Category Archives: The Chaotic Contrarian

Trump, Clinton and the Dystopian New York Penal System

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Former president Donald Trump has been indicted by a politicized Manhattan grand jury handpicked by New York County District Attorney Alvin Bragg for misclassifying a purported political expense, a settlement payment to a porn star, as a business and legal expense, while former presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and her campaign staff and attorneys, who were in fact sanctioned for classifying the funding and distribution of the infamous Steele dossier as a legal expense, not only got a pass, but publicly revel in the difference.  As does most of the corporate media, as do Democrats everywhere.

So, aside from political affinities, what is the difference between these two situations?

Well, the Trump situation involved an issue not necessarily tied to politics and thus, not illegal in any sense.  It could well have involved an expense classifiable as involving business or personal factors and should perhaps be classified as the response of a victim of blackmail and extortion entitled to protection under the penal system.  On the other hand, there is no doubt about the nature of the Clinton expenditure, a political expense involving a fraudulent campaign disguised as a legal fee, thus, the case against Ms. Clinton and her campaign organization is much stronger.  Other than that, not one thing.  Well, Trump is despised by the Deep State and Mrs. Clinton is their idol although both Mr. Trump and Ms. Clinton are unpleasant and unsavory characters.  But justice is supposedly blind, albeit purportedly in a positive sense, stressing its neutrality, not in a negative sense involving utter incoherence, hypocrisy and malfeasance.

The 2016 electoral cycle was a wakeup call, but not in a good way.  The People, fed up, reacted in a manner much different than that anticipated by the corporate media and traditionalist politicians in both major United States political parties.  They made it clear that they were prepared for real change.  But rather than correct the injustice, inefficiency, corruption and misfeasance that led to the revolt by the electorate, from both the left (the Sanderistas) and the right (the Tea Party), a massive reactionary campaign was launched by traditionalist politicians in both major political parties to silence populists of all bents, to censor opposition to Deep State (i.e., Democratic Party) candidates, to facilitate a market in electoral ballots, and thus to assure a satisfactory, predetermined electoral outcome.  Further, in order to preemptively quell furor over the foregoing, a massive prosecutorial campaign was implemented, with agent provocateurs insidiously planted, to insure that electoral protests would not be permitted to spread.  Instead, the bureaucracy, the judiciary and the justice system spread a veil of silence, promptly dismissing, usually on procedural grounds, all legal actions seeking to demonstrate the existence of electoral irregularities, making it impossible to determine if enough irregularities took place to change electoral outcomes.  Something we will now never know, although many have strong suspicions.

The results of the 2020 elections were profoundly satisfying to the Deep State.  Mission accomplished.  The attempted mini-revolt that seemed brewing in 2022, was at least minimized.  Now 2024 is looming, and the Deep State, fearful of another revolt in 2024, as implied by most polling data, is seeking to limit opposition to its candidates, not just through control over available information, but also through abuse of the legal system, and it may work. 

Mr. Trump, to the dismay of many, the disgust of some and the panic of others, is once again running for president.  But unlike 2016, he seems a much stronger candidate; certainly within the GOP.  That is in large part because of the horrendous performance of the Biden administration in every possible sense, but, it’s loyalty to the Deep State is unquestionable, hence, Mr. Biden will also apparently run again.  And Mr. Trump may well defeat him, if given a chance to run.  Which is why litigation, both penal and civil, is being resorted to by those who have good cause to fear his return to power.  Mrs. Clinton?  Much as she might wish she were still relevant, she seems to have been consigned to a role as an embittered relic of days we wish were gone-by but which, unfortunately, have just changed some of the cast.  Of course, perhaps one should beware of the “walking dead”.

What a world in which Messers. Trump and Biden and the ghosts conjured by Mrs. Clinton are the candidates offered up to lead the purportedly free world, especially when there are people like Tulsi Gabbard and Dennis Kucinich and Even, Joseph Kennedy IV available as alternatives, but there you have it; we are collectively up the creek with no paddles in sight.

Sooo, in conclusion, an imprisoned candidate in the United States is precluded from conducting a political campaign, and in many states, from being on the ballot.  That, clearly, seems to be the Deep State’s ultimate backup strategy for 2024. 

Which explains all the Trump related litigation and the dichotomy in Mr. Bragg’s approach to law enforcement.
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© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2023; all rights reserved.  Please feel free to share with appropriate attribution.

Guillermo (“Bill”) Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet) is a writer, political commentator and academic currently residing in the Republic of Colombia (although he has primarily lived in the United States of America of which he is also a citizen).  Until 2017 he chaired the political science, government and international relations programs at the Universidad Autónoma de Manizales.  He is currently the publisher of the Inannite Review, available at Substack.com.  He has academic degrees in political science (the Citadel), law (St. John’s University), international legal studies (New York University) and translation and linguistic studies (the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies).  However, he is also fascinated by mythology, religion, physics, astronomy and mathematics, especially with matters related to quanta and cosmogony.  He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at https://guillermocalvo.com/.

Quizás, quizás, quizás

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For erudite and knowledgeable conservative Republicans of the populist rather than traditionalist bent, it must be shocking to have to admit that Hugo Chavez was dead on with respect to his New Latin American Constitutionalism, a political philosophy premised on the hypotheses that elite control over the judiciary, the media, the bureaucracy and the legislative branch was antithetical to democracy, and especially to democratic reform.

