AHA/ INSIGHTS

forgot this category:

adding mega-trends, big picture

see OMG in Bizzarocapt 3x? some lost? ggl 817 capt 818 / 619 ext HD both capt txt 5/21

 and/or this cat for ideas questions insights generated by the web technique

== 7 22neo-con is // neo-libtard Bush 43; BOTH MUY MACHO, REDUCTIONISTIC?aha  GULF WAR 2 POSTER CHILD FOR CASCADE OF FAILS:JRNLISM FAILset off refugee surge --> brexit  [CAMBRIDGE anal ] , alt rt, authoritarian [eu la penn] ; wolfie neo-cons wanted it for decades , cooked the intel, hunted the whistleblowers PlameSEE WMD BS YELLOWCAKE CHENEYde-Bathification --? al queda, CNP fail ministry of oilpvtization blackwater halliburton? tigerswan<div>=</div><div times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">=</div><div times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">see sov citizen me vs we; VXR:  bodily integrity is last stand/refuge // virgin not penetrated totemic for safety of castle vs invaders?!</div><div times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">body is last thing i have control of, not my city, country b/c POC gt replacement, my econ future/membership in middle class precarious, factory jobs outsourced overseas to chicom and POC peasants.</div><div times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">rugged indiv me vs we BUT ironically there is a social component, i am not alone/crazy, i'm part of a tribe of patriots who love god and country // brave founding fr/minutemen STORY 1</div><div times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb" style="">soc media lets isolated ppl find each other, validate crazy but also amplify it see radicalization of alt rt --> manifestos and mass shooting</div><div times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">aha: recall origins in Heartland reverse engineer: if AGW real, world gov't no capitalism</div><div times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">also fork 1 origin // sununu collectivist jackboots story 1 threatened</div><div times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">vax everywhere = neg?</div><div times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb" style="">gw denial eroded faith in sci for decades and made us vuln to vaxxer BS --> civil war?!</div><div times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><div>fox murdochs burn down the world for money and power (vax and AGW) ; koch gop anti-gubmint erode norms, </div><div><div>
</div><div>fox briefly forgot trump TV hacks and acted like a news org and reported FACT that trump lost AZ, immediate threat from oann newsmax reb mercer soc media play</div></div></div><div times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><div times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">no lnx</div><div times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">
</div><div times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">Black flag: Understanding the Trumpists' latest threatening symbol</div><div times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">
</div><div times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">Chauncey DeVega and Salon October 12, 2021</div><div times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">   </div><div times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">It's an old truism that the "real bad men" (and bad women) "move in silence and violence." That's certainly true for the most dangerous and most effective of Donald Trump's allies, henchmen, henchwomen, and other followers. But for Donald Trump himself, and most of his political cult, that rule does not apply....</div><div times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">
</div><div times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb"><a href="https://www.alternet.org/2021/10/trumpists/" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none;">https://www.alternet.org/2021/10/trumpists/</a></div></div>
=<div>=</div><div>bannon touts trump as the great disrupter b/c the system is sick/rigged</div><div>aha/hmmn: koch  gop TP libtards have been undermining faith in gov't, [only balance/mod w/ unions to corp power/authoritarian fascism] mebbe building on viet nam lies?  but now big lie conspiracy theory says if dems win it was rigged/fraud, so voter suppression plus gerry allows minority gop rule.  alt rt 8 chan ampl/accelerate cynicism apathy to black pill --> ACT-ion mass shoot spark race war? prove you're not a pussy/squish/cuck
=</div>=9/20<div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">aha: reduction = retaliation = transaction</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">terministic screen/tunnel vision limits to small number of visible things right here and now  self-ish vs larger complex system/ long term; also zero sum</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div>long term means more entities,  more events thus more complexity (tho a story can simplify/screen/ change emphasis, make a pattern thus meaning, which then acts as term screen filter to repell conflicting/anomalous/dissonance info )</div><div>
</div><div style=""></div><div style="">UBER AHA: polarization, inequality, instability (all feed on each other, death spiral matthew? GOP most dangerous org in hist b/c ailes, rove, newt, trump stoke?! kill cop15 paris just side effect? [also note xian jbs hate of UN)</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">1/20</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">aha_let: all these pols may not be bigots at heart, but anti-gay is culture war wedge issue, big w/ evangelicals, so mostly freebie nobrainer upside?</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">PLUS these hot-button issues are great to generate FEAR thus great for direct mail fundraising (also email) and mebbe GOTV</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">theory to check: scam pac online fundraise on FEAR?</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">gingrich rove and trump are masters of culture war thus polarization</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">=</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">AHA OMG interaction matthew</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><div>aha omg agw increase inequality --> decrease ability poor to cope w/ climate chaos, increase migration, political instability, increase xenophobia/ militarism ....</div><div>
</div><div><div>robt r davos</div><div>
</div><div>Popular anger is boiling over against elites seen as irredeemably greedy, corrupt and indifferent to the plight of most people struggling to get by. The anger has fueled uprisings in Chile, Spain, Ecuador, Lebanon, Egypt and Bolivia; environmental protests in the UK, Germany, Austria, France and New Zealand; and xenophobic politics in the US, the UK, Brazil and Hungary.</div><div></div></div></div><div>=</div><div>aha omg agw increase inequality --> decrease ability poor to cope w/ climate chaos, increase migration, political instability, increase xenophpbia/ militarism ....</div><div>
</div><div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">robt r davos</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Popular anger is boiling over against elites seen as irredeemably greedy, corrupt and indifferent to the plight of most people struggling to get by. The anger has fueled uprisings in Chile, Spain, Ecuador, Lebanon, Egypt and Bolivia; environmental protests in the UK, Germany, Austria, France and New Zealand; and xenophobic politics in the US, the UK, Brazil and Hungary.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"></div></div>AHA! THE SOLUTION IS TO RESTORE THE COMMONS<div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">AHA:  REDUCTIONISM KILLS/ ENSLAVES/ EXTRACTS</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">VS SYSTEMS HEAL, CONNECT, FREE</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">I/THOU VS I/IT ME v WE</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div>triggerd bywicked smart henry g  <a href="https://www.alternet.org/2019/05/our-culture-of-ignorance-has-made-possible-the-rise-of-a-terrible-new-political-blend-neoliberal-fascism/" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none;">https://www.alternet.org/2019/05/our-culture-of-ignorance-has-made-possible-the-rise-of-a-terrible-new-political-blend-neoliberal-fascism/</a><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">REPAIR THE COMMONS</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">AHA, SYNERGISTIC, CASCADE GOOD OR BAD/DOWN</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><a href="https://theconversation.com/environmental-reporting-can-help-protect-citizens-in-emerging-democracies-115822">https://theconversation.com/environmental-reporting-can-help-protect-citizens-in-emerging-democracies-115822</a></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div>What happens when an illegally logged tree falls or poachers kill endangered brown bears in the forest, but there’s no journalist to report it?That’s the situation in the Republic of Georgia, which faces challenges that include poaching, deteriorating air quality, habitat disruption from new hydropower dams, illegal logging and climate change. The effects cross national borders and affect economic and political relationships <a href="https://www.routledge.com/Environmental-Crises-in-Central-Asia-From-steppes-to-seas-from-deserts/Freedman-Neuzil/p/book/9781138824843" style="outline: none; white-space: pre-wrap; overflow-wrap: break-word;">in the Caucasus and beyond</a>.I researched environmental journalism in the Republic of Georgia as a Fulbright Scholar there in the fall of 2018. I chose Georgia because many of its environmental and media problems are similar to those confronting other post-Soviet countries nearly 30 years after independence. As I have found in <a href="https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=bEOS7t8AAAAJ&hl=en" style="outline: none; white-space: pre-wrap; overflow-wrap: break-word;">my research</a> on mass media in other post-Soviet nations, journalists risk provoking powerful public and corporate interests when they investigate sensitive environmental issues.<p style="background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; margin: 0px 0px 18px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">But when the media don’t cover these problems, Georgians go uninformed about issues relevant to their daily lives. Eco-violators operate with impunity, and the government and Georgia’s influential private sector remain opaque to the public. At a time when government hostility to journalists is <a href="https://rsf.org/en/2019-world-press-freedom-index-cycle-fear" style="outline: none; white-space: pre-wrap; overflow-wrap: break-word;">rising in many countries</a>, Georgia illustrates how environmental damage, pollution and ill health can spread, and go unpunished, when powerful interests are unaccountable to the public.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">...</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><h2 libre="Libre" baskerville="Baskerville" georgia="Georgia" times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" serif="serif" style="margin: 0px 0px 12px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; text-rendering: optimizelegibility;">Transparent in principle, not in practice</h2><div>...</div></div>
=<div>

=</div><div>AHA DOH!</div><div>
</div><div>left gets accused of name-calling/ intolerance, we use these terms to beat down legit conservative thought/voices (cf campus freedom bs) BUT:</div><div>
</div><div>but sinclair weather guy ~ red alerts made me realize it's fox's biz model?! asl oright, certainly trump/ authoritarian (only I the Strong Man alone) can save you from: ISLAMOPHOBIA, XENOPHOBIA  AFRO-PHOBIA, , HOMOPHOBIA, MISOGYNY (planned parenthood is selling baby body parts?!), COMMIE-PHOBIA mccarthy witch hunts, under the bed infiltrate state dept.</div><div>
</div><div></div>public bank: see also commons, co-op, buffer (jiu jitsu on buffer gestalt flip?)<div class="GGD0W3FBKT" aria-hidden="false" style="float: left; top: 3px; left: 5px; margin-right: 110px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Buffer resilience</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); clear: both; position: relative;"><div class="GGD0W3FBKS" aria-hidden="false" style="float: left; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); clear: both;"><div class="gwt-HTML" aria-hidden="false" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">see mod tag and Moderation nodeBuffers are reserves of resources that give systems resilience

