On Guns -- and Shootings and Killings -- In America

There aren't two sides to this issue of guns in America.

There's sensible people who know we need solutions and then there are the weapons supporters, putting guns and gun ownership over human life. That's it. That's all there is.

Quote of the Day -- On Our Wealth Inequality

Please keep in mind, folks, gross wealth inequality actually weakens nations, weakens our nation.

"...When Gates, Bezos, and Musk together have more wealth than the bottom half of Americans put together? When 1 out of 8 American children are hungry? When 20 million can't afford to see a doctor? When our schools are literally falling apart? We need a wealth tax." --Robert Reich   @RBReich

Quote of the Day -- Insane Guns Edition

"The big increase in the murder rate in 2020 has carried over to 2021. Early data shows murder 18% in first 3 months of 2021.

Meanwhile, last week, 203 members of Congress voted to make it 'easier' for prohibited purchasers to purchase guns & traffic firearms." --igorvolsky @igorvolsky Doesn't portend well for the nation. Certainly doesn't bode well for the Kansas City metropolitan area.

Stand Up, America. Stand Up, Americans

We must do this.

Big Picture Damage Trump and the Republicans Did to Our Nation

I'm hoping lots of Americans read and understand this article from The New Yorker  just now. I think it very likely true but also important, however ugly for us.

The World Likes Biden But Doubts the U.S. Can Reclaim Global Leadership

A bit from the article:

...Biden faces the core problem of convincing the United States’ chief diplomatic, economic, and military allies to believe in America again. Some wonder if the U.S.—which was, for decades, the world’s most powerful democracy—has lost its groove for good. “It will be hard to convince allies that Washington is capable of coming back as a global leader,” Mark Leonard, the co-founder and director of the European Council on Foreign Relations, told me. “Our polling shows that, while most people in Europe were happy to see Biden elected, they also feel that America’s political system is broken, that they can’t rely on the U.S.A. to defend them, and that China will overtake the U.S.A. as a great power.” Europeans like what Biden stands for, “but they are not convinced that he can deliver, and they are worried about who will follow in his wake.”

America’s global reputation has plummeted to the point that it will even be difficult to persuade key Western allies to make common cause against China. “A majority of the public would prefer to stay neutral than to take America’s side,” Leonard said of European views. To regain the confidence of allies, the Biden Administration would have to think differently about alliances—and not assume “that other nations will automatically follow American leadership,” he added. Most of all, Biden has to prove that America has “the staying power to follow through.”

Yet more proof, as though we need or needed it, of the damage Republican Party President Donald J "Jenius" Trump and his political party did to our nation and nation's standing in the world.

Thanks so much, fellas. One more thing that's on us but that is also on you, on you all. Forever. You did this. 

Check Out What These 3 Polls Are Saying Just Now About Trump and America

 Three polls today, from The Hill. What Americans are thinking just now. 

Poll: Majority of voters say Trump has behaved poorly post-election

Poll: 62 percent of voters say country is on the wrong track

Poll: Voters view Biden more favorably than Trump

Just the facts. God bless America.

Have a nice day. Have a nice weekend.

Happy Thanksgiving, America!

One thing, anyway, we Americans did right, that we do right.

"There is one day that is ours. 

Thanksgiving Day is the one day that is purely American."

--O. Henry 

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone. Enjoy.

Biden says staff has spoken with Fauci: 'He's been very, very helpful'

Fauci says he would 'absolutely' serve on a Biden coronavirus task force

A reason to give thanks: 

Help with COVID-19 is on the way

Biden to receive first daily presidential briefing on Monday

Oxford-AstraZeneca Vaccine Is Cheaper than Pfizer’s and Moderna’s and Doesn’t Require Supercold Temperature

Have a great day and weekend and by all means, stay safe out there.

This President, the Nation, History and Democracy

Truth

Bernie Sanders @BernieSanders·

No figure in history has done more to undermine American democracy than Donald Trump. His "birther" movement tried to delegitimize the Obama presidency. His refusal to accept defeat now is trying to undermine the Biden presidency. 

Goodbye Trump

____________________

#ThrowTheBumOUT

Excellent Article Out Now Far Too Many Americans Won't Get

 There is an excellent article out from last July at The Atlantic that, as I said above, far too many Americans won't even understand, let alone accept.

Do Americans Understand How Badly They’re Doing?

