Note that the percentages add up to more than 100% because there are overlapping causes. In most cases, there is a crisis relating to loss of personal support and isolation. This could be job loss, housing loss, relationship loss, or some other crisis. 29% of suicides could be ascribed to a definite crisis, either past or upcoming. Many more less obvious crises were not recorded and relationship problems were a more obvious explanation. Males account for 84% of suicides, mostly by shooting or strangulation.
Rates varied in the separate states by a factor of four:
Overall, the US experienced a 25% rise in the rate of suicides during that period, with individual states ranging from a 6% increase in Delaware to a nearly 58% increase in North Dakota, the researchers say.
All states except Nevada experienced an increase; although Nevada showed a 1% decrease in suicide, the state’s suicide rate was still high, ranging between 21 and 23 suicides for every 100,000 people through the years studied, the researchers say.
Suicide rates were four times greater in the highest state compared with the lowest when calculated on an annual basis during the most recent time period, 2014 to 2016.
Montana experienced about 29 suicides for every 100,000 people — the highest in the nation — compared with about seven people out of every 100,000 in the District of Columbia — the lowest. As a whole, the nation saw 15 people dying by suicide for every 100,000 in 2016.
—By Susan Scutti, CNN – CNN – Thursday, June 07, 2018
Suicides occur most frequently when people are isolated, poor, and live in northern states such as North Dakota. Isolation and loss are the most common predictors of suicide.
Suicide prevention is most effective when professionals and close relatives reach out to individuals in distress.
Mr. Trump has been working hard at one thing, in between those three-day weekends at Mar-a-Lago playing golf and after he absorbs his own early-morning three-hour TV briefing from Fox: propaganda. He uses his Twitter account like a sword to cut down his enemies and like a shovel to dig up dirt to cover up his losses. After the Democrats did well in multiple state primary elections on Tuesday, he tweeted: “Great night for Republicans! … John Cox… can win… So Much for the big Blue Wave, it may be a big Red Wave. Working hard!”
The reference to John Cox, a Republican candidate in the top-two primary for governor in California, celebrates his strong showing after he gained the second spot for the final election in the governor’s race. This is indeed a truthful and encouraging sign, as it will motivate strongly Republican voters to turn out for a protest vote against the virtually certain Democratic winner in that race. While they are in the voting booth, they will also vote for Republican candidates in House races even though they wouldn’t have bothered to turn just for that. The increase in Republican turnout may mean the difference between defeat and victory in some closely-contested House races this fall.
That kernel of truth about John Cox, however, is surrounded with blatant lies– overall, it was not a “Great night for Republicans”. Here is another quote from the article that cites Mr. Trump’s tweet:
“Democrats have to be happy and relieved,” said Dave Wasserman, House race analyst for the nonpartisan Cook Political Report. “They have woken up from their nightmare of lockouts, and everything is O.K.”
The Democratic success could affect activity in Congress. Faced with the need to protect endangered Republican incumbents in California, House Republican leaders may determine that they have to move forward with a vote on immigration policy being demanded by Republican centrists who believe the issue is critical to their campaigns.
–By CARL HULSE and JONATHAN MARTIN – The New York Times – Wednesday, June 06, 2018
What is more, John Cox, although he is a pure Republican, has no chance of winning the governorship in California. So Don the Con’s congratulations are a little premature. At most, Mr. Cox’s candidacy will inspire pure Republicans (of whom there are many in California) to turn out for a protest vote that might help embattled Republican Congressmen in three House districts. The big Blue Wave that has been predicted consists mainly of a reaction of disgust against Don and continues to roll on.
It appears from the pace of Mr. Mueller’s investigation that it is nearly complete except for Mr. Trump’s personal testimony. Based on the most recent leak, probably from Trump forces, of the letter written to Mr. Mueller by Trump’s lawyers in January that asserts what may primly be called “executive privilege”, Mr. Mueller has apparently been pressuring Mr. Trump towards granting that vital interview at least since last winter. The last resort appears to be when Mr. Trump’s lawyers refuse an interview and Mr. Mueller issues a subpoena to compel his testimony. The Supreme Court is likely to be asked to decide this issue.
