Blame

I’m sitting in  hotel room by the Isar River in Munich. It’s been swelteringly hot here, a city where air conditioning has never really been needed… until now. European farmland is drying up, and folks are coping as best they can. It’s not the first heat wave this year, temperatures soaring above 100F, and no one here thinks this is a passing phenomenon. Climate change is very real. A bit under the weather, I spent most of my time recovering with excellent medical care from a local doctor. Gave me lots of time to read, surf the local channels and just sit and people watch.

I remember my history books, how post-World War II Germans blamed the harsh reparations demanded by the victorious allies under the WWI Versailles Treaty for provoking Germany into a second war to rebuild their economy and their dignity. Most Germans in 1945 felt that the “purported” extermination of Jews and other “undesirables” were either fabrications or perhaps isolated incidents of a few rogue Nazis. The Nuremburg trials focused on the bosses and missed the massive collaboration, the blind eyes to the obvious, of so many ordinary Germans, enlisted soldiers not associated with the SS or other comparable reprehensibles. 

Germans mostly were an unrepentant lot… until one German Jewish lawyer, who had fled to save his life, was brought back to Germany to prosecute rank and file soldiers, local citizens, where the routine “we were just following orders” failed to convince anybody. Slowly, Germans began to learn the truth. Ordinary Germans had enabled mass exterminations mixed with torture, depravity, cruel experimentation and slave labor. Many escaped convictions; others did not. But the truth flooded out.

Death camps were turned into ugly museums. School children were forced to visit them as a part of their education. Aryan purity came crashing down. Germans embraced their shame. Chancellor Willy Brandt even dropped to his knees (pictured above) during a 1970s visit to Warsaw, Poland ghetto, from which so many Jews were extracted and shipped to concentration camps,  as gesture of sincere apology on behalf of the German people.

German children were shocked when they learned of the their parents’ effective complicity, and by the turbulent sixties, it seemed as if German youth were rebelling in disgust at their elders, rejecting capitalism, militarism and traditional religious and cultural values. There were riots and local terrorists trying to bring down the system. It took time to restore balance, but German attitudes changed. The notion of blaming others for their own failure (Germany stupidly started WWI because of the vanity of the Kaiser, wildly supported by the people) stuck out as the incredible sign of weakness that it always is. Jews were contributors to German greatness, not remotely the pariahs Hitler convinced his people that they were.

In the last few days, I watched as happy couples, many racially mixed, stroll down the river banks, stopping in at local coffee shops and eateries. Bicycles are everywhere, but not because people cannot afford cars… because it’s easy, good exercise and parking is a snap. There are no harsh signs, no serious political rantings, voices are soft and muted. Germany is productive. The migrants here are finally settling in, bringing new foods, new music and new culture to a welcoming population. 

I was expecting to see the rejection, the rise of the alt right and the racism against refugees I had been hearing about in the US press. Instead, I found a very friendly city, and a country with the political party with the largest constituency being the Greens. Germans I met spoke of sadness at the rise of a very divisive Donald Trump, now mirrored in the UK with Boris Johnson, reminiscent of their own bout with denial, mythology and blame. The diversity of the city astounded me. I was jealous.

What this experience has taught (reminded) me, a lesson I already knew but failed to recognize its significance, is that the politics of blame, seeking to pin failures on others, is both a sign of extreme weakness and a precursor to potential catastrophe. If you have failed but will not take responsibility to fix what has gone wrong, if you believe that hurting, expelling or blaming others will make your life better, you and all who follow that path will lose. When that blame rises to a national cry, the loss to that society will rise to a scale unimaginable. When facts are replaced by mythology and wishful thinking, when responsibility dissolves into the acidity of blame, you get paralysis, extreme polarization often leading to civil war or worse, and nothing gets fixed.

