Lies and Liars

Quite a long time ago, I had my very first full-time job in the meat department of a supermarket.  When we had chickens on sale, there were times that there were crates of chickens left over after the sale.  We froze them.  Then, when they went on sale again, we defrosted them.  I recall one time when the department manager was running water over the frozen chickens to defrost them faster, and the word came down from the store office that the big boss had walked into the store.  There followed a Marx Brothers-like dash to get the chickens out of the running water and onto trays.

Because freezing and defrosting the chickens and then selling them as fresh was illegal.  The game was that everybody knew this was done, but it had to be done in the dark.

Around the same time, a friend who was a cook in an upscale restaurant was visiting, and he was working the grill in our backyard.  He was describing in Bourdain fashion the horrors that go on in the kitchen in a fancy restaurant.  He had just described how, if a piece of meat fell on the floor, the cook would pick it up, brush it off, throw it on the stovetop for another minute, and then serve it.  As he finished the story, the steak he was grilling dropped to the ground.  Looking just a tad abashed, he picked it up, brushed it off, and threw it back on the grill.

In a non-food related area, I was volunteering at my daughter's elementary school library.  The librarian was pulling books from the shelf and deleting them from the school's records.  I am sure I asked what would happen to them next, and she told me a story about how they would be stored in an attic in an administration building.  After many later years working in school and public libraries, I can assure you they were not being stored.  They were being discarded.  When you work in a library, you don't tell the patrons (or the parents) that books are being thrown out.

If you look back on your various jobs and careers, most of you will recall lies you were told, and lies you told.  Not too long ago, in congressional testimony under oath, White House communications director Hope Hicks testified that she had told "white lies" for the president.  The very president who on Day One made his press secretary tell us that "This was the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration... period."  And then there are the convenient lapses of memory by Jefferson Beauregard Sessions during his confirmation hearing.  All under the watchful -- you might say, paranoid -- eyes of the liar-in-chief.

We once lived in a country wherein the business philosophy was "caveat emptor" -- let the buyer beware.  Buyers were taken for such a horrific ride that they rebelled, and laws were passed protecting them from harmful lies.  Of course, it did not take long for capitalists to fight back for the right to do whatever the hell they please, and we have had ups and downs in the area of consumer protection.  These days, Congress and Trump's swamp creatures are busy dismantling consumer protections and the Supremes are solidly behind the big bucks.  We seem to have returned to the carnival days of never give a sucker an even break.

In today's atmosphere of cynicism, it is surprising how naive we all continue to be.  We are watching Donald Trump and his cronies display in full screen the flagrant corruption and rampant lies of business in America.  This is the corruption of the real estate industry, and of the oil industry, and big pharma, ad nauseum.  From Bill Gates to the Kochs, the rich got that way by screwing others and telling us how lucky we are to have the opportunity to be screwed.

How do they get away with it?  They have learned how to frame their lies in a way that appeals to us.  Republicans won congress back in 2014 by well capitalized lies about Obamacare.  The Supremes, in Citizens United, gave their blessing to big lies told with the money of big donors.  Political ads tell more brazen lies than the most egregious drug commercial, and they work.

Diversion is the other tactic that keeps us fish biting through misdirection.  The magic is in making the mark look the other way while their pocket is being picked.  I know some very fine and caring Democrats who get rabid over food stamp cheats.  While there are going to be a few slick characters who don't need food stamps but have found a way to receive them, this is mostly a myth that goes way back to Reagan's food stamp queen driving up to the welfare office in her Cadillac.  The woman in the grocery store line buying that steak may have eaten pasta and beans for a week to afford that treat, and very likely lives a life of worry over making ends meet.

On the other hand, if a wealthy businessman pays no taxes you can be sure it will be painted as well deserved, because he contributes so much to the economy.  The worker who earns $20,000 a year?  Not so much.

I had a conversation with a guy repairing my washing machine a few years ago.  We were having an innocent, non-political chat about retirement and being able to afford it, and he went off on welfare cheats.  I said I was far more concerned about the billionaires that were cheating us via the government.  And he replied:  "Yeah, but you can't do anything about them."

So our entire economic system comes down to getting abused by your boss and coming home and kicking the dog.  It is all about feeling so helpless to fight the corrupt powerful that we are willing dupes in the misdirection that causes us to turn on those with less than us.

