The American Stain, or, Come on, White People, Stop Lying

Cartoon by Rogers Pittsburgh Post Gazette Please Don't Sue Me I'm Already Broke.

I cannot remember a more demoralizing four months in governance.

In November of 2016, about 40% of U.S. voters (give or take a couple of percentage points depending on who is counting) elected a man so vile in personality and so low in moral character that Richard Nixon looks statesmanlike in comparison, and George Bush looks like an aspiring saint.

The 60% of us who did not want this man in office immediately went into serious shock, and have since that time been descending through the various stages of grief:

    •     #1 Denial: This can’t be happening. We will take to the streets and work every second and make lots of noise and it will go back to the way it was!
    •    #2 Bargaining: Okay, maybe we can’t be in the streets every minute and maybe it won’t go away right away but we will fix it, just not as fast. Everyone will do what the can and the bad man will stop being bad, someday, maybe.
    •    #3 Depression: Shit. We have a dictator and he’s dangerous and Congress is craven and stupid and they don’t care about us one whit. It's all over. Why even live? Life sucks.

This week the country seemed to enter the depression state en masse as 45, the ugly American at the top of the pile, threw a week-long tantrum that started firing the FBI director—something that has been done only one other time in history. The tantrum continued.

Baldly admitting during a television interview that he fired Comey to obstruct an ongoing investigation into his ties with Russia, 45 humiliated his staff, threatened the intelligence community AND Comey on Twitter, and threatened to pull the funding for the ACA anytime he felt like it.Then he had the Russians into the Oval Office with no US press allowed but Russian press welcomed (because Putin asked him to, and how could he say no?)

Then he admitted he told the Russians a sensitive highly classified secret and also called Comey a 'nut job' and admitted the pressure over 'this Russ-er thing' was off now that Comey was gone.

Then his family said, hey Dad, let's all go to the Middle East! Like, um... now! Right away!

Chop, chop,  time's a wastin'.

The 45 Show never ends. I mean, seriously. This perpetual dumpster fire literally never ends.

But the real problem is us.

We all know it is, too.

The Worm Hath Turned

When I was a kid, every time a change came that hinted at somebody getting his or her just comeuppance, my Irish-American grandmother would declare smugly,

“Pammy, the worm hath turned!”

White America’s refusal to confront the legacy of slavery and an intractable acceptance of white supremacy post-Civil War is what brought 45 to power. Not jobs. Not the economy. Not his 'refreshing direct language.' Please. Russia could not have gotten so much as a dirty look from voters if we weren’t already so bitterly divided.

During the obsessive election postmortem, pundits were fond of explaining that politicians in both parties had ignored working class white America for way too long—so long, in fact, that the desperate working poor were willing to vote for a huckster and a liar.

Oh bullshit, bullshit, bullshit. 

Listen, I’m a white working class American, so is my husband, so are my kids, and so are my in-laws, and all sorts of other folks who live and vote here in the decaying rust belt, and we were, to a person, horrified by His Royal Orangeness, his filthy mouth, his racist ideas, his bold stupidity, his untreated mental illness, his horrible clothes, his fatty diet, and his piggish and criminal abuse of women.

What’s more, while some of the white working class poor wailed and moaned about brown people taking 'their' jobs and 'their' country, black Americans were struggling harder than almost any other group, and the ‘illegals’ they so despised were picking tomatoes and corn and fruit for wages no white person would ever accept—that is, if a white person could even work like that, which few will.

Some were receiving no wages at all. 

A few years ago, Michigan, the fruit belt of the Midwest, tried forcing farmers to hire white citizens over transient brown workers through state legislation. The legislature had to repeal that attempt shortly after it became law. White people were walking off these jobs after half an hour; eventually workers stopped showing up at all, and crops began to spoil in the fields.

Of course, there are all those great slaughterhouse jobs a bit farther west--jobs where South American refugee teens lose limbs and bleed to death on the cutting floor, and there is also the slavery of the tomato and strawberry pickers in Florida—a place that routinely and openly coerces ‘illegals’ fleeing brutal conditions in South American dictatorships to work for free or be turned over to ICE.

There are also all those great dish-washing jobs and domestic positions white people are missing out on. Oh yeah, and stripping and making up motel beds and cleaning up pubes and puke.

In short, all of us are suffering since the crash of 2008 (and before!), but black and brown people are suffering way more, as usual, than poor whites.

The big difference is not the suffering, it's the sense of entitlement.

When some poor whites start suffering the same harsh conditions blacks have suffered since the horror of Reconstruction and Jim Crow, some of us white folks experienced that loss of special privilege as an unfair attack. Are these people not due certain considerations just for being white?

They feel they are. Or they should be. They say as much. Openly.

White Supremacy is the gasoline that fueled the fire that energized 45’s campaign--not job loss, not aborted babies, not the tragedy of the opioid epidemics--which by the way no one gave two hoots about so long as illegal drugs only killed urban blacks--and not the terror of gays and transsexuals doing anything at all,  just daring to, you know, exist.