Chavez, in essence, recognized the functioning of Latin America’s version of the “deep state”, a subsidiary of the United States’ own Deep State, and tried his best to dismantle it in Venezuela, impossible given the economic leverage against Chavismo exerted by the United States and its allies, including fifth columnists predominant among the Venezuelan elite, but he at least managed to splinter the preexistent power structure, at least in the public’s perception.

His successor, Nicholas Madura is no Chavez, he is a lightweight caretaker whose replacement never arrived.  He is not an intellectual theorist, or a revolutionary.  But amazingly, notwithstanding the theft of major Venezuelan assets organized in a bipartisan manner by the United States and its allies, especially the United Kingdom, he has hung on.  By his fingernails at times, but he has hung on.

Now the tactics used against Latin American progressives by elites loyal to the United States billionaire class have come home to roost, … in a sense.  The diverse agencies charged with administration of the justice system in the United States, on federal and state levels, including prosecutors, private attorneys and judges are busy investigating and litigating in order to obstruct functional democracy and to deprive voters of choices deemed unacceptable, to exact revenge on political adversaries, while the corporate media is not only cheering them on, but censoring information damaging to predetermined electoral outcomes, predetermined, of course, by the Deep State and its owners.  The mole ridden bureaucracy is a second line of defense, should primary efforts to block an unruly electorate prove insufficient, as occurred in 2016.  Just as Hugo Chavez predicted.  Only the victims now include the American People, and of course, superficially, those rigidly antisocialist populist right wingers beloved by adherents of the philosophies of the non-existent Tea Party.

Unfortunately, victims also include the left wing Cassandra class.  We who’ve been pointing out the dangers of a Deep State dedicated to extracting every penny possible from “ordinary” Americans through taxation and government borrowing, mechanisms for generating and “laundering” extorted wealth through the ill named “defense industry” (what Ike referred to as the “military industrial complex”), now supplemented by the pharmaceutical industry via “blessed” pandemics.

Perhaps, somehow, Latin America can escape the vicious sociopolitical-economic quagmire in which so much of the world finds itself.  Perhaps it can orchestrate such escape through the insights Hugo Chaves tried to weave into an effective oppositional strategy, and if it does, perhaps other countries will follow it and escape the Deep State gravity well whose event horizon seems to have the world trapped in endless war.  Perhaps the BRICS’ efforts to attain a non-hegemonic world power structure will bear fruit, and, echoing the hypothesis on which United States federalism was premised, a multipolar world will experiment with different sociopolitical and economic options resulting in new solutions to age old problems which can then be adopted by others.

Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps, as the wonderful Hispanic song “Quizás, quizás, quizás” croons.

But from where I sit, that seems to be somewhat beyond today’s horizons.
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© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2023; all rights reserved.  Please feel free to share with appropriate attribution.

Guillermo (“Bill”) Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet) is a writer, political commentator and academic currently residing in the Republic of Colombia (although he has primarily lived in the United States of America of which he is also a citizen).  Until 2017 he chaired the political science, government and international relations programs at the Universidad Autónoma de Manizales.  He is currently the publisher of the Inannite Review, available at Substack.com.  He has academic degrees in political science (the Citadel), law (St. John’s University), international legal studies (New York University) and translation and linguistic studies (the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies).  However, he is also fascinated by mythology, religion, physics, astronomy and mathematics, especially with matters related to quanta and cosmogony.  He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at https://guillermocalvo.com/.

The Political Fallacy of Right versus Left

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The left-right dichotomy in the political spectrum is greatly exaggerated and manipulated in order to (through the divide and conquer strategy made famous by the British in foreign affairs) keep the most selfish among us in perpetual power.  The infinitesimally tiny billionaire class which owns the corporate media, all major political parties and the leadership of “our” government’s bureaucracy, uses that left-right divide to fuel the polarization essential to maintain itself in power, stressing faux issues such as abortion, gun control and identity politics in order to avoid the issues that really make a difference in our lives, issues like peace, equity, healthcare, education and sustainable family economics.  Issues as to which families on both sides of the left-right political spectrum mostly agree.

The majority of citizen-victims (a more accurate characterization of just what and who we are, except, perhaps, that “subject” might be more accurate than citizen), sense that something is terribly wrong, and so, are more and more drawn to populist figures who, although less articulate and less versed in rhetoric, resonate with them.  And it’s not a United States phenomenon but rather, one spreading throughout the “western” world.  Jair Messias Bolsonaro in Brazil and Rodolfo Hernández Suárez in Colombia were analogues to Donald John Trump in the United States, albeit much less experienced or capable than the unpleasant Mr. Trump.  All received significant support from populists on the right.  But other much more palatable choices on the left of the populist spectrum like Colombia’s Gustavo Petro, Brazil’s Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and Mexico’s Andrés Manuel López Obrador, have managed to attain power.  Other leftist populists in Latin America attained power briefly but were quickly deposed by United States funded and supported “soft” and hard coups d’état, as was the case recently in Peru, and a few years ago in Bolivia and Honduras.

If populists on the left and on the right, including populists in the United States, e.g., political followers of Bernie Sanders, Tulsi Gabbard, Dennis Kucinich, etc. (on the left) and the Republican Tea Party (on the right) ever stopped to carefully analyze the current situation and their respective ideals, we’d realize that we have a great deal in common, most importantly, a common foe.  That foe is the billionaire class referenced above, and its tools, are primarily the Democratic Party, traditionalist Republicans, the corporate media, and moles implanted throughout the federal bureaucracy, especially the intelligence communities, the Department of Justice and the judiciary.  A foe which, however, if we united and respected our right to be different, even our right to be wrong, we could finally render impotent.

