King Chaos, the Doctor Who Saved His Life, and Jackie Robinson

The fast pace of devastation continues.  In the past forty-eight hours King Chaos and his cabinet courtiers have dealt mortal blows to the American health system and the American economy.  These in particular are the equivalent of clear-cutting forests in this fatal way: it doesn't take long to cut it down, but it takes a whole lot longer to grow it back, and in many cases that becomes virtually impossible.  

But you don't need me to tell you what the Chaotic tariffs are likely to do to inflation, recession/depression worldwide, and almost immediately, to your lives.  Lots of others are describing it in detail.

And you don't need me to tell you what the latest barely announced but huge number of firings and funding cuts in federal health infrastructure will mean in the long run, as well as in the next health crisis, which might be one of those ongoing problems like measles and bird flu, whose leading experts and researchers were among those fired.  Listen to Dr. David Kessler on Rachel Maddow on Wednesday.  

Kessler (a usually quiet but determined former chair of FDA who I met once and found very impressive) lays it out: among those fired yesterday were the two medical doctors and officials who essentially saved the country from an even worse COVID pandemic, and the very doctor who authorized the treatment that saved the life of a very sick COVID patient who I used to call Homegrown Hitler.  And it's much bigger than that.  Kessler says we have maybe a week to save the health infrastructure it took nearly a century to build, and will take nearly a century to rebuild.

All I can really add to the conversation attempting to grapple with the ongoing reign of Chaos is a perspective, maybe even an occasional insight, that results from my own long life and my own modest experiences.

Explosions are happening so fast in so many places that the ones set off the day before yesterday are already forgotten.  But I will for a moment return to one that in itself is an historic retrenchment, throwing this country back into the darkness that has always been its fatal flaw.  For now as the first quarter of the 21st century ends, the American constitutional government is openly and officially racist, and is leading the rest of sheepish society in that same direction.

For all of this began with the attack on something called Diversity, Inclusion and Equity, which have been the moral as well as quite practical arc of history of the past 75 years or so, with roots in the Civil War, bringing American practice in line with American ideals.  But dismantling and essentially demonizing DEI programs in a McCarthyism/Blacklist campaign was not enough.  King Chaos has gone after non-white races as a whole, from top military officials to historic figures, and anybody of any non-white race who might be foreign-born.  

How underreported was this?  That nearly every top military leader who was black or female was fired and replaced by a white man?  The Secretary of Defense, a drunken abuser of limited intelligence and no experience, is also a practicing racist.  In advance of his visit to the US Naval Academy in Annapolis, a place I revered as a boy and still respect, he demanded that its library be stripped of DEI books, which is apparently code for anything to do with nonwhite people (some white people also may not make the cut if they are disabled or not hetero and of course, not men.)  One of the books being considered for the book-burning pile was said to be a biography of Jackie Robinson.

I thought immediately of the biography of Jackie Robinson I took out of the Greensburg Public Library when I was 12.  It's probably not the same one because I got that one from the children's room, where most of the sports books were kept--like the John R. Tunis and Joe Archibald novels.  (As well as, in fact, the Robb White books on Midshipman Lee of the Naval Academy.)

Very early in that book was a scene I haven't forgotten: frustrated with racial barriers like those that kept superior black players out of the major league system for more than 60 years, young Jackie Robinson physically clawing at his arm, trying to tear off his black skin.  

But eventually a one man DEI affirmative action program came along named Branch Rickey, general manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers.  He selected Robinson from the Negro League not only for his excellence as a player but for the strength of his character, because together they were going to break the color line in Major League baseball, and a lot of people weren't going to like it.

Given the chance, Jackie Robinson played one year in Minor League baseball, breaking the color line there over substantial opposition including on the field.  Nevertheless he was named the league's Most Valuable Player.  He was called up to become the first black player in the Major Leagues in April 1947, with the same difficulties.  At the end of the season he was named Rookie of the Year.  

He was named the National League Most Valuable Player in 1949.  He was an All-Star for six straight seasons. He played in six World Series and helped the Dodgers win it in 1955.  He had a long career and remains one of the most beloved baseball stars of all time.  Because someone saw that a little DEI was good for the game and good for America, as well as good for Jackie Robinson and all the black players who followed him.

That may not mean much to King Chaos, whose father was a Ku Klux Klansman.  Or to His Lord High Executioner Musk, whose father supported apartheid in South Africa.  And just to emphasize the reversal of history, the King's pick as American Ambassador to South Africa, no doubt approved by if not named by Musk, actively opposed the ending of apartheid there.

The other side of this exercise in Hitlerian racism is to reveal how ingrained the fruits of diversity have become in American society, and how much a source of common pride they are. But how deeply ingrained is another question, still to be answered.

  

The Story

It's just part of a story, actually quite a lot of stories,

 the part where the third son or the stepdaughter

 sent on the impossible errand through the uncanny forest

 comes across a fox with its paw caught in a trap

 or little sparrows fallen from the nest

 or some ants are in trouble in a puddle of water.

 He frees the fox, she puts the fledglings in the nest,

 they get the ants safe to their ant-hill.

