VLIR-UOS Masters Scholarships (ICP) 2020/2021 by Belgium Government for Developing Countries

Application Deadline: Application Deadlines depend on candidate’s chosen programme (See ‘How to Apply’ link below); deadlines generally between November 2019 – March 2020

Offered annually? Yes

Eligible Countries:

• Africa: Benin, Burkina Faso, Burundi, DR Congo, Ethiopia, Guinea, Cameroon, Kenya, Madagascar, Mali, Morocco, Mozambique, Rwanda, Senegal, Tanzania, Uganda, Zimbabwe, South Africa, Niger
• Asia: Cambodia, Philippines, Indonesia, Palestinian Territories, Vietnam
• Latin America: Bolivia, Cuba, Ecuador, Guatemala, Haiti, Nicaragua, Peru

To be taken at (country): Belgium

Accepted Subject Areas: Only the following English taught courses at Belgian Flemish universities or university colleges are eligible for scholarships:

• Master of Human Settlements – Deadline for applications: 1 February 2020
• Master of Development Evaluation and Management – Deadline for applications: 1 February 2020
• Master of Governance and Development – Deadline for applications: 1 February 2020
• Master of Globalization and Development – Deadline for applications: 1 February 2020
• Master of Cultural Anthropology and Development Studies – Deadline for applications: 1 February 2020

Two-year programmes

• Master of Science in Food Technology – Deadline for applications: 1 February 2020
• Master of Science in Marine and Lacustrine Science and Management – Deadline for applications: 1 February 2020
• Master of Aquaculture (IMAQUA) – Deadline for applications: 1 March 2020
• Master of Epidemiology – Deadline for applications: 1 March 2020
• Master of Agro-and Environmental Nematology – Deadline online copies: 3 January 2020. Please note you have to send a hard copy of your application and all requested documents to the programme coordinator before 16 January 2020!
• Master of Rural Development – Deadline online application: 1 February 2020 – deadline hard copies: 1 March 2020
• Master of Statistics – Deadline for applications: 1 February 2020
• Master of Water Resources Engineering – Deadline for applications: 1 February 2020
• Master of Sustainable Development – Deadline for applications: 1 February 2020
• Master of Transportation Sciences – Deadline for applications: 1 February 2020

About the Award: VLIR-UOS awards scholarships to students from developing countries to study for a master or training programme in Flanders, Belgium. VLIR-UOS funds and facilitates academic cooperation and exchange between higher education institutions in Flanders (Belgium) and those in developing countries, which aims at building capacity, knowledge and experience for a sustainable development.

The master programmes focus on specific problems of developing countries. These are designed to enable graduates to share and apply acquired knowledge in the home institution and country. In the shorter training programmes the focus is on transferring skills rather than knowledge, thus creating opportunities for cooperation and networking.

Selection Criteria: The following criteria will be taken into account for the selection of candidates for a scholarship:

• Motivation. The candidate who is not able to convincingly motivate his application, is unlikely to be selected for a scholarship.
• Professional experience: Preference will be given to candidates who can demonstrate a higher possibility of implementing and/or transferring the newly gained knowledge upon return to the home country.
• Gender. In case of two equally qualified candidates of different sexes, preference will be given to the female candidate.
• Regional balance. The selection commission tries to ensure that 50% of a programme’s scholarships are granted to candidates from Sub-Saharan Africa, provided there is a sufficient number of qualifying candidates from this region.
• Social background. In case of two equally qualified candidates, preference will be given to candidates who can demonstrate that they belong to a disadvantaged group or area within their country or an ethnic or social minority group, especially when these candidates can provide proof of leadership potential.
• Previously awarded scholarships: Preference will be given to candidates who have never received a scholarship to study in a developed country (bachelor or master).

Eligibility: You can only apply for a scholarship if you meet the following requisites.

1. Fungibility with other VLIR-UOS funding: A scholarship within the VLIR-UOS scholarship programme is not compatible with financial support within an IUC- or TEAM-project. Candidates working in a university where such projects are being organized, should submit a declaration of the project leader stating that the department where the candidate is employed is not involved in the project.
2. Age: The maximum age for an ICP candidate is 35 years for an initial masters and 40 years for an advanced masters. The maximum age for an ITP candidate is 45 years. The candidate cannot succeed this age on January 1 of the intake year.
3. Nationality and Country of Residence: A candidate should be a national and resident of one of the 31 countries of the VLIR-UOS country list for scholarships (not necessarily the same country) at the time of application.
4. Professional background and experience: VLIR-UOS gives priority to candidates who are employed in academic institutions, research institutes, governments, social economy or NGO’s, or aim a career in one of these sectors. However, also candidates employed in the profit sector (ICP and ITP) or newly graduated candidates without any work experience (ICP) can be eligible for the scholarship. The ITP candidate should have relevant professional experience and a support letter confirming (re)integration in a professional context where the acquired knowledge and skills will be immediately applicable.
5. Former VLIR-UOS scholarship applications and previously awarded scholarships: A candidate can only submit one VLIR-UOS scholarship application per year, irrespectively of the scholarship type. As a consequence, a candidate can only be selected for one VLIR-UOS scholarship per year.
6. The ICP candidate has never received a scholarship from the Belgian government to attend a master programme or equivalent or was never enrolled in a Flemish higher education institution to attend a master programme or equivalent before January 1 of the intake year

Number of Awardees: VLIR-UOS will award up to 180 scholarships.

