DEMOCRACY

3/18 general concept

see TWO / acctability

see authoritarian, norms, neo-nazi

All in the family

Dual-class voting structures have been around for decades.

When Ford Motor Co. went public in 1956, its founding family used the arrangement to maintain 40% of the voting rights. Newspaper companies like The New York Times and The Washington Post often use the arrangement to protect their journalistic independence from Wall Street's insatiable demands for profitability.

In a typical dual-class structure, the company will sell one class of shares to the public, usually called class A shares, while founders, executives and others retain class B shares with enough voting power to maintain majority voting control. This allows the class B shareholders to determine the outcome of matters that come up for a shareholder vote, such as who is on the company's board.

Advocates see a dual-class structure as a way to fend off short-term thinking. In principle, this insulation from investor pressure can allow the company to take a long-term perspective and make tough strategic changes even at the expense of short-term share price declines. Family-controlled businesses often view it as a way to preserve their legacy, which is why Ford remains a family company after more than a century.

It also makes a company effectively**immune from hostile takeovers** and the whims of activist investors.

Checks and balances

But this insulation comes at a cost for investors, who lose a crucial check on management.

Indeed, dual-class shares essentially short-circuit almost all the other means that limit executive power. The board of directors, elected by shareholder vote, is the ultimate authority within the corporation that oversees management. Voting for directors and proposals on the annual ballot are the main methods shareholders have to ensure management accountability, other than simply selling their shares.

Recent research shows that the value and stock returns of dual-class companies are lower than other businesses, and they're more likely to overpay their CEO and waste money on expensive acquisitions.

Companies with dual-class shares rarely made up more than 10% of public listings in a given year until the 2000s, when tech startups began using them more frequently, according to data collected by University of Florida business professor Jay Ritter. The dam began to break after Facebook went public in 2012 with a dual-class stock structure that kept founder Mark Zuckerberg firmly in control – he alone controls almost 60% of the company.

In 2020, over 40% of tech companies that went public did so with two or more classes of shares with unequal voting rights.

This has alarmed governance experts, some investors and legal scholars.

Ayn Rand and the myth of the superhuman founder

If the dual-class structure is bad for investors, then why are so many tech companies able to convince them to buy their shares when they go public?

I attribute it to Silicon Valley's mythology of the founder –- what I would dub an “Ayn Rand theory of corporate governance" that credits founders with superhuman vision and competence that merit deference from lesser mortals. Rand's novels, most notably “Atlas Shrugged," portray an America in which titans of business hold up the world by creating innovation and value but are beset by moochers and looters who want to take or regulate what they have created.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Rand has a strong following among tech founders, whose creative genius may be “threatened" by any form of outside regulation. Elon Musk, Coinbase founder Brian Armstrong and even the late Steve Jobs all have recommended “Atlas Shrugged."

Her work is also celebrated by the venture capitalists who typically finance tech startups – many of whom were founders themselves.

The basic idea is simple: Only the founder has the vision, charisma and smarts to steer the company forward.

It begins with a powerful founding story. Michael Dell and Zuckerberg created their multibillion-dollar companies in their dorm rooms. Founding partner pairs Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak and Bill Hewlett and David Packard built their first computer companies in the garage – Apple and Hewlett-Packard, respectively. Often the stories are true, but sometimes, as in Apple's case, less so.

And from there, founders face a gantlet of rigorous testing: recruiting collaborators, gathering customers and, perhaps most importantly, attracting multiple rounds of funding from venture capitalists. Each round serves to further validate the founder's leadership competence.

The Founders Fund, a venture capital firm that has backed dozens of tech companies, including Airbnb, Palantir and Lyft, is one of the biggest proselytizers for this myth, as it makes clear in its “manifesto."

“The entrepreneurs who make it have a near-messianic attitude and believe their company is essential to making the world a better place," it asserts. True to its stated belief, the fund says it has “never removed a single founder," which is why it has been a big supporter of dual-class share structures.

Another venture capitalist who seems to favor giving founders extra power is Netscape founder Marc Andreessen. His venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz is Coinbase's biggest investor. And most of the companies in its portfolio that have gone public also used a dual-class share structure, according to my own review of their securities filings.

Bad for companies, bad for democracy

Giving founders voting control disrupts the checks and balances needed to keep business accountable and can lead to big problems.

WeWork founder Adam Neumann, for example, demanded “unambiguous authority to fire or overrule any director or employee." As his behavior became increasingly erratic, the company hemorrhaged cash in the lead-up to its ultimately canceled initial public offering.

Investors forced out Uber's Travis Kalanick in 2017, but not before he's said to have created a workplace culture that allegedly allowed sexual harassment and discrimination to fester. When Uber finally went public in 2019, it shed its dual-class structure.

There is some evidence that founder-CEOs are less gifted at management than other kinds of leaders, and their companies' performance can suffer as a consequence.

But investors who buy shares in these companies know the risks going in. There's much more at stake than their money.

What happens when powerful, unconstrained founders control the most powerful companies in the world?

The tech sector is increasingly laying claim to central command posts of the U.S. economy. Americans' access to news and information, financial services, social networks and even groceries is mediated by a handful of companies controlled by a handful of people.

Recall that in the wake of the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection, the CEOs of Facebook and Twitter were able to eject former President Donald Trump from his favorite means of communication – virtually silencing him overnight. And Apple, Google and Amazon cut off Parler, the right-wing social media platform used by some of the insurrectionists to plan their actions. Not all of these companies have dual-class shares, but this illustrates just how much power tech companies have over America's political discourse.

One does not have to disagree with their decision to see that a form of political power is becoming increasingly concentrated in the hands of companies with limited outside oversight.

Jerry Davis, Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford and Professor of Management and Sociology, University of Michigan

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

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

The battle over free speech online is a volcano that’s ready to blow

Marshall Auerback / Independent Media Institute

Donald Trump threatened to close Twitter down a day after the social media giant marked his tweets with a fact-check warning label for the first time. The president followed th...

https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/american-rage-is-fueling-political-campaigns-and-tearing-us-apart/

as the 2020 presidential election draws near, one thing is clear: America is an angry nation. From protests over persistent racial injustice to white nationalist-linked counterprotests, anger is on display across the country.

The national ire relates to inequality, the government’s coronavirus response, economic concerns, race and policing. It’s also due, in large part, to deliberate and strategic choices made by American politicians to stoke voter anger for their own electoral advantage.

Donald Trump’s attempts to enrage his base are so plentiful that progressive magazine The Nation called him a “merchant of anger.” Meanwhile, his opponent, Joe Biden, elicits anger toward the president, calling Trump a “toxic presence” who has “cloaked America in darkness."

anger-filled political rhetoric is nothing new. From Andrew Johnson and Richard Nixon to Newt Gingrich, politicians have long known that angry voters are loyal voters. People will support their party’s candidates locally and nationally so long as they remain sufficiently outraged at the opposing party.

While inciting voter anger helps candidates win elections, research from my book, “American Rage: How Anger Shapes Our Politics,” shows that the effects of anger outlast elections. And that can have serious consequences for American democracy’s long-term health.

Trust in government

Political anger lowers citizens’ trust in the national government, causing people to view it with hostility, skepticism and outright contempt. Due to the increasingly national focus of politics, that anger is often directed squarely at the federal government, not state or local officials.

That creates a governance problem. As previous scholars have demonstrated, trust facilitates bipartisan lawmaking and support for social welfare programs that seek to make society more equitable, among other policies.

Americans’ trust in government has been declining for six decades.

Scholars have argued that party affiliation determines trust in government. When one’s preferred party controls government, that trust is high; when the opposing party has power, it’s low.

While partisanship does affect people’s trust in various political institutions, it cannot explain why overall faith in the U.S. government has been dropping for decades. After all, party control of Washington switches frequently.

My research finds sustained anger is a more likely suspect for Americans’ diminished trust in government.

Though American political anger has many sources, it was Ronald Reagan’s 1981 assertion that “government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem” that really began to solidify Republicans’ anger at the federal government.

This statement, rooted in the conservative preference for individualism and free markets over government intervention, crystallized latent Republican anger with what many considered to be an activist federal government. That anger is in full bloom today.

Anger with the government is not simply a conservative phenomenon. Liberals are mad, too – usually because they believe the government is not doing enough to address racial and social inequalities. That anger, too, is in full bloom today.

Angry people tend to negatively judge the source of their anger. So when politicians continually label each other with crude epithets and infuriate people by taking – or not taking – certain actions, the public responds by lowering their evaluations of Washington.

Eventually, they question what government is even capable of.

Health of American democracy

Anger causes Americans to adopt attitudes that run contrary to the democratic ideals of the nation, my research shows.

It makes Americans see supporters of the opposing political party as less intelligent than themselves. Arguably more harmful for democracy, anger also makes people see supporters of the opposing political party as a threat to the country’s well-being.

These findings help explain why both Democrats and Republicans tend to hold a dim view of each other. Recent polling data finds that nearly two-thirds of Republicans see Democrats as “closed-minded,” while approximately half of Democrats see Republicans as “immoral.” In 2016 only half of Republicans and a third of Democrats held these views. Partisan antipathy is rising.

Angry people generally want to blame somebody – or some group – for their problems, whether they are the real or perceived cause. Political campaigns, logically, work to elicit anger at the opposing party. This means that their supporters are quick to blame those who disagree with them for the country’s shortcomings.

Consequently, voter anger causes politics to move beyond a competition of ideas and philosophies and into a zero-sum game in which each side’s gain is the other’s loss. That weakens people’s commitment to the democratic norms and values that have long been the linchpin of the U.S. political system, such as tolerance and a respect for minority opinions.

In 2018 the Pew Research Center found that 40% of Americans believed democracy was working “not too well” or “not at all well.” This year 62% of Americans surveyed by Pew agreed that the structure of the U.S. government needs “significant changes.”

Democracy may not disappear because candidates keep stoking Americans’ ire at each other and at the political system. My work finds that discontented Americans don’t want an entirely different form of government, despite global concerns that the U.S. is “backsliding” toward authoritarianism.

But anger is corrosive. It diminishes the quality of American democracy well after the politicians who used anger as a campaign strategy have won and left office.

Steven Webster, Assistant Professor of Political Science, Indiana University

https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/trump-derangement-syndrome-those-of-us-who-warned-america-that-fascism-was-coming-were-called-hysterical-alarmists-we-were-right-all-along/

Do you remember “Trump Derangement Syndrome?”

It was a cute phrase that likely first appeared in 2015, deployed by prominent voices across the political spectrum to demean, mock, reject, dismiss and deflect the warnings that Donald Trump was a fascist, an authoritarian and a white supremacist, not to mention a vile and dangerous human being with apparent mental pathologies who posed a massive threat to American democracy....

no lnx

Do you remember “Trump Derangement Syndrome?”

Such truth-telling patriots were called “hysterical” and “alarmist,” or told they were “out of touch” and overly “bitter” about Hillary Clinton’s defeat thanks to the antiquated mechanism of the Electoral College and Russian interference. Those who first raised the alarm about Trumpism as a new version of fascism were also assured that ” the institutions were strong” and fascism could never take hold in America — and most certainly not in the form of a proudly ignorant wrestling-heel wannabe and reality-TV huckster.

When Trump won the presidential election in 2016, there were some on the left eager to dance on Hillary Clinton’s grave. A few even gave Trump the totally unearned benefit of the doubt: He claimed to oppose globalization, neoliberalism and “endless war,” and to speak for the “white working class”.

Centrist Democrats and the so-called mainstream American news media also rejected the existential threat to democracy that Trump represented. They convinced themselves, over and over, that the supposed power and gravity of the office would normalize and mature him. He was a “businessman” and a “pragmatist” eager to make deals, not an ideologue — so why worry? Trump was “brash” and “unconventional,” but America’s political institutions were strong.

The stenographers of current events and the other hope-peddlers, with their horse-race journalism, false equivalence “both-sides-ism” and obsession with meaningless controversies would not let themselves see the truth of Trump’s danger or that of his neo-fascist movement. To admit the truth about Trump would mean that the old habits of writing and thinking about American politics are obsolete. Moreover, such an admission would demand speaking truth to power in a way that many members of the mainstream news media, specifically, are too afraid to, for both professional and personal reasons.

