History will tell all

“Net neutrality” is apparently dead, since there is no going back once the new FCC rules are implemented, which will allow politically conservative corporations to collude and essentially ban content they don’t like (they are already doing that on radio). Despite receiving 20 million texts and emails opposed to the new rules, Donald Trump’s FCC chairman, Ajit Pai, played bare-faced partisan politics to make this decision. What does this mean? It means that people like you and me who see the world for what it is may not be long for this world. Even online giant Google expressed concern about what this will mean for free speech.

But before that happens, I might just get in this word about what the world has become since Trump was elected by the outdated quirks of the Electoral College. It is clear that Trump is a man who is dictated by the foibles of an abnormal sense of self. He thinks he is a “great” man, but he clearly is not. When people point this out to him, he responds like a child--pouting, attacking and degrading. As Democrats have learned, even when he courts your “friendship,” this is the mere fleeting fancy of a man whose attention span last no longer that the time it takes to write out one of his mindless tweets.

Trump’s die-hard supporters claim to be impressed by his “business” career; but outside the real estate business that was founded by his father, he has been one disaster after another; no product he attempted to market stamped with his “brand” has ever lasted more than a few years, and some never even got off the ground. I once found one of those “Make America Great Again” caps on someone’s desk. I didn’t want to soil my hands by touching it, but out of curiosity I compelled myself to do so. Talk about “cheap”—this thing felt like it had been “manufactured” out of tissue paper. If one looks at Trump’s various other “manufacturing” projects, they are as flimsy as those hats are. The list of epic failures of anything bearing the Trump name is staggering: Trump Airlines, the for-profit Trump “Make America Stupid Again” University, the travel agency GoTrump.com; the Trump-labeled “energy” drinks “Fire” and “Power” lacked both, and his “Pale Ale” was certainly “impaled” by the competition. Trump neckties and steaks must have been ideas he concocted when he was inebriated on his pale ale. Trump’s casino and mortgage ventures were epic money losers before they folded, and hardly anyone read his Trump’s magazine, which hung on for two years before the presses stopped. 

And these were just a few examples of Trump’s business “acumen.” And this is the person to make America “great” again? Not if he has anything to do with it. The truth is that Trump made his money by conning people into believing in nothing more than his “brand.” Trump’s hatred of anything Mexican probably stems from the fact that his Mexican “partners” in a couple of property developments were unwilling to enter into an agreement where he paid virtually nothing while receiving most of the profit just for the use of his “brand.” And why shouldn’t they have been concerned? Trump Tower Tampa was an example of such a “deal”—and it ended it up costing investors millions when that project went belly-up; only Trump came out of it with a “sweet deal.” 

How exactly did Trump the “businessman” become rich? Well, mainly because he wasn’t a businessman, but a real estate developer—with more than a little help from his father. The Washington Post reported that “Trump clearly benefited from the wealth and connections of his father, Fred Trump. One of the richest people in America in the 1970s, Fred Trump built a real estate empire developing apartments for middle-class families in Brooklyn, Queens and Staten Island after World War II.” What the son “benefited most from initially was his dad’s credit-worthiness. When he wanted to go into business on his own, his father’s credit was available to him, and that was worth tens of millions of dollars.” What should also be mentioned that father and son also engaged in blatant racial discrimination in their housing projects, something that was exposed by the Village Voice in the late 1970s and subject to a federal investigation. 

There is also a question of just how much business “acumen” Trump has even in the real estate business; according to Business Week, if Trump’s net worth was $100 million in 1978, and if he had “merely put that money in an index fund based on the Standard and Poor's 500 index — the kind many Americans use to save for retirement — he would be worth $6 billion today,” not the $2.9 billion currently estimated. And that is just an estimate, since Trump’s companies are privately owned and it is unknown exactly how much their equity is, given the fact that Trump’s real estate ventures have often found their way into bankruptcy court—which his “partners” were always the biggest losers. This is the “art” of a Trump “deal.”

But even if Trump isn’t the “businessman” his supporters think he is, it really doesn’t matter, does it? So what does “matter”? As Alex Sheppard of the New Republic pointed out, Trump has no card to play now but the race card, despite his denials that he is doing so; ginning up racial hostility has always been the tried and true method of the right-wing to keep their supporters minds off failures of policy and unjustified wars. That is why Trump continues to engage in this ongoing feud with black athletes, because he knows those crowds of white people in Arizona and Alabama hate the fact that there are blacks who make more money than they do. He knows what they want to hear, and why, and about whom. And “behind-the-scenes,” Trump and that sinister racist Jeff Sessions are ramping-up their war against Hispanics, and this shouldn't be confuse with merely being an illegal immigration issue; Sessions has praised the “scientific” racism of eugenics that was the basis of the 1924 immigration law (which by the way did not regulate immigration between the Americas; that did not happen until 1965), and he continues to support race-based immigration policy. Like Trump, Sessions  hates “Mexicans”; they can talk about them “stealing” jobs, but so are illegal immigrants from Asia and India (the latter whose illegal presence has risen from 28,000 in 1990 to 405,000 in 2014--that from The Times of India, not some anti-immigrant group, and right under the media “radar”). No, they, like their supporters, really just hate the way Mexicans “look”; they just don’t want them around.

