The Shithole "President" Is Illegitimate And Always Will Be

I just went through a couple of very intense years of cancer treatment. My doctor is an award-winning researcher and my cancer is extremely rare and extremely difficult to manage. She was one of the world's experts in it and she saved my life. She was born in China and I consider myself very lucky that her family immigrated to America, to California, where I live. Another specialist who my primary care physician suggested I also talk to suggested a much less intense treatment for the disease, much less stressful treatment. Everyone dies within a couple of years who goes that route. He's just a few years behind the times.

My China-born doctor wasn't the only one who treated me though. The hospital had a lot of very skilled nurses working on me on a day ti day basis. One who I came to absolutely love is a woman named Cindy. My heart leaps when I go see her every three months for my on-going treatment. Cindy's family immigrated from the Philippines. Other nurses who worked on me were from Latin America and Asia and they all made me feel wonderful and all contributed to my recovery. But in California it seems like most of the nurses are from the Philippines.

In South Florida, though, it appears that most of the nurses at from Haiti. While I was going through my ordeal, one of my oldest friends was dealing with his mothers passing. His mother was very wealthy and didn't want to die in a facility. So she lived out the last years of her life at home in Miami in her palatial home. My friend lives in New York and he tried to go down to see her every week or so, She needed pretty intense 24/7 treatment and her head nurse, a Haitian woman, was in charge. I'll tell you how great of a job she did-- a woman with her own life and her own troubles. When my friend's mom eventually died, me friend gave the nurse $250,000. Nice tip. He sometimes wonders if he gave her-- this Haitian immigrant-- enough. "Take them out," said the worthless piece of shit head of the kakistocracy this week. Up top is a commentary from American Alisha Laventure, a Dallas TV news anchor whose parents immigrated from Haiti, a "shithole country" according to the racist slob sitting and stuffing his ugly face with McDonald's in the Oval Office. Below is a much more overtly emotional commentary from MSNBC's Joy Reid, one of who's parents came from Haiti and one from the Congo, another "shithole country" according to Trump. Please find the time to watch both.

I spent the holidays in Thailand. Thais are too polite to bring up Trump, but Europeans we met there-- there are far more Europeans traveling these days than there are Americans-- always brought up Trump, none, at least none that we met, admiringly, the way they talked about Obama. "How could you?" they all asked, almost accusingly. What do you think Africans think about our ignorant racist slob of a leader?

The African Group of UN ambassadors is "extremely appalled at, and strongly condemns the outrageous, racist and xenophobic remarks by the president of the United States of America as widely reported by the media," a statement said.

After an emergency session to weigh Trump's remarks, the group said it was "concerned at the continuing and growing trend from the US administration toward Africa and people of African descent to denigrate the continent and people of color."

While demanding a "retraction and an apology" from Trump, the 54 countries also thanked those Americans "from all walks of life who have condemned the remarks."

The resolution was passed unanimously after four hours of discussions.

Why hasn't Speaker Paul Ryan or Republican Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy introduced a resolution in Congress disassociating the United States from Trump's vile comments? Really-- why haven't they?

NPR's Karen Grisby Bates tried figuring out what's going on with all this Republican racism and xenophobia. "He's saying exactly what he wants to say," she wrote about Trump. "As the Congressional Black Caucus pointed out, 'Make America Great Again' really means Make America White Again."

One way to do that is to cut back on people from the aforementioned "shithole countries"-- countries that, coincidentally, are full of black and brown people-- to make room for immigrants from countries the president deems more desirable. He seems to like Norway. (Although as one Twitter user asked, why would most Scandinavians, who have higher education rates than their U.S. counterparts and a far more extensive social service system, want to trade that for what we have here?)

People from Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean are who Trump doesn't want. But he cannot turn back time. The country is getting browner, and America 2018 is never going to look like America 1918. Interracial marriages continue to increase; the bi- and multiracial population steadily grows. And the world has not stopped spinning.

So yes, calling most of Africa and the Western world's oldest independent black nation the institutional equivalent of a latrine is a new low in racial vulgarity for this president. But we probably haven't reached an absolute nadir yet.

Nevertheless, we should worry at the constant stream of racist, crude remarks this president unleashes on the public. Normalizing that kind of behavior leads to what sociologists call "otherization"-- making the subject of one's remarks different from one's self to the point that it is easier to neglect, harm, even kill people one doesn't see as people. It happened in Germany in 1939. It happened in Rwanda in the '90s. It's happening now in Myanmar.

