Month: September 2017

How Do You Solve a Problem Like Korea?

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David Fitzsimmons / Arizona Star

I may be wrong but hasn’t the no nucs in North Korea ship sailed. Obviously Kim Jong-un already has nuclear weapons; he keeps testing them. Obviously, he has medium range and long range missiles. He’s sending them over Japan with some regularity these days. President Trump drew a new redline at North Korean acquisition of an ICBM missile, but that’s just a matter of time. The president’s tactics are now to get down in the mud with the North Korean dictator and lob schoolyard insults at him, a game they’ve both played for the whole of their careers. It’s a bully one upmanship contest that Trump can’t win. He’s not going to out bully a bully who sees the United States as Bully Numero Uno in the world. Kim has done what he’s done to poke the bear, mindful of hardline North Korean generals and his own hero worship at home. He wants to elevate his status on the world stage. Kim’s David is slinging missiles at the US Goliath, a hero in his own mind.

John Darkow / Columbia Daily TribuneThe latest round of name calling featured 45 withdrawing behind successive red lines, an Obama thing he’d rather die than repeat; except that he has. It’s like the conversational idle threats your mother used. Kim threatened to send a missile to Guam, perhaps too direct a challenge to the US, and settled for launching a rocket over Japan. Trump countered with more insults and the US imposed its own sanctions. Kim then tested his possible hydrogen bomb. The US then pushed through more sanctions in the UN. And the US flew jets along the Korean coast, just far enough out to sea that they were outside the range of North Korean missiles, as a show of force. The South Koreans are moving to install more anti-missile interception defenses; the Japanese are seriously beefing up their current military forces and talking about rearming in their own defense, perhaps with their own nuclear weapons. Japan swore that it would never possess nuclear weapons and codified it into their Constitution, but they’re rethinking that now.  

We might ask how the North Koreans got so good so fast. Rumor has it that Kim acquired some Ukrainian missile technology through the black market, perhaps Russian mafia mediated, from a downsized missile factory in Crimea. We also know that the North Koreans have sent legions of students to study areas relevant to engineering and technology in China, likely stealing some designs just as the Chinese are want to do. Now, Kim probably doesn’t need much outside assistance to keep his missile factory humming except for the purchase of jet and rocket fuel components and basic fuels to run industrial production – oil, coal.

Kim seems to have been able to circumvent sanctions, either through Chinese merchants who continue to export goods unmonitored or actively assisted by corrupted Chinese government officials, or through other black market sources. He’s chuckling after every successful missile launch that he accomplished this right under the nose of the United States, who was trying to mobilize the rest of the world to its anti-nuclear cause. The Korean dictator holds up Muammar Qaddafi as the dictator who, after being wooed into relinquishing his nuclear weapons, was targeted, toppled and executed by the United States government. Now that he is so close to establishing North Korea as a nuclear power and therefore, an international player, there are no negotiations or sanctions that will deter him. Only his assassination would stop him dead and even then, a hard line military successor could take up the sword in the absence of the military destruction of the country. There’s no walking that back.

Baby RattleThe BullyPresident has confirmed the North Korean dictator’s worst nightmare. From his UN Assembly speech, “if the United States is forced to defend itself or its allies, we will have no choice but to totally destroy North Korea.” Boom, it could not be any clearer. Kim fired back, calling Trump a “mentally deranged US dotard”, a fitting insult that probably sent Trump or a subordinate scurrying to a dictionary for the definition, although he certainly got the gist. Kim has made it clear that he must respond to what he considered a declaration of war, gearing up his defense and possible preemptive action.  

Trump’s pronouncements on the Iran Nuclear Agreement are adding poison to the well. If the US is threatening to walk away from a long established international treaty there is not a chance in hell that the Korean dictator would believe any deal with the US is worth the paper it’s’ written on, nor should he.

Trump is steadfastly striking out on a go-it-alone path, or what he thinks is his best deal sealing posture. But it’s tough to make a deal when you’re the only one seating at the table. Trump can’t tweet an invitation to Kim to a fireside chat. The US has no diplomatic relationship with North Korea (ah this might be a good time for Jared to set up a illegal backchannel through perhaps the Chinese Embassy). But international agreements are not the result of two leaders and their interpreters hammering out a few details. They are the result of intensive preparation by state department experts, steeped in the history of regional interests, past relationships and current intelligence, strategizing with diplomatic personnel. Rex Tillerson’s hollowed out State Department has no such personnel. Right now, the generals seem to be in charge of diplomacy as well as war preparation. Military men are generally ill suited for diplomacy.  Even if a Trump-Kim Jong-un negotiated settlement were achievable, it is meaningless without some buy-in from other countries in the region, South Korea, China, Japan, all with their own and sometime conflicting interests.

The diplomatic world, stubbornly unlike the business world (thank your deity), greeted the BullyPresident’s belligerent UN Assembly speech with shock and awe. The use of the “Rocket Man” moniker for Kim before the global assembly is reminiscent of past leaders who stooped to undignified name calling for less than honorable positions, but it’s an “American First” for the leader of the free world. So were the twenty-one uses of the word “sovereignty” scattered throughout the text. TheCelebrityPresident is setting another Guinness record here. Many in the UN assembly were watching 45’s limp withdrawal from the international community. But his posturing is inching him further out on a limb. Many nations have looked at Trump’s verbal projectiles launched at the North Korean dictator as instigating a fight that through overzealousness could result in a nuclear war. His remarks are making him look like the bad guy.

During the speech, Trump reassured diplomats from less democratic governments that the US no longer had any interest in supporting human rights or regime change, somewhat incongruous in light of his threats to North Korea. After all, his administration is less than a shining example. He went further to suggest intense interest in Venezuela’s recent move toward dictatorship under Maduro. On the other hand, Crimea, and the Russian assault on the Ukraine mostly escaped mention.

What are potential solutions? First, the world will have to shift to developing a strategy to accomodate another nuclear armed country, even as decades long efforts for denuclearization have sputtered to a halt as the detente between Moscow and the US dissolved. The real object of North Korean wrath is the United States; the country seems to have little interest in territorial expansion, at least for now. Yes, Kim’s ultimate objective is a unified Korea, but that doesn’t appear to be immediate, although once the country has consolidated acknowledgement of its nuclear prowess, it’s hard to predict. But a global response will require a global agreement, perhaps through the UN but also through multinational agreements initiated by the United States. These will require serious diplomatic negotiations, for which the Trump administration is ill prepared and has so far refused to engage. But America First can only fail in this endeavor if it chooses to go it alone rather than marshall the international community.

Among possible tools to thwart further North Korean missile launches and nuclear testing would be cyber espionage of North Korean missile systems and power grids, a new approach now within reasonable bounds against hostile enemies, used against Iran in its nuclear build up. North Korea itself engages in cyber espionage, not that that is a justification. The unfortunate Wikileaks of NASA anti-terrorist cybertools has retarded those efforts, but one can only assume that the agency has been furiously working on re-creating new tools and hopefully securing them more thoroughly than in the past.