No, it was race. White entitlement. White whining and pissing and moaning.

And we, as a culture, as a nation, still don’t want to talk about it.

Why not? It’s been 154 years by the shortest count, much longer if you count the slaves brought here in the 17th century, before America was even a thing. Slaves that literally built the country. For free.

Too soon? Seriously? After 154 years? After over 300 years?

As my grandmother used to cluck, the worm has turned all right.

And now we have a nation ruled by worms.

This Means W.A.R.: Whites Against Racism? Why Not?

Here’s something you don’t see very often: White people talking to other white people about how not to act like racist assholes (and how not to be racist assholes, and why this is worth working on).

You just don’t see much of that.

And there’s a good reason you don’t see it.

It’s because, as a white person, if you pipe up in that voice in public, you put your own safety in peril. At the very least, you’re likely to get shouted down, or drown in a chorus of, “My great-grandfather wasn’t even HERE during slavery,” or some other whiny sniveling evasive rant. The 2017 justification for this is "I don't believe in political correctness," which, nine times out of ten is a coded way of saying, "I'm not going to be ashamed of my racism."

During the Watts riots, I was standing in line at a Mini-Mart behind five or six assorted white people, some well-dressed, some in work clothes, some just waiting to buy a lottery ticket. The conversation in front of me turned to the riots, with everyone going on about “these people who go and burn down their own neighborhoods,” while looking nervously over their shoulders to be sure no black people were around.

Being way more mouthy that intelligent, I said, “Would you be happier if they hopped on buses and burned down YOUR neighborhood?”

The silence after that quip was so heavy, I decided to leave. Right away.

Because I’m cowardly that way. I am.

I've been through worse, but I'll get to that by and by. My history is what inspire my cowardice.

I have stories to tell about race, lots of them.

Recently some online writer friends were talking about what we could do about this mess the US finds itself in, what would help, and one person suggested a blogging circle. “The only bad thing is,” she warned,”you will get trolled. If you write about politics you will get trolled.”

I used to write about politics back before 2008 but I gave it up because I got sick of trolls. That was years ago. But I thought her blogging circle idea wasn’t bad. I need a place to dump my anti-45 thoughts, and it seemed to me that it also might be the right time for me to tell my stories and talk to other white people about race and my own experiences confronting racism.

Basically I'm taking up Michael Eric Dyson's challenge to white people to challenge each other. Already I am getting shit about it, which is encouraging.

So that’s my declaration of W.A.R.

I mean to speak for no one except myself. These are personal stories and will be presented as such. They are not prescriptive or preachy, just an account of shit that has actually happened in my actual life, shit I have never had a place to share.

Take from it what you will, or leave it.

And stay tuned.

Dear Stephen: A Letter to an English Friend About Life Under Trump

Dear Stephen,

Courtesy of Inkygirl, creative commons license.

It’s pretty clear to me that there was collusion between not just the Russians and Trump's team but Trump himself. He brags that he doesn't play by the rules, and that he games the system. I'm sure some voters saw that as an asset, as if knowing how to beat the system meant that he understood it and could win the Washington game for them, but that's the same lie we were told when Bush and 

Obama tried to persuade us that the guys who caused the financial meltdown were just the guys to fix it, since no one understood it better than them. The biggest lie was in the last phrase- they didn't understand it. Then Fed chairman Alan Greenspan: “Those of us who have looked to the self-interest of lending institutions to protect shareholders’ equity, myself included, are in a state of shocked disbelief,” he told the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform." That quote is from the New Yorker. From NBC: “A critical pillar to market competition and free markets did break down,” Greenspan said. “I still do not fully understand why it happened.”

I don't think  Trump thought he would lose without help from Putin. I think it's simply the way he operates. What  evidence beyond his behavior for the last seventy years is needed to observe that the fat fuck has no moral compass? The goddamned media has bought into the current "post truth" fetish. The only reason they cover him now is the same reason they gave him a trillion dollars worth of free advertising during the campaign. The media loves conflict and Trump is loaded for bear with potential conflict. He's certain clickbait, and the media doesn't give a shit if it's negative or positive- “Just look at our fucking ads, stupid". They're corporate whores, and covering his reality show antics is a hell of a lot cheaper than paying for good investigative journalism.

There are a few things going on with Trump that although  they aren't news ought to be repeated here. One, he lies so egregiously and so often that it's difficult to sort it all out and winnow out whatever germ of truth might have accidentally wandered into his remarks.. Second, although he claims not to care what others think of him, he's in fact so thin skinned that he can't let any criticism slide, no matter how trivial. He tries to cover his dumb ass with bluster in cases like this. Hence, when he blurted out that he fired James Comey to end the investigation into his ties with Russia, it was not only true- disconcerting enough coming from a congenital liar-  but bluster. It was Trump's great "Fuck you!" to the system. He doesn't have a feel for politics at all, and cut the legs out from under his entire staff, who were trying to pass off their own outrageous and completely different lie that Comey was fired for being mean to Hillary. But of course we're reeling from the audacity of it all and stand by gobsmacked. He hasn't been able to decide which he's going to react with, one of the lies or more bluster, so he's used both and we're left wondering if he's arrogant or stupid, when in fact both things are true. In any case it was an unbelievably stupid admission, bluster or not.

