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Starting with Fox News anchor Bill O’Reilly and film producer Harvey Weinstein, they’ve fallen like so many dominoes in the glare of publicity and grim public testimony from the women (and, in a few cases, men) they mistreated -- all those predators, gropers, sexual abusers of Hollywood, TV, the news, magazines, comedy, and politics, including a former president.  Their films, their shows, their roles, their books have been cancelled, sent to the trash bin of history.  Not so long ago, they were the big dogs, the winners of our world, and now, shown up for how they misused their power and prestige, they’ve been humiliated just as they humiliated others.

Oh wait, actually not all of them. I can think of one who didn’t go down at all. He won. He made himself great again. He got away with it.

In the full knowledge of what that particular big dog had done to women, with at least 10 of his victims coming forward to offer public testimony against him, with a filmed self-confession of what sort of behavior he had considered perfectly permissible for himself as a “star” -- with all of that in plain sight practically 24/7 -- a near-majority of the American people elected Harvey Weinstein president, or at least the Harvey Weinstein of 2016.  That should be sobering indeed.

Pussy-grabber Donald Trump waved all of it aside as so much “locker room talk” and “fake news.”  He threatened to sue.  He denied everything, instead accusing his political opponent, Hillary Clinton, of aiding and abetting her husband’s sexual predation.  And it all worked.  The evangelicals voted for him.  His “base” went for it.  They elected a self-confessed predator president and, exactly a year later, in Alabama, with recent revelations about Republican Senate candidate Roy Moore’s scandalous behavior toward a 14-year-old girl and other young women, it just may happen again in the very same way based on the very same playbook.  Moore has, of course, denied (almost) everything, labeled it all “fake news,” threatened to sue, attacked the "Obama-Clinton Machine's liberal media lapdogs," and is even raising money off it. And it's at least possible that he may still win the special election for the Senate seat of Attorney General Jeff Sessions next month by staying on the same path into the wilderness of sexual predation that Donald Trump pioneered in 2016. (Keep in mind that if a story broke tomorrow that Hillary Clinton had, in her thirties, approached a 14-year-old boy in a similar fashion, evangelicals across the South and that same Republican base would surely be up in arms about it.)

I suppose it’s hardly surprising that we’re on a predatory planet.  The question is: What’s to be done about it?  On that, TomDispatch’s jock culture correspondent Robert Lipsyte has some thoughts about the men (and this should ring a bell for many of us) who never spoke up when the big dogs barked.  It’s certainly a perspective we guys should think about at this moment, given the big barker ensconced in the White House. Tom

Groping for Manhood
It’s Time for the Bystanders to Challenge the Bullies
By Robert Lipsyte

Almost 80, I’ve been stunned and bewildered by the ever-expanding list of sexually predatory males, from movie mogul Harvey Weinstein to former New Republic editor Leon Wieseltier to comedian Louis C.K. And it’s triggered a list of questions for me: Who raised these louts? How did they give themselves permission to harass and assault women the way they did? Why did they think they could get away with it? And above all, who enabled them to advance along this vicious spectrum from creepy remarks to groping to rape?

Slowly, I’ve come to a realization I probably should have had long ago.  It’s men like me, the bystanders, who enabled them. However righteous we may feel as they’re exposed and punished, the truth is we’re the problem, too.

But we’re at least part of the solution as well.

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When it comes to the art of the deal, at least where arms sales are concerned, American presidents, their administrations, and the Pentagon have long been Trumpian in nature.  Their role has been to beat the drums (of war) for the major American weapons makers and it’s been a highly profitable and successful activity.  In 2015, for instance, the U.S. once again took the top spot in global weapons sales, $40 billion dollars of them, or a staggering 50.2% of the world market.  (Russia came in a distant third with $11.2 billion in sales.)  The U.S. also topped sales of weaponry to developing nations.  In these years, Washington has, in fact, peddled the products of those arms makers to at least 100 countries, a staggering figure if you stop a moment to think about the violence on this planet.  Internationally, in other words, the U.S. has always been an open-carry nation.

Donald Trump has, however, changed this process in one obvious way.  He’s shoved the president’s role as arms-purveyor-in-chief in everybody’s face.  He did so on his initial trip abroad when, in Riyadh, he bragged ceaselessly about ringing up $110 billion dollars in arms sales to the Saudis. Some of those had, in fact, already been brokered by the Obama administration and some weren’t actually “sales” at all, just “letters of intent.”  Still, he took the most fulsome of credit and, when it comes to his "achievements," exaggeration is, of course, the name of his game.

