Tag: Venezuela

By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Consumer Issues, Ethics in Government, Ethics-International, Mindset, Politics, propaganda, Protests and Crackdowns, Psychology, Talking to the Other Side Tagged with , , , , , , , , ,

There’s a long list of basic psychology principles that the guy in the White House doesn’t seem to understand. For starters,

  • He values feigned loyalty and obsesquiousness more than real friendship, and he never seems to have loyalty to anyone else—not even his wives and kids—with the possible exception of his abusive late father. He thinks some dictators, including the murderous Vladimir, are his friends and doesn’t notice how they play on his need for flattery to accomplish an agenda diametrically opposed to our country’s interests (I write as a US citizen).
  • He thinks he has the right to desecrate and destroy public property.
  • He thinks he can establish his greatness by slapping his name—or the name of our continent (which he doesn’t even seem to understand is NOT the name of our country)—on landmarks he had nothing to do with.
  • He squanders our tax dollars on these personal vanity projects, on the illegal war, and on the persecution of immigrants and his perceived enemies—even when he says it will all be privately paid for or funded by another government, as he claimed for his ballroom and the border wall, to name two prominent examples.
  • He also not only accepts but actively solicits payments that sure look like bribes or blackmail attempts: from media, from universities, from nonprofits, from billionaires, from corporations and foreign leaders with business before the government, etc.
  • And he thinks the laws—he’s violated dozens of them—don’t apply to him because he’s president (which, unfortunately, the Republican majorities in Congress and on SCOTUS have perpetuated by refusing to hold him in check).

But the one I want to talk about today is his perverse idea that attempting to censor or punish the press makes the problem the press is reporting on go away. This crazy mindset has been one of his hallmarks since his first presidential campaign.

This kind of “thinking” is more dangerous than it seems on the surface. By surrounding himself only with people who will give him bad advice to advance their own agendas but never criticize him and by blasting attacks on those who question anything he does, he takes away the guardrails on his actions. He is an impulsive person who not only acts without thinking things through, over and over again, but has somehow internalized a belief that he knows more than the experts on any question, no matter how far outside of his actual knowledge base.

In his first term, he had Cabinet members who could help him navigate at least some of the shoals. Those guardrails don’t exist in his second administration, with a Cabinet composed largely of incompetents, grifters, or both, and unofficial advisors or former advisors who’ve wielded real and destructive power, which, interestingly enough, often ends up benefiting those advisors directly (talking about you, Mssrs Musk and Kushner).

And that has led the US into a downward spiral. This president who said he would not start wars invaded Venezuela in a coup after killing civilians in multiple attacks on their boats. He listened to another of his thug-dictator friends and started the unwinnable war in Iran that no previous US president would touch, leaving an enemy in a far stronger position and the US far weaker than before the war. He has torched decades-long alliances for capricious reasons—even making repeated threats against other nations’ sovereignty—leaving the rest of the world to understand that the US can’t be trusted and they’d better make their way in the world without allying with us. His changing-all-the-time tarrifs and his squandering tax dollars in a war against his own residents (in the name of immigration policy) have wrecked the economy and alienated many in his own base.

It will take decades to undo the damage, hold the perps responsible, and build trusted relationships again

Please remember all of this when you vote on or before November 3rd (and if voting before, please vote in person, as he has ordered the post office to sabotage mail-in voting). The best way out of this morass is to provide unassailable majorities of Democrats in both houses of Congress. Believe me, I know the Dems are far from perfect. We need to get out of the hole we’ve dug ourselves where we have to vote for a lesser evil rather than a greater good. All the way back in 2007, I endorsed a whole package of voting reforms that I’d love to see, including a parliamentary system and ranked-choice voting (known at that time as instant-runoff), which would combine to give us a lot more choices. I’d add a few more to that list today, but I’ll let it stand as my thinking at the time. But in the current framework, the only way to get the Republicans out is to get the Democrats in.

Facebooktwitterpinterestlinkedinmail

By Posted on Posted in Democracy, Eco-friendly, Energy & Sustainability, Environment, Ethics in Government, Ethics-International, Green Living/Green Lifestyles, language, Mindset, Peace and War, Politics, propaganda, Social and Economic Justice, Talking to the Other Side Tagged with , , , , , ,

Responding to something I posted on Facebook saying the US “has signed a colonialist and exploitative agreement with Venezuela on oil rights (an unsurprising outcome after the US coup against that country some months back),” someone responded, “Yeah, let’s have China control Venezuelan oil.”

This is how I answered:

I’ve got a better idea. How about we let VENEZUELA control Venezuelan oil. And while we’re at it, support the democratic elements in Venezuelan politics (who are not a part of the new T-backed government). And simultaneously with that, let’s get serious already, 40 years behind when we should have, about switching to fully renewable green energy. We have the technology. We know the benefits. And we sure as heck have the sun, wind, and water.

I didn’t get into the weeds about the Venezuelan pro-democracy movement. It’s enough to know it exists and has been heavily repressed by the last several Venezuelan presidents.

But this isn’t the whole story. The comment from this other person reflects a mindset that I find disturbing. If you follow the thinking implicit in that post, it says that the US should control all the important resources in the world.

