Judiciary Is Undermined Worldwide

November 22, 2018
democracy, history, politics, strategy
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Are these recent news articles related?

  • American Chief Justice John Roberts publicly strikes back against President Trump
  • Poland is forced to re-seat judges who had been forced out
  • Top political leaders of Brazil are forced out by judiciary

On the front page of the Dallas newspaper, Roberts is quoted: “We do not have ‘Obama Judges’ or ‘Trump Judges’ or ‘Bush Judges’ or ‘Clinton Judges.'” Trump insists that we do. Two main points take up the rest of the article:

  1. Trump has consistently vilified Roberts and any other judge who disagrees with him
  2. It is completely unprecedented for a Supreme Court Justice to fight back

Over on page 16, under the headline, “Poland: Judges Will be Reinstated,” we learn that the reactionary government of Poland has been forced to bring back their nation’s top judges after pressure from the European Union.  A couple of weeks ago, we learned that an outright dictatorial fascist had been elected President of Brazil after their judiciary put his two most important political adversaries into prison. It’s more complicated, but it’s going on in Argentina, too.

Democracies Use Checks and Balances

The judiciary reviews the acts of other government branches. That’s what we’re used to in our 250 or-so years of limited American democracy. It’s no secret in America that much of our judiciary, including the Supreme Court, has been taken over by dark money so that they can hand power and wealth to billionaires. At the same time, Americans, including many of the judges, still believe that we have an impartial judiciary overseeing a fair democracy. Apparently, Chief Justice Roberts is one of those.

Whether we agree with him or just have some intellectual equivocating position, we need to back Roberts against Trump as part of our worldwide fight to save every scrap of democracy!

–Gene Lantz

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

Once: Only One Woman in Congress

November 21, 2018
chauvinism, elections, history, politics, women
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Book Review:

Smith, Norma, “Jeannette Rankin. America’s Conscience.” Montana Historical Society Press, Helena, 2002.

jeannette-rankin

According to the intro, Norma Smith wrote this in the 1970s. She died in 2001, before they decided to publish it. She developed the information by research and visiting Rankin several times in the 1970s. It seems suitable to read this book in late 2018, because the mid-term elections put a record 100 women into Congress! But once, there was only Jeannette Rankin.

I was impressed with the historical value of this volume. I know a little bit about some of the historical events involving Rankin, but this work brings it together and contributes valuable information.

I especially like trying to understand the transitional nature of politics during and after World War I. Up to 1916, African Americans and other progressives generally supported the Republican Party because they won the war to end slavery. The Republicans lost some of that vote because of overt racism during the T.R. Roosevelt administration. Major African American leaders such as W.E.B. Dubois switched to the Democrats during the 1916 presidential race partially because President Wilson said he had “kept us out of war.”

Jeannette Rankin ran as a Republican, but she didn’t consult them when she voted. She apparently didn’t consult anybody!

Rankin was a major mover of the suffragette movement. She was a congresswoman twice. She stood up for many social programs benefiting, especially, women and children. She was an important part of the pacifist movement and is the only person to have voted against both WWI and WWII. Each of those votes ended her political career at the time, even though she had been elected both times by anti-war voters. I guess that’s how fast public opinion can change.

I’m not sure what it means, but Rankin was a big disappointment to the feminist movement of the 1960s. I think she opposed the Equal Rights Amendment! By the time she died, women did not esteem her. Anti-war activists certainly did, though, because she lived long enough to add her voice to protests of the American adventure in Vietnam.

jeannette-rankin-peace

Earlier, Rankin was smeared in many different ways. Anaconda Copper was one of her enemies, and they controlled most of the press in Montana.  Among the slurs against her was the often charge of communist. According to this book, she could not have possibly been a disciplined or consistent communist, because she voted, during her second term, to extend the Dies witch-hunt Committee. It changed its name to House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC).

