Trump Voters Terrifying

46% of Americans are ready to re-elect Donald Trump according to recent polling. That’s a truly stunning number especially since only 46% are committed to electing a Democrat to replace him. That nearly half of Americans are on board with a man whom even Republican congressman Justin Amash says clearly obstructed justice and should be impeached shows that they don’t care what he does wrong he’s their guy and they’re sticking with him.

If you’ve read the Mueller report like I have you too understand what Amash is talking about as it lays out the case for obstruction of justice quite clearly. Worse still he has instructed members and former members of his administration to defy congressional subpoenas preventing their investigations from gathering evidence.

The trade war he set off with China and other countries is causing farmers to lose billions of dollars in sales so his administration is providing $15-20 billion in federal assistance to soy bean farmers among others who have been harmed by the backlash. Family farmers are the ones most harmed and the least helped causing unusually high levels of farm bankruptcies.

Harley Davidson moved some manufacturing out of the country in order to avoid tariffs on sales in Europe and elsewhere. Many of those Carrier air conditioner jobs in Indiana that Trump made so much about saving during the 2016 election have now moved to Mexico anyway. There are many other examples of the trade war and Trump’s economic policies hurting more than helping.

Just this week Trump announced "I don’t want to fight. But you do have situations like Iran, you can’t let them have nuclear weapons — you just can’t let that happen.”  Republic Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas claims it would take just two strikes to wipe out Iran’s nuclear capabilities. Acting Secretary of Defense Patrick Shanahan and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo failed to convince House members of any real threat from Iran in their meeting earlier this week. This is the same kind of sabre rattling and falsehood pedaling that the Bush administration engaged in during the lead up to the invasion of Iraq.

About two miles of new border wall/fence has been built on the southern border and Mexico hasn’t paid a dime toward it. Five immigrant children have died in custody of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) while separated from their parents who were legally seeking asylum in the United States. Rather than sending more immigration judges to process asylum applicants Trump has contracted with private prison operators to house immigrants.

Trump’s cabinet selections have repeatedly been caught with their hands in the cookie jar, often for lavish travel expenses on the tax payer dime. Some have resigned in disgrace but others like Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin hang on. Those not engaged in outright theft are often incompetent such as Secretary of Education Betsy DuVos who doesn’t understand basic educational terms and principles or Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Ben Carson who showed no understanding of the terms describing real estate finance at a recent congressional hearing.

None of this phases nearly half of the American public, I find that terrifying.

Published in the Seguin Gazette - May 24, 2019

Trump's National Security Team Out to Make War

While the national news cycle seems focused on the Mueller Report and the Trump administration’s denial of its conclusions as well as access to the full version Trump and his handpicked advisors like National Security Advisor John Bolton, Special Representative for Venezuela Elliot Abrams, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo seem to be shopping for a nice small war. Trump has been antagonizing Iran since his first days in office and last year unilaterally withdrew from the Iran nuclear deal, officially named the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. For the last several months he and his enablers have been escalating rhetoric and threats against the duly elected leader of Venezuela.

Elliot Abrams is best known for his involvement in the Iran-Contra scandal, which supplied weapons to right wing insurgents in Nicaragua, during the Reagan administration, and led to his conviction in 1991 on two counts of unlawfully withholding information from Congress.

John Bolton is also of Iran-Contra scandal alumnus and has worked tirelessly to undermine nuclear weapons reduction and biological weapons treaties. Until last year Bolton was chairman of the Gatestone Institute, a nonprofit organization that disseminated false anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim information, where Bolton published articles on Iran and other topics.

Mike Pompeo denies climate change and claims that reduced sea ice in the Arctic Circle is a good thing as it can lower the cost of international trade. Pompeo is known for making bombastic and false statements like claims that China is investing in facilities in northern Canada of which there are no such investments. He has also state strong support for torturing prisoners of war.

Trump has been talking about military intervention in Venezuela since the summer of 2017 including asking advisors why the US wasn’t at war with Venezuela, noting that “they have all that oil and they’re right on our back door.” Just last week Pompeo stated that American troops might be used in support of the overthrow of Venezuela’s president, Nicolás Maduro.

Earlier this week, Bolton announced that the United States was dispatching an aircraft-carrier strike group and bombers to the Middle East, saying that the U.S. is sending “a clear and unmistakable message to the Iranian regime” and threatening “unrelenting force.” Actually the deployment has been scheduled for months as part of a rotation of forces. Nevertheless the unprovoked comments follow a yearlong campaign of threats and intimidation aimed at Iran, after the administration’s withdrawal one year ago from the Iran nuclear deal. Since then, the United States has instituted tough new sanctions aimed at crippling Iran’s economy and cutting off its oil exports.