The “Deep State” is a term some of us use to identify the informal coalition that comprises our foe.  The foe that bleeds United States tax payers of funds that could be used for universal healthcare, for universal education at all levels, for a meaningful universal social safety net, for decent infrastructure, etc., syphoning such funds into expenditures to fund permanent armed conflict around the world, which, at the costs of millions of lives, funds the lavish lifestyles of the few.  Consider: most of the world’s wealth is owned by sixteen families, while a majority of the world’s people lack adequate food, adequate shelter, adequate clothing, adequate healthcare and adequate education.  Children die every second of every day from United States funded bombs to support the whims of the very worst among us, all with the essential assistance of very foolish voters who feel that by rewriting history, evil history will not have happened.  That through censorship, reality and truth will become irrelevant.  That by insulting, ridiculing and calumnying those with different perspectives we will all finally get along and freedom will finally ring.

All of the foregoing negativity is possible because we are denuded of empathy and common sense through emotional manipulation.  Through what purports to be entertainment but is instead, Orwellian propaganda glorifying villainy, murder, dishonesty and violence; an us versus them disease, with what passes for news being a filter that eliminates that which does not promote Deep State agendas and replaces it with calumny, ridicule and deception (plus a smattering of Pablum to keep us bored).  Some of us remember Pablum, albeit vaguely; tasteless baby food, carefully blended to assure homogeneity.

If we, as a People, in sufficient numbers, ever grasp the foregoing and, taking the time to reflect on it, evaluate it and digest it, unite (despite our superficial differences), and, rejecting polarization, decide to impose rather than merely demand change, our progeny might inherit a world they’ll respect.

And we’d earn their blessings instead of their justified disdain.
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© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2023; all rights reserved.  Please feel free to share with appropriate attribution.

Guillermo (“Bill”) Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet) is a writer, political commentator and academic currently residing in the Republic of Colombia (although he has primarily lived in the United States of America of which he is also a citizen).  Until 2017 he chaired the political science, government and international relations programs at the Universidad Autónoma de Manizales.  He is currently the publisher of the Inannite Review, available at Substack.com.  He has academic degrees in political science (the Citadel), law (St. John’s University), international legal studies (New York University) and translation and linguistic studies (the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies).  However, he is also fascinated by mythology, religion, physics, astronomy and mathematics, especially with matters related to quanta and cosmogony.  He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at https://guillermocalvo.com/.

Context on the Current Criminal Case against Former US President Donald John Trump, a Perspective from the Republic of Colombia

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The following is based on an article written by the author for use in the Republic of Colombia trying to contextualize for a Colombian audience the nature of the actions recently brought against former president Donald Trump by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg.  It contrasts Mr. Trump’s current situation with the similar experiences of Colombia’s current president, a left wing progressive, when he was the mayor of Bogota and a probable contender for the Colombian presidency (which he obviously won, but only after intervention by the Interamerican Human Rights Court, an institution to which the United States does not subscribe).

The recent indictment of former President Donald John Trump by a grand jury convened and controlled by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg seems very confusing to foreigners, primarily because reports in the traditional United States lack both context and objectivity, and, further, admittedly, because the former president’s personality is so abrasive, self-centered and unpleasant, that it is difficult to feel compassion for him.  However, as indicated in the introduction, for Colombians, some analogies involving their own recent experiences are useful. 

One, involves a political leader who shares Mr. Trump’s aggressive personality, Carlos Felipe Mejía Mejía, a former senator from former president Alvaro Uribe Velez’s ultra-right wing political party, the Centro Democratico (a favorite of the United States’ Deep State), and the other (again as mentioned in the introduction), involves the experiences of current Colombian president Gustavo Petro’s in the face of abuse of the Colombian legal system by his opponents, to prevent him from participating in electoral politics.  Mr. Petro’s struggles were successful only because, unlike the United States, Colombia respects international law and human rights and accepts the decisions of the Interamerican Court of Human Rights, an institution established through the Interamerican Convention on Human Rights, which the United States has refused to ratify (that tribunal found the abuse of the legal system to bar Mr. Petro from political activity illegal).  Mr. Petro had been removed from office as mayor of Bogota and barred from future political by the national procurator, a political opponent, pretty much in the manner Democratic prosecutors in Georgia and New York, as well as in the Department of Justice, are seeking to convict Mr. Trump of crimes in order to render him ineligible to engage in political activity, especially with respect to the presidential elections scheduled for 2024.

The following is pretty much how I explained the current situation in the United States to a Colombian audience:

Former president Donald Trump has just been indicted by a grand jury organized by a county attorney within New York City on 34 felony counts. They all have to do with a payment pursuant to a legal settlement and non-disclosure agreement seeking to put an end to accusations by Mrs. Stephanie Gregory Clifford, a former porn star using the name “Stormy Daniels”, to the effect that Mr. Trump had spent a night with her when, although married, he was a private citizen.

Normally, Ms. Clifford’s demands would have involved the crimes of blackmail and extortion and she would have been the person facing criminal prosecution, but the current case is, for purely political reasons, different. The truth is that the alleged crimes attributed to Mr. Trump have never existed in American jurisprudence and, rather, involve an “innovation” by the Manhattan District Attorney focused on the way in which the expenses were reported by Mr. Trump’s employees, i.e., not as donations from Mr. Trump to his own presidential campaign, but as business or personal legal expenses, paid to his attorney, who had paid them to Ms. Clifford.  Indeed, the agreement was between that attorney and Ms. Clifford, for the benefit of Mr. Trump.

