Big Picture analysis insight

7/18

see SYSTEM solutions REPAIR THE COMMONS

see wikdsmrt tag wicked smart

SEE SYMPTOM SYSTEM DEGRADATION

see long game on pol strategy

aha: 2 sep big pict analysis see gt recession as root; (also effect); inequality

see salon, wa mo connects dots

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A stark report from one of the main independent European think tanks says there is no going back to any sort of pre-MAGA America, and warns that even after the Trump years, unless drastic action is taken, the “core fascist” political beliefs of the MAGA movement won’t quickly disappear.

“By the 2030s, the vulgarity, corruption, buffoonery, cult-like loyalty to Donald Trump and gratuitous cruelty of this regime may fade into history,” writes Lincoln Mitchell for the Institute for International and Strategic Affairs (IRIS). “As these most visible aspects of MAGA disappear many will choose to believe that the country has been reunified, but the core fascist political beliefs of the MAGA movement are unlikely to fade away so quickly.”

“As the Trump regime continues to sink into fascism and corruption, it is increasingly evident that the US will be forever changed by this era,” he continues. “If the US emerges from the Trump years as a functioning and cohesive, just in the legal sense, country, something that cannot be easily assumed, it will look very different than it did before Trump announced his candidacy in June of 2015 and almost immediately became the dominant figure in American political life.”

Mitchell, a political analyst, essayist, and lecturer at Columbia University, points to other times of crisis in American history, such as the Civil War or the 1960s and 1970s, and warns against those who “say that if we survived that, we can survive this.”

“That view cannot be ignored, but if we take it seriously, we must push back on the idea that the US simply survived those crises,” he writes. “The social movements that led to greater racial equality and expansions of rights for women, people of color, LGBT people and others-and the backlashes to all those movements that soon followed-still drive much of our political life and political conflicts.”

He says that even if, post-Trump, “the MAGA fervor cools a little,” it will be possible for Americans to reform the political system just enough to say to themselves that the fascist MAGA threat has passed — but they may be fooling themselves. The issues that spawned the MAGA movement will still be “central to our political life.”

Mitchell says it “should be clear” to all that now, more than a decade after Trump launched the MAGA movement, “there is no going back.”

He suggests that the question Americans need to answer is whether they want to return to “ineffective center-left administrations” or “fascist or fascist adjacent ones.”

Mitchell warns that to defeat MAGA, a few Democratic Party wins at the ballot box will not suffice.

“It will require an earnest rethinking not just of what American democracy can be, but of what the US is. It means accepting that the Constitution is no longer the core document that governs the US, so our political imaginations must not be bound by it.”

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root cause CU an 1 26

All of the dysfunction in Congress is coming from decisions that the U.S. Supreme Court ushered in, and it is completely changing the face of American government, a legal scholar explained.

Writing for The Atlantic on Tuesday, Stanford Law School fellow Duncan Hosie said that there are two key rulings that have resulted in the downfall of Congress.

"These dynamics share a root cause: the partisan polarization that has reshaped American politics over the past four decades," wrote Hosie. "But the connection is deeper and more complex than that. Whereas polarization weakened Congress, it emboldened the Court to dismantle laws and, in the process, undermine Congress’s ability to make laws at all, reinforcing Congress’s sclerosis."

The first began during the "Newt Gingrich revolution," he argued, with "rising partisanship and institutional upheaval."

Sorting members into "distant ideological camps and normalizing scorched-earth tactics" led to absolutist politics and made bipartisan politics for the greater good rare. Instead, ideological battles were launched with Supreme Court nominees with a litmus tests for partisan purity over reasonable interpretations of the law. Even justices below the High Court have become partisan as "Republican appointees began consolidating its authority at Congress’s expense."

Under Chief Justice John Roberts, Hosie said, the Court has canceled "congressional constitutionalism." Laws passed such as the Voting Rights Act, the Affordable Care Act, the Family and Medical Leave Act and campaign finance regulations have all be undermined by the Roberts cCurt.

The latter took a hit with a collection of decisions, such as Citizens United (2010), that "dismantled Congress’s two most significant efforts to regulate private money in public elections, eroding the safeguards that protect elections as conduits of public opinion," Hosie wrote.

There's a chance one case this year could make such issues even worse. The Roberts Court "dismantling" key laws "has left Congress more detached from its electorate, diminishing its claim and role as a representative authority."

Deregulating campaign finance laws has turned politics into such a huge undertaking that lawmakers and candidate spend more time trying to raise money than they do making direct contact with voters, conducting legislative oversight or fostering bipartisanship, the legal scholar said.

"Empiricalstudies confirm that reliance on large donors depresses participation in time-intensive legislative activities — things such as bill sponsorship, floor debate and committee work," Hosie wrote. "It simultaneously redirects lawmakers’ attention toward courting high-net-worth donors and away from talking to people in their districts."

The second issue is gerrymandering. Partisan legislatures draw maps that make congressional districts more one-sided. It then ensures that members of Congress appeal to the most extreme factions of their electorate.

Hosie called the court's ruling in "Rucho v. Common Cause (2019) [the most] entrenched electoral distortion in American politics. The Court has since doubled down. Last month, Justice Samuel Alito defended Texas’s gerrymandered maps on the grounds that they reflected 'partisan advantage pure and simple' — an unabashed apologia for a practice destructive to democracy."

Drawing congressional maps to craft "safe seats" means the ideologues win. That can "marginalize moderate voices," he explained. It reduces any incentive for compromise and accountability.

These rulings have ultimately reduced the power of Congress and expanded that of the judiciary branch that was meant to be equal under the Constitution. "Substantively, it has redefined what the Constitution forbids, preemptively removing entire policy domains from democratic deliberation before voters and lawmakers can even weigh in," Hosie closed.

*Read more here.

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CONTEXT

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In Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right, political theorist Laura K. Field explains how "under [President Donald] Trump, post-liberal intellectuals have abandoned tradition for radicalism and scholarship for vulgarity," according to a review in The Atlantic.

"For the past decade or more, the intellectual energy in American politics has been on the right," writes George Packer.

"The MAGA ideologues who provide America’s new ruling elite with any claim to having a world view should be understood as offspring of a shared parentage, not unlike the Lovestoneites, Trotskyites, and Shachtmanites of 1930s and ’40s communism," he continues.

"More reactionary than conservative, their political ancestry is in the underground of the American right — Strom Thurmond, Joseph McCarthy, Patrick Buchanan — rather than the forward-looking Reaganite libertarians who dominated the Republican Party for four decades," he adds.

MAGA's modern hero, Packer says, aren't philosophers or even a Nazi theorist of authoritarianism.

"They share a revulsion toward liberalism and pluralism, which, they believe, have corroded the moral and spiritual fiber of America by accommodating false ideologies and harmful groups. Their modern hero is Viktor Orbán," he writes, of the authoritarian Hungarian president.

Field's book explains how this affects American democracy today.

"The American experiment in egalitarian, multiethnic democracy fills these intellectuals with anxiety, if not loathing," Packer writes.

"As Field notes, they often express undisguised hostility toward women, sexual minorities, the 'woke Marxists' of the left, and the cultural elites of the 'soulless managerial class,'" he explains.

The mood of MAGA intellectuals, Packer notes, is "overwhelmingly negative."

“The movement is, in many respects, untethered from the ordinary decency and common sense that characterize America at its idealistic best, and from the pluralistic reality of the country as it exists today," Fields says.

Packer says that Field's "background perfectly positions her to deliver this lively, devastating taxonomy and critique of MAGA’s ideologues."

"She was originally trained in Straussian scholarship — a reading of classical political thought that criticizes the modern turn away from the sources of moral authority toward liberalism and, in Strauss’s view, nihilism," he explains.

Packer notes that "anti-liberal intellectuals made a Faustian bet that this coarse real-estate developer and reality-TV star would be the vehicle for realizing the Good, the Beautiful, and the True."

"Trump was the strongman brought to bring liberalism to heel,” Field writes.

Packer says that "in attaching themselves to MAGA, they did less to influence the new regime than Trump did to corrupt them."

"The MAGA right has filled a vacuum created by popular disenchantment with globalization, neoliberal economics, mass immigration, political corruption, technological power and democracy itself," Packer adds.

There's one thing Field doesn't have the ability to explain in her book, Packer writes.

"A question that Field touches on but never analyzes in depth is why liberal minds haven’t produced an equally potent answer" to the MAGA right.

"Liberals are in the necessary but untenable position of having to defend democracy from right-wing assault in an age of broad discontent," Packer explains.

"They need their own theorists and influencers, their own institutes and manifestos, to undertake the historic task of not only reversing America’s self-destruction, but showing the next generation why liberal democracy offers the best chance for a good life," he concludes.

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More than 100 days into his return to the White House, the conclusion is stark: Donald Trump is no longer the same president he was during his first term. His familiar nationalist and populist rhetoric is now openly paired with an authoritarian turn – one without precedent in US history. He has adopted a neo-imperial view of the economy, treating the global order as a zero-sum contest of winners and losers. In this worldview, cooperation gives way to domination: what matters is power and the accumulation of wealth.

Having withstood two impeachment procedures, numerous lawsuits and at least one assassination attempt, Trump now governs with what can appear to be unchecked authority. To his followers, he has become a hero, a martyr – almost a messianic figure. He no longer sees democracy as a framework to be honoured, but as a tool to legitimize his hold on power. His decisive electoral victory now serves as a mandate to cast aside institutional limits.

Three key features define his style of governance: a radical centralization of executive power grounded in the theory of the “unitary executive”; the politicization of the Department of Justice, used as a weapon against rivals; and the manipulation of federal authority to target cultural, media and educational institutions. His playbook is chaos: unsettle opponents, dominate the media narrative and blur the boundaries of democratic norms. Impulsive and reactionary, Trump often governs in response to Fox News segments or trending posts on Truth Social. Instability has become a strategic tool.

But Trump is not a historical anomaly. While his 2016 victory may have seemed unlikely, his re-election reflects a deeper, long-term transformation rooted in the post-Cold War era.

From an external to an internal enemy

The collapse of the USSR – a structuring external enemy – redirected political confrontation toward the designation of an internal enemy. The culture war has become the dominant ideological battleground, driven by two closely linked forces. On one side, a religious radicalization led by nationalist Christian movements – such as the New Apostolic Reformation – seeks to roll back social progress and promote the vision of an outright theocracy. On the other, growing racial anxiety is fueled by fears of white demographic decline and resistance to civil rights gains.

The commentator Pat Buchanan saw it coming as early as the 1990s., he warned: “There is a cultural war going on for the soul of America… as critical as the Cold War itself.” Too radical for his time, Buchanan championed a white, Christian, conservative US hostile to cosmopolitan elites. Though marginalized then, his ideas laid the groundwork for what would become Trumpism.

Newt Gingrich, who served as Speaker of the House from 1995 to 1999, played a pivotal role in reshaping both the Republican party and US politics. A Republican group he chaired famously distributed a pamphlet to Republican candidates titled “Language: A Key Mechanism of Control”, advising them to use uplifting language to describe themselves, and inflammatory terms like “corrupt”, “immoral” and “traitor” to describe their opponents. This aggressive rhetoric redefined political rivals as enemies to be defeated – helping pave the way for a right-wing politics in which winning trumps democratic norms.

At the same time, the rise of a new conservative media ecosystem intensified polarization. The launch of Fox News in 1996, the growth of right-wing talk radio shows like Rush Limbaugh’s and the later explosion of social media gave the US right powerful tools to shape and radicalize public opinion. Today, algorithm-driven information bubbles trap citizens in alternate realities, where misinformation and outrage drown out reasoned debate. This has deepened polarization and fractured society as a whole.

Channeling anger

This ideological and media realignment has unfolded alongside a broader crisis: the unraveling of the post-Cold War neoliberal consensus. Promises of shared prosperity have been replaced by deindustrialization, deepening inequality and widespread resentment. Successive traumas – from 9/11 and the 2008 financial crash to the Covid-19 pandemic – and foreign wars without real victories have eroded public trust in the establishment.

Trump channels this anger. He offers a vision of a restored and idealized America, a rollback of recent social gains, and a reassertion of national identity grounded in religion and race. His populism is not a coherent ideology but an emotional response – born of perceived injustice, humiliation and loss.

Trump is more than a symptom of America’s democratic crisis: he is its most vivid manifestation. He embodies the legacy of the 1990s – a foundational decade of identity grievance, culture wars and media deregulation. Viewed as a political outsider, he has never been judged as a traditional politician, but rather embraced, by some, as the archetypal “self-made man” – a successful businessman and reality TV celebrity.

His rhetoric – transgressive, provocative and often cruel – gives voice to what had been repressed. The humiliation of opponents becomes part of the performance. For his supporters, it’s exhilarating. It breaks taboos, flouts political correctness and feeds the fantasy of reclaiming a lost America.

And he’s no longer alone. With the vocal support of economic and tech elites like Elon Musk – now a central figure in the radicalized right on X – Trumpism has entered a new phase. Together, they’ve outlined a new kind of authoritarian, cultural and digital power, where influence matters more than institutions.

The US re-elected not just a man, but a style, an era and a worldview built on dominance, disruption and disdain for rules. Still, history is unwritten: intoxicated by hubris and undermined by incompetence, Trumpism may yet crash into the wall of reality – with consequences far beyond America’s borders.

Jérôme Viala-Gaudefroy, Spécialiste de la politique américaine, Sciences Po

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Journalist/author Katherine Stewart is known for her in-depth reporting on the Religious Right, which she has been highly critical of over the years. The titles of her books — among them, "The Good News Club: The Christian Right's Stealth Assault on America's Children" and "The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism" — underscore her view that far-right white evangelicals and Christian nationalists pose a major threat to religious freedom in the United States.

In her book, "Money, Lies, and God: Inside the Movement to Destroy American Democracy" — which has a February 18 release date on Amazon — Stewart warns that an alliance between Christian nationalists and billionaire oligarchs is pushing "an end to pluralistic democracy."

The Guardian's Adam Gabbatt examines the book in an article published on January 19.

Stewart, according to Gabbatt, warns, "Money is a huge part of the story, meaning that huge concentrations of wealth have destabilized the political system. Second, lies, or conscious disinformation, is a huge feature of this movement. And third, God, because the most important ideological framework for the largest part of this movement is Christian nationalism."

Gabbatt notes that although "billionaire oligarchs" and Christian nationalists "may not seem to have much in common," the "aim" of their "unholy alliance" is "the same: bringing an end to democracy in the U.S. as we know it."

According to Stewart, "The best label I can find for the phenomenon — and I do not pretend it is a fully satisfactory label — is 'reactionary nihilism.' It is reactionary in the sense that it expresses itself as mortal opposition to a perceived catastrophic change in the political order; it is nihilistic because its deepest premise is that the actual world is devoid of value, impervious to reason, and governable only through brutal acts of will."

Stewart adds, "It stands for a kind of unraveling of the American political mind — a madness that now afflicts one side of nearly every political debate."

Gabbatt points out, however, that Stewart, in her book, "insists the situation is not hopeless."

Stewart argues, "There's no feature as of yet in the American political system that would ensure that the MAGA movement is going to rule indefinitely. And frankly, I take heart from the fact that those of us who believe in democracy and its core principles probably represent a majority and not a minority of the population. I continue to believe more Americans support a democratic political system over some sort of cronyistic, kleptocratic and theocratic system that has authoritarian features."

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SEE BADASS

SEE RESIST POST MORT 11 24

RO K AND

After the 2012 election, the Republican National Committee famously commission an internal “growth and opportunity” report to chart a path forward. But even then, the GOP found electoral success only after Trump ignored the report’s recommendations to strengthen the party’s infrastructure and adopt a more welcoming and inclusive message.

After the 2016 election, Democrats also made changes to their party infrastructure and fundraising after a period of introspection as well.

Democratic strategist Faiz Shakir, who led Sanders’ 2020 presidential campaign, is worried that Democrats won’t do the introspection necessary after this devastating loss.

“A healthy party is challenging itself to do that kind of an autopsy and hear what we did wrong,” he said. “I don’t even know that there is going to be that kind of a process.”

Sanders himself was more blunt in his statement.

“Will the big money interests and well-paid consultants who control the Democratic Party learn any real lessons from this disastrous campaign?” he said. “Will they understand the pain and political alienation that tens of millions of Americans are experiencing? Do they have any ideas as to how we can take on the increasingly powerful Oligarchy which has so much economic and political power? Probably not.”

Cappelletti reported from Detroit. Associated Press writers Dan Merica, Farnoush Amiri and Stephen Groves in Washington contributed.

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6:21

The Big Picture: How We Got Into This Mess, And How We Get Out of It | Robert Reich

88,156 views Jan 1, 2022

I’ve been in or around politics for over a half-century now. I’ve watched as corporations ransacked our system. In 1952, the corporate share of federal tax revenue was 32%. In 2020, it was down to 7%. Here’s how we break the corporate oligarchy and return power to the people. Watch More: What's the Real American Story? ►► • What's the Real American Story? | Rob...

6 min

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Today we don’t know if the United States government will shut down tomorrow because, first, Elon Musk followed by his co-president Donald Trump, persuaded House Republicans to vote against a compromise bill, and then, last night, Republicans couldn’t summon enough votes for a stripped-down continuing resolution because Trump insisted that it contain a measure lifting the debt ceiling.

This is not governing. Trump and the Republicans are not a governing party.

What’s the back story to all this? It’s the oligarchy that put Trump into the presidency.

A half-century ago, when America had a large and growing middle class, those on the “left” wanted stronger social safety nets and more public investment in schools, roads, and research. Those on the “right” sought greater reliance on the free market.

But as power and wealth have moved to the top, everyone else — whether on the old right or the old left — has become disempowered and less secure.

Today the great divide is not between left and right. It’s between democracy and oligarchy.

The word “oligarchy” comes from the Greek words meaning rule (arche) by the few (oligos). It refers to a government of and by a few exceedingly rich people or families who control the major institutions of society — and therefore have most power over other peoples’ lives.

So far, Trump has picked 13 billionaires for his administration. It’s the wealthiest in history, including the richest person in the world. They and Trump are part of the American oligarchy, even though Trump campaigned on being the “voice” of the working class.

America has experienced oligarchy twice before. Many of the men who founded America were slaveholding white oligarchs. At that time, the new nation did not have much of a middle class. Most white people were farmers, indentured servants, farm hands, traders, day laborers, and artisans. A fifth of the American population was Black, almost all of them enslaved.

A century later a new American oligarchy emerged comprised of men who amassed fortunes through their railroad, steel, oil, and financial empires — men such as J. Pierpont Morgan, John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, Cornelius Vanderbilt, and Andrew Mellon. It was called the Gilded Age.

They ushered the nation into an industrial revolution that vastly expanded economic output. But they also corrupted government, brutally suppressed wages, generated unprecedented levels of inequality and urban poverty, pillaged rivals, shut down competitors, and made out like bandits — which is why they earned the sobriquet “robber barons.”

World War I and the Great Depression of the 1930s eroded most of the robber barons’ wealth, and much of their power was eliminated with the elections of Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1932 and Democratic majorities in the House and Senate.

America demanded fundamental reforms — a progressive income tax, corporate taxes, estate taxes, limits on the political power of large corporations, antitrust laws, laws enabling workers to form unions and requiring that employers negotiate with them, Social Security, the forty-hour workweek, unemployment insurance, civil rights and voting rights, and Medicare.

For the next half-century, the gains from growth were more widely shared and democracy became more responsive to the needs and aspirations of average Americans. During these years America created the largest middle class the world had ever seen.

There was still much to do: wider economic opportunities for Black people, Latinos, and women, protection of the environment. Yet by almost every measure the nation was making progress.

Starting around 1980, a third American oligarchy emerged.

Since then, the median wage of the bottom 90 percent has stagnated. The share of the nation’s wealth owned by the richest 400 Americans has quadrupled (from less than 1 percent to 3.5 percent) while the share owned by the entire bottom half of America has dropped to 1.3 percent, according to an analysis by my Berkeley colleagues Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman.

The richest 1 percent of Americans now has more wealth than the bottom 90 percent combined.

The only other country with similarly high levels of wealth concentration is Russia, another oligarchy.

All this has been accompanied by a dramatic increase in the political power of the super-wealthy and an equally dramatic decline in the political influence of everyone else.

While the Biden administration sought to realign America with its ideals, it did not and could not accomplish nearly enough. Trump’s lies and demagoguery exploited the anger and frustration of much of America — creating the false impression he was a tribune of the working class and an anti-establishment hero — thereby allowing the oligarchy to triumph.

In 2022, Elon Musk spent $44 billion to buy Twitter and turn it into his own personal political megaphone. Then, in 2024, he spent $277 million to get Trump elected, also using Twitter (now X) to amplify pro-Trump, anti-Harris messages.

These were good investments for Musk. Since Election Day, Musk’s fortune has increased by $170 billion. That’s because investors in Tesla and SpaceX have pushed their value into the stratosphere.

Trump has put Musk (and another billionaire, Vivek Ramaswamy) in charge of gutting government services in the name of “efficiency.” Musk’s investors assume that Musk will eliminate the health, safety, labor, and environmental regulations that have limited the profits of Musk-owned corporations, and that Trump will put more government money into SpaceX and xAI (Musk’s artificial intelligence company).

Unlike income or wealth, power is a zero-sum game. The more of it at the top, the less of it anywhere else.

The power shift across America is related to a tsunami of big money into politics. Corporate lobbying has soared. The voices of average people have been drowned out.

The American oligarchy is back, with a vengeance.

Not all wealthy people are culpable, of course. The abuse is occurring at the nexus of wealth and power, where those with great wealth use it to gain power and then utilize that power to accumulate more wealth. Today’s robber barons include Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Peter Thiel, David Sacks, Charles Koch, Jeff Yass, Ken Griffin, and Rupert Murdoch.

This is how oligarchy destroys democracy. As oligarchs fill the coffers of political candidates and deploy platoons of lobbyists and public relations flaks, they buy off democracy. Oligarchs know that politicians won’t bite the hands that feed them.

As long as they control the purse strings, there will be no meaningful response to the failure of most people’s paychecks to rise, nor to climate change, nor racism, nor the soaring costs of health insurance, pharmaceuticals, college, and housing, because those are not the main concerns of the oligarchy.

The oligarchs want lower taxes, which is what Trump, Musk, and other oligarchs are planning — an extension of the 2017 Trump tax cut, with an estimated price tag of at least $5 trillion.

They want no antitrust enforcement to puncture the power of their giant corporations. Instead, their corporations will grow larger, able to charge consumers even more. Trump is replacing Lina Khan, the trustbusting chair of the Federal Trade Commission, with a Trump crony.

There will be no meaningful constraint on Wall Street’s dangerous gambling addiction. The gambling will only increase.

Wall Street is already celebrating Trump’s victory. The stock market has reached new heights. But the stock market is inconsequential for most people, because the richest 1 percent own over half of all shares of stock owned by Americans while the richest 10 percent own over 90 percent.

There will be no limits to CEO pay. Wall Street hedge fund and private equity managers will also rake in billions more. Government will dole out even more corporate subsidies, bailouts, and loan guarantees while eliminating protections for consumers, workers, and the environment.

It will become a government for, of, and by the oligarchy.

The biggest divide in America today is not between “right” and “left,” or between Republicans and Democrats. It’s between democracy and oligarchy. The old labels — “right” and “left” — prevent most people from noticing they’re being shafted.

The propagandists and demagogues who protect the oligarchy stoke racial and ethnic resentments — describing human beings as illegal aliens, fueling hatred of immigrants, and spreading fears of communists and socialists.

This strategy gives the oligarchy freer rein: It distracts Americans from how the oligarchy is looting the nation, buying off politicians, and silencing critics. It causes Americans to hate each other so we don’t look upward and see where the wealth and power have really gone.

The way to overcome oligarchy is for the rest of us to join together and win America back, as we did in response to the oligarchy that dominated America’s last Gilded Age.

This will require a multiracial, multiethnic coalition of working-class, poor, and middle-class Americans fightingfordemocracy and againstconcentrated power and privilege.

It will require that the Democratic Party, or a new third party, tell the truth to the American people: that the major reason most peoples’ wages have gone nowhere and their jobs are less secure, why most families have to live paycheck to paycheck, why CEO pay has soared to 300 times the pay of the typical worker, and why billionaires are about to run our government, is because the market has been rigged against average working people by the oligarchy.

The agenda ahead is simply stated but it will not be easy to implement: We must get big money out of our politics. End corporate welfare and crony capitalism. Bust up monopolies. Stop voter suppression.

We must strengthen labor unions, give workers a stronger voice in their workplaces, create more employee-owned corporations, encourage worker cooperatives, fund and grow more state and local public banks, and develop other institutions of economic democracy.

This agenda is neither “right” nor “left.” It is the bedrock for everything else America must do.

It may seem an odd time in our history to suggest such reforms, but this is the best time. Trump and his oligarchy will inevitably overreach. The lesson from the last Gilded Age is that when the corruption and ensuing hardship become so blatant that they offend the values of the majority of Americans, the majority will rise up and demand real, systemic change.

It’s only a matter of time. A government shutdown that hurts average people, engineered by the richest person in the world, might just hasten it.

NOW READ:**Elon Musk shows Mike Johnson who's boss**

'Quickly rot from within': Expert reveals 3 traits the US shares with declining empires

https://www.alternet.org/us-empire-decline/)

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The United States is currently displaying several characteristics that have historically been seen by empires in decline, according to one social scientist.

Peter Turchin is one of the pioneers of "cliodynamics," which is the field of study concerning statistical analysis of historical dynamics of societies around the world. In a recent essay for the Guardian, Turchin wrote that he and his fellow researchers have noticed the U.S. having three key traits in common with past global hegemons just before a period of decline. Those three factors are "popular immiseration, elite overproduction and state breakdown."

Turchin explained that "popular immiseration" describes a breakdown of the social contract between workers, the private sector and the public sector, which he said began after the Republican assault in the New Deal that happened around the time former President Ronald Reagan took power. He noted that as "the power of unions was undermined," taxes on the richest Americans were "cut back," which was followed by stagnating wages and a decline in life expectancy.

READ MORE:['Not good enough anymore': Union leader explains why Dems lost economic argument to Trump

"With the incomes of workers effectively stuck, the fruits of economic growth were reaped by the elites instead. A perverse 'wealth pump' came into being, siphoning money from the poor and channelling it to the rich," he wrote. "In many ways, the last four decades call to mind what happened in the United States between 1870 and 1900 – the time of railroad fortunes and robber barons. If the postwar period was a golden age of broad-based prosperity, after 1980 we could be said to have entered a Second Gilded Age."

The second trait, which Turchin called "elite overproduction," involves a growing population of the "uber-rich," (which he defined as "those with fortunes greater than $10 million") and their influence in the public sphere. He noted that when adjusting for inflation, this population grew by tenfold over the last four decades. This has led to rich elites either running for office, like President-elect Donald Trump, or funding candidates for office, like many billionaires have done in recent cycles. He also pointed out that "counter-elites" will emerge who oppose the existing political establishment.

"The more members of this elite class there are, the more aspirants for political power a society contains," he wrote. "By the 2010s the social pyramid in the US had grown exceptionally top-heavy: there were too many wannabe leaders and moguls competing for a fixed number of positions in the upper echelons of politics and business."

"As battles between the ruling elites and counter-elites heat up, the norms governing public discourse unravel and trust in institutions declines," he continued. "The result is a loss of civic cohesiveness and sense of national cooperation – without which states quickly rot from within."

READ MORE:[Watch: JD Vance booed by room full of firefighters as he calls himself 'pro-worker'

Finally, Turchin opined that "state breakdown" will inevitably follow popular immiseration and elite overproduction. He argued that Democrats' loss in the November election "represents one battle in an ongoing revolutionary war," but that the goal of the new order is "far from assured" given that "opponents are pretty well entrenched in the bureaucracy and can effectively resist change."

"Popular discontent in the US has been building up for more than four decades. Many years of real prosperity would be needed to persuade the public that the country is back on the right track," he wrote. "So, for now, we can expect a lasting age of discord. Let’s hope that it won’t spill over into a hot civil war."

Click here to read Turchin's full essay in the Guardian.

READ MORE:['A corporate CEO's dream': Labor unions blast Trump-Vance ticket

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SEE MUSK 6 FOR ANNO

GUK 12 24

In the days since the sweeping Republican victory in the US election, which gave the party control of the presidency, the Senate and the House, commentators have analysed and dissected the relative merits of the main protagonists – Kamala Harris and Donald Trump – in minute detail. Much has been said about their personalities and the words they have spoken; little about the impersonal social forces that push complex human societies to the brink of collapse – and sometimes beyond. That’s a mistake: in order to understand the roots of our current crisis, and possible ways out of it, it’s precisely these tectonic forces we need to focus on.

The research team I lead studies cycles of political integration and disintegration over the past 5,000 years. We have found that societies, organised as states, can experience significant periods of peace and stability lasting, roughly, a century or so. Inevitably, though, they then enter periods of social unrest and political breakdown. Think of the end of the Roman empire, the English civil war or the Russian Revolution. To date, we have amassed data on hundreds of historical states as they slid into crisis, and then emerged from it.

So we’re in a good position to identify just those impersonal social forces that foment unrest and fragmentation, and we’ve found three common factors: popular immiseration, elite overproduction and state breakdown.

To get a better understanding of these concepts and how they are influencing American politics in 2024, we need to travel back in time to the 1930s, when an unwritten social contract came into being in the form of Franklin D Roosevelt’s New Deal. This contract balanced the interests of workers, businesses and the state in a way similar to the more formal agreements we see in Nordic countries. For two generations, this implicit pact delivered an unprecedented growth in wellbeing across a broad swath of the country. At the same time, a “Great Compression” of incomes and wealth dramatically reduced economic inequality. For roughly 50 years the interests of workers and the interests of owners were kept in balance, and overall income inequality remained remarkably low.

That social contract began to break down in the late 1970s. The power of unions was undermined, and taxes on the wealthy cut back. Typical workers’ wages, which had previously increased in tandem with overall economic growth, started to lag behind. Inflation-adjusted wages stagnated and at times decreased. The result was a decline in many aspects of quality of life for the majority of Americans. One shocking way this became evident was in changes to the average life expectancy, which stalled and even went into reverse (and this started well before the Covid pandemic). That’s what we term “popular immiseration”.

With the incomes of workers effectively stuck, the fruits of economic growth were reaped by the elites instead. A perverse “wealth pump” came into being, siphoning money from the poor and channelling it to the rich. The Great Compression reversed itself. In many ways, the last four decades call to mind what happened in the United States between 1870 and 1900 – the time of railroad fortunes and robber barons. If the postwar period was a golden age of broad-based prosperity, after 1980 we could be said to have entered a Second Gilded Age.

The uber-wealthy increased tenfold between 1980 and 2020

Welcome as the extra wealth might seem for its recipients, it ends up causing problems for them as a class. The uber-wealthy (those with fortunes greater than $10m) increased tenfold between 1980 and 2020, adjusted for inflation. A certain proportion of these people have political ambitions: some run for political office themselves (like Trump), others fund political candidates (like Peter Thiel). The more members of this elite class there are, the more aspirants for political power a society contains.

By the 2010s the social pyramid in the US had grown exceptionally top-heavy: there were too many wannabe leaders and moguls competing for a fixed number of positions in the upper echelons of politics and business. In our model, this state of affairs has a name: elite overproduction.

Elite overproduction can be likened to a game of musical chairs – except the number of chairs stays constant, while the number of players is allowed to increase. As the game progresses, it creates more and more angry losers. Some of those turn into “counter-elites”: those willing to challenge the established order; rebels and revolutionaries such as Oliver Cromwell and his Roundheads in the English civil war, or Vladimir Lenin and the Bolsheviks in Russia. In the contemporary US we might think of media disruptors such as Tucker Carlson, or maverick entrepreneurs seeking political influence such as Elon Musk alongside countless less-prominent examples at lower levels in the system. As battles between the ruling elites and counter-elites heat up, the norms governing public discourse unravel and trust in institutions declines. The result is a loss of civic cohesiveness and sense of national cooperation – without which states quickly rot from within.

