On A.B. Yehoshua

Here is an interview I found with A.B. Yehoshua while looking for something else on Yehoshua.

Yehoshua is my favorite Israeli novelist, and I have now completed nearly every one of his novels (I think I have two left).  I also just finished reading his book of essays from 1980, "Between Right and Right," where he goes into detail of his positions: (1) Jews should migrate to Israel, which would make for a more diverse Israeli society, hopefully more kind; (2) the history of Judaism is one of exile, and that the irony is Jews could have returned to the "Holy Land" at nearly any time after the fall of Rome, and yet, did not, and still for the most part do not even when Israel was created as a State; (3) there is no justification for the State of Israel that makes sense in world history but one:  Jews needed a homeland for physical safety from the anti-Semitism that emanated from Europe, culminating in the Holocaust.  Yehoshua agrees with the charge that Israelis have oppressed Arabs/Palestinians since day one of the Zionist movement, and says a religious justification for Israel is not sufficient justification as any number of groups could start walking into homes of others talking about their right to be there from that perspective.  Living in New Mexico, and seeing the Native American tribes still here, and knowing I am on their land, well, that was really brought home to me.  My only surprise is Yehoshua never quoted Isaac Deutscher on this last point, because Yehoshua was recognizing the dual victimhood point Deutscher had made in his prophetic 1967 essay.

It is not that Yehoshua was or is correct in these remarks, though his arguments are both cogently made and are compelling.  What I adored about the book of essays, again written earlier but published in 1980, is how thought provoking they were to read in 2018, and knowing how my own views about Israel have changed over the years.

Yehoshua is an interesting and compelling mind and persona. His novels, which I have only read in the English translations (as alas I have no facility for foreign languages, including especially Hebrew), read so beautifully to me, though nearly every one of the novels I have read have a dark moment that I sometimes have found baffling.  I had just finished, before reading "Between Right and Right," "The Extra," Yehoshua's latest English translated novel.  I found it to be one of his best.  If I had to describe Yehoshua's novels, I would not recommend them to young people as the characters tend to be rooted in late middle age, and there is no longer any sense that anyone is correct about how to live one's life.  It is not morose like Joyce Carol Oates, to take an extreme example, but there is melancholy, though that melancholy is richly mixed with irony and humor that comes from life in one's advancing age.  I sleep better at night reading Yehoshua.  Some have called him the Faulkner of Israeli literature, and there is that, to the extent Faulkner dealt with the burden of American Southern history, and Yehoshua deals with the burden of Zionism.   

I highly recommend Yehoshua to those, like me, now in deepening middle age. :)

Some tongue in cheek musings about a primary election...

A black, a woman, and a Jew walk into a primary...each trying to face a white supremacist Italian for governor...Smells like Florida.

Yup, it's Florida.  And yes, I am ecstatic about Andrew Gillum, but I don't know how Gillum gets more than a third of the white vote in that culturally out of control State. Floridians, help me out here.  While it will be exciting to watch an electoral re-enactment of Reconstruction, my response to hand-wringing Corporate Democrats is, let's face it, the Republican candidate, Ron DeSantis, a Traitor Trump enabler, has a better chance of winning against any of the three gubernatorial candidates who ran in the Dem primary.  

On the other hand, perhaps DeSantis will make some KKK and Southern white supremacist heads spin too..."What? An Eye-talian?"  But they will eventually console themselves..."Well, at least he hates immigrants, and..you know...loves guns...maybe prob'ly don't like those...um, thugs..."  

I figure DeSantis will reach out to such natural allies as he says, "Hey, I'm white, too! Really! Never mind that I tan more easily than you (I do...)! Please! I hate immigrants who don't look like either one of us!....And damn, I got my guns ready to defend ourselves against a gov'mint of 'libruls,' but I support the police when they shoot down unarmed...thugs...! Let's keep all the Confederate statues so people can know 'history!' I love Trump--Make America Confederate Again! Black hordes voting!  Voter fraud! Northern money pouring in to help my even tanner opponent! Remember Reconstruction!"  

Pass the popcorn, boys and girls, and welcome to the Florida swamps, figuratively and literally.

UPDATE SAME DAY:  Well, it did not take long for reality to catch up with satire...."Monkey this up?"  Oy.

