Trump’s high point, low point and turning point

by Eric Jackson

On December 1 the Republicans pulled off the biggest political raid on the public coffers in US history, with well over $1 trillion in tax giveaways to the very rich and their corporations. Note that the Senate’s tax cuts for business do not extend to most small businesses, which are the ones that are most likely create jobs and new economic spaces into which other people and companies can grow.

It will take a little while for the cuts in services and benefits that will flow from this plutocratic heist to make themselves generally felt among the electorate at large, but that will be coming. Republicans and corporate Democrats may be enhanced by even more money in their campaign coffers, but for the foreseeable future all other divisions in US society recede before a gaping chasm over economic class. More and more, variations on that theme will be the stuff over which Democratic primaries and general elections will be fought. Democratic unity on the Senate floor will do little to help the party establishment from a rank-and-file clamor for change in the face of this defeat.

So, was it a big Republican victory? Perhaps. They now have something that they will spend the next few years defending. But it was overall a horrible day for Republicans. Lieutenant General Michael Flynn copped a plea and turned state’s evidence against Donald Trump and members of Trump’s family. It will be an accelerating legal and public relations rout for the Republican administration from now until Donald Trump leaves office. The GOP will fight next year’s congressional elections wearing the taint of disloyalty and corruption.

Flynn was probably not a double agent in the sense of a spy for two sides. He was a multiple agent with a duty of loyalty to the United States both as an army general and as a member of an incoming administration. Despite that he served as an agent on behalf of a repressive Turkish government, illegal Israeli appropriations of Palestinian lands and Kremlin desires to get out from under US sanctions. A private US citizen might lobby for any of those causes, but Flynn had a legal and ethical duty to refrain from that.

So is some Republican going to bring up the infamous revolving door between government and corporate work and point out the foreign influences that were asserted or attempted to be asserted through the Clinton Foundation? And will some Democrat point to Republican foundations that have done more or less the same things? All those nasty things might be truthfully said.

December 1 was a turning point and there will be no going back. The Republican tax cuts will have to be repealed as an existential necessity for the republic, but there will not be and should not be a return to what was. That’s not to suggest a halfway compromise return to the old schedule, but rather something different that does not make much reference to what was. Perhaps it might mean keeping the corporate tax breaks and extending these to small businesses, but jacking up tax rates for those individuals in the highest brackets to far more than they were before this latest legislation. Perhaps it might mean an end to US taxation for Americans earning their livings abroad, but tighter restrictions on companies and individuals in the USA who would want to send their wealth offshore.

There will also be no return to the pretenses that were made before Flynn’s guilty plea. Perhaps the Republicans will want to cut their losses and promote the quick impeachment of Donald Trump, so that Democrats can complain about a President Pence, the right-wing religious fanatic, rather than this bizarre and corrupt piece of work that is President Trump. The tax bill shows Republicans riding high in the water, but make no mistake about it. Their ship is sinking.

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Panama’s best-loved public institution

Yes, November 28 is a legal holiday because that’s when Panama City joined a revolt that started in the Interior and definitively separated the isthmus from Spain, back in 1821. But it’s also the anniversary of the founding in 1885 of this country’s oldest and most beloved public institution, the Cuerpo de Bomberos or Firefighters Corps.

It’s a core of full-time professionals bolstered by a larger group of volunteers. They’re not only on call for fires, but also for floods and other disasters. These are the people who go into burning buildings from which others have fled in terror, and who wade into flood waters to pluck out those having difficulty getting to higher ground like their neighbors. Plus they have the country’s coolest marching bands.

Wouldn’t it be nice, not only for the bomberos but for everyone, if such less loved public institutions like the National Assembly and the Presidency saw to it that the bomberos were properly funded? The are not equipped as they should be to fight fires in and rescue people from tall buildings. Notoriously in Colon’s city center, but in other places as well, fire hydrants don’t get enough water pressure. Bomberos even get sent in to fight fires without proper boots, gloves, coats and breathing apparatus. And for such an international place as we are, our emergency response switchboards are underdeveloped for dealing with the many languages encountered here.

So let not parades be our only occasion to show our appreciation for the bomberos. They protect all of us every day and deserve proper support every day.

