Obama's Mistake

It is not unusual for politicians to talk about healing divisiveness and working across the aisle during their campaigns.  The difference in Obama's case was that he actually tried to make that work after he took office.  It was a great waste of time and effort.  When he reached out, the Republicans were right there ready to chop off his hand and shut the door on his candidate for the Supreme Court.

I was reminded of Obama's unfortunate strategic error yesterday when I went to a Democratic ward meeting in Albuquerque.  The up side of the get-together was the presence of some bright, engaged young people.  One of the brightest and most articulate spent his allotted time talking about the negative consequences of confronting aggressive rants by Trump supporters, pointing out that their attitudes were likely due to some personal misfortune.  For all I know that could be true, but is it relevant to effectively changing the way the country is governed?

I think it indisputable that people stressed by economic, social and emotional conditions will often turn for reassurance to authoritarian leaders.  We are certainly seeing that now with the rise of Trump and other right-wing leaders world-wide.  It is also important, however, to not lose sight of that fact that people over-all are becoming more liberal generally across the ideological divides.

Just look at attitude shifts in recent decades toward inter-racial relationships, gay marriage and marijuana usage.  Some concrete statistical support for those trends was offered recently in an article at FiveThirtyEight.  The article was specifically addressing the liberalization over the past thirty years of the Democratic Party, but the statistics also support the idea that liberalization has not been confined to the left side of the political spectrum.  While the populace as a whole has moved leftward, governance has moved in the opposite direction.

So, the problem is not the natural age-old human tendency to look to support from right-wing authoritarians.  Rather it is that the machinery of governance has been captured by corporate dark money which supports the politicians willing to sell out the real interests of their constituents -- and not all are Republicans.  An obvious response is to just not support any candidate -- regardless of party or ideological pretense -- who accepts corporate campaign funding.

Greta

Climate activist Greta Thunberg
photographed on the shore in Lisbon, Portugal December 4, 201Photograph by Evgenia Arbugaeva for TIME

Looking at recent polling I'm thinking I may write in Greta on my 2020 ballot.

Ignore Trump

He craves attention.  The best way to deal with him is to just look away.  He is, after all, just a symptom of what is wrong with the country -- the domination of government at all levels by the Republican agenda.

There is some satisfaction to be derived from exposing Trump's thuggish behavior in the impeachment inquiries.  There is certainly also some value to exposing the hipocracy of Trump's congressional supporters.  In the end, though, none of that matters if Democrats don't have  an effective strategy for winning.

There is a good overview available at The New York Review of Books of how Democrats can regain momentum toward achieving control of the nation through a bottom up strategy.  Joseph O'Neill reviews of couple of books which examine Democratic Party successes and failures, and he extrapolates their evidence to some hard-hitting recommendations for the long haul.  Worth a read.

Take Aways

Impeachment:

The Dems have done a pretty good job of staging the public hearings.  I would imagine that a fairly small percentage of the public tuned into all the hours of testimony and questions.  Still, there was plenty of red meat for the media and a coherent story of Trump's attempt at bribery is out there.  The last two people called to testify have done a thorough job of poking holes in the falsehoods and conspiracy theories propagated by the Republicans.

The Debate To Date:

I'm hoping ever more fervently that I will not have to vote for Joe Biden.  I'm also not much happier with the idea of supporting Pete Buttigieg, and for much of the same reasons, though he does not carry the burden of being over the hill like Joe.  Bernie still has the clearest voice of the bunch.  Warren seemed a bit lost in the weeds at this last debate. (Others rated her performance to be superior -- see, for instance, the 538 report on the debate.)  The rest are also-rans, but I would be happy to see nearly all of them in high government positions after a Dem victory in the 2020 elections.

