What Happens When The Oligarchs Turn Back To Democrats To Save Their Asses?

TRUMP-MUSK'S TARIFF STUNT of yesterday has put any attempt to restore things by a future Democratic president (or a Republican one, if Republicans give up fascism, which is unlikely) has put the entire world at an advantage because they can unite to extract reparations from the country that has caused this, the United States.   

And I can't say that, if what I suspect will happen, a world-wide economic depression results, that they wouldn't have justice on their side.

This is a result of the stultification of the collective American mind by American media, by Hollywood, by Republican-fascist control of our educational institutions , by the exploitation of America's indigenous mental debility, racism and sexism and bigotry by the oligarchs to divide and lord it over those who have been stultified.  It's not unlike what happened during the original period of such stultification through popular culture and the media created zeitgeist of the stupid and roaring 20s, Republican rule which led to what I think is likely going to be called The First Great Depression.   

I hope that among those things which the rest of the world imposes on the United States is reigning in the traditional, long-embedded mental debilities which have led the United States into a history of disasters, including the Civil War,  the promotion of racism, bigotry, the love of ignorance and lies, though I think they may simply extract economic reparations - I hope not in the style that Britain and France extracted from Germany after WWI, which were a disaster.  

I would love it if they got us to dump the presidential system for a prime ministerial system, though it would have to be thoroughly explained to Americans who have been maintained in ignorance.   Trump clearly is totally ignorant in that way, he is too typical an example of American stupidity.  

We should start thinking of what happens when Trump-Musk-Vance passes, considering the relief of the world after Bush II and Trump I because I think this time the world isn't going to give the Democrat who is handed the ruins to repair a Nobel Peace Prize or the mere praise they gave Joe Biden, this time they are going to have to do something to make sure this doesn't happen again.  They now know they can't count on the American political system,  even more laughably, its legal system to right things.  Now they know that America isn't safely counted on to do that, not after the past fifty years of watching ever more criminal Republicans then Republican-fascists installed by the media and, after 2000 the Republican dominated Supreme Court.   Our Constitution has failed catastrophically  

An Open Message To The White Supremacist Troll With The Neo-Nazi Moniker Whose Pinafore Got In A Twist When I Praised Tabitha

IF CIS-GENDERED, STRAIGHT WHITE MEN were to experience what you want trans-women of color to be subjected to if ONE person who is described that way commits murder, CIS-GENDERED, STRAIGHT WHITE MEN WOULD BE ANSWERABLE FOR THE CENTURIES OF MURDERS OF WOMEN, cis-gendered straight white Women, Lesbian Women, Trans Women, Asexual Women.   They would further be subjugated and deprived of equality for what they have done to Women and Men of Color, People Of Color of every gender in any description.   If even those cis-gendered, straight white men who commit and support such DAILY OCCURRING  violence and oppression, SO COMMON THAT IT SELDOM MAKES NEWS THAT EVEN A BIGOT LIKE YOU CAN FERRET OUT, if your type could could be separated from those who don't practice or support such casual and deadly violence to be subjected TO THE RULE YOU FAVOR,  YOU AND YOUR FELLOW WHITE SUPREMACIST BIGOTS WOULD BE THE ONES WHINING AND CRYING IT LIKE THE FAFO'S OF SOCIAL MEDIA ARE BAWLING OUT THEIR BUYER'S REMORSE NOW THAT THEY ARE THE ONES GETTING WHAT THEY SUPPORTED FOR MILLIONS OF OTHERS, maybe Tabatha would have something to say about that as, in fact, I would.

Cis-gendered, straight, white men, under your rule, would constitute a dangerous criminal class if they were all made to answer for the innumerable crimes committed by them.  As it is, I confine those I place in that class to the subset you are a member of, white supremacists, which include non-cis-gendered, non-straight, white male supremacists, and also the gay men and fewer lesbians, etc. who are white supremacists.  I even include such as Clarence Thomas and other black Republican-fascists in your klan, so how do you like that.  That's you're crowd.   Any CGSWM or others who favor and practice equality and the respect for the rights of all are not part of it and you have no rights to claim to represent them. 

Your type never has to answer in exactly the way you insist Black Women and others are required to answer for such things WHEN IT HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH THEM.   But you'd wail of the terrible injustice if the same rules you want in place were imposed on you.    Maybe you have to be a radical egalitarian like me to notice when you do that, but now you know that I will notice it.  Perhaps if she notices this she will have something to say about it.   I wouldn't presume to speak for her.  She does that so well, herself.  Maybe if she gives me permission to post your comment that led to this, I will. 

That's part of the equality I want.  And the truth telling. 

The Blind Legal Mania Of The Civil Liberties Industry And Those Who They Gull

 . . . the Pinkness talked.  Not only of the machine entities, but of many others.   Of the insect tribes that piled up over endless centuries huge reserves of food for which they had no need , slaving on an endless treadmill of a blind economic mania. 

Clifford D. Simak, Time Is The Simplest Thing

THE ANTI-DEMOCRATIC SPECTACLE of the degenerate, drug addled, apartheid billionaire Elon Musk overtly putting another bid in on another American election,  trying to buy himself and the party which he bought in a friendly takeover,  Republican-fascists, a court,  AND HE'S BEEN DOING THAT, PROBABLY BREAKING THE LAW IN WISCONSIN, FOR MORE THAN A YEAR AND IN ELECTIONS IN MORE THAN ONE STATE.   And the goddamned legal system has yet to do something to stop him.   Fining the fascist won't do anything because at least on paper he's the richest man in the world and fines won't phase him.   He is almost certainly enriching himself through buying the presidency for Donald Trump through funding lies in the mass media - the entire reason that the billionaires and millionaires and their sleazebag lawyers and assets on the courts and on the U.S. Supreme Court don't want to end this corruption of our elections system.   It's entirely understandable why Republicans in the past and Republican-fascists, now, like dirty elections run on paid-for lies, because they have a higher purpose, to enrich the already rich like Elon Musk.   It's no wonder why the incumbent members of the Republican caucus in Congress and the Republican-fascist majority on the U.S. Supreme Court believe in trickle-down economics - BECAUSE THEY ARE ABOUT THE ONLY CLASS OF PEOPLE THAT ENRICHING THE OBSCENELY RICH EVER MORE BENEFITS.   Which is pretty much a pattern that was early set in the Supreme Court as the slave-holding majority on the early Supreme Courts repeatedly ruled in ways that enhanced the slave-power of which they were members.  John Marshall, the idolized John Marshall of Marbury v Madison fame, the man whose Supreme Court decisions make up an outsized part of the curriculum of those who are indoctrinated into the folklore which is what a legal education is,  was a major slave-holder holding hundreds in slavery as he ruled, repeatedly to enhance the institution that benefited him financially.  

That is their motive.  This is asking what the motive of the ACLU and other "civil liberties" lawyers who support Supreme Court rulings such as Sullivan v NYT which created a "right to lie" and Buckley v. Valeo in which the Supreme Court created out of nothing billions of times more "free speech" for those with more money by declaring the millionaires and billionaires money is "speech", with which they finance those lies the Supreme Court privileged by declaring their telling to constitute "a right" and, in the one that is so relevant to why Elon Musk has bought himself the presidency and may well buy himself the Supreme Court of Wisconsin, in order to, among other things ratfuck Wisconsin elections for the party he effectively owns,*  the Ruling of the Roberts Court in which the Republican-fascist majority on that court KNOWINGLY KNEW THEY OPENED UP AMERICAN ELECTIONS TO AN UNPRECEDENTED LEVEL OF CORRUPTION,** Citizens United.   

Since when I do this if someone falls on the fainting couch it's likely over me slamming the ACLU,  here's the excuse of that "civil liberties" group from their website as to why they supported the Citizens United ruling.  I will break in with comments but I will note that the entire things places the most basic factor in making ANY government, ANY LEGAL SYSTEM legitimate, the vote, behind their irrational and fundamentalist reading of the First Amendment. 

The ACLU and Citizens United

In Citizens United, the Supreme Court ruled that independent political expenditures by corporations and unions are protected under the First Amendment and not subject to restriction by the government. The Court therefore struck down a ban on campaign expenditures by corporations and unions that applied to non-profit corporations like Planned Parenthood and the National Rifle Association, as well as for-profit corporations like General Motors and Microsoft.

That decision has sparked a great deal of controversy. Some see corporations as artificial legal constructs that are not entitled to First Amendment rights. Others see corporations and unions as legitimate participants in public debate whose views can help educate voters as they form their opinions on candidates and issues.

You will notice that the ACLU doesn't address the absolute fact that CORPORATION ARE ARTIFICIAL LEGAL CONSTRUCTS,  THEY ARE NOT PEOPLE, THEY ARE NOT NATURAL, LIVING BEINGS,  they were granted no inherent rights by "nature and nature's god"  they and everything else about them are fictitious entities - as fictitious as the entities that Clifford Simak created in the passage at the top of this post.   Nor do they admit that the purpose of a corporation is for those who have created them to exercise greater power than almost any individual, on their own can wield.  

