Without Shoes

I 75

2019-03-14T00:28:00.001-07:00

The House Of Fear - The Rise Of 21st Century Fascism In The US

2018-12-30T01:38:00.000-08:00

Let's have a fresh look at the 14 features of Fascism.
Are you living under fascism?
Decide for yourself.

- Fourteen Characteristics of Fascism -

1. Powerful and Continuing Nationalism
Fascist regimes tend to make constant use of patriotic mottos, slogans, symbols, songs, and other paraphernalia. Flags are seen everywhere, as are flag symbols on clothing and in public displays.

"Legally, the flag should never be used for any advertising purpose. It should not be embroidered, printed, or otherwise impressed on such articles as cushions, handkerchiefs, napkins, boxes, or anything intended to be discarded after temporary use. Advertising signs should not be attached to the staff or halyard."

"When fascism comes to America, it will be sporting a bad comb-over and humping a flag." — Sinclair Lewis, probably

2. Disdain for the Recognition of Human Rights
Because of fear of enemies and the need for security, the people in fascist regimes are persuaded that human rights can be ignored in certain cases because of "need." The people tend to look the other way or even approve of torture, summary executions, assassinations, long incarcerations of prisoners, etc.

Trump Removes US From Human Rights Council

US Rolls Back Civil Rights

US Human Rights Violations 2017 -2018

Children In Cages, Seperated From Parents

3. Identification of Enemies/Scapegoats as a Unifying Cause The people are rallied into a unifying patriotic frenzy over the need to eliminate a perceived common threat or foe: racial , ethnic or religious minorities; liberals; communists; socialists, terrorists, etc.

Some"Good People" according to the president

4. Supremacy of the Military
Even when there are widespread domestic problems, the military is given a disproportionate amount of government funding, and the domestic agenda is neglected. Soldiers and military service are glamorized.

5. Rampant Sexism The governments of fascist nations tend to be almost exclusively male-dominated. Under fascist regimes, traditional gender roles are made more rigid. Divorce, abortion and homosexuality are suppressed and the state is represented as the ultimate guardian of the family institution.

6. Controlled Mass Media
Sometimes to media is directly controlled by the government, but in other cases, the media is indirectly controlled by government regulation, or sympathetic media spokespeople and executives. Censorship, especially in war time, is very common.
These Few Owners Control Most Media In The US

7. Obsession with National Security
Fear is used as a motivational tool by the government over the masses.
Trump Uses Fear To Garner Support

8. Religion and Government are Intertwined
Governments in fascist nations tend to use the most common religion in the nation as a tool to manipulate public opinion. Religious rhetoric and terminology is common from government leaders, even when the major tenets of the religion are diametrically opposed to the government's policies or actions.

Hypocrite Religion Leaders

9. Corporate Power is Protected
The industrial and business aristocracy of a fascist nation often are the ones who put the government leaders into power, creating a mutually beneficial business/government relationship and power elite.

How Corporations Overthrew American Democracy

10. Labor Power is Suppressed
Because the organizing power of labor is the only real threat to a fascist government, labor unions are either eliminated entirely, or are severely suppressed.

Trump Insults Labor Leaders On Labor Day

America Going Backwards On Labor

Yet Another Blow To Unions

11. Disdain for Intellectuals and the Arts Fascist nations tend to promote and tolerate open hostility to higher education, and academia. It is not uncommon for professors and other academics to be censored or even arrested. Free expression in the arts and letters is openly attacked.

Trump Toxic To The Arts - Though he does have a golden toilet!
And he did commision portraits of himself charged to his scam charity

Anti-Science Congress

12. Obsession with Crime and Punishment
Under fascist regimes, the police are given almost limitless power to enforce laws. The people are often willing to overlook police abuses and even forego civil liberties in the name of patriotism. There is often a national police force with virtually unlimited power in fascist nations.

US Prison Population - 25% of all the world's incarcerated people, with only 5% of the worlds population

13. Rampant Cronyism and Corruption
Fascist regimes almost always are governed by groups of friends and associates who appoint each other to government positions and use governmental power and authority to protect their friends from accountability. It is not uncommon in fascist regimes for national resources and even treasures to be appropriated or even outright stolen by government leaders.
Trump's Swamp Worst Ever

Trump Admn Most Corrupt In US History

14. Fraudulent Elections
Sometimes elections in fascist nations are a complete sham. Other times elections are manipulated by smear campaigns against or even assassination of opposition candidates, use of legislation to control voting numbers or political district boundaries, and manipulation of the media. Fascist nations also typically use their judiciaries to manipulate or control elections.

Election Fraud In 2018 North Carolina

Wisconsin Fraudulent Power Grab

Suppression, Tampering ,
and Fraud in 2018 Elections

The Kremlin KKKandidate

We are awash in corruption, secrecy, theocracy, militarism and election fraud.
Never before in the history of this country have the people as a whole been rendered so powerless by a ruling, corporatist gang of mobsters & con men.
Wake up and smell the fascism.
The decades old scheme to reduce nation states to pawns in a corporate, controlled, global, fascist state and secure the neo-enclosures of the 21st century is fully being realized right now.
Trump is the vehicle...not the drivers though.
Even getting rid of the vehicle will not solve our problem. Essentially "we have met the enemy and he is us".

A dumpster, full of raw sewerage and gasoline, just waiting for it's match.

2018-06-18T18:15:00.002-07:00

We have the rejection of the value of the individual, and aggrandizement of the nation to a point of hypernationalist primacy.

We have A cult of "traditionalism", (more imagined than true) based on history revision (Texas politicians deciding to remove Thomas Jefferson from their history text books comes to mind.)
There's a A rejection of modernism (cultural, as well as technological)
A cult of distrust of intellectualism.
A framing of disagreement as treasonous
A fear of difference.

There's the appeal to a frustrated middle class — blaming economic or political pressures from both above and below.

We see the classic obsession with alleged plots and machinations of the movement’s identified enemies.

The demonizing of former leaders...(Is anything on Earth not Obama's fault?)

We witness a requirement that said enemies be simultaneously seen as both omnipotent and weak, conniving, and cowardly.

Life is framed in terms of permanent warfare.

There's the contempt for weakness and false cartoon-ish authoritarianism.

A cult of "heroism" around a "fearless leader".

There's the pretentious hypermasculinity, with warfare functioning as “an ersatz phallic exercise”.

(military hardware parades, once laughable and strongly rejected in this nation are now scheduled.)

Populism...but a selective sort of populism, relying on crass misogynist definitions of “the people” that the movement claims to speak for.

There's the heavy usage of "New-speak" — impoverished vocabulary, elementary syntax, and a resistance to complex and critical reasoning.

What we have is a particular style of politics, with its identifying characteristics related to one’s relationship to the state or particularly some autocracy within the state, and to their fellow citizens, (particularly in-group/out-group divisive dynamics).

So...Fascist much?

We must understand the framing of Fascism as stylistic politics, rather than programmatic or policy related.

One of the most important elements of European fascism in the past was it's programmatic fluidity — by that, I mean its ability to conform to local particularisms and norms.

On the other side of the Atlantic, we witness the effective fusing of American neo-Nazis with the Neoconfederate movement.

This has been a cult just waiting for it's "charismatic leader".

A dumpster, full of raw sewerage and gasoline just waiting for it's match.

Those who condone, aid, or promote this dumpster fire will be on the wrong side of history. They will become ignominious. Humanity will only remember them ONLY as pariahs.

They will be remembered much the same as we recall leaders of the fascist periods of Germany, Italy, Spain, Portugal, and Croatia.

Enemies of decency...unmitigated evil.

Opposing Fascist movements would be so much easier, for us, if they actually appeared on the world scene with somebody saying, “I want to reopen Auschwitz, I want the Black Shirts to parade again in the Italian squares.” Life, is just not that simple.

And while fascism thrives on stupid, it; itself is not so stupid as to simply employ it's past trappings...it adapts like viruses do...it attempts to avoid recognition.

Fascism is no relic...it can come back under the most innocent of disguises.

It is our duty as members of the human race (the only "race" folks) is to uncover it and to point our finger at any of its new instances — every day, in every part of the world.

We have our work cut out for us.

Music For The Post Truth Era

2018-05-29T13:26:00.007-07:00

Fantastic new double disk album from Ben New.
Enjoy a free listen here.
Great guitar work, well crafted songs and arrangements.
Enjoy!!!

Learn more at www.bennew.info

2017-11-25T11:21:00.002-08:00

Why?
In 2017, the topic of many conversations among reasonable people often includes wanting to know why.
Why Trump, why mass shootings, why massive student debt, why deny science, why any of this nonsense? And why does Republican Party policy enable and encourage the worst of humanity's traits and facilitate today’s catastrophes?
While there are no Oracles nor prophets to consult, we must discern for ourselves the shape of the society we inhabit.

Here are a few observations I've made.
Political analysts, you may recall, described Sarah Palin support as a deviation from the Republican Party’s attitudes rather than an accurate reflection of them. Traditional conservatives they claimed, valued small government, a balanced budget, and restrained conduct in public.
Yet Palin was impulsive, incoherent, and completely reactionary.
I disagree with that, I would say that Palin was no aberration at all. But a typical bellowing bloviator within the history of conservative beliefs. Palin, brought to the national spotlight opened the door for a Trump presidency though.
Conservative thought through history principally reacts against egalitarian demands; it is committed entirely to conserving a social order marked out by hierarchy. History shows that for instance, conservatives opposed the labor movement, the women's rights movement, the civil rights movement, and rights for LGBT citizens. Why? because each has threatened existing hierarchy—and conservatives’ grasp on the power to control society.
Palin and Trump's appeal demands some sort of unifying theory. How can it be that the party of Senator Ben Sasse—who enjoys a (mostly-unearned) reputation as a moderate—is also the party of Trump? The answer is less difficult to discern than it was back in 2011.
We reasonable people seem befuddled by Trump, unable to describe his actions as anything beyond “this is not normal.”

I suggest Trump makes sense as a truly quintessential conservative figure (as did Palin). His peculiarities do not place him outside the movement that propelled each of them to prominence. His populism is as about as substantive as his business acumen; his rhetoric is empty as intergalactic space. . He is an elitist, and he understands what it means to thoroughly embrace "the free market". Despite being a chronic liar, in many respects, he’s the most honest conservative in power, with no pretensions of concern for anyone or anything but himself.

Consider Burke’s conviction that the market, and the “monied men” who control it, should determine value. Burke scorned both the Levellers and the French Revolution, mostly for the same reason: They wanted to overthrow an order that he wanted to preserve. His theories of value were central to defining and defending that order. Burke argued both that value is “subjective,” and that there is an objective “hierarchy of value that divides and distinguishes rich from poor, capital from labor.”
Similarly, Nietzsche later feared that the demands of workers presented serious threats to his sense of order, writing that they would tear “down the walls of culture.” In this aspect, he articulates the ideals of the Austrian school in economics and contemporary conservatives, who frequently speak of the dignity of work and the glories of free enterprise as if both comprise an intrinsic cultural facet of American national identity. You hear them praise “liberty,” and laud America’s role in defending it. But what do they mean?

Conservatives may praise the worker when it is time to win Wisconsin’s electoral votes, but when they are in power we see who they really admire, and that is the CEO. If workers were able to determine their own value, they would not choose to occupy a low position. They would not choose to be subjugated nor have their wages compete in a race to the bottom.
At the core of the conservative tradition is the defense of the stratification of society into upper and lower classes. Conservatives do not all justify this stratification in the same way, or communicate it in the same terms. Some, like Palin, or the so called Christian Right conceive of it as a religious order. Others, like Paul Ryan prefer the purity of Ayn Randian narcissism. But they share a belief in hierarchy, the rights of a few to dominate the many... and an opposition to equality & egalitarianism.
This right to be a vested interest, this opposition to altruism, this vindictive justification of greed ironically is what they are calling liberty, and a few probably believe that they are telling the truth. Beneath this, "populism" is a marketing gimmick. It’s meant to lull you, to sell you something that in reality you don't need nor want.
And so we have Trump, the salesman-in-chief, a carnival barker, and a con man. He has “revised” the conservative script, but his most virulent qualities do not subvert it at all.
In his book, "The Reactionary Mind"; Political Science professor Corey Robin says:
“The racism of the Trumpist right is nastier than its most recent predecessors, but the weaponization of racism and nativism under Trump is an intensification of a well-established tradition on the right, as studies of American conservatism from the 1920s through the Tea Party have shown.”
Strom Thurmond and Lee Atwater might be dead, but their party certainly hasn’t turned away from white supremacy. The war on drugs, hardline immigration policies, the privatization of public schools, the weakening of organized labor...Republican policies continue to disproportionately target people of color and reinforce the injustices previously bestowed on them by slavery, Jim Crow, and violent, organized groups.
Trump’s racism is only a more open expression of older beliefs. As is the oafish manner in which he politicizes his own wealth.

Trump is not versed in the history of conservative ideas. His ascent shows that one need not be conversant with the conservative tradition in order to take an important place in it. His grotesque celebration of greed and wealth are not out of step with conservative norms.
Perhaps a bit more banal and gaudy...but greed has always been the guiding force behind conservatism.
As we witness some of the right's spokesmen & rhetors complaining about Trump, we observe it is because he puts forward competing visions of the market. In Trump's book "The Art of the Deal", he mounts a persistent question of the value of capitalism insisting “A lot of attention alone creates value.” Trump celebrates the market, and the position he has created for himself within it. It is a world, and he is its strongman Fuhrer.
This is a telling admission in the book... “The market is a moment of truth — and an eternity of lies. It reveals; it hides. It is everything; it is nothing. It shall be all; it is naught.”
Trump believes in the market. He believes in himself as an economic “warrior prince.”
He grasps the utter futility of it all. According to Trump, there is no truth. "It’s a show about nothing.” Trump takes literally the conservative slogan that government should be run like a business...his business.
Trump’s literalism may serve as a useful indicator of the conservative movement’s general health. For Republicans. Trump’s agenda, which is a Republican agenda, has stalled. His popularity is plummeting; recent polls suggest that most American voters currently want the Democratic party to recapture Congress. Trump hasn’t been able to channel resentment into governance, and his failures leave the conservative movement vulnerable.

So what do we need to do?
How do we counter religious fervor, and the mythology of the market’s liberatory potential? How do we counter Trump’s grotesque materialism without a competing, egalitarian economic vision?
If equality and fairness is to have a turn in the seat of power, We must take on the economic forces that keep it out of reach!
While Democrats have done a reasonable job of taking on racism, sexism, and homophobia. What is needed now is a competing economic plan that benefits all, instead of the few already doing well. Yes, seems like a no brainer...but where is this plan? It needs to be developed and must be capable of being explained in a sentence or two.
(This is where we fail to connect with "average voters" by and large...we have had good policies but have been unsuccessful in selling them largely because nuanced policy isn't easy to package into a short marketing slogan. I am not the guy for this obviously...I salute you for your attention span if you've read this far!
But folks like you and I, who maintain interest this long, are not the norm anymore. The left fails to understand the huge role marketing techniques play. We debunk some nonsense once and move on thinking the issue was resolved while conservative rhetors simply keep pounding away with their debunked assertion.
And the technique sadly works.

Economic Fairness.
In this effort, we will find no allies in the conservative movement. Moderate conservatives may be useful as a vote against the worst of Trump’s legislative agenda. But thinking if we moderate our agenda to court them is a pathological view.
It will condemn any and all resistance efforts to failure.
Conservatives will never work for you, not unless you are already truly filthy rich, pious in designated fashions, unduly Caucasian, old...(but not old enough for social security, which you don't care about, because it's chump change for you), and excessively male.
The problem is not particularly egregious conservative politicians like Trump or Palin, but conservative politics itself. Ours must be better. We can only respond to a show about nothing with something; with substance, and with political force.
This my friends is the reality.

Ignorance is Strength

2017-08-13T20:52:00.000-07:00

"Ignorance is Strength."
-- George Orwell, from "1984"

The memory of totalitarianism, with its demand for simplistic answers, intoxication with spectacles of vulgarity, and a desires for strong leaders, has faded in a society beset by a culture of immediacy, sensations and civic illiteracy.

Under such circumstances, it is difficult to underestimate the depth of tragedy that the collapse of civic culture and democratic public spheres has wrought. The profound influences of a permanent war culture that trades in fear and loathing, along with the ever-present petty consumerism has bred depoliticization and infantilism throughout the culture. Meanwhile the goose stepping actual fascists in the Trump cabinet (count 'em...there's 3. Bannon, Gorka, and Miller) continually assault the free press. "The media is the opposition party" they declare. News media must play a critical essential role in a democracy. We are beyond the very real threat of suppressing dissent, if not democracy itself. What is clear is that the dire times that haunt the current age no longer appear as merely an impending threat. Fascism isn't creeping. It has pounced and seized. Trump and his administration of extremists epitomize the dire dangers posed by those who longed to rule American society without resistance, dominate its major political parties, and secure uncontested control of its commanding political, cultural and economic institutions. The consolidation of power and wealth in the hands of the financial elite along with the savagery and misery that exemplifies their politics is no longer the stuff of Hollywood films, such as Wall Street and American Psycho. Trump's ascent to the highest office in America is already being normalized by numerous pundits and politicians who are asking the American public to give Trump a chance or are suggesting that the power and demands of the presidency will place some restraints on his unrestrained impetuousness and unpredictable behavior. Those members of Congress who railed against both Obama's alleged imperial use of executive orders and later, during the Republican primaries, denounced Trump as unfit for office now exhibit a level of passivity and lack of moral courage that testifies to their complicity with the darkness in the shadow of authoritarianism.

A range of supine politicians, pundits and right wing talking heads are already tying themselves in apologetic knots while they desperately try to make any of this presidencies absurdities "normal". Trump is not ordinary and his politics are an American version of authoritarianism. This is not normal in any sense. And the second enough people accept that it is, democracy has died.

When news media reported the appointments of White House counselor Steve Bannon and attorney general Jeff Sessions, two men with serious racism in their pasts, as if they were ordinary appointments, democracy began to die.
Modern authoritarianism is based on terror management just as Orwell described,
and so modern authoritarians need terror attacks: real, simulated, or both.

It is just as James Madison noticed long ago, tyranny arises "on some favorable emergency."
The experience of the 21st century, as well as the experience of the 1930s, teaches that it takes about a year to engineer a regime change. The question now is to what, exactly? We cannot deduce, from the Trump administration's destructive chaos and ideological incoherence, what the post-democratic American regime will be. We can be sure, however, that we will miss being free. The prospect of children and grandchildren growing up under heavy tyranny is terrifyingly real.
History reminds us just how fragile fundaments of democracy actually are.

But what follows now is up to you!

It's up to us.

We resist in every way possible, and we must step up to the responsibility of guiding what happens next, after Trump. After the inevitable fall he is causing.
It needn't be a dystopian nightmare. But without your input...without us working together it will be.

Still hope springs eternal.
The future has never been quite in your hands the way it is right now.

Ever Wonder How Democracy Dies?

2017-07-20T09:16:00.000-07:00

A new poll has been conducted by Public Policy Polling has revealed some truly depressing data about voters in the U.S.
If we say that Trump voters are fact-deprived, it is an understatement. The poll was taken after Trump Jr. admitted publicly that he met with Russians to discuss "sensitive info that would help his father's presidential campaign", & released e-mail exchanges regarding the meeting. Even though Donald Trump Sr. had tweeted that his son met with Russians, only 45% of Trump voters think Donald Trump Jr. met with Russians last year to discuss their offer to help his father win the election, 32% are certain there was no meeting at all.

This is how democracies die.
According to the poll, even though Donald Trump Jr. has publicly admitted it, only 26% of Trump voters think the Russian government wanted Trump to win. And 44% claim Putin wanted Hillary Clinton to win. (Putin HATED Hillary, and that’s a leading reason he got involved in the election to begin with.) Again, Donald Trump Jr. already tweeted out the emails he received from an intermediary for the Russians, acknowledging that they wanted Trump to win and wanted to help. Yet that admission by a Trump himself isn’t enough for Trump voters.
Also bizarre, only 13% of Trump voters think Trump’s team worked with Russians to help his campaign. Again, junior already admitted meeting with the Russians for this very purpose.
72% of Trump voters consider the Russia story overall to be 'fake news,' only 14% disagree.

Public Policy Polling refers to this as a certain amount of willful ignorance. But it's far worse than that. PPP polled how Trump voters would feel if he shot someone. (Trump had famously bragged during the campaign that he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and his supporters wouldn’t care.) He was right.
Only 29% disapprove, while 45% approved — without even knowing who he shot or why.
Observing Trump’s incremental train wreck we can glean a view of how bad men rose to power in the past. It’s not just that they slowly, stealthily consolidate power to themselves when no one is looking. It is also the fault of a public who knowingly accepts, or shrugs off, what was previously unthinkable. (Fox News isn’t helping things, either... though this is no surprise, Rupert Mudoch is a friend of Trump)
The truth is the problem isn’t Trump, the problem is America. The Trump phenomenon goes much deeper than a shallow narcissist who never outgrew puberty and simply got lucky at the ballot box. Trump is in power because voters knew what he was, and voted for him anyway. Trump spewed sexism, racism, mocked people with disabilities and openly praised, and even embraced and defended, some of the world’s worst dictators, while repeatedly criticizing America.
And people voted for him anyway.

Though Trump lost the popular vote by a large margin; in the end, the American people didn’t actually choose him to be their president. But he still got far too many votes after everything we learned about him during the campaign. Trump received 63 million votes to Hillary Clinton’s 65.8 million, a veritable ass whooping. But someone as vile, inept, corrupt and unqualified as Trump should have lost by double-digit margins regardless of who he ran against. But he didn’t.
Trump isn’t the only thing that’s broken and incompetent. America is broken too. And a large swath of the electorate is incompetent. The question is whether there is still the will or time to save her.

New Album - "Smart intelligent Songwriting" - -Step Into Liquid

2017-07-02T00:52:00.001-07:00

Disgruntled Dictators And The Assholes Who Love Them

2017-06-04T00:35:00.000-07:00

For decades experts have explained, over and over, that the science of climate change is incontrovertible, the consequences of blindly sticking with fossil fuels is catastrophic while the costs of inaction are far higher than switching to a low-emissions economy.
But these facts have had no impact on assholes, who cling to a worldview where they find “alternative facts”, where fossil fuels are erroneously believed to be the only path to prosperity. In this fantasy, the mounting environmental and economic evidence to the contrary is merely a kind of dastardly plot.

In Australia, former PM, Tony Abbott’s economic adviser Maurice Newman believed climate change was invented by the United Nations to hook unsuspecting nations into some 'new world order' which would end “capitalism and freedom”.
In the US, Donald Trump claims climate science is a “hoax” propagated by the Chinese to undermine the US while the rest of the world rolls around laughing. Trump's idiotic decision to withdraw from the Paris climate accord is a major victory for assholes. If anything of a positive nature can be associated with this moronic event, it may just push the politicians, scientists, business leaders and economists; who have grown weary from all these years of talking to the hand to unite and double the efforts before a point of no return is reached. It may galvanize activists and voters to respond. Let's hope so, because now it is clearer than ever that the economic interests Trump claims to defend can only be served by acting on global warming. It is way past time to speak some more loud, blunt truth to arguments this stupid.

To make the ridiculous case that abandoning Paris was good for the US economy, Trump didn’t just have to ignore science, but also the pleading of the US business community he pretends to defend – the 630 business leaders who wrote to him in January demanding that he keep Barack Obama’s climate plan and stick with the Paris deal, and the long list of businesses and business leaders who have attacked his decision, including the chief executives of Tesla, Goldman Sachs and Disney and companies including Nike, BP, IBM, Apple, Google, Twitter, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, Adobe, Morgan Stanley, Unilever and Mars. The sad truth is, he has clear evidence that renewable energy jobs in the US are booming and his ill-considered campaign promises on coal industry jobs are absurd and impossible. The contentious job figures he advanced to make his case for abandoning Paris came from one study by NERA, an economic consulting firm ranked 37th which made some highly questionable assumptions to reach its conclusions, including that it admits it did “not take into account potential benefits from avoided emissions or economic gains from green energy industies”. This is like suggesting one shouldn't get an education because it costs money, while not revealing the economic benefit of having an education.

In the real-world, evidence is very different. In the past 3 years alone, in the U.S. the increase in employment in solar energy companies is more than double the total jobs in the coal industry, which inevitably will decline even further as demand continues to diminish. Fewer and fewer communities condone coal burning power plants regardless of what Trump says or does. He may as well promise to get people jobs as steam train drivers...there's not realistically much demand, and if you ARE going to invest in trains, (actually a great idea) why wouldn't you utilize the most efficient modern designs that are available as opposed to designs from the 1800s? Why wouldn't you use the frictionless magnetic tracks? Why opt for a 35 mph inefficient engine over one that can travel 200 mph and uses little energy? Answer: No sane person would. With this act, Trump absolutely cemented his place in history as the absolute worst president of the US ever. No one else even comes within miles of this chicanery.

If you searched for "asshole" on Twitter, @realDonaldTrump is the first thing that popped up. In fact, Donald Trump's account was the first thing that displayed when you searched the word fascist, bigot, racist, or asshole on Twitter until recently. Those results were driven by a search algorithm. Twitter responded to complaints from the White House by manually removing those links. But face it, one would have to be a Grade-A Jumbo asshole if even a computer algorithm can see it.
All joking aside, you only have to watch Trump for a minute or so to understand he's a master A-hole. No surprise, as all totalitarians are masters of assholery. It's in the DNA of all autocrats.

But how does such a major-league asshole like Trump actually become president? There's only one answer, and it should worry all decent people. Nearly half the voting public are assholes too.This is the problem that truly vexes me and decent people everywhere. While it's unlikely Trump will finish his term, (but even if he does, he WILL be gone), the people who voted for him will not be.
Without exception, all of Trump’s hard-core supporters are real assholes because they admire a major asshole. Die-hard Trump supporters are almost all identity Republicans, who are assholes because intransigent adherence to a "philosophy" of government based on greed, selfishness, belligerence, and winning power at any cost is certainly something only an asshole would like.
That's about 35% of voters.
Those who made up the difference that got Trump to 47% of the vote—barely enough to win the electoral college on technicality—are also assholes. There is no way they could miss the fact that Trump was a flaming asshole throughout the election process—but they voted for him anyway.
It doesn't matter what the reason was—whether it was despair, misogyny, or anarchism that drove them to make the mark near Trump's name. The point is that they were willing to put the lives of their fellow citizens, and indeed the fate of the world in the hands of an unstable, vicious, ignoramus.
That is a complete asshole move, whatever the motive.
So the vexing question is: Can America survive with so many assholes among its citizens?
The short answer is No.

