Clancy Sigal's Blog

“Just the minute the FBI begins making recommendations on what should be done with its information, it becomes a Gestapo.”

- - J. Edgar Hoover, FBI chief, who constantly fed confidential files to his political friends


Before we rush to embrace the FBI’s “proud tradition of impartiality and neutrality” just because Trump screwed the pooch in firing its fumbling director Comey, just hold on a second.

A chunk of my life was spent hiding from, or being chased by, FBI agents who, in conversation, I found uniformly tightassed Organization Men and facelessly conservative. OK, this was in the bad old days of the gay-bashing, commie hunting, Mafia denying, blackmailing J. Edgar Hoover who no president from FDR to Nixon had the guts to fire because The Chief had the goods on them. (FDR’s mistress Lucy Mercer, Truman’s political ‘father’ Kansas City crooked boss Pendergast, Eisenhower’s girlfriend Kay Summersby, and let’s not even think Jack Kennedy.)

As a secret and (normally, until the past few days) secretive police the FBI was born in the 1920s to protect us from immigrants and radicals. Under its weird boss J. Edgar Hoover it never wavered from its reason for existence, the Red Hunt, reds to be defined loosely. It was, and still is, racist to the core.

If you saw Mississippi Burning with Gene Hackman and Willem Dafoe as heroic G men chasing the white killers of black civil rights workers, it’s a lie. I was in the south in the 1960s when Atty Gen Bobby Kennedy, to help his brother Jack’s re-election prospects, flooded Georgia (where I was) with white southern born FBI agents who did absolutely nothing except stand by passively while local white cops and their KKK allies brutalized African American kids and their parents.

As Kurt Vonnegut was fond of saying, And so it goes.

J. Edgar never died, his paranoid ghost stalks us. The agency is a rigid top down yessir nosir bureaucracy with a historical and irresistible tendency to break and bend laws. (It messed up the 9/11 investigation by not listening to its own whistleblowers. It loves entrapping dumb-as-dogshit, mentally retarded “terrorists”.) By many accounts, the agency was virulently anti Hillary and today is “Trumplandia” with agents openly admitting who they voted for.

Within living memory the agency engineered COINTELPRO, to illegally disrupt antiwar, civil rights and left groups; and colluded with presidents Kennedy and Nixon to smear Martin Luther King into (they hoped) suicide.

Shed no tears for Comey. Think what life is like for the occasional honest, trustworthy, Constitution-loving agent – they’re out there – under Comey, Trump and coming to work every morning in a building named for J. Edgar Hoover.

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Ps There are some really good books about the FBI by Curt Gentry, Tim Weiner and Seth Rosenfeld’s about the agency’s war on students.

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“Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive but to be young was very Heaven.”
– poet Wordsworth about the French revolution before it changed his mind


For a long time I lived among educated middle class English who had a passion, verging on sickness, for Panhellenism, a nostalgic look back to classical Greece (without the slaves and bad drainage) as a “second home”. This longing for a mythical, happier Greece swept Victorian England (and Germany) when people were shaken up by convulsive social change. New railroads, new women, new politics. Too much too soon in what Thomas Hardy called a “precipice of time”.

Nobody laughed when the poet Shelley announced, “We are all Greeks now.”

Today we live on the edge of just such a precipice.

Nostalgia cuts both ways. Longing for an idealized past can help us map out a dangerous but possible future. It can also handicap our desire for change by miring us in a fantastical historically distorted “good old days”.

I’m terribly guilty of this because in my ceaseless search for “ancestors” I sometimes idealize the worst parts of the Great Depression, even the war years, their violence and poverty and racism, as well as the good stuff like the three-cent stamp and mass strikes and factory-occupy movements that grew the New Deal-era labor movement and thus our middle class.

Other people’s nostalgia takes different forms, like an inspiring look back to the Vietnam antiwar protests or feminist marches or blaming Russia or the Electoral College for a mismanaged liberal campaign. Or, more historically, enshrining the Abolitionist movement as peaceful Quakers rather than armed militants.

