Category Archives: Fe-911

The World We Promised Them

Last week, four blocks away from my old neighborhood near downtown Berkeley, Berkeley High School students staged a mass demonstration over the appearance of a racist epithet posted on one of the high school’s library computers. Two thousand of Berkeley High’s 3,000 students walked off campus en masse to march through Berkeley’s streets in protest.

Yesterday, 1,000 students marched and demonstrated in a planned gathering of civil disobedience in Washington DC, demanding “racial, immigration, and climate justice reform for a ‘broken’ political system.”

Also yesterday, Tim Wolfe, system president of the University of Missouri, resigned his post after months of pressure from the university’s student body, who were pushing their administration to act on what was described as a climate of fear and racial intimidation on campus.

What finally pushed him to resign was the boycott by the university’s football team of the school’s upcoming football game this next weekend. Their boycott was in solidarity with the campus anti-racist movement, and had the absolute support of the team’s coach. The boycott and the game’s cancellation would have cost the school a financial loss of $1 million.

But there was plenty more than just a football game leading up to Wolfe’s resignation. In what the campus’ newspaper, “The Maneater,” described fatefully as “An Historic Fall”, the university had been a focal point for social unrest and is a microcosm of what is happening across the country.

It started with the cutting of health care for graduate students, many of whom work on campus; a grad student walk-out; student demonstrations over threatened discontinuation of abortion and other women’s health services; and demonstrations against an increasing climate of racism on campus. Graduate student Jonathan Butler spearheaded the graduate student movement earlier in the fall, and bumped up the stakes by waging a hunger strike until President Wolfe resigned.

The students’ demands — presented in a meeting earlier in the fall with campus administration — were handled sluggishly at best, if at all. President Wolfe was slow and dismissive of the students’ call for the administration to make the campus a “safe and inclusive place.” That meeting was then followed by a racism-based attack — the smearing of a swastika made from human feces in a campus residence hall.

It was Butler’s hunger strike that spurred the football team’s boycott, the final straw leading to Wolfe’s resignation. Apparently, concern for human rights and safety needed the help of college athletics to help the blind see the light.

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If it appears that President Wolfe refused to see the big picture, the students knew it all too well. Their demands: removal of Wolfe as UM president; that UM meets the demands of the Legion of Black Collegians first presented in 1969 for the betterment of the black community — a promise unkept for nearly fifty years; enforcement of a mandatory comprehensive racial awareness and inclusion curriculum throughout all campus departments overseen by students staff and faculty of color; and an increase of the percentage of black faculty and students campus-wide by 10%.

Their demands also included a 10-year plan to increase retention rate for marginalized students; sustain diversity curriculum and promote campus safety and inclusivity; increase resources to include mental health professionals — particularly those of color for outreach and programming campus-wide; and establish social justice centers on campus.

To complete our frame of reference, the University of Missouri is located in Columbia, a two-hour drive from St. Louis and Ferguson. Both cities have been at the epicenter of the Black Lives Matter movement in the Midwest, protesting police aggression against African Americans following the deaths of black people at the hands of police.

From my view — at four blocks, 2,500 and 3,000 miles away — my heart is a mixture of pride, apprehension and hope. Some of us have been focused more on survival and — if we were lucky — comfort. We were too bogged down by the distractions of day-to-day reality to peek over our newspapers and hand-held devices and understand what has been happening to us. But these kids in Berkeley, Washington DC, and Columbia — and our kids everywhere — have been watching it all too closely.

They are about to enter their adult lives. They’re trying to blossom into adulthood as young people should, even in what sometimes can mildly be called a dark and dangerous world. These demonstrations are a sign of hope that our youth are actively working towards a world better than the one we are leaving them. They are fighting for the world we promised them, long ago when we were young. Send them support, encouragement and a light to help them continue safely on their way.

Autumn’s Fallout

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Speaker of the House John Boehner will resign congress and his speakership on Oct. 31.

Today’s column will be brief. I say this with some caution, partly because I don’t know what to expect, but I think something big has begun in Washington.

Outgoing Speaker John Boehner is clearing his to-do list after last Friday’s surprising announcement of his resignation. He began by appearing on Face the Nation, and without naming names, identified his bete noir (which, by the way, is Ted Cruz) by the biblical epithet “false prophet.”