Value of Scholarship: The scholarship covers ALL related expenses (full cost).

Duration of Scholarship: The master programmes will last for one or two academic years.

How to Apply: 

• To apply for a scholarship, you first need to apply for the Master programme.
• To apply for the Masters programme, visit the website of the Master programme of your interest. Follow the guidelines for application for the programme as mentioned on its website.
• In the programme application, you can mention whether you wish to apply for a scholarship. In case you do,  the programme coordinator forwards your application to VLIR-UOS.
• Applications submitted by the candidates to VLIR-UOS directly will not be considered!

Visit Scholarship Webpage for more details

Why is Latin America Burning?

Cesar Chelala

In Latin America several countries are under turmoil, as people cannot even meet their most basics needs. The last few months have seen a remarkable spectacle: hundreds of thousands of citizens are taking to the streets to protest to what they perceive is their governments’ attack on their well-being, and the governments’ responses have been late and inadequate.

A reason for these failures can be found in an anecdote related by Jean Cocteau. A couple of drivers suffer a car malfunction in a small Chinese town: there is a hole in the gas tank. They find a mechanic that can repair it; he can do an exact replica of the tank in a couple of hours. When they pick up the car they restart the trip when, in the dark hours of the night, they face the same problem. The reason: the mechanic had also copied the hole in the gas tank. Governments, and alas, not only those in Latin America, are trying to solve problems facing them using the same recipe, the one that hadn’t succeeded before.

What is happening now is important not only in its dimension, but also in the possibility of a generalized continental chaos with unpredictable consequences. And this is happening after Latin America seemed to be a on a path to sustained development, based on years of high commodity prices. However, governments, rather than taking advantage of this situation, have instead used the remarkable financial resources obtained for their own spurious aims.

The citizenry, tired of false promises, resorts to voting for populist governments that, although they increase the countries’ external debt, have at least a policy of redistribution of resources that solves immediate problems and gives people a false sense of security. This has been starkly seen now in Argentina, where Alberto Fernández and Cristina Fernández de Kirchner (they are not related) won the country’s presidential election although she has more than a dozen criminal cases against her.

Present economic and social crises have special characteristics according to what countries are considered. The common denominator to all is the profound economic inequality which, according to the United Nations, is greater in Latin America than in any other part of the world. The Economic Commission for Latin America and Caribbean states that, although in Chile poverty levels went down three percentage points between 2016 and 2019, one percent of the country’s population still owns 26.5 percent of its wealth.

David Konzevik, an Argentine economist and advisor to many governments, has developed the theory called “The revolution of expectations”. According to Konzevik, the degree of knowledge and information that exists today makes people aware of possibilities for better living that are unfulfilled. Governments by and large remain deaf to people’s demands. “The poor today are rich in information and millionaires in expectations,” Konzevik told me recently in New York.

In addition, in almost all countries judicial institutions are weak and as a result widespread corruption remains unpunished. As the worldwide economy has slowed down, governments lack resources to pay for social programs. As a result, the public has become increasingly more vocal in its demands for better services and salaries, and less willing to accept great levels of social inequality.

However, today not only the poor participate in the protests against the governments. Protesting as well are vast sectors of the middle class who also see their quality of life considerably lowered by government policies that favor mainly the rich.

Is there a way out of this morass? The answer may be in the following story told by the
Spanish-Mexican historian Juan María Alponte. “A man, passing a quarry, saw three stone cutters. He asked the first: ‘What do you do?’ ‘You see, cutting these stones.’ The second said: ‘I prepare a cornerstone.’ The third one simply said, unaffected. ‘I build a cathedral.’” We need politicians who want to build a cathedral.

Middle East: a Complex Re-alignment

Conn Hallinan

The fallout from the September attack on Saudi Arabia’s Aramco oil facilities is continuing to reverberate throughout the Middle East, sidelining old enmities—sometimes for new ones—and re-drawing traditional alliances. While Turkey’s recent invasion of northern Syria is grabbing the headlines, the bigger story may be that major regional players are contemplating some historic re-alignments.

After years of bitter rivalry, the Saudis and the Iranians are considering how they can dial down their mutual animosity. The formerly powerful Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) of Persian Gulf monarchs is atomizing because Saudi Arabia is losing its grip. And Washington’s former domination of the region appears to be in decline.

Some of these developments are long-standing, pre-dating the cruise missile and drone assault that knocked out 50 percent of Saudi Arabia’s oil production. But the double shock—Turkey’s lunge into Syria and the September missile attack—is accelerating these changes.

