Helen H. Moore's Blog, page 671

Exploiting a broken system: Trump’s within striking distance of Hillary — and that’s mind-boggling

Donald Trump (Credit: Getty/Ralph Freso)

In case you hadn’t noticed, the polling gap between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton is slowly narrowing, according to Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight.com where Trump has gone from a 12 percent chance of winning to a 27 percent chance in four short weeks. By itself, it doesn’t seem all that scary for Democrats, but when we look at the trendlines, the race is clearly narrowing, with no signs of slowing. The latest IBD/TIPP poll shows a national dead-heat, 39-to-39. The Los Angeles Times shows Trump leading by a point, as does the Republican-leaning Rasmussen. Talking Points Memo’s Polltracker average has Hillary up by just one.

Should Democrats and, indeed, all reasonable human beings panic now? Maybe.

And the GOP nominee hasn’t really done anything specific to warrant such a change in fortunes. In fact, he’s done almost everything wrong by a factor of thousands. This speaks volumes about the malfunctioning condition of American politics and the news media, and I’m afraid that all of the garment rending over Trump’s individual hourly trespasses is serving to avoid the big picture crisis: Trump shouldn’t even be in the race, much less nearly tied with a far more qualified opponent. He’s marched through a super-colossal loophole in the system, bobby-pins and border walls in tow, while doing everything wrong.

After watching Donald Trump yelling at the world about immigration Wednesday night, I’m more discouraged than ever about the current state of the American political process. How could this have possibly gone so far? Are we really this vulnerable to the whimsy of necrotic populism? Sadly, we are, and there are scant firewalls to prevent it from happening again and again.

In case you missed it, Trump’s whiplash posture — one minute “softening,” the next minute going full Hulk Smash! — was on unavoidable display Wednesday, beginning with his awkward meeting with Mexican President Peña Nieto and concluding with what was supposed to be a major policy address, but which ended up being one of the most horrifying presidential-level speeches ever recorded. In addition to the apocalyptic hatred and loudness of Trump’s rant, it was, of course, loaded with terrible speechwriting, joined by outright fiction.

For example, Trump went off-prompter to declare that no one knows how many undocumented immigrants are in the United States, saying, “Our government has no idea. It could be three million. It could be 30 million. They have no idea what the number is. . . . But whatever the number, that’s never really been the central issue. It will never be a central issue. It doesn’t matter from that standpoint.”

Seconds later, Trump said, “[T]here are 11 million illegal immigrants who don’t have legal status.” He just said that no one knows how many “illegals” are here, but then continued by announcing there are 11 million “illegal immigrants who don’t have legal status.” Illegal immigrants don’t have legal status — as opposed to legal immigrants who don’t have legal status? Inexcusably bad writing.

Nevertheless, we know for a fact that Mexican migration is a net negative with more Mexicans leaving the U.S. than are arriving, and the Obama administration has deported a record number of undocumented immigrants. So, when Trump repeated that the Obama administration has an “open border” policy, he was clearly lying. One out of many lies. But it doesn’t seem to matter.

Simply put: Trump is an embarrassment to civilization. A crackpot who exploited a broken party and a broken nominating process to threaten the world. If Trump’s brand of undisciplined pandering and screechy malevolence ever becomes the standard for American politics, I don’t want any part of it. I can’t repeat this enough: We’re on the brink of disaster, with roughly five percentage points separating us from Trump and the abyss.

Based on the narrowing polls, and absent any other explanation for it, I’m afraid that a Trump victory is more or less the default outcome for U.S. elections. Unless something’s done to fix it, we could permanently become a nation that elects despots and freaks similar to the Republican nominee.

Within our present system, a reality-show demagogue can parlay his tabloid popularity into a run for president. He can win the nomination by appealing to the basest, cruelest, most simplistic instincts of reactionary voters who are too ignorant and lazy to understand the wonky details of public policy and who are mostly brainwashed from within an impermeable bubble in which a limitless geyser of misinformation and propaganda, carefully designed and crafted to tap into the reptilian brains of the poorly educated and easily influenced, has successfully deceived enough voters to openly support this destructive character.

He can emerge from the nominating process more or less unscathed, even though he’s blundered into an ongoing series of fatal errors, multiple times per day, then, a few days later, he can somehow gain in the polls simply by not blurting as many racist, insensitive things as he did when he was badly trailing the Democratic nominee.

He can literally sidestep every standard by which all other candidates are expected to achieve, and the news media, along with a frustratingly large chunk of the voting public, will give him a pass anyway. Again, he can say a million things that no other candidate could possibly get away with, and never has, and because the news media has been rendered flaccid before the false accusation of liberal bias, the existential threat he poses — the urgent relating of facts that’d easily disqualify him — takes a back seat to horse-race narratives and smirky roundtables in which, inexplicably, Bill Kristol, who’s always wrong about everything, pops up on the liberal network, MSNBC, because who the hell knows.

Worse, and as the polls seem to indicate, this clownish American embarrassment can still win most of the same states won by previous Republican nominees, despite being a proud dilettante — a politically drunken myrmidon with punchline hair. And this amateur will continue to be evenly compared and contrasted with a woman who’s objectively lightyears more qualified to be chief executive of the world’s last superpower. Yet qualifications and conspicuously vast differences are irrelevant when there’s an equivalence quota to fill on cable news.

Even though the Democrats still have a superdelegate firewall, and, by the way, the electoral college was designed by the Framers in part to expressly stymie outlier candidates, the GOP nominating process is without a mechanism to prevent another Trump from getting this far despite himself. The Republican Party needs to devise a firewall now. I mean, right fucking now. If nothing else, Trump’s success underscores how the superdelegate system and the electoral college as they exist today are, obviously, crucial to the future of democracy. Without a stopgap on both sides to prevent populist weirdos from getting this far on the backs of screaming yokels and impressionable fanboys, we’re vulnerable to many more Trumps. And if you think there can’t be a Democratic Trump, you’re very wrong. Sadly, however, there are enough Americans with voting privileges who would choose a crazy-bomb like Trump, and this has to be the last time.

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Colin Kaepernick’s brave decision: An open letter to the 49ers quarterback

Colin Kaepernick (Credit: Reuters/Jake Roth)

Dear Brother Kaepernick,

I could only imagine the repetitive thump of vomitous noise you are hearing from the racist parasites that hinder American growth. So much that maybe you questioned your decision — I hope not, but if you did, I’d like to say that we are proud you chose to sit out again and that the people are with you.

I don’t speak for every person of color, nor do I try to; however, as a community activist, professor, and writer, I have a firsthand experience in dealing with some of the victims you sided with when you sat the anthem out — through dealing with police brutality, struggling to navigate through this racist system, and drying the tears of Baltimore residents who had to watch Freddie Gray’s murderers go free. Often the fight feels like a hopeless nightmare, but the work so many of us activists are doing in an effort to enhance social relations has just been elevated by your brave decision. My time in modern activism has taught me not to rely on professional athletes or entertainers in general, and you changed that.

Don’t get it twisted, we will certainly welcome any high profile help that we can get, but I understand that over 95% of these predominantly black-stacked teams have white owners who don’t understand what its like to be black in America, probably don’t care, and have benefited from the racist legacy attached to the American flag. They have a vested interest in patriotism and nationalism, as it has played a key role in their businesses, their families, the billions of dollars they make. Anything against the ideologies that are directly connected to the money is criminal, and no endorsement-seeking athlete wants to be seen as a criminal or traitor, they just want to get paid for their talents, as they should.

I also respect the professional athletes who understand these issues, but don’t want to ruffle any feathers because they use their money to bring about systemic change in a different way, which is also valuable. Either way, your decision is monumental and you will now be mentioned in the ranks with other courageous athletes like the late great Muhammad Ali, Kareem Abdul Jabbar, Craig Hodges, John Carlos, and Tommy Smith. All of you are honorable and took huge gambles just to be on the right side of history, regarding morality and representing the plight of your people. And Colin, you are also on the right side of history by boycotting the anthem, as it wasn’t intended for black people when it was created by Francis Scott Key, a slave owner in 1814.

I explained his role in the toxic legacy of the song in my book, “The Beast Side,” published last year: “Francis Scott Key sang for freedom while enslaving blacks. His hatred even bled into the lyrics of the elongated version of ‘The Star Spangled Banner’ you won’t hear at a sporting event. The third stanza reads, ‘No refuge could save the hireling and slave, From the terror of flight, or the gloom of the grave.’