Parting shots and old scores are par for the course in halls of power. Congress is no exception. Yet, what Boehner did was more than an exit interview. He was waving a red flag to anyone who can see it.

Boehner isn’t the only Congressional leader in trouble. The traditional party leadership is as well, with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell in line as the next target to walk the plank. Today, Senator Lindsay Graham had to quell absurd rumors from the Teapublicans that President Obama coerced Boehner to quit. We’re watching the current leadership of the Republican Party call for help from a life boat.

Continue reading →

The Day We Let a City Die

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How do we measure the distance of our conscience from our deeds? Is it just by time? By how much has been torn down? How much has been rebuilt? Is it by lessons learned, or never learned? Perhaps it is by the stories that leave us haunted, nagged by the incessant ghosts of ‘what we should have done’?

These questions tug at us regarding Hurricane Katrina and our response. Ten years later, we sit with thousands of questions unanswered that we still find ourselves needing to ask.

To help us look back at what was and what is, today I am employing observations by Eric from his article “Katrina the Awakener” published in September 2005, to give us our baseline. It’s a must-read. The block quotes in this article are his.

“What we are witnessing is beyond incompetence at this stage; and is approaching genocide.”

As a former public works employee, I remember vividly how helpless I felt ten years ago, watching CNN’s coverage of an historic category five hurricane named Katrina raging over the Gulf of Mexico. When the storm hit the Gulf Coast it was downgraded to category three. But even lowered in its category of intensity, a hurricane is a hurricane. We were watching what climate change could do, though CNN could barely make a whisper, let alone a hint, about it.

While roads were still functional, many who had transportation available left the city. But those who couldn’t afford to leave stayed. We then witnessed with dismay and horror what appeared to be criminal foot-dragging by the government. Where were the FEMA officials getting aid, shelter and evacuation help for those too poor or infirm to escape?

Even to this day, we are uncovering more: I stared in shock at the photographs of over a hundred buses parked in lots, assigned to evacuate citizens in emergencies like this, unable to move because the lots they parked in were were flooded. In the event of Katrina, the city itself abandoned its own evacuation plan.

What happened after the storm hit was even worse. The levees along Lake Pontchartrain broke, right when Saturn moved from Cancer into Leo, and as Eric had said — all that water that had been penned up started to burst. The levee blew open over the most vulnerable areas of New Orleans, its lower east side, also known as the Ninth Ward.

When it was over, it was a disaster that killed close to 2,000 people. Still more remain missing, and incomplete records mean that if they still remain lost now, they may never be found.

“Are we to understand that the federal government is incapable of responding to an emergency? It would seem so.”

You only have to hear the name “Katrina” and you associate it with how much America, one of the richest countries in the world, stumbled and fell. In Katrina’s case, it was on every account: the bumbling of the federal government — FEMA specifically — as well as the State of Louisiana to react proactively and quickly to get people to safety prior to the storm hitting land; the mismanagement of the post-storm rescue and recovery by know-nothings like “heckuva job” Michael Brown, head of FEMA — a political lackey appointment whose job it was, until that time, to get as much government money out to Bush cronies as possible.

Before 9-11, FEMA was its own agency until the Bush Administration moved it under the Department of Homeland Security. I remember being reminded of the mismanagement of the Iraq War, already two years into the fight, in FEMA’s emergency response to Katrina. In fact, the parallels between the two would be comical were they not at the cost of so much misery, including and especially the ridiculous profiteering from human suffering using your taxpayer dollars.

FEMA’s response to Hurricane Katrina was the model of criminal neglect and dereliction of public duty at a time and place where it should never fail. New Orleans’ nickname, “The city that care forgot,” took on a new, darker twist. Then again, the Bush Administration was leading the effort of his party to make sure that government does not work; in that they were eminently successful.

“Incredibly, no organized relief program appeared visible. Indeed, police have received federal orders to privilege stopping looters against delivering aid and searching for survivors. In other words: The priority (as we have so often come to expect) is to protect property.”

We remember the bodies face down in the waters of the Mississippi; the people waiting for evacuation from their roofs; the stories of the sick and infirm trapped in blacked-out hospitals and elderly care homes, forced upstairs waiting for days for food, water and a safer place to be. We remember the cries for help on the news by the thousands forced to stay for days in the Superdome, finally being given water and ultimately food.