There were some intersections between Rankin’s life and that of my personal hero, Frank Little. She was born in Missoula, and apparently lived there when the IWW carried out its first big free speech fight. She came to Butte within weeks after Frank Little’s lynching. She apparently did not publicly approve of Little, but she decried the manner of his death.

I knew that the suffragette movement was fractious and I knew that FDR had to overcome a lot of resistance as he maneuvered the United States into World War II, but I’d never seen the detail that I find in this book.

There are a lot of other interesting historical people in this book. Texans may be interested in Rankin’s long friendship with Maury Maverick of San Antonio. Maverick wrote her that she had done the right thing in voting against WWI, but he wrote that he had changed his position because WWII was different. He wanted her to vote for war, as almost everybody did after Pearl Harbor. She stuck to her guns and voted against it anyway. It’s interesting to speculate about her motives and what might have happened.

One of the things I didn’t know is that FDR had already moved to wreck the Japanese economy months before Pearl Harbor. According to this book, FDR left them little choice but to attack. Rankin generally did not support FDR.

As far as I can figure out, Rankin’s politics were inconsistent, as middle-class politics generally are. She was remembered as an eccentric in her personal life and in politics. But I don’t think anybody ever accused her of following somebody else.

–Gene Lantz

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

Mother Courage Teaches Us

November 20, 2018
art, history, politics, strategy, women
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My astute movie buddy found out that Texas Women’s University was staging Bertold Brecht’s play, “Mother Courage” in nearby Denton, Texas. She bought tickets immediately, thereby providing a genuine educational experience for me.

My own experience with Brecht had never gone much further than listening to Bobby Darin’s 1960s rock song, “Mack the Knife.” But I knew he had been a communist and was a German who opposed Hitler. This play was written about the time the Nazis invaded Poland. The play doesn’t mention Hitler nor WWII, it is set in the Thirty Years’ War in Europe in the 17th century. But then,”M.A.S.H.” was set in Korea, but it was about Vietnam.

Wikipedia says, “Mother Courage is considered by some to be the greatest play of the 20th century, and perhaps also the greatest anti-war play of all time.” You should try to see it if you can, but not because you’re going to like the title character. Or not because you’re going to like anybody at all in this play. They’re not heroic nor self-sacrificing, not physically beautiful, not charming, not tremendously insightful nor clever. They are just people. In other words, this is not an American play. As far as I know, Hollywood has never shown the slightest interest in filming it.

Apparently, Bertold Brecht didn’t believe in cultivating emotional transference between his characters and the audience. He felt that nothing should get in the way of the basic art experience between audience members and the entire performance. He wanted to make his point. In this case, his point was that war is an awful thing benefiting no one, and perhaps adding that people who try to exploit war deserve help the least.

Mother Courage and her children sell food and sundries to Protestant soldiers, or sometimes to the Catholics, in the devastating religious war underway. The thing that she and others in the play dread most is the possible ending of the war. It would cut off their livelihoods. This message is more than obvious in a conversation between two Swedish soldiers in the first scene. The rest of the play enlarges the theme, like a map of battle zones, by sticking pins in it.

Need A Spiritual Life Coach?

November 5, 2018
education, strategy
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I normally listen to NPR while I do my morning yoga, stretches, and calisthenics. Six days a week it’s news, but sometimes on Sundays I catch some motivation program named something like “Humankind.” They interview various “spiritual advisers” and “life coaches” who use a lot of elusive terms like “inner voices” and “true destiny.” They want us to meditate and to “settle with ourselves,” or to “achieve calm within.”

alienation-chaplin

When I add up everything they say, it totals nothing. But I can see how they manage to get clients to pony up money to listen to them. A lot of Americans, especially those from the more-or-less affluent middle class, think they really need someone help them “find meaning.”

I think rich people don’t subscribe to spiritualism because they think they already have a purpose: getting richer. Poor people don’t seek “meaning” because they don’t have time. But it’s not hard to see why those in the middle would feel this need. They feel a genuine lack, something they should have that they have possibly lost.

Actually, they’re right.