Asshole-Americans tend to be selfish, arrogant, devoid of introspection, belligerent, tyrannical, grievance-filled, bullying, self-justifying, boorish, angry, incapable of self criticism , vulgar, fearful, and ultimately delusional people.
Watch any film of a Trump campaign rally and you'll see them acting out these traits.
(If you voted for Trump and don’t see yourself as having those tendencies, look in the mirror more closely. If you’re honest with yourself, you’ll find at least one.)
If you were to sum up that list of attributes in one word that relates to politics, it would be anti-social. Assholes hate government because they are anti-social. They don't care about anyone but themselves.
They have no desire to work together to solve problems.
They dislike anyone who isn't like them, and that's a death-wish for any civil society.

Is there any cause for hope to exist? I wish I could tell you yes, but the truth is it's only a "maybe".
It may not be possible to reach these assholes before they remove the last means of affecting public policy. How might we turn the horrendous situation we are now facing around?
This situation in which assholes, even though they are still a minority, hold all the reins of power?
Time is running out, they are working to remove entirely civilization's last means of controlling them—the vote. Assholes have already made great strides in preventing decent and disadvantaged people from voting. They will go even further now that there is no force to stop them from closing polling places, passing extremely restrictive voting hurdles into law, and pumping money into disinformation campaigns.

The window is closing. The last remaining chance to escape from becoming a totalitarian neo-fascist state is the 2018 midterm elections. There were about 24 million young people who didn't vote in 2016. If only half of them would come out in 2018 to vote against assholes—especially those who live in red counties that went for Trump—their votes would swamp even the most robust Asshole-American turnout. Keep in mind, these assholes only got to 47% with the help of people who are not die-hard assholes—people who, for some reason, imagined that electing a major asshole wouldn't destroy us all. If some of them realize their error of judgment and vote like the decent citizens they probably are at heart, perhaps...maybe—despite all odds—we can put a stop to Trump's assholery by removing asshole control of the House of Representatives. Having one check on Trump's powers would be enough.
This is about the only hope there is for the US as we have known it. Maybe humankind itself.

Make America Covfefe Again

2017-05-31T02:07:00.000-07:00

Trump is a moron.
Americans managed to elect a functionally illiterate president who knows very little about anything.
Case in point, having returned from his insult tour of Europe, at 12:03 5/31/17 - barricaded in a room with several bags of McDonalds and self-pity in hand, Trump addresses his 31 million twitter followers with this...

"Covfefe."
As of this moment it's been posted for over 4 hours...no attempt made by the nitwit in chief, or the incompetent lying boneheads he surrounds himself with to remove or change the ominous tweet.

Sean Spicer later will no doubt tell beleaguered reporters "Not only is covfefe a word, it's the greatest word ever uttered." While the White House spokeswomen will book themselves on cable news outlets claiming "Of course #covfefe is real word. It was coined during the Bowling Green Massacre!"

While this administration may be a gift from the gods to comedy, it is testing the bounds of any reasonable human being's ability to survive with any semblance of functional cerebral cortex intact.

Understanding The Internal Cancer Of The Politics Of Cowardice

2017-01-28T14:32:00.000-08:00

The lamentable politics of cowardice have a stranglehold on western civilization and we must recognize that the end result is that not only do we destroy who we are, what we value, and what we aspire to become; but we promote terrorism by making it's acts absolutely successful. A small group of extremists can literally destroy a nation, or nations; by flying a hijacked plane into a building.
They can observe that nation literally self destruct in reactionary actions that ultimately strip it of it's identity, it's character, and it's freedoms. The knee jerk reactions may seem to be "prudent" or in the interest of security...but they are cowardly and "reptile brained" in the end. Security is always an illusion, and it's an illusion that can not be bought with the currency of tyranny, authoritarianism, or submission to being dominated. The world needs to understand that it's tragic turn towards nativism, the relinquishing of hard won freedoms and rights, nor the embracing of despotic anti-democratic autocracy will not make the world "safe. It is quite the contrary. The transformation of free & just societies into supremacist police states is literally a reward rather than a deterrent for extremists. It teaches them terrorism works very effectively. One brainwashed zealot randomly shooting up a public place can transform entire nations from bastions of fairness and freedom into hegemonic falangists and principled egalitarians into chaotic reactionaries willing to trash everything they claim to hold dear and value. This is the point of acts of terror. And largely people seem inclined to give them exactly what they want. The destruction of western democracy.

It isn't just America, the rise of reactionary fascism is every bit as present in the Netherlands (once the most liberal open society on the planet), France, England, and many other places that were once beacons of social democracy. France's Marine Le Pen expelled her own dad from the National Front, a far right wing party whose policy is against immigration. Add to this Italy's recent embrace of Beppe Grillo, a comedian turned far right politician. They are on their own, mini versions of Trump. AfG, (Alternative for Germany) is an anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim far right wing fascist party led by Frauke Petry. Their stand is to be able to shoot migrants within German borders. They are gaining in influence, the direction in which France and Italy move could well influence the vote in Germany in that curious phenomenon which can be called competitive nationalism. The last time that happened in the Western Europe was in the 1930s. I won't say it...you know what happened. These are fringe movements... but so was Hitler in 1928. Speaking of 1928, the last time the US went GOP for the White House, Senate and the House of Reps was 1928. They met with the Great Depression in 1929 and of course the rise of fascism. Fast forward to 2016 and again the US has gone Republican in the White House, Senate and the House. Oops. If Trump bungles awfully, which is frankly very likely and US heads into a deep recession, it could impact world economics and it is here that the weakness of centrist parties would crumble in Western Europe.

Even in Greece, Neofascism is on the rise.

What can we do? Nothing. Really... nothing would be a far better policy than knee jerk reactions. Look at what happened when for whatever purpose the US and some of it's allies invaded the wrong country...Iraq. As a result, aside from lives lost and treasury looted; the entire region was destabilized, extremists had a boom in recruiting, refugees flooding other nations led directly to Isis and the stressing of Europe's social safety nets. The flood of immigration led directly to the rise of radical right wing autocrats selling native supremacy. Not only did hucksters of long rejected bronze age ideas become "viable" candidates, but they were actually elected. All these things happened because of the ill considered asinine reactionary response to a terror attack initiated by 20-100 people. Looking at this with objectivity, if you want to change the world, what is the most effective way to do it? I for one do not like the answer. And neither should you.

Epilogue:

We very well could see every influential EU member tilt far right depending on how Italy and France tilt. The Netherlands, Turkey, and India are already skewed on the right. Blaming all of this on racism/Islamophbia doesn’t make sense (though it is one part). In the U.S., the Rust Belt voted for Barrack Hussein Obama in 2008 and 2012. A black man with a Muslim name. It’s gone to Trump now. Perhaps you can attribute it to sexism. That doesn’t however explain it fully.
The Rust Belt’s economics was at play.

In what was once the Manufacturing Hub of the USA recession corroded jobs
and standards of living plummeted
. Detroit is quite literally in a state of decay.
Look at the wage ratio of CEOs to workers in USA. It’s $475,000 to $1.
Boom.
Trump went to Hillary’s left in economics, said no to TPP and NAFTA.
While going ape shit right socially.
He openly courted all racists/bigots/Islamophobes/misogynists/homophobes.
And he won.

Why?
It is largely because the Democrats failed to stand up for the working class.
And that is the trend across the globe.
The centrists who are supposed to be center of left; Democrats, Labour Party, Indian National Congress, etc. are all sold out to the corporates.
The middle class worker’s extended middle finger is what they voted with.
And this is the trend globally.

For further information about Europe's swing to the right click here.

America's Mango Mussolini

2017-01-25T14:28:00.000-08:00

The similarities between the rise of fascism in the 1930s and the political wasteland of the US have much in common. Mussolini originally coined the term "fascism" (some say his speechwriter did, but that has no bearing here) and he defined it as the combination of state and corporate powers. Today, on the White House's official government website there is a plug for the current Mrs. Trump's brand of perfume. Need I say more?
He’s just a funny and quirky man who’s not afraid to speak his mind. Nobody even took him serious as first.” That’s what people have been saying about Donald Trump — but that’s also what people once said about Adolf Hitler. The similarities are and should be frightening.

America’s increasingly sick abnormal politics have surrendered to complete dystopia.

Donald Trump, a proven serial liar, utter narcissist, failed businessman turned reality show clown, con artist, adulterer, a braggart about being a grabber of women’s genitals without their permission, a man who does not read, a proud ignoramus, admirer and fan of despots and dictators, a cheerleader for vigilante violence against innocent people, actor in a porn video, person who stiffs his employees, member of the Vladimir Putin fan club, racist landlord, the preferred candidate of neo-Nazis and other fringe racists, professional wrestling villain, and candidate who incites violence against his political opponents, is now the 45th president of the United States of America.
Donald Trump is also a fascist authoritarian controlling the world’s most powerful and influential “democracy.” No this isn't fake news and it isn't satire.
Throughout the 2016 presidential campaign, the American news media desperately avoided using such language to describe the Mango Mussolini. They did this largely because the advertising revenues, as well as an inability to accept how Trump had gamed obsolete journalistic norms of “fairness,” “balance” and “objectivity.”
In doing so, the American news media facilitated Trump’s rise to power. They labeled Trump as a “populist” who was “unconventional.” The American news media kept suggesting that Trump would “pivot” for the general election in order to win more “mainstream” and “centrist” voters. There were some bold voices who said that Trump had “authoritarian tendencies.” But very few commentators had the courage to plainly state that Donald Trump was a fascist — even though the evidence was readily available, and now undeniable.

Donald Trump does not believe in or accept freedom of the press.
Donald Trump threatened his political enemies with violence and/or prison.
Donald Trump used ethnocentrism, bigotry, nativism and racism to mobilize his voters.
Donald Trump does not believe he should be held to the long standing norms of democratic governance or tradition.
Donald Trump is a misogynist.
Donald Trump is obsessed with “strength” and his own “virility.” Promising massive military buildup in an age where a 200 dollar drone can take out a military base...when a 200 million dollar stealth plane is absolutely useless against some asshole setting a shoe on fire in a plane.
Donald Trump promises to bring“law and order.”
Donald Trump is a militant nationalist.
Donald Trump traffics only in conspiracy theories and lies.
Donald Trump admires and praises authoritarians and political strongmen.
Donald Trump’s press conferences are conducted exactly like Putin's.
Donald Trump has surrounded himself with a cabal that consists of family members and self-interested Cabinet appointees, who — like him — stand to enrich themselves through the agencies they are supposed to administer in the public interest.

Ultimately, the American news media were and are like the troglodytes in Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave,” comforted by the dark because their eyes would be hurt by the light of the truth. Or, to borrow from a more contemporary example, the media did not want to face the situation Morpheus explains to Neo in “The Matrix”: “Standing there, facing the pure horrifying precision, I came to realize the obviousness of the truth.”
Political liberals and progressives belong to a centuries-long tradition with origins in the Enlightenment, they are unprepared to deal with the primitive thinking and irrationality that drives Donald Trump’s political movement and contemporary conservatism more generally. In reality, the Republican Party abandoned any semblance of normal politics beginning with their assaults on Bill Clinton in the 1990s. There has been a long decline which culminated with the absurdity of Republican reaction to Barack Obama and now the rise of Trump. Americans have become numb to the extremism and lack of truthfulness in politics due to constant bombardment with it..there are generations that know nothing else.
In New York magazine, Jonathan Chait offers a classic example of how dangerous liberal reasoning has become to itself:

"It is impossible to know what course American democracy will take under Trump’s presidency. The fears of authoritarianism may prove overblown, and Trump may govern like a normal Republican."

This assumes there is a “normal Republican,” and that Trump is something else. Yet Trump won more votes than any Republican presidential candidate in history. Research shows that authoritarian attitudes have increased among the American public over the last 20 years, especially among Republicans. The Republican Party is the country’s largest white identity organization: It mobilizes anti-black and anti-brown animus for political gain. Since the 1960s at minimum, conservatism and racism have been functionally identical in this country. Trump leveraged those forces to maximum effect in order to defeat Hillary Clinton and win the White House.
In short, Donald Trump is a normal Republican. Pretending otherwise is what led the chattering classes to underestimate Trump’s appeal to angry, authoritarian-minded voters willing to pretend fascism is acceptable or even desirable.

What can be done?
What do good people who believe in fairness do now?
Protest marches are great. They are a cathartic release.
And they can, if sustained make a difference.
Run for office on the local and state level.
Practice political consumerism: Refuse to spend money at stores, banks, and other businesses that work with Trump, his administration or his enterprises.
Target Republican officials with phone calls and emails. Let them know that if they support Trump's fascist agenda there will be negative consequences at the ballot box.
Borrow from the obstructionist strategy that Republicans used against Barack Obama.
Turn the metaphorical map upside down and practice political Aikido.
Especially we must learn from those groups and individuals who have been actively fighting fascism.

Donald Trump and his movement are not normal. Do not make the mistake of treating them like they are. There is no room for negotiation or compromise. Nor burying your head in the sand if you didn't like Clinton either. That's over. All that matters if you want to see any sort of reasonable future is to band together with any and all anti-fascists. Whatever other squabbles one may have, and maybe one person's issues are not yours or vice versa; it doesn't matter. FDR & Churchill certainly weren't in agreement with Stalin on many matters...but I'm glad they opposed Hitler together.
I'd be writing this in German if they hadn't.

America is your country. Donald Trump and his supporters represent the tyranny of minority opinion. They are the worst example of the "ugly American". And this movement is a real threat to the world.
Don't care about the world? History teaches us that it's a real threat to you personally.
Not a woman? Not on the list of people Trump hates?
You will be.
Want to equate all this with the usual left v right bickering over taxes?
It's not. There is absolutely nothing "usual" about this.
Want to write opposition to Trump's fascism off as partisan chicanery?
It's way beyond that.
America, quite likely the world actually; as you have known it... will not survive a full frontal fascist regime like this.

Now is the time to reclaim the United States’ fundamental character.
The will, spirit and character of this nation is NOT to be found in fascism.
Shouting “Not in my name!” is a fine beginning, but not an ending. Resistance to Donald Trump and everything he represents must be the new normal.

2016 - A Shit Year...Or The Shittiest Ever?

2017-01-02T14:12:00.001-08:00

2016 definitely sucked

As we bid a contemptible good riddance to 2016 with it's numerous absurd Terror attacks, Zikas, Brexits, police shootings, Syria, Trump, record-hot temperatures, the losses of our musical heroes, cultural icons, artists, friends, and family...well this has been one unrelenting godawful turn around the sun hasn't it? I see a fair amount of hoopla suggesting 2016 is actually the worst year ever. As terrifying events truly piled up on each other in 2016, is it in a way they have not done any other year in human history? Is it possible to judge the awfulness of a year while it’s still unfolding or very fresh in memory? Is it possible that we just notice negative happenings more these days because of high levels of connectivity? And what does “worst year” even mean—“worst year” for New Yorkers, Americans, for humanity, for the planet? As a way of actually finding some sort perspective on these matters, lets look at some other godawful years that have occurred.

72,000 B.C. - there was a volcanic super-eruption on the island of Sumatra in present-day Indonesia. The explosion was massive. Where once there was once a mountain, there is now a lake.
It exploded with the force of 1.5 million Hiroshima-size bombs. Rock and magma were hurled continental distances. A layer of volcanic ash approximately 15 centimeters (about six inches) thick settled over the entire continent of Asia. The skies darkened and global temperatures fell.
Yes, this was a pretty shitty year too. A“long night” descended, and something analogous to a nuclear winter began that year and lasted for many years afterward. The food sources died off, and the recent mapping of human genome indicates that the population of human beings was reduced to between merely 3,000 and 10,000 people. From this tiny group of survivors, all 7 billion people on Earth today are descended, making us one of the most numerous but genetically close species in nature.
This genetic "closeness" may account for the bad decisions and behaviors of 2016.

1348 - We talk about 2016 being a particularly disastrous year, but historically there’s nothing new about vicious detestable assholes fighting for power. Nothing new about dreadful useless leaders with incorrigible bad ideas gathering widespread support. Consider for a moment 1348, when the Black Death took hold. Dogs tore at the bodies of the dead that lay about unburied in the streets.

The disease spread quickly all along the Silk Roads and then across the trade routes crisscrossing the Mediterranean. In the space of a mere 18 months, it killed at least a third of the population of Europe.

Francesco Petrarch

“Our hopes for the future have been buried alongside our friends,”

wrote the great Italian scholar and poet Franseco Petrarch. It seemed like the end of the world was coming. Some advised avoiding “every fleshly lust with women,” others that marching barefoot while self-flagellating would help. One writer in Damascus recorded that plague “sat like a king on a throne and swayed with power,” killing thousands every day. Yes, on the bright side here in 2017, at least for the moment; dogs are not tearing at the bodies of the dead that lie unburied in the streets.

However there was a positive consequence of the Black Plague, a consolation prize...a parting gift. The Black Death spurred one of the most golden of golden ages in history. Plague led to sharply reduced inequality, a spending boom, and a flowering of the arts. Storms do sometimes give way to sunshine. Maybe...maybe...

So how does one measure the “worst year in human history”?
By some calculus of human suffering? By sheer number of deaths? By the geographical extent of misery? While any of these metrics provide ample and ready candidates, I suggest, however, that the worst year ought to be the beginning of a world-historical process that once started, offered no chance for reversal.
1492 was such a year.

That year, the Catholic monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella completed their conquest of Moorish Granada. Within a few years, the roughly half-million Muslim inhabitants of the territory would be killed, enslaved, or expelled. The kingdom also expelled its Jewish population, resident since Roman times, which provided the blueprint for similar persecutions and expulsions in the years to follow. Spanish actions helped create the idea of a geographically distinct “Christian Europe,” replacing the more than two millennia of political and religious identities that had connected different Mediterranean shores. The most significant event of that year, however, was the first American voyage of Christopher Columbus. Columbus wasn’t the first European to reach the western continents, but his voyages were the first to become widely known. As a result, Spain and its rival powers accelerated their overseas contest for trade and territory. Old World diseases made their inevitable drift to the Americas and by the early 16^th century, a series of plagues ultimately caused the demographic collapse of 90 percent of the indigenous population. And by the mid-19^th century, for many groups, the utter obliteration of their society itself. Worse still, as the indigenous labor force disintegrated, Europeans turned to Africa for new sources of enslaved labor.

Few years in human history are so freighted with catastrophic consequences.
Will the events of 2016 have such reverberations in history? Well maybe so...maybe not.
At any rate, the abominable events that unfolded have yet to enslave anyone...but don't hold your breath. The death of truth or the "post truth" era has yet to find a bottom.

Columbus burning natives in Hispaniola

1919 - This was a shitty year too. The allies had won the First World War but effectively lost the peace. An isolationist U.S. Senate refused to ratify the League of Nations treaty while President Wilson suffered a debilitating stroke. Meanwhile, as the government ended wartime spending and regulations, inflation skyrocketed and unemployment shot up to 20 percent. An influenza epidemic, one of the worst in history, killed a half-million Americans. The 18^th Amendment introduced Prohibition and a decade of lawless dog eat dog power struggles. More immediately, the infamous “bloody summer of 1919” saw race riots in cities across the country: Chicago erupted in five days of brutal violence that left 500 wounded and 38 dead. Meanwhile, lynchings continued to rise, with 76 black Americans killed, including 10 war veterans.

The fall of 1919 featured massive labor strikes: 350,000 steelworkers in Indiana, 425,000 miners in coal country, most of the Boston police force, etc. America was poised for a revolution. Fear turned to panic with mail bombs sent to prominent Americans like Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes and John D. Rockefeller. In November, Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, himself the target of a bomb, launched the first Red Scare, a massive series of arrest raids against suspected radicals, anarchists, and communists that turned into the biggest violation of civil liberties in modern times. All told, 1919 was a year of political chaos, social unrest, economic disasters, deadly epidemics, bloody race riots, giant labor strikes, and brutal government overreach.
Definitely a shit year.

World War I

2003 - a prime candidate as measured by long-term consequences for democracy.

In February of that year, as the Bush administration and its allies geared up for war.
Protesters eager to speak out against the mobilizations swamped cities around the world in the largest global demonstration for peace in world history. In Manhattan, more than 100,000 protestors from all walks of life swamped the city, stopping traffic in the middle of the street, and assembling in a vast throng near the U.N. building. European cities saw even larger protests.

"So we create the conditions that lead directly to the rise of Isis, flood the European liberal nations with refugees collapsing their social programs, rob from the poor and give to the rich,...basically shoot humanity in the face and torture them for shits and giggles...and some black guy gets blamed...ha ha ha. What a plan!"

The U.S media, still dominated by major networks owned by only a handful of corporate overlords, barely covered the event. In New York, the nightly news showed images, instead, of a sympathy protest in Baghdad—a damning substitution. The failure of the occupied media to cover these protests (which set a precedent, followed ever since)—and, more broadly, to aggressively question the Bush administration on the absurd lies and half-truths used to rationalize the war—was catastrophic for the entire world. The quiescence of political parties when confronted with the even-then very dubious link between 9/11 and the war in Iraq revealed the power of macho patriotism to sweep away partisan dissent and intelligent thinking, and to cow the news into submission, a power that has proved durable and dangerous. A power that has apparently turned most of the western world's brains into sand. The war went on as planned. And the terrible world we live in now, —jingoistic, bomb-scarred, drone-addled, armor-clad, morally bankrupt, spied on, and over-flooded with refugees creating the rise of nativism—is the consequence. Yes...I think 2003 in a historical sense was complete shit. Maybe the worst ever. Alas my friends, there is sadly no shortage of candidates.

I failed to point out 1876, A true toilet clogging stinker. There was a split presidential election which set the stage for the bargain that ended Reconstruction. While we might be tempted to nominate the highest casualty year of the Civil War as the worst, the failure to defend racial equality in the South after so many lives were sacrificed seems far more tragic since it continues to cause death and misery 130 years down the road . Also, in ’76 you have the Battle of the Little Bighorn and the inexplicable cruelty of bison-hunting equestrianism on the Great Plains. The fall of Reconstruction and the rise of Plains reservations are enough for a really bad year, and then you add race riots in South Carolina, and Princeton, Harvard, and Columbia...well let's say a courtesy flush was in order.
I neglected the years of the rise of fascism, the Holocaust, the age of the robber barons, the rise of the dark corporate overlords, etc. Well there's veritable feast of bad years we wish could be forgotten quickly.
With past years we have the vision afforded by historical perspective, which is something we lack in evaluating 2016.
One thing leads to another.
See you on the bottom.

Coming soon! - How to get the most out of your bottomless pit.

Without Shoes inevitable Year End List

2016-12-29T02:35:00.000-08:00

Year-end lists may seem tedious.They are easily perceived as the privilege of self proclaimed authorities & taste purveyors. Though this may be entirely wrong as humans of every age seem to have a passion for organizing things. In a sense, the end-of-year list-maker is adult version of the toddler who lines up his toy cars into neatly arranged rows for no reason other than that it is satisfying to make order out of chaos. End-of-year lists illustrate our human tendency to order time by arbitrarily marking December 31st as the end of the year, and in doing so we like to order experience by forming a compendium of events we associate with this time frame. Ultimately, year-end lists are a manifestation of our deep urge to impose order on experience. And it's something of a mirror as well.
The sorting out movies or albums does more than impose order on material goods; it also imposes order on the social world. By proclaiming which items are the year’s best or worst, we ultimately are categorizing ourselves. What do we value? Who are we? What concepts do we embrace and which ones do we reject? It reflects us both personally and as a society.
Our world is an ever hastening fragmented place. At every turn, we are inundated with options: Television, movies and music crop up just long enough to be supplanted by new options only moments later. How do you make sense of the year when it’s always receding in the shadow of the next great thing? It's even harder when the most artistic or important bits can easily be subsumed by artless absurdity or populist claptrap. The junk food of human endeavor, while perhaps serving some function; creates very unhealthy conditions if consumed instead of actual nutrition.
The New Year evokes visceral feelings, both positive and negative about time passing.
Year-end lists are if nothing else, a way to manage the psychology of the experience. Make your own list, it can be anything that merits your attention. Your list fills in the gap, completes the experience, expands horizons or organize pleasures. The listmaker offers a positive sense of control (real or perceived). And viewing the recommendations of others we respect facilitates a quick catch-up, an on-track feeling of moving forward with a sense of “done” and “will do!”

List-making actually has a calming effect on the mind. The inner swirl of desires, goals, choices and concerns is an overwhelming experience. If nothing else list making evokes a sense of containment of the past and joyful anticipation of whatever comes next. Also, when we read others lists, the recommendations allow us to feel protected with a bit of assurance that our time or money will not be ill-spent on unsatisfying goods or art. When someone does some thinking for you, you feel cared for somehow.
Selection can be hard for people who are very open-minded, indecisive or too consumed by other obligations to stay abreast of culture. I would argue this is how we ended up with a demagogue overgrown toddler in the white house, there was no curator of any merit to actually evaluate political realities and signal got drowned out by the noise....but that's an entirely different post. As human beings, we need art and culture to protect health. Studies indicate that personal self-expression or identification with an artist’s work boosts mood, decreases stress and seeds hopefulness. Creativity has been defined as a combination of divergent and convergent thinking and list-makers employ this thought process. Your year end list is an offering of sorts and in a sense it can save time and money and minimize disappointing experience. Also it is sort of a ritual, all cultures have rituals to deal with turning points. While New Year may be a cause for celebration, the somber awareness that we cannot turn back exists. Fear of regrets, letting go, loss or change can be unsettling. Year-end lists allow us to take stock, accept, evaluate, or alter what we can do in what is forthcoming.
Here then is my list of musical journeys that I found fulfilling this year.
Maybe you've missed one of these.

