I was having lunch at the San Pedro Brewing Company next to a couple of longshoremen at the bar. Never being one to shy away from controversial topics, our conversation drifted over to automation and trade tariffs. One of them tells me he used to vote liberal but has changed in the last 20 years. I asked if robots and trade politics would change his mind about the Orange Felon and he said, “I doubt it. I probably won’t be around to see complete automation. Besides, they don’t have enough electricity to power the entire ports fully.”
We agreed on that point and I told him that the defunding of the Environmental Protection Agency will only add years to meeting the zero-emissions goals. “EPA has placed 171 employees in Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility and Environmental Justice on administrative leave,” according to a released statement by the EPA. However, the IQAir 2024 world air quality report set to be released on March 11, found that “The most polluted major U.S. city in the U.S. was Los Angeles. And Ontario, California was the most polluted city in the United States.” And the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach remain the largest stationary source of pollution in the seven counties of Southern California.
Then the conversation drifted off to the COVID-19 pandemic and I said that the defunding of the National Institute of Health and World Health Organization would only make America vulnerable to the next virus. He poo-pooed that this had anything to do with protecting national health. When he started blaming Dr. Anthony Fauci, I knew I was talking to a man who had drunk more than beer but the Kool-Aid of the radical right. I paid my tab and thanked them for the conversation.
On this very same day, Reuters reported, “U.S. President …. [placed] new 25% tariffs on imports from Mexico and Canada took effect on Tuesday, along with a doubling of duties on Chinese goods to 20%, sparking trade wars that could slam economic growth and lift prices for Americans still smarting from years of high inflation.” The Dow Jones dropped 1,200 points. These tariffs are set to upend nearly $2.2 trillion in annual trade. And my conservative new friend didn’t think it would matter to his job on the waterfront.
I’m sure that the farmers in Kern County who voted for the Orange Felon also believe that deporting their farm workers and having a trade war with China, which buys tons of our agricultural products, is a good idea just like the MAGA longshoreman who lives in Orange County.
The Joint Session of Congress on this same evening was just an extension of what we’ve all groaned to expect from the — Orange reality TV show “star.” It’s a performative theatrix not unlike the debacle with Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, a colossal embarrassment on the world stage that makes our allies cringe and a growing number of Americans sick with regret. The problem is that even though this is a kind of performative political theater, real consequences will come. It will come faster than expected this time and the resistance will have to be more responsive — either a national boycott of the billionaires or a general strike — before the next pandemic or recession starts. Will the Democrats lead or follow in such efforts? Will this be a class war or a culture war, perhaps both?
Yes, nobody wants to admit it but it’s been historically true that under every Republican president since Richard Nixon there has been an economic recession. The worst, of course, was under George W. Bush, with the mortgage bond debt swap banking collapse of 2008. And what we saw with the COVID-19 pandemic recession is just a primer of what the Orange Felon is going to do again with defunding national health systems and having a vaccine skeptic as the Secretary of Health and human Services. Who wants to have an outbreak of measles in their school?
It’s going to take a lot of brick-wall reality checks to change some peoples’ beliefs about what really makes America great and what makes it a tragic farce. I’m not yet even addressing the horrific war in Gaza because that’s a blind spot for both Democrats and Republicans.
We are now standing on the edge of democracy, a term best understood from the Netflix documentary of the same name about the rise, fall, and redemption of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, the most popular labor party president of Brazil. He won his first election with an astounding 83% of the vote. After two terms, he was prosecuted twice with political allegations of corruption from the far right and after two years in jail his case was overturned and he ran for a third term and won. It almost sounds similar but is the opposite, where justice and democracy prevailed.
It is uncertain at this point if the continued gaslighting from the Oval Office will succeed but what is becoming particularly clear is that this form of governance is patrimonialism — one based on individual loyalty and appeasement — a system of government where the leader runs the state as if it were his personal property or family business. It is still authoritarian fascism, no matter how high the gaslight flame you cook it. And it’s still not making America great.
PS. An afterthought on the speech to Congress — I never trust a man who has to continually repeat himself because it makes him appear as though he’s trying to convince himself of things he knows just aren’t true.