Armies of the Night Fifty Years On

I like that Rick Perlstein had the chance to sum it up in this relatively short retrospective of the riots (police and less so students) at the 1968 Democratic Party convention.  I always felt Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin were mostly into destruction than anything policy based.  They, and too many of the protestor leaders (Paul Krassner and Phil Ochs get important passes from me) were petulant and ultimately reactionaries themselves at that point (Rubin was a network marketer in his last years, proving he was always a cynical sales marketer, while Hoffman settled into a more positive left-liberalism and was even good on environmental issues).  

The one thing I think was not highlighted, though, is the frustration the young activists felt about the Democratic Party, which was doing so much for improving civil rights domestically, and trying to help the poor, but was still prosecuting a war so awful it qualified as a war crime, as later admitted by Nuremberg prosecutor, Telford Taylor.  The then-young activists never thought its own generation would settle into Archie Bunker-dum and walk away from the New Deal achievements.

I have always said I come from a 1930s American New Deal political tradition in the sense of pushing for public policy changes to benefit the many while protecting institutions through the reform of institutions.  I am not a tear-it-all-down person, and do not have that do-your-own-thing sensibility of so many Yippies of 1968, hippies of that late 1960s era, or the so-called "Woodstock Generation."  I remember, as a fourteen year old in 1971, being appalled by Hoffman's Steal This Book as destructive to the Commonweal and ultimately a pre-historic cosplay at revolution (I of course did not have the word "cosplay" for use at the time).  As Zappa understood, that mindset led to phony behaviors and ultimately reactionary ends, which is terribly ironic since these very people thought themselves most "revolutionary" at the time.*  It is why I remember saying to one of my close friends,  upon the death of legendary frontman of the Doors, Jim Morrison, in July 1971, Morrison may have ended up as a real estate investor had he lived (though I continue to love the Doors, both for their musical sound and for their lyrical fury). Morrison's Dionysian sensibilities would have lead him eventually to Ayn Randian sensibilities since both are rooted in narcissism.  When Christopher Lasch began publishing his books on narcissism in modern American life, and related topics, I found much to re-affirm what I was feeling and seeing.  I even wrote a song in 1978 about it, later updated in one line about "E.T" when recording the song in 1984, called "Spoiled Generation."  Apparently, it is a big ticket for record collectors these days.  Imagine that...

I have long said future historians in the 22nd Century will see 1968 as the year the American Empire and American society looked at itself in the mirror and found itself wanting, and is the point at which the slow, long collapse of the American Empire and American society began.  It is the point where we as a nation stopped having hope for ourselves or in ourselves, and began losing even the belief that our government could be harnessed in a way to help our communities.  It is a point where the phrase "every person for himself, herself or itself" began to fester into the discourse and become an overarching political philosophy.  "Rights, rights, rights" became a mantra, including the modern Christian Right line of a "right" to discriminate--when the only people who had a right to say "Rights, rights, rights" were African-Americans, who have been betrayed from the moment their ancestors were captured in Africa and brought here on ships as slaves, and gays, who, since the rise of Christianity, have had to endure a millennia of repression, oppression, and at least silence.  The rest of us have less rights and more obligations to each other.  This does not give African-Americans a "free" ride, however, for their own obligations to themselves and communities, and to the larger American community, have never been stronger. And it does not give gays license to suddenly find themselves without obligations to society once same-sex marriage is legalized. But a recognition of the institutional racism and homophobia that continues to oppress African-Americans and gays, from, respectively, us white folks, including white ethnics and Jews, and from us breeders, would be nice, wouldn't it--and this time, without the whine about "political correctness."  

Anyway, I think we are at a point, fifty years on, where we may be able to remind ourselves how the Greatest Generation failed its children, how the Baby Boomers have been and remain narcissistic as a generation, and therefore failed, too, and how Baby Boomers and our parents (some Red Scare Teens, like my own parents' generation, and some of the Greatest Generation) got together to screw ourselves with the undermining of unions, pushing reckless tax cuts and trade deals, and continuing to expand Pax Americana, with our horribly beautiful technological violence.  But nah.  Let's just focus on the music, the long hair we used to have, bad cops in what a national commission acknowledged was a "police riot" (at least on the part of a "minority" of police officers in Chicago**) and passively wonder what happened.  "We didn't start the fire," Billy Joel sang.  But as I said at the time, "What are you even saying, Billy?  This is just vacuous, stupid news headline reading and mindless name dropping--with a bare melody."  

