This from an article by Masha Gessen in the New Yorker about the unreality of the Trump era:
The great French thinker and activist Simone Weil had a prescription that she wrote down in her journal in 1933: “Never react to an evil in such a way as to augment it.” A few days later, she added, “Refuse to be an accomplice. Don’t lie—don’t keep your eyes shut.”
This is risky. You could be attacked by the accomplices of evil. Your country is being taken over by a criminal gang disguised as a political party. This gang has enormous power because some of its members are the richest of the rich. Not all rich people are complicit, but many are, and they have the power to silence you or just kill you if they think you are a threat. The awesome power of the state could be harnessed to destroy you.
The democratic process of removal for the prominent members of the gang in government is the only really effective method of fighting back. But the democratic process itself is in danger because the gang has developed propaganda that fools most people into voting against their own interests.
The Republican Party is a perfect storm. It propagates propaganda that fools people into voting for those who are complicit in the process of enslavement. People are frightened by propaganda and they can be deceived into voting against their best interests– at first it was unfair regressive taxation that they somehow convinced the people would be good for the economy. It isn’t– that is a lie that will lead to starvation of the equalizing process of the government. The process of starvation has already been ordained– tax cuts and a deficit budget have been agreed upon that will force the contraction of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid if they are not reversed.
What is worse, there may be no-one to vote for. All the candidates may be suborned by the criminal gang, even if they are not members of the Republican Party. Anyone who identifies as a “libertarian” for example, could be a stealthy member of the gang. Even those who identify as Democrats could be hijacked if there is sufficient “dark money” to be had.
My district is a perfect example of these problems. It is a “safe seat” for a Republican who has been in Congress for a long time and has accumulated great powers: Devin Nunes. He has been actively supporting the president and trying to cut off the Congressional investigation into Russian meddling in the last election. He has succeeded in having the House investigation cut short and reported out as “no collusion”– which is absurd. The collusion is so obvious that you are likely to trip over it if you are not looking for it.
Now the primaries are here and California has a “top two” system that puts all the candidates into the same primary, regardless of party. This empowers independents, who can now vote for anyone– whereas before, unless you identified with a particular party, you couldn’t vote in that primary. Instead of separate primaries, the Democrats, Republicans, independents, and libertarians are all together and the top two vote getters will advance to the full election. There are multiple potential consequences to this. In my district, known for its conservatism, independents had no voice in the primaries and no one to vote for except a Democrat with no chance or a Republican– Nunes– with a safe seat which he has used to gather power through seniority.
Nunes has been abusing his power– and his constituents– almost since the first day he set foot in the House. Most of his constituents don’t even vote in the elections because they have been led to believe that their votes don’t count. They have been fooled by propaganda that is produced, secretly, by Republicans (the Russians haven’t bothered to meddle with this seat because it is perceived as safe (by circular reasoning, it is true)). They don’t realize that if they got together and voted for someone else, they could overcome Mr. Nunes’ incumbent advantage.
But how to get the voters to vote– and to vote for a bigger, stronger government that will protect them and counterbalance the unfair advantages that laissez-faire capitalism has endowed to a tiny minority? There are so many contradictions. Getting the poor voters together to vote for someone who will do the hard work of strengthening government without forming it into a fascist super-state– how can this be done?
The only way– and it is hard– is to always tell the truth, to never be an accomplice to any evil, to never wink at any wrongdoing, and to always strive for a fair compromise. The rich deserve to enjoy the advantages they have gained– albeit perhaps excessive– but they do not deserve to lord it over any poor person, cheat them, nor force them into an unfair bargain.
The current administration has gone a long way towards unfairness and they intend to go still further. They intend to cheat the poor out of their educations, out of any savings they may have (and drive them into hopeless debt), and to indenture them for life in dead-end jobs. The Department of Education is a perfect example. Under the current head of this Department, Trump University would still be in operation, cheating people with false promises of a real estate education. What more is there to say? Outrage is the appropriate response.
Paul Krugman published a column in the op-ed section of the New York Times today which contains the above quote:
“If there is any lasting benefit from the Trump era — which is by no means a sure thing, since democracy may not survive the experience — it will lie in the Great Unmasking: the revelation of just how much bad faith pervades modern conservatism. Some of us, of course, knew this all along, and are not surprised. Conversely, many centrists and much of the news media simply refuse to face up to the asymmetry of our politics and will persist with bothsidesism even as one side drives us into the abyss. But one can at least hope that the constant revelations of past hypocrisy will have some impact.”