However, Republicans still like to portray themselves as “Christians” and arbiters of public morality, but nothing could be further from the truth. I’m not talking just about people like Roy Moore, who Trump and various Alabama politicians are defending on the basis that Moore is responding by taking a page out of the apparently tried-and-true Trump playbook of calling his sexual misconduct accusers liars, loudly. And why not? After all, 53 percent of white women voted for Trump because, despite what gender advocates believe, racism is a more powerful opium of the masses that can’t be “cured” by accusations that often only exacerbate racism. A new book, Forgotten Dead: Mob Violence Against Mexicans in The United States 1848-1928, notes that while only a very small percentage of these lynchings were based on “transgressions” against white women, 40 percent of lynchings of blacks were—and could have involved something as innocuous as “whistling.” as in the case of Emmett Till (his accuser, Carolyn Bryant, recently admitted that not only did she lie during the trial of the murderers--one of whom was her then-husband--but she didn't even remember if Till actually did "whistle" at her). 

No, the real transgression against morality by the right-wing involves the failure to live by the standards set by their “Lord and Savior” Jesus Christ as enunciated on the Sermon on the Mount. They seem to be completely unfamiliar with the fact that the New Testament was intended to replace with a different kind of ethics and morality than that found in the “eye-for-an-eye” Old Testament. “Whosoever is angry at his brother without a cause shall be in danger of the judgment,” “turning the other cheek,” “love your enemies,” condemn “good works” done only for recognition rather from the heart, condemn the superficiality of material wealth, rather to seek God’s Kingdom first; condemn judging others before judging yourself—judge not, for you shall be judged; blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the Earth; blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied. Which of course leads us to issues of affordable health care for people barely living on poverty wages, a Republican tax plan that cuts taxes for the very richest while promising higher taxes for the low-to-middle income people in the future, and of course massive cuts all-around for anti-poverty programs to make rich people richer. If there is a God, I don't think this is the "ticket" to get past the pearly gate.

Yet Moore’s defenders hypocritically claim that he is a “pious” man being unjustly attacked by the “Obama-Clinton” machine with “fake news.” At least one has quoted “scripture,” although it seems that he forgot about the part where Jesus asserted that those who only “lust in their hearts” for another woman are still guilty of “adultery.” But again, this all seems less important to Moore supporters than his racial bigotry and stereotyping; even here in “progressive” Seattle—despite the fact that we just had a white male mayor resign after allegations of pedophilia, and after allegations of sexual misconduct by white Hollywood “icons” and politicians—by the way the people look at you, you would suspect that they think all sexual “deviants” are “Mexicans”—you know, white “Mexicans,” black “Mexicans,” Asian “Mexicans,” Indian “Mexicans,” Filipino “Mexicans” etcetera, etcetera, which seems to be the only “explanation” when the truth is caught on surveillance cameras. You want me to buy into the gender victim narrative? My world isn’t the “la-la-land” some people live in.

Meanwhile, many people here and around the world are flummoxed by Trump’s cozying up to Russian dictator Vladimir Putin like a wet rag. VOX recently questioned Mikhail Fishman, the editor of an English-language Russian newspaper in Moscow about this bizarre situation, which at first blush seems inimical to US interests. But then again, we are talking about a fool, as Fishman informs us:

In their habits, they're radically different. Trump is a posturing performer, full of idiotic narcissism. He appears to be a disorganized fool, to be honest. Putin, on the other hand, is calculating, organized, and he plans everything. He also hides much of his personal life in a way that Trump does not. 

Then there's also the fact that Putin is so much more experienced than Trump. He has more than 15 years of global political experience. He knows how to do things, how to work the system. He makes plenty of mistakes, but he knows how to think and act. Trump is a total neophyte. He has no experience and doesn't understand how global politics operates. He displays his ignorance every single day.

(The Kremlin is) quite obviously playing Trump. They consider him a stupid, unstrategic politician. Putin is confident that he can manipulate Trump to his advantage, and he should be. 

