Give me a Xanax!

Now I am really fearful.  I see things happening that are fundamentally changing what we are as Americans, and for the first time am seeing how far ‘back’ we will have to come once we rid ourselves of this scourge called Trump.

He is methodically undoing all the regulations and rules that were instituted in the Obama years to protect consumers and the small guys.  As a result, our efforts to stem the effects of global warming and climate change are being thwarted and reversed at every turn.  That doesn’t include the authoritarian executive orders he is disgorging on a regular basis.

His appointments to all the critical organs of our government are systematically deconstructing the effectiveness of their mission, or deconstructing their mission itself.  Look what is happening at the Department of State!  No appointments to crucial second level administration posts are being made.  The Secretary of State is flying around the world by himself without a press contingent; he refuses to comment about anything; there is no one at State to answer a phone call from disparate parts of the world as issues present themselves, and no plans to staff key positions.  What then is the role of the State Department.

Trump's Middle East envoy is told to report to Jared Kushner and not Rex Tillerson.  What does that tell you about the importance of the State Department?

There is constant subterfuge going on with this Russia investigation.  All the administration says is, “Look here at this, or look here at that, but don’t look at the investigation into what we were really doing”.  Distraction.  Lying.  Obfuscation.  That is what we see every day as the connection of all the dots lumbers ahead so that the picture of mendacity and subterfuge becomes a bit clearer every day.

There is chaos in the White House and administration.  Unqualified people are in charge of critical operations and governmental responsibilities.

And what are we able to do about it?  Nothing yet.  One wonders when whatever intelligent Republicans remain in the Congress will realize that they are Americans before Republicans and do what they must to rescue us all from this miasma of incompetence and danger.

What happens when there is a real crisis that will need to be managed by a grown-up?

Bill Maher delivered a truly enlightening monologue at the end of last Friday’s Real Time.  He characterized positions taken by Republicans in Congress as if tghey were asking themselves  He then went on to catalogue all the issues we face as a country from climate change to economic decisions affecting all of us and illustrated how Republican statements and positions reflect their complete disregard for the welfare of all of us, making them all “dicks”.  Definitely worth watching to get a real sense of the mentality we are dealing with.

, “Given the variables and mission of all the issues we deal with, how can I take a position that makes me a “dick”?

Eventually the pendulum will swing back, and we will be able to again make policy with rationality in mind, but let’s hope there is something left to make policy about……

Time Is Running Out.......

We are in trouble, and if we don't act soon, our free 

way of life will disappear..

All the negative things that so many have foretold with the ascension of the Trump machine are happening and it portends an ugly result.

The full panoply of Russian activity and subversion is becoming clear, and what were at first tenuous threads to the Trump people are being revealed as much more substantive.   In fact the relationships that are being revealed are so antithetical to what we have always believed were American values, that it is breathtaking.

The level of lying, misrepresentation, obfuscation and distraction is constant and at a high level.  As soon as reporters or critics point to questionable and downright illegal activities by the Trump Administration, the immediate response is to distract, change the subject or revive old tropes about the Clintons or Democrats.

The House Intelligence Committee farce; the double standard and crass shell game the administration is playing is not fooling anyone, but the continually muted flaccid response from Republicans is remarkable.  When will all these people remember that they are Americans first before Republicans.  Our democracy is truly in danger.

The Russians are slowly, successfully dismantling our democratic institutions with the complicity of the Trump Administration.  The Administration itself is slowly but surely dismantling all the safeguards set in place by the previous administrations to protect us, the citizens.  Instead the ‘preferred citizens’ are now corporate interests and greedy billionaires.  Eventually the populist promises will wind up biting the believers in the ass, and then, maybe we can recapture our democracy from the clutches of those whose goal is to dismantle the ‘administrative state’.

There are so many potentially egregious, impeachable actions taking place at every turn, that we are all being numbed by it.  Guess what folks, lying is not OK!  Stonewalling investigations and raising of red herrings is not OK!  Changing our democracy into a strongman authoritarian ruling modality is not OK!  Not releasing tax returns, continuing to maintain economic controls and management of personal interests which is in violation of the emoluments clause of the Constitution is not OK!

And now, look at the ‘Presidents’ advisors:  Jared Kushner, Ivanka Trump—nepotism, please!  All the unqualified people running parts of the government now who subscribe to the President and Bannon’s plan to deconstruct the government seem to have a free hand to do their damage.

I am certain that the founding fathers are spinning in their graves at the metamorphosis taking place in our beloved republic.

Connecting the Dots

I have become a fan of Rachel Maddow.  I really like her opinionated and passionate style, but what I really love is her ability to tell a story.  As with any good storyteller, she begins with something that at first seems innocuous until she weaves all the elements of the story together, carefully and skillfully , until the overall picture  begins to come into focus.

That is what she did last night on her program on MSNBC.  Starting with a backgrounder on Bechtel, the giant infrastructure company that completes huge projects around the world, which evolved from an interesting history of the Seatac Narrows Bridge in Washington , she enumerated the scope of the companies activities worldwide.  Then she focused on a particular project Bechtel was bidding on in Azerbijian. 

