Yonnah! I pleeve da Twenny FIF!

How Sweet It Is?

A soon-to-be-published book about hijinks in the White House and on the campaign trail may well set in motion proceedings involving impeachment in the House and trial in the Senate. It might also trigger mechanisms in the Executive Branch to invoke Article 4 of the Twenty-Fifth Amendment. Either way the alarum bells are tolling for trimp.

What would Jackie Gleason say?

But relegating trimp to the swamps far far beyond the political sidelines cannot only be a cause for celebration.

There is a clear and present danger by no means new either to our Republic or to democracy itself. The idea that the toppermost levels of the trimp campaign never expected to win a presidential election is also not new. Neither is it news that many in trimp’s immediate inner circle have nothing but contempt for the feeble minded bully who thinks he bosses them.

But enabling callow, out of touch, irresponsible, and unengaged presidents is older than the trimp administration. It was clear cut in the second bush administration and may even be older than the reagan White House.  The danger is not "the president".  It is not even just "the president's men."  It goes much deeper.  Deeper even than the vaunted 'deep state" of the national security apparatus.

The institutional problem superficially centers on the Grand Old Republican Party who seem to require telegenic patsies for working their will on (and against) a shell-shocked public. But the GOP is not the product of any popular base despite how easy it is to whip up poplar (fascist) authoritarian and racist sentiments among the discontented, economically insecure, and atomized 99% of people forced to earn wages from corporate vampires. The GOP is the zombified shambling slave of the 0.1%.  Drive a stake through its heart.  Slice it to pieces and burn each to a cinder.  No matter how it is destroyed, it will be reconstituted in some new alluring form.

Apologists for the GOP have been known to go so far as to blame Hillary Clinton for the scourge of a trimp presidency. Unfortunately, this is not totally absurd if one considers how the Democratic Party is nearly as beholding to corporate ownership as the GOP. In fact, the Democratic Party is arguably corporate wealth’s more faithful servant in that it has the wherewithal to often protect the 0.1% from the worst manifestations of its own idiocy.

The only decent argument against democracy is the intellectually honest argument against socialism - because Socialism is, in fact, “Economic Democracy”. This is the sincere, truthful conservative argument which ruefully points out the vast majority of any population is ill prepared and indifferent to the heavy responsibilities of self rule. Anyone who fails to make this argument may well be ignorant, irresponsible, foolish, or demagogic. But anyone who does point out this truth is bound by honor to help rectify the situation with all the struggle, disappointment, and danger it entails.

Abuse and Degredation in the Workplace

Sexual harassment in the workplace was a major impetus for the growth of organized labor in the United States and Western Europe. It shouldn’t be forgotten that the first large scale employment of wage labor during the industrialization of the US involved women and farm girls in New England. Wage labor was considered too demeaning by men, and females were judged to be more easily managed. But an idea we tend to primly repress today was in the forefront of the consciousness of those involved in early Union Movements in the US and elsewhere:

Employment is always demeaning when it is part of an organized process of extracting wealth from the many for the irresponsible benefit of a very tiny few.

But surely we continue to struggle to establish institutions and habits of mind that reduce the likelyhood some will have opportunities and motivations to abuse those who have been socially engineered into positions of fear or dependence? Isn’t that the thrust of recent (the previous two centuries) history?

Whatever the record of past victories, defeats, or the everpresent temptations of hopelessness, there is no escape from the need for enhancing liberal democracy (individual rights, rule of law, and countervailing institutions), but mystifications regarding private property and individual freedom must be decoupled from justifications for allowing a tiny few to dominate the investment and development priorities of entire nations.

Struggling to institutionalize accountability for harassment, demeaning behaviors, and psycho/social repression is part of the struggle to make power accountable and responsible to the common good.

Progress is certainly always being made, but civil (and brutish) resistance is so constantly fierce that setbacks are quite frequent. The tax scam juggernaut currently befouling Congress is extremely likely to institutionalize the irresponsible power of a predatory plutocratic oligarchy for at least a generation. It will certainly siphon resources away from the already haphazard efforts of our society to develop humane education systems for fostering the skills and knowledge required by complex working democracies where productive abilities are neither despised nor rewarded by diminishing (or humiliating) others.