We start losing our natural sense of purpose as soon as we enter modern society. That’s because our purpose is to help one another, and society in America as we know it is dead set against that purpose. Our society sets us against one another. It tells us to look out, to compete, and to vanquish the very people that we would have cared about if we weren’t twisted away as we are.

alienation

If anyone needed an example, look at our education. From kindergarten through graduate school, we compete for grades. The only way to be top of the class is to have everyone else beneath. We may never acknowledge it, but it’s how the system works. It’s not just the schools. It’s our jobs, too. We compete with everybody else for promotions, for raises, and for the best assignments.

At the grocery, we compete for the best products, the lowest prices, and the fastest check-out lines. On the streets, we have to make time by getting ahead of other drivers. It’s a rat race everywhere, and we’re the rats.

Once we’re aware of our forced alienation, we begin to find ways to fight back against it. It’s not like we have discovered a purpose; we always had one but we were purposefully driven away from it. To get back to caring for one another, as evolution created us to do, we have to fight.

We have to figure out how to fight alienation for ourselves. Life coaches won’t tell us.

–Gene Lantz

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

Does Democracy Have a Future?

October 30, 2018
civil rights, democracy, economy, elections, history, politics
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At a rally in Dallas on the first day of early voting, congressional candidate Colin Allred said “We have two weeks to save democracy!”

allred-cwa-earlyvote

Soon afterward, the election in Brazil sharpened world concern for democracy’s future. Jair Bolsonaro openly welcomes a return to military dictatorship. He threatens all his political opponents with using the military and government sanctions militias to carry out “a cleansing never before seen.” Women, gays, landless peasants, and the homeless are targets named in a New York Times article.

Almost immediately after the election, military units began raiding student organizations to confiscate any “anti-fascist” or “pro-democracy” materials, according to @castriotar on Twitter.

It’s not just Brazil. The Week news service says, “Right-wing populist and nationalist governments are in power in Russia, Turkey, India, Israel, Hungary, Poland, and the United States, and they share power with left-wing populists in Italy. Established right-wing parties in Britain, Canada, and Australia are busily adapting to the populist trend. Japan’s Shinzo Abe has taken his conservative Liberal Party in a notably nationalist direction. And with Angela Merkel announcing her intention not to run for re-election, and her party anxiously watching the rise of the far-right Alternative for Germany, it’s likely her conservative coalition will also begin sounding right-wing populist themes.”

What’s “Populism?”

In American history, the populists were always considered the representatives of the downtrodden, primarily farmers and sharecroppers who were being squeezed out by urbanization. Populism was associated with being pro-democracy, according to Wikipedia.

Today, newspersons and pundits use the term to mean anybody who claims to oppose the status quo. They’ve invented the term “right-wing populism” to include politicians who are virulently against democracy. Others just call them fascists.

What’s “Left,” What’s “Right?”

On the democracy scale, “left” is usually associated with more democracy while “right” is associated with less. The meaning of both terms is so thoroughly distorted as to make them generally useless. “Pro-democratic” or “anti’” is more accurate.

President Trump’s recent claim that he can overturn the American constitution’s birthright guarantee by executive order is a good example of anti-democratic activity.

What’s “Democracy?”

Historically, we associate democracy with the ancient Greeks. The idea was government by the will of the people. Through the ages, we have never seen anything close to a complete democracy. The Greeks, of course, excluded their slaves. In America, democracy has grown a lot since slavery days but has never included the people’s control over basic economic nor foreign policy.

Of especial importance is the people’s lack of control over the machinery of elections. We may get to vote, but we have never controlled the elections.

During economic or military emergencies, democracy is always diminished. Wartime presidents Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt were often called dictators.

Socialists have held out the promise of great extensions of democracy, but have never completely delivered because of the extreme tactics of capitalist opposition. The best that socialists have been able to deliver was “wartime democracy” similar to what Lincoln and Roosevelt practiced.

Who Is “Shifting to the Right?”