That line was basically a shot at the slaves who agreed to fight with the British in exchange for their freedom. Who wouldn’t want freedom, and how could he not understand them opting out for a better life?

A life free of mass whippings, rape and unpaid labor. Andrew Jackson caught wind of slaves agreeing to fight with the British in exchange for freedom and made a similar promise to thousands of slaves in Louisiana. He told them if they protected Louisiana, they could be free after the war. Well, we won the war, and then Jackson reneged on the deal. He went on to be president while the brave Africans who fought with honor went back into servitude.

Jackson’s lie was followed by generation after generation of broken promises. It’s 200 years later and America still enslaves a tremendous amount of its population through poverty, lack of opportunity, false hopes of social mobility, unfair educational practices and the prison industrial complex.”

This essay alone brought me hundreds of death threats and cost me money, and some employment opportunities that I really needed at the time it was published, but it was the right thing to do and I wouldn’t change a word. Hopefully your boycott will be followed by more public figures taking a stand and pushing to truly make this country a better place. The other day I saw a funny meme with a picture of that clown Donald Trump spewing hate about America not being great and receiving love from the same people ripping you for being brave, in our nation of double standards — and that’s the problem.

Too many Americans act like loving this country means never criticizing this country and that’s just stupid. Blindly praising a flag and not acknowledging the problems that exist is the most un-American thing a person can do. When did challenging our country to be better become anti American? That same mentality is responsible for our country lagging in education, healthcare, life expectancy — we are just claiming to be the greatest without doing the work.

James Baldwin once wrote, “I love America more than any other country in this world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.” We change flat tires and put cast on broken arms in this country — we fix problems. So why are so many of our citizens suffering without notice? If you truly love America, you’d challenge it and all it’s flaws until it was a place where equality truly exists, that’s what you are doing and that’s what being great is all about.

Thank you again for choosing the people, we salute you.

One Love,

D. Watkins

Below, watch D. Watkins chat with activist Tariq Toure about Colin Kaepernick and police brutality

Below, watch D. Watkins chat with former 1st round draft pick, ex NFL player turned activist Aaron Maybin about Colin Kaepernick, art, and the responsibility that comes with having a platform.

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He went to Burning Man and never came back

(Credit: Getty/MikeNelson)

“My ex-wife got remarried fast,” Andy said the night I met him at our ten-year college reunion. “I’m that guy in the crappy romantic comedy ‘Two-Buck Chuck,’ where every woman goes on to find the love of her life right after him.”

“I don’t believe it,” I said.

“I was born with bad luck,” he said. “If something bad can happen, it happens to me.”

That night, Andy and I learned we’d gone to college together but hadn’t known each other. At a potentially awkward reunion karaoke session, he belted James’s “Laid” like a professional rock star. He was Robin Williams-esque — charismatic, over the top, the instant center of gravity in any room he walked into. Dubbed “Most Likely To Be Famous” in his high school yearbook, he married his college sweetheart, lived in a suburb, and got the kind of job he thought he was supposed to have instead. He felt like a black sheep, he said, in his family of physicians and attorneys.

When I entered his orbit, we were both divorcées in our early thirties. I was just out of another destructive relationship with a guy who drowned my computers in a bathtub. After his divorce, Andy moved to the big city — Boston — lived with tattoo artists and sought his calling as an independent filmmaker while maintaining a day job as an administrator at a lab for Alzheimer’s research.

I’m going to get Alzheimer’s one day, he wrote to me. Both my maternal grandmother and grandfather suffered severe dimensia (sic), as did my paternal grandfather.  The risk is high … and it scares me more than anything. I already have a genetically flawed memory … I often times do not recognize people when I run into them and I see how hurt they are because they think I don’t care … but that’s not it.  It’s my addled brain, my damaged fluff. I am losing my own history because the record in my mind is missing fragments.

What I thought would be a college-reunion hookup turned into a long-term relationship. But after he moved from Boston to Brooklyn so we could live together, signs that this relationship wasn’t right began to appear.

We moved into a new apartment in Prospect Heights. What I saw as the ideal home, a sign we were moving up in the realm of adult life, Andy called “uppity.” I accused him of wanting to live in a Bushwick loft with pop-up canvas walls and fifteen artist roommates. He denied it. “I want to be here, with you,” he said, but we both, on some level, must have known it wasn’t true.

I came home from work to find him binge-watching reruns of “ALF,” the ‘80s show about an alien puppet. Andy talked about feeling like an alien himself, about how he didn’t know what it meant to be human. He admitted the flipside of his high-highs were low-lows. He never felt he was good enough, or that he belonged anywhere, but no one really understood — myself included — as he appeared so happy-go-lucky.

But what really drove us apart was his unlived youth. He wanted to go out all night to shows and events like the zombie march, Pillow Fight Day and the Mermaid Parade. We’d met in an intersection; he was headed deeper into the wildness I was moving away from. During his way out of rational responsibility and my way toward it, we collided before forging on in opposite directions. When he said “We’ve reached the end of our road” on the morning we broke up, we were lying in bed, the sky flat and gray over Brooklyn. We’d both known it was coming — and yet we’d been “almost” right for each other.

The direction of his Facebook journal post-breakup revealed our incompatibilities anew. There’s a picture of him at the Coney Island mermaid parade. He’s in neon face-paint, dancing at a Moby show after-party. “This is my Valhalla,” he posted. I hate crowds. I longed for solitude and he thrived at massive Events-with-a-capital-E. Satisfied with the adventures I’d had traveling and being young, I sought to create my own quirky version of “settling down.” Andy, on the other hand, was looking to reclaim that unlived part of his youth.

Still, few months after breaking up, both of us were finding dating unsatisfying. We questioned whether we’d been wrong. Couldn’t we could do away with the “almost”, we wondered? Maybe we were right for each other after all, and the timing simply hadn’t been.  In the midst of reconsidering, we both left for a month — he upstate to work on a film shoot, and I to a writing residency in Columbus, Ohio. In Columbus, I started seeing someone. Unlike with Andy, there were no questions. It was easy. We knew this was it. Within six weeks, we were engaged.

Remember when i told you that you’d meet your future husband right after me? Andy wrote, recalling his Two-Buck Chuck fate.

Oh Andy, I replied. The perfect woman for you is still out there. You’ll see. You’re a truly special guy, and the right one is just going to be a match, no questions, doubts or hesitations.

Maybe, he said, but I’m not really interested in finding her right now. I think this is going to be my year of living recklessly. Less caution, more wind. Reward doesn’t come without risk, right?

***

He bought a silver cargo van he emblazoned with the words BURN YOUR STARS BRIGHT in blue painters tape and left to drive across the country, go to Burning Man and make a documentary he was calling “Notes to Self,” about the art of preserving memory. I watched the photos he posted as his life became performance art, an online spectacle of glittery nail polish, cartwheels in parking lots, and enormous cutout gold stars he held up atop his van, reflecting the sun.

***

On the way back out onto the road after his first Burning Man, he visited me in Santa Cruz, where I’d since moved and gotten married. We walked out on the pier and he told me a long story about meeting a mermaid in the desert, how he’d gone to San Francisco to find her again, and various transformations he’d undergone since the festival. He wore Hakama pants and a silver burqa that revealed only his eyes and said he’d discovered his true identity as a whirling dervish. He was tranquil and frenetic at the same time. My concerns flared, but I said nothing. Andy was an adult, even if he was reliving those younger years he’d missed out on. When I asked him what happened to the documentary, he said he was still making it, but it wasn’t of the utmost importance now. His life was the art.

“I’m a professional appreciator of moments,” he said.

And then he was standing in my kitchen, meeting my husband. As I made salads, Andy told Jason the mermaid story.

“A woman who was dressed as a mermaid?” Jason asked.

“No,” Andy said. “A mermaid.”

An hour with both of them in the same room reified how much your choice of partner creates and impacts your daily existence. I could have lived in a world where mermaids were real and everyone was on a cosmic quest toward magical destiny, where I would be a passenger on a Ken Kesey-esque adventure, searching for those “secrets of the universe.”

While Andy needed to “ramble,” as he said, I craved home, security and attachment to a place and partner. My single mother had worked for the Foreign Service, I was her only child, and we moved every few years. My father was a different sort of wanderer. He became homeless and alcoholic. Was it any wonder I so desperately needed to follow Flaubert’s advice to “be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work?”