Tendency to engineer out as inefficient, eg  just in time supply chainbut evil darkside limits transprenecy and acctabilityeg IPAA, CoC, API...ca farm bureau<div style="">3/19 primary, evil pending, BUFFER on chemicals and water</div><div style="">11 tags</div>=aha 4/19 related end-runs around law: terms of service, eula</div>the uber lie: darwin invis hand meritocracy<div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">=</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><div>=</div><div>aha-ish: some awareness that right has been funded by rw oligarch for a long time, dupont cellophane league, ford elders of zion, so soros is mirror for kochs, the funder and thus the source of all evil (plus he's a Jew); plus they need simple explanation for why their ideas are not more popular: liberal press and prof's.</div><div></div></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"> retrench rebrand retreat<div>
</div><div>eg james martin ctr</div><div>
</div><div>this began as node about success in name and shame forcing an org to "morph"</div><div>
</div><div>but listening aaron matte reminding me that the trump cand was an exercise in brand boosting [and of course pique) that he never expected to win, remind me on how so much now comes down the branding, memes [and extraction, see Team Human]</div><div>=</div></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">[6/26 kpfa tim wise observes that the sin of all this is the system is ALREADY DESIGNED FOR THESE PPL, WHY DID THEY FEEL THE NEED TO PUSH/CORRUPT IT EVEN MORE?!</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><a href="https://www.democracynow.org/2019/3/13/cheating_bribes_lies_doj_charges_dozens" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none;">https://www.democracynow.org/2019/3/13/cheating_bribes_lies_doj_charges_dozens</a></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Operation Varsity Blues. That’s the name of a sweeping federal probe into what the Justice Department calls the biggest college admissions scam the agency has ever uncovered. On Tuesday, 50 people, including 13 college coaches, were arrested for taking part in a scheme where wealthy parents paid exorbitant bribes to secure spots for their unqualified children in elite schools, including Yale, Stanford, Georgetown, UCLA, USC and Wake Forest. Prosecutors have charged 33 parents, including Hollywood stars Felicity Huffman and Lori Loughlin; Loughlin’s husband, the fashion designer Mossimo Giannulli; and Bill McGlashan, a founder of TPG Capital, one of the largest private equity investment firms in the world. We speak with Ivory Toldson, professor of counseling psychology at Howard University and president of Quality Education for Minorities. His new book is titled “No BS (Bad Stats): Black People Need People Who Believe in Black People Enough Not to Believe Every Bad Thing They Hear About Black People.”</div></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">....</div><div>GOODMAN: So, that’s the FBI special agent talking about this scandal. No actual schools were charged, though people within the schools, like, you know, the head of soccer at Yale, for example. You had these pictures sent in of athletes with their heads photoshopped to be a student who didn’t even play the particular game, in cases like water polo. What message does this scandal send to black and brown children, to white not wealthy children, who believe that higher education is a meritocracy? What do you say to them?IVORY TOLDSON: Yeah, yeah. Well, I hope it’s a wake-up call for people who have bought into the system that people become wealthy because they have worked hard. It’s a deception that’s pervasive in our society. Among the wealthy, their objective is passive income. You know, they talk actively about making money without working. That’s what they talk about in their own social networks. But yet, when they’re talking to people who may work for them, they try to make it seem like it’s all about working hard. In reality, it should be about working hard. Everybody should work hard for what they have. But there are people in this country, unfortunately, who would rather manipulate the system so that some people work hard to get enough, and other people work not at all and get more.And I think it also does a disservice to their children, because their children will grow up feeling a false sense of entitlement, believing in unearned privilege, believing in inherited wealth and all of the things that will lead to certain types of predatory behaviors, whether it be predatory lending, manipulating markets, predatory landlords—you know, different aspects of society that we’ve all grown to loathe. All of this is cultivated in these types of environments.</div><div>=</div>=remember chickenhawks? elliot abrams ....EXTRACTION:<div>rw radio often use fda loophole to hustle vit/diet supplements; preys on magical thinking; MLM is odd hybrid see below of individuality , but leaches off personal network; UBER extracts via car, AIRBNB personal space. Capitalism extract natural world resources, FANG of digital world.</div><div>
</div><div>Regarding the prosperity gospel, Fea cites the work of historian Kate Bowler, writing, “Prosperity preachers teach that faith in God combined with positive thinking and an optimistic attitude will ultimately lead to monetary wealth, good health, and victory over the difficult circumstances of life.” His broader background descriptions are adequate, but his focus on one figure, Paula White, who has a long history with Trump, is not fleshed out much.</div><div>
</div><div>Fea mentions but does not elaborate on Trump’s youthful experience hearing sermons from Norman Vincent Peale, author of “The Power of Positive Thinking,” and never delves into how Trump’s own business practices have reflected the influence of such figures, such as <a href="https://nymag.com/nymag/features/70831/" target="blank" rel="noopener" times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" box-sizing="box-sizing" border-box="border-box" outline="outline" none="none" margin="margin" px="px" padding="padding" text-decoration-line="text-decoration-line" transition="transition" color="color" s="s" ease="ease" cursor="cursor" pointer="pointer">this 2011 New York magazine story</a> about Trump’s multi-level vitamin marketing scheme. The prosperity gospel is the utmost in individualism, while at the same time relying on a powerful and persuasive social environment, which Fea’s analysis does not include.</div><div>
</div><div>
</div><div>=</div>aha: provocateurs and (mindless?) catalyst that sets of reactions they can control or predict? dangerous in tribal destabilized world? but MLK and other activists look for event to trigger media coverage, change of mind/heart tipping point/ leverage?re sandmann
==aha but not mine: eskow<div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><a href="https://www.alternet.org/2019/01/11-questions-you-should-ask-libertarians-see-if-theyre-hypocrites/" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none;">https://www.alternet.org/2019/01/11-questions-you-should-ask-libertarians-see-if-theyre-hypocrites/</a></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Libertarians have a problem. Their political philosophy all but died out in the mid- to late-20th century, but was revived by billionaires and corporations that found them politically useful. And yet libertarianism retains the qualities that led to its disappearance from the public stage, before its reanimation by people like the Koch brothers: It doesn’t make any sense....</div>am rising oppos shop popping up mult places; need to rebrand? eg matt whitaker11/18interesting to track dev of hard rt and how it morphs/ migrate to diff platforms eg freepers top gab to---- (increasingly quickly?  social network has bias to crap/conspiracy/extemeism? beyond FB algorithm?doh unions are targets, but look at how many attackers 11/18 =aha anti semite [the original archetypal conspiracy theory: unseen evil force at fault for all, vs actual structural], anti- islam (sikh temple?)AHA: 1st and worst: go after poor ppl of color w. extractive pvtization schemes // disaster cap'l Puerto rico<h2 style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 0.5em; line-height: 1; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><a class="tag" href="https://boingboing.net/tag/prisons" style="box-sizing: border-box; text-decoration-line: none; display: block; margin-bottom: 0.25em; text-transform: uppercase;">PRISONS</a><a class="headline" href="https://boingboing.net/2018/09/14/pennsylvania-to-end-prison-boo.html" style="box-sizing: border-box; text-decoration-line: none; margin-bottom: 0.25em;">Pennsylvania to end prison book donations, forcing inmates onto pricey eBook platform </a><a class="byline" href="https://boingboing.net/author/rob_beschizza" style="box-sizing: border-box; text-decoration-line: none; text-transform: uppercase;"> ROB BESCHIZZA</a></h2>plus egprivatized probation<a href="http://www.allgov.com/news/controversies/outsourcing-probation-a-lucrative-and-growing-industry-140129?news=852293" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none;">http://www.allgov.com/news/controversies/outsourcing-probation-a-lucrative-and-growing-industry-140129?news=852293</a>Privatization of the criminal justice system has extended beyond prisons that are run for profit and now includes probation operators making a buck off Americans who have violated the law.Quietly over the past four decades, private probation companies have gone into business in 40% of U.S. states, most of them in the South. Georgia alone has 34 businesses providing probation services.rudy villain, evil pending=aha getting to be a problem (even an issue in 2018 election) in populous (swing?) states: CA, Tx, la FLA sorta thought anti-global elite is bannon trump meme, but of course anti-commie paleocon, agenda 21 big, but still amazing how mainstream this bogus watchdog is 818:<a href="https://webbrain.com/brainpage/brain/E212D5AA-EEF5-535C-9D0D-27920B094E45#-3215">https://webbrain.com/brainpage/brain/E212D5AA-EEF5-535C-9D0D-27920B094E45#-3215</a>
see strategy on 3 elites (not so much global?) badass ppt 3 kinds of fail:
1) economic, recession, depression (bubble burst, sytsem in runaway mode, no balance)
2) ecological: Dust Bowl (overlaps with above), exxon valdez /gulf oil spill [deregulation, greed cut corners on worker and nature safety: nature commons is a buffer, but free to pollute, externaliies)
3) political fail:  massive inequality (Matthew Effect, amplifying fdbk) rich corrupt political process; white rural working class feel same hopelessness ghetto felt for decades (no riots, but own drug epidemic of despair).  inequality led to instability that allowed russian trolls to tweak enough ppl to vote against their own interests (drain the swamp, bring back coal and mfg jobs w/ tariffs]; Cambr anal target swingables in swing states?aha war on drugs is sys fail; opium record amounts in afghanistan (which is a regional issue, other countries are stakeholders [Paki intel works at cross purposes?)
drug WAR is wrong metaphor: build a wall to keep the bad guys out; ignores the demand (ppl are sick, need treatment); opioid epidemic of despair (often starts with pain med for ppl hurt at work; trump no $ for new opioid pgm (tho recently rolled on going after co's?); opioid sold as non-addictive, data hidden like tobacco?
see dana m on traps: problem with drug war is that the obvous tactic is to push harder, arrest more, harsher mandatory sentnences (3 strikes) but it just reduces supply which raises the price which provides more resources to smuggle and incentives to use violence (so the answer is surrender? truce?) legalize? libtard reductionism? (junkies who kill themselves are "externalities/ collateral dmamage, stupid poor brn ppl who take themselves out of the darwinian/american pool?)
connection between militarism and drug addiction? 4 horse [heroin pun] war on terror
war on drugs big under nixon, Reagan and bush 43 --> PIC (Clinton triangulation)<div>4 horse: privatization, financialization, militarization, and criminalization, which together are producing a steadily creeping authoritarianism</div><div>
</div><div>{{ aha all? 3 lead to inequality:</div><div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Got a problem with gun violence and assault weapons in schools? Let’s discuss the way <a href="https://www.miaminewtimes.com/news/miami-beach-police-obtain-military-armored-mrap-truck-from-department-of-defense-9357062" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none;">weapons of war are coming home</a> and how many United States gun manufacturers are also military contractors.Concerned about climate change? The U.S. military <a href="https://www.globalpolicy.org/social-and-economic-policy/the-environment/climate-change/49292-pentagons-role-in-global-catastrophe-add-climate-havoc-to-war-crimes.html" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none;">uses more fossil fuels</a>than the majority of nations, and the billions of dollars <a href="https://www.iraqtribunal.org/bill_mckibben" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none;">wasted on the Iraq war</a> could have converted the whole planet to green energy.Women are leading the way to <a href="https://www.vogue.com/projects/13528338/american-women-water-protectors-standing-rock-dakota-access-pipeline-protesters/" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none;">protect our water</a> and create a <a href="https://www.theclimatemobilization.org/" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none;">mass climate mobilization</a> that responds to our ecological crisis like the existential emergency it is. Why then are we still so silent about how the war on women isthe war on the world? Why so silent about America’s de facto foreign policy of using armed force to safeguard the <a href="https://theintercept.com/2018/08/03/climate-change-new-york-times-magazine/" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none;">capitalism that is destabilizing the climate</a>? Why so silent about the fact that women—particularly women of color, women living in poverty and marginalized women—disproportionately bear the burden of war and the violence it begets? Dateline: America, 2018. All roads lead to war.When <a href="https://twitter.com/search?q=%23WomenDisobey&src=typd" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none;">#WomenDisobey</a> and righteously demand an end to putting <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/we-will-not-obey-hundreds-of-women-rally-in-dc-to-protest-zero-tolerance-immigration-policy/2018/06/28/d1aca604-7a4a-11e8-aeee-4d04c8ac6158_story.html?utm_term=.35a09f91fc91" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none;">immigrant children in detention centers</a>, we also should demand an end to military contractors like General Dynamics and MVM, Inc., which are <a href="https://www.thedailybeast.com/defense-contractors-cashing-in-on-immigrant-kids-detention" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none;">profiting from those centers</a>. And making money on the misery this country creates for children overseas.We can talk about intersectionality and proclaim "gender justice is racial justice is economic justice," as Women’s March organizers did in their powerful <a href="https://www.womensmarch.com/principles/" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none;">Unity Principles</a>. But economic justice is a fiscal impossibility when defense-related spending accounts for slightly more than two-thirds of the national budget. This country puts more money into the military than the next 10 nations combined while tens of millions of women and children living in poverty struggle to survive. In fact, war spending makes social inequality worse, according to a <a href="https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/files/cow/imce/papers/2018/Cappella%20Zielinski_June%202018_War%20Financing%20and%20Inequality.pdf" style="text-decoration-line: none; outline: none;">June 2018 report by the Costs of War project</a> at Brown University. An analysis of past and present wars since 1812 "suggests that the current combination of domestic borrowing to pay for war, accompanied by continuous tax cuts, have led and will continue to lead to rising social inequality in the US."...</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">pvtization boosts inequality<a href="https://www.huffingtonpost.com/donald-cohen/how-privatization-is-fuel_b_13173324.html" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none;">https://www.huffingtonpost.com/donald-cohen/how-privatization-is-fuel_b_13173324.html</a></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><a href="https://www.alternet.org/buried-fine-print-trump-rule-would-give-25-billion-tax-cut-big-bank-fat-cats" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none;">https://www.alternet.org/buried-fine-print-trump-rule-would-give-25-billion-tax-cut-big-bank-fat-cats</a></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Wall Street banks <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/news/2018/04/18/workers-see-crumbs-biggest-wall-street-banks-have-already-pocketed-25-billion-trump" style="text-decoration-line: none; outline: none;">continue to enjoy record profits</a> thanks to President Donald Trump's $1.5 trillion tax scam, Trump's Treasury Department—headed by former Goldman Sachs executive Steve Mnuchin—quietly moved to hand big banks yet another major gift on Wednesday by hiding a <a href="https://capitalandmain.com/trumps-treasury-department-hands-banks-a-windfall-0808" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none;">$2.5 billion tax cut</a> in the fine print of an "<a href="https://twitter.com/davidsirota/status/1027369635811745792" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none;">esoteric</a>" new <a href="https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-drop/reg-107892-18.pdf" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none;">rule proposal</a> (pdf).}}</div></div>aha ALEC 5 NOLA:<div>aha: note pattern, any time mod kicks in ctr-attack]</div><div></div>=aha:offshore banks are secret vs transparency thus boost corruption, but also allow tax dodge for rich ppl and corps to park assests offshore, thus evade tax thus extraction from economy (as our country becomes de-industrialized/finanacialized) so a huge budeer untapped to stimulate economy and build infrastructure<div>=</div>jones de-platformed --> Cohen Syndrome: interpret all as attack?] deny everything, counter-attack --> amplify?  tolerance/addiction --> constant escalation?  in echo bubble, no balancing info/ fdbk FB social media algorithm amplifies the sensational (eg hothouse v stabilized Earth) addiction is systemic, amplifying feedback, but also symptomatic of system degredation eg opioidsNB aha less diversity in marketplace and species (natural and food crops)<h1 class="widgetheadline h1" style="margin: 10px 0px 0px 10px; padding: 0px; cursor: pointer; word-wrap: break-word; line-height: 22px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><a class="widgetheadline-text custom-post-headline" href="https://www.ecowatch.com/monsanto-bayer-merger-food-2593978186.html" style="text-decoration-line: none; outline: 0px; word-break: break-word; word-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; margin: 0px; line-height: 31px;">What Would a Monsanto-Bayer Merger Really Grow?</a></h1><div style=""></div><div style="">aha:  unions are collective action in the workplace/economic world, but class action is collective use of courts (legal vs economic power). both are under attack, defund the left</div><div style=""></div>pvtization boosts inequality<a href="https://www.huffingtonpost.com/donald-cohen/how-privatization-is-fuel_b_13173324.html">https://www.huffingtonpost.com/donald-cohen/how-privatization-is-fuel_b_13173324.html</a><div style="">rev door a proxy? related to sci supp 3</div><div style="">
</div><div style="">key to regulatory capture?
<div>
</div><div>=</div></div><div style="">aha: he  DELAY tom is the source of many evil spawn? some sort of transition pt in GOP? gerry, cut corrupt</div><div style=""></div><div style="">wow look at law firm tags eg covington</div><div style=""><div>=</div><div>alt rt everything you love will burn wants to interview soros as he is nexus of all conspir theories</div><div>
</div><div>white nat'lism is mirror; jonah goldberg bktv and pod // eylvb afterparty norwegian or italian pride ok but not wht; blk ppl had their culture ID stripped when bropught here, so blk --> ID ok.</div><div>
</div><div></div></div>=<div class="GGD0W3FBKT" aria-hidden="false" style="font-weight: bold; float: left; top: 3px; left: 5px; margin-right: 110px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">apocalypse end times armageddon</div><div class="gwt-HTML" aria-hidden="false" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><div>
</div><div>
</div><div>
</div><div>internet ads contantly have rich recluse who will clue you in on impending mkt collapse you can profit from</div><div>
</div><div>see newsletter crash</div><div>
</div><div>related to gold hoarding?</div></div>OMFG RW ju jitsu?!--privacynever connect petit to social media before, aha<div class="body js-expandable clearfix js-listicle-body js-update-url" data-elid="2538134798" data-authors="Lorraine Chow" data-headline="Monsanto 'Commands' Civic Group to Turn in All Communications Over Glyphosate" style="margin: 10px; line-height: 24px;"><div class="body-description">Avaaz worries about the scope of the subpoena, as it would also include the names and email addresses of members who have signed Monsanto petitions. <a href="http://gmwatch.org/en/news/latest-news/18131-now-monsanto-goes-after-civil-society" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">GM Watch</a> noted that <a href="https://secure.avaaz.org/campaign/en/stop_glyphosate_loc_glb/" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">one of its petitions</a> calling for a moratorium on glyphosate garnered more than 2 million signatures.The subpoena was issued as part of a class-action lawsuit against Monsanto in which <a href="https://www.ecowatch.com/monsanto-lawsuits-roundup-cancer-2324693930.html" style="text-decoration-line: none;">plaintiffs around the country claim</a> that they or their loved ones developed non-Hodgkin's Lymphoma due to exposure to Roundup.Avaaz is <a href="https://secure.avaaz.org/en/monsanto_red_alert_41/" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">now fighting</a> back and is raising funds for the defense effort. The group will be represented by the New York firm of Emery Celli Brinckerhoff & Abady, LLP."This is big," Avaaz writes in a new petition. "[Monsanto's] a $50 billion mega-corporation, infamous for legal strong-arm tactics like this. They have unlimited resources. If they get their hands on all our private information, there's no telling what they'll use it for."Emma Ruby-Sachs, Deputy Director of Avaaz, said Monsanto's demand for internal communications is a "violation" of first amendment rights."There are millions of people around the world who have a deep and genuine concern that Monsanto's glyphosate is making us and our environment sick," she added. "That is the sole reason our members have called on governments to regulate it based on independent science. We're not going to let this legal attack slow down that essential work one bit."<div class="around-the-web" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><div class="around-the-webheadline" style="font-weight: 700; text-transform: uppercase;">RELATED ARTICLES AROUND THE WEB</div><ul class="around-the-weblist" style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; list-style: none;"><li class="around-the-webitem"><a href="https://www.ecowatch.com/monsanto-propaganda-newsweek-2528277875.html" class="around-the-weblink" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none; line-height: normal; display: inline-block; margin-top: 10px;">Monsanto's Fingerprints All Over Newsweek's Opinion Piece, a Hit ... ›</a></li><li class="around-the-webitem"><a href="https://usrtk.org/in-the-news/carey-gillam-on-monsanto-cancer-and-the-corruption-of-science/" class="around-the-weblink" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none; line-height: normal; display: inline-block; margin-top: 10px;">Carey Gillam on Monsanto, Cancer and the Corruption of Science ... ›</a></li><li class="around-the-webitem"><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/04/business/monsanto-roundup-europe.html" class="around-the-weblink" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none; line-height: normal; display: inline-block; margin-top: 10px;">Monsanto's Roundup Faces European Politics and U.S. Lawsuits ... ›</a></li></ul></div></div></div>
=<div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">=</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><span times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" background-color="background-color" transparent="transparent" font-variant-numeric="font-variant-numeric" normal="normal" font-variant-east-asian="font-variant-east-asian" vertical-align="vertical-align" baseline="baseline" white-space="white-space" pre-wrap="pre-wrap">Einstein famously said you can't fix a problem using the kind of thinking that created it, but we do cling to reductionistic, mechanistic, linear and silo/disciplinary thinking, which is not suitable for addressing complex systemic problems.<span times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" background-color="background-color" transparent="transparent" font-variant-numeric="font-variant-numeric" normal="normal" font-variant-east-asian="font-variant-east-asian" vertical-align="vertical-align" baseline="baseline" white-space="white-space" pre-wrap="pre-wrap">Conservatives use a very basic kind of systems analysis: the Free Market will solve all problems (a very impoverished model: the environment, our life support system is dismissed as an "externality").  Market one of 4 inter-locking ideologies/stories.<div><span times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" background-color="background-color" transparent="transparent" font-variant-numeric="font-variant-numeric" normal="normal" font-variant-east-asian="font-variant-east-asian" vertical-align="vertical-align" baseline="baseline" white-space="white-space" pre-wrap="pre-wrap">
</div><div><span times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" background-color="background-color" transparent="transparent" font-variant-numeric="font-variant-numeric" normal="normal" font-variant-east-asian="font-variant-east-asian" vertical-align="vertical-align" baseline="baseline" white-space="white-space" pre-wrap="pre-wrap">Four interlocking ideologies: military, economic, fundamentalist and anti-communist. Greatly simplifies thinking and messaging, increasing coherence and unity. Progressives have more complex ideas and diversity (and less message"discipline").  Reinforced by Lakoff’s Strict Father framing.</div><div><span times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" background-color="background-color" transparent="transparent" font-variant-numeric="font-variant-numeric" normal="normal" font-variant-east-asian="font-variant-east-asian" vertical-align="vertical-align" baseline="baseline" white-space="white-space" pre-wrap="pre-wrap">
</div><div><span times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" background-color="background-color" transparent="transparent" font-variant-numeric="font-variant-numeric" normal="normal" font-variant-east-asian="font-variant-east-asian" vertical-align="vertical-align" baseline="baseline" white-space="white-space" pre-wrap="pre-wrap">trump rightwing talk radio have simple algorithm based on the 4?</div></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">=</div>mental health depression is both MIC and PIC!vets, pharma, homeless, RRaha doh!  i did not see ~ mod of corruption, dark $, offshore banks etc etc<div style=""></div><div style="">
</div><div style="">aha wow all with sustainable in names 1/18 are bogus/front/crypto?!</div><div style="">------  </div>fines has 15 tags, all big corps? 13 class actionlawyer bio <div style="">dogwhistle: i can help you make $ by poisoning ppl and wildlife
<div>
</div><div>=</div></div>iwf: thot this was defunct, i assoc with philyis schlafly, but keeps showing up lately in GMO background? ACTAcf renta-tom: ideological entrepreneur can find a niche to spin counter-narrative, often mirroring?privilidged white women would want to reject victim narrative? sucessful (self-made?) women would want to deny they got special help/respurces from RWI??is it training? a hub?bitcoin oddly supports and erodes transparency? block chainsis bitcoin an odd/extreme version of loss of faith in institutions?  soveignty for tech bro's?odd secular apocalypse the End/Crash is near, eg endless Ron Paul web ads for "newsletter" on how to prophet from the coming crash ==12/17 <div style="">aha: soft/stealth dereg via budget cut, often of enforcement:</div><div style="">(NB crypto cover of responsible budget cutting (starve the beast that is strangling the economy)<a href="https://www.ecowatch.com/epa-employees-leaving-2519323571.html">https://www.ecowatch.com/epa-employees-leaving-2519323571.html</a><div class="headline-container" style="margin-top: 10px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><h1 class="headline h1" style="margin: 10px; padding: 0px; position: relative; line-height: 31px;">700+ Employees Have Left the EPA Under Trump: Loss of Scientists, Staffers Undermines Agency's Purpose</h1></div><div id="utm_campaign" style="margin-top: 10px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><div class="body js-expandable clearfix js-listicle-body js-update-url" data-elid="2519323571" data-authors="Lorraine Chow" data-headline="700+ Employees Have Left the EPA Under Trump: Loss of Scientists, Staffers Undermines Agency's Purpose" style="margin: 10px; line-height: 24px;"><div class="body-description">Hundreds of people have quit, retired or taken buyouts from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (<a href="https://www.ecowatch.com/tag/epa" style="text-decoration-line: none;">EPA</a>) ever since <a href="https://www.ecowatch.com/trump-watch/" style="text-decoration-line: none;">President Trump</a> and his EPA head <a href="https://www.ecowatch.com/tag/scott-pruitt" style="text-decoration-line: none;">Scott Pruitt </a>took office.</div></div>That figure includes more than 200 scientists and 96 are environmental protection specialists that investigate important issues such as pollution levels, according to a new <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/22/climate/epa-buyouts-pruitt.html?r=0" target="_blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">report</a> from the New York Times and ProPublica. Others that have left include nine department directors and dozens of attorneys and program managers.</div><div>=</div><div>aha: crit of 2nd wave green was too based in lawsuits? nb CBDiv</div><div>lunatic slapp/foia of greenpeace makes sense?</div><div>=-</div>=puerto rico maria:  austerity --> fiscal control bd unelected // flint mich emergency mgr --> pvtization aha cf 4 horseaha: interesting // katrina and flint, disaster capitalism? perfect stormRepresenting billionaire Eli Broad, Bruce Reed celebrated the paralysis in local governance in post-Katrina New Orleans as key to pulling off the rapid expansion of charter schools, exploiting disaster without oversight by any “central office”:<blockquote style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">“New Orleans is an amazing story — when you make it possible to get political dysfunction and sick a bunch of talent on the problem — it’s the one place where grand bargain of charters has been kept the best.”</blockquote>New Orleans' "amazing" story resulted in the firing of 7,500 mostly black school employees, wiping out a substantial part of the city’s black middle class. Meanwhile, the “miracle” claims of boosters like Reed have fallen apart. <a href="https://www.theneworleanstribune.com/main/faking-the-grade/" style="text-decoration-line: none;">A recent editorial</a> in New Orleans’ African American newspaper called out the false promises and lack of results from the charter experiment.<div>analysis: with both trump and rush, fairly simple alorithm that generates postions?</div><div>NB both need to generate BS daily, rush has to feed the beast, Naomi Klein says disasters have to be constant to keep us off balance.</div><div>
<div><a href="https://www.mediamatters.org/video/2015/09/28/after-nasa-announces-it-found-water-on-mars-rus/205820" style="box-sizing: border-box; text-decoration-line: none; outline: 0px; font-weight: bold !important;">After NASA Announces It Found Water On Mars, Rush Limbaugh Says It's Part Of A Climate Change Conspiracy </a> September 28, 2015 2:35 PM EDT
<div><div>eg</div><div><a href="http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/rush-limbaugh-uncorks-wild-new-conspiracy-theory-about-hurricane-irma">http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/rush-limbaugh-uncorks-wild-new-conspiracy-theory-about-hurricane-irma</a></div></div></div></div><div></div><div>see false equiv/ balancing norms, weaponization of rw mirror strategy? aha</div><div>
</div><div><a href="http://www.alternet.org/activism/media-busy-creating-left-wing-threat-balance-out-awful-racist-right-wing-hordes-who" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none;">http://www.alternet.org/activism/media-busy-creating-left-wing-threat-balance-out-awful-racist-right-wing-hordes-who</a></div><div>=</div>=aha + aha: 4 horse alec apocalypse led to Flint water, EJ as proxy for allmike davis says tee'd up trump win:
In the Midwest the 2010 Tea Party victories brought a new generation of feral Republicans to power, many of them groomed by far-right think tanks such as Indiana’s Policy Review Foundation (once headed by Mike Pence), Michigan’s Mackinac Center, Wisconsin’s MacIver Institute, and Minnesota’s Center of the American Experiment, all of them spoiling for a fight to the death with the region’s public-sector unions and progressive big-city governments. Coordinating through the State Policy Network (sixty-five conservative think tanks) and the American Legislative Exchange Council, they launched campaigns to destroy public-sector bargaining rights, defund unions through right-to-work laws, and privatize public education through vouchers.They focused in other words on increasing their structural and legal advantages in ways that Democrats would find difficult, even impossible to roll back. Unions and students, of course, conducted an epic resistance in Wisconsin but were unable to recall Scott Walker, in large part because of the lackluster character of the Democratic candidate. In Ohio the unions were more successful and repealed right-to-work by referendum, but in Indiana, Michigan and West Virginia, Republican majorities <a href="http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2011/03/michigan-snyder-mackinac-center" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none; background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; cursor: pointer; border-bottom: 1px solid; transition-duration: 0.25s;">rammed through</a> right-to-work and in Michigan, a Mackinac Center-inspired receivership for Detroit’s schools.<a href="https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/02/the-great-god-trump-and-the-white-working-class">
</a><a href="https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/02/the-great-god-trump-and-the-white-working-class">https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/02/the-great-god-trump-and-the-white-working-class</a>=cherrypick resume anomaly  eg FIRE acluicecap 8/17  note these guys front epa and ipcc affiliations (bogus?)uh-0h ~ mod:
</div></div></div></div>Of course most right-wing Republicans and Tea Party supporters don’t