Over the past few weeks, the campaign of threats and what the White House calls “maximum pressure” has intensified. In early April the administration took provocative action via the State Department announcement that it was labeling Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, Tehran’s main military arm, a terrorist group. Trump seems to be following Bush's pattern of manufactured false charges that Saddam Hussein had ties to Al Qaeda and 9/11, the Trump administration is painting the Iranian nation as a terrorist threat. In the two-decade history of the State Department’s terrorist listing no nation's entire armed forces have ever been designated as a foreign terrorist organization.

Watch for further sabre rattling as Congress pursues its investigation of the Mueller report and Trump’s financial dealings. Don’t be shocked if Trump starts a war in an effort to preserve his presidency.

Published in the Seguin Gazette - May 10, 2019

Time to End the War on Terror

In October the “War on Terror” will have been going on for 16 years. It is now a bi-partisan war in that it has been fought by both Republican and Democratic administrations. "The world is a battlefield and we are at war; therefore the military can go wherever they please and do whatever it is that they want to do, in order to achieve the national security objectives of whichever administration happens to be in power." That's the logic which reportedly drives the Joint Special Operation Command known for directing SEAL Team Six among other special operations forces.

“The world is a battlefield” isn't just a vaguely aggressive point of view; it's the legal underpinning of the use of military force in today's War on Terror. This legal definition comes from the Authorization for Use of Military Force, which Congress passed on Sept. 14, 2001 which gave the President of the United States broad power to fight terrorism around the world.

Al-Qaeda is now a shadow of its former self but other groups have taken up the call so terrorists still strike anywhere in the world including here. The United States continues to send troops, drop bombs, and fire missiles in more than a dozen countries today. ISIS is now the focus of much of our attention and while it has inspired many terror attacks including the recent Manchester, England slaughter it is not sending out directing or coordinating large scale attacks like September 11, 2001.

Terror is not an ideology regardless of Trump’s recent assertion on Twitter. Terror is a tactic and you can’t fight a war against a tactic. The followers of ISIS and other similar groups aren’t fighting because they believe in terror they’re fighting because they believe that their people are oppressed. They attack us and European countries because we prop up and in the case of the Shah of Iran install and support their oppressors. Regardless of that they have committed many more attacks on their own people and killed many more of them.

Some of the ISIS fighters are religiously motivated and some aren’t. While the leadership may claim religious they’re creating a religious state as called for in their view of their religious text it’s clear to most people of the world, including those of the same faith, that ISIS and groups like it aren’t inspired by their holy book so much as they use selected passages from it to defend their baser instincts.

The War on Terror isn’t winnable in the sense that there is capital or leader to capture, no one to accept peace terms, no country to conquer and rule. All we can accomplish by continuing to spend blood and treasure is insure that there will be other mothers losing their sons and more young people angry over lost family members killed by American bombs.

We would do well to reconsider who our friends are around the world. Instead of supporting oppressive regimes just because they allow American companies to plunder their natural resources as we have done in Central America, Africa and the Middle East perhaps we should show support for governments that are truly democratic regardless of whether they are capitalist or socialist or somewhere in between. After all many of the European nations we’re allied with are social welfare states to one degree or another. Standing up for human rights would put us on the moral high ground. Of course that might mean rescinding the $110 billion arms deal Trump just approved with one of the most oppressive governments in the Middle East.

Published in the Seguin Gazette, June 2, 2017

Remembering the real Ronald Reagan

In all the hoopla over the centennial of Ronald Reagan’s birth published in this newspaper and others during the past week I’ve seen nothing about his stated dream of a nuclear free world which both our Texas senators recently made every effort to derail by voting against the New Start Treaty.

There was also no word on Reagan’s support for the murderous right-wing Contra’s in Nicaragua whom he financed by selling arms to Iran in violation of U.S. law. Nor was there mention of his funding and training of the right-wing Guatemalan military, which a United Nations commission found to be a "key factor" in that military committing "acts of genocide" causing the deaths of hundreds of thousands of indigenous Mayans and many other nonviolent left-wing activists.

No one wrote that it was under Reagan that the United States armed and supported Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein in his aggressive war against Iran, which led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people. Those actions, it should be noted, embittered citizens of both countries against the United States. And let us not forget that it was his administration which helped lay the groundwork for Al Qaeda by financing and training an Islamist militant movement in Afghanistan and Pakistan aimed at fighting the Soviet Union.

So yes let’s all remember Ronald Reagan just so long as we remember who he really was.