LOEFFLER—HOW THE GOP’S GREAT WHITE HOPE MAY DO DEMOCRACY AN INADVERTENT FAVOR

As the Georgia run-off looms, there are a couple of things Georgians might want to remember about Kelly Loeffler. First, her racist dog whistles have gotten to the place where they are no longer such. They are now blatant, and coming through as loud and clear as the president's. After Rep. Ilhan Omar publicly expressed her backing for Loeffler's opponent, Raphael Warnock, the incumbent Georgia senator falsely claimed Omar had been seen “smiling and laughing while talking about al-Qaeda and 9/11”, and suggested that Congresswoman Omar should be removed from office because of her status as a Muslim and as a naturalized American born in Somalia.

The fact is that, whether Senator Loeffler likes it or not, Ilhan Omar is what the United States looks like—or at least, what it should look like, since conservatives are lately loath to talk about the great American “melting pot” of nations, races and religions that is the United States of America, and that was so often referred to, by politicians and journalists alike, when I was a boy growing up in the fifties and sixties. Ilhan is a former war refugee, who found security and freedom in America and is literally living the American Dream by running for and winning national office to represent her district in Minnesota. Omar is the first Somali-American, the first naturalized citizen from the African continent, and the first woman of color to represent Minnesota in Congress. She is also one of only two Muslim women the Legislature, a woman of non-Christian descent in a Christian-majority country that, nevertheless, champions—at least on paper—freedom of religion and separation of Church and State. She is, then, a textbook example of what the United States is supposed to be all about.

Rep. Ilhan Omar

Loeffler, meanwhile is the richest member of the Senate, bar none. The fifty-year-old senator has an estimated personal net worth of eight hundred million dollars, and commutes between her Atlanta home and Washington in a private jet that she reportedly bought for that specific purpose. Just before she was recently accused of insider trading for the sale of millions of dollars worth of stocks that stood to be hurt by the coronavirus pandemic, her net worth was reported to be “only” about half a billion.  

Questions of insider trading were raised because Loeffler sold off the vulnerable stock—some of which she owned jointly with her husband, billionaire Jeffrey Sprecher—the sixty-five-year-old founder and CEO of the Inter-Continental Exchange (ICE), a sixty-billion-dollar financial, and energy and commodities trading firm, and chairman of the New York Stock Exchange—the same day that she joined other senators at a classified briefing on the coronavirus outbreak. Th
e meeting took place before the seriousness of the pandemic was known to the public at large.

Kelly Loeffler

Although the Senate Ethics Committee looked into the matter and despite calls for an FBI probe, in a political world where Mitch McConnell reigns supreme, and with Trump hand-puppet William Barr then at the head of the Justice Department, officials found insufficient evidence of wrongdoing to take disciplinary measures or to bring federal charges against Loffler. This, despite the fact that the public release in March of federal disclosure documentation showed that Sprecher and Loeffler had also purchased stock in a company that stood to gain from shelter-in-place orders that governors and mayors eventually issued as a result of the pandemic of which Loeffler had prior and privileged knowledge.  Meanwhile, her husband’s company has seen a twenty-two percent rally over the course of the pandemic.

The other thing that’s interesting to recall is that Loeffler has only been a senator since just before the start of the pandemic, since she was not elected to office. Indeed, she was appointed by Georgia Governor Brian Kemp in December of 2019 to complete the term of Republican Senator Johnny Isakson, who resigned his office early because of failing health. She would later bite the hand of Kemp by joining Trump in accusing the governor and his Republican secretary of state of rigging the election against the incumbent president in Georgia. She continues to refuse publicly to accept the fact that Joe Biden in president-elect of the United States.

Jeffrey Sprecher

Since taking office a year ago, Loeffler has apparently spent no time whatsoever considering a stance on any issue under Senate consideration, merely mimicking whatever Trump’s current tweets have indicated his policy was. This is true to such an obvious extent that the president has praised her for having a “one hundred percent Trump” voting record throughout her single year in Congress.

