“get off the bus, and get out of the country because you don’t pay taxes here.”
Is that the smear that's being spread by the Bannon trolls now? That immigrants somehow aren't paying any taxes? How would that even work? No one wearing a hijab is going to be able to avoid payroll taxes if they have a job. Everyone pays sales taxes. We also have taxes on our phone bills and power bills.
You're all out of credibility now in claiming that Trump is not a militarist after the bombing of the Syrian airbase on flimsier grounds than even Obama used. You're also out of credibility in claiming Trump's racist redneck base hates war. They want war on Moslems abroad and Blacks at home, and the crueler he is the more they dig in.
And conniving while a private citizen to get elected to the presidency by making deals with foreign powers to sabotage the sitting president's policies is what Richard Nixon did and should have been prosecuted for in 1968. How is THAT not undermining a sitting President's constitutional prerogative to establish foreign policy? Why is sabotaging Obama's sanctions on Russia okay with you?
Spyguy, during the Bush Junior regime I felt the same way, that surely our lack of genuinely useful exports would catch up with us this time. But again and again, the rich of the outside world keep bailing out America by buying its $ and preventing its value from collapsing.
I've come to think this is a rigged game. Specifically, the global capitalist elite need America as a hegemon, either temporarily or permanently, and they will shield us from our folly as much as they can.
For instance, why hasn't China used its vast pile of US$ and its reach in Central Asia to make our occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan far more painful? Here's the cosmic joke: our leaders may subscribe to a belief that pacifying lawless lands and bringing them into the global economy is a net win for the US corporate empire. But in fact US entrepreneurs are effete cowards and won't touch one of our quagmires. The Chinese can find hustlers willing to work anywhere at risk of life and limb, so they benefit when the US merely semi-stabilizes a country enough for others to march in and bribe all the local forces and set up shop. China does not want to disabuse us of our illusions in such places; it wants us to waste our last resources making the world safe for Chinese sweatshops.
As for the global bailout we've gotten with the elites perpetually showing greater confidence in our currency than their own despite our foolishness, I can only speculate that this is the only way the global financial system can work and the global players need the USA to play the role Britain (and gold) once played. They won't jump ship to the alternative system that Beijing is patiently developing until some crisis even bigger than 2001 or 2008. Until then, they're mostly hedging bets, as are the Chinese themselves.
A possible insight into this was the negotiations over Bretton Woods in 1944. The US delegation insisted that the new global currency convertibility system be tied to the US $. Keynes, from the declining empire, instead wanted a neutral currency basket as the standard of value - just as China is now arguing. But maybe the problem with a basket is precisely that because no one nation owns it, no nation will back it with all the powers at its disposal. As beneficial as Bretton Woods was in postwar economics, it gave the US unique powers and responsibilities that were a good match with its overwhelming wealth and military power. Even the rotten carcass of that mythic concordance seems to carry value with today's oligarchs, who have systematically corrupted all the economic organizations that accompanied Bretton Woods in FDR's Postwar World plans meant to prevent another worldwide trade war and depression.
The redacted 9/11 Commission pages finally came out last year. They show Federal surveillance encountering many ties between the 9/11 hijackers in San Diego and known "associates" of the Saudi consulate there, slippery figures who always had money and other forms of assistance for the terrorists-in-training.
I'm not saying the royal family itself was directing this. Saudi Arabia is a corporatized feudal system built around buying off the other noble houses with cushy government and Aramco jobs instead of land. But that buying-off is necessary because, as I understand it, some of those noble houses feel the throne of Arabia is actually their birthright. I would hardly put treachery and funding of terrorism beyond such noblemen inside the state bureaucracy.
If all that had come out in 2001, there would have been more investigations. It would not be good for the royal family's business interests for Western tycoons to suddenly discover that this fantasized stable business environment is full of plotters and usurpers.
He postures as the savior of a race looking for excuses to claim victimhood, to claim everyone else is out to get them for being so hard-working and virtuous, to claim the right to kill anyone who stops them from taking back their "birthright". That grim face perfectly fits this self-serving bullshit; they voted for a stick to beat the world with.
Nixon called it the "Madman Theory" and he was a pretty good manipulator of that same electorate.
Little by little, events forced American leaders to realize that they must occasionally play to the audience of ordinary Middle Eastern citizens and not just their tyrants, because even a tiny sliver of the former were willing to die to make Hell for America and its interests.
Of course, all that's out the window with Trump, who cannot even be bothered to play to any audience in his own country that isn't White, Christian, and paranoid. He's fully back to wanting the world divided between regional strongmen whom he deals with directly and obliviously, even praising some of the worst of these while he pisses on actual products of parliamentary democracy. See, it reduces everything in his mind to his Mastery of the Art of the Deal.
In 1968, Nixon should have been prosecuted for coordinating with the South Vietnamese regime while a private citizen running for President. The quid pro quo: Saigon would sabotage LBJ's peace efforts with Hanoi long enough to tilt the election to Nixon, who would reward Saigon by keeping the war and the stealable foreign aid going for 4 more years.
Now, will anyone dispute that this was some form of illegal act?
And if so, how does it differ from Russia's relationship with Trump? See, this isn't just about Cold Warriors and Russophobe Clintonites. Allies can solicit treason too, and cause millions of deaths. What matters here is when it becomes the manipulation of events by a foreign power that has been promised a return on its investment.
Were where you when Hillary Clinton was being held to an extreme standard over Benghazi and e-mails?
What crime would Trump have to commit to bother you? Why can you not see that this is a man defined by racism and theft? Did you pay no attention to the hatefest of his campaign trail - a campaign that for the first time is being made permanent with endless stops whipping up mobs of rednecks who lack only torches and swastikas? Why do you want so desperately to believe that Bannon and his neo-fascists will lead the world to peace?
Our fuhrer has already sacrificed our environment, he's tried to destroy healthcare by killing Obamacare so as to bankrupt Medicaid and destabilize Medicare, and he's already bombed Syria. What do you really see in him?
You act as if Trump's racist smears about fake voters and Chinese global warming conspiracies and birtherism being the very basis for his rise within the Republican Party are not proof that the main source of fake news is the American Right and its allies.
What's frightening is that we're having to depend on the courts because a horrible gap is growing between the letter of the law and what the public is willing to convince itself it means. They see clearly discriminatory laws and convince themselves that these only affect a mythical race of alien vote fraudsters or public bathroom pederasts that has nothing to do with their animosity towards tens of millions of actual minority citizens.
Lincoln said during another period of polarization, “As a nation, we began by declaring that 'all men are created equal.' We now practically read it 'all men are created equal, except negroes.' When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read 'all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and Catholics.' When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty – to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocrisy.”
We all need to be looking ahead to how far Trump will go to remain in power. What will you and I do if he and the GOP Congress simply refuse to acknowledge any wrongdoing? What will you and I do if dissidents get fired from the media for raising too many questions? What will you and I do if the first mass protests are met with silence - or with gunfire?
You certainly have the power to throw a close election. Like 2000. Tell us how W's war and Depression was no different than Gore, please, please.
What's worse, it seems a lot of so-called "leftists" around here prefer Trump to any Democrat who could actually win. Maybe they're sick of sullying their purity with all those uppity corporate Negroes and Mexicans who support economic growth and US hegemony and are only Democrats because they don't want to go back to Jim Crow. Whereas some "leftists" want isolationism and a weak government back so bad they'll take Jim Crow 2 in the bargain... as long as all the dirty work is done by the GOP so they can whine about how evil America is from a position of total uselessness.
I hope you're not in that group. Because if the price of progressive helpless purity is that the Republicans take us all the way to an Apartheid state, they will not enjoy the thing that must inevitably overthrow it.
Back in the 1950s, Louis Kelso and Mortimer Adler's book, The Capitalist Manifesto, explained Kelso's lifelong argument that automation & productivity increases makes it more and more impossible to keep people productively employed. The choice is to either allow inequality to skyrocket back to 19th century levels, or to use an infinitude of governmental band-aids to redistribute wealth from company owners to everyone else. It's ironic now that Kelso's main concern in the Eisenhower era was that there was too much of the latter; it was inconceivable to him that society would be deformed by the Reagan revolution to swing in the barbaric neo-Victorian direction instead.
But it may now be too late to impose his solution: force the banking industry to finance the conversion of workers into worker/owners through employee stock ownership. Like the lifetime savings plan suggested above, the idea is to get ordinary citizens into the investor class over time, because soon the working class must become the unemployed class. Growing share ownership allows the nature of employees' earnings to transition from wages reflecting the actual (declining) value of their labor, to dividends based on the value of decisions they make as shareholders using knowledge they acquired before the robots took over.
Is the particular issue how they together can try to install fascist rulers in every capital in Europe, thus unifying most of the White race, and every one of its official nuclear powers, under an anti-democratic alliance?
Society, I'm afraid, manages and coordinates all these negative and positive qualities to create the most effective wealth-acquiring complex, in competition with other societies doing the same thing. The societies most brutal towards their own ordinary members have presumably been weeded out by revolution and disintegration. The societies most ruthless in conquering and enslaving their neighbors, however, may well be all of our ancestors. That double standard explains how the democratizing, liberalizing Great Powers of Europe could enslave the Third World in the 19th Century. The society that cleverly manages that double standard can cultivate loyalty and solidarity at home - and then unleash that in the form of the most monstrous acts abroad, creating an outlet for their citizens' basest urges.
We've carried that elimination tournament to the point where the world is divided into multi-continental spheres of influence controlled from a few world capitals. The concept of universal human rights intruded into that process, but was also co-opted by it to an extent, such that modern powers both wage wars of humanitarian intervention, and let in immigrants of races their native-born citizens consider alien and unacceptable.
So was the seeming consolidation of our many societies into a single multicultural world about conquest and eradication (which must culminate in a World War between the finalists), or diversity and democracy (which must culminate in a genuine United Nations)? And is the current world crisis of ethnonationalism and fascism the result of the native citizens of those last surviving power blocs rejecting the liberal dogmas that served them well to absorb their neighbors (i.e., we secretly know we're still on top) but inconvenience them too much to make the jump to true global sovereignty (i.e., we fear this time we're outvoted by the Others)?
The key insight is the word "sadism", extended to the conservative movement and supporters in general. No one dares say that sadism is the secret ingredient in American history; that racism was the tribalization of sadism to turn the chosen race into a weapon to conquer and exploit a continent; that sadism is the ultimate White man's bonus, the thing he chooses to value more highly than uniting with his fellow workers of color to demand better wages and living conditions from the leaders of his tribe.
Sadism is the heart of the Stanford Prison Experiment, the reason those students who were labeled "guards" became monsters. America has been the Stanford Prison Experiment for 350 years.
But you don't compare it to Nixon's Saturday Night Massacre, which specifically was about covering up his crimes. You know, the act that cost him his job, but won't cost Trump his job.
Why worry about the future of your party when you're rigging election laws to create a one-party authoritarian state?
They KNOW their party can't survive the demise of White-majority America. They knew it 30 years ago. This is their kamikaze run, their Samson Option: a criminal sprint to bumrush the Constitution and destroy all legal opposition, then demonize the illegal opposition to create a permanent state of emergency. Their voters have no other options their egos can accept.
By that horrific standard, Trump fits in quite nicely.
In all fairness, America inspired the Zionist belief they could steal Palestine from its inhabitants and get away with it. Zionist hero Jabotinsky wrote that the Arab natives must be dealt with in the same way the USA dealt with the Indians. All subsequent denials aside, this was exactly the program carried out. And it brilliantly played on America's unwillingness to accept that the only just compensation for its own crimes would be to give most of the continent back to the Natives.
Even better, the American settlers themselves stole the Hebrew narrative of stealing Palestine from the Canaanites 3000 years ago to justify their own Manifest Destiny. So America and Israel are locked in a holy loop of self-justified conquest and oppression. The American Right has clearly come to view Israel as its laboratory for its own plans for America's People of Color.
The classic fascists, Hitler and Mussolini, came to power by parliamentary processes, though I understand Mussolini manufactured a "coup" in 1922 when he knew he was going to be asked to become prime minister anyway, to show that he was really installing a New Order.
This is very important. Fascism is a right-wing populist critique of democratic capitalism. Populism here means mass participation among those coded as the superior race. It's really the populism of a warrior tribe against those it oppresses. But it creates the possibility of an elected tyrant, who promises to liberate his superior brethren from the injustice of legal equality. That's potentially far more dangerous than a junta coming to power in a military coup, because it embraces the goal of totalitarian transformation of society that few juntas have the fanatical zeal to carry out. Usually, those guys are just trying to butcher some leftists and then hand power back to the capitalist oligarchs on more favorable terms.
