Category: Brian Browne

By Brian Browne

 

For Black Africa and its American descendants, the past year has been a telling one. For a moment, a spark of hope appeared. A gossamer hope that we might actively press for the economic justice and freedom that have been our want for centuries. The global eruption after the police murder of George Floyd was that moment. But the moment faded. Even before fading, it was taken over by those who saw our interests as inferior and contrary to theirs. The Floyd episode shows the difficulty of generating a lasting political movement based on angry emotion rather than studied commitment. We got mad but did not grow smart.

Our collective intellect has grown dim. We cotton to simplistic notions and fail to cultivate strong principles and ideals to galvanize ourselves. We accept anything and question nothing except our own merits. We are uncommitted to reform to improve the station of Black Africa and Africans born in the Americas. Confused and lacking strong convictions, we are made happy by dancing with manacles and shackles about us, so long as the irons are shiny and gold-plated. There seems to be no end to the dancing we will do in this instance. We will dance in quicksand if so instructed. Those, who in the past exchanged their very lives for our liberation, must now be contemplating where they may request a refund.

Beyond the fleeting spark provided by the involuntary martyrdom of George Floyd, the past year was relatively bleak. The black race has been fustigated by COVID and its economic consequences. If you want to see the worth the world places on us look no further than the disparities revealed by COVID.

In America, blacks have been more adversely affected by COVID more than the general population. Because of poor living conditions, blacks are more likely to get COVID and more likely to die of it. Yet, when it comes to distributing medical treatment that might save lives and avert severe illness, black people suddenly become invisible and inaccessible. State governments willfully plant vaccination sites far from black communities. In instances where black communities are actually remembered, vaccines have repeatedly been diverted to whiter, wealthier neighborhoods. To this, all we do is shrug our shoulders as our leaders feign indignation but fall to demand accountability.

When something is good or lifesaving, a black person will be the last to know and last to receive of it. If something is bad or toxic, it will be cheaply stored in our community or cheaply sold in our community stores. Poor living conditions are just a euphemism for ripe dying conditions.

Black Africa has fared no better. African nations that managed to gather money to buy vaccines were initially denied. So much for your faith in the colorblindness of the free market! Rich nations hoarded vaccines from poor nations. This teaches an important lesson. The more important the item, the more race and wealth matter in its distribution. Trading patterns and volumes tend to differentiate valued human beings or nations from expendable ones. Your need is inconsequential; your money immaterial. Because they refuse to sell you an entry ticket, you remain on the outside looking in. While they dine at the well-appointed table, you provide the night’s entertainment by dancing in quicksand.

The disparity and unfairness in vaccine distribution was purposeful; it perfectly tracks the imbalance of the global political economy. The uneven vaccine distribution is but a dramatic revelation of the inner workings of the global economy.

Just think of the vaccine as a precious economic good. You have been endlessly told to remove barriers to the quick trade in goods the Western world desires to buy or sell. However, when you want to buy something of theirs that may be in short supply, they erect a barrier against you and even your money. African nations were first told “no” when they sought to bargain for the vaccine. When push comes to shove, a black man with a bit of money is but an ex-slave with a wad of useless paper in hand. Likewise, a former colony, which means most of Black Africa, is still seen as an ex-slave to its colonial master. Money and economics are never colorblind.

Global economic dynamics work so clearly against you in a crunch because they were already strongly pitted against you in the ordinary pace of things. Thus, be careful in giving too much significance to such things as Kamala Harris being elected Vice President in the U.S. or Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala being selected as WTO Director General, the first black women to hold these offices. Yes, celebrate them but do so in a bittersweet not mindless fashion.

Okonjo-Iweala is an accomplished figure, a person of high intellect. She will do a fine job but that fine job will likely mean little material gain for Black Africa and Nigeria. The superstructure of global trade is tilted against Africa. The dilemma for Okonjo-Iweala is that promoting the extant trade regime will do her nation and continent more harm than good. However, if she attempts the drastic reforms needed to help Africa, she will be summarily dismissed. Well-established organizational policy and structure matter more than individual personnel selections.  It is not enough to tinker marginally with the terms of trade. A major overhaul is needed if African nations are to evolve from being mere natural resource depots into becoming productive factories of manufactured goods for global commerce.

Sadly, coming into effect this year, the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) will do less than advertised. It is not a groundbreaker. It is but an incremental step with an auspicious name. As exemplified by the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and their offspring, the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), it has become a popular, if injurious, recreation in orthodox developmental circles to invert causal relationships. You have been previously told that established nations spend this or that percentage of their income on certain social services. Thus, if Africa spends similar percentages of its income on similar functions, its development will repeat that of rich nations. This is errant humanitarian mind fog. These nations did not get wealthy because they spent a certain sum on enumerated social services. The greater truth is that they became able to spend on these social services because they became wealthy. The lone exception to this observation is education. If a nation lashes itself to the SDGs while opening its economy to the vagaries of the free market, it likely will remain poor and struggling. Eventually, it will not earn or keep enough money due to debt servicing to sustain the purportedly sustainable development model. These nations would fare better if they seek to create prosperity by building infrastructure and industry and erecting trade barriers to anything standing in the way of these national job and wealth creating imperatives.

Similarly, with the continental trade agreement. Trade generally does not follow treaty. Treaty follows trade. While treaties can enhance trade, a treaty can rarely create trade de novo. Thus, the belief is misplaced that the pact will dramatically enhance intra-continental trade. Poor nations geared to sending and selling raw material to their former colonial metropoles will find that signing a treaty among themselves will not do much to break longstanding, unfair trade patterns. With the signing of the agreement, what goods do these nations have to trade with each other in any meaningful quantities?  As of now, very little.

Better would have been an economic concert of African nations geared toward industrialization. Here, the first step would be for nations to fashion their own workable national industrial policies and plans. The second step would be for nations to gather to amend their individual plans to make them as complementary as possible so that nations trade different manufactured goods and raw materials with each other. While the current pact is better than nothing, it also may contain hidden danger. Over time, foreign investors may establish factories in one nation to exploit the lack of barriers to continental trade. If such investors repatriate their profits to their home countries, this will drain funds from Africa while making truly indigenous industrialization more infeasible. This would be nothing but old colonialism in new bottles.

Given the all of above, the black race partakes of a severe form of economic masochism. We have entered the third decade of the 21st century, yet we are no better off than when we exited the 20th century. Most of our economists plow no new ground. Fearing ostracism by the Western mainstream, they meekly parrot the dangerous themes of free market liberalism. Our leaders, impressively long on ambition but short on economic expertise, follow this destructive path simply because it is the one of least resistance; moreover, and they can take solace in not knowing any better.  However, there is better. If we are to copy the successful economic powers, it would be better that we copy how they actually grew instead of following the myths they created to obscure fact and reality. We would find that they grew because government seized the lead in economic policy from investment in infrastructure, formulation of national industrial policy protecting key sectors from outside competition, and capital controls to regulate the outflow of hard currency. If we utilize these tools, we may have a chance. If we continue reciting economic nursery rhymes, we will continue to be ignorant and that ignorance will relegate us to an omnipresent, constant poverty.

Politically, we have been myopic. We still refuse to see the larger struggle before us. We act as if the big victory has been won because formal slavery and colonialism were ended. We mistake the beginning of the end with the end of the beginning. We have far to go as we remained subject to the great injustices known to humanity. Our political leaders are content with things as they are. On the continent, none champions the African cause because few even champion their national cause. Most are parochial and content to lord over rather than lead their people. Thus, most nations grow less responsive to citizen needs, more authoritarian but also more fragile. As timid internationally as they are intimidating domestically, none speaks of racism or colonialism’s modern edition.

Black American political leaders are cut of the same cloth. They are transactional and devoid of grand strategy or high purpose. They mention racism only because it anneals their political support come election time. However, they are quick to trade their complaints about racism for a few crumbs and a place in the cozy room if not actually a seat at the elegant table.  Some try to disguise their servitude to the mainstream by raising futile cries for reparations for descendants of enslaved blacks. This is a hoax of the magnitude of Trump claiming electoral victory. It is cynical political trick. Publicly espousing a radical but practically unobtainable policy helps a politician obscure the serial compromises he makes in order to stay on the good side of the powers that be.

While reparations are justified, we are not going to get them with the nation as it is. So called progressives cannot muster enough support to increase the minimum wage above the poverty level which would help both whites and blacks and only cost in the billions of dollars. How in the world will they be able to gather support for a massive reparations package carrying a price tag of several trillion dollars aimed solely at black people?

Instead of clamoring for what is presently unattainable, black American leaders would do better trying to strengthen the 1.9 trillion-dollar stimulus package currently on the table to ensure that a proportionate share flows to the black community. Additionally, they should begin to develop smaller, follow-on stimulus measures of several hundred billion dollars to ensure better employment, health care, housing and education for black and brown people once the Biden measure has run its course.

Both Black Africa and Black America suffer compound poverties. The most harmful is our intellectual one. We mimic, echo and parrot but rarely create. However, the hardships of this past year should cause us to reexamine our ways and means. We manage to define ourselves culturally. In the musical and visual arts, no one can tell us who we are or what we can do. However, when it comes to the fundamentals of economic life, we allow ourselves to be led from slum to swamp and back again.

If we are to achieve any degree of economic fairness and parity, we must master the workings of the global monetary system. We must learn how we can use the fiat currency system to our benefit. America has exploited this system to enable it to spend record amounts on military spending solidifying its position as the primary global power. China has used this system to fund the greatest economic transformation in history in the span of a few decades. We can at least use the system to end abject poverty amongst us. Are you not tired of dancing in quicksand?

 

08060340825 sms only

 

 

 

By Brian Browne

 

The Senate trial of former President Trump has will likely have ended by the time you read this. The trial of America will not have. It shall continue because the nation’s two major political parties have failed their calling. The Democrats are ineffective, lacking the drive to achieve what is important. The Republicans currently struggle with group insanity. This gives them the madman strength to undo what is important. Democrats manage to face the right direction only to bedevil their cause by walking backwards. Reveling in facing the wrong direction, Republicans dash thereto with all the velocity their contumacious limbs can muster.

In their different ways, both go the same direction. The Republicans just get there faster and with greater faith in their incorrectness than the Democrats have in their ineptitude. Sadly, the current American style of politics is for those long in ambition and baseness but short of vision and heart. If American democracy were a stock, the prudent investor would sell it.