Best Albums Of 2016 -

1.) Blackstar, David Bowie
A wonderful parting gift, but much more than that. I listened to this astonishing 25^th studio album on the Friday in January it was released, which also happened to be his 69th birthday. I spent that weekend working through the album's somber horns and avant-jazz experimentalism, the mystical, indecipherable allusions on tunes like "'Tis a Pity She's a Whore" and those multipart, Tony Visconti-aided arrangements such as the mind-blowing, challenging title track. Two days later, Bowie suddenly died and we were all were forced to re-examine/re-think the album's most curious, WTF lyrical moments like, "Look up here, I'm in heaven" (on "Lazarus") and "Where the f*** did Monday go?" (on "Girl Loves Me"). Re-hearing eccentric songs like "I Can't Give Everything Away" as existential commentary turned Blackstar into more than the final bit of punctuation on Bowie's multi-decade career. This is a jazz-backed rock album with a melancholy ruminations on death, on identity boundaries, on fame, on the universe and astrology, on love, religion and on the limits of the popular culture. Blackstar also happens to be a richly musical offering, more sonically generous and full of boundary-exploding ideas than one might ever expect to hear from any terminally ill musician. The most endearing feature of Blackstar to me is that it refuses closure: It becomes something new every time you deeply listen. It's the most powerful parting gift a great artist could have ever given us. Whatever else one may say of Bowie's work, he was a creative genius, one of the most significant artistic forces in our lifetime. And this is an easy choice for best album of the year.

2.) - In Movement, Jack DeJohnette / Matthew Garrison / Ravi ColtraneThis record is just enjoyable. Even without knowing any of the tunes, or the players, or their history it's solid on it's own merits. It's full of spacious slow numbers that eventually reveal gorgeous melodies. At other moments the energy is turned up, sometimes with raw abstraction, other times with dark funk grooves. Texturally and intellectually there's a little bit of an elusive and mysterious quality to the proceedings, a lot of coloring outside the beat. Ravi Coltrane (saxes) and Matthew Garrison (bass) are the sons of John Coltrane (saxes) and Jimmy Garrison (bass), and drummer Jack DeJohnette has known them since they were kids because he played with John Coltrane and Jimmy Garrison. Some of these tunes salute DeJohnette's heroes like Jimi Hendrix ("Two Jimmys"), Maurice White of Earth, Wind and Fire ("Serpentine Fire"), and bandmate Rashied Ali ("Rashied"); others were famously performed by John Coltrane ("Alabama," "Blue In Green"). The roots run deep, and you can read whatever interpretive intentions you wish from that. Or you could just enjoy the music.
Fantastic album.

3.) Stranger To Stranger, Paul Simon
Paul Simon may be our greatest living songwriter. His songs are portraits, thoughtful snapshots on the human condition and, more often than not, Skillful observations on Americans and American culture. His consistency as an artist is unparalleled, going back fifty solid years to those early Simon and Garfunkel records. From its opening track, his masterful 2016 album Stranger to Stranger explores our fears as a culture...fears of the future, of the unknown. Every instrument, every sound effect, every vocal is finely detailed and crafted to serve the song. And those songs are more often created not from the usual three chord acoustic guitar repertoire but from the feet of flamenco dancers and electronic beats, found sounds, etc. then sculpted and changed and polished beyond recognition into these memorable musical jewels, each one gem in it's own right. He mentions having been inspired by attending a Harry Partch recital in the liner notes. While I could not detect any of the micro-tonal sonority Partch pursued in this record, I do hear the willingness to use unexpected sounds as musical instruments in the texture. It's a great album. Paul says it's his last...and he certainly owes us nothing. But we'll see. I hope he enjoys a break, but comes to be inspired again.

4.) "let me tell you" - Barbara Hannigan/Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra/Andris Nelsons

There is a synergy between music, words and performers that rarely rises to the extraordinary level as we find here in Danish composer Hans Abrahamsen's 35-minute song cycle, let me tell you, which features soprano Barbara Hannigan with Andris Nelsons conducting the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra. The text, by Paul Griffiths, adopts all the words (about 480 of them) Shakespeare allotted to Ophelia in Hamlet, shuffled about to create a fresh, confident character with cracks of fragility. Sung by the fearless Hannigan, Ophelia divides her story into past, present and future, speaking of a time without music, the inadequacy of language and a transformative love. When she sings "you have sun-blasted me," the orchestra shatters into twinkling shards of sound. The final scene finds Ophelia calmly walking out into the falling snow. Hannigan's high C, plucked direct from the frigid air, might be the most beautiful note you'll hear all year. Fantastic album.

5.) Beautiful Lies, Birdy

Beautiful Lies, is the third album from Birdy, and it's evolved. She began as an acoustic covers singer at the young age of 14 but she's truly a confident and powerful artist now...19 when the album was recorded. On the lush opener "Growing Pains," she incorporates East Asian-influenced melody into a swelling, powerful chorus that echoes Del Rey with a little Kate Bush sprinkled on top. That refreshing quirkiness is also present on the wistful "Silhouette," which includes a surprising flourish that wouldn't be out of place on a Joanna Newsom or Regina Spektor track. Beautiful Lies' there are powerful uplifting moments in "Keeping Your Head Up" and the urgent "Wild Horses". There are nods to her origins on the piano ballads "Lost It All," the soothing "Unbroken," and the closing title track, a sparse beauty that ends Beautiful Lies with a kiss goodbye. "Turn out the light, there are no more surprises to come," she sings, as the album drifts off into silence. This is a work full of life and texture. Arrangements are great and her singing is top notch. The entire album exudes an inspiring attitude. Beautiful Lies is Birdy's declaration that she is more than able to make her mark in the big leagues and join the ranks of the alternative pop pantheon.

There is something wonderful going on here.

6.) Still Come The Summer Rains, Ben New
Ambitious wide and ranging collection of songs brilliantly executed and expertly arranged.
This is a rare amalgam of thoughtful lyricism, inspired composition, and virtuoso performance. Deeply committed to art, expression, and quality, Ben's music encompasses diverse influences and he dissects them to their irreducible minimum; then reassembles them into new metaphysical entities.
This is an an LP in the classic sense, a weighty serious thing made by someone who transcends jingles and singles yet brings the finer elements of that world to the arty party. This is the real deal, music that can act as a key to doorways. Part wild-eyed Romanticism, part pragmatic observation. Compassionate at times and aloof at others, this is a reading of the historical moment into disconcertingly ambivalent songs, most of which grow on you... and like Bowie's last album, these pieces always seem to have something fresh to offer with each new listening. Still Come the Summer Rains is the right album at the right time. From the hope of "Calling Out" to the stark brooding of "House Of Fear" this album never disappoints! One of the year's very finest. You need this.

7.) A Moon Shaped Pool, Radiohead

While it's obvious this album doesn't have the brooding guitar noise of Radiohead's earlier records, or the vast conceptual scope and studio alchemy of the band's more recent work. What it does have is a tremendous amount of heartache, It's quite a reflection on where the band finds itself after reaching middle age with 30 years of making music behind it. The songs are more restrained, more introspective and certainly among the most beautiful and deeply affecting of anything the band has ever recorded. A Moon Shaped Pool is a bit of an acquired taste I'd say but I'd also say it will likely, in time, be considered one of Radiohead's masterpieces.

8.) Good Times! The Monkees
Yes, it's miraculous enough that there even is an album released in 2016 of all new material from the Monkees. But the truly amazing thing is, it's actually one of the very best albums of the year.

The project was initiated by Rhino executives John Hughes and Mark Pinkus, who were excited about a 50th anniversary album for the band. Adam Schlesinger of Fountains of Wayne was hired to produce the album, with tracks by the three surviving Monkees, initially unreleased songs by the songwriters they used during their initial run including Neil Diamond, Carole King & Gerry Goffin, Harry Nilsson and Tommy Boyce with Bobby Hart and contemporary rock songwriters Schlesinger, Rivers Cuomo, Andy Partridge, Ben Gibbard, Noel Gallagher and Paul Weller.
The title track was written by Harry Nilsson and a surviving demo from the late 1960s was used incorporating Nilsson's vocals posthumously in a "duet" with Micky Dolenz. Davy Jones is heard on the album on one track despite being dead, he performs the Neil Diamond-penned song "Love to Love" which was actually recorded in 1967 for the Monkees' third album in a Don Kirshner-supervised session while the group was trying to gain musical independence from Kirshner.
Once Kirshner was removed, the song was discarded in favor of recording an album of songs written sung and played by the group itself. The resultant album was Headquarters. For its inclusion on Good Times!, Dolenz and Tork contributed new backing vocals.
The first single from the album was "She Makes Me Laugh". Penned by Weezer frontman Rivers Cuomo, it was released on April 28 along with a lyric video. The second new track to be released was "You Bring the Summer" written by Andy Partridge, which was debuted by DJ and Monkee-fan Iain Lee on his radio show on May 2, followed by it being made available by Rhino.(Personally my favorite track...it sounds like what it is, a cross between XTC and the Monkees.)
Musicians on the album include Fountains of Wayne members Adam Schlesinger (guitar, bass, keyboards, drums, percussion), Jody Porter (guitar) and Brian Young (drums, percussion), as well as Mike Viola (guitar, bass, background vocals), and band members Micky Dolenz (vocals, drums), Michael Nesmith (vocals, guitar) and Peter Tork (vocals, keyboards, banjo).
The album brings elements that we love about music from the 1960s but it also brings the element of fresh and current sounds to the table, it's inspired and the songwriting is simply top notch.
Truly a contemporary pop music masterpiece! Kudos to all involved.

8). Under The Sun, Not For Pussies

From the opening strains of "Ice Queen" a tale of transformation, acceptance, and redemption to the closing track "The Code", an epitaph of sorts for the loss of empathy and the rise of inhumanity on the cusp of the new year, this album is full of thoughtful lyricism and inspired musicianship. Not For Pussies is a duo from Perth that has a remarkable catalog of quality music that never fails to engage.
There is a unique style that pervades this, as well as their past albums. It's rock, it's heir to a great progressive tradition, but it's also ethereal and otherworldly. What I like best about their music is that it's not only intelligent, and well arranged but sublime and very personal. Something about the vocals and harmonies chosen brings a bit of the great Scottish folk traditions to the table as well. And the vocals themselves are lush and superbly executed by Jan Kidd. The instrumental tracks are layered and arranged delicately and artfully. This is a work that brings together ideas about our humanity, our myths and our modernity in collectives and as individuals. A must have album.

9.) Invisible Din, ESP
Tony Lowe and Mark Brzezicki may have released the BEST new music in progressive rock in years. From the opening song “Overture” to the closing “Almost Seen” every piece is simply superb. The work is sometimes specular and reflective while also sometimes just purely jubilant. the incredibly melodic aspect shines through at every turn and like all music that I personally enjoy, it bears new insights with repeated listening. Obviously the work of consummate professionals who have spent many long hours perfecting their craft. This is frankly the type of music that is sorely needed and generally not found much in today's world. Make every effort to hear this. Great work!
The album is written and produced by Tony Lowe who recently co-produced the ‘Starless Starlight‘ album by David Cross and Robert Fripp. Notable contributors are violist David Cross (King Crimson), the impeccable saxophone of David Jackson (Van der Graaf Generator), the bass artistry of Phil Spalding (Steve Hackett, Mike Oldfield, Simon Townsend), Acoustic guitars from Steve Gee (Landmarq), keyboards from John Young (Lifesigns), Pat Orchard, Alison Fleming, the pure and outstanding vocal work of John Beagley and electric harp from Yumi Hari. One of the best albums of 2016 and maybe of the decade.

Emily's D+ Evolution, Esperanza Spalding
"Good Lava," is the first track and it's also a mission statement. A beautifully dissonant guitar riff, and the lurching time signature make it sound a bit like a dare to stick around. These are exuberant, confrontational songs, amplified in a sort of rock/funk/jazz informed hybrid style.

After winning a Grammy she took two years off feeling commercial pressures beginning to stunt her growth. On this outing she lets her alter ego speak to her more extroverted, creative side. Spalding sings through a muse named Emily (her middle name). Emily wants you to buck the system, to fight for peace and tranquility. She wants you to reconnect with your spiritual center, to avoid facades. Recorded in front of a small studio audience in Los Angeles, you can almost see Spalding act out these songs as the band—comprised of guitarist and Christian Scott collaborator Matthew Stevens, producer/drummer Karriem Riggins, and others—create thick textures that provide plenty of space for her. People will likely call this art-rock or performance art, but D+Evolution advocates an almost indescribable ethos. The harmonic language remains rooted in jazz, but there are folk elements, prog, rock and funk elements... but like "Emily" herself, the music doesn’t seem to be "from" anywhere: It seems most concerned with establishing a space, and creating room for possibility. Even the more conventional songs like "One," "Noble Nobles" and "Unconditional Love" are expansive and rich.
There are traces of Bitches Brew, Captain Beefheart, and King Crimson in here. But not in an overt way. The best aesthetics have no zip code. And if there is an underlying theme here, it's one of personal freedom. Spalding shrugs at societal constraints, urging you to "live your life" on the chorus of "Funk the Fear" and shed preconceived notions of who you're supposed to be. On "One," she embraces emotion with bravo but uncertainty. The lyrics are a bit elusive at first, sprinting about behind fast-moving songs, delivered in impressionistic conversational bursts that have some common bonds with the delivery of Joni Mitchell. Listening to this wonderful album one senses a fearless generosity behind the proceedings, the message is loud and clear. Spalding has defined an already singular career, dictating a vision entirely on her own terms. And I for one am certainly thankful she has! This is one great album! You need this.

Honorable Mention - -

Car Seat Headrest - Teens Of DenialAn interesting punk outing that is highly ambitious work if nothing else. Not only is this album compelling in scope, it is frankly executed brilliantly. Teens Of Denial is something of a masterpiece. Epic in its vision, each track mumbles and roars with life, building monumental guitar noise and intricate, multi-layered wordplay before receding again to more ruminative shadows. It sounds at times like the ramblings of a madman others it's pure genius as a song suddenly (and repeatedly) careens in multiple directions depending on whatever thought or observation is being processed in the labyrinth of melodic seas. Teens Of Denial is the kind of album future 20-somethings will obsess about if there is a god...or not.

To seek the quality of mercy in the post truth moonlight...

2016-11-28T03:59:00.000-08:00

Here in the ludicrous post truth era, American Nazis and Fascists have finally gotten a place at the table, thanks to President-elect Trump.
Trump's senior advisor is a Nazi who for years has operated a white-supremacist/Nazi website.
The Klan is marching again. Swastikas are appearing all over the country, on signs and banners and defacing public and private buildings. But, we beat these bastards once, and we'll beat them again.
American Fascism is not new. There were plenty of Nazi sympathizers in this country going back to the 1930s and they have changed tactics and masks, but have never gone away. They plotted to overthrow president Roosevelt and install a fascist state. They murdered people and generally do what fascists do.
The fascist ideology conditions children to fear nonconformity and to blindly obey which ensures their continued obedience as adults. The challenging task of engaging in how one makes moral choices, or how to accept personal responsibility, or how to deal with the chaotic reality of human life is handed over to God-like authority figures. This process makes possible a perpetuation of childhood. It allows adults to bask in the warm glow and magic of imagined divine protections. It hides the array of human weaknesses which include our deepest fears, our dread of irrelevance and death, our uncertainty... our vulnerability. Belief systems such as this make it difficult to build mature, loving relationships. Fascism is in a sense, not a political ideology but a religion.
The believer is told it is all about them, about their needs, their desires, and above all, their protection and advancement. Relationships, even within families, splinter and fracture. Those who adopt the belief system, who find in the dictates of a fascist movement or a religion; a binary world of black and white build an exclusive and intolerant camaraderie that shuns and condemns the “unbeliever.”

People are not valued by their intrinsic qualities. They are not judged by their actions, capacities, nor compassion. They are valued for the rigidity of their obedience. Obedience defines the good and the bad, the patriot and the traitor, the Christian and the infidel. This obedience is a blunt and effective weapon against the possibility of love that could overpower the dictates of hierarchy. In many ways it is love itself, that the leaders fear most. Love unleashes passions and bonds that defy the carefully constructed edifices that keep followers trapped and enclosed. And while both fascists and self appointed religious leaders may speak often about love, as they do about family, it is the cohesive bonds created by family and love they actually wage war against. It is only through the destruction of these bonds that humanity can be divided into these black and white, good and bad factions. It is only through the destruction of truth, logic, and compassion that fascism thrives.

America's religious right was ripe for picking by fascists. They have a lot in common actually. Both utilize teachings that friends, neighbors, colleagues and family members who do not conform to their ideology are gradually dehumanized. They are painted with the despised characteristics. This attack is waged in highly abstract terms, to negate the reality of concrete, specific and unique human characteristics, to deny the possibility of goodness in those who do not conform. Some human beings, their message goes, are no longer human beings. They are "types". The exclusive community fosters rigidity, conformity and intolerance. In this binary world, segments of the human race are disqualified from moral and ethical consideration. How else could the barbaric treatment of protesters at Standing Rock occur? How else could the news of such events be tolerated for one second? It's because fundamentalists of all stripes including fascists live in a binary universe. Their capacity for seeing others as anything more than inverted reflections of themselves has been destroyed. If they seek to destroy nonbelievers to create a Christian America, then nonbelievers must be seeking to destroy them. If they seek to destroy democracy to prevent some abstract 'liberalism" then in their minds liberals are plotting against them to destroy it first. If they conceive of science as an enemy, then science must be evil.
If you are taught that education is your enemy, then education is evil . This type of belief system negates the very possibility of an ethical life.

The "believer" fails to grasp that goodness must be sought outside the self and that the best defense against evil is to seek it within. When a group of people come to believe that they are immune from evil, that there is no resemblance between themselves and those they define as their enemy, they inevitably grow to embody the very evil they believe they fight. It is only by understanding one's own capacity for evil, one's own darkness, that we hold the capacity for evil at bay. When evil is purely external, then moral purification always entails the eradication of others.
Human kindness is deeply subversive to totalitarian creeds, which seek to thwart all compassion toward those deemed unworthy of moral consideration, those branded as internal or external enemies.
To fight fascism, one thing you, yourself can do...every day is be kind.
To find compassion.
To seek the quality of mercy.
The fascist is a fundamentalist, and fundamentalists do not commit evil for evil’s sake.
They commit evil to "make a better world". To attain this they believe, some must suffer and be silenced, and eventually all those who oppose them must be destroyed.
The worst suffering in human history has been carried out by those who preach or believe this claptrap. In a serious twist of irony, it is indeed an idealism that leads radical fundamentalists and fascist followers to strip human beings of their dignity and their sanctity and turn them into abstractions. Yet it is only by holding on to the sanctity of each individual, each human life, only by placing our faith in tiny, unheroic acts of compassion and kindness, that we survive.
Both as communities and as individual human beings.
These small acts of kindness are deeply feared and subversive to these idealists.

On Thanksgiving I tried to find something to be thankful for.
I came up short.
It's costing American taxpayers $1 million per day to provide security for Trump and his family in New York City.
Ben Carson has accepted or is considering the office of Secretary of HUD. Carson has absolutely no experience in public housing or urban planning and has shown no interest whatsoever in it.
From what we've seen during the 2016 when he was running for the GOP nomination, he's pretty much an ignorant, bumbling fool.
Betsy Devos will head up the Education department. There couldn't be a worse choice. She and her billionaire husband have devoted their lives to the destruction of public education through privatization and charter schools. She is an ultra-right wing fanatic Christian who hates that public schools are the foundation of democracy. She thinks education should be only for those in the upper classes who can pay for private schools, and seeks to destroy public schools by diverting their funding elsewhere...this is the tactic that will also be employed to destroy medicare and social security. Probably everything that citizens value about their citizenship.
Trump's business entanglements make it impossible to function as president. He has already compromised his ability to deal properly with foreign interests, owing hundreds of millions of dollars to Russian oligarchs, banks in China, and other countries. The other day while speaking with President Erdogan of Turkey, Trump promoted his business partner in that country, a clear abrogation of his presidential responsibilities. This is a nightmare.
Trump's advisor on "Space" wants to defund NASA's climate work.
Although Trump knows nothing about foreign affairs or even how our country works, he is blowing off the daily intelligence briefings. He's attended two such briefings in the past two weeks. But then he has been awfully busy twitting about his dislike of the cast of "Hamilton," and Saturday Night Live.
In a move to reward a supporter with a governorship, Trump appointed Nikki Haley, the governor of South Carolina, as the U.S. Ambassador to the UN. Haley is an ultra-right wing "birther" politico with no experience or expertise in foreign policy, the United Nations, or anything else of importance.
Last, but far from least, is Trump's appointment of Jeff Sessions, the Alabama crackpot, as Attorney General. Sessions was rejected as a federal judge previously because of his blatant racism.
He is a bigot extraordinaire and an out-and-out racist wanker.
Enjoy your holiday folks. (Try not to get indigestion!)
Remember, acts of compassion and kindness are blows against this empire.

It CAN happen here...American Fascisim

2016-11-09T02:26:00.001-08:00

American Nazi Rally, Madison Square Gardens. 1939

American Fascism Isn't New

Elites in both of America's major political parties acted on behalf of corporations and carried out a savage assault on the working class. Their duplicity has succeeded for decades. These elitists spoke the language of values—civility, inclusivity, a condemnation of overt racism and bigotry, a concern for the middle class—but all the while thrusting a knife into the back of the underclass for their corporate masters.
There are tens of millions of Americans, especially lower-class whites, who are rightfully enraged at what has been done to them, their families and their communities. They have risen up to reject the neoliberal - neoconservative policies and political correctness imposed on them by elites from both political parties: These people; largely lower class whites, are quite willing to embrace an American fascism.

These particular Americans want a sort of freedom—but it's a freedom to hate. They desire the right to use vulgar words like “niggers,” “kikes,” “spics,” “chinks,” “ragheads”, “faggots" etc.
They want the freedom to idealize violence and the gun culture. They want the freedom to have enemies, to physically assault Muslims, undocumented workers, African-Americans, homosexuals and anyone who dares criticize their cryptofascism. They want the freedom to celebrate historical movements that the college-educated elites and general decency condemn, including the Ku Klux Klan and the Confederacy. They want the freedom to ridicule and dismiss intellectuals, ideas, science and culture. They want the freedom to silence those who have been telling them how to behave decently. And they want the freedom to revel in faux hypermasculinity, racism, sexism and white patriarchy. These qualities are the core sentiments of fascism. These sentiments are engendered by the collapse of the democratic state.
While Democrats frankly blindly played a very dangerous game by anointing Hillary Clinton as their presidential candidate because she epitomizes the real or perceived double-dealing of the elites, those who spoke of "feel-your-pain" while selling out the poor and the working class to corporate power.
The Republicans, conversely became energized by America’s reality-star version of Il Duce, Donald Trump, have been pulling in voters, new voters.
Richard Rorty in his last book, “Achieving Our Country,” which was written in 1998, predicted where our postindustrial nation was headed:

"Many writers on socioeconomic policy have warned that the old industrialized democracies are heading into a Weimar-like period, one in which populist movements are likely to overturn constitutional governments. Edward Luttwak, for example, has suggested that fascism may be the American future. The point of his book The Endangered American Dream is that members of labor unions, and unorganized unskilled workers, will sooner or later realize that their government is not even trying to prevent wages from sinking or to prevent jobs from being exported. Around the same time, they will realize that suburban white-collar workers—themselves desperately afraid of being downsized—are not going to let themselves be taxed to provide social benefits for anyone else.
At that point, something will crack. The nonsuburban electorate will decide that the system has failed and start looking around for a strongman to vote for—someone willing to assure them that, once he is elected, the smug bureaucrats, tricky lawyers, overpaid bond salesmen, and postmodernist professors will no longer be calling the shots. A scenario like that of Sinclair Lewis’ novel It Can’t Happen Here may then be played out. For once a strongman takes office, nobody can predict what will happen. In 1932, most of the predictions made about what would happen if Hindenburg named Hitler chancellor were wildly overoptimistic.
One thing that is very likely to happen is that the gains made in the past forty years by black and brown Americans, and by homosexuals, will be wiped out. Jocular contempt for women will come back into fashion. The words “nigger” and “kike” will once again be heard in the workplace. All the sadism which the academic Left has tried to make unacceptable will come flooding back. All the resentment which badly educated and/or dis-informed Americans feel about having their manners dictated to them by college graduates will find an outlet."

Fascist movements build their base not from the politically active but the politically inactive, the “losers” who feel, often correctly, they have no voice or role to play in the political establishment. The sociologist Émile Durkheim warned that the disenfranchisement of a class of people from the structures of society produced a state of “anomie”—a “condition in which society provides little moral guidance to individuals.” Those trapped in this “anomie,” he wrote, are easy prey to propaganda and emotionally driven mass movements. Hannah Arendt, echoing Durkheim, noted that “the chief characteristic of the mass man is not brutality and backwardness, but his isolation and lack of normal social relationships.”
In fascism the politically disempowered and disengaged, ignored and reviled by the establishment, discover a voice and a sense of empowerment.