In France, where I live, the virus is under control. I can hardly believe the news coming out of the United States.

This is a great question and I'm certain the answer is no, Americans no way know how badly they're, we're doing. It mostly covers here how awful our situation is regarding this President, our/his "leadership" and this pandemic but there's so much more we are doing and do so very badly, so poorly. Here are some of the worst.

• This President and election alone have put us in "banana republic" territory with his trying to deny our vote, our votes and election
• There there is our only-nation-with-it, for-profit health care system and our bankruptcies from it all and then our really obscene and grossly immoral wealth inequality
• Because of our health care system, Americans go bankrupt from those costs and expenses. So much so that it's the number one reason and source of bankruptcies in the nation
• And don't get me started on our insane number of guns and weapons and shootings and killings for no reason whatever
• Additionally, there's this idiot, self-possessed, self-absorbed, greedy, ignorant, reckless, literally dangerous President we've had ostensibly leading us these last 4 years
• Then we far outspend what we should on what we call "defense", bankrupting us in other ways so we can't and don't take care of our infrastructure. More insanity.
• We have horrible wealth inequality
• We nearly literally shovel yet more money, and great quantities, at that, to the already-wealthy and corporations

No. No way Americans have any idea we have it bad, badly and so wrong. So stupidly wrong. So unnecessarily wrong.

Links:

U.S. becomes first nation to cross 10M COVID-19 cases as third wave of infections surge

Things I'll never get used to in the USA

This Article Out of Australia Should Hurt and Concern Every American

We are witnessing the fall of a great power

A bit, but most, of the article:

Tragically, American exceptionalism - 'we are the first and best democracy on Earth' - contributes to the self-delusion of indestructibility. There is nothing automatically self-correcting in US democracy.

Look at the US now. Its president is so psychiatrically disordered with narcissism that he is incapable of dealing with the COVID-19 crisis in a coherent, empathetic way. Everything he says and does is through a prism of himself. He has now turned his whole re-election campaign into one of race hate, law and order and a bizarre invention of a threat from "left-wing fascists".

But worse, the US seems to have a national self-delusion that once Trump loses and is gone, everything will return to normal. The delusion extends to a belief that the COVID-19-stricken economy will bounce back to normal in a V shape.

Trump is as much just a symptom of the underlying rottenness as an integral part of it, even if his sucking up to authoritarian leaders in Russia, China and North Korea is unprecedented.

The underlying weakness in present US democracy is that partisanship has become so extreme that the nation is incapable of dealing with the major issues that face it. COVID-19 has illustrated that starkly, with every word and act predicated on party allegiance. Meanwhile, other problems like race, police violence, gun control, inequality, the health system, climate change and energy policy go unattended.

The motives of "the other side" are routinely vilified without evidence. The Democrats are blamed for everything. The Republicans can do no wrong. And to a lesser extent, vice versa. My side of politics, right or wrong.

In a vicious cause-and-effect circle, the imperative of winning at all costs corrodes the political process, and the corroded political process makes winning at all costs even more imperative.

The Trump presidency has made all this worse, but the seeds were there long before. He has appointed incompetent ignorant toadies to the most senior positions in his cabinet and the bureaucracy. He has undermined the Supreme Court with appointments based on politics, not law.

For a long time, the electoral process has been corrupted by state governors drawing unfair electoral boundaries so that the Republican Party is grossly over-represented in Congress compared to its vote, and has won the presidency twice this century with a minority of the vote.

The electoral process has also been corrupted by runaway bribery through political donations.

Another vicious circle has emerged. The politicised Supreme Court from 2010 on has refused to control corporate and individual political donations - thus favouring the Republicans.

Donations from billionaires, mainly to the Republicans, consequently boomed from just $17 million in 2008 to $611 million in 2018 - and rising. This results in policies more skewed to the wealthy and conservatives, and therefore greater inequality. These policies include engaging in wars in remote places where the only real US interests are those of war profiteers. In turn, these policies result in more donations from billionaires, who get repaid manyfold, and who now have as much if not more control of the process than voters.

Tragically, American exceptionalism - "we are the first and best democracy on Earth" - contributes to the self-delusion of indestructibility. There is nothing automatically self-correcting in US democracy. Even the so-called checks and balances are not working - they are causing gridlock, rather than adding a bit of mild caution to a system that is overall supposed to be geared to problem-solving, not political point-scoring.