Commentators are scrambling to explain the anti-democratic global changes. They ask why people have been voting away their own democratic powers. The answer is that we aren’t.

Our democracy, even American democracy, is not complete and never was. The struggle between the poor and the rich, the 1% and the 99%, the employees and the employers, the workers and the owners, is being played out in elections that are ignored by many on our side. The elections are  being manipulated by the rich and distorted by incredible rivers of dark ugly money.

As a world crisis of international competition shrinks their opportunities, the wealthy are increasingly choosing to give up all pretense of government by the people. They are throwing their considerable wealth and power behind reactionary anti-democracy politicians who are willing to carry us all down an obvious path of total destruction.

Only our side can save democracy.

–-Gene Lantz

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

Notes:

Ny times https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/29/world/americas/jair-bolsonaro-brazil-profile.html

Brazil Election: How Jair Bolsonaro Turned Crisis Into Opportunity

Mr. Bolsonaro’s broadsides against women, gay people, Brazilians of color and even democracy — “Let’s go straight to the dictatorship,” he once said as a congressman — made him so polarizing that he struggled to find a running mate until early August. Traditional parties and politicians considered him too extreme.

President Trump called on Sunday to congratulate him on his victory, following up with a tweet on Monday morning that said, “Had a very good conversation with the newly elected President of Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro, who won the race by a substantial margin. We agreed that Brazil and the United States will work closely together on Trade, Military and everything else!”

In 1993, he delivered a fiery speech before the lower house of Congress urging its demise, calling the emerging version of democracy in Brazil a lost cause.

“I am in favor of a dictatorship,” Mr. Bolsonaro thundered. “We will never resolve serious national problems with this irresponsible democracy.”

rc‏ @castriotar Oct 26

rc Retweeted Folha de S.Paulo

More than 20 Brazilian universities were invaded by the military police in the past 2 days. They confiscated material on the history of fascism, interrupted classes due to ‘ideological content’, removed anti-fascist banners and posters claiming that it was electoral propaganda.

@castriotar

Many other student movements and organizations reported military police forces inside classrooms, student units, academic directories, confiscating any sort of materials with ‘anti-fascist’ or ‘pro-democracy’ content.

“It will be a cleansing never before seen in Brazilian history.” [referring directly to “reds,” to Workers Party leader Lula Da Silva, and to his present electoral opponent. He said they will “rot in jail.” He directly threatens to use the armed forces and civilian militias with legal sanction against enemies such as the landless peasants movement and the homeless movement.

April article From Independent about Hungary: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/victor-orban-hungary-migrant-refugees-george-soros-ngo-far-right-a8297441.html

“Viktor Orban’s right-wing populist party has vowed to would crack down on organisations helping migrants and refugees, in an announcement made just a day after it won an overwhelming election victory.

The autocratic prime minister portrayed himself as the saviour of Hungary’s Christian culture against Muslim migration into Europe, an image which resonated with more than 2.5 million voters.”

His Fidesz party won a two-thirds super majority in the country’s parliament, which would allow it and its small ally, the Christian democrats, to push through changes to constitutional laws.

**

From Washington Post: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2018/02/27/polands-right-wing-government-is-rewriting-history-with-itself-as-hero/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.2ef44090bd99

By Mateusz Mazzini February 27

Poland is in the midst of a pitched battle over its collective memory. The ruling party has recently stirred an international controversy by passing a bill criminalizing the use of the phrase “Polish death camps.” But in many ways, those international rifts are just collateral damage. The real battle is at home and is over what counts as legitimate political authority, and who can wield it.

Poland’s government is suggesting that the present-day cosmopolitan liberals who want to acknowledge Polish collaborators in crimes against Jews are traitors, like the Communists, willing to sell the nation to the highest international bidder. And such national mythmaking has more real-world power than many understand.