One of the biggest “tells” that Trump and his administration are lying through their teeth is their effort to force us to subsidize the production of coal-derived electricity from obsolete, uneconomic power plants based on the claim that “national security” requires them to stay open and to produce pollution and waste that befouls the environment. The “national security” excuse states that coal-fired power plants are essential because they are able to store more than 90 days supply of coal on-site and thus are resistant to sabotage, such as obstruction of natural gas supply pipes by explosives or computer hacking. This argument is invalid because the alternative supplies, solar and wind, are completely impervious to attempts to sabotage their power output– unless, for example, some evil genius figures out a way to cause permanent cloud cover and stop the wind from blowing.
Nuclear power plants, by this same reasoning, deserve careful protection since they are even more resistant to attempts at interruption. But the Trump administration doesn’t care about nuclear power. It only cares about coal, and it supports coal mining, coal-burning power plants, and the billionaires who run them. One example is the Kentucky coal baron and billionaire Joseph Craft and his family, who are close friends with Trump’s head of the EPA, Scott Pruitt. Another New York Times article details the close personal relationship between Mr. Craft and Mr. Pruitt, which extends to Mr. Pruitt’s cash purchase from Mr. Craft of two seats at a University of Kentucky basketball game, “one of the biggest of the season”, for $130 each for him and his son. (The seats were only available to Mr. Craft because he is one of the biggest donors to the University of Kentucky and has buildings at the campus named after him.)
The economics of electric power production have suddenly overturned, and coal-derived power, even without including the cost of “externalities” (pollution), is more expensive than natural gas-derived power– and even more expensive than solar and wind power. Nuclear power, which produces no climate-changing carbon dioxide, is more expensive still (mainly because of the high cost of insurance against accidents and the need to store radioactive waste indefinitely). Coal power plants are aging and being shuttered even as power production from renewable sources soars. Employment in the coal industry has plummeted, dropping by half in just the last five years. Coal is still being mined, but workers are being replaced by machines who don’t get tired, don’t get black lung, and don’t complain.
Even though the coal industry is shedding jobs, it is leaving behind workers with damaged lungs from inhalation of coal dust over years in poorly regulated mines. It is true that the worst cases of black lung are complicated by the workers bad smoking habits, but even when they quit, their lungs are still full of black dust. An even worse consequence of the changing nature of coal mining is the fact that miners are being exposed to high levels of sand (silica) in the air as they work surface mines– and silicosis (the aftereffect of breathing sand) is even worse than pneumoconiosis (black lung).
The most ethical course of action in this case is to allocate funds for treatment of lung disease and help in smoking cessation, especially in retired miners. In addition, it is ethically imperative to train miners and their children for other jobs– new jobs in a new economy that has no room for the obsolete, dirty, destructive coal mines of the past. Instead of providing support and training for miners affected by the shutdown of coal mines and power plants, Mr. Trump and his administration are demanding that the federal government subsidize coal use as a matter of “national security”– with the money from these subsidies finding its way into the pockets of the owners, who are already billionaires.
Mr. Trump’s true strategy– if he has one, which some people doubt– is to support his friends, the billionaires who secretly own and control much of the US economy. He is signing executive orders and supporting administrative strategies that put money in the pockets of friendly billionaires. At the same time, he and his ilk are supporting “opposition research” to expose the dirty laundry of people who oppose him. His assistants supply the personal information of his “enemies” to private parties who do not hesitate to attack opponents online and in person, causing intimidation or even terror that takes a page from the playbook of that new Russian czar, Vlad “the Impaler” Putin. (“The Impaler” was a legendary but historical– real– Transylvanian count who executed his prisoners, mostly Muslim soldiers, by impaling them on poles and then planted those poles with their dying bodies in front of his castle. His name was Vlad Tepes, but he later became known as Dracula.)