One result of all this political dysfunction is an inability to agree on how the federal budget should be balanced. Together with the loss of trust and legitimacy, that accelerates the breakdown of state capacity. It’s notable that a collapse in state finances is often the triggering event for a revolution: this is what happened in France before 1789 and in the runup to the English civil war.

How does this landscape translate to party politics? The American ruling class, as it has evolved since the end of the civil war in 1865, is basically a coalition of the top wealth holders (the proverbial 1%) and a highly educated or “credentialed” class of professionals and graduates (whom we might call the 10%). A decade ago, the Republicans were the party of the 1%, while the Democrats were the party of the 10%. Since then, they have both changed out of all recognition.

The recasting of the Republican party began with the unexpected victory of Donald Trump in 2016. He was typical of political entrepreneurs in history who have channelled popular discontent to propel themselves to power (one example is Tiberius Gracchus, who founded the populist party in late Republican Rome). Not all of his initiatives went against the interests of the ruling class – for example, he succeeded in making the tax code more regressive. But many did, including his policies on immigration (economic elites tend to favour open immigration as it suppresses wages); a rejection of traditional Republican free-market orthodoxy in favour of industrial policy; a scepticism of Nato and a professed unwillingness to start new conflicts abroad.

It seemed to some as though the revolution had been squashed when a quintessentially establishment figure, Joe Biden, defeated Trump in 2020. By 2024 the Democrats had essentially become the party of the ruling class – of the 10% and of the 1%, having tamed its own populist wing (led by the Vermont senator Bernie Sanders). This realignment was signalled by Kamala Harris massively outspending Trump this election cycle, as well as mainstream Republicans, such as Liz and Dick Cheney, or neocons such as Bill Kristol, supporting the Harris ticket.

The GOP, in the meantime, has transformed itself into a truly revolutionary party: one that represents working people (according to its leaders) or a radical rightwing agenda (according to its detractors). In the process, it has largely purged itself of traditional Republicans.

The defeat on 5 November represents one battle in an ongoing revolutionary war

Trump was clearly the chief agent of this change. But while the mainstream media and politicians obsess over him, it is important to recognise that he is now merely the tip of the iceberg: a diverse group of counter-elites has coalesced around the Trump ticket. Some of them, such as JD Vance, had meteoric rises through the Republican ranks. Some, such as Robert F Kennedy Jr and Tulsi Gabbard, defected from the Democrats. Others include tycoons such as Musk, or media figures, such as Joe Rogan, perhaps the most influential American podcaster. The latter was once a supporter of the populist wing of the Democratic party (and Bernie Sanders in particular).

The main point here is that in 2024, the Democrats, having morphed into the party of the ruling class, had to contend not only with the tide of popular discontent but also a revolt of the counter-elites. As such, it finds itself in a predicament that has recurred thousands of times in human history, and there are two ways things play out from here.

One is with the overthrow of established elites, as happened in the French and Russian Revolutions. The other is with the ruling elites backing a rebalancing of the social system – most importantly, shutting down the wealth pump and reversing popular immiseration and elite overproduction. It happened about a century ago with the New Deal. There’s also a parallel in the Chartist period (1838–1857), when Great Britain was the only European great power to avoid the wave of revolutions that swept Europe in 1848, via major reform. But the US has so far failed to learn the historical lessons.

Trump victory not a mandate for radical change, top election forecaster says

Read more](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/nov/28/trump-victory-election-forecast)

What comes next? The electoral defeat on 5 November represents one battle in an ongoing revolutionary war. The triumphant counter-elites want to replace their counterparts – what they sometimes call the “deep state” – entirely. But history shows that success in achieving such goals is far from assured. Their opponents are pretty well entrenched in the bureaucracy and can effectively resist change. Ideological and personal tensions in the winning coalition may result in it breaking apart (as they say, revolutions devour their children). Most importantly, the challenges facing the new Trump administration are of the particularly intractable kind. What is their plan for tackling the exploding federal budget deficit? How are they going to shut down the wealth pump? And what will the Democrats’ response be? Will their platform for 2028 include a new New Deal, a commitment to major social reform?

One thing is clear: whatever the choices and actions of the contending parties, they will not lead to an immediate resolution. Popular discontent in the US has been building up for more than four decades. Many years of real prosperity would be needed to persuade the public that the country is back on the right track. So, for now, we can expect a lasting age of discord. Let’s hope that it won’t spill over into a hot civil war.

Peter Turchin is project leader at the Complexity Science Hub, Vienna, and the author of End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites and the Path of Political Disintegration (Allen Lane).

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Gore book

The Future: Six Drivers of Global Change — Al Gore

eow

forecast in the visionary tradition of Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock and John Naisbitt’s Megatrends. In The Future, Gore identifies the emerging forces that are reshaping our world: Ever-increasing economic globalization, Worldwide digital communications, The balance of global political, economic, and military power is shifting, A deeply flawed economic compass, genomic, biotechnology, neuroscience, and life sciences revolutions, and the radical disruption of the relationship between human beings and the earth’s ecosystems

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1 24 an robt reich bit of systemic

when I was a boy, my father sold dresses and blouses to the wives of factory workers. As the wages of those workers rose through the 1950s, my father earned enough to expand his business to a second shop in another factory town not far away. We were by no means rich, but he earned enough to put us in the middle class.

For three decades after World War II, the average hourly compensation of American workers rose in lockstep with the nation’s productivity gains. In other words, as workers produced more value, they got more pay.

It was a virtuous cycle, from which our family and tens of millions of others benefited: The economy grew, and the middle class expanded. Its purchasing power rose, causing the economy to grow faster. This fueled new investments and innovations that further enriched and enlarged the middle class.

But then, beginning in the late 1970s, the virtuous cycle came to a halt.

While productivity gains continued much as before and the economy continued to grow, wages began to flatten. Starting in the early 1980s, the median household’s income stopped growing altogether, when adjusted for inflation.

Today, the median household is earning just a bit more than it did in 1979, 45 years ago (adjusted for inflation).

If you’re a non-supervisory worker who relies on an hourly wage — still the vast majority of workers — you’re earning no more than you earned in 1969. Job security also declined.

So, despite an economy that’s far larger and more productive than it was 40 or 50 years ago, the typical American worker has gone nowhere.

The standard explanation attributes this to neutral “market forces,” especially globalization and technological innovations that have made many working Americans less competitive.

While surely important, the standard explanation can’t account for much of what’s happened. It doesn’t explain why the transformation occurred so suddenly, over a relatively small number of years. Nor why other advanced economies facing similar forces didn’t succumb to them. Nor why so much of the nation’s income and wealth have gone to the top.

America’s middle class has shrunk because of its declining bargaining power — orchestrated and directed by America’s oligarchy. The economic gains that would otherwise have gone to the middle class went instead to the moneyed interests at the top. Let me explain.

1. The financialization of the economy

Before the 1980s (as I noted in our discussion about the decline of the common good), large corporations were in effect owned by all their stakeholders, who were assumed to have legitimate claims on them.

As early as 1914, the popular columnist and public philosopher Walter Lippmann called on America’s corporate executives to be stewards of America. “The men connected with [the large corporation] cannot escape the fact that they are expected to act increasingly like public officials …. Big businessmen who are at all intelligent recognize this. They are talking more and more about their ‘responsibilities,’ and their ‘stewardship.’”

This vision of corporate governance came to be widely accepted by the end of World War II. Frank Abrams, chairman of Standard Oil of New Jersey, declared in a 1951 address that typified what other chief executives were saying at the time:

*“The job of management is to maintain an equitable and working balance among the claims of the various directly affected interest groups … stockholders, employees, customers, and the public at large. Business managers are gaining professional status partly because they see in their work the basic responsibilities [to the public] that other professional men have long recognized as theirs.”

Pulp and paper executive J.D. Zellerbach told Timemagazine that “[t]he majority of Americans support private enterprise, not as a God-given right but as the best practical means of conducting business in a free society … . They regard business management as a stewardship, and they expect it to operate the economy as a public trust for the benefit of all the people.”

But a radically different vision of corporate ownership emerged in the late 1970s and early 1980s. It came from corporate “raiders” who mounted hostile takeovers with high-yield junk bonds.

The raiders used leveraged buyouts and undertook proxy fights against the “industrial statesmen” who, in their view, were depriving shareholders of the wealth that properly belonged to them.

The raiders assumed shareholders were the only legitimate owners of the corporation and that the only valid purpose of the corporation was to maximize shareholder returns.

This transformation did not happen by accident. It was a product of changes in laws governing corporations and of financial markets — changes that were promoted by the monied interests, America’s oligarchs.

In 1974, at the urging of pension funds, insurance companies, and Wall Street, Congress enacted the Employee Retirement Income Security Act. Before then, the giant portfolios of pension funds and insurance companies could be invested in only high-grade corporate and government bonds. Legally, it was their fiduciary obligation.

The 1974 Act changed that, allowing pension funds and insurance companies to invest in the stock market — thereby making a huge pool of capital available to Wall Street.

In 1982, another large pool of capital became available when Congress allowed savings and loan banks — the bedrocks of local home mortgage markets — to invest their deposits in a wide range of financial products, including junk bonds and other risky ventures promising high returns.

The convenient fact that the government insured savings and loan deposits against losses made these investments all the more tempting (and ultimately cost taxpayers some $124 billion when many of the banks went bust).

Meanwhile, the Reagan administration loosened other banking and financial regulations and simultaneously cut the enforcement staff at the Securities and Exchange Commission.

All this made it possible for corporate raiders to get the capital and the regulatory approvals they needed to mount unfriendly takeovers.

During the whole of the 1970s, there had been only 13 hostile takeovers LBO of companies valued at $1 billion or more. During the 1980s, there were 150.

Even where raids did not occur, CEOs felt pressured to maximize shareholder returns for fear their firms might otherwise be targeted. Hence, they began to see their primary role as driving up share prices.

The easiest and most direct way for CEOs to accomplish this feat was to cut costs — especially payrolls, which constitute most firms’ largest single expense.

Accordingly, the corporate statesmen of the 1950s and 1960s were replaced by the corporate butchers of the 1980s and 1990s, whose nearly exclusive focus was to “cut out the fat” and “cut to the bone.”

When Jack Welch took the helm of GE in 1981, the company was valued by the stock market at less than $14 billion. When he retired in 2001, it was worth about $400 billion. Welch accomplished this largely by cutting payrolls.

Before his tenure, most GE employees had spent their entire careers with the company. But between 1981 and 1985, a quarter of them — 100,000 in all — lost their jobs, earning Welsh the moniker “neutron Jack.” Even when times were good, Welch encouraged his senior managers to replace 10 percent of their subordinates every year in order to keep GE competitive.

Other CEOs tried to outdo even Welch. As CEO of Scott Paper, “Chainsaw” Al Dunlap laid off 11,000 workers, including 71 percent of headquarters staff. Wall Street was impressed, and the company’s stock soared.

When Dunlap moved to Sunbeam in 1997, he promptly laid off half of Sunbeam’s 12,000 employees. (Unfortunately for Chainsaw Al, he was caught cooking Sunbeam’s books; the SEC sued him for fraud, and he settled for $500,000, agreeing never again to serve as an officer or director of any publicly held company.)

In consequence of this change in the purpose of the American corporation, share prices soared, as did the compensation packages of CEOs. The results have been touted as “efficient” because resources theoretically have been shifted to “higher and better uses.”

But the human costs of this transformation have been huge. Millions of workers have lost jobs and wages. Many communities have been abandoned.

Nor have the efficiency benefits been widely shared.

As corporations have steadily weakened their workers’ bargaining power, the link between productivity and workers’ income has been severed.

Almost all the gains from growth have gone to the top. As noted, the average worker today is no better off than his or her equivalent 40 years ago, adjusted for inflation. Most are less economically secure.

Not incidentally, few own any shares of stock.

The richest 1 percent of Americans now own 52 percent of all the shares of stock owned by Americans. The richest 10 percent, 93 percent. The nation’s economic gains, once distributed broadly to the working and middle class — have been siphoned to the top.

2. Globaloney

Wages have also been suppressed because workers who are worried about keeping their jobs have accepted lower pay, relative to the economy’s productivity gains, than they did 40 years ago.

Here again, political decisions steered by the nation’s oligarchy have played a significant role. Some of the prevailing job insecurity is the result of trade agreements that invited American companies to outsource jobs abroad.

The conventional view equating “free trade” with the “free market” — in contrast to government “protectionism” — is wrong.

Just as all nations’ markets reflect political decisions about how they should be organized, so-called “free trade” agreements entail complex negotiations about how different market systems are integrated.

Within these negotiations, the interests of large corporations and Wall Street, to fully protect the value of their intellectual property and financial assets, have repeatedly trumped the interests of average working Americans to protect the value of their labor.

3. The Fed and inflation

When the Federal Reserve raises interest rates and Congress opts for austerity to reduce federal budget deficits — two policies favored by the oligarchy — the resulting unemployment also undermines the bargaining power of average workers.

Higher unemployment keeps wages low. This means higher corporate profits, leading to higher returns for shareholders.

The high inflation after the pandemic was driven in part by supply shortages and a major government stimulus. But it was also driven by monopolistic corporations using the excuse of inflation to raise their prices.

The Fed, however, believed that a root cause of inflation was wage growth, and it set out to slow the economy and loosen the labor market by raising interest rates. Here, too, the strategy was consistent with the views of the moneyed interests and was pushed by them.

4. The risk-shift to workers

Public policies that emerged during the New Deal and World War II placed most of the risks of economic change on large corporations rather than workers — through Social Security, worker’s compensation, 40-hour workweeks with time-and-a-half for overtime, and employer-provided health benefits (wartime price controls encouraged such tax-free benefits as substitutes for wage increases).

By the 1950s and 1960s, a majority of the employees of large companies remained with the companies for life. Their paychecks rose steadily with seniority, productivity, the cost of living, and corporate profits. When they retired, they received generous corporate pensions.

But after the junk-bond and takeover mania of the 1980s, that relationship broke down.

Even full-time workers who have put in decades with a company can now find themselves without a job overnight — with no severance pay, no help finding another job, no health insurance, and little or no pension.

Nearly one out of every five working Americans is now in a part-time job. Many are temporary workers, freelancers, independent contractors, or consultants, whose incomes and work schedules vary from week to week or even day to day. Two-thirds of American workers are living paycheck to paycheck.

The risk of getting old without a pension is rising.

In 1980, more than 80 percent of large and medium-sized firms gave their workers “defined-benefit” pensions that guaranteed them a fixed amount of money every month after they retired.

Now, fewer than 10 percent of companies provide their workers defined-benefit pensions. Instead, they offer “defined contribution” plans whose risks have been shifted to the workers. When the stock market tanks, as it did in 2008 and then again in 2020, their 401(k) plans tank along with it.

A quarter of all workers with so-called “matching” defined-benefit plans get no match because they don’t earn enough to contribute to them.

Meanwhile, the risk of a sudden loss of income continues to rise. Even before the crash of 2008, the Panel Study of Income Dynamics at the University of Michigan found that over any given two-yearstretch, about halfof all families experienced some decline in income.

Those downturns have become progressively larger. In the 1970s, the typical drop was about 25 percent. By late 1990s, it was 40 percent. By the mid-2000s, family incomes rose and fell twice as much as they did in the mid-1970s, on average.

Workers who are economically insecure are not in a position to demand higher wages. They are driven more by fear than by opportunity.

This is another central reality of American capitalism as organized by those with the political power to make it so.

5. The demise of labor unions

Fifty years ago, when General Motors was the largest employer in America, the typical GM worker earned $35 an hour in today’s dollars.

Today, America’s largest employer is Walmart, and the typical entry-level Walmart worker earns about $11 an hour.

This doesn’t mean the typical GM employee a half-century ago was “worth” four times what the typical Walmart employee today is worth. The GM worker was not better educated or motivated than today’s Walmart worker.

The real difference is that GM workers a half-century ago had a strong union behind them that summoned the collective bargaining power of all autoworkers to get a substantial share of company revenues for its members.

Because more than a third of workers across America then belonged to a labor union, the bargains those unions struck with employers raised the wages and benefits of non-unionized workers as well. Non-union firms knew they would be unionized if they did not come close to matching the union contracts.

Today’s Walmart workers do not have a union to negotiate a better deal. They are on their own. Because only 6 percent of today’s private-sector workers are unionized, most employers across America have no incentive to match union contracts. This puts unionizedfirms at a competitive disadvantage.

The result has been a race to the bottom.

Some argue that the decline of American unions is simply the result of “market forces.” But other nations have been subject to many of the same “market forces” and continue to have strong unions. In Sweden, 90 percent of workers in the private sector are unionized. These unions continue to provide their middle classes sufficient bargaining power to command a significant share of economic growth — a much larger share than that received by the middle class in the United States.

Why the difference? Look to politics and the allocation of power.

***

The National Labor Relations Act of 1935 guaranteed American workers the right to organize into unions and imposed on employers the legal responsibility to bargain with them.

As unions gained economic power in the late 1930s and 1940s, they gained greater. political power and wielded it to further enlarge the bargaining clout of American workers. After the legendary Treaty of Detroit in 1950, when Big Business and Big Labor agreed to share productivity gains in exchange for labor peace, the rate of unionization increased dramatically, as did wages and benefits.

Which is why, by the mid-1950s, almost a third of all American employees in the private sector of the economy belonged to a union, and why the median wage increased in tandem with productivity growth.

But starting in the late 1970s, the process went into reverse. Union membership began to decline, as did the economic and political power of unions, along with the bargaining clout of most workers.

The reasons for the decline involved the changes I’ve already noted — globalization, labor-replacing technologies, and a shift in the purpose of the corporation to maximizing shareholder returns.

But the decline of labor unions was also the consequence of political and legal decisions demanded by the monied interests.

When the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947 allowed states to enact “right-to-work” laws, workers who did not pay dues got a free ride off of those who did, thereby undermining the incentive for anyone to join a union in the first place.

Until the 1980s, such laws had minimal effect because they were enacted in southern and western states. Most industries remained in the north.

But as corporations came under increasing pressure to show high returns and cut labor costs, many CEOs found “right-to-work” states more alluring. Even the old heartland industrial states of Indiana and Michigan have enacted “right-to-work” laws.

CEOs whose corporations had high percentages of unionized workers moved, or threatened to move, to “right-to-work” states.

Additionally, Reagan’s notorious firing of the nation’s air traffic controllers for going on strike (which he had a right to do because they had no right to strike) signaled to the nation’s large employers that America had embarked on a different era of labor relations.

Workers who inhabited the local service economy — retail, restaurants, custodial, hotels, elder and child care, hospitals, transportation — faced a different challenge. Their jobs were in less danger of disappearing, because they couldn’t be outsourced abroad and most would not be automated. In fact, the number of local service jobs in America has continued to grow.

But because so many workers expelled from the older industrialized economy had no choice but to seek local service jobs, service-sector employers easily found people willing to work for low wages, few benefits, and little chance of advancement.

Walmart and major fast-food chains, such as Starbucks, have been aggressively anti-union. They’ve blocked union votes, fired workers who tried to organize, refused to enter into contract negotiations, and intimidated others into rejecting the union — all in violation of the National Labor Relations Act.

A succession of Democratic presidents have promised legislation streamlining the process for forming unions and increasing penalties on employers who violate the law, but nothing has come of these promises. (President Biden has been the first to strengthen the National Labor Relations Board and encourage it to enforce the law.)

The result of all this has been a steady decline in the percentage of private-sector workers who are unionized. Despite the jolt of labor activism in 2023, that percentage continues to drop.

The decline parallels the declining share of total income going to the middle class.

Take a look:

6. Summary

The underlying problem is that average working Americans have steadily lost the bargaining power to receive as large a portion of the economy’s gains as they received in the first three decades after World War II. As a result, instead of the middle class growing, it has shrunk.

To attribute this to the impersonal workings of the “free market” is to ignore how the market has been reorganized since the 1980s. America’s oligarchs — the moneyed interests — have spearheaded this reorganization in order to receive a steadily larger share of the nation’s economic gains. As those gains have risen, so has the oligarchy’s power to accumulate even more.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. Next week we’ll look at whether — and how — countervailingpower can be restored so that more of America’s poor and working class can ascend into the middle class once again.

*Robert Reich is a professor at Berkeley and was secretary of labor under Bill Clinton. You can find his writing at https://robertreich.substack.com/.*

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an 1 23

https://www.alternet.org/american-politicians/

Our political class does not govern. It entertains. It plays its assigned role in our fictitious democracy, howling with outrage to constituents and selling them out. The Squad and the Progressive Caucus have no more intention of fighting for universal health care, workers’ rights or defying the war machine than the Freedom Caucus fights for freedom. These political hacks are modern versions of Sinclair Lewis’s slick con artist Elmer Gantry, cynically betraying a gullible public to amass personal power and wealth. This moral vacuity provides the spectacle, as H.G. Wells wrote, of “a great material civilization, halted, paralyzed.” It happened in Ancient Rome. It happened in Weimar Germany. It is happening here.

Governance exists. But it is not seen. It is certainly not democratic. It is done by the armies of lobbyists and corporate executives, from the fossil fuel industry, the arms industry, the pharmaceutical industry and Wall Street. Governance happens in secret. Corporations have seized the levers of power, including the media. Growing obscenely rich, the ruling oligarchs have deformed national institutions, including state and federal legislatures and the courts, to serve their insatiable greed. They know what they are doing. They understand the depths of their own corruption. They know they are hated. They are prepared for that too. They have militarized police forces and have built a vast archipelago of prisons to keep the unemployed and underemployed in bondage. All the while, they pay little to no income tax and exploit sweatshop labor overseas. They lavishly bankroll the political clowns who speak in the vulgar and crude idiom of an enraged public or in the dulcet tones used to mollify the liberal class.

Donald Trump’s seminal contribution to the political landscape is the license to say in public what political decorum once prohibited. His legacy is the degradation of political discourse to the monosyllabic tirades of Shakespeare’s Caliban, which simultaneously scandalize and energize the kabuki theater that passes for government. This burlesque differs little from the German Reichstag, where the final cri de coeur by a mortally ill Clara Zetkin fascism on August 30, 1932, was met with a chorus of taunts, insults and jeers by Nazi deputies.

H.G. Wells called the old guard, the good liberals, the ones who speak in measured words and embrace reason, the “inexplicit men.” They say the right things and do nothing. They are as vital to the rise of tyranny as are the Christian fascists, a few of whom held the House hostage last week by blocking 14 rounds of voting to prevent Kevin McCarthy from becoming Speaker. By the time McCarthy was elected on the 15th round, he had caved on nearly every demand made by the obstructionists, including permitting any one of the 435 members of the House to force a vote for his removal at any time, thus guaranteeing political paralysis.

The internecine warfare in the House is not between those who respect democratic institutions and those who do not. McCarthy, backed by Trump and far-right conspiracy theorist Marjorie Taylor Greene, is as morally bankrupt as those trying to bring him down. This is a battle for control among con artists, charlatans, social media celebrities and mobsters. McCarthy joined the majority of House Republicans in support of a Texas lawsuit to void the 2020 Presidential result by preventing four states — Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin and Georgia — from casting electoral votes for Biden. The Supreme Court refused to hear the lawsuit. There isn’t much in the Freedom Caucus extremist positions, which resemble those of Alternative fur Deutschland in Germany and Fidesz in Hungary, McCarthy doesn’t embrace. They advocate greater tax cuts for the wealthy, further deregulation of corporations, a war on migrants, more austerity programs, champion white supremacy and accuse liberals and conservatives who do not line up behind Trump of treason.

“I want you to watch Nancy Pelosi hand me that gavel. It will be hard not to hit her with it,” McCarthy said in audio posted to YouTube by a Main Street Nashville reporter in 2021. Pelosi, for her part, called McCarthy a “moron,” after he said that a possible renewed mask mandate was “a decision conjured up by liberal government officials who want to continue to live in a perpetual pandemic state.” This is what passes for political discourse. I yearn for the time when political rhetoric was geared to the educational level of a 10-year-old child or an adult with a sixth or seventh-grade education. Now we speak in imbecilic clichés.

This political vacuum has spawned anti-politics, or what the writerBenjamin DeMott called “junk politics,” which “personalizes and moralizes issues and interests instead of clarifying them.” Junk politics “maximizes threats from abroad while miniaturizing large, complex problems at home. It’s a politics that, guided by guesses about its own profits and losses, abruptly reverses public stances without explanation, often spectacularly bloating problems previously miniaturized(e.g.: [the war in] Iraq will be over in days or weeks; Iraq is a project for generations).”

“A major effect of junk politics — its ceaseless flood of patriotic, religious, macho and therapeutic fustian — is to pull position after position loose from reasoned foundations,” DeMott noted.

The result of junk politics is that it infantilizes the public with “year-round upbeat Christmas tales” and perpetuates the status quo. The billionaire class, which has carried out a slow motion corporate coup d’état, continues to plunder; unchecked militarism continues to hollow out the country; and the public is kept in bondage by the courts and domestic security agencies. When the government watches you twenty-four hours a day, you cannot use the word “liberty.” That is the relationship between a master and a slave. The iron primacy of profit means that the most vulnerable are ruthlessly discarded. Supported by Republicans and Democrats, the Federal Reserve is raising interest rates to slow economic growth and increase unemployment to curb inflation, exacting a tremendous cost on the working poor and their families. No one is required to operate under what John Ruskin called “conditions of moral culture.”

But the second result of junk politics is more insidious. It solidifies the cult of the self, the amoral belief that we have the right to do anything, to betray and destroy anyone, to get what we want. The cult of the self fosters a psychopathic cruelty, a culture built not on empathy, the common good and self-sacrifice but on unbridled narcissism and vengeance. It celebrates, as mass media does, superficial charm, grandiosity and self-importance; a need for constant stimulation; a penchant for lying, deception and manipulation; and an inability to feel guilt or remorse. This is the dark ethic of corporate culture, celebrated by the entertainment industry, academia and social media.

The essayist Curtis White argues that “it is capitalism that now most defines our national character, not Christianity or the Enlightenment.” He assesses our culture as one in which “death has taken refuge in a legality that is supported by both reasonable liberals and Christian conservatives.” This “legality” ratifies the systematic exploitation of workers. White excoriates our nationalist triumphalism and our unleashing of “the most fantastically destructive military power” the world has ever known with the alleged objective of “protecting and pursuing freedom.”

“Justice, under capitalism, works not from a notion of obedience to moral law, or to conscience, or to compassion, but from the assumption of a duty to preserve a social order and the legal ‘rights’ that constitute that order, especially the right to property and the freedom to do with it what one wants,” he writes. “That’s the real and important ‘moral assessment’ sought by our courts. It comes to this: that decision will seem most just which preserves the system of justice even if the system is itself routinely unjust.”

The consequence is a society consumed by excessive materialism, pointless soul-destroying work, suffocating housing developments closer to “shared cemeteries” than real neighborhoods and a license to exploit that “condemns nature itself to annihilation even as we call it the freedom to pursue personal property.”

The billionaire class, for the most part, prefers the mask of a Joe Biden, who deftly broke the freight railway unions to prevent a strike and forced them to accept a contract a majority of union members had rejected. But the billionaire class also knows that the goons and con artists on the far right will not interfere in their disemboweling of the nation; indeed, they will be more robust in thwarting the attempts of workers to organize for decent wages and working conditions. I watched fringe politicians in Yugoslavia, Radovan Karadžić, Slobodan Milošević and Franjo Tudjman, dismissed by the political and educated elites as buffoons, ride an anti-liberal wave to power in the wake of widespread economic misery.Walmart, Amazon, Apple, Citibank, Raytheon, ExxonMobile, Alphabet and Goldman Sachs will easily adapt. Capitalism functions very efficiently without democracy.

The longer we remain in a state of political paralysis, the more these political deformities are empowered.As Robert O. Paxton writes in “The Anatomy of Fascism,” fascism is an amorphous and incoherent ideology. It wraps itself in the most cherished symbols of the nation, in our case, the American flag, white supremacy, the Pledge of Allegiance and the Christian cross. It celebrates hypermasculinity, misogyny, racism and violence. It allows disenfranchised people, especially disenfranchised white men, to regain a sense of power, however illusory, and sanctifies their hatred and rage. It embraces a utopian vision of moral renewal and vengeance to coalesce around an anointed political savior. It is militaristic, anti-intellectual and contemptuous of democracy, especially when the established ruling class mouths the language of liberal democracy but does nothing to defend it. It replaces culture with nationalist and patriotic kitsch. It sees those outside the closed circle of the nation-state or the ethnic or religious group as contaminants who must be physically purged, usually with violence, to restore the health of the nation. It perpetuates itself through constant instability, for its solutions to the ills besetting the nation are transitory, contradictory and unattainable. Most importantly, fascism always has a religious coloring, mobilizing believers around rites and rituals, using sacred words and phrases, and embracing an absolute truth that is heretical to question.

Trump may be finished politically, but the political and social decay that created Trump remains. This decay will give rise to new, perhaps more competent, demagogues. I fear the rise of Christian fascists endowed with the political skill, self-discipline, focus and intelligence that Trump lacks. The longer we remain politically paralyzed, the more certain Christian fascism becomes. The January 6 mob assault on the Capital two years ago, the polarization of the electorate into antagonistic tribes, the economic misery afflicting the working class, the rhetoric of hate and violence, and the current dysfunction in the Congress is but a glimpse of the nightmare ahead.

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11 22

The vote counting continues. The Democrats appear poised to hold on to the Senate, 50 plus one, after John Fetterman beat Mehmet Oz. The House is a toss-up, but Democratic votes usually take longer to count. (There’s more of them.) All in all, Tuesday was a good night.

These midterms signal a return to the norm.

Didn’t they defy the norm?

Sure – if your definition of normal goes back to 2004. That was the start of the current pattern by which the party that controls the White House loses the Congress in the president’s first term.

But if you go back farther, all the way to 1900, you can see that Tuesday’s elections didn’t defy the norm so much as affirm it.

For the entire 20th century, how many times did the Congress flip?

Six times.

Wut.

I said what I said.

Other than those half dozen, the norm was nothing changing.

Nothing changed in 1902, 1906, 1914, 1922, 1926, 1930, 1934, 1938, 1942, 1950, 1958, 1962, 1966, 1970, 1974, 1978, 1982, 1990 and 1998.

Nothing changed 76 percent of the time in 100 years.

It’s early yet. As I said, the counting continues.

But so far, there’s a good chance that the Congress doesn’t flip. In that case, the midterms would signal a departure from the new norm of the last 18 years and a return to the old norm of the prior 100.

But why were those 18 years exceptional?

Well, as I’ve been saying, those 18 years were probably a period of transition between different and opposing political gestalts – a volatile buffer zone marked by crisis and uncertainty between the old regime in which the Republicans prevailed most of the time and a new regime in which the Democrats may prevail most of the time.

The era of William McKinley gave way to the era of Franklin Roosevelt. The era of Franklin Roosevelt gave way to the era of Ronald Reagan. And Ronald Reagan’s era seems to be giving way to something new. Whether that’s Joe Biden’s is to be determined.

While the press corps is fixated on who controls the Congress, these midterms are about much, much more. They indicate larger, more important political currents in American history. It’s been said that the midterms mark Trumpism’s end. (Many of Donald Trump’s endorsements failed.) But it’s more like the end of a global order.

This is why I’ve made such a fuss over 1982. That was the last year, more or less, of the postwar liberal consensus that formed the contours of the Cold War and that fell apart in the jungles of Vietnam. 1982 was the hard open of a new gestalt, neoliberalism, the privileging of militarism over diplomacy, markets over statecraft.

