The Ironic Cherry Reads...

The Sack of Rome

by Alexander Stille

Hitler, Trump,... Berlusconi?  I didn't believe it either.  Italy is such a small place, I hardly pay attention to it, except for the food.  But when we weren't looking, Silvio Berlusconi took over and ran a country already corrupted into the ground.  And when I read about the parallels between Italy's prime minister and our own clown president in the New York Times in December, I decided to learn more.

The Sack of Rome was written in 2006, but rather than feel outdated, it is prescient.  When the author compares Berlusconi's manipulations to those of George W. Bush, the impression is that W. was just a prequel to the Trump reality show.  And that Trump is more Berlusconi than W., albeit even a bit stupider.

From odd bits like both being germophobes and referring to themselves in the third person, there are the more significant details of personal history, like the origination of their wealth in real estate development.  In fact, the lies and obfuscations, the hidden deals behind the schemes, are eerily similar.  Both bolster arguments with false quotes and statistics.  Neither read much.  And both garnered fame and power with the people of their country by virtue of media empire -- Berlusconi's ownership and control over television in Italy and Trump's fame and popularity beginning with Miss Universe pageants and culminating with the image of the successful entrepreneur and business mogul on the reality show, The Apprentice.

We mostly assume Trump is an idiot, because his poor impulse control and anger have led to some really dumb moves.  His attacks on people who might be supporters tend to prove he is not as smart as he thinks.  Or it might just be that the crazy has overridden the smart.

But Berlusconi seems to have a shrewd intellect wherein he has planned his successes with a philosophy that Trump can merely mimic.  As owner of the first private television station in the country, Berlusconi imported popular American TV shows that had been unavailable through the government owned station.  Then he built up commercial advertising in a way that multiplied both power and profit.

Berlusconi was hands on with both programming and personnel of his media empire.  As Stille writes:

"Berlusconi went unabashedly after the lowest common denominator and made the silent majority the protagonist of his television.  'Remember that the audience of our listeners, as they say in America, have an eighth-grade education and were not at the top of their class,' he told his sales force in the late 1980's."

And then there is his involvement with the Mafia, the shady characters that aided and abetted his ambitious plan for power and wealth.  Much as Trump and Russia, it was a mutually beneficial dirty deal.  And supporters of both merely shrugged off the complicity as something that was necessary to bring change.  Both assumed that it would take someone who knew how to deal and had the great wealth to prove it in order to bring order to their lives.

There needs to be a certain level of distrust and cynicism for the people of a nation to hand the reigns of power over to a leader who is known to be corrupt.  And in our country we have grown accustomed to lies, deceits and deals from our politicians.  We have a media that no longer is required to hold to standards of ethics or even pretend to fairness, in spite of claims to the contrary.  Our political leaders spend more time courting the wealthy and powerful and holding meetings to plan how they will control the electorate than actually listening to voters, which has been proved dramatically during the past several months of town hall evasions by legislators.

And after years of lies and innuendo, buttressed by a media that went after the most outrageous news rather than the most credible, we saw our election sabotaged to the point where people who should have known better said they couldn't vote for Hillary because they just couldn't trust her.  Day after day of Chuck Todd inserting in every story that these were the two most unpopular candidates ever, as though he had nothing to do with the perception.

The pressure on the media for ratings and ad dollars wakened and gave life to the hibernating Trump, but it took Russia to know what strings to pull to unravel our democracy.  And the corruption seeped through the system.  The cynicism that had been growing in the American people for decades allowed supporters to cheer when Trump said "crooked Hillary" even though they knew he had scammed Trump University enrollees; it is the kind of cynicism that has Michael Flynn yelling "lock her up" even as his is conspiring with the Russian government.

In fact, in the New Yorker article by John Cassidy cited above, he says,

"It is also worth recalling that, in Italy, Silvio Berlusconi, another populist businessman, served as Prime Minister four times despite a list of allegations against him that included bribery, tax evasion, sexual misconduct, and having ties to the mafia."

For an American who isn't much interested in the world outside my own walls, this book was a page turner.  I would like to recommend it, but I realize we all could use a diversion in these dark days.  So let me suggest a drinking game to go along with the book.  Take a shot every time you can substitute "Trump" for "Berlusconi."  And don't plan on driving anywhere for awhile.