Mr. Putin’s method of operation has long been to support private parties with no direct connection to the Russian government who take his suggestions as orders– and commit murder, eliminating his political and personal enemies without his having to take responsibility. Many people, especially journalists and reformed spies, have been killed both in Russia and other countries. Mr. Trump’s minions obtain personal information on the physical and email addresses, phone numbers, places of work, peccadillos, and so on, of people who he sees as enemies. They supply this information to people who have no direct connection to him or the Republican party, and these people use it to intimidate, or if necessary, terrorize his “enemies”.
Mr. Trump does all this in secret, while he employs the classic techniques of propaganda (repetition; a catchy slogan; color; a specific objective; a kernel of truth; concealment; and timing) openly in all his communications– tweets, interviews, instructions to his press secretary, and speeches (he began his campaign for the 2020 presidential election the day he was inaugurated, and gives rousing, campaign-style speeches to large crowds at least twice a month)– to rile up his supporters and confuse his opponents. Mr. Trump lies intentionally to bewilder and misdirect people who “attack” (criticize) him, and he lies on a wholesale basis with the intent to besmirch anyone who might oppose him (he has admitted as much in private, repeatedly– there are multiple records of him explaining that he attacks people strategically with lies about them, using words such as “failing” and “a stain on America” to belittle them in advance so that his supporters will not listen to them). He even lies when he can be proven to be lying because it provides him with an opportunity to claim that the reporters are lying and enrage them, misdirecting their anger to his lies instead of his pernicious policies.
I hesitate to bring Hitler into this otherwise reasonable rant, but one of Trump’s biographers claims that the only book Mr. Trump is known to have read and kept at his bedside is a collection of Hitler’s speeches. So Mr. Trump emulates Vladimir Putin in secret and copies Adolf Hitler in public. That is an extremely dangerous and toxic combination. I wouldn’t call it fascism because that trivializes it.
Finally, Paul Krugman again:
“In any case, it’s yet another demonstration of the pervasive bad faith of the conservative movement. Nothing they said about their reasons for opposing climate policy [was] sincere, and now they’re perfectly willing to ditch all their supposed principles to keep the coal fires burning.”
We Are In Deep Doo-Doo Because of Him
How can I say this? We are in the deep, deep doo. Deep in the doo. He has trumped us. We are in a slide of Titanic proportions, a slippery slope to end all slippery slops [sic].
We’re fried.
No sense in getting any more upset, it’s too late. Time to jump, now. Can’t hesitate or we will die. Must jump now.
(sunny side up fried egg courtesy of pixabay.com and open clip art vectors)
By instinct or design, [Trump’s] attack on Mueller meets many of the requirements for a successful misinformation campaign that the British author A. J. Mackenzie listed in his 1938 book, “Propaganda Boom”: repetition; a catchy slogan; color; a specific objective; a kernel of truth; concealment; and timing.
—from John Cassidy’s online piece in the New Yorker May 30, 2018
Presidents throughout the years have differed in their approaches to policy, based on political platforms, ideologies and individual beliefs. Mr. Trump, however, has shown highly abnormal behavior by lying routinely to the American people without compunction, intentionally fueling divisions in our country and actively working to degrade the imperfect but critical institutions that serve us.
Although appalling, those actions shouldn’t be surprising. As was the case throughout his business and entertainment careers, Mr. Trump charts his every move according to a calculus of how it will personally help or hurt him. His strategy is to undercut real, potential and perceived opponents; his focus is to win at all costs, irrespective of truth, ethics, decency and — many would argue — the law. His disparagement of institutions is designed to short-circuit legitimate law enforcement investigations, intelligence assessments and media challenges that threaten his interests. His fear of the special counsel’s work is especially palpable, as is his growing interest in destroying its mandate.
For more than three decades, I observed and analyzed the traits and tactics of corrupt, incompetent and narcissistic foreign officials who did whatever they thought was necessary to retain power. Exploiting the fears and concerns of their citizenry, these demagogues routinely relied on lies, deceit and suppression of political opposition to cast themselves as populist heroes and to mask self-serving priorities. By gaining control of intelligence and security services, stifling the independence of the judiciary and discrediting a free press, these authoritarian rulers followed a time-tested recipe for how to inhibit democracy’s development, retard individual freedoms and liberties, and reserve the spoils of corrupt governance for themselves and their ilk. It never dawned on me that we could face such a development in the United States.
