To All Inquisitive Minds.
Becoming totally blind at the age of 29, married with a 2 year old
daughter and a mortgage, I signed up for Aid to Dependent Children.
Welfare!
Back in those days the Legislature voted a set amount of dollars to
cover the projected applicants. If more than the expected number
applied for benefits, the money was redivided by that new number, and
Grants were reduced accordingly. My Grant allowed $60 per month for
rent or house payment. But we had a 10% increase in applicants, and a
10% reduction in our individual Grant. My house payment was a modest
$65 per month, 5 dollars above the allowance. With a 10% reduction I
was now allowed $54. And so it went. Food allowance, utilities,
clothing, and just to add insult to injury there was even a
recreational allowance. That meant that the fixed expenses had to be
met from somewhere. If anyone was caught accepting help from family
or friends, that money plus a penalty was deducted from the next
month's grant. Of course those of us who wanted to live, cheated.
The fixed costs were covered by using money from the food allowance.
In place of adequate funds, Surplus Food was provided. The problem
was not with the quality of the foods provided, but rather with the
amount. We received about enough to feed our family for one week.
But while our relatives were squeezing out money for powdered milk,
powdered eggs and margarine, we received real butter, cheese and whole
milk.
So we took in children, under the counter...the money, not the
children. And I sold Fuller Brush door to door. And, under the
direction of my Vocational Rehab Counselor, I applied and received
Unemployment Compensation. This came back to bite me in the backside.
I had never been unemployed since I graduated from high school, during
which years I had worked at part time jobs and then, following
graduation, full time. Now, not being totally ignorant, I thought we
were getting by a bit too well, living high on the hog, with both
Welfare and Unemployment coming in. But that was what I believed my
VRC had advised. One fine day an Inspector came around. He asked
some pointed questions, and explained that we were Welfare Cheaters,
double dipping. We were overdrawn by about $3,500, which we would
need to repay.
By this time I was a student in the training center for the Blind and
was headed back to college. I was told that I had a 3 year grace
period before repayment had to be made.
3 years later I was still in school. A letter arrived demanding full
repayment, or my first born would be held for ransom...or some similar
threat. The letter suggested that I, a Welfare Cheat and Deadbeat,
had refused to return their requests. I assured them that I still
lived in the same house, had the same phone number, even had kept my
original name, and my two year old daughter was now six. So I called
my VR Counselor and asked his advice. "You should have known you
couldn't draw both Unemployment and Welfare at the same time".
"But" I whined, "You were the one who told me to apply for
unemployment". Fortunately, through no help from my VRC, I learned
that in certain situations the state could forgive such
transgressions. I typed a three page letter and within two weeks the
$3,500 was made to disappear.
I've never felt remorse over having begged off that debt. For one
thing, I've been paying taxes for nearly half a century since then,
and during part of those years it was at a pretty hefty level. But at
the same time I felt that I had done my best to follow the law...well,
except for the Fuller Brush and Child Care under the Table...but at
the time I was a practicing Christian, and I prayed hard for God to
understand that we really, truly needed that extra little dribble of
money. But I did, and still do blame the "VR Counseling" I was given.
My VRC, a really decent fellow, carrying a heavy load of cases, had
become careless in his job. Later we called our intake process,
"Informed Choice". New clients were to be given all the options, and
then helped to develop a Plan. And by the way, that Informed Choice
policy was as bogus as the hit and miss system it replaced. "Informed
Choice" can only occur if the VRC is totally knowledgeable of *All
choices. And if you ever wonder what the "Deer in the Headlights"
means, just have a VRC dump a pile of booklets, forms, brochures,
pamphlets and "literature" on your lap.
Before I end this long winded dissertation, I want to make it clear
that I believe my own, and all VRC's are just as much a victim of the
System as am I, and all blind people.
The state legislature went over our budget proposal each year with a
fine tooth comb, demanding cuts any place they felt we were showing
too much "fat". Our VRC's were carrying case loads of around 180
clients each. In my program I could not afford a substitute
instructor to fill in when staff took vacation or were ill. Usually I
would fill in for my instructors, which made the students really
appreciate their teachers when they returned.
But, like the Veteran's Administration, Public Education and the Post
Office, once strong programs were being nickel and dimed to death.
And the wrong trumped up reasons are being given, fingering those
hopelessly weary workers who are buried under a growing bureaucratic
pile that is beyond their control.
Cordially,
Carl Jarvis
On 9/29/18, Andy Baracco via acb-chat <acb-chat@acblists.org> wrote:
> for over 40 years, my employment was to help homeless vets to reenter the
> world of work. One of my biggest barriers was the fact that often the jobs
>
> for which they were qualified would net them less than the government
> benefits they would receive when you considered the total picture of cash
> assistance, pensions, etc., housing subsidies, food assistance, free medical
>
> care, and on and on, and the psychiatrists and social workers who would
> counsel them to just take the benefits.
>
> Andy
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Bob Hachey via acb-chat" <acb-chat@acblists.org>
> To: "'General discussion list for ACB members and friends where a wide range
>
> of topics from blindness to politics, issues of the day or whatever comes to
>
> mind are welcome. This is a free form discussion list.'"
> <acb-chat@acblists.org>
> Cc: "Bob Hachey" <bhachey@verizon.net>
> Sent: Saturday, September 29, 2018 9:20 AM
> Subject: Re: [acb-chat] Tax Policy was RE: where are the warehouses for
> children located
>
>
>> Hi Bob,
>> Thanks for the update on the tax cuts. I don't think the dems have or have
>>
>> had much of a chance to take the senate given that most of the senators up
>>
>> for election this time around are democrats and some in red states.
>> I would be surprised if the Republicans keep the House. So, the
>> Republicans will likely have the same small majority for future SCOTUS
>> fights.
>> AS for being magnanimous, if Jeff Flake hadn't threatened to oppose
>> Kavanaugh in the Floor vote, I doubt we'd be having an investigation this
>>
>> week. IMHO, the dems are merely following the lead of the Republicans who
>>
>> lurched way to the right beginning in 2010 with the predominance of the
>> tea party.
>> If the Dems want to be successful going forward they really do need to do
>>
>> a better job looking out for the middle class, especially those who work
>> with their hands.
>> Heck, I'd say I have more respect for the folks who work with their hands
>>
>> whom I believe tend to work harder than many who work with their minds. I
>>
>> say shame on those lefties who don't hold all types of wwork in high
>> regard; I'd put the Clintons at the very top of that hall of shame.
>> Bob Hachey
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Bob via acb-chat [mailto:acb-chat@acblists.org]
>> Sent: Saturday, September 29, 2018 11:15 AM
>> To: General discussion list for ACB members and friends where a wide range
>>
>> of topics from blindness to politics, issues of the day or whatever comes
>>
>> to mind are welcome. This is a free form discussion list.
>> Cc: Bob
>> Subject: Re: [acb-chat] Tax Policy was RE: where are the warehouses for
>> children located
>>
>> Hello:
>>
>> The tax cuts were extend yesterday by the house. Now, it is up to the
>> senate.
>> After this current fiasco, the Dems will never take the senate, there is
>>
>> some question whether they will even take the house.
>> Americans are sick and tired of this obstruct and delay tactic.
>> There is going to be a FBI investigation because the Republicans chose to
>>
>> work together. Can you say the same about the extreme left which the
>> Democratic party has become?
>>
>> Bob Clark
>>
>>
>> On 9/28/18, Andy Baracco via acb-chat <acb-chat@acblists.org> wrote:
>>> I am a registered Democrat, but I don't think I've ever felt more
>>> disalusioned than I do now. I voted for Clinton in the last election
>>> only because there was no way I could have voted for Trump, but I
>>> might have voted for one of the other Republicans, except perhaps for
>>> Cruz.
>>> I think that Hillary threw workers, seniors and the middle class under
>>> the bus, in pursuit of minorities. I would have voted for Stein except
>>> that i feared that she would help Trump by taking votes away from
>>> Clinton. I don't
>>>
>>> know if Stein garnered enough votes to actually make that happen.
>>> I think I agree with Thomas jefferson who said that the government
>>> should be
>>>
>>> dissolved with each new generation.
>>> My comment about voting for Republicans applies only to candidates in
>>> California because the Dems here will never address the issue of taxes.
>>> Andy
>>>
>>> ----- Original Message -----
>>> From: "Bob Hachey via acb-chat" <acb-chat@acblists.org>
>>> To: "'General discussion list for ACB members and friends where a wide
>>> range
>>>
>>> of topics from blindness to politics, issues of the day or whatever
>>> comes to
>>>
>>> mind are welcome. This is a free form discussion list.'"
>>> <acb-chat@acblists.org>
>>> Cc: "Bob Hachey" <bhachey@verizon.net>
>>> Sent: Friday, September 28, 2018 6:06 AM
>>> Subject: [acb-chat] Tax Policy was RE: where are the warehouses for
>>> children
>>>
>>> located
>>>
>>>
>>>> Hi all,
>>>> Hi Andy and all,
>>>> I am sick to death of hearing from those who continue to pine for
>>>> lower taxes. Actually, those in the middle like yourself get screwed
>>>> badly by a
>>>>
>>>> system that should probably feature lower taxes for those making
>>>> between
>>>> $50,000.00 and $100,000.00 per year. Rather than complaining about
>>>> those poorer than yourself and immigrants, you ought to aim your
>>>> anger squarely
>>>>
>>>> at those who take in over $500,000.00 per year. The way it is now,
>>>> neither
>>>>
>>>> party looks out for the interests of what is left of a shrinking
>>>> middle class. Note that the recently passed Republican tax cuts come
>>>> in two
>>>> flavors:
>>>> a. Those cuts that benefit members of the middle and lower classes.
>>>> These
>>>>
>>>> cuts expire after 2020.
>>>> b. those cuts that benefit corporations and the highest income
>>>> individuals. These cuts don't expire at all! IF you vote for
>>>> republicans,
>>>>
>>>> you will be helping the very wealthy and probably not middle class
>>>> folks like yourself. Also, I can see why you don't want to vote for
>>>> democrats.
>>>> More proof here that we need to dissolve both badly corrupted parties.
>>>> Bob Hachey
>>>>
>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>> acb-chat mailing list
>>>> acb-chat@acblists.org
>>>> http://www.acblists.org/mailman/listinfo/acb-chat
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> acb-chat mailing list
>>> acb-chat@acblists.org
>>> http://www.acblists.org/mailman/listinfo/acb-chat
>>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> YOUR HEALTH IS YOUR MOST IMPORTANT PERSONAL ASSET!!!
>> TAKE THE CHALLENGE AT:
>> HTTP://BOB-CLARK.COM
>> Telephone: 800-345-9760
>> _______________________________________________
>> acb-chat mailing list
>> acb-chat@acblists.org
>> http://www.acblists.org/mailman/listinfo/acb-chat
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> acb-chat mailing list
>> acb-chat@acblists.org
>> http://www.acblists.org/mailman/listinfo/acb-chat
>
> _______________________________________________
> acb-chat mailing list
> acb-chat@acblists.org
> http://www.acblists.org/mailman/listinfo/acb-chat
>
Sunday, September 30, 2018
Tuesday, September 25, 2018
from Chris Hedges book, America: A Farewell Tour
This is from Chris Hedges book, America: A Farewell Tour
Mr. Fish / Truthdig
The French sociologist Emile Durkheim in his classic book "On Suicide"
examined the disintegration of social bonds that drive individuals and
societies to personal and collective acts of self-destruction. He found that
when social bonds are strong, individuals achieve a healthy balance between
individual initiative and communal solidarity, which he called a
"life-sustaining equilibrium." These individuals and communities have the
lowest rates of suicide. The individuals and societies most susceptible to
self-destruction, he wrote, are those for whom these bonds, this
equilibrium, have been shattered.
Societies are held together by a web of social bonds that give individuals a
sense of being part of a collective and engaged in a project larger than the
self. This collective expresses itself through rituals, such as elections
and democratic participation or an appeal to patriotism, and shared national
beliefs. The bonds provide meaning, a sense of purpose, status and dignity.
They offer psychological protection from impending mortality and the
meaninglessness that comes with being isolated and alone. The shattering of
these bonds plunges individuals into deep psychological distress that leads
ultimately to acts of self-annihilation. Durkheim called this state of
hopelessness and despair anomie, which he defined as "ruleless-ness."
Ruleless-ness means the norms that govern a society and create a sense of
organic solidarity no longer function. The belief, for example, that if we
work hard, obey the law and get a good education we can achieve stable
employment, social status and mobility along with financial security becomes
a lie. The old rules, imperfect and often untrue for poor people of color,
nevertheless were not a complete fiction in the United States. They offered
some Americans—especially those from the white working and middle
class—modest social and economic advancement.
But the capture of political and economic power by the corporate elites,
along with the redirecting of all institutions toward the further
consolidation of their power and wealth, has broken the social bonds that
held the American society together. This rupture has unleashed a widespread
malaise Durkheim would have recognized.
"When society is strongly integrated," he wrote, "it keeps individuals in a
state of dependency, holding them to be in its service and consequently not
permitting them to dispose of themselves as they wish. Society is thus
opposed to them escaping from their obligations towards it through death. …
The bond that attaches them to their common purpose attaches them to life;
and, in any case, the high goal towards which their gaze is turned
alleviates the suffering that they feel from life's troubles. Finally, in a
coherent and vital community, there is a continual exchange of ideas and
feelings from all to each and from each to all which is like mutual moral
support, so that the individual, instead of being reduced to his resources
only, participates in the collective energy and draws on it when his own is
exhausted."
The reconfiguring of American society into an oligarchy and the collapse of
our democratic institutions have left most of the population disempowered.
The elites, predatory by nature, have discarded all restraint. "The state of
disorganization, or anomie, is thus reinforced by the fact that passions are
less disciplined at the very time when they need stronger discipline,"
Durkheim noted of the avarice of the rich.
"It is not for nothing that so many religions have celebrated the benefits
and the moral value of poverty," Durkheim wrote. "This is because, of all
schools, it is the one that best teaches man to restrain himself. By
obliging us to exercise constant discipline over ourselves, it prepares us
to accept collective discipline with docility, while wealth, by exalting the
individual, constantly risks awakening the spirit of rebellion that is the
very fount of immortality."
The political process, as the research by professors Martin Gilens and
Benjamin I. Page underscores, no longer advances the interests of the
average citizen. It has turned the consent of the governed into a cruel
joke. "The central point that emerges from our research is that economic
elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial
independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while mass-based interest
groups and average citizens have little or no independent influence." This
facade of democratic process eviscerates one of the primary social bonds in
a democratic state and abolishes the vital shared belief that citizens have
the power to govern themselves, that government exists to promote and
protect their rights and interests.
The economic structures, like the political structures, have been
reconfigured to mock the belief in a meritocracy and that hard work leads to
a productive and valued role in society. American productivity, as The New
York Times pointed out, has increased 77 percent since 1973 but hourly pay
has grown only 12 percent. If the federal minimum wage was attached to
productivity, the newspaper wrote, it would be more than $20 an hour now,
not $7.25. Some 41.7 million workers, a third of the workforce, earn less
than $12 an hour, and most of them do not have access to employer-sponsored
health insurance. A decade after the 2008 financial meltdown, the Times
wrote, the average middle class family's net worth is more than $40,000
below what it was in 2007. The net worth of black families is down 40
percent, and for Latino families the figure has dropped 46 percent.
The economic disparity and political dysfunction have been exacerbated by
the collapse of the judicial system, as Matt Taibbi writes in his book "The
Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap." There is
aggressive criminalization of the poor while the ruling elites are protected
by high-priced lawyers and non-enforcement or rewriting of laws. Amid
selective enforcement of laws in the ruleless society, the high rollers on
Wall Street and in wealthy enclaves are not prosecuted for possessing and
ingesting illegal drugs but the poor are thrown into prison and must forfeit
all their property for being caught with small amounts of the same drugs.
HSBC, the world's seventh largest bank by total assets, after admitting to
laundering $800 million for Central and South American drug cartels, was
slapped with largely symbolic fines and a deferred prosecution agreement,
which is the legal equivalent of a get-out-of-jail-free card. The poor,
meanwhile, are hounded, arrested and fined for absurdly criminalized
activities such as not mowing their lawns, loitering, selling loose
cigarettes, carrying open containers of alcohol or "obstructing pedestrian
traffic"—which means standing on a sidewalk. These fines are used to fill
state and county budget shortfalls resulting from corporations and the
wealthy fixing the rules to avoid paying meaningful taxes, if they pay taxes
at all. This virtual tax boycott by the rich has broken yet another social
bond, the idea that everyone contributes a significant portion of his or her
income to make the society function.
The elites, who sacrifice nothing for society and are not held accountable
for their criminal behavior, live in what Taibbi calls a "stateless
archipelago." They are empowered to pillage the nation, amass obscene wealth
and wield unchecked political and legal control. The result has been the
obliteration of the primary social bonds that, however biased in favor of
the white majority, held the nation together.
The shattering of these bonds has left tens of millions of Americans adrift.
Society, Durkheim wrote, is no longer "sufficiently present for
individuals." Those cast aside can participate in the society, as Durkheim
wrote, only "through sadness." The self-destructive pathologies that plague
the United States—opioid addiction, morbid obesity, gambling, suicide,
sexual sadism, hate groups and mass shootings—rise out of this anomie. My
new book, "America: The Farewell Tour," is an examination of these
pathologies and the anomie that fuels these self-destructive behaviors.
Durkheim noted that the poor have lower rates of suicide. The poor know the
rules are rigged against them. James Baldwin made much the same point when
he wrote that African-American men are less prone to a midlife crisis than
white men because they are less susceptible to the myth of the American
Dream. Most African-Americans learn very early in life that there are two
sets of rules. But white Americans, because of white supremacy, are more
susceptible to the myth, and therefore more infuriated when that myth is
exposed as a con. This, I suspect, is why nearly all mass shooters and
members of right-wing hate groups, along with a majority of supporters of
Donald Trump, are white men.
Capitalism, Durkheim wrote, is antithetical to creating and sustaining the
relationships that are vital to social bonds. Capitalism rewards those for
whom relationships are transactional and temporary. Relationships under
capitalism are mercenary. They are part of the scheme for personal
self-advancement and require the oily manipulation of others. To advance in
a capitalist system it is necessary to build and then discard a series of
ultimately hollow relationships. These empty relationships—and you can see
them on display at any business gathering—contribute to the collective
anomie and disintegration of social bonds.
