Racism

Not so hard to find if you open your eyes.

Take a few moments to read the comments on the local news report.

It's Texas, so these people choose your children's textboooks, wherever you live.

Poll dancing

Public opinion polls show declines in Trunp's standing. Trump says his polls are different and show that he's doing great.

OK. Publish the polls. When were they taken? By whom? How many people were questioned. What were the questions and the responses? What is the margin of error ? All the things that are published by other pollsters.

Otherwise those polls don't exist.  It is possible though unlikely that Trump has been shown polls that show he's doing great. The atmosphere at the White House seems increasingly like that is Hitler's Chancellery in 1945 even including unfriendly Russians trying to gain access.

I can easily believe that Trump is being shown made-up polls. I can easily believe that he made  them up himself.
     * * *

Longtime readers of RtO or Great Guys we'll remember how often erp complained about the God complex of Obama and his supporters, one of her many fantasies. It seems almost a law that what right-wingers complain about they do themselves times 10.

Now we have Trump quoting with approval the opinion of right-wing commentator Wayne Root that Israeli Jews regard Trump as the second coming of God. Even if this is true, only a monomaniac would quoted that about himself to 40 million people.

(The head of the Jewish Anti-defamation League objected to Root's and Trump's use of Christian theology to explain what Jews think. We can absolve Trump; he doesn't know the first thing about Christianity.)

Gleichschaltung, American-style

Moley and Stull are accused of targeting career government staffers because they suspected those staffers were disloyal to President Donald Trump. At least one staffer was unfairly stripped of duties and quit the department, the report says.

Career government staffers are expected to carry out the priorities of whoever is in charge of the White House, regardless of political party. Their existence allows for an accumulation of expertise in the government and assures some continuity between administrations.

But many Trump appointees came into office believing that a “deep state” exists within the government bureaucracy and that it is determined to undermine the new president.

From Politico, which has done an excellent job of covering thisissue.

The 4-second catastrophe

Possibly Skipper overestimated his skills when he claimed he would have flown those Boeing planes out of danger.

It is certainly true that Boeing lied from the start about its behavior and continues to do so.

Role model

Ever since the protests began in Hong Kong, the BBC World Service has treated them as the most important story in the world. I think of it as a dog bites man story myself; I am astonished that it has taken this long for Peking to initiate its version of gleichschaltung.

However that may be, today the BBC reported that China suggested that protesters might be guilty of terrorism. The BBC correspondent in Hong Kong said this would likely deter some protesters since no one would wish to face a terrorism arrests in China where he or she might be imprisoned for years without charges.

Exactly like in the United States, I thought.

Then this evening CNN's Wolf Blitzer announced breathlessly that his network would reveal for the first time how shadowy Russian mercenaries we're being used around the world to help reestablish Russian dominance.

Never mind that reestablish is the wrong word, but exactly like in the United States, I thought.

It would be nice if our policy were different from those of our adversaries. It would make it easier to choose between them.

CNN produced an interview with Oleg, a purported member of the Wagner mercenary group. The correspondent asked Oleg how much training he had received for his mission to conquer the world. Almost none, Oleg said. He had been trained for six days including two visits to the rifle range and one session firing a machine gun.

That describes the training that I received from the United States Army during the first week of ROTC summer camp 50 years ago. I did not then feel prepared to conquer the world or even lead a platoon in South Vietnam.

If Russia is indeed attempting to establish world dominance, I am pleased to learn that its military is as stupid and incompetent as ours.

Spirit of Drancy IV

So much outrageous and evil behavior is coming from Trump's version of a war on the poor that I could put up a new post every few hours. By now, I hope, anybody who reads RtO can figure out my itnerpretation without my having to write it out. But Wednesday something important happened.

A United States attorney laid down a marker that will allow us to determine just who the American versions of the Milice are. It was not exactly buried in The Washington Post's story but it was not and has not been emphasized:

“To those who use illegal aliens for a competitive advantage or to make a quick buck, we have something to say to you: If we find you have violated federal criminal law, we are coming for you,” said Mike Hurst, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Mississippi. But he declined to comment on whether anyone other than the immigrant workers would be charged as a result of the operation, which he said is ongoing.

I waited a few days to mark this out, in case indictments against the employers were in the mill. Not happening.