His “year of living recklessly” turned into two and continued after that, seemingly endless. In my laid-back, small-city routine, I obsessively watched the very different journey Andy chronicled. A flicker of excitement registered every time my Facebook notifications showed a new Andy post. Some loved watching him as inspiration, others as reality-show-type trainwreck. Though I veered toward the latter at the time, Andy had undeniably journeyed far from the man who held a day job and played it safe. He lived as if he’d never left the “Playa,” traveling the country with few specific plans. He wore a furry vest with nothing underneath in the middle of Times Square. He helped the homeless in Reno in a pirate costume. He stood atop of his van wearing a unicorn head. He left little bottles and chalk messages all over the country with “Secrets of the Universe” (“Secret of the Universe: If you are in a place and you are not feeling it for whatever reason, GO WANDER, and the universe will put you exactly where you are supposed to be.”)

I met all this with a mixture of sarcasm and intrigue. When we’d first broken up, Andy said, “I don’t think I’m meant to love just one person, but to love all beings equally.” I’d scoffed, but then he actually went and did it. He posted compulsively about the lessons he was learning through the interactions he had on the road.

“Epic things happen when you don’t let hurdles keep you down, and instead accept serendipitous chance and fate.”

“Water flows and water falls. Down is not always a bad direction.”

“Some of the most beautiful things are for a limited time only. Keep your eyes and your mind open, or you’re guaranteed to miss them all.”

“There are no silver linings. The cloud itself is awesome.”

What is he really even doing, I wondered, pedaling fortune-cookie wisdom? I was glad he was finding value on his vision quest, but worried all his sparkle was a reaction to some deep pain.

The month after I saw him, he drove to the Playa off-season and got his van stuck in the mud, where it remained for eighteen days before he could get help digging it out.

***

In the spring of 2015, a few months before his third year at Burning Man, he returned for what would be a few months in New York City, a rest stop in the city he loved, where he’d started this journey. He had just settled in to his artist loft with fifteen roommates in Bushwick when he reported on Facebook that he had woken up off-balance with blurred vision. The next day he’d gone to the emergency room. He posted photos from the hospital: the inside of his brain, his heart, vials of spinal fluid. My unease deepened, but I reached out only with a brief get-well-soon message. He posted an update: he’d had a stroke, and doctors had discovered five lesions on his brain. He’d feared Alzheimer’s and dementia — brain diseases of the elderly — but now it seemed he had more immediate reason for his fear. In Oliver Sacks’s case study, “The Last Hippie,” a correlation is found between a Hare Krishna’s seeming state of enlightenment and brain disease when, described by his swami as “an illuminate” and told that his “inner light was growing,” he turns out to have an advanced brain tumor. I wondered about Andy, how serious this was, but he had returned to his daily life seemingly without setback, posting videos of trading jokes with the barista of his favorite café. I hoped everything was as back-on-track as it seemed.

That was May; I was due to give birth in June. “I found out you were pregnant via a Facebook photo,” Andy wrote. “How appropriate, and how wonderful. I love you. I’m so happy for the lessons we learned from each other so you could be ready to meet ‘him’ and I could be ready for all ‘this,’ right now. I would never have been ready for my current life without that time with you. I’ll come visit after this year’s Burning Man. I cannot wait to meet the new game-player you two created a time-and-space machine for.”

I was anxious about his return to Burning Man so soon after having a stroke. The desert, with the heat and risk of dehydration, not to mention the drinking, partying and drugs that went with the territory, could be dangerous. I didn’t mention it, only that I was glad he’d be coming to Santa Cruz to meet the baby. As she grew up, I figured she’d look forward to eccentric Uncle Andy’s post-Burning Man visits. When he told me he was meant to love all beings equally, he also said he realized he wasn’t meant to have kids of his own, but to be Uncle Andy to all his friends’ kids.

Strolling downtown with Jason and our newborn last August, a sign outside a costume-and-lingerie shop caught my eye: Eighteen Days Til Burning Man!

Which translated to, Andy’s visiting soon!

On August 15th, while on one of the many Target runs Jason and I made for something we suddenly realized we needed for the baby, a text came in from a friend. I checked Facebook for the first time that day. It was already a mess of tributes and shocked friends.

He never made it to his third Burning Man. 

That no cause was given made some surmise suicide, but I knew that was impossible. He loved life too much to die purposefully, much less right before Burning Man. Over those past three years, he’d come to call himself by many names, one of which was “Magician.” Well, he pulled the ultimate disappearing act. It was a private death for a man who put everything on public display.

***

 I’d thought Andy’s road trip needed to be ended — where is this going? I thought the answer would provide justification for it. But he was right; the road trip was for its own sake. Andy would have appreciated the way it all looked now that he wasn’t here to see it. I’d wanted to see the end, to know what he would do with what he gained. Instead it has both an abrupt ending and no end at all.

Over the following weeks and months, the way I saw his journey shifted. What I’d seen as Andy’s playa platitudes, dismissible as New Age, Burning-Man-went-to-his-head joke-fodder or entertainment, took on a new gravitas.

He was right about the “Two-Buck Chuck” thing and even about having bad luck.  Maybe he knew more than he let on. He’d posted a phrase he encountered in a fortune cookie soon before he passed: “Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding.” He’d constantly quoted the fantasy novel “The Last Unicorn”: “There are no happy endings because nothing ends” — was this, too, fortune-cookie wisdom, or was he more in touch with some mythological realm? He’d viewed his life through the lens of the legend of Dragon’s Gate, about a koi that dares try to leave the pond, swim up a dangerous waterfall, and, if he could evade numerous perils en route, transform into a dragon. Andy was getting images from the legend tattooed on his body in stages, as he accomplished steps of his journey. Was he the koi who made it through Dragon’s Gate and transformed, or was he one who perished in the attempt? His death either cements or undermines everything he came to believe.

Mythologizing the self is healthy behavior, Tad Waddington writes in Psychology Today: “For people to have meaningful lives, they must put their lives into a narrative, a story, a myth.” If it was so, Andy achieved this. Usually a rationalist, I chose to believe Andy was like Icarus — he flew too close to some sort of secret or forbidden understanding and was “called back.” Logic tells me it’s more likely that smoking and lack of rest overly taxed his already compromised nervous system.

One year from his death, close to what would have been his fourth Burning Man, I still scroll to the image of his van stuck in the mud. It reminds me of a children’s book I picked up called “Beautiful Oops.” It reads, When you think you have made a mistake, think of it as an opportunity to make something Beautiful! I took a snapshot with my phone and posted it to the “Embrace Your Awesome” Facebook group, a page where Andy’s friends shower his memory with cultlike devotion, such as tattoos of his face and his aphorisms. One of these, the photograph that remains his banner on Facebook, distills the statement he was making with his life: “One must dare to be himself, no matter how frightening or strange that self may prove to be.” It’s the truest thing I’ve come to believe. It’s from a fortune cookie.

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Dead in the water: Why the TPP and TTIP trade deals probably won’t go anywhere

Delegates protesting against the TPP at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, July 25, 2016. (Credit: Reuters/Mark Kauzlarich)

This article originally appeared in In These Times.

The Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) is dead, at least according to Angela Merkel’s second-in-command. And the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) may not be far behind.

German Vice Chancellor Sigmar Gabriel said last week that “negotiations with the United States have de facto failed, even though nobody is really admitting it.” According to Gabriel, who also serves as his country’s economy minister, negotiators from the European Union and United States have failed — despite 14 rounds of talks — to align on any item out of 27 chapters being discussed. Gabriel and his ministry are not directly involved in the negotiations.

EU officials were quick to downplay Sigmar’s statement, saying they hoped to “close this deal by the end of the year.” But Gabriel isn’t the first to cry foul on the TTIP, which, if enacted, would establish the world’s largest free trade zone between the United States and the EU’s 28 member states. In May, French negotiators threatened to block the agreement. U.S. negotiators have also reportedly been angry over the passage of a similar agreement between Canada and the EU, which included protections U.S. negotiators don’t want included in the TTIP.

Last week’s TTIP news comes on the heels of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) saying that the Senate would not vote on the TPP in the upcoming lame-duck session of Congress. (The Obama administration countered, saying it still hopes to pass the deal before the next president takes office.)

Both trade announcements follow years of protests on each side of the Atlantic to fight the TTIP and the TPP, especially from unions and environmental groups.

“The fact that TTIP has failed is testament to the hundreds of thousands of people who took to the streets to protest against it, the three million people who signed a petition calling for it to be scrapped, and the huge coalition of civil society groups, trade unions, progressive politicians and activists who came together to stop it,” writes Kevin Smith of Global Justice Now, an organization that has worked to fight TTIP in the United Kingdom.