–from an op-ed by John Brennan, career CIA officer and director of the CIA from 2013 to January 2017, in the Washington Post, dated June 1, 2018 (obtained from Microsoft’s News application built into Windows 10)
(illustration courtesy of pixabay.com and WikiImages– showing the legendary Baron Munchausen and his ride on a cannonball… “Munchausen’s Syndrome”, a condition in which the sufferer invents tall tales, is named after this mythical individual.)
At this point, does it even make sense to speak of “international trade”?
The really large businesses operate globally. Bribing local officials is pretty much routine.
The current difficulties over NAFTA are intended to put pressure on companies that have integrated their operations. Exceptions will have to be bought from Trump and his Republican enablers. The Republican base actually admires this, much as a gang member admires the toughness of his or her boss. The falsity of the “national defense” rationale is part of the appeal, just as the falsity of Evangelical theology appeals to the people who want to force it onto others.
If Trump’s trade policy appears to defy logic, it’s a sign that you’re using the wrong logic. Think of the Republicans as a criminal gang, where anybody can be whacked at any time, but more like the IRA than the Mafia. It’s American, not Manchurian, and will be much, much harder to be rid of.
I’ve been saying for years that the notion of a trade deficit between the U.S. and its allies, and indeed, many of its enemies, is absurd — it’s like a trade imbalance between say California and Oklahoma. And trade with our so-called enemies, facilitating their integration into the global economy, is probably the single most effective way to facilitate change in those societies as global trade leads to improved economic conditions, which leads to less uncertainty about things like how am I going to feed my family, which leads to a growing interest in improving social conditions, personal freedom, and participation in society. Unfortunately, many of the policies pursued in this country since the Reagan revolution have undermined those conditions, leading to the kind of uncertainty that results in people preferring strong man — who they believe will at least keep them safe — to the messy uncertainly of democracy and, indeed, the market. I find it ironic that the very people who are doing the most to undermine our society do it in the name of personal freedom, the market, and, of course, religion (their religion that is, they don’t care about freedom of or from religion any more than they care individual freedom).
Most of the deaths came in the three months after the hurricane, from delayed medical care. The total estimate was 4,645.
“The researchers say their estimate, published Tuesday in the New England Journal of Medicine, remains imprecise, with more definitive studies still to come. But the findings, which used methods that have not been previously applied to this disaster, are important amid widespread concerns that the government’s tally of the dead, 64, was a dramatic undercount.”
This from a New York Times article whose words were funneled into a Microsoft news application in Windows 10; the story was repeated by every major news portal.
(photo courtesy of pixabay.com)
From National Public Radio (NPR) today:
”
The four [Federal Election Commission–FEC] commissioners on Thursday deadlocked, again, on proposals to consider new rules, for example, for foreign-influenced U.S. corporations and for politically active entities that don’t disclose their donors.
“We have reason to think there are foreign actors who are looking for every single avenue to try and influence our elections,” said Commissioner Ellen Weintraub, a Democrat who offered two proposals for new regulations.
Both proposals failed on partisan 2-2 votes.
The FEC is debating the question in the shadow of several investigations of Russian election interference, which included an alleged $1.2 million-per-month campaign to place anonymous, socially divisive ads on prominent Internet platforms.
”
And from March 18:
”
The Federal Election Commission, better known for deadlocks than decisions, has unanimously agreed to take a first step against anonymous political advertising on the internet. The proposed rule deals with disclaimers — the “authorized by” taglines that are mandatory in print, television and radio ads that explicitly support or attack candidates.
…
Although the FEC is acting after Russian trolls spread advertisements through social media during the 2016 presidential election, the proposed rule wouldn’t have touched most of those ads. Disclaimers are required only for “express advocacy” messages that attack or support candidates. The Russian ads were not that direct, and many focused on issues without mentioning the candidates.
”
(image courtesy of pixabay.com and creozavr)
Just ran across this while surfing through the RationalWiki:
| —Katharine Hayhoe, climate scientist and evangelical Christian[1] |
A long exposition of who Katharine Hayhoe is was shown on the University of Toronto physics department website in 2012. The reason I like it and find it resonating is that “faith is the evidence of things not seen” is a famous definition from the Bible, specifically Hebrews 11:1, which says (King James Version):
“Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.”