By pretending that those facts aren't important because "others see corporations and unions as legitimate participants in public debate whose views can help educate voters as they form their opinions on candidates and issues," packs a huge amount of dishonesty into a single sentence.  It's to be remembered that the ACLU are a bunch of lawyers, trained and rehearsed in the kind of lawyerly lying that that profession consists of.   Those "others" who say that are, BY AND LARGE THOSE WHO FAVOR THE POWERFUL AND ALMOST ALWAYS RICH AND THEM HAVING THE ENHANCED POWER THAT IGNORING REALITY HAS GIVEN THEM.   

One of the foremost realities of Citizens United, Buckley v Valeo and other such rulings is that those who oppose unions, when they win elections, work to destroy unions and to destroy their effectiveness by changing laws AND BY MAKING APPOINTMENTS TO THE COURT OF LAWYERS HOSTILE TO THE INTERESTS OF WORKING PEOPLE.     Union leaders who were gulled into supporting such rulings as Buckley v. Valeo or Citizens United may have either been suckered by lawyers or they, themselves, are knowingly supporting rulings that will destroy the very unions who would, then, have a merely theoretical "right" to donate to campaigns for candidates who would be swamped by the far, far deeper pockets of the very corporations and financial interests THEY SO OFTEN LOSE TO.  

As for Planned Parenthood, well, look what happened to Womens' rights to the ownership of their own bodies after that ruling. 

To call the majority of what that campaign money buys, time TO LIE on behalf of the rich and so already powerful to put their lackies and servants and, let's call them what they are, assets into office and onto court benches "education" is cynicism of the type that typifies legal blather. 

IN ORDER FOR SPEECH TO COMPRISE "EDUCATION" IT HAS TO BE FACTUAL, IT HAS TO BE HONEST, LIES CAN NEVER COMPRISE "EDUCATION".    But if you're a lawyer, you don't really care about the truth, you're trained not to, you care about the narrative being sustained and the legal lore being upheld.    If you ever have to wonder how the Supreme Court "justices" lie through their teeth or, in the case of "liberals" who vote against what they purport to believe in, that is how they do it.   As I've mentioned here before, it's how the officially anti-slavery "justice" Joseph Story issued what was, before Dred Scott the most infamous pro-slave-power ruling, the Prigg decision, which said that free Black People could be kidnapped into slavery from Free States under the Constitutional order.  That Constitutional order being whatever those thugs in black robes say it is at any given time 

We understand that the amount of money now being spent on political campaigns has created a growing skepticism in the integrity of our election system that raises serious concerns. We firmly believe, however, that the response to those concerns must be consistent with our constitutional commitment to freedom of speech and association. For that reason, the ACLU does not support campaign finance regulation premised on the notion that the answer to money in politics is to ban political speech.

And, since those who win elections and are appointed to courts and, especially the Supreme Court under the "free speech" theory that the ACLU supports HAVE EVERY INCENTIVE TO KEEP THE CORRUPTION IN PLACE, that will never change, despite the bogus alternatives the ACLU purports to support remaining, perpetually as a theoretical way to insure the integrity of our elections, THE ONLY MECHANISM UNDER WHICH ANY ACTION OF ANY PART OF THE GOVERNMENT, INCLUDING THE COURTS HAVE ANY CLAIM TO LEGITIMACY.    Clearly the lawyers of the ACLU don't much care about the foundational integrity or the legitimacy of what their "free speech" produces so long as, a. the form is kept and, b. they can sucker "free speech-press" supporters into keeping their corporation financed.  

At the same time, we recognize that the escalating cost of political campaigns may make it more difficult for some views to be heard, and that access to money often plays a significant role in determining whom runs for office and who is elected.

Well they should as they were part of making money equal speech in legal fiction and, so, giving millionaires millions of times more of it and billionaires billions of times more of it than any natural human being without millions and billions to spare.  

Clearly, they understand THAT THE SYSTEM THEY SUPPORT DETERMINES WHO GETS ELECTED,  THEY JUST SAID SO.   So the fact that it's the opponents of equality, of equal justice, of economic justice, of workers' safety, workers' rights, environmental protection,  LGBTQ+ rights, Women's rights including their very right to them owning their own bodies (Women having bodies which corporations, even unions, don't have),  and literally everything that so many of those who gullibility donate to the ACLU and hold them up as sacrosanct, support WIN OVER AND OVER AGAIN AND APPOINT MEMBERS OF THE SUPREME COURT WHO DETERMINE WHAT THE CONSTITUTION IS means nothing to the lawyer of that corporation. 

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

If you think those who win under the ACLU's supported regime of how campaigns really are run, right now and every second since the Supreme Court started overturning the post-Watergate campaign finance reform laws - which were passed with bi-partisan approval in the 1970s - are ever going to allow that kind of reform INCLUDING THE ENTIRELY UNLIKELY TO EVER HAPPEN PUBLIC FINANCING OF CAMPAIGNS THAT WILL EFFECTIVELY COUNTER THE CORPORATIONS, MILLIONAIRES AND BILLIONAIRES COMBINED MONEY AND COORDINATION,  you are as stupid as someone who would believe the lawyers who wrote this bull shit think they really mean it. 

Some argue that campaign finance laws can be surgically drafted to protect legitimate political speech while restricting speech that leads to undue influence by wealthy special interests. Experience over the last 40 years has taught us that money always finds an outlet, and the endless search for loopholes simply creates the next target for new regulation. It also contributes to cynicism about our political process.

Experience over the past fifty years, since Buckely v Valeo shows that America has gone from the high-point of the early Johnson administration passing the Voting Rights Act, the Civil Rights Act, Medicare, Medicaid and the rest of the most significant advancement of equality - INCLUDING THE LAWS THAT FOR THE FIRST TIME MADE THE COUNTRY,  POTENTIALLY A TRUE DEMOCRACY -  to a country in which a Supreme Court has installed a president (Bush v Gore) and turned Trump into a monarch and legalized overt quid-pro-quo buying of politicians and, no doubt "justices" on the Supreme Court.   In fact I date the commencement of that corruption to the ACLU supported creation of the "right to lie" in the Sullivan decision.   EXPERIENCE IS THAT THE ACLU HAS BEEN ALL-IN ON CREATING THE RUIN OF EQUALITY AND DEMOCRACY. 

As to cynicism, have these "officers of the court" not noticed how cynical the large majority of the public are about the legal profession and the legal system? 

Any rule that requires the government to determine what political speech is legitimate and how much political speech is appropriate is difficult to reconcile with the First Amendment. Our system of free expression is built on the premise that the people get to decide what speech they want to hear; it is not the role of the government to make that decision for them.

I'm not, at least in this case, talking about the government determining "what speech is legitimate and how much political speech is appropriate,"*** BUT IN HOW MUCH OF IT CORPORATIONS, BILLIONAIRES AND MILLIONAIRES CAN INJECT INTO THE TIME LIMITS OF AN ELECTION THAT LITERALLY DETERMINES WHAT THE LAW WILL BE.   The blather about "the people" getting to decide holds the tacit and clearly false premise that THE PEOPLE fed on lies created with the help of PR professionals and sold to them through repeated retellings on TV can, by a reliable majority overcome that indoctrination WHEN THE EXPERIENCE OF THE WORLD IS LITERALLY THAT MOST OF THE TIME THEY CAN'T.   This is the lawyerly-liarly equivalent of the economist-liarly pretense that entirely unsophisticated, unsuspecting People who are gulled by corporations AND THEIR LAWYERS into singing agreements are "rational actors" making rational decisions. 

It is also useful to remember that the mixture of money and politics long predates Citizens United and would not disappear even if Citizens United were overruled. The 2008 presidential election, which took place before Citizens United, was the most expensive in U.S. history until that point. The super PACs that have emerged in the 2012 election cycle have been funded with a significant amount of money for individuals, not corporations, and individual spending was not even at issue in Citizens United.

Again, the ACLU should remember that the mixture of money and politics long predates Citizens United BECAUSE THEY PLAYED SUCH A SIGNIFICANT ROLE IN MAKING SURE THE MIXTURE OF MONEY AND POLITICS, WHICH CAME TO SUCH SCANDALOUS LIGHT IN THE NIXON YEARS, CONTINUED WITH SUPREME COURT APPROVAL.   This may be the most cynical paragraph in what is a thoroughly cynical document.   If there had been no such corruption of money on politics before the first campaign finance law was duly adopted, only to be overturned by Court fiat,  no one would have drafted such a law. 

Unfortunately, legitimate concern over the influence of “big money” in politics has led some to propose a constitutional amendment to reverse the decision. The ACLU will firmly oppose any constitutional amendment that would limit the free speech clause of the First Amendment.