Whatever the Supreme Court decides, Mr. Mueller will conclude his investigation with a report to Mr. Wray and ultimately to Mr. Sessions. That will inevitably be leaked and will also inevitably be reported to the House, which will inevitably begin another investigation, this time into whether Mr. Trump should be impeached. This will take us all the way into the summer or fall of 2019. By then the damage Mr. Trump and his Republican allies have done to the government and the country will become blatantly obvious. The federal deficit will balloon to over a trillion dollars, and Congress will be forced to raise taxes or face a crisis of confidence in the federal economy.
Bad things will happen, and despite the election of a Democratic House (and possibly Senate) nothing can be done about it without Mr. Trump’s signature. I suspect that Moral Mike Pence will get into trouble and have to be replaced, as Spiro Agnew was replaced by Gerald Ford. I remember the collective relief expressed when Mr. Ford was elevated, because he was thought to be a moderate and many knew that he would become the next President. Little did we know that Mr. Ford had made a secret agreement with Mr. Nixon, to pardon him proactively shortly after he resigned in the face of impeachment by the House.
Back then, the propaganda machine was in full cry against Mr. Nixon’s foes. Today, Twitter gives Mr. Trump that “bully pulpit” that can reach into everyone’s home– a new propaganda weapon that has far-reaching and unforeseen effects. We can expect the unexpected– the propaganda war will only get weirder.
(image of woman with sword and American flag courtesy of pixabay.com and Open Clipart-Vectors)
There has been a lot of lying going on. My formative years were indeed informed by the consistent lies of the Johnson administration (I was too young to study the lies of the Kennedy or Eisenhower administrations, but in history books I studied the lies of the Franklin Delano Roosevelt administration), as eventually exposed by the Pentagon Papers. For the less well-informed, the Pentagon Papers were revealed and published by Daniel Ellsberg, who is apparently still alive at 87 years of age.
Ellsberg was a military analyst who was employed by the RAND (Research and Development) Corporation in the 1960s and early ’70s. He contributed to an analysis of top-secret documents (which analysis became known as the Pentagon Papers, 7000 pages long ) relating to the war in Vietnam that was scornful of the usual assessment of that war (quoted from Wikipedia):
It was no more a “civil war” after 1955 or 1960 than it had been during the U.S.-supported French attempt at colonial reconquest. A war in which one side was entirely equipped and paid by a foreign power – which dictated the nature of the local regime in its own interest – was not a civil war. To say that we had “interfered” in what is “really a civil war,” as most American academic writers and even liberal critics of the war do to this day, simply screened a more painful reality and was as much a myth as the earlier official one of “aggression from the North.” In terms of the UN Charter and of our own avowed ideals, it was a war of foreign aggression, American aggression.
By 1969, Ellsberg had concluded that our conduct of the war in Vietnam was morally wrong, and he began attending anti-war public events while still employed at RAND. In August 1969, after listening to a speech by a man who was about to report to prison for resisting the draft, he became convinced that something had to be done to counter the massive lies that were being told by the government about the war. He secretly made several photocopies of the analysis in late 1969 and then spent a year trying to persuade anti-war Senators to release the Papers into the Congressional record (because a sitting Senator could not be prosecuted for anything he said or revealed on the floor of the Senate). He eventually revealed the Papers to a New York Times correspondent, and on June 13, 1971, the Times began to publish excerpts from them.
The Times was prevented from publishing further by a court order engineered by John Mitchell (Nixon’s Attorney General), and at the end of June, Senator Mike Gravel entered 4,100 pages of the Papers into the Congressional Record. The Washington Post and sixteen other newspapers then published the rest of the Papers. The FBI had been pursuing Ellsberg for two weeks after the first appearance of an excerpt in the Times. Eventually, the Times won the right to publish the Papers from the Supreme Court, but in the meantime, the other papers had to carry the ball.
