One Problem With Opinion Shapers

They Warp and Mislead Themselves as Much as They Confuse Everyone Else

In his latest NYT column, the normally astute Thomas Edsall is confusing an already tangled set of issues with his focus on "trade" and his misuse of that term.

It's extremely important to recognize that VERY few people (rich or poor, from red states or blues states) object to trade when it means exporting "our" goods and services. This has simply never been the case. US policy, going back even to before there was a US (which means before there was an Alexander Hamilton), has always been about promoting exports and blocking (to the extent possible) many forms of imports.

But the fake "trade" deals (NAFTA, TPP, etc) are only marginally about reducing barriers to US exports. As Edsall points out, the "Blue" areas are already doing very well.

The situation with "imports" is where everyone's thinking gets more discombobulated. The US is still highly protectionist in many areas (one of the privileges of imperial firepower). But these so-called (actually fake) "trade" deals are more concerned with a special kind of "import" which is more like an internal corporate transfer of goods (or their components) between different locations of one business that "coincidentally happen" to be on different sides of the US borders (or on different sides of the Pacific Ocean).

Thus these "trade" deals are really about facilitating the export of JOBS and PRODUCTION. The majority of people who live in "Blue States" are only temporarily insulated from the corrosive effects this will eventually have on their well being, incomes, and security. And their major benefit from these high powered scams is the temporarily "low everyday prices" made possible by the beggaring of their relatives in "Red States" and the grinding exploitation of workers (often children or prisoners) on the wrong side of the borders/oceans.

We all need to be more careful about our terminology. What we (too often) call "trade" deals are really part of a long term, well-financed, highly propagandized program to reduce the bargaining power of US workers and to dilute the political power of US voters. 

Columnists, politicians, and corporate mouthpieces who (through their mischaracterizations) collaborate with the predatory global 0.1% against the interest of the US population should be called out - or educated.

Are Democrats Bad for the Country?

Being the lesser of two evils can never earn whole hearted support from honest people.

Stanley and Anna Greenberg ask if Obama was "Bad for Democrats". Their column points to how the party lost seats in the off-year elections and failed to win a majority large enough to offset the vagaries of the Electoral College in the context of strategic FBI and Russian meddling.

The Greenbergs never acknowledge structures of white supremacy and attitudes of racism that certainly "colored" every interpretation of Obama's actions and demeanor. This obviously wore heavily on the man, and enabled his (our) enemies to largely keep him in check.

But the Greenbergs' most deleterious omission was any direct reference to the negative power of concentrated wealth. FDR was the only modern presidential politician who could call out "the malefactors of great wealth" and publicly mock them, defy them, attack them, and "welcome their hate". But FDR, of course, was not only "white", he was a born and bred member of the opulent classes.

Obama played a careful game in the constraints of a shattered and still fragile economy. Yes, he "failed" to venture into the risky territory of naked class warfare. That means he was more calculating than bold. But the story of ObamaCare puts all that into its correct perspective.

The Affordable Care Act was barely passed despite a Democratic Congressional majority. Not a single Republican offered any support despite the fact that the bill's provisions had been largely cooked up in Conservative and Republican circles. And his reward? A devastating setback in the next off-year election.

Obama may have been bad for Democrats. But the Democrats (as currently constituted with their dependence on corporate$) are bad for themselves - and bad for the country. Being the lesser of two evils can never earn wholehearted support from honest people.

Scowl

Unseasonably warm now, it's nearly December, the month before a looming Gogg of Maggnoration, but it chills to remember April will be yet more cruel / knowing there must be so many to cross - with as many or more unwarming winters.

Through many dark moments difficulties will deliberately be made for you so you might forget the elevation you decry is for one who has sure-footedly forfeited all leadership rights to allegiance, faith - or honor. 

Repeatedly you’ll be be asked what you’re fighting for, queried mockingly, dismissively, and provocatively by those who sneeringly and seemingly wish to wither your resolve and youth.  And in dark moments you are certain to forget.

If you ever knew what you are fighting for - instead of warring against - you will forget.  

You will forget because your interrogators seemingly want that: because they appear intent on forcing you to falsely realize and confess you never knew - that there may be nothing behind you or inside - except perhaps puerile histrionics, naive outrage, infantile entitlement, and childish spite.

Across unnumbered Aprils you will forget your struggling motives because it will shock and hurt to sense your inquisitors merely pretend not to know.  And well they might.  You'll forget because it will horrify and chill to imagine their ignorance is unfeigned.  You will forget because such deadening forgetfulness seems all numbing and silencing.  And you'll forget because your tormenters will appear convincingly correct about the void they fear you're dragging them towards. 

It's said winter burial brings comfort.  So lonely and bitter, the deep dark cold dulls each urge to stretch and sprout - freezing life spurring rains against frozen crusts far removed. Such dead comfort pulls coldly as if, like gravity, it were inexorably woven in time's fabric.  It will pull you hard, and make you forget why you must resist.

You will forget.  

Again and again.

You will forget even in the branded shadows of towers, even trumping aside glistening ribbons of tolled highways, even huddling miserably under corporately leveled arching spans, even swallowing metered measures of privatized water from walled rivers, sealed wells, and padlocked springs.