 The little fox will come back later

 and lead him to the castle where the princess is imprisoned,

 the sparrow will fly before her to where the golden egg 

is hidden, 

the ants will sort out every poppyseed for them

 from the heap of sand before the fatal morning,

 and I don't think I can add much to this story.

 All my life it's been telling me

 if I'll only listen who the hero is

 and how to live happily ever after.

---Ursula K. Le Guin

This is a poem for all time, posted at a particular time in which the US government is cutting all funding for immunizations against deadly infectious diseases such as malaria in the poorest countries in the world, which the institution on the ground estimates will result in the painful deaths of more than a million children.  

Previous announced cuts will likely result in starvation for many more, as well as blindness and debilitating illness.  It's estimated that more than 11,000 additional people have already died of tuberculosis since funding through USAID was stopped, and TB infections are predicted to increase worldwide this year by nearly a third.

For decades, the United States has supported immunizations partly out of self-interest: to stop the disease outbreaks before they reach the US.  But ever since the Marshall Plan saved Europe from starvation after World War II, a component of such programs has been compassion.  Yes, US farmers benefitted from selling grain and other foodstuffs to the US government to be distributed in poor countries, but they did so proudly under the slogan, We feed the world. 

Now cruelty and brutality are official policy, which the administration apparently feels no obligation to defend or even explain. Sudden massive cuts to food banks and school lunches, Medicaid and Social Security, public health and emergency services--policies of faceless cruelty are now attacking the most vulnerable people within the US as well--the disabled, the disenfranchised, the old and the poor.  And children.

Those who believe cruelty is necessary to succeed in the world would scoff at this poem, because for them it means living in a fantasy world, a fairy-tale.  But traditional stories have transmitted wisdom for untold centuries.  Cooperation is the strategy for success of nearly every living species, as science learns over and over.  "You'd do the same for me" is the ethic that supports survival, as well as happiness.

But for each of us, it is a matter of personal commitment.  There are lots of words for the actions suggested in this poem, such as altruism and empathy.  To me compassion says it best: to feel together. 

 A word describing these particular actions is even simpler: kindness. The longer I live the more I feel the primary importance of kindness.

American Gestapo

I grew up in the 1950s, when memories of World War II were still fresh, when feature films and documentaries about the war, about Hitler and the Nazis were prominent on television and in theatres.  There were magazine articles and books--lots of books.  

At the same time, in the 50s through the 70s, we heard, watched and read a lot about the Soviet Union and the eastern European countries they controlled.  These regimes--the Nazis and the Soviet Communists--had many things in common, that we were told and taught were un-American as well as being immoral and uncivilized.  One of these was the Secret Police.

The Secret Police in 1940s Germany--the Gestapo--and the KGB in the later Soviet Union (as well as similar secret police organizations in East Germany and elsewhere) not only spied on people and collected information concerning their political beliefs or even their ethnicity.  They arrested people, pulled them out of their homes and snatched them off the street, without warrants, without judicial process, with no information about them given to their families or anyone, as they disappeared into the prisons and prison colonies and (in the 40s) concentration camps. 

All of this we were told was profoundly un-American.  Until today.

People are being snatched off the street without judicial process and shipped off to prison, or deported.  Right now I'm not even dealing with immigration issues, or specific political beliefs or rationales for the arrests.  Even if they were accused of crimes does not pertain.  I don't need to deal with Rumeysa Ozturk's nationality or religion or visa status.  I am talking simply about this:

A person in America (in this case, in Somerville, MA, just a few miles from where I once lived) was accosted on a public street by individuals in dark hoodies, some of whom wore masks, handcuffed, forced into an unmarked car and taken away.  Hours later she was hundreds of miles away in a Louisiana prison, without her medications, treated as we can imagine, without access to legal counsel, without seeing a judge or given a court date.

We know the first part of this because it happened to take place within view of a stationary security camera.  We know the rest of it from reporting.  Whether she ever saw any identification from her assailants is still a question I have.  

We were so proud of our justice system.  Police at every level were required to show identification, and arrests were most often conducted by uniformed officers.  People were read their rights.  They had a right to counsel.  They had a right to know the charges against them, and to have those charges read before a judge.  It didn't matter if it was a murderer, everyone was due these rights.

What happened in Somerville, and what is happening elsewhere in America, is pretty exactly the definition of the Secret Police.  The differences between normal procedures--as imperfectly and even cynically as they are sometimes employed--and what happened to Rumeysa Ozturk is the difference between the police and authoritarian thugs.  

Yet these actions have been publicly defended by the American Secretary of State and the President, as not aberrations but official policy.  This makes ICE the new American Gestapo, the United States KGB.  The plan to Hitlerize America is on track, and it's only two months from the inauguration of Chaos. 

Bunker Hill

The onslaught of Chaos continues at a bewildering pace.  There's too much to absorb, too much to understand.  The news is heartbreaking on a human level, and heartbreaking for those who see the future as well as current implications and devastation.