Nixon’s secret White House taping system captured him discussing the New York Times piece on the afternoon of June 14, 1971 (Wikipedia again):
[HR Haldeman speaking] Rumsfeld was making this point this morning… To the ordinary guy, all this is a bunch of gobbledygook. But out of the gobbledygook comes a very clear thing…. You can’t trust the government; you can’t believe what they say; and you can’t rely on their judgment; and the – the implicit infallibility of presidents, which has been an accepted thing in America, is badly hurt by this, because It shows that people do things the president wants to do even though it’s wrong, and the president can be wrong.
The publication of the Pentagon Papers prompted Nixon to begin an independent espionage operation through private parties (as opposed to the CIA or FBI) against Ellsberg, the Democratic Party, and the anti-war organizations most prominent at the time. This led directly to the break-in at Democratic Party headquarters in the Watergate hotel, a year after the Papers were published, that eventually unravelled Nixon’s schemes.
Since the Franklin Delano Roosevelt administration, the American public had become reliant on the good faith of the Presidency and devoted to his person. Although he had been known to lie on occasion, the vast majority of Americans trusted him implicitly to protect their best interests. The Pentagon Papers revealed that the president had been lying to them and steering them wrongly about a matter of tremendous importance to them, the reasons for and the conduct of the war in Vietnam.
By the time I went to college in 1970, I knew that the government was lying to me from books and materials I had read that were independent evaluations of the situation in Vietnam. The Tet offensive in February 1968 had made it obvious that General Westmoreland, in charge of the Army in Vietnam, had lied and was continuing to lie through his teeth about what was going on there. So I did not expect anything different from government. The revelations of Watergate, around the time that I graduated from college, in the summer of 1974, simply confirmed that Nixon had been caught scheming, lying, and covering up, and lying about that too.
Since then, I and many other Americans have simply assumed that the government lies to people to achieve their purposes. Reagan’s administration merely confirmed that assumption for me, while it seemed to have dispelled the suspicions of many Americans. The Clinton administration, while it came with some relief from the heavy-handed tactics of Reagan, did nothing to disabuse me of the notion. The attempted impeachment of Clinton showed that he could be induced to lie about even trivial things.
Then the presidential elections in 2000 showed me that even the Supreme Court could be bought off. The fact that GW Bush was lying about the “weapons of mass destruction” in the hands of Saddam Hussein came as no surprise to me. His motivation in lying, that is to sway American public opinion so that he could engineer regime change in Iraq through invasion, was more weighty than Clinton’s motive, but less reasonable.
The election of Barack Obama in 2008 made a slight difference: I began to believe that some current-day presidents could be sincere and at least try to be truthful and try to work for the best interests of the most needy among us. Obama was the most “truthy” of presidents: he tried hard to tell the truth, or to keep his mouth shut when he couldn’t– as in the drone program to assassinate Arab jihadists. All that came to a crashing halt on the first Tuesday in November, 2016.
I am relating all of this ancient history to make a point: we need someone we can trust to lead us. Donald J. Trump is not that person.
(Postscript: obviously we can’t trust Bill Clinton despite his policy and economic successes; his wife was badly damaged by not having divorced him after he was impeached and the Republican obsession with hating her afterwards– if sexual morality is your criterion for trust, then you’ll have to look elsewhere. Perhaps Ellen deGeneres?)
(The photo of the Trumps and the Clintons at a happier time– Trump’s last wedding– was published by people.com and quora.org and is attributed to Maring Photography/Getty/Contour)
I hate to say this but Trump must have gone to the “Hitler Schoo[l] of Politics” for Hitler knew exactly how to manipulate the political system in order to achieve his dream, namely to became [sic] a dictator and absolute ruler of Germany. Nobody can tell me that this cannot happen in the US. Just like in Germany, the Republicans in Comgress [sic] except for very few, do NOT speak out against Trump and his ilk and some of their outrages [sic] claims. All they want is bend the rules and laws in Trump’s favor. My family were German refugees escaping from East Germany to West Germany as the German’s were loosing [sic] the war and the Russians were rolling west. I am now in my late seventies and learned the story of Hitler’s rise well. He manipulated the political system as well as weak and vulnerable polititians[sic] took advantage of a bad situation in Germany[ ]and once Hindenburg died Hitler had it made.