The fascist movements in Europe in the 1930s recruited their members from this mass of apparently indifferent people which other parties had abandoned as too apathetic or too stupid for their attention. The result was that the majority of their membership consisted of people who had never before appeared on the political scene. This permitted the introduction of entirely new methods of political propaganda as well as indifference to the arguments of political opponents. Fascist movements not only placed themselves outside and against the party system as a whole, they found a membership that had never been reached, never been ‘spoiled’ by the party system. Therefore they did not need to refute opposing arguments and consistently preferred methods which ended in death rather than persuasion, which spelled terror rather than conviction. They presented disagreements as invariably originating in deep natural, social, or psychological sources beyond the control of the individual and therefore beyond the control of reason. This would have been a shortcoming if they had sincerely entered into competition with opposing political movements; but it was not if they were sure of dealing with people who had reason to be equally hostile to all parties.
Fascism is aided and advanced by the apathy of those who are tired of being conned and lied to by a bankrupt establishment, whose only reason to vote for a politician or support a political party is to elect the least worst. Fascism expresses itself in familiar and comforting national and religious symbols, which is why it comes in various varieties and forms. Italian fascism, which looked back to the glory of the Roman Empire, for example, never shared the Nazis’ love of Teutonic and Nordic myths. American fascism will reach back to it's own traditional patriotic symbols, narratives and beliefs. Hitler and Mussolini, after all, had not tried to seem exotic to their fellow citizens. No swastikas in an American fascism, but Stars and Stripes (or Stars and Bars) and Christian crosses. No fascist salute, but mass recitations of the pledge of allegiance. These symbols contain no whiff of fascism in themselves, of course, but an American fascism would transform them into obligatory litmus tests for detecting internal enemies.
Fascism is about an inspired and seemingly strong leader who promises moral renewal, glory and revenge. It is about the replacement of rational debate with sensual experience. This is why the lies, half-truths and fabrications by Trump have no impact on his followers. Fascists transform politics, as philosopher and cultural critic Walter Benjamin pointed out, into aesthetics. And the ultimate aesthetic for the fascist, Benjamin said, is war. The amorphous ideology characteristic of all fascist movements is the leader’s mystical union with some imagined historic destiny of his people.
The fascist leader promises to bring his people into a higher realm of politics that they will experience sensually the warmth of belonging to a race now fully aware of its "identity", historic destiny, and the thrill of domination.

America is now in exactly the same place politically the Wiemar Republic was when the political hacks & oligarchs of that time installed Hitler as Chancellor....they thought he was their dupe, that they could use him, that he would be their lap dog. They were wrong.

As for the disenfranchised lower classes who came out in droves to support Mr. Trump, it's doubtful he will do anything to improve their lot. America voted to gamble on someone who promises change... we all understand that yearning. But he's surrounded himself with the worst of the usual hacks from rightwing extremism. Despite yearning for change, America also voted nearly all the same universally despised representatives & senators back into power so it doesn't follow that it really wants change, or is it just plain stupid? Change is inevitable, but not all change is good...as the last living memory of a world on the brink thanks to fascism fades away, as the generation that remembers WWII and the Great Depression disappears... history is poised to repeat itself.
For those Americans who so desired this freedom to hate, it's a great day...not so much for anyone else in the world.
I wish us all luck. And I'm afraid we'll need it.

There is only one way left to blunt the yearning for fascism that coalesced around Trump. It is to build, as fast as possible, movements that declare war on corporate power, engage in sustained acts of civil disobedience and seek to reintegrate the disenfranchised—the “losers”—back into the economy. If this movement does not come out of the Democratic Party, then a different party should be empowered for the task...(though as things stand, there is no path for a 3rd party to win a national election...if the apparatus of the Democratic Party can not be re-engaged to be the vehicle, then the difficult task of funding and creating a COMPETITIVE infrastructure, as well as removing the Electoral College must begin immediately. (The Electoral College gave us the last two Republican presidencies despite those candidates losing the popular vote...Clinton will have won the popular vote by roughly a million votes this election for instance) Not only does the electoral college give us presidents who didn't win the majority of votes, but it prevents any 3rd party from being viable due to it's winner take all construction. I've no doubt that if Clinton won the electoral college, Trump probably would have just disappeared, but the fascist sentiments he exploited would have only expanded. And another Trump, perhaps even more vile, would be vomited up from the bowels of the decayed political system. We are fighting for our political life. Tremendous damage has been done by corporate power and the political class elites to our democracy. The longer the privileged elites, who oversaw this disemboweling of the country on behalf of corporations—who believe, as does CBS Chief Executive Officer Leslie Moonves, that however bad Trump would be for America he would at least be good for corporate profit—remain in charge, the worse it gets.
Is the hour too late?
It just may be.

Henry Wallace

Consider the words of Vice President Henry Wallace in 1944.

The Danger of American Fascism
By Henry A. Wallace
The New York Times
From Henry A. Wallace, Democracy Reborn (New York, 1944), edited by Russell Lord, p. 259.

Sunday 09 April 1944
On returning from my trip to the West in February, I received a request from The New York Times to write a piece answering the following questions:
What is a fascist?
How many fascists have we?
How dangerous are they?
A fascist is one whose lust for money or power is combined with such an intensity of intolerance toward those of other races, parties, classes, religions, cultures, regions or nations as to make him ruthless in his use of deceit or violence to attain his ends. The supreme god of a fascist, to which his ends are directed, may be money or power; may be a race or a class; may be a military, clique or an economic group; or may be a culture, religion, or a political party.
The perfect type of fascist throughout recent centuries has been the Prussian Junker, who developed such hatred for other races and such allegiance to a military clique as to make him willing at all times to engage in any degree of deceit and violence necessary to place his culture and race astride the world. In every big nation of the world are at least a few people who have the fascist temperament. Every Jew-baiter, every Catholic hater, is a fascist at heart. The hoodlums who have been desecrating churches, cathedrals and synagogues in some of our larger cities are ripe material for fascist leadership.
The obvious types of American fascists are dealt with on the air and in the press. These demagogues and stooges are fronts for others. Dangerous as these people may be, they are not so significant as thousands of other people who have never been mentioned. The really dangerous American fascists are not those who are hooked up directly or indirectly with the Axis. The FBI has its finger on those. The dangerous American fascist is the man who wants to do in the United States in an American way what Hitler did in Germany in a Prussian way. The American fascist would prefer not to use violence. His method is to poison the channels of public information. With a fascist the problem is never how best to present the truth to the public but how best to use the news to deceive the public into giving the fascist and his group more money or more power.
If we define an American fascist as one who in case of conflict puts money and power ahead of human beings, then there are undoubtedly several million fascists in the United States. There are probably several hundred thousand if we narrow the definition to include only those who in their search for money and power are ruthless and deceitful. Most American fascists are enthusiastically supporting the war effort. They are doing this even in those cases where they hope to have profitable connections with German chemical firms after the war ends. They are patriotic in time of war because it is to their interest to be so, but in time of peace they follow power and the dollar wherever they may lead.

American fascism will not be really dangerous until there is a purposeful coalition among the cartelists, the deliberate poisoners of public information, and those who stand for the K.K.K. type of demagoguery.
The European brand of fascism will probably present its most serious postwar threat to us via Latin America. The effect of the war has been to raise the cost of living in most Latin American countries much faster than the wages of labor. The fascists in most Latin American countries tell the people that the reason their wages will not buy as much in the way of goods is because of Yankee imperialism. The fascists in Latin America learn to speak and act like natives. Our chemical and other manufacturing concerns are all too often ready to let the Germans have Latin American markets, provided the American companies can work out an arrangement which will enable them to charge high prices to the consumer inside the United States. Following this war, technology will have reached such a point that it will be possible for Germans, using South America as a base, to cause us much more difficulty in World War III than they did in World War II. The military and landowning cliques in many South American countries will find it attractive financially to work with German fascist concerns as well as expedient from the standpoint of temporary power politics.
Fascism is a worldwide disease. Its greatest threat to the United States will come after the war, either via Latin America or within the United States itself.
Still another danger is represented by those who, paying lip service to democracy and the common welfare, in their insatiable greed for money and the power which money gives, do not hesitate surreptitiously to evade the laws designed to safeguard the public from monopolistic extortion. American fascists of this stamp were clandestinely aligned with their German counterparts before the war, and are even now preparing to resume where they left off, after “the present unpleasantness” ceases:
The symptoms of fascist thinking are colored by environment and adapted to immediate circumstances. But always and everywhere they can be identified by their appeal to prejudice and by the desire to play upon the fears and vanities of different groups in order to gain power. It is no coincidence that the growth of modern tyrants has in every case been heralded by the growth of prejudice. It may be shocking to some people in this country to realize that, without meaning to do so, they hold views in common with Hitler when they preach discrimination against other religious, racial or economic groups. Likewise, many people whose patriotism is their proudest boast play Hitler’s game by retailing distrust of our Allies and by giving currency to snide suspicions without foundation in fact.
The American fascists are most easily recognized by their deliberate perversion of truth and fact. Their newspapers and propaganda carefully cultivate every fissure of disunity, every crack in the common front against fascism. They use every opportunity to impugn democracy. They use isolationism as a slogan to conceal their own selfish imperialism. They cultivate hate and distrust of both Britain and Russia. They claim to be super-patriots, but they would destroy every liberty guaranteed by the Constitution. They demand free enterprise, but are the spokesmen for monopoly and vested interest. Their final objective toward which all their deceit is directed is to capture political power so that, using the power of the state and the power of the market simultaneously, they may keep the common man in eternal subjection.
Several leaders of industry in this country who have gained a new vision of the meaning of opportunity through co-operation with government have warned the public openly that there are some selfish groups in industry who are willing to jeopardize the structure of American liberty to gain some temporary advantage. We all know the part that the cartels played in bringing Hitler to power, and the rule the giant German trusts have played in Nazi conquests. Monopolists who fear competition and who distrust democracy because it stands for equal opportunity would like to secure their position against small and energetic enterprise. In an effort to eliminate the possibility of any rival growing up, some monopolists would sacrifice democracy itself.
It has been claimed at times that our modern age of technology facilitates dictatorship. What we must understand is that the industries, processes, and inventions created by modern science can be used either to subjugate or liberate. The choice is up to us. The myth of fascist efficiency has deluded many people. It was Mussolini’s vaunted claim that he “made the trains run on time.” In the end, however, he brought to the Italian people impoverishment and defeat. It was Hitler’s claim that he eliminated all unemployment in Germany. Neither is there unemployment in a prison camp.
Democracy to crush fascism internally must demonstrate its capacity to “make the trains run on time.” It must develop the ability to keep people fully employed and at the same time balance the budget. It must put human beings first and dollars second. It must appeal to reason and decency and not to violence and deceit. We must not tolerate oppressive government or industrial oligarchy in the form of monopolies and cartels. As long as scientific research and inventive ingenuity outran our ability to devise social mechanisms to raise the living standards of the people, we may expect the liberal potential of the United States to increase. If this liberal potential is properly channeled, we may expect the area of freedom of the United States to increase. The problem is to spend up our rate of social invention in the service of the welfare of all the people.
The worldwide, agelong struggle between fascism and democracy will not stop when the fighting ends in Germany and Japan. Democracy can win the peace only if it does two things:
Speeds up the rate of political and economic inventions so that both production and, especially, distribution can match in their power and practical effect on the daily life of the common man the immense and growing volume of scientific research, mechanical invention and management technique. Vivifies with the greatest intensity the spiritual processes which are both the foundation and the very essence of democracy.
The moral and spiritual aspects of both personal and international relationships have a practical bearing which so-called practical men deny. This dullness of vision regarding the importance of the general welfare to the individual is the measure of the failure of our schools and churches to teach the spiritual significance of genuine democracy. Until democracy in effective enthusiastic action fills the vacuum created by the power of modern inventions, we may expect the fascists to increase in power after the war both in the United States and in the world.
Fascism in the postwar inevitably will push steadily for Anglo-Saxon imperialism and eventually for war with Russia. Already American fascists are talking and writing about this conflict and using it as an excuse for their internal hatreds and intolerances toward certain races, creeds and classes.
It should also be evident that exhibitions of the native brand of fascism are not confined to any single section, class or religion. Happily, it can be said that as yet fascism has not captured a predominant place in the outlook of any American section, class or religion. It may be encountered in Wall Street, Main Street or Tobacco Road. Some even suspect that they can detect incipient traces of it along the Potomac. It is an infectious disease, and we must all be on our guard against intolerance, bigotry and the pretension of invidious distinction. But if we put our trust in the common sense of common men and “with malice toward none and charity for all” go forward on the great adventure of making political, economic and social democracy a practical reality, we shall not fail."

Apparently we have failed.

The Lady Or The Tiger?

2016-10-17T03:25:00.000-07:00

The Lady or the Tiger?" Most of us know the short story first published in 1882 by Frank Stockton that tells of an unusual punishment imposed by a semi-barbaric king in which the accused must choose between two doors. Behind one door is a maiden and behind the other is a tiger.
While there is no shortage of memes or impassioned bloggers trying to convince people to vote for outlier parties in the presidential election with appeals to emotion primarily or perhaps fair play or even ideology purity. Is there any path for any of these outlier candidates to win?

It is not a coincidence (see the power structure article) that in the many years since this country’s establishment of democracy, no more than two parties have ruled national elections and the senate. Although 43% of Americans today are classified as political independents and despite the present preference of an emergent third party among voters, the Libertarians and Green Party members struggle to find support nationally and could not get enough signatures or forgot to file the paperwork, or couldn't raise the 5,000 dollar filing fee to even be on the ballot in 12 of the states.
That alone prevents them from even having a path to winning a national election.
But that's not the only thing that stops them from possibly winning.

This, as I say is no coincidence,
it's in the mechanics laid out in our constitution.
The rules strongly encourage a two party system.

I do not like this any more than staunch believers in libertarian-ism
or any of the 150 some political parties in the US do.
It isn't "fair", it isn't "good"...but it is so.

I'm betting most people would find policy positions much closer to what they personally would choose somewhere in that array outside of the 2 major parties.
If one votes for policy only with no regard for viability, (the possibility of actually winning)
there are compelling reasons to do just that,
yet most people want to ACTUALLY effect policy
and to do that you have to win elections.

Currently friends, an outlier party can not win.

The closest an outlier party has ever come to the presidency was Theodore Roosevelt’s 1912 Progressive party campaign where he won 27.5% of the vote!
That only occurred as conservatives wrangled control of Republican party chasing the Roosevelt progressives away. Which led eventually to the Democratic party becoming their home.(as faulted as it may be, the Democratic party has been the sole source of all progressive legislation since 1930. It's been the source of all legislation that dealt with civil rights, women's rights, infrastructure investment, funding education, the arts, social services, national parks, etc. All these matters were supported by the Democrats and opposed by the Republicans).
The reason outlier parties simply can not win is primarily the structure of the nation’s voting system and the simple concept of Duverger’s law.

The electoral college, created to formally elect presidents, requires an absolute majority of at least 270 votes, and this requirement in itself makes third parties nonviable.

Winner-take-all systems which 48 of the 50 states use for the electoral college make it impossible for a third party to emerge with any chance of gaining considerable electoral votes.

It's that simple.

Wouldn't we all LOVE to do away with the electoral college?

I imagine all but the staunchest conservative who has no faith in democracy , but dreamily longs for the good old days of feudal states would agree.

Getting rid of the electoral college requires rewriting the US constitution.
That my friends is a very big hurtle to any change.

It's not impossible, but it requires a 2/3s YEA vote in both houses (votes from people who benefited from the existing system), AND ratification from 2/3s of the states.

I would love to see plurality myself, but I will not vote for someone who simply can not win and hence not effect any policy at all.
In local and state elections, it may well be another story.
And if enough elections are won at that level by an outlier party
a network can begin to be built to supplant one of the larger parties.
(the possibility of converting the existing system at the federal level to a plurality are slim as we have demonstrated...so supplanting is the more likely scenario).

The populace realizes this statistical improbability of outside party success, and most third party supporters coalesce around the largest party with whom they identify the closer election day comes.

They form an allegiance with this party although they identify more with the smaller party, in order to defeat the largest party of their ideological opponents. Those who go against this process will be blamed for lost elections by splitting votes and guaranteeing success of the major opposing party. This process happens in countries where plurality is the norm more so than the US actually.

(Look at the un-natural alliance of the Liberals & the Tories in England for instance).
Candidates and supporters of outlier parties deny this, but the data just does not support their claims.
Social Scientists studying the matter as it applies in the U.S. agree the net effect of voting for outlier parties only helps whichever of the major parties is least like the outlier one a person votes for.
Could we become more pluralistic like the UK or Canada?
Not without amendment to the constitution.

Differences in voting processes explain why the United Kingdom normally has three or more parties that have a fair chance at elections while the US does not.
With our winner-take-all system , proportionality is tossed aside no matter how close the plurality of the vote actually is.
In the UK, though it may not be direct proportionality, more than three parties get a certain amount of seats in the House of Commons. In the US, anything other than a Democrat or a Republican is rarely seen, (only two independents in the Senate. None at all in the House of Representatives.) Unfortunately, both systems end up being troubled by some form of gerrymandering, but far more so in the US.

There are further restrictions other than absolute majority in the electoral college that put further severe dampers on any third party efforts. The amount of private money and funding in forms of Super PACs and other organizations leaves other parties little to work with in terms of competition.

Parties who do not have significant funding compared to the standard billion dollar benchmark of the large parties are surpassed immensely in efforts of marketing, a requirement to spread the message and even existence of the party. Private funding also means the GOP and Democratic Party receive an easy pass when it comes to the eligibility requirements of raising at least $5,000 in 20 states while third parties struggle to meet it. (Those are state by state rules...again the constitution gives states this power).

You have to remember that the political parties are nothing more than private clubs. They have no official state function, nor any requirements to behave in a democratic fashion...no more so than a yacht club or a golf club. Furthermore, the Democrats and Republicans can even be seen working together to disenfranchise smaller parties. One example of this is the Committee of Presidential Debates that determines who is allowed on the highly-watched general election debate stage. Rules and regulations are often imposed to shut out smaller parties instead of allowing the nominees from the third and fourth largest parties to debate, effectively creating a monopoly on these debates.

Again this problem arises because they are no more than private clubs that are not controlled by government any more so than the process of selecting Grand Poobahs at the Flintstone's Waterbuffalo Lodge.

These are unfortunate truths but they are truths none the less.
America’s two-party system is a result of its electoral structure.
Its electoral structure is not a result of its two-party system.

Possible solutions

Instant Runoff.

The current political process leaves many Americans longing for more choices of candidates and hoping for election reform. One voting process that may prove to be a more inclusive solution is an instant run-off.
Instant run-off elections constitute candidate ranking by the voter.
The voter would list over three candidates starting with the most preferred.
If a voter’s first pick candidate received the least votes, their vote would then be given to their second pick.
With this process, though it is not flawless, no blame could be placed on a voter of a third party for splitting votes and the winner take all effect at least could be overcome.

Public Financing
Removing the effect of private capital on elections would transform the process entirely.
It would create a level playing field where no candidate could garner advantage.
It would also eliminate the institutionalized graft where politicians owe their financiers favors.

Want to reform the process?
That's how you do it.
Want to vote for someone other than a major party candidate and have your vote actually HELP your cause?
That's how you do it,
Until then, it's casting the first stone...in your own face.

As to The Lady or the Tiger?
Sutton never solved the riddle...he left it up to you.

Sex, Politics, Religion, & Baseball

2016-10-15T04:33:00.001-07:00

The Real Reason Trump Has Evangelical Support:
They're Just Not That 'Religious'

As long as I can remember, conservative commentator George Will has never impressed me with his political pieces, though oddly perhaps, I have often read his columns because he does know and love baseball and writes very well about the game and it's history as well as his experience as a long suffering Chicago Cubs fan. (At least there's something he can be pleased about this year).

I would often cringe as I witnessed Mr. Will struggle to find ways to make arguments for George Bush's policies, particularly the choice to invade Iraq, since the rationale changed almost daily for doing so and none of it made any sense whatsoever to me at any point.
George Will is an avowed conservative, I am not. So it's not surprising that in political matters we seldom agree. But giving credit where I feel it is due, this last year George Will has been one of the earliest and most vocal critics of Donald Trump's presidential campaign.
In an article for National Review, George Will writes:

"the tape revealed nothing about this arrested-development adolescent that today’s righteously recoiling Republicans either did not already know or had no excuse for not knowing. Before the tape reminded the pathologically forgetful of Trump’s feral appetites and deranged sense of entitlement, the staid Economist magazine, holding the subject of Trump at arm’s-length like a soiled sock, reminded readers of this: “When Mr. Trump divorced the first of his three wives, Ivana, he let the New York tabloids know that one reason for the separation was that her breast implants felt all wrong.

His sexual loutishness is a sufficient reason for defeating him, but it is far down a long list of sufficient reasons. But if it — rather than, say, his enthusiasm for torture feven “if it doesn’t work,” or his ignorance of the nuclear triad — is required to prompt some Republicans to have second thoughts about him, so be it."

Trump's faux masculinity, or.rather cartoon version of masculinity;
is frankly an ironic gift to feminism.

Another inexplicable truth pointed out by Mr. Will:
“Trump is a marvelously efficient acid bath,
stripping away his supporters’ surfaces, exposing their skeletal essences.”

One of the plethora of shams in the skeletal essences
is the counterfeit piety found among Donald Trump’s supporters.
As Yahoo News reported-

“Leaders of religious conservative groups largely stood behind Donald Trump on Saturday, the day after vulgar sexual comments he made about women surfaced online, but some expressed concern that the U.S. Republican presidential nominee’s remarks could depress evangelical turnout on Election Day."

Trump brags about groping women and trying to seduce a married woman. Vice presidential poodle Mike Pence said he could not defend Trump’s words. But he forgives him. (Fine, actually that is admirable...but I wonder if he also forgives his political foes...judging from the legislation he pushed for in his state allowing businesses to refuse service to gays or Muslims...anyone they don't like really if they claim it's against their religious belief; I'd say not.)
Gary Bauer, chairman of the Campaign for Working Families, said “I continue to support the Trump-Pence ticket.”What the above-quoted story doesn’t mention is that Gary Bauer is currently president of an organization that named itself American Values.
Considering all of the vile things that Donald Trump has said, one wonders of course,
just what values that Bauer considers to be American values.
And is the working FAMILY he claims to represent the Manson Family?

Jerry Falwell Jr. proudly continues to endorse him (though thankfully students at the Liberty University campus, which he is president of, generally do not.)
James Dobson of Family Talk radio condemned Trump’s comments but called Clinton’s support for abortion rights “criminal.”
Overall, politically active Christian conservative leaders across the country said they were worried that Trump’s comments could depress turnout, but have no problem apparently with the pernicious comments Trump has made throughout his campaign regarding women, "the Blacks", people of other faiths, Mexicans, admiration of dictatorships, flippant calls for violence ("I'd like to punch that guy's face in" "Anyone who beats that guy up, I'll pay your legal fees"), etc.
I have to think they must own completely different "bibles" than any I have ever seen in my lifetime.

Why would so-called “Evangelicals” be supporting Trump?
Rebecca Cusey explains in her commentary published by The Hill:

“Who knew obscure Biblical knowledge would be so handy in this election?
With Evangelicals remaining,
at least as far as we can tell in the rapidly changing environment,
a solid block for Trump,
those stories of old echo into today.

Evangelicals are a funny bunch, prone to tease points out of – to all others – irrelevant Biblical passages and apply them to current events.

To this point, an idea has been circulating in Evangelical circles
that paints Donald Trump as a modern day Cyrus
— the ancient king of Persia who sent Jews home to Israel from captivity
as told in the book of Ezra (among other passages).
By accounts in and out of the Bible, Cyrus was a generous and just ruler,
instituting (relatively) fair laws and religious freedom in his vast empire.

Cyrus was a pagan and yet God used him to restore the people of Israel, so the pro-Trump argument goes. Though Trump is not a Christian in the way Evangelicals would ever really accept, it continues, God is raising him up to fulfill God’s purposes.”

In short, Trump can act like a pagan,
but that doesn’t matter as long as he isn’t Hillary Clinton."

Others who stand by Trump are Ralph Reed,
a member of the campaign’s evangelical advisory board.
He's the former partner of the imprisoned lobbyist-racketeer Jack Abramoff,
and the founder of the Faith n' Freedom Coalition.

Perennial feces huckster and televangelist Pat Robertson also stands fast with Trump.
The above-mentioned Trump supporters
preach that piety requires one to support Trump over Clinton.
They are, as they always do; promoting counterfeit piety.

First off, these so-called “evangelical leaders”
are certainly not promoting the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

Instead, they are promoting a hybrid of religious legalism
somewhat like Sharia Law and their political philosophy
which favors corporatism and wealth concentration.

Oh yeah, Dobson rails against abortion,
but the Bible never mentions abortion.

The Bible is silent about that subject.

The Bible is silent about all the things that Trump’s religious supporters rail about.

The faux piety within the GOP is troublesome.
I have known plenty of devout practicing Christians who are Democrats
and who would never support Donald Trump.
Are they somehow less pious than the Republican Christians?

And why do obvious hucksters like Pat Robertson or Ralph Reed
get to define what Christians should believe about the Bible?
And which parts they shouldn't?

The one very clear message I think we all can clearly see
in the New Testament,
Is Love One Another
As much as I try to see any sort of way to correlate that edict
to any policy of the GOP
or anything Trump has said
I can not find even an inkling of similarity

That's ok because...

the Christian faith is politically neutral.
We all should be abhorred by any attempt to mix Christianity with politics.
We all should reject false piety.

The Fear Of A Just World - The Backlash Against The 1960s

2016-10-13T16:44:00.000-07:00

Who controls the past, controls the future. Who controls the present, controls the past.

– George Orwell, 1984

Forget about Trump. Forget about Clinton. There is far more going on than the personalities and flaws of these individuals. There is a far larger frame here and a picture that needs interpretation and possibly curating.
Those of us left who lived through the 1960s, who experienced the upheavals of that era understand that the project of transforming our world towards a more democratic, just, ecologically balanced future has deep roots. Straddling confidently atop the long sturdy roots laid down by labor struggles and previous movements for social justice transmits the possibility and hope that we can indeed change the world. I know this is so because my friends... because we already have. Indeed, the civil rights, anti-Vietnam War, women’s rights, LBGT, and environmental movements movements begun in the 60s era successfully challenged the dominant capitalist institutions of the U.S.
So much so, that those institutions have been scrambling for the last 50 years to systematically minimize the possibility of any future freedom struggles. Pretty much that's all the last 50 years have been about...attempting to negate and deny the impact of the 1960s rebellions on society.

There has been an ongoing campaign to denigrate and obscure the democratic promise that the movements of the sixties still hold, while at the same time co-opting the symbols and imagery of that era to trivialize the meanings as well as make Corporate America seem “cool” and sell more products. This reaction has gone hand-in-hand with material forces, such as student debt and coercing the population into inactivity and obedience. The result is a “depoliticized society,” with a diminished ability to make history. Knowledge of this campaign is a weapon against rootlessness and despair.
This is the product being sold now in every media market...rootlessness and despair.
It's why we see the political campaigns we see today.
It's why we are not talking about Native Americans struggling to protect their water supply, or global warming... but instead the absurd antics of a narcissistic billionaire with the intellect and vocabulary of a carrot or the tired stories of misogyny and alleged 'crookedness" that has been investigated ad nauseum over and over. It's all designed to distract, disgust, repel, and lower the IQs of those outside the power network that revolves around the extreme concentration of wealth and the power that goes with it. It's all meant to make you feel rootless, disparate, and hopeless.

