"The Leninist antagonism to the most essential features of socialism was evident from the very start."

Most of those lefties of my younger years who maintained a romantic view of Lenin, the Soviet Union, Communism, etc.  Those who held the torch, then the feeble candle for those traditional concerns of such people, the ability of Dalton Trumbo to get a movie credit for the scripts he wrote, the innocence of the Rosenbergs, weren't exactly high-brows or scholars.   Though most of them had college credentials, most of them got whatever they knew about such things from self-interested propagandists, magazine scribblers trying to break into or maintain a position in the tiny little market of lefty scribbling or the equally tiny market of lefty electronic distribution of such lore.*  The true believers are the kind of people who, as I've pointed out, believe historical distortion in such products as The Crucible and Inherit the Wind are historically accurate when they are anything but that.  They're not much brighter than those who have gotten their idea of history from shit like Gone With The Wind, The Pony Express or, in more extreme cases of that fascism that has been called "Americanism" "Americanist", Birth of a Nation.  

The short essay by Noam Chomsky I excerpted yesterday could serve as a very good introduction into the reality of the utter corruption of the various American Communist and associated parties, the real damage they have done to the struggle by the real left, those never taking orders and money from "Russian" dictators and carrying water for them, the people who have had no effect in American politics except to discredit the real left and who, in their post-Communist form, are carrying water for the post-Communist gangster Czar of Russia in all the implication of that accusation.  So I'll excerpt the passages from right before the part I excerpted yesterday. 

The terminology of political and social discourse is vague and imprecise, and constantly debased by the contributions of ideologists of one or another stripe. Still, these terms have at least some residue of meaning. Since its origins, socialism has meant the liberation of working people from exploitation. As the Marxist theoretician Anton Pannekoek observed, “this goal is not reached and cannot be reached by a new directing and governing class substituting itself for the bourgeoisie,” but can only be “realized by the workers themselves being master over production.” Mastery over production by the producers is the essence of socialism, and means to achieve this end have regularly been devised in periods of revolutionary struggle, against the bitter opposition of the traditional ruling classes and the ‘revolutionary intellectuals’ guided by the common principles of Leninism and Western managerialism, as adapted to changing circumstances. But the essential element of the socialist ideal remains: to convert the means of production into the property of freely associated producers and thus the social property of people who have liberated themselves from exploitation by their master, as a fundamental step towards a broader realm of human freedom.

The Leninist intelligentsia have a different agenda. They fit Marx’s description of the ‘conspirators’ who “pre-empt the developing revolutionary process” and distort it to their ends of domination; “Hence their deepest disdain for the more theoretical enlightenment of the workers about their class interests,” which include the overthrow of the Red Bureaucracy and the creation of mechanisms of democratic control over production and social life. For the Leninist, the masses must be strictly disciplined, while the socialist will struggle to achieve a social order in which discipline “will become superfluous” as the freely associated producers “work for their own accord” (Marx). Libertarian socialism, furthermore, does not limit its aims to democratic control by producers over production, but seeks to abolish all forms of domination and hierarchy in every aspect of social and personal life, an unending struggle, since progress in achieving a more just society will lead to new insight and understanding of forms of oppression that may be concealed in traditional practice and consciousness.

The Leninist antagonism to the most essential features of socialism was evident from the very start. In revolutionary Russia, Soviets and factory committees developed as instruments of struggle and liberation, with many flaws, but with a rich potential. Lenin and Trotsky, upon assuming power, immediately devoted themselves to destroying the liberatory potential of these instruments, establishing the rule of the Party, in practice its Central Committee and its Maximal Leaders — exactly as Trotsky had predicted years earlier, as Rosa Luxembourg and other left Marxists warned at the time, and as the anarchists had always understood. Not only the masses, but even the Party must be subject to “vigilant control from above,” so Trotsky held as he made the transition from revolutionary intellectual to State priest. Before seizing State power, the Bolshevik leadership adopted much of the rhetoric of people who were engaged in the revolutionary struggle from below, but their true commitments were quite different. This was evident before and became crystal clear as they assumed State power in October 1917.

That is a pattern of virtually every subsequent self-declared Marxist government and a pattern which virtually no Marxist entity in the United States which gained any traction ever seemed to be much bothered by.   The Marxists' largest contribution, by far, to the history of the 20th century was in service to one or another of the strong-man-gangster regimes in other countries.  In the period up to the 1960s, that was almost uniformly, in the West, to Leninism, then Stalinism, with a splinter faction who took the thug Trotsky's part in the power struggle with Stalin (and who, in large numbers took the tiny baby step into capitalist-fascism) then, as Khrushchev discredited Stalin by a minimalist exposure of his crimes against humanity, went on to a devotion to Maoism even as he was matching or outdoing Stalin in committing murder.   

That is what is on display at the fucking Left Forum later this month, that is what has been on display at every one since it evolved out of an earlier "socialist" forum which, mostly, did a lot of that ideological distortion of the meaning of "socialism" that has made the word political poison to the majority of the American electorate.   I think the baggage of that ideological distortion and the damage  to the label has made it an obstacle to the goals of genuine socialism, a better and more just life for us, for economic justice.  Complaining that that distortion is unfair to the label is nothing but a continued hampering of achieving those goals by democratic means and under a different name.  It was one of the greatest revelations of my reading of Marilynne Robinson that she pointed out there were indigenous American paths for achieving such goals, things which are not "socialism" but which will be far more certain to achieve those goals of, by and FOR THE PEOPLE.  When Lincoln used the word "People" he certainly didn't mean the same thing as the word in the names of so many Communist dictatorships.  He delivered liberation, they were gangsters who only sought their own empowerment and enrichment.  

*  I am interested in the role that the cumbersome process of fact checking the claims of such scribblers for most people when that checking had to take the form of looking stuff up in large libraries through the information retrieval by consulting ink on paper, books, bibliographies, card catalogues - going up and down stairs - played in the naive faith of the readers of such claims in the ink on paper magazines and in phonied up theatrical and movie history.   I can guarantee you that having access to online publication of complete texts of primary source documents, easily found, easily searched by the use of search terms has made an incredibly huge difference in my understanding of these things.  If we survive long enough for the regime of ink on paper to give way to effective training of that former mid-brow ersatz intelligentsia, the old myths of the old left are totally unsustainable.  I am very relieved to find that my more intellectual nieces are not as susceptible to buying into that garbage as I was.  Marxism is dead, it's not wanted anywhere where people had a real experience of it.  Those who held its torch here were of most use to those who used them as a foil to attack traditional American liberalism.   Such young people may be more open to the slogan "democratic socialism" but they should never fool themselves that they constitute an effective majority or a margin of the electorate that can swing most elections.  They can't even manage to win an election in Britain where the word has been less damaged and seem to be failing in one place after another in Europe, too. 

Hate Mail - Knowing We Were Deceived, I Don't Care Anymore

No, I didn't bother looking to see if the Left Forum has, finally, decided to let go of claiming that the Rosenbergs or even just Ethel got framed.  Even their sons admit that Julius was the Stalin spy he was accused of being and if anyone was to blame for Ethel being unjustly framed for something she didn't do, it was him and, possibly, higher-ups in the Communist establishment who ordered them to not talk.  As far as I'm concerned, he and quite possibly she have the same moral status as spies for Hitler or Hirohito.  The extent to which she is responsible for her end is unknowable unless we know what she knew and there isn't any way to know that unless direct evidence of that surfaces and I wouldn't even care about it then.  There are numerable cases of unjustly convicted, unjustly imprisoned and unjustly executed people that don't get any notice.  I'd rather concentrate on more recent ones of those.    