(I think we should be very, very afraid. This person, whose parents were in Germany during Hitler’s rise to power, must have explained to him/her exactly how Hitler managed his coup d’ etat… Despite the spelling and grammar mistakes (possibly due to English being the writer’s second language?) the points made are persuasive. It’s not Trump himself, it is the Republicans who are dismantling the government and remaking it in a fascist mold– Trump is just providing the distraction to keep the opposition busy while the real dirty work is done behind the scenes. That’s the way it happened in Germany.)
(this comment was attached to the article I referenced in my last post, about Trump’s lawyer’s assertion that he cannot be considered obstructive, no matter how corrupt his motives are, because he is, after all, The President who can do anything he wants… oh, and he can pardon himself.)
“We overthrew control by a monarchy, and the Constitution signals in multiple places that the president is subject to law,” said Peter Shane, an Ohio State University law professor and co-author of a separation-of-powers casebook.
“The idea that the president could — regardless of his motive — just work his will on the investigation of civil or criminal offenses, that the Constitution frees him to act with corrupt motives, is just an affront to the idea of the president as a public trustee and subject to law.”
From the New York Times, in an article yesterday, “Trump and His Lawyers Embrace a Vision of Vast Executive Power”
(illustration courtesy of pixabay.com)
“As for the president’s descent into the sewer where hatred and pogroms are fashioned, the United States is not a nation of animals. Immigrants, including Trump’s own German-born grandparents, made this nation distinct.”
Alas, Donald Trump turns his back on his background and acts as if he’s a self-made man, forgetting his ‘starter kit” of a million dollars.
The moral rot is everywhere: the nonstop attacks on what made this nation great–generosity, reciprocity, trust, integrity, and a magic land where refugees could build lives, as well as new companies.
I almost didn’t respond to this article, because it’s draining to write about Trump’s America which grows increasingly depressing to tolerate. Nothing great is being done, only tear-downs and attacks on our better impulses.
Plus, I know Roger Cohen is a brilliant writer with true international perspective. And to hear so many countries and former allies express despair on where America is headed is frightening.
I don’t think that many Americans, particularly Trump supporters, understand how close we are to losing our precious freedoms.
I wish they would all read some history and the documents that form our “imperfect union.” Because our growing tribalism and isolation only helps those who are abusing power do so more freely.
Mr. Cohen is right–are we up to preserving our Republic despite the occupant of the Oval Office?
Republicans, at least the good majority of Republicans, blame poor people for their poverty. Many Repubs truly believe that the less fortunate in our society are poor because they don’t work hard enough; they are too lazy; they have made poor choices and they must grab themselves by the bootstraps and pull themselves out of poverty. I have always believed that our country will be judged on how we treat the poor, the elderly, and our children. We will not be looked upon kindly. (I find it ironic how those who want to cut or eliminate all our safety nets are the same people who claim to be good Christian folks, and so many states that rely heavily on the Federal Government to subsidize their people are the same states that, in most cases, vote Republican.)
Trump is a liar, no doubt, but he did not invent the mess we are in. He is simply the poster child for it. Part of the problem is the way that the internet has become an echo-chamber in which rumor, innuendo, and conspiracy theories are circulated and verified.
After 2010, I read the Tea Party blogs for a number of years. In that world, “facts” were pieces of information which were “proven” by being repeated back and forth by an assortment of right-wing web sites. When a blogger wished to verify what he/she said, the more web sites which had said it, the more true it became. Never mind that those sites simply cited each other in a never ending chain.
Add to that the many, many folks who are all too willing to let so very much pass in their single minded focus on a certain issue (e.g., “pro-life” voters who care only about getting a SCOTUS which will overturn Roe or drive GLBT folks back into the closet or keep those ‘others’ out of the country), and you get a pretty much Teflon Trump who can destroy and lie with impunity as long as he delivers on their pet issue.
Yes, democracy is in deep trouble. Trump’s calling some immigrants “animals” would make Hitler proud. Unfortunately, such things matter not at all to many who voted for him. Out best hope is the ballot box. Let’s hope the Democrats can find and mount a strong, stable candidate who can draw not only Dem purists, but also the millions of moderates needed to actually win.