(photo courtesy of pixabay.com and geralt)
Comments: “I don’t think that many Americans, particularly Trump supporters, understand how close we are to losing our precious freedoms.”
“As for the president’s descent into the sewer where hatred and pogroms are fashioned, the United States is not a nation of animals. Immigrants, including Trump’s own German-born grandparents, made this nation distinct.”
Alas, Donald Trump turns his back on his background and acts as if he’s a self-made man, forgetting his ‘starter kit” of a million dollars.
The moral rot is everywhere: the nonstop attacks on what made this nation great–generosity, reciprocity, trust, integrity, and a magic land where refugees could build lives, as well as new companies.
I almost didn’t respond to this article, because it’s draining to write about Trump’s America which grows increasingly depressing to tolerate. Nothing great is being done, only tear-downs and attacks on our better impulses.
Plus, I know Roger Cohen is a brilliant writer with true international perspective. And to hear so many countries and former allies express despair on where America is headed is frightening.
I don’t think that many Americans, particularly Trump supporters, understand how close we are to losing our precious freedoms.
I wish they would all read some history and the documents that form our “imperfect union.” Because our growing tribalism and isolation only helps those who are abusing power do so more freely.
Mr. Cohen is right–are we up to preserving our Republic despite the occupant of the Oval Office?
Republicans, at least the good majority of Republicans, blame poor people for their poverty. Many Repubs truly believe that the less fortunate in our society are poor because they don’t work hard enough; they are too lazy; they have made poor choices and they must grab themselves by the bootstraps and pull themselves out of poverty. I have always believed that our country will be judged on how we treat the poor, the elderly, and our children. We will not be looked upon kindly. (I find it ironic how those who want to cut or eliminate all our safety nets are the same people who claim to be good Christian folks, and so many states that rely heavily on the Federal Government to subsidize their people are the same states that, in most cases, vote Republican.)
Trump is a liar, no doubt, but he did not invent the mess we are in. He is simply the poster child for it. Part of the problem is the way that the internet has become an echo-chamber in which rumor, innuendo, and conspiracy theories are circulated and verified.
After 2010, I read the Tea Party blogs for a number of years. In that world, “facts” were pieces of information which were “proven” by being repeated back and forth by an assortment of right-wing web sites. When a blogger wished to verify what he/she said, the more web sites which had said it, the more true it became. Never mind that those sites simply cited each other in a never ending chain.
Add to that the many, many folks who are all too willing to let so very much pass in their single minded focus on a certain issue (e.g., “pro-life” voters who care only about getting a SCOTUS which will overturn Roe or drive GLBT folks back into the closet or keep those ‘others’ out of the country), and you get a pretty much Teflon Trump who can destroy and lie with impunity as long as he delivers on their pet issue.
Yes, democracy is in deep trouble. Trump’s calling some immigrants “animals” would make Hitler proud. Unfortunately, such things matter not at all to many who voted for him. Out best hope is the ballot box. Let’s hope the Democrats can find and mount a strong, stable candidate who can draw not only Dem purists, but also the millions of moderates needed to actually win.
I call it the Echoplex. Impervious to facts, right wing media spins half truths and outright lies to an increasingly isolated slice of the population. Created by talk radio and Fox News, the system rapidly expanded through social media in the early years of the millennium. Later on Donald Trump, in a schadenfreude moment, Donald Trump displayed the GOP’s less incentive messaging and the Russians weighed in, recognizing a disinformation system similar to their own.
Who’s to blame? In addition to the companies who profit from the slavish support of fevered consumers and the GOP which quickly recognized the value of reducing critical assessment of its policies (something they now may regret), add one other group, the press, particularly broadcast and cable media. Their business model discourages focus on long term encroaching threats, ones which take analysis and investigation. We did it to ourselves.
Yes, we suffer from and others succumb so easily to the things made true by constant repetition…repeated till it’s true because for those who see it thus, its made easy and serves as confirmation of whats already in their minds and of what they are thinking, wanting and wishing if others this , these and that is also what they think.
They see it is and see again and more who think the same, now what was just perhaps a thought or wish cements to ingrained Truth…become frozen now as Fact.