You will forget when you succumb to illusions your torturers are foes.   Red face, ursine workers with regained Sinatra swagger heaving twinkied lunch pales under country music strains are made as uneasy by you, the true hopes and fears for their own small starting futures they have pledged to better life.  Desiccated scholars of war, embalmed in repartee and sly allusion, scurrying always to cover feigned life tracks, fear faltering and swooning to the wide alluring openness of your still soft eyes.  Page five scribes and hydrogen jukeboxed Pharisees seep their false selves in white whine and angry gin worrying whether and how your like will remember their sad, scattered, bewildered bits and bytes.

You will forget, but need not remember why never to yield.  Reasons will be your your creation, torn painfully from the timeless, selfless whirlwind where all creation returns.

You are not bound to heed counsel from elders who'll rightly spy the Moloch in your battered eyes - and with fiendly voice, proclaim fears groundless.  Institutions, our tawdry legacy, need much scrubbing, fixing, fortifying and testing.  

Though respect is not something earned - like allegiance, deference, fear, or hatred, / distrust most those who, naively or vulpine, claim rights and properties.  Foxes facilitate ingratiatingly for wolf packs and lion prides to whom rights are only what are seized, or held, or pried away from the young, the lame, the wounded, the old, the sleeping, and the fallen.  Raise your dreams up high in the light of moon and sun to wave into hard twisting winds.

Give everyone their due, and keep the circle open.  

Why not dance and sing?  

But if, holy or not, with shoes full of blood, in some Standing Rock or makeshift Paradise Alley kitchen, one haughty, high-spirited, or humbled Hillary offers true lamb stew, buffalo lung tortillas, or unpure hot frybread, shut your Von Trapps one moment and eat.

But just remember.


Remember.

When someone asks for what you’re fighting, it may just be they’ve lost the words. You may not have them either. Not for them. Those go far back to the first words ever - well before being writrn on clay, or stone, or skin. You can find - or read them when you need. So can anyone - to ape, or state, or sing.

Words web knowledge, dreams, and lies. Stern experience, well thought and felt, are webbed - and sad seductive reveries, stuck and sweated, are woven. But words are traps far more than those.

Right wrought words are not enough even if they’re really yours - and irony rings alarming from their exchange.

Words are also holders, open, waiting to catch or be filled - which no one has. Not that we’ve failed - or that they’re empty. The right ones overflow more than they beg. Right words are much more than tools - and so are you. Remember that when you are quizzed.

There’s the response your quizzers crave even more than they might fear.  Giving it with words or hands or heart might be more than you should do. Working it right could stab in panic too - for lashing out or shriveling in.

Remember.

To each other we are wolves - and so are you with no right to despise those whose wounds, beneath hard beaten hides, still gape.

To each other we are wolves and exchanging wounds is what, older than words, still weaves us together.

To each other we are wolves, and from the moon of Aprils' borrowed light is where songs can be chosen.

It Takes a "Bitch" to Stamp Down on "Twatitude"

"Bitches get stuff done," is (or should be) a central generative theme for our culture, our politics, and our economy in the coming decades.

Claiming and reframing such "derogatories" will definitely escalate culture wars and possess the stark potential to explode well beyond the "verbal".  Of course, this will further divide and silo us - and drive many more of us into novel versions of "safe spaces" for incubating new strengths and insights while also generating myriad forms of personal and social pathologies.  This is intoxicatingly inevitable - and rich with brave possibilities for forging new perceptions and connections our so brittle world.

"Bitch", of course, is now only one of the milder derogatories directed at women by males - and by other females.  And, regardless of the outcome of our current hyper-gendered presidential sextravaganza, females will need to steel themselves in ways that are still relatively unprecedented in our lamentably primitive public arena.  Underlying this is the increasing feminization of the workforce and its abandonment by a growing number of males.  The rise of transgender, non gender, "non binary" youth is likely both a desperate symptom AND a hopeful response to these self shredding tensions in our culture.

We will all need to steel ourselves while also cultivating new versions of self and mutual nurturing.  Failure there means we're trapped in deadly patterns of exploitative irresponsibility.

State capitalism, wage labor, and neo-imperialism may be hard-won advancements over the serfdom and slavery that blighted so many generations into the all to recent past, but we should all pray (and work to guarantee) that these are merely transitory historical stages well on their way to obsolescence.

Otherwise, the cockroaches are poised to overrun the wreckage left behind by our benighted species.

A Papist Plea for Populism from the Altar Boy of the Right Wing Set.

"No one should doubt that a President Hillary Clinton would also play Caesar whenever the opportunity presented itself. But she would lack many of the qualities that make imperial presidents particularly dangerous — powerful charisma, a passionate and devoted base, a close relationship with a compliant press, a claim on some sort of sweeping policy mandate."      --   Ross Douthat

This might the least confused thing Ross has to say here.

He does, however, maunder on to wonder if the best outcome of this current electoral clusterputsch might be a relatively slim margin of victory for the great white hostess with the mostest who hails from Chicago via Little Rock - via the leafy boulevards of Chappaqua, NY.  Manfully ignoring the brickbats and Molotovs that might get hurled from the general direction of easily incited Trumpulists, he makes the intriguing point that the real tragedy of a Clinton landslide might be the "elite" would feel empowered to ignore the "populism" now making The Donald so, well . . . "popular".

What might make this somewhat less confusing would be for Ross to specify what exactly he means by the "elite" - because that could actually clarify what should be done about the "populism" he so fears might be ignored.  Something about the tenor of his column makes me think the "elite" that Ross would like to see chastened is not the idiot elite (.1%) bunch of baby men who would gladly (again) trash our (their?) economy in order to forestall any more troublesome demands for democracy and equality.