Capitalism may cater to a natural desire among many for self-enrichment, but
you don't want this belief system to dominate society. Capitalism rewards
single-minded narcissists and often con artists devoid of empathy and
incapable of remorse. It rewards those focused exclusively on personal gain
and self-aggrandizement. These dedicated capitalists often lack the capacity
to form meaningful bonds, seeing in other people tools for commodification
and exploitation. Once a capitalist class achieves complete control, as it
has in the United States, it dismantles the structures that make social
bonds possible, seeing in them an impediment to profit. The more
concentrated wealth becomes, as with corporate capitalism, the more damage
it inflicts on society, sending jobs to overseas sweatshops and leaving
American workers underemployed or unemployed.
Karl Marx saw alienation as a positive force, one that estranged workers
from the means of production and moved them to question the structures of
power, educate themselves about their exploitation, and revolt. But for
Durkheim this alienation, or anomie, is debilitating. It is, he wrote, "a
collective asthenia" that drains us of energy and will. It manifests itself
in self-loathing. We may indeed understand what is happening around us,
Durkheim argued, but we lack the ability to free ourselves from the despair,
frustration and rage that cripple our lives.
"Our actions require an object outside of themselves," Durkheim wrote. "It
is not because we need to sustain the illusion of some impossible
immortality: it is because it is implicit in our moral being and it cannot
be lost, even partially, without that moral being losing its reason for
existence. There is no need to demonstrate that in such a state of collapse
the slightest cause for depression can easily give rise to desperate acts.
When life is not worth living, everything becomes a pretext for ridding
ourselves of it."
"For individuals are too closely involved in the life of society for it to
be sick without their being affected," Durkheim added. "Its suffering
inevitably becomes theirs."
President Trump is not a product of the theft of the Podesta emails, James
Comey or racism—although he and many who support him are racists—or Russian
bots. Demagogues arise from failed democracies plagued by ruleless-ness and
anomie. They tell an enraged population what it wants to hear and crudely,
to the delight of the betrayed, ridicule the elites who sold them out.
Removing Trump from office without confronting the ruleless-ness and anomie
that define the lives of tens of millions of Americans would do nothing to
restore democracy. In fact, it would probably consolidate the power of a
Christianized fascism that cloaks itself in a cloying piety and false
morality. Vice President Mike Pence, because he is a creature of the
Christian right and has ingested its protofascist ideology, would probably
be worse than Trump if he gained the presidency.
The left, like most critics of Trump, personalizes our decay. It focuses
myopically on Trump, who is the symptom, not the disease. It spits back the
thought-terminating clichés about the Russians stealing our elections while
it refuses to examine the deep wounds within the society, wounds exacerbated
when the Democratic Party under Bill Clinton sold out working men and women.
If we do not heal these wounds, if we do not restore the social bonds
shattered by predatory corporate capitalism, when the next financial crisis
arrives—and it will arrive—this collective anomie will explode. Frightening
demons, harnessing these dark, self-destructive pathologies, will rise from
the depths of the ruleless morass.
* * *
Mr. Fish / Truthdig
The French sociologist Emile Durkheim in his classic book "On Suicide"
examined the disintegration of social bonds that drive individuals and
societies to personal and collective acts of self-destruction. He found that
when social bonds are strong, individuals achieve a healthy balance between
individual initiative and communal solidarity, which he called a
"life-sustaining equilibrium." These individuals and communities have the
lowest rates of suicide. The individuals and societies most susceptible to
self-destruction, he wrote, are those for whom these bonds, this
equilibrium, have been shattered.
Societies are held together by a web of social bonds that give individuals a
sense of being part of a collective and engaged in a project larger than the
self. This collective expresses itself through rituals, such as elections
and democratic participation or an appeal to patriotism, and shared national
beliefs. The bonds provide meaning, a sense of purpose, status and dignity.
They offer psychological protection from impending mortality and the
meaninglessness that comes with being isolated and alone. The shattering of
these bonds plunges individuals into deep psychological distress that leads
ultimately to acts of self-annihilation. Durkheim called this state of
hopelessness and despair anomie, which he defined as "ruleless-ness."
Ruleless-ness means the norms that govern a society and create a sense of
organic solidarity no longer function. The belief, for example, that if we
work hard, obey the law and get a good education we can achieve stable
employment, social status and mobility along with financial security becomes
a lie. The old rules, imperfect and often untrue for poor people of color,
nevertheless were not a complete fiction in the United States. They offered
some Americans—especially those from the white working and middle
class—modest social and economic advancement.
But the capture of political and economic power by the corporate elites,
along with the redirecting of all institutions toward the further
consolidation of their power and wealth, has broken the social bonds that
held the American society together. This rupture has unleashed a widespread
malaise Durkheim would have recognized.
"When society is strongly integrated," he wrote, "it keeps individuals in a
state of dependency, holding them to be in its service and consequently not
permitting them to dispose of themselves as they wish. Society is thus
opposed to them escaping from their obligations towards it through death. …
The bond that attaches them to their common purpose attaches them to life;
and, in any case, the high goal towards which their gaze is turned
alleviates the suffering that they feel from life's troubles. Finally, in a
coherent and vital community, there is a continual exchange of ideas and
feelings from all to each and from each to all which is like mutual moral
support, so that the individual, instead of being reduced to his resources
only, participates in the collective energy and draws on it when his own is
exhausted."
The reconfiguring of American society into an oligarchy and the collapse of
our democratic institutions have left most of the population disempowered.
The elites, predatory by nature, have discarded all restraint. "The state of
disorganization, or anomie, is thus reinforced by the fact that passions are
less disciplined at the very time when they need stronger discipline,"
Durkheim noted of the avarice of the rich.
"It is not for nothing that so many religions have celebrated the benefits
and the moral value of poverty," Durkheim wrote. "This is because, of all
schools, it is the one that best teaches man to restrain himself. By
obliging us to exercise constant discipline over ourselves, it prepares us
to accept collective discipline with docility, while wealth, by exalting the
individual, constantly risks awakening the spirit of rebellion that is the
very fount of immortality."
The political process, as the research by professors Martin Gilens and
Benjamin I. Page underscores, no longer advances the interests of the
average citizen. It has turned the consent of the governed into a cruel
joke. "The central point that emerges from our research is that economic
elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial
independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while mass-based interest
groups and average citizens have little or no independent influence." This
facade of democratic process eviscerates one of the primary social bonds in
a democratic state and abolishes the vital shared belief that citizens have
the power to govern themselves, that government exists to promote and
protect their rights and interests.
The economic structures, like the political structures, have been
reconfigured to mock the belief in a meritocracy and that hard work leads to
a productive and valued role in society. American productivity, as The New
York Times pointed out, has increased 77 percent since 1973 but hourly pay
has grown only 12 percent. If the federal minimum wage was attached to
productivity, the newspaper wrote, it would be more than $20 an hour now,
not $7.25. Some 41.7 million workers, a third of the workforce, earn less
than $12 an hour, and most of them do not have access to employer-sponsored
health insurance. A decade after the 2008 financial meltdown, the Times
wrote, the average middle class family's net worth is more than $40,000
below what it was in 2007. The net worth of black families is down 40
percent, and for Latino families the figure has dropped 46 percent.
The economic disparity and political dysfunction have been exacerbated by
the collapse of the judicial system, as Matt Taibbi writes in his book "The
Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap." There is
aggressive criminalization of the poor while the ruling elites are protected
by high-priced lawyers and non-enforcement or rewriting of laws. Amid
selective enforcement of laws in the ruleless society, the high rollers on
Wall Street and in wealthy enclaves are not prosecuted for possessing and
ingesting illegal drugs but the poor are thrown into prison and must forfeit
all their property for being caught with small amounts of the same drugs.
HSBC, the world's seventh largest bank by total assets, after admitting to
laundering $800 million for Central and South American drug cartels, was
slapped with largely symbolic fines and a deferred prosecution agreement,
which is the legal equivalent of a get-out-of-jail-free card. The poor,
meanwhile, are hounded, arrested and fined for absurdly criminalized
activities such as not mowing their lawns, loitering, selling loose
cigarettes, carrying open containers of alcohol or "obstructing pedestrian
traffic"—which means standing on a sidewalk. These fines are used to fill
state and county budget shortfalls resulting from corporations and the
wealthy fixing the rules to avoid paying meaningful taxes, if they pay taxes
at all. This virtual tax boycott by the rich has broken yet another social
bond, the idea that everyone contributes a significant portion of his or her
income to make the society function.
The elites, who sacrifice nothing for society and are not held accountable
for their criminal behavior, live in what Taibbi calls a "stateless
archipelago." They are empowered to pillage the nation, amass obscene wealth
and wield unchecked political and legal control. The result has been the
obliteration of the primary social bonds that, however biased in favor of
the white majority, held the nation together.
The shattering of these bonds has left tens of millions of Americans adrift.
Society, Durkheim wrote, is no longer "sufficiently present for
individuals." Those cast aside can participate in the society, as Durkheim
wrote, only "through sadness." The self-destructive pathologies that plague
the United States—opioid addiction, morbid obesity, gambling, suicide,
sexual sadism, hate groups and mass shootings—rise out of this anomie. My
new book, "America: The Farewell Tour," is an examination of these
pathologies and the anomie that fuels these self-destructive behaviors.
Durkheim noted that the poor have lower rates of suicide. The poor know the
rules are rigged against them. James Baldwin made much the same point when
he wrote that African-American men are less prone to a midlife crisis than
white men because they are less susceptible to the myth of the American
Dream. Most African-Americans learn very early in life that there are two
sets of rules. But white Americans, because of white supremacy, are more
susceptible to the myth, and therefore more infuriated when that myth is
exposed as a con. This, I suspect, is why nearly all mass shooters and
members of right-wing hate groups, along with a majority of supporters of
Donald Trump, are white men.
Capitalism, Durkheim wrote, is antithetical to creating and sustaining the
relationships that are vital to social bonds. Capitalism rewards those for
whom relationships are transactional and temporary. Relationships under
capitalism are mercenary. They are part of the scheme for personal
self-advancement and require the oily manipulation of others. To advance in
a capitalist system it is necessary to build and then discard a series of
ultimately hollow relationships. These empty relationships—and you can see
them on display at any business gathering—contribute to the collective
anomie and disintegration of social bonds.
Capitalism may cater to a natural desire among many for self-enrichment, but
you don't want this belief system to dominate society. Capitalism rewards
single-minded narcissists and often con artists devoid of empathy and
incapable of remorse. It rewards those focused exclusively on personal gain
and self-aggrandizement. These dedicated capitalists often lack the capacity
to form meaningful bonds, seeing in other people tools for commodification
and exploitation. Once a capitalist class achieves complete control, as it
has in the United States, it dismantles the structures that make social
bonds possible, seeing in them an impediment to profit. The more
concentrated wealth becomes, as with corporate capitalism, the more damage
it inflicts on society, sending jobs to overseas sweatshops and leaving
American workers underemployed or unemployed.
Karl Marx saw alienation as a positive force, one that estranged workers
from the means of production and moved them to question the structures of
power, educate themselves about their exploitation, and revolt. But for
Durkheim this alienation, or anomie, is debilitating. It is, he wrote, "a
collective asthenia" that drains us of energy and will. It manifests itself
in self-loathing. We may indeed understand what is happening around us,
Durkheim argued, but we lack the ability to free ourselves from the despair,
frustration and rage that cripple our lives.
"Our actions require an object outside of themselves," Durkheim wrote. "It
is not because we need to sustain the illusion of some impossible
immortality: it is because it is implicit in our moral being and it cannot
be lost, even partially, without that moral being losing its reason for
existence. There is no need to demonstrate that in such a state of collapse
the slightest cause for depression can easily give rise to desperate acts.
When life is not worth living, everything becomes a pretext for ridding
ourselves of it."
"For individuals are too closely involved in the life of society for it to
be sick without their being affected," Durkheim added. "Its suffering
inevitably becomes theirs."
President Trump is not a product of the theft of the Podesta emails, James
Comey or racism—although he and many who support him are racists—or Russian
bots. Demagogues arise from failed democracies plagued by ruleless-ness and
anomie. They tell an enraged population what it wants to hear and crudely,
to the delight of the betrayed, ridicule the elites who sold them out.
Removing Trump from office without confronting the ruleless-ness and anomie
that define the lives of tens of millions of Americans would do nothing to
restore democracy. In fact, it would probably consolidate the power of a
Christianized fascism that cloaks itself in a cloying piety and false
morality. Vice President Mike Pence, because he is a creature of the
Christian right and has ingested its protofascist ideology, would probably
be worse than Trump if he gained the presidency.
The left, like most critics of Trump, personalizes our decay. It focuses
myopically on Trump, who is the symptom, not the disease. It spits back the
thought-terminating clichés about the Russians stealing our elections while
it refuses to examine the deep wounds within the society, wounds exacerbated
when the Democratic Party under Bill Clinton sold out working men and women.
If we do not heal these wounds, if we do not restore the social bonds
shattered by predatory corporate capitalism, when the next financial crisis
arrives—and it will arrive—this collective anomie will explode. Frightening
demons, harnessing these dark, self-destructive pathologies, will rise from
the depths of the ruleless morass.
* * *
“Fahrenheit 11/9,” the title of Michael Moore’s new film that opens today
FYI:
Michael Moore's "Fahrenheit 11/9" Aims Not at Trump But at Those Who
Created the Conditions That Led to His Rise
Glenn Greenwald
September 21 2018, 1:08 p.m.
2017 AP YEAR END PHOTOS - Donald Trump is sworn in as the 45th
president of the United States by Chief Justice John Roberts, as
Melania Trump and his family
looks on during the 58th Presidential Inauguration at the U.S. Capitol
in Washington, on Jan. 20, 2017. (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky)
Photo: Patrick Semansky/AP
"Fahrenheit 11/9," the title of Michael Moore's new film that opens
today in theaters, is an obvious play on the title of his wildly
profitable Bush-era
"Fahrenheit 9/11," but also a reference to the date of Donald J.
Trump's 2016 election victory. Despite that, Trump himself is a
secondary figure in Moore's
film, which is far more focused on the far more relevant and
interesting questions of what – and, critically, who – created the
climate in which someone
like Trump could occupy the Oval Office.
For that reason alone, Moore's film is highly worthwhile regardless of
where one falls on the political spectrum. The single most significant
defect in
U.S. political discourse is the monomaniacal focus on Trump himself,
as though he is the cause – rather than the by-product and symptom –
of decades-old
systemic American pathologies.
Personalizing and isolating Trump as the principal, even singular,
source of political evil is obfuscating and thus deceitful. By effect,
if not design,
it distracts the population's attention away from the actual
architects of their plight.
This now-dominant framework misleads people into the nationalistic
myth – at once both frightening and comforting – that prior to 2016's
"Fahrenheit 11/9,"
the U.S., though quite imperfect and saddled with "flaws," was
nonetheless a fundamentally kind, benevolent, equitable and healthy
democracy, one which,
by aspiration if not always in action, welcomed immigrants, embraced
diversity, strove for greater economic equality, sought to defend
human rights against
assaults by the world's tyrants, was governed by the sturdy rule of
law rather than the arbitrary whims of rulers, elected fundamentally
decent even if
ideologically misguided men to the White House, and gradually expanded
rather than sadistically abolished opportunity for the world's
neediest.
But suddenly, teaches this fairy tale as ominous music plays in the
background, a villain unlike any we had previously known invaded our
idyllic land,
vandalized our sacred public spaces, degraded our admired halls of
power, threatened our collective values. It was only upon Trump's
assumption of power
that the nation's noble aspirations were repudiated in favor of a far
darker and more sinister vision, one wholly alien to "Who We Are": a
profoundly "un-American"
tapestry of plutocracy, kleptocracy, autocracy, xenophobia, racism,
elite lawlessness, indifference and even aggressive cruelty toward the
most vulnerable
and marginalized.
This myth is not just false but self-evidently so. Yet it persists,
and thrives, because it serves so many powerful interests at once.
Most importantly,
it exonerates, empowers, and elevates the pre-Trump ruling class, now
recast as heroic leaders of the #Resistance and nostalgic symbols of
America's pre-11/9
Goodness.
ellen-instagram-1537551468Screenshot: The Intercept
The lie-fueled destruction of Vietnam and Iraq, the worldwide torture
regime, the 2008 financial collapse and subsequent bailout and
protection of those
responsible for it, the foreign kidnapping and domestic rounding up of
Muslims, the record-setting Obama-era deportations and whistleblower
prosecutions,
the obliteration of Yemen and Libya, the embrace of Mubarak, Sisi, and
Saudi despots, the years of bipartisan subservience to Wall Street at
everyone else's
expense, the full-scale immunity vested on all the elites responsible
for all those crimes – it's all blissfully washed away as we unite to
commemorate
the core decency of America as George Bush gently hands a piece of
candy to Michelle Obama at the funeral of the American War Hero and
Trump-opponent-in-words
John S. McCain, or as hundreds of thousands of us re-tweet the latest
bromide of Americana from the leaders of America's most insidious
security state,
spy and police agencies.
Beyond nationalistic myth-building, there are substantial commercial,
political and reputational benefits to this Trump-centered mythology.
An obsessive
fixation on Trump has single-handedly saved an entire partisan cable
news network from extinction, converting its once ratings-starved,
close-to-being-fired
prime-time hosts into major celebrities with contracts so obscenely
lucrative as to produce envy among most professional athletes or
Hollywood stars.
Resistance grifters exploit fears of Trump to build massive social
media followings that are easily converted into profit from
well-meaning, manipulated
dupes. One rickety, unhinged, rant-filled, speculation-driven Trump
book after the next dominates the best-seller lists, enriching
charlatans and publishing
companies alike: the more conspiratorial, the better. Anti-Trump mania
is big business, and – as the record-shattering first-week sales of
Bob Woodward's
new Trump book demonstrates – there is no end in sight to this profiteering.
All of this is historical revisionism in its crudest and most
malevolent form. It's intended to heap most if not all blame for
systemic, enduring, entrenched
suffering across the country onto a single personality who wielded no
political power until 18 months ago. In doing so, it averts everyone's
eyes away
from the real culprits: the governors, both titled and untitled, of
the establishment ruling class, who for decades have exercised largely
unchecked power
– immune even from election outcomes – and, in many senses, still do.
The message is as clear as the beneficial outcomes: Just look only at
Trump. Keep your eyes fixated on him. Direct all your suffering,
deprivations, fears,
resentments, anger and energy to him and him alone. By doing so,
you'll forget about us – except that we'll join you in your
Trump-centered crusade, even
lead you in it, and you will learn again to love us: the real authors
of your misery.
The overriding value of "Fahrenheit 11/9″ is that it avoids – in fact,
aggressively rejects – this ahistorical manipulation. Moore dutifully
devotes a
few minutes at the start of his film to Trump's rise, and then asks
the question that dominates the rest of it, the one the political and
media establishment
has steadfastly avoided examining except in the most superficial and
self-protective ways: "how the fuck did this happen"?