Pakistani Prime Minister, Imran Khan, recently flew to Iran and then on to Saudi Arabia to lobby for détente between Teheran and Riyadh and to head off any possibility of hostilities between the two countries. “What should never happen is a war,” Khan said, “because this will not just affect the whole region…this will cause poverty in the world. Oil prices will go up.”

According to Khan, both sides have agreed to talk, although the Yemen War is a stumbling block. But there are straws in the wind on that front, too. A partial ceasefire seems to be holding, and there are back channel talks going on between the Houthis and the Saudis.

The Saudi intervention in Yemen’s civil war was supposed to last three months, but it has dragged on for over four years. The United Arab Emirates (UAE) was to supply the ground troops and the Saudis the airpower. But the Saudi-UAE alliance has made little progress against the battle-hardened Houthis, who have been strengthened by defections from the regular Yemeni army.

Air wars without supporting ground troops are almost always a failure, and they are very expensive. The drain on the Saudi treasury is significant, and the country’s wealth is not bottomless.

Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman is trying to shift the Saudi economy from its overreliance on petroleum, but he needs outside money to do that and he is not getting it. The Yemen War—which, according to the United Nations is the worst humanitarian disaster on the planet—and the Prince’s involvement with the murder and dismemberment of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, has spooked many investors.

Without outside investment, the Saudi’s have to use their oil revenues, but the price per barrel is below what the Kingdom needs to fulfill its budget goals, and world demand is falling off. The Chinese economy is slowing— the trade war with the US has had an impact—and European growth is sluggish. There is a whiff of recession in the air, and that’s bad news for oil producers.

Riyadh is also losing allies. The UAE is negotiating with the Houthis and withdrawing their troops, in part because the Abu Dhabi has different goals in Yemen than Saudi Arabia, and because in any dustup with Iran, the UAE would be ground zero. US generals are fond of calling the UAE “little Sparta” because of its well trained army, but the operational word for Abu Dhabi is “little”: the Emirate’s army can muster 20,000 troops, Iran can field more than 800,000 soldiers.

Saudi Arabia’s goals in Yemen are to support the government-in-exile of President Rabho Mansour Hadi, control its southern border and challenge Iran’s support of the Houthis. The UAE, on the other hand, is less concerned with the Houthis but quite focused on backing the anti-Hadi Southern Transitional Council, which is trying to re-create south Yemen as a separate country. North and south Yemen were merged in 1990, largely as a result of Saudi pressure, and it has never been a comfortable marriage.

Riyadh has also lost its grip on the Gulf Cooperation Council. Oman, Kuwait, and Qatar continue to trade with Iran in spite of efforts by the Saudis to isolate Teheran,

The UAE and Saudi Arabia recently hosted Russian President Vladimir Putin, who pressed for the 22-member Arab League to re-admit Syria. GCC member Bahrain has already re-established diplomatic relations with Damascus. Putin is pushing for a multilateral security umbrella for the Middle East, which includes China.

“While Russia is a reliable ally, the US is not,” Middle East scholar Mark Katz told the South Asia Journal. And while many in the region have no love for Syria’s Assad, “they respect Vladimir Putin for sticking by Russia’s ally.”

The Arab League—with the exception of Qatar—denounced the Turkish invasion and called for a withdrawal of Ankara’s troops. Qatar is currently being blockaded by Saudi Arabia and the UAE for pursuing an independent foreign policy and backing a different horse in the Libyan civil war. Turkey is Qatar’s main ally.

Russia’s 10-point agreement with Turkey on Syria has generally gone down well with Arab League members, largely because the Turks agreed to respect Damascus’s sovereignty and eventually withdraw all troops. Of course, “eventually” is a shifty word, especially because Turkey’s goals are hardly clear.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan wants to drive the Syrian Kurds away from the Turkish border and move millions of Syrian refugees into a strip of land some 19 miles deep and 275 miles wide. The Kurds may move out, but the Russian and Syrian military—filling in the vacuum left by President Trump’s withdrawal of American forces—have blocked the Turks from holding more than the border and one deep enclave, certainly not one big enough to house millions of refugees.

Erdogan’s invasion is popular at home—nationalism plays well with the Turkish population and most Turks are unhappy with the Syrian refugees—but for how long? The Turkish economy is in trouble and invasions cost a lot of money. Ankara is using proxies for much of the fighting, but without lots of Turkish support those proxies are no match for the Kurds—let alone the Syrian and Russian military.

That would mainly mean airpower, and Turkish airpower is restrained by the threat of Syrian anti-aircraft and Russian fighters, not to mention the fact that the Americans still control the airspace. The Russians have deployed their latest fifth-generation stealth fighter, the SU-57, and a number of MiG-29s and SU-27s, not planes the Turks would wish to tangle with. The Russians also have their new mobile S-400 anti-aircraft system, and the Syrians have the older, but still effective, S-300s.

In short, things could get really messy if Turkey decided to push their proxies or their army into areas occupied by Russian or Syrian troops. There are reports of clashes in Syria’s northeast and casualties among the Kurds and Syrian Army, but a serious attempt to push the Russians and the Syrians out seems questionable.