Here are the facts: climate change is real and accelerating faster than predicted with devastating consequences, pollution kills, the United States has legitimized corruption by fostering gerrymandering, voter restrictions and by giving the rich a disproportionate political voice, we have the worst income inequality in our history and among the developed world, racism has found a new legitimacy, our failed healthcare system is reflected in rising infant mortality rates and declining longevity statistics, social mobility has been relegated to the history books, our educational system is sliding downwards fast, coal is not coming back, blue collar jobs will continue to be automated (with more than a few white collar jobs along the way), money for research is vaporizing, we spend more on military costs but have not had a significant military victory since WWII, China has not remotely been responsible for any American decline, undocumented immigrants have not cost jobs or exploded the crime rates (MS-13 was born in Los Angeles!), there are too many guns and too many shootings… am I making my point? Lowering taxes, cutting food stamps and denying medical care have never made a country great.

If we want change, we must deal with reality. See facts. Accept truth. And as long as we think blaming and persecuting others will solve our difficulties, as long as we don’t take up the pick and shovels ourselves to build what we say we want, as long as we can complain on social media and desperately cling to some notion that we can turn back time, we must lose. Do we need to wait for the diehards to die – they tend to sit with older Americans? What if the crisis explodes before they pass? Remember this: almost half of all the fatalities faced by American soldiers in all of America’s wars combined came from our Civil War. And we have way more guns out there today, 15 million military-grade assault weapons alone (out of well over 300 million guns in civilian hands). If we cannot find a compromise in our national heart, we are done.

              I’m Peter Dekom, proud to be an American, but sadly, Munich gets it, most of Germany gets it… and not much of America does.

Launch Ain’t a Mid-Day Meal

"If Russia obtains reliable information that the United States

has finished developing these systems and started to produce them,

 Russia will have no option other than to engage in a full-scale

effort to develop similar missiles." Vladimir Putin, August 5^th

Looking at the above chart, prepared by the BBC based on US sources, it doesn’t exactly make you feel all warm and fuzzy inside. It’s not as if the notion of “mutually assured destruction” has completely left the building, but the existence of both limited-capacity nuclear warheads (tactical battle-field range) and strategic (the big one) just might make the playing field more dangerous. Ballistic missiles can deliver massive payloads over very long distances. Some of those missiles are in hard silos, some on mobile platforms and others carried on submarines.

The notion that a limited, targeted nuclear strike might not result in a full-fledged strategic response, could cause a nation or a military commander to deploy that “lesser” weapon. But the recipient of that “lesser” weapon might simply view the assault as a nuclear attack and respond with the bigger weapon. And remember, from the time there is an awareness of a nuclear attack, the defenders have ten minutes to decide how to respond and to warn civilians. Once a major strike is launched, the missiles are locked and gone. Boom!

There was – I repeat “was” – an arm’s limitation treaty between the United States and Russia. As of August 2^nd, there isn’t. “Last year the Americans said they had evidence that the new Russian cruise missiles fall within the range banned by the treaty… Accusations about the 9M729 missiles - known to Nato as SSC-8 - were then put to Washington's Nato allies, which all backed the US claim… In February, President Donald Trump set the 2 August deadline for the US to withdraw from the pact if Russia didn't come into compliance…

“Russian President Vladimir Putin suspended his country's own obligations to the treaty shortly afterwards… ‘Russia is solely responsible for the treaty's demise,’ Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said in a statement on Friday [8/2]… ‘With the full support of our Nato allies, the United States has determined Russia to be in material breach of the treaty, and has subsequently suspended our obligations under the treaty,’ he added… Russia's foreign ministry confirmed the INF treaty had been terminated ‘at the initiative of the US,’ in a statement carried by the official Ria news agency.” BBC.com, August 2^nd.

What is that 9M729/SSC-8 missile? It’s the one Vladimir Putin has bragged rather openly about that is so much faster than the speed of sound that he claims no defense system is fast enough to destroy. Some say, we should have negotiated before we terminated. It’s not really clear it would have made much difference, and it does not appear as if the United States has a comparable missile system to trade off against. But is Russia the big concern?