I find the support of the far right for demolishing Net neutrality very short-sighted on their part. Net neutrality enabled many extremists in getting their views out there and finding like-minded followers. The media corporations might come down just as hard on Islamophobes and homophobes as they will on liberals - depending on the capitalist calculus on public relations.
It's as if they're ready to shut all their activities down and hand over their voice to Trump and Bannon and those corporations that have bowed down to them. Not a path for a healthy grass-roots movement.
Thank you for stating the hard truth. We are approaching the ultimate crisis: America no longer has a public. It has an agglomeration of narcissists and autistics who imagine that their own tiny sliver of the population is the only real America. The difference between the Left and the Right is that the Right is willing to do the many horrible things necessary to make their sliver the Master Race at gunpoint. Far too many of the rest of us are willing to react to that by retreating into our own media/market wombs, willed powerlessness.
Considering that right now all the serious alternatives are fascists, including the ones who have already won in America, India, and the Philippines, business as usual means we will not be in a concentration camp tomorrow.
Trump may or may not destroy himself in office. But a lot of Little Hitlers took notes on how he pulled it off, and they will infest our elections for another generation, attracting those abandoned but dangerous Trumpists by promising even greater retribution against the rest of us.
It goes on because they pay no price for their barbarism, or at least none that they can see. America is rewarded for its irresponsible fiscal policies and trade deficits because once its debts became large enough it could hold the world hostage, stuck holding US securities whose value they had to try to defend. The Pentagon is rewarded for useless stalemate wars because wartime keeps the rednecks in the state of self-righteousness they demand. Judges, police chiefs, and other elected law enforcement officials are rewarded for killing Black kids with the votes of those rednecks. Our corporations are rewarded for paying the GOP to regress our public into superstitious peasants because it can always get cheap foreign engineers and scientists to keep our systems barely working. Beyond all that, the problem is that rank-and-file regressives can always get by on the trickle-down from a national economy driven by city folk they hate and consider inferior, the parasitic suburbs and obsolete farmlands sucking the tax burden of the knowledge workers in the Blue States via Federal transfer payments and the national permanent real estate bubble.
It's time that actual costs be imposed on your enemies. BDS, within our own borders. Of course, that can swing both ways, and the costs are mutual just as in any trade war or real war between countries.
Recall Gen. Winfield Scott's Anaconda Plan, to crush the Southern Rebellion by cutting it off from global trade. He could do it because he had a Navy. But the distribution of votes now shows that opponents of everything the Right stands for are already a beachhead, down both coasts, and across much of the border with Canada. That leaves the Mexican border and the Gulf Coast, but then Trump may well finish off trade along that route.
A People's Anaconda Plan would be ruthless and require years of discipline and sacrifice. It would involve sanctions against polluters and polluter states. It would wreck the normal modern practices of open economics and transfer payments within our borders. It would force the liberal cities to cultivate what they already have in embryonic form; economies that trade not in bulk commodities but in information and entertainment that are actually in demand in the outside world.
Do it until the gap between urban and rural America is as large as the gap between the 1st and 3rd World. Then the young women of Red America will be defecting with their children to survive in your cities. That leaves your enemy with no future.
Either you do it to them, or they do something worse to you.
How long can representative democracy go on like this, hacked to pieces by various devils and demagogues? We know human behavior; these false-flag attacks and Br'er Rabbit games will always work on some people. The knowledge of how to do these things is now well distributed among extremists. Evidence of a developing immunity would require a public that magically stops responding to images of violence on mass media, or scapegoating of marginal groups for everyday problems. Our mental manipulation tools are evolving faster than we are.
I saw an article by James Carville where he conducted a focus group of self-identified Tea Partiers a few years ago. The position of these ordinary citizens was that Obamacare, like social programs in general, were an evil bribe to corrupt childlike minorities into voting Democratic. So their hostility had nothing to do with whether universal healthcare could work or not - they did not care. It was euphemized in the usual self-serving bullshit about "rescuing" Blacks, et al. from the welfare "plantation" by forcing them to have to work for the most menial benefits... because surely all Real Americans had jobs that came with the privilege of health coverage. Or were White enough to belong to an Evangelical church wealthy enough to bail them out from a medical bankruptcy. They genuinely demand that people who fail to conform to their sacred Way of Life suffer, regardless of the practical consequences for the entire nation.
They don't care how bad the employers' insurance is in practice as long as it's a privilege that distinguishes them from parasites. They don't care how bad the whole system is as long as it symbolizes them as being more self-reliant than other societies. So any facts about these problems are denied simply because they don't care that they are true. It is highly ritualistic, like the right-wing obsession of punishing deviance despite any proof that gentler approaches are more effective (drug treatment instead of Drug War, midnight basketball instead of threatening disgruntled Black kids with police bullets, sex education instead of abstinence education). As long as we carry out the rituals of obedience, a wrathful Jehovah will magically reward our nation with manna falling from economic heaven.
The question is, why did our private industry get to this position of power, while counterparts in Europe and Japan caved in to universal coverage mandates by reorganizing as non-profits or going out of business? Any government can be lobbied or even bribed (Asian governments are routinely bought), but only in America are businessmen so brazen and self-righteous in assaulting the democratic will, yet so certain of support from a large faction of the voters.
That's interesting. You know that illegal immigration from Mexico collapsed after 2008; it's largely an issue of Hondurans and Guatemalans passing through and Asians overstaying their visas.
Is it possible that Mexico's single-payer system is the most effective tool in keeping people in Mexico - more than all our deportations and threats?
The combination of TVs and automobiles encouraged the breakup of work-based (and thus class-conscious) communities to become a White flight to the suburbs. Then the resulting long commutes caused an opportunity for the recently-marginalized radio stations to go into demagoguery-for-profit every rush hour (which became Rush hour). That created the suburban audience base for Fox News.
Those laws meant nothing without the willingness to use muscle to control the streets. Not the willingness of Hitler, but the willingness of his followers.
That's what this will come down to. Mass participation is crucial to the totalitarian dream. If Trump's followers are willing to personally go out like the night riders and Klansmen of the Reconstruction South to enforce unwritten laws, then he can eventually write any laws he likes. If not, then things get complicated.
The value of the used batteries is so great that people are already working on the economics of recycling and repurposing them. Generally an EV battery is considered ready to be replaced when it's down to 85% of original capacity. Based on Tesla real-world data, that appears to be over 100,000 miles of use. That means that when the battery is removed, it could well be used for a variety of other things.
As for India's grid, Indians are taking matters into their own hands. Search cleantechnica.com for the many stories on solar utility projects in India as well as some on individual installations.
In an age when material wealth is the only unimpeachable motive, we stopped basing the legitimacy of democracy on any of the past principles of shared citizenship and humanity, and reduced it to a calculus of goodies provided to us by billionaires on terms we are not to question. Our sentiments have been turned from our communities to their brands, and maybe our sovereign loyalties will soon follow. Such loyalties have, after all, gone from chieftains to kings to popes to nation-states over time.
That leaves us with zero means of explaining why we should not be directly governed by billionaires.
Anthony Quinn's character in Lawrence of Arabia justifies his actions as the chieftain of a tribe of thieves and cutthroats by saying that he is a poor man, for he is a river to his people. Now we say that only a rich man would know where the water is.
Gee, there's so many ways to undermine freedom of speech without going through all the hassle of honestly rewriting one's Constitution. We've had local censorship boards, "community standards", the Mississippi Citizens Council, all the way up to putting whistleblowers in solitary confinement. And that's just the homegrown stuff. The tricks overseas are amazing! My favorite is Singapore's practice of "gazetting" dissident publications by simply changing their mail category; a gazette can only print one copy, which must be mailed to the Singaporean national library for, uh, safekeeping.
Many people are falling into the trap of thinking giant, centralized utility power is eternal.
The big action right now in solar is large corporations generating their own power in their own facilities, and firing their utility provider. That doesn't show up in the standard national measurements of the power grid.
Once it becomes a contributor to the bottom line of some major corporations, self-generation will look necessary to all the rest.
Established wealth always has the advantage - with or without government. Either it's bribing a strong government, or it's usurping a weak one. As to which situation you're better off living under, the latter was called feudalism but more broadly should be called peonage.
Mitch McConnell told Republican Congressmen on Day One that their Number One objective was to prevent Obama from having a positive legacy at all costs. Republican state governments refused Medicaid expansion for that reason even though it was a financially irrational act on their part.
FIrstly, how much has the proportion of natural gas changed over that time?
Secondly, there are plenty of third-world states that are manufacturing powers, and fourth-world states that are agricultural powers. The type of manufacturing makes the difference between an India and a Germany.
And as to "services", we must recall that much of the bubble economy of the USA has been in financial "services" and "real estate" - including our fraudulent billionaire ruler. What services are being performed that are outpacing fossil fuels?
Since when has it been enough for a dictator to claim he's making the trains run on time? We know how hollow a state capitalist economy under a dictator can be.
Well, so much for the idea that the anti-immigrant alt-righters are merely peaceful isolationists who want to free us from liberal internationalist imperialism.
Sparta was renowned for its warrior class, which was the product of its willingness to deform itself in every possible way to create slaveowners vicious enough to put down slave rebellions by all means necessary. But the consequence was that the tests for becoming a Spartan citizen/soldier were so severe that fewer and fewer Spartans could actually pass them. Finally, they had to bring in foreign mercenaries as their low-ranking foot soldiers, officered by a dwindling number of Spartans. This cultural obsession with purity led to disastrous defeats and the king having to flee and himself become a mercenary.
It does seem that the overarching agenda of a lot of your respondents is to look the other way while monsters destroy the Western capitalist order they have proven pathetically too weak to reform themselves. They will believe any crazy thing - Trump the peacemaker, Putin the progressive, any 3rd-world despot with a Swiss bank account and anti-American rhetoric as a hero of socialism - as long as it opens the tiniest crack of daylight in an order that, for all its crimes, is a vast improvement on the rapacious colonial empires of the Victorian Age and their inevitable slide into war with each other.
And none of them will address my endless remarks about this. They call me a dupe, but they won't explain how a future restored to the objective conditions of 1914 will be a utopia of peace and prosperity. Maybe because then they'd have to expose whether they're really on the Left or the Right, and as we've seen lately, the fake news machine depends greatly on confusing those things to melt radicals in general into a giant swamp of paranoia and cynicism that bogs down everyone else.
The question is, what are they intending to replace the "West" with? A White Bloc like the strange coalition of fascist regimes that existed in Eastern Europe during that brief moment before Hitler sacrificed it to his need to invade Russia? It has been pointed out that if Hitler had resisted that urge, he could have used his hegemony to mold those regimes into a sort of evil twin of NATO.
For Christ's sake, you're going to use Fascists as a stick to beat socialists with after all the right-wing smears against egalitarianism that prepared the path for Trumpism?
It's the acceptance of private property that matters. The fascist is in love with the same past as the libertarian, one simply uses a gun to get there and the other a privatization edict. (Thus Milton Friedman being Pinochet's mentor.)
Feudalism - the only real system of serfdom that we've ever actually known - began as a process by which the kings swept into tenuous control of post-Roman Europe traded away their sovereign power over parcels of land in exchange for military support from those landlords able to raise their own forces. But this became formalized as a hereditary monopoly over state offices by the big landlords, who after all were the capitalists of their time. Much of this also happened in ancient Japan, and I suspect in other kingdoms as well.
That's what I see when I see privatization of state services and property underway, supported by Christian "libertarians" like Betsy DeVos and her brother Erik Prince.
So if say, the choice facing the world in World War 2 was Adolf Hitler versus Tom Dewey you don't think that's enough of a difference to be worth dying for? You're not accepting the trend line of how much worse the Right is getting from year to year.
As an ideology, fascism is a populist but anti-egalitarian critique of capitalism, essentially decrying markets only to the extent that they fail to preserve traditional caste inequalities, and demanding all forms of power be concentrated in the hands of traditional "patriotic" elites, meaning local landlords and clergy, at the expense of urban elites and minorities. It can be seen as a demand of the lower levels of the "master race" to have their tribal leaders restore their primacy, in the manner of a conquering tribe over the conquered, with private property and markets working around that as best they can.
As a ruling system, fascism in our experience has always involved a sellout to the most right-wing capitalist elites. The terms of this included the requirement of the capitalists to be completely compliant to the state - but for the workers and peasants to be completely compliant to the capitalists. Meaning, the capitalists produce what the state demands, but are handsomely rewarded for doing so since they have total control over labor, all the way to slavery.