No.  I think the "elite" he refers to is the one that includes Hillary and Ross himself.  This is the 20% (or so) of those of us who have wrangled positions of "responsibility", if not influence and prestige, in the workings of our "established" political economy.  This is the portion of mid and upper managers, entrepreneurs, professionals, academics, and journalists who have the time to receive, transmit, and even help make what passes for conventional wisdom and respectable opinion in our, the best of all possibles, society.

And if that's what he means, then he's blaming this sad and beleaguered class of busy multi-taskers for the woes of even less well-educated males as they abandon the labor force and also for the plight of their long-suffering and increasingly unsettled parents who worry about what is blighting the futures of those they engendered when times seemed somewhat less hopeless.

But though it may be quite gratifying to mock we mediocre middling sorts who may exceed our rightful quota of groaning, gaming, corner-cutting, and more than fifty shades of clock time hanky spanky, it's not fair to blame us for the feminization of the workforce that has accompanied the massive transfer of wealth from the hands of the many to the pockets of the few over the past 40 years.  It's just completely rink stink unfair to blame the hapless administrators and clueless explainers for the crushing dilemmas caused by super predatory oligarchs who monopolize resources because "that's what they do."

And what exactly would be so comforting - and who would be so gratified  - about a frustrated and thwarted Clitory Administration that merely prolonged the unsatisfying "grind lock" of the NoBama era?  Not the boys with truck payments.  Not the vets in the waiting rooms.  Not the pensioners who receive court issued payment cuts.  Not the cops in the riot gear.  Not the paramedics who scrape up the fentanyl overdosed corpses from seedy bedsits and blighted back alleys.

No they will not be happy or satisfied at all, but who will they blame?  Not the the idiot elite baby men, but the pant suited bitches on wheels and the girly guys who do their advance work.  That's why the yacht club set likes the likes of Ross so much.  He sees the situation so clearly through the rosary beads he winds around his stubby stubbly appendages. 

Citizen Trump: A Paragon of Public Virtue

Jay Gould was, is, and deserves to remain a national icon. One of his virtues is the demonstration his career and reputation provide against the idea that Donald Trump represents anything original or unprecedented in US culture or politics.

In a cunning example of the irony of popular justice, Jay Gould may be primarily remembered for a quote he probably never actually uttered.

“I can hire half the working class to kill the other half.”

Gould’s verifiable quotes are more interesting and more instructive. Clearly, he was more complicated and more intelligent than a chimp-like Trump. It’s easy to imagine him snorting in derision at the idea of paying members of the working class to kill their compatriots. Why should I hire them? he’d ask, eyes twinkling - or eyes dead. They do it for nothing!

But still.

Too many of we “Libtards” seem to think Trump “is the only trash here” we see. It’s undeniable - and understandably a symptom of the latest strain of virulent “election frenzy” which (this time around) also causes some victims to spew hatred and disgust indiscriminately against both major candidates. Neither fair nor restorative, this actually gets so much wrong about both Trump and Hillary. They are by no means equivalent in the infamy they merit.

But from a distance, it kinda works out.

“From a Distance” is of course a sublimely gorgeous composition by Julie Gold, who deserves a lifelong stream of sustenance and comfort for that single contribution.

Little Donny Trump is just one noxious link in a long chain of bullies, grifters and showmen who rose to prominence on the shoulders of us - a distracted, peanut munching crowd milling about between the funhouse and the factory. He is the bastard spite child of his own dad and “Citizen” Roy Cohn who infamously rubbed greasy shoulders with the likes of Bobby Kennedy and Carmine “The Snake” Persico.

But Trump, together with Clinton (his much lesser partner in grime), is performing a truly valuable public service in this, the best of all recent presidential campaigns. So it's somewhat unjust he may be long remembered as a vile manipulative clown who crushed and shattered the radical insurgency that once could have (straight-faced) been referred to as the “Grand Old Party”.

It’s supremely crucial for as many people as possible to recognize - and appreciate - that this current pageant of grotesquery is actually the best presidential campaign that “We The People of the United States of America” have ever inflicted upon ourselves. Anybody who doesn’t see that, or anyone already moaning about what a fatiguing ordeal this campaign is, should at least be aware of being a major part of the problem.

This campaign is laudable not only for its entertainment value - although the laughs it ought to generate are intrinsic to its restorative power. History should enshrine this election in a cherished place because of its clarifying and instructional value.

Democracy is not a state of being, nor even a system of government.

It never was, and never could be.

It is a claim. It is a struggle. It is a process that has always been resisted, traduced, and betrayed. But democracy is a claim and a struggle that can never be totally exhausted. It is the only force that can ever come close to "guaranteeing" human dignity, justice, and equality in any culture more advanced than scattered bands of hunter-gatherers.

Democracy is the ugly palooka in the boxing ring who won’t stay down. Despite being overmatched. Despite having already agreed with thugs to throw the match. He drinks too much. He whores too much. He sometimes beats his wife and often neglects his children. Or maybe democracy is simply one part of the spirit that thrusts him up again for another savage beating, and then another - just like the ones he’s survived since he was a child, ever since his mother dosed him with gin and paregoric and left him on the stoop of the precinct house.