Although his acquittal was a foregone conclusion, Democrats correctly impeached Trump. Before the election, Trump declared himself a “terrible loser.” He uttered this rare accuracy not as a factual assertion but as an implicit yet dark threat. He was warning the nation he would not accept electoral defeat. Worse, he was prepared to go to uncharted depths to flip the election result to his favor.

For months before the election, he trafficked the notion that the election was being fraudulently precooked against him. What he never explained was how the powerful personage of the Commander-in-Chief would be so keenly aware of such a massive fraud yet take not a single step beforehand to prevent it. Would not it have been easier to prevent the alleged fraud then to contest it after the fact? It makes no sense that this raging bull of a man would exercise such restraint when such a large crimson flag was placed closely before his eyes and right under his nose.

At his disposal, he had the power of the entire national justice and law enforcement apparatus. Yet, Trump could not even muster one strand of credible evidence of the alleged fraud.  Either he was a uniquely weak, effete leader who could not get this massive bureaucracy to halt the unprecedented fraud or he was propagating a demagogue’s fairy tale. Though the logic of his position was specious, his followers blinded themselves to this flaw because they cared not about logic or fact, for neither did their leader.

On Election Day and immediately afterwards, Trump demanded that votes be left uncounted. He made this improper demand because he knew the outcome would be against him. In a fair election, his was a lost cause. He had botched everything related to the COVID crisis. The economy was in free-fall. His bigoted remarks had alienated, if not infuriated, most black and brown people. Trump’s approval rating was the lowest of any sitting president since the advent of opinion polling. His loss was but the most plausible outcome, a solid bet. Had he won, talk of a perverse miracle would have been justified.

Yet, as the nation buckled under a public health crisis and economic downturn, Trump could think of nothing except overturning the election.  The method of overturn was inconsequential. If ever the ends justified the means, it would be in this instance for the disgraced, angry man. He continued to lie that he handily won what had been so obviously lost. He told his bigoted, hate-filled supporters that their votes had been stolen by minorities and others who were not true Americans. His rhetoric turned them febrile.

After the election result became known, he summoned officials from key states to the White House. There, he pressured them to thwart Biden’s victory by overturning the popular vote in their respective states. That failed. He instituted 60 lawsuits. They failed. Last December, he encouraged members of the Electoral College to break the law by casting their votes for him when state law demanded that they cast their votes for Biden just like the people of their states had during the November popular vote. Fortunately, none of the electors turned unfaithful to their constitutional duty.

Having lost in every forum from the election itself onward, his desperate focus fell on the January 6 Congressional certification of the Electoral College result. This would be the last step in America’s arcane process of certifying a presidential election. Until that day, all previous Congressional certifications of presidential elections had been largely ceremonial affairs.  Trump would bash that tradition. Advancing his malignant hope of overturning the election, Trump turned the nation’s Capitol into a battleground, labelled Congress his enemy, and slandered his Vice president as a traitor. He would turn the plain language of the constitution into authoritarian whimsy.  Then, he lathered a crowd of violent miscreants by exhorting them to take strong action to save the nation from those who sought to make it a more just, democratic one.

The events of January 6 are notorious and in no need of full restatement here. The Trump crowd needed little instigation. They were ready to tear things down. They felt cheated. Those unduly advantaged by injustice always feel shortchanged upon the advent of greater justice. Trump falsely told them Vice President Pence, as presiding officer in the Congressional certification, could unilaterally overturn the election. They believed him not because it was true but because they wanted to believe. It fit the outcome they wanted. Democracy be damned at that point.

To believe one man, especially the Vice President, can overturn the verdict of the over 81 million people who voted for Biden is a ludicrous notion. If this were true, then the party in power could easily and always perpetuate itself. Pence soberly decided that he better follow constitutional law than Trumpian whim.  Pence suddenly became the most marked of men, hunted by the mob Trump had directed toward the Capitol building. Had they laid their hands on him, Pence would not have survived the day. Tellingly, Trump refused to act once the building was under violent attack. He did not care if the Vice President and all of Congress were in harm’s way if that was the only way to retain his hold on office.

Five people died. The fragility of democracy was put on full display as a mob groped and grabbed to scuttle the certification of a free election.

Trump may not have planned the violent siege. However, it is clear he wanted the certification stopped by any available method. When the tumult began, Trump saw the insurrection as his last best hope. Thus, the Commander-in-Chief did nothing to protect Congress from the ugly ructions.

Given this background, the Democrats in the House were right to initiate proceedings against Trump. In the impeachment and subsequent Senate trial, you witnessed American democracy in action. You also witnessed it in decline. Both Democratic and Republicans leaders lack something vital although the something the Democrats lack differs significantly from the Republicans’ deficiency. Democrat’s seem well intentioned but absent keen political judgment and verve. Republicans mindlessly disregard logic but are single-minded in pursuing the schemes hatched of their collective madness.

Because of the Democrat’s lack of sharpness, they made two glaring, almost inexcusable errors in preparing their case. Perhaps their perspective was too clouded because they had been direct victims of the onslaught. Nevertheless, they fumbled what should have been a more damning exposition against Trump.

First, they placed their weaker argument as the cornerstone of their impeachment quest. Democrats emphasized that Trump incited the insurrection with his speech that day. Their secondary argument was that he was guilty of a dereliction of duty because he failed to act against the insurrection once it started. They placed the arguments in the wrong order.

Their primary argument, the incitement claim, was fraught with constitutional ambiguities, thus vulnerable to attack. Trump’s defenders could and did raise plausible free speech arguments, labelling the president’s January 6 address constitutionally protected speech. This allowed the Republicans to paint the Democrats as seeking to abridge the constitution instead of trying to protect it.

Had the Democrats emphasized presidential inaction in the face of the violent attack on the legislative branch while it was perfecting a peaceful transfer of power, Republicans would have lost their constitutional façade. There was absolutely no constitutional or factual defense for Trump’s willful inaction. The Democrats should have hammered this point repeatedly.  Trump was clearly guilty of standing by, hoping the mob would halt the Congressional certification. This dereliction means Trump abetted the assault after the fact. This, by itself, would have sufficed to convict Trump. Moreover, the Democrats could have publicly depicted him as joining that short list of notorious, reviled traitors who used their public office to try to undo America’s democratic republic. This would have been the greatest sting to both Trump and his partisan supporters.

Because of the Democrat’s mistake, Republicans eagerly rallied to Trump, painting him as the guardian of free speech. They would have been a tad less eager to defend the President’s breach of his duties as the nation’s chief law enforcement officer. Against this argument, there was no constitutional pretense behind which they could have hidden. The only thing they could have done was to hide in shame for trying to defend the indefensible.

Related to this, the House Democrats erred in drafting a single article of impeachment that held incitement as its anchor. They should have drafted two distinct articles. The lead should have been that Trump wantonly abandoned in his duties as Commander in Chief by not moving to stop the insurrection. The second, less important article would have been that Trump’s January 6 address incited the melee. Also, this arrangement of legal arguments would have been more profitable because the first article helps prove the second by revealing Trump’s craven state of mind.

The second grave flaw in the Democratic efforts was their failure to call witnesses. The trial would not have been terribly elongated by this vital inclusion. For example, both sides could have been limited to five witnesses with the examination of each witness lasting no more than 30 minutes. The Democrats could have called witnesses to testify and bring records that revealed Trump’s conduct while the insurrection was occurring. In failing to permit witnesses, Democrats open the door to Republican claims that too many questions remained unanswered.

The Senate trial lasted several days. The Democratic managers of the impeachment did much better than Trump’s lawyers. However, the Democrats failed to have the maximum impact because they initially emphasized the wrong legal argument at the expense of their better one. Only toward the end of the trial did they pivot to highlighting the dereliction argument. Then it was too late to reshape the case from a constitutional battle over the limits of free speech. Still, Democratic lawyers overall performed quite well once the actual trial began.

On the other hand, Trump’s lawyers were a bumptious lot. What they lacked in legal knowledge and finesse, they compensated with angry bluster and flared nostrils. Their tactics were akin to the murderer vociferously complaining that the police had handcuffed him too tightly. They feigned indignation much like the irate husband who, upon being found in a compromising position with his mistress, upbraids his wife for failing to knock before entering the marital chamber. However, for Trump and his faithful, these coarse antics are the stuff of white conservative heroism. Their undignified performance provided enough excuses for Republicans to stand behind Trump and disregard the preponderant evidence against him.

In the end, it was not surprising that Trump would be acquitted in the Senate trial. Conviction required 67 senators, meaning 17 Republicans would have to vote against Trump. Given his continued stronghold on the party, this was but a wish. Yet, in throwing themselves to Trump, Republicans likely make a cardinal mistake in electoral mathematics. Upon thinking of the 74 million people who voted for Trump, they cower. They forget he lost the election by over 7 million votes.

While Trump may call 74 million voters to his side, he also rallies 81 million and more against him. In politics, such a numerical difference is generally a losing proposition. Republicans see Trump as a prolific vote magnet but he is an even stronger voter repellent.

Republican senators know Trump incited the insurrection and, more importantly, was guilty of dereliction of his law enforcement duties. However, they dared not make Trump walk the plank. Many Congressional Republicans well know the unsavory details of the wrongs Trump did and the right he did not do that fateful day. In exchange for their silence during this impeachment process, he has signaled his support for their reelections in 2022 and beyond. To retain office, these Republicans have unhitched their consciences that they can tether themselves to Trump’s coattail. A Faustian bargain has been made. Having been consummated, it cannot be repudiated. At its core is a slick form of villainy that has managed to change its name to something that sounds respectable. This might seem like good short-term strategy; in the longer-term, it is not a winner’s formula.

These people have marred their legacy. By covering Trump’s transgressions, they stand for the strange proposition that an outgoing president, after being rejected by the people in an election, can exercise greater power without fear of impeachment than can a reelected president who must fear impeachment. They adhere to the belief that an outgoing president, at least a Republican one, can attack valid electoral results with impunity. They hold that democracy does not necessarily hold. As such, they have married a demagogue. They shall reap the reward of those who consort with such danger.