Republicans and other members of the Trump movement used “Trump Derangement Syndrome” to bully their critics into silence. The American right celebrated drinking “liberal tears” and loved the way Trump’s victory had made Democrats and so-called progressives go “crazy.”[// to the fed art'l that mollie h etc do not defend djt cos can't but own the libs/ hit bogey[wo]men]

Trump Derangement Syndrome is weaponized language in the same vein as the myth of the “liberal media.” Both lies put Democrats and the mainstream news media on the defense. While the American right and the Republican Party (and now Trump’s neo-fascist movement) drag the issue-space further and further to the right — and have done so for decades — the “liberal media” tries to find an imaginary balance by presenting right-wing extremism as somehow a “reasonable” alternative point of view.

Trump Derangement Syndrome was also a smokescreen for Donald Trump’s wild success in advancing the agenda of the plutocrats, gangster capitalists, Christian nationalists and “Dominionists” — as well as overt white supremacists — in destroying the very idea of government itself as well as American multiracial democracy.

Of course, it was not Donald Trump’s most vocal critics who were “deranged” but his followers, enablers and allies. As I explained in January 2017, shortly before his inauguration:

It is not those who oppose Trump who are deranged, but rather those voters who convinced themselves that a plutocrat authoritarian reality TV star con man and professional wrestler wannabe with no experience in government at any level was qualified to be president of the United States.

This is America’s great national derangement. Those who stand against and oppose Donald Trump are patriots who are trying to return the country to sanity.

Now, some three months away from another Election Day, Donald Trump has finally arrived at the moment which those of us who were slurred as “hysterical” and “alarmist” have warned about for more than five years.

Last Thursday, Trump issued this now-infamous tweet:

With Universal Mail-In Voting (not Absentee Voting, which is good), 2020 will be the most INACCURATE & FRAUDULENT Election in history. It will be a great embarrassment to the USA. Delay the Election until people can properly, securely and safely vote??? [// muslim ban "whAT'S GOIng on" = agenda/ deep state]

That same afternoon, when questioned about Trump’s threats to interfere with the 2020 election, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo told the U.S. Senate: “In the end, the Department of Justice and others will make that legal determination.” This is not true. The Department of Justice and the president possess no legitimate authority to delay or cancel a federal election.

Later in the day, Trump continued to work from the authoritarian’s playbook, attempting to pivot away from his earlier statements. During a White House press event, Trump said:

Do I want to see a date change? No. But I don’t want to see a crooked election. What will happen in November – it’s a mess. I want a result much more than you… I don’t want to be waiting around for weeks and months.

This is a familiar strategy in which the authoritarian challenges norms and boundaries by floating trial balloons and then pretends to change his mind as a way to make the heretofore-unthinkable into something acceptable.

Trump’s most recent threats are but another crescendo in he and his servants’ efforts to subvert and eventually overturn secular multiracial democracy and the rule of law in America.

Only weeks ago Trump began deploying his own personal secret police force, hoping to enforce his will by suppressing dissent and free speech in Democratic-led cities all over the United States. The events in Portland, Oregon, are but a prelude to Trump’s national terrordome.

Trump’s own personal secret police force along with his civilian “watchdogs,” may well be used to intimidate Democratic voters on Election Day and beyond. Trump has repeatedly asked hostile foreign countries to interfere in the 2020 presidential election on his behalf. He was impeached for doing just that with his attempt to blackmail the government of Ukraine to launch a phony investigation of Joe Biden.

Trump continues to threaten senior Democratic leaders, including Biden, Barack Obama, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and others withtreasoncharges, potential imprisonment and perhaps even execution. Former national security adviser John Bolton’s recent book includes details of Trump’s lurid fantasies about having journalists killed. According to Bolton, Trump supports imprisoning his “enemies” in concentration camps — something he is already doing with brown and Black migrants and refugees from Latin America, the Caribbean and other parts of the nonwhite world.

Donald Trump, has repeated his threats, ever since the 2016 campaign, that he will not respect the will of the American people if he loses a presidential election.

In sum, Donald Trump is not pretending. None of this is a game. He is a neo-fascist. Such observations and warnings are not hysterical. They are plain observations based on a consensus of the available facts. [also he can be prosecuted, just today info DA new charges?]

As historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat explained in a 2017 essay at The Washington Post:

The strongman knows that it starts with words. He uses them early on to test out his plans to expand and personalize executive power on political elites, the press and the public, watching their reactions as they arrange into the timeless categories of allies, enemies and those who help him by remaining silent. Some say the strongman is all bluster, but he takes words seriously, including the issue of which ones should be banned.

Now what to do?

In a perfect and just world, the hope peddlers, professional centrists, stenographers of current events and others who maintain the boundaries of approved public discourse in America would go to the public square, prostrate themselves before the world and then beg forgiveness for how they, for years and by various means, empowered Donald Trump.

That will not happen. Instead, such voices will proclaim that they were sounding the alarm about Donald Trump years ago and are the real vanguard defenders of American democracy. In reality, such voices were enablers, far behind the truth if not actively running away it. They are now trying to position themselves on the correct side of history because their shame and failure to protect America from Donald Trump and his neo-fascist movement are so great.

In the weeks remaining before Election Day — which will certainly not be “free and fair” and when Trump’s machinations will be at their most extreme — the mainstream news media and theAmerican people must internalize the fact that the rule of law and the U.S. Constitution mean little for Trump and his regime.

Hopeful claims — or delusions — that the Constitution and state laws dictate the rules of Election Day must be viewed with extreme cynicism. Trump and his enforcers are not restrained by such arcane conventions.

If there is indeed an election on Nov. 3, Americans mUst vote against Trump in overwhelming numbers in order to force him to step down. Unless Donald Trump is convincingly vanquished at the polls, he will find some way to stay in office.

If Donald Trump and Attorney General William Barr try to cancel the presidential election or interfere with it in any other way, Americans must take to the streets and engage in corporeal politics — including a national strike and other plans to disrupt day-to-day life and “business as usual” — on a scale so large that they make the George Floyd people’s uprising look like a PTA meeting.

Ultimately, those of us who warned the American people for years, sometimes on a daily basis, about this Mad King and would-be tyrant take no joy from saying, We told you so. There is no satisfaction in being correct about such a horrible thing.

On this point,Jared Yates Sexton, author of “American Rule: How a Nation Conquered the World But Failed Its People,” wrote last Thursday on Twitter:

Those of us warning that Trump is an authoritarian capable of destroying democracy haven’t been doing it for profit or attention or out of unwarranted alarmism. None of this is hard to predict. They don’t hide it at all. Stop expecting everything to be fine because “America.”

To watch American democracy, fall so ill so fast, and now to be on the verge of collapse — when such a thing could have been so easily prevented — is a world historical tragedy. SYSTEM CRASH economy, health care sys?!

https://www.alternet.org/2020/06/bill-moyers-its-happening-before-our-very-eyes/

At 98, historian Bernard Weisberger has seen it all. Born in 1922, he grew up watching newsreels of Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler as they rose to power in Europe. He vividly remembers Mussolini posturing to crowds from his balcony in Rome, chin outthrust, right arm extended. Nor has he forgotten Der Fuehrer’s raspy voice on radio, interrupted by cheers of “Heil Hitler,” full of menace even without pictures.

Fascist bullies and threats anger Bernie, and when America went to war to confront them, he interrupted his study of history to help make history by joining the army. He yearned to be an aviator but his eyesight was too poor. So he took a special course in Japanese at Columbia University and was sent as a translator to the China-Burma-India theater where Japanese warlords were out to conquer Asia. Bernie remembers them, too.

In time, we became colleagues on a series of broadcasts about the 20th century. As we compared the leadership of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Adolf Hitler in an episode titled The President and the Dictator, Bernie kept reminding the team that the most cunning demagogues “are never more than a few steps from becoming dictators.” Not surprisingly, the subject came up again when Trump was elected. No, we didn’t think he was Hitler, or the Republicans Nazis, but both of us acknowledged a deep unease over the vulnerabilities of democracy, which had led to Trump’s election in the first place. Inspired by Bernie and unnerved by Trump, I decided to take a deeper look at democracy under stress and began reading what is now more than a dozen books on Europe in the 1930s. The most recent is a compelling and chilling account of Hitler’s First Hundred Days, by the historian Peter Fritzsche – a familiar story revisited by the author with fresh verve and insight.

Hitler was a master of manipulation, using propaganda, violence, intimidation, showmanship, and spectacle — and above all, fear. By demonizing “the other” – Jews, social democrats and communists – Hitler won the hearts and minds of the masses, consolidating his power, and turning Germany into a one-party Nazi state.

i had just finished the book when I received a short email from Bernie, who had been watching on television the events following the killing of George Floyd by police in Minneapolis. He wrote, “All this open talk by Trump of dominance is pretty undisguised fascism. He’s inciting chaos to set the stage for the strong man to ‘rescue’ the nation.”

There was no doubt who would be Superman riding to America’s rescue. When Trump promised to end what he called “American carnage” – a crisis of “poverty in our inner cities, rusted-out factories scattered like tombstones across the landscape of our nation, crime and gangs and drugs” — he did not ask for our help. He did not ask that we put our faith in each other or in our democratic values or even in God. Donald J. Trump would be our savior, the new Messiah — because “I alone can fix it.”

Bernie’s note triggered a recollection, sending me across the room to retrieve from a file drawer an essay written two years ago in The New York Review of Books by the American legal scholar Cass Sunstein. Reviewing three new books about ordinary Germans and the Nazi regime, he concluded: “With our system of checks and balances, full-blown authoritarianism is unlikely to happen here.”

I had admired Sunstein’s work for years and found reassuring his judgment that the rule of law would check a would-be tyrant. But many found that assurance disquieting.One dissenter was Norman Ravitch, emeritus professor of history at the University of California, Riverside. Responding to Sunstein, he wrote: “The normal concern of people of all sorts with their daily lives, family, work, leisure, and so on indicates that only those in certain areas of work and life could possibly notice the slow but relentless advance of authoritarian and totalitarian policies by the government. The Nazis knew how to appeal to people who did not have the ideological concerns but only normal human concerns. They knew how to conceal their real goals and how to make passive individuals active supporters.”

So does Trump. He understands that most Americans are concerned with little more than the economy, health care and jobs. They respond positively to politicians who promise action on these priorities, whether or not they know if those promises will ever be fulfilled. Ravitch pointed out that like Hitler and like Mussolini, Trump knows how to appeal to a variety of concerns with promises that can be both attractive and contradictory. Because no population is educated enough, sensitive enough, or ethical enough to see through the deception, “the danger is very great indeed. It may in fact be one of the chief weaknesses of democracy that democracy can lead to tyranny just as well or perhaps even more than other political systems.”

Two years have passed since that exchange between scholars, and in those two years Trump has doubled down. This president is no friend of democracy.

He has declared himself above the law, preached insurrection by encouraging armed supporters to “liberate” states from the governance of duly elected officials, told police not to be “too nice” while doing their job, and gloated over the ability of the Secret Service to turn “vicious dogs” and “ominous weapons” loose on demonstrators — to “come down on them hard” if they get too “frisky.

He has politicized the Department of Justice while remaking the judiciary in his image.

He has stifled investigations into his administration’s corruption, fired officials charged with holding federal agencies accountable to the public, and rewarded his donors and cronies with government contracts, subsidies, deregulations, and tax breaks.

He has maligned and mocked the disadvantaged, the disabled, and people of color.

He has sought to politicize the military, including in his entourage the secretary of defense and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs (dressed in combat fatigues), as his orderlies unleashed chemical fumes on peaceful protesters – all so that the president could use them as stage props in a photo op, holding up a Bible in front of a historic church, just to make a dandy ad for his re-election campaign.

He has purged his own party of independent thinkers and turned it into a spineless, mindless cult while demonizing the opposition.

He has purloined religion for state and political ends.

He has desecrated the most revered symbols of Christian faith by converting them to partisan brands.

He has recruited religious zealots for jobs in his administration, rewarding with government favors the electoral loyalty of their followers.

He has relentlessly attacked mainstream media as purveyors of “fake news” and “enemies of the people” while collaborating with a sycophantic right- wing media – including the Murdoch family’s Fox News — to flood the country with lies and propaganda.