If settlement and non-disclosure agreements were a crime, then many American politicians would (or should) be in jail, especially major Trump adversaries, but that doesn’t seem to matter. It also doesn’t matter whether he is eventually found innocent. The mere accusations (indictments are only accusations, after all) are expected to have the desired impact. An electoral victory in 2024 for someone more in accord with current neoconservative politics in the United States.

So, why the current situation? After all, Mr. Trump is clearly a neoliberal capitalist very much in the mold of many of his political opponents.  Well, because “very much” is apparently not enough, especially when it involves rejection of traditional neoconservative tactics.

Former President Trump currently leads presidential preference polls for the 2024 presidential elections in the United States, and that is intolerable to the Democratic Party and to traditional Republicans, not because of his alleged immoral personal conduct, that’s a matter between him and his wife, but because Mr. Trump disagrees with current policies concerning the conflict in the Ukraine, because he wants to end NATO, which he perceives as anachronistic, and also, because he believes that the huge expenditures on “defense” spending, on military bases in other countries and on interventions in foreign affairs should be reduced considerably, with the savings used to improve domestic infrastructure, lower taxes charged to US citizens and reduce the national debt to zero.

For the powers that actually control the American state (which President Dwight David Eisenhower warned against when he alluded to “the military/industrial complex”), that would be intolerable given that such industry “earns” billions of dollars in profits every year. Thus, as was the case for current the Colombian president (prior to intervention by the Interamerican Human Rights Court), Mr. Trump’s opponents are seeking to destroy him politically through constant and consistent abuse of the legal system, abuse orchestrated by Democratic prosecutors in several states, especially in New York and Georgia, as well as in the Department of Justice; prosecutors using all the resources available through the United States criminal justice system (an oxymoron) to convict Mr. Trump of offenses which would make him ineligible to run for or hold public office.

In the case of Colombian President Petro, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights prevented his political opponents from denying the Colombian people the right to elect the candidate of their choice as president, but nothing of that nature exists with respect to the United States, purportedly the land of the free, and Mr. Trump is at the mercy of judges and prosecutors appointed by his political enemies, and a press that hates him.  Not an enviable position for Mr. Trump, but also, not an enviable position for those Americans, perhaps a majority, who see him as their champion.  The United States is currently more polarized than it has been since 1859, and we know what happened then.  This situation is likely to make matters even worse, but then, that’s a future problem and as Louis XV is alleged to have proclaimed: “Let the flood come, as long as I’m no longer here”, which it did.  From this author’s perspective, the issue is not whether Mr. Trump is a good or decent person, he is not a Trump supporter nor does he intend to vote for him, but in a democracy, a real democracy, what is happening to Mr. Trump should not be tolerated.

It should be noted that the author tried to post a Spanish version of this article on Facebook, but it was immediately banned, allegedly for violating the community guidelines against nudity. Judge for yourself what this article has to do with that subject, and then ask yourself what is happening, and why.
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© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2023; all rights reserved.  Please feel free to share with appropriate attribution.

Guillermo (“Bill”) Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet) is a writer, political commentator and academic currently residing in the Republic of Colombia (although he has primarily lived in the United States of America of which he is also a citizen).  Until 2017 he chaired the political science, government and international relations programs at the Universidad Autónoma de Manizales.  He is currently the publisher of the Inannite Review, available at Substack.com.  He has academic degrees in political science (the Citadel), law (St. John’s University), international legal studies (New York University) and translation and linguistic studies (the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies).  However, he is also fascinated by mythology, religion, physics, astronomy and mathematics, especially with matters related to quanta and cosmogony.  He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at https://guillermocalvo.com/.

Now What?

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As I write this, I wonder if it will ever be permitted to see the light of day.  I’m certain that access to this article will be subjected to the de facto censorship limiting its spread and access through algorithms designed to limit postures frowned upon by our Internet censors.  But perhaps some brave souls will share it.  Every once in a while we somehow manage to get our messages heard, after which, of course, they’re distorted.

As usual when I write about abuse of the political, electoral and legal systems by the Deep State and its primary tools, the Democratic Party, traditionalist Republicans and the corporate media to impact the electoral options of Donald John Trump, I precede by asserting that I do not care for him and do not intend to vote for him, even as a protest.  But Mr. Trump has been indicted through the machinations of a Deep State tool, one of several local attorneys general and federal prosecutors tasked with preventing him for again running for and again possibly winning the United States presidency. 

The action is unprecedented, not only because it involves a former United States president, but because the purported “crime” involves having been the victim of blackmail and extortion.  But the real reason seems obvious to me.  It seems obvious to many who love peace, to the many who really strive for equity and equality, and for a system of governance based on justice and legality.

Mr. Trump has many negative characteristics but also a few saving graces, and it is the latter which have led the Deep State to take this unprecedented action, an action so polarizing that it once again promotes the prospect that American citizens will feel it is their duty to act in an uncivil, possibly violent manner.  The saving graces all involve repudiation of neoconservative military activities abroad, for example, in the Ukraine and in Taiwan; they involve repudiation of the dangerously anachronistic North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the similar web of offensive military alliances and bases around the world designed to promote and preserve political, economic and military hegemony, even at the risk of nuclear war.  They involve a desire to redirect spending on defense towards improved infrastructure.

