Consent of the Governed

Wikipedia:  Article 21 of the United Nation's 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights states that "The will of the people shall be the basis of the authority of government".

The current resident of the White House imagines himself to be the most powerful man in the world. Traditionally, the President of the United States has been considered to be the leader of the free world. For the first time in my lifetime, I don't believe that is the case. I don't believe he has a fraction of the power he imagines he has, because he doesn't have the consent of the governed: not in the US nor in the rest of the world. No one has power unless those they hope to lead agree that they have it. No one can have power over you unless you consent to it. One has to earn the respect of those they govern, earn their trust, and earn their tacit consent. One has to demonstrate they are competent to govern. This is not happening. Each day the power he seeks is farther from his reach. 

He is not a powerful man: he's a loose cannon. Loose cannons are not powerful at all. Out of control and dangerous, they roll around on the deck threatening good order. His behavior is erratic, his decisions are often made on childish whims, his main interest seems to be hearing himself praised. He recently held a cabinet meeting in which he first bragged about his imaginary triumphs and then asked his cabinet, one by one, to praise him. He went around the circle and demanded each one tell him how wonderful he is. I can't imagine anyone but the leader of North Korea ever doing such a thing. Only one cabinet secretary failed to do so, passing it off with a joke instead.  He has alienated most world leaders. He does not seem able to learn from his mistakes or exert adult self-control. 

He lies so much, I swear I can see his nose growing like Pinocchio's. Today I heard him say "Manufacturing dominance is at an all time high." We have not dominated manufacturing since the previous century. We are no longer known for manufacturing, which, except for cars and automotive parts, has almost all been sent offshore. He has his own clothing line manufactured outside the country. He constantly takes credit for economic gains that were in place before he was elected or were set in motion years ago as part of long-term business plans. He never ceases to praise himself or take credit for accomplishments that either don't exist or were achieved by others. He brags about his overwhelming electoral victory, when he actually lost the popular vote by 2 million votes and barely squeaked by in the electoral college. He swears he had the biggest inaugural crowd of all time, yet we have solid photographic evidence that it was anything but. He lies about things he was recorded saying, denies things he has just finished swearing to on record. There is nothing he says that can be trusted to still hold true in the next few minutes. 

All that doesn't add up to someone we can trust with power, or someone who could handle it if he were granted it. This is not someone who deserves, nor has, the consent of the governed. 



photo credit: Google images

Earth Has a Sad

The orange man who is occupying the White House has decided the continued health of planet earth doesn't matter. Unfettered greed is what really counts -- being able to pollute, deplete resources, besmirch the planet in the name of profit, those are the things that matter to him.  No limits. That there may not be a habitable planet for his grandchildren doesn't matter. He lives in the eternal now of immediate gratification. What does it matter what happens to those left behind after he dies? The bounty of earth is here for his pleasure and that of his billionaire friends. Nothing must get in the way of unbridled growth and unfettered profits.

I chose the image above from Google Images because it illustrates our two possibilities. The one on the left is what we get with careful stewardship of the earth in cooperation with the other countries of the world. On the right, we get what Trump has chosen: industrial waste, pollution, unbridled growth, death of the planet, poisoned water and unbreathable air. Not at all surprising that the 22 senators who signed a letter supporting his decision to pull out are all well funded by the oil and coal industry. His rejection of the Paris environmental agreement places us with only two other countries on the face of the earth -- Syria and Nicaragua. Sad company, indeed.

The US is being labeled a "Rogue Nation" as a result. Our standing in the world community has hit rock bottom. Europe wants nothing to do with us, for good reasons. While the US president used to be thought of as "the leader of the free world," that is no longer the case. We have stepped down from world leadership and stepped in something very nasty on the way down.

That Trump is not capable of governing even the country he heads is quite obvious. His self-stated "big brain" proves to be a perfect match for his "tiny hands." The job is too complex, too difficult, too  demanding for him. He retreats into a sulk, tries to manipulate what can't be manipulated, imagines a world far different from reality and tweets nonsense in an attempt to distract.