engage in acts of violence. But their political views often reflect the

Paranoid Style described by Hofstadter in which they see their very way

of life as under attack by liberal elites and in which their political

opponents are not only wrong but illegitimate and must be destroyed. As

Ed Kilgore <a href="http://www.thedemocraticstrategist.org/strategist/2011/01/after_tucson.php" target="_hplink" data-beacon="{" p="p" lnid="lnid" writes="writes" mpid="mpid" plid="plid" http="http" www.thedemocraticstrategist.org="www.thedemocraticstrategist.org" strategist="strategist" after_tucson.php="after_tucson.php" data-beacon-parsed="true" class="bn-clickable">writes</a>,

“To put it bluntly, it has become common on the Right to treat

conservative policy prescriptions as exempt from the normal procedures

of democracy because they reflect the preferences of God, the Founding

Fathers, or Real Americans. Indeed, the essence of the Tea Party

Movement, which dominates the GOP from top to bottom, is the belief that

by advancing such quotidian centrist policies as a managed-competition

health care system or a market-based cap-and-trade device, Democrats are

not simply wrong, but are violating permanent and never-to-be-amended

guarantees of low taxes, small government, and laissez-faire capitalism.

That point of view helps explain the spluttering rage of people like

Glenn Beck and his most devoted fans, who really do seem to believe

their ‘fundamental liberties’ include the right to enrich themselves

limitlessly and to be exempt from any collective responsibilities, and

that mildly redistributive and exceptionally traditional practices like

progressive taxation or unemployment insurance represent a

totalitarianism that must resisted by any means necessary.”

</blockquote>

The Paranoid Style in American politics tends to become most virulent

during periods of rapid social change and economic crisis when

significant portions of the population feel their way of life threatened

and do not see any way in which conventional politics will protect

them. That’s certainly true of the present post-Wall Street bust era. In

coming years, we’re likely to see a new normal of low economic growth,

high unemployment, lower incomes for much of the middle and working

class, greater economic inequality, more political gridlock, and even

greater control of the political system by corporations.

Under these circumstances, in the absence of a significant

progressive populist movement to channel legitimate popular anger

towards meaningful solutions to our nation’s problems as a viable

alternative to the timid corporatism of the Obama administration and

many Democratic office-holders, right-wing movements which reflect the

Paranoid style in American politics are likely to grow and flourish in

coming years.


IER inside the wire at DOEstaffers? FCCfischer wrote BS study, see Spanish=h<a href="http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/176295/tomgram%3A_engelhardt%2C_the_making_of_a_pariah_nation/#more">ttp://www.tomdispatch.com/post/176295/tomgram%3A_engelhardt%2C_the_making_of_a_pariah_nation/#more</a>
big pict status quo:...<p times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" helvetica="helvetica" arial="arial" color="color" rgb="rgb" margin="margin" px="px" padding-top="padding-top" line-height="line-height" background-color="background-color">Meanwhile, at home, despite all that wealth, despite <a href="http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/USA-Update/2014/0303/Forbes-richest-people-number-of-billionaires-up-significantly-video" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">billionaires galore</a>, including the one running for president, despite the transnational corporate heaven inhabited by Google and Facebook and Apple and the rest of the crew, parts of this country and its infrastructure were starting to feel distinctly (to use a word from another universe) Third Worldish.  He sensed that, too.  He regularly <a href="http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2017/feb/9/donald-trump-vows-overhaul-airports/" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">said</a> things like this: “We spent six trillion dollars in the Middle East, we got nothing… And we have an obsolete plane system. We have obsolete airports. We have obsolete trains. We have bad roads. Airports.”  And <a href="http://www.economist.com/blogs/gulliver/2016/09/plane-speaking" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">this</a>: “Our airports are like from a third-world country.”  And on the nation’s <a href="https://www.infrastructurereportcard.org/" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">crumbling infrastructure</a>, he couldn’t have been more on the mark.<p times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" helvetica="helvetica" arial="arial" color="color" rgb="rgb" margin="margin" px="px" padding-top="padding-top" line-height="line-height" background-color="background-color">In parts of the U.S., white working-class and <a href="https://newrepublic.com/article/138754/blame-trumps-victory-college-educated-whites-not-working-class" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">middle-class</a> Americans could sense that the future was no longer theirs, that their children would not have a shot at what they had had, that they themselves increasingly didn’t have a shot at what they had had.  The American Dream seemed to be gaining an almost nightmarish sheen, given that the real value of the average wage of a worker <a href="https://www.juancole.com/2017/06/climate-disavowal-capitalism.html" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">hadn’t increased</a> since the 1970s; that the <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/grade-point/wp/2016/10/26/college-costs-rising-faster-than-financial-aid-report-says/?utm_term=.7e83fb944579" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">cost</a> of a college education had gone through the roof and the educational <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/student-loan-debt-state-of-the-union-2016-1" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">debt burden</a> for children with dreams of getting ahead was now staggering; that unions were <a href="http://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/316310-union-membership-hits-new-low" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">cratering</a>; that income inequality was at a <a href="https://thinkprogress.org/income-inequality-is-at-the-highest-level-in-american-history-d2c263980be6" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">historic high</a>; and... well, you know the story, really you do.  In essence, for them the famed American Dream seemed ever more like someone else’s trademarked property. <p times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" helvetica="helvetica" arial="arial" color="color" rgb="rgb" margin="margin" px="px" padding-top="padding-top" line-height="line-height" background-color="background-color">Indispensable? Exceptional? This country? Not anymore. Not as they were experiencing it.<a name="more" style="" times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" helvetica="helvetica" arial="arial" font-size="font-size" medium="medium" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb"></a><p times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" helvetica="helvetica" arial="arial" color="color" rgb="rgb" margin="margin" px="px" padding-top="padding-top" line-height="line-height" background-color="background-color">And because of that, Donald Trump won the lottery.  He answered the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The$64,000_Question#The.2464.2C000_Question" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">$64,000 question</a>.  (If you’re not of a certain age, Google it, but believe me it’s a reference in our president’s memory book.)  He entered the Oval Office with <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/hillary-clinton-popular-vote_us_58599647e4b0eb58648446c6" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">almost 50%</a> of the vote and a fervent base of support for his promised program of doing it all over again, <a href="http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/176222/tomgram%3A_michael_klare,donald_trump%27s_energy_nostalgia_and_the_path_to_hell/" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">1950s-style</a>....Despite the mainstream pieties of the moment about the nature of the system Donald Trump appears to be dismantling in Europe and elsewhere, it was anything but either terribly “liberal” or particularly peaceable.  Wars, invasions, occupations, the undermining or overthrow of governments, brutal acts and conflicts of every sort succeeded one another in the years of American glory.  Past administrations in Washington had a notorious weakness for autocrats, just as Donald Trump does today.  They regularly had less than <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2016/10/13/the-long-history-of-the-u-s-interfering-with-elections-elsewhere/?utm_term=.dff92913d628" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">no respect</a> for democracy if, from Iran to Guatemala to Chile, the will of the people seemed to stand in Washington’s way.  (It is, as Vladimir Putin has been only too happy to point out of late, an irony of our moment that the country that has undermined or overthrown or meddled in <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/the-us-has-been-meddling-in-other-countries-elections-for-a-century-it-doesnt-feel-good_us_57983b85e4b02d5d5ed382bd" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">more electoral systems</a> than any other is in a total snit over the possibility that one of its own elections was meddled with.)  To enforce their global system, Americans never shied away from <a href="http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175934/tomgram%3A_rebecca_gordon,the_torture_wars/" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">torture</a>, <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2007/08/13/the-black-sites" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">black sites</a>, <a href="https://www.thenation.com/article/time-for-a-us-apology-to-el-salvador/" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">death squads</a>, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2003/mar/21/usa.davidpallister" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">assassinations</a>, and other grim practices.  In those years, the U.S. planted its military on close to <a href="http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/1181/chalmers_johnson_on_garrisoning_the_planet" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">1,000</a> overseas military bases, garrisoning the planet as no other country ever had. Nonetheless, the cancelling of the Trans Pacific Partnership trade deal, the withdrawal from the Paris climate accord, threats against NAFTA, the undermining of NATO, the promise of <a href="http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/article/2016/jun/21/donald-trump-has-floated-big-tariffs-what-could-im/" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">protective tariffs</a> on foreign goods (and the possible trade wars that might go with them) could go a long way toward dismantling the American global system of soft power and economic dominance as it has existed in these last decades.  If such acts and others like them prove effective in the months and years to come, they will leave only one kind of power in the American global quiver: hard military power, and its handmaiden, the kind of covert power Washington, through the CIA in particular, has long specialized in. If America’s alliances crack open and its soft power becomes too angry or edgy to pass for dominant power anymore, its massive machinery of destruction will still be left, including its vast <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/04/us/politics/trump-nuclear-weapons-cost-estimate.html" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">nuclear arsenal</a>.  While, in the Trump era, a drive to cut domestic spending of every sort is evident, <a href="http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176238/tomgram%3A_william_hartung,investing_in_the_military(and_little_else)/" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">more money</a> is still slated to go to the military, already funded at levels not reached by <a href="http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2016/jan/13/barack-obama/obama-us-spends-more-military-next-8-nations-combi/" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">combinations</a> of other major powers. Given the last 15 years of <a href="http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175854/tomgram%3A_engelhardt,a_record_of_unparalleled_failure/" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">history</a>, it’s not hard to imagine what’s likely to result from the further elevation of military power: disaster.  This is especially true because Donald Trump has appointed to key positions in his administration a <a href="http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/176250/tomgram%3A_william_hartung%2C_the_generals_vs.the_ideologues_or_the_generals_and_the_ide" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">crew of generals</a> who spent the last decade and a half fighting America’s catastrophic wars across the Greater Middle East.  They are not only notoriously incapable of thinking outside the box about the application of military power, but faced with the crisis of failed wars and <a href="http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/176094/tomgram%3A_engelhardt,tomorrow%27s_news_today/" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">failing states</a>, of spreading terror movements and a growing <a href="http://www.unhcr.org/afr/news/latest/2016/6/5763b65a4/global-forced-displacement-hits-record-high.html" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">refugee crisis</a> across that crucial region, they can evidently only imagine one solution to just about any problem: more of the same.  More <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/checkpoint/wp/2017/03/15/u-s-military-probably-sending-as-many-as-1000-more-ground-troops-into-syria-ahead-of-raqqa-offensive-officials-say/?utm_term=.5bd20d11226c" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">troops</a>, more <a href="http://www.militarytimes.com/articles/us-troops-afghanistan-donald-trump" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">mini-surges</a>, more military trainers and advisers, more <a href="http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/airstrikes-are-on-the-rise-in-afghanistan-but-you-probably-havent-heard-about-it/article/2617792" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">air strikes</a>, more <a href="https://www.cfr.org/blog-post/not-so-peaceful-transition-power-trumps-drone-strikes-outpace-obama" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">drone strikes</a>... <a href="http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176279/" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">more</a>.After a decade and a half of such thinking we already know perfectly well where this ends -- in further failure, more chaos and suffering, but above all in an inability of the U.S. to effectively apply its hard power anywhere in any way that doesn’t make matters worse.  Since, in addition, the Trump administration is filled with Iranophobes, including a president who has only recently fused himself to the Saudi royal family in an attempt to further isolate and undermine Iran, the possibility that a military-first version of American foreign policy will spread further is only <a href="http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176289/" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">growing</a>.    Such “more” thinking is typical as well of much of the rest of the cast of characters now in key positions in the Trump administration. Take the CIA, for instance.  Under its new director, Mike Pompeo (distinctly a “more” kind of guy and an <a href="http://www.haaretz.com/us-news/.premium-1.767122" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">Iranophobe</a> of the first order), two key positions have reportedly been filled: a new chief of counterterrorism and a new head of Iran operations (recently identified as Michael D’Andrea, an Agency hardliner with the nickname “the Dark Prince”).  Here’s how Matthew Rosenberg and Adam Goldman of the New York Times <a href="https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/06/02/world/middleeast/cia-iran-dark-prince-michael-dandrea.html" target="_blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">recently described</a> their similar approaches to their jobs (my emphasis added):<blockquote style="padding: 0px 20px 0px 0px; line-height: 21px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">“Mr. D’Andrea’s new role is one of a number of moves inside the spy agency that signal a more muscular approach to covert operations under the leadership of Mike Pompeo, the conservative Republican and former congressman, the officials said. The agency also recently named a new chief of counterterrorism, who has begun pushing for greater latitude to strike militants.”</blockquote>In other words, more! ...4/17gamblingadelson big funder, trump seemed to make $ in casino (mafia?)ney, abramoff, ralph reed, rip off indians
Manafort, Cohn, STONEprofit/ extraction on collapse of middle class  [proto Uber airbnb]tump inaugr slush fundfrc backed TP 2010 wave, 2 in penn anticipates blow wall fall trump?

many investigative reporters are targets, jack anderswon rmn enemy list kill LSD?

===

<div>this is age of trump</div>

<div>

</div>

<div>layers/scales:</div>

<div>

</div>

<div>1) CEC Conservative Entertainment Complex: fox news of course but also reality TV, wrestling, even moving pict inst "documentaries" eg duck dynasty guy; give the lie to Liberal Media (tho they just claim puny counter-wt).</div>

<div>

</div>

<div>2) Echo chamber; this refers to earlier and now seemingly quaint constellation of WSJ, Forbes, Fox maybe Drudge.</div>

<div>

</div>

<div>3)  Escalator Effect: refers to low level no filter areas of vulnerability that allow BS to work its way up the food chain to mainstream legit media.  Thus "punked"</div>

<div>

</div>

<div>see Breitbart, fake news, bots, conspiracy theory

<div>

</div>

</div>

==

docu vids pivotal

===

arbusto draper

==

EJ aha proxy for all ?! see constellation

==

===

<div>aha clickbait CEC plus big data plus dark $? //Bb?</div>

<div>

<div>

<div>XANDRIA, Va. — Last week, with the midterm elections fast approaching, the conservative website Independent Journal Review was not focused on the control of the Senate or crucial statehouse races. Instead, it led its home page with a gruesome beheading on Long Island and a video of a belligerent drunk being arrested at a Dallas airport.</div>

<div>

</div>

<div>But sprinkled throughout the attention-grabbing fare was a steady stream of articles critical of President Obama and other Democrats. “Obama’s schedule from today shows how toxic he is to Democrats running for Senate,” read one headline. Another asked, “Did Hillary intentionally talk over a crowd singing ‘Happy Birthday’ to her?” (The sub-headline: “If elected president, she would be the second oldest in history.”)</div>

<div>

</div>

<div>IJReview, a two-year-old site started by a pair of Republican operatives, has emerged as one of the most popular online destinations for conservatives. The site mixes entertaining, shareable topics like pets through a conservative-values lens (for example, a recent piece about a dog helping to heal a sick veteran) with articles about politics and policy.</div>

<div>

</div>

<div>“It’s like if you crossed RedState with BuzzFeed,” said Alex Castellanos, a Republican political consultant and an adviser to IJReview.</div>

</div>

==

and SOCIAL MEDIA

promoted primary on trump

=post trump win ppl said TP koch support not true?!

rogue's gallary anti conservation LEED

AG NY capone tax?

https://webbrain.com/brainpage/brain/E212D5AA-EEF5-535C-9D0D-27920B094E45#-3112

==

regulatory capture may comeout of good preactice, eg 1906 the jungle teddy wants the meat indistry to pay for saftey inspection by gov't, but OTS bond rating agency, the co regulated becomes the boss/funder

sinclair lewis quote on blindness willful vs paycheck

===

amplifying feedback: Tea Party, trump

social network "supernode"

luther 95 thesis were statement he wanted to have a debate, al l greeks, but picked up by one printer, then copies copied

standage writing on the wall; ppl would copy letter, coffeehouse, hyperlocal newspaper, reprinted letter; steam press, TV Radio (one way, centralized, impersonal) 1833 penny paper with ads

sil valley "accelerant"  https://kpfa.org/episode/letters-and-politics-december-28-2016/

==

aha; trump may be the culmination of disabling of moderation: free press, then clickbait

fake news propagated by twitter and facebook and google

trump twitter candidacy fed TV coverge; donny as proto troll

twitter bots

==

YAF hub deep trump

==

odd strain of nepotism?