The 1960s are typically remembered as a time of turbulence and change.
Even if you did not live through it, you know the iconic images of assassinations, war, protests, urban riots, men on the moon, long hair, drugs, sex, pop art, and fantastic music.
The underlying story of that decade was the clash between capitalism and democracy, one in which millions of Americans participated in social movements and challenged the country to become more just and more democratic. In some ways it succeeded and in others it failed. The true history of that struggle has been consistently distorted and hidden from view. What the power network and the media they own still cannot comprehend, or perhaps would most like to forget, is the democratic promise that formed the basis of those sixties social movements. In his book, Obscuring The Promise of Democracy; Edward P. Morgan suggests that the surge in democratic empowerment in which large numbers of Americans of all ages organized themselves to confront and transform a range of injustices rooted in American institutions has largely disappeared from memory.

The sixties’ social movements, at their best, were not just about stopping racism or war on a systemic scale, but also about the self-realization of the millions of individuals involved on a personal level. Morgan calls that“democratic empowerment.” and describes it as “one’s unfolding ‘freedom to,’ a lifelong discovery of one’s authentic self, the discovery of which progressively frees one from manipulation by others and potentially by the disabling scripts of the unconscious”
You may have experienced this, it's a rush of sorts...perhaps the first time you participated in some type of organizing meeting for a cause you knew was a just one, and realized that in working with others you had the power to impact the world for the better. The meaningfulness and self-confidence that comes from a politically active and engaged life contrasts dramatically from the dominant modes of apathy and self-loathing inoculated into us by capitalism and its occupied mass media appendages. The experience of acting together allows people to see themselves differently and to grow into their full potential, to gain courage in the face of challenges – from registering people to vote, speaking at a meeting, to holding a picket sign, or risking arrest in direct action. Jim Lawson, the civil rights organizer is quoted as saying, “ordinary people who acted on conscience and took terrible risks were no longer ordinary people. They were by their very actions transformed”.

In the 1960s we rode a wave of personal and political transformation. It exploded in the black freedom movement as African Americans of all ages stood up against terrorism and oppression and found pride and voice, it contagiously spread out from the South to other areas and populations in the country. White students returning to campus from battles against segregation began to question and stand up against the U.S. invasion of Vietnam. Women involved in these movements connected their gender experiences with the role of women in capitalist patriarchal society, and fought for a world without sexual inequality. LGBTs, Chicanos, Puerto Ricans, American Indians, Asian Americans, factory workers, prisoners, and many others also joined in to the wave of democratic empowerment, finding allies & greater confidence and higher expectations for the world around them.
In concert these social movements pointed the way towards a vision for a radically democratic society, in which capitalism would be replaced by the participation of diverse constituencies in the decisions which affect them. Such a vision was spelled out in many places including Students for a Democratic Society’s famous Port Huron Statement, which coined the term “participatory democracy.” This vision absolutely mortified the ruling class of the time, prompting such responses as the Trilateral Commission’s 1975 publication “Crisis of Democracy,” which defined the “crisis” as an “excess of democracy,” or too much democracy for the correct functioning of the U.S. in its role as “the hegemonic power in a system of world order”

The fear of rising democracy was the prevailing attitude of elites long before 1975.
Corporate power riddled the impartiality of the news way before Reagan came along and removed all the stops. Morgan’s book, (mentioned earlier) in fact, documents media distortions of sixties social movements at the time they happened. Rather than the right-wing myth of a “liberal media” bias, Morgan documents how the mass media in the 60s consistently misinterpreted the democratic surge of social movements in order to discredit them in the eyes of the public and prevent them from picking up too much steam.
This was done much more intently after the 60s on two fronts: a right-wing “ideological backlash” which bore poison fruit in the policies of the Reagan-Bush era in the 1980s (which still continues to this day), and a “commercial exploitation” of sixties sights and sounds to sell “a feeling of empowerment as a partial compensation for the real thing”.

Anyone who has read Chomsky and Herman’s critique, Manufacturing Consent, will recognize that while the United States has freedom of the press, the reality is that the press is largely in the hands of 3 owners...this corporate media defines “legitimate” points of view and excludes contradictory ones.
They design the public consumption of a limited range of viewpoints that embrace rather than challenge the system’s foundational myths, ideological beliefs, and institutions.
Many of the perspectives and actions of the earlier black freedom movement, which challenged racist segregation in the South, were considered “legitimate” and were covered at times sympathetically by the mainstream press. Yet, once that same movement turned its sights from regional (Southern) to national or economic targets, the press swung against it. For example, The Washington Post reacting to Martin Luther King’s first anti-war speech in 1967, “Many who have listened to him with respect will never again accord him the same confidence. He has diminished his usefulness to his cause, to his country and to his people. And that is a great tragedy”
MLK had stepped outside the boundaries of "legitimate" discourse. Questioning Jim Crow segregation was “useful,” but questioning a US foreign policy which ultimately killed 3-5 million Vietnamese was interpreted as betrayal.
Many Sixties historians draw a line between earlier civil rights activism, most of which was explicitly nonviolent, and later post-1965 struggles, including “Black Power,” anti-war organizing, the women’s movement, etc. and create a “Good Sixties” vs. “Bad Sixties” mythology. Research highlights how this was entirely a media construction, mostly due to the movements moving their criticisms of American society beyond “legitimate” media boundaries. As the press turned from sympathetic to unsympathetic, the official story got further away from the issues that movements were raising and increasingly focused on the protesters themselves as “outsiders.” Unable to comprehend or transmit growing moral outrage against the war in Vietnam, white supremacy in the North, or male domination of women, the media became fixated on the idea that all this protesting was due to “a new, postwar baby boom generation that was merely restless, questioning, and ultimately rebellious. The “baby boomer” story or the “family quarrel” frame therefore was used to characterize protesters’ actions as errant and their causes as unworthy. Similarly, the media sensationalized appearances over substance, constantly revisiting the “dirty hippie” theme as a way to ridicule those involved in grassroots movements.
Other right-wing anti-sixties backlash frames have so thoroughly poisoned much of the media’s coverage of protest and activism that they have graduated to the level of “common sense.” Thus, attempts to challenge racism, sexism, homophobia or other oppressive behaviors are lumped into the belittling term “political correctness” Feminism has become almost a dirty word in much of society, associated with “man-hating” and a completely fabricated, over-sexualized “bra burning” myth. Another commonly-held belief which Morgan’s book reveals to be a total myth is the story that veterans returning home from Vietnam were “spit on” by anti-war protesters. Instead he found, "A search for documentation of spitting incidents found only a few press reports of pro-war people spitting on antiwar veterans” (pg 279 of his book). Nevertheless, this myth serves the larger establishment goal to “shift historical guilt from those who instigated and ran the war to those who opposed it”.
I can personally attest to not only being spit on, but actually being physically attacked by a group of pro-war men in their late 30s in front of the Smithsonian Natural History museum during a peaceful demonstration when I was 17...oddly my 2 companions had been drafted and were off to boot camp the next day...but we looked like "hippies" I guess. Ironically we weren't even there for the protest on the mall...merely to visit the museum. It was a volatile time. But a time I'd not trade for any other.
I'm thankful to have experienced it. And those experiences inform and enrich my life to this day.

They also make it possible to understand and deconstruct all the backlash that we are still dealing with. When we watch films about or alluding to the 1960s...like CNN's series on the decade or even the backstory in "Forrest Gump". It's sanitized, re-arranged, the message controlled.
It wasn't black and white, but many shades and hues.
It's a fine movie with a wonderful soundtrack mind you, but there is an underlying propaganda message...intentional or merely subliminal.
The Forrest Gump film unquestioningly contains and propagates many right-wing backlash frames, reinforcing them in the public mind. The protagonist is a white man from Alabama, home of the most vicious racism and some of the greatest racial battles of the 1960s. The innocent and mentally challenged Gump remains oblivious to this racism and therefore provides an avenue for today’s viewers to “move past” or “get over” racial conflict by simply ignoring, Gump-like, that it is still a problem More blatant right-wing themes fill other scenes in the movie, including Jenny’s physically abusive boyfriend being “the President of SDS at Berkeley,” who hangs out with threatening, rhetoric-spouting Black Panthers, and the portrayal of the Vietnam War reduced to one in which invisible Vietnamese inflict gruesome damage on young American men. (One thing about the "real" 60s folks, is news reporters didn't filter footage from the war...how anyone ate dinner back then I have no clue). Most of all there is the incredibly problematic portrayal of the Jenny character herself. Instead of remaining with slow-witted-but-loyal Forrest, Jenny’s crime is in her seeking independence (perhaps an allegory for the women’s movement?) As punishment, Jenny then becomes the butt of a long string of right wing backlash myths. Joining up with hippies she doesn’t know, she then begins to smoke dope, performs naked in a club, is featured in Playboy, gets strung out on hard drugs, and eventually dies of an AIDS-like disease. Along the way, Jenny is also shown with a large number of strange men, and even contemplating suicide. Think of it...Jenny is the one character who happens to be the only sympathetic character involved in any kind of protest or movement activity in the entire film, Jenny embodies not only the myth that 60s activists had too much sex and took too many drugs, but that these behaviors led directly to the social problems of the 70s and 80s, the AIDS epidemic. This history revision is easy to point out in this film, but it's rampant in all forms of media.

History is constantly being revised and sanitized for the benefit of corporate capitalism. You can recognize this "backlash" against the 60s and positive social change as a crusade in which one's material interests are suspended in favor of vague cultural grievances that are all-important and yet incapable of ever being assuaged.While earlier forms of conservatism emphasized fiscal sobriety, the backlash mobilizes voters with explosive social issues...which is then married to pro-corporate empire economics. And in particular any honest view of the 1960s is purposefully obscured or erased entirely in all of corporate media and indeed even pop culture to a degree.

While Forrest Gump transmits anti-movement backlash messages, the film is remembered more for its heavy dosage of iconic sixties imagery and its classic countercultural soundtrack. This illustrates the second prong of mass media’s reaction to sixties-era social movements which is cultural co-optation. However much the conservatives may froth and moan about the 60s, the truth is mainstream culture was tepid, mechanical, and uniform; while the revolt of the young against it was a joyous and even a glorious cultural flowering, though it quickly became mainstream itself. It was a time when the gray cold 50s cracked open and springs of contrarian sentiment began bubbling into the best minds of a generation raised in an era of unprecedented prosperity but well versed in the exquisite existential subversions of the Beats and Mad magazine. The story ends with the noble idealism of the New Left waterboarded and in ruins while the art and music of the counterculture was sold out to Hollywood and the television networks.
The music industry of the 1960s was wonderfully chaotic and diverse with far too many small entrepreneurs running record companies to control "the message". By the end of the 1970s the corporate world bought them up and controlled "the message" which is why music no longer plays the crucial role in people's lives it once did. Film industries & TV especially, adapted itself in the late-60s/early-70s to attempt to absorb the attention and market of “rebellious youth,” through such shows as “Mod Squad” and “All in the Family”. While these and other shows communicated various liberal ideas and attitudes prevalent in sixties counterculture, they effectively exploited them in order to sell corporate goods and culture. At the same time, this commercial co-optation took people off the street and plopped them onto the couch, it worked hand-in-hand with the government’s repression of social movements to demobilize and anesthetize the population.
The corporate mass media’s post-60s adaptation of the tools of the counterculture elevated irony, self-satire, and absurdity in an attempt to stay “hip.” “The introduction of ironic, hip advertising became a magic cultural formula by which the life of consumerism could be extended indefinitely, running forever on the discontent that it itself had produced.
Watching TV commercials in 2016 is a drastically different experience than watching ads from forty years ago. If you go back and watch old commercials, it’s a startling experience. Not only do they run at a much slower pace, without constant cutting from one shot to another, and of course making use of far fewer computer generated effects, but the tone of the commercials was very different.
Older ads tried to convince the viewer that their product was quality, useful, and affordable.
Today’s commercials often have nothing to do with the product in question.
Although they display the company’s logo and deploy clever techniques to slip the brand into dialogue, the vast majority of today’s ads are 30-second comedy routines headlined by celebrities or wacky characters who are involved in some satirical or absurd plot. Corporate brands actively parody themselves in order to present the impression that they are perhaps cooler or hipper than other brands. This transformation is part of a truly subversive dynamic that effectively preempts dissent and criticism because the media themselves are self-parodying.
Interesting to me is that parody, satire, and irony remain the most common cultural weapons utilized by those of us on the left or in the counterculture. It is as if we are attempting to stay one step ahead of capitalism’s cultural co-optation, mocking them faster than they can mock themselves.
Yet, sadly I would suggest that we have entered a race we cannot win.
This is no longer 1968, and the vast majority of youth in the US today are completely plugged in to the mainstream media’s constant hum, while most are probably unaware that a counterculture or left movement even existed in this country. Thomas Frank speaks of the media as “cultural machines that transform alienation and despair into consent,” the left’s use of satire reverses this transformation. But yes, we may know how to use our words and images to break down consent and conformity, but in doing so I fear we may generate more cynicism and despair than we do hope or inspiration, qualities that are absolutely necessary for building a mass movement for any sort of social or economic justice. I don't like saying this...as satire and parody are personally very valuable to me.
But I don't think they work as effectively as they once did, and may actually contribute to the effect desired by our dark corporate overlords.

Understanding Power Structure In The U.S.

2016-10-12T00:14:00.000-07:00

Who wields predominant power in the United States?
From 1776 to the present, the answer is and always has been those who have the money.
It's no coincidence that the first president,
George Washington; was one of the biggest landowners of his day.
Late 19th century presidents were close to the railroad interests and the 'robber barons'.
For the Bush family, it was oil and other natural resources, agribusiness, and finance.
Today it's the banks, corporations, agribusinesses,as well as big real estate developers.
They work separately on many policy issues, but in combination on general issues like
taxes, opposition to labor unions, and trade agreements.
They set the rules within which all policy battles are waged.

How and why does it differ from other nations?
This conclusion may at first glance strike you as too simple or direct,
leaving out the effects of elected officials or voters.
Yet it is not simple at all. The reasons behind it are ripe with complexity.
Understanding the deviations and contrasts with other democratic nations
require an understanding of social classes, the role of "experts",
the two-party system, and the history of the United States, (especially Southern slavery).
In terms of the larger world-historical picture, large economic interests rule the U.S. because there are no rival networks that grew in U.S. history.

There is no one big church, as in many countries in Europe
No big government, as it took to survive as a nation-state in Europe
No big military until after 1940 (which is not very long ago) to threaten to take over the government

So, the only power network of any consequence in the history of the United States has been the economic one, which under capitalism generates a business-owning class and a working class, along with small businesses and skilled craft workers who are self-employed, and a relatively small number of highly trained professionals such as architects, lawyers, physicians, and scientists etc.
In this context, the key reason why money can rule -- i.e., why the business owners who hire workers can rule -- is that the people who worked in the factories and fields were divided from the outset.
They were divided into free and slave, white and black, and into numerous immigrant ethnic groups as well.

Divide and Conquer
The divisions created by the ruling class made it difficult for workers as a whole to unite politically to battle for higher wages or better lots in society. The divisions couldn't be more obvious today.
Look at our presidential race. Observe how the various groups are incited on many fronts including the major media (which now is 'occupied'. Owned by very few corporate interests) to be angry with each other rather than at the very people doing the inciting and dividing.
The simple answer that money rules has to be qualified somewhat.
Domination by the few does not mean complete control, but rather the ability to set the terms under which other groups and classes must operate. Highly trained professionals with an interest in environmental and consumer issues have been able to couple their technical information and their understanding of the legislative process with timely publicity to win governmental restrictions on some corporate practices. Wage and salary workers, when they are organized or disruptive, sometimes have been able to gain concessions on wages, hours, and working conditions.
Most of all, there is free speech and the right to vote. While voting does not necessarily make government responsive to the will of the majority, under certain circumstances the electorate has been able to place restraints on the actions of the wealthy elites, or more often, to decide which elites will have the greatest influence on policy. This is especially a possibility when there are disagreements within the higher circles of wealth and influence.

There is global stratification and there is American stratification.
The effect in the US is more pronounced.The Poor never have any power and are at the mercy of others, in the US the Middle and Working Class, once robust in the post WWII era have been decimated and have less power than in nearly all other democracies. Still, the idea that a relatively fixed group of privileged people dominate the economy and government goes against the American grain and the founding principles of the country. "Class" and "power" are terms that make many Americans a little uneasy, and concepts such as "upper class" and "power elite" immediately put many people on guard. Americans may differ in their social and income levels, and some may have more influence than others, but it is felt that there can be no fixed power group when power is constitutionally dwelling in all the people.
We observe democratic participation through elections.
There is evidence of social mobility. So we conclude that elected officials, along with "interest groups" like "organized labor" and "consumers," have enough "countervailing" power to say that there is an open, "pluralistic" distribution of power rather than one with only the very richest people and corporations at the top. But this is just denial.
Contrary to this pluralistic view, rule by the wealthy few is possible despite free speech, regular elections, and organized opposition.

The ruling wealthy coalesce into a social upper class that has developed institutions by which the children of its members are socialized into an upper-class worldview, and any newly wealthy people are assimilated.
Members of this upper class control corporations, which have been the primary mechanisms for generating and holding wealth in the United States for over of 150 years now.
There exists a network of nonprofit organizations through which members of the upper class and their hired corporate leaders not yet in the upper class shape the policy debates in the United States.
Members of the upper class, with the help of their high-level employees in profit and nonprofit institutions, are able to dominate the federal government in Washington.
The rich, and corporate leaders, nonetheless claim to be relatively powerless.
Working people have less power than in other democratic countries.

Let's take a moment to define the term "power" and to explain the "indicators" of power that determine who has it.

Power
Power is one of those words that is easy to understand but hard to define in a precise manner.
We know it means "clout" or "juice" or "muscle" or "the ability to make things happen." We know it comes from words implying the ability to act in a strong, compelling, and direct way, but we also know that power can be projected in a very quiet or indirect manner.
Let's define power as "the capacity of some persons to produce intended and foreseen effects on others" This is a general definition that allows for the many forms of power that can be changed from one to another, such as economic power, political power, military power, ideological power, and intellectual power (i.e., knowledge, expertise). It leaves open the question of whether "force" or "coercion" is always lurking somewhere in the background in the exercise of power, as many definitions imply. Power can be thought of as an underlying "trait" or "property" that is measured by a series of signs, or indicators, that bear a probabilistic relationship to it. (Bet you didn't see quantum physics coming into play in an article about policy making!)
There are three primary indicators of power, which can be summarized as (1) who benefits? (2) who governs? and (3) who wins? In every society there are experiences and material objects that are highly valued. If it is assumed that everyone in the society would like to have as great a share as possible of these experiences and objects, then the distribution of values in that society can be utilized as a power indicator. Those who benefit the most, by inference, are powerful. In American society, wealth and well-being are highly valued. People seek to own property, earn high incomes, to have interesting and safe jobs, and to live long and healthy lives. All of these "values" are unequally distributed, and all are power indicators.

Power also can be inferred from studies of who occupies important institutional positions and takes part in important decision-making groups. If a group or class is highly over-represented in relation to its proportion of the population, it can certainly be inferred that the group is powerful.

If, for example, a group makes up 10% of the population but has 50% of the seats in the main governing institutions, then it has five times more people in governing positions than would be expected by chance, and there is thus probable reason to believe that the group is a powerful one.

There are many policy issues over which groups or classes disagree.
In the United States different policies are suggested by opposing groups in foreign policy, taxation, the general welfare of the people, research, public education, and the environment. Power can be inferred from these issue conflicts by determining who successfully initiates, modifies, or vetoes policy alternatives. This indicator, by focusing on actions within the decision-making process, comes closest to approximating the process of power that is contained in the formal definition. It is no less an inference to say that who wins on issues is an indicator of "power" than with the other two types of empirical observations -- value distributions and positional over-representation -- that we must also use as power indicators.

The Upper Class
The upper class makes up only a few tenths of one percent of the population.
Members of the upper class live in exclusive suburban neighborhoods, expensive downtown co-ops, and large country estates. They often have far-away summer and winter homes as well. They attend a system of private schools that extends from pre-school to the university level; the best known of these schools are the "day" and "boarding" prep schools that take the place of public high schools. Adult members of the upper class socialize in expensive country clubs, downtown luncheon clubs, hunting clubs, and garden clubs. Young women of the upper class are "introduced" to high society each year through an elaborate series of debutante teas, parties, and balls. Women of the upper class gain experience as "volunteers" through a nationwide organization known as the Junior League, and then go on to serve as directors of cultural organizations, family service associations, and hospitals (see
http://book-me.net/a/power-of-good-deeds-privileged-women-and-the-social-reproduction-of-the-upper-class.pdf Kendall, 2002, for a good account of women of the upper class by a sociologist who was also a participant in upper-class organizations).
These various social institutions are important in creating "social cohesion" and a sense of in-group "we-ness." This sense of cohesion is heightened by the fact that people can be excluded from these organizations. Through these institutions, young members of the upper class and those who are new to wealth develop shared understandings of " how to be wealthy".
Because these social settings are expensive and exclusive, members of the upper class usually come to think of themselves as "special" and "superior." They think they are better than other people, and certainly better able to lead and govern. Their self-confidence and social polish become useful in dealing with people from other social classes, who are taught to admire them and defer to their judgments. Findings by economists on the wealth and income distribution say that the upper class, comprising 0.5% to 1% of the population, owns 40-50% of all privately held wealth in the United States and receives gains of 12-15% of total income yearly on average. In short, the upper class scores very high on the "who benefits" power indicator.

The Role of Corporations
Major economic power in the United States is concentrated in an organizational and legal form known as the corporation, and has been since the last several decades of the 19th century. No one doubts that individual corporations have great power in the society at large. For example, they can hire and fire workers, decide where to invest their resources, and use their income in a variety of tax-deductible ways to influence schools, charities, and governments. Are the large corporations united enough to exert a common social power? Are they controlled by members of the upper class?
The unity of the corporations can be demonstrated in a numerous ways. They share a common interest in making profits. They are often owned by the same families or financial institutions. Their executives have very similar educational and work experiences. It is also important for their sense of unity that corporate leaders see themselves as sharing common opponents. Largely organized labor, environmentalists, consumer advocates, and regulation from government officials. A sense of togetherness is created as well by their use of the same few legal, accounting, and consulting firms.
However, the best way to demonstrate the unity among corporations is through what sociologists call "interlocking directors," meaning those individuals who sit on two or more of the boards of directors that are in charge of the overall direction of the corporation. Boards of directors usually include major owners, top executives from similar corporations or corporations located in the same area, financial and legal advisors, and the three or four officers who run the corporation on a daily basis. Several studies show that those 15-20% of corporate directors who sit on two or more boards, who are called the "inner circle" of the corporate directorate, unite 80-90% of the largest corporations in the United States into a well-connected "corporate community."
Most all social scientists agree that corporations have a strong basis for cohesion.

So members of the upper class have power based on their wealth, and corporate executives have organizational power. Contrary to the claim of some, that there is a division between owners and managers, I think there is strong evidence for the idea of great overlap in membership and interest between the upper class and the corporate community. The wealthiest and most cohesive upper-class families often have "family offices" through which they can bring to bear the concentrated power of their collective stock ownership, sometimes placing employees of the office on boards of directors. Then too, members of the upper class often control corporations through financial devices known as "holding companies," which purchase a controlling interest in operating companies. More generally, members of the upper class own roughly half of all corporate stock . Then too, upper-class control of corporations can be seen in its over-representation on boards of directors. Several past studies show that members of the upper class sit on boards far more than would be expected by chance. They are especially likely to be part of the "inner circle" that has two or more directorships. According to the "who governs" power indicator, the upper class absolutely controls the corporate community.

Government Policy Is Shaped From Outside Government
The upper class and the closely related corporate community do not stand alone at the top of the power structure. They are supplemented by a wide range of nonprofit organizations that play an important role in framing debates over public policy and in shaping public opinion. These organizations are often called "nonpartisan" or "bipartisan" because they are not officially identified with politics or with either of the two major political parties. But they are the real "political party" of the upper class in terms of insuring their stability and domination of society and the compliance of government to their wishes.
Upper-class and corporate dominance of the major nonprofit organizations can be seen in their founding by wealthy members of the upper class and in their reliance on large corporations for their funding. However, dominance is once again most readily demonstrated through studies of boards of directors, which have ultimate control of the organizations, including the ability to hire and fire top executives. These studies show that members of the upper class are greatly over-represented on the boards of these organizations, and that nonprofit organizations share a large number of directors in common with the corporate community, particularly directors who are part of the "inner circle." In effect, most large nonprofit organizations are merely part of the corporate community.
All the organizations in the nonprofit sector have a hand in creating the framework of the society in one way or another, and hence in helping to shape the political climate. The cultural and civic organizations set the standard for what is beautiful, important, and "classy." The elite universities play a determine what is important to teach, learn, and research, and they train most of the professionals and experts in the country. However, it is the foundations, think tanks, and policy-discussion organizations that have the largest, most direct, and important influence. Their ideas, criticisms, and policy suggestions go out to the general public through a wide array of avenues, including pamphlets, books, local discussion groups, mass media, endless internet sites and echo chamber blogs as well as the public relations departments of major corporations. The foundations, think tanks, and policy-discussion organizations function as a "policy-planning network."