He has maneuvered the morally hollow founder of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, into compromising the integrity of the most powerful media giant in the country by infusing it with partisan bias.

And because truth is the foe he most fears, he has banned it from his administration and his lips.

Yes, Bernie, you are right: the man in the White House has taken all the necessary steps toward achieving the despot’s dream of dominance.

Can it happen here?

It is happening here.

Democracy in America has been a series of narrow escapes. We may be running out of luck, and no one is coming to save us. For that, we have only ourselves.

an 620

Ex-intelligence officials warn we are dangerously close to a complete unraveling of democracy Nancy LeTourneau / Washington Mon

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In its latest move to put profits over people, President Donald Trump’s administration is trying to make it easier for corporations to hide from accountability.

Let’s make sure corporations can’t hide.

Every year, investors use shareholder proposals to sound the alarm on emerging issues that not only impact the corporations they own, but also affect how companies interact with our communities and the planet.

Now, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is trying to make it more difficult for shareholders to bring these critical proposals up for a vote.

This rollback will crush accountability. Tell the SEC to make sure shareholders are heard – submit your comment here.

Years before Boeing’s 737 MAX aircraft killed hundreds of people, the company’s shareholders filed proposals raising concerns about the company’s influence over regulators.

Under the new rules, those shareholders’ efforts to hold Boeing’s management accountable would have been blocked.

https://www.alternet.org/2020/01/historians-explain-why-the-west-is-losing-the-fight-for-democracy/

no lnx

Historians explain why the West is losing the fight for democracy

Written by History News Network January 19, 2020

Adapted from The Light That Failed by Ivan Krastev and Stephen Holmes, published by Pegasus Books. Reprinted with permission. All other rights reserved.

The future was better yesterday. We used to believe that the year 1989 divided ‘the past from the future almost as clearly as the Berlin wall divided the East from the West.’ We had ‘trouble imagining a world that is radically better than our own, or a future that is not essentially democratic and capitalist.’ That is not the way we think today. Most of us now have trouble imagining a future, even in the West, that remains securely democratic and liberal.

When the Cold War ended, hopes for liberal capitalist democracy spreading globally were high. The geopolitical stage seemed set for a performance not unlike George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion, an optimistic and didactic play in which a professor of phonetics, over a short period of time, succeeds in teaching a poor flower girl to speak like the Queen and feel at home in polite company.

Having prematurely celebrated the integration of the East into the West, interested observers eventually realized that the spectacle before them was not playing out as expected. It was as if, instead of watching a performance of Pygmalion, the world ended up with a theatrical adaptation of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, a pessimistic and didactic novel about a man who decided to play God by assembling replicas of human body parts into a humanoid creature. The defective monster felt doomed to loneliness, invisibility and rejection. And envying the unattainable happiness of its creator, it turned violently against the latter’s friends and family, laying their world to waste, leaving only remorse and heartbreak as legacies of a misguided experiment in human ?self-?duplication.

So, how did liberalism end up the victim of its heralded success in the Cold War? Superficially, the fault lay with a series of profoundly destabilizing political events: the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center in New York, the second Iraq War, the 2008 financial crisis, Russia’s annexation of Crimea and intervention in Eastern Ukraine, the impotence of the West as Syria descended into a humanitarian nightmare, the 2015 migration crisis in Europe, the Brexit referendum, and the election of Donald Trump. Liberal democracy’s ?post-?Cold War afterglow has also been dimmed by the Chinese economic miracle, orchestrated by a political leadership that is unapologetically neither liberal nor democratic. Attempts to salvage the good name of liberal democracy by contrasting it favourably with ?non-?Western autocracy have been undercut by the feckless violation of liberal norms, as in the torture of prisoners, and the evident malfunctioning of democratic institutions inside the West itself. Tellingly, how democracies atrophy and perish has become the question that most preoccupies liberal scholars today.

The very ideal of ‘an open society,’ too, has lost its ?once?-fêted lustre. For many disillusioned citizens, openness to the world now suggests more grounds for anxiety than for hope. When the Berlin Wall was toppled, there were only sixteen border fences in the world. Now there are ?sixty?-five fortified perimeters either completed or under construction. According to Quebec University expert Elisabeth Vallet, almost a third of the world’s countries are rearing barriers along their borders. The three decades following 1989 turned out to be an ‘inter-?mural period’, a brief ?barricade-?free interval between the dramatic breaching of the Berlin Wall, exciting utopian fantasies of a borderless world, and a global craze of ?wall?-building, with cement and ?barbed-?wire barriers embodying existential (if sometimes imaginary) fears.

Most Europeans and Americans today also believe that the lives of their children will be less prosperous and fulfilling than their own. Public faith in democracy is plummeting and ?long-?established political parties are disintegrating or being crowded out by amorphous political movements and populist strongmen, putting into question the willingness of organized political forces to fight for democracy’s survival in times of crisis. Spooked by the phantom of ?large?-scale migration, electorates in parts of Europe and America are increasingly drawn to xenophobic rhetoric, authoritarian leaders and militarized borders. Rather than believing that the future will be uplifted by the liberal ideas radiating out of the West, they fear that ?21st-?century history will be afflicted by the millions of people streaming into it. Once extolled as a bulwark against tyranny, human rights are now routinely accused of limiting the ability of democracies to fight terrorism effectively. Fears for liberalism’s survival are so acute that references to William Butler Yeats’s ‘The Second Coming’, written in 1919 in the wake of one of the deadliest conflicts in human history, became an almost obligatory refrain for political commentators in 2016. A century after Yeats wrote them, these words are now the mantra of apprehensive defenders of liberal democracy worldwide: ‘Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; / Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.’

Stephen Holmes is a Professor at the NYU School of Law and the author of many books, including The Anatomy of Liberalism and The Beginning of Politics. He lives in Manhattan.

Ivan Krastev is the chairman of the Centre for Liberal Strategies, Sofia, and permanent fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences, Vienna, a contributing writer for the international New York Times, and, most recently, the author of the acclaimed After Europe.

aha, lessen power of one small aspect of democracy in cap'lism, structural incentive MAX profit [// Worster Dust Bowl maxims, extraction]

1219, CoC lobby

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/11/05/reuters-america-update-1-u-s-sec-proposes-rules-that-could-limit-shareholder-voices.html

Nov 5 (Reuters) - Wall Street’s top regulator on Tuesday proposed a pair of long-awaited rules that would set new limits on shareholders ability to call for corporate changes on thorny issues like climate change disclosures and executive compensation In one of the biggest wins for the corporate lobby under President Donald Trump, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission voted 3-2 along partisan lines to raise the re-submission thresholds for motions that shareholders file on company ballots and to put new requirements on firms guiding investors how to vote in corporate elections.

Both shareholder proposals and proxy advisory firms are cornerstones of corporate governance and how investors hold management accountable.

Both changes will be subject to public comment.

Democrats Rob Jackson and Allison Herren Lee voted against the rules, saying they tilted the playing field toward corporate management.

https://www.alternet.org/2019/12/former-cia-officer-putins-long-game-is-to-destroy-western-democracies-and-the-gop-is-helping-him/

n olnx

Former CIA officer: Putin’s ‘long game’ is to ‘destroy western democracies’ — and the GOP is helping him

Written by Alex Henderson December 10, 2019

As articles of impeachment against President Donald Trump move forward in the U.S. House of Representatives, pro-Trump Republicans continue to insist that Ukraine interfered in the 2016 presidential election — a claim that foreign affairs expert Fiona Hill described as total nonsense during her testimony before the House Intelligence Committee last month.Regardless, Republican Sen. Richard Burr of North Carolina recently told an NBC News reporter that in 2016, “Every elected official in the Ukraine was for Hillary Clinton. Is that very different than the Russians being for Donald Trump?” And former CIA officer Alex Finley, in a December 10 article for Just Security, explains why Burr’s assertion is a “false equivalence” that “completely and dangerously mischaracterizes the threat we are facing” from Russian President Vladimir Putin....

ref

https://www.salon.com/2019/10/17/the-trump-murder-video-is-no-joke-its-an-encouragement-to-ramp-up-the-violence/

Trump is not a “friendly fascist.” Unlike Ronald Reagan, the prototype for that concept, Trump does not pretend to be harmless. He does not offer up fake smiles and a cheerful nature, or display empathy and human concern for others, feigned or otherwise.

Donald Trump is direct, obvious and public in his threats against democracy, the Constitution and the rule of law. Trump and his movement are working to destroy America’s multiracial democracy through appeals to a mythic past that will “Make America Great Again.” In practice this means undoing all the social progress and democratic reforms of the last century or more and returning to a society where white people — rich white male Christians, in particular — are fully in control over all aspects of American society for all time.

And of course, Donald Trump — the not-so-friendly fascist — embraces violence as a means of achieving his goals. When Trump said famously during the 2016 presidential campaign that he could shoot someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue without losing his voters, it was both a threat and a promise.

“Friendly fascism” and traditional fascism are more alike than they are different. Writing in his 1980 book “Friendly Fascism: The New Face of Power in America” Bertram Gross explained this:

In each, a powerful oligarchy operates outside of, as well as through, the state. Each subverts constitutional government. Each suppresses rising demands for wider participation in decision making, the enforcement and enlargement of human rights, and genuine democracy. Each uses informational control and ideological flimflam to get lower and middle-class support for plans to expand the capital and power of the oligarchy and provide suitable rewards for political, professional, scientific, and cultural supporters.

A major difference is that under friendly fascism Big Government would do less pillaging of, and more pillaging for, Big Business.

It is true that both Trump and Reagan are TV presidents: products of the worst aspects of American popular culture and its superficiality, the emphasis on the impulsive versus the meditative and contemplative. It is also true that the results of Trump’s and Reagan’s policies for the poor, the working class, the vulnerable and other marginalized groups are very similar. And it is true that Trumpism is like the venerable right-wing lie about “trickle-down economics,” dosed on meth, crack and steroids.

But in at least one very important way Donald Trump is most certainly not like Ronald Reagan. Cultural critic James Poniewozik explores this in his new book “Audience of One: Donald Trump, Television, and the Fracturing of America":

[T]he differences between Reagan and Trump were as important as their similarities. Reagan was an actor; Trump was a reality-TV star. Reagan came from the world of fiction; Trump came from nonfiction-based entertainment. Reagan played characters; Trump played an amplified version of himself. Reagan’s job was acting; Trump’s job was acting out.

Reagan’s preparation for being president, in other words, was years of imagining himself in the heads of other people …. Reality TV did not require you to do that. You needed to understand other people as obstacles, or as creatures who would react to stimuli, but not necessarily as full human beings with the same complexities as you. If anything, too much empathy was a liability. It was noise that kept you from being your fullest you …. This is a frightening attribute for a person who has power and responsibility for others.

Trump's performance is seductive and beguiling for his audience. They don't want friendly fascism — it does not satisfy their emotional needs. Trumpists want and need a “strongman,” a bully and political thug who “doesn’t take any crap.” This is projection and wish-fulfillment; Trump is their hero and an imagined cure for their own emotional ailments. In that way, Donald Trump the political cult leader is poison medicine for his followers.

Trump's supporters are bound to him by violence, both real and imagined. This was shown yet again through the fantasy mass murder video that was shown last weekend at an event hosted by the pro-Trump group American Priority at the president’s resort in Miami. In the video, an edited scene from the 2014 movie “Kingsman: The Secret Service,” an imaginary Trump guns down numerous symbolic figures: Democratic politicians, the news media, the Black Lives Matter movement, and other perceived enemies. Donald Trump Jr. and former White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders were featured speakers at the American Priority conference.

Such fantasies of political violence are a defining feature of fascism and a sign of a failing democracy.

That video was shown at the American Priority conference as part of a presentation on political memes. A meme is a message that circulates rapidly, in uncontrolled fashion, with the goal of changing how its targets think and behave. As such, the goal of the Trump mass-murder video is to encourage Trump supporters to support violence (literal or otherwise) against the president’s adversaries.

Trump himself has also shared videos and other messages on Twitter that encourage violence against the news media if they do not do his bidding.