It couldn't be more obvious, or more simple, that Comey was fired for exactly the reason Trump gave- he didn't like the Trump/Russia investigation and wanted to end it. The simplest explanation is very often the most likely, and whether Trump had chosen to lie or tell the truth, ending the investigation is the one thing he might think he had to gain from dismissing Comey. But of course he only succeeded in making himself guilty of obstruction of justice, coincidentally the exact offense that brought Richard Nixon face to face with impeachment and resulted in his resignation to avoid that fate.

What Hunter S. Thompson wrote about Nixon over forty years ago is also true of Trump: The son-of-a-bitch ought to have his nuts ripped off with a plastic fork. When Trump thumbs his nose at the system he gets big cheers from his hard core of supporters, but what he's thumbing his nose at is our system of checks and balances and our rule of law. He thinks he's above the law and his staunchest backers are looking for revenge against a government that they think has sold them down the river, so every nail he drives in the coffin of the republic sends them into an ecstasy of perceived retaliation. They don't recognize white privilege and are so blind to it that equality looks like oppression to them. And they have no loyalty to that system anymore for all their protestations of patriotism and love for America. They claim to love a vanished America, and indeed many of them do pine for the vanished and traitorius Confederate States of America, paragon of Christian virtue that it was.

There is a recent article in The Nation magazine  by Susan McWilliams:  "This Political Theorist Predicted the Rise of Trumpism. His Name Was Hunter S. Thompson.”.

(https://www.thenation.com/article/this-political-theorist-predicted-the-rise-of-trumpism-his-name-was-hunter-s-thompson/)

McWilliams points out that Thompson described the culture and motivation of our present class of Trump deplorables fifty years ago in his book " Hell’s Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs". Thompson chronicled the philosophy of violent and total retribution that was followed by the Angels  against anyone who crossed them, which meant pretty much any outsider, and almost all of us are outsiders to them. I remember the book well, and Thompson in his turn had credited Nelson Algren from his book, "A Walk on the Wild Side". 

"Algren’s book opens with one of the best historical descriptions of American white

trash ever written.

 He traces the Linkhorn ancestry back to the first wave of bonded

servants to arrive on these shores. These were the dregs of society from all over the British

Isles – misfits, criminals, debtors, social bankrupts of every type and description – all of

them willing to sign oppressive work contracts with future employers in exchange for

ocean passage to the New World. Once here, they endured a form of slavery for a year or

two – during which they were fed and sheltered by the boss – and when their time of

bondage ended, they were turned loose to make their own way."

Later: 

Drifting became a habit; with dead roots in the Old World and none in the New, the

Linkhorns were not of a mind to dig in and cultivate things. Bondage too became a habit,

but it was only the temporary kind. They were not pioneers, but sleazy rearguard camp followers of the original westward movement. By the time the Linkhorns arrived anywhere

the land was already taken – so they worked for a while and moved on. Their world was a

violent, boozing limbo between the pits of despair and the Big Rock Candy Mountain. They

kept drifting west, chasing jobs, rumors, homestead grabs or the luck of some front-running

kin. They lived off the surface of the land, like armyworms, stripping it of whatever they

could before moving on. It was a day-to-day existence, and there was always more land to

the west.

 Some stayed behind and their lineal descendants are still there – in the Carolinas,

Kentucky, West Virginia and Tennessee. There were dropouts all along the way: hillbillies,

Okies, Arkies – they’re all the same people. Texas is a living monument to the breed. So is southern California."

I know these people, Stephen. I grew up with them, went to school with them  and worked with them. Lived next door to them. I don't shrink at all from identifying them as deplorables and racists. Not many of them ever  did believe that Trump would fix their problems or bring back their jobs, dumb as they are. What they liked were the things that repelled the rest of us, Trump's open misogyny and bigotry. They liked his fascism. He blamed the same people they blame- anyone seen as not "one of us", and they're out to burn down the system, burn it all down, since being white and Christian is no longer enough to buy them special treatment. In the past was a time when no matter how low they were in the pecking order, at least they weren't black or brown skinned or Jews, and by God that meant something. If the system won't give them back what they once had they mean to see to it that nobody has it.

In an earlier time we'd have been able to count on a congress that still had some vestiges of decency to thwart Trump's ambition and restrain his excesses, but this is no longer that time. The "Freedom Caucus" wing of the House, put there in the rebellion once known as the Tea Party, was elected by the folks Thompson and Algren described, Bible thumping, hellfire and brimstone preaching, hard drinking and bitter, and the right wing ideologues that make up the rest of the Republican congress are more interested in their own agenda of stripping away the last threads of an already shredded New Deal. Theirs is a bankrupt political philosophy demonstrated to be false time and again, but these are Ayn Rand devoteés and they believe with the fervor and fanaticism of true believers. They are beholden to huge muti-national corporations which are now the sugar tit they suckle. Democrats will put up some resistance but many of them are nursing from the same tit. The Democrats will bring a hacky sack to a street fight.