But just think of all of the theatrical wailing and moaning and lying and posing over those deaths - in the past, just about all of it now discredited by the lie that they were both framed when we now know that was a lie in at least his case.  I think we've given the first couple of atomic spying more than enough of our time.   There's no one left to hold accountable now that her brother is dead.  And I don't care. 

Update:  We've been through this before.   I am absolutely opposed to capital punishment, the Rosenbergs shouldn't have been executed.  Neither should have Troy Davis, Claude Jones, George Stinney Jr, . . . who, unlike at least Julius Rosenberg and not beyond question Ethel Rosenberg, were not guilty of the crimes they were convicted and murdered by the state for.  I wonder if any of those names were ever mentioned at any Left Forum.

I will also mention that, though it's certainly true that Judge Kaufman was hardly admirable in his conduct of the case and Roy Cohn was scum, the crimes the Rosenbergs were convicted of were done on behalf of the Stalin regime in the 1940s, well after his infamous show trials were not only known in the West, they were supported by the Communist Party that Julius Rosenberg and, as I recall, Ethel Rosenberg belonged to, many a Communist and "lefty" signed petitions of support for Stalin's show trials conducted by people who made Kaufman's conduct of the trial look like justice.  If the Rosenbergs had been put on trial in their idea of a worker's paradise and been totally and even obviously innocent, they'd have been convicted - if there were even a trial, which isn't anything like certain - and shot or tortured to death to get them to give up names.  It would have probably been part of a program to set off a pogrom which, in fact, Stalin was starting against Jews during the very years that the Rosenbergs were on trial. 

The repeated use of the 5th Amendment by the Rosenbergs during their questioning and trial is an even sharper contrast to "justice" under the dictator Julius worked for along with, certainly Ethel Rosenberg's brother and, I wouldn't be surprised, she did.  I doubt the things that would have happened right under her nose would not have been known to her.  

As to the claim that Judge Irving Kaufman was corrupt, that is certainly open to debate.  I think he conducted this trail badly and I believe he had career motives in doing that.  Though, as it happened, that worked against his greatest desire, to be appointed to the Supreme Court.  

I will note that, appointed to his seat by Truman and after the Rosenberg case he was nominated by President Kennedy to the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and confirmed by the Democratically controlled Senate in 1961.  He was hardly a hard right winger.  Some of his decisions are seen as progressive.  

He was the trial judge in the case that led to the decision in  Irving Berlin et al. v. E.C. Publications, Inc, that established the right of MAD magazine and others to create parodies of pop songs.

He was part of the three-judge panel that prevented the Nixon administration from deporting John Lennon, highly critical of the government for using the law to try to silence criticism of it.

He helped establish the right of those tortured elsewhere to sue in American courts in the Filártiga v. Peña-Irala case.  

He greatly expanded the right to plead innocent by reason of insanity in the case, United States v. Freeman, which probably saved more than a few lives. 

I can't say that I greatly admire Irving Kaufman, but the charge that he was corrupt is probably an exaggeration.  They certainly didn't think so in the Kennedy administration and the Senate in 1961.  I doubt I'd have liked him but as judges go, he was far from the worst. 

The idea that the Rosenbergs were victims of antisemitism is ludicrous, considering both Kaufman and Cohn were Jewish and especially considering the fact that Julius Rosenberg was certainly guilty of the crime he was convicted of and Ethel certainly didn't help herself by refusing to testify honestly as to what she knew.  As I said, considering who it was they and their close associates were supporting, Stalin, I'm not inclined to feel all that sorry for them. Though, as I said, neither of them should have been executed.  And there were lots of other people put to death in 1953, none of whom should have been executed, none of whom I would imagine, the Left Forum poured over decades after they were killed by the state.  And lots since then.  Lots of them still on death row, some estimates as high as 4% of those are totally innocent.  I'd rather concentrate on preventing their executions than rehashing the old lies of the old left about those two. 

Update 2:  The accusation that I fail to care, sufficiently, for the execution of a "commie woman" is funny because I'm absolutely certain that the hero of the Communist Party of the United States during those years, Stalin, killed hundreds and hundreds of times more Communists than were executed in the United States, many of them as Stalin liquidated just about all of his surviving fellow revolutionaries in those show trials that so many heroes of the Communist friendly left supported with their signatures on those petitions I mention above.  We've been through that, too, as I pointed out the poseur of the Red Scare era, Lillian Hellman and her boyfriend, Daschel Hammett did.  I don't have any respect for people who made excuses for democidalist killers in the same league with Hitler and Mao.  They are the moral equal of the supporters of Hitler.

About The Only Thing You Can Learn From The Left Forum Is Why Its Kind Of "Left" Will Always Work Against Democracy

When you go to the 2019 Left Forum page, when you scroll past the masthead and get into the description of the "sessions," the first image you see is

 this picture of Lenin to decorate the listing of their first posted "session" Lenin: His Works' Pertinence Here and Now, as will be expressed in the words and thoughts of of Richard D. Wolff, Chris L Hedges, Laura Flanders, Tim Schermerhorn   The last one, Tim Schermerhorn is the only one I hadn't ever heard of, Wolff being what counts as a ubiquitous presence in the obscurity of current Marxism in the English speaking world, a Professor of Economics Emeritus at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and a Visiting Professor at the New School University in New York City who scribbles books and apparently has a TV show about economics which I'd never heard of before and which I doubt gets much viewing.  

Hedges and Flanders are, I would guess if I had to, what might pass as better known, getting marginal airtime on the big cabloid networks, Hedges being the somewhat admirable and honored former war reporter but who, I'm convinced, is rather shell shocked and who mostly, these days, is a discouraging prophet of doom.  In other words, these three I knew of because they're of the professional scribbling-chattering class of the kind who really have marginal skin in the actual world of laboring People but who have endless ideas about what should happen to them.  The class that it is unsurprising to find are still holding the torch for Lenin and the coming of the Communist regime in Russia and, as Lenin and his successors violently imposed it, the Soviet Union.  That is when about the only place in the world where a government is holding the torch for Lenin may be such places as North Korea.  What Lenin was, was the first in a series of mob bosses who racked up one of the highest body counts of any modern country, outdone, perhaps, by China under the Communists, and Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy and Imperial Japan, the Mongol hoard in medieval times perhaps outdoing them and the European colonial efforts in the Americas, Australia, Africa, Asia.  

What's odd about the group is the one which is not like the others, Tim Schermerhorn, of whom his Left Forum bio says:   

Tim Schermerhorn is a retired train operator and member of TWU Local 100. A rank and file organizer, Tim was a founding member of the Hell on Wheels newsletter and the New Directions Caucus. He now works with Democracy at Work New York and is on the board of Labor Notes.

If there is anything that Lenin was not it was the working Person's friend, a friend of independent unions - he and Trotsky et al crushed the start of those in Russia and the Soviet Union and its occupied European and Asian satellites and, ironically, for all time, anything of socialism that was coherently  consistent with democracy.  While I have my differences with Noam Chomsky, this passage from this article is quite a good description of what Lenin and Trotsky did to unions and working people.

A historian sympathetic to the Bolsheviks, E.H. Carr, writes that “the spontaneous inclination of the workers to organize factory committees and to intervene in the management of the factories was inevitably encouraged by a revolution which led the workers to believe that the productive machinery of the country belonged to them and could be operated by them at their own discretion and to their own advantage” (my emphasis). For the workers, as one anarchist delegate said, “The Factory committees were cells of the future… They, not the State, should now administer.”