Moreover, because violence is a core strategy and tactic of authoritarian leadership, he has suggested that Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden and other leading Democrats — as well, again, members of the news media who dare to criticize him — should be executed for treason.

Trump is a racial authoritarian. Racism is a form of violence.

Trump and his allies obsessively direct their violent threats and other attacks against nonwhite people as a group — notably, but not exclusively, nonwhite immigrants and migrants from Latin and South America. Trump has focused many of his most toxic attacks on prominent nonwhite Democratic elected officials such as Maxine Waters, Elijah Cummings, Ilhan Omar, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ayanna Pressley and Rashida Tlaib, all duly elected members of Congress.

Donald Trump, the Republican Party, conservatives and their media allies are masters of stochastic terrorism. This has resulted in lethal political violence in the form of mass shootings, white supremacist riots and attacks, bombings, and hundreds of other documented hate crimes and other attacks by Trump’s supporters and those others who share his beliefs, across the United States and the world.

Predictably, Trump and his enablers have officially “condemned” the (most recent) Trump mass murder video. This supposed “condemnation” is a function of the plausible deniability which is a feature of stochastic terrorism. Trump’s defenders, including the hosts of the American Priority event, claim that the video is a “parody” and a “joke.” So-called humor has long been a way of encouraging violence against perceived enemy groups, because it dehumanizes the targeted individuals and groups in a supposedly harmless context, lowering the social inhibitions on committing violence against them.

Of course, there is the hypocrisy, which is always at the heart of fascism and authoritarianism.

Comedian Kathy Griffin was pilloried by conservatives when in 2017 she posed with a fake severed head of Donald Trump.

Republicans and other gun obsessives constantly claim that video games and other violent forms of popular culture lead to mass shootings. Yet somehow a video showing the president of the United States slaughtering his “enemies” is harmless fun.

If Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton, as president, were featured in such a video at an event hosted by their supporters, at a property either of them owned, the right-wing news media would create an enormous public panic that might well end with their impeachment and removal from office.

Ultimately, the Donald Trump murder video is but another example of how fascism has been normalized in America. In total, Trump’s presidency has unleashed, encouraged, spawned and permitted a long, nasty smear of political scatology across American politics and American life.

It's true that the Democrats and other decent Americans have finally become mobilized to remove Trump, either through impeachment or the ballot box. But we must not overlook the fact that Trump and his movement’s rise to power is both a problem in itself and also a symptom of a much deeper set of political and social crises.

What we are witnessing in the Age of Trump is a behemoth of broken democracy and governance in a society that has become much too rapidly accustomed to a state of malignant normality and moral inversion.

In his brilliant book “Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism,” political theorist Sheldon Wolin signaled to the rise of Trump and how that regime would wield power:

Antidemocracy, executive predominance, and elite rule are basic elements of inverted totalitarianism. Antidemocracy does not take the form of overt attacks upon the idea of government by the people. Instead, politically it means encouraging what I have earlier dubbed “civic demobilization,” conditioning an electorate to being aroused for a brief spell, controlling its attention span, and then encouraging distraction or apathy.

What comes next?

There will be (more) blood.

The Trump murder video is a script. When it is followed (again) will Donald Trump and his movement suffer any consequences? No. Instead, Trump and his mouthpieces will issue their obligatory “thoughts and prayers” and “concerns” about right-wing political violence. Trump’s supporters will understand the real message behind such false proclamations. Trump’s condemnations of violence by his supporters and others acting in his name are really not-so-subtle winks of encouragement toward even more heinous actions.

1 link?

https://www.alternet.org/2019/10/how-ohios-fascist-pro-nuke-attack-on-democracy-threatens-the-referendum-process-across-the-nation/

no lnx

How Ohio’s fascist pro-nuke attack on democracy threatens the referendum process across the nation

Written by Harvey Wasserman / Common Dreams October 20, 2019

A terrifying series of gestapo-style assaults, petiton buying, bribery, mass media manipulation and systematic intimidation has smacked into the attempt of Ohio citizens to repeal a billion-dollar bailout for two dangerously failing atomic reactors on Lake Erie.

The unprecedented assault threatens the referendum process in Ohio and across the nation.

It also threatens to keep on line two very old, dangerously decayed reactors where melt-downs and explosions could forever contaminate the Great Lakes region and more. (For a full explanation, hear this one-hour discussion).

The story may end Monday, October 21, when signatures are due to qualify an anti-nuclear referendum for the fall 2020 ballot.

It begins with the July passage by the gerrymandered Ohio Legislatureof HB6, a massive bailout scheme designed to subsidize the Perry and Davis-Besse nukes, plus two fifty-year-old coal burners, one of them in Indiana. HB6 does support ten small solar facilities. But it also kills an extremely popular, effective energy efficiency program along with larger subsidies for wind and solar energy in general.

The bailout is vehemently opposed by a large majority of Ohioans, including most of its usually pro-corporate media. Commercial, industrial and environmental groups did mount a massive campaign meant to stop the bill from passing. But with help from Democrats in both houses, the Legislature narrowly approved the bailouts.

Almost immediately, a referendum was filed for repeal. With 265,000 signatures due by October 21, Ohioans Against Corporate Bailouts began hiring canvassers.

Ohio’s GOP Secretary of State delayed the process as long as possible. He waiting a full 20 days before turning down the first petition submission. He then waited another 20 to certify the second.

But as soon as the referendum supporters began gathering signatures, pro-nuke forces attacked with a fascist assault unlike any other in US history.

First they began running an astonishing wave of TV ads claiming thereferendum was a plot by Chinese Communists to take over Ohio’s electrical grid. The ads feature (they are still running!) hordes of goose-stepping Chinese soldiers, sinister footage of China’s dictator, shuttered US factories, and more.

Accompanied by high-gloss mass mailings, the pro-nuke forces are also running saturation radio ads warning Ohioans to shun all signature gatherers lest they be tracked by sinister communists out to ruin their lives and credit. A toll-free number is offered to those willing to call in the location of any repeal supporters.

But the pro-nuke gestapo has also leapt from mere media manipulation to physical intimidation.When the referendum-gatherers hit the streets, they were confronted by industry “blockers” to tangibly prevent them from doing their job. In one case (as filmed on a security camera) a blocker smacked the cell phone out of the hands of a signature gatherer as he tried to photograph her. Gatherers have widely reported close-up verbal assaults. In some cases as many as three paid blockers have surrounded a single signature gatherer to prevent anyone from coming near to signing a petition.

Because many of the signature gatherers are hired employees, they’re required to register contact information with the state. The pro-nuke mob has assaulted them with threatening phone calls. In some cases they’ve reportedly offered substantial cash payments and airline tickets if they leave the state. One signature gatherer reported being offered $2500 (!) for the day’s accumulated sign-up sheets, which would presumably then be shredded.

Under the circumstances, many now wonder if the pro-referendum forces have been able to accumulate the required 265,000 signatures, plus the many more needed for a traditional cushion. The Republican Secretary of State is certain to discard as many signatures as he can, especially with the micro-managed scrutiny of the nuclear industry.

The ramifications of such an outcome are staggering. It could signal the death of the popular referendum, a cornerstone of the democratic process.

It could also mean two old, uncompetitive, uninsured, un-inspected crumbling atomic reactors highly likely to explode will continue to threaten the entire Great Lakes region for years to come.

https://www.alternet.org/2019/10/the-united-states-is-not-a-healthy-democracy-⁠-heres-why'

United States is not a healthy democracy ?— here’s why

Written by Andrew Fletcher, Jonathan Montano / History News Network October 14, 2019

Richard C. Lyons is the award-winning author behind “The DNA of Democracy,” Volume 1 of the “Shadows of the Acropolis” series releasing on April 15, 2019. His first book, “But By Chance of War” (2012) won a Nautilus Book Award and a Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Award. His education took him through the University of North Texas and a graduate career at Southern Methodist University. Lyons has been an avid admirer of the written word, which led him to literary pursuits as a poet, essayist and screenwriter. Professionally, Lyons has been involved in printing, publishing, stage and television production throughout his professional career. For more, visit https://www.lylea.com.

“The DNA of Democracy” is an interesting title – what does it mean?

In viewing democracy through history, several cornerstones become apparent to its foundations, such as heroes who devote their lives to freedom, such as the will to found government for the good of all, not just some. Such as legal foundations as evident in constitutions going back to Athens and as modern as our own.

How and why did you choose the subject of democracy for your book? And what was your research process like?

I chose the subject because I have noticed what a fragile, temporal thing democracy can be. It is assumed we live in an eternal form of government, we do not, nor did the people of the Roman Republic. Several things are necessary for the health of democracy and they can be measured. As to the research, I found parallels or rhyming natures between the tyrannies of every era researched. Therefore, just as democracy has a DNA, tyrannies have a DNA as well.

Why is it so imperative for Americans to educate themselves on the history and processes of democracy, especially now?

We know as individuals we are in good health if our temperature is 98.6 degrees, if our heart rate is between 60 and 80 beats per minute at rest and if our chemistry exists within certain ranges. The same can be said about telling readings as to the balances in a democracy. It is necessary to know if as individuals we are physically healthy, just as it is necessary to know if the government that governs us as a people is healthy!

What are the greatest misconceptions about democracy and the democratic process?

The greatest misconception is that all governance is at the federal level and resides in the executive branch of government. That was not how our government was founded. “The DNA of Democracy” goes into depth, at a very readable level, to relate how the power of the individual in our democracy is the key to our democracy’s health....

gerry and voter ID, overturn props undermine democ:

In Michigan, for example, Republicans gerrymandered the state so well that the party held nine of 14 congressional seats after 2012, 2014 and 2016, even in years when Democratic candidates won 200,000 more votes. Democrats have also dominated the statewide vote for the state house since 2012, but have not been able to translate a majority of votes into a majority of seats during this entire decade.

In response, the nonpartisan Michigan-based group called Voters Not Politicians successfully led a statewide ballot initiative to end gerrymandering by removing the power to draw state and congressional district maps from politicians. A simultaneous grassroots effort to expand the franchise culminated in another victorious ballot initiative that included automatic and same-day voter registration.

In response, GOP officials filed a lawsuit to prevent the voter-approved independent redistricting commission from going into effect and made it more difficult to run ballot initiative campaigns in the future.

Last year in Florida, the Second Chances campaign won a ballot initiative for a state constitutional amendment that brought together liberals and conservatives with the goal of re-enfranchising those convicted of felonies who have completed the terms of their sentence, excluding murder and sexual abuse perpetators. (Ex-felons meeting those criteria in Florida — approximately 1.4 million of them at this moment — had lost voting rights permanently unless granted clemency due to a Jim Crow-era constitutional provision.)

Republican officials, immediately following this victory, approved a new law restricting enfranchisement to those who paid fines, fees and restitution — a modern-day poll tax. The state legislature, in recent years, has additionally sought to make voter registration drives harder, limit early voting on college campuses and curtail language accessibility. Right now, there is a campaign to make ballot initiatives almost impossible to win.

In Texas, partisan gerrymandering likely cost Democrats five Congressional seats in 2016, according to election expert Stephen Wolf. Equally disturbing, the state GOP has passed strict voter registration hurdles and implemented discriminatory voter ID laws, all of which primarily targeted minorities and communities of color.

https://www.alternet.org/2019/05/democracy-is-in-a-global-crisis-revealing-the-structural-flaw-at-the-heart-of-classical-liberalism/

All over the world, alarm bells are ringing for democracy. Everywhere we find strongmen in charge, enraged citizens and a desperate search for explanations and remedies. Rodrigo Duterte’s Philippines. Viktor Orbán’s Hungary. Benjamin Netanyahu’s Israel. Maybe something’s even going wrong in the United States.

In 1992, political theorist Francis Fukuyama declared there was finally a solution to the riddle: “Who should rule, and why?” The answer: liberal democracy.

A generation later, Fukuyama’s declaration is not wearing well.

As it turns out, the structural flaw that would hobble liberal democracy had actually been identified 30 years earlier, in a study called *Possessive Individualism* by University of Toronto political scientist Crawford Brough Macpherson.

He pointed out that liberal democracy was a contradiction in terms. From the 16th century to the 20th, classical liberals of the British tradition had argued for the rights of the “individual.” In theory and practice, though, they only counted a person as an individual (almost always male) who had command over himself and his possessions, including human ones.

