Another Domino Falls Against Trump

Oct 24, 2023

I’m limiting myself to sharing a few links today due to schedule demands. (I’ll explain in the near future)

***

Jenna Ellis becomes the latest Trump lawyer to plead guilty over efforts to overturn 2020 election Via the Associated Press

Ellis, 38, pleaded guilty to a count of aiding and abetting false statements and writings. She had been facing charges of violating Georgia’s Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act and soliciting the violation of oath by a public officer.
The guilty plea from Ellis comes just days after two other defendants, fellow attorneys Sidney Powell and Kenneth Chesebro, entered guilty pleas. That means three high-profile people responsible for pushing baseless legal challenges to Democrat Joe Biden's 2020 election victory have agreed to accept responsibility for their roles rather than take their chances before a jury.

***

GLOBAL WARMING HAS FOCUSED concern on land and sky as soaring temperatures intensify hurricanes, droughts and wildfires. But another climate crisis is unfolding, underfoot and out of view.
Many of the aquifers that supply 90 percent of the nation’s water systems, and which have transformed vast stretches of America into some of the world’s most bountiful farmland, are being severely depleted. These declines are threatening irreversible harm to the American economy and society as a whole.
The New York Times conducted a months-long examination of groundwater depletion, interviewing more than 100 experts, traveling the country and creating a comprehensive database using millions of readings from monitoring sites. The investigation reveals how America’s life-giving resource is being exhausted in much of the country, and in many cases it won’t come back. Huge industrial farms and sprawling cities are draining aquifers that could take centuries or millenniums to replenish themselves if they recover at all.

***

Crime used to be a lot worse in the United States. The homicide rate has dropped by nearly a third in the last three decades.
Feel safer? Probably not, because right-wing politicians demagogue the crime issue relentlessly. They seem determined to make people think the sky is falling and the answer is to put more people in jail, put more guns in Americans’ hands, and (of course) put more Republicans in office.

***

We cannot understand the 75 years since the creation of Israel without understanding the 75 years that preceded it. I mean, you can try, if it makes you feel better, and gives you a false sense of moral superiority, to start in the middle. It starts with Bismark, though, and nation-states in Europe denying Jews citizenship, denying Jews the right to own land and the right to run businesses, appropriating land and property that was theirs, in the latter part of the 19th century. If that did not happen, there would have been no Zionist movement. Had the British not “won” Palestine to rule as a colony from the Turks who had ruled it as a colony in the world war, the idea of self-determination would likely have not entered the Palestinian consciousness, as what was known as Palestine, and the greater Middle East from Iran to Egypt, had been ruled by colonizers for two thousand years.
And the Turks would have started to attempt to exterminate Zionists after finishing off the Armenians.
I don’t need to tell you what happened to Jews between the world wars, and during the second one.
Lloyd George had it right, 20 years after the first world war, a year before the start of the second, when he was frank with Ben-Gurion, which is where we started:
“During the world war they gave the Arabs and the Jews conflicting assurances. We sold the same horse twice.”

***

This basic analysis—companies exist to make profits and nothing else, so expecting them to have values is foolish—may sound familiar from the Wall Street Journal variety of the political right. The key difference, though, is that those people argue that exempting companies from morality, and ceding to them the unfettered ability to perform their central function, will produce good outcomes for society. That is wrong, and absurd to anyone who has ever seen a community polluted by a strip mine or a Congressman in the pocket of a health insurance company.
In reality, the contempt that activists often aim at companies themselves—unbreathing, mindless entities who cannot be shamed—can and should be aimed instead at the people who benefit from corporate power, and who work to arrange the world so that corporations can continue their dominance of it. They are a bunch of Renfields, ghoulish servants of Dracula willing to help him suck humanity’s blood in order to further their own gain. This is a small but important distinction.
You cannot hurt Amazon’s feelings. You can, however, denounce Amazon’s CEO as a no good union busting cretin and spit in his sandwich if he comes into your restaurant. The machines can’t rule without their pathetic human allies. When the machines do evil things, it is the allies who deserve the shame.

Words & Deeds