Only a handful of Republicans, such as Senator Romney and Representative Liz Cheney, exhibited the fortitude to go against the partisan grain and vote their conscience. I have never been a fan of either of them but their conduct speaks of political bravery; it is upon such bravery that democracy is maintained provided enough people have such courage.

While the Democrats lost the constitutional trial, they may have unwittingly won on the political front. Trump is injured but still politically strong. He remains eligible to run for future office. The Democrats wanted to disqualify Trump from future office. They may be better off in not getting what they wanted. Turning this criminal president into a political martyr would have been a political mistake. Better to leave Trump in the arena for he is as capable of eating his own people as he is attacking Democrats. Trump’s grating presence will continue to fracture the Republican Party. People of conscience and regard for the constitution will not vote for him. This will make it harder for Republicans to constitute the united front needed to regain the presidency. It will also make it difficult to win in heretofore politically competitive swing states and districts where the numbers of Democrats and Republicans are at near parity.

Trump may be the Democrats’ best fundraiser and campaign asset. Fearing what might happen if Trump regained the White House, decent people will vote against him. Even in these tumultuous times, there are more decent people than not in America. Upon this tender supposition rests the fate of the most powerful nation on earth.

 

08060340825 sms only

 

By Brian Browne

 

The January 20 inauguration of President was an American civics lesson. Sadly, an excellent civics lesson does not abrogate the uncivil melee that two weeks preceded it. By Inauguration Day, the detritus of the January 6 riot had been swept from sight. However, the mindset that gave vent to the wild insurrection will pollute the American air for some time to come, much like a rat that perishes inside the wall of one’s bedroom. The rodent may have departed but its stench continues to reek and, thus, define the room if not the entire house for the animal was a large, pestilent one. No matter the amenities the room may offer, the noxious odor taints it all.

Still, considering the limitations imposed by COVID and the anxiety generated by white supremacist threats, the Biden inauguration was an inspiring sight to behold. I am no great fan of pomp and circumstance. Nor am I enamored with Biden and his political antecedents. However, it would be ill-tempered of me to assign much fault to the occasion. Events of that day were stately without being funereal. Words spoken were serious without being somber. It was celebratory without being syrupy. The inauguration spoke around Trump without speaking directly about him. Trump was not there but then again, he was there, like the decaying rat in the wall.

Three former presidents (Clinton, Bush and Obama) attended and did their best to act like old chums egging on a new member of their exclusive club to do better than they had done before him. Republican and Democrat talked and walked together like people who had just gone through a harrowing experience together. While the shared experience may not turn strangers into friends, it fosters an inchoate comradery that may either blossom into a stronger bond or whither if left unattended. Time will tell if devotion to nation or to lesser interests will prevail once the happy aura of the inauguration fades.

For those Americans who still hold to common sense, the inauguration felt like a great lifting. As Trump boarded the presidential aircraft for the last time, up went a collective sigh of relief from most Americans. People felt like employees do upon learning that a mean, cruel boss had been fired from company and unceremoniously walked from the premises.

The exit of Trump from the White House will be known as the Great Relief. For many, watching the scenes of the inauguration was redolent of people emerging from their homes after a destructive hurricane had passed. No matter their prior disputes and disagreements, all were happy to see that each other had survived. Surveying the storm’s aftermath, they spoke more about the fact that things basically remained intact than about the damage that had been done.

No president in modern times has been so full of bombast and petulance yet so devoid of bravery and prudence as Trump. That he was able to attract such large, often rabid support speaks to an ill and evil that America, as its better self, wishes it had buried. But this affliction is as American as America itself. There is something terribly wrong in the socialization of many, but not all, white Americans. To be frank all cultures are imperfect and teach their members things that should not be taught. Black American culture surely has its afflictions and contradictions yet it does not teach its members to hate and seek to oppress other races in their entirety.

The culturalization of many white Americans often involves a mixture of unfounded racial superiority with a fondness for wholesale repression of those they consider beneath them. The fact that many whites consider everyone else beneath them means their socialization is too often prone to fascist intolerance and irrational levels of bigotry built on white nationalism, two traits at odds with the stated tenets of American democracy which speak of human equality and universal freedom. These whites reconcile the irreconcilable by holding to the position that America should return to a herrenvolk democracy. Meaning it is a democracy for white men and all others should be happy with whatever sliver of democracy the white population deigns to give them.

This is crux of the Trump presidency and the January 6 Capitol riot. In the final analysis, the dissection of the Trump presidency is to peer into the anatomy of a belief system founded on the love of hate and elevation of ignorance as a virtue superior to the vice of wisdom. The world of Trump and his supporters is an unregenerate, unapologetic one where pride and honor go to those who can hate the most and spew bigoted screed the farthest.

These people are set in a world governed by dualities. There is white and black and never the twain shall meet. Evil and Good. Man and Woman. Master and Slave. American and foreigner. But today’s America is multidimensional. Not only is there white and black. There are brown, red, yellow and a growing population that mixes all the above. Much was stated of Kamala Harris being the first female, black, and Asian Vice President. Less discussed but equally historic, hers is the first racially mixed marriage to occupy one of the nation’s top positions. I am no fan of Harris for I think she lacks the requisite progressive scruples to accomplish what is needed at this hour, yet I still acknowledge that her ascendance marks a spot in America history that should have been marked long before. In any event, she promises to outperform her predecessor and this is cause for some form of relief.

Joe Biden’s cabinet and staff also reflect America’s diverse demographics. For the first time, a black man occupies the office of Defense Secretary which is the most powerful cabinet position given the size of the American military, its ominous budget and global mandate. Also, he has hired men who are married to husbands and women married to wives as well as men who used to be women and women who were once men. Here, conservative religionists should stop reading for what I next write will be upsetting. You will say all this proves that Biden is a child of Satan and does not believe in God.

Now, what you say about Biden may be true. No one can tell the heart of another; many people claim God but know Him not. However, your evidence against Biden falls if the evidence is his tolerance of gays, lesbians and others. America is a constitutional democracy that professes equality of all people. For this to have any meaning it must actually mean “all people” no matter who or what they are. Everyone is entitled to the fullness of citizenship. Thus, none should be subjected to discrimination in the arena of public life.

If you do not what to invite a lesbian or queer person to your birthday party, that is your prerogative.

But none should be denied gainful employment equal to their merit or deprived the right to serve their nation. If you discriminate against such people and believe they should be denied such rights, then you must be consistent in application of your religious injunctions. Neither the adulterer, the liar, those who have dishonored mother or father, those of froward tongue nor the businessman who engages in unethical schemes (i.e., uses dishonest weights and scales) to finagle a profit should be eligible for positions in government.

If you apply such standards fairly, then the corridors of government in America and other nations would be mostly vacant. If you do not apply these standards fairly, then you are a hypocrite whose subjective bias is such an offense that it precludes you from rightfully committing on another human being’s fitness. In a constitutional democracy as America defines itself, all are to be treated with fairness and latitude. None should be denied their access to prosperity and vocation. Judgment as to the moral correctness of any life is better left to the Almighty who knows and loves so much more than our flawed souls can. Joe Biden is often wrong; on this important matter, he is completely right.

The Americans who believe in the traditional duality and those who see a multidimensional nation face each other across the social battlefield. The former understands the war more so than the latter. While most people felt good seeing the mixture of colors and races that graced the inauguration, others bristled with a hatred as deep as the grandest of canyons.

America’s current poet laureate is the youngest in history. She is also a black woman of high intelligence and an astounding gift for verbal imagery and inspiration. As I watched her, my eyes watered. For her to have this moment, slaves escaped into the woods at night not knowing whether their trek, their expression of desperate courage, would carry them to freedom or visit upon them brutal death. For her, our people marched throughout the South asking for their humanity to be returned to them. For her, Martin Luther King, Black Panther leader Fred Hampton and others gave their lives. This young sister paid tribute to them all as well as to all that was best in America regardless of race. At that moment, she was America, a living, breathing Sister, not a lifeless Statue, of Liberty, reciting her poem with a slight hip-hop cadence. Generations of soul and striving burst forth in this slender, almost tiny, daughter of ours. All that we were and hope to be, she spoke of. To me, she was the highlight of a glowing day. Once again, a black woman rose to the occasion to affirm the best of America even though black women are among the most put-down of Americans.

While watching her with pride, a disconcerting thought walked my mind. There are roughly a million white Americans who would have gladly shot her where she stood if they had but the chance. And they would have lauded themselves as heroes for downing such a beautiful person who spoke a vision of America their hate-inebriated minds could never comprehend. Yes, the inauguration made most Americans feel better. However, all of the smiling brown and black faces at the event, angered both radical white supremacist groups as well as the neighborhood racist down the street. Of those 74 million Americans who voted for Trump, almost all of them rather the traditional duality of the past than the multidimensional diversity that is forming. Joining them are a like number who did not vote. Thus, well over 100 million Americans are at war with an inevitable future. Their fight is more futile than that of the slave-holding South in America’s Civil War. They too will lose it but, in the process, they will cause great damage.

America is attempting the unique. It is transforming from a bifurcated racial society to a freer, more racially diverse society while still maintaining its democratic form of government. In effect, it attempts a social and demographic revolution while holding to its democratic political traditions. In other words, America is attempting to protect the procedural forms of governance while changing the social substance of that governance. Political democracy is being used to make America more socially and culturally democratic. The irony is that those most loyal to the democratic political traditions are relative newcomers to it. They are also those leading the social revolution. Those opposed to the social revolution now want to undo the democratic traditions they claim as their exclusive heritage. Events since the election have revealed their love of democracy was only situational. They supported democracy as long as it functioned to help them control racial minorities. In the end, their objective was not democracy but white racial dominion.

Stepping into the presidency, Joe Biden also steps into the middle of this impending collision between the traditional social duality and the modern, multi-sided America. He believes he can be a bridge between the two sides. He, in fact, may be able to delay or deflect the confrontation for a time. In the long-run, one side or the other must be defeated to the point where it is reduced to the social periphery. Both cannot remain potent social forces yet simultaneously occupy the same house. But that is for later.

For now, relief is in order. Inauguration Day was a fine, inspiring moment, demonstrating that America withstood the Trumpian farce. Yet, if not too swayed by the glad festivities, one can still smell that rat.