And if the goddamed ACLU and the other "civil liberties" lawyers have anything to do say about it, that "legitimate concern" will go unaddressed, certainly unrelieved for the rest of time.    You may ask what the goddamned ACLU lawyers see as the ultimate purpose of this "speech" is if the results will be ever more inequality, ever more corrupt, ever more anti-democratic governance, ever more corrupt Supreme Courts making ever more corrupt and Republican-fascist enabling and empowering rulings?   In fact, I am asking that of them and their supporters.   What is the good of "free speech" when what will result is that any speech which those who hold power will be a. what supports that regime or, b. in the unlikely event that it is even permitted, speech opposing it will be kept impotent and of no danger to them.  

As to them opposing such an amendment to the Constitution, what do they think the First Amendment was?  It was an amendment that was adopted by the Congress and the President, sent out to the legislatures of the various states to accept or reject, and so would any honest elections amendment.   If the First Amendment can be said to have any legitimacy, even any legal legitimacy, it gained it ONLY ON THE PRESUMED VALIDITY OF THE ELECTION PROCESS, BY THE VOTE CAST BY THE PEOPLE.  For the ACLU to oppose measures to ensure that elections are not corrupted by big money is for them to oppose the legitimacy of the entire process, INCLUDING THE VERY CONSTITUTION THEY REST THEIR CLAIMS ON.   There is no reason to believe the First Congress, the legislatures that adopted the First Amendment were of more legitimacy than the electorate or their elected representatives today, when in many places the descendants of those who were enslaved can vote, when Women can vote, when those who don't own property can vote, etc.   

Such "free speech" as the "civil liberties" lawyers gas on about can pile up for centuries and be of absolutely no use to anyone, in case you wonder why this document made me think of that passage from science fiction.   Legal fiction is so much less honest than it is. 

I would like to know exactly how much money the lawyers of the ACLU, especially the "civil libertarians" get from the corporations, the millionaires and billionaires.  Really, I think the lawyers who peddle themselves as idealists under the false banner of the ACLU may be the most cynical of all of them.  At least those who peddle their asses for the most money aren't pretending otherwise. 

* Musk's ability and intention to finance a challenger to any Republican who votes for the welfare of their constituents instead of the way he and his asset,  Trump tell them to, is what is running the Republican-fascist party now.  

** We know that the Republican-fascist majority on the Court knew that because they were presented with the argument that that is what they were doing by legalizing billionaires foreign as well as domestic, buying American elections.    We can know that beyond any shadow of any doubt because last year the Roberts Court also legalized overt quid-pro-quo buying of politicians as long a the payment post-dates delivery of what was being bought.   There is no rational doubt that those two rulings, taken together prove the Roberts Court has knowingly corrupted the elections systems in favor of the party of its majority. 

*** I think in typical lawyer-liar dishonesty they include such stuff in this argument as a means of distraction,  courts, lawyers, INCLUDING THOSE IN THE DAMNED ACLU, are constantly discussing what speech is legitimate.  If they didn't do that then there is not a single thing that could be said by anyone in any court that could be depended on to be factual instead of a lie.   I doubt the lawyers of the ACLU would be reticent to note that testimony they didn't favor was illegitimate if they believed they could show it was false.   Why the speech that is regulated within the confines of a court case is legitimately regulated for its truth or falsity not to mention merely falling within the arbitrary rule of court procedure while political and other speech which can do everything up to and including getting hundreds of thousands, even millions killed is held by the lawyers of the ACLU to be illegitimately regulated is something I'd really like to be able to ask them, though, being experienced in reading what they claim and examining it for honesty,  I wouldn't trust them farther than I could throw the grotesque Supreme Court building. 

Tabitha Points Out The Hypocrisy Of White Republican-fascist Women Who Support Discrimination Against Other People

are whining when YETI doesn't discriminate against them BUT HOLD THEM TO THE SAME POLICY THEY HOLD OTHERS TO.  The same groups that celebrated the Supreme Court reinstitutionalize deial of services to LGBTQ+ People are whining and crying when THEY ARE BEING TREATED LIKE OTHER POLITICAL GROUPS UNDER A COMPANY'S POLICY THEY DON'T SERVICE POLITICAL GROUPS.

I like Tabitha's commentary and style.   There is no group that is whinier and more self-pitying than the privileged. 

The Discouragement of Our Better Intentions And The Cynicism That Fashionably Replaces Those - Part Four

Marilynne Robinson concludes her preface with two questions, one obviously true, the other one true but which needs considerable discussion.

What if good institutions were in fact the product of good intentions?    What if the cynicism that is supposed to be rigor and the acquisitiveness that is supposed to be realism are making us forget the origins of the greatness we lay claim to - power and wealth as secondary consequences of the progress of freedom, or, as Whitman would prefer, Democracy?  After all these things rose together.  The air is thick now with "the people," a phrase that is meant to give authority to the claims and the grievances of those who use it.  That it is often invoked in good faith one may doubt, but the fact that resort is had to it so insistently means that we are still good enough democrats to feel that ultimately authority and reason do and should lie with the people.  Then the old impulse that lay behind the dissemination of information and learning, the will to ensure that the public will be competent to make the weightiest decisions and so conform society to its best sense of the possible should be as powerful as it has ever been,  and more powerful because of the fragility of the contemporary world.  Instead we have slack and underfinanced journalism and the ebbing away of resources from our universities, libraries and schools.  The liberation of the human individual as a social value required optimism which is also amply justified.  This loyalty to democracy is the American value I fear we are gravely in danger of losing.

It is inescapable that when you use the word "democracy" you have to define what you mean by that or you will end up talking about radically different things.  It is absolutely different if you put the emphasis on "freedom" instead of the equality that will make that freedom available to everyone and of value to everyone.  The history of America is tellable in the freedoms which those with money and power have given themselves in reality, perhaps giving the least among us the theoretical possession of those same freedoms but which they will never get to enjoy.   The crucial point isn't "freedom" the rich and always the richest have always enjoyed the lions share of freedom.   

Equality is and has been lacking in American democracy from the beginning of it up till at least 1965 when the most decisive steps taken towards real, meaningful equality were taken in the Johnson administration.  Steps that were immediately attacked by white supremacists and the Republican Party as they sought to benefit from the disaffected racists who had been traditionally members of the Democratic Party leaving because they opposed equality.  They had nearly a hundred seventy years of precedent of life under the Constitution and the Bill of Rights to fuel their resentment.  As that reaction took hold, as the likes of Lewis Powell set out an anti-democratic blueprint to create the oligarchy that the courts he was a member of clearly worked towards and which is reaching its lowest point in the Neronian style decadence of Trump II the target was always equalty, making sure that all the freedom was as concentrated in the same places that the framers placed it, in affluent white men of an acceptable kind.

It is all well and good to talk about democracy but, as my posts on The Trial of Socrates demonstrated, "democracy" as a man-made, artificial thing can be had by a favored, restricted class of those deemed in ancient Athens to be "free men" or "citizens" who hold large numbers in slavery, Women and who exclude even wealthy men who are not part of that traditional group.  Why would anyone not in that group care about such a democracy?   Why would anyone who was excluded from participation care about America's democracy as, in fact, most adult citizens of the country were excluded from even the vote, not to mention the just access to the necessities and, as importantly, the goods of life?  

The times we live in provide, instead of equality and the right to a decent life free from the fear of homelessness, an inability to access healthcare, food, and any number of other things, provids The People with entertainment that is like what was provided in Orwell's 1984 but with better production values, one of the greatest pleasures cultivated by it, hating other People, feeling resentments, and stoking greed after status symbol possessions.  The ersatz religion of the TV style ministires and the variety-show-nightclub churches turn something referred to as "The Bible" into an inversion of the Gospel, the Epistles, The Law, the Prophets hardly mentioned except in their fortune telling games.  

If relgion, if Christianity, especially, among if not the most egalitarian religion if Jesus is to mean anything to it, has to make equality the central moral aspect of it or it will continue to decline.  The United States may well be lost to despotism because it never has been allowed to be pushed to equality despite that struggle having been engaged in since before the Constitution was drafted.  That struggle for equality, NOT THE PURSUIT OF LIBERTARIAN "FREEDOM" is literally the best thing about the United States and it is continually thwarted on the basis of the Constitution or something as illegitimate as the "common law tradition" under the practices of the legal profession, the courts and, especially the Supreme Court.

Marilynne Robinson correctly notes that democracy and prosperity would seem to have something of a direct relationship, as the Biden presidency shows, as the Johnson presidency showed, as the New Deal showed, and the opposite has been demonstrated, as well, in the string of Republican administrations that have thwarted equality all have a record of producing economic hardship going back more than a century Governing of, by and for the millionaries and billionaires produces bad economic results, especially as you go down the economic scale.   Yet our "free press" lies about that because bad times for the many have the possibility of temporarily being good for the rich.  

