Columns
SMITHEREENS: Reflections on Bits & Pieces
Our Modern Watergate
On June 17, the 50th anniversary of the Watergate scandal that drove Richard Nixon from power, our country found itself facing a new and potentially graver threat—from an imperial grifter, scam-artist, buffoonish bully, serial liar, consummate crook, infantile autocrat, and flat-out sociopath named Donald Trump.
Thinking back to 1972, I remembered how important the single word "Watergate" became in the months following the arrest of the White House burglars for their bungled attempt to break into the Democrat National Committee HQ in the Watergate complex.
Speaking of "complex": It was a challenge just to remember all the secretive players, daunting to assess all the mind-boggling revelations, a chore to keep all the numbers in mind as investigators struggled to "follow the money."
The scandal might have crumbled into confusion amid all the complicating revelations and the public might have lost interest in the crime. But that didn't happen because the media came up with a short phrase that encompassed the entire story in a single headline-worthy word: "Watergate."
The January 6 Committee has done an excellent job researching the misdeeds of Trump and his minions and got off to a great start presenting its findings in a series of in-person episodes on live TV. But there's a risk that the country's attention may begin to wane as the coming episodes are broadcast intermittently over the next weeks.
For those who may have started to tune out of the on-going drip of revelations, we may need another all-encompassing piece of shorthand to nail Trump's crimes to the wall—a MAGA-era "Watergate," if you will.
Here's a suggestion. When Trump lost the election, he lost the right to occupy the White House. The building's owners (the voting public) essentially ordered him to vacate the premises. Instead of accepting that his lease had run out and he was facing eviction, Trump maintained he was still the rightful occupant of the Oval Office. There is a word for someone who is ordered to leave someone else's property and refuses to do so. That word is "squatter."
So maybe we should start referring to Trump's seditious scandal as "Squattergate!"
Weirdest News Note of the Year
A California District Court of Appeals was recently called upon to determine "whether the bumblebee, a terrestrial vertebrate, falls within the definition of a fish." According to TIME, on May 31, the court ruled that "bumblebees can, indeed, be classified as fish for the purpose of being protected by the California Endangered Species Act." Good news, but could this open the door to a new sport of fly-fishing for honeybees?
Fashion Plates
• A VW in Marin sports a plate that reads 350RFRY.
My guess is the driver is a climate activist with 350.org (350 parts-per-million being the danger-point for atmospheric concentrations of CO2). So the plate reads "350 'r Fry"—i.e., keep climate-changing pollution below 350ppm or learn to deal with planetary heat stroke.
• On a Honda Civic: ARETE UP.
Thank you, Google, for solving this mystery: "Arete is an ancient Greek word meaning excellence or virtue. The arete of something is the highest quality state it can reach. Avoid actions that lack arete."
Biden's Summit Tanks; Peoples' Summit Soars
While the mainstream media covered President Biden's contentious Summit of the Americas gathering in Los Angeles, the MSM managed to ignore a parallel event—the People's Summit for Democracy, also held in LA.
On May 10, Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador announced that he was boycotting the Summit to protest the exclusion of Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua. A number of other Latin American leaders announced their own boycotts of the Summit.
“The world is much bigger than the dominance and arrogance of Washington,” said President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela, calling the People’s Summit “the true Summit of Los Angeles.”
People's Summit participants gathered outside the LA Convention Center, site of Biden's summit and brandished protest signs reading “end white supremacy,” “end mass incarceration,” and “housing for all.”
Brian Becker, executive director of the ANSWER Coalition told the crowd: “Working class and poor people in the United States have hundred times more in common with the people of Cuba and their government, a hundred times more in common with Venezuela and its government, than we do with the Wall Street bankers and capitalists who pretend to speak in our name.”
For a taste of what went on at the three-day Peoples' Summit, tune in to this CODEPINK Radio episode, as Medea Benjamin greets grassroots ambassadors from the Global South and calls for the abolition of the Organization of American States.