Tax-free foundations receive their money from wealthy families and corporations. Their primary purpose is to provide money for education, research, and policy discussion. They have the power to encourage those ideas and researchers they find compatible with their personal goals, and to withhold funds from others. Support by major foundations often has had a significant impact on the direction of research in agriculture, social science, and the health sciences. However, foundations also create policy projects on their own. The role of the think tanks is to suggest new policies to deal with the problems facing the economy and government. They do so using money from wealthy donors, corporations, and foundations, think tanks hire the experts groomed by the graduate departments of particular elite universities. These policy-discussion organizations are the hub of the policy-planning network. They bring together wealthy individuals, corporate executives, experts, and government officials for lectures, forums, meetings, and group discussions of issues that range from the local to the international, and from the economic to the political to the cultural. New ideas are tried out in weekly or monthly discussion groups, and differences of opinion are aired and compromised. These structured discussion groups usually begin with a presentation by the invited experts, followed by questions and discussion involving all participants. Such discussion groups may range in size from ten to 50, with the usual group having fifteen to 25 members.
The many discussion groups that take place within the several policy-discussion organizations have several functions that do not readily meet the eye. First, these organizations help to familiarize corporate leaders with policy options outside the view of their day-to-day business concerns. This gives these executives the ability to influence public opinion through the mass media and other outlets, to argue with and influence experts, and to accept appointments for government service. Second, the policy-discussion organizations give members of the upper class and corporate community the opportunity to see which of their colleagues become the best natural leaders through watching them in the give and take of the discussion groups. They can see which of their counterparts understand the issues quickly, offer their own ideas, facilitate discussions, and relate well to experts. The organizations thus serve as sorting and screening mechanisms for the emergence of new leadership for the corporate rich in general.
Third, these organizations disseminate their participants to the media and public as knowledgeable experts or leaders who deserve to be tapped for public service because they have used their free time to acquaint themselves with the issues in nonpartisan forums. The organizations thereby help make wealthy individuals and corporate executives into "national leaders" and "statesmen." Finally, these organizations provide a forum wherein members of the upper class and corporate community can come to know policy experts. This gives them a pool of people from which they can draw advisors if they are asked to serve in government. It also gives them a basis for recommending experts to politicians for government service.
The organizations also serve obvious functions for the experts. First, presenting their ideas and policies to these organizations gives them an opportunity to have influence. Second, it gives them a chance to advance their own careers if they can impress the upper-class and corporate participants.

The policy-planning network is not totally homogeneous. There are basically two ideologies represented. There are moderate-conservative and ultra-conservative wings within it. Moderate conservatives may favor foreign aid, low tariffs, and increased economic expansion overseas, whereas the ultra-conservatives tend to see foreign aid as a giveaway. Moderate conservatives tend to accept the idea that governmental taxation and spending policies can be used to stimulate and stabilize the economy, but ultra-conservatives insist that taxes should be cut to the very minimum and that government spending is the devil. Moderate conservatives accept some welfare-state measures, or at least they support such measures in the face of serious social disruption. Where ultra-conservatives have consistently opposed any welfare spending, claiming that it destroys moral fiber and saps individual initiative, so they prefer to use arrest and detention when faced with social unrest.
The reasons for these differences are not well understood. There is a tendency for the moderate-conservative organizations to be directed by executives from the very largest and most internationally oriented of corporations, but there are numerous exceptions to that generalization. Moreover, there are corporations that support policy organizations within both camps. However, for all their differences, leaders within the two clusters of policy organizations have a tendency to search for compromise due to their common membership in the upper-class and corporate community. When compromise is not possible, the final resolution of policy conflicts often takes place in legislative struggles in Congress.
The existence of the policy-planning network provides evidence for yet another form of power possessed by the wealthy few: expertise on social and political issues. It is an important complement to the naked economic power possessed by the corporations. One that plays a larger role in directing and forming public opinion as time goes on.

The Power Elite
Now that the upper class, corporate community, and policy-planning network have been defined and described, it is possible to discuss the the "power elite."The power elite is the leadership group of the upper class. It consists of active-working members of the upper class and high-level employees in profit and nonprofit institutions controlled by members of the upper class through stock ownership, financial support, or involvement on the board of directors. This does not mean that all members of the upper class are involved in governing. Some are only playboys and socialites; their social gatherings may provide a setting where members of the power elite mingle with celebrities, and sometimes they give money to political candidates, but that is about as close as they come to political power.
Conversely, not all those involved in the power elite are members of the upper class. They are sons and daughters of the middle class, and occasionally, the blue-collar working class, who do well at any one of several hundred private and state universities, and then go to grad school, MBA school, or law school at one of a handful of elite universities -- e.g., Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Columbia, MIT, Johns Hopkins, University of Chicago, and Stanford. From there they go to work for a major corporation, law firms, foundations, think tanks, or universities, and slowly work their way into the 'elite' group.
The idea of the power elite intertwines class theory and organizational theory, two theories which are often thought of as distinctive or even as rivals. The basis for the intertwining of the two theories is to be found in the role and composition of the boards of directors that govern every large profit and nonprofit organization in the United States. It is on boards of directors that the values and goals of the upper class are integrated with those of the organizational hierarchy. Upper-class directors insure that their interests are infused into the organizations they control, but the day-to-day organizational leaders on the board are able to harmonize class interests with organizational principles.
It is important to stress that not all experts are members of the power elite. People have to be high-level employees in institutions controlled by members of the upper class to be considered part of that realm. Receiving a fellowship from a foundation, spending a year at a think tank, or giving advice to a policy-discussion organization does not make a person a member of the power elite. It also may be useful to note that there are many experts who never go near the policy-planning network. They focus on their teaching and research, or work for groups that oppose the policies of the power elite.

Direct Control Of Government
Members of the power elite directly involve themselves in the federal government through three basic processes, each of which has a slightly different role in ensuring "access" to the White House, Congress, and specific agencies, departments, and committees in the executive branch. Although some of the same people are involved in all three processes, most leaders specialize in one or two of the three processes. These three processes are:

The special-interest process, through which specific families, corporations, and industrial sectors are able to realize their narrow and short-run interests on taxes, subsidies, and regulation in their dealings with congressional committees, regulatory bodies, and executive departments;
The policy-making process, through which the policies developed in the policy-planning network described earlier are brought to the White House and Congress;
The candidate selection process, through which members of the power elite influence electoral campaigns by means of campaign donations to political candidates.

Power elite domination of the federal government can be seen most directly in the workings of the corporate lobbyists, backroom super-lawyers, and industry-wide trade associations that represent the interests of specific corporations or business sectors. This special-interest process is based in varying combinations of information, gifts, insider dealing, friendship, and, not least, promises of lucrative private jobs in the future for compliant government officials. This is the aspect of business-government relations described by journalists and social scientists in their case studies. While these studies show that the special interests usually get their way, the conflict that sometimes erupts within this process, occasionally pitting one corporate sector against another, reinforces the image of widely shared and fragmented power in America, including the image of a divided corporate community. Moreover, there are some defeats suffered by the corporate rich in the special-interest process. For example, laws that improved auto safety standards were passed over automobile industry objections in the 1970s, as were standards of water cleanliness opposed by the paper and chemical industries.
Policies of concern to the corporate community as a whole are not the province of the special-interest process. Instead, such policies come from the network of foundations, think tanks, and policy-discussion organizations. The plans developed in the organizations of the policy-planning network reach the federal government in a variety of ways. On the most general level, their reports, news releases, and interviews are read by elected officials and their staffs, either in pamphlet form or in summary articles in the Washington Post, New York Times, and Wall Street Journal. Members of the policy-planning network also testify before congressional committees and subcommittees that are writing legislation or preparing budget proposals. More directly, leaders from these organizations are regular members of the dozens of little-known committees that advise specific departments of the executive branch on general policies, making them in effect unpaid un-elected temporary members of the government. They are also very prominent on the extremely important presidential commissions that are appointed to make recommendations on a wide range of issues from foreign policy to highway construction. They also serve on the little-known federal advisory committees that are part of just about every department of the executive branch.
Finally, and crucially, they are appointed to government positions with a frequency far beyond what would be expected by chance. Several different studies show that top cabinet positions in both Republican and Democratic administrations are held by members of the upper class and corporate executives who are leaders in policy-discussion organizations.

The general picture that emerges from the findings on the over-representation of members of the power elite in appointed governmental positions is that the highest levels of the executive branch are interlocked constantly with the upper class and corporate community through the movement of executives and lawyers in and out of government. Although the same person is not in governmental and corporate positions at the same time, there is enough continuity for the relationship to be described as one of "revolving interlocks." Corporate leaders resign their numerous directorships in profit and nonprofit organizations to serve in government for two or three years, then return to the corporate community or policy-planning network. This system gives them temporary independence from the narrow concerns of their own organizations and allows them to perform the more general roles they have learned in the policy-discussion groups. They then return to the private sector with useful personal contacts and information.
As important as the special-interest and policy-planning processes are for the power elite, they could not operate successfully if there were not sympathetic, business-oriented elected officials in government. That leads us to the third process through which members of the power elite dominate the federal government, the candidate-selection process. It operates through the two major political parties. For reasons to be discussed in a moment, the two parties have very little role in political education or policy formation; they are reduced to the function of filling offices. That is why the American political system can be characterized as a "candidate-selection process."
The main reason the political system focuses on candidate selection to the relative exclusion of political education and policy formulation is that there can be only two main parties due to the structure of the government and the nature of the electoral rules. The fact that Americans select a president instead of a parliament, and elect legislators from "single-member" geographical areas (states for the Senate, districts for the House) leads to a two-party system because in these "winner-take-all" elections a vote for a third party is a vote for the person's least desired choice. A vote for a very liberal party instead of the Democrats, for example, actually helps the Republicans. Under these rules, the most sensible strategy for both the Democrats and Republicans is to blur their policy differences in order to compete for the voters with middle-of-the-road policy views, or no policy views at all.
Contrary to what many believe, then, American political parties are not very responsive to voter preferences. Their candidates are fairly free to say one thing to get elected and to do another once in office. This contributes to confusion and apathy in the electorate. It leads to campaigns where there are no "issues" except "images" and "personalities" even when polls show that voters are extremely concerned about certain policy issues.
It is precisely because the candidate-selection process is so personalized, and therefore dependent on name recognition, images, and emotional symbolism, that it can be in good part dominated by members of the power elite through the relatively simple and direct means of large campaign contributions. Playing the role of donors and money raisers, the same people who direct corporations and take part in the policy-planning network have a crucial place in the careers of most politicians who advance beyond the local level or state legislatures. Their support is especially important in party primaries, where money is an even larger factor than in general elections.
The two-party system therefore results in elected officials who are relatively issueless and willing to go along with the policies advocated by those members of the power elite who work in the special-interest and policy-planning processes. They are motivated by personal ambition far more than they are by political conviction. Still, there are some extremely conservative elected Republicans who often oppose power elite proposals, claiming that such policies are the work of secret communists or pointy-headed intellectuals out to wreck the "free enterprise" system. There also are many Democrats from blue-collar and university districts who consistently oppose power elite policies as members of the liberal-labor coalition. However, both the ultra-conservatives and the liberals are outnumbered by the "moderates" of both parties, especially in key leadership positions in Congress. After many years in Congress the elected liberals decide to "go along to get along." "This place has a way of grinding you down," explained Abner Mikva a former liberal Congressman of the early 1970s in a classic summary of what happens.

Although members of the power elite are far and away the most important financial backers for both parties, this does not mean that there are no differences between the two parties. The leadership levels have intra-class differences, and the supporters tend to have inter-class differences. The Republican Party is controlled by the wealthiest families of the upper class and corporate community, who are largely Protestant in background. The Democratic Party, on the other hand, is the party of the "fringes" of the upper class and power elite. Although often called "the party of the common person," it was in fact the party of the Southern segment of the upper class until civil rights issues chased them away. The power of the Southern Democrats in the party and in Congress was secured in a variety of ways, the most important of which was the seniority system for selecting committee chairs in Congress. (By tradition, the person who has been on the committee longest just about automatically becomes the chair; this avoids conflict among members of the party.) However, the underlying point is that the one-party system in the South and the exclusion of African-Americans from the voting booth until the mid-1960s gave the Southern planters and merchants power at the national level through the Democratic Party out of all proportion to their wealth and numbers. Thus, it is not necessarily the wealthiest people who rule. The nature of the political system also enters into the equation. But the Southern elites are not poor; they are only less rich than many of their Northern counterparts. The Southerners dominated the Democratic Party in alliance with the "ethnic rich" in the North, meaning essentially wealthy Jews and Catholics who were shunned or mistreated by the rich Protestants in the Republican party. The businesses they owned were often local or smaller than those of the Republican backers, and they usually were excluded from the social institutions of the upper class. These ethnic rich were the primary financial supporters of the infamous "political machines" that dominated Democratic politics in most large northern cities.
The alliance between the Southern segment of the upper class and the Northern ethnic rich usually was able to freeze out the policy initiatives of the party's liberal-labor coalition through its control of congressional committees, although there was a time (1940 to 1975) when labor unions had significant influence on the Democrats. When that alliance broke down because the machine Democrats sided with the liberals and labor, then the Southern Democrats joined with Northern Republicans to create the "conservative coalition," AKA "the conservative voting bloc," wherein a majority of Southern Democrats and a majority of Northern Republicans voted together against the Northern Democrats. This conservative coalition most often formed around the issues that reflect class conflict in the legislative arena -- civil rights, union rights, social welfare, and business regulation. Legislation on any of these issues weakens employers in the face of workers and their unions, so it is not surprising that the conservative coalition is based on the shared interests of Northern and Southern employers. This alliance won far more often than it lost in the years between 1937, when it was formed, and the 1990s, when it disappeared for the simple reason that many of the Southerners had become Republicans.
Once the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was in effect, the Democratic Party was slowly changed because African-Americans in the South were able to vote against the worst racists in the party primaries. The gradual industrialization also was causing changes. As a result of these two forces, Southern whites started to move into the Republican Party, which thus became the party of wealthy employers in both the North and South. In that context, the Democratic Party is slowly becoming what many always thought it to be, the party of liberals, minorities, workers, and the poor.
In summary, the special-interest process, policy-planning process, and campaign finance make it possible for the power elite to win far more often than it loses on the policy issues that come before the federal government. The power elite is also greatly over-represented in appointed positions, presidential blue-ribbon commissions, and advisory committees within the government. In terms of both the "who wins" and "who governs" power indicators, the power elite dominates the federal government.

However, this domination does not mean control on each and every issue, or lack of opposition, and it does not rest upon government involvement alone. Involvement in government is only the final and most visible aspect of power elite domination, which has its roots in the class structure, the nature of the economy, and the functioning of the policy-planning network. If government officials did not have to wait on corporate leaders to decide where and when they will invest, and if government officials were not further limited by the acceptance of the current economic arrangements, then power elite involvement in elections and government would count for a lot less than it does under present conditions.
There are many democratic countries where the working class -- defined as all those white-collar and blue-collar workers who earn a salary or a wage -- has more power than it does in the United States. This power is achieved primarily through labor unions and political parties. It is reflected in more egalitarian wealth and income distributions, a more equitable tax structure, better public health services, subsidized housing, and higher old-age and unemployment benefits.
How is it possible that the American working class could be relatively powerless in a country that prides itself on its long-standing history of pluralism and elections? There are several interacting historical factors. First, the "primary producers" in the United States, those who work with their hands in factories and fields, were more seriously divided among themselves until the 1930s than in most other countries. The deepest and most important of these divisions was between whites and African-Americans. In the beginning, of course, the African-Americans had no social power because of their enslavement, which meant that there was no way to organize workers in the South. But even after African-Americans gained their freedom, prejudices in the white working class kept the two groups apart.
This black/white split in the working class was reinforced by later conflicts between craft workers -- also called "skilled" workers -- and industrial workers -- also called mass-production or "unskilled" workers. Craft workers usually tried to keep their wages high by excluding industrial workers. Their sense of superiority as skilled workers was reinforced by the fact that they were of Northern European, Protestant origins and the industrial workers tended to be Catholics and Jews from Eastern and Southern Europe. Some African-Americans were also found in the ranks of the industrial workers, along with other racial minorities.
It would have been difficult enough to overcome these divisions even if workers had been able to develop their own political party, but they were unable to develop such a party because the electoral system greatly disadvantages third parties. Workers were stuck. They had no place to go but the Republicans or Democrats. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries the craft workers often supported the Democrats, while the recent immigrant industrial workers tended to support the Republicans. Even when craft and industrial workers moved into the Democratic Party en masse in the 1930s, they couldn't control the party because of the power of the wealthy Southern planters and merchants.
Nor did the workers have much luck organizing themselves through unions. The employers were able to call upon the government to crush organizing drives and strikes through both court injunctions and police arrests. This was not only because employers had great influence with politicians then, just as they do now, but because the American tradition of law, based in laissez faire (free market) liberalism, was so fiercely opposed to any "restraint of trade" or "interference" with private property. It was not until the 1930s that the liberal-labor coalition was able to pass legislation guaranteeing workers the right to join unions and engage in collective bargaining. Even this advance was only possible by excluding the Southern workforce -- i.e., agricultural and seasonal labor -- from the purview of the legislation.
Industrial unions were defeated almost completely in the South and Southwest.
Unions thrived in a few major industries in the North in the years after World War II, but then their power was eroded beginning in the 1970s as the big corporations moved their factories to other countries or lost market share to European and Japanese companies culminating with the absolute all out war on American laborers since the 1990s. Given this history of internal division, political frustration, and union defeat, American workers continue to accept the highly individualistic ideology that has characterized the United States since its founding. This acceptance in turn makes it even more difficult to organize workers around "bread-and-butter" issues. They often vote instead on the basis of bait traps...social issues or religious convictions, with those who are deeply religious, opposed to affirmative action, or opposed to gun control voting for the avowedly anti-union anti-worker Republican Party.

We must not confuse freedom with social power.
Between 1962 and the 1990s there was a great expansion in individual rights due to the civil rights, feminist, and lesbian-gay movements, but during that time the ratio of a top business executive's pay to a factory worker's pay increased from 41 to 1 to about 300 to 1. American workers can say what they want and do what they want within very broad limits, and their children can study hard in school so they can go to graduate school and join the well-off professional class as doctors, lawyers, architects, or engineers, but when it comes to social power the vast majority of Americans have very little of it and have no real path to becoming a part of the power elite. The economic division has only gotten far worse since the 1990s.

So who benefits? Who sits? Who wins?
All the indicators point to only one conclusion.
You know the answer.
It isn't you.

So Why Are The Rich And The Businessmen Moaning?
Despite these various kinds of objective evidence that the power elite have nearly absolute power in relation to the federal government, we witness many corporate leaders claiming that they are relatively powerless in the face of government. To hear them tell it, Congress is more responsive to organized labor, environmentalists, and consumers. They also claim to be harassed by willful and arrogant bureaucrats. These negative feelings toward government are not a new development, contrary to those who blame the New Deal and the social programs of the 1960s. A study of businessmen's views in the 19th century found that they believed political leaders to be "stupid" and "empty" people who went into politics only to earn a living, and a study of businessmen's views during what are thought of as their most powerful decade, the 1920s, found the exact same mistrust of government.

The emotional expressions of business leaders about their lack of power cannot be taken seriously as a power indicator
This is little more than childish emotional outburst...entirely based on their feelings and not in any tangible reality. It may be a psychological uneasiness with power. Feelings are one thing, the effects of one's actions another. But it is difficult to try to understand why businessmen complain about a government they completely dominate.
I imagine complaining about government is a useful political strategy.
It puts government officials on the defensive and forces them to keep proving that they are friendly to business. Also, businessmen complain about government because in fact very few civil servants are part of the upper class and corporate community. The anti-government ideology in the United States tends to restrain members of the upper class from government careers except in the State Department, meaning that the main contacts for members of the power elite within government are at the very top. There is uncertainty and mistrust about how the middle levels will react to new situations, and therefore a feeling that there is a necessity to "ride herd" on or "reign in" the potentially troublesome "bureaucrats" who are not necessarily in their pocket.
There also seems to be an ideological level to the business leaders' attitudes toward government. There is a fear of the populist, democratic ideology that underlies American government. Since power is (in theory only) in the hands of all the people, there always is the possibility that someday "the people," in the sense of the majority, will make the government into the reflection of pluralist democracy that it is actually supposed to be. In a very real way the great power of the upper class and corporate community are culturally illegitimate, and the existence of their power is always vigorously denied. It is okay to be rich, and even to brag about wealth a little bit, but to flaunt that power becomes problematic, and they sense that. It's a sort of masquerade, maybe even one that due to limited experience with the reality 99% of people have to deal with, they actually believe is so.
Finally, the expressions of anguish from individual corporate leaders concerning their powerlessness also suggests an explanation in terms of the intersection of social psychology and sociology. It is the upper class and corporate community that have power, not individuals within that community. Apart from their institutional context psychologically they feel powerless.
As individuals, they feel hurt that they are not always listened to, and that they have to convince their peers of the reasonableness of their arguments before any actions are taken.
Moreover, policy that is adopted is a group decision, and it is sometimes hard for people to identify with group actions to the point where they feel personally powerful. It is not surprising then, that specific individuals might actually feel powerless within the context of this monied and powerful group which is the only experience they have.

Consider for a moment the absurdity of the powerful & privileged Donald Trump representing a revolt against the privileged and powerful. He champions 'populist' causes such as complaining about the bad trade deals made, yet if you look at what little specifics he offers, his "deals" are no more beneficial domestically to workers. They favor the same people who benefited from the original deals & his record of manufacturing his namesake goods is the same as the people he demonizes on the campaign trail. He claims to represent the "common" people's interest in "helping" the middle class.
Yet his economic proposals only give even more tax cuts to the wealthiest such as himself...many of whom (Trump included) don't pay federal taxes at all thanks to their ability to write the tax codes in their favor through their power structure. I have no idea personally why Trump is doing this, other than I imagine his ego is just so big he feels he needs a crown to wear. Maybe, in terms of the power structure allowing this absurd charade, it's a way to control the anger of the electorate. Certainly something similar occurred with the "Tea Party". Media and folks like the Koch brothers, guided and financed that "rebellion" which used frustrated angry voters to put candidates friendly to Koch industry wants in government. One thing I can tell you is that any political operative who inherited a fortune, who owns 600,000 dollar portraits of themselves (which they charged to an alleged "charity") and sits on gold chairs and toilets has no understanding of what could possibly improve the lot of a working family and little or no interest in doing so. With all the evidence presented here that the power is in the hands of such people, why on earth would they want to be the "face" of it and in what universe would they fight against themselves?
Why would they want even more power?
Well that's another discussion.
The Nature Of Greed.

Postlogue

"Concentration of wealth yields concentration of political power. And concentration of political power gives rise to legislation that increases and accelerates the cycle." - Noam Chomsky

Concentration of wealth yields concentration of political power. And concentration of political power gives rise to legislation that increases and accelerates the cycle.
Read more at: http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/n/noamchomsk635835.html

More Than Economics
GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump’s ego may be larger than the size of his real estate empire, but that doesn’t mean he leads a happy satisfying life...or enjoys mental health. Indeed the extreme wealth inequity the US system has produced also tends to produce psychopathologies.
On the other hand, the self-esteem of people who are living from paycheck to paycheck, or become unemployed tends to erode as well. Research from UC Berkeley has revealed this mind-wallet connection. The Study finds self-worth plays a key role in the development of mental disorders. Researchers concluded that one’s perceived social status or the lack thereof; is at the heart of a wide range of mental illnesses. Researchers have linked inflated or deflated feelings of self-worth to such afflictions as bipolar disorder, narcissistic personality disorder, anxiety and depression, providing yet more evidence that the chasm of ever widening distance between rich and poor is also bad for your health.

Moreover, the richest of the rich think differently than the rest of us, see themselves differently than the rest of us see them, and inhabit an alternate reality exclusive to themselves. In other words, they function very much like any 16th century European aristocracy. Oh yeah, and they're deeply paranoid.

Extreme inequality, it turns out, creates a class of people who are alarmingly detached from reality — and simultaneously gives these people great power.

Today’s Masters of the Power Universe are insecure about the nature of their success. We’re not talking captains of industry here in modern times folks, not men who make stuff.
We are, instead, talking about wheeler-dealers, men who push money around and get rich by skimming off the top as it sloshes by.
They boast that they are job creators, the people who make the economy work.
But that is a blatant lie. Many of us know it — and so, I suspect, do some of the wealthy themselves, as a form of self-doubt causes them to lash out even more furiously at their critics.
Unlike the robber barons of the past age, the endeavors of these people simply DO NOT really add any value whatsoever to the economy.

References

Kendall, D. (2002). The power of good deeds: Privileged women and the social reproduction of class. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.
Wrong, D. (1995). Power: Its Forms, Bases, and Uses (2nd ed.). New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers.
The Myth of Liberal Ascendancy: Corporate Dominance from the Great Depression to the Great Recession

by G. Williams Domhoff

The End Of It All -or It Can't Happen Here

2016-09-30T15:32:00.000-07:00

In a 1935 novel, It Can’t Happen Here, author Sinclair Lewis wrote about what would happen if fascism (as it was then spreading across Europe) were to triumph in America. It probably isn't his best work as an author, but it IS a highly resonant work today.
Sinclair imagined the American fascist leader as a senator called Buzz Windrip. He described him as a “Professional Common Man … But he was the Common Man twenty-times-magnified by his oratory, so that while the other Commoners could understand his every purpose, which was seen as exactly the same as their own, they saw him towering among them, and they raised hands to him in worship.” He “was vulgar, almost illiterate, a public liar easily detected, and in his ‘ideas’ almost idiotic.” ‘I know the Press only too well,’ ” Windrip opines at one point. “Almost all editors hide away in spider-dens, men without thought of Family or Public Interest … plotting how they can put over their lies, and advance their own positions and fill their greedy pocketbooks.”
Windrip is obsessed with the balance of trade and promises instant economic success:
“I shall not be content till this country can produce every single thing we need … We shall have such a balance of trade as will go far to carry out my often-criticized yet completely sound idea of from $3000 to $5000 per year for every single family." [A very tidy sum in that time] However absurd and empty his promises, he nonetheless mesmerizes the party faithful at the nominating convention (ironically held in Cleveland!):
“Something in the intensity with which Windrip looked at his audience, looked at all of them, his glance slowly taking them in from the highest-perched seat to the nearest, convinced them that he was talking to each individual, directly and solely; that he wanted to take each of them into his heart; that he was telling them the truths, the imperious and dangerous facts, that had been hidden from them.”
And all the elites who stood in his way? Crippled by their own failures, demoralized by their crumbling stature, they first mock and then cave. As one lone journalist laments before the election (he finds himself in a concentration camp afterward): “I’ve got to keep remembering … that Windrip is only the lightest cork on the whirlpool. He didn’t plot all this thing. With all the justified discontent there is against the smart politicians and the Plush Horses of Plutocracy — oh, if it hadn’t been one Windrip, it’d been another … We had it coming, we Respectables.”