(Any time you hear a Republican candidate call for cutting taxes to stimulate economic growth, that’s neoliberalism – or, asPaul Krugman calls it, “zombie economics.” Though it doesn’t work the way it’s supposed to, and never has, Republicans always call for it.)

This theory of political time, one regime giving way to another, will hold true, I suspect, even if the GOP manages to squeak out a one-seat majority in the House. Why? Because the conventional wisdom, based on 18 years’ worth of electoral patterns, said the Republicans would wipe out the Democrats the way they did in 2010.

Yeah, nah.

It wasn’t a blue wave, mind you. But for reasons to be discerned (the fall of Roe, probably, and/or the J6 insurrection), the Democrats’ energy was equal to or (fingers crossed) greater than the GOP’s energy. That wasn’t supposed to happen. Neither was the president supposed to double down on democratic values and Democratic accomplishments. Biden was supposed to run away from it all.

That none of this was supposed to happen but did happen indicates something huge: a new regime in which a majority favors the ideas and policies of the Democrats over those of the Republicans.

Perhaps the biggest exponent of regime change is the Republican Party itself. It used to care about policy. It used to care about appearing to care about policy. But none of the candidates this cycle bothered much with keeping up appearances. They turned the Democrats into the enemy. Vote for us because we’re not them.

The Republicans also dropped their faith in democracy. Not long after Barack Obama’s election, it was clear the GOP could win by protecting the white-power syndicate that benefits most white people. (That’s what the so-called “Tea Party” revolt was about.)

But it wasn’t until the Supreme Court cut down parts of the 1965 Voting Rights Act that state legislatures enacted election laws that would in effect water down the power of Democratic (Black) voters.

Since 2013, the question hasn’t been how to bring people into the fold. The question has been how to box them out of the franchise.

All of this depended on the continued support ofrespectable white people– or swing voters reliable enough to vote Republican most of the time but fickle enough to vote for Democrats some of the time. They are for civil rights, mostly, but not Black equality and the policies that demands. Neoliberalism depended on this balance.

Then something happened.

Whatever it was (the fall of Roe, probably, and/or the J6 insurrection), it pushed 2 percent of white women, who are unaffiliated with either party, to choose Democratic candidates.

These are respectable white people. These are the Americans who determine which party establishes and maintains a political regime. The GOP has lost the support of respectable white people in a year when they would normally rely on them. If they don’t have that support now, they won’t have that support two years from now.

These midterms signal a return to the norm.

They signal a return to Democratic dominance.

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aha/hmnn/yikes slide to fascism means kicking out props/norms, but it gets easier b/c fewer ctr-forces?!

comm dr

Liz Cheney's removal from House GOP leadership over her rejection of Trump's election lies and Republican senators' blocking of a bipartisan proposal to create an independent panel that would investigate the Capitol siege reveal in stark terms at least two things: (a) that Republicans have built a cult of personality around Trump, and (b) that they are now at the mercy of the proto-fascist mob that their Dear Leader energized and nurtured during his four-year tenure in the White House.

Either way, the fact of the matter is that, for purposes of political expediency, the GOP has opted to become a dark political force, relying almost entirely on lies and deception—while at the same time waging a coordinated onslaught on voting rights—as its governing techniques. As such, it represents a real threat to the stability of the republic.

Following Trump's defeat, the strategic objective of the Republican Party is not simply to engage in obstructionism, but to continue dividing the nation and radicalizing the American public against the democratic system. This is the only way that the Republican Party can hope to stay in the game in the political, economic, social, and cultural landscape that defines 21st century America.

Always the party of Big Business and the rich, the Republican Party has oscillated from conservatism to reactionism pretty much throughout the twentieth century and the early part of the twenty-first centuries, but today's GOP has gone so far toward abandoning basic democratic norms that it now belongs firmly in the political universe of parties and movements that make up the far-right. In fact, it is considered to be more extreme that Le Pen's National Rally, according to findings based on data collected from the Manifesto Project.

The political identity of today's GOP reflects a decades-long transformation. It begins to take form sometimes during the early 2010s, a decade that historian Andrew Bacevich characterized as an era of "venomous division." Driven primarily by fear of losing power in an increasingly diverse United States, the GOP made a dramatic shift towards extremism as a way of mobilizing white working-class voters, who experienced income stagnation and felt deep economic insecurity thanks to 40 years of brutal neoliberal capitalist policies, and scaring the hell out of the petty bourgeoisie with visions of chaos and disorder brought about by radical forces bent on destroying America and its traditional values and way of life.

Indeed, well before Trump threw his hat in the ring for Presidency, a 2013 survey of local party leaders found that, in contrast to Democrats who preferred more extreme candidates to more moderate candidates by a 2-to-1 margin, Republicans did so by 10-to-1.

Of course, it is Trump himself who solidifies the shift towards extremism. Fully cognizant of the mood both inside the Republican Party and the country as a whole, especially with a large segment of disenchanted and angry white voters seeing equal opportunity as a zero-sum game for them, Trump embarks on the complete transformation of the GOP into an extremist political party by lurching towards reactionary nationalism and diving deeply into nativism with his MAGA campaign slogan and inflammatory rhetoric about immigrants, Muslims, and African-Americans, respectively.

Trump also breaks with elite bipartisan consensus on a broad range of other issues, including trade and foreign policy, in order to secure his image as a unique figure in American politics, while falsehoods and outright lies become indispensable weapons on his performative proto-fascist march towards power.

To be sure, this was a bid for power with a strong resemblance to the political strategy that authoritarian parties have long adopted in many parts of the world, including that of the Nazi Party between 1919-1933. An unmistakable sign of Trump's"performative proto-fascism" was also his dalliance with armed militias—undoubtedly as grave a threat to democracy as were Hitler's brown shirts.

Trump's tenure in office ended on the same note as his rise to power—namely, with another act of "performative proto-fascism." His rejection of the 2020 election as "the big lie" was intended to cement in the minds of his fanatical base the idea of a "deep state" conspiracy and, subsequently, undermine democratic procedures. A movement built on lies, deception, and sheer propaganda can only be maintained by the very same tactics that energized it. There is no other way around it.

The reason that Republicans have opted to continue down the path charted by Trump is because this is now the only way to maintain the support of the proto-fascist base. Without that support, the GOP will have to reinvent its political identity—no small task for a party that has made a remarkable transition from conservatism to reactionism and finally to neoliberal proto-fascism—or cease to exist.

However, the paradox that Republicans face in the post-Trump era is that they cannot sustain a movement built around the cult of personality without the presence of a charismatic leader in its midst. In this sense, the Republicans can continue with Trumpist shenanigans as long as Trump is still around and politically active, but sooner or later they would have to look for an appropriate replacement—and perhaps an authentic fascist—otherwise the proto-fascist base may gradually begin to wither away.

What the future holds for the American republic is impossible to predict. However, what is abundantly clear right now is that with its delusional attachment to Trump, the GOP is methodically dragging the country into the abyss of instability, chaos, and proto-fascism.

C.J. Polychroniou is a political economist/political scientist who has taught and worked in numerous universities and research centers in Europe and the United States. He has published scores of books and his articles have appeared in a variety of journals, magazines, newspapers, and popular news websites. His latest books are Optimism Over Despair: Noam Chomsky On Capitalism, Empire, and Social Change, an anthology of interviews with Chomsky originally published at Truthout and collected by Haymarket Books; Climate Crisis and the Global Green New Deal: The Political Economy of Saving the Planet (with Noam Chomsky and Robert Pollin as primary authors); and The Precipice: Neoliberalism, the Pandemic, and the Urgent Need for Radical Change, an anthology of interviews with Chomsky originally published at Truthout_{ and collected by Haymarket Books (scheduled for publication in June 2021).}_

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aha critical thinking is systems thinking, it is the antidote to nihilism and authoritarianism, which is radically reductionist

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aha: someone said alt right is search for uncastrated father; jordan p gives rules; muslim kids in french ghettos get radicalized, so do cuck in parent's basements who can't be pick up artists and wohl of wall street. [matrix 4 guy does sys analysis:darwin/ invis hand meritocrisy leaves losers to blame themselves, not structural forces.

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https://www.alternet.org/2022/08/humanity-fate-overcoming-outdated-myths/

richard eckerdsly sp salon

When I was young, back in the 1970s, I spent two years traveling across the world: by truck with a group through Africa from south to north; in a camper van with a friend through Northern and Eastern Europe and Russia; on foot along most of the south coast of Crete; and by boat, bus, truck and train across Asia to India and Nepal.

The most difficult cultural adjustment I had to make was not to the cultures of other countries, but to my own on my return home to Australia. Many long-term Western travelers have the same experience, shocked in particular by the West's extravagant consumerism. My initial response on flying into Sydney from Bangkok was one of wonder at the orderliness and cleanliness, the abundantly stocked shops, the clear-eyed children, seemingly so healthy and carefree. However, this initial celebration of the material comforts and individual freedoms soon gave way to a growing apprehension about the Western way of life.

In a way I hadn't anticipated, the experience allowed me to view my native culture from the outside; and in ways I hadn't appreciated before, I became aware ours was a flawed and harsh culture. I realized that the Western worldview was not necessarily the truest or best, as I had been brought up and educated to believe, but just one of many, defined and supported by deeply ingrained beliefs and myths like any other.

We in the West tend to see material poverty as synonymous with misery and squalor; yet only with the most abject poverty is this so. Mostly the poorer societies I travelled through had a social cohesion and spiritual richness that I felt the West lacked. We see others as crippled by ignorance and cowed by superstition; we don't see the extent to which we are, in our own ways, oppressed by our rationalism and lack of "superstition" (in a spiritual sense).

There were other elements to my "re-entry trauma" besides the experience of other cultures. My lifestyle, very open in some respects, was closed or contained in others: the consequences of being on the road; and the almost total absence of mass media in my life. The exposure to the counterculture of my fellow travelers, especially in Asia, was another influence.

Over the following decades, as a journalist, researcher and writer, I developed these early insights into an analysis of cultural influences on health and well-being, how we define and measure human progress and development, and what the future holds for our civilization and species. This work is available on my website, including my book, "Well & Good: Morality, Meaning and Happiness," published in 2005.

"Culture" is often understood to mean the arts, or to mean ethnicity and ethnic differences, or to describe a quality of specific institutions, especially when their "cultures" become toxic. In scientific research, culture is a challenging topic, much debated and contested, defined and used differently in different disciplines and even within the same discipline. It can be difficult to pin down cultural qualities to measure their effects, which are often diffuse and pervasive, with complex interactions with other social factors.

In this essay, I use "culture" to refer to the language and accumulated knowledge, beliefs, assumptions and values that are passed between individuals, groups and generations; a system of meanings and symbols that shapes how people see the world and their place in it, and gives meaning and order to their lives; or, more simply, as the knowledge people must possess to function adequately in society.

Culture and health

The dominant discipline in research on population health is epidemiology (although other disciplines also contribute). Over the past few decades, epidemiologists have become more interested in the so-called social determinants of health, with a particular focus on socioeconomic inequality. Research suggests that the greater the inequality, the steeper the gradient in health is (meaning that at any point on the social ladder, people on average have better health than those below them and worse health than those above them), and the poorer people's health is overall.

I felt cultural factors were being neglected in this literature, however. This is unsurprising: Epidemiology (and science more generally), tends to overlook or underestimate the intangible, abstract and subjective in favor of the tangible, concrete and objective, which are easier to measure. A notable exception in the research was the work in the 1990s of psychologist and anthropologist Ellen Corin, to which I immediately related because of my travel experiences.

In contributions to two books on social determinants of health, Corin argues that culture shapes every area of life, defines a worldview that gives meaning to personal and collective experience, and frames the way people locate themselves within the world, perceive the world and behave in it.

Humans do not live in a purely objective world in which objects and events possess an inherent and objective significance, she says; instead, these things are imbued with meanings that vary with individuals, times and societies, and emerge from a network of associations: "Every aspect of reality is seen embedded within webs of meaning that define a certain worldview and that cannot be studied or understood apart from this collective frame."

As reflected in my own experience, Corin notes that cultural influences are always easier to identify in unfamiliar societies."As long as one remains within one's own cultural boundaries, the ways of thinking, living, and behaving peculiar to that culture are transparent or invisible; they appear to constitute a natural order that is not itself an object of study. But this impression is an unsupported ethnocentric illusion."

In contrast to this way of thinking about culture, epidemiology understands "culture" mainly in terms of "subcultures" or "difference," especially ethnic and racial difference, and therefore usually as one dimension of socioeconomic status and inequality. Generally speaking, the broader influence of culture on health has been seen as remote and diffuse, pervasive but unspecified. As Corin observes, epidemiology's "categorical" approach to sociocultural factors, which fits comfortably within prevailing scientific paradigms, strips human realities of much of their social context and disregards and dismisses other approaches to social and cultural realities.

Modern Western culture's health hazards

I have written many scientific papers discussing culture and health. Perhaps the most influential is a 2006 paper, "Is modern Western culture a health hazard?" published in the International Journal of Epidemiology,together with three commentaries by other researchers. In this paper, I argue that cultural factors such as materialism and individualismare underestimated determinants of population health and well-being in Western societies and that an important and growing cost of our modern way of life is "cultural fraud": the promotion of images and ideals of "the good life" that serve the economy but do not meet psychological needs or reflect social realities.

Research suggests that inequality impacts health through both material and psychosocial processes: In other words, such processes result from differences in material conditions, experiences and resources and from people's position in the social hierarchy and their perceptions of relative disadvantage, which contribute to stress, depression, anxiety, isolation, insecurity, hostility and lack of control over one's life. These qualities affect health directly, and also indirectly by encouraging unhealthy behavior. If factors such as perceptions, expectations and emotions were part of the pathways by which inequality affected health, I argued, research needs to take culture into account, since culture influences these things.

Even if we look just at inequality, culture affects the extent to which a society tolerates or even promotes inequality rather than discouraging it. If perceptions of social status influence levels of stress and anxiety, then cultural factors also play a critical role: For example, by amplifying a sense of relative deprivation through media images of "the good life" and celebrity lifestyles that are increasingly beyond the reach of most of us; or moderating that sense by providing alternative cultural models, such as downshifting and simple living, that undermine conventional social comparisons. Culture also influences the social distribution of risk behaviors like smoking and alcohol use.

Culture's impacts are far more pervasive than these effects on inequality, however, penetrating and shaping every facet of life in ways that affect well-being, including meaning, identity, belonging and security. Consider how Western culture construes the self. When I was at school, 60-odd years ago, we were taught that the atom was made up of solid particles, with electrons whizzing around the nucleus like planets orbiting the sun. Similarly, we think of the self as a discrete, biological entity or being. Sociologists talk of modern society as one of "atomized" individuals.

But these days science depicts the atom in quite different terms, as more like a fuzzy cloud of electrical charges. What if we were to see the self like this, as a fuzzy cloud of relational forces and fields? As a self of many relationships, inextricably linking us to other people and other things and entities? Some are close and intense, as in a love affair or within families; some more distant and diffuse, as in a sense of community or place or national or ethnic identity; some maybe are more subtle, but still powerful, as in a spiritual connection or a love of nature.

These relationships can wax and wane, vary in intensity and charge (positive or negative). Importantly, they never end — for example, the breakup of a marriage, or the death of a parent or child, does not "end" the relationship, just changes it. Transforming how we see the self in this way — as a fuzzy cloud of relationships — would change profoundly how we see our relationships to others and the world. It would bring us closer to the way many indigenous peoples see the self, and would alter radically our personal choices and our social and political goals.

Vices and virtues

A critical consequence of the trends in modern Western culture has been their effect on moral values. Values provide the framework for deciding what is important, true, right and good, and have a central role in defining relationships and meanings, and so in determining well-being.

Most societies have tended to reinforce values that emphasize social obligations and self-restraint, and to discourage those that promote self-indulgence and antisocial behavior.Virtues are concerned with building and maintaining strong, harmonious personal relationships and social attachments, and the strength to endure adversity. Virtues serve to maintain a balance — always dynamic, always shifting — between individual needs and freedom on one hand, and social stability and order on the other. "Vices," on the other hand, typically involve the unrestrained satisfaction of individual wants and desires, or the capitulation to human weaknesses.

Christianity's seven deadly sins are pride (vanity, self-centeredness), envy, avarice (greed), wrath (anger, violence), gluttony, sloth (laziness, apathy) and lust. Its seven cardinal virtues are faith, hope, charity (compassion), prudence (good sense), temperance (moderation), fortitude (courage, perseverance) and religion (spirituality).

French philosopher André Comte-Sponville, in his 2002 book "A Short Treatise on the Great Virtues," lists these as the most important human virtues: politeness (as the "imitation of virtue," paving the way for true virtue to be learned), fidelity, prudence, temperance, courage, justice, generosity, compassion, mercy, gratitude, humility, simplicity, tolerance, purity, gentleness, good faith, humor and, finally, love (which transcends virtue). He says that a virtuous life is not masochistic or puritanical, but a way of living well and finding love and peace.

Modern Western culture undermines, even reverses, universal values and time-tested wisdom. The result is not so much a collapse of personal morality, but a loss of moral clarity: a heightened moral ambivalence and ambiguity, a tension or dissonance between our personal values and our lifestyles and the institutional values of the organizations we work for, and a deepening cynicism and mistrust toward social institutions, especially government.

Think for a moment about how much of public life, especially as revealed by politics and the mainstream and social media, reflects and promotes the "great virtues" (or, conversely, the vices).

Without appropriate cultural reinforcement, we find it harder to do what we believe to be "good"; it takes more effort. Conversely, it becomes easier to justify or rationalize bad behavior. There are positive (reinforcing) feedbacks in the process: Antisocial values weaken personal and social ties, which in turn reduce the "hold" of a moral code on individuals because it is those kinds of ties that give the code its "leverage"; they are a source of "moral fiber."

Values are the foundations of social organization, and any discussion of personal well-being and social functioning must begin here. The sounder the foundations, the less we need to rely on elaborate supporting structures of legislation and regulation. As the 18th-century political philosopher Edmund Burke said, the less control there is from within, the more there must be from without.

Human societies are complex systems, and the management of complexity requires rules that are generic, diffuse, pervasive, flexible and internalized; in other words, they need a strong framework of values. As moral frameworks erode, and our culture becomes more rational, legalistic and technocratic, the more the work of values is supplanted by laws and regulations, which tend to be rigid, specific and externally imposed; they are often a poor or inappropriate substitute.

Cultural fraud

The apparent harm caused by materialism and individualism raises the question of why these qualities persist and even intensify, a point I discuss in my 2006 paper. Both have conferred benefits to health and well-being in the past, but now appear to have passed a threshold where their rising costs exceed their diminishing benefits. Various forms of institutional practice encourage this cultural "overshoot": Government policy makes sustained economic growth a priority, but leaves the actual content of growth largely up to individuals, whose personal consumption makes the largest contribution to economic growth.

Ever-increasing consumption is not natural or inevitable. It is culturally "manufactured" by a massive and growing media-marketing complex. I cite a figure from Michael Dawson's 2003 book "The Consumer Trap: Big Business Marketing in American Life": At that time, nearly 20 years ago, corporate business in the U.S. spent more than $1 trillion a year on marketing, about twice what Americans spent annually on all levels of education, private and public, from kindergarten through graduate school. That spending includes "macromarketing," a term describing the management of the social environment, particularly public policy, to suit the interests of business.

While other species have "cultures" in the form of learned behaviors, humans alone require a culture to give us reasons to live, to make life worth living: to give us a sense of purpose, identity and belonging — personally, socially and spiritually — and a framework of values to guide our actions. There may be many cultural paths we can follow in meeting human needs (as I discuss later). This is the source of our extraordinary diversity and versatility, but it is also a source of danger: We can lose the path altogether, run off the rails.

In my 2006 paper, I argued that Western culture's promotion of images and ideals of "the good life" amounted to cultural fraud, concluding:

To the extent that these images and ideals hold sway over us, they encourage goals and aspirations that are in themselves unhealthy. To the extent that we resist them because they are contrary to our own ethical and social ideals, they are a powerful source of dissonance that is also harmful to health and wellbeing.

Nevertheless, there are reasons for optimism (on this score at least). As Western culture becomes more harmful to health, we are seeing a diminishing "cultural consonance": Increasing numbers of people in Western nations are rejecting this dominant ethic of individual and material self-interest, and making, or trying to make, a comprehensive shift in their worldview, values and ways of life as they seek to close the gap between what they believe and how they live.

This is a driving dynamic behind various countercultural movements such as simple living, downshifting, minimalism and transition movements. We are witnessing parallel processes of cultural decay and renewal, a titanic contest as old ways of thinking about ourselves fail, and new ways of being human struggle for definition and acceptance.

Culture and progress

This cultural contest has obvious significance for the notion of progress — the belief that life is constantly getting better — which is a defining feature of modern Western culture. Another line of my research has been to address this topic, including its cultural and subjective elements. The measures of progress that we use matter: Good measures are a prerequisite for good governance because they are how we judge its success; they also influence how we evaluate our own lives because they affect our values, perceptions and goals. Models and measures both reflect and reinforce how we understand progress: If we believe the wrong thing, we will measure the wrong thing, and if we measure the wrong thing, we will do the wrong thing.

Essentially, we equate progress with modernization. Modernization is a pervasive, complex, multidimensional process that characterizes our times. It includes industrialization, globalization, urbanization, democratization, scientific and technological advance, capitalism, secularism, rationalism, individualism and consumerism. Many of these features are part of the processes of cultural Westernization and material progress (measured as economic growth). This equation of progress and modernization reflects a deep cultural bias.

Western nations dominate the top rankings of most indices of progress and development, and Western nations are promoted as a model of development for other countries. On the face of it, the equation seems compelling. The UN Development Programme has noted that past decades have seen substantial progress in many aspects of human development. Most people today are healthier, live longer, are more educated and have more access to goods and services, it reports; they also have more power to select leaders, influence public decisions and share knowledge.

Let us notice that indicators focus on those qualities that characterize modernization and that Western culture celebrates as success or improvement, such as material wealth, high life expectancy, education, democratic governance and individual freedom. However valuable these gains are, they do not represent the sum total of what constitutes optimal well-being and quality of life. Emotional, social and spiritual well-being barely register in this view of progress. It is precisely in these areas that progress has become most problematic, especially in rich nations.

Nor does this view of progress adequately integrate the requirements of environmental health and sustainability. This dimension is being addressed in new indices, although not yet adequately. Despite devoting a huge amount of social and political energy to attempting to get the policy settings right, development — at least as currently understood and pursued — and sustainability remain fundamentally irreconcilable. Modernization's benefits are counted, but its costs to well-being are underestimated and downplayed. At best, the qualities being measured under orthodox approaches may be desirable and even necessary, but they are not sufficient. At worst, the measures result in a consistent decline in quality of life, and lead us toward an uncertain and potentially catastrophic future.

Transforming culture

Our flawed idea of progress is being challenged by the realities of global threats to humanity, such as climate change and biodiversity loss; pollution of land, air and water; food, water and energy security; global economic crises; nuclear war; and technological anarchy (where technologies become so powerful and develop so rapidly that we lose control over them). Without a deep change in culture, we will not close the gulf between the magnitude of the problems we face and the scale of our responses.

A cultural transformation of this extent is very different from the policy reforms and technological remedies on which public discussions and political debates typically focus. The history of climate-change politics provides a clear example of the "scale anomaly" or "reality gap" between the threat and our response. Politics continues to produce slow, incremental change, while science demands urgent, radical action. The pressure on the political status quo is increasing, but has yet to crack it open; we are still "kicking the can down the road."

This predicament applies across the range of humanity's challenges. These are "existential" in that they both materially and physically threaten human existence, and also undermine people's sense of confidence and certainty about life. Culture is central to resolving the situation, meaning both Western culture in general and the specific institutional cultures of politics and journalism, which concentrate some of the worst aspects of the broader culture (making them more visible).

Cultural factors are one driver behind growing electoral fragmentation and tribalism. A lack of a sense of belonging or social attachment was important to Donald Trump's election as president. Veteran journalist Carl Bernstein (of Watergate fame) observed recently that American democracy had not worked well for decades, and that Trump had ignited what he called a "cold civil war." It was a mistake, he said, "to look at the country just in terms of politics and of media. This is a cultural shift of huge dimension."

In a previous essay in Salon, I argued that a deep and dangerous divide existed in liberal democracies between people's concerns about their lives, their country and their future, and the proclivities and preoccupations of mainstream politics and news media. The cultures of politics and journalism are too short-sighted and narrow-minded to bridge the gulf between what we are actually doing as a society and what we now know we need to do. Adding to this failure is a focus on division and conflict over a multiplicity of discrete issues, which are dealt with in isolation from the totality, complexity and interconnectedness of life. As I concluded in that essay, political debate needs to encourage the conceptual space for a transformation in our worldview, beliefs and values as profound as any in human history.

This cultural transformation can be compared to that in Europe from the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment: from the medieval mind, dominated by religion and the afterlife, to the modern mind, focused on material life here and now. Historian Barbara Tuchman, in "A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century," writes that Christianity provided "the matrix and law of medieval life, omnipresent, indeed compulsory." Its insistent principle was that "the life of the spirit and of the afterworld was superior to the here and now, to material life on earth.… The rupture of this principle and its replacement by belief in the worth of the individual and of an active life not necessarily focused on God is, in fact, what created the modern world and ended the Middle Ages."

Today, humanity faces another rupture or discontinuity in its view of what it is to be human, and that rupture will profoundly change how we live. Just as it was impossible for the medieval mind to anticipate the modern, so too is it impossible for the modern mind to grasp what might come next. A greater awareness and acknowledgment of the flaws and failings of material progress and modernization, however, can encourage us to think more positively about alternative ways of living that deliver a high quality of life with much lower material consumption and social complexity. Growing and deepening crises will help to precipitate this change.

Alternative perspectives

The modern myth of material progress implies, even insists, that past life was wretched, as expressed in the oft-quoted words of 17th-century philosopher Thomas Hobbes that the life of man in his natural state was "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short." It is true that people were materially poorer and their life expectancy lower in the past, but they often led rich social and spiritual lives, as recent accounts of the quality of life among indigenous Australians show.

Traditional indigenous ways of living were devastated by the arrival of Europeans, but early accounts suggest a life of relative abundance and ease. Culturally speaking, the lesson is that we need to realize and accept that other, quite different and even better ways of making sense of the world and our lives are possible. Furthermore, we need to examine our situation at this fundamental level if we are to have a chance of achieving a higher and sustainable quality of life.

Anthropologist Wade Davis' writing offers an eloquent exposition of this viewpoint. In his books "Light at the Edge of the World: A Journey Through the Realm of Vanishing Cultures" and "The Wayfinders: Why Ancient Wisdom Matters in the Modern World," he urges us to heed the voices of other cultures because these remind us that there are alternatives, "other ways of orienting human beings in social, spiritual, and ecological space." They allow us "to draw inspiration and comfort from the fact that the path we have taken is not the only one available, that our destiny is therefore not indelibly written in a set of choices that demonstrably and scientifically have proven not to be wise." By their very existence, Davis argues, the diverse cultures of the world show we can change, as we know we must, the fundamental manner in which we inhabit this planet.

Davis learned as a student to appreciate and embrace the key revelation of anthropology: the idea that distinct cultures represent unique visions of life itself, morally inspired and inherently right. Cultural beliefs really do generate different realities, separate and utterly distinct from each other, even as they face the same fundamental challenges.

The significance of an esoteric belief lies not in its veracity in some absolute sense but in what it can tell us about a culture, he says. "What matters is the potency of the belief and the manner in which the conviction plays out in the day to day life of a people." A child raised to believe that a mountain is the abode of a protective spirit will be a profoundly different human being from one brought up to believe that a mountain is an inert mass of rock ready to be mined. A child raised to revere forests as a spiritual home will be different from one who believes that they exist to be logged.

Davis cautions that modernity (whether identified as Westernization, globalization, capitalism or democracy) is an expression of cultural values: "It is not some objective force removed from the constraints of culture. And it is certainly not the true and only pulse of history." The Western paradigm, for all its accomplishments, and inspired in so many ways, is not "the paragon of humanity's potential," he writes; "there is no universal progression in the lives and destiny of human beings."

The writer Barry Lopez, in his 2019 book "Horizon," also brings an anthropological perspective to humankind's current state of precarity, "a time when many see little more on the horizon but the suggestion of a dark future":

As time grows short, the necessity to listen attentively to foundational stories other than our own becomes more imperative…. Many cultures are still distinguished today by wisdoms not associated with modern technologies but grounded, instead, in an acute awareness of human foibles, of the traps people tend to set for themselves as they enter the ancient labyrinth of hubris or blindly pursue the appeasement of their appetites.

Lopez warns that if we persist in believing that we alone (whatever our culture) are right, and that we have no need to listen to anyone else's stories, we endanger ourselves. "If we remain fearful of human diversity, our potential to evolve into the very thing we most fear — to become our own fatal nemesis — only increases."

The future of cultures

Davis and Lopez's warnings take me back to an early 1990s UNESCO project on the futures of cultures, which had as its hypothesis that "cultures and their futures, rather than technological and economic developments, are at the core of humankind's highly uncertain future." A project report noted: "Some of the participants expressed the view that culture may well prove to be the last resort for the salvation of humankind."

The project considered some critical questions about culture. Will economic and technological progress destroy the cultural diversity that is our precious heritage? Will the "meaning systems" of different societies, which have provided their members with a sense of identity, meaning and place in the totality of the universe, be reduced to insignificance by the steamroller effects of mass culture, characterized by electronic media, consumer gadgets, occupational and geographic mobility and globally disseminated role models? Or, on the other hand, will the explosive release of ethnic emotions accompanying political liberation destroy all possibility of both genuine development founded on universal solidarity and community-building across differences? Will we witness a return of local chauvinisms, breeding new wars over boundaries and intercultural discriminations?

Background papers for the UNESCO project proposed two scenarios: one pessimistic, one optimistic. The pessimistic scenario was that cultures and authentic cultural values will be, throughout the world, bastardized or reduced to marginal or ornamental roles in most national societies and regional or local communities because of powerful forces of cultural standardization. These forces are technology, especially media technology; the nature of the modern state, which is bureaucratic, centralizing, legalistic and controlling; and the spread of "managerial organization" as the one best way of making decisions and coordinating actions.

The optimistic scenario was that humanity will advance in global solidarity, with ecological and economic collaboration, as responsible stewards of the cosmos. Numerous vital and authentic cultures will flourish, each proud of its identity while actively rejoicing in differences exhibited by other cultures. Human beings everywhere will nurture a sense of possessing several partial and overlapping identities while recognizing their primary allegiance to the human species. Cultural communities will plunge creatively into their roots and find new ways of being modern and of contributing precious values to the universal human culture now in gestation.

Participants in the UNESCO project appeared to see the pessimistic scenario as more likely, as things stood then (it is perhaps even more likely today), while the optimistic scenario was more an ideal to guide policy.

With culture as with so many other areas of modern life, humanity's destiny hangs in the balance: A dominant culture that is deeply flawed is nevertheless spreading throughout the world. Epitomized by today's global, technocratic, managerial elite, this culture has become hugely powerful, the default setting for running national and world affairs. Yet its failures grow correspondingly more profound, with growing inequality and concentration of wealth and power, growing mistrust of government and other institutions, growing global problems such as climate change. At the same time, ethnic and other "tribal" feelings have become more fervent and exclusive, often fanatical, including in the West. The 20-year war in Afghanistan offers one powerful symbol of this cultural contest.

On the other hand, somewhere beyond this ugly mix, largely hidden by the outdated and dysfunctional cultures of mainstream politics and the news media, through these same dual processes, there is also the potential, the possibility, for the optimistic scenario: a world where rich cultural diversity underpins a new and vital cultural universality.

At least we should hope so. Humanity's fate hangs on the outcome.