 

• 08060340825 sms only

By Brian Browne

 

Democracy is always under assault, more often from within than from without. Even during moments of clear democratic triumph, its deracination remains in close proximity. If there is anything the Trump years have taught us, it is this saturnine reality.

In this vein, January 6 will be recorded as a rather odd, eventful day. The oddness of the day nevertheless is keenly symbolic for the month named after the mythic two-faced god who simultaneously peered in opposite directions, toward the future as well as the past. Early that day, the state of Georgia was effervescent with democratic celebration. This state, historically a fortress of bigotry, had just elected a black pastor and a Jewish reporter as its senators, replacing two right-wing, white reactionaries. In a note of poetic justice, the pastor shepherds the same church once pastored by Martin Luther King Jr.

To be honest, I thought the pastor would win his run-off election; but I gave Jon Ossoff, the other Democrat, less than half a chance to overcome the long-time incumbent and longer-time bigot, David Perdue. Ossoff gained the upset due mainly to two factors. First, voter registration and related efforts captained by politically astute black women resulted in a record turn-out for the Democratic candidates. President Trump’s heavy-handedness also abetted the Democratic mission. A few days before the senate run-offs, Trump made a singularly bumbling, probably criminal phone call to the Georgia Secretary of State. In the call, Trump played the role of a journeyman crime boss awkwardly putting the squeeze on a recalcitrant public official. Trump urged the Georgian official to forge election results so that Trump would be deemed to have won the state in the November presidential election though he actually lost it. The Georgian official, although a Trump voter, not only rebuffed the illegal request, he released a tape of the sordid phone call. To preserve his faith in the constitution, the Georgian had to part with Trump in a most public way.

News of the call would serve as a compelling fillip for blacks and other Democrats to vote in record numbers. Black Georgians recognized that Trump’s attempt to overturn the presidential results was his way of saying that their votes, their very participation in the election, was illegitimate. The clear implication of Trump ‘s complaint was that they were not American enough to have a voice in ending his presidency. Yet, for the second time in two months, they demonstrated they were both American enough and numerous enough to deny him and his fellow right-wing reactionaries. Democracy worked and greater political openness won in Georgia that day. The racist lament was that a Negro and a Jew would, for the first time, represent Georgia in the US senate. If you happened to pass by a segregated cemetery in Georgia where the racists of yesterday are interred, you would have heard the anguished rattling of old bones.

Despite the euphoria in Georgia, democracy’s victory is never a pure one. The early morning celebration in that state should have been more subdued than it was. The day was still young. Moreover, if the truth be told, democratic progress won by only the slimmest of margins. The two Republican incumbents were damaged goods. Both were more than incompetent. They were openly corrupt. The two Democratic candidates were clearly more worthy.  Yet the two races were decided solely by several thousand votes. The racist and inferior version of American democracy may have lost. But coming in a close second, it still showed great potency. That potency would come into raucous display later that day when the spotlight shifted to the nation’s capital.

In Washington, the two houses of Congress were to meet in what is usually a ceremonial certification of the Electoral College results. This would confirm that Joe Biden won the presidential election. However, Trump and many Congressional Republicans refuse to concede obvious defeat. Since Election Day, Trump and most Republicans broadcasted lies and demented claims of the election being “stolen” from “true Americans,” as if some alien force had invaded the nation. The meaning of his claim was as unmistakable as it was undemocratic. Those who voted against him were not only less American than he; they were, in fact, anti-American. Sadly, a sizeable minority of those who voted for him would adhere to this extraordinary claim simply because it appealed to their crudest bigotry.

Indeed, it was a sad commentary on the American electorate that roughly 74 million people voted for an empty tin can of a demagogue who does not even have the scruples attributable to a petty criminal or the lowly aardvark. In such a situation, a reasonable mind is left to ponder who is more demented, the leader or those who blindly follow the purblind, angry piper?

As Congress settled into their seats to do their work, Trump and his most rabid subalterns were addressing a crowd along the Mall, within walking distance of the Capitol building. Trump and the other speakers clearly sought to incite throng, exhorting them toward the Capitol. He clearly wanted them to disrupt the certification session. His deep vanity is always more dominant than his shallow intellect. Thus, he thought he could gain some durable advantage by using the dumb crowd to delay the certification. He pointed them toward the Capitol building. Like mad yet obedient dogs, they went.

They needed little encouragement. They had been dining on a surfeit of electoral lies and white nationalist screed for the past four years if not longer. They were more than eager to storm the Capitol. Most of them prayed for it. Many of them had prepared for it; they bore weapons ranging from firearms to steel pipes with which they would injure numerous police officers.

When I saw pictures of rowdy Trumpists lunging through the doors and windows of the Capitol, I automatically laughed the sardonic laugh black Americans know so well. It has been part of our repertoire of survival techniques for centuries. Had a group of a black people approached the Capitol with anything resembling ominous intent, they would not have gotten within one hundred yards of the august building before being repelled by overwhelming force if not brutal violence. Aggressive police would have beaten them down with nightsticks if not mowed them down with live ammunition. Theirs would have been a mass of broken bodies and numerous corpses strewn on the verdant Mall.

Yet, the Trump crowd was allowed to assault the Capitol with minimal resistance from law enforcement. The reason for this was obvious.

The mob was predominately working-class whites burdened by a sense of social drift and personal powerlessness in 21st century America. Thus, they seek a return to the 19th century when every white person felt better about themselves than they ought simply because they resided on the favored side of a cruel racial divide. No matter how lowly he was as a white man, he ranked above all dark-skinned folks. While this racial status did not confer financial prosperity, psychologically it was worth millions.

Now with civil rights, women’s rights, and gay rights, all seems to have gone wrong to many whites. They have lost the sense of social superiority; this has placed their self-identity under grave threat. Like the thief robbed of his ill-gotten possessions, these whites are indignant and fearful that what has been done to others will soon be done to them. This fear is unwarranted. Whites still control America; subjugation of white people is less likely than the seas drying or the sun suddenly turning cold blue. Yet, the irrational fear exists and it catalyzes white nationalist madness. These people have become unglued by American society’s hesitant, glacial progress toward of greater racial fairness. It is laughable that white people believe they are being disenfranchised simply because racist restrictions on black and minority voters are finally being lessened in a few states.

Because this crowd was white, they were not met with much force at all. They were allowed in the Capitol with disturbing ease. The police who would have beaten black intruders with the strong intent of inflicting bodily harm. In this instance, the police generally behaved toward the rioters as ushers would toward paying customers at a social gala. While the rioters came from the outside, the ease of their entry speaks of an inside job. Those who stormed the building were abetted by many inside the building. Thus, they were allowed to march in, cause mayhem, then waltz out as if they attendants at a royal ball.

Compare this to the way the police brutalized Black Lives Matter protesters last summer though the BLMers never came close to such an outrageous assault against public institutions. All BLM sought was for America to honor its creed of equality. Yet, for many whites, blacks asking America to live up to its beliefs is the greatest threat of all. (The top three leaders of the Capitol Hill police were middle-aged white men. Upon surveying the Trump crowd, they figuratively saw themselves in that sea of mostly white faces. Thus, they saw no threat in people who so resembled them; they refused to even plan to repel the assault. Even when the attack was upon them, they were slow to seek reinforcement. In all likelihood, these police officials sympathized with this violent crowd in ways they could never sympathize with BLM. In America, racial, tribal identification more often than not trumps justice and democracy.)

In a fundamental sense, this racist riot was as much a reaction to BLM protests as it was to the election results. White racists see BLM and the presidential election as intertwined parts of a nebulous conspiracy against them. Their attempt against the Capitol amounted to a “White Votes matter more than Black Lives” protest.

Though I laughed involuntarily upon first sight of the situation, I too realized the danger of the moment. It was inevitable the certification process would be disrupted but that delay could easily be cured. Worse, it was inevitable some poor souls would die. There is no cure for that tragedy.  Yet, Trump did not lament the five deaths or regret his role in them. Instead, the deaths sent him into a fit of self-adoration. Driven by lunatic reasoning, he would conclude that he was indeed a great president who won the election since people were so willing to die and kill for his cause.

The world anxiously watched the vivid siege of the Capitol. People in many countries worried America had taken a grave turn, putting its democracy under serious attack. In this analysis, they go too far for they never accurately understood America. America was never as virtuous and strongly democratic as many had thought before this event; it is not as weak as they now fear after the event.

While the specifics of the assault were novel, the authoritarian, anti-democratic spirit that fueled it is as old as the nation itself.

At the inception of the republic, neither poor unpropertied whites nor black bondsmen were permitted the vote. Poor whites were later afforded the vote, in large part, to ensure their loyalty to slavery and institutional racism. From the very beginning, the idea was planted that some people should not vote. In the modern context, this plant has matured to translate itself into the belief that some votes are inherently less valid than others.

In 1828, ardent slaver and shameless murderer of Native Americans, Andrew Jackson became president. He was the first president from a state south of Virginia. His victory signaled the political empowerment of a most virulent and crude version of white nationalism. Those who backed Jackson were uneducated, intolerant, arrogate, adventurous, prideful and violent. Armed with these traits, they considered themselves more purely American than their northern counterparts. They saw their lack of education and proclivity for violence as virtues. Jackson and his supporters were America’s proto-fascists. In time, these types would push the nation into Civil War to maintain their slave-hold over black people. Trump and his believers are the direct philosophical heirs of the Jacksonians.

The attack on the Capitol was even redolent of Jackson’s inaugural party at the White House. His uncouth supporters rushed the building, breaking furniture and dancing on table tops. They smashed plates, glasses and anything that could be smashed. Alcohol flowed. Fistfights erupted in the house and on the lawn. Things got so rowdy that Jackson had to be escorted from the premises. It took a week to clean the mess.

In the 1930’s, America suffered under the Great Depression. During that period as now, white Americans feeling socially adrift, groped for extreme solutions to their problems. Blacks, by and large, were to heavily moored to poverty and racial prejudice to feel adrift. They struggled to perfect and find their appropriate place in the democratic union while many whites plotted to extinguish it.