The biggest irony is we Baby Boomers hated our parents in the 1960s.  Now, we join our doddering parents in hating our children and grandchildren.  We have not looked into that societal mirror for fifty years...because I think we will know what we will see.   Maybe going back to 1968 for a deeper perspective will help some of us, at least.***  But you know my take:  Let's give the kids a chance to run things.  As The Who sang once, "The Kids Are Alright."  If only the doddering old people now had given more respect and credit to their own children...maybe the "kids" would not have acted out in 1968, and maybe we could have avoided the corrosive effect of the Counterculture. It is not to say the Counterculture was all bad.  Not at all.  But the corrosive hatred for authority and its cynical belief that nothing good can come from governmental organization or any organization keeps us mired more and more in a world where the economic royalty in our midst become more powerful, and more corrosive and ultimately destructive.

* Old 1930s socialist-minded Irving Howe, who had a hard time coming to grips with the War against Vietnam, and a harder time understanding "the kids," still had a wonderful line about the Yippie types. He said:  "Those who attack me from the Left eventually attack me from the Right."  In the 1930s, Howe, a labor left guy who liked Trotsky as an "underdog," had experienced hardcore Stalinists call him a Social Fascist, but, when those Stalinists later became right wing anti-Communists, called him a Communist.  Howe made the remark, speaking of the likes of David Horowitz, the early 1960s Leftist who became a notorious right wing agitator, though I like the Wiki cite quote of Howe dressing down a student radical who attacked Howe, saying to the agitator, "You know what you're going to be?  A dentist."     

**Sorry, Commission study author Dan Walker. A minority of people who riot can do a lot of damage, whether by citizens or by police.  And when it is official authority, i.e. the police, that is a real lot of damage.

***Yes, the title of this post comes from the late Norman Mailer's best book, Armies of the Night, where Mailer writes in an anti-scholarly, literary way about what he was seeing in Chicago and in 1968.  I have never had much interest in finishing it, having found it too hazy in its writing style, and too full of Mailer's ego.  But the book's title is a wonderful literary image that captured a flickering moment in American life in 1968.

Some musings following the Cohen plea

If Traitor Trump lawyer Michael Cohen's plea is a prelude to a flip, let's keep score of the Steele Dossier information and whether Cohen admits he went to Prague to hand money to the Russians as thanks for the hack.  That would be quite stunning...

Ah, Prague, the place where right wingers used to concoct fantasies.  I remember, for example, how right wingers, loudly trumpeted by Rush Limbaugh, thought Clinton was a secret Communist because, during Clinton's time as a Rhodes Scholar, he visited Prague and Moscow.  The theory was Clinton met with KGB people who convinced him to be a secret Commie so one day, twenty years later, he could ascend to the top of the American government.  Just read this article on the subject from WND and note how easily right wingers liked to connect dots which today, with Traitor Trump, they constantly refuse to do.

The other infamous fantasy from right wingers in and out of government was that one of the 9/11 attackers had gone to Prague and had something to do with Saddam Hussein, which was a needed fantasy as part of the Bush-Cheney parsing of words that led so many people to support the invasion of Iraq to get back at those who "attacked us on 9/11."  Wikipedia helps us recall the ins and outs, and later backing off of the claim.

It would deeply ironic, beyond the stunning part, if this time, Prague was a place where we learned real American national security had been compromised, and that right wingers themselves had voted for and continued to support a president the Russians had some control over.  

If this occurs, my suggestion to CPAC planners: Invite Jane Fonda to be your guest speaker next year, where you present her with a written apology and a bouquet of roses.  Oh, and Bill Clinton too, since CPAC so supported the impeachment of a president who paid off mistresses on the basis of moral turpitude.

A brilliant neo-liberal take down of Traitor Trump Trade Wars

This is the most intelligent Neo-liberal defense of trade deals we will ever see. I agree with most of it, and understood most of it for years, and I am glad how John Oliver, about 40% in, recognized setting up the current world required trade deals that did beggar many workers in the US, and did environmental damage around the world.

What is still too bad is Oliver never tells the viewers Peter Navarro is a known economist who, yes, has tried to use hyperbole over the years to get his point across, but who is still fundamentally correct in looking at the effect of China's growing economic power on our nation. Most economists look through a very narrow lens, and avoid nation building and nation sustaining issues. I remember reading during the Bush the Elder administration how we were buying steel from China, rather than our own steelmakers, to build military weapons. I was worried then, and still worry, about our nation becoming more about services than building things. 

