Resenting the Immigrant

Lincoln Soldati asked "Where does the resentment and fear of the immigrant come from?"  He went on, "Have any of you, raise your hands, lost a job to an immigrant lately?"

He laughed at the Louie Gohmert line about all those dark skinned immigrants massing on the borders poised to flood across and take our jobs and to rape white women.

"Of course, if they raped women of color, he'd have no problem with that," Soldati observed.

But all this made me think.

I talk to people living in Lawrence, Mass every week, a town which is densely populated with immigrants from the Dominican Republic, Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Middle East, South Asia. One Black man told me he was leaving Methuen because the Hispanics have ruined his neighborhood, playing loud music, speaking Spanish.

I can think of no better depiction of resentment against immigrants than the 1989 Spike Lee movie, "Do the Right Thing," in which three Black men sit across from a Korean owned grocery and contemplate why the Koreans seem to have been successful so quickly, while they, Black men who have lived in the United States so much longer, have not.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZUbvT6YKPzk


That's where the resentment comes from. Not from anything the immigrants have done but from the disappointment which wells up from a sense of failure.
One of the men speaks with a Caribbean accent and he laments that Korean grocer has been off the boat no longer than three years and already has a thriving business, while he, who has been in the States for a decade has failed to acquire any wealth.

Watch that clip and you can see it all there. So many of the Trump crowd have that same sense of rage, and it must come from a sense of  humiliation--that  they have not done better, and the unspoken suspicion they cannot admit to themselves derives from their own sense that they have not done better because of their own failure to advance themselves.

It is a question they must see in the eyes of their wives: Mr. Kim across the street, he buys his wife a new car. We can barely meet the rent. What's wrong with you? And that man has to ask himself, "What's wrong with me?"
MAGA.

You Know You're In Trouble When the Russians Are Following Your Blog

Actually, Mad Dog is  not sure what to think when he checks his "audience" display and sees a lot of Russians tuned in this week.

To say nothing of the Italians, but they are the folks who elected the Italian Trump, Berlusconi, so it's hard to know what to think about them.

The Russians, on the other hand, we know are just riding the internet seas flying the skull and crossbones.

Mad Dog is comforted in that his blog audience is so small, it could fit into a single Moscow subway car.

Despite his negligible Russian ancestry, or possibly because of it, Mad Dog is pretty sure Russia is not much interested in him or his blog--they just cast a net from that pirate ship and see what they pick up.

What Mad dog particularly likes about this display is it makes it appear that he has a robust audience in Alaska, which is of course untrue. The guys out there on those king crab boats are not entertaining themselves by reading Mad Dog--they are part of America so they get the same dark green treatment because people in New Hampshire and Washington, DC tune in and it's a gerrymandered map.

Presumably, the same applies to Russia--nobody in Siberia is actually reading some hobbit from a New Hampshire shire, although it might do everyone some good if they did. Mad Dog would love to read about life and thought in Siberia, if he could find a good blog from somebody in Siberia.

No, it's probably Moscow which turns that map dark green for Mad Dog, some schlub in some dreary Moscow office who has been assigned some insignificant portion of the American internet, is tuning in and logging on to Mad Dog, while he drinks vodka to drown his boredom and sorrow. 

North Hampton, NH

He would rather be in Berlin, clubbing with attractive young ladies and drinking whatever they drink in Berlin. So, my sympathies, Mr. Schlub. You have a really uninspiring entry level internet troll job, and you'll know you're taking the next step up the ladder when they give you a better assignment with some bloggers who have thousands, rather than hundreds of followers and which have pop up ads.

Exeter, NH

If you are like most Europeans, you get 12 weeks vacation, and I'd suggest you use part of that for a holiday on the seacoast of New Hampshire, maybe even the lakes region. Eat lobster rolls (New Hampshire chicken) and expose yourself to sunshine (good for your vitamin D levels, likely pretty low after a winter in Moscow), do some surfing, meet some interesting women, talk to some Live Free or Die men, go to a minor league baseball game in Manchester. 

Plaice Cove, Hampton

Just don't get ill when you're here, because, our healthcare system is nothing you want to get involved with. They will track you down no matter where you go, Siberia even, for that $1200 Emergency Room bill. 