Democracy is among the most frustrating, enraging, and heartbreaking compulsions of human life. That’s what makes it worthwhile. That’s why we ignore it when we’re not running from it. That’s why we betray it - and Peter like - deny it.

Most of the “both sider-ism” and “lesser evilism” cant lamentably dripping from thoughtless mouths and lazy pens in every election campaign rings especially hollow - and obviously empty - this year. The same is true of any gassy messianic tendency to idealize one candidate over another. Everyone knows that neither offers more than dismal prospects. This campaign, in the context of the half dozen or so that preceded it, forces even the least sentient of us to pine for something new. We are compelled by the cruel cunning of reason to try to raise ourselves at least one crisp nacho above where we’ve stagnated so long.

Long?

Not long.

Not so long at all.

Even the term “democracy” as it applies to institutionalized practices in societies capable of supporting urban populations is not much more than 2,000 years old. Our, species with its capacity for symbolic representation, is at least 100 times that old.

There is the argument that Hillary is truly the more evil of two lessers. That her complicity in racist crime laws, the travesty of welfare reform, drone bombings, and military coups puts pale to Trump’s petty gangsterism and retail racism. Of course, that logic melts like a wicked witch as soon as Trump is inaugurated. But, aside from that, the argument should not be dealt with glibly - or at all dismissed. The key point is not whether we should or shouldn’t have higher standards for female leaders. The key point is that our leaders are ours. The key point is that we have used such standards to disqualify any leader who could not cope with the long span of uncreation between our standards and our reality.

How long?

In a recent article in “Common Dreams” Jake Johnson "concludes" it might be easier to build a new party centered on the concerns and needs of working people then work to reform the Dems. Of course, he may be correct . . . IF such a party stays very small, doesn't have too many "working class" people, and doesn't care that much about winning elections - at least in the short run.

The power of the idiot elite (.1%) bunch of baby men who have hijacked our economy and our politics stems from the hold it has on the hopes and fears of the mediocre class of college "educated" strivers and slackers. We're all submerged in an ideological soup of commercialism and confusion that’s essentially a numbing agent to help us better bear the burdens of student debt, mortgages, and institutional futility in the context of a hierarchy of oppression and brutality in which we occupy a rather "privileged" (if precarious) position.

The base of that soup is fear - and that fear is the reality of how precarious our positions are. Our unjust hierarchy is forever offering subtle reminders of its power to devastatingly convince us that we "never deserved" our "comforts" at all. Of course, this soup is also mercifully spiced with more diffuse types of menace such as fear of nuclear annihilation, civilization collapse due to climate change, terrorism, super predator street "thugs", trigger happy frightened police, Trump, Hillary, Ebola, and Zika. (There really is something for everybody in America!)

We DO need movements, organizations, and factions that contend against the enveloping webs of lies and seductions spun out constantly by the ideological organs that underpin the most rancid elements of our oligarchy. But to worry too much about whether these are "in" or "out" of the Democratic Party is just another diversion - and a snare.

But Pogo had it right.

So did Eleanor Roosevelt.

The calamities that would result from a Trump presidency are unthinkable. Recent polls put Hillary 7 about points ahead. Seven points! Seven points of difference between a conventional politician and a vulgar talking yam of a sideshow promoter? Yes, that’s an indictment of “politics as usual.” But it’s ultimately an indictment of us.

The idea that Trump might still be elected is cringeworthy. But nearly as revolting is imagining a Hillary victory greeted with any kind of Pollyannaish “glad gaming” where we pat ourselves on the back for having “seen through” Trump and vindicating ‘democracy”. That would be just another cruel kick in the teeth democracy does not deserve.

A current rumor attests the Trump Campaign's latest shakeup is confirmation of a new entertainment venture to be launched following the vote. Perhaps that was the originally intended function of Trumpulism all along. It would be so brilliant if Trump loses and then makes such a claim: true or not.

Who can predict the impact on Trump’s supporters if it came to be accepted they were being played and betrayed just like Joe Palooka? Just like democracy. Just like always. Would it be a surge into rage? A sag into resignation? A sad shaking of the head? It would hardly be a Capraesque revelation.

But:

"I would not lead you into the promised land if I could, because if I led you in, someone else would lead you out. You must use your heads as well as your hands, and get yourself out of your present condition; as it is now the capitalists use your heads and your hands."

Eugene Debs said that.

He said that as his own fanfare for the common man and woman.

He was someone with a lot to say.

He was a socialist, and for that his words continue to be scorned.

And Jay Gould would still remind us, eyes dead - or eyes twinkling - that (for whatever reason) there have always been those who would sell themselves cheap.

But.

Bernie Sanders is not a socialist. Yet even though he claimed that label, the young stirred to him. Even though he was a man and old, young people who are women chose him before entrusting their support to Hillary who is, after all, trustworthy enough - and their sister, their mother, their fate.

Our fate.

Bernie Sanders is not a socialist, but he is a liberal on the leftward range of that blurry spectrum with its origin in the Enlightenment, a name for yet another arcing human project only recently started and covered not completely in glory.

But inspiring still. From a distance

Bernie Sanders does not call himself a Democrat, yet he is the current exemplar of the best that those compromised spawn of Jefferson have yet offered to we the people and our overarching projects.

