This blog is dedicated to the struggles of people everywhere to advance human progress and save this planet from the decline of capitalism. Its focus, since 2011 has been supporting the emerging revolutions everywhere.
Since I am writing this as an example of everyday racism, I will need to identify people by their perceived colors. So, let me begin with myself. I am African American, and I look black as the word is used to define races. Now to my story:
1501 Lincoln Blvd., Venice, CA 90291
I've been shopping on-line for a new laptop, and since I had a little time before work this morning, I thought I'd see if I couldn't give a local brick-n-mortar establishment a little love instead. So I drove down to our local Staples, on Lincoln Blvd. in Venice, CA.
It didn't take me long to decide to buy a HP laptop they had on sale for less than $300, and this was the last day of the sale.
There was no stock around the sample, but it was in the brochure I had picked up when I entered the store, so with that folded to highlighted to the item I was interested in, I went towards the front of the store looking for someone who could get it for me.
Venice Staples inside on typical day
The store is laid out with many obstacles. Some are designed to invited you to buy. Others are designed to create a queue of customers for the cashiers to checkout. But this Saturday morning there was no one in line, and the lone cashier, a brown woman, wasn't helping anyone. However there was a white woman waiting at the adjacent service counter.
I approached this cashier in such a way that the obstacles designed to create their customer queue became a barrier to me. She saw my dilemma and signaled that I needed to come around to the other side. I am not a slow walker, but before a could get around the barrier and approach her, she had discovered the woman at the service counter and was asking her if she could help her.
How Staples provides shelter for the homeless in Venice
I spoke up, and pointed out that she knew I was headed towards her before she walked to the end of her area to lean over and ask the woman waiting at the service counter if she could help her first.
Later, when I asked her why she hadn't asked that woman if she needed help earlier, before she saw me approaching her, she said it was because another employee had been helping her, but had gone off to look for something.
By now, they were checking inventory for the laptop I wanted, and the store manager had gotten involved.
I was told that they were out of stock on that laptop. I asked for a rain-check to guarantee that price, since it was the last day of the sale. I was told that they don't do rain-checks, but that I could order it at the kiosk. I asked could I also order it from home online and was told that I could.
So imagine my surprise when I got home and looked it up at https://www.staples.com and found out that the $299.99 price was an in-store only deal!
They, did however, have the same laptop available online for a few dollars more. {$30 to be exact} They could ship it to me and I could receive it in a few days, or lucky me! I could pick it up at my local store on Lincoln in Venice, CA in a hour because they had stock there according to staples.com.
Somer cat was my partner for more than 17 years. Continuing the iconic style and timing that characterised her life, she died on New Year Eve.
We got her as a kitten in June 2001. We picked her because of her beautiful coloration and feisty attitude. My daughter Candice suggested the name Somer, saying "she's some of this and some of that." Somer was so young I had to hand feed her special food myself. She ended the same way.
She was a confident cat that would fiercely face challenges from all comers, large or small. For a brief spell in 2004, I had a housemate with a German shepherd. While my other cat, Cyrstal, would cower, Somer stood her ground, and let the big dog know that if he messed with her, there would be pain involved. She was also a very gentle cat that could exercise extraordinary control over her sharp instruments. I rarely received scratches from her, even when playing roughly with her in the nude. If I did, it was because she panicked in trying to hang on. Mostly, she trusted me.
She only bit me twice in all those years. The first time was shortly after we brought her home. She went into hiding. Her tiny meow seemed to reverberate throughout the apartment as we looked for her. I found the tiny creature in the space between the back of the kitchen cabinet drawers and the wall. As I reached over and down to scoop her up in the palm of my hand, she sunk her tiny teeth into me. Ouch! A kitten's teeth are at their sharpest. They were like needles. She was then so small that she easily fit into the palm of my hand, and as I bought her up, our eyes met. When she realized that I wasn't going to crush her in my hand, and I wasn't going to eat her, she released her bite and began a bond that would last a lifetime. The second time she bit me, just snapped at me really, was only a few days before she died, while I has trying to force feed her a food and medicine mix I had been preparing and giving to her each morning. I think she was trying to tell me it was time to give up and face the inevitable end of life.
Somer's scale
In April of this year I noticed that she had lost a lot of weight, and I started weighing her. I devised a system that used a hanging scale hung from a C-clamp on the edge of a kitchen counter. A clothe Google bag was hung from the scale. The bag weighed 0.18 lbs., and that had to be subtracted from the reading on the scale. The trick was always in getting her into the bag, and with her arms down, so that she would be still long enough to get a reading.
