ZERO

 

Listening to last night’s debate, I wondered if Democrats who were “rattled” by a poll that claimed that 59 percent of respondents thought that Donald Trump was the “moderate” candidate were justified in this fear. I expected the debate to put that nonsense to rest in the minds of some of those people. As expected, Kamala Harris remained stable and in control, while Trump—apparently irritated by her attacks on his fitness and competency, and her visible amusement at some of his absurd lies—was flailing about with the usual personal attacks and made-up numbers taken out of thin air. Trump’s incompetency is such that it is clear that if he is elected, he would not be running the country, but fascist goons like Stephen Miller and others who are motivated by nothing more than juvenile contrariness and master race fantasies.

Is the country in that bad a shape as Trump claims? I mean, really? One must wonder what country Trump thinks he is living in, sounding like a clownish functionary from the Russian propaganda ministry. His refusal to say he supports Ukraine independence and employing Hungarian dictator Viktor Orban as a "reliable source" demonstrated his discomfort with democratic norms. His accusations of immigrants eating pets is typical of his dehumanizing people and total lack of simple human decency.

And of course he lied about this, he lied about that; a little research will tell you that U.S. job figures showed 2.7 million fewer people were working when Trump left office than we he started. A little research will tell you that Iran and North Korea became more dangerous because of Trump’s amateurish meddling. A little research will tell you that Trisha Meili, the victim in the Central Park jogger case, is not only not dead (as Trump insinuated), but still alive at 64, an author and activist.

The NPR commentators unanimously called the debate a TKO for Harris; Fox News, despite the usual suspects enamored with Trump’s mere repeating of their own lies on national television, was apparently so rattled  by Trump’s “performance” that they immediately offered to host a debate. Harris probably unwisely suggested another debate, but if held by Fox News it should be declined because it would a hit job, the “motivation” behind it clearly to save Trump from himself and not make his Fox News "advisors" look like complete fools.

And wouldn’t you know it, but this person…

 

….who Arwa Mahdawi of The Guardian was half-convinced was a “secret” Trump supporter for failing to publicly disown it or saying anything at all, announced that after Harris’ debate performance had convinced her that all the issues she holds personally dear in deference to her self-involvement, Taylor Swift came out on Instagram to first say that she was “aware” of the possibility of misinformation in the above image, although she didn’t explicitly condemn it, and second to say that she was voting for Harris after all. Isn’t it amazing that something like this is actually headline news in this day and age?

The world is a zero sum game; not everyone can be a “chief,” because then who will do all the work to make a few people super rich? It all has to start from somewhere. What good is a lot of money if there is nothing to buy with it? Nothing from nothing equals nothing, and what is Trump feeding working people who make people like him rich? A bunch of empty propaganda with zero calories. 

Unfortunately we live in a world where nothing is actually “free,” not even silence. I was in the Seattle Central Library the other day, which is more a “tourist attraction” than any place to do any real work (let alone reading books). Remember the “good old days” when one of the tasks of a librarian was to insure the library was a place where you could work in peace and quiet? 

Well, not anymore. The “library,” at least the downtown branch, is a place where people (some of them homeless) can treat as a “community center” where they can talk, yell or play their music or videos if they so choose, because once you “relax” the rules for some, rules no longer mean anything. In fact, if you complain about the noise, you are the one who is “the problem.”

And so I was working on this post, the final entry for my “dictionary,” when I became aware of jawing and joking a half-dozen rows down. Maybe this is just me, but noise in “quiet” environments is more irritating than it is in environments where you expect to hear a lot of noise. So I “asked” whoever these people were to “shut-up”—who I figured were just a couple of “tourists” who were just there to look around. What I heard in response was some arrogant, combative individual who wanted to pick a fight.