Knowing that no political work can be commercially successful on a
large-scale without affirming Resistance clichés, Moore dutifully
complies, but only
with the most cursory and fleeting gestures: literally 5 seconds in
the film are devoted to assigning blame for Hillary's loss to Putin
and Comey. With
that duty discharged, he sets his sights on his real targets: the U.S.
political establishment that is ensconced within both parties, along
with the financial
elites who own and control both of them for their own ends.
Moore quickly escapes the dreary and misleading "Democrat v. GOP"
framework that dominates cable news by trumpeting "the largest
political party in America":
those who refuse to vote. He uses this powerful graphic to tell that story:
It's remarkable how little attention is paid to non-voters given that,
as Moore rightly notes, they form America's largest political faction.
Part of why
they're ignored is moralism: those who don't vote deserve no attention
as they have only themselves to blame.
But the much more consequential factor is the danger for both parties
from delving too deeply into this subject. After all, voter apathy
arises when people
conclude that their votes don't change their lives, that election
outcomes improve nothing, that the small amount of time spent waiting
in line at a voting
booth isn't worth the effort because of how inconsequential it is.
What greater indictment of the two political parties can one imagine
than that?
One of the most illuminating pieces of reporting about the 2016
election is also, not coincidentally, one of the most ignored:
interviews by the New York
Times with white and African-American working-class voters in
Milwaukee who refused to vote and – even knowing that Trump won
Wisconsin, and thus the presidency,
largely because of their decision – don't regret it. "Milwaukee is
tired. Both of them were terrible. They never do anything for us
anyway," the article
quotes an African-American barber, justifying his decision not to vote
in 2016 after voting twice for Obama.
Moore develops the same point, even more powerfully, about his home
state of Michigan, which – like Wisconsin – Trump also won after Obama
won it twice.
In one of the most powerful and devastating passages from the film –
indeed, of any political documentary seen in quite some time –
"Fahrenheit 11/9″ takes
us in real-time through the indescribably shameful water crisis of
Flint, the criminal cover-up of it by GOP Governor Rick Snyder, and
the physical and
emotional suffering endured by its poor, voiceless, and overwhelmingly
black residents.
After many months of abuse, of being lied to, of being poisoned, Flint
residents, in May, 2016, finally had a cause for hope: President Obama
announced
that he would visit Flint to address the water crisis. As Air Force
One majestically lands, Flint residents rejoice, believing that
genuine concern, political
salvation, and drinkable water had finally arrived.
Exactly the opposite happened. Obama delivered a speech in which he
not only appeared to minimize, but to mock, concerns of Flint
residents over the lead
levels in their water, capped off by a grotesquely cynical political
stunt where he flamboyantly insisted on having a glass of filtered tap
water that
he then pretended to drink, but in fact only used to wet his lips,
ingesting none of it.
President Barack Obama drinks water as he speaks at Flint Northwestern
High School in Flint, Mich., Wednesday, May 4, 2016, about the ongoing
water crisis.
(AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster)
President Barack Obama appears to drink water as he speaks at Flint
Northwestern High School in Flint, Mich., Wednesday, May 4, 2016,
about the ongoing
water crisis.
Photo: Carolyn Kaster/AP
A friendly meeting with Gov. Snyder after that – during which Obama
repeated the same water stunt – provided the GOP state administration
in Michigan with
ample Obama quotes to exploit to prove the problem was fixed, and for
Flint residents, it was the final insult. "When President Obama came
here," an African-American
community leader in Flint tells Moore, "he was my President. When he
left, he wasn't."
Like the unregretful non-voters of Milwaukee, the collapsed hope Obama
left in his wake as he departed Flint becomes a key metaphor in
Moore's hands for
understanding Trump's rise. Moore suggests to John Podesta, who seems
to agree, that Hillary lost Michigan because, as in Wisconsin, voters,
in part after
seeing what Obama did in Flint, concluded it was no longer worth
voting. As Moore narrates:
The autocrat, the strongman, only succeeds when the vast majority of
the population decides they've seen enough, and give up. . . . . The
worst thing
that President Obama did was pave the way for Donald Trump. Because
Donald Trump did not just fall from the sky. The road to him was
decades in the making.
The long, painful, extraordinarily compelling journey through Flint is
accompanied by an equally illuminating immersion in West Virginia, one
that brings
into further vivid clarity the misery, deprivation, and repression
that drove so many people – for good reason – away from the political
establishment
and into the arms of anyone promising to destroy it: from the 2008
version of Obama to Bernie Sanders to Jill Stein to Donald Trump to
abstaining entirely
from voting.
We meet the teachers who led the inspiring state-wide strike, some of
whom are paid so little that they are on food stamps. We hear how
their own union
leaders tried (and failed) first to prevent the strike, then
prematurely tried (and failed) to end it with trivial concessions.
We meet Richard Ojeda, an Iraq and Afghanistan War veteran, Democratic
State Senator, and current Congressional candidate, who tells Moore:
"Our town is
dying. One out of every four homes is in a dilapidated state . . . . I
can take you five minutes from here and show you where our kids have
it worse than
the kids I saw in Iraq and Afghanistan." Needless to say, all of that
began and took root long before Donald Trump descended the Trump Tower
escalator
in 2015.
To Moore's credit, virtually no powerful U.S. factions escape
indictment in "Fahrenheit 11/9." The villains of Flint and West
Virginia are two Republican
governors. But their accomplices, every step of the way, are
Democrats. This, Moore ultimately argues, is precisely why people had
lost faith in the ability
of elections generally, and the Democratic Party specifically, to
improve their lives.
And in stark and impressive contrast to the endless intra-Democrat war
over the primacy of race versus class, Moore adeptly demonstrates that
the overwhelmingly
African-American population of Flint and the largely white
impoverished West Virginians have far more in common than they have
differences: from the methods
of their repression to those responsible for it. "Fahrenheit 11/9″
does not shy away from, but unflinchingly confronts, the questions of
race and class
in America and ultimately concludes – and proves – that they are
inextricably intertwined, that a discussion of (and solution to) one
is impossible without
a discussion of (and solution to) the other.
No examination of voter apathy and the perceived irrelevance of
elections would be complete without an ample study of the 2016
Democratic Party primary
process that led to Hillary Clinton's ultimately doomed nomination.
And this is another area where Moore excels. Focusing on one
little-known but amazing
fact – that Bernie Sanders won all 55 counties over Clinton in the
West Virginia primary, beating her by 16 points in a state where she
crushed Obama in
2008, yet, at the Democratic Convention, somehow ended up with fewer
delegates than she received – Moore interviews a Sanders supporter in
West Virginia
about the message this bizarre discrepancy sent.
Moore asks: "This just tells people to stay home?" The voter replies:
"I think so." Moore offers his own conclusion through narration: "When
the people
are continually told that their vote doesn't count, that it doesn't
matter, and they end up believing that, the loss of faith in our
democracy becomes
our deathknell."
With all of this harrowing and depressing evidence compiled, it
becomes easier and easier to understand why Americans are either
receptive to anyone vowing
to dismantle rather than uphold the system they have rightly come to
despise, or just abstain altogether. And it becomes even easier to
understand why
the guardians of that system view Trump as the most valuable weapon
they could have ever imagined wielding: one that allows them to direct
everyone's attention
away from the systemic damage they have wrought for decades.
Broadly speaking, there are three kinds of political films. There are
those whose filmmaker fully shares your political outlook, mentality
and ideology,
and thus produces a film that, in each scene, validates and
strengthens your views. There are those by filmmakers whose politics
are so anathema to yours
that you find no value in the film and are only repelled by it. Then
there are those that do a combination of all those things, causing you
to love parts,
hate other parts, and feel unsure about the rest.
Without doubt, "Fahrenheit 11/9″ falls into the latter category. It's
literally impossible to imagine someone who would love, or hate, all
of the scenes
and messages of this film.
Indeed, for all the praise I just heaped on it, there were several
parts I found banal, meandering, misguided and, in one case, downright
loathsome: a
lurid, pointless, reckless, and deeply offensive digression into the
long-standing, adolescent #Resistance theme that Trump wants to have
sex with, if
he has not in fact already had sex with, his own daughter, Ivanka.
What makes the inclusion of this trash all the more tragic is that it
comes very near
the beginning of the film, and thus will almost certainly repel – for
good reasons – large numbers of people, including more reluctant and
open-minded
Trump supporters, who would be otherwise quite receptive to the
important parts of the film that constitute its crux.
Then there is the last 20 minutes, devoted to a direct comparison
between Trump and Hitler. I am not someone who opposes the use of
Nazism as a window
for understanding contemporary political developments. To the
contrary, I've written previously about how anti-intellectual and
dangerous is the now-standard
internet decree (inaccurately referred to as Godwin's Law) that Nazi
comparisons are and should be off-limits.
As the Nuremberg prosecutors (one of whom appears in the film)
themselves pointed out during the post-war trial of Nazis: those
tribunals were not primarily
about punishing war criminals but about establishing principles to
prevent future occurrences. There are real and substantive lessons to
be drawn from
the rise of Hitler when it comes to understanding the ascension of
contemporary global movements of authoritarianism, and this last part
of "Fahrenheit
11/9″ features some of those in a reasonably responsible and informative manner.
Ultimately, though, this last part of the film is marred by cheap and
manipulative stunts, the worst of which is combining video of a Hitler
speech overlaid
with audio of a Trump speech, with no real effort made to justify this
equation. Comparing any political figure to someone who oversaw the
genocide of
millions of human beings requires great care, sensitivity, and
intellectual sophistication, and there is sadly little of that in
Moore's invocation (which
at times feels like exploitation) of Nazism.
There are, without doubt, people who will most love the exact parts of
the film I most disliked. And those same people will likely hate many
of the parts
I found most compelling. But that's precisely why Moore's film is so
worth your time no matter your ideology, so worth enduring even the
parts that you
will find disagreeable or even infuriating.
Because – in contrast to the endless armies of cable news hosts,
Twitter pundits, #Resistance grifters, and party operatives, all of
whom are vested due
to self-interest in perpetuating the same deceitful, simple-minded and
obfuscating narrative – Moore, for most of this film, is at least
trying. And what
he's trying is of unparalleled importance: not to take the cheap route
of exclusively denouncing Trump but to take the more complicated,
challenging, and
productive route of understanding who and what created the climate in
which Trump could thrive.
Embedded in the instruction of those who want to you focus exclusively
on Trump is an insidious and toxic message: namely, removing Trump
will cure, or
at least mitigate, the acute threats he poses. That is a fraud, and
Moore knows it. Unless and until the roots of these pathologies are
identified and
addressed, we are certain to have more Trumps: in fact, more effective
and more dangerous Trumps, along with more potent Dutertes, and more
Brexits, and
more Bolsonaros and more LePens.
Moore could have easily made a film that just channeled and fueled
standard anti-Trump fears and animus and – like the others who are
doing that – made
lots of money, been widely hailed, and won lots of accolades. He chose
instead to dig deeper, to be more honest, to take the harder route,
and deserves
real credit for that.
He did that, it seems clear, because he knows that the only way to
move forward is not just to reject right-wing demagoguery but also the
sham that masquerades
as its #Resistance. As Moore himself put it: "sometimes it takes a
Donald Trump to get us to realize that we have to get rid of the whole
rotten system
that gave us Trump."
That's exactly the truth that the guardians of that "whole rotten
system" want most to conceal. Moore's film is devoted, at its core, to
unearthing it.
That's why, despite its flaws, some of them serious ones, the film
deserves wide attention and discussion among everyone across the
political spectrum.
Michael Moore's "Fahrenheit 11/9" Aims Not at Trump But at Those Who
Created the Conditions That Led to His Rise
Glenn Greenwald
September 21 2018, 1:08 p.m.
2017 AP YEAR END PHOTOS - Donald Trump is sworn in as the 45th
president of the United States by Chief Justice John Roberts, as
Melania Trump and his family
looks on during the 58th Presidential Inauguration at the U.S. Capitol
in Washington, on Jan. 20, 2017. (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky)
Photo: Patrick Semansky/AP
"Fahrenheit 11/9," the title of Michael Moore's new film that opens
today in theaters, is an obvious play on the title of his wildly
profitable Bush-era
"Fahrenheit 9/11," but also a reference to the date of Donald J.
Trump's 2016 election victory. Despite that, Trump himself is a
secondary figure in Moore's
film, which is far more focused on the far more relevant and
interesting questions of what – and, critically, who – created the
climate in which someone
like Trump could occupy the Oval Office.
For that reason alone, Moore's film is highly worthwhile regardless of
where one falls on the political spectrum. The single most significant
defect in
U.S. political discourse is the monomaniacal focus on Trump himself,
as though he is the cause – rather than the by-product and symptom –
of decades-old
systemic American pathologies.
Personalizing and isolating Trump as the principal, even singular,
source of political evil is obfuscating and thus deceitful. By effect,
if not design,
it distracts the population's attention away from the actual
architects of their plight.
This now-dominant framework misleads people into the nationalistic
myth – at once both frightening and comforting – that prior to 2016's
"Fahrenheit 11/9,"
the U.S., though quite imperfect and saddled with "flaws," was
nonetheless a fundamentally kind, benevolent, equitable and healthy
democracy, one which,
by aspiration if not always in action, welcomed immigrants, embraced
diversity, strove for greater economic equality, sought to defend
human rights against
assaults by the world's tyrants, was governed by the sturdy rule of
law rather than the arbitrary whims of rulers, elected fundamentally
decent even if
ideologically misguided men to the White House, and gradually expanded
rather than sadistically abolished opportunity for the world's
neediest.
But suddenly, teaches this fairy tale as ominous music plays in the
background, a villain unlike any we had previously known invaded our
idyllic land,
vandalized our sacred public spaces, degraded our admired halls of
power, threatened our collective values. It was only upon Trump's
assumption of power
that the nation's noble aspirations were repudiated in favor of a far
darker and more sinister vision, one wholly alien to "Who We Are": a
profoundly "un-American"
tapestry of plutocracy, kleptocracy, autocracy, xenophobia, racism,
elite lawlessness, indifference and even aggressive cruelty toward the
most vulnerable
and marginalized.
This myth is not just false but self-evidently so. Yet it persists,
and thrives, because it serves so many powerful interests at once.
Most importantly,
it exonerates, empowers, and elevates the pre-Trump ruling class, now
recast as heroic leaders of the #Resistance and nostalgic symbols of
America's pre-11/9
Goodness.
ellen-instagram-1537551468Screenshot: The Intercept
The lie-fueled destruction of Vietnam and Iraq, the worldwide torture
regime, the 2008 financial collapse and subsequent bailout and
protection of those
responsible for it, the foreign kidnapping and domestic rounding up of
Muslims, the record-setting Obama-era deportations and whistleblower
prosecutions,
the obliteration of Yemen and Libya, the embrace of Mubarak, Sisi, and
Saudi despots, the years of bipartisan subservience to Wall Street at
everyone else's
expense, the full-scale immunity vested on all the elites responsible
for all those crimes – it's all blissfully washed away as we unite to
commemorate
the core decency of America as George Bush gently hands a piece of
candy to Michelle Obama at the funeral of the American War Hero and
Trump-opponent-in-words
John S. McCain, or as hundreds of thousands of us re-tweet the latest
bromide of Americana from the leaders of America's most insidious
security state,
spy and police agencies.
Beyond nationalistic myth-building, there are substantial commercial,
political and reputational benefits to this Trump-centered mythology.
An obsessive
fixation on Trump has single-handedly saved an entire partisan cable
news network from extinction, converting its once ratings-starved,
close-to-being-fired
prime-time hosts into major celebrities with contracts so obscenely
lucrative as to produce envy among most professional athletes or
Hollywood stars.
Resistance grifters exploit fears of Trump to build massive social
media followings that are easily converted into profit from
well-meaning, manipulated
dupes. One rickety, unhinged, rant-filled, speculation-driven Trump
book after the next dominates the best-seller lists, enriching
charlatans and publishing
companies alike: the more conspiratorial, the better. Anti-Trump mania
is big business, and – as the record-shattering first-week sales of
Bob Woodward's
new Trump book demonstrates – there is no end in sight to this profiteering.
All of this is historical revisionism in its crudest and most
malevolent form. It's intended to heap most if not all blame for
systemic, enduring, entrenched
suffering across the country onto a single personality who wielded no
political power until 18 months ago. In doing so, it averts everyone's
eyes away
from the real culprits: the governors, both titled and untitled, of
the establishment ruling class, who for decades have exercised largely
unchecked power
– immune even from election outcomes – and, in many senses, still do.
The message is as clear as the beneficial outcomes: Just look only at
Trump. Keep your eyes fixated on him. Direct all your suffering,
deprivations, fears,
resentments, anger and energy to him and him alone. By doing so,
you'll forget about us – except that we'll join you in your
Trump-centered crusade, even
lead you in it, and you will learn again to love us: the real authors
of your misery.
The overriding value of "Fahrenheit 11/9″ is that it avoids – in fact,
aggressively rejects – this ahistorical manipulation. Moore dutifully
devotes a
few minutes at the start of his film to Trump's rise, and then asks
the question that dominates the rest of it, the one the political and
media establishment
has steadfastly avoided examining except in the most superficial and
self-protective ways: "how the fuck did this happen"?
Knowing that no political work can be commercially successful on a
large-scale without affirming Resistance clichés, Moore dutifully
complies, but only
with the most cursory and fleeting gestures: literally 5 seconds in
the film are devoted to assigning blame for Hillary's loss to Putin
and Comey. With
that duty discharged, he sets his sights on his real targets: the U.S.
political establishment that is ensconced within both parties, along
with the financial
elites who own and control both of them for their own ends.
Moore quickly escapes the dreary and misleading "Democrat v. GOP"
framework that dominates cable news by trumpeting "the largest
political party in America":
those who refuse to vote. He uses this powerful graphic to tell that story:
It's remarkable how little attention is paid to non-voters given that,
as Moore rightly notes, they form America's largest political faction.
Part of why
they're ignored is moralism: those who don't vote deserve no attention
as they have only themselves to blame.
But the much more consequential factor is the danger for both parties
from delving too deeply into this subject. After all, voter apathy
arises when people
conclude that their votes don't change their lives, that election
outcomes improve nothing, that the small amount of time spent waiting
in line at a voting
booth isn't worth the effort because of how inconsequential it is.
What greater indictment of the two political parties can one imagine
than that?
One of the most illuminating pieces of reporting about the 2016
election is also, not coincidentally, one of the most ignored:
interviews by the New York
Times with white and African-American working-class voters in
Milwaukee who refused to vote and – even knowing that Trump won
Wisconsin, and thus the presidency,
largely because of their decision – don't regret it. "Milwaukee is
tired. Both of them were terrible. They never do anything for us
anyway," the article
quotes an African-American barber, justifying his decision not to vote
in 2016 after voting twice for Obama.
