Something Came Up That Reminded Me Of This Post From 2011

 
Saturday, April 16, 2011
 

The Randians At Play With Their Model Trains [Anthony McCarthy]

I'd better admit that I've been taking quite a good deal of pleasure reading the bad reviews of the movie made out of Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand's novel. And some of them have been among the worst reviews I've read recently. I should also admit that I didn't read Atlas, having struggled with her prose and her bizarrely demented thinking fully developed in her earlier The Fountainhead. I'd been aware of some of her other writing, skimming some of the shorter stuff, maybe looking at some of the rest of it but nothing there changed the original impression that she was a crackpot* and one with a psychotic mean streak. Wait, change that, it wasn't a mean streak, it was a deluge of pathological hate, anger and resentment.

That she developed one of the stranger and more dangerous political-"philosophical" cults going is what's primarily interesting about Ayn Rand and her similarly cracked followers. Having given people who are emotionally arrested at the state between infantile generosity and when they have mastered their selfishness enough to relearn sharing, was a sure fire formula for that kind of movement. The worst of it has been those who gained political power, Alan Greenspan, Paul Ryan, and her true believers in the media have deformed our politics from our idealistic democratic beliefs to the predominant faith of our establishment. Since the Republican Party has handed economic policy to Ryan, we have every right to say that Ayn Rand is the foundation on which they intend to build. Rand was Lyndon LaRouche with influence.

For anyone who hasn't heard, one of the bases of Randian faith is that only the private sector is able to produce anything good, that anything that is done by the government is bad. That is one of the things about the reviews of Atlas Shrugged that has given me the most pleasure. For anyone who doubts that Rand was totally nuts and not especially intelligent, she chose a make believe, would be railroad baron as her hero to demonstrate the evil of good intentions, the folly of democracy and the virtue of selfishness.

Anyone who has ever looked at transportation as a part of human technology and history will be struck by one thing, there has never been a form of transportation that hasn't absolutely depended on government support. Shipping required protection from pirates, beacons to mark dangerous obstructions, direct subsidies to mercantile efforts, the construction and maintenance  of ports. Roads are built with government subsidies, often through the labor of people held in servitude by the government, often on the basis of government appropriation of private property, etc. The history of the railroads have been a history of even stronger involvement by governments, often depending on the corrupt subsidies from bought off legislatures, executives and courts. In the United States, the irrationality of much of the rail infrastructure is directly due to that history of corruption by private capital of the government. Air travel would die without massive support from the government.

If anyone wanted to choose a worse example to spin a Randian fantasy around, it would be hard to think of one. Yet Ayn Rand, who some of her devotees believe is the most brilliant human being to have ever lived, built her proof on the one industry that most definitively refutes her credo.

In reading around about it I have been reminded that Rand credited a number of inspirations for her writing, including Hugo and Dostoyevsky. I have also read that she credited a number of classical philosophers as antecedents, though I'm also aware that philosophers who have specialized in some of them doubt she ever understood them. I have to say that reading the plot of her book and the movie, I didn't think of anything but the little remembered British film The Titfield Thunderbolt, which was made four years before Atlas was published. Though, if she did depend on that rather charmingly silly movie, it would also be ironic because it is all about the virtues of cooperative action to save a tiny rail line from the predations of the bus industry.

That Rand seemed to have missed that it was the titans of the auto industry, the interstate highway system built by the federal government at the behest of the military-industrial complex and other competing industries that made her book ridiculously anachronistic even as she was writing it, only adds to the hilarity. But when you're the greatest genius in the history of the universe, an example of the most Uber of Supermen, you don't need to notice that vulgar little thing called reality. Alan Greenspan didn't have much use for it either.

* Anyone who might dispute that Rand was psychotic should look up her adoration for William Hickman, a man whose greatest claim to anyone's attention was his brutal rape and murder of a 12-year-old girl, whose dismembered body he sent in pieces to the authorities. Of course she would see him as a great example of the Nietzschean superman. As is always the case with the people impressed by that other nutcase, perversity impresses. If anyone who has looked at that could still think there was anything positive about that cesspool of psychosis they should be watched, carefully. This is an aspect of the thinking that is regularly promoted by our media and one of our political parties as worth considering. Withholding judgement on the basis of alleged philosophical foundations only makes us complicit.

Field Invasion? Neo-Nazi Name Says What?

HAD ANOTHER SLIP ON THE ICE and fractured a bone and and re-tore my rotator cuff that I tore about thirteen years ago, funny how I couldn't exactly remember that event until my shoulder reminded me of it, so much for "brain only" nonsense.  Odd how I don't seem to remember to put on my crampons, even after that.

In the deep dive into unread comments I find this from the neo-Nazi who trolls me.

Vandiemenlander commented on "Keeping Track Of Who Credentialed The Criminals"
2 days ago
Isn't it funny a misogynist like Trump was the president to stand up for woman athletes not having their fields and courts intruded upon by men with odd sexual fetishes?