While the TPP has become a lightning rod for labor and other progressive organizations in the United States, the TTIP has slipped mostly under the radar stateside. That’s partially because talks over it, which began in 2013, have taken place almost entirely behind closed doors. Among the proposals unearthed are provisions to open European public services to U.S. businesses and to scale back online privacy protections. European groups have also raised the concern that the deal could send jobs from their continent to the United States, where trade unions and labor protections are weaker than in the EU.

Like the TPP, the TTIP would dismantle regulations in areas like banking and the environment by limiting governments’ ability to impose rules on transnational corporations. Both trade deals would further allow the investor-state dispute settlement system, which permits corporations to sue states. (TransCanada Corp. — the Canadian company behind the now-defunct Keystone XL oil pipeline — is currently seeking $15 billion from Washington under a similar NAFTA provision for rejecting the controversial project.)

Though both presidential candidates in the United States have voiced their opposition to the TPP, neither has said much about TTIP. Hillary Clinton changed her tune on the former, which she pushed for as secretary of state. The move is largely seen as a response to dedicated protests from unions and community groups that have been mobilizing to stop the talks since they began, and as a reaction to the fact that both her primary and general election opponents have spoken out aggressively against so-called free trade agreements.

In a letter this month, a coalition of progressive groups including Demand Progress and 350 Action called on Clinton to reject a vote on the TPP in the next session. “Allowing a lame-duck vote,” they write, “would be a tacit admission that corporate interests matter more than the will of the people.”

Beyond progressive organizations’ fold, though, lies a growing bipartisan resentment of NAFTA-style deals. A poll released in April found that just 17 percent of Germans and 18 percent of Americans support the TTIP — likely not enough to save deals like the TTIP and TPP from a political climate that increasingly sees free trade agreements as anything but free.

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Bewildered in “Bloom County”: How its long hiatus transformed the still-beloved comic

Cover detail of "Bloom County Episode XI: A New Hope" (Credit: IDW Publishing)

It’s a bit like a beloved Reagan-era rock band getting back together after decades of silence. Berkeley Breathed, creator of “Bloom County,” had not stopped writing and drawing since the strip’s 1989 conclusion. But he’d done nothing as popular and zeitgeist-y as his comic strip starring a mix of humans and talking animals tossing out pop-culture-inspired wisecracks in a fictional small town. 

And the return of “Bloom County” — which Breathed revived last July, with no warning, as an online-only daily strip on Facebook — is now in print, as IDW Publishing brings out a book of the new strips: “Bloom County Episode XI: A New Hope” comes out September 13. A picture book for young readers, “The Bill the Cat Story: A Bloom County Epic,” will make its debut from Philomel Books on the same day. 

“Early and Late Bloom County should be worth a week in some future bullshit college course on pop history,” Breathed told me by email, his preferred way of communicating. “Nobody has done this before — start strip, stop strip, start family, see world, get old, watch world become digital, start strip again. So it is sorta intriguing. Remember, Bloom County became of age when I was barely out of college. I ended it at an age most college kids now graduate and finally leave the house. Read: what the hell did I know?”

A lot has changed about the world since “Bloom County” made its debut in newspapers — through the Washington Post Syndicate — in December of 1980. Jimmy Carter was still president, though he had been defeated in an election the previous month. Newspapers were thriving, and the internet barely existed. “Miami Vice” had not yet aired, MTV was still a year away and neither Madonna’s debut nor Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” had come out. “Star Wars” was in between films in its initial trilogy. (No one knew what a “prequel” was at that point.)

The popularity of the original comic may’ve come from its distinctive tone. The strip was satirical, but unlike “Late Night With David Letterman,” which would launch in 1982, there was nothing bitter about it. With the exception of Steve Dallas — a jaded, shades-wearing playboy lawyer — the characters were mostly sweet. Milo, Cutter John, Binkley and Opus the penguin (who gradually became the dominant character) brought a warmth to the comic. And the absurdity of the story lines, a general knowingness to the characters and oddball figures like the eternally freaked-out Garfield parody Bill the Cat, kept it from becoming cutesy.

The strip was intensely loved by its fans in a way that had few parallels, says Tom Spurgeon, who runs The Comics Reporter blog. “It went beyond even the following for ‘Doonesbury,’” Spurgeon says of Garry Trudeau’s classic politics-focused comic. “It’s an interesting achievement for a satirist, for someone who’s taking shots at society, to have that kind of affection.” It was also massively popular, running at one point in more than 1,200 papers, which put it in front of 40 million readers. 

“Bloom County” would be linked, for a lot of people, to the Trudeau strip: For one thing, the two comics looked alike, and Breathed’s strip filled the vacuum for many newspapers when “Doonesbury” went on hiatus for most of ’83 and ’84.

Breathed, for what it’s worth, says the only two strips he’d read before starting his were “Doonesbury” and “Peanuts”; this may, at least in part, explain his strip’s originality. “There had been fantasy strips, like ‘Peanuts’ and ‘Pogo,’ “ said Chris Mautner, who writes for Comics Journal and The Smart Set. “But they didn’t have the goofy, weird quality. [“Pogo” creator] Walt Kelly would never have had things like ‘the anxiety closet,’ or the characters forming a heavy metal band. Breathed struck me as someone who was very tickled by the absurdity of ‘80s culture.”

Breathed says his strip’s roots come less from other comics and more from the small town in Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird.” And some of his sensibility, he says, comes from Douglas Adams, author of “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,” and Monty Python’s John Cleese. (Both were Englishmen who moved to California, where Breathed lives, and eventually became friends.)

After the closing down of the original “Bloom County” — Donald Trump became a character and, in 1989, bought out the strip and fired the other characters — the comic went on to become an important influence. “There was a time when every college comic had a guy in sunglasses nobody liked, talking animals, and characters who addressed the audience,” Mautner said. He sees its influence in many web comics. And Aaron McGruder of “Boondocks” — the strip, about a black family in a white town, that started in 1996 and later became an animated series — has praised Breathed’s influence. 

But despite the fondness with which many remembered “Bloom County,” Breathed’s related strips — “Outland” and “Opus” — didn’t quite catch fire.

What did happen to bring Milo and Opus and the rest back into visibility was IDW’s publication of “Bloom County” in a series of hardback books, part of a larger wave of comics, as familiar as “Peanuts” and as obscure to American readers as “Moomin,” receiving deluxe repackaging. 

Though the revived strip includes a few political references, including some to Trump, Breathed has been cagey about how much the candidate inspired the return. “This creator can’t precisely deny that the chap you mention had nothing to do with it,” he wrote to a fan on Facebook. And he told me that Trump is both a natural and difficult part of his comic: “He’s a cartoon character, duh! As my son would say. Which is another way of saying that he is untouchable in most typical satire. ‘SNL’ and the nightly talk shows should just stand down. I am.”

The explanation he gave The New York Times last year for his strip’s return turned on politics, though:

Deadlines and dead-tree media took the fun out of a daily craft that was only meant to be fun. I had planned to return to Bloom County in 2001, but the sullied air sucked the oxygen from my kind of whimsy. Bush and Cheney’s fake war dropped it for a decade like a bullet to the head. But silliness suddenly seems safe now. Trump’s merely a sparkling symptom of a renewed national ridiculousness. We’re back baby.

But Breathed now says he’s trying to move the strip away from political issues. “I’m toiling to make it less so,” he wrote. “It is not easy. That’s not a glib answer. Like everyone, I struggle with the fascination/repellant push and pull of it all. The repelling is winning at the moment. So too with my readers, I sense. They don’t mind paying attention to it all in their peripheral cultural vision… but they don’t much like keeping it straight in front of their retina every day. There’s a spiritual context to it all, although I really hate that I said the word ‘spiritual.’”

The new strip resembles the old one pretty closely, with its familiar cast of characters, but now with references to the “Star Wars” sequels, electoral politics, sex tapes, the burkini, yoga and the unpleasantness of air travel. But there’s a broader difference.

“In the recent strip there are a lot of times the characters are bewildered or confused,” Spurgeon said. Sometimes the strip is less funny, but it has a warmer tone. “It has an appealing fragility and vulnerability. It’s comforting when the smart ass is confused, too. There’s so much anxiety in the air. This is a little gentler and a little more human.”

One other difference is that by posting on Facebook, Breathed is not making any money on the strip outside books and other licensing. “I do this mostly for free at the moment,” he said, explaining that he had turned down half a million dollars from a newspaper syndicate, “just to play the martyr for art.”