In recent days, however, this loyalty to the mad king Trump caught her on her back foot, since she had followed the lead of Mitch McConnell and other leading GOP senators in voting to cut benefits to a COVID-strapped nation in half, compared with the first stimulus bill which had provided six hundred dollars a week in unemployment benefits plus a one-time twelve-hundred-dollar check to the worst-hit segments of the population. While Democrats wanted to extend the jobless benefits at six hundred a week and provide a stimulus check of at least twelve hundred, if not expanding it to two thousand, McConnell Republicans posited that many unemployed people would make more staying at home than working at that rate—the point here being that six hundred dollars for a forty hour work week implies a fifteen dollar an hour minimum wage and, let’s be honest, the business-beholden GOP didn’t want to give lower class non-union workers any big ideas. And, since they apparently live in a country-club bubble and have no idea (nor do they care) what’s happening even a block from the Capitol, let alone in lower-class America as a whole, they felt another twelve-hundred-dollar stimulus check was “excessive”. All of which Trump seemed to be on board with, as long as he could stick it to the Democrats.

But at the last minute, as a hollow bone thrown to his working-class base and as a means of kidney-punching Republicans, including McConnell, who had dared to admit (in the face of overwhelming evidence) that the president had lost the election, Trump suddenly, if only briefly, joined with Democrats in demanding a two-thousand-dollar stimulus check, vetoing the new stimulus bill that Loeffler had voted for in lockstep with the GOP leadership, thinking that in doing so, she was doing Trump’s bidding. Now, a couple of days away from the run-off that will define her political future, Trump has left her, with her feet dangling in the air, scurrying to explain why she voted to hack COVID crisis benefits to Georgians in half and is now seeking to disavow that vote, claiming, like Trump, to think the stimulus check should have been two thousand, when it’s too late to do anything about it, because the Senate leadership has spoken and Trump’s veto has been overturned.

If all of this means that both Loeffler and her fellow Georgia Republican David Perdue—who is spending the last days of his campaign in COVID quarantine—lose the run-off in Georgia, which it appears they well might, perhaps both Trump, with his mindless trash-talking about the Republican administration in that state, and Loeffler, by kowtowing to the president’s insane conspiracy theories instead of defending her own constituency, will have done an inadvertent service to democracy, by handing the Senate to the Democrats and forcing Mitch “Stonewall” McConnell to step down, after the most disgraceful administration in history.    

 

TRUMP IS NOT (just) A RACIST

US President Donald Trump is not a racist. Or at least that’s not all that he is. His is, rather, a misanthrope, an equal-opportunity hater, who can always find something bad to say about just about anybody.

Well, no, not quite. Actually, he can find something awful to say about anyone decent and admirable (John McCain, Barack Obama, Angela Merkel and Meryl Streep spring to mind), or anyone who criticizes or disagrees with him (as long as they are allies or former allies of the United States), or anyone who is a Democrat (or a democrat), or anyone Muslim (other than Saudi Prince Mohammad bin Salman), or anyone Jewish (with the exception of Bibi Netanyahu and “short guys that wear yarmulkes” and count his money), or any foreign-born person (other than his wife and her parents) living in the US, or anyone gay, or anyone who doesn’t look like or sound like they just came from participating in a Ku Klu Klan rally.

Incited racism...The crowd chanted, "Send her back!"

But in all fairness, there are those about whom he seldom if ever has anything bad to say, people who, by his own admission, he really admires—read: Vladimir Putin, Kim Jong-un, Rodrigo Duterte, even the late Benito Mussolini, authoritarians that he would like to be “when he grows up.”

If he weren’t the president of the United States, he could be as racist, bigoted and misanthropic as he liked in his speech (it would indeed be his right to free, if repugnant, expression), and it wouldn’t matter one iota. But he is. And it does.

During the Civil Rights Era of half a century ago, back when I was growing up in my small, all-white, Midwestern home town, it was not uncommon to witness how prominent members of our homogeneous community would blithely ignore the fact that most African American people’s roots in the US stretched back much further than their own Scots-Irish and German immigrant “pedigree” and would suggest that if blacks, who were demanding that their constitutional rights be respected, didn’t like it in America, they could “go back to Africa.”