The goal of resettling refugees is unlikely to go anywhere. It will cost some $53 billion to build an infrastructure and move two million refugees into Syria, money that Turkey doesn’t have. The European Union has made it clear it won’t offer a nickel, and the UN can’t step in because the invasion is a violation of international law.

When those facts sink in, Erdogan might find that Turkish nationalism will not be enough to support his Syrian adventure if it turns into an occupation.

The Middle East that is emerging from the current crisis may be very different than the one that existed before those cruise missiles and drones tipped over the chessboard. The Yemen War might finally end. Iran may, at least partly, break out of the political and economic blockade that Saudi Arabia, the US and Israel has imposed on it. Syria’s civil war will recede.  And the Americans, who have dominated the Middle East since 1945, will become simply one of several international players in the region, along with China, Russia, India and the European Union.

Growing Ecological Civilization in China

Evaggelos Vallianatos

The Chinese Academy of Social Sciences invited me to an international ecological conference in Jinan, Shandong Province. The Academy gave the conference a provocative and insightful title: a Paradigm Shift: Towards Ecological Civilization: China and the World.

I listened to several Chinese and non-Chinese experts talk about a variety of issues (political, economic and ecological) touching on our present world crisis.

The discussion tool place during the  last two days of October 2019. Chinese speakers had reasons for being exuberant. They merged their ecological dreams with their celebration of the 70^th anniversary of the Chinese Revolution.

Chinese forum speakers stressed their ideological victories of having institutions dedicated to the exploration of ecological civilization in all its complexity. In such pioneering task, they have the blessings of Xi Jinping, president of China. A section of the forum examined “the world significance of Xi Jinping’s thought on ecological civilization and Chinese traditional ecological wisdom.”

Western participants like me brought out the looming threats industrialized civilization poses to human health and the health and very survival of the natural world.

Theory

The picture that emerged was by no means pretty: the world is upside down. Politicians, scholars and scientists spoke, sometimes passionately, about how to make China and the world better places, especially how to avoid the worst effects of climate change. A former German politician, Hans-Josef Fell, warned us of existential threats, even cataclysmic consequences of business as usual. Fell is right. American and UN climate scientists give world leaders no more than ten years to get their house in order: primarily banning fossil fuels and replacing them with renewable and non-polluting energy.

Leaving fossil fuels in the ground would be a boon to public health. Moreover, stopping burning them would put a break to global warming. Healthy alternatives exist. We can get the energy we need from the inexhaustible Sun and other non-polluting sources like wind, geothermal energy and water.

There’s little doubt in my mind we better act now (in the next ten years) to make the fundamental changes necessary in slowing down the awaken climate monster. Yes, no more petroleum, natural gas and coal. But we also need to change our mentality: the ways of seeing the world, both that of the Earth and that of the cosmos.

The ancient Greeks worshipped the Sun god Helios for millennia. Did they know something about the cosmos that, in our hubris, we ignore? That the Sun is forever? That the Sun is life-giving and light-giving? The Greeks called the Sun Helios because Helios means the gathering of people observing the rise and setting of this magnificent star.

The Greeks put the Earth (Gaia) at the center of the universe. We describe that cosmological design as the geocentric universe. This shows the immense respect Greeks had for the Earth as a living being, even the oldest of the gods, according to Plato. But then in the third century BCE, another natural philosopher, Aristarchos of Samos, put the Sun at the center of the cosmos. Aristarchos’ heliocentric cosmology best explains how the universe works. It’s our cosmology.

However, the rulers of the planet and most scientists look at the Earth as a mine for resources, not a living world. That explains the hunting and killing of wildlife and the ruthless treatment of our terrestrial home: perpetual clearcutting of forests, exploitation and pollution of the seas, and the transformation of ancient and gentle and ecological practices of growing food to mechanical factories that poison the land and the very food people eat.

I focused my remarks at the Jenin conference on the so-called industrialized agriculture. I tried to convey the fact that making farming a mechanical factory was no less a grave error than becoming addicted to petroleum, natural gas, and coal: we have been undermining our health and the health and survival of the natural world.

Here’s how it happens.

America, Europe, China and the affluent classes of most other nations have embraced giant farms growing a few selected crops. These large pieces of land are the 2019 version of medieval plantations and state farms of the twentieth century. Their corporate, state or private owners manage these farms like factories. They employ machines, genetic engineering for the modification of crops, and neurotoxic pesticides.

The toxic cover of such large agricultural territories and the crops themselves are often fatal to pollinating honeybees, other insects, birds and wildlife. Poisons sip into the land and devastate microorganisms responsible for carrying nutrients to the crops. In addition, spayed neurotoxins become airborne and travel with the winds. They contaminate the environment, including organic farms.

The conversion of forests to industrial farms and the concentration of thousands of animals in gigantic animal factories make a substantial contribution to greenhouse gases warming the planet.

I urged China to take the initiative in sponsoring a World Environment Organization for collective international activities for the transition of the world economy away from fossil fuels. Such actions and policies must be compatible to the awesome emergency of climate change and over-industrialization of farms and food production.