Moore develops the same point, even more powerfully, about his home
state of Michigan, which – like Wisconsin – Trump also won after Obama
won it twice.
In one of the most powerful and devastating passages from the film –
indeed, of any political documentary seen in quite some time –
"Fahrenheit 11/9″ takes
us in real-time through the indescribably shameful water crisis of
Flint, the criminal cover-up of it by GOP Governor Rick Snyder, and
the physical and
emotional suffering endured by its poor, voiceless, and overwhelmingly
black residents.
After many months of abuse, of being lied to, of being poisoned, Flint
residents, in May, 2016, finally had a cause for hope: President Obama
announced
that he would visit Flint to address the water crisis. As Air Force
One majestically lands, Flint residents rejoice, believing that
genuine concern, political
salvation, and drinkable water had finally arrived.
Exactly the opposite happened. Obama delivered a speech in which he
not only appeared to minimize, but to mock, concerns of Flint
residents over the lead
levels in their water, capped off by a grotesquely cynical political
stunt where he flamboyantly insisted on having a glass of filtered tap
water that
he then pretended to drink, but in fact only used to wet his lips,
ingesting none of it.
President Barack Obama drinks water as he speaks at Flint Northwestern
High School in Flint, Mich., Wednesday, May 4, 2016, about the ongoing
water crisis.
(AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster)
President Barack Obama appears to drink water as he speaks at Flint
Northwestern High School in Flint, Mich., Wednesday, May 4, 2016,
about the ongoing
water crisis.
Photo: Carolyn Kaster/AP
A friendly meeting with Gov. Snyder after that – during which Obama
repeated the same water stunt – provided the GOP state administration
in Michigan with
ample Obama quotes to exploit to prove the problem was fixed, and for
Flint residents, it was the final insult. "When President Obama came
here," an African-American
community leader in Flint tells Moore, "he was my President. When he
left, he wasn't."
Like the unregretful non-voters of Milwaukee, the collapsed hope Obama
left in his wake as he departed Flint becomes a key metaphor in
Moore's hands for
understanding Trump's rise. Moore suggests to John Podesta, who seems
to agree, that Hillary lost Michigan because, as in Wisconsin, voters,
in part after
seeing what Obama did in Flint, concluded it was no longer worth
voting. As Moore narrates:
The autocrat, the strongman, only succeeds when the vast majority of
the population decides they've seen enough, and give up. . . . . The
worst thing
that President Obama did was pave the way for Donald Trump. Because
Donald Trump did not just fall from the sky. The road to him was
decades in the making.
The long, painful, extraordinarily compelling journey through Flint is
accompanied by an equally illuminating immersion in West Virginia, one
that brings
into further vivid clarity the misery, deprivation, and repression
that drove so many people – for good reason – away from the political
establishment
and into the arms of anyone promising to destroy it: from the 2008
version of Obama to Bernie Sanders to Jill Stein to Donald Trump to
abstaining entirely
from voting.
We meet the teachers who led the inspiring state-wide strike, some of
whom are paid so little that they are on food stamps. We hear how
their own union
leaders tried (and failed) first to prevent the strike, then
prematurely tried (and failed) to end it with trivial concessions.
We meet Richard Ojeda, an Iraq and Afghanistan War veteran, Democratic
State Senator, and current Congressional candidate, who tells Moore:
"Our town is
dying. One out of every four homes is in a dilapidated state . . . . I
can take you five minutes from here and show you where our kids have
it worse than
the kids I saw in Iraq and Afghanistan." Needless to say, all of that
began and took root long before Donald Trump descended the Trump Tower
escalator
in 2015.
To Moore's credit, virtually no powerful U.S. factions escape
indictment in "Fahrenheit 11/9." The villains of Flint and West
Virginia are two Republican
governors. But their accomplices, every step of the way, are
Democrats. This, Moore ultimately argues, is precisely why people had
lost faith in the ability
of elections generally, and the Democratic Party specifically, to
improve their lives.
And in stark and impressive contrast to the endless intra-Democrat war
over the primacy of race versus class, Moore adeptly demonstrates that
the overwhelmingly
African-American population of Flint and the largely white
impoverished West Virginians have far more in common than they have
differences: from the methods
of their repression to those responsible for it. "Fahrenheit 11/9″
does not shy away from, but unflinchingly confronts, the questions of
race and class
in America and ultimately concludes – and proves – that they are
inextricably intertwined, that a discussion of (and solution to) one
is impossible without
a discussion of (and solution to) the other.
No examination of voter apathy and the perceived irrelevance of
elections would be complete without an ample study of the 2016
Democratic Party primary
process that led to Hillary Clinton's ultimately doomed nomination.
And this is another area where Moore excels. Focusing on one
little-known but amazing
fact – that Bernie Sanders won all 55 counties over Clinton in the
West Virginia primary, beating her by 16 points in a state where she
crushed Obama in
2008, yet, at the Democratic Convention, somehow ended up with fewer
delegates than she received – Moore interviews a Sanders supporter in
West Virginia
about the message this bizarre discrepancy sent.
Moore asks: "This just tells people to stay home?" The voter replies:
"I think so." Moore offers his own conclusion through narration: "When
the people
are continually told that their vote doesn't count, that it doesn't
matter, and they end up believing that, the loss of faith in our
democracy becomes
our deathknell."
With all of this harrowing and depressing evidence compiled, it
becomes easier and easier to understand why Americans are either
receptive to anyone vowing
to dismantle rather than uphold the system they have rightly come to
despise, or just abstain altogether. And it becomes even easier to
understand why
the guardians of that system view Trump as the most valuable weapon
they could have ever imagined wielding: one that allows them to direct
everyone's attention
away from the systemic damage they have wrought for decades.
Broadly speaking, there are three kinds of political films. There are
those whose filmmaker fully shares your political outlook, mentality
and ideology,
and thus produces a film that, in each scene, validates and
strengthens your views. There are those by filmmakers whose politics
are so anathema to yours
that you find no value in the film and are only repelled by it. Then
there are those that do a combination of all those things, causing you
to love parts,
hate other parts, and feel unsure about the rest.
Without doubt, "Fahrenheit 11/9″ falls into the latter category. It's
literally impossible to imagine someone who would love, or hate, all
of the scenes
and messages of this film.
Indeed, for all the praise I just heaped on it, there were several
parts I found banal, meandering, misguided and, in one case, downright
loathsome: a
lurid, pointless, reckless, and deeply offensive digression into the
long-standing, adolescent #Resistance theme that Trump wants to have
sex with, if
he has not in fact already had sex with, his own daughter, Ivanka.
What makes the inclusion of this trash all the more tragic is that it
comes very near
the beginning of the film, and thus will almost certainly repel – for
good reasons – large numbers of people, including more reluctant and
open-minded
Trump supporters, who would be otherwise quite receptive to the
important parts of the film that constitute its crux.
Then there is the last 20 minutes, devoted to a direct comparison
between Trump and Hitler. I am not someone who opposes the use of
Nazism as a window
for understanding contemporary political developments. To the
contrary, I've written previously about how anti-intellectual and
dangerous is the now-standard
internet decree (inaccurately referred to as Godwin's Law) that Nazi
comparisons are and should be off-limits.
As the Nuremberg prosecutors (one of whom appears in the film)
themselves pointed out during the post-war trial of Nazis: those
tribunals were not primarily
about punishing war criminals but about establishing principles to
prevent future occurrences. There are real and substantive lessons to
be drawn from
the rise of Hitler when it comes to understanding the ascension of
contemporary global movements of authoritarianism, and this last part
of "Fahrenheit
11/9″ features some of those in a reasonably responsible and informative manner.
Ultimately, though, this last part of the film is marred by cheap and
manipulative stunts, the worst of which is combining video of a Hitler
speech overlaid
with audio of a Trump speech, with no real effort made to justify this
equation. Comparing any political figure to someone who oversaw the
genocide of
millions of human beings requires great care, sensitivity, and
intellectual sophistication, and there is sadly little of that in
Moore's invocation (which
at times feels like exploitation) of Nazism.
There are, without doubt, people who will most love the exact parts of
the film I most disliked. And those same people will likely hate many
of the parts
I found most compelling. But that's precisely why Moore's film is so
worth your time no matter your ideology, so worth enduring even the
parts that you
will find disagreeable or even infuriating.
Because – in contrast to the endless armies of cable news hosts,
Twitter pundits, #Resistance grifters, and party operatives, all of
whom are vested due
to self-interest in perpetuating the same deceitful, simple-minded and
obfuscating narrative – Moore, for most of this film, is at least
trying. And what
he's trying is of unparalleled importance: not to take the cheap route
of exclusively denouncing Trump but to take the more complicated,
challenging, and
productive route of understanding who and what created the climate in
which Trump could thrive.
Embedded in the instruction of those who want to you focus exclusively
on Trump is an insidious and toxic message: namely, removing Trump
will cure, or
at least mitigate, the acute threats he poses. That is a fraud, and
Moore knows it. Unless and until the roots of these pathologies are
identified and
addressed, we are certain to have more Trumps: in fact, more effective
and more dangerous Trumps, along with more potent Dutertes, and more
Brexits, and
more Bolsonaros and more LePens.
Moore could have easily made a film that just channeled and fueled
standard anti-Trump fears and animus and – like the others who are
doing that – made
lots of money, been widely hailed, and won lots of accolades. He chose
instead to dig deeper, to be more honest, to take the harder route,
and deserves
real credit for that.
He did that, it seems clear, because he knows that the only way to
move forward is not just to reject right-wing demagoguery but also the
sham that masquerades
as its #Resistance. As Moore himself put it: "sometimes it takes a
Donald Trump to get us to realize that we have to get rid of the whole
rotten system
that gave us Trump."
That's exactly the truth that the guardians of that "whole rotten
system" want most to conceal. Moore's film is devoted, at its core, to
unearthing it.
That's why, despite its flaws, some of them serious ones, the film
deserves wide attention and discussion among everyone across the
political spectrum.
Friday, September 14, 2018
Re: [blind-democracy] Re: "No Blind Need Apply"...sign on Trump Tower
Carl:
I doubt that Mr. Evans can conceive anything more politically complicated than Islamic Fundamentalism!
Richard
Sent from my iPhone
> On Sep 14, 2018, at 9:00 AM, Carl Jarvis <carjar82@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Mostafa and Anyone Else Interested in Defining What a Nation is.
> You wrote, "So, nations are mostly disingenuous until things go
> against their private interest."
> Once again I ask you, what are you referring to when you say, nations?
> The People? The Land lying between artificial borders?
> In my simplified view, a nation exists only so long as it is able to
> defend its artificial borders, either by superior military force or by
> agreements negotiated with its neighboring nations. But within these
> artificial borders there exist a variety of interests that separate
> the citizens of that nation into self interest groups. These groups
> struggle among themselves for dominance. Either one, or a coalition
> take control and set the policies and write and enforce their laws.
> The nation is then seen by other nations in the image of those who
> make up the Ruling Class.
> Within the nation however, a variety of struggles go on. Over time or
> by external force, a nation's Ruling Class changes. How the new face
> of the nation is viewed reflects how its new Ruling Class impacts
> those other nations that must live with it. For example the American
> view of China, in my lifetime, changed from a picture of simple
> peasant farmers, so passive that the aggressive Nipponese(Japanese)
> overran them, to a belief that China had turned into a mindless
> Communist nation, and to our current picture of China being
> our(America's Ruling Classes) greatest competitor.
> The United States, at the time victory was declared from England, was
> ruled by the Landed Gentry. George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and
> the people gathered to draft the Constitution were Land Owners,
> Gentlemen Farmers, those men whose wealth allowed them some time to
> give thought to how these Colonies would shoulder their way into the
> World Community.
> As World conditions changed, so did the United States of America's
> Ruling Class. From Land Holders, to Money Lenders. From Money
> Lenders to Military/Industrial Masters.
> Two things that I believe have gone unchanged as this nation expanded
> and became a world threat, first and foremost, the Ruling Class has
> always behaved as an Empire, regardless of who composed the Ruling
> Class. Secondly, the vast majority of Americans, the Working Class
> that did the dirty work of building and maintaining this Empire, this
> Working Class did not change in its basic nature. This major portion
> of Americans have been held in place through manipulation, deception,
> and outright lies. The Ruling Class has controlled its Working Class
> by dividing it into factions, and then turning those factions on one
> another. It has even set up its government as a Straw Man. It has
> successfully divided the Working Class into Classes, the Upper Class,
> the Middle Class, the Working Class, and the Lower Class. The Ruling
> Class bestows various rewards upon these Classes, depending upon how
> well they serve their Masters.
> From this simple look, we could continue into looking at the complex
> workings within each of these Classes, and expand to to explore the
> complexities of the current American Corporate Empire.
> But all of that is an effort in futility. Until we come to realize
> that we are all brothers and sisters, different but One People, we are
> doomed to continue down this path of self destruction. Artificial
> Borders, Classes, Nationalities, Male/Female/Other, Elder, Youth, Rich
> or Poor, we are all Brothers and Sisters. As long as you, Mostafa,
> see me, Carl Jarvis, as an American rather than as a Brother, we will
> continue traveling down the wrong road. As long as either of us place
> our trust in some "Great Being" rather than looking within ourselves,
> we are doomed.
> It's ironic. We rail against the Evils of others, while defending to
> the death the very Forces that are killing us all.
>
> Cordially Yours,
> Carl Jarvis
>
>> On 9/14/18, Mostafa <ebob824@gmail.com> wrote:
>> Well, each and everyone knows for sure what it means to be an American
>> citizen settling abroad in the current circumstances. Americans chose
>> for themselves. No one coerced them to go to Iraq. I knew it was
>> Bush's decision however, he didn't go there on his own. You may look
>> at polls prior to launching airstrikes on Iraq versus what people said
>> afterward. Double standard is practiced all the time. Likewise are
>> Egyptians, when Sisi committed the ungracious coup against an elected
>> government, people stood with him in his oppression. Now, people hate
>> him not because he murders and imprisons innocents, but because their
>> economic status has substantially exacerbated in his era. So, nations
>> are mostly disingenuous until things go against their private
>> interest. All what we think of as people is food, proper job and
>> shelter. People do not chant anti government sentiment because it is
>> corrupted or because it imposes subjection. We only despise them when
>> things worsen on our side. Note though, I do not fend for the
>> brotherhood party, I just destined to utter the truth.
>>
>>
>>
>> Mustafa
>>
>>
>>> On 9/14/18, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@optonline.net> wrote:
>>> That's true. There are blind people who are Trump supporters. They are
>>> misguided. All of the working people and middle income people who voted
>>> for
>>> him and who still support him are deluded, and they don't understand what
>>> is
>>> in their own interests. And it isn't only Evangelical Christians.
>>> However,
>>> if the Democratic Party had been concerned about the needs of the
>>> majority
>>> of people in the US, rather than with pleasing its wealthy supporters,
>>> Bill
>>> Clinton would have been a different kind of President. We wouldn't have
>>> had
>>> a George W. Bush. We wouldn't have had a 9/11 attack or an Iraq war. Our
>>> history might have been very different and Donald Trump would never have
>>> had
>>> a chance to be elected.
>>>
>>> Miriam
>>>
>>> -----Original Message-----
>>> From: blind-democracy-bounce@freelists.org
>>> <blind-democracy-bounce@freelists.org> On Behalf Of Mostafa
>>> Sent: Thursday, September 13, 2018 4:59 PM
>>> To: blind-democracy <blind-democracy@freelists.org>; dselset@aol.com;
>>> Jennifer Ford <dandjford88@live.com>
>>> Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: "No Blind Need Apply"...sign on Trump
>>> Tower
>>>
>>> Miriam, Donald Trump is broadly idolised among white southern
>>> evangelists.
>>> There are plenty of pro Trump protagonists within blind faith folks.
>>>
>>>> On 9/13/18, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@optonline.net> wrote:
>>>> I would love to forward this to every blindness list I'm on for all
>>>> those blind Trump supporters to read. But I just don't feel like
>>>> dealing with the fallout. If you only knew what hysteria there was on
>>>> the BARD Talk list because of the announcement of Woodward's book,
>>>> Fear, first being on Bookshare and then yesterday, on BARD. I have my
>>>> own criticisms of all these books but these people just refuse to
>>>> believe what the books report. First it was Michael Wolff's book, now
>>>> this
>>>> one.
>>>>
>>>> Miriam
>>>>
>>>> -----Original Message-----
>>>> From: blind-democracy-bounce@freelists.org
>>>> <blind-democracy-bounce@freelists.org> On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
>>>> Sent: Thursday, September 13, 2018 10:56 AM
>>>> To: blind-democracy <blind-democracy@freelists.org>
>>>> Cc: delores selset <dselset@aol.com>; Jennifer Ford
>>>> <dandjford88@live.com>
>>>> Subject: [blind-democracy] "No Blind Need Apply"...sign on Trump Tower
>>>>
>>>> It would be interesting to peek into Donald Trumps mind and see what
>>>> he thinks of America's Blind Citizens. The following note could give
>>>> us a hint.
>>>> Carl Jarvis
>>>>
>>>> President Donald Trump allegedly ordered an architect not to include
>>>> braille in Trump Tower elevator panels because "no blind people" would
>>>> live in his building—even after being informed that excluding the
>>>> tactile writing system is against federal law.
>>>> The alleged interaction was recounted by Barbara Res, who led
>>>> construction at the Trump Organization, in an opinion piece in the New
>>>> York Daily News on Wednesday.
>>>> "What's this?" Trump, noticing the small raised dots, reportedly asked
>>>> the architect who went to his office to show what the residential
>>>> elevator interiors would look like.
>>>> "Braille," the architect responded.
>>>> Trump apparently demanded that the architect take the feature out.
>>>> "We can't," the architect replied. "It's the law."
>>>> "Get rid of the [expletive] braille. No blind people are going to live
>>>> in Trump Tower," Trump shouted, according to Res. "Just do it."
>>>> The architect pushed back, making Trump yet more mad. The future
>>>> president also apparently called the architect weak, considered
>>>> architects and engineers to be weak unlike construction workers, and
>>>> enjoyed tormenting weak people.
>>>> Trump ordered "outrageous or just plain stupid ideas, both legal and
>>>> illegal. Sometimes those lines were blurred," Res wrote.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>
>>
>
I doubt that Mr. Evans can conceive anything more politically complicated than Islamic Fundamentalism!
Richard
Sent from my iPhone
> On Sep 14, 2018, at 9:00 AM, Carl Jarvis <carjar82@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Mostafa and Anyone Else Interested in Defining What a Nation is.
