, Kentucky, New Mexico, Maryland, Virginia, and Alaska. Connecticut and Hawaii were the only Blue states in the top 10. Research by the Washington Post found similar results.

The fact is this Union is held together by an economic spider web of federal spending. Any attempt by a state to break away would result in an immediate economic collapse in that state. Large corporations with federal contracts – whose only loyalty lies with the source of their profits – would quickly pull up roots and relocate to a loyal state to keep those contracts. Subcontractors working for those corporations would do likewise or wither. Housing markets in secession states would collapse as workers moved to Union states to keep their jobs, and construction jobs would soon disappear.

Breakaway states where the economy relies on imported and exported products would be unable to do either. The federal government not only controls all the air corridors crisscrossing the nation, but also all the intrastate waterways. Without the FAA to regulate air traffic, or the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to maintain ports or rivers like the Mississippi and the Missouri, commerce would come to a standstill.

Defenseless

Seceding states would be left defenseless from outside aggression. In 1860, state militias were funded entirely by the states. When the Civil War started, they were able to raise an army from state-funded militia. But it didn't last. The Confederate states were unable – perhaps unwilling – to raise enough tax revenue to fund the rebel army. By the end of the war, the Confederate Army was short of everything needed by its troops—clothing, shoes, food, ammunition. Johnny Reb fought much of the war barefoot and starving.

Had the South successfully seceded, its army would have been no match for the French army in Mexico. Napoleon III was keen on recapturing land the first Napoleon reluctantly sold to the United States as part of the Louisiana Purchase. Throughout the Civil War, French troops stood ready to invade the American south had the opportunity arose.

Today, Washington, DC pays 95 percent of the costs to maintain each state’s National Guard, the modern day organized state militia. Since Red states today are as reluctant to raise taxes as their Civil War predecessors, it would be impossible for them to maintain their state militias. Any border state that secedes from the Union would see its state militia fall apart, leaving the state vulnerable to invasion from more powerful countries such as Mexico, Canada or, in the case of Alaska, Russia.

When our Founding Fathers created this country in the 18th century, they originally founded a confederation of states. The loose bounds of that confederacy made governance nearly impossible, so our Founders created the Union.

In 1860, the seceding states also created a confederation. It worked no better than the original confederation. Despite early rebel battle victories, the Confederacy could not support its army or maintain itself as a country.

There is no reason to believe a third try would be the charm.

The Myth of Republican National Security Prowess

2012-09-28T07:43:00.008-07:00

Each election year, Americans are bombarded with Republican claims that the Democrats are weak on defense, and only the GOP can protect America. Historically, however, the Republican Party has been pathetically weak on national security – so bad in fact, we came close to losing more than one war.

After the end of the American Civil War, the Republican Party opposed maintaining an army of any appreciable strength. As soon as the war ended, the GOP-controlled Congress reduced the U.S. Army to a bare shadow of its wartime strength. They did this despite the fact that a very clear and present danger existed at the country’s southern border. At that point in history, the much larger French Army occupied Mexico. French dictator, Napoleon III, openly harbored a desire to wrestle control of France’s former Louisiana Territory back from the United States.

Nevertheless, Republicans repeatedly cut the army’s strength. Throughout the late 1800s, during which the GOP held virtual one-party rule, the American army’s strength dropped to 27,000 regular troops. What troops we did have were poorly trained and poorly armed. While the rest of the world’s armies were adopting modern magazine-fed repeating rifles, the U.S. Army was still armed with archaic single-shot Springfield “Trapdoor” rifles, many of them simply remanufactured from Civil War muzzle loading guns.

During the Indian Campaigns of that period, many of the Native American tribes were better armed than the average army regiment. Col. George Custer and the men who met their fate with him at the Little Bighorn did so not only because they were outnumbered, but they were out-gunned, too. Armed with their single-shot Springfields, Custer’s men could not match the intensity of fire offered by Sitting Bull’s forces, many of whom were armed with repeating rifles like the Henry, the Spencer, and the Winchester.

Out Gunned by the Spaniards

Many of our troops were still armed with Trapdoors during the Spanish American War in 1898. Those who were issued modern Krag-Jorgensen magazine-fed, bolt-action rifles complained that because of the lack of funds for ammunition, the army had disabled the magazines, requiring soldiers to reload the weapon after each shot. The rifles also still used black power, which revealed the shooter’s position with a massive cloud of smoke.