And he’s just done it again on his blustery jaunt through Japan and South Korea.  There, using the North Korean threat, he plugged American weaponry mercilessly (so to speak), while claiming potential deals and future American jobs galore.  In the presence of Shinzo Abe, for instance, he swore that the Japanese Prime Minister would "shoot [North Korean missiles] out of the sky when he completes the purchase of a lot of military equipment from the United States." Both the Japanese and the South Korean leaders, seeing a way into his well-armored heart, humored him relentlessly on the subject and on his claims of bringing home jobs to the U.S.  (In fact, one of the weapons systems he was plugging, the F-35, would actually be assembled in Japan!) 

Strangely enough, however, the president didn't bring up an issue he raises regularly when it comes to weapons sales in the United States (at least, sales to white people, not Muslims, with an urge to kill): mental health.  Isn’t it curious that, as he peddles some of the more destructive weaponry imaginable across Asia and the Middle East, he never brings that up?  Fortunately, TomDispatch regular and expert on American arms sales William Hartung raises the issue today in an adaptation of a piece he wrote for Sleepwalking to Armageddon: The Threat of Nuclear Annihilation, a book just published by the New Press.  You might say that he considers the most mentally unnerving aspect of American arms sales: the way, since the 1950s, the nuclear lobby has sold planet-destroying weaponry of every sort to presidents, the Pentagon, and Congress.  And if that doesn't represent a disturbing mental health record of the first order, what does? Tom

Massive Overkill
Brought to You By the Nuclear-Industrial Complex
By William D. Hartung

[This piece has been updated and adapted from William D. Hartung’s “Nuclear Politics” in Sleepwalking to Armageddon: The Threat of Nuclear Annihilation, edited by Helen Caldicott and just published by the New Press.]

Until recently, few of us woke up worrying about the threat of nuclear war. Such dangers seemed like Cold War relics, associated with outmoded practices like building fallout shelters and “duck and cover” drills.

But give Donald Trump credit.  When it comes to nukes, he’s gotten our attention. He’s prompted renewed concern, if not outright alarm, about the possibility that such weaponry could actually be used for the first time since the 6th and 9th of August 1945. That’s what happens when the man in the Oval Office begins threatening to rain “fire and fury like the world has never seen” on another country or, as he did in his presidential campaign, claiming cryptically that, when it comes to nuclear weapons, “the devastation is very important to me.”

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[Note for TomDispatch Readers: Alfred McCoy’s new Dispatch Book, In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power, has been getting all sorts of attention lately. Here’s what the Progressive Magazine has to say about it: “McCoy’s latest book... provides an autopsy on a dying empire, which has squandered its moral capital by promoting wide-scale torture and mass surveillance... The end of empire scenarios relayed by McCoy in dark terms could in turn provide positive opportunities for societal change as the necessity for constant war is removed." In addition, you’ve been able to read excerpts from his book at this site. I only hope you’ve gotten your hands on a copy. It’s a way of supporting TomDispatch, while getting a book that zeroes in on where our American world is heading. If you want to support this website even more fulsomely, for $100 ($125 if you live outside the U.S.), you can get a signed, personalized copy of the book. Just check our donation page for the details. Tom]

As you read today’s piece by historian and TomDispatch regular Alfred McCoy, author most recently of In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power, think of Afghanistan as the gateway drug for three Washington administrations.  Within weeks of the 9/11 attacks, George W. Bush and his top officials had launched their invasion of that country and soon knocked off the Taliban (rather than simply going after Osama bin Laden and his followers). That “victory,” however ephemeral, acted as the policy equivalent of a drug high for the president and his crew of geopolitical dreamers who promptly turned their attention to Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and nailing down the rest of the oil heartlands of the planet. (And you know just how well that went in mission-accomplished terms.)  In 2009-2010, Afghanistan (“the right war”) would prove the gateway drug for Barack Obama as he surged in 30,000 troops, along with mini-surges of contractors, CIA agents, Special Forces soldiers, and others. Before he was done, from Libya to Iraq, the Afghan War would be the least of his problems. And finally, of course, there’s Donald Trump, who, in the years leading up to his election victory, spoke or tweeted as if he might take a different approach to Afghanistan, but then surrounded himself with three generals from America’s losing wars and once again decided to do the usual Afghan thing.  Now, he, too, is hooked and, from Niger to Somalia and beyond, the results are already coming in. 