I call it the Echoplex. Impervious to facts, right wing media spins half truths and outright lies to an increasingly isolated slice of the population. Created by talk radio and Fox News, the system rapidly expanded through social media in the early years of the millennium. Later on Donald Trump, in a schadenfreude moment, Donald Trump displayed the GOP’s less incentive messaging and the Russians weighed in, recognizing a disinformation system similar to their own.
Who’s to blame? In addition to the companies who profit from the slavish support of fevered consumers and the GOP which quickly recognized the value of reducing critical assessment of its policies (something they now may regret), add one other group, the press, particularly broadcast and cable media. Their business model discourages focus on long term encroaching threats, ones which take analysis and investigation. We did it to ourselves.
Yes, we suffer from and others succumb so easily to the things made true by constant repetition…repeated till it’s true because for those who see it thus, its made easy and serves as confirmation of whats already in their minds and of what they are thinking, wanting and wishing if others this , these and that is also what they think.
They see it is and see again and more who think the same, now what was just perhaps a thought or wish cements to ingrained Truth…become frozen now as Fact.
Now primed and joined with same thinking others and the groups in together become the ties that bind in mutual affirmation that now morphs into what becomes confirmed as Fact and is as real as the reality that these people now live and breath in can only be and now becomes the offset against those others not agreed, hostile to the “Truth” as no friend , only Foe must then be.
More than anything else this deep, nurtured and promoted SCHISM is what will bring us to a reckoning where almost everything will be on the line from which it all will happen.
What concerns me most is I don’t think anyone knows what it is when it does finally happen…
…as it must.
And, a Republican Congress acting like a spectator, completely irresponsible in their checks and balance, letting this incompetent, child president tear down the republic, one brick at a time so nobody will notice till it’s too late. We overcame the Germans, Japanese, and the Soviet Union. Will we overcome the Republicans? We’ll know in November.
Howard the Democratic Party is even less active than the Republicans.
Democrats just spent eight years telling us that Republicans wouldn’t let them get anything done, and now we have a president who might be a traitor, but is definitely a pathological liar, attacking all of the checks on presidential power and all of the institutions of our Republic, but Democrats, instead of trying to shut him down, are still begging for compromise.
What is it about a party whose base is filled with Neo-Confederate, Neo-Nazi, mysogonist, anti-LGBT, white supremacists that you feel you need to compromise with? What part of the Republican program deserves consideration?
Democrats made Trump possible by treating the Republican party as if they are not against most of the Constitution (against freedom of religion, against the separation of powers, against the assumption of innocence except for Trump. against Miranda warnings, for no knock warrants except for Cohen, for a religious test for public office, for using the Ten Commandments as the basis for law, against taxing and regulating trade, against promoting the general welfare, for the second clause of the second amendment but also for having a standing army which goes against the first clause, etc., etc., ) or even against everything Jesus said (helping the poor, helping the sick, basing your life in love, against greed against violence, etc.).
They keep saying that compromise is evil and a sign of weakness so you keep begging?
What everyone seems to miss is that mass media influences political discourse, and that the controlling shares in mass media are controlled by global billionaires.
Yes markets determine a lot of what we see. They are perfectly happy to give us reality TV, like The Apprentice, where firing people is the way to greatness. and show children Disney Princess movies where the only people that count are royalty.
But the editors determine what we don’t see. If they want the TPP to pass, but don’t think people will support it, then they just pretend that Obama and global corporations are not negotiating a trade deal for 1/3 of the world’s economy in secret. (You only heard about because activists made it an issue, Bernie picked up on it, and Trump stole it.)
They covered Trump far more than Hillary and they covered Hillary far more than Bernie, and the other candidates we barely covered at all, except to blame them for Hillary’s loss.
We used to have shows like the Twighlight Zone, or Kung Fu, that were morality tales designed to get people to question their assumptions and their selfishness. Now greed is good, and the news is mostly a bunch of experts in nothing (pundits) telling us what to think.
They have created a political “center,” that most people don’t actually believe in. That is why the country is polarized. The real middle is invisible, and the people they want to vote for are described as “not viable,” or “crazy.”
News was already mostly fake, and alt news is worse.