I think the first question in this last paragraph from Marilynne Robinson's Preface is self evident.  Of course good institutions come from good intentions.  Like religion, like scripture, all of that is a product of human thought, of human intentionality, of pursuing purposes.  If an institution goes from bad to good, it is a product of human intention.  I doubt the change and reform of any bad institution has ever just happened on to the good by accident.  The opposite happening by chance has somewhat better odds, especially if "civil libertarian" lawyers or "institutionalists" are making those choices.  The fact that the common good, the general prosperity, what the familiar preamble to the U.s. Constitution states as its intentions in a way that a non-lawyer would certainly take to be a promise made by those who frame it and would be an integral part of the document, since that is what was promised in the document that they got The Peoples' representatives to sign on to in the beginning.   Here is the lawyerly loophole to that as found at that most august of American institutions, the secular delphic oracle of our idolatry, the United States Courts:

The preamble sets the stage for the Constitution (Archives.gov). It clearly communicates the intentions of the framers and the purpose of the document. The preamble is an introduction to the highest law of the land; it is not the law. It does not define government powers or individual rights.

Establish Justice is the first of five objectives outlined in the 52-word paragraph that the Framers drafted in six weeks during the hot Philadelphia summer of 1787. They found a way to agree on the following basic principles:

"We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."

Maybe those largely lawyers who framed it put "justice" first because they knew they needed lawyers to get out of the existing contract promising "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness," that The Reverend Martin Luther King jr. so famously noted they had promised in the Declaration of Independence but which they never intended to pay up on.  And they appointed such judges and "justices" as would never intend to make them pay, some things haven't changed much since then.

Of those five things promised under the Constitution, the only one that they can be said to have intended to deliver on was the protection of the country from foreign attacks and whatever domestic attacks as would put the wealth of the wealthy and the order that favored them at risk.  It was the rebellions of those who felt duped by the revolutionary leaders, who, typical of revolutionaries who take control, once in power didn't keep their overtly made promises.  That is what led to the drafting of the Constitution.  But they certainly never did much of anything to quell violence against others under the rule of law, they institutionalized it under the Second Amendment, what the Rehnquist and Roberts Courts have used to arm a Republican Klan in case egalitarian democracy threatens to become real.  And now under Trump, they have failed even to quell the possibility of insurrection against the very government they instituted or, incredibly enough, an insurrectionist gaining the presidency by election. The Roberts Court, with some Democratic support, nullified the relevant section of the 14th Amendment to allow an insurrectionist to become president.   YOU DON'T HAVE TO BE A RADICAL EGALITARIAN DEMOCRAT TO NOTICE THAT THE CONSTITUTION HAS FAILED. Though you appear to need to be one to admit that obvious and terrible truth.

The slave holders and Indian murdering land grabbers in the Constitutional Convention certainly didn't have any intention at all to provide any of the others on an equal basis, certainly not to those they enslaved, the free Black People that the Supreme Court under "due process" said were allowed to be abducted into slavery as Trump's ICESTAPO are abducting People off the streets today, they had no intention of permitting those for most of the People living in the United States during slavery and genocide against the Native population, Women, to those who were denied the vote due to their propertyless state, and, in the beginning, even Catholic males who met all other requirements to vote in some states.  The history of America is tellable with great accuracy, I'd say only told with any possible accuracy,  as the struggle to achieve equality by all of those groups and others, such as those who were in bond to the wage slave system.  It is incredible that those at the top of the "justice" system, the Courts, deny that those contractual promises are not only a contract BUT FORM THE BASIS OF THE CONTRACT THAT GIVES THEM AND ALL OF GOVERNMENT ANY LEGITIMACY with complete and self-granted impunity AND THAT A DUPED AND COWED PUBLIC WILL ALLOW THEM TO GET AWAY WITH IT BECAUSE THEY'RE THE BIGGEST FATTEST LAWYERS IN THE LAND.

Whatever good institutions we have had under the federal government are either being destroyed or have been turned bad and since the federal government is allowing that to happen, it has to be attributed to the Constitutional order it is happening under, John Adams three-branch theory has failed, the presidential system turns out to be as dangerous here as it has in  other countries that have copied it, the First Amendment has been the engine of corruption under its interpretation by the Supreme Court which grabbed extra-Constitutional powers in the first such failure of the Constitution in 1803, the terrible assertions of Marbury v Madison.  

By their fruits you will know them.  Donald Trump is the fruit of the kind of democracy America has.  As were George W. Bush, Ronald Reagan, Bush I and Richard Nixon.  The fruits of the long struggle for equality, The Voting Rights Act, the Civil Rights Act, myriads of other rights, which apart from Roe v Wade, were the product of long and difficult and not infrequently deadly struggle which have been have been swept aside by five or six or nine unelected "justices" And that is because of what the Constitution is and always has been apart for a few brief years in a couple of periods in American history when Courts and Congresses and the majority of voters had better intentions.

Just Part 3

Note:  I'd written this post and thought I'd already posted it but, apparently not.  I have rewritten it because I can't find what I'd originally intended,  I think the commentary is pretty much the same. I will not give it a last edit because the electricity is flickering here and I don't want to lose it, again.

Continuing on with Marilynne Robinson's Preface:

Whitman was a Quaker and he wrote as one: "I say the real and permanent grandeur of these States must be their religion,/ Otherwise there is just no real and permanent grandeur,/ nor character nor life worthy the name without religion . . . )."  This is from Leaves of Grass, and so is this: "All parts away for the progress of souls,/ All religion, all solid things, arts, governments, all that was or is/ apparent upon this globe or any globe,/ falls into niches and corners/ before the procession of souls along / the grand roads of the universe."  The vision of this soul, all souls, realizing itself in the course of transforming everything that has constrained it and them, finds expression in many writers of the period, prominent among them Emerson, Melville, and Dickinson, and in later writers such as William James and Wallace Stevens. For all of them creeds fall away and consciousness has the character of revelation.  To identify sacred mystery with every  individual experience, every life, giving the word its largest sense, is to arrive at democracy as an ideal and to accept the difficult obligation to honor others and oneself with something approaching due reverence.  It is a vision that is wholly religious though by no means sectarian, wholly realist in acknowledging the great truth of the centrality of human consciousness, wholly open in that it anticipates and welcomes the disruption of present values in the course of finding truer ones.  And it is fully as well attested as America's old-time religion as is any exclusivist or backward-looking tradition, though our ill-informed nostalgias elevate what is called fundamentalism to that place, with the result that those who cannot endorse fundamentalist religion scorn the past while those who embrace it despise the present.    

I will point out again that Walt Whitman anticipated one of the greatest and most important discoveries of modern physics by a half a century, the centrality of the individual mind observing and thinking about anything is all we have, we can't have that theoretical and mythical scientific point of view, an "objective" point of view of anything.   One of the reasons that so many in science and outside of it acts as if that isn't the truth is because it is, actually rather frightening because so many points of view are so focused on self-gain, self-importance, selfishness and the selfishness that is at the bottom of all parochialisms, those which are merely annoying to those that are as dangerous as Trump's or Putins or Xi's or MBS's, . . . *

I have spent most of my life studying American history and literature.  I have studied other histories and literature largely to gain perspective on this civilization.  The magnanimity of its greatest laws and institutions as well as its finest poetry and philosophy move me very deeply.  I know that there are numberless acts of generosity,m moral as well as material, carried out among its people every hour of the day.  But the language of public life has lost the character of generosity and the largeness of spirit that has created and supported the best of our institutions and brought reform to the worst of them has been erased out of historical memory.  On both sides the sole motive force in our past is now said to have been capitalism.  On both sides capitalism is understood as grasping materialism that has somehow or other yielded the comforts and liberties of modern life.  Capitalism thus understood is seen on one side as providential, so good in its effects that it reduces Scripture with its do-unto-others to shibboleth.  The other side sees it as more or less corrupting and contemptible but beyond human powers to resist.

And no one offers a definition of it.  But in these days when its imperium is granted by virtually anyone who attends to such things, our great public education system is being starved and abandoned and our prisons have declined to levels that disgrace us.  The economics of the moment, and of the last several decades, is a corrosive influence, undermining everything it touches, from the industrial strength of our research capacity to the well-being of our children.  I am not the first to suggest that it is undermining our politics as well.

One of the things which troubles me about this essay is that as astute an observer as Marilynne Robinson doesn't take into account the centrality that the media plays in the actual lives of almost all Americans and, in fact, in almost all of the world which has access to mass media or merely electronic media, especially when they can go online.   Before the internet it was television and radio and the movies (especially when those became available for in-home watching), before that it was radio and the movies.   The United States, or, rather the various states didn't try to raise the financial resources to allow the public schools to even try to compete with them for the time and, so, minds of students.   I doubt that even if they had it would have been very effective in countering the effect of that all encompassing difference in the United States and, in fact, the possibility of democracy from before the mass media and its ever diminishing prospects afterwards. 

Considering the place that the mass media, the most consumed "entertainment division" far more than the "news division," has played in exactly the production of the things that she rightly bemoans about our culture, society and, so, government it is extraordinary that she has left it so much out of the discussion.  