Relatives of the administration were also given jobs, such as Ari Fleischer’s brother Michael, and Simone Ledeen, the daughter of Michael Ledeen. Cheney’s daughter Liz, also did a short stint. However, it should be noted that none of them lounged around for too long in what soon became a hellhole in Iraq.

==

is trump the culmination of loss of moderating forces?

eg

<strong times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" widows="widows" background="background" transparent="transparent" border="border" px="px" margin="margin" padding="padding" vertical-align="vertical-align" baseline="baseline">promoted to 2ndary on twitter bots 2016 election trump

<strong times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" widows="widows" background="background" transparent="transparent" border="border" px="px" margin="margin" padding="padding" vertical-align="vertical-align" baseline="baseline">leverage social networks, un filtererd but also filter bubble blogosphere echo

<strong times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" widows="widows" background="background" transparent="transparent" border="border" px="px" margin="margin" padding="padding" vertical-align="vertical-align" baseline="baseline">key swing states alec-kochalypse, pence?

===

==

cheddar mafia wi

gerrymander, voter ID Koch alecKochaplyse

ryan, sykes, preibus, okeefe, john doe, cfg

<a href="http://www.prwatch.org/news/2016/04/13083/dark-money-is-contested-convention-paul-ryan">http://www.prwatch.org/news/2016/04/13083/dark-money-is-contested-convention-paul-ryan</a>

In the run-up to Wisconsin's April 5 primary, the state's GOP machine worked in lockstep to throw their support behind Ted Cruz in a last ditch effort to block Trump.

First, Scott Walker suggested that with an open GOP convention, "it's very likely [the nominee] would be someone who's not currently running."

Then right-wing radio hosts lead by WTMJ's Charlie Sykes <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UOif2C3jPr8" target="blank" style="text-decoration: none;">savaged Trump on the air</a>. In Sykes' <a href="http://www.politico.com/story/2016/03/wisconsin-paul-ryan-ted-cruz-221337" target="blank" style="text-decoration: none;">view</a>, it is Ryan who represents Wisconsin's "sort of inclusive, aspirational style of conservatism" that could win support.

Then Walker made a last minute, tepid endorsement of Cruz on Sykes' show, saying Cruz was "the best positioned by far" to beat Trump.

Then national Club for Growth spent <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T95DqjUwEKo&feature=youtu.be" target="_blank" style="text-decoration: none;">a whopping $1 million on TV ads</a> instructing the GOP faithful to skip John Kasich and support Ted Cruz as the only way to stop Trump.

Watching all this U.S. Rep. Scott Krug, a bemused Kasich supporter, explained: "I think this is a three-corner bank shot." Krug told the right-wing outlet Breitbart, "I don't think there's that much of a lovefest for Ted Cruz, but they're just using him to keep Trump below 1,237 delegates so they can broker the convention for Paul Ryan."

In the end, Trump won the majority of Wisconsin counties, 44 out of 72, but lost the key counties where the right-wing radio hosts had the best opportunity to pound home the Club for Growth message.

<h2 style="line-height: 2em; margin-top: 1em; margin-bottom: 1em; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Beware "Wisconsin Nice"</h2>

If the anti-Trump wing of the GOP coalesces around Ryan, it won't be because the Ayn Rand fan represents a moderate, "inclusive" conservatism when it comes to policy. Ryan just puts a smiling face on the same extremist policies the Kochs and their allies have been pushing all along.

---

aha: linkage from sea level rise to chemical spoll eg katrina

</div>

<div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><a href="http://www.ecowatch.com/exxon-lawsuit-mystic-river-2024418598.html" style="text-decoration: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none;">http://www.ecowatch.com/exxon-lawsuit-mystic-river-2024418598.html</a></div>

</div>

<div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><a href="http://www.ecowatch.com/exxonmobil-put-your-money-where-your-mouth-is-1882175344.html" style="text-decoration: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none;">ExxonMobil</a> is facing a first-of-its-kind <a href="http://www.clf.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/CLF-v.-ExxonMobil.pdf" target="blank" style="text-decoration: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none;">lawsuit</a> for failing to account for the risks from <a href="http://www.ecowatch.com/climate-change/" style="text-decoration: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none;">climate change</a> to its fuel storage terminal outside Boston. The <a href="http://www.clf.org/" target="blank" style="text-decoration: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none;">Conservation Law Foundation</a> (CLF) claims that <a href="http://www.ecowatch.com/james-hansen-dangerous-sea-level-rise-will-occur-in-decades-not-centur-1882198301.html" style="text-decoration: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none;">sea level rise</a> and accompanying storm surges could damage the facility and lead to further pollution of the Mystic River.</div>

===

not my aha

The sociologists say one major reason why attempts to better communicate the realities of climate change to conservatives have failed is down to “motivated cognition” — described as the tendency for people to only accept information that reinforces their existing political beliefs and their views on the world.

Even when Republicans experience extreme weather events, there was little evidence that this was enough for those voters to change their views. Dunlap told DeSmog:

“I fear polarization will be difficult to overcome because Republican reluctance to accept the reality and seriousness of human-caused climate change is in a self-reinforcing loop.

There are top-down cues from Republican political elites and their supporters from conservative think tanks to conservative media — especially the Murdoch media— that influence voters, as well as bottom-up pressure from party activists such as Tea Party supporters who act as ‘enforcers’ of party principles, especially in primary elections to select Republican candidates.

The result is that global warming has joined God, guns, gays, and abortion as core elements of Republican identity, and this will be hard to change.”

<a href="http://www.desmogblog.com/2016/08/31/americans-now-more-politically-polarized-climate-change-ever-analysis-finds">http://www.desmogblog.com/2016/08/31/americans-now-more-politically-polarized-climate-change-ever-analysis-finds</a>

</blockquote>

==

mcW and dunlap

==

trump corey lewan was koch AFP connected by BOSSIE CU! axis of evil, together at last

==

<div class="GGD0W3FBKT" aria-hidden="false" style="font-weight: bold; float: left; top: 3px; left: 5px; margin-right: 110px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">disaster capitalism</div>

<div>see corps that profit on GW  shock doctrine?</div>

<div>MIC and PIC together at last</div>

<div>MTC prisons in iraq?  contractors</div>

</div>

==

convergence:

===

UN is moderation, IPCC conference, Paris Cop 15

cf agenda 21, JBS black helicopters, FEMA camps, blue hull navy, gun /arms sales agreement scuttled?see also C Streeet / evangelicals

, milita, TP, wise use, cfact, ncppr

------

==

big law lobby firms have belguim brussels HQ

==

co fdr doug goodyear (mcCain OMG whole staff was DCI, including matt rhoades)

TCC pioneer journo-lobbying

team blue subpoena

hyde TP prophet: grassroots/astro plus ideology shift ~ gov't

---

FCF nazi, ellis --> armpac delay

==

rove flipped texas, judiciary in texas (--> tort reform?) phil Gramm, rick perry, beat ann Richards, beat hightower,  dubya, NCLB, Cornyn...

==

yaf 1 org, amazing # ppl orgs come from it

==

# anwr foes stunning

==

systematic disabling of MODERATION

==

8/16

NB decentralized orgs like naacp and aclu open themselves up to a local bogus chapter/person going rogue out of a PO box, see congress of bl women florida cf rentatom silverglate FIRE.

==

7/16

social media create maw that must be fed, so good use of cheap student labor is all those interns; they get instant feedback, can network, can work their way up ring within org eg FIRE) or up escalator: ctt, legislative aide, staffer, spokesperson, oppo res, candidate

[caption with derigeur unflattering foto: A group of conservative leaders calls on Americans to urge their representatives in Washington to protect citizens from abuse by IRS officials such as Lois Lerner, above. ] cute Portrait of Leah Jessen, so a PR platform for baby ideological entre?

@LeahKay

Leah Jessen is a news reporter for The Daily Signal and graduate of The Heritage Foundation's Young Leaders Program. Send an email to Leah.

---

==

6/16

CIR: Use DC? anti-SLAPP; they sems to care more about forcing their adversaries to pay their (inflated?) legal fees, so anti-SLAPP just reverts/perverts/ to SLAPP?!

==

evil co's bought by china bottom feed do not are about PR they drive Buicks

smithfield pork (McRib? ;)

<div>

<div>SYNGENTA CHINA?

43billion $

<a href="http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2016/03/senators-try-to-scuttle-syngentachemchina-merger-in-a-harbinger-for-u-s-posture-toward-chinese-investment.html">http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2016/03/senators-try-to-scuttle-syngentachemchina-merger-in-a-harbinger-for-u-s-posture-toward-chinese-investment.html</a>

</div>

</div>

==

==

RR as tipping pt:  ~ unions, deregulation (heritage mandate)

Merger mania (media consolidation)

unleashed Rush (--. fox --> trump?!)

gov't is the problem meme

bankrupted the country but teflon sainthood --> drinking game

==

a race between mod and deathmatch/ endgame

===

<div>

<div>BOOKS:</div>

<div>

</div>

<div>see vanity</div>

<div>

</div>

<div>I have overlooked the moderating / gate-keeping of book and magazine publishers; but merger mania led to media consolidation, deadly to journalism, presiably also affect book co which become part of the media conglomerate.  Moreover, presumably synergy in that the same content can be put on several platform and different media.</div>

<div>

</div>

<div>Presemably as solomon does anthology of columns get bundled into a book, and more than a few denial books (often from vanity press) are anthologies (maybe some log-rolling, and each guy uses netowrk to get blurbs?)</div>

<div>

</div>

<div>But a book still has cachet/cred that almost noting else does?  Plus it gets reviwed (this endorsed, but also a summary is posted and reposted, so no one actually has to read the thing; books also give cred for spker bureau (ideally bd of dir gig, tho i have not seen one for co, just bogus NGO).</div>

<div>

</div>

<div>Amazon rankings five instant automagic and seeming irrefutable statistical evidence (tho ur TP bus tour to train activists to trash Amazon ratings of lefty books; </div>

<div>

</div>

<div>amazing that Geo Gilder wrote Amazon rev, praised Richard Vigilante co.</div>

<div>

</div>

<div>A book also validates book tour, interviews on TV and radio shows, presumably desperate for fodder;</div>

<div>

</div>

<div>plus a book author is better than mere bloviator/pundit?</div>

<div>

</div>

<div>Conservatve book clubs? virtual?</div>

<div>

</div>

<div>But now books can be self-published, and kindle/ereader is losing negative rep?  Note amazon has button to vote for ereader version.  But self-publ means no fact checker. so 180 on moderation</div>

<div>

</div>

<div>Steyn has a virtual publishing house?  // Richard Vigilante under R Littlefield?  Big books corps already had in-house imprints as Rush and Beck big sellers (and Al Franken, Moore?]</div>

<div>

</div>

==</div>

==

odd rollover:

1. not real

2. real but not human caised

3. human caused to too $$$ to fix

4. real, hu caused but then ACT opposite? 2 eg

==

is trump the ultimate frankenstein product of Cons Ent Complex, escalator/echo

fame based on reality show

trump has ju jistsued mpd eg PC

mussolini started out as populist/worker?

reagan democrats, nixon hardhats

reboot/spin on old I'll make govt run like/ be as effic as biz (romney)

huffington hubby bloomberg? forbes

==

disenfranchise

<h2>INCLUDES REDISTRICTING AND MACHINES</h2>

numerous gop controlled states pushing voter ID (see sep newer node) , anti-abortion and pro-gun legislation.

also includes voter fraud scam

see Redmap pgm gerrymander

~ mod: see voter disenfranchise, voting machine, camp finance reform,

</div>

==

TIPPING PT:

frack TPP pincer on coal; they bet big on China, 3 in bankruptcy (tho hillary had to walk back on primary, local and temp)

tort reform class action RICO

Divest picking up steam umass? rockefeller bros

===

rwi denier must hate to be on back foot, so long Gore afraid to debate trope:

Both <a href="http://ecowatch.com/?s=Marc+Morano" style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; transition: color 0.2s linear; background: transparent;">Marc Morano</a> and Joe Bastardi are well-known climate change deniers (Mr. Morano said once that he prefers the term “extreme doubter”). In an <a href="http://patriotpost.us/opinion/38793" target="blank" data-beacon="0}}" style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; transition: color 0.2s linear; background: transparent;">opinion piece</a> in the unusual Patriot Post online publication, Mr. Bastardi insisted that there is nothing unusual going on in our Earth’s atmosphere and oceans. In time for Earth Day, I issued a <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/bill-nye-bets-joe-bastardi-20k-climate-change_us_571589a5e4b0018f9cbaee3a" target="blank" data-beacon="1}}" style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; transition: color 0.2s linear; background: transparent;">video challenge</a> that was published on The Huffington Post. I offered and <a href="http://ecowatch.com/2016/04/20/bill-nye-challenges-joe-bastardi/" style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; transition: color 0.2s linear; background: transparent;">still offer</a> to bet Mr. Bastardi $10,000 that this year 2016 will be among the top 10 warmest years on record. I offer him another $10,000 that the decade 2010-2020 will prove to be the warmest on record. Mr. Bastardi wrote a <a href="https://patriotpost.us/opinion/42312" target="_blank" data-beacon="2}}" style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; transition: color 0.2s linear; background: transparent;">second piece</a> in which he re-stated his belief that carbon dioxide has little effect on global temperatures. Incidentally, despite publishing a “midday digest” every day, no one at the Patriot Post has responded to my enquiries.

==

from staff:

"school of delay" K street?

conrad burns staffers rev dr telecom?

McConnell mafia

===

FTI consult

all have same sr title, nearly all ex staffers, one boehner

==

<div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">==

poster boy staffer?

steven law

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/decision2012/head-of-crossroads-gps-once-a-mcconnell-aide-now-his-political-ally/2012/10/30/9f17ea2a-1329-11e2-ba83-a7a396e6b2a7_story.html

</div>

==

==

junkets

a neglected category: promoted to primary after RAGA

got attn in abramoff, scotland golf trip, sweat shop (forced abortions) on Marians Is nominally Made in USA

ALEC trips to New Orleans, Vegas etc) SPN

it's a major form of bribery for state officials

also ASPEN koch

===

raga naag?

The schedule of attorney general conferences for the coming year is laid out — after a pause for the elections — with events set for theFontainebleau resort in Miami Beach, the Four Seasons Hotel at Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas and the Grand Wailea resort on Maui, among many others. The invitations for corporate sponsorships are already being sent.

==

RAGA? big ~CPP, bondi endorse trump

but schIderman NY AG goes after exxon, SEC enforce disclosure of risk CSR leverage

INFLECTION POINT?

Peabody bankrupt,alt energy invest 2x FF?

scalia RIP

==

4/1/16

irony:  polluter corps who greedy dumb overinvest in capacity like coal get ballouts/subsidy, and judge will toss their pension obligation (and even let them loot the fund supposed to be used to recover the land after), but students who wisely invest in own future cannot declare b.  judges may be sons of Rove like griffin?  FTI wrecked economy and cooked planet then makes $ repping the villains.

==

tipping pt: union ~RTW majority w/ W va 1/16

<a href="http://org2.salsalabs.com/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=lrfOd76gitakfEMCQJeawaDHvA8T5rim">http://org2.salsalabs.com/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=lrfOd76gitakfEMCQJeawaDHvA8T5rim</a>

China is our banker; walmart if front/beard; buying up resources land (water?) in Africa, bought pork and now

<a href="http://ecowatch.com/2016/02/03/syngenta-merger">http://ecowatch.com/2016/02/03/syngenta-merger</a>

also H&K, coal blackwater

==

==

native am are the 1st, smallest and poorest demographic thus unfair/completely logical that they are on the front lines of coal, nuke, water, XL, death squads, koch, abramoff, allbaugh, strafor sea level rise, gambling, Buffet, roger stone, wise use, Ridenour, Ralph Reed, phil Anschutz

some native ppl eat from land eg salmon, so ecology necessity

Am. prosperity built on Indian land and AA labor; subtext to who built that fight?  real history rebuke to our founding myths; continuing poverty/crime pointas to continuing/structural inequality

==

enron crash was dress rehearsal/ precursor to Gt recession, both caused by Gramm dereg:

==

pension plan:  ; starr at Baylor rape; Graham, Dudley, Bolten, ebharrison, Boren Okla; funding cut in gt rec and sequester from feds, so states rause tuition, leads to Biz #1 major?

==

<div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">see hedge, dark $, inequality, offhsore</div>

<div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Matthew effect:

<div>

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/30/business/economy/for-the-wealthiest-private-tax-system-saves-them-billions.html?ref=todayspaper&_r=0

</div>

==

http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/millennials-have-gotten-royally-screwed-thats-why-theyre-voting-bernie-sanders

black lives and student debt overlap like suffrage and abolition? bernie invites muslim woman on stage

==

coal subsidy

tool:

<a href="http://www.goodjobsfirst.org/sites/default/files/docs/pdf/UncleSamsFavoriteCorporations.pdf">http://www.goodjobsfirst.org/sites/default/files/docs/pdf/UncleSamsFavoriteCorporations.pdf</a>

provision of the 2009 Recovery Act providing cash payments in lieu of tax credits. Iberdrola’s subsidy total is $2.2 billion. Other top grant/ allocated tax credit recipients include NextEra Energy (parent of Florida Power & Light), NRG Energy, Southern Company, Summit Power and SCS Energy, each with more than $1 billion. The results exclude the numerous corporate tax breaks that ca

<a href="http://www.goodjobsfirst.org/subsidy-tracker">http://www.goodjobsfirst.org/subsidy-tracker</a>

==

==

post san bernadino mass shooting, NRA mirror of regulatory capture, a gun safety group taken over by trade front/lobby

===

PIVOT PT:

BP Withdraws

In the immediate aftermath of the speech, BP announced that it would be withdrawing from the <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Global_Climate_Coalition" target="_blank" style="text-decoration: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none;">Global Climate Coalition</a>.