Since I’m impossibly drawn to the past, to my own antiquity, for comfort as well as instruction, a question is how to use our own experiences, including our parents and their parents – and their dreams - to turn back the death wave coming out of Mar-a-Lago.

In his campaign Donald Trump and his trolls successfully exploited nostalgia as a political tool by painting a fake picture of a 1950’s Rinso-all-white America without all these irksome African Americans, border crossing Latinos and defiant women – without What Makes America Really Great. His Oz had a mighty appeal for voters who were hungry for something they weren’t quite sure what except to trust a compulsive liar’s promise that whatever is wrong “I can fix it.”

Our side never learned to use nostalgia as effectively and emotionally as he did and does.

Democrats and liberals are often accused of being poor at “the vision thing”. Probably true, since we tend to believe poll numbers more than our creative memories.


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In a few days France’s version of Hillary Clinton, a bland young Rothschild investment banker named Emanuelle Macron faces off in a crucial presidential election against France’s lovely blonde fascist Marie Le Pen the daughter of an outright Nazi lover.

It’s a sexy election, literally. Unprecedentally, the current socialist president Francois Hollande (Macron was his deputy) is ducking re-election due to a pile of women troubles. His long time mistress and mother of his four kids, Segelene Royal, a formidable politician in her own right, angrily split from pudgy Hollande when he brazenly took a new mistress into his palace while also chasing – on a moped! - a young actress. Oh, those hypersexualite French.

Meanwhile, “centrist” Macron – technocratic, pro Europe and indifferent to the immigrant suburbs, deaf like Hillary to blue collar workers – has the most intriguing marital setup. As a 16 y.o student he fell in love with his 39 y.o. drama teacher whose eldest daughter was also in Macron’s class. Despite fierce parental objections and vicious small town gossip, they’ve stayed married for 24 years, he now 39 she 64. If that doesn’t get him the vote of mature women like Isabelle Huppert and Juliet Binoche then nothing will.

May 7’s spoiler is France’s Bernie, the egoistic, ex-Trotskyist Jean Luc Melanchon who, like Macron, seemed to “come out of nowhere” and in his case excite and galvanize youngsters. He got a lot of votes but not enough for the final round. At the moment he is sulking in his tent by refusing to support either “liberal” Macron or fascist Le Pen. The practical result is that about l/5th of Melanchon’s resentfuls will probably go to the fascist who is angling for their votes, and many once-reliable left voters in the immigrant quarters, disgusted by broken promises, will also abstain.

(The German communists similarly shot themselves in the head – and paved Hitler’s way – by denouncing rival socialists as “social fascists”).

As in our own recent election formerly leftwing miners’ and factory towns voted for Le Pen.

This is the way to defeat fascism?

Sex aside, the 7 May presidential election (voting for the Assembly, like our Congress, is in June) is a teaching moment for us here.

The question is, as it was for us in November, do we lay aside political principles – our virtue – to unite with ANYONE – to defeat a fascist? My dream coalition can include pro-life women, evangelicals, second-thought racists and Limbaugh rednecks – the deplorables temporarily willing to join hands, gingerly, with us adorables if we drop our clannishness to make some sort of opening.

What’s wrong with promiscuous openness?

As we bitterly learned in November there were enough grumbling youth and anti-Hillary abstentions and pro-Bernies paralyzed by rage to conceivably throw the election to Trump. We’ll never know.

Faced with a nightmare in the White House – the NYT keeps calling the little hitlers “right wing populists” – do you throw your biases out the window? Or have the integrity to follow that great American labor radical Gene Debs who advised, “It is better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.”

Welcome, enemy.

“There is s chance that we could end up having a major, major conflict with North Korea. Absolutely,” - - Trump

“The time for strategic patience (with North Korea) is over” – vice prez Pence

“War against US imminent” – North Korean statement after another of its missiles fail


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I graduated from college on June 30, 1950 the day North Korean communists invaded capitalist South Korea with Red Chinese and Stalin’s help. As the civil war dragged on miserably the newly liberated Chinese sent in ‘volunteer’ soldiers and the Russians secretly flew MIGs against U.S. jets in what Pres. Truman called a “UN police action”.