Considering the role that mistrelsy had in promoting racism and chattel slavery in the time of those 19th century writers and, especially the role that Uncle Tom's Cabin played in, as Lincoln said, fomenting the Civil War, it is hardly a new thing in American life, though never as ubiquitous as it became when it was distributed by Hollywood, starting at least as early as Birth of a Nation and, especially, when it became available in the home at the turn of a dial.   

Dealing with the fact that the media is what has most corrupted Americans and thwarted equality and, so, any democracy that is worthy of mentioning in a positive manner,  to mention it is to risk being blackballed or drilled out of the realm of respectability or to just get ignored.

Despite what the still fashionable new atheism held, what vulgar (both in terms of crudeness and ubiquity) academic culture held and still holds, religion as such is hardly the dominant feature of our decadence.   As an attempt to discern the meaning of Scripture, institutions such as the incumbent U.S. Catholic Conference of Bishops, the Southern Baptists, and the other churches held to have some sway over large numbers of allegedly church going Americans is far less accurate than that they are, in fact forces for the worst of capitalism in its current, billionaire-millionaire dominated investor-crook, non-produing form.  That was, of course, nothing new, similar things could be said for the Roman Catholic Church and most of the national Protestant and Orthodox religious establishments in the long history of Christianity in Europe and elsewhere.   The extent to which the disestablishment of churches held that off for a time in the United States is probably related to the rise of radio and then TV "ministries," who financed and sponsored them and their propensity for propping up capitalism and such things as white supremacy, too.  The worst of that, coming in the 1970s, with the rise of Jerry Falwell (motivated in the first instance by white supremacist rebellion against equality, not least of all his own enrichment) and such as Pat Robinson, Jim Baker, etc.  (mostly in it for the money) and the others cannot be considered without the centrality of the mass media promoting them, as well.   In Catholic terms it would be the putrid Mother Angelica and her ETWN and, now, Robert Barron's Word on Fire.   All of which is intimately tied up with the corruption that mass media is allowed to have under our Constitution.

I am ever more certain that American democracy as a decent thing,  apart from elections that turn ever more into shams of exclusion under Roberts Court overturning of the Voting Rights and Civil Rights Acts, the Republican controlled states reimposing Jim Crow apartheid, cannot escape the necessity of rewriting the rules, the laws, the Bill of Rights to save American equality and, so democracy from the media which is a cesspool of stupidity and lying.   I agree with Walt Whitman that America is only as good as its religious adherence to those principles of equality, of the equal distribution of the good of life, the distribution of wealth from its massive concentrations in few hands to its equal possession all over, not only the discouragement of bigotry and discrimination but the full out attacks on those, making them that most deadly of things, unfashionable, is included in that religion.  

You might get the idea from this series that I have gone off of Marilynne Robinson but that couldn't be farther from the truth.  I think that her work holds up to rigorous criticism and I think she is America's best living novelist and essayist.  I encourage everyone to read her.  I only half agree with her on Calvin, though more on the actual role that 19th century descendants of Calvinists had in creating American style liberalism based on the liberal distribution of material wealth to the least among us.  I think the Anabaptists have an outsized role in that, though you always have to distinguish those who held with slavery and other forms of oppression from those who were among the first of our abolitionists and Women's suffrage agitators.   As Marilynne Robinson points out,  Walt Whitman was an Anabaptist, a Quaker.    He was no Southern Baptist.

* I can never hear Emerson's or Thoreau's name without recalling them being invoked by the late anti-tax activist in Massachusetts,  Barbara Anderson, a truly awful person whose stinginess was overtly claimed to be part of the rugged independence preached by the transcendentalists.   Though what she was was your typical 2-year-old 20th century libertarian,  I can honestly say that I despised her so, perhaps, that has tended to prejudice me against that tradition.  I have never found anything in Dickinson or Whitman to put me off of them.  

Hey, Hey RFK How Many Kids Did You Kill Today?

LAWYERS WHO GIVE OUT health advice, pretending to have an expertise they don't have,  should be held responsible for what happens when parents follow his advice and it endangers their children.  Especially when that lawyer gets 10% of the millions his law firm gets from bringing suit against those who actually produce sound health care to People.

Excessive consumption of vitamin A can result in serious health complications — indeed, several unvaccinated children in Texas have had to be treated for liver damage due the vitamin-based regimen some families are using, a children’s hospital in Lubbock, Texas, announced.

The increase in parents using vitamin A as the primary treatment for measles — despite no scientific backing — comes after Kennedy has downplayed the outbreak for weeks and falsely promoted the treatment option as effective.

This is what happens when you allow an arrogant Ivy Leaguer lawyer-ambulance chaser who is of proven amorality to run HHS.   He should be under criminal investigation, not running the country's health system.   Hell, he should have been disbarred and imprisoned for what he did to get CHILDREN killed before now.  The Senators who confirmed him share in this.   They should be fired by the voters.  Republicans have absolutely no morals.

Took Another Fall Yesterday But I'm Just Sore This Time - Reposted Comment from RMJ's Place

This is different from when the world was so grateful to Obama for ending Bush II that they gave him the Peace Prize, as they were grateful to Biden for ending Trump I, the American voters and non-voters giving the world the old and far, far worse Trump II and the Constitutional system maintaining this criminal insanity for even two months has changed everything for the worse. I doubt America can ever regain its status in the post WWII world under the present Constitution, especially as the Roberts Court and, even before that, the courts in general and the Republican caucus in the Senate let him off to run again. Nullifying the part of the 14th Amendment that would have stopped him under law.

America's position it had in the world during Biden's term is gone and it's not coming back during our lifetimes. The billionaires, millionaires, the judges and "justices" and lawyers and media have brought us down to this, the non-working, non-productive elite has brought us to this.

I was talking to my brother yesterday and he agreed that the U.S. position as "leader of the free world" has been forfeited by billionaires buying the presidency, with the complete collusion of the media and the refusal of "law enforcement" to stop any of the illegality during what we're witnessing THE BIGGEST CRIME SPREE IN AMERICAN HISTORY.   If you think they're not stealing everything, personal information of ALL AMERICANS and monetizing it for themselves, if you think they're not actually stealing money and other valuables as Musk-Trump ransack the United States government, you are as stupid as an old line DoJ "institutionalist" or a member of the Republican caucus of the Supreme Court.  Or a Susan Collins, though in her case it's just her "I'm just a dumb little girl," act that she's gotten away with due to the 100% Republican media ownership in Maine  

Trump turned Quebecers into Canadians

 

About the only good thing I've seen come from the goddamned Trump II regime is that it has done wonders for Canadian unity.   I always watch Ma Prof de Francais to overcome my school-French limits but I was surprised that this one was posted today.   I hope they show us how inclusion can be achieved even after centuries of division and justifiable resentment.   There's no reason to let the past destroy the future. 

How Long Will It Be Before Kidnappers Dressed As ICESTAPO Fom Trump Abduct People?

IT SHOULD BE illegal for ICE to do what they've been doing, with covered faces, without uniforms and anonymously abducting People in violation of the law and their legally acknowledged rights.  

Trump is doing it on behalf of Putin, now.   

Anyone tell me that this isn't being done under the Constitution as it really is instead of as the make-believe of Supreme Court pretense about what that rag is?  

The entire goddamned Republican-fascist party is all-in on this, every single one of them in Congress and on the Supreme Court.  Every single Republican voter, fascist or otherwise is guilty of this. 

Michel Cusson en direct & Special Omerta - SESSION 2

 

Michel Cusson, guitar and composer

Paul Brochu, drums

Jean-Bertrand Carbou, bass

Benoit Glazer, trumpet

Daniel Thouin, keyboards

Back in the 1990s, when I still had a TV I came across the best cop show I ever saw on Societe Radio Canada,  Omerta - La Loi Du Silence  The script, the acting, the directing etc and, hardly least the music by Michel Cusson.   It was the most sophisticated cop opera I ever saw.    The music was haunting.   It was really challenging because the Montreal dialect is especially opaque to someone whose French comes mostly from school, it also had Italian dialogue and some English. 

I think I'll go looking for the series online.   I could use some brushing up.  

They Should Hang This Portrait Up Instead

 

False Alternatives Seem To Be All Our College-Credentialed Can Imagine - Hate Mail

MY CRITICISM OF MODERNISM, by which I certainly mean the "modernism" of the 20th century but in which I include the earlier modernism of the 18th century and, really, according to context, sometimes include the 16th century,  DOESN'T LEAD TO THE CONCLUSION THAT I WANT TO RECAPITULATE WHAT MODERNISM WAS A REACTION AGAINST. 

I know that for non-Catholics and, also, for many Catholics it won't be appreciated that in my rejection of Catholic integralism, both the 19th century kind that was a reaction against "liberalism" of the 18th century and it's even more insane billionaire financed Ivy Leaguer wackjob neo-version ,   would certainly signal that I reject any idea of going back to any past.   