His Russian buddies may have helped him achieve the office, but they can't help him now that he is in it and finding that the shoes of his predecessors are far too big for his little boy feet to fill. The realities of how he achieved the office are rapidly catching up with him and the consequences may be dire.

Meanwhile, we are left with his awful decision to step back from the agreed on limits to pollution and observing environmental caution. As has apparently happened with some of his other bad decisions,  people and entities outside the executive branch are stepping up to correct the errors of his ways. States and cities are subscribing to the Paris agreement on their own, bypassing his potentially deadly decision, just as the courts have overridden his Muslim travel ban  and congress rejected his "health care"initiative and budget demands. Michael Bloomberg has promised to contribute the $15 million our pulling out of the agreement would remove from their budget. The system of checks and balances, which he clearly does not understand, is working, despite his attempts to override it. The people are standing up to his petty actions and making things work in spite of him.

As former California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger said, environmental regulations do not slow or stop job growth or manufacturing growth or profit. California has the most stringent environmental laws of any state yet has the highest employment, best economy by far and best growth rate of any state in the union. Trump's excuses for despoiling the earth do not stand the hard test of reality, as is true with so many of his claims. But reality is not one of the things he deals with well at all, much to our detriment as a nation.

Photo credit: Google Images

The Morning After

Well, guys, here we go. The election is over and we have done the unthinkable: we have elected Donald Trump. 

I have to say this. Hillary sealed her own fate by sheer hubris. She just assumed herself to be the candidate, and the people clearly did not agree. She thought, since she had lost the last one, this one was hers, that she would be a shoo-in, that the presidency was her right and her legacy. She expected a coronation. None of that was true. The country had moved on. We didn't want her, and voted in droves to say otherwise. Debbie Wasserman Shultz and the DNC gang decided those of us who didn't want Hillary were a bunch of kooks not to be considered, and they bulldozed through the primaries, doing what they had to do to throw the vote to Hillary. If anyone doubted they threw the primaries, reading their  emails showed that was exactly what they did. Some of us held our noses and voted for her; a great many more, apparently, didn't. 

We didn't believe the 30 years of Republican lies about her, and we didn't think her being a woman was a handicap to doing the job. We simply didn't think she was the best candidate. All through the primaries, polls showed that Trump could beat her, but could not even come close to beating Bernie. The pollsters are still saying "Bernie was never going to win." Wrong. Without the manipulations of the DNC, he would have won. They kept saying "but she has the popular vote." She didn't, actually, because they did not count the votes cast in the caucuses, where Bernie won by landslides. Both primaries and caucuses counted the same in choosing a candidate, but the DNC would have you believe the caucuses didn't count. Caucuses are simply a different way of doing the same thing: choosing a candidate. 

The media went all out to make Bernie look like an idiot, a loser, a wild-eyed radical, a fool, but he was none of those things. He had real vision, real promise and offered a chance at something different. Hillary offered more of the same center right politics. We wanted a turn to the left. We wanted to return the Democratic party to it's previous compassion and commitment to social justice. We wanted serious change in economics. The enthusiasm to vote for her was not there, because she was not at all what we hoped for. Her day had passed, and she and the DNC could not see it. They kept pushing her as the only viable candidate. 

The results are the election of a fascist who has a 200 word vocabulary, a massive, grandiose and easily bruised ego and no ability to use self-control. People who do not have much in the way of critical thinking skills simply saw "different" but did not scrutinize what kind of "different." They don't see around corners to visualize the consequences of their short-sightedness. They believed what he said without ever taking a look at how that actually compared to his past actions. We all have our work cut out for us now, to see that we don't have a resurgence of 1938, to see that people's lives are not destroyed in the keeping of campaign promises, to see that children are not frightened or harmed. 

Fortunately for us, few presidents have bothered to keep campaign promises. Maybe the gravity of the job will change the rhetoric and the behavior. meanwhile, bullying is on the rise in schools and the alt right has been empowered. The idea that if you tell a lie over and over again it becomes the truth has prevailed in ways I never thought possible. Be forewarned. 

It's up to us to keep the faith.