Plainly the incidents of Russian hacking and Comey's ill-advised tepid dismissal of the email charges against Hillary had an effect on the election. Only a fool would find nothing suspicious about the timing of that move. But concentrating on that distracts attention from an unrelenting assault by the Republican party in legislatures across the country on the voting rights of minorities, most of whom would vote Democratic. Voter suppression is not there yet, but it’s approaching the old Jim Crow years and includes the conservative Supreme Court’s repudiation of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and its decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. When you add in the apathy many of those same voters feel, and the defeat of the most acceptable alternative to either Hillary or Trump- Bernie Sanders- the voting rolls were trimmed and diverted enough for Trump to just squeeze in. 

And squeeze he did! He won the popular vote in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania by a tiny amount, giving him the bare edge in electoral votes. Inquiries into the legality and accuracy of the vote were slammed shut by Republican legislatures in each case and we may never know whether there was hacking at the state level by the Russians or ballot manipulation by the Republicans. Journalist Greg Palast has reported on shenanigins in several states, but of course it’s buried in an avalanche of clown show performances by the Trump administration. And given the constant barrage of misdeeds by that administration, it seems likely that any election irregularities will take a permanent back seat to more pressing issues, leaving us vulnerable to a repeat performance in 2020. 

We’ve been there and done that. In the election of 2000 it was made clear that reform of our federal elections was badly needed and that some kind of standardization of procedures by the states was in order. We have had one Democratic House since then and they did not address it. You can bet your last quid that no Republican congress is going to devote itself to the mantra of one man, one vote. As far as they’re concerned money talks and everything else walks. It’s interesting to me that the Old South and the Dixiecrats who waved its flag considered blacks to be property and thus ineligible to vote, while now they’re married to the party whose idea is that property should indeed have a vote. 

William Hutson 

The letter above was penned by my husband, William Hutson. Bill writes political commentary and humor at another blogging site and regularly corresponds with friends overseas. 

Why We Need Politicians in American Politics

If you live in the U.S., the first thing you probably think you know about politics is that politicians are lying, corrupt bastards and the world would be a much better place without them.

Let's think that through for a few paragraphs, shall we?

It's true that politicians are often evasive and love to answer questions that have nothing to do with the question asked. It's also true that politicians can also be corrupt and greedy, or at least they can seem to be overly-focused on campaign money and political 'pork'-- that is, projects and laws that benefit only the people who live in their own districts and states.

Current common sense dictates that these qualities have damaged our nation so severely that we should now seek to elect only people of pure ideals and ideas, or businessmen, not politicians, and certainly not 'political insiders'--a term that can mean a lot of things but usually refers to a politicians who have been around Washington for many years.

I think that the second part of this phrase--the part that wants to clean up Washington by ridding it of nasty, murky politicians--is where common sense gets it dead wrong. 

Although it might sound strange in this acid historical moment, I would argue that what looks like evasiveness (lying) and greed (corruption) to the American public, is actually part of a whole set of political skills necessary to the process of getting anything done. By purifying government of people who know how to use these skills, we, the public, have created paralysis and division--so much paralysis and division that our government has ceased to function normally.

In short, we need politicians. Plug your nose if you must, but we need skilled politicians badly.

Politicians do the ugly, hard, thankless work of bargaining and negotiating that most of us do not want to even see much less do, and without them we are left with a bunch of egomaniac loudmouths who like to go on talk shows and cable news programs but don't do much else.

A few of these zealots (Ted Cruz, are your listening?) enjoy pitching infantile tantrums that shut down the government over figments of the public imagination but keep the representatives in the public eye. This tactic is even less helpful than simply blathering on about your high principles and refusing to compromise those principals while Rome burns down around you.

It's easy to see how after Nixon and Watergate we confidently ushered in this era of political purity.

It's somewhat harder to see how to rewind this particular tape and try something more traditional and boring.

The Art of the Deal in D.C.

Jimmy Carter makes the point that in any political negotiation, every faction has to feel like it is secretly winning. If one faction holds most of the cards, that winning faction has to leave an opening for the other side to back off gracefully and save face.

If this sounds complicated that's because it is, and not everyone is good at it.

If you are a businessman, you may be able to take a scorched earth attitude and push through hostile takeovers and humiliating deals that leave your opponent resentful and grinding an axe. But if you are a public servant and you behave this way, you soon find yourself isolated and unable to push through the simplest piece of legislation.

Business and public service are not the same thing. Business is about making money. Public service is about, well, serving the public--doing the greatest good for the greatest number, even if the action that accomplishes that is not the action that creates maximum financial profit.