For the moment, we wait for Kim Jong-un’s next move. In the past, North Korean provocations have been on isolated individuals, like Auto Waimer or others charged with espionage or symbolically tangential, as with the missiles into the ocean toward Japan. The missiles over Japan have been the boldest yet. The threatened hydrogen bomb test over the Pacific would seem too aggressive for all the nations in the region if not the world, so it is unlikely; another subterranean test though is not. Parenthetically, there is no definitive evidence that a previous detonation was in fact a hydrogen bomb; that was a deduction from seismic calculations which may be subject to simulated deceptions. Let’s keep our fingers crossed that there is now an intense backchannel diplomatic effort to acknowledge North Korea’s nuclear arsenal and with that acknowledgement, deter further missile wagging. From there, it’s a question of offering economic support and restructuring sanctions as conditional benchmarks are met. It’s a pipe dream I know, but that would be the Hollywood happy ending.

It’s Alive, It’s Alive!

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graham-cassidyConservative Republicans haven’t given up on Making America Sick Again. Much like Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction, Repeal and Replace just keeps popping back up. In a respite created by the Trump-Schumer/Pelosi deal to extend the debt ceiling and fund Hurricane Harvey relief, they’re back with the new Graham-Cassidy bill and racing to make the deadline of September 29, when 50 votes can still pass the bill. Bill Cassidy, a freshman Senator from Louisiana, earned his chops as a healthcare expert as a practicing physician. Unfortunately, most doctors are not schooled in healthcare delivery, except in the school of more; more procedures mean more reimbursements mean more money for me. HHS Secretary Price is another former physician who understands all too well the doctor’s perspective of more but not the patient’s perspective of quality care.

Congressional leaders are frantically pulling every trick to send this legislation to 45’s pen. GOP leaders, deviously trying to maintain the pretense of normal Senate process, have scheduled a hearing before the Homeland Security Committee of all places, in an attempt to win the vote of John McCain who is unhappy about the complete disregard for legislative procedures in crafting the bill. 45 is bully tweeting as well, singling out Rand Paul and McCain as naysayers. It’s still an open question if they can get the needed votes and finally send America back to the good ole days of pre-existing conditions and 47 million uninsured.

It’s important to understand this obsession with health care insurance in the context of medical insurance coverage. There are 156 million Americans or over 54% of nonelderly adults insured through employer-based insurance, the overwhelming majority of the insured. This proportion continues to shrink as employers have stopped offering plans and more people have become entrepreneurs, self employed, consultants and part-time workers. About  20% of the population is covered by Medicare  which includes primarily adults over age 65 but also some younger people who are handicapped and disabled. A further 14% are enrolled in Medicaid, including the estimated 20 million people who joined the rolls as part of Obamacare programs utilizing Medicaid expansion. Admittedly, this was one of the objectives of Obamacare, to create more portable health insurance that would allow people to switch jobs more easily. This action transformed Medicaid from a program primarily providing low income people access to medical care to one that now covers many middle income adults.

In addition, the A.C.A changed health insurance coverage across the whole medical insurance terrain. So even employed based plans had to cover children up to age 23, provide coverage for basic medical benefits, including drug plans with contraceptive coverage for the most part, emergency room visits and mental health services. These services had been often excluded or capped in many policies before these changes. Every family had access to care that most closely approached ideal coverage, regardless of the type of insurance that covered them.

In sum, about 88% of the population are covered by some type of private or public group insurance. About 9% of the total population remains uninsured, which includes a significant number of undocumented immigrants who are not eligible for federal benefits. In contrast, refugees granted asylum are eligible for federal benefit programs, as a bridge until they can become working residents. That leaves somewhat less than 10% of adults, about 15.6 million people, buying insurance in the individual market; these are people who are self-employed, early retirees, low wage earners or those who lost coverage for personal reasons. This number had grown from 10.6 million with the implementation of Obamacare, as the exchanges have provided supplements to make private insurance affordable. Still, all this hoopla is over a very small proportion of the population.

The Obama administration began with the premise that everyone deserves health care in as wealthy a country as the United States and developed a legislative program to do just that in a healthcare delivery system that is not so much a system as a conglomeration of small, i.e physicians, and large, i.e. hospitals and healthcare organization, businesses. The bedrock principle of business in capitalism is profit and thus the healthcare industry is designed to profit from the population’s illnesses. This is a simple statement of fact. But it is radically different from the healthcare systems of the other advanced economies, primarily designed to keep their populations healthy. Some of those systems also have a supplemental insurance market and some private providers.

Despite raucous opposition funded by Kochtopus billionaires, Obamacare in practice has become very popular, even as Republican conservatives hammered away at the Repeal Obamacare theme. The party has stuck to the billionaires’ principles that government should be smaller and out of the healthcare business while Americans have shifted their perspective to everyone deserves healthcare, if not quite healthcare is a right. Many Americans came to appreciate what it was like to have routine medical care and access to doctors’ offices rather than ERs or clinics. The misstepping GOP is scrambling to deliver on a promise that Americans don’t seem to want them to keep.

So the debate has centered on addressing the problems of 10% of the health insurance market, but not to be outdone by the Black president, Republicans thought they would expand to “fix” the issues for a broader segment of citizens by restructuring 6% of the nation’s GDP through a few backroom deals with a couple of older white male Senators. Our uniquely American system of representative government is operating at its optimal best!

Still, the affected 10% is a critical part of Republican party support. These are people making over $97,000 for a family of 4 who are buying private insurance; they are particularly hard hit by rising premiums and copays because they are not eligible for subsidies. Another group of vocal taxpayers being squeezed are those in the 50-65 age group who are paying the highest premiums and are more frequent users of medical care. Also unhappy are some of those in middle income ranges who are receiving subsidies, which increase nearly as much as the premiums have increased, a fact consistently omitted from the GOP narrative as well as the media coverage. Still they are being squeezed by copays and coinsurance fees and high deductibles as well as insurers leaving the exchanges, particularly in rural areas. But it turns out what they want is stabilization of the insurance markets, lower premiums and a wider array of insurers from which to choose.

So what’s this bill proposing to take away this time around? It will eliminate mandated medical insurance coverage, a particular provision that stuck in the craw of all libertarians and conservatives. It will eliminate protections against higher rates for people with “pre-existing” conditions and the requirement for insurance plans to cover essential health needs such as hospitalization, maternity care, prescription drugs and mental health treatments. GOP talking points are careful to deny this by saying it will be up to individual states to decide, no doubt an inducement for families with chronic illnesses to shop around for the best coverage and move to that state. Under Graham-Cassidy, insurers would be allowed to adjust prices every time someone renews their policy, allowing the rates to astronomically increase after being diagnosed with a major disease like cancer or a heart attack or diabetes. More importantly, it will eliminate the insurance exchanges and the federal subsidies for premiums and insurance companies alike by 2020. All of these monies, about $1 trillion will be thrown into the pot that would be divided between the states.

Congress, not wanting to take the heat this time around, have cleverly dumped choices about healthcare in the lap of state governors, most of whom are Republicans, in the name of federalism. Not just the decisions about coverage, but also the costs, since state coffers will have to fund any government initiatives. The governors will have to decide about who will get Medicaid – granny or a newborn – with drastically decreased funds.

