Some time has passed since I've posted. This was not an accident but an inaction that I took when I went to Peru for a month. The stories on social media about having your computers and phone perused by immigration agents had me pause during my trip as I thought about the consequences of having anything I've posted here regarding the Middle East thrown in my face. It's almost funny if not tragic that standing up for an active genocide results in getting thrown out of the land of the free. But that is what this country has unfortunately come to. I keep reminding myself that in Peru we lived under two different dictatorships and some of us survived it. Perhaps the point is that during those dictatorships life really couldn't flourish because of all the repression and looting. In fact a generation if not more were lost there and that is what will and is happening here. Pretending to erase history will do that.
Here's an article from The Atlantic:
He blinked. But we don’t really know why.
Whether it was the stock market cascading downward, investors fleeing from U.S. Treasury bonds, Republican donors jamming the White House phones, or even fears for his own portfolio, President Donald Trump decided yesterday afternoon to lift, temporarily, most of his arbitrary tariffs. This was his personal decision. His “instinct,” as he put it. His whim. And his decision, instinct, or whim could bring the tariffs back again.
The Republicans who lead Congress have refused to use the power of the legislative branch to stop him or moderate him, in this or almost any other matter. The Cabinet is composed of sycophants and loyalists who are willing to defend contradictory policies, even if doing so makes them look like fools. The courts haven’t decisively intervened yet either. No one, apparently, is willing to prevent a single man from destroying the world economy, wrecking financial markets, forcing this country and other countries into recession if that’s what he feels like doing when he gets up tomorrow morning.
This is what arbitrary, absolute power looks like. And this is why the men who wrote the Constitution never wanted anyone to have it. In that famously hot, stuffy room in Philadelphia, windows closed for the sake of secrecy, they sweated and argued about how to limit the powers of the American executive. They arrived at the idea of dividing power between different branches of government. As James Madison wrote in “Federalist No. 47”: “The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary in the same hands … may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.”