 
Honduras

A vote count that should have been done within less than 12 hours, with final results held off for several days? Let us hope that this is a fruitless final manipulation by a miserable corrupt death squad regime that came to power in a 2009 coup. Latin America’s democracies, left and right, have a lot of problems. The violent overthrows of elected governments and rigged elections make things worse and Honduras has been a poster child for that. And please, President Varela, if former Honduran officials come fleeing here, don’t let them in.

 
Net neutrality

In Panama years ago, we saw what the Republicans on the FCC are trying to do in the United States, with worldwide implications. Back then Cable & Wireless Panama blocked The Panama News website from being seen by their subscribers, and when people complained they falsely told people that we had gone out of business. At the time it appeared that it was a move to force websites in Panama to US that company’s web hosting services.

Telecom monopolists would shut The Panama News and many other websites from all over Latin America out of access to those who surf the Internet in the USA. This they would do to extort ransom. It would harm US foreign relations by dumbing down Americans about the rest of the world worse than is already the case. It would cause immediate trade conflicts between the United States and many other countries. It would reduce the interchanges of ideas and culture between Panama and its diaspora communities in the USA. It would have that effect with Americans who hail from, or whose recent ancestors have come from, many other places. In the long run — and not actually THAT long — it would lead to international rejection of and retaliation against the US companies that think that they will cash in by ending net neutrality.

Becoming a pariah is the usual thing that happens to stick-up artists. But these folks have led privileged lives that have kept them from learning that lesson. Let’s raise a hue and cry now, so that they don’t learn the hard way at everybody else’s expense.

 
Bear in mind…
 

A terrible thought

by Uri Avnery — Gush Shalom

Suddenly, a terrible thought struck me. What if Avi Gabbay really believes what he is saying?

Impossible. He cannot really believe all those things. No, no.

But if he does? Where does that leave us?

Avi Gabbay is the new leader of the Israeli Labor Party. Until recently, he was a founding member of a moderate right-wing party, Kulanu (“We all”). Without ever being elected to the Knesset, he served as a junior minister. He resigned when Avigdor Lieberman, considered by many as a semi-fascist (and the “semi” is far from certain), was allowed to join the government as Minister of Defense, the second most important post.

In a bold move, Gabbay left Kulanu and joined the Labor Party (also known as “the Zionist Camp”) and was soon elected its chairman. However, he did not become the official “Leader of the Opposition,” because he was not a member of the Knesset. (The formal title remained with his predecessor, the very nice but rather insignificant Yitzhak Herzog.)

One of Gabbay’s outstanding qualities is the fact that he is “Oriental,” an Eastern Jew. He is the seventh of eight children in a family that immigrated from Morocco in 1964, just three years before his birth.

This is very important. The Labor Party is decried as “Western” (or Ashkenazi), the party of the social elites, estranged from the mass of the Orientals. It must overcome this characterization if it ever wants to attain power again.

In the Likud Party, the situation is the exact opposite. The mass of Likud voters are Orientals, but Binyamin Netanyahu is as Ashkenazi as you can get. The Orientals adore him, as they have never adored any Oriental leader.

But Gabbay’s origin is not his only attribute. From his humble beginnings he climbed the heights of economic success. He became the CEO of one of Israel’s most important corporations, amassing a personal fortune on the way.

He is not a charismatic leader, not a person to arouse the masses. Indeed, his face is easily forgotten. But he took with him from the business world a sound, logical way of thinking. In politics, logic is a rare commodity. It can be obstructive.

The question now is: where does logic take him?

During his few months as leader of the Labor Party, Gabbay has deeply shocked many party members. Shocked them to the core.

About once a week, usually on Shabbat, Gabbay lets loose a statement that seemingly contradicts everything the party has stood for during its more than one hundred years of existence.

He once declared that peace does not mean that any of the many dozens of settlements in the occupied territories must be removed. Until then, the party line was that only the “settlement blocs” — located hard on the Green line — could remain, within the framework of an agreed exchange of territories, and that all the others must be removed. Gabbay’s announcement caused quite a stir, since it probably makes the “two-state solution” impossible.

On another occasion, Gabbay announced that he would never set up a coalition with the “United List,” the only Arab list in the Knesset. This list consists of three separate — and very different — Arab parties, which were compelled to unite when Lieberman (the same) raised the minimum electoral threshold in order to eliminate them.