Look and India and Pakistan, battling over Kashmir, facing nasty exchanges between border forces and even through out-and-out terrorism. India still claims Pakistan stood behind the 2008 massive assault in against mostly tourist targets in Mumbai by Islamists from Pakistan: “By the time the standoff ended at the Nariman House on the evening of November 28, six hostages as well as two gunmen had been killed. At the two hotels, dozens of guests and staff were either trapped by gunfire or held hostage. Indian security forces ended the siege at the Oberoi Trident around midday on November 28 and at the Taj Mahal Palace on the morning of the following day. In all, at least 174 people, including 20 security force personnel and 26 foreign nationals, were killed. More than 300 people were injured. Nine of the 10 terrorists were killed, and one was arrested.” Encyclopedia Britannica. How much would it take for either nation to have launched a nuclear response?

Or the threats from Donald Trump’s buddy, Kim Jong-Un, who always resumes testing when the denuclearization talks with the United States stall, which they always do. Or perhaps Iran, slowly unraveling their obligations under the UN six-party nuclear containment accord since the United States withdrew, will finally have nuclear weapon. And one day, as Trump baits Tehran and moves our Naval fleet closer, perhaps Iran will show the United states exactly what it will have or perhaps already has developed. Or Pakistan, once having shared its nuclear secrets with North Korea, makes another sinister deal with Iran or some terrorist group one of its generals secretly supports?

In a world of chemical and biological weapons – Syria seems to be Russia’s testing ground by assisting the Assad regime against its own people – you would think that there are sufficient alternatives to nuclear weapons. But one well-placed nuke, smuggled in or launched, can do so much damage, can kill hundreds of thousands (millions) of people, that the temptation to use one just might be great to ignore. We don’t need bully tactics, go-it-alone politics, bi-lateral agreement (vs multiparty accords) and openly threatening and hostile statements from our president. Prepared for attack, we need to rebuilt our thoroughly demoralized diplomatic corps, resurrect our standing foreign aid, join forces with countries that used to be our allies and stop saber-rattling and baiting enemies with serious military might.

              I’m Peter Dekom, and wouldn’t be grand if we did not have a government begging our enemies to attack while shoving our allies out the door?

Messin’ With China

You’d think that baiting the second largest economy on earth, run by an autocrat who knows that kowtowing to America puts him on a short list to be deposed, would be a challenge even for an accomplished bully. Donald Trump’s proud to say, “I know China very well.” And indeed, his dealings with Chinese/Hong Kong investors suggest that indeed he does. You think he might have learned his lesson. It started a long time ago, when Trump needed some financial rescuing in connection New York City real estate in desperate need of refinancing. HK investors came up with the cash.

Here’s the way the May 30, 2016 New York Times tells the story: “‘I beat China all the time,’ Mr. Trump declared in a speech the day he announced his candidacy. ‘I own a big chunk of the Bank of America building at 1290 Avenue of the Americas that I got from China in a war. Very valuable.’… Mr. Trump does have an investment in the building, an office tower near Rockefeller Center. But court documents and interviews with people involved in the deal tell a very different story of how he ended up with it.

“It began when a group of Hong Kong billionaires, including one who has been called the Donald Trump of China, helped rescue Mr. Trump from the verge of bankruptcy by investing in one of his properties in Manhattan… Their partnership began in 1994, after the collapse of the real estate market left Mr. Trump deeply in debt. He could not afford to make the bank payments on a 77-acre swath of land near Lincoln Center known as Riverside South, let alone to develop the property…

“In need of cash, he agreed to meet with intermediaries from a consortium of Hong Kong billionaires who were willing to buy the land, assume Mr. Trump’s debts and pay him 30 percent of the profits, as well as fees for helping to manage the development of the site, which they agreed to finance. It was by far the best offer he received. The group included Henry Cheng Kar-shun, one of the world’s richest developers, and Vincent Lo, who is Mr. Trump’s Chinese counterpart in more ways than one… 