Michigan elected a corporate businessman to be its governor in the last election. That catastrophic bit of wishful thinking resulted in the permanent poisoning of thousands of children in Flint, MI in an effort to save, literally, a few cents per gallon on public water.

From the point of view of a corporation, which has very limited liability for such things, this was a smart move. From the point of view of public service, it was an unforgivable betrayal.

One Man's "Pork" is Another Man's Paycheck

For decades Alaska's Ted Stevens specialized in "pork", doing so well at bringing home the bacon for his constituents that Alaskans received yearly checks from the oil industry instead of paying state taxes. That is what got Stevens reelected term after term.

Stevens' focus on political pork is an extreme example, but it illustrates how what looks excessive at the national level looks quite different locally. Before Washington became so divided and dysfunctional, pork was one of the most powerful chips in getting landmark legislation through Congress.

Lyndon Johnson used promises of pork to get the Civil Rights Act passed. Lincoln used the same technique to pass the Emancipation Proclamation. In the process of negotiating these historic changes for America, both Presidents kept many cards close to their chests, and both were ready and able to politically push their fellow poker players against the wall if necessary.

Politics is a game, and the game has rules, and you can cheat and win. But if you throw the game out and just beat your chest in fury, nothing gets done.

Chasing Out the Good Guys

For the last decade the Republican party has been purging its members of moderates and insiders, men (mostly men) who had years of successful across-the-aisle politicking under their belts. Intelligent men respected by both sides have walked away in disgust.

In Indiana, where I was born, the exodus started with Evan Bayh and continued on to Dick Lugar, a man so universally respected on the topic of foreign policy that members of both parties relied on his expertise. These men were replaced with Tea Party zealots, newcomers who believe being a good representative means compromising nothing. The GOP now even includes Congressional representatives who don't believe in government.

Lest Democrats get too smug here, it's worth noting that the Democratic Party shows signs of following the same self-destructive pattern, insisting on the ejection of "insiders" (read: people who know how to get shit done) with politically correct satisfactorily left-leaning speech givers. Witness the Bernie or Bust phenomenon during the current Presidential campaign, a movement that became so insistent on ideological purity that Bernie himself was no longer good enough.

Reality is Not a Reality Show

Reality shows are cheap, filled with drama, and not much happens in them. Their main appeal is spectacle. Viewers get to watch people behaving outrageously and often cruelly and best of all, to feel superior to the people on the show. 

Reality, on the other hand, is expensive. Reality sucks the life out of everyone sooner or later, and that is why people cluster together in communities--so the strong can help the weak, knowing that other strong members will be there for them when their hard times come. To negotiate reality, as opposed to a reality show, we really are stronger together, but working together is hard.

If you think working with other people isn't hard, join any committee formed to accomplish anything, and see how that works out for you. I once was put in charge of a community that was to make PNB sandwiches and lemonade for a street fair. The internal discussion on how to get this done got so heated and acrimonious that after many, many hours of fruitless arguing one member mutinied and ordered all of it catered before anyone could stop her.

I could have made fifty PNB sandwiches and 5 gallons of lemonade for under twenty bucks in an hour or so, but we had to do it together, so we spent over $100 in the end.

You Monster, You Miscreant, You Public Servant!

So many surreal political moments have been floating by lately that I'm kind of losing track of them all, but one of the weirdest was surely the way Donald Trump kept flinging the ultimate insult at Hillary Clinton in the second televised debate. Not that she was married to a hound. Not that she set up her own email server. But that she had been working hard behind the scenes in Washington DC, doing the grunt work, the negotiating, the behind the scenes politicking that almost no one knows how to do anymore for THIRTY YEARS!!

He said this over and over again, and it started to make me a little woozy. There was a time when pointing out a public servant's longevity in DC would have been the highest praise and most genuine compliment. But we are now living in the age of the Reality Show, not actual reality, a time when competence in public service is considered a liability.

I don't have all the answers. In fact, I hardly have any answers. But I do think I have a sense of what the right questions are, and I do believe too many voters are not asking them.

I would also say, if you don't like the government you have, then step up and get involved in government.

Don't want to do that? Too messy? Too corrupt and smelly and time consuming?

Then maybe think about voting for people who are experienced in politics, not just good at shooting off their mouths.

You don't have to have a beer with them or even like them.

You just have to go to the polls and make an informed choice based on experience and facts.

Five Good Reasons Why Donald Trump Will Never Be President

The past few days have been tough on just about everybody who pays even passing attention to media. 

In case you've been living in a cave under a mountain in Antarctica, what's got people stirred up lately is Donald Trump, the loudmouth Cheeto-Colored drunk at the end of the bar who decided late last year to run for President, just for shits and giggles. 

Well, it turns out he's pretty good at whipping up a certain sort of American person; so good at whipping these people up in fact that his rallies have been getting more and more unapologetically violent and more and more reminiscent of a phenomenon specific to the fall of Weimar Germany, circa 1933 and after. 