Sound familiar? It should, because that’s precisely what the president suggested four congresswomen of color should do this past week. And until Trump took office and declared political correctness a thing of the past, this would have been discriminatory and an example of hate-speech.

Indeed, in most workplaces, it still would be considered discriminatory, and the perpetrator would be subject to reprimand, suspension or dismissal. In fact, it is a patent example of potentially unlawful language when it creates a threatening atmosphere in the workplace. Under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, ethnic slurs and other verbal or physical abuse due to nationality are illegal if they are severe or pervasive and create an intimidating, hostile or offensive working environment, interfere with work performance, or negatively affect job opportunities. Examples of potentially unlawful conduct include insults, taunting, or ethnic epithets, such as making fun of a person’s foreign accent or comments like, specifically, “Go back to where you came from,” whether made by supervisors or by co-workers.

The Squad

In clear reference to US-born citizens, women of color and Congresswomen Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), Rashida Tlaib (D-MI), Ayanna Pressley (D-MA) and (especially) to Somali-born Ilhan Omar (D-MN) a naturalized citizen who has lived in the US since childhood, Trump attacked the four elected representatives for their critical views of US policies saying that if they didn’t like it in America, “Why don't they go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came.” 

Some people have tried to argue that Trump isn’t really a racist. That he only uses racism to energize his base, since, he figures, most of his base is indeed racist. But I’m not very sure that the president isn’t a blatant racist, and if he isn’t, then saying something like this simply for effect is even more criminal, because, if that’s true, then his purpose in saying it is to incite hatred and violence. Indeed, Congresswoman Omar has been receiving death threats for some time, and they spiked following Trump’s latest racist tweet. As was amply covered by the media, at a rally that he held this past week in North Carolina, the president clearly mentioned Congresswoman Omar’s name as a crowd-teaser and a buzzword, and the response was immediate. Members of his base in the crowd started chanting “Send her back! Send her back!” As they did, Trump stood idly by and let the racist chants go on, while he postured like Mussolini on the podium.

Equality has never been a value for many of the people who make up Trump’s core base: nativists, tribalists, bigots, Christian fundamentalists, white supremacists, xenophobes and all others who are too ignorant, insecure and narrow-minded to accept diversity. His energizing of these people, his permission for them to give in to their worst instincts is dangerous and frightening. And energizing the rabble to get them to attack “the other” is the stuff that fascism and dictatorial rule are made of.

More terrifying still, however, is not Trump himself, but the GOP’s tolerance of him. The party of Lincoln and Eisenhower has been converted into the party of Trump and it is the Republican Party, in its vast majority, that is providing Trump with the power he needs to become a clear and present danger to democracy or the rule of law. The fact that only a tiny handful of Republican politicians were willing to come out this week and condemn racism and Trump’s use of it as a rallying cry is a clear indicator of the extent to which the current occupant of the White House has usurped the GOP and imbued it with his one-man authoritarian quest for unbridled power.

That racist, bigoted poison with which the 45^th president of the US has been rallying his base has spread, obviously, beyond the stage of cutting off the hand to save the body when nearly no one in his party is willing to stand up and say, loudly and unequivocally, that racism is wrong and un-American, and that it won’t be tolerated. Not by anyone, including the president.

The Handmaid's Tale...the new normal?

We Americans tend to think that once historic social conquests like those won in the civil rights era are in place, they become self-maintaining and permanent fixtures. Trump and the hijacked GOP have demonstrated that we can take nothing for granted, that the threat of authoritarianism and a return to hatred of “the other” are only latent as long as the worst that the nation has to offer isn’t marshaled behind a would-be tyrant with the means necessary to inflame a following.

It is no coincidence that the TV miniseries of The Handmaid’s Tale, based on a book that Margaret Atwood wrote back in the mid-1980s, is so wildly popular among liberal democratic audiences today. It’s because, back then, Atwood’s premise was a prescient invention, while today, it’s becoming a burgeoning reality.