Though seldom thought of that way (except perhaps by McCoy), Afghanistan is not just the longest war in American history but possibly the longest opium war in anyone’s history.  And sixteen years later, here’s one thing we can take for granted about what’s likely to happen: in the end, it never goes well.  If we know less than we should about how badly it’s going right now, part of that can be explained by the policies of those most deeply hooked on the war.  When things go badly for them, they turn off the information spigot, as in 2015 when the American command in Afghanistan cut off all public release of material on “U.S.-taxpayer-funded efforts to build, train, equip, and sustain the Afghan National Security Forces.”  That was, of course, at the point when almost $65 billion had already been poured into training and equipping those forces and they were failing nationwide.  Since then, we know that Afghan police and military casualties have soared, desertions have risen, “ghost soldiers” fill many units (with their commanders and others skimming off their salaries), and the Taliban has gained control of ever more of the country. In response, the U.S. command there has again “classified and restricted once-public information regarding the state of Afghan security forces, including ‘casualties, personnel strength, attrition, capability assessments, and operational readiness of equipment.’”

And so it goes in America’s drug war in South Asia.  Someday, the high will truly wear off and then who knows where we’ll be.  In the meantime, read McCoy and think about what this repetitive version of war making means so many years later. Tom

Into the Afghan Abyss (Again)
How a Failed Drug War Will Defeat Trump’s Afghan Adventure
By Alfred W. McCoy

After nine months of confusion, chaos, and cascading tweets, Donald Trump’s White House has finally made one thing crystal clear: the U.S. is staying in Afghanistan to fight and -- so they insist -- win. “The killers need to know they have nowhere to hide, that no place is beyond the reach of American might,” said the president in August, trumpeting his virtual declaration of war on the Taliban. Overturning Barack Obama’s planned (and stalled) drawdown in Afghanistan, Secretary of Defense James Mattis announced that the Pentagon would send 4,000 more soldiers to fight there, bringing American troop strength to nearly 15,000.

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Back in May 2013, a word came to mind that I wanted to see in all our vocabularies.  It wasn’t the ever-present “terrorist” but “terrarist” and I meant it to describe people intent on destroying the planetary environment that had welcomed and nurtured so many species, including our own, for so long; in other words, human beings willing to commit “terracide.”  I had in mind the CEOs of the biggest energy companies, the ones whose scientists understood global warming perfectly well decades ago and who still were ready to put their corporate money into supporting climate denialism. At the time I wrote:

“If the oil execs aren’t terrarists, then who is?  And if that doesn’t make the big energy companies criminal enterprises, then how would you define that term? To destroy our planet with malice aforethought, with only the most immediate profits on the brain, with only your own comfort and wellbeing (and those of your shareholders) in mind: Isn’t that the ultimate crime? Isn’t that terracide?”

Of course, that was in the good old days before Donald Trump and his cronies filled a whole administration to the tipping point with so-called climate skeptics and outright climate-change denialists.  And this continues to happen, even as one report or study after another confirms that humanity and its fossil fuels are heating the planet at a remarkable rate and filling its atmosphere with carbon dioxide at a record pace.  In the end, Trump and his crew may prove to be the biggest collection of criminals -- in terms of harm to this world -- ever.  And it should be considered a historical irony (of sorts) that, on this issue, the Republicans, once the American party of the environment, are with them all the way.

If you want an example of what this means in practice, take Donald Trump’s secretary of the interior, former Montana Republican Congressman Ryan Zinke.  In June, he addressed the American Petroleum Institute’s board of directors at Washington's Trump International Hotel (on the very day his department announced plans to get rid of an Obama era regulation on payments for drilling and mining on federal land) and he also chartered a plane owned by oil and gas execs at a cost of $12,000 to American taxpayers for a domestic trip that would have cost $300 commercially; meanwhile, he’s been doing everything in his power to open up America’s protected areas to energy exploitation, shrink the boundaries of such areas, slash the Park Service budget meant to protect them, and even make them more expensive for ordinary Americans to visit. And if you think that’s a mouthful of a run-on sentence, it only begins to hint at where this administration is heading with its energy fantasies about how this planet should operate. As TomDispatch regular Subhankar Banerjee, an expert on Alaska’s Arctic lands and seas, points out today, no previously protected spot is likely to be spared such attention.  In this context, think of the Trump White House as the Exxon Valdez of administrations and a group of terrarists all rolled into one. Tom

Drilling, Drilling, Everywhere...
Will the Trump Administration Take Down the Arctic Refuge?
By Subhankar Banerjee

What happens in the Arctic doesn’t just stay up north.  It affects the world, as that region is the integrator of our planet’s climate systems, atmospheric and oceanic. At the moment, the northernmost places on Earth are warming at more than twice the global average, a phenomenon whose impact is already being felt planetwide.  Welcome to the world of climate breakdown -- and to the world of Donald Trump.

