The Impeachment Thing

[Note: Buddhism, in some cases especially Zen, doesn't preclude one's interest and involvement in the material world. It does, however, affect one's sense of the importance of this or that aspect of it. 🕉]

The current impeachment inquiry is the third in my lifetime. There have only been four attempts at impeachment of a president in the history of  the United States. None have been successful [Nixon resigned before the impeachment resolution went to the floor of the house]. The betting is that this one won't be, either, but of course you never know.

The charges likely to be included in any House resolution to impeach Trump are being laid out day-by-day, pretty much as follows:

1. Abuse of power -- impeachable, not criminal
2. Bribery -- of Zelensky/Ukraine; impeachable, criminal
3. Intimidation of witnesses -- impeachable, may be criminal
4. Suborning perjury -- impeachable, criminal
5. Defying Congressional subpoenas -- impeachable, may be criminal
6. Probably violations of emoluments clauses -- this might be a throwaway
7. Misprision of felony -- impeachable, criminal

And so on. The charge-list could get quite long indeed. But there is no likelihood, whatever Trump does, that a Republican-controlled Senate would vote to convict and remove him from office. At least not now. 

It's possible that not even a Democratic controlled Senate would do so.

Here's the problem as I see it:

Trump has been allowed to get away with just about anything he wants to do during his tenure in office -- just like he's largely been allowed to do whatever he wants throughout his life. He's a terrible person and a rotten president, but.... he gets away with it, just like he always has.

As president, he's changing the presidency and the nature of the federal government. He's making the presidency over into a highly authoritarian position (it's always had such elements) in command of not just the government, but of the nation as a whole. In other words, the point is to make the president a ruler rather than a servant of the people. Opposition to be crushed rather than co-opted or negotiated with. 

In this remodeling of the presidency by Trump, the president is to have full and personal control of the federal government independent of any advisors, systems, precedent, Congress, or the courts. S/he will personally direct and control every aspect of the federal government (something no individual human being can do, but that's beside the point). The president becomes a de-facto emperor. Something that again is inherent in the position, but which until recently has been suppressed in action.

These are among many aspects of systemic changes we're seeing in real time under Trump's presidency, and they will become precedent for future presidents. Trump may be a bad emperor -- oh yes -- but what he's being allowed to do can lead (in time, if we're very, very good) to a Good Emperor. But Emperor it will be, good, bad or indifferent.

I came to this conclusion while watching part of the Yovanovich testimony yesterday. What it boiled down to was a question of whether the president has the power and authority to emplace anyone he wants in an ambassadorship (yes), and whether it is appropriate for a president to engage in the smearing of an ambassador in the process of having her removed (could be.)

In this case, the ambassador is the avatar of any federal officer, the smear is the symbolic means of removal/replacement that could affect anyone in federal service. We've seen examples in the past (Shirley Sherrod comes to mind, but there have been many others, especially since the 2000 election.)

But now it seems the smear-and-removal will be codified. 

These are big changes to what the presidency is, not so much what it could be, and I predict they will be permanent. Trump can go or stay, it really doesn't matter. The governing system is what is being overhauled-- mostly without the knowledge or consent of the governed -- and there will be no going back. Impeachment may just fade entirely from the conception of checks and balances. After all, the consistent argument during the Trump reign is that ONLY impeachment can be used to control the actions of the president, and if impeachment fails to remove him (likely), there's no remedy under the constitution or law. That's it, he gets away with it.

Ambassador Yovanovich was quite eloquent in defending norm, process, propriety, etc., but I don't see a future in which those things are considered necessities for governing. Indeed, just the opposite may become normalized. The reasons are simple enough. We're entering into a rough transition period in which the consequences of climate change and decades of neoliberalism become one continuous crisis. There's really no escape at this point. Past norms and processes will have to be jettisoned in order to deal with the inevitable crises, or the permanent crisis. No way around it. Trump is crude and awful, but he's doing what the ruling class believes is necessary to cope with the transition and beyond. That's why he's been protected and allowed to get away with so much harm.

Better it should happen now. So that we can become accustomed to it. It's only going to get worse for most of us.

Trump won't be in the Big Chair forever. And whoever comes after him -- whenever that happens -- will almost immediately be considered a "savior".  Because he or she won't be as terrible a person nor as incompetent and chaotic a ruler. 

But Ruler/Emperor the follow-on president will be. And most of the hoo-hah during the Trump years will seem silly in retrospect. We have serious business to attend to.

So, that's my theory of what's really going on... 

🕉

The California Fires

Some truly outrageous wild fires have been burning through northern California continuing a pattern established over the last several years of drought and then a super-abundance of rain.

We didn't live in the affected areas, but we are certainly familiar with them. Santa Rosa, the Napa Valley, burned areas in Yuba Country (Loma Rica), Mendocino, Nevada County, Calaveras. Oh yes, all of them hold emotional connections either through people we knew or the many places we became familiar with.

They say 23 are dead from the fires, hundreds missing, thousands of homes and other structures destroyed so far, and there is no end in sight. For many, it's an Apocalyptic situation, one that has become all too familiar in this era of climate change.

To be caught up in it is almost impossible to imagine, though we haven't been spared firestorms in our area of Central New Mexico. The backside of the Manzanos burned spectacularly a couple of years ago, dozens of homes burned and many people left refugees. The fire scar is still slashed across the mountains.