The system has become so warped that those disenfranchised, disempowered and disenchanted are taking to the streets, questioning the legitimacy of the whole system.

The only question is whether the taking to the streets can break these vicious circles, or whether it is just another step in the decline and fall of a great power.

If that doesn't give any adult American pause, I don't know what would or will.

I say again.

Thanks, Mr. President.

Thanks, Republicans.

Links:

That explains this:

Americans are giving up US citizenship in record numbers

As if to maybe, maybe make we Americans feel slightly better--if even just slightly--this article was at the end of the above.

Joe Biden's VP pick is a watershed moment in American democracy

Quote of the Day -- Election Day Version

“My dear friends: Your vote is precious, almost sacred. It is the most powerful nonviolent tool we have to create a more perfect union.”

–- Representative John Lewis, a 2012 speech in Charlotte, North Carolina

A Timely Must-Read

Sunday's New York Times Magazine had a magnificent, even important article I think it's safe to say all adult Americans should read.

America’s Enduring Caste System

Our founding ideals promise liberty and equality for all. 

Our reality is an enduring racial hierarchy that has persisted for centuries.

We heard the man on the ground pleading with the man above him, saw the terror in his face, heard his gasps for air, heard the anguished cries of an unseen chorus, begging the lighter man to stop. But the lighter man, the dominant man, looked straight at the bystanders, into the camera, and thus at all of us around the world who would later bear witness and, instead of heeding the cries of the chorus, pressed his knee deeper into the darker man’s neck as was the perceived right granted him in the hierarchy. The man on the ground went silent, drained of breath. A clear liquid crept down the pavement. We saw a man die before our very eyes.

What we did not see, not immediately anyway, was the invisible scaffolding, a caste system with ancient rules and assumptions that made such a horror possible, that held each actor in that scene in its grip...

American Exceptionalism?

I saw this video earlier today from and by Professor Robert Reich on this pandemic, our response as a nation and our results.


It got me thinking, thinking about America and what and who we are.

• Worst pandemic response in the world.
• More cases of coronavirus and more deaths, both, than any other nation.
• More incarcerated citizens than any other nation, bar none and including far more populated China and India.
• Spend more, far more, on war than any other nation, far and away.
• Spend more, far more, again, than ANY OTHER NATION on health care.
• Only Western, industrialized nation without universal health care.
• Only Western, industrialized nation to tie health care to corporate profit and profits.
• Nation with the most guns in the world.
• Nation with the most homocides and killings, worldwide, again, far and away.

At minimum.

Oh, yeah.

We're "exceptional", all right.

The Present Racial, Police Brutality Problem As Today, But 50 Years Ago

I found this yesterday on YouTube. Some of their marketing their own videos, I'm sure. Regardless, it is stunning that it's the same, exact discussion and debate and problem we have today, now---and it's from 50 years ago.  This was posted on the video by one David Hoffman:

This was on national public television (PBS) in the prime time in 1971. It was considered shockingly bold to present this debate and to hear police officers and chiefs of police honestly and bluntly state how they saw the racial injustices in the department and in the society. Some things have clearly changed for the better. But it is, at least for me, strangely familiar and uncomfortable to see what has not changed. Since the murder of Floyd George, once again, police injustice and inequality is front and center in the news across America.

Stunning.

We haven't changed a bit.

Quote of the Day -- On Racism

“There is another kind of violence, slower but just as deadly, destructive as the shot or the bomb in the night. This is the violence of institutions; indifference and inaction and slow decay. This is the violence that afflicts the poor, that poisons relations between men because their skin has different colors. This is a slow destruction of a child by hunger, and schools without books and homes without heat.”

--Robert F. Kennedy, 1968, shortly before his assassination

The NYT Asks a Great Question Today -- Then Also Gives Great American History Lessons

Today's Sunday New York Times does just that today. That is, they ask an excellent question and then give what I hope is lots of Americans not just a great American history lesson, but in this one column, LOTS of excellent history lessons.

Why Does the U.S. Military Celebrate White Supremacy?

The information they give on Confederate General George Pickett alone is eye-opening and important, let alone all the rest they give in this one column. Here is just a snippet of what is an extremely full and very informative article:

Black recruits (in WWII) who volunteered to die for their country were mainly shut out of combat units, commanded by white Southerners who often resented being assigned to colored units. In some contexts, black servicemen were treated worse than prisoners of war. The actress and singer Lena Horne, for example, flew into a rage during World War II when she arrived at a military camp to entertain only to find that the best seats — in the “white” section of the audience — had been reserved for German P.O.W.s.