“The project proved extremely profitable, as the New York real estate market rebounded. In 2005, the Hong Kong partners sold the development for $1.76 billion. Although it was believed to be the largest residential real estate transaction in the city’s history, Mr. Trump was furious, and contends to this day that his partners did not consult him first… ‘I said: ‘Why didn’t you come talk to me? Whatever price you got, I could have gotten more money,’’ Mr. Trump recalled in an interview... Mr. Lo said that Mr. Trump had been informed of the decision, and that in any case it would have been very hard to shop such a large property around without Mr. Trump’s becoming aware of it.

“Instead of accepting his share of the proceeds, Mr. Trump sued his partners for ‘staggering breach’ of fiduciary duty in a lawsuit that demanded $1 billion in damages. Mr. Lo, who felt that Mr. Trump should have been appreciative of the deal he had received, called the lawsuit ‘a shock.’

“And when the Hong Kong partners sought to invest the proceeds from the sale in Bank of America buildings in San Francisco and New York, Mr. Trump sought an injunction to scuttle the deal… The judge ruled against him. Instead of receiving the cash he wanted, Mr. Trump had to accept a 30 percent share in the profits from the two Bank of America buildings, tied up in a partnership that is slated to last until 2044. But today, Mr. Trump counts that legal defeat as a victory.” A quarter century from now. That same Donald Trump believed he could bully China by slapping them with tariffs, his most recent foray added a further 10% duty on roughly $300 billion worth of Chinese goods that is supposed to take effect on September 1^st.

So how’s that effort going, Donny? China cowering at your feet yet? Begging for mercy? Or did they have a little surprise for Donald “I didn’t do so well at Wharton” Trump? Not exactly what he expected. The PRC announced a 7% devaluation of their currency, supposedly simply a reflection of the marketplace. Hmmmm. So not only does the 7% currency cut offset a chunk of that new tariff, but it (a) makes Chinese goods even cheaper all over the world where PRC sellers compete with American companies, and (b) it makes US goods, particularly agricultural exports, that much more expensive in China… without China’s lifting a finger to impose a new tariff. 

It’s already considered unpatriotic for Chinese to buy US goods, and China has adjusted its buying habits to import farm goods from other countries, easily filling the void left when they stopped buying US foodstuffs, particularly soybeans. Their recent pledge to buy more American farm products? Yeah, well, how do you make people buy stuff? Oh, and anyway they reneged after the new tariff was announced. As Trump has been doling out his corporate socialist dollars to farmers caught in his trade wars, China’s just adjusting to living with a whole lot less US trade, which is making friends with a lot of countries who stepped in to fill our shoes.

“The potential loser in this international game of chicken is the U.S. economy. Both long term and short term, the White House is playing with fire — and it could end up burning Trump’s reelection bid… ‘Being tough on China in pursuit of an imaginary deal that fixes everyone’s problems is a very safe political space to be in,’ said David Loevinger, an analyst for TCW Emerging Markets Group in Los Angeles and a former senior Treasury Department official for China affairs. ‘Once you move from an imaginary space to a real deal, it makes a lot of constituencies unhappy, and you’re taking a bigger political risk.’” Los Angeles Times, August 7^th.  The US stock markets plunged in response.

“Longer term, the trade war could cut off many U.S. companies, including producers of materials for high-tech industries, from a lucrative market… The conflict may also increase pressure on Beijing to move away from dependence on exports and increase its efforts to supply its domestic markets itself. For American companies, that would probably curb their opportunities for future growth in perhaps the richest future market for consumer goods in the world.

“On Monday [8/5], Trump added a gut punch to his tariffs by making good on his campaign promise to label Beijing a ‘currency manipulator.’… If that’s just a hardball negotiating tactic, it has the downside for Trump of making it harder to accept less than total victory… He would risk a big backlash if he were to accept anything less than a comprehensive deal that includes not just hefty purchases of American goods but major structural reforms to China’s state-run economy.