It issued a short statement which included the following quote from Browne: “The time to consider the policy dimension of climate change is not when the link between greenhouse gases and climate change is conclusively proven, but when the possibility cannot be taken seriously by the society of which we are part. We in BP have reached that point.”

Shell would follow shortly after, and the transatlantic coalition would slowly unravel. The environmentalists, by targeting shareholders and leveraging Blair's influence over his friend Browne, had delivered a knockout blow.

The sceptics in the oil industry had lost their extremely well-funded, effective and brutal weapon in the war against climate regulations. Energy companies could not rely on openly funded, and in some ways honest, special interest-lobbying front groups.

The executives at Exxon faced the prospect of having to come to terms with climate science and rebuild their multi-billion dollar company in its entirety, from the tip of the rotary oil drill, along the pipelines and refineries, to the nozzle of the petrol pump pushed into the back of the SUV.

Or they could instead go it alone in the public relations and lobbying war. Exxon and the remaining oil companies would have to find new allies.

...

http://desmog.uk/2015/03/21/what-happened-when-former-bp-boss-lord-browne-called-action-climate-change

By <a href="http://desmog.uk/user/25731" style="text-decoration: none; line-height: 18.59px;">Brendan Montague</a> • Saturday, March 21, 2015

===

==

hmmn, maybe better in sys? death spiral?

http://insideclimatenews.org/news/01092015/fossil-fuel-industry-ensures-CEO-executive-pay-bonues-sink-climate

A <a href="http://www.ips-dc.org/executive-excess-2015/" style="text-decoration: none; outline: none;">report released Wednesday </a>examining the pay practices of the 30 largest publicly held U.S. oil, gas, and coal companies concluded that pay incentives for the companies' chief executives encourages reckless behavior and is hastening a climate crisis.

In the analysis, all 13 oil exploration and production companies examined by the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) tied executive bonuses to increasing the amount of proven carbon reserves each year.

"What we are essentially doing here is paying people massive amounts of money to continue to drill and burn and do things that are going to harm the planet and put a lot of costs on the rest of us," said lead author Sarah Anderson of IPS, a Washington D.C.-based think tank.

Fossil fuel companies current hold vast reserves of oil, gas, and coal which, if burned in their entirety would emit five times the amount of carbon than can be emitted to keep the planet from warming more than 2 degrees Celsius. The same companies also spend $600 billion a year to locate additional carbon reserves.

"These companies are already sitting on reserves that if fully burned would cause catastrophic effects, so why are we tying executive bonuses to expanding those reserves?" Anderson said.

Compensation packages for corporate executives are increasingly tied to short-term profit gains, a practice financial watchdogs criticize. For the oil and gas sector, however, the concern is amplified by the carbon dioxide emissions created from burning fossil fuels.

"When you're talking about companies with this great of an impact on our long-term health, we think it is even more necessary to take a long hard look at this and change the incentives," Anderson said.

The report cites the salary and stock bonuses of ExxonMobil chief executive Rex Tillerson, who made a reported $33 million in 2014. Under Tillerson, Exxon has boosted share prices by buying back its own stock, which also inflates Tillerson's equity-based pay. According to the report, 51 percent of ExxonMobil earnings per share growth from 2003-13 was a result of buybacks. Tillerson owns an estimated $166 million worth of shares.

ConocoPhillips also gave its CEO, Ryan Lance, an 18 percent raise to $27 million in 2014, the report says, while the company laid off 1,500 employees that year.

One group looking to change incentives for oil and gas company executives is Ceres, a non-profit sustainability advocacy organization based in Boston. In 2013, the group launched <a href="http://www.ceres.org/issues/files/investor-files/car-factsheet" style="text-decoration: none; outline: none; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">the Carbon Asset Risk Initiative</a> to work with fossil fuel companies to address the financial risks of climate change.

"It really comes down to compensating executives for creating value for the company rather than compensating for amassing huge reserves on their books that might never be exploited or brought to market," said Shanna Cleveland, a senior manager at Ceres.

For the past 150 years, the best way for these companies to make more money was to sell more barrels of oil, so increasing reserves made sense. We are now, however, entering a period of transition where continued expansion of reserves isn't necessarily in a company's best interest, Cleveland said.

"You need to think about whether you've got reserves on your books that are resilient to reduced prices for a barrel of oil, lower demand scenarios, and whether or not you can generate revenues from other types of energy sources," Cleveland said.

<a href="http://www.qualenergia.it/sites/default/files/articolo-doc/KC-ESG_Toil%20for%20Oil-1.pdf" style="text-decoration: none; outline: none;">A 2014 study</a> by European financial services company Kepler Cheuvreux compared potential investments by oil companies over a 20-year period.  The study found that onshore wind would be competitive with oil over a 20-year period if oil sold for $25 a barrel. Offshore wind would be competitive with oil at at $50 a barrel and solar would compete at $75 a barrel.  Oil is currently trading at $47 a barrel, down from $100 in July 2014.

The current report also found fault with share repurchases, a controversial practice of public companies buying back shares of their own stock. Critics say this artificially inflates a company's share price. In 2014, 23 of the top 30 fossil fuel companies spent a combined $38.5 billion repurchasing shares, a figure six times larger than the $6.6 billion all corporations spent that year on research into renewable energy, according to the report.

"The money that is disgorged through share repurchases would be much better spent doing research and development on green energy technologies," said Lynn Stout, a professor of corporate law at Cornell University.  Forty years ago the average American public company reinvested 40 percent of its profits into its business. Today, due in part to share repurchases, reinvestment is typically less than 15 percent, Stout said.

</div>

==

kpfa 8/26  why press cover stock mkt vs economy

rich ish wht ppl the only ones who can afford to work in media; rich wht ppl own stocks, so stocks seems to = economy; this in part explains why middle and lower class ppl do not vote their interest. also fearful ppl (one paychecvk away from loss of MC) susceptible to propaganda

==

8/15

all eco-heroes are targets (the question is why)

==

AHA: texas is southern thus conservative/racist, but oil has produce millionaires who affect state and national elections, eg Bush 1 and esp 2; Rove engineered judicial takeover, leveraged evangelicals; delay pioneered gerrymander at state?  dems fled. hunt bros/fred koch; jfk shot.

as goes texas book vs CA bellwether? 2 americas?

==

renta-tom

===

Many of the Bhopal-related emails, addressed from Stratfor to Dow and Union Carbide public relations directors, reveal concern that, in the lead-up to the 25th anniversary of the Bhopal disaster, the Bhopal issue might be expanded into an effective systemic critique of corporate rule, and speculate at length about why this hasn't yet happened—providing a fascinating window onto what at least some corporate types fear most from activists.

"[Bhopal activists] have made a slight nod toward expanded activity, but never followed through on it—the idea of 'other Bhopals' that were the fault of Dow or others," mused Joseph de Feo, who is listed in one online source as a "Briefer" for Stratfor.

"Maybe the Yes Men were the pinnacle. They made an argument in their way on their terms—that this is a corporate problem and a part of the a [sic] larger whole," wrote Kathleen Morson, Stratfor's Director of Policy Analysis.

"With less than a month to go [until the 25th anniversary], you'd think that the major players—especially Amnesty—would have branched out from Bhopal to make a broader set of issues. I don't see any evidence of it," wrote Bart Mongoven, Stratfor's Vice President, in November 2004. "If they can't manage to use the 25th anniversary to broaden the issue, they probably won't be able to."

Mongoven even speculates on coordination between various activist campaigns that had nothing to do with each other. "The <a href="http://yeslab.org/project/chevron">Chevron campaign</a> [in Ecuador] is remarkably similar [to the Dow campaign] in its unrealistic demand. Is it a follow up or an admission that the first thrust failed? Am I missing a node of activity or a major campaign that is to come? Has the Dow campaign been more successful than I think?" It's almost as if Mongoven assumes the two campaigns were directed from the same central activist headquarters.

Just as Wall Street has <a href="http://thinkprogress.org/special/2011/11/21/373143/washington-lobbyists-occupy-wall-street/">at times let slip their fear</a> of the Occupy Wall Street movement, these leaks seem to show that corporate power is most afraid of whatever reveals "the larger whole" and "broader issues," i.e. whatever brings systemic criminal behavior to light. "Systemic critique could lead to policy changes that would challenge corporate power and profits in a really major way," noted Joseph Huff-Hannon, recently-promoted Director of Policy Analysis for <a href="http://www.yeslab.org/">the Yes Lab</a>.

===

charter pvtization but also heavy subsidy

<a href="http://www.prwatch.org/node/12830">http://www.prwatch.org/node/12830</a>

==

kidswarm in countries we backed death squads? (special forces? // sch of americas?]

honduras dangerous for greens; indig prize fight dam (wow, bertha caceres 3/16 rip)

<div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">kinda like Mt Shasta?!</div>

</div>

We don’t need much help to imagine what a world under these provisions of the TPP would look like. We need look no further than some of the current investor-state dispute cases in which powerful international corporations are demanding millions – sometimes billions – of dollars in claims, against countries both poor and wealthy, for the sin of protecting their citizens.

This is the very same system that the Bechtel Corporation used to attempt to drain $50 million from the Bolivian public treasury after the corporation had been thrown out during the <a href="http://democracyctr.org/bolivia/investigations/bolivia-investigations-the-water-revolt/bechtel-vs-bolivia-details-of-the-case-and-the-campaign/" target="_blank" style="text-decoration: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none;">Cochabamba Water War</a>.

This is the same system that Canadian mining firm Pacific Rim, recently taken over by Oceana Gold, is using to try to extract over $300 million from the people of El Salvador for having rejected mining operations that threaten to contaminate their drinking water.

</div>

===

capt/lost 3/15

==

<h1 property="dc:title" datatype="" class="node-title" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">5 Powerful Shifts Transforming the Future of American Society into Something Unrecognizable and Frightening</h1>

Have you ever undertaken some task you felt less than qualified for, but knew that someone needed to do? Consider this piece my version of that, and let me put what I do understand about it in a nutshell: based on developments in our post-9/11 world, we could be watching the birth of a new American political system and way of governing for which, as yet, we have no name.

And here’s what I find strange: the evidence of this, however inchoate, is all around us and yet it’s as if we can’t bear to take it in or make sense of it or even say that it might be so.

Let me make my case, however minimally, based on five areas in which at least the faint outlines of that new system seem to be emerging: political campaigns and elections; the privatization of Washington through the marriage of the corporation and the state; the de-legitimization of our traditional system of governance; the empowerment of the national security state as an untouchable fourth branch of government; and the demobilization of "we the people."

Whatever this may add up to, it seems to be based, at least in part, on the increasing concentration of wealth and power in a new plutocratic class and in that ever-expanding national security state. Certainly, something out of the ordinary is underway, and yet its birth pangs, while widely reported, are generally categorized as aspects of an exceedingly familiar American system somewhat in disarray.

1. 1% Elections

Check out the news about the 2016 presidential election and you’ll quickly feel a sense of been-there, done-that. As a start, the two names most associated with it, Bush and Clinton, couldn’t be more familiar, highlighting as they do the curiously dynastic quality of recent presidential contests.  (If a Bush or Clinton should win in 2016 and again in 2020, a member of one of those families will have controlled the presidency for <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/dana-milbank-no-freshness-in-our-2016-presidential-contest/2015/01/16/f7c4c310-9d8c-11e4-96cc-e858eba91ced_story.html" target="_blank">28 of the last 36</a> [4] years.)

Take, for instance, “Why 2016 Is Likely to Become a Close Race,” a <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/10/upshot/hillary-clinton-is-more-vulnerable-in-2016-than-you-think.html" target="_blank">recent piece</a> [5] Nate Cohn wrote for my hometown paper.  A noted election statistician, Cohn points out that, despite Hillary Clinton’s historically staggering lead in Democratic primary polls (and lack of serious challengers), she could lose the general election.  He bases this on what we know about her polling popularity from the Monica Lewinsky moment of the 1990s to the present.  Cohn assures readers that Hillary will not “be a Democratic Eisenhower, a popular, senior statesperson who cruises to an easy victory.”  It’s the sort of comparison that offers a certain implicit reassurance about the near future.  (No, Virginia, we haven’t left the world of politics in which former general and president Dwight D. Eisenhower can still be a touchstone.)

Cohn may be right when it comes to Hillary’s electability, but this is not Dwight D. Eisenhower’s or even Al Gore’s America. If you want a measure of that, consider this year’s primaries. I mean, of course, the 2015 ones. Once upon a time, the campaign season started with candidates flocking to Iowa and New Hampshire early in the election year to establish their bona fides among party voters. These days, however, those are already late primaries.

The early primaries, the ones that count, take place among a small group of millionaires and <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/21/us/koch-seminar-is-early-proving-ground-for-gop-hopefuls.html" target="blank">billionaires</a> [6], a new caste flush with cash who will personally, or through complex networks of funders, pour multi-millions of dollars into the campaigns of candidates of their choice.  So the early primaries -- this year mainly a Republican affair -- are taking place in resort spots like Las Vegas, Rancho Mirage, California, and Sea Island, Georgia, as has been<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/01/us/politics/gop-race-starts-in-lavish-haunts-of-rich-donors.html" target="blank">widely reported</a> [7]. These “contests” involve groveling politicians appearing at the beck and call of the rich and powerful, and so reflect our new 1% electoral system. (The main pro-Hillary super PAC, for instance, is aiming for a <a href="http://www.usnews.com/opinion/blogs/peter-fenn/2015/02/12/jeb-bush-and-hillary-clinton-2016-fundraising-is-out-of-control" target="blank">kitty of $500 million</a> [8] heading into 2016, while the Koch brothers network has already promised to drop <a href="http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2015/02/koch-retreat-donors-249-million-2016" target="blank">almost $1 billion</a> [9] into the coming campaign season, doubling their efforts in the last presidential election year.)

Ever since the Supreme Court opened up the ultimate floodgates with its 2010 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_United_v.FEC#Opinions_of_the_Court" target="blank">Citizens United</a> [10] decision, each subsequent election has seen record-breaking amounts of money donated and spent. The 2012 presidential campaign was the first <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/06/2012-presidential-election-cost_n_2254138.html" target="blank">$2 billion election</a> [11]; campaign 2016 is <a href="http://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/presidential-races/230318-the-5-billion-campaign" target="blank">expected to hit</a> [12]the $5 billion mark without breaking a sweat.  By comparison, according to Burton Abrams and Russell Settle in their study, “The Effect of Broadcasting on Political Campaign Spending,” Republicans and Democrats spent just under $13 million combined in 1956 when Eisenhower won his second term.

In the meantime, it’s still true that the 2016 primaries will involve actual voters, as will the election that follows. The previous election season, the midterms of 2014, cost <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2014/11/01/politics/4-billion-expensive-election/" target="blank">almost $4 billion</a> [13], a record despite the number of small donors <a href="http://ivn.us/2014/12/01/political-donors-spent-enough-money-last-election-to-rebuild-detroit-twice/" target="blank">continuing to drop</a> [14]. It also represented the <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-politics/wp/2014/11/10/voter-turnout-in-2014-was-the-lowest-since-wwii/" target="blank">lowest midterm voter</a> [15]turnout since World War II. (See: demobilization of the public, below -- and add in the demobilization of the Democrats as a real party, the breaking of organized labor, the fragmenting of the Republican Party, and the return of <a href="https://www.aclu.org/maps/battle-protect-ballot-voter-suppression-measures-passed-2013" target="blank">voter suppression laws</a> [16] visibly meant to limit the franchise.) It hardly matters just what the flood of new money does in such elections, when you can feel the <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/03/16/richer-and-poorer" target="_blank">weight of inequality</a> [17] bearing down on the whole process in a way that is pushing us somewhere new.

2. The Privatization of the State (or the U.S. as a Prospective Third-World Nation)

In the recent coverage of the Hillary Clinton email flap, you can find endless references to the <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/11/opinion/frank-bruni-hillary-clinton-the-email-controversy-and-the-2016-presidential-race.html" target="_blank">Clintons of yore</a> [18] in wink-wink, you-know-how-they-are-style reporting; and yes, she did delete a lot of emails; and yes, it’s an election year coming and, as everyone points out, the Republicans are going to do their best to keep the email issue alive until hell freezes over, etc., etc.  Again, the coverage, while eyeball gluing, is in a you’ve-seen-it-all-before, you’ll-see-it-all-again-mode.

However, you haven’t seen it all before. The most striking aspect of this little brouhaha lies in what’s most obvious but least highlighted.  An American secretary of state chose to set up her own private, safeguarded email system for doing government work; that is, she chose to privatize her communications.  If this were Cairo, it might not warrant a second thought.  But it didn’t happen in some third-world state.  It was the act of a key official of the planet’s reigning (or thrashing) superpower, which -- even if it <a href="http://mediamatters.org/blog/2015/03/11/two-names-the-press-omits-from-email-coverage-c/202847" target="_blank">wasn’t</a> [19] the first time such a thing had ever occurred -- should be taken as a tiny symptom of something that couldn’t be larger or, in the long stretch of history, newer: the ongoing privatization of the American state, or at least the national security part of it.

Though the marriage of the state and the corporation has a pre-history, the full-scale arrival of the <a href="http://www.tomdispatch.com/archive/175507/tom_engelhardt_remotely_piloted_war" target="blank" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">warrior corporation</a> [20] only occurred after 9/11.  Someday, that will undoubtedly be seen as a seminal moment in the formation of whatever may be coming in this country.  Only 13 years later, there is no part of the war state that has not experienced major forms of privatization.  The U.S. military could no longer go to war without its crony corporations <a href="http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175036/pratap_chatterjee_inheriting_halliburton_s_army" target="blank">doing KP</a> [21] and guard duty, delivering the mail, building the bases, and being involved in just about all of its activities, including <a href="http://www.thenation.com/blog/197057/afghanistan-war-still-raging-time-its-being-waged-contractors" target="blank">training</a> [22] the militaries of foreign allies and even fighting.  Such warrior corporations are now involved in every aspect of the national security state, including <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/12/12/outsourcing-torture_n_6317236.html" target="blank">torture</a> [23], <a href="http://articles.latimes.com/2011/dec/29/world/la-fg-drones-civilians-20111230" target="blank">drone strikes</a> [24], and -- to the tune of <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/10/nsa-leak-contractors_n_3418876.html?1370919691" target="blank">hundreds of thousands</a> [25] of contract employees like Edward Snowden -- intelligence gathering and spying.  You name it and, in these years, it’s been at least partly privatized.