But the State priests knew better, and moved at once to destroy the factory committees and to reduce the Soviets to organs of their rule. On November 3, Lenin announced in a “Draft Decree on Workers’ Control” that delegates elected to exercise such control were to be “answerable to the State for the maintenance of the strictest order and discipline and for the protection of property.” As the year ended, Lenin noted that “we passed from workers’ control to the creation of the Supreme Council of National Economy,” which was to “replace, absorb and supersede the machinery of workers’ control” (Carr). “The very idea of socialism is embodied in the concept of workers’ control,” one Menshevik trade unionist lamented; the Bolshevik leadership expressed the same lament in action, by demolishing the very idea of socialism.

Soon Lenin was to decree that the leadership must assume “dictatorial powers” over the workers, who must accept “unquestioning submission to a single will” and “in the interests of socialism,” must “unquestioningly obey the single will of the leaders of the labour process.” As Lenin and Trotsky proceeded with the militarization of labour, the transformation of the society into a labour army submitted to their single will, Lenin explained that subordination of the worker to “individual authority” is “the system which more than any other assures the best utilization of human resources” — or as Robert McNamara expressed the same idea, “vital decision-making… must remain at the top… the real threat to democracy comes not from overmanagement, but from undermanagement”; “if it is not reason that rules man, then man falls short of his potential,” and management is nothing other than the rule of reason, which keeps us free. At the same time, ‘factionalism’ — i.e., any modicum of free expression and organization — was destroyed “in the interests of socialism,” as the term was redefined for their purposes by Lenin and Trotsky, who proceeded to create the basic proto-fascist structures converted by Stalin into one of the horrors of the modern age.

You might want to compare Chomsky's piece with this load of hagiographic crap from the "Trade Union Educational League," in 1924.*  

But this is a piece about the absurd waste of time and counterproductive heap of bull shit that the Left Forum is and has been.  Considering the political character of the regime that Lenin imposed on the lands he lorded over, preparing the way for Stalin's more developed terror state, it is putridly disgusting that the next item in the list of "sessions" at the 2019 Left Forum is Election Integrity: Publicly Verified Elections and Informed Public Are Key to De-Corrupting Our Democracy!   For any bunch of play-lefties to be holding up Lenin and "His Works' Pertinence Here and Now" to have the gall to then go on to lecture Americans about democratic elections is disgustingly hypocritical.  If there is one thing that Lenin was entirely against, it was democracy, especially what might have been understood, even then, as democratic socialism.  Something which makes me wonder if another clearly Commie sponsored session later in the conference Trotskyist Youth in the Fight for Socialist Revolution vs. "Sanders Socialism" has more to do with the idiocy represented in the likes of the "Trade Union Educational League" and its history of typical commie infighting, especially with anyone who has any possibility of winning a single Senate seat, something which Sanders actually, though rather idiosyncratically managed and which is nothing like anything any member of the sponsoring organizations," Internationalist Group, Revolutionary Internationalist Youth" have done or will ever do.   I wouldn't be surprised if Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez isn't slammed in that session by the, I'll bet, less than two dozen members of those groups.  I am confident in predicting no one not in those groups will attend the session. 

I didn't feel like pouring through the entire contents of the Left Forum's 2019 sessions to see what unintended rather bitter comedy will, no doubt abound there.  I will say that in 2019, after a hundred and two years of seeing Communism, especially Leninism in action, anyone who holds a torch for it is the moral equivalent of a Holocaust denier, a neo-Nazi.   And I say that having had some respect for at least Chris Hedges from that group, back before I came to conclude he was shell shocked.   Any "left" that holds up anything like a candle for Soviet Communism is a self-discrediting heap of shit that we on a left that might make things better need, absolutely need to throw on the garbage heap of history or we have no one to blame for the century worth of discrediting of the real left continuing into a second one, but ourselves.   These people are not our comrades, they are not our friends, they are not any burden we can get to do anything but drag us down and defeat us.  The struggle against fascism, against corporate gangsterism can't afford to coddle or tolerate their presence. We've got to get shut of them in all of their delusion and scribbling-babbling class idiocy. 

I didn't poke around to see what the Putin fixture of the Green Party, Jill Stein was doing that got her in the rogues gallery of photos of participants that moved across the Left Forum 2019 site.  If Lenin was a fitting symbol for the history of counter-productive, hypocritical and thuggish lies of the play-left, there is no more fitting symbol and symptom of it in contemporary terms than Jill Stein, so infamously the table mate of Putin and Michael Flynn at the celebratory dinner for the Putin crime regime propaganda outlet RT after she helped deliver the election to Putin's guy, Trump.  Any "left" that has anything to do with her is a left that is probably taking money from the same people who funded that effort. 

*  Poking around in the baroque complex that is the history of Communist-"socialist" and other lefty organizations in the United States, the risings and falling and infighting and ideological posturing and opposing AND THE TOTAL AND ABSOLUTE DISASTER THEY WERE FOR ACCOMPLISHING ANYTHING EXCEPT HAMPERING AND DISCREDITING THE ACTUAL LEFT, can lead to you reading something like the program of the Left Forum in this almost new century with different eyes.  It can also make you rather allergic to the academic and journalistic "left" and the cult members of various commie and other "parties" and "groups" of maybe scores or dozens of members who organize and staff these "sessions".   

Saturday Night Radio Drama - Hear Now Festival 2019

Hear Now Podcast Palooza 

It must have been the pollen and antihistamines but I totally forgot that this was the month of the The National Audio Theatre Festival's annual HEAR Now: The Audio Fiction and Arts Festival held in Kansas City, Missouri every year, this year.   For us that means that we get to hear the results and knowing that there are dedicated professionals, semi-professionals, gifted amateurs and enthusiasts keeping this art alive when it's supposed to have died decades ago.  Well, it's alive and well and worth trying the many different samples they've posted online.  There's enough here to take a few weeks to hear, though you want to get around to it soon before it lapses. 

I'm having computer trouble so I'll just post this and try to write later. 

Republican-fascist Hate Mail

Oh, yeah, Sleazy Susan is a real outsider in the Republican-fascist circle that controls the Senate.  Yeah, right.   Here's from the Lewiston Sun Journal the other day:

To boost her political standing, U.S. Sen. Susan Collins has been spreading campaign cash around for years, both to her Republican colleagues in the Senate and to the Maine GOP

It comes from her little-noticed leadership political action committee, Dirigo PAC, which has hauled in more than $2.5 million since its inception in 2003.

Her PAC has donated to a who’s who of powerful GOP figures, including Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, Assistant Majority Leader John Thune of South Dakota, U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas and U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina.

The skank is in thick with thieves with them, just like she was when she was one of the Senators promoting the viciously racist, sexist, likley criminal Jeff Sessions to be the Attorney General.   

As we say in Maine, Susan Collins will do the right thing under two conditions, she feels she has to and her for-show opposition to a Republican-fascist won't make the slightest difference to the outcome.  She's one of them pretending she isn't.  

Samantha Bee Provides Exhibit A In Support Of My Earlier Argument

Why We Are Ratfucked - The Sleazy Susan That Spins Round And Round And Never Moves

The corruption and destruction of American democracy was done by lies told in the mass media, through the corruption of the minds of enough Americans through lies told in the mass media, through the promotion of amorality of the sort that kills democracy, racism, sexism, selfishness and greed, appealing to our greatest weaknesses and our greatest flaws.  That is the nutrition deficient sugar that rotted the most durable aspects of democracy, delivered with the methods of peddling products invented by the advertising industry on behalf of industries wanting to appeal to and invent appetites for things that weren't good for us, things we didn't need or really want, to rob us and cheat us and enslave us.  I don't think that the goals of the tobacco, the alcohol, the opioid pushers and other pill mill industrialists to create addicts for the poisons they sell,l making themselves billionaires, is at all different from the goals of the Republican-fascists who are not so reticent about hiding the fascist part of that anymore. 