> You wrote, "So, nations are mostly disingenuous until things go
> against their private interest."
> Once again I ask you, what are you referring to when you say, nations?
> The People? The Land lying between artificial borders?
> In my simplified view, a nation exists only so long as it is able to
> defend its artificial borders, either by superior military force or by
> agreements negotiated with its neighboring nations. But within these
> artificial borders there exist a variety of interests that separate
> the citizens of that nation into self interest groups. These groups
> struggle among themselves for dominance. Either one, or a coalition
> take control and set the policies and write and enforce their laws.
> The nation is then seen by other nations in the image of those who
> make up the Ruling Class.
> Within the nation however, a variety of struggles go on. Over time or
> by external force, a nation's Ruling Class changes. How the new face
> of the nation is viewed reflects how its new Ruling Class impacts
> those other nations that must live with it. For example the American
> view of China, in my lifetime, changed from a picture of simple
> peasant farmers, so passive that the aggressive Nipponese(Japanese)
> overran them, to a belief that China had turned into a mindless
> Communist nation, and to our current picture of China being
> our(America's Ruling Classes) greatest competitor.
> The United States, at the time victory was declared from England, was
> ruled by the Landed Gentry. George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and
> the people gathered to draft the Constitution were Land Owners,
> Gentlemen Farmers, those men whose wealth allowed them some time to
> give thought to how these Colonies would shoulder their way into the
> World Community.
> As World conditions changed, so did the United States of America's
> Ruling Class. From Land Holders, to Money Lenders. From Money
> Lenders to Military/Industrial Masters.
> Two things that I believe have gone unchanged as this nation expanded
> and became a world threat, first and foremost, the Ruling Class has
> always behaved as an Empire, regardless of who composed the Ruling
> Class. Secondly, the vast majority of Americans, the Working Class
> that did the dirty work of building and maintaining this Empire, this
> Working Class did not change in its basic nature. This major portion
> of Americans have been held in place through manipulation, deception,
> and outright lies. The Ruling Class has controlled its Working Class
> by dividing it into factions, and then turning those factions on one
> another. It has even set up its government as a Straw Man. It has
> successfully divided the Working Class into Classes, the Upper Class,
> the Middle Class, the Working Class, and the Lower Class. The Ruling
> Class bestows various rewards upon these Classes, depending upon how
> well they serve their Masters.
> From this simple look, we could continue into looking at the complex
> workings within each of these Classes, and expand to to explore the
> complexities of the current American Corporate Empire.
> But all of that is an effort in futility. Until we come to realize
> that we are all brothers and sisters, different but One People, we are
> doomed to continue down this path of self destruction. Artificial
> Borders, Classes, Nationalities, Male/Female/Other, Elder, Youth, Rich
> or Poor, we are all Brothers and Sisters. As long as you, Mostafa,
> see me, Carl Jarvis, as an American rather than as a Brother, we will
> continue traveling down the wrong road. As long as either of us place
> our trust in some "Great Being" rather than looking within ourselves,
> we are doomed.
> It's ironic. We rail against the Evils of others, while defending to
> the death the very Forces that are killing us all.
>
> Cordially Yours,
> Carl Jarvis
>
>> On 9/14/18, Mostafa <ebob824@gmail.com> wrote:
>> Well, each and everyone knows for sure what it means to be an American
>> citizen settling abroad in the current circumstances. Americans chose
>> for themselves. No one coerced them to go to Iraq. I knew it was
>> Bush's decision however, he didn't go there on his own. You may look
>> at polls prior to launching airstrikes on Iraq versus what people said
>> afterward. Double standard is practiced all the time. Likewise are
>> Egyptians, when Sisi committed the ungracious coup against an elected
>> government, people stood with him in his oppression. Now, people hate
>> him not because he murders and imprisons innocents, but because their
>> economic status has substantially exacerbated in his era. So, nations
>> are mostly disingenuous until things go against their private
>> interest. All what we think of as people is food, proper job and
>> shelter. People do not chant anti government sentiment because it is
>> corrupted or because it imposes subjection. We only despise them when
>> things worsen on our side. Note though, I do not fend for the
>> brotherhood party, I just destined to utter the truth.
>>
>>
>>
>> Mustafa
>>
>>
>>> On 9/14/18, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@optonline.net> wrote:
>>> That's true. There are blind people who are Trump supporters. They are
>>> misguided. All of the working people and middle income people who voted
>>> for
>>> him and who still support him are deluded, and they don't understand what
>>> is
>>> in their own interests. And it isn't only Evangelical Christians.
>>> However,
>>> if the Democratic Party had been concerned about the needs of the
>>> majority
>>> of people in the US, rather than with pleasing its wealthy supporters,
>>> Bill
>>> Clinton would have been a different kind of President. We wouldn't have
>>> had
>>> a George W. Bush. We wouldn't have had a 9/11 attack or an Iraq war. Our
>>> history might have been very different and Donald Trump would never have
>>> had
>>> a chance to be elected.
>>>
>>> Miriam
>>>
>>> -----Original Message-----
>>> From: blind-democracy-bounce@freelists.org
>>> <blind-democracy-bounce@freelists.org> On Behalf Of Mostafa
>>> Sent: Thursday, September 13, 2018 4:59 PM
>>> To: blind-democracy <blind-democracy@freelists.org>; dselset@aol.com;
>>> Jennifer Ford <dandjford88@live.com>
>>> Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: "No Blind Need Apply"...sign on Trump
>>> Tower
>>>
>>> Miriam, Donald Trump is broadly idolised among white southern
>>> evangelists.
>>> There are plenty of pro Trump protagonists within blind faith folks.
>>>
>>>> On 9/13/18, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@optonline.net> wrote:
>>>> I would love to forward this to every blindness list I'm on for all
>>>> those blind Trump supporters to read. But I just don't feel like
>>>> dealing with the fallout. If you only knew what hysteria there was on
>>>> the BARD Talk list because of the announcement of Woodward's book,
>>>> Fear, first being on Bookshare and then yesterday, on BARD. I have my
>>>> own criticisms of all these books but these people just refuse to
>>>> believe what the books report. First it was Michael Wolff's book, now
>>>> this
>>>> one.
>>>>
>>>> Miriam
>>>>
>>>> -----Original Message-----
>>>> From: blind-democracy-bounce@freelists.org
>>>> <blind-democracy-bounce@freelists.org> On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
>>>> Sent: Thursday, September 13, 2018 10:56 AM
>>>> To: blind-democracy <blind-democracy@freelists.org>
>>>> Cc: delores selset <dselset@aol.com>; Jennifer Ford
>>>> <dandjford88@live.com>
>>>> Subject: [blind-democracy] "No Blind Need Apply"...sign on Trump Tower
>>>>
>>>> It would be interesting to peek into Donald Trumps mind and see what
>>>> he thinks of America's Blind Citizens. The following note could give
>>>> us a hint.
>>>> Carl Jarvis
>>>>
>>>> President Donald Trump allegedly ordered an architect not to include
>>>> braille in Trump Tower elevator panels because "no blind people" would
>>>> live in his building—even after being informed that excluding the
>>>> tactile writing system is against federal law.
>>>> The alleged interaction was recounted by Barbara Res, who led
>>>> construction at the Trump Organization, in an opinion piece in the New
>>>> York Daily News on Wednesday.
>>>> "What's this?" Trump, noticing the small raised dots, reportedly asked
>>>> the architect who went to his office to show what the residential
>>>> elevator interiors would look like.
>>>> "Braille," the architect responded.
>>>> Trump apparently demanded that the architect take the feature out.
>>>> "We can't," the architect replied. "It's the law."
>>>> "Get rid of the [expletive] braille. No blind people are going to live
>>>> in Trump Tower," Trump shouted, according to Res. "Just do it."
>>>> The architect pushed back, making Trump yet more mad. The future
>>>> president also apparently called the architect weak, considered
>>>> architects and engineers to be weak unlike construction workers, and
>>>> enjoyed tormenting weak people.
>>>> Trump ordered "outrageous or just plain stupid ideas, both legal and
>>>> illegal. Sometimes those lines were blurred," Res wrote.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>
>>
>
Re: [blind-democracy] Re: "No Blind Need Apply"...sign on Trump Tower
Mostafa and Anyone Else Interested in Defining What a Nation is.
You wrote, "So, nations are mostly disingenuous until things go
against their private interest."
Once again I ask you, what are you referring to when you say, nations?
The People? The Land lying between artificial borders?
In my simplified view, a nation exists only so long as it is able to
defend its artificial borders, either by superior military force or by
agreements negotiated with its neighboring nations. But within these
artificial borders there exist a variety of interests that separate
the citizens of that nation into self interest groups. These groups
struggle among themselves for dominance. Either one, or a coalition
take control and set the policies and write and enforce their laws.
The nation is then seen by other nations in the image of those who
make up the Ruling Class.
Within the nation however, a variety of struggles go on. Over time or
by external force, a nation's Ruling Class changes. How the new face
of the nation is viewed reflects how its new Ruling Class impacts
those other nations that must live with it. For example the American
view of China, in my lifetime, changed from a picture of simple
peasant farmers, so passive that the aggressive Nipponese(Japanese)
overran them, to a belief that China had turned into a mindless
Communist nation, and to our current picture of China being
our(America's Ruling Classes) greatest competitor.
The United States, at the time victory was declared from England, was
ruled by the Landed Gentry. George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and
the people gathered to draft the Constitution were Land Owners,
Gentlemen Farmers, those men whose wealth allowed them some time to
give thought to how these Colonies would shoulder their way into the
World Community.
As World conditions changed, so did the United States of America's
Ruling Class. From Land Holders, to Money Lenders. From Money
Lenders to Military/Industrial Masters.
Two things that I believe have gone unchanged as this nation expanded
and became a world threat, first and foremost, the Ruling Class has
always behaved as an Empire, regardless of who composed the Ruling
Class. Secondly, the vast majority of Americans, the Working Class
that did the dirty work of building and maintaining this Empire, this
Working Class did not change in its basic nature. This major portion
of Americans have been held in place through manipulation, deception,
and outright lies. The Ruling Class has controlled its Working Class
by dividing it into factions, and then turning those factions on one
another. It has even set up its government as a Straw Man. It has
successfully divided the Working Class into Classes, the Upper Class,
the Middle Class, the Working Class, and the Lower Class. The Ruling
Class bestows various rewards upon these Classes, depending upon how
well they serve their Masters.
From this simple look, we could continue into looking at the complex
workings within each of these Classes, and expand to to explore the
complexities of the current American Corporate Empire.
But all of that is an effort in futility. Until we come to realize
that we are all brothers and sisters, different but One People, we are
doomed to continue down this path of self destruction. Artificial
Borders, Classes, Nationalities, Male/Female/Other, Elder, Youth, Rich
or Poor, we are all Brothers and Sisters. As long as you, Mostafa,
see me, Carl Jarvis, as an American rather than as a Brother, we will
continue traveling down the wrong road. As long as either of us place
our trust in some "Great Being" rather than looking within ourselves,
we are doomed.
It's ironic. We rail against the Evils of others, while defending to
the death the very Forces that are killing us all.
Cordially Yours,
Carl Jarvis
On 9/14/18, Mostafa <ebob824@gmail.com> wrote:
> Well, each and everyone knows for sure what it means to be an American
> citizen settling abroad in the current circumstances. Americans chose
> for themselves. No one coerced them to go to Iraq. I knew it was
> Bush's decision however, he didn't go there on his own. You may look
> at polls prior to launching airstrikes on Iraq versus what people said
> afterward. Double standard is practiced all the time. Likewise are
> Egyptians, when Sisi committed the ungracious coup against an elected
> government, people stood with him in his oppression. Now, people hate
> him not because he murders and imprisons innocents, but because their
> economic status has substantially exacerbated in his era. So, nations
> are mostly disingenuous until things go against their private
> interest. All what we think of as people is food, proper job and
> shelter. People do not chant anti government sentiment because it is
> corrupted or because it imposes subjection. We only despise them when
> things worsen on our side. Note though, I do not fend for the
> brotherhood party, I just destined to utter the truth.
>
>
>
> Mustafa
>
>
> On 9/14/18, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@optonline.net> wrote:
>> That's true. There are blind people who are Trump supporters. They are
>> misguided. All of the working people and middle income people who voted
>> for
>> him and who still support him are deluded, and they don't understand what
>> is
>> in their own interests. And it isn't only Evangelical Christians.
>> However,
>> if the Democratic Party had been concerned about the needs of the
>> majority
>> of people in the US, rather than with pleasing its wealthy supporters,
>> Bill
>> Clinton would have been a different kind of President. We wouldn't have
>> had
>> a George W. Bush. We wouldn't have had a 9/11 attack or an Iraq war. Our
>> history might have been very different and Donald Trump would never have
>> had
>> a chance to be elected.
>>
>> Miriam
>>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: blind-democracy-bounce@freelists.org
>> <blind-democracy-bounce@freelists.org> On Behalf Of Mostafa
>> Sent: Thursday, September 13, 2018 4:59 PM
>> To: blind-democracy <blind-democracy@freelists.org>; dselset@aol.com;
>> Jennifer Ford <dandjford88@live.com>
>> Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: "No Blind Need Apply"...sign on Trump
>> Tower
>>
>> Miriam, Donald Trump is broadly idolised among white southern
>> evangelists.
>> There are plenty of pro Trump protagonists within blind faith folks.
>>
>> On 9/13/18, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@optonline.net> wrote:
>>> I would love to forward this to every blindness list I'm on for all
>>> those blind Trump supporters to read. But I just don't feel like
>>> dealing with the fallout. If you only knew what hysteria there was on
>>> the BARD Talk list because of the announcement of Woodward's book,
>>> Fear, first being on Bookshare and then yesterday, on BARD. I have my
>>> own criticisms of all these books but these people just refuse to
>>> believe what the books report. First it was Michael Wolff's book, now
>>> this
>>> one.
>>>
>>> Miriam
>>>
>>> -----Original Message-----
>>> From: blind-democracy-bounce@freelists.org
>>> <blind-democracy-bounce@freelists.org> On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
>>> Sent: Thursday, September 13, 2018 10:56 AM
>>> To: blind-democracy <blind-democracy@freelists.org>
>>> Cc: delores selset <dselset@aol.com>; Jennifer Ford
>>> <dandjford88@live.com>
>>> Subject: [blind-democracy] "No Blind Need Apply"...sign on Trump Tower
>>>
>>> It would be interesting to peek into Donald Trumps mind and see what
>>> he thinks of America's Blind Citizens. The following note could give
>>> us a hint.
>>> Carl Jarvis
>>>
>>> President Donald Trump allegedly ordered an architect not to include
>>> braille in Trump Tower elevator panels because "no blind people" would
>>> live in his building—even after being informed that excluding the
>>> tactile writing system is against federal law.
>>> The alleged interaction was recounted by Barbara Res, who led
>>> construction at the Trump Organization, in an opinion piece in the New
>>> York Daily News on Wednesday.
>>> "What's this?" Trump, noticing the small raised dots, reportedly asked
>>> the architect who went to his office to show what the residential
>>> elevator interiors would look like.
>>> "Braille," the architect responded.
>>> Trump apparently demanded that the architect take the feature out.
>>> "We can't," the architect replied. "It's the law."
>>> "Get rid of the [expletive] braille. No blind people are going to live
>>> in Trump Tower," Trump shouted, according to Res. "Just do it."
>>> The architect pushed back, making Trump yet more mad. The future
>>> president also apparently called the architect weak, considered
>>> architects and engineers to be weak unlike construction workers, and
>>> enjoyed tormenting weak people.
>>> Trump ordered "outrageous or just plain stupid ideas, both legal and
>>> illegal. Sometimes those lines were blurred," Res wrote.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>
>
You wrote, "So, nations are mostly disingenuous until things go
against their private interest."
Once again I ask you, what are you referring to when you say, nations?
The People? The Land lying between artificial borders?
In my simplified view, a nation exists only so long as it is able to
defend its artificial borders, either by superior military force or by
agreements negotiated with its neighboring nations. But within these
artificial borders there exist a variety of interests that separate
the citizens of that nation into self interest groups. These groups
struggle among themselves for dominance. Either one, or a coalition
take control and set the policies and write and enforce their laws.
The nation is then seen by other nations in the image of those who
make up the Ruling Class.
Within the nation however, a variety of struggles go on. Over time or
by external force, a nation's Ruling Class changes. How the new face
of the nation is viewed reflects how its new Ruling Class impacts
those other nations that must live with it. For example the American
view of China, in my lifetime, changed from a picture of simple
peasant farmers, so passive that the aggressive Nipponese(Japanese)
overran them, to a belief that China had turned into a mindless
Communist nation, and to our current picture of China being
our(America's Ruling Classes) greatest competitor.
The United States, at the time victory was declared from England, was
ruled by the Landed Gentry. George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and
the people gathered to draft the Constitution were Land Owners,
Gentlemen Farmers, those men whose wealth allowed them some time to
give thought to how these Colonies would shoulder their way into the
World Community.
As World conditions changed, so did the United States of America's
Ruling Class. From Land Holders, to Money Lenders. From Money
Lenders to Military/Industrial Masters.
Two things that I believe have gone unchanged as this nation expanded
and became a world threat, first and foremost, the Ruling Class has
always behaved as an Empire, regardless of who composed the Ruling
Class. Secondly, the vast majority of Americans, the Working Class
that did the dirty work of building and maintaining this Empire, this
Working Class did not change in its basic nature. This major portion
of Americans have been held in place through manipulation, deception,
and outright lies. The Ruling Class has controlled its Working Class
by dividing it into factions, and then turning those factions on one
another. It has even set up its government as a Straw Man. It has
successfully divided the Working Class into Classes, the Upper Class,
the Middle Class, the Working Class, and the Lower Class. The Ruling
Class bestows various rewards upon these Classes, depending upon how
well they serve their Masters.
From this simple look, we could continue into looking at the complex
workings within each of these Classes, and expand to to explore the
complexities of the current American Corporate Empire.
But all of that is an effort in futility. Until we come to realize
that we are all brothers and sisters, different but One People, we are
doomed to continue down this path of self destruction. Artificial
Borders, Classes, Nationalities, Male/Female/Other, Elder, Youth, Rich
or Poor, we are all Brothers and Sisters. As long as you, Mostafa,
see me, Carl Jarvis, as an American rather than as a Brother, we will
continue traveling down the wrong road. As long as either of us place
our trust in some "Great Being" rather than looking within ourselves,
we are doomed.
It's ironic. We rail against the Evils of others, while defending to
the death the very Forces that are killing us all.