...For all his inspiring words about government created by and responsive to “the people,” supposedly liberal philosopher John Locke, investor in the slave trade, had a narrow view of who got to be considered a rights-bearing individual.

The key was property. Society was little more than an agreement among the privileged to respect each other’s property rights.

Hardly pro-democracy

These liberals were not democrats, but after the rise of industrial capitalism, they had to respond to growing populations of working people with their own, often democratic, ideas. Generations of liberals, with John Stuart Mill at the helm, struggled to reconcile their assumptions about free-standing individuals who owned property with the democratic demands of the exploited and excluded.

Until the 1960s, a softer, gentler liberalism seemed to gain ground. The privileges of propertied individuals were preserved, but at a price: welfare programs, unions, public education, housing and health and, worst of all, taxes.

Still, liberals ultimately had to choose between democracy and capitalism. They might find themselves defending both the rights of workers to unionize and of factory owners to fire them, for example. Which should prevail? Macpherson feared the fall-back answer for liberals, whatever their democratic posturing, would often be the owners.

Macpherson’s critics painted him as “yesterday’s thinker.” Didn’t he realize, they asked, that liberals had found a sweet spot — harmonizing the public and the private, the people and the propertied, the many and the few?

Macpherson’s prescience

Today, more than three decades after his death, Macpherson’s diagnosis — that the acquisitive drive of unfettered capitalism poses a stark challenge to liberty and democracy — seems very prescient.

Liberal democracy has fallen into a world crisis.

Liberal democrats were working to make democracy safe for property, but to their right were hard-nosed businessmen, economists and politicians working on an extreme makeover of liberal democracy that came to be called “neo-liberalism.”

Outraged by infringements on capital, determined to roll back socialism and seeing the market as near-infallible, this determined cadre of conservative intellectuals created a movement of reactionary resistance.

Regulations impeding the free flow of capital were demolished. Once-powerful labour movements were eviscerated.

Liberated from effective regulation, financial institutions developed global chains of indebtedness and speculation which, even after the crisis of 2007, have attained pervasive influence.

After three decades of pious liberal hand-wringing, the world is set to warm by three to five degrees Celsius by 2100, a catastrophe attributable to unregulated capitalism.

Liberal toolbox of no use

The propertied patterns underlying these civilization-threatening developments cannot be grasped, let alone resisted, using a liberal toolbox.

In the possessive individualism of classical liberalism, we find the seeds of today’s democracy crisis. A devotion to property over people is democracy in chains and a planet in peril.

Countless people experience the precariousness wrought by this extreme makeover of the world’s liberal order. A neoliberal world, by design, offers minimal security —in employment, social stability, even in reliable networks of knowledge helping us reach reasoned understandings about the world in the company of our fellow citizens.

People longing for security confront, instead, an unintelligible, turbulent world seemingly bent on destroying any prospect of it. Insecurity breeds acute and often angry anxiety. It prompts a search for sanctuary in anti-depressants, opioids and alcohol. A deliberately starved state sector leaves only a few short steps between you and social and economic ruin.

Even the reasoned consideration of factual evidence recedes in a neoliberal world where every institution — newspapers, universities, the state itself — is rethinking itself in neoliberal terms. This very precariousness is represented, not as culturally and psychologically damaging, but as freedom itself.

In this climate, a pervasive culture of militarism offers beleaguered individuals at least the solace of an imagined national community. Our daily work may be regimented, pointless and insecure, but at least we can imagine, beyond it, a world of collective noble endeavour and selfless courage in defence of the nation.

In this militarized culture, many people are plainly looking for strongmen who can stand up for the nation. And around the world, including our corner of it, they’re finding them.

Responding to nationalism

The sovereign political paradox of our time is that a global army of people — precarious, harried, anxious, angry, disenfranchised and above all divested of all social rights to reasonably secure and prosperous livelihoods — is responding avidly to nationalist movements that, on closer inspection, are likely offer them more extreme versions of the hardships they are already enduring.

The Macpherson challenge — to liberate democracy from its neoliberal chains by rethinking property relations right down to their foundations — is daunting, but not unprecedented.

There will be conflict, pain and sacrifice in the long revolution to retrieve democracy and the liberties once sincerely defended by liberals. There will also be excitement and energy. The 21st century is already echoing with cries of dynamic, often youthful participants in such struggles, as they challenge the extreme makeover that has so convulsed contemporary life and placed liberal democracy in question.

They know the hour is late. The stakes could not be higher.

Ian McKay, Director of the Wilson Institute for Canadian History, McMaster University

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

fac so

Southern legislatures take aim at direct democracy

After voters approved a constitutional amendment restoring the franchise to people with felony convictions, Florida lawmakers are trying to make it harder for citizens to put amendments on the ballot. Legislators in Arkansas, the only other Southern state that allows citizen-initiated amendments, did likewise after voters passed a minimum-wage hike.

[also have to pay any fees/fines to get vote back

norms eg:

red tide post election dirty tricks

https://www.alternet.org/heres-rundown-gops-anti-democratic-red-tide-and-what-you-can-do-stop-it

In the wake of the 2018 “blue wave,” we’re now seeing a “red tide” of anti-democratic power-grabs -- strategies, tactics and rationales designed to deny the will of the voters — not just in Wisconsin, but in Michigan, Ohio, North Carolina, Maine and elsewhere.

In mid-November, Salon’s Igor Derysh reported on GOP efforts to rush unpopular laws through three state legislatures: Rolling back minimum wage raises and paid sick leave protections in Michigan, a new new voter-ID requirement in North Carolina, and restricting Democratic Gov.-elect Tony Evers’ executive powers in Wisconsin. But the picture has darkened considerably since then, both within these three states and beyond.

The power grab politics we’re seeing fall into three main categories:

InWisconsin, Michigan, Ohio, and North Carolina lame -uck legislaturesare engaged in overriding will of the voters, with the back-up protection of gerrymandering protecting them from reversal and from voters' wrath. (Something similar may be happening with county board of supervisors in Maricopa County, Arizona, with noise being made about stripping the Democratic election supervisor of powers as well.)
In Maine, GOP Rep. Bruce Poliquin has brought a lawsuit against the ranked-choice vote election of his Democratic opponent, Jared Golden. As I’ve described before (here and here), RCV makes democracy more robust, which drives GOP crazy, so here they’re trying to attack it arguing the opposite. The power-grab mentality simply cannot understand the power-sharing benefits involved in ranked-choice voting, and can only see it as some kind of trick.
In North Carolina’s 9th congressional district race, there’s overwhelming evidence of actual electoral fraud(involving hundreds, if not thousands of ballots), driven by the power-grabbing mentality. This flies in the face of the myth of voter fraud, which has never been supported by more than a few scattered examples among many millions of votes. Both the myth and the reality reflect the underlying worldview of right-wing Republican activists, and given how fact-free the “voter fraud” myth is, we should expect this example of GOP electoral fraud to be used to further suppress Democratic voters.

The first category is so overflowing with examples that it’s impossible to do justice to the other two in a single story, but they need to be recognized as parts of the same overall dynamic, a zero-sum quest for power, eerily estranged from any sense of shared purpose that power might serve.

As noted at Vox, the New York Times and elsewhere, after Democrat Roy Cooper won the North Carolina governor’s race in 2016, North Carolina Republicans wrote the playbook for lame-duck power grabs that Wisconsin and Michigan Republicans are using today — playbooks focused on stripping power from the executive branch and assuming it for themselves. But as the list above shows, Wisconsin and Michigan aren’t alone, nor are GOP power grabs limited to legislatures grabbing power from the executive branch, nor is the 2016 North Carolina playbook the sole origin point for the power grabs going on.

As Vox notes, the basis of most such power grabs is the GOP’s unprecedented post-2010 gerrymandering. Former Salon executive editor David Daley wrote the book on this, “Ratf**ked.” (Salon interview here.) But there’s also a history of legislative power grabs attacking state courts since the early 2000s, as I wrote about earlier this year.

In addition, 2003 stands out as especially significant because of power grabs in two of the most populous, politically consequential states: The unprecedented recall of California Gov. Gray Davis (the first governor ever recalled for purely political reasons, with no allegations of malfeasance) and the equally unprecedented mid-decade redistricting of Texas’s congressional districts. Both were legally permissible, but violated long-standingnorms,a category of political action described by Harvard Law professor Mark Tushnet as “constitutional hardball.” While 2003 was hardly the beginning of constitutional hardball, it signaled the start of a new phase, focused on state-level machinations, which is now more intensified than ever.

Yet more recently, a counter-movement from below has suddenly emerged. Redistricting reform— taking the process out of politician’s hands — proved enormously popular this year, the Brennan Center noted. Ballot measures passed in five states — Colorado, Michigan, Missouri, Ohio and Utah — putting the breaks on future extreme partisan gerrymandering. While uniformly more popular with Democrats, the measures received more than 60 percent support from Republicans in four of the five states. The Brennen Center analyzed the county-level approval rate and compared support to that in statewide partisan elections, finding that “these proposals did strikingly well among Republicans, far outperforming candidates of either party in nearly every instance.”

Michigan was a particularly interesting example, because GOP officials openly opposed the citizen initiative, as “a Democratic power grab,” the Center noted. “Despite that, the measure won more than 61 percent of the statewide vote and a majority of the vote in 66 of the state’s 84 counties,” including all of the most populous GOP-leaning counties, as can be seen from this chart:

What this tells us, in no uncertain terms, is that there’s light at the end of the tunnel, if only we can manage to find our way. But finding our way includes understanding where we are. So let’s take a closer look at the forms that power-grab politics has taken this post-election season.

Wisconsin

In Wisconsin, Democrats Tony Evers and Josh Kaul ran for governor and attorney general, respectively, on a promise to defend the Affordable Care Act, and remove the state from a GOP lawsuit challenging the law. The GOP power grab would block them from doing that. It gives GOP lawmakers control of litigation involving the state, and allows them to replace the attorney general with state-funded private attorneys. It also entirely eliminates the position of solicitor general, the state’s in-court representative in high-profile cases. It’s as if Congress took over the Department of Justice, and farmed out work to private law firms—a jaw-dropping violation of the separation of powers.

As Dan Kaufman, author of "The Fall of Wisconsin," told Governing magazine, “Tony Evers campaigned on certain things. He ran on the position of defending the Affordable Care Act. That was a central part of his campaign. Nobody ran on their side on stripping power away from the incoming governor, whoever it may be.”

While there are many other aspects to the GOP power grab —“It's a dense, 141-page bill, with a lot of changes,” Kaufman said — this stands out as a defining feature, if only because so much else was simply smuggled through. “Like most of what has happened in the last eight years, there was no public input, with one limited hearing,” Kaufman explained. “The process itself is maybe the biggest outrage for people.”

The Wisconsin story actually starts two years before North Carolina Republicans wrote their playbook, and its essence is straight-up deception of the voters, as University of Wisconsin professor Michael Wagner explained in a Salon interview last week:

Gov. Walker took office and immediately pursued legislation curtailing the power of labor unions. He had not campaigned on it. It was so controversial it filled the capitol with protestors for weeks. He leaves office with the capitol filled with protesters once again as he is asked to sign legislation that he and his fellow Republicans did not campaign on during the election season.

More than that, Wisconsin had long observed the norm that once an election was held those in power would stop pursuing any contested policies, as Wagner explained:

When Gov. Walker replaced outgoing Gov. Doyle, Doyle halted his signature high-speed rail project at Walker’s request, as Walker had been against it. What is happening now in Wisconsin is a subversion of democracy – Wisconsin Republican lawmakers are changing the job descriptions of the governor and attorney general between Election Day and Inauguration Day simply because their side lost. This is a textbook example of how democracies die. That is, when norms about the peaceful transfer of power are violated, we are in trouble.

Georgetown public policy professor Donald Moynihan, late of the University of Wisconsin, agreed. “It’s impossible in Wisconsin history to find anything even remotely similar,” he told Salon for this story.

The new legislation also restricts the governor’s power to negotiate state-federal relations, another key feature of executive power. “That might sound like inside baseball, but it’s a huge deal, since Medicaid and Medicare drive state budgets,” Moynihan said, going on to explain:

Evers’ predecessors used this power to put their impri

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jim h

Is it possible to get public policies out of our political system that benefit common people rather than moneyed elites?