Oliver also takes the Neo-liberal line on automation, which is fine as far as it goes, but in comparing the loss of jobs now due to Trump's tariff policy, he never wants to compare that to how many jobs have been lost over the past 30 years, as I have long said, from the beginning of the NAFTA discussions, that the problem with the NAFTA and the WTO was the codification of trends the Reagan and Bush administration (which administrations did most of the negotiations that led to the trade deals) had allowed to happen. Let's compare those numbers and yes, John Oliver, it is more complicated. And the fact that we produce as much now as in 1984 (with one third less workers) is one of those snapshots that obscures more than illuminates. What about 1974, and then we'll see what had already happened in that decade difference. And yes, I know automation continues to develop, as anyone can see with self-checkouts and kiosks in fast food places. The question there will be universal basic income (UBI), but so far, Baby Boomers and Oldsters as a group can't seem to grasp that yet. Don't worry kids, in twenty years, we'll finally be dead....

Still, the fundamental thing John Oliver avoids, and here he is most neo-liberal in his thinking, is why it is a short term (meaning now) good to not have trade barriers, but a long term problem if our clothes, steel, and other basic things continue to be made elsewhere. I have always tried to help people understand this is about nation building and nation sustaining--so that tariff policy should be about what Alexander Hamilton recognized in Federalist Paper #11, which is promoting American industry. I have also tried to say that if we are going to impose tariffs, it would be about going to China, and shaming the leaders by saying, why is it your people are still earning starvation wages and can't buy what they make? There is still ridiculous poverty, and maybe 1/8th of the Chinese population is making oodles of money, but the rest of the Chinese people still suffer greatly. Each nation of a major size can diversify its economy and improve the lives of its people in each economy. In smaller nations, they should be promoted to band together to raise wages and work for themselves. And most important, places like China and South Korea imposed strict tariffs while they built up their industries, so that people there had to pay more for foreign goods, which would have been cheaper to buy, so that their industries could grow. The problem with China, and less so South Korea, is that the budding capitalists in China and to some extent South Korea, were not sharing the bounties from the developing industries, which is what happened here in the US, as wave after wave of immigrant workers could always fill jobs, and why we saw so much racism against that wave after wave. The irony has been that the tough immigration laws of the first two decades of the 20th Century gave a break so that the New Deal really got things moving forward for workers here. Yes, I sound like anti-immigration here, but I'm saying anti-immigrant racism was an excuse that gave rich owners the cover to not share profits with workers. At some long term point, China's workers will benefit, but it's a long view the Chinese leaders have, which is an overcorrection from what I would want to change here, which is too short a view.

But you see, all of this is what makes me "a dirty Commie" to right wingers, and that my take on getting people around the world to work together sounds like "Kumbaya Hippie stuff." However, what we have seen for the past forty years (again, this began before NAFTA/WTO codifications) is an integration that has proceeded apace. But now, the integration has gotten so far that we need to reconsider how we approach tariff policy, and most important, how we redevelop our nation's basic infrastructure.

Overall, Oliver is a brilliant mind, and this is a very effective and proper take down of the cynical carnival barker, Traitor Trump. But it remains brilliant within a neo-liberal ideology that needs review and reconsideration, too, especially from a nation sustaining perspective. This is because one day the Chinese will dominate foreign financing, law, medicine, etc. and by then, we will have beggared our nation's talent so that forty years from now, there will be "American war brides" for wealthy Chinese men (remember the birth dearth for girls due to the one child policy) and people around the world will wonder how this nation ever built anything. Oh, and Mr. Oliver, I am not an economist, either. That does not make me dumb. :) My criticism of economists over the decades is very few of them have any knowledge of sociology or anthropology.  Also, their economic Darwinian sensibilities show they never read Stephen Gould or EO Wilson on the diversity of motivations (both altruistic and selfish, not one or the other) that humans have developed and life itself developed over four billion years. We can be kind, we can be mean, we can all sorts of things. It is not we are angels or devils, but a combination of both, just for starters.

Trumpism is the Socialism of Fools, Part II

Maher. 