“And this week’s swift response from Beijing to Trump’s new tariffs made it clear that President Xi Jinping isn’t going to cave to U.S. demands, which include the Chinese legislature writing changes into its laws… Beijing promptly announced it would stop new U.S. farm purchases and let its currency drop against the dollar.

“‘Up until the latest salvo from Trump, the strategy was working out pretty well,’ said Sung Won Sohn, a business economist at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. Trump got an economic boost from tax cuts, and then the Fed shifted its interest rate policy that eventually led to rate cuts last week, all of which buoyed stocks. ‘But the latest salvo, 10% tariffs on $300 billion, was a significant policy mistake.’” LA Times. Are you tired of winning so much?! Hey, Trump knows China. Just ask him. It gets worse from here. A whole lot worse.

              I’m Peter Dekom, and a shoot-from-the-hip bully president with a deeply flawed understanding of how tariff wars tend to end up and an unwillingness to listen to experts is pretty much getting to see “up close and personal” what happens when you mess with sasquatch.

Domestic Terrorism, Race War or Civil War

"Hate has no place in our country, and we're going to take care of it."

Donald Trump after giving condolences to shooting victims and their families on August 4^th. Seriously!

The interesting feature of modern warfare is what we euphemistically call “asymmetrical combat.” Stateless warriors, hit and run targets, focused on imploding political systems, instilling fear to provoke reactions and recruit additional adherents, and assemblages of those led by maniacal leaders – charismatic slogan-driven militants with fire in their eyes and hate in their hearts – joined by pop-up lone-wolves acting on their own in seeming synchronicity with a perceived greater movement. Hating minorities, blaming them for the ills of a nation, is hardly new. Every demagogue, every rising autocrat, throughout history has built and consolidated his (yup “his”) power based on targeting hapless others as the bane of their nations’ everyman.

Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, Mao, Castro, Khomeini, Assad, bin Laden, Al Baghdadi, Ghaddafi come to mind as those who began as outcasts and rose through blame and violence to positions of power. Others hold their power through violence and blame. Putin, Maduro, Burma’s (Myanmar’s) generals, African strongmen, etc., etc. There always has to be a “good us” vs a “bad them.” Winners and losers. No consensus. One group must dominate another, one group accorded “legitimacy” while another is “unpatriotic” and the “root of the problem.” Blame.

Unification is the enemy for these autocrats. They rely dramatically on a divide and conquer strategy, fall quickly when their populace stabilizes and finds accommodation through compromise and consensus. They simply cannot thrive in a true, balanced and functional democracy. Without severe polarization, forcing people to pick sides with zeal and commitment, they cannot survive or hold power. Roping in the military or police power helps as does delegitimizing aspects of their own governments, structures they are committed to take down anyway, that could serve as barriers to their ascendency and retention of power.

Until the most modern era, nascent dissents were forced into clandestine meetings – rife with risk as informants could easily penetrate these organizations. Then came the Internet and smart phones. Social media dominated. So many websites. So many ways to reach the disenfranchised, loners seeking vindication. Automated targeting – bots – made the task of identifying and reaching those vulnerable to the message easy to find, easy to target.

And for those violently inclined in the past, almost uniformly relegated to explosives vs guns. After all, explosives can be manufactured from the simplest components, even ordinary fertilizer can be rigged to detonate, and industrial dynamite easy to come by. Regime changes loosed all manner of military-grade explosives, even chemical and biological weapons (and a few lose nukes), and the arms market flourished, for the right price, for AK-47s and RPG launchers. Then came AR-15s and their ilk.

