Category: Politics

It’s Election Day in the USA

Today is a day for wise choices.

If you know my writing (and if you are out there reading this, I sure would appreciate a little “hello” in the comments to show me that someone looking at this isn’t a bot of some sort or another) you know that I’m long-term dissatisfied with the direction this country is headed, and have been for a while.

One of the things I’ve started exploring here is New England Secession. I think one of the possible solutions for the deep, deep well of corruption that seems to be fueling this country is to move the capitol, I think it may be the only option we have to return the people of these formerly-united States to some level of compassion, humanity, and fairness. I’m not saying it will get us there, but it will give us a chance at something better.

But that is a long term approach, and admittedly a pipe dream of mine. In the short term, in the VERY short term, what we have to do is eminently clear to me.

We need to vote as many of the corrupt bastards out as we can manage to get to today. If there is a candidate on your ballot who is not beholden to any monied interest, be they foreign or domestic, please make sure you put your mark by their name on the ballot today.

Abdul El-Sayed meeting voters. Photo by Paul Sancya for AP.

I will be voting for Ed Markey, Jim McGovern, and Maura Healey here in Franklin County. Both Markey and McGovern have taken AIPAC money in the past, but have long since sworn off. If you don’t know who you’re going to vote for yet (and you need to make that decision NOW) one place to get information you can use is TrackAIPAC.com. Look for other sources, too. Some of your local press outlets may be able to help.

Good luck to us today. We really need it.

We’re a Week Out From the Thing

Brazil did it. Can we?

For all that I wish to move the capitol by having my region secede from the larger country, the fact is that we’re here in the world as it is. Stinky Don is the president. He is surrounded by goons and sycophants, including some that have a (D) after their name on certain ballots. In general though, it seems that if you’re voting for anyone with an (R) after their name on any ballot, you’re voting for someone who supports Stinky Don. And if you’re voting for a supporter of that guy, you’re voting against a democratic society.

It’s just that simple. You’re voting for cruelty without consequences. You’re voting for someone who supports the idea of no accountability for certain Stinky people. We know this because we’ve been living through this particular Stinky chunk of history.

Stinky Don is offering all sorts of cash prizes, all conditional on a win for the (R)s in this coming election. No changes in policy, no promises to do better. Just spread the corruption to the average voter, for the one act of importance we each have the opportunity to commit every couple of years. It’s all bribes, it’s all corruption. He’s saying, “If you let me continue robbing the country blind, I’ll give you a stinking Werther’s® for your trouble.”

google screenshot page showing various electoral maps of the US
A screenshot I took from Google.

Please remember that his operating budget is your money anyway, and that if you let him have his way, he’s only going to pick up the pace of putting your tax dollars in his own pocket and those of his friends and allies, killing kids, putting the youth of America in harm’s way, and further destroying whatever good will and political capital this country has in the world community. It’s not a good deal. I’d go so far as to say that no deal with Stinky Don is a good deal for anybody but Stinky Don. And not even that, necessarily. Gerrymandering Texas seems not to have done him any actual favors. The five new “safe” districts he had the state legislature create there are not so safe after all.

In fact, for those who have a numbers fetish, here’s a link to Nate Silver’s FLIPR forecast for the midterms. It’s narrowing a little bit, it seems, but it’s still looking pretty good for the Democrats. Polling in the modern era is a bit less than perfect, but it’s still info.

To that end, Brazil had their elections this past Sunday, and against conventional wisdom and the best polling available, Lula da Silva won a fourth term as President of Brazil. That election day was wild. Municipalities closed down their public trans portation to keep people from being able to get to the polls. People came by boat out of the remostest areas to make their way to the polls, against everybody’s expectation. Bolsonaro tried unsuccessfully to get the polls closed early with tons of people still on line to vote. In the end, instead of the predicted loss, Lula won by about 3,000,000 votes.

And of course Flavio Bolsonaro is refusing to concede, and is asking Trump to intervene and hand him the presidency. Time will tell if Trump has the will and resources to do so. It’s worth remembering that Stinky Don has his own troubles, a host of them, all of his own making.

