Dysfunction Junction

Posted on by

I’ve argued that aging teaches the personal lesson that everything hurts and there’s no cure, but it also reveals a disquieting societal truth: nothing works and nobody is willing or able to fix it.

Our healthcare system is among the worst among the developed countries, for instance. It has managed to pull off the hat trick of being the most expensive while achieving among the worst outcomes while serving only some, not all of the people. If rich doctors, insurers, providers, and pharmaceutical companies are the measure, we win. If the health and well-being of the community, not so much. Is a cure in sight? Fat chance.

Since Reagan embraced supply-side voodoo, alarms have been sounding over the accumulating public debt and a painful reckoning prophesied. A few fitful attempts have been made to address the mess, notably under Clinton, but the alternative to a carnival of spending is an unpleasant lenten austerity. So nothing is done and we remain on the road to bankruptcy, a process Hemingway described as happening in two ways: “gradually and then suddenly.”

In every case the problem is a refusal to face hard facts and take painful steps. Let someone else suffer, compromise, adjust, not me. Thus, on mass murder, some people oppose bans on weapons, others intrusive data bases, others costly counter-measures, others stigmatizing the mentally ill. And so the streets and school hallways will continue to run red with the blood of the innocents.

Immigration? Forget about it. Without compromising, stasis is likely, and the worst of all possible worlds. Those we don’t want to admit willingly will continue to entry the country illegally. Those we should welcome will be barred. Those who ought to be allowed to stay will be deported. And everyone will get to say, “See, I told you so.”

Climate change? Why give up today’s pleasures and profits to avoid tomorrow’s catastrophes? Let somebody else worry about rising seas, shrinking harvests, dying sea life, desertification, proliferating diseases, waves of extinctions. Why worry? Call if fake news and party on.

And if politics is a Sargasso Sea where rotting issues are trapped forever without being able to move forward, the business world is hardly a model of efficiency and adaptation. Once customers bought a product and owned it, but that didn’t guaranteed a perpetual income stream. Now, you subscribe to music, movies, software, television, and pay monthly.

Users of Microsoft are well aware that their business plan has long been a form of ransomware, software that requires constant, costly updates, so you have to buy the same product repeatedly. That might be tolerable if what you bought was both useful and reliable. Instead, their products are so prone to hacking you have to subscribe to a bug-catching service.

And they are far from alone. Bugs, glitches, viruses, worms, and, for all I know, cancers infect all our devices and everywhere we shop. Life online is now spent waiting for a cyber-mugging. Whether we wake and sleep, infection lurks, ceaselessly intent on stealing our data, holding it hostage, pilfering our identities, spying on our every move, hijacking our credit cards, invading our bank accounts, ripping us off. And we are expected to bear the cost in time and money we lose because of the incompetence, greed and carelessness of the tech geniuses whose products and services made us vulnerable.

The list of the largest data breaches of last year alone reads like a “who’s who” of business — Equifax, Uber, Adobe, Anthem, JP Morgan, eBay, Home Depot, Yahoo, Target. Retailers, healthcare companies, banks and credit services, and, of course, the tech companies who ought to be most on guard against such dangers.

The most flagrant case of business dysfunction and dereliction is the self-congratulatory institution that ought to be known as Fakebook. Instead of providing the social network linking all humanity that it advertises, it has given our body politic a social disease.

Rather than police the anarchic mean streets of its cyber realm, Fakebook chose to profit from providing a platform on which the monsters from its users’ ids would be give free rein, and criminal conspirators from a foreign power could contrive to steal an American election. Has Fakebook and its billionaire tech brethren fixed the flaws that allowed this atrocity, or are they resisting reforms that would kill the cash cow.

Now, we are told a rising tide of disgust with our illegitimate president and his enablers in Congress will sweep Republicans out in November, but will that really happen? If it did, would it help? The electoral map is rigged by gerrymandering. The money that decides elections flows from the one percent who just got huge tax breaks, not the 80 percent who pay for them. The incumbents write the laws to deny the vote to those they can’t convince on the campaign trail.

If democracy has been hijacked, who will save us from more of the same? Maybe the Russians will decide they miscalculated and rig the game in favor of a more reliable tool next time. Or maybe Zuckerberg will repent of his sins and use Fakebook to make restitution. He does seem to owe us a president.

Cold, Dead Hand

Posted on by

Just shoot me. (Not really, gun loonies. It’s an expression indicating exasperation). Donald Trump suggests the solution to mass murder by assault rifle in our schools is to ignore the easy availability of assault rifles and to arm teachers with hand guns to shoot back.

What does one make of such a notion, other than to note its purpose, which is to distract from the need for banning civilian access to weapons of war — tanks, fighter jets, nuclear submarines, rockets, flamethrowers, and assault rifles.