Donald Trump's relegation of whole nations filled with black and brown people to an undesirable inconvenience is another step down a slippery slope. If it's not called out and stopped, it could lead to something far worse than hurt feelings.

Which is why we should still take a moment to be shocked when the president of the United States says racist things. Even if you know his history.

This weekend, a NY Times editorial reminded its readers, few of whom need reminding, that "Trump is not just racist, ignorant, incompetent and undignified. He’s also a liar." In a new notorious meeting with congressional leaders he asked "why the United States should accept people from places like Haiti or Africa instead of nice Nordic countries like Norway, and then tweeting his tiresome demands for a 'Great Wall' along the Mexican border... The president of the United States is a racist. And another: The United States has a long and ugly history of excluding immigrants based on race or national origin. Mr. Trump seems determined to undo efforts taken by presidents of both parties in recent decades to overcome that history."

No one is denying that Haiti and some of these other countries have profound problems today. Of course, those problems are often a direct result of policies and actions of the United States and European nations: to name just a few, kidnapping and enslaving their citizens; plundering their natural resources; propping up their dictators and corrupt regimes; and holding them financially hostage for generations

The United States has long held itself out as a light among nations based on the American ideal of equality. But the deeper history tells a different story.

The sociologists David Scott FitzGerald and David Cook-Martin have shown that the United States pioneered racially based exclusionary immigration policies in the Americas in the late 18th and 19th centuries. (Not long before he was elected president, for example, Theodore Roosevelt asserted the bigoted but then-common view that the Chinese should be kept out of America because they were “racially inferior.”)

It should sober Americans to know that authoritarian governments in Chile, Cuba and Uruguay ended racist immigration policies decades before the United States.

...What is concerning is not the wall, or the word “shithole” or the vacillation on the Dreamers or the Salvadorans. It’s what ties all of these things together: the bigoted worldview of the man behind them.

Anyone who has followed Mr. Trump over the years knows this. We knew it in the 1970s, when he and his father were twice sued by the Justice Department for refusing to rent apartments to black people. We knew it in 1989, when he took out a full-page newspaper ad calling for the execution of five black and Latino teenagers charged with the brutal rape of a white woman in Central Park. (The men were convicted but later exonerated by DNA and other evidence, but Mr. Trump never apologized, and he continued to argue as late as 2016 that the men were guilty.) We knew it when he built a presidential campaign by demonizing Mexicans and Muslims while promoting the lie that America’s first black president wasn’t born here. Or when, last summer, he defended marchers in a neo-Nazi parade as “very fine people.”

Just last month, The Times reported on an Oval Office meeting on immigration during which Mr. Trump said that the 15,000 Haitians now living in the United States “all have AIDS,” and that Nigerian immigrants would never “go back to their huts” in Africa once they had seen the United States. See a pattern yet?

...Republicans in Congress are spending most of their time finding ways to avoid talking about their openly bigoted chief executive. Some claimed not to have heard what Mr. Trump said. Others offered tepid defenses of his “salty” talk. House Speaker Paul Ryan called Mr. Trump’s comments “unhelpful,” clearly wishing he could return to his daily schedule of enriching the wealthiest Americans.

Mr. Trump has made clear that he has no useful answers on immigration. It’s up to Congress to fashion long-term, humane solutions. A comprehensive immigration bill that resolves all these issues would be best. But if that is not possible, given the resistance of hard-core anti-immigration activists in Congress, legislators should at least join forces to protect the Dreamers, Salvadorans, Haitians and others threatened by the administration’s cruel and chaotic actions.

Up to Congress? That means it's up to us, the citizens of this country to defeat every Republican-- and every Democrat who enables Republicans (corrupt, paid off Blue Dogs and New Dems like Dan Lipinski and Debbie Wasserman Schultz) this year so Congress can deal with the shit Trump and the GOP are clogging up the system with.

Myths, Lies... What's The Difference-- It's How The Republican Party Rolls

You may have noticed that I've been reading Joshua Holland's terrific book, The Fifteen Biggest Lies About The Economy. Of course there are way more than 15 lies the Republicans routinely use to persuade low-info voters that their toxic, one-percenter agenda is somehow good for ordinary Americans, but Holland manages to organize them in such a way that 15 super-groups stand out as the most lethal to American families. This week Alan Grayson took a stab at his own list-- The Myths That Are Killing Us. He actually gets the list down to an even dozen!

As the Republican demolition derby rolls on, I continue to be amused by how each remaining contender tries to assume the “small government” mantle.
 
Mitt Romney wants a government so small that it provides universal health care.
 