I recall where people who love Trump now were in the 1980s, when our "Deep State" was killing doctors, teachers, nurses, and especially clergy in Central America.  They were buying hook, line, and sinker into Ronald Wilson Reagan (note the letters 6 6 6) administration lies about those murders--first denying they were murdered, and then saying, Oh, they were just Commies, anyway. Such Reagan fans who are now Trumpists were, back then, totally in thrall with what they now suddenly deride as the "Deep State."  What is sad, pathetic, ironic, and frankly a little weird, is that now, when there is a real probability that the president they support, i.e. the Orange Caudillo, is compromised by a foreign power out to undermine the United States, these very same people or their ideological descendants have decided there is a "Deep State" after all.  

For those who care, the irony of the use of the phrase "Deep State" is an unconscious borrowing of the phrase from a certain element of the sectarian left over the decades.  When used in those circles, and I can point to a book by Peter Dale Scott from ten years or so ago called "The Road to 9/11," where he uses the phrase "Deep State," it simply means the permanent establishment put into solid place at the start of the Cold War, what Gore Vidal called "the National Security State."  It consists of those in and out of government who supported and promoted the narrative that we know as the Cold War.  I said "unconscious" because the Trumpists who have cult like devotion to everything "Trump" have never heard of, let alone, read Peter Dale Scott, and, if they tried to read Vidal or Chomsky, they would get too bored--not enough pictures, I suppose.  

What we are seeing today, though, is more than the John Birch Society mindset from the 1950s through 1970s that found a certain element of the National Security State establishment too "liberal" and "Communist influenced" (the JBS' view was that the Council on Foreign Relations was pro-Soviet, and later believed the Trilateral Commission was completely pro-Soviet).  What makes this current attack on American institutions from the right wingers and assorted Trumpists who oppose the "Deep State" different is this anti-American attack goes to the very heart of hating everyone in government who dares to wonder about Trump's compromised relations with Putin.  What we see with Trumpists is a cultist, fascistic, irrational and time limited version of Peter Dale Scott's scholarly critique of institutions and historical analysis of the past near century.  As I have said before, this is another manifestation of August Babel's early 20th Century formulation of German anti-Semitism as the  "Socialism of Fools"--so that one properly applies Babel's conclusion to say "Trumpism is the Socialism of Fools."  

For Trumpists of today, their embrace of labels from old lefties, such as "Deep State," and their belief in any number of conspiracies that would make Oliver Stone wince, is precisely what Hermann Goering was after when he, Hitler, and their Nazi cohorts, pushed the name of their party as "National Socialism," for it combined symbols and sometimes language (not substance) of socialism with a substantive program that was fascistic, and based upon cult-like devotion of the cult's leader who acts to undermine and tear down important government institutions--at least until he has the full levers of dictatorial power.  

Right now, at this moment, the answer is to laugh at, deride, and ultimately get past our Trumpists, and simply...and hopefully (gulp!)...outvote them.  Some of these Trumpists will eventually come back to reality. Others will never return to reality, and be similar to old Nazis in Germany after WWII, sitting on the porch or in their living room mumbling about Jews.  Such people who will never return to reality will, in the words of the first post-WWII American pretender-to-the-throne caudillo, General Douglas MacArthur, simply fade away. 

Jeff Weaver's new book, "How Bernie Won--Inside the Revolution that's taking back our country--and where we go from here."

Am just finishing a book that fell into my lap, courtesy of my Uncle and Amazon: Jeff Weaver's "How Bernie Won-Inside the Revolution that's taking back our country--and where we go from here."

Weaver, who was Bernie's campaign manager, has written the book in a breezy, journalistic style that takes us step by step through the 2015-2016 Democratic Party presidential primary and convention. The hacked DNC related emails are cited to help fill in what would have been guesses regarding how the process can be fairly said to have been manipulated in various places, and Weaver does a great job in explaining arcane voter registration rules as he discusses primaries and caucuses in each state in which Bernie competed.  Weaver reminds us, too, how the corporate media narratives run perceptions, and overwhelm factual analyses that may be more true than the narrative. Weaver further  reminds us of two things I think should be takeaways whenever someone tells us "Bernie isn't a Democrat!" as if that is a good-faith argument:

1. Contrary to most mainstream corporate media spin at the time, the Clinton campaign kept most of the money it raised that was supposed to go to State Democratic Parties. Clinton's campaign deal with the DNC netted only $450,000 for State parties out of $61 million raised. Contrast that with Bernie's Our Revolution organization, which has funneled $4.5 million to downstream Democratic Party candidates in federal, state, and local offices.  Bernie's primary 2015-2016 campaign monies did primarily go to Bernie, but he was trying to establish name recognition and giving people a series of policy perspectives not normally heard in any coherent way.   