Republicans have been quite politically astute in crafting this legislation. While claiming the distribution of the federal Obamacare funds have been unfair, Graham and Cassidy use a formula that rewards states, primarily Republican that declined to expand Medicaid under Obamacare, with more money than those who did, the 31 often Democratically led states. This maneuver is an enormous wealth transfer from states who cared about the health of their populations and those who didn’t.

Republican Jeff Flake tried to rationalize this by citing the fact that California and New York get 40% of ACA funding as unfair. Sounds simple except for the complexities of healthcare spending. Both states are not only the most populous in the country but also have a much higher medical costs for comparable services than some places like Arizona. They may have a higher proportion of people at various income levels requiring subsidies or supplements. They may also have more people using medical services than in other states. Liberal bastions like California and New York are responsible for a large share of federal tax dollars that will no longer be returned to those states. Texas, the state with the highest rate of uninsured residents, 16.6% and that has staunchly refused to surrender to Medicaid expansion, is the biggest winner in this lottery. And yet, Texas had the option to expand Medicaid and benefit from those federal dollars, just like New York. They made their own bed, but apparently they don’t have to lie in it because Graham-Lindsay is going to reward their intransigence for years into the future. The state would get an additional $35 billion by 2026. In contrast, California, which rescued 3.7 million under Obamacare from the ranks of the insured, would get $78 billion less than they receive under the current law and New York would get $45 billion less; both states have democratic governors and expanded Medicaid. Arizona, John McCain’s home state, is another loser, to the tune of $1.9 billion over the 10 years. But every state will find itself having to do with much less; overall federal funding to states is estimated to fall by $215 billion through 2026 and more than $4 trillion over the next 20 years. Republicans just couldn’t resist giving a middle finger to Democrats while destroying Obama’s signature program.

One more stroke of genius is the start date, 2020, falling after the next presidential election. In the interim, the chaos of “failing Obamacare”, precipitated by rising premiums in the face of crumbling insurance exchanges as the supplements under Obamacare are withdrawn, will propel the argument for the Graham-Cassidy program. Other issues will have moved to the forefront and the people dying as a result of losing their healthcare will fall under someone else’s watch.   

The restructuring of Medicaid is as central to Graham-Cassidy as in the previous bills. This bill goes beyond Paul Ryan’s dream of cutting the Medicaid budget to paring the program, born in 1965, back down to more resemble its original form, with comparatively less funding.  As 31 states expanded Medicaid, the program now covers 74 million Americans. While the federal government shared the cost of traditional Medicaid with the states at about 50-75% of the costs, it paid 100% for adults enrolled under Obamacare with the percentage declining after a few years. Traditionally, the federal government paid its share of the funding for as many people as a state enrolled, allowing a state to respond to economic downturns when more people qualified for Medicaid. But the new proposal would cap Medicaid spending to a state on a per-person basis, using a complex formula that leaves Medicaid funds falling short of the increases in the cost of medical care. These funds would disappear in 2027 or have to be reauthorized, effectively ending Obamacare lock stock and barrel: insurance exchanges and supplements, consumer protections, Medicaid expansion. Experts suggest that the number of uninsured would explode by more than 30 million as a result.

The bill would send the over $1 trillion allotted to Obamacare over the next 7 years to the states as block grants with which the states will need to create their own health care programs, a tough task in a two year time frame. This means that states have latitude to adopt individual mandates, the minimum benefits to be offered in insurance coverage. A state may choose to create high risk pools. Still, there is no stipulation that the block grants need to be spent on health care, so some portion or actually all could be spent on other state programs.

Here’s the fatal flaw; healthcare insurance is expensive because healthcare is expensive. The price of healthcare increases annually, at a much faster rate than inflation; with that said, healthcare premiums must go up every year as well. No matter how you slice it, someone has to pay medical care providers and if it’s not the insurance company, then it’s going to be the insured. Republicans have offered nothing to address this catch 22. The “free-market schemes” to lower the cost of premiums through expanded competition are pure fantasy hatched in conservative think tank faux theory, not the actuality of the market place. But that will not hold down the price of medical care itself, not without restructuring medical reimbursement processes and the methods used by providers to set charges for services. These simple truths add up to something unsustainable, as GOP spokesmen are want to say about Obamacare and Medicaid but not this.

Single – payer plans do address the cost of medical care, by radically reshaping the healthcare delivery system itself. Unfortunately there’s a huge downside to single-payer as proposed by Bernie, but that’s a subject for a later blog.

The good news if the bill passes may be that this will break the stranglehold of the Republican Party on state houses, as the governors and state legislatures go down in flames fanned by the unhealthy and undertreated. Let’s hope those affected are not too sick to get to the polls.

The BullyPresident is Out of Order

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nfl playerd

A gaggle of white guys have come out to support Trump’s war against NFL players who have protested with various gestures during the national anthem. Americans have fought and died for the flag that these athletes disrespect is a constant reframe. Hell ya. Among them have been millions of Black Americans, from the American Revolution to Afghanistan and Iraq today who died, without ever fully participating in the benefits the flag is supposed to represent. Not a single white critic or news reporter ever mentions that.

Rand Paul declared that no matter what, he thinks that this is the best country in the world in which to live. That’s probably because he is a wealthy white male surgeon elected official. He hasn’t ever sat crouched in his car with his hands on the steering wheel facing an abusive cop for no good reason, except as an excuse to harass a Black man and search his car. No doubt, every one of these athletes has, at least once. An African American man might well do better in Canada, for one, where there is a comparable standard of living and respect for diversity but without the police harassment and institutional racism that Black people in this country face on a daily basis.

This is another instance where the white man has decided what is an “appropriate” form of protest. Black Americans don’t need help with that; we keep trying every available avenue to accomplish our goal permanently, not the half step of progress forward and two steps back we’ve seen through the country’s history. Hell, we’re back battling the KKK and white supremacists supported by the President just as it was for over a hundred years. If they think it’s disrespectful, so be it.

And yet, I submit that taking a knee is honoring the promise of the American flag and praying that it will finally live up to the values it purportedly represents, applying them equally to every person in the country. It follows in the tradition of nonviolent protest that inspired the Boston Tea Party. Despite centuries of constantly being rebuffed, Black Americans have stayed in a country that has repeatedly told us that we weren’t wanted; we keep plugging away, trying to make America a better country by living up to its oft repeated ideals. We are still hopeful that true freedom and equality for every citizen will one day happen, even as we watch the ferocious backlash from two terms of a Black president that supposedly ushered in the era of “post-racialism”, whatever the hell that was. Now we know it is epitomized by Make Whites Dominant Again, as if that hasn’t always been.

Why is that more disrespectful of tradition than 45 deciding he won’t divest his business holdings as the Constitution dictates or publish his tax returns or engaging in a political campaign for his next term from day 1 of taking the office of his first? Kaepernick’s display has all the elements of respect: he is attentive to the flag, he quietly suspends all other activity. Standing is the only missing element. White critics have decided that makes it disrespectful; there are many others, including myself, who submit that it is not. It is the position of a supplicant, asking for his prayers to be heard and answered. According to the First Amendment, created by the Founders to limit government’s power against citizens, every individual has the right to free speech anytime and anywhere, even multimillionaire athletes on a football field. But being a multimillionaire Black athlete doesn’t protect them against racial profiling by the police.