You guys must like the GOP being in charge because if you keep acting like Trump's position is the fringe, minority one.

OK, I'll argue it in your terms of numbers because arguing on abstract principle when it's a real matter of real life actually distorts things to the detriment of equality and justice. 

It was a few weeks back when the Republican ex-governor of Massachusetts, Charlie Baker present head of the NCAA was asked how many female trans-athletes there were in college athletics and he said fewer than ten.  Republican-fascist politics and media run off of the hate and fear of their ignorant suckers, the theme I've been featuring lately.  Whipping the ignorant and gullible into voting against their interests through the fascist media, led by that sub sewer source, FOX Lies on entirely imaginary crises such as "DEI" "caravans" etc.   It's generally something dreamed up in what I am certain is a soc-sci-media-pro operation to find out how to lie about whatever minority group to the greatest media and electoral effect and it works for them over and over again until their real goals cause a total collapse as they did during Trump I, during Bush II, Bush I and before that in reaction to Watergate.   See my many posts on the disaster "free speech-press" has been for egalitarian democracy and moral decency.

Anyone who reads me knows that I don't have a particularly high opinion of organized sports - they violate several of the most important Commandments of Christ, the Golden Rule first and foremost - and are generally anti-intellectual and are inherently mean spirited.   like a number of the arts and other pass-times, they are generally not terribly important, certainly not in terms of the public good.  I certainly am opposed to sports as a profit-making racket, of which college sports is one of the more corrupt ones to the ruination of American education.  

As a public and political issue,  I don't think that the very, very few trans-people whose major presence in public life is their wanting to participate in Womens' sports comprise a major issue for LGBTQ+ People in our many millions anymore than I would mistake the millionaire pro athletes of Color as representative of the most important interests of the generally subjugated and discriminated against members of those groups in their many millions.   Or the larger but still small numbers of Women and minority groups who have, comparatively, "made it" in our anti-egalitarian country and who make common cause with the oppressors of Women and minority groups out of their personal, financial interest.  I was never especially interested in the issue of such high climbers reaching the tops of corporations because the many, many thousands and millions who wouldn't even get close to a promotion or a living wage is what's really important.  Guess what, they don't, once they achieve board-member or CEO status do much if anything for Women or minority members in general.   The rich are like that.   Something that you'd think poor-white men would have realized by now if they weren't distracted by the distractions of racism and misogyny that they're fed by the corporate media.

The NCAA, being a generally conservative group of financially interested opportunists feeding off of the bodies of young athletes in what is supposed to be an educational system have caved to Trumpzi-Republican-fascist pressure in regard to the fewer than ten college atheletes that Charlie Baker was questioned about.  If they thought it was in their interest they'd go back to 1910s era racial discrimination as their policy, though the pro-sports industry they service would probably think that would be unprofitable for them.  I AM NOT, BY THE WAY, HOLDING MY BREATH THAT NFL PLAYERS OF COLOR AND THEIR WHITE ALLIES WILL BE PROTESTING THE NFL FOLDING TO TRUMP ON ENDING RACISM ON THE FIELD IN FRONT OF THE TV CAMERAS during America's pagan high holy day.  If those millionaires surprise me, I'll be the first to say I was wrong. 

I, of course, support Trans-rights as I do the rights of any other beleaguered minority group but I am a realist, a realist who knows not every worthy fight is worth the cost of fighting it.   Compared to the issue of Transwomen, especially Transwomen of Color being victims of one of the highest murder rates in the country,  fewer than ten Transwomen who want to play college sports, an entirely voluntary participation in what is at best a pass-time, is not worth expending political resources on.  Imagine it's a checkers tournament instead of a field-sport and you'll see what I mean, and I like playing checkers.  It's like those stupid and costly annual brawls over erecting manger scenes on public property which were of minor interest to a few non-Christians AND THE LEGAL INDUSTRY THAT PROFITED OFF OF IT BEING AN ISSUE but which wasn't worth a comma in the text of a law advancing equality for those of minority religious beliefs. 

As for Trump, he has exactly two uses for women.  Either they have lots of money like the putrid Linda McMahon or the even more putrid Miriam Adelson and, the complete transactional operator he is, he wants some of it, or he wants sex from them.  That's it, including, by his own Freudian revelation, his own daughter.   His attitude towards Women is known by his own words and actions,  in the infamous Access Hollywood bragging about his sex crimes against Women to the sexual assault he is fully adjudicated as having committed against a Woman he repeatedly slanders, a women he mistook on the stand as his second wife under oath. 

I am beginning to warm to the study of your repeated neo-Nazi, stupid-Hitler worshiping ravings by a college-credentialed,  I would bet, college employed nut-case.  I am fascinated by how, under our athletics led university and college system, such detachment from reality flourishes right within the employees of it.   Perhaps when my shoulder heals I'll be able to do the research and writing.

