The long view

Presidential candidates always get a boost from a week in the limelight at their nominating conventions and the non-stop worship of their distinguished persons from a streaming claque of boosters. Therefore, it’s no surprise that Trump’s political stock is perking up from its persistent doldrums, a trend that is striking anguish into the hearts of many distressed citizens. That patriotic glow eerily lighting up Trump’s face, engineered by his shameless hijacking of the White House for his partisan aims, may fade in a few days. On the other hand, given the remarkably suicidal hero-worship Trump elicits from his thoroughly tribalized minions, it may not. The implosion of Trumpism is inevitable; whether or not it occurs by Nov. 3 remains to be seen.

But if we cast a dispassionate eye over the upheavals of the modern era, say the last few hundred years, a triumph of one or another faction that looks overwhelming in the moment often turns out to be fleeting. For example, I’ve been learning about the provocatively instructive year of 1830 in France. After the trauma of the 1789 Revolution and the Terror, followed by 20 years of continental warfare that finally concluded at Waterloo, the restored Bourbons thought they had things pretty well in hand. Louis XVIII, a modestly enlightened monarch, followed by his reactionary absolutist brother, Charles X, reigned as in the old days: the nobles occupied their estates (although not always the same ones they’d lost), and the peasants and urban underlings had to put up with them. Fifteen years went by, and the revolutionary fervor seemed a distant memory.

But the 1820s were not the 1780s. The urban liberals and mercantilist bourgeoisie chafed under an anachronistic regime transplanted from the era of agrarian feudalism. Charles X, sure that he was boss for life, overplayed his hand, provoked the July 1830 revolution, and suddenly found himself boarding a ship for exile. And that was merely one more chapter in the topsy-turvy and often murderous battle of wills and interests among the various sectors of French and European society.

We Americans tend to think we’ve escaped all that, at least since the Civil War days, and to a large extent we have. There are movements and tendencies, waves of support for a variety of causes, reforms and rollbacks, and sometimes ugly incidents seasoned with random violence and the firing of weapons. But the underpinnings of our polity, the grinding monotony of our reliably duopolous structure of government, has undergone no serious challenge in 150-plus years.

That may change. There’s no telling what the cult now surrounding Trump will do, having long abandoned any pretense of trying to represent the majority of the nation (as opposed to the majority of white people). Trump’s stoking of racial divisions is playing with fire in a gunpowder factory. We gaze fondly on the era of Martin Luther King, Jr., (whom Trump & Co. love to quote), which now reassuringly looks like a troubled time with a happy ending, a civil rights bill, black faces on TV and in the movies (not just as maids), and the consignment of “colored” drinking fountains to history museums.

But there is an important difference between the mid-20th century and our times: in the 1960s modern industrial capitalism could credibly promise to fulfill most people’s needs most of the time. Its current replacement, the dictatorship of the rentier class, cannot. In recent weeks both the London stock exchange and its U.S. counterpart have scaled record heights at the precise moment in which unemployment in both countries reached similarly record levels and economic activity plummeted by unheard-of percentages. Financial assets are now completely decoupled from the real economy; zombie corporations deep in insolvency abound, fed by never-ending Ponzi streams of cash from the Fed.

As competition in key sectors is crushed by gigantism, the presumptions of “market equilibrium” lose all meaning, except as religious tenets deployed to legitimize ever more thorough looting by the financiers and their Beltway toadies. Amazon bleeds and destroys all commercial activity not feeding its bottomless money pit as Bezos’s ballooning fortune exceeds most countries’ GNP. Private equity seizes viable concerns, strips their assets in ways that would make Tony Soprano envious, and tosses the eviscerated shell onto the corporate scrap heap along with its workers. Trillions in illicit loot are squirreled away through “offshore” computer trickery.

Post-capitalist rentier exploitation is so dominant that the system is unable to achieve “price discovery” whereby market forces set reality-based values on financial assets, and its ever-tinier set of plutocrat puppeteers is uninterested in channeling capital toward productive capacity as the real money is to be made in hyper-leveraged arbitrage and other manipulations of computer keystrokes. The official economists no longer even bother to perform hypocritical nods toward providing employment as a policy goal and now openly encourage “essential” workers to march obediently to their deaths in service to an economy that can get by with fewer and fewer of them. Unproductive grandmas are told to take one for Team Youth, and destitute families facing eviction and hunger are forced to wait while Congress goes on holiday.