The Spanish Army, on the other hand, was armed with state-of-the-art Mauser repeating rifles and rapid firing Maxim machine guns, both firing smokeless powder. The only rapid fire weapon our troops had were Civil War-vintage Gatling Guns.

The American Navy didn’t fare much better under Republican rule. In 1881 the London humor magazine Puck described the U.S. Navy as a force of "three mud-scows supplemented by a superannuated canal-boat." It wasn’t much of an exaggeration.

The GOP-controlled Congress funded a naval shipbuilding program that began in 1890 and continued throughout the end of the century. But the funding they provided for training ship crews was so meager, sailors were rarely able to practice their gunnery. As a result, during the Spanish American War, U.S. naval gunnery was pathetic. At the Battle of Manila Bay, American ships fired a total of 4,959 shells of various sizes. They scored only 72 hits. At the Naval Battle of Santiago de Cuba, the U.S. Navy fired 1,300 shells; only 25 found their mark.

In his memoir of the Spanish American War, Teddy Roosevelt, a Republican himself, condemned his own party’s failure to support the army and navy with adequate funding. In the end, the U.S. won the Spanish American War only by the courage of its soldiers and sailors, and the fact the Spanish never wanted to fight a war over Cuba in the first place.

TR tried to improve American military power during his presidency, but his policies were largely reversed by his own party after he left the White House.

When a European war broke out in 1914, it was the isolationist Republican Party that led the movement to keep America out of it. It would be up to a peace-loving Democratic president, Woodrow Wilson, to see the dangers posed to this country by a collapse of Britain and France and build up our military in preparation to sending them “over there.” Still, America’s military equipment was so limited that the bulk of U.S. troops in WWI were armed with British Enfield rifles, French-made Chauchat machine guns, and French- and British-built aircraft.

When Republicans again controlled the government in the interwar years, U.S. military strength again shrank and stagnated. Important legislation passed in 1920 established the framework for an improved, professional army. However, because Republicans controlled both houses from 1920 to the early 1930s, lack of appropriate funding prevented the reforms from being fully implemented. The U.S. Army so stagnated that some career officers remained junior officers like lieutenants and captains for nearly their whole careers.

Democratic President Franklin Roosevelt and his fellow Democrats in Congress began the rebuilding of the American military in the early 1930s, despite opposition from isolationist – and in many cases, pro-fascist – Republican legislators.

Establishment of the Defense Industry

World War II was followed by years of decline in conventional forces, as the atomic bomb was considered the weapon of the future. Outbreak of the Korean War in 1950, however, brought with it the need for a massive buildup of conventional American forces and equipment. When US manufacturers balked at retooling for war, President Harry Truman made a momentous decision that would impact the U.S. for the rest of history – with passage of the Defense Production Act of 1950, he created the defense industry.

Once the defense industry became a permanent form of business in the United States, the Republican attitude to military spending changed. From that point on, the pro-corporation Republican Party would push as much money as possible to the defense contractors.

But spending on the defense industry doesn’t necessarily equate to making America strong. Massive defense spending during the Reagan administration did little more than triple our national debt and turn the U.S. from a creditor nation to a debtor nation. With defense manufacturers overcharging million of dollars for such follies as “crash-proof” coffee makers and the so-called “Star Wars” missile defense system, there was literally little money left for maintenance.

As a result, some older Navy ships were unable to leave port due to mechanical breakdowns. Entire squadrons of aircraft reportedly were cannibalized for spare parts. At the time, I served in a Navy reserve ground combat unit that, despite being part of the country’s Rapid Response Force, had no weapons; Reagan had sent them to El Salvador and there was no money to buy replacements.

Defense from Terrorists

In 1999, the Clinton administration received a single warning of a pending Al Qaeda attack on the U.S. President Bill Clinton immediately placed the country’s entire law enforcement apparatus on alert. As a result, the so-called Millennium Plot was thwarted when the intended bomber was caught trying to cross into the U.S. from Canada.