Mr. Trump’s posture with respect to the foregoing is neither consistent nor coherent given his dedication to Israeli objectives and his intent to do to the Islamic Republic of Iran what his predecessors did to Iraq, nor given his methodology of governance through arrogance and aggressive posturing on economic issues, but it is deeply threatening to those who rule us through proxies, those who rule us through moles scattered throughout the bureaucracy and the judiciary, throughout what used to be a purportedly free press, throughout international institutions.  That is why a minor league functionary has taken the unprecedented, illegal action that confronts the United States today.  The action which will exacerbate the polarization which led to the events of January 6, 2020, and which, step by step, is bringing Americans closer and closer to another disastrous civil conflict.

Some among the American people seem to be waking up to the reality that democracy in the United States is an illusion, too many perhaps.  And the Deep State will not tolerate such independence, not again.  It is hell bent on preventing the miscalculations that led to the disastrous 2016 presidential and Congressional elections, disastrous at least from their perspective.  And no price is too high to pay to avoid them, especially when it is We the People who pay the price, not those who rule us.  Who rule us as though they were the proud owners of Tolkien’s one ring.

Julian Assange sits rotting in a British prison, thanks to the Deep State, in that case including Mr. Trump.  The real criminals, the Clintons, the Obamas, the Bush’s and the Bidens (and I don’t mean just Hunter and Jimmy), are free to loot, plunder and cast the world into chaos; a world suffering from the blights of inflation and recession everywhere, and from the violence of the antithesis of Kant’s perpetual peace.  And I’m not at all certain that We the People can do anything about it.  It may already be too late. 

It is certainly way too late to stop the madness through the prophylactic means the Constitution was adopted to provide, means such as limiting the war powers to Congress, an institution which, for more than a century, has abdicated its most important responsibilities, both with respect to peace, and to foreign affairs, and to the wise use of our tax dollars.  And I’m not certain that there are any other constitutional options still open. 

Many of us seriously question the legitimacy of the electoral process, some, because of recent events, but others because the United States has always been a duopoly, a faux democracy with the electoral system rigged in favor of two principal players, both ultimately controlled by the same people.  That leaves us no options that most of us find acceptable, certainly not those options brewing under the surface among left and right wing armed thugs who consider themselves patriots.

So, … “now what”, as Troy’s Cassandra might ask, after having warned us of what was happening for so long?  As Julian Assange might ask, or Edward Snowden, or Chelsea Manning, or as the small group of independent journalists exiled from the major media constantly remind us.  Or as George Orwell and Aldous Huxley and myriad other authors of dystopian novels illustrated for us.

Now what?
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© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2023; all rights reserved.  Please feel free to share with appropriate attribution.

Guillermo (“Bill”) Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet) is a writer, political commentator and academic currently residing in the Republic of Colombia (although he has primarily lived in the United States of America of which he is also a citizen).  Until 2017 he chaired the political science, government and international relations programs at the Universidad Autónoma de Manizales.  He is currently the publisher of the Inannite Review, available at Substack.com.  He has academic degrees in political science (the Citadel), law (St. John’s University), international legal studies (New York University) and translation and linguistic studies (the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies).  However, he is also fascinated by mythology, religion, physics, astronomy and mathematics, especially with matters related to quanta and cosmogony.  He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at https://guillermocalvo.com/.

Once Again, the Ides of March

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It’s March 15, 2023.  Once again the Ides of March. 

Two millennia, six decades and seven years ago, more or less (given Pope Gregory’s machinations with the calendar), Gaius Iulius Caesar was assassinated by a number of the colleagues he’d pardoned multiple times, including his reputed illegitimate son, Marcus Junius Brutus, as he entered the purportedly sacrosanct Roman Senate.  His crime, protecting the Roman lower classes against those who perceived themselves their betters, and denominated themselves the “boni” (the good).

He was a populist and populists are not well regarded by those who seek permanent power by hiding in the shadows and working through moles in the bureaucracy, the military and in the institutions that operate the economy.

Not that he was a paragon of virtue in all respects, especially shameful was his conduct of the so called Gallic Wars, but he was a fascinatingly complex human being, whose heart, at least with respect to the Roman people, seemed to be in the right place.

Except for the absence of a charismatic and effective populist leader protecting the interests of the most vulnerable among us, little if anything has changed today from the world that Gaius Iulius Caesar left us so long ago.
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© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2023; all rights reserved.  Please feel free to share with appropriate attribution.

Guillermo (“Bill”) Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet) is a writer, political commentator and academic currently residing in the Republic of Colombia (although he has primarily lived in the United States of America of which he is also a citizen).  Until 2017 he chaired the political science, government and international relations programs at the Universidad Autónoma de Manizales.  He has academic degrees in political science (the Citadel), law (St. John’s University), international legal studies (New York University) and translation and linguistic studies (the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies).  However, he is also fascinated by mythology, religion, physics, astronomy and mathematics, especially with matters related to quanta and cosmogony.  He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at https://guillermocalvo.com/.

On the Ironic Nature of the Emerging Financial Crisis

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The Biden administration’s economic policies are clearly a disaster, largely because of the administration’s insane efforts to destroy the Russian and Chinese economies, rather than concentrating on improving our own.  That is not a partisan issue as both major political parties bear at least some blame, but the architects of this disaster are clearly Barak Obama, Joe Biden and their Ukrainian misadventures.