In short, the Trump cult is a perfect example of what one astute observer of his times termed the “great variety of morbid symptoms” that appear during the interregnum when old systems enter into terminal decline and their replacement remains invisible. In our case, the morbid symptoms proliferate in plain view, many of them quite alarming given their potential to produce harm. But while trying to stay out of the line of fire, much of the disturbing madness is merely the manifest death throes of decadence rather than a permanent new feature of our landscape. It’s at times like these when we need the long view.

It would be foolhardy to predict how all this will play out and simple-minded to think that an election will do much to right the ship of state aside from bringing a brief moment of existential relief. I for one remain uncharacteristically optimistic, even in the face a renewed mandate for Trump, unlikely though that seems. I’m old enough to remember Richard Nixon sweeping to a 49-state reelection in 1972 and forced out of the White House two years later. Neither Trump nor Biden can resist the pressures bubbling up from below; those forces are the architects of our future, not the clapped-out figures that dominate our rickety state.

[To receive alerts on new posts here, email me: tfrasca@yahoo.com]

Weaponizing sex

Or more precisely, weaponizing sexual harassment, coercion, aggression, and violence: largely, a good thing. Our culture has changed its view of these behaviors, recognizing some that used to be thought cute or harmless, criminalizing others that once escaped that category. Women, and men for that matter, now have greater opportunities for bodily autonomy and safety, freedom of decision, and the chance, albeit imperfect, to pursue the right to be left alone.

And yet, our notoriously sexophobic culture can turn sexual misconduct into a selective weapon, just as corruption—undeniably a social ill in itself—is easily incorporated into the tyrant’s arsenal to consolidate autocratic power. (Recall the child-sex-ring debacle of the late 1980s—now revived as QAnon—that led to many horrific imprisonments of innocent daycare workers.)

Anita Hill educated America about how sexual harassers abuse and constrain women as workers; it is one of the age’s great ironies that a principal engineer of the backlash against Hill is now the champion of millions of women eager to see the back of the pussy-grabber-in-chief. Clarence Thomas still occupies the Supreme Court bench that Joe Biden ushered him into. The felling of an Epstein or a Weinstein remains an unusual denouement while most abuse escapes punishment.

While it is healthy that people sometimes now dare to denounce outrages against the body, we should keep in view the great utility accusations related to sex have had historically for the powerful. Some barely reach our consciousness: the Malaysian regime deployed rape accusations in 1998 against Anwar Ibrahim, [above right] a deputy prime minister, leading to a lengthy imprisonment, convenient for his political enemies. Ibrahim’s ordeal was further complicated by the fact that his accuser was a man in a country where any homosexual acts were illegal.

That was far away, but closer to home we have the sexual misconduct (consistently headlined as “rape”) allegations against Julian Assange, exploited by the security states of the U.S. and U.K. to get him into prison. Having weaponized his behavior, the furious spy agencies now have Assange in solitary and facing life in prison in the U.S. for the crime of embarrassing and exposing them.

A more obscure weaponization of sexual harassment claims also comes from the U.K., where former first minister Alex Salmond was framed by his rivals in the Scottish National Party with a bevy of anonymous testifiers to his alleged groping and sexual assault [see photo above]. Salmond faced 13 separate charges—he was acquitted on each one. The court awarded Salmond 512,000 pounds in legal costs from the Scottish Government over their botched fishing expedition, termed “unlawful, unfair and tainted by apparent bias.” Sounds a bit fishy, no?

But the British legal system grants excessive protections to accusers in cases like these, enabling the tabloid press to splash for weeks lurid headlines, like the one shown at the top, while Salmond’s defense was hogtied and unable to counter the accusatory narrative. Although the case collapsed ignominiously, the tabloids never undid the damage inflicted by their salacious tales, which linger in the public mind and no doubt put an end to Salmond’s political career. A cynic might observe that Salmond’s opposition to foreign adventures such as the Iraq invasion may have put him in severe disfavor with the intelligence/weapons lobby, but we don’t know if they had a hand in all this. If we find out in 10 years that they did, it won’t matter. The accusations have done their job.

