Monthly Archives: June 2019

Disliking Trump Is Not Enough

June 28, 2019

art, civil rights, democracy, economy, history, politics, strategy

Book Review: Woodward, Bob, “Fear. Trump in the White House.” Simon & Schuster, New York, 2018

Most of the people who can read already have a low opinion of Donald J Trump. What they find in Woodward’s careful documentation of White House conversations is not likely to change many opinions. It will confirm, and strongly confirm, those with the opinion that the President of the United States is a lazy, prevaricating, egomaniacal, loose pistol with one finger on his Twitter feed and the other on nuclear war.

The book extensively explains that Trump believes that power is fear. But I don’t think that’s the reason for the book’s title. I think Woodward is talking about the world’s fear for its own safety.

If one wanted to take Trump’s view of things, or if one yearned for the vacuous “neutrality” nonsense to which most journalists pretend, then one could credit Trump with being loyal to his original plan. In other words, he really is against free trade, globalization, immigrants, and foreign entanglements. If those ideas are twisted and spun well, a lot of Americans would agree with him on those fundamentals. In fact, a lot of Americans voted for him and will vote for him again.

The popular idea that any Democrat could beat Trump in 2020 is just as unreliable a belief as the 2016 national conviction, supported by scientific polling, that he didn’t stand a chance against Hillary Clinton. Nobody believed that Trump would take power, even though they had the clear precedent from Nazi Germany.

Understanding Is Needed

It is not enough to dislike Donald J Trump as we prepare for 2020. It is not enough to quote Bob Woodward from this book to convince people to look elsewhere for a president in 2020. If we are to make progress in the 2020 elections, we need to carefully explain what is happening and what must be done.

Certain truths need to be faced and understood. Begin with the clear fact that we are reaching the end of America’s economic dominance. The reasons for that dominance grew out of World War I and World War II. Those reasons are long gone. American continues to dominate the world militarily, but not economically. Donald Trump did not make that happen. He exploits it, but he didn’t make it happen.

Springing directly from America’s waning economic domination and continuing military domination is the growth of immigration numbers. After all, if the United States hadn’t created the Syrian military crisis, millions of people would have stayed home. In other countries, it may take two sentences instead of one to explain why families leave home, but the military and economic factors, both springing largely from the United States, are the root cause. Donald Trump exploits that situation, but he didn’t create it.

Hitler exploited the 25% unemployment rate in Germany and the failure of the social democrats to reform society. He didn’t create the misery, but he exploited it.

Speaking of Hitler and Trump, it is especially important to note that they had a lot more power afterward than they did when they were first elected. Hitler was eventually able to do away with the German legislature entirely. Trump hasn’t gone that far, but Trump and the Trump supporters have eroded the power of the legislative branch. Their control over the judiciary is even more obvious and more scary.

The Solution Goes Far Beyond Personalities

As 2020 draws near, progressive voters are asking, “Which Democrat has the best chance of beating Trump?” That question barely scratches the surface of what is needed. No one person, even a president, will change the underlying problems we face. The president that we elect, and all the down-ballot politicians that we elect, are going to have to contribute to actual solutions: organizing for fundamental change.

—Gene Lantz

I’m on KNON’s “Workers Beat” radio program at 9 AM Central Time every Saturday. If you are curious about what I really think, check out my personal web site

Good News ‘Neath Bad

June 15, 2019

democracy, elections, politics, strategy, unions

1 Comment

Why am I still smiling?

In Dallas, the “business elite,” a euphemism for “unscrupulous greedy rich people,” won the June runoff elections for City Council and School Board. Turnout was among the lowest in the nation.

Elections are absolutely critical, but we always find that the winners we support (think Obama) can’t really save us from everything and the ones we worked against (think Trump) can’t really do as much damage as we feared. So elections are not entirely completely totally about who won and who lost.

To understand politics, we have to look beyond candidates and try to understand trends. For example, the Dallas election turnout was 33% higher than the last comparable election. The runoff election, which should have had a much lower turnout than the first round because there were far fewer candidates, was the same as the first round!

What does it mean? It means that we may have a very low level of political consciousness in Dallas, but that it’s dramatically improving! That’s one thing to smile about!

Another trend worth noting is the humongous amounts of money that rich people are paying to win elections. Positions that they used to buy for a few thousands are now costing them millions! Money still wins elections, but it takes more of it!

Another very good trend sounds like a bad trend: the political stooges of the rich-and-greedy are trying every possible way to end democracy, especialy as it applies to elections. Voter suppression is obvious in many state legislatures, especially ours. If they weren’t running scared, would they be publicly shaming themselves so?

The rule of the rich-and-greedy is becoming precarious, and they know it!

Some other good things are evident in Dallas’ local elections. In the past, it was difficult to pick the candidates to vote for. Nowadays, the Dallas AFL-CIO has perfected the most comprehensive screening process ever available for working families. Many Dallasites haven’t realized it yet, but the information is there for future elections.

And, speaking of information, the Dallas AFL-CIO is steadily improving its ability to inform and activate the progressive population. In the last week of the runoff election, we were finally able to establish a Digital Organizing Committee that will be the beginning of a progressive information network. Our goal is to organize everybody, and, thanks to the farsighted National AFL-CIO leadership, we have the tools to do it!

Thanks for reading this. You’re proving my point! If you share it around, you’ll prove it even more!

–-Gene Lantz

I’m on KNON’s “Workers Beat” program 89.3 FM in Dallas at 9 AM Central Time every Saturday. If you are curious about what I really think, check out my personal web site

Scared of Robots?

June 14, 2019

art, civil rights, politics

Leave a comment

Artificial intelligence has a lot of people scared, but they’re looking the wrong way.