The news media is overwhelmed, especially in this era of reduced news space and rampant trivialities on every front page of every major news outlet at least in their Internet form.  Even the courts have been slow to see the threats to what holds our society together, and once those are gone, there is only the slow or fast extinction of civilization.  The bulwarks of our society have many serious flaws but they are now facing erasure: the rule of law, equal protection, due process, regard for the environment that sustains us, institutional integrity, organized empathy, to name a few. 

But people feel it--they are feeling fear, and expressing it as anger.  They are shouting at their Republican representatives for what they are doing and endorsing being done by the Chaos administration and the Lord High Executioner Musk.  But they are also shouting at their Democratic representatives for not fighting back with more urgency and force.

For the times are urgent.  Dismantling government agencies weakens this country for the stern tests ahead as well as the very near future, when students look for college loans, or adequate schools, and middle class Americans as well as the poor look for medical care support.

Having stopped programs that sent food and medicine to deeply needy people abroad--to the extent of letting food rot on American docks--Chaos has now "suspended" federal support for food going to food banks across America in coming months, many in rural areas--which therefore get hit twice, with farmers seeing their markets disappear.  I find this a lot more disturbing and consequential that the surrender of rich but cowardly universities and a rich but cowardly law firm that are laughably making deals (i.e. paying extortion) to the Chaos administration that will never hold up its end of the bargain they think they've made. (However, the precedent of a private company--that law firm-- being forced to/ agreeing to dump its diversity programs should be highlighted.) Of course that extortion is itself immensely destructive, especially as it will be applied to institutions and people with fewer resources.

Elected Democrats are divided by what seems like only different strategies.  Some follow the advice articulated by James Carville to do nothing, let Chaos have his way (they are a minority in Congress anyway) until the administration subverts itself.  Live to fight another day.

Others want to more strongly define and confront the Chaos.  In Congress, they were willing to let the government shut down rather than submit to extortion and vote for a horrific budget. The first side--with the Senate minority leader prominent among them-- said that Chaos could have done more damage with the government shut. 

 And who knows, he might be right. But it's beyond strategies now.  It's about seeing the true proportions of what's happening, and the extent and depth of the damage, how it will ripple out, how many people it will hurt, what it will do to future emergencies, and the civic and social suffering and breakdown that might very well follow.  And how painfully difficult and expensive it will be to rebuild systems and institutions, if that's even possible.

Let me say it again: no foreign enemy, even in war or Cold War or terrorism, over any time period, has done as much lethal damage to the American government as Chaos and his minions in the past two months.

It's about standing up for what has given us some protection we depend on.  It's about standing up for who we are, or at least who we want to be.

Not so long ago--and in some ways, still ongoing--there was this argument that Democrats had to tack towards some undefined center to return to electability.  Anyone still saying that is living in the past.  It's not about anybody's preferences anymore.  It's about survival.

One of the prime areas under siege is the Social Security system.  Thousands of employees are being shed while new demands for their time and presence are being heaped on.  And all for no defensible reason.  Social Security fraud is very low and its administrative costs are even lower--probably the best of any agency that large in the world.

Seventy million of us right now depend on those checks, and millions more eventually will.  In one day, the current chief of Social Security threatened to shut the whole thing down because he couldn't interpret a court decision, and the Secretary of Commerce said that anybody who complains about not getting their check is a fraudster.

Also on Friday, Rachel Maddow interviewed Martin O'Malley, former governor of Maryland and under Biden the head of Social Security.  According to him, the Chaos administration has already done "90% of what's necessary" to destroy the Social Security Administration.  And then he said this: "This should be the Democrats' Bunker Hill, upon which the party is willing to die."

That is the seriousness of the moment, and that is the urgency.  The Battle of Bunker Hill was the first major engagement of the American Revolution.  On the third try, the British army took the hill from the vastly outnumbered Americans, who had run out of ammunition. But the victory was more costly to the British.

Kim Stanley Robinson describes the Revolution from the American point of view in this way: Lose, lose, lose, lose, lose, win.

Caring about living to fight another day isn't going to cut it in these circumstances. More than thirty thousand people showed up in Denver to hear Bernie Sanders and AOC make the case for meeting the moment.  Probably no one knows just how to defeat Chaos, or apart from the courts how to defend against it.  But the seriousness of what they are doing demands that they be engaged. The Democrats and whatever allies they still have in the anti-Chaos Republicans that stuck their necks out for Harris, need to give it all they've got.  Now.

The Good News

Boston

 I never thought I'd be looking to Rachel Maddow for the good news.  But it seems she's making a concerted effort to start her nightly program with the positives, and it's certainly heartening to me.

Often she starts with a roundup of anti-Chaos demonstrations that are happening in big places and a lot of small places, including in red states, but that aren't otherwise being widely covered.

Just on Tuesday she had video from West Virginia, Colorado and Greensboro, North Carolina, focusing this time on citizen-sponsored town hall meetings for Republican members of Congress who are too frightened to hold one: about a thousand people gathered to hear the Piedmont Raging Grannies musically ask where Senator Tom Tillis was hiding, in three part harmony.