2. Weaver also makes the point that Bernie's policies resonated deeply with the base, whether people had enough courage to vote for Bernie or stay with the always putative nominee, Hillary Clinton.

Weaver was also good at calling attention to lies from Clinton surrogates at strategic points in the primary campaign.  However, he strangely left out John Lewis' double down lie for what I can only surmise is a hesitancy to criticize a hero of the Civil Rights Movement. My take is Lewis sullied his otherwise well-deserved and honored reputation, and needs to atone for that--which can only come from initial history recording the double down lie.  This is particularly important as Weaver crunches the numbers and shows African-American and Latino youth went for Bernie more and more as the campaign progressed, as the word about who Bernie was spread, and how his policies spoke to the combination of identity politics and economic populist politics--not the dichotomy most often favored by corporate Democrats when the issues arise.  

Weaver's book re-confirms what many of us understood at the time, which was the youth, across race, gender, and ethnicity, throughout America has chosen the Bernie platform, but the problem remains with youth turnout, which has been a problem since 18 year olds received the right to vote in the early 1970s.  As for Baby Boomers and Oldsters, as I said back in 2016 and thereafter, they came out and voted--and gave us Clinton and Trump. Even then, they couldn't even get the choice amongst those two political barkers correct in at least the states that put Trump over the top in the Electoral College.

Weaver appears to be ending the book as to how Bernie's campaign was an educational campaign, and how it truly has begun to change the discourse, much to the chagrin of who the late Gore Vidal called the "owners" of the nation, and the corporate media executives who are part of that "ownership."  That is an important development after 70 plus years of corporate media and governmental propaganda against what are policies designed to finish FDR's New Deal.

Weaver's book is an important book for those interested in reforming the election processes throughout our nation, and those who are looking forward to further develop policy issues Bernie raised in his campaign--policies which continue to resonate and grow more popular the more the issues are discussed.  One should not read this book with an eye to re-fight the 2016 presidential campaign as much as to demand our election, voting, and primary rules be substantially revised.  Reading this book, I find myself starting to revert to my view, from 20 odd years ago, that the Greens, Working Families Party, and Libertarian Party need to unite on election access and primary rule reforms. Third parties tend to lead to one of the two wings of The Property Party prevailing. Four parties...well, that would be interesting as it could lead to a collapse of one of the two wings of what the late Gore Vidal liked to call the singular "Property Party."  That is the type of collapse that may be fun.  The type of political collapse we are witnessing now is not fun.  It is downright scary.

Birthday gift to Mitchell: Go to a public forum and speak out about a public policy proposal

"So what did you do for your birthday, Mitchell?"

Jackie and I went to the Rio Rancho School District School Board parents and staff meeting to discuss a proposal that is being, unfortunately, seriously considered, which is to arm security guards at Rio Rancho Public Schools. Jackie and I each spoke against it, in our own ways, and Jackie was interviewed on local television. And by God she made the station manager cut! Here it is.  I liked this birthday activity much more than a birthday dinner or date, I have to admit, which is why Jackie is perhaps the only woman I could have married who would put up with me. :)

What I did, instead of going over to talk to the reporter, was speak to the Board president and two Board members after the meeting, and reminded them of what I said in simple persuasive words (I'm a lawyer after all). I said public policy making is not about individual preferences (people talked about how much they personally like or loathe guns too often in the forum). I said, instead, public policy is about determining priorities, recognizing probabilities not remoteness of threats, and thinking of the communities' needs overall. When evaluating the proposal, we see, from the presentation the operating officer of the Board made, there are nearly 132,000 schools across the nation, and it turns out, from 2000-2015, there were various armed shooter instances in schools, but that was 0.0044% of schools affected. We also see the Board proposal would require an additional $400,000 in the budget, in a district where, at the end of the first week of school last year, my wife learned there were not enough textbooks in the elementary school she was at, and the school said there would not be sufficient money to order more. And none came. Also, even if the Board passes the proposal, it turns out there are not enough people on the security staff currently who meet the requirements to carry a gun, and the school district has often sought retired police officers, but cannot find enough. So, I said, what is the point of passing something that will make it harder to fill the position, when, even if there are retired police officers, how many truly have training in SWAT or armed to the teeth shooters? One, it turns out. I said that's like hiring lawyers and not asking who has tried a lawsuit.  I said publicly that this is governance by cable news because one is proposing a policy that cannot be effectively implemented with the proper people.  That got major applause, but notice it does not show up--despite it being snappy--on the t.v. report.  Wonder why?  We know why. Corporate media never likes corporate media criticism, especially when it is from a systemic perspective.