I admit it got to me too, especially the mess Trump created, on purpose, in Chicago Saturday evening March 12th.  As I write this, Trump is threatening to send "his people" to rallies for Bernie Sanders, a not at all veiled threat that gives his Trump-shirted devotees yet another green light to create chaos, do bodily harm, and spread hate. 

But I've had a day to calm down and take some deep breaths, and listen to me carefully:

Donald Trump will never be President of the United States. 

Why not, you ask?

Hey, I'm glad you asked that question!

Here's five good reasons why not:

1) Trump is courting the wrong demographic. Pissed off racist white people are now, believe it or not, in the minority in the U.S. The United States is already solidly multicultural, and within the next ten to fifteen years many academic types predict that there will be more brown people than white people here. Those of us who live and work in cities are not alarmed about this--we work and live side by side with the very people Trump demonizes. Neither time nor history is on Trump's side. He's talking to the past, literally beating a dead horse.

2) Millennials own the future, and Trump is the antithesis of what Millennials want. Most young people today know that their parents and grandparents generation pretty much wrecked the economy and the political system, which you might expect to make them bitter, but no. Millennials have embraced multiculturalism, racial equality and harmony, flexible work and gender roles, ecological responsibility, and creative endeavors. Trump is old. He's ugly. And his fans are longing for the bad old days. Not a good way to get the kids on board.

3) Trump can't do any of the things he's promising. Mexico is not going to build a wall all the way across the Southern border. The very experienced and often brilliant generals in the US military are not going to follow the orders of a demagogue. (Many have already said so.) Half of the country is not going to listen to him, even if by some cataclysmic accident he 'became' President. He can't govern. He can only shoot off his mouth and lose his temper.

4) This is not the Weimar Republic, this is the United States. Most of us came here to get away from the kind of government that Trump wants. Our ancestors (sometimes our parents or even us) took grave risks and started with nothing to speak of, just to escape that kind of totalitarian nightmare. Another large portion of the US population was brought here against their will to build this country and pick its cotton and clean its homes and more, only gaining their freedom after hundreds of years of slavery and abuse. We remember the bad times, and we don't want them back. We won't have that.

5) The RNC doesn't have to give the nomination to Trump. A brokered convention could hand the nomination to anyone, regardless of how many delegates Trump gets and regardless of how much spittle his deranged fans leave on windows and camera lenses. And if Trump, lacking the nomination, runs as an Independent, great. Split the vote, end of story, the Democrat wins.

So that, my friends, is that. 

This Trump BS has really gotten in the way of my Rick Snyder vendetta, and things at the state level with Governor Mealy Mouth and his progress in not fixing Flint are really heating up in dramatic ways that deserve way more attention than bloated middle-aged demagogues who import trophy wives from Slavic countries. 

Oh yes, and,

6) Mrs.Trump as First Lady? Girlfriend, please. 

Might as well have Kanye West as Secretary of State. 

Kim Kardashian as Head of FEMA. 

Bruce Jenner as Vice President. 

So let the press keep coming all over itself while covering this maniac. 

The rest of us have real problems to deal with, and they need our immediate and focused attention.

Flint Michigan: Urban Disaster, or Just Good Corporate Governance?

Michigan Politicians

When Rick Snyder, Michigan's former CEO & self-professed 'Nerd' governor discovered that his personal decisions were directly responsible for turning Flint, Michigan's water supply into a toxic, lead-infused mess, he took immediate action (well…two years late), the same kind of immediate action that any powerful, effective CEO would take in such a situation:

He hired two new PR firms and conceded at a national press conference that the situation in Flint would "probably be a stain on (his) legacy."

Yikes. 

Priorities, huh? Good thing he got right on that.

Actually, by revealing his priorities in such a bald and tone-deaf way, Governor Snyder unintentionally shone a surgical-wattage light on why good governance and good corporate management are not the same thing, nor should they be the same thing.

No matter how many political sound bytes we hear to the contrary, being a successful businessman is not a credential for being a decent public servant. 

It's worth doing a little thought experiment at this point:

Just imagine, if Rick Snyder could do this much violence to the people of Michigan in four years just by running it like an efficient corporation, what could Donald Trump do to the U.S. over the same period of time by applying the same methods?

If that thought doesn't scare the pants off you, keep reading.

The Rick Snyder Guide to Ridding Your State of Pesky Poor People

A lot of political progressives believe that corporations are immoral and evil, but corporations are not immoral by design. Corporations are amoral. The purpose of organizing a business as a corporation is not to create evil but to generate the most profit with the least liability. 

A corporation is essentially a profit-making machine. Should this machine end up taking harmful actions in the pursuit of profit, the individual people running the corporation can't be blamed because the corporation did the harm, not the people. The corporate structure protects the individuals running it. 

Corporations may or may not be required to redress those harmed by their actions, but often, even legal consequence turns out to be inconsequential. How badly was Wall Street harmed after nearly tanking the world economy? World Con? Dow Chemical?

You get my drift.

Corporations may do evil in the pursuit of profit, but that's more of a side effect, not an expressed intent. 

