My Blog Week: July 26 to August 1

A Word on the Week

Twilight of the Old Regime

Two threats came to us this week, on record—threats that can’t be called overt. But no longer queued items not yet floated. The postponing of the election, out of the president’s mouth (tweet fingers), and the after-echo, that flaccid volleyball tossed from Mike Pompeo to Bill Barr, that opened up a constitutional certainty to question.

Can it be that, until the Justice Department looks into the matter and makes some determination, no one knows whether the election can be postponed..?

Barr, Trump, and the late Jeffery Epstein are part of a circle, or moved/move through the intersections of more than one circle. The members are predators, and predators come at their victims by pretending they’re not serious. They get the victim to accept the first thing; then they encroach further in introducing the next. The victim accepts the first thing because she doesn’t understand this to be a step taken.

Point one: Trump’s defenders would have us believe him sarcastic, or that more shadowy, more backgrounded figures are playing the news media by raising distractions, a ploy that by now is played out. They’re a humorous bunch in the White House, it seems, but why should anyone care? The class clown, at the end of the school term, still gets his grade from the teacher. America can bide the time, adding each new eruption to the list of wrongs to right. We can do this without failing to deplore the deplorable, keep outrage over outrageous behavior alight; also while laughing at the actually funny responses of…late night TV, most of Twitter, average people everywhere…to the president’s joking ways. 

Point two: Adding months to the campaign season means effectively wasting money spent on early advertising, while imperiling the raising of additional funds—big donors must have their limits on half-million-dollar-a-plate dinners, while small donors, to thwart their MAGA urgings, have growing poverty.

On top of which, Republicans would feel pressured to side with the president and laud the postponement. Should the idea prove unpopular at all…another few inches of the party’s grave dug. (And Mitch McConnell himself is showing resistance to Trump on this.)

One heads up, though, for threats. It’s nothing new for corporate interests to tell workers they don’t need protective gear. Below, three examples, out of many, many, including the World Trade Center cleanup workers and those responding to the nuclear accidents at Chernobyl and Fukushima. 

The Center for Public Integrity: Former Cleanup Workers Blame…

Pensacola News Journal: Lawsuit Alleges BP Ignored…

Bloomberg Business Week: America’s Worst Graveyard Shift…

The anti-mask movement is worth watching, for the life-of-its-own it’s capable of taking on. Even Trump’s public admission that masks should be worn, didn’t cause the MAGAs to instantly drop their complaints. (A mask is about as uncomfortable as a pair of reading glasses…and no one seems crazy enough to suggest we’d have been born wearing glasses if God had intended it….)

There are rich entities whose talking points are well-rehearsed, who would like to have it not be suggested the workplace is hazardous. And if they can be flamed up by FOX news pundits or anyone else they listen to, the MAGA mob will be a democracy-threatening, public-welfare-endangering tool ready to follow its next Pied Piper. The Trumpensteins, in short, haven’t really controlled this backlash from the start, and Biden’s election won’t take away the corporate incentive to shortchange workers, thus to distribute undermining propaganda against activism.