Simps Earns His Nickname Yet Again

IT'S REMARKABLE HOW with the largest percentage of the U.S. population holding college degrees how a functional illiterate could have had a career in magazine "journalism."   It's especially amusing when you consider his job as a typelr of "criticism" consisted of him making believe that pop music was more important than it is misrepresenting my rather mild critique of one Randy Newman song that, considering his own identification of the source of his topic in the lyrics, had to leave important information out.  His own use of stereotype in the song is an attribution of ignorance to the very thing he was writing about.  I would bet money that if it were possible to count them, that the number of Lester Maddox supporters who were converted to the cause of equality, legitimate democracy and justice by even a Randy Newman song would approximately be zero.   And Newman was among the best working in that vein.  Like those idiot secular liberals who bought and praised VD Vance's Hillbilly Elegy, turning that carney con man into what passes as a man of significance,  it was all about them feeling smug and superior about themselves, all along.

Update:  I wasn't going to go on with this but Simps in his simplicity volunteered to prove his illiteracy and inability to understand the simplest of lines of thought. 

Re-read the last sentence after reading Simp's comment below.  I'm sure my regular readers will see what I mean as Simps and whatever eejits of Eschaton who might possibly come here to see what Simps, no doubt, says about me there probably won't get it. 

Keeping Track Of Who Credentialed The Criminals

 

Mark Paoletta, the advocate of law-breaking  "legal councel at OMB mentioned by Senator Whitehouse in his opposition to the nomination of Heritage Foundation thug, Russ Vought is a product of Georgetown Law and Duquesne.

Russ Vought, the law breaking OMB nominee is a product of George Washington Law School and Wheaton College. 

THE MOST CRIMINAL TREASURY secretary in history, the man who let Elon Musk have access to your Social Security account, Scott Bessent, is a product of Yale. 

Lets Get One Thing Absolutely Straight

ANYONE IN THE MEDIA, in politics, in any sector who is trying to minimize what Trump said about the economic boon he wants to get from genocide in Gaza is committing the kind of crimes that were successfully prosecuted in the Nuremberg trials and for which Nazis were executed or given prison terms for.  Julius Streicher comes to mind.  Any network that employs such genocide enthusiasts and enablers are guilty of crimes against humanity.   CNN is only one such network that has regulars on who do things like that.   Keeping him on after this should be considered an endorsement of what he says.

What Trump did in saying that was confirming what the opponents of Israel's genocide in Gaza have been saying for more than a year and that includes them noting his son-in-law, the Kushner crime family figure married to Trump's daughter is in on the Lebensraum deal.  

This is Nazism by Americans in 2025 and there is no other honest name for it.  

I Got The Feeling

 that Netanyahu was upset that Trump said the silent part out loud when he presented the Lebensraum program of the Israeli government, no doubt Trump's criminal son-in-law and daughter, the genocide in Gaza and its planned redevelopment as a sea-side luxury vacation destination was a part of Israel's genocide in Gaza.

We have stupid-Hitler as president, that statement alone proves that.  One with all of the power stupidly and cravenly given to the American presidency through acts of Congress giving up its powers to the executive branch, though the ever foolish and corrupt Supreme Court, especially the Roberts Court turning the presidency into a criminal racket above the law and, lest it be said, the idiocy of the presidential system and the mythological means of impeachment and conviction removing even the worst and most incompetent of them before their term is over.   We have seen the Supreme Court even removing any liability from one who sought to overturn an election that removed him by nullifying the 14th Amendment. 

Stupid King Trump is a product of the college-credentialed elite laying the ground for him coming to power, in the legal racket, in the political realm, certainly in the thing that created and elevated him, the goddamned free press in its modern form.  And now it's clear what those "best and brightest" gave us this time is stupid-Hitler instead of the Vietnam quagmire. 

-------

Black players in the NFL along with other players who want to end racism could turn the NFL's racist accommodation of stupid-Hitler with a boycott of secular America's foremost religious rite or a massive demonstration of knee-taking, they should coerce most if not all of the players to do it.   They couldn't play the game without Black bodies doing it.   I think that they could but I'm not holding my breath thinking something like that is going to happen.

Let's Keep Track Of Who Credentialed The Criminals

THE MOST CRIMINAL TREASURY secretary in history, the man who let Elon Musk have access to your Social Security account, Scott Bessent, is a product of Yale. 