And who’s moral rot is it? It’s the rot of American society. It’s the rot of tens of millions of our people. Trump didn’t create them. He legitimized them. He opened the door they were standing behind and let them out into public view.
Trump’s dishonesty is their dishonesty. Trumps hatred is their hatred. Trump’s isolationism is their isolationism.
How else can we explain the war on science, the war on higher education, the war on women, the surging popularity of reality TV, the decline of artistry and originality of popular music, the decline of classical everything, the war on the humanities, and worst of all, the war on the truth.
Truth speaks to character. Truth speaks to integrity. Truth speaks to honor. Trump has trashed all three. Trump just tells people what they want to hear. He feeds their hate and fear. He feeds their desire for power, primarily white power. Serving those needs supplants the truth. Satisfying their deep seated urges becomes their truth, their reality.
That’s the source of Trump’s power. He has help. With Facebook providing an input of lies and group think, and Fox News pushing the Trump alternate reality 24/7, a massive amount of brainwashing propaganda seals the deal.
Society is a fragile thing. It hinges upon social cooperation and respect for others. Trump has destroyed that. His world is, I want, I take. How I take doesn’t matter. That’s Trump’s America.
This from an article by Masha Gessen in the New Yorker about the unreality of the Trump era:
The great French thinker and activist Simone Weil had a prescription that she wrote down in her journal in 1933: “Never react to an evil in such a way as to augment it.” A few days later, she added, “Refuse to be an accomplice. Don’t lie—don’t keep your eyes shut.”
This is risky. You could be attacked by the accomplices of evil. Your country is being taken over by a criminal gang disguised as a political party. This gang has enormous power because some of its members are the richest of the rich. Not all rich people are complicit, but many are, and they have the power to silence you or just kill you if they think you are a threat. The awesome power of the state could be harnessed to destroy you.
The democratic process of removal for the prominent members of the gang in government is the only really effective method of fighting back. But the democratic process itself is in danger because the gang has developed propaganda that fools most people into voting against their own interests.
The Republican Party is a perfect storm. It propagates propaganda that fools people into voting for those who are complicit in the process of enslavement. People are frightened by propaganda and they can be deceived into voting against their best interests– at first it was unfair regressive taxation that they somehow convinced the people would be good for the economy. It isn’t– that is a lie that will lead to starvation of the equalizing process of the government. The process of starvation has already been ordained– tax cuts and a deficit budget have been agreed upon that will force the contraction of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid if they are not reversed.
What is worse, there may be no-one to vote for. All the candidates may be suborned by the criminal gang, even if they are not members of the Republican Party. Anyone who identifies as a “libertarian” for example, could be a stealthy member of the gang. Even those who identify as Democrats could be hijacked if there is sufficient “dark money” to be had.
My district is a perfect example of these problems. It is a “safe seat” for a Republican who has been in Congress for a long time and has accumulated great powers: Devin Nunes. He has been actively supporting the president and trying to cut off the Congressional investigation into Russian meddling in the last election. He has succeeded in having the House investigation cut short and reported out as “no collusion”– which is absurd. The collusion is so obvious that you are likely to trip over it if you are not looking for it.
Now the primaries are here and California has a “top two” system that puts all the candidates into the same primary, regardless of party. This empowers independents, who can now vote for anyone– whereas before, unless you identified with a particular party, you couldn’t vote in that primary. Instead of separate primaries, the Democrats, Republicans, independents, and libertarians are all together and the top two vote getters will advance to the full election. There are multiple potential consequences to this. In my district, known for its conservatism, independents had no voice in the primaries and no one to vote for except a Democrat with no chance or a Republican– Nunes– with a safe seat which he has used to gather power through seniority.
Nunes has been abusing his power– and his constituents– almost since the first day he set foot in the House. Most of his constituents don’t even vote in the elections because they have been led to believe that their votes don’t count. They have been fooled by propaganda that is produced, secretly, by Republicans (the Russians haven’t bothered to meddle with this seat because it is perceived as safe (by circular reasoning, it is true)). They don’t realize that if they got together and voted for someone else, they could overcome Mr. Nunes’ incumbent advantage.