Far too many of us, far too many Americans, don't know our national history--our true, complete national history.

Please. If you can. If you will. Do yourself, and the nation, really, a favor and read it. No exaggeration.

Please.

All the Ways America Is "Exceptional"

That last "American Exceptionalism" post here yesterday got me thinking. In fact, I've been thinking about it for some time. So on that thought, let's have a list of some of the biggest things we're "number one" at, America.

• We pay more for health care as a percentage of GDP than any other nation
• Only nation wherein people go bankrupt for healthcare costs
• Only nation with the highest amount of bankruptcies due to healthcare costs
• More guns than any other nations, per capita
• More shootings than any other nation
• More killings, homicides than any other nation
• Spend more--far, far more--than any other nation on guns and bombs and weapons, calling it "defense." We spend 7 times more on the military than any other nation on the planet. Worse,  U.S. military spending is greater than the military spending of China, Russia, Japan, India, and the rest of NATO combined
• We have more foreign military bases than any other nation; Empire much?
• We have more citizens incarcerated, in prisons, than any other nation
• We have the highest percentage of the population that is obese
• We have the highest divorce rate
• Highest rate of illegal drug use in the world
• More reported murders than any other nation
• More total crimes committed in the US than anywhere else in the world
• We have more student loan debt than any other country and finally, at least here and now, 
• We have the most complicated tax system in the world
• Biggest Weapons exporter in the world
• We kill more people with drones, presently, than any other nation; Some of what our big "defense" budget gets us, I'm sure

But wait. There's more. There's more of our positions in the world and these are things we're not number one at:

• The U.S. ranks 23rd in gender equality
• The U.S. ranks 33rd in internet download speeds
• The U.S. ranks 46th in freedom of the press
• The U.S. ranks 26th in child well-being
• The U.S. ranks 24th in literacy
• The U.S. ranks 19th in perceived honesty
• The U.S. ranks 27th in leisure and personal care
• The U.S. ranks 17th in happiness
• The U.S. ranks 9th in retirement security
• The U.S. ranks 99th in peacefulness
• The U.S. ranks 24th in freedom from corruption
• The U.S. ranks 16th in manufacturing compensation costs
• The U.S. ranks 29th in intellectual property protection
• The U.S. ranks 23rd in wage distribution
• The U.S. ranks 10th in purchasing power of minimum wage
• The U.S. ranks 11th in minimum wage

Don't get me wrong.  I like this place America. There are some things, plenty, I guess, we're doing well or right at. But the fact is, we need to take a good, hard, long look at ourselves and maybe, hopefully, work on changing and improving.

Let's do this.

Links:

The Myth of American Exceptionalism

The myth of American exceptionalism 

Myth of American Exceptionalism 

American Exceptionalism Is a Dangerous Myth

NUMBER ONE? 20 Shameful Categories In Which America Leads

One Is The Loneliest Number - America Is Number One At Things We Shouldn't Brag About

Robert Reich: Is America Becoming a Third World Country?

Oh, Happy Day! Hope For and In America

   

We Missourians got a pretty huge, very unexpected "two-fer Tuesday" yesterday.

A racist got fired from her own TV show and an extramarital sex blackmailing Missouri Governor had to resign from his job, all on the same day.

All in all, a great, if unexpected day.  Enough to give a person hope for us.

Next up? The Orange Man? And his entire administration?

Hey. We can hope.

Have a great day, y'all.

Think happy thoughts.

Very happy thoughts.

Link:

Roseanne Barr tweet backfires, Eric Greitens resigns

An Important, If Also Brief, History Lesson All Americans Need

I do wish all adult Americans and, yes, all our schoolchildren, too, would read the brief article from today's New York Times from their editorial board.

When Southern Newspapers 

Justified Lynching

It is stunning.

So with that thought and hope, here it is in its entirety:

The white Southern press played a role in the racial terrorism of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, which saw thousands of African-Americans hanged, burned, drowned or beaten to death by white mobs.

The Arkansas lynch mob that burned a black tenant farmer at the stake in 1921 observed common practice when it advertised the killing in advance so spectators could mark the grisly event on their calendars. The organizers notified newspapers early in the day that they planned to kill Henry Lowery as painfully as possible, giving editors time to produce special editions that provided the time, place and gruesome particulars of the death to come.