When I was a kid, as I've mentioned, I would sit on my back fence and watch the slopes of the San Gabriel Mountains north east of Los Angelesburn almost every year, and one year, the fires came up the east side of the hills by our home, crested the hilltop, and were starting down our  side. Panic ensued, but the fire department arrived just in time to stop the progress of the fires a few hundred yards from the border of the housing development. I did a Google street view tour of the area not too long ago and saw those hills were now covered with houses. I thought, "Uh-oh" but people there didn't and don't much care about the intrinsic hazards of earthquake and fire I think. It just goes with the territory.

I remember my mother was horribly fearful of fire, and I never quite understood it until she told me that when she was just a little girl, three maybe four years old, she witnessed the family home in Indianapolis burn to the ground. She couldn't shake the memory and she was terrified of fire ever afterwards.

I don't have quite that fear of fire, but when she told me what had happened when she was a child, I understood her fear.

These visions of fires in California are disturbing, there's no doubt. Ms Ché is somewhat less disturbed -- more for the animals than the people, whom she refers to as "rich white people" -- which not all of those affected are by any means. But enough of them are that her sympathies can sometimes lie elsewhere.

Is this something like the Trump regime's disinterest in Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands? I don't know. But for the most part, the "rich white people" affected by the fires in California can and no doubt will  take care of themselves while the poor black and brown folks in Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands can't very well, can they?

They were mostly impoverished by colonialism to begin with and have few resources to fall back on. How many of us are actually in the same leaking boat?

I mentioned to someone the other day that we are one, maybe two, catastrophes away from the Apocalypse and there isn't a lot we can do about it.

I'm not into Doom Blogging, but..

It's always darkest before the dawn. Or something.

The Puerto Rico Thing: Trump's Katrina

History doesn't repeat itself, but it often rhymes. -- attributed to Mark Twain

 We'll have to wait till the veil lifts to learn what has transpired in Puerto Rico and the Caribbean islands devastated by the two hurricanes that have passed through so far this year, but a week in to the aftermath it doesn't look good.

Much talk these days that Puerto Rico's lack of relief is the rhyming equivalent of Bush's Katrina.

Yet from the White House -- once they realized there was a problem down there -- we've heard little but happy talk and boasting.

Outside of San Juan, and in parts of San Juan itself, there's been little or in many cases no relief at all. People have no potable water, no food, no electricity, no functioning plumbing, they may have no roofs over their heads, and they have little or no communications with the outside world. They're on their own to manage as best they can -- or to die.

"Help is on the way." But.... It's already been too long, and "help" is either stalled at the San Juan docks, or has only now been deployed to the islands, and won't reach the people for another week or more. Likely more.

The military has apparently taken control of relief efforts, and I saw a report yesterday that an aircraft carrier the USSKearsarge has been sitting off shore since the day after the storm and has been ferrying supplies by helicopter ever since. If true, good. I guess.

Well, what happens to those supplies is something of a mystery, no? Are they pre-positioning for the coming relief-occupation? That's my guess.

Supposedly, 7000 troops have been or will be deployed, along with some 3000 contractors. Their objective, however, remains murky.

Trump has essentially blamed Puerto Rico for its plight, a belief echoed by FEMA, DHS, and other spox, who claim that Puerto Rico didn't "prepare" and there is little local coordination of relief efforts.

The issue is complicated by the fierce austerity regime imposed on the island by the Wall Street vultures who insist on being paid in blood and flesh or money for Puerto Rico's $72 billion debt. Cf: Greece.

Well before the latest hurricanes, the island's infrastructure, never robust, was allowed to deteriorate to the point where much of it simply collapsed. Because there was so little public or private sector money available -- thanks to the extractions of the vultures -- little or nothing could be done to prepare the island for twin hurricanes, and very little or nothing could be prepositioned for relief purposes once the hurricanes passed.

To blame the Puerto Ricans for this situation is outrageous, but that's how the game is played. Almost exactly the same playbook was used in New Orleans after Katrina. It was their fault entirely.

So here we go again, and the regime is whining and complaining that "the media" is unfairly fostering the notion that nothing is being done fast enough to prevent a humanitarian crisis on Puerto Rico and other Caribbean islands.

"The media" got over its obsession with Trump's NFL tweetstorm over the weekend and began focusing on Puerto Rico only to find a horrible situation on the ground and a total lack of relief for the residents on the interior and very little relief in San Juan. The fact that they reported on this situation was furiously denounced by the White House as undermining "morale" on the island. What nonsense, but there you are. The fact that Puerto Ricans are suffering and are not receiving aid while containers pile up in the port is not to be reported, apparently, as it is not flattering to the regime. Only "good news" is to be reported.

"The media" is reluctant to play along. But we'll see.

They have a way of failing at crucial moments.

Meanwhile the catastrophe worsens.

Katrina was seen as an opportunity by the Disaster Capitalists, and we can assume the same for Puerto Rico and the other devastated islands. Until profits are assured to the capitalist vultures, relief will be slow walked, the point being to get rid of undesirable and surplus brown and black people on the islands, much as poor refugees from Katrina were left to die, and the survivors were hustled out of the region.

New Orleans' population was cut by something like a third.

The disaster capitalists made out like the bandits they are, and most of the poor and black residents have been dispossessed, exiled, and otherwise "disappeared." Win-win, right?

So it goes, and so it is likely to go in Puerto Rico and the islands.

There will be the usual hand wringing objections, but nothing substantive will be done about it.

"It's for the best..."