All you have to do is read reporter James Risen’s recent book, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/dp/0544341414/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20" target="_blank">Pay Any Price</a> [26], on how the global war on terror was fought in Washington, and you know that privatization has brought something else with it: corruption, scams, and the gaming of the system for profits of a sort that might normally be associated with a typical third-world kleptocracy.  And all of this, a new world being born, was reflected in a tiny way in Hillary Clinton’s very personal decision about her emails.

Though it’s a subject I know so much less about, this kind of privatization (and the corruption that goes with it) is undoubtedly underway in the non-war-making, non-security-projecting part of the American state as well.

3. The De-legitimization of Congress and the Presidency

On a third front, American “confidence” in the three classic check-and-balance branches of government, as measured by polling outfits, continues to fall.  In 2014, Americans <a href="http://www.apnorc.org/projects/Pages/HTML%20Reports/confidence-in-institutions-trends-in-americans-attitudes-toward-government-media-and-business0310-2333.aspx" target="_blank">expressing</a> [27] a “great deal of confidence” in the Supreme Court hit a new low of 23%; in the presidency, it was 11%, and in Congress a bottom-scraping 5%.  (The military, on the other hand, registers at 50%.)  The figures for “hardly any confidence at all” are respectively 20%, 44%, and more than 50%.  All are in or near record-breaking territory for the last four decades.

It seems fair to say that in recent years Congress has been engaged in a process of delegitimizing itself.  Where that body once had the genuine power to declare war, for example, it is now “debating” in a <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/13/us/congress-shows-a-lack-of-enthusiasm-for-giving-obama-war-powers-to-fight-isis.html" target="_blank">desultory fashion</a> [28] an “authorization” for a war against the Islamic State in Syria, Iraq, and possibly elsewhere that has already been underway for eight months and whose course, it seems, will be essentially unaltered, whether Congress authorizes it or not.

What would President Harry Truman, who once famously ran a presidential campaign against a “<a href="http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2013/12/01/do-nothing-congress-was-way-more-productive-than-the-current-one" target="blank">do-nothing</a> [29]” Congress, have to say about a body that truly can do just about nothing?  Or rather, to give the Republican war hawks in that new Congress their due, not quite nothing.  They are proving capable of acting effectively to delegitimize the presidency as well.  House Majority Leader John Boehner’s invitation to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to undercut the president's Iranian nuclear negotiations and the <a href="http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2015/03/09/text-of-gop-senators-letter-to-irans-leaders-on-nuclear-talks/" target="blank">letter</a> [30] signed by 47 Republican senators and directed to the Iranian ayatollahs are striking examples of this.  They are visibly meant to tear down an “imperial presidency” that Republicans gloried in not so long ago.

The radical nature of that letter, not as an act of state but of its de-legitimization, was noted even in Iran, where fundamentalist Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/13/world/middleeast/ayatollah-ali-khamenei-criticizes-republicans-letter-on-iran-nuclear-talks.html" target="blank">proclaimed</a> [31] it “a sign of a decline in political ethics and the destruction of the American establishment from within.” Here, however, the letter is either being covered as a singularly extreme one-off act (“<a href="http://newsbusters.org/blogs/curtis-houck/2015/03/12/nbc-touts-petition-alleging-gop-senators-committed-treason-and" target="blank">treason!</a> [32]”) or, as Jon Stewart <a href="http://thedailyshow.cc.com/videos/ial564/under-miner" target="blank">did</a> [33] on “The Daily Show,” as part of a <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2015/03/11/opinions/stanley-congress-iran-letter/" target="blank">repetitive</a> [34] tit-for-tat between Democrats and Republicans over who controls foreign policy.  It is, in fact, neither.  It represents part of a growing pattern in which Congress becomes an ever less effective body, except in its willingness to <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/13/us/politics/struggling-in-congress-republicans-unite-on-foreign-policy.html" target="_blank">take on</a> [35] and potentially take out the presidency.

In the twenty-first century, all that “small government” Republicans and “big government” Democrats can agree on is offering essentially unconditional support to the military and the national security state.  The Republican Party -- its various factions increasingly at each other’s throats almost as often as at those of the Democrats -- seems reasonably united solely on issues of war-making and security.  As for the Democrats, an unpopular administration, facing constant attack by those who loath President Obama, has kept its footing in part by allying with and fusing with the national security state.  A president who came into office rejecting torture and promoting <a href="http://www2.gwu.edu/_{nsarchiv/news/20090121/index.htm}" target="blank">sunshine and transparency</a> [36] in government has, in the course of six-plus years, come to identify himself almost totally with the U.S. military, the CIA, the NSA, and the like.  While it has launched an <a href="http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175500/tomgram%3A_peter_van_buren,in_washington,fear_the_silence,not_the_noise/" target="_blank">unprecedented campaign</a> [37] against whistleblowers and leakers (as well as sunshine and transparency), the Obama White House has proved a powerful enabler of, but also remarkably dependent upon, that state-within-a-state, a strange fate for “the imperial presidency.”

4. The Rise of the National Security State as the Fourth Branch of Government

One “branch” of government is, however, visibly on the rise and rapidly gaining independence from just about any kind of oversight.  Its ability to enact its wishes with almost no opposition in Washington is a striking feature of our moment.  But while the symptoms of this process are regularly reported, the overall phenomenon -- the creation of a de facto fourth branch of government -- gets remarkably little attention.  In the war on terror era, the national security state has come into its own.  Its <a href="http://projects.washingtonpost.com/top-secret-america/articles/a-hidden-world-growing-beyond-control/" target="_blank">growth</a> [38] has been phenomenal.  Though it’s seldom pointed out, it should be considered remarkable that in this period we gained a second full-scale “defense department,” the Department of Homeland Security, and that it and the Pentagon have become even more entrenched, each surrounded by its own growing “complex” of private corporations, lobbyists, and allied politicians.  The militarization of the country has, in these years, proceeded apace.

Meanwhile, the duplication to be found in the U.S. Intelligence Community with its <a href="http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175901/tomgram%3A_engelhardt,entering_the_intelligence_labyrinth/" target="blank">17 major agencies</a> [39] and outfits is staggering.  Its growing ability to surveil and spy on a global scale, including on its own citizens, puts the totalitarian states of the twentieth century <a href="http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175713/tomgram%3A_engelhardt,you_are_our_secret/" target="blank">to shame</a> [40].  That the various parts of the national security state can act in just about any fashion without fear of <a href="http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175833/tomgram%3A_engelhardt,knowledge_is_crime/" target="blank">accountability</a> [41] in a court of law is by now too obvious to belabor.  As wealth has traveled upwards in American society in ways not seen since the first Gilded Age, so taxpayer dollars have migrated into the national security state in an almost plutocratic fashion.

New reports regularly surface about the further activities of parts of that state.  In recent weeks, for instance, we learned from Jeremy Scahill and Josh Begley of the Intercept that the CIA has spent years trying to <a href="https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/03/10/ispy-cia-campaign-steal-apples-secrets/" target="blank">break the encryption</a> [42] on Apple iPhones and iPads; it has, that is, been aggressively seeking to attack an all-American corporation (even if significant parts of its production process are actually in China).  Meanwhile, Devlin Barrett of theWall Street Journal <a href="http://www.wsj.com/articles/cia-gave-justice-department-secret-phone-scanning-technology-1426009924" target="blank">reported</a> [43] that the CIA, an agency barred from domestic spying operations of any sort, has been helping the U.S. Marshals Service (part of the Justice Department) create an airborne digital dragnet on American cell phones.  Planes flying out of five U.S. cities carry a form of technology that "mimics a cellphone tower." This technology, developed and tested in distant American war zones and now brought to "the homeland," is just part of the ongoing militarization of the country from <a href="http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175834/tomgram%3A_todd_miller,the_creation_of_a_border_security_state/" target="blank">its borders</a> [44] to its <a href="http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175881/tomgram%3A_matthew_harwood,one_nation_under_swat/" target="blank">police forces</a> [45].  And there’s hardly been a week since Edward Snowden first released crucial NSA documents in <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/world/series/the-snowden-files" target="_blank">June 2013</a> [46] when such “advances” haven’t been in the news.

News also regularly bubbles up about the further expansion, reorganization, and upgrading of parts of the intelligence world, the sorts of reports that have become the barely noticed background hum of our lives.  Recently, for instance, Director John Brennan <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/cia-plans-major-reorganization-and-a-focus-on-digital-espionage/2015/03/06/87e94a1e-c2aa-11e4-9ec2-b418f57a4a99_story.html" target="blank">announced</a> [47] a major reorganization of the CIA meant to <a href="https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/03/06/spies-now-cia-director-announces-major-restructuring/" target="blank">break down</a> [48] the classic separation between spies and analysts at the Agency, while creating a new Directorate of Digital Innovation responsible for, among other things, cyberwarfare and cyberespionage.  At about the same time, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/17/world/middleeast/us-intensifies-effort-to-blunt-isis-message.html" target="_blank">according to</a> [49] the New York Times, the Center for Strategic Counterterrorism Communications, an obscure State Department agency, was given a new and expansive role in coordinating “all the existing attempts at countermessaging [against online propaganda by terror outfits like the Islamic State] by much larger federal departments, including the Pentagon, Homeland Security and intelligence agencies.”

This sort of thing is par for the course in an era in which the national security state has only grown stronger, endlessly elaborating, duplicating, and overlapping the various parts of its increasingly labyrinthine structure.  And keep in mind that, in a structure that has <a href="http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175526/tomgram%3A_peter_van_buren,joining_the_whistleblowers%27_club/" target="blank">fought hard</a> [50] to keep what it's doing<a href="http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/mar/16/whistleblowers-double-standard-obama-david-petraeus-chelsea-manning" target="blank">cloaked</a> [51] in secrecy, there is <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/mar/14/congress-wont-protect-us-from-the-surveillance-state-theyll-enhance-it" target="blank">so much more</a> [52] that we don’t know.  Still, we should know enough to realize that this ongoing process reflects something new in our American world (even if no one cares to notice).

5. The Demobilization of the American People

In <a href="http://www.amazon.com/dp/0316185434/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20" target="_blank">The Age of Acquiescence</a> [53], a new book about America’s two Gilded Ages, Steve Fraser asks why it was that, in the nineteenth century, another period of plutocratic excesses, concentration of wealth and inequality, buying of politicians, and attempts to demobilize the public, Americans took to the streets with such determination and in remarkable numbers over long periods of time to protest their treatment, and stayed there even when the brute power of the state was called out against them.  In our own moment, Fraser wonders, why has the silence of the public in the face of similar developments been so striking?

After all, a grim new American system is arising before our eyes.  Everything we once learned in the civics textbooks of our childhoods about how our government works now seems askew, while the growth of poverty, the flatlining of wages, the rise of the .01%, the collapse of labor, and the militarization of society are all evident.

The process of demobilizing the public certainly began with the military.  It was initially a response to the <a href="https://msuweb.montclair.edu/_{furrg/Vietnam/heinl.html}" target="blank">disruptive and rebellious</a> [54] draftees of the Vietnam-era.  In 1973, at the stroke of a presidential pen, the citizen’s army was declared no more, the raising of new recruits was turned over to advertising agencies (a preview of the privatization of the state to come), and the public was sent home, never again to meddle in military affairs.  Since 2001, that form of demobilization has been etched in stone and <a href="http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175904/tomgram%3A_engelhardt,inside_the_american_terrordome" target="_blank">transformed</a> [55] into a way of life in the name of the “safety” and “security” of the public.

Since then, “we the people” have made ourselves felt in only three disparate ways: from the left in the Occupy movement, which, with its slogans about the 1% and the 99%, put the issue of growing economic inequality on the map of American consciousness; from the right, in the Tea Party movement, a complex expression of discontent backed and at least <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Tea_Party" target="_blank">partially funded</a> [56] by right-wing operatives and billionaires, and aimed at the de-legitimization of the “nanny state”; and the recent round of post-Ferguson protests spurred at least in part by the militarization of the police in black and brown communities around the country.

The Birth of a New System

Otherwise, a moment of increasing extremity has also been a moment of -- to use Fraser’s word -- “acquiescence.”  Someday, we’ll assumedly understand far better how this all came to be.  In the meantime, let me be as clear as I can be about something that seems murky indeed: this period doesn’t represent a version, no matter how perverse or extreme, of politics as usual; nor is the 2016 campaign an election as usual; nor are we experiencing Washington as usual.  Put together our 1% elections, the privatization of our government, the de-legitimization of Congress and the presidency, as well as the empowerment of the national security state and the U.S. military, and add in the demobilization of the American public (in the name of protecting us from terrorism), and you have something like a new ballgame.

While significant planning has been involved in all of this, there may be no ruling pattern or design.  Much of it may be happening in a purely seat-of-the-pants fashion.  In response, there has been no urge to officially declare that something new is afoot, let alone convene a new constitutional convention.  Still, don’t for a second think that the American political system isn’t being rewritten on the run by interested parties in Congress, our present crop of billionaires, corporate interests, lobbyists, the Pentagon, and the officials of the national security state.

Out of the chaos of this prolonged moment and inside the shell of the old system, a new culture, a new kind of politics, a new kind of governance is being born right before our eyes. Call it what you want. But call it something. Stop pretending it’s not happening.

[Note: My special thanks go to my friend John Cobb, who talked me through this one.  Doing it would have been inconceivable without him.  Tom]

Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author of <a href="http://www.amazon.com/dp/1608460711/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20">The American Way of War: How Bush’s Wars Became Obama’s</a> [57] as well as <a href="http://www.amazon.com/dp/155849586X/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20">The End of Victory Culture</a> [58], runs the Nation Institute's <a href="http://www.tomdispatch.com/" target="_blank">TomDispatch.com</a> [2]. He is the author of, most recently, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Shadow-Government-Surveillance-Security-Single-Superpower/dp/1608463656/ref=la_B001JP2OJK_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1416267939&sr=1-1">Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World</a> [59] (Haymarket Books, 2014).

Links:

[1] http://www.alternet.org/authors/tom-engelhardt-0

[2] http://www.tomdispatch.com/

[3] http://tomdispatch.us2.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=6cb39ff0b1f670c349f828c73&id=1e41682ade

[4] http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/dana-milbank-no-freshness-in-our-2016-presidential-contest/2015/01/16/f7c4c310-9d8c-11e4-96cc-e858eba91ced_story.html

[5] http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/10/upshot/hillary-clinton-is-more-vulnerable-in-2016-than-you-think.html

[6] http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/21/us/koch-seminar-is-early-proving-ground-for-gop-hopefuls.html

[7] http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/01/us/politics/gop-race-starts-in-lavish-haunts-of-rich-donors.html

[8] http://www.usnews.com/opinion/blogs/peter-fenn/2015/02/12/jeb-bush-and-hillary-clinton-2016-fundraising-is-out-of-control

[9] http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2015/02/koch-retreat-donors-249-million-2016

[10] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_United_v._FEC#Opinions_of_the_Court

[11] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/06/2012-presidential-election-cost_n_2254138.html

[12] http://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/presidential-races/230318-the-5-billion-campaign

[13] http://www.cnn.com/2014/11/01/politics/4-billion-expensive-election/

[14] http://ivn.us/2014/12/01/political-donors-spent-enough-money-last-election-to-rebuild-detroit-twice/

[15] http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-politics/wp/2014/11/10/voter-turnout-in-2014-was-the-lowest-since-wwii/

[16] https://www.aclu.org/maps/battle-protect-ballot-voter-suppression-measures-passed-2013

[17] http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/03/16/richer-and-poorer

[18] http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/11/opinion/frank-bruni-hillary-clinton-the-email-controversy-and-the-2016-presidential-race.html

[19] http://mediamatters.org/blog/2015/03/11/two-names-the-press-omits-from-email-coverage-c/202847

[20] http://www.tomdispatch.com/archive/175507/tom_engelhardt_remotely_piloted_war

[21] http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175036/pratap_chatterjee_inheriting_halliburton_s_army

[22] http://www.thenation.com/blog/197057/afghanistan-war-still-raging-time-its-being-waged-contractors

[23] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/12/12/outsourcing-torture_n_6317236.html

[24] http://articles.latimes.com/2011/dec/29/world/la-fg-drones-civilians-20111230

[25] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/10/nsa-leak-contractors_n_3418876.html?1370919691

[26] http://www.amazon.com/dp/0544341414/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20

[27] http://www.apnorc.org/projects/Pages/HTML%20Reports/confidence-in-institutions-trends-in-americans-attitudes-toward-government-media-and-business0310-2333.aspx

[28] http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/13/us/congress-shows-a-lack-of-enthusiasm-for-giving-obama-war-powers-to-fight-isis.html

[29] http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2013/12/01/do-nothing-congress-was-way-more-productive-than-the-current-one

[30] http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2015/03/09/text-of-gop-senators-letter-to-irans-leaders-on-nuclear-talks/

[31] http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/13/world/middleeast/ayatollah-ali-khamenei-criticizes-republicans-letter-on-iran-nuclear-talks.html

[32] http://newsbusters.org/blogs/curtis-houck/2015/03/12/nbc-touts-petition-alleging-gop-senators-committed-treason-and

[33] http://thedailyshow.cc.com/videos/ial564/under-miner

[34] http://www.cnn.com/2015/03/11/opinions/stanley-congress-iran-letter/

[35] http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/13/us/politics/struggling-in-congress-republicans-unite-on-foreign-policy.html

[36] http://www2.gwu.edu/%7Ensarchiv/news/20090121/index.htm

[37] http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175500/tomgram%3A_peter_van_buren,_in_washington,_fear_the_silence,_not_the_noise/

[38] http://projects.washingtonpost.com/top-secret-america/articles/a-hidden-world-growing-beyond-control/

[39] http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175901/tomgram%3A_engelhardt,_entering_the_intelligence_labyrinth/

[40] http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175713/tomgram%3A_engelhardt,_you_are_our_secret/

[41] http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175833/tomgram%3A_engelhardt,_knowledge_is_crime/

[42] https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/03/10/ispy-cia-campaign-steal-apples-secrets/

[43] http://www.wsj.com/articles/cia-gave-justice-department-secret-phone-scanning-technology-1426009924

[44] http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175834/tomgram%3A_todd_miller,_the_creation_of_a_border_security_state/

[45] http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175881/tomgram%3A_matthew_harwood,_one_nation_under_swat/

[46] http://www.theguardian.com/world/series/the-snowden-files

[47] http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/cia-plans-major-reorganization-and-a-focus-on-digital-espionage/2015/03/06/87e94a1e-c2aa-11e4-9ec2-b418f57a4a99_story.html

[48] https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/03/06/spies-now-cia-director-announces-major-restructuring/

[49] http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/17/world/middleeast/us-intensifies-effort-to-blunt-isis-message.html

[50] http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175526/tomgram%3A_peter_van_buren,_joining_the_whistleblowers%27_club/

[51] http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/mar/16/whistleblowers-double-standard-obama-david-petraeus-chelsea-manning

[52] http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/mar/14/congress-wont-protect-us-from-the-surveillance-state-theyll-enhance-it

[53] http://www.amazon.com/dp/0316185434/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20

[54] https://msuweb.montclair.edu/%7Efurrg/Vietnam/heinl.html

[55] http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175904/tomgram%3A_engelhardt,_inside_the_american_terrordome

[56] http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Tea_Party

[57] http://www.amazon.com/dp/1608460711/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20

[58] http://www.amazon.com/dp/155849586X/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20

[59] http://www.amazon.com/Shadow-Government-Surveillance-Security-Single-Superpower/dp/1608463656/ref=la_B001JP2OJK_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1416267939&sr=1-1

[60] mailto:corrections@alternet.org?Subject=Typo on 5 Powerful Shifts Transforming the Future of American Society into Something Unrecognizable and Frightening

[61] http://www.alternet.org/

[62] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B

</div>

==

loss of classified ads killed newspaper (jrnlism) but boosted google and facebook

==

sam singer SF poster boy for jrnl degradation?