Yes! We the people can bypass corporate-purchased lawmakers and write the laws ourselves. In 26 states and numerous cities, grassroots people can put statutes and constitutional amendments on the ballot through a citizens initiative process, that in this era of plutocratic rule, has become a major avenue for achieving progressive change.

For example, on November 6, voters in Albuquerque, Baltimore, and Denver will be offered new forms of small-dollar, public financing of elections to counter secret, unlimited donations by corporations. A South Dakota measure would ban corporate donations to candidates and political parties and bar “gifts” from lobbyists to elected officials. To stop incumbents from hand picking their voters by gerrymandering their districts, people in Colorado, Michigan, Missouri, and Utah will have a chance to turn redistricting over to independent, non-partisan commissions – and other various reforms to democratize voting are proposed in Florida, Michigan, Nevada, Maryland, South Dakota, and Massachusetts.

Ballot measures have proven so successful that corporate front groups have begun proposing deceptively worded initiatives that – get this – would forestall citizens from putting initiatives on the ballot. So far this year, initiatives to stop or restrict initiatives have been filed in Maineand South Dakota to curtail people’s access to this process of direct democracy. Also, ALEC, the secretive, Koch-funded anti-democracy group, has generated bills in six state legislatures essentially to keep citizen initiatives off the ballot.

Corporate elites are so afraid of democracy that they’re actually trying to outlaw it! To help protect direct democracy, go to: ballot.org.

https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/trump-building-autocratic-system-america-one-concession-time

chait

thom h

https://www.alternet.org/right-wing/9-ways-trumps-authoritarianism-taking-hold

no many lnx

9 Ways Authoritarianism Is Taking Hold Under Trump

The president and his neo-authoritarian acolytes are following an ancient playbook.

By Thom Hartmann / Independent Media Institute May 29, 2018, 6:37 AM GMT

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70 COMMENTS

Photo Credit: CNN

As our country slides into an ugly Americanized form of neofascism, there’s good news: nonviolent protest, when in the service of progressive, egalitarian goals, almost always wins out when it reaches a national critical mass. And we may well be on the verge of that right now. But we must understand what we’re up against.

Donald Trump and his neo-authoritarian acolytes are following an ancient playbook.

Part Machiavelli, part Caesar, part Mugabe/Duterte/Mao, it always includes a few simple and primary elements of seizing and subverting normal political power.

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Here's how the president is building authoritarian institutions.

Lie Often — Lie Big.

As President Franklin D. Roosevelt pointed out, the Big Lie technique wasn’t invented by Hitler but was essential to his success, and in the 1944 election, the Republican Party began to turn it on Democrats.

FDR wasn’t having any of it.

“The opposition, in this year, has already imported into this campaign a very interesting thing, because it’s foreign,” FDR told the nation during that year’s presidential campaign.

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“They’ve imported the propaganda technique invented by the dictators abroad,” FDR said. “Remember a number of years ago there was a book, Mein Kampf, written by Hitler himself. The technique was all set out in Hitler’s book and was copied by the aggressors of Italy and Japan.

“According to that technique, you should never use a small falsehood. Always a big one. For its very fantastic nature would make it more credible. If only you keep repeating it over, and over, and over again.”

As George Lakoff pointed out in his brilliantly titled book Don’t Think of an Elephant, in order for us to process a lie—even knowing it’s a lie—we must first imagine it as a truth, a reality. (I also wrote at length about this in my book on using neuro-linguistic programming [NLP] in politics, Cracking the Code.)

If you hear, “Don’t run into the street,” you must first imagine running into the street to know what “don’t run into the street” means. You have to clearly visualize it.

If you hear “FBI spies were in my campaign,” you must first clearly imagine FBI spies in the Trump campaign, before you can process the fact that every intelligence agency and even the administration itself say that there were no spies (unless they were foreign) within the Trump campaign.

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That simple act of creating the visualization that is then knocked down by the correction of the lie, instead embeds itself into consciousness as a temporary pseudo-reality and, for people inclined to believe, the actual belief of reality, of the asserted lie. From there, the lie makes its way to the conscious mind as a belief or “fact.”

Whether the lie is about a particular religion or race being “vermin” or “animals,” and whether it’s said in 1934 or 2018, doesn’t much matter: once the mental picture is formed, reality begins to waver for even the most well-informed among us.

And trying to rebut the lie only strengths it, because the rebuttal presupposes the possibility that the lie could be true. Every time a Trump or GOP lie is rebutted, it’s also repeated: The rebuttal actually strengthens, in the minds of the already-converted, the reality of the lie, and makes it easier for the uncertain to begin to believe it.

This is why fully 48 percent of Republicans believe that over 3 million undocumented immigrants voted in the 2016 election, and similar or higher percentages of Republicans believe climate change is a hoax, the GOP tax cuts “for the middle class” were real, and that deregulating environmental and workplace protections will lead to higher wages and more jobs.

All lies; all repeated over and over again; all believed.

Consolidate Power While Challenging or Co-Opting Institutions That Enforce Accountability.

Every authoritarian leader who’s come to power in history, from Samaria 7,000 years ago to today’s administration from the White House at the top, to the EPA under Scott Pruitt, makes this their second big move. Weaken the institutions of accountability, while intimidating your own allies into submissive servility.

That judge was a Mexican. The investigation into Trump is a witch hunt. Congress doesn’t have the authority to investigate Republicans.

People in Trump’s own party, like Corker, McCain, and Flake, who are willing to challenge the president, got politically destroyed, so others became afraid to challenge him. Meanwhile, those American politicians and foreign powers that suck up to him and his relatives in the Trump Crime Family are richly rewarded.

This behavior is a calling card of tin-pot dictators, but it’s also the key to the power held by most national-scale modern authoritarian regimes. And once the allies of Dear Leader begin to bow to the authoritarian on bended knee, the process can take on a momentum that makes it unstoppable until it’s totally and irrevocably defeated by an external power (think Germany, Italy, Spain, and Japan in World War II).

Packing the courts is the final step in this process, as we’ve seen in every country in history where democracy has died. Senate Majority Leader Republican Mitch McConnell set this process up by denying President Obama his constitutionally provided-for court appointments, ranging from the most routine to the Supreme Court itself. Now the GOP court-packing operation, even to the point of defying centuries-old Senate traditions like blue-slipping, has moved into hyper-gear.

Even “prison reform” efforts have been co-opted to include “mens rea” (“state of mind”) changes in the law that will insulate CEOs and billionaire corporate owners from decisions they make that lead to death or environmental destruction if the prosecution can’t prove that such an outcome was not only predictable, but was their specific intent. It will end corporate perp walks for all but the lowest-level flunkies, and is tied to virtually every Republican or bipartisan “sentencing reform” effort.

And to the extent that the electorate may hold these new authoritarians in check by voting them out of office, wide swaths of the American electorate are being purged from voting rolls with Kansas’s Kris Kobach’s Interstate Crosscheck program, or blocked from voting for lack of the “Republican-certified ID” like a state-issued concealed carry permit (students with government-issued student ID need not apply to vote).

If they successfully navigate all these barriers, voters (particularly minority voters, or voters in Democratic-heavy districts) still find that their voting machines, like the ones in Detroit in 2016 that failed to record over 75,000 votes for president (Trump won Michigan by fewer than 11,000 votes), are “defective.” If they do work at all, they’re put out in such small numbers that working people must wait in lines for 6 to 12 hours.

The speed with which these deeply anti-democratic changes are happening in America today is, to most historians, extremely alarming.

3.Attack the Press.

British conservative (and advocate of the American Revolution) Edmund Burke coined the phrase “the fourth estate” in 1787 to describe the press when arguing that Parliament should open itself up to newspaper reporters. Along with the legislative, executive, and judicial “estates” of governance, every functional republic since that era has included strong protections of the press as a pseudo fourth branch of governance, an explicit and public check on the abuse of power.

But to an autocrat whose wealth, power, and longevity in office depend on the abuse of power, a free and independent press is a danger. This is why Hitler shut down the independent press in 1933-’34, although he kept the appearance of press diversity by allowing many of the formerly independent newspapers to be acquired by media companies his cronies owned.

Historically, the two strategies emerging autocracies use in this regard are to: 1.) Attack the credibility and right to existence of the independent media while, 2.) Consolidating and expanding the reach and power of friendly media, typically owned by cronies of the autocrat.

Between cries of “fake news” and “pull their credentials” directed at “legacy media”; a push for corporate concentration of that media that started when the Reagan administration ended the Fairness Doctrine and corporatized NPR; and the elevation of billionaire-owned/affiliated media outlets like Fox, Sinclair, and the large terrestrial radio networks that pretty much exclusively carry right-wing talk radio, this process is already far down the road in the United States.

Vilify Protesters, Minorities, and Political “Enemies” to the Point of Provoking Violence.

This administration and the GOP they’ve captured have become the party “of dreadful fear and hate” that President Dwight Eisenhower warned against. We see it in institutionalized police violence against African Americans and immigrants; excessive arrests and punishments of people protesting Trump’s inauguration and speeches; new laws punishing journalists for reporting on factory farm and corporate environmental abuses; and violence-tinged rhetoric against “Mexican rapists,” using MS-13 as a rhetorical proxy for Hispanics, and saying Black NFL players hate/disrespect our flag and country, among other things.

And by accusing the other side of what they, themselves are doing, these new authoritarians deflect attention from their own very intentional strategy. Just google the words “Trump attacks liberals” without the quotation marks to see page after page of over-the-top snowflake-like examples of conservative media and politicians complaining that liberals are “unfairly attacking” Trump and the GOP.

Scapegoat Minority Groups to Rile Up a Mob Mentality.

Sadly, one of the psychological legacies we share with other predatory mammals is the ability to instinctually form “packs” and drop into pack-like behavior, particularly against those who are weak or wounded. Although we have an intellect that should protect us from such behavior, the instincts wired into our DNA will always beat our thought processes, at least over the short term.

Fascists and authoritarians use this core mammalian instinct, paraphrasing Sinclair Lewis, to “rouse up the rubes.”

While this was a common feature of American politics in the century following the Declaration of Independence when it was directed by white politicians and police authorities against Native Americans and slaves, and popped up in the 1880s against Chinese immigrants, the modern Trump Party has resurrected it to use against immigrant children, women, religious and racial minorities, and the LGBTQ community.

Not to mention provoking violence against “libtards” like Heather Heyer, whom Trump’s “very fine people” murdered last year in Charlottesville, Virginia. (I don’t want to include links in this article to neo-Nazi sites, but just google “libtard heather heyer” without the quotes; you’ll be shocked.)

Elevate One Religion That You Can Control (and Reward) While Trashing Others.

After World War II, one of the most interesting and conspicuous of the suicides in Germany was that of the Reich’s Bishop, Ludwig Müller. Elevated to the head of the German evangelical movement by Hitler himself, Müller became the most wealthy and powerful member of Germany’s clergy during the Reich. At first skeptical of the Fuhrer, he later told his colleagues that the “great goods” that Hitler would bring the church far outweighed his failings as either a person or a leader.

Müller was neither the first nor the last religious leader to both exploit and be exploited by an authoritarian regime.

Authoritarian leaders almost always use members of minority religions as scapegoats. What’s less well realized is that they almost always (the one modern exception was communism) favor one particular religious group, and use the wealth and power of the state to shower favors on that group so long as that group helps keep them in power.

Along those lines, in 1988 the campaign of George H.W. Bush against Michael Dukakis brought onboard an outspoken fundamentalist evangelical Christian to lead their “religious outreach” efforts. Ex-alcoholic, saved-by-Jesus credentialed “black sheep of the family” George W. Bush worked hard through that campaign to bring religious leaders who were skeptical of the religious enthusiasm of George Senior into that 1988 campaign.

Bush Jr.’s efforts were largely successful and were repeated and amped up during his own presidency, as Jerry Falwell and his ilk became regular fixtures in the White House. In bright contrast to Republicans from Warren Harding to Dwight Eisenhower, that established the foundation for a clear quid pro quo relationship between white evangelical leaders and Republicans.

Now the religious right wants their payback.