U.S. President Donald Trump speaks at a campaign rally for Senator Luther Strange in HuntsvilleI submit that Trump is being even more disrespectful of the American flag when he defends white supremacists and neo-Nazis as “good guys” after they chant “Jews will not replace us” in a torchlit march in Charlottesville that looked like a 1930s Hitler rally. I submit that Trump is being even more disrespectful of the American flag when he calls for the firing of Black athletes for using their First Amendment right in front of his political rally of white supporters in a bastion of the former Jim Crow South, Alabama. I submit that when the President of the United States calls on a business to fire employees for exercising their First Amendment rights, that is unAmerican. Further, for the President of the United States to dog whistle racist overtones into his political rallies for his second term is also un-American, even in the context of the Make America White Again overt racist threats against all people of color that is so easily being tolerated in the halls of both federal and state governments today.

Of course, the First Amendment applies only to government action. Hiring and firing decisions in the NFL are a matter of contractual agreements between players, team owners, and league officials. This is not an area where presidents should tread. How is it appropriate for the president to call on the NFL to make a rule that players should be required to stand for the national anthem? Or at least that’s what Steven Mnuchin has said is Trump’s intention. Of course, he has wandered into inappropriate areas many times before, with bully tweets to businesses about jobs moved to foreign soil; no doubt he will continue to do so unchecked. Certainly, Donald Trump is welcome to his own personal opinions and even to express them to others. But President Trump can not make official pronouncements, even on Twitter which he has designated as a source of official communication. Or at least, he should not if American traditions are an unassailable standard.

There will be a lot of back and forth, with tweets and counter tweets, proposed boycotts and counter boycotts all focused on sports. But we should not be distracted from the larger issue, of a president who continually threatens the foundations of United States democracy and the institutions of our government. Donald Trump continually tramples our traditions, our institutions, our collective sense of morality (if there still is one). The origins of authoritarian government are gradual and insidious. President Donald J Trump’s actions are fundamentally un-American and far more damaging to our country than Colin Kaepernick’s, because after all, he is the president.

The Quagmire that is Afghanistan

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A U.S. Marine (L) shakes hand with Afghan National Army (ANA) soldiers during a training exercise in Helmand province, AfghanistanThe president’s announcement of his own policy on Afghanistan essentially sounded like a rehash of the old but without a stated objective or strategy or timeline. In fact, he pretty much said he wasn’t going to divulge anything about strategy or troop strength, as that would be aiding and abetting the enemy. And long term goals are not in the CelebrityPresident’s wheelhouse; he’s strictly a president of now. And he loves the surprise ending. One thing we do know is that Trump’s America First is not in the business of nation building. Unfortunately, without that nation building piece, the United States will be stuck in Afghanistan for years and years, unless, of course, a nuclear holocaust has intervened or we give up the ghost and but out like in Vietnam.  

Congress holds the purse strings for conducting war and Trump told them that he will not disclose the strategy, or objectives, limiting their role in or ability to appropriately fund the war. General Matiss will go to Congress to persuade them but they won’t be too receptive. They’ve ceded a lot of war powers already, with McCain leading the charge to take it back. Apparently, the generals’ request for a mere 4000 additional troops played a large part in convincing 45 to stray from America First non-interventionism. That and the slam dunk “eliminating terrorism rally cry”, at least the Islamic kind, from the face of the planet. He can’t be known as the president losing the war on terrorism because the CelebrityPresident is always winning.

Like the bull in the china shop that he is, the BullyPresident knocked over a tea stand when he poked Pakistan about increasing their anti-terrorist efforts by promoting India, their nuclear armed arch enemy in the region. Pakistan has responded by visiting allies in China and in India to argue their case that they are actively rooting out terrorists, at least far more actively than they have in the past. Any new sanctions against Pakistan are likely to be as ineffective in changing that country’s chosen course as those that were levied to stop the Pakistan nuclear weapons program. China as a powerful ally can easily counterbalance any sanctions. They’re all convinced that the US will pull out, just as the British and the Russians did before them and they’re betting more on the short term rather than the long. The implications of a Taliban controlled Afghanistan destabilizing the region is the primary concern for these neighbors, so some are hedging their bets now.

A brief review of the history of Afghanistan may help in understanding the territory now. Afghanistan, made up of 34 provinces, is bordered by India, Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Iran and China. Historically, the country has stood at the peripheral interface of imperial wars. In the 19th century, it was the boundary of the standoff between the British and Russian Empires. In the mid 20th century, it was the Cold War, when the Soviet Union faced off in a guerilla war against the US ensconced in a global anti-communist campaign to save democracies, and some would say create faux-democracies around the world. In the 21st century it has been the war on militant Islamic terrorism. Afghanistan with its vast mountainous terrain and narrow passes bedeviled them all, with ill equipped tribesman bringing well-equipped armies to their knees.

27Afghan-empire19-superJumboBeginning in 1839, the British Empire fought three wars in the country for over 80 years, finally withdrawing in 1919 by granting Afghanistan independence at the close of WWI. The Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979 to support the government in a developing civil war during an era where they were extending a policy of stabilizing the neighboring Asian republics of now Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan and Tajikistan. Unlike those other countries, the Afghans proved difficult to manage assisted by the United States, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. The Soviets like the British before them found themselves isolated in the Afghan capital of Kabul and other well fortified positions scattered in a vast sea of hostile countryside, controlled by rebellious warlords. When the Soviet army limped out of the country in 1989, they left the country with more landmines than anywhere else on the planet and a  puppet regime that disintegrated into years of civil wars. Those wars set the stage for the rise of the Taliban.

afghan caravanThe United States began a new war soon after 9/11. In the interim, more than one million American soldiers have served in the country, over 2400 have lost their lives and Afghan civilians are still dying at a rate of over 3000 annually. Now 16 years in, so far this year, there have been 11 American casualties. After a peak military presence of 100,000 soldiers, a force of about 12,000 American “military advisors and trainers” support about 300,000 Afghan security forces, stationed in isolated bases, much like the British and Soviets had been. Many suspect that the number of Afghan troops is overestimated by as much as 40%, similar to the “ghost soldier” in Iraq, a name on the military rolls unassociated with a body that is drawing a salary.

The military position of the Taliban changes from week to week. Some authorities contend that the organization has growing momentum. Despite heavy casualties, estimated to be 20,000 in 2012 and over 10,000 annually they appear to have no trouble recruiting. When the Khamab district was overrun by the Taliban during the week of Trump’s Afghanistan announcement, it was the sixth government held territory to fall. They have seized several provincial capitals, but have not held them successfully.  Still they control and dominate the surrounding countryside, as much as 48% of 400 administrative districts, from which they disrupt supply lines and commerce as well as kill Afghan forces and civilians. They also control Helmand province where 80% of opium is produced, a hugely lucrative source of financial support.  

Meanwhile, the Afghan government of Hamid Karzai is facing street protests over lack of security and political unrest. The Taliban influence in Kabul, once considered a relatively safe place, is growing, evident in stepped up terrorist attacks in the capital, despite the intense and concentrated security. The government is also beset with internecine conflict between pro-government warlords.