Zeitgeist 10/13/26

It’s too soon to ask me my opinion on the death of a nation that isn’t dead yet.

I looked into it, because I’m so horrified at the state of things down there in Foggy Bottom, but I can’t apply for refugee status in Canada. Canada still considers this a safe country.

I’m thinking about that. Is the US of Assholes still a safe country? And what does it mean that Canada thinks so?

We’re three weeks out from the 2026 midterm election, and Trump is making all kinds of noise about how the Democrats are going to steal the election, while at the same time, he’s trying to gain control of each state’s election process, stationing ICE near polling places, having practice ballot-seizings… and everybody remembers January 6th of 2021, when he tried to coup Congress to stop them certifying Joe Biden as president and in the middle of things maybe eliminate a couple of enemies, like Mike Pence, Nancy Pelosi, and AOC.

But we’re 6 years futher into Stinky Don’s slide into dementia, into a presidency whose approval ratings have gone about as sour as any president’s in recent memory have gone (which is saying something, isn’t it, W?) and whose base is crumbling like stale, stale cookies. Can this crippled old bagadoo muster the wherewithall to actually steal the whole country from us? And here’s the real question: are we all pathetic enough to let it happen?

And is Canada right about us? The answer to those questions and many others might come as soon as three weeks from today.

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Over the weekend, I found my self in an extended go-’round with an English guy who at the beginning of things had seemed somewhat reasonable and worth talking to about various topics where I knew we disagreed. I held out hope for a lot longer than I probably should have. By the end of our “debate” this morning, I was 100% convinced that there was no there there. If you bring up stuff he doesn’t like he starts repeatedly screaming about “the left” and how “the left” is fundamentally delusional and always wrong about everything because “the left.”

It was truly disheartening. The longer it went on, the more vehement he became and the more obviously he strove to find some path to “victory(?).” His one article of faith (and it was faith) is that everything any leftist says is some received false notion and can’t possibly be true. In the end, he resorted to abandoning our”conversation” and started one elsewhere that was meant as character assassination and miscast what I said while still crowing about “the left” and how I’m “a racist.”

So in the end we come to this. Yes, I am on the left, and proudly so, and as to whether I’m a racist… probably? But this dude is definitely a delusional RWNJ. The more we got into it, the more it became clear that the supposed reasonability and willingness to explore ideas was a veneer overlaying a whole lot of postmodern ideology.

I’m still looking for a right-winger I can talk to and consider views I have that might be wrong. Didn’t find that here, and by golly, it seems more and more unlikely that I ever will. The best I’ve found for this so far are Saagar Enjeti and Emily Jashinsky over on Breaking Points, but I’m nobody so I don’t talk to them, I just listen to Krystal Ball and Ryan Grim talk to them.

And yeah, I learn stuff, and sometimes I call shenanigans. But at least they show it’s possible for there to be some kind of continuing discussion.

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We’re a couple of days into the aftermath of the Ukrainian bombing of 3 Russian data centers and the cascading effect of that destruction on the discourse on the internet. Bot activity on the web from Russian servers has gone down to 0.4% of usage prior to the attacks. There’s no clear data on the full effects, but with at least a couple of major Yandex data centers offline, there’s widespread reporting of a marked drop in right wing troll activity online.

I can only see this as a good thing, just a few weeks out from an election.

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Ilhan Omar’s being targeted by HSI (Homeland Security Investigations), who raided her Washington DC residence, looking for any evidence they can find of irregularities in her immigrant status, so that they can revoke her citizenship and deport her ahead of the midterm elections.

My sense is that this is backfiring. One has only to look at Elon Musk, who is the subject of reports that he came to this country with undocumented status and then bought his way in. The same can be said for FLOTUS, who is the subject of similar reports and who, for some reason, got a “genius” visa in the midst of her immigration process. Is Melania Trump really a genius? Perhaps in that crowd she is…

My guess is that they will find no irregularities in Omar’s legal path to naturalized citizenship, but that this will not dissuade Trump from targeting her and trying to remove her from office and from the country.