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ppl need help b/c of globalization defund soc safety net, but are abandoned by neighbors? church? am indiv macho i only need a gun to protect what's mine from brn horde? nb weyrich wedge issue answer how to brk working class solidarity and vote ~ own interest (plus magical thinking entrepreneur [art brooks magic mantra]lotto dream)

aha fundamental/systemic: putnam bowl alone esp rural wht ppl marginalized by globalization, digital divide, outsourcing by corps, some hype fr=ear histporical trend to blame immigrant other coming to steL YOur jobs, daughters (rapists) and culture/country, so fill in public swim pool and make it harder for THEM to vote [plus gerrymander so can minority rule anyway; inequality (tax dodge/brk subisdy for rich/coprs b/c buy election w/ dark money so defund public school, health care, pvtize everything which makes it harder and more expensive to be poor, then demonize govt RR /koch libtard GOP TP so not ask them for help/justice/equity GI Bill VA homes mort) but build that wall

sparked by

https://www.alternet.org/2021/05/noam-chomsky-republican-party/

alexh

The United States has had 17 different presidents during Noam Chomsky's lifetime, from Calvin Coolidge to Joe Biden — and the left-wing author, now 92, has lived through major historical events including the Great Depression, Watergate, 9/11, and the COVID-19 pandemic. Chomsky discussed the challenges of the Biden era during a recent interview with author/journalist David Masciotra for the Los Angeles Review of Books.

Chomsky discussed his most recent book, "Consequences of Capitalism: Manufacturing Discontent and Resistance," in the interview with Masciotra, warning that people who are hurting economically can be manipulated by far-right extremists. Chomsky has been a blistering critic of neoliberal economics, which he said continues to fail millions of people in the United States.

"I've seen it over and over," Chomsky told Masciotra. "During the Kennedy and Johnson years, the technocratic and meritocratic elite, my colleagues from Harvard and MIT, were flocking down to Washington to show how the world should be run. Well, in Vietnam, we saw what came of that. It was not unpredictable. Those of us in the streets were warning of it all along. Now, it is the same. Neoliberalism, whatever is in the minds of people who advocate for it — maybe they don't even think about it — is an explicit effort…. to hand power to private institutions, which are dedicated to self-enrichment."

Neoliberalism, Chomsky added, only worsens the divide between the haves and the have-nots in the United States.

"The majority of the population gets by paycheck to paycheck," Chomsky told Masciotra. "Real wages have stagnated for 40 years. The gains of productivity growth concentrate in very few pockets. This leads to…. unfocused anger. Is it surprising? People aren't told what is really robbing them. Instead, they are told that it is immigrants, Blacks, some pedophiles from outer space, if you believe QAnon — anything but what is actually happening."

When economic conditions are unfavorable to the working class, Chomsky noted, Republicans try to distract their voters with "cultural issues."

"The Republicans, who are the party of the superrich, understood in the 1970s that you can't get votes by coming to people and saying, 'I want to rob you, and hand everything you have over to the rich and corporate sector,'" Chomsky explained. "Somehow, that doesn't work. You have to turn to what are called 'cultural issues,' meaning everything but what matters for your life. So, Paul Weyrich, one of the main Republican strategists, by the mid-1970s got a flash of insight and realized that if the Republicans pretend — stress 'pretend'— to be opposed to abortion, they'll pick up the evangelical vote and the northern Catholic vote."

Noting that the Republican Party is becoming "increasingly dangerous and brazenly antidemocratic," Masciotra asked Chomsky to discuss the political climate of 2021. And Chomsky agreed with his description of the modern GOP.

Chomsky said of the Republican Party, "They can mobilize the people they've turned into raging monsters, and get them to attack these communist rats who want the country flooded with rapists and murderers so that the White race suffers genocide. You know the whole story. That's the Republican Party. It's not a political party anymore. It's very dangerous."

The 92-year-old author added that scapegoating is an effective tool of the far right in 2021 just as it was when he was a kid during the 1930s and Jews were targeted by Nazis. He explained:

There are other parts of it that are just as dangerous. For example, just recently, Pew Research Center came out with one of its regular polls on major issues facing the country. They had a choice of 15 major issues, and people were asked to rank them. It was divided between Republicans and Democrats. Take a look at Republicans. At the very bottom — 13 percent — the most important question that has ever arisen in human history:global warming. They don't call it that. They call it "climate change," which is more neutral. But only 13 percent think that is a major problem.It is only the most important problem that's ever arisen — the question of survival. Then you go to the problems they are most concerned about — illegal immigration, the deficit. This is the result of very effective propaganda. Imposing common sense, manufacturing consent, year after year — turning people into the kind of people that supported the Nazis. Going back to my childhood, I remember them right here in the United States. These were the people who wanted to get rid of the Jews, because "the Jews are destroying civilization."

"If people are isolated, atomized, with no support groups, no involvement in constructive activities, they are prey to this attack on their moral and intellectual integrity," Chomsky continued. "Go back to what I said, the Republican leadership is overjoyed at the moves toward some humane behavior on the part of Democrats. They know, especially with (former President Donald) Trump — who is a genius at this —that they can organize and mobilize crazed groups who really believe they need their guns to save the White race from genocide. You can drive people to that."

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amanda wikdsmaRT TAG

https://www.alternet.org/2021/04/biden-speech-gop/

President Joe Biden's plans are ambitious. I know this because every headline Thursday morning after Biden gave his first speech to a joint session of Congress said so.

"Biden Just Gave the Most Ideologically Ambitious Speech of Any Democratic President in Generations," Politico's wordy headline screamed. "Biden bets big," Axios said more succinctly. "Big Government Is Back," said the NPR headline. The Washington Post described Biden's"sweeping agenda" and the New York Times called it a "risky gamble."

Except that none of this actually feels risky. On the contrary, Biden was able to frame everything he said in convincingly reasonable tones. Put at ease by his patented "c'mon, man" approach, so far, it seems like the public can't be bamboozled into feeling angry, scared or worried about Biden's surprisingly progressive aspirations. Snap polls after the speech showed that 85% of viewers approved of Biden's speech, out of a crowd that was only 54% Democratic. This comports with previous polling that shows that,while Biden's approval numbers are stuck in the low 50s because of GOP voters who will never say they like him,an overwhelming majority like his actual policy ideas. Demonizing him as "tax-and-spend" isn't working, because voters are increasingly keen on the idea that we should be taxing corporations and wealthy people and spending it on the programs that Biden has successfully — and correctly — identified as investments in our nation's future: infrastructure, child care, jobs.

"We have to prove democracy still works," Biden said during his speech. [=] "That our government still works– and can deliver for the people."

It all feels so reasonable. Why shouldn't Americans get to have democracy and get to have a functioning government, especially since we pay for it? Why shouldn't we want, as Biden said, "the wealthiest 1% of Americans to pay their fair share"? Why shouldn't we try to eliminate child poverty, an idea that made Republicans in the chamber so salty they refused to clap for it? Why shouldn't the wealthiest country in the world be able to provide its citizens with the same standard of living so many other less wealthy countries do with ease?

The thing is, these are the same exact arguments that progressives have been making for decades, and yet Republicans — aided by a loud right-wing media, the racism of the majority of white voters, and a mainstream media addicted to false equivalencies — were successful at demonizing such reasonable points as basically communism. Why then does it seem like Republicans suddenly can't land a glove on Biden?

Part of the credit should go to Biden himself, who is rising above what doubters like myself thought of him. He was able, as John Harwood of CNN said, to speak "in plain, non-political, non-ideological language invoking the people he wants to help."

But let's face it: Republicans also did this to themselves.

For decades, Republicans have increasingly abandoned policy debate in favor of culture war antics, race-baiting and raw tribalism. From Monica Lewinsky to Barack Obama's birth certificate, the modern GOP has turned politics into conflicts about personality and identity, not policy. Even during the height of the debate over the Affordable Care Act — the biggest policy agenda Democrats had pushed since the 1960s — the Republicans were mired in culture war theatrics. Their response was to freak out about abortion and birth control, as well as the "death panels" nonsense, which was always a barely coded conspiracy theory about Democrats taking away health care from old white people so younger, more racially diverse people could have it. They created a political environment of style over substance because, of course, they know that they can't win debates about policy on the merits.

The result is a situation where voters think Biden is more moderate than Obama was, even though the reverse is true, simply because Biden looks and sounds like more people's idea of a moderate. Those stereotypes are racist, to be clear. As Paul Waldman of the Washington Post points out, Obama "was young, Black, cosmopolitan, hip and the hero of young people across the country," and Biden "has always been the establishment," a "folksy guy with a bottomless supply of bromides."

No wonder right-wing media has, in desperation, grasped for a bizarre conspiracy theory accusing Vice President Kamala Harris of being the "real" president.They don't know how to do oppositional politics that isn't about base racism and sexism. But it is also an increasingly losing proposition. The forces that allowed Obama to get elected in the first place — Americans growing more relaxed about racial diversity and more urbane in general — are only growing stronger as time goes by.

One line during Biden's speech Wednesday night really jumped out at a number of pundits: "Trickle-down economics has never worked." It was a notably explicit repudiation of Reaganism. But it's also likely that large numbers of Americans, especially younger Americans, have no idea what "trickle-down economics" even is or was supposed to be. Not just because it is a failed economic theory that was always nonsense, though it is that. The phrase is more so a relic from a time when conservatives used to pretend to have serious policy ideas.

"Trickle-down economics" never made sense, but it sounded smart and gave Republicans a thing they could say to voters to explain why cutting taxes and government investment would somehow lead to prosperity. But mostly, they've given up even that kind of argument in favor of screeching about Dr. Seuss and "cancel culture," hoping these tactics would distract voters from their more substantive concerns. Even when Republicans half-heartedly try to argue against Biden's policy ideas, it's through lame tactics like arguing over the semantics of what constitutes "infrastructure."

Of course, a big part of the reason that Republicans want to avoid talking policy is that, increasingly, voters can see what decades of doing things their way has done to this country.

Low taxes on corporations and rich people, coupled with low levels of government investment, did not, as promised, produce a robust economy where private interests pay for all that stuff people want and need. Instead, our roads and buildings are falling apart, health care is a nightmare, and childcare and education are unaffordable. Food is cheap, in part because it is one sector government quietly subsidizes. But as Biden pointed out in his speech last night, so many Americans are living paycheck to paycheck that the economic downturn meant "nice cars, lined up for miles, waiting for a box of food to be put in their trunk."

Republicans are grumpy, extremely grumpy. Republican Senators watching the speech last night collectively looked like they smelled a fart, and not just because they were wearing masks. They're mad, not just because they know he's right. They're mad because they know he's popular and what he's saying is popular. They'll block as much of his agenda as they can and hope that voter suppression and gerrymandering do the rest. But on the merits of the argument itself? They're toast.

It's not because Biden is some super-politician. It's because Republicans spent decades making politics into a reality TV show. Now that we're facing a real crisis, the public is turning its eyes towards the comfort of a real politician who wants to do real policy. And Republicans have nothing to say in response.

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

RELATED ARTICLES AROUND THE WEB

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eg of good analysis, good caveat but no remedy?

no lnx

https://www.alternet.org/2021/02/trump-supporters/

salon

the persistent Trump "base" and the Republican members of Congress who maintain fealty to Donald Trump do so for a variety of reasons. They are not a monolithic body but a loosely associated conglomeration of supporters with their own individual or group reasons for remaining loyal to the twice-impeached ex-President.

"Membership" in the Trump base may include entry into one or more of the following categories.

"All-in" isolationists, ultra-nationalists, white supremacists, racists and insurrectionistsArguably all those who marched in Charlottesville in summer 2017 and many of those stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 are openly racist, and have felt liberated by the rhetoric and policies of the Trump era. For them, Trumpism represented an enticing outlet for perceived slights or a platform upon which to boost their identity, sense of meaning or being, and self-importance.

Opportunists and political chameleonsThose who fall into this category recognized that the Trump train presented itself as a vehicle by which one could achieve fame, success, ambition and political or personal gain. Those with political ambition watched Trump's tactics, saw its success and made the decision to be a Trump sycophant and copycat. Matt Gaetz and Marjorie Taylor Greene, mediocre members of society who had the financial means to run for Congress, are noted Trump exampled who will ride this train until it throws them off (and even then will continue to chase it). Fox News talking heads fall into this category as well. Following opportunity often requires suppressing any logic, rational thought or independent notions. This is a key factor behind the flip-flopping of politicians like House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (who has vacillated in his defense and indictment of Trump and his insurrection), Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio (two former Republican rivals to Trump who were mercilessly dragged by him only to become full-throated supporters), and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, for whom every Trump-related decision comes with an eye on the next election cycle. These are the political chameleons who will change as needed to survive.

Narrow-minded, limited information input and vulnerable to cultism This group of followers is either actively or passively limited in the information that they receive through on-air and online media outlets. As a result of their "soda straw" approach to Republicanism, conservatism or Trumpism, they are simply not exposed to the damning evidence that exists to show Trump and the GOP's unethical, immoral and likely criminal behavior. This is the consumer of a steady diet of right-wing sources such as Fox News, OANN and Newsmax. One cannot discuss this group without referring to the concept of shared omnipotence, a cult leader tactic by which followers are repeatedly told that the leader will take them to a "promised land" (e.g., a place of increased wealth, no immigrants or people of color, world superiority or dominance, protection from death) and if they don't follow, the result is certain doom.

Voting with their pocketbook Members of this group are totally focused on individual and family wealth. They voted for Trump twice because of his tax breaks for wealthier Americans. They may be repulsed by Trump the man, but they feel compelled to vote for him because they are profiting from his policies. They are one-issue voters and they will not be deterred by any of Trump's antics, lies or dishonesty.

Hold your nose and vote RepublicanThese group members are cousins of the previous group. This faction is diehard conservative Republicans who are unwavering in their support of the GOP based on years of support and the hope that this period is an aberration that will correct itself soon. Sen. Mitt Romney is one of the remaining stalwarts of this group.

But he and I are Christians! In many ways an outgrowth of the latter group, these followers maintain their identity and faith as evangelical Christians. They have consistently voted Republican for a widely varying set of reasons, the abortion issue first and foremost among them. Now, electing and supporting Donald Trump, who is arguably the embodiment of sin, requires resolution of a huge case of cognitive dissonance. To accept Trump and Trumpism requires that a "true" Christian must fit this obviously square block into a circular halo. Attempts to reconcile this dissonance include pairing Trump with known Christian leaders and evangelicals, citing scripture that appears to validate this choice, or projecting Christian values on to Trump and Trumpists.

Not all Trump supporters are alike. It is inaccurate and wrong to lump them together. It misses the point and undermines any chance for reaching out to supporters in order to reinvent a Republican Party that is reasonable, more moderate and hinged to our American democracy.

Short of convicting and repudiating Trump at his upcoming impeachment trial — which appears highly unlikely — we will be left with the task of disambiguating and understanding his followers and what motivates them, and connecting with as many of them as possible. The future of our two-party democracy, and our entire country, will hang in the balance.

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https://www.alternet.org/2021/01/american-empire/

def/sum

...

An Empire in Decay

If you need proof that the last superpower, our very own empire, is indeed crumbling, consider the year we've just lived through, not to mention the first few weeks of 2021. I mentioned above some of the factors that contributed to the collapse of the famed Roman empire in the fifth century. It's fair to say that some of those same things are now evident in twenty-first-century America. Here are four obvious candidates:

Grotesque Economic Inequality:Ever since President Ronald Reagan began the Republican Party's long war on unions and working people, economic inequality has steadily increased in this country, punctuated by terrible shocks like the Great Recession of 2007-2008 and, of course, by the Covid-19 disaster. We've seen 40 years of tax reductions for the wealthy, stagnant wages for the rest of us (including a federal minimum wage that hasn't changed since 2009), and attacks on programs like TANF (welfare) and SNAP (food stamps) that literally keep poor people alive.

The Romans relied on slave labor for basics like food and clothing. This country relies on super-exploited farm and food-factory workers, many of whom are unlikely to demand more or better because they came here without authorization. Our (extraordinarily cheap) clothes are mostly produced by exploited people in other countries.

The pandemic has only exposed what so many people already knew: that the lives of the millions of working poor in this country are growing ever more precarious and desperate. The gulf between rich and poor widens by the day to unprecedented levels. Indeed, as millions have descended into poverty since the pandemic began, the Guardianreports that this country's 651 billionaires have increased their collective wealth by $1.1 trillion. That's more than the $900 billion Congress appropriated for pandemic aid in the omnibus spending bill it passed at the end of December 2020.

An economy like ours, which depends so heavily on consumer spending, cannot survive the deep impoverishment of so many people. Those 651 billionaires are not going to buy enough toys to dig us out of this hole.

Wild Overspending on the Military: At the end of 2020, Congress overrode Trump's veto of the annual National Defense Authorization Act, which provided a stunning $741 billion to the military this fiscal year. (That veto, by the way, wasn't in response to the vast sums being appropriated in the midst of a devastating pandemic, but to the bill's provisions for renaming military bases currently honoring Confederate generals, among other extraneous things.) A week later, Congress passed that omnibus pandemic spending bill and it contained an additional$696 billion for the Defense Department.

All that money for "security" might be justified, if it actually made our lives more secure. In fact, our federal priorities virtually take food out of the mouths of children to feed the maw of the military-industrial complex and the never-ending wars that go with it. Even before the pandemic, more than 10% of U.S. families regularly experienced food insecurity. Now, it's a quarter of the population.

Corruption So Deep It Undermines the Political System: Suffice it to say that the man who came to Washington promising to "drain the swamp" has presided over one of the most corrupt administrations in U.S. history. Whether it's been blatant self-dealing (like funneling government money to his own businesses); employing government resources to forward his reelection (including using the White House as a staging ground for parts of the Republican National Convention and his acceptance speech); tolerating corrupt subordinates like Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross; or contemplating a self-pardon, the Trump administration has set the bar high indeed for any future aspirants to the title of "most corrupt president."

One problem with such corruption is that it undermines the legitimacy of government in the minds of the governed. It makes citizens less willing to obey laws, pay taxes, or act for the common good by, for example, wearing masks and socially distancing during a pandemic. It rips apart social cohesion from top to bottom.

Of course, Trump's most dangerous corrupt behavior — one in which he's been joined by the most prominent elected and appointed members of his government and much of his party — has been his campaign to reject the results of the 2020 general election. The concerted and cynical promotion of the big lie that the Democrats stole that election has so corrupted faith in the legitimacy of government that up to 68% of Republicans now believe the vote was rigged to elect Joe Biden. At "best," Trump has set the stage for increased Republican suppression of the vote in communities of color. At worst, he has so poisoned the electoral process that a substantial minority of Americans will never again accept as free and fair an election in which their candidate loses.

A Country in Ever-Deepening Conflict: White supremacy has infected the entire history of this country, beginning with the near-extermination of its native peoples. The Constitution, while guaranteeing many rights to white men, proceeded to codify the enslavement of Africans and their descendants. In order to maintain that enslavement, the southern states seceded and fought a civil war. After a short-lived period of Reconstruction in which Black men were briefly enfranchised, white supremacy regained direct legal control in the South, and flourished in a de facto fashion in the rest of the country.

In 1858, two years before that civil war began, Abraham Lincoln addressed the Illinois Republican State Convention, reminding those present that

"'A house divided against itself cannot stand.' I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved — I do not expect the house to fall – but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing, or all the other."

More than 160 years later, the United States clearly not only remains but has become ever more divided. If you doubt that the Civil War is still being fought today, look no farther than the Confederate battle flags proudly displayed by members of the insurrectionary mob that overran the Capitol on January 6th.

Oh, and the barbarians? They are not just at the gate; they have literally breached it, as we saw in Washington when they burst through the doors and windows of the center of government.

Building a Country From the Rubble of Empire

Human beings have long built new habitations quite literally from the rubble — the fallen stones and timbers — of earlier ones. Perhaps it's time to think about what kind of a country this place — so rich in natural resources and human resourcefulness — might become if we were to take the stones and timbers of empire and construct a nation dedicated to the genuine security of all its people. Suppose we really chose, in the words of the preamble to the Constitution, "to promote the general welfare, and to secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity."

Suppose we found a way to convert the desperate hunger for ever more, which is both the fuel of empires and the engine of their eventual destruction, into a new contentment with "enough"? What would a United States whose people have enough look like? It would not be one in which tiny numbers of the staggeringly wealthy made hundreds of billions more dollars and the country's military-industrial complex thrived in a pandemic, while so many others went down in disaster.

This empire will fall sooner or later. They all do. So, this crisis, just at the start of the Biden and Harris years, is a fine time to begin thinking about what might be built in its place. What would any of us like to see from our front windows next year?

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insurrection sine qua non

apogee culmination

aha-ish: HUB ie bad intersectionality it was gathering of tribes, via and b/c of soc med, vax, qanon, trumpistas, boogaloo...

alt rt keeps trying to make online manifest IRL [LARP] "back to our parents' basements" post-gamergate // magical thinking? [qanon dark side of magical tjink, an ememy you must defeat] recall GRU organized opposing groups online to clash IRL; mass hallucination fueled by echo bubble eg after insurr accidently tuned into AM radio JOK BS; role play save world in videogame to LARP boogaloo militia cos play, constant amplification of shit post--> put up or shut up, are you authentic brave patriot or fag squish? "castrated" absent fathers so peterson 12 laws, proud boys inititiation rite of passage requires violence incremental KB hierachy; fem and CRM undermine white male birthright to have comf MC life if not rule; GOP neo-lib RR BS orig MAGA lied while steadily undermined material basis for secure life eg factory and social safety net. trump accel deterioration of faith in gov't that we need to repair commons, and even more Globalist BS ~ pandemic and AGW so may be be doom/death spiral?

https://www.alternet.org/2021/01/boogaloo-boys/

alex h

Following the violent January 6 assault on the U.S. Capitol Building, national security experts are pointing to the Boogaloo Bois as one of the extremist groups that law enforcement will need to keep a close eye on in the months ahead. Dallas-based journalist Michael J. Mooney examines Boogaloo's goals in an article published by The Atlantic this week, stressing that although they didn't have a "huge presence" in that attack, they have been inspired by it.

"The riot at the Capitol last Wednesday featuredpartisans of the long-gone country of South Vietnam, Falun Gongadherents, end-times Christians, neo-Nazis, QAnon believers, a handful of Orthodox Jews, and Daniel Boone impersonators," Mooney writes. "The Boogaloos weren't a huge presence in that mob. But according to federal officials, the attack on the Capitol has galvanized them and could inspire Boogaloo violence in D.C. and around the country between now and Inauguration Day."

Most of the far-right insurrectionists who stormed the Capitol Building were devotees of President Donald Trump and were hoping to prevent Congress from certifying the Electoral College victory of President-elect Joe Biden. But according to Mooney, "The Boogaloos don't appear interested in fighting for Donald Trump — they tend to despise him, mostly because they think he panders to the police. But for the past year, Boogaloo Bois all over the United States have been cheering on the country's breakdown, waiting for the moment when their nihilistic memes would come to life and the country would devolve into bloody chaos."

Many liberal and progressive activists, contrary to what right-wing media often claim, have stressed that they are not anti-police — that they want to reform law enforcement, not abolish it. But at Mooney points out, the Boogaloo Bois have expressed a visceral hatred of law enforcement in general.

"Some are likely just joking when they 'shit-post' about shooting cops or 'yeeting alphabet boys' — killing government law-enforcement agents," Mooney explains. "But others seem serious. They've already shown up heavily armed — and in their signature Hawaiian shirts — at protests and at state capitols. They've allegedly killed law-enforcement officers, talked about throwing Molotov cocktails at cops during the racial-justice protests this summer, and plotted to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer. They say they want a total reset of society, even if they haven't thought very hard about what, exactly, should come next."

The Boogaloo Bois have made it clear that they want a civil war, and Mooney notes that he has "spent the past few months trying to figure" exactly why they want one. For his article, Mooney interviewed JJ MacNab, a fellow with the Program on Extremism at George Washington University

According to MacNab, "They really want to create their own in-world so the rest of us won't get their jokes. It's tribal. These are tribal markings: the shirts they wear, the jargon they speak, even the types of guns they like."

But Mooney writes that even though Boogaloo's beliefs are nebulous and seem incoherent at times, that doesn't mean they aren't dangerous.

"Watching hordes of armed people storming the doors of Congress, facing off with any cop who offered resistance, killing a Capitol Police officer, and chasing another through the halls of a government building, I couldn't help thinking: These are the fantasies that Boogaloo Bois have been posting about for months," Mooney writes. "The riot may have captured their imagination."

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/11/trump-democrats/

monbiot build social movement

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/11/historian/

long paul r salon

As soon as Joe Biden's victory in the 2020 election was clear, the question of what lies ahead immediately came to the fore: What do Democrats need to do, not just to help America recover from the profound damage of the Trump presidency, but to address the long-term underlying problems that made it possible in the first place? To help answer that question, I turned to the man who took the measure of those problems in the first place,sociologist and historian Jack Goldstone, whose 1991 book, "Revolution and Rebellion in the Early Modern World," revolutionized our understanding of revolutions as products of organizational failure in coping with demographic pressures.

Goldstone's book appeared just as America was celebrating "The End of History," as announced in a then-famous book by Francis Fukuyama. With the end of the Cold War, everything had supposedly been settled. There would be no more revolutions or ideological struggles. Almost 30 years later, no one thinks that anymore, and the demographic factors Goldstone identified — such as the "youth bulges" associated with the Arab Spring — have become commonplace terms in discussing potential revolutions. Goldstone's model combined measures of demographically-driven social stress from the mass population, the elites and the state to produce a single number, the "political stress indicator," orpsi. State breakdown — and thus revolution — has only occurred when psi rises to dramatically high levels. Unlike earlier theories, Goldstone's approach explained when revolutions didn't happen, as well as when they did.

I discovered Goldstone's work by way of cultural anthropologist Peter Turchin, who refined and expanded his model and applied it to a broader range of societies, including modern industrial states. Four years ago, the month before Donald Trump was elected, I reviewed Turchin's book, "Ages of Discord: A Structural-Demographic Analysis of American History," which predicted an approaching period of social and political disintegration, regardless of whether Trump won or lost.

But even in 1991, Goldstone had seen worrying signs in America of the same sorts of problems his book described in England and France in the 17th and 18th centuries, respectively, as well as in China and the Ottoman Empire. Most notable was the problem of "selfish elites" who "preferred to protect their private wealth, even at the expense of a deterioration of state finances, public services, and long-term international strength." [BTB evans elite panic vs rebecca solnit paradise built in hell]

That's why Goldstone's perspective on the problems facing us today seem particularly worth our attention. He and Turchin combined to write an article for Noema magazine in September, "Welcome to the Turbulent Twenties," and BuzzFeed highlighted their perspective — and specifically, the role of psi — in a late October story on the possibility of rising political violence in the U.S. But their perspective deserves much more than an occasional mention — it should inform the entire framework in which our discussions take place.

I reached out to Goldstone even before this election had been decided, seeking the broadest perspective I could possibly get. Some of what he and Turchin wrote about is admittedly now difficult to imagine, given that Democrats may not win a Senate majority and have lost at least nine seats in the House. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Your book "Revolution and Rebellion in the Early Modern World" came out just after the end of the Cold War, at the same time as Francis Fukuyama's celebrated book "The End of History and The Last Man," which claimed that we had reached "the end-point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government." Fukuyama was hardly alone at the time, but you offered a strikingly different view, one much more consistent with how history has unfolded in subsequent decades. What was the key insight that gave you such a different view?

Most people had viewed revolutions as a result of great ideological struggles. And if there weren't going to be any more such great struggles, people thought there wouldn't be any more revolutions either. It's certainly true that the leaders of revolutions need an ideological platform, but in my view the causes of revolutions were organizational failures, and the ideological shifts come about when people feel the organizational failure of their society and look for new ideas on how to fix it.

In my view, organizational failure is not something that goes away with some march of history. It's always possible, even likely, that societies will get themselves into trouble. Governments tend to overspend, elites tend to fight taxation and accumulate resources. As elites grow in number, they tend to fight more and more among themselves for position and wealth, and if elites do not make sure that the wealth of society is distributed in the way that gives ordinary people hope and a stake in society, then they can be recruited to opposition, even radical movements.

So I feel the risk of revolutions is always there. The ideologies may change. We went from an ideology of liberalism to an ideology of communism and then, when communism faded, the Middle East and much of Asia started turning to an ideology of radical Islam. So I had no reason to believe that revolutions would disappear.

When they reappeared with vigor I was not surprised, and my work started getting a lot more attention — especially after the Arab Spring, which was a whole bunch of old-fashioned violent, civil war-inducing revolutions. They obviously had a lot to do with the failure of states to provide jobs for the young, the problem of over-educating a large cohort of youth, the failure to distribute economic progress equally.

So, my vision turned out — not happily but, as it turned out, correctly — to foresee that many more revolutions were possible. In fact, I'll go one step further. At the time of the collapse of the Soviet Union, many people said, "Well, those aren't revolutions, those are something new. Those are refolutions" — with an F — "They're more like reforms, they're negotiated, they are peaceful or they are democratic movements." I was a little bit alone in saying, "Now, wait a minute, to me they look like revolutions."

You had a failure of states that were organized on the basis of state communism, and they unwound differently because the populations tended to be older and thus were less drawn to radicalism and violence. So you had the color revolutions as the response, but when you talk about why these things occurred and how they played out and whether we'll see more of them in the future, the answer was, "They're organizational failures. Yes, we will see more of these." And indeed, after 1998 is when so we started seeing more color revolutions across Asia, and we will continue to see those.

In fact, I think the real difference between color revolutions and violent revolutions is not just a matter of tactics or ideology. It's got a great deal to do with the age structure of the population, the educational job profile. When you have a younger population that's more educated, that's suffering higher unemployment, you're likely to get a more ideologically extreme revolution. When you have an older population that is in a stagnant economy, you're more likely to get the color revolutions, seeking just to open up and democratize politics.

Another big argument I had with people at the time was that they felt that once capitalism had triumphed, there would not be any more need for revolutions. But I said this is not about capitalism. The revolutions of the 19th century were still about the same kind of organizational state failures that we'd seen in earlier centuries, and once we get to the 20th and 21st centuries, we could still have organizational failures, even in modern, fully industrialized states.

Your model actually had three contributing factors to political instability: the mass population, the elites and the state. You've already talked about that dynamic, but could you break it down into those three parts and say a little more specifically about each of them?

Let's start with what it takes for society to continue to work and successfully reproduce itself across time. We tend to think about society as how it looks at a particular moment in time: Are people getting along or are they not getting along? Is it because they disagree or whatever? That to me is a very incomplete, shortsighted way to approach the dynamic nature of society. Instead I tend to think in terms of flows of resources, flows of people....

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/11/experts-explain-the-economic-situations-that-beget-successful-coups/

matt r

Throughout history, coups and coup attempts are more often than not linked to economic distress: the coup's leaders side with one group of industrialists or power-brokers, and opposition groups are supported by another. Now, Trump's own refusal to concede in the 2020 presidential election after a legitimate election loss, and his machinations to remain in power, have led to public debate over whether he is trying to perform a coup — or if that's even possible given the political and economic climate.

Salon reached out to economists who explained the ways in which current America's economic struggles have, and have not, created the climate in which Trump's coup attempt is possible. The verdict? The situation may not be quite right for Trump to be successful — with some caveats.

Because of Trump's political disposition, his coup d'etat would epitomize a right-wing coup — in which an authoritarian seizes control to consolidate their power on behalf of the ruling classes, from which Trump originates. Disregarding the legal and (possibly) military elements required for success, Trump could very well have popular support from his base were he to seize power. Indeed, polls show that 70 percent of Republicans accept Trump's disinformation about the election not being "free and fair," and seem willing and ready to turn against the concept of democracy.

"As for the broader question, there are tensions," Dr. Ioana Marinescu, assistant professor of economics at the University of Pennsylvania's School of Social Policy & Practice, wrote to Salon. "Rising inequality and stagnation of wages among the less educated should have empowered the left, but the left has increasingly become the party of the educated elites so they were not able to fully capitalize on this."