Newt Gingrich wants a government so small that it will establish a permanent base on the Moon.
 
Rick Santorum wants a government so small that it will fit inside a woman’s uterus.
 
The only real remaining advocate of small government is Ron Paul. Dr. Paul appears to be disqualified from the Republican Presidential Primary, however, because he is unwilling to drench himself with the blood of our imagined enemies, like Gerard Butler in the movie 300.
 
But what about that Jon Huntsman guy? This week three different people told me, quite independently of each other, how sorry they were that Governor Huntsman never gained any traction in the Republican Presidential Primary.
 
I told them that they should get over it. Huntsman wasn’t any better.
 
It somehow counts as an act of courage for Huntsman to have tweeted: “I believe in evolution.” Of course, it would have been more courageous if Huntsman had said that to a Tea Party audience, and then they tore him limb from limb, thereby disproving the theory of evolution right before our eyes.
 
And evolution is not something that you “believe” or “disbelieve.” Evolution is like gravity; it’s not like Santa Claus or the Abominable Snowman. (Question: Why do they both live at the North Pole?)
 
Be that as it may, neither Huntsman nor any other Republican Presidential candidate has been willing to take on the hard myths. The myths that are killing us. Here are a dirty dozen, right off the top of my head:

(1) The Government can’t create jobs. (Tell that to FDR, who created four million jobs in three months.)

(2) Tax cuts reduce the deficit. (Doesn’t it bother them that a man named “Laffer” came up with this one?)

(3) A fetus is a baby.

(4) The poor have too much money.

(5) Cutting the federal deficit will end the recession.

(6) The rich are incentivized by tax cuts, while the poor are incentivized by lower wages, no benefits, an end to the minimum wage, and unemployment.

(7) An unwanted child is God’s will.

(8) Everyone who wants health insurance has it.

(9) The problem with education is the teachers.

(10) The “free market” satisfies every human need.

(11) There is no discrimination in America anymore.

(12) The distribution of wealth and income are irrelevant.
 
I don’t remember Jon Huntsman disputing any of these myths. And these are the ones that do the real damage. Show me a candidate who is willing to take on these myths, and I’ll pay more attention.

And that's why Blue America has paid so much attention to Alan Grayson. His career has taken on all these myths-- and taken them on powerfully and successfully. Perhaps it's why he won both the Blue America candidates contest last month and the DFA Grassroots Allstars run-off this week. And it's why I'd like to ask you, once again, to help put Alan back into the U.S. Congress, something you can do, here at the Blue America page.

In the second chapter of his book, "It's Not Your Fault There Aren't Enough Good Jobs," it's as though Holland was anticipating Grayson's critique of the Republican policy agenda-- which, of course, is simply the policy agenda of the plutocrats, oligarchs and ruling elites.

It’s difficult to argue that a wealthy country such as the United States should have a threadbare social safety net-- arguably the weakest of any advanced economy-- simply because the well-heeled want to keep their tax bills low. So conservatives instead claim that when government steps in to make working people’s lives a bit easier, it only ends up hurting them by nurturing a “culture of dependency." They say food stamps, minimum wages, and programs for the poor sap one’s will to go out there, work hard, and make something of oneself. It’s the proverbial “nanny state,” and for the Right, avoiding its harms generally trumps other concerns, often including common sense.

In 2010, with millions out of work, Senator Jim Bunning (R-KY) blocked a bipartisan bill to extend unemployment benefits. The Washington Post reported that in defense of his colleague, Senator Jon Kyl (R-AZ) “told the Senate he questioned why anyone would see unemployment benefits as helpful to the economy, or to the job market.”

Kyle remarked, “If anything, continuing to pay people unemployment compensation is a disincentive for them to seek new work.” It’s actually a tenable argument in countries that offer decent unemployment benefits. But in the United States, a married worker with kids will get half of his or her wages replaced on unemployment, one of the lowest rates in the developed world. Nobody’s living the high life.

But that doesn’t trump right-wing columnist Jonah Goldberg in providing the most jaw-dropping example of letting ideology trump human empathy. In the wake of the earthquake that decimated Haiti, leaving 300,000 of that poor country’s inhabitants dead and millions more displaced, Goldberg argued that what Haiti really needed was not immediate assistance and lots of it, but some “tough love.” Jonah blamed the foreign aid that Haitians had received before the quake for creating “a poverty culture” and concluded, “It’s hardly news that poverty makes people vulnerable to the full arsenal of Mother Nature’s fury.”