Of course fascists on the path to power look very different than they do once in power. Your omission is the role of the populist mob as a covert tool of regime enforcement. Since I look at fascism primarily from its racist component, I can see the similarities of White supremacism in the Jim Crow South, the Third Reich, and Apartheid South Africa. Part of that is the romanticization of armed ancestors and the implied threat of their re-mobilization. The KKK, the Brownshirts, and the Broederbund of South Africa in a sense were the polity of these regimes, the henchmen classes whose grievances had brought them to power.
Thus from their point of view, there is no dictatorship, because the regime reflects their tribal consciousness and consent. The rights of others are where we get into racial ideology and exclusionism. The Jim Crow South wasn't a dictatorship if you were White, but it was if you were Black.
Enough of these aspirations are apparent in the arc of authoritarian movements reaching across the White world with startling suddenness that we should not refuse to look back at the mechanics of fascism. You say there's no dictatorship yet. It only takes one emergency decree and the right combination of oligarch and henchman support to change everything, like in America in 1876 and South Africa in 1948.
Have you heard of the book "Late Victorian Holocausts" by Mike Davis? I've only read parts of it, but it puts into context the abnormality of the era of White global domination by showing that India and China had comparable standards of living to Britain until the 19th century. And it shows how Britain used its advantages to dominate and ruin both societies and plunge them into depressions from which they are now recovering.
Now if you consider that Britain was the world's #1 creditor and the US was its #1 debtor in 1914, and that much of US industry and railroads were built by British investors, you have to wonder how much Indian and Chinese blood was on the money that powered our rise to global economic dominance over Britain.
A couple of years ago, I was trying to imagine a scenario in which America fell into neo-feudalism. An offhand remark I made about the DeVos' Amway made me research how that operation's system of sales hierarchy worked, and I realized that it was like a feudalism of salesmen. The successful sellers received higher rank (or bought it) and obtained "lines" of loyal sub-salesmen. In effect the former is lord and the latter are minor knights who swear fealty to him and kick profits up the line to him. As you have likely heard, the latter tend to fall behind their quotas and get into impossible situations. There are 22 ranks, whose names get progressively more ridiculous in their grandiosity. So it's like a super-aggressive capitalist perversion of the stability-oriented feudal order.
Now add into this Ms. DeVos' brother, the Christian fanatic mercenary Erik Prince, and you have the tools to complete the circle. Imagine military contracting converted to Amway methods, at home and abroad. Dukes, barons, and counts originated as military ranks in the final version of the Western Roman Empire, and were converted into landowner-warriors in the subsequent chaos. They each had their own armed bands, but the fealty system allowed them to build "lines" of lower feudal lords they could depend on when called to war by their king.
Feudalism, in reality, was the privatization of military and civil government to the owners of the main form of capital, land.
The similarity of the DeVos' religious fanaticism to the Catholicism that provided social services and a thin moral veneer to Medieval feudalism is a subject I leave to others.
He will only back down to other bullies big enough to actually hurt his personal interests. We're already locked into a pattern of threatening war on weaker countries, so he's not deterred from that. The problem he and most Americans have is seeing that even a large tier of weaker countries can wear out available US forces if their existence is on the line.
Human demographics, being based on the actions of hundreds of millions, is very different than predicting individual technologies. Whites have known for over 50 years that they would become a minority in some vague, slowly approaching future - that's why we've had the waves of politics we've had since 1960. It's like the 7 Stages of Acceptance, except acceptance might not be the outcome.
Uh, note that this is not the original Dictator Assad, this is Sonny Assad. So on top of dictatorship, you have inherited rule, stretching over half a century. And calling the powers of that regime "similar" is either a joke, or fantastic gullibility by someone who wants to believe in socialism's inevitability so badly that he will count any tyrant with a Swiss bank account as a socialist as long as he's anti-American.
This is one of the reasons I have to keep telling pissed-off folks at Daily Kos comment sections that "letting" my far-right state of Texas or any other state secede to recreate the Confederacy and let the liberal states go in peace is a terrible idea. Because in every region in a state of armed conflict there are people from both sides mixed together, and mechanical solutions like partition will leave too many people on the wrong side of the line no matter what you do. Many Blacks will never leave the South because they think it's their home because their ancestors have lived there for a dozen generations. But as long as the rest of America doesn't hold back the Southern Whites, they will persecute the Blacks as they have at every available opportunity (and now pursue disenfranchisement so they can do it again). So in a partitioned America, leftist troublemakers like me in Texas will try to fight back against the racist rulers, leftist troublemakers in Blue America will send me aid, hothead Texans will escalate violence in retaliation and even carry out terrorist attacks in Blue America. The more people of the left who evacuate Red America, the more the remainder will be persecuted. The more people of the right who evacuate Blue America, the more the remainder will bleat that they are being persecuted by having to respect the human rights of Blacks and gays. Each situation will invite aspiring terrorists.
People are not free-market abstractions with infinite mobility. They are attached to their homes and communities.
The fact that Moi hates the Clintons and all liberal internationalists, apparently. I hope Moi at least has the honesty to equally hate the tens of millions of Americans who sincerely supported the Clintons, especially the Black, Latino and gay ones.
The vital question now is, are these theatrical stunts a leadup to something bigger - whether by intent, or by this failing administration's lack of any other lifeline to get through the next 3 1/2 years?
It seems to narrow down to the enemies Trump can use to maintain consensus within his right-wing America: Iran and North Korea. All the others come with complicating attachments that create problems for either the imperialist capitalist faction or the White supremacist faction. War itself is not a problem at all. As I've been trying to warn people at this site, the neo-Confederates love war and militarized hierarchy overshadowing civilian life. The track record of White supremacists towards their non-White neighbors is hardly isolationist. This fantasy among anti-war people of turning the American clock back before that evil liberal-internationalist FDR ruined everything ignores American military actions in Latin America before, and especially offensively, the war on America's native peoples since colonial times.
"Donald Trump has no more grasp of the concept of EROEI than the man in the moon."
This is not surprising since Trump is the perfect representative of the financialized rentier economy that replaces agriculture and industry in aging empires. They have no ability to relate energy to production because all they do is move speculative instruments around to produce price bubbles.
Note that no one showed such sympathy when millions of African-Americans were losing their jobs as sharecroppers due to the mechanization of Southern agriculture. In fact, no one could even be bothered to think about the mass migration Northward that logically would accompany such neglect. Apparently, some ways of life deserve a bailout more because they're led by Americans more American than the rest of us; coal miners, oilfield workers, and farmers, or should I say White people whose labor supports the narrative of the hard-working, testosterone-drenched, patriotic Caucasian.
Permanent "campaigning" is a characteristic of a fascist regime, since the elections don't really matter. Its purpose is to maintain a national fever of hysteria so that the bureaucratic apparatus can govern in the most brutal ways imaginable.
It's also cynical of a Russian to say to adapt, because his will be the last house to catch fire. Yeah, that last generation or two before the final extinction will be Russia's Golden Age of Global Domination, that Third Rome day in the Sun they've been pining for. But only because the rest of the dominated globe will already be dead or dying.
This is about global strategy, not what Putin really believes. He needed to cooperate with nearly the entire rest of the world on Paris because he couldn't afford to get isolated. But if the US could be gotten to break ranks, that would give Russia the cover to do the same. Other petro-states might follow, creating a bloc to undermine all international coordination.
But even these two rogue elephants by themselves can make a mess of things by tossing out their Paris commitments - which probably wasn't going to survive any objective analysis of their emissions anyway. Right now, methane emissions are already supposed to be way up over Siberia. Either it's due to the thawing of organic matter in the permafrost, which is bad, or it's due to releases of methane hydrates from the Arctic Ocean, which is a death sentence for our kind. Russian scientists had been monitoring this, but will they continue?
In 1968, Richard Nixon was in a tough fight against Hubert Humphrey for the presidency. Humphrey was finally getting leeway from Johnson to lean against the Vietnam War. But that required that Johnson obtain a peace deal with North Vietnam. And that required an understanding with South Vietnam's leader, Nguyen Van Thieu.
So Nixon, a civilian who was no longer in the government, sent go-betweens, specifically Anna Chennault, to negotiate his own counter-understanding with Thieu. Thieu needed guarantees that the War and US aid that he and his cronies were stealing would continue. In exchange for helping Nixon get into the White House to carry out that promise, he would block Johnson from making peace with the North.
Nixon barely won the election.
So now I ask you, was what happened between Nixon and Thieu a crime? Was it treason? Was it interference?
More accurately, prepare for Business As Usual In The 19th Century.
And unfortunately, the 19th Century had its own oligarchic solution for these eternal problems of capitalism: the conquest of peoples abroad and the persecution of other races at home.
Not a Trump voter, but someone who is willing to spend the rest of his life imagining that he had great integrity by sticking to his positions while being in practice totally powerless. I think the hatred of big government on the Left, unlike the Right, comes from a desire to embrace weakness, to surrender to the reality of life under Jim Crow II, to live in an impoverished village in a fallen empire and have the satisfaction of having the people around you forced to finally live in the sackcloth and ashes that you think Americans deserve - even if that degradation comes at the hands of violent barbarians who want exactly the opposite of what you claim to want.
As Socrates observed, if good men refuse to rule (because it is a dirty business), that leaves the job to the bad men.
It's been sitting there for 37 years: the conversion of the American military into redneck welfare, merging soldiery and peasantry into a Praetorian class that points its guns at all of us, and puts in a few years in uniform pointing guns we paid for at foreigners to justify it all.
That's their real identity, not the "White Working Class," but the henchmen who stand guard over the actual workers. Because they'd rather die than learn the skills needed in the degrading new workplace their sacred capitalism is creating, the only thing about them that's not obsolete is the violence they absorbed from their culture and honed in our military.
Trump is not the only Republican sacrificing the real economy to the myth of fossil-based prosperity yanked from our hands by evil environmentalists. The state of Ohio just severely rewrote its regulations involving the spacing between wind turbines to make it impossible to economically build new wind farms. The picking of winners by Koch-bought legislators is blatant, destroying any pretense that we ever operated under free markets or that Republicans ever actually gave a damn about them.
Think about how much work was done to organize every aspect of life in America's early days to support White supremacy. Think about how every institution that molded thought was on the same page. Think about how much work it took the ordinary poor White racist to follow his path of self-aggrandizement. He HAD to believe the ideology, the myths, the superstitions, the taboos, he had to spend a lot of time learning them and a lot of work enforcing them. All of that to overcome the stark words sitting at the front of the Declaration of Independence, "All Men are Created Equal, with Certain Inalienable Rights."
Doesn't it seem that it's all much easier now? You don't have to believe race codes or the Sons of Ham crap or the convolutions of States' Rights legality, if you want to justify police butchering Blacks left and right. Or immigration restrictions that our racist ancestors would have considered excessive and unenforceable. Or blatant attempts to restore Jim Crow. If it's to your advantage, you find a way to justify it without the slightest guilt because your life consists only of accumulation, not principle.
It's easy now. If it makes you feel good, the free market provides. In our case, it provides far-right think tanks that make up press releases which you then half-understand from Fox News or Breitbart or your buddy's Twitter. The mainstream media and the gun magazines feed you endless and unrepresentative anecdotes about crime which you easily code for color. The bigot of our time no longer openly and honestly proclaims White supremacy - but he's fed by certain media markets a lifetime supply of lies whose consequences are exactly that.
I've wondered if public schools teaching our kids any of the truth about the crimes our ancestors committed to make us rich and powerful really has the intended effect. If the kids are fed the glorification of greed and self-service around the clock outside of school, won't they just conclude - "If those crimes worked, they were worth it."
Only some individuals count as actual humans in far-right ideology. The rest are unruly beasts of burden who must be tamed using the terror of starvation and illness.
Have you considered the possibility that the Trump-Putin alliance was not meant to bring peace, but like the Hitler-Stalin detente of another age, was meant to facilitate the launching of major wars by both countries?
And because what Israel does is in plain sight, we must regretfully conclude that a lot of voters are willing to tolerate that. But if Russians connections are kept secret, then how are the voters to make a similar decision?
And ultimately, if you want to be all judgmental about that, then how about comparing what the Israel-lobby voters support for a domestic agenda to what this bizarre new White Power bloc supports, based on their admiration for Putin, LePen, and every racist crypto-fascist in Europe? It turns out the former include millions who support very liberal policies at home, from universal health care to strong civil rights for minorities, which makes their blind allegiance to Israel's growing Apartheid sickening. But the latter are very consistent in what they want at home and abroad: a Master Race whom the government subsidizes with undeserved favors, while it persecutes women/Moslems/non-Whites/the poor. Either you should stop pretending the Trumpites are pro-union egalitarians, or you should make clear your own agenda for domestic politics.