Greensboro is an interesting case, for in the past few weeks there have been also separate demonstrations protesting the Chaos betrayal of Ukraine and on Chaos immigration policy. I count at least three with different emphases in Harrisburg, PA, and these aren't isolated examples.

Boise, Idaho

 On Monday Rachel covered demos in Tucson, Boise (Idaho), Kansas City and a big demo at a Tesla dealership in Leon Springs, Texas.  She also highlighted truly huge demonstrations in Hungary against Chaos hero Viktor Urban, and against Putin in Romania and elsewhere in Eastern Europe.  

Again I am impressed by the homemade signs at the local demos, many expressing in a few words the heart of the matter.  I'm also noticing a lot of signs with the words Fascist, Dictator and Hitler on them.  These signs and demos reveal what there has been reason to doubt: a lot of Americans value the federal government and the services it provides to them and those they know, as well as the federal employees they know (remember that some 80% of them work outside Washington), and the worth to their communities of federal or federally support facilities near them.  

Also they reveal the depth of support for Ukraine and the extent of opposition to Putin's Russia.  The cozying up to Russia and Putin by Republican politicians in recent years may have cast doubt on the public sentiment against them, and support for Ukraine.  And as Rachel emphasizes, it's not just the demonstrations that tell this tale: the latest NBC poll finds support for Putin at all of 3%, and support for Ukraine at 61% with only 2% supporting Russia. But a near majority sees Chaos as supporting Russia.

Leon Springs, Texas

These provide evidence of some bedrock commitments that again have been all but dismissed by the bullies in Washington: against an American dictator, and for the rule of law.  There's been some impressive community defense for people outrageously manhandled by ICE and Immigration. This last alone may reflect a reawakening of empathy for the victims of injustice, as well as the reflexive knowledge that they too may someday--or soon--need to depend on due process and the protections of the law.  Or they may need emergency services, even weather reports, as well as health safeguards, clean air and water.  The support for USAID also suggests more emotional commitment to the foreign aid that shares food and medicine to less fortunate parts of the world.

People are certainly upset at how they themselves might be affected, by Social Security cuts, Medicaid, education and so on, not to mention inflation from tariffs.  And they see the simple craziness of making enemies of Canada, Denmark and all of Europe

Rachel is often able to follow up reports on demos with Chaos defeats in federal court, especially those ordering the undoing of much of the Muskovite damage, by reading from court transcripts and opinions.  Again, you'd expect a lot of judicial language, but these statements and orders are often very pointed and very succinct.  One refers to the shutting down of the USAID agency as having "likely violated the United States Constitution in multiple ways."

 Another decision voided the attempted ban of transgender people in the military without any cause given, and that these individuals are to be accorded the equal protection under law "that the military defends every day." The decision concludes:  "In the self-evident truth that 'all people are created equal,' all means all.  Nothing more. And certainly nothing less."

Kansas City

An earlier decision ordering the re-hiring of thousands of federal workers sharply criticized the Muskovite method of firing probationary employees wholesale with terse emails claiming they were fired for performance issues, without any evidence or due process, and in one case the judge chose as an example, with documented counter-evidence of superlative evaluations. The judge noted the particular brutality of this tactic, for by calling the firings for bad performance, the workers couldn't get unemployment insurance payments, and poor performance would be part of their record when applying for other jobs.

All these persistent local demonstrations on various issues raises the question of when there might be really big central demonstrations uniting the issues.  And what the response of the Chaos bullies will be to those.  We may find out soon.  The national organization Indivisible has responded to requests from local groups and has called for a "nationwide mobilization" on Saturday April 5, with the simple theme HANDS OFF!  (Rachel had the president of this group on her show last week to announce this.)  Many of the demos now organizing for that day are still local, including big cities, but also including Washington, DC.  

It's too bad that Democratic politicians aren't as direct and eloquent as these signs and these court decisions. But it is better anyway that the eloquence and energy are coming from the people.  As bad as things are and as they quickly could become, it would be worse to see complete apathy from an unresisting public.  These demonstrations have made a good start.  And as one sign proclaimed, courage is contagious.  

"Push-back works," is Rachel's mantra.  (She also has the perfect demeanor to embody the sense of tragic absurdity we're living through.)  Whether it will work well enough and soon enough, who knows.  But it's a good feeling, and I'll take what I can get.

The United States Is Now A Prison

 

Japanese internment camp in the US

The story is still unfolding regarding the deportation of alleged Venezuelan gang members to prisons in El Salvador, despite a federal court judge's order to stop the deportation, even to the extent of turning the planes around.  Though the Chaos administration claims these people were outside the US by the time the order was given, the White House press secretary and others are asserting that the judge has no jurisdiction.  King Chaos invoked a 1798 law previously used a few times during a war, including the rationale for the infamous Japanese-American internment camps during World War II (and lest it be forgotten, at least one Italian internment camp.)  