What's the beef with the OAS? According to CODEPINK, the OAS has "promoted a coup in Bolivia, ignored electoral fraud in Honduras, props up an unelected government in Haiti, endorsed an invasion of Venezuela, and [has] ignored human rights abuses … in Haiti, Honduras, Ecuador Colombia, and Chile. And all of this occurred in just the past five years!"
Who's a Democracy?
President Biden explained he was not inviting Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua to participate in his Summit of the Americas because those countries were "dictatorships." Maybe Joe should reconsider. According to the 2022 Index of Economic Freedom, the USA failed to make it into the Top Ten list of world democracies. (The top democracies are—in reigning order: Singapore, Switzerland, Ireland, Luxembourg, New Zealand, Taiwan, Estonia, Netherlands, Finland, and Denmark.) The USA comes in at #25. (Lithuania, Lativa, South Korea, and the Czech Republic are more democratic than the US.) Nicaragua is ranked more democratic than Brazil or Ukraine. (The World Population Review lists 33 full-fledged global democracies. The "flawed" US is not among them.
And the US itself doesn't even rank as a democracy. According to Freedom House, the US is now listed as a "flawed democracy" whose ranking has plummeted 11 points in the past decade, placing it below Argentina and Mongolia. Cuba holds elections but it has a one-party political system.
If you ask Google "Is Nicaragua a democracy?" the response is: "Nicaragua is not a perfect democracy. It is a practicing one, and in comparison to those countries around it, it looks benign, even beneficent. In El Salvador, civilian populations are bombed by the government army using US-supplied military aid and expertise."
According to the World Population Review, 57 nations are ranked as full-blown authoritarian regimes They are: Mali, Mauritania, Palestine, Kuwait, Algeria, Burkina Faso, Angola, Iraq, Jordan, Nicaragua, Gabon, Mozambique, Ethiopia, Russia, Niger, Qatar, Zimbabwe, Kazakhstan, Republic of the Congo, Cambodia, Rwanda, Comoros, Guinea, Eswatini, Myanmar, Oman, Vietnam, Egypt, Afghanistan, Cuba, Togo, Cameroon, Venezuela, Djibouti, United Arab Emirates, Azerbaijan, Guinea Bissau, Belarus, Sudan, Bahrain, China, Iran, Eritrea, Burundi, Uzbekistan, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Libya, Tajikistan, Equatorial Guinea, Laos, Turkmenistan, Chad, Syria, Central African Republic, DR Congo, and North Korea.
Windfall Profits for the Oiligarchs (Not a Typo)
“Exxon made more money than God this year.” Thus spake President Biden, scolding the oil giant for hiking gas pump prices and raking in $8.8 billion in profits over the first quarter of 2022.
"Not to nitpick," writes Public Citizen's Robert Weissman, "but the president must have missed that Shell made even more than that, with $9.1 billion in profits from January through March—its best quarter ever. Chevron ($6.3 billion in first quarter profits) and BP ($6.2 billion in first quarter profits) did pretty well for themselves, too."
Remember: we aren't talking sales; we're talking profits.
Weissman ticked off a major contributing factor: Production costs haven't changed but the market price of oil is up owing to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. And are US oil companies using these windfall profits to invest in clean energy? Heck, no! They’re using the money to buy back their own stock!
Weissman compares Big Oil to a "sleazy drug dealer" keeping the public hooked on dirty, deadly products. "The fossil fuel industry has brought us to the brink of climate catastrophe that threatens the continued viability of human civilization as we know it," Weissman rages. "It’s time to tax Big Oil’s outrageous windfall profits and give money back to American consumers. Italy is doing this. The United Kingdom — even with Boris Johnson (still) in charge — is doing this."
Public Citizen has posted this online petition:
Tell Congress: The American people need a break from out-of-control prices. Pass legislation without delay to tax Big Oil’s windfall profits and give money back to consumer. Add your name here
Fox News Downplays Big Oil's Upswings
My Country Is of Thee, Sweet Land of Infantry
A keen observer of political corruption and the Pentagon recently noted how "Congress gives the Pentagon money and the Pentagon uses the money to pay lobbyists to manipulate congress into voting more money for the Pentagon."
So: the more money the pols give the DoD, the more money the solons stand to receive back in the form of donations from the war lobby—freshly laundered by the country's powerful "defense" industries.