Then there were the stories of food shipments donated from across the globe lying in wait and disposed of because they’d spoiled; disorganized relief workers couldn’t get it to survivors in time. We even remember those racists of the AP, with a photo of a white couple carrying loaves of Wonder Bread and water bottles through the flood with the headline “Hurricane Survivors Struggle for Survival,” while a photo of black survivors doing the same was headlined “City Seeks to Prevent Looting.”

Ten years later, we are still sorting things through. We see some improvement over the handling of natural disasters such as Katrina; Hurricane Sandy comes to mind, but the baseline set by the Katrina disaster has been a low bar to clear.

The City of New Orleans is standing and re-building. But it isn’t the same. Many of the homes that stood for generations in the east side are gone, replaced by shining new homes that few of the original residents can afford. Gentrification has decreased the number of blacks in New Orleans, though enough have retained a foothold, struggling to keep the cultural vitality of the city and the region intact.

We have a White House that recognizes climate change is real, but still struggles with the interests that keep us from pursuing what should be a logical course of disaster prevention — and we have Katrina as a very concrete example of what that kind of devastation entails. We have yet to determine and appreciate the value of our most vulnerable: low-income, predominately black people and people of color. They still pay the “regrettable price” for protection of property.

I owe Hurricane Katrina for the awakening in me. It was through her that the outrage I felt found a voice. My writing voice was already crafting itself while blogging on politics, but when the levees broke it was Katrina that broke something through in me. Her tragedy helped me verbalize the outrage latent in my years of public service, and I found my voice of political activism. My writing was honed from a whisper to a shout. Fe-911 sprung from those flood waters.

How do we measure the distance of our conscience from our deeds? Is it by how much has been torn down or rebuilt? Is it just by time? Is it by lessons learned? Is it the stories that leave us haunted, nagged by incessant ghosts of “what we should have done”?

It’s been ten years since the levees broke, overwhelmed; ten years since they failed to keep the rising waters of Lake Pontchartrain away from the lower east side of New Orleans, killing close to 2,000 people and allowing a city to die. But something else died the day Saturn moved from Cancer into Leo — our arrogance.

We learned that even the greatest of nations is only as great as how much care its government and citizens give to their most vulnerable at their greatest time of need. We need to learn to pay attention to the changes in the Earth — the signs that only become more obvious with time and tide. We need to keep our arrogance muffled down, low and dead. We cannot be the nation that care forgot.

Shift Happens

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The summer-to-autumn transition is a pronounced shift for humans and human affairs. The body’s ease from late spring to summer gives way to harvest and preparation for the days of winter. You are braced to return to the rigors of school. Your body needs the additional comfort of just one more layer to fight off the cooler mornings and night. Winter is coming.

The world itself is a body. Affairs of the world and its people — from the personal to the economic — are also transitioning, caused by and connected to the web, trade and foreign relations. We are a smaller, more interconnected world community now more than ever.

Venus retrograded from a brief stay in Virgo back into Leo late last month into this month, and the affairs of the body have taken the stage. Stable relationships during this retrograde period face sudden shift.

Nothing more sharply exemplifies this aspect of the Venus retrograde on the world stage than the hack and subsequent data dump of the email addresses of 33 million users of the Ashley-Madison site: the website for married people seeking affairs. With technological advancement comes the price that nothing is private. Not even your surreptitious love life.

The data dump of Ashley-Madison’s user emails by the Impact Team — a move made with the intent to shut down Ashley Madison permanently — has had repercussions. The leaks have spawned spin-off crimes, such as having your Ashley Madison profile “scrubbed” at a cost (a form of digital-age extortion), blackmail, and two leak-related suicides, thus far.

And then there’s China — the world’s largest country and economy — which is having a terrible summer. The month saw explosions at the Tianjin chemical plant on August 12, which Eric covered last week, and another explosion this last Saturday at the chemical plant in Zibo.

Adding to the misery, the explosions come on the heels of the Yuan taking a precipitous fall and Chinese stocks plummeting. Because so much of the world’s money is invested in China’s economy, the world’s markets, ours included, are volatile, fearing instability similar to the Lehman collapse of 2007-2008.