In my imagination I built another system. It put an electronic scale attached to a computer under her kitty litter pan. It would effortlessly, and regularly record the cat's weight by measuring the increased pressure when it got in it to do its business. Such a system would also record the frequency and timing of such visits, as well as the weight of the deposit left behind, all information a vet would find useful, and all gathered without having to wrestle a cat into a bag. I had no time to create such a system, I just had to learn how to get the cat into the bag. Fortunately, she was gentle, like I said.
I was surprised to find that she had slipped to about two-thirds her normal adult weight before I really noticed. It was only after my doctor alerted me to some of my own health problems back in April, that I started to look at her's as well. It begin with reading up on the care of geriatric cats, combined with adjustments to diet, I tried a lot of different foods, and a lot of weigh ins to monitor the results. That first alarming day, 7 April, I ordered Pet Ag Catsure Powder, 4 oz, Purina Pro Plan FOCUS Adult 11+ Indoor Care, and Tomlyn High Calorie Nutritional Gel for Cats. If you use Amazon, the way I do, you can use your order history to build a timeline of your life. For the record, these are the weights I recorded on a wall calender in the kitchen in the last nine months of her life.
April 7
8.08 lb.
April 9
8.14 lb.
April 11
8.34 lb.
April 14
8.26 lb.
April 24
8.44 lb.
April 28
8.38 lb.
May 1
8.54 lb.
May 7
8.44 lb.
For a few months it seemed like progress was being made. Her weight came up about a half pound and seemed to stabilize, although I did notice that she was drinking increasing amounts of water. What I noticed first was that she developed the new habit of lapping up water from the bathtub whenever I would run the shower. As soon as she heard water running in the bathroom, she would come to drink. At first I took it to be something special about licking up water from the porcelain, or the sound of the running water, because she had ready access to all the water she needed in her bowl. It was only later that I came to understand that this excessive drinking was her way of fighting the effects of kidney failure. Armed with this understanding, I started making sure she had ready access to water at multiple locations, and doing whatever I could to encourage her drinking habit.
One regular transaction that developed between us went like this: My morning routine would find me sitting on the toilet, and while on the toilet, I would start water running in the wash bowl so that I might soon have hot water for shaving. Somer would hear this and come rushing into the bathroom looking for some water. What to do? I'm still stuck on the toilet. But I could reach over and fill my bathroom glass with water and put that on the floor for her. It got so she would come into the bathroom whenever I was on the toilet and patiently wait for me to fill or refill the glass that more often than not, could be found on the floor. I think the sound of running water did trigger a desire to drink, and I was happy to encourage that at every opportunity. I think she also liked the idea drinking from the same glass as me, or maybe I just liked it.
By example, she taught me the importance of drinking more water. My doctors have been telling me this forever. Somer finally drove home the message that its no joke when your kidneys give out.
She also showed new interest in the foods I ate. I think she was looking for sources of high quality protein.
For 17 years she was the easiest cat in the world to feed. Friskies Seafood Sensations dry food was her staple. I fed her that almost exclusively, and she strived. I never could get her to cotton to canned foods until the last years of her life. I think the reason was that for so many years she lived in the shadow of Crystal, my older cat, who also died at age 17, in 2010. Crystal loved her canned Friskies, so I think to keep the peace, Somer stuck to the dry food, even long after Crystal was gone.
Now it was becoming increasing difficult to find anything that she would eat. She would eat some chicken, turkey or crab meat, if I was having some. Even then, not enough. Other foods, even canned tuna and chicken, let alone a countless variety of can and dry cat food, were also failing to turn the tide. For a long while, about the only thing she seemed interested in eating was kitty treats fed to her on the bed. I went through a lot of bags of kitty treats knowing that when she stopped eating those, we would really be in trouble.
May 26
8.56 lb.
May 31
8.52 lb.
June 7
8.42 lb.
July 9
8.66 lb.
July 20
8.64 lb.
