International

An Example Says It All

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During the Covid crisis the Trump people carried on a campaign of blatant immorality that never got the attention it deserved. They got themselves vaccinated, but encouraged their supporters not to. Not getting vaccinated was an act of resistence to Biden, a gesture for freedom in the face of government overreach, and would be just fine. They killed supporters for their benefit.

That was handy for the campaign. It was a smokescreen for their botched handling of the early stages of the epidemic. So many people died from the anti-vax campaign that they could repeat their bottom line over and over again: “More people died from Covid under Biden than under Trump.”

Now cut to the present. As with Covid, it’s not an accident that Trump’s supporters are the ones hurt most by today’s Trump economy: the tariffs, the instability, the cuts to public services including medicare and social security. It’s certainly not the billionaires (or Trump himself) who are getting hurt. They’ve got their tax cuts, which is to say all those supposed savings from DOGE and other budget cuts went to them. The MAGA people–like the unvaccinated–are sacrificed to the program.

It’s the same internationally–who is getting hurt? Not Russia or China. He’s buddy-buddy with them. They’re all on board with the idea of spheres of influence, the idea that big powerful countries should be able to take what they can get. It’s US allies who trusted us. They’re easy targets, because they were on our side. They represented the first line of our defense against the USSR and now Russia. They didn’t have defenses against us (although they’re now learning).

It’s time to recognize that’s what Trump is. It’s easier to fleece people who considered themselves your friends than to fight enemies. He’s the ultimate confidence man. He’s enormously skilled in insinuating himself with people who are ambitious or have problems, and absolutely ruthless in taking advantage of those who have the misfortune to trust him. Whether he sees himself that way or not, that’s what he is.

There’s no arguing that the MAGA people, among others, have seen the prosperity of the country pass them by. There are real problems with the top-heavy distribution of wealth in this country. But Trump has sold them a story worthy of his talents: that poor immigrants and our foreign allies are the ones making them poor, while the billionaires who command real money and used their political power to create the wealth distribution are their friends! This amazing switch of responsibility is sold as free market economics, but it comes down to something as old as time–that the rich deserve all they can get and certainly should not be saddled with the needs of their inferiors. Unsurprisingly those billionaires are now cashing-in left and right while the others are standing hat-in-hand waiting for the ever-distant golden future.

The ultimate confidence man has delivered the ultimate win.

Urgent Messages

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1.  From the Olympics: 

In the opening and closing ceremonies at the Olympics many speakers, notably IOC President Thomas Bach, pointed out the importance of the Olympics as a symbol of what can be possible when all countries of the world to come together in peace.  That sounds nice, but it’s probably more apt to think about what happened with the original version of the Olympics, which persisted for quite some time. That message is not so rosy.

The original Olympics functioned even more as a symbol of peace, because there was an actual truce during the Olympic period.  But the overall lesson of the Olympic experience was that good feelings are not enough.  The Olympics did not prevent the horrendously bloody and unnecessary Peloponnesian War, fought between prime participants Athens and Sparta. 

Symbols aren’t enough.  If we don’t work at peace, it won’t happen.  There are more than enough parallels of that past with the current situation between the US and China.  If you want peace you need to remove reasons for war.

2.  From the fires and floods worldwide:

Messaging about effects of climate change has been more than a little confused.   We read about how front-line communities will bear the worst of climate issues (true enough but that makes it someone else’s problem).  We see maps of how different countries or regions will be better or worse off.  The NYTimes once had an article asking readers to plug in numbers to see if they were rich enough to escape the worst.  The most frequent objection to the Paris Accords is that we need to go back and renegotiate a better deal.

Nature is telling us something else.  We’re all in this together, and there is nowhere to hide.  Scientists have correctly indicated the directions of change.  But the world has never been here before, so it’s impossible to predict every bad thing that is going happen and where.

What’s more, carbon dioxide just accumulates in the atmosphere, so climate effects are going to continue getting worse until we can stop burning fossil fuels.  There will be more and more unexpected phenomena with more and more damaging results.   All the talk of taking CO2 out of the atmosphere is not going to produce results any time soon (and even if it works will itself take monumental amounts of energy).  So there’s only one answer—migrating the world’s energy requirements to sustainable sources.

This has to happen worldwide and we have to work together.  It may be contrary to all of our normal modes of behavior, but if we don’t all win we’re going to lose.

In the end the two messages are largely the same. We’ve fought two world wars, and now we’ve now got a third one against climate change. We have to learn how to behave when we’re all–unavoidably–on the same side.