For Putin, this is very much a zero-sum game. The West is the enemy. America is the enemy. Whatever you can do to damage the enemy, you do it. The more unrest there is in America, the better positioned Russia is to work its will on the world stage. He wants to divide democratic and European nations in order to then play those divisions to his advantage. 

Fishman notes that Trump and Putin have one thing in common, that they are both authoritarians who see democratic institutions as “burdens, impediments to their will.” 

What else? Remember the controversy in regard to the Dakota Access portion of the TransCanada/Keystone XL pipeline project? Well, maybe not, probably not any longer than anyone will remember that a few days ago there was a significant oil spill in South Dakota from a breach in the line, expelling more than 200,000 gallons of shale oil from Canada. But not to worry; as we are informed by a story from Quartz Media, there is approximately one inspector per 5,000 miles of pipeline on the job.  Meanwhile, The Guardian tells us that the Trump administration is engaging in a whole roll of rollbacks in environmental protection.

I remember when the media was actually “on the job” when this sort of thing was occurring, but then again James Watt, Ronald Reagan’s first Interior Secretary, had a habit of keeping himself in the news. I recall a Pat Oliphant cartoon featuring Watt with one of those World War I “Big Bertha” howitzers rolling out of his mouth with the barrel exploded; Watt also received a “foot-in-mouth” award from Reagan when he said that the Beach Boys were “un-American,” but little else of what came out of his mouth was “funny.” He was particularly infamous for claiming that there was no need for environmental stewardship, because the “end of the world” was coming soon. Worse, his associates in the EPA, Anne Gorsuch and Rita Lavelle, were not just business stooges but corrupt as well. Watt was forced to resign after two years in office, and Gorsuch and Lavelle were convicted of various crimes stemming from their interpretation of “stewardship” of the environment. 

But that was then. The US media has been shockingly ignorant of what the Trump administration has been up to, and naturally it takes an outside source, the UK’s Guardian, to tell us what is happening. For instance, within weeks of Trump’s inauguration the following occurred, under the aegis of Scott Pruitt:

Trump signs a bill repealing an anti-corruption rule that required energy companies to disclose payments to foreign governments. The regulation was scrapped under the Congressional Review Act.

The stream protection rule, which prevented mining companies dumping their waste into streams, is axed under the Congressional Review Act. Trump calls it a “terrible job-killing rule.”

Trump instructs the EPA to rewrite the ‘waters of the United States’ rule, which expanded the definition of the Clean Water Act to protect the water supply for around 117 million Americans. Many farmers, real estate developers and golf course owners opposed the rule. 

On 1 March, governors and attorneys general from several Republican-led states write to Scott Pruitt to request the EPA stop collecting methane emissions data from around 15,000 oil and gas operations. A day later, Pruitt says he has decided to oblige “after hearing from industry”. 

Trump announces a review of vehicle fuel efficiency standards that are designed to push down greenhouse gases and other pollutants. More than a dozen car company chief executives asked the president to revisit an Obama-era decision to mandate improved fuel economy by 2025. Pruitt calls the standards “costly for automakers and the American people.”  

A sweeping executive order penned by Trump orders a rewrite of the EPA’s clean power plan, which was Obama’s centerpiece climate policy, an end to the moratorium on coal mining on public land and the removal of climate change as a consideration when approving federal projects.

Pruitt denies a bid to halt the use of chlorpyrifos, a widely-used pesticide. The chemical has been linked to damage to the nervous system and last year EPA scientists said a ban was warranted. Household use of the chemical was phased out a decade ago but it is still used in farms across the US. 

A court grants an EPA request to delay the implementation of ozone pollution standards that were made stricter in 2015. The EPA intends to review the rules around ozone, which is created when sunlight reacts with pollutants from vehicles exhausts and other sources. Ozone can create smogs and can trigger a raft of health ailments, especially among children, the elderly and those with respiratory problems.

The EPA pauses a regulation that curbs the dumping of toxic metals such as arsenic and mercury by power plants into public waterways.

And the list goes on, and on, and on; Just in the past month Pruitt barred scientists who oppose his politically-motivated policies from advising the EPA. The pipeline spill might not be Love Canal, but the fact that the Trump administration is making massive cuts in regulation, money and personnel in not just the EPA but the Transportation Department which oversees oil pipelines and power plants seems just what the doctor “ordered” for an inevitable disaster of that magnitude. 

This is how the history books will describe Trump's presidency—the facts don't lie--and we don’t even yet know if he will be responsible for a nuclear holocaust with all his tit-for-tat with a small-time dictator who is his equal in foolish bluster. What we do know is that Trump is capable of anything.