Then, in late August, that's what happened. She'd lost a half pound from what I was starting to think of as her new normal, and then another 0.42 lb. in just a week! She stopped eating entirely. She had found a quiet corner on the balcony and was waiting to die. I couldn't get her to eat anything, and for days no solid waste was to be found in her kitty litter. I knew that a few more days without food would seal her fate for sure. Emergency time! What to do? With the encouragement of a neighbor, I decided to try to force feed her. I had gotten the Catsure nutriment when I first noticed the problem in early April, but after Somer turned her nose up at it, I set it aside. Now I mixed up a batch and fed it to her with a large eye dropper. It had the desired effect! I had never been so happy to find solid waste in the kitty litter. Finally, she had found a way to make me love her shit.
While it bought her back from the edge, she was never to regain much weight again. It was all downhill from there. In September, I went through 28 ozs. of Catsure in twice daily feedings with the eye dropper, but I knew that wasn't sustainable.
I became concerned that she might have lost her sense of smell, and realized that this could amount to a death sentence for a cat. They depend on smell to make food choices. As one veterinary blogger put it, to a cat that's lost its sense of smell, that just as well could be a pile of rocks you have put before it. Armed with this understanding, I was able to give a new interpretation to observed behavior.
Somer always loved her kitty treats. She could zero in on crinkling of the bag and come bounding up on the bed. Sometimes it would be problematic because no matter how quietly I tried to move the bag, if only to remove it from the bed, she would invariably become alerted. But if I wanted to treat her, or even to retrieve her from whatever hiding place, it was only enough to krinkle the kitty treats bag. If only I could have taught her to find my bluetooth earbud and bring it with her.
Then this behavior changed. At first, she would still bound up onto the bed at the sound, but them she would just sniff around, but not eat any of the treats. Then, increasingly, she wouldn't even be called by the sound. At first I just assumed she was losing her appetite for them. Then it occurred to me that what might be happening was that the sound was alerting her to the presence of the treats, but she depended on smell to actually find them. If she had lost her sense of smell, she wasn't finding the treats even as she was sniffing at them, and maybe that's why she wasn't eating them.
I had no way to test her sense of smell, but assuming it was gone or going, her life depended on finding a new way of identify food. The old cat had to learn a new trick. I discovered that if I krinkled the bag, while she could see the treats coming out of the bag and still next to the bag, rather than being tossed out on the bed, she would again start eating the treats. She was able to make a direct association between the sound and the treats. Once she started tasting them, that took over.
I stopped the Catsure feedings after she ran away by leaping to my neighbor's balcony about four feet away. We're on the second floor. I was so afraid that she was going to die over there before I could retrieve her. When she returned on her own, I built a cardboard wall to try to stop her from doing it again, but she so imperiled herself trying to get over my wall that I took it down. I promised then to stop trying to force feed her and let her die on her own terms.
Although she looked to be little more than skin and bones, it didn't seem to bother her too much. She didn't appear to be suffering. She spent her days as she usually had, relaxing in the sun or watching the world from the balcony wall. Still, there was always this nagging question: Was I trying to keep her alive for her or for me?
Although she regained some appetite, and I managed to get a variety of foods into her, she continued to lose weight over the next three months.
August 22
8.14 lb.
August 29
7.72 lb.
September 10
7.5 lb.
September 20
7.34 lb.
October 1
7.1 lb.
November 1
5.94 lb.
November 11
6.06 lb.
November 20
5.84 lb.
By late November she was little more than skin & bones, but still having fun
On this Sunday morning, 25 November, I woke up smelling of cat piss. Somer had peed on the bed. This is something she hadn't done before. She was sending me a very powerful message. Although, because of the renal issues, the piss was weak. It was time to take her to the vet. The $377 bill I received for the vet visit confirmed my reason putting it off for so long. The vet weighed her at 5.7 lb. and confirmed the renal failure I already suspected and added hyperthyroidism to the mix. These are the things cats die from if they are lucky enough to die from old age. There is no cure for old age, nor these organ failures, but their deterioration can be retarded. The drug recommended to treat the thyroid condition is bad for the kidneys, so monthly vet visits and lab tests to the tune of +$300/month for as long as we could keep her alive were prescribed. The vet's price for his recommended pharmaceuticals and such came $103 for the first order. I found an online pet pharmacy that could deliver the goods for half that price. It took 3 requests from them, and 2 requests from me directly to the vet to get that approval, but when I cc'd some of my local friends on the second request, the vet finally relented and allowed the low cost pharmacy to fill the order. Then they took their sweet time. The upshot was that I received this medication more than two weeks after it had been ordered. This didn't help matters.