Responding to the Yuan crisis and other factors, including the lack of a decision by the Fed to increase US interest rates — something it promised it would do this year — the Stock Market rallied to stabilize itself from a precipitous 1,000-point drop by shifting away from computer-generated auto-trades. As of this writing the market closed at 15,875. In other words, we experienced market “correction.”

As Planet Waves team member Lizanne Webb says: “The 1000 decrease when the market opened was almost ALL computer-generated trades … with humans allowing it to happen. This was a market day during which people should have paused and observed. Human intuition was missing. The human mind can calculate so many more factors, simultaneously, than a trading program. We can apply common sense, and although we may not be able to execute a trade as fast, those choices are far less reactionary and potentially more stable than auto-trades.”

Today’s story is about the intriguing drama of the little Virgo details that make up the bigger picture: how an online business making a profit on your most intimate and maybe damning secrets can have more repercussions than an extramarital fling; how not minding the store when computers nearly run the stock market into the ground could have led to stock meltdown.

This story is about how much we need to be aware of on this earthly plane, from our values to our purchases — and gambling them for business or pleasure. The mechanisms we use now are not infallible, and neither are our relationships. Adultery and the stock market are similar in that both are high stake games of risk. As shifts happen this season — and they will — we mind the Virgo Sun as it slaps us back into paying attention.

I guess the operative words this week are “Shift happens. Stay alert.”

Yang Girl

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“You have been pushing too hard, you’re always going, going, going. Too much yang is burning up your yin.”

These were the words of my acupuncturist as I lay down on the exam table, needles inserted at the meridian points on the top of both feet, hands, forehead and heart.

Before leaving, he turned off the lights to the exam room, told me to close my eyes, relax and try to take a nap. He would come back in 20 minutes.

I was there to be treated for my first bout of shingles, which came 27 days after my 60th birthday. On top of the prescribed regimen of antivirals from doctors at Kaiser, I took the double precaution of going to my acupuncturist to root out underlying problems.

He said, “You have too much yang (fire) and not enough yin (water). You’re burning up your immune system.”

And he was right. I have been a seeker of creative fire all of my life: from being a little girl who drew pictures before I could speak; lip synching to my aunt’s opera records; reading Shakespeare out loud to myself; and having weekly, personally written science fiction short story exchanges between me and my best friend in high school. I graduated with a degree in Fine Arts and headed right out the door of the university into the theater. I have been there ever since.

I was born with my Aquarian Sun in the 12th house. My uniqueness and electrical spark was bubbling incessantly, contained yet constant, hidden and needing release. That release came through my Sagittarian 10th house. Picture me and my creative expression as a fire coming out of the smokestack of a large factory. That pillar of fire and smoke was the pen; the written, spoken and sung word; the paintbrush and the voice.

And yet, here I was at the acupuncturist’s office, fighting to reclaim my health and healing the shingles attack that ironically erupted on my actual smokestack — my crown and forehead. Instead of napping like I was supposed to, I was examining my very existence. Why was I here if not to create? What was wrong with doing what I have been doing the last 60 years?

The shingles attack came at the worst possible time for this Yang Girl. I was forced to confront containment of my creative fire when I needed it the most: production was about to start on our main stage play, a play that we had been working on for three years. We were about to reach the finish line. First curtain was in four weeks.

The Universe has interesting ways to speak to us, and its timing is, as always, impeccable. Thus, this Yang Girl was forced to contain and manage her fire.

“You need to rest more. You need to stop eating spicy foods, eat plenty of water-filled vegetables and fruits, and you need to be near water as much as you can.”

We were four weeks until opening night. Until that time I was burning energy at both ends. My own female energy was exhausted. I had lived beyond my body’s capacity to cope. Much to the incredulity of the entire theater company, I told everyone that I needed to not be at rehearsal for ten days. With the high contagion possibility of shingles, especially in the early days of the disease, my absence was out of concern not only for my health but theirs.

I slept through the first five days of my recovery, a sleep that I did not realize I needed to save my own life. I had to learn to say no to requests that required my mind’s creative fire. I had to turn off my mind to replenish and re-activate my internal water. I had to say yes to my body.