Running a government like a corporation therefore means valuing what and who is profitable above all else, and taking no personal responsibility for harmful outcomes in the process of applying those values. Rick Snyder is doing exactly that and he is doing it consistently and well.

Sadly, representative government gets in the way of efficient corporate management, especially when it comes to unprofitable segments of the governed. Immediately recognizing this troubling conflict of interest between government and good corporate management, Rick Snyder decided to simply wave the rights of citizens in poor cities and instead appoint his own city managers to take over and make all their decisions for them.

OK, the jury is still out on whether that is even constitutional (because so far there hasn't been a jury or a constitutional inquiry), but Snyder did it anyway. 

When a statewide ballot initiative calling for the repeal of the city manager provision passed overwhelmingly in the last election, Snyder and the GOP-controlled legislature changed a few phrases of the old law and simply reinstated it under a different name, immediately. 

So, if you live in Michigan and your city is poor, you have no rights. Sorry. 

This policy had far-reaching effects almost as soon as Snyder took office, and not just for cities.

School teachers instantly became the target of brutal cost/benefit analyses and many teaching positions were eliminated in poor cities and towns across Michigan. State employees similarly became the butt of severe ridicule and their access to unions, pensions, and decent wages was slashed. 

Benton Harbor, a city consisting pretty much entirely of desperately poor blacks had its local government shut down and taken over by a state-appointed city manager in 2008. That city manager decided that what would really help the poverty stricken people of Benton Harbor would be to sell their Lake Michigan access and empty land to a private developer. 

That developer is currently building an exclusive private golf resort with an expensive beachfront hotel on land that once belonged to the citizens of Benton Harbor. 

Benton Harbor's citizens will be priced out of that resort and that golf course. The likelihood that they will be employed in these exclusive developments is not looking good either. 

Back before the days when we thought corporations and governments were the same thing, that used to be called a 'land grab'. Now it's just an example of maximizing your profit margin: giving to the profitable the spoils of the profit-less

No one should be surprised that Rick Snyder's city managers are people he knew from his CEO days, his friends and cronies and familiars. The fact that his CEO days were at Gateway, that 90's computer retailer that sold desktop PCs packed in witty cow boxes seems not to matter. 

Gateway is long gone, sold to China, and the cow box thing was kind of stupid. 

The point is, if you are a CEO of something, even outsourced cow boxes, people figure you know what you are doing, even if all you know how to do is delegate and hire PR firms.

Maybe we need to start examining this government=business equation more critically.

Eat the Poor

Have you noticed that, except for random general complaints against food stamp recipients, no one talks about poverty anymore? 

Most Americans today think of themselves as "middle class", and this seems to be so whether they make $12,000/year or $120,000 or $400,000; whether they are employed, between jobs, retired, or other; whether they live in shared efficiency apartments or trailers or gated communities. 

The reason everyone has decided to be middle class these days is that we've pretty much accepted the proposition that poverty is shameful.

We don't talk about poverty, and we most especially don't talk about our own poverty, because we feel ashamed. Good hard working people are rewarded with wealth, right? So if you don't have enough, you must not be enough.

This shaming of the poor is great for rich people and even better for corporations. You don't have to pay people well or treat people well if they have already proven their unworthiness by having no money. 

When a government-run-like-a-corporation steals land from the poor, or takes away their rights to representative government, or poisons their water to save a paltry amount of money then refuses to repair the damage done, no guilt or liability is admitted, because these people, these poor people, are not profitable concerns. They have no wealth, they generate no profit. 

And what's more, most of them are black.

Swift's Modest Proposal doesn't read as satire in such a world, it reads as a poor business plan, since even the corporate elite have a negative reaction to consuming cooked babies. 

Why should they have to consider such a thing?

They can afford that  $45/pound steak and the right wine to go with it. 

And the poor?

Never mind cake: Let them drink the water in Flint.

As Flint Goes, So Goes the Nation

I live in West Michigan, roughly 130 miles southwest of Flint. The city where I live is also an aging industrial center that has recently seen jobs dry up and blow away, specifically northward, to the GOP-leaning city of Grand Rapids. 

It is another unintended artifact of corporate governance that the cities most likely to be unprofitable are also the ones most likely to vote Democratic: Flint, Detroit, Kalamazoo.

I retired at 62 when I could no longer get a decent job to save my life, and that makes me just another unprofitable person in an unprofitable city in Michigan, but that, for me, was an upgrade, since before that I lived in Indiana. 

A couple years ago, the worst inland oil spill of all time happened where I live now, and not long after a half-assed clean up effort, the corporation responsible for that spill hired a PR firm to make TV spots about how the oil spill actually made the rivers and wilderness areas better than before. 

Nothing like a buttload of sticky, toxic, tar sand oil spilled all over field and stream to improve the beauty of nature, huh?

America has become increasingly corporate over the last three decades, and that corporatization has mostly benefited the super-rich, who are now the super-duper-rich and getting richer by minute. 

The rest of us, not so much.