Eye catching: But really boring. Airheads. 

And don't miss Fox News every morning. A week of that and you'll be just dying to get back to Russia.

The Best Congress Money Can By

When Terence O'Rourke attacks his fellow Democrats Shaheen and Hassan for voting to dismember Dodd-Frank, he imputes a certain nastiness to their motivations: Oh, they are owned by "banking interests." They are banking's whores. They sold out Main Street to Wall Street.

We can and will get into this, but, ultimately, he raises a larger question: As soon as money changes hands in the political world, is there not a built in conflict of interest between serving those who voted for you and those who pay you?

$Money: The Gorilla in the Room$

This is not limited of course to politics: How can you know and dissect out motivations?

A woman meets a man in a bar. She laughs at his jokes and moves closer to him, makes eye contact which she holds steadily. She's attracted. He says, "Your place or mine?"

Right then and there we see some insight into the nature of the relationship unfolding.

If she says, "Mine," well then that may mean she wants some measure of control. It also may imply some trust on her part. If she says, "Yours," on some level that may mean she wants to know more about him, and part of that may be his wealth, his taste, his interests.

They go to his place and it's a hovel. She leaves shortly. Or, it's a palace and she sits down on his bed. What is her motivation? Is she thinking steps ahead? If I get involved with this guy, he might be a long term prospect. 

I would not be the first to consider the thought that the difference between a prostitute and a wife is their long term plans. 

It's that old joke about the woman at the bar who accepts the proposition when asked if she'll sleep with the man who offers her $50 million. 
But when he says, "Well, then will you sleep with me for $50?"
She erupts in anger: "What kind of girl do you think I am?" 
"We have already established that," says the man, "Now, we are just haggling about the price."

Now many women will say, of course the money matters in choosing a mate, partner, ally, but the consideration would never even have gotten that far unless the values of the guy were simpatico. These ladies will say: If I'm talking to a guy at a bar and he turns out to be a Trump fan, the discussion ends there. But if he voted for Bernie Sanders and he sends Planned Parenthood a check and if he marched with the women wearing the pink pussy hat, then I might just check out his apartment. If he's poor as a church mouse, I may walk; if he's living in a Penthouse, maybe I'll spend the night.

Where are you when we need you?

Did the money matter?  

This extended analogy may be quite flawed but the point is, if you accept money from somebody who you already like for other reasons, is that a moral flaw?

That Cost Money

So the top donors to Maggie Hassan and Jeanne Shaheen accepted was Emily's list a political group which sends money to women politicians who support abortion rights.  They will say, they gave me money to keep up the good fight, which I had started before they gave me the money.  
O'Rourke will say, now they've got you.  What happens when it's about late term abortion, so late term you might think it's infanticide?  Or what happens when Emily's list decides to push a bill for reparations to all Black Americans for slavery?

Does accepting money that mean Shaheen and Hassan have been bought and sold? If they got $50 million from Emily's list is that worse than they got $50?
Are we just now haggling about the price?

The fact is, you can go on to the "Open Secrets" website and it's still tough to tease out who is sending any senator money. There is also all that Dark Money we cannot trace, especially since the Supreme Court ruled money is speech. 

Money is amplified speech.

What O'Rourke has been saying is that once we know our senators have taken bank money, how can we know whether their votes for "community banks" were based on a judgment about what's good for the average citizen in New Hampshire or based on paying off the investment the banks made in the senators?

We cannot.

Our senators could reply: Look, if I took no money from anyone other than anonymous on line supporters I would have no chance to even vote. I'd never have made it to the Senate, which costs millions to run a campaign.

As matters stand, O'Rourke looks like he's tilting at windmills. "I will not take PAC money. The only consideration should be what's right."

He says that in a long line of thinkers who saw clearly the impact of money on moral decision making.  Alexander Yersin, the doctor who identified the bacillus which causes the Black plague, the first doctor to come up with an effective anti serum against plague, the first man in the history of mankind to defeat that scourge which had wiped out large portions of humanity across Europe, refused to practice medicine.  He said simply: "I could never practice medicine because I could never say to a man, 'Your money or your life.'" (Of course, that was before government sponsored National Health Care in France.) 