Historically, most economic or political empires (and in the last 500+ years, especially the US and our European allies) have been exploiters and colonializers of resources that should be under the control of the Indigenous people whose land they’re on—and when our control is questioned, we go to war. Every modern war, and many ancient ones going back at least to Biblical times, is based on wanting resources someone else claims or protecting resources someone else wants. The ethnic and religious cloaks these struggles might be wrapped in don’t change that underlying reality.

In 2026, we are even seeing our own president blowing up decades long alliances that have kept a fragile peace in Europe and North America, because he wants the resources of places like Venezuela, Canada, and Greenland. But in 2026, we are old enough to know better. Diplomacy-based peace and stability are hard to obtain and easy to lose. But the past 80 years have shown they are indeed possible and can spread to other corners of the world—not by force, but by the power of example.

It will take decades to undo the damage T has inflicted, to create better safeguards against authoritarianism here in the US, and to rebuild the shattered trust of the US around the world. It’s difficult—but it’s doable.

Facebooktwitterpinterestlinkedinmail

By Posted on Posted in Democracy, Diversity, Energy & Sustainability, Environment, Ethics in Government, Ethics-International, language, Mindset, Peace and War, Politics, poverty, Protests and Crackdowns, Psychology, Social and Economic Justice, Talking to the Other Side, Uncategorized Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

I admire your constant calls for peace, Donald. I just wish I could believe them. You see, there’s this little problem: saying you want peace isn’t enough. You have to actually BE a peacemaker. And you haven’t been one.

You’ve claimed to end eight wars. Independent fact checking shows that you did in fact have a role in bringing several of those countries to the table, and I commend you for that. However, your grand, sweeping claims that peace wouldn’t have happened without your aggressive diplomacy are highly exaggerated. And several of the peace agreements aren’t exactly working out. For example, the United Nations reports that 339 Palestinians were killed by Israel in the six weeks following the ceasefire. We’ll give you a B-.

You renamed the US Institute of Peace after yourself.  You spent months telling Oslo you deserved the Nobel Peace Prize. Yes, it’s true that some recipients didn’t deserve it either: Barack Obama was new in office and hadn’t done anything significant toward peace at that point. Henry Kissinger was a war criminal responsible for much harm during the Vietnam War, the Chilean Pinochet dictatorship that followed the US-aided coup, and many other foreign policy debacles. But still, if you have to nominate yourself for the peace price and name an institution that is supposed to be independent after yourself, it doesn’t scream “qualified.” It actually says “laughably insecure and demanding.” Grade: D-.

Then there’s Ukraine. You’ve been so inconsistent that nobody knows where you stand. You berate the Ukrainian president in person on national TV. Next, you tell Putin to negotiate. Then you bring forward a proposal so lopsidedly Russia-centric that even Mitch McConnell dismissed the plan and said Putin had made a fool of you. One key principle of peacemaking: It has to include all the sides and let all of them at least claim some small victory, which this plan utterly fails to do. Grade: F.

How about relations with our near neighbors? You’ve killed at least 87 people in 22 separate attacks on vessels in the Caribbean, claiming that they were smuggling drugs. You’ve provided no evidence that this is true (and your long record as a massive serial liar doesn’t boost our confidence). And even if it were true, the proper procedure is to interdict and seize the boat, arrest the crew, and hold the cargo as evidence—not to blow it out of the water without warning. Both Colombia and Venezuela have accused you of extrajudicial murder. At least two of those were killed while clinging to the wreckage after you destroyed their boat, in clear violation of international law.  And it’s hard to believe that you really care about keeping drugs out of this country when you just granted a full pardon to the former president of Honduras, who had just started serving more than 40 years for a huge cocaine smuggling operation. There’s widespread speculation that this is really about setting your sights on Venezuela’s oil, and that you’re willing to start a war against them. Grade: F.

And then there’s your “peacemaking” right here in the  good old United States of America.

  • You send armed, masked goons to snatch honest, hard-working non-criminal immigrants away from jobs, loved ones, and decent places to live,  without a shred of due process. Sometimes, your goons snatch up people who have citizenship or permanent residence. Other times, you target people who are going through all the proper steps of being able to stay legally. This creates terror, not peace. It serves no useful function, disrupts families and the economy, and makes the whole country unsafe. Grade: F.
  • You rip the safety net apart, causing economic dislocation of the kind that encourages crime, making our streets less safe and less peaceful.
  • Your energy policies, pushing the most destructive, resource-intensive, and economically unworkable energy options, will lead to resource conflicts, which will lead to more wars. Grade: F.
  • Finally, your public language is the opposite of a peacemaker’s. You issue all sorts of smears against people of color, non-Christians, people with disabilities, even those who happen to belong to a different political party, as well as people you have specifically named and declared they are your enemies. You are an attack dog with a remarkably thin skin who insults others but has zero tolerance for dissent. To paraphrase Three Dog Night, “That ain’t the way to make peace, please.” Grade: F.

So if you want to be seen as a peacemaker, you have to become one. That’s going to take major restructuring of your whole way of being president. Are you up to the challenge? I’d love to see you succeed at embracing peace and would cheer you on publicly if you’re sincere. I’m not optimistic that you’re up to it—but I’d love to be proven wrong.

 

Facebooktwitterpinterestlinkedinmail