Cordially Yours,
Carl Jarvis
On 9/14/18, Mostafa <ebob824@gmail.com> wrote:
> Well, each and everyone knows for sure what it means to be an American
> citizen settling abroad in the current circumstances. Americans chose
> for themselves. No one coerced them to go to Iraq. I knew it was
> Bush's decision however, he didn't go there on his own. You may look
> at polls prior to launching airstrikes on Iraq versus what people said
> afterward. Double standard is practiced all the time. Likewise are
> Egyptians, when Sisi committed the ungracious coup against an elected
> government, people stood with him in his oppression. Now, people hate
> him not because he murders and imprisons innocents, but because their
> economic status has substantially exacerbated in his era. So, nations
> are mostly disingenuous until things go against their private
> interest. All what we think of as people is food, proper job and
> shelter. People do not chant anti government sentiment because it is
> corrupted or because it imposes subjection. We only despise them when
> things worsen on our side. Note though, I do not fend for the
> brotherhood party, I just destined to utter the truth.
>
>
>
> Mustafa
>
>
> On 9/14/18, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@optonline.net> wrote:
>> That's true. There are blind people who are Trump supporters. They are
>> misguided. All of the working people and middle income people who voted
>> for
>> him and who still support him are deluded, and they don't understand what
>> is
>> in their own interests. And it isn't only Evangelical Christians.
>> However,
>> if the Democratic Party had been concerned about the needs of the
>> majority
>> of people in the US, rather than with pleasing its wealthy supporters,
>> Bill
>> Clinton would have been a different kind of President. We wouldn't have
>> had
>> a George W. Bush. We wouldn't have had a 9/11 attack or an Iraq war. Our
>> history might have been very different and Donald Trump would never have
>> had
>> a chance to be elected.
>>
>> Miriam
>>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: blind-democracy-bounce@freelists.org
>> <blind-democracy-bounce@freelists.org> On Behalf Of Mostafa
>> Sent: Thursday, September 13, 2018 4:59 PM
>> To: blind-democracy <blind-democracy@freelists.org>; dselset@aol.com;
>> Jennifer Ford <dandjford88@live.com>
>> Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: "No Blind Need Apply"...sign on Trump
>> Tower
>>
>> Miriam, Donald Trump is broadly idolised among white southern
>> evangelists.
>> There are plenty of pro Trump protagonists within blind faith folks.
>>
>> On 9/13/18, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@optonline.net> wrote:
>>> I would love to forward this to every blindness list I'm on for all
>>> those blind Trump supporters to read. But I just don't feel like
>>> dealing with the fallout. If you only knew what hysteria there was on
>>> the BARD Talk list because of the announcement of Woodward's book,
>>> Fear, first being on Bookshare and then yesterday, on BARD. I have my
>>> own criticisms of all these books but these people just refuse to
>>> believe what the books report. First it was Michael Wolff's book, now
>>> this
>>> one.
>>>
>>> Miriam
>>>
>>> -----Original Message-----
>>> From: blind-democracy-bounce@freelists.org
>>> <blind-democracy-bounce@freelists.org> On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
>>> Sent: Thursday, September 13, 2018 10:56 AM
>>> To: blind-democracy <blind-democracy@freelists.org>
>>> Cc: delores selset <dselset@aol.com>; Jennifer Ford
>>> <dandjford88@live.com>
>>> Subject: [blind-democracy] "No Blind Need Apply"...sign on Trump Tower
>>>
>>> It would be interesting to peek into Donald Trumps mind and see what
>>> he thinks of America's Blind Citizens. The following note could give
>>> us a hint.
>>> Carl Jarvis
>>>
>>> President Donald Trump allegedly ordered an architect not to include
>>> braille in Trump Tower elevator panels because "no blind people" would
>>> live in his building—even after being informed that excluding the
>>> tactile writing system is against federal law.
>>> The alleged interaction was recounted by Barbara Res, who led
>>> construction at the Trump Organization, in an opinion piece in the New
>>> York Daily News on Wednesday.
>>> "What's this?" Trump, noticing the small raised dots, reportedly asked
>>> the architect who went to his office to show what the residential
>>> elevator interiors would look like.
>>> "Braille," the architect responded.
>>> Trump apparently demanded that the architect take the feature out.
>>> "We can't," the architect replied. "It's the law."
>>> "Get rid of the [expletive] braille. No blind people are going to live
>>> in Trump Tower," Trump shouted, according to Res. "Just do it."
>>> The architect pushed back, making Trump yet more mad. The future
>>> president also apparently called the architect weak, considered
>>> architects and engineers to be weak unlike construction workers, and
>>> enjoyed tormenting weak people.
>>> Trump ordered "outrageous or just plain stupid ideas, both legal and
>>> illegal. Sometimes those lines were blurred," Res wrote.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>
>
Wednesday, September 12, 2018
from Prophet Chris Hedges
The Rich get Rich and the Poor get Poorer. But what happens to wealth
when the bubble bursts?
Carl Jarvis
***
Conjuring Up the Next Depression
Mr. Fish / Truthdig
During the financial crisis of 2008, the world's central banks, including
the Federal Reserve, injected trillions of dollars of fabricated money into
the global financial system. This fabricated money has created a worldwide
debt of $325 trillion, more than three times global GDP. The fabricated
money was hoarded by banks and corporations, loaned by banks at predatory
interest rates, used to service interest on unpayable debt or spent buying
back stock, providing millions in compensation for elites. The fabricated
money was not invested in the real economy. Products were not manufactured
and sold. Workers were not reinstated into the middle class with sustainable
incomes, benefits and pensions. Infrastructure projects were not undertaken.
The fabricated money reinflated massive financial bubbles built on debt and
papered over a fatally diseased financial system destined for collapse.
What will trigger the next crash? The $13.2 trillion in unsustainable U.S.
household debt? The $1.5 trillion in unsustainable student debt? The
billions Wall Street has invested in a fracking industry that has spent $280
billion more than it generated from its operations? Who knows. What is
certain is that a global financial crash, one that will dwarf the meltdown
of 2008, is inevitable. And this time, with interest rates near zero, the
elites have no escape plan. The financial structure will disintegrate. The
global economy will go into a death spiral. The rage of a betrayed and
impoverished population will, I fear, further empower right-wing demagogues
who promise vengeance on the global elites, moral renewal, a nativist
revival heralding a return to a mythical golden age when immigrants, women
and people of color knew their place, and a Christianized fascism.
The 2008 financial crisis, as the economist Nomi Prins points out,
"converted central banks into a new class of power brokers." They looted
national treasuries and amassed trillions in wealth to become politically
and economically omnipotent. In her book "Collusion: How Central Bankers
Rigged the World," she writes that central bankers and the world's largest
financial institutions fraudulently manipulate global markets and use
fabricated, or as she writes, "fake money," to inflate asset bubbles for
short-term profit as they drive us toward "a dangerous financial precipice."
"Before the crisis, they were just asleep at the wheel, in particular, the
Federal Reserve of the United States, which is supposed to be the main
regulator of the major banks in the United States," Prins said when we met
in New York. "It did a horrible job of doing that, which is why we had the
financial crisis. It became a deregulator instead of a regulator. In the
wake of the financial crisis, the solution to fixing the crisis and saving
the economy from a great depression or recession, whatever the terminology
that was used at any given time, was to fabricate trillions and trillions of
dollars out of an electronic ether."
The Federal Reserve handed over an estimated $29 trillion of this fabricated
money to American banks, according to researchers at the University of
Missouri. Twenty-nine trillion dollars! We could have provided free college
tuition to every student or universal health care, repaired our crumbling
infrastructure, transitioned to clean energy, forgiven student debt, raised
wages, bailed out underwater homeowners, formed public banks to invest at
low interest rates in our communities, provided a guaranteed minimum income
for everyone and organized a massive jobs program for the unemployed and
underemployed. Sixteen million children would not go to bed hungry. The
mentally ill and the homeless-an estimated 553,742 Americans are homeless
every night-would not be left on the streets or locked away in our prisons.
The economy would revive. Instead, $29 trillion in fabricated money was
handed to financial gangsters who are about to make most of it evaporate and
plunge us into a depression that will rival that of the global crash of
1929.
Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers write on the website Popular Resistance,
"One-sixth of this could provide a $12,000 annual basic income, which would
cost $3.8 trillion annually, doubling Social Security payments to $22,000
annually, which would cost $662 billion, a $10,000 bonus for all U.S. public
school teachers, which would cost $11 billion, free college for all high
school graduates, which would cost $318 billion, and universal preschool,
which would cost $38 billion. National improved Medicare for all would
actually save the nation trillions of dollars over a decade."
An emergency clause in the Federal Reserve Act of 1913 allows the Fed to
provide liquidity to a distressed banking system. But the Federal Reserve
did not stop with the creation of a few hundred billion dollars. It flooded
the financial markets with absurd levels of fabricated money. This had the
effect of making the economy appear as if it had revived. And for the
oligarchs, who had access to this fabricated money while we did not, it did.
The Fed cut interest rates to near zero. Some central banks in Europe
instituted negative interest rates, meaning they would pay borrowers to take
loans. The Fed, in a clever bit of accounting, even permitted distressed
banks to use these no-interest loans to buy U.S. Treasury bonds. The banks
gave the bonds back to the Fed and received a quarter of a percent of
interest from the Fed. In short, the banks were loaned money at virtually no
interest by the Fed and then were paid interest by the Fed on the money they
borrowed. The Fed also bought up worthless mortgage assets and other toxic
assets from the banks. Since Fed authorities could fabricate as much money
as they wanted, it did not matter how they spent it.
"It's like going to someone's old garage sale and saying, 'I want that
bicycle with no wheels. I'll pay you 100 grand for it. Why? Because it's not
my money,' " Prins said.
"These people have rigged the system," she said of the bankers. "There is
money fabricated at the top. It is used to pump up financial assets,
including stock. It has to come from somewhere. Because money is cheap
there's more borrowing at the corporate level. There's more money borrowed
at the government level."
"Where do you go to repay it?" she asked. "You go into the nation. You go
into the economy. You extract money from the foundational economy, from
social programs. You impose austerity."
Given the staggering amount of fabricated money that has to be repaid, the
banks need to build greater and greater pools of debt. This is why when you
are late in paying your credit card the interest rate jumps to 28 percent.
This is why if you declare bankruptcy you are still responsible for paying
off your student loan, even as 1 million people a year default on student
loans, with 40 percent of all borrowers expected to default on student loans
by 2023. This is why wages are stagnant or have declined while costs, from
health care and pharmaceutical products to bank fees and basic utilities,
are skyrocketing. The enforced debt peonage grows to feed the beast until,
as with the subprime mortgage crisis, the predatory system fails because of
massive defaults. There will come a day, for example, as with all financial
bubbles, when the wildly optimistic projected profits of industries such as
fracking will no longer be an effective excuse to keep pumping money into
failing businesses burdened by debt they cannot repay.
"The 60 biggest exploration and production firms are not generating enough
cash from their operations to cover their operating and capital expenses,"
Bethany McLean writes of the fracking industry in an article titled "The
Next Financial Crisis Lurks Underground" that appeared in The New York
Times. "In aggregate, from mid-2012 to mid-2017, they had negative free cash
flow of $9 billion per quarter."
The global financial system is a ticking time bomb. The question is not if
it will explode but when it will explode. And once it does, the inability of
the global speculators to use fabricated money with zero interest to paper
over the debacle will trigger massive unemployment, high prices for imports
and basic services, and a devaluation in which the dollar will become nearly
worthless as it is abandoned as the world's reserve currency. This
manufactured financial tsunami will transform the United States, already a
failed democracy, into an authoritarian police state. Life will become very
cheap, especially for the vulnerable-undocumented workers, Muslims, poor
people of color, girls and women, anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist
critics branded as agents of foreign powers-who will be demonized and
persecuted for the collapse. The elites, in a desperate bid to cling to
their unchecked power and obscene wealth, will disembowel what is left of
the United States.
Chris Hedges
when the bubble bursts?
Carl Jarvis
***
Conjuring Up the Next Depression
Mr. Fish / Truthdig
During the financial crisis of 2008, the world's central banks, including
the Federal Reserve, injected trillions of dollars of fabricated money into
the global financial system. This fabricated money has created a worldwide
debt of $325 trillion, more than three times global GDP. The fabricated
money was hoarded by banks and corporations, loaned by banks at predatory
interest rates, used to service interest on unpayable debt or spent buying
back stock, providing millions in compensation for elites. The fabricated
money was not invested in the real economy. Products were not manufactured
and sold. Workers were not reinstated into the middle class with sustainable
incomes, benefits and pensions. Infrastructure projects were not undertaken.
The fabricated money reinflated massive financial bubbles built on debt and
papered over a fatally diseased financial system destined for collapse.
What will trigger the next crash? The $13.2 trillion in unsustainable U.S.
household debt? The $1.5 trillion in unsustainable student debt? The
billions Wall Street has invested in a fracking industry that has spent $280
billion more than it generated from its operations? Who knows. What is
certain is that a global financial crash, one that will dwarf the meltdown
of 2008, is inevitable. And this time, with interest rates near zero, the
elites have no escape plan. The financial structure will disintegrate. The
global economy will go into a death spiral. The rage of a betrayed and
impoverished population will, I fear, further empower right-wing demagogues
who promise vengeance on the global elites, moral renewal, a nativist
revival heralding a return to a mythical golden age when immigrants, women
and people of color knew their place, and a Christianized fascism.
The 2008 financial crisis, as the economist Nomi Prins points out,
"converted central banks into a new class of power brokers." They looted
national treasuries and amassed trillions in wealth to become politically
and economically omnipotent. In her book "Collusion: How Central Bankers
Rigged the World," she writes that central bankers and the world's largest
financial institutions fraudulently manipulate global markets and use
fabricated, or as she writes, "fake money," to inflate asset bubbles for
short-term profit as they drive us toward "a dangerous financial precipice."
"Before the crisis, they were just asleep at the wheel, in particular, the
Federal Reserve of the United States, which is supposed to be the main
regulator of the major banks in the United States," Prins said when we met
in New York. "It did a horrible job of doing that, which is why we had the
financial crisis. It became a deregulator instead of a regulator. In the
wake of the financial crisis, the solution to fixing the crisis and saving
the economy from a great depression or recession, whatever the terminology
that was used at any given time, was to fabricate trillions and trillions of
dollars out of an electronic ether."
The Federal Reserve handed over an estimated $29 trillion of this fabricated
money to American banks, according to researchers at the University of
Missouri. Twenty-nine trillion dollars! We could have provided free college
tuition to every student or universal health care, repaired our crumbling
infrastructure, transitioned to clean energy, forgiven student debt, raised
wages, bailed out underwater homeowners, formed public banks to invest at
low interest rates in our communities, provided a guaranteed minimum income
for everyone and organized a massive jobs program for the unemployed and
underemployed. Sixteen million children would not go to bed hungry. The
mentally ill and the homeless-an estimated 553,742 Americans are homeless
every night-would not be left on the streets or locked away in our prisons.
The economy would revive. Instead, $29 trillion in fabricated money was
handed to financial gangsters who are about to make most of it evaporate and
plunge us into a depression that will rival that of the global crash of
1929.
Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers write on the website Popular Resistance,
"One-sixth of this could provide a $12,000 annual basic income, which would
cost $3.8 trillion annually, doubling Social Security payments to $22,000
annually, which would cost $662 billion, a $10,000 bonus for all U.S. public
school teachers, which would cost $11 billion, free college for all high
school graduates, which would cost $318 billion, and universal preschool,
which would cost $38 billion. National improved Medicare for all would
actually save the nation trillions of dollars over a decade."
An emergency clause in the Federal Reserve Act of 1913 allows the Fed to
provide liquidity to a distressed banking system. But the Federal Reserve
did not stop with the creation of a few hundred billion dollars. It flooded
the financial markets with absurd levels of fabricated money. This had the
effect of making the economy appear as if it had revived. And for the
oligarchs, who had access to this fabricated money while we did not, it did.
The Fed cut interest rates to near zero. Some central banks in Europe
instituted negative interest rates, meaning they would pay borrowers to take
loans. The Fed, in a clever bit of accounting, even permitted distressed
banks to use these no-interest loans to buy U.S. Treasury bonds. The banks
gave the bonds back to the Fed and received a quarter of a percent of
interest from the Fed. In short, the banks were loaned money at virtually no
interest by the Fed and then were paid interest by the Fed on the money they
borrowed. The Fed also bought up worthless mortgage assets and other toxic
assets from the banks. Since Fed authorities could fabricate as much money
as they wanted, it did not matter how they spent it.
"It's like going to someone's old garage sale and saying, 'I want that
bicycle with no wheels. I'll pay you 100 grand for it. Why? Because it's not
my money,' " Prins said.
"These people have rigged the system," she said of the bankers. "There is
money fabricated at the top. It is used to pump up financial assets,
including stock. It has to come from somewhere. Because money is cheap
there's more borrowing at the corporate level. There's more money borrowed
at the government level."
"Where do you go to repay it?" she asked. "You go into the nation. You go
into the economy. You extract money from the foundational economy, from
social programs. You impose austerity."
Given the staggering amount of fabricated money that has to be repaid, the
banks need to build greater and greater pools of debt. This is why when you
are late in paying your credit card the interest rate jumps to 28 percent.
This is why if you declare bankruptcy you are still responsible for paying
off your student loan, even as 1 million people a year default on student
loans, with 40 percent of all borrowers expected to default on student loans
by 2023. This is why wages are stagnant or have declined while costs, from
health care and pharmaceutical products to bank fees and basic utilities,
are skyrocketing. The enforced debt peonage grows to feed the beast until,
as with the subprime mortgage crisis, the predatory system fails because of
massive defaults. There will come a day, for example, as with all financial
bubbles, when the wildly optimistic projected profits of industries such as
fracking will no longer be an effective excuse to keep pumping money into
failing businesses burdened by debt they cannot repay.
"The 60 biggest exploration and production firms are not generating enough
cash from their operations to cover their operating and capital expenses,"
Bethany McLean writes of the fracking industry in an article titled "The
Next Financial Crisis Lurks Underground" that appeared in The New York
Times. "In aggregate, from mid-2012 to mid-2017, they had negative free cash
flow of $9 billion per quarter."
The global financial system is a ticking time bomb. The question is not if
it will explode but when it will explode. And once it does, the inability of
the global speculators to use fabricated money with zero interest to paper
over the debacle will trigger massive unemployment, high prices for imports
and basic services, and a devaluation in which the dollar will become nearly
worthless as it is abandoned as the world's reserve currency. This
manufactured financial tsunami will transform the United States, already a
failed democracy, into an authoritarian police state. Life will become very
cheap, especially for the vulnerable-undocumented workers, Muslims, poor
people of color, girls and women, anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist
critics branded as agents of foreign powers-who will be demonized and
persecuted for the collapse. The elites, in a desperate bid to cling to
their unchecked power and obscene wealth, will disembowel what is left of
the United States.