Identifying minorities is relatively easy. Ethic names, choice of dress, a tendency to live in like-minded communities, race or skin color, language, places of worship, place of birth or a willingness to stand out as a spokesperson for the relevant minority group. Once identified, shifting blame and building moral outrage is easy. In times of destabilizing change – where globalization and automation are totally reprioritizing job-skill-values more than at any other time in human history – those left behind or being left behind are desperately seeking simple lifelines to return to what their life assumptions had always been.

Think of a farmer in the deep South in the 1860s being told that he (yes, “he”) would no longer have the use of exceptionally cheap slave labor to earn a living. He was ready to fight and die rather than accept the change. We don’t have slavery today, but the economic/work displacement is just as severe. The patterns of generations of labor, from great grandfather, to grandfather, to father to son, are now broken by modernity.

For who say that Donald Trump is a racist, they really cannot make that statement without the deepest psychoanalysis of the President himself. He may actually be deeply “un-racist.” What he is, whatever his true beliefs might be, is willing to exploit racism to exacerbate a vast political divide, extreme polarization, in order to maintain political power. Throwing in statistics on GDP (an average number boosted by rich people making much more) and unemployment (excluding those who cannot find any work and have given up or those severely under-employed) provides an argument for his reelection, but the immutability of this base constituency.

Muslim Americans, inner-city African Americans living in violence well-below the poverty line and undocumented Hispanic immigrants have not remotely cost jobs or decimated the U.S. economy, quite the opposite. But they fit the bill as perfect targets.

“Socialism” – particularly as that word is callously misused – can be used to tear apart the opposition, at least in this country. Paying for healthcare for all is done in every other developed country on earth, except the United States. Simply put, it’s hard to argue that the United States cannot replicate a viable universal healthcare system when the entire developed world has been operating with such systems for years. Environmental protection is not a Chinese hoax… those wildfires, tropical storms, droughts and flooding… consistently rising temperatures… have the most consistent direct relationship to increases in greenhouse gasses.

The United States is the only developed country on earth with virtually the same number of guns in private hands as it has people. More assault weapons in private hands than the entire population of many European nations. And a clear and oft-repeated justification for allowing such assault weapons to proliferate (by no means constitutionally protected) as a check on a government that might veer too far away from “core American values.”

Donald Trump is acutely aware of this sentiment. He has delegitimized the mainstream press, his own intelligence agencies, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Environment Protection Agency. He is sworn to take down these institutions and to the maximum extent possible, replace them with Trump-supporting alternatives. But taking extreme positions, finding hidden enemies, amplifies that required political divisiveness and justifies extreme measures.

Since 9/11/01, the tsunami of mass killings in the United States has been deeply and fundamentally driven by what we euphemistically call “domestic terrorists,” a label that is never used by Donald Trump. His explanation is to ignore the patterns of rising mass shootings, almost all with those legitimate military grade assault weapons, and label each as a deranged psychopath acting from some form of mental illness. There may even be a ring of truth to the required mental aberration to implement a mass killing. But that so many mass murderers are clearly linked either as unambiguous supporters of the President or passionately committed to the annihilation of those ethnic and racial targets who are the unambiguous targets of Donald Trump’s blame game… suggests that what is really happening is an acting out of Trump’s deepest message. “Good people” on both sides.

With the ascendency of Donald Trump came an acceleration, a spike, in hate crimes, hate speech and related domestic terrorism. There are more semi-automatic weapons in circulation today than at any other time in our nation’s history. El Paso, August 3^rd. 20 murdered, 26 injured by a white supremacist hell-bent on carrying out his president’s subliminal message. Dayton, August 4^th, 9 dead, 27 injured. Two days. So what is really happening here? Domestic terrorism or a slow explosion of a civil war? Joe Biden, old Joe Biden, had said what many Americans – right, left and center – intuitively already think. The United States as we know it will not survive a second Trump term. Enough blame on those with mental illness. Enough of those “our thoughts and prayers are with the families of the victims.” Enough! The hate you give…

              I’m Peter Dekom, and sometimes the acceleration of what might otherwise pass for random… is no longer random.