First, cast your mind back to your High School and Elementary teachers. Which of them can you imagine playing a Rambo role in protecting you? None? On the other hand, to which would you have liked to bid a fond farewell? In my case, Coach Bell, Mrs. Somerville, and Mr. Schwartz. So it is maliciously amusing to imagine them whipping out a handgun and facing the superior firepower of a homicidal maniac wielding an AR-15.

Second, if teachers are going to be the first line of defense when lethal weapons are involved, will members of SWAT teams, the police department, the sheriff’s office take up the teaching of algebra, debate, and gym? That looks like a twofer. Schools will be less safe, and the students more poorly educated.

Third, the bone-spur president who dodged Vietnam assures us a guy with a gun in a school will scare away potential shooters since all mass murderers are cowards. But it turns out there were three guys with guns at Parkland, and they were the scared ones who never unholstered their weapons as the killing went on.

Whereas, mass murderers are many things — crazed, suicidal, white hot with rage, jealous, delusional, or committed extremists — but they’re rarely cowards. They court suicide by cop, or shoot themselves as a grand finale to their deadly drama. So, an absent-minded math teacher or Shakespeare-spouting schoolmarm is unlikely to strike terror into their dark souls.

And speaking of cuckoo, those who don’t attend closely to what Trump hath wrought, the normalization of the off-the-deep-end forces of the right, might want to take a look at Wayne LaPierre’s speech to CPAC. He’s the head of the NRA with a Hitler haircut, and CPAC a kind of masonic order of right-wing zealotry.

At their annual conclave, which coincided with the aftershocks of the Parkland murders, LaPierre was so far out that he managed to alarm even this crowd of extremists with the extremity of his remarks. Apparently, the notion of kids refusing to be gunned down drove him completely around the bend.

He refused to imagine a world in which military weapons could not be sold to every lunatic Tom, gang member Dick and irate teen-age Harry itching to slaughter people at their school or workplace or in the streets.

With reactionary Republicans in control of the White House, both houses of Congress, a majority of states, and the courts, you’d think LaPierre would be feeling safe and secure, but he must be reading Breitbart and watching Fox since he issued a jeremiad of sheer terror to his fellow posse members. Of course, to be fair, it is his job, for which he is paid $950,000 a year, to wax apocalyptic whenever a restriction on any weapon is proposed.

According to LaPierre, the Republican stranglehold on all the levers of power is an illusion. There’s a rising tide wave of “European-style socialism.” Soon we will be a captive society where resistance will be futile, speech will be controlled, big brother will watch us, and our most basic freedoms — guns, guns, and more guns — will be eliminated.

Who are these lurking enemies? Oddly, they are apparently Trump’s government, the corrupt FBI, Justice Department, EPA, intelligence agencies, and of course Hollywood liberals, the media, universities, billionaire capitalists, and the Black Lives Matter movement. Now, he warns, even kids who survive school massacres and want to live are tools of the Deep State. Grab your guns, Republicans, you’re surrounded! You have met the enemy and its everyone you ever met, except Wayne LaPierre.

Let’s face it, what really worries LaPierre is not creeping socialism, it’s creeping democracy. A majority of Americans favor every gun control measure the NRA opposes. And now a Children’s Crusade has begun. They are as mad as hell at being targets and they’re not going to take it anymore. I wish them well, but unfortunately I have lived long enough to have seen this movie before.

When the Vietnam antiwar movement took to the streets, it may have had the moral high ground, and it certainly had the best songs (“Blowing in the Wind,” “Masters of War,”
“For What It’s Worth,” “Ohio,” “Fortunate Son”), but the government it opposed had the guns, the tanks, the planes, the cops, and, more importantly, the votes.

Nixon defanged the opposition when he turned the draft into a lottery, since a majority of potential draftees then knew they were off the hook. So, even as the public turned against it, the unwinnable war ground on and on, killing another 25,000 Americans while we waited for the secret plan to end the war to kick in.

Civil Rights protests won some legislative victories, but racism is still alive. Earth Day led to the EPA, but the polluters still befoul the earth and buy legislators dedicated to keeping it that way. And the NRA’s cold, dead hand controls Washington by means of $30 million in campaign bribes to Trump, and millions more to congressional candidates. And it turns out the vote.

The Parkland kids have demanded action, rather than the usual prayers and promises. And they have at least identified the real issues: the availability of assault rifles and a political class on the NRA payroll. But until voters replace those tools of the gun lobby, I fear the killings will continue. The paranoid style in American politics never goes out of fashion, as LaPierre demonstrates, so the armchair frontiersmen get to cling to their weapons, but so do the crazies, the terrorists and the murderous.

With 300 million guns abroad in the land, it’s surprising the death toll isn’t worse. But 13,000 dead and another 26,000 wounded every year is bad enough.

If the Parkland, Columbine, Sandy Hook, Virginia Tech kids went to school in Australia, England, Germany, France, Spain, Sweden, Japan, or almost any developed country on Earth, they’d still be alive. And their siblings, parents, teachers, classmates, neighbors wouldn’t have to mourn their loss. Have we no shame? We do not. So, the beat goes on.