In 2001, the Bush administration received some 40 separate warnings from American and foreign intelligence agencies that Al Qaeda was planning an imminent attack. George Bush ignored all of them. On September 11, more than 2,000 Americans paid the price for Bush’s national security incompetence.

Less than two years later, in March of 2002, Bush told reporters he was no longer concerned with finding the organizer of that attack, Osama Bin Laden. Bush eventually closed down the CIA office dedicated to tracking and capturing or killing Bin Laden. Two useless and unnecessary wars later, the Al Qaeda mastermind was still at large when Bush left office in 2008.

It would be left to Bush’s Democratic successor, Barack Obama, to reopen the search for Bin Laden and launch the covert operation that finally made him pay for his treachery.

So much for Republican prowess on national security.

Jesus Hates Us, This I Know...

2012-06-07T15:15:00.002-07:00

“Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God."

Matthew 19:24

Apparently, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker credits God in his war on the working class in his state. While running for governor, Walker did what all Republicans do these days – he announced he is a Christian. In an interview with a so-called Christian broadcasting station, Walker said God told him to make many of the decisions in his life. One of those decisions was leaving college to take a job with IBM. I never knew God ran an employment service. More likely, Walker is using God to bury the fact the governor was a sub-average student who became a college drop out.

The implication of Walker’s testament is that everything he’s doing in Wisconsin – handing out $140 million in tax cuts for wealthy corporations, then claiming the state is facing bankruptcy; denying state workers their bargaining rights; taking millions of dollars away from the public school system to finance vouchers for private schools for the rich – all this, he says, God and Jesus told him to do.

The only prophets these self-styled disciples of Christ follow are the ones preceded by dollar signs. In my opinion, they epitomize those Jesus accused of turning places of worship into “dens of thieves.”

It amazes me how many Republicans claim God talks directly to them. How does he it do it? Does he call them collect? Does he send them videos like Osama Bin Laden? In Walker’s case, how does he know he’s really talking to God and not getting punk’d by another liberal blogger?

Moreover, how does a man who claims to be a follower of Christ’s teachings of love, charity, tolerance and forgiveness reconcile his actions of taking money from the poor and working class citizens of his state and giving it to its richest residents?

Certainly, it helps if you are a cynical sociopath. No doubt that’s the case with Newt Gingrich, the disgraced former Republican House leader who, with a straight face, recently told a Christian news show that his love of country caused him to work so hard it destroyed two of his three marriages. In Gingrich’s mind his habitual womanizing had nothing do with those failed marriages, or with his forced resignation from Congress.

But what if Walker actually believes he is doing God’s work?

We have become a nation in which rich people who got rich by lying, stealing and cheating, are getting elected to leadership positions in state and federal government. Walker’s own reputation as a corrupt county administrator was so bad he lost the county he used to run. Rick Scott, the new governor of Florida, was CEO of the health care corporation convicted of the largest Medicare fraud in U.S. history. U.S. Rep. Darryl Issa, the California congressman now planning a series of investigations into what he claims are crimes committed by the Obama administration, has an arm’s-length rap sheet including grand theft auto and arson for profit.

Jesus Loves the Rich

How do these men face the electorate when they should be hanging their heads in shame? How do they call themselves men of God and followers of Jesus Christ’s teachings? I’ll tell you how. Because they know something you and I don’t: They know Jesus hates us. He hates us because we’re not rich.

One of the fastest growing sects of Christianity in this country is called the Gospel of Prosperity. Dating back to the 1930s – during the Republican-caused Great Depression – the Gospel of Prosperity believes the Bible got it wrong. Christ wasn’t sent by God to minister to the poor and downtrodden. He was sent to aid the wealthiest of the wealthy.

Under this form of Christian belief, the rich have no problem getting through the Gates of Heaven. It is the poor and middle class who will have a harder time getting through the Pearly Gates than a camel has getting through a needle’s eye. You can do whatever you need to do to become rich – lie, cheat, steal – because you are doing God’s work. Who could argue with that kind of missionary work? But it also involves destroying the lives of other people.

If you think this is just hype, consider this: dozens of conservative members of Congress – both Republicans and Democrats – live nearly rent-free in a Washington, DC condominium project owned by The Family. If you’ve followed the sexual scandals of Sen. John Ensign and South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford, you’ve heard of The Family. Also known as the Fellowship, the Family has been criticized by mainstream Christian churches as being a cult-like congregation of the rich and elite that caters to their appetite for power and wealth.