The corruption and destruction of American democracy came from a combination of permissions to lie given to the mass media by the Supreme Court, the expansion of such "free speech" including, in the Rehnquist and Roberts courts, billionaires foreign and domestic to let them lie with impunity and insert themselves directly into the political process to peddle lies directly.   The judges and justices who pretend that the suppression of lies is beyond their competence to administer deserve to be seen as the part of government most responsible for the corruption and destruction of our democracy, they knocked down every single effective measure which would have protected us from the power of lies but they chose an especially corrupt and stupid interpretation of the First Amendment over a responsible reading of it in the 20th century because, like any law of any kind, there is a potential for its abuse and so they abandoned any responsibility they had as judges of fact to protect us from lies.

But behind all of that is the corrupt influence of great wealth, the form of theft which has allowed the creation of so many billionaires with effective control of the media.   We had domestic Putins before the Supreme Court our billionaires bought themselves gave the power of a Putin to ratfuck our elections with lies, the concentration on Putin is entirely legitimate but if we were left to the devices of the Mercers, the Kochs, the myriad of other enemies of democracy holding American citizenship, we wouldn't be any better off. 

The Republican party is the delivery system of the poison to democracy, they are at the point where even some of the merely less corrupt members of it are leaving.  They were the enthusiastic importers of Rupert Murdoch during the Reagan administration, the master of promotion of fascism in Australia and Britain, they were certaily hoping for what he delivered, a television-radio delivered method of peddling lies that are, after the drugs mentioned above, probably the greatest creator of mental illness, paranoid irrationality and unreality among a population large enough to deliver elections to Republicans.  It was the vehicle under which the Bush II putsch began when John Ellis and his thuggish cohorts began the stealing of the election from Al Gore, they were certainly the key to Trump being imposed on us, though they were not the only ones.  I think that in the Australian-Brit import, Rupert Murdoch and his family* we got someone who has no real sense of obligation to the American People who would cynically deliver us to a consortium of billionaires, domestic, certainly and foreign as well.  He's just one of the  foreign tools like Julian Assange who the Republicans, especially those on the Supreme Court delivered the United States to. 

The Republican-fascists have made full use of all of the tools that the slave owners, Madison, foremost among those, put into the Constitution to protect and enhance the power of the slave economy.   They were certainly and explicitly supported in that by Alexander Hamilton, who, as I pointed out the last time, was an enthusiastic supporter of a lawless dictator as the chief executive of the United States, one beyond the power of the law, one beyond even the real and effective power of control by the Congress - that it is the Senate that is the impediment to removing Donald Trump and punishing the members of his criminal regime which they installed, is all the proof we need of what a really terrible thing they imposed on us for the protection of that most evil of human economic systems, slavery. 

We know that the Republicans, those in office, those on the courts, those working behind the scenes in law faculties, other faculties, think tanks, in the media have mastered all of the flaws in the Constitution of the United States, they have mastered the methods of corrupting We The People through the use of the mass media.  We know that unless the Constitution and laws are changed in fundamental ways they will use the very same vehicles of attack on democracy that they have mastered, we know that they will always be looking for the weak points in the law and,ultimately, the only protection against that is for people to know the truth and value it beyond attractive lies.  But that isn't enough, either.  People have to know the truth and be of the moral character on which democracy ultimately depends.  You can know all the truth there is and use it for selfish, malevolent ends.  The people who ratfucked American democracy aren't stupid, though they have certainly imposed the stupidest, most degenerate crew of criminals to rule us in our history.   They are morally corrupt.  In the end, democracy is made of the moral holding that we are to do to other people as we would have done to us. 

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

I want to tie the continued employment of the criminal Kellyanne Conway, William Barr, Elaine Chao, etc, etc, etc, to Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski and whatever other Republicans are peddling themselves as not being as bad as the Republican leadership in the Senate that they keep in power.  If five Republicans left the hopelessly corrupt Republican Party, even if they threatened to leave the party unless Mitch McConnell, Lindsay Graham and other supporters of  the Trump crime wave were replaced by those who would hold them responsible for their crimes, they could change their party.  They will not do it, they will never do it.   Sleazy Susan spins and turns and always ends up in exactly the same place she always is, supporting the most criminal regime in the history of the country.  Susan Collins has to be made personally responsible for the worst of it being in place.  She is as guilty as Mitch McConnell for keeping Trump in office.

The Worst And The Blightest As Championed By The Hamiltonian Federalists

It was especially gratifying to me to hear this segment from Ari Melber's show, starting with the Federalist-fascist society hack, John Malcolm,  the scumbag the  Republican-fascists called in to the hearing of the Judiciary Committee yesterday to cover-up for Trump criminality.   

What was gratifying was later in the discussion when the former prosecutor John Flannery called out the Federalist-fascist hack for citing the real Alexander Hamilton in Federalist Paper 70, the one in which Hamilton, the real one, not the fiction that that show-biz boob Lin-Manuel Miranda put on Broadway, called for the President to be a dictator of the kind Republicans are trying to make Trump into.  Here is the passage that John Flannery pointed out was cited by Malcolm in defense of Donald Trump's criminality. 

There is an idea, which is not without its advocates, that a vigorous executive is inconsistent with the genius of republican government. The enlightened well-wishers to this species of government must at least hope that the supposition is destitute of foundation; since they can never admit its truth, without at the same time admitting the condemnation of their own principles. Energy in the executive is a leading character in the definition of good government. It is essential to the protection of the community against foreign attacks; it is not less essential to the steady administration of the laws; to the protection of property against those irregular and high-handed combinations which sometimes interrupt the ordinary course of justice; to the security of liberty against the enterprises and assaults of ambition, of faction, and of anarchy. Every man the least conversant in Roman history knows how often that republic was obliged to take refuge in the absolute power of a single man, under the formidable title of dictator, as well against the intrigues of ambitious individuals who aspired to the tyranny, and the seditions of whole classes of the community whose conduct threatened the existence of all government, as against the invasions of external enemies who menaced the conquest and destruction of Rome.

I got the feeling while listening to the clip that John Malcolm hadn't actually read the document that is probably the foremost authority behind the Republican-fascist unitary executive theory of the presidency that is a menace to the United States in 2019, a theory which is probably supported - for Republican presidents,  I doubt for Democratic ones - by a majority of those on the Supreme Court and in the Republican-fascist majority in the Senate.  I can say that because they have installed so many of their fellow fascist believes in the federal judiciary with complete support by Republicans in the Senate.

In Trump, of course, they prove their total and complete hypocrisy and degeneracy and the stupidity of Hamilton BECAUSE WHAT THEY ARE PROTECTING IS EXACTLY WHAT HAMILTON USED AS AN EXCUSE IN CALLING FOR A DICTATOR-PRESIDENT, TRUMP, THE REPUBLICAN-DICTATOR WAS INSTALLED BY A HOSTILE FOREIGN DICTATOR-GANGSTER WHOSE BIDDING HE IS DOING AND WHICH THE FEDERALIST-FASCISTS ARE ENABLING IN ATTACKING AMERICAN DEMOCRACY.  

William Barr's and the Federalist-fascist establishment championing of the stupidest, most corrupt, most criminal, most degenerate man to have ever held the office of the presidency, one of the crew of such highly placed lawyers to do so, many of them the soured cream of the Ivy League class crop of law schools, proves just how stupid Hamilton's conception of the presidency is and how dangerous his thinking on the law and government is.   