Azerbijian has become very wealthy because of it’s oil reserves and with lots of money, wanted to build a huge road infrastructure throughout the country.  When Bechtel’s bid of $4-5 Million per kilometer of road was rejected in favor of another contractor’s bid of $18 Million per kilometer, Rachel asked the obvious question:  Why would Azerbijian choose to pay 3 times the cost to this alternate construction company?  Turns out the alternate construction company was a front for Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, the largest purveyor/exporter of terrorism in the world right now.  Hmmmm.

So you might ask why Iran’s Revolutionary Guard has a construction company…..well, it turns out that using front companies is how they launder money out of IRAN to support their worldwide terrorism activities.  You see, the Azerbijiani Transportation Minister responsible for letting those contracts pays all that money to the Revolutionary Guard of Iran’s Construction company which is then free of any restriction to distribute that money abroad.  So he is supporting the terrorist activity……and of course is making a huge ‘fee’ while doing it.  This is the quintessential definition of a corrupt business practice, not to mention supporting a terrorist organization.

Then Rachel turned to her most salient part of the story.  It turns out that Donald Trump, up until a month after the election, was a business partner with the Azerbijiani Transportation Minister’s family to build the new Trump Tower in Baku, the capital of Azerbijian.  He even sent Ivanka there in 2014 to manage the deal.  The only fly in this ointment is that the new hotel was being constructed in a place that was probably the least desirable location in the city, far from the place where a tourist hotel of the caliber of a Trump project would expect to be seen.  It was in the middle of some railroad yards and surrounded by highways with no ‘off ramps’ to get to the building.  There are some sketchy financial records that were part of Trumps presidential filings prior to the election that shows he received several million dollars from this project before he backed out of the deal in December of 2016.  What do you suppose was going on there?

Is it too much to surmise that Trump was doing business with a family that has the reputation of being the ‘Corleones of the Caspian’, as described in Foreign Policy Magazine in 2014?   This inexplicable project which was inexplicably abandoned 1 month after the election, makes it highly likely that Mr. Trump was doing business with a corrupt, bribery ridden supporter of terrorist activities worldwide.

It is against US Law to do business with people, companies or countries in which simple due diligence shows that their activities are sanctioned, corrupt and illegal.  Under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Law, you cannot go into business with people like this—it is punishable with jail time…..and yet he did.

How many other deals like this are there around the world that the Trump Organization has or is still participating in?  How many of their business partners are in the business of laundering money, paying outrageous sums for projects that make no sense, supporting front organizations that support international terrorism?  (How about the $30 Million house in Palm Beach that the Trumps bought and then immediately sold to a Russian for $90 Million without even opening the front door, and then saw it demolished?    A quick $60 Million for moving money around?)

This is just the tip of the iceberg friends.

And so, we see the dots being connected by journalistic professionals who are doing real digging.  This President’s financial records must be examined.  The American people need to understand the moral or amoral motivations of this man before it is too late.

And I encourage all of you to watch Rachel Maddow.  She is perhaps the most articulate and coherent story teller we have seen in many a moon.  And her stories are so important to listen to….. for the health and safety of our democracy.

The Awakening?

What difference a few days make, eh?  Suddenly the airways are full of full-throated Americans who are pissed off at what is happening.  (It must have been my blog that rattled their cages and made them awaken!)

I admit I watch a lot of MSNBC to try to make all of this a bit more palatable, but I am seeing a kind of unexpected jubilation on the faces of the MSNBC commentators as they seem to be surprised by the unexpected virulence of the town hall reactions that the current Congressmen are getting from their constituents.  Frankly it does give one an inkling of hope.....

The crowds that are jamming the town meetings are a mixture of Dems and Repubs, without the absolute need to identify themselves.  They suddenly seem to be just Americans who are looking at the state of our government and saying to themselves, Holy Shit, what is going on??  Finally, the patient shows signs of life!

It is unclear what happens from  here, because of course the Trumpians and all the suck-upian Republicans are blaming all this demonstration on the 'liberal activists'.  But our newly awakened citizens know better.  There are lots of reports of many new people who are considering running for office.  As I have said for years, that is the only way there will be real change in our country.  We all need to get involved from the ground up....from school boards to county commissions, to state legislatures.  It is time to grab a hold of our democracy and shake all the leeches off it, douse them with lighter fluid and get rid of them with a match!  Maybe that is what will happen.

This new renaissance of spirit in the body politic is encouraging.  It is almost possible to imagine the feeling of the colonists as they gathered in secretive groups to talk and plan on how to rid the land of the hated English monarchists in 1776.  Can you imagine what that scenario would have been like if everyone had an Iphone and Twitter?

Of course it is way too early to have real hope that we will be able to rid ourselves of the Republican political scourge that has blighted America for the last 40 years, but if we nourish these voices and continue to expose the hypocrisy and self serving arrogance of people like Jason Chaffetz, Mitch McConnell and all the too many parasites that find those kind of people acceptable, perhaps there is a light at the end of the tunnel of despair we are trying to escape.

Dawning Awareness......