Gospel of Prosperity

The best known apostle of the Gospel of Prosperity is Oral Roberts, the televangelist who in 1987 invoked his viewers to send him $8 million or he would be called to Heaven by God. I never understood why a man of religion would fear being called to meet his Maker. But apparently, Roberts’ viewers felt compelled to save him from his just reward by sending him their life savings. Roberts was spared, temporarily. He died in 2009 in an exclusive enclave of Newport Beach, California, after he was forced to sale off his homes in Palm Springs and Beverly Hills, as well as three of his Mercedes.

Another who preaches the prosperity gospel is TV cleric Pat Robertson, who has financed his lavish lifestyle with his viewers’ donations to his church and its shady disaster relief programs. Robertson’s belief that God wants him to find a gold mine led the televangelist to make a business deal with Liberia’s dictator Charles Taylor to look for gold in that African country.

Now deposed, Taylor is standing trial before an international criminal court for crimes against humanity involving his attacks on neighboring Sierra Leon, motivated by Taylor’s coveting of that country’s mineral riches. Robertson, who claimed Hurricane Katrina and the Haitian earthquake were God’s vengeance (apparently because the victims were poor), continues to defend Taylor to this day.

You can also count George W. Bush in this category, too. When Bush, whose family business – the Carlyle Group – reaped a fortune from the war in Iraq, said he was a Christian, the Gospel of Prosperity was the Christianity he was referring to.

With such a belief system, one can commit any reprehensible, even criminal, act to gain power and wealth – lie, steal, betray, even start a war – because you’re doing God’s will. With this corrupt moral compass, you can commit any sin; as long as you say you accept Jesus into your heart, you’ll be forgiven. To me, this gospel’s idea of Christ smells more like the Antichrist. In the meantime, the rest of us are just so much flotsam left in the wake of God’s miraculous work.

I am certain Gov. Walker considers himself a good Christian as well as a patriot. But then history is filled with evil men who cloaked themselves in patriotism and Christ. “When fascism comes to America,” Sinclair Lewis prophesized in 1935, “it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross.” If there is a hell, then I believe there is special place there for Gov. Walker and his phony “Christians.” They, in turn, would consider me a heretic for suggesting God and Jesus were interested in such heathens as the unwashed masses. So be it. I will remain, as Jackson Browne wrote, “a heathen and a pagan on the side of the Rebel Jesus.”

The Myth of Corporate Leadership

2012-06-06T16:18:00.000-07:00

I cringe every time someone says government should be run like a business. A former business journalist, I have had the opportunity to study the inner workings of Corporate America, and I know the one secret that businessmen and conservative politicians would rather you not know: Most American businesses fail. They fail due to poor leadership at the top.

Yet only two years after Wall Street led the country into the worst economic collapse since the Great Recession, California voters seriously considered electing two former CEOs – Ebay’s Meg Whitman and Hewlett Packard’s Carly Fiorina – to the governorship and the U.S. Senate. Not yet four years after the economic collapse, U.S. voters are considering electing another CEO, Mitt Romney, to the White House. That would only recreate the same mistake voters made 12 years ago with the election of George W. Bush as president.

Bush, after all, took great pride in calling himself the “CEO president.” He proudly referred to his days as chief executive officer of an oil drilling company called Abusto, Spanish for “bush.” What he never mentioned was that Abusto – as well as every other business Bush was involved with – went bust.

Nor was he the only failed CEO in his administration. As chief executive officer of Halliburton, Dick Cheney drove the oil drilling equipment giant to the brink of bankruptcy. He saved Halliburton only by appointing himself Bush’s vice-president and steering billions of dollars of government contracts to the company – at great cost to the taxpayer.

The myth of corporate leadership – that business executives could run government better than politicians – is just that, a myth, a fable that makes good bedtime reading for Ayn Rand fans but has little basis in reality.

Failed Corporate Leadership

In his book, “Built to Fail,” business author Jonathan I. Klein concludes “failure claims an overwhelming majority of businesses within five years [of start up] and almost all businesses within ten years.” Despite claims of conservatives that most business failures stem from government interference, Klein concludes that these failures are rooted directly in the internal leadership of the failed companies.