The New Deal is not in the past, and is indeed much more alive than the Great Depression which itself will continue to influence us even well past the final decade of the last person with living memory of it. Many who didn’t know any better (and a few who surely did) told us that the economic, social, and legislative lessons we learned in the 30s had somehow became outdated. Or that their very success in creating a “stable” middle class had made them somehow superfluous. This is the same toxic logic endorsed by the Supreme Court to gut the Civil Rights Act. The major difference in these crimes against history and justice is that the effects of the Shelby County v Holder decision were immediately apparent. It’s taken 40 years of stewing in the aftermath of the damage done to the New Deal for its effects to begin to register on our politics in a meaningful way.

But as egregious as it is to deliberately ignore or distort history - or to fail to teach and learn from it - History has its own cunning. It’s passed on to the young in more ways than words and pictures. Those, after all, can be shredded, erased, burnt or altered - or suppressed. History is passed on in the way our bodies tense when we hold our children. In the way old men walk and talk. In what we say when we’ve drunk too much or haven’t slept. In what we buy and what we gift. In the songs we sing.

Trump’s (hopefully diminishing) support is strongest among older white males. But the key word here is really “older”.

The young people stirred to Bernie.

Like they stirred to Obama.

Like they stirred to Kennedy.

Like they stir to Martin Luther King, and Mandela, and . . .

And to the young, it doesn’t matter (as much) that those icons, those men, are not all what they ARE imagined to be. What matters, more than anything, is what those imaginings are. And the images in those young minds matter just as much to us.

I was a child in the sixties. And I believed.

And then came the seventies, the eighties, the nineties, and then Fox News, W, and now Trump.

It’s fine that today’s young people haven’t made as many compromises as we have. They aren’t as tired. They aren’t as confused. They aren’t as brainwashed.

They still have time.

And there will be new generations with new inspirations. And they will believe.

And, many years from now, no matter what’s in their words, something in the things they show their children will help us all to believe and move on.

Or not.

Quotes from "Jay Gould : A Character Sketch"

Quotes from "Jay Gould : A Character Sketch" by William T. Stead, in The Review of Reviews (February 1893)

• It was the custom when men received nominations to come to me for contributions, and I made them and considered them good paying investments for the company. In a Republican district I was a strong Republican; in a Democratic district I was Democratic, and in doubtful districts I was doubtful. In politics I was an Erie Railroad man all the time.

• I judge property myself by its net earning power; that is the only rule I have been able to get.… This whole island [Manhattan] was once bought for a few strings of beads. But now you will find this property valued by its earning power, by its rent power, and that is the way to value a railroad or telegraph.
  • Testimony to the New York Senate Committee on Labor and Education

• My idea is, that if capital and labor are left alone they will mutually regulate each other. People who think they can regulate all mankind and get wrong ideas which they believe to be panaceas for every ill cause much trouble to both employers and employees by their interference.
  • Testimony to the New York Senate Committee on Labor and Education"

• Corporations are going, we are told, to destroy the country. But what would this country be but for corporations? Who have developed it? Corporations. Who transact the most marvelous business the world has ever seen? Corporations.
  • Interview with the New York Herald

• No man can control Wall Street. Wall Street is like the ocean. No man can govern it. It is too vast. Wall Street is full of eddies and currents. The thing to do is to watch them, to exercise a little common sense, and … to come out on top.
  • Interview with the New York Herald

• I never notice what is said about me. I am credited with things I have never done, and abused for them. It would be idle to attempt to contradict newspaper talk and street rumors.

• I have the disadvantage of not being sociable. Wall Street men are fond of company and sport. A man makes one hundred thousand dollars there and immediately buys a yacht, begins to race fast horses, and becomes a sport generally. My tastes lie in a different direction. When business hours are over I go home and spend the remainder of the day with my wife, my children, and books of my library. Every man has natural inclinations of his own. Mine are domestic. They are not calculated to make me particularly popular in Wall Street, and I cannot help that.
  • Also quoted in The Life and Legend of Jay Gould (1986) by Maury Klein

Attributed:

• I can hire one half of the working class to kill the other half.

https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Jay_Gould

The United States of Reality

“'Prior to the [Berlin] Wall’s removal, President Reagan assured Secretary General Gorbachev that if he would support bringing down the Wall separating East and West Berlin, NATO would not move ‘a finger’s width’ closer to Russia than East Germany’s border. With this assurance Gorbachev gladly signed on." Kathy Kelly

Gun restrictions, gun banning, what "AR" stands for, who gets to poop where, and many questions of a truly serious nature such as nuclear brinkmanship and environmental-climate policy are actually peripheral to a more fundamental problem facing humanity.

I believe the central problem of our day is the lack of accountability and democracy in the world's most fearsome superpower.


The reasons for this are basically twofold (although they are mutually enmeshed and reinforcing).

1. The obscene concentration of wealth in the hands of an idiot elite (.1%) baby men. (A preemptory review of the history of civilization shows this has always been true. But digging just a bit deeper also reveals this has fluctuated erratically everywhere throughout history, and that it has been institutionally mitigated and managed successfully enough to give serious people hope and courage. See US History: "New Deal"; "Post War Consensus")
2. The still embryonic and uncertain 'knowledge and experience base' we have developed regarding mass education. (Mass education is an incredibly recent notion. And taking it beyond the most rudimentary forms of literacy and numeracy is not yet even something for which there is a meaningful consensus, never mind a coherent conception.)