So Much Shit So Many Fans

ALL OF THE MUSK-TRUMP CRIMES are a direct result of the Supreme Court, especially the Roberts Court, making blatant evil and actual betrayal of the American People legal for Republican-fascist presidents to do.   They were warned what would happen if they ruled the way they did in the line of cases from Buckley v Valeo to Citizens United and beyond and they ruled that way anyway and what was predicted to happen has happened.  "More speech" didn't protect us from the corrupt presidents that appointed Thomas, Alito, Roberts, Goresuch, Kavanaugh, Coney-Barrett or such predecessors to them as O'Connor, Rehnquist and Kennedy, "more speech" didn't protect us from the lies that were spread in the media to get Republican-fascists elected who confirmed them in the Senate.  No matter how you analyze how we got here, it all started with the Supreme Court creating a "right to lie" out of the language of the First Amendment, an Amendment created under the reluctant parentage of James Madison who had to be forced into promising that there would be a so-called Bill of Rights added to the Constitution he was trying to convince the Virginia legislature into adopting so it would become the supreme law of the land.  That it is so vague, inspecific and sloppily written so as to allow "justices" as daffy as the ones who, first, created that "right to lie" and hand a weapon to those corrupt enough to overturn the clean election legislation passed after the Watergate crimes of Nixon (the first presidential beneficiary of that "right to lie") and the Roberts Court to blatantly legalize billionaires, foreign dictators ones and domestic ones and massively publicly funded-ketamine taking ones buying the presidency and the Congress proves how really, really bad the First Amendment is.  

It proves what happens when you don't specify such plain truths such as that there is no such a thing as a right to lie, not even for those possessors of rights, living human beings and what happens when your vague, ill chosen language fails to distinguish that the artificial entities, "the press," the media, organizations not only have no right to lie but they don't possess rights, only, perhaps, privileges which are not inalienable and are never intelligently given without mandatory obligations to serve egalitarian democracy and the right of The People to a legitimate government.   Madison et al were not terribly enthusiastic about having any bill of rights during the Constitutional Convention and they were certainly not going to have one that would enshrine equality under the law, most of all not to those they profited from holding in slavery.   I think the dishonesty that was used to peddle the Constitution to a skeptical public - and its adoption was about as shady a political operation as any in later periods of history - would provide a motive for those who want to know why the First Amendment was worded so vaguely and, as it really has turned out, dangerously.   Madison's increasing bitterness and disillusion with the Constitutional order as he saw those two white-man "revolutions" the Jeffersonian one he participated in and the Jacksonian one - Madison being the last of the framers to die - proves he was never much of a democrat.   His treatment of those he enslaved should have confirmed that, even without that.  

----------------------

The ongoing inadequacy of the response of the Democratic leaders in the House an Senate to the Constitutional putsch by Elon Musk and his boy, Trump , the longing for a reestablishment of such Constitutional order as Merrick Garland pretended was in place, even such a clear-eyed observer as Nancy Pelosi thinking that the old, pre-Gingrich Republican Party can rise three decades from the dead proves how unwilling they are to face the fact that all of that is dead, murdered by Supreme Court interpretation of the Bill of Rights and other provisions of the Constitution, permitting, encouraging really, election corruption,  nullifying that part of the 14th Amendment that is as much a part of the Constitution as the goddamned Bill of Rights and the First Article which seems to have never much been in effect in the modern period.  As I pointed out the other day, once Supreme Court "justices" have blazed trails to fascism in the lore of the Constitution, the only way to lose those roads, which in the use by corporate lawyers in courts become superhighways,  is to drastically change both the words of the Constitution and to once and for all correct a defect, as well innovated by the Supreme Court, the Marbury power grab that is responsible for everything from the Dred Scott decision to Buckley v Valeo, Citizens United, and the Court nullification of the 14th Amendment which would have kept the insurrectionist Trump out of a second term.  

American democracy, equality, the only basis of legitimate government has fallen by Supreme Court rulings made under that power which Louis Boudin correctly said meant the Constitution means only what the incumbent Court says it means at any given time  He called it government by nine conservative black-robed men, not of laws.  And the history of the United States from 1803 on proves that they seldom mean anything good when they use that usurped power.   Even when they think they're doing the opposite to produce good, as the Warren Court did, they prove to be rather naive as to what they're producing.  The concurrence of even "justice" Jackson on the nullification of the 14th Amendment shows how the corruption of Marbury pervades and saturates the folklore which is the actual character of Constitutional scholarship.  Anyone who believes you can count on the best, most meticulous of legislative records and the good and wise intentions of such ELECTED OFFICIALS as wrote the 14th Amendment to right even the most obvious wrongs with the Constitutional order - THEY WERE ADDRESSING THE TREASON OF THE CONFEDERACY AND THE WORST WAR IN OUR HISTORY, FOR FUCKSAKE - hasn't taken into account the treachery and stupidity of the UNELECTED "justices" and the kind of casuistry that they teach at Harvard, Yale and Princeton law.  

I think Musk and his crime gang have probably stolen more at treasury than we're ever going to find out short of an honest government getting their hands on everything they have and are probably in the process of selling or trading with China and Russia.   You shouldn't bet against the Supreme Court preventing such a revelation of criminality by fascist white Republican men.  You're going to need every penny, if they haven't abolished pennies by then.   And there was not a thing in the goddamned Constitutional order or law or "institutionalism" that did a goddamned thing to keep them from doing it.  And that's only one of the shit spewing fans that the Heritage Foundation crime gang - many of them licensed lawyers - are flooding the zone with.   The goddamned media are in collusion with them, CBS negotiating a bribe in exchange for a merger, only one of the reasons for that.  Which is the stupidity of the inadequacy of the First Amendment in action, too. 