There were four or five medications that I was to deliver orally. This proved to be a problem as it made for some very stressful times for Somer and me. Also, she became very good at holding the pills in her month calmly for however long I chose to hold her upside down with her mouth closed, until I finally would release her, and then she would spit out the pill, or what was left of it. Finally, I settled on the method of grinding all the pills up and mixing with the Catsure power and water into a surrey I could feed to her with the dropper. I never felt sure all these drugs were necessary. I was sure each had its own cost.
I bought a Christmas tree this year. I hadn't done so in many years. Not since my children had grown up, but I missed the pine smell, I remember how fascinated Somer was by the sparkling Christmas tree when she was a kitten, and I was pretty sure this would be her last Christmas. She made a home for herself under that tree. She spent her last days their, drinking from large pan watering the tree, and hiding in its seclusion.
Probably the most effective therapy, the one that showed the most visible results was giving her subcutaneous fluids to relieve dehydration. I found a couple of YouTube videos that gave good guidance. The fluid comes in 1000ml. bags and is delivered 50 - 100ml per treatment with an IV tube set and a needle, except you don't actually stick the needle into a vein. I wouldn't even know how to find a vein on a cat. You stick it into a tent you make by pulling up the skin on the back of the neck. The fluid goes under the skin and from there to where it is needed in the body. At first, the idea of sticking a needle into my cat scared me, but she didn't seem to mind at all. I made a place for the treatment in a old blue plastic parts bin. I lined it with old towels so she could be comfortable. It had a sloped lower wall on the front, as such bids do, so she could put her head on it and look out, but the other walls were higher, affording me good control. That hardly seemed necessary. She seemed to know these treatments were keeping her alive. Probably she felt better immediately after. Her last recorded weight was 5.98lb. on December 26. She finally had gained a little weight, probably because of the hydration.
Finding time for her medicine prep, feeding, and hydration became part of my regular schedule in December. For the hydration, I would put her in the bin and stoke her until she became comfortable and started to purr. She could still raise a purr till the end. She would give almost not reaction when I stuck the needle in. I don't think they feel pain there the way we do. That is where their mothers pick them up, and that is where they must be able to throw off the pain of battle to survive. In anycase, only once did she get away from me and throw off the needle. Most of the time she would rest there patiently while I administered the fluids. I would stroke her back and massage the area to speed the fluid flow until the determined amount was given. It became a special period of daily bonding in the last weeks of her life. She died while I was attempting the last such treatment on New Year eve morning.
I woke up that morning to find Somer in the bed with me again. Although that is where she slept for most of her life, not so much recently, so I was surprised to find that for the second morning in a row, I awoke to find her sitting on the bed watching the morning sun come up. After I got coffee, she went out onto the balcony to warm herself in the sun.
Balcony cat door
When I moved into this apartment thirteen years ago, I invented a way to create a cat door for Somer through the two large sliding glass doors without breaking any glass. As is usual with such patio or balcony doors, one door was fixed in its track, while the other was allowed to slide open or shut, and could be locked. I was surprised to find the non-sliding panel was fixed into place with just a few sheet metal screws. Creating the cat door then became a matter fitting a piece of wood about 4" wide and about 10" shorter than the height of the door. The non-sliding door was then slid over 4" and wood piece put in place so that the 10" gap provided a cat door at the bottom. This position and the wood piece were then fixed with screws. The other sliding door could then function as it normally would, but the cats could have access to the balcony no matter what. This made it very convenient to keep the kitty litter box on the balcony. It also gave this house cat access to a safe outside area. She even caught an unlucky bird there once and brought the present to me through that cat door. I have gone into such detail about this cat door arrangement because I invented it, but have never written about it before, and I know there are other people with cats [and dogs] that might find this trick useful.
Death Scene
I had a leisurely morning New Year Eve. Made breakfast, then laid in bed watching the morning news. As noon approached, I decided it was time to give Somer her medicine mix. I wanted to do it before I showered, in case it got messy.
It didn't go well. For the third day in a row she was really fighting it. I started out determined to make up for lost ground by giving her more than the daily dose, but by the third dropper full, it was clear that that wasn't happening. She had worked herself up into such a distressful state that I stopped entirely. This had happen before and I knew to let her catch her breath and normalize herself. I took her over to the bed and lay with her, she didn't seem to be recovering this time. What to do? I had planned to hydrate her after she did normalize herself. Since that didn't seem to be happening, I thought I would do it now and maybe that would help, I knew I was losing her. I took her over to the bin. I made the tent and got the needle in. I massaged the area and saw the fluid was flowing. Then I looked down and Somer was biting her paw! I forced her mouth open and removed it, but she immediately bit down on her tongue. There was a shutter, and then the life flowed right out of her. She looked peaceful in the end.