All he had to do was be “respectful” and tone it down. Instead, this person who identified himself as a library employee, deliberately wanted to escalate the situation.  What for? What was his motivation to insist on carrying on a nonexistent argument?  When I pointed out he was the one shouting, not me, like some street punk he huffed and puffed his way to the table I was working and “presented” himself, in a fashion—and I do mean “fashion”—which if intended to create the impression that people were reacting to that instead of his bullying behavior, the latter rendered it counter-productive.

Now, this being Seattle, you have to understand the concept of “different strokes for different folks,” and this guy was definitely stroking different. Imagine Marilyn Manson in a dress (well, maybe not so hard to imagine for those who are his “fans”). When I say “counter-productive,” I mean it was obvious that this guy wanted to draw attention to himself in order to draw a particular view from people. The “problem” was that hardly anyone would have noticed or cared what this white guy “looked like,” but this guy was looking to play a “victim” by trying to claim that I was “judging” him by his appearance and not his actions—and I hadn’t even see him before he started his noise-making and decided to show himself for my "entertainment."

Of course, security and other librarians stopped by, none of them who claimed to have heard this guy’s rude and contemptible behavior. It all soon died down, but I couldn’t help but to observe that some people are desperate to portray themselves as a “victim of society,” but their behavior negates that; for most of the world it is ships passing in night, but people like this want to cause a shipwreck. I was born an “alien,” and I can’t change that in the eyes of many (or most); but this guy, he chose to be an “alien” by drawing attention to himself by being a rude asshole, and it appears in retrospect based in on a few encounters the next day that the librarians knew this as well.

This is a case where a great deal of effort is put into “causes” that they should just leave alone because it is all in their head and there is no benefit from it. This can also happen to people who believe they are a cut above the common run, and are indignant  that anyone would believe that they have any taint or association with the unwanted “others,” and efforts to disprove such associations often only backfire because people might ask “What is he trying to hide?”

That is story of the 1976 French film Mr. Klein, where the beginning credits tell us it is based on “the experiences of several individuals,” implying factual events in France from 1942 involving the infamous the Vélodrome d'Hive round-up of French Jews. So it is we see a man named Robert Klein (Alain Delon) as an apolitical, amoral art dealer who takes advantage of desperate French Jews looking to sell off their valuable artwork before the Gestapo and their French police collaborators steal it for nothing, but for only centimes on the franc.

One day a Jewish newspaper is left at his residence; outraged that someone either believes he is Jewish or is trying to frame him, Klein first goes to the publisher, and then to the police to file a complaint. He immediately comes under suspicion, since despite the fact he doesn’t “look” Jewish, and Klein is a technically a German name, in France it is seen as a “Jewish” name. He is advised by his lawyer not to draw attention to himself and just let the thing die, but he is intrigued by the existence of this “doppelganger” who he shares the same name with, and conducts an “investigation” of this man, who he never actually sees, but discovers he appears like him in a general way.

What follows is that in a series of coincidences, Klein goes from suspect to “confirmation” of being this Jewish man; being only “suspected” he is not required to wear the yellow Star of David, but since art dealers are stereotyped as being all Jews, Klein finds his apartment invaded by police and all his artwork and other valuables confiscated. His lawyer attempts to dissuade him from doing “suspicious” things, but Klein will not be stopped: he is determined to find this other Klein.

He goes too far in his quest, even telling a landlady, who claims to have never seen the Jewish Klein’s face, that he wants to rent the rundown room where he once lived. Realizing it isn’t safe for him to remain in France, he is given the opportunity to escape the country with a forged passport provided by his lawyer. However, he meets a woman who informs him that the other Robert Klein was at the train station they just left, and unable to control his foolish quest he jumps off the train to find him. Having contacted him using the phone number he found at the doppelganger’s apartment, he arranges for them to meet, but instead when police arrive to arrest the Jewish Klein in the aforementioned round-up of French Jews, they only find our Robert Klein.