Bush and Cheney, in fact, are splendid examples of the modern CEO. Gone are the Horatio Alger days when a young man worked his way up from the mail room to the board room. Most CEOs today land in the big office with the help of their rich father (like Bush) or with the help of personal publicists who make sure their clients get the credit for anything that goes right, and deflect the blame for anything that goes wrong.

As a result, CEOs often begin to think they can do no wrong. By believing themselves infallible, CEOs turn a deaf ear to nay Sayers or any other harbingers of reality who might disagree with them. In his book, “Why Smart Executives Fail,” Sidney Finklestein points to this “executive mindset” as well as “protective mechanisms and delusional attitudes” as the cause for the growing number of corporate leadership failures.

Klein came to similar conclusions. The genesis of such failures, he says, came not from without but from within the corporation, and “included inappropriate motives for entrepreneurship, disdain for procedure, underestimation of resource needs, insensitivity to the environment, infatuation with the product, and unrealistic projections of the future.” In other words, poor judgment.

Bush showed this quality before Sept. 11, 2001, when he refused to listen to more than 40 separate warnings of an impending attack from Al Qaida – including two personal phone calls from the presidents of France and Russia. He showed it again when he refused to accept intelligence reports that refuted his belief that Saddam Hussein was responsible for the 9/11 attacks and was harboring terrorists and weapons of mass destruction.

Short-Sighted Leadership

Governing requires a long-term view of the needs of the population and the nation. American business executives, however, are notoriously short-sighted. In the American business world, everything revolves around the quarterly profit statement. Bonuses are based on the degree of profit seen in each three-month business cycle. This produces extreme myopia. Decisions are made to close plants, layoff workers, outsource jobs, etc., based entirely on how it will look on the next balance sheet. As a result, American businesses tend to suffer in the long run.

The Bush administration’s entire war strategy showed this kind of short-sightedness. When the United Nations refused the administration’s call for an immediate invasion of Iraq, the president did what too many CEOs would do: He plunged ahead without any plans for the long-term occupation or rebuilding of Iraq. His infamous landing aboard an aircraft carrier to announce “Mission Accomplished,” got him what he wanted – a jump in the polls – but his failure to plan ahead left our troops and the Iraqis in an ever bloodier quagmire.

Similar corporate leadership failures are leading to a volatile business environment. In the last decade, CEO turnover in the United States jumped from around 10 percent during the 1990s to nearly 50 percent, according to Chief Executive magazine. Not all those turnovers were firings, of course, but it shows a terrible instability in today’s corporate leadership.

Both Fiorina and Whitman were part of that volatility. Like Bush, both candidates boast of their CEO experience, yet neither candidate left behind a legacy that would promote confidence in their leadership skills. Fiorina, after all, was fired by HP’s board in 2005 because they lacked confidence in her abilities. Whitman resigned in 2008 amid demands from shareholders she be fired for driving the company stock value into the ground. Since her departure, most of Whitman’s business decisions at eBay have been reversed by her successor.

CEO candidates invariably claim they know how to create jobs. Unfortunately for American workers, their legacies prove otherwise. Despite his vaunted “trickle down” tax cuts, CEO President Bush reigned over the worst U.S. job growth since WWII – and that was before his policies tanked the economy in late 2008, resulting the loss of 700,000 U.S. jobs.

Fiorina personally helped Bush’s legacy by cutting nearly 30,000 U.S. jobs at HP and shipping thousands of them overseas in an attempt to make up for massive financial losses at HP caused by her ill-conceived acquisition of computer maker Compaq. Whitman helped as well, outsourcing 40 percent of eBay’s workforce to other countries. Her corporate leadership failures also resulted in 1,000 eBay workers losing their jobs. Despite their failure, both Fiorina and Whitman left their posts with expensive golden parachutes.

Romney, born rich, made himself richer at Bain Capital by buying up perfectly good American companies, firing their employees, and shipping the jobs overseas. Of course, that tactic didn't always work: twice while Romney was CEO of Bain, the company nearly went insolvent and Romney had to arrange for federal bailouts amounting to tens of millions of dollars.