Father Coughlin was America’s most influential radio evangelist, the forerunner to today’s tele-evangelists. His popularity rivaled that of President Roosevelt. Unlike Roosevelt, he sought not to save American democracy but to give it an unceremonious burial. Coughlin blamed Jews for every calamity known to man. He also used his perch to attack democracy. He preached that Hitler, Mussolini and fascism were the way to go. Believing that all of Christianity can be reduced to the most violent passages of the Old Testament, Coughlin breathed hellfire and brimstone on all who did not believe as he did. His popularity only faded after WWII started yet he held to his admiration for the Nazis of Berlin. In large degree, Coughlin is a founding father of that strain of violent, racist Christianity present in the white nationalist movement.

Charles Lindbergh, the first man to fly the Atlantic, was even more popular than Roosevelt and Coughlin for most of the decade. He was an outspoken advocate of fascism and a hater of democracy. He commanded the loyalty of millions. There was talk of him unseating Roosevelt in the 1936 and again in the 1940 elections. As war approached, he recommended that America join league with the fascists against England. It was not until Lindbergh overplayed his hand by going to Berlin to accept a medal from Hitler did his influence begin to wane.

Senator Prescott Bush and other conservative members of Money Power went even further. They actually plotted the overthrow of the American government and the institution of a fascist dictatorship. Their plot went awry when they requested the wrong former general to lead it. Smedley Butler was the most decorated Marine of the time; but he had soured on war and the reasons for it. He spilled the beans on Bush and his conspirators. In the end, an informal settlement was reached between Roosevelt and Bush. Roosevelt agreed to slow New Deal reforms and Bush agreed to forego future coup plotting. Ironically, had Bush succeeded in his fascist way, both his son and grandson would have been denied the presidencies they were later to win.

 

 

There are many other instances of American fascism holding sway over events and institutions of the nation. It is naïve, even dangerous to adhere to the myth that democracy represents some sort of teleological political finality. The truth is that a nation may be an established democracy but this in no way guarantees all of its people believe in that system. The vagaries of human nature do not lend themselves to such broad unanimity. Some people who live in a democracy pine for dictatorship just as some people in a dictatorship struggle for democracy. This is the way of the world and this is the way of America. America is no more exceptional than any other powerful nation that has ever existed. It is and will remain a struggle between progress and regression, between openness and suppression.

In this context, we must view the assault on the Capitol. Some call it a coup. That is hyperbole. Though violent and dramatic, the attack had few hallmarks of a coup. If this was a coup, it was one planned by children. Notwithstanding the violent moments, there was a juvenile, unserious aspect to the event in the main. It appeared on the Mall like a perverse carnival of misfits and malcontents. Like a sudden storm, it lacked staying power. There was no planning beyond the physical assault itself.

This was but a malign frolic born of poor forethought and no strategic calculation. In this, it took on the personality of Trump himself – impulsive, boisterous and self-destructive. This madcap, emotional strike could only cost lives and cause destruction. There was no way it could have overturned the election or permanently brought down Congress. It was as futile as an irate man tossing a brick through the store window because he lacked the money to purchase the wares he desired inside. In the end, he would neither gain the wares nor cause the store to permanently shut its doors. Someone else would purchase what he could not.

Yes, this was a dangerous, ugly act of criminal insurrection. One can even describe it as a premeditated attempt by the executive to use violence to coerce or disrupt the legislative function. Yes, there might have been the forlorn hope held by Trump that this disruption might acquire some permanence. However, without more, the disruption would have only have lasted a few hours, a day at most. A dramatic tempest yes but a serious coup, this was not.

America is fortunate in a way. The attack could have been more deadly had the rioters brought more weapons and if DC Mayor Bowser had not responded quickly and intelligently to fill the gaping holes in security left by the Capitol police. By sending in her officers to help protect the building and instituting a curfew, Mayor Bowser stemmed what could have been a bloodier melee inside the building. Again, a note of poetic justice. As whites flailed to tear at the republic, a black woman would stand as the unsung hero of the day.

This is part of the tale of America. Whenever they fail to get all they want, a considerable segment of a white America is ready to upend the republic. Never getting the minimum due them, black people remain among the most faithful to a nation that has so often failed them.

In the aftermath, there is but one imperative. Trump’s incitement of the attack is an impeachable offense. Whether he has but 10 days left or 10 months is inconsequential. Congress must impeach him. While impeachment may not succeed because of time constraints or Republican opposition, it is necessary. Incongruous it would be for Congress to have impeached Trump for his silly phone to the Ukraine over a year ago but ignore this violent assault against the Capitol.

Those Republicans who argue impeachment would be a politically motivated errand bringing further division to the nation are disingenuous. Nothing can be more morbidly partisan than the mayhem Trump unleashed yet these Republicans never counseled him against the path he was taking. Moreover, there is nothing that can be done to appease ardent Trump supporters. These people do not believe in democracy and never will. The divide is insurmountable; it cannot be bridged by acting nice or ignoring their indiscretions. The only way to protect the union from more serious attack is to punish this brigandage in its infant, dilettante stage.

Let Trump be forever marked as the first and hopefully only president to be twice impeached.  This not only will all but ruin his future political designs. This hopefully will deter future usurpers of democracy. America must be mindful. Among white nationalists and populists, there are figures more dangerous and intelligent than the current president waiting to take up where Trump should now be forced to leave off.

 

08060340825 sms only

 

 

By Brian Browne

 

The end of the year has come. Yet, this does not portend an end to the extraordinary things the past year has wrought. If anything, 2020 reminds us of the frailty of human civilization, the disquieting weakness of the institutions around which we organize ourselves and which lend us our social meaning and purpose. Prior to 2020, we had been taught a comforting but unfounded myth which has given our passage through everyday life a false assurance. 2020 ripped away this falsity.

We have been taught that society progresses, that the course of human events is of a linear design always flowing, but solely in one direction – forever toward improvement. According to this line of thought, we are to assume that we are part of a great human and humane project to which we must lend ourselves because our personal and collective amelioration can only be realized by following the dictates of the extant social order.

Therefore, we must not question too much and never demand anything more than that which has been allotted. In this line of reasoning, the world in which we exist is the best possible world that can exist and thus our personal situation is the best it can be. Change only portends diminution. Be content with the tiny mercies available to us because the wheel of progress rolls in a way that we cannot comprehend but we must have faith that it forever rolls in the best way. The pain you now feel would even be worse if you were allowed to pilot your life more fully than you now do. So, it is best to go along for the ride and fret not about where you are going or who is driving.  All we must do is play the game as it has been laid before us. Work hard and gladly accept the smallness of your fate and your smaller portion of society’s bounty yet never question the enormity being carried away by the rich and powerful.

2020 should erase this facile, numbing device from our minds. Even an established society can quickly teeter unless intelligent precaution is taken to prevent society from descent.

Our knowledge of history is an insult to those who came before us. Had we studied more thoroughly, we would better understand the fragility of the house in which we live. We thought it impregnable. That misperception was largely due to the fact that it had not been seriously attacked a while. If we understood history, we would have known that the years of relative stability were neither preordained nor particularly deserved. Those years were just an incident of history. A relative quiet was here but now it is gone. A global storm has come. Welcome to vagaries of human history. Ask not why this is happening. If we had a finer awareness of the sweep of history, we would understand that such turmoil is as much our due as is a gentle breeze and a mild sun.

If society always advanced, the empires of antiquity would still be glorious entities not nearly forgotten remnants and ruins of foggy past. World powers have come and gone just as poor nations have been born with great hope but perished in sadness. The replacement of one great power by another is as much the story of the elevation of a new social order as it is an account of the demise of an older one. Yet even there, the transfer tends to get a bit messy with chards of disorder and dislocation ever present. There is no guarantee the transition will be instantaneous or clean. Usually, blood and battle are involved and where there is war, pestilence is not far behind. Years, decades, even centuries may pass before the light of progress and grandeur shines once more. The Dark Ages lasted centuries. If truth be told, some people and nations today still reside in that dim period.

Please, attempt not to overread my position just as I labor not to overstate it. I neither forecast a new Dark Age nor the collapse of modern civilization. I do not predict the end of times, at least any time soon. Conversely, I do not cotton to the myth that progress and complete recovery from last year’s pitfalls are inevitable, especially to any nation or person who remains passive in the face of what has happened. There is no valid reason to believe the passage of one day into another or one year into the next somehow brings us closer to the relief we seek. By itself, the passage of time remedies no social ills or imbalances. There is nothing mystical or magical about edging into a new year. One generally awakens in the same bed in which one fell asleep. The same goes for a society.

Neither God nor the socio-economic forces that visit us pay special attention to the first day of the year simply because we lend that day unsubstantiated significance. Unless we work to make things better, things may not get better.

Those who think the new year will bring relief just because it is not the old year merely cast their fate to wild fortune. They shall dine on what merciless chance decides to feed them. It may be good. It may be something uglier. After what we have witnessed in 2020, such a vague, uncertain predicament should not sit well with anyone who cares about their plight.

COVID-19 breathed death and sickness into 2020. It brought about a degree of global economic dislocation surpassing the 2009 world recession. Not since the Great Depression of the 1930s has such a large portion of the world’s productive capacity been rendered idle without recourse to alternative employment.   Except for the very wealthy and a few exceptions among the rest of us, this truncated economy has been mostly unkind. You are fortunate if you have not lost too much. Too many people lost their lives. Among those who survived, too many lost their livelihoods. Many lost their minds and their social bearing. Poverty first sets one adrift before the drowning.

As is often the case with systemic downturns, the COVID global recession has burdened the poor in rich nations much the same as it has burdened poor nations themselves. In rich nations, the poor have only their labor to exchange for money. They sweep hotel floors, clean dishes in restaurants, bag groceries or work the till at the food store. COVID took many of these jobs away, reducing the working poor to the direr status of the unemployed poor. Meanwhile, executives of medical-sector companies, information technology entities and real estate firms reaped meteoric profit and income increases. While millions were forced into food lines, the stock market reached record highs.

This confirms the financial sector no longer complements the real economy. Instead, it feeds off the real economy like a crafty parasite does to a dull-witted host. Capitalism is no longer the ogre of the day for it has died the worst of deaths for it has been strangled by one of its component parts. It has been replaced by a threat more virulent to our collective welfare, much like COVID has supplanted the common flu. The financial sector now rules supreme. The capitalist now subrogates his toil to that of the banker. It used to be that a person manufactured things in order to make money. Now, the golden principle is to manufacture money in order to make more of it.