Fast forward - 81 years later, and many of us do have it coming. Sinclair Lewis may have been a prophet.
An American elite that has presided over massive and and increasing public debt while pilfering the treasury for private gains, that failed to prevent 9/11, that idiotically chose a disastrous war in the Middle East, that obliviously allowed financial markets to nearly destroy the global economy, and that is now so bitterly divided the Congress is effectively a moot point in a constitutional democracy: “We Respectables” as Lewis described them....deserve a comeuppance.
The vital and valid lesson of the Trump phenomenon is that if the elites cannot govern by compromise, someone outside will eventually fill the void to govern by manipulation of populist passion and brute force. It's not that Lewis was prophetic, it's that he understood the dynamics of how tyranny rises to power. He observed how fascists were rising to power in Europe and merely imagined the same scenario in an American setting.

Those who don't remember the lessons of the past are doomed to repeat it.

To Say Trump Is A Fascist Is Actually An Insult To Fascists It's true. Dictators such as Mussolini actually had some semblance of cohesive thought attached to their tyrannical regimes if only glimmers...and only occasionally. A contrast from what we witness in Trump's bubble of delusion and fragmented nonsensical blathering.

Trump considered running for president for decades. Those who didn’t see him coming — or kept treating him as a joke (myself included there) — had not yet absorbed the precedents of Sarah Palin emerging in 2008 as proof that an ardent Republican, branded as an outsider, tailor-made for reality TV, and proud of her own ignorance would emerge...not so much as a messiah... .but a John the Baptist blowing fart noises through her clenched fist to herald in the true messiah of conservative populism, Trump...who was waiting patiently and strategically for his time to come.Trump's candidacy was underrated for all of 2015. He intuitively grasped the vanishing authority of American political and media elites, and he had long fashioned a public persona perfectly attuned to blast past them. Despite his wealth and inherited privilege, Trump always cultivated a commoner facade. He flaunted his wealth in a way that connected with the masses. He lived the rich man’s life most working men dreamed of — endless glamour and women, for example — without sacrificing a way of talking about the world that would not be out of place on the construction sites he regularly toured or dim lit corner barrooms just before last call.
His was a poster boy in a cult of capitalist aspiration. His appearances on “The Howard Stern Show” cemented his appeal. His friendship with Vince McMahon offered him an early entrée into the world of professional wrestling, with its bizarre fusion of sports and fantasy.
He was a macho media superstar.
One of the more amazing episodes in Sarah Palin’s early political life, in fact, bears this out. She popped up in the Anchorage Daily News as “a commercial fisherman from Wasilla” on April 3, 1996. Palin had told her husband she was going to Costco but had sneaked into J.C. Penney in Anchorage to see … one Ivana Trump, who, in the wake of her divorce, was touting her branded perfume. “We want to see Ivana,” Palin told the paper, “because we are so desperate in Alaska for any semblance of glamour and culture.”
Indeed.
Trump cultivated this image and took to reality television as a natural. Each week, for 14 seasons of The Apprentice, he would look someone in the eye and tell them, “You’re fired!” A conversation any humane boss would hate to have with an employee. Yet it was was something Trump obviously relished, and the cruelty became entertainment.
In hindsight, it is clear he was training both himself and his viewers.
If you want to understand why a figure so widely disliked nonetheless powers toward the election as if he were approaching a reality-TV-show finale, look no further.
His reality television tactics, as applied to presidential debates, wiped out rivals used to a different game.
And Reality-TV training has conditioned enough of us to hope he’ll win In the shame-free media environment of reality TV, where the assholes often win.
In the end, the audience supports them because they’re assholes.

The late 20th century expanded the notion of who might be qualified for public office. Once, candidates built a career through experience in elected or Cabinet positions or as military commanders; they were effectively vetted and selected by peer review. That elitist sorting mechanism has slowly imploded. In 1940, Wendell Willkie, a businessman with no previous political office, won the Republican nomination for president, pledging to keep America out of war insisting Hitler was no threat, and boasting that his personal wealth inoculated him against corruption: “I will be under obligation to nobody except the people.” He lost badly to Franklin D. Roosevelt, but nonetheless, since then, nonpolitical candidates have proliferated, from Ross Perot and Jesse Jackson, to Steve Forbes and Herman Cain, to this year’s crop of Ben Carson, Carly Fiorina, and, of course, Donald J. Trump.
This further widening of our democracy — our increased openness to being led by anyone; indeed, our accelerating preference for outsiders — is now almost complete.
In 2000, when George W. Bush lost the popular vote and won the election thanks to Electoral College math and, more egregiously, to a corrupted partisan Supreme Court vote. Al Gore’s concession spared the nation a constitutional crisis, but the episode generated widespread unease, not just among Democrats. Today half of Americans now believe the system is rigged to one extent or another.
The combination of deserved mistrust & barriers to the popular will, especially when it comes to choosing our president, are now almost nonexistent. While this is good news in a way, it's a double edged blade. And America is ripe for the slashing.

In Plato’s Republic he argues that his version of democracy, which is a political system of maximal freedom and equality is a place where every lifestyle is allowed and public offices are filled by a lottery. He wrote that the longer such a democracy lasted, the more democratic it would become. That its freedoms would multiply; its equality would spread. Deference to authority would wither; tolerance of any kind of inequality would come under intense threat; and multiculturalism and sexual freedom would create a state like “a many-colored cloak decorated in all hues.”
But it is inherently unstable. As the authority of elites fades, views and identities can become so magnificently diverse as to be mutually uncomprehensible. And when all the barriers to equality, formal and informal, have been removed; when everyone is equal; when elites are despised and full license is established to do “whatever one wants,” you arrive at late-stage democracy. There is no kowtowing to authority here, let alone to political experience or expertise. While we are hardly the Utopia of Plato's Republic, there are resonances.

"It is when a democracy has ripened as fully as this", Plato argues, "that a would-be tyrant will often seize his moment." (No, Plato was not a prophet either of course...but he was logical!)
The tyrant makes his move by “taking over a particularly obedient mob” and attacking his peers as corrupt. If not stopped quickly, his appetite for attacking the rich on behalf of the people swells further. He is a traitor to his class — and soon, his elite enemies, shorn of popular legitimacy, find a way to appease him or are forced to flee. Eventually, he stands alone, promising to cut through the paralysis of democratic incoherence. It’s as if he were offering the addled, distracted, and self-indulgent citizens a kind of relief from democracy’s endless choices and insecurities. He rides a backlash to excess—“too much freedom seems to change into nothing but too much slavery” — and offers himself as the personified answer to the internal conflicts of the democratic mess. He pledges, above all, to take on the increasingly despised elites. And as the people thrill to him as a kind of solution, a democracy willingly, even impetuously, repeals itself.
It's increasingly hard not to see Plato’s vision as a murky reflection of our own times, and Trump as the demagogic tyrannical character plucked directly out of one of the first books about politics ever written.

It has been said that all empires rise flourish and fall. And history bears this out. But how long did it take for the Romans to decay?
Could it be that the Donald has emerged from the populist circuses of pro wrestling and New York City tabloids, via reality television and Twitter, to prove not just Plato but also James Madison right, that democracies “have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention … and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths”?
Is the death of our democracy attempt necessary? Have we reached the pinnacle of what we could have achieved and now must walk off a cliff voluntarily? I for one hope not.


It will take more than Woody's great music to defeat today's fascist.

The rise of a mass movement -Who are they?
After the suffering of recession, rampant unemployment, and despite hard work with stagnant or dwindling pay, for many the future stretches ahead with relief always just out of reach.
We observe those who helped create the last recession facing no consequences, but rather renewed fabulous wealth, the anger reaches a crescendo. The reasons for today’s rage are not hard to find, although many elites have shamefully found themselves able to ignore them.
The jobs available to the working class no longer contain the kind of craftsmanship or satisfaction or meaning that can take the sting out of their low and stagnant wages.
The once-familiar avenues for socialization — their church, their union hall, theirVFW — have become less vibrant and social isolation more common. Global economic forces have pummeled blue-collar workers more relentlessly than almost any other segment of society, forcing them to compete against hundreds of millions of workers throughout the planet whose cost of living is far less. No one asked them in the 1990s if this was the future they wanted.

The impact of "globalization" has been more brutal than any economists predicted.
No wonder suicide and mortality rates among the white working poor are spiking dramatically.
“It is usually those whose poverty is relatively recent, the ‘new poor,’ who throb with the ferment of frustration,” the moral and social philosopher Eric Hoffer said.
Where since the "great awakening" in the 1800s, religion long provided some emotional support for those being left behind in modernity (for one thing, it invites practitioners to defy the elites as unholy), Its positive effect has waned as modernity itself as well as personal greed has penetrated the administration of the doctrines and mythology. In the U.S. the churches themselves are more likely to be the "mega" variety, led by elites looking to enrich their bank accounts and preaching doctrines far removed from anything actually attributed to Jesus. The newly poor; the former working class, abandoned by the elites for cheaper sheep to shear on foreign soil are ripe low hanging fruit for any demagoguery to come along and harvest. This is the wine made from the Grapes Of Wrath folks.

So the great culture wars of the 1990s and 2000s have ended in a routing.
The result has been a more diverse mainstream culture — but also, simultaneously, a subculture that is alienated and despised, and ever more infuriated and bloody-minded.
While this is an age in which a woman might succeed a black man as president, it is also one in which a member of the working class has declining options to make any sort of decent living.
This is a time when gay people can be married in 50 states, but working-class families are hanging by a thread. It’s a period in which we have become far more aware of the historic injustices, yet we ignore the desperate plight of today’s working class.

THE STAGE IS SET, THE PROPS ARE PLACED
So late-stage vulture capitalism created a righteous, revolutionary anger that late-stage democracy has little or no ability to moderate or constrain — and has actually helped exacerbate.
For the the former working class, having had their morals roundly mocked, their religion deemed impotent, and their economic prospects decimated, also find their very gender and race, indeed the very way they talk under attack (in their view).
So they are lashing out.
Much of the newly energized left has come to see the white working class not as allies but primarily as bigots, misogynists, racists, and homophobes, (and to be honest there is certainly that element in the mix, and the frustration experienced only gives them cause for more new recruitment). But in generalizing like this, we are also condemning those often at the near-bottom rung of the economy to the bottom rung of the culture as well.
A struggling white man in the heartland is now told to “check his privilege” by students at Ivy League colleges.
Even if you agree that the privilege exists, we need to find empathy with the object of this disdain.
Why? Because we are better than that. Because if we don't find it, there will be more tea parties and more Trumps. Assuming the current batch don't actually seize power and destroy civilization.

The disenfranchised will accept any liar who pretends to represent them.

These working-class communities see themselves “disinherited and injured by an unjust order of things.” To quote James Hoffer.
And so they wait, and they steam, and they lash out. This was part of the emotional force of the tea party: which wasn't just against the advancement of racial minorities, gays, and women but the simultaneous demonization of their white working-class world, its culture and way of life.
Obama never intended this, but he became a symbol to them of this cultural marginalization.
As the tea party swept through Washington in 2010, as its representatives repeatedly held the government budget hostage, threatened the credit of the U.S., and refused to hold hearings on a Supreme Court nominee, the American political and media Establishment mostly chose to interpret such behavior as something other than unprecedented. But Trump saw what others didn’t, as Hoffer noted in his 1951 publication, The True Believer: “The frustrated individual and the true believer make better prognosticators than those who have reason to want the preservation of the status quo.”

Why would I, a lefty by nature; try to understand and indeed suggest empathy is needed for people who in the modern era generally oppose my own views and espouse intolerance and in pockets...hatred...indeed "deplorables" (with or without baskets)?
Precisely because we NEED to be better than that
...because of the quality of mercy
...and because we need to find our own magnanimity.
It is not easy...but I know we have these qualities and we must find them within ourselves.
Finding a solution to their very real problems must be part of our agenda, if only to prevent Trump or the next would be, self aggrandizing, totalitarian from destroying civilization.
And make no mistake. That's exactly what will happen.
We need to understand how dire the need is to defeat Trump, and we need to address the social ills that fermented his rise...or we will have another Trump in short order to defeat.

What is the critical ingredient that can save democracy from itself?
The political Establishment is battered and demoralized, deferential to the algorithms of the web and to the monosyllables of a gifted demagogue, but this is not the time to give up all hope.

The country has endured far harsher times than the present without succumbing to rank demagoguery; it avoided the fascism that destroyed Europe; it has channeled extraordinary outpourings of democratic energy into constitutional order. Yet Democrats who are gleefully predicting a Clinton landslide in November need to both check their complacency, and understand that the Trump question is no cause for partisan Schadenfreude. It’s much more dangerous than that.

The Trump success as a presidential candidate is an existential threat not merely to the U.S. but to humanity.
This is a gravely important election the likes of which, frankly the U.S. has never seen.

Those of us who backed Bernie Sanders (myself included), might want to reflect that their critique of Clinton’s experience and expertise and facile conflation of that with corruption is now only playing into Trump’s hands. That it falls to Clinton to temper her party’s ambitions has been uncomfortable to watch, since her willingness to compromise and equivocate is precisely why many Americans find her distrustful. But here are the facts. She is all we have left to counter the threat.

She needs to grasp the lethality of her foe, moderate the kind of identity politics that unwittingly empowers him, make an unapologetic case that experience and moderation are not vices, address much more directly the anxieties of the white working class—and Democrats must listen. and all of us rational people need to support her now.
More to the point, those Republicans desperately trying to thwart this monster deserve our passionate support, not our disdain. This is not the moment to remind them that they brought this on themselves. This is a moment to offer solidarity, especially as the odds are increasingly stacked against them politically (opposing Trump will ruin their party standing as he amasses power...we are seeing even his most ardent critics in the GOP now kowtowing and bowing before him. We have seen this before...in the Wiemar Republic. And I am NOT overemphasizing the threat Trump represents).
They need, quite simply, to disown their party’s candidate.
They should resist any temptation to loyally back the nominee or to sit this election out.
They must take the fight to Trump at every opportunity, and they must unite with Democrats and Independents against him, they must be prepared to sacrifice one election in order to save their party and their country...maybe humanity itself. For Trump is not just a wacky politician of the far right, or a riveting television spectacle, or a Twitter phenom or bizarre working-class hero. He is not just another candidate to be parsed and analyzed by TV pundits in the same breath as all the others.
In terms of our liberal democracy and constitutional order,
Trump is an extinction-level event.
It’s long past time we stop denying this.
I don't care who you are, what your political ideologies are...Hillary Clinton as fate would have it, is now the only person who stands between survival and The End Of It All.

Like her or not, she is the ONLY viable option to the end of the world.
She has the intellect, stamina, qualifications and poise to do the job.
Your world will NOT end if you vote for her.
It very well will if you don't.

Make America ONE Again - or why I stand against conservatives and you should too.

2016-09-24T03:25:00.000-07:00

Formal political ideologies other than pragmatism have little use in my view. The old idiom "divide and conquer could not ring truer than in the USA at this time. Divide and be conquered or unite and win. I say unite and win. This is why.

Political parties have stood for varying things over time. I can't say anyone should have an allegiance to a political party per se because in 1906 I'd have certainly supported Teddy Roosevelt...a true progressive and he was a Republican. But conservatives wrangled control of that party and actually caused Roosevelt to leave, taking the progressive element with him as he founded the short lived "progressive party". Lincoln of course believed in a strong federal government and found slavery morally intolerable. Opposite positions of today's GOP. But since FDR's time the Democratic Party has been the home of progress and social justice. It's not difficult to explain why I oppose the conservatives. I am largely pragmatic, and I believe in democracy, I am convinced that the only alternative to having a functional democracy is one sort of totalitarianism or another. I believe most humans are decent folks, that we desire nothing more than to live and let live.

I am sometimes asked by friends who identify themselves as conservative why I oppose their politics.
My reply is twofold:
One is that conservatives have never been on the correct side of any political issue...they were wrong on slavery (yes...at that time the Republican Party was the most progressive one.)
They were wrong on women voting, they were wrong on opposing social security, wrong on opposing school integration, wrong on civil rights in the 60s, wrong on women's rights, wrong on equal rights for LGBT folks. (What were they ever right about? . . . . . . [crickets].)

Two is that I am forced into opposition...why?
Well look, if you attack my friends for their sex, or their religious views being different than yours , or the color of their skin or who they love, then you force me to take a stand against you.

When you attempt to force your religion on me, or onto my friends,
or upon others against their will -- and that's precisely what you're doing when you try to pass laws governing reproduction and women's bodies or policing who can use what bathroom or who can be married in the eyes of the state.
Do not waste my time pretending otherwise -- then you force me to oppose you.

When you attempt to force your religion into my life by inserting it in public policy even though you, yourself contemptuously refuse to adhere to it's main tenets- to feed the hungry, clothe the poor, heal the sick, do unto others, and not judge others.
I am forced to stand against you.

When you attempt to force ridiculous beliefs into my schools, replacing disingenuous quackery for science... then I must oppose you. I have no choice.

When you turn dogs loose on peaceful protestors, you force me to oppose you.

When you tell me 30,000 Americans dead from gun violence every year is the price we must pay for freedom, and you set about arming every nutter, lunatic, and raging hater in the country, then you force me to oppose you.

When you tell me I must bear the risk for your irresponsible investment schemes yet you alone can profit from them, then you force me to oppose you.

When you tell me we must go to war yet again for your ideology,
for your skewed idea of freedom,
for your fear,
for your hate,
or to benefit your corporate bottom line.
I am forced to oppose you.

When you demand people die in yet another undefinable vague, unending conflict that make things worse and whose only winners are defense contractors and arms dealers,
then you force me to oppose you.

When you tell someone they must obediently stand and cheer for a flag or song without question or criticism because "freedom"...you force me to oppose you.

When you say we must march on Washington and burn it to the ground, when you demand we drag the president from office and hang him from the nearest lamppost because of some idiotic absurd and ridiculous conspiracy theory you've read on some hate blogger's site, you force me to oppose you.

When you demand Wall Street should be free of regulation, free to risk the economic security of every single person on this planet without protest or oversight, you force me to oppose you.

When you tell me corporations are people, I am forced to oppose you.

When you tell me we can just continue to consume resources
and belch pollutants at an ever increasing pace
without regard for the environment that we all must live in,
then you force me to oppose you.

When you disenfranchise minorities through unjust laws or by gerrymandering or through trickery, then you force me to oppose you.

When you tell me we must spend trillions more, on aircraft carriers and stealth bombers and tanks while the nation's infrastructure crumbles around us, while Americans go hungry and without medical care, when we can't afford colleges, a space program or the National Endowment for the Arts,
then I must oppose you.

When you insist on buying those weapons anyway and then blame the resulting debt on those who resisted the idea from the start, then you force me to take a side against you.

When you tell me prisons should be run for profit, you force me to oppose you.

When you tell me medicines should be used for outrageous profiteering,
you force me to oppose you.

When you tell me that we must make America great again
by retreating into an armed camp surrounded by minefields
and barbed wire as we peer fearfully out at the world over the barrel of a gun,
then you force me to oppose you.

Yes, I am your political enemy then.
But you must understand that you FORCED me to oppose you.
YOU forced me to choose whatever vehicle is best suited to beat you
in the race to control power.

YOU demanded that I take this ride.
Not because I seek undue power, but because you do.
So yes, I am forced into being a "partisan"...it's not a choice, but a matter of defense.
I will treat you personally with the degree of dignity I know every human being is entitled to,
but know that some ideology is simply poison.
And I for one will not knowingly drink that poison.
I will warn as many who will listen, not to drink it.
If you think I should not oppose your ideology, then I'm afraid you should have offered options other than poison.

Nihilism Stands At The Door - The New American Pessimism

2016-08-16T00:50:00.000-07:00

“Nihilism stands at the door,” wrote Nietzsche.
“Whence comes this uncanniest of all guests?”
There has been nothing like the Trump campaign in American political history and perhaps not in history, period, which means that everything that happens is unexplored territory. As those of us with a degree of reason try to understand whence this whirlwind of self destruction comes from, where it leads, and why it exists at all, we may be focused on the wrong parameter. We look to the individual psychology of Donald Trump, which I suggest is a thick narcissistic morass of opaque self aggrandizement and little else...a deeply uninteresting phenomenon.
There is almost literally nothing there. Though Trump has a public persona, he has no personality. Any theory we come up with looking at Trump himself is doomed to fail because there is nothing there to observe. His persona exists only in terms of a larger field of observation... the contemporary American disorder of which Trump is but one especially acrimonious and disgraceful manifestation.

Donald Trump is behaving very much like a megalomaniacal billionaire with no qualifications would be expected to behave if he wanted to be elected president. (It's doubtful he wants to actually be president, but he wants to be elected. There is a difference. Perhaps not so subtle). He's an opportunist, tapping into a vast angry and fearful audience. Does he believe a word of his rhetoric?
I doubt it, I'm not sure there is any evidence that he remembers his own rhetoric from day to day...he feeds the beast whatever the beast has an appetite for.

Maybe the question we should ask is why he’s doing such a nonsensical thing at all? Or why he has been so successful with this essentially suicidal rhetoric? How large is the segment of the population that is hell bent on self destruction anyway?

The emergence of Trump as the inexplicable champion of working class white men, evangelical bible bangers, and retirees who watch way too much Rupert Murdoch programming on TV tells us less about him than about the country whose bowels he came from. Trump is riding the crest of a wave of nihilistic rampage, acting out a deep-seated national desire for self-destruction that runs parallel to America’s more optimistic self-image and interacts with it sporadically. He is trafficking in pseudo-uplifting nostrums about "making America great again" and how much “we” will “win” once he is president. But he has never offered any specific ideas or policy proposals, only incoherent fantasies that combine unilateralism with a police state and total war against amorphous enemies in a great game of nuclear wack-a-mole.
He just released an economic agenda...surprise angry workers! Same old trickle down bullshit that benefits Trump's income bracket and no one else. But his supporters won't really care.
They are hell bent on destruction. The rhetoric of which isn't important.
I have never believed that even his most vocal supporters take his proposals about the bazillion-dollar border wall, the deportation of all undocumented immigrants, or the exclusion of all Muslims seriously...this is pure fantasy. Those things represent a yearning toward the imaginary and the impossible. It's a nihilistic rejection of all reality. No candidate who proposes such things — or who asks why we can’t use nuclear weapons, since we have them — is actually selling hope or optimism of any kind.
No way, no how, my friends.

I don't believe Donald Trump’s suicide mission is a personal one. He wants to be president but doesn’t know why really, and he's got no idea whatsoever what he would do with the office should he actually win it.
Trump wishes only for his own glorification; he isn’t intelligent enough or complicated enough to yearn for his own destruction. It's a uniquely American sort of Nihilism.

In practice, is there a desire to lose the election, with the side benefit of endangering democracy by claiming that the system is corrupt and the results were rigged? I'd say that is a good guess. Trump’s suicide mission is ultimately about something much larger than his own presidential campaign, and also much larger than demographic clichés about the declining white majority. It's a disturbing self destructive penchant and it's not going away anytime soon.

Sowing The Wind

2016-06-28T04:23:00.001-07:00

The prevalent understanding of history is a compendium of more or less unrelated events.

We view it as an annal of wars, battles, and murders. A chronicle of the deeds and misdeeds of a pantheon of kings, despots, villains and heroes. It is a scrapbook of spectacles where the more conspicuous and dramatic occurrences are given a skewed, distorted, and hyperbolized prominence. Little, if any attention is given to either their underlying causes or to their ultimate effects.

"Those Who Don't Know History Are Doomed To Repeat It"

We have all heard these words. Yet "knowing" history as it is commonly perceived is simply not enough. History is littered with loud-mouthed authoritarian ego-maniacal "leaders" who dupe nations into following them on a conquest of ruin. The cup of history, my friends; "runneth over" with despots who scapegoat foreigners of any stripe, intellectuals, or any other group who may seem "different" to the local normalcy. Everyone knows this history, yet still the lackeys come.
Still the followers gather and kill each other in foxholes for one local tyrant or tyrant's ideological propaganda or another.
Knowing the chronology of events in history has little value.
Clearly, analysis of the causes and effects of these events is what matters.

Perspective...It Matters

If you understand the concept of perspective, you know that this woman isn't exactly holding the sun is she?

We need a clear view of the underlying mechanics and implications of events rather than merely an account of their occurrences. In chaos there is actually order (ask any game theorist or chaos theorist). And it can be understood. In an unmortgaged view of history, the importance of wars and battles diminishes. The glory of kings, messiahs, and assorted heroes & fools fades away like morning mist when seen in their true light as the pawns of circumstances pimped out in a bit of tinsel. Events, actually are far from being unrelated, but are an ordered sequence interlinked into a vast chain of causation. The great panorama unfolds showing us the human race in its progress from the stinking primordial swamps of the past towards the receding veil of the future. The key to unlocking this honest perspective is most often overlooked or ignored even by historians. It is a lens that brings the whole into focus. It is the lens of the evolution of human society. Ever since mankind began to cooperate with others for mutual benefit, we formed societies and they have not been static but have grown and changed over time.
We are in error to view society now as it ever was, as it has always been, and is now; in a process of growth, the universal law of evolution dictates that it moves from the simple to the complex. The beginnings of our present society must be traced to each preceding phase unraveling the previous forms back to the earliest tribal communities. If one sketches this out, history takes on a clear and consistent form. In a very real sense, you do need to understand where you are coming from to reach a destination. And you do need to choose a destination...or someone will be choosing it for you. This is one of the great lessons to be gleaned from history.