I always related to how Ernest Hemingway talked about cats in Islands in the Stream. Like when he wrote about a man who had inherited his son's cat:
Now the boy was gone and the kitten had grown into an old cat and had outlived him. The way he and Boise felt now, he thought, neither one wanted to outlive the other. I don't know how many people and animals have been in love before, he thought. It probably is a very comic situation. But I don't find it comic at all.
But now I had outlived Somer, and my grieving process began. The first stage, Denial, both passed very quickly, and in some sense, lingers to this day.
There was a moment, after she first went silent, when I wondered if she hadn't suddenly fallen into some sort of sleep state. I tried to see if I could detect shallow breathing, or any signs of life. I knew with a human, I would be trying CPR right now, or using the paddles if they were available. I had given no thought to implementing such emergency measures on a cat, and I quickly realized that even if I could somehow revive her, what would be the point given her advanced age and everything else? So, on a very basic gut level, I accepted her death within minutes. Long before the rigor mortis had set in, I knew that she was fully and irretrievable dead. Touching that rigid, cold body gave it a visceral feel I will never forget. I know this, and yet an element of denial lingers on because when the wind rustles the blinds just right, and makes the sound of Somer coming through the cat door, I still half expect to see her.
The second stage of the Five Stages of Grief: Anger, was easy. Both the vet and the pet pharmacy saw in Somer's geriatric issues, and my concerns, an opportunity for profit. If there was a silver lining to the way we had been treated by them, it was that they made ready targets for my anger. Consider this, one crucial thyroid medicine the vet prescribed for life, but the script was only for a 30 day supply and required new lab work before it could be refilled. Now there may have been very valid medical reasons for stipulating that, but the practical financial effect would have been that had Somer outlived that initial supply, another $300+ vet visit would be required for a refill. Consider also the vet's markup. He wanted to sell me 10 18gx1 needles for $6.00. I was able to purchase 20 of those needles for $2.15 from the CVS pharmacy across the street. Still, the anger subsided quickly, probably because I saw this coming for a long time and I have only myself to blame for bringing her to the vet so late in the game.
That brings us to Bargaining. I did a lot of that. What if I had taken her to the vet sooner? What if I knew that the uptick in water drinking heralded renal failure right away? What if I hadn't tried to force that third dropper of food/medicine on her? What if I had hydrated her first? I know that seventeen and a half is quite old for a cat. Still, I know that some get past twenty. Why couldn't Somer be one of those? And there were questions on the other side too: Would she have been better off if I had let her go in August? I do think that had she lasted another month, it would have been the worst month of her life, with the constant needle pricking and forced medication, but it would have been another month of life.
I think Somer showed great style by dying when she did on New Year Eve. It makes the date easy to remember, and it also meant that the weights I was recording on the calendar ended with the year. Later, I rang in the New Year at the Venice Beach Bar with old friends, and while I was sorry to have to bring them such a downer, I was grateful for their love and support. It was somehow quite fitting that she went out with the old year.
I also thought it showed great consideration in as much as I had that day and the next one off from work. I work from home as a Linux Systems Administrator for a large Internet Cloud company with facilities all over the globe and headquarters in San Antonio, TX. If I don't mention the name, I don't think I have to run this by anybody. Anyway, we have team meetings every Wednesday, I participate via video conference. At a meeting earlier in the year, another team member had to take some time off from work because of a death in the family, and I took that opportunity to warn everyone that I would probably need some time off also, when Somer died, even though she was only a cat. They all knew Somer because sometimes I would post pictures of her to our Slack channel, and occasionally I would even sit with her in my lap, Godfather style, at team meetings.
With a full two days to deal with it, I thought I should be able to put it enough behind me to be fit for work on Wednesday, but I knew I would need to tell people and that would bring the pain roaring back. I posted a death notice with a picture and a video on the Enterprise Linux Slack channel as soon as I got in. I spoke about it again in our team meeting and people gave me much support. I had to get through a second team leadership meeting, and then my manger scheduled a one-on-one after that, I think just to check on how I was doing. Fortunately for me, the second half of that day was self study time. I spent it reading about the Kessler-Ross theory on the Five Stages of Grief, which isn't exactly computer science, but was what I needed to understand in the moment.