It’s been close to six months since my bout with the shingles, and my encounter with the dark side of my Yang Girl existence. Yet, with the balancing of the female water residing inside me — the Yin Woman — the two sides of me fused back together.

This year has been a year of balancing these two, so one side does not overwhelm the other. I have been walking more than I have in years, grounding the fire energy from the base of my feet. I try to make at least one of the five walks I take per week to be by a body of water.

I look at the fading shingles scars on my forehead as both a reminder and a crown. I thank the Yang Girl who earned this crown, because she has worked diligently all my life to forge me into the artist I am. Her ‘burning’ me with shingles was a wake-up call to recognize the Yin Woman, who I discovered living inside me all along.

It is she who cooks, walks, smells the jasmine and acacia on the streets in the Oakland hills and the salty air of the San Francisco Bay. She’s the one who helps me sleep deeply enough so that I can dream. I love exploring to define her existence inside me, and her nurturing ability has great creative potential for expression as well. It looks like the next chapter of my life is starting to get written.

I will always be the Yang Girl and Yin Woman, both providing me the impetus to see and experience the world and create in it, and to do this with a body and spirit grounded in the earth and water. At this half-way point in this year of discovery, I am happy and grateful to know that I have these twin females inside me — a fiery mind and a much healthier body. I fully intend to use them.

One Year Later

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I remember Dr. Martin Luther King, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the Freedom marches of the 1960s with the mind of a child. Something was happening that I understood at the surface, yet had no idea of the consequences or the price. Yet even from a child’s surface of perception, I learned from the news a respect and admiration for the struggle, because as a child I never learned that one person was better than another.

I lived as a little brown girl with an odd and foreign sounding name in a racist town in Northern California. Even though I am not black but a person of color, there was still a divide between whites and us. Some of these divides were stronger, deeper and harder than others. It “All depends on the skin we’re living in,” as poet Sekou Sundiata once wrote.

Which brings us here, one year and a day after the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, where he was gunned down by Ferguson police and his body left on the street for four hours. It wasn’t the first death of an African-American by police or vigilante that we’ve known about in the news this decade, but in light of Trayvon Martin’s killing by George Zimmerman on the pretext of Florida’s “Stand Your Ground” laws and Zimmerman’s subsequent acquittal, it was one of way too many straws on a camel’s back.

It was in this crucible of news, fueled by this century’s technology that #Black Lives Matter was born. It is the Civil Rights Movement updated for the 21st century.

At last count, since its inception in 2013, the movement has staged close to 1000 demonstrations. It has 23 chapters in various cities across the United States, including my home town of Oakland, California, as well as in Canada and Ghana.

The Movement is proving to be a new litmus test for election politics as experienced by Democrats and Republicans. Some more than others are trying to bridge the gap between the issues of income inequality and racial inequality, and the promise of equal protection under the law.

By every police action from Michael Brown to Sandra Bland, and by every acquittal of police officers who shoot first and show remorse later, this promise remains unmet. If there is a ‘but’ in this conversation, it is that at least the conversation, though heated, has started. And thanks to Pluto, it is going deep, as Eric presciently wrote about in early 2013 on the Trayvon Martin case:

Even as the major aspects (for example, Uranus square Pluto) strive to push us forward and help us confront modern problems, we’re being reminded of what remains unresolved from our collective past. While Trayvon Martin may seem insignificant to some and an overblown story to others, racial karma is one of the most significant issues we face on the planet, though in truth the next layer down involves the economic problems we face: the distribution of resources that fuel racial crises and are at the root of many ethnicity-based wars and genocides.

What exactly was George Zimmerman worried that Trayvon Martin was doing? Well, stealing, of course. Stealing what? What else? White people’s stuff.

Let’s not forget the elemental equation that informs so much of what we think of as politics: lighter-skinned guy thinks darker-skinned guy is trying to take the stuff of lighter-skinned guys. Sadly, this sounds more reductionist than it is. You can look at almost any national issue through this filter and suddenly it makes more sense.

Set aside the Confederate flag, the out-of-control gun lobbyists in Congress and the prison-industrial complex that make it profitable for cities to fine the poor to meet budget constraints to fund police departments. Set all that aside, and you still have the dregs of the pot stirred up, crusted, rotting and needing to be removed. Pluto is serving as the ultimate solvent.