Chris Hedges
Monday, September 10, 2018
Re: [blind-democracy] Creeping Fascism No Problem for Trump’s Durable Base
The author writes, in part:
"Sadly enough, however, stupidity is not necessarily a big problem for
much of the population. Ten years ago, historian Rick Shenkman wrote a
book titled
"Just How Stupid Are We? Facing the Truth About the American Voter."
The book was filled with depressing statistics..."
Whether intended or not, the focus appears to be upon placing the
blame on the victim...the American Public.
After generations of lying, withholding information, and controlling
what passes for Education in our public schools,we then turn around
and tell the People that it's all their fault. In Basic English, that
is just plain Bull!
Carl Jarvis
On 9/9/18, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@optonline.net> wrote:
> Creeping Fascism No Problem for Trump's Durable Base
>
> President Trump at an Aug. 30 rally in Evansville, Ind. (Evan Vucci / AP)
>
> How, liberals and progressives ask with shocked amazement, can President
> Trump's supporters continue to back him? They persist even as one piece of
> evidence after another emerges of his epic and pathological gaslighting, his
> shameless immorality, his abject criminality, his wild stupidity and his
> corruption. Then there's his chilling authoritarianism, his tendency toward
> fascism, his ugly sexism, his textbook malignant narcissism and his nasty
> racism.
>
> These flummoxed observers aren't wrong about Donald "Don't Believe What You
> See and Hear" Trump's terrible, duplicitous and unabashedly Orwellian
> nature, but their incredulity is naive.
>
> Yes, the evidence is clear as day—to people who pay serious attention to
> evidence. Nine of every 10 Americans—and certainly a larger share of
> Republicans and Trump backers—believe in the existence of God. Ask most
> Americans what exactly one is supposed to believe in when it comes to "God,"
> and they will say little or nothing in the way of empirical proof. It's
> never quite clear what the concept and word mean. It's about faith, not
> evidence.
>
> Evidence is easily devalued in a faith-based nation in which magical
> thinking (a critical component of authoritarianism and hardly limited to
> religious and metaphysical matters) is rife.
>
>
>
> "Cognitive dissonance," a mental pattern first identified by the
> psychologist Leon Festinger, doesn't help. People confronted with evidence
> that contradicts their convictions don't typically correct their beliefs,
> Festinger found. Instead, they more commonly double down on their mistaken
> idea rather than face the mental and egoic pain associated with admitting
> erroneous thinking. The more they have invested in and even lost from false
> beliefs, the more they will respond to contrary evidence by actually
> intensifying their attachment to those untrue notions. (This may help
> explain how Trump often seems to gain support after talking heads, reporters
> and politicos call him out for saying or tweeting something particularly
> absurd.)
>
> Right-wing media worsens the problem. A potent network of counterfactual
> white Republican news and opinion outlets regularly amplify and reinforce
> fact-trumping feelings and cognitively dissonant reactions. Watch Fox News
> and listen to noxiously racist, nationalist and neo-McCarthyite talk-radio
> hate-mongers like Rush Limbaugh and Mark Levin. Nothing is clear as day
> across the soulless landscape of radically conservative media, where 2+2=5;
> war is peace; love is hate; corporate Democrats are Marxists; antifa is a
> giant mass movement created by the Democratic Party; black football players
> who take knees during the national anthem are traitors; the billionaire
> rentier Donald Trump is a friend of the working man; anthropogenic global
> warming is a "hoax"; and "God" wants us to burn every last fossil fuel on
> earth. As Trump's wacky post-modernist lawyer Rudolph Giuliani put it
> recently, "truth isn't truth."
>
> Feelings trump facts all the time in the U.S. This is true on both sides of
> the major-party aisle. Talking in 2007 and 2008 to highly educated
> campus-town liberal Democrats, including plenty of doctorate holders and
> religious skeptics, I consistently found that facts were of little use in
> trying to dent their deeply entrenched and utterly false view that Barack
> Obama was a people's champion of peace, democracy and social justice. To
> paraphrase the Beatles, they had "a feeling [about Obama]–a feeling deep
> inside, oh yeah."
>
> The so-called mainstream liberal media is itself no great champion of truth.
> It perversely purveyed George W. Bush's Orwellian nonsense about Iraq's
> supposed "weapons of mass destruction." As I was first writing this
> paragraph (last Friday), moreover, Trump's cable-news bêtes noires CNN and
> MSNBC were immersed in a seemingly endless and totally absurd
> memorialization of the war criminal, lifelong imperial war hawk and
> corporate neoliberal John McCain as a Christ-like embodiment of transcendent
> human decency.
>
> There's also the selective and partisan use and interpretation of evidence.
> Trumpsters know some facts very well. Tell them their president lies, cheats
> and commits crimes, and some of them will remind you that Bill Clinton,
> Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton have done the same. They're right about
> that (Obama's apparent observance of his marriage vows notwithstanding),
> even if they often get their facts wrong on how and why those corporate
> Democrats (absurdly seen as Left by Republicans) transgressed. And it's
> never clear how the readily documentable fact that Democrats do nasty things
> makes Trump's epic awfulness any less awful.
>
> Trump's backers also cite undeniable facts of economic expansion, the stock
> market explosion and a falling official unemployment rate during Trump's
> anti-presidency. But Trump boosters leave out and often deny the fact that
> the expansion started under Obama. They ignore the considerable downsides of
> the Obama-Trump "boom": over-stagnant wages, savage economic and related
> racial inequality, environmental destruction, massive public and private
> debt, the over-concentration of stock ownership and profits in the hands of
> a small minority, and the reckless overvaluation of stocks and other
> financial assets—harbingers of a coming crash encouraged by Trump's heedless
> deregulation of finance.
>
> Trump backers seem to think the U.S. capitalist economy is micromanaged in
> the Oval Office, as if Trump—who can't even read a basic balance sheet—is
> personally responsible for the business cycle he's been fortunate to ride.
> That's a pretty stupid thing to believe.
>
> Speaking of stupidity, what about Trump's real or alleged idiocy? The
> "mentally deranged dotard" (North Korean leader Kim Jong Un's colorful
> description of Trump last summer) would probably outscore George W. Bush
> (more on that dolt below) but come in below the Clintons and Obama on
> standard intelligence measures. Whatever his brainpower, however, Trump is
> an inexhaustible font of fatuous and inane political assertion. Take, as one
> example, his frequent go-to: climate change denial. Then there's his claim
> that thousands of Muslims danced on the roofs of apartment complexes
> watching the World Trade Center towers collapse on 9/11, as well as the
> ridiculous assertion the U.S. is being flooded by immigrant rapists and
> murderers.
>
> These would also make the list: the preposterous charge Trump was denied a
> popular victory over Hillary Clinton by immigrant voter fraud; the ludicrous
> allegation Google has "rigged" its search engine against him, and the
> wild-eyed contention that a small leftist anti-fascist group (antifa) will
> drown the nation in violence if Democrats take over Congress in the 2018
> midterm elections. Finally, there's Trump's openly and insanely false claim
> that NBC doctored ("fudged") an interview he did with Lester Holt in May of
> 2017—an interview in which he clearly tells Holt that he fired FBI Director
> James Comey because Comey was investigating the president's connections to
> Russia. Every day seems to bring a new ludicrous and patently false tweet or
> comment from "President Dunce Cap."
>
> Sadly enough, however, stupidity is not necessarily a big problem for much
> of the population. Ten years ago, historian Rick Shenkman wrote a book
> titled "Just How Stupid Are We? Facing the Truth About the American Voter."
> The book was filled with depressing statistics like the following:
> ● A majority of Americans didn't know which party was in control of
> Congress.
> ● A majority couldn't name the chief justice of the Supreme Court.
> ● A majority didn't know the U.S. had three branches of government.
> ● A majority of Americans told pollsters in 2003 they believed George W.
> Bush's argument the United States should invade Iraq because Saddam Hussein
> had attacked America on 9/11.
>
> George W. "Is Our Kids Learning?" Bush, Number 43, was an abject moron who
> thought "God" wanted him to invade Iraq. The depressing fact that a majority
> of Americans believed Dubya's bold-faced lie about Saddam Hussein's
> culpability in the 2001 jetliner attacks on U.S. soil was striking evidence
> for Shenkman's assertion that "ignorance of basic facts" reflects a "level
> of inattentiveness that is unhealthy in a society that purports to be free
> and democratic."
>
> The problem didn't go away just because the electorate responded to the Iraq
> fiasco and the meltdown of the economy by putting enough of its longstanding
> racism aside to place a former editor of the Harvard Law Review—an epitome
> of the professional class' education-based meritocratic worldview who
> happened to be black—in the White House for eight years. The silver-tongued
> and deeply conservative Ivy League creation and arch-neoliberal imperialist
> Obama did facts and truth no favors by pretending to be something he
> wasn't—a progressive friend of social justice, democracy and peace—while he
> dutifully helped preserve Wall Street's control of the nation's domestic and
> foreign policies. (Orwell noted that form of pretense, too.)
>
> Reflecting on the Trump phenomenon in early 2016, Shenkman recognized the
> underlying U.S.-American disease of mass stupidity (though in truth the real
> problem he was discussing was ignorance) was alive and well in Obama's final
> year:
>
> "
> [M]illions of [U.S.] people take sheer nonsense seriously. Their ignorance
> is making them sitting ducks for politicians like Donald 'I love the poorly
> educated' Trump. Election 2016 is turning into a civics teacher's case study
> from hell. … From the moment he rode down the escalator at Trump Tower …
> Trump has been offering simplistic solutions. … Each proposal has been
> eviscerated in the media based on the critiques of experts who have pointed
> out that his proposed solutions barely withstand cursory analysis. … But his
> voters haven't cared. Nor have they worried when the media have caught him
> in one lie after another. Politifact has called him out for lying more than
> any of the other candidates, but to little effect. … It appears he can get
> away with saying anything.
>
> The rest, as they say, is history. With no small help from the horrific and
> uninspiring candidacy of the ultimate establishment politico Hillary Clinton
> (Yale Law, one notch above Harvard Law), the Orwellian falsehood machine and
> lower-brain atavist Trump swept the Electoral College. The president has
> continued his relentless war on reality with a remarkably durable approval
> rate in the low to mid-40s, largely undented even by his former longtime
> lawyer Michael Cohen's recent identification of Trump as a co-conspirator in
> the illegal payment of funds for the purpose of silencing two women with
> whom Trump had had extramarital affairs.
>
> What about Trump's authoritarianism? It is evident in his cold disregard for
> the rule of law and the power of Congress and his Cabinet, as well as his
> recurrent habit of praising strongman leaders around the world.
>
> Most liberals and progressives I know are stunned that Trump's clear
> despotism and taste for tyranny do not bother his base. But there's no basis
> for their astonishment about this. Leaving aside the fact Trump is more
> showman than strongman, nobody who pays serious attention to the relevant
> survey data should think that the president's authoritarian inclinations
> would be a problem for his supporters.
>
> In December 2015, the political scientist Matthew MacWilliams surveyed 1,800
> registered voters across the country and the political spectrum. Employing
> standard statistical survey analysis, McMillan found education, income,
> gender and age had no significant bearing on a Republican voter's preferred
> candidate. "Only two of the variables I looked at," MacWilliams reported in
> January of 2016, "were statistically significant: authoritarianism, followed
> by fear of terrorism, though the former was far more significant than the
> latter." Trump, MacWilliams found, was the only candidate in either party
> with statistically significant support from authoritarians. "Those who say a
> Trump presidency 'can't happen here,' " MacWilliams wrote in Politico,
> "should check their conventional wisdom at the door. … Conditions are ripe
> for an authoritarian leader to emerge. Trump is seizing the opportunity."
>
> A year and a half later, a poll conducted by political scientists Ariel
> Malka and Yphtach Lelkes found that 56 percent of Republicans support
> postponing the 2020 presidential election if Trump and congressional
> Republicans advocate this to "make sure that only eligible American citizens
> can vote."
>
> This brings us to Trump's racism, evident from numerous statements of his
> before and during his presidency. Is it a problem for Trump backers?
>
> Know any other good jokes? Trump's disproportionately Caucasian base is
> fused by an embattled white racial identity. This Trumpian "make America
> white again" heart- and mind-set holds that whites are becoming a minority
> targeted by discrimination and "politically correct" liberal and leftists
> have been turning the nation's politics and policies against white values,
> culture, needs, rights and prerogatives. This curious "reverse
> discrimination" victim whiteness (devoid of evidence for its claims) informs
> the Trump base's understanding of the meaning of the word "corruption" in
> ways the liberal writer Peter Beinart recently captured in the Atlantic. For
> Trump's base, Beinart writes, the idea of corruption isn't so much about
> politics and the law as it is about racial and gender purity:
>
> "
> Trump supporters appear largely unfazed by the mounting evidence that Trump
> is the least ethical president in modern American history. … Once you grasp
> that for Trump and many of his supporters, corruption means less the
> violation of law than the violation of established hierarchies [of race and
> gender], their behavior makes more sense. … Why were Trump's supporters so
> convinced that [Hillary] Clinton was the more corrupt candidate even as
> reporters uncovered far more damning evidence about Trump's foundation than
> they did about Clinton's? Likely because Clinton's candidacy threatened
> traditional gender roles. For many Americans, female ambition—especially in
> service of a feminist agenda—in and of itself represents a form of
> corruption.
>
> Cohen's admission makes it harder for Republicans to claim that Trump didn't
> violate the law. But it doesn't really matter. For many Republicans, Trump
> remains uncorrupt—indeed, anti-corrupt—because what they fear most isn't the
> corruption of American law; it's the corruption of America's traditional
> identity. And in the struggle against that form of corruption—the kind
> embodied by Cristhian Rivera [the "illegal immigrant" accused of murdering
> the young white woman Mollie Tibbetts in rural Iowa two weeks ago]—Trump
> isn't the problem. He's the solution. [Emphasis added.]
>
> But, of course, it's not about racism, nativism, sexism or authoritarianism
> when it comes to understanding Trump's base. White racial and gender
> identity and authoritarianism have long merged with and cross-fertilized
> each other. Last May, political scientists Steven V. Miller and Nicholas T.
> Davis released a working paper titled "White Outgroup Intolerance and
> Declining Support for American Democracy." Their study found a strong
> correlation between white Americans' racial intolerance and support for
> authoritarian rule. "When racially intolerant white people fear democracy
> may benefit marginalized people of color," NBC News reported, citing the
> Miller and Davis paper, "they abandon their commitment to democracy."
>
> The Trump base's bigotry and its leanings toward authoritarianism are not
> separate problems. They are inseparably linked. When Trump calls Mexicans
> murderers and rapists, when he rails about the need for building a wall,
> when he denounces the media as "fake news," when he disses judges and the
> rule of law and juries, and when he praises authoritarian leaders, he is
> appealing to the same voters.
>
> The most sophisticated and statistically astute analysis of the 2016 Trump
> electorate produced so far has been crafted by political sociologists David
> Norman Smith and Eric Hanley. In an article published in Critical Sociology
> last March, Smith and Hanley found the white Trump base was differentiated
> from white non-Trump voters not by class or other "demographic" factors
> (including income, age, gender and the alleged class identifier of
> education) but by eight key attitudes and values: identification as
> "conservative"; support for "domineering leaders"; Christian fundamentalism;
> prejudice against immigrants; prejudice against blacks; prejudice against
> Muslims; prejudice against women, and a sense of pessimism about the
> economy.
>
> Strong Trump supporters scored particularly high on support for domineering
> leaders, fundamentalism, opposition to immigrants and economic pessimism.
> They were particularly prone to support authoritarian leaders who promised
> to respond punitively to minorities perceived as
> "line-cutters"—"undeserving" others who were allegedly getting ahead of
> traditional white Americans in the procurement of jobs and government
> benefits—and to the supposed liberal "rotten apples" who were purportedly
> allowing these "line-cutters" to advance ahead of traditional white American
> males.
>
> Support for politically authoritarian leaders and a sense of intolerance
> regarding racial, ethnic and gender differences are two sides of the same
> Trumpian coin. The basic desire animating Trump's base was "the defiant wish
> for a domineering and impolitic leader" linked to "the wish for a reversal
> of what his base perceives as an inverted moral and racial order."
>
> Is Trump's narcissism a problem for his backers? Not really. As psychologist
> Elizabeth Mika noted last year in an essay titled "Who Goes Trump? Tyranny
> as a Triumph of Narcissism":
>
> "
> The tyrant's narcissism is the main attractor to his followers, who project
> their hopes and dreams. The more grandiose his own sense of self and his
> promises to his fans, the greater their attraction and the stronger their
> support. … Through the process of identification, the tyrant's followers
> absorb his omnipotence and glory and imagine themselves winners in the game
> of life. This identification heals the followers' narcissistic wounds, but
> also tends to shut down their reason and conscience.
>
> If that sounds anything like "creeping fascism," that's because it is. As
> political scientist Anthony DiMaggio recently observed:
>
> "
> There are too many red flags in public sentiment to ignore the threat of
> creeping fascism. Ominously, one of the strongest statistical predictors of
> support for Trump is the desire for a strong leader who will 'crush evil'
> and 'get rid of the rotten apples' who 'disturb the status quo.' Half of
> Republicans say they trust Donald Trump as a more reliable source of
> information than the news media—more reliable even than conservative media
> outlets. Nearly half of Republicans think media outlets should be 'shut
> down' if they are 'broadcasting stories that are biased or inaccurate,'
> raising ominous possibilities regarding precisely who will act on such
> allegations. … The cult of Trump is not an abstract phenomenon, but one that
> has real implications. … The danger of fascist creep is also seen in the
> support from most Republican Americans for shutting down the 2020 election,
> so long as Trump declares it necessary to combat fictitious voter fraud.
> Conservatives' acceptance of this conspiracy theory continues,
> unfortunately, despite the president's own 'voter fraud commission' being
> disbanded after failing to find any evidence of it.
>
> Is Trump's "creeping fascism" a problem for his backers? Leaving aside the
> interesting debate among liberal and left commentators about whether Trump
> is a real or creeping fascist, it is unlikely that more than a small number
> of Americans could provide even the remotest outlines of a working
> definition of what classic European fascism was or what fascism more broadly
> defined is in the world today. It's hard for people to reject something they
> know little or nothing about regarding its existence and nature (even as
> they are thinking and acting in accord with some of the phenomenon's key
> characteristics).