Leave a dresser drawer open just a little and Somer would do the rest. Cat hair on my shirts before I even wore them.
The next morning, the forth stage, Depression, set in.
I don't start work until noon Pacific time, and initially I was looking forward to it. People already knew about the death of Somer, so that trama was dealt with. Plus no pesky meetings. I was looking forward to a rather ordinary day of working tickets and answering phone calls. Make it go away with work. Then it hit me, and I couldn't stop crying.
Flowers from my co-workers
There was a time most mornings, after I finally had my shave and shower and what have you, and I am settling down with my first cup of coffee to catch the morning news, that I could expect to first hear Somer coming through the cat door from the balcony and bounding up to say good morning. When I realized that was never going to happen again, the depression really set it. I told the Slack channel I would be taking the day for myself, and spent most of it listening to the blues, and crying. I also watched movies about grieving. James Bond in Quantum of Solace, and James Rockford in an episode of the Rockford Files in which he lost a girlfriend.
By Friday, I felt ready to go to work. After I checked in, my manager started asking had I received a package yet. When I did receive it, I found that my team members had sent me a bouquet of Peruvian Lilies for Somer. This kind gesture will always be remembered because it has helped me immensely with the final stage of grief - Acceptance.
I don't believe I have ever written about Somer in this blog before, but she has been here in every post. Her love and companionship have supported me in everything I have done over the last seventeen years. She lay at my feet through the long hours of editing Vietnam: American Holocaust. She provided much needed comic relief and diversion as I was researching horror stories in MENA. And she was always standing by to reward me with warm fur and a purr whenever I was ready to take a break from the work. In that sense, Somer's contributions live on in mine. May she rest in peace.
By now it should be clear to all that when Donald Trump talks about when America was "great" before, he is talking about a time when white men of wealth could rule without the challenges they face today, i. e. the good ole days of the 1950's or maybe even the 1850's. Ever since he came down a Trump Tower escalator to complain about so-called Mexican rapists and announce his candidacy, he has stood at the center of a last-ditch attempt by a segment of the US capitalist class to re-establish white supremacist rule in a radical new way that is likely to lead to fascist government in a few years if not stopped.
Jill not Hill equaled Trump
This successful attempt by a white supremacist cabal to seize executive power in the US government was aided in no small part by a white Left that rallied around the Green Party candidacy of Jill Stein. This group refused to acknowledge the extreme white nationalism and racism that distinguished the Trump candidacy. They declared that there were no significant differences between the two contenders, or even claimed that Donald Trump was the lesser of two evils. They campaigned for progressives to either cast a symbolic vote for Jill Stein, or just stay home. They never seriously tried to win over Trump voters. Their focus was on diverting Clinton voters to the Jill St. off-ramp This was, in effect, a voter suppression campaign every bit as effective as any run by the Russians or the Republicans, and without it Trump would have lost. Had the Jill Stein voters in just three states voted for Hillary Clinton instead, she would be president now.
Last Monday, Amy Goodman had Ralph Nader on Democracy Now to get his appraisal of the current situation. In spite of the Trump cabal's continuing fear-mongering about immigrants from the South, and the cruelty they are training Americans to accept in the government's treatment of people of color. In spite of the fact that the architects of this immigration madness see it as but a stepping stone to racist policies they hope to implement against all people of color, regardless of citizenship, Amy and her guest continue to remain mute on the racism driving Trump's policies and programs.
Note the cruelty he highlights in his wall.
Where does Nader address this?
Curiously, they also made no mention of either the Green Party or Jill Stein. What made this noteworthy was the fact that Ralph Nader ran as a Green Party presidential candidate, and appeared on DN in 2016 to promote Jill Stein's bid. Now he gets billing only as "former presidential candidate Ralph Nader," and the Green Party is nowhere to be seen.
What makes this particularly tragic is that during the 2016 presidential campaign, the line from Greens was even if they had no chance of winning, and might even throw the election to Trump, they were doing the really important work of building the political party that could lead the mass struggle in the future. Now the future has come, and not only is the Green Party no more effective than it ever was, many activists formerly known as Greens are striving to distance themselves from that history.
Ralph Nader pitching his new book on Democracy Now on Monday
To talk about all of this and much more, we’re joined by longtime consumer advocate and former presidential candidate [ of what party, Amy? ] Ralph Nader. He is author of the new book To the Ramparts: How Bush and Obama Paved the Way for the Trump Presidency, and Why It Isn’t Too Late to Reverse Course.