I can't find the video in which he said it but David Bentley Hart did a two minute or so take-down of the current Catho-fascist version of integralism, including the criminally insane assertion that the ancien regime, from the French Revolution back was some golden age,  literally what such integralists have based their clams on.   In rejecting the products of the 18th century revolutions, including the slave-holder-financier framed U.S. Constitution I HAVE NEVER ARGUED FOR RETURNING TO ANY PAST, I HAVE ARGUED THAT WE HAVE TO MOVE ON FROM THOSE.   Here's a rule to go by,  Catholic neo-integralists are, to a person, total nut jobs and decidedly are not interested in the Gospel of Jesus. 

The typical either-or style of "which side are you on" forced choice is generally wielded by nostalgic fascists or would-be lefty ideologues WHICH TOO MANY PEOPLE FALL FOR.   It is a classic straw-man, false alternative style of assertion and argument in which too many People fall for defending one of those false alternatives by condemning the one they take as worse wastes generations of time.   The old and ubiquitous practice of defending some pretty awful Stalinists who worshiped one of the 20th centuries worst mass murderers and oppressors BECAUSE OF THE AWFUL AMERICAN FASCISTS WHO MOUNTED THE RED SCARE has been one of the biggest wastes of time for the American would-be left.    The Stalinists may have had some of their rights violated by the FBI, the House Unamerican Activities Committee and been slandered by Red Channels and other organs of the media, elite as well as gutter level, but they were certainly not heroes of equality and democracy and the left that held them up as that were lying as much as any anti-commies did.   

It may have been when I read that asshole, Lester Cole's alleged memoir, Hollywood Red that I realized I'd been played for a fool, that I didn't have to choose his side or the side of those who testified to HUAC about the Communist Party,  that I was free to hold all of them in contempt.   I certainly realized I'd been played for a fool when the Soviet recordswere released proving that Julius Rosenberg had, in fact, been a spy for Stalin while he worked on the atomic bomb,  that he was guilty on that account AND THAT DIDN'T MEAN I HAD TO BE ON THE SIDE OF HIS PROSECUTION AND HIS AND ETHEL'S EXECUTION.   I didn't have to choose one side OR the other,  I could reject them both.   Since then I have found that instead of drifting right,  I have actually become far more radically egalitarian and democratic.   Instead of becoming a right-winger, like so many Trotsyites did or becoming a neo-liberal as several members of the "new left" did or someone who fell into the trap of the Democratic Leadership Council,  I found that The Gospel, The Epistles, The Law and The Prophets are a far more radical and dependable left than the secular left is.   That certainly doesn't mean that I look to any past from the Christian period or before that in the history of the Kingdoms of Israel or Judea as something to be recreated,  if  I'd been tempted in that direction the scandals of the history of "Most Christian Monarchs" or those recorded in the Jewish Scriptures would have warned me off of it.

So, to answer your question,  No, I don't want to return to any past,  I want to return to nothing but to go to a better future which, at least we can say this much for, it hasn't already failed.   One which, unlike our Constitutional system, learns from the evils of the past in order to prevent them from happening again. 

A lot more accurate predictor of who will vote for Republican-fascism than when they shower is certainly WHAT MEDIA THEY CONSUME

I CERTAINY AGREE with the idea that Democrats should have been doing more to address issues of the working class and poor than they have been doing but they don't do more because of the pressure that the media puts on them when they do it.   And they have to do it because todays Republicans will stop them doing it at all costs.   And by "media" I don't mean just what supposedly constitutes the "news" I mean the entire media and what they choose to put on.  I remember when the greatest advance in helping the working and poor since LBJ, the ACA was passed, the media gave hour after hour of coverage to the phony billionaire financed, Republican astroturf "Tea Party" which was largely responsible for disastrous 2010 election which elevated a Republican majority in Congress, continuing on a road to insanity which leads directly to the present Republican Caucus in both House and Senate, a product of the media coverage of Joe Biden, THE PRESIDENT WHO TRIED TO DO MORE FOR THE WORKING CLASS THAN ANY PRESIDENT SINCE LBJ.  

Michael Sean Winters published an article in which he takes up the typical media criticism that the trouble with Democrats is that they're too "elite"  

In a recent interview with Ezra Klein, Democratic pollster David Shor argued that "the most important political trend of the last 30 to 40 years, both here and in every other country in the world — at least in Western countries with elections — has been this story of education polarization. Basically, we've seen highly educated people move to the left, while working-class people have moved to the right." 

Shor argued that the competing narrative — that Donald Trump's ascent was really a continuation of the GOP's "Southern strategy" after the Civil Rights Act, motivating white voters with racist dog whistles — was wrong. White voters did not shift very much in 2024. Trump's biggest gains were among Hispanic and Asian voters, especially immigrant voters.

"There's a very clear correlation between how many immigrants there were in a county and how much Trump's vote share increased," Shor said. "In counties like Queens, N.Y., or Miami-Dade, Fla., Trump increased his vote share by 10 percentage points, which is just crazy." 

How crazy? "Our best guess is that immigrants went from being a Biden plus-27 group in 2020 to a group that Trump narrowly won in 2024. This group of naturalized citizens makes up roughly 10% of the electorate." 

Michelle Cottle recently profiled Rep. Jason Crow of Colorado. "A lot of communities divide the world between when you shower: before work or after work," he told her. The problem for too many Democrats is that they do not know anyone who showers after work.  

To start with, I don't know who Jason Crow knows but most of the Democrats I know are either of the lower middle-class or they are working class to poor, even most of the college educated Democrats I know have blue collar jobs or their equivalent.  And if they have a white collar job, their families are full of those who don't. 

IF HE WANTS TO ARGUE THAT TOO MANY TOP POSITIONS IN DEMOCRATIC ADMINISTRATIONS AND WITHIN THE PARTY APPARATUS GO TO THE AFFLUENT, I WOULD NOT ARGUE WITH THAT.  I have railed against the tyranny of the Ivys and Ivy equivalents and their product since at least Obama's administration - I remember an early brawl that started when I noted neither he nor his Secretary of Education had ever been a student in a public school or university or had children in public schools or universities.   

If that's his point he should have made it more accurately.  

In saying what he did he props up a Republican-fascist narrative that, unfortunately, Barack Obama and previous Democratic Presidents have not seemed to mind being made.  That Obama and Bill Clinton were products of Ivy League - Ivy equivalent schools, Georgetown, Oxford, Yale, Columbia and Harvard may have something to do with that perception.   Though that was never a media created problem for the Bushes.  They surrounded themselves with the same and, in all cases, appointed the same to their administrations and to the Supreme Court.  I will also note they are Ivy Law trained lawyers.  Since I've been addressing the inherent corruption of the legal profession due to its golden rule of servicing the interests of those who can pay the best, that Jason Crow as well as way too many Democrats in office and in power have been from that profession.   I don't know too many lawyers who are best friends with members of the great unwashed, except when they have them as pro-bono clients.  I'll bet you one of the more widely held opinions of the working class and the poor are that lawyers charge way, way too much.  Probably a lot more than think that "the Dems" are too elite. 

Of course, the big irony here is that what Crow, Winters, etc. say about Democrats being too elite is said about the party which has served the elite far less than the only alternative.    Why that isn't widely perceived is because of the media lying about it, distorting reality in favor of a narrative that benefits Republicans, in the past and Republican-fascists today.

I would ask Michael Sean Winters and, while I'm at it, Jason Crow which of the minority groups who Democrats support - their championing the rights of LGBTQ+ people is often implied as a problem in these kinds of articles, their support of Black People is hinted at tacitly -  is to be tossed aside in order to attract the kind of voters who are so fickle that they'll go from voting for an Obama or a Joe Biden to voting for Trump - so easily forgetting that when Republicans held power THE WORKING CLASS, THOSE WHO "SHOWER AFTER WORK" WERE GETTING SHAFTED BY THEM.  Jason Crow has an excellent record of voting for the Democratic agenda, he had a 100% record of voting with Joe Biden and is given top grades by a number of groups which give such ratings.  I think he's a good Democrat.   It is a plain fact that the most reliable group which most consistently votes Democratic are Black Voters, who are also largely NOT PART OF THE ECONOMIC ELITE.   It's one of the facts of this that it is exactly the Republican-fascists,  especially those of the Ivy League rank who are trying to resegregate the most elite institutions and schools,  the ones on the Supreme Court have certainly made that one of their higher priorities.    It is the Republicans who want to go back to 1950s era policies that allowed all levels of American life to be able to serve a restricted clientele. 

I think this boils down to the real unmentionable fact that our media has lied us into a situation when the party of, by and for the billionaires and for impoverishing those who aren't get into power gain power.   And, after their policies and practices destroy the economy too much for the media to lie about and Democrats fix it, they  lie about Democrats in order to put the billionaires' party back into power.  That is a pattern that has held since 1964 when the "civil liberties" industry and the Warren Court made media lies about politicians a part of the First Amendment.  It has gotten steadily worse as subsequent Courts have built on that decision to make money equal speech and to overtly hand our government over to the highest bidder, whether that billionaire be domestic or foreign or a freakish illegal immigrant from Apartheid South Africa. 