Conqueror of the Black Death

Like Ralph Nader, he did substantial good outside the established system. 
When he arrived in Hong Kong, a British crown colony, the British authorities would not allow him access to plague victims. They already had their selected doctors in place. So Yersin worked outside of the establishment and succeeded in conquering plague while the British effort sunk beneath the waves. 

Is he correct or too pure?

I once saw a man on a soap box speaking in Hyde Park, London.  He said, "I refuse to speak to a crowd of less than 500 people! My insights, my thoughts are simply too valuable and profound to squander on an audience of smaller size!"

Of course, the joke was, he might have been correct about the importance of what he had to say, but he was never going to get a chance to say it.

Good Luck with That 

I can write a blog which is read by only a few hundred people every week and which gets no responses. I can shout into the void and tell myself if there is a sound in the forest and only I can hear it, it's still a sound.

But I'm not running for Congress. You do that and you better take steps to get heard.

Drawing Conclusions, Inferring Motivations from Campaign Contributions

A Democratic candidate for the New Hampshire 1st U.S. Congress seat is getting a lot of attention for saying that New Hampshire's two Democratic senators sold out to the bank lobby when they voted for a change (gutting/repealing/repairing--depending on your point of view) of the Dodd Frank Act which was supposed to protect Main Street from Wall Street after the near catastrophe of the financial meltdown of 2008.

Terence O'Rourke says their votes to "gut" Dodd Frank were a betrayal of core Democratic Party principles and the reason for their votes was simple: They are in the pay of the banking industry lobby.

Barney Frank, in his youtube video begs to disagree:
He is the author of the law which the Senate voted to change and he says 95% of the law was left intact by the changes, so it was hardly an evisceration of the law.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4NUlVA8dT5A

He explains that the American banking industry has 3 components: Big banks with over $250 billion dollars (often trillions) in assets, which if they fail could start a chain reaction in the economy.   Middle size banks which hold between $10 and $250 billion and "community banks," small banks which played no role in the financial crisis.

The changes would exempt all but the banks with over $250 billion from federal government stress tests to be sure they are not going to fail.

Community banks, the little guys have complained that a law intended to discipline the big boys has instead been thwarting the health and vitality of the little guys and they want that fixed.

That's what Senators Shaheen and Hassan voted for. 

Responding to inquiry from Mad Dog, Senator Shaheen said, "As with most broad reform legislation, time reveals improvements that need to be made. Main street lenders did not cause the financial cris, but many small banks and credit unions located int New Hampshire were unnecessarily burdened by the Dodd-Frank Act. I have heard directly from many community banks and credit unions in New Hampshire."

So she argues, she was responding to her constituents and as often happens with complex fixes, the fix has to be adjusted later.

O'Rourke says this is poppycock, that both senators have received money from the banking industry and that's why they voted to change the law.They were bought off.

Looking on line the two biggest contributors to both senators seem to not be banks but something called, "Emily's List" an pro abortion organization. O'Rourke does not argue the senators are pro choice because of this.

The next big contributors to both is something called "J Street" a pro Israel lobby.

Then there are "law firms" and "real estate" which might be banks.

But let's suppose Mad Dog's internet research is wrong and both have received money from the banks. Does that mean we must conclude that money bought their votes on this particular bill?

It is hard to prove the money did NOT buy their votes, but they are getting money from all sorts of sources and what might be banking interests looks small enough that if they never got another cent from them, it wouldn't make a big dent.

What O'Rourke may be saying is that with our current system, we've got legalized bribery.  We give you money. We are banks. Legislation comes up which we tell you is good for us. We expect you to vote our way. We expect a return on investment.

O'Rourke says he won't take money this way and he faults the senators for participating in the game as it is currently played because it looks like their votes were bought, or might have been bought or at least influenced by campaign contributions.

When Hillary Clinton tried to explain those $250K "speaker's fees" from Wall Street firms, she basically said, "Everyone does it and it didn't ever affect the way I voted."

Donald Trump was able to label her "Crooked Hillary" because she could never make that appearance of being bought look like good clean fun. 

Apparently our two senators are in the same position now. O'Rourke is making essentially the same claim Trump made about Clinton: The optics are bad.

But the difference is the magnitude. They got some money, but compared to the money they had coming from other sources, chump change.