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An Annotated List of Some Sources of My American Malaise

These are symptoms of a corrupt society.

  • Democratic Neoliberals –
    • Jimmy Carter – Ineffectual leader, Famously criticized Americans for their lack of will while failing to address the hostage crisis in Iran, the double-whammy of unemployment and concurrent inflation, or much else, really.
    • Bill Clinton – tried to combat the Reagan wave in politics by becoming more Reagan-like.
    • Hillary Clinton – Not politically talented, managed to continue the Democratic tradition of snatching defeat from the jaws of vicotry.
    • Obama – Big talker on the campaign trail, didn’t do much of what he promised, continued the party’s practice of pointing at the Republicans while lying in a self-drawn chalk outline of themselves.
    • Zombie Joe – propped up by a party apparatus more motivated to hold on to power than to help people, as they had been since Bill Clinton. Failed to manage even that.
  • Fascists
    • Reagan – Laid the groundwork for every evil thing the Republican Party has done since. Didn’t introduce Milton Friedmann’s to the American economy (that would be Jimmy Carter) but he advanced the neoliberal cause into the inescapable plague it is to this day.
    • Bush – Bush 41 was the intellectual giant of the last 4 Republican presidents, but that didn’t help. Lasted 1 term. Remember Operation Desert Storm? Whoopee! Also, his opposition to “Voodoo Economics” disappeared the moment he got the job helping Reagan administer those very policies.
      • Bush 43 eroded the power of the constitution even farther, committed horrible atrocities across the globe, is nothing in comparison to the next Republican president in terms of destructive, greed-fueled idiocy.
    • Trump – Here is the air you’re breathing now. At this point the constitution is a meaningless piece of paper, human life is only as valuable as its bank account, and because of his actions on the international stage, everyone in the world rightfully hates us.
  • Imperialist Wars of Aggression
    • Genocide – An American tradition going back as far as 1619. Today our tax dollars are continuing that tradition in Gaza, the West Bank, and southern Lebanon.
    • Iraq War – An illegal, unprovoked war of agression that has led, by some counts, to the deaths of over 600,000 innocent Iraqis and destabilized the entire region.
    • Afghani War – An intentional failure and boondoggle that went on for 20 years too long. It’s trillions of dollars that were just thrown away, and that was the actual purpose of the adventure.
    • Iran War – continuing the American tradition of unprovoked and illegal wars of aggression against countries that didn’t attack us. We’re losing this one decisively.
    • Rat Bastardry™ in countries to our south – How different is Nicolás Meduro from Manuel Noriega, in the final analysis? Mainly the difference is in the even worse behavior of the American state. It must be remembered that the US has worked its evil on the countries south of us since we’ve had the ability and interest to do so. The Mexican-American War of 1848 is of a piece with the kidnapping of Meduro and the theft of Venezuela’s oil and gold.
    • Vietnam War – An obvious precedent for much that has happened since. No one remembers Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., but they should.
      • Gulf of Tonkin – the trumped up fake attack that set the precedent for many lies that followed.
  • Internal scandals
    • Watergate – A context in which an American President claimed, “If the President does it, then it’s legal.”
    • Corruption – This country has been set up to benefit the merchant class from the time said rich imperialist first set foot on these shores in the 17th century. At this point, all other impulses – Democracy, individual liberty, equality (hah) – have been subsumed into the weathiest among us’s greed.
    • Racism – Endemic and written into the script. Apart from simple prejudice, there’s endless history of legislation (Virginia’s Black Laws dating back to 1680 as an example,) suppression, and all manner inhumane treatment. The thing to remember about racism is that it’s a tool of the rich and powerful. It’s divide and conquer.
    • Sexism – Let’s just say “virulent patriarchy” and move on here.
    • Homophobia – A tool of patriarchal hegemony with the added pizzazz of being a fear of the self in many cases, and in virtually all of the most virulent cases.
      • Transphobia should probably get its own own bullet here, although in my perception, it’s got most if not all of the features of homophobia, with the addition of trans folk being seen as an even more direct affront to the sensibilities of the patriarchy.
    • White Supremacy – If we look at this as distinct from racism – which it isn’t, really – we have to point to the strange matter of how many white people think they’re being oppressed if they’re treated the same as everybody else. It’s truly weird, and that misreading of the map of the world in the social dimension is a huge source of the malaise we all endure.
  • The disappointing left
    • Bernie – Bernie gets huge credit from me for the things he’s accomplished. He’s the best spokesman for the anti-neoliberal movenent that’s burgeoning in this world that the US has, but he has also failed us all at a couple of crucial moments. He’s twice gotten to a crucial moment in his campaigns for president and just thrown in the towel without winning enough concessions from his opponents to make a difference.
    • The Squad – Four women in Congress, generally fighting the good fight, but they sometimes self-sabotage and therefore sabotage a country struggling to find some moral and ethical footing in this post-neoliberal era. The best of them is Ilhan Omar, in my opinion, although AOC is more charismatic. We shouldn’t expect them to change the world, but sometimes I wish they would fight harder, and sometimes it’s frustrating that they fold when they shouldn’t.
    • Current Liberal Leadership – When the supposed opposition acts like quislings and collaborators, and simultaneously shout down anyone who acts as true opposition. They pretend to be on our side while abjectly serving their Epstein-class masters.