Historians have paid scant attention to the role that the white Southern press played in the racial terrorism of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, which saw thousands of African-Americans hanged, burned, drowned or beaten to death by white mobs. This issue surfaced in dramatic fashion recently when the nearly two-centuries-old Montgomery Advertiser printed a front-page editorial apologizing for lynching coverage that dehumanized black victims. The apology coincided with the recent opening in Montgomery, Ala., of a memorial to lynching victims, and it sets the stage for a timely discussion of a deeply dishonorable period in Southern press history.

The bloody celebration at which 500 jeering spectators saw Henry Lowery burned to ashes was held at Nodena, Ark., on Jan. 26, 1921. Among those in attendance was a reporter for The Memphis Press whose story — under the headline “Kill Negro by Inches” — validated the barbaric proceedings and cataloged the victim’s suffering in lurid detail, noting that Lowery remained stoically silent “even after the flesh had dropped away from his legs and the flames were leaping toward his face.”

Lowery had been charged with a wanton act of murder for killing his white landlord and the landlord’s adult daughter. The renowned lynching investigator Walter White later reported that Lowery had drawn a pistol only after being shot by the landlord’s son and physically attacked by the landlord himself in a dispute over wages. In the eyes of the lynching state — where an African-American could be put to death on a white person’s whim — the impulse toward self-defense was often viewed as a crime when it came with a black face.

Newspapers even bragged about the roles they had played in arranging particularly spectacular lynchings. But the real damage was done in terse, workaday stories that justified lynching by casting its victims as “fiends,” “brutes,” “born criminals” or, that catchall favorite, “troublesome Negroes.” The narrative that tied blackness inextricably to criminality — and to the death penalty — survived the lynching era and lives on to this day.

The Montgomery Advertiser was historically opposed to lynching. Nevertheless, when its current staff scrutinized the paper’s lynching-era coverage, they concluded that it had conveniently opposed lynching in the abstract while responding with indifference to its bloody, real-world consequences. The editors found that the paper too often presumed without proof that lynching victims were guilty and that, in doing so, it advanced the aims of white supremacist rule.

That description applies broadly to the Jim Crow-era South, where even newspapers that were viewed as liberal replicated the apartheid state within their pages — by separating news and birth announcements by race, by rendering law-abiding black people invisible and especially by denying African-Americans the courtesy titles Mr. and Mrs. This humiliating practice was meant to illustrate the impossibility of racial equality. It also let white readers know when a black person was being quoted so that the person’s statement could be ignored.

The newspaper editor Ira Harkey, who was white, incurred outrage in 1949 when he abandoned the Southern journalistic practice of automatically labeling black people by race in stories and began cautiously extending the courtesy title Mrs. in the pages of The Pascagoula Chronicle-Star “to certain carefully selected Negro women such as teachers and nurses.” Harkey was reviled — and shot at — by racists in Mississippi for championing civil rights. He wrote bitterly of his earlier years at The New Orleans Times-Picayune, where there was “a flat rule that Negroes were not to appear in photographs”; it was required that they be airbrushed out of crowd scenes.

The Montgomery Advertiser — known in the 19th century as the leading paper of the Confederacy — put itself on the wrong side of history in countless ways, not least by ridiculing the civil rights movement that was launched by the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955 and reached its zenith a decade later with the march from Selma to Montgomery and the passage of the Voting Rights Act.

Bro Krift, now the paper’s 41-year-old executive editor, was well aware of this history when he greeted the opening of the lynching memorial by devoting the Advertiser’s front page to the names of victims alongside its bluntly worded editorial acknowledging the paper’s complicity. Speaking of the memorial in a recent telephone interview, Mr. Krift said: “I realized, holy Moses, this could change the narrative for the rest of time in America. This could be the physical representation of the conversation we need to have in America.”

Link:

Newspaper Apologizes for 'Shameful' Coverage of Lynchings

What Canadians--and the World--Are Seeing Here In the US

I saw this today out on the interwebs. I couldn't confirm it's written by a Canadian but seriously, think about what they write. It seems a very real, fair and at least sad, if not ugly comment on America presently.

And he didn't even touch on shoveling yet more money to the already-wealthy and corporations while taking it from the middle- and lower-classes.

Again, thanks, Republicans!

And may God help us.