This is one of the biggest failures in corporate leadership. Too often the CEO’s solution for every problem is handing out pink slips, and making their remaining employees work harder and longer. As a result, American workers put in longer hours than their European counterparts (50 to 60 hours compared to 30 to 40 hours in Europe) with less time off (one to two weeks of vacation compared to four to six weeks for Europeans). This, business leaders tell us, makes America more productive. Coincidentally, it also makes CEOs richer.

The last place you want to see this sort of “do more with less” CEO mentality is in government, where doing more with less usually means fewer police, prosecutors, firefighters, paramedics – the very government workers we need to protect our property and lives. We saw the impact of doing more with less in Iraq and Afghanistan where our armed forces, stripped down by the Bush administration in the months preceding the 9/11 attacks, where stretched to the breaking point.

Corporate Welfare

Yet nearly every CEO candidate chants the same mantra: cut taxes and reduce government spending. Their religiosity in this regard would be more convincing if the corporations which spawned these same candidates weren’t the largest recipients of government welfare spending. In 1998, TIME magazine reported the federal government spent $125 billion a year on corporate welfare, and this undoubtedly doubled if not tripled under Bush’s CEO presidency.

This largess – which typically goes to the richest corporations in the country – includes cash subsidies, free or below-cost government services and products, tax-payer subsidized loans to foreign countries to buy U.S. goods, and tax breaks, including credits for outsourcing U.S. jobs overseas. This also does not count the subsidies and tax breaks given large corporations by state and local governments.

Despite such aid from the government, these corporations and their leaders continue to fail, miserably and repeatedly. Which is what makes me cringed when people say government should be run like business, and when failed CEOs like Mitt Romney want to run our government.

Class Warfare, Slavery and Company Towns

2012-06-06T15:47:00.004-07:00

"There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.”

– Multi-millionaire Warren Buffet

Listening to GOP leaders, one might think the Democrats were waging nuclear class warfare. Because progressive Dems wants the richest one percent of Americans to pay their fair share in taxes, multi-millionaires Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich, along with their cohorts in Congress, want Americans to think the Democrats are preaching the “politics of envy.”

Nothing is further from the truth. The fact is the Republicans have been waging a vicious, no-holds-bar war against the American worker for the past 30 years, since the election of their vaunted leader, Ronald Reagan.

Company scrip token.
Photo: Jerry Adams

In school, we are taught that America is the Land of Opportunity. America, in fact, has been the Land of Opportunity for many years of its existence – for some. In the 1700 and 1800s, yes, migrants from Europe had a chance to make something of themselves – assuming you weren’t Irish or Italian. God help you if you were Chinese – or African.

Even though slavery supposedly ended after the Civil War with the adoption of the 13^th Amendment, involuntary servitude did, in fact, continue in this country in the form of the truck system. Under the truck system, workers were paid in company scrip rather than real money. That scrip could only be used in company-owned stores to buy over-priced goods, or to pay excessive rent in company-owned housing in what came to be called “company towns.”

Also known as debt bondage, the truck system resulted in workers becoming indebted to the very companies they worked for, forcing them to stay in the company’s employ to pay off their debt. This, the companies contended, produced employee “loyalty.” Workers felt otherwise, as Tennessee Ernie Ford lamented when he sang:

“Load sixteen tons and what do you get?

Another day older and deeper in debt.

St. Peter don’t you call me, ‘cause I can’t go.

I owe my soul to the company store.”

The truck system was ruled slavery by the U.S Supreme Court in the early 1900s, but the concept hasn’t died. In 2008, Wal-Mart’s Mexican subsidiary was blocked by the Mexican Supreme Court of Justice for trying to pay its employees, in part, with company vouchers. The Mexican court ruled the vouchers were scrip, and in violation of Mexico’s prohibition of the truck system.

Debt Bondage Today

The concept of debt bondage hasn’t died in the United States either. One of the foundations the Founding Fathers conceived for this country was accessible higher education for its citizens. Thomas Jefferson’s pride in creating the tuition-free University of Virginia in 1819 surpassed his pride in being the third president of the United States. So much so, he made sure the epitaph on his head stone after he died would identify him as the author of the Declaration of Independence and the founder of the University of Virginia.