I Want to Make a Case for New England Seceding From the “United” States

A thing I think about sometimes. Maybe you do too?

I sometimes fantasize about our northeastern states seceding from the Union (capitalized for clarity and for the sake of divorcing the word from certain specific meanings) because I no longer feel that the government as constituted in Washington DC represents the interests of its citizens. It would be easy enough to claim that the problem is Stinky Don and his minions, but the issues run deeper, and are unlikely to be resolved by replacing him as head of state.

It would be hard. Crashing out comes with damage. Along with the risks, there would be some rewards, most having to do with not having to listen to and work within the whims of the cadre of corrupt billionaires who currently run too much of our lives. As such, this might not be my last post about this. I think about national divorce a bunch.

There are a number of areas of governance we would have to consider here: economics/feeding ourselves, defending ourselves/relations with our neighbors, living by the social contract/civic policy, and the thousand unknowns of going it alone seem to me to be the basics.

This map is from the US Geological Survey.

One thing I often hear talked about is that New England states are “donor states.” In truth, three New England states qualify as donor states, and three of our number are recipient states. Massachusetts and Connecticut consistently pay more in taxes than we recieve in benefits, New Hampshire is usually a donor state, though not always because they’re close to the line between donor and recipient always. Maine, Vermont, and Rhode Island are consistently recipient states.

The thing to remember here is that states don’t pay federal taxes, individuals do. Massachusetts and Connecticut (and to a lesser extent, southern New Hampshire) are where the highest concentrations of wealth are. Every possible solution to the donor/recipient state disparity that I’ve heard looks like bad policy, including some “fixes” that are pure regressive taxation.

This is not something that should be thought of in making the case for secession. Honestly, the fact that the first place I went to in thinking about this is an example of right-wing framing is surprising to me, now that I’ve investigated a little bit. To get to the goal of a free New England, there’s clearly some reflection and self-deprogramming that needs to happen.

Perhaps the main reason I want to cut away from the rest of the country is that this region, in self-rule, would be more humanist and more left-leaning. A smaller system would be more likely to support the people of that system. It would be our responsibility to realign away from sheer wealth creation to making a local system of governance that respects and supports individuals in a way that the current federal government has almost completely abdicated from.

Sorry this post is so random. There’s a ton to think about here, and I will have to do a bunch of digging to even scratch the surface of how this massive historical shift could even begin to be considered. I will make little swipes at this from time to time… more so if readers of this blog show interest, of course. Does anybody else around here sometimes imagine a social-democratic New England, standing proud and free? Let me know in the comments.

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