Marinescu noted that economist Dr. Thomas Piketty explored these themes last year in his book "Capital and Ideology," then added that "the populist or conservative right has then been able in some cases to speak to disaffected workers (those for example who lost their jobs to the China shock) by showing more respect for them and their values, and by promising a return to the prior state of the world (bring back manufacturing, something that is pretty hopeless given the economics)."

Dr. Richard D. Wolff,professor emeritus of economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, talked to Salon about how economic factors can usually be found in coups and attempted coups, although it would be a mistake to assume they are the only relevant variables.

"These are always multi-causal, multi-dimensional events," Wolff told Salon. "We can talk about the economics, but the economic aspects — and that's what they are — are never alone, or are never the only significant factor. . . . Economics always contributes to the attempt to make a coup, whether or not it's successful, and economics are always affected by a coup — again, whether it's successful or not. It's part of the story, but it's never some kind of dominating part, at least not in my experience. . . . but it's never absent either, and it wouldn't be here in the United States."

Wolff proceeded to explain to Salon that the United States "is in an extreme economic turmoil situation, fraught with enormous suffering coming at the end of a period of very profound changes and confronting [t]he upsurge in coronavirus cases all over the country." He noted that these conditions can make people either more politically active or resign themselves to political inactivity. The last occasion when America faced levels of unemployment, income inequality and lack of economic opportunity for young people was during the Great Depression in the 1930s, Wolff pointed out.

"Interestingly, during that Great Depression, the reaction of the mass of people was to become more politically active, not less so," Wolff said. "What struck so many of us was that, already at the period in 2008 and 2009 when we had the so-called Great Recession, was the level of non-activism. The fact that you didn't have the rise of a massive union organizing movement, the way you did in the 1930s with the CIO. You didn't have a mass upsurge of people joining two socialist and one communist party this time. You did have a bump up with the Democratic Socialists of America, but it was much smaller, much more modest, much more isolated, than what you had in the 1930s."

He added, "Now we have record-breaking inequality before and during the COVID-19 crisis, at least since it hit in March. The Bezoses of the world have gotten way richer, the mass of people the opposite, et cetera, et cetera. I think you've had pretty much the resignation of the mass of people, with the exception of a few signs, but I don't think they've congealed yet to give you the mass progressive upsurge that you had in the 1930s."

By contrast, America is finding itself in a situation now where a far right-winger like Trump is able to undermine the core institutions of democracy, although Wolff stopped short of saying that it will amount to a full-fledged coup.

"The bottom line of what I'm telling you is that the things that make coups happen, that have any kind of traction, don't seem to me to be present here," Wolff said, pointing out how American right-wingers misread public sentiment when attempting to pull off recent coups in other countries like Venezuela and Bolivia.

"My reading of the United States — and I'm frightened by it all too, so I'm not sitting on some pedestal of of self-assuredness — but I don't read a situation that would allow [Trump] to get away with anything more than either a quiet exit or, if that's not available, a blustery exit," Wolff explained. "If he's not smart enough to see that's his best option,some kind of coup-type event about which Stephen Colbert will have a lot of fun."

Dr. Karl Widerquist, a professor of philosophy at Georgetown University–Qatar who has doctorates in political theory and economics, told Salon that economic factors were probably a "wash" in terms of the 2020 election, with some American voters likely blaming Trump for the current bad economy (and correctly so) while others may have blamed the COVID-19 lockdowns and supported Trump's opposition to them.

"He's taken advantage of being president to further his white nationalism, but I don't think that's his main goal," Wilderquist told Salon. "I think Trump's main goal for his entire life is to convince as many people as possible that he's a winner that he wins and wins and wins, and that he's the world's biggest winner.And like a lot of us, he doesn't want to be a loser. The way to step down without feeling like a loser is to convince his echo chamber that he didn't lose. He won and that it was stolen from him. He doesn't need a coup to do that. He just needs to complain a lot."

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/10/heading-off-the-prospects-of-a-dark-and-tumultuous-future

quite long, see post trump

...Fixing Capitalism- Building A New Foundation

There is growing consensus that the current economic and political systems are broken. Social unrest is waging a battle against ages-old systemic racism and social exclusion and the absence of social, economic, and physical protections. Choices presented to us for too long have posited that for prosperity to blossom we could not have sustainability. We are told that to have efficiency, we had to sacrifice equity. But these are false choices. The blind worship of free markets and unabridged global trade have benefited only a few whilst exploiting many. A skewed relationship favoring the owners of capital over the many who labor on their behalf is an imbalance achieved and sustained through the extraordinary influence of money in politics. The nearly unlimited flow of private funds to support campaigns has left us with a form of plutocratic capitalism that must be reversed. We need to restore a political process and governmental institutions that work for all citizens. We must hold our elected officials accountable to the populations that elected them, not to those who bought them.

As a priority, campaign finance reforms and the role of lobbyists must be fundamentally changed to tip scales back so that our political economy is no longer shaped by a self-serving ruling class. As citizens, we can no longer remain complacent as elected representatives from both parties talk reform of campaign finance but continue to pocket the proceeds from corporations and political action committees. Excessive inequality and monopolistic concentrations are the only outcomes of a system of long-term political investments in the representatives that we elect (and continue to mostly re-elect). It is they who reap the rewards. America must reclaim a sense of trusteeship from its leaders

The structure of tax policies in the US is designed to favor those at the top. Those who argue that taxes are an impediment to growth fail to appreciate the vast gains in income and wealth for those at the very top of the income ladder while permitting mega-corporations to pay no taxes at all. A more progressive form of taxation with clear redistribution benefits and a restructuring of business taxes favoring socially desirable investments and productivity improvements must be undertaken to ensure a sustainable economy.

Regulatory institutions suffering from long-term neglect and underfunding, are often led by former industry leaders who come from the very institutions they are tasked to regulate. Corporations now have inordinate market power through vertical and horizontal integration, stifling the consumers voice. Furthermore, digital technologies and artificial intelligence have fundamentally restructured the economy and come to dominate commerce and trade. The new economy requires new and more appropriate regulatory functions and processes to protect consumers.

For too long, we have treated the long-term adverse impacts on environment and worker health and safety as "externalities" in our economic accounting. In the end, these costs have been ultimately shifted to the taxpayers while the profits earned over many years by abusive enterprises remain untouched. There is no free lunch. Government has an obligation to protect societal interests in the long run by incorporating, through pricing and taxes, the cost of these externalities. Consumers too must appreciate the reality that low prices often come at the expense of an exploited workforce or a damaged environment....

NB RR and others see overlap between CRIM and MIL, 4 horse is systems analysis

https://www.alternet.org/2020/07/robert-reich-the-real-choice-is-social-control-or-social-investment/

Some societies center on social control, others on social investment.

Social-control societies put substantial resources into police, prisons, surveillance, immigration enforcement, and the military. Their purpose is to utilize fear, punishment, and violence to divide people and keep the status quo in place — perpetuating the systemic oppression of Black and brown people, and benefiting no one but wealthy elites.

Social-investment societies put more resources into healthcare, education, affordable housing, jobless benefits, and children. Their purpose is to free people from the risks and anxieties of daily life and give everyone a fair shot at making it.

Donald Trump epitomizes the former. He calls himself the “law and order” president. He even wants to sic the military on Americans protesting horrific police killings.

He has created an unaccountable army of federal agents who go into cities like Portland, Oregon – without showing their identities – and assault innocent Americans.

Trump is the culmination of forty years of increasing social control in the United States and decreasing social investment – a trend which, given the deep-seated history of racism in the United States, falls disproportionately on Black people, indigeneous people, and people of color.

Spending on policing in the United States has almost tripled, from $42.3 billion in 1977 to $114.5 billion in 2017.

America now locks away 2.2 million people in prisons and jails. That’s a 500 percent increase from 40 years ago. The nation now has the largest incarcerated population in the world.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement has exploded. More people are now in ICE detention than ever in its history.

Total military spending in the U.S. has soared from $437 billion in 2003 to $935.8 billion this fiscal year.

The more societies spend on social controls, the less they have left for social investment. More police means fewer social services. American taxpayers spend $107.5 billion more on police than on public housing.

More prisons means fewer dollars for education. In fact, America is now spending more money on prisons than on public schools. Fifteen states now spend $27,000 more per person in prison than they do per student.

As spending on controls has increased, spending on public assistance has shrunk. Fewer people are receiving food stamps. Outlays for public health have declined.

America can’t even seem to find money to extend unemployment benefits during this pandemic.

Societies that skimp on social investment end up spending more on social controls that perpetuate violence and oppression. This trend is a deep-seated part of our history.

The United States began as a control society. Slavery– America’s original sin – depended on the harshest conceivable controls. Jim Crow and redlining continued that legacy.

But in the decades following World War II, the nation began inching toward social investment – the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, the Fair Housing Act, and substantial investments in health and education.

Then America swung backward to social control.

Since Richard Nixon declared a “war on drugs,” four times as many people have been arrested for possessing drugs as for selling them.

Of those arrested for possession, half have been charged with possessing cannabis for their own use. Nixon’s strategy had a devastating effect on Black people that is still felt today: a Black person is nearly 4 times more likely to be arrested for cannabis possession than a white person, even though they use it at similar rates.

Bill Clinton put 88,000 additional police on the streets and got Congress to mandate life sentences for people convicted of a felony after two or more prior convictions, including drug offenses.

This so-called “three strikes you’re out” law was replicated by many states, and, yet again, disproportionately impacted Black Americans. In California, for instance, Black people were 12 times more likely than white people to be incarcerated under three-strikes laws, until the state reformed the law in 2012. Clinton also “reformed” welfare into a restrictive program that does little for families in poverty today.

Why did America swing back to social control?

Part of the answer has to do with widening inequality. As the middle class collapsed and the ranks of the poor grew, those in power viewed social controls as cheaper than social investment, which would require additional taxes and a massive redistribution of both wealth and power.

Meanwhile, politicians whose power depends on maintaining the status quo, used racism – from Nixon’s “law and order” and Reagan’s “welfare queens” to Trump’s blatantly racist rhetoric – to deflect the anxieties of an increasingly overwhelmed white working class. It’s the same old strategy. So long as racial animosity exists, the poor and working class won’t join together to topple the system that keeps so many Americans in poverty, and Black Americans oppressed.

The last weeks of protests and demonstrations have exposed what’s always been true: social controls are both deadly and unsustainable. They require more and more oppressive means of terrorizing communities and they drain resources that would ensure Black people not only survive, but thrive.

This moment calls on us to relinquish social control and ramp up our commitment to social investment.

It’s time we invest in affordable housing and education, not tear gas, batons, and state-sanctioned murder. It’s time we invest in keeping children fed and out of poverty, not putting their parents behind bars. It’s time to defund the police, and invest in communities. We have no time to waste.

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wolff sys status:

https://www.alternet.org/2020/07/why-the-government-mostly-helps-people-who-need-it-the-least-even-during-a-crisis/

spate of artls on US declibne leadership for a while? an 720

https://www.alternet.org/2020/07/a-historian-breaks-down-the-4-different-scenarios-that-could-lead-to-americas-collapse-by-2025

[quite long]

A soft landing for America 40 years from now? Don’t bet on it. The demise of the United States as the global superpower could come far more quickly than anyone imagines. If Washington is dreaming of 2040 or 2050 as the end of the American Century, a more realistic assessment of domestic and global trends suggests that in 2025, just 15 years from now, it could all be over except for the shouting.

This story first ran in December 2010]

Despite the aura of omnipotence most empires project, a look at their history should remind us that they are fragile organisms. So delicate is their ecology of power that, when things start to go truly bad, empires regularly unravel with unholy speed: just a year for Portugal, two years for the Soviet Union, eight years for France, 11 years for the Ottomans, 17 years for Great Britain, and, in all likelihood, 22 years for the United States, counting from the crucial year 2003.

Future historians are likely to identify the Bush administration’s rash invasion of Iraq in that year as the start of America’s downfall. However, instead of the bloodshed that marked the end of so many past empires, with cities burning and civilians slaughtered, this twenty-first century imperial collapse could come relatively quietly through the invisible tendrils of economic collapse or cyberwarfare.....

https://www.alternet.org/2020/07/theres-a-hidden-economic-trendline-that-is-shattering-the-global-trade-system/

Former U.S. Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers has recently conceded: “In general, economic thinking has privileged efficiency over resilience, and it has been insufficiently concerned with the big downsides of efficiency.” Policy across the globe is therefore moving in a more overtly nationalistic direction to rectify this shortcoming.

COVID-19 has accelerated a process that was well underway before it, spreading beyond U.S.-China-EU trade negotiations and into the world’s 50 largest economies. As much as many defenders of the old order lament this trend, it is as significant a shift as the dawn of the World Trade Organization (WTO) global trade era.

Economists, politicians, and leading pundits are often tempted to see new economic patterns through the prisms of the past; we are therefore likely to hear that we’re back in an era of 19th-century mercantilism, or 1970s-style stagflation. But that misses the moment—the motives are different, and so are the outcomes.

What we are experiencing is the realization by state planners of developed countries that new technologies enable a rapid ability to expand or initiate new and profitable production capacity closer to or inside their own markets. The cost savings in transport, packaging and security and benefits to regional neighbors and these countries’ domestic workforces will increasingly compete with the price of goods produced through the current internationalized trade system. U.S. national politicians from President Trump to Senator Elizabeth Warren will be joined by a growing chorus who see the long-term domestic political benefit of supporting this transition..

the combination of high-speed communication, advances in automated manufacturing and computing combined with widespread access to the blueprints and information necessary to kick-start new production capacity increasingly makes the current international network of supply chains resemble a Rube Goldberg contraption, and it lightens the currency outflow challenge that many economies have had to deal with for the past seven decades.

Growing political will to restore manufacturing capacity in the national interest will have a shattering effect on countries that built up their economies through a labor price advantage over the past 40 years. No amount of currency depreciation or product dumping can overcome the reality of a country’s foreign customer base suddenly opting to produce and buy their own goods at competitive prices.

Taken in sum, the transformation underway isn’t just Donald Trump demanding less dependency on China’s production capacity—it’s a global process. It’s also India signaling it’s going to try to strike its own technological path away from China.

New Patterns of Production

...

https://www.alternet.org/2020/06/the-coronavirus-next-victim-could-be-capitalism/

salon

The pandemic has deftly illustrated two lessons that we, as a civilization, must learn in order to survive:

Science does not care about your political ideology.

The economic status quo — namely, free market capitalism — is fatally flawed, in ways that the coronavirus pandemic has brought to light.

The first lesson was evident in President Donald Trump’s initial response to the coronavirus. Despite being warned as early as January that it was an existential threat, he dismissed his advisers’ concerns as “alarmist” and did everything he could to ignore and downplay the problem so that the stock market wouldn’t be negatively impacted. It took him more than ten weeks to declare a state of national emergency and, even then, America’s ability to respond to the pandemic was weakened by the various budget-cutting policies he implemented prior to the pandemic that ignored expert advice and made it more difficult for the Centers for Disease Control to do its job.

a similar point could be made about man-made climate change. Even though the scientific consensus is clear — global climate change is real, caused by humans and poses an existential threat to our planet — Trump continues to deny it solely because fossil fuel companies and other special interest groups don’t want to lose money.

There in an additional factor in both the coronavirus and climate change denialism, of course: A distrust of intellectuals who use pesky, inconvenient facts in disciplines like epidemiology and climatology to make arguments that go against conservative, free market doctrine. After all, a strong centralized government is needed to regulate the economy in ways that will protect the planet from climate change and to save lives as the pandemic worsens. Because right-wingers don’t want to believe that the federal government should have this power, they cannot acknowledge that it is necessary on these occasions — and certainly not when doing so would seemingly concede a point to the left.

Yet scientific realities don’t change simply because right-wing egos would be wounded if the left is proved correct about pandemics and ecological apocalypses. That is why the pandemic reveals that science must always take precedence over ideological whinging when it comes to shaping key policy decisions.

“Ultimately, of course, the science is a key part of any decision, but the science alone does not determine what that decision should be,” Dr. Kevin Trenberth, a distinguished senior scientist in the Climate Analysis Section at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, told Salon. “And the politicians are supposed to be the ones who assimilate all of the information and time it and including the science, but also all of the possible consequences in all ways, shapes and forms including health, economics and society. And so on.”

He added, “The problem is I don’t think most politicians actually recognize their role, and it’s much worse in the United States than it is in many other countries. And the reason it’s much worse is because of advocacy, because of money in particular, because of Citizens United and the nasty politics that gets involved with using so-called dark money, television and all sorts of things like that.”

This brings us to the other fundamental truth that has been illustrated by the pandemic — namely, that our free market capitalist system is inherently unsustainable.

Part of that unsustainability is rooted in ecology.

“I think that there are larger lessons and messages here about the sustainability of a global population of nearly 8 billion and growing people on a planet with finite resources,” Dr. Michael E. Mann, a distinguished professor of atmospheric science at Penn State University, told Salon. “And what COVID-19 has laid bare is the fragility of this massive infrastructure which we’ve created to artificially maintain consumption far beyond the natural carrying capacity of the planet. And continued exploitation of fossil fuels, obviously, is inconsistent with a sustainable human society.” [calling dr ehrlich]

One of the chief problems with free market capitalism — or, for that matter, the global economic system in general — is that it depends on constant consumption in order to sustain itself. If that consumption is disrupted even for a brief period, the entire system grinds to a halt, with people losing their employment and poverty skyrocketing. As the coronavirus pandemic has revealed, this is not always because people needto be poor. It isn’t as if we experienced a famine or the sudden depletion of a vital natural resource. The fundamentals of our economy remain as strong as they ever were; the problem is that, because people are not able to continue consuming, the edifice built on top of that foundation has begun to crumble.

“Going with the structural metaphor concept, there always huge cracks underneath the facades of capitalism, and the huge weight of this pandemic has widened those cracks,” Norman Solomon, co-founder and national coordinator of RootsAction.org and a Sanders delegate to the 2016 Democratic National Convention, told Salon. “For the most part, the people who are the most vulnerable anyway to corporate capitalism, they’re suffering the most, they’re dying the most.”

He added, “The entire political economy is geared to overproduction and over-consumption to maximize corporate profits. And at the same time, the access to consumable goods and services is so unequal. And I think these are coexisting problems. But if you look at it from 30,000 feet — I guess you can’t look at it from 30,000 feet now because nobody is flying — but if you look at it from a macro- view, the extended consumption is insane.”

The pandemic has also highlighted race and class differences in our society. Members of the African American and Latinx communities have been disproportionately impacted by the coronavirus, with African Americans making up almost half of the coronavirus cases in Philadelphia and the African American and Latinx communities making up more than three out of every five coronavirus deaths in New York City. In terms of economic inequality, as the Brookings Institution writes, “people living paycheck to paycheck in service sector jobs are in a very different position to those working in salaried jobs they can do from home. Stark gaps in wealth, health and work have gone from being chronic problems to acute ones.” The authors noted that even amenities that don’t always seem essential, such as a fast internet connection, have become vital for psychological health during the pandemic — and this, too, underscores the income gap.

The one glimmer of hope here is that the pandemic may push Americans toward a more just economic and social system.J. Miles Coleman, the associate editor of Sabato’s Crystal Ball, told Salon on Thursday that “we’re already intensely polarized as a country — people’s partisan preferences can influence everything from their shopping habits to dating life — but if the economic situation worsens, it certainly opens the door for radicalization.”

He added, “When the economy suffers, voters tend to be more open to anti-establishment or populist candidates: during the Great Depression, Huey Long with his ‘Every Man a King’ slogan tapped into that sentiment, and was seen as a threat to Franklin Roosevelt.”

Certainly those changes would not come a moment too soon. We may pull through from this crisis, but global warming is just one of many future existential threats that lurk around the corner. Humanity is not going to survive — at least, not in any sense worth looking forward to — if it doesn’t start paying attention to scientific fact and using that knowledge for the betterment of all of us, not just the privileged.

cdv

https://www.alternet.org/2020/06/matrix-4-writer-breaks-down-the-clash-between-trumps-right-wing-revolution-and-the-democrats-wishful-thinking/

Matrix 4’ writer breaks down the clash between Trump’s right-wing revolution and the Democrats’ ‘wishful thinking’

Written by Chauncey DeVega / Salon June 3, 2020

The American people are in pain. There have been days of protest and civil unrest in many American cities following the killing of George Floyd, an unarmed black man, by the Minneapolis Police Department on Memorial Day.

This article was originally published at Salon

These convulsions in the American body politic are not just the result of one more murder of an unarmed, surrendered black man by a white cop, televised before the world like a New Age lynching. America’s problems are vast.

The coronavirus pandemic has killed more than 108,000 people in the United States, with the total number of cases now approaching 2 million. Donald Trump and his administration have responded with malevolent indifference. These deaths are but another entry in a social Darwinist ledger where the “useless eaters” are being left to die for “capitalism” — and in service to Trump’s 2020 re-election campaign.

Now the American people are struggling through a second Great Depression, in which tens of millions cannot pay their rents or mortgages, or feed their families. Republicans have only offered a pittance for ordinary people amid this global economic disaster — a onetime payment of $1,200 — while giving big corporations and the richest citizens trillions of dollars of the American people’s money.

Overall, there is a sense that something is deeply wrong in this country and this society, which elevated a racial authoritarian demagogue and avatar of corruption to the presidency. Many Americans feel ashamed by how their country now appears before the world. There is great potential for positive change in America, but to this point no great hero or leader has emerged. That vacuum is what makes Trump’s power so great. Even though he lacks a great mass movement after the model of Adolf Hitler and the Nazis, he commands cult-like followers who will carry out his every wish.

Trump is an authoritarian and neofascist, who only knows how to destroy and not create. He is not a unifier but a divider. Like other leaders of that ilk, Trump uses violence, chaos and pain as a primary means of expanding and securing power.

For Trump and the Republican Party, America’s pain is a target of opportunity for their gangster capitalist agenda.

Trump has used “stochastic terrorism” to encourage violent threats by his followers and enforcers against prominent Democrats like Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. Trump has also targeted nonwhite people, Muslims, immigrants and “liberals” in general with violent threats.

Trump has made reference to “Second Amendment solutions” as a way of inspiring right-wing militias and other paramilitaries to attack his perceived enemies. As seen with his recent declaration of “MAGA Night,” Trump would like to mobilizes white supremacists and other right-wing terrorists as his street hooligan enforcers.

Trump has urged his armed followers to threaten or perhaps overturn the governments of Democratic-led states and cities if they do not bow to his will by ending public health measures designed to slow the spread of the coronavirus pandemic. To some extent, they have been successful: The Michigan state legislature was recently forced into recess by such threats of violence.

This week, Trump has threatened to invoke a 200-year-old law called the Insurrection Act to crush the protests and civil unrest which has burst forth in response to the killing of George Floyd. This is one more step in Trump’s effort to create an autocratic pseudo-democracy where he rules indefinitely. Martial law would be the most efficient way for Donald Trump to use a “state of emergency” — his personal Reichstag-fire moment — as a way to end America’s constitutional democracy and the rule of law.

Donald Trump has his knee on the throat of American democracy, just as surely as Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin had his on the throat of George Floyd.

In a recent article for the Intercept, Bosnian-born novelist Aleksandar Hemon — also the co-writer of the forthcoming “Matrix” sequel — warns that the United States is careening towards ethnic violence, civil war and self-destruction under Donald Trump. The “most important and troubling symptom,” he writes, is the rising atmosphere of conflict “meant to culminate in transformative, cathartic violence; this marks the beginning of collective self-actualization.” Hemon continues:

As we bear witness to armed white American militias storming or protesting outside government institutions, it is clear that the chaos and tragedy of Covid-19 are being used by Trump and the GOP to enhance the conflict and accelerate the birth of a new, greater America. At the heart of every nationalist mythology is some kind of a rebirth, usually bloody and requiring sacrifices, preferably of the weak and the doubtful. …

For many of my fellow ex-Yugoslavs, it was instantly clear that once the GOP and Trump committed to conflict and destruction, they could never afford to quit, for that would constitute a tactical error leading to an irreversible defeat. They now have no choice but to follow their trajectory to its logical extreme, which must be victory and rebirth at all cost. They will kill if they have to, or at least let Covid-19 do it.

When armed Trumpists pretend to be a happening of good people who demand the end of the lockdown, anti-fascist ex-Yugoslavs don’t necessarily see an American version of murderous Serbian paramilitaries. What we see with heart-clenching clarity is that the familiar nationalist strategy of perpetually inciting conflict is advancing along a predictable trajectory.

In our recent conversation, Hemon warned that Donald Trump and the far right are engaged in revolutionary politics where compromise is not possible because they are preparing for armed conflict, while Joe Biden and the Democrats are only worried about the normative strategy and tactics of electoral democracy. Hemon also described Trump as leading a death cult organized around white supremacy and the related existential insecurities of the white men who are attracted to such politics. Like other death cults, Trump’s supporters are willing to kill and die in his name, believing it will lead to personal rebirth and glory.

Hemon also shared details on a proposed project he developed with Lana Wachowski and David Mitchell in 2017, about a United States ruined by Trump-like demagogues, civil war, environmental disasters and — believe it or not — a pandemic. As usual, our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

So many people are in a state of terror and fear right now. From my perspective they should have been afraid at least four years ago in response to Trump. Why were so many people in denial about the dire dangers of Donald Trump and what he represents? Why are they so late in realizing the reality of the situation? It was all so obvious.

The fight is not over. This moment with Trump, the other members of the global right-wing and the virus is going to have consequences across many areas of our lives. We are struggling just to stay alive right now. There are going to be severe consequences from all the forces coming together that no one can quite predict.

The virus allows Trump, Boris Johnson, Jair Bolsonaro, Vladimir Putin, Viktor Orbán and other authoritarians to accelerate a total reconfiguration of their respective societies. Such leaders are not fighting the virus so much as they are fighting to radically change society to serve their far-right agenda. That goal and agenda is not always visible to many people.

Donald Trump keeps saying that he is a “war president.” That claim is being misinterpreted by most observers in the mainstream news media. What Trump really means is that he is an authoritarian and the rule of law does not apply to him. Trump is able to hide his true intent because hefloods the zone with chaos, distractions and lies. In most important ways, Donald Trump is open about his plans.

This is part of a strategy. The global right and its leaders want to make everything meaningless. They want people to “fish in murky waters,” as the saying goes back in my home of Yugoslavia. One headline by itself would stand out and the public would understand the danger. People either understand the entirety and wholeness of this dangerous situation or they choose not to. If the public cannot see the big picture, they will also not be able to see how the smaller parts fit together as a whole. It all seems like one isolated series of events after another. For those who cannot see the big picture, it is a maelstrom and they lack perspective to make sense of it all.

Another element of Trump’s authoritarianism — and this is why the mainstream media is still unable to effectively grapple with this crisis — are the threats against reporters and journalists, where he calls them “fake news” and “human scum”. Journalists have also been attacked and killed in America under Trump.

There is an inability to grasp the magnitude of the catastrophe. Before the war in Bosnia, in the former Yugoslavia, the catastrophe of war was so huge that people were too fearful to imagine what was happening because that would have meant — as turned out to be the case — that their entire way of life, the very structure of life, would be destroyed. If the people in Bosnia or the former Yugoslavia were then to have acknowledged or understood the magnitude of the catastrophe it would have meant making choices about changing their lives. This would have helped them to keep their agency. But too many of them waited, therefore losing their agency, and the catastrophe of the civil war and ethnic cleansing made the decision for them.//AGW

This is a frightening proposition to a lot of people. That meant, in case of their war, they would have to get up and leave their lives and not take much for themselves. And so one finds oneself in a situation where you see that there is a catastrophe unfolding and say, “But what am I going to do now?”

Difficult decisions must be made. And it’s terrible. It is a horrible proposition. People start negotiating with reality to avoid the catastrophe and the real possibility of death. In this country at present that looks like, “Maybe it’s not that bad? Maybe Biden is going to fix it? Maybe somehow Trump is going to turn presidential all of a sudden? Maybe the Republicans actually do love this country? Maybe I should wait to see what happens, and decide in a month?”

With Trumpism the news media has to change the entire way in which they interpret and engage with reality. The American news media, for the most part, cannot do it. They cannot make that pivot. The rules are different with an authoritarian such as Donald Trump.

At the same time, the advantage of Trump and his movement is that they do not care about reality or the truth. They are a death cult. They are not afraid to die. The Trumpists and Republicans are excited and motivated by the possibility of remaking reality itself, because they are in revolutionary mode. The Democrats and everyone else are, by comparison, trying to find a magical way to retain the status quo. Which, even if the status quo was somehow good enough, is now impossible to salvage. The American right’s, and the global right’s, revolutionary process is far too advanced at this point.

What guidance would you give the average person about maintaining perspective and reorienting themselves to this new reality?

People are struggling with the logistics of life, just staying on the surface and not drowning. Given the circumstances with the economy and the state of the world I would not blame anyone for that. But there has been this longstanding notion that America is a stable society. It is a country with its own deep tradition of checks and balances. In America, however deep the social injustice and inequality, the future was something that could be reasonably anticipated. Even if things were bad, there was a sense of continuity and predictability.

But what is happening now with COVID is that people in the United States simply do not know what is going to happen in a month. The future has become unpredictable. In America, people are now negotiating reality. Having to figure out reality and what is true or not on a basic level is a shocking change for many people in America and some other parts of the world. People are now thinking of the “future” in terms of months and not three or 10 or 30 years in the future. With this disruption in even being able to plan for the future, it takes agency away and gives it to other people and individuals. Someone else is now deciding your fate. Meanwhile, the people on the right have guns and think that they are some type of liberation force. They think they are the ones with the agency and freedom. Being on the left puts you in a position of not having agency in the United States at present.

One person’s dystopia is another person’s utopia. The global right wing has purpose. They have got the guns. They are highly ideological and committed. There is a core group of the global right-wing extremists who are committed to “accelerationism,” destroying society in order to create their own new world.

The right wing is in revolutionary mode because part of every nationalist movement or discourse is a myth of some kind of sacrifice or rebirth in blood and sacrifice. That logic justifies all of their wars and mass killing. Donald Trump has no ideology or understanding of political theory and philosophy. But Trump does have an instinctive understanding of nationalism.

He just said the other day, “Our doctors are at war.” It’s a war that is part of the rebirth of the nation.

Donald Trump and the right wing are in revolutionary mode, but there are so many observers who believe that they are just stupid and insane. These outsiders do not really understand what is happening. They dismiss what the right wing is doing as some type of farce or joke when it is deadly serious.

Revolutionary political parties do not need many supporters or members to succeed. Obsessing over how many people do or do not support Donald Trump is an error. Numbers are not the absolute measure of his strength. The true measure of Trump’s strength is how many people are willing to die for him. How many people in America and Europe are willing to die for a leftist cause? Donald Trump has stormtroopers. We don’t have stormtroopers. It is that simple. The Democrats are so afraid of anyone who even appears that they might just be a tiny bit radical. Even something like national health care is treated as too radical. The Democrats are not preparing for a fight; they’re preparing for a vote. Those are not the same things. It is not enough. And it is probably useless in the long run, when the Democrats are up against a revolutionary right-wing movement.

The other part of the equation is the people who are willing to kill for Donald Trump and his movement. Moreover, Trump’s supporters have been killing their “enemies” here in the United States through mass shootings and other violence. Those murders, assaults and other violence have been a feature of Trump’s regime. Unfortunately, the mainstream news media has not been consistently reporting on it because such outcomes are now normalized.

A large number of people who are willing to die for Donald Trump are also willing to kill for him. These Trump supporters are willing to sacrifice their previous morality and to be reborn through an act of blood and sacrifice in service to him. The military is very important here. During the wars in the former Yugoslavia it came down to who controlled the military. In the United States, people on the left are saying, “Well, if it really gets that bad, the military will intervene and save us.” We are at a point where people on the left in the United States are hoping for military intervention — as though that’s a good thing. What will the United States military do? I don’t know.