It bears repetition that these two factors are inextricably linked on multiple levels of cause and effect.

"Lesser Evilism" in the Real World

People need to send this guy money - or appropriate gift certificates!

It's a lot harder than he makes it look to make sense of (and find any glimmer of hope) in the ongoing clown olympics by which we, every four years, install a new Firefly (Rufus T.)

Some trivial quibbles:

• 1. It is completely responsible for anyone to entertain the possibility that Trump could actually be the LESSER of two evils when the other choice is Hillary - even if she actually does what she needs to do to earn Bernie supporters' full-throated support. (Don't hold your breath.) Mocking, shaming, badgering, or superciliously lecturing his supporters only strengthens Trump's demagoguery by perpetuating the wrong kinds of resentment and reaction. 

• B. Anyone who feels too much of the urge to be taken seriously by existing "pwogwessive" movements needs to carefully examine her thinking process and serotonin levels.  Right-wingers have no monopoly on sanctimony, grifting, hysteria, or lust for dominance.

• The idea of "safe states" in these times of instability is quite shaky, if not arrogant and pernicious.  In recent memory, Massachusetts has gone for the "Sainted" Ronny "the Gipper" and for "Downtown Scotty Brown - which only shows to go you that no Commonwealth is immune to the cat cries of a well-financed confidence man.

Hillary Needs to Concede

It's Time for Hillary to Concede!

If Hillary cares about the soul of the Democratic Party, it's time to concede.

If Hillary believes her party and our nation have a decent chance at a bright future, it's time she concedes.

She needs to concede our party can no longer be the party of soulless compromise.

She needs to concede that our party can no longer be craven supplicants to the idiot

The Prerequisite for "Free Enterprise" and "Formal Democracy"

Whatever people think they mean when they prattle about "Free Enterprise", Entrepreneurialism, or "Capitalism", could not survive without the "Rule of Law"

Whatever people think they mean when they gush about "democracy" would not last two generations without constitutionalism - the halting historical process of "rule of law" which is necessarily irksome, compromised, and troubled but has nothing in common with some urgent fetish for a yellowed document few trouble themselves to read.

The upper echelons of our courtier press are just now getting around to working themselves up into a pleasant little tizzy about Trumpulism which is indeed a mortal threat to the underpinnings of what's worth salvaging in our suicidally kleptocratic society.

But what Trump represents is a symptom of an underlying pathology that could be much less virulent if it were to be openly recognized and soberly addressed.

The problem is not wealth or income inequality. "Free marketers" are annoyingly correct that such is both inevitable and salubrious for a dynamic economy. The existential threat to formal democracy and "free enterprise" is the extreme type of excessive wealth concentration that afflicts us now as malignantly as it once plagued us before the Great Depression and the New Deal.

And the so-called "under-educated" Trumpulists are quite right to blame the liberal establishment for enabling this pathology of concentrated wealth that drains their security and dignity the way a tumor sucks life from the healthy tissues it disfigures.

It's important to remember that the "Red Scare" Anti-Communist Witch Hunts of the 40s and 50s were initiated by prissy liberal democrats who later recoiled at the buffoon antics of Tricky Dick Nixon and Tailgunner Joe McCarthy whom liberal Dems later scapegoated for the whole fiasco. But we could blame this illiberal liberalism for starting the slippery slope of discrediting The New Deal.

The concentrated wealth of the Idiot .1% is THE fundamental threat to constitutionalism and the institutional rule of law that guarantee formal democracy and economic opportunity. But we could blame JFK's tax cuts for starting the slippery slope of the actual institutional dismantling of the New Deal and Progressivism.

What we label "Reaganism" arguably began during the Carter Administration. And it was a series of Democratic legislative majorities that actively enabled Reagan, the Bushies, and Clinton to skid the rails with supply-side Voodoo and pushed us to the perdition we face today.

Trumpulists hate liberals for being bossy scolds, but even more for being cowardly hypocritical self-serving liars. Trump is indeed a grotesque and menacing monster, but the liberal establishment (including The New York Times and the Clintons) is his craven, handwringing creator.

Calling Dr. Frankenstein!

Don't Blame Trump for Threatening "The Rule of Law". (Blame the Concentrated Wealth of the Idiot .1%)

A Really BAD Daddy for America

Sometimes the filter just catastrophically fails. I should stop reading the New York Times in bed before I am fully awake. Otherwise stuff happens.

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The intellectual & moral bankruptcy of US elites is lewdly exhibited here.

The US tries to foster peace and global democracy only in the troubled imaginations of ordinary Americans oppressed by overwork and underpay - if not yet made redundant or underemployed by a rigged economy staggering and stagnating under the vigorous parasitism of an idiot elite .1%

An "expert" in US foreign policy has all the information required to know that US foreign policy is about protecting business & investment interests with NO compunction about:

• supporting terrorism and torture, 
• subverting sovereign (even democratically elected) governments by disrupting their societies with propaganda and economic warfare leading to violence, hunger, and lack of medical care, 
• direct "covert" attacks on property and persons (including death from the sky via cruise missiles and drones), 
• Or, when "necessary" . . . terror bombing and outright invasion. 

The fact that our "free press" constantly publishes poisonous dreck like this helps explain why voters are swayed by unprincipled demagogues like Trump. What Trump spews is no less outlandish, irresponsible, and mendacious than what's foisted upon us as the sober, sound, and "respectable" consensus of a cancerous establishment.