Just remember, these bastards keep surprising us by getting one jump ahead of our worst expectations. Some are writing that Merkel is next on the alt-right hit list, meaning Putin wants her destroyed and perhaps even replaced by the KfD, another Moslem-bashing hate front.
So you have to ask yourself, is this Trump behavior all part of the preparation for another electoral coup in the country that taught the whole world how dangerous electoral coups can be? Are Trump and Putin foolish enough to think that they can long live with a Germany back under fascist rule? What about the rest of us?
A White Bloc of the USA, Russia, France, and Germany. Think about it. Three of the world's five possessors of the H-bomb and ICBMs capable of launching them, and a fourth member that may be more technologically advanced than those three. Unified by the belief that all other races and religions are plotting together to enslave the White Christian man. How does this end peacefully?
I said some years ago that White people have run out of ideas. Boy, thinking that they can make the Confederacy and Apartheid and the Third Reich work in the 21st Century if they simply throw the collective resources of the United States behind them is intellectual bankruptcy at its most desolate.
But Hunter Thompson warned about this long ago, in "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas."
"The Circus-Circus is what the whole hep world would be doing on Saturday night if the Nazis had won the war. This is the Sixth Reich. The ground floor is full of gambling tables, like all the other casinos ... but the place is about four stories high, in the style of a circus tent, and all manner of strange County-Fair/Polish Carnival madness is going on up in this space. Right above the gambling tables the Forty Flying Carazito Brothers are doing a high-wire trapeze act, along with four muzzled Wolverines and the Six Nymphet Sisters from San Diego ...
This madness goes on and on, but nobody seems to notice."
Remember that Roth was influenced by an actual incident, the DuPont plot of 1934. Bannon would have felt very ideologically comfortable in the company of that DuPont and the father and grandfather of two presidents, Prescott Bush.
The amount of money pouring into self-driving car research may be greater than electric car research. Like it or not, the West is full of old people with big houses that can't be too close together. They often hate cities and the people who live in them. They also want to preserve the illusion of self-sufficiency, so having the cars slowly take over more and more of the real driving over the years will fit well with their eroding resistance.
Now the benefit of this is that EVs, robot cars, and car-sharing between them are each attracting huge investment and have great synergy between them. So those of us in the cities increasingly will be able to give up actual car ownership, but still have cars appear when needed.
Right now GM is in cahoots with Lyft, the "other" ridesharing service, testing self-driving EVs in San Francisco, and working on a much bigger test program next year.
Now if these services become the replacement for car ownership among the next generation, we should expect that cars will be designed specifically for that purpose, meaning that they will not need to weigh 4000 pounds or travel long cross-country routes. In fact, once you get out of the car it probably will find a place to recharge itself, so it doesn't need a big battery at all. The question remains as to whether the net energy use of this model is less than if everyone privately owned EVs, but this disruptive model could take over much faster and thus get gasoline-engined cars off the road far sooner. If these cars can get people to mass transit options faster, solving the last mile problem, then everyone should be happy. But ultimately, you can't stop people from coveting convenience over the environment.
There are other ways to place wind turbines. Out in the ocean, and flying overhead connected by power cables to the ground. The latter will take longer, but it will have the advantage of working everywhere.
And that lack of talk about climate change is what delayed the whole process long enough that we still face disaster. If we had poured Pentagon money into this technology, as we successfully did into other past technological challenges, we might have gotten those super-sized wind turbines a decade earlier. Recall that 50 years ago we could build a giant bomber capable of going 2000 miles an hour, and land men on the moon, and we can't do that now because our priorities changed.
Our economics are only as good as the extent to which we prize future value over immediate gain. That's called the "discount ratio". And it looks like societies which discount the future more as they get older and more desperate to hold onto status quo power get overrun by more vigorous and optimistic societies that look at the numbers completely differently. For China to get to where it is in wind and solar power from where it was 10 years ago is the miracle. We're no longer leading the way, we're just one of the pack and more burdened than any of them by those who say there's nothing to race for, that things are fine and nothing needs to change.
It isn't about civilization. It's about the idea that America is the property of a warrior tribe called The Whites, and all others who live here are merely servants. Somehow those servant peoples got out of control, but they will be dealt with now. The Master Race does not have to negotiate in good faith with subhumans; it can lie and trick and then betray with massive armed force.
Seriously, look up the far-right Christian fantasy of a covenant between the "real" Americans and God to rule this land, requiring adherence to the worst oppressions of the Old Testament. There's even an interesting branch (descended from an anti-Semitic fantasy) claiming the Britons were the lost tribe of Israel, and America is of the blood of Britain, thus all three states make up the "nations" of Israel and thus all are part of the story of the Book of Revelation. That's not an obscure crackpot theory; it's the position of two national Christian publications, The Plain Truth and The Philadelphia Trumpet.
We're not uniting because, though to a lesser extent than the Trumpian racists, we hate sharing power with anyone else at all. People are too selfish to put much effort into politics unless they see it as a way to get themselves something huge. It's not enough to beat Trump, we all have agendas to totally remake America - or totally keep it the way it was at some point that was most profitable for us. So the instant that any of us try to talk with different people about what we need to do, we start tearing at each others' throats over past offenses. Nothing from last year's primaries will ever be forgiven, because each faction believes it was robbed of the chance to beat Trump by someone else, which in turn was the chance to remake America in our own narcissistic self-image.
Don't worry, that will be forgotten once the political killings begin, perhaps at a protest in North Dakota, perhaps when cops murder another unarmed Black person. Then we will all fear for our lives. But of course, by that time it will be too late to unite.
All that remains is how the restored Master Race is to be defined.
Is it as White Christian patriots empowered to terrorize all others in an isolated, backward America...
or an America empowered to unleash its full capability for terror on the world?
Either way, it makes White American men happy. They have to wield the whip on someone's back or they go crazy. Someone has to be sacrificed, either here or abroad.
Sure, but what is that to Whatcom County, Washington? Or more accurately, who in the power structure over there thinks that a pipeline in North Dakota matters for that reason? Is this a network of Republican politicians, or even worse a cabal of local police across broad jurisdictional lines, combining the power of a police state with plausible deniability?
It's like trying to find the power structure of the hidden empire known as the Jim Crow South. From senators to mayors to sheriffs to lynch mobs, to the last resort in their hoods, all kept in line without an organizational chart. That's a terrifying power.
Do you understand that there may be no way under the Constitution to save healthcare, the environment, and immigrant families under a Republican monopoly of power?
The Constitution operates under the assumption that Presidents and Congressmen will place their roles over their parties. This does not even begin to happen with modern Republicans (compare now to how they acted in 1974 against Nixon). For all practical purposes, the GOP may have the power to take away your right to vote, carry out mass ethnic cleansing, legalize slave labor in private prisons, or start World War III. The courts might be able to block the first three of those. Or not.
How would you have stopped Hitler in 1934? If you don't think we're at that dire a point, then you don't see the Republican Party and ordinary Republicans the way I do. They have already declared war on you and me, and now they legally have all the guns.
The Civil Rights era has now been undone as completely as the Reconstruction was undone by the triumph of Jim Crow. Except this time there's no Rest of America to escape to. It's All of America this time.
I have long feared that this could happen. But to see it happen on this scale, with the supporters of White Christian Patriarchy championing such a grotesque demagogue as, basically, being a savior figure, shows that they're much worse than I suspected.
Because in truth, this is the THIRD time that America's redneck heartland has allied with oligarchs to reduce People of Color to statelessness and subhumanity. The first time was in 1676, a hundred years before the Revolution. Again, it was a slow drip, drip, drip of cleverly written laws that turned African indentured servants into slaves, and thus stigmatized them in a way that magically let poor Whites feel better about themselves for not being Black. This monstrous act may have saved the Southern colonies (the important ones) as a viable investment for Britain.
Is this simply baked into the country's foundation? Is this how things will be until power is wrested from White people by sheer numbers? Are we living in the Stanford Prison Experiment?
It depends on what value you place on foreseeable consequences. Selectively leaking to affect another country's election is, perhaps, normal dirtyness. Doing it to put a fascist madman in charge, one who may have the power (and the insane following) to terminate democracy for good, and whip up wars that dwarf Iraq with his conspiracy theories, is a striking act of contempt towards all his possible victims. Which with Trump is a very long list.
Breivik's manifesto claimed that Norwegian Socialists had to be annihilated for the crime of conspiring to use Moslem immigrants to bring down White Christian rule. However, I've read that after his imprisonment he more openly admitted to being a fascist, and the butchering of leftists by that crowd is long established.
Yes. The only good thing about this long slog is that the more Trump is seen to have to submit his dictat to the very legal processes his supporters want eradicated, the more frustrated they will become. These are folks obsessed with absolutes, not a long list of caveats.
So the question is, can these half-measures be clearly regimented into a process of growing oppression that reaches into every area of our lives, as the supporters lust for?
All that might take is that first act of retaliation that triggers the cycle of escalatory violence the security state requires.
While Russia is important in that Trump apparently needed those bastards to bail him out of his past business incompetence (having used up everyone else), the immigrant ban is a cornerstone of this regime in the same way that anti-Semitism was the cornerstone of the Third Reich. You could have said in 1934 or 1935 that the myriad forms of petty persecution the Nazis devised were distractions - but 10 years later, you had to admit that they fit into a larger plan that became the regime's signature.
In both cases, it is the willingness of the regime's supporters to embrace these oppressive and (especially because) offensive actions that establishes the new caste order. The Master Race brazenly demonstrates its willingness to defy normal morality - and lie about it in plain sight.
And for that sense of privilege, the supporters will embrace any crime, including treason of their republic's interests. They are incapable of loving the republic as a thing they share with others. That is expendable, just as the government is expendable. Blood, and the land that it "conquered", stands above laws and any rational price. If Putin helped them to re-steal this continent back so they can go back to whipping and lynching anyone they please, damn, that's worth it.
I think it shows something about far-right African-American ideologues living in complete denial of their history. It hurts their pride too much to mention the slaves and whips and the fact that generation after generation of their ancestors had to just put up with that with zero improvement... besides the fact that they aspire themselves to be property owners with unlimited rights, which they refuse to accept eventually gets us back to whips and chains.
Sure, but America has been a free rider on global interdependence for years. Nothing changes until the free rider is slapped with severe economic (because they care about nothing else) consequences.
I would argue that the Beijing regime made a deliberate strategic decision to amplify its frantic growth rate during the Bush era. Because if they had done any research on Cheney and his circle at all, they would have realized that China qualified as a threat to American dominance that the PNAC required to be defeated. 9/11 instead distracted Cheney and China exploited America's need for loans and cheap goods, emerging as an indispensable power. What the leaders probably didn't expect was the sheer size and speed of the environmental damage this would require.
However, China is again facing an Administration that considers it a special threat. The question is, if they've been chastened by environmental blowback, does that mean the leaders take a completely different approach this time, or do they try to create a Green Bubble using mandates to force-feed solar panels to the world instead of cheap steel and tablets? Which gets to the global question of judging the damage from green growth versus no growth.
Any sensible general would tell Trump that there is no way for America to win a conventional war against Iran.
So what if his response is to authorize the nukes?
Is Trump cause or effect? You have to look at the people who voted for him. If what they really fear is not illegals or Moslems but the overall reduction of Whites to a mere plurality, if they are willing to commit Hitlerian crimes to maintain a near-monopoly of police and discriminatory power against minorities, then Trump is simply making them comfortable with what they really want.
And that requires a 9/11 - Reichstag Fire level casus belli to justify war, not on other countries this time, but on half of America. A war that will not stop until this country looks, at best, like Apartheid South Africa.
The mistake we've all made is to assume that this evil does not lurk in more than a few American hearts. Survey questions are hopeless when Americans can twist the meanings of words sufficiently to hand power to Trump. And they're still going to be there when he's dead.
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“get off the bus, and get out of the country because you don’t pay taxes here.”
Is that the smear that's being spread by the Bannon trolls now? That immigrants somehow aren't paying any taxes? How would that even work? No one wearing a hijab is going to be able to avoid payroll taxes if they have a job. Everyone pays sales taxes. We also have taxes on our phone bills and power bills.
You're all out of credibility now in claiming that Trump is not a militarist after the bombing of the Syrian airbase on flimsier grounds than even Obama used. You're also out of credibility in claiming Trump's racist redneck base hates war. They want war on Moslems abroad and Blacks at home, and the crueler he is the more they dig in.