Breathed also told me he has a new approach to the strip:

Some new rules now: no celebrities get snark treatment unless they actually commit snark offenses. Being imperfectly cool with their art, for instance, doesn’t reach that bar. Another rule: avoid celebrity humor altogether. I had it [to] myself in 1982. A bit busier a quarter of a century later.  

Probably most important is the Dukakis rule: political humor has a half-life similar to a mayfly. Be sparing with it. More: It’s largely without nourishment. Politics actually means very, very little in people’s lives.

What he does want to capture is the new social conditions he’s picking up. “I smell a quantum shift in the world right now that is unlike other revolutions,” he wrote. “We’re realizing that nobody is actually behind the green curtain pulling the levers on the special effects of the Great Wizard. Its a reckoning with how close chaos actually is, around every corner. Trump is a glimpse. Isis and the allure of suicidal nihilism is another. People are nervous. It’s a good time to be in my business.”

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Trump’s mass deportation machine: He’ll create an American police state equal to Nazi Germany

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump speaks during a campaign rally at Xfinity Arena of Everett, Tuesday, Aug. 30, 2016, in Everett, Wash. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci) (Credit: AP)

This article originally appeared on AlterNet.

Donald Trump’s pledge this week to speedily deport “anyone who has entered the United States illegally” would require the creation of a vast police state that harkens back to the early 20th century, with Nazi Germany’s roundups and deportations of millions of Jews and others deemed undesirable.

“Under my administration, anyone who illegally crosses the border will be detained until they are removed out of our country and back to the country from which they came,” Trump blared. “And you can call it deported if you want. The press doesn’t like that term. You can call it whatever the hell you want. They’re gone.”

Trump’s plan starts with the immediate roundup and expulsion of “illegal immigrants who are arrested for any crime whatsoever,” but goes far beyond the notion that local police might stop a car whose rear headlight is out, demand visas and green cards, and in their absence throw that person into an American gulag that ends in a foreign airport. Trump has said that “62 percent of households headed by illegal immigrants” receive some welfare or food stamps, a “tremendous cost to our country” and “will be priorities for immediate removal.” That would create not just a climate of great fear, but in tandem with his pledge to push for a new national law withholding federal funds from sanctuary cities, it echoes 1930s Germany’s deliberate stripping of civil rights.

Until Trump’s Arizona speech Wednesday, he had signaled that he still wanted to deport 11 million undocumented migrants — and also ensnare their estimated 5 million children born here and revoke their citizenship — but offered no details beyond saying he would find a “humane and efficient” way to do it. On Wednesday, he offered some numbers to indicate the size of the expanded federal police force needed, saying he would “triple the number of ICE deportation officers” and “hire 5,000 more Border Patrol agents.”

But a series of 2016 reports from a right-wing think tank, American Action Forum, which looked at the logistics behind Trump’s pledge to deport migrants in a two-year period reveals a far larger state police force and deportation machinery would be required. The closest historic analogy is not the arrest and deportation of 1.3 million Mexicans in the 1950s derisively known as “Operation Wetback,” nor the roundup and internment of 110,000 Japanese-Americans in WWII, nor the arrest of thousands of accused Communists in the Palmer Raids after WWI. It is Nazi Germany, where the Gestapo, or the state police — along with the legal system and the courts, a transportation infrastructure, and transit and concentration camps — were used to arrest and deport millions of Jews and other “undesirables.”

“We examined what it would take to execute Donald Trump’s promise to remove all undocumented immigrants in just two years,” American Action Forum reported. “We detailed current immigration enforcement operations and estimated exactly how large each component of the enforcement process would have to be in order to accomplish this task.”

“We found that to remove all undocumented immigrants in two years, the federal government would need to increase federal immigration apprehension workers from 4,844 to 90,582, immigration detention personnel from 5,203 to 53,381, federal immigration attorneys from 1,430 to 32,445, and immigration courts from 58 to 1,316,” its 2016 analysis continued. “In addition, the number of immigration detention beds would need to increase from 34,000 to 348,831 and to physically transport all undocumented immigrants out of the country the government would need to charter a minimum of 17,296 flights and 30,701 bus trips each year.”

In other words, Trump’s Arizona speech was not just the usual ranting and raving Americans have come to expect from a man whose words cannot be trusted — such as playing nice while standing at the podium with Mexico’s president, and hours later vilifying migrants in his speech promising a new federal police state and gulag. His purportedly substantive speech detailing how he would do it was devoid of the real size and scope of the state police and deportation industry needed.

As for Trump’s illogical and cynical claims that deporting millions of migrants would lift the American economy and help underemployed Americans, the American Action Forum report found deporting 11 million undocumented people — including upwards of 6.8 million workers — would have devastating economic consequences. It would remove 16 percent of the nation’s farm, forestry and fishing workers, 12 percent of construction workers, 9 percent of leisure and hospitality workers, 6 percent of manufacturing workers and so on, cutting national economic growth from between 3 and 5 percent, or upwards of $625 billion.

American Action Forum projects that nearly 135,000 more immigration police and prison guards would be needed to arrest, process and deport 11 million undocumented migrants, as well as several thousands of additional judges, lawyers and workers in the courts and transit systems. They do not include Trump’s new pledge to police state welfare and public assistance agencies, which would increase the police state’s size. Nonetheless, the projection that 135,000-plus deportation police would be needed is on par with Nazi Germany’s police, imprisonment and deportation treadmill.

Here’s how enclycopedia.com summarizes the Gestapo network in WWII:

“At the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939, there were approximately 40,000 Gestapo agents in Germany. As the war progressed and the Nazis gained territory throughout Europe, the Gestapo swelled to employ over 150,000 informants, agents and accessory personnel. Gestapo agents were charged with rooting out foreign agents and resistance fighters, but they also expanded their role as an internal police force.”

The comparisons continue. American Action Forum anticipates the need for more than 300,000 additional “immigration detention beds.” If you look at the population of Nazi Germany’s biggest transit and concentration camps, you find a matrix of prisons where tens of thousands were held simultaneously in an array of facilities for forced prison labor or before being deported over many months.

Trump’s police state would turn modern America into something that hasn’t been seen in the West for 75 years. And his proposal that new migrants sign loyalty oaths is akin to what the United States required European immigrants to swear as they landed on U.S. shores before WWI.

Considering that the largest number of annual deportations under President Obama has been about 410,000 — causing tremendous grief as families have been broken up — any scenario for exponentially increasing that figure portends great civil strife, economic disruption and the imposition of a police state.

“I can’t even begin to picture how we would deport 11 million people in a few years where we don’t have a police state, where the police can’t break down your door at will and take you away without a warrant,” Michael Chertoff, secretary of Homeland Security under President George W. Bush, told The New York Times in May when asked about implementing Trump’s proposal.

It’s easy to dismiss Trump’s deportation pledge as the ravings of a politician who will say anything to rev up his base through grievance and revenge politics. But it’s another to thing to contemplate what it would mean to enact. The historic analogies, where they can be found, are appalling and could transform the country into an unrecognizable police state.

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David Lynch in conversation: “It’s ignorance that keeps us in that boat of suffering”

David Lynch (Credit: Getty/Kevin Winter)

David Lynch’s book “Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity” has become an iconic record of the director’s commitment to meditation, his feelings about Hollywood and his working style as an artist. TarcherPerigee has just reissued Lynch’s work in a 10th-anniversary edition, which includes new interviews with Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr.

To mark the new edition, due out on Sept. 6, here is a never-before-published 2006 interview that writer Mitch Horowitz, Lynch’s editor, conducted with the filmmaker upon the publication of the book, in which Lynch discusses his past and future as an artist and which boxes he checks on census forms.

If I sound the least bit nervous it’s because I’ve been fan of your movies since I was a wee lad – I grew up here in New York in punk rock and my friends and I all considered “Eraserhead” one of those movies that we really believed in. I can’t say exactly why that was so, but everybody felt the same way about it. Like many of your fans, I feel as though I’ve been living with that movie ever since I was just a kid.

Wow, that’s wild. Well, I always say it’s my most spiritual movie. No one understands me, but it is.

I believe it. Let me start by asking you this, I understand you’ve been meditating since about 1973.

Right, exactly since July 1st, 1973.

Why are you now speaking publicly about your commitment to Transcendental Meditation, why at this particular time?