The latest problem, that of failing banks, very large banks, involves something that impacts all banks, large and small, and that involves the diminution in the value of their investment portfolios, especially the fixed, legally required portion invested in United States government securities.  The diminution is not the fault of the bankers, regardless of what the Justice Department and Securities and Exchange Commission seek to imply.  It is a direct result of the Federal Reserve’s efforts to curb the inflation caused by poorly thought out economic sanctions imposed by the United States and the European Union all over the world.

By raising interest rates to curb inflation, the Federal Reserve causes interest on all new debt to rise, making new debt more desirable for investors, including all kinds of financial institutions, than debt previously issued.  The older debt comprises a major portion of the assets held in portfolios. Consequently, the value of the principal on old debt decreases compared to the value of higher interest paying new debt.  It does so in order to equalize yields.  For example, a $100,000 dollar bond paying interest at the annual rate of five percent yields a $5,000 annual return.  If new $100,000 bonds paid ten percent, their annual yield would be $10,000 and in order to compete, that is, to yield a comparable return (10%), the old bonds, rather than having a price based on their face value, would have to be deeply discounted, in this case, to $50,000.  That would vastly reduce the value of portfolios holding the older debt.

That is exactly what happened to Silicon Valley Bank’s portfolio, seriously impairing its liquidity by souring initially sound investments, and putting the depositors’ savings at risk.  More seriously, that is what is happening to the portfolios of every financial institution required to maintain a portion of their assets in United States’ securities, securities issued by the same Federal Reserve that is responsible for the national banking system.

So, it is the state itself that is guilty of the disaster for not taking into account the consequences of its actions that resulted in inflation in the first place when imposing economic sanctions, getting involved in expensive armed conflicts abroad, and taking other reckless economic actions, such as forgiving debt, etc., and then the reactions to combat the resulting inevitable inflation

There is a belief in the United States, especially among Democratic Party strategists, that the United States can merely print its way out of the problem, increasing the national debt and inflation; but the world is no longer as accepting of such conduct.  Acceptance of irresponsible United States fiscal policies relies totally on maintaining the United States dollar as the world’s medium of exchange.  However, the arbitrary imposition of economic sanctions and the freezing of other countries assets are quickly resulting in the evolution of mechanisms to clear international transactions in currencies other than the dollar.  In addition, no longer will most countries feel secure in maintaining their assets, their gold, etc., in facilities subject to United States or even European Union control, and as that happens, a different doomsday clock approaches an economic apocalypse.

Fasten your safety belts and hang on.
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© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2023; all rights reserved.  Please feel free to share with appropriate attribution.

Guillermo (“Bill”) Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet) is a writer, political commentator and academic currently residing in the Republic of Colombia (although he has primarily lived in the United States of America of which he is also a citizen).  Until 2017 he chaired the political science, government and international relations programs at the Universidad Autónoma de Manizales.  He has academic degrees in political science (the Citadel), law (St. John’s University), international legal studies (New York University) and translation and linguistic studies (the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies).  However, he is also fascinated by mythology, religion, physics, astronomy and mathematics, especially with matters related to quanta and cosmogony.  He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at https://guillermocalvo.com/.

Reflections on Alexander

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On June 11 of this year, 2023, it will be two millennia, three centuries, four decades and six years since the death of Alexander III of Macedon, really of Macedon, Greece, Persia, Asia, and the world.  And not just the “world” he ruled but from many perspectives, our own world as well.

His dynastic family[1] was the Argeadai (Ἀργεάδαι) which colonized Macedonia from Argos (famous for the Golden Fleece sought by Jason and the Argonauts) around 750 b.c.e., 400 years before Alexander’s birth. “Argeadai” was the family name his ancestor, Alexander I, used to prove to the hellanodikai (the judges who decided if you were Greek), that he was Dorian, and as a Dorian, Alexander was thus also part of the Heracleidae (Ἡρακλεῖδαι, the purported sons of Heracles).  More proximately, he was known to his contemporaries as Filipidis (Φιλιππίδης), son of Philip, which was his father’s name.  Almost everyone, everywhere today however just refers to him, in whatever their native languages are, as “Alexander the Great”.  That’s been true for more than 2,346 years now.

Alexander has always fascinated me.  I named my second son after him.  My first’s son’s Greek name, “Basileus” (“great king”, the title by which Alexander was addressed) was also, from my perspective, a link to the Alexander that I so admired.  My fascination was not premised on his renowned military prowess or on his charisma, but rather, on the fact that he considered all men brothers, regardless of their nationality, their race, their religion or their sexual orientation, and that he treated those his armies conquered as one people, much to the distaste and despair of his Macedonian brethren.  An attitude which, after more than 2,346 years, we have yet to fully accept although hundreds of millions, perhaps billions of people have claimed to do so, unfortunately, usually, in an extremely hypocritical manner.

His tomb, eventually located in Egypt’s Alexandria, a city Alexander founded, was revered for hundreds of years.  Both Iulius Caesar and his grandnephew, Octavian, visited it almost three centuries after Alexander’s death.  Unfortunately, as so often happened in antiquity, the tomb was looted and his amazingly preserved body, it apparently refused to decay, has vanished.  The Roman emperor Gaius (Caligula), may have been to blame; he wanted Alexander’s armor, but other Roman emperors or popes evidently eventually needed the gold of his sarcophagus, and ultimately, apparently looters just wanted whatever they could get to sell, although there are legends that it was Christians from Venice who stole the body, believing it to be that of Mark the Evangelist, or perhaps Matthew, or maybe Luke.  Christians and looters are synonymous to people all over the world, especially in the Americas.