The Democrats really believe they can just vote Trump out of office. They are not properly organizing for all possibilities and in response to what the right wing is doing.

We hope that Biden will get elected and then somehow we’ll return to some status quo from before and pre-Trump democracy will be restored in some way. That’s just wishful thinking. Totally wishful thinking. Meanwhile, Donald Trump and the right wing and the Republicans are preparing for a showdown.

Trump and the broader right are now saying that people should sacrifice themselves for “the economy” by dying from the coronavirus pandemic. Specifically, those who should die are the elderly and others who are vulnerable to the disease. This is social Darwinism. It is fascistic. That logic should be abhorrent but there has been little outrage from the American people.

I don’t know what could constitute enough outrage and opposition. There has to be change at the end. Otherwise it is just yelling at the wind. Moreover, what is needed now to counter Trump and his movement is more than just objections — it must be a vision and an alternative plan. There must also be a movement that is created out of that rage and anger in order to follow through on the necessary work and struggle.

Being angry is a precondition, I suppose, for some kind of radical or at least committed action. But it’s a necessary but not sufficient condition. There is plenty of outrage. What is lacking is a framework for what to do with that outrage. Democrats are afraid of that outrage. Whatever happens with Trump and the 2020 election, and afterwards, the United States is going to be radically different than before. The question becomes, who wins? Trump and the revolutionary right wing, or the left and the Democrats?

Suppose Joe Biden and the Democrats win. Who in their sane mind thinks that will lead to a radical correction to the country? Who really believes that Donald Trump and his enforcers are just going to drop their weapons and go home? That is not going to happen. The United States is heading towards a conflict. This conflict cannot be resolved politically. I believe that it may have to be resolved extra-politically.

I initially accepted the fact that some people voted for Trump in 2016 because they are straight-ticket Republican voters. I think that is a horrible decision, but I can understand it on a certain level. But to continue to support Trump at present given the authoritarianism, corruption, white supremacy, misogyny, environmental destruction and malevolent negligence is to be complicit. Trump’s supporters are now active agents of fascism. I have suggested in my writing and interviews that people of conscience and other good people should not interact in any way with Trump supporters, even if they are members of the family. How have you made such decisions?

I agree. Trump’s supporters are participating in a project that directly impacts my life, my family and the people I love in a very negative and dangerous way. We are past the point of understanding with Trump and his supporters. That moment was gone a long time ago. Any intelligent, active citizen understands the consequences of their actions. The whole idea that somehow these white people voted for Donald Trump while not meaning to be racist is just nonsense. If they somehow did not know that Donald Trump is a racist, then it is their responsibility to find out. Now it is evident because Trump is a rabid white supremacist who is aligned with the worst racist elements in the country. To support Donald Trump is to be complicit with white supremacy. It is to actively support a white supremacist project.

I do not talk to Donald Trump’s supporters. They are my enemies. I want them to go away and not be anywhere near me. I do not want to “unite” with such people in this country. I do not care if they live in the same country as me. Donald Trump’s supporters are my enemies and I want them gone from my life. And that’s a hard thing to say. Countries break up over such things. This is imaginable in this country now. And what is imaginable is possible.

You have written about the ethnic conflict and civil war in Yugoslavia and your fears of how such a thing is now on the horizon in the United States. How are people — especially young men — seduced and radicalized into committing such acts of violence?

It is empowering. It flatters their masculine power. Nationalism and fascism are always masculine political projects.This is why misogyny is always an aspect of any kind of nationalism. Fascism and nationalism also empowers old men. And in the context of white male supremacy, the advances of people of color and women were imagined as somehow disempowering white men. These white men became disgruntled. They lost jobs. But the problem with that white male anger is that it ignores that black and brown people lost their jobs too from deindustrialization, neoliberalism, globalization and related forces. The anger and sense of loss and feeling that they do not have agency was compensated for by uniting behind Donald Trump.

I always took Trump seriously. He was always capable of reaching this point. It’s not that he’s exceptional. It is rather that the conditions were right for Trump to win the presidency because he embodies this vulgar, blatant misogyny, sexism and arrogance. His psychopathic characteristics exactly match the fantasies of fascism.

There is another aspect of Donald Trump’s popularity among his followers. There is something terribly reassuring to a certain type of person that one can be stupid and lazy and so openly unpleasant and still become president of the United States. By comparison Barack Obama had to be a saint. He had to be perfect, Harvard-educated and wise. But Trump’s white supporters hated him intensely. Trump restores a certain type of faith in white supremacy for his supporters because someone as stupid and bad and lazy and evil as Trump can become president of the United States. Trump’s supporters now know that the worst of them can still be president. That must be terribly reassuring.

Donald Trump’s narcissism and other mental pathologies exactly match the collective pathology of white nationalists. Trump is a natural-born white supremacist because in any other context he is an idiot and a psychopath.

You are one of the co-writers of “The Matrix 4.” The Age of Trump, and now this pandemic and associated economic collapse is a surreal living nightmare. Could you have sat down and made up such a story? Would it even be believable?

With the same writers I worked with on “The Matrix 4,” we developed a spec script in December of 2017. The premise of the project was the disintegration of the United States and what happened afterward, as seen through the lives of several characters over 25 or so years of time in the story. Anything imaginable is possible. In our story there was a pandemic, environmental collapse, random violence, militias and rogue governors of different states.

I am sure people are writing science fiction stories based in this current moment, and his gets us back to politics in this moment and the power of imagination. I believe that many people cannot accept what is happening and are in denial because they lack imagination. They cannot make sense of the headlines because their minds eliminate so many possibilities about what is happening in the world right now — and what will happen in the future.

a bunch like this:

https://www.alternet.org/2020/04/the-failures-and-inadequacies-of-neoliberalism-are-now-on-stark-display/

https://www.alternet.org/2020/04/if-the-postal-service-dies-so-does-democracy/

no lnx

If the postal service dies, so does democracy

Written by Roxanne Cooper / The Washington Monthly April 11, 2020

There are two big stories this week about a subject that normally sounds painfully boring: the mail. Each is crucially important in its own right, but combined they presage a nearly apocalyptic threat to American democracy.

The first is that the Donald Trump and Republican Party are engaged in an all-out war against the expansion of mail-in voting in the era of COVID-19.The flimsy outward justification is concern about voter fraud, but of course there is no evidence of significant voter fraud surrounding mail ballots. In fact, the only major scandal in the modern era around mail-in voting was a corrupt scheme by Republicans in North Carolina–one that was quickly and easily discovered. Republicans aren’t exactly being shy about why they want to restrict the expansion of access to mail voting: they think the more people are allowed to vote, the better Democrats will do against them. It certainly doesn’t hurt that Republicans are far less concerned about the virus than are Democrats, and that in battleground states with Republican legislatures like Wisconsin, there are far more polling places per capita in red districts than blue ones, which means not only longer lines but more dangerous crowding at the polling places. It only adds to the Republican turnout advantage if most people have to vote in person.

The opposition to mail voting is amusing given that it has traditionally been advantageous to Republicans, and even now doesn’t much benefit one party or the other. But facing electoral calamity after four years of Trump plus a disastrous epidemic response and looming recession, Republicans clearly feel their best shot at keeping power is if as few people are allowed to safely vote as possible. It’s a fundamentally immoral stance at odds with the principles of democracy itself, but unashamedly taking baldly self-serving positions contrary to previously shared values of basic decency is a hallmark of Republicanism under Donald Trump. It’s not a bug; it’s a feature.

The second story involves the Post Office itself. The United States Postal Service is set to run out of money by September. The previous round of emergency coronavirus stimulus did not take the long-beleaguered Postal Service into account. Conservative policymakers have been eyeing the USPS with hungry privatizing chops for a long time, and have been hamstringing it with ridiculous provisions like forcing the USPS to take into account 50 years of pension payments in advance in its budget, which no other corporation or public agency has to do.

Donald Trump loves to talk about what a “great American company” FedEx is, and conservatives would love to eliminate the postal service and give all of its operations to private shipping companies and private equity. Of course, long gone would be the days of sending a letter from coast to coast in a few days for a fraction of a dollar–but since when was that sort of thing a concern for Republicans?As with libraries, if the Postal Service didn’t already exist and you proposed it, it would be considered a ridiculous and wasteful socialist fantasy. In the modern era Republicans would make sure it never came into being, and mainstream Democrats would means-test it so that everyone would have to fill out tax statements in triplicate to make sure that no one making over a certain amount got a free mailbox.

Are these two stories merely a coincidence? Perhaps. It is possible that just as Republicans are attempting to thwart vote-by-mail in order to reduce voter turnout in a pandemic, they also just so happen to be defunding the Postal Service.

But what if it’s not? What if the plan is explicitly to cripple the mail system itself as yet another argument against mail-in voting, providing them an excuse to force people to vote in person in a pandemic or not vote at all? It would be a villainous plot straight out of a James Bond film. That doesn’t mean it’s not real, especially given the current administration. Even if it’s not intentional, the combined effect of both acts of bad faith would certainly be convenient for deeply unpopular conservatives whose only chance of holding onto ill-gotten power is to thwart democracy itself.

Democrats would do well to act as if they were facing opponents with the depraved moral instincts of a Bond villain, and think proactively. Any future assistance on legislation to Trump and McConnell over the coming year should be predicated on both saving the Postal Service and ensuring access to mail-in voting across the country. An election in which one side is lulled into complacency about a pandemic and has lots of polling places available, while the other is rightfully concerned for the public good while also being crushed by long lines and crowded locations, is no true election at all. It’s a mockery of democracy and cannot be allowed to stand.

https://www.alternet.org/2020/04/how-the-pandemic-pulled-back-the-curtain-on-the-flawed-global-economic-system/

no lnx

How the pandemic pulled back the curtain on the flawed global economic system

Written by Marshall Auerback, Jan Ritch-Frel April 2, 2020

When the wealthiest country in the world is unable to produce basic medical gear to cope with a rampaging pandemic, it is dealing with a strategic vulnerability by depending on multinational supply chains to produce manufactured goods. Absent sufficient redundancies and physical reserves of resources, “just-in-time” lean supply systems can’t cope with sudden disruptions. The global pandemic of 2020 is a case in point.

This pandemic continues to unfold, but it will serve as the D-Day equivalent of a new predominating economic model for the world, and which in many ways was beginning to take shape before COVID-19. At its core, developed and mixed market economies will factor in the health risk and growing military cost of sustaining international supply chains against investing in high-tech production closer to their markets, and increasingly export their goods to the rest of the world.

Dozens of economies that developed in the past 50 years by enmeshing themselves in the international supply chain on the basis of their labor price advantage will find themselves increasingly cut out of the new process. The contest for global power will increasingly pivot to the extraction and refinement of minerals and component materials that are critical to sustaining the high-tech economy model, away from carbon energy resources. We will be hearing much more about “national stockpiling” and “strategic reserves” beyond oil in the months and years ahead.

Not only has COVID-19 exposed potential health risks and costs involved (as globalized trade routes become vectors of contagion), but the champions of the offshoring phenomenon increasingly resort to myths and misconceptions that are irrelevant to a 21st-century economy. They are as obsolete as spending trillions annually on managing the supply and price of Middle East oil, which American foreign policy figures, including Martin Indyk, are beginning to openly say “isn’t worth it.”

Before we get into the details on thefuture economy, let’s quickly review how the U.S. saw a massive decline in its industrial capacity. Bad ideas and pernicious orthodoxies grew like barnacles over the decades on what was once the world’s leading manufacturer. First was the idea that offshoring is essential to preserving profitability. Often this assertion has been more apparent than real. As far as profitability goes, many companies have made choices to move manufacturing offshore despite continuing domestic profits on home shores. For example,the five North American plants that General Motors (GM) shut down in 2019 were still profitable, but the company, which had received a government bailout in 2009, chose to refocus on the higher-margin operations in China.

Of course, capitalism controlled by bankers and speculators gives free rein to companies to make profits on how they see fit.The consequences are that for decades, Detroit’s “Big Three” automakers have consistently underperformed their German and Japanese counterparts because of their decision to embrace a Wall Street-driven culture that has prioritized short-term quarterly earnings, massive dividend payouts and unprecedented spending on stock repurchases over productive investment in innovation. And as GM’s 2019 experience illustrates, the resultant profits did not go to spur domestic reinvestment, which in turn creates domestic employment, but abroad to expand China’s manufacturing base. GM is but one example of the hundreds of major corporate actors that have denuded the country’s industrial ecosystem, creating gaps in the U.S. workforce and shortages of vital skilled labor.

There are also multiple examples of companies acquiring smaller innovative companies “solely to discontinue the target’s innovation projects and preempt future competition,” according to researchers Colleen Cunningham, from London Business School, and Florian Ederer and Song Ma, both from Yale. A particularly poignant example of these “killer acquisitions,” given today’s ongoing ventilator shortage, is Covidien’s attempted 2012 purchase of California-based Newport Medical Instruments, a smaller competing medical device company that had secured a contract from the federal government in 2010 to produce up to40,000 mobile ventilators.But as David Dayen of The American Prospect observed, the purported rationale for the acquisition was bogus: It had nothing to do with expanding Covidien’s product base and everything to do with destroying a competitor whose product “could cut into its existing profits.”

For years, the political economist Seymour Melman argued that companies that embraced the soft option of downsizing/offshoring labor would ultimately create grave production weaknesses in the U.S. economy and stifle innovation. Higher domestic wages, by contrast, would induce competent managers to compensate by using and investing in more and better machinery, which in turn would lead to a virtuous cycle of production: higher profits, which can lead to higher wages, leading to better machinery and organization of work.

While American companies may think they are improving their individual competitiveness in the short term by shifting operations to low-cost labor economies, the current pandemic illustrates that they collectively undermined America’s (and their own) competitiveness over the long haul.

Intuitively, Melman’s forecasts make sense. A modern manufacturing “ecosystem” makes it much easier to redeploy and pivot to new priorities when there are shortages in vital areas. China, for example, has a sufficiently deep and robust industrial infrastructure to adjust production lines quickly, even as the U.S. continues to struggle with ventilator shortages. And in Germany, a flagship company likeSiemens, for example, announced that it is “making its Additive Manufacturing (AM) Network along with its 3D printers, available to the global medical community to speed design and production of medical components … to enable faster and less complicated production of spare parts for machines like ventilators.”

The Next Economy

A combination of existing technologies and capacities that are already in business application and on the rise will enable the new era of production and global economic overhaul and develop in motion with Melman’s thinking. These include artificial intelligence computing, automated manufacturing and increasingly universal and portable manufacturing equipment, innovations in energy production and storage, high-speed data transfer, and nanotechnology. Some of these technologies are mature, profitable and business-ready. Others are still in an early phase but will be seen as more economically viable or worthy of state investment and subsidy in light of a growing awareness among policy planners that the consequences of running global supply chains are potentially more expensive.

All of these technologies are revolutionary. Their concomitant rise will create a new economic era dominated by the countries that fully integrate them into their economies:

AI computing has the capacity to introduce game-changing efficiencies in the production process, quality control in terms of production and blueprints for new models of production and consumption. It can handle huge volumes of administration and management of automated systems. This industry is estimated to be growing at an annual rate of over 45 percent.

Automated manufacturing can be expensive and requires skilled labor to maintain, but it can produce goods at precision levels beyond what people can make, as well as at increasing volumes. 3D manufacturing is a universalizing process: one machine capable of producing a dizzying number of products that already competes with some products from global supply chains. Many companies are locating back in deindustrialized New York and other U.S. cities on the back of 3D manufacturing.

Recent major advances in energy production—from solar and wind to geothermal and energy storage—are the holy grail of non-carbon energy sources, permitting solar and wind industries to compete on a 24-hour basis with carbon-based fuels, giving more weight for policy planners to minimize fuel imports and revisit dormant energy alternatives.

High-speed data transfer—enabled through satellites and huge server farms—is necessary for the multi-location management and logistical coordination of the segments of the new supply chain: the means of information transfer and the capacity of one hand to know what the other is doing.

The rise of nanotechnology—the capacity to engage in precision design and manufacture at a molecular scale—presents humanity with a new frontier of materials and products that have capabilities beyond what we currently know in terms of materials, products, medicines and much more. Products ranging from glass to suntan lotion are already vastly enhanced by nanotechnology production. Qualities of human-made materials such as those designed for fireproofing, bulletproofing, insulation and space travel are in the midst of being revolutionized. Medicines can be deployed through nanotechnology at the molecular level, vastly improving their effectiveness.

The collective strength of these technologies will diminish the appeal of finding cheaper labor outside a country’s borders or common market—and the costs they entail. Countries that are advanced along these lines and have access to the minerals required to engage in this form of production will prosper, plugging into their existing consumer market and building up a head of steam that will eventually lead to a new chain of international exports and imports. These trend lines will accelerate the decline of brick-and-mortar retail and service industries.

Export-led economies that grew on the back of a labor price advantage will find themselves in a role reversal of having the option of importing better goods from the markets they once exported to or paying intellectual property (IP) licensing fees to produce them domestically. The geopolitical advantages that went with offering a developing country a labor role in a global supply chain will be replaced with discounts on IP licenses or imports.

The past phases of industrialization saw an ongoing contest among wealthy countries for control of petroleum, minerals and shipping lanes, using all their available powers to obtain them. The historical pattern is that residents of the resource-rich and undeveloped countries suffer far more than prosper in the mineral extraction and export process to wealthy markets. Barring a major shift in attitudes to wealth distribution or successful political resistance to exploitation, the pattern will likely continue, with the wealthy countries’ preoccupations pivoting increasingly from carbon energy resources to the components of the new economy: cobalt, lithium and rare metals. Resources that sustain the present and future economies, like iron, copper and gold, will continue to retain their strategic value.

Much of Europe and Asian countries like China, South Korea and Japan are poised for the transition. Based on their traditions of rigid state-driven capitalism, these nations instinctively grasp how state capacity and direction can help drive further industrial development. It remains to be seen if the U.S. is fully capable of it. That is unlikely, if the prevailing neoliberal ideology persists, limiting the role of the U.S. government to be, at best, a neutral umpire that sustains efficient, rent-free markets able to supervise the delivery of an increasingly narrow set of public goods (as opposed to an active participant in industrial policy).

The U.S., with thousands of advanced research institutions, is certainly capable of the next stage of economic development. It has a developed market and a partial manufacturing base. But it also has a long history of wage-avoidance for its workforces and an utterly dysfunctional political process. You need nation-state competence and highly skilled labor in this new world, as well as a willingness to expand ownership and dividend models to workers and the governments that funded the research for this advanced economy.

The coronavirus pandemic will force the U.S. and other countries to stop making distinctions between low-tech business (supposedly fine to offshore) versus high value-added industry. Not only can production lines be altered to cope with shortages (as China is doing), but there is often a continuum in the industrial ecosystem.

Consider the case of surgical masks. Even though their production is ostensibly a low-tech commodified business, the critical inner filtration layer of a mask, which allows the wearer to breathe while reducing the inflow of possible infectious particles, is a high-end business: Costing “upward of [$4.23 million] apiece, the machine that creates this fabric melts down plastic material and blows it out in strands, like cotton candy, into flat sheets of melt-blown fabric for face masks and other filtration products. A similar line of machines can create a related kind of fabric, called spun-bond fabric, also used in face masks and in medical protection suits worn by health-care workers,” according to a report carried by National Public Radio.

The point is that there is a continuum. One creates the demand for the other. Eliminate one industry and another potentially dies, much like a biological ecosystem. We now know that when forests are cut down, at some point if the surviving forest is too small, the whole ecosystem collapses. The ecosystem has to be large enough to encompass all of the niches that make it work.

If the machine tool industry is allocated in one country, the textile industry in another, the steel industry in another, the whole thing becomes much more delicate and inefficient, depending on a greater range of variables to succeed. Crucially, the speed with which innovations can ricochet around the system decreases significantly. When Japanese auto manufacturers have access to Japanese machine tool makers, they can get at the machine tool advances before GM and Ford. Proximity becomes a competitive advantage.

All of which helps to explain why the distinction between offshoring hardware while retaining software is not only fatuous but damaging to long-term economic welfare.

Offshoring left the U.S. unprepared for COVID-19. It has also occasioned a widespread reassessment of globalization: What was once seen as the heretical refuge of economic nationalists has now become respectable again. Even without this pandemic, the foundations of America’s economic model were failing and becoming rapidly obsolete.

The question is: As the world moves to a post-carbon future, can the U.S. economy take away the primacy of rent-extracting sectors like finance, insurance and real estate; Hollywood films, smartphone apps, or increasingly irrelevant sectors like oil and natural gas exports, and join the leaders of the pack? Or is coronavirus merely the pandemic that presages a more terminal disease?

Marshall Auerback is a market analyst and commentator. Jan Ritch-Frel is the executive director of the Independent Media Institute.

This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

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https://medium.com/insurge-intelligence/escaping-extinction-through-paradigm-shift-83e33d4cb548

INSURGE INTELLIGENCE, a crowdfunded investigative journalism project for people and planet.

For the last month, as a journalist and academic, I’ve experienced a strange sensation of paralysis.

I don’t usually experience this. Usually I find myself driven by the pressures of wanting to cover with due justice a full spectrum of intersecting crises and potential solutions.

But this month watching the spectacle of political madness unfolding across Washington, London and Brussels, while chaos and suffering continues to kick off across Venezuela, Yemen, Israel-Palestine, Syria, Nigeria and beyond, I experienced something I haven’t felt in a long-time. A sense of total burn-out. Of futility. Of tiredness.

Watching the news has become like entering a psychological boxing ring where you get the shit punched out of you repeatedly until you drop to the floor, broken, bloodied, and inert: helpless.

I can’t imagine this is a particularly unique sensation. But I wanted to share it with you because this is common ground. Common ground across the deepening divides tearing our societies apart. No matter which side of the divide we stand on, that sensation of paralysis and helplessness is playing out in tangible form in the political processes we see out there.

The sensation of paralysis is therefore not just a psychological artifact. It’s the internal experience of the systemic dysfunction playing out in the world. It’s a reflection of the state of collapse that our prevailing democratic institutions are experiencing as they prove completely incapable of responding to and solving for the intricate complexity of inherently interconnected converging global crises.

How to deal with the ‘Other’ has now become the defining sticking point of contemporary Western politics. It is particularly exemplified in the paralysis of the UK government and parliament in the face of the Brexit process; the paralysis of the US government over the Trump administration’s ‘Wall’; the inexorable mainstreaming of anti-‘Other’ sentiment across Europe; in the extent to which the failure of the incumbent order to resolve internal crises has driven the resurgence of new forms of extreme politics, inspired by nativism and nationalist rejections of groups of people considered both ‘foreign’ and parasitical.

Within this paradigm, expulsion of the ‘Other’ is the final solution. This is the zero-sum game model of existence. There’s not enough to go round, so we need to accumulate as much for our(narrowly-defined)selves as possible. More growth, but just for ‘us’ — because ‘They’ are the ones taking our jobs.

But rumbling beneath the surface of this obsession with the ‘Other’ is a deeper problem that we find much difficulty facing up to: the fact that the system of life we have built for ourselves and which many of us think is being undermined by too many of ‘Them’, is already collapsing in its own right.

There has been welcome media coverage of a startling new UN report by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES). The report concludes that human civilization is systematically destroying its own life-support systems, resulting in the potential mass extinction of at least one million animal and plant species.

The driving motor of this destruction is the ‘endless growth’ paradigm of our current global economy, a paradigm that has seen human populations and cities grow exponentially across the world, in turn driving the exponential growth in consumption of resources, raw materials, food and energy.

That accelerating expansion of industrial civilization-as-we-know-it has ravaged natural ecosystems, leading to the decline of numerous species who are critical for the continued healthy functioning of natural services providing food, pollination and clean water that are essential to sustain our own civilization.

If we continue on this path, our ongoing destruction of nature, forests, and wetlands will fatally damaging the earth’s capacity to renew breathable air, productive soil and drinkable water.

The report is by far the most comprehensive to hit home how the collapse of biodiversity ultimately entails the collapse of human civilization. But it is hardly the only study confirming our current trajectory.

In February, the UN Food & Agricultural Organisation (FAO) issued its own comprehensive global assessment across 91 countries, warning that prevailing agricultural techniques were destroying the biodiversity needed to sustain global food production.

According to the report, of 7,745 local (occurring in one country) breeds of livestock reported globally, 26 percent are at risk of extinction; nearly a third of fish stocks are overfished, with more than half having reached their sustainable limit; and 24 percent of nearly 4,000 wild food species — mainly plants, fish and mammals — are decreasing in abundance (a number likely to be much higher due to lack of data).

Another report out this month by the World Wildlife Fund and Global Footprint Network outlines how this massive, systematic environmental destruction is rooted in a way of life based on overconsumption of natural resources: we are growing beyond our means. We are taking without giving back.

The new report shows how if everyone in the world consumed at the same level as EU residents, from the period of 1st January 1 to 10th May alone, humanity would have used as much as the planet’s ecosystems can renew over the entire year: which means that 2.8 planet earths would be needed to provide for this level of consumption.

So there is something fundamentally wrong. Yet for the most part, our political leaders are preoccupied with the surface symptoms of this fundamental crisis of civilization, rather than the crisis itself.

The UN IPBES global assessment, for instance, confirms that the planet is currently experiencing 2,500 conflicts over fossil fuels, water, food and land — conflicts which are therefore directly related to the ongoing collapse of the earth’s biodiversity.

These conflicts are driving the mass displacement and migrations of people across the world, in turn radicalizing political bureaucracies and triggering extreme nationalist responses.

This month, a new study by the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC) of the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC) — launched at the UN headquarters in Geneva — found that a record 41.3 million people worldwide are displaced inside their own countries due to conflict and violence. This is the highest it has ever been, an increase of more than a million since the end of 2017 and two-thirds more than the global number of refugees.

The report flags up particular crises: the ongoing conflicts in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Syria, a rise in intercommunal tensions in Ethiopia, Cameroon and Nigeria’s Middle Belt region — which together contribute most of the 10.8 million new displacements.

Many of these disruptions are directly linked to climate change impacts. In 2018, extreme weather events were responsible for the majority of the 17.2 million new displacements. Tropical cyclones and monsoon floods led to mass displacement in the Philippines, China and India, mostly in the form of evacuations. California suffered the most destructive wildfires in its history, which displaced hundreds of thousands of people. Drought in Afghanistan triggered more displacement than the country’s armed conflict, and Nigeria’s crisis in the northeast was aggravated by flooding that affected 80 per cent of the country.

The climate connection was further underscored in a major scientific study published earlier this year in Global Environmental Change, which concluded that climate change played a significant role in migration and asylum seeking from 2011 to 2015, by creating severe droughts which drove and exacerbated conflicts.

Conflicts across the Middle East, Western Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa were exacerbated by “climatic conditions” — eventually resulting in as much as one million desperate refugees turning up on European shores. That mass migration, of course, played a pivotal role in the UK campaign to leave the European Union, and the revival of nationalist sentiment across Europe, the US and elsewhere.

By end of century, it won’t just be migration we have to worry about — it will be, if we continue business-as-usual, an uninhabitable planet: a situation where we, too, will end up becoming the Other.

And this is where the sheer futility of conventional political responses — and prevailing political discourse — rears its ugly head. Because of course, whether or not we leave the EU will have literally no meaningful impact in itself on the fundamental systemic drivers of mass migration. Neither will whether or not we do indeed build a Wall along the US-Mexico border.

Yet while the planet burns beneath our feet, we are preoccupied with essentially irrelevant questions whose answers offer nothing of substance to address the real crisis — to which, for all intents and purposes, we are blind.

It is no wonder that following the inspirational lead of Greta Thunberg, some have seen little option except to take to the streets through protest movements like Extinction Rebellion. The hope is that sustained nonviolent resistance can compel governments to take the urgent action necessary to transition rapidly to fossil fuel free societies.

But there is a serious faultline in this approach. XR suffered from a serious lack of joined-up thinking. It was not grounded in a comprehension of the climate crisis as a systems crisis, and therefore failed to explicitly link up climate action to other key systems such as austerity, food, water, politics, culture, and ideology. XR therefore failed to appeal to the working class and largely occluded people of colour and diverse faith groups.

The other faultline is that the target of action — national government — may well have missed the point. Governments are merely nodes in a wider system of power which they do not really control, but tend to pander to — a system of power which we are all to varying degrees and in different ways complict in.

It is precisely through governments that the prevailing system has, over the last several decades, carefully built-up a special resistance to the power of street protests. This is why the largest demonstrations failed to derail the Iraq War. Counterinsurgency doctrines fine-tuned in theatres of war have been increasingly applied in domestic settings to counter, disrupt and neutralise all forms of protest action. The fear of what Samuel Huntington once called the ‘crisis of democracy’ has meant that governments have dedicated themselves to ensuring that direct protest action has as little tangible impact as possible. Hitting the streets and hoping the powers-that-be do what you want is, therefore, not a viable strategy.

That doesn’t mean that XR shouldn’t be part of a wider strategy.

But right now there is no wider strategy, there is no cross-coordination between groups and sectors to create a more systems-level understanding of the crisis, and therefore enable a more systems-level vision of the solutions. And there is a very key reason for that. The response which sees ‘open rebellion’ as the only feasible form of reaction is a direct result of the degrading impact of a system whose entire design is to invoke a sense of helplessness and apathy in citizens.

We have been trained to believe that voting every once in a while in parliamentary systems suffices for effective democratic action that serves our legitimate interests. We now know that this is not enough. Our democracies are not just broken, beholden to special interests belonging to an interlocking network of energy, defense, agribusiness, biotechnological, communications and other industrial conglomerates dominated by a tiny minority.

Our democracies are in a state of collapse: incapable of addressing the systemic complexity of the crisis of civilization. As they fail, they are veering toward rejecting their own democratic ethos toward increasing authoritarianism — shoring up centralized state powers to ward off dangerous ‘Others’ and unruly citizens. And so it is only natural that we feel the most immediate response must be to react against this state of abject failure. Yet this response itself is a function of the same sensation of helplessness and paralysis induced by the system itself.

The problem is that liberal democracies in their current form are in a state of collapse for a reason: they are, indeed, incapable of addressing the systemic complexity of the crisis of civilization. No amount of nonviolent resistance will provide our existing political institutions with the capacity to address the crisis. Because the problem runs much, much deeper.

Until we address the question of transforming the very sinews and structures of contemporary neoliberal capitalism-as-we-know-it, the defining economic paradigm of our global civilization, we are speaking the wrong language.

But even here, this transformation is not simply a question of economics. It is a question of our entire paradigm of existence. And it is here — in recognising that the current crisis is calling us not merely to a fundamental transformation in our external relations, but one that is simultaneously co-extensive with our internal being — that the pathway for action emerges.

Over the last 500 years or so, humanity has erected an ‘endless growth’ civilization premised on a particular patchwork of ideological worldviews, ethical values, political and economic structures, and personal behaviours. This is a paradigm that elevates the vision of human beings as disconnected, atomistic, competing material units, which seek to maximise their own material consumption as the principal mechanism for self-gratification. This is the paradigm that defines how we live in our everyday lives, and constantly bleeds into how we end up conducting our relationships with our family and friends, in our workplaces, and beyond. It is the paradigm that has cemented our current trajectory toward mass extinction.

This is not just about external systems. It’s also about the internal systems of thought with which the external is co-extensive, and through which we have imprisoned ourselves. Our entire reductionist, mechanical model of what we think it means to be human needs to be re-written.

[How collective intelligence can change your world, right now

An open source toolkit for self and social transformation

medium.com]

To break this paradigm requires far more than making demands of broken institutions. Because, let’s just lay out our cards and be totally honest here, for most of the largely middle class white people that participated in the XR protests, it’s really not that difficult to do so.The biggest gap here is that it doesn’t necessarily require an act of transformative change on the part of the protestors themselves.