But how to get the voters to vote– and to vote for a bigger, stronger government that will protect them and counterbalance the unfair advantages that laissez-faire capitalism has endowed to a tiny minority? There are so many contradictions. Getting the poor voters together to vote for someone who will do the hard work of strengthening government without forming it into a fascist super-state– how can this be done?
The only way– and it is hard– is to always tell the truth, to never be an accomplice to any evil, to never wink at any wrongdoing, and to always strive for a fair compromise. The rich deserve to enjoy the advantages they have gained– albeit perhaps excessive– but they do not deserve to lord it over any poor person, cheat them, nor force them into an unfair bargain.
The current administration has gone a long way towards unfairness and they intend to go still further. They intend to cheat the poor out of their educations, out of any savings they may have (and drive them into hopeless debt), and to indenture them for life in dead-end jobs. The Department of Education is a perfect example. Under the current head of this Department, Trump University would still be in operation, cheating people with false promises of a real estate education. What more is there to say? Outrage is the appropriate response.
Paul Krugman published a column in the op-ed section of the New York Times today which contains the above quote:
“If there is any lasting benefit from the Trump era — which is by no means a sure thing, since democracy may not survive the experience — it will lie in the Great Unmasking: the revelation of just how much bad faith pervades modern conservatism. Some of us, of course, knew this all along, and are not surprised. Conversely, many centrists and much of the news media simply refuse to face up to the asymmetry of our politics and will persist with bothsidesism even as one side drives us into the abyss. But one can at least hope that the constant revelations of past hypocrisy will have some impact.”
One of the biggest “tells” that Trump and his administration are lying through their teeth is their effort to force us to subsidize the production of coal-derived electricity from obsolete, uneconomic power plants based on the claim that “national security” requires them to stay open and to produce pollution and waste that befouls the environment. The “national security” excuse states that coal-fired power plants are essential because they are able to store more than 90 days supply of coal on-site and thus are resistant to sabotage, such as obstruction of natural gas supply pipes by explosives or computer hacking. This argument is invalid because the alternative supplies, solar and wind, are completely impervious to attempts to sabotage their power output– unless, for example, some evil genius figures out a way to cause permanent cloud cover and stop the wind from blowing.
Nuclear power plants, by this same reasoning, deserve careful protection since they are even more resistant to attempts at interruption. But the Trump administration doesn’t care about nuclear power. It only cares about coal, and it supports coal mining, coal-burning power plants, and the billionaires who run them. One example is the Kentucky coal baron and billionaire Joseph Craft and his family, who are close friends with Trump’s head of the EPA, Scott Pruitt. Another New York Times article details the close personal relationship between Mr. Craft and Mr. Pruitt, which extends to Mr. Pruitt’s cash purchase from Mr. Craft of two seats at a University of Kentucky basketball game, “one of the biggest of the season”, for $130 each for him and his son. (The seats were only available to Mr. Craft because he is one of the biggest donors to the University of Kentucky and has buildings at the campus named after him.)
The economics of electric power production have suddenly overturned, and coal-derived power, even without including the cost of “externalities” (pollution), is more expensive than natural gas-derived power– and even more expensive than solar and wind power. Nuclear power, which produces no climate-changing carbon dioxide, is more expensive still (mainly because of the high cost of insurance against accidents and the need to store radioactive waste indefinitely). Coal power plants are aging and being shuttered even as power production from renewable sources soars. Employment in the coal industry has plummeted, dropping by half in just the last five years. Coal is still being mined, but workers are being replaced by machines who don’t get tired, don’t get black lung, and don’t complain.
Even though the coal industry is shedding jobs, it is leaving behind workers with damaged lungs from inhalation of coal dust over years in poorly regulated mines. It is true that the worst cases of black lung are complicated by the workers bad smoking habits, but even when they quit, their lungs are still full of black dust. An even worse consequence of the changing nature of coal mining is the fact that miners are being exposed to high levels of sand (silica) in the air as they work surface mines– and silicosis (the aftereffect of breathing sand) is even worse than pneumoconiosis (black lung).