The Pre-Slavery Period

The period of human development previous to the appearance of slavery is so far removed in the dim past that it has left little historic trace beyond the scattered remains of primitive handiwork that we unearth from time to time. There isn't a lot that we can ascertain, but there is one characteristic that marks the ante-slavery period (as well as cultures in existence today that managed to develop on their own due to their remoteness)...and that is the non-existence of property in the true sense of the word. Oh they had personal possessions of course, such as his weapons and personal dwellings, but the resources of the earth, were and are of free of access to all, these resources are the property of none. Property is not so much the assertion of the claim of the individual as it's owner as it is a denial of claim of all others to ownership.

The Slavery Period And The Transition To Barbarism

     The tools of this time were simple and crude, and so too were the economics. Human activity and thus production under savagery differs from that of today as everything was a matter of hand production instead of machine, products were created for individual use instead of social consumption. That is to say, each article produced is completed by one individual instead of being, as it is today, the result of the toil of a whole army of workers, each one doing a little to it. Furthermore, under "savagery", articles are produced for use; whereas in more recent times articles are produced for individual profit. What we can observe about this time, is that if we eliminated the social production, the machinery, and profit we'd see economics reduced to it's lowest common denominator. Its simplest form. In the pre-civilization and early civilization days, exchanges were carried on mostly on whim, but the more civilized we became, the more exchanges became based on the labor required to fashion things. An "uncivilized man" wishing to barter, say, ornaments for weapons, would exchange them upon the basis of the labor it would cost him to produce either. He would know how long it took him to make the ornaments, and he would have a pretty good idea how many of the weapons he could make in the same time, and would therefore insist on just so many in exchange for his ornaments. To accept any less would be foolish, as he would be better off to make them himself. This standard of value has endured through all the succeeding changes in the methods of production and exchange until the introduction of machines and profit. Then we allowed foolishness to prevail. In those times, the earth's resources had no economic value in themselves, they are simply there and accessible to all.They were no one's property. No one claimed to own the water, the sky, or the land upon which one treads. It was understood that only when the hand of labor is applied to those natural resources to convert them into articles of use by mankind, that anything of value is created. Something we have allowed to be obscured in the industrial age.

The primitive's way of life was predatory. It involved hunting and fishing, and relied upon wild fruits and roots. Such a method of life is precarious and becomes more so with the increase of population. There would necessarily be consequent restrictions of the tribal hunting grounds etc. and as time goes on the people would be driven to domesticate animals and to cultivate the soil in order that this means of life may be more certain. Once this becomes generalized, the door to slavery is opened.
     The primitive kills his enemies on the battlefield – maybe he even eats them. There is no incentive to make them captive, as it would only mean more mouths to feed. He cannot even compel them to maintain themselves by sending them to hunt, as obviously, they would just escape. But with the cultivation of the soil it becomes possible for an individual to produce more than is necessary for his own keep. It then becomes practical to make captives. They now can be compelled to toil in the fields and produce for their masters; their escape can be prevented by armed guards.
    So property, the slave and the soldier make their advent upon the scene of human events together. Through our clear lens of historic causation, we can see this was not an accident and these events are definitely related. To sum this era up: the savage came upon the scene endowed with power to labor, which he applied to the natural resources, and produced for himself wealth – articles of use to him. Later, the chattel slave was owned by a master, who compelled him to apply his labor power to the natural resources, and then took the wealth he produced.

The Rise Of The Slave Empires

Uncomfortable as it may be, it is noticeable that where slavery of one sort or another did not exist, the societies did not advance much in the arts and sciences. This would indicate that slavery was essential to human progress, and this is actually the case. Why? When man lived by fishing, gathering and hunting he had little leisure for the pursuit of knowledge. His time was taken up with the economic problem – how to provide for his wants. When, however, the agricultural stage was reached, and it became possible for an individual to live upon the fruits of another’s labor, society became divided into two classes, the slaves and their masters, the working class and the leisured class. This master class then had leisure to turn its attention to other things besides its immediate necessities. It was in fact upon this foundation, that the civilizations of the ancient world were built. Upon the labor of slaves Babylon upraised her temples and gardens, Egypt her pyramids and tombs, Greece her colonnades and statuary; the armies of Xerxes and Hannibal, the mighty empire of Rome, were all maintained out of the surplus product of vast armies of chattel slaves. And so upon the backs of toiling millions, empire after empire arose, attained its zenith and crumbled to decay, some of them leaving scarcely a trace to mark their existence in history. The course of each one was in many respects similar. Because they were all slave civilizations, and because they all commenced as bands of rude conquerors subjugating their neighbors until having overcome rivals, the masters degenerated into a horde of parasites living upon the ever-increasing product of their slaves.

We can readily observe that in all these cases, wealth accumulated into the hands of the already most wealthy, and, as the wealthy class became fewer, the slaves became more numerous until the disproportion becomes so great that the wealthy few, with all their luxurious extravagance and wastefulness, were no longer able to consume the volume of wealth, and there were more slaves than employment could be found for. As the slave's value declined, his condition became more and more precarious and miserable. Society was no longer able to provide for the wants or needs of the useful portion of it, and, there was no possibility, at the time, of any new form of society to take its place. So the slave civilization perishes, its extinction generally being hastened by the inroads of some younger and more virile empire. The fall of the last of these ancient chattel slave empires, the decadent Roman empire, marked the dawn of a new era. For thousands of years chattel slavery had been the only form of slavery. An endless rotation of civilizations had been founded on that basis, they had succeeded one another, but conditions were ripe for a change, for which these cycles of chattel slavery had been merely a preparation.

The Institution of Feudalism

Western Europe, formerly one great forest, had now become populous. The incoming races amalgamated with the former inhabitants who had, under Roman rule, been reduced to some semblance of order. Conditions became so settled that it was no longer easy for a slave to escape. It was no longer necessary to own and guard him. Therefore, gradually, a new system of slavery evolved. The slave was attached to the land he toiled; he became a serf.
His master was now the owner of the land – the lord. The serf toiled on his lord’s land, producing wealth for him, in return for which he was permitted to toil on his own behalf upon a piece of land set apart for that purpose. The wealth he thus produced was just sufficient to meet his necessities so that he might continue to live and produce more wealth for his lord. The difference between the chattel slave and the serf is one of form rather than of reality. Each produced the wealth that maintained both himself and his master. The serf received of that wealth only subsistence...sufficient, at the best, to maintain him in a good enough working condition. While the chattel slave, being generally bought, represented so much cash laid out, and was therefore worth taking a certain amount of care of, the personal welfare of the serf was a matter of little or no concern to the lord beyond that it was to the lord’s interest to protect him from other robbers in order that he himself might get the full benefit of robbing the serf himself. The reason serfdom displaced chattel slavery was that it was a more economical and less troublesome method of exploiting workers. The point most worthy of remembrance in the feudal system is that the serf worked a part of the time for himself and the rest of his time for his lord, much as the worker today works a part of his working day producing his own wages and the rest of the time producing profit for his employer. We have not yet left the shackles of serfdom in a sense. A particularly nasty irresponsible form of slavery.

The Rise Of Capitalism

It had taken several thousands of years of chattel slavery to prepare the way for serfdom. And it took several centuries of feudalism to prepare the way for a new form of exploitation – capitalism – the kernel of which already existed in the feudal society.
While the agricultural districts were under the sway of the nobility, the towns and cities of the Middle Ages were, to some degree, free from their domination. The merchants, artisans and craftsmen gathered in these places. Their interests were at all times antagonistic to those of the land-barons, who naturally sought to place restrictions on the manufacture and marketing of the city products. This antagonism was accentuated by the discovery of America and of the southwest passage to the Orient, and the consequent expansion of trade. As the wealth and power of the townsmen increased, that of the nobility decreased. The invention of gunpowder sealed the fate of the mail-clad knights and their chivalry. The nobleman became a mere parasite upon society; feudalism ran its course as other forms of slave society had done. It was dying when the steam engine gave it a death-blow.

That invention threw wide the doors of opportunity to society’s new masters, the townsmen or bourgeoisie. The production of articles of commerce had been carried on by hand until this point. The town worker was a craftsman who learned his trade by a long apprenticeship, who, when he became a journeyman, worked by the side of a master, and had reasonable hopes of becoming a master himself. The tools of production were yet so primitive as to be within the purchasing power of the thrifty workman. Land alone was the sacred property of the ruling class. The coming of the steam-driven engine changed all this. The hand tool grew step by step into the gigantic set of machines we know today. Ownership of these tools became more and more an impossibility for the worker. The master workman left the bench for the office; the foreman took his place. The factory called for more labor – cheaper labor. The new capitalist turned his profit-hungry eyes on the brawn of the agricultural districts. Serfdom stood in the way, so serfdom was abolished. The serf was freed from his bondage to the land that he might take on a heavier yoke, that of the factory. The factory had no use for brains, but “hands”. The hands of the country yokel, of his wife, and of his children, would serve equally as well as those of the skilled craftsman to operate machines. No apprenticeship was needed, no training. Only “hands” with hungry stomachs attached. The serf was not freed from the land, rather, he was driven off it by the closing in of the commons and by other measures. The freeing of the serfs was no humanitarian measure. Greed – and greed alone – was its inspiring motive. This was a power struggle...the new capitalists rose up to take the reins the lords had accumulated.

The capitalist class had humble enough beginnings. Its progenitors were the townsmen of the Middle Ages. They were a part of the feudal society and yet, in a way, apart from it. They were neither nobles nor serfs, but a species of lackeys to the nobility. Sycophants. From them the noble obtained his clothing and the gay trappings of his horse; they forged his weapons and his armor, built his castles, loaned him money. He stood to them in the relation of a consumer, and, as a consumer, he legislated, defining their markets, prohibiting them from enhancing prices, enacting that wages should not exceed certain figures, insisting that goods should be of such and such a quality and texture, and be sold at certain fixed prices. Naturally these restrictions were not pleasing to the townsmen. As trade and commerce increased they found these conditions less and less tolerable. As they grew in wealth and influence they became less and less inclined to tolerate them. In England they had joined with the nobles to weaken the king, and with the king to weaken the nobles. Finally they broke the power of both. In the false name of freedom they crushed feudalism. But the freedom they sought was a freedom that would allow them to adulterate goods, that would allow the workers to leave the land and move where the factories needed them, their wives, and their children. While in other lands the course of the bourgeois revolution was somewhat different to that in England, the result was the same. In France, for instance, the revolution was pent up for so long a period that when it burst forth it deluged the land in blood, through which the people waded, bearing banners inscribed “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity”.

The Industrial Age And Beyond

Once freed from feudalism the onward march of capitalism became a mad, headlong rush. Everywhere mills, factories, and furnaces sprang up. Their smoke and fumes turned fields once fertile and populous into desolate, uninhabitable wastes; their refuse poisoned and polluted the rivers until they stank to hell. Earth’s bowels were riven for her mineral hoards. Green flourishing forests became acres of charred hideous stumps. Commerce pierced all mountains, fathomed all seas, explored all lands, disturbing the age-long sleep of hermit peoples that they might buy her wares. Capital spread its ever expanding tentacles over the entire world. Everywhere its voice was heard, crying “Work, work, work”, to all the workers; “Buy, buy, buy”, to all the peoples.

The New Slavery

The essence of enslavement is that one man should be compelled to work for others, and surrender to them the product of his or her toil. Wage-slavery, the present form of servitude, fulfills this condition every bit as much as did chattel slavery or serfdom. The workers of today have no claim upon the wealth they produce. And while they may not actually be compelled to work for any given master, they must work for some master. They are therefore slaves in the proper sense of the word. They are exploited for more wealth – that is to say, the masters obtain from their labor greater returns than did the masters of the past. Sadly, if this were not so, the other forms would still be widespread. But no feudal serf or chattel slave can compete with the modern wage slave at slaving. Where the masters of old were, to a certain extent, interested in the welfare of their slaves, having, directly or indirectly, a property interest in them. The modern slaver, on the other hand, has no such interest in his slaves. He neither purchases nor owns them. He merely buys so much labor-power – physical energy– just as he buys electric power for his plant. The worker represents to him merely a machine capable of developing a given quantity of labor-power. When he does not need labor-power he simply refrains from buying any. The human....can go to hell. He could care less.
The ages of chattel slavery broke the ground for feudalism. Centuries of feudalism prepared the way for capitalism. In a few decades capitalism has brought us to the threshold of ruin.
Capitalism has done remarkable work for itself, and done it thoroughly.
It found workers, for the most part, an ignorant, voiceless peasant horde.It found them working individually and with little co-ordination; it has made them work collectively and scientifically. It has abolished their individuality and reduced their labor to a social average, leveling their differences, until today the humble ploughman is a skilled laborer by comparison with the mere human automata that toils at meaningless tasks.
It found the means and methods of production crude, scattered and ill-ordered, the private property of individuals – very often of individuals who themselves took part in production; it leaves them practically one gigantic machine of wealth production, orderly, highly productive, economical of labor, closely inter-related – the collective property of a class, and of a class wholly unnecessary to production, a class whose sudden extinction would not affect the speed of one wheel or the heat of one furnace. It found the earth large, with communications difficult, divided into nations knowing little or nothing of one another, with prairies unpopulated, forests untrod, mountains unscaled. It has brought the ends of the earth within speaking distances of one another, has ploughed the prairies, hewed down the forests, emptied the mountains, explored all regions, exploited all resources; it has largely broken down all boundaries, except on maps; it has given us an international capitalist class with designs on all lands and nations. Aristotle, with something akin to prophetic vision, laid down the axiom that slavery was necessary until the forces of Nature were harnessed to the uses of Man. This has been accomplished and the necessity for slavery is past. Armed with the modern machinery of production and technology, the workers, a small fraction of society, can produce more than all society can possibly use or waste – so much more, that periodically the very wheels of production are clogged with the super-abundance of wealth of 1%ers. We see at the pinnacle of prosperity, industry suddenly become disjointed; the wheels all come to a standstill. Furnaces cool off; smoke ceases to belch forth to the skies; the belts stay their eternal round over the pulleys. The workers, from being worked to the limit of their endurance, find themselves unexpectedly without work at all, and soon without means of subsistence having committed their lives to serving faceless corporate overlords who have no interest in their personal survival....one dead peasant, "no problem another will come along and I'll cheat them even more!" Everywhere where capitalism rules, from all quarters comes the same sad tales. Famine-stricken where food is plenty; ill clad where clothing is plentiful; shelterless among hordes of empty houses; shivering by mountains of fuel. There is no promise of alleviation, but rather portents of worse to come. So it is imperative that humanity learn from it's history. It is time to end all slavery. It is time to create a society that does not tolerate the greed of capitalism. One that does not tolerate the poverty of the many. One that refuses to let any human being go to bed hungry when there is plenty of food. One that does not deny health care when there is plenty of medicine. The economic problems, whose solution laid in the advent of slavery, have long been solved. Humanity must step forth free at last from its aeons of bondage. There is no reason we shall not be the master of our own destiny. Our technology and machines have enabled us with little effort to produce all that we need. And with ample leisure to enjoy the fruits of our work, and the legacies of time. The time has come to rethink what the next human society should be. What it should embrace....and what it should reject. The title of this article comes from a 1914 socialist pamphlet...."They have sown the wind – they are reaping the whirlwind."
The slave of old toiled in his master’s fields and the fruits of his toil belonged to his master; the worker of today toils in his master’s office, factory or farm, and the fruits of his toil belong to the master. The former received for his toil enough for his own subsistence, just what the latter today receives at the best. The slave was bought and sold bodily and, being so much invested wealth, was more or less well cared for whether he worked or not. The worker of today sells himself from day to day, and being a “freeman” and nobody’s property, nobody is under any obligation to care for him or to feed him when there is no work for him to do. The slave was generally an unwilling slave, but the worker votes for a continuance of his servitude.
His freedom lies in his own hands, but he refuses to be free. Which is the baser slave?
What next fellow humans? Why do we continue this charade? It is not necessary.
What sort of world do we really want? One that values human dignity? One that values resources?
One that transcends the shackles of the slaver? Or not? It is time to move forward.
Going to the moon was hard. Rejecting the "need' for servants isn't. We really can do this.
No...we must. For the future generations of humans. We must.

The Grapes Of Wrath - Ready For The Harvest

2016-04-15T03:10:00.002-07:00

“and in the eyes of the people there is the failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath.
In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling
and growing heavy,
growing heavy for the vintage.”
~John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath

John Steinbeck's brilliant novel "The Grapes Of Wrath" was published on April 14th in 1939.
He documents how society is divided into the dominant and the dominated and how people in the dominant roles in a society act viciously to preserve their dominance. The novel identifies that division as the primary source of evil and suffering in the world.

So Where Is Tom Joad Today?

“And the great owners, who must lose their land in an upheaval, the great owners with access to history, with eyes to read history and to know the great fact: when property accumulates in too few hands it is taken away. And that companion fact: when a majority of the people are hungry and cold they will take by force what they need. And the little screaming fact that sounds through all history: repression works only to strengthen and knit the repressed. The great owners ignored the three cries of history. The land fell into fewer hands, the number of the dispossessed increased, and every effort of the great owners was directed at repression. The money was spent for arms, for gas to protect the great holdings, and spies were sent to catch the murmuring of revolt so that it might be stamped out. The changing economy was ignored, plans for the change ignored; and only means to destroy revolt were considered, while the causes of revolt went on.”~ John Steinbeck, The Grapes Of Wrath

What have we learned? Where are we today in terms of combating the obvious evil that arises when any group of people assemble themselves as a force to dominate others? Whether it is politically or economically, the lesson history teaches us is ignored time and again.
Indeed what is the true nature of capitalism in today's world?
Is it some grand national adventure, as politicians and textbooks preached when I was growing up? Is it some benign system in which markets provide framework for amiable competition, from which emerges the greatest good for the greatest number of people? Or is it merely the domain of class struggle, a “global class war,” as Jeff Faux’s book of the same title would have it, in which the “party of Davos” outmaneuvers the remnants of the organized working class and beats them down?

The doctrines of the “law and economics” movement, now ascendant in our courts ["law & economics" is the theoretical analysis of law focusing on efficiency. Basically a legal situation is said to be efficient if a right is given to the party who would be willing to pay the most for it.], suggest that firms will adhere on their own to honorable conduct. That any public presence in the economy undermines this. Even insurance—whether deposit insurance or Social Security—is perverse in this belief system, for it encourages irresponsible risk taking. Banks will lend to bad clients, companies will speculate with their pension funds, etc. This movement has even argued that seat belts foster reckless driving. To adherents insurance creates a “moral hazard” for which “market discipline” is the cure-all. It’s a strange vision, and if we weren’t governed by people like John Roberts and Sam Alito, who pretend to believe it, it would hardly be worth wasting our attention on.

“ Class struggle is the history of all hitherto existing society”-~ Karl Marx

The idea of class struggle goes back a long way; it really is “the history of all hitherto existing society,” as Marx and Engels had declared. But if the world is ruled by a handful of monied elite, What role does the middle-class working citizen have today in the global society, or even in his or her own nation state? None. It's a shell game, a hoax. The political decline of the left flows in part from rhetoric that no longer matches experience; generally speaking, people in the developed nations do not feel they are living on the edge of a Malthusian catastrophe. Dollars mostly, but Euros and Pounds as well, command most of the world's goods...rupees not so much. So workers, as members in the "dollar" economy have been assimilated and in today's world; are made complicit in sustaining and ever expanding the influence of the capitalist class.

I grew up in the mixed-economy America. Yes, there existed a post-capitalist, post-Marxian vision of middle-class identity and indeed pride. It consisted of shared burdens, assets and entitlements.
The cornerstone of which was public education. Along with access to college, decent housing, full employment at living wages, Medicare, and Social Security.
    These programs, were publicly provided, financed, or guaranteed, and had softened the sharp edges of Great Depression capitalism, rewarding the sacrifices that won the Second World War. They also showcased America, demonstrating to those behind the Iron Curtain that regulated capitalism could yield prosperity far beyond the capacities of state planning. (This, and not the arms race, are what really ended the Soviet empire.) These middle-class institutions survive in America today, but they are weakened, diluted, frayed and tattered from constant attack. The division between those included and those excluded is large and growing larger exponentially with each year. This is frightfully obvious.

   The main feature today of modern American capitalism is certainly neither benign competition, nor class struggle, nor an inclusive middle-class utopia. No the main feature is predation. It has become a system where the rich come to feast on decaying systems built for the middle class.
I concede of course, that the predatory class is not the whole of the wealthy; it may be opposed by many others of similar wealth. But it is sadly the defining feature and the leading force in today's world. The agents of this bloodfeast are in full control of the governments under which we live.
Our rulers deliver favors to their clients.They have no interest in representing us, there's not enough cash in that. In the U.S. the predators range from Native American casino operators, to Appalachian coal companies, to 3rd world sweatshop operators, to the oil field operators of Iraq. They include the misanthropes who led the campaign to abolish the estate tax; Charles Schwab, who suggested the dividend tax cut of 2003; the “Benedict Arnold” companies who move their taxable income offshore; and the financial institutions behind the crash of 2007. Everywhere you look in the U.S or the U.K., you find public decisions yield gains to very specific private entities. We have become a predatory regime, and nothing is done for public reasons ever. Those in charge do not recognize that “public purposes” even exist at all. They have friends, and enemies, and as for the rest—we’re simply their prey.
    Remember what happened in New Orleans? Hurricane Katrina illustrated this perfectly, as Halliburton scooped up contracts and Bush hamstrung Kathleen Blanco, the Democratic governor of Louisiana. He stuck a guy who had organized a dog show in charge of the relief and rescue operations. The population of New Orleans was, at best, an afterthought; and once dispersed, it was quickly forgotten. In this predator-prey model, growth among the prey stimulates predation.
The two populations grow together at first, but when the balance of power shifts toward the predators
they swoop in and take everything they prey has accumulated. They have all sorts of tools for doing this; rising interest rates, utility rates, oil prices, crashing home prices by flooding the market with worthless mortgages, buying off the government, or outright embezzlement to name a few).
When any catastrophe occurs, from the 9-11 attacks to Hurricane Sandy, the predators swoop in and use the catastrophe to enrich themselves. Yes, the Iraq war was nothing more than just that, vulture capitalism at it's worst, an excuse to loot the treasury and funnel money to the capitalist class. No one in government had concern for the suffering of the 1st responders, who sought to have their medical bills paid...14 years later the few who hadn't died from cancers as a result of exposure to toxins in the burning buildings they walked into on that day to save as many lives as they could, were still begging congress for a bill that would help with their medical bills. Gov. Chris Christie and Rudy Giuliani like to cite the attacks as some sort of personal badge of honor, but politically they forgot entirely about the actual people who suffered loss and or disease in those attacks, they were largely discarded except for the occasional photo op. Christie thanks the first responders by not funding the states portion of their pensions, and has sought to bust the public employees unions, roll back healthcare & pay for them. 9-11 was little more than a cash cow to the predators. An excuse to undo the Magna Carta, to stick their bloated friends in cushy 'homeland security' positions, and to loot Iraqi oil fields.
Everything that happens is an excuse to prey.

Predator Capitalism Is The Enemy

Of Honest Business As Well As Workers

In a world where the "winners" are all connected, it’s not only the prey who lose out. It’s everyone who hasn’t licked the required boots. Predatory regimes are nothing more than protection rackets. They may be powerful and feared, but never loved nor respected. They do not enjoy a broad political base. In a predatory economy, the rules imagined by the law and economics crowd don’t apply. There’s no market discipline. Predators compete not by following the rules but by breaking them. They take the business-school view of law: Rules are not designed to guide behavior but laid down to define the limits of unpunished conduct. Once one gets close to the line, stepping over it is easy. A predatory economy fosters and rewards criminal behavior.

The Best Way to Rob a Bank Is To Own One

    Remember the Savings and Loan and Keating Five scandals?
obvious examples where the leader of an organization uses his company as a “weapon” of fraud and a “shield” against prosecution. Look at Enron, Tyco, and WorldCom, The Neil Bush S&L looting. All examples of controlled fraud which was protected by clean audits from respected accountants. The large frauds were nearly all committed in institutions taken over for that purpose by criminal networks, often by big players like Charles Keating, Michael Milken,Bernie Madoff, and Don Dixon. There’s another reason people need to be concerned about predatory institutions. They invariably fail in the end. They fail because they are meant to fail. Predators suck the life from the businesses they command, concealing the fact for as long as possible behind fraudulent accounting and hugely complex transactions; and that’s the looter’s point.

     We have governments run by people rooted in this culture.
To expect that they should not also be predatory is lunacy.
The link between George H.W. Bush, who led the deregulation of the S&Ls, his son Neil, who ran a corrupt S&L, and Neil’s brother George, for whom Ken Lay sent thugs to Florida in 2000 on the Enron plane, could hardly be any closer. But aside from occasional references to “kleptocracy” in other countries, economic opinion has been slow to recognize this. Thinking wistfully, we assume that government wants to do good, and its failure to do so is a matter of incompetence.
This is not so. You can't complain if your wine is sour when you choose a liar to select the brew he pours you.

    One would think if our governments are also predatory, or at least controlled by predators, then they too will fail: not merely politically, but in every substantial way. Government will not cope with global warming, or Hurricane Katrina, or Iraq—not because it is incompetent but because it is willfully indifferent to the problem of competence.
    What mechanisms survive for calling the predators to account?
Unfortunately, at the highest levels, one cannot rely on the justice system, thanks to the power of the pardon. It’s politics or nothing, recognizing that in a world of predators, all established parties are corrupted in at least part. So, how can the political system reform itself? How can we reestablish checks, balances, countervailing power, and a sense of public purpose? How can we get modern economic predation back under control, restoring the possibilities not only for progressive social action but also—just as important—for honest private economic activity? Until we can answer those questions, the predators will continue to rape and pillage. We can say Steinbeck's powerful observations are just as true today as in 1939. All the gains of our father's generation, and ours as well are now being looted. Being taken back. The question is, what will we do about it?
What has happened in the past when peoples are made necessitous?
When they hunger?
When they have been robbed?

“Whenever they's a fight so hungry people can eat, I'll be there. Whenever they's a cop beatin' up a guy, I'll be there . . . . I'll be in the way guys yell when they're mad an'-I'll be in the way kids laugh when they're hungry an' they know supper's ready. An' when our folks eat the stuff they raise an' live in the houses they build-why, I'll be there."
~Tom Joad in John Steinbeck's "The Grapes of Wrath"

John Steinbeck