This is the most blatant act of defiance of a court order so far. But there have been others, especially relating to border issues. Though no evidence has been presented that any or all of the deported and now imprisoned people were gang members, there is at least the appearance of eliminating danger.  Not so in the case of Dr. Rasha Alawieh, a medical specialist in the crucial area of kidney transplants, and a Brown University medical school professor.  On returning from a visit to family in Lebanon, she presented her valid visa and was detained, and then later put on a plane to Paris presumably to connect with a flight to Lebanon.  In other words, she was expelled, even though the US Customs and Border Protection officials who held her were informed that there was a federal court order to prevent her immediate deportation, and to provide 48 hours notice of their intentions.

  Later the judge who issued the order said from the bench that there was reason to believe his order was willfully disobeyed.  Again, a case of open defiance of the rule of law.

Except for the timely court orders, these are not isolated incidents.  There's a story on the Internet about a Canadian woman attempting to renew her work visa at the southern border who was summarily dumped into a privately run prison and left there in primitive and unsanitary conditions.  She encountered other women there who had no idea why they were being held, or even where they were.

There are many other reports of harassment at the northern border as well, including of Canadian citizens.  What a lot of these incidents have in common is people being jailed without being charged before a court, without access to attorneys, perhaps transported to a prison far away if not summarily deported. 

Given other circumstances, Canadians are not eager to travel to the US anyway, but this alone makes that dangerous.  It is dangerous as well for anyone to attempt to leave the country.  Brown University has already advised its employees to avoid foreign travel.  But even that may not be enough.  There are several reported and documented instances of US residents clearly on the legal path to citizenship being stopped at airports from domestic flights, detained and imprisoned.

 When the government uses arbitrary and unchecked power with impunity, eventually no one is safe. The United States is now a de facto prison run by lawless authoritarian thugs.   

RIP George Bookless

 

I learned recently from the Knox College alumni magazine of the death of George Bookless last spring.  George was a senior in my first year, 1964-5.  He was one of the older students known on campus as what was then called a public intellectual--someone involved in campus and political discourse as well as in their field of endeavor. Along with those known as literary writers,    they were role models.

There were others I remember.  Some, like Gordon Benkler, I knew of mostly through his writing and speaking, or Jim McCurry as a literary writer and scholar.  Others I knew a little, like the well-known wild man Cecil Steed, or the poet and editor of the literary magazine Jay Matson.  And others treated me as a friend, even if I was still a little in awe, like Gary McCool and Mary Jacobson. (Mary was in her third year then, so I got the chance to know her better the next year, along with Judy Dugan, Bob Misiorowski, Kevern Cameron, Gerry Roe, James Campbell and others.)  

In that first year experience, George Bookless was somewhere in between. I remember him as a public presence, but also as a witty and affable raconteur who was often in the company of Gary, Mary and their friends.  In fact, Mary Jacobson is the source of two memories.  She joked with him that after he became a great success in the world, he should endow a library for Knox, but insist they name it the Bookless Library...  It was funnier in those pre-computerized days than it is now.

The other is one of those stray memories--in the Gizmo, with the new Beatles song called "Yesterday" playing often on the jukebox, Mary laughed at the line "I'm not half the man I used to be," something George used to say that she thought was ridiculous but endearing.

But the direct memory that has stayed with me is from a day that spring, shortly before graduation when for various reasons the campus was in tumult.  I was staring at the bulletin board near the entrance of the student union after dinner when George surprised me by stopping to speak with me.  Exactly how he knew I was an aspiring literary writer I no longer recall, but he talked to me about that, quite seriously.  He offered advice and encouragement.  (The one specific piece of advice I remember is the one I didn't take--to write about my early adolescence rather than my life now, because I was too close to it.  He was right of course, but I was too emmeshed in the fast changes of the moment to yet be gripped by anything else.)

These many years later I am still astonished by the attention these older students paid me, especially this spontaneous moment with George Bookless.

The last I remember hearing of him was that he'd joined the Peace Corps, as did may Knox students I knew over the next years.  According to his extensive online obituary, he quickly wound up being witness to a civil war in Nigeria, and in essence a part of the government.  Though he was an English major with biology minor at Knox, he'd learned photography from his father, who had served in the Army Air Force photography unit.  Photography and related activities became his profession.

George visited historic Galena, Illinois on the Mississippi River to photograph eagles, and decided to make his life there.  He became an Alderman at Large and worked on many civic projects including downtown reconstruction, consistent with his advocacy and activism at Knox. 

He seems to have led a full life, with family (including two children and I count four grandchildren), a civic and community life, and life outdoors, camping, hiking and canoeing. He displayed a talent for cooking, and in their tributes, one of his children and one grandchild offered that a dish he learned to make in Nigeria remains their favorite.  I admire all of it more than I can say.

But the best image I have is of George as storyteller, which both of these tributes and the obit mention. I'll remember his kindness to me and I wanted to acknowledge it here, as well as the kindness of those other older students.  But I'll want to remember George Bookless like that: out on his Galena front porch, telling tales.

Non-Democracy in America

Parade float in Germany. People everywhere but the US get what's happening.

Claude Malhuret's short address to the Senate of France continues to resonate, through the several times I've carefully listened to it. In summarizing the import and impact of what Chaos is causing in his brief rule so far, he brought up the swiftness with which Hitler toppled the democracy of Germany.  A French statesman does not make this analogy lightly.