>
> As the dangerously declining superpower that is the United States moves at
> an accelerating pace, under Trump, into a period that deserves to be called
> at least pre-fascism, it is an even better time than usual to heed George
> Santyana's warning: "Those who cannot learn from the past are doomed to
> repeat it."
>
> Paul Street
>
>
>
>
>
"Sadly enough, however, stupidity is not necessarily a big problem for
much of the population. Ten years ago, historian Rick Shenkman wrote a
book titled
"Just How Stupid Are We? Facing the Truth About the American Voter."
The book was filled with depressing statistics..."
Whether intended or not, the focus appears to be upon placing the
blame on the victim...the American Public.
After generations of lying, withholding information, and controlling
what passes for Education in our public schools,we then turn around
and tell the People that it's all their fault. In Basic English, that
is just plain Bull!
Carl Jarvis
On 9/9/18, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@optonline.net> wrote:
> Creeping Fascism No Problem for Trump's Durable Base
>
> President Trump at an Aug. 30 rally in Evansville, Ind. (Evan Vucci / AP)
>
> How, liberals and progressives ask with shocked amazement, can President
> Trump's supporters continue to back him? They persist even as one piece of
> evidence after another emerges of his epic and pathological gaslighting, his
> shameless immorality, his abject criminality, his wild stupidity and his
> corruption. Then there's his chilling authoritarianism, his tendency toward
> fascism, his ugly sexism, his textbook malignant narcissism and his nasty
> racism.
>
> These flummoxed observers aren't wrong about Donald "Don't Believe What You
> See and Hear" Trump's terrible, duplicitous and unabashedly Orwellian
> nature, but their incredulity is naive.
>
> Yes, the evidence is clear as day—to people who pay serious attention to
> evidence. Nine of every 10 Americans—and certainly a larger share of
> Republicans and Trump backers—believe in the existence of God. Ask most
> Americans what exactly one is supposed to believe in when it comes to "God,"
> and they will say little or nothing in the way of empirical proof. It's
> never quite clear what the concept and word mean. It's about faith, not
> evidence.
>
> Evidence is easily devalued in a faith-based nation in which magical
> thinking (a critical component of authoritarianism and hardly limited to
> religious and metaphysical matters) is rife.
>
>
>
> "Cognitive dissonance," a mental pattern first identified by the
> psychologist Leon Festinger, doesn't help. People confronted with evidence
> that contradicts their convictions don't typically correct their beliefs,
> Festinger found. Instead, they more commonly double down on their mistaken
> idea rather than face the mental and egoic pain associated with admitting
> erroneous thinking. The more they have invested in and even lost from false
> beliefs, the more they will respond to contrary evidence by actually
> intensifying their attachment to those untrue notions. (This may help
> explain how Trump often seems to gain support after talking heads, reporters
> and politicos call him out for saying or tweeting something particularly
> absurd.)
>
> Right-wing media worsens the problem. A potent network of counterfactual
> white Republican news and opinion outlets regularly amplify and reinforce
> fact-trumping feelings and cognitively dissonant reactions. Watch Fox News
> and listen to noxiously racist, nationalist and neo-McCarthyite talk-radio
> hate-mongers like Rush Limbaugh and Mark Levin. Nothing is clear as day
> across the soulless landscape of radically conservative media, where 2+2=5;
> war is peace; love is hate; corporate Democrats are Marxists; antifa is a
> giant mass movement created by the Democratic Party; black football players
> who take knees during the national anthem are traitors; the billionaire
> rentier Donald Trump is a friend of the working man; anthropogenic global
> warming is a "hoax"; and "God" wants us to burn every last fossil fuel on
> earth. As Trump's wacky post-modernist lawyer Rudolph Giuliani put it
> recently, "truth isn't truth."
>
> Feelings trump facts all the time in the U.S. This is true on both sides of
> the major-party aisle. Talking in 2007 and 2008 to highly educated
> campus-town liberal Democrats, including plenty of doctorate holders and
> religious skeptics, I consistently found that facts were of little use in
> trying to dent their deeply entrenched and utterly false view that Barack
> Obama was a people's champion of peace, democracy and social justice. To
> paraphrase the Beatles, they had "a feeling [about Obama]–a feeling deep
> inside, oh yeah."
>
> The so-called mainstream liberal media is itself no great champion of truth.
> It perversely purveyed George W. Bush's Orwellian nonsense about Iraq's
> supposed "weapons of mass destruction." As I was first writing this
> paragraph (last Friday), moreover, Trump's cable-news bêtes noires CNN and
> MSNBC were immersed in a seemingly endless and totally absurd
> memorialization of the war criminal, lifelong imperial war hawk and
> corporate neoliberal John McCain as a Christ-like embodiment of transcendent
> human decency.
>
> There's also the selective and partisan use and interpretation of evidence.
> Trumpsters know some facts very well. Tell them their president lies, cheats
> and commits crimes, and some of them will remind you that Bill Clinton,
> Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton have done the same. They're right about
> that (Obama's apparent observance of his marriage vows notwithstanding),
> even if they often get their facts wrong on how and why those corporate
> Democrats (absurdly seen as Left by Republicans) transgressed. And it's
> never clear how the readily documentable fact that Democrats do nasty things
> makes Trump's epic awfulness any less awful.
>
> Trump's backers also cite undeniable facts of economic expansion, the stock
> market explosion and a falling official unemployment rate during Trump's
> anti-presidency. But Trump boosters leave out and often deny the fact that
> the expansion started under Obama. They ignore the considerable downsides of
> the Obama-Trump "boom": over-stagnant wages, savage economic and related
> racial inequality, environmental destruction, massive public and private
> debt, the over-concentration of stock ownership and profits in the hands of
> a small minority, and the reckless overvaluation of stocks and other
> financial assets—harbingers of a coming crash encouraged by Trump's heedless
> deregulation of finance.
>
> Trump backers seem to think the U.S. capitalist economy is micromanaged in
> the Oval Office, as if Trump—who can't even read a basic balance sheet—is
> personally responsible for the business cycle he's been fortunate to ride.
> That's a pretty stupid thing to believe.
>
> Speaking of stupidity, what about Trump's real or alleged idiocy? The
> "mentally deranged dotard" (North Korean leader Kim Jong Un's colorful
> description of Trump last summer) would probably outscore George W. Bush
> (more on that dolt below) but come in below the Clintons and Obama on
> standard intelligence measures. Whatever his brainpower, however, Trump is
> an inexhaustible font of fatuous and inane political assertion. Take, as one
> example, his frequent go-to: climate change denial. Then there's his claim
> that thousands of Muslims danced on the roofs of apartment complexes
> watching the World Trade Center towers collapse on 9/11, as well as the
> ridiculous assertion the U.S. is being flooded by immigrant rapists and
> murderers.
>
> These would also make the list: the preposterous charge Trump was denied a
> popular victory over Hillary Clinton by immigrant voter fraud; the ludicrous
> allegation Google has "rigged" its search engine against him, and the
> wild-eyed contention that a small leftist anti-fascist group (antifa) will
> drown the nation in violence if Democrats take over Congress in the 2018
> midterm elections. Finally, there's Trump's openly and insanely false claim
> that NBC doctored ("fudged") an interview he did with Lester Holt in May of
> 2017—an interview in which he clearly tells Holt that he fired FBI Director
> James Comey because Comey was investigating the president's connections to
> Russia. Every day seems to bring a new ludicrous and patently false tweet or
> comment from "President Dunce Cap."
>
> Sadly enough, however, stupidity is not necessarily a big problem for much
> of the population. Ten years ago, historian Rick Shenkman wrote a book
> titled "Just How Stupid Are We? Facing the Truth About the American Voter."
> The book was filled with depressing statistics like the following:
> ● A majority of Americans didn't know which party was in control of
> Congress.
> ● A majority couldn't name the chief justice of the Supreme Court.
> ● A majority didn't know the U.S. had three branches of government.
> ● A majority of Americans told pollsters in 2003 they believed George W.
> Bush's argument the United States should invade Iraq because Saddam Hussein
> had attacked America on 9/11.
>
> George W. "Is Our Kids Learning?" Bush, Number 43, was an abject moron who
> thought "God" wanted him to invade Iraq. The depressing fact that a majority
> of Americans believed Dubya's bold-faced lie about Saddam Hussein's
> culpability in the 2001 jetliner attacks on U.S. soil was striking evidence
> for Shenkman's assertion that "ignorance of basic facts" reflects a "level
> of inattentiveness that is unhealthy in a society that purports to be free
> and democratic."
>
> The problem didn't go away just because the electorate responded to the Iraq
> fiasco and the meltdown of the economy by putting enough of its longstanding
> racism aside to place a former editor of the Harvard Law Review—an epitome
> of the professional class' education-based meritocratic worldview who
> happened to be black—in the White House for eight years. The silver-tongued
> and deeply conservative Ivy League creation and arch-neoliberal imperialist
> Obama did facts and truth no favors by pretending to be something he
> wasn't—a progressive friend of social justice, democracy and peace—while he
> dutifully helped preserve Wall Street's control of the nation's domestic and
> foreign policies. (Orwell noted that form of pretense, too.)
>
> Reflecting on the Trump phenomenon in early 2016, Shenkman recognized the
> underlying U.S.-American disease of mass stupidity (though in truth the real
> problem he was discussing was ignorance) was alive and well in Obama's final
> year:
>
> "
> [M]illions of [U.S.] people take sheer nonsense seriously. Their ignorance
> is making them sitting ducks for politicians like Donald 'I love the poorly
> educated' Trump. Election 2016 is turning into a civics teacher's case study
> from hell. … From the moment he rode down the escalator at Trump Tower …
> Trump has been offering simplistic solutions. … Each proposal has been
> eviscerated in the media based on the critiques of experts who have pointed
> out that his proposed solutions barely withstand cursory analysis. … But his
> voters haven't cared. Nor have they worried when the media have caught him
> in one lie after another. Politifact has called him out for lying more than
> any of the other candidates, but to little effect. … It appears he can get
> away with saying anything.
>
> The rest, as they say, is history. With no small help from the horrific and
> uninspiring candidacy of the ultimate establishment politico Hillary Clinton
> (Yale Law, one notch above Harvard Law), the Orwellian falsehood machine and
> lower-brain atavist Trump swept the Electoral College. The president has
> continued his relentless war on reality with a remarkably durable approval
> rate in the low to mid-40s, largely undented even by his former longtime
> lawyer Michael Cohen's recent identification of Trump as a co-conspirator in
> the illegal payment of funds for the purpose of silencing two women with
> whom Trump had had extramarital affairs.
>
> What about Trump's authoritarianism? It is evident in his cold disregard for
> the rule of law and the power of Congress and his Cabinet, as well as his
> recurrent habit of praising strongman leaders around the world.
>
> Most liberals and progressives I know are stunned that Trump's clear
> despotism and taste for tyranny do not bother his base. But there's no basis
> for their astonishment about this. Leaving aside the fact Trump is more
> showman than strongman, nobody who pays serious attention to the relevant
> survey data should think that the president's authoritarian inclinations
> would be a problem for his supporters.
>
> In December 2015, the political scientist Matthew MacWilliams surveyed 1,800
> registered voters across the country and the political spectrum. Employing
> standard statistical survey analysis, McMillan found education, income,
> gender and age had no significant bearing on a Republican voter's preferred
> candidate. "Only two of the variables I looked at," MacWilliams reported in
> January of 2016, "were statistically significant: authoritarianism, followed
> by fear of terrorism, though the former was far more significant than the
> latter." Trump, MacWilliams found, was the only candidate in either party
> with statistically significant support from authoritarians. "Those who say a
> Trump presidency 'can't happen here,' " MacWilliams wrote in Politico,
> "should check their conventional wisdom at the door. … Conditions are ripe
> for an authoritarian leader to emerge. Trump is seizing the opportunity."
>
> A year and a half later, a poll conducted by political scientists Ariel
> Malka and Yphtach Lelkes found that 56 percent of Republicans support
> postponing the 2020 presidential election if Trump and congressional
> Republicans advocate this to "make sure that only eligible American citizens
> can vote."
>
> This brings us to Trump's racism, evident from numerous statements of his
> before and during his presidency. Is it a problem for Trump backers?
>
> Know any other good jokes? Trump's disproportionately Caucasian base is
> fused by an embattled white racial identity. This Trumpian "make America
> white again" heart- and mind-set holds that whites are becoming a minority
> targeted by discrimination and "politically correct" liberal and leftists
> have been turning the nation's politics and policies against white values,
> culture, needs, rights and prerogatives. This curious "reverse
> discrimination" victim whiteness (devoid of evidence for its claims) informs
> the Trump base's understanding of the meaning of the word "corruption" in
> ways the liberal writer Peter Beinart recently captured in the Atlantic. For
> Trump's base, Beinart writes, the idea of corruption isn't so much about
> politics and the law as it is about racial and gender purity:
>
> "
> Trump supporters appear largely unfazed by the mounting evidence that Trump
> is the least ethical president in modern American history. … Once you grasp
> that for Trump and many of his supporters, corruption means less the
> violation of law than the violation of established hierarchies [of race and
> gender], their behavior makes more sense. … Why were Trump's supporters so
> convinced that [Hillary] Clinton was the more corrupt candidate even as
> reporters uncovered far more damning evidence about Trump's foundation than
> they did about Clinton's? Likely because Clinton's candidacy threatened
> traditional gender roles. For many Americans, female ambition—especially in
> service of a feminist agenda—in and of itself represents a form of
> corruption.
>
> Cohen's admission makes it harder for Republicans to claim that Trump didn't
> violate the law. But it doesn't really matter. For many Republicans, Trump
> remains uncorrupt—indeed, anti-corrupt—because what they fear most isn't the
> corruption of American law; it's the corruption of America's traditional
> identity. And in the struggle against that form of corruption—the kind
> embodied by Cristhian Rivera [the "illegal immigrant" accused of murdering
> the young white woman Mollie Tibbetts in rural Iowa two weeks ago]—Trump
> isn't the problem. He's the solution. [Emphasis added.]
>
> But, of course, it's not about racism, nativism, sexism or authoritarianism
> when it comes to understanding Trump's base. White racial and gender
> identity and authoritarianism have long merged with and cross-fertilized
> each other. Last May, political scientists Steven V. Miller and Nicholas T.
> Davis released a working paper titled "White Outgroup Intolerance and
> Declining Support for American Democracy." Their study found a strong
> correlation between white Americans' racial intolerance and support for
> authoritarian rule. "When racially intolerant white people fear democracy
> may benefit marginalized people of color," NBC News reported, citing the
> Miller and Davis paper, "they abandon their commitment to democracy."
>
> The Trump base's bigotry and its leanings toward authoritarianism are not
> separate problems. They are inseparably linked. When Trump calls Mexicans
> murderers and rapists, when he rails about the need for building a wall,
> when he denounces the media as "fake news," when he disses judges and the
> rule of law and juries, and when he praises authoritarian leaders, he is
> appealing to the same voters.
>
> The most sophisticated and statistically astute analysis of the 2016 Trump
> electorate produced so far has been crafted by political sociologists David
> Norman Smith and Eric Hanley. In an article published in Critical Sociology
> last March, Smith and Hanley found the white Trump base was differentiated
> from white non-Trump voters not by class or other "demographic" factors
> (including income, age, gender and the alleged class identifier of
> education) but by eight key attitudes and values: identification as
> "conservative"; support for "domineering leaders"; Christian fundamentalism;
> prejudice against immigrants; prejudice against blacks; prejudice against
> Muslims; prejudice against women, and a sense of pessimism about the
> economy.
>
> Strong Trump supporters scored particularly high on support for domineering
> leaders, fundamentalism, opposition to immigrants and economic pessimism.
> They were particularly prone to support authoritarian leaders who promised
> to respond punitively to minorities perceived as
> "line-cutters"—"undeserving" others who were allegedly getting ahead of
> traditional white Americans in the procurement of jobs and government
> benefits—and to the supposed liberal "rotten apples" who were purportedly
> allowing these "line-cutters" to advance ahead of traditional white American
> males.
>
> Support for politically authoritarian leaders and a sense of intolerance
> regarding racial, ethnic and gender differences are two sides of the same
> Trumpian coin. The basic desire animating Trump's base was "the defiant wish
> for a domineering and impolitic leader" linked to "the wish for a reversal
> of what his base perceives as an inverted moral and racial order."
>
> Is Trump's narcissism a problem for his backers? Not really. As psychologist
> Elizabeth Mika noted last year in an essay titled "Who Goes Trump? Tyranny
> as a Triumph of Narcissism":
>
> "
> The tyrant's narcissism is the main attractor to his followers, who project
> their hopes and dreams. The more grandiose his own sense of self and his
> promises to his fans, the greater their attraction and the stronger their
> support. … Through the process of identification, the tyrant's followers
> absorb his omnipotence and glory and imagine themselves winners in the game
> of life. This identification heals the followers' narcissistic wounds, but
> also tends to shut down their reason and conscience.
>
> If that sounds anything like "creeping fascism," that's because it is. As
> political scientist Anthony DiMaggio recently observed:
>
> "
> There are too many red flags in public sentiment to ignore the threat of
> creeping fascism. Ominously, one of the strongest statistical predictors of
> support for Trump is the desire for a strong leader who will 'crush evil'
> and 'get rid of the rotten apples' who 'disturb the status quo.' Half of
> Republicans say they trust Donald Trump as a more reliable source of
> information than the news media—more reliable even than conservative media
> outlets. Nearly half of Republicans think media outlets should be 'shut
> down' if they are 'broadcasting stories that are biased or inaccurate,'
> raising ominous possibilities regarding precisely who will act on such
> allegations. … The cult of Trump is not an abstract phenomenon, but one that
> has real implications. … The danger of fascist creep is also seen in the
> support from most Republican Americans for shutting down the 2020 election,
> so long as Trump declares it necessary to combat fictitious voter fraud.
> Conservatives' acceptance of this conspiracy theory continues,
> unfortunately, despite the president's own 'voter fraud commission' being
> disbanded after failing to find any evidence of it.
>
> Is Trump's "creeping fascism" a problem for his backers? Leaving aside the
> interesting debate among liberal and left commentators about whether Trump
> is a real or creeping fascist, it is unlikely that more than a small number
> of Americans could provide even the remotest outlines of a working
> definition of what classic European fascism was or what fascism more broadly
> defined is in the world today. It's hard for people to reject something they
> know little or nothing about regarding its existence and nature (even as
> they are thinking and acting in accord with some of the phenomenon's key
> characteristics).
>
> As the dangerously declining superpower that is the United States moves at
> an accelerating pace, under Trump, into a period that deserves to be called
> at least pre-fascism, it is an even better time than usual to heed George
> Santyana's warning: "Those who cannot learn from the past are doomed to
> repeat it."
>
> Paul Street
>
>
>
>
>
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