Yet Klein has one more opportunity to escape: his lawyer arrives with his birth certificate and records proving that his parents and grandparents were Christians. But Klein “sees” in the crowd the man he believes to be the other Klein and informs his lawyer that he “will be back.” But instead he passes the point of no return, when still looking for the other Klein he goes through the gate into the area that is controlled by German soldiers rather than French police. He is shoved into a cattle car, destiny likely Auschwitz, and now he can only mull over his eventual fate, his face a picture of resignation that he allowed himself to become the Jewish version of Robert Klein, although not yet realizing that his destiny is likely to become nothing but burnt ashes:

 

The film is somewhat ironic since later Delon would be the subject of scrutiny over his views on Jews and the Holocaust, but here at least he gives his star power to a film that is revealing about the French complicity in the Holocaust.   

On the other hand, the 1969 French documentary The Sorrow and the Pity on the subject was radioactive in France for years, and not allowed to be seen on French television for a decade. I purchased the Arrow Blu-ray instead of the domestic Milestone release because it includes an extra that features a televised debate between the filmmaker and historians, with high school age students inputting their own views about the subject of French complicity after watching the documentary; while a few were more honest about racial views (then, not necessarily now), many simply fell back on the notion that people were scared for themselves, and that “we are not like that anymore.”

Of course the Dreyfus Affair had already exposed the underlying anti-Semitism in French society beforehand, and the fact that Dreyfus was eventually exonerated was due more to political backlash rather than social growth.  After all, Karl Marx was Jewish, and anti-Jewish propaganda when France was under Nazi control or influence (Vichy), made clear the connection between Jews and “Bolshevism”—just another way in this country of saying “socialism.”

This is all ironic given that the far-right National Rally party gained the most votes by a single party in the national election (37 percent), and despite the fact that left-wing parties formed a coalition to win a plurality of seats in the National Assembly, Emmanuel Macron chose instead to select as prime minister a right-wing politician  from a second-run party, inspiring outrage from the left after they had aided Macron and his center-right party in overcoming the far-right threat. In an op-ed in the Washington Post, Lee Hokstadder writes

French President Emmanuel Macron last week handed a noose to the nation’s hard right, a movement animated by bigotry, and empowered it to hang his government whenever it likes. Macron, backed into a corner of his own making, named a new prime minister whose survival, along with the cabinet’s, will depend on the support of Marine Le Pen’s National Rally, a party whose trademark is rejection of France’s vibrant multicultural diversity…

... Now, Macron has allowed not just a crack in the firewall but a yawning breach, brought about by his impulsive decision to shuffle France’s political deck when no such move was necessary. How Le Pen will deploy that leverage — by pressing for her party’s populist, right-wing agenda or by hewing to the center — will become clearer over the coming months. What is extraordinary is that after years on the margins, the French far right now has a chokehold on government policies and the nation’s future.

And none of this had to happen; Macron was frightened by the electoral success of the far-right in the EU elections, and so to “prove” to himself that this was not the “will of the people,” he called a snap election, What did happen instead is that Macron allowed the far-right National Rally an opportunity to control the government. He is being accused thus of “endangering democracy” and ignoring the “will of the people”—or at least a majority of it—who are not ready to hand power to a party with the usual far-right populist rhetoric: immigration, crime and inflation, all exaggerated and all meant to frighten people.

All of this of course disguises the real problems in France—a rapidly aging population, rising debt fueled by an enormous public sector (21 percent of the labor force is in government compared to 13 percent in the US), and an overly generous public pension system with fewer workers to pay for it. It is ironic that the far-right in France opposes working age immigrants who fill jobs and pay taxes, since telling lies about them is also the “strategy” of Trump and the far-right in this country to avoid discussing the issues that really affect the lives of people and the future.