Taking a cue from ALEC—that right-wing, billionaire-funded group that brings together state lawmakers and lobbyists to write “model” legislation on behalf of corporate interests in exchange for their funding GOP politicians—the new group is called Project Blitz. They’re working explicitly and publicly to change the legal landscape of America with regard to religion.

As Katherine Stewart wrote for the New York Times, “The idea behind Project Blitz is to overwhelm state legislatures with bills based on centrally manufactured legislation.” She quotes “Christian nationalist” David Barton as saying, “It’s kind of like whack-a-mole for the other side; it’ll drive ’em crazy that they’ll have to divide their resources out in opposing this.”

Americans United for Separation of Church and State has, so far, identified more than 70 pieces of state legislation derived from Project Blitz, with more to come. In Oklahoma, Stewart writes, it’s a bill that allows discrimination in adoptions; in Minnesota, it’s legislation unconstitutionally letting publicly paid-for schools to post “In God We Trust” in their classrooms.

Contrary to Barton’s revisionist history, this was not how the Founders saw things.

In the summer of 1786, Thomas Jefferson was the U.S. government’s official envoy, essentially an ambassador, to France. While there, he was horrified by the way the Catholic Church dictated terms to both people and government.

On August 13th, he wrote a long letter to his old friend, teacher, and mentor George Wythe, then a judge in Virginia. Jefferson started out by commenting on how his (he first demanded it, then wrote parts of it) First Amendment to the Constitution had been well received by the Parisian intelligentsia:

“Our act for freedom of religion is extremely applauded. The ambassadors and ministers of the several nations of Europe, resident at this Court, have asked of me copies of it, to send to their sovereigns, and it is inserted at full length in several books now in the press; among others, in the new Encyclopedie. I think it will produce considerable good even in these countries, where ignorance, superstition, poverty, and oppression of body and mind, in every form, are so firmly settled on the mass of the people, that their redemption from them can never be hoped. …

“If anybody thinks that kings, nobles, or priests are good conservators of the public happiness, send him here. It is the best school in the universe to cure him of that folly. He will see here, with his own eyes, that these descriptions of men are an abandoned confederacy against the happiness of the mass of the people.”

Noting that the people of France had been “loaded with misery” by “nobles and priests, and by them alone,” Jefferson ended his letter with a call for Wythe to join him in his crusade against religion burrowing into the newly formed government of the United States by using the power of Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution to build a free public school system:

“Preach, my dear Sir, a crusade against ignorance; establish and improve the law for educating the common people. Let our countrymen know, that the people alone can protect us against these evils, and that the tax which will be paid for this purpose, is not more than the thousandth part of what will be paid to kings, priests and nobles, who will rise up among us if we leave the people in ignorance. But it needs but half an eye to see, when among them, that the foundation is laid in their dispositions for the establishment of a despotism.”

The religious right has made a metaphorical “deal with the devil” in Trump and the GOP that would have horrified the Founders of this nation, but is found in the storyline of nearly every authoritarian government in history. And now these so-called “Christians” want to leverage that power into ever-greater control over our minds and ever-greater access to our bank accounts.

Co-opt and Make Institutions of Military and Police Power into Loyal Sycophants.

Without the police and the military on their side, a tyrant’s days in office are inevitably numbered.

That’s why one of the hallmark behaviors of authoritarian leadership and its media supporters is to praise and empower, to the point of fetishizing, the police and the military. They then amplify this with elaborate displays of symbolic patriotism like singing the national song and hyper-displaying the flag.

From attacking NFL players for protesting police violence against unarmed Black people to telling a crowd of police officers to not be professional or respectful when arresting people, to chest-thumping about our military as “the most powerful ever,” Trump doesn’t even try to be subtle about his threats. The next step, if he follows the well-worn authoritarian path, is to put on Saddam Hussein-style military parades.

Meanwhile, the process that Ronald Reagan began, and Newt Gingrich sped up with his 1033 program, of redirecting billions of dollars of military funds, hardware and training to police departments, begins the process of turning ordinary police agencies into praetorian guards to solidify the power of the now-captured state.

Exempting police unions from crackdowns on other government employee union activities, like Scott Walker did in Wisconsin, hastens the process by ensuring the loyalty of the one legally armed, duty-sworn agency of government.

Ignore Competence and Incompetence; Only Loyalty Matters—and Is Richly Rewarded.

Mainstream Republicans on TV seem baffled as to why Trump would want clearly incompetent people like Ben Carson, Betsy DeVos, and Wilbur Ross in Cabinet positions where they run major governmental agencies.

Similarly, average Americans can’t figure out why Ryan Zinke (Interior) is intent on selling off our national parks to mining and drilling companies; why Scott Pruitt (EPA) is hell-bent on destroying the quality of our air and water; and why Mick Mulvaney (OMB and CFPB) wants to hand banking and general corporate regulation over to the lobbyists for the banks and payday lenders.

While some of this, particularly the last three mentioned, is really all about shifting power in America away from government protections of consumers/workers and toward giving such power to the billionaire/corporate class, the key to the whole thing is loyalty.

When Trump introduced a raised-arm loyalty oath at his campaign rallies in 2016, even Glenn Beck said on ABC, “We all look at Adolf Hitler in 1940. We should look at Adolf Hitler in 1929. Donald Trump is a dangerous man with the things that he has been saying.”

Trump’s obsessive need for loyalty—the result of a lifetime of insecurity and unethical/illegal business practices—are spreading through government institutions like the EPA and DOD the way a fungus spreads through a bag of apples on a warm day. The autocrat-in-chief is being, daily, imitated by his appointed minions, to the point that there are constant leaks about the “kiss-up-kick-down” psychopathological behavior of everybody from the White House doctor to Ryan Zinke and the flag he requires be raised over the roof of his building when he’s in his office.

In the process, the public good has been forgotten—or pushed aside as Trump and his fellow hogs monopolize the trough.

Another dimension of this is, while punishing your enemies, to support your friends. Trump and his administration have showered literally trillions of taxpayer dollars on their billionaire and corporate friends, from the GOP tax scam to their widespread destruction of protective regulations, to selling off public lands for pennies on the dollar.

Looting the public trust—and rewarding your friends with the money—was well documented by Fritz Thyssen’s chilling book I Paid Hitler. It’s a visible and important key to success for autocrats from Turkey to Russia to China. And Trump has brought it to the White House in a big way.

Foster a Sense of Helplessness Among the Opposition.

Whether it’s done with selective and brutal enforcement of the law, subtly shutting down access to the media, or outright infiltration, destroying the opposition is a critical key to seizing and holding authoritarian power in any nation.

When I was a teenager, Richard Nixon was behind efforts to shut down the anti-war and Civil Rights movements. His attacks on Martin Luther King Jr. are well known, and I still clearly remember the guy who always showed up at Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) meetings yelling that it was time to “kill the pigs” and “burn down the ROTC building!” We later learned he was a police informant, although most of us suspected it at the time.

But the infiltration word of its effectiveness—along with the murder of JFK, MLK, RFK, and members of nonviolent dissident groups like the Panthers—did its dirty work.

Numerous people, at first enthused by the nonviolence and human rights advocated by Students for a Democratic Society and the ’60s Civil Rights movements, drifted away from political activism and, in the 1970s and ’80s, fell into sex, drugs, rock-and-roll, and religious cults. And, as Reaganomics began to strip the middle class of the economic independence they enjoyed pre-Reagan, people bonded more and more to the corporate world and left politics behind.

Today, with government agencies able to turn a cell phone into a remote spy device, even people planning simple protests (from the RNC in 2004 to inaugural protests in 2017) often find themselves in jail cells or court before they take any direct actions whatsoever. Trump’s regime ramped up the charges against the 2017 inaugural protesters to the point where hundreds were facing over a decade in federal prison, further terrorizing any potential future protesters.

Fear, and a sense of powerlessness or resignation, are two of an authoritarian regime’s most powerful weapons.

Defeating Neofascism, Neo-Authoritarianism, and Corporate/Billionaire Corruption

The good news is found in recent research on the ways that societies come back from, or restore democracy to, authoritarian and/or highly corrupt governments. While surprising, it’s not counterintuitive.

Maria J. Stephan, director of educational initiatives at the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict, and Erica Chenoweth, assistant professor of government at Wesleyan University and a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University, published a mind-boggling paper almost a decade ago titled “Why Civil Resistance Works.”

In the first (!) comprehensive look in 200 years at how people take back their governments, they found that nonviolent resistance was nearly twice as successful (53 percent to 26 percent) as violent opposition at restoring democracy to, or exacting consequential political concessions from governments that had flipped authoritarian. (Chenoweth lays it out in a fascinating TEDx talk, as well.)

In just six years, for example, they showed non-violent-led civil reform movements having major successes around the world: “Serbia (2000), Madagascar (2002), Georgia (2003) and Ukraine (2004-05), Lebanon (2005), and Nepal (2006).”

Looking all the way back to 1900, they demonstrated that that two-to-one ratio of the success of nonviolent versus violent movements held.

Even revolutionary violence and terrorism as methods to produce political and social change (the methods we used to liberate the U.S. from Britain in 1776, and the Confederacy tried without success in 1861) are only effective 7 percent of the time, they found—a fraction of the 53 percent success rate demonstrated by historic nonviolent movements like those led by King and Gandhi.

Of course, these things can rub both ways. When our nation elected our first Black president, the Koch billionaire network and friends funded the Tea Party to "create a movement" out in the streets and in front of the cameras. That nonviolent movement, once activated, was sufficient to change control of an entire political party, the GOP.

Similarly, it seems that the progressive movement to return the Democratic Party to its FDR roots, which kicked off in a big way with the 2015 Bernie Sanders candidacy, has already succeeded in producing a deep and lasting refutation of the “Third Way” corporatist political alignments that had controlled the Democratic Party since 1992. The job isn’t yet finished, but it’s moving at a lightning pace.

And, most encouraging, it was done without being funded and directed by a small group of cranky billionaires. It represents a true people’s movement, which means its power to produce deep and lasting change is massively greater than a few rich people buying politicians and owning media.

If Chenoweth and Stephan et al’s research is correct, this relatively small tail can wag the proverbial dog of national politics in hugely consequential ways.

At a time when several American billionaires are funding openly racist media vehicles and explicitly using them to foment white rage, resentment, and fear, this small cabal is moving the hate-based Right closer to widespread acceptance and political power.

Meanwhile, less-well-funded but equally passionate progressive movements are pushing hard for health care for all, free college education, and rights and decent pay for working people, all while respecting the entire range of minority rights.

Whoever wins the hearts of Americans and gets them into the streets first will transform America for generations, and if the turnouts for things like the Women’s March or kids walking out of school across the country protesting gun violence (versus the tiny white nationalist rallies that get so much coverage) are any indication, progressive America is winning.

But there’s still a long way to go: Tag, you’re it.

Thom Hartmann is a talk-show host, Independent Media Institute writing fellow, and author of over 25 books in print. Two of Hartmann's major books on climate change - The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight and The Last Hours of Humanity - have been published in 17 languages on 5 continents. He also co-wrote and co-narrates the "Last Hours" documentary with Leonardo DiCaprio and Leila Connors.

https://www.alternet.org/death-democracy-author-says-trumps-cultivation-dishonesty-strongly-reminiscent-nazis

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ow is Donald Trump's political style and agenda similar (or not) to that of the Nazis and Adolf Hitler? What parallels and comparisons exist between the economic and social crisis in German society and democracy during the 1920s and 1930s and the United States in the age of Trump? How did mainstream right-wing German politicians -- like Republicans today -- enable Hitler's rise to power? How are anxiety and guilt among the dominant group regarding their treatment of minority groups used by right-wing authoritarians? What lessons do that earlier era of "fake news" and "the big lie" hold for America now?

In an effort to answer those questions, I recently spoke with Benjamin Carter Hett. He is a professor of history at Hunter College and the City University of New York and author of the new book "The Death of Democracy: Hitler's Rise to Power and the Downfall of the Weimar Republic."

This conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

How do you explain Donald Trump's rise to power and eventual election to the presidency?