Ralph Nader, welcome back to Democracy Now! Let’s start where we ended, with that long list of just what’s happened this week,
We'll get to Nader's list in a moment. First, let's start with when he was on DN just before the election, because I think it can be fairly argued that Ralph Nader also paved the way for the Trump presidency, and I suspect that isn't covered in his new book.
Ralph Nader didn't notice the racism of the Trump campaign when he was on DN before the election, 19 September 2016, but he did rage against what he called "bigotry" in the 2016 presidential campaign:
[T]he idea of calling a third party “spoiler,” using the First Amendment right to run for office, is a politically bigoted word and should never be tolerated by the American people, because everyone has an equal right to run for office.
Just because you can run for office, it doesn't follow that you should run for office. If most progressive think like Ralph Nader, and write their own name in, while the reactionaries rally around a single candidate, a bad outcome will be assured, and banning the word spoiler won't change that arithmetic. Jill Stein was so taken by the fact that she could run for office, that she never considered whether she should run for office. Many warned Donald Trump can only win if Jill Stein stays in. She did stayed in, and on DN until election night, and he won.
Anyway, back to the present. Ralph Nader gives Amy Goodman a list of current political priorities as he sees them:
RALPH NADER: And we’re going to present to the progressive chairs of the House of Representatives a whole list of hearings that have to be held in order to put these in play, electorally, in terms of public opinion and in terms of civic action. I can give you a quick list if you’d like.
AMY GOODMAN: Go ahead.
RALPH NADER: OK. First, obviously, is one on single payer. Full Medicare for all...
There needs to be hearings on corporate crime by the Judiciary Committee...
5,000 people die every week in this country in hospitals due to preventable problems. We know what they are. There are no congressional hearings here.
There’s got to be congressional hearings on foreign policy...
Criminal justice reform, that one is long overdue...
How about climate devastation? I think we shouldn’t use the words “climate change.” It’s too benign...
So, you could just go list after list. Minimum wage, that should be up right away...
Good list. Except it fails to fight or even address the extreme white nationalism, both in rhetoric and program, that the Trump cabal uses to "rally its base." This is the terrain of the most important political struggle facing the country. This obviously includes all the fear mongering against brown immigrants that has been skillfully used to normalize a level of official cruelty to people of color that would have been intolerable only a few years ago. Shouldn't a progressive congress also challenge Trump on his border wall and Muslim ban, Nader?
Trump has also lead a very vocal attack against African American football players for protesting the racist killings of people of color at a time when those killing go unabated, and hate crimes by white supremacists, including racist murders, are on the rise. Where are these questions on Nader's list?
Maybe the new congress should exercise some oversight into the FBI's responds to the rising tide of white nationalist violence, and question why the new category of "Black Identity Extremist" was created by the Trump administration.
Much of Trump's support for white nationalists international, whether in Britain, Europe or South African has been done in concert with Vladimir Putin, and Russian ultra nationalists. Shouldn't the new congress also look into this?
Ralph Nader didn't exactly lead the fight against Trump before the election. Now he tries to see a silver lining where he can. For example, he thinks that "if they overturn judicially" ObamaCare "that opens the door" to single payer health care. Nevermind it will close the hospital door to thousands that need life-saving treatment right now.
He tells us that the gathering of synophants around Trump means he won't be around long:
The combination of Mulvaney, John Bolton and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is a lethal one even for Trump’s political survival. He’s trying to get sycophants around him, which is usually a late stage in the collapse of a regime.
His reading of history is meant to comfort and disarm us, when we should be most alarmed because that is not the lesson of history. Adolf Hitler had gathered his most important sycophants, including Joseph Goebbels, Rudolph Hess, Hermann Göring, and Heinrich Himmler as early as 1925, hardly the late stage in the collapse of his regime.
This Monday, the US government is going into a second day in a huge fight over what Nader called "a porous wall that is eroding farmer property values and ranchers on the Mexican border." The campaign to build the southern border wall is about distracting people from the real problems we face with fear of brown people. All the rhetoric ostensibly about border, is really about building a fear of the brown caravans. It certainly isn't about stopping drugs and terrorists. Unlike refugees, they are very mobile. They can and do cross the unguarded Canadian border with little trouble or controversy. Nader doesn't address the real purpose of Trump's border wall. He just thinks it won't work ["porous" - but that's not its purpose, Ralph.] And the worst thing - it will erode property values.