This is what is missing from our response to the crisis of civilization. Our responses are based on demanding change from the ‘Other’. Whether it’s governments, or philanthropy or business — it’s about calling to account everyone other than ourselves. The problem is out there, and we have to shout and glue ourselves to the ground to get Them to listen.

When are we are going to realise that They are Us?

It’s not that we shouldn’t protest or call for institutions to change. But far more than that, if we are really serious about this, the far bigger challenge is for each of us to work within our own networks of influence, to explore how we ourselves can begin changing the organisations and institutions in which we are embedded.

And it means grounding this effort in completely new frame of orientation, one in which human beings are inherently interconnected, and inter-embedded within the earth; where we are not atomistically separated from the reality in which we find ourselves as technocratic overlords, but are co-creators of that reality as individuated parts of a continuum of being.

Whatever happens out there in the world, the crisis out there is calling unto each of us to become who we need to be, truly are, and always were. And on the basis of that internal renewal, to take radical action in our own place-based contexts to build the seeds of the new paradigm, right here, right now.

How can we change some of the systems within our schools, our places of work, our places of play? How can we harness learnings from our personal practice and transformation as people and family units, and translate that into working with our local communities to galvanise place-based change in our own local contexts? How can we plant the seeds for new organisations, institutions, businesses, political approaches, through our own actions, even while we call on pre-existing ones to take urgent action, refusing however to simply wait idly for them to do so, by starting up ourselves? How can we, throughout these efforts, work toward seeding the recognition that the great task is to build a new post-growth, post-carbon, post-materialist paradigm?

Let us not simply go to a protest. Let us build our own capacity as individuals and members of various institutions to think and do differently within our own consciousness and behaviour, as well as across energy, food, water, culture, economics, business, finance. By doing so, we plant the seeds of an emerging paradigm of life and reality that redefines the very essence of what it means to be alive.

This is the conversation we need to begin having, from our boardrooms, to our governing councils — for those of us who have woken up to what is at stake, the real question is, how can I actually mobilise to build the new paradigm?

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Dr. Nafeez Ahmed is the founding editor of the 100% reader-funded investigative journalism project INSURGE intelligence. His latest book is Failing States, Collapsing Systems: BioPhysical Triggers of Political Violence (Springer, 2017). He is an 18-year investigative journalist, formerly of The Guardian where he reported on the geopolitics of social, economic and environmental crises. He now reports on ‘global system change’ for VICE’s Motherboard. He has bylines in The Times, Sunday Times, The Independent on Sunday, The Independent, The Scotsman, Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, Foreign Policy, The Atlantic, Quartz, New York Observer, The New Statesman, Prospect, Le Monde diplomatique, among other places. He has twice won the Project Censored Award for his investigative reporting; twice been featured in the Evening Standard’s top 1,000 list of most influential Londoners; and won the Naples Prize, Italy’s most prestigious literary award created by the President of the Republic. Nafeez is also a widely-published and cited interdisciplinary academic applying complex systems analysis to ecological and political violence. He is a Research Fellow at the Schumacher Institute.

INSURGE intelligence

We are crowdfunding adversarial investigations into power, to empower people and save the planet. Join us via www.patreon.com/nafeez

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but also related to RW Big picture long term SYSTEMIC strategy, eg gerry? -> capture of states --> eco-terror, abortion, voter suppress ...[see below ALEC model grabbed by barton wallbuilders

aka defeat defund the left

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. kochs undermine democ eg voter fraud BS to deprive we the ppl of political power, trifecta game over.

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/01/project-blitz-is-producing-model-legislation-for-christian-nationalists

no lnx

Project Blitz is producing model legislation for Christian Nationalists

Written by Nancy LeTourneau / Washington Monthly January 24, 2020

You may have heard about legislation passed recently in Tennessee and other states which allows adoption agencies to discriminate against gay couples or families with whom they have religious objections. The fact that bills like that are being considered and passed by red states is no coincidence. They are the product of an organized effort being led by Project Blitz.

The first thing to know about Project Blitz is that it was launched in 2015 by the Congressional Prayer Caucus Foundation, the National Legal Foundation, and Wallbuilders. The latter is an organization founded by David Barton, the Republican operative and discredited historian who rejects the separation of church and state, claiming that the United States was founded as a Christian nation.

This project seems to have maintained a low profile until Fred Clarkson, who has been studying the Christian right for decades, came across their 116-page manual of model legislation in early 2018. As Clarkson explains, Project Blitz is to Christian nationalists what the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) was to big business.

Many of the bills on [the Christian right] agenda are making news; some have passed key legislative committees or whole state legislative chambers, and some have already been signed into law. But what reporters, activists, and most legislators don’t realize is that many of these bills draw from an unusual package of 20 model bills included in a report assembled by a coalition of Christian Right groups for an initiative they call “Project Blitz.”

The bills are seemingly unrelated and range widely in content—from requiring public schools to display the national motto, “In God We Trust” (IGWT); to legalizing discrimination against LGBTQ people; to religious exemptions regarding women’s reproductive health. The model bills, the legislative strategy and the talking points reflect the theocratic vision that’s animated a meaningful portion of the Christian Right for some time. In the context of Project Blitz’s 116-page playbook, however, they also reveal a sophisticated level of coordination and strategizing that echoes the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), which infamously networks probusiness state legislators, drafts sample legislation, and shares legislative ideas and strategies.

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catastrophe-looking-back-at-the-mayhem-of-the-2010s/

A decade closer to catastrophe: Looking back at the mayhem of the 2010s

Written by Anis Shivani / Salon January 5, 2020

no lnx

A decade closer to catastrophe: Looking back at the mayhem of the 2010s

Written by Anis Shivani / Salon January 5, 2020

No, I do not mean climate change, though that too — or, more generally, ecological collapse, since I hate reducing the nature of the ecological challenge to the words “climate change,” which are simultaneously reductive and fatalistic, and at the same time weirdly exculpatory. And by looking at it in abstraction from the human actions which beckon the catastrophe, one avoids its true meaning altogether.

What did we get much closer to then, in the time period from 2010 to 2019? Most worrying to me, a flattening of human consciousness. People everywhere, because capitalist globalization goes on unchecked, speak a simpler language, shun centuries or millennia of cultural tradition, live in a Twitter-vacuum of the moment, echoing platformed thoughts, imbibing the latest hypocrisy dressed as outrage, sounding like everyone else even when they do resort to speaking their native languages. The same limited cultural producers, dramatically declining in range and number (in the U.S. we seem to be down to just about one worthy newspaper, the New York Times), offering the same vacant thoughts. The dream of cultural uniformity, and therefore cultural annihilation, is much closer than it was 10 years ago. That’s a big change, and for me the most notable one.

Technology has pushed this along, this flattening of human culture, just as it has taken huge steps forward in annihilating privacy and autonomy. I’ve been rereading for the last few years the classics of golden-age science fiction, and one thing that almost everyone — Isaac Asimov, Clifford Simak, Arthur C. Clarke, Algis Budrys, Frederik Pohl and C.M. Kornbluth (as a duo), Alfred Bester, Theodore Sturgeon, A.E. van Vogt and others — missed is the power of technology to track and control us at the mundane level. Nearly all the plots of classic science fiction seem irrelevant now in the face of technology that makes day-to-day elusiveness impossible. That was the one big thing — unlike, say, nuclear power — those writers almost completely overlooked. Their minds, even when writing about millennia into the future, couldn’t grasp the scale of technological control that was actually just around the corner.

Certain facile conclusions are possible about where we have been and where we’re headed. If you look at the rise of Occupy and before that the Tea Party, and more recently Trumpism, Brexit and millennial-style democratic socialism, it seems easy to conclude that the days of conventional neoliberal economics are over. In this prism, populism— whether of a Narendra Modi or a Donald Trump — is resurgent, in opposition to neoliberalism’s reduction of the human being to globally tradable commodity, with all the uniqueness of culture, tradition, ideology, philosophy, art and literature stripped away. But if you consider neoliberalism as being enfolded within capitalism, as being a variant rather than a substitute of the higher power, then the protest movements of the last decade, both on the left and right, seem relatively impotent. Because they are not yet aiming at the real enemy — no, not even American democratic socialism, it seems to me.

Power, in fact, has filtered to certain overlords in the technological world, the Jeff Bezoses and Mark Zuckerbergs of the world having consolidated infinitely more ability to dictate patterns of thought and behavior than anyone would have thought possible at the start of the last decade. They have faced very little resistance: The Russiagate attack on Facebook is fraught with doublespeak, with the “liberal” side exposing its hypocrisy with respect to what has been derisively relabeled the “deep state” — and used to be called the military-industrial complex by respectable dissidents — because they stand in symbiotic relationship with the populist masses who have voluntarily delegated this power upward to them. As long as they can preen and posture, to the delight of their own minute cults, the quiet relinquishment of power and the voluntary erasure of privacy seem to be a price worth paying.

Without privacy, no liberalism. Without print, no liberalism. Without due process of law (consider the various hotheaded cultural movements of the last decade stemming mostly from the liberal side), no liberalism. Without cultural distinction, and the mental space that makes it possible, free from technological determinism, no liberalism. Without reasonable upward mobility even on superficial materialist terms, no liberalism. Without minimal consensus about history and the empirical basis of political narrative, no liberalism.

The movie “Idiocracy” once seemed like a wild exaggeration, despite the patent idiocy of George Bush the younger, during whose peak era the movie was made. Now, at the end of this decade, Mike Judge’s film seems to have been under-boiled, a fainthearted effort at capturing the kind of dumbness the population at large would come to embody.The populist leader in “Idiocracy” seems almost enlightened compared to the actual reality today.

The last decade consolidated the illiberal trends of the decade that preceded it — the one that gave the world the war on terror, and the assorted bureaucratic tools to separate wanted and unwanted people, many of those instruments unprecedented in scope and power. Thus we remain on the linear trend of the gradual dissolution of empire that began as soon as the Soviet Union disintegrated and really took off at the turn of the millennium. Twenty years have gone by, and another 30 or so remain before this saga is all wrapped up.

For the coming decade, certain obvious predictions are in order.An economic collapse, since the fundamental skew toward debt and leverage was never addressed — and can’t be, within the straitjacket American capitalism has forced itself into — which will usher in a stronger wave of austerity, reaction, xenophobia and social Darwinism than was the case in the wake of the last economic crash. And continued political fragmentation, which won’t be anything new, but will be orders of magnitude greater than anything we experienced in the previous decade.

Ten years ago, most large American cities (except for New York and San Francisco, most prominently) were still affordable to large numbers of people. If you go to Los Angeles today, you would never dare to make such an assertion. The crisis of affordability, whereby perfectly good housing that could accommodate normal people has been converted into empty financial space controlled from a distance by oligarchies that refuse to be named, has infected every American city. It does not stem from independent forces, but works in perfect correlation with the new technological prowess to separate the wanted from the unwanted.

I’m sorry, but democratic socialism as it is being marketed now, and which is successfully recruiting large numbers of millennial followers, was suitable for 1990. It is not suitable for 2020. It can’t even begin to address the social pathologies engendered by the last 30 years of unchecked capitalism. Most evidently, it can’t even bring into the ideological fold more than half the voting population, who will fight it tooth and nail, to their own death if necessary, precisely because it promises the kind of love and compassion for which they see no place in public life, except as a form of unwanted weakness.

This linear progression toward absolute chaos and division and fragmentation and quarantine and erasure has become all too predictable. It used to be that Hollywood loved to destroy Manhattan, the ultimate nerve center of empire, over and over again, as an act of love: To declare total fealty to America is to wish to demolish it at its liveliest core, it seems. The era of such movies has passed, their peak being the 1990s, and to a lesser extent the 2000s, both more transitional decades than the one that has just ended. Manhattan is already hollow, cured, pacified, irrelevant, silent, gored at its core. There is no need for Hollywood to step in with its short-order apocalypses.

At the end of the decade, after 10 years that were remarkably free of memorable movies and literature, came two of the best ever. I found Martin Scorsese’s “The Irishman” as compelling as any American movie I’ve ever seen,and his edgy refusal to go quietly into the sunset, as he faces his own mortality, is a testament to his will to tell the truth. The mob is America. It is not a subculture or a split from the mainstream, it is the very essence of America. The small hoodlum (I just rewatched “Mean Streets” from 1973, the first Robert De Niro and Scorsese collaboration) becomes the big hoodlum almost without note, which is what we call America. The sense of wrapping up, of imminent farewell, transcends Scorsese’s personal alarm toward mortality, and is rather a postulate that all of our lives, during these hyper-capitalist last few decades, have been in vain. There is not even sorrow or apology or penance to be had, as is embodied in De Niro’s luminous characterization.

And the novel that spoke to me most resonantly about this exact same dread — this fear of an opportunity for reclamation that went by in a moment’s glimpse before it was even adequately grasped — was “Quichotte,” Salman Rushdie’s best novel since “Midnight’s Children,” published almost four decades ago, just a couple of years after the ayatollahs seized Iran and set in motion furies that still haven’t subsided. “Quichotte” has a lot in common with “The Irishman,” and I encourage readers to look at how far advanced the superficial Hollywood project of annihilating America has become in these trustworthy hands, a giant of filmmaking on the one hand, and of literature on the other hand. The myth of America, in “Quichotte,” is fully encompassed, which is the only reason why alternative (fantastical) myths can be offered, which Rushdie, generous to a fault, does, in plenty.

During the last decade every opportunity for intellectual clarity was passed up by the well-spoken elites — in the academy, in publishing and writing, in all of the arts — as people were encouraged to retreat into their private hells of belief, unwilling to meet other people at face value, living out suspicion, paranoia, conspiracy, fear-mongering and delusion at the most personal level. To give up your humanity without even the promise of anything in return (which is what something like the escalation of social media dependency or call-out culture or ideological surrender represents) is quite something. That’s what this last decade demonstrated in spades. It was not a pretty sight, and it’s about to get worse.

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/12/the-citizens-united-ruling-broke-american-democracy-at-the-start-of-the-decade-it-may-never-recover/

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The Citizens United ruling broke American democracy at the start of the decade. It may never recover

Written by Igor Derysh / Salon December 29, 2019

The election of President Donald Trump will likely define this decade, but the breakdown in our political system which sowed deeper partisan divisions and ultimately paved the way for his White House victory can be traced back to a single January day almost exactly ten years ago.

On Jan. 21, 2010, then-Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy cast the deciding vote in the Citizens United case, which was brought by a group chaired by David Bossie, who would later serve as Trump’s deputy campaign manager.

Kennedy wrote in the majority decision that limits on independent expenditures violated the First Amendment rights of corporations and other groups, effectively overturning spending restrictions dating back more than a century.

The decision allowed corporations to spend unlimited money on campaign ads as long as they did not formally coordinate with candidates or political parties. According to Kennedy, there could not be corruption, because “an independent expenditure is political speech presented to the electorate that is not coordinated with a candidate.”

Some have argued that the ruling was the “logical next step” after the court’s 1976 Buckley v. Valeo decision, which said election spending limits may violate the First Amendment. But the Supreme Court ruled in favor of corporate limits in 1990 and then upheld limits on corporate and union spending in 2003.

The Citizens United ruling was later compounded by Republican efforts to block transparency rules, Federal Election Commission rulings and further court decisions like McCutcheon v. FEC, paving the way for the creation of super PACs, or committees which can spend unlimited sums of money to promote or oppose candidates while hiding the identities of their donors.

The impact of the Citizens United ruling and subsequent campaign finance changes are undeniable. In 2010, the biggest Republican donor of the election cycle spent $7.6 million to support conservative candidates, according to the Center for Responsive Politics (CPR).Just eight years later, casino mogul Sheldon Adelson and his wife, Miriam, donated $122 million to support GOP candidates, or more than 15 times as much.

Democrats pumped big money into elections, too. Presidential contender Mike Bloomberg spent $95 million during the last election cycle, while fellow billionaire candidate Tom Steyer spent more than $73 million, according to CPR data. [FOR GUNS AND CliMATE]

There was certainly loads of money pumped into elections prior to Citizens United. The 2008 presidential election, which was the last national contest before the Supreme Court decision, saw about $338 million in outside spending. But the amount of outside cash injected into the presidential race skyrocketed to more than $1 billion in 2012 and $1.4 billion in 2016.

Such massive expenditures are not limited to presidential races. The 2018 midterm election cycle was the first in history to see more than $1 billion in outside spending — up from $69 million just four cycles earlier and $567 million in 2014, according to the CPR.

Super PACs quickly became the biggest outside spenders. In 2018, the House Republican-linked Congressional Leadership Fund spent $136 million, the Senate Democratic-aligned Senate Majority PAC spent $112 million and the Mitch McConnell-connected Senate Leadership Fund spent $94 million, according to the CPR.

Though both parties have raised and spent hundreds of millions in outside money — and the Citizens United ruling has been criticized by both former President Barack Obama and Trump — researchers at the University of Chicago, Columbia University and the London School of Economics and Political Science found that the rise of dark money has resulted in a huge advantage for Republicans in state legislature races, particularly in “states with weak unions.”

“We find that Citizens United increased the GOP’s average seat share in the state legislature by five percentage points. That is a large effect— large enough that, were it applied to the past twelve Congresses, partisan control of the House would have switched eight times,” the researchers wrote in a Washington Post op-ed. “In line with a previous study, we also find that the vote share of Republican candidates increased three to four points on average.” PLUS GERRY VOTE SUPPRESS?!]

The result has been a shift much further to the right in numerous state legislatures and an increase in “ideological extremism,” which was more prevalent among Democrats, according to the study.

In the 2010 election, the first to see a massive upswing in outside money, Republicans captured two dozen state legislative chambers ahead of a game-changing nationwide gerrymandering effort, which made it harder than ever for Democrats to win back the seats they lost.

“Without Citizens United every frontline Congressional race of the last two cycles are TOTALLY different,” Fordham Law Professor Zephyr Teachout tweeted. “A billion in outside spending in 2018. And that is just a tiny fraction of the impact.”

Despite Kennedy’s insistence that there could be no corruption because candidates cannot coordinate with super PACs, the ruling has also led to corruption as candidates flout rules preventing them from coordinating with the PACs. [EITAN_]

“The supposed barrier between candidates and unrestricted super PACs is flimsier than ever,” Roll Call reported just four years after the ruling. “As midterm elections approach, complaints are rolling into the FEC from both parties about super PACs that share vendors, fund-raisers and video footage with the politicians they support.”

GOP leaders like Paul Ryan devised ways to solicit money directly from billionaires like Adelson by using go-betweens. The New York Times reported in 2015 that Republican presidential candidate Carly Fiorina had “aggressively” exploited loopholes to allow a super PAC to effectively run her campaign.

And the corruption is not merely limited to exploiting loopholes in the law. Obama warned in a State of the Union speech that the Citizens United ruling could lead toforeign interference in U.S. elections. Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito could be seen mouthing the words, “Not true.”

But Obama’s foreshadowing turned out to be remarkably true. Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, the two associates of Trump’s personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, were recently indicted on charges that they illegally funneled foreign money to Republican politicians, including a $325,000 contribution to a pro-Trump super PAC.

George Nader, an adviser to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates who was linked to efforts to aid Trump’s campaign during the election, was also indicted for allegedly funneling $3.5 million into elections, including a $1 million contribution to a Democratic super PAC.

In 2012, a foreign-owned company made a $1 million contribution to a pro-Mitt Romney super PAC.

Democratic presidential candidates, including Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., have premised their campaigns on driving big money out of politics. Sanders has long called for a constitutional amendment to repeal Citizens United, which was echoed by Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., and others at the party’s December primary debate.

But it may be nearly impossible to meet the high threshold to ratify a constitutional amendment. There has only been one amendment ratified since 1971. While House Democrats voted to approve H.R. 1, which called for the ruling to be repealed, there appears to be little to no support for the legislation from Republicans in the upper chamber.

Groups like the American Civil Liberties Union have decried these efforts as attempts to “ban political speech.”

“In our view, the answer to that problem is to expand — not limit — the resources available for political advocacy. Thus, the ACLU supports a comprehensive and meaningful system of public financing that would help create a level playing field for every qualified candidate,” the organization said. “We support carefully drawn disclosure rules, we support reasonable limits on campaign contributions and we support stricter enforcement of existing bans on coordination between candidates and super PACs.”

Some local governments have tried to counter the rise of dark money with public financing.Seattle’s “democracy vouchers” give voters $100, which they can donate to any campaign in a local election. Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang has proposed a similar “Democracy Dollars” program, which would expand this initiative across the country.

But while cities, states and federal lawmakers grapple with the rise of dark money in politics, one thing that is clear is that Citizens United irrevocably changed politics over the course of the last decade — and beyond.

Kennedy himself admitted in 2015 that the disclosure requirement he believed would fix any potential issues of corruption was “not working the way it should.”FEC Commissioner Ann Ravel quit in 2017 over the state of campaign finance, writing in her resignation letter that “our political campaigns have been awash in unlimited, dark money” since the Citizens United decision.

“Most of the funding comes from a tiny, highly unrepresentative segment of the population,” she wrote. “Disclosure laws need to be strengthened, the broken jurisprudence of Citizens United re-examined, public financing of candidates ought to be expanded to reduce reliance on the wealthy and commissioners who will carry out the mandates of the law should be appointed.”

A Brennan Center report pointed out that a small wealthy group of Americans now wields “more power than at any time since Watergate, while many of the rest seem to be disengaging from politics.”

“This is perhaps the most troubling result of Citizens United: in a time of historic wealth inequality,” report author Daniel Weiner wrote, “the decision has helped reinforce the growing sense that our democracy primarily serves the interests of the wealthy few and that democratic participation for the vast majority of citizens is of relatively little value.”

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big pict tom disp

https://www.alternet.org/2019/12/trump-is-just-a-symptom-of-our-decline-but-hes-proven-to-be-the-symptom-from-hell

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Trump is just a symptom of our decline — but he’s proven to be the symptom from hell

notation lost 1x

https://www.alternet.org/2019/12/impeachment-a-struggle-to-save-democracy-from-the-pathological-cult-of-donald-trump/

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Impeachment: A struggle to save democracy from the pathological cult of Donald Trump

Written by Paul Rosenberg / Salon December 1, 2019

There are many different ways to view the Trump impeachment process, but perhaps the most important, if least recognized one is to view it as a part of struggle to preserve American democracy from destruction at the hands of predatory individuals utterly lacking in conscience.

It’s well recognized that there’s an ongoing wave of democratic erosion or backsliding around the world — and that the United States today is caught up in that wave, not standing apart from it. What’s far less appreciated is the role that individuals with personality disorders play in this process — a role that systematically disrupts our expectations of how things work, based on the normal psychology we commonly and tacitly assume. Unless we understand them and their role, we will never fully grasp what is happening, and it will be much more difficult, if not impossible, to correct.

Although disordered individuals aren’t the primary underlying cause of democratic erosion, they exploit it ruthlessly and are the primary vectors in spreading chaos, turning rising tensions into unmanageable runaway conflicts, which they then claim to be uniquely able to fix. As I noted in July, the 2015 paper, “Antisocial Personality Disorder and Pathological Narcissism in Prolonged Conflicts and Wars,” by physician and psychiatrist Dr. Frederick “Skip” Burkle, cited half a dozen examples, from Idi Amin in Uganda to Slobodan Milosevic in the former Yugoslavia, who “have emerged first as saviors and then as despots, or as common criminals claiming to be patriots.”

But they aren’t the only disordered personalities involved. A long-suppressed book, published just over a decade ago, “Political Ponerology,” by Polish psychiatrist Andrew Lobaczewski, describes what he saw first-hand as a youth about how such individuals form the core of systems of oppressive misgovernment. Two experts who draw on his work, Elizabeth Mika and Ian Hughes, have provided some of the clearest insight into what’s been happening in America since 2015.

As Hughes explains in “Disordered Minds: How Dangerous Personalities Are Destroying Democracy,” three personality disorders — psychopathy, narcissistic personality disorder and paranoid personality disorder — play a crucial role. Individuals with these disorders experience only a narrow range of emotions, are incapable of empathy and are utterly lacking in conscience. They represent only a small fraction of the population — 5 to 10 percent, at most — but when conditions are dire many more ostensibly normal people can come to resemble them. After all, once things get bad enough, being paranoid is almost rational.

I returned to him to more fully explore what’s happening now, and reached out to Mika as well. Before turning to their responses, here’s what I have already learned from Mika. Her contribution to the collection “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump” (available online here) was arguably the most significant of all, as I have noted, because it places Trump into the larger context of what’s enabling him. “Tyrannies are three-legged beasts,” she wrote: There is the tyrant, his supporters and the society as a whole. The tyrant and his supporters join together in a “narcissistic collusion … driven by the latter’s need for revenge,” she wrote, “for the tyrant is always chosen to perform this psychically restorative function: to avenge the humiliations (narcissistic wounds) of his followers and punish those who inflicted them.”

This helps explain the intensity and durability of Trump’s support, which repeatedly baffles pundits. It also suggests that Trump’s enablers — such as Republican senators in an impeachment trial — would be much easier targets to focus on, if we wish to curtail the growing power of the pathocracy centered around Trump. This is one striking example of what’s being missed by not paying attention to expert perspectives like these.

More precisely, Mika continued:

The tyrant’s own narcissism hints at the level of woundedness of his supporters. The greater their narcissistic injury, the more grandiose a leader they require to repair it. While his grandiosity appears grotesque to non-narcissistic people who do not share his agenda, to his followers he represents all their denied and thwarted greatness which now, under his rule, will finally flourish.

Mika also notes a second kind of supporter, those close to the tyrant who serve as his surrogates. In discussing society as a whole, she too referenced how Lobaczewski’s book “discusses at length the formation and progression of pathocracies — political and other systems [run] by characterologically impaired individuals, predominantly psychopaths and narcissists.”

Impeachment as an opportunity to target Trump’s enablers

While the bonds between ordinary followers and the would-be tyrant are particularly strong, for reasons noted above, they’re usually much weaker with others, such as his close supporters and local enforcers, who are also involved in running the pathocracy. Because Trump is so focused on preserving his own hold on power, as impeachment proceeds, such lesser figures may become easier to expose, discredit and drive from power — such as, perhaps, enough Republican senators for Democrats to regain control of that body. By expanding our thinking to challenge the pathocracy wherever vulnerable, we create more opportunities to defeat it.

To date, Democrats have failed to think in such terms, even though it’s clear that Trump has many henchmen and accomplices who either share his personality disorders or have willingly gone along with them. Consider the large number of questionably-qualified cabinet members Trump has appointed, the even larger legion of “acting” appointments he’s made as a means to avoid even cursory Senate scrutiny and the alt-right media sphere that has blossomed in support of him.

These are all symptomatic of a pathocracy Democrats have too often simply accepted, rather than seeing as prime points to attack. The struggle to dislodge Trump through House impeachment and a Senate trial almost certainly won’t remove him from office, but it does provide opportunities to expose and confront the larger collection of malignant actors who support him, and who threaten America’s existence as a functioning democracy.

Hughes helped set the stage with his comments noted above, particularly his observation that the Republican Party is now dominated by those “who mirror Trump’s pathological mindset. This was not the case just three years ago when Trump was elected.”

During this time, individuals within the GOP who share Trump’s disordered mentality, as reflected in their beliefs in conspiracy theories, rejection of facts as the basis of their worldview, propensity to attack and demean opponents, and their sense of entitlement to power at any cost, have risen in stature within the party. Those who privately believe such views and actions to be destructive, immoral and deluded have either been silenced or have left the party. The Republicans’ behavior during the impeachment hearings illustrate to me that segregation in terms of pathology within the GOP is now virtually complete.

Mika calls this “a natural development once a disordered leader is elected.”

He surrounds himself with people who are similarly impaired, whose conscience is either nonexistent or so ‘flexible’ that it allows them to engage in immoral and criminal activities without an emotional penalty of guilt and shame.

The rise of full-blown pathocracy shows us how easily so-called normal people can be co-opted for abnormal — psychopathic, immoral and criminal — ends. We can see that this applies to people from all walks of life, no matter their intelligence, education, social status.

In the present case,” she continued, “almost the entire Republican Party has become a mirror eagerly reflecting Trump’s psychopathology and protecting him from reality, no matter the cost to the country and the world.”

Preconditions: The trouble with “normal”

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I then asked about the preconditions which made Trump’s rise possible in the first place, and the light these may shed on calls for a “return to normal.”

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“The single biggest trigger for Trump and the collapse of U.S. democracy was the financial crisis of 2008 and its aftermath,” Hughes said. “This is true not just in the U.S. but in Europe also. It was the single biggest factor behind the Brexit vote.”

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Personality disorders played a role here as well, he suggested. “Those at the top of the major financial institutions were seen to have recklessly built an unstable financial system, based on highly unethical practices, profited enormously, and walked away with their fortunes when it all came tumbling down,” Hughes pointed out. “Ordinary people, on the other hand, were left to pay the price in terms of lost homes, reduced salaries and unemployment.”

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Both because of the crisis and the failure to hold those who caused it responsible, this sequence of events “had the effect of destroying public confidence in elites in general and in politicians in particular,” Hughes added. “Trump is part of a slow car crash that has been happening for decades and that originated in large part on Wall Street.”

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Mika’s views were related, but expressed from a different angle:

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The preconditions that paved way to the Trumpist takeover of America are most of all, in my mind, the narcissism that pervades American culture, as well as the toxic materialism and greed, and the staggering and growing inequality and poverty they produced. The insatiable greed, along with the narcissism expressed in the myth of American exceptionalism, is a defining feature of American capitalism. Narcissism and greed go hand in hand, in individual and collective life. They are both expressions of false consciousness that contains within themselves the seeds of their own inevitable destruction.

More precisely, Mika continued, “Trump, like all leaders with his defective character, is an agent of that destruction. He was elected to ‘drain the swamp,’ and in a perverse way he is doing just that by exposing the rot within American politics and society, and specifically the lack of conscience that characterizes the members of GOP as well as sizable segments of the populace.”

This would all be a great deal clearer if Democrats as a whole were keyed in on it. But there are still too many who yearn for a “return to normal,” as if everything had been fine before Trump.

“The calls for return to normal, which many anti- and never-Trumpers advocate, are misguided, I believe, if not dangerous — but also futile,” Mika said. “First of all, the normal is what brought us Trumpism, so going back to it would be a recipe for more and perhaps even greater disaster.”

“A ‘return to normal’ isn’t possible because ‘normal’ is how we got here,” Hughes agreed. We need a new, healthier normal, instead, he suggested.

“Donald Trump is a violent man,” he continued, who “incites violence and aggression against anyone who opposes him, identifies with and rewards those who are violent, and acts in ways that are gratuitously cruel.” But Trump didn’t arise in a vacuum, and he doesn’t act in one, either:

Trump’s direct violence is enabled by another form of violence that is prevalent in America, namely structural violence.Structural violence refers to the conditions that society imposes on people that constrain them from meeting their essential needs and achieving basic levels of dignity and quality of life. The extreme level of inequality in the U.S. is a form of structural violence that is resulting in enormous levels of the so called diseases of despair — drug abuse, alcoholism, and suicide.

“Reducing the structural violence of inequality and tackling or removing the causes of mental illness, depression, racism, incarceration, and other social problems,” Hughes said, reprising a key point from his book, “must form the basis for a new, more humane and caring ‘normal’ after Trump.”

Any return to the old normal is “impossible now,” Mika agreed. “The changes set in motion by Trump’s presidency are irreversible. They have unleashed forces of disintegration that are impossible to contain, for better and for worse.”

Lessons from abroad

I asked about similar examples of pathocracy from other countries, and Hughes turned to the example of Stalinism in Eastern Europe — the example that Lobaczewski lived through, and from which the psychological concept of pathocracy was born:

One of the clearest examples from history of the deliberate dismantling of democracy occurred once Stalin gained control of Eastern Europe at the end of the Second World War. I think there are clear parallels between Stalin’s systematic destruction of the central pillars of democracy there and what is happening under Trump today.