These days, the Trump swamp has stunk so much that it has even magnified the odors coming from Congress.  Paul Ryan's lies about health care and Trump's lies about tax cuts just may be what creates the prism that separates the lies from the reality.  It may not be so far between lies about inaugural crowd size to stealing those massive tax cuts.  Taking away consumer financial protections and affordable health care might serve to focus us more on the real issues than the diversions.  The outcomes of recent special elections may be the proof that we are waking up to the big con that has been perpetrated on us for far too long.

Today the liar-in-chief is rethinking his promise of just yesterday to sign the budget and keep the government running.  I heard everyone from Paul Ryan to Mick Mulvaney were surprised.  I try not to dwell on the creep's tweets, but I heard he was complaining that the Dems have abandoned the Dreamers and he hasn't gotten the full amount for his damned wall.  It would take another entire blog to unpack that load of crap.  As I recall though, it was the orange criminal himself who took DACA away from the Dreamers, and Mitch McConnell who has been refusing to bring it up for a vote in the Senate.  And we keep hearing about Trump fulfilling his promise to build the wall, but he fails to mention who he said was going to pay for it....  Lies and cons.

November is coming, and I hear that this year it is going to be swamp-draining season, in Washington and throughout the country.

The Unstoppable Elizabeth Warren

As despised as the Affordable Care Act has been is the Consumer Financial Protection Agency .  And as despised as Obama for getting away with the ACA, Senator Elizabeth Warren is despised by Congressional republicans for taking on the powerful banks.  And when it comes to dastardly villains, hell bent on power and revenge, there is none like Mitch McConnell.  Oh, sure, he may duck into his shell whenever a controversy arises,

but when the coast is clear and he is surrounded by his own kind, he is a true leader.

Let us remember that it was Mitch who first stated his primary purpose after President Obama's 2008 election was to make him a one-term president.  He may have a weak chin, but he has balls that even Donald Trump must admire.  Under McConnell, republican senators have stood firmly on the right to oppose Obama's every act as president -- even when he was making a proposal that had been strongly endorsed, even suggested, by republicans.

Perhaps the most absurd act of obstruction by McConnell was last year's refusal to hear testimony on the nomination of Merrick Garland for Supreme Court Justice.  It was not only unprecedented and undemocratic, the rationale given for this militant act against the president's authority was ridiculous.  As everyone from pundits to legal experts to late night talk show hosts pointed out.

His outrageous gambit appears to have won.  We may soon have a supreme court justice that moves to the right of right-wingnut Antonin Scalia.

And now he has his sights on Elizabeth Warren.

It is easy to understand why he wants Warren neutralized.  She was the voice that led to the creation -- her creation -- of the Consumers Financial Protection Agency.  Following the Wall Street fiasco that led to the Great Recession, right wingers couldn't figure out fast enough how to stop the call for regulation and monitoring of Wall Street.  And Warren is smart and persistent.  She can't be outargued, and she won't be manipulated.  She thrives on challenges and attacks; she knows she has facts and the moral high ground on her side.

She also has the American people on her side.

And, as they used to say at Ronco,

When it was learned last year that Wells Fargo executives had pressured employees to set up millions of fake accounts in customers' names, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau pursued the complaints and fined Wells Fargo $185 million dollars.  During the Senate hearing, Elizabeth Warren told Wells Fargo CEO John Stumpf, 

"This is about accountability.  You should resign.  You should give back the money that you took while this scam was going on, and you should be criminally investigated."

The plot thickens, because Donald Trump in his effort to keep his swamp full to capacity, nominated Elaine Chao to be transportation secretary.  Elaine Chao, since 2011, has sat at the board of Wells Fargo.  And... wait for it... Elaine Chao is Mitch McConnell's wife.

So I guess we could say there is history here between Warren and McConnell.  Or we could say, follow the money and the special interests.

McConnell had a rare opportunity to really stick his foot in it two days ago, when Warren was on the floor speaking against the nomination of Jeff Sessions to be attorney general.  She was reading a 1986 letter from Coretta Scott King to the Senate opposing Sessions' appointment to a federal judgeship.  Thinking this was the moment he had been waiting for, he had Warren stopped and told to sit down.  There was then a vote as to whether to rebuke Warren for "impugning" Sessions' character, which of course fell on party lines.

