THE FIRST TRUMP INDICTMENT

 

Well, it's official!  Today, for the first time ever, criminal indictment charges were made against Donald Trump, making him the first ex president to ever be indicted in American history.  And the amazing thing is that there are probably more on the way.

There's a certain inevitably to this: anyone who has read honest media reports about Trump for the past decade knows that he is a man who has always lived on the edge of legality, who acts (and talks!) more like a mob boss than a businessman or politician.  And like a mob boss who avoids prison while his underlings take the fall for him, Trump is surrounded by criminals who often have been caught committing crimes on his behalf.  From Trump's former lawyer and convicted criminal Micheal Cohen, who's hush money payments to porn star Stormy Daniels just before the 2016 election started this whole mess for Trump, to former campaign advisor George Papadopoulos who was convicted of lying to the FBI, to Trump's long time accountant Allen Weisselberg who was recently convicted of tax fraud, some of the closest people to Trump have broken the law.  It's hard to believe that he himself would never  face some kind of charges.

The interesting thing about this indictment is that it may be the weakest of the 4 potential criminal charges that may be brought against him.  To get a felony conviction here, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg will have to prove to a jury that Trump both falsified business records while violating campaign finance laws. While this may be difficult, clearly Bragg thinks that he has enough evidence to make a case.  We'll see.

The second possible criminal charge against Trump, (and the one that seems to be the  strongest),  is the one coming from the state of Georgia.  As we all now know from a recorded conversation, after losing the election, Trump called former Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and asked him to "find" him votes.  He even implied that Raffensperger himself might face some kind of charge if he didn't find those votes.  The fact that this call came after the state had already recounted the votes twice without changing the outcome meant nothing to Trump, and his behavior certainly seems criminal here, even if was still the president when he made that call.

Then there's a Justice Department investigation over whether Trump's stirring up of the mob on January 6th counts as a criminal incite to riot.  This is a bit tricky, since freedom of speech is important and Trump did use the word "peacefully" while addressing the crowd.  On the other hand, he had the power to stop the riot while it was going on and he delayed doing that for hours.  He even sent out a tweet condemning Mike Pence as the riot was taking place, further inflaming the crowd.  Plus there was testimony during the House of Representatives's January 6th investigation that said that he wanted metal detectors removed from the rally because the protestors were  "not there to hurt me.”

Finally, there's the stolen document scandal, in which Trump's refusal to turn over classified documents after leaving the White House prompted an FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago that resulted in over a hundred secret documents being found.  The crazy thing about this possible crime is that it reveals just how immature and downright stupid Trump is: he was told that he needed to turn over all the secret documents he had taken with him after leaving the White House, and he only returned some of them, leaving the rest in a closet in his resort/home.  All he had to do was hand them over, but, like a small child crying finders keepers, he refused, seeming to believe that any document he got as president was his forever.  If this is the crime that finally nails Trump, he'll be guilty of criminal stupidity.   

Inevitably, there's some worry in the media that this unprecedented step will galvanize Trump's supporters into some kind of violence, and while that fear is understandable, there is no doubt that it  right thing to do.  Every American who commits a crime should face charges for it, no matter who they are.

DO CONSERVATIVES WANT POWER MORE?

 

Back in 1992, "Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus", a book that intended to improve communications between genders, was released.  The central theme of the book was that men and women inherently saw the world so differently that it was often hard for them to understand each other.  Personally, I think a new version of that book could be released now, entitled "Conservatives are from Mars, Progressives are from Venus" because of the deep, often fundamentally different ways that conservatives and progressives see the world.  As anyone who's tried to argue with someone with different political views, agreement, especially in the age of Trump, is hard to find.

One big difference I see in the two different political mindsets is that conservatives seem to assume that power is their right; with the conservative image being one of the strong, aggressive person (usually a man) in charge, their assumption of power seems baked in.   Imagine if there were 2 recent Democratic presidents that won the White House while losing the popular vote.  The howls of "illegitimate!" from the right wing media would de deafening.  But when it happened to George W Bush and Donald Trump, they both swaggered into office claiming that they had a mandate.  

This lust for power can be seen in recent presidential elections dating back to 1968.  In that election, we now know that Richard Nixon sabotaged peace talks to end the war in Vietnam, fearing that an end to the war would help his Democratic opponent Hubert Humphrey.   Add to that the coded racist language that Nixon used to win over white voters, known as the "Southern Strategy" and other dirty tricks his campaign pulled, and you can see that winning power meant more to him than anything, even when it meant prolonging a war.