From The Atlantic: https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2018/06/its-the-right-wings-italy-now/562256/  June 6

“A new populist government came to power in Italy this week, and the right is calling the shots. It swept in on a wave of anxiety about immigration and the economy. On the economy, certain European rules could prevent Italy from going totally off the rails. When it comes to immigration, things could get rough—at least in rhetoric. In 88 days of coalition talks, Salvini, known for his strident attacks on immigrants as a threat to Italian safety, grew emboldened by the League’s rising popularity in the polls, and in the 11th-hour negotiations to forge a government, he appears to have outmaneuvered Luigi di Maio, the head of the anti-establishment Five-Star Movement, which won twice as many votes as the League in Italy’s March 4 elections

From The Week: https://theweek.com/articles/804453/why-are-rightwing-populists-winning-everywhere

“Right-wing populist and nationalist governments are in power in Russia, Turkey, India, Israel, Hungary, Poland, and the United States, and they share power with left-wing populists in Italy. Established right-wing parties in Britain, Canada, and Australia are busily adapting to the populist trend. Japan’s Shinzo Abe has taken his conservative Liberal Party in a notably nationalist direction. And with Angela Merkel announcing her intention not to run for re-election, and her party anxiously watching the rise of the far-right Alternative for Germany, it’s likely her conservative coalition will also begin sounding right-wing populist themes.”

“What is the commonality in contemporary conditions, around the world, that has made people in so many countries susceptible to both emotional impulses at once, and powered the global rise of the populist right?

That’s the question that liberal democrats need to answer before they are completely swept away.”

Watching the World Fall Apart

October 24, 2018
economy, environment, history, politics, strategy
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I have never been sure whether Donald J Trump was restoring a world of hatred and nationalist paranoia because it’s just what he wants to do, or if he was simply reflecting a change in world relations whose time had come.

diplomacy-cartoon

Fraternalization among nations is ending.

One could say that international fraternalization started during World War II, or after it, or during the Nixon Administration when he visited China. One could say that it began with the fall of socialism in the USSR and Eastern Europe. Or one could say it began with the formation of the European Economic Community, or with the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, or with the Organization of American States, or with all of that. However it started, it’s ending now. Nations are pulling apart.

Case in point: The European Union is strongly criticizing the governments of Italy and Poland. Even bigger case in point: Donald J Trump is pulling out of environmental accords and, lately, even out of nuclear proliferation accords. Plus, he seems intent on offending almost all traditional American allies. Nations are pulling apart.

Should we ask why?

Or should we look at it the other way around and ask why nations had been seeking cooperation with one another prior to the Trump election?

The period just ending, in which America dominated and forced every other nation to cooperate, is not new in history. In the centuries of British domination, roughly 1700 to 1900, they did the same thing. They even used the same rubric: “free trade.”

As British domination fell apart, the separate nations experienced their first World War. As that war began, V.I. Lenin wrote “Imperialism.” In it, he compared the world’s national leaders to gangs of criminals who might, for short periods, cooperate, but were likely to launch a new “turf war” almost any time. The inference from the pamphlet was that the capitalists running the largest industrialized nations would never cooperate for long. For economic reasons, it’s just not in their nature.

The United States dominated the world economically from World War II to the present, but that domination is being severely tested today. Our cars aren’t the only cars, our steel industry is about gone, even our electronics industry has disappeared. If other nations decided to stop using U.S. dollars as their reserve currency, our economy would fall to pieces. And that could happen. Almost any time. Trump is pushing them in that direction, too.

What we called “globalization,” or fraternalization among nations was really a set of circumstances in which the United States was unchallenged in its world domination. Every other nation actually had to cooperate, or to seem to cooperate. That seems to be ending now. I don’t think Trump caused it in 2016, just as I don’t think Hitler caused it in 1931, or if the heir to the Austro-Hungarian empire caused it by dying in 1914. It’s part of the system we live under. It had to end.

The question really is: what are we going  to do about it?