If you haven't already been immersed in this story, your head may be spinning, you may be saying "Wh-What???"  But it is true.  There is a rule -- Rule XIX -- that was created in 1902, back when Mitch McConnell was just a boy.  It came about because a couple of South Carolina senators engaged in fisticuffs on the floor of the Senate.  And -- this could only happen in Congress -- the rule does not just ban fights on the Senate floor, but any disparagement of a sitting Senator.  This odd and arcane rule has not been used in some forty years, and apparently did not apply when Ted Cruz accused Mitch McConnell of lying. So Warren's crime was that she read a letter stating that Jeff Sessions -- a racist -- is a racist.  And maybe that she is a woman.  A powerful woman.

(In a wonderful act of unity and defiance, a number of Democratic Senators, all male, took their turn to read the same letter for which Warren had been censured.)

More important, Mitch McConnell has once again put Warren front and center of the fight for honest government.  And she relishes that fight.  We can all scoff at the rule that allows unsavory senators like Jeff Sessions to hide the truth.  And we will.  We are fighting on the internet.  "Nevertheless, she persisted" has become yet another battle cry against the tyranny of Trump's right-wing.

And you can catch Elizabeth Warren on talk shows and on the internet spreading the good word.  Fighting for us all.

Thanks for the inspiration, Elizabeth.

 

Challenge to Democratic Party: Why Should I Care?

In its typical tone-deaf fashion, days after "Giving Tuesday," when we were all exhausted from being hammered by requests for donations by hundreds of worthy causes, I got an email from the South Carolina Democratic Party asking for -- not $3, not $5 -- a $25 donation.

The accompanying message, which I scanned rather than read, included the words "whites only."  It contained the terrifying idea that Henry McMaster would be our new governor soon, as though he might be worse than Nikki Haley.  Basically, the message was, "Scary things are happening, so give us money."

Meanwhile, on another absurd front, SCDP Chair Jamie Harrison, who kept popping up on MSNBC before the SC primaries and then disappeared during the general election, has resurfaced in order to seek the position of -- and I can't believe I am saying this -- Chair of the Democratic National Committee.  When asked why he feels he is qualified, we hear all about how he came up in politics.  Nothing about anything important that is going on right now.  Not to mention, why he should be considered given the sad state of Democratic politics in South Carolina under his watch.

This is what the SCDP is missing:

Voters can't possibly understand the complexities of the dirty games being played in politics (and I try, I really do).  We don't have the time to follow bills being introduced on a state or national level, much less sort out the meaning behind the bills.  Or where they come from.  They don't know the candidates or office holders, really.

What people know about politics is in the headlines.  And if it is too dense, they dismiss it.  Which pretty much describes the success of the republican party.  They, and their current leader, have been able to reframe issues and point voters in any direction they choose, just by using simple and stark phrases.  Remember the threatened "death panels" from Obamacare?  How about "death taxes," leading us all to believe that after we die, the government would take all our hard-earned money from our children?  Trump turned it into an obscene art form, boiling down the essence of his opponents to easy-to-remember memes like "lying Ted" and "crooked Hillary."

If the SCDP, or the DNC for that matter, want to get voters involved, they need to do two things:  educate themselves about the bills that are being written, and then educate the voters in a way that is meaningful to us.

For weeks, we have been hearing about the "emoluments clause" of the constitution.  Don't feel bad if you don't know what it means, even though you've heard it in the news a zillion times.  It has no meaning to us.  The first thing the republicans would do if they wanted voters to pay attention to the emoluments clause is:  rename it.  Turn it into a catchy, solid, simple phrase that is full of emotional meaning.  "Gifts for favors" conveys the idea more simply, but it doesn't have the emotional punch.  So I posted the idea on Facebook and Twitter, in the hope that others more clever than I will come up with the phrase that will let everybody know that the Trump family is planning on wheeling and dealing with corporate and world leaders while he is president so that he can increase his power and fortune.  In other words, reaping emoluments.

And let's take a look at Congress.  Just this week, to great fanfare about the new bipartisanship, the grandiose "21st Century Cures Act" passed the House, 392-26.  I heard it was to honor Joe Biden and his work to fund cancer research in the name of his son.  Even so, this was highly suspicious.  It took a little research, but not too much, to find that Elizabeth Warren in the Senate, had spoken in opposition to this bill.  Apparently, the pharmaceutical industry is going to make out like bandits from its passage.  Listen to Senator Warren:

You may be wondering a few years from now why we haven't cured cancer.  This is a clue.