We can't go back to how it was even when Joe Biden was presiding over one of the most competent and honest presidencies in our history a short few weeks ago.  What that rested on wasn't the goddamend Constitution, it rested on the decency and good will of Joe Biden and his administration - the weak link in that being the lawyer-staffed Department of "justice" under that great, cowardly, foolish "institutionalist," Garland.   All of that is gone, anyone who is unwilling to face that is unwilling to face the fact that even Biden's morality and law-based good-governance under the goddamned Constitution as twisted and modified by the Roberts and earlier courts, making that work for the American People failed to protect us from Trump and Republican-fascism.   Wanting to go back to what was there before and, by the way, is still there now, is to ask to repeat our most recent history expecting it to turn out better.   IT WON'T, IT'S LITERAL INSANITY TO EXPECT IT CAN.  If you try that it will get you about what it got when Obama had two terms and Clinton did, as well.  Brief intervals of good government in the midst of developing Republican fascism has been what American history has been since Nixon won with the Sullivan Decision permission for the mass media to lie him into office in 1968 and to keep him there in1972 as he ran against one of the most decent men to have ever gotten a presidential nomination.  

If Sullivan and others in  in that line of corruption permitting decisions that brought us here aren't overturned and permanently shut off from the cleverness of Supreme Courts (they're mostly just doing what lawyers do, working for those with the deepest pockets), if the power to overturn duly adopted laws and to even nullify the Constitution isn't overtly, decisively and permanently stripped from that Court, we're only going to see them do it again and faster this time because the language doing that has already been articulated and is a part of the Ivy League legal lore. 

We've had successful white-male revolutions, which I talked about yesterday, the Courts have pretty well thwarted the ones for People of Color and Women, they've been doing that since those white-male revolutions.  The Constitutional order has kept that grinding inequality in place, it hasn't even provided economic justice for most white men who have been distracted and corrupted by racism and sexism, YET AGAIN, in electing Trump.  I've laid it out, where the corruption in the Constitution is and why it is there.  As a former slave pointed out during the Civil War, he and other Black People had been held in slavery under the Constitution since its adoption, he wasn't terribly impressed with the idea of fighting to preserve it.  I hold that given the real history of the Constitution and what it permits - the ongoing Musk-Trump crime spree included - we have less reason to want it to remain in its current form than ever before.   That history of failure to provide good or even legitimate government, failure unintended, Court instituted and intended by the slavers and financiers who wrote it, is the thing which the best thing about America, the struggle for equality and justice and economic justice has had to struggle against.   Every massive boulder which generations of struggle push up hill can be pushed back down by a five to four decision by the Court, even the most blatantly necessary protections against traitors and insurrectionists can be swept aside.  We can't go on this way.

The Elite Playing Of Racism Among Poor Whites As An Essential Part Of Black History

I STARTED WRITING a piece on the Randy Newman song lyrics posted by the always relevant RMJ yesterday, the 1970 song Rednecks, about the relationship of perceived regional snobbery and resentment and white supremacy.  I started writing one and it got really, really long.  Why?   Like most Randy Newman songs it makes some relevant points and like all such topical songs, it overgeneralizes and leaves things out.   That's inevitable when you are using archetypes in song lyrics or a full blown novel.  That happens even when you try to avoid them turning to stereotypes and even when you, as Newman clearly does, has some sympathy with those he's opposing in the songs he writes.  That's one of the downsides of writing topical material.  

But you can't talk about the history of discrimination and inequality, segregation, oppression, enslavement and murder without dealing with the motives of those who did that and those who may oppose them but who don't mount an effective opposition to it.  You can't deal with an oppressive history without understanding what put it in power and what keeps it in place.  And white supremacy is, in fact, the major force for evil in American history and America's present.   And it has been promoted and encouraged and kept in place by those who benefit the most from all of that, the rich, the white, the male and those in their families and their economic class. 

I'm interested in poor whites who don't follow those archetypes, the ones who don't need to be won over because they are already on the side of equality and democracy and who are, despite what such artificial entities as state lines and the goddamned Electoral College would lead you to believe, are an important percentage of those put in that group.  I don't recall many topical songs talking about working class white southerners or northerners, for that matter, who favor equality and economic justice on the basis of morality, the Golden Rule, Matthew 25: 31-46, the radical egalitarian commandments of the Old Testament, etc.  Or those whose for whom the vestiges of that heritage are still held under the erosion of secularism.  

But even as I say that I know that in many of the states, not only Southern ones, such poor whites even when voting with Black People and People of color don't constitute a reliable majority, swamped by a combination of upper-class People an poor-whites who are suckered by the kind of regional and class resentments that are whipped up to divide them from their natural allies in the long and most often thwarted struggle for equality.   Some states, Alabama, Mississippi, have never not been governed by a white supremacist government, just about every state, including every one who were on the Union Side during the Civil War was not governed by white supremacy at some point in its history, including Maine, including even Vermont.  I think those very artificial boundaries and entities have more to do with empowering evil in the United States is far more important than is ever discussed.   If we didn't have states and an Electoral College some of our worst presidents would never have come to power, including Rutherford Hayes, George W. Bush and Donald Trump.