–Gene Lantz

I’m on KNON radio’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

 

Spacek Still Has It

October 20, 2018
art
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Movie Review:

The Old Man and the Gun, Directed by David Lowery, 93 minutes

oldmanwith-a-gun

It’s a Robert Redford movie beginning to end, but Sissy Spacek has a single close-up that is worth the entire movie. I guess I had always thought that the way she beams off the screen had something to do with her unfailing youth, but now I know it wasn’t that. Whatever it was, she was great then and she’s great now!

The movie is an old-style semi-documentary gangster movie overlaid with the Robert Redford charm. The dates of events are given to make it more “authentic,” and indeed there really was an old gentleman bandit that was captured around the Dallas area, and he really did have a dramatic back story.

You know it’s a pretty good movie because Redford doesn’t make any bad ones. I’d like to say that there are some eternal themes or important messages, maybe about aging gracefully, to take home with you, but that’s probably not true. This is a movie for people who are crazy about Robert Redford, have been for decades and always will be.

And Sissy Spacek, too.

–Gene Lantz

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

The Split in Society

October 9, 2018
democracy, education, history, politics
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We are living in a time of great contradiction.

contradiction-enter-only

The more we learn, the stranger is our political world.

People have never been so enlightened. Knowledge, long ago, was accessible to only a privileged few. Most human beings, lacking any real understanding, were guided by dark superstitions and easily herded about by those in power.

We’ve only had public education in America for 150 years or so. Printed words for 600 years, telegraph for maybe 200, radios for 150, movies for 120, TV for 75, and the internet for about 40. It gets harder and harder to herd people around when they are figuring things out for themselves. That’s a tremendous and growing contradiction.

People of my generation can remember when segregation ruled. We can remember that people laughed when Desi spanked Lucy on the world’s most popular TV program. We can remember poll taxes, white primaries, and English-only ballots. We remember when little children were spanked for speaking Spanish. We may have a long way to go, but we have come a long way, too!

If one thinks of human enlightenment as human progress, one sees a continuum of gains that has never completely stopped and is not likely to ever stop. Remember the apelike creatures in the movie “2001?” They huddled in the darkness while predators roamed around them. Then they began to learn. We are learning still, but at an accelerating pace.

The other side of the contradiction is that we are still being herded around by the people in power. They pretend that their arguments are “equal” or “the other side,” but they aren’t. They aren’t “alternative facts,” they are just lies.

Their rulers’ methods of superstition, divisiveness, chauvinism, and general backwardness are less and less effective. Something will have to give eventually, and it has to be them.

–Gene Lantz

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

 

Primer on Black Lives Matter

October 8, 2018
chauvinism, civil rights, women
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Movie Review:

“The Hate U Give,” Directed by George Tillman Jr, 129 Minutes

It’s a young adult movie made from a young adult novel. I am not at all sure how African American moviegoers will view it, but it’s a great introductory course on Black Lives Matter for the rest of us.

As you can figure out from the trailer, the story is about how teenagers are affected when a white police officer shoots an unarmed young Black man. It’s an unfortunately familiar problem. The film’s treatment is pretty strong, even though some might say it isn’t strong enough, and it covers many aspects of racism today. That makes it really worthwhile.

Luckily, it’s also a very fine movie. The screenplay is tight, the pacing is about right, the cinematography and the music jell together well, and the actors are simply wonderful. No matter what anybody thinks of the movie, I doubt they will be able to resist the unfathomable charm of the young star played by Amandla Stenberg.

at arrivals for EVERYTHING, EVERYTHING Special VIP Screening, TCL Chinese Theatre (formerly Grauman's), Los Angeles, CA May 6, 2017. Photo By: Priscilla Grant/Everett Collection

It makes all the sense in the world that her character’s name is “Star.” Her siblings, too, have empowering names that help carry the plot along. Coincidentally, the actress’s name, Amandla, also carries a lot of punch.  The word “Amandla” means “Power.” It is explained on Wikipedia.

When a movie is this enjoyable, it’s hard to remember that it’s also timely and important.

–Gene Lantz

I’m on KNON radio’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 site