And conniving while a private citizen to get elected to the presidency by making deals with foreign powers to sabotage the sitting president's policies is what Richard Nixon did and should have been prosecuted for in 1968. How is THAT not undermining a sitting President's constitutional prerogative to establish foreign policy? Why is sabotaging Obama's sanctions on Russia okay with you?
Spyguy, during the Bush Junior regime I felt the same way, that surely our lack of genuinely useful exports would catch up with us this time. But again and again, the rich of the outside world keep bailing out America by buying its $ and preventing its value from collapsing.
I've come to think this is a rigged game. Specifically, the global capitalist elite need America as a hegemon, either temporarily or permanently, and they will shield us from our folly as much as they can.
For instance, why hasn't China used its vast pile of US$ and its reach in Central Asia to make our occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan far more painful? Here's the cosmic joke: our leaders may subscribe to a belief that pacifying lawless lands and bringing them into the global economy is a net win for the US corporate empire. But in fact US entrepreneurs are effete cowards and won't touch one of our quagmires. The Chinese can find hustlers willing to work anywhere at risk of life and limb, so they benefit when the US merely semi-stabilizes a country enough for others to march in and bribe all the local forces and set up shop. China does not want to disabuse us of our illusions in such places; it wants us to waste our last resources making the world safe for Chinese sweatshops.
As for the global bailout we've gotten with the elites perpetually showing greater confidence in our currency than their own despite our foolishness, I can only speculate that this is the only way the global financial system can work and the global players need the USA to play the role Britain (and gold) once played. They won't jump ship to the alternative system that Beijing is patiently developing until some crisis even bigger than 2001 or 2008. Until then, they're mostly hedging bets, as are the Chinese themselves.
A possible insight into this was the negotiations over Bretton Woods in 1944. The US delegation insisted that the new global currency convertibility system be tied to the US $. Keynes, from the declining empire, instead wanted a neutral currency basket as the standard of value - just as China is now arguing. But maybe the problem with a basket is precisely that because no one nation owns it, no nation will back it with all the powers at its disposal. As beneficial as Bretton Woods was in postwar economics, it gave the US unique powers and responsibilities that were a good match with its overwhelming wealth and military power. Even the rotten carcass of that mythic concordance seems to carry value with today's oligarchs, who have systematically corrupted all the economic organizations that accompanied Bretton Woods in FDR's Postwar World plans meant to prevent another worldwide trade war and depression.
We've finally reached the point where we have to BDS our own leaders.
Wow, so that's how grotesque racism has to be to bother Clarence Thomas. I've been wondering all these years.
The redacted 9/11 Commission pages finally came out last year. They show Federal surveillance encountering many ties between the 9/11 hijackers in San Diego and known "associates" of the Saudi consulate there, slippery figures who always had money and other forms of assistance for the terrorists-in-training.
I'm not saying the royal family itself was directing this. Saudi Arabia is a corporatized feudal system built around buying off the other noble houses with cushy government and Aramco jobs instead of land. But that buying-off is necessary because, as I understand it, some of those noble houses feel the throne of Arabia is actually their birthright. I would hardly put treachery and funding of terrorism beyond such noblemen inside the state bureaucracy.
If all that had come out in 2001, there would have been more investigations. It would not be good for the royal family's business interests for Western tycoons to suddenly discover that this fantasized stable business environment is full of plotters and usurpers.
He postures as the savior of a race looking for excuses to claim victimhood, to claim everyone else is out to get them for being so hard-working and virtuous, to claim the right to kill anyone who stops them from taking back their "birthright". That grim face perfectly fits this self-serving bullshit; they voted for a stick to beat the world with.
Nixon called it the "Madman Theory" and he was a pretty good manipulator of that same electorate.
Little by little, events forced American leaders to realize that they must occasionally play to the audience of ordinary Middle Eastern citizens and not just their tyrants, because even a tiny sliver of the former were willing to die to make Hell for America and its interests.
Of course, all that's out the window with Trump, who cannot even be bothered to play to any audience in his own country that isn't White, Christian, and paranoid. He's fully back to wanting the world divided between regional strongmen whom he deals with directly and obliviously, even praising some of the worst of these while he pisses on actual products of parliamentary democracy. See, it reduces everything in his mind to his Mastery of the Art of the Deal.
In 1968, Nixon should have been prosecuted for coordinating with the South Vietnamese regime while a private citizen running for President. The quid pro quo: Saigon would sabotage LBJ's peace efforts with Hanoi long enough to tilt the election to Nixon, who would reward Saigon by keeping the war and the stealable foreign aid going for 4 more years.
Now, will anyone dispute that this was some form of illegal act?
And if so, how does it differ from Russia's relationship with Trump? See, this isn't just about Cold Warriors and Russophobe Clintonites. Allies can solicit treason too, and cause millions of deaths. What matters here is when it becomes the manipulation of events by a foreign power that has been promised a return on its investment.
Were where you when Hillary Clinton was being held to an extreme standard over Benghazi and e-mails?
What crime would Trump have to commit to bother you? Why can you not see that this is a man defined by racism and theft? Did you pay no attention to the hatefest of his campaign trail - a campaign that for the first time is being made permanent with endless stops whipping up mobs of rednecks who lack only torches and swastikas? Why do you want so desperately to believe that Bannon and his neo-fascists will lead the world to peace?
Our fuhrer has already sacrificed our environment, he's tried to destroy healthcare by killing Obamacare so as to bankrupt Medicaid and destabilize Medicare, and he's already bombed Syria. What do you really see in him?
You act as if Trump's racist smears about fake voters and Chinese global warming conspiracies and birtherism being the very basis for his rise within the Republican Party are not proof that the main source of fake news is the American Right and its allies.
What's frightening is that we're having to depend on the courts because a horrible gap is growing between the letter of the law and what the public is willing to convince itself it means. They see clearly discriminatory laws and convince themselves that these only affect a mythical race of alien vote fraudsters or public bathroom pederasts that has nothing to do with their animosity towards tens of millions of actual minority citizens.
Lincoln said during another period of polarization, “As a nation, we began by declaring that 'all men are created equal.' We now practically read it 'all men are created equal, except negroes.' When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read 'all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and Catholics.' When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty – to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocrisy.”
We all need to be looking ahead to how far Trump will go to remain in power. What will you and I do if he and the GOP Congress simply refuse to acknowledge any wrongdoing? What will you and I do if dissidents get fired from the media for raising too many questions? What will you and I do if the first mass protests are met with silence - or with gunfire?
Worse than Nixon means worse than Kent State.
Perhaps Trump doesn't consider himself beholden to any laws whatsoever?
You certainly have the power to throw a close election. Like 2000. Tell us how W's war and Depression was no different than Gore, please, please.
What's worse, it seems a lot of so-called "leftists" around here prefer Trump to any Democrat who could actually win. Maybe they're sick of sullying their purity with all those uppity corporate Negroes and Mexicans who support economic growth and US hegemony and are only Democrats because they don't want to go back to Jim Crow. Whereas some "leftists" want isolationism and a weak government back so bad they'll take Jim Crow 2 in the bargain... as long as all the dirty work is done by the GOP so they can whine about how evil America is from a position of total uselessness.
I hope you're not in that group. Because if the price of progressive helpless purity is that the Republicans take us all the way to an Apartheid state, they will not enjoy the thing that must inevitably overthrow it.
Back in the 1950s, Louis Kelso and Mortimer Adler's book, The Capitalist Manifesto, explained Kelso's lifelong argument that automation & productivity increases makes it more and more impossible to keep people productively employed. The choice is to either allow inequality to skyrocket back to 19th century levels, or to use an infinitude of governmental band-aids to redistribute wealth from company owners to everyone else. It's ironic now that Kelso's main concern in the Eisenhower era was that there was too much of the latter; it was inconceivable to him that society would be deformed by the Reagan revolution to swing in the barbaric neo-Victorian direction instead.
But it may now be too late to impose his solution: force the banking industry to finance the conversion of workers into worker/owners through employee stock ownership. Like the lifetime savings plan suggested above, the idea is to get ordinary citizens into the investor class over time, because soon the working class must become the unemployed class. Growing share ownership allows the nature of employees' earnings to transition from wages reflecting the actual (declining) value of their labor, to dividends based on the value of decisions they make as shareholders using knowledge they acquired before the robots took over.
Senility can be national.
Is the particular issue how they together can try to install fascist rulers in every capital in Europe, thus unifying most of the White race, and every one of its official nuclear powers, under an anti-democratic alliance?
Now that would be change.
Society, I'm afraid, manages and coordinates all these negative and positive qualities to create the most effective wealth-acquiring complex, in competition with other societies doing the same thing. The societies most brutal towards their own ordinary members have presumably been weeded out by revolution and disintegration. The societies most ruthless in conquering and enslaving their neighbors, however, may well be all of our ancestors. That double standard explains how the democratizing, liberalizing Great Powers of Europe could enslave the Third World in the 19th Century. The society that cleverly manages that double standard can cultivate loyalty and solidarity at home - and then unleash that in the form of the most monstrous acts abroad, creating an outlet for their citizens' basest urges.
We've carried that elimination tournament to the point where the world is divided into multi-continental spheres of influence controlled from a few world capitals. The concept of universal human rights intruded into that process, but was also co-opted by it to an extent, such that modern powers both wage wars of humanitarian intervention, and let in immigrants of races their native-born citizens consider alien and unacceptable.
So was the seeming consolidation of our many societies into a single multicultural world about conquest and eradication (which must culminate in a World War between the finalists), or diversity and democracy (which must culminate in a genuine United Nations)? And is the current world crisis of ethnonationalism and fascism the result of the native citizens of those last surviving power blocs rejecting the liberal dogmas that served them well to absorb their neighbors (i.e., we secretly know we're still on top) but inconvenience them too much to make the jump to true global sovereignty (i.e., we fear this time we're outvoted by the Others)?
The key insight is the word "sadism", extended to the conservative movement and supporters in general. No one dares say that sadism is the secret ingredient in American history; that racism was the tribalization of sadism to turn the chosen race into a weapon to conquer and exploit a continent; that sadism is the ultimate White man's bonus, the thing he chooses to value more highly than uniting with his fellow workers of color to demand better wages and living conditions from the leaders of his tribe.
Sadism is the heart of the Stanford Prison Experiment, the reason those students who were labeled "guards" became monsters. America has been the Stanford Prison Experiment for 350 years.
But you don't compare it to Nixon's Saturday Night Massacre, which specifically was about covering up his crimes. You know, the act that cost him his job, but won't cost Trump his job.
Why worry about the future of your party when you're rigging election laws to create a one-party authoritarian state?
They KNOW their party can't survive the demise of White-majority America. They knew it 30 years ago. This is their kamikaze run, their Samson Option: a criminal sprint to bumrush the Constitution and destroy all legal opposition, then demonize the illegal opposition to create a permanent state of emergency. Their voters have no other options their egos can accept.
By that horrific standard, Trump fits in quite nicely.
In all fairness, America inspired the Zionist belief they could steal Palestine from its inhabitants and get away with it. Zionist hero Jabotinsky wrote that the Arab natives must be dealt with in the same way the USA dealt with the Indians. All subsequent denials aside, this was exactly the program carried out. And it brilliantly played on America's unwillingness to accept that the only just compensation for its own crimes would be to give most of the continent back to the Natives.
Even better, the American settlers themselves stole the Hebrew narrative of stealing Palestine from the Canaanites 3000 years ago to justify their own Manifest Destiny. So America and Israel are locked in a holy loop of self-justified conquest and oppression. The American Right has clearly come to view Israel as its laboratory for its own plans for America's People of Color.
The classic fascists, Hitler and Mussolini, came to power by parliamentary processes, though I understand Mussolini manufactured a "coup" in 1922 when he knew he was going to be asked to become prime minister anyway, to show that he was really installing a New Order.
This is very important. Fascism is a right-wing populist critique of democratic capitalism. Populism here means mass participation among those coded as the superior race. It's really the populism of a warrior tribe against those it oppresses. But it creates the possibility of an elected tyrant, who promises to liberate his superior brethren from the injustice of legal equality. That's potentially far more dangerous than a junta coming to power in a military coup, because it embraces the goal of totalitarian transformation of society that few juntas have the fanatical zeal to carry out. Usually, those guys are just trying to butcher some leftists and then hand power back to the capitalist oligarchs on more favorable terms.
I find the support of the far right for demolishing Net neutrality very short-sighted on their part. Net neutrality enabled many extremists in getting their views out there and finding like-minded followers. The media corporations might come down just as hard on Islamophobes and homophobes as they will on liberals - depending on the capitalist calculus on public relations.