But — and here’s another ‘but’ — I see Pluto providing the ash heap upon which we can revive civilization in our civil society. We are confronting our most horrible racist demons in the worst ways imaginable — witnessing unjustifiable deaths of our fellow citizens at the hands of law enforcement. All available now by tweets, camera phones and hashtags. But this is exactly what the Civil Rights Movement needed as well back in the 1960s: open information and eye-witnessing to the truth. A chance to write the whole history warts and all, not the parts we are more comfortable with. Pluto.

We’re accomplishing this today, with the help of courageous people and their allies. The generation of Black Lives Matter is growing a movement that needs to finish the job started by their parents and grandparents five decades ago. I benefited from that struggle 50 years ago, as did so many of my brothers and sisters of color back then.

Yet equal protection under the law for all should mean for all. And to our country’s shame, this is something that our African-American brothers and sisters still have to fight for, a year after Ferguson, more than a month after Charleston, and Baltimore, and Staten Island and centuries and thousands of places more in a history that still needs to be revealed and taught about ourselves. We can’t ever forget justice belongs to all of us, this year and the years to come.

Cthulian Overlords Debate Earth’s Domination

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This is the first of a series of Fe-911 special reports on the Presidential debates here at Planet Waves, where the motto is: “We watch so you don’t have to!!” –fb

Officially, the Silly Season of 2016 — as we in America call the Presidential election campaign — has begun. Last night, much like HBO boxing events, the Republican Party officially offered not one but TWO rounds of debates at Cleveland’s Quicken Loans Arena: a preliminary round of low-polling candidates like Rick Perry, Carly Fiorina and Lindsay Graham followed by the main event featuring the more highly polled.

Using their earth-given names, these top 10 contenders — anyone with more than 2% polling popularity among Republicans — were: Manhattan billionaire Donald Trump; Florida Governor Jeb Bush; Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker; neurosurgeon Ben Carson; Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee; Texas Senator Ted Cruz; Kentucky Senator Rand Paul; Florida Senator Marco Rubio, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie and Ohio Governor John Kasich.

These ten represent the highest polling presidential candidates among Republicans, which I like to call the New Order of Cthulian Leadership vying for the role of Extreme High Overlord of the United States.

FOX News did right this round, deciding ten was the most number of candidates you could cram on one stage at a time. This gave the candidates the opportunity for as much 10-second sound byte, personal attack, Obama-cootie accusation and starting-World-War-III talk that could reasonably be digested by a viewing public. I heard the earlier debate of five candidates was far more substantial, giving actual reasoned responses to questions, though no one was allowed in there to watch.

But this is what you need to know: Mr. Trump was clearly the front-runner, was booed for refusing to rule out a third party run, bragged about his bankruptcies and opted for single payer health care. Neurosurgeon Ben Carson will use water boarding as torture; and Jeb Bush attacked President Obama for his brother’s economic recession.

Ted Cruz will throw out Obamacare with an executive action, and everyone wants to build a dome over the United States, with one entry point: a turnstile with a ticket taker for immigrants to enter at the border. Mike Huckabee plans to invoke the 5th and 14th Amendments of the Constitution to protect the rights and personhood of unborn citizens, and if need be, could invoke the 2nd Amendment for the unborn to stand their ground in the face of imminent threat by birth control.

In other words, coining a new word for the English vocabulary, it was a combination of clash and bluster, which I call blusterfuckery. However, much to the horror of the rest of us, the Republican base loved it. I found after two hours of watching I needed a purifying mud facial to remove the excess of an unidentifiable sheen of an origin I could not comprehend. I swear I did not see any tentacles. And thank God for Jon Stewart, whose finale was on the same night, reminding me that human life does exist on Earth.

Should no winner be declared at the end of the 11 scheduled Republican debates, the top three remaining candidates will compete to the death by gladiatorial combat. This will be broadcast live by Univision.

I will return on Monday with my regular column on actual news.

Stroking the Beast

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Planet Waves is running a membership drive.
Read more in Solstice Fire and the Art of Service, by Eric Francis.

Merriam Webster defines demagogue as “a political leader who tries to get support by making false claims and promises and using arguments based on emotion rather than reason.”