When Amy Goodman asked him for his thoughts on impeachment, Nader said "We shouldn’t make a big deal out of it." Since impeaching a president is a big deal any way you slice it, it sounds like Ralph Nader opposes impeaching Donald Trump. No doubt, this position was welcomed when he appeared on Fox News the day after his DN appearance to pitch his new book on Tucker Carlson.
Ralph Nader pitching his new book on Fox News Tucker Carlson on Tuesday
I registered my first Internet domain name, CosmosEng.com, in 1996, and over the years I have registered or bought many Internet domain names, sometimes on speculation. This morning I got the idea that it would be fun to own TrumpTowerMoscow.com. Since this wasn't an original idea, I wasn't surprised to find that someone else had beat me to the punch. TrumpTowerMoscow.com had already been claimed, although no corresponding website for it exists.
Instead it was parked on Godaddy, where they are offering to negotiate its sale:
It turns out that the domain name TrumpTowerMoscow.com is owned by the Trump Organization. The WHOIS database shows they first register it on 17 July 2008, which means Trump's interest in a Moscow Tower goes back over a decade. Five years later, he still kept hope alive, although there still was no website!
@AgalarovAras I had a great weekend with you and your family. You have done a FANTASTIC job. TRUMP TOWER-MOSCOW is next. EMIN was WOW!
Apparently, Trump's dream of a Moscow tower didn't die even after he became president, contrary to all his denials. The domain registration was last updated less than six months ago on 28 June 2018, the same day Trump sent out this tweet:
Russia continues to say they had nothing to do with Meddling in our Election! Where is the DNC Server, and why didn’t Shady James Comey and the now disgraced FBI agents take and closely examine it? Why isn’t Hillary/Russia being looked at? So many questions, so much corruption!
It doesn't expire until 1 July 2019, assuming it isn't renewed:
I'm seriously thinking of ponying up the seven buck, or better yet, contacting the Trump Organization directly, and making a bid. After all, it isn't being used, and Trump swears he's not interested in a Trump Tower Moscow anymore. If that is the case, might he be willing to part with it?
According to Democracy Now's own search facility, today's Death Notice was the first mention ofRaed Fares on Democracy Now. Google's much more thorough search engine also finds nothing before today's Headlines on Democracy Now.
For those familiar with the work of this Syrian revolutionary and the civilian society protest organization he lead, Kafranbel, this will sound extraordinary, but it is a true fact, and a damning commentary on the biased way Amy Goodman and Democracy Now have represent Syrian developments since the beginning of 2011.
Banner like these made Kafranbel famous worldwide, just not on DN
He came to Los Angeles, and I had an opportunity to hear him speak. The event was even announced on KPFK, but I guess Amy missed it. That was five years ago. We have cover Fares and Kafranbel manytimessincethen, as has just about anyone interested in honestly informing people about what the struggle in Syria, that has taken as many as a million lives, is all about. Clearly, that hasn't been Democracy Now. Raed Fares and Kafranbel should have had a dozen show segments by now, if DN really was an unbiased progressive outlet. Now that he is dead, its safe to talk about him, so today he finally got a HEADLINE:
Syrian Journalist Raed Fares, Who Faced Threats by Government and Rebels, Killed in Idlib
Syrian radio host and activist Raed Fares was shot dead in Idlib Friday, along with activist Hamoud Jneed. Fares founded Radio Fresh, an independent radio station broadcasting from inside opposition-held Syria. Fares joined the popular protests against the government of President Bashar al-Assad in 2011. In the following years, he documented the human cost of the war in Syria, exposing rights violations and the devastation of air strikes on civilians. Fares was targeted by both the government and opposition militants. He survived previous assassination attempts, a kidnapping and torture.
So the first ever Linux Beach CYA Awards goes to Democracy Now for Wednesday's first ever mention of Raed Fares. Now we can't say Amy never mentioned him, and now that he's dead, its safe to say a few words. Democracy Now knew that if their audience saw the Syrian Revolution through Raed's eyes, they would support it, and that's the last thing Amy wants. Way to go, Democracy Now! Don't ever change. We won't be able to use this logo.
I was told that they were out of stock on that laptop. I asked for a rain-check to guarantee that price, since it was the last day of the sale. I was told that they don't do rain-checks, but that I could order it at the kiosk. I asked could I also order it from home online and was told that I could. 