The struggle for equality which made the most headway at first was the struggle of white men of the working class and lower in the early years of the 19th century.   The Jeffersonian Revolution of 1800 that swept aside the Federalists - who were, for the most part, anti-democracy - was, itself, swept aside by the "Jacksonian Revolution" three decades later, though those early movements for equality pulled up the ladders lest others climb them.  Jackson was a likely candidate for a predecessor of Trump, who had someone tell him he should hang his picture up, no doubt as a figurehead of white criminal racism in the presidency.  

Once there was supremacy for a larger number of white men, including those who had been excluded from voting by not owning property, it proved easier for the elites to divide and conquer.   White men and their families may have had some marginal benefit from it but they were always in danger of falling through misfortune, through being cheated and swindled, through just being not very smart or, even if smart, being ill-educated.  It was the genius of the elites, especially the richest class in the world at the time, the plantation owner-economic elite of the South and their Northern allies, that they were able to encourage poor white men and women to hate those who had no actual power to keep them oppressed, pretty much the same thing that the "free press" did after the very, very brief period of the late 1960s and earliest 70s devolved into vulgar and pornographic shock jock humor and worse.   Entertainment has always had a big hand in that divide and conquer program and it still does.  Hollywood has been the greatest force in that in our history, matched only later by cabloid TV and now the hate-filled internet.  

So much of the struggle for equality by Black People, other People of Color and others has had to deal with the margin of white supremacists among those who economics and politics should make their most natural allies.   I don't think you can make much progress until you address that.   The first and probably most productive way to do that is though alliances with those poor whites who favor equality and economic justice and there doesn't seem to be much of a hope of the organizational foundation of that coming from the college-credentialed white elite, such as are represented in the intro section of Newman's song.  When I started thinking about this I thought if he didn't have All In The Family in mind when he wrote it, he had something very much like that in mind.  It turns out that he referred to Lester Maddox's appearance on Dick Cavett's show, a Nebraskan Protestant who I doubt any angry Georgian would have mistaken as a "smart-ass New York Jew."  I don't think any such movement is likely to come from any media figure, they have too much investment into using stereotypes and manipulating their audiences.  

I think it's most likely to come from the churches, to tell you the truth.  The ones who are in place, already.   The old line about Sunday morning being the most segregated hours of the week was probably far from accurate when it was said and is certainly less accurate now, though that would depend on congregation and denomination.   

We've got to do something different than we've been doing.  I can appreciate Randy Newman's analysis of things, Lester Maddox was many things evil but stupid wasn't one of them.   He got elected to office and exercised power such as Dick Cavett or the writers of All In The Family never did.  They didn't seem to get that even in New York, the Archie Bunkers exercised more power than they and their guys ever did. 

Remember All Of This Is Happening Under The U.S. Constitution And The "Rule Of Law"

 such as those really are in real life.

We are at the stage of fascist takeover where the values slogans of even the Nancy Pelosis and Joe Bidens aren't going to help.  The "institutionalism" that was peddled by the virtuous lawyers of MSNBC have been pushed into the Patomac and drowned.   It proved to be not much use in the past four years.   This is the greatest crisis in American democracy in its history, worse than in 1861 BECAUSE THEN IT WAS THE PRESIDENT AND THE CONGRESS WHO WERE ON THE SIDE OF DEMOCRACY AND THIS TIME THEY ARE ALL IN ON THE NATIVE FASCISM THAT THE CONFEDERACY CHAMPIONED.  

This time the traitors ARE THE CONSTITUTIONAL ORDER, THOSE DEFINING "THE RULE OF LAW."   

Lincoln could use the Federal government to fight against white supremacist government and treason, they've got control of the federal government this time.  Just as they have for the entire antebellum period, during the long Jim Crow period and ever since Republican-fascism has been resurgent in the backlash against the long struggle for equality and economic justice in the brief period in which that made some headway.  

This is the worst it's been since at least the lowest period before 1861 and I hold it's arguably worse because they're stealing everything as they destroy democracy.   And they've got the entire federal government now, especially the Roberts Court.

We MUST All Observe Black History Month Because It Contains So Much Of What Is Best About America

AND BECAUSE TRUMP'S regime is trying to suppress that history. 

So I will go back over posts from a project I did a number of years ago dealing with the history of abolitionism starting tomorrow.   I hadn't planned on that before just now, reading about the Trump regime's order banning that history so I need to go back to review and revise and add to those posts.    

The history of he struggle of People of Color and Women and LGBTQ+ and Disabled People and Poor People and everyone else who are subjugated and oppressed for equality is the best thing about us.   Only those who love the worst about America want to suppress that, most of all our indigenous fascists, the white supremacists who dominate the Republican Party and the corporate media. 