Both North and South Koreans were ferocious, hating fighters in a proxy Cold War between the USA and Russia.

We forget, but Koreans don’t, that Japan “owned” Korea as a semi slave colony until the end of WW2. The core of North Korea’s tough army was composed of long time anti Japanese guerrillas.

The 1950s war, ended in a three year stalemate where it began on the 38th Parallel splitting the peninsula in half. The country was awash in the blood of massacres, executions, and no quarter to the enemy including slackers on your own side. (Friends who fought later in Vietnam tell me that of all the Allied units the Koreans were the most savagely unforgiving.)

In seesaw battles the Communists made a point of executing intellectuals, and the South Koreans mowed down many of their own people suspected of “tendencies”.

Curtis Le May’s bombers pretty much destroyed North Korea until there were no more targets to hit. The south was devastated; the north a napalmed wasteland. All in the name of “reunification” by one side or another.

At the time, argued some leftists and the independent journalist I.F. Stone, the south was as guilty of aggression as the north and – winked at by our State Dept. – may have fired the first shot. Who cares now?
Americans lost 33,000 soldiers; almost 3 million dead Korean civilians and hundreds of thousands of troops on both sides.

What’s amazing is that from a ruined landscape the North Korean prison-state has in a mere half century managed to become a sophisticated, industrialized nuclear threat.

Imagine yourself as a U.S. soldier on duty at the Armistice Line or an ordinary citizen of congested Seoul
within easy artillery range of Kim Jong-il’s revenge.

What does it prove? That if you starve and terrorize your own people, mismanage or provoke famines, and
sustain at gunpoint a culture of betrayal, modern miracles are possible – as indeed the Soviets also proved in the1930s.

And you end up on a Pyongyang balcony applauding yourself while lovingly caressing a mini-atom bomb that fits into the nose cone of – lets hope not – an ICBM. He’s a weirdo all right. Who kills off his rivals with an antiaircraft gun?

But how sane are our own generals Trump appointed to crucial posts? Especially now when his U.S. field commanders are off the leash and the Navy Dept. sends its Asian task force to the wrong ocean?

Our problem is and always has been our generals, from blundering Courtney Hodges’s WW2 Hurtgen Forest disaster to Doug MacArthur’s demanding to nuke the “Chinese hordes” to Vietnam’s obsessively bodycounting Westmoreland to priapic Petraeus in Afghanistan.

Now our lives are in hands of generals like Secy of Defense “Mad Dog” Mattis (“It’s fun to kill some people”); Guantamo’s harsh warden John Kelly as homeland chief; and as #1 military advisor Herb McMasters (“the Vietnam war was lost on the pages of the NY Times and on campuses”).

And of course in the grasp of Kim Jong-il who in the nuclear poker game has the hole card.

Don't go down in the mine, Dad,
Dreams very often come true;
Daddy, you know it would break my heart
If anything happened to you…
-- -- in honor of 1907 South Wales mining disaster



I’ve never been down an American coal mine, among the least safest in the world, though have plunged thousands of feet into the dark bowels of British pits in Yorkshire, Wales and Scotland, the world’s safest until they were closed by politicians and bean counters.

I have a selfish interest in coal mining since it was English pit men who first opened up their world to me and encouraged my first writing.

Deep down in the hard-to-breath darkness at 2000 feet below the surface miners educated me how they’re a separate culture, with its own taboos and permissions. At the coal face, handgetting or machine-cutting, I saw them as skilled surgeons, or code breakers using logic to solve life and death problems underground, with super-sensitive ears for the faint early warning crack of a wall collapse or groan in a roof support.