In 2007, when Congress passed a bill that would have expanded a highly popular program that offers health insurance to poor kids-- with an overwhelming bipartisan majority-- then president George W. Bush vetoed the measure. He admitted that he had no problem at all with the program itself but argued on purely ideological grounds that “the policies of the government ought to be to help people find private insurance, not federal coverage. And that’s where the philosophical divide comes in.”

Now, the idea that “dependency” is what makes people poor might make some sense if we were all born with the same opportunities to get ahead. Tragically, however, that American dream is dead, or, at the very least, it lies broken and bleeding on the side of the road. In today’s economy, the single greatest predictor of how much an American child will earn in the future is how much his or her parents take home. Working Americans have essentially bought into a unique social contract: they forgo much of the economic security that citizens of other wealthy countries take for granted in exchange for a more “dynamic,” meritorious economy that supposedly offers them plenty of opportunities to succeed. Of course, this is never explicitly stated, and most of us don’t know about the deal, but it’s
reinforced all the time in our economic discourse.

The belief that our chances of moving up the economic ladder are limited only by our innate abilities and our appetite for hard work is almost universal in the United States. Around 3 percent of Americans are actually millionaires (or were before the crash of 2008), but in 2003, almost one in three Americans told Gallup that they expected to be millionaires at some point in their lives. A 2006 poll found that more than half of those surveyed believed “Almost anyone can get rich if they put their mind to it.”

Contrary to that popular notion, the United States is not a meritocracy, and Americans are getting the worst of both worlds-- not only is a significant portion of the middle class hanging on by the narrowest of threads, not only do fewer working people have secure retirements to look forward to, not only are nearly one in seven Americans uninsured, but working people also enjoy fewer opportunities to pull themselves up by their bootstraps than do the citizens of other advanced countries.

Baby Doc Duvalier Didn't Show Up At The Wedding... I Don't Think

Baby Doc & Papa Doc-- there may be a chicken or pig left to steal

You may have guessed that I don't spend a lot of time with rightists; not my cup of tea-- and I have so little self-control that I just fight with them. But... my friend Jean-Michel was different from the rest. My old boss has homes around the world, always fabulous places sitting in exactly the best place in every city. That's what happens when you're the guy who signs Madonna. Problem with all these fabulous homes is that he's a pig beyond belief. Every home was uninhabitable. It isn't only because he doesn't like having strangers coming in to clean, it's because strangers refuse to! He's an "art" collector-- one of the world's most notorious... and "art" is very much stretched to cover a lot of ground even beyond one of the world's most complete homoerotic collections and so much art deco furniture that he could turn his mansions into warehouses-- which, of course, he has. But he's not the rightist I'm talking about.

When I worked for him I used to have to travel to our affiliated companies around the world. He suggested I could save a lot of money on my expenses if I stayed at his places instead of hotels. But his places turned out to be gross. I tried hiring someone to clean one of his 3 London flats but I wound up having to hire a whole crew-- for three solid days. However, a block and a half from l'Étoile, oui, oui, the Arc de Triomphe he had a place that needed no cleaning. That's because Jean-Michel lived there full time. We became good friends and just avoided talking about politics, not always easy since he had been a paratrooper for Kataeb, the Lebanese Phalangist Party (oui, oui, fascists-- the real thing)-- led by the Maronite Christian Amin Gemayel and funded by Israel-- in the 1980s.

He was my boss' most handsome and cultivated boyfriend but he eventually got married (to a woman) and invited me to the wedding. It was spectacular. The lovely bride's papa had been the Minister of Finance in Baby Doc Duvalier's Haitian kleptocracy until they fled the country in 1986-- with the national treasury. Mon. Minister bought a lush park with gently rolling green hills just outside of Paris with a château that you'd expect to see Marie Antoinette's ghost running around looking for her head. The park was big enough to build his daughter and Jean-Michel a classic-looking château of their own a couple kilometers away. What a nice place for a wedding.

The most fundamental problems of the Haitian economy, however, were economic mismanagement and corruption. More avaricious than his father, Jean-Claude Duvalier overstepped even the traditionally accepted boundaries of Haitian corruption. Duvalierists under Jean-Claude engaged in, among other activities, drug trafficking, pilferage of development and food aid, illegal resale and export of subsidized oil, fraudulent lotteries, export of cadavers and blood plasma, manipulation of government contracts, tampering with pension funds, and skimming of budgeted funds. As a result, the president for life and his wife lived luxuriously, in stark contrast to the absolute poverty of most Haitians. Allegations of official corruption surfaced when Duvalier appointed a former World Bank official, Marc Bazin, to the post of finance minister in 1982. Bazin sought to investigate corruption and to reform fiscal accounting practices in connection with a 1981 International Monetary Fund (IMF) economic stabilization agreement. More zealous than Duvalier had anticipated, Bazin documented case after case of corruption, determined that at least 36 percent of government revenue was embezzled, and declared the country the "most mismanaged in the region." Although quickly replaced, Bazin gave credence to foreign complaints of corruption, such as that contained in a 1982 report by the Canadian government that deemed Duvalier's Haiti a kleptocracy.