US voters might just be entering a pubescent stage of awareness that our "parents" are really drunk, drug-addled abusers at home and murderous Mafiosi in the street. Some siblings will emulate. Others . . .?

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The Times piece being reacted to was written by a Harvard educated professor named Eliot Cohen, a member of George W. Bush's foreign policy "brain trust" which, I suppose, might be all anyone needs to know. It really shows what humanity has always been up against. "We have met the enemy, and they are . . . ."

It Can't Happen Here. (Could it?)

What's happening in Brazil is actually very important for the future of freedom and democracy across the world - and in the United States.

What's happening in Brazil is actually very important for understanding our own idiot elite (.1%) who would like you to refer to them as "job creators".

What's happening in Brazil is actually very important for understanding the forces behind what our "free press" repeatedly refer to as "free trade" agreements.

Sometimes it seems that the only freedoms and rights that matter (to journalists and opinion makers) are the freedoms and rights of those who control investments. (Corporate brainwashing and poor education tempt me to write "investor class", but that would imply these people invest their own money when just as often - if not more often - they are actually investing our money.)

We love to congratulate ourselves about our "free press".

But we blame ourselves when we feel uniformed about the workings of our politics and our real economy.

We are taught to think of capitalism as freedom of opportunity and the pursuit of happiness.

And we blame ourselves for not sacrificing and focusing enough in our pursuit of success.

Maybe you know people who think what's going on in Brazil has nothing to do with us?

Maybe you (like a good citizen of the world) follow the news, and have heard that an unpopular president of Brazil (a latinized version of Horrible Hillary) is being impeached in for corruption?

Maybe you know a little something about the history of Latin America and wonder if the US could be involved in some way. You might even know something about what happened in Brazil in 1964.

Well, back then the US government supported a military coup with all the fascist trappings of murder and torture.* (You can Google for yourself about similar US interventions in Guatemala in 1954, The Dominican Republic in 1965, El Salvador in the 1970s and 80s, or Honduras in 1903, 1907, 1911, 1912, 1919, 1924, 1963, 1925, and 2009 . . . Barry! Hillary!! Say it ain't so!!!)

What's happening (right now) in Brazil is not called a military coup. It's called a "corporate coup". But the people controlling the resources and protecting "their" investments in Brazil (right now!) are the same people who we are taught to idolize here in the US as "job creators".

Do you think this might explain anything about dysfunction in our own politics and economy in the last generation or two?





*It's important to note that Brazil's impeached president, Dilma Rousseff, was a victim of horrible torture by the US backed military dictatorship in the 1970s.

The Purpose of Super Delegates

What passes in the US for a "free market democracy" is enough to reduce anyone to a hopeless puddle of befuddlement. Some people, somehow, have not only managed to assemble relatively decent personal "BS detectors" but have also honed their ability to communicate some clarity to the rest of us. Charlie Pierce of my own Commonwealth (God Save It!) is one of those.


Read Pierce's blog post about the purpose of super delegates, a recent invention of the Democratic Party. Spoiler Alert: it never had 'nuthin to do with democracy (intentional double negative because it was all about democracy, but . . .) This is stuff that teachers need to grapple with (if only in their own serious reflections) because it has profound affect on what and how we teach . . .


Knowing a little history truly is a dangerous thing, but a good start would be to have every high school graduate learn that the Madisonian master plan of 1787 was designed to limit most possible dangers from any possible emergence of a specter which has always been so fearsome to landed or moneyed elites - and to the majority of skilled mandarins that serve their interests.


Hamilton was forthright in his belief that the people were "a great beast". He was more qualified to say stuff like that then were Madison, Jefferson, or Washington, all slaveholding plantation lords. Hamilton, emerging from truly humble beginnings, could claim a familiarity with the common sort that would have rung quite false in utterances from natural-born members of the "master class".


Speaking of "false ringing", the most insidious injuries to possibilities for democracy come from shallow, thoughtless, and completely groundless romanticizing of the ideal: so lamentably prevalent in high school civics lessons and campaign stump speeches. Democracy may well sometimes win truly inspiring victories once or twice in every few generations, but mostly it's a slow, dirty, frustrating, heartbreaking, and thankless slog against the sharp-elbowed opportunists, the superciliously privileged, the well-financed exploiters, the drunken street bullies and brawlers, the false-hearted demagogues (funded by the aforementioned exploiters and bolstered by the aforementioned brawlers) but mostly against the crisscrossing currents of confusion, contradiction, cant, ignorance, desperation, despair, and distraction that is the sea we little fishies swim in.


Hearkening back to "BS detectors", it's often the most unschooled, and the least "formally articulate" who have the best internalized warning systems. That might be because such are more needed for survival when one lacks the systemic credentials. Or it might also, sadly but credibly, be because schooling never successfully suppressed their native wit or deluged them with intensive, sense destroying, indoctrination. How many "dropouts" (and even graduates) look back at (at least some of) their schooling as a farrago of stultifying nonsense?


But the Madisonian plan could never - and was never designed so as to totally -foreclose the possibility of democracy. The reasons for that are profound and not categorically uplifting. Suffice it to say that democracy (whether in the good ole' US of A or in the "golden age" of classical Athens) has always been deeply rooted and intertwined with war and militarism. (So even when a veteran, who fought in a war you have reason to believe was motivated by criminal imperialism, says he fought for "your" freedom, he's still somewhat correct - even if you are too!) On a less dismal note, the possibility of democracy can never be totally foreclosed because of the profoundly unknowable, unlimitable nature of human existence based as it on foundationless quantum characteristics of the building blocks of "nature" which, as we are slowly learning, constantly generate new possibilities from what appears(to us) to be "nothingness".