It's as if they're ready to shut all their activities down and hand over their voice to Trump and Bannon and those corporations that have bowed down to them. Not a path for a healthy grass-roots movement.
Thank you for stating the hard truth. We are approaching the ultimate crisis: America no longer has a public. It has an agglomeration of narcissists and autistics who imagine that their own tiny sliver of the population is the only real America. The difference between the Left and the Right is that the Right is willing to do the many horrible things necessary to make their sliver the Master Race at gunpoint. Far too many of the rest of us are willing to react to that by retreating into our own media/market wombs, willed powerlessness.
Considering that right now all the serious alternatives are fascists, including the ones who have already won in America, India, and the Philippines, business as usual means we will not be in a concentration camp tomorrow.
Excellent question.
Trump may or may not destroy himself in office. But a lot of Little Hitlers took notes on how he pulled it off, and they will infest our elections for another generation, attracting those abandoned but dangerous Trumpists by promising even greater retribution against the rest of us.
It goes on because they pay no price for their barbarism, or at least none that they can see. America is rewarded for its irresponsible fiscal policies and trade deficits because once its debts became large enough it could hold the world hostage, stuck holding US securities whose value they had to try to defend. The Pentagon is rewarded for useless stalemate wars because wartime keeps the rednecks in the state of self-righteousness they demand. Judges, police chiefs, and other elected law enforcement officials are rewarded for killing Black kids with the votes of those rednecks. Our corporations are rewarded for paying the GOP to regress our public into superstitious peasants because it can always get cheap foreign engineers and scientists to keep our systems barely working. Beyond all that, the problem is that rank-and-file regressives can always get by on the trickle-down from a national economy driven by city folk they hate and consider inferior, the parasitic suburbs and obsolete farmlands sucking the tax burden of the knowledge workers in the Blue States via Federal transfer payments and the national permanent real estate bubble.
It's time that actual costs be imposed on your enemies. BDS, within our own borders. Of course, that can swing both ways, and the costs are mutual just as in any trade war or real war between countries.
Recall Gen. Winfield Scott's Anaconda Plan, to crush the Southern Rebellion by cutting it off from global trade. He could do it because he had a Navy. But the distribution of votes now shows that opponents of everything the Right stands for are already a beachhead, down both coasts, and across much of the border with Canada. That leaves the Mexican border and the Gulf Coast, but then Trump may well finish off trade along that route.
A People's Anaconda Plan would be ruthless and require years of discipline and sacrifice. It would involve sanctions against polluters and polluter states. It would wreck the normal modern practices of open economics and transfer payments within our borders. It would force the liberal cities to cultivate what they already have in embryonic form; economies that trade not in bulk commodities but in information and entertainment that are actually in demand in the outside world.
Do it until the gap between urban and rural America is as large as the gap between the 1st and 3rd World. Then the young women of Red America will be defecting with their children to survive in your cities. That leaves your enemy with no future.
Either you do it to them, or they do something worse to you.
Now that it's official that not all Israelis are equal, on to official Apartheid.
How long can representative democracy go on like this, hacked to pieces by various devils and demagogues? We know human behavior; these false-flag attacks and Br'er Rabbit games will always work on some people. The knowledge of how to do these things is now well distributed among extremists. Evidence of a developing immunity would require a public that magically stops responding to images of violence on mass media, or scapegoating of marginal groups for everyday problems. Our mental manipulation tools are evolving faster than we are.
I saw an article by James Carville where he conducted a focus group of self-identified Tea Partiers a few years ago. The position of these ordinary citizens was that Obamacare, like social programs in general, were an evil bribe to corrupt childlike minorities into voting Democratic. So their hostility had nothing to do with whether universal healthcare could work or not - they did not care. It was euphemized in the usual self-serving bullshit about "rescuing" Blacks, et al. from the welfare "plantation" by forcing them to have to work for the most menial benefits... because surely all Real Americans had jobs that came with the privilege of health coverage. Or were White enough to belong to an Evangelical church wealthy enough to bail them out from a medical bankruptcy. They genuinely demand that people who fail to conform to their sacred Way of Life suffer, regardless of the practical consequences for the entire nation.
They don't care how bad the employers' insurance is in practice as long as it's a privilege that distinguishes them from parasites. They don't care how bad the whole system is as long as it symbolizes them as being more self-reliant than other societies. So any facts about these problems are denied simply because they don't care that they are true. It is highly ritualistic, like the right-wing obsession of punishing deviance despite any proof that gentler approaches are more effective (drug treatment instead of Drug War, midnight basketball instead of threatening disgruntled Black kids with police bullets, sex education instead of abstinence education). As long as we carry out the rituals of obedience, a wrathful Jehovah will magically reward our nation with manna falling from economic heaven.
The question is, why did our private industry get to this position of power, while counterparts in Europe and Japan caved in to universal coverage mandates by reorganizing as non-profits or going out of business? Any government can be lobbied or even bribed (Asian governments are routinely bought), but only in America are businessmen so brazen and self-righteous in assaulting the democratic will, yet so certain of support from a large faction of the voters.
That's interesting. You know that illegal immigration from Mexico collapsed after 2008; it's largely an issue of Hondurans and Guatemalans passing through and Asians overstaying their visas.
Is it possible that Mexico's single-payer system is the most effective tool in keeping people in Mexico - more than all our deportations and threats?
The combination of TVs and automobiles encouraged the breakup of work-based (and thus class-conscious) communities to become a White flight to the suburbs. Then the resulting long commutes caused an opportunity for the recently-marginalized radio stations to go into demagoguery-for-profit every rush hour (which became Rush hour). That created the suburban audience base for Fox News.
Those laws meant nothing without the willingness to use muscle to control the streets. Not the willingness of Hitler, but the willingness of his followers.
That's what this will come down to. Mass participation is crucial to the totalitarian dream. If Trump's followers are willing to personally go out like the night riders and Klansmen of the Reconstruction South to enforce unwritten laws, then he can eventually write any laws he likes. If not, then things get complicated.
The value of the used batteries is so great that people are already working on the economics of recycling and repurposing them. Generally an EV battery is considered ready to be replaced when it's down to 85% of original capacity. Based on Tesla real-world data, that appears to be over 100,000 miles of use. That means that when the battery is removed, it could well be used for a variety of other things.
As for India's grid, Indians are taking matters into their own hands. Search cleantechnica.com for the many stories on solar utility projects in India as well as some on individual installations.
In an age when material wealth is the only unimpeachable motive, we stopped basing the legitimacy of democracy on any of the past principles of shared citizenship and humanity, and reduced it to a calculus of goodies provided to us by billionaires on terms we are not to question. Our sentiments have been turned from our communities to their brands, and maybe our sovereign loyalties will soon follow. Such loyalties have, after all, gone from chieftains to kings to popes to nation-states over time.
That leaves us with zero means of explaining why we should not be directly governed by billionaires.
Anthony Quinn's character in Lawrence of Arabia justifies his actions as the chieftain of a tribe of thieves and cutthroats by saying that he is a poor man, for he is a river to his people. Now we say that only a rich man would know where the water is.
Gee, there's so many ways to undermine freedom of speech without going through all the hassle of honestly rewriting one's Constitution. We've had local censorship boards, "community standards", the Mississippi Citizens Council, all the way up to putting whistleblowers in solitary confinement. And that's just the homegrown stuff. The tricks overseas are amazing! My favorite is Singapore's practice of "gazetting" dissident publications by simply changing their mail category; a gazette can only print one copy, which must be mailed to the Singaporean national library for, uh, safekeeping.
So much for the Party of Lincoln.
Many people are falling into the trap of thinking giant, centralized utility power is eternal.
The big action right now in solar is large corporations generating their own power in their own facilities, and firing their utility provider. That doesn't show up in the standard national measurements of the power grid.
Once it becomes a contributor to the bottom line of some major corporations, self-generation will look necessary to all the rest.
Established wealth always has the advantage - with or without government. Either it's bribing a strong government, or it's usurping a weak one. As to which situation you're better off living under, the latter was called feudalism but more broadly should be called peonage.
Mitch McConnell told Republican Congressmen on Day One that their Number One objective was to prevent Obama from having a positive legacy at all costs. Republican state governments refused Medicaid expansion for that reason even though it was a financially irrational act on their part.
FIrstly, how much has the proportion of natural gas changed over that time?
Secondly, there are plenty of third-world states that are manufacturing powers, and fourth-world states that are agricultural powers. The type of manufacturing makes the difference between an India and a Germany.
And as to "services", we must recall that much of the bubble economy of the USA has been in financial "services" and "real estate" - including our fraudulent billionaire ruler. What services are being performed that are outpacing fossil fuels?
Since when has it been enough for a dictator to claim he's making the trains run on time? We know how hollow a state capitalist economy under a dictator can be.
Well, so much for the idea that the anti-immigrant alt-righters are merely peaceful isolationists who want to free us from liberal internationalist imperialism.
Sparta was renowned for its warrior class, which was the product of its willingness to deform itself in every possible way to create slaveowners vicious enough to put down slave rebellions by all means necessary. But the consequence was that the tests for becoming a Spartan citizen/soldier were so severe that fewer and fewer Spartans could actually pass them. Finally, they had to bring in foreign mercenaries as their low-ranking foot soldiers, officered by a dwindling number of Spartans. This cultural obsession with purity led to disastrous defeats and the king having to flee and himself become a mercenary.
It does seem that the overarching agenda of a lot of your respondents is to look the other way while monsters destroy the Western capitalist order they have proven pathetically too weak to reform themselves. They will believe any crazy thing - Trump the peacemaker, Putin the progressive, any 3rd-world despot with a Swiss bank account and anti-American rhetoric as a hero of socialism - as long as it opens the tiniest crack of daylight in an order that, for all its crimes, is a vast improvement on the rapacious colonial empires of the Victorian Age and their inevitable slide into war with each other.
And none of them will address my endless remarks about this. They call me a dupe, but they won't explain how a future restored to the objective conditions of 1914 will be a utopia of peace and prosperity. Maybe because then they'd have to expose whether they're really on the Left or the Right, and as we've seen lately, the fake news machine depends greatly on confusing those things to melt radicals in general into a giant swamp of paranoia and cynicism that bogs down everyone else.
The question is, what are they intending to replace the "West" with? A White Bloc like the strange coalition of fascist regimes that existed in Eastern Europe during that brief moment before Hitler sacrificed it to his need to invade Russia? It has been pointed out that if Hitler had resisted that urge, he could have used his hegemony to mold those regimes into a sort of evil twin of NATO.
For Christ's sake, you're going to use Fascists as a stick to beat socialists with after all the right-wing smears against egalitarianism that prepared the path for Trumpism?
It's the acceptance of private property that matters. The fascist is in love with the same past as the libertarian, one simply uses a gun to get there and the other a privatization edict. (Thus Milton Friedman being Pinochet's mentor.)
Feudalism - the only real system of serfdom that we've ever actually known - began as a process by which the kings swept into tenuous control of post-Roman Europe traded away their sovereign power over parcels of land in exchange for military support from those landlords able to raise their own forces. But this became formalized as a hereditary monopoly over state offices by the big landlords, who after all were the capitalists of their time. Much of this also happened in ancient Japan, and I suspect in other kingdoms as well.
That's what I see when I see privatization of state services and property underway, supported by Christian "libertarians" like Betsy DeVos and her brother Erik Prince.
So if say, the choice facing the world in World War 2 was Adolf Hitler versus Tom Dewey you don't think that's enough of a difference to be worth dying for? You're not accepting the trend line of how much worse the Right is getting from year to year.
As an ideology, fascism is a populist but anti-egalitarian critique of capitalism, essentially decrying markets only to the extent that they fail to preserve traditional caste inequalities, and demanding all forms of power be concentrated in the hands of traditional "patriotic" elites, meaning local landlords and clergy, at the expense of urban elites and minorities. It can be seen as a demand of the lower levels of the "master race" to have their tribal leaders restore their primacy, in the manner of a conquering tribe over the conquered, with private property and markets working around that as best they can.
As a ruling system, fascism in our experience has always involved a sellout to the most right-wing capitalist elites. The terms of this included the requirement of the capitalists to be completely compliant to the state - but for the workers and peasants to be completely compliant to the capitalists. Meaning, the capitalists produce what the state demands, but are handsomely rewarded for doing so since they have total control over labor, all the way to slavery.
Of course fascists on the path to power look very different than they do once in power. Your omission is the role of the populist mob as a covert tool of regime enforcement. Since I look at fascism primarily from its racist component, I can see the similarities of White supremacism in the Jim Crow South, the Third Reich, and Apartheid South Africa. Part of that is the romanticization of armed ancestors and the implied threat of their re-mobilization. The KKK, the Brownshirts, and the Broederbund of South Africa in a sense were the polity of these regimes, the henchmen classes whose grievances had brought them to power.