Praxis

The second part of my visit to Jinan was praxis. I spent a day visiting a distinguished Chinese scientist by the name of Jiang Gaoming. He works in the Hongyi Organic Farm, his land in the village that gave him birth.

Vegetable garden. Hongyi organic Farm. Jiang Family Village. Photo: EV.

A Dutch colleague, Harris Tiddens, and I went from Jinan to Qufu, the hometown of the ancient Chinese philosopher, Confucius who flourished in late sixth and early fifth centuries BCE. From Qufu we traveled to the Jiang Family Village located in Pingyi County, Linyi City.

Jiang Gaoming is a man of knowledge and passion for organic food and ecological civilization. He is associated with the Institute of Botany of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Shandong Province that funds his research. He is a prolific botanist interested in public health and the health of natural world. He grows organic food and tests plants for their food and medicinal virtues.

Jiang Gaoming showing off his vegetables. EV.

Jiang Gaoming, his two graduate students, the farm manager, Harris Tiddens, Gao Yuan, a graduate student in the philosophy of science at Beijing Normal University, and I sat on a round wooden table for dinner. Five bowls included delicious vegetables, noodles, and rice. Each of us had two wooden chopsticks for taking food from the bowls. In addition, Jiang Gaoming kept filling our tiny glasses with a drink from sorghum and sweet wine.

This memorable symposium led to extensive talk. I listened to him describing his work and marveled at the breadth of interest and deep knowledge he possesses. He is a professor of plant ecological physiology. In other words, he is inventing the natural history of plants that make life possible. Ecology is his mission. He and his graduate students are paving the path for China to enter the scientific and political realms of ecological civilization.

The next half a day Gaoming gave us a tour of the various strips of land where he and his graduate students are testing plants. His German shepherd dog, Tiger, followed us everywhere. We even went to the center of his village where a small store holds his books for sale.

I departed China with the botany professor in mind.

Talk about ecological civilization is sweet. No one knows what ecological civilization was, is or if it is possible among humans. But we know traditional Greek and Chinese wisdom and institutions are the closest possible models of ecological civilization.

Yet it’s great to have gigantic dreams of one day converting semi-barbarian humans hooked on petroleum and pollution to caring for the Earth like ancient Greeks and ancient Chinese did.

It’s never too late, except basic questions for survival must be resolved in the next ten years. In November 5, 2019, in the journal BioScience, 11,000 scientists from 150 countries issued a warning to the leaders of the world:

“Despite 40 years of global climate negotiations, with few exceptions, we have generally conducted business as usual and have largely failed to address this predicament… The climate crisis has arrived and is accelerating faster than most scientists expected… It is more severe than anticipated, threatening natural ecosystems and the fate of humanity… Especially worrisome are potential irreversible climate tipping points and nature’s reinforcing feedbacks (atmospheric, marine, and terrestrial) that could lead to a catastrophic “hothouse Earth,” well beyond the control of humans… These climate chain reactions could cause significant disruptions to ecosystems, society, and economies, potentially making large areas of Earth uninhabitable.”

President Xi Jinping would do well to heed the advice of these scientists and dramatically cut China’s gigantic carbon emissions. Start the conversation with our hospitable, friendly, and ingenious professor Jiang Gaoming. He is growing a new species of ecological civilization.

The Real Constitutional Crisis: The Constitution

Paul Street

It has been amusing to hear liberal commentators say over and over that the malignant racist rogue president Donald “I am the World’s Greatest Person” Trump is precisely the sort of terrible tyrant the United States Founding Fathers had in mind when they devised their “genius” Constitutional system of “checks and balances.” The Tiny-fingered, Tangerine-Tinted, Twitter-Tantruming Tyrant Trump (hereafter “T7”) owes his ascendancy to the White House and his continued presence there largely to the U.S. Constitution.

Ballot-marked by roughly a quarter of eligible U.S. voters in 2016, the venal aspiring fascist strongman T7 remains too transparently terrible a human being to win support from most U.S.-American voters. But so what? The hallowed 1787 parchment’s Electoral College system permits someone to ascend to the White House without winning a majority in the national popular presidential vote. Majority support is not required under the constitutionally prescribed U.S. electoral system. A President Elect does not have to win most of the votes from the very modest majority (just 55% in 2016) of the U.S. electorate that bothers to participate in the nation’s money- marinated presidential elections. The Constitution’s absurd, democracy-flunking Electoral College significantly inflates the “democratic” electoral voice of the nation’s most reactionary, white, racist, rural, and “red” (Republican) states by rendering popular vote totals irrelevant in more urban, racially diverse, high population, and reliably “blue” (Democratic) states. It grants slightly populated “red” states a disproportionately high number of collegiate Electors.

It is openly ridiculous, from a democratic, one-person-one vote perspective.