Sean Micheal Winters as a journalist has a professional self-interest that all the rest of the journalists have in covering up that fact, of never admitting that the legal permission they are given to lie or get it wrong has a direct result in the media owned by millionaries and billionaires to lie their servants, Republicans and now Republican-fascists into power.  The lawyers have an interest in this, too, which, as I point out, is likely not unrelated to their means of making as much money as they can and the professional culture they are trained in and go along with to get along.   It is far easier for a journalist, or, in fact, a blogger or podcaster to just repeat the old like that Democrats are elite than to tell the truth about the decisive role that media lying on behalf of Republicans and the class who owns their media - apparently it is a habit that even those in the independent, non-millionaire owned media just repeat out of professional habit. 

A lot more accurate predictor of who will vote for Republican-fascism than when they shower is certainly WHAT MEDIA THEY CONSUME. 

That has entirely more to do with why Joe Biden was forced out of the race and why Harris and Walz lost (even more how Hillary Clinton lost the election that she won)  and how Trump got the chance to wreck everything and steal everything this time.  The journalists and the lawyers are at the bottom of this, not Democrats who favor equality for hated minority groups.  

The Better Heritage Has Had To Work Against The Worst One Embedded Into Our Governments And Laws - 2

 Law in seventeenth-century Maryland forbade the use of the words "papist" (Catholic) or "round-head" (Puritan), fighting words in the Old World whose effects were muted here by methods still familiar to us.  We learned early to live with diversity, at least by the standards of the time.  It is useful to remember that the terrible Thirty Years War (1618-1648) was fought among European Christians during the early period of European settlement in America, and that New England was largely populated by British Protestant refugees of religious oppression and warfare in Protestant Britain.  What might look like homogeneity in nostalgic retrospect was felt and acted upon as intolerable difference justifying enormity in these cultures of origin.  Our national ancestors generally managed, by the standards then prevailing, to avoid encouraging the same conflicts here.  Now it is seen as un-American in certain quarters to reject participation in the bitter excitements that can surround religious difference.  This is a crucially important instance of self-declared patriots attacking the very substance of our heritage.

I can't let that go without pointing out the fact that in Calvinist New England, four Quakers were hanged by the governing theocracy for testifying to their faith, others were beaten or otherwise tortured.  And it was a capital crime for Catholic priests go be there, though that was due in part to them wanting to exclude French Catholics even at that early period, sometimes excused for geo-political reasons but which resulted in a form of bigotry which survives into living memory.  Still, I take Marilynne Robinson's point about the early adoption of an unusual level of tolerance among diverse Protestants in most of the colonies.  In some, even after the adoption of the Constitution, there were places where non-Protestants were not allowed to vote.  Some of the framers wanted to exclude Catholics from being citizens.   I agree with Robinson that America's traditional liberalism, founded on the liberal provision for the least among us, is a heritage of a strain of Calvinism but we're talking about a double heritage all through this, and that one includes some of the worst theological racism and bigotry along with some of the earliest calls for abolition of slavery and equality for Women. 

We have seen bad times and we will see more of them, like any other human community.  The question is always whether America is indeed doing well upon the whole, whether the civilization at any present time is strong and resilient enough to sustain itself despite the crisis of the moment, or the decade, or the generation, and despite the bent toward malice and nonsense that is always present anywhere but seems harder to resist during periods of crisis.

What has been the basis of the enduring health that has so far made for the stability and the dynamism of the country?  It is always necessary to stipulate, though of course it should be assumed, that a statement like this one implies comparison with the human norm, not with Utopia.  As societies go, we have enjoyed the kind of prosperity and advancement that is possible only where there is domestic peace.  We have managed this at the same time that we have created a population whose origins are increasingly various.  The canard that associates "heterogeneity" with conflict and instability would have to be reexamined if comparison were made between America and countries that claim to be homogeneous or insist that they must be.  The modern history of Europe is highly relevant here.  

We are blessed with the impossibility of arriving at a definition of America that is either exhaustive or final not only because of our continuously changing and self-transforming population but also, as Whitman says, because we have never fully achieved democracy.  This is a very reasonable light in which to consider a mingled heritage, full of lapses and errors and therefore often said to be hypocritical or failed, even by those who see themselves as its defenders.  By Whitman's lights this process of discovery with all its setbacks, is a splendid, metaphysically brilliant passage in human history.  It is moved by the power of religious imperative because it honors and liberates the sacred human person.  He says:

"There is, in sanest hours, a consciousness, a thought that rises, independent, lifted out from all else, calm, like the stars, shining eternal.  This is the thought of identity-yours for you, whoever you are, as mine for me.  Miracle of miracles, beyond statement, most spiritual and vaguest of earth's dreams, yet hardest basic fact, and only entrance to all facts.  In such devout hours, in the midst of the significant wonders of heaven and earth, (significant only because of the Me in the centre.) creeds, conventions fall away and become of no account before this simple idea.  Under the luminousness of real vision, it alone takes possession, takes value.

Language like this makes clear how far our vocabulary has drifted over the generations.  So far from the sense of radical uniqueness Whitman evokes here, identity seems now to imply membership in a group, through ethnicity or affinity or religion or otherwise.  Rather than acknowledging the miraculous privilege of existence as a conscious being (and, considering the overwhelming odds against anyone's existence, the word "miraculous" is an appropriate superlative), it has reference now to knowing one's place, culturally and historically speaking.  And this is taken to be a good thing.  Whitman himself has been charged with rampant egoism for pondering and celebrating the centrality of the perceiver, that "hardest basic fact."  It seems fair to conclude that certain of his critics have no grasp of physics of metaphysics.  In other words, in changing, our vocabulary has not always advanced.

Taking that last point first, it is among the greatest and most central discoveries of modern physics that no statement can be made about any observation without taking into account the fact of the individual making the observation, their position when they made the observation, their method of making the observation, the other individual even peculiar aspects of THEM MAKING THAT OBSERVATION and not some other one making it from another point of view. It is impressive that Whitman identified it as "the only entrance to all facts" a half a century before the most sophisticated physicists of our century formalized it as a scientific law.

I will, again, point out that those very things that Marilynne to some extent rightly bemoans, that "identity" is so caught up with the ethnicity or affinity or religion, of membership with a group is inescapable because, among other things, our Constitution and government and laws have, from well before independence, been caught up in those and those in various elites and right down the economic scale have sought to benefit from membership in a privileged group and assigning others to groups not to have equal access to the good of life and entirely more access to the bad of it.  You can rightly point out the ways in which, largely white, largely male, largely straight, males have been somewhat unhabituated to treat differences among themselves as determinative but you won't make any real progress until you address the fact that those so privileged, the institutions and companies and governments and legal systems they have set up are based on those other discriminations based on group identity, applying those to the individuals assigned those identites.  That is so strong that identification with a larger group of People discriminated against is, itself, a necessity in fighting against that discrimination.  Given a life in which their identiy was taken as unremarkable and equally as the various Protestant, white, affluent identities were allowed to live under, every member of every such identity group would probably prefer to generally just live their lives unencumbered.  

It is no good pretending that the predominant forces with power have sought to gradually or even slightly diminish THOSE discriminations which are, in fact, still embedded within our very forms of government,  state as well as federal, informally even more so than as a matter of putting in writing.  The benefits to the original slave states are still befitting those states with the least dedication to overcoming the very discriminations the framers installed in the Constitution and, with that, the laws we still live under. Emancipating those prevented from voting merely increases the share of stolen power for their oppressors by two-fifths.   Whitman's democratic aspirations can't make the jump over those facts to arrive at some kind of peaceful prosperity because, as we can see in the white supremacist rancher-farmers who voted for Trump based on their racism, are now complaining that the immigrant laborers who were the basis of THEIR prosperity aren't there to work in terrible conditions for low pay and they certainly aren't about to improve the conditions and raise the pay to tempt unemployed white workers to take those jobs, and so Nebraska is afraid of bankruptcy but I have not seen any of the ranchers offering a living wage for those jobs.  

I see the point of the idealistic aspirations in Whitman's essay but, as all safe idealism must, have to see it in light of things as they really were and really are.  Which is about as fashionable as the get up I'm wearing as I type this out.

Again, I'll point out that when she wrote this Barack Obama was in office and there was no evidence that Trumpism was on the horizon.  I would wonder how she would write on the same themes now.   

Trump's Ranting About His Portraits Solidified My Image Of Him

 

For anyone too young to remember, that's the decidedly inferior cartoon character Baby Huey.   Without going back to actually subject myself to one of the cartoons, as I recall he sounded a bit like Trump, too. 