And then there's the Pentagon's scheme of "foreign aid." Many of the financial bequests the US bestows on foreign allies is gifted on the condition that a substantial part of the largesse must be used to buy US-made weapons.
The US spends more money on its military than the next 11 most-militarized countries combined. The US maintains around 800 military bases in more than 70 foreign nations. The US is the world's largest merchant of arms. In 2021, the US and its allies conducted more than 300 military exercises around the planet. It has been said that "America's greatest export is war."
According to the 2014 book, America Invades: How We’ve Invaded Or Been Militarily Involved With Almost Every Country on Earth, the US "has invaded or fought in 84 of the 193 countries recognized by the United Nations and has been militarily involved with 191 of 193—a staggering 98 percent."
As the website, We Are the Mighty points out, "there are only three countries in the world America hasn’t invaded or have never seen a US military presence: Andorra, Bhutan, and Liechtenstein." (Note: The numbers don't match up so it looks like the Pentagon may have added one of these three tiny nations to its squish-list.)
Given all the above, maybe we it's time we should start referring to the US as "The United States of Warmerica."
Russia and the Nazis: It's Personal
In the run-up to his invasion of Ukraine, Russian President Putin complained about the presence of extremist hard-right politicians in the neighboring country, including some who openly paraded under banners historically linked to Hitler's Germany. These latter-day Nazi sympathizers were involved in the 2014 US-backed coup against Ukraine's pro-Russian leader
Why does Putin have such a fixation on neo-Nazis? It has a lot to do with the USSR's WWII role in defeating Hitler.
Historians note that 24-27 million Soviet fighters died on the battlefields of WWII. Soviet soldiers killed 80% of the Nazis fighting on the Eastern front.
Some 418,500 US soldiers were killed in WWII. The Soviet Union had 60 times more killed and wounded than the US.
Of the estimated 60-70 million deaths caused by World War II, around half occurred in battles fought in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe between the Nazis and the USSR.
A Caribbean Escape
A few weeks ago, against all odds (and owing to the tenacity of MBF), we managed to bust through a swath of extreme weather and the COVID Curtain to negotiate a dicey trip to an island in the Caribbean. Some memorable encounters included:
• Meeting Gabriel, the keeper of a lighthouse built by the US military in 1910. A few years ago, the landmark was blown apart by a hurricane. The lights were knocked out and the metal cap that topped the tower now sits nearby on the hilltop looking like a crashed UFO.
• While Gabriel explained how a new radar system now tracks commercial vessels in the island's waters, we noticed a stray goat crossing a meadow below a loose rope trailing from its neck. Ten minutes later, the goat joined us in the tower. The animal turned out to be the lighthouse keeper's pet. We asked what the critter's name was. Gabriel replied: "Goaty."
• We stayed in a spacious villa overlooking a bay, a pier, and the towering distillery tanks of a large brewery.
The gracious owner/resident of the two-story dwelling explained that the brewery's former owners built the villas on the nearby bluff so they could look down on their employees working below. (That explained the competition-class tennis court adjacent to the "overseers'" top-most villa.)
• We noticed a large sports stadium that sported the five Olympic rings. We were told the Olympics never made it to the island and the sports stadium was converted to serve as a hospital. Unfortunately, the hospital's new doors turned out to be too narrow to accommodate the passage of gurneys. As a local resident explained: "The only part of the building that worked was the morgue."
• We learned of another building project was halted after two years when someone pointed out that the impressive new structure lacked two critical elements—windows and doors.
• We met a lot of delightful people, including Terry T. Janvier, a local artist who had turned his entire multi-floored residence into a visual carnival of painted lattices, cabinets, windows, galleries, and architectural flourishes adorned with portraits of luminaries like Nelson Mandela and Sir William Arthur Lewis.
• We also had the good fortune to meet two adorable sisters—nine-year-old Ivana and her five-year-old sister Mia—who adopted us and wound up engaging in surf-splashing conversations, water gymnastics, Zen calisthenics, and palm-tree rope-swinging contests for several delightful, never-to-be-forgotten hours.
Over and Out
