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%)