The Taliban has proven more tenacious than back in 2008, killing more Afghan government soldiers,  police and the elite special forces. The strength of the Taliban lies in its administration of rural and urban governments. They deliver government services, like utilities and schools, that the Karzai government is not. Trump has characterized the struggle for Afghanistan as a war to drive out the radical Islamists in order that the people determine their own future. But wiping out those characterized as terrorists may be killing normal Afghani who have  chosen lives with the public services that the Taliban have provided as preferable to some undefined concept of democratic government which in their country has meant only some form of oppression and corruption. The average illiterate Afghan has no idea what democracy means. 

But the Taliban we thought we knew has evolved as newly radicalized groups have come onto the scene. It appears that the Haqqani Network, once a marginal faction known for running a suicide bomber training camp in Pakistan, has now assumed leadership of the organization. The  Haqqani Network was deemed responsible for the most deadly attacks in Kabul. At this point. no one currently in Taliban leadership is interested in peace talks. General Matiss has said that American policy is now aimed at enhancing the territorial position of Afghan governmental forces to coerce the Taliban to peace talks, conceding a stalemate.

There are still other players in the Afghanistan shell game. Iran is supporting the government while it has intermittent relations with the Taliban. And then there is the incursion of ISIS forces, associated with the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, which has gained power in Khorasan. There are an estimated 50,000 jihadists and 4000 extremist groups fighting each other in Afghanistan. The UN estimates that ISIS has a presence in 25 of the country”s provinces. The Taliban sees ISIS as a potential rival, forcing them to become more radical and more violent. Altogether, some experts estimate that insurgents hold up to 60% of the countryside. The government contests or controls 35%, which is actually a quantum leap over the last year.

Vladimir Putin hasn’t overlooked the ISIS presence in the region. Russia believes that there more than 3000 fighters have come from the Northern Caucasus. It fears that the jihadists may spark militancy in Central Asia and southern Russia, making the situation in Putin’s mind, “close to critical”. Putin is not one to demur when territorial loss or pushback against his authoritarian regime in question. Russian assessment of the current situation has led them to take their own action. Moscow is currently negotiating with Kabul to provide combat helicopters and heavy weapons, assault rifles and tons of ammunition. It has also been training Afghan troops, slated to be expanded as NATO involvement in the conflict diminishes. To complement its efforts with the government, they are also negotiating with the Taliban, as part of its effort to combat the rise of ISIS.

Much to the surprise of the anti-jihadists forces, the Taliban seized the city of Kunduz in northern Afghanistan near the border with Tajikistan. The Taliban has also popped up in Badakhshan, another province of the Tajikistan border. These are new areas of incursion, ethnically more akin to the recruiting base of the former Northern Alliance, a Taliban enemy. It now appears that the support for this group is coming from Tajikistan, suggesting some involvement from the Kremlin. For its part, the Taliban has shown no propensity to challenge Russian influence in Central Asia or at home. Moscow seems content to use the Taliban as a temporary buffer to shield Tajikistan from the war against other radical Muslim groups.

The Russians view Islamist ideology as a variant of Afghan tribalism and nationalism rather than a global conspiracy. Their primary objective is to keep it within Afghanistan’s borders. Moscow’s fear is that well-trained ISIS-like groups flush with cash will bribe Taliban leaders and splinter the group from within. To that end, they want to strengthen the Taliban against its rival groups through supporting its leadership and its preparedness. Moscow, not wanting to repeat the US blunder of arming the mujahideen, is being careful to limit its support to a range of more unsophisticated weapons.

At the same time, the Kremlin is hedging its bets by building up its military presence in Tajikistan. It has been continuously reinforcing a Russian division in that country with both soldiers and attack helicopters.

Perhaps 45 has an insider link to Moscow’s maneuvering and is factoring those unknown bits into his Afghanistan scheme, letting the Russians do more of the heavy lifting there just as he’s done in Syria. Surely US Intelligence knows this stuff and they’ve passed it on the generals; they’re just not cluing the public in. The Trumpophants don’t care and that’s all that concerns the CelebrityPresident. Still Afghanistan is far more complicated than most of the public realizes. The situation, fluid and dynamic as it is, has multiple fingers dipping in the mix and that suggests a chaotic future for years to come.

Let’s Make A Deal

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President Trump Departs White House En Route To North Dakota For Tax Reform SpeechThe Dealmaker in Chief is riding high now. We hear there was a new bounce in his step. He finally made a deal, seven months into his presidency. He skirted the GOP leadership in Congress, basically ambushing them in an Oval office meeting with Democratic leaders Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi. With Mike Pence grinning at his side, he jumped into bed with the Democrats and threw the GOP leadership under the bus. It seemed like a snap decision made mid-meeting. Some have hinted that 45 just got bored, given his limp attention span. Apparently what clinched it for the Donald was that the Democrats had the votes for their proposal, a sure thing, while the Republicans were still fumbling with theirs, an outcome yet to be determined, with Democrats aligned against it and some Tea Partyers unenthusiastic.

The end result, a deal to pass legislation providing relief for Hurricane Harvey victims combined with raising the debt ceiling for the next 3 months, pulled the rug out from under Tea Partyers who were drooling to have a debate that would scold the legislature for excessive spending. That’s part of the lyrics for their sing-along song “mortgaging our grandchildren’s future”. Threatening government shutdown, they would hold Congress hostage in exchange for some pledge to make even more draconian cuts in the upcoming budget than are already requested. Damn human suffering; as one conservative said, he was looking forward to the day when every emergency didn’t become a federal one, even as Houston was drowning in the waters of Hurricane Harvey and Irma was in the wings.

In Schumer’s version of the meeting, related in an interview for the New York Times The Daily podcast, Paul Ryan kept accusing the Democrats of playing politics. Schumer’s response was to quote Ryan’s remarks during the 2 previous debt ceiling debates, essentially doing that politic playing thing. Mnuchin’s contribution was to repeat that the markets would crash in the continued uncertainty, which of course did not happen during the two previous government shutdowns.

Moments before attending the meeting, Paul Ryan was rehearsing his demonizing the Democrats for playing politics with disaster relief remarks in front of the press after flatly rejecting the Democratic proposal to extend the debt ceiling for 3 months earlier in the day. The GOP wanted to extend the debt ceiling for 18 months, until after the midterm elections, not wanting to fight over the debt ceiling or play the government shutdown card just before Christmas. And before that, there are the thorny issues of tax reform and the budget, briar patches where the chances of emerging unscarred are still iffy. After the meeting, Mitch McConnell’s chin would have quivered if he had one, as he remarked that the president could speak for himself.

As budget director Mick Mulvaney and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin tried to drum up support for the legislation, before the vote, among Republicans who sat in stunned disbelief, they were rumored to have booed Mnuchin, called by some the “Democratic donor Treasury Secretary”. On the other hand, Mulvaney is one of their own, a former Tea Party fiscal conservative, no doubt lured to the Dark Side by the CelebrityPresident’s charisma.

Lawmakers went on to approve $15 billion in hurricane relief as part of a short-term measure that increases the nation’s debt ceiling and keeps the government funded until December. The measure was opposed by more than one third of Republican Representatives.