Jean-Michel's more amenable father-in-law followed a quickly dispatched Bazin. I can't say I've kept up with any of them-- except my old boss, and it is through him I found out that Jean-Michel split up with Baby Doc's Finance Minister fille. Jean-Michel is no doubt still in France, in all likelihood supporting the rise of Marine Le Pen. But what about Jean-Michel's ex-wife (and child)? As you no doubt know by now, Baby Doc's back in Haiti, broke... but did he bring the pillager of the national treasury (and his family)? And will there be trials? A wikileaks document from 5 years ago indicates that the U.S. was worried Baby Doc might try to come back. Duvalier says he's back to help, not for politics, but no one believes that.

Coming against the backdrop of an earthquake that killed 250,000 and reduced sections of the capital, Port-au-Prince, to dust, paralysis in the efforts to rebuild, a fatal cholera epidemic, a presidential election crisis and crippling social conditions, the playboy president's re-emergence put one more bizarre twist in Haiti's chaotic landscape.

However, after stepping off an Air France flight from Paris and kissing the ground, the 59-year-old insisted that his intentions were pure. "I am not here for politics," he claimed. "I am here for the reconstruction of Haiti."

It had been an "emotional return," said his second wife, Veronique Roy, who was asked at the airport why they had come. "Why not?" she replied, claiming that they planned to stay for only three days.

...Duvalier presided over a dark chapter in Haiti's history, becoming the world's youngest head of state in 1971 when he assumed the title of "president for life" at the age of 19, following the death of his father, Francis "Papa Doc" Duvalier, who had ruled since 1957.

Their successive dictatorships brought decades of savagery, corruption and the wholesale theft of state funds while the population cowered in fear, poverty and starvation.

Both executed a campaign of bloody oppression, torturing and killing political opponents in their tens of thousands and handing free rein to a bloodthirsty militia known as the Tonton Macoute-- Creole for "bogeyman"-- to silence detractors. Trade unionism and independent media were crushed. Those who spoke out or agitated for democracy disappeared, sometimes assassinated in broad daylight, their corpses often strung from trees as a warning.

Up to 30,000 people were murdered and hundreds of thousands more driven into exile.

"It is the destiny of the people of Haiti to suffer," Baby Doc once declared, as his people scratched for survival.

By the time a series of popular uprisings finally destabilised his dictatorship in 1986, the international community was ready to help show him the door.

President Ronald Reagan's administration provided a US air force jet to spirit him out of the country under cover of darkness and France, Haiti's former colonial ruler, granted him and his 20-strong entourage asylum-- an arrangement that it intended to be temporary, until realising that no other country would take him off its hands thereafter.

UPDATE: Baby Doc In Custody-- Where All Tyrants And Sociopaths Should Be

Jean-Claude Duvalier has been charged with corruption. How could it be otherwise? Well, the Tunisian president and his family got away with $20 billion (+ a last minute ton and a half of gold). And just like morons in our country protest that Congress passed a health care bill, idiots in Haiti are protesting that Duvalier may have to face the consequences of his 15 year kleptocracy, not to mention an abysmal record of human rights abuses.

Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, among others, have urged the authorities to prosecute the former dictator for jailing, torturing and murdering thousands of people during his time in power. His longtime companion, Veronique Roy, when asked whether Duvalier was being arrested, simply laughed and said nothing.

The scene evoked memories of 7 February 1986 when crowds danced in the streets after widespread revolts and international pressure led to his departure.

His Swiss-banked fortune long used up in divorce and tax disputes, Duvalier returned to Haiti without warning on Sunday on a flight from Paris, saying he wanted to help. "I'm not here for politics. I'm here for the reconstruction of Haiti."

A spokesman for the UN high commissioner for human rights said it should be easier to prosecute Duvalier in Haiti because it was where atrocities took place but that the judicial system was fragile.

It remained unclear why he returned and what impact it would have on the year-long post-quake crisis which has left a leadership vacuum and a country in ferment, with near daily street demonstrations by rival factions.