 

War at Home

I have been away for awhile.  I found that it seemed I was writing the same old over and over again.  No new information, no new perspectives.  It has been nice being a member of the uninformed public.  Also, when I got back not a thing had changed -- except that somebody told me gay marriage is now legal in South Carolina, which I guess would be earth-shattering news if it were true.

The "riots" in St. Louis are related to George Zimmerman being handed his gun and set free with the blessing of the NRA and the KKK.  And the Zimmerman outrage is related to the fact that Columbia, SC, last year bought a tank from the federal government.

Rachel Maddow last night had an excellent retrospective on the shootings at Kent State in 1970.  But then she went farther back, to the campus protest in Madison, Wisconsin, in 1967, when Vietnam protests were turned over from local campus police to city police, ending in 65 people hospitalized.

After that, Madison hired a new chief of police, David Cooper, who in his long career there successfully demilitarized the police force, and began what is now called "community policing."

I urge you to read The Rise of the Warrior Cop by Radley Balko.  He paints a gruesome picture of how police departments in small communities in this country over the past decade have become armed.  Just as the US is supplying their favored sides in battles in the Middle East, they are also arming our communities.  And what they are being armed for is not fighting neighborhood crime, but for war.

Here are the priorities in the nation today:  we do not have money to spend on education, on housing, on psychotherapy.  We do have unlimited amounts to spend on arms and prisons.  And the citizens of our country are the ones who have chosen these priorities, because they are the ones who are voting.  They may be voting out of ignorance, they are certainly vulnerable to the hysterical fear-mongering of Fox News and the NRA, but the fact remains, we voters have chosen.

The reason we voters choose an armed America is because we believe that only the bad guys will get hurt.  But the battering rams are not shattering the houses of drug lords, but homes of individuals who may have their small stash of pot.  They aren't going after cartels, but people enjoying poker night.

Don't believe it?  Neither do most of us, because it is too horrendous to consider.

But there are a couple of truisms about this situation.  First, there is the supply of weapons.  Then there is the fact that we will pay for the toys, but not for the training.  And then there is the fact that the police have gone from those who live in the community and are hired to protect us, to those with too much firepower, too little training, and who believe that they need to be constantly vigilant, in order to protect themselves.

And of course, police violence like that going on in Ferguson, Missouri, won't be likely to happen in suburban white communities.  We have over the past several years, been fed racist attitudes that have allowed black teenagers to be targeted.  It may be that Michael Brown stole cigars from a convenience store, but maybe not.  He may have pushed the officer, but maybe not.  Whatever he did do, he was unarmed, and shot eight times.

This is not our system of justice.  This is a national corrosion of values, evident in "stop and frisk" and "papers, please."  Where guns are not just allowed but welcomed, because politicians and, yes, our courts, don't really have a clue about the second amendment but prefer to sow seeds of fear across the country, and quash state and individual rights to protect themselves through peaceful measures.  In fact, the second amendment has become somewhat like a Rorschach Test, reflecting just how power hungry and paranoid we are.

This time, though, there were journalists -- white journalists -- who got caught in the tear gas and the rubber bullets and the jailing.  It was a middle class, conservative campus in 1970 where the murders of four unarmed students forced the nation to look at its war on its young citizens.  I am hoping that the media, because members of its own were caught in the crosshairs of a militant police action, will pick up this fight.  Because we are looking at a future with tanks and assault weapons, where people are watched from cameras on the street corners, and are guilty until proven innocent, or maybe until killed. 

In All Fairness

While I was tuned in to as much of the Syria "debate" as I could stand, a couple of remarkable things happened.

The absolute ickiest person in the country, Ariel Castro, after being found guilty of kidnapping and holding captive three women and sentenced to a hearty life plus 1,000 years, committed suicide.  Eric Bolling at Fox News thought it was Christmas, imagining all the tax dollars that could be saved if every bad guy killed himself.

Again in the icky category, George Zimmerman appears to have threatened his wife with a firearm.  It also appears that he is not likely to be arrested, as his wife, whose veracity is questionable to say the least, is now saying he did not have a gun.  Who knew Zimmerman was potentially violent?  Certainly not the court that found him not guilty for murdering Trayvon Martin, and then handed him back the gun he used to kill Martin on his way out of jail.