Miners are a special, ancient breed whether in China, Poland or Appalachia; at their union’s strongest, which it’s not now, militant solidarity is bred in their bones. (See the Battle of Blair Mountain where massed miners shot it out with federal troops and even the US air corps for the right to unionize.)

Gradually I climbed into a social class where “coal” became a dirty word because the getting of the decayed vegetation with its high carbon content became synonymous with earth’s destruction and our asthmatic lungs.

You know, shaved mountain tops, poisoned rivers, massive health costs to miners (black lung, silicosis, injuries) and any of us who has to breathe in the fossil-fuel fumes. Not to mention the harm to climate change.

Gas powered electricity (fracking) is allegedly cheaper. Cleaner, more modern, more accessible. Anyway Appalachian coal is giving out, and privately owned coal companies – whose safety records are an obscenity – daily go bankrupt abandoning their workers’ health benefits. Right now Wyoming with its open cast strip mining produces more coal than traditional deep pit mines in the eastern mountains.

So what happens to the aging coal miners who voted for Trump on his promise to bring back jobs and restore coal which none of them believed but had hopes he would care for them in a declining industry?

One of the thousands of reasons Hillary lost was going to coal-mining West Virginia which she won in 2008 and telling them, “We’re going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business” in the drive for clean energy. The voting miners preferred Trump’s hopeful lie to Clinton’s blunt death sentence. Who wouldn’t?

The gods of coal are vengeful. Today, the 80,000 or so remaining miners, out of a 1970 high of 140,000 and a 1920s high of 700,000, are getting royally screwed by Trump’s rich Republicans. In a word they’re being sent on a fast ride to the cemetery by the people they voted for in such big numbers.

The Republican congress is twisting miners and their families in the wind by refusing, until the very last moment and maybe not then, to honor promised federal health benefits that are used to beef up the much used Medicare and Medicaid. The loss of this government money is literally the difference between life and death for men on oxygen or suffering other coal-related injuries.

A double kick in the face: Trump is also defunding the Appalachian Regional Commission and U.S Economic Development Commission set up specifically to cushion coal’s collapse.

An amazing number of people, still traumatized by Hillary’s defeat, say Trump’s betrayals are only what the miners deserve. Or as one NYT reader wrote from W. Virginia, “I have run out of patience and empathy for these people…They’re…ignorant…and generally not interested in anything but being a coal miner, shooting wild animals and each other, getting drunk or high,
and qualifying for disability.”

Oh, have I run into such soured Democrats! They can’t forgive coal miners for voting the wrong way but above all for being the stubborn rednecks they are. Why can’t they be more like us, and vote the right way and stop being so damn poor?

The Republican agenda is clear. One by one knock off the most vulnerable then the least unionized then the rest of us, all in good time.

The Appalachian miners are not our past but our future.

I keep looking for Donald Trump’s missing piece of duct tape but it isn’t there yet. Half a century ago Richard Nixon over-reached himself in the “Watergate fiasco” that brought him down. But so far Nixonian overplaying his hand seems to be part of Trump’s winning style.

Roll flashback:

On the night of June 17, 1972, Frank Willis, a low wage African American security guard at Washington’s luxury Watergate office complex, noticed a piece of duct tape on one of the door locks to the Democratic National Committee kept reappearing after he’d removed it. He called the police who arrested five CIA employees on one of their several “black bag” operations to burglarize anywhere Pres. Nixon believed his enemies lurked. Previous breakins included the psychiatrist of former war hawk Daniel Ellsberg who had leaked the “Pentagon Papers” tracing official lies that led to, and persisted in losing, the Vietnam war.

Ellsberg in particular drove Nixon nuttier. A White House-based ‘plumbers unit’ (to plug leaks) was formed that, with Nixon looking the other way, ran wild with serial burglaries and fantasies of assassinating The Boss’s enemies. Nixon was too busy to pay full attention since he was conducting several wars at once, against the press (his near-psychotic obsession), black people, the antiwar movement and almost as an afterthought the Vietnamese.

For months the Watergate breakin was a minor police matter and hardly appeared in the press except as a tiny item on an inner page.