What I find extraordinary is when I confronted them about insurance considerations of arming school guards, they said the state regulations do not allow for school guards to carry non-lethal weapons, only lethal ones. I said they need to contact the PED (Public Ed Department) and get that regulation changed immediately. It was the reason the school's risk pool (the district does not have "insurance") said it was okay to have guns, not tasers, batons, or anything else for guards. I said, What? You have a risk pool, not insurance? Do you realize what happens when there is a catastrophic injury or incident in a risk pool? Rates go up dramatically, much more than the savings you had by foregoing insurance. The school district executive manager agreed with me, saying that after the one shooting event in a small rural school district in New Mexico last year (there has been one more in the last fifteen years, so two overall), the rates have now dramatically increased. I said that is precisely why your risk pool agent should be fired, and get the district out of the risk pool, and into insurance. I said, if you have a homeowners' policy, your rates go up with a gun in the house. For the risk pool to say, No problem with arming security guards, and then, after an incident, where a gun may either be ineffective or may escalate a situation, the rates go up dramatically, is an insurance agent giving bad advice about true risk and underwriting. 

In speaking to the Board members, it is clear this is a close vote, and it may get voted down in favor of more study, which would be a relief. This is especially so because I find the schools here are more security hardened, as Jackie's school has double doors with bullet proof glass, and one cannot even enter without buzzing in. And there is no way to get to the other side without jumping big fences, and each room has bulletproof glass to protect against most intruders. The school does twice a year drills about active shooter situations, too. All of this is not perfect, of course, but more than I saw in Poway Unified in San Diego, for example.

So, of course, with my presentation, the media decided to do what it does, which is interview the big, burly guy who loves guns and the woman (Jackie) who doesn't. The funniest thing to me is the big, burly guy, in the forum, said he was not sure he supported the proposal because he owns guns, and would not trust himself with children who may act out, particularly those with mental disabilities. He said guns can often escalate a situation. But notice the report just has him tell you how much he likes guns. Jackie tried to get me to talk to the reporter, but I again felt I needed to get to these Board members and go into deeper detail on the points to consider in the evaluation process. None of these other points were aired, despite my public question which was recorded by the cameraman, in the one minute report. Funny that, but of course typical corporate media. Always keeping it shallow and to arguing the way one argues on "Oprah."

Russian cyberspace disinformation is a narrative competing with and overlapping corporate media...but is designed to sow chaos and hatred inside the US

I have always been skeptical of the idea that the Russian disinformation campaign via social media in 2015-2016 won the election for Trump.  The high negatives against Hillary Clinton in areas where people remembered Bill Clinton's betrayal of American workers in working with Republicans to pass the NAFTA and the WTO, plus the racist tropes which Trump's campaign had played in those areas, were, by themselves, enough to turn the vote against Clinton in those areas.  Bernie Sanders won Wisconsin, Michigan, and had a lot of support from "Reagan Democrats" in Ohio and Pennsylvania  as Sanders spoke to people's better selves and a New Deal type of politics, which had been immensely popular in the period of the 1930s through 1960s.  That Sanders performed poorly in black and Latino communities, particularly in the early but significant State primary elections in the South, was more about Sanders not being known, and the manner in which the corporate media ensured the people in those areas did not know or trust Sanders.* And it is important to recognize two other salient facts of corporate media's narrative, which was promoting Donald Trump above everyone else, and the fact that coverage of Clinton's campaign was largely negative in tone and content.  See this summary of a report on media coverage in 2015 and 2016 presidential campaigns, for starters.

