Doom Report (Week 33: Steal Like No One's Watching)

This week, while being interviewed by Jim Acosta, Mehdi Hasan said:

A judge this morning said Donald Trump violated that law by putting the National Guard on the streets of LA against the governor’s recommendation.  So on the same day, literally the same day, that a judge is saying, what you did in LA was illegal, he comes out and says, “Well, I’m going to do it in Chicago, too.”  And he said today, “I may go back into LA.”  What a weird world we live in, Jim ...

He goes on to note:

Most people go, “Oh, I broke the law; hope no one notices.”  He says, “I broke the law, and I’m going to do it again and again.”

And this ties in with something I was pondering last week, but hadn’t yet well formulated.  Once upon a time, when the government did bad shit, you could expose them.  We used to have movies and novels where the heroes just have to get the story to the New York Times or Rolling Stone or Mother Jones, and then the evil politicians won’t be able to continue their evil plans.  In fact, we don’t even need to restrict ourselves to fiction: remember All the President’s Men (book or movie, take your pick), where reporters met informants in dimly-lit underground parking garages?  Just expose the story and that’ll put the brakes on a lawless President.  Seems almost quaint in retrospect.  Now, when the government does something bad, or illegal, or horrifying, they just don’t care who knows.

Other things you need to know this week:

• Josh Johnson has really been the rising star of the making-fun-of-the-news scene this year: if the YouTube clips of his stand-up tour are any indication, he’s doing entirely different routines in every city, keeping up with the frenetic pace of the news while keeping a very sharp edge.  His facility with words calls to mind a fusion of rappers with a complex flow, such as Nas and Lateef the Truthspeaker, with some of the best of the old-school British purveyors of comedic wordplay, such as John Cleese and Stephen Fry.  He has a way of relating the insanity of the Trump regime with personal anecdotes that are extremely relatable, blending it all together until the absurdity is manifest.  This week, he talks about the reasons that people voted for Trump in a way that I hadn’t considered before: that maybe people just “felt like there was no one looking out for them; that slowly everything that was their quality of life and everything that they earned was eroding away piece by piece.  Right?  And that they just needed someone to step up who would stand in the way of all that, and wouldn’t be swayed by it.”  I think what he’s saying is that the Dems and the Repubs are all locked into the status quo, and people just wanted someone who would say “fuck you” to everybody and do whatever the fuck they wanted.  And boy did we get that.  Maybe it’s not quite as good as we hoped it would be.

• Hank Green explains why your electric bill is going to get very, very bad, and how the Republicans will blame green energy for it.

• More Perfect Union is killing it this week.  They have two excellent videos exposing the bad shit that continues to fester behing all the bad shit that Trump is doing: one on Musk’s “self-driving cars” scam, and one on how to make tons of money in the stock market (hint: it’s by buying and selling whenever Congress does).

If you’re only going to watch one thing this week, I encourage you to spend an hour watching Hasan Minhaj interview the former head of USAID.  This is an organization that’s saved over 90 million lives over the last 20 years; now, it’s completely gutted.  Best estimates are over 300,000 lives lost because of this so far this year.  Here’s the stark reality that Dr. Gawande lays out:

You had people in a hundred offices around the world: those are shut down.  The organizations that they worked with that had expertise, local organizations in different countries and large organizations around the world, they’ve terminated their staff.  There’s a bank account that has billions of dollars in it that now has shifted to the State Department; who knows whether that’ll be spent appropriately, but there aren’t the people there anymore to to make this program work.  Sixty years of experience of an agency that’s built up these capabilities.  Now, if you turn that back on, it would take you years, if not decades, to rebuild.

Watch Hasan’s reaction to this pronouncement.

I wish there was a note of hope to leave you on this week, but, to echo Dr. Gawande, “What I am simply trying to do is bear witness to the destruction at at this moment.”  So keep looking ahead to a time when this is over, keep trying to laugh as best you can at the absurdity of it all, but never lose sight of the wanton destruction wrought by the hands of a few capricious and callous billionaires.