Skip to main content

Bleak Times for Trump’s USA? by Bill Lee

“If we don’t put a stake into the heart of this administration, there may not be an election in 2028.” Gavin Newsom, Governor of California


The news from the US of A about the wild and weird pronouncements and actions of the abhorrent individual sitting in the most powerful seat in the land, DJ Trump, is bleak. There is his destructive mania for imposing tariffs on every nation in the world: his corrupt attempt to block public knowledge of the truth of the sordid matter of the Epstein files; his racist hatred of Brown and Black people and his inhumane policy of arresting them willy nilly and illegally deporting many; his war on the hard won rights of women and other minorities; his ignoring of court orders (he owns a more or less corrupt Supreme Court); his impossible and unhinged comments on wanting Canada to become the 51st state of the USA; and his increasingly wacky and garbled speech, are only the most recent concerns. But probably the most dangerous of his right-wing campaigns is to destroy any effort to moderate, let alone halt, the march toward the looming climate catastrophe. Just this week it was reported that he was using the opportunity of his trip to England to absurdly criticize that country’s use of windmills.


Under this short but baleful Trump rule, the USA has staggered to the point of now teetering dangerously on the edge of chaos and plunging into the depths of oligarchy and dictatorship. This is at the hands of someone who is a not very intelligent, second rate grafter, along with a bunch of his avaricious and clearly enthralled sycophants. Through his placing these sleazy incompetents in powerful government positions, this immoral and abhorrent individual controls the key governing institutions, the Justice department, the Supreme Court, the Department of Health, the armed forces, Foreign aid, etc., etc.. There are no checks or balances on how presidential power is functioning. There is, one supposes, the hope that the apparently confused Democratic Party will recapture the House of Representatives (but not likely the Senate) at the midterm elections, which are more than a year away. They, one again assumes, expect to mount a third successful impeachment process. However, that would require that Trump and his minions not successfully bully their way to messing up the “normal” voting process so that the Democrats hopes will be dashed. And in any event should the Democrats not gain a sufficient number of Senate seats, they cannot hope to meet anything but a blockage in the Senate.


I have of course been wrong before but I’m much afraid that the long struggle back to some form of normalcy and human decency in the USA will be an exceedingly difficult one, and I fear the possibility of it being a bloody one.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

THE PROFOUND EMPTINESS OF PIERE POILIEVRE by Bill lee

“You take the lies out of him, and he’ll shrink to the size of your hat; you take the malice out of him, and he’ll disappear.” - Mark Twain. There has never been any very substantial evidence that Pierre Poilievre is an even moderately well-rounded human being, or someone with even a modicum of depth. What he clearly is, is a career politician with no experience of, and no apparent interest in, life outside of the narrow, dark recesses of the CPC caucus room; i.e., he’s a pure political operator. Though that is something, let’s be honest, it is not a whole lot, at least if one wants to become an authentic political leader. At this point however he is becoming (has become?) a completely plastic image created by the gang of back-room boys whose task it is to construct something that looks like a leader. Whether what they have rendered in PP is, or even looks like, a leader however is questionable. Good leaders (never mind great ones) have an ability to, and interest in, showing an unders...
Post a Comment
Read more

HOW THE COVID PANDEMIC HAS CHANGED PANHANDLING by Jim Ward

Panhandling, i.e., begging for small change on the street, has been under considerable threat since the coming of Covid. Of course, the practice has been under threat before whenever the good burgers of some city find that the poor have resorted to “inconveniencing” the public and they feel the “moral” need to criminalize it. But Covid is causing different constraints. In these times very few people carry cash with them. In fact, many retailers will not accept cash, since it may well be ‘dirty money’. The term panhandling had its origins, so I’m told, during an economic depression in the United States in the late 19th century. That depression hit the panhandle area of northern Texas particularly hard and it caused many workers to head to New York City, where the ‘Buddy can you spare a dime?’ request was given birth. The practitioners of this art became known as the panhandlers. Back in the early 1970s I conducted studies of panhandling approaches in six North American cities, one of th...
Post a Comment
Read more

Gun Violence and Bigotry, Due South & in Canada

Bill Lee August 24, 2019 Trump in his Florida speech asked how “these people” could be “stopped”. Someone among the crowd shouted, “Shoot them!” At first laughing, Trump responded, "That's only in the [Florida] panhandle, can you get away with that statement. [1] Given the obscene number of deaths from mass shootings in the USA recently it is probably not surprising that some of the old "rationales" have been taken off the shelf and dusted off. One GOP “legislator” has opined that there is a link to the spread and consumption of violent video games. Leaving aside that this is an exceedingly tired trope that has never been proven, there are a couple of others that clearly have much greater power as explanations. It is not, for example a fanciful notion that high capacity automatic weapons are a more likely link. [2] But there is another issue that really deserves much more full attention. When, oh when will the denizens political class, the media, a...
Post a Comment
Read more