==

ALecKoch-alypse

</div>

<div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">These are privatization, financialization, militarization, and criminalization, which together are producing a steadily creeping authoritarianism—a new authoritarianism—to fit our times. Let’s call them the Four Plagues, or if we wish, “The Four Horsemen of Our Apocalypse,” from the Book of Revelations.</div>

==

===

union = mod

<h1 property="dc:title" datatype="" class="node-title">Robert Reich: Why Americans Are Screwed and Europeans Are Not</h1>

</div>

<div class="byline economy">By <a href="http://www.alternet.org/authors/robert-reich-0">Robert Reich</a> [1] / Robert Reich's Blog</div>

<div class="story-date">March 15, 2015</div>

</div>

<div id="atstbx" class="at-share-tbx-element addthis_32x32_style addthis-smartlayers addthis-animated at4-show" style=" padding: 0px; margin: 0px; -webkit-animation-fill-mode: both; -webkit-animation-duration: 1s; opacity: 1 !important;">The U.S. economy is picking up steam but most Americans aren’t feeling it. By contrast, most European economies are still in bad shape, but most Europeans are doing relatively well.</div>

</div>

What’s behind this? Two big facts.

First, American corporations exert far more political influence in the United States than their counterparts exert in their own countries.

In fact, most Americans have no influence at all. That’s the conclusion of Professors Martin Gilens of Princeton and Benjamin Page of Northwestern University, who <a href="http://scholar.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/mgilens/files/gilens_and_page_2014_-testing_theories_of_american_politics.doc.pdf">analyzed</a> [2] 1,799 policy issues — and found that “the preferences of the average American appear to have only a miniscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy.”

Instead, American lawmakers respond to the demands of wealthy individuals (typically corporate executives and Wall Street moguls) and of big corporations – those with the most lobbying prowess and deepest pockets to bankroll campaigns.

The second fact is most big American corporations have no particular allegiance to America. They don’t want Americans to have better wages. Their only allegiance and responsibility is to their shareholders — which often requires lower wages  to fuel larger profits and higher share prices.

When GM went public again in 2010, it <a href="http://www.gm.com/content/dam/gmcom/COMPANY/Investors/Corporate_Governance/PDFs/StockholderInformationPDFs/Annual-Report.pdf">boasted</a> [3] of making 43 percent of its cars in place where labor is less than $15 an hour, while in North America it could now pay “lower-tiered” wages and benefits for new employees.

American corporations shift their profits around the world wherever they pay the lowest taxes. Some are even morphing into foreign corporations.

As an Apple executive <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/22/business/apple-america-and-a-squeezed-middle-class.html?_r=0">told</a> [4] the New York Times, “We don’t have an obligation to solve America’s problems.”

I’m not blaming American corporations. They’re in business to make profits and maximize their share prices, not to serve America.

But because of these two basic facts – their dominance on American politics, and their interest in share prices instead of the wellbeing of Americans – it’s folly to count on them to create good American jobs or improve American competitiveness, or represent the interests of the United States in global commerce.

By contrast, big corporations headquartered in other rich nations are more responsible for the wellbeing of the people who live in those nations.

That’s because labor unions there are typically stronger than they are here — able to exert pressure both at the company level and nationally.

VW’s labor unions, for example, have a voice in governing the company, as they do in other big German corporations. Not long ago, VW even <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/storyline/wp/2014/11/19/the-strange-case-of-the-anti-union-union-at-volkswagens-plant-in-tennessee/">welcomed</a> [5] the UAW to its auto plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee. (Tennessee’s own politicians nixed it.)

Governments in other rich nations often devise laws through tri-partite bargains involving big corporations and organized labor. This process further binds their corporations to their nations.

Meanwhile, American corporations distribute a smaller share of their earnings to their workers than do European or Canadian-based corporations.

And top U.S. corporate executives make far more money than their counterparts in other wealthy countries.

The typical American worker puts in more hours than Canadians and Europeans, and gets little or no paid vacation or paid family leave. In Europe, the <a href="http://20somethingfinance.com/american-hours-worked-productivity-vacation">norm</a> [6] is five weeks paid vacation per year and more than three months paid family leave.

And because of the overwhelming clout of American firms on U.S. politics, Americans don’t get nearly as good a deal from their governments as do Canadians and Europeans.

Governments there impose higher taxes on the wealthy and redistribute more of the wealth to middle- and lower-income households. Most of their citizens receive essentially free healthcare and more generous unemployment benefits than do Americans.

So it shouldn’t be surprising that even though U.S. economy is doing better, most Americans are not.

The U.S. middle class is no longer the world’s richest. After considering taxes and transfer payments, middle-class incomes in Canada and much of Western Europe are <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/23/upshot/the-american-middle-class-is-no-longer-the-worlds-richest.html?abt=0002&abg=0">higher</a> [7] than in the U.S. The poor in Western Europe earn more than do poor Americans.

Finally, when at global negotiating tables – such as the secretive process devising the “Trans Pacific Partnership” trade deal — American corporations don’t represent the interests of Americans. They represent the interests of their executives and shareholders, who are not only wealthier than most Americans but also reside all over the world.

Which is why the pending Partnership protects the intellectual property of American corporations — but not American workers’ health, safety, or wages, and not the environment.

The Obama administration is casting the Partnership as a way to contain Chinese influence in the Pacific region. The agents of America’s interests in the area are assumed to be American corporations.

But that assumption is incorrect. American corporations aren’t set up to represent America’s interests in the Pacific region or anywhere else.

What’s the answer to this basic conundrum? Either we lessen the dominance of big American corporations over American politics, or we increase their allegiance and responsibility to America.

It has to be one or the other. Americans can’t thrive within a political system run largely by big American corporations — organized to boost their share prices but not boost America.

</div>

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pwl memo

root of defund the left strat?

===

As <a href="http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2013/05/16/why_the_gop_lost_the_vote_but_gained_house_seats__118430.html" target="_blank" style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; background-image: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-size: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial;">Trende observed</a>, the Democratic political coalition “has become geographically narrow in the past decade, heavily concentrated among urban liberals and minorities who live in densely populated cities or are placed into minority-majority districts under interpretations of the Voting Rights Act that many minority groups pressed for in the 1980s and 1990s.” This concentration helps win some state-wide races and national electoral votes, but means that Democrats lose a lot of close races for the House. When Democrats do manage to win in the House, they often win by larger margins than Republicans do, which helps account for their national popular vote majority. Gerrymandering is part of the problem faced by the Democrats, but the other part is that, like the Republicans, they too are less inclined to appeal to those outside of their coalition. Democrats may not be as extreme as Republicans, but they are also less interested in compromise and consensus building than they used to be.

When we look at American politics we need to understand that our legislative branches represent places (districts and states) as well as people. The U.S. is a representative democracy yet by design is far from a pure democracy. Our constitution is designed to facilitate continuity and the translation of economic power to political power, but it is also designed to permit change when absolutely needed. In the past, dramatic change has taken place when the stability of the political system was threatened by the absence of change. These changes took place when the political center accepted them: the reforms of the progressive era, the economic policies of the New Deal, the changes brought about by LBJ’s Great Society. Typically, agents of change convince moderates to accept some part of their view. The exception that proved the rule was our Civil War.

In the past, the geographic orientation of our political system has led to moderate politics. In the U.S. system, an extreme party receiving 20 percent of the votes in every congressional district would send no one to Congress. Therefore, the political dynamic pushed candidates to the center where they build the largest coalitions generating pluralities or majorities. The growing presence of moderate independent voters continues that trend in general elections. But the growing importance of low-turnout primary elections has driven candidates further to the extremes. It is hard to believe that Eric Cantor was too moderate for the Republican base—but he was. The <a href="http://ecowatch.com/2014/07/09/tea-party-needs-clean-water" target="_blank" style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; background-image: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-size: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial;">Tea Party</a> has less than 20 percent of the national vote, but they have managed to skillfully work the seams of the political and media system to dominate the Republican-controlled House of Representatives. If the Occupy movement had been less politically pure they might have done the same thing on the left.

==

7/16/14

extreme ideology or just tactics lead to attacks on moderate/allies: anita roddick, social entre; thses prove that mkt an be tame/humane vs ecoterror (see Kill the msgr: in genocide, must prove that opp win will lead to apocalyse

shareholder revolts? DDT

look at issa targets: post office, jaczko, solyndra

<h1 property="dc:title" datatype="" class="node-title">Krugman Divulges Real Reason Conservatives Freak Out About California Success Story</h1>

ctr for climate strategies is pro-biz gp (dow)

Left-Right alliance?

Nader new book unstoppable (vs billionaires will save us?) finds 25 points of overlap

CFR levy says up tax on oil! (also export more LNG? boost US green energy for comp advantage?)

Laffer debate carbon tax

==

local regulation under hvy attack, ironically b/c agenda 21 ppl think that local control will somehow flip to international control.  conservative governors just sellout to corps who want to extract/pollute

==

the two biggest offending industries are the most subsidied: oil and agribiz, and both have populist potential

===

right has morphed into a corporate protection racket: norquist extorts with pledge; abramoff got paid by playing 2 sides against each other;corp protection in broader sense of powell memo too

<span style="font-style: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; float: none; display: inline !important;">ironically the actors who played gangsters were leftists/union men, while the patriots were anti-union, often associated with the real mafia

===

CAPT 315

ahainsight

lost/capt 3/28/2015

forgot this category:

adding mega-trends, big picture

see OMG in Bizzaro

==

5 Powerful Shifts Transforming the Future of American Society into Something Unrecognizable and Frightening

Have you ever undertaken some task you felt less than qualified for, but knew that someone needed to do? Consider this piece my version of that, and let me put what I do understand about it in a nutshell: based on developments in our post-9/11 world, we could be watching the birth of a new American political system and way of governing for which, as yet, we have no name.

1. 1% Elections

Take, for instance, “Why 2016 Is Likely to Become a Close Race,” a recent piece [5] Nate Cohn wrote for my hometown paper.  A noted election statistician, Cohn points out that, despite Hillary Clinton’s historically staggering lead in Democratic primary polls (and lack of serious challengers), she could lose the general election.  He bases this on what we know about her polling popularity from the Monica Lewinsky moment of the 1990s to the present.  Cohn assures readers that Hillary will not “be a Democratic Eisenhower, a popular, senior statesperson who cruises to an easy victory.”  It’s the sort of comparison that offers a certain implicit reassurance about the near future.  (No, Virginia, we haven’t left the world of politics in which former general and president Dwight D. Eisenhower can still be a touchstone.)

The early primaries, the ones that count, take place among a small group of millionaires and billionaires [6], a new caste flush with cash who will personally, or through complex networks of funders, pour multi-millions of dollars into the campaigns of candidates of their choice.  So the early primaries -- this year mainly a Republican affair -- are taking place in resort spots like Las Vegas, Rancho Mirage, California, and Sea Island, Georgia, as has beenwidely reported [7]. These “contests” involve groveling politicians appearing at the beck and call of the rich and powerful, and so reflect our new 1% electoral system. (The main pro-Hillary super PAC, for instance, is aiming for a kitty of $500 million [8] heading into 2016, while the Koch brothers network has already promised to drop almost $1 billion [9] into the coming campaign season, doubling their efforts in the last presidential election year.)

Ever since the Supreme Court opened up the ultimate floodgates with its 2010 Citizens United [10] decision, each subsequent election has seen record-breaking amounts of money donated and spent. The 2012 presidential campaign was the first $2 billion election [11]; campaign 2016 is expected to hit [12]the $5 billion mark without breaking a sweat.  By comparison, according to Burton Abrams and Russell Settle in their study, “The Effect of Broadcasting on Political Campaign Spending,” Republicans and Democrats spent just under $13 million combined in 1956 when Eisenhower won his second term.

In the meantime, it’s still true that the 2016 primaries will involve actual voters, as will the election that follows. The previous election season, the midterms of 2014, cost almost $4 billion [13], a record despite the number of small donors continuing to drop [14]. It also represented the lowest midterm voter [15]turnout since World War II. (See: demobilization of the public, below -- and add in the demobilization of the Democrats as a real party, the breaking of organized labor, the fragmenting of the Republican Party, and the return of voter suppression laws [16] visibly meant to limit the franchise.) It hardly matters just what the flood of new money does in such elections, when you can feel the weight of inequality [17] bearing down on the whole process in a way that is pushing us somewhere new.

2. The Privatization of the State (or the U.S. as a Prospective Third-World Nation)

In the recent coverage of the Hillary Clinton email flap, you can find endless references to the Clintons of yore [18] in wink-wink, you-know-how-they-are-style reporting; and yes, she did delete a lot of emails; and yes, it’s an election year coming and, as everyone points out, the Republicans are going to do their best to keep the email issue alive until hell freezes over, etc., etc.  Again, the coverage, while eyeball gluing, is in a you’ve-seen-it-all-before, you’ll-see-it-all-again-mode.

However, you haven’t seen it all before. The most striking aspect of this little brouhaha lies in what’s most obvious but least highlighted.  An American secretary of state chose to set up her own private, safeguarded email system for doing government work; that is, she chose to privatize her communications.  If this were Cairo, it might not warrant a second thought.  But it didn’t happen in some third-world state.  It was the act of a key official of the planet’s reigning (or thrashing) superpower, which -- even if it wasn’t [19] the first time such a thing had ever occurred -- should be taken as a tiny symptom of something that couldn’t be larger or, in the long stretch of history, newer: the ongoing privatization of the American state, or at least the national security part of it.

Though the marriage of the state and the corporation has a pre-history, the full-scale arrival of the warrior corporation [20] only occurred after 9/11.  Someday, that will undoubtedly be seen as a seminal moment in the formation of whatever may be coming in this country.  Only 13 years later, there is no part of the war state that has not experienced major forms of privatization.  The U.S. military could no longer go to war without its crony corporations doing KP [21] and guard duty, delivering the mail, building the bases, and being involved in just about all of its activities, including training [22] the militaries of foreign allies and even fighting.  Such warrior corporations are now involved in every aspect of the national security state, including torture [23], drone strikes [24], and -- to the tune of hundreds of thousands [25] of contract employees like Edward Snowden -- intelligence gathering and spying.  You name it and, in these years, it’s been at least partly privatized.

All you have to do is read reporter James Risen’s recent book, Pay Any Price [26], on how the global war on terror was fought in Washington, and you know that privatization has brought something else with it: corruption, scams, and the gaming of the system for profits of a sort that might normally be associated with a typical third-world kleptocracy.  And all of this, a new world being born, was reflected in a tiny way in Hillary Clinton’s very personal decision about her emails.

3. The De-legitimization of Congress and the Presidency

On a third front, American “confidence” in the three classic check-and-balance branches of government, as measured by polling outfits, continues to fall.  In 2014, Americans expressing [27] a “great deal of confidence” in the Supreme Court hit a new low of 23%; in the presidency, it was 11%, and in Congress a bottom-scraping 5%.  (The military, on the other hand, registers at 50%.)  The figures for “hardly any confidence at all” are respectively 20%, 44%, and more than 50%.  All are in or near record-breaking territory for the last four decades.

It seems fair to say that in recent years Congress has been engaged in a process of delegitimizing itself.  Where that body once had the genuine power to declare war, for example, it is now “debating” in a desultory fashion [28] an “authorization” for a war against the Islamic State in Syria, Iraq, and possibly elsewhere that has already been underway for eight months and whose course, it seems, will be essentially unaltered, whether Congress authorizes it or not.

What would President Harry Truman, who once famously ran a presidential campaign against a “do-nothing [29]” Congress, have to say about a body that truly can do just about nothing?  Or rather, to give the Republican war hawks in that new Congress their due, not quite nothing.  They are proving capable of acting effectively to delegitimize the presidency as well.  House Majority Leader John Boehner’s invitation to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to undercut the president's Iranian nuclear negotiations and the letter [30] signed by 47 Republican senators and directed to the Iranian ayatollahs are striking examples of this.  They are visibly meant to tear down an “imperial presidency” that Republicans gloried in not so long ago.

The radical nature of that letter, not as an act of state but of its de-legitimization, was noted even in Iran, where fundamentalist Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei proclaimed [31] it “a sign of a decline in political ethics and the destruction of the American establishment from within.” Here, however, the letter is either being covered as a singularly extreme one-off act (“treason! [32]”) or, as Jon Stewart did [33] on “The Daily Show,” as part of a repetitive [34] tit-for-tat between Democrats and Republicans over who controls foreign policy.  It is, in fact, neither.  It represents part of a growing pattern in which Congress becomes an ever less effective body, except in its willingness to take on [35] and potentially take out the presidency.