But for the banker to manufacture money, he must place someone else in debt. The banker’s ability to create money is predicate on someone getting a loan from him. In this scenario, the common person, the average worker is even more estranged from prosperity than in his relationship with the capitalist. At least, the worker had some connection with capitalist; to a degree, both needed each other. Thus, even though the relationship was unbalanced and usually adversarial, the wise employer recognized the need to maintain his workforce at some condition above mere subsistence.

The banker is not held by such restraints. His relationship with the worker is rarely complementary. The banker profits by driving the worker into debt and concomitant property forfeiture. Capitalism wanted workers to be plaint but also paid and propertied to some extent. Financialism seeks to make debt peons of them.

For example, during the early phase of the pandemic, the American federal government eagerly gave the giants of the financial sector several trillion dollars. That same government only begrudgingly and belatedly gave American families an aggregate of a several hundred billion dollars, or a few thousand dollars per family.

Giving the financial sector a king’s treasure very early in the process meant government wanted to ensure Money Power would be made whole and then some. By delaying relief payments to the people and keeping those payments scant meant the people would not be made whole. They would be left to struggle to pay for food, rent and mortgages. Not receiving enough money, many would be forced to borrow.  To be forced to borrow is to be forced to bend.  For a person to borrow money when he has no durable source of income to repay the loan is to schedule an appointment with disaster. Enter the smiling banker for he knows he has won before the game is even played.

Whatever property that worker has will become collateral which he will be forced to relinquish once loan repayment is due but unachievable. Wealthy financial creditor-predators will swoop down and take his hard-earned property at a discounted rate. The creditor profits upon the misery of another. While we foolishly celebrate our entry into a new year, this process of rich devouring poor is as old as history itself; due to COVID, this process will accelerate against poor people and poor nations unless we do something extraordinary to thwart it. In this struggle, flipping the calendar from one page to the next will be of no avail.

Here, it is apt to quote Jesus, given that we are at the tail end of the Christmas season. In Luke 4:18-19, Jesus proclaims the “acceptable year of the Lord” while declaring he came to set free the captives and give succor to the poor. Every Christmas, gleaming and smiling pastors stand before their congregations to recite this passage. Every Christmas, they do so without knowing much about what they are saying. If they knew the phrase’s true meaning they would either stop reciting it because the dare not upset the elite they hope to join or they would act differently toward those poor souls they claim to lead.

The phrase “acceptable year of the Lord” is just not some eloquent selection of words. The phrase had import to those who first heard it. It was a specific reference to the year of Jubilee. Every fifty years, came this year of years. On Jubilee, the slates of debtors were wiped clean. Those who had borrowed and lost their farms and even their very liberty due to failure to repay a debt were returned to their former status as free men and landowners. Those who sold their children and wives into servitude were given back their families.

Why the Jubilee? Ancient societies understood a key principle of finance. Those given an initial even if only slight economic advantage would over time increase that advantage to the point of unfairness in all things economic and financial. They would become so rich that they could prey on others without remorse. They would come to dictate the economy to the detriment of overall society. To counterbalance this, the Jubilee year was instituted. The ancients new it is ludicrous to believe someone dispossessed of his land and liberty might be able to repay a loan when his land and labor were the only sources of income available to redeem the debt.

The ancient Israelites were not the first to observe such reformative measures. This practice traces to ancient Mesopotamia approximately 4000 years ago. If the ancients well understood the perverse consequences of compound debt on the poor, there is no good reason modern society feigns ignorance to the obvious financial devastation done to the poor and weak. Ancient societies prohibited usurious interest rates. Modern society has buried the age-old revulsion at usury. This was done so that the modern creditor could feast on those who must borrow. In this fundamental aspect of economic life, certain ancient societies were fairer than today’s. As before stated, the passage of years does not necessarily mean progress.  A young fool does not turn into a wise man simply because of the accumulation of years. Without learning the ways of wisdom, a young fool simply turns into an old one.

Modern society gives the debtor class no relief because the architects of modern society want to reduce a large portion of the population to peonage. Today, this peonage is not to some landed aristocracy as in feudal times. It is to the financial aristocracy – Money Power. As Money Power reduces segments of the population of rich nations to debt peonage, it does the same to poor nations as well.

Money Power seeks to break the financial independence of every African nation. It does so through negative trade flows, thwarted economic development and an ever-increasing amount of debt denominated in foreign currency. If Money Power cannot break an African nation through debt and negative terms of trade, it will do so through force of arms. If you do not believe me, ask Muammar Gaddafi, if you can find his remains. COVID has simply presented Africa’s foes an opportunity to speed the process.

While Africa has not be as roughly buffeted by the virus itself, it has been rudely treated economically. Too dependent on raw material exports, African nations have been troubled by falling prices for their commodities. Meanwhile, the costs of manufactured goods remain somewhat inelastic. We pay for them as dearly as we always have although we have less money to do so.

African nations face strong pressure on their local currencies. They have been forced to devalue; they will be forced to devalue even more. Too wedded to mainstream economic and intellectual icons, nations resorted too quickly to borrowing the currencies of those who would keep Africa poor and beholden to their financial power. It is their very economic power that has helped push Africa into such a straitened place. This is not by accident but by purposeful design.

The long-term consequences of COVID will be more African casualties on the back end of it due to increased poverty, growing debt and lack of development. If you hire your foe’s money, you surrender yourself to his influence over you. The war today is waged not on the battlefield but on the balance sheet. In this situation, a large loan taken in foreign currency is tantamount to a declaration of financial war by the creditor upon the debtor nation.

There is nothing about the passage into a new year that changes this truth. Yes, it is human nature and quite understandable to want the status quo ante. But such an idea is chimerical, its attainment impossible. Hopefully, COVID will be arrested and the global economy will recuperate. But that recovery will place us in a condition worse than when COVID began. Hirelings will speak of increased economic growth and the end of recession in Africa. Such words will not speak of good tidings to you; they will signify the emptiness of mind of those who blabber them.

If you want a better place, African must do more than wait for the passage of time or wait for the Western nations to vaccinate enough of their people that they may emerge from their homes to begin to buy and sell as before.

For us, such a return to yesterday will be but a drop of water on the parched tongue of a desiccated man. It will seem to be relief; the bitter truth is that it will be a travesty.

Sadly, history will record that Africa wasted the chance that COVID provided to better fortify itself economically. While Western nations were more introspective and distracted, Africa should have done more to lay the groundwork for more economic diversification and industrialization. Instead of borrowing money from the West, African nations should have put to use their own currencies to spur homegrown infrastructural development and employment. No nation every reached prosperity by borrowing large sums in a currency not of its own.

All that is borrowed must be repaid with interest yet Africa’s ability to do so has been impaired by worsening trade patterns. The game is stacked against Africa; every bet placed with things remaining as they are amounts to but a fool’s wager. We need to summon the courage to change our place in the global economy and how that economy treats us.

It was COVID and the world’s response to it, not 2020, that have cost us much. Our collective lack of foresight and political vision may cost us even more. In the end, the coming of the new year will do little to change our misfortune if we continue with our old ways.

 

• 08060340825 sms only

 

 

Brian Browne

 

Part One of this installment examined the then extant batch of results of U.S. presidential election, concluding that Joe Biden won the contest by a significant, if not massive, differential. At that point last week,  roughly 95 percent of the votes had been counted. Now with almost all remaining votes counted and verified, Biden’s victory is clearer still.

Over 153 million people voted. A record turnout. Besting the contumacious incumbent by 6 million votes, Biden gained an unprecedented 79.6 million votes to Trump’s still hefty 73.6 million. Biden obtained 51 percent of the popular vote nationwide while Trump garnered 47.2, lending Biden a nearly 4 percentage point advantage in the nationwide vote. By any reasonable metric, Biden won. According to American political custom, Trump should have conceded defeat and publicly acknowledged Biden as president-elect. Trump will do no such thing.

He continues to pretend victory despite the bevy of facts against him. He asserts that he is the victim of an historic, monumental fraud perpetuated by those terrible black people who inhabit the big cities of America. He has no qualms upending tradition and testing American democracy to its foundations if the gambit has but a minute chance of achieving one of his political aims. His first aim is to retain the presidency but he knows this is highly and increasingly unlikely. His second goal is to stir a large segment of his over 70 million supporters into an agitated condition. This racist contingent loves nothing better than to hear black people have stolen something that belongs to a white man. They need no evidence to prove the pudding he cynically feeds them. They consume it because all their lives they have believed such evil about blacks. They do not see blacks as fellow citizens and likely never will. They see blacks as a virus to contain if not put down.

With this element affixed to him like postbellum southerners clinging to the Confederate flag, Trump will remain the great hope of the white race against the black scourge and rising tide of brown immigrants who threaten to remake white people’s America into a different and darker version. As such, he hopes to retain control of the Republican party’s conservative base and to compel the party’s other leading figures to offer him fealty. Thus far, his actions have attracted mixed success. He is failing at retaining the presidency but winning his attempt at holding the party in thrall. The question becomes will he be able to continue the latter once he has officially lost the former.

This is a game of power and public perception being played by perhaps the most personally reckless, irresponsible tenant to ever occupy the White House. Reason is given no significant role in his political calculations. As for justice and fair play, he treats them like a mongoose does a blind cobra. To maintain power, he would grotesquely wreck and rewrite the American political system with a vengeful hand if only he held the unilateral power to do so.

Trashing standard etiquette by failing to concede defeat, he claws desperately to hold the White House. In this, he seeks to engineer the most astounding swindle in a long life of audacious grifts. He plots to overturn a clean and fair election by claiming the votes for Biden in predominantly black urban areas should be tossed aside as fraudulent. He is attempting a monumental fraud by slandering the proper exercise by millions of black people of their right to vote. If this man is a prophet or agent of any god as many Evangelicals believe, that god must be a card-carrying member of the Ku Klux Klan, the Blessed Knights of the White Race and any other crazed outfit of hooded misfits who go about claiming racial superiority and physically attacking unarmed, harmless black people.