Trump was over the moon with the favorable feedback he got from MSNBC of all places; so happy that he called Chuck and Nancy to tell him that Fox, Trump’s cable TV station was praising them. That was a homerun for Trump, he flipped the liberal cable coverage with the right wing cable coverage. The consummate showman, the RealityPresident was toying with the Republican Party. He was driving it home to his TrumpPack and the softer edges of support that are beginning to fray that he is 1) the one and only consummate deal closer; 2), that he can manage an inept Congress to get his agenda accomplished; and 3) that he is outside the party, soaring over its head. He wasn’t going to let Congress screw him over again and let down the people of Texas and Louisiana. Think back to his nomination acceptance speech where he extolled, “I am the only one who can!”

As for the Democrats, the detente would give them more leverage in upcoming bills like the DACA reboot (which 45 says he wants), the budget (which they don’t want) and maybe even tax reform; the legislative agenda for the next 6 months. The Democrats may have drawn some hope on DACA as Trump tweeted reassurances to Dreamers that they didn’t have to worry in the next 6 months about deportation, at the urging of his new best bud, Nancy. Never mind the 12 months after that. Still, 45 can be fickle and ICE could be moving on the Dreamers while he was tweeting. Next week brings a new day, when a new whim could emerges from under his freshly colored mop top. And he’s talking to Schumer, a fellow New Yorker from way back, about a plan to eliminate the debt ceiling revisits entirely.

To add insult to injury, 45’s Twitter feed lit up with criticism of the party. He insisted that he had to collaborate with the Democrats, contending that they held the power to block legislation. As he has done in the past, he pointed to the way out, that is to change the Senate Filibuster rule to cut the Democrats out of decision making. 45 went on to thrust his tax reform in their faces as urgent, his urgency stimulated by the need for a legislative win after his climax over Repeal Obamacare fizzled.

PresidentDealmaker went further when he championed a Democratic Senator whom he took with him to his North Dakota rally, calling her out as one of the good guys. He’s letting the GOP know that he has options to get done what he wants and he’s willing to do whatever. That comes as no surprise, of course, from a president without ideology or party loyalty or morals. His only creed is get what he wants when he wants it, damn the consequences. His desires can shift from moment to moment, as evidenced by his Twitter feed. By empowering the Democrats he may be advancing his own agenda, hoping to supplement the 51 GOP Senate votes since a couple of GOP defectors united with the Democrats can sink any Trump inspired legislation, a la the healthcare debacle. Or he may be applying the screws to McConnell to move to change Senate rules.

And low and behold, after the initial grumbling, more and more Republicans, nose rings securely clipped through their nostrils, have been falling in line behind their fearless leader, in the days since The Deal. Just as 45 knew they would. They can’t let go of those coat tails until they’ve finished making the rich richer and the poor poorer.

Antifa Are Anarchists and Self Admitted Thugs

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antifa

“An-tee-fa-a-a”, the Barker-in-Chief bellowed at a Make America Great Rally, as if he was introducing an trapeze act. Antifa had made the president’s list, an accomplishment the groups likely applauded. In 45’s hands, the antifa had emerged as the moral equivalent of white nationalists, the KKK and the neo-Nazis. No doubt they applauded that too. And yet, that may be one of the worst aspects of these small, scattered bands that coalesce in attacks against the white supremacist movement. More odious are attacks against the police and government.

There is no case for moral equivalence for Nazis, neo or not. And there is no equivalence in impact between the two movements either. The scale of violence of left extremists is miniscule. Right wing extremists  committed 74% of 372 politically motivated murders in the US from 2007-2016. There are no deaths attributed to the antifa. Moreover, they have nothing like the influence in the White House that white supremacists have; no Bannon, no Trump, no Alex Jones of Infowars and no Sessions who called the NAACP “unAmerican”.

Antifa is a neat abbreviation for Anti-Fascist Action reborn from roots in the 20s and 30s where leftists battled fascists in the streets of Germany, Italy and Spain, then disappeared after WWII. Groups revived in the 80s and 90s in the UK and in Germany after the fall of the Berlin Wall to defeat skinhead neo-Nazis in the music scene and then extended to the US through the punk scene where they called themselves Anti-Racist Action, sensing that Americans would warm more to anti- racism than anti-fascism. In the late 90s, the internet facilitated links with international groups.

The groups have had major appeal in the Pacific Northwest. Antifa activity began back in the late 1980s in reaction to a group of neo-Nazis beating an Ethiopian immigrant to death with a baseball bat. Portland is a stronghold, which may reflect the state’s rich history of racism. Alexis de Tocqueville observed that “The prejudice of race…no where is it as intolerant as in those states where servitude has never been known.”  When Oregon gained statehood in 1859, its constitution prohibited Blacks from living in the state. A small number of Blacks were allowed to stay in a hostile environment not unlike the South, but  it remained illegal for African Americans to move to the state until 1926.

Technically, the state constitution should have been overridden by the 14th Amendment, which the state ratified in 1866, but then rescinded in 1868, merely symbolic from a legal perspective, but not in terms of attitudes of state residents. The state did not re-ratify the 14th amendment until 1973. Still segregation was practiced across the state, reinforced by a Oregon Supreme Court ruling in 1906 that ruled that Negroes could be legally segregated from whites in public places. Even into the 1950s, there were restaurants in the Portland area who catered to “White Trade Only”.

In the aftermath of the Civil War, the state used its lily-white population as an appeal to attract new settlers to it’s white utopia. Officials envisioned their promotions as appealing to southerners as well as midwesterners, fleeing devastating conditions following the war. That desire to have a homogeneously white population targeted the Chinese and Japanese as well. In the 1890s, Chinatowns in numerous cities were burned and residents were forced to board trains out of town and often deported.

The movie, Birth of A Nation inspired an explosion of the Ku Klux Klan with the membership growing to over 14,000, with over 9,000 in Portland. Some estimates suggest as many as 50,000 men passed through the organization in its 10 year heyday. A population that was nearly 85% native-born with a history of antagonism toward African Americans, Eastern Europeans and Asians seemed ripe for the picking. The Klan thought Oregon was the near-perfect homogeneous American state. The KKK found success in appeals to the pioneer spirit, Protestantism and American nationalism. With such a small population of minorities, anti-Catholicism and anti-semitism were a prominent part of their propaganda. The KKK was well integrated into the political life of the state, with both a governor and state senators as members and traditionally hooded and white robed members photographed in community organizations and at events. But by 1926, the organization fizzled wracked with financial problems and infighting.

Even after the KKK faded, segregation remained. When WWII brought an influx of Negro workers to the Kaiser shipyards, the company built a city, Vanport, between Vancouver and Portland to house the laborers. Portland officials wanted it demolished and took the opportunity presented by a looming flood in 1948. Despite telling residents they would be warned to evacuate if dikes failed to prevent the area from flooding , they did not send out warnings when dikes first became compromised. The whole area washed away, leaving 18,000 people homeless, but remarkably only 18 people dead. Most survived by ignoring official advice to stay put until warned; the lapse in notification seemed to be tinged with genocidal intent. Housing for African Americans in Portland, was severely limited.