Minor League Don

Posted on by

If, as suggested in my previous post, Trump is less like a politician or run-of-the-mill capitalist than like a mobster, such as fellow native of Queens John Gotti, then many of his odder quirks begin to become explicable.

He hates the press, for example, except for the tame segments run by fellow oligarchs who are not interested in uncovering facts but in manipulating opinion, the better to publicize those who can help them and attack those they regard as enemies. So, Trump is cozy with Rupert Murdock’s Fox, the Mercer’s Breitbart, and protected from his own sleazy tabloid behavior by friendly tabloid CEO David Pecker.
Conversely, he is perpetually irate over investigative reporting by “The Bezos Amazon Post,” “The Failing New York Times” and “Fake News CNN”. What mobster wants inky scribblers poking their noses where they don’t belong? And clearly, Trump is afraid they will report actual news, defined by Bill Moyers as follow: “What people want to keep hidden. Everything else is publicity.”

If Trump, like any mobster, fears what the press might discover about his activities, he is really terrified of the forces of criminal justice. Friends and foes alike have been baffled by words and actions that have expressed contempt for the FBI, judges, courts, prosecutors and the intelligence community.

Most presidents, especially Republicans, are gung-ho fans of law and order and national security. Critics have supposed Trump’s fury over Jeff Sessions recusing himself, his firing of Comey, and the bashing of Rosenstein, McCabe, and Mueller reveal a guilty mind and collusion with the Russians to steal the presidency. Maybe so.

But it’s nothing new. Trump has spent almost 50 years litigating, bending if not breaking laws, delaying trials endlessly, refusing to settle until all other means have been exhausted, then paying the minimum and admitting nothing. On this subject he should be taken at his word. He really does have contempt for justice.

He is used to junk yard dogs like Roy Cohn crushing his enemies or Michael Cohen paying off bimbos and plaintiffs. Now that he is the boss of America, Trump has been stunned to learn that the Attorney General, the head of the FBI and federal judges won’t serve as his employees, as fixers.

In the wider world, foreign policy experts have been stunned that Trump has treated our traditional allies like dirt and long-standing agreements as negotiable or meaningless scraps of paper. Is this populism, nationalism, or the scorn of a mob boss for nickel and dime public servants who are at the mercy of voters, who stupidly play by the rules, and whose net worth is a paltry fraction of his own?

He has saved his regard for his peers, crooked kleptocrats and oligarchs who grab what they want and spit on the rule book. So, he’s praised Duterte of the Philippines for his strength in combatting drug dealers by personally assassinating malefactors. He’s overlooked Erdogan of Turkey’s scorn for democratic and NATO niceties and his jailing of political foes and dissident journalists.

For Trump, such thuggery makes them birds of a feather. As does the fact that somehow the head of Turkey has managed to pile up a fortune of around $200 million, matched by a like amount in the hands of the famiglia – his daughter and sons.

But of course, his most lavish praise and deference have been reserved for the real Dons. First, Ji Xinping, a lifelong “civil servant,” who has returned China to greater autocracy and, on a salary of $10,000, has amassed a net worth of at least $1.5 billion while his extended family controls billions more.

Not bad, but a mere bagatelle compared to Vladimir Putin, the capo di tutti capi. If he has political enemies or media critics, they die. His oligarchic friends kick back their profits to him. His oligarchic rivals are striped of their wealth and banished. His press is good since he controls the press, and his net worth is reckoned at between $40 and $200 billion, making Trump’s putative $3-4 billion look like chump change. Putin is what Trump wants to be when he grows up.

Is the feeling mutual, or is Trump a useful idiot? When Trump’s bankruptcies made him toxic to conventional lenders, Russian money came to his rescue. When he needed tenants, Russian oligarchs anxious to launder money via real estate investments bought into his buildings in New York, Panama, and elsewhere. When he was seeking office, Russian hackers offered him dirt on Hillary. She was his enemy, but also an enemy of Putin’s.

So, what do you think, would he turn down any of these boons, or would he, like Bonasera seeking justice, kiss the ring of the Godfather? Even though he surely knew what such a deal meant, that “someday, and that day may never come, I’ll call on you to do a service for me.”

And that day having come, is it any surprise that he would repay the debt? So, the party platform regarding assistance to Ukraine was changed, sanctions against Putin were quashed, despite mounting evidence of cyberwar Trump has denied it all and defended Putin, and has refused to launch an effort to make sure such election fraud never takes place again?

Even a minor league Don like Trump knows the rules of the game – loyalty and omerta. And he knows that Putin is more to be feared then the press, the law, or the voters. Trump also knows that he may need Putin’s help again, in 2018 and 2020. What he doesn’t seem to know is that he, personally, his election is Putin’s most destructive act of war against the United States. But Putin knows, and in Trump’s elegant words, “is laughing his ass off in the Moscow.” As for his fellow Americans, not so funny.