Some people think that problems can be “killed” by shooting them with blanks; of course when they are done shooting, the “problem” is still standing. In a review of the Netflix film version of JD Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy, which Scott Mendelson in Forbes called “pandering poverty porn,” he notes that the Ron Howard-directed film (oh, and he has “second thoughts” about it now?)—the screenplay of which edits out most of Vance’s more extreme views—argues that if he thinks that

…hard work and determination are the only determining factors without wondering why, if that’s the case, such a story would be unique enough to justify an awards-season movie. It goes without saying that the film doesn’t touch on trickle-down economics and the outsourcing/automation of American labor, the Reagan-era gutting of public education and social programs or the over-prescription of Oxycontin. Todd Phillips’ Joker is a more honest look at the macro causes of micro ills. The notion that Bev “stopped trying” negates the very real social and corporate causes of poverty.

Mendelson points out the hypocrisy in the belief that “everyone” can be a “winner” in this society; you know, “all chiefs and no Indians”; I mean if everyone was a Yale-educated lawyer who made his money (with the cash help of right-wing billionaire Peter Thiel, who Vance recently “begged” for campaign funds) as a venture capitalist and not helping people in need of legal help (what a waste of an education), essentially ripping off entrepreneurs for their own gain as noted by this law firm 1 and shown here:

 

And so we are supposed to ignore the fact that people like Vance (oh, hell, and like Trump) insure that the “people” who support Trump that Vance supposedly gave “voice” to are left in low-paying jobs (or jobs at all) to make people like him who create or make nothing rich.

So arrogant, self-privileged con artists like Vance scolds and feeds people a fake line, running government like a “business,” where the profits of corporations and wealth of the rich come first, and the needs of the people come last (if not disregarded altogether).  Mendelson notes that

This is what pundits talk about when we hear about folks ‘voting against their own self-interest.’ Although it’s also argued that, for too many white voters, white supremacy is in their self-interest to the point of denying themselves just to make sure that ‘those people’ don’t also benefit. Needless to say, the very idea of racism doesn’t play a role in this sanded-down fable.

When people act against the own interests, like Robert Klein, and become so “outraged” that people they don’t even know is trying to “destroy” them, they become their own worst enemy, and destroy themselves in the end; why did this man try to race his bike through the center of an intersection in front of a left turn signal?

 

It’s just not “smart,” just as it isn’t voting for Trump again. You just have to say enough is enough. In John Sayles’ 1983 film Baby It’s You, Jill tells Sheik “We’re not in high school anymore!” That is something some people need to learn; it’s about going somewhere, or going nowhere. They need to “grow-up” and finally get it into their heads that Trump is a “fad” that had its day, and we need to learn from our mistakes. He’s not the “answer.” In 2020 he left the country like this…

 

…and why do we want to return to that? Well, folks, if you don’t like democracy because your guy didn’t win, there are other places to go. The Daily Mail tell us that

Brits have already signed up for Vladimir Putin's offer to escape the woke West and move to Russia for its traditional values, reports in the country claim. Already 17 people have been in touch with Russian diplomats in Britain seeking details of Putin's fast-track residence permits, Moscow has said. It comes after Putin changed immigration laws to tempt Westerners to embrace his dictatorship.

Of course it ain’t over until its over, and unless the Trump fad ends, we won’t even see this country turn into a zero sum game: if people like Trump, Vance, Thiel, Musk and the like have their way, you might as well follow all those migrants out of town for all the “benefit” their plans have for you.

On Fox News’ “The Five” Jessica Tarlov, exhausted from being the lone exhibiter of common sense on the panel who dared her fellow panelists to explain the nonsense coming out of Trump’s mouth and the fact that nothing he proposes helps working people, stopped David Gutfield cold when he said “Look, I know…” with “You know what?” “I know tariffs.” “I dated tariffs.” At least Gutfield had a sense of humor about it; his fellow right-wing panelists sat stonefaced, the one liberal on the panel “trumping” them all with something they are not used to encountering: the undisputable truth.

Trump is keen with those one-line policy proposals that demonstrate that he is  keenly aware not of his working class "base," but those on the far-right with the knives and scissors.  When asked if he supports a child day care tax credit, he avoids the question by talking about “tariffs” that will generate “lots of money” as if that is going to solve working families’ day care issues. Trump talks about inflation, but tariffs certainly are drivers of inflation, since they add cost to imported products, which will be borne on people who can least afford it. It would only “work” if the U.S. manufactured products of a like nature that then could compete better, but it hasn’t been doing that since at least the Carter administration.  Again, Trump’s proposals add-up to zero benefit for working people.