I took a lot of heat for pointing out that the musical "Hamilton" dishonestly held up one of the worst possible "founders" as some kind of hero of egalitarian democracy when he was anything but that.  I did, unlike, perhaps, John Malcolm, read the Federalist Papers and knew what a piece of shit the writers of those were.  Now, in this danger the country is in from Trumpian fascism, the show-biz bullshit has to be exposed for what it is even if it makes a lot of star bedazzled idiots unhappy, those who know nothing more than they see on stage, on TV in movies because that kind of lie about real people whose words and actions had and has real consequences is dangerous.

I'm tempted to say that it's unfortunate Aaron Burr or someone else hadn't shot Hamilton before he wrote that paper which has become so dangerous to us, today.   I, of course, can't approve of dueling but, noting that Hamilton was sort of addicted to dueling - I believe he had been involved with about a dozen, if memory serves - that asshole was asking for it. 

The Catastrophe That The Yearning For Normalcy Brings, And The Delusions of Revolution As Well

As of today, by a mile, Elizabeth Warren is my favorite of the two dozen or so announced candidates for the Democratic nomination for president.  My second choice for president is Kamala Harris, after a couple of hearings in which I wondered what people saw in her, the last several and in some of her campaign appearances, she's got greatness in her.  Pete Buttigieg is my favorite for vice-president but I am not enthusiastic about someone of his relative inexperience making such a big leap to be president, though I think eight years as the President of the Senate might be an excellent preparation.   I see greatness in him, though I hope he doesn't harbor any romantic notions about the Kennedy presidency, which, over the years, was more Camelot show-biz hokum than real.  If Kennedy had not been assassinated, his legacy would not be romantically looked at as some kind of illusory golden age. 

My last choice among those with any traction to speak of is Joe Biden my second last is Bernie Sanders who has no business seeking the nomination of a party he is not a committed member of. *

The estimable Charles Pierce puts it very well in criticizing Biden who is running a campaign based on his association with Barack Obama,  

However, the second overriding notion that all the candidates had in common, and with which the entire hall seemed to agree, was that conventional metrics—hell, conventional anything related to politics—may well be unsuited to the current political moment, that with the election of this particular president* and with the animatronic zombie thrill-ride on which he's taken the government, the country may have passed some kind of point of no return. This would mean bad news for Biden, who seems to be campaigning mainly on the theme of bringing back the golden age of 2009. 

I think that that legitimate criticism of Biden is also a key to understanding what Obama's greatest weakness was and, thinking about Pierce's piece, I think it's something that both of them share with Robert Mueller's "institutionalist" process based concept of governing or administering a country in which those things that such establishment golden-boys as Obama and Mueller are most comfortable with, have produced the disaster we are in, today.   They are not suited to a country in as much peril as the United States proves it is in by the fact that a known crook, gangster and civil traitor such as Donald Trump, an asset of the greatest danger to democracy since 1945, Putin remaining into office into a third year.   I don't think such men have much of a vision of anything past their own careers and self-concept.  

I think that Bernie Sanders' current run for the nomination of a party that he will not actually and permanently join and whose previous candidacy is in the running as a contributing factor to Donald Trump occupying the presidency shares much of their self-contentedness, though unlike Biden, he at least can see past the rim of his inner circle.  But that's nowhere near enough.  Bernie Sanders exposed himself as a selfish egotist, not by running in 2016 but by leaving the party only to rejoin it so he can run in 2020 even as he took out papers to, again, run as an independent for the Senate in 2024.  That is a point that I will not stop pointing out.  You have to be a monumental egotist to think you are entitled to run for the nomination of a party you will not really be a member of.

Pierce's theme was one I found extremely gratifying.  I took some pride in having written at what a disaster a "return to normalcy" would be in 2006, a piece that I took some pride in at the time.  I'm still feeling weak from the narrow escape from another major respiratory illness so here it is, almost to the day, thirteen years ago. 

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

Wednesday, June 14, 2006

WHAT IF WE DODGE THE BULLET?

What if they lose? What if the congress investigates the crimes of the Bush regime and those are stopped? What if things go back to normal? After what we've seen the past forty years, if things can go back to normal it won't be a blessed relief, it will be a disaster. Our recent history proves that we have fatal problems in the foundation of the American government.

Our elections have to be fixed, not just returned to c. 1964. We have to secure the vote, from before it is cast to counting to reporting the results to their fulfillment. No elections official, secretary of state, or judge can ever be allowed to prevent another legal ballot being cast or counted or made to count. The sleazy behavior we've seen from every level from elections clerk to Supreme Court and the Executive wouldn't be tolerated in a real democracy. A democracy needs it to be an impeachable crime for a Supreme Court Justice to say that a Citizen of the United States does not have a right to vote. That is a fundamental contradiction of the role of the court in a democracy. Anyone who believes that has no place on our court or in our government.

The media, and today that means the electronic media, have to have their self-interested biases exposed and it's pollution scrubbed out of our politics. They have to be forced to perform the public service they promised, including standards of fairness. Broadcast stations must provide real news, including local news, which has to be unbiased and fair. And as a comment here yesterday said, without diverse ownership of the media, they won't serve the entire public.

The cable "news" channels have betrayed the publics trust even more flagrantly than broadcast, spreading lies effective enough to start the most idiotic and dangerous war of our history. We will pay the cost of their lies for decades, in blood as well as money.

They also aided the Bush putsch of 2000 and the earlier scheme to remove a genuinely elected President on trumped up charges and lies. Pretending that a rogue cable industry isn't a danger to freedom has to stop. Anyone who defends them on their crimes against democracy is a dupe or a profiteer. Put them under the same public service requirements as broadcast media. Media passes itself off as the voice of the people, then let them show it by putting the public before their investors and owners.

Recent history proves that self-government can't depend on leaving it to chance. Laissez faire democracy dies and the death is never a natural one. It lets the powerful and wealthy swamp the Peoples's voice almost all of the time. In the same comments mentioned above, it was pointed out that the Supreme Court rulings making corporations artificial people made that all the more true.

Our government is always presented as having three branches, those are where almost all of the pitiful efforts at reform are concentrated. And that hasn't worked, we have the most dishonest government of our lifetimes. Putting patches on the process to make it a level field is unrealistic to the level of willful blindness. Powerful interests have power. They will always win when they have equal access to the process and own the media. The handful of examples where individuals or small groups win over the big guy make for sentimental TV movies, using them as proof that the system works is calculated dishonesty.

If the People are neglected then it all goes wrong. They won't even show up to vote. That step isn't a naive social studies lesson that you stop thinking about after the test in fourth grade. You don't go on to the higher study of civics and leave it behind. There is nothing higher in a democracy that the People, there is no act of government more important than their Vote. Abraham Lincoln, one of the real founders of the country we live in today, gave the formula for it. You know it by heart. He didn't mention the congress, the executive or the high church of the judiciary. He said that the enormous sacrifice of the American People in the Civil War was so that government of the People, by the People, and for the People shall not perish from the earth.

Any aftermath of the Bush II disaster that doesn't include changes to these laws will be just the beginning of the next time. Not securing the Vote, the will of the People; and forcing their own chosen responsibilities on the media, the only guarantee of an informed and realistic Vote, is a welcome mat for the next would-be dictator. Any liberal, leftist, Democrat, independent, even "moderate" Republican who lets two years go by without enacting real electoral and media reform had better beware. It's just a matter of waiting before the same coalition of corporate interests, bigots, oligarches and haters tries again. They might be as slow and stealthy as they were this time, buying up media, using it to spread lies that "more speech" can't drown out, but they'll make a come back.