This is the first blog in almost 4 years.  For those of you who have read me in the past, I decried what I saw as the slow and steady corruption of our American system.  I repeatedly, with hope and belief, saw an opportunity to 'turn it around'.  Today, not so much......

I am a patriotic American.  I believe in, and revere the Constitution and honor the long road we have traveled as an experiment in democracy for 241 years.  And so I am trying to find an accommodation for what we seem to have become as a republic.

I can’t find my way.  And that is mostly because I have become acutely aware that the country I thought I belonged to has a large group of citizens who are not educated, are not critical thinkers and who are afflicted with herd mentality.  Their values are not the same as mine.  I am a man of integrity and honesty.  I believe in telling the truth; of accepting facts in the pursuit of reason and intelligent decision making. 

That is not the way the citizens I am describing view their world.  These citizens simply don’t want to accept facts that are proven.  They are happy to accept hearsay falsehoods and facebook as the true source of the truth.  They do not have  inquisitive minds.  They are oblivious to the actual fact that they are rabidly supportive of a movement led by an anti-intellectual who has no interest in their needs.

All one has to do is watch the news reports of the ‘rallies’ being held and see the assortment of citizens who stand in endless lines to attend these gatherings where they feel like their anger is being justified and assuaged.  These are not intelligent people who read and consider actions and their consequences.  These are followers; sheep; lemmings following a pied piper who is rude, crass, and narcissistic.

The true tragedy is the ‘party they belong to’.  Witness a collection of purportedly intelligent people who unfortunately do not understand liberty and whose priorities, in this order, are: power, money, re-election, party, the people, and finally the country.  Democracy is not a concept they truly understand, and so they are ambivalently happy to see it trampled, desecrated, and ignored.

The current USA is not what I thought it was.  It is a country without purpose anymore.  It is being led by people whose mission is to acquire power and make as much money as they can no matter the damage to the republic, the world , the climate, the environment, consumer protection, health care, jobs, etc. etc. etc.

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But the reality is that it may be too late to redeem these citizens.  They have sacrificed their independence on the altar of expedience.  They are humanoids who have lost the ability to be human.  That is the tragedy of the United States of America in 2017.  I am afraid.

A Truly 'Sick' System

How many of you have read Stephen Brill's article in Time Magazine about what is going on in the healthcare industry?  It details how the hospital system in this country is bilking the American people.  Brill chronicles several patient stories and reports in great detail how hospitals, while claiming to be non-profit, gouge us all to death-literally- with exorbitant prices for every one of their services and supplies.

As I am sure most of you know, insurance, whether it is Medicare or private insurance negotiate rates with hospitals because they actually know what things cost.  Unfortunately, those of us with no insurance or little insurance are presented with bills for care that are so outrageously beyond a reasonable profit margin, that many of our citizens are forced into bankruptcy or forced to pay off bills for years that are unreasonable.

I would urge all of you to take the time to read this article carefully.  It will change the way you think about hospital care.

The picture that emerges from this study is one of an institutional medical system gone rogue.  Incredibly greedy people with stratospheric salaries are running a system with no real accountability.  Charges for everything from simple supplies like gauze pads, blankets, sheets to sophisticated instrumentation are anywhere from 10 to 500 times what they really cost.  Brill details it all and it takes your breath away.

The horror of all this is that there is no compassion for the sick in this story.  When you have to go to the hospital for anything, do you EVER ask what the charges are?  No, of course not.  You are at the hospital because you have injured yourself or your loved one is in an emergent condition with disease or injury.  Are you going to stop and ask what it costs when the surgeon says, " We need to take you to surgery right away to stop the bleeding!"

I don't think so.

So what we have here is a system that favors the well to do.  If you have insurance, you at least have some protection, although with limits set by insurance companies, in todays hospital world your charges can easily exceed the limits and you are on the hook for the balance.  If you have no insurance you are in debt for the rest of your life.  The poorest and least covered among us are paying huge amounts of money because they have no one to negotiate the rates, and the hospital system is brutal in it's pursuit of its profits.

My disgust with this situation is aimed at several groups.  First, the media.  How much have you heard about this problem since that particular issue of Time was released?  Except for one story, I have heard nothing.  This is a shameful national economic crisis and no one is saying anything about it.  Why not?   Probably because the hospital lobbyists are intimidating all our representatives in Congress with threats of withdrawal of support for their re-elections, or threats of withdrawal of consulting agreements or future employment opportunities.  People--sick people--are being fleeced and no one is advocating for them.  Where is our Fourth Estate?

Second, our Congress and Administration have failed to stop this outrage.  Why you may ask?  Do I really need to answer this point?

Third, the people running these systems have exorbitant salaries, most administrators and board member's pay exceeds six figures...that's right, over $1M.  Admittedly this is not an easy job, but where is their real oversight.   It is not hard to see the egregious nature of what their institutions are charging, so why don't they stop it?

The victims here are mostly powerless to stop this.  If you need the hospital, what is your alternative?....the healthcare system in a neighboring country??

This is a terribly depressing scenario.  Real change here will take some legislative muscle and as we know, there is only atrophy in that particular venue.