Stalin’s first step was to install puppet leaders across Eastern Europe who would do his bidding — think [William] Barr and [Mike] Pompeo in the U.S. domestic context. Stalin used these proxies to target the rule of law and empower secret police forces tasked with the violent oppression of the regime’s opponents.

Stalin’s second step was the elimination of free and fair elections. Trump has been working on that since before his election in 2016.

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Ending freedom of religion and replacing religion with the cult of Stalin was Stalin’s third objective. Again, Trump’s sycophants are working hard to realize this objective in the U.S. Rick Perry, Mike Pompeo and Sarah Sanders have all said that God chose Trump to be president. According to a 2017 survey by the Public Religion Research Institute, close to half (45%) of Republicans agree.

Eastern European cultures were catastrophically damaged, Hughes notes:

Philosopher Roger Scruton has written that Stalin’s destruction of Eastern European societies reveals an unpleasant truth about human nature: “If enough people are sufficiently determined, and if they are backed by adequate resources and force, then they can destroy ancient and apparently permanent legal, political, educational and religious institutions, sometimes for good. And if civil society could be so deeply damaged in nations as disparate, as historic and as culturally rich as those of Eastern Europe, then it can be similarly damaged anywhere. If nothing else, the history of post-war Stalinisation proves just how fragile ‘civilization’ can turn out to be.”

“Ian’s vivid and detailed description of the Stalinist takeover of Eastern Europe is spot on, and it is one that is obviously closest to my heart,” Mika said. “What struck me most in it is the always shocking, but not surprising, ease with which many so-called normal people revert to primitive, quasi-psychopathic functioning when given the opportunity.”

This is what deserves particular attention: How a pathocracy can create a new reality in which its wildly disordered worldview becomes the new normal, and everyone else must adjust.

“The rule of a pathological leader and his similarly disordered coterie that defines pathocracy normalizes and champions the worst human impulses,” Mika said. “We saw this under communism in Eastern Europe, under fascism in Germany, in the former Yugoslavia where neighbors turned against each other. We see it everywhere when the pathological political leaders give people permission to act on their primitive instincts. We learn quickly how fragile our civilized norms and mores are.”

If pathocracy has sown havoc elsewhere, its seeds have long been planted here as well, waiting for a favorable moment to flourish. Mika again:

In 1964, Richard Hofstadter wrote about “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” describing the pervasive conspiratorial mindset of a large enough, dispossessed portion of American citizenry. This mindset is activated by ethnic, religious and class conflicts, and by times of upheaval and frustrations. It does not take much to foment it, especially when conditions are right, i.e., people become increasingly unable to cope with the difficulties of their daily life and look for scapegoats for their misery and pain. Trump’s untruths, big and small, have thus found a naturally receptive audience in America today.

Thuggish enforcers

I also asked for any further thoughts about the support and elevation of those Hughes has described as “thuggish enforcers” —from Trump’s persistent defense of police abuse against black and brown people to the pardon of former Arizona sheriff Joe Arpaio and the more recent pardons of accused or convicted war criminals, which led to the resignation of the Navy secretary.??

Hughes responded:

During my research for “Disordered Minds,” one of the common features that emerged from studying the regimes of Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot and Mao was how violent thugs played a critical role at a local level in securing and maintaining each of these regime’s hold on power.

Historian Frank Dikotter, for example, quotes one village resident recalling how during Mao’s violent collectivization of agriculture in China: “All the scamps and the village bullies, who had not done a stroke of honest work in their life, suddenly blossomed forth as the accredited members of the Communist Party.” Historian Orlando Figes similarly recounts how the Communist youth organization in the Russian village of Obukhovo comprised a dozen teenage thugs with guns, led by 18-year-old Kolia Kuzmin, who had spent his childhood on the village streets begging on behalf of his alcoholic father. So it was right across both China and the Soviet Union, as violent thugs were empowered to terrorize their communities.

“People with an impaired conscience tend to gravitate toward each other and excuse their crimes and misdeeds because it’s their normal,” Mika noted. “Trump’s pardons of war criminals and the subsequent ouster of the Navy secretary is very much in line with the developing pathocratic takeover of what we considered our democracy.”

Trump, like all leaders with his character defect, is enamored with brute force and violence. He identifies with and admires thugs, and given more power, he would fully demonstrate this aspect of his character. Now Trump wants the pardoned war criminals to campaign with him. He feels stronger and emboldened in the company of those who openly act out their primitive impulses. They are his role models and sources of inspiration.

Using open and officially sanctioned violence as a means of social control, as well as settling personal vendettas, is a natural progression in the development of tyrants and tyrannies. Tyrants are driven by an insatiable desire to gain and exercise deadly power in order to achieve personal glory. This desire is self-destructive, of course, but that is not obvious to the tyrant wannabe, nor to his followers.

Failures of the supposed free press

The media’s ongoing failure to report on Trump accurately was another concern I raised — reflecting both the pursuit of false balance, among other things, and a general failure to grasp the broader significance and true nature of the spreading pathocracy.?

“To accurately cover what is happening, the media would have to accept four unpleasant facts,” Hughes told me:

First, it is highly likely that Donald Trump has a dangerous narcissistic character disorder that makes him psychologically incapable of functioning within a rules-based democratic system. In fact, as we are seeing, his character disorder compels him to dismantle that system.’

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Second, the Republican Party is no longer a democratic party. It too has rejected the rules and values of democracy and is pursuing a power-at-all-costs authoritarian agenda.

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Third, and most unpleasantly perhaps, a sizable fraction of the U.S. population would be happy to live within such an authoritarian system if those they despise are “put in their place.”

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And finally, violence and aggression are increasingly an indispensable means for the alliance between Trump, the GOP and core Trump supporters to achieve their goals.

Traditional media practices simply aren’t suited to reporting what’s been happening right before its eyes, he went on:

You can understand that this is a difficult framing for any mainstream media organization to adopt, but it is a scenario that has been repeated ad nauseam in so many countries, that the media really should recognize it by now.

I feel very strongly that we won’t be able to counter the threat we face unless and until we understand it. But the mainstream media doesn’t, or chooses not to, and so there is a complacency or a “behind the curve” quality to most of the coverage. As a result, the gravity of the situation is not accepted and communicated, and the lies and disinformation are allowed to continue without being contextualized.

“We are now a country where war criminals are pardoned and celebrated while innocent children are kept in cages, and this is considered normal,” Mika noted. Mainstream media “does not appear too perturbed by the tragic absurdity of it,” she said. I couldn’t help but think of what CBS CEO Les Moonves said in February 2016: Trump’s candidacy might not be good for America, but it was “damn good for CBS.” That attitude seemingly has not changed, except perhaps to become more accommodating toward Trump after he was elected.

“The inability and/or unwillingness of the American mainstream media to grasp and report what is happening in our country makes them complicit in the spread of pathocracy,” Mika added. “But again, this is typical. The corporate ownership of the media, the purpose of which is to sell ads and generate profits, makes it a natural ally of the political powers that be, with a compromised regard for truth and morality.”

How do we fight back?

I asked both these experts what ordinary readers can do to resist or deter the spread of pathocracy. Hughes didn’t answer directly, instead voicing his concerns about what wasn’t being done.

“Looking on from Europe, the absence of mass public demonstrations against Trump are a worrying sign,” he said. “I know that a lot is happening in terms of political mobilization at the party level, but the U.S. appears to be standing in complacent silence, in comparison with the mass demonstrations for democracy taking place around the world, from Hong Kong [waves of protests since March, topping one million multiple times] to Chile [since mid-October, peaking at 3.7 million protesters] to Lebanon [since mid-October, hundreds of thousands nationwide].”

The extent of such pro-democracy mass movements spanning the globe is historically remarkable, suggesting comparisons to 1968— except for the fact that the U.S. seems to have missed out this time. “These comparisons are telling,” Hughes noted. “Trump and his enablers will take that silence as a free pass to proceed with their dismantling of American democracy.”

Mika answered more directly, and with more assurance. “Be informed, but don’t get sucked into the political drama too far,” she said. “Do what you must, and work on equanimity. Voice your concerns, but remember that this too shall pass. Vote.”

In closing, I asked for final thoughts. Hughes raised the question of what Trump is really after.

“History shows that the dismantling of democracy by an autocrat is not an end in itself,” he said “Rather, it is the precondition that allows the tyrant to violently impose his narcissistic vision upon society.” He ticked through a list of examples:

For Hitler that vision was German domination of, and ethnic cleansing of, Europe. For Stalin, it was to make the Soviet Union a world power, on the backs of the slave labor camps of the Gulag and the subjugation of the population through terror. For Mao, it was to enable the endless use of revolution and violence in pursuit of his vision for China, in which, as he said, “half of China may well have to die.”

It’s chilling to realize that America could be headed somewhere similar, Hughes warned: “If we allow him to continue his attacks on U.S. democracy and the rules based international order, we may find out, to our cost, what the narcissistic fantasy of Donald J Trump, really is.”

Whatever that terrifying vision may be, let’s make sure we never need to know.

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sort of big pix long view:

2 big SYS fails uncorrected led to djt: gt recess and gulf war 2, brexit

...curry salon

After the Iraq war, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown appointed a commission to investigate how exactly his country stumbled into such a tragic fiasco.The Chilcot Report (for Lord John Chilcot, who led the commission) was an account of political bungling and deception as thorough and damning as the Pentagon Papers. Its 2016 release made former Prime Minister Tony Blair, chief accomplice to George W. Bush in that disastrous undertaking, into a social leper. Unlike Robert Mueller, Chilcot had an absolute right to interview any witness and compel production of any document he felt he needed; nearly all his interviews were done in public, and he delivered his report direct to the people of the United Kingdom.

The war was hatched in America by ideologues bent on exporting democracy via bribery and force of arms. In the eyes of many, it surpasses Vietnam as the worst foreign policy blunder in our nation’s history. In a speech to the nation summarizing the case for it, Bush leaned heavily on the only possible rationale for an unprovoked attack on a sovereign nation:

Intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised.

For months, his vice president and national security adviser peddled “evidence” of nuclear and chemical weapons. Before his speech, Bush was told by experts at the Department of Energy that the evidence was false, but he kept the news to himself. To this day it remains unproven who was lying, and who was only lied to.

The Congressional Budget Office says the war cost the U.S. $2 trillion. Nobel Prize-winning economist Joe Stiglitz puts it at $3 trillion. Nearly 4,500 U.S. military personnel died there, and tens of thousands more suffered disabling physical and psychic wounds. Iraqi casualties remain in dispute — as Gen. Tommy Franks informed reporters, “We don’t do body counts” — but estimates range from 180,000 to more than a million deaths. The UN High Commissioner for Refugees counted 3.7 million refugees. Americans think the war’s over. Last month, it took 166 Iraqi lives.

In 2009, as Gordon Brown was launching the Chilcot Inquiry, Barack Obama was being pressured to take a similar look back at how America was lured or lied into war. Obama took a different tack. Rather than appoint a commission with plenipotentiary powers, he did nothing. Aides said he thought retracing Bush’s path to war would make it hard to forge bipartisan alliances with Republicans.

2: Similar concerns colored his take on the other huge crisis he inherited, the 2008 Wall Street meltdown that leveled the global economy. No one knows its true cost, only that the number exceeds most human minds’ ability to conceptualize. A Government Accountability Office study put the U.S. cost at $22 trillion.

Social and political costs were even higher. Post-meltdown austerity measures, following ondecades of stagnant wages just as millions of Middle East refugees flooded Europe, rocking center-left coalitions that had ruled the West since World War II. Far-right political parties the old order was too polite to label fascist began to metastasize. Britain got Brexit. America got Trump.[NOTE CONFLUENCE OF 2 FAILS]

When the crisis broke, Obama was running for president. His closing stump speech was a litany of vows to curb corruption; above all, to punish Wall Street fraud. His administration never brought a case. Three years later, he went on “60 Minutes” to explain that the worst behavior wasn’t actually illegal. Given his dazzling intellect and access to wise counsel, one assumes he knew that what he said wasn’t true.

Privately, Obama revealed his thinking. He worried that prosecutions would hurt banks. He worried he’d lose personal support in the business community. (A major culprit, Goldman Sachs, was also his biggest donor.) And he worried he’d lose business backing vital to building bipartisan coalitions in Congress.

Lying was as much a cause of the Great Recession as it was of the Iraq war. Loan originators lied about applicants’ creditworthiness. Investment bankers lied about the toxicity of mortgage portfolios. Standard and Poor’s and Moody’s and Fitch all lied. So did Obama and most of Congress, which meant major reforms, excepting only Elizabeth Warren’s Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, were designed to curb “irrational exuberance,” not the immorality at the root of what befell us.

Instead of going to prison, bankers got bailed out, while homeowners got betrayed. Like the meltdown itself, the government’s response helped incite a populist revolt. Obama and Clinton Democrats were deaf to it, but Trump’s final 2016 TV ad began “Our movement is about replacing a failed and corrupt political establishment.” In the last week, it replaced nearly every other ad he had up in the industrial Midwest.

These failures — to investigate the origins of the Iraq war and the Great Recession and punish the culprits — were not anomalies. After 9/11, no one had the stomach to hold George W. Bush to account for ignoring intelligence reports on his desk, so the bipartisanship crowd invented a structural failure and wasted years rearranging intelligence and homeland security bureaucracies, resulted in a new Cabinet-level post, the Director of National Intelligence, who lacks the authority to direct anyone to do anything.

It happened after the 2000 election: Media barons set out to fix the exit polls, Congress set out to rid the world of hanging chads via nifty paperless ballots and the Democratic Party set out to rid the world of Ralph Nader.Thus, a pioneering GOP foray into voter suppression went nearly unremarked. Despite butterfly ballots, staged riots, a chief election official doing double duty as a Bush campaign chair and a Supreme Court concocting phony equal protection claims to rob Al Gore of real due process, Bush was clothed in legitimacy, leaving millions of Americans to conclude that the system was indeed rigged.

I doubt we’d be saddled with Trump had we not come to resemble him: way too materialistic, more than a bit narcissistic, unfocused, unlettered, infantile, even amoral. Our responses to these crises suggest that we also share a high tolerance for lying, a limited capacity for self-examination and an unspoken belief that the rich and powerful are above the law. Which brings us to the latest in our recent line of failures to look either evil or ourselves in the eye, the Mueller Report....

overview recap status:

prez steelworkers

Americans are not happy. And for good reason: They continue to suffer financial stress caused by decades of flat income. And every time they make the slightest peep of complaint about a system rigged against them, the rich and powerful tell them to shut up because it is all their fault.

One percenters instruct them to work harder, pull themselves up by their bootstraps and stop bellyaching. Just get a second college degree, a second skill, a second job. Just send the spouse to work, downsize, take a staycation instead of a real vacation. Or don’t take one at all, just work harder and longer and better.

The barrage of blaming has persuaded; workers believe they deserve censure. And that’s a big part of the reason they’re unhappy. If only, they think, they could work harder and longer and better, they would get ahead. They bear the shame. They don’t blame the system:the Supreme Court, the Congress, the president. And yet, it is the system, the American system, that has conspired to crush them.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, unemployment is low and the stock market is high. But skyrocketing stocks benefit only the top 10 percent of wealthy Americans who own 84 percent of stocks. And while more people are employed now than during the Great Recession, the vast majority of Americans haven’t had a real raise since 1979.

It’s bad out there for American workers. Last month, their ranking dropped for the third year running in the World Happiness Report, produced by the Sustainable Development Solutions Network, a UN initiative.

These sad statistics reinforce those in a report released two years ago by two university professors. Reviewing data from the General Social Survey, administered routinely nationally, the professors found Americans’ assessment of their own happiness and family finances has, unambiguously, declined in recent years.

But if Americans would just work harder, everything would be dandy, right?

No. Not right. Americans work really, really hard. A third of Americans work a side hustle,driving an Uber or selling crafts on Etsy. American workers take fewer vacation days. They get 14, but typically take only 10. The highest number of workers in five years report they don’t expect to take a vacation at all this year. And Americans work longer hours than their counterparts in other countries.

Americans labor 137 more hours per year than Japanese workers, 260 more than Brits, and 499 more than the French, according to the International Labor Organization.

And the longer hours aren’t because American workers are laggards on the job. They’re very productive. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics calculates that the average American worker’s productivity has increased 400 percent since 1950.

If pay had kept pace with productivity, as it did in the three decades after the end of World War II, American workers would be making 400 percent more. But they’re not. Their wages have flatlined for four decades, adjusting for inflation.

That means stress. Forty percent of workers say they don’t have $400 for an unexpected expense. Twenty percent can’t pay all of their monthly bills. More than a quarter of adults skipped needed medical care last year because they couldn’t afford it. A quarter of adults have no retirement savings.

If only Americans would work harder. And longer. And better.

Despite right-wing attempts to pound that into Americans’ heads, it’s not the solution. Americans clearly are working harder and longer and better. The solution is to change the system, which is stacked against workers.

Workers are bearing on their backs tax breaks that benefited only the rich and corporations. They’re bearing overtime pay rules and minimum wage rates that haven’t been updated in more than a decade. They’re weighted down by U.S. Supreme Court decisions thathobbled unionization efforts andkneecapped workers’ rights to file class-action lawsuits. They’re struggling under U.S. Department of Labor rules defining them as independent contractors instead of staff members. They live in fear as corporations threaten to offshore their jobs—with the assistance of federal tax breaks.

Last year, the right-wing majority on the U.S. Supreme Court handed a win to corporatists trying to obliterate workers’ right to organize and collectively bargain for better wages and conditions. The court ruled that public sector workers who choose not to join unions don’t have to pay a small fee to cover the cost of services that federal law requires the unions provide to them. This bankrupts labor unions. And there’s no doubt that right-wingers are gunning for private sector unions next.

This kind of relentless attack on labor unions since 1945 has withered membership. As it shrank, wages for both union and nonunion workers did too.

Also last year, the Supreme Court ruled that corporations can deny workers access to :{class-action arbitration. This compels workers, whom corporations forced to sign agreements to arbitrate rather than litigate, intoindividual arbitration cases, for which eachworker must hire his or her own lawyer. Then, just last week, the right-wing majority on the court further curtailed workers’ rights to **class-action** suits.}:

In a minority opinion, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburgwrote that the court in recent years has routinely deployed the law to deny to employees and consumers “effective relief against powerful economic entities.”

No matter how hard Americans work, the right-wing majority on the Supreme Court has hobbled them in an already lopsided contest with gigantic corporations.

The administrative branch is no better. Just last week, the Trump Labor Department issued an advisory that workers for a gig-economy company are independent contractors, not employees. As a result, the workers, who clean homes after getting assignments on an app, will not qualify for federal minimum wage (low as it is) or overtime pay. Also, the corporation will not have to pay Social Security taxes for them. Though the decision was specific to one company, experts say it will affect the designation for other gig workers, such as drivers for Uber and Lyft.

Also, the Labor Department has proposed a stingy increase in the overtime pay threshold—that is, the salary amount under which corporations must pay workers time and a half for overtime. The current threshold of $23,660 has not been raised since 2004. The Obama administration had proposed doubling it to $47,476. But now, the Trump Labor Department has cut that back to $35,308. That means 8.2 million workers who would have benefited from the larger salary cap now will not be eligible for mandatory overtime pay.

It doesn’t matter how hard they work; they aren’t going to get the time-and-a-half pay they deserve.

Just like the administration and the Supreme Court,right-wingers in Congress grovel before corporations and the rich. Look at the tax break they gave one percenters in 2017. Corporations got the biggest cut in history, their rate sledgehammered down from 35 percent to 21 percent. The rich reap by far the largest benefit from those tax cuts through 2027, according to an analysis by the Tax Policy Center. And by then, 53 percent of Americans—that is, workers, not rich people—will pay more than they did in 2017 because tax breaks for workersexpire.

The White House Council of Economic Advisers predicted the corporate tax cut would put an extra $4,000 in every worker’s pocket. They swore that corporations would use some of their tax cut money to hand out raises and bonuses to workers. That never happened. Workers got a measly 6 percent of corporations’ tax savings. In the first quarter after the tax cut took effect, workers on average received a big fat extra $6.21 in their paychecks, for an annual total of a whopping $233. Corporations spent their tax breaks on stock buybacks, a record $1 trillion worth, raising stock prices, which put more money in the pockets of rich CEOs and shareholders.

That’s continuing this year. Workers are never going to see that $4,000.

No wonder they’re unhappy.The system is working against them.

Leo W. Gerardis the international president of the United Steelworkers Union (USW).

This article was produced by the Independent Media Institute.

badass ppt 3 kinds of fail: SYS

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]; Cambridge analytical target swingables in swing states? related to jrnl fail

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?)

[rattlesnake ranch?]

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 obvious 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 damage, 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)

818 max profit capitalism extraction: sharing economy morph /frankenstein into uber rideshare;

AHA WEDGE ISSUES:

Chomsky

https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/they-cannot-get-votes-their-actual-policies-noam-chomsky-explains-how-republican

"They Cannot Get Votes on Their Actual Policies': Noam Chomsky Explains How the Republican Party Is Rotten to the Core

"It’s an intriguing spectacle, and not a little worrisome."

By Cody Fenwick / AlterNet July 6, 2018, 7:04 AM GMT

In a recent interview with Truthout, renowned MIT professor Noam Chomsky gave an incisive explanation of the current state of American politics, touching on the failures of President Barack Obama and the rise of President Donald Trump.

Chomsky argued that contrary to many narratives, Trump was a natural outgrowth of a rightward shift in political currents.

TheGOP's "dedication to wealth and corporate power is so extreme that they cannot get votes on their actual policies — which are now being revealed to us daily — and so have had to mobilize a voting base on issues unrelated to their service to their actual constituency," he explained. "These includereligious fundamentalism — a major phenomenon in the US unlike other developed societies —white supremacy, xenophobiaand other latent anti-social attitudes that tend to break through to the surface during periods of disillusionment and distress. This is partly a matter of 'search for scapegoats,' the actual sources concealed in the usual manner of propaganda; thus, the public vastly exaggerates the number of immigrants, even more than in Europe.

Disaffection began with Obama's insufficient response to the 2008 financial crisis, he said, and racial animus to his presidency also boosted the Republican Party.

And while many are surprised that Trump maintains strong approval within his own party, Chomsky argued that this is just par for the course.

"Trump’s roughly 90 percent support among Republicans is actually not unusual for an incumbent party at this stage in office — about the same as Obama among Democrats, though the fervor and passion are different, presumably reflecting the general atmosphere of anger, hatred and fear. And frightening," he said.

He even noted that the fervent support for Trump brings back "childhood memories of hearing Hitler’s Nuremberg rallies on the radio" — though he acknowledged that there were "great differences" between the two time periods.

Yet even as the GOP base gets swept up in the tides of extremism of all sorts, the business class is relishing the political moment, he argued.

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"For the actual Republican constituency of wealth and corporate power, these are glory days, so why object, even if his antics sometimes cause some grimaces?" he ask

https://www.alternet.org/noam-chomsky-fascism-showmanship-and-democrats-hypocrisy-trump-era

https://www.alternet.org/noam-chomsky-explains-exactly-whats-wrong-libertarianism

...

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may not fit here 6 trends 7/18

... half-dozen articles from the past two weeks that reflect some of the best reporting or analysis on the most important trends in voting.

1. The Supreme Court’s voting rights rulings were terrible, but the Court could get a lot worse. Years ago, the University of California Irvine law school’s Rick Hasen created the most-respected election law blog, where, among other things, he regularly gives his take on this vast topic. He most recent piece for Slate, How Justice Kennedy’s Successor Will Wreak Havoc on Voting Rights and American Democracy, is a sobering reminder of how the just-retiring justice was the author of some of the most damaging election law decisions in recent decades—damaging if you think that empowering big money and restricting voter participation are harmful. Clearly, conservatives disagree.

“Kennedy was the author or in the majority in three of the worst election law cases the court decided in the last two generations: Bush v. Gore (2000), Citizens United v. FEC (2010), and Shelby County v. Holder (2013). It’s worth looking back at Kennedy’s bad voting rights decisions—and how much worse they could have been—when thinking about his replacement,” Hasen writes. “It’s entirely conceivable that the next justice may become part of a new majority… to hold that voters cannot use initiatives to establish fair redistricting commissions and nonpartisan election rules applicable to federal elections. Further, the court could hold it unconstitutional for state supreme courts to strike down partisan gerrymanders of congressional districts on state constitutional grounds.”

Hasen’s comments come against a series of recent Supreme Court decisions—as the court ended its term in June—that basically evaded a once-a-decade chance to rein in extreme gerrymanders, or segregating voters by party to engineer likely popular vote majorities. The Court’s conservative majority also gave the green light to partisan voter purges in an Ohio case. In both cases, the conservatives didn’t elevate the principle that votes should carry equal weight, and the right to participate should take precedence, compared to being on the receiving end of partisan gaming of the rules by which people vote.

Hasen noted there were times when Kennedy seemed to agree with liberals, such as a famous 2004 case where he said there ought to be a limit to partisan gerrymanders—and urged potential litigants to document the negative impacts of extreme gerrymanders, or segregating voters by party when drawing districts. But when those gerrymandering suits finally came before the court this past term, Kennedy’s would-be search for reasonable political rules was nowhere to be seen in the majority opinions. And then he resigned.

“The Census has not asked respondents about their citizenship status since 1950,” his latest report for Mother Jones said. “Civil rights groups say the citizenship question will depress response rates from immigrants, imperil the accuracy of the Census and shift political power to areas with fewer immigrants.” Berman noted that the question comes from the white nationalist corner of Trump’s base—led by former advisor Stephen K. Bannon and Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach. But the deeper you look, the full extent of the administration’s cynical power play emerges. As others have reported, Attorney General Jeff Sessions said the citizenship question was needed to enforce a section of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 to protect minority voters. That rationale is beyond dubious when considering how Trump’s Justice Department has gone to court numerous times to oppose more a more open and equitable voting process—switching sides from the stance taken by the Obama administration.

2. Meanwhile, the fight over politicizing the 2020 Census continues. On Tuesday in New York City, a federal judge was deeply critical of the Trump Administration’s last-minute push to add a question about citizenship to the U.S. Census. Judge Jesse Furman of the Southern District of New York said the effort was a “strong showing of bad faith” because it “deviated from standard operating procedure” by adding the question without prior vetting by academics and statisticians. Mother Jones’ Ari Berman has reported on the citizenship question since the story broke earlier in the year, where he correctly has tied the use of citizenship status to pre-Civil Rights Movement racial discrimination. More than a dozen states have sued to stop the inclusion of the citizenship question.

3. America remains two different countries when it comes to voting. It would be wrong to think that the right to vote is under attack all over America—it’s not. It’s been under attack in the swing states that frequently determine the winners in presidential elections. These are the same states where extreme gerrymanders by the GOP, in 2011 following the last Census, created red supermajority U.S. House and state legislative delegations. But as Alan Greenblatt reported for *Governing* magazine, “Democrats, conversely, are doing everything they can to make voting easier.”

Washington Goy. Jay Inslee and New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy signed bills last winter creating automatic voter registration—bringing that automatic enrollment to 12 states. Nevada will soon vote on AVR. Maryland, Nevada, and Michigan will soon vote on versions of same-day registration. And Florida will vote this fall on restoring voting rights to non-violent former felons—possibly increasing its voter rolls by 10 percent.

Greenblatt noted that progress might only happen when the process is moved from the legislature to ballot boxes. “Case in point: The Nevada Legislature, which is controlled by Democrats, last year approved an automatic voter registration bill,” he wrote. “But GOP Gov. Brian Sandoval vetoed it, warning that it could expose residents to legal liability if it turned out they weren’t eligible to vote.”...t

“In recent years, progressives have enjoyed a fair measure of success with ballot initiatives on issues including minimum-wage increases and marijuana legalization,” he said. “They believe they can similarly convince the voters themselves that expanding the franchise is the right way to go, despite concerns about election security.”

4. Cyber securityin voting has gone mainstream. Voter turnout in some of 2018’s primary elections may be up slightly compared to past midterm years, but the focus on securing every step of the process has received unprecedented attention this cycle. Even former president Bill Clinton has weighed in, saying during his most recent book tour that paper ballot-based voting systems are the most transparent and reliable.

Most of the security work has gone on in relatively closed settings—or technical forums where the government has been reluctant to discuss current threats. But a firsthand report by David Becker at the Center for Election Innovation profiles what Colorado did in its recent primary offers a strong counterpoint to the all-too-common fear-based narratives surrounding 2018 voting doomsday scenarios. While it’s wonky and dry, it’s also real evidence that disrupting the vote is getting harder—not easier.

“In addition, information sharing about potential cyber threats occurs throughout the day,” Becker notes. “Through efforts like the Elections Infrastructure Information Sharing and Analysis Center (EI-ISAC), the federal government (DHS and others) and state and local election officials are sharing information in real-time about any intrusive activity, enabling better coordination and security. These coordinated efforts are layered on top of the cybersecurity that each office maintains on its own, including sophisticated monitoring of all systems, sites, and devices. For example, in Denver County, virtually every voting site, drop-off box, and room in their facility has 24-hour video surveillance.”

5. Meanwhile, about that blue wave. Becker’s biggest point is that the higher the voter turnout, the harder it is for any potential meddler to be effective. “Every additional voter makes it more difficult to successfully interfere with our elections, and provides an early warning system to any potential tampering,” he tweeted after his Colorado trek. “So don’t get mad. Don’t get even. Don’t get despondent. Don’t get sanctimonious. Get active. As in being an active registered voter. And then vote. It’s easier than ever, and it’s the one thing everyone can do to be a patriot. Start the process here. https://vote.gov.”

On the other hand, as ex-Oregon Secretary of State Phil Keisling wrote for Governing, voter turnout is still low—especially among young voters. “Those who are predicting, expecting – or simply hoping for – a surge of voter turnout, especially among younger citizens, in this year's elections need to reflect on these sobering percentage figures: Oregon (34), Idaho (32), Illinois (25), West Virginia (24), Nebraska (24), Kentucky (23), Arkansas (22), Ohio (19), Georgia (19), Indiana (18), Texas (17), Pennsylvania (17) and North Carolina (14).”

“A typical congressional district contains between 400,000 and 500,000 registered voters,” he noted. “Pennsylvania's newly drawn 18 congressional districts generated 21 contested party primaries on May 15, and in 13 of those races the winner received fewer than 25,000 votes.” (Indeed, in Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s defeat of Rep. Joe Crowley in New York’s 14th House district, only 27,658 people voted.)

His solution? “The evidence is strong that we should stop asking voters to travel to the polls. Instead, we should bring the ballots to the voters,” Keisling said. “What happened in Nebraska’s May 15 primary is perhaps the clearest evidence of the extraordinary power of mailing all primary voters their ballots rather than requiring them to traipse to the polls or pre-arrange to receive an absentee ballot. Garden County received permission from Secretary of State John Gale to run a vote-at-home election in its May 15 primary. Turnout in Nebraska's other 92 counties averaged 24 percent; among Garden County's 2,000 voters, it was 59 percent.”

Kiesling’s column underscores that if there is the political will, there are ways to increase public participation and investment in voting and the political process. But not every state or their governing classes share that sentiment. Indeed, at the very apex of the American constitutional pyramid, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority has not made voting their foremost priority in election jurisprudence. And the Trump administration, like the GOP writ large, has no problem tinkering with the rules of the process to game partisan outcomes. Still, that hasn’t stopped blue and otherwise purple states from trying to make voting easier and more accessible, and civil servants in every state from taking new steps toward cyber security of voting systems.

But as Becker and Kiesling both note, that leaves one big variable on the table: people still have to cast ballots—whether they are delivered to them or at polling places.