Furthermore, the judicial persecution continues with one of Salmond’s few defenders, former ambassador Craig Murray [left], now charged with contempt of court for his blog posts on the trial, in which he took meticulous care not to identify any of the women whose testimony the jury promptly tossed out. While the tabloids get off scot-free despite publishing far more questionable material, Murray has to face an expensive slog through the courts in what certainly smells like retaliatory, selective prosecution. Read the details at his excellent blog.

Then we have our presidential aspirant himself, against whom a credible accusation of sexual assault dropped into the well of forgetfulness soon after it surfaced. As a thought experiment, can anybody imagine what we would all be talking about today if the accused were Bernie Sanders? When the Democrat hierarchy coalesced around Biden’s candidacy, female Democrats jumped to exclaim “Me Too!” while tossing the “Believe Women” slogan into the temporary trashcan. Believe me, I get it—now’s not the time for purity tests. But let’s also admit to a towering double standard.

Which brings us to the case of Kansan Aaron Coleman, the teenaged dishwasher who pulled off a surprise primary victory against an incumbent for that state’s legislature. He turns out to have engaged in reprehensible behavior with a female middle school classmate and is taking considerable heat for it. He is apologetic and claims to have grown up. Some voices insist he be shunned and banned—no doubt many Biden voters among them. And the state Democrat party is amassing a huge war chest to reverse the vote with a write-in campaign for the corporate-friendly incumbent whom Coleman ousted, claiming that his behavior in childhood should disqualify him.

Of course, their campaign has nothing whatever to do with Coleman’s support for legalizing marijuana, abortion rights, and Medicare for All. But the party that welcomed an unrepentant Bill Clinton to their recent convention has no time for a kid who committed abuse at age 13.

I have read numerous accounts of how the Chinese Communist Party works at the local level and reached the conclusion that party operatives there are compelled to engage in routine corruption that greases the wheels of the state from top to bottom. If promoted, the lowly official then must collude with his bosses’ more lucrative graft and extortion at risk of marginalization, dismissal, or worse. With corruption then baked into the system, the top capos can easily take down their rivals with a lively “anti-corruption” campaign, which will resonate with the long-suffering citizens who have had to put up with the constant grifting by their overlords. Power struggles are veiled with pious phrases about cleaning up the bad behavior of this one and that one, but no real reform of the system is attempted or intended.

The weaponization of sex threatens to follow this playbook: shock and dismay over the antics of one’s enemies; understanding and dismissal on the rare occasion when the complaints reach one’s friends. Supporting victims of abuse should remain the focus; at the same time, we should not be naïve about when and why we hear from them and which ones are taken seriously.

Our elections don’t need protection from any damn furriners

The loose talk about Russian-Chinese-Iranian interference in our democratic process makes several assumptions, the first being that we have a democratic process with which to interfere. That is increasingly debatable and brings up a correlate: that our system reflects the popular will or, as Lincoln phrased it, government of, by, and for the people.

Let me hasten to say that, having lived under military dictatorship, I value democratic forms even when imperfect or plagued with cheating in all its multitudinous manifestations. We have not sunk to the depths of electoral playacting that occurs in, say, Azerbaijan or Guinea-Bissau; opposition candidates are not regularly assassinated, nor are their supporters frequently beaten with pipes or caused to disappear. Even budding autocrats such as Erdoğan in Turkey, Orbán in Hungary, Duterte in the Philippines and many like-minded others must submit at least superficially to the electoral process while massaging it to assure their permanence in power. Pinochet himself could not crush the electorate when he stood in a 1988 plebiscite to award himself a new eight-year term as president and famously “ran alone and finished second.”

But the idea that the sovereign American people march to the voting booths, select representatives to defend their interests and well-being, and then monitor these solons to make sure they do so is frankly fantastical. Rather than worrying ourselves about what the nefarious Russkies or an Iranian hacker in a long gown might be doing, we should direct our gaze to the behavior of native-born Americans.