Elections Bought By Musk and Thiel Are A Direct Result Of The Supreme Court's

First Amendment rulings since 1964.   Elections are won through what the media puts out and our media puts out lies and slanted information based on who owns the media and the interests of the rich men and a few women who own the media and finance it through advertising.  The rich having ever so much more money than the poor and middle classes, their lies and slanting dominates the biggest and most politically effective media.  There's nothing complicated or mysterious about that, though the Ivy League product on the Supreme Court pretends it isn't entirely obvious and one of the most salient factor in American life and politics.

Franklin warned that experience keeps a hard school but a fool will learn in no other one.  He was right but it's hardly enough.  It is a hard fact of American politics, that the media has the power to overcome even the hardest of even lived experience.  That the Covid 19 criminal insanity and idiocy of Trump I didn't bury his political aspirations forever is a product of the American media lying for him during the catastrophe and lying for him after, during his nonfeasance , malfeasance and misfeasance which were the entire substance of his first regime.   

Even his completely catastrophic economic shit show, what the media and its owners care about more than anything MORE THAN UP TO A MILLION UNNECESSARY DEATHS OF AMERICANS NOT FIVE YEARS AGO didn't force them to tell the truth about Trump's disasters.  And worse, as Joe Biden did literally the best job in the world of recovering from Trump's disasters, they sandbagged him and undercut him and lied and lied and lied about him and his team of perhaps the most competent appointments in recent history - and I do make an exception of Merrick Garland in that - to pave the way for Trump II EVEN AS TRUMP ANNOUNCED HIS INTENTION OF BEING A CORRUPT DICTATOR WHICH HE IS PUTTING IN PLACE AS THE MASS MEDIA LIES TO SUPPORT HIM IN THAT. 

That is all a result of the Supreme Court, from the Sullivan decision of Earl Warren's time, when the remote priests of the Supreme Court got addicted to setting up would-be progressive milestones of "freedom" in permitting the New York Times and the rest of the media to lie with total impunity when it came to politicians and other public figures, to the Burger Court's Buckley v Valeo, and the even more blatant First Amendment enabling of political corruption and election corruption by overturning the clean elections laws passed by the Congress AFTER WITNESSING AND EXPERIENCING THE CRIMES OF THE NIXON YEARS,  Nixon having been a direct beneficiary of that first, the Sullivan Decision, and onward in the parade of increasingly corrupt and incompetent and bungling Republican administrations, its magnification through the Gingrichization of the Congressional Republicans, through further Supreme Court decisions, the Roberts Court's Citizens United expansion of the line of Sullivan and Buckley v Valeo, announcing that American elections were on the market for billionaires such as Musk and Thiel, and before them the likes of the Mercers and Kochs to buy themselves the Congress, the presidency and through such dark money groups as Leonard Leo runs, the Supreme Court.

I have been a life long student of politics and a news junkie and there is literally nothing clearer about American politics of my lifetime than that analysis of how things went to shit in America.  And I will bet you if I or someone brought that case with full documentation to even the three non-bought, Democratic appointees to the Supreme Court they would literally be as clueless as to its meaning as the aged member of the Brit aristocracy who didn't know how to put toothpaste on his tooth brush, his valet hospitalized having done that his entire life before him.  Such is the power of the lore of "Constitutional scholarship" to blind even those who are somewhat willing to see what's right there before them FOR DECADES. 

And all of that flows from the sloppy, nonspecific, and incomplete wording of the First Amendment of the Constitution as it was molded and modified, especially by first the rather stupid liberalization of the Warren Court and then far less attractive aspirations of further courts, partly through a stupidly and falsely virtuous building on those Warren Court aspirations to - and they really are this politically stupid - "enhance freedom."   Even the "liberal justices" went along the more obvious motives of other "justices" to enable exactly the buying of elections on behalf of a party which was increasingly addicted to the financing of millionaires and billionaires.   That motive BEFORE THE ROBERTS COURT CONGEALED IT INTO ITS CURRENT FORM was most blatantly expressed in the Court's Bush v Gore decision, in effect five Republicans on that court choosing to put George W. Bush in office, though he'd lost the election, one of them, Sandra Day O'Connor, having expressed displeasure over Gore winning the election because she wanted to retire and didn't want a Democrat to choose her successor.  

That the Constitution didn't and still doesn't expressly prohibit the goddamned Supreme Court from stealing an election on behalf of the party of its majority is a damning indictment of the document. 

But now that the Supreme Court has made those previously uncut trails to corruption and dictatorship through the already far less the pristine virgin forest of the First Amendment, the only way to shut down that road to dictatorship is to change the wording of that stupidly inadequate text.   It has to be blatantly set out that "free speech - free press" does not include that oxymoron of secular legalism a "right to lie."   It has to include language that the press is an artificial, human creation and has no rights, those only adhering to natural living creatures but that it may have permission to tell the truth and operate for the public good but not the public damage.  It has to be made plain that media and speech which attack or damage equality and democracy can be acted against civilly in ways that prevent the media from damaging equality and democracy.   That has to be done because it is the story of American history that millions of Americans have been denied the most basic of rights on the basis of lies and, especially, lies spread by the media, including "entertainment" media.  