(Incidentally, Puerto Rico is a preponderantly Latinx U.S. territory that is home to more than three million people who pay U.S. [payroll, business, and estate] taxes but have no Electoral College votes even as they help fund the U.S. government [The same is true for other U.S. territories]. It has a bigger population than do seventeen U.S. states, all of whom have at least three presidential Electors and four of which [Arkansas, Kansas, Mississippi, and Nevada] have six Electors. The combined total population of the nation’s four least populous states [Wyoming, Vermont, Alaska, and North Dakota] is less than that of Puerto Rico alone. Those very predominantly white four states together have twelve presidential Electors.)

A different way in which T7 (the tiny-fingered, tangerine-tinted, Twitter-tantruming tyrant Trump) owes his 2016 victory to the Constitution is less obvious. As has been documented at length, T7 was elected largely because the neoliberal-corporate-globalist Obama-Clinton Democrats demobilized the nation’s all-too silent progressive majority. The dismal-dollar-drenched Democratic Party – the nation’s perennial Inauthentic Opposition and Fake Resistance – is vote-depressingly awful thanks in great part to the distorting role big-money campaign contributions play in determining the outcomes of the nation’s ever more preposterously expensive elections. And that role is attributable in no small measure to the holy Constitution. The Founders created the Supreme Court as a critical, presidentially appointed-for-life check on the popular will. And in two landmark decisions, Buckley v. Valeo (1976) and Citizens United (2010), the high court has ruled (in total violation of majority public opinion) that private campaign contributions are “free speech” and that there are no limits to be legally set on how much the rich and powerful can invest in the giant organized bribery project that is U.S. campaign finance. With full Supreme Court approval, the American money-politics system subjects U.S. candidates to what current US Congressman Jamin Raskin (D-MD) once accurately described as “the wealth primary” – the requirement that one either possess vast personal wealth or access to others’ vast personal wealth in order to make viable runs for elective office. T7 rode the money-politics “wealth primary” to power indirectly, through election investors’ demobilizing impact on the Democratic vote, and directly, through Trump’s self-financing (decisive in the primaries along with massive free media promotion) and campaign backing from right-wing moguls like Robert Mercer and Sheldon Adelson (critical to T7’s success in the general election).

Equally if not more horrendous is the Constitution’s role in preventing T7’s properly rapid removal. T7 announced its wretched unsuitability for the office to which it had arisen on its very first day in power. That’s when it gave a mind-bogglingly moronic, delusional, and disjointed “speech” at the CIA’s headquarters. It blustered that “we should have kept [Iraq’s] oil” and that “maybe you’ll have another chance” (to get “the oil”).   The dementia-addled low-lights included passages like these:

“I know a lot about West Point…Every time I say I had an uncle who was a great math professor at MIT…who did a fantastic job …and then they say, Is Donald Trump an intellectual? Trust me, I’m like a smart person…You know, when I was young. Of course I feel young – I feel like I was 30, 35….39…Somebody said are you young? I said I think I’m young…I remember hearing from one of my instructors, the United States has never lost a war. And then, after that, it’s like we haven’t won anything. You know the old expression, to the victory belongs the spoils? You remember I always say keep the oil….we should have kept the oil….But okay, maybe you’ll have another chance ….as you know I have a running war with the media, they are among the most dishonest human beings on earth…”

“In the seconds after [T7’s CIA monologue] finished,” Michael Wolff has recounted, “you could hear a pin drop.” The rest, as the saying goes, is history: think Charlottesville, “shithole nations,” concentration camps, the fake national emergency, the Nativist Wall, the criminal diversion of taxpayer funds, “go back to the crime-ridden countries you came from,” Kavanaugh, reckless environmental deregulation, the abrogation of asylum rights, record-setting drone war, “fire and fury,” “I might end birthright citizenship,” threats of “tough guy” violence if Congress or voters try to remove him from office, disfigured weather maps, the torture of Puerto Rico, covering for Saudi Arabia’s dismemberment of a dissident journalist, the torture of Yemen, 10,000 false statements, Alabama Hurricane threat, “no obstruction,” “the Blacks love me,” “my perfect phone call,” “the Kurds are very happy,” “this phony emoluments clause”….the maddening list of T7’s offenses goes on and on and on. An activist Website gives the following daunting list of offenses for which the aspiring fascist strongman deserves impeachment: Violation of Constitution on Domestic Emoluments; Violation of Constitution on Foreign Emoluments; Incitement of Violence; Interference With Voting Rights; Discrimination Based On Religion; Illegal War; Illegal Threat of Nuclear War; Abuse of Pardon Power; Obstruction of Justice; Politicizing Prosecutions; Failure to Reasonably Prepare for or Respond to Hurricanes Harvey and Maria; Separating Children and Infants from Families; Illegally Attempting to Influence an Election Tax Fraud and Public Misrepresentation; Assaulting Freedom of the Press; Supporting a Coup in Venezuela; Unconstitutional Declaration of Emergency; Instructing Border Patrol to Violate the Law; Refusal to Comply With Subpoenas; Declaration of Emergency Without Basis In Order to Violate the Will of Congress; Illegal Proliferation of Nuclear Technology; Illegally Removing the United States from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty. I would add one: the criminal acceleration of Ecocide, the biggest issue of our or any time. Trump has brazenly violated his oath to serve the General Welfare by doing everything he can to turn the world into a giant Greenhouse Gas Chamber as soon as possible. (Where Burisma-Biden-Gate ranks on this list is a matter of ideologically mediated interpretation.) Meanwhile, T7’s dreadful and Huxwellian womanchild adviser Kellyanne Conway tells us that it “needs to tweet like the rest of us need to eat.”