Notwithstanding my skepticism, we should be more willing to accept where the Russian disinformation campaign can be said to have "worked," which was in the re-enforcement of Trump's campaign strategy, which strategy was to remind white working and upper middle class people in particular Rust Belt States of Clintonian neo-liberal betrayal of white working Americans, and appealing to their sexism and racism, and how this campaign, woven through social media, operated in much in the way corporate media has long "worked"--that is, by pushing what political scientists and literature professors would call a "narrative."  We continue to see this even after the 2016 election, as I continue to be amazed at how people on my own Facebook wall promote what is truly false "news."  Just in the past week, I have seen, on my FB wall, regular people promote fake quotes from Ocasio-Cortez and B-list movie stars like Ashley Judd, designed to  either undermine New Deal politics (Ocasio-Cortez) or else promote anger against Hollywood "liberals" who, they wrongfully believe, are supporting Muslim fundamentalist extremists, and ultimately terrorists. Generally, the memes promoted buy into nearly every sort of anti-"liberal" conspiracy of one type or another.  When I have confronted these folks on my FB wall, with Snopes.com, Politifact.com, or direct links showing why the information being promoted is false, the persons often claim this was merely a joke, when the comment from the FB posting persons showed they had believed the meme without recognizing its falsehood. Other times, such persons fall into the old Cold War parlance, saying, well, this was "objectively" true, even if it is not, um, actually true.

A former FBI agent, Clint Watts, has written a book about the Russian use of disinformation and illegal hacking in the 2015-2016 presidential campaign. Mr. Watts states the disinformation the Russians spread, and hacking into DNC emails with the help of Wikileaks and others, had an effect that has, with the election of Trump, ended up advancing Russian foreign policy goals, while sowing further dissension in our nation because of the disinformation.  While the ex-FBI agent, Mr. Watts, admits, at the end of this article summarizing an interview Mr. Watts gave to Yahoo!, that it remains impossible to state the extent to which the Russian disinformation and DNC hacking campaign turned the election in those States which gave Trump his Electoral College victory,** he properly recognizes the very openness of social media platforms, where even a nobody like me may offer editorials through this blog or on Facebook to hundreds of people, on a near weekly or, in the case of FB, daily basis, also allows a foreign government to plan and implement a disinformation campaign to re-enforce divisive biases that exist within enough people in our nation, and promote that government's foreign policy goals--much in the way advertisers and propagandists have studied the human psyche to get us to buy products that may not be good for us or we do not need, and much in the same way corporate media has operated to promote pro-corporate and anti-governmental regulation thinking, particularly since the onset of the Cold War (it occurred before then, as noted through the early links in this post, but it was simply not as sophisticated and wide ranging as it is in a wired world in which we live, and where unions no longer are able to provide a counter-narrative to corporate media and well-funded pro-corporate/libertarian think tanks, for example).

That the Republican Party-led Congress is, relatively speaking, not very interested in combating this cyber "warfare" speaks volumes about their compromised position. We know Republicans, during the Cold War, led the overreaction about the Russian menace in order to defeat candidates who supported New Deal policies, which policies had been immensely popular. But the Republicans are now under-reacting because it appears they are either cowed by a potentially compromised president they helped elect or, in the case of those who have also taken money from Russian foreign nationals, are themselves compromised.

Therefore, it remains correct to be highly skeptical regarding any assertion that the Russians won the 2016 election for Donald Trump.  But it is wrong to deny the manner in which the Russian disinformation and hacking efforts are promoting a narrative which is influencing American political discourse, and the disinformation appears to work hand-in-glove with right-wing elements wishing to promote racism, white supremacy, right-wing versions of libertarianism that are anti-governmental when the policy discussed is designed to help people, but pro-government when the policy discussed promotes police power, immigration enforcement officers, and the military--and a narrative, ironically for those who have long been opposed to the American Empire's horrid behaviors, that promotes the undermining of American military and diplomatic power around the world in which we all live.  

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*I have also never forgiven John Lewis (D-GA) for his disgusting lie about Sanders supposedly not being involved in the civil rights movement, and his double down lie that, if one reads his phrasing, made it sound as if he had met Hillary Clinton and Bill Clinton during the 1960s civil rights movement, in which Lewis participated--when Hillary was in high school pushing for then-anti-civil rights politician Barry Goldwater, and Clinton was busy not inhaling marijuana and likely already beginning to seduce those humans who wore skirts.  

**Cliff Watts' book admits, at page 241, that gerrymandering may have also played a role in how Republicans were able to gain power in the run-up to the 2016 presidential election.  However, Mr. Watts' book appears to ignore the decline of minority vote participation in the 2016 presidential election, either from lack of enthusiasm for Hillary Clinton or Voter ID laws/reduction in places where minorities may vote or even register, etc.