UPDATE: 2019,  I would add as absolute requirements for saving equality and democracy are 

a. Every ballot for federal elections should follow a set form ON PAPER MARKED BY HAND.  Nothing short of that, preserved and protected and counted and recountable will result in honest elections.  The elections of President, Vice-President, House Member and Senator are issues of national importance having an impact of all of us, the rules protecting that choice should be national, not subject to state corruption. 

b. Get rid of the goddamned anti-democratic caucuses in favor of primaries.  

c. The Democratic Party should have a rule that refuses to seat delegates not chosen by closed primaries in which party members choose the nominee of their party, 

d. If states will not change their laws allowing for that, the Democratic Party should run its own, Washington State style by-mail primary on a national scale, party members only voting for delegates to the convention.  Voters who were not declared party members for at least a year before the primary or since shortly after they turned 18 should be inelligible to vote in it.  I remember too many Green Party and Bernie Bots changing their party affiliation in Maine while declaring that they would never vote for anyone but Bernie as the Democratic candidate.  

e. All announced Democratic candidates must be asked to pledge to fully support the nominee of the party and not to run in it or to support other candidates for the nomination.  If they want Democrats nomination, they should be required to abide by the choice of Democratic voters. 

*  Pierce notes that The Young Turks is a real and continuing presence in the Sanders campaign:

All day, First Avenue up and down and around the U.S. Cellular Center was alive and raucous with cheers, chanting and, at last, a parade led by Bernie Sanders, who marched with some striking McDonald's workers and with a whole battalion of people from The Young Turks, which is apparently going to be a thing this time around.

I've noticed that the online narrow casting of TYT and its sattelite operations, The Majority Report, etc. are all pushing hard on the Bernie Sanders cult, sandbagging real Democrats with some real chance of winning the real election.   I have to see this as part of the pseudo-lefty media that in its past (and current) print version have serially sold deluded and mostly affluent play lefties on one election losing scheme after another, one idiotic self-defeating "issue" after another, paranoia campaigns, etc.  Not long ago one of them was slamming Elizabeth Warren for in the past doing work as a lawyer for corporations AS IF HER ENTIRE PUBLIC CAREER FOR SEVERAL DECADES COUNTS FOR NOTHING BY COMPARISION. 

I have to wonder when people otherwise appearing to be smart do such stupid things with the experience of the Bush II and now Trump disasters to wise them up.  It's almost as if they, like the old Communist Party were being paid to do this shit.  Or at least that's what I have to wonder.  I know the Greens probably have been, as Jill Stein's appearance at that RT celebration with Mike Flynn and Putin at the same table would excuse anyone from concluding.   I wouldn't be shocked if the not that long ago conservative Cenk would run such a cynical operation.  He and his buddies are pretty cynical. 

Reconsidering Michael Wolff

Listening to another interview with the celebrity journalist Michael Wolff, I've come to the conclusion that he is actually more qualified to report on Donald Trump's regime than regular political reporters because Donald Trump is a show-biz personality, he's not a person who lives within the confines of serious pubic life - or what passes for that, these days.   The regular reporters of Washington DC and NYC whose beat is regular politicians and bureaucrats and lawyers and judges are out of their depth, valuing their observation of decorum and the regular order of politics and the law.   A show biz lawyer who is used to covering the world of Donald Trump is more qualified to get to something more like realistic view of the unreality that Trump is than those who are used to treating political fraud with a decorous veneer of respect for the fraudsters.  

Maybe along with the 2000s phenomenon of Comedy Channel shows doing a better job of getting the deplorable Bush II regime and Samantha Bee, Seth Meyers and Stephen Colbert doing Trump better than the network news shows, Michael Wolff has a more realistic picture of Trump world than you're going to get from those used to treating the office with a deference Trump makes dangerously in appropriate, now.  Maybe that's why the media was so stupid about the "tea party" fraud, as well.  Maybe they should just admit that when TV and social media constructs most peoples' thinking you can't achieve a few of reality by the old rules of polite journalism that they, themselves, have typically honored more by breaching it than in really observing it.  Their industry created Trump, that's a fact.  They did it by repeating lies and telling some of those, themselves. 

Saturday Night Radio Drama - Sean Grundy - Rita Sue And Andrea Too

Rita Sue And Andrea Too 

Tragi-comic drama based on accounts of the life and career of Andrea Dunbar, the schoolgirl playwright from Bradford whose Rita, Sue and Bob Too took 1980s Britain by storm.

Told through the eyes and ears of friend and film director Jennie Howarth, the drama follows a young Andrea as she creates a visceral, acerbic and dark comedy about her own sexual exploitation. 

Based on accounts from the people who worked with Andrea and were involved in the creation of stage-play and film Rita, Sue and Bob Too, this audio-biopic of the author's very short life remembers how she struggled to survive financially and how she battled to protect the authenticity of her original works - as they transferred from stage to film.

Cast:
Andrea ..... Natalie Gavin
Jennie ..... Claudia Jessie
Max and Alan ..... Duncan Wisbey
Oscar ..... James Quinn 
Alma and Peggy ….. Anjella Macintosh

Other voices by Cara Jennings, Sophie Trott and members of the cast 

Written and directed by Sean Grundy
Sound Design by Alisdair McGregor
Produced by Sally Harrison

Bad Times

I will be out for the next several days, a combination of obligations, illness and computer problems.   I hope to be back and if something important breaks I will try to get back to the keyboard.  

I'd say until then enjoy my incomparable archive but I don't know what an "incomparable archive" would be as compared to a "comparable one" so I'll not say that.   I have a radio drama cued up so that will be posted in a while. 

The Watchman As Human Being Instead Of Heroic Monument

I wouldn't normally pay as much attention to Michael Wolff's claims about Robert Mueller and his claims about Mueller's investigation but watching on while Mueller let his thug mafia lawyer pal,  William Barr trash his work, obstruct Congress, ATTACK THE INVESTEGATORS ON BEHALF OF THE PRESIDENT WHO MUELLER CERTAINLY KNOWS OBSTRUCTED JUSTICE AND VERY LIKELY IS PUTIN'S INSTRUMENT IN THE PRESIDENCY! makes me far more open to considering if the celebrity journalist has a more realistic picture of Mueller and the weakness that Trump and his thugs have been able to take full advantage of.   I think the biggest question isn't that Mueller's public persona of integrity made him the right man for the job, I think think the bigger question is the borders and soft edges that are certainly there.   Real people, such as every human being has ever been, is not a damned granite statue, they're not movie-TV cartoon heroes, they're not goddamned Atticus Finch-Gregory Peck* or Albus Dumbledore.  We all have feet of clay and if not feet some other part of us will crumble or wash away.   That's especially true of anyone who could have remained a member of the Republican Party of the United States in the last several decades as it has descended ever more rapidly into the edges of fascism where we are now.

I don't remember who wrote or said in the past week that if Wolff's picture is even close to accuracy - I don't have any doubt about Wolff's weak spots - then one of the most vulnerable things about Mueller is his devotion to institutions, his devotion to the FBI, the Department of Justice and, as Wolff has said, his own investigative team's existence.   I have already, several times, mentioned Mueller's decades long habitation in the habitat of insider DC as a source of my skepticism about him.   He may, indeed, be the best of his local sub-species but he is still of that species.