They Send Me Links - In Which I Compliment Simels

AS FAR AS I HAVE ever seen,  I have been the only person anywhere who has been making this argument for the past two decades.    It was, as I recall, the topic of my first disagreement with Duncan Black and a number of his ACLU type commentators back in the earliest years of this millennium.  Apparently it convinced one person who I know reads me:

Steve Simels, blog malignancy

Phineas T. Gage

 20 hours ago

Beg to differ.

There is no, nor should there be, Constitutional right to lie with impunity. We need vastly stricter libel laws.

There would have been no Rush Limbaugh, hate radio and Fox News without the Sullivan decision.

And free speech absolutism is as dangerous and stupid as gun rights absolutism.

Nice to know I have some persuasive ability even against the greatest of resistance.   I assume that is due to even Simels realizing that hate-speech is effectively dangerous in producing violence, terrorism, discrimination and genocide, something that I will compliment him on realizing as those in the media, those on the secular left and even many on the religious left pretend that most terrible of lessons in the school of experience isn't obvious on behalf of the ACLU style reading of the goddamned First Amendment and the blathering blather of "civil liberties" lawyering.   I will note that in recent years, well after I started making that argument online, I've come to understand some lawyers Of Color, some Feminists have said similar things.  Those who are most likely to be victims of hate speech and the violence it inevitably incites and encourages.   And  it always does 

Democracy "is a great word, whose history, I suppose, remains unwritten, because that history has yet to be enacted."

IN HER PREFACE to one of her collections of essays published in 2013, Marilynne Robinson said:

Writing in 1870, Walt Whitman said, "America, if eligible at all to downfall and ruin, is eligible within herself, not without, for I see clearly that the combined foreign world could not bear her down; But these savage, wolfish parties alarm me.  Owning no law but their own will, more and more combative, less and less tolerant of the idea of ensemble and of equal brotherhood, the perfect equality of the States, the ever-overarching American Ideas, it behooves you to convey yourself implicitly to no party, nor submit blindly to their dictators, but steadily hold yourself judge and master over all of them."  And he said, "It is the fashion of dillettants [sic] and fops (perhaps I myself am not guiltless,) to decry the whole formulation of the active politics of America, as beyond redemption, and to be carefully kept away from.  See that you do not fall into this error.  America, it may be, is doing very well upon the whole, notwithstanding these antics of the parties and their leaders, these half-brained nominees, the many ignorant ballots, and many elected failures and blatherers."  These passages come from Whitman's long essay Democratic Vistas, a virtual hymn of praise to America, and to Democracy, words which for him are interchangeable.

It needs to be asked how Black and Native Americans would see the state of American democracy in 1870.  NO STATEMENT ABOUT THE UNITED STATES CAN BE COMPLETE WITHOUT SUCH QUESTIONS, EVER. For Black Americans things may have seemed better than they ever had be as Reconstruction was in effect in the former Confederacy, one of those brief periods in American history like the one a century later when the Jim Crow that came in with Rutherford Hayes and his Electoral College deal with white supremacists was briefly eclipsed with the Voting Rights and Civil Rights Acts and a few Supreme Court rulings that would be increasingly swept aside as Republicans, empowered by their deal with white supremacists, the "Southern Strategy" gained power and packed the Courts which have been overturning all of that progress just as they did in the Jim Crow period.  

And you could ask similar questions about how working People under the wage slavery that was never abolished by presidential proclamation or law - Marilynne Robinson had interesting things to say about how that was also a political issue for those like Lincoln - and how Women, who would be denied the vote for fifty years saw it.  

I have to point out one thing in Whitman's list of supposed American virtues that is not only deeply troubling as an idea but which constitutes one of the most glaring defects of the U.S. Constitution and the source of some of its most anti-democratic manifestation, "the perfect equality of the States."  You can't have "perfect equality" of the states when the features embodying that, the equal representation of different states in the Senate,  the added weight given to even the lowest population states in both the Senate and the Electoral College that results,  the equal weight given to the states with the smallest populations to either pass or block amendments, etc.  is inherently anti-democratic, anti-egalitarian and, it being easier to propagandize and gull smaller populations than larger ones, it hands those who would manipulate the system by doing just that an enormous advantage in corrupting the American system.  Adding in such notions as states being the ones to control elections - which directly led to the American apartheid system that rose in the post-Civil War period - and you need to take seriously the folly of believing that states have rights, including a "right" to equality.  People have rights, the fictitious entities,  states don't.   The United States won't be a democracy of any kind until all of those corruptions of our Constitutional system are removed in favor of the perfect equality of People. 

It is true that the period after the Civil war was a low point in American political history.   And it is true also that the country came through it all at last, fairly intact by the standards that apply in such cases.  This is reassuring to consider, since we now live in a political environment characterized by wolfishness and filled with blather.  We have the passive pious, who feel they have proved their moral refinement in declaring the whole enterprise bankrupt, and we have the active pious, who agree with them, with the difference that they see some hope in a hastily arranged liquidation of cultural assets.

It was Whitman's faith that a great presiding spirit of Democracy would check, or correct for, the worst deficiencies of the civilization.  It may indeed have been that ideal that kept us on course, or allowed us finally to find our way back to a better and healthier national life then and in all the other periods in our history when our politics have seemed to be beyond redemption.   Whitman says Democracy "is a great word, whose history, I suppose, remain unwritten, because that history has yet to be enacted."  It is for him like the word "Nature" in that its history, therefore its definition, remains partial and tentative, though some valuable phrases and paragraphs have been added from time to time.

The only "great presiding spirit of Democracy" that "would check, or correct for, the worst deficiencies of the civilization," is, in fact, equality of People.   The very reason that democracy "has yet to be enacted,"  something as true, perhaps more true than in 1870 is due to the fact that the many long, hard, not infrequently bloody struggles for equality under law have been repeatedly thwarted from progress and, on those rare occasions when great progress towards equality is made,  the very Constitution, most frequently in our history by Supreme Court assertion of the "meaning" of the Constitution has turned back the clock to 1862 and earlier.   The Court under the genteel Virginia white supremacist John Roberts has done that in just about every category under which progress had been made, including against Black People, People of Color, Native Americans, Women and working People.   It was one of the great and ironic tragedies of America in this century that Barack Obama,  Harvard trained lawyer,  was so timid in asserting opposition to that re-imposition of a status quo that Whitman may have recognized and that Joe Biden appointed another Harvard man as Attorney General whose failures have contributed  directly to Trump II.    Biden was far and away the greater egalitarian but I think his lawyerly training may have led to his too easy capitulation to Roberts-Republican-fascist enablement.  I have to watch, it, though,  that will get me on the topic of lawyers and the inherent corruptions of their lucrative profession.* 

What if we have ceased to aspire to Democracy, or even democracy?  What if the words "Democracy" and "America" are severed and no longer imply each other?  It is not unusual now to hear that we have lost our values, that we have lost our way.  In the desperation of the moment, justified or not, certain among us have turned on our heritage, the country that has emerged out of generations of attention to public education, public health, public safety, access to suffrage, equality under law.  It turns out, by their reckoning, that the country they call the greatest on earth has spent most of its history acting against its own (great) nature, and that the enhancements of life it has provided for the generality of its people, or to phrase it more democratically, that the people have provided for themselves has made its citizens weak and dependent.  How the greatest nation on earth maintains this exalted status while burdened with a population that patriots do not like or respect is an interesting question, certainly.  In any case, the return to traditional values seems to them to mean together with a bracing and punitive severity toward the vulnerable among us, the establishment of a kind of religious monoculture we have never had and our institutions have never encouraged.

Americans have been gulled out of their rightful inheritance, not ironically due to the actions of such as the "Heritage Foundation" by a combination of media, entertainment most effectively but also the "news" the promotion of racism starting in the 1970s reaction against the progress made in Civil Rights in the 1960s, the promotion of racism and bigotry and inequality in the movies, on TV, the glamorization of vulgar wealth (Trump was invented through that) and various lies and regional resentments.   Religion - which will become the central feature in this discussion later - Christianity, especially - -was perverted to mean white evangelicalism and "traditional catholicism,"  again through the free press, the media.   

I'm planning on going on with what Robinson said in her preface, wondering how she would write the same piece today, during Trump II.   Though I certainly will not try to speak for her.   

*  As I pointed out in discussing I. F. Stone's chapter from The Trial of Socrates,  "democracy" without THE FACT OF  equality being the dominant feature of it is guaranteed to produce a corrupt government, no matter how many elections are held.   American apartheid as South African apartheid featured regular elections, as have happened in various "Peoples' democratic republics" as a one party, often clique or even one family have ruled in a totalitarian manner for decades.    Our apartheid ran under the slogan "Equal Justice Under Law" as the entire legal system proved that was a lie.   What the Roberts Court is reimposing very fast. 

I'm tempted to go through the discussion between two of the MSNBC style lawyers I heard this morning blithely asserting that John Roberts is about to lower the boom on Trump.   One of the thing they put their faith in was Marbury v Madison, to show you how much they've learned from witnessing the past twenty five years.