Humble Devotees of trimp May Yet Show Us The Way

It is both possible and necessary to address the justifiable grievances of trimp supporters without fueling or condoning the racism that many of them even fail to recognize. Don’t forget that significant numbers of them once voted for Obama.

Bill Clinton provides a partial model to the extent he sought small but tangible victories that sometimes brought worthwhile benefits to the many. Obama, despite intractable opposition, was able to win a momentously significant battle by institutionalizing a nationwide system of healthcare that will provide a floor for future models.

Of course neither of them felt they were in a position to address the central malady of our economy and culture: the over concentration of too much wealth in the hands of a tiny (0.1%), unaccountable and irresponsible elite.

Franklin D. Roosevelt proved it was possible to presidentially excoriate “malefactors of great wealth” and to “welcome their hatred” so as to mobilize popular support for essential reforms (Social Security, National Labor Relations Act, Unemployment Insurance, Minimum Wage and Overtime Compensation, financial regulations, etc.)

Lyndon B. Johnson blackened his own legacy with his role in the atrocity of the IndoChinese War. But he also had the courage to declare war on poverty and back his rhetoric with substantial advances in Civil Rights and Social Welfare (Medicare, Medicaid, Head Start, etc,)

The road to economic democracy is a long and bumpy one that we must pave as we go. In the long run we must take measures to tame the modern corporation so as to safeguard their ability to provide public benefits while limiting their natural tendencies to abuse workers, consumers, and the environment.

But we have immediate need for a tax system to redistribute wealth and power while financing radical overhauls of our education, healthcare, transportation, and energy infrastructures so as to minimize onrushing environmental, economic, and social calamities while raising wages and workforce participation rates..

The Politics of Abandonment

"Weakness is now a sin, punishable by social exclusion." - Henry Giroux

Armies of people are being excluded.  

Armies are being locked out of effective politics. And armies are becoming irrelevant to basic systems of production and consumption. Armies of people are surplus, their services no longer needed. These are armies of the rejected whose lifestyles are written off as as "backward". There are armies of souls whose basic needs are unmet. Already abandoned, they wait precariously for the next deluge, for the next catastrophe to sweep them away. This is the language of Naomi Klein.

The "politics of exclusion" can also be called neoliberalism. Neoliberal policies are the pernicious consequences of a growing casino capitalism, ravenously extracting resources from the productive sphere and sucking them down into puerile arenas of gaming and speculation.

This is much more than money being transferred from the many to the few. This is about infrastructure, basic services, and ways of life. 

Factories, stores, industries, cities, entire regions and whole cultures are all being sucked into a frothy nothingness as resources are forcefully clawed into the schemes of callous speculators. These edifices remain only as ruins, refuse, ghost towns, and wastelands traversed by the semblances of dazed zombies, the walking dead. This is not about "creative destruction" because production is being shriveled. This is dereliction and destruction for no reason but the vain benefit of a tiny few.

The unemployed and the uneducated have few recourses under neoliberalism. The need for unskilled labor has been steadily shrinking for half a century and it is still shrinking. Attribute this to a developing economy, but then look at the infrastructure of education.  It is being dismantled for the majority, increasingly replaced by the sham schooling of profit motivated scams. Armies of people are being abandoned. This is the language of Henry Giroux.

Under the neoliberalism of casino capitalism armies of people are no longer needed. Armies of people are considered expendable. This can be seen in growing wealth inequality. This can be seen in shrinking labor market participation. This can be seen in the epidemic of opioid abuse. And much more can be foreseen in proposals to hack at the safety net of Medicaid which funds far more than addiction treatment. Under unproductive casino capitalism, there is no need for the sick or the elderly.

The driving principle of neoliberalism goes far beyond exploitation: a concept which sufficed for most of the 19th and 20th centuries. The vampiric dynamics of casino capitalism demand exclusion. It requires denying value to large swaths of the earth's population. Armies of people are being abandoned, locked out, and cursed into a zombie like condition where they are regarded as - and where they may feel themselves to be - the walking dead. This is the language of Henry Giroux.


Armies of people are being excluded

Armies of people are being abandoned.

We are armies of people unneeded and unwanted by a tiny (0.1%) idiot elite.


We are people.

We are armies.





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