Humans is good TV

I love the way good futuristic science fiction can be used to illustrate current problems. Normally, they take just one trend in our current lives and push it to extremes. In the terrific TV series “Humans,” almost all middle-income Americans have at least one humanoid-looking robot doing all their grunt work. Virtually all basic industry uses them. But they discover a handful of them who have their own consciousness that matches, and excels, that of the humans.

Should we be scared? Well, most of the humans in the TV series are terrified. A lot of working people, in the TV series, didn’t like the robots to begin with because robots could do their jobs better and cheaper than they could. They really, super don’t like the ones that aren’t anybody’s slaves!

The series is really entertaining and thought provoking. But should we really be afraid of robots and artificial intelligence? I just found a nice article by Cori Crider, she wrote “The Big Picture, the World According to AI. She founded an organization called Foxglove that aims to make tech accountable. The article was “Artificial Intelligence Reinforces Power and Privilege.”

I would guess that Crider is one of the people who want to break up Google and Facebook with anti-trust laws. It’s similar to the solution posed in the TV series: “kill the robots!”

Robots, or artificial intelligence, or automation, has been with us for a long time, and it’s true that lots of people fear it and would like to smash it like the Luddites of old. The trend isn’t going to lessen, it’s going to get stronger so that, more and more, the futuristic sci-fi on TV won’t seem so far away.

But it isn’t the machines that take our jobs. It isn’t the machines that want to replace us. Machines don’t have stomachs demanding food nor hormones demanding sex partners. Our problem is the the same one we’ve always had, it’s the bosses!

Even if we had humanoid robot servants with superior mental abilities, they would not threaten us. If we were in control, we’d just cut our working hours drastically and enjoy the better life that the robot servants could provide.

The problem is that we’re not in control. That’s the problem.

–Gene Lantz

I’m on KNON radio’s “Workers Beat” program 89.3 FM in Dallas at 9 AM Central Time every Saturday. They pod-cast it on Itunes. If you are curious as to what I really think, check out my personal web site

Ask Before Bombing

June 14, 2019

Uncategorized

Leave a comment

Before we start bombing, we might want to check around.

Looking for an Enemy

I’ve said for sometime that Mr Trump would like to be considered a “wartime president.” A wartime president wouldn’t be bothered with subpoenas, investigations, and possibly even the 2020 election. The fires on the oil tankers are now being twisted into just the excuse he needs.

But Americans could be a little skeptical about the new excuse for war. The wars we waged since 1945, for example all of them, were started under very questionable circumstances.

On the BBC this morning, an Iranian spokesman said that if his country wanted to block the Strait of Hormuz they would just block it. The video of their sailors removing a defunct mine from one of the tankers only proved that they had removed it, not that they had put it there. Pompeo said they had kidnapped the tanker crew that they rescued!

A good source on Middle-East developments is the Qatar news service, Al Jazeera. They’re so good that they suffer powerful attacks from the United States and Saudi Arabia. Here’s some of what they have posted:

*https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2019/06/holds-iran-responsible-reported-gulf-attacks-tankers-190613183053625.html

*US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has accused Iran of being behind the reported attacks that damaged two tankers in the Gulf of Oman, offering, however, no concrete evidence in a statement that came hours after Tehran called the incidents “suspicious”….

*A Saudi-led military coalition, which is battling the Houthi rebels in Yemen, described Thursday’s events as a “major escalation” and linked them to July 2018 attacks on two Saudi oil tankers in the Red Sea.

*Riyadh had blamed the attack on the Houthis, which it alleges receives arms from Iran, a charge Tehran denies.

*Russia, one of Iran’s main allies, was quick to urge caution on Thursday, saying no one should rush to conclusions about the incident or use it to put pressure on Tehran.

*Qatar, meanwhile, called for an international investigation and a de-escalation of tensions. In a statement, the Qatari foreign ministry condemned what it called acts of destruction “regardless of who is behind them”.

We haven’t heard the last of this. The Trump Administration will either get a war started or go out of business. I’m hoping the latter comes before the former.

–Gene Lantz

I’m on KNON radio’s “Workers Beat” program at 9 AM Central Time every Saturday. If you are curious about what I really think, check out my personal web site

Bernie Speaks

June 12, 2019

democracy, history, politics, strategy

Leave a comment

I had to agree with just about everything that presidential candidate Bernie Sanders said on Facebook Live on June 12. I especially liked his opening remarks.

Sanders said that our nation and the world are facing a choice of two different paths. One goes toward authoritarianism and oligarchy, the other toward socialism. Worse yet, our nation and the world are being forced to choose one or the other. “This is that time,” Sanders said.

Rampant inequality is causing the crisis. In our nation, three families control more wealth than the bottom 160 million. Worldwide, a mere 26 billionaires have more than half the planet’s population. It gets worse every time statistics are discovered.

Sanders correctly compares today’s situation with the one we faced in the 1930s. Europe ended up with the bad path, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt took America on the good path. Sanders says that our task today is to continue Roosevelt’s plan, not Hitler’s.

How? You may properly ask. Sanders says, “The only way we can achieve these goals is through a political revolution.” I agreed with that, too.

When Sanders’ plan gets shaky is when he says that his revolution will be accomplished with no more effort than good electioneering and voting. I’d certainly like to agree with that, but it’s actually going to be considerably harder. After all, F.D. Roosevelt was elected four times and permanent progress still eluded us.

Getting organized with the Bernie Sanders campaign may turn out to be only a first good step, but no one could deny that it’s a darned good first step.

–Gene Lantz

I’m on KNON radio’s http://knon.org/workers-beat “Workers Beat” program 89.3 FM in Dallas at 9 AM Central Time every Saturday. If you are curious about what I really think, check out my personal web site