In our recent history, the last fifteen years or so, every presidential election season has had at least one demagogue. Republican Presidential candidate and former House Leader Newt Gingrich was one in 2012.

In 2008, it was John McCain’s running mate Sarah Palin. In 2000 and 2004 George W. Bush’s “aw shucks” charm exuded a plain-and-deadly charm of willful ignorance coupled with entitlement and power that thrilled his Republican base.

This year, for the 2016 presidential campaign, we have billionaire Donald Trump. While declaring his candidacy he hit press gold by vilifying Mexican immigrants as killers and rapists. This was followed by an onslaught of corporate abandonment: the Miss Universe Pageant that he sponsored; Univision — the Hispanic American network with domestic and international viewership in the millions — especially for soccer; NBC; the Pro Golfers Association; NASCAR and Macy’s.

Macy’s dropped Trump’s clothing line, which is made in Mexico. With Trump a traditional sponsor of the annual Macy’s Thanksgiving parade — a gaudy national display of colorful plastic cartoon character gasbags — their firing of Trump, a human gasbag, is a beautiful irony.

The best political art coming fresh out the gate early in the silly season has to come from Mexico — the Donald Trump piñata. I understand there is also a Donald Trump butt plug, but that could be urban legend. Yet, even by demonizing Mexico and Mexicans, he acts as a form of stimulus for Mexico’s domestic economy. He is a perfect corporate product.

Donald Trump has no equal in branding himself. It seems as though he can do this in a matter of minutes. Having already made a name in real estate, entertainment and tabloid-worthy divorces, he really is a man who doesn’t give a shit. He doesn’t have to. He has done what every American craving entitlement wants to do. He wants to make you and me (well maybe not ME) a success story, the good old-fashioned capitalist way. He does that by bringing down others. They’re losers. They must be fired. They are not worthy in the eyes of His Corporate Lordship: immigrants, poor people and even other Republicans.

Trump’s bombast is honey to the feverish press, breathlessly waiting for the next stupid thing to come out of his mouth. He has accomplished in three short weeks what the other Republican candidates are dying for — relentlessly focused attention. And that’s exactly what he wants. It’s this that makes him quite dangerous.

His recent attack on Senator John McCain, who called him out for “riling up the crazies” in the base, incited Trump to double down on his initial insult. He not only said McCain — a POW in Hanoi for five years — was “no hero in Vietnam,” he continued by saying McCain has made America less safe. Agree with him or not — because if John McCain was president, he WOULD make America less safe — Trump is laying the traditional leadership of the Republican Party on an ironing board and flattening it.

Trump uses ‘winner’ words, which is more than red meat to Tea Party lizard brains. It’s filet mignon. Racist, classist, ruthless and greedy. He doesn’t care. He is Sarah Palin with bigger hair. He is the Republican id — the personality component made up of unconscious psychic energy that works to satisfy basic urges, needs and desires.

Whatever we think about Donald Trump, he knows Americans as consumers of products, and he is marketing himself as the ultimate product: a corporate leader who dreams of becoming President of the United States. He has abandoned campaign methods of ‘civil discourse’ by career politicians like Governors Jeb Bush, Scott Walker, Chris Christie, and he’s eclipsing his fellow Republicans in the process. It’s working with the most cherished Republican demographic — the Tea Party base. Early polling shows Trump with the lead amongst his other Republican challengers.

He has sucked the air out of his competition’s campaign bandwagon tires. Who are these other guys again? He is doing exactly what Sarah Palin did in 2008 and George W. Bush in 2000 and 2004. He makes it acceptable — exciting even — to stroke the beast of intolerance, bigotry, unabashed thoughtless greed and militarism.

Hopefully, Trump’s bubble of political prominence will not last. Early risers in the primaries rarely last, at least according to conventional wisdom. So we hope that danger will pass soon enough.

Yet the greasy slick of Trump’s campaign rhetoric will remain a form of sanctioning that it is okay to talk like that and to think like that. Immigrants, career politicians, and everyone else be damned. Trump, as our latest iteration of demagoguery, is a human gasbag stroking the beast. Even if (and when) he loses, that slick will remain long after the gasbag has gone, and all it takes is one fool with a match…