For the Hitlerization of America is on schedule.  So much so that the Polity Project, an organization that studies and characterizes governments worldwide has re-classified the United States as a "non-democracy."

The overwhelming number of illegal orders roiling everything the government does is accompanied by other automatic subversions of the rule of law, including the attempt to say the pardon of one of his January 6 thugs includes erasing subsequent charges that he engaged in conspiracy to kill a government investigator.

The attacks on free speech are so various and so many that several observers remark on the palpable climate of fear they are creating.

Last week the Muskovite takeover and decimation of the federal government moved into outright thuggery when armed men forced their way into a small resisting agency. They were reputed to be US Marshals, though this is not in their remit, and there's some question about whether that's actually who they were.

While Chaos makes lots of noise disabling the US government, the world order and life on Earth, his administration is readying the militarized sweep of allegedly illegal immigrants, to herd them into the concentration camps now being prepared--that is, those not already sent to Gitmo. 

The analogy extends to foreign affairs, as Europeans note the Hitler-like treachery of the US of Chaos betraying Ukraine, penalizing longstanding allies and cozying up to enemies.

So far however the resistance has not measured up to the threat. The Fidel-sized, Fuhrer-inflected State of the Union seems to have galvanized his Republican support, while the Democrats were all over the place, since admitting they blew it. Congressional Democrats face another test very soon with budget votes, but so far they seem disorganized.

Americans face the prospect this year of recession combined with inflation, and the absence of a government to address them.  Result: more chaos.

But Malhuret holds out one hope: "In America, the defenders of freedom have always prevailed." It's the test of this generation.  So far the resistance is scattered and apparently without strategy. The energy in the streets is there, but there's nothing yet to rally around.  So far, the signs at these protests have been more articulate that the words of any leader.

Pittsburgh protestors in one of many demos Friday 3/7 about cuts in science research.

In previous crises in American history, people have turned to people of stature, respected enough by the majority to be listened to. That's part of what's disturbing now--because it's hard to think of any such persons.  Maybe the very idea of people of stature is obsolete. (Except maybe in Canada, where an actual person of stature is to be the new Prime Minister.) The last one in America may have been Obama, and he's been noticeably quiet. Some suggest this leadership will have to come from the states, from governors and attorneys-general.

This is also in contrast to the reactions in other countries.  European leaders almost without exception quickly reaffirmed their support for Ukraine in the wake of the Chaos betrayal of that country, and his further betrayals of the Atlantic Alliance.  Canadian leaders with the support of its citizens are staunchly resisting the Chaos threats to its sovereignty and economy.  With actual and threatened tariffs, Canadians are stripping the shelves of US beverages (especially alcoholic) and other products. Ontario is imposing its own tariff on the electric power it generates that parts of the upper Midwestern US depend on, and threaten to turn it off altogether.  In each case, leaders aren't hedging, they are resisting, and their poll numbers show popular support.

One form of resistance in the US is potentially dangerous: the Washington Post reports that Tesla dealerships, charging stations and vehicles have been the targets of Molotov cocktails and gunfire.  Something like this could be the pretext for a federal escalation, now that Chaos has installed puppet leaders in the military and Justice Department.  Or he could unleash his violent minions, especially the ones whose leaders he recently freed from prison. 

 Why do I suggest this possibility?  It's the next step in the Hitler playbook. 

 

Is This What Made America Great?

 

According to Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo,  a memo from the Secretary of Defense puts into action a policy that the Department of Defense will no longer prohibit its contractors from maintaining segregated facilities, by race, gender or anything else--they can mandate separate places, keep the undesired race, gender, nationality, religion, etc. out.  They'll still get the DOD's millions and billions.

In other words, segregation is okay with the Defense Department of the United States.

The Call

Claude Malhuret is a senator in the legislature of France.  This short discourse is the most eloquent, realistic and inspiring speech on the Chaos administration, Ukraine and Europe.  Don't miss this, and do it with the sound on: the French language is perfect for this.

The basic message: After summarizing eloquently what's been going on, he calls for Europe to be done with Chaos, and for the time being, with the United States.  But there is a message also for Americans towards the end.

Theatre of Cruelty

 It used to be said of the Republican party, we know what they are against.  What are they for? Now we know what they are for: suffering, sickness and death.  It is the party of cruelty, operating from the theatre called the White House.

Consider the most blatant example: the cancellation of global programs under the USAID agency.  Here is how Stephanie Nolen's reporting begins in the New York Times:

"Starting Wednesday afternoon, a wave of emails went out from the State Department in Washington around the world, landing in inboxes for refugee camps, tuberculosis clinics, polio vaccination projects and thousands of other organizations that received crucial funding from the United States for lifesaving work.

"This award is being terminated for convenience and the interest of the U.S government," they began.

The cancelled contracts include support for the UNICEF program to immunize against polio, a project that operates the only source of water for a quarter million people escaping warfare in crowded camps, several projects countering malnutrition, and two contracts that would have paid for malaria tests, bed nets that protect against malaria-bearing mosquitoes and malaria treatments that would have protected more than 53 million people.  Plus the projects that got the most attention: cancellation of an HIV protection program and one that tracks Ebola infections.