Skipping over the presidency of Gerald Ford (who was, of course, appointed not elected) and we get to the 1980 campaign of Ronald Reagan.  Although Reagan's 1980 victory over Jimmy Carter was seen as a landslide, it had been quite close until negations to bring back the American hostages in Iran fell through, making Carter look weak.  Recently, Ben Barnes, a former lieutenant governor of Texas, came forward to admit that he and other Republicans went on a trip to the Middle East before the election with one purpose: to make sure that the hostages didn't come home before the election by visiting Middle Eastern cities and telling regional leaders that Iran would get a better deal with Reagan.  While this may not have been as despicable as Nixon's extending the Vietnam war, it still was unconscionable, as it essentially kept the hostages in prolonged bondage to win the election for Reagan.  Add to that Reagan's continued use of Nixon's Southern Strategy (he announced his candidacy in the state of Mississippi, voicing his support of "state's rights", not far from where some civil rights workers were killed in the 60's while trying to register black voters), and we see another power hungry Republican President open to try anything to win the White House.

Eight years later, George Bush's won without sinking as low as the Nixon and Reagan campaigns did.  But he still resorted to an openly racist ad campaign by linking the furlough of felon Willie Horton with his opponent Micheal Dukakis, turning around the early polls that showed him trailing Dukakis.

2000, of course, brought the whole fiasco in Florida.  One of the uglier parts of that state's highly contested vote count was the reports that hundreds, perhaps even thousands of African American voters were turned away at the polls, told that their names were not on the voting lists.  We know now that they were victims of a voter purge done by the state to remove ineligible felons from the voting lists that also removed eligible voters.  The level of corruption in this election was such that George W Bush's brother, Jeb, was governor of Florida when all the madness occurred, and that the Supreme Court, which had members appointed by Bush's father, openly interfered in the election by  stepping in and ending all the recounts to hand the election to Bush.

And then there was the 2016 campaign of Donald Trump.  We now know that, even if the Trump campaign did not criminally collaborate with Russia during the election, that country definitely did interfere in ways both big (releasing thousands of hacked Democratic emails) and small (false Facebook accounts posting made up stories) to tip the election in Trump's favor.  On top of that, we also know that the story of an  alleged affair that Trump had with porn star Stormy Daniels in 2006 was killed before the election with a payoff made to Daniels by Trump's then personal lawyer, Micheal Cohen, who went to jail because of that payoff.  (Whether Trump will also be charged with a crime over it remains to be seen). 

There you have it, a brief history of conservative presidents using underhanded and sometimes criminal means to bring themselves to power.  And I haven't even talked about the means used by them and other conservative politicians to maintain that power, from passing laws specifically designed to keep black voters from voting, to gerrymandering voting districts, to opposing any limits on campaign financing, the modern Republican party has found a way to win elections even without getting a majority of voters.  Which means that, looking back at this history, I don't think I can see a future that will get any better, not when the next generation of  conservatives will continue to assume that power is their birthright.

WHY WE NEED BIG GOVERNMENT

 Bashing so called big government has been a go to talking point for right wing media for years.  Really, just putting the two words together conjures an  imposing and frightening image of a government imposing its will on the people like something out of Orwell's 1984 novel. (Or perhaps something by Ayn Rand).

But the boogeyman of big government is actually a lot less scary than what can happen when there's a lack of government in the form of regulations.  Recently, a train derailment in the small town of East Palestine Ohio released nearly 116,000 gallons of vinyl chloride.  The effects of this on the local people are potentially devastating, with possible health issues lasting for years.  While there has been the usual amount of finger pointing from both sides of the political fence, about this,one thing is clear: a train carrying such dangerous chemicals should have had more safety regulations.  Not surprisingly, such regulations were put in place by the Barack Obama administration and then were later repealed by the Donald Trump administration.  Now to be fair, it's unsure at this time if the Obama era regulations would have prevented the crash, but what it does show is how much corporate profits are often put over the safety of the American public.

A similar situation occurred recently with the bankruptcy of Silicon Valley Bank; once again, the Obama administration had passed a  series of regulations to avoid the same kind of banking crisis that tanked the economy back in 2008, and once again those regulations were weakened by the Trump administration in 2018, sowing the seeds for a once prosperous bank (SVB was  the 16th biggest bank in the country) to fall into ruin.

The frustrating thing about regulations is that there's no way to know just how many are needed; as these two examples show, some regulations are necessary, even in a free market.  But, as every Californian can tell you, the high speed rail train between San Francisco and Los Angeles that voters supported in 2008 has been so stymied by cost overruns and, yes, regulations, that it may never get built.

So again, there's no easy answer here, but to me, the real problem in this country isn't the amount of regulations, it's the lack of them (and the enforcement of them), which has brought on by the huge influence of money and lobbying in our government.  Ever since the Supreme Court ruled that money equals speech in the Citizen's United case of 2010, more and more money has spent influencing (or you might call it bribing) the decisions of politicians, resulting in a country that is less safe overall.   When you compare America to other industrialized nations, it's clear that we generally have air, food and water, that is less clean than theirs, and we are more likely to be exposed to the kind of dangerous accident that occurred in Ohio.  An untamed free market can be a dangerous thing.