And on the subject of Elizabeth Warren, Congress has set its sights on the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which she designed in order to curb overpricing and fraud in financial services, like in those credit cards we all carry.  Along with that, they plan on deregulating the banking industry further by cutting back if not eliminating the Dodd-Frank Act and the Volcker Rule, which were intended to prevent the financial chaos and destruction of the 2008 Recession, you know, where people lost their houses because big banks were allowed to gamble them away.  And this bill is called -- are you ready for it? -- the Financial Choice Act.

Feeling the need to further mask their true intent, the House this week passed a bill that moved forward tsunami research AND tweak -- deregulate -- Dodd-Frank:

H.Res.934 - Providing for consideration of the Senate amendment to the bill (H.R. 34) to authorize and strengthen the tsunami detection, forecast, warning, research, and mitigation program of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and for other purposes, and providing for consideration of the bill (H.R. 6392) to amend the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act to specify when bank holding companies may be subject to certain enhanced supervision, and for other purposes.

Now this is something we might pay attention to.

If the Democratic Party, both state and national, were to send out alerts whenever an explosive bill comes to the floor and tell us 1) what it means and 2) why it matters, and in actual easy to understand English, we all might become more invested in seeing our interests served.

And yet.  All we get are scary images of Henry McMaster taking over for Nikki Haley.  Or vague threats of what a Trump presidency will do to our country.

Y'all got to do better, Democratic Party.  Because nobody is hearing you.  And sending out a fund raising email three days after Giving Tuesday trying to get us to cough up another $25 without giving us a solid reason is proof that you aren't hearing us.

Not as Dumb as They Look

Yes, we all laughed at John Boehner yelling "Hell, no!" on the House floor after Obama's win.  And then there was the fiasco after the 2012 republican loss wherein they all stood in a circle and jerked off to the tune of, "We have to figure out how to say the same thing, but make it sound different."  You know that tune.  Just like Tim Scott's voting record, the republicans have gotten away with blocking and stalling any Democratic program that might succeed.

But wait.  Last week heralded a new day for bipartisanship, as Congress passed the bill that would "permanently" fix the threat of doctors refusing to accept Medicare due to lower rates of reimbursement.  Jon Stewart mocked the national moment of joy expressed at Congress at last getting together to do their job.

I am wondering, on the other hand, what we gave up in order to get those fools to agree.  Because what has been happening in Congress lately is a series of compromises that make the republicans look like real leaders while our Democratic goals and programs are being eroded.

Take the Human Trafficking Victims' Fund that just passed the Senate with 99 votes.  In March, this bill got bollixed up because the creeps in the republican party tied it to an anti-abortion amendment.  Fortunately somebody woke up and read the bill, and the media attention killed that sleazy plan.  Or so we thought.

These days, it seems that everybody wants to stop human trafficking, although it seems to me that this has become a term that can mean anything to anybody, and I doubt that the republican supporters are really planning on helping Mexicans who have been abused by coyotes after paying their way into the country.  But whatever we think it is, fighting human trafficking is so hot that a bill was even passed into law and signed by Governor Haley in South Carolina on April 2 of this year.

In the Senate, the compromise over which everyone is taking bows, involves splitting funds in a way that in no way no how can money for "health services" be spent on abortions.  Never let it be said that a Democrat would be unwilling to compromise when it comes to a woman's right to have an abortion.  Been abused?  Raped?  Coerced?  Have some "health services" sans abortion.

And then there is the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which could be subtitled "a million ways to die at the hands of the republican congress."  The plan seems to be that the more Senator Elizabeth Warren works to increase protections from big banks and their hi-jinx, the more creative become the wordsmiths in the republican party, assisted of course by Wall Street, ALEC, and all those other helpful denizens of the one percent.  So as Warren calls for more regulation and demands for accountability, the House has passed a bill which would require additional advisory boards (including what they call "small business") and to offset the cost of these boards, has PUT CAPS ON FUTURE FUNDING OF THE CONSUMER FINANCIAL PROTECTION BUREAU.

So thanks, Ronald Reagan, your plan to strangle government continues to thrive.

All I am saying is, this new era of "bipartisan politics" that has dawned in Washington is Democrats being roped in and hornswoggled.  If you want to know what is really going on, follow the comments of those who are opposing all these great moments in unity:  Bernie Sanders, Maxine Waters, Elizabeth Warren.  Now is the time to find the truth-tellers on the left, and not those who are either so naive or so concerned with being re-elected that they will compromise away the things we have fought for, like financial reform and women's rights.  When you see a 99-0 vote, ask yourself what we've lost, because the chances are pretty darned good that we have.