Mad Dog really does not believe either Senator is corrupt, or bought. He does believe they responded to the "community bankers" pressure, but isn't that their job?

One man's legalized bribery is another man's redress of grievances.

Barney Frank has said Democrats should not throw the baby out with the bath water. He says senators who voted to amend his law were violating no core principles; they were just trying to survive.

O'Rourke says this has to change. 

Mad Dog suspects both senators have clear consciences about their votes. 
How are you going to run if you don't solicit and receive campaign contributions? But if you do, then how are you going to convince your constituents your vote on legislation was not influenced by the money?

Lambs to the Slaughter

There are the issues:  How do we approach the opioid crisis (which is not just one problem but several); guns (ditto--many problems wrapped in a single cloth); healthcare (again); income inequality; endless war; abortion (oh, God); immigration; globalization; climate change.

And then there is the personality: When Democrats face a strongman (or, really, a phony strongman) Trump and all his Lilliputian disciples and henchmen, how do you respond? With whom do you respond?

Much as we may be inspired by him, Gandhi would have been on a fast train to Auschwitz and never been heard of again, had he faced Hitler instead of the English crown and parliament.

England needed a tough guy to rally around, a Chruchill who could growl, belittle and inspire. 

He was a man for his time, but remember, the British electorate threw him out of office promptly after the war ended.

I'm not saying we can never look for another Obama, but really, how would even Obama be able to respond to Trumpism? In fact, is Trump not the inevitable reaction to the cool, informed, careful Obama?

We have 8 candidates for Congress for the New Hampshire first. 

Among them are some real prospects: Mad Dog counts three who he thinks could stand up against the thug Republicans, maybe four.

But when he talks, briefly, with his comrades in arms, he is confounded, confused and mystified by who they gravitate towards.

It is really apparent that Trump fans tend to fall into two or three easily defined categories:  the dull, the rich and the pathologically resentful. 

Democrats come toward selecting representatives from all sorts of angles: Is he kind to gays and transgenders? Does he embrace immigrants? Is he appalled by guns? Does he appreciate the importance of women's rights? And on and on. 

Every Democrat has his or her own burning issue and required personality profile for the candidate.

The only thing which unifies Democrats now is Not Trump.

The New Left? Muscular Liberalism and Terence O'Rourke

Terence O'Rourke spoke at the Hampton Dems meeting tonight and Mad Dog thought he was wonderful.

It did not bother Mad Dog one bit that O'Rourke launched a blistering attack on both New Hampshire's Democratic Senators for voting to gut Dodd Frank, even when he asserted Shaheen and Hassan voted with the banks because the banks contributed heavily to their campaigns.

This annoyed some longtime connected Dems in the audience.
"You don't come to a Democratic party meeting and diss other Dems," one said.

Jefferson: A Fire Bell In the Night

Mad Dog disagreed. We ought to be making heads roll in the Democratic Party. The Democratic Party got clobbered on November 8, 2016 but we still have Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer and Ray Buckley. 

Dems should have cleaned house. 

O'Rourke says we have endless war because it's good for business. Money is being made. Hard to prove that. Hard to disprove it. If you're going to say that, you have to get specific about who is making money from those military actions and how those interests have outweighed anti war interests.

Mad Dog hardly blinked when Mr. O'Rourke said the Senate would not flip because of Gerrymandering. Of course, you can't Gerrymander a Senate seat, which is always statewide and at large. But that the more generous Dems let pass--the man was speaking fast, on a roll, a little over excited. Details, details.

What he is selling is indignation, anger and determination not to back down.

It Didn't End Here: See Iraq

Mad Dog likes that. 

Bernie Sanders has been tweeting we cannot win the upcoming elections with same old same old. We need new candidates from the actual left, not the mostly left, most of the time left. 

Eliminate the cap on Social Security tax rates; create a National Health Care like England's; stop endless war by insisting Congress authorize acts of war; repeal the Trump Tax bill; fund public education and reject assassination of the public schools by voucher; reject candidates who do not have issues listed on their websites; pack the Supreme Court.

O'Rourke's description of the Iraq war, of how the United States laid waste to that nation, killed it's people, destroyed its armed forces and its infrastructure was stark. "We were the bad guys in that one," he said. 