We have a number of rights under a democratic government, as they say in Canada, speech is a right but it's not the only right.  One of the most interesting of those rights but one which the legal scholars and Supreme Court "justices" don't seem to have much interest in at all is the right all of us have to being governed by a LEGITIMATE government.   There is no truly legitimate government which has been devised by human ingenuity except egalitarian democracy, and within that realm of legitimacy must come the admission that even an egalitarian democracy is a product of human aspiration and human trying and with that comes the susceptibility to human error.   We have a right to a far, far better government than the one which our Constitution has given us, certainly People of Color, Women, LGBTQ+, etc. have suffered terribly under the United States Constitution, the only good things in our history are the story of the struggles to right what has been wrong under that document AND THE SO-CALLED BILL OF RIGHTS throughout our history.   The very framers of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights were some of the worst oppressors of People of Color and Women, the oppression of both groups has been the law of the land for almost all of American history, under the Constitution, under the rule of law under that Constitution, the few hiccups in that under random Court rulings have been only temporary as the history of the history of the Rehnquist and, most of all Roberts Court have proved in their headlong return to Jim Crow and motel-room abortions and the most florid period of corrupt, bought government since the previous periods punctuated by a brief period immediately after Lincoln,* immediately after the Republican crash and the FDR years and the brief period after the now dead Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts were in effect.  There was, in truth, no such a thing as legitimate government without the voting of Women and People of Color, there is no such a thing as legitimate government through most of American history which we have fast returned to under the regime of First Amendment permitting lying by hate-talk media as championed by that group you are unhappy with me telling the truth about, the goddamned ACLU.  

By the very terms set out in the preamble to the Constitution - the aspirations of the Declaration of Independence having been set aside by our slave-holding, financier aristocrat-framers - the American Constitution has now failed catastrophically in the Supreme Court aided return of Trump, this time as the dictator he promised he would be.   The Republican partisanship, the servicing of the billionaires who put them on the Court matter to the corrupt Roberts six more than anything about even an effective or mildly beneficial government.  The diseased Clarence Thomas and Alito are interesting cases in pathology but it's the genteel Virginia white supremacy of Roberts that has interested me most right now.  I think in his articulate and somewhat hesitant support of the most blatant of corruption, his desire to present an attractive fascade even in the face of the crudeness of the rest of his coalition of Republican-fascists on the court might give us some insight into how those corruptions baked into the Constitution by the framers, Adams, Madison, Hamilton, Ellsworth, etc. were shit presented in the form of an heroic monument.   

I've also become more interested in something I read from Louis Boudin in his discussion of the problem having a written Constitution presents.  He discussed the proud legal erudition of the early "justice" Joseph Story, one of the most learned legal scholars in the history of the Court but one who was wedded to the long history of the English law in the way that the least learned of today's corrupt Court, Alito cited in the government takeover of Women's reproductive systems.  Boudin pointed out that the very provisions of early English law that Story cited to support his American Constitutional decisions had, by the time he cited them, already been discarded in England through the courts and government addressing the defects in those earlier legal holdings.   He said that the flexibility that the unwritten British Constitution allowed was foreign to the legal system under the written Constitution and so a learned "justice" could remain totally clueless as to what was wrong with what they ruled.   In the case of Storey, it lead a putative opponent of slavery to write what was, before Dred Scott, the most infamous pro-slavery, anti-egalitarian and most blatantly unjust rulings of that already blatantly unjust Court in its history, the Prigg decision.   

The reverence we are taught and rotely give to the Constitution, the Bill of Right, the Supreme Court are misplaced and not based on an honest, accurate and informed assessment of their real existence in reality instead of hagiographic lying.   The fact is that slavery, genocide, land theft, the theft of labor, the turning of the bodies of slaves and Women into chattels of white men and the bodies of workers into the chattels of rich white men (Goresuch on companies freezing their employees to death as a term of employment proves that's still ongoing) all of that has existed under the rule of law under the U.S. Constitution.   The corruption of our politics by money and by media lying is permitted under the U.S. Constitution and the idoloized First Amendment is the vehicle under which that corruption is maintained even in the face of bi-partisan attempts to clean up our elections.   The corruption of Trump II, blatantly bought by billionaires and now running the United States government into the ground on behalf of the billionaires who bought it is a direct product of "free speech-press" as it is laid out in the First Amendment as that has been made to mean by Supreme Courts for the past sixty one years.  

You have to be a total idiot to not realize that something is wrong here and that that is what is wrong.  We are required by our civic superstitions to pretend nothing is wrong and what we can see right before our eyes is not happening.  Such is the "civic religion" to use Sandra Day O'Connor's putrid phrase, it would seem to be dependent on the lies it permitted and now promotes.

* Which would lead to a discussion of the Electoral College and other slave-power enhancements baked into our corrupt Constitution.