The most ethical course of action in this case is to allocate funds for treatment of lung disease and help in smoking cessation, especially in retired miners. In addition, it is ethically imperative to train miners and their children for other jobs– new jobs in a new economy that has no room for the obsolete, dirty, destructive coal mines of the past. Instead of providing support and training for miners affected by the shutdown of coal mines and power plants, Mr. Trump and his administration are demanding that the federal government subsidize coal use as a matter of “national security”– with the money from these subsidies finding its way into the pockets of the owners, who are already billionaires.
Mr. Trump’s true strategy– if he has one, which some people doubt– is to support his friends, the billionaires who secretly own and control much of the US economy. He is signing executive orders and supporting administrative strategies that put money in the pockets of friendly billionaires. At the same time, he and his ilk are supporting “opposition research” to expose the dirty laundry of people who oppose him. His assistants supply the personal information of his “enemies” to private parties who do not hesitate to attack opponents online and in person, causing intimidation or even terror that takes a page from the playbook of that new Russian czar, Vlad “the Impaler” Putin. (“The Impaler” was a legendary but historical– real– Transylvanian count who executed his prisoners, mostly Muslim soldiers, by impaling them on poles and then planted those poles with their dying bodies in front of his castle. His name was Vlad Tepes, but he later became known as Dracula.)
Mr. Putin’s method of operation has long been to support private parties with no direct connection to the Russian government who take his suggestions as orders– and commit murder, eliminating his political and personal enemies without his having to take responsibility. Many people, especially journalists and reformed spies, have been killed both in Russia and other countries. Mr. Trump’s minions obtain personal information on the physical and email addresses, phone numbers, places of work, peccadillos, and so on, of people who he sees as enemies. They supply this information to people who have no direct connection to him or the Republican party, and these people use it to intimidate, or if necessary, terrorize his “enemies”.
Mr. Trump does all this in secret, while he employs the classic techniques of propaganda (repetition; a catchy slogan; color; a specific objective; a kernel of truth; concealment; and timing) openly in all his communications– tweets, interviews, instructions to his press secretary, and speeches (he began his campaign for the 2020 presidential election the day he was inaugurated, and gives rousing, campaign-style speeches to large crowds at least twice a month)– to rile up his supporters and confuse his opponents. Mr. Trump lies intentionally to bewilder and misdirect people who “attack” (criticize) him, and he lies on a wholesale basis with the intent to besmirch anyone who might oppose him (he has admitted as much in private, repeatedly– there are multiple records of him explaining that he attacks people strategically with lies about them, using words such as “failing” and “a stain on America” to belittle them in advance so that his supporters will not listen to them). He even lies when he can be proven to be lying because it provides him with an opportunity to claim that the reporters are lying and enrage them, misdirecting their anger to his lies instead of his pernicious policies.
I hesitate to bring Hitler into this otherwise reasonable rant, but one of Trump’s biographers claims that the only book Mr. Trump is known to have read and kept at his bedside is a collection of Hitler’s speeches. So Mr. Trump emulates Vladimir Putin in secret and copies Adolf Hitler in public. That is an extremely dangerous and toxic combination. I wouldn’t call it fascism because that trivializes it.
Finally, Paul Krugman again:
“In any case, it’s yet another demonstration of the pervasive bad faith of the conservative movement. Nothing they said about their reasons for opposing climate policy [was] sincere, and now they’re perfectly willing to ditch all their supposed principles to keep the coal fires burning.”
We Are In Deep Doo-Doo Because of Him
How can I say this? We are in the deep, deep doo. Deep in the doo. He has trumped us. We are in a slide of Titanic proportions, a slippery slope to end all slippery slops [sic].
We’re fried.
No sense in getting any more upset, it’s too late. Time to jump, now. Can’t hesitate or we will die. Must jump now.
(sunny side up fried egg courtesy of pixabay.com and open clip art vectors)
By instinct or design, [Trump’s] attack on Mueller meets many of the requirements for a successful misinformation campaign that the British author A. J. Mackenzie listed in his 1938 book, “Propaganda Boom”: repetition; a catchy slogan; color; a specific objective; a kernel of truth; concealment; and timing.
—from John Cassidy’s online piece in the New Yorker May 30, 2018
Conrad Theodore Seitz 