In the twenty-first century, all that “small government” Republicans and “big government” Democrats can agree on is offering essentially unconditional support to the military and the national security state.  The Republican Party -- its various factions increasingly at each other’s throats almost as often as at those of the Democrats -- seems reasonably united solely on issues of war-making and security.  As for the Democrats, an unpopular administration, facing constant attack by those who loath President Obama, has kept its footing in part by allying with and fusing with the national security state.  A president who came into office rejecting torture and promoting sunshine and transparency [36] in government has, in the course of six-plus years, come to identify himself almost totally with the U.S. military, the CIA, the NSA, and the like.  While it has launched an unprecedented campaign [37] against whistleblowers and leakers (as well as sunshine and transparency), the Obama White House has proved a powerful enabler of, but also remarkably dependent upon, that state-within-a-state, a strange fate for “the imperial presidency.”

4. The Rise of the National Security State as the Fourth Branch of Government

One “branch” of government is, however, visibly on the rise and rapidly gaining independence from just about any kind of oversight.  Its ability to enact its wishes with almost no opposition in Washington is a striking feature of our moment.  But while the symptoms of this process are regularly reported, the overall phenomenon -- the creation of a de facto fourth branch of government -- gets remarkably little attention.  In the war on terror era, the national security state has come into its own.  Its growth [38] has been phenomenal.  Though it’s seldom pointed out, it should be considered remarkable that in this period we gained a second full-scale “defense department,” the Department of Homeland Security, and that it and the Pentagon have become even more entrenched, each surrounded by its own growing “complex” of private corporations, lobbyists, and allied politicians.  The militarization of the country has, in these years, proceeded apace.

Meanwhile, the duplication to be found in the U.S. Intelligence Community with its 17 major agencies [39] and outfits is staggering.  Its growing ability to surveil and spy on a global scale, including on its own citizens, puts the totalitarian states of the twentieth century to shame [40].  That the various parts of the national security state can act in just about any fashion without fear of accountability [41] in a court of law is by now too obvious to belabor.  As wealth has traveled upwards in American society in ways not seen since the first Gilded Age, so taxpayer dollars have migrated into the national security state in an almost plutocratic fashion.

New reports regularly surface about the further activities of parts of that state.  In recent weeks, for instance, we learned from Jeremy Scahill and Josh Begley of the Intercept that the CIA has spent years trying to break the encryption [42] on Apple iPhones and iPads; it has, that is, been aggressively seeking to attack an all-American corporation (even if significant parts of its production process are actually in China).  Meanwhile, Devlin Barrett of theWall Street Journal reported [43] that the CIA, an agency barred from domestic spying operations of any sort, has been helping the U.S. Marshals Service (part of the Justice Department) create an airborne digital dragnet on American cell phones.  Planes flying out of five U.S. cities carry a form of technology that "mimics a cellphone tower." This technology, developed and tested in distant American war zones and now brought to "the homeland," is just part of the ongoing militarization of the country from its borders [44] to its police forces [45].  And there’s hardly been a week since Edward Snowden first released crucial NSA documents in June 2013 [46] when such “advances” haven’t been in the news.

5. The Demobilization of the American People

In The Age of Acquiescence [53], a new book about America’s two Gilded Ages, Steve Fraser asks why it was that, in the nineteenth century, another period of plutocratic excesses, concentration of wealth and inequality, buying of politicians, and attempts to demobilize the public, Americans took to the streets with such determination and in remarkable numbers over long periods of time to protest their treatment, and stayed there even when the brute power of the state was called out against them.  In our own moment, Fraser wonders, why has the silence of the public in the face of similar developments been so striking?

After all, a grim new American system is arising before our eyes.  Everything we once learned in the civics textbooks of our childhoods about how our government works now seems askew, while the growth of poverty, the flatlining of wages, the rise of the .01%, the collapse of labor, and the militarization of society are all evident.

The process of demobilizing the public certainly began with the military.  It was initially a response to the disruptive and rebellious [54] draftees of the Vietnam-era.  In 1973, at the stroke of a presidential pen, the citizen’s army was declared no more, the raising of new recruits was turned over to advertising agencies (a preview of the privatization of the state to come), and the public was sent home, never again to meddle in military affairs.  Since 2001, that form of demobilization has been etched in stone and transformed [55] into a way of life in the name of the “safety” and “security” of the public.

Since then, “we the people” have made ourselves felt in only three disparate ways: from the left in the Occupy movement, which, with its slogans about the 1% and the 99%, put the issue of growing economic inequality on the map of American consciousness; from the right, in the Tea Party movement, a complex expression of discontent backed and at least partially funded [56] by right-wing operatives and billionaires, and aimed at the de-legitimization of the “nanny state”; and the recent round of post-Ferguson protests spurred at least in part by the militarization of the police in black and brown communities around the country.

The Birth of a New System

Otherwise, a moment of increasing extremity has also been a moment of -- to use Fraser’s word -- “acquiescence.”  Someday, we’ll assumedly understand far better how this all came to be.  In the meantime, let me be as clear as I can be about something that seems murky indeed: this period doesn’t represent a version, no matter how perverse or extreme, of politics as usual; nor is the 2016 campaign an election as usual; nor are we experiencing Washington as usual.  Put together our 1% elections, the privatization of our government, the de-legitimization of Congress and the presidency, as well as the empowerment of the national security state and the U.S. military, and add in the demobilization of the American public (in the name of protecting us from terrorism), and you have something like a new ballgame.

While significant planning has been involved in all of this, there may be no ruling pattern or design.  Much of it may be happening in a purely seat-of-the-pants fashion.  In response, there has been no urge to officially declare that something new is afoot, let alone convene a new constitutional convention.  Still, don’t for a second think that the American political system isn’t being rewritten on the run by interested parties in Congress, our present crop of billionaires, corporate interests, lobbyists, the Pentagon, and the officials of the national security state.

Out of the chaos of this prolonged moment and inside the shell of the old system, a new culture, a new kind of politics, a new kind of governance is being born right before our eyes. Call it what you want. But call it something. Stop pretending it’s not happening.

[Note: My special thanks go to my friend John Cobb, who talked me through this one.  Doing it would have been inconceivable without him.  Tom]

Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author of The American Way of War: How Bush’s Wars Became Obama’s [57] as well as The End of Victory Culture [58], runs the Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com [2]. He is the author of, most recently, Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World [59] (Haymarket Books, 2014).

5 Powerful Shifts Transforming the Future of American Society into Something Unrecognizable and Frightening

Have you ever undertaken some task you felt less than qualified for, but knew that someone needed to do? Consider this piece my version of that, and let me put what I do understand about it in a nutshell: based on developments in our post-9/11 world, we could be watching the birth of a new American political system and way of governing for which, as yet, we have no name.

1. 1% Elections

Take, for instance, “Why 2016 Is Likely to Become a Close Race,” a recent piece [5] Nate Cohn wrote for my hometown paper.  A noted election statistician, Cohn points out that, despite Hillary Clinton’s historically staggering lead in Democratic primary polls (and lack of serious challengers), she could lose the general election.  He bases this on what we know about her polling popularity from the Monica Lewinsky moment of the 1990s to the present.  Cohn assures readers that Hillary will not “be a Democratic Eisenhower, a popular, senior statesperson who cruises to an easy victory.”  It’s the sort of comparison that offers a certain implicit reassurance about the near future.  (No, Virginia, we haven’t left the world of politics in which former general and president Dwight D. Eisenhower can still be a touchstone.)

The early primaries, the ones that count, take place among a small group of millionaires and billionaires [6], a new caste flush with cash who will personally, or through complex networks of funders, pour multi-millions of dollars into the campaigns of candidates of their choice.  So the early primaries -- this year mainly a Republican affair -- are taking place in resort spots like Las Vegas, Rancho Mirage, California, and Sea Island, Georgia, as has beenwidely reported [7]. These “contests” involve groveling politicians appearing at the beck and call of the rich and powerful, and so reflect our new 1% electoral system. (The main pro-Hillary super PAC, for instance, is aiming for a kitty of $500 million [8] heading into 2016, while the Koch brothers network has already promised to drop almost $1 billion [9] into the coming campaign season, doubling their efforts in the last presidential election year.)

Ever since the Supreme Court opened up the ultimate floodgates with its 2010 Citizens United [10] decision, each subsequent election has seen record-breaking amounts of money donated and spent. The 2012 presidential campaign was the first $2 billion election [11]; campaign 2016 is expected to hit [12]the $5 billion mark without breaking a sweat.  By comparison, according to Burton Abrams and Russell Settle in their study, “The Effect of Broadcasting on Political Campaign Spending,” Republicans and Democrats spent just under $13 million combined in 1956 when Eisenhower won his second term.

In the meantime, it’s still true that the 2016 primaries will involve actual voters, as will the election that follows. The previous election season, the midterms of 2014, cost almost $4 billion [13], a record despite the number of small donors continuing to drop [14]. It also represented the lowest midterm voter [15]turnout since World War II. (See: demobilization of the public, below -- and add in the demobilization of the Democrats as a real party, the breaking of organized labor, the fragmenting of the Republican Party, and the return of voter suppression laws [16] visibly meant to limit the franchise.) It hardly matters just what the flood of new money does in such elections, when you can feel the weight of inequality [17] bearing down on the whole process in a way that is pushing us somewhere new.

2. The Privatization of the State (or the U.S. as a Prospective Third-World Nation)

In the recent coverage of the Hillary Clinton email flap, you can find endless references to the Clintons of yore [18] in wink-wink, you-know-how-they-are-style reporting; and yes, she did delete a lot of emails; and yes, it’s an election year coming and, as everyone points out, the Republicans are going to do their best to keep the email issue alive until hell freezes over, etc., etc.  Again, the coverage, while eyeball gluing, is in a you’ve-seen-it-all-before, you’ll-see-it-all-again-mode.

However, you haven’t seen it all before. The most striking aspect of this little brouhaha lies in what’s most obvious but least highlighted.  An American secretary of state chose to set up her own private, safeguarded email system for doing government work; that is, she chose to privatize her communications.  If this were Cairo, it might not warrant a second thought.  But it didn’t happen in some third-world state.  It was the act of a key official of the planet’s reigning (or thrashing) superpower, which -- even if it wasn’t [19] the first time such a thing had ever occurred -- should be taken as a tiny symptom of something that couldn’t be larger or, in the long stretch of history, newer: the ongoing privatization of the American state, or at least the national security part of it.

Though the marriage of the state and the corporation has a pre-history, the full-scale arrival of the warrior corporation [20] only occurred after 9/11.  Someday, that will undoubtedly be seen as a seminal moment in the formation of whatever may be coming in this country.  Only 13 years later, there is no part of the war state that has not experienced major forms of privatization.  The U.S. military could no longer go to war without its crony corporations doing KP [21] and guard duty, delivering the mail, building the bases, and being involved in just about all of its activities, including training [22] the militaries of foreign allies and even fighting.  Such warrior corporations are now involved in every aspect of the national security state, including torture [23], drone strikes [24], and -- to the tune of hundreds of thousands [25] of contract employees like Edward Snowden -- intelligence gathering and spying.  You name it and, in these years, it’s been at least partly privatized.

All you have to do is read reporter James Risen’s recent book, Pay Any Price [26], on how the global war on terror was fought in Washington, and you know that privatization has brought something else with it: corruption, scams, and the gaming of the system for profits of a sort that might normally be associated with a typical third-world kleptocracy.  And all of this, a new world being born, was reflected in a tiny way in Hillary Clinton’s very personal decision about her emails.

3. The De-legitimization of Congress and the Presidency

On a third front, American “confidence” in the three classic check-and-balance branches of government, as measured by polling outfits, continues to fall.  In 2014, Americans expressing [27] a “great deal of confidence” in the Supreme Court hit a new low of 23%; in the presidency, it was 11%, and in Congress a bottom-scraping 5%.  (The military, on the other hand, registers at 50%.)  The figures for “hardly any confidence at all” are respectively 20%, 44%, and more than 50%.  All are in or near record-breaking territory for the last four decades.

It seems fair to say that in recent years Congress has been engaged in a process of delegitimizing itself.  Where that body once had the genuine power to declare war, for example, it is now “debating” in a desultory fashion [28] an “authorization” for a war against the Islamic State in Syria, Iraq, and possibly elsewhere that has already been underway for eight months and whose course, it seems, will be essentially unaltered, whether Congress authorizes it or not.

What would President Harry Truman, who once famously ran a presidential campaign against a “do-nothing [29]” Congress, have to say about a body that truly can do just about nothing?  Or rather, to give the Republican war hawks in that new Congress their due, not quite nothing.  They are proving capable of acting effectively to delegitimize the presidency as well.  House Majority Leader John Boehner’s invitation to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to undercut the president's Iranian nuclear negotiations and the letter [30] signed by 47 Republican senators and directed to the Iranian ayatollahs are striking examples of this.  They are visibly meant to tear down an “imperial presidency” that Republicans gloried in not so long ago.

The radical nature of that letter, not as an act of state but of its de-legitimization, was noted even in Iran, where fundamentalist Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei proclaimed [31] it “a sign of a decline in political ethics and the destruction of the American establishment from within.” Here, however, the letter is either being covered as a singularly extreme one-off act (“treason! [32]”) or, as Jon Stewart did [33] on “The Daily Show,” as part of a repetitive [34] tit-for-tat between Democrats and Republicans over who controls foreign policy.  It is, in fact, neither.  It represents part of a growing pattern in which Congress becomes an ever less effective body, except in its willingness to take on [35] and potentially take out the presidency.

In the twenty-first century, all that “small government” Republicans and “big government” Democrats can agree on is offering essentially unconditional support to the military and the national security state.  The Republican Party -- its various factions increasingly at each other’s throats almost as often as at those of the Democrats -- seems reasonably united solely on issues of war-making and security.  As for the Democrats, an unpopular administration, facing constant attack by those who loath President Obama, has kept its footing in part by allying with and fusing with the national security state.  A president who came into office rejecting torture and promoting sunshine and transparency [36] in government has, in the course of six-plus years, come to identify himself almost totally with the U.S. military, the CIA, the NSA, and the like.  While it has launched an unprecedented campaign [37] against whistleblowers and leakers (as well as sunshine and transparency), the Obama White House has proved a powerful enabler of, but also remarkably dependent upon, that state-within-a-state, a strange fate for “the imperial presidency.”

4. The Rise of the National Security State as the Fourth Branch of Government

One “branch” of government is, however, visibly on the rise and rapidly gaining independence from just about any kind of oversight.  Its ability to enact its wishes with almost no opposition in Washington is a striking feature of our moment.  But while the symptoms of this process are regularly reported, the overall phenomenon -- the creation of a de facto fourth branch of government -- gets remarkably little attention.  In the war on terror era, the national security state has come into its own.  Its growth [38] has been phenomenal.  Though it’s seldom pointed out, it should be considered remarkable that in this period we gained a second full-scale “defense department,” the Department of Homeland Security, and that it and the Pentagon have become even more entrenched, each surrounded by its own growing “complex” of private corporations, lobbyists, and allied politicians.  The militarization of the country has, in these years, proceeded apace.

Meanwhile, the duplication to be found in the U.S. Intelligence Community with its 17 major agencies [39] and outfits is staggering.  Its growing ability to surveil and spy on a global scale, including on its own citizens, puts the totalitarian states of the twentieth century to shame [40].  That the various parts of the national security state can act in just about any fashion without fear of accountability [41] in a court of law is by now too obvious to belabor.  As wealth has traveled upwards in American society in ways not seen since the first Gilded Age, so taxpayer dollars have migrated into the national security state in an almost plutocratic fashion.

New reports regularly surface about the further activities of parts of that state.  In recent weeks, for instance, we learned from Jeremy Scahill and Josh Begley of the Intercept that the CIA has spent years trying to break the encryption [42] on Apple iPhones and iPads; it has, that is, been aggressively seeking to attack an all-American corporation (even if significant parts of its production process are actually in China).  Meanwhile, Devlin Barrett of theWall Street Journal reported [43] that the CIA, an agency barred from domestic spying operations of any sort, has been helping the U.S. Marshals Service (part of the Justice Department) create an airborne digital dragnet on American cell phones.  Planes flying out of five U.S. cities carry a form of technology that "mimics a cellphone tower." This technology, developed and tested in distant American war zones and now brought to "the homeland," is just part of the ongoing militarization of the country from its borders [44] to its police forces [45].  And there’s hardly been a week since Edward Snowden first released crucial NSA documents in June 2013 [46] when such “advances” haven’t been in the news.

5. The Demobilization of the American People

In The Age of Acquiescence [53], a new book about America’s two Gilded Ages, Steve Fraser asks why it was that, in the nineteenth century, another period of plutocratic excesses, concentration of wealth and inequality, buying of politicians, and attempts to demobilize the public, Americans took to the streets with such determination and in remarkable numbers over long periods of time to protest their treatment, and stayed there even when the brute power of the state was called out against them.  In our own moment, Fraser wonders, why has the silence of the public in the face of similar developments been so striking?

The process of demobilizing the public certainly began with the military.  It was initially a response to the disruptive and rebellious [54] draftees of the Vietnam-era.  In 1973, at the stroke of a presidential pen, the citizen’s army was declared no more, the raising of new recruits was turned over to advertising agencies (a preview of the privatization of the state to come), and the public was sent home, never again to meddle in military affairs.  Since 2001, that form of demobilization has been etched in stone and transformed [55] into a way of life in the name of the “safety” and “security” of the public.

Since then, “we the people” have made ourselves felt in only three disparate ways: from the left in the Occupy movement, which, with its slogans about the 1% and the 99%, put the issue of growing economic inequality on the map of American consciousness; from the right, in the Tea Party movement, a complex expression of discontent backed and at least partially funded [56] by right-wing operatives and billionaires, and aimed at the de-legitimization of the “nanny state”; and the recent round of post-Ferguson protests spurred at least in part by the militarization of the police in black and brown communities around the country.

The Birth of a New System

[Note: My special thanks go to my friend John Cobb, who talked me through this one.  Doing it would have been inconceivable without him.

Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author of The American Way of War: How Bush’s Wars Became Obama’s [57] as well as The End of Victory Culture [58], runs the Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com [2]. He is the author of, most recently, Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World [59] (Haymarket Books, 2014).

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