His vision of the brotherhood of man was adopted by the stoic philosophers, and eventually, by the early Christian churches, adopted but pretty much ignored.  An attitude all too similar to ours today.

What might he have accomplished had he lived beyond his span of a bit less than thirty-three years?

We could sure use an Alexander, in the latter sense, today.
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© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2023; all rights reserved.  Please feel free to share with appropriate attribution.

Guillermo (“Bill”) Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet) is a writer, political commentator and academic currently residing in the Republic of Colombia (although he has primarily lived in the United States of America of which he is also a citizen).  Until 2017 he chaired the political science, government and international relations programs at the Universidad Autónoma de Manizales.  He has academic degrees in political science (the Citadel), law (St. John’s University), international legal studies (New York University) and translation and linguistic studies (the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies).  However, he is also fascinated by mythology, religion, physics, astronomy and mathematics, especially with matters related to quanta and cosmogony.  He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at https://guillermocalvo.com/.

[1] Information obtained from a post by Achilles Monomaxos.

The Former Right to Protest, now a Restricted Privilege

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Protests in the United States, once a sacrosanct right, have become tolerable only when deemed politically correct by politicized leaders of the criminal justice system (an oxymoron) and their rubber stamp echoes in the lazy, politicized judicial system.  The purported guardians of the truth and defenders of the citizenry from governmental abuse, the “fourth estate” (i.e., the “press”) have, for the most part, switched sides.  Just consider what happens now to real journalists like Julian Assange and Seymour Hersh.

It’s no longer the nature of the protests that matter (whether peaceful or violent), but the subject matter.  While perhaps, to an extent that has always been the case in the United States, it has now become the rule.  Contrast reactions to protests during the four years immediately following the 2016 presidential election, when apparently anything was fair game including looting, arson, mayhem and murder, with the protests following the presidential election in 2020, when less severe political protests became anathema.  But the bastardization of the right to protest and of the related right to freedom of expression, has now taken a massive leap backward, a backflip, if you will.

On March 9, 2023, Peoples Dispatch, formerly The Dawn News (an international media project which seeks to assure that the coverage of news is not restricted to the rhetoric of politicians and the fortunes of big companies but encompasses the richness and diversity of mobilizations from around the world), published an article, without identifying the writer, perhaps for obvious reasons, entitled “Protesters Charged with Terrorism in Atlanta”.  The article, as is so often the case, was published in Consortium News, one of the very few reliable sources of information still available, and dealt with the spreading tendency to treat political protest in the United States as “terrorism”.  Atlanta is once again a focal point.

This time, protests involved the perversion of the government’s eminent domain powers to create what residents called a “cop city”, a proposed $90 million police training complex in the City of Atlanta, Georgia.  The government’s reaction seems not only perverse, but, with the cooperation of the media, was orchestrated to create the false impression that the protestors were not local residents but rather out of state provocateurs.  In recent years, when convenient for electoral purposes, Georgia has become a magnet for out of state activists who have been urged to participate in second round elections, even if they voted elsewhere in the initial rounds, but evidently, they are only welcome when convenient for Deep State purposes.

The United States Declaration of Independence and its Constitution of 1787-89 (which replaced the first constitution of the United States, the Articles of Confederation), both unequivocally enshrine the right to protest government actions, and not always peacefully.  The Revolutionary War was hardly peaceful.  But the Deep State is, with the collaboration of the corporate media, the Department of Justice, the intelligence agencies, the Democratic Party and traditionalist (non-Tea Party) Republicans, as well as a lazy and politicized judiciary, doing away with such right.  It is now merely a privilege afforded to the politically useful, e.g., supporters of black lives matter groups, pro-abortion groups and anti-Trump groups of all kind (e.g., the vagina hatted, the “resistance”, the Russiagated crowd, etc.). 

An example of where we find ourselves is reflected in the information being made available to the public, despite large scale obstruction by the Democratic Party, the Capitol Police, the Justice Department and the corporate media concerning the events that really took place on January 6, 2020, events which were the subject of orchestrated, televised hearings by a special committee of the House of Representatives and of thousands of prosecutions by the Biden “Justice” Department.  Police videos, frequently withheld from defendants, show how completely false and out of control the Deep State has become in seeking to impose and maintain control over an uncooperative electorate.  Trumped up charges of terrorism and espionage, perverting completely the original intent of legislation that authorized drastic curtailment of civil rights under extraordinary circumstances, have now become common, and the cooperative judiciary acts, not as a neutral arbiter, but as a collaborative prosecutor, impeding rights to present relevant evidence in kangaroo court proceedings.  The events in Atlanta were a logical extension of the prosecutorial improprieties in the trials of defendants charged with criminal violations for their participation in events at the Capitol on January 6, 2020.  And it is unlikely that the tendency will end in Atlanta.  We have gone from a libertarian state, to an authoritarian system tending towards totalitarianism, the things of which our Deep State has so often accused other states.

The image of Julian Assange, incarcerated and tortured in a maximum security British prison at the request of the Biden administration which seeks to extradite and try him for telling the truth tells it all.  Magna Carta, like our Bill of Rights, seems now useful primarily for purposes of post fecal hygiene.