But right on Day One, with T7’s insane, rambling CIA oration, it should have been clear as day that Malignant Orange was mentally (as well as morally) unfit for the demanding position to which it had been so absurdly yet constitutionally elevated. The “Stable Genius” is, among other terrible things, an abject dotard. An immediate Vote of No Confidence should have been immediately held in Congress, mandating the calling of a new national presidential election as soon as possible.

But, of course, no such commonsensical parliamentary procedure is permitted under the U.S. Constitution, which mandates absurdly time-staggered and strictly scheduled presidential elections just once every four years. That’s the ridiculously brief and spaced-out window when the corporate-managed citizenry gets it absurdly filtered (Electorally Collegialized) “input” on who sits in the nation’s most powerful job (the world’s most powerful job after 1945): two minutes once every 1460 days.

There is, it is true, a Constitutional procedure for the removal of a president on the grounds of incapacity – the 25th Amendment. But nobody takes this remedy seriously, short of a finally crippling presidential stroke or some other White House calamity/Godsend that renders T7 unable to tweet. Even if T7 could be Twenty-Fifthed out of the Oval Office, the process would only give the White House (under our “genius” Constitution) to demented evangelical fascist, Mike Pence. Who wants his apocalyptic fingers on the nuclear codes even for one day?

There is of course the impeachment path. Impeachment is now very likely thanks to the Democrats’ electoral takeover of the House of Representatives and to T7 getting its venal little red hands caught in the “deep state” Ukraine-Biden-Burisma cookie jar (Burisma-Biden Gate). But actual removal is unlikely under the nation’s sacred parchment because the U.S. Senate is majority Republican and therefore likely to hand T7 an “exoneration” he could use as an electoral asset next November. It requires just a simple majority in the U.S. House of Representatives to impeach but two-thirds of the U.S. Senate to remove a president under “our” beloved Constitution. We’ve had two presidential impeachments (Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton) in U.S. history but no removals, though the evil nut-job Richard Nixon (who Trump thinks was “framed”) would have been both impeached and removed had he not resigned first

It might seem absurd that the U.S. Senate is majority-Republican given the fact the Trumpified Republican Party is widely hated and deeply unpopular in the United States. But this irrationality (from a democratic perspective, at least) is fully constitutional, for the nation’s unjustly hallowed charter grossly exaggerates the Senate voice of the nation’s whitest, most reactionary, Republican, gun-addicted, racist, and proto-fascistic regions. The Constitution assigns two Senators to each U.S. state regardless of (steep) differences in state population.

Like the Electoral College, it’s totally ludicrous from a democratic standpoint. “Red” (Republican) Wyoming, home to 573,720 Americans, holds U.S. Senatorial parity with “blue” (Democratic) California, where more than 39 million Americans reside. That’s one U.S. Senator for every 19.5 million Californians versus one U.S. Senator for every 287,000 Wyoming residents.

Just one of New York City’s 5 boroughs, bright-blue Brooklyn, has 2.6 million people. If Brooklyn were a state and US Senators were apportioned there with the same populace-to-Senator ratio as red Wyoming, Brooklyn would have 9 U.S. Senators, al Democrats.

The following 13 states together have a combined population of roughly 34. 4 million: Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Nebraska, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Utah, and Wyoming.  Together these 13 “red states” send 26 Republicans to the U.S. Senate. The single “blue state” of California, with a population more than 5 million higher than these 13 states combined, sends 2 Democrats to the upper chamber of Congress.

Due to “a growing population shift from the agricultural interior to crowded corridors along the coast,” Daniel Lazare noted two years ago, it is mathematically possible now to “cobble together a Senate majority with states that account for just 17.6 percent of the popular vote.”

(And by the way, the bright blue District of Columbia is home to 693,972 people, more than all of Wyoming and just roughly 46,000 less than that of Alaska.  It is absurdly denied voting representation in either the House or the Senate.)

This preposterous (from a pro-democracy perspective) apportionment system means that the Republican Senate majority answers to a very disproportionately white, rural, and reactionary section of the electorate.

How idiotic (from a democracy standpoint) is that?

And what, by the way, would the impeachment and removal of Herr Donald give the nation under the “genius” Constitution but the presidency of the arch-right-wing Christian Fascist Mike Pence? There’s a case to be made for impeaching and removing Trump anyway, but Pence’s constitutionally ordained ascendancy is no small negative incentive.