In this, Trump authors a new chapter in the racist guide to political suppression. Until now, the standard practice has been to stymie black voting by making it difficult, if not impossible, for a black person to cast a ballot vote in the first place. In the old days, a potential black voter had to correctly guess the number of buttons or pieces of candy contained in a large jar. If the election official did not like the answer, that black person was refused a ballot. Many a voter was turned aside by this and similar obstructions. Later, polling stations in black communities became as nocturnal phantoms, there on the eve of Election Day yet mysteriously gone by the morn. More modern forms of voter suppression involved stringent voter identification requirements that poor people have difficulty meeting. Such measures hurt black voters more than whites simply because blacks suffer a higher degree of poverty than their white counterparts.

All of these measures had one thing in common. They were devised to prevent blacks from voting. Trump has improvised a new theme, taking suppression a step further. His efforts are to cast aside wholesale the already counted votes of an entire urban population. Blacks can vote but the validity of that vote is conditional with final determination of their validity resting on him or people like him. In effect, his stance is that black votes ought not count unless they favor him. More to the point, in no way should the votes of black people be allowed to deny him a second term. For him, an independent-minded black voter is nothing short of a travesty against American history and thus should be excised from the electoral calculation. This is the clear position and policy of the current president of a nation that claims to be the greatest democracy ever constructed by human endeavor. It is as blatantly racist as one can get in the 21st century.

Thus, Trump and his electoral saboteurs attack the vote tallies in Philadelphia, Milwaukee, Detroit, and Atlanta. All are cities with large black populations that voted not for him. These cities helped Biden seize the key states of Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan and Georgia. Along with Arizona and Nevada, these states provided Biden the needed electoral votes to win the presidency. Trump has filed over 30 law suits in these states. The suits have been a study in comical farce. His lawyers filed exaggerated, if not willfully inaccurate, pleadings asserting widespread fraud and electoral abuse. When asked by the courts to present evidence, the lawyers engage in awkward circumlocution aimed at obscuring the fact they have no evidence to present because what they alleged simply does not exist. Most of the cases have been summarily tossed from court for lacking merit. The handful that remain await the same fate.

Sensing the legal avenues closing quickly against him, Trump has upped the ante. He is now shamelessly courting Republican officials and state legislators in these key states to ignore their constitutional duty. He is asking them to shred the election results by declaring him victor in their states although he lost. His allies are also pressuring officials. Republican Senator Lindsay Graham from South Carolina was caught pressuring the top electoral official in Georgia to invalidate the votes from Atlanta and its environs for no plausible legal reason. Not only was Graham’s call to an official in a state other than his own an untoward novelty, it also borders on the criminal. Moreover, Graham’s pressure was counterproductive. Georgia has certified Biden’s victory after recounting the votes in that state. Another defeat for Trump in a string of post-election defeats.

Trump’s attempts to sway state officials to overturn the results or to refuse in bad faith to certify the valid results of the election inch him and his confederates closer to possibly violating any number of state or federal election laws. But even here, Trump has not been successful in his pursuit. He summoned Republican members of the state assemblies from Michigan and Pennsylvania to the White House to coax them to do his bidding. But doing his bidding might place their own positions in legal jeopardy. Thus far, none of the state legislators have taken his dangerous bait.

All of Trump’s electoral machinations are taking place within the context of a deadly spike in COVID-19. Prior to the election, the highest number of daily cases was roughly 85 thousand. On November 19, America experienced over 186,000 new cases. More than 1000 people daily perish. Hospitals and caregivers are being stretched to the limit. Yet the insensitive, self-absorbed president says little and does nothing. His attention is squarely on his political plight. Those who cannot help him escape his electoral dilemma can die for they are of no present use to him. He does not even care enough to feign to care at all.

While ignoring the deaths of sick Americans, he did try his hand at foreign policy misadventure. He angled toward a dangerous military strike against Iran until even his normally pliant advisers warned him of the negative consequences such a move would provoke domestically and abroad. That he thought of this disastrous move does not mean his mind was still on the job. The substantive merits or demerits of the military strike never entered his thoughts. He ventured toward this caper probably because he wanted to curry last minute favor with Israel and the deep financial pockets of Riyadh. Trump’s son-in law is deeply indebted to Israeli concerns for hundreds of millions of dollars. Trump likewise needs money after leaving office. What better way to discharge the debt owed to Israeli businessmen and to have the Saudis owe him than by buffeting Iran?

The man is clearly guided in all his decisions by nothing more than greed and power. Here, given the energetic comments received, I must return to a theme visited last week. So many purported Christian pastors in Nigeria and elsewhere in Africa cast their die with Trump and lost. I say cast their die because that is exactly what they did. They gambled. But they told you it was from God that they had heard. What they heard was the voice of their own prejudice; they had the terrible audacity to call that pettiness the voice of the Creator of all things. They prophesied, squeezing their faces and contorting their bodies in strange ways in order to convince you God had revealed to them Trump would win the election. Trump was God’s close envoy is what they said and you believed them because you knew no better. But today, you know better yet you still want to believe them because you have invested yourself emotionally in believing the self-concocted fantasies they pass to you as messages from Above.

Lets state things bluntly. Someone or some god is lying. These people who claim God anointed Trump to win are mistaken. This means that they did not hear from God for He is not in the business of deception. Thus, they either heard from themselves or from some unnamed yet mischievous presence pretending to be God. Either way, such people should check themselves at the door and take seats in the back of the church instead of standing at the front of the altar. It is potentially injurious for spiritual leaders to be so easily deceived that they believe their own voice or that of a lesser entity is God speaking unto them. These people need help. The last thing they need is to pretend to be God’s spokespersons and, in so doing, lead hungry multitudes astray.

Too many have claimed the Holy Spirit led them to Trump. But all the speaking in tongues and writhing on the floor cannot help them from the mockery they commit. The Holy Spirit does not command a person to toss himself to the floor to act like a human mop. Nor does it ask that you laugh at veracity or snicker at the truth. Instead, it is the conveyor of the truth.

There is a video of mega-rich, mega-ignorant pastor Kenneth Copeland laughing like a madman upon hearing that Biden won the presidency. He had his whole congregation following him in this lunacy. But these histrionics are not of God because they obscured not revealed the truth. Biden won. Trump lost and Copeland lost even more because he is swindling you into believing his judgment is superior to what God has allowed or perhaps affirmatively directed.

Because he thinks in this twisted fashion, Copeland and others like him counsel and encourage Trump to commit any imaginable travesty against justice and the democratic will of the people so that Copeland may have his selfish way. In so doing, he hopes to keep his erroneous beliefs hidden from the light of day. Pride begets a multitude of transgressions while leading to a fall. People like Copeland seek not to conform their beliefs to the truth. Instead, they seek to misshape it to conform to their counterfeit beliefs. These people are much like the Pharisees believing themselves so righteous that they measure God by their own standard instead of measuring themselves by His. They give you a brand of religion they invented themselves; such an endeavor is an inherently unbecoming and dangerous undertaking.

However, you will excuse their lies yet castigate others who point out these fallacies to you. If you only selected your religious leaders/teachers with the same care you select a pair of shoes or a tomato in the market, you would be much better off because you would have eschewed such pretenders long ago.

They have enticed you by appealing to your emotions and telling you that the Spirit talking to you. You have suspended reason and thus are susceptible to believing inconsistent fictions. You believe Trump was cheated. Yet how can this be? This avarice and greedy man who covets all things material occupies the most powerful office on earth. At his command stand the greatest surveillance and intelligence gathering capacities mankind has known. Yet, he either learned of the alleged widespread fraud prior to the election but selected not to stop it or he found out about such a large nationwide conspiracy involving hundreds of thousands of poll workers in fifty states only after the election. Still he cannot produce a shard of evidence in court concerning this massive and fraudulent conspiracy against him. How could such a large criminal undertaking not leave any evidence yet be so openly known? There is no explanation that makes sense of this because it is a lie. Yet, so many of you who profess to follow God will believe such an obvious fallacy because it accords with existing biases and emotions.

Trump knows that millions of whites feel the same way about him. That black Africans admire him Trump sees as amusing; it is evidence of his power of persuasion to make the gullible view his fantasy as if it were vital fact. As such, Trump has no intention to concede defeat. Such a move would ruin his long-term strategy. If he cannot retain the presidency, his objective is to be the second coming of the “Lost Cause.” The Lost Cause was a term white southerners attached to the Civil War. They claim they fought for “states rights” and “southern culture.” These seemingly august and noble aims constitute the cause lost during that insurrection.

This was all euphemism, a momentous lie constructed to occult the unseemly truth. No one fights a bloody four-year war over an abstract concept such as states rights. The South fought not for such rights in the abstract but for the concrete and terrible right for southern states to declare that the black race should be permanently enthralled to the white race. The cultural heritage they fought for was none other than the rather profitable institution of slavery because it was upon this mode of human oppression that the entirety of southern society and culture was built.

Trump seeks to attract to himself the same fervent devotion that racists lend the Confederate cause. Thus, he bases himself in updated versions of traditional racist themes in order to produce a like effect. He seeks to become a martyred yet still living political symbol for the white man’s cause. While it might not have kept him in office in 2020, this immoral tact might well return him there come 2024. (Next week, we discuss Joe Biden and the quirks of the American electoral college.)

 

08060340825 sms only

Brian Browne

 

The American election is over. Despite his many allegations, Trump was not undone by a fraudulent hand or some wholesale conspiracy. If conspiracy was afoot, it was that unique genre called a conspiracy of one. The admixture of his acrid personality, incompetent leadership and palpable racism led to his defeat.  His list of people to blame is so long as to be endless. However, that list serves no function resembling truth. He needs it as a psychological barrier protecting reality from destroying his distorted view of his place in the world. If he wants to know the truth behind his defeat all he has to do is cast his eyes on his own reflection.

The election outcome was predictable. For close to a year, this column predicted Trump would lose. An earlier edition of this column surmised Trump would do to himself in 2020 that which he had done to Hillary Clinton in 2016. This particular forecast came to pass with caustic accuracy. In 2016, Trump outdistanced Clinton by 306 electoral votes to 232. According to most reliable accounts, Biden will best Trump in electoral votes by the same figures. In a fundamental sense, Trump lost the election for the same reason Clinton did. He has replaced her as the most divisive political figure in the nation. In this election, he received the just reward for being the most reviled political actor in the land just as Clinton received it in 2016.