Millions of middle class people are falling into poverty, while clinging to the middle class title to cushion the anger and shame. 

I didn't like working for corporations, and I like being governed by them even less. All over the U.S., infrastructure is crumbling at an astonishing rate. In some places, like Flint MI, that decay is helped along by callous GOP governors. In others, like Porter Ranch CA, amoral corporations who only care about money neglect toxic situations of their own making. 

In still other places, like San Francisco, the new techie elite are pushing people out of their own neighborhoods and turning entire cities into expensive Whole Foods-Starbucks-Sushi-bar meccas accessible only to young hip millionaires. 

The midwest may be on the crest of this new and destructive wave, but it's what's on the menu for everyone who didn't inherit a whole lot of Benjamins. If that seems like a good thing to you, by all means, continue carrying on as if you are perfectly safe and everything is fine. 

If not, you might want to think about making some noise. 

Like, now.

  

The NPR White People's Introduction to Poverty

According to several recent reports on NPR, middle class white people are falling into poverty at a rate unseen since the days when children still worked 18 hour days in garment factories and gentlemen wore spats. 

As I write this, in January of 2016, expensive prescription opioids are being thrown over for cheap heroin faster than your grandmother can flip flap jacks; artisan meth manufacturing has become a growth industry; over half the US population takes anti-anxiety/depression meds (until they can't afford health insurance anymore); and the most suicidal group of people in America are now middle-aged Caucasian men. 

If you listen to a lot of NPR (I do), then there's a real good chance you already are a white person, and you might think, wow, this is news? You might think you'd damn well know if you were falling into poverty or not, thank you very much. Falls of any kind suck and most human beings do notice them, even white human beings. 

But you'd be wrong. 

Many of the universal features of poverty are more or less unknown to middle class white people, and the few aspects of poverty we do understand tend to get chalked up to someone else's laziness or lack of character. So when these things happen to US, after we feel we've been GOOD and done everything RIGHT, it seems that we freak out comically and grab for the hypodermic or start attending Trump rallies and taking over bird sanctuaries. 

It's not that we are bad people. We are not bad. 

It's just that many of us have never been poor before. We take it personally because it's new and we don't understand what it means. We think it's about us. Isn't everything about us?

We're just ignorant, that's all. But we can learn. I believe we CAN learn. 

I personally have been poor more than I've been anything else in my life, and I don't let it freak me out anymore. All you really have to do to stay mellow is recognize that you ARE poor and that it just is what it is. It really isn't about you. It's about other people hogging all the goddamn money--something they won't ever ever quit doing just because you don't like it.

Once you realize this, once you learn to go with the flow and just lean into it, you can even grab a chunk of serenity now and then during the giant lull between your shitty temp jobs, should you be so lucky to get any. 

So if you are white and confused, please don't jump off a bridge or start foaming at the mouth at Mexican dishwashers just because new, unpleasant things are happening to you. Instead, check out the following list, and if you recognize yourself in more than one of these normal facets of poverty, take a deep breath and adjust your expectations to zero. 

You'll feel a lot better, I promise.

So here goes.

You might actually be poor if:

You've ever pilfered toilet paper from public stalls or napkins from fast food places so you can wipe your ass until payday. 

You enjoy a filling Sunday meal composed of three different starches. (Noodles over mashed potatoes with biscuits! Beans with rice and cornbread! Boxed Mac & Cheese with white bread!)

Some of your favorite sweet treats contain no actual food. 

You can't get a bank account and have to cash your sporadic paychecks at storefront loan shops.

You rent sleeping space in your step-uncle's trailer but some other guy is always in your bed.

You shop for new furniture and household items on trash day.

You are an adult person and have more than four roommates. 

Your TV only gets three channels and two of them are in Spanish.

Your last three jobs required a hairnet, a stupid hat, or a name tag that says "I like to help!"

You've ever taken expired veterinary meds instead of going to the doctor.

You've had your electricity or water shut off more than once.

Crack addicts won't break into your house because they are afraid you'll rob them.

You buy black market laundry detergent.

You sell black market laundry detergent.

You have four jobs and three of them are conducted out of your garage.

You dream of the day when you can move back into a luxurious manufactured home community.

You think the women shopping at Walmart are hot.

Your idea of a romantic evening involves a candlelight spaghetti dinner with canned Ragu sauce, Velveeta, and a fresh bottle of Wild Irish Rose. 

You think that someday you really might win the lottery. 

Your beloved is missing more than three teeth. 

You consider ketchup packets and soda crackers to be versatile cooking staples. 

I could go on, but I think you get the drift. 

Maybe none of this seems all that funny, or maybe you are still clinging to the delusion that "middle class" refers to any person making between $12,000 and $240,000 a year. If that's how it is, carry on, don't mind me. I'm just a bitch.

But if, on the other hand, you are starting to realize that the other side of 'lonely at the top' is 'crowded at the bottom', then pull up a chair, pop a malt liquor, and pass the soda crackers. 

Mumbly peg anyone?