Look at the following passage from Nancy Pelosi’s recent House floor speech in support of open impeachment hearings on the orange malignancy’s abuse of power in the Biden-Burisma Gate case:

“And, what is at stake?  What is at stake, in all of this, is nothing less than our democracy…I proudly stand next to the flag…which stands for our democracy. When Benjamin Franklin came out of Independence Hall –  you heard this over and over – on September 17, 1787, the day our Constitution was adopted, he came out of Independence Hall, people said to him, ‘Dr. Franklin, what do we have a monarchy or a republic?’  And, he said, as you know, he said, ‘A republic, if we can keep it.’  If we can keep it.”

“And this Constitution is the blueprint for our republic and not a monarchy.  But, when we have a President who says, ‘Article II says I can do whatever I want,’ that is in defiance of the separation of powers.  That’s not what our Constitution says. So, what is at stake is our democracy.  What are we fighting for?  Defending our democracy for the people.”

You know in the early days of our revolution, Thomas Paine said, ‘The times have found us.’  The times found our Founders to declare independence from a monarchy, to fight a war of independence, write our founding documents and thank God they made them amendable so we can always be expanding freedom.  And, the genius, again that genius of that Constitution was the separation of power.  Any usurping of that power is a violation of our oath of office.  So, proudly, you all, we all raised our hands to protect and defend and support the Constitution of the United States.  That’s what this vote is about.”

“Today – we think the time found our Founders, the times found others in the course of our history to protect our democracy, to keep our country united.  The times have found each and every one of us in this room and in our country to pay attention to how we protect and defend the Constitution of the United States – honoring the vision of our Founders who declared independence from a monarch and established a country contrary to that principle, honoring men and women in uniform who fight for our freedom and for our democracy and honoring the aspirations of our children so that no President, whoever he or she may be in the future, could decide that Article II says they can do whatever they want… let us honor our oath of office.  Let us defend our democracy” (emphasis added).

Notice anything wrong here? Pelosi accurately described the nature of the government blueprinted by the ruling-class Founders just one time: a republic. She got it wrong six times when she called it “our democracy.” As I have shown (with no special claim of originality) here and elsewhere on numerous occasions, democracy – the rule of the popular majority – was the last thing the Founding Fathers of the United States ever wanted to see break out in their newly created white male property-holders’ republic, which later developed into a corporate state-capitalist oligarchy. Their charter was brilliantly crafted precisely to keep democracy at bay in numerous ways that cripple our efforts to practice serious popular sovereignty 232 years later.

At the same time, even the explicitly non-democratic “small-r” republican promise of intra-elite checks and balances is undermined today by hyper-partisan politics so extreme that 9 in 10 Republicans oppose the House impeachment inquiry while 9 in 10 Democrats support it. The Founders’ “genius” scheme was always flawed by the possibility, indeed likelihood, of party politics overriding the Constitution’s heralded checks and balances. What does Congress’ and/or the Supreme Court’s supposedly grand institutional power to check the tyranny of the imperial presidency really mean when Congress’s powerful upper body (the Senate) and the high court (whose presidential for-life appointees are approved only by the Senate) is controlled by the same party that controls the White House?

Candidate Trump was not that far off when he said that his Red State party base would still back him even if he “st[ood] in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shot somebody.” None of T7’s long list of sickening outrages (of which the Ukraine-Biden scandal is just one example and arguably not the worst one) have shaken the dedicated support T7’s white-Amerikaner “heartland” fans give their Dear “Make America Hate Again” Leader. At this point, one has to wonder if real-time video of the orange malignancy dismembering and eating live children could dent their faith in the Great God Trump. T7 taps his neofascist base’s lust for an authoritarian master who smites liberal and left elites and puts brown-skinned people back in “their place.” The herrenvolk are sticking by their Manimal president come Hell or high water. Many among the nation’s heavily armed white male militia cohort are ready to go “full animal” themselves, proclaiming their readiness to act on the Great God’s not-so veiled call for “Civil War” if Congress acts seriously on its constitutional duty to check the current tyrannical POTUS. Even Major League Baseball umpire Rob Blake has tweeted that he will buy an assault rifle to use in “CIVAL WAR” if Trump is impeached.

It’s depressing that a third or so of the electorate clings so tenaciously to the noxious neofascist sociopath in the White House. But it is equally demoralizing that T7’s “deplorable” (something horrible Hillary got right) base enjoys such absurdly outsized political voice in the fake-democracy granted to us by our slave-owning “founders,” for whom popular sovereignty (democracy) was a dreadful specter much to be checkmated in advance.

To no small degree, “our” (their) archaic Constitution is the constitutional crisis. It helped hatched the Trumpenstein and it is helping keep it in office perhaps for five or, God help us, more years. The way to get rid of this terrible tyrant is through a mass and prolonged popular rebellion that includes among its demands the call for a new national charter, one that includes among its provisions (just for starters) the abolition of anti-democratic absurdities like the Electoral College, the disenfranchisements of Puerto Rico and Washington DC, the provision of two Senators to each state regardless of its population size, the lifetime appointment of Supreme Court Justices, and the eviction of private money from public elections. The whole damn system that spat up/shat out Malignant Orange is guilty as Hell. As Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote not long before his death, “the real issue to be faced” beyond superficial matters is “the radical reconstruction of society itself.”