Thus from their point of view, there is no dictatorship, because the regime reflects their tribal consciousness and consent. The rights of others are where we get into racial ideology and exclusionism. The Jim Crow South wasn't a dictatorship if you were White, but it was if you were Black.
Enough of these aspirations are apparent in the arc of authoritarian movements reaching across the White world with startling suddenness that we should not refuse to look back at the mechanics of fascism. You say there's no dictatorship yet. It only takes one emergency decree and the right combination of oligarch and henchman support to change everything, like in America in 1876 and South Africa in 1948.
Have you heard of the book "Late Victorian Holocausts" by Mike Davis? I've only read parts of it, but it puts into context the abnormality of the era of White global domination by showing that India and China had comparable standards of living to Britain until the 19th century. And it shows how Britain used its advantages to dominate and ruin both societies and plunge them into depressions from which they are now recovering.
Now if you consider that Britain was the world's #1 creditor and the US was its #1 debtor in 1914, and that much of US industry and railroads were built by British investors, you have to wonder how much Indian and Chinese blood was on the money that powered our rise to global economic dominance over Britain.
A couple of years ago, I was trying to imagine a scenario in which America fell into neo-feudalism. An offhand remark I made about the DeVos' Amway made me research how that operation's system of sales hierarchy worked, and I realized that it was like a feudalism of salesmen. The successful sellers received higher rank (or bought it) and obtained "lines" of loyal sub-salesmen. In effect the former is lord and the latter are minor knights who swear fealty to him and kick profits up the line to him. As you have likely heard, the latter tend to fall behind their quotas and get into impossible situations. There are 22 ranks, whose names get progressively more ridiculous in their grandiosity. So it's like a super-aggressive capitalist perversion of the stability-oriented feudal order.
Now add into this Ms. DeVos' brother, the Christian fanatic mercenary Erik Prince, and you have the tools to complete the circle. Imagine military contracting converted to Amway methods, at home and abroad. Dukes, barons, and counts originated as military ranks in the final version of the Western Roman Empire, and were converted into landowner-warriors in the subsequent chaos. They each had their own armed bands, but the fealty system allowed them to build "lines" of lower feudal lords they could depend on when called to war by their king.
Feudalism, in reality, was the privatization of military and civil government to the owners of the main form of capital, land.
The similarity of the DeVos' religious fanaticism to the Catholicism that provided social services and a thin moral veneer to Medieval feudalism is a subject I leave to others.
He will only back down to other bullies big enough to actually hurt his personal interests. We're already locked into a pattern of threatening war on weaker countries, so he's not deterred from that. The problem he and most Americans have is seeing that even a large tier of weaker countries can wear out available US forces if their existence is on the line.
Human demographics, being based on the actions of hundreds of millions, is very different than predicting individual technologies. Whites have known for over 50 years that they would become a minority in some vague, slowly approaching future - that's why we've had the waves of politics we've had since 1960. It's like the 7 Stages of Acceptance, except acceptance might not be the outcome.
Uh, note that this is not the original Dictator Assad, this is Sonny Assad. So on top of dictatorship, you have inherited rule, stretching over half a century. And calling the powers of that regime "similar" is either a joke, or fantastic gullibility by someone who wants to believe in socialism's inevitability so badly that he will count any tyrant with a Swiss bank account as a socialist as long as he's anti-American.
This is one of the reasons I have to keep telling pissed-off folks at Daily Kos comment sections that "letting" my far-right state of Texas or any other state secede to recreate the Confederacy and let the liberal states go in peace is a terrible idea. Because in every region in a state of armed conflict there are people from both sides mixed together, and mechanical solutions like partition will leave too many people on the wrong side of the line no matter what you do. Many Blacks will never leave the South because they think it's their home because their ancestors have lived there for a dozen generations. But as long as the rest of America doesn't hold back the Southern Whites, they will persecute the Blacks as they have at every available opportunity (and now pursue disenfranchisement so they can do it again). So in a partitioned America, leftist troublemakers like me in Texas will try to fight back against the racist rulers, leftist troublemakers in Blue America will send me aid, hothead Texans will escalate violence in retaliation and even carry out terrorist attacks in Blue America. The more people of the left who evacuate Red America, the more the remainder will be persecuted. The more people of the right who evacuate Blue America, the more the remainder will bleat that they are being persecuted by having to respect the human rights of Blacks and gays. Each situation will invite aspiring terrorists.
People are not free-market abstractions with infinite mobility. They are attached to their homes and communities.
It's simple. Trump has privatized the United States government by making it his own private property. At least in his own mind.
Under a monarchy, what does the king actually own?
He might have to learn to be an imperialist, but he was already a fascist. Would you rather live under Churchill or Hitler?
The fact that Moi hates the Clintons and all liberal internationalists, apparently. I hope Moi at least has the honesty to equally hate the tens of millions of Americans who sincerely supported the Clintons, especially the Black, Latino and gay ones.
The vital question now is, are these theatrical stunts a leadup to something bigger - whether by intent, or by this failing administration's lack of any other lifeline to get through the next 3 1/2 years?
It seems to narrow down to the enemies Trump can use to maintain consensus within his right-wing America: Iran and North Korea. All the others come with complicating attachments that create problems for either the imperialist capitalist faction or the White supremacist faction. War itself is not a problem at all. As I've been trying to warn people at this site, the neo-Confederates love war and militarized hierarchy overshadowing civilian life. The track record of White supremacists towards their non-White neighbors is hardly isolationist. This fantasy among anti-war people of turning the American clock back before that evil liberal-internationalist FDR ruined everything ignores American military actions in Latin America before, and especially offensively, the war on America's native peoples since colonial times.
"Donald Trump has no more grasp of the concept of EROEI than the man in the moon."
This is not surprising since Trump is the perfect representative of the financialized rentier economy that replaces agriculture and industry in aging empires. They have no ability to relate energy to production because all they do is move speculative instruments around to produce price bubbles.
Note that no one showed such sympathy when millions of African-Americans were losing their jobs as sharecroppers due to the mechanization of Southern agriculture. In fact, no one could even be bothered to think about the mass migration Northward that logically would accompany such neglect. Apparently, some ways of life deserve a bailout more because they're led by Americans more American than the rest of us; coal miners, oilfield workers, and farmers, or should I say White people whose labor supports the narrative of the hard-working, testosterone-drenched, patriotic Caucasian.
Permanent "campaigning" is a characteristic of a fascist regime, since the elections don't really matter. Its purpose is to maintain a national fever of hysteria so that the bureaucratic apparatus can govern in the most brutal ways imaginable.
It's also cynical of a Russian to say to adapt, because his will be the last house to catch fire. Yeah, that last generation or two before the final extinction will be Russia's Golden Age of Global Domination, that Third Rome day in the Sun they've been pining for. But only because the rest of the dominated globe will already be dead or dying.
This is about global strategy, not what Putin really believes. He needed to cooperate with nearly the entire rest of the world on Paris because he couldn't afford to get isolated. But if the US could be gotten to break ranks, that would give Russia the cover to do the same. Other petro-states might follow, creating a bloc to undermine all international coordination.
But even these two rogue elephants by themselves can make a mess of things by tossing out their Paris commitments - which probably wasn't going to survive any objective analysis of their emissions anyway. Right now, methane emissions are already supposed to be way up over Siberia. Either it's due to the thawing of organic matter in the permafrost, which is bad, or it's due to releases of methane hydrates from the Arctic Ocean, which is a death sentence for our kind. Russian scientists had been monitoring this, but will they continue?
In 1968, Richard Nixon was in a tough fight against Hubert Humphrey for the presidency. Humphrey was finally getting leeway from Johnson to lean against the Vietnam War. But that required that Johnson obtain a peace deal with North Vietnam. And that required an understanding with South Vietnam's leader, Nguyen Van Thieu.
So Nixon, a civilian who was no longer in the government, sent go-betweens, specifically Anna Chennault, to negotiate his own counter-understanding with Thieu. Thieu needed guarantees that the War and US aid that he and his cronies were stealing would continue. In exchange for helping Nixon get into the White House to carry out that promise, he would block Johnson from making peace with the North.
Nixon barely won the election.
So now I ask you, was what happened between Nixon and Thieu a crime? Was it treason? Was it interference?
More accurately, prepare for Business As Usual In The 19th Century.
And unfortunately, the 19th Century had its own oligarchic solution for these eternal problems of capitalism: the conquest of peoples abroad and the persecution of other races at home.
Not a Trump voter, but someone who is willing to spend the rest of his life imagining that he had great integrity by sticking to his positions while being in practice totally powerless. I think the hatred of big government on the Left, unlike the Right, comes from a desire to embrace weakness, to surrender to the reality of life under Jim Crow II, to live in an impoverished village in a fallen empire and have the satisfaction of having the people around you forced to finally live in the sackcloth and ashes that you think Americans deserve - even if that degradation comes at the hands of violent barbarians who want exactly the opposite of what you claim to want.
As Socrates observed, if good men refuse to rule (because it is a dirty business), that leaves the job to the bad men.
It's been sitting there for 37 years: the conversion of the American military into redneck welfare, merging soldiery and peasantry into a Praetorian class that points its guns at all of us, and puts in a few years in uniform pointing guns we paid for at foreigners to justify it all.
That's their real identity, not the "White Working Class," but the henchmen who stand guard over the actual workers. Because they'd rather die than learn the skills needed in the degrading new workplace their sacred capitalism is creating, the only thing about them that's not obsolete is the violence they absorbed from their culture and honed in our military.
Trump is not the only Republican sacrificing the real economy to the myth of fossil-based prosperity yanked from our hands by evil environmentalists. The state of Ohio just severely rewrote its regulations involving the spacing between wind turbines to make it impossible to economically build new wind farms. The picking of winners by Koch-bought legislators is blatant, destroying any pretense that we ever operated under free markets or that Republicans ever actually gave a damn about them.
Think about how much work was done to organize every aspect of life in America's early days to support White supremacy. Think about how every institution that molded thought was on the same page. Think about how much work it took the ordinary poor White racist to follow his path of self-aggrandizement. He HAD to believe the ideology, the myths, the superstitions, the taboos, he had to spend a lot of time learning them and a lot of work enforcing them. All of that to overcome the stark words sitting at the front of the Declaration of Independence, "All Men are Created Equal, with Certain Inalienable Rights."
Doesn't it seem that it's all much easier now? You don't have to believe race codes or the Sons of Ham crap or the convolutions of States' Rights legality, if you want to justify police butchering Blacks left and right. Or immigration restrictions that our racist ancestors would have considered excessive and unenforceable. Or blatant attempts to restore Jim Crow. If it's to your advantage, you find a way to justify it without the slightest guilt because your life consists only of accumulation, not principle.
It's easy now. If it makes you feel good, the free market provides. In our case, it provides far-right think tanks that make up press releases which you then half-understand from Fox News or Breitbart or your buddy's Twitter. The mainstream media and the gun magazines feed you endless and unrepresentative anecdotes about crime which you easily code for color. The bigot of our time no longer openly and honestly proclaims White supremacy - but he's fed by certain media markets a lifetime supply of lies whose consequences are exactly that.
I've wondered if public schools teaching our kids any of the truth about the crimes our ancestors committed to make us rich and powerful really has the intended effect. If the kids are fed the glorification of greed and self-service around the clock outside of school, won't they just conclude - "If those crimes worked, they were worth it."
Only some individuals count as actual humans in far-right ideology. The rest are unruly beasts of burden who must be tamed using the terror of starvation and illness.
Have you considered the possibility that the Trump-Putin alliance was not meant to bring peace, but like the Hitler-Stalin detente of another age, was meant to facilitate the launching of major wars by both countries?
And because what Israel does is in plain sight, we must regretfully conclude that a lot of voters are willing to tolerate that. But if Russians connections are kept secret, then how are the voters to make a similar decision?
And ultimately, if you want to be all judgmental about that, then how about comparing what the Israel-lobby voters support for a domestic agenda to what this bizarre new White Power bloc supports, based on their admiration for Putin, LePen, and every racist crypto-fascist in Europe? It turns out the former include millions who support very liberal policies at home, from universal health care to strong civil rights for minorities, which makes their blind allegiance to Israel's growing Apartheid sickening. But the latter are very consistent in what they want at home and abroad: a Master Race whom the government subsidizes with undeserved favors, while it persecutes women/Moslems/non-Whites/the poor. Either you should stop pretending the Trumpites are pro-union egalitarians, or you should make clear your own agenda for domestic politics.