Mad Dog is  looking forward to hearing from him again. 

Tribalism: Is It Just Too Deep Seeded?

Tessio: I understand thirty thousand men enlisted this morning.
Sonny: Yeah, bunch of saps.
Michael: Why are they saps?
Connie: Sonny, come on. We don't have to talk about the war.
Sonny: Hey, beat it--you go talk to Carlo, alright? (Leaning menacingly toward Michael) They're saps because they risk their lives for strangers.
Michael: Now that's Pop talking.
Sonny: You're fucking right that's Pop talking.
Michael: They risk their lives for their country.
Sonny: Your country ain't your blood--you remember that.
MIchael: I don't feel that way.
Sonny (taunting): "I dont' feel that way." Well, if you don't feel like that why don't you just quit college and go into the Army?
Michael: I did--I enlisted in the Marines.
--"The Godfather"

www.youtube.com/watch?v=435mkg6_eGQ


And I gladly stand up
Next to you and defend her still today
'Cause there ain't no doubt I love this land
God Bless the USA.
And I'm proud to be an American 
Where at least I know I'm free
And I won't forget the men who died 
Who gave that right to me.
--"Proud To Be An American"

The Sunday Times carried an article about two brothers who opened a restaurant in Sri Lanka where a Facebook posting claimed Muslims were plotting to sterilize Sri Lanka's Sinhalese majority. A Singhalese patron found something in his plate he thought was a sterilization pill and the brothers were beaten and their restaurant set  aflame and a riot ensued. One of the subtitles of the piece was "The Thrill of Tribalism."  Various authors and academics have made hay on this concept, that tribalism is deeply rooted in human nature.

When I was an undergraduate, one of the most popular events on campus were the "anthro flicks" put on by the Department of Anthropology. This was before the National Geographic channel and youtube and even before computers, so the novelty of seeing how other people lived in cultures far away and vastly different drew pre medical students, engineers, math majors, philosophy majors, a wide swath of students from all over the campus. 

One of the favorites--they showed it every year--was "Dead Birds" about two warring villages  in New Guinea. Periodically, a war party consistenting of all the men (and some boys) from each village marched out onto a field between the villages with spears and shields and they shouted threats at each other and launched spears and arrows and battle ensued until the first villager was killed. Then, the villagers gathered up the dead, in this case a ten year old boy, and carried him back to the village and the fighting ended. The villagers staged a ritualistic funeral, and the dead boy was seated in a chair and carried about before being immolated. 

After a time, the villagers would go at it again. Usually, the next fatality was suffered by the village who had not lost the last time. In this way, the war could continue, because neither village lost too much and balance remained.

The moral of the story, as I got it then, was that human beings are tribal, and they must have conflict. It's in our DNA.

When we see the Republicans appealing to all this, when President Trump tells us some of those Neo Nazis in Charlottesville are "fine people," we see an appeal to that sort of butt naked tribalism. 

The wonder to me has been, how you ever get a population as diverse as ours, with so many "tribes" to coalesce into a nation. How do you get mothers willing to give up their sons for this idea of country?
One way, of course, is if those mothers do not have much to lose. If you are a family like the one depicted in "Hillbilly Elegy," which is to say, a failing family, barely able to meet the rent, barely scraping by, well then the Army seems like the best deal out there. And if you are an ambitious young man from a wealthier family, fighting might be one way to created a story for yourself. 

When you watch that scene from "The Godfather" where Sonny explodes at his brother for placing country above family, you see the force of the idea of family, which is really nothing more than tribe. 

That the Lee Greenwood anthem, "Proud to be an American" resonates with the least wealthy, mostly white population, says something too. The people who tear up listening to this song are very much what Sonny had in mind: Saps. Trump chumps. But for them, what else do they have? They live paycheck to paycheck. They are often fighting with their own family. They are isolated, alienated, and then there is this sappy song, calling them to a higher purpose, enobling them. They can't make enough money to take their family out to dinner; their parents and grandparents are living with them in the same rental; they are one payment away from having their cars repossessed. But at least they are free. Freedom's, indeed, just another word for nothing left to lose. "Stronger Together" has no appeal for them.