But due to the reality later dramatized by Robert Redford (as reporter Bob Woodward) and Dustin Hoffman (as Carl Bernstein) in All The President’s Men, and the persistence of a powerful Beltway paper the Washington Post, it all came undone.

The breakins would have faded into history (as indeed Watergate scandal itself has) except for Nixon’s hysterical attempts at coverup. All it needed was these two stubborn reporters and one CIA conspirator to lose his nerve and confess, and the whole house of corruption came tumbling down with Nixon’s impeachment and indictment of 69 – no less- federal officials for perjury, fraud, obstruction, whatnot.

A major conspirator, Atty Gen John Mitchell, a Jeff Sessions predecessor, served 19 months prison.

As also did two UCLA school pals and drinking buddies of mine, Nixon’s top aides Bob Haldeman (“I’m the president’s sonofabitch”) and the President’s snarling spymaster John Ehrlichman. I spent tons of time with Bob at (a rather comfortable) prison and with Ehrlichman. The bottom line of our talks was with dark energy they despised the press and journalists, the basic fuel for the Watergate fiasco. Unbelievably, their hatred of reporters went back years to my college newspaper UCLA Daily Bruin which in Haldeman’s view was a cabal of “Jewish liberals”. (And we wonder where Nixon got his spewing anti-Semitism on his office tapes?)

Roll to Today. Give Robert Redford, who got the movie made, the next to last word. A few days ago on Watergate’s 45th anniversary, he drew the parallel:

“When President Trump speaks of being in a ‘running war’ with the media, calls them ‘among the most dishonest human beings on Earth’ and tweets that they’re the ‘enemy of the American people,’ his language takes the Nixon administration’s false accusations of ‘shoddy’ and ‘shabby’ journalism to new and dangerous heights.”

Back then, Redford says, “politicians from both sides of the aisle put partisan politics aside to uncover the truth”. He’s talking about a long-ago political Brigadoon, almost lost in the mists, when now forgottens like Judge Sirica, Sen. Sam Ervin, Archibald Cox – we musn’t forget ‘Woodstein’s secret source Deep Throat the FBI's 2d in command Mark Felt – outwrestled a once-popular and impregnable Pres Nixon.

But Redford is concerned that in today’s “divided” America, things might be different. “If we have another Watergate, will we navigate it as well?

In the 1970s America was also “divided”. But today somewhere out there another Frank Willis is alive, alert and has an Iphone.

In August 1914 Germany invaded “gallant little Belgium” expecting a quick rollover. Using guerrilla tactics, Belgians fought back enraging the Kaiser and his generals who brutally punished the civilian population
burning down whole villages.

Nothing stirred patriotic blood lust more than Allied poster images of apelike Germans bayoneting Belgian babies - a brilliant exercise in unverified atrocity propaganda.

The result four years later was 38 million wartime dead.

Belgian babies in 1914 became Kuwaiti babies in 1990 when Congress heard false testimony from a phony 15 year old girl “eyewitness” that Sadam’s soldiers flung hundreds of babies from their incubators to die. That lie seeded “horrified” minds for the coming US-Iraq war.

Then, a few days ago, 69 Cruise missiles crashed into Assad’s Shayrat air base giving the Syrian fliers and their Russian sponsors plenty of warning. Or Russian fliers and their Syrian sponsors.

Around the world, as Reuters reports, our missile attack was seen as a mere “slap on Assad’s wrist”,

Not so. Exxon’s gift to diplomacy, US secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, has announced that we would come to the defence of innocent civilians “anywhere in the world”. That’s anywhere, Ivanka. A missile strike on Canada which has been slow to heal the wounds of its aboriginals? Or Australia with its notorious labor camps for boat people?

Who exactly retooled “No Foreign Wars, America First” Donald Trump into The Man With A Bleeding Heart Hurling Tomahawk Missiles at baby-gassing Assad?