Against this backdrop, the Pacific Northwest has long been on the radar of white supremacists, attracting ex-southerners to its conservatism, gun culture, and its racial homogeneity, what 1920s KKK leader, Richard Butler, saw as the potential of the region to become an Aryan utopia. While the popular image of the region is one of millennials involved in the computer industry and tech start-ups or environmentalists steeped in a culture of organic eating and natural medicinals, Confederate flags are a common sight across the region.

In this cultural environment, the Pacific Northwest has been a bastion of antifa activity. From the political framework of these anarchists, the intention is to disrupt government, and the groups’ various activities have made some progress in Portland. They have disrupted so many city council meetings that the meetings have been moved behind locked doors which consequently keeps them out of public purview and comment as well. They hounded Mayor Ted Wheeler at his home so much that it drove him to a hotel. They break windows in down

The organizers of Portland’s annual Rose Festival parade were threatened by anonymous email with 200 people who would drag and push people presumed to “promote hateful rhetoric”. One group, Direct Action Alliance denounced marchers with Trump flags and red Make America Great Again hats and hinted that those people would be culled from the parade. Another group, Oregon Students Empowered created a Facebook page called “Shut down fascism! No nazis in Portland!” Portland police said they could not provide security; the parade was canceled. Later, the GOP claimed they could not conduct voter registration in the city without fear of physical injury either.

This kind of activity breeds fear in the hearts of Trumpophants. The GOP has started using a right wing militia called Oath Keepers for security at its rallies and say, in voter registration drives. The fear also breed violence. After Jeremy Christian made Nazi salutes and yelled out racial slurs at a Trump supporter March for Free Speech rally in Portland, he later stabbed three men on a train who were defending two teens from his racial slurs. Two of the men died. The following week, Trumpophants held another rally, with the guy who hit an antifa demonstrator in Berkeley with a pole. The antifa in turn threw bricks at rally attendees.

With the rise of more racist group activity released by the Trump movement, the antifa has also exploded as well. On Inauguration Davy, one activist sucker punched Richard Spencer, white supremacist; antifa disrupted Berkeley’s plans for Milo Yiannopoulos to speak; Middlebury College in VT disrupted a speech attempt by Charles Murray a conservative political scientist. They identify white nationalists and get them fired or evicted. They pressure venues to deny meeting places. They disrupt rallies with force. In Charlottesville, they used eggs, punches, pepper spray and sticks against the neo-Nazis and white nationalists. In San Jose, they punched and threw eggs at people leaving a Trump rally.

For the left, increasingly frustrated by the direction of the Trump administration unresponsive to anything other than its own interests, direct action becomes more attractive. This frustration is what’s feeding demonstrations in support for equality, the rights of women, immigrants and the LGBTQ community and against the hostility of the conservative right in all its permutations. That energy has led to increased interest and support for the antifa among the mainstream left as well. The NYC Antifa twitter feed nearly quadrupled in the first 3 weeks of January. Many progressives perceive fascist undertones in 45’s behaviors and actions: his disregard for the rule of law, his conduct of government as his personal and family fiefdom and the predominance of generals in administration. For them, anti-Trump antifa activity is tantamount to anti-fascist activity. In a recent YouGov survey, 71% of Democrats approve antifa activity.

Who are the antifa? They are a loose collective of anarchists and thugs. The Daily Show profiled a couple of men who see themselves as defending obscure video games against the claim that they are the property of the right. There are those who just like cracking heads. Others claim to be anti-authoritarian.  Others are anarchists. They have no faith in government which they see as complicit with fascism and racism. More than relying on government, they don’t want governmental forces to act against white nationalists, they want to do it themselves and in that way, make government impotent. They believe in direct action. The antifa thinks violence is the answer.

antifa on campus hero But this approach is problematic on multiple levels. They continuously trample on the right to free speech and free assembly. They think they are protecting people from harm while simultaneously offensively inflicting injury on others. They have designated themselves as the judge and the jury; theirs is the lens through which speech is permitted. It is their judgement that decides whose views should be heard or crushed. I, for one, want to use my own judgement and resent their interference in my decision making.

Increasingly they are targeting not neo-Nazis or white supremacists, but ordinary people leaving Trump rallies. They may categorize anyone attending a rally as a racist which unfortunately defines racism in its most narrow dimension as personal, rather than the institutional racism derived from governmental policies themselves. That is no better demonstrated than the Trump administration itself. They are not wrong in understanding that the government is complicit in racism; that the hand of the federal government studiously supported the southern Dixiecrats in their perpetuation of the Jim Crow police state and supported segregation outside the south through federal housing policies and even social security in the liberal programs of FDR. Or that it continues to support a justice system and policing policies that were born from the national urge to criminalize the Black man. But beating up powerless individuals who support the current administration is hardly a redress or even an approach to redress.

Yet they call their actions defensive, even as they come dressed in black, armed with sticks, clubs and pepper spray, faces covered with masks, heads covered with helmets or hoods. They contend that hate speech leads to violence against minorities and should be eliminated. Their tactics, however, are the epitome of authoritarianism. They are decidedly undemocratic, an illegitimate use of power by private citizens. They are vigilantes.

Secret-Antifa-Manual-Revealed-You-Gotta-See-THISTrumpophants in turn see antifa actions as assaults, attacks on freedom of assembly to which they respond with violence to reassert their rights. This is brewing street wars, not seen since the 1960s. When a white supremacist called a march in Sacramento to protest the attacks at Trump rallies, Anti-Fascist Action Sacramento counter protest resulted in 10 people being stabbed. In demonstrations against the Yiannopoulos appearance at Berkeley, where masked antifa threw Molotov cocktails and rocks at police, a white nationalist named Kyle Chapman retaliated by hitting an antifa activist over the head with a wooden post. Crowdfunding by the far right generated $80,000 for Chapman’s legal defense.

Another difficulty with self appointed vigilantes is their declaration that they are outside the law. They act on their own initiatives and they select their victims without any interaction with organizations, elected representatives or even a broad swath of the public. Their ideology of anarchy is inherently anti-government and disruptive of society. That makes them dangerous, to both the left and the right. Our history has shown that minorities are inherently at higher risk of harm when lawless reigns. It also makes them unstoppable, except by action from the government.

Those who see fascism in the White Supremacist-in-Chief do not see an effective way to combat his policies with standard liberal appeals to reason. But those who look to the antifa are selecting an authoritarian alternative which is no less dangerous. The antifa has no sympathy for liberal government.  They are vigilantes who have taken the law into their own hands. If there is any political philosophy in the group, it is anarchy which is antithetical to government itself. The antifa deserves to be denounced, just like Trump, and white nationalists.

Hey, Look at Me

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hurricaneAs all eyes and the media were laser focused on the struggle of storm victims to survive Hurricane Harvey, 45 was probably feeling ignored. Harvey was sucking up all the media air; his tweets were being downplayed or ignored. Harvey’s ratings were higher than his, unprecedented! The North Koreans launched more missiles, and he fell to third place. The storm challenged the president to calm the country’s fears; to applaud the people leading the response and commiserate with those whose lives were disappearing in the deluge. The CelebrityPresident never fails to disappoint. True to being Trump, he tripped over his ego again.

