Ahh! Finally! A feel-good positive news story to report on; the incredible Hands Off demonstration at the courthouse the other day! So awesome to see the entire courthouse block just chockablock with people and their gallery of creative, individually created protest signs.
There were probably about a thousand people there in front of the courthouse, with the crowd spilling out onto the other side of the street and both adjacent blocks. The turnout made me, once more, proud to be a Mendonesian!
Spirits were high in the crowd, and the vast majority of vehicles driving by seemed to be in support of the protests, with many of them raising supportive fists. When I first came across the demo while running errands in town, I assumed that people across the street were MAGA counter-demonstrators, but after finding a parking spot a couple blocks away and going to say hi to all my friends there, I realized that there was no representation by those of the Trumpian political persuasion, other than a moron with a diesel truck who proceeded to ‘roll coal’, spewing smoke over the crowd, and another of the MAGA faithful who pumped his fist and yelled, “go Trump, go Trump!” as he drove by, it was a source of great hopefulness for me to see how many good local folks felt strongly enough about the ongoing destructive madness taking place in our supposed democracy as to create a sign and stand there for hours expressing their disapproval.
It is really an unfortunate fluke that someone like Donald Trump could be elected president; it is only through numerous failures and missed opportunities that it happened; first was the failure of the Democratic party to hold Joe Biden to his word about being an interim president, serving just one term. He should have been gently shuffled off to retirement. Instead, no one in the party seemed to have the intestinal fortitude to fill him in on the fact that, even though he had a lot of bragging rights for guiding the ship of state through the most successful post-Covid economy in the world, that he had failed utterly in the essential political task of bringing this fact to the attention of the electorate!
Instead of getting out there every day and hammering home the facts about his programs, reminding people of the widespread economic benefits of the unprecedented investment of his Inflation Reduction Act in much needed infrastructure projects all over the country, with their attending benefits to local economies, his handlers chose instead to wall him off to avoid gaffes, while Donald J Trump was out there every day trumpeting his daily ration of lies which, repeated often enough (and published by enough media sources), become widely accepted as the truth, even though they lacked any evidence.
So, having inherited an economy that was the envy of the rest of the first world, and after spending his whole campaign trashing Biden’s economy as a complete disaster, I guess idiot boy and his passel of deranged billionaires are, for some reason, going to now show us what a real disastrous economy looks like. The tariff musical chairs that Trump has been playing with the whole world’s economy is exactly the opposite of what the world’s economic system needs for stability and growth; markets hate uncertainty, and Trump’s daily gyrations, one day imposing enormous tariffs on just about every other nation, the next announcing a ‘pause’ on these ill advised tariffs which made the infamous Smoot-Hawley tariffs, which led directly to the Great Depression, seem mild in comparison.
Like any sensible adult, I was ashamed to see our president acting like an eighth grade schoolyard bully with regard to China, probably our biggest trading partner in the world (just TRY to find something that you need at the store that is NOT made in China), with this absurd tit for tat tariff escalation; first raising China’s tariff to 120 percent, then in response to China, reasonably enough, raising its tariff on US goods to 85 percent, then raising it again to 145 percent! With China then raising theirs to 110 percent, even while saying that “there are no winners in a tariff fight”.
To those naïve enough to believe that their orange Jesus was really going to lower prices on goods across the board, it must come as a shock to realize that Trump could care less about inflating the price of just about everything people want to buy in both countries, as long as it provokes officials from the tariffed countries to send delegations to come, hat in hand, and offer whatever kind of grift they can to our grifter in chief to seek some kind of exception to these draconian trade barriers.
No doubt Trump will make a killing off of all the special offers that he’ll get for favorable tariff exemptions. “Want an exception? Just buy a billion dollars or so worth of my personal crypto currency and see if that improves your odds of getting it”.
It is shameful and disgusting, the outright bribery that has been officially sanctioned by the Scotus in their ‘Citizens United’ decision. Nixon was driven from office without so much as a hearing for something that today would be perfectly legal!
The best democracy money can buy!
For this and other columns; inarationalworld2.blogspot.com/2025/04/hands-off.html
John Arteaga is a Ukiah resident.
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