Before delving into that, however, let’s pause to remind those who came in late that ALL the “reports” of foreign interference in our sacred elections come from anonymous sources at spook agencies whose record is weak when it comes to propagating actual facts. More often, they pull convenient rumors out of their collective G-I tract and feed the tasty chittlins to selected stenographers at the Times and Post. These spicy propaganda sausages are like QAnon chalkboard drawings for liberals, satisfying fantasies designed to keep Democrat-leaning voters believing in the November tooth fairy while remaining in a state of paralyzed anxiety. Pore over the dozens of breathless paragraphs in the Times or listen to the endless MSNBC chatter about these spy tales from anonymous insider sources, and you will wait impatiently for anything resembling a confirmable datum. Check out Craig Murray for many hilarious details of the British version of this journalistic cotton candy from the “Intelligence Community.”

While our discomfited gaze is drawn to the prospects of October surprises, November sabotage, and post-election defiance, the evidence of ongoing voter suppression right here at home performed by U.S. citizens on other U.S. citizens is evident for all to see. Furthermore, it’s been going on for years. In 2019, Georgia tossed hundreds of thousands of mostly black and Hispanic voters off their registration rolls. Earlier, in 2017, Georgia governor Brian Kemp cheated his way into the statehouse by purging 1 out of every 10 voters in a similar fashion. Democrats let him get away with it.

In 2016 Michigan Republicans successfully challenged on technicalities 75,000 absentee ballots, mostly from Detroit districts, enabling Trump to win that key state by a margin of 10,000.

Wisconsin Republicans put so many obstacles in the way of voting that Trump arguably squeaked by in 2016 with that thumb on the scale.

Then in 2020 the 600,000 residents of Milwaukee (40% black) had five polling stations available while the state refused to let people vote absentee.

Going back further, Ohio purged its voter rolls in 2004 to lock in a key state for W’s second term victory.

States everywhere use electronic voting machines that are easily hacked, producing dubious results that can never be audited due to the lack of a paper trail.

We now hear cries of horror about the attempts to cripple the U.S. Postal Service and block mail-in voting, as well we should. But note that these voter suppression tactics are old news. They have been in the GOP toolbox for at least two decades while the Resistance raises no more than a bland objection before acquiescing to the results of the theft—the classic example being Democrat legitimization of the purloining of the 2000 presidential election with Supreme Court collusion. The kind of permanent denunciation of vote-rigging that would educate (and inflame) the public to insist on free and fair elections—the kind of thing we demand from other countries—is sorely lacking.

Perhaps one reason is that the Democrat machines actually like the cheating as they can do it, too. After all, electoral chaos, incompetence, and the subsequent freedom from accountability enables them to maintain minority control in their respective fiefdoms. Brooklyn (NY) famously “lost” the registrations of many tens of thousands of likely Bernie voters during the state's key 2016 primary.

California’s primary apparatus is so dysfunctional and unreliable that no one can confidently say that that all-blue state accurately reports voter preference, especially in close races. [Upon searching for links for this item, I noted that the headlines for 2016 and 2020 both used the word “chaos.” Plus ça change . . .]

Aside from dubious outcomes in close races, our political class has made sure that most of them aren’t close at all. Gerrymandering is a long-standing national sport, enabling the two sets of party insiders to set up shop as feudal potentates in their respective enclaves without fear of annoying interruptions from mere citizens. North Carolina’s absurd districts [see map above] are a national disgrace. Wisconsin Republicans regularly get fewer votes and a majority of state legislative seats.

Finally, of course, there is the staggering absurdity of the Electoral College, a slaveholder-protection artifact from the most shameful aspects of our early history. But perhaps this anti-democratic anachronism more accurately reflects the nature of our democracy than we care to acknowledge. A hefty percentage of seats occupied by our political class are non-competitive, safely dominated by one party or the other, such that the respective machines can concentrate on serving the interests of whatever lobby or corporate interest group they wish. No wonder preserving the accuracy of expressions of the people’s will awakens so little fervor among them. And if something goes wrong, there’s always the Russians/Chinese/Iranians to take the blame.