Step up fashionista -national security advisor First Daughter Ivanka. Her blab mouthed brother Eric spilled the beans to a British paper that his sister pushed their father to avenge “these horrific images” of choking kids in Idlip, Syria.

All these years of barrel bombs, indiscriminate artillery strikes and gunship strafing…? Not good TV.

Memory lane: Also in 1914, on the eve of war, international pacifists met, as they had for years, to denounce militarism and swear they’d never fight one another. Yet overnight, once drums rattled and bugles called to colors, the main organized peacemakers of Britain, France, Italy and Germany voted to give their governments money to start the slaughter.

Democrat senate leader Chuck Schumer, Democrat House minority leader Nancy Pelosi, Democrat Elizabeth Warren all cheered on Ivanka’s missiles each with a tiny degree of reluctance. Bernie Sanders waffled. No Jeanette Rankin there.

Only Brian Williams, on Rachel’s MS NBC TV didn’t waffle. He called Ivanka’s missiles “weapons of beauty”.

“…calling, signing, marching, posting, talking, listening all seem to be useless. Suggestions?”
-- from Diane a Facebook friend

Diane, we’re in the same boat.

Morale – keeping good heart and not letting yourself down for too long - and icy-clear thinking in the midst of an avalanche – take precedence. Easy to say, hard to do.

Morale is easier since there are time-proven ways of fending off, or distracting oneself from, let’s call it a “social depression”. Pills, the gym, booze, TV or unplug it at the wall, friendships, sex.

Here’s what I do. May not work for anyone but me.

Once a week I re-read the Russian-American reporter Masha Gessen’s ‘Rules for Survival’ in an Autocracy. (Look it up or find it on my web site clancysigal.com.) Putin honored Gessen with a personal face to face threat. The real ‘Russian connection’ is finding
people like ourselves, or who we would like to be like, over there.

For joy I watch Pussy Riot on Youtube. On my web site you can find them dancing at the Sochi Olympics and getting Cossack-whipped for it. They couldn’t care less about “reaching out” to Soviet rednecks. See them rocking at Moscow’s Church the Savior Cathedral...for which they got jailed.

I also do ancestor worship.

This is a very big deal for Vietnamese who erect an altar to the beloved dead in a special place in the house to express gratitude and to educate a younger generation in who they are and where they come from.

I think about one or more of them when I’m in a tight spot.

My own ‘ancestors’ are a strange lot of not always pleasant mavericks who have the grit to step out of line and take the flak.

They include PHOEBE PEARL, a Radio City Music Hall Rockettes, who risked her job by refusing to dance at Trump’s inauguration. And Mormon mother JAN CHAMBERLAI, of the Tabernacle Choir, who resigned saying “I could never throw roses to Hitler”
and got jumped on by angry traditional Mormons.

The EDELWEISS PIRATES, “riff raff” rough teenage working class gangs that were Hitler’s most effective resistance. Even the Gestapo was afraid of this despised German subculture some of whom were hanged for beating up Nazis.

ANDRE VAN DER MERWE, a white South African urologist known as “Dr Dick” ,who free of charge performs penis reattachments for poor black, and often suicidal, Xhosa Bantu boys mutilated in coming-of-age ceremonies. He’s not popular with his surgical colleagues.

REP. JEANETTE RANKIN, the Montana “ranch girl”, who voted in Congress against both WW1 and (the only one) WW2 after Pearl Harbor. Chased by a patriotic lynch mob she hid in a phone booth.

WARRANT OFFICE HUGH THOMPSON, the helicopter pilot who stopped more of the My Lai massacre of Vietnamese peasants by landing his ship and threatening to shoot murder-crazed GIs. For which he was nearly courtmartialled and got hate mail from his Georgia neighbors.

VICTORIA WOODHULL, scandal-plagued, free loving free living first women candidate for president in 1870, also the first women stockbroker and first female publisher of a national newspaper. She and her sexy sister Tennessee were a sensation on popular spiritualist cicles “magnetizing” the all too numerous Civil War widows. America wasn’t ready yet for a Victorian financier with hippy morals.