Actually, they have loaned him money.
Just remember, these bastards keep surprising us by getting one jump ahead of our worst expectations. Some are writing that Merkel is next on the alt-right hit list, meaning Putin wants her destroyed and perhaps even replaced by the KfD, another Moslem-bashing hate front.
So you have to ask yourself, is this Trump behavior all part of the preparation for another electoral coup in the country that taught the whole world how dangerous electoral coups can be? Are Trump and Putin foolish enough to think that they can long live with a Germany back under fascist rule? What about the rest of us?
A White Bloc of the USA, Russia, France, and Germany. Think about it. Three of the world's five possessors of the H-bomb and ICBMs capable of launching them, and a fourth member that may be more technologically advanced than those three. Unified by the belief that all other races and religions are plotting together to enslave the White Christian man. How does this end peacefully?
I said some years ago that White people have run out of ideas. Boy, thinking that they can make the Confederacy and Apartheid and the Third Reich work in the 21st Century if they simply throw the collective resources of the United States behind them is intellectual bankruptcy at its most desolate.
But Hunter Thompson warned about this long ago, in "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas."
"The Circus-Circus is what the whole hep world would be doing on Saturday night if the Nazis had won the war. This is the Sixth Reich. The ground floor is full of gambling tables, like all the other casinos ... but the place is about four stories high, in the style of a circus tent, and all manner of strange County-Fair/Polish Carnival madness is going on up in this space. Right above the gambling tables the Forty Flying Carazito Brothers are doing a high-wire trapeze act, along with four muzzled Wolverines and the Six Nymphet Sisters from San Diego ...
This madness goes on and on, but nobody seems to notice."
Remember that Roth was influenced by an actual incident, the DuPont plot of 1934. Bannon would have felt very ideologically comfortable in the company of that DuPont and the father and grandfather of two presidents, Prescott Bush.
The amount of money pouring into self-driving car research may be greater than electric car research. Like it or not, the West is full of old people with big houses that can't be too close together. They often hate cities and the people who live in them. They also want to preserve the illusion of self-sufficiency, so having the cars slowly take over more and more of the real driving over the years will fit well with their eroding resistance.
Now the benefit of this is that EVs, robot cars, and car-sharing between them are each attracting huge investment and have great synergy between them. So those of us in the cities increasingly will be able to give up actual car ownership, but still have cars appear when needed.
Right now GM is in cahoots with Lyft, the "other" ridesharing service, testing self-driving EVs in San Francisco, and working on a much bigger test program next year.
http://www.greencarreports.com/news/1109055_thousands-of-self-driving-bolt-evs-to-be-deployed-next-year-report
Now if these services become the replacement for car ownership among the next generation, we should expect that cars will be designed specifically for that purpose, meaning that they will not need to weigh 4000 pounds or travel long cross-country routes. In fact, once you get out of the car it probably will find a place to recharge itself, so it doesn't need a big battery at all. The question remains as to whether the net energy use of this model is less than if everyone privately owned EVs, but this disruptive model could take over much faster and thus get gasoline-engined cars off the road far sooner. If these cars can get people to mass transit options faster, solving the last mile problem, then everyone should be happy. But ultimately, you can't stop people from coveting convenience over the environment.
There are other ways to place wind turbines. Out in the ocean, and flying overhead connected by power cables to the ground. The latter will take longer, but it will have the advantage of working everywhere.
And that lack of talk about climate change is what delayed the whole process long enough that we still face disaster. If we had poured Pentagon money into this technology, as we successfully did into other past technological challenges, we might have gotten those super-sized wind turbines a decade earlier. Recall that 50 years ago we could build a giant bomber capable of going 2000 miles an hour, and land men on the moon, and we can't do that now because our priorities changed.
Our economics are only as good as the extent to which we prize future value over immediate gain. That's called the "discount ratio". And it looks like societies which discount the future more as they get older and more desperate to hold onto status quo power get overrun by more vigorous and optimistic societies that look at the numbers completely differently. For China to get to where it is in wind and solar power from where it was 10 years ago is the miracle. We're no longer leading the way, we're just one of the pack and more burdened than any of them by those who say there's nothing to race for, that things are fine and nothing needs to change.
Don't forget the animated arrow arcing over the globe to plunge deep into the heart of the enemy continent. I love that part.
I used to play my dad's Victory at Sea LPs on the last day of school every year to celebrate surviving.
It isn't about civilization. It's about the idea that America is the property of a warrior tribe called The Whites, and all others who live here are merely servants. Somehow those servant peoples got out of control, but they will be dealt with now. The Master Race does not have to negotiate in good faith with subhumans; it can lie and trick and then betray with massive armed force.
Seriously, look up the far-right Christian fantasy of a covenant between the "real" Americans and God to rule this land, requiring adherence to the worst oppressions of the Old Testament. There's even an interesting branch (descended from an anti-Semitic fantasy) claiming the Britons were the lost tribe of Israel, and America is of the blood of Britain, thus all three states make up the "nations" of Israel and thus all are part of the story of the Book of Revelation. That's not an obscure crackpot theory; it's the position of two national Christian publications, The Plain Truth and The Philadelphia Trumpet.
Master Races do not share power.
We're not uniting because, though to a lesser extent than the Trumpian racists, we hate sharing power with anyone else at all. People are too selfish to put much effort into politics unless they see it as a way to get themselves something huge. It's not enough to beat Trump, we all have agendas to totally remake America - or totally keep it the way it was at some point that was most profitable for us. So the instant that any of us try to talk with different people about what we need to do, we start tearing at each others' throats over past offenses. Nothing from last year's primaries will ever be forgiven, because each faction believes it was robbed of the chance to beat Trump by someone else, which in turn was the chance to remake America in our own narcissistic self-image.
Don't worry, that will be forgotten once the political killings begin, perhaps at a protest in North Dakota, perhaps when cops murder another unarmed Black person. Then we will all fear for our lives. But of course, by that time it will be too late to unite.
All that remains is how the restored Master Race is to be defined.
Is it as White Christian patriots empowered to terrorize all others in an isolated, backward America...
or an America empowered to unleash its full capability for terror on the world?
Either way, it makes White American men happy. They have to wield the whip on someone's back or they go crazy. Someone has to be sacrificed, either here or abroad.
Sure, but what is that to Whatcom County, Washington? Or more accurately, who in the power structure over there thinks that a pipeline in North Dakota matters for that reason? Is this a network of Republican politicians, or even worse a cabal of local police across broad jurisdictional lines, combining the power of a police state with plausible deniability?
It's like trying to find the power structure of the hidden empire known as the Jim Crow South. From senators to mayors to sheriffs to lynch mobs, to the last resort in their hoods, all kept in line without an organizational chart. That's a terrifying power.
Do you understand that there may be no way under the Constitution to save healthcare, the environment, and immigrant families under a Republican monopoly of power?
The Constitution operates under the assumption that Presidents and Congressmen will place their roles over their parties. This does not even begin to happen with modern Republicans (compare now to how they acted in 1974 against Nixon). For all practical purposes, the GOP may have the power to take away your right to vote, carry out mass ethnic cleansing, legalize slave labor in private prisons, or start World War III. The courts might be able to block the first three of those. Or not.
How would you have stopped Hitler in 1934? If you don't think we're at that dire a point, then you don't see the Republican Party and ordinary Republicans the way I do. They have already declared war on you and me, and now they legally have all the guns.
The Civil Rights era has now been undone as completely as the Reconstruction was undone by the triumph of Jim Crow. Except this time there's no Rest of America to escape to. It's All of America this time.
I have long feared that this could happen. But to see it happen on this scale, with the supporters of White Christian Patriarchy championing such a grotesque demagogue as, basically, being a savior figure, shows that they're much worse than I suspected.
Because in truth, this is the THIRD time that America's redneck heartland has allied with oligarchs to reduce People of Color to statelessness and subhumanity. The first time was in 1676, a hundred years before the Revolution. Again, it was a slow drip, drip, drip of cleverly written laws that turned African indentured servants into slaves, and thus stigmatized them in a way that magically let poor Whites feel better about themselves for not being Black. This monstrous act may have saved the Southern colonies (the important ones) as a viable investment for Britain.
Is this simply baked into the country's foundation? Is this how things will be until power is wrested from White people by sheer numbers? Are we living in the Stanford Prison Experiment?
Three strikes, you're out, America.
You seem to discount all the stories about his past criminal activities before becoming president.
http://www.alternet.org/21-questions-donald-trump
Seriously, would you give the benefit of a doubt to a Democrat who did the things described in that article?
It depends on what value you place on foreseeable consequences. Selectively leaking to affect another country's election is, perhaps, normal dirtyness. Doing it to put a fascist madman in charge, one who may have the power (and the insane following) to terminate democracy for good, and whip up wars that dwarf Iraq with his conspiracy theories, is a striking act of contempt towards all his possible victims. Which with Trump is a very long list.
Breivik's manifesto claimed that Norwegian Socialists had to be annihilated for the crime of conspiring to use Moslem immigrants to bring down White Christian rule. However, I've read that after his imprisonment he more openly admitted to being a fascist, and the butchering of leftists by that crowd is long established.
Yes. The only good thing about this long slog is that the more Trump is seen to have to submit his dictat to the very legal processes his supporters want eradicated, the more frustrated they will become. These are folks obsessed with absolutes, not a long list of caveats.
So the question is, can these half-measures be clearly regimented into a process of growing oppression that reaches into every area of our lives, as the supporters lust for?
All that might take is that first act of retaliation that triggers the cycle of escalatory violence the security state requires.
While Russia is important in that Trump apparently needed those bastards to bail him out of his past business incompetence (having used up everyone else), the immigrant ban is a cornerstone of this regime in the same way that anti-Semitism was the cornerstone of the Third Reich. You could have said in 1934 or 1935 that the myriad forms of petty persecution the Nazis devised were distractions - but 10 years later, you had to admit that they fit into a larger plan that became the regime's signature.
In both cases, it is the willingness of the regime's supporters to embrace these oppressive and (especially because) offensive actions that establishes the new caste order. The Master Race brazenly demonstrates its willingness to defy normal morality - and lie about it in plain sight.
And for that sense of privilege, the supporters will embrace any crime, including treason of their republic's interests. They are incapable of loving the republic as a thing they share with others. That is expendable, just as the government is expendable. Blood, and the land that it "conquered", stands above laws and any rational price. If Putin helped them to re-steal this continent back so they can go back to whipping and lynching anyone they please, damn, that's worth it.
I think it shows something about far-right African-American ideologues living in complete denial of their history. It hurts their pride too much to mention the slaves and whips and the fact that generation after generation of their ancestors had to just put up with that with zero improvement... besides the fact that they aspire themselves to be property owners with unlimited rights, which they refuse to accept eventually gets us back to whips and chains.
Sure, but America has been a free rider on global interdependence for years. Nothing changes until the free rider is slapped with severe economic (because they care about nothing else) consequences.
Boycott, divest, sanction.
I would argue that the Beijing regime made a deliberate strategic decision to amplify its frantic growth rate during the Bush era. Because if they had done any research on Cheney and his circle at all, they would have realized that China qualified as a threat to American dominance that the PNAC required to be defeated. 9/11 instead distracted Cheney and China exploited America's need for loans and cheap goods, emerging as an indispensable power. What the leaders probably didn't expect was the sheer size and speed of the environmental damage this would require.
However, China is again facing an Administration that considers it a special threat. The question is, if they've been chastened by environmental blowback, does that mean the leaders take a completely different approach this time, or do they try to create a Green Bubble using mandates to force-feed solar panels to the world instead of cheap steel and tablets? Which gets to the global question of judging the damage from green growth versus no growth.
Any sensible general would tell Trump that there is no way for America to win a conventional war against Iran.
So what if his response is to authorize the nukes?
Is Trump cause or effect? You have to look at the people who voted for him. If what they really fear is not illegals or Moslems but the overall reduction of Whites to a mere plurality, if they are willing to commit Hitlerian crimes to maintain a near-monopoly of police and discriminatory power against minorities, then Trump is simply making them comfortable with what they really want.
And that requires a 9/11 - Reichstag Fire level casus belli to justify war, not on other countries this time, but on half of America. A war that will not stop until this country looks, at best, like Apartheid South Africa.
The mistake we've all made is to assume that this evil does not lurk in more than a few American hearts. Survey questions are hopeless when Americans can twist the meanings of words sufficiently to hand power to Trump. And they're still going to be there when he's dead.
Roger Stone is another strong tie between Cohn and Trump.