I hate speaking in public, but I look at the world and I say if people only knew that it’s true that happiness comes from inside, or to use another expression: “The world is as you are.” The Maharishi Mahesh Yogi [who’s the founder of Transcendental Meditation] uses the analogy that if you have dark green, dirty glasses on, that’s the world you see, that’s your experience. But if you start meditating, you take the natural dive into pure consciousness.

That ocean of pure consciousness is also known by modern science as the “Unified Field.” It’s at the base of all matter, of all things. We also learn this from Vedic science, the science of consciousness, or what you could call eternal science. And this act of diving within in Transcendental Meditation is so easy because it’s just natural – the mind wants to go into fields of greater happiness. The deeper you go, the more there is, until you hit pure bliss. Transcendental Meditation is the vehicle that takes you there, but it’s the experience that does everything.

You’ve made the point that so much of the film business is run on fear. That fear is this negative motivator that runs through the business — but that you do not run your movies and your business based on fear, or you wouldn’t be able to get anything of substance out of the people around you. I was wondering how you came to that, and whether it had something to do with meditation.

It had everything to do with meditation. And it had everything to do with common sense, as well.  I once noticed an article about somebody here in Hollywood who ran his whole business on fear, like it was a macho, cool thing. Now to me, it’s like that person is an idiot. Not only that, but he’s probably riddled with fear himself, broadcasting it and needing to give more of it to others.  

This goes on day after day – but humanity was not made to suffer: Bliss is our nature – that and being naturally kind to others. We’re all in this thing together.

So, it’s common sense that if a guy goes to work and he’s always afraid of losing his position or his whole job, or being humiliated publicly, his fear will often turn to anger. And a person becomes ultimately angry at his work. And then he begins to hate.

And this is the kind of life that this person in Hollywood, and probably many, many others who run the show, give to their employees. And it’s real close to hell. And you don’t get people to go that extra mile for you. They can probably hardly wait to get away from you and away from their work. And the creativity is cramped – negativity cramps creativity.  

I wanted to ask you a question about California. It’s very interesting to me that when the Maharishi came to the United States, he came to California, as do many teachers from the East.  Sometimes here in the Northeast people will poke fun at California for its supposed spiritual excesses, or will say that everybody has a guru, or something like that. And I reject that because I think California really has a renewing influence on the spiritual culture of this country. And I wanted to ask you, what is it about California that attracts so much that is novel or new in terms of the spiritual culture in America?

Well, I really don’t know – but it’s always been the light for me, the light and the weather. Where you go outside and it’s the same temperature as it is inside. This light is a certain kind of thing. It brings a lot of happiness. You get a feeling in California that you can do what you think to do. It’s an interesting kind of feeling. And, of course, it’s true that there are people in California who’ll go with the next guru that comes through town. For me, though, once I got on a path, I wanted to stay on that path. I don’t want to mix it up, add anything to it, or subtract anything from it.  

Were you interested in metaphysical ideas as a kid?

No. I grew up in the Northwest, and if you couldn’t see it, feel it, touch it or kick it then it didn’t exist. But as a kid I would dream and I would feel, and I knew that something more was going on, but I didn’t think about it all the time. And when you grow up then you start getting anxieties, you start getting fears; things happen and you start getting angry, you get confused.

I had darkness and confusion, and it’s tough being a human being – but it shouldn’t be. It’s ignorance that keeps us in that boat of suffering. That’s not the way it’s supposed to be.  

Do you have kids and did they grow up meditating?

I’ve got three kids and all of them started when they were about six. And they all meditate regularly. My son Austin, my second child, stopped for a year, not telling anybody because he felt it wasn’t his – like it was put on him. And then he started again after a year, and he made it his own. And, you know, meditation throws stress off kids like water off a duck’s back.    

When the U.S. census form comes to your house and they have these boxes to check for your religion, do you check “unaffiliated” or what do you check?

I don’t remember them ever coming to my house, but I was raised Presbyterian.

And do you consider yourself Presbyterian or Christian, or do you not think of yourself in those terms today?

I respect people who are religious, I think they find something there and I think it’s beautiful, just beautiful, all of it. There’s truth there. But I feel that some of the keys, because these religions are old and they’ve been fiddled with possibly, I feel some of the beautiful original keys from the Master have been lost.

But we’re all going to the same beautiful goal. That’s the way I see it. Whatever really and truly takes you there, we’re all on the same path. We’re all one, as the physicist Dr. John Hagelin says, at that most fundamental level. We’re sparks off the Divine Flame.

And we can realize that, not intellectually but we can live it by unfolding it, we can really live it. There’s an ancient saying, “Know that by knowing which all things are known.” Or know it by being it. And this is what Transcendental Meditation will do for a human being. You’ll know it by being it. It’s a field of pure knowingness.

You speak so eloquently about the experience of transcendent bliss – but for those of us who love your movies, it’s impossible not to wonder at how many of the characters in your movies live with so much darkness. Why that dichotomy?

Stories are always going to be stories, and worlds that we can go into where there’s suffering, there’s confusion, there’s darkness, there’s tension, there’s anger, there’s murder, and so on. But the filmmaker or the author doesn’t have to suffer in order to show that. In fact, and this is common sense too, the more the artist suffers the less creative he or she is going to be. And the less likely [the artist is] going to enjoy [his or her] work or be able to do really do good work.

Fear and anger and tension, anxieties and stress and depression – these things strangle creativity. And you can’t think your way out of it, you can’t wish for a glass of water when you’re thirsty – you’ve got to have real water. You can’t pretend you’re happy if you aren’t.

What I’ve discovered is that the practice of diving within in meditation makes ideas easier to catch and the enjoyment of the doing increases exponentially and you appreciate people more – you seem to almost recognize everyone. It becomes fun to work. It’s not the kind of thing that you even think about, it just grows naturally. You can still get angry, but you can’t hold onto that anger. You can still get sad, but you can’t hold onto it.  

What gives you the greatest satisfaction as an artist?

Catching ideas and realizing them. It’s the story and the way the story is told. You get an idea and that is like a supreme gift. It’s like the chef catches this fantastic fish, and now he can go about cooking it in a special way, using his talents for cooking the fish. It’s great to catch an idea that you fall in love with; that gives me a lot of happiness.

Then along with the idea comes this spark of inspiration and energy and excitement because that idea holds so much – you know what you’re going to do. If it’s an idea for a chair, you see the chair and you just go to work translating that idea into a chair.

What gave you the indication early in your life that you were on the right path as a filmmaker?

Only my desires. I wanted to be a painter, and then I made a moving painting with film and I started getting green lights and I started falling in love with that.

That’s what guides most of us. For one reason or another, you desire to go this way or that way.

Now you can hit some troubled waters and then you say, wait a minute, maybe I’m going the wrong direction, and you adjust, but when you start getting the green lights it’s kind of an indication you’re going down the right path.

What response are you getting from the kids you encounter when you speak about meditation on college campuses?

The feeling in the rooms each night is very good. Realistically speaking, at least half might have said, “Well, Lynch is a cool guy and all, but meditation is not for me.”  

Or maybe, “He’s not a cool guy and meditation is not for me.” But one girl said, “I’ve been waiting my whole life to hear this.” So it’s a range.

But if one person got something and started really blossoming because of it, it’s a good thing.

So, let’s say it was way more positive [than] I thought it would be. For students things are tough, there’s so much pressure.  They’re sitting right on the brink wondering, “What am I gonna do in life? How is it gonna go? And I gotta get this, I gotta get that, I gotta get this.”

It’s just like a steamroller. And then there’s also a lot of partying. So, it’s confusing to have all this stuff rolling along. But with meditation, it’s like you’re partying, and you’ll enjoy things more, and have the clarity, the ability to focus, and the ease in gaining knowledge. And you may not even realize it, but the people around you who obviously know you, your family and friends, they see it. It’s the weirdest thing.

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Colin Kaepernick and American freedom: The quarterback’s protest exemplifies what our nation stands for

Colin Kaepernick (Credit: Reuters/Jake Roth)

“We wonder why our country is in the toilet?!” Thus tweeted former pro baseball player Aubrey Huff, condemning Colin Kaepernick after the San Francisco 49ers quarterback refused to stand during the national anthem at a preseason game last week.

But Huff has it exactly backward. The Kaepernick controversy shows what is truly great about America: our shared commitment to free expression.

Yes, critics across the blogosphere have denounced Kaepernick’s conduct as an insult to the nation and its armed forces. They also slammed subsequent comments by Kaepernick, who is biracial, about the experiences of people of color, whom he said are denied “freedom and justice” in the United States.