No, we should “pity” the rich. While it is true that those in the upper-income brackets pay the large majority of federal income taxes, we must remember they still make gobs of money, a lot more than when there was a 90 percent marginal tax rate on income above the exorbitant that was instituted during the FDR administration to insure that rich were not keeping all the money for themselves. The following graphic shows that the lower-end pays the vast majority of the FICA and Medicare payroll taxes, and is about 45 percent of all federal deductions taken out of most people’s checks. Unlike the federal income tax, none are subject to refund:

 

What this tells us is that just maybe if there is a "problem" keeping Social Security and Medicare solvent the answer is staring us right in the face? 

Of course the states need to gouge working people too. Here in Washington State, there is the WA Cares Fund to pay for “long term care services,” the WA Paid Family and Medical Leave tax  (which of course is not meant to help me or anyone I know),  and the state workers compensation fund. If you own property, you likely see property taxes increase every so often to pay for new projects. The state has no income tax, just the regressive sales tax, which tends to hit the lower-income types the hardest; this is also true of “red states” that brag of not having state income taxes that unnecessarily “burden” the well-off; no, that’s for poor people to be burdened.

It’s not hard to understand that some people just don’t “get it.,” especially if they don’t watch MSNBC. We know about Fox News, but CNN has been faking it as a “moderate” voice, to the point of being accused of “sanitizing” and “sanewashing” Trump’s incoherent rally speeches; we remember that  CNN was also accused of aiding Trump’s election in 2016 by giving his rants endless screen time without comment.

We live in a world where sometimes you have expectations, but you have no control over it. For example this Amazon driver ignored both the delivery window of 10AM to 3PM requested for this "rush delivery" and the permanent instructions stating that the business opened at 9 AM:

 

This person didn't even input the correct city when he made this faked entry. This "rush delivery" was subsequently "lost" and had to be reordered and delivered by the usual way, two days late.

But we expect someone who is running for the highest office in the land to be in control at least of his sanity, and Trump certainly isn't one of those people. He repeated the same one-liner lies he’s told endless times during the debate and some people will take this as “evidence” of that he can put together a string of coherent sentences better than Joe Biden could, but as we saw even during the first debate when asked specific yes or no answers he was unable to commit to any actual policy plan, other than deport, deport, deport, and drill, drill, drill.  The evidence from his campaign speeches shows that he is losing his mind, his social media posts completely unhinged…

 

…and he won’t be in “charge” of anything if elected again, but simply a “front” for the activities for white nationalists with their own dark vision of what they want this country to be. In Texas, Steve Hanley notes that the Texas Supreme Court upheld the creation of new “special courts” stocked with judges who have in the past proven to be in the pocket of the polluters in the fossil fuel industry, whose existence is Gov. Greg Abbott’s payback to the industry for dumping tons of campaign cash in his coffers. 

Unlike most judges who are elected by the people, “Instead, they have been handpicked over the last two months by Greg Abbott personally. They are to serve two-year terms, which means if they dare to rule against the whims of the governor, they can be dumped overboard fairly quickly replaced by someone who will shut up and do what they are told.”

In Texas, political influence is easy to buy if you are rich or are a corporation. Working people in Texas still haven’t gotten the message yet, continuing to vote for corrupt politicians like Abbott and Ken Paxton whose only interest is power and how to keep it.  Hanley ends by noting that “For those who are paying attention, this is exactly the kind of unequal justice we can expect all across America if there is a second Trump presidency. You have been warned. Please vote wisely.”

We shall see. Some people seem to think that the act of "thinking" is too exhausting:

 

 If politics is a zero sum game where there are only “winners” and “losers,” in the end nobody wins if there is no country to “win” left. Think about that.