They will never happen.

I do not doubt the sincerity of Hurst, but these are charges that will have to be cleared by the Attorney General. Barr will never do it. It would be a spear in the heart of Trump's racist narrative of invasion. (Incidentally, while the word was purged from Trump's twitter file -- evidently by underlings -- the invasion narrative is still the word of the day and of the campaun. When asked, a senior White House accomplice, probably Miller, simply said "No.")

That is why I will be astounded if any of the mployers are prosecuted criminally. They may perhaps be allowed  an Epstein Plea and have to pay civil fines, with a promise to sin no more. Which will put them out of business, so I will be surprised if they are held even to that small an account.  Americans want their chicken nuggets and Trump is not the man to deny them.

Let me offer some ancient history.

I now live in Maryland, home of the delicious Chesapeake Bay blue crab. When I lived in Norfolk 45 years ago, you could buy picked crabmeat. It wasn't cheap but it was available everywhere. Most of the picking was done in Crisfield, Maryland, and the pickers were older black women, illiterate or nearly so with no other opportunities of making money.

Those women are gone now and so are their children. And the children's children have, thanks to the Great Society programs, grown up literate, many going to college. They don't have to pick crabs and they won't.

It is difficult to find picked local crabmeat nowadays and when you do find it it's expensive -- $25 dollars pound for backfin. I asked at the one store that regularly carries it, who picks it? "Hispanics."

But Hispanic immigrants, even illegal ones have better moneymaking opportunities than picking crabs, which is truly unpleasant work. More unpleasant evidently then working in a chicken plant,  which which is unpleasant indeed, as the excellent the Des Moines Register reporter George Anthan detailed in a series more than 30 years ago. (I edited Anthan's stories and thought they deserved the Pulitzer Prize for national reporting.)

Or perhaps it's just that chicken plucking is year-round work and crab picking is seasonal.

In any event it is not true that recent immigrants, legal or otherwise, are taking jobs from Americans or depressing Americans' wages. For better or ill, the capitalist dream of forcing the poorest laborers to work for starvation wages -- what David Ricardo understood -- has been short-circuited by our public benefit system that right-wingers call socialist. It is not in any serious sense socialist. But it does have effects on capitalists. It complicates their labor recruitment.

Trump and his fascist friends have no hesitation to inflict sickening horrors on brown children -- you have seen the videos, you do not need me to say anything further -- but they do not and will not have any intention of seeing white employers compelled to submit to the rule of law.

I will be surprised if Mr. Hurst's career as a prosecutor lasts much longer.

Since the first weeks of Trump's regime I have been warning about gleichschaltung. When fascism is done by Americans, as Sinclair Lewis Lewis warned so long ago, it will be done in the name of Americanism. With flags flying.

Enemies of the state will not be proscribed as in Nuremberg laws but will be forced out in the name of efficiency like the scientists at the Department of Agriculture. There've been a few bumps along the road  as when Trump attempted  to install a bootlicking incompetent as director of national intelligence. However, good progress continues to be made.

RtO has noted more than once before that it took Hitler five years to become a dictator.

Reagan the racist

To the surprise of no one, really, St. Ronald was a crude, bile-filled racist, as newly released tapes reveal.

The tapes had been published in 2000, but the National Archives, to their shame, cut out the racist part "to protect" Reagan's privacy.

I noticed a number of present-day racists trying to soften the impact of the revelation by saying "it was a different time." Not that different, as we see.

Child sacrifice again

I went to bed last nght not having heard how many children were sacrificed to the 2nd Amendment in El Paso and still this morning I don't know. Presumably the Dayton slaughter, which was at a bar at 1 a.m., did not sacrifice any children.

But several mass child sarifices ago, I flipped on Fox to see how rightwingers were welcoming that news. I happened to get Tucker Carlson, the racist, and in the few seconds I listened to him, he was sneering at someone (I don't know who) who had labeled "white men" as the biggest terrorist threat in America now.

"Really?" said Carlson, "white men."

Yeah, really.

It strikes me that during the period over the last few hours when there were mass protests in favor of democracy in Moscow and Hong Kong, and when the despotisms there reacted forcefully, there were no deaths; while there were -- it appears -- at least 20 political murders in the United States and perhaps 29 (depending on the motivation of the Dayton killer).