And they booed Kaepernick at the 49ers’ final preseason game on Thursday night against the San Diego Chargers, where he dropped to one knee — instead of remaining seated — when “The Star-Spangled Banner” was played. “You’re an American. Act like one,” read one sign in the crowd, which was celebrating the Chargers’ annual Salute to the Military night.

But almost nobody said that Kaepernick himself should be denied the freedom to protest during the national anthem. Donald Trump suggested that Kaepernick “find a country that works better for him,” but even the voluble Trump didn’t say the quarterback should be penalized for his behavior. Nor did the 49ers, who admitted that Kaepernick was within his rights to remain seated.

“In respecting such American principles as freedom of religion and freedom of expression, we recognize the right of an individual to choose and participate, or not, in our celebration of the national anthem,” the 49ers declared, in a statement.

That’s exactly as it should be in a country that makes such a fuss about freedom. But it’s also easy to forget that until the very recent past, athletes didn’t actually possess freedom — at least not when the national anthem was playing.

African-American medal winners Tommie Smith and John Carlos were expelled from the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City for raising their fists in a black power salute during the playing of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Four years later, two  black American athletes who turned their backs to the flag during their medal ceremony were kicked out of the Munich Games.

Back home, meanwhile, the National Football League required players to hold their helmets in their left hands and salute the flag with the other one while the national anthem was playing. Pulling what he called “a low-key Tommie Smith,” NFL union organizer and anti-war protester Dave Meggyesy held his helmet in front of him and bowed his head instead.

But that was as far as it went. Angered by players who showed insufficient reverence towards the anthem, the NFL issued further orders barring talking, gum chewing and “shoulder-pad slamming” while it was playing. As recently as 1996, pro basketball player Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf was suspended for refusing to stand during the Star Spangled Banner.

Not surprisingly, student athletes didn’t have the right to protest amid the playing of the national anthem either. In 1970 a football player at a high school in suburban Chicago was suspended by his coach for refusing to remove his helmet during the anthem. But the school principal came to the student’s defense, arguing that the playing of “the Star Spangled Banner” had become an empty ritual.

“People talk while it is being played, eat hot dogs and drink Cokes, visit friends and pay no attention whatsoever to it,” the principal told reporters. “So why bother at all? The only thing the national anthem accomplishes before a sports event is that it helps numb the crowd for a minute or two.”

For the most part, he was right. Bored sportswriters in the 1970s timed the playing of the national anthem at different events, awarding mock prizes to singers and musicians who could get through it the fastest. To this day, bookies and casinos offer wagers on the length of the anthem’s playing at big games. It’s a patriotic masquerade, a hollow gesture, a joke.

Until someone protests, that is. Then the song’s playing becomes something dead serious, and we learn something important about ourselves. Over the past few days, as the controversy over Colin Kaepernick exploded, we’ve seen how deeply we value individual freedom — even for people whom we might detest.

And if you ever forget that, just think about Feyisa Lilesa. He’s the Ethiopian marathoner who crossed the finish line at the Rio Olympics this summer with his hands above his head in an “X.” That’s a symbol of the Oromo people, Ethiopia’s largest ethnic group, who have been killed and jailed for protesting their government.

“If I go back to Ethiopia, maybe they will kill me,” Lilesa said. “I have not decided yet, but maybe I will move to another country.”

I hope if he can’t go home, Lilesa comes here. Americans can protest whenever we want, even during our patriotic celebrations. And that’s something all of us should celebrate, proudly and patriotically, no matter what we think of Colin Kaepernick.

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Donald Trump went to Mexico — and all we got was this stupid election

Alicia Lopez Fernandez paints a pinata depicting Donald Trump at her family's store in Mexico City, July 10, 2015. (Credit: AP/Marco Ugarte)

If you tried to follow the Dr. Jekyll-and-Mr. Hyde media circus around Donald Trump’s surprise visit to Mexico this week, followed by his fire-eating immigration speech in Phoenix, you got to hear a lot of slack-jawed journalists saying a lot of strange and funny and sometimes strikingly intelligent things. See, there’s always an upside! Even when you’re talking about the craziest and stupidest event that has ever occurred in the history of the world. Trump did not destroy himself, apparently, with his bizarre 360-degree pivot from hate to love and back to hate again. But he continued his assault on the media and the collective consciousness of humanity and the fabric of reality, and all those things are in grave danger of destruction.

Look, I know you’ve read too many articles about this already and quite likely watched some of it unfold in real time. Still: Jumping Jesus Christmas Christ. That was a combination of brilliant Jedi mind-tricks and total incoherent idiocy that would have seemed impossible before it happened, and largely still does. In mid-afternoon, Trump stood behind an official podium bearing a seal that read “Estados Unidos Mexicanos,” something I thought I would only see in a Black Trump video or a “Saturday Night Live” sketch. (Whatever Mexican president Enrique Peña Nieto ate for breakfast on Wednesday, his aides are making damn sure he never eats it again.) The American media’s collective hallucination narrative that Trump looked “presidential” was pretty dumb — all that means is that he didn’t bite anyone or express wonderment that Los Pinos, the Mexican president’s official residence, had indoor plumbing.

But at least Trump briefly impersonated a human being, until he got back to Arizona and bellowed at a crowd of sunburned white people, all heavily dosed with Mountain Dew and credit-card debt and conspiracy theory, for more than an hour. Mexico was still going to pay for building that “intangible, physical, tall, power, beautiful southern border wall.” (I’m serious; that’s from the published transcript.) But the Mexicans just didn’t know it yet; Trump is such a brilliant negotiator he got Peña Nieto to sign a promissory note under hypnosis or perhaps with the aid of “roofies.” Furthermore, Trump told the pickled people of his tribe, illegal immigration was the only major problem facing America and he was going to fix it in two hours. Or perhaps within eight years; certain aspects of the timeframe were not crystal-clear.

Virtually everything Trump said in that so-called policy address was a distortion, an exaggeration or a flat-out lie, including the articles, the prepositions and the declaration that Arizona has “a very, very special place” in his heart. (The place reserved for digesting and dissolving Arizona in Trump’s mechanico-reptilian anatomy is lower down, between his spleen and his liver. “Special,” I suppose, is a term of art.) I’m going to give Trump a pass for the baffling passage where he wandered off script and referred to “this horrible, horrible thought process called Hillary Clinton.” It’s an opinion, first of all, and also an interesting analogy or figure of speech. In what sense is Hillary a thought process? Does he mean she’s a projection of our national trauma and does not really exist? He won back millions of Americans, for a split-second, with that one.

Dan Rather, who learned the hard way how the demands of the campaign news cycle can bite you in the ass, told Chris Hayes of MSNBC that whether or not you take Trump seriously as a presidential candidate, he can manipulate the media like no one else in political history. José Diaz-Balart of Telemundo and NBC News compared the whole spectacle to Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí’s disorienting surrealist masterpiece “Un Chien Andalou,” not a reference you expect to encounter on the network news. (Drawing that analogy in Mexico City, where Buñuel spent the middle portion of his career in artistic and political exile, was oddly appropriate.)

In its relentless quest to find the reasonable middle ground in a world where that no longer exists, The New York Times once again made itself look thick, slow and ridiculous. Hours after Trump vowed to vaporize all undocumented criminals with his Zargon death-ray within minutes of taking office, the Times still had a strained, credulous, this-but-that story atop the front page. Trump’s Mexico junket, we were told, was “an audacious attempt . . . to remake his image,” “a spirited bid” for undecided voters and “a stark turnaround” from his previous tactics and policies. Yes, except no.

Liz Spayd, the Times’ public editor (or inside-outside ombudsman), was left to clean up the mess in a postmortem article the next day, noting mildly that numerous other publications — from The Washington Post to Politico to the Arizona Republic — were not caught flat-footed by the possibility that the candidate who has campaigned as a hateful xenophobic creep for 15 months would continue to do so. “Trump acted jarringly differently in Phoenix than he did in Mexico,” political editor Carolyn Ryan told Spayd, without addressing the question of why anyone should be surprised by that and why her paper swallowed the bait so readily.

I’ll tell you why. It was a classic example of Jon Huntsman Disorder, the ailment that causes the Times’ editorial leadership to gather at doleful cocktail parties on the Upper East Side and pine for a so-called moderate and reasonable Republican who will save the benighted American electorate from itself. The fact that the paper’s brain trust spent half a day trying to turn Donald Trump into such a person represents a new low in self-delusion: If this guy repudiates everything he has ever said, he’ll be great. Given the nature of her job, I understand that Ryan can’t say, “Well, the Times got massively punked by Trump, and we fell for it yet again because we have a profound institutional desire to believe that the election will be decided on political and ideological terrain we perceive as normal.” But that’s what happened.