We were warned this would happen.  We were warned in 1948 by George Orwell, we were warned by Aldous Huxley, we were warned by Kurt Vonnegut, and we were warned by many others, and despite a blackout on real news by the corporate media, we are constantly being warned by courageous independent journalists like Julian Assange (and you know where he is), Seymour Hersh and the varied writers who publish in Consortium News (a donation supported news source) and other alternative news sources like Truthdig, and Common Dreams and now Substack.  We were warned by brave whistleblowers like Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden, among many others (most either jailed, formerly jailed or in exile).  All of the foregoing have done their best to keep any who care informed.  Unfortunately, as this article illustrates, the tide is in favor of the corrupt, the power mad, the warmongers and of their insipidly silly supporters who ironically identify as the “woke”.

Our situation today parallels that which was the subject of a poem following World War II by Martin Niemöller, a German Lutheran pastor and theologian born in Lippstadt, Germany, in 1892.  A version of his poem is enshrined in the United States Holocaust Museum, as follows:

“First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out because I was not a socialist.  Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out because I was not a trade unionist.  Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out because I was not a Jew.  Then they came for me and there was no one left to speak for me.”

It may already be too late to turn things around, but, like Troy’s Cassandra, some of us will keep trying, and if it’s too late for the United States, that may not be the case with the global south. 

From the Republic of Colombia, … here’s hoping.
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© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2023; all rights reserved.  Please feel free to share with appropriate attribution.

Guillermo (“Bill”) Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet) is a writer, political commentator and academic currently residing in the Republic of Colombia (although he has primarily lived in the United States of America of which he is also a citizen).  Until 2017 he chaired the political science, government and international relations programs at the Universidad Autónoma de Manizales.  He has academic degrees in political science (the Citadel), law (St. John’s University), international legal studies (New York University) and translation and linguistic studies (the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies).  However, he is also fascinated by mythology, religion, physics, astronomy and mathematics, especially with matters related to quanta and cosmogony.  He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at https://guillermocalvo.com/.

On the Journalistic Ethics of Tucker Carlson

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Tucker Carlson, one of the most followed political commentators in United States media (he appears on Fox News), is one of the most reviled journalists by his colleagues, and for some time, has been a designated enemy of the Deep State and its primary tools: the intelligence communities, the corporate media, the Democratic Party, traditionalist Republicans and easy to dupe faux progressives.  The latest criticism centers on his willingness to criticize other purported journalists in their reporting on Mr. Trump, characterizing purportedly legal actions against him as politically motivated, and criticizing government (especially Department of Justice) reaction to the political protests against what many feel was a corrupted presidential election in 2020.  I would assume that Mr. Tucker’s experiences are helping him to mold a more positive attitudes with respect to the travails of his fellow journalist, the imprisoned Julian Assange (whom I admittedly admire).  The specific target of the latest anti-Carlson criticism centers on leaked personal communications where Mr. Carlson indicates a deep personal antipathy towards former president Trump, but nonetheless, continues to ignore his personal bias in his reporting.  Apparently, objectivity in journalism is now anathema.

If Tucker Carlson indeed personally despises former president Donald Trump, then his journalistic insistence on Mr. Trump’s being treated fairly is laudable rather than despicable.  It mirrors my own attitude, although I would not characterize mine as “hate”.  I find Mr. Trump’s personality and method of communicating extremely obnoxious and have for many decades had a visceral personal reaction to him, in a sense, inexplicably so.  I met him once at a fundraiser for cancer research where he was featured, that was shortly after publication of his book, the Art of the Deal.  I should have admired him then for his charitable work, but the chemistry was all negative.  I found him pompous, conceited and obnoxious.  Many years later I did have cause to look down on him, when his alma mater, New York Military Academy, sought his assistance during a financial crisis, and he ignored them, a point I made to fellow Citadel graduates when he appeared at my own alma mater.  But notwithstanding the foregoing, I have written criticizing the dishonest and hypocritical manner in which the corporate media has consistently attacked him for daring to defeat their darling, Hillary Clinton, in the 2016 presidential elections, and for suggesting that NATO was a dangerous anachronism, and for urging the closing of US military bases abroad and reducing military expenditures in favor of domestic infrastructure reform and lower taxes, and for avoiding meddling in the internal affairs of other countries (all policies I support). 

Kudos to Mr. Carlson for bucking that trend, even though it has put him in the Deep State’s cross hairs.  Journalistic courage seems passé, especially given the current unjust imprisonment of Julian Assange, but Mr. Carlson is a rare exception.  Journalistic ethics involving objectivity, full disclosure, adherence to truth and rejection of hypocrisy are today usually available only from independent journalists, independent because they have been fired, or not hired, or discarded from traditional media sources (such as the New York Times, Washington Post, etc., e.g., Seymour Hersh), but Mr. Carlson seems an exception, and that is a rare ray of hope for those who value verity, and democracy, and liberty and peace.
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© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2023; all rights reserved.  Please feel free to share with appropriate attribution.

Guillermo (“Bill”) Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet) is a writer, political commentator and academic currently residing in the Republic of Colombia (although he has primarily lived in the United States of America of which he is also a citizen).  Until 2017 he chaired the political science, government and international relations programs at the Universidad Autónoma de Manizales.  He has academic degrees in political science (the Citadel), law (St. John’s University), international legal studies (New York University) and translation and linguistic studies (the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies).  However, he is also fascinated by mythology, religion, physics, astronomy and mathematics, especially with matters related to quanta and cosmogony.  He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at https://guillermocalvo.com/.