Now primed and joined with same thinking others and the groups in together become the ties that bind in mutual affirmation that now morphs into what becomes confirmed as Fact and is as real as the reality that these people now live and breath in can only be and now becomes the offset against those others not agreed, hostile to the “Truth” as no friend , only Foe must then be.
More than anything else this deep, nurtured and promoted SCHISM is what will bring us to a reckoning where almost everything will be on the line from which it all will happen.
What concerns me most is I don’t think anyone knows what it is when it does finally happen…
…as it must.
And, a Republican Congress acting like a spectator, completely irresponsible in their checks and balance, letting this incompetent, child president tear down the republic, one brick at a time so nobody will notice till it’s too late. We overcame the Germans, Japanese, and the Soviet Union. Will we overcome the Republicans? We’ll know in November.
Howard the Democratic Party is even less active than the Republicans.
Democrats just spent eight years telling us that Republicans wouldn’t let them get anything done, and now we have a president who might be a traitor, but is definitely a pathological liar, attacking all of the checks on presidential power and all of the institutions of our Republic, but Democrats, instead of trying to shut him down, are still begging for compromise.
What is it about a party whose base is filled with Neo-Confederate, Neo-Nazi, mysogonist, anti-LGBT, white supremacists that you feel you need to compromise with? What part of the Republican program deserves consideration?
Democrats made Trump possible by treating the Republican party as if they are not against most of the Constitution (against freedom of religion, against the separation of powers, against the assumption of innocence except for Trump. against Miranda warnings, for no knock warrants except for Cohen, for a religious test for public office, for using the Ten Commandments as the basis for law, against taxing and regulating trade, against promoting the general welfare, for the second clause of the second amendment but also for having a standing army which goes against the first clause, etc., etc., ) or even against everything Jesus said (helping the poor, helping the sick, basing your life in love, against greed against violence, etc.).
They keep saying that compromise is evil and a sign of weakness so you keep begging?
What everyone seems to miss is that mass media influences political discourse, and that the controlling shares in mass media are controlled by global billionaires.
Yes markets determine a lot of what we see. They are perfectly happy to give us reality TV, like The Apprentice, where firing people is the way to greatness. and show children Disney Princess movies where the only people that count are royalty.
But the editors determine what we don’t see. If they want the TPP to pass, but don’t think people will support it, then they just pretend that Obama and global corporations are not negotiating a trade deal for 1/3 of the world’s economy in secret. (You only heard about because activists made it an issue, Bernie picked up on it, and Trump stole it.)
They covered Trump far more than Hillary and they covered Hillary far more than Bernie, and the other candidates we barely covered at all, except to blame them for Hillary’s loss.
We used to have shows like the Twighlight Zone, or Kung Fu, that were morality tales designed to get people to question their assumptions and their selfishness. Now greed is good, and the news is mostly a bunch of experts in nothing (pundits) telling us what to think.
They have created a political “center,” that most people don’t actually believe in. That is why the country is polarized. The real middle is invisible, and the people they want to vote for are described as “not viable,” or “crazy.”
News was already mostly fake, and alt news is worse.
And who’s moral rot is it? It’s the rot of American society. It’s the rot of tens of millions of our people. Trump didn’t create them. He legitimized them. He opened the door they were standing behind and let them out into public view.
Trump’s dishonesty is their dishonesty. Trumps hatred is their hatred. Trump’s isolationism is their isolationism.
How else can we explain the war on science, the war on higher education, the war on women, the surging popularity of reality TV, the decline of artistry and originality of popular music, the decline of classical everything, the war on the humanities, and worst of all, the war on the truth.
Truth speaks to character. Truth speaks to integrity. Truth speaks to honor. Trump has trashed all three. Trump just tells people what they want to hear. He feeds their hate and fear. He feeds their desire for power, primarily white power. Serving those needs supplants the truth. Satisfying their deep seated urges becomes their truth, their reality.
That’s the source of Trump’s power. He has help. With Facebook providing an input of lies and group think, and Fox News pushing the Trump alternate reality 24/7, a massive amount of brainwashing propaganda seals the deal.
Society is a fragile thing. It hinges upon social cooperation and respect for others. Trump has destroyed that. His world is, I want, I take. How I take doesn’t matter. That’s Trump’s America.