There is a very real difference between a person put up as a hero and an actual hero and one of the real differences is in how much they are willing to sacrifice to do the right thing.  Real heroes would sacrifice the appearance of stability in the rotted out edifice of the law and the institutions of government that have been becoming obvious since the turn of the century.   The Bush v Gore imposition of one of the worst presidents in the history of the United States THROUGH THE MOST INSTITUTIONAL OF INSTITUTIONS OF ALLEGED JUSTICE, THE SUPREME COURT, held up by the establishment media as well as the gutter, Murdochian media,  was certainly enough to indicate that anyone who could be called "an institutionalist" as a compliment likely was in on that other corruption to some extent.  Now, with Trump imposed on us through the Supreme Court striking down every attempt by elected officials to protect our very electoral process from the kind of corruption that has produced a Trump that title, "institutionalist" is, itself holding corruption up as a virtue. 

Mueller's own history is a mix, included with actions in law enforcement that are uncontroversially seen as positive, he has been associated with dubious actions.  He was involved with the prosecution of Manuel Noriega, after George H. W. Bush invaded Panama to abduct him - killing, by credible estimates, more than six hundred People, many of the civilians - the cover up of which Mueller's friend William Barr conducted, That is something I have little doubt that Mueller knew about at the time, certainly he knew it after it became public.  His appointment to head the FBI was done by the illegitimate president,  George W. Bush. He gave Senate testimony that was clearly part of whipping up the invasion of Iraq, though it was hardly the most extreme example of lying, of the kind that another monument in simulated granite, Colin Powell engaged in, it was clearly part of it.   I see his appointments by Bill Clinton and Barack Obama as little more than their acceptance of institutional Washington, parts of their choice to be weak presidents hankering after the title "bi-partisan," a title the virtue of which seems to be held out as exclusively applying to Democratic presidents. 

His actions which are pointed to as admirable, his refusal to go along with the worst programs of torture and dubious prosecution during that time, look to me, in retrospect, mostly done in the interest of protecting HIS institution, the FBI.  And, no doubt, it was done to protect his own reputation with respectable Washington and the respectable press, some of those who, now that it is in service to the center of power in the Trump regime, are turning on Mueller as the gutter press that is the more explicit branch of the media doing the billionaire oligarchs ground work, already has. 

As to Mueller's position as a hero, I don't buy it.  His service in Vietnam was him choosing to be a part of the military that was rare for those of his class at the time, I don't know his motives.   He was certainly no more heroic for that than many of the kids I knew who were drafted and sent there, some of whom suffered a lot more than Mueller did, any of whom I have to wonder about how they'd have been treated by Mueller the law man as opposed to someone like Barr. 

I have to form an image of Mueller based on his entire record, most of all on how he has acted as a public official and as the leader of his latest investigation and in his handling of Barr's obstruction.   And in that, in his continuing reticence at openly testifying about what he found and, most tellingly, how far he was willing to try to go and why he might have chosen not to, I can't say that I respect him.  

I think the adulation given to Mueller and the faith that was put in him have been far too much and that naive trust, itself is a symptom of the denial of reality.  I think what we are seeing in this as in all aspects of the Trump regime, the Republican-fascist ratfucking of our elections, including their refusal to protect the United States from Putin and other foreign gangsters, the Supreme Court's decades long assault on the integrity of our elections in favor of big money, Republicans gerrymandering to prevent democracy in ways that I think would make the Brits nauseated, the widespread dissemnination of overtly fascistic propaganda to directly corrupt the morals and minds of The People, the first and last target for those who want to kill legitimate government, egalitarian democracy by an adequately informed People OF GOOD-WILL, consideration of all of that might be the lens to view Robert Mueller through.  It is, I am convinced, the only one that will give you an accurate instead of a phony show-biz view of the world we live in and will likely die from. 

* I will always remember how when Harper Lee's first version (second published) and far more true-to-life Set A Watchman incarnation of Atticus Finch as an upper class racist of the 1950s as seen by a more evolved adult daughter facing his real character for the first time was met with such hurt outrage, even legal attempts to suppress its publication - EVEN BY THE ALABAMA STATE GOVERNMENT!.  That the peddler of mid-brow civic piety Aaron Sorkin has redone To Kill a Mockingbird for Broadway is probably not a good sign.  I read the books, I won't be seeing the Sorkin version.  I found Watchman Atticus more believable than Mockingbird Atticus.  That in the one it was the child Scout who saw him and in the other it was the adult Scout who did is certainly relevant to how Harper Lee wrote him.  As Flannery O'Connor noted, Mockingbird is a children's book.  I wonder if Atticus - Gregory Peck, most peoples' version of him - might not contribute dangerously to the delusional construction of such heroes as Mueller instead of looking realistically at the extent to which they are compromised by the privileges they enjoy.  

Dusan Bogdanovic, - A Little Prayer

Luca Vimercati, guitar

The Shame Of Our Time

Those Trump regime figures who first stole children from refugees and now have them in for-profit prisons where they are violating court orders as to the education and care are a good model of how indifference is the close ally of bigotry.  The Trump regime and the sadists who seem to have been waiting for the opportunity to exercise their depravity under Republican-fascism seem to be going out of their way to outdo each other in vileness. 

There are the deaths of detainees, children, young children among them by negligence and, I wouldn't be surprised to find, willful abuse.

There is the sadistic separation of families without any thought of bringing them together.

There is what seems to be a choice to try to reproduce something like the reported overcrowding on slave ships in over-stuffed, standing room only detainment for days in rooms meant to hold, I've read, a fifth of the number of people held in them.  Holding children in vans for days at a time. 

 

As I mentioned above, there is the news that the Trump regime are, in violation of court orders, ending education and exercise to children it is holding in rent-a-prisons run by for-profit corporations. 

The list of particulars is long and the permission that Republicans in the Congress, the Courts, in the country have given these sadists to do this to people proves that we really are no better than those Americans who accepted or tolerated legal slavery before and de facto slavery and apartheid after the Civil war.

As I mentioned the other day rereading the Hebrew Scriptures, especially after studying some of the the eye-opening commentary by Walter Brueggemann and others, mostly Protestant but some Jewish and some Catholic and Orthodox, has made me see that human beings are doing the same things, committing the same wrongs, accepting the same atrocities that they have always been liable to.  I think that was the biggest lie of the Enlightenment-scientistic period, that belief that we were scientifically and rationally self-starting a new era of ever upward and onward.  The kind of idiocy that Stephen Pinker, the budget brand Pangloss of our time, peddles.  

It's discouraging to consider how long this has been allowed to go on if you remain in the mindset that expects quick and easy righting of things, as seems to be the expectation of those demanding a miracle cure of impeachment when there is no chance that that will work due to the Senate AND THE MEDIA being in the hands of those who either like this status quo or who aren't bothered much by it.  It's so tempting to give up as some I know seem to have given up.  The gangsters, the Trump regime, the Republican-fascists, the billionaires foreign and domestic who are funding the resurgence of neo-fascism and neo-Nazism so to destroy democracy and decency are counting on that weary capitulation.  We don't have any right to do that.  I think what we have to do is face the fact that we are facing the perpetual worst parts of human character which are always there unless they are held in check by the belief in specific holdings of absolute morality.  

I think one of the most interesting parts of this is the resurgence of fascism in the Europe we were all being assured was, de-Christianized, safely civilized and rational during the atheist fad of the 00s.  I will admit that I have been kind of surprised at how such places as Holland, Denmark, Norway,  France even Sweden have seen a resurgence of powerful neo-fascist and neo-Nazi movements.  I was not as surprised to see it in those countries damaged by Soviet occupation where the habits that come from being terrorized by a police state were more entrenched so recently.  