2020

New Mexico has been treated to a preview of the Republican strategy for the upcoming elections.  Trump's Attorney General/Personal Lawyer put on a big show in the State implying that State and local governments are not doing anything to effectively combat crime.  This is now being followed up by an on line media barrage disparaging the governor, the mayor of Albuquerque and Representative Xochitl Torres Small of Las Cruces.  TV PAC ads about Torres Small are running nightly.

A sample of the Republican talking points can be found on Joe Monahan's New Mexico Politics blog.   The Nov. 20 blog post carried a law and order screed by retired APD Sergeant Dan Klein suggesting that Federal oversight of the Albuquerque Police Department was hampering law enforcement.  Overlooked was the fact that the current city administration has put a good effort into hiring more officers.  Additionally, the governor recently detailed a large number of State Police to help out with combatting crime in central New Mexico.  In the post for the following day, Monahan published my brief reply to Klein:

Klein, with his opportunistic law and order pitch, would have us conveniently forget that we just recently got rid of a "law and order" governor who did nothing to effectively combat crime in New Mexico. In fact Martinez starved and disrupted the public services institutions which are crucial to real progress. Lessening police oversight now is one sure way to undermine social justice while doing nothing to affect the root causes of crime in our State.

 So, expect LAW AND ORDER every day from now to the election.  What you won't hear from the Republicans, of course, is any kind of support for educational reform, jobs, health care, mental health or drug abuse treatment for rural and small town New Mexico.  Also, don't hold your breath while waiting for them to tackle methane pollution, degradation of the State's water supply through fracking and any number of other environmental threats faced by New Mexicans.

Lessons for America

I came across this video of Arundhati Roy and Naomi Klein on The Nation yesterday.  I'm not usually pleased when lecturers deliver their presentations by reading from a prepared script.  However, Roy is such a marvelous writer that having her read her own written words produces a great experience for the listener.

Americans don't pay a lot of attention to what is going on in India,  but we make that choice at our own peril.  It is a country of over a billion people ruled by an authoritarian regime which operates comfortably in the neo-liberal global economy.  One result of that is that India is far along the path to the environmental disaster brought to us by a combination of global warming and continuing bad economic and political choices.  It is a scenario that is very likely a preview of what is coming to the U.S. and the other most prosperous nations which tend to think of themselves as much more advanced than those of the sub-continent.

Roy does a marvelous job of explaining all that in this video as well as in her recent books including The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, a novel which focuses on the plight of Kashmir whose people are living through a nightmare of military control over of every aspect of their lives.

The written version of Roy's story about India is available in an article at The Nation.

You saw it here first.

I see Thomas Geoghegan at Bloomberg has picked up on my idea to offer Trump immunity in exchange for immediate resignation from the office of the President.  I would like at least a citation.

To be fair, Geoghegan does thoroughly lay out the details of how Congress might craft the process of forced resignation by passing a law which would only require the votes of a few Republicans as opposed to a two-thirds majority in the Senate.

Realistically, there is close to a zero probability of success for either a conviction in the Senate or passage of a law forcing resignation.  Given the available time before the 2020 election the best that can be hoped is that either process would sufficiently damage Trump to prevent reelection.  The Democrats' strategy for the impeachment route is based primarily on two charges -- extortion of the President of Ukraine and obstruction of justice in regard to cover-up attempts by Trump and his lackeys. The process of crafting a law forcing resignation could be more wide ranging, including all of Trump's sordid past.

Well, it is probably too late now for the Democrats to change horses, and I expect they will stick to the impeachment process.  Too bad they apparently didn't see my suggestion in July.

Found Art

I found this nice mosaic lying in the dirt beside a street.

One wonders how something like this gets lost or discarded.  I probably should have photographed in place to document the circumstances of its discovery.  Instead I took it home thinking I might frame it and hang it on the wall.

I tried scanning the piece, but result was very dull; it needed to be lighted obliquely in order to properly illuminate the polished surfaces.  I then photographed it with my digital camera against a white background in subdued window light.

A shot of the back of the mosaic reveals something of its origin.