As such, Trump is among the rarest of men. He has the distinction of being the father of two of the largest electoral movements in the history of his nation. This would seem to portend well for his ambitions. However, his downfall became inevitable when the largest movement he spawned was the one aimed squarely against him. He gave birth to himself as a politician but was his own assassin. Rarely has a man been his own mother and executioner. Trump can lay claim to this strange duality; no one can take it from him and no one in their right mind should attempt to do so. This trophy is his alone. This is what he won in this election. It is as if he built a tall building not to live in but from which to jump. Donald Trump, master builder and master defenestrator!

This election witnessed the greatest voter turnout in American history. Over 151 million people voted. Trump ended with 72.7 million votes, the second highest total in any American presidential election. His devastation was that Biden won 78.2 million, the highest total in American history. These figures exceed the 2016 aggregate amount of 129 million by over 22 million voters. Of the over 22 million new voters, Trump gained roughly 9.9 million or less than half of the newcomers. Biden attracted over 12.5 million of the additional voters or roughly 55 percent of that group. In all, Biden won 50.9 percent of the total vote while Trump trailed significantly with 47.3 percent. In 2016, Clinton beat Trump by nearly 3 million in the popular vote; but she fell short in the electoral vote because of the maladroit campaign she ran. Biden ran a better campaign than Clinton. Also not saddled with the negative public perception that dogged Clinton, he bested Trump by over 5 million votes and 3.5 percentage points. By any objective measure, this was not a landslide neither was it a narrow cliffhanger. The victory becomes even more pronounced upon considering that Trump exploited all the prerogative of office and incumbency but to no avail. The trappings of office could not overcome Trump’s failings of leadership.

The sense that this was a narrow victory resulted from a perceptional mirage. In previous contests, Election Day balloting vastly outnumbered early mail-in voting. Thus, after a representative number of votes had been tallied on Election Day, it was relatively easy to project a winner early in the tabulation process. COVID-19 changed this but our psychological expectations regarding vote tabulation, based as they were on prior experience, did not adjust to the new reality. Our minds were still expecting vote tabulation to mirror pre-COVID elections.

Consistently downplaying the dangers of COVID, Trump and his Republican followers asked their supporters to cast walk-in ballots on Election Day as if this election could take place without the pandemic giving it special context. Biden and the Democrats on the other hand urged people to vote early by mail. Trump did a good job in soliciting additional Republican votes. The trouble was that Biden did a better job. Well, in all honesty, Biden did not do such a great job. He was barely a passable candidate. In the final analysis, Trump lost the election mainly due to his mishandling of COVID-19. Ironically, it was also his disregard of the virus that allowed him to make the contest more competitive than it should have been. Because he ignored the virus, Trump ran a more active campaign than did the more reticent Biden who observed all the social distancing protocols associated with COVID. Trump held large, crowded rallies and sent campaign volunteers knocking door-to-door in key areas. Biden offered none of these traditional campaign staples. Yet, Biden held an ace in the cut. Biden sagely calculated Trump and his antics would prove to be his best campaign tools and vote-getters.

The truth is that no matter how good Trump was in gathering additional support he was more proficient in drumming up even more opposition.

Early on, things looked good for Trump. This was due to procedural idiosyncrasy. In most states, the procedure for vote counting was to tabulate Election Day ballots first, then count the mailed ballots. This sequencing was used although most of the mailed ballots had arrived before Election Day. This method of tabulation lent Trump sizable, early leads in many states. This raised false hopes in the camp of conservatives and caused undue indigestion among the liberals. However, the number of mailed ballots was unprecedented and leaned heavily toward Biden. As those ballots were counted, the election slowly came to look as predicted. Trump’s lead melted into the mirage it was.

Biden was always poised for a distinct if unspectacular victory. However, the tabulation of mailed ballots was slower, more tedious than contemplated. The process thus took longer than normal. The sequence of vote tabulation and the length of time taken on the mailed ballots provided an uncertainty and suspense that obscured the more mundane reality: Trump’s loss was nigh inevitable.

The elongated process played into Trump’s hand in an untoward way. This shameless lout, well knows he lost. His campaign pollsters had warned him that Election Day would be his day of defeat. However, believing himself larger than the nation itself and aided by an army of blind followers, Trump began complaining of voter fraud and electoral subterfuge. Never has a sitting American president publicly described the electoral process as a massive criminal conspiracy. Never as any candidate done so with so little evidence.

Trump goaded and intimidated Republican operatives and law firms friendly to the party into filing lawsuits in various states alleging fraud. Conservative media outlets and sympathizers undertook a rather distasteful exercise. They began broadcasting unproven reports of fraud that later proved inimical to the truth. In Nevada, they claimed nonresidents of the state illegally voted. These alleged criminals turned out to be active military personnel stationed overseas in patriotic service to their country. In Pennsylvania, a postal worker recanted a false affidavit Republican operatives had coaxed him into signing. Without any investigation, Fox News aired the scurrilous allegation of the voting of a man deceased since 2006. Had they bothered to check, they would have found the widow of the deceased, as an act of enduring love, had taken to calling herself “Mrs. John Doe” instead of using her own given name. It was her legitimate and proper vote that Fox labeled as a fraud. Seems the only true fraud was committed by those trying to depict the election as a fraud.

The dozens of lawsuits have been to no avail. Many have been tossed from court for lack of merit. The cases are so weak that the major law firms associated with the party are quickly withdrawing from these cases. These firms do not want to incur the professional sanctions for pursuing merit-less cases or for submitting fraudulent evidence in support of baseless claims. Even Trump’s own administration undermined his claims of widespread fraud. The Department of Homeland Security hailed the election as the most secure on record. Several Justice Department officials also called the election a clean and good one.

Of course, if you look far and hard enough you will discover some irregularities. This is true with all elections and shall be with every election yet to come. No endeavor of this magnitude can occur without mistake. However, the mistakes were few and of minute import.

All the facts point to a Biden victory. Yet, Trump supporters would rather believe a falsehood than accept reality. This brings me to those curious people in Nigeria who adore, even idolize, Trump. Among this strange group are those so smitten with Trump that they see in him the latter day version of a biblical prophet. It is to you I now write.  For it is troubling that people can be so duped into following the opposite of what they lay claim to believe.

To put it bluntly, you commit a monumental transgression against God when you proclaim Trump as an agent of the Heaven.

Unlike his most ardent foes, I do not label Trump a devil though if one where to use his conduct as a spiritual locator of sorts, I dare say he stands much closer to the gates of Hell than to those of Heaven. Trump inhabits that wretched crawlspace which is too low for moral man and too high for craven beast but properly befitting the sort of man who would rather act like a beast than a human being touched with a spark of the Divine.

Yet, you have been mulched and inveigled to believe in this buffoonish man that you marched for him in Nigeria despite the fact that he despises you. He hates you to the extent he has done everything in his presidential powers to stop you and those who look like you from entering his nation. You need not have done anything wrong. Being black and African is wrong enough in his eyes. But you have been so blinded that you cannot see the folly in admiring someone who would rather destroy you than look at you. For this, you have my sympathy. You consider yourself free; but you have placed upon yourself an odious yoke. It is never a good strategy to make a hero, let alone a demigod, of a man who despises you. This is an act of indirect yet frighteningly pungent self-hatred. How did so many African Christians bow to such a menial state in these modern times that they would parade in the very streets of their own nation for a man who would call the police to arrest or shoot them if they appeared at his front door? I could understand taking the servile posture during slavery or colonialism’s height. But why now?

A person is defined not only by the company he keeps but by the quality of those who teach him. This is where you have gone awry. Too many of you listen uncritically to TBN and similar outlets without realizing what they are. Without thinking, you accept what they tell you as if they are the voice of God. The people who run these platforms are no more prophets of God than is a pig in a poke. Yes, they shout long and repetitious prayers and freely lay hands on animate and inanimate objects alike. However, they also bind what they should loose and loose that which they should bind. They take money from those they should be giving it to and give it to those who do not need it. Worse of all, their teachings are not from above. Their teaching come from their own stomachs for what they promulgate are but the prejudices of white nationalist American culture.

Just because they have money to broadcast their propaganda across continents and oceans, you consider them blessed of God. That they have monetary power is the primary test you use to determine their rectitude. This means you are easily deceived for he who is quickly swayed by money is the most beguiled of all men.

They claim Trump is of God because he opposes abortion, gay rights and is for Israel. Trump is also a liar with a froward tongue, a man who has dropped countless bombs on innocent people, and a racist who would suppress black voting rights and jail black activists as terrorists if he had his way. He cares not for the poor for he has treated them with lethal indifference for the entire duration of the COVID crisis.

The folks at TBN love Trump because he is wedded to the same racial and other prejudices they hold. If you knew American history, their strident opposition to abortion and gay rights are but code words for prejudice against blacks and other minorities. They use such words, along with the phrase “law and order” to signal that they seek to return to the good old days when everything was black or white and that which was white was good while that which was black was placed underfoot or under the ground. They cannot stand the freedoms that others now seek because they see such freedom as impinging on their ability to subjugate these others.

They have fed you a steady diet of white nationalism and you have consumed it as the gospel. Those who lead you into this bog know much but understand little. As followers, you know little and understand almost nothing. You have been swindled as if by master thieves.

That so many Christians twisted their beliefs so as to adore Trump shows that human folly respects neither distance nor national boundary. Moreover, such bald foolishness is accepted more broadly and rapidly than its rarer opposite. For every wise man, there is a gang of fools waiting to waylay him for his prudence.

Those who believe that Trump and these TBN racketeers are chosen of God misread the Divine Book and the mission it gives. Those who see in Trump a latter-day prophet belittle God, turning Him into some mean, petty political deity. God is Love; thus our appeal to him and relationship with him cannot be based on some checklist of cultural biases and narrow hatreds. To do so is not to see God but to cast Him in our own image.

The spiritual world is a glorious canvas upon which we strive to paint the best of our humanity as we strive to follow the Divine. Yet to this wonderful exercise, these people rush in like crazed mechanics armed only with snake oil and a broken wrench. They can paint nothing compassionate or sublime with what they tote in hand and heart. They are full of hatred for those not like them. This is not how God would have it. The sun He created shines on both the just and unjust, the good and bad, saint and sinner. It even shines on Donald Trump. But after January 20, Inauguration Day, that sun will have to shine on Trump somewhere other than the White House.

08060340825 sms only