In the United States, the most intersting thing is in the exposure of such a large percentage of "evangelicals" right-wing integralist Catholics [including so many of the Bishops and Cardinals appointed by JPII and BXVI] are so quick and eager to set aside the teachings of Jesus, the radical justice of the Hebrew tradition to support a vulgar Mammonist sexual degenerate and crook like Trump.  

It becomes ever more clear to me that atheist or "evangelical" when someone gives up a real and effective belief in the moral teachings of Jesus and the other Prophets, this is the kind of thing you can expect.  And it isn't just libertarian atheists who have done that, though they certainly share in the blame. 

On Stuffy Noses And Those Stuck Up

Several people around here have noted that this is the worst allergy season in memory and my allergies are many and severe, one of the blessings of living to get old.  Or so I'm told.  I will try to write something sufficiently startling and, perhaps, original to satisfy anyone who might come here for that,  it's not that I'm not having ideas, it's that I'm too exhausted to write them out.  

As to the tempest in a toss pot that my answer about the stupidity of the standardized spelling of the English language set off and, since the snobs will cow people into not adopting even the moderate and realistic original proposals that many have advocated,  I have decided to, again, favor a return to non-standardized spelling. 

Here is a footnote from Noah Webster's* interesting and, with some reservations, excellent 1789 An Essay on the Necessity, Advantages and Practicability of Reforming the Mode of Spelling, and of Rendering the Orthography of Words Correspondent to Pronunciation, proving that the original American genius, Benjamin Franklin had the same position I've adopted. 

I once heard Dr. Franklin remark,  "that those people spell best, who do not know how to spell," that is, they spell as their ears dictate, without being guided by rules, and thus fall into a regular orthography. 

As I pointed out last weekend, Americans who sneer at spelling reform, using the standardized American spelling stupidly advocate what was presented, by Noah Webster as a spelling reform, himself noting the frequent stupidities to be found in the font of standardized Brit spelling,  Samuel Johnson's mish mosh of a dictionary.   I was surprised reading Webster's essay how much was known of how the defects of English spelling came into use, the fact that in the early days of printing most of the printers and typesetters were Dutch and introduced lots of the silent letters that vex so many writers of English, now.  On top of that there was the late Renaissance - "Enlightenment" practice of snobs trying to introduce supposed Latin and Greek spelling into English words which, in many cases, were not derived from their supposed classical language false friends.  Not to mention other sources for some of the worst problems.  The idea that the written form of a language should be deformed out of any practical practice in the interest of alleged etymological erudition is about the stupidest idea ever to gain any kind of a foothold in any alleged intellectual establishment.  That alone would justify We The People taking it back from the snobs and claiming our right to the written language. 

But to hell with all that, if the snobs won't give up their petty skill - which, by the way, many of the forsworn enemies of spelling reform haven't really mastered, themselves - I advocate that the rest of us just follow Benjamin Franklin's words and spell however the hell we think best.  Even the best sort of standard spellers have better manners and more wisdom than to despise someone who uses a different spelling, especially if they use the word according to its meaning. 

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

And, just to piss off those I'd find it most satisfying to like to piss off in my bad mood, the observation about the corruptions of English spelling introduced by the early print shops and publishers more or less render the arguments about the "hand D" manuscript of Thomas More being by the Stratford man, as put forward by the "Birthplace Trust" and the British Library, of entirely unknown but almost certainly vanishingly improbable import.  There is no way to know how any variant spelling in a print source in the Tudor-Jacobean period came into being, how faithfully the print setter followed the hand written copy which, itself, could be a copy by someone not the author.  Just thought I'd throw that in to annoy the trolls. 

The Media Is The Mess

Stipulated: the Republican capacity to believe anything, encouraged by the modern conservative movement, and the conservative media's unmatched ability to monetize it, made someone like the current president* not only possible, but also inevitable. We can count ourselves marginally fortunate that the guy in the low-water golf pants is so bad at what he's trying to do. The main event in American conservatism over the next several years is going to be a monumental pissing match over the best strategy to consign these obvious truths to the same memory hole where they stashed the events of 2000-2008 and the detritus of the Avignon Presidency. And the first real brawl in this existential pie fight is going on right now.

Charles Pierce: These Conservative Intellectuals Can Go Hash Things Out on Some Desert Island While the Rest of Us Fix the Country

Everything he says about the absurdity of Trump giving Arthur Laffer the Presidential Medal of Freedom*, along with the likes of Milton Friedman to have been among the most fecund of advocates for economic disaster in modern times is true.  I agree with everything he says. All well and good, Mr. Pierce, as far as it goes.  

But it wasn't the intellectuals who caused the real problem, such scum taking office,  it was the media gulling enough of "the rest of us" into putting Hollywood products and two Bushes, one Nixon and a bunch of the biggest bunch of goons as have ever held the Congress in place.  The intellectuals found fertile ground in the composted brains of Reagan and Bush II and Trump - all I would bet having their most significant formation through Hollywood and other entertainment.   That three out of the past five Republicans almost certainly had that formation (though Ford shouldn't count since he was the choice of Nixon, hot We The People) is certainly not irrelevant.  

This is what a country formed by entertainment mass media is bound to turn into.  The inevitability of that is as certain as that the past two Democrats have been afraid of the media and, so, have not been as aggressive as those who put them in office would have liked them to be.  

I've mentioned before the early days of the Obama administration when cabloid TV was pushing the billionaire financed astro-turf campaign of the "Teaparty" that a blog commentator, I believe it was the erudite "Southern Beale" who pointed out that when CNN was giving full coverage of a sparsely attended "Teaparty Convention" in her town, there was a knitting convention happening in the same city which had many times more participants.   And that was only one instance when the media, which Pierce is a full member of, did far more than an idiot pseudo-intellectual like Arthur Laffer did to destroy the country.  

And the media is what led both Bill Clinton and, especially, Barack Obama into choosing to be weak presidents, discouraging their supporters, turning them into far weaker presidents than their support should have led to them being.   Voluntary weakness in the face of media created backlash is the Democratic equivalent of Pierce's "prion disease" in the Republicans. 

Until figures in the media own up to the part that the effectively unlimited freedom of the press to lie, to distort, to make disappear anyone they want to disappear from the day-to-day thinking of an effective margin of Voters, concentrating on the hijinks of the hirelings of billionaires who peddle horseshit like supply-side economics is far too little, too late. 

Does anyone think that Donald Trump knew about Laffer except what he saw or heard about him on TV?  On FOX?   George W. Bush, no doubt inspired by his wife, pretended to read books.  I don't think Trump even bothers to pretend that he reads, I don't think even his supporters believe he does.  I don't think Milton Friedman would have gained any real traction in American politics if PBS hadn't had the billionaire financed series he did in the late 70s, in reaction to a series about the history of economics by Kenneth Galbraith earlier in the decade.  No doubt some of Reagan's advisers saw it, I can't imagine it holding his dwindling attention for much more than part of an episode.  Maybe Maureen interpreted it for him.  From what I have heard, he mostly liked to watch his own movies and to talk about them.  Trump, the formula to getting his attention is to mention him, even his own aids know that.  And if it's too long, it doesn't work. 

* I've always had an uneasy feeling about the Presidential Medal of Freedom, one of president Kennedy's innovations.   While some of the recipients of it have been, admittedly, great people, many have been the exact opposite.  As time goes on I find that a lot of what happened in the Kennedy years has been of dubious wisdom or motive.   I wish they'd stop giving the thing. 

My immune system is running amok and I'm exhausted from being the battleground.