Nearly all the cancelled monies were to support projects in Africa, furthering the racism that is the bottom line for nearly everything the Chaos administration is doing.

 "People will die," said the executive director of the African Population and Health Research Center, "but we will never know, because even the programs to count the dead are cut."

So the suffering and death--the Rs hope--will not be televised.  

These are not program budgets that were just trimmed a little.  Though the amounts are not huge, they represent the financial lifeblood of these projects and in many cases the groups that manage and deliver them. So not only aid but the infrastructure for future aid is being summarily destroyed.  They amount to 90% of the USAID programs, and this on top of the cutoff of funds that left food grown by American farmers rotting on the docks instead of on its way to feed the desperately hungry, and the mass firings of USAID personnel in Washington, who were given 15 minutes to clean out their desks and vacate the building.

These programs add up to a small dent in the federal budget.  The US spends about $20 billion a year on all humanitarian and health projects. Comrade Musk can make more than that in a day.  Of course, this is not his money we're talking about, since he doesn't pay taxes.

This at a time when the global effort to eradicate extreme poverty and hunger and greatly limit tropical diseases is one of the unsung successes of our time.  Many of these programs are in war-torn areas, where there are no available alternatives.  Only those individuals with exceptional dedication and courage have been capable of the relentless tasks involved in saving and bettering lives.  Now their efforts are dishonored and their work vaporized in a moment. And who else suffers?

Black lives.  Babies.  Old People. Women. 

Update 3/3: Pro Publica has added its reporting on the impact of cancelled programs, quoting local authorities who estimate the resulting deaths as in the hundreds of thousands. Talking Points Memo reports that a USAID health official, now placed on leave, has released a series of memos with the details of cancelled programs and impacts, many either previously unknown or contrary to public statements and assurances to federal court judges made by the Chaos administration.

The Chaos administration and their angry white male billionaires and mere millionaires are ignorantly but also maliciously targeting those same vulnerable populations in the United States.  The Republican budget plan to slash support for Medicaid, and its threats against Medicare and Social Security will attack the health and lives of the old and disabled.

The Chaos chief of health, currently backtracking on his callous disregard for a child's death from measles, is threatening the same populations plus children with anti-immunization rhetoric and the beginning of the disappearance of federal support for them.  For instance, the yearly meeting of scientists to discuss formulations for next year's flu vaccine was cancelled.

At the turn of this century, measles was declared eradicated from the United States.  Now there is a measles epidemic, because of doubts fostered about vaccines and the resulting lack of immunizations.  There is at this moment a strong epidemic of flu across the US, with hospitals overrun with seriously ill patients. The chief reason for it is that too many people did not get their flu shots.  Measles kills children, flu kills old people.

Even the apparently patternless firings of federal employees, which is cruel enough in its execution and lack of real rationale, hits the most vulnerable the hardest.

PBS pulled together some research about federal employees with very interesting results.  See how you would answer these questions:

What proportion of federal employees work in Washington?

How much has the "bloated" federal workforce grown since the 1960s?

What agency has the most employees?

What is the job category with the most employees?

Some eighty percent of federal employees do not work in Washington (or near it in VA and MD).  Only twenty percent do.

The federal workforce has grown--well, not at all--since the 1960s. It's always been around 2 million employees.  It's varied from 1.8 to the current 2.2 to 2.4 million.

The agency with the most employees is the Veterans Administration, and the job category with the most employees is: nurses.  Not exactly bureaucratic pencil-pushers.

Slashes of the federal workforce hurts communities all over the country.  Most conspicuously, in National Parks, Forests and Monuments, which is why there are  protests in all those places. But veterans hospitals and services--already struggling to meet the needs--will be hurt, as will wounded and disabled veterans and PTSD programs.

The idea we're supposed to buy is that one completely ignorant but very wealthy and reportedly drug-addicted white man and his equally clueless techboys can instantly--in minutes-- discern waste even without knowing a damn thing about what these people do or why their work is vital.  But waste isn't really the point anyway.  

Here's some other facts not covered in the PBS piece. About 20% of federal workers identify themselves as black, which is higher than the proportion of blacks in the general population (but as 60% of federal employees, whites are also overrepresented, as are Asian Americans..  Latinos at 10% are underrepresented from their 20% of the population.)  

Blacks hold 18% of senior executive level jobs in the federal government, and 11% everywhere else. That's a significant if not huge difference.  Whites hold 60% of those positions among federal employees, but 75% as a whole.  Disabled workers are also overrepresented in federal jobs versus the general job market.

The percentage of women employees is slightly less in federal government than all jobs, both under 50% of the total. However, women do better in so-called independent agencies.  For example, about 65% of employees of the Social Security administration are women.  Across the board it seems they hold something like 40% of supervisory positions or less, but at Social Security, 62% of supervisors are women. By amazing coincidence, half of Social Security workers are reportedly to be fired. 