Meanwhile, continuing with the stranger than fiction theme,  back in the real world, the US and Russia have reached an agreement on a proposal to eliminate Syria's chemical weapons arsenal.  Throughout these amazing talks between two world leaders that have lately been unable to agree on the weather, the media have reported that the American people are not happy.  It seems that not only do we not want to go to war because there is nothing in it for us.  We also are disgruntled because such an agreement with Syria would mean that Assad would give up Syria's chemical weapons without getting punished.

And as I write this last line, let me remind you that yesterday may have been Friday the 13th, but it's feeling more like April Fool's Day.

  

If It Worked for ACORN...

Have you heard the scandal about the surfer on Food Stamps?  If you haven't you aren't paying attention.  Crime fighters at Fox News are all over it.  They found a guy who is proud of the fact that he is cheating the government.

And James O'Keefe played a pimp in order to kill ACORN.

We have become a country far too easily duped.  This is the place where Wall Street Banks break the law and figure by the time they get caught they will have made millions (or billions).  This is the land of corporate welfare, where the Koch brothers, ExxonMobil, and Wal-Mart write the rules so that they can legally pillage and plunder.  And create a nation where the numbers of poor and hungry grow each year.

Ronald Reagan invented the welfare queen, and the tall tale worked so well for him that the republican party -- funded by corporate America -- has fed off it ever since.

Because of Reagan's dream, shared by corporate America and the right wing, hard working Americans have been seeing their dreams dashed.  Less likely these days to wish for wealth than health care, insecure Americans prove an easy target for the myth of the welfare queen.

Just as with the other battles we are fighting for what should be our rights as Americans -- the right to vote, the right to a living wage, the right to medical privacy -- as long as we are struggling just to keep from losing those battles, we are unable to focus on the real financial criminals in our society.

As long as Fox News and Markwayne Mullin can get us riled up about the Food Stamp recipient that eats steak, we won't even notice that our children's future is being stolen by the wealthy and powerful.

So we need to keep reminding people of where the real corruption lies.  Maybe surfer Jason Greenslate really exists, or maybe he's another wannabe James O'Keefe.  What he is not, is the person who is draining our economy and living high off our tax dollars.  You will need to look to our Congress and folks like Wal-Mart's Waltons to find the real guilty parties.

Let's help focus on the real problems, and get the American people back on track.

Where Are the Poor?

You have to admit, we Americans hide our poor well.  That, plus the fact that when you're tired, cold and hungry you just don't make it a priority to write to your congressional representative, much less get out and vote, making the ever-increasing number of poor in this country quite unheard from, and even less talked about.


The right-wing-nut Heritage Foundation, stranger to empathy that it is, published on July 19th, an article that smugly asserts that the poor in this country are far better off than most third world countries.  Thankfully, when FOX "News" leaped on this report, Colbert was not far behind.


In fact, if you search the web for "poor America refrigerator" you will find an abundance of appalled responses to the Heritage nonsense.  In July and August.  Here we are in September and I am afraid that all we are left with is Tea Partiers and other assorted right-wing-nuts that now know for a fact that poor people in America are living high.


And, if you look closely at that search -- wait!  Robert Rector, the Heritage Foundation dude that wrote that article, actually rewrote it from an article he wrote in 2007.  He did make some crucial changes, though.


In 2007, in his chart showing just how much stuff the poor really own, he listed homes first (42.6%).  In a clever marketing-type strategy, in his reworked 2011 chart, he drops home ownership entirely; hmm, could that be because a whole lot more "poor" don't own homes anymore.  No, that's not it,  because he's using the exact same data from 2005.  Must  be because that figure of 99.9% that own a refrigerator is far more impressive.  Like, all poor people own refrigerators!


As a matter of fact, 99.9 is such an impressive number, that he changed it from the 2007 article, using the same data, from 99.2.  Not to be picky.  Because Rector is so good at slinging charts and poll numbers around that the whole thing gave me a headache.


Bottom line, though, is that the Heritage Foundation is claiming that most Americans should not be considered poor if they own a refrigerator.  And they have been at it for years.


Deja vu all over again, if you are old enough to recall Ronald Reagan's presidency-winning nonsense about the black welfare queen.


Or if Rector reheats this data and serves it up again in a couple more years.