It is very difficult (if not impossible) to put together a leftist majority in the Knesset without the Arab list. The Oslo agreement would never have come into being if the Arab members had not given their unwavering support to Yitzhak Rabin (but without joining his government).

To make matters worse, Gabbay announced that the only Arab member of the Labor Party in Parliament — a popular sports commentator — would not be in the next Knesset. His crime: he criticized the Balfour Declaration of 1917, which promised the Jews a national home in Palestine, which at the time was an Arab land.

The climax (so far) came last week, To top it all, Gabbay did something that many Labor members found abhorrent.

There are in Israel tens of thousands of non-Jewish African refugees, especially from Sudan and Eritrea. They have been held for several months in an open semi-detention facility, which is vastly superior to conditions at home. Others vegetate in the poor quarters of Tel Aviv, doing occasional jobs and competing with poor inhabitants, making them very angry.

Israel claims to be a “Jewish State.” Jews have been persecuted refugees for centuries. But now the government has decided not only to stem the flow, but to pay to dispose of the refugees who are already here: paying the government of Rwanda 5000 dollars for every refugee they accept from us. The refugees themselves will also get 3500 dollars each if they go voluntarily. If they refuse, they will be put in a real prison indefinitely.

Deported? Imprisoned? In a “Jewish” state? Incredible. And here comes Gabbay and calls upon his party to vote for this atrocity!

As if all this was not enough, Gabbay said something else incredible. He denounced his party’s stand on Judaism.

Years ago, Netanyahu was caught on camera whispering into the ear of a very old rabbi that “the Labor Party has forgotten what it means to be Jewish.” Incredibly, Gabbay repeated this accusation, announcing that the Labor Party had indeed “forgotten what it means to be Jewish.”

Nothing could be more shocking than that. The party was founded a century ago by convinced atheists, like David Ben-Gurion, who refused to put a kippah on his head even at funerals. (Sometimes even I do so out of courtesy to religious mourners.)

The entire Zionist enterprise started as a rebellion against religion. Almost all the important rabbis of his day condemned Theodor Herzl, the founding father, as a heretic and cursed him in no uncertain terms. God Himself evicted the Jews from their country because of their sins, and only God could send His Messiah to bring them back there, if and when He pleases.

The Zionist Labor Movement has always been profoundly atheistic, except for minuscule religious elements. What Gabbay was saying now amounted to an ideological revolution. (By the way, gabbay is the Hebrew word for the administrator of a synagogue.)

Nobody is quite sure what “to be Jewish” means nowadays. Does Judaism represent a religion, a nation, or both? Does it only mean that one identifies with Jewish history and tradition, or that one believes in a God who has “chosen us from among the peoples”? And who the hell cares?

So does Gabbay really believe all this stuff, or is it just political propaganda?

It may well be the latter.

Gabbay is a seasoned businessman. His logic is that of a businessman. It adds numbers.

There are two ways to view the Israeli political landscape. One is the simple one: adding election results. According to this system, the Right now enjoys a clear majority. Apart from the Likud, it consists of two extreme rightist parties, the “Jewish Home” and “Israel is Our Home,” Kulanu and two Orthodox parties. The Left (or “Center-Left” as they like to call themselves these days) consists of Labor, Meretz, Ya’ir Lapid’s “There is a Future” and the Arab list.

To change the balance, Labor must win over a considerable number of voters from the moderate Right.

Another way of looking at the picture sees a rightist minority facing a leftist minority, with the great mass of the people in between. The result is the same: the Center-Left must win over enough voters to change the balance.

How? Gabbay’s answer seems logical: steal the clothes that the Right hung out to dry, as Churchill once put it. Meaning in practice: adopt the slogans of the right, look religious, act chauvinistic, make it possible for Rightist voters to vote for you.

That seems to be Gabbay’s tactic. Can it succeed? In political life, the proof of the pudding is in the eating. If he can attract enough right-wing voters, he may change the balance. If his party loses voters on the left, no problem. They will vote for Meretz, which makes no difference. And if the Arabs are very angry, that makes no difference either: they have no choice but to support a leftist government “from the outside.”

But what if this approach leads to disaster? Political logic is quite different from business logic. It is not based on a 2 + 2 = 4 equation. In politics the answer may well be 3 or 5.

And then it hit me. What if this is not a political tactic at all? What if Gabbay really believes in all this?

God save us!

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