Though these numbers are not wildly out of proportion with the rest of the American workforce, I've observed that government employment on all levels has helped to raise the standard of living and status of minorities and women at least since the 1960s.  The federal government especially but also city governments, mostly through merit-based employment (Civil Service tests, or example) and some affirmative action or at least less prejudice, seemed to me to have been the earliest in offering secure and well paying work to minorities and women, as well as the disabled and the older working population.  Government jobs (including the Post Office) I believe were a major pathway to the middle class for minorities as well as white working class families, especially with the decline of manufacturing jobs.

But angry white supremacist and misogynist billionaires and the angry white males that elected them don't like these trends.  They don't want black and women supervisors.  They want fewer black faces in their television commercials.

Then there are the unions representing federal government workers, which the Chaos administration is also attacking. The decimation of labor unions that followed from the loss of manufacturing jobs was a major factor in severing the white working class from the Democratic party.  Any weakening of any unions furthers that separation, and limits a major source of money and votes for Democrats.  So politics is part of this, too.  

But the casual cruelty, the disrespect and disdain, the callous disregard, and even the sadism are the clearest features of all these policies, including the planned deportations and bungling rendition of immigrants and refugees, who just happen to be primarily people of color, and include lots of women, children and old people. We even see this in the attitudes toward Ukraine and Gaza, and the casual imperialism that values nothing else, like the real estate developer's attitude towards land and forest life, or a community's life.

"People will die..."  "...for convenience."

 This is the most inhuman side of human behavior.  It is seen mostly in times of acute danger and stress.  There are pockets of stress in the US, such as in the rural areas most affected by opioid addiction, and the underlying if unacknowledged dread of climate distortion, but there is no real accounting for this cruelty in high places, except itself. 

But thanks to them, suffering and death will increase in this country and around the world, especially among the most vulnerable. We were fighting the good fight to limit it, and now we're not.  The theatre of cruelty deliberately prevents it, with not even an attempt to justify these actions--compounding the contempt.    "...and the interest of the United States government."  So now the United States will own it. 

Fighting Back

 

The moves go on, the blitzkreig isn't over, but the counter-moves have begun.  There are now court cases too numerous to track in process, and the ones that have been decided have almost all gone against the Chaos administration.  Three went against them in just 90 minutes on Tuesday.  The independent watchdog agency Office of Special Counsel found that the firing of the government employees of several agencies who sued were illegal. 

Musk has been slowed if not stymied by resistance within the administration as well, and has quietly rehired key personnel, and corrected erroneous cuts he was bragging about last week.  At least 21 technology staffers of the agency Musk took over have resigned over dangerous intrusions they were told to make into sensitive information on government computers, as well as in protest of the Chaos efforts to "dismantle critical public services."  It's not for nothing that columnist Eugene Robinson calls him "the Lord High Executioner" of the Chaos kingdom.

Republican members of Congress in multiple states faced hostile crowds at town hall meetings, and a group of conservative Republicans is on record opposing the Muskovite massacres and other Chaos acts that attempt to lay waste to the Constitution.

Voices are finally being raised, including eloquent ones, from Kamala Harris at the NAACP awards to Jane Fonda at the SAG awards. Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut is gaining attention for his direct words about each Chaos outrage.  And so far, western Europe is standing up to Chaos and his shameful and cynical show of betraying Ukraine.

And people are active again: fired government workers besieging congressional offices, citizens demonstrating at court houses, federal buildings--and Tesla dealerships. Their pointed signs (as shown here in excellent photos on Lost Coast Outpost of a Eureka, CA demo) simply show that the essence of what's going on is not being missed.

The Chaos poll numbers are down and approval for their actions and policies way way way down.  Prices are going up, especially groceries, especially eggs (so cutting government monitoring of Bird Flu probably not a good idea, though there's evidence also that the egg industry (surprise! surprise!) is using it as an excuse to jack up prices), and everyone--economists, public polls--expect inflation to go up. 

The Chaos admin may have counted on a greater time lag between their actions and the reactions and consequences but  they are already starting to happen.  Of course Chaos will make countermoves as well as splashy diversionary ones, and there's much more conflict to come.  But that people are being emboldened and especially galvanized into resistance communities are good signs, and one that until recently looked like they might not appear.

One of the court cases just beginning is aimed to show that the whole anti-DEI campaign is illegal as well as immoral and racist.  But that insidious effort continues well beyond the Chaos government.  Possibly in an institution where it would be least expected: none other than MSNBC.

  In putative economy and on-air redesigning, the new MSNBC chief has managed a Muskovite massacre of staff and several longtime on-air hosts, with the hosts axed and many of the staff members being people of color.  This has not escaped the notice of Rachel Maddow, who condemned it on her show.  "It is indefensible," she said, "and I do not defend it."

When they took these actions--especially the axing of Joy Reid, one of the most interesting faces and voices on television, but also the demotion of Alex Wagner, another super smart and dynamic TV presence--they must have known that Rachel would be very unhappy, and decided they could do without the most-watched face of their network.  So savor the Rachel show because I have a feeling it's not going to be on MSNBC much longer--by her choice.