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Who can keep up with the madness of our never-ending Trumpian media moment? Each day is a lesson in the bizarre, in ever-wilder comments, accusations, charges, and claims of every sort from or against The Donald and crew. Each day spotlights subjects you hardly knew were subjects until they burst onto cable news and individual screens nationwide. Did an American president really call the country’s justice system “a joke and a laughingstock” (in the context of the possible sending of terrorist Sayfullo Saipov to Guantanamo) during a televised cabinet meeting? And that very afternoon, did his White House press secretary flatly deny he had ever said such a thing? Is a “seething” Donald Trump truly angry at his son-in-law Jared Kushner for his advice on special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation? Did Paul Manafort really use (launder?) $1.3 million, assumedly from Russian oligarchs, on clothes? Is special counsel Mueller about to be fired by the president? Had you ever even heard of the Diversity Visa Lottery program before Donald Trump pinned its existence on the Senate minority leader -- “a Chuck Schumer beauty” -- even though it was actually signed into law by President George H.W. Bush? Did the White House chief of staff, who adamantly refuses to apologize for an erroneous accusation against a Democratic congresswoman, actually call for “compromise” when it came to the years leading up to the Civil War?

I mean, in your wildest dreams could you make this stuff up? And worse yet, in the maelstrom of claims, tweets, wild statements, strange bits of information, and god knows what else, it would be so easy for what truly matters in our world to get lost in the shuffle.  For instance, amid all Donald Trump’s bluster and tweets, it’s not hard to forget who he really is: our first elected billionaire president. (Nelson Rockefeller undoubtedly came closest, historically speaking, but he was only vice president and was in any case appointed, not elected.) Trump should be seen as the living, breathing result of an inequality gap that first began to widen almost four decades ago in the era of President Ronald Reagan and reached cataclysmic proportions in this century. It was, of course, the Supreme Court which, in 2010, released all the money that has flowed so steadily upwards into the political system big time with its Citizens United decision and so paved the way for the truly wealthy to organize and fund a genuine 1% politics in which a billionaire could finally become the people’s candidate.

It’s easy in the chaos of the moment -- every moment these days -- to forget that Donald Trump appointed the wealthiest cabinet in our history by a country mile and so prepared the way for the further promotion of a system in which the benefits of... well, you name it... will flow ever upwards ever more rapidly. Amid all the chaos and “fake news” of our moment, something profound is happening and, under the circumstances, it’s easy enough to ignore.  However chaotically, we’re witnessing the creation of a new American system of injustice, a true government of the plutocrats. Fortunately, we still have TomDispatch regular Nomi Prins, author of All the Presidents' Bankers: The Hidden Alliances That Drive American Power, to remind us of this reality, as today when she focuses on Secretary of the Wealthy... oops, I mean Secretary of the Treasury Steven Mnuchin. Tom

Steven Mnuchin, Foreclosure King of America
Secretary of the Treasury for the .01%
By Nomi Prins

Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin doesn’t exactly come across as the guy you’d want in your corner in a playground tussle. In the Trump administration, he’s been more like the kid trying to cop favor with the school bully. That, at least, is the role he seems to have taken in the Trump White House. When he isn’t circling the Sunday shows stooging for the president, he regularly plays the willing fall guy for tax policies guaranteed to stoke further inequality in America and for legislation that will remove just about any consumer protections against Wall Street.

Mnuchin, a former Goldman Sachs partner, arrived in Washington with a distinct reputation.  Back in 2009, he had corralled a bundle of rich financiers to take over California’s IndyMac bank, shut down amid the 2008 foreclosure crisis by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC).  Bought for $13.9 billion (but only $1.3 billion in actual cash), Mnuchin turned it into a genuine foreclosure machine, in the process sealing his own fate when it came to his future reputation. At the time, he didn’t appear concerned about public approval. Something far more valuable was at stake: the $200 million that, according to Bloomberg News, he raked in personally, thanks to the deal.

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