And countless WHISTLEBLOWERS – scientists, accountants, soldiers many of whom lost their jobs and careers for trying to save our lives. Names on request.

They stick their necks out and pay the price.

Be careful, very careful, jumping for joy over Trump’s alleged ‘defeat’ failing to get enough votes to torpedo Obama Care. This is just one of his opening shots. Keep your eye peeled on the prize, what he’s really about, which is to deliver pain to the weak, the poor and fucked-over.

I continue to be astounded that, despite spotty news items, there’s so little fuss among us about the ICEmen’s mass arrests of Latinos, lurking to catch their fish in hospitals, courthouses, in violent no-knock raids. You probably disagree but except from the immigrant community itself I see more of a shrug (charitably, shellshock?) than the sort of Pink Hat militance that filled the streets with angry women recently.

In WW2 the Nazi-occupied Bulgarians did more for their transported Jews than we do for our new Jews, Latinos under threat.

Why the indifference? Among the 11 million undocumented there must be a great number of “submarines”, or “U-boats”, the name German Jews gave themselves who lived in hiding from the Gestapo to evade arrest and deportation.

OK, immigrant raids do not lend themselves to super TV ratings like Rachel’s or yet more serial “guest appearances” by Cong. Adam Schiff on the hunt for the “Russian connection”.

But it’s Krystallnacht type “immigrant control” that really makes Bannon&Trump’s hearts and pulse beat faster. Fending off “investigations” of the their sham Kremlin link is child’s play to them. This Democratic puppet show fits their agenda because they know – and I guarantee – it will run and run forever, like Agatha Christie’s stage Mousetrap.

Yes, at some unforeseeable time, Trump may be nailed to the Putin cross. But in the end it will turn out to be anticlimactically about mere money and not espionage.

Come back home, Congressman Schiff and Rachel and all you other MS-DNC Sherlocks. Do your proper jobs. There’s an awful Something Else happening in Boyle Heights, Maricopa, San Bernadino and Flatbush.

While stealing from the poor and from the barely surviving middle class Trump’s budget is handing me
through the Veterans Admin an extra six percent.

So why should I care about everyone else’s cuts in food stamps, school lunches, food pantries, laid-off job retraining,
low income rent help, medical and breast cancer research, Head Start and help for slow students? Even though
once I was one of those “disadvantaged students”.

I’ve got mine. And the four star generals and ICEmen have theirs. Down in the militarized southern states
they love the butchered budget.

For the moment Social Security and Medicare are “safe” though the GOP wolves are prowling closer.

SS and Medicare are temporarily untouched because they happen to benefit Trump’s white working class voters who,
according to latest Census Bureau stats, DO NOT BENEFIT, repeat DO NOT benefit, from means-tested “welfare” stuff like
Meals On Wheels, child-help centers and low income rent aid.

Do the math.

Among families with incomes above the poverty line — just making it at over $24,000 for a family of four — only 13 percent
of non-Hispanic whites take money from welfare programs. Compared to 42% of African Americans and 36% of Hispanics.

Race matters.

So working class whites curse welfare as a con, invented by us, to give their tax money to lazy, sexually loose,
law breaking “minorities” while they, heroes of their own struggles, get zip.

In all our talk of “resistance” let’s ask ourselves. Why should a Trump voter change their mind and return the next
sure-to-lose Democratic hopeful when our candidate dare not retreat on “giveaway” programs that pisses them off?

Yet we cannot save what’s left of the safety net without capturing The Great White Conservative Them who couldn’t
care less about Black Live Matter, LGBT and the rest of our liberal values.

Melville’s Captain Ahab was fueled by revenge and hatred, certainly not love, when he tried harpooning his whie whale
only to be drowned by it and his own arrogance.

Do the math, again.


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p.s. Thanks to Eduardo Porter’s NYT 7 March economics column and Joan C. Williams’s “White Working Class:
Overcoming Class Cluelessness in America.”