My former Salon colleague Joan Walsh (now a columnist at the Nation) launched an impressive Twitter assault during and after Trump’s Arizona speech on Wednesday night, repeatedly calling out the Times and other mainstream outlets for enabling Trump’s charade. “I hope the journalists who called this Cro-Magnon ‘presidential’ today are resigning their jobs,” she wrote. Then, a bit later: “Listen to this hopped up maniac, my fellow journalists. What is wrong with you?” Toward the end of the evening, Walsh wrote that she had “never been so ashamed to be a mainstream American journalist” and began contemplating new lines of work, which I imagine provoked all sorts of suggestions from Trump supporters.

It’s always refreshing to encounter righteous indignation in our overly jaded and modulated profession, and I get where Joan is coming from. There is no question, as I and many others have pointed out, that the media got hooked on Trump’s clownish persona and outrageous antics early in the campaign cycle. As Dan Rather said, either out of animal instinct or calculated strategy, Trump has exploited that magnificently, and the result was a toxic symbiosis that accelerated his momentum. But it’s too simplistic to say that the media created Trump and enabled his rise and that, without that coverage, he wouldn’t have come so alarmingly close to the White House. Nor is it realistic to blame newspaper and TV reporters for treating the actions of the Republican presidential nominee as major news events and for trying to fit them into a conceptual framework those reporters can understand.

Millions of people voted for Trump during the Republican primaries and continued to do so while mainstream media commentators insisted that his campaign was a hilarious anomaly, and that surely Jeb Bush or Marco Rubio or John Kasich or, God help us, Lyin’ Ted Cruz would end up as the nominee instead. Trump’s repeated claim that he received more primary votes than any other Republican candidate in history is apparently true — although it’s also true that more Republicans voted against him than for him, meaning that he accumulated both more positive and more negative votes than any previous GOP contender. My point is that Trump is the product of a diseased political cycle and, more than that, a diseased political and cultural ecosystem. To blame this systematic dysfunction on one of its elements, the journalist class, is like saying that if we arrest all the drug dealers we can end addiction. (That was tried; it didn’t work.)

Walsh and other Hillary Clinton boosters were understandably outraged that their candidate gave what was supposed to be a major foreign-policy speech at the American Legion convention in Cincinnati on Wednesday and no one paid the slightest attention. Trump stole Clinton’s lunch money, hijacking all the available media bandwidth and then some, with his unexpected Mexican field trip, followed by his full-throated fallback to fascism in Phoenix. But you know what? I tried to read Clinton’s speech, and then I tried to watch it, and I just couldn’t. It was deadly boring and didn’t say much of anything, and the few snippets of policy or philosophy I could glean from it (e.g., about American exceptionalism) I didn’t care for. She said that this election is “about how to make things better,” and promised to do that. Well, thanks. I can’t blame anyone for finding the Trump saga more compelling.

I have no idea whether Trump helped himself or hurt himself, in normative polling-data terms, with his whiplash whirlwind tour. I’m also not sure it’s the right question. At the moment, conventional wisdom holds that Trump has clawed back some of the ground he lost after the Democratic convention and the dozens of offensive things he has said and done over the course of the summer and that we are once again heading for a close election in November. But the fact that Trump is a toxic and charismatic figure with an anaconda-like hold on the news cycle, the fact that mainstream journalists remain enslaved by outmoded narratives of pseudo-impartiality and false equivalence, and the fact that Hillary Clinton’s campaign appears to be drifting along in neutral, hoping that nothing will go wrong, are all related. They are symptoms of a sick democracy, and however this campaign ends the prognosis is not hopeful.

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Time to reinvent labor for the 21st century: We don’t need the unions of yesterday

(Credit: Reuters/David McNew)

This article was originally published on The Conversation.

On Labor Day, politicians have traditionally paid lip service to the plight of the worker, whom the national holiday is meant to honor. With working-class struggles taking center stage in this year’s election, we will likely hear from them more than usual talking about the steps they will take to reduce income inequality or end three decades of wage stagnation.

Some of them will go one step further and voice support for unions and collective bargaining, both of which have declined at the same time wages have stagnated.

They do so for good reason. Not only have American workers made it clear they are fed up with being left behind as the economy prospers, there is a growing body of evidence that union decline is one of the key causes of wage stagnation and income inequality.

The solution, however, isn’t to bring back the unions of yesterday. We need to create stronger business-labor partnerships for tomorrow.

Slide of union power

As far back at the mid-1980s, our research at MIT showed that collective bargaining was no longer capable of using the threat of strikes or other forms of pressure to get businesses to match negotiated wage increases.

Previously, strike threats and the fear of getting organized led companies to match wages negotiated in key bargains. For example, in the late 1940s, General Motors and the United Auto Workers negotiated a wage formula linking wage hikes to increases in productivity and the cost of living. Unionized businesses had to follow suit or risk a strike. Even companies without unions had to do the same if they wanted to avoid their workers getting organized.

Recent research shows that the decline in union bargaining power observed in the 1980s has persisted and has now taken a big toll on union and nonunion workers alike. A just-released report from liberal-leaning think tank the Economic Policy Institute, for example, estimates that the decline in unions — from 23 percent in 1979 to 11 percent in 2013 — and their collective bargaining power has caused men in the private sector to earn $109 billion less every year and women to earn $24 billion less.

Other recent research shows that the decline in wages has now spread to the public sector. Teachers have been especially hard hit. In 1979, teachers earned just 2 percent less than comparable college graduates. In 2015, the earnings gap had widened to 17 percent.

More than empty rhetoric?

Research like this has convinced more Democratic candidates to call for rebuilding labor unions.

But is that possible or is it just empty rhetoric?

As I’ve argued before, I believe it is empty for two reasons. First, since 1978 three major efforts to pass labor law reform to make it easier to form a union have been blocked in Congress. And there is no reason to believe this will change.

Second, even if unions started growing again, they would not be able to rely on their past sources of power to drive up wages. There is just too much domestic and international competition, and it is too easy to move capital and jobs to lower-wage countries. That makes it much harder to use strike or unionizing threats to get businesses to lift wages or match negotiated increases.

So what else can be done? In previous articles, I’ve made the case for a new labor policy that not only supports unions but also promotes labor management partnerships. I’ve also suggested extending protection against employer retaliation to more workers, such as fast-food employees fighting for a $15 minimum wage or independent contractors like Uber or Lyft drivers. These changes would help reframe labor policy to fit the modern economy.

But labor policy can no longer stand alone. A more complete strategy is needed that integrates a revised labor policy with something known as a “high road” economic strategy.

At MIT, my colleagues and I teach this approach to our MBA students, in executive education classes and in our public online courses. We tell current and future business executives that they have a choice in how they compete in the marketplace: They can minimize labor costs and fight to keep unions out of their organizations or they can invest in their workers, drawing on their knowledge, skills and motivation to achieve high levels of productivity and customer service. And then reward those employees with their fair share of the profits they help produce.

Over the past two decades, researchers have discovered how companies employing this “high-road” approach — such as retailers like Costco or Market Basket, airlines like Southwest or health care providers like Kaiser Permanente — do just as well or even better on long-term financial returns, customer service and wages than “low-road” competitors, such as Walmart or Spirit Airlines.

The task ahead

How can we encourage more companies to move in this direction?

As educators, we have an important role to play, but our efforts need to be matched by a well-coordinated effort that cuts across the federal government and business to realize the benefits of a high-road policy. One example is repairing America’s decaying infrastructure through public-private partnerships, which some business and labor leaders have already committed to.

The same deal needs to be struck in implementing a new manufacturing policy. We are not likely to bring back many of the jobs lost to China and other lower-wage countries. The best way for government to help rebuild our manufacturing base is to support investments in next generation technologies, such as light metals, photonics, robotics and wearable fibers that will generate energy and cool our bodies. But it’s also important to insist the businesses getting federal funding commit to making their products here and investing in their workforces.

So this Labor Day, I believe candidates need to go beyond the empty rhetoric of the past and commit to doing the hard work of recasting labor policy in ways it might be possible to enact.

And then they should follow up with the comprehensive and disciplined administrative actions needed to realize a high-road strategy that puts the economy on a course that will truly work for all.

 

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