So, yes. Our leaders will betray us, and they will keep on betraying us, again and again - and again, even in the unlikely event that we could ever contrive to give them good reason to safely trust us as a reliable bulwark to protect and defend the ideals associated with principles of self rule. (Sing along now! Did anybody seeeee my good friend . . . ?)


If democracy is not the road itself, it is a goal that shimmers only faintly on a far horizon. But the Madisonian architecture of our Constitution, by limiting both government and democracy, may still well be humanity's last best hope for democracy and for meaningful self rule. if democracy had no possibility here, our leaders would not work so hard to head it off. And the failures and consequences of their fatuous attempts are glaringly manifest in this, absurdly disconcerting, election year.

Idiots' Guide to Fixing our Politics

Trying to understand the rise of Trump, David Brooks points to our culture's "individualistic/autonomy mindset"  - as if that were a bad thing.   Actually, "rugged individualism", whether opportunistically celebrated by the right - or the by the left, should not be understood as being antithetical to any "community/membership mindset"  In fact, as conservatives rightly point out, the opposite is more true.  Individualism, as in some relative degree of "self-sufficiency", is absolutely necessary for affiliation between equals.  And there lies the rub!

The Big Swindle

What would happen if Americans became convinced that they live neither in a democracy nor a capitalist economy?  For two generations now, Noam Chomsky has been in the forefront of those building a strong case for such an unsettling model of US governance.

The Guilty Truth

The "Guilty Truth" of America is much older than the United States.

It was here for the Pequot War in 1634-38, at the Boston gallows in 1660, and in 1692 Salem.  It was with us in the Philippine "Zones of Protection" enforced by the US Army

It's Never Too Late To Think

"Idiocy" is not the opposite of intelligence.  There is actually a positive correlation between the two, just as there is a positive correlation between intelligence and "stupidity" (which is emotional).  This is especially true in the culture which we are continually creating: one where the self and selfishness are idealized

Stagnation

The "Greatest Generation" surely knows better, but insufferable baby boomers can revel in annoying younger (and even lesser) generations by asserting a distinct lack of innovation in popular music since approximately 1980.

The Law Does Not Have to be an Idiot

"Law is whatever is boldly asserted and plausibly maintained."

-- Aaron Burr


"Law is merely the expression of the will of the strongest for the time being."

-- Brooks Adams

Thanks to scoundrels like Antonin Scalia, the Constitution and our laws can seem inexorably weighted to the benefit of the corporate investor class (.01%). But the law is actually older and more flexible than the greedy few would have us believe.

Jeremy Brecher reminds us of the "Public Trust Doctrine" which is the principle that the sovereign holds in trust for public use some resources such as shorelines, running water, and the atmosphere, regardless of private property ownership. This doctrine goes back at least as far as the Roman Emperor, Justinian. It was substantiated in English Common Law and in US Case Law (Illinois Central Railroad v. Illinois, 146 U.S. 387 (1892). Today in most states, lakes and navigable-in-fact streams are maintained for drinking and recreation purposes under a public-trust doctrine.

Brecher advocates extending the doctrine to justify direct action against the agents of climate change where civil disobedience becomes law enforcement, and the children are leading the way.

The rich are different from you and me. Having more money, they can chip away at hope and sustainability. But it's not because they're particularly evil. It more because they are Trump Stupid, and (often seeing themselves as victims) willfully blind to the consequences of their actions.

It's not a Conspiracy. (It's Congenital)

A bunch of swells running around in dark cloaks killing cute furry woodland creatures does not a conspiracy make.

Does anyone really believe that a coven of un-creatively anachronistic Elmer Fudds have the drag to gin up international terror while suppressing wages and opportunities for us ordinary American slobs?


Well . . . , it's still not a conspiracy.

It's what Cronkite said. "That's the way it is!"

It's not a conspiracy; it's the way things work.


Not that there isn't a "power elite" inordinately dominated by the investor class.

It's just likely most such toffs who delight in "tours of the Czech countryside, wine tasting, wild boar and mouflon (wild sheep) hunts, classic dance instruction and a masked costume ball” are probably more like Fredo than Vito or Michael Corleone. They're the ones paid to stay OUT of the family business.

Well . . . , maybe not ALL of them . . .

The Pot Starts to Scald

What happens when froggies in a heated pot start to feel the scald?

Do they Turn to the Bern or (try to) Jump to the Trump?

Either way "The Establishment" is dismayed.

They know too well that there is no alternative to what is happening now.

We're terrorized by terrorists.  We work longer hours for less pay.

Muslims want to kill us.  Mexicans are taking our jobs.

Those Mexicans, especially "the illegals" will, after all, work so hard for so little pay.  And they can't complain.  (They're illegal.)   A wall won't keep them out, but at least Trump will build one.  He says so.

And, he says, Mexico will pay for the wall.  It will, at least, generate construction jobs. But for whom?  Illegal Mexicans who work hard for less pay and don't complain?


It looks like the Establishment will always be right.  (No wonder we hate them so much.)