Today, the idea of a free college education is merely a memory for those of us old enough to remember what the education system of this country was like before Ronald Reagan was elected governor of California and, after destroying that state’s education system, being elected to the U.S. presidency to do the same nationwide. These days college graduates are so deeply in debt, they are largely incapable of movement up the class ladder – unless they happen to be another George W. Bush or Mitt Romney.

Keeping Americans in debt – and under control – has been the battle plan for conservative politicians of both parties and their oligarch overlords for the past 30 years. During that time, labor union membership – the greatest way to level the economic playing board – has declined as much as 30 percent, thanks to Reagan’s war on labor and GOP legislation making it harder to recruit members. That continues today with the anti-labor legislation being seen in states like today’s Walkerstan (Wisconsin) and Kasichstan (Ohio), where Tea Party governors and legislatures are passing repressive anti-middle-class measures.

Republicans would like you to believe that capitalism is synonymous with freedom. It isn’t. Recent history is rife with authoritarian governments ruling over capitalistic systems – Argentina under Peron, Spain under Franco, the Philippines under Marcos, Italy under Mussolini and, last but not least, Germany under Hitler. In each case, these dictators were put in power by industrialists and financiers. After all, fascism by definition is an authoritarian form of capitalism. For that matter, many economists argue that communism is simply a form of state capitalism.

Contrary to what many have been taught, capitalism is not synonymous with free enterprise and a free market place. Free enterprise is the provision of a service or product in exchange for a price. Capitalism is simply the accumulation of wealth and the power it brings.

To be truly successful, free enterprise requires two things, the free movement of money and a level playing field. Money is like blood to the economic body; if it doesn’t flow freely, the body dies. When the bulk of the wealth of a country is held by a small percentage of individuals – as it is in this country today – it doesn’t flow freely and the economy stagnates, contracts and dies, at least for the rest of us.

Taxation stimulates the excessively wealthy to spend their money through investment in new companies and the workforce. Taxes force the wealthy to convert the form of their wealth from offshore accounts to U.S. holdings, circulating that money through the economic body. Taxes paid to the government are reinvested in public infrastructure and public services, further encouraging the circulation of wealth.

A Level Playing Field

Along with circulating wealth, free enterprise requires a level playing field to allow those with enterprising abilities to rise to well-deserved levels of success. That can only be done by legislation that prohibits the kind of Mitt Romney vulture capitalism that destroys U.S. companies for the sake of short term benefits; legislation that prohibits exporting U.S. jobs for the same reason; legislation that regulates the business environment so predator corporations can’t wantonly destroy their competitors to establish anti-competitive trusts.

Yet for 30 years, Republicans and conservative Democrats have pushed through legislation that has torn middle class and worker rights to shreds, gave tax breaks to corporations that shipped U.S. jobs abroad, destroyed true competition, and left the burden of paying off the national debt that quadrupled under Reagan and Bush Jr. on the middle class.

Over the past 30 years, American wages have declined roughly a percentage point each year, while the wealth of the richest Americans – people like Romney – has grown exponentially. Republicans say the middle class has to carry the brunt of the tax burden because taxing the wealthy – the so-called “job creators” – would cost the country jobs.

That, as I’ve said, is nonsense. The economic engine of this country is small business, the mom and pops which are responsible for 95 percent of this county’s job growth. In other words, large corporations and mega-naires don’t have that much impact on the economy.

Don’t believe that? Then ask yourself this: George W. Bush and his Republican-controlled Congress gave every tax break they could to Big Business and the rich, yet the Bush administration was already suffering a net loss of millions of American jobs long before the recession hit us in 2007.

If high taxes destroyed jobs, then Germany, with Europe’s highest taxes, should have the Continent’s highest unemployment rates instead of its lowest. In fact, German unemployment is lower than any other industrialized nation. On the other hand, every European country that adopted neo-conservative “trickle down” tax policies is now experiencing extremely high unemployment rates and economic collapse.

In fact, when one looks at taxation vs. employment among industrialized nations, there is a distinct converse relationship – the higher the tax rate, the lower the unemployment. The United States, with one of the lowest tax rates in the world, also has one of the highest unemployment rates.

What more do Americans need to understand that they are, and have been, engaged in class warfare for three decades? And as Warren Buffet said, we, the middle class, are losing.