The public has come to expect its presidents to survey the disaster area. This is normal presidential protocol. But Trump has put the kibosh on presidential protocols. Still, not wanting to fall on George Bush’s sword of disengagement, his communications people reassured the public that 45 did not want to shaft emergency responders by draining resources from the storm response that a presidential visit entails.  Nothing is normal under the CelebrityPresident and neither was his visit to Texas. It was all about him, as almost everything for him is. It felt a little bizarre, but the shock has worn off in these last 7 months.

His visit took him to a spot where his carefully coiffed yet unruly hair would stay dry and his shoes could keep out of the mud. Trump’s compassion seemed sparse as he sat in a building with emergency planners in Corpus Christi where not a drop of rain was falling.  Social media dis’d Melania for wearing those stiletto heels but it turns out she was right; she knew she wasn’t going anywhere wet. Still, Twitter must have had some impact because she emerged from Air Force One with sneakers and a bit of product placement, a USA baseball cap available online. The site is sponsored, as listed on the web page by the “Trump Make America Great Again Committee, a joint fundraising committee authorized by and composed of Donald J Trump for President, Inc. and the Republican National Committee.” Remember, the already elected president is campaigning for 2020 now, another Trump historical landmark. The caps are $40. The Carnival Barker-in-Chief, also wearing the cap, never misses a chance to hawk his brand.

As Trump choreographed his interaction with the officials that he had been getting updates from while in the White House, or was it Mar-a-lago or New Jersey, he appeared much more interested in promoting Harvey as a “one in 500 year event” so he could then claim that his administration’s response was history making; one that will be used as an example for all other emergency responses. As usual, his facts were a bit muddled; Harvey is the third “one in 500 year event” in Houston in the last 50 years, giving it a considerably lower probability of 6 in 100. His references to the storm were somewhat cavalier, in a tone that is his own special blend of an attempt at humor tinged with condescending distance. Trump avoided any statement like “our hearts go out to the victims”; he struck what he probably considered a positive yet unemotional note of praise for the responders rather than commiserating with the stricken. He was worried about his ratings.

From Corpus Christi Trump flew on to Austin to meet with emergency response command and Ben Carson, HUD Secretary. He joked with him that “it [Harvey] seems like such an innocent name, right Ben, but it’s not innocent”. Still he stuck close to the guys in uniforms while he avoided victims or laying eyes on the disaster itself. He must have confused the TV screen with an actual helicopter flyover of the stricken area when he tweeted on August 30, “After witnessing first hand the horror&devastation caused by Hurricane Harvey, my heart goes out even more so to the great people of Texas!” Corpus Christi had little damage and he didn’t see any of that either. To claim he’s doing a great job when the rain he couldn’t see was still falling and the damage was still spreading exponentially is pure folly. This is before the flooding and loss of the water supply in Beaumont, the movement of victims from one shelter to another as some overflowed with people and others were in danger of overflowing with muddy water and all the unforeseeable consequences that later developed.  Arkema Chemical announced that their plant was full of water and without power to keep stored chemicals cold. The company acknowledged that it had no options to prevent an explosion, which is exactly what happened and the surrounding neighborhoods had to be evacuated.

u deserve meThe Donald studiously avoided any contact, even a few words, with victims. He didn’t have to be physically in the rescue centers; Skype or Facetime are great at putting people in different locations together. They could have generated a powerful video clip for the world. Instead he created a mini rally, maybe it was a spontaneously gathered crowd or maybe they had help, and he once again used the platform to brag about his greatness.” What a crowd, what a turnout.” Any place, any time, it’s all about him. Another sight for the history books; a disaster visit turned into a political rally. As he was promising the best recovery ever, he had previously moved to cut funding for FEMA and federal responses to emergencies in the upcoming budget. Just a few days earlier, he had signed an executive order to eliminate Obama rules that infrastructure projects account for predicted changes in climate.

The CelebrityPresident later pledged $1 million from what administration officials said his own personal fortune, perhaps emulating Ellen Degeneres. The Donald has been notoriously ungenerous with his money; an investigative reporter exposed that his $1 million pledge to veterans made during the campaign didn’t materialize until the reporter published his article. Another reporter found that the Trump Foundation is primarily maintained with contributions from others, sometimes compensation for Trump’s TV appearances. Those funds were used to pay Trump’s debts, like a fine from Ft Lauderdale for noncompliance with municipal regulations. They were also used to purchase a 6 foot tall portrait of the Donald himself. Hurricane Harvey may be another example of the verbal promise that holds no substance, but relies on lack of media attention for follow through.

(An aside: will Sarah Huckabee Sanders, White House press secretary come to regret her Dorian Gray-like deal with the Trump devil? For an evangelical Christian to come out so obviously lying day after day should disturb their sleep, but she may have exchanged it for a political career beginning with the next wave of Congressional races in which her extensive experience with the political lie will serve her well.)

And then the RealityPresident was off, one day later, to yet another love fest in Missouri, as if the fact that it had been previously scheduled made cancelation or rescheduling unthinkable. He needs his adoration fix urgently, given the deficit of attention he’s gotten during Harvey. In a make-up reset, he started by saying, to those who lost loved ones, all of America is grieving with you. Devoid of empathy, he couldn’t find the words to comfort the vast majority of storm victims, those injured and those who have lost everything they own including their pets. Not to acknowledge that everyone is emotionally devastated by their displacement from everything they know while the flooding was still spreading is to be wholly ignorant of the years of recovery that lay ahead for the victims and their city governments. His imagination is incapable of stretching that far. Trump’s never lost everything; sure he declared bankruptcy a few times, but that was to enable him to hold onto his personal assets. He’s always had credit so his lifestyle didn’t suffer a blip. He’s led a life sheltered from suffering and misery; it’s just not part of his lexicon. He is unable, like most people, to imagine himself in similar circumstances, drawing on something emotionally akin.

Of course, Trump fancies himself a giver, at least rhetorically, while Congress likes to taketh away. They’ve demonstrated that they’re not afraid to vote against what their constituents want, holding fast to their high principles. But Trump has already begun to goose his TrumpPack to show Congress their wrath if it doesn’t deliver funding for the Wall in the upcoming session (whatever happened to #mexicowillpay). He urged Missourians to dump Senator Claire McCaskill if she doesn’t vote with the TrumpPack.

In contrast, Mike Pence, a VP looking for all the world like a man exploring a run for president in 2020, got down in the weeds a couple of days later. He was talking with victims and clearing tree limbs. Trump made a do-over visit to Houston this Labor Day weekend. They say the third time’s the charm. Trump’s forte is standing above the crowd, not mixing in it. An admitted germophobe, he’s all about the selfie, but not so much handshaking with unknowns. Still, not to be outdone by his second in command, he loaded boxes on trucks, met with emergency workers, schmoozed with victims, and handed out foods in the rescue centers. He even threw in a hug or two; well; we know how he loves groping women. Although he was greeted by a small group of supporters when he landed, he stuck within his self-congratulatory mode. For this performance overall, he should get two thumbs up. Residents seemed appreciative of his visit, although they worried about what kind of support lay in their futures. The administration has already prepared a $14.5 billion proposal as part of a plan for more than $100 billion. And he even got wet as he boarded Air Force One to return to Washington, a fitting omen that Hurricane Harvey’s fury is still not over for the hundreds of thousands left behind.