I am a historian of Germany, particularly the time of Hitler. When I look at what happened in the 1920s and the 1930s, what strikes me about the downfall of democracy in Germany and the rise of the Nazis was how they attracted a lot of support and particularly angry protests against the effects of economic globalization. When people initially voted for the Nazi Party their votes were motivated by discontent with what they felt the global political situation was doing to them.

There is another aspect that is also a striking parallel. The Nazis were very much involved with cultivating deliberate lies for political purposes. In a way I think you could say the Nazis were the inventors of "fake news" as a political tool.But that would not have gotten Hitler into power if it had not been for a number of very powerful people in high positions in government and in business. They looked around and said, basically, "This guy Hitler is kind of crude and he’s kind of rough -- but we can use him." It was elite accommodation that allowed Hitler to get through the doors of power. You could draw a kind of rough and ready analogy from that to how mainstream Republicans have found themselves either wanting Trump or feeling compelled to adopt Trump and his base as a means of keeping themselves in power.

Donald Trump has been unapologetic and transparent about his authoritarian values. Yet so many Republicans and other conservatives have supported him, despite all the ways Trump is a dangerous and disruptive presence in American politics and society. How will history remember them?

A certain segment of elite conservatives put Hitler in power and soon started to grasp the scale of the disaster that he represented and how to get out of it.

I think the strongest example of this was a neoconservative intellectual named Edgar Julius Jung. Jung wrote a book in 1927 which was his critique of democracy called "The Rule of the Inferior." He was a vehement opponent of the democracy of the Weimar Republic. But as soon as Hitler was in power Jung said to a friend, “We are partly responsible for this guy being in power. We have to get rid of him.” The first resistance movement that had a real chance of getting Hitler out of power came from people who were inside the system, highly placed governmental and political operatives.

How did Germans who lived through the rise of Nazism make sense of that moment? Who were the supporters? What were Hitler's detractors, and soon-to-be victims, thinking during those years?They started to feel like their duty was to remove Hitler from power but they were mostly killed in the process.

As a general rule you could say that as soon as Hitler came into power he was greeted by more support and enthusiasm across the spectrum than greeted Trump. Trump has a pretty good hold on 35 percent or maybe 40 percent of the electorate and the rest really doesn’t like him. Hitler was almost certainly doing much better than that through most of his time in power.

Hitler was able to enjoy very strong support among Germans and this actually held up to a very great degree even through to the end of the war.

As you detail in your book, there are many parallels between the rise of Hitler in Germany during the 1930s and the rise of Donald Trump in America today. How do we navigate the metaphorical minefield that is summoned into existence by such a comparison?

I’m not pessimistic enough to think that we are heading straight into World War III and genocide. But there are warning signs in that Donald Trump is pulling on some of the same emotional chords as Hitler. For example, resenting what the rest of the world is doing to you. Racism and the hostility that a majority group might feel towards a minority group are also similar.

Trump had strong support from white voters across the socioeconomic spectrum. This is comparable to how Christian Germans felt about Jews in the 1920s or 1930s. This is a kind of resentment of the minority which can be mobilized as political passion. That is never going to lead anywhere good. It obviously led somewhere spectacularly bad in Germany in that era. It’s not going to lead anywhere good for us.

The other thing that really does trouble me about this moment under Trump is the deliberate cultivation of dishonesty. This is something that Hitler famously talked about when he wrote that a politician would be well advised to use a big lie, not a little lie -- because that will get seen through. People won't be able to grasp that you are putting forward such a massive falsehood. Hitler and his chief propagandist [Joseph Goebbels] were masters of this, and this is something that we have seen with Trump.

I fear that American political life is being actively degenerated by Trump and his propagandists.

Donald Trump and the broader conservative movement in America are largely propelled by a commitment to anti-intellectualism. In general, do they represent a backlash against or rejection of the Enlightenment?

There is a parallel where a lot of the people who backed Hitler were very conscious of rebelling against the Enlightenment. Edgar Julius Jung, whom I mentioned earlier, saw this as a reaction against the Enlightenment, which he saw as being French and foreign and thus not German.

I do think we have that going on now. I think perhaps it is what happens when the present reality just seems absolutely unacceptable to a lot of people. That was certainly the case in Germany in the 1920s. Certainly America right now is not experiencing anything like the crisis that Germany experienced after World War I. But I think there are a lot of people who are not doing well economically, which paradoxically is largely a product of Republican policies over the last four years.

Donald Trump positioned himself as a defender of the supposedly "lost" and "forgotten" white American working class. Yet instead of "draining the swamp," Trump appears to be running a Mafia-like protection racket where he personally benefits from the office and fattens . his and his family's bank accounts shakedown money. Nevertheless, his voters are devoted to him.

The Republicans and Trump have succeeded in changing the discourse away from what’s really happening with the American economy.

This too is something that has strong parallels to Germany in the 1920s and 1930s. This is something the Nazis succeeded at very well. The Nazis depicted themselves as being of the people and against the system. And of course for the Nazis "the system" was something which is directed by the elites who they don’t like. Obviously, they also present "the system" as being a product of Jews as a people, Jewish capital, Jewish intellectuals and so on.

From time to time the Nazis could actually sound very radical in their anti-business, anti-corporate, anti-elite rhetoric. Of course they drop that as soon as they get into power, because Hitler understands perfectly well that he needs big business -- especially the big arms businesses -- to create the kind of military forces that he wants. So once Hitler's in power, the policies of his regime are really quite corporate-friendly and not very worker-friendly.

As a scholar who has studied the rise of the Nazis, when you hear Trump's rhetoric about immigrants and nonwhites, or that of his supporters, what are you thinking?

There is a kind of projection onto a group of people who really are not powerful, to say nothing of not being threatening. Ye, the projection involves labeling those people as "thugs" or "rapists." This is not dissimilar from the politics of Germany in the 1920s and the 1930s, with its rhetoric about migrants and refugees as well as the security of the border -- which was another huge theme in the Weimar Republic.

What came to mind as you watched young white men riot in Charlottesville while chanting Nazi slogans?

It was deeply revealing that Donald Trump said that there was violence equally on both sides. And of course Trump also said there were "very fine people" on both sides -- which included Nazis and other white supremacists. In Germany, the Nazis had their own band of thugs -- the "brown shirts" known as the SA -- who instigated a good deal of violence. Their job was to go out and beat up Nazi opponents. At one point the president of the Weimar Republic, when confronted with a dossier on the violence that the brown shirts were committing, said, "The violence is on all sides it’s not just the Nazis.” What took place in Charlottesville evoked the pattern of political mobilization which the Nazis made their trademark.

White people -- especially white male conservatives -- are the dominant social, political and economic group in the United States. Yet, reflecting back on the white supremacist riots in Charlottesville, the rise of the "alt-right" and Trump's victory, it seems clear that white men of a certain stripe are angry and believe they have somehow been victimized and oppressed.

You can’t be alive and awake and halfway attentive to the news in our country without being deeply aware of the profoundly systematic ways that our society discriminates against African-Americans, other nonwhites, women and other marginalized groups.

So, I think there is something else going on which actually reminds me a little bit of how many Germans thought about Jews after World War II. When you are a German who survives World War II and you are also not Jewish there is guilt. The victims -- in this case Jews -- are resented because of those feelings of guilt. This resentment can become something even worse depending on the individual's personality and values. To that point, there was anti-Semitism in Germany after World War II. I believe this applies in America at present.

We must also remember that Germans in 1933 don’t know exactly where this is going to go. They also have a national feeling that Germany is a land of high culture, law and order. They are a good people and so the rise of Hitler and the Nazis cannot go anywhere very bad.

I think we Americans have very much the same problem. With American exceptionalism, we believe that our values are good. We are after all the people of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. We think we are a democracy. Nothing we do can go anywhere very bad. But the fact is that it can. And we ought to know better because America has committed genocide against native peoples and enslaved black people. There is a kind of dangerous innocence that Americans possess which ignores how bad things can become when the politics of racial division are stoked.

There are some people who would instinctively reject any comparison between the rise of the Nazis in Germany and the rise of Donald Trump in America. How would you rebut their claims?

Well, the parallel doesn’t and won’t hold 100 percent. But there is a deeper structure which is similar. The cultivation of hatred against minorities, against the vulnerable, against immigrants and so on. The deliberate cultivation of flagrant falsehoods. The manipulation of alienation and a sense of aggrievement among a group you then use to oppress others.

How do you deal with folks who have no real expertise about the rise of Hitler and the Nazi Party but nevertheless feel empowered to confidently offer their opinions on such a serious and complicated topic?

I wish I had a really good answer to that. There is a gentleman I talk to on occasion who will try to use evidence and arguments from online sources, really unreliable fly-by-night websites. I always try and think about how I can try to get this gentleman to a different place. The one time I think I had some success was when he made some ridiculous claims and I then asked, “What’s your source for that?” He paused. That threw him off a little bit.

It’s a reflex for a historian or anyone who studies something rigorously. It’s always a reflex to think: What’s the source? Is the source reliable? Does the source have an agenda? That’s always the point I try to drive home with my students or anyone I am talking to. At the end of the day, all you can do is press people to think about the information they consume, and think about it really critically. You are never going to reach everybody. So much of this is driven by emotions that are not accessible to rational argument.

Here is an example of that phenomenon. The NRA and other gun obsessives love to argue that if the Jews in Germany had had guns, they would have been able to stop Hitler. By implication, America should never have serious gun control.

The idea that there wouldn’t have been a Holocaust if there had not been gun control is so historically illiterate on so many levels it’s hard to know where to start. There were between 5.5 million and 6 million victims of the Holocaust. Of those, only -- I hate to say "only" in this context, but relatively speaking -- only a couple of hundred thousand were German, meaning only a couple of hundred thousand lived in a country where the Nazi laws were actually relevant. The great majority of Holocaust victims were from Poland or the Soviet Union, so German laws had nothing to do with them. So NRA types would have to take their complaints and theories to Joseph Stalin.

Then you have to consider the circumstances under which people died in the Holocaust. I actually read a comment where someone actually said, “If people had guns when the Nazis came to get them to put them on trains and send them to the camps then they could have fought back.” Well, by no means did everybody who was killed in the Holocaust die that way. Nearly half of Holocaust victims died at the hands of mobile killing squads. These were basically massive forces of police officers who swept through areas like Poland and the Soviet Union just behind the German army as it advanced. They would roll into a village and identify the people they wanted to kill. This would happen very quickly. The mobile killing squads would enter an area and a few hours later tens of thousands of people are dead.

In that kind of situation a person does not have time or knowledge to contemplate what is going to happen. Let’s leave aside the fact that Joe Citizen with a gun is not going to get very far against the German army. Most armies didn’t get very far against the German army in World War II. The Allies did not win until we had an enormous material superiority over the Germans.

Last but not least, let’s consider the fact that a great number of Holocaust victims were elderly people or children, and the perpetrators coming to kill them were healthy young men. A firefight is not going to go well under those circumstances. It’s so dumb on every possible level. Frankly, even by NRA standards that’s a dumb talking point.

Under Trump there has also been a celebration by his voters and other allies of the cruelty by ICE enforcers against undocumented immigrants, their families and communities. What does history tell us about such casual cruelty and its impact on a given culture?

That too has parallels in the past. It’s one of the hardest things for many of us to fathom. How you could look at someone who maybe is a refugee from a place where they are going to get killed by a gang, or the government is going to torture them, and think it’s a good idea to turn them over to ICE. I don’t know how you get there, especially when it's children. We hear horror stories about children escaping from various places and yet there are people who want to turn them back.

Of course this happened with the Nazis. It happened in the case of the Holocaust. It was remarkable how some Holocaust perpetrators seemed ready to revel in cruelty towards children.

When you hear the rhetoric which is emerging from Donald Trump or from people around him and from some of his supporters, that rhetoric really seeks to dehumanize people. It is a coded transmission that says, "It's OK now, it’s open season on people. You can do this.” That certainly is what happened in Nazi Germany and I think we have a mild version of it happening here. But then there were good people too. The person who had an unfailing moral compass and would take risks to help a Jewish person hide or help them escape. I know we have those people too. I just hope those people outnumber those who would be cruel, who would dehumanize their